Disclaimer: I do not own the character from Tomb Raider games or movies and no money is made of this piece of fan fiction.

Lara had returned to her hotel room early, but to her it mattered not where she was. Her face carried no signs of relief or satisfaction. Her features, lively before, now only showed her tiredness. But she couldn't sleep, the idea seemed ridiculous to her at the moment.

She knew she needed her sleep, the bags under her eyes were enough to point that to her. But she was also aware of the weight on her chest, hurting more with each breath.

But to her surprise it wasn't the pain that kept her from falling asleep. It was the fear of waking up without it.

All of her life she had forced herself to forget, not to remember the lives she took. In the beginning of her career she had stayed up at nights, afraid of seeing the dead in her sleep. She had woken, many times during her restless slumber, sweating and panting – relieved that what she had seen stayed in the dream world, in her subconscious. And as long as she stayed awake that was where the nightmares would remain waiting for her.

But as years lingered by the nightmares vanished. She couldn't say whether it was her growing numb of death , caring less about the fact that it was she who caused it or continuously telling herself that they were bad men, they deserved what they got.

In the eyes of the law she wasn't a criminal, not even in her own eyes, not anymore. Sometimes saving all demanded sacrifices. She grimaced as the voice on the phone crawled back to the surface from her subconscious. Had she, during all the years of her raiding, let go of the bits that others referred to when spoken about humanity?

She yawned, tired of staying awake and, for the first time in years, her life.

And now, for the very first time in years, she was afraid to close her eyes – not because of remembering but because of forgetting. What if the same that happened to her guilt then would take away her pain now? What if she grew numb of something she was afraid to loose? And why was she so afraid of loosing her guilt of what happened to him? She had, in the end, been a part in writing so many destinies. She had condemned so many to death that she had lost count.

But still the world viewed her as a hero of sorts – true, she had saved the planet and humanity more than once, but to whom, from whom? After all, history was written by the victorious. What would the earth have become if Natla still lived? If Lara hadn't journeyed to Atlantis to bring her to her end would the world as she knew it stopped existing? Could she assume she had done what she did to the best of everyone?

She surely hadn't done it for fortune and glory. She didn't yearn to bathe in the sunlight, causing others to hide in shadows. She didn't want to be raised on a pedestal.

And how, even after all had happened in Prague, how she still thought it was about her.

The thought caught her off-guard. Was that it, her feeling guilty over believing it was about her? No matter how she tried to deny it or push the thought away, her mind seemed to loop around it. When had it turned around? When had everything come to be about her?

She brushed the thought out of her mind, it would lead her nowhere. The fact that the tape was on loop had to mean something else than just the proof of the nightshift existing being erased. The nurse had come, she had gone – but no one could tell where she was in between...and if she even was there.

Lara hadn't gone through the other tapes since Stravsky had promised her the police would take care of that. They hadn't started on the job before she had left and this far she had heard no news. But if the other tapes were on loop, too, it would open the possibility of the nightshift never having existed in the first place.

But how could a whole nightshift not exist? Surely someone would've noticed that, someone who was working there. Unless there was something else to the puzzle, something that couldn't be by the means of a normal human being.

She discarded her thoughts about the Nephilim doing the deed, surely not even they could smuggle someone out without anyone noticing. Perhaps something made the workers forget a minute or two of the shift, or the entire time they worked. Hypnosis? Could it be?

All of the tapes being on loop would surely support the theory as well as expanding the list of suspects to almost anyone. But she remembered reading that hypnosis wouldn't work if the person it was tested on resisted. There was no sense all the workers in the nightshift would let themselves bee hypnotised freely. It either had to happen to them all at once or otherwise someone might've sounded the alarm because of a co-worker's strange behauviour. And brainwashing all of the workers would just be too much trouble. She doubted anyone would go through all that just to get to kidnap one man.

No matter how much of her time and thoughts she sacrificed to the matter, she found herself unable to come up with any solution.

She glanced out of the window of her the tiny kitchen of her room, not surprised to find it was already dark – almost pitch black. But shouldn't the snow light the ground up, at least a bit? It was way too dark, the dull light of the streetlamps only just shining through the night. There was always something ominous about nights like this, they always carried promises of threats, something ghastly and not quite human.

It was then she heard a crash, and for a blink of an eye, shards of glass raining down. Sounding like wind chimes in a hard breeze the pieces each found their spot next to the others on the floor.

She ducked, out of sheer instinct, cowering her head with her hands thus leaving as small an area as possible open for damage. But she felt none of the shards biting into her skin.

Slowly she raised her head and glanced around, surprised to find the kitchen window intact and the floor free of shards. She stood up and rushed to her bedroom, stopping short in the doorway.

The floor was littered with glass but that wasn't what caught her attention. There, in the middle of the room, lay a crow, its legs twiching a time or two as its body tried to comprehend why its heart beat no more. Its dark eyes still glinted with the remains of its soul as the bird's lifeforce slowly seeped out of its body. Crimson liquid formed a small puddle under the black-feathered corpse and, as if trying to avoid Lara's gaze, shyly started flowing towards the nearest wall. Lara, her gaze still on the unmoving bird, failed to notice the uncommon flow of the blood.

She knew it was normal for birds to hit windows but she had never witnessed one that flew to its death with such a force that the glass was shattered, in addition to the bird's neck or spinal cord. The angle the bird's head was in told her it was its neck that had snapped, ending the crow's life before it knew what had happened.

She sighed, heading for the phone. She stepped around the largest shards carefully, even though she still wore her boots. Her hand reached for the receiver, picking it up and placing it to her ear. But she never got to press the buttons, her fingers freezing before she managed to press even the first one.

There, on the wall, was her evidence of the case being far from normal. A thin line of the bird's blood slowly made itself up the wall as if it had a will of its own.