The Camera Loves You

By Asynca

Thanks for 100,000 hits!

Sam's father insisted on chartering us a flight for the following morning.

That evening was a little strange in just how routine it was; we'd fallen asleep together on the couch watching documentaries. We didn't really talk about what had happened, either. I had my arm around her for most of the night, and it was so tantalizingly close to one of her breasts that I wanted to reach just that further and brush over it. I didn't, though.

Even though I promised myself I wouldn't dwell on it, Sam fell asleep before me and all that did was give me ample time to worry that we shouldn't have slept together. She had been in the crook of my arm again, with her hands curled under her chin. I played with her hair as I worried about what would become of us.

I wanted to continue that conversation we had been having just before we'd hopped in the spa. All we'd really talked about my sexuality. Sam hadn't said what she wanted, and I hadn't really said what I wanted. To be honest, I wasn't really sure exactly what I wanted.

I loved her, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind about that. I loved her, and I was really attracted to her. If she were anyone else, it would be really simple. We'd date a bit, sleep together and eventually be recognised as a couple. With Sam, it had happened all around the wrong way: the media had set us up as a couple and now everyone just assumed we were. We were long past the pictures-and-dinner stage, but we had finally slept together.

Was she still my best friend? Were we actually a couple now, or was sex just sex? We'd always snuggled, it was difficult to know if that made shagging the natural next step. Maybe 'friends with benefits' was an actual real situation and not just some man's fantasy.

God, it was so difficult with Sam. She said she loved me and I knew she did, but I had no idea what that meant about us. She'd sleep with anyone who was capable of consenting, and she was absolutely terrible with relationships. I think from memory her longest was about three months and that was only because we'd spent half of that time on a trek in India, during which she'd cheated on him, anyway.

Is that what I really wanted?

I just hoped that whatever happened we could hang on to our strong friendship. Apart from Sam, I didn't really have any family and I just didn't know what would happen if we fell apart. I also really wanted to be with her, whatever incarnation of that I ended up getting. I hope those two things weren't mutually exclusive.

I did eventually end up falling asleep, and was awoken the following morning by the wakeup call I'd ordered to make sure we didn't miss the plane. It was a little redundant, I supposed, since charter flights didn't exactly leave without you.

The private airport was just outside the town we'd been staying in, and the shiny new jet couldn't have looked more out of place amongst the poorly maintained concrete hanger which looked like a throwback to the Soviet era.

We searched around for clothes shops near the airport, but there was absolutely nothing. When I stepped on that plane I probably still looked like something out of Survivor, because even though I'd washed all my clothes and they'd dried overnight they were still torn and stained. My main concern was how Mr. Nishimura would receive us looking like that, but when we got on the plane he wasn't on it, anyway.

One of his staff members apologised on his behalf and added, "He does send his warmest thanks for exposing Natla Technologies and restoring Nishimura Corp's share price, though."

Sam had been really looking forward to seeing him so she could discuss the footage she'd taken of us. "Sure he does," she said bitterly. "I bet I'll even get a Christmas bonus this year."

She didn't want to talk about it and I didn't force her to, even though I really would have like to comfort her. What I did do was take advantage of the best thing about charter planes: internet connectivity for the whole flight.

I had about fourteen thousand emails. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it certainly felt that many while I went through them. There weren't many I was really interested in responding to, but I couple of them caught my eye. One of them was from Professor Chamberlain that completely ignored the fact I'd fled the dig on a stolen helicopter. He thanked me for being involved and invited me to apply for a PhD candidature the following semester. I saved it, thinking I was interested to discuss more about my father with him. Natla had never detailed what her involvement with my family was, and since she clearly had a long-standing business relationship with Professor Chamberlain who also new them, I thought he might be able to explain what that connection was.

The next was a short one from Reyes. The wording was absolutely priceless: 'Hey Lara, I'm sick of these fucking journalists, get Sam to tell her father to stop them from calling. Sam already has plenty of footage of me so they can get the hell out of my face. Also, Alisha says hi, can you please call her when you get a chance." I grinned, and tapped out a quick reply to her.

One of the last ones caught me by surprise: it was from Alex's email address. I had a fleeting glimmer of hope that perhaps he'd managed to escape the Endurance after all, but when I opened it, it was just from his parents. They'd invited us to his funeral, which we'd actually missed. We should have been there.

I looked over at Sam who was sitting across from me, thinking I would show her that email. She was staring out the window with her eyes glazed. I shouldn't disturb her, I thought. After everything we'd just done, I wondered what it would feel like to have a father who was mostly indifferent to me and a mother who was probably keeping Lindsay Lohan company in rehab somewhere.

Sam had a lot to lose if something happened to our friendship, too.

She saw me watching me and turned her head toward me. I smiled faintly at her.

She acknowledged my smile, but didn't give me one of her own. "He said I can have the studio for four days," she said. "A week or two would have been better, but there's a new season of some show that wraps up filming on Monday." She looked back out the window. "I bet I'll out-rate them anyway, even with only four days to cut something together."

I almost didn't want to ask about it. "Do they still what that interview with me?"

Sam was looking at me in the reflection of the window. "Yeah, of course. I want some more fillers of you, too. There's whole chunks of what just happened to us where there isn't any footage." When I simply nodded, she frowned, turning properly toward me. "Wait, you don't care?"

I shifted in my seat, thinking. Yamatai felt like a lifetime ago, even though it couldn't have been more than a month. "It won't be live, will it?"

She shook her head. "Probably not, Dad's a bit of a content control freak about stuff to do with the family. He'd never let an interview longer than like five minutes be live." She stopped for a second and thought. "Actually, that's kind of cool. I think he actually did say 'family' about you," she said, using the Japanese word.

I smiled, but it just reminded me about the unanswered questions I had about Sam and I.

Sam was looking across at me. "You don't seem so happy about that," she observed.

I poked my head around my seat to make sure the flight attendant wasn't anywhere to be found. I couldn't see her. I still didn't really want to be having this conversation here, though. "'Family' how?"

Sam didn't share any of my concern about the attendant. "To be honest, I kind of already think Dad thinks we've sleeping together for a while. He probably wouldn't have released that photo of us in bed together if he thought it would upset us."

It was a really uncomfortable idea. Mr. Nishimura was really intimidating, and I hadn't actually thought about how he might feel about me dating his daughter. "He didn't say anything, though, did he?"

She shook her head. "No, he wouldn't. I mean, in the long run he might, but otherwise we don't ever really talk about that stuff."

My stomach fluttered. I didn't think she'd even realised what she'd just said. "'The long run'," I repeated.

She swallowed. "Yeah, I mean, I kind of assumed…" I watched her, hanging on what followed. "You know, that it wasn't a one-time thing."

That much I had already gathered. "But what is it, then? Like, are we still friends, or…?"

God, I wanted her to reply and at the same time I completely didn't. She took her sweet time about it, and in the meantime I sat sweating it out. "You mean if we're a couple?" She said eventually. I nodded. "Does that supersede friendship, though? Because you can have a boyfriend for, like, a week, but you usually have a best friend for a lot longer than that." She had a point. "I'm still kind of worried you're going to wake up straight one of these days, and be like, 'Yeah, that was fun but let's just be friends again'."

As much as I couldn't guarantee anything about myself, I doubted I'd be able to look at her in the same way I had a month ago. Not after being with her, and especially not after she'd gone down on me. "I don't think it works like that."

We watched each other for a few moments. I decided all this skirting around the actual point was probably more torturous than any answer she could give me. "I want us to be a couple, Sam." I watched her eyes brighten and a delighted smile rise to her lips. "I don't really know how that will work. I know it just has to, though, because otherwise we're both in trouble."

Her smile faded. "I know," she said. "I kept wondering what would happen if I hit on you and you weren't up for it. I can't lose you."

"So…?"

She grinned broadly, and tossed her hair like she was hitting on someone in a pub. "So, like, you want to have dinner with me sometime? I know this great little place."

That made me laugh, and the relief… I felt like I'd just released a breath I'd been holding for three weeks. I undid my seatbelt and leaned forward toward her, catching her lips in a kiss. She opened hers immediately and it ended up going a bit further than I'd intended. Every time the blade of her tongue touched mine, it reminded me of what she'd been doing with it in the spa. Wow, this had to stop before it went anywhere on her father's plane.

I pulled back, a little breathless. "Okay," I said. "Dinner sounds great."

Sam was still looking at my lips. "On second thoughts, let's skip dinner." She made an attempt to draw me back into the kiss, but I turned my chin. "You're so hot," she said. "You have no idea how hot you are, it's killing me."

"I'm glad you think so," I said, evading another kiss.

"I'm serious, Lara. I should show you all the footage I took of you. You look fucking amazing on camera, and even better in real life."

I did actually want to see that footage, but not at all to scrutinise myself in it. I wanted to know more about this 'setting up scenes' Sam had talked about when she was sneaking past all Natla's men. If she was that good at it, I could probably learn a thing or two from her. She was certainly markedly less torn up than I was after having fought my way past all those men in Yamatai.

"You'll have to show me," I said to her. "There's no reason why I can't bring the artefacts into the studio and we can't work next to each other."

That did stop her attempting to get me into her lap. "You know, that would probably be a great way to film the fillers as well," she said, lighting up. "We could set you up with a desk or something, and you could chat to me while you're cataloguing them. It would give the viewers some insight into the recovery process without even needing to explain it. Actually…" she said, going into the bag she'd put next to her on the seat and pulling the camera out of it, "…we could shoot some stuff now, too."

I sat back in my seat and rolled my eyes. I was smiling, though, glad she'd mostly forgotten about her father. I listened to her questions and answered them, for the most part just watching her. So, we were together. I had a girlfriend.

"You know what's really strange," I said, ignoring whatever her last question had been. She kept filming, anyway, waiting for me to reply. "That we don't have to worry at all about coming out."

She snorted. "There you have it folks: Rising Star Archaeologist Lara Croft is gay."

I winced. I still didn't feel like that word described me. "Don't put that in," I told her. "I don't really want people to be discussing my sexuality when I don't even really know what I am."

"Yeah… no way to avoid that," she said, this time looking at me over the LCD. "Hot girl sleeps with best friend. I think people are probably going to be almost more interested in that than the zombie centaurs."

"Can we somehow just not comment on it? At all?"

She flicked her thumb and the red LED stopped flashing. "Like, anything about us? That's going to be kind of hard. There's all sorts of stuff in here that's going to suggest it, even if we don't show it." She pointed at me. "And then there's that photo Dad released."

I picked absently at a hole in the knee of my cargos. "I don't really mind people assuming we're together as sort of a secondary thing. They already do, anyway. I just don't want it to be the topic and I don't want to have to say anything about it. At least, not yet."

She looked sombre. "You do know that's going to make people talk more about it, though, right? If you just said, 'Yeah, I'm gay, deal with it', people would totally cheer you on for like a month or two and then would stop talking about it. If you don't confirm it, you'll have journalists picking over every second of footage and hacking your phone looking for whatever they can use as evidence."

"Guess I'd better be careful what photos I take of you, then."

Her eyes twinkled and the playfulness returned. "Or what photos you get sent."

I actually could completely imagine her sexting me five times a day just to mess about with me. "What if that type of photos did get out? Don't you care what people are saying about you?"

She scoffed. "No. Or I wouldn't have done half the crap I did in boarding school and college." She held her hands up. "It's okay, though, I know you're much more private about stuff like this. I won't try to make out with you in public or anything." She held the camera back up and said before she turned it on, "I can also probably edit out most of the really incriminating footage, as long as it doesn't contain narrative elements."

When we landed and stepped out of the plane, I already decided I didn't want to stay in Tokyo for very long. Being back there was bizarre. I felt a million miles away from everyday life and like I didn't fit in it at all. On the other hand, I didn't want to go back to London, either. My flat still had Alex's server in it and photos of Roth and I everywhere. It wouldn't really be any great drama for me to put them away, but just being in the same places I'd been when they were alive was going to be tough. I'd manage, I supposed. I just wasn't looking forward to it.

I didn't really know where that left me, though. I supposed with Sam's monthly paycheque and Nishimura Corp's retainer in my bank it would be possible for us to live on the road, but I wasn't really sure if that was the solution. At some point I was going to want to settle somewhere between digs.

Maybe we could rent a big old-fashioned house in the English countryside somewhere, away from all the crowds? I'd loved visiting my Aunt in the little hamlet she'd lived in when I was little. The more I thought about that, the more I liked the idea of it. Somewhere near Surrey – it was beautiful and so very quiet around there.

I mentioned it to Sam in the car on the way back to her father's house and she grinned at me. "Wait, we're moving in together already? I haven't even taken you to dinner yet." Given that we'd shared a dorm room in boarding school, I hadn't even considered that the suggestion might come across that way. Before I could feel uncomfortable about it, though, she continued. "But let's be serious, we're always at each other's places anyway. Might as well save a couple of grand."

She was busy doing the rounds of the news websites on her phone, though, and didn't seem to be interested in discussing housing further. "Hey, look at this," she said, and passed her phone over to me. I skimmed the text on the screen. Several other people had come forward with allegations against Natla, and one of them claimed to have information pertaining to how she had been manipulating the stock market. The police had made a statement about reviewing the documents with the view of charging her with a criminal offense.

Natla certainly wasn't in any position to be charged with anything, but it gave me pleasure to see her name continuing to be dragged through the mud.

"Make sure you put in a lot of stuff about her," I told Sam. "Whatever you have."

Sam appeared to remember something. "Oh, my God, that's right," she said, snatching her phone back from me and opening up her email. The video that Natla had taken where she threatened me was there. She pressed play and we re-watched it – I was glad the driver didn't speak much English.

Sam paused it on a frame of me glaring at her. "It doesn't have her face or anything, but it's totally clear that it's her – and she's threatening to have you gang-raped. I think the police are about to have a whole lot more to charge her with." She paused. "We can't let this get out before it goes to air, though, or the police won't let us use it."

"She would have done it," I said, reflecting on what had nearly happened. It had been all over so quickly that it was difficult to really comprehend the gravity of everything she'd been planning. "She was dead set on reconquering the old Atlantean empire."

Sam let the phone rest in her lap. "I knew she was serious. When they kidnapped you..." She took a breath. "Lara, I was so scared. Just wait until you see the footage I shot. I'm probably a total sobbing wreck through the whole seven gigs of it. I can't believe I managed to pull myself together, let alone sneak in there and rescue you."

I put a hand on her thigh and she covered it with her own.

Mr. Nishimura wasn't back at the house, either, which wasn't very surprising. Yoko gave us a warm welcome, though, and already had a big dinner set out for us when we arrived. Sam had been rather keen on getting straight to the studio and starting to cut the footage, but the smell of Miso and cooked meat convinced us to stay for a little white. It was great to eat home-cooked food again.

Sam needed to open the safe for me before I was able to get the artefacts out. To do that, she had to call her father and that was a phone call I'd rather have not been listening to. I did step out of the partition so as not to look like I was eavesdropping, but it was impossible not hear her sullen reaction what I assumed were his excuses.

"I don't fucking get him," Sam said to me as she read the numbers she'd written on the back of her hand and entered them into the PIN-pad on the safe. "As far as he knows we just saved him from making huge losses this year and he can't even show up to thank us." I didn't know why it still surprised her. "At least he promised me a ninety minute slot, though, so I know what I need to cut everything down to."

She clicked the lock into place and let door fall open. My artefacts were in a crate inside, carefully packed. It was such a pleasant surprise to find myself feeling that rush of excitement again as I went through them to check they were all still in one piece. I took out one of the coins out, turning it over in my hands. I wondered how many people had done the same, hundreds of years beforehand.

Sam was watching me. "I think I've figured out how we can combine your love of archaeology with your love life," she said, and bent down into the crate to pick out one of the monstrous female Noh masks. She held in front of her face, and said in Japanese, "Give us a kiss!"

I desperately tried to shush her while she pushed me back onto the floor and knelt over me. She was saying outrageous things to me in her Japanese Noh Mask voice, when Yoko said loudly and pointedly, "Would you girls like some tea?"

We dissolved into giggles, and I smacked her gently on the arm with the lid of the crate. "I thought you were in a hurry to get to the studio," I said to her. "Come on, let's change and head off."

The look Yoko gave us as we exited suggested Sam and I might find our futons on different sides of the house when we returned.