Just Desserts
A Tomb Raider short story by Sarah Crisman
Scrisman@juno.com

Like most hospitals at night, it was cold, dark, antiseptic. A pervading sense of fear mingled with a modicum of hopelessness and a draught of tears overwhelmed all but the most hardened and trained (or jaded) individuals who walked the halls. Illness was nothing more than a business to most of the people employed by the hospital, and their casual air about the whole thing did nothing to ease the fears of patients and visitors alike.
Fortunately, at least for those who had come to see loved ones, visiting hours were over, and all but those who were with dying family members had been quietly ushered out the door hours ago. For the next few hours, they would have a rest, a reprieve from the subconscious terrors of the medical facility.
The patients, on the other hand, were not so fortunate. A night in a hospital, even when one has grown used to such things over the years, can cause even the most stone-hearted of people to break down and weep. Yet even among the patients, there were some who were more fortunate than others. Many were sedated into a mild slumber, and had tuned out the world around them. Others were so tired from their long days that not even the night terrors of the hospital could keep them from sleep. The least fortunate of all were the ones who were new, and could not sleep for whatever reason, be it the patient in the bed next to them who was making noise, or just the problems caused by sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.
The lights in the fourth floor room had been dimmed in a manner that the nurse hoped would be suitable to the lone occupant. With the breathing tubes stuck down his throat, he was in no position to talk. Earlier in the day, the hospital staff had removed a bullet from his right shoulder, set a broken leg and a broken arm, wrapped his chest to help a few broken ribs heal, and immobilized him further to prevent unauthorized movement on his part. The IV attached to his hand dripped steadily, barely perceptible in the silence that had descended over the hospital over the last few hours. The drug injections of before had started to wear off, and the night nurse had not yet been around to re-administer them.
He felt around on the bed next to him for the switch to call the orderly, picked it up in his hand, then paused, taking pleasure in the fact that he was, for the first time in many hours, starting to feel coherent again. Pain was certainly not foreign to him, and he had borne much worse before. Compared to some of the other scrapes he had gotten himself into over the years, this was nothing. He set the call button back down on the bed and closed his eyes.
A few minutes later, he felt the cool outside air starting to flow over him. As best he could, he tried to smile. This was an unexpected luxury right now. For a brief moment, he dreamed he was flying, soaring through the air on the night breeze, unencumbered by the weight of the hospital bed, the casts, the tubes down his throat, or the needle jabbed into the upper veins of his hand. He was free again…
A twinge of…something…fluttered through his brain. His conscious mind was trying to tell him something, trying to get him to remember…what? Why couldn’t he remember? It probably had something to do with the fall, he reasoned. After all, he had hit his head somewhere on the way down, he was certain. He could have sworn the doctors had said there was no concussion (a miracle, given the circumstances and everything else that had gone wrong that day). So what would-
In an instant, it flashed into his head. When he was first wheeled into the room, he had taken notice of the windows while they were unhidden by the drapes: they did not open. There was no handle, inside or out, that would permit them to twist or move in any way. So where was this wind coming from all of a sudden? In a panic, he opened his eyes and turned his head as far to his right as he could, straining to see in the pale illumination. Though he knew the window couldn’t be open, the drapes blew in a gentle zephyr. What had once seemed a welcome, refreshing breeze of cool air now caused his spine to tingle, and gooseflesh to pop out all up and down his arms. Something was not right…
Movement!
He turned even farther to the right, ignoring the pain from his shoulder, straining to see what was moving in the room with him. He hadn’t heard the door open…indeed, it had been locked by the nurse as he left for the evening. Shadows played inside the room, bouncing off walls where they had no business being cast in the first place. His first impulse was to shout for help, but the breathing tubes prevented any sort of loud vocalization.
Then it hit him: he must be asleep. It was all a dream, or the drugs, or both. After all, a window that wasn't designed to be opened couldn’t possibly be letting in the wind. And he was four floors up. There wasn’t anyone in this world who would be capable of breaking into a fourth floor hospital room from the outside, nor anyone who would even want to do so with the possible, utterly absurd exception of-
“Hullo, Pierre.”
The shadows came into focus all at once to reveal brown hair, a feminine figure, a holstered gun at her waist, and a pony tail swaying behind her back. She made no noise as she walked slowly and deliberately across the tile floor, moving like a ghost.
She looked down at him, staring into him with those eyes which he had met so many times in the past. Boring into him with that gaze of hers. Staring right through him as though he were a sheet of wispy, transparent cloth instead of a bed-ridden, virtually defenseless hospital patient.
Lara Croft…
The thought snapped his mind back to reality, and he groped for the buzzer to call the nurse. As his hand went for it, however, he bumped it unintentionally, and felt it start to slide off the bed. As quickly as he could, he slithered his hand after it, feeling it tug on the sheet slightly where it had seemed to catch itself.
Lara watched him with detached interest, watched his fingers slowly groping towards the button on the side of the bed, let him get within a hair’s distance of it, then tapped the edge of the bed with her boot. “Oops.”
Pierre watched in mute horror as the call device slipped from the side of the bed, swung towards the floor, missed it by scant inches, tapped the wall several times, then finally became motionless, hanging from its attachment in the ceiling.
“Awww,” Lara said in condescending sympathy, “did you lose your little toy?”
It was infuriating having her towering over him, and him not able to speak a single word in his own defense. He couldn’t even reach up and pull the tube out of his throat because of the way his arms had been strapped to the mattress. Somewhere inside, Pierre DuPont started to quiver with fear. But he would not show it…no, not even with this woman, this girl standing over him. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
“Terribly sorry about the window,” Lara continued. “I do hope the breeze doesn’t get to you. I thought the night air was simply too nice to be left outside.”
Rage started to bubble up inside Pierre now, and he gritted his teeth as best he could against the ribbed plastic tubing.
“Tut tut,” Lara said, looking him over. “Why, you are quite a mess. My sources were correct after all. Now…let’s see just what happened to you to put you into this place…” Casually, she walked over to his chart and picked it up, wet her finger with her tongue, then began flipping through the pages casually, nodding here and there as she read. “Hmmm…bullet to the shoulder…always a nice feeling. Ah, broken leg! Oh, and an arm to go with it. An excellent choice, by the way. Cracked ribs…minor internal injuries, and a couple of torn ligaments.” Still holding the chart, she looked up at him. “All in all, I’d say a pretty nasty bit of work. But then again, it’s absolutely nothing compared to what I was going to give you if I had caught up with you that day.”
Pierre glared at her. What on Earth was she going on about?
Lara closed the folder then placed it gently back in the small plastic holding bin at the foot of the bed. Turning her fingers towards her, she placed her palms on the foot of the bed and leaned towards him. “Yes, comparatively speaking, you got off with little more than a slap on the wrist. That’s why I’m here tonight.”
Pierre frowned. This didn’t make any sense.
“Silly me…I’m certain you’ve forgotten by now, haven’t you?”
Pierre cocked his head slightly.
“Well, I have not. You see, when you killed Michael, something inside of me just sort of, well, snapped. Ah, I see the recognition dawning already. You should know that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to track you down. I was lucky you hurt yourself when you did, since I had gotten a tip that you were in China, and I was just about to book a flight out there when I heard about this.”
Pierre shook his head, trying to convey that he didn’t understand what was going on.
From her side holster, Lara withdrew a single gun, and turned it towards the light to admire it. Pierre’s eyebrows went up in surprise, for it wasn’t what he had been expecting her to carry.
“Recognize one of these, Pierre? Of course you do. It’s a .38 calibre pistol, a “snubbie” as they call them on the streets. They’re terrible weapons, really. Utterly useless at any sort of long range. You certainly wouldn’t take one with you on a hunting trip, as it’s got very little real stopping power. Only six shots, too, which is worse than the standard ammo clip for a magnum or other high-powered handgun. Plus it has to be manually reloaded with a bullet in each chamber. Not something you want to have to deal with in a high-combat situation. So you’re probably wondering why I’ve got one with me tonight, right?”
Pierre didn’t say anything. He heard the different pitch in Lara’s voice, recognizing it as the tone of someone who had gone over the edge, or who was in serious danger of doing so. This, he decided, was very bad…
Lara held the gun up and gave the chamber a whirl, listening to the clicks as it spun before finally stopping it by pulling back the trigger. “Tonight, Pierre, we’re going to play a little game. I’m sure you’ve heard of it before. It’s called ‘Russian Roulette’. Very simple, uncomplicated type of game. All it takes is one gun, one bullet, and two utter fools. And tonight, we’re the fools. The rules are fairly straightforward. The two fools take turns pointing the gun at their heads and pulling the trigger.”
Lara put the barrel of the gun at her temple, hesitated a moment until she was certain Pierre was looking at her, and pulled the trigger.
An audible ‘click’ echoed through the room.
Lara smiled, then turned the gun on Pierre, holding it a few scant centimeters away from his forehead. “Under ordinary circumstances, you’re considered lucky if you’re the one who’s left alive. So tell me, Pierre…in the words of ‘Dirty Harry,’ do you feel lucky?”
Pierre’s eyes crossed themselves in an effort to watch her finger as it pulled on the trigger a second time. He felt the sweat breaking out on his brow. This was it…Lara had seriously gone stark raving mad…
Seconds later, Pierre heard the ‘click’, and felt himself start breathing again.
Lara lowered the pistol and stared at him again. “I’m sure you understand that normally you’d be the one to pull the trigger, but given your current condition, I figured I’d be a better woman for the job. Any objections?”
Pierre couldn’t have said anything even if he could have spoken. Lara had him absolutely paralyzed with fear, the likes of which he’d never felt in his life.
“Didn’t think so. But you didn’t seem to remember what I was talking about before. Now that I have your attention, I’ll try again.”
Lara drew herself up to her full height and glared down at Pierre. “It was two weeks ago. Michael and I were looking for the ‘Figure of Dawn’ in those caves when you swooped in out of nowhere and stole it practically out of my hands.”
A smile sprouted across Pierre’s face as her words triggered the memory of the day he had, once again, outsmarted Lara Croft.
“You fired at us as we were leaving,” Lara continued, eyes closing to slits. “You missed us both, because you’ve always been such a lousy shot, but you managed to cause a rather significant cave in. I got out. Michael didn’t.”
Pierre tried to shrug, but the motion caused pain to explode from his shoulder, and he halted midway through the motion.
Lara backed away from him, then walked to the side of the bed and sat down beside him on the mattress. “Yes, you had forgotten all about that, hadn’t you? But I remember.” Without warning, she poked his injured shoulder.
Pierre’s scream of pain at Lara’s touch was converted into an almost soundless moan around the breather tube. He eyed her wildly now, trying to move and trap her in some way to keep her from doing it again, but the restraints held him firmly.
“Do you have any idea what these last two weeks have been like for me?” she demanded of him. “Have you even the slightest notion of what I’ve been going through? Do you realize it’s been the same thing for my entire life now?”
Pierre found himself shaking his head.
“Of course you don’t.” The words came as nothing but a whisper from her lips. “How could someone like you know? How?”
Lara dragged a nearby chair over to the hospital bed and sat down next to her prisoner. “Now, where was I? Oh, right. We were comparing notes about our lives. I’ll go first, if you don’t mind. Not that you have any choice, of course, but it makes me feel better to pretend like I’m actually presenting you with some option. Rather like those South American dictators who claim to be elected democratically simply because the population knows that anyone who votes against the current despot will be executed, don’t you think? Of course, everyone in these so-called ‘civilised’ nations looks the other way. Right now, Pierre, I’m the dictator, you’re voting, and everyone else is facing the opposite direction. So…cast your ballot.”
Slowly, infuriatingly, Pierre nodded his head. If he had any say about things, there might be coup before the night was out. But he had to play his cards right, and that included showing Lara what she wanted to see. Because to do otherwise might invite her to actually use that gun again, and that wasn’t good at all.
“Excellent.” Lara crossed her legs, laid the hand with the gun in her lap, and continued. “I know your background, of course. Mother left when you were quite little, and daddy was a two-bit thug who let his son do whatever he pleased. You might think this was terrible, but coming from my point of view, you had absolute and total freedom from very early on.”
She shifted her weight. “You wouldn’t know what it’s like, growing up in utter and complete social isolation because you had a father who felt that children should be seen and not heard. Getting all manner of etiquette and ‘proper’ manners thrown at you, getting told you liked it even when you wanted to snap back that you didn’t, thank you very much. Getting taken to places so stuffy that you could hardly breathe. No, you had your freedom from day one.”
Pierre glanced at her, not understanding anything. What does this have to do with anything?
“Then, just when I needed them the most, they sent me off to a boarding school in another country! A ‘Finishing School,’ they called it. Pretty accurate name, if you think about it. They were meant to ‘finish you off’ if you hadn’t gotten absolutely all the rules down when you were living at home. Can you imagine me at a finishing school?” She threw her head back and laughed. Not loudly, but it was audible.
“So, in a way, I guess it was a bit of a load lifted when the plane crashed and Daddy finally disowned me. There wasn’t any more of that upper-class life to live, no more finishing school, and I had my freedom. The only sad part was that Daddy didn’t want to talk to me anymore. Bad enough my mother had to die, but then he made it all the worse.
“I called him on the phone the other day, you know. Called him up and told him Michael had been killed. I felt it only fair, seeing as how he had met Michael before, and seemed to get on with him well, even though he was an American. Know what he said? Said he was sorry for Michael, for staying with me like he had, and then he got upset at me for getting him killed. As if I had any choice in the matter?
“I tried to explain to him, of course. Tried to tell him it was all your fault, that if you hadn’t decided to follow us in and run off with my treasure, that we wouldn’t have given chase, and you wouldn’t have shot at us like that and caused the cave-in. But he was convinced that, somehow, the responsibility was all on my shoulders, even though Michael was an adult and followed by choice, not because I pushed him around or bullied him.
“Maybe I should have you call Daddy on the phone and tell him the story. You’re another male. Perhaps he’d listen to you. But I doubt it. When Daddy gets set in his ways, it would take something more powerful than a locomotive to move him. And right now, you’re not even as strong as a small pushcart. So I’m afraid that makes us both worthless in my father’s eyes.”
Lara stood up slowly, raised the gun, placed it under her chin, tilted her head back, shut her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
“Looks like I’m still lucky so far, Pierre. How about you?”
Pierre shook visibly as Lara turned the pistol away from her throat and pointed it at his head. He wanted to close his eyes like Lara had, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her finger…holding the trigger…starting to pull it…
Click.
Pierre let out the breath he had been holding and Lara laughed. “So…your luck holds out a second time. Two more chambers left, though. So the question, Pierre, is this: will ‘5’ be my lucky number…or yours?”
She watched Pierre shiver under the sheet as the gentle outside breeze rolled through the window, danced through the air, and swirled around the room. It really was a nice evening outside. It was a shame to be wasting it in here like this.
“Anyway, Pierre, that’s the story of my life: a father who was never there for me when I was around, who closes himself off in his own little world of politicking and finances to keep himself from thinking about the past, from thinking about mother… Walls so high that not even his only daughter can climb them. Maybe that’s why I do what I do.”
She sat back down in the chair, re-crossed her legs, and balanced the gun on her knees, barrel pointing at the bed. “Yes, I think that would be a good excuse, don’t you? I explore and do things for sport that most normal people wouldn’t do for millions of pounds. Or francs, if you prefer. What’s your favorite currency, Pierre?”
DuPont shrugged, trying to indicate general helplessness, confusion, and the fact that he’d never really thought about that before with the same simple motion.
“They’re really all the same, you know. Dollars or Deutschmarks, Lira or Rubbles, Yen or Pesos… Did you know that my father could tell you the conversion rate for any of them, back and forth, updated to the day? He really liked that sort of thing. It was partly how he made his money before he got married to my mother, playing the world market. Every day and evening, he reads the papers and memorizes the going rates to keep himself in tip-top fashion.
“But all of that means so little in the grand scheme of things. The fact that he can’t even see his own prison, can’t see the fact that he built it for himself, is completely beside the point right now. That’s his problem to deal with, not mine. You, on the other hand, are my problem.”
She stuck an accusing finger at his nose. “You’re not my only problem, of course, but right now, you’re the biggest. Don’t get all smug and assume that you are the only person I ever get mad at, because you aren’t, and even if you were, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction by telling you. No, Pierre DuPont, there are others. Dozens of others. Some of them might even make you look like a saint. And we all know there are no saints in this game. There may not even be such a thing as right and wrong. Morality and archaeology got divorced a long time ago.”
Pierre wanted to argue that what they did wasn’t technically archaeology, but was forced to settle with frowning instead.
“But you know something, Pierre?”
He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, “What?”
“That’s the reason I do what I do,” Lara stated, matter-of-factly. “The excitement of doing something that I know is right…that’s what keeps me in this game. The feeling of satisfaction when I walk away from a successful mission knowing that no one else on this Earth could have pulled it off. The knowledge that, when I’m doing a job, I’m right and everyone else is wrong… It’s powerfully seductive, isn’t it?”
Without standing this time, Lara put the gun to her temple, shut her eyes…and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Pierre began to squirm in the bed.
Lara opened her eyes and lowered the gun. “Looks like I’m the lucky one tonight, Pierre. But I guess I should finish my train of thought, shouldn’t I?”
She waited for an answer, but Pierre didn’t move. She brought the gun up and pointed it at him. “Shouldn’t I?”
Swiftly, Pierre nodded as best he could. Anything to keep her talking…
Lara kept the gun pointed at him anyway. “I thought so.” She leaned back in the chair, and paused to reflect on something.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about something else,” she said. “I’ve killed people in my lifetime. You have to. It comes with the territory, after all. Sometimes, I’ve used a gun. Other times, I used a knife. A few times, I even used my bare hands. And, for some reason, the feeling is almost always…euphoric. Cathartic, if you will. Because even though I know what I'm doing is right at the time, someone else out there might think differently.
“And I suppose that is what this all boils down to, Pierre. When I fight you…when I beat you at your own game, I know somewhere down deep in my heart that I’m doing the right thing.
“There are times, Pierre, that I hate your kind. I hate your kind with such a passion that it makes me cry. The fact that people like you are out there absolutely pisses me off, forgive the slang. So, when I see that you are evil, and I am good, that makes me happy.”
Pierre started to shake in the bed again. But Lara wasn’t done…
“When, after two weeks of searching, I finally have you pinned down, safely set in my crosshairs, with no chance of you escaping, and I finally smell your fear, watch you sweat…when it comes down to that final, fatal act of ending you, once and for all…”
Though he tried to control himself, a single tear rolled from Pierre’s left eye, and the shaking continued.
Lara brought the gun down until it was pressed lightly against his forehead. “When I know that you’ll wake up someplace else, someplace that isn’t of this world…”
Her finger touched the trigger gently, slid up and down it for a brief moment, then started to tighten.
Pierre finally found the strength to shut his eyes as he saw her finger beginning to pull the small lever. He felt his heart hammering his chest, certain it was audible all up and down the hall. His breathing tripled in speed as he started to hyperventilate. Time slowed to a crawl as panic flooded his brain, mixing with the adrenaline there, giving him what felt like a few precious seconds to mentally say his good-byes, knowing that he’d be dead before he heard the shot.
Click.
“…That’s when I find out that my gun isn’t loaded,” Lara finished. “I guess I’m stuck with you, Pierre DuPont.” She holstered the gun, and, without another word, turned her back on him and walked for the window and her escape.

Two hours later, an orderly made his rounds of the halls and discovered Pierre DuPont to be wide awake, suffering from what seemed like some form of mental shock. The patient didn’t even argue with him as he took out the syringe, squeezed it until a few drops of liquid spurted out, then plunged it deep into his vein. “Sleep tight, Mister DuPont,” the nurse said as the drugs rapidly coursed their way through Pierre’s system and dropped him into an uneasy slumber. Somewhere inside, he was grateful for the small reprieve. That was going to leave a scar…