A/N: Guest: Thanks!^^

Trigger warning for graphic description of OCD! OCD can be treated, and it doesn't have to be suffered in silence.

Timeline-wise this is after SOTR and before "B is for Benumbed". However, in intensity this is not fully in line with the other one-shots where Lara is coping better with everything.

D is for Disorder

- It doesn't matter if there is nothing to obsess about, a tightly wrung mind will always come up with something. In OCD only your fears have a voice – the world is silent.

I could have died thousand times over.

It should be okay now.

Should be, because Trinity is gone, the world is saved, and Jonah is alive and building a new life on the other side of the planet.

And it should be fine, because she has gotten her stomach full of root porridge this morning – courtesy of Jacob – and she has slept last night indoors under a warm hide.

And somehow nothing is okay – not to her mind anyway.

It starts all so innocently, and she almost doesn't notice it at first. The water cup the stewardess gave her on her flight back to England fit so well into the small slot in the tray. She checked how her bow sat in its new casing when she packed it in the last evening at Kuwaq Yaku; and she checked it again, because it had been her lifeline over the past few years and she wanted it to make it back home.

England was a hazy mess in her mind; full of confusion and fumbling steps. Nothing had its place, and the organizing was natural. Her new souvenirs onto a display, making an inventory of everything in the attic, small renovation projects here and there. It was all so logical, better, improvement, restoration – a new quest when her old one had been fulfilled.

And it had felt so safe when she could watch the results of her work and slump on the bed after staying in constant motion for the entire day. – But from somewhere, she had begun to feel the vibration in her bones, the unending energy in her muscles that willed to do something, never stopping.

And she doesn't know when it spread to her mind – no, to her brain – because she can still think, but there is something in her that's out of her control – and worse – keeping her in an ever-tightening leash, suffocating her.

Traveling back to the Geothermal Valley had been a flurried decision. She had been running out of things to soothe her mind in England and part of her logical side longed for Jacob's wisdom. He had seemed to understand her – maybe more than she had wanted to reveal or had been ready to admit to herself back then. She doesn't necessarily like it, because she is fine, there is no pain, and she has made peace with her past.

She hadn't even mentioned anything to Jonah, because, despite that he would have supported her point of view on the surface, she would have seen the worry in her friend's eyes: on how no one should be okay with what she had had to push herself through.

And she doesn't know how to open up about the subject to Jacob now, because everything should be fine.

It's her body that doesn't seem to understand it.

And her body has been the only thing she has been able to trust absolutely in this world.

But she gets the feeling that Jacob can already read her better than she understands herself, so he doesn't press the issue. He'd listen, she knows, but she doesn't… know.

Because she is scared.

Because it is not just the water cup or the bow anymore. Her instincts are on haywire and whisper to her all the time. Everything could be better, she could be so much better if she just tried.

And oh, does she try.

It's all she has ever known. Save the world, save her friends, keep her cool because fighting with people causes them to commit suicide.

Every single thing counts.

And somehow all the things that logically shouldn't be connected, like the way she crosses the doorstep into Jacob's cabin and Jonah potentially having a car accident back in Peru, are irrevocably linked. It makes no sense, but there was a time when she wouldn't have thought that lifting an ancient key from its place could cause the world to end. And her body is so certain of the weight of her every single action and thought, letting the doubt eat her insides until she succumbs out of anxiety because she simply cannot lose anyone else.

But she is losing her mind to something that is not her. And she feels more trapped than she ever did parceled from the roof of the cave at Yamatai or under the influence of the White Breath. Because she doesn't know how to fight against herself and everything that feels right, and correct, and brings her peace. Pain is easy to ignore compared to her instincts.

And so, she doesn't know why she is taking four times as long to help and clean the weapons the Remnants saved from Trinity because she has to check every surface from specific angles. Nor can she close her ears from the whisper to tap the trees that she passes on her way down to the lake: five taps on each tree trunk and seven more when it doesn't feel enough. However, twelve feels like a wrong number which adds another seven more, and soon she is turning back and forth, wanting to rip her hair and the doubt out of her head. And she goes through the same mantra in her mind over and over again; it's a small fragment of her father's notes and probably nothing, but it feels like the key to the universe that her mind is just too stupid to decipher.

Hasn't she made enough careless mistakes already?

She feels sick, physically sick, and unstable at how her heart pounds, breath shortens, and blood thunders in her ears because she is safe – should be safe – at least that's what a tiny part of sane logic tells her. She tries to grasp onto it with all her will, but the uncertainty is too much and she feels weak, drowning into herself a little more with each surrender.

And she wants to scream when her knees hit the rocks at the edge of the lake because the pressure is so much and she feels that she'll go crazy from the sheer force of it. How everything could be a little bit better, and how the whole world will fall apart if she misses one calculation, one movement.

And she screams her heart out, but it still doesn't manage to drown out the sounds of urgency that her instincts yell at her with every heartbeat.

She yanks her shirt and pants off and scrambles to the icy water of the Valley, desperate for it to numb her. And she groans with tears as the adrenaline meets her like an old friend and the genuine life-threat directs her brain to a singular goal that is right in her reach with no steps, no patterns, just in primal survival.

She doesn't know how long she stands there, the water licking her waist after the initial submerge. But she is crying in earnest, completely at loss on what to do, when Jacob comes to wrap his arms around her midsection after having waded after her. He has been keeping an eye on her for the past three weeks and even now, is gauging her body temperature and breathing against him.

And she leans back against his bare upper body to have something to focus on as the water is making her numb. And she grounds the soles of her feet against the small rocks at the bottom of the lake because they are too many to be counted. Indefinite time later, she lets Jacob half-carry half-walk her back ashore, wrap her shivering body in dry hides, and pull her into his lap to share warmth.

She cries herself empty, because surely, by all the whispers she missed in her brief speck of freedom, the world is already ending.

She doesn't know when the world managed to break her, but she still feels guilty about taking it with her.

A/N: Something little happier the next time around. On another note: I'm hosting a Lara/Jacob - Lara & Jacob prompt challenge on AO3. You can participate in any language and there are no length requirements for the fic(s). It would be amazing to have more people on board! You can find the challenge by my AO3 account Salty_but_Sweet and by clicking "Collections" in the sidebar.