The Camera Loves You

By Asynca.

Language warning. No, really.

On the Eidos Forums, there is a poll about relationship options for Lara, and one of them is Sam. If you've made it this far, I'm guessing you're in the boat as I am ("Ship, it's a ship."). Go forth and vote!

Thanks to zubba for plot-picking. The offending little plot hole has been sewn up so tightly that no light will ever shine through it again.

I couldn't hear anything on the ground below, and that made me worry that Sam had been seriously injured. "Sam?" I called, looking directly up into the barrel of Pierre's gun. Past it, a goatee smirked at me. No one answered.

"You can tell Natla that she can kiss goodbye to any hope she will ever complete—"

"I'm not working for her any more, Pierre! You made sure of that yourself!" I needed to get away, I needed to go down and see if Sam was alright.

He didn't look surprised at me saying that, which suggested to me that someone may have already told him since I'd left base camp. However, he did scowl at me and jab the gun in the air towards my face. "Then what are you doing here, eh? I suppose you're just a tourist?"

"The same thing you are!" I said, desperate for him to let me get away and go down to Sam. "Trying to prevent Ms. Natla from getting the next fragment!"

"I think not," he said. "I think you want it for yourself, eh?"

I must have looked at him as if he were absolutely mad. "No! Pierre, she's… dangerous! We've got to stop her, you must know that!"

"We are all dangerous, Ms. Croft, with the right reason to be." He was glaring down at me. "Now, I'm stuck with a dilemma. I need to make sure you don't follow me, but I also feel it is a waste to kill such a pretty young woman while she's lying helpless at my feet." He looked me up and down with such hunger that it made my hair stand on end. He wouldn't, I thought, wasn't he supposed to be incredibly faithful to his wife? "I hear Larson had the same idea, and that didn't end so well for his face, eh?"

"Larson is nothing like you," I said, regretting saying something so inflammatory even as it came out of my mouth.

He roughly shoved me with the tip of his boot. "Larson is a fucking bloodsucker," he hissed at me. "You think he's such a gentleman? Who do you think keeps that bitch cosy at night, eh? It's disgusting. It's no fucking wonder about his daughter, I'd have done the same." He kicked me again.

As I curled to try and brace myself against the impact, it occurred to me that the level of anger Pierre was harbouring was too extreme for me to have been the only problem in his relationship with Ms. Natla. What could have possibly happened to someone to fill them with such fury, and did he just say Larson had a daughter?

"Lara…?" Sam's voice sounded confused and uncertain. I'd never heard a sweeter sound.

"Sam! I'm coming!" He kicked me again.

"Now, there's an idea. Slowly take that rope off your shoulders," he ordered, and then explained his reasoning. "I'm too old-fashioned to just kill a helpless girl," he said. "But perhaps the lion down there doesn't have my sensitivities."

I did as he said, waiting every second for an opportunity to pull him off balance, or smack the gun away, or kick his feet out from under him. He was no amateur – the opportunity didn't come.

"Shall we go down and tie you to your cute little girlfriend?"

I remember what Sam had said about Aurelie being a pacifist. "Your wife would be horrified if she knew what you were doing to us," I tried. "If you really loved her, you'd—"

"If I loved her, Ms. Croft? If I really loved her? I wouldn't bring her to this place to get kicked off ledges by men and eaten by lions!" He kicked me dead in the side and I gasped for breath. "Now tie your feet together. You can tell her how much you love her and how sorry you are for bringing her here to die while you both get torn to pieces."

I looped the rope around my ankles with quivering hands, acutely aware of the gun beside my head. "You don't have to do this, Pierre. We both don't want Ms. Natla to get the Scion!" I loathed the idea of working with him after what he'd done to us, but it was a better solution than being killed. "We could help each other."

"I don't need your help to enter Tihocan's tomb, Ms. Croft," he told me, still supervising my efforts. "Qualopec may have been fond of small spaces, but Tihocan was much less paranoid. The pleasure of crushing that bitch's dreams is going to be mine, and I'm going to savour every delicious moment of it after everything she's done to me."

Tihocan?

Just then, the lion roared and the sound echoed off the walls. There was some movement below us.

It distracted Pierre for a microsecond, just enough for me to roll toward him and knock him off his feet. He fell over me, but not far enough to topple over the edge. I reached inside my pullover and drew my gun, firing at him, but he knew exactly what he was doing and weaved in and out of the broken pillars so it was impossible for me to get a clear shot.

"You're an idiot, girl!" he yelled from behind one of them. I stood kicking the rope off my feet and aiming from pillar to pillar. The way the sound bounced made it impossible for me to tell where he was from the echo of his voice. "You really want to compete with me on this one?"

I didn't bother pointing out he wasn't giving me many options.

"And how am I so different from you, Pierre?" I shouted, "You just got bested by the 'pretty young girl' and you think you're the one to stop her completing it?" I tried to back over to the edge of the second story so I could sight Sam without taking my gun from where I thought he was. "I've killed a Demi-God, and I got the first fragment!"

"This is a personal matter for me, Ms. Croft," He ran between two columns, firing at me. "I have been dreaming of fucking that bitch since I first laid eyes on her, but I have finally figured out the most satisfying way to do it isn't Larson's way." He paused. "Or, I think, your way."

I shot a few rounds at the pillar he was behind, hoping shrapnel would brain him. How did this man at all relate to the loyal monogamist Ms. Natla had hinted that he was on the video, or how everyone spoke about his marriage?

"Make the smart choice," he warned me. "Turn around and leave, because I won't be such a gentleman if we meet again."

He made an attempt to prove his point, rounding a pillar to the left of me and taking a few shots. None of them connected and I dived out of the way. By the time I had my gun pointed at where he had been shooting from I could already see him disappearing through a doorway. I kept the gun pointed at the door for a few seconds, but he wasn't coming out of it.

Sam, I thought, and rushed over to the edge. I had been about to drop off it, but I stopped myself at the last minute.

Sam was still lying on her side, the camera some distance from her across the floor. Standing behind her and sniffing her head was the lion.

Her eyes were wide open and she was trying not to breathe or make any sound.

She made eye contact with me, terror visible on every inch of her face.

My hands shook as I held the gun up toward the lion. From the high angle I was shooting at, though, I could easily have missed and hit Sam. I had no idea how accurate this gun was since I hadn't managed to hit Pierre with it.

When the lion saw me above them, it looked up at me and made a deep hunkering noise. Before it had the chance to go back to Sam, I changed the angle of my gun and shot the floor beside it a couple of times. The noise startled the lion and it ran away from her, giving me enough time to climb down and dash over to her.

I didn't make it, though, before the lion recovered from its surprise and stopped. It turned around as if to double-check its assessment of me as a threat, and started running at full pelt toward us.

I stood my ground, raising my gun and peering over the barrell. I fired about five shots before it dropped, and then I fired another couple just to make sure it was definitely not going to get up.

Sam had curled into the fetal position with her hands over her head. When the sound of gunfire stopped, she peered between her hands. I closed the distance between us and crouched beside her, looking over her for blood through her clothes or bent limbs. I didn't find any.

She sat up slowly, shaken.

"Are you okay?" I asked her. "That was a heavy fall."

She nodded. "Yeah, I think so. I was winded, though." She took an unsteady breath. "That lion just– Lara!"

I didn't understand her surprise, and then I saw where she was looking. I had blood seeping through the shoulder of the pullover. I hadn't felt anything at all, I couldn't even figure out at which point I'd got that wound. I pushed the collar aside and found a chunk of shrapnel poking out of my skin. Without even thinking, I just pulled it between my index finger and thumb, tossing it somewhere. It didn't look like it was going to bleed much more, so I left it and slid my pullover back across.

She was staring at me like I'd grown another head. "You're like… G.I. Jane or something," she said, but sounded at least as impressed as she was dismayed.

I had a quick look over the rest of me for anything else I'd missed, and then set about checking her as I helped her up. "Maybe you should just go back to Kalamaka…" I said as I felt gently around her ribs to see if there was any tenderness. Fortunately, she felt like she was in one piece. "He was serious, Sam. He will kill us if he gets the chance."

"Then we'd better not give him the chance," she said. "Because I'm not going to go back and just sit by the road wait for Ms. Natla to arrive and do, like, whatever with me."

I brushed off her back. "But will she shoot you, you think? We don't even know what she wants."

"You said you saw magic," Sam pointed out. "With the Scion. At least with a gun you know what it's going to do." She shivered. "Plus, there's just something about her. She feels bad. He's just a jerk."

We stood in the centre of the room, stuck as to what to do. "It's just madness," I said at last. "I would happily have let him get his revenge if it meant destroying the Scion, but he didn't even let me offer."

"That guy clearly has his own agenda," she said. "He doesn't seem like the save-the-world type."

"That's just it, though, Sam." I frowned. "I don't actually think he knows how dangerous Ms. Natla is, that there's some sort of magic about her. I think he just thinks she's this normal woman who's jilted him or something." I exhaled. "I don't think he thinks it's a world-saving matter at all."

"Maybe if we told him?"

"Told him what, though? 'Oi, Pierre, the world is in danger, how about you just give me the Scion'?" I shook my head as I fixed my pendant. "I don't even know how to explain it myself. But I do know that if he gets the Scion and takes it to her to execute his grand plan… well, if he's not expecting magic, she'll get it from him somehow."

We stood there for another few moments. Sam spoke first. "Well, we can't just stay here," she said. "I can already tell you want to be all heroic and I'm not going anywhere without you. And," she interrupted me, anticipating I was going to speak because I had been, "it's not like you could just try and hide me away somewhere now, anyway. Not after what dad's doing to her on the news."

"So we follow him?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Okay," I said, feeling both pleased about possibly getting to shoot him and terrified that he might shoot either of us. Sam was limping a little. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"I'm fine," she said too quickly. She tried to dismiss my concern, though, moving over and picking up the video camera. "My camera on the other hand…" She unfolded the screen and checked over the case. "It's still rolling," she said, surprised. She stopped it and replayed the footage. "Guess they make these better than the studio ones, you can't even sneeze without breaking those." She paused. "Wow…"

I took a few steps so I could look over her shoulder. The camera had been facing her on the ground when the lion came up behind her. It was a spectacular shot that any director would have been supremely proud of, but this was no movie. This was real, and she could have been torn limb from limb at any moment.

"Guess the camera gods were smiling on me," she said, and smiled, too.

She was going to be the death of me, I swore it. "Yes, what really matters is that you captured such a golden moment on film."

"Whoa! I got you pulling that thing out of your shoulder!"

I let her get away with changing the subject, because I didn't want her to think too much about what lay ahead of us. It was nice just listening to her babble anyway, even if it was nervously. Everything about her voice reminded me of how much I loved her and that she was still alive.

When we climbed up to the second storey again, she jumped across without hesitation. That, at least, was comforting.

I reloaded my gun, collected my rope, and walked over to the doorway Pierre had disappeared through. It led downwards, into the rock. Taking my torch out, I shone it down into the hole. I'd taken special care to buy one with a very strong beam, but still the light didn't fall on any sort of surface.

I bent down and picked up a stone from the floor near us and threw it in. It was a good twenty seconds before I heard it hit the ground far below.

"Maybe he fell and died?" Sam suggested, aiming her camera into the hole.

"I hope not," I told her, and she looked confused. "Then I wouldn't get the chance to kill him."

"I can't believe you're saying that on camera," she said incredulously and pointed it at me.

I took the camera off her and angled it at my face. "Everyone," I told the lens, "For what that bastard did to Samantha Nishimura, I plan to try and kill him."

Despite the content of what we were discussing, Sam was laughing. She pushed my arm out but positioned my wrist so we were still in frame. "How do you think I should thank her?" she asked the camera, and then wrapped her other arm around my neck and pulled me into a firm kiss.

It was the last thing I had expected in a place like this, and I didn't want it to end. When it did, Sam didn't look at the footage straight away are per normal. She just gazed across at me. "There," she said. "Neither of us can die now. The world just doesn't work like that."

I hoped she was right.