MY FIANCE IS IN HERE AND I'M GOING TO KILL HER.
Who: Lara and Sam What: Lara stumbled into a smuggling operation when: Sunday Where: Hospital Rating: Pg-13 for wounds and adorableness
Lara had said she was going rock climbing, but she’d gotten distracted on the way there, turning her truck down a dusty and dirty old road to investigate what she'd thought was an old settlement. There were plenty scattered through the mountains, from old Spanish buildings to native sites, and she had wanted to see what this one was.
Two hours later, she'd walked into hospital with two gunshot wounds and what she was certain was a concussion, and fallen flat on her face.
Sam was going to kill her.
Sam was absolutely going to kill Lara. That was a thing that was going to happen, and it was exactly what Sam was thinking as she drove into the hospital parking lot like a bat out of hell.
With one hand still clutched around half of an apple strudel. What, she was hungry!
She rushed into the ER and ran up to the nurse's station, "MY FIANCE IS IN HERE AND I'M GOING TO KILL HER."
After a pause - in which she finished the last of the strudel - she smiled and added, “I mean not really, but can you point me to her curtain because really? Seriously!? Gunshot wounds!? How do you go rock climbing and come back with gunshot wounds!?”
Someone let Sam drive. Who let Sam drive? If Lara was conscious she would have been upset.
“Uhm. And what’s her name?” The nurse smiled politely. They’d had multiple gunshots come in, and the police had delayed surgery while they’d gotten their statements. Lara hadn’t been deemed a risk, at least, but the other two that had come in were.
"Lara Croft. I'm her fiance, Sam Nishimura? I'm also her like... emergency contact and stuff and please just let me go see her. It's complicated but I'm a hormonal pregnant lady and I will scream and cry all over you and no one wants that." Sam was prepared to scream and cry right then and there, all at once. She looked like it, too, but she was trying to keep a smile on.
Even if she was worried. Did she mention she was going to kill Lara?
The nurse stared at her, then stared at her stomach, and decided that he didn’t want to deal with it. “Miss Croft is on the second floor, room 103. They should have finished up with her now.” He pointed at the elevator and then returned to his work.
"Thank you so much, sweetie." Sam made a heart shape at him with her hands and then booked it towards the elevator. It wasn't that long before she was a floor up and looking for room 103, walking down the hallways like a woman on a mission. Because she was.
The door to the room was wide open and she stomped right on in, "Are you kidding me with this!? 'Oh Sam, I'm just going to go rock climbing'. Since when do rocks SHOOT people?"
Lara groaned. Someone was shouting and it made her stitches hurt. It was a very familiar, and very angry voice, and she let out the kind of sigh of someone preparing to defend themselves from baseless accusations. “Sam?”
Oh, that was Sam all right, and she looked furious. Lara tried to hold up a hand in the universal gesture of ‘give me a moment.’ She’d just explained the whole thing to the police.
“I took a detour to investigate an old homestead.”
It looked less like Lara was asking for a moment to explain and more like Lara was waving the 'Sam please stop screaming' white flag. Which usually made Sam feel a little more sympathetic about things. Lara looked like hell, too, and Sam chewed on her lip a bit. It was possible that she'd mood swing straight to sobbing, and that was so not going to help anything.
She took a seat and let out a sigh, "Of course you did. You know, you keep talking about how adventure found you, but I swear you also go looking for it, sweetie."
“I thought I might find something interesting. Settler relics. I think it was Spanish, perhaps mid 1700s. The really fascinating thing…” She trailed off as she realized Sam probably wasn’t interested in that part and she could ramble on about it and it wasn’t actually that important right now. “I was fine until I followed fresh tracks into the mountains. I surprised some people who were trying to move some crates. Smugglers I think.”
Sam smashed her hand up against her face and let out a long sigh, "Laraaaa... Can't you learn to leave well enough alone? Tell me you're not gonna be wanted for murder or anything now."
That was of more concern to her than the state of Lara's wounds. If her fiance had been in serious danger she figured that someone would have called her sooner. Or that Lara would still be in surgery. But she was here, and alive, and everything seemed attached... "And you say I'M a pain in the ass to deal with."
“I wasn’t armed with anything bigger than a knife.” She sounded like she wished she had been. “I did drop one with a well placed rock, and the other I took out when he came to make sure I was dead.” She reached for Sam’s hand. “I’m fine. They’ll live. It’s self defense and they’re apparently terrorists.”
Like that was something one did every day.
Apparently terrorists. Sam's eyes blinked a few times as those two words echoed in her head. Lara could have actually been killed, she'd managed to interrupt some kind of terrorist... thing. That was so much more dangerous even than the story she'd gotten over the phone. A cold pit formed in her stomach, and it felt like a storm was gathering inside her.
Coincidentally, one seemed to be gathering outside, too.
"You... apparently terrorists? And you're talking about this like you're discussing the weather or something! That's crazy dream stuff, Lara, it's not stuff you do HERE..."
But it kind of was, and she tossed her hands up, "Fine, alright, we've been chased by creepy black star-eating things and Renji went to train with monkeys and maybe I shouldn't be SURPRISED that you found terrorists and they tried to KILL You..."
Lara winced, grabbing Sam’s hand. “I suppose I just have that kind of luck. I don’t know what they were trying to smuggle, only that I had a...bad feeling. A hunch. I really wish I could have looked in those crates. I think it was more than just weapons or drugs…”
"Oh, you had a bad feeling. So of course you had to go check it out instead of running away..." Sam squeezed Lara's hand and tried to take a deep breath. Lightning crashed outside, and she felt like it was touching down inside of her, too. That wasn't right. None of this was right.
And she was seriously going to get heartburn if she didn't stop stressing out about it. She rubbed at her belly with her free hand and tried to calm herself down, "Sweetie, I love you, but we're raising a child and you're kind of the baby daddy and I need you in one piece, and not full of holes, okay?"
“Sam,” Lara whispered, her eyes darting out towards the window. That was the absolute last thing she wanted to see. The last thing she really wanted to think about right now was that Himiko could be inside her fiance. She squeezed her hand, then touched her stomach. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to disappear on you, Sam.”
"Well you better not. You better not! Because like... I seriously can't do this alone. Alright? I've learned how to do a lot without you and maybe I'd have been okay ish. Like not really okay but kind of okay before. Maybe last year, or a year before that." Sam's hand started to shake and she squeezed Lara's hand a bit more tightly. The clouds broke outside, and rain started to pour down.
"No, alright, I'd have just gone dead inside and probably would have ended up bouncing from one bed to another until my drinking got too bad. But we have a blueberry and I can't drink myself into a stupor, so you better not go finding random terrorists again, alright!?"
She was crying, damn those pregnancy hormones. And it was stupid, she knew, because Lara wasn't dead and had just been shot full of holes. If anything, she should be the one being strong, not the other way around, "I'm sorry! I shouldn't be crying all over you like a crazy person. I can't help it."
Sam's emotions washed over Lara. In her pained and slightly drugged state, when she closed her eyes fresh tears formed at the corners. Please, she thought. Don't do this, Sam. Control this. Maybe it was just the powers transferring over, not Himiko.
She didn't want Sam to panic, so she didn't say anything about that, opening her eyes again and tugging Sam closer. "I love you, you silly git. I'd tear down this whole damn city to get to you if I had to."
Sam wiped at her cheeks a bit and tried to get her emotions under control. That wasn't that easy in her current state, but she gave it an effort, for Lara's sake. It helped if she tried to imagine that she was British. She was going to be a noblewoman's wife after all.
"I love you too, sweetie... but lets not tear down the whole city okay? I mean... you don't need to worry about that, nothing is going to happen to me! Instead things are happening to you, and I don't know what I'd do without you, that's all. I mean, lets be honest, sweetie, I can't tear down the whole city to get to you. We've all seen how I do with a gun."
Lara muttered something about tearing it down anyway. For Sam anything, because she was her everything. “All right, Sam. I’ll …. try to behave. Is that fair enough?” She gave her a tired smile.
"You'll especially try to behave while they keep you here in the hospital or I swear to god I'll-- WOAH!" Sam let out a gasp and rested her hand on her belly, then giggled, "Oh my god Lara give me your hand!"
She didn't even wait for Lara to give it to her, she just grabbed it and tugged it onto her belly, "BLUEBERRY IS KICKING!"
For the moment, Lara’s worries melted away, and she grinned stupidly as she felt the baby kick. It was as though, for the first real time, she was able to accept that this was happening to them. A tear rolled down one bruised cheek. “If it’s a girl, can we call her Amelia?”
"Amelia Joslin Croft." Sam replied, adding in Reyes' name. She felt like that was fitting somehow, considering how much of an addition to their lives Reyes had been.
She added, after a pause, “I think your mother’d be proud.”