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“That’s going to scar.”
It was exactly a week after Yamatai. Seven days since Lara climbed down the mountain with Sam in her arms. A week, yet it felt somehow like years and moments simultaneously.
Lara stood in front of the mirror in the small cabin that had been designated as hers since the rescue. The space hadn’t explicitly been offered to her, but she had been existing in it since, and the crew hadn’t said anything about it.
It wasn’t like her cabin on the Endurance: filled with bits and pieces of herself. This cabin was largely impersonal: blank turquoise walls and grey blankets on the bed. A pile of spare clothes peeking out from under the bed where Lara had left them. There was a crack in one corner of the mirror, and it showed her reflection partly distorted.
She winced as she pressed down on the mess of scarred flesh on her stomach, even though she knew it would hurt.
The scar from where the nail had impaled her was the boldest of the lot, still red and tender however many weeks it had been since the Endurance had shipwrecked. But the worst of the scarring was actually from the cauterization afterwards. The impalement had been fairly clean, straight in and fast, but the burn was messy, and so painful, pressing the metal to her stomach was like having a star explode inside of her, singeing her from inside out. Lara steered away from thinking about that much more, if she didn’t she’d stand there for hours. It had been a necessary evil; one that had both taken her breath away and saved her from infection.
“It might not,” Sam, curled up on Lara’s little bunk, the thin blankets pulled up to her chin, legs tucked by her chest. Sam had been laying there for most of the afternoon, but Lara knew that she hadn’t slept for much of it.
Lara carefully prodded the raised, bumpy skin of the scar, clenching her teeth as a sharp burst of pain shot through her stomach. There was no need for her to touch it, but she couldn’t help herself.
She’d been poking and prodding at the various scars all afternoon, laying next to Sam as the ship rocked them back and forth. Lara had so many scars. Too many to count, though she had tried.
“It will,” Lara said with certainty. The flesh was too damaged for it not to. She supposed then, that she should be grateful it wasn’t worse. It could’ve been so much worse - it could have gotten infected, it could have punctured a lung, it could have sliced her open completely and left her to bleed to death.
A lot of things could have been worse. Couldn't they?
Lara swallowed heavily and pushed away any thoughts of Roth, Grim and Alex.
Sam reached out a hand from her blanket cocoon, and the rough pads of her fingertips just barely traced over the mark, a whisper of a touch. It wasn’t enough to hurt, but Lara swallowed for another reason.
“Sweetie…” Sam started, and then trailed off, eyes suddenly distant. They had all been doing that - struggling to stay in the moment, being pulled down into the past.
Lara took hold of Sam’s hand and squeezed it. Sam’s hand was warm, and Lara’s fingers were so cold that they snapped Sam out of whatever memory she had been sucked into.
“Lara, you’re freezing.” Sam sat up, pulling Lara back until her legs hit the bunk. Lara let herself be pulled down and under the blankets, not even bothering to take her boots off, no matter how much dirt was now getting on her sheets.
Sam arranged her like a doll, until Lara was laying in between her legs, her head resting on Sam’s chest, her breath hot on Lara’s head, Lara moving with each rise and fall of Sam’s chest.
Encircled by Sam’s warm arms, Lara let her eyes drift closed, the ship gently rocking them, Sam a comforting presence. Lara didn’t sleep - Lara hadn’t slept properly for weeks; whereas Sam did nothing but sleep or pretend to, Lara could barely manage an hour per night.
Sam’s fingers lightly trailed up her arms, and Lara heard her wince quietly when she brushed across a raised scar on her bicep- some near miss that Lara couldn’t put a memory to right then. If Lara thought about it hard it would come to her in flashes at unexpected moments, but just then, while in Sam’s warm embrace, Lara didn’t much care.
Sam’s fingers moved on from the scar, and to her credit she didn’t react to any of the others - the little slashes and purple bruises that littered her skin, and Lara had gotten used to pretending that she couldn’t feel the pain that radiated from them.
Eventually, the light touches stopped, and Lara blearily opened her eyes at the soft snore from above. Sam had fallen asleep again, and Lara pulled the blankets over both of them, and closed her eyes again, and willed herself to sleep.
She wouldn’t.