War of Elysium

Chapter Fifteen: The Ankou

        Oblivion was nearly ready. There would be little time for rest once it began, battle would rage on all fronts and time to flee would be sparse. Lara lay her head awkwardly against the supposed doomsday device after taking her rifle apart. She had done so nearly two dozen times to keep focus and fend off the grasping fatigue. It had been a long night filled with long conversations and lots of jumping shadows. She sat there alone for a moment with nothing to focus on and, in that brief window of boredom came clarity; thought. Arch raced through her mind, she didn't even see him die; she just jumped straight into the fight. Could she have saved him? Could she have pulled the arrow before it blew and stemmed the bloodloss?

The generator whined a little louder and vibrated a little harder but it had been doing so progressively all night. It started to get somewhat annoying and so Lara pulled her rifle back together and moved back to the camp.

Reese was still yet to return and Iris must have joined him some time ago. "Iris." Lara grunted to herself with a small laugh. It seemed that 'Iris' was sick of her assumed moniker and intended to return to her original name. It would be strange to get to know Serah again after all these years. Lara wondered what it was that had triggered the sudden desire in her old friend to return to the name of a dead woman. She remembered when Serah became Iris. She watched the funeral at an inn somewhere near Taipei alongside Reese and Sash. They toasted to their own deaths and started new lives. 

She remembered her first day with Raptor, the day she met Archi. He saved her life at the same time as he introduced himself. 

        It was winter, as it always seemed to be when she was sent out on missions. Raptor needed a scout and Garrison requested her. They pulled her from her marine unit a few days after half of the unit had been wiped out because of her. She expected to be court marshalled, but instead she was promoted to Sergeant and placed in special forces. It was a kind of probationary period before she could be accepted fully and as a result, she didn't get to meet any of the squad but Reese and Garrison. 

Reese had never wanted her in Raptor, he constantly pushed her away from the unit and had been endorsing other candidates for weeks before Garrison settled on Lara. It seemed that he stopped blocking her from the squad after she lost her unit. When she asked Reese why he no longer kept her from signing on, all he had to say was: "When your CO died in the field, and you had no way to contact command, you took charge and took into your hands the lives of your men. That was commendable - but not enough. Then... When you realised you had an objective and to complete it, you would need to choose between your mission or your men; you chose the mission. That's Raptor. You made the decision most would consider wrong, but we know to be necessary. We do the awful things that nobody wants to admit happens and I think you finally understand it."

His words didn't inspire pride in her. She remembered the feeling of her decision, the guilt and terror. She remembered having to fight some of her squad, her friends, in order to complete the objective. She wondered if she could truly make that decision again, most of all if it meant Reese's or Serah's life. 

Garrison decided to test her resolve and capacity by sending her out on her own, much to Reese's protest. Lara was young, though, and still held the arrogance and assumed invincibility of youth. She agreed to the mission and was sent to Siberia where she would track down a band of raider Macks that had been harassing Alliance supply lines. 

The snow was thick and the air colder than she had ever felt. When she was in the Marines, she had been trained for beach assaults and aerial drops into the desert. A blizzard in a forest was new in every way to her and Garrison knew as much. He intended to test her fully in the most adverse circumstances possible.