Title: Homeostasis
Fandom: Tomb Raider
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 396
Summary: Freezing to death would be an ignoble (if regrettably common) end.



Heat is the excited vibration of molecules, the expression of energy that the human body needs to stay within a specific range to retain function and, in the end, viability.

And heat rises. Lara learned that long before her first lecture on thermodynamics. Still, she doesn't need detailed diagrams now, labelled and colour-coded to exacting precision. She is, to put it in slightly less scientific terms, freezing more or less all of her extremities off at once. If Lara is to find the lost city and it's evidence - perhaps even the Divine Source - she needs to have that not happen. Trinity isn't going to wait around for her to be med-evac'd.

Her progress toward that goal is helped by the fact that she's finally made it down into the treeline. Good. Step in the right direction. Woods have shelter and tinder, but everything she can see is wet with snow. Has no means of quick ignition on her. Continues to tramp on.

Stabilizing her temperature loss is first item on the agenda, her first and only priority before she can afford to focus on regaining anything approaching satisfactory levels of warmth. (But she she'll be damned if she doesn't - she's in fact planning a trip to hot springs right this instant, for the nebulous after this adventure. Perhaps one that has an integrated spa. Somewhere in the tropics. That'd be nice.)

Once she's reached that milestone, she can start planning her next steps - how to reconnect with Jonah, reorient and backtrack to signs of what might just be evidence of the lost city and keep working forward from there.

Lara's only got her own body heat - what's left of it, after playing around with an avalanche - to work with. Needs to trap it. Get something over her. Basic survival in snow. Cocoon. Off the heatsink of the ground, away from the sky. Brush and shrubbery are her friends, stubbornness and knowledge - could do without particulars of frostbite and tissue death - her tools.

That ... and the shelter she's just found. It's little more than a shape, half taken over by bush, fallen apart, obviously long since abandoned, like the fire pit at her feet. But its a start. One she can patch up and turn into a temporary base of operations.

Lara can survive this. Will survive this.