I lied when I said there weren't going to author's notes at the beginning of chapters. But I'm only doing it this time to tell you that flashbacks are in italics and flashbacks within flashbacks the return to regular format. Make sense?
As you're finishing the last of your breakfast, you're caught unaware as Sam flicks the corner of her last piece of bacon at you. The knife you were using to cut your eggs is still in your hand, and your face hardens as you effortlessly spin the knife your hand, grip it tightly and point it at her. The way she's frozen up, the look she has in her eyes, immediately tell you that you just fucked up. Kitchen utensil threats (more specifically, knife threats) don't really feel all that funny anymore, you quickly realize. Dropping the knife causes a loud clatter, and it's the only noise in the room. You try to pick the bacon out of your hair as humourously as you can, but you can't help feel that you've just undone the whole morning in that one stupid move. When you finally retrieve the crisp meat, you flick it back at her with a smile that you hope looks apologetic. Crunching the bacon between her fingers, she takes a deep breath, and you feel like she's stopped short of saying… something. You feel compelled to apologize once again but you end up also holding your tongue, for a change. That odd expression is back on her face and the two of you sit and stare at each other for a few more seconds before Sam flashes a smile that looks horribly forced. Your eyes flicker away for a second before they meet hers again and you do your best to smile back as she spins her chair, and stands up. However, she still looks like she has something to say. You prepare for the worst as she starts speaking. "I should go shower." She turns to leave, and you're quite sure that that wasn't the pressing issue.
The second she's out of sight, you slump slightly in your chair and roll your head forward to watch the smiling bunnies on your feet bob as you anxiously tap them. Goddammit. You don't deserved to be smiled at, so you kick the bunnies off your feet and across the room. A minute later, the knife violently joins the bunnies. Remains of egg yolk fly off the knife as it hits the floor, and most of it splatters across one of the bunnies' face. For a moment, the yellow yolk turns red, and now the bunny is smiling brightly at you through a cover of blood. You force your eyes shut, and keep them that way long enough so when you next open them, the red is once again bright yellow. You push your chair out from under yourself and go to clean your literal mess. You'd love to clean the figurative one too, if only you knew how.
Sam finishes showering, and you finish doing the dishes. You drop onto the sofa, and Sam appears. She's fully dressed and ready to go out and deal with the media again. A few seconds and a quick goodbye kiss later, she's out the door and you're alone again.
You're sitting on your blood stained sofa, mentally prepping yourself for another day all alone. Which is something you don't allow yourself to complain about because it's a choice that you made. The fact that you could go out somewhere, so as to not be in total solitude, hasn't occurred to you. You've been more focused on your decision that you want nothing to do with interviews, publicity, any media at all. Not after the disaster that was the first interview you did shortly after being released from hospital.
You've settled down into the oversized, overstuffed chair that fits the odd aesthetic of the room you're feeling trapped in. You really don't want to be here and you really don't want to talk about this, but like you told Sam, you just want to get this over with (how naive, thinking you'd be able to do the media thing in a nice, easy, one and done interview). Waiting for the man who you're about to play twenty questions with, you fidget with your hands and try to get comfortable in the huge, soft chair. For some reason, you can't and instead you try to occupy yourself by looking around the room, surveying it. As you do, you can't help but pick out the best possible escape routes, take note of items that could be used to defend yourself if needed. When you look to the actual exit, you see Sam watching from the door and she smiles at you and gives you a double thumbs up. A few minutes later Mr. Twenty Qs shows up and wastes no time getting down to business.
The first few questions are all pretty standard, if a little boring, and you begin to feel yourself relaxing. You can explain archaeological theories, you can talk about which theories interest you, you can even push yourself to talk about the theories that led you to Yamatai. Then Twenty Qs asks the question that starts to send you spiralling, "Now, from what I understand, there were a veritable ton of wrecked ships littered around the island. It seems you were pretty lucky to even get to the mainland, yes?" the hatch above you is shut tight and despite your efforts to open it it's not budging and you're up to your knees in the water and you're getting desperate but it just isn't budging and the water is halfway up your torso now and even though you've still got room to breathe you're already gasping desperately for air and You take a deep breath and pull yourself back into your giant chair and out of the non-existent water. Struggling to find words that don't contradict how "lucky" you were, you let the first coherent thought that comes to you answer the somewhat upsetting question, "Yes, and it was that incredible luck that allowed us to make so many discoveries throughout our time on the island."
When Sam had sat you down before the interview, she heavily hinted that you should maybe perhaps leave out the whole immortal sun queen thing. Not lie about it or anything, just… omit the "crazy-town-banana-pants" bits. For your reputation, you know, because you don't want to start your career with some laughable fairy tale, like your parents. Not that your parents were crazy or wrong! But the rumours, you've heard them yourself, and you don't need to start your career surrounded by rumours like that, do you? You'll just tame the stories down a bit. Same stories, no angry entities. You can do that.
Sam didn't need to suggest that you leave out as much detail as possible, when it comes to how you "made your discoveries". The details of what happened on the island haven't been leaked much. You don't need, or want, to casually discuss what you had to do in order to survive.
"I notice that you used the words "us" and "our" in your last answer. From what I've heard, you were the only actual archeologist that returned from the trip," you're clumsily stumbling the only reason you're standing at all is because roth is there supporting you and he's stumbling back with you and there's a handful of men starting to surround you and you're still stumbling as roth starts shooting and all of a sudden you're spinning around and your view has changed and mathias is there and mathias has an axe in his hand and mathias is throwing the axe and now you're falling backwards and roth isn't holding you up anymore roth isn't holding you up anymore and he's stumbling more than you were and roth has an axe lodged in his back and you're on the ground utterly useless and oh god roth "but I presume you all worked together while making these historical discoveries. I realize this is probably a tough topic to talk about so soon, but do you feel that those who didn't come back would have considered the trip to be the most successful of their career? It's certainly kickstarted yours." whitman's ranting at you he's ranting about playing along with these insane rituals because the bastard actually seems to think that playing along will not only get him (and maybe the rest of you) off of this island but that it'll also lead to some significant discovery as if you haven't found enough mythological and historical shit already and the fucking bastard gave them Sam he gave Sam back to them that son of a bitch doesn't care about anything other than his career he betrayed all of you and "They. Yes." Your words are coming out broken and you're losing the ability to speak with multiple syllables, but you take a look around the room and see Sam standing at the door. She's mouthing something at you. You miss it the first time, but she repeats it: "You're okay. Breathe." So you breathe, and you find a few extra syllables in that breath, enough to finish answering the question. "I do believe that they would feel that way. I don't know how anybody wouldn't. We- I haven't even finished cataloguing all of our discoveries." You've actually barely started, but you aren't going to broadcast that.
Mr. Twenty Qs doesn't notice your stutter over the word "we", but Sam does and you look out the room again to see her silently watching you, the mysterious expression on her face. You turn your attention back to Twenty Qs as he starts another question. "Now obviously Yamatai was a dangerous island," You must have been rubbing at a cut on your cheek. His eyes aren't meeting yours at the moment, and are lingering on the visible wounds on your face. You chose to wear clothes that would cover as much of you as possible, but he clearly saw you rubbing at the cut on your cheek. You don't like where this is going, the last few questions have been bad enough and you don't know how much more remembering you want to do right now. You want to go back to boring standard questions. You would answer boring standard questions for eight hours straight, if only he would go back to them. "We've heard from some of the other survivours that you were pretty much the one responsible for getting the lot of you back from the island. Would you say that you had to face a fair amount of hardships to survive? Again, there were so many wreckages that you must have known from the start that the odds were against you." you're wading through a river of blood and you're falling and you're sliding down steep cliffs you're being held down and beaten and you're setting fire to dozens of buildings and you're trying to brace yourself within an incredible windstorm you're climbing impossibly high mountains in the snow and you're fighting no you're killing dozens of men each one more brutally than the next and you're watching your rescue plane crash and it's all happening at once and you're about to stab yourself with a super heated arrow tip And suddenly you find your hand at your side, your fingers tapping at the stitches and scar tissue through your shirt. You can taste pennies in your mouth and you feel bile burning the back of your throat. You've been quiet for a while, too long, you assume, because you can see Sam looking at you again. But this time she isn't saying anything to you, she's just staring at you with worry plastered all over her face. Mr. Twenty Qs is staring at you too, minus the worry. How can he be asking you these questions? How does he think it's okay to be asking these things? Sam had warned you that people were going to be insensitive but you hadn't expected anything like this. You should have, because now your mouth is full of pennies that you can't seem to spit out and you can't swallow back the bile that's burning your throat and you're excusing yourself, and you're pushing your way through the door. Behind you Twenty Qs is throwing his hands up in a "what?" manner and you can hear footsteps that you assume to be Sam's behind you. You don't stop though, instead you crash through the nearest emergency exit and the moment you're out that door your stomach is up. A few seconds later, as you're wiping your mouth with the back of your sleeve, you feel a hand on your back. You're on high alert and the hand causes you to panic and you whip your arm backwards, knocking the other arm away from you. Then you remember the footsteps behind you as you were rushing out of the building and you turn to see Sam, who immediately drops the arm she had been nursing when she notices you've turned to her.
You're tapping your foot against the outer wall of the building because you can't keep still and Sam silently takes a careful step towards you. You can't keep eye contact and you turn your head to the side to focus on a crack in one of the bricks in the wall. Sam takes another step towards you. "Hey." When you don't respond, she risks another step and she's close enough to you now that even with just your peripheral vision you can almost meet her eyes. That's when you break. You close the small gap between the two of you and cling on to her so tight that she'd probably complain under different circumstances.
"I'm sorry." Your speech is impaired by the shallow breathes you're taking but you keep going. "God, Sam, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." You keep repeating your apology and it's almost become a mantra by the time she interrupts you.
"Lara." Hearing her say you name silences you, but you're still frozen in place. "Lara, sweetie, look at me." You don't, you're still clinging to her and you don't want to let go so you bury your face in her neck instead. She seems to understand and continues anyway. "Listen to me, okay?" You nod into her. "It's not your fault." You know she can feel you take a deep, shaky breath. "Keep listening to me, okay? It's not your fault. None of it was your fault." You can't hold it in anymore and an ugly sob escapes you. "You're okay. We're okay. We made it home. We're off the island, and you're okay and I'm okay." Another sob as her words inadvertently stab you. The two of you made it off the island, but how many others didn't?
"I shouldn't have let you do this so soon. I should have told them to fuck off for even thinking of asking for an interview this soon." You sniffle, and give up on stifling any more sobs. "You did nothing wrong, okay? We shouldn't have done this. I'm so sorry, sweetie. I shouldn't have let you do this," She pauses every time your sobbing gets a little out of control, to make sure that you hear every word. "And you shouldn't have to answer those questions right now. Or ever, really. None of this was your fault. You're safe. And I'm safe too. You saved me, remember? You saved me and you have to let me help you now, okay? You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to apologize for, okay?" You're too busy sniffling and whimpering to respond, but you heard Sam's voice crack on that last "okay", and she's silent now. With the limited movements she can make while you're crushing her, she does her best to keep her arms wrapped around you and stands there as your anchor in the dimming light of that dirty alley, right beside a pile of your own sick.
You don't know how long you stay there, crying, and clinging to Sam like your life depends on it.
You haven't done any interviews since then. It hasn't been very long since that interview, really, but the next time Sam brought up speaking with the media you said no. After she tried to change your mind by explaining that she would talk to the interviewer, do somewhat of a pre-screen, before you'd start the interview, you didn't say a word. You just sat there, arms crossed, not really listening. Not even when Sam was literally right up in your face. You just stared through her or away from her until she got fed up with you and stormed out of the house. Somewhere around the time you heard the door slam, you realized that you had just acted like a six year old throwing a silent fit.
When you got up the next morning, you found her sleeping on the couch. As delicately as you could, you woke her up to check on her. When her head had cleared of sleep enough that she could understand you, you explained to her that the reason you woke her up was because you thought it was strange she was on the couch and wanted to make sure she was okay. She sighed at you.
"You're all wounded and cut up and shit, and you need to heal properly. I couldn't just kick you out onto the couch, could I?" All you could do was blink at her. "So I kicked you from the couch to the bed. Or something like that. Go eat some food." She held your gaze with a glare as you backed away and then headed towards the kitchen. You wanted to go apologize for acting like a child, but you didn't know what to say beyond "I'm sorry". A ruffle of blankets indicated that she had covered herself back up to probably sleep some more, and your window for apology had disappeared.
But she's the one who's supposed to know all about the media. So she should be the one doing the interviews and such, because she knows how it works. Some details of what happened on the island have spread since the interview, although a lot of it is wrong or assumed to be made up. You don't care much anymore about how the media twists stories about it, either from absolutely nothing or from Sam's valiant attempts at speaking on your behalf. But you've never stopped to think about how she might feel about having to be the public face of Yamatai and Lara Croft. You've also never bothered to ask her. And as you get up off the couch and start unwrapping the bandage that she so carefully applied to your wound last night, you still don't think about either of those things.
dig up her bones but leave the soul alone
This was kind of a short chapter. Sorry?
I was gonna call it The Interview but that reminded me of that shitty movie so I said fuck that.
I don't watch TV interviews, and I don't really read many either. I guess that was tiptoeing the line of even being believable, but I needed questions for Lara to react to.
Did you know that it's really hard to switch back to writing these notes in first person, after spending time proofreading and fixing things in second person? You wait for an answer, but you're talking to the internet and the internet can't exactly immediately reply to you. When you reread the sentence you've just wrote, to make sure there are no spelling errors, I saw that I was fucking writing in fucking second person again and then I ruined any grammar that might have lingered by switching back to first. Okay, I exaggerated that, but I have actually had to backspace a few times.
Also, yes, I am, aware, that I use, probably far too many, commas.
Next up: The Forty-Sixth Episode