Oh my god. It's a quiet, foggy thought, like a dull hum, an acknowledgment of a trauma deep in my head. I wake up in bed, sore from rocking exhaustion and stress, and blink at the stream off early morning light coming through the bottom of the window shade.

In bed…I'm in bed? The sheets are tangled up around my legs. As I shift about, clawing at my knees to free myself, I feel a weight beside me roll closer. Lara tightens her upper arm grip on her pillow and lays still as stone. She must have gotten me out of my studio sometime in the night, despite the drugs, and put me to bed while I was barely there.

My heart stutters as I lean down over her, pressing my forehead to her temple and letting my hair pour over her face. She breathes so slow I can barely feel it, so I sit for a little while and just listen, with my hand against her abdomen, and remember that she is alive.

After some uncounted minutes I climb out of bed, shake out my hair, and stumble into the kitchen. Cold water startles me awake, and eggs with toast keep me alert until I settle back into my chair at my desk.

I fiddle with the headset for a long time, staring at the plastic despondently. The computer screen stares at me, and I stare back hard, making eye contact with my reflection and frowning.

I don't want to do this again. My first exhale is a quivering stutter. My hands squeeze themselves between my thighs as I try to retain my composure. I press the space bar on the keyboard. The computer wakes up.

It's still black, the green ticker at the right corner where I'd left it.

"I'm fine, Roth."

Liar, I think. I'm immediately taken by the dull knife of guilt as that thought passes my mind. She doesn't deserve that, but in that moment, I've never hated her more. She should have been screaming and crying. She should have stayed away. She should have told me everything. She should have told Roth everything. I hate her for keeping it away. I hate her for coming after me. My chest is a tangled knot of steel cords, first thing in the morning, and I hate her for that, too.

The headset feels like a vice around my head.

…..

"I never told you about the monsters in the temple."

She's sitting on a fallen tree, adjusting her boot ties.

"I salvaged some batteries from the tower. Someone's been messing around up there recently. Anyway, the Solarii called them 'Oni', which I'm sure you know is the Japanese term for 'demon'." She breathes and picks at the bark, scavenging for salvageable greens. "It's becoming harder and harder to deny the nature of this island. They were…not human. Something else, but not human. Their main sanctuary looks like a human meat cellar. Had wallow through a sea of dismembered…body parts just to escape. I don't think the Solarii they captured with me were so lucky."

She takes off her left shoe and shakes some gross black liquid from it. She stares at the puddle it's made on the soil for a long while.

"I had to tell Roth that Grimm was killed today. I…I don't think I'd be here now if it hadn't been for him. And now, he's gone. I don't understand how a person could disappear so quickly. There one moment, and then- gone. It doesn't feel real." Her eyes narrow as someone off screen yells in the distance. She stands quickly, draws her bow, and fires twice. Something beyond my view falls with a sharp thud and goes quiet. Lara returns to the frame a minute later.

"The scouts are searching more frequently now, looking for us. Looking for me. I'm beginning to welcome it.

"The fight keeps me alert, keeps me alive. Every time one of them falls, Grimm feels a bit more avenged, and I feel like I'm making a difference. They don't seem afraid of me, but they're becoming wary. They must know I'm looking for Sam. I heard two of them talking about her before, playing a game of checkers. Something about Mathias preforming…a ritual.

"It doesn't matter. I'm going to find her. There's no other option. I refuse to lose her like this. If they've hurt her…I've killed already. I don't know what I'll do if she's hurt. But at least hearing that they need her means she's still alive, and I have time."

The footage cuts to black, and my face burns from her hard-eyed words. She's beginning to lose herself, and hearing her talk about me like that is terrifyingly thrilling. But that's a kind of horrible thing to think, isn't it? She's fraying at the edges now.

…

Her face is purple with bruises and sliced all over when the next video begins. Even more blood this time covering every inch of her clothing and body.

"I had her," she growls anxiously, digging her fingers into her scalp and hanging her head to the ground. "I had her, but I fucked up. She was tied, and I couldn't get to her fast enough. Those bastards held me down, I couldn't move. She was right there, now I don't know if she's even still alive."

My throat coils as she grabs at herself, hissing between her teeth. "I'll kill all of them. If she's dead, I'll set this entire island on fire. I'll kill them all. I won't go back without her." She shakes her head back and forth, choking on repressed tears. My eyes burn, and my fingers go to stroke the cold glass she's behind. They had taken me to the temple in the shanties after that. The wind blew the fire out, and they turned her into a bloody mess. I watched her, unable to fight back, beaten within an inch of her life and carried away to be disposed of. I thought she was dead.

I had lost my resolve to fight after that. I followed them to the temple dead-eyed and shut down, numb to my fear. It wasn't until later that I overheard someone telling Mathias that she had dropped into the blood pits and likely escaped, and in that relatively short time I had become friendly with the idea of dying.

But then, she was alive again, and I was seized with the purest wave of excitement and relief. Even though my fear became even more acute. It's selfish, but I hadn't thought about her even once the first time I had been captured. Not until I heard her voice over the radio. I was so terrified wondering what they were going to do to me, too enveloped in my own mental torture, but seeing her beaten but still fighting gave me a new hope and a new worry. I couldn't let her die. So I stayed strong, and alive, until she could find me again.

She takes in a ragged inhale and mumbles to herself, regaining composure.

"She's still alive. They need her. She must still be alive. I have to find the others. They'll be where she is, maybe."

Her eyes are bloodshot and shockingly even when she lifts her head up, and the visual disappears seconds after.

…

"We can't leave them behind!"

The scream catches me off guard in the blackness of the screen. Audio only, yet again, in the violent tossing of fire and metal.

"Do it!" Lara, and she sounds angrier than ever before. The stream is clogged, even with the setting dialed all the way up, with a hard, crisp rumbling and the cracks of lightning. "Now!"

Another voice I don't recognize, and just as panicked as her own. "Fuck! You're crazy!"

The blaring of alarms fills my ears to the brim, exploding behind my eyes and itching at my brain. I clutch the sides of the muffs desperately, promising myself that I wouldn't take them off, not until the footage was over. The blasting ends in a shiver of static, frantic and listless, before the feed cuts completely.

…

"I'm so sorry."

The darkness made the two scenes blend, and at the suggestion I feel my heart squeeze around itself. Chaos and terror mix with quiet calm as the visual flickers on. Lara sighs deeply, face almost serene in its stillness. She stays like this for a moment, locked in an emotional stall, before her brow falters and her lips curl and her bangs fall into her vision. And her face is suddenly wet with tears, slicing delicate lines into the grime on her cheeks. She opens her mouth as if to speak again, closes it, and covers her head with her hands, back heaving as she sobs.

"This is my fault."

I've only ever heard that awful sound once from her before, and it's as gut-wrenching as I remember. She shakes at her shoulders, shuddering, shallow exhales raking her whole frame mercilessly.

Roth is gone. The funeral pyre we burned him under is still laying its orange glow on the night around her. She lifts her head after a long time and wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands. Eyes glazed with impassiveness turn away from me. She reaches for her thigh and makes a frustrated sound at finding no weapon holstered there.

Lara had given me that gun. What had she been planning to do with it at this moment?

She whispers so low I can barely make out what she says next.

"I can't let anyone else die."

…

"We are dropping like flies."

The night is too dark to make out any more than the outer contour of her face, haloed with starlight.

"Alex is dead.

"He died a hero, in the very least.

"I can't keep talking. Sam is alive, with me now. Everything somehow feels okay.

"Part of me thinks I can't leave. That I shouldn't leave. If I were to stay here, things would be fucked up forever, and I could survive in that. But when I go back, I think I'll realize everything that we've lost. Here, I don't have time to think.

I couldn't, though. Not without her.

But I can't be that selfish. If she stays here, she'll die. And if she dies, I don't know what will happen to me.

Everyone is gone, but she's still here. She's all the hope I have left."

My heart whines in response, twisting into a knot. I shouldn't have slept, and I shouldn't have let Whitman stay so close. I was just so exhausted, too exhausted to listen to Lara's advice about turning my back to anyone. I should have stayed by her.

It's getting closer now.

….

The next is a bird's eye view down the face of a cliff. It looks as if she's scaling it vertically, pebbles falling to create temporary dirt paths into the darkness below. In the background, she continues to speak as if someone was there with her. "I've been thinking about my father a lot since the crash. When Roth died, all of my memories of him came rushing back."

Her voice is halted and raspy. "I always thought of him as a fool. I thought that he was crazy, that he sacrificed me and my mother for the sake of things that didn't exist." She gasps upon lifting herself onto a ledge, rising to her knees with a shake. A man's vicious yell fills the audio, then two, then three, as they rush her. She bites a curse under her breath.

A solid, sharp sound cuts into the stream of white noise as an arrow slices a clean gash into her upper thigh. Without a pause, she swipes it from the ground and sends it hurling back to her attackers.

"I've been blind and numb until now," she continues, the fight hardly distracting her. A body falls by her feet and she searches it for ammunition before plunging his knife into the approaching Solarii. All of the noise stops. "I wish I could tell him all of this. He would be so proud; of me and of himself. He was right. I wonder what else he could have been right about."

….

"She's coming this way! Fall back!"

The ragged voice that follows the retreating order is so razor sharp and cold I hardly recognize it.

"Run, you bastards!" she snarls, heavy gunfire exploding in punctuation. "I'm coming for you all!"

A dirty, bleeding man falls at her feet, gunshot wound gushing from his middle, and throws his hands up over his face.

"No, no, no. Please, Christ-" His begging is interrupted when her boot punches into his gut and the muzzle of a rifle takes off half of his head. I hear more advance on her, but she's ready, always ready, and drives an arrow point into a booted foot as it collides with her blocking forearm. His cry of pain is answered by her shotgun. Another strikes her with the unsharpened side of a machete, carving a thin smile into her side. She screams and smashes his nose in with a rock, unyielding.

People run past her, away from her, as the few who turned to face her fall. She roars and runs after them as they scatter.

…..

That's enough.

My ears ache terribly as I pull the muffs from them. The quiet of the apartment seems empty and unnerving in the wake of the chaos, and for a moment I half-expect to close my eyes and wake up on the island.