Tunnel Vision

His fall had seemed to take an eternity, but for a few drawn-out splinters of a second, the freezing rush of air felt ridiculously familiar.

In his eighteenth year, he used to race his first motorbike across the wide alkaline flats of home in the early mornings with the wind in his face, the distant western mountains shimmering ahead, and the sun rising directly behind him, throwing down its rays across the smooth white surface; a fiery road for a reluctant latter-day knight and his metal steed.

The wind of his motion, even in the warm season, was enough to make a tangled mess of his hair (which in those days was shoulder length, much to Konstantin's disapproval). And when the playa was baked hard by the long hot days of high summer, he could push the bike to its greatest speeds and later make exaggerated boasts to his smiling mother about breaking records. But he liked the winter mornings best of all, when the air was chill and there was no other living creature in sight, the landscape empty from horizon to horizon as though ancient Lake Bonneville's saline relic, this bleached desert, were his own private playground; when the surface became wet and soft, so that his wheels would spin and skid, throwing up tangy spray as the bike fishtailed dangerously, and he'd come home, ears aching from the cold and covered in encrusted salt - him and the bike both.

Back then, the speed and the vast emptiness had seemed the sole outlet for his angered frustration, the frigidity of the air the only thing that could cool the rebellious fire in his blood. The fire which rose up increasingly in opposition to Konstantin's teachings, making him swear to himself, time and again in the aftermath of their arguments, that one day he would condemn his father's expectations to hell and make another life for himself, somewhere far away.

The icy air whipping past him as he plunged through its insubstance was just like that-or so he thought for a pulse beat, until the abrupt anticipation of unyielding concrete and shattered flesh brought him back to the present reality. A reality in which his enemy was neither Joachim Karel nor Lara Croft, but the dragging mass of his own body and its weaknesses, the pain in his ears from bitter wind adding to the agony in his midsection.

Then dimly, over the scream of the wind, his father's voice, not quite forgotten after all, had echoed down the years: "When strength fails, use your weakness, Kurtis, make it your servant..."

And the only resource left to him, his own terror, had transmuted into a repulsing force, pushing off the immovable ground to allow him to live. Because if you were Lux Veritatis, you could exert your will over inanimate objects; hard, unimagining stone and steel could be made to lift and spin through the air. (And he was Lux Veritatis - foolish to have denied it, more foolish still to imagine that he could evade the calling that burned in his blood by leaving the New World to return to the Old, seat of his order for centuries.)

And if you could do that, then how much easier to manipulate the living and infinitely suggestible human mind. So it was that the half dozen Agency soldiers who had walked right past him twice, guns at the ready, had seen nothing more than a patch of blank wall where he sprawled, bloodied and exhausted. It wouldn't have worked on the Nephilim, he knew that. But he hadn't come down.

He half-walked, half dragged himself to one of the old safehouses, a refuge remembered dimly from his childhood - a place unused in years and devoid of comforts, but a safe place nonetheless. More than once he thought he would die there, days spent drifting in a fog of pain and confusion, struggling to focus his waning powers on the burning hole in his chest. But in the end he healed - slowly, painfully, but he healed. And finally he was strong enough to rejoin the world again.

Had he not seen it with his own eyes, he would not have believed it. She had allied herself with Karel - why, he could not begin to understand, but he knew straight away what their next move would be. So he set out without delay, determined to get there first - only to find his own face staring back at him from television screens and newspapers, and armed officers at every port.

There were other ways, of course. In his previous line of work he had often needed to travel "discreetly". But he found to his dismay that many of his old contacts, even the most hardened denizens of the underworld, wanted nothing to do with someone linked to the Monstrum murders; they had made their excuses and backed off, or refused even to speak to him. He should have known. The Nephilim were damnably clever, and this one had overlooked nothing.

So it became a race - one that she didn't even know she was part of. Denied the satisfaction of leaving her an empty tomb, in the end the best he could manage was to reach Syria at the same time as she did. And from then on it was like Paris all over again, being her shadow, following the same trail, seeking the same end until once again he lay in wait and their paths intersected.

Powers focused and honed during the long, difficult years of initiation took him safely past the ancient defenses, past water and fire and blade, yet he had barely made it into the burial chamber when, throwing his consciousness outward in a red haze, he saw her traversing the outer tunnels. A confrontation, then; and he was glad of it. Because on the road to Damascus, he had had a revelation. Simple, but stunning in its intensity: this was who he was.

He had been to Carthage once - on business, not pleasure, but after the job was done and he'd scrubbed away the last stubborn traces of blood and sand, he'd found time to wander the city as the evening shadows lengthened, and the place - a fusion of ancient and modern, redolent with spilled blood and the struggles of great empires - had evoked in him the exact same emotions: Pity. Guilt. Remembrance. Here in this walled city his Crusader forebears had laid down their lives for their beliefs, the beliefs he had rejected. What would they have thought of him, the one who turned and fled and left the fight behind?

Not that running away had helped much. His brothers in arms had nicknamed him 'Demon Hunter' for a reason, but, stubborn idiot that he'd been, he'd still believed it was possible to cheat fate, and he found other ways of using his particular skills, ones that paid well as long as you didn't ask questions. 'Security work', they all called it with a knowing nod of the head. It hadn't always meant killing, of course, but likely as not the anonymous client would need proof of a corpse in order to feel 'secure'...

After years of this he'd thought his conscience dulled beyond repair, but finally it had begun to agitate again, and he was already thinking about giving it up when the letter came from Mathias with the dreaded news. The Lux Veritatis was losing its long fight against the Black Alchemist and his cabal, and Konstantin was just the latest casualty. And even as he crushed the heavy notepaper in his hands and stared unseeingly out at the dark, he knew that Vasiley himself would be next; and so he had been.

This time there was no-one else to carry the banner. This time, he would not fail them. He would stand between humanity and the dark tide - stemming it, if he had to, with the sacrifice of his life...

...or hers.

He had come prepared to kill.

He broke the long silence first. "What the hell are you doing, Lara?"

She must have asked herself that - she must have, dammit-

As she turned to look at him her eyes were wide with stunned surprise; he noted this with a flicker of vindictive pleasure, but she recovered quickly. "I was going to ask you that. You can't find anything for yourself, can you? Follow me around and take the things I've struggled for. It's getting to be a pattern."

His gun never wavered -if he pulled the trigger right now, the bullet would impact right there, in the soft hollow at the base of her throat- "A man's gotta do something with his time. And since I have no family left to visit…and since I'm not welcome anywhere in civilised society, thanks to you and Karel…I thought a vacation somewhere warm and dry might be nice. Especially since it was a pretty safe bet that you'd think so, too, now that you're his lapdog…"

It was said with deliberate lightness, the intention to provoke, but she only arched a knowing brow at him.

"If it were the other way around, would you have gone to prison to protect me, Kurtis?" She paused for a moment, searching his face. "No, I didn't think so."

"I've made plenty of sacrifices for you already, Lara Croft." Without lowering his gun or taking his eyes from hers, he pulled up his shirt with one hand, so that she could see the dull, angry red skin around the healed puncture wound. He had no intention of turning his back to her, but she didn't have to look any closer to realise that it went all the way through.

"That's what Boaz did to me," he said, hearing his own voice harden in resentment, "because I stayed behind to fight her." And sent you ahead, to safety... "And this," he indicated the ruined skin encircling the first wound, "is the souvenir from your new friend."

Something did flicker in her eyes then - guilt? Or was it pity? He sure as hell didn't want that from her. He tugged his shirt down again.

"You don't know what you're doing," he told her. "You don't know the Nephilim."

"And you do?"

"I know more about them than anyone else alive. They're evil, Lara."

This prompted the ghost of a cynical smile. "It must be nice to view the world from such a righteous perspective of moral certainty."

"You can't trust them, Lara. They've always got their own agenda, and Karel, he's no different. He used Eckhardt when he needed an alchemist, your friend Von Croy when he wanted someone to get the paintings. And hey look, now he needs someone who's good at finding old artefacts, and along comes Lara Croft to help him out. In case you forgot, he killed those other two once he'd got what he wanted from them."

She just kept on staring at him; there was something in her face he couldn't quite fathom, something he didn't like...

"You think he won't do just the same to you?" Stepping closer, shaking his head, he continued, "Come on, Lara. Why would he want to keep you around after-"

He stopped, his brows creasing, and lifted his head to look her in the eye. His breathing unsteady.

"You two..." he said it slowly, incredulously, "…you and him - you're together?"

She said nothing. She didn't have to.

"Christ-" An appalled whisper. His eyes, unfocused, moved rapidly back and forth; he passed a hand shakily across his mouth, a meaningless gesture, something for the body to do while the mind tried to assimilate. "I can't believe it," he managed.

Boaz' worst was nothing compared to this, the deepest, cruellest twist of the knife in his gut.

"Kurtis, listen…" she began, as if about to explain, but he cut her off.

"If you dare- if you dare to try and justify what you're doing," he said slowly, "I'll shoot you dead where you stand. You make me sick."

"What gives you the right to judge me!?" she demanded coldly, suddenly as angry with him as he was with her. "Working for Marten Gunderson? We both know what kind of a man he was. I've met plenty like you before, Kurtis Trent. You were nothing more than a common mercenary. A gun for hire."

"Karel tell you that, did he?"

"Was he wrong?" she challenged, and he couldn't meet her eyes. Seventeen murders, he now stood accused of. Wrongly, but in reality - one of Providence, or fate's little jokes - he'd been responsible for just that many deaths without ever having been called to account. No, Karel hadn't been wrong. So maybe it was a twisted sort of justice, after all.

"People can change, Lara. But I guess I don't need to tell you that. You were always gonna tip the balance, weren't you? I just thought you'd do it on my side, not his."

She said nothing, watching him minutely, he realised - even now - for any opening, any sign of weakness.

"Guess I'll just have to do this alone, then."

"Yes, you will. If you can."

The callousness of her words brought home to him just how much she had changed. The woman he had met in the Strahov had been coolly determined, tough, yes, even hard, but this bitter disillusion was something else entirely. And he, Kurtis, knew only too well how a person could make certain decisions, cross certain lines, and never be the same again. But he couldn't afford to linger here and ponder her motivations. And he couldn't let her do what she was planning to do. This was the moment. His finger tightened on the trigger.

"I can't let you do this. I can't let you help him."

"Then you'd better shoot me. And quickly, please, because I'm starting to tire of your company." She moved closer, and closer still.

The tip of his gun made contact with her chest. They stood, inches apart, a perfect echo of that instant in the Louvre which seemed like years ago but was really only weeks. Her flesh yielded slightly beneath the cold, hard metal; a mere hair's breadth of movement would end her life, and his mind flashed up an image: that flesh, hardly soft but still warm and womanly, torn and shattered by his bullet, that lovely face bloodied. And the hot, righteous anger that had driven him wavered.

He'd come prepared to kill...and he'd thought he could do it, too, for the cause. But maybe there was a part of her he could still reach, maybe if he chose just the right words...

"Thought you and I were a team, Lara." He shook his head with a faint, regretful smile. "Thought we were gonna save the world together..."

The hurt and entreaty in his face wrenched at her, in a way she'd no longer thought possible. For a second she wanted to say "I'm sorry", actually considered saying it, and it must have shown in her face as well.

The gun trembled minutely in his grip. In that moment, they were the same people who had stared at each other, eyes and lips just centimetres apart, in arrested fascination in the Louvre; in that moment he felt he might be willing to forgive her everything.

And, feeling it - her advantage - she smiled. The moment passed.

"Then you think the world's worth saving? I don't. Not any more. And there's the difference between us, Kurtis. I have nothing at all left to lose, which is why we're going to win."

All emotion left him; he was suddenly, strangely calm. He looked right into her eyes and spoke with quiet conviction. "You're playing with fire, Lara. Gonna get burned."

At that, something like apprehension flitted across her face. But it was gone as quickly as it had come, and she shook her head hard, defiantly, her braid lashing back and forth. "I didn't come here to listen to lectures from you."

He straightened. "No..." he said slowly, his eyes moving to the open sarcophagus behind her, "no, we both know why we're here."

There was a moment of utter silence. Eyes locking, muscles tensing, each trying to anticipate the other's move.

The silent tableau came to life. He flung himself towards the prize, feet straining at the floor. Too late, too late...he had moved a split second before her, but she was closer, and the more agile. She reached out to snatch the Seal-

And it lifted from the coffin. Lara shouted in shock and fury as her fingers closed on empty air and the Seal flew to Kurtis' waiting hand.

He smiled at her, closing his fingers deliberately around it. But she recovered herself quickly, and in one swift movement, she was between him and the exit shaft, her gun drawn and aimed between his eyes. "You're not walking out of here with that."

He tossed it in his hand, his whole stance challenging her. "No? How ya gonna stop me?"

She bowed her head for a second, considering, and when she looked up again, her eyes were burning with cold fire, her mouth set in a merciless line.

"You're in my way, Kurtis." An odd phrase given their respective positions, but he knew very well what she meant. It was as though the artefact in his hand filled her vision so that she couldn't see anything else, she couldn't see him.

She pulled her other gun from its holster and, without taking her eyes from his, swung it straight upwards to point at the ceiling. Kurtis held his breath. She couldn't be serious, to bring the whole place crashing down on their heads, she wouldn't-

"You know I will," she said. "Your choice."

His eyes were like blue steel. "No. Yours."

She shrugged. "All right, then."

He never heard the shot. All he heard was the deep, ominous rumble, all he saw was her turning to run, eyes alight with a fear worse than his own, before the ceiling gave way with a monstrous, deafening roar; the room shaking, choking showers of dust falling, huge chunks of stone slamming into the dirt between them…

…it was dark. Impenetrable blackness all around him, nothing but a pinprick of light piercing his vision.

It widened into a bright, dazzling circle, a tunnel of light, and for a moment he thought he was having one of those afterlife experiences, that his Maker was waiting for him at the other end, and he thought, Better start thinking up some damn good excuses, Trent… all those faces, some hardened and vicious and probably deserving, others peaceful and utterly unprepared, all of them fearful at the last.

But then, deep down inside, the part of him untouched by bloodshed and cynicism had always known that when the day of judgment came, platitudes such as It was just a job and I was only following orders would buy him no mercy whatsoever.

He lay on his side, weapon gone, gasping for air, tasting his own blood.

And then his vision cleared enough for him to see it: the circle of light was a gap in the awkwardly piled chunks of pitted stone, and in its centre, on the other side, was the Seal, undamaged and only inches away from him.

His filthy, torn fingers splayed, stretching, grasping as uselessly as hers had only moments before, but the gap was too small and he couldn't force his hand through. And before he could focus his mind again, call it back to himself, a pair of boots came into view, and he froze.

"I was never a good loser," she said, sounding almost apologetic, and then: "You're lucky I can't reach through there."

He had no doubt that she could have aimed through there. Her guns must be lost, too, under the stones. But before he could feel anything like relief, to his profound annoyance the scene began to retreat before him. He struggled to stay conscious, but his own body was, once more, his enemy.

He concentrated his foggy mind, but as the Seal began to tremble her boot came down on it. "No more tricks from you, Kurtis."

"If it's tricks that worry you, you probably shouldn't be hanging out with a Nephilim who wants you on your back."

A pause, and then she crouched down and he was looking into her eyes, cool and derisive. "Isn't that what you wanted, too?"

He tried to reply, but his world faded again to a single pinpoint of light, and then the blackness was complete.

When he came to, wiping grit from his eyes and cursing her, she had gone and the Seal along with her.

Posted from Waiheke Island off the coast of Auckland! Yes, I'm on holiday, and no, I have not given up on this story. A huge thank you to those long-suffering souls who are actually still reading and reviewing this after all this time. I love you all. Have cookies!!

Also, I'm sorry for being mean to Kurtis (again) but y'know, the plot demands it. What are you gonna do??