A Revelation; A Resurrection
She stumbled out of the light, into the relative darkness of the arena in the Strahov. She had defeated the enemy, or so she hoped, and yet emerged empty handed. There was no artifact, no priceless treasure untouched for millennia and yet suddenly in her hands. There was no physical prize for Lara Croft on this adventure. Perhaps she was happy, perhaps she was nostalgic, or perhaps she had simply chosen to ignore that fact.
The arena was empty save the mutilated, bullet-ridden carcass of a mammoth, however hideous butterfly. The decapitated corpse lay off to the side; the cause of the destruction to the beast lay in a pool of blood and immediately attracted the attention of the fatigued adventurer. Her hands reached tentatively towards the object, her fingers nearly brushing the metallic surface before her hand recoiled as though she had been shocked. Thoughts of the owner flashed through her head as her knees hit the floor heavily, and she collapsed into her hands and let the tears flow.
So Eckhardt murdered your Father, and you want revenge.
Justice.
Her thoughts were, initially, on Kurtis, on the man whose weapon lay abandoned in a puddle of what was presumably his blood, but in one of the great, selfish acts of her life, her tears were for herself.
Part of her wanted to pocket the glaive, the weapon; an accolade from her most recent adventure. And part of her refused to touch it. She could not have the same thrill, the same glory from taking something that so clearly belonged to someone else. It was not hers. Her omnibus of relics from previous times were arguably not hers either; but they were hers for the taking, untouched by civilization in the decades and centuries and millennia they had been buried. The blade would not serve the same purpose, she knew that. And yet part of her clung on to the shreds of a life once buried in darkness, and wanted nothing more than the physical trophy of a journey completed.
Justice.
Kurtis had wanted justice; so honorable a cause he had chased. Thoughts concerning his health, his motivation, his affiliations vanished nearly as quickly as they arrived, thoughts of her own motives arising in the void they left. What was the cause that she chased? To clear her name? Then why was her journey filled with the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of satisfaction that came after the death of her mentor, the man who had been in effect, her father. That man had died years before. And yet the death of Werner Von Croy was so absolute, so final. Kurtis's father had been murdered, and in a way so had her own. Was she, too, ultimately, searching for the justice of an avenged death?
Kurtis, although he was searching revenge, had returned to something he had once abandoned in order to achieve that. Could Lara do the same? In a way, had she not already? Was the best way—the only way—that she could right the wrong of Werner's death was by resuming to her old life, the life he had so carefully and fully taught her?
Her tears dried as she stared at the motionless blade.
She'd thought of herself as a god once. Not the powerful, omnipotent kind, but merely as a being of immortality, a being not predisposed to the fickle lives of humans. She was wrong; she was not immortal. And she knew it. And yet she was wrong of the gods, too. She had seen a god—'killed', for lack of a more appropriate term, one, even. And she knew that gods were as fickle as the life of a human.
Her fingers wrapped around the blade as she lifted it from the ground.
She smiled as she thought of the prize of her mission, not the glaive, but a startling revelation.
Surely, as it's possible to revive an angel, a god can be resurrected, too.
A/N: Decided to take a very temporary break before updating my other story. I'd like topromise that the next update will be up in a week or so, but we'll see. In the meantime, enjoy this one-shot I wrote to sort-of describe Lara's transition from AoD to Legend.