InsaneJournal

Who: Lara and Bo
What: Bo has some issues to work out with regards to tabloids which leads to a crisis of what to do with her life
When: Recent
Where: Croft Manor
Status: complete
Rating: PG

More or less, Bo had been in a relatively good mood of late. She was actually in the midst of doing a project for the room that passed for her ‘office.’ Obviously, she didn’t work in there, but that’s where she put her computer, CD player, and even kept some of her weapons that she cleaned and sharpened on a regular basis. She was rearranging some stuff in it, mostly as she was thinking about finally adding a TV in there, but she also just generally reorganizing.

She was looking for something specific and she went in search of it. She was rummaging around in one of the rooms where they more or less stored some things. That was one benefit of living in a manor like this, plenty of space for storage. Bo moved a box that had some of her stuff in it when a couple magazines and books fell to the floor.

“Oh shit,” she cursed as she set the box down and went to pick up the magazines and books. She wasn’t going to pay them any mind except the cover of one of the magazines caught her eye. She looked at the cover and saw a photograph of her and Lara on the cover. But then the headline caught her eye and she stared at it in disbelief. It basically labeled her a gold digger, and that hit on a nerve that had been hit on a little while before.

Bo hated the very idea of being a gold digger, and she hated even more that other people seemed to think she was. Sure, she didn’t exactly care about what other people thought of her, she had a thick skin in most areas. Except for when it came to the subject of money and where she came from being the opposite end of the spectrum from Lara. She’d gotten over the worst of it a while back, but some issues still lingered under the surface, issues she wasn’t consciously aware of until something smacked her in the face like this.

Pressing her lips together, Bo hadn’t realized that she’d crushed part of the tabloid in her hand. Yet again she felt inferior to Lara and like she wasn’t worthy to be married to her. As much as it really upset her, Bo also decided she should do something about it. Perhaps she should look into getting a GED and going to college to get a degree in...something. She didn’t know what, but she felt that she should be way more than just a bartender for the rest of her life.

Crumpling the tabloid the rest of the way up, she tossed it aside as she left the room and headed back to her office in a bit of a rush. She just wanted to be alone while she tried to think of what to do. She didn’t even notice that Fae was trotting along behind her until she got back to her office and nearly closed the door on the poor dog.

“Oh, sorry Fae,” she apologized, giving her a pat on the head and letting her into the room. She left the door slightly ajar as she pulled out one of her swords and started sharpening it. It was better than simply taking one swing at the punching bag and obliterating it.

Lara hadn’t really meant to keep it. She’d put it up to deal with later when Bo wasn’t around and had simply forgotten it had existed. It would have upset Bo so she wanted to recycle it, but she was so used to the stupid things people said about her in the rags that it had been fairly low on her agenda.

Thus, forgotten.

And that wasn’t even the worse thing she’d ever seen.

Her hair was damp and she was wearing a dripping diving suit as she came into the kitchen and looked around. She thought she’d heard something. “Bo, are you home?”

It may not have been the worst thing ever, but it hit Bo right where she was the most vulnerable. She hated how it got under her skin, but it did. And she couldn’t shake it off either, especially since it hit on so many things for her not just the whole having been a runaway with no money thing. It hit on the fact she’d never finished high school, and sometimes she did feel stupid. Sometimes she felt bad because she couldn’t hold intellectual conversations with Lara about much of anything, she just sat and listened to her talk about history.

Which she didn’t mind, she liked listening to Lara talk, but sometimes she wondered if Lara would like someone who could debate with her instead of just ask questions.

Hearing Lara, Bo took a breath and tried to stuff everything down. “Yeah, I am,” she called back. And of course when she heard Lara’s voice, Fae gave a happy bark, then went and nosed the door open further before streaking out to greet Lara.

Lara would dispute that her conversations weren’t intellectually stimulating. Bo listened and was attentive and had picked things up over time. And as Lara tried to tell her on occasion, it just wasn’t her area of expertise.

There were plenty of things Bo knew that reversed their positions. Right?

“Hullo, love.” She knelt down to pet the dog. “I’m sure I smell like fish.” Straightening, she started to unzip her wetsuit as she went searching for her wife, Fae happily bouncing after her. “The new suit worked wonders. Kept me dry and warm, for the most part.”

When it came down to it, Bo tended to feel like her only area of expertise was sex. School wasn’t her thing. She got good enough grades to always be able to move on and not have to repeat a grade level, but that was about all the could be said about that.

Also unlike her, Lara was well-traveled, worldly. Before they’d met, the only two countries she’d ever been in had been Canada and the United States. Languages also weren’t her thing. She could kind of count in French and that was about it.

As it was, she took some centering breaths and pushed her insecurities aside and tried to lock them in a box deep inside of her. She could pretend she’d never seen the tabloid and that nothing was wrong and try to move on. But of course, she well knew it would never work, at least not for very long. When she felt she had a grip on herself, she stepped out of her room to greet her wife.

“Only for the most part?”

“Well, it’s designed to help warm you by, ah, urination, but I didn’t have to go,” Lara admitted. That was a less glamorous part of her chosen career; that, and dysentery. Not that she’d ever had the latter but it was always a definite possibility. “So much romance in my field.”

Lara peeled out of the wetsuit and went to hang it up in one of the bathrooms. Then she peeked her head back out and squinted at Bo. “Everything all right?”

“I suppose the romance is more in the finding artifacts lost to time as opposed to the methods used to find them, then?” She responded. “Though perhaps in the future when you return from dives I should make you shower first before hugging you.” She managed to tease.

At least Lara had a field and a career. Bo poured drinks for a living, and while she was good at it, she didn’t exactly like the thought of doing it for her entire life. But she didn’t exactly know what else she wanted to do. Or what else she could do because she didn’t exactly have skills that translated to a career.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just rearranging and reorganizing things in my room.” Liar, but she didn’t quite want to get into the whole gold digger and being inadequate thing.

“Yes, it would be that. Lets just say you couldn’t do my job if you have an aversion to dirt and disgusting things.” Lara thought of certain parts of her dreams and shuddered.

Lara gave her a smile, not quite believing her but knowing better than to push outright. Sometimes Bo required a more subtle approach. “Would you like some help with that after I shower?”

She almost offered for Bo to join her but always felt a little weird about that. Not that she didn’t want it but she never wanted Bo to think she only had sexual solutions for all her problems.

“I don’t mind dirt, but there’s only so much disgusting I can handle.” And the fact that Bo didn’t do bugs. She could easily kill spiders, even tarantula sized ones without flinching, but that was about it. Of course, the evil spider she’d killed in her dreams had bitten her and Kenzi and made them go more than a little crazy. The thing had deserved to die.

“Maybe? I’m debating putting a TV in there and where to put it, mostly.” She didn’t have a ton of things that needed moving, but she could probably use a second opinion of where to put the TV.

“Trying to be a little lazy?” Lara stuck her tongue out at her, then stripped out of her undersuit and stepped into the shower to wash out the salt and brine. It was amazing how her hair remained lusterous in the dreams where she was angelina jolie older. Something she tried not to think about.

Bo may have a thing for Angie but Lara didn’t want to be her and there were some days she was afraid she’d wake up like that.

“Not really. Just thought it might be a good idea. Or maybe it’s a bad one.” Bo shrugged. Mostly she was just trying to find an actual use for the room other than just sitting in it. She didn’t have work to do in there, and when she played video games she played them in one of the spare bedrooms. One of the ones far enough away from the rooms Lara frequented so she didn’t have to overhear when Bo played any of the Tomb Raider games.

Once Lara went to shower Bo sat down in the chair at her desk and sighed heavily. Today was not going the way she’d envisioned it going. She briefly debated seeing if she could pick up any shifts at the Nightcrawler to help distract her.

Once she was clean, Lara dried herself off and dressed, thinking she didn’t want to tease Bo right now. She snuck into the room and put her hands on Bo’s shoulders, rubbing them lightly. “So what’s really bothering you?”

Feeling Lara’s hands on her shoulders, she rolled into the touch. She heard the question, but didn’t immediately answer. Bo wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. And given Lara had asked her that question, she wasn’t going to get away with avoiding the subject. So ultimately she gave in.

“Do you think I’m a gold digger?” She finally responded.

This kind of intimacy was the thing Lara enjoyed the most. Casual touches, tenderness,memorizing everything about her. Just being close.

She applied a little more pressure, working out kinks in Bo’s shoulders with her thumbs and humming to fill the silence.

At Bo’s question, Lara’s hands froze. She blinked several times, slowly shaking her head as she processed what Bo had just asked her.

“Do I think you’re a… of course not! Shit, you found that fucking rag, didn’t you.”

She came around to stand in front of Bo, and cupped her face. “I understand how you might think you are, but you’re not.”

Bo also enjoyed this kind of intimacy. And she loved as Lara started working out the kinks in her shoulders. There definitely were a few there.

Of course, she’d anticipated Lara’s answer, and it was good to hear it, but she still had issues on the matter. She looked at Lara when she moved to stand in front of her and cupped her face. She pressed her lips together tightly as her throat tightened.

“You know that, but clearly other people see it differently. I mean, I came from nothing, and it’s not like I have a hot shot career of my own. I’m a bartender. Which I guess at least I’m not a stripper otherwise that story would’ve been worse.”

“You being a stripper wouldn’t have stopped me loving you either. Those rags are just that though. They’re rags.” Lara shook her head. “I know I’m more used to ignoring them than you are. They’re like that Skeeter woman on the network; taking the truth and twisting it into a juicy story to titillate the dull masses.”

“They may be rags, but they know exactly where to hit to make it hurt. I mean they have a point. You’re the one with the money and the good career. And I just sit here and do nothing with my life. I don’t even do volunteer work or anything. I just pour drinks.” Bo got emotional as she spoke. But she found herself in a catch-22. She wanted to actually make something of her life, but she didn’t do well when it came to school. So when it came to finding an actual career for herself, she didn’t see a path because of needing the schooling background, and she didn’t even know what she wanted to do.

Own a bar? She’d be shit at running a business. Become a private investigator like in her dreams? She most definitely would never comply with laws and regulations in that regard. The only other viable option was becoming a stripper, but she wasn’t going to do that for multiple reasons. Even if she’d probably make a lot more money that way.

Lara sat down next to Bo, taking her hand and listening to her as she spoke. Maybe she was a little to blame. “I’m sorry if … maybe it’s like you’re a kept woman. Not on purpose, I mean, but… you know what I mean. I never meant to put you in a position like this. God knows I hate money. Sometimes I wonder if living in a tiny flat might not be better for us.”

She smiled ruefully. “Whatever you want to do with your life, I’ll support you. I don’t mean with money, but as your wife, and your friend.”

Bo squeezed Lara’s hand gently and took a breath to steady herself a bit. “None of this is your fault. I’m the one who dropped out of high school and never had a direction in life. I just drifted from place to place and never thought about the future or bettering myself. I have no idea what I even want to do with my life. I’d most likely just fail out of school if I tried to get a degree in something.” She sighed a little and looked down at their hands.

“I just don’t have a passion in life like you do. You love history and adventure and discovery, you live and breathe it. I don’t feel that way about anything. Not anything that I can make a career out of, at any rate.” She looked back at Lara. “And maybe my dreams are playing a part in this. I mean, I was a bartender turned private investigator turned Chosen One. I always had something to fight, but here, it’s just normal life. I’m an immortal in a human world and I’m not nearly as okay with that as I seem to be.”

“Just because you think you will, doesn’t mean you would fail out of school.” Lara shook her head. “Maybe start with some generalized lasses. Get acquainted with it again. I love to study, Bo, I can help you.”

Lara thought about that for a moment. “Why can’t you do that here? Private investigator. Help people.”

“I’d probably just frustrate you with my inability to understand science and math. I don’t even remember what subject I was decent at.” Of course, there was a difference between having an inability to understand things and actually applying one’s self to learning. Bo had been otherwise distracted in high school with the whole rebelling against her parents thing.

“Because I don’t follow the laws when I do it. I never play by the rules and always do whatever I have to to get what my client wants me to get. Of course, in my dreams that always involved a fae doing something and more often than not I ended up having to fight the fae. I’d just end up taking justice into my own hands here.”

Shaking her head, Lara didn’t say anything right away, letting Bo vent. For someone who was a lot smarter than she thought, Bo had a lot of self esteem issues and Lara was mostly willing to blame her upbringing for that.

“You probably have a point about the law. But there are other ways to help people. What about helping out at shelters?”

Bo definitely had self-esteem issues. She didn’t feel all that smart, which undoubtedly played into this whole mess. But she did have insecurities about people thinking she was nothing but a gold digger. She needed to actually do something with her life. And that was the crux of the issue, she was bringing this up out of a need instead of a want.

“I could. I think Logan has a place for teenagers that are in a rough way.” In other words, similar backgrounds to Bo’s own. Though she didn’t actually know how well she could do with troubled teenagers.

Needs were as important as any want, something that Lara would be the first person to admit. And the person to admit to the fact that she’d always had a hard time adhering to her own needs when she needed them too.

“Why don’t you volunteer for a few days then? See what it’s like?”

True, needs were important, but Bo was about to act on a need without really having any passion behind it. She needed to do something, so she was more or less pushing herself into it instead of letting life happen and see where things went.

“I’ll talk to him about it next time I’m at work. It can’t go any worse than the time I posed as a counselor at a camp for troubled teens that were being targeted by a vengeful fae.” That wasn’t a pleasant memory. Not just because of trying to deal with the teens who didn’t trust her, but that had also culminated in Lauren breaking up with her. The first time.

If asked, Lara would point out that sometimes you didn’t know you had a passion for something until you tried it the first time.

“This time you won’t be posing. This time you’ll be there to help with people. Ask Logan what else they do there. I know they do some athletics and other activities. Hell.” Lara nudged Bo with her shoulder. “Think of how much of your life experiences could help you emphasize with them and show them that no matter how bad it gets you can come out of it.”

Bo managed to crack a smile when Lara nudged her shoulder. “True. Though I only came out of it because I met you. Not everyone is that lucky.” And god that made her sound like a gold digger, or like she’d been looking for a sugar mama. “I just hope I can actually be useful.”

She took a breath. “Sometimes I wonder where I’d be if I hadn’t run away. Maybe I would’ve finished school and gone to college or something.” It was definitely bothering her. She felt like she needed to measure up to Lara, to have a degree and a good job. After all, she’d grown up with the mentality of if you went to school and got a degree, you’d get a good job. Bo had done none of those things, and thus felt like a failure. Especially when her wife was an archaeologist making amazing discoveries and getting recognition for it. Sometimes she just felt like a shadow. A gold digging shadow.

“Then pass it on.” Lara took Bo’s hand, squeezing it and tracing her knuckles and lines and imperfections. Even though Bo wasn’t human, she was a succubus who looked younger than she was and would for Lara’s entire life, she was still. … Human where it counted. In her heart.

“Life is 50% luck and 50% hard work. And sometimes you have to make up for the lack of luck. There’s no shame in that.”

She looked at her hand, liking the feeling of Lara tracing along her skin. Bo would always look young, and looks would be incredibly deceiving in her case. It was something she didn’t like thinking about, but she wouldn’t have to really confront that until the people around her started noticeably aging while she remained looking like she was around 30.
“I guess not. But people are assholes that know where to hit where it hurts.” Bo could hit people where it hurt, but she only did so when she pushed enough to lash out. People like the writer that called her a gold digger did it to be malicious. Bo leaned into Lara and rested her head on her shoulder. “Would you still love me if I was a gold digger?”

It was about the time of year that Lara really started thinking about her future with Bo. About not wanting Bo to be alone. The whole immortality thing. She wasn’t much closer to a solution now than she had been before, not without doing something that would destroy her in the process.

“Yes, I would. Because even if you were, there’s still so much to love about you.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. I love you for you, not your money.” Bo nuzzled her cheek against Lara’s shoulder. “God, I hate feeling like this. I normally don’t give a shit what people think about me. But this? It definitely bothers me.”

“We could give away all my money and move into a tiny flat?” Lara suggested, only half jokingly.

“Somehow I don’t think the cats would take to living in a tiny flat.” Bo wouldn’t mind living in a tiny flat with Lara. But the cats would probably have something to say about not having as many hiding places from Fae. And Fae wouldn’t like not having a yard to run around in.

“Maybe a medium sized flat then,” Lara joked. But she wasn’t sure she could give up this home. Besides this one and the one in London, she had a half-dozen other homes around the globe. They made for nice bases of operations. And actually… “I do have a few of those. Small and mid-sized flats. Some of them are shit holes really. Places to bolt to, or to have a clean bed to stay in when I’m in that part of the world.”

She smiled sheepishly. “The only ones under the Croft name are houses like this, I used false names for the others. I turned one in Peru into low cost apartments for people.”

Bo lifted her head and looked at Lara. She wasn’t surprised by that admission, and not because she’d played the video games wherein Lara clearly had a hiding out apartment in Rise of the Tomb Raider. But with her world travel, it made sense she’d have a few different places where she could stay.

“Hey, it never hurts to have places to bolt to when needed. And that’s definitely good that you gave people a low cost place to live in Peru. Another reason I love you, you help people that need it.”

Well, Bo wasn’t mad, even if it was an admission of some of Lara’s wealth. she leaned in and gave her a soft kiss. “I love you. Lets get take-out tonight. It would be so scandalous for so-called gold diggers.”

She definitely wasn’t mad. Besides, it’s not like she ever asked how many properties Lara owned. Bo also trusted that if there came a need for Lara to tell her about them, she would’ve. She returned the soft kiss, and couldn’t help a little chuckle. “Oh, so very scandalous. I love it. And I love you.” Spending the evening with takeout and snuggling with Lara would certainly help. Bo was feeling a need to be a cuddlebug.