#ch: cayde 6

[waterdeep]

DESTINY 2: FORSAKEN ➵ DESTINY 2: SEASON OF THE CHOSEN.

Do you know which side YOU'RE on?

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Corrupt [2]

Come, oh bearer mine, and show them that even a rose can be deadly.

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 6,806 SHIP: N/A CHARACTERS: kel, luke, cayde-6, lord shaxx, eris morn, ikora, zavala, quinn

Almost two weeks later, Cayde’s call comes at an inopportune moment.

Middle of a firefight with a group of Fallen that he’s sorely underestimated, and he makes the mistake of opening the line at the exact time he sees the Captain bearing down in him. Before Cayde can start to speak Kel grunts and calmly says, “one second,” before diving out of the way of a pair of shock blades that descend on him.

Reaching for his belt and one of the sticky grenades resting there Kel rushes forward, ducking underneath the Fallen’s four arms and two blades, not stopping to look behind him as the Captain roars in offense.

An explosion causes the rocks under his feet to shudder. A blink of red disappears from his HUD radar.

The comm line, surprisingly, remains patiently silent.

He takes stock of the enemies left: a dozen Fallen, all of them conveniently grouped up.

Propelling himself forward he leaps from the ground and pushes off the surface of a broken pillar, light roiling around him and shrouding his body in rippling flames—flames that he pulls handfuls of etheric, fiery knives from that fly from his hands too fast for the Fallen to dodge.

Kel lands as those knives erupt around him, and when the dust settles there are no Fallen bodies to be seen. Just ash and smoldering, blackened shrubs.

His fingers flex over the grip of the hand cannon held in them, eyes scan for any more enemies in waiting.

Cayde can’t seem to keep silent any longer. “Was that the trick I taught you? Tell me that was the trick I taught you. It was the trick I taught you, wasn’t it.”

Kel ignores him, glancing at Echo as she materializes to survey the area. “Did you have news?”

“We know how to find her.” Cayde answers without missing a beat or acknowledging the snub.

He holsters Thorn and turns away from the battlefield he’d just cleared, and Echo calls in his ship without prompting. He doesn’t need to hear more explanation than that, but Cayde gives it anyway, voice briefly drowned out by the roar of engines.

Kel wonders if he does it just to reassure himself that Quinn was still alive and they would get her back now that they had a lead.

Luke’s assumption that the Taken had pulled her through a rift into the Ascendant Plane had been correct—and her ghost, after having found a way out of that alternate dimension, had gone on for several minutes about how terrifying it was until Ikora had gently urged it to focus.

Apparently she had managed to turn the Taken’s own paracausal powers against them, tearing a hole in that reality herself. A rip only big enough for Glyph to slip through, allowing it to return to the Tower, frantic and exhausted by the long and rushed journey between Saturn and Earth.

It knew where to enter the Ascendant realm to find her—the tricky part would be hoping they got there quickly enough to keep whatever lurked there from either corrupting or killing her.

Kel’s fingers twitch near his holster and he wonders: were they one and the same?

He wonders: what would Dredgen Yor have said?

He doesn’t dwell on it, spending the entire flight from Venus back to Earth silent and aware of the rising hum in the back of his head the closer he got after days of peace. Like when he had found it, Thorn was eager.

The little girl still appears in the corner of his eyes and tugs on the hem of his tattered cloak, begging for his attention. Sometimes he feels her fingers curl around his own, finding upon looking down that they’ve been replaced by the grip of a handgun that purrs at him to lift the barrel to his chin and pull the trigger.

It’s getting easier for him to recognize the signs and brush them aside, but the visions and whispers had intensified and Kel knows he’s on a short timer. Part of him wants to just toss the damn thing, but the rest of him doesn’t enjoy the thought of what might happen should someone that hadn’t spent hundreds of years practicing intense self-control got their hands on it.

It had already proven itself to be a ticking time bomb for even him—how deep and easy would it sink its claws into someone else?

So, no, he wouldn’t toss the gun and hope for the best, and he had done everything from emptying every round of his rocket launcher’s ammo on it to dropping it in the lava flows of Venus in the hopes of destroying it without success.

The lava flow attempt had left him blacked out and he had woken later with the gun vibrating with furious energy.

That had been the first time Kel had felt true, all-consuming fear since his rebirth, and it was also the moment he realized that Thorn was more than just an accursed weapon in the City’s and in humanity’s history—it was a curse in and of itself.

One that he now held the responsibility of containing.

Eris had said there was a way to silence it, to make it easier to control, but in two weeks he’d had no luck finding how. He was running out of time, and quickly, but he had enough time for this detour. He wouldn’t abandon Quinn. Not when there was a chance she was still alive, not when Gil had given his life to make that chance possible, and not when her bright presence had burned away the shadows of his memories.

When he arrives on Earth he’s met with more greetings that he only briefly acknowledges before moving on. The less time he spent here, the better.

Eris is absent from her place in the Vanguard hall again, but Kel’s steps slow and then stop when he catches Shaxx’s gaze.

From behind their helmets they stare each other down. Shaxx’s fists are clenched tightly at his sides, and Kel sees arc energy sparking around them. He could apologize for what had happened—he had violated the sanctity of the man’s training grounds, unknowingly or not—but it would be hollow and they both knew it.

There was nothing forgivable about murdering one of their own.

“Shaxx.”

The bold greeting sends a fresh ripple of furious static sparking over the titan’s form. “Dredgen.”

Kel can’t put a finger on whether it’s the icy treatment of a stranger he receives or the cold accusation behind the simple moniker, but the painful sting nearly cripples him. The former he had expected, but the latter?

He swallows it down and continues forward as though it didn’t affect him. Though Shaxx looked as though he was ready to intercept him and wanted to do nothing more, the titan remains in place and stares him down as he passes.

Like the last time he had approached the war room an argument is underway, only this time the doors are wide open and the subject, thankfully, isn’t him. Ikora is silent, her hands clasped behind her back, while Zavala and Cayde butt their heads together.

“—I’m going, Zavala. You can run my hunters through Shiro or Marcus while I’m gone, but I’m going.” Cayde says, heated. Not quite as rare attitude for him, but still out of the norm.

“We need you here, Cayde,” Zavala jabs a finger down onto the table in front of him to emphasize the statement, firm and unyielding in everything from his voice to his body language, “let her fireteam run the rescue op and we’ll send a temporary third with them.”

Cayde refuses to concede. “And I need to be there.”

He’s the first to notice Kel’s entrance. His expression shifts to something neutral, but Kel doesn’t miss the quick glance to where Thorn is strapped to his thigh. Cayde’s gaze lingers—and then he gives Kel a nod in greeting. “I gotta be there for more than one reason.”

Kel returns his nod and understands.

Zavala doesn’t look happy about Kel’s presence, but whatever protests he has to it are held in check; he makes no effort, however, to hide his distrust. Ikora just gives him a once over and a long, considering look before lifting her chin ever so slightly in acknowledgement.

Two out of three wasn’t bad.

He says nothing, quietly continuing down the steps and veering off to the side once he’d reached the lowered landing and finding a spot apart from them where he can stand silent and still as a statue. Maybe they could pretend he wasn’t even there.

Distraction put aside Cayde continues his argument. “Only way you’re keepin’ me off this op, Zavala, is by puttin’ a lock on my ship.”

“Which you would find a way to break or circumvent.” Zavala sighs explosively, pushing away from the table and folding his arms over his chest. “This isn’t like Venus, or Mars, or any of our other warzones, Cayde. You’ll be heading into Oryx’s turf, not one we control.”

“I know the risk. It’s worth it.” Cayde replies.

Silence falls, stretching out until Ikora speaks up. “Think of it this way, Zavala: there would be something especially inspiring for our guardians and City to see one of their leaders heading a direct strike into the heart of the enemy. Morale is something we’ve...been seeing a decline in recently.”

She must’ve been taking a backseat to mediate their argument.

Still, Zavala says nothing, leaning forward on the table again and showing his distaste openly. “And if you die, Cayde? If this fails?”

“It’s a risk all of them take every single day. ‘Side from the fact we’re the ones givin’ orders, what makes us so special?”

Kel had already had more than enough respect for Cayde but that simple rhetorical question tips it even higher.

Hunter Vanguards historically had the shortest details—in the years since the City’s beginning, both warlocks and titans had seen less than five leadership changes combined, and hunters alone had seen at least five—that were typically cut short thanks to a stereotypically flighty nature that usually got them killed.

Cayde was the ‘youngest’ of the current Vanguard iteration, and he still knew what it felt like to be one of the rank and file. Zavala and Ikora had forgotten, and both look sobered by the statement.

In the end Zavala relents, and Kel wordlessly follows Cayde from the war room.

Luke is rushing across the plaza when they run into him, apparently trying to get to the war room himself. Cayde intercepts him before he bypasses them entirely, and Kel has to spend a handful of heartbeats carefully controlling his breathing and beating down the rage that threatens to resurge. It wasn’t his fault, he reminds himself.

Cayde and Luke are staring at him when he returns to the present. Luke looks nervous, and Cayde was once again unreadable. He says nothing to it. “Are we going or not?”

He wants Quinn back within the City walls, safe. He wants to strike a blow against the Taken King, retaliation for his lost brother. The sooner he does both, the sooner he can retreat from the remnants of humanity and seek a way to control Thorn’s influence, keeping them safe from the threat it poses to all of them.

He keeps his distance on the flight from Earth to the rings of Saturn, remaining in the middeck of Cayde’s ship and listening while the Hunter Vanguard and Luke discuss their plan with Glyph giving input based on its knowledge of the chunk of the Ascendant Plane they’d be infiltrating.

Luke glances over at him every so often and Kel returns the looks from behind his helmet impassively, saying nothing; like with Shaxx, he knows that there aren’t words to make up for what he had almost done, and he doesn’t expect Luke to forgive him for it.

They journey deep into Oryx’s floating fortress once they arrive, directed by Glyph who had opted to share a ‘backpack’ with Cayde’s ghost, Sundance. Neither of his allies comment on him using Thorn, but Cayde does conspicuously order Luke to fall back and bring up the rear and Kel to take point, keeping himself between the two members of Fireteam Ward.

It was just as well; the proximity to so much Hive power and magic made the black static at the back of his mind roil, so Kel doesn’t mind pulling ahead so his back was to them rather than the other way around.

Pulling an Ascendant Soul from one of Oryx’s many ‘children’ on the Dreadnaught is no simple task but they accomplish it through equal amounts skill and raw determination—there would be no other way to force open the tear that Quinn had created.

Glyph’s directions lead them into a passage small enough all three of them have to duck down to file through. Luke’s vocal disgust about the chitinous growths and writhing hive worms surrounding them allows a brief moment of amusement to push back Thorn’s greedy grasping at his mind.

The passage darkens the further in they move, all the colors reaching his eyes suddenly washing out in shades of dark blues and grays and blacks as though a painter had stripped all of the vibrance from their universe.

The change from the plane of existence they call home and the Ascendant one is immediate and disorienting, as though they’d stepped through a pressurized barrier, the weight of the air around them suddenly oppressive and stifling. His light feels small and choked and he knows that he can’t remain here long.

Already, Thorn is drawing strength from the darkness.

The passage opens up after a ways and all three of them are struck dumb by the void that greets them, littered with cracked stone pathways and floating islands of sand and Hive growths consuming nearly every visible surface.

All around them a howling gale roars, dark clouds twisting and and swirling, obscuring every broken, floating pathway until a blinding flash of lightning within the unnatural storm around them sets the endless horizon alight and reveals them.

Along with the shadows of massive, writhing tendrils somewhere in the far distance within the smoke-like clouds of the storm.

The reports of Crota’s throne world, infiltrated by that six-man fireteam decades ago, hadn’t done this chaotic realm justice. It was terrifying in its seemingly endless, haunting expanse with the storm around them both deafening and silent at once.

He couldn’t see any of Oryx’s mindless army, but he can still feel countless eyes watching them, greedy and hungry, something ancient and eldritch and powerful waiting for them to fall into the yawning abyss below.

Thorn feels abnormally warm in his palm. It speaks to him for the first time in nearly a week, voice almost incomprehensible within the deafening cacophony of echoes that accompany it.

Do you hear it, oh bearer mine? The song. Listen to the song. Hear its truth.

Light-wielders shouldn’t be here. No one should be here. He knows this instinctively, and with a glance at the other two Kel knows that both of them have come to the same conclusion.

And Quinn had spent over a month trapped in this hell. Alone.

A massive, distant roar rising over the silent gale snaps them all of them out of their horrified awe, reminding them of what they had come here for.

Cayde readies his Ace. “C’mon, let’s move.” To the point and devoid of his usual good humor. It’s a testament to the wrong-ness of this place, to the danger of it. This wasn’t a place to underestimate and he knew there was no place for his usual levity and devil-may-care attitude here.

This time he leads the way, Glyph’s nervous voice over team comms telling them that Oryx’s throne world was massive, and it had no idea how much further in Quinn may have traveled in its absence—they hadn’t been able to find somewhere safe to just bunker down, and it wasn’t likely she had found a way to since.

Monsters unlike anything they had ever seen wandered these teetering paths and inexplicable ruins, apparently, and it makes near-frantic emphasis that even if they couldn’t see any now they were still everywhere.

So they moved forward carefully, following Glyph’s direction further into the throne world, all on high alert. Cayde quickly grew visibly frustrated with their slow pace, but with the roaring winds and fog around them they could scarcely see twenty feet ahead, and knowing that one wrong step sent them into a dark abyss that Kel doubted they could survive, ghost or not, they couldn’t afford to rush any more than they could afford to dawdle.

Several times Glyph had to call out for them to abruptly change direction or for them to stop before they walked right over the edge of one of the floating structures they traversed.

Kel had to reach out and grab Luke’s robes one of these times, just barely catching the warlock before he completely lost his footing. By the way he had gone completely still, staring at Kel as he held him over the edge, he’s sure Luke had wondered in that moment if he was going to just let him fall.

Thorn tells him that he should and then howls its rage into his mind when he instead pulls Luke back onto solid ground.

“Thanks.” Luke says, voice shaky.

Kel’s head hurts. “Don’t mention it.”

Twenty minutes pass. Then thirty. Only twice did they have to stop to fend off a wave of Taken-warped thrall, vicious and screeching at them as they scale and traverse the twisting and broken landscape of their King’s territory.

Cayde works flawlessly with both of them as though he’d been part of their team for years, and all the thrall and acolytes and knights unlucky enough to be in their path fall.

They take a moment to breathe after a wave of thrall clear, all acutely aware that they didn’t have many of them to spare. Tick tock, tick tock.

Luke breaks the silence first. “Anyone else a little worried we haven’t seen any of those monsters Glyph mentioned?”

“Think it’s somethin’ we should be grateful for, kid.” Cayde replies easily, flicking his wrist and dropping the empty magazine from his Ace so he can reload it.

“No,” both Cayde and Luke’s attention snap over to him at the single deathly certain word, “it’s not.”

“What’re you thinkin’, Kel?” Cayde’s hand flicks the new magazine into place within the barrel of his gun.

He struggles to find the words he wants to say through the deafening static between his ears. Thorn doesn’t want him to speak at all. “Oryx wants us to keep going. He wants us as deep into his world as he can get us.” He pauses, one of his gloved hands settling on his helmet over the crown of his head; he’s not sure why he knows this. Or how.

His fingers tighten around Thorn’s grip.

“I mean, we know Oryx wants us dead, Kel. Why not just try to kill us here?” Luke asks. He doesn’t have to mention that thrall and knights were hardly a challenge for veteran guardians that had faced them before.

He can’t make the words form, though they’re on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t know. He does, but he doesn’t.

“‘Cause we’ll be farther from a way to escape,” Cayde supplies, and though there’s something crucial missing from the answer Kel knows that he’s dead to rights, “we find Quinn, he kills all of us at once. If he’s lucky, which he ain’t. This handsome mug ain’t dyin’ today.”

Kel needs to figure out what that crucial missing piece is. He needs to. What was it?

“Question is: why?” Cayde continues, and Kel sees him shift impatiently in the edge of his vision. He knows the answer to this question is important, just as Kel does, but he’s gotten far enough that his biggest concern is finding the woman he still hasn’t admitted he loves.

Listen to the song. You know the words. Let me sing to them, oh bearer mine. Join me, let us sing together.

“I don’t know.” Kel finally says, his tongue feeling leaden within his mouth. And it’s true that he doesn’t, but the melody between his ears is beginning to make horrific sense.

Cayde’s watching him with sharp eyes, likely trying to assess whether or not Thorn was getting its hooks into his head again—but he apparently comes to the conclusion that Kel had it under control, because he turns his back to him and then starts forward, calling for them to keep moving.

Fool.

‘Shut. Up.’ Kel thinks forcefully, his jaw grinding until it’s painful. Miraculously, Thorn retreats to an incessant buzz in the back of his head in response.

It gives him no comfort.

They move forward, minutes ticking by, until the silent thunder cracks and the roaring winds around them are broken by a single, piercing scream that causes gooseflesh to erupt all over his skin. All three of them stop dead in alarm that’s quickly replaced by urgency.

Cayde breaks into a run first, followed without prompting by him and Luke, and Kel can hear Luke muttering a staccato repetition of shit, shit, shit from beside him.

It’s as they round a colossal stone column that Glyph speaks up, having remained silent long enough Kel had nearly forgotten it was there, its voice a shrill, tinny yell of warning over the comms: “Abyssal Knight!”

Barely a second after it yells in warning a massive behemoth materializes right in front of them in an unnatural, crackling storm of something like dust or gravel. It looked like a Hive Knight in shape, but was so huge that their heads just barely reached the height of the bottom of its knees, and its chitin was soot-black and nearly invisible in the inky darkness of the Ascendant Plane.

They notice the massive blade raised above the creature’s head nearly too late.

The shockwave of the blade striking the already cracked and crumbling ground sends all three of them along with shattered debris flying; Kel feels his back slam into the jagged stone surrounding the path, the blow knocking wind from his lungs and stunning him.

On the other side of the path a blast of arc energy sends more debris scattering and Luke stumbles out of it on his knees. A few feet to Kel’s side Cayde crouches almost on his knees as well, feet dangerously close to the edge of the floating path and one of his hands curled tightly around the exposed root of a dead tree.

Shaking the daze from his eyes, Kel lifts Thorn as the Knight raises its blade again.

“Just run, you can’t damage these things!” Glyph yells at them, panicked.

The issue, Kel thinks, wasn’t that they couldn’t damage it—but that they didn’t have the time to figure out how. Was that hubris? He doesn’t care.

Reaching for his belt quickly Kel lobs a tripmine up onto the stone that towers above him, the explosive beeping only once before its sensor picks up the Knight and explodes. The Knight stumbles, and a furious roar that sounds less like a creature and more like a force of nature follows them as they push forward.

“Glyph, where is she?” Cayde slows slightly to raise his gun and fire off a few shots at the thrall that had picked an awful time to come swarming from the shadows.

“Dead ahead, but there’s more knights!”

Poor word choice.

The exo swears, word nearly lost to the horde of screaming thrall blocking their way forward and the heavy, lumbering steps of the Knight giving chase behind. “Luke, we need a path!” Cayde calls out.

Kel expects Luke to let out a whoop and a jubilant ‘let’s rock n’ roll!’, but the warlock is instead silent as electricity flares up around him, flying from his open palms and ripping through the horde of thrall before them.

It’s unnerving to see Luke without the gusto everyone knew him for, but Kel doesn’t have time to wallow in self-loathing at the fact he’d been the one to dampen it.

He and Cayde follow after Luke, single shots from their pair of hand cannons picking off whatever Hive escaped from the warlock’s raging storm. Kel turns around once to fire a shot at the Abyssal Knight still pursuing them, hoping to find some weakness, but the bullet doesn’t so much as cause it to stumble.

Echo beeps at him to get his attention just as he turns away and he pauses, watching as though in slow motion as something incandescent wavers around the Knight’s gargantuan form; an image flashes in his mind of a dead titan in a Crucible arena.

The Knight’s body shifts as it moves to strike down and Kel dives out of the way, rolling back into gear and taking off after the other two.

They can see more of the Abyssal Knights ahead, clear of the screaming thrall that Luke had successfully reduced to smoking ash. Something glows brightly in the darkness of the Ascendant Plane right in the middle of the three monsters, and both Kel and Luke immediately recognize the opaque white shield unique to their teammate.

One of the knights rears back with its weapon and slams it down on the shield, scattering the sound of cracking glass on the wind around them. Quinn lets out a scream of helpless fear from within the shield’s dome.

“Cayde, we can kill these things, do you have a barrage ready?”

“Hold on, what?” Luke demands.

There’s no hesitation in Cayde’s answer. “I do.”

The easy, unflinching trust for him to give an affirmative without even knowing what his plan was, after everything he’d done and nearly done, punches Kel in the chest. He sequesters that feeling for later, a weapon to use against Thorn when it tries to press into the depths of his mind for an advantage.

Nine bullets in Thorn’s magazine. Three Abyssal Knights.

He takes aim—three shots each, a full magazine of hungry, caustic bullets that do exactly as he had hoped they would. The three knights stumble when the rounds chew through whatever paracausal shields they had and shatter them, massive weapons slamming to the ground and making it rumble under their feet.

Cayde takes to the air with his light burning wild and unleashes a barrage of fiery knives that erupt violently over the carapace of the now defenseless goliaths, leaving them to howl as the fire of Cayde’s light rips them to shreds and turns them to ash that’s swept away by the wind.

Immediate threat to the one they came here to save out of the way, the three of them turn for the last Knight still lumbering heavily towards them. Kel reloads quickly and empties the full clip into it, his teammates hailing it with even more the moment its shields are destroyed.

Nothing but the roaring silence of the storm around them follows. It’s a reprieve and nothing more, Kel knows this even without the hissing laughter he hears cut through his thoughts.

Cayde doesn’t hesitate, immediately turning and bolting back for the center of the massive open platform they find themselves on. The opaque shield they’d seen, so similar and yet so different from a titan’s at the same time, dissipates and reveals Quinn lying prone on the crumbling stone within a small divot.

The knights had been hammering at her shield for longer than they’d been witness to, it seems.

He and Luke join Cayde.

“Hey, sunshine,” he’s saying as they approach, Ace gently set on the ground next to him as he reaches for her, “you’re alright. You’re alright.”

It seems more like he’s trying to convince himself rather than her, but Kel doesn’t mention it.

She’s pale as a sheet and there are dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes, that much more pronounced with how white she looks, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat visible over her skin even in the desaturated colors of the Plane.

Her chest heaves with exertion and she shakes with something he can’t tell between weariness or unfiltered relief that they’d found her; morbidly, Kel wonders whether Oryx would’ve become unstoppable if they’d gotten here too late, for he knew now that that is why he wanted all of them here, deep in his realm.

Power feeds power. Blade versus flesh. Blade versus Eternity. There can be no survival without teeth.

Thorn’s laughter grows louder and Kel goes stiff as he fights with himself, suddenly struggling not to lift the barrel of the gun and fire off three very specific shots.

Weight hits him and nearly throws him off balance, and Kel only realizes that someone’s embraced him when the contact somehow pushes the dark static from his mind and leaves his thoughts clear again. He blinks, looking down and seeing Quinn with her arms tight around his back and face pressed against his chestplate.

His throat feels tight; he wasn’t deserving of the silent thank you she was projecting to him, not at all, but he hesitantly wraps an arm around her back in return.

“Can you move?” He asks her, following Cayde’s line of sight when he lifts Ace at the ready. Already the Taken were swarming again. They couldn’t stay here.

She looks like she might pass out at any moment, but when she steps back he spends a moment wondering at the sheer force of will the woman had to be able to keep upright after being trapped here for so long, after an ordeal that must have drained her to the brink.

She nods, pausing when Glyph materializes briefly to shift from Cayde to her.

“Good, that’s good, because there are a lot of bad guys heading our way,” Luke says, already hop-stepping back in the direction they’d come.

“Kel, take point again. Quinn, stick close. Luke, you ‘n me bring up the rear. Move!” Cayde barks out quickly, and all of them—all four of them—take off, hoping that their path would remain clear as they’d made it.

He didn’t hold out hope, knowing that now Oryx had them where he wanted them they weren’t going to leave easy. Part of him wants to argue Cayde’s order for Quinn to stick close to him with Thorn’s possessive, dark whispering growing disorientingly loud and demanding, but he doesn’t.

It was a double-edged sword, grasping at his mind greedily and testing every ounce of his carefully honed restraint, but the only weapon among them that could damage the powerful creatures that he hoped could only exist within this realm.

Instead, Kel took solace in knowing that Cayde still trusted him to maintain his control over something that could be both their and and salvation here.

Taken swarm at them from all sides as they run, the King of this world throwing oceans of screaming and howling thrall and knights and acolytes at them to slow them down and tire them out. To stop them from leaving.

Kel understands now why the disastrous mission that Gil died on went the way it had.

It’s nothing but sheer luck that sees the four of them back to the beginning, back to the passage they’d come through and out of the choking void.

They weren’t safe, far from it—if Gil’s death had told them anything, things were about to get even more difficult.

The moment they’re out of the tight passage and into the cavernous halls and suspended platforms filled with rock and chitinous growths and writhing worms that made up the Dreadnaught, they stop for nothing, slowing only to push back against the waves and waves of enemies Oryx furiously throws at them.

By the time they make it back to the transmat zone and are pulled into the confines of Cayde’s ship all of them are exhausted—though, he imagines, nowhere near to the state Quinn likely is—and Sundance immediately sends the ship into flight away from Oryx and his throne and the Taken.

The ship makes it into hyperspace and it’s only then that all of them allow themselves to catch their breath and relax.

“How long was I gone?” Quinn asks quietly from where she’d collapsed against the hull of the ship, hands hanging limply on the ground on either side of her and legs bent unevenly where they stretch out in front of her.

“Almost two months.” Sundance answers her from within the ship’s systems, her voice soothing and gentle.

There are tears in her eyes. “It felt like so much longer.” She whispers, and then the first sob wracks her body.

Cayde is at her side instantly, pulling her against him and settling his chin on top of her head, jaw lights flashing erratically while they’re caught somewhere between his choking relief and concern. “You’re alright now, sunshine.” He says, rocking her gently while she clutches at him and cries. “You’re alright. We’re taking you home.”

Kel looks away, unable to stop the feeling that he was an intruder to the scene and wordlessly moving for the rear of the ship. He doesn’t belong here with either of them, not while the corrupting grasp of the Darkness claws at him and tells him to just end her suffering.

Somewhere between there and Earth she falls asleep, too exhausted from her ordeal to remain awake, and she stays that way even when they arrive at the Tower and are transmatted down into the hangar. Cayde carries her all the way to the medical ward, Luke and Kel both following and remaining outside while they wait to hear how she is.

The silence between them is stifling.

It’s comfortable enough for Kel, but it leaves Luke twitching and fidgeting restlessly until he speaks up.

“I don’t think even Gil could’ve held up a ward against those things after a month of...all that.” He says, the statement seemingly more to himself than to anyone else, but Kel’s helmet tilts up to him just slightly and the warlock freezes as though only just remembering he was even there.

Kel stares at him for a length, Thorn clawing at his thoughts after hours of silence and telling him to get up, to reach out and strangle Luke for daring to speak Gil’s name. Instead, he nods and evenly replies: “No, he couldn’t have.”

The look of shock on Luke’s face is absolutely worth the pain of acknowledging a still raw wound.

He won’t stay in the City. He can’t. Gil had been the only reason Kel had ever agreed to work as part of a team, the only reason he’d grown to enjoy someone always having his back while he was out in the wild.

He’d miss Quinn. He has to hope she wouldn’t lose the bright personality that had wiggled its way under his skin, and she was one of the few that acutely understood why he found solace in silence and solitude.

Deep down, he’ll miss Luke and his obnoxious, optimistic energy, too; he knows he can’t keep blaming the warlock forever, and it’s only the sharp sting of loss and Thorn’s desperate, hungry whispering that has him pointing the finger of blame in his direction.

Cayde, Ikora, Zavala, Banshee, he’d miss all of them. Shaxx, too, though he’s sure the feeling wasn’t going to be returned.

At least with Quinn back in the Vanguard’s hands, Kel could be satisfied in knowing Gil’s death wasn’t in vain.

Maybe once the wound has healed he’ll come back.

Maybe.

His thumb drags along the grip of Thorn, still hissing at the back of his skull, still urging him to rip open Luke and drink in the light he’ll bleed. It was furious at his careful restraint, frantic that it was being ignored by him ever since the debacle in the war room.

That had been the first time Kel had lost control of himself and snapped in hundreds of years since the phantoms from his first life had begun to plague him, and Kel swears to himself that it was going to be the last.

He speaks with Quinn once she’s awake again, quietly and evenly, just as she remembers.

Cayde stands nearby, unwilling to leave her side and relaying his messages and report to the other Vanguard members through Sundance. He doesn’t mention how close Kel had come to putting down the only other remaining member of their fireteam, nor does he watch Kel like a hawk as though expecting that buried rage to reappear, and Kel appreciates it more than he’ll ever be able to put into words.

She’ll find out, eventually. Luke has too big of a mouth for her not to, and once he vanishes from the Tower he knows she’ll wonder why.

When he leaves the ward and heads back through the Tower he figures it’s well enough that her last impression of him before he left for who knew how long is just the same as before the loss of his best friend ripped open old wounds and nearly changed him for the worse.

She needs the stability right now, and while that implies him needing to stay he knows he can’t. Cayde and Luke were fixed enough points on their own, and they could fill in where he’d never be able to so long as Thorn was at his side.

Eris Morn is out in the sunlight of the plaza for once and Kel stops in his path to stare at her.

She’s watching him expectantly.

“There’s no coming back.” It’s more of a statement than a question. He already knows the answer.

“Not fully.” She says, her head tilting slightly. The answer as well as her covered, glowing gaze are surprisingly lucid. “The corruption digs in, burrows into the fiber of your bones as tenaciously as we cling to this dead rock of a planet. You yet hold the weapon. It is still trying. It will continue. It will get worse.”

Worse, implying that killing another guardian and gunning for his own teammate after only a few weeks with the weapon wasn’t that bad. He supposes, compared to the pain and torment she’d suffered at the hands of the Hive, it wasn’t.

They had stolen her eyes and poured corruption into her veins.

She had stolen theirs in return, and used that corruption to exact retribution in spite of the Light now shirking her.

He nods in response; he can still feel it at the back of his mind, insistent and angry. Whatever evil the Hive had planted in the weapon, it didn’t like being ignored.

Kel glances into the distance, his eyes settling on the gargantuan form of the Traveler hovering over the Last City on Earth. “You said there was a way to sever its connection to the Hive magic controlling it. I haven’t found it yet.”

“Xyor. The moon. Slay her.” She offers him, and he looks over at her, both of them sharing a quiet moment of understanding. As he turns away what she says next causes him to stop in his tracks again. “Perhaps you will get to keep your eyes when she is gone.”

Had she just made a joke?

He blinks at her, and her head simply tilts the other way. “You will also be free of the worm wearing a dead girl’s face.”

Anyone else might have jerked back in surprise, but Kel simply curls his hands into fists at his sides. “How—?”

It’s a stupid question; all three of her stolen eyes blink slowly at him.

“I’ll silence it.” He says after a pause, wondering for a moment at just how wrong he may have been about Eris. “And I’ll make sure it doesn’t dig its claws into anyone else.” He’s not sure yet if it’ll even be possible for him to maintain control of it. But he will.

Her lips twitch into a smile so slight and so brief that Kel might have missed it. “Conviction. Eriana would have liked you.” She says, and as she returns to the Vanguard hall she leaves him with one more piece of advice: “Do not let it consume your light, and you may become something even the Hive fear.”

He watches her leave, then looks up at the silent Traveler in the distance, taking in the sight of it for just one more time.

Echo chirps at him cheerfully, confidently, and Kel leaves the Tower and the City behind.

[phantomwarrior12]

Desperation (Ch. 1)

He's so still.

His chest rises and falls in such a subtle rhythm that she's placed her hand against it nearly a dozen times in the last hour to ensure he's still breathing.

From what she could gather from the wreckage, he had used the last of his Light to brace a crumbling building, protecting the civilians inside. When the shield caved, he'd braced it with his shoulders until everyone escaped. It's where she found him, unconscious and half buried beneath rubble.

It took half an hour to dig him out by hand, another twenty minutes to maneuver him into a position she could use to get him up. She expected him to be heavy, he is after all, a seven foot Titan but he exceeded even her expectations. She couldn't fully brace his weight given her own weakened state, so she'd had to drag him into the nearest cover and prop him against a wall as best she could. They've been here for hours, she isn't sure when nightfall had been, all she knows is that it's dark and cold and her Titan isn't awake.

She's afraid he won't regain consciousness. His Ghost has stuck close to his side, doing her best to monitor his condition but it doesn't put the Young Wolf's mind at ease. She stands and paces away to the window, scanning the streets for Cabal.

They're empty - just like the last seventeen times she's checked. It's a distraction at best, a way to pool that anxious energy into something. She doesn't want to think, to consider the ramifications of the loss of their Light - what it means for Lord Shaxx if he can't recover on his own. Her gaze flits over her shoulder to his slumped form against the wall, his head tilted down and to the left just as she'd left him hours prior and her chest constricts.

He has to wake up.

She pushes off the wall and makes her way over to him on aching legs. She winces as she eases down onto his lap and stares into his helmet almost expectantly. He doesn't move, doesn't flinch, doesn't offer so much as a singular grunt of pain as the palm of her hand cradles the side of his helmet, lifting and tilting his head to a more upright position.

Wake up. She pleads wordlessly, pressing her helmet against his. Please.

She half expects him to grip her waist and tug her against his chest like he always does. But he doesn't move. His hands lay motionless at his sides and her hands ball into fists around the collar of his neck wrap even as his head sags back down.

Wake up, Shaxx! The words are trapped in her throat, a violent desperation contained beyond lips that cannot speak as she drags him forward and shoves his limp form against the wall with all her strength as if to jolt him from his slumber. I need you. She sags against him, burying her helmet against the crook of his neck as silent tears trail and pool into the neckline of her shirt.

"Perhaps you should rest?" Ghost offers softly, "We can keep an eye on Lord Shaxx while you sleep. I'll wake you if anything changes."

Her little Light is terrified of losing her. She can hear it in the subtle tremor in his voice - a very real and tangible reality given the circumstances. Seeing Shaxx like this, seeing his Ghost try not to fret as she scans him again for improvements - she knows how much her own Ghost is trying to avoid that same train of thought

And she relents.

She slides off the Warlord's lap and slumps onto the floor beside him. She takes his hand in hers and holds it in her lap as she leans against his shoulder.  She's tired. More so than she'd realized as she finally lets her eyes sag shut. His frame is warm and solid beside her, soothing in it's own right but she'd give anything to hear a soft snore or groan - anything to tell her he's alive and beside her. But he remains motionless, breathing and wheezing barely audible beside her and it's all she can cling to.

Wake up.

She lifts his arm carefully, sliding beneath the weighted appendage and curls up beside him. It's cold. Perhaps he's cold too? She shifts away ever so slightly, undoing her cloak and shakes it out, dust and dirt filling the air before she drapes it over them.

Now he should be warmer. She lifts his arm again, holding it around her shoulder as she leans against his chest, her cloak barely a barrier between the night chill but she tells herself it's enough - it has to be enough. If she still had her Light, she'd allow it to flare to a soft thrum, warm them both instantaneously.

And how she longs to be warm.

His breathing is rhythmic, catching periodically on what she can only assume is dust he inhaled during the collapse. But she needs more than that as her head rests above his heart and she listens. Faint yet strong - he's alive.

She sags against him in relief, fixating on the steady beating of his heart as it lulls her to sleep.

The next time she opens her eyes, Ghost is ramming against her shoulder repeatedly and it hurts. For the first time, she regrets giving him such a pointy shell and she lifts her head.

"Wake up, Guardian!"

She waves at him and he floats back as she leans forward, Shaxx's arm falling from her shoulder. She blinks away her exhaustion and tilts her head as the Ghost begins to ramble, her mind only registering the tail end of his panicked words.

"--there's movement outside. It sounds like it's getting closer."

Those two sentences send her into a fully alert state. She grabs her gun, darting to the window to peer outside. There's a Cabal patrol moving down the street. They're still far enough that they don't pose an immediate threat but if there are any sounds--

"What's going on out there? Talk to me Guardian."

His voice startles her and she nearly pulls the trigger on her gun from behind the scope. Her eyes dart back to him, the towering Titan slowly trying to get to his feet. Her gaze shifts to the approaching patrol and she scrambles over to him, landing on his lap in her panic, forcing him back down onto the ground.

"Guardian--"

Her hand clamps over where his mouth would be beneath his helmet and she shakes her head, holding a finger up in a silencing gesture. Her head turns back toward the window, straining to listen as the Warlord sags back against the wall. They stay there for what feels like an eternity, chest plate to chest plate, breathing in tandem before the footsteps fade and silence settles over them once more. Her shoulders sag in relief as her head drops to his shoulder, the soft padding of fur silencing any metallic clink.

He must be able to sense how tired she is. His arms encircle her and tug her forward into a firm embrace. She'd be lying if she said it wasn't what she needed the most right now. Her fingers curl around the edge of his chest plate and she melts against him, clinging to him as if he were life itself.

He's alive.

She can breathe again.

"I'm glad you're alright." He whispers, squeezing her as much as he can manage.

"We could say the same about you," Ghost supplies even as she presses closer, eyes squeezed shut beneath her helmet visor. "You gave us quite the scare there for awhile."

"It's alright now."

She pulls away slightly to look at him before lightly smacking his chest and he barely flinches - more so from surprise than from pain.

"I think I speak for both of us when I say: Don't ever do that to us again." Ghost chuckles softly.

Shaxx looks from the hovering Little Light to the Hunter staring up at him, "I believe you're right, little Ghost." His large hand gently cradles the indented edges of her helmet along her cheek, "You have my word, Guardian."

She inclines her head into his touch, closing her eyes as her own hand lifts to cradle his. Everything aches, even her heart in that moment. He's alright. He's alive. He's right here and yet? Her heart aches for him. Her fingers slip around his, gently pulling his hand away from her helmet so she can lean against him once more but she doesn't release his hand, merely grips it tightly as if he'll slip through her fingers again.

It doesn't seem to bother him. He rubs her back with his other hand for a long few minutes, bathed in peaceful silence and moonlight.

"Why aren't you wearing your cloak?" He asks abruptly, noting the large piece of cloth draped over him.

"You looked cold, she decided you needed it more." Ghost supplies while the Hunter remains comfortable against Lord Shaxx's chest.

He chuckles softly, a sound that eases the ache in her chest, "I appreciate that, Guardian."

"You two should rest," her Ghost suggests, "We can keep watch for awhile. We'll need to get moving at first light."

"Very well." Shaxx's eyes fall to the Hunter in his lap, no doubt very aware of how tightly she's clinging to him. By all rights, she should be ashamed, but nearly losing him is excuse enough to justify the vice grip on his fingers. "Sleep well, Guardian."

She snuggles a little closer in response before she drifts off in his arms, lulled by the steady beating of his heart and the calm, soothing rumble in his chest when he speaks.

I've got you, my little Hunter.

---------------------------

Chapter 2 (Dire Need)

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[creative-frequency]

Cayde-6 x Reader: The Trigger Ch. 3

Word count: 1904 Pairing: Cayde-6 (Destiny) x Female Reader Contains: Rating eventually up to mature/explicit. Cayde being Cayde, hunting, trips into the EDZ, bickering

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Confidence usually grew with experience and experience was more valuable than Glimmer outside the walls of the Last City. The inhabitants of the wilds only traded in lives.

The bow string tensed in a swift, fluid motion with no time for thoughts to surface. Sharp gaze found its target quickly and stayed on it. There was almost nothing that could stop the predator about to pounce on its prey. And success always felt good.

Success, when your life literally depended on it, felt even better. The sweet rush of adrenaline, all instincts strained to their maximum capability. The focus. Your quickened but steady heartbeats were the foundation of the effort. Your body was the actor.

For the time of an exhale, the forest around you was still and silent. Only the sharpest ears could’ve been able to hear the air splitting. The mild pumping of adrenaline pounded in your ears with each beat as you waited.

Cayde’s admiring inhale of surprise was the first sign that your arrow had hit its mark. Not surprising, but satisfying nonetheless. The deer was taking its last breath as Cayde hurried to release it from its suffering.

“Nice shot!” he complimented and you saw how he eyed the bow in your hands with a glint in his optics. The background noise returned with a snap.

“Thanks,” you said quietly and looked over at the animal. It was a female of average size, probably a bit on the older side. Its movements had been slower than of the one from before. An easy kill, but it was probably for the best. Some other predator would’ve soon snuffed its life out.

As usual, you clicked on the communication device in your ear and waited for someone to answer. After the Guardian had made rounds around the EDZ, the connections had gotten a lot better. Begrudgingly you had to admit things would’ve been a lot worse without her. It was hard not to be thankful, especially since everyone around you, Suraya included, seemed to worship her.

“Come in,” a familiar voice from the survey unit replied. He wasn’t a Guardian, but he had worked at the Tower before the invasion attack. That didn’t make you like him more.

“Ready for transmatting,” you said as you eyed the deer. It was a good catch. You had been lucky.

“Copy that. Just a moment…”

You waited for a few seconds, trying to ignore the look on Cayde’s face. His gaze was glued to the bow in your hand and his head was tilted in a thoughtful gesture.

“Ready to receive whenever.” A hint of an amused chuckle got through the coms. “You were quick today.”

You didn’t reply but drew in a sigh.

Cayde’s Ghost circled around the animal and projected a transmat beam over it.

“Transmatting now,” Sundance said.

The comm device buzzed and clicked once in your ear before the clearance order got through. It was another thing that was hard to admit but having a Ghost along in the wilds did have its benefits. Unfortunately, it was always a package deal with a Guardian.

You let your posture relax and turned to Cayde.

He jumped to his feet from the ground and cheered. “We’re a good team! High-five! No? Okay. No high-five.”

You left him hanging and continued walking. A small pool of blood was all that was left of the deer and you felt relieved in a sense. It wouldn’t matter if you didn’t find anything else to hunt that day. Your daily quota had been hit for several upcoming days.

“Alright, that’s it then?” Cayde asked in a hopeful tone and swept dirt off his backside.

You bit your lip and let your eyes wander around the forest. The sun was still high, and the sky was clear. It would be a shame to waste such a clear day but staying in the wilds with Cayde wasn’t tempting either. Going back early for a proper rest wouldn’t be so bad once in a while. The Farm had nothing to worry about food-wise so there was no sense in trying to find more prey than what was currently needed.

“I guess,” you said when you couldn’t think of anything better to imply the hunt was concluded for the time being.

“Sooo, we go back now?” Cayde inquired.

You shrugged while walking. “You can stay here if you want.”

He hurried after you. “I know I said it already, but I’ll say it again: Great team. Us.”

“I don’t really do team,” you replied dubiously. It almost felt bad to shoot Cayde’s enthusiasm down like that, but you weren’t up for a bonding session with a Guardian.

“Okay, let’s just stay in the basics, then. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. That sort of thing.” He wasn’t ready to give up and as annoying as it was, it was slightly moving.

“I won’t hesitate to leave you to the wolves.”

“Ouch!”

Almost a full minute of walking in silence ensued with Cayde grinning behind your back.

“Can I say something else?” he asked, definitely not about to wait for your permission, “It’s been kinda rough for these past few days, but you’re making it hella lot easier for a lot of people.”

You cast a sideways glance at his sincere tone.

“Right. Where’s this coming from?” you asked.

Cayde shook his head, amused. “Can’t take a compliment, can you?”

“Not really.”

“Anyways, this was great. I’m looking forward to the next trip already. Now how far is the Farm? I’m craving a sandwich…” Cayde babbled, his voice trailing off in your ears as you focused on finding the right path.

Having someone cheer for you had left an unknown sense of warmth. You didn’t know how to deal with something like that. You quickly settled into the familiarity of ignoring most of what Cayde was saying, but his presence no longer felt like having a pebble in your shoe. It was almost comforting to hear someone talking as you trekked through the woods. And he didn’t expect you to reply anything besides the occasional mumble.

It was weird. As if he was constantly trying to cheer you up.

After walking for over an uneventful hour, Cayde began to pester you about taking a break.

“Oh man, my legs are killing me!”

He slumped onto the trunk of a fallen tree. You gingerly followed him, leaving a wide gap between you two.

“I don’t know how you do this every day,” he continued, blue optics fixated into you.

The forest around you was still and silent. Apart from the occasional chirping and faint rustling, the gentle wind blowing between the trees was the only sound. The midday wasn’t popular time for animals to be moving around.

You stretched your legs, reaching your fingertips towards your toes. “You’re just out of shape, Mister Vanguard.”

“Oi! That’s unnecessary and rude. Aaand probably true,” Cayde admitted with a chuckle that you joined into without realizing it.

It was good to stop to just breathe the fresh air once in a while. It was rejuvenating. You reached your arms up towards the sky and breathed in deeply.

Cayde cleared his throat.

“There’s something I wanted to ask.”

You turned to look at the Exo, brows lightly scrunched in suspicion. “Then ask.”

“What if…” Cayde began in a sly tone and it already drew a slight sigh out of you.

“Yeees?”

“Let’s say I wanted to, uhh, pull my weight here. What should I do?” He stared at you, completely, uncharacteristically serious.

“Stay out of my way,” you wanted to say but bit your tongue. If the Guardian really wanted to make himself useful, you shouldn’t shoot him down. Or Suraya would shoot you down as soon as she would hear about it.

Cayde looked at you intently, waiting for a reply.

“You need a bow,” you finally said.

“YES!”

“Talk to Hawthorne about it. Tell her I said so.”

“I will. Thanks.” He pointed finger guns at you and you rolled your eyes, hard. “Y’know how I said I’ve missed going out? They can never make me go back in.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” you asked, though the answer obviously included the Vanguard Commander.

Cayde shrugged. “Zavala and Ikora, I guess? Okay it hasn’t been that bad, but still…” Cayde looked up to the sun peeking behind the treetops.

Your gaze lingered on the happy expression on his face. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

“Hey, are you hungry? I think I still have a snack bar in here somewhere…” Cayde shoved his hands into his pockets and pulled out something wrapped in bright green. “Wanna share?”

You cast a dubious look at him. “Is that what you eat in the City these days? ‘Cause I’d rather starve.”

“What? Oh no, we do have real food. Like… ramen!” Cayde suddenly looked dreamily at the sky, the snack bar still hanging in his hand. “Man, I miss ramen.”

“So I’ve heard. Like a nine thousand times during these past few days,” you quipped.

Cayde turned to look at you and snapped the bar in half. He offered the food to you. “Well, if things turn out as well as they should, I’ll treat you a bowl when this is over.”

You were taken aback by his sudden offer and the wistful tone. Maybe he really did consider you a some sort of friend? You accepted the bar. It tasted like paper, so no surprise there.

“You think it’ll go down in your favor? Things are looking pretty bad for you guys…” you asked quietly as you munched the snack bar.

“Of course! You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Cayde said instantly, “Zavala is on it. Ikora too… And we have the Guardian. We could really have a shot at turning this around. Don’t you think?”

You cast your eyes to the forest floor and pursed your mouth into a thin line. You shouldn’t have asked. The snack bar was crumbling in your grip.

Cayde squinted at you. “What?”

Your eyes snapped up to look at him, realizing your reaction had been utterly suspicious. “Huh?”

“What’s with the long face?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t like Guardians but–”

“That’s not it!” you yelped. “I do want you to get the City back.”

“More room for you in the forest, eh?” Cayde tossed the leftovers of the bar into his mouth. He didn’t sound too convinced. “I don’t know who rubbed you in the wrong way, but not all Guardians are that bad. Look at me, for example! I’m great!” He pointed at himself with a thumb.

“’Not all Guardians…’” you muttered under your breath. Cayde was right, of course, but you really didn’t want to continue talking about it.

“I’m curious, y’know,” he said in a vain attempt at making you talk, but it only made anxiety rise bile into your throat.

“I bet you are.” You hopped off the log and shook your legs a bit. “Let’s go.”

“What? Already? It’s been like three minutes since we sat down!” Cayde whined but jumped down too. He didn’t really have a choice. Or he did, but that one was to anger Zavala by getting separated from you and getting lost in the wilds of the EDZ. And Cayde was rather fond of the last life the Light had left him.

“Okay, wait up! I’m coming!”

Next Chapter - Coming Soon!

Tagging: @bleucommelhiver @lucianhuntress @singlebecauseofthechocobros@sherniwrites @owlwrites @toastyfiction @sevansheart @xcayde6

[shaken-veil]

Open your heart, Oh Bearer Mine, let us defeat our enemies together.

The Break of Dawn

Cayde-6 x Female Guardian

Crota defeated, Oryx dead for good, SIVA contained.. Everything seemed to be settling in just fine over the Last City. But ghosts of the past often come to haunt you, when you least expect it. Nevia follows the quiet voice in her mind and her actions puts her relationship with Hunter Vanguard Cayde-6 to the test.

Ao3-Link [x]

Ch. 1

Ch. 2

Ch. 3

Ch. 4

Ch. 5

Ch. 6 

Ch. 7

Ch. 8

Epilogue

[waterdeep]

[404botnotfound]

Corrupt [1]

Come, oh bearer mine, and show them that even a rose can be deadly.

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 8,410 SHIP: N/A CHARACTERS: kel, luke, cayde-6, lord shaxx, eris morn, ikora, zavala

He should have been there.

It’s a thought that’s plagued him ever since Luke had returned alone from the Dreadnaught, both of the teammates that had gone with him missing. He’d been frantic and shaking, a far cry from the endlessly optimistic and unapologetically cheerful guardian everyone in the tower knew him for.

It had taken time for them to get him to even speak of what had happened, explain why he was alone—Kel had thought that maybe it was simply a case of the team uncovering something that they desperately needed backup on and Gil had taken the risk of being down one team member to send Luke for that backup.

But it was worse.

They’d been overrun. Whether it had been due to the simple fact they were intruding on Oryx’s turf or that Quinn—font of light herself, so different and enigmatic than her fellows, that she was—had been with them and had drawn the attention of the Taken King, they didn’t know. They’d been boxed in, cornered, and swarmed; first by the Hive and then by Oryx’s Taken.

Luke, somewhat lost in what had happened, had speculated that the assumption that Oryx had taken interest in the tower’s resident anomaly was the correct one—the Taken had immediately zeroed in on her once they’d appeared, attempting to cut her off from them.

They’d pushed, and pushed, and pushed, but they’d begun to run low on ammo and strength.

And now Luke was all that was left.

Quinn, ripped through a portal into another plane of existence and presumably lost to them forever. Gil had sacrificed himself to give Luke enough of an opening to flee and seek help or to simply alert the Vanguard of the mission failure and loss.

It was probably the latter, Kel thinks bitterly. Luke’s ghost, Gibson, had solemnly confirmed that Gil’s light signature had been erased entirely. Quinn’s signature was faint but still there—but too far out of reach for them to help her inasmuch as any of them could figure out.

The Ascendant Plane was a vast expanse of void and they could spend an eternity searching for her within it, but without a point of entry and something to home in on her, it would be ultimately fruitless and a waste of resources to try and search for her. Just pulling an Ascendant soul from one of Oryx’s soldiers and hopping into the void after her wasn’t good enough; with how many guardians they had already lost trying to find Oryx’s throne world and failing, I wasn’t a risk they could take.

Even Cayde had admitted it, pain evident in the utter lack of his usual affable attitude as he did so.

And so it was that Kel was down two teammates, the loss stinging far more than anyone around him could understand. None of them knew of the phantoms that plagued him. None of them knew that this was a loss that only added to the number of ghosts haunting his steps.

A memorial is held.

It’s a short affair because even with as well-known and respected as Gil was among his fellow guardians, even with as quickly as Quinn had wormed her way into their hearts—they’re in the middle of a war on four fronts and they don’t have the time or resources to spare.

It’s rare that any lost guardian winds up with a memorial service, but Gil was tantamount to a hero within City walls, having fought at the sides of the Vanguard members hundreds of years past. Defending the walls as they were built and holding off the siege of the Fallen at Six Fronts, saving lives at the battle of Twilight Gap, respected mentor alongside Shaxx to newly risen guardians for many, many years.

He was one of the best guardians the City probably ever had or will have, and as a result a decently large crowd gathers to show their respect.

He was gruff and abrasive, but loved and respected.

Yet still only moments after saying their solemn farewells, Cayde and Ikora are already leaving the plaza discussing the next step in the war against the Taken King. Zavala paces a few steps ahead of them, looking a fair bit more solemn than usual, as they all retreat for the Vanguard hall.

Kel’s fairly certain Cayde is trying to find some way to rescue Quinn on the side of his work, but Kel had heard of Toland the Shattered, and he doesn’t hold out hope.

The loss hurts them all, but the Vanguard has already moved on and before long Kel is the only one left standing in the plaza, for the first time in centuries feeling the prickling sensation of being overwhelmed by the mere presence of others.

None of them have time to mourn. To truly mourn. Humanity has clung to the tails of survival for thousands of years, and mourning the loss of a single guardian was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Not even for Gil, and certainly not for one that had only been a presence for under a decade.

Kel leaves the City.

He vanishes because he’s tired of the condolences from the older guardians that knew him as the hero that always fought at Gil’s side, at his friend’s side, and the apartment the team shared is too quiet with both him and Quinn gone and with Luke as withdrawn as he’s become.

The silence is driving him mad and it’s a feeling he’s unfamiliar with. Silence had been his balm for so long that Kel couldn’t begin to pinpoint the place in time that he’d grown fond of having a team at his back—at hearing Quinn and Luke’s cheerful laughter and jokes as they checked off another victory for Fireteam Ward, at Gil’s fond looks when he thought no one was looking, at how his ghosts were silenced when he sat down in quiet solidarity with Quinn who struggled to hear her ghosts.

He leaves for the wilds and it’s the first time he’s been on his own for nearly two centuries. Kel can’t decide if he hates the sudden isolation or the fact that Gil had convinced him to be part of a team in the first place more.

In the first week he skirts the plaguelands, takes down half a dozen groups of Fallen holed up just within its borders. He feels empty. Nothing.

In the second he tears a bloody path through the Cosmodrome, clearing out Rasputin’s bunker (just in case) and wreaking havoc on the forces of Hive as pure vengeance for what they’d wrought on his team. Still, nothing.

By the third week he hesitantly makes his way to the final battleground of Twilight Gap, the memories of fighting by his old friend’s side and the few, rare laughs Kel had ever had after being resurrected making him want to raze the entire memorial to the ground. He doesn’t have the raw power of a Titan or the capability for devastation like a Warlock, so he makes do with firing a few rockets at the creaking and rusted artillery and watches them tumble down the cliffs with a numb disinterest.

Echo stopped trying to speak with him after the first week, instead opting to ping messages onto his heads-up display whenever Luke tried to contact him or the Vanguard attempted to deliver updates or request missions he was in the area for. Cayde confirms Kel’s theory that he’d been researching for the purpose of hunting Quinn by sending him updates on said research.

He’s not feeling particularly endeared to the Vanguard these days and he disregards both the updates and the assignments. Quinn was gone just as assuredly as Gil was gone and he wasn’t about to get his hopes up.

He’d had enough loss. In both of his lives.

He had no reason to return to the City. None.

Uncharted territory is where he finds himself by the end of the third week, somewhere across the sea as he sought even more distance from the place he’d so foolishly called home for the last few hundred years. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s looking for or why he’s looking for it, but there’s an indescribable pull that’s carving his path as he treks through the ravines and forests by foot.

He wonders if it’s a Hunter instinct or just a Kel instinct—or something else entirely.

He comes upon a swathe of ruins nearly reclaimed by nature, evidence of a post-Collapse civilization making itself known in the form of ancient buildings rebuilt with scrap and anything the people back then could pull together for shelter. It was empty, a ghost town with some kind of dangerous heaviness settled thick enough to choke over it.

Something happened here. Something tantamount to cataclysmic that had nothing to do with the onset of the Collapse. Something final.

He can see a pair of massive Hive seeds, one crashed through an old, rotting building and another cracking up through what remains of a paved street. Only a pair, and he can’t see any telltale signs of the Hive repurposing the area for their own gain—just an isolated group, then, lingering to feed on the remaining light and darkness trapped within the energy of the place before they moved on.

A pair of Knights notice him.

Kel stands there as they roar and open fire on him, the glow of the heated weapons the Hive used reflecting in his visor as they paint a violent slash of color through the air towards him.

He considers not moving. He truly does—considers not moving, ordering his ghost to abandon him and to head back to the tower without him.

She chirps at him in alarm, as vocal as she’s been in weeks.

Kel knows that’s not how it works. He’s seen the ghost shells, broken and forlorn, scattered along the coasts and ruins of pre-Collapse civilization. Their light had run out before they could find their guardian, or they’d been attacked and damaged by the monsters that saw the little creatures as a light-filled treat to feast on. Or they’d simply given up.

He may feel like one of those broken and empty shells, but he won’t suffer Echo the same fate. She was perhaps the one thing he thought he had left that he wouldn’t forsake like that.

Kel dives, feels the heat of the bolts of Hive fire boil the air where he’d been standing seconds ago; he wonders if his cloak, already ripped and worn from hundreds of years of battle and survival, had been singed by the close call. Whirling into action his auto rifle coughs out bullets as fast as he can aim and pull the trigger.

His shields drop far enough that he’s forced to seek cover, slipping under a broken garage door and into one of the ramshackle buildings lining the ruined street. The Knights and Thrall howl for his blood and light, seeking him as he slips away from them.

He finds a place to recuperate, eyes slipping to the indicator Echo provides for him for the status of his shields as he reloads. Once it blinks and disappears he leaves the building, sweeping the new street slowly and carefully. He can still hear the Hive somewhere around the corner, unaware of his presence.

Good—he can flank them.

As his eyes sweep the other direction he freezes, taking in the sight of a body slumped there before him. Bones, nothing but dust and rags, and Kel would have mistaken it for any poor soul lost when this settlement had been overrun or abandoned—but Echo makes a noise of surprise, telling him that there’s the faintest signature of light emanating from these bones.

Light that felt…different.

Next to the body rests a gun. Revolver. Custom. It looks like it had been warped, swallowed alive by something dark and vile and spat back out; black and sharp and sickly green, and though it must have been abandoned for decades if not longer and was partially covered by growing weeds and grass it looks as though it had been sitting there for just a few days.

It pulses with dark green light almost eagerly. Almost like it had been waiting for him to stumble upon it and it was happy he was here. And there, again, was the pull he had been feeling. The pull that had led him here.

Shouldering his rifle Kel kneels and digs the handgun out from the weeds grasping at it, wrapping his fingers around the grip of the handgun and hefting it lightly to test its balance.

Echo makes a noise of disapproval as though telling him to leave it.

Kel looks up from the body before him and sees a little girl with blonde curls and a pink dress standing on the opposite side of the street staring at him with unblinking, bright blue eyes. He goes rigid. When he blinks, the little girl vanishes.

His grip tightens on the handgun and he brushes the unbidden vision aside at the same time something whispers in his head.

My name is Thorn, oh bearer mine I will bring ruin to those who wronged you.

This, too, he brushes aside; it isn’t the first time he’s dealt with whispers and shadows in the back of his mind and vision, and he knows this is no different. A lot is on his mind and he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Just hallucinations. Nothing more.

Shaking his head, Kel turns away from the sun-bleached bones of the poor soul whose name he’ll never know.

When he returns to finish off the Hive still clawing at the door he’d vanished through the bullets that bite through their chitinous forms comes from a vile handgun that purrs at the back of his mind, pleased with the carnage and the way the Hive corrode and collapse under the gun’s fire.

He feels ill.

It’s the first thing he’s felt since his brother in arms died.

When he returns to the tower, Kel thinks he shouldn’t have come back at all.

He has no idea what even drove him to come back, but the way people greet him with concern and ask him how he’s doing as though he weren’t just an empty shell who remembers too much feels too much hurts too much, or greet him as though nothing has changed, it grates on his already frayed nerves. As though his best friend isn’t dead, as though he cares for their idle chatter and words.

When he blinks stonily at them, knowing they can’t see his eyes, he stares until they get uncomfortable and turn away. He sees the little blonde girl with curls and a pretty dress staring back at him when they move out of the way.

They don’t see her. It’s been hundreds of years since he has.

Kel makes his way to the Vanguard hall, feels Eris Morn’s three stolen eyes burn into his back and Shaxx’s sharp gaze follow him as he passes, and when he moves down the steps towards the Vanguard’s war table all three members stop to stare at him.

He doesn’t bother to address it, though he feels his skin crawl with frustration at the response.

Moving to stand in front of Cayde—why was he still here, if he was so sure Quinn was still alive? Why wasn’t he actually doing anything? It’s been a month, is she dead?—as though the wary, concerned looks from the other two weren’t making a deep anger he hasn’t felt in years stir inside him.

“Been gone a long time, guardian,” Cayde drawls, one hand still resting idly on his maps and papers spread in front of him. Kel supposes that when you’re on the brink of extinction and fighting an impossible war, a month could be considered a long time. “What’d you find?”

Everyone knows about the Dare. Everyone knows how Cayde-6 became Hunter Vanguard.

Andal Brask had been a good man.

The whispering and aggravation at the back of his mind quiets with relief that Cayde, at least, seems to understand the desire to avoid speaking of the dead and lost. “Mapped out some territory.” Kel replies evenly; in his periphery he can see the way Zavala shifts in irritation.

No ventures into dark zones without fireteams. Ever.

Cayde however steps to one side and gestures to the archaic map he has spread across the table. “Show me.”

So Kel does, pointing to parts of the map and indicating where he found a Fallen Ketch docked, or Hive seeds—that old city in the dark zone he had combed through. Explains what he saw and what he thinks of it, what might be going on or whether it was worth looking into further.

He does this not because it’s his duty to but because something pulled him back to the City just as it had pulled him away, and without the friend that had been helping to guide him for centuries Kel has fallen back into that old Hunter habit of following the paths that call to him. He’s not sure what it was or why, so for now he’s simply going through the familiar motions he’d gotten used to while working as part of a fireteam even though it no longer felt like he had one.

When he finally looks up from the map, done with recounting his travels, he freezes as his eyes land once more on the little girl, standing on the other side of the table and seemingly standing on her toes to try and reach up for Ikora’s ghost.

“Was that all you found?” Cayde asks. Kel hears the caution in it, the double meaning, and understands Cayde’s intent for asking it.

The little girl looks towards the entrance of the hall and Kel follows her gaze. Standing there is Luke, halfway down the steps and staring at him. Kel’s fingers twitch in search for the handgun he’d found.

He blinks. The little girl vanishes. “Yes. That was all I found.”

Without waiting for confirmation, Kel turns away from the table and heads for the stairs at a pace that could just barely be considered a rush, his shoulder bumping against Luke’s roughly and nearly knocking the Warlock off-balance.

Luke tries to say something to him as he leaves, but the whispering is back and Luke’s voice is lost somewhere in the red-hot static boiling in Kel’s veins. He’s close to the burning fire of a Golden Gun let loose and Kel knows that if he doesn’t leave the hall behind, that Golden Gun will be turned on Luke.

Much as something dark and hateful clamors for that exact thing, Kel doesn’t want it.

Maybe if he says it enough he’ll convince himself.

It’s as he reaches the steps to ascend into the plaza that Eris finally decides to insert herself in his way, stopping him and sidestepping to block him every time he tries to move around her. “You found one.”

“I found a few ‘ones’ while out there.” Kel replies, irritated. Another step to the side, blocked again by the woman warped by darkness and Hive, teetering somewhere between the Dark and the Light and leaving his skin crawling—something he’s never felt in her presence before. “Be more specific or get out of my way.”

“It’s whispering to you.” She says, her gauze-covered eyes glowing through the thin fabric and dripping with ichor focused intently on his face as though she could catch his own eyes through his visor. And maybe she could. “I can hear it, too. Where did you find it?”

Shaxx is watching the exchange from further back in the hall.

Kel doesn’t answer, still blocked from moving forward, and he’s tempted to shove her aside as he had done with Luke; he hasn’t felt this openly aggressive in a long time but he’s falling back into it easily as though he’d never stopped.

It felt good. It takes all his willpower to ignore the urge.

“A sorrowful weapon, bleak and dripping with carnage and hate. What does it promise you? Does it promise you vengeance? Purpose? Freedom? They are all lies. You will find no true answers from its treacherous mouth, guardian.” Her voice is thick with spite and venom, growing thicker with every word, and it occurs to Kel that he’s never heard Eris so emotive before.

Ironic, considering his own behavior.

The little girl is back, pouting up at her with furrowed brows.

I promise you solace, oh bearer mine. I promise you certainty.

His lips twitch. More hallucinations. He’ll feel better once he’s gotten some rest—that’s all he needs.

“It speaks to you now,” Eris breathes, her fingers curling around the gently glowing soul stone she carries and her lips pull back in a feral snarl, “do not listen to it! It is hungry and it lies.”

I promise you vindication. I promise you vengeance. All that exists struggles to exist. Blade versus flesh. Blade versus eternity. You know this. You have seen it. You have suffered it. In death and in Life.

My name is Thorn, and I promise you the power to continue existing.

Kel’s skin crawls with illness again, and something soot-blackened and dark and full of sickeningly sweet comfort curls claws around his thoughts; he gives in to his urge and finally pushes past Eris Morn with her haunting call following his rapidly retreating form.

“Do not lose yourself, guardian! Your light yet burns!”

He enters the Crucible at Shaxx’s insistence. He represents no faction, plays with those far from lacking in skill; game of choice is Rumble. He still doesn’t feel like playing as part of a team, not when what was left of his was the one responsible for the other half being lost.

Shaxx says it’ll clear his head, get his mind focused forward instead of stuck in the past. Stuck on events that couldn’t be changed.

He indulges in his old friend’s suggestion, not because he thinks it’ll clear his head (it won’t) but because a deep, darkened part of his soul craves the mind-numbing violence he’s dirtied his boots with for centuries, craves the ability to let loose, put his anger and emptiness outward rather than holding it in for a change.

He wants blood. Wants to see the light bleed from his peers as he shows them how far from his level they are, to prove to them and himself that if he had been on that mission in the Dreadnaught—

He shakes his head and steps around a corner with his auto rifle at the ready, firing a hail of bullets into the back of an unprepared Warlock. The Warlock’s ghost blinks at him balefully, facets spreading around the glowing orb of light that represented the creature’s light and life as it works on reviving its guardian.

The only reason Kel doesn’t glare back at it is because he’s at the top of the scoreboard and doesn’t have the time nor the care.

He’s leaps and bounds ahead of the other participants and on a killstreak, much to Shaxx’s delight, and it’s likely why the other participants seemed to have abandoned their crosshairs being aimed at each other and instead pointed them all in his direction.

He didn’t mind. It just gave him more chance to prove his skill.

He normally didn’t enjoy the Crucible, caring only for its ability to hone team coordination and personal skill—but now, now he was enjoying it. He can’t point to what changed, but he can’t say it was a bad one.

It was…thrilling, he supposed. It made him feel alive.

He ducks under a natural archway in the Venusian landscape, glancing at the radar in his HUD.

He sees the flash of red on his radar a split second too late; something solid slams into his side and he just barely catches himself before it throws him from his feet and knocks him prone. His rifle isn’t so lucky—it goes flying out of his hands, sliding to a halt a few yards away.

The Titan that had slammed into him gives him no time to recover, closing the small distance his shoulder charge had created and snapping an elbow into Kel’s helmet before he can block it. The strike leaves a nasty ringing in his ears and this finally throws him off-balance and his knee brushes the ground.

Kel tips over and rolls with the motion away from the Titan, ignoring the vertigo the action causes. He hears a shotgun round rip through the air, lodging into the course gravel of the landscape he’d just vacated.

He bounds away from the Titan, using a pulse of his light to propel himself further with a jump—another shotgun blast shatters his shields and Echo beeps a sharp warning at him as he retreats.

Somewhere in the scattered rocks and Vex monoliths in the arena he loses the Titan and he circles back around to where he’d dropped his rifle with Echo’s assistance; the Titan had the same idea as soon as he’d lost sight of him, apparently, and Kel is forced to duck back under cover when he appears in sight, booted feet planting firmly on the ground right next to the rifle.

He was waiting.

Kel’s shields had recovered, but that shotgun had a quick firing rate and it would bite through them faster than he’d be able to grab his gun and take the Titan down. The moment he got within range, if the first shot didn’t knock him out of the running the second would, and Kel would still have to aim and fire.

Point blank range or not, rifles didn’t have the same kind of close-range stopping power.

He needed to think of something fast. It wouldn’t be long before the other combatants caught up to them and joined the fray, and Kel didn’t hold out hope that they’d end their grudge and go after each other rather than eliminate the one in first place and then return to the regular slaughter.

The handgun he’d found. It was still in his inventory—

He grimaces. No, he’s got a solar-fueled grenade ready and a throwing knife still on his belt, he could make use of those.

But—

Fingers twitching, Kel orders Echo to summon the hand cannon, spins out of cover, and takes aim.

The first shot knocks out most of the Titan’s shields, and something sick and corrosive eats away at the rest before he even fires a second time; Kel frowns. When he fires again the shot snaps through the Titan’s helmet and he drops like a stone, the heavy thud drowned out by Shaxx calling an end to the match.

He thought there’d been at least another minute left on the timer and he frowns at the empty HUD on his visor. Had he reached the point cap? Why was the Titan’s ghost not visible and working on a revive?

His ghost is quiet.

He’s won either way and he decides it doesn’t matter much. Leisurely and with a heavy exhale he moves to retrieve his auto rifle; considering it for a moment, he glances at the jagged thorn of a weapon in his other hand. Echo chirps her disapproval in his ear, but obediently stows the rifle and transmats a holster onto his thigh for the hand cannon.

Kel returns to the tower to see if there are any open bounties on the board in the plaza. He may as well go out and do his duty to the City while he got used to the new weapon.

He’d been wrong—the match had helped him feel better.

You are strong. The rest are weak. You need to show them. This is the way it should be. This is the way it is.

The whispers are getting louder. Clearer. More insistent. Something about this one in particular gives him pause, but when he tries to grasp the cause it slips through his fingers like sand. He dismisses it, thumbing the grip of the gun holstered on his thigh.

He’s been dealing with the hallucinations for hundreds of years. They’d gotten worse after Demi’s death. They were worse now, after losing Gil. He knows what to expect.

They’ll fade with time. They always do.

When Kel approaches the war room a few days later it’s much louder than he ever remembers it being; their voices are at a volume that he can hear, indistinct and muffled, as far back as the stairs Eris liked to hover by.

Her typical haunt is devoid of her heavy presence.

Shaxx, too, is absent from his usual spot in the Vanguard hall, the space conspicuously and unnervingly empty with the large Titan and his even larger energy gone.

Kel’s footsteps pause momentarily when he catches Arcite, Shaxx’s quartermaster frame, staring at him. He stares back wordlessly until the frame returns to work, muttering in displeasure at whatever messages it’s receiving from the various factions invested in the upcoming Crucible season.

And then he notices the war room’s doors are closed.

It’s an unfamiliar sight—Kel can only recall one time in his hundreds of years of undeath that those doors had ever closed: the crisis on the moon. Humanity’s first contact and war with the Hive, and the First Fireteam to have descended into the Hellmouth. The Vanguard had always adopted an open-door policy from its formation to the modern day, and he wonders what kind of cataclysm must have occurred to force them to close their doors to discuss it.

Did the new war with the Taken warrant such a closed-door meeting?

Kel resumes his walk to the door and pauses just before it, the voices beyond still muffled but more distinct now.

“—he’s not fit for active duty. Is that what you’re saying, Shaxx?” Zavala asks.

Shaxx’s voice, easily the loudest in the room as was the norm for the Titan, answers with a kind of fury Kel hasn’t heard in many years. “I’m saying he’s not fit to be within the City walls, much less on active duty or participating with either the skilled or the under-trained in my Crucible.”

“May I remind you, Lord Shaxx, that you are the one that invited him to participate in that match in the first place.” Ikora says calmly.

“I don’t need to be reminded!” Shaxx responds, the statement punctuated by what sounds like a fist slamming down onto a solid surface. “Had I any idea that he had a weapon that could cause true death, I never would have! Do you think I would ever willingly invite another Red Death incident?”

There’s a heavy beat of silence and Kel’s frown deepens; he remembers the incident well. Everyone had heard of it. Everyone had talked about it. A small massacre caused by a gun prototype found in the wild whose designs had immediately been confiscated and destroyed.

“Don’t think that’s what Ikora was saying, Shaxx,” he hears Cayde’s voice, a parallel to Ikora’s in its even calm—rare, for the typically aloof and jovial hunter, “none of us want a repeat of that.”

“So what is it you’re suggesting, Shaxx? Banishment is a heavy punishment, and what happened could have been an accident.” Zavala, again, now sounding uneasy.

No one had been banished from the City since Osiris—and he, as far as Kel was aware, was one of only two in the history of the City that had ever suffered such a punishment. It was far from a light punishment to consider.

Who the hell was the subject of their conversation?

The next voice that speaks up catches Kel off guard and sends a wave of anger roiling through him, his fists clenching at his sides. “Why is banishment even on the table? He’s just—he’s just messed up from what happened, right? He couldn’t have meant it.” Within the same sentence Luke’s tone wavers between desperately upset to insistent. “He just needs time—”

“To kill more guardians?” Shaxx demands, voice rising another level in volume. “Absolutely not. I will not have more deaths in my Crucible, and I refuse to simply ignore a threat to guardians outside of it either.”

Zavala’s responding tone is sharp and unyielding, a reminder to Shaxx that though he was a valued voice to the Vanguard he wasn’t in a place to state what he just had. “This isn’t a decision for you to make on your own, Lord Shaxx. It will be brought to the Consensus, and it’s why we’re having this discussion in the first place.”

Something is purring at the back of his mind again and Kel glances down at the hand cannon strapped to his thigh. If he believed in weapons with personalities (just tools. Just dead things. just like guardians.) then he might have believed it enjoyed all this heightened emotion.

Whether or not Shaxx intended to respond to Zavala’s warning, Cayde interrupts them both—Kel wonders if it’s to attempt to diffuse the argument before it grew violent. “You said he was usin’ a new gun, Shaxx.” His voice is again eerily calm and even. It’s rare that Cayde was the level-headed one out of the three. “What did it look like?”

“Hand cannon.” Shaxx huffs, either cowed by Zavala or sufficiently distracted by the topic change. “Black and green. Sharp ridges along the barrel, glowing between the seams. It looked sick. Vile. Like the Darkness itself spat it out.”

Kel realizes, then, that they’re talking about him.

“You got a recording of it?”

“I did.”

“Show me.”

Silence follows and Kel twitches impatiently, agitated.

Eyes are on his back again; when he turns around, Arcite’s glowing, unblinking eyes are once again burning holes into him. It’s only because he doesn’t want to alert the people inside the war room to his presence that he doesn’t demand the frame minds its own business.

Bristling, Kel ignores it.

“What is that?” Ikora breathes, so quiet Kel almost misses it.

“Thorn,” Is Cayde’s simple, assured response. His voice is so caustic that it shocks him—he’s never heard the Exo sound so full of raw hatred.

“You can’t be serious, Cayde,” Ikora says. “Dredgen Yor vanished centuries ago—no one knows what happened to him, what are the chances that the fabled weapon none of us could ever confirm even existed shows up in the hands of one of our own?”

He knows that name. Like with the Red Death incident, every guardian does—but unlike Red Death, no one knew the story behind the hushed way it was mentioned, only that it was as feared as any of the enemies they faced in the wilds.

“Tell me, Ikora,” Cayde replies, “where did the fables come from? That gun’s as real as the one that killed its owner and the man that wields it. And that—that is Thorn. That’s the gun that killed Pahanin and Jaren Ward. The one that killed dozens more guardians before ‘em.”

Zavala sounds unconvinced. “And you know this for a fact?”

“I do.”

“And you never brought this anonymous guardian up or the connection of Pahanin’s and Jared Ward’s disappearances to us why?”

“Ain’t a guardian, just a man with a Golden Gun.” Cayde corrects Ikora, clearly unconcerned with either her or Zavala’s skepticism. “And the man likes his privacy, doesn’t want anything to do with our politics. It doesn’t matter. What matters is Thorn’s on our doorstep, a guardian killer, in the hands of a troubled guardian that ain’t thinkin’ clearly.”

The whispering at the back of Kel’s head intensifies, almost a hissing. He finds his lips pulling back in a snarl; he wasn’t troubled, and the gun he had found was just that—a gun. What vile deeds may or may not have been performed with it didn’t change the fact that it was nothing but a tool.

“Hunger…it is hungry. It has been so long and he is so angry…” Eris mutters from somewhere within; he has to lean forward to hear her clearly.

His snarl turns into a sneer; Eris Morn saw evil in everything, and he doesn’t find it hard to believe that she’s simply projecting her losses onto everything she can. Damn the truth, the Hive had warped her and her thoughts, twisted her into something that straddled the line between the Light and the Dark.

How the Vanguard could see her opinion as credible was beyond him.

But a stray thought occurs to him and briefly stifles his building anger—hadn’t she lost her friends and allies in the Hellmouth? Hadn’t she suffered the same painful loss he had?

“So we force him to turn it over and we destroy it.” Zavala says after a heavy pause as they all considered Eris’s words. “And we take him off active duty until his head is cleared.”

Static washes through his thoughts and swats aside the thought that gave him pause, replacing it with that same wash of tidal rage. His fists curl even tighter and he feels his light spark with electricity rather than warm flame for the first time in centuries.

The whispers, the hissing, the hallucinations crescendo into a near roar between his ears, insistent and angry. He feels fingers wrap around his palm and looks down.

The little girl with blonde curls and bright, open blue eyes stares up at him. Her mouth doesn’t move but he can hear her speaking to him, the voice so familiar but distant from his memories. Indistinct, but clear enough that he knows it’s her.

They don’t understand, oh father mine. You are strong. That guardian was weak. This universe eats the weak. You could make them understand. All of them. Do you understand?

He should be afraid. He should be terrified. He killed someone, whether intentionally or not. He killed a fellow guardian when there were already such a small number of them compared to the innumerable enemies they faced.

Deep down, he feels that terror mixing with the anger and the ill feeling that had overcome him when he first found the weapon.

A dark undercurrent accompanies his long-lost daughter’s voice when she wordlessly speaks again.

Teach them, oh father mine. Start with the one who wronged you.

Everything else is drowned out by the roaring in his mind, a cold grasp of fury urging him to finally step forward and shove the doors to the war room open.

Shaxx is next to Ikora, both closest to the doors, and Zavala is on the other end of the long table. Eris is apart from the group, halfway between Cayde and Zavala. Cayde stands in his usual place in front of his maps and in the middle of the table.

Luke is next to him.

All eyes are on Kel. Wary, guarded, surprised—and in Cayde’s case, uncharacteristically empty.

His movements careful and measured, Kel moves down the steps towards them and if he realizes that his little girl’s fingers have become the solid grip of a black hand cannon, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “My head is cleared.” He snaps. “If anyone needs to be taken off active duty, it’s him.”

If Kel had been there instead of Luke, Gil would still be there. Quinn wouldn’t be gone. Luke wasn’t fit to be in the field, on a team, responsible for the lives of his fellow guardians. Gil had taken him under his wing and now Gil was dead.

Luke blinks at the open aggression Kel willingly displays, eyebrows lifting in confusion. “…Me?”

Though his eyes are settled rigidly on Luke, Kel is aware that everyone’s attention is on him. Save for Cayde, who has turned away from him and is leaning with his palms flat on the table and eyes focused but unseeing on the maps under them, everyone in the room is ready to intervene, ready to stop him.

From what?

Shaxx’s fury would make anyone else buckle under the weight of it, but not Kel. He knows Shaxx, has known him for hundreds of years, and though he’s not fool enough to underestimate the Titan nor holds any belief that he could square off against him in a fair fight Kel isn’t afraid of the man.

He doesn’t fear anyone in this room—fears utterly nothing he can recall.

He had been there during the Collapse a lifetime ago. Nothing had frightened him since.

Luke shifts uncomfortably under Kel’s malevolent, heavy stare, shuffling slightly back and away from him even though Kel stops several feet away. Then he freezes and recognition dawns in his eyes, followed by pain and resignation. “Kel, if this is about Gil—”

His shoulder twitches as though he were going to draw up his gun and fire. Right into Luke’s skull. It would only take two shots. Just two. “Don’t.”

“I did what I could! He told me to r—”

Kel disappears in a blink and reappears right next to Luke, ozone tinting the air in the room from the crackle of arc energy; he spins and wraps his fingers around Luke’s throat, forcing him back against the surface of the table and cutting off his protest.

Thorn snaps up from where it had rested uneasily at his hip, barrel settling firmly against the Warlock’s forehead.

He doesn’t flinch when the sound of weapons readying around the room reaches his ears. Neither Cayde nor Eris has moved, but everyone else now had a gun trained on him.

“You ran, right? You’re a coward that let him die.” His voice is frigid. The green light under Thorn’s twisted frame pulses as though eager.

“There was an army of Taken, Kel. They took Quinn, I couldn’t—”

He pulls the hammer back on his hand cannon with a click that firmly and finally silences his teammate.

Cayde speaks up, then, calm despite the scene occurring right next to him. “Eris, that thing’s evil I take it?”

Her responds is a plagued, dreadful moan. “Fingers in my brain.”

“Right.” Cayde moves so fast, then, that Kel doesn’t even see it happen; his head tips to one side when the barrel of Cayde’s Ace of Spades is pressed to the side of his helmet. When the Exo speaks again, eyes unwavering from Kel, it’s directed to the others in the hall. “Rest of you ‘cept for Eris, leave for just a minute. And yes, Zavala, that means you.”

No one moves immediately. Ikora is the first to nod in acceptance and turn to leave, Zavala following after. Shaxx takes the longest to abide the request but he goes as well, shutting the war room’s doors behind him.

Cayde waits for a beat before speaking again. “Let him go, guardian.”

Kel doesn’t take his eyes off Luke. “No.” His finger is on the trigger. The whispering has grown into a hum, some kind of dreadfully beautiful melody, one that calls for him to finish it—to let it consume the light of the traitor standing in front of him.

The urge gnaws at the gray matter of his brain, the undead cells of his body given new life by the Traveler. It burns through his every nerve and his fingers are curled so tightly around the gun’s grip that it’s nearly painful.

He is weak. You are strong. Show them the law and the Logic. Show them the truth.

He wants to. Kel wants to. Luke had left Gil to die—Gil, the man that had considered the young Warlock something of a son, the man Kel had considered his closest friend and brother in arms for hundreds of years. It was Luke’s fault that Gil was dead, Luke’s fault that Quinn was gone. The loss of Demi had been decades ago, around the same time Luke had joined the team, and Kel knows it must have been his fault, too.

Their team had shrunk from five to two. It was his fault.

Wasn’t it?

It was only fair. Put a bullet in his skull. Vengeance. Vindication. Not just for Demi and Quinn and Gil, but also for the wife and daughter Kel shouldn’t even remember. For the rebirth he had never asked for and the war he never wanted to fight.

If he did, Cayde wouldn’t hesitate to put him down. He knew this; rare as it was, Cayde was every bit the leader Zavala and Ikora were, no matter how much he denied it and claimed he wasn’t cut out for the station he’d fallen into. He knew when to be merciful, and he knew exactly when to show no mercy.

Echo wouldn’t be allowed to revive him—she’d be stopped if she tried to. It would be a true death, one Kel wouldn’t be able to come back from just like the Titan he had unwittingly killed in the Crucible, just like Luke should he pull the trigger.

Death upon death upon death.

His blood chills as he finally recognizes the hum at the back of his mind, the words indistinct through the roaring of whispers and demands and promises but no less familiar in their finality.

It was a lure to release—to freedom from an endless existence of nothing but loss and pain, from an existence he had never asked for and a return to the peaceful silence of death and to the ghosts had he left behind in his first life. Freedom from the Traveler’s war and the losing, hopeless battle they’d all been forced into fighting.

But it wasn’t a hopeless fight. Though it seemed that way so often that it was hard to see otherwise, there was a difference between a lost cause and a hopeless one, and the difference was in keeping that hope alive long enough to turn to the tide.

Gil wouldn’t have ordered Luke to flee the battle if he didn’t think there was a chance to turn that tide. Kel knew his friend too well to think that he didn’t.

He knew the difference. Why had it taken Kel so long to see the difference himself?

He feels a phantom tug on the hem of his cloak, sees the little girl in the edge of his vision, and he grits his teeth. The hand holding Thorn suddenly begins to shake, nearly imperceptibly. Was it from rage? Or was he more afraid than he was willing to admit to himself?

“You aren’t the first guardian to lose a partner, hunter.” Cayde’s voice is still calm and even but filled with the kind of tranquil fury that the Hunter Vanguard hid behind jokes and good humor. A calculated coldness that only a handful of other guardians that knew him had ever seen or heard.

He hears the click of Cayde dropping the hammer on Ace, just as Kel had moments ago. “Last chance. Put it down.”

Kel doesn’t move, and it takes him a long moment to get any words out. “Is Quinn still alive?” He asks. His jaw grinds and he tells himself to focus on something else, anything else, other than the scratching in his skull telling him how much easier it would be to just pull the trigger and finish it. It’s not his own.

The ghost wearing his daughter’s face was no hallucination anymore. It was a gun, and it was hungry.

If the question catches Cayde off guard it doesn’t show. “I know she is.”

He still doesn’t move. Kel stares at Luke for one, two, three heartbeats; Luke stares back and it’s the solemn acceptance in his face that eventually breaks the spell Kel could now see being cast. Luke blamed himself for the team’s loss.

Finally he drops Thorn to his side and steps back, releasing Luke from his hold.

Cayde lowers his gun as well but doesn’t holster it. His gaze is unblinking. “Gimme the gun, guardian. So that we can get you back out there.” He says, a little bit more of his usual warmth back in his voice.

Kel ignores him and instead turns to Eris. Surprisingly, she’s looking back like she had expected him to. “Is there a way to shut it up?” He asks.

“Sever the bond.” She says, but as he turns away she adds: “Hive magic warped that weapon, and it has been soaked in countless deaths and drank the light of many. It will never be clean. Never be silenced. And you will listen to it.”

He stares at her, and it takes him a moment to understand what she truly meant—not that should he hold onto the weapon it’ll eventually take full hold of him, but that if he ever underestimated it, it would succeed in dragging him into the same kind of end Dredgen Yor must have suffered.

He looks at Cayde, then, both of them quiet in light of Eris’s words. Cayde seems to pick up on the fact that Kel had no intention of turning the gun over, finally holstering Ace and stepping back.

Kel briefly considers asking Eris if the gun could be destroyed as Zavala had suggested earlier but he decides against it. He won’t take that risk, not with knowing how quickly and easily Thorn had gotten into his head, even considering how poorly he responded to Gil’s death.

Even now, he could hear it howling in rage at his denial of it. Hear it demanding that he pull the trigger, finish the job, let it consume the light of Luke and Eris and Cayde and feed whatever dark magic powered it.

One thing was for certain: he couldn’t trust himself within the City’s walls so long as he held onto it.

He mutes his helmet comms long enough to tell Echo to ready his ship for transmat, and then he holsters Thorn back into place on his thigh, meeting Cayde’s gaze and ignoring Luke’s confused stare. “Contact me when you plan to get her back.” He says.

The engines of his ship roar as it flies over the tower and Echo transmats him into its confines before he hears Cayde’s response.

He leaves the City behind again—this time, somehow, with an even heavier heart than before.

[404botnotfound]

He supposes he's gotten used to seeing her perched in objectively Very Not Safe places, at this point, which is why he barely spares a blink in response to seeing Quinn sitting on a railing over a deep plummet off the back of the Tower.

It's worrisome that his first concern is wondering why she's back at the Tower at all.

"Kinda figured you'd be out at the new base of operations Lord Saladin had set up." Cayde speaks up, scuffing his feet along the ground purposefully so he doesn't spook her and accidentally cause her to go tumbling off the edge.

As obvious as he makes his presence, her head still snaps around and her shoulders tense up; a reflex she's probably still trying to break herself of, even a year after the Taken crisis. Something cold grips at him at the reaction. He hates that he caused it, but hates that she had to suffer something that still adversely affects her even more.

(but at least she's still alive, he reminds himself gently. at least there's that.)

He watches her visibly exhale and force herself to relax, and he glances down at the paved tiles of the path through the small garden area of the Tower. 

"Luke, Nikon, and Nyx still are. Helping Shiro and a few others direct and lead clean up operations in the plaguelands." She says, eventually, her gaze shifting back out to the open air as he walks over to stand next to her. "I...uh. I opted to handle things needing done here. Since a lot of guardians shifted to Plaguelands ops."

Cayde's optics blink over to her, settle on the uncharacteristic fidgeting she's doing with her fingers, and that cold feeling underneath his chest plates grows. She's not saying it, but considering her usual confident and unshakeable demeanor it stands out as discomfort and restlessness.

She's visibly guilty for the decision to bow out of ops in the Plaguelands, and that fact is likely why he found her out here, on the Traveler's Walk, as opposed to wandering anywhere near the Vanguard hall. The Vanguard, all three of them, as well as Shaxx and any battle-seasoned leader, knows that sometimes you just need to take a step back and breathe--they all know it, but the guilt of knowing you could be out there doing more and instead you're resting while friends and fellow soldiers are out risking their lives instead...

Cayde gets it. He does. It's why he works himself harder than even Zavala and Ikora sometimes.

It's why sometimes, his ghost has to remind him to clear the processors and rest. Let it go. Put the horrors behind him and remember there's a job to do and it can't get done if you're half-cocked and not thinkin' right from burning yourself out.

He knows.

He hates that she knows, too.

"Got reports from Shiro and the other scouts." He says, eventually, his gaze following the line of hers out to the mountains. His elbows settle on the railing next to where she sits, hands clasp together. "Say it's bad out there. Even with the replication facility closed."

He feels the shudder roll through her rather than sees it, and he looks at her again with a tight, uncomfortable feeling in his chest. "Sorry." He says.

Her hands continue to tremble lightly until she settles her hands on the railing and closes her fingers around the cold metal until her knuckles are white. Her mouth opens and closes several times before she actually manages to get any words out. "SIVA took control of them, Cayde."

The statement is quiet enough that he almost misses it over the wind. "Took control of who?"

"The Iron Lords." She answers, and he watches as she shifts restlessly, her eyes rolling skyward not in frustration but in distress--they're watering, and she's trying to blink them back. "Their bodies--they were dead, but SIVA was using them as--as puppets."

Ah, hell. Shiro had left that little nugget out of his reports.

Or, her fireteam had opted not to tell Shiro.

Or--the most likely option, Cayde thinks--they'd opted to not say anything about it to anyone out of respect for Saladin's memory of his comrades.

And she had gone down there. With her fireteam at her back or not, she had gone down there, with all the trauma she'd faced in a month trapped on the Dreadnaught with the Taken and Oryx keeping her company.

'Puppets', she said. Cayde understands immediately why she's so unnerved; the similarity between SIVA and Oryx's command of his Taken army was too close for her to shrug off so soon after what she'd been through.

Shifting, Cayde settles his gloved hand over hers on the railing and closes his fingers around hers, gives them a gentle squeeze.

She looks over at him with a soft smile that trembles and eyes that are still watering with tears. "It's ridiculous, right? I'm not the first person to go through--to go through that, and I'm letting it get to me."

"Hey, c'mon. Eris has had a decade to come to terms with what she suffered. It's been a year, sunshine. You can't expect to come back from that so fast." Cayde says, his tone gentle.

He hates that this is something she's struggling with. Nevermind that almost all guardians--himself included--have trauma and layers of psychological damage at varying levels to deal with. Maybe he's too close to this (he knows he is), but he hates that her smile is so fragile these days.

Kinda wishes he could abuse Vex tech somehow to go back in time and kill Oryx for it himself.

It's a dangerous line of thinking, which he'd struggled with once before already; at least this time he knows how to push past it.

Her hand moves, pulls out from under his, and he watches carefully as she twists and pulls herself back over the railing to stable ground; he stands straight and moves an arm around her back as she does. Just in case.

Once she's standing there on the stonework next to him, he settles that hand on her back and steps closer. "You're doin' fine, darlin'. Don't feel bad for needin' a breather."

"Just..." She sighs, leaning into his side and curling her arms around her midsection. "Humanity's on the brink, Cayde. It doesn't feel right."

His jaw works, light flashing between metal joints as he considers the underlying meaning she's trying so hard not to communicate--or isn't sure how to communicate. "I can push you some missions in the Cosmodrome. Or on Venus. Vex have been actin' up recently, if you just need somethin' to keep busy with."

He's never been very good at the whole leadership gig, but he knows himself, and he knows how he'd be feeling if he'd switched places with her. Keep busy, keep moving, keep your mind off your demons.

Problem was, like he's not good at being the leader everyone expects him to be, he's also not very good at other people.

"I...Venus would be fine." She says.

Sometimes, he's pleasantly surprised.

"Done. I'll work somethin' out with Zavala. Meantime," Cayde settles his hand on her lower back and starts guiding her forward, back towards the Tower's main plaza, "there's this spicy ramen shop down in the west district. Real tasty. You hungry?"

He glances at her, and watches, satisfied, as a small smile graces her features. "Sure. And Cayde?"

"Yeah?"

She stops briefly as they're walking, puts one of her hands on his side and leans up to press a kiss to to his metal jaw that very nearly fries his circuits for a moment. "Thank you." She says.

"Uh," is his very intelligent response. Wide, bright optics blink at her; after a few seconds he snaps out of it and starts leading her forward again. "No problem."

Hell, he really wishes this war would slow down so he had time to talk to her about how he felt.

[404botnotfound]

Towerfall [1]

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 3,210 SHIP: Quinn/Cayde (ment.) CHARACTERS: quinn leonis (AU), glyph, roland, ghost, cayde-6, lord shaxx

1 - Roland

Something is very wrong, and it has nothing to do with the storm clouds surrounding his ship as he flies through the upper Himalayas.

Ghost, too, can feel it, nervous energy thick enough to be felt by Roland as his companion tries to hail someone for the fourth time. “Repeat, Tower Approach, this is–this is City Hawk seven-two-three. Anyone home…?”

A full two minutes tick by with nothing but radio silence.

“No response. On any channels. Not even–not even the emergency frequencies.”

“You can’t tell what’s causing the interference?” Roland asks, grip tightening on the ship controls.

Ghost drifts down to hide within his hood. “No.”

Tower communications don’t just go silent. Even when he isn’t frequenting City limits Ghost has been able to pick up scattered encrypted transmissions and otherwise–whether it’s a transmission Ghost is able to crack or not, with how large the City is and how active the Vanguard keeps guardian forces, the lines are always annoyingly chatty.

A silent Vanguard isn’t a good sign.

Maybe he can’t give less of a shit about the actual people there, but if he had learned anything from his past, it’s that more often than not, things go far beyond what he or anyone actually cares about. The world is bigger than one person, and selfishness is ugly.

“You remember how–how I always tell you that you fly too fast?” Ghost says after a tense pause. “Forget I ever said it. Fly fast.”

He doesn’t need to be told twice.

Roland guns the throttle and pushes the engines into redline, diving into the stormy clouds surrounding the City airspace with experienced confidence and narrowing his eyes at the visuals that pop in to overlay the shrouded viewport. More static; no simulated visuals whatsoever.

The sensors aren’t picking up anything, not even the ground below. What the fuck is going on?

He goes stiff when the useless static drops away from the viewport and his ship exits the dark, stormy clouds–that he realizes aren’t just stormy. The thunder that had been rattling the hull of his ship isn’t just thunder. The lightning that had been illuminating the interior and flashing through the clouds isn’t just lightning.

Missiles streak through the stormy sky into the City streets and towering skyscrapers below. Debris crashes down the sides of the walls as ballistics and alien fire tear into them. Around them are the massive warships and frigates of the Cabal, and swarming in between are the smaller carrier and assault craft. A strange, claw-like device is settled against the surface of the Traveler.

The City is under attack.

“How did we not hear a rally?” Roland demands as he veers his ship into a sharp turn towards the Vanguard tower, teeth gritting when its crumbling structure roaring with pockets of flame enters his vision.

Ghost is panicked, flashing out of sight in fear. ‘I don’t–I don’t know! All the channels are silent!’

He starts to snap something else, but a thresher drops from the billowing clouds of smoke above and a volley of rockets rip through the air towards him. Another quick-reflex maneuver dodges most of them, but Roland jerks in his seat when at least one of them manages to tear into the ship’s frame.

‘That hit the fuselage! We n-need to land!’

Damnit, he had spent a fortune of glimmer modifying this ship. Jumpships just aren’t made for combat; next time he’s investing in a Reef fleet fighter.

Swearing aloud, he veers around the thresher back towards the ruined Tower, aiming for the open plaza situated in front of the Vanguard hall.

The ship’s engines sputter once and his stomach leaps up into his chest as it abruptly drops. No time or engine power to regain that altitude, so he steers instead for the fiery, open guts of the lower levels of the Tower, somehow still miraculously clinging to the main structure.

Silence descends upon the interior of the ship like a vacuum had sucked the air out.

Engines dead.

“Transmat now!” he barks, ship viewport dropping below the destroyed section he’d been aiming for.

Space flickers apart around him, and in a flash of particles and light Ghost drops him unsteadily onto a crumbling chunk of flooring that shakes and threatens to give way under his sudden weight. His arms fly out to steady himself, and with a hurried pulse of light he hops forward onto a more stable chunk of solid ground.

The platform he’d landed on crunches and breaks off, the noise of it crashing down drowned out a handful of seconds later as his ship slams into the wall at an angle and rips exterior panels off, exposing the levels and decks within on its violent path to the ground with gut-wrenching screeches of metal on metal.

He doesn’t bother hoping no one is within those sections. The Cabal are tearing through the City, and people are without a doubt already dead.

Ghost drops his pulse rifle into his hands, and Roland sets in motion, navigating the teetering ledge of what had once been a systems hub on the inside of the Tower.

“Vanguard personnel, this–this is guardian ident eight-two-eight-three-C, requesting–we’re within the Tower and heading inside,” Ghost calls out, trying and failing to keep his voice even on the ground channel. “Requesting orders!”

Nothing but more static, the occasional explosion or gunfire garbled by the chaotic frequencies breaking through.

Ghost’s voice is little more than a fearful whine. “Anyone?”

Roland runs toward a hole in the wall leading further inside, the makeshift door framed by fire. His mouth opens to tell Ghost to save his energy, and the words are halted when a legionnaire rushes through the opening at him. He backpedals before the alien’s heated arm blade can cut him in two.

A three-round burst from his pulse rifle pops the legionnaire’s head from its massive shoulders with a hiss of organofluid, and the one that runs in after its ally suffers the same fate.

‘This doesn’t...it doesn’t make any sense–the Cabal conquer systems by blowing up entire planets of oppositional civilizations, not invading them.’

Roland steps around the Cabal bodies and moves into the Tower. “Unless they want something.”

Conquering is the typical play for the Cabal, but if they want something, they dig in and fight for it with everything they’ve got. The exclusion zone on Mars just outside of Freehold, the Vex gate leading to the Black Garden, the Dust Palace–hell, even the Dantalion Exodus on the Dreadnaught.

The Cabal are frighteningly ruthless in general, but if they want something–really want something–they become utterly terrifying.

For the first time since they entered the solar system, they’re laying siege to the City after years of not giving a single damn about it. These Cabal are here for something.

The only answer can be the Traveler, especially when he remembers that strange device he’d noticed settled onto its inert shell.

“This is Commander Zavala to all channels,” the voice of the awoken Vanguard commander finally crackles in over ground comms, and he slows to a halt to listen. “Vanguard Tower personnel: report to evac points immediately. Guardians: rendezvous in the Plaza. Our City will not fall.”

Ever optimistic and noble.

And stupid.

Still, what else are guardians good for other than throwing themselves against the enemy like lemmings, abusing their immortality to fight impossible odds? Humorlessly, he thinks, ‘sir, yes, sir’ as he continues onward.

Weaving through hallways and debris and sparking, shredded power lines falling from ceilings at just shy of a breakneck pace, he rounds a corner and spots a Tower civilian at the end of a hall. He’s facing away, hands held up as though trying to fend something off.

A terrified cry leaves his mouth as Roland’s increases his speed.

He doesn’t make it in time, a legionnaire lumbering into sight and impaling the worker on an arm-mounted blade, spattering blood and worse on the tiled floor as the body is tossed aside.

The Cabal catches sight of him, roars in challenge–and Roland answers by firing a volley of bullets into its head. An arc grenade that splits into tracking clusters follows, homing in on the two others that run into sight after.

Not waiting for the dust to clear, he moves on. The civilian he’d failed to save barely even crosses his mind.

‘This shouldn’t be–this shouldn’t be happening. The wall has defenses. How–how could so many get past?’ Their current predicament should be enough to keep Ghost from wasting time on questions like that, but Roland keeps his mouth shut.

Ghost’s never been the same since Carran fell to Valen’s brutality, and he’s gotten used to his overly nervous nature.

Ahead of them an automated door hangs ajar, one half still attempting to shut but caught on something stuck in the runner. As Roland approaches it, something–someone–slams into the thin edge of the door and forces it wide open.

Ghost blips in surprise. “Cayde!”

Head shaking off the daze of the blow and glowing blue eyes blinking, Cayde-6 looks at them with a pleasantly surprised expression. He’s cheery as though he isn’t in the middle of fighting off an enemy invasion in the heart of the City’s command and a group of well-armed legionnaires aren’t approaching from his other side. “Hey, you two! Gimme a sec.”

The air pulses heavy with a discharge of light; Roland watches as the Hunter Vanguard’s body lights with solar energy and the gun in his hand glows a fiery orange.

Booming shots of the Golden Gun vaporize three of the approaching group, leaving two more–who let out short-lived howls as an ear-ringing fweem of linear fusion rifle rounds strike them in the back and turn them to ash.

From the flashes of void fire, a helmetless blonde woman jogs up, spinning around and checking for more enemies. The dark gray jacket she wears looks like the robes of a warlock, but everything else about her speaks of something other.

She looks familiar, and his brow furrows when she turns around to face Cayde–sparing him a single glance. Is it her he’s seen frequenting the war room with Cayde and Ikora?

“Nice shootin’, sunshine. I could’a handled it,” Cayde quips, the familiarity more or less confirming his question.

One of her shoulders lifts in a half shrug. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

Of all the times for the Hunter Vanguard’s moronic, Sky-damned devil-may-care attitude...and she’s not helping. “Can someone explain to me what the fuck is going on?”

The two of them glance at him; she lifts an eyebrow at him, and Cayde looks like he had forgotten he was even there. Attention-deficit, annoyingly cheery piece of exo shit. How he became a leader is beyond Roland.

Cayde’s the one that answers, much to Roland’s chagrin. “We got blindsided. Satellites went dark. Next thing we know–boom. Missiles to the face. Zavala’s pissed. Ikora’s pissed. I’m pissed–wait, maybe I’m the only one that’s pissed. No, no, Ikora’s definitely pissed–”

“So, what’s the plan?” Roland’s fingers twitch on the grip of his pulse rifle impatiently.

“The plan,” Cayde says, spinning his hand cannon by the trigger around his finger and lifting it to the ceiling, “is me having a date with whoever’s behind this. It’ll be a short date.”

“Cayde, you can’t just…” Ghost starts.

‘Can’t’ isn’t a word in the exo’s vocabulary, Roland knows, and Cayde reinforces that knowledge by brushing the concern off and backing away. “Talk later, kick butt now. Zavala’s doing the hero act in the Plaza. You guys meet up with him, I gotta go shoot a probably very big space rhino in the ugly face.”

Like himself, the blonde is surprised by Cayde’s order. “I’m going with you, Cayde.”

“Nah, you’re gonna back up Big Blue along with this hunter. The civilians he’s defending are the priority.” He starts to back away from the door, moving towards a jagged hole from the collapsed ceiling in the corner of the room.

Roland bristles. “I don’t need–”

“Vanguard’s orders! Shoot the bad guys, and I’ll see you on the flip side.” Without waiting for a response or more protests, he hops up through the hole in the ceiling and vanishes from sight.

Both he and the blonde stare at the hole and then look at each other warily.

“Guess we’re a team, now,” she says at a length. “I’m Quinn.”

“I don’t care.” He veers around her.

A snort reaches his back. If that alone isn’t enough to irritate him, her bootsteps following as he breaks into an urgent jog definitely are; he doesn’t play well with others. “Nice to meet you too, asshole,” she says.

His expression twists in distaste.

Thankfully, she says nothing else as he leads them onward through the Tower, hallways in various states of collapse and destruction. Considering she’s a friend of the Vanguard, it’s odd that she chooses to follow him rather than take the lead; her association implies some kind of leadership, but she seems content to follow.

It leaves him free to ignore her, though, so he won’t complain.

He rounds a corner and comes to a rapid halt when the business end of a shotgun is shoved into his face. Human-made, Vanguard design. After realizing, Roland steps back and lets the Redjack frame from Shaxx’s personal team register his FOF tag.

“Guardian.” The Redjack’s optics shift to Quinn as she approaches, and the shotgun lowers. “Guardian. Proceed ahead.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Roland replies, flatly.

He and Quinn step around the pair of frames guarding the hallway and move up a short flight of stairs into another hall, pausing at the sight of almost two dozen civilians and Tower workers huddled inside. More frames stand guard around them.

A mother sits against a wall a handful of feet away, cradling a toddler to her chest with terrified tears in her eyes.

Quinn walks past him, and Roland uses the motion as an excuse to tear his eyes away and force down the black tightness that had formed in his chest. Familiarity mixed with grim acceptance. Farther down the hall near a set of sealed doors is the recognizable, hulking figure of the Crucible’s handler.

Lord Shaxx, in his trademark, imposing white and orange armor and one-horned helmet, stands as Quinn approaches him at a brisk pace. There’s a sword glowing with fiery light strapped to his back, and a simple dark brown mark brushes the backs of his legs much like Quinn’s tailed coat does her own.

She’s barely tall enough for the top of her head to reach the titan’s shoulders. It’d be funny if they didn’t have more important things to worry about.

“Ah, the little lioness,” he says, accented voice warm and relieved. Apparently, she’s good at making friends. He’s not envious of the fact. “I’m glad to see you made it unscathed. Where’s your paramour?”

His lips curl in a sneer at the casual question; does no one in this fucking Tower have any sense of staying focused while a damn invasion is happening all around them? Roland stops next to her with a pointed stomp of his boot. “We need to get through.”

That flat surface of Shaxx’s helmet turns to sight on him, but he says nothing and Quinn ignores him outright. “Cayde sent us to rendezvous with Zavala. He went off to find out who’s behind this, I think.”

Roland blinks at the response, surprise wiping away the angry bristling he’d begun to feel at being ignored as he puts the question and answer together. Is she saying–

“Of course he did. Reckless.” Shaxx shakes his head.

“Will you let us through already?” Roland impatiently demands, discarding the connection because he will not fucking fall to their level of inept distraction.

Quinn shoots him a nasty look; like she had just a moment ago to him, he ignores her.

“Answer the call, guardians,” Shaxx replies, aggravatingly unconcerned with Roland’s vitriol. “Follow the path through here, it will lead you through the hangar to the Plaza. I’ll take care of these people. Give the Cabal the war they so desire.”

They both watch as he pries the door open with brute force alone, holding it ajar without the barest hint of strain. With how tightly it looked shut and the stressed whir of straining mechanisms, they must have sabotaged the door to prevent entry by unwanted guests.

He’s reminded, not for the first time, why everyone and their mother is afraid of an angry Shaxx.

“Be careful,” Quinn says to the titan, slipping through the gap in the door easily.

Shaxx nods once at her. “You need it more than I, but I will.”

Roland gets no such well wishes as he struggles slightly more than he had to bypass the door. He honestly doesn’t give a shit, but he wonders about the parting statement; why would she need to worry more than any other guardian, given the circumstances?

From here she takes the lead, moving with a lithe agility (the tailcoat outfit says warlock, the agility says hunter, what is she?) through the corridors and rear workings of the Tower until they reach the exterior deck and catwalk heading down to the side of the Tower the hangar juts out of.

A klaxon blares over the P.A. system, barely decipherable over the roar of Cabal war engines and what few guardian jumpships remain in the air racing by. “Evacuation order Seven Seven is in effect. This is not a drill. All civilians report to the designated evacuation areas immediately.”

Provided those evacuation areas aren’t completely demolished by this point already–and provided more people are even left.

He dodges around a puddle of blood seeping out from underneath collapsed rubble as well as the arm sticking out limply from within the pile, deciding that if anyone’s still around to evacuate, they’ve already reached the landing zones. He’s seen this before, and Rolad hates that he had allowed himself to hope he never would again.

The platform under their feet rumbles as they approach the catwalk leading down to the hangar, the deafening thrum of massive engines filling the air. Both of them stop and watch as a red-hulled, flattened ship, large enough to stretch across a quarter of the miles-long distance between one wall Tower to the next, flies overhead.

“Look at the size of that thing,” another ghost, presumably hers, speaks up with an awed voice over the team comm he hadn’t even noticed had opened up, “it must be their command ship.”

Roland stares at it as it drifts slowly towards the center of the City–towards the Traveler, its gargantuan form partially obscured with billowing smoke from the fires and explosions below and held within the grasp of that claw-like device he saw before. Some kind of shimmering field has begun to stretch between those prongs, rippling over the Traveler’s surface.

He hasn’t felt this kind of discomforting fear in a long time, and Roland has to wonder if there’s anything they can do to stop this.

He doubts it.

[404botnotfound]

[catalyst]

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 1,548 CHARACTERS: quinn o’connor (AU), cayde-6, zavala, ikora rey, the speaker, gil-23, glyph

None of them quite know what to make of the Tower's new guest, least of all the tower Vanguard. Bloodied and broken as she is--the first thing the doctor informed the fireteam that found her was that it was a damned miracle she was even breathing much less up, moving, and conscious--she can't pose any terrible threat.

And Cayde's instincts are telling him that even at high health, the Jane Doe they're currently gathered around wouldn't be one.

It's not her potential for threat that's making him all...twitchy. Threat or not, Cayde's gut--full of wires and bits of metal and scraps as it is--says that her stumbling out of that rift during the fireteam's crucible exercise was no coincidence.

Whether it was a good or bad one remains to be seen.

And in the meantime, even unconscious, the girl seems to be good at driving the Tower's head medic batty. Cayde has to give her credit for that; he never did like the guy's tendency to poke and prod.

"Her light is pure. She doesn't just...wield it as guardians do, it doesn’t just lie dormant under her skin and in her bones until it’s focused into use; it's as though her whole body is made out of it."

Ikora is the first of the vanguard to speak after the doctor's revelation, and she sounds as baffled as Cayde feels. "What does that mean?"

"I've never seen anything like it." The doctor answers, shoulders lifting in a shrug.

Cayde-6 paces to one side, gesturing idly in not so much irritation as impatience. "So make an educated guess, doc'."

The voice that responds to Cayde is not the doctor. "The Traveler chose her." All eyes turn to the Speaker of the Traveler as the enigmatic figure enters the ward.

Zavala seems troubled by the vague answer, expression pinched and shoulders tense. Ikora's delicately formed brows are pulled together over her eyes, thoughtfulness in her expression. And Cayde-6 seems unconcerned, but his carefully aloof attitude probably fools no one but Zavala.

"We were all chosen by the Traveler." Zavala argues, his hands clasping together behind his back. He's attempting to sound respectful considering he's effectively sassing the closest thing the City has to a high priest, but it's obvious he disagrees with whatever point the Speaker is trying to make.

Cayde, for once, agrees with Zavala.

The doctor chooses this awkward by all accounts situation to politely excuse himself and wander off to assist other patients outside of the isolated section their Jane Doe was being kept in.

"Not like she was." The speaker says, firmly but no less ambiguously. He turns to the little blue-shelled ghost hovering by the unconscious and battered girl's bed. "Ghost, how long has it been since you chose her?"

Cayde-6 shifts where he stands near the foot of her bed, leaning forward with his palms on the footrail and head cocking. "I don't see why its length of tenure has any bearing on the subject of her apparently being a special snowflake." He does, actually. Verly slightly. If he squints.

The ghost's facets flit around its central eye in an agitated fashion at the insult, but it opts to not say anything.

The Speaker, meanwhile, fixes Cayde with a look that, despite his helmet not offering anything in the way of facial expression, could be best described as baleful. Cayde blinks back, completely innocent. "It is nonetheless important. Ghost?"

The blue-shelled synthetic bobs in the air uncertainly, facets folding and shifting almost in discomfort. It's obviously unused to the attention. "She calls me Glyph." Is all it offers, hesitantly. "Is that what I am? I'm called a...ghost?"

Cayde rocks back on his heels, interest suddenly peaking in the conversation, and he picks up on the blank confusion from the other two vanguards and practiced disinterest--he's a little miffed by it, honestly, he had perfected that trick--from the other exo, the leader of the fireteam that had found the girl, in the room.

"We all got one," Cayde comments, orange light flashing between flexible joints as he works his jaw and holds out a hand to summon his own--and the little creature bobs above his hand before looking at him grumpily. The exo hunter's facial plates shift into as close to a grin as he can manage. "We were all chosen by one."

His ghost, white-shelled and forever temperamental, drifts to one side, and when she speaks her tone is dry. "Oh, is it finally time for a meet and greet? Was I invited?"

Cayde ignores her, save for an affectionate 'head' pat, blue optics focusing once more on the unfamiliar ghost. "You chose her. That's what you--all of you--do. What you've always done."

"I...don't think I understand." The girl's ghost says, sounding unsure. Its eye flicks to its injured guardian, and it drifts closer to her as though to draw comfort from her presence, before it looks at the Speaker again. "I've never seen another...ghost, like me. She never called me one. I never knew of myself as one. She called me Glyph; that's what I've always been. That's all I've ever been."

The Speaker hums in interest. "You are unaware of what you are, little one? What about your purpose?"

"I...I'm her friend. I always have been." The ghost responds, single eye flicking about the people gathered nervously. "She created me."

Shock ripples through everyone--including the stoic titan whose team had discovered the current subject of their conversation. Cayde's back straightens, Zavala's whole body goes rigid, and Ikora's arms drop to her sides and her eyes go wide. Even the Speaker is taken off-guard.

The blue-shelled ghost notices the sudden mood shift; facets shift quickly, folding inward as though to guard itself, as though uncomfortable and anxious. "Am I supposed to have some sort of purpose?"

"All ghosts were created by the Traveler," Ikora responds, her tone equal amounts baffled, curious, and the slightest bit reverential, "any attempts to make more ourselves have been unsuccessful. It's not possible."

"It is!" Glyph says, suddenly heated--but it fades just as quickly for the same meek attitude it's becoming familiar for. "Or--was." Upon receiving a wave to continue from Cayde, it adds: "She was six years old. I think she wanted a friend. So she made me. If I have a purpose, that's the only one I know of."

"To be a friend?" Zavala asks, skeptical.

"To be a partner." The ghost fires back, defensive. "And a friend."

The three vanguard share looks.

"Fascinating," The Speaker says, airily. He reaches a hand out so that the blue-shelled ghost hovers above his palm, and when he pulls his hand back towards him the ghost complicitly follows it. "You have no idea about the Traveler, or anything of its plight, do you?"

The ghost's body twists from side to side in a copy of someone shaking their head. "No."

Cayde pushes away from the foot railing of the bed and steps back. He has a better idea of what the Speaker is getting at, but the theories the variables are giving him are all discomforting, at best. He thinks about redirecting and condensing any attempts by his mind to understand who the girl is and what the information he's receiving means, but he decides against it. He knows it'd make him more twitchy.

Mostly because he's always been piss-poor at compartmentalizing.

He doesn't like problems that can't be solved by shooting them.

The titan vanguard takes a few steps closer to the Speaker, uncomprehending. "Speaker, you seem to understand better than the rest of us do--has the Traveler spoken about the girl and her ghost?"

"No." The Speaker answers, without missing a beat and not bothering to turn his attention from studying the unfamiliar ghost. "Not exactly."

Cayde-6 barely--just­ barely--resists the urge to roll his eyes. Trust in the Traveler's light or not, he had never put much stock in the enigmatic figure's comings and goings and supposed ability to speak for a being no one else could come close to truly understanding.

Silence, heavy and in at least one case--Zavala's case--wary, reigns in the isolated ward.

Eventually, the Speaker lets his hand fall, and Glyph bobs once before moving back towards the unknown blonde woman and disappearing, as all of them do, as it merges its light with hers.

"I can tell you one thing."

Gazes that had drifted in thought snap back to the robed figure of the Speaker. "That ghost is unique. One of a kind."

"Of course it is. No one has ever heard of a ghost being created by anything but the Traveler." Ikora responds, gesturing idly, her brows pulling together over her eyes again. Cayde knew that look; knew that ideas and theories were rushing through her head fast enough she probably couldn't keep track of them all and very likely putting all the rest of their theories to shame.

"It is unique because the girl is unique." The Speaker corrects, gaze on their Jane Doe long, as though she might start giving them all answers right then and there. After a moment, he turns away from the bed and begins to move towards the exit.

"To what, I don't know, but she is the key to something. She is a change we have so desperately needed to see, one way or another, and I look forward to the story she can tell us."

[creative-frequency]

Cayde-6 x Reader: The Trigger Ch. 1

Word count: 2719 Pairing: Cayde-6 (Destiny) x Female Reader Contains: Rating eventually up to mature/explicit, Cayde being Cayde, sass, shooting, chickens, idek yet. Notes: You might be wondering how tf did this happen and I have no excuse, but I can point a finger at @glistoi.

My Writing Masterlist

The refugees, people who had lost their homes, and Guardians, who had lost their Light, had been arriving for weeks. Weeks of tending the wounded, burying the dead, sharing the supplies and scraping by with whatever you could find. Who knew how many more such weeks there was to come?

There had been hard times, it was easy enough to admit, but this was different. They were already calling it “The Red War”. It was a difficult concept to grasp for someone like you. So far, your life had been a rather solitary one, only banding together for convenience or the occasional need to talk to another human being. It was a good, simple way of living.

Life in The Last City had never been for you. You weren’t a Guardian, but the burn of the wanderlust was too tempting, its flame too bright to resist. There were others like you and a handful of them you were proud to call your friends.

Just like you, Suraya Hawthorne had lived half of her life outside the City walls. To neither of you there was no other way of life. The untamed, Fallen-filled wilds of the European Dead Zone were your home and the life of a wanderer was yours.

So, when Suraya came up with the grand idea of transforming your beloved Farm into the cradle of civilization, you couldn’t find the excuse to refuse her your help. Since then she had taken charge of the camp, much to your relief, and handled the daily tasks of running the safe haven.

Your job was much easier. Aim. Shoot. Kill. Provide. Repeat as needed.

The only problem was that the need was getting way too high to handle. The flood of people had peaked already, but there were still more arriving each day, and everyone needed to eat. For someone from the City, the lands of the EDZ were unfamiliar and unquestionably dangerous. To you the terrain was familiar, and most importantly, you knew where to go when one wanted to find something to fill their belly with.

After a particularly rushed, but lucky hunting trip, you were back at the Farm, resting your mind and body by enjoying the warm, sunny day sitting on the grass. Things had started to gradually calm down since the attack on the City as everyone found their daily tasks and the rhythm of the life at the Farm.

People kept coming and going around you, most of them ignoring you, until a pair of boots appeared to your field of vision.

“Oh, hey, they told me to find you.”

“Who’s asking?” You looked up from your rucksack. An Exo. That explained the metallic voice. “And who’s ‘they’?”

“Some guy at the landing. ‘Find the woman with a rifle and a permanent scowl’, so here I am,” he said sounding suspiciously excited. His blue eyes were bright and aimed at you like a pair of flashlights. A light glowed in the back of his throat as he spoke, altering between cold yellow and warm orange shades.

As it happened, you had been cleaning your sniper rifle and the parts were scattered on the grass around you. Half of the Exo’s description certainly fit but taking care of new refugees had never been your job.

“Well, sorry but that’s not me. You’re looking for Suraya Hawthorne – she’s up there,” you said, already focused back on the weapon and nodded to the general direction of the large garage building.

The Exo hummed in thought, nodded and planted his hands on his hips, waiting.

“Did you need something else?” There was a scowl on your face you could swear wasn’t there before his arrival. If someone had asked you to describe Suraya, you would have told them to look for a woman in a poncho with a falcon. Half of the people at the Farm were carrying a rifle and there wasn’t much to smile about these days.

The Exo tilted his head, a somewhat apologetic look on his face. “Could you show me the way? I’m not sure I can find her on my own.”

You looked up to stare at him, trying to figure out was he serious. The pair of blue lights blinked innocently.

“It’s that building over there. She’s probably on the second floor, straight ahead from the stairs at the left,” you explained patiently, now more carefully pointing at the right direction. Even from that distance you could distinguish the woman in a blue poncho, hunched over a table you knew was filled with maps and plans.

“Yeah, okay,” the Exo agreed, but made no motion to any direction.

You waited a few seconds, hoping he would get the hint.

“Fine,” you groaned and placed the barrel you had been cleaning to the ground. No one would dare to touch your stuff anyways, or you would see to that they would never touch anything that belonged to you again.

You ignored the hand reached out in aid, got up and started walking at a brisk pace, silently irritated at being pulled away from your solitude.

“I’m Cayde-6, by the way,” the Exo said and hurried after you.

Out of the shreds of courtesy you managed to dig from inside you, you turned to nod to him over your shoulder.

“Pleasure,” you said curtly but didn’t bother introducing yourself. You wouldn’t have to stand his company ever again anyway.

“So, you live around here?” Cayde questioned to make small talk.

“I do.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was a beat of silence, but he didn’t let it last for long.

“And what do you do?” he asked.

“I’m a hunter.”

Cayde let out a delighted noise. “Oh, what a coincidence! I’m a Hunter too.” He sounded way too excited about the revelation.

“Great,” you muttered and continued stomping up the stairs, not listening to what the Exo was gushing about behind you.

Being a hunter like you, and being a Hunter like him were worlds apart. With each step you were gladder you would get rid of him soon.

“Hawthorne, there’s someone looking for you,” you announced as soon as you stepped onto the second-floor platform.

Suraya was leaning heavily over the map that had been spread on the table. She looked up and her brows raised. “What is it?”

You simply pointed a thumb over your shoulder towards the Exo sauntering after you. You imagined he was throwing finger guns at everyone and everything along with the greetings that kept spilling out of his mouth. Seemed like you had found the noisiest person on the planet.

“Heyy, you must be Hawthorne.”

“And you must be Cayde-6. Welcome to the European Dead Zone.” Suraya straightened up and folded her arms on her chest. Her judgmental gaze scanned over the newcomer.

“Oh. Thanks.” Cayde glanced at you, eyes bright with clear as day mischief. “…For the warm welcome.”

Suraya laughed. “Don’t mind her. She’s our best tracker and that compensates to her people skills.”

You rolled your eyes to the heights, still not feeling like warming up to Cayde the Hunter. You had seen enough Guardians for one life time and had a long time ago deemed it best to avoid them.

“Oh, so that’s what you meant when you said you were a hunter. That’s amazing, though! I let my Ghost handle the tracking stuff.” Cayde was looking at you with completely new interest and it made your insides tingle nervously.

The small, red device appeared in the air as if on cue: “Nice to meet you. My name is Sundance.”

The Ghost made a circle around Cayde’s head before settling to hover above his left shoulder.

“You came from Nessus, didn’t you?” Suraya asked, her brows creasing in thought.

“Yeah. Had a little stuck-in-endless-portal-loop-scenario. The Guardian helped me out,” Cayde explained and chuckled.

Everyone knew which Guardian he was talking about: The only one who had gotten their Light back. News of her heroics around the system had spread like a wildfire.

“You know where she is now?” Suraya continued.

“We left Nessus at the same time. I sent her to Io, she was looking for Ikora, our Warlock vanguard.”

“Ah.”

When the conversation deceased, you started slowly retreating towards the exit, hoping Suraya would handle Cayde and you could go back to being left alone.

“Are you busy now?” she asked sharply, stopping you on your tracks.

“Always,” you turned to say with a blank face.

Suraya looked back to Cayde and her posture relaxed. “You should get some rest before you guys start planning on how to save the world again.” A hint of a smile tugged at her lips. For every Guardian who arrived at the Farm, she seemed happier. The Farm needed people who knew which end of the gun went where. Though you weren’t sure did the Hunter deserve so much credit.

Cayde swatted the air as if saving the world was nothing. “It’s just another Tuesday.”

“Hmh. Have you had time to explore the place?” Suraya’s tone was pondering and the feeling that you were not going to get back to being left alone grew tenfold.

“Nah, just got here,” Cayde said.

“Why don’t you show him around?” Suraya asked you in a tone that didn’t leave any room for argument.

You threw a murderous look at her, but after so many years of friendship, she was immune by now. Cayde, on the other hand, was not so immune to the power of your scornful glare.

“Y’know what? I’m good, really, there’s no–”

“Cayde? Are you there?” a booming shout carried from nearby.

The voice belonged to the Titan Vanguard Commander. You had seen him from afar, never made any contact with and didn’t even want to. He was an Awoken, always armored from neck to toe and seemed to have a stick up his ass but that was probably caused by the recent events. Losing the City you’re supposed to protect will do that.

“On second thought, I could really use a tour.” Cayde grabbed your shoulders and before you could utter a word of protest, he turned you towards the stairs and walked you down.

Suraya just chuckled and went back to her maps.

It was an easy way out of the situation, but as soon as you were down on the ground level, you shook the Exo off your back.

“Hey, I didn’t catch your name back there,” he said.

“That’s cause I didn’t say it,” you muttered loud enough to be heard.

“Yeah, I noticed. Just didn’t want to be rude.”

“You can call me whatever you like. I don’t care.”

“Uuh, I like that…”Cayde rubbed his hands together eagerly. “So, how about–”

You stopped abruptly, interrupting him by almost causing him to bump into you. You didn’t budge when you turned, and instead fixated the scariest, most serious look you could form straight into his bright blue eyes.

Cayde blinked, obviously surprised.

“I have no interest in being your friend, so there’s really no need to try so hard,” you said as you eyed him up and down, for the first time actually looking at him, “…Guardian.”

“Ah, the cold shoulder again!” Cayde waved one finger in the air, as if saying that he knew the answer to this one. “Sorry, I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud, was I? I’m not so good at this whole ‘making friends’ thing–”

A frustrated groan rumbled from your throat as you spun on your heels and continued to try and go on about your business. The rifle needed cleaning, the bow string needed to be changed, there was tons to pack before heading out and your dog was god knows where, so you’d have find him…

But Cayde skittered after you like a puppy wanting to play.

“Don’t you have something to do, Guardian?” you asked angrily, not sparing a look at him. You headed towards the spot where you had left most of your stuff behind the survey unit house.

“First of all, it’s Cayde, C-A-Y-D-E. But I forgive you since we only just became friends.”

Okay now you were sure he was trying to get on your nerves on purpose. You took a sharp inhale before opening your mouth:

“Why don’t you run along–”

The delighted gasp that left Cayde and the reason for it silenced you mid-sentence.

“What is that?” Cayde asked, skittering forward in tiny, dancing steps.

You patted your thigh and made a short whistle.

“A dog?” you said.

“Duh. I know it’s a dog. Of course, it’s a dog. What I mean is what is that doing here?” The pitch of Cayde’s voice heightened as he crouched with open arms, ready to try and hug the animal.

One of your concerns had solved itself as your occasional hunting companion sat on the grass, tail wagging and dark golden eyes peeled at you. You felt a weird sense of satisfaction as he ignored the Exo trying to call out to him.

“Good boy,” you murmured and invited the dog closer for a scratching behind the ear.

Cayde let out a dismayed huff and crossed his arms on his chest. “Now I know what it means that pets and their owners are alike...”

You hummed, decided to overlook the stupid comment and patted the dog’s head. He had noticed you were planning to leave and had come to check could he go with you. The short, orange-brown fur was clean and flowy, a telltale signal of love, care and a bath. Mark and the kids had probably looked after him again. You would have to go thank them before heading out. The thought brought an almost imperceptible smile to your lips.

“What’s his name?” Cayde asked after a few seconds of looking at you and the dog.

You hesitated. “Uh, he doesn’t have one…” At least to your knowledge. It was highly probable that the kids had given him a name. You just called him “the dog”.

You peeked at the horrification on the Exo’s face from under your brows.

“…What?” you asked.

“He doesn’t have a name?! How’s that possible?” Cayde all but screamed.

You shrugged, uncomfortable about the amount of emotion he put into his words.

“Well, he might have one. I just don’t have one for him.” You didn’t want to start explaining how he had been a stray in the wildlands and just tagged along when you had given him some food. Apparently, that had been an unintentional invite to be a part of your pack, but the dog had made himself useful, for sure.

“Then who does?” Cayde questioned with a frown. He was itching to lean down to pet the dog.

“Maybe the kids who live at the camp nearby. I– I don’t know. What does it even matter?” Your gaze shifted from the Exo to the dog.  “The tour will have to wait until I get back. Come on, boy.”

As fast as you could, you started throwing the stuff from the ground into the rucksack, all the while trying to act like Cayde’s presence wasn’t bothering you at all.

“You’re ditching me already? I thought we were starting to bond here.” He gestured between himself and you, a mock hurt look on his face.

“I work alone,” you said when you were done and slung the bag over your shoulder. You didn’t mean to look, but Cayde had his hands on his hips again and a stern pout on his face.

“I’m gonna make sure you hold on to that promise, hunter,” he said and a look of dismay passed his features, “Good luck out there.”

A weird sensation fell into the pit of your stomach. You couldn’t snap back at him like you wanted to, nor did you say thanks or even glance at him. The dog waited eagerly by your side, ready to head out into the wilds and the feeling was gradually taking you over too.

“Come back with a story!” Cayde quipped at your retreating back.

As a reaction, only a light huff escaped you. It almost curled the corners of your mouth up.

“Man, I want a pet too,” Cayde said to himself, longingly staring at the dog that was happily trailing after you.

Next Chapter

Tagging: @bleucommelhiver @lucianhuntress @singlebecauseofthechocobros @sherniwrites @owlwrites @toastyfiction @sevansheart

[creative-frequency]

Cayde-6 x Reader: The Trigger Ch. 2

Word count: 2816 Pairing: Cayde-6 (Destiny) x Female Reader Contains: Rating eventually up to mature/explicit, Cayde being Cayde, hunting trips into the EDZ, reader is tired with Cayde’s shit

Previous Chapter | My Writing Masterlist

You had compiled a list of Cayde-6’s new hobbies at the Farm:

Tagging along on hunting trips Being unhelpful Throwing stupid comments about everything Acting like a nosy buffoon Spoiling your dog Dramatically lamenting the lack of ramen Enraging you to the point where you’re planning his violent murder

And he had stolen (or rather, adopted without a permission) your chicken.

“This is Colonel!” Cayde held the brown chicken high in the air. His voice was lilted with pride.

“…Is that one of my chickens?” you paused to ask. It was time to head out again, so there were a lot of preparations to make. The last two hunting trips hadn’t been as bountiful as you would’ve hoped. Or solitary, thanks to a certain Exo. His presence was distracting, to put it mildly.

“Not anymore. I love her,” Cayde announced, holding the bird tenderly in his arms and stroking its head.

You replied with an angry glare. “You can’t just go and steal animals.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No you can’t.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you– Y’know what? FINE.” You shook your head and started walking. “Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”

Cayde silently labeled the term from adoption to rescue and kissed the chicken’s head.

For the last two trips into the EDZ, you had stayed close to the Farm. There were still deer and hares in the forests, but the more the Cabal surveyed the area, the more scarce the animal population got. You were not a soldier, maybe a scout at best, but you had an inkling feeling that soon you’d have to lay down your bow and resort to stealing instead of providing.

Cayde had of course wanted to follow every Cabal aircraft you had seen fly over. Or infiltrate the dark nooks and caves where the Fallen resided. Neither of the propositions was tempting. Your prey wasn’t the kind that carried weapons.

The Exo was itching to get into action and it was as difficult as it was annoying to watch. He didn’t carry a bow, so he was forbidden from shooting any animals that were meant to become food. He would sometimes play practice without actually firing at cones in trees with his hand cannon. It would’ve been easy to ignore, but he made ridiculous explosion and pew pew sounds.

The tranquil silence and solitude the forests had provided for you before was long gone in Cayde’s company. The guy was able to shut up only when you hissed at him and he saw you taking aim. He didn’t want to tempt you to turn the aim towards him any more than you already wanted to.

So, there were multiple reasons why you were not so eager to wander further from the Farm. It meant sleeping under the starry sky with the noisiest person on the planet. Stealth was a thing in hunting. You had pretty much given up on the hope that Cayde would decide not to come.

You had complained, obviously, but any and all of your protests had fallen to deaf ears. Zavala and Suraya didn’t seem to care. They were too busy coordinating the defense efforts and distributing supplies evenly to the residents of the Farm. In fact, the two seemed satisfied that Cayde had something to keep him busy, and as long as you kept sending food to the table, they saw no problem with him tagging along into the EDZ – no matter how much trouble it meant for you.

Babysitting hadn’t been in your job description before, but neither could you have guessed you’d be hanging out with a Guardian. Or several, in fact, since it had become impossible to completely avoid the surviving ones at the Farm.

The fabled hero of the Light had not yet returned from Io and it was making everyone worried. Your only worry was that you would happen to be at the Farm at the same time. That would be one too many Guardians.

“Got something botherin’ you?”

Cayde waved his hand in front of your face. You were staring at the contents of your rucksack under the pretense of checking everything was packed but didn’t really see anything.

“Stop that,” you snapped and his hand dropped. The dog whined next to you. You didn’t want to take him with you since you didn’t know where exactly you were going. Not that you wanted to take Cayde with you either.

“That’s a yes, no?” Cayde continued.

“It’s nothing. Time to go,” you said, closed the bag and threw it to your back. The dog got onto its feet, puppy eyes looking for yours in an attempt at melting your resolve.

“Okay then, let’s go!” Cayde pumped his fist in the air but stopped abruptly to clear his throat. “Uh, I mean, yeah, I’ll come and make sure the Cabal don’t ambush you while you– you do your… thing. Great. This is great.”

You didn’t even have it in you to argue anymore, instead just shaking your head. The first time that argument had taken over an hour, unnecessarily delaying your departure and had brought no results. Cayde had tagged along anyway. Not to mention the unwanted publicity the volume had brought to you at the Farm.

Hunting was a solitary art form, which you had perfected during the long years outside the City walls. As much as you tried to ignore Cayde while you were in the forest, his presence still bothered you. You had to be continuously aware of his movements and at least pay enough attention to know if he tried to warn you about the Fallen or Cabal.

Cayde’s Ghost appeared in the air when you started walking. It had taken some time for you to get used to its sudden appearances.

“Cayde, remind me again why we–”

The Hunter silenced it with vigorous swatting in the air. “Nope, we already talked about this, Sundance. We’re not doing it again. Not in front of the lady.”

A light huff escaped your lips before you could stop it – a slip that would tell you had been listening. Cayde had taken a peculiar liking to referring to you as a lady. Maybe because it was so bizarre to anyone who had actually met you.

Sundance warbled disapprovingly, but let the subject go. Based on what you had seen, the Ghost was eager to go along with the stupid shenanigans Cayde came up with, but they didn’t always see eye to eye. She seemed to think they had better things to do and you were inclined to agree.

The plan was to trek towards the mountains in hopes of finding larger game than brown hares. You had completely given up on laying traps since the Fallen would pick them clean and steal them before you would have the chance to check them. It wasn’t worth the materials or the work.

“Now, I was thinking,” Cayde began and hurried to walk beside you, “We could take a ship, fly there, hunt some deer, transmat it here and fly back. Hm? How does that sound?”

In the direction away from the City, the untamed wilds started literally from the Farm’s backyard. There were several Cabal scouting camps close by, but they were small. A larger base nearby had been under construction for a few days and it made the refugees anxious and worried. Soon you would have to figure out a way to circle around to get deeper into the forests and the mountains.

“Great, but we can’t spare a ship for that right now. And the air traffic is restricted,” you said.

“Aw man, can’t we even get a lift there while cloaked? Save some time? And our legs?” Cayde pointed at his feet as you walked. The undergrowth was engraved with clear paths that were used for patrolling and the terrain would stay rather easy until you’d have to start climbing. If you were going to try and find new hunting areas, you’d much rather get to know the route on foot.

“Does it really save time that someone dumps us into the middle of the forest?” you retorted with slight humor in your tone.

“Is that a rhetorical question? ‘Cause yeah, it does.”

You glanced at Cayde. “And do you know where the deer are?”

“Uhh, well…” He motioned towards the vast forests ahead, “There?”

You turned to quirk an eyebrow at him.

“…Damn it. You do have a point.”

You kept the smug smirk to yourself to not make Cayde think you were enjoying the banter.

“We can hunt while we move and transmat on the way,” you said, “With some luck we won’t have to go far.”

Cayde sighed in defeat. “Okay. Fine. Let’s do that. That’s smart.”

“That’s what I thought,” you mumbled.

Getting back to the Farm for the night was ideal, but not probable. The day was only just beginning but you were already mentally prepared to sleep under a lean-to. A foreign feeling of anxiousness swelled inside you, but you brushed it away.

It took several hours filled mostly with Cayde’s monologue and a couple of hares until you were in an area with even hope for finding larger prey: Promisingly thick undergrowth and no Cabal. The weather was warm but cloudy, so the walk so far had been fast and easy. The mechanical bow was pitched in your hands, an arrow ready to fly at the smallest sign.

Cayde was hanging back while you looked for tracks. He kept talking in half-whisper about his heroics during the Cabal attack, or was it something about the Taken? It was hard to focus on listening to him while watching out for any animals trying to make a run for it.

“—They kept coming at me, but I took out every. Last. One. Burned my fingers on the Golden Gun, too, but it was so worth it–”

Cayde chuckled to himself while you drew in an exasperated breath through the nose.

“Okay, okay, but the best part was when–”

You hissed sharply to silence him and motioned for him to stop moving. There were clear tracks where something larger had laid down underneath a thick spruce, but they were cold. When nothing turned out, Cayde continued his bored humming, about to start blabbing again.

You took another deep breath to force yourself to calm down. He was swaying on his heels, hands planted on his hips and looking around for something interesting.

“You’re bored, I get it. But you need to–”

Just then you caught a flicker of motion between the shadows, four legs that were ready to gallop to safety. The first deer on your path and the reason to go back to the Farm was right–

“Hey, did I ever tell you how I became the Vanguard?”

The arrow landed on a tree. In a flash of a white, fluffy tail, the deer was gone.

You turned to Cayde with a wrathful glare. He had the most unapologetic “Oh shit” -look on his face. Partly, because for a fleeting moment, he had thought you were going to stick an arrow into him.

“Why don’t you ever just SHUT UP,” you practically growled, bow shaking with irritation.

“Shh, don’t be so loud! You’ll scare the animals away,” Cayde hissed.

You snarled in anger and wished for his painful death. He was distracting you despite your direct wishes and orders cultured with swear words against that.

You took three quick steps and shook your index finger at Cayde’s face while letting it all out:

“I’m trying to pull my weight here – even help others, which is not like me at all, but you’re making it really difficult, so if you could just kindly SHUT THE FUCK UP OR STAY AT THE FARM WITH YOUR GUARDIAN BUDDIES. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO BABYSIT YOU.”

Cayde’s mouth was hanging open and he tried to motion for you to calm down, but you were not done.

“I don’t care about the Guardians. I don’t care that you’re the Vanguard – I barely even know what that means”–Cayde tried to interrupt you, no doubt about to explain the term, but you kept spitting the words at his stupid, metal face–“What I do care about is getting the job done cause those people need to eat. Unlike you, I’m not here to play around.”

You paused to take in a breath, nostrils fluttering in anger.

“Wow. That’s more words than you have said to me in total before that.”

“Fuck you. Go home.”

You turned to leave, but Cayde rushed to block your path. His hands were raised in a soothing motion, but for each second he stood in front of you, your blood pressure kept rising.

“Okay look, I get that you’re angry. I’ve been cooped up in the Tower for Traveler knows how long and to get to walk in the forests like this… It’s just…” Cayde sighed heavily and hang his head. His hands dropped to his sides. “I’ve really missed it.”

For a moment, you were at a loss on words. Hunter was a hunter, no matter whether he was a Guardian or not. Anger slipped from your grasp with each short, annoyed breath.

“I was just so happy to get out, y’know? The thrill, the danger! Gaah! I’ve really missed field work.” Cayde chuckled and shook his head in regret.

You stared at his animated face until you found the right combination of words and tone to describe your feelings.

“Then why, pray tell, you’re trying to muck it up for me?”

Cayde scratched the back of his neck, looking around the undergrowth for an answer. “Uh… I got sidetracked? I wanted to impress my new friend aka you? The baseline– no, wait, don’t leave!” He circled around to stop you again and started speaking faster: “The baseline is; I get excited. And I didn’t take this as seriously as I should have. Sorry. There. I said it. Please don’t make me apologize again.”

You shot an unconvinced look at the Exo and puffed the air out of your lungs.

“Whatever,” you mumbled.

“Sooo, does that mean I get to come with you?” Cayde asked carefully, eyes lit with excitement.

“…Whatever,” you repeated and shook your head. You were probably giving up too easily but based on previous experiences Cayde wasn’t an easy person to disagree with regarding his comings and goings.

He pumped his fist in the air behind your back but didn’t make a sound.

You returned to tracking the deer. That particular individual was already far away, but the herd was in the area, so there was bound to be other tracks. Miraculously, Cayde was silently following right at your heels. There was a whole different aura about him: He was focused, attentive and serious about the hunt. You eyed the gun on his side, hoping he wouldn’t reflexively use it to spoil the food.

You stopped at the edge of a clearing. Judging by the tracks, the area was like a shopping center for the inhabitants of the woods. The lack of humans outside the City walls was good for the animal population. The Fallen had zero interest in the local fauna and there was nothing valuable to them anyways so deep in the forest.

You found yourself hoping the Cabal wouldn’t destroy the whole planet. There was indescribable beauty in the untamed wilds and it was a privilege to be able to appreciate that.

“Got anything?” Cayde asked suspiciously quietly. As if he didn’t want anyone else to hear.

When you turned to reply, he was crouched right next to you, closer than you anticipated. You ignored the jump your heart made, but the words got momentarily lost on your tongue.

“Some of these tracks are probably from this morning,” you said after returning to looking around.

Cayde’s brow plates quirked up. “Uh-huh. How can you tell?”

You side-eyed him and held back a sigh that wasn’t as annoyed as the previous ones of the same day. “It rained last night.”

“Riiiight.”

The dents in the soft moss were steep and the tingling feeling of getting closer to your prey grew with each step.

The forest was spotty beyond the clearing, even sparse in patches. Prey animals wouldn’t stay in such areas where they could be easily spotted, so you turned to follow your instincts towards area with thick undergrowth, similar to the place where you had seen the first deer.

Cayde followed you in complete silence and you had to glance over your shoulder to make sure he was still there. He could be unbelievably silent when he wanted to.

When the first faint rustling broke the normal background noises, your body moved on its own. Every other sound disappeared. Your eyes fixated forward.

You aimed without thinking and let go.

Next Chapter

Tagging: @bleucommelhiver @lucianhuntress @singlebecauseofthechocobros@sherniwrites @owlwrites @toastyfiction @sevansheart @xcayde6

[shaken-veil]

The Break of Dawn - Ch. 5

Happy new year everyone! Here is chapter 5. I didn’t edit this one much, i hope you won’t mind.

Rating: Mature

Pairing: Cayde-6 / Female Guardian

Characters: Shiro-4, Lord Saladin, Tyra Karn and Chia as Nevia’s Ghost.

AO3 Link: Ch.1 [x] Ch. 2 [x] Ch. 3 [x] Ch. 4 [x] Ch. 5 [x]

~~~

In the darkest of night, there’s light to be found

From a spark will be born a fire

Shine through the shadow of doubt

JT Music - Fireborn

~

Felwinter Peak, Entrance to the Iron Temple - 2 Days later

~

Even if she preferred the forest, the mountains had something peaceful and calming, yet strong and protective. It made sense, remembering for what the Iron Lords stood, even with most of them gone. Nevia wasn’t aware of others being alive aside from Saladin and, newly named, Siobhan. Rumors were going around that Lady Efrideet also survived the SIVA massacre, though she didn’t know of anything else. This place had been her destination, mostly, because of it’s location so far away from everything and also because of Shiro.

The Exo hunter was one of the most trusted Vanguard scouts, a close friend and student of Cayde and some kind of anchor in the wild for Nevia. She would seek him out, when she wanted to leave everything behind, but didn’t feel like spending time in the wilderness completely by herself. Their characters matched well, but they also knew when to keep their distance.

The icy wind caused the huntress to pull her Iron Banner cloak closer around her shoulders. She should have thought this through, before running off, still wearing her armor from before. Nevia approached the Iron Temple with some uncertainty in her heart. She had come unannounced and it was only her best friend, who was an Iron Lord. Lady Siobhan, the title still felt somewhat wrong, but she had earned it, from the things she heard about her friend’s adventures in the plaguelands.

The area felt empty, no one was in sight, only a few wolves, laying in the snow, apparently dozing, though she knew better. It was only her second visit here and she wouldn’t be surprised if they would come charging and attacking her.

This whole time, Nevia stood in the courtyard and looked around, feeling slightly lost. Should she just approach the temple doors? Saladin, might not appreciate that..

“Well, if that is not a familiar face.”

The huntress swirled around and raised both eyebrows, face breaking into a grin, as she realised, that it was indeed Shiro approaching her with open arms. They shared a long lasting hug, which included him lifting her up from her feet, making her giggle. The first time she actually smiled in two days.

“Shiro! It’s been a while.” Once back on her feet, she put her hands on each of his shoulders, looking up, Why were Exo’s all so tall? Probably she was just little.. Thinking about the height difference to Cayde.. or even Shaxx.. Yes, definitely small.

“It indeed has been, Nevia. You look tired. Came here for some time off?” The other hunter regarded her with a curious glance. Seemed like her motives were already laid open.

“Yes, for a while.. I mostly came to think, I hope Saladin won’t tell me to think outside of the temple. It’s very cold.” She shivered and pulled the fur of her cloak further over her face to protect it from the winds of the mountain. Shiro just chuckled and shook his head.

“You know him. He seems rough on the outside, but actually has a heart of gold.” That seemed to be a common Titan thing. Thinking about Echo, Jareth, Zavala or even Shaxx. They all seemed like such hardasses on the outside, but were actually total teddy bears.

“We will see. Let’s not tell anyone yet, that I’m here? I don’t know, how long I will be staying.”

Shiro gestured for her to walk with him to the temple entrance. “Cayde won’t like that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a grown woman, I can take care of myself.”, she grumbled, mostly to herself, as they made their way up the, snow covered, stairs.

“Something happened? If you want to talk about it.”

“They took me off duty, because of my ‘mental condition’.”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly..” Nevia looked down onto the ground, kicking a bit of snow aside, as they walked together. “I don’t know, what reaction they expected.. Not every hunter likes to be locked up into the tower, or stays there..What was Ikora thinking?! That putting me under arrest could keep me from running off into the wilds?”

She hadn’t noticed that her voice grew louder, the more she talked and the other hunter had fallen silent, listening to her ranting with patience.

“I’m sure, she just wanted the best for you, Nevia. Also, if you keep ranting like this, Saladin might really leave you out here to cool off.” There was a teasing tone in his voice and it stopped her anger immediately, making her smile and shaking her head. This was, why she liked him so much. Just like Cayde and Sio, Shiro always found the right words to calm her down and make her smile.

“There is a first time for everything, I assume.” The deep, rough voice coming from the temple entrance caused both of them to stop in their joking and look up. Saladin stood there, arms crossed over his massive chest and head slightly tilted to the side in question, obviously asking what she was doing here, without using any words.

The huntress stopped dead in her tracks, staring at the Iron Lord with wide eyes. Sure, she takes part in the Iron Banner, everytime he appeared at the tower, but Felwinter Peak was something completely different. This was his home and she suddenly felt, like she invaded it. “I.. I left the tower and this was the first place I could think of. I apologize for my unannounced visit, Lord Saladin.” Her cheeks heated up and the blue shade of her face turned slightly purple. She turned into the size of a little pup under his eyes. Shiro bumped her side with his elbow, since she couldn’t really look the Titan in front of them in the eyes.

“Hm..” Saladin looked back and forth between Shiro and Nevia. He simply stepped aside and gestured for both of them to come in. The Exo raised both of his hands and excused himself from the situation, running back off into the snow. She however, stepped inside the temple and was instantly hit with the warmth of the fires burning, taking the cold from her bones.

“Thank you, really.” She still pulled the cloak further around her shoulders. “I didn’t know where to go.. I.. Shouldn’t be alone in the wilds.”

“Your reasons are your own, but you are the young Wolf’s friend and we owe her a lot. You are welcome to stay, hunter. I will ask Tyra to make some tea.” Saladin regarded her with a gentle smile, which had her nearly melt into a puddle, and turned away to step into one of the thousands of corridors, at least it felt like it.

That man had an aura, Nevia couldn’t help but admire. She caught herself staring after him for a moment longer, before regaining her senses. Cayde once said ‘Everyone has a crush on Saladin.’ That might actually was true, for everyone, except for Shaxx maybe. She shook her head slightly and stood in the large hall, eyes wandering over the walls. She should go looking for Tyra, the wise woman could help her with her thoughts, if she was lucky.

The Cryptarch was an incredibly kind. After they shared some tea, she got Nevia settled in one of the smaller rooms nearby. It would provide a bed to sleep, which was far more, than she was used to in the wilds. Usually her cloak would do, but Tyra would have nothing of it. She couldn’t help but notice, though, the lingering gaze on her gauntlets. The older woman seemed to be fascinated by the Ahamkara-bones and the huntress couldn’t blame her. They were pretty rare.

“Would you mind telling me, how you got these?” Tyra reached for the discarded bones, laying on a table on the other side of the room. Nevia, while unpacking the few things she had transmatted by Chia from her ship, lifted her eyes and looked over her beloved armor piece.

“I found them shortly after my resurrection. I think it was my very first patrol on Mars.. I had no idea, what I was doing, was terrified from the Cabal I encountered, but these bones someone.. spoke to me? I was drawn to them and just..kept them. Later, two of my friends, both Warlocks, looked over them. Lorenzo helped me cleaning the bones and bringing them into shape, but Yaralia crafted Gauntlets out of them.”

“I know what happened to your other Warlock friend, I’m sorry for your loss.” The Cryptarch lowered her head in sympathy but Nevia made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“She died protecting us. It was an honorable death.”

“But this doesn’t make the pain over the loss of someone close to you any better.”

“No..” The huntress looked down at her hands. “It doesn’t.”

~

So Nevia stayed at Felwinter peak. Since there were no more messages from the Tower, she figured someone must have contacted the Vanguard about her location, but Cayde always respected her need for time alone. Aside from that, she was in safe hands. She had to admit, that the time away from the tower did her some good, except for some bad dreams, there hadn’t been any whispers or words in her mind. Maybe she was just too distracted and busy? Hunting with Shiro, studying with Tyra, some talks with Saladin about the situation in the system and slowly even the wolves got used to her presence and dared to come near her.

Especially this one female.. Her fur was completely black and she looked small compared to the others of her pack. Saladin told her, that she wasn’t as young anymore either. She had started following Nevia around the temple and the two of them often just sat around outside and watched the wilds, maybe sometimes even go out into the woods together.

Just right now, the huntress ran her fingers through the soft black fur of the wolf, as her new friend rested next to her, dozing.

Even Chia was thrilled to be here. She consumed so much knowledge, which would help them later on. Nevia sighed. It had been a week now, however, and she couldn’t learn more about these bones or her own connection to the Hive… There needed to be a reason, why she constantly felt drawn to the moon, no matter the bad memories of this place. She hoped to find answers in the Books of Sorrow, but Tyra wouldn’t hand them to her, or the files. She said, nobody could read them except for a Cryptarch. Nevia doubted that, probably it was an act of protection.

Maybe the only way was to actually tell Tyra, what was troubling her. So far, nobody knew about the cryptic words and whispers in her mind every time she put on the Ahamkara bones.

It had gotten worse. Everytime she left for hunting or scouting, the presence coming with the gauntlets tried to take over her mind, influence her or lure her somewhere dark. It spoke of darkness, quite a lot, but not in a terrifying and shocking sense, more as if it was something good to turn to, something easier and welcoming.

And sometimes, yeah sometimes even Nevia felt a little tempted, but she remembered her friends and those, she called family, at the Tower. The people, she was doing this for, knowing she was being guided,but if she could defeat the evil on the other side, everyone might be a little safer in the end and it would be worth it.

As if she had sensed the huntress’ unease, the wolf shifted closer and leaned against her thigh. Nevia smiled softly and started to scratch behind her ear, which caused her new friend to grumble quietly.

“I can’t stay here for much longer, my friend..”

The she-wolf lifted her head, ears up and a questioning gaze. The awoken huntress sighed deeply and turned her gaze back to the landscape, spreading out underneath her feet, with a free view over the plaguelands. She didn’t really want to leave this place, but the low humming in the back of her mind grew more insistent. One more night, then she would make her next steps, whatever they might were. She was a hunter, she could figure this out, as she went along..

Staying on her spot on the edges of the courtyard, her wolf friend laying by her side, mental and physical exhaustion must have gotten a hold on Nevia’s body, letting her fall asleep, with her head leaning against a stone pillar. She wasn’t aware of the fact, that she was sleeping when the whispers took the chance to catch her unguarded and invaded her mind more violently than ever.

‘Oh hunter mine, what a troubled heart you have..’ With the words came a pleasant warmth to her mind, like a comforting embrace. ‘Always at war with yourself. They don’t know. They fear the darkness, but it’s comfort, isn’t it? Don’t you feel protected here? Why not stay?’

The blackness in front of her dream-sight breached and broken by green light, surrounding a silhouette. The closer it got, the more gigantic it grew and her spirit felt drawn to it. Three bright orbs..maybe eyes?.. watched her curiously.

‘Don’t be so hesitant. Reach out.’ And she followed the suggestion and held out her imaginative hand, as the humming grew louder and louder. But before Nevia’s dreamself could actually touch the vision, the figure in front of her hissed in frustration and anger, a shriek followed, made her back off quickly. The darkness surrounding her was ripped down by pure light, forcing her to return to the waking world. The last words, beckoning in her mind, ‘Slayer of this brother mine’ in a terrible distorted voice.

“Hunter! Nevia! Come back to yourself!” Saladin’s booming voice seemed to shake her very soul and she stared up at the, so much taller, Iron Lord. His fierce eyes would have scared every bone out of her, if it wasn’t for the guarded hint of worry in them. “You nearly walked over this cliff. Now I understand, why you shouldn’t be alone. You need to leave for the tower. Do you understand me? Nevia!”

But the huntress wasn’t listening. Her gaze was without any focus, as her troubled mind tired to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Slayed whose brother? Who could influence her dreams like this? Or was this caused by the gauntlets to guide her on the wrong path? Or maybe even the right one? Her head was hurting. She blinked a couple of times and then turned her attention to the distressed Titan standing in front of her.

“Lord Saladin? What? Why is it dark already?”

“I couldn’t wake you up.” Chia appeared next to her shoulder, answering instead of Saladin. “You were sleepwalking.”

“I.. I don’t know what happened.” To her dismay, the humming in the back of her mind only made her headache stronger and Nevia leaned her face into the palm of her hand.

“Get some rest, Guardian. We will speak about this tomorrow.” The Iron Lord’s voice didn’t allow any further discussion and he just walked by her, finishing his ‘Evening Round’, how Shiro called it. The huntress looked after him for a moment, but then realised something else..

“Ouch, my nose..”

“You ran face first into Saladin’s armored chest, no wonder your nose hurts. I’m not healing that.” Chia hovered in front of her face, her single eye narrowed. “Do you remember the dream you had?”

“I do.. and it’s not good.. Everyone is in danger, Chia, if I’m right.. I need to clear this out.. This has gotten so much worse..We’re leaving. Now.” The huntress turned and walked towards the steps, which led away from the Iron Temple, not even turning her gaze. “Please transmat my things back to the ship.”

“Done, but.. Is this wise? Shouldn’t you get some sleep first?.. Nevermind, dumb idea. Let’s at least get some help! Contact Enzo, Echo or Siobhan, even Cayde! Nevia!” Chia’s usually soft, electronic voice had turned distressed, because her guardian basically wouldn’t listen.

“I will not endanger either of them.. If I need backup.. I have you.” She smiled slightly

“That’s not very reassuring…” But the ghost gave in and brought Nevia to her ship and they left earth’s orbit immediately after that. The messages and calls coming in, apparently Saladin had informed the tower over her disappearance, were left unanswered.

[shaken-veil]

The Break of Dawn - Ch. 2

(Thanks everyone for your amazing feedback and support! This really keeps me going. Chapter 3 is already written and will be up soon.)

Rating: Mature

Pairing: Cayde-6 / Female Guardian

Characters: OC’s (Mine and Friend’s Oc’s. Siobhan belongs to @seigephoenix​ and Enzo belongs to @eatingbubbles​), Cayde-6, Zavala, Ikora and Chia as Nevia’s Ghost.

AO3 Link: Ch.1 [x] CH. 2 [x]

~~~~~

I’ll tell you when it’s over, just close your eyes.

I’m always watching over your earth and skies.

JT Music - Legend

~~~~~

“I don’t like this, Nevia. You are already struggling with the memories of this place and now you want to fly right into it again?” Chia hovered over her shoulder, as they approached the surface of the moon. The Ocean of Storms spreads out underneath their ship, the very same field, where once thousands of guardians died their final deaths. Nevia had avenged them all.. Eventually. Maybe it was to the price of her own mind, that she saved the day so many times. She had taken Ikora’s advice to heart and took some time off.. A long time, actually, but it didn’t do her any good. Being stuck in the tower made her insane.

“Someone has to do it. You know that, as well as I do. We need to know how the situation is here.” Her eyes wandered over the grey surface and she felt her heart beat heavy in her chest. “How bad can it be with Crota and Oryx gone?”

“We don’t know how far the Hive have spread in the meantime. They are without focus and guidance. Who knows, what could happen down there? Nevia, let’s go back home..” Her ghost was worried, she could tell. Just like Cayde..

The thought of the Exo hunter back at the tower made her sigh. She had been unfair to him and they really had to talk about her mental condition, but she was scared, that he would just push her into a therapy, or away entirely..

Why was she even thinking like this? He would never make her do anything, that she didn’t want to..

“Dropzone ahead, Nevia. Ready?” Chia peaked up next to her, her artificial eye moving quickly, scanning her guardian’s face. The huntress just nodded and let her ghost take over the controls of the ship, while she strapped her weapons to her armor, waiting for the transmat.

The moon’s surface was cold, dire and empty, as she remembered it. The worst about it was the silence, though. A shiver ran down her spine and she felt, like she was being watched. Nevia reached for her auto rifle and held it close to herself, as she started walking. The paths, made by the people of the golden age, were barely visible but a trained eye could make them out, if one bothered to look close enough. She didn’t dare to use her sparrow, not wanting to wake up the Hive, which were probably directly underneath her feet…

Directly.. Underneath her feet..

She stopped dead in her tracks and looked around, a bit more hectic than before. Chia materialised next to her. Was she talking to her? There was this humming in the back of her head. It soothed her nerves drastically, but seemed to shut everything out. Nevia closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath.

“Nevia? Nevia! Are you even listening to me?”

The light of Chia’s eye made her blink and caused her to focus again on her companion. “I.. I’m sorry, Chia. What did you say? I zoned out for a second.”

“That’s what I thought. Going on this patrol was a stupid idea, why did you do this? Cayde is going to have my head, if something happens to you.. Are you alright? You are not injured, what happened?” The little ghost circled her and even without not really having expressions on a face, she could tell that Chia was worried sick.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should have slept some more… So much action this morning…” She shook her head and continued her patrol. Not a single sound.. And it was unnerving. The last time, she sat foot on the Moon, she was with 5 others. Enzo and Echo were by her side that day. “So, What does the Vanguard need?”

“Typical scouting patrol. Figure out how the Hive activity is on the surface and, if possible, checking some of the tunnels, which are not too far underground…. Nevia… I have 10 messages from Cayde waiting on your comm. Maybe you should consider contacting him?.. I’m sure, he is just worried…”

“Can we discuss this, when we’re not in hostile territory? I would rather not wake the Hive, because my boyfriend thinks, he has to discuss our relationship exactly now.”, Nevia hissed and examined their surroundings. Nothing. Good. Careful, she moved along the small path, ducking behind a rock, eyes on the entrance to the Hellmouth. Two Knights were guarding it. She would be able to fight them, but that would startle the rest of the fortress. Not so wise…

“Maybe we are more lucky somewhere else? There are several tunnel entrances around here.”, Chia’s voice came from the back of her neck, where her ghost usually hid away during patrols or missions.

“Yes.. Yes, you are right. Let’s go.” Though instead of leaving her position behind the rock, Nevia found herself staring at the big gate which led deeper into the underground fortress. Six of them wandered into the Abyss, which was the Hive stronghold.. Only five made it back out. She swallowed.

“Nevia!” Her ghost ripped her out of her own, dark thoughts and she quickly jumped to her feet, getting a better hold of her rifle and retreated. She climbed through the rocks, always staying low and silent. Who knew what else was lurking in the shadows here. The Fallen had a small camp here, but there were no signs of their presence around here. Unlikely, regarding how close they were to the Hellmouth. The Hive or the Fallen? If she would have to choose, the Fallen would be it. Nevia preferred them over the creeps underground any day.

~~

The Tower, Vanguard Hall, in the meantime.

“What do you mean there is no feed from her?” Cayde crossed his arms over his chest and narrowed his artificial eyes at Zavala, who gave him an exhausted sigh and shook his head.

“We haven’t heard from her or her ghost, since she left for the moon. I don’t think you need to worry. Nevia is a capable huntress and knows her way around.” The Commander turned his attention back to the stack of papers in front of him and signed some of them.

Of course, Zavala was right, but even he had to see the distress in Nevia’s face, when she hurried away earlier today to head out to a zone, which was the certain death for most others. All tries to contact her had failed, however. It was natural for a hunter to stay out for weeks sometimes, without reporting back to the Tower, but this should be a one-day patrol. But the moon, of all places. He remembered how she was after Crota had fallen. It took weeks for her to get back on track, worse after Oryx.

Cayde stared down onto the reports, spread out in front of him. None of them were too pressing matters. He had fallen silent and the other two noticed it. Ikora was the one to speak up, giving the Exo a deep frown and a concerned glance. “Are you that worried? I can’t say, that you are wrong in this, but you could have stopped her.

‘You could have, too. You know about how she feels better than I.’, he thought but doesn’t make his frustration known. Cayde blinked twice and titled his head to the side. His blank expression was replaced by his usual cocky self. “Nah, I’m not worry. I know my hunters. I trained them. They’re the best. Don’t fool yourself.”

If there was someone, who wasn’t foolish it was Ikora Rey.

Thankfully, his friend didn’t confront him any further about the obvious lie and just nodded, before turning back to her work. Maybe they could lock onto Nevia’s comms by force.. With Vanguard codes? Maybe? She would be super pissed about it, though..

Ah, it was worth a try..

Cayde pulled his ghost away from under his hood and woke him up. “Aos, I need a connection to Chia, use Vanguard authorization codes.” His companion hesitated, observing his guardian’s face for a moment, as if he knew it what was going to happen.

“She won’t like that.”, was all the small Ai offered.

“I agree with Cayde in this, though. I am curious to know, what happens on the moon.” Zavala finished sorting his papers and straightened his posture, nodding towards the Exo. Aos gave a soft sigh and fell silent for a short moment..

Only second later, an angry female voice flooded the Vanguard Hall.

“Cayde! For fuck’s sake, get off my comm!”

~~

The Moon, same moment.

“Cayde! For fuck’s sake, get off my comm!”, Nevia nearly yelled out, but got a hold of herself and rather hissed it. “I’m just walking through a damn Hive tunnel!” She had switched her auto rifle to her hand cannon, since the tunnels mostly offered short distances to get a shot. The walls covered in black, highlighted by some green lights.. Organic material grew from the rocks, dripping with weird smelling slime.

The huntress moved careful around a corner, finding a crossway. “How does it look down there?”, she heard Zavala’s voice directly in her ear. It took her a moment to reply, since she was still examining the situation, but everything seemed to be clear so far. The Hive must had retreated further into the tunnel system.

“Hey, Zavala. You know, that I established the comm link, because you just wanted to let her wander around without any contact to us?”

Nevia stopped in her tracks and rolled her eyes, totally agreeing with the Titan’s annoyed sigh. “I have full trust in this Hunter’s abilities. You were worried.”

“I was not worried!”

“Guys!”, she whispered into the mic. “I’m in Hive territory! Could you please stop now? I really wish we still had Eris by our sides..” She moved on, taking the path directly across from her. It only let further down and soon, she heard claws on the ground, scratching sounds not too far ahead. Sounded like unwanted company. “Chia, into my hood, now.”

Without any arguing her ghost vanished and snuggled into the back of her neck. One foot in front of another, Nevia moved along the tunnel wall, trying not to think about her cloak brushing against the slimy surface… Ew.

She made her way into a chamber, not very big, but large enough to hold a ritual apparently, even if Nevia was unaware, what the purpose was. A Hive Wizard hovered above a crystal, the whole area pulsing with energy. It looked like.. no.. that couldn’t be. The power flowing from the Hive’s hands was similar to the rifts of the Taken. “A Ritual chamber.. nothing special for Hive tunnels.. A wizard, few acolytes and a bunch of thrall’s. They didn’t notice me yet.”, she whispered into the comm and was thankful, that there was no reply. “Moving on.”

It was like back then.. When they went into the Hellmouth.. Six of them in.. Five out.. The thought stuck.. The image of Yaralia’s twisted body and destroyed ghost invaded her mind. The Warlock had fought to keep the Hive off their backs, summoned all the solar energy, she could to crush them.. She took most of them out, but it wasn’t enough.. A knight knocked her off her feet and crushed her ghost with his own.

The huntress took a deep breath, trying to shut the images out, when she felt this silent presence again, sneaking up on her in a moment of weakness. Now was not the time.. Now was really not the time for this. To her own luck, she was hiding behind a rock and stayed unnoticed.. Everything sounded so muffled. A faint voice? In the background? No… At the edges of her mind, gently nudging her subconscious. She almost felt a touch of soft lips at the shell of her ear and it mesmerized her. A shuddering breath left Nevia’s lips..

“.... Nev… still…. us?.. ia!!”

She shut out the voice over her comms and tried to listening to the foreign presence. It was speaking? Was it? She couldn’t make out the words..

“Nevia… where.. going.. on? Talk… me?”

A long, exhaled breath brushed over her skin, at least she felt like it did? Her mind cleared after this, regaining a hold of herself. She blinked and now only recognized the distressed Exo at the other end of her comm.

“Nevia! Come on, say something!”

“I’m here, sorry. Was busy..” She checked her hand cannon and leaned against the rock for support. “I will move now.. I…” A stone cracked behind her and the huntress tensed, turning around, fully aware that she would look into the twisted face of any type of Hive. Soon, her two bright eyes stared into three, shining, green ones. The creature was heavily armed.. A knight. Wonderful. Of all things.. Why didn’t she see the knight, when she walked in?...

“Nevia. We are not going to risk this any further. Come back home. We will talk about, what you’ve seen.” Even Ikora’s calm voice couldn’t tame her heart, because it was about to break through her ribcage. The Knight in front of her let out a low growl, he lifted his sword.. and swung it after Nevia.

She jumped back easily, though that meant leaving her cover and instantly every single Hive in the chamber noticed her presence. A symphony of screams and shrieks rolled over her and she fired her hand cannon. Precision shots, every single one of them, while trying not to be ripped in two by a cursed blade. She couldn’t make out the voices in her comm channel, as she backed off against a wall. Her light running wild in her veins. Arc energy spread over her skin.

There was no other way, she could make it through this without using her staff. So Nevia reached out and her hand was overtaken by lightning. It formed a staff, crackling with wild power. She charged forward, unleashing the untamed power of the storm over the Hive. Distressed cries of death all around her, as she just danced through the attacking Thralls, forging a path through to the Wizard. The huntress jumped into the air and slammed her staff to the ground, destroying it’s shield and tearing her apart with a painful shriek. Nevia swirled the staff around in her hand and lunged at the Knight without hesitation this time. It didn’t have a single chance against the power of the light. In the end, all that remained were charred corpses and ashes. She was covered in Hive body parts and fluids, catching her breath..

“That sounded brutal. I think, I’m hard.”, Cayde said deadpan through the comms, making her roll her eyes. Surely, this fight didn’t go unnoticed and her suspicion proved right, as more screams emerged from the depths.

“Shit. We need to get out.. Glad we didn’t move that far..” Once a green glow appeared on the other exit of the chamber, her eyes went wide and she turned around to run, leaving this cursed place without a look back.

“Well, that was fun..” Chia freed herself from under her hood and floated in front of Nevia’s helmet. “But we should go.. I don’t want any more Hive after us and.. I’m worried for you.”

“I agree on the Hive at least.. Let’s go. I need a drink.. No, a lot of drinks.. And strong ones..”, while she was talking, her ghost already transmatted her onto her ship. “Is Siobhan at the tower? Can you check, please?”

They left the moon and Nevia didn’t try to think too much on everything, she had felt down there. Aside from her flashbacks.. Which would haunt her dreams for some time.. This second presence? Always at the back of her head.. She felt drawn to it. Maybe she should ask Ikora… or.. maybe better not.

“Siobhan confirmed her status. She is at the tower and free for a visit at the bar.”, Chia informed her.

“Alright.. I want to go into my apartment, take a shower and then get wasted.. Don’t tell Cayde. It’s girl’s evening.”

[shaken-veil]

The Break of Dawn - Ch. 3

(Here you go, Chapter 3. So much fluff. Chapter 4 is in the making.)

Rating: Mature

Pairing: Cayde-6 / Female Guardian

Characters: OC’s (Mine and Friend’s Oc’s. Siobhan belongs to @seigephoenix​ and Enzo belongs to @eatingbubbles​), Cayde-6, Zavala, Ikora, Shaxx and Chia as Nevia’s Ghost.

AO3 Link: Ch.1 [x] Ch. 2 [x] Ch. 3 [x]

~~~~~

Come and take me off my daily dose of pain

Take me off and shelter me

From this static nothing

Kamelot - My Therapy

~~~~

“You look awful.” These were the first words, that reached Nevia’s ears, when she entered her Fireteam’s shared apartment and looked deadpan at Lorenzo, who stood in front of the stove..cooking something that looked like a bone?.. She wouldn’t ask, it was better that way. “And you smell disgusting.”

“Why, thank you for your charming welcome, Enzo. I just crawled out of a Hive tunnel.” She pulled a slimy piece of the enemies’ armor from her shoulder and dropped it onto the kitchen counter, right next to the Warlock.”I brought you something. When I grilled them with my Arc staff, it didn’t leave much behind. Sorry.” She shrugged and walked by him, directly into the bathroom.

Locking the door behind her, the huntress took her equipment off, piece by piece. Once she pulled the shoulder armor loose, the rare bones gently slid off her arm. Nevia looked at them for a while, a slight frown on her face. For once, it was silent. She had never believed that the bones of the Ahamkara were influencing the mind of the guardian, who wore them. Maybe she had been wrong? The whispers and the feeling of not being alone inside her own mind were concerning, but she wouldn’t leave it behind. She had collected these bones herself and turned them into armor.

Once completely undressed, she climbed into the shower cabin and pulled it shut, turning on warm water. Nevia sighed in delight, when it hit her skin and her whole body came back to life. She put one hand against the cool metal wall, lowering her head and just letting the wonderful heat run over herself, while her mind wandered. The talk with Ikora would have to wait until tomorrow.. The Hive wouldn’t start a big invasion, just because she took one evening off with her friend and get some drinks. A message at least would be required, though..

Nevia really tried to force the thoughts about this strange voice in her head away. Ignorance sometimes was a blessing and she intended to be exactly this for tonight, completely ignorant of her situation.

After a long shower and getting her armor clean again, she wrapped a towel around her body and carried everything to her room, still seeing the destruction from this morning, shaking her head. Nevia made a mental note just to stay at Cayde’s place for the future.. If she wanted to avoid further holes in her wall.

“Nevia, Echo left a message, that he went to the Crucible for the night. Since you asked Siobhan for drinks, should I tell him, that you will go another day?” Chia appeared next to her, circling her, while the huntress was dressing.

“Yeah, sure. Can you send a request to Siobhan and ask her, where she wants to meet up?” She slipped into comfortable clothes. Jeans, hoodie with hunter symbol and some sneakers. She made her way back to the kitchen, where Lorenzo was drying off a perfectly clean bone. “Good work. What kind of bone is that?”

“Fallen, Echo brought it with him from his last patrol. A very nice piece.” He looked to proud and so relaxed and even when it was weird for most of them, the Voidwalker had made his way into Nevia’s heart, once he patched her up, after she had been badly wounded in one of her first patrols.

She smiled at her friend and put a hand on his shoulder. “I will be heading out for drinks. See you tomorrow? I will stay at Cayde’s place tonight.”

“Bring me a sample from him.”

“Enzo, no.”

“Please?”

“No.”

She chuckled quietly and turned around to leave the apartment, Chia silently hovering by her side. Once the door was closed, Nevia poked her ghost gently, in a playful manner, which caused her companion to make some delighted chirping noises. She smiled fondly and started walking down the corridor.

“Siobhan is talking to Shaxx. She will meet you there. Maybe we can see how Echo is doing?”

“You know, you can just stay there, if you wish to watch the matches? I’m sure, Shaxx wouldn’t mind.” The huntress regarded Chia with a curious glance. Usually, she would be down there in the Crucible. Sometimes she thought, that this was her only hobby.. “Well, if we’re going to the Vanguard hall, I can talk to Ikora directly, about what we’ve seen on the Moon.”

“Good idea, shall we?” Chia flew lower and pushed herself into the front pocket of Nevia’s hoodie.

Meeting with Ikora would mean stumbling over Cayde as well and she still felt bad for treating him like she did. She didn’t want to keep things from him, it was just so hard to talk about..

The Vanguard hall was quiet around this time of the day. The three leaders of each class were talking to each other over the table, it seemed like friendly, relaxed banter for once and it brought a smile to her face. She already had passed Siobhan and Shaxx, but she didn’t want to disturb them, as they were talking.

“You’re back.” Ikora, of course, noticed her first and the other two turned to look at her as well. The huntress nodded slightly and approached the Warlock Vanguard. They had a small talk about the tunnel, she had explored on the moon. Nevia informed her about the strange energy, the Wizard used.

“That is indeed concerning.. I will think about this and let you know, when I decided on how we should proceed.” There was nothing else to say, so she just nodded in agreement. Without another word the Warlock turned back to her papers and Nevia found herself unsure what to do.

She moved around the big table and passed by Cayde, as she made her way over to Shaxx and Siobhan. While walking by, Nevia gave his arm a gentle squeeze and smiled at him. A small gesture of affection, but nothing too noticeable for everyone else around, who didn’t pay closer attention.

Before she had even the chance to announce herself, Shaxx took the job out of her hands and raised a hand in greeting. “Nevia! Here to show our kinderguardians how a veteran fights?”

“Not today, big guy.” She bumped her fist against his chest plate. “When I’m back from my next patrol, though. My knife his thirsty.” Her comment was followed by his booming laughter, which made several people around turn to his direction, as if nobody was used to his loud voice already. Nevia shook her head and then turned to Siobhan. The fellow, awoken huntress gave her a sly smirk and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Good to see you. Ready to grab some drinks?”

She nodded in return and Chia dragged herself out of the pocket of her hoodie, floating over to the screens and following the Crucible match. Shaxx gestured for the two women to leave and so they did.

The small bar, they picked was not in the tower, just rather close to it, a few streets further into the city. Both hunters were not rather fond of too many people around them, so they retreated into a darker corner, from where they had an overview over the whole room. Some other guardians enjoyed their free time here as well. Not that anyone would dare to approach them and those, who tried, earned a dark glare and turned in an instant.

“How was your trip to the moon? Your boyfriend seemed rather distracted, when I brought in some reports earlier.” Siobhan looked at Nevia, one eyebrow raised and her bright, blue eyes curious, yet piercing for answers.

“It’s the moon. How was it supposed to go? Hive everywhere. Took me forever to get my armor clean again and get all this crap from my body. He worries too much.” She took a sip from her drink and observed their surroundings. A few cheers emerged, after a few brutal hits during the Crucible match, which was playing on the two screens in the front of the bar.

“Ugh.. I hate the Hive.. And the Cabal.” Siobhan frowned deeply and emptied her glass. Nevia lifted her hand to show the bartender, that they both wanted a refill. The man though only rolled his eyes and brought the bottle over, before hurrying away from the two women. The Arcstrider reached for it and refilled both of their glasses quickly. The hunters clinked them together and both took a sip.

“Found something worrying on the moon, though. No idea, maybe it’s nothing, but one of the Wizard’s was casting something, that looked like this weird Taken energy? You know, when they appear out of nowhere?” She shrugged a little and turned back to her friend. “I gave the infos to Ikora. She can do with it whatever she wants..”

“And going back to the moon was such a good idea?” Sio tilted her head to the side, her silvery hair falling a bit into the same direction.

Of all people she knew, who she considered friends and family, Siobhan was one of the few, who actually knew what happened in the Hellmouth and they fought side by side in the Ascendant Realm against Oryx.

“Maybe not.. I don’t know. I just had to get out of here. Can’t stay at the tower for long, you know me.” Before the other huntress could reply, Nevia’s comm device made itself known with a message from Cayde. She sighed and opened it.

-ACEOFHEARTS-: You running away from me, Nevia? I’m hurt.

Her face was twisted in guilt. Yes, she was indeed running away to not have to face his worry. At least for now.

-ARCSTRxDER-: No. Maybe? A little?

-ACEOFHEARTS-: A little? How about running away to my place later. If you can still run, that is.

Well, apparently he had seen them leave from the spot in front of his precious map. Surprising, that he even looked up from it. “Who is that? Cayde again?” Sio leaned over, curious what they were typing. “Tell him he sucks.” That made Nevia giggle, the alcohol slowly getting a hold of her system.

-ARCSTRxDER-: Will try. Sio says you suck.

-ACEOFHEARTS-: She means a lot to me, too. See ya later, sweetie.

-ARCSTRxDER-: Ima punch you for that.

-ACEOFHEARTS-: Welcome to try.

She closed the small screen with a smile on her lips. Sometimes she felt like a lovesick teenager because of this damn man. The smile turned into a laugh, when Nevia just heard the ‘Ugh’ noise from Sio and she nudged the other woman with her elbow. “Hey!”

“What? You look like a lost puppy. It’s disgusting!”

“You’re just jealous!”

“Of what? That you spend your nights with a rusty, old Exo?”

“Oh you!”

They both started a little playfight, mindful not to throw anything over on the table. The time with Siobhan had put her mind more at ease, with a little help from all the drinks they got. The evening just flew by and ended with two very drunk hunters, a Titan with a bleeding nose (Poor guy thought he could pick a fight with them.) and a very, very high bill at the bar, which Nevia completely wrote off to Cayde-6’s name.

Siobhan and Nevia stumbled more back to the tower, arms around each other’s shoulders, as they sang one hunter hymne after another. A few calls regarding the remaining two classes were answered with ‘You suck!’

Their paths separated, when Sio made her way out of the Elevator, as soon as they reached her floor. The two hunters hugged and said their goodbye’s, before it moved upwards once more. The ride up to the Vanguard Quarters took a while, but it gave her some time to sort her thoughts and get a hold of her body, running crazy. It kept her so busy, that she nearly ran into Zavala’s apartment, instead of Cayde’s. Not that she had the code to the Commander’s Quarters, but it would have been funny.. Just to see his face, when she stumbled in.. Nevermind.

How difficult could it be to type in four simple numbers into the small console next to Cayde’s door, she thought, after having troubles reaching it at all.. Why were the numbers so blurry? Surely her sight was still excellent, even drunk, she was a hunter after all, yes? What was this dumb Exo’s number again?... 4..8..?.. No..

Nevia bowed down in front of the small console, trying to figure out the numbers, which she usually had completely memorized.. With all her focus on that, she didn’t notice the slide of the door, right next to her.. and the shadow falling onto her hands, too busy was her mind with figuring this riddle out. Damn alcohol.

“Found something interesting?”

Cayde’s voice startled Nevia so much, that she shrieked and jumped back, landing elegantly on her ass. He crouched down in front of her, one elbow on his knee. The other hunter was wearing casual clothes. A hoodie and sweatpants. His hand reached for hers, getting up and pulling his helpless lover with him. “Come on, let’s go inside, before you wake up Zavala.. Believe me, you don’t want that.” Cayde chuckled and dragged Nevia inside, closing the door behind them. “Where’s Chia?”

“Don’t know.. left her with Shaxx…” The young woman snuggled into the soft fabric of his hoodie, while she had troubles staying up right. “Can we go to bed… I want to cuddle..”

“You will have some coffee first and something to eat, then we can talk about anything else, Nevia.” Carefully he placed her onto the couch in the living room, where she instantly fell over and lied down. Cayde watched her with a gentle expression in his optics, turning to the kitchen and putting on some coffee for his tired huntress.

A cup of coffee and sandwich later, Nevia sat up on the couch again, leaning back, eyes closed and taking a deep breath. She was feeling a lot better and not like she was already half dead. Drinking this much had that effect on her. She sighed and rubbed her hand over the stubble on her head. “Thank you.. You’re the best boyfriend ever.” Her head fell onto Cayde’s shoulder and he put an arm around her. “I nearly broke into Zavala’s apartment..”

That caused the Exo to laugh. “What? Why?”

“Because I failed to find yours and i was about to rip the console off his door and go to sleep.” She dropped an arm over his middle and closed her eyes again, already dreading the headache, that would overwhelm her in the morning.

“Well, that would have been the first time in decades, that someone else was in his bed, I guess.”

“Don’t be so mean!” Nevia smacked his chest, but couldn’t help but grin herself. She felt Cayde’s fingertips gently stroking over her head, making her sigh. If there was a place in this galaxy, where she wanted to be, if there was a place she called home? This was it. Right here on his couch, curled up against her lover, held by his arms. There was no spot safer than this.

“Soo… How ‘bout that bed now?”

Nevia lifted her head and nodded. She felt very sleepy, but was well aware, that he wanted, or needed, to talk about what had happened today. Not sure, if she was ready for it, though he deserved the right to ask. The huntress left his side to climb off the couch and stretched her arms. Before he could slip past her, she caught his hand, earning a questioning gaze. “Will be right with you, just quickly abusing your bathroom.”

“Well enjoy. Just don’t fall asleep in it.”

Nevia rolled her eyes and turned to the left, once entering the corridor, walking to said bathroom. She didn’t do much in here, just undressed herself, cleaned up and looked at herself in the mirror. Wow, she looked wasted. Sleep was needed, very much so. Sighing deeply, she ran a hand over her face, a shiver running down her spine, not because she was cold.. Serious talks with Cayde sometimes made her uncomfortable. There was no person, she trusted more than him and he knew so much more, than herself, hiding underneath all the jokes and sassiness.

Another deep breath and Nevia pushed herself away from the sink, turning around and making her way over to the bedroom. Cayde’s bedroom was.. a mess. Sometimes, she thought her own room as messy, but this man was just beating everything. As soon, as she sat foot in there, she nearly stumbled over a pair of boots.

“Cayde! Will you ever clean up here?”

“Nah, for what reason? Nothing like seeing you stumbling, naked and gracefully, over all my stuff.” He had pulled his hoodie off and dropped it down onto the floor, of course. The exo turned towards the huntress and put his hands on her waist. Nevia could see the smug expression on his face and narrowed her eyes. “Mhm, my favorite sight on the planet..”

She put her arms around his neck and pushed herself up a bit on her tiptoes. “Only on the planet?”

“In the Universe?” Cayde wrapped his arms around her and lifted Nevia up, turning and dropping them both on his big bed. She laughed and held onto his shoulders. He dropped down to her side and pushed himself up on his elbow, his artificial eyes examining her face. She reached up and put her hand to the side of his neck, stroking the soft material, between the metal, gently.

“Sounds a lot better.” She shifted a little and pressed her lips to the side of his horn, causing him to chuckle. “You have something on your mind.. Usually, you would be all over, joking around..”

“I do..” The other hunter paused and settled down a bit further, never taking his gaze away from her. “I was worried today, Nevia. Really worried.. You ran off to the moon.. We could have sent someone else, but you just took the patrol and charged off.. Why?”

She knew, that these questions were coming, but she didn’t want to answer them. Nevia curled up against him, hiding her face against his chest and letting the warmth of his body calm her down. “I.. I had to go.. I can’t explain why.. I just had to leave the tower as soon, as possible.” Her voice was quiet and unsure, completely unlike her usual self. Cayde put his arms around her in a protective gesture. “Something drew me away..”

“Something?”, he questioned, a bit suspicious.

“Yes.. I don’t have words for it.. Don’t think, I don’t trust you, Cayde.. Because I do, more than anyone else, I just.. I..” While she was babbling, she had freed herself from the embrace and sat up on the bed. The Exo followed her and put his hand on either side of her face.

“Shh.. Shh, calm down. Everything’s alright. You need to tell me, when something’s wrong. I can’t see into your head..” His thumbs stroked over her cheek and she let out a shuddering breath. “Let’s lay down, alright? And get some sleep.. Maybe Ikora is the better person to speak about these things.. Just know I’m here, okay?”

“Okay.” She whispered and a weak smile made it’s way onto her lips. And with that, they both settled back onto the bed and Cayde pulled a blanket over their bodies.

[shaken-veil]

The Break of Dawn - Ch. 4

(This is the last chapter for 2017. I will return with Nevia’s stories when I’m back from visiting my parents. ^^)

~~~

Rating: Mature

Pairing: Cayde-6 / Female Guardian

Characters: Echo-L13, Cayde-6, Ikora, Shaxx and Chia as Nevia’s Ghost.

AO3 Link: Ch.1 [x] Ch. 2 [x] Ch. 3 [x] Ch. 4 [x]

~~~~

'Cause if your eye's on the ground

When the night comes around

You only see the stars when they fall like rain

Netzwerk (Falls like Rain) - Klangkarussell

~~~~

If she had to stay in the tower for a few nights, Nevia avoided to sleep alone. Staying with Cayde always offered the most peaceful rest and rarely brought any nightmares with it. The only things, which could keep them away were her Exo’s arms and the open night sky. So she stirred from her, very much needed, rest and stretched her arms, eyes still closed. Surprised, that there was no tight hold around her body, she opened them slowly, blinking against the sunlight, only to make out Cayde still laying next to her, pushed up on his elbow and resting his head against the heel of his hand.

Nevia reached out to run her thumb along the non-metal part of his neck, causing him slightly to shiver and she grinned. “Morning, Hot Stuff.”

The other hunter chuckled at that and put his free arm around her again. “Back at you. Sleep well?” She just hummed in reply and shifted closer to him, one leg pushing between his.

“How late is it?”

“No Idea.”

“You woke up and didn’t check the clock?” She turned her head a little, so she could look up at him. Cayde just gave her a small shrug and leaned his face against the top of her head, mindful not to hurt her with his horn. Nevia gave a small sigh and considered just going back to sleep. Nothing very important was on the plan today, except for a meeting with Ikora, for which they hadn’t set a time yet.

Instead of relaxing, though, her lover had other plans.

He poked her side with the top of his finger and startled the huntress in his arms. She was terribly ticklish and he was well aware of that. She yelped slightly and stared up at him. His bright, blue optics spoke of pure mischief. “Cayde! No! Let me wake up first! Cayde!!” Though he didn’t wait, threw himself at her and pushed her down to the bed, starting to tickle her sides merciless, making her cry out with laughter. “You stubborn, old Exo, let me go!” Her hands pressed against his shoulders, though she didn’t really have the strength to push him away, not that Nevia was serious about wanting it. Instead, she chose another tactic.

Wrapping her arms around his neck and legs around his waist, she forced him down, so he could just catch himself on his hands, each of them next to her shoulders. The huntress gave him a smirk, leaning up to kiss him between the artificial eyes and the tickling instantly stopped. It offered a moment to take a breath, while Cayde took in her, still completely naked, body underneath him. “Hm, looks like breakfast.” His voice carried a teasing tone, making Nevia laugh quietly. She ran her hands down his back and reaching for the hoodie, he was wearing again.

“Best kind of breakfast, but you’re overdressed for it. Why did you dress yourself again?” She pulled at the fabric, waiting for Cayde to help her remove it, sending it flying across the room, once off. Satisfied with the sight above her, the huntress let go of his neck and ran her hands over the metal on his chest, enjoying the smooth feeling under her fingers. He rested his weight on the right arm and used his other, free one, to trail his fingers along her side, making her shudder in delight. The warmth of his touch was always special, she could feel his light in it and it made her go crazy.

“Got us breakfast.. different breakfast…”

A small, pleasant sting on the side of her neck, ripped Nevia out of her thoughts. The Exo had leaned down and nipped at the soft, pale blue skin to get her attention back. She let out a harsh breath, while his hand moved noticeably lower and she called upon her own powers, small pulses of arc energy flowing through her fingertips. It was the same, as if she summoned her Arc Staff, but very controlled, having no intention of actually hurting him, but she knew, he liked the small kicks it caused.

Carefully she touched his neck with her arc charged fingers and the noise, that emerged from his throat was worth everything. It sent a spike of pleasure through her whole body and made her roll her hips against his in a greedy motion.

“Someone’s eager..” And there he was, back at teasing. Cayde was aware, that she was always eager for him, he just liked to stroke his own ego sometimes. Nevia narrowed her eyes at him and tightened the hold around his waist, her hands pressed to his shoulders and with all her strength, she pushed the Exo over and onto his back. She grabbed his wrists and pressed them down. Of course, she wasn’t as strong, as the other hunter, only being able to all this, because he let her.

“You know, how I told you, that you stumbling over my stuff was my favorite sight in the universe?” Cayde looked up at her, as she leaned down, a sly smirk on her lips.

“Go on.”

“I lied.”

She giggled and peppered kisses over his jaw. “Did you now?” The huntress stretched out on top of him, shamelessly rubbing her body against his.

“I did.. This here, is my favorite sight in the universe.”, he replied with a chuckle and let himself fall back into the pillows. She gently reached out with her light for Cayde’s own. Her arc energy is met by his wonderfully solar warmth. It sent a tingling feeling through every single one of her nerves and this is when he managed to get the upper hand back, freeing his wrists and grabbing her ass without hesitation. Nevia moaned and was just about to really enjoy herself...

.. as a small noise made them both freeze. Cayde’s Ghost Aos appeared next to the bed, his optic switching back and forth between the two hunters. “Sorry, to interrupt you two, but Cayde… You are 45 minutes late for a Vanguard meeting, Zavala is asking for you. It’s 10:45 in the morning.”

Nevia’s eyes went wide. “Did you just start this, because you wanted to avoid a meeting?” She glared at the Exo, laying underneath her. It wouldn’t be the first time he did this and she completely understood, that he wanted to get away from his many duties as a Vanguard, but she wouldn’t be his excuse..  “Cayde…”

He crossed his arms behind his head and sighed deeply, dramatically. “Not only because of that…”

This would be a terribly frustrating day. Nevia huffed and climbed off her boyfriend and off his bed. She grabbed Cayde’s hoodie and pulled it over, nothing else, and then walked out of his bedroom, or more climbed over all his belongings.

In the kitchen she found the promised breakfast. Fresh bread rolls for her.. Hmmm.. Silently, she grabbed a knife out of the drawer, a plate from the shelf and cheese out of the fridge. Before she started with her food, she put on coffee. Eventually, Cayde stumbled into the room as well. He put his arms around her shoulders and placed his chin on top of her head.

“You mad at me?”

“Yes.”, she replied without hesitation. “Very mad.” Of course, she wasn’t really angry with him, mostly annoyed that she would have to walk around all day horny like a teenager. Beside of what she just said, she put a hand on his arm and continued with her breakfast.

~~

After she left Cayde’s apartment a bit later, Nevia made her way back to her own home and changed into her armor. Echo and her intended to jump into the Crucible, since they missed their matches last night together. Usually, she would pick her Iron Banner set for fights against other guardians, but somehow.. she felt like her usual armor was right today. Putting it on had a soothing effect on her nerves and she felt safe with it.

The huntress strapped her auto rifle to her back and bound her Quickfang, her beloved sword, to her belt. She only ever used it in the Crucible. It was her thing.. her favorite thing, actually.

“Ready?” Echo’s deep voice startled her for a moment, as he suddenly appeared next to her, completely in his armor already, his ‘Sweet Business’ on his back and Sunshot holstered on his thigh. Nevia smiled and nodded. “Good. I already notified Shaxx to put us up for the next matches, so we better not be late.”

“I’m good to go. Let’s hunt some rookies.” She grinned at her friend. The two of them were veterans of the Crucible and always good for giving the young ones a lecture.

The Shores of Time, one of Nevia’s favorite locations for matches against other guardians. She liked Venus, always did. It’s wild landscape and jungles had something beautiful and untamed. All eight of them transmatted to the ground and she looked at their enemy team. No one she recognized, but so were their other two teammates. Another Titan and a Warlock, both seemed pretty relaxed tho. The human Titan give Nevia a wink and a smirk, causing her to grin back, as she loaded her weapon.

When both teams were on their starting positions, Shaxx announced the beginning of the match. Nevia decided to lay low for the moment. Echo and her always knew what the other one was doing, so she trusted, that he was on the other side of the wall, giving her back up. Hurried steps made her stop and she listened closely. None of her team, they were too collected and calm. From the sound of it, it was another hunter, running directly into her direction. She reached for her knife and waited patiently..

A harsh movement, a painful cry and the younger hunter was laying on the ground, struck down by Nevia’s swift stab. She grabbed her Auto Rifle again and moved on, faster this time. His comrades probably heard that. A small sting in her temple, made the huntress hesitate, feeling not alone anymore in her head.. Something was encouraging her fury in battle. Nevia had the desire to use her sword and slice everyone into pieces. Her heart was hammering, as small sparks of Arc Energy licked out into the air around her form.

Before she could react any further, a bullet hit her right in she shoulder and then in the chest. She went down with a gasp and everything vanished into a blurr. She wasn’t revived.. Why not?.. Something was wrong.

‘Fight, oh bearer mine.. Let your blade cast fear into their souls.’

The words were quiet, whispers but in the silence of near death, she could make them out easily. Was this the voice, she had noticed on the Moon? Maybe, she was finally going insane..

As soon, as her sight cleared a little, she was pulled back to her feet. How? Nevia looked around herself. This was not their respawn area, she was supposed to be struck down? Echo looked down at her and through his helmet she could feel the Exo’s worried gaze. Gunfire quickly interrupted anything, that could have been said and the huntress swirled around.

‘Do it!’, the voice encouraged her, sounding like it was right next to her ear, followed by a hoarse, crazy chuckle.

Instead of her blade, she frowned deeply underneath her helmet and called upon her Arc Staff, jumping at the enemy, a whole group of them, as they walked around the corner. Her first victim just basically walked into the lightning, as she charged forward. Faintly, in the background, she recognized the sound of Echo’s gun, but she couldn’t focus on anything else, but strike down their opponents.

The second one got caught by the end of her staff, as she turned around, motions more like a dancer, than an actual fighter. Every step was in her blood and pure instinct and the presence in her head howled in delight. As she attacked the third one of the group, her movements felt like they were not her own anymore. An uncontrolled rage had overtaken her and she just jumped at the enemy Titan and slammed her staff into his chest.

‘What a joy, my hunter.. one more..’

Her bright blue eyes searched for the last standing enemy and the female Hunter wasn’t far away. She took a step back, once she spotted Nevia and her staff crackling with Arc power. The muscles in her legs tensed and she sprinted forward, using a crack in the wall to pull herself up and jump, smashing her weapon down from above and the other huntress goes down.

And all of a sudden, the presence in her mind was gone and she was left with the adrenaline rush of a team kill, while Shaxx was yelling excited into her ears over the comms. The euphoria vanished into thin air, though, when she wasn’t able to breath properly, pulling her helmet off her head and throwing it away, gasping for air. What was that? What just happened? She rubbed her eyes, but there was no time to take a break. She heard a shot from halfway across the map and was barely able to dodge it. She would have to finish this.. and then go home.. Yes, going home was a good idea..

The rest of their rounds was blurry. They won and everyone was happy, except for Nevia. She was concerned about, what had happened on the battlefield. She didn’t say a word, as they arrived back at the tower in the early afternoon. To her surprise, Ikora was waiting next to Shaxx at the entrance of the Vanguard Hall. This was not good, especially once she regarded the expression on the Warlock’s face. Echo have her shoulder a gentle squeeze and then left her, to get his Tokens for the last matches.

“What a fight, Nevia! You demolished them!” Shaxx smacked her arm.. For him probably it was just a friendly pat but it actually hurt a little.

“Uhm.. Thanks, Shaxx…” Hesitant, she turned her gaze to Ikora. The other woman nodded towards the corridor, which led up to the plaza. And so they walked slowly side by side. Anxiety was rising in Nevia’s heart, clawing at every single one of her nerves.

“I saw your match. Impressive, one might would say, but then I noticed your reactions after your dance with the Arc Staff. Do you want to tell me what was wrong?” Ikora’s voice was always so soft, gentle, calming even.

“I.. don’t know.” This was only half the truth, she wouldn’t tell Ikora, that she was hearing voices. “I felt like, I couldn’t breath anymore under my helmet.” The Warlock said nothing, just walked on out into the sun. They stopped at the railing on the balcony, from where you could overlook the whole city. An amazing view, for those, who could appreciate it.

“Cayde is worried about you. He might try to hide it, but I knew him long enough to see through his mask.” Her warm gaze met Nevia’s bright one. “And I think, he has the right to. We both know about your problems.. I just wish, you would finally address them and help me to help you. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of and several other guardians are suffering from it. Nevia..” She reached out to the huntress and placed a hand on her forearm. “We all know, what you have seen and how horrifying it must have felt, but you need to allow yourself to heal.”

Ikora was right, of course, she was always right. Her hands clenched around the railing and she had problems to control her breathing. What could she possibly say to this? Gladly, her silence was enough answer for the other woman.

“I will tell Cayde to put you off duty, until we found a way to help you and you are feeling better. We just want the best for you.” She gave her a final, gentle squeeze of her arm, before the Vanguard left her alone. Nevia, though, felt lost all of a sudden. They wanted to keep her in this tower? This couldn’t be good. She would go insane. It would be like after she faced Crota…

‘Oooh.. Don’t fall into despair, oh hunter mine.. They don’t understand…’

There was it again.. the words, the presence, the voices.. Though she didn’t pay mind to all of it. Tears were burning in the side of her vision, but she didn’t allow them to fall. “Chia..��

Her ghost appeared by her side in an instant, snuggling into her neck.

“Can you contact Amanda and ask to make my ship ready to depart?” She took a deep breath, her voice was shaking.

“Yes, of course, but where are we going?”

“Away..”