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Chapter Text

Relocated from summary to its own chapter for your convenience and entertainment.  Descriptions/links will be updated as prompts are filled and stories are posted.

Triumph - Eris and the Drifter. The hand kiss in Eris' throne world in Heresy. (poem)

Phone - Ring! Ring! Worm Phone! Savathun calling!

Strength - Eris and the Drifter talk about Vell Tarlowe in Europa during the events of Beyond Light.

Trust - Eris asks to borrow a weapon.  (Somewhere between The Final Shape and Heresy.)

Ahamkara - The Drifter tells a story regarding one of his misadventures. Frontier was wild times.

Brave - Quiet whispers in the dark. A conversation about fear.

Train - Udon the Bog Slug exhibits some interesting behavioural patterns.

Fireteam - Night terrors result in Eris waking up in a bathtub with Drifter singing to her.

Nine - "We came down here as a squad of nine. Got picked off one by one. Watched a wizard rip the Light out of my best friend and funnel it into some kind of crystal."

Upgrade - Eris writes in her journal as Drifter is performing an upgrade and finds herself distracted with a desire to bite him.

Time Travel - The Drifter writes a poem (limerick - cw: lewd) (poem)

Command - Eris and the Drifter discuss the differences between compelling Hive and influencing Taken.

Sparrow / Eyes - Two prompts in one!  The Drifter and Eris repair a Sparrow on Europa as they are beginning to get to know each other during Beyond Light.

Harbinger - Eris and the Drifter have a disagreement regarding his wanting to see her in her Hive god form.

Awoken/ Gift - Eris and the Drifter discuss elements of the past, including the Great Hunt, Asher Mir, and the terrible fate of an old, long-dead friend.

Horse

Damage

Coin

Splicer

Reclaim

Iron

Free Will

Pyramid

Nightfall

Foggy

Bright

Last Stand

Prophesy

Lodi (Free Space)

Chapter Text

a kiss
slow and deliberate
on one knuckle
of his right hand

him
speechless
shattered from grief
beholding her living and whole
unable and unwilling to stop her
from reaching out and claiming
what is undeniably hers

her face bare
triumphant in glory
shining omnipotent
heretic queen

him insisting she always was
to him

he will wait
let moonlight shine
she will proclaim her power
announce her will
empower her acolyte
to slay in her name

and then
when it is quiet
she will turn to find him
still standing there
waiting
he will reach for her
his body trembling
to feel her strong hands

she will hold him
as his knees buckle
as his face crumples
no longer able to keep
any semblance of composure
she will lower them both
gently to their knees
as he dissolves in her arms

the masks all gone
the bravado dropped
like a useless rag
instead of playful banter
and an alluring gravelly voice
soft mewling, keening,
piteous cries
involuntary, ripped from his throat,
painful, pathetic,
laden with shame

and she who has defeated gods and death
will become overwhelmed with powerlessness
against the raw grief of a broken nameless man

who trusted no one
but trusts her
who loved no one
but loves her
who believed in nothing
but believes in her
who couldn't feel anything
and then felt everything
when he lost her

she will hold him, then
tight
each cry a lash across her independence
she will clutch him close
as he wails
helping him grieve the loss of herself
while she holds him in her living arms
understanding his devastation keenly
knowing that this is what it is to survive

and when they have both exhausted themselves
she will take him
somewhere secret
somewhere safe
and there she will simply hold him
with soft quiet caresses, gentle whispers,

she will claim him in ways
he never thought he would submit to
there, wordlessly
he will offer himself to her, in ways he never thought
he would ever be willing to
not as something so simple and easily articulated
as a lover or a friend
more than a penitent begging for their god
more than a motherless child hungry and cold
none of these things and all of them all at once

not something that can be expressed in words
a deep howling need
shuddering and raw

and she will accept his offering of himself
imperfect, fearful, and discontent
both willingly and unwillingly given
she will take his grief into herself
holding him and his grief together in her arms

and this, too, is triumph
as she takes him
and claims him
as hers
for as long as she wants
he will follow
seeing dust and ashes in everything without her
and hope and life when she is near

she takes him
and claims him
as her faithful companion
she has kissed his hand
conquered him with her lips,
her fierceness,
and her refusal to be ignored
he is hers now
unquestioningly
and together they will relearn
what it is to feel joy

Chapter Text

Almost unnoticed, the three-eyed Hive worm crawls slowly but steadily across the stones of the Noiseless Chantry within Eris Morn's Throne World. It has escaped its prison. It has crawled through the rift. And now, it approaches. Its purpose is clear. The Heretic Queen, Hive god of Vengeance, is seated at a table, engrossed in her writing. Soft lo-fi beats (to tithe to) play from the radio her consort has cobbled together for her from spare parts and salvage. Every once in a while she pauses, pen in the air, fingers moving ever so slightly to the music, a half-smile on her face.

The worm continues its slow pilgrimage. It has almost made it across the middle of the floor bearing Eris' Bane of the Swarm symbol when it is snatched up by an armored, gloved hand and a low, gravelly, male voice says "Nuh-uh."

The worm writhes angrily as it is unceremoniously tossed into a burlap sack. It twists, its tiny protrusions and tumescences flailing in futility against the cloth as it is swiftly carried back out through the portal into Eris Morn's flat in the Last City.

"Look," the Drifter says as he extracts the worm from the bag and plunks it gently, but not kindly, back into its enclosure. "I know you're pissed off and wanna give her a piece of your mind, but Eris is not acceptin' your calls right now, Savathun."

"Well now," the cruel voice of the Hive god of Lies ripples from the worm, faint but audible if one is standing right next to it. "…if it isn't her little pet that follows her around like a lost puppy. Do you actually believe she loves you and you're not just a convenient and pliable tool, hopelessly trailing after her because you're so codependent that you can't handle being separated from her for more than five minutes at a time?"

The Drifter grins at the worm and snaps the lid of the small terrarium (worm-arium? vermitorium?) until he feels it click shut.

"She also told me not to listen to you." He says as he looks around Eris' apartment and begins rummaging around in one of the corners. "Now where did she put those things?"

The three eyes of the Hive worm flash angrily. "Do you honestly think a woman who has become a god can love something as pathetic as you?" Savathun asks, the snarl in her voice rippling through the worms segments as it bobs its three-eyed head slowly in the Drifter's direction.

"Gonna need some extra security on your tank so you stay put," he tells it over his shoulder as he opens a drawer and spies what he's looking for next to an awl on top of a pile of parchment and Hive leather strips.

Savathun's voice continues to emanate from the worm. "What happens when she tires of… whatever it is you do for her that has her willing to let you wrap yourself around her finger so tightly?"

"Now, these clamps should do the trick. She usually uses 'em for bookbinding, but this should work for now to keep you from interruptin' her." He twirls the small C-clamps in his hands as he walks back to the hate-filled shuddering parasite.

"Wouldn't you like to know who set her up to die?" Savathun's voice spills from the worm, smooth and liquid. "Surely if you are that enamored of her you'd care?"

The smirking rogue twists first one clamp into place and then the other. "There we go! Nice and tight. That lid ain't movin' for nothin'. Good luck getting out of that." He winks at the worm, a sparkle in his eyes.

"You're not the only lover she's had, you know. She will end up tossing you aside just like the others, and then where will you be?" The worm rocks from side to side. "She's the center of your world, isn't she? What will happen to you when she no longer wants you clinging to her like an emotional leech, hopeless and desperate. It can't last. Surely you know that."

The Drifter crouches down, bringing himself eye-level with the tiny monster he has secured. "Ya know, I can tell you're talkin' but, just so you're aware, she had me put earplugs in to deal with ya." He turns his head and taps at a small round knob embedded in his ear. It glints with soulfire. "So you can say anything you want but I still can't hear ya. They're infused with her magic so you're not gettin' through no matter how much ya yell through the worm phone. I can't hear shit."

A hiss of frustration emanates from the grub-like body.

"Anywho, I got dinner to prep. So long Hive god of Lies! She'll let ya know when she wants to talk to ya, and not a moment before. Toodles!"

He gives the worm a wave and walks back through the portal.

Trapped once more in the glass walls of its cage, the Hive worm begins to bonk its head repeatedly against the glass in rage. This does nothing but make a soft repeating 'plunk' sound which would be audible in the room but there is no one around to hear it.

Chapter Text

ACCESS: RESTRICTED
DECRYPTION KEY: 4JQVY58204$IKO-006
REP#: 62-EUROPA-REMOTE-AUDIO-DEVICE-MONITORING
AGENT(S): AUN-326
SUBJ: VIP#1316 AND ERI-223 INTERACTIONS BETWEEN UNSANCTIONED DARKNESS "LESSONS" - DISCUSSION OF FATE OF FORMER MEMBER OF FCFT

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

"That one of your things from your fireteam?"

"Yes."

"I noticed you pull 'em out when you're upset. Bad dreams tonight?"

"Horrific. I am used to them… for the most part. The mementos help. They remind me of the positive memories… proof the twisted phantoms on the Moon are perversions of who they actually were."

"Vell Tarlowe, right?"

"Yes. Each link in this Titan mark was added as a memento of someone he saved. One of them is for me."

"Want some coffee?"

"It is… four in the morning. And I prefer tea. Why are you awake?"

"Same reason as you, most likely. I figure I'll stay up at this point. Gonna be a long day. Want breakfast?"

"No but… if you would boil water for tea…"

"On it. Ya know… I dunno if he made one for me or not. Always wondered."

"It was only for people whose lives he'd saved."

"Oh he did… I'm just, you know… unsure if I qualified as people at the time."

"You knew him?"

"More like… he knew a guy I used to be."

"Hmmm… masquerading as human needing rescue when he was in the Pilgrim Guard?"

"Nah. I was uh… well… the guy I used to be was… in… that."

"You. In the Pilgrim Guard. One of the most noble and self sacrificing groups of Titans to ever walk the earth."

"It uh… wasn't looked on so highly at the time. But yeah, I was there for a bit. Not a long time."

"You were a Titan?"

"Not really. No. I mean… I didn't say, and they didn't ask. Wasn't exactly a situation where they had the luxury of turning down help. Stories make it sound so much more impressive than it was. To hear Saint-14 talk we were knights in shining armor but… it was more like… grubby wannabe heroes tryin' their best to keep people alive… failing more than succeeding most of the time."

"Your statements strain belief."

"Strain belief… like spaghetti?"

"Your words seem confabulated. Potentially untrue."

"Ok. I guess they would, yeah. Sorry. Your water's hot."

"He would still have considered you a person."

"I dunno 'bout that. He didn't like me much."

"Why?"

"Ha! Why would he?"

"You said you were a different person. I assume you mean that the changes between yourself then and now would be so drastic as for you to not be recognizable."

"I mean yeah, that's fair. Want sugar?"

"No. Why didn't he like you? Vell liked everyone."

"Didn't trust me."

"Hmmm…"

"Said I was doin' it for the wrong reasons."

"Were you?"

"Probably. Yeah. If I was doin' it for the right reasons I probably would have stuck around after…"

"After?"

"After Orin left."

"Hmmm… Yes. Was the Sunbreaker why you joined?"

"Yeah. Told her where she'd go I'd go."

"Interesting. Why?"

"I um… well, at the time I thought… it's just I don't tend to like… click with people very much… not in ways that are… deep like… like…"

"Click… interesting."

"She was my best friend. I hadn't really had one before. Not like that."

"You had to have been at least 500 years old by that time."

"Maybe? I dunno… probably."

"And Orin was the first person you felt close enough to, that you could call her your best friend."

"Yeah. She was… she… she understood… a lot. And she let me trick her into dancing with me."

"Tsch. As if one can be tricked to dance."

"I mean it was a line. Its just she… it had never worked before in all the times I tried it."

"A line."

"Yeah."

"I do not follow."

"So you ask someone to dance, right? You say 'would ya like a dance before you go?' and then they say 'no' and then you act surprised an' confused. And you ask them what they thought you just said."

"Hmmm…"

"And then they say what you said: 'would you like to dance before you go?' At which point, you say 'I'd love to!' And most of the time they laugh and walk away. Or sometimes they trip you on your ass and someone else dumps a drink on your head for your trouble."

"Dumping a drink seems overly unkind. Are you claiming Orin did this?"

"Nah. That was Lady Efrideet at the bottom of Fellwinter Peak. She was a character."

"Have you always been attracted to Titans then?"

"I mean… attracted to people who can kill me and look hot while doing it? Sure. Especially if they seem like they might keep my sorry hide alive if I can convince 'em it's worth it."

"Hmmm…"

"I like to keep some folk close—real close. I feel somebody's hand on my throat, I figure they're about to kill me or kiss me. Personally, I like to keep my options open."

"I'm surprised you didn't attempt to seduce Vell."

"Ha! Who's sayin' I didn't?"

"Tsch."

"He didn't like me. I also… may have also called him a fucking idiot a few times."

"Vell was not stupid. He was honest. And kind. He built friendships and defended them. If anything is stupid it is you."

"Well… I ain't gonna argue with that. Sometimes I am. But sometimes he was too."

"Speak. Carefully."

"Look… his heart was always in the right place. Always. But a great tactician? He wasn't. There were times he made stupid decisions that upon several occasions nearly got his own ass kill-killed in the permanent way. Usually involving him tryin' to save someone what couldn't be saved. You knew him. You know he was like that."

"He was… willful at times and… refused to give up on people. But he was not stupid."

"That princess needed saving more than a few times when I knew him. When he'd decided he was gonna help someone and damn the consequences and throw logic out the window. Hell. That man tried to headbutt a Kell. Broke his own neck."

"Likely the Kell's neck too."

"Yeah, he did, but that's besides the point when there's two Ketches full of Fallen coming to kick your ass and you got a broken neck. 'I'll hold em off!' No you damn well won't you meat head. I swear that man had a death wish."

"I believe he may have."

"So I wasn't the only one to see that."

"Vell was strong but… he found it difficult… to survive… he had seen so much death… his mark was his way of reminding himself that he had… purpose… that everything he worked for was not in vain… it was very hard for him to lose people… it is hard for everyone but… Vell was empathetic… he felt things more keenly than most."

"Yeah. Saw a lot of shit on that crew. Lot of it wasn't nice. Vell was one of the strongest titans - stronger than Orin. Not as strong as Wei Ning, mind you but… he was up there."

"Yes."

"Real big heart. Too big. Couldn't handle people dyin' on his watch. Took that shit personal."

"He did. I… we had deliberately not told him about the mission to the Moon. We knew he would volunteer. But he found out and… insisted."

"Yeah. He would've. Sounds like him."

"He died protecting us… protecting me."

"I figured. Knowing him, though? It's how he would have wanted to go. It'd mean everything to him that you survived… and I don't say that as a placating thing. That's just how he was. That's what I mean when I say he was an idiot. The fact he lived as long as he did is well… a testament to just how strong he was. Someone like that ain't the type to live very long. Not the way he was. He might've acted like he was fine but he was good at hidin' things when he wanted to. And he was not fine."

"Yes. He was subtle, for a Titan. Perhaps too subtle… when it mattered."

"Yeah?"

"I am not certain but… I think he may have loved me."

"Everybody loved you. And Wei Ning. Ya don't traipse down into literal Hell over someone you don't care for. Lotta people noticed when you did what you did. After Wei Ning died… those that went with you… it was you they were looking out for. They all cared about you. Surely you know that. Even I know that and I don't do that shit."

"I mean romantically ."

"Ha! Yeah, I could see that."

"Could you now?"

"Yeah. Vell had good taste. He liked Orin too. A lot."

"Many did."

"That's actually probably one of the reasons he didn't like me. Although… she and I never went beyond friends in the Pilgrim Guard… not that I would'a said no… and quite frankly I wouldn't'a said no to Vell neither. He was cute."

"Tsch. He was considerably more than just 'cute.'"

"That's a truth… but, I could totally see Vell Tarlowe bein' ass-over-teakettle for you. Back when you had two eyes you were… pretty great. Strong, beautiful, fierce as fuck, take no bullshit, real fast, face first into danger with no fear…"

"A 'fucking idiot,' you mean?"

"I wasn't gonna say it, but yeah, by my standards, yes. Still… Lotta people loved you back then. You were a legend. And contrary as fuck, even then. Doing what needs doing even when everyone in authority was against it because you knew it needed getting done… Yeah, he'd a been nuts for you. He never said anything?"

"I… there was a moment once… by a fire. We were interrupted. I think he would have kissed me. I felt like he wanted to. I wish… I wish he had just asked me if he could kiss me. I was never certain. Looking back. If he had wanted to, I wish he would have simply… spoken the words and… asked."

"Would you have?"

"Would I what?"

"Kissed him?"

"Of course."

"Then why didn't you? You don't strike me as the type that needs the guy to make the first move. Or that necessarily needs someone to be a guy to kiss 'em neither."

"I am not."

"Heh. Then why didn't you?"

"I- He was clearly… He needed someone to show him he was worthy of love… Worthy of all those who had given their lives to save him… Worthy of having tried to save others. He tried so hard to compensate for the losses. He loved everyone but… he did not love himself. I felt… at the time I wanted him to show me that his desire for me outweighed his hesitancy. Looking back, now, I regret it. I should have tried. I wish I had been able to show him… to convince him… that he was loved… that he mattered… I think I could have made him believe it. But… I did not. I regret not pursuing him. I was impulsive and had many admirers…"

"I bet."

"I enjoyed it, the affection… I did not wish to bind myself to one person although… I do not know if that was even what was being offered. Still, I remained coy… aloof… a mistake, I feel, now. I was thinking of what I would receive from such a relationship, and not enough about what I could have given… how much I could have helped him… the healing that being loved by me could have provided."

"Huh."

"And then, when I wanted vengeance… He was there, behind me, supportive… and I was grateful… and I remember thinking if we both survived, his devotion to me should be rewarded… But I never told him… and then he was gone."

"When a team has a Titan and they lose 'em, it always hits hard. Hits hard regardless but… somethin' about the ones like that hit harder."

"Vell was not just our strength, he was our heart… like Wei Ning before him…"

"Like having your heart ripped out of your chest."

"Yes. The strength of the fireteam, the core… I remember his screams. I hear them… even now. The axe that felled him did not kill him. It merely crippled him. He was still alive when the Thralls descended upon him. He tried so hard to be silent, but they did not start with his throat."

"Yikes."

"We tried to circle back… hoping we could find his ghost… Razor… if we could just keep Razor safe then Vell could possibly still have still been revived. Perhaps not then… perhaps not for years… but we tried… Vell was the first to fall. We had not yet realized how the tunnels were twisting themselves against us. We did not know that attempting to find Razor was an exercise in futility. Our bodies were heavy. We could not move with alacrity. We were laden with the oppressive crush of the Darkness in that place. There were great swinging lanterns which cast no light… their pendulums designed to stun and kill. Immense pits which opened up at our feet spewing forth hundreds of Thralls. And all around the screams, and then… the screams stopped. Eventually Eriana called off our search… reminded us of our mission… that to fail it would mean he died in vain. It felt so wrong to leave him. I did not wish to. But we could not go back. It is not that we did not try. We did try. It was not possible. He was… he was gone."

"Careful. Don't twist it too much, you'll hurt your hands and break it and then that'll feel worse."

"No! I- thank you."

"Let me get you more tea, ok?"

"Yes."

"Your hands are shakin'. Here. Hold this. It's warm."

"What is it?"

"My coffee."

"Thank you. Even now, having assisted the Guardian in avenging them all, having ended Crota, having taken his vile power and forged new weapons to use against the Hive… even now… I question… was Vell's death in vain?"

"No. Look, sister, I'm the first one to tell you dyin' for someone else does nothin'… and I don't go stickin' my neck out for no one… But that guy? That guy didn't care that much about livin' beyond what it could do for others. Told me enough times himself he wanted his death to matter. And the fact that you're still breathin'? Someone he loved-loved? Yeah… Damn straight he'd think it was worth it. I'll bet you any money that if you pulled him back from the dead and gave him the same choice, knowing what you know now? Hell yeah he'd do the same thing all over again if it meant you lived. You know damn well he would."

"Yes."

"That's who Vell Tarlowe was. That's what he was about."

"Yes. He was. I miss him."

"Me too."

"You said he did not like you."

"He didn't but… always felt safer when he was around."

"Yes."

"Big strong arms, big heart, Titan through and through."

"He was."

"Here now. Have some tea. Careful, it's hot."

"You are being kind. This is unusual for you."

"Losing people is hard. And besides. Vell would probably appreciate me doin' it. Since he can't… what with bein' dead and all. And… well, maybe talking about him reminds me of what it was like… that time I decided to give a shot at bein' one of the good guys for a change. I think he'd approve."

"Yes. He would."

[END TRANSCRIPT]

Chapter Text

[Some time after the events of the Final Shape but before the bento box deliveries that happened prior to the start of Episode: Heresy.]

Eris Morn glared at the message on her modified data pad. Of all the times to be summoned. She was always ready to go out in the field. Always. Outside of… extenuating circumstances… she slept in her armour, ready to fight at a moment's notice.

But Ikora had summoned her to the tower earlier today, and she'd left two weapons with Banshee for repairs, which, while they were not beyond her, he was able to do much faster and, as Ikora kept pointing out, members of the Vanguard, which Eris still ostensibly was, received these repairs for free, and it did make sense to take advantage of them.

She normally would have had Loud Lullaby with her at all times anyway, but she had loaned it to Crow for a demonstration he was doing. Her sword was in Sanctuary and outside of her Soulfire wreathed Ahamkara bone and multiple knives, Eris was dismayed to realize her recent attempts to make her apartment more presentable (why she had no idea, the only person visiting her lived in squallor far more extensive than her own) had resulted in a complete lack of guns within it. (There were, granted, two of them still, but they were disassembled for her to make her own repairs.)

Eris cast her eyes around her apartment in irritation, one last check to see if there was anything she could bring with her and paused, staring at the Drifter's coins by her bedside. As she reached out and picked one of them up, a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. She pulled a communicator out of a pocket, placed it in her ear, and sent out the call even as she was locking her front door.

"Yo! " He picked up immediately.

"Drifter."

"Aww hell yeah! My favourite person!" His voice rumbled in her ear as she left the building and began walking along the alley.

"I have a favour to ask of you."

"Oh well you have my attention now, not that you didn't before, but extra now. Waddaya want?"

Eris smiled. He was always so genuinely eager to please her. They had come along way from snipping at each other across the fire in that frozen plateau on Europa. She couldn't help a surge of affection and delight within her. Still, she kept her voice calm and tried to avoid showing too much emotion. The request she was about to make would swell his ego enough on its own.

"My presence is unexpectedly required for a minor field mission but I am currently in the city and had no intentions of being in the field today. Going to the Moon will take far too much time. The Annex is on my way to the transport. You have previously said you have 'oodles' of weapons for your Gambit players. Might you have some you could loan to me?"

The Drifter laughed. Eris forced herself not to smile as she crossed the busy market, despite instinctively wanting to. The sound of his laughter was infectious.

"I thought you said my weapons were shit."

"Tsch," Eris chided as she avoided three small children rushing from behind a pillar, shrieking over… whatever children shriek about… and then she paused while a large off-duty Cabal Centurion staggered in front of her from Spider's disreputable bar. Eris sighed and went around the lumbering drunkard as he careened off toward an Eliksni fruit vendor's stall. She was briefly concerned that a brawl might be about to break out but in fact the Cabal was extolling the virtues of that particular merchant's produce to all who would listen and proceeded to purchase a large breadfruit, holding it up with great excitement.

"Your guns are functional and I am not in a position to be picky," Eris continued. "Speed is of the essence. If I was in possession of a Ghost it could simply transmat from inventory but…"

"I got ya." His voice was warm and gentle in her ear. She felt the affection in it as he spoke. "Come on by."

"I am already on my way." Eris stepped into one of the Tower elevators and pressed the well-worn buttons to ascend to the highest levels.

"So, what you want? You said it's a rush. I'll get it ready."

Alone in the elevator, Eris permitted herself a smile. It brought him so much joy to be useful to her. It was a love language of his, she realized. Much like his constant desire to share food, something he did with her and for her as an expression of friendship, a desire for her companionship, and care. Well… they both were aware at this point that he was offering considerably more than friendship. Something Eris had been strongly considering accepting for quite some time now.

"Something for range," Eris clarified. "Something Heavy, and a Hand Cannon." Likely excessive but, considering this mission was taking them into an active war zone, it would be best to have all three.

"Ha! Hunters." She heard the shake of his head through the communicator, felt the sparkle in his eyes.

Eris reached into a pocket and pulled out the coin she'd taken from him most recently, running her thumb along its surface. He had never once objected to her blatant theft of his coins. Each time she took one it felt like an invasion, but a welcome one. He was letting her take them. Each brazen intrusion into his space she made caused him to flush and stutter. His adoration was intoxicating.

"Other classes than Hunters use Hand Cannons," Eris blandly replied as she fondled the coin in her hand, thinking of him.

"Yeah, but every Hunter I ever known always has at least one of 'em. They're a standard for a reason."

"Clearly."

"You prefer a Bow, a Sniper, or a Scout for range?" His voice practically purred in her ear.

"Hmmm… A Scout Rifle if you have one." Eris looked down on the city as the elevator ascended. Her Hive eyes saw the inherent Light of everyone below. It felt good to see it but also good to be above it. In her flat she was insulated from much of the bustle and noise, but even her short trip through it on foot always generated mild anxiety. She was much more accustomed to the quiet of the Moon or, she realized with a small amount of pleasure, the Drifter's Annex with his heaps of junk and his perpetually under repair mote banks. It was, she realized, easily one of her preferred locations within the City, and not only because of him… or perhaps it was because of him that it felt good. Safe. Familiar. They had now been spending so much time together that the Annex, like the Derelict, felt a little bit like home to her. There were few locations where Eris Morn felt at ease, but the Annex and the Derelict were among them.

"Yup. Servant Leader. Ain't no Touch of Malice, mind ya, but it's decent."

"It will do." It amused her he remembered her Weapon of Sorrow. She should bring it back from the Moon next time she was in the city so he could inspect it. He would undoubtedly be thrilled.

"What about your Heavy? Want a Machine Gun? Less likely to blow you up than a Grenade Launcher or a Rocket Launcher. You don't exactly got extra lives to spare." The way he said it was gentle, considerate but not smothering like Ikora so often was with her mothering. He was giving her the option rather than attempting to choose for her. Even when he was being protective, he respected her autonomy. It was one of the things she genuinely appreciated about him.

"Do you have a sword?" Eris asked him as the doors to the elevator opened and she stepped out onto the catwalk.

"Ha! Not one you'd want."

"Alas. The Machine Gun will do," Eris said as she walked past the tree growing in the middle of the courtyard just before the Bazaar. Ikora stood at her usual location in consultation with several Guardians. Eris made eye contact with her as she moved along the shops and store fronts. They nodded to each other across the distance and Eris felt Ikora's eyes on her back as she turned down the path to the Annex.

The Hidden mission Eris was involved in was known to Ikora. Her visit to the Drifter prior to departure was undoubtedly causing the Warlock to raise her eyebrows but surely wasn't that surprising. Eris had already told Ikora she considered the Drifter part of her Fireteam.

"Where ya at?" the Drifter's voice in her ear brought her attention back to him.

"On the stairs on my way down to you. I shall be there momentarily."

And she was.

The Drifter was, predictably, almost glowing with delight when Eris stepped through the entrance of his space. The messy workshop/storage area where he recruited players for his game was empty outside of the two of them. The only people nearby were two Eliksni by the vending machine in the hall and Ada-1 who would be in her workshop farther down the corridor.

"All right. All right. All right," he said as he proudly gestured to two guns on his makeshift table. Eris noticed how the Cabal helmet with its pool of coins had been relegated to the floor on the other side of the stairs and much of the random assortment of objects had been hastily pushed aside to make room for the weapons and their accompanying ammunition boxes.

"Here's your Scout," he began, and handed it to her.

Eris inspected it briefly, looking through the sights and being pleased she could read the backs of the books on one of his dusty shelves at the back of the Annex. "An anthology of Twentieth Century Literature" caught her notice. It was not something she expected to find. She would have to ask him about that later.

Eris slung the Scout rifle over her shoulder with a worn but secure and functional strap.

"Here's the machine gun," he continued.

Eris appreciated the heft of the weapon, in particular how it glinted with the distinctive violet light indicating Void destabilizing rounds.

"And uh…" the Drifter paused, drawing her attention back to him before he continued.

Eris tilted her head to the side as he reached into his belt, pulled out Trust, twirled it on one finger, grabbed it by the barrel, and handed it to her, grip first, careful to point it down and away from them both as he did so.

"…here's the cannon."

She took it from him in both hands, her fingers lingering against his, unable to keep herself from smiling. The weapon was still warm from his body heat. His hands shook slightly at her touch.

Her eyes moved from the gun to his face.

"Are you certain?" she asked, gently, respectfully.

"Well um… Yeah." He blinked several times, unable to look away from her, feeling her fingers against his own. They were both wearing their usual gloves but the contact still delighted him. "Yeah I am." His grin widened. "Unless you don't want it. Might stink." His eyes glinted mischievously. He did not pull away from her touch.

"I want it." Eris stepped closer to him, squeezing his hand slightly with hers as she took the weapon from him. "And… I appreciate the sentiment with which it is given."

His fingers reflexively moved toward her as she pulled the gun away and holstered it, as he did, in the belt around her waist. His smile widened even further and his face seemed to glow with pride as she did so. Before he could pull his hands back completely, though, Eris replaced the weapon with her own hands, humming softly to herself as she felt him catch his breath.

He leaned in closer to her, close enough to be more than conspiratorial. Almost close enough to kiss. "You sure you don't want me comin' with?" he asked her softly, adoring her with his eyes.

Eris sighed. "I do very much, but I cannot bring you with me on this. It is… I am not…" She turned her head away slightly.

He smirked. "Hidden shit?"

She looked back to him. "Yes," she said, regret in her voice.

Time seemed to slow. They were still, three eyes staring into two, their faces not quite touching, affection radiating from each of them to the other. The silence lingered, pulled taught, neither one of them wanting to step away.

Drifter cleared his throat. "I expect that back when you're uh… done with it."

Eris hummed in the back of her throat and squeezed his hands before releasing them. "And if I'm never done with it?"

He blinked, holding his breath.

"Well…" He swallowed. "You know where it's holstered."

Eris reached a gloved hand out to gently brush against his beard, just below the scars in his cheeks.

"I do," she whispered, just loud enough for him to hear.

Her fingertips tugged gently at his cheek, light but insistent, pulling his face closer to hers.

Distant laughter echoed into the Annex. Someone was coming down the stairs. Both froze and turned to look and then relaxed looked back at each other. Eris smiled wryly and stepped back, retrieving the Machine Gun from the table.

The Drifter licked his lips, moving with her, his hand at her elbow, unwilling to let the space between them increase just yet. "You back tonight?" he asked her as she finished pocketing the ammunition he'd put out for her.

"Yes."

"When?"

"Provided nothing overly interesting happens, a few hours at most."

"Late dinner?" He leaned to the side to better see her smile. "Could do take out."

"Hmmm… I would…" Eris turned and placed her empty hand on his chest. "…enjoy that." She felt him catch his breath again.

"What do you want?" The purr was back in his voice. Seductive and playful. Meaning more than surface interpretation. Such a rogue.

Eris' smile widened and she leaned in "You…"

His eyes widened and she watched his mask slip, his expression going from playful to surprised and hopeful.

"…choose," she said, her lips inches from his.

"Ch-choose?" he repeated back to her.

"Dinner. You choose."

He blinked a few times rapidly in confusion and then his brain caught up with the conversation. "Haha!" he laughed nervously. She hummed softly with him. "You uh…" He placed his hand on top of hers, pressing her fingertips against his chest, prolonging the moment. "…you sure about that?"

"Yes. But I must go. Now."

He sighed wistfully and released her hand, stepping back. "Yeah."

She let her fingertips linger as she pulled away, making her reluctance clear as she turned and walked to the exit.

"Later, Moonlight," he called after her.

She turned, her hand on the wrought iron grating in the entryway to the Annex at his use of the new variation of the nickname he'd given her, one he only used in private soft moments. It was an intimate term, the endearment clear and unambiguous, devoid of any negative connotation. Eris smiled back at him again, letting him see the pleased look on her face.

"Yes. Later."

As she disappeared from view it took the Drifter a few moments before he remembered that he was supposed to breathe.

His hands flew to his face and his knees buckled. He sat down on the bench by the railing, feeling dizzy.

"Holy shit," he whispered to himself. "Drifter… you just got a green fuckin' light… from Eris Morn." He formed his hands into a small tent over his nose and mouth and breathed quietly for a few moments before releasing his own face and staring, open mouthed, at the crane shifting and creaking over his now-empty makeshift work table.

"That was a yes," he whispered to himself. "That was green light full speed ahead. Drifter you lucky bastard. Don't you dare screw this up. Holy shit. Ok. Ok. Ok. Think. Where we gettin' take out? What's the best damn take out in the city. Something impressive but not to heavy just in case… Don't jinx it you stupid fuck. Shit, I should like… shower or somethin'."

Chapter Text

Ok so I'm on the Tangled Shore, right? Pre-Red War, Pre-Great hunt, Pre-Great Disaster, Pre-Twilight Gap. I'm following up on a lead for something I needed to know about, so I'm doin' odd jobs, keeping my head down, making sure I pay my protection money so I don't get ganked for having too few arms and not enough eyes and I'm doing oil changes on skimmers for a two-bit junkyard chop shop run by a Fallen goes by the name of Pa-n'Keek. Anyone speakin' not-Eliksni calls him Pancake. He knows what it means but he figures our mouths are too soft to pronounce it properly so he's fine with it.

Anywho, random day, I'm half-covered in a combination of oil and ether, and Pancake calls me up front. At his desk are three Fallen, two Cabal and an Awoken man named Marik. Can tell, just by lookin' at 'em they're smugglers. Bad news. My kinda people. Pancake asks me if I ever been a ship's engineer. I say no. He's like, "Great news!" and I'm suddenly on Marik's crew. I wasn't really asked about it but the pay was decent and Pancake wasn't exactly someone you say no to. He worked very close with Spider and Spider pretty much ran the Tangled Shore so if Pancake said I was a ship's engineer now, I was a ship's engineer.

So I pack up my tools and show up where I'm told. Marik says we've got a shipment lined up, hot item, needs to be delivered to Ganymede and we're leaving in under an hour and also make sure I got some electromagnetic shielding because I'm gonna need it. I don't know what in the hell that's for but Pancake's got some and he sells it to Marik and then they got me in the belly of this freighter called the Dancing Loon. I'm there with all my junk and they bring in this shipping crate. It's a small thing, like the size of a dinner table.

Dunno what's in it but it is spiking all the resistance meters and has me scrambling to get it stabilized. How in the hell they managed to even get it there without it cracking open I don't know. But I do some tweaks real quick, hot-wire a few capacitors together and divert enough juice from the backup engines to run it and bam! One eleoctromagnetically shielded cursed cargo, as requested. It's unstable as fuck and I keep having to swap out components as they melt but it's good enough, and off we go.

Crate has no markings on it. Like none. And the way the insides keep shifting like something inside wants out, I don't wanna know what the fuck is going on. I just keep tweaking the electrical, swapping in bits when they blow to maintain that shit, and hope we get where we're goin' before I run out of spare parts.

Seems like we're doing ok until we get stopped by the Awoken blockade.

Now, we ain't supposed to be stopped by the Awoken blockade. That is not how this is supposed to go. These guys are professionals, or so I was told. They're supposed to have paid the right people off.

Marik calls me into his cabin, tells me to strip. I tell him that ain't the kinda engineer I was expectin' to be. He gives me his (admittedly pretty nice) clothes and puts on my greasy ether-stained shit and sends me over as the "Captain" to negotiate with the Awoken.

You can imagine I do not like this plan at all. Turns out Marik's home port, as it were, was the Prison of Elders, and him showing his face near any Awoken military would be suicide, same with the rest of his crew. I was the only one that didn't have my face in the register so I needed to go over and play legitimate businessman while Marik and his crew got inspected as my "staff."

Did I like this idea? No, I did not. Did I have a choice? Also no.

So I go on over, unarmed, in civilian clothes, with an armed escort and meet the Awoken Commander on a full-on Battleship, bringin' Marik's sloppy-ass paperwork with me. She's grillin' me over the coals on protocol and I'm tellin' her I don't know shit about shit, I pay people to do my taxes for me and I have a permit.

I play my part and they start makin' me fill out forms, talking about what fines will be levied on my ass for the crime of bein' a Human in Awoken space when all of a sudden the inspectors that got sent over stop responding and the Dancing Loon up and takes off at a dead run into deep space.

I do what any self-respectin' patsy would do at that point.

I point at the receding ship and go "Hey! They're stealin' my ship! Those fuckers! This is mutiny! You aren't just gonna let them do that are you?"

Ion cannons are firing warning shots. Fighters are scrambling. Commander's yelling orders. Battleships ain't exactly the most maneuverable of spacecraft, but soon enough we're in a high-speed police chase with Marik's crew gunnin' it for Ganymede and an entire Awoken squadron behind.

But the thing is, I know something the Awoken space cops don't know. That freighter is actually two ships, a little one inside of a big one and the little one can detach and bugger off super fast if it needs to, leaving everything else behind. And if they do that and take the cursed cargo then that capacitor field is not gonna hold so dollars to donuts they're gonna leave it behind. Which means the squadron's gonna find the highly illegal contents of the bigger ship, and this here 'legitimate businessman' is gonna be left holdin' the bag, which will probably get me a free one-way ticket to the Prison of Elders. Not my idea of a good time.

So I tell the Commander, "Hell. I got insurance. Light 'em up. This is piracy at this point. That's punishable by death, right? Blow 'em to smithereens!"

And this Awoken Commander? Someone must'a pissed in her breakfast that mornin' because she is all for it. Bloodthirsty and angry (and, thankfully, no longer directed at me). She tells her crew to quit with the warning shots and open fire on that freighter with full ion cannons, and tells her fighters to start takin' kill shots, no longer looking to run 'em down.

And you'd think that'd be it, right? Either they get away and I'm screwed or my new Awoken friends vaporize my old new friends into space dust, right?

But no, because they got close enough to Ganymede and what was waitin' just behind Ganymede where the gravitational pull would mess with sensors enough for them to be invisible until we were close, is a whole-ass Cabal Warship.

At this point my nope-o-meter is goin' haywire and all I can think of is I need to be somewhere that ain't here, so I start figuring out my exit strategy. See if I can run off in an unattended jump ship or somethin'.

Sure enough, Awoken coming in guns blazin' is not conducive to a peaceful encounter with the fucking Cabal. Warship starts immediately taking shots at the Squadron, includin' the Battleship I am on, while simultaneously bein' real interested in the Dancing Loon and ol'Drifter's sittin' here thinkin' that cargo bein' cursed was not a figurative expression.

Awoken Commander turns to me askin' what the fuck the Cabal want with my ship and I tell her with complete honesty that I have no idea, because I don't. But at this point she ain't buyin' it and gets two of her crew to arrest me and throw me in the brig.

And while in normal circumstances Drifter doesn't mind two sets of Awoken hands on him (most of 'em are not hard on the eyes, ya know?), these two were armed and dangerous and cuffed my hands behind my back and then marched me down a corridor to an elevator to toss my ass in a cell.

So there I am in an elevator, wonderin' how I managed to go from oil changes on the Reef to this in the space of less than 24 hours, when there's a big jolt, the lights go out, and all three of us hear the absolute last thing you ever wanna hear when you are in a spaceship.

Silence.

Engines are off. HVAC is off. No mechanical nothing. And we start to float because the artificial gravity is gone too.

I turn to my two newest friends and tell 'em "Look, I don't wanna die here and neither do you. Let me out of these cuffs so I can help and we can all survive together because if this ship's mechanical and electrical are hard down we really, really, do not want to be where we are bein' right now."

One of 'em agrees. The other one doesn't. They're arguing and the whole ship seems to shift sideways and starts making a low grinding groaning sound, the kind that metal makes when it's bein' made to do something metal doesn't wanna do.

Well, that does it and they let me go. We climb out of the vent at the top and start making our way up the elevator shaft. We get back out on one of the decks and find some emergency helmets. It's a standard issue Awoken ship so they're everywhere. Good thing too because not five minutes later the hull is breached and we three start grabbin' on to anything we can to keep from bein' sucked down the hallway into what is undoubtedly low orbit above Ganymede at this point.

One of my new friends doesn't pick something sturdy enough. He goes flyin' off out into deep space, leaving me and my one last Awoken military friend. She and I find a room with a door, climb inside and shut it so we can stop being sucked out into space for a little bit while the Battleship is careening around like a chicken with its head cut off.

And where do we find ourselves? Some sort of officer's mess or fancy entertainin' spot. It's got a observation deck with big windows, some nice tables, a fish tank, and a full bar. Very fancy. And there, we see it through the big ass fancy windows: the Dancing Loon, that little freighter I was the 'engineer' for, held in one of them giant ship-sized pincers the Cabal use for planetary-level ore harvesting.

Freighter's cracked open sideways down the middle like a egg, an' poured out of it as though it was made from glowin' ink or somethin', shimmering against the backdrop of space, is the biggest freakiest thing I ever seen in all my lives. Knew what it was when I saw it even though I never seen one alive before that. I didn't know they could even get that big.

Head like a weird four lobed flower, opened up all teeth an' eyes. Body like some sorta fucked up giant cat. Long lizard tail. Big fucking claws. Massive Ahamkara wish dragon hangin' on to the front end of the Cabal Warship like it was perched on a log or somethin'.

I dunno what the Awoken Commander did, or if it was even her, but at this point, the Battleship we're on somehow manages to kick into axillary power, which means the floor suddenly works again, and the ion canons are back on. Some idiot, instead of getting us the fuck out of this nightmare, decides the smart thing to do at this point is to take a shot at the otherwise preoccupied-with-Cabal dragon.

Awoken fighter pilots in their little ships, the ones that are still left, start swarming at it, shooting it up.

Might as well be flingin' peas at a house cat.

Thing reaches out one hand, grabs one of them small Awoken ships like it was a little bird in its fist, crushes it and then turns and - I am not joking here, this is no exaggeration - it took a bite out of the Cabal Warship. Like a straight up bite and tore a huge chunk off.

Cabal bodies are flyin' into space. Awoken Battleship is firing at both the dragon and the Cabal. Cabal are firing at both the dragon and the Awoken. I'm quite sure at that point there aint' no more crew left alive on the Dancing Loon. Me and my newest Awoken friend turn to look at each other in complete confusion at what we are watching happen in space on the other side of these fancy windows and she goes: "Did that thing come from your ship?"

And I tell her I don't know nor do I know how it could even fit if it was.

And of course, this is when my newest friend decides I'm full of shit. I saved her life twice at this point but no, she points her gun in my face and starts yellin'.

I start backing up and tell her to calm down and I'm as much a victim of this situation as she is, but she don't buy it. Meanwhile, as she's yellin' at me she's got her back to the action. You know that fighter the giant-ass Ahamkara crushed? I guess it gets tired of being poked by the Battleship ion cannons and sees movement or something from my friend right at the window. I don't know. But the dragon throws that mashed up fighter ship right at us. Just as my newest Awoken friend is screaming on how she's gonna kill me, the fancy windows catch the dragon's new softball and the crumpled fighter comes crashing through that observation deck glass, sucking the lady with the gun out into space along with tables, chairs, champagne glasses and fancy Awoken fish. I seen it coming and held on to the nearest sturdiest thing, which just so happened to be the very well stocked and elaborate bar.

Old habits die hard, I guess. Drifter's still a bartender even in the middle of a three-way space battle watching a dragon eating a Cabal Warship.

Whoever is piloting the Awoken Battleship at this point has clearly lost their sanity because they aim what's left of the vessel at the Ahamkara and try to get their barely functioning axillary power engines up to ramming speed.

This manages to get the dragon's attention. And what does the dragon do? Run away? Nope. Let the two ships smash and eat whatever falls out like pickin' up ants? Nope. It turns and I swear it grins with that four-lobed face it has, and it jumps.

It launches off the Cabal Warship straight for the Awoken Battleship, which is the ship that I am currently on at this point. And one that, as soon as I realize there is a giant-ass fucking wish dragon coming to party, I very much would prefer to no longer be a passenger of.

So there's a giant Ahamkara flying through space that I am watching through the broken windshield of this observation deck as I am trying not to get sucked out into space. I got no weapons. No armour. Synthweave and a helmet and some fancy clothes and that's it, and I look around me to see what the hell I can do for myself in this very not good situation.

It's a bar. I'm a bartender. I look where I'd normally look for the little canisters for CO2 for the bubbly water. There's two of 'em. I grab 'em both, one under each arm, and I stop trying to fight to avoid getting sucked out into space. I get blown out and let the momentum carry me, then I open one end of the seltzer bottles point it a little to the side of the Awoken ship, and scootch out of the way of the incoming Dragon. I then turn it and point it at a different angle, and putt putt putt my way along with no tether through the powers of alcoholic bubbly to the ripped up and mangled space ship that is not currently playing host to a giant Ahamkara wish dragon.

Dragon lands on the Awoken Battleship and starts tearing it up, biting chunks out like it did with the Cabal one, and I manage to aerate my own ass through the big hole that same dragon recently tore out of the Cabal Warship, which, as you know, is not the healthiest place to be in in most situations, never mind one where you're unarmed in the middle of a space battle between two big-ass military ships and a huge-ass dragon.

Thankfully, ol'Drifter's been on a few Cabal ships in his time, picked up enough of a smattering of Ulurant along with enough basic engineering that he could read a floor plan and find the spot they launch out the Cabal Balls that our Guardians have such a strong tendency to get squished by in the field. I sneak down, jump in and push the button, get jettisoned in the Drop Pod, away from one of the biggest shit shows of all my lives, down to the surface of Ganymede.

Spent six months finding a research outpost and then another three waiting for a supply ship to hop away on. Never saw any of the crew from the Dancing Loon again, or anyone else from that whole mess neither. I figure they all bit it when the dragon got out. My guess is the Ahamkara was probably what was inside the weird unmarked box with the electromagnetic stabilizer that I was powering from the engines of the smaller ship they probably tried to divert all power to in order to escape in. If only they'd had a ship's engineer on board to tell them not to do that.

Eventually went back to find Pancake on the Tangled Shore to ask him what the actual fuck. He wasn't there no more. Went to Spider myself. Spider told me he had no memory of what in the hell I was talkin' about, that nobody there knew anyone named Pancake, they never had, and that neither did I.

I looked him straight in all four of his eyes and told him he was right. Ether does strange things to Human anatomy and I clearly had a few too many in his bar the other night and was tripping balls.

We all agreed it must have been a wild ride. And then we never discussed it again.

Chapter Text

"Are you awake?"

"Yeah.

"You are trembling."

"Heh. Yeah."

"What are you thinking?"

"Scared."

"Tell me."

"Don't wanna lose this. Don't wanna lose you. Don't wanna fuck it up. I don't exactly have a lot of experience with healthy relationships. That was always something other people did, not me. Seen a lot of 'em go real bad from the sidelines."

"Then you likely have some knowledge at least of what not to do."

"Yeah, I- I even went to the library not too long ago. Tried to see if any books would help. Mostly just made me even more paranoid. Learned some new words to be scared of."

"What words?"

"Uh… codependence… substance abuse issues… personality disorders… de-personal-i-sation…"

"I see. What about… anxiety disorders?"

"Oh yeah! There's a lot of 'em! I didn't know there could be so many. And that's just the ones they knew pre-Golden Age! Who knows how many new ones we got now."

"Hmmm…"

"I uh… I think I might have 'em all."

"You might."

"Don't wanna be bad for you but… also don't wanna… not have you… need to… need to get my shit together… but I don't know if… I can… do that… What if I can't do that, Moonlight? What if we try and I'm just too messed up?"

"This is not a path you walk alone."

"I got a lot of baggage, Moonlight."

"As do I."

"It's a lot to put on someone… me… I'm a lot."

"Yes. You are. Do you think this is new information for me?"

"Nah. You knew. I know. And you made your choice. Fully informed decision."

"It was. I did. And I still do."

"Moonlight… I-"

"Hush."

"No. Listen. I may not be a good call, ya know?"

"I don't care."

"Maybe… maybe you should."

"Why?"

"I don't wanna hurt you. You been hurt so much."

"The time for avoiding that is past."

"I love you."

"I feel the same about you."

"But like… you're supposed to want the best for the person you love and I'm… I am not the best."

"I do not want the best. I desire you. Unless… you have decided that loving me is… too much work."

"What? No."

"Too exhausting. Requiring too much change to be healthy… Not worth the effort."

"Never."

"Perhaps I have become… that phrase you used about the guardians and their favoured weapons changing with the whims of battle… perhaps I am no longer… shiny… to you."

"You're the shiniest thing I ever seen or ever will see. Don't you dare think otherwise. I mean, not just emotionally. Your eyes literally glow."

"Tsch."

"But no… you're so shiny. I love you, Moonlight. I… I love you. I'm just scared it'll come to a point where you realize this sack of bones ain't worth it to salvage."

"A fear of abandonment."

"I guess you can call it that."

"I will not tell you not to fear. Nor will I make blind assertions or declarations to placate you. Fear has been a constant companion of yours for so long it would be madness to try to separate you from it. Tell me, do you think I have no fear?"

"You're the bravest person I know."

"Hmmm… That does not answer the question. Bravery is not the antithesis of fear. It is that which exists because of it."

"Yeah ok. You're right. Brave person ain't the one with no fear it's the one that shows up in spite of it."

"You are the most fearful person I know."

"Heh. Ya know, Orin… when she was the Emissary… said I was so afraid of violence I'd kill anyone who tried to inflict it on me. She wasn't wrong. All my lives I been scared. And that is… that is a really, really long time."

"And yet, despite your fear… you are here in my arms."

"Yeah."

"And you hold me close."

"Always."

"Despite having lost me once already… and been destroyed by it."

"Yeah… That was… not a good time. Let's not ever do that again."

"And you stood by my side, at the front of Humanity, when the Witness threatened to destroy everything."

"Wasn't anywhere else to go but also I… I couldn't live with it if I'd left you to fight it without me. Even if we won… if something had happened to you and I wasn't there? No way I could deal with that. I knew where I belonged at that point, without question, and it was… in our fireteam, by your side."

"Germaine. You are the bravest person I know. And I love you for it."

Chapter Text

"Drifter."

"What's up, Crota's Bane?"

"Udon is exhibiting new behaviour. It is… quite frustrating. I am beginning to wonder if he is demonstrating some sort of nesting compulsion or… hoarding."

"Oh? What's our extremely long, excessively legged, overly chitinous refugee from Savathun's throne world doin now?"

"He has been relocating objects. Stealing things and bringing them to me. Moving them into piles at my feet when I am engaged in my work and do not notice. It is causing considerable disruption. Where this new obsession of his came from, I cannot fathom."

"Ah shit. I'm sorry. Pretty sure that one's on me."

"What? How?"

"Well, you see, he really likes playing fetch."

"He has toys."

"Yeah but… I was feelin' bad about not bein' able to play with him all the time and after that huge mess he made playin' with my ghost I figured why not try and redirect some of that energy to somethin' useful and productive that'd give him interaction with me on the regular?"

"What have you done?"

"Just so you know, when you get that tone in your voice, you are absolutely terrifying. Like ice in the veins, shiver run up the spine and I am scared now and… also turned on."

"Hmmm…. I await your explanation."

"I was tryin' to teach him to bring me tools so that when I was workin' on somethin' I could ask him for a tool he'd know, and get him to get it for me and… ideally… put it back after."

"Have you succeeded?"

"No. We're still in the learnin' phase. He's just bringin' me random shit. I didn't realize he was going and doin' it with you too."

"I see."

"I'm sorry."

"It would be prudent for us to have better communication and coordination between ourselves regarding training him in future. I have undoubtedly been undoing much of your efforts."

"Yeah. Didn't think of it. Started out as a very spur of the moment thing. I was just happy he was doing stuff with me. He loves you way more than he does me."

"Perhaps the piles of relocated objects are his attempt to provide testimonial of his 'love.'"

"Hehehe. That's kind of adorable."

"Tsch. What commands have you been giving him?"

"Well… I tried to show him my three-quarter crescent wrench and get him to bring it to me when I asked for it. And when he brought me one of your charms or your knives or a piece of disassembled hand cannon or a teacup instead I'd say no and walk him over to where it belongs and put it there, then bring him back to the wrench and name it and ask him to bring it to me again."

"Are those the words and phrases you are using? 'Bring,' the object name, and 'put it back'?"

"Yeah."

"I shall attempt to assist in reinforcing these commands, in particular with the putting back, since he keeps piling things at my feet for me to trip over."

"That… that really is very cute… What sorta things he bringin' ya?"

"Garbage, mostly. I'm surprised he didn't try to drag you and leave you at my feet. Although… now that I think on it… "

"What? I belong with the garbage now?"

"It is your natural habitat."

"Oooh!"

"An empty food bowl, still filthy. A single, partially chewed, chopstick. The communicator I removed from my ear and left on a different shelf. The datapad I was using to send messages to you. Wrappers from candy you have eaten and thrown in the garbage (thank you, though, your efforts are noticed and appreciated)."

"Workin' on it. Don't always remember to throw those out but I'm gettin' better."

"One of your partially decomposed, reeking socks."

"Hey! My socks are well-worn, not partially decomposed. The holes give 'em character! Although you're right, they do stink, but that's why they were in the laundry heap in the first place."

"Random assorted bolts and bits of wire. A half-eaten dumpling."

"He took my dumpling? Can I have it back?"

"No. I incinerated it with Soulfire."

"Dammit! I could'a eaten that."

"If you had eaten it to begin with, he would not have been able to bring it to me… repeatedly."

"Fair point."

"A dismembered Vex digit. A badly mangled vine of some sort - I assume from one of your plants. So many of your coins…"

"Maybe he is tryin' to bring me to ya."

"I think perhaps, in effigy somehow."

"You know that's actually pretty smart that he'd connect that shit to me and then bring it to you because… well… cuz you like me… and he's tryin' to give you things you like."

"Perhaps but… it may be more than that."

"Yeah?"

"I will admit I have been preoccupied with work and very focused when I have been here."

"Yeah, I barely seen you at all last little while, an' we been on the same ship."

"I have missed you."

"Yeah? Well… I missed ya too."

"I know. My thoughts have been lingering upon you… considerably."

"Well that's flattering. And... I'd be lyin' if I said I wasn't wantin' you this entire time too."

"I question if perhaps Udon is more than simply intuiting that I would desire your presence. He has demonstrated attunement to my moods in the past and behaved… empathetically. Perhaps he is responding to my conscious or even my unconscious desires."

"You mean… he can feel your emotions that you miss me, and he's been trying to bring you… bits of me in garbage form… to make you feel better?"

"I am uncertain but… perhaps."

"That's fuckin' adorable."

"Yes, it is. But it is also infuriating and, ideally, with more consistency in training him, we can improve this behaviour toward… less obnoxious ends."

"Well… we don't wanna remove the obnoxiousness too entirely. You like a little bit of obnoxious in your life."

"Ugh. I have quite enough from you already, thank you. I do not need more."

"Ha! What about now though?"

"What about now?"

"Well... since we're already both not doin' what we're supposed to be doin', what say we get a little obnoxious right now?"

"I- You are correct that my focus has already been derailed. I suppose a break would be... usef-"

"Kissin' you tastes so much better than a half-eaten dumpling."

"Is that supposed to be complimentary?"

"Don't get me wrong, I really like a good dumpling. I just like you more."

"I also find you more appealing than a half-eaten dumpling."

"Guess we're stuck with each other then."

"I suppose. Wait! What was that?"

"I dunno. Something metal, that's for sure."

"What has he done now?"

"Uh…Well that's interesting."

"What is it?"

"It's my crescent wrench. The three-quarter one."

"What?"

"That thing I was tryin' to train him to bring me."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah it does."

"How?"

"It's what I wanted him to do."

"And he is doing it now?"

"I think it might be a reward..."

"A reward? For what?"

"Us doin' the behaviour he wanted us to do. Maybe we ain't the only ones tryin' to train someone to do something."

"But that would mean..."

"You been missin' me on one end of the ship. I been missin' you on the other. Finally start gettin' cuddly and the crescent wrench shows up..."

"He thinks he is the one training us."

"Startin' to think that, yeah."

"Insufferable."

"That's your worm!"

"He is as much your worm as he is mine. Ugh. He's not even a worm!"

"I know you're mad but can I kiss you? You're so cute right now."

"Did you teach this to him?"

"Nope. I'm startin' to think he's a lot smarter than he's been lettin' on. But c'mere Moonlight. Come on. Clearly he likes it when we're happy. Let's be happy for a bit, huh? It's good for the worm."

"Tsch!"

"Good for us too. Come on. Let's go cuddle."

"This is ridiculous but… Yes. I do very much wish to. Your touch is soothing and I have missed it…"

"Maybe we work some more breaks into our work routine, huh? This is nice."

"It is. Very much so."

Chapter Text

Eris has two eyes but she can barely see. She is cold. So cold. She is bleeding.

She moves slowly, quiet, the weight of the Darkness is suffocating, pressing down on her. Her limbs are heavy. It is difficult to breathe.

Before her is a pit. Nearby she hears the swish of one of the spiked pendulums. The pit is alluring. All she would need to do is fall down. An end to pain. Shadows on the other side of the pit shift, crawling, hunting her. She stills her breathing and pulls out her knife. She still has some bullets but the sound will call more. Shadows, endless shadows, hundreds upon hundreds of Thralls, Cursed Thralls, Shadows of Thralls. So many. They are everywhere.

Eris shivers in the cold. She is so tired. So weak.

A long scream echoes through the abyss.

Omar again.

The Thralls seem to swell at the sound, hissing softly to each other. They scuttle off in another direction, away from Eris Morn.

Eris does not react to the scream beyond gripping the rough stone she is pressed against even more tightly. Omar's light is being flayed from him along with his flesh: slowly.

Eris does not know how long it has been that he has been intermittently screaming. But she knows it has been days.

And with a guilt that feels like a pit in her chest blacker than the one at her feet, she is aware that his screams have drawn them off of her several times now.

He was so afraid to come with them. He was convinced he would die. This is so much worse.

Eris is trying to retrace their steps back, to find the way out. She has come to the Abyss several times now. The weight of it makes traversing it near impossible, especially without the Chalices of Light that Toland had instructed them to use. Eris does not trust them now and even if she could find one, they attract too much attention. For five to hold off the hordes, after they lost Vell, was almost too much. On her own she must find another way.

Eris moves cautiously along what she thinks is a path. She no longer assumes it is the path they followed. She cannot stay here. She needs to get out before she is crushed by the pervading weight of the Abyss.

There is a sound of air. A sense of a heavy object approaching.

Shit.

Eris flings herself to the side.

The spikes from the massive pendulum only graze her. They tear long gouges across her back.

Eris grunts in pain and lies still a moment, face down, the chill of the Darkness seeping into her through her new wounds. She feels it pressing, like fingers, into the new injury. Twisting.

So cold.

So heavy.

She almost loses consciousness from the weight and the exhaustion and the pain but if she lies here much longer, she will be crushed.

Omar screams again. Eris retches, her stomach long empty. Dirt grinds into her mouth and nose. She must get up. She cannot lie down and die. She cannot.

Eris rolls on to her side and pulls her knees up, rolling on to them so she can stagger to her feet. She cannot linger.

There is a door in the cliff face to her right, dimly outlined in Soulfire.

She does not remember it. She does not think it is the way back. But perhaps it will provide some respite from the crushing weight of the Abyss.

She stumbles toward it and looses her balance, her left foot landing on air. No!

Another pit.

Eris' arms fly out and she tries to shift her weight to the side. Her knife digs deep between the cobbled stones and holds.

And then she is dangling, clutching her knife with both hands as her feet try to find purchase on the slick walls of the pit.

It will not end like this. She will not allow it.

Eris shifts her hips from side to side, swinging her legs. One heel hooks on the crumbling lip of the hole. She grinds her foot into any traction she can find, pulling herself up. Her knife almost comes loose before she succeeds but she makes it.

More careful now, Eris inches around the circular lip of the pit, approaching the Soulfire door from the side. The runes are different from the others. She does not know them.

Toland's journal would enable her to unlock the secret with his notes on the different vile sigils, but she cannot risk the attention that illuminating the pages would bring.

Eris tries one combination and then another. The runes remain lit with Soulfire when correct. All extinguish when the guess is wrong.

She is becoming dizzy from the pressure on her lungs as she tries different combinations, her body becoming more and more brittle with the weight of the Darkness. She is so cold. Her field of vision is shrinking.

She has learned two of the symbols correctly but the third… There.

The door slides open and Eris stumbles through into a hallway that seems bright in comparison to the Abyss behind her. As she steps through the threshold the weight lifts slightly and Eris falls forward into a heap, dragging herself into an alcove.

The door slides closed behind her.

Omar screams again. Fainter now through the door.

Eris the last. Eris the lost. Eris is all that remains.

Softly as the weight of the Darkness lessens and her lungs are able to properly fill themselves again Eris begins to sob. She has lost much blood. Her lungs can now expand enough to be able to cough.

A low laugh slithers through the hall at the sound. She is not alone.

Her brief indulgence of sorrow has betrayed her as surely as Toland betrayed them all.

Eris readies herself, one of Sai's knives in one hand, Eriana's hand cannon in the other.

She will wait until it approaches closer and strike.

Yet, shivering, blood steadily seeping from so many wounds, nothing approaches.

Somehow Eris is even more cold, so cold, she is shivering. It is, something in the back of her head tells her, most likely shock from blood loss. She unused to it. Unused to being injured for so long. Unused to the loneliness of being without her Ghost.

But no, it is not only that. The song begins pricking at the edges of her awareness, rhythmic, whispering.

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

No. Not here! Not now! She is too weak. Eris' throat aches as she tries to swallow.

It does not need to show itself. It can simply sing and the sound will find her.

No.

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

Eris darts out from her corner, snarling. She must find it and silence it or she will die. She must kill the Deathsinger before it can complete its song.

Eris searches. It must be near. It knows she is here.

But it also knows that if Eris does not find it in time, all it need do is sing.

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

"No! Sai…Omar…Vell…Eriana!"

Eris tries to drown it out so she can think, she needs to find it.

"Eir…"

"SAI!"

"Ur…"

"OMAR!"

"Xol…"

"VELL!"

"Yul…"

"ERIANA!"

Eris screams out their names, clinging to them, demanding her mind overlay them on top of the Deathsong. She will NOT let it in.

She is warmer now. But the Deathsong… the Deathsong is here… and she cannot find the singer…

And another voice has joined… singing a different song… Eris does not understand what is going on… but it is a human voice. How? Her fireteam is dead and dying. Who is singing counter to the Deathsong with her?

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

"Sai…Omar…Vell…Eriana!"

"…only thing a gambler needs…"

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

"Sai…Omar…Vell…Eriana!"

"…suitcase and a trunk…"

Eris is going mad but it is a madness she embraces because anything that is not the Deathsong is strength for her in this moment. She does not know the song. She runs through the corridor, searching for the Deathsinger to kill it or the singer of the third song, because any human voice in the Hellmouth is something counter to the Hive.

"Eir… Ur… Xol… Yul…"

"No!" Eris croaks, her throat ragged. "Sai…Omar…Vell…Eriana!"

"…And the only time he'll be satisfied… Is when he's all a drunk."

A hand is rubbing her back in circles.

Eris turns sharply and there is a splashing sound. She is on her knees. Her legs tangled in something. No. Someone. The liquid is very warm. Is she in a pool of her own blood?

"Oh, mother, tell your children… not to do what I have done…"

The voice is low and rumbling. She feels it in the liquid. She feels the vibrations against her cheek. The hand is rubbing circles in her back and… and…

"Omar?" Eris calls out to the only other living human in the Hellmouth. "Omar is that you?"

"I'm sorry, darlin'. He's dead. But you're ok now. You're safe."

What is… what is going on?

Eris can't see. No. She can see. But she is also blind. Her sight is wrong. It's wrong.

"Eriana!" Eris cries out.

"Easy now," the rumbling voice says. The hands being gentle with her are soothing. Eris does not understand. "I gotcha. I gotcha. Eriana's gone, but I'm here, lover. You're safe."

"Gone," Eris sobs. "Eriana's gone. I watched her die."

"I know. I'm sorry but I'm here." The warm liquid splashes as Eris thrashes, unable to see properly. The sound of the water is different. Why is there water? Is it water?

"They're all gone," Eris whispers, still trying to understand what is physically going on. Still struggling to see with human eyes that do not respond. Still overwhelmed with sight that is alien and strange. "They're all dead!"

"They are, but I'm here," the voice says.

Is the Deathsinger gone? Its song has faded.

"I loved them," Eris croaks. "I loved them and they're gone. They're all gone."

"Easy now, I gotcha."

Eris has three eyes. She blinks them in the darkness. They glow with the malachite of the Hive. Her alien vision serves her even though her human vision is no more.

"I gotcha." He repeats. She both feels it and hears it.

"Drifter?" She asks, still blinking. Still straddling two worlds. One foot in the Hellmouth. The other foot in the now.

"Hey, Moonlight." Controlled. Gentle. "You back?"

Omar screams again but it is faint. Eris flinches and more water splashes.

"What is happening?" Lit candles come into focus. The surface of the water glints in the light of her three glowing eyes.

"We're ok. You're safe." Drifter's voice is an anchor. She realizes it is his body she is entangled with. His hand is making circles on her back.

"I am… disoriented," Eris says. The Hellmouth is fading, fading. "Where are we?" she asks him.

"We're in your flat."

"My flat?"

"You were asleep and having a bad time."

"What is this?" Eris pushes hard against the hard slippery sides of what is containing them. Water sloshes.

"We're in your bathtub."

"My bathtub," she whispers. "Why?" she asks him. "Why are we in… my bathtub?"

"You were real out of it and yellin' and kept sayin how cold you were. Talkin' wasn't gettin through so I figured maybe a temperature change might help. This was the best I could think of."

"In our… clothes?"

"It's just sleep clothes. We got more. They're just wet. It's fine."

Still dizzy and confused, Eris sits up from him and looks around. Several candles have been knocked over. A shelf with books and towels has been toppled. The floor glistens.

"There is water everywhere," she says, trying to make sense of the situation.

"We splashed a bit. I'll clean it up, don't worry. It's just water." His voice is so gentle, filled with worry. "Want me to clean it up now?" He leans forward to stand up.

"No!" Eris cannot keep the panic from her voice at the thought of being separated from him right now. "Stay. Do not go. I cannot lose you again."

Drifter looks at her and reaches out a hand under the water, rubbing her arm. "I'm right here," he says. "I'm not goin' nowhere. You ain't lost me."

Eris looks at him, trembling. Her wet tshirt clinging to her. Her paracausal tears dripping slowly into the bathwater. She hears a distant hiss and flinches, scanning the bathroom for Hive.

"It's fine," the Drifter continues. "We're fine. I'm alive. You're alive. We're good. I know it was bad but you're not there no more. It's a nightmare. You're all right."

Eris blinks, clarity breaking through the fog in her mind, remembering previous nightmares, concern washing over her. Guilt.

"Did I hurt you?"

"No." His voice is assertive and firm. He keeps his hands rubbing her arms, soothing. He looks exhausted.

"I am grateful for that, at least. What has happened?"

"You were more out of it than you normally are. You weren't even tryin' to kill me - although if you had that'd be ok."

Eris shudders violently. "It would not be ok," she insists.

"But it didn't happen. We're fine. We're safe. Everything's ok right now."

"There is nowhere safe," Eris intones, her voice hollow.

The Drifter gives her a wry smile. "You sound more and more like me every day. Sometimes I worry I'm makin' it worse hangin' around you so much."

"No!" She grips his shoulders with both hands. "No you are not. Do not go."

He leans forward and pulls her close. "Not goin' nowhere. I'm right here."

Eris leans against him and rests her cheek on his shoulder. "I do not want to be alone right now," her voice trembles. "I have been alone for so long. Please do not leave."

"I ain't leavin'. I gotcha." He resumes rubbing circles in the wet cloth on her back as he talks. "We're a fireteam now, remember? We stick together. Watch each other's backs. Keep each other safe. We're not alone no more. Not you. Not me. We got each other now. As long as we got each other we'll be ok. That's how that works. Two peas in a pod, Moondust. I'm yours forever. Whether you fuck me or not… Whether you're pissed at me or not… Whether you're the one that needs help… Or me… Or both of us… Or neither." He kissed the top of her head before he continued. "More than lovers. More than friends. More than anything. I gotcha. I ain't what you lost, but I am what you have. And it' ain't much, but I'm yours."

Eris shudders in his arms and gripps him tightly as he continues, letting his words ground her to reality.

"You got a fireteam again," he said. "It's not the same one and it sure as hell ain't an upgrade, but we're good for each other. We help each other out. We're not alone no more."

Eris nods and a small sob escapes her lips. "I miss them," she says, her voice cracking. "I wish… I wish they could have known you as I do now. I wish we could have all been together at the same time. It hurts so much that they are gone." Her voice shrinks into a harsh whisper. "I will never be whole."

Drifter breathes out sharply at her words, feeling something inside his chest clench hard. Tears begin to flow quietly from his eyes. "Me neither, sister. Me neither."

They stay this way, holding each other, for a few long moments. Eris pulls gently away and takes his hands in hers.

"I am attempting to… compose myself but… it is still so vivid."

"That's fine. You don't have to. Just sit and soak in the tub with me an' when you're ready we'll get out together and… and go get some tea." He cups her cheek in his hand, letting her black tears trickle along and between his fingers.

This is abnormal for me." Eris states flatly.

Drifter shrugs, still crying. "Yeah, well, shit happens. And you an me? We seen a lot of shit. Sometimes it just… hits real hard all at once and there's nothin' you can do."

Eris reaches up and wipes away some of his tears. "I have frightened you."

He shrugs again, licking his lips, letting his hand slid down her neck to her shoulder, to just above her elbow where his thumb can rub back and forth across her arm. "Combination of fear and… needing to help you… not bein' sure how."

"You were singing."

"Sorry," he smirked. "I knew what you were hearin', based on what you were sayin' and I figured maybe a different song would help. Probably was not the best to listen to but…"

"No. It helped… but… what was the song?"

"It's a bar song… Not as in about a bar… Just… people play it and sing it in bars a lot for some reason. Very old. I uh… didn't have much time to come up with a set list." He gave her a gentle smile. "Just sang the first thing that came into my head and that was all I could think of."

Eris leans against him. He leans back against the bathtub. He cups some water in his hand and slides it up to warm her back.

"Will you sing it again?" she asks, her ear against his chest.

"Thought you hated my singin'."

"No." She swallows before continuing. "No I do not. Please. Brya… Brya used to sing to me. You sound nothing like her but… the sentiment is the same. Please sing. Please."

"Of course, Moonlight. Whatever you want."

Eris feels his voice in his chest almost more than she hears it. And as he continues, it is as though his song is bringing the real world more into focus, sharpening her alien eyesight, grounding her and anchoring her in the now.

"There is a house in New Orleans… they call the rising sun… and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy… and god I know I'm one."

"What is New Orleans?"

"I don't really know… place probably…"

"It almost sounds French."

"Yeah but it ain't a very French sounding song."

"No it is not. Is there more to the song?"

"Yeah."

Eris watches as the water in the bathtub ripples from the vibrations that come from his chest. She lets the heat of the water infuse into her and, as he continues, her muscles begin to relax.

"My mother was a tailor… She sewed my new blue jeans… My father was a gamblin' man… Down in New Orleans…"

Chapter Text

Deputy Commander Sloane sat on the edge of the rooftop, her Taken-infested legs dangling over the edge, sipping clear alcohol from a bottle. Below her the Last City, decked out in lights and pageantry for the Festival of the Lost was reduced to pinpoints of coloured lights and blurred shapes. It was one of the highest points in the Tower, completely abandoned. No one ever came here, which was why Sloane was here now. To sit with her thoughts and be alone.

Memories washed over her, voices crying out in panic through static, the sound of crystals shattering. Guilt and duty. Duty and guilt. Names, faces, voices, gone.

"Hey," a strange low, slightly mechanical voice broke through her pensive concentration. "Are you all right?"

Sloane blinked, confused. Who in the hell would be up here? She turned to look.

Two hunters, both in different types of Gambit gear. One glittering with a tacky Gambit Emerald shader, the other nearly invisible against the night sky with all her armour covered in Superblack.

"I'm fine, guardians," she told them. "Please continue on your way."

They did the opposite.

"You don't look fine," the same voice continued with a measure of snark Sloane only tolerated from a handful of people, unknown guardians not being among them.

She could, in theory, write them up for insubordination, but then she'd have to fill out paperwork explaining why she was up here in the first place, and quite frankly written reprimands were not Deputy Commander Sloane's style.

"I'm off duty, guardians," she growled, not hiding the irritation in her voice like she normally would. It was the sort of tone that scared the piss out of new lights. "Please respect that and leave." She took another swallow from the bottle.

"Now, I don't wanna blow our cover but this is extenuatin' circumstances, Thunderguns, and I don't think I can do that."

The fuck?

Sloane turned her body sideways, bringing her knee up on to the rooftop to do so, and turned to give a long hard look at the two hunters behind her.

She briefly engaged her HUD. It identified them as "Teeth" and "Claws." They had no records beyond that.

The one in tacky green pulled off his helmet and the Drifter's face smiled at her with his irreverent grin.

'Claws' stood stiffly beside him. Still wearing her opaque helmet, the other hunter lifted her chin defiantly with a little head tilt that was unmistakable.

"The fuck are you two doing?" Sloane asked.

"You first," Drifter smirked.

"No," Sloane replied.

The Drifter made a face. Behind him, Eris Morn removed her Poison Promise helmet and walked around him, toward Sloane, her three green eyes glowing brightly in the darkness of the rooftop.

"It is the Festival of the Lost," Eris explained. "Guardians have been running around the Tower, and everywhere else, wearing, among other idiotic things, crude effigies of our faces." She gestured to the man beside her. "The Drifter insists it is only fair that we masquerade ourselves in return. That this is in the spirit of… Trick or Treat."

In spite of her morose mood, Sloane let out a hoarse laugh and shook her head.

"See?" Drifter turned to Eris and jerked his thumb back toward Sloane. "Even she thinks it's funny."

"Tsch," Eris waved him off and approached Sloane. "Commander… why are you here?"

Sloane gave Eris a long hard stare before giving her answer. "Remembering the dead."

The Drifter walked closer and gave an exaggerated lean over to the side to look at the bottle in Sloane's other hand before leaning back and continuing. "Seems like a strange place for a memorial. Even stranger that you're doin' it while drinkin' alone."

Sloane snorted. "You're one to talk."

Drifter nodded. "That's fair, but uh…" He pointed gently at the bottle. "You're the one that's always told me not to do that."

"Yeah well," Sloane turned away and resumed letting both legs dangle over the edge of the roof. "Maybe I decided to take a page from your book for once."

Behind her, Eris and Drifter shared a look. He raised one eyebrow, looked to Sloane and then back to Eris. Eris nodded.

Drifter shrugged, walked to the edge of the roof, and sat down next to Sloane, letting his own feet dangle down off the edge only a foot or so away from hers.

"Good thing I packed extra," he said as Sloane gave him a confused look. Then her face became even more confused as Eris sat on the other side of her, allowing her own feet to also dangle off the edge of the roof.

"You can always prepare more later," the three-eyed witch intoned.

"The hell are you two doing?" Sloane growled.

"Havin' dinner with a friend," Drifter said. "Who're we remembering?"

"That's weird, I don't recall inviting either of you."

"Grief is not lessened when it is shared, but it does become more bearable, if only for a little while. Let us join you for a small respite, Commander, and then we will depart."

Sloane turned to glare at Eris. "Why?"

"Well, that's what friends do, ain't it?" Drifter asked.

Deputy Commander Sloane turned her head with a snarl on her lips, ready to put the Drifter on blast. He smirked at her and held out a sandwich.

Sloane clenched her fists. The Drifter's face was suddenly overlaid with the face of Drifter in the past. Eyes with no sparkle, blood running from his nose across his mustache, over his lips, into his beard from her punch, just before he left. A face with no hope. A man who had lost everything and had no reason to keep going.

Sloane turned away from the memory and looked back at Eris, whose three Hive eyes were now proudly on display. Revulsion curled in Sloane's stomach at the thought of Hive eyes sitting next to her on this, of all nights. And then Eris blinked. Her human eyelids with their human eyelashes briefly covered and then revealed the three green orbs. Sloane's focus shifted to the scarring around the eyes, the memory of Drifter recounting for her how Eris had slit Savathun's throat with her sword, avenging her fireteam and all the others the Witch Queen had killed.

Eris was not the enemy and neither was he.

Sloane looked back to the Drifter. He was still holding out the sandwich. The white bread glowed faintly green from Eris' eyes. Briefly unable to think of a response, Sloane took the sandwich from him. He leaned over and handed a similar triangle of white bread with filling to Eris.

"What is it?" Sloane asked.

"Chicken curry salad. It's chicken and curry, but mixed in with cream cheese. It's real nice. The curry gives it a bite but the cream cheese mellows it out. Give it a try. You'll like it. Trust."

Sloane watched Eris bite into her own sandwich eagerly before shaking her head and sniffing the triangular offering in her hands. It did smell like pretty good curry. The Deputy Commander took a bite and let it roll around on her tongue. The flavour was warm with spice but creamy and the texture was surprisingly pleasant. She finished chewing and swallowing her first bite, looking back at the Drifter and telling him, "It's better than I thought it would be."

"Told ya!" He winked and bit into his own triangular sandwich.

They sat in silence, eating, and then as Sloane finished, the silence felt awkward and she suddently wanted to fill it.

"It was a failed mission in the Arcology," she began. "Well before Titan was taken, before Ahsa. I'd gotten reports of a Hive ritual so I followed routine operations and sent several fireteams. They didn't come back and I… I followed protocol and sent more. And then when they all went dark we called in the guardian."

Eris reached out her hand and placed it gently on Commander Sloane's wrist.

Sloane stared at the black-gloved hand for a moment, surprised, somewhat weirded out. Eris didn't touch people - well, except for Drifter - and she certainly didn't touch Sloane. Sloane looked up to Eris' face to see the three-eyed woman's frown drawn into a tight line in her face.

"Savathun," Eris intoned.

Sloane nodded and Eris withdrew her hand.

"I remember that," Drifter said from the other side of Sloane. "Taeko-3 right? Praxic Warlock?"

"Yeah." The fact that both Eris and Drifter knew and understood who and what Sloane was talking about was comforting. She wasn't the only one who remembered. They were gone, but not forgotten. "She was cocky," Sloane continued. "Her whole team was cocky. Went down as a squad of nine."

"I am familiar," Eris said. "They were picked off one by one. Taeko-3 was the only one who remained when she was found by the guardian… but it was not soon enough."

"Harvesting guardians," the Drifter's gravelly voice came from the other side of Sloane as she looked down onto the city lights. "Bitch queen special. Turn 'em into Void crystals."

"Yeah," Sloane confirmed.

"She has taken so much from us all," Eris said, her voice holding a faint twinge of anger.

"Heh. Taken." The Drifter laughed and pointed at the black tendrils enveloping Commander Sloane's legs.

Both women glared at him. He looked up to meet their eyes and the smirk fell off his face.

"Sorry," he mumbled, looking away.

Eris sighed deeply.

"Want another sandwich?" The Drifter made his peace offering gently, holding the triangle of bread and filling in front of Sloane.

The Commander realized her mouth was salivating. "Yeah actually. I hadn't really thought about it but I… I don't think I ate today."

The Drifter pulled out a small square cloth, placed it on the ground next to Sloane and piled three more sandwiches onto it.

"Are you giving me your whole lunch?"

"Nope." He handed Eris a sandwich and began to eat another.

Once more the three of them looked down at the city between dangling legs, chewing in silence.

"What were you two intending on doing for your Trick or Treat anyway?" Sloane asked.

"Huntin' Headless Ones!" the Drifter exclaimed with his mouth full.

Sloane shook her head. "Seriously?"

Eris sighed again beside her. "The Drifter insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are real and that he can show me one."

"There is too evidence!" he said, his beard full of crumbs. "I seen 'em with the guardian! And Glint! And Ghost! Eido's seen 'em! They exist!"

"And you two are going to what… run a Haunted Lost Sector yourselves and try to find one?" Sloane asked.

"That's the plan, yeah. Can't be that hard. Guardians whip through 'em real fast all the time. And if it gets too hairy we'll bug out through one of her portals." He gestured to Eris with the last corner of his sandwich before popping it into his mouth.

"Ok but what the hell are you two doing up here then?" Sloane asked.

"Aaaahhh.."

There it was. Sloane knew it well. The telltale sound of the Drifter being evasive and about to spew some bullshit.

On the other side of Sloane Eris leaned forward and glared at him. She knew that sound well too. "Sloane has entrusted you with her grief, and you wish to keep this from her?"

Drifter shifted and tried to backpeddle. "It's more that what she don't know, she don't have to tell nobody about."

It was Sloane's turn to sigh. "All right," the Titan braced herself for what she was about to hear. "What is it?"

"Tell her," Eris commanded.

In front of Sloane, the Drifter bit his lip. Sloane had to admit, when Eris was compelling him to behave himself, it was pretty fun watching Drifter squirm.

"Ok so… I may have a… highly unauthorized… fairly illegal and well hidden transmat zone on this rooftop… that we were gonna use to get in and out without bein' noticed."

Sloanes eyes widened.

"I don't do nothin' terrible with it, mind you," he continued. "It's just… really useful for gettin' in and out when you don't want anyone to see. It's keyed to my ship and my ship only, and it has better encryption and security than the Vanguard ones. Trust."

Sloane shook her head. "Zavala's been trying to figure out how you've been able to smuggle so much contraband into the city for years."

"What? I don't use that for smuggling!" He actually looked offended. "That's way too easy to be caught. If I was smuggling things into the tower - which by the way I completely deny - I would be doin' it in a far more elegant and effective manner than a transmat pad on a rooftop. That's just sloppy, not to mention, painfully easy to track anything that isn't just guardians and their gear." He folded his arms with an indignant look on his face. "Drifter's got standards."

Sloane snorted and stood up with a groan. "All right," she said gruffly but with warmth in her voice. "Where are we going?"

"We?" the Drifter half choked in surprise.

"You are going to accompany us?" Eris asked.

"You're planning on running Lost Sectors undercover with no backup. Someone's got to be the adult in the room. Besides… I think Taeko-3 would find me coating my sword in Hive guts to be a fitting memorial."

Eris smiled a cruel smile as she stood. "I will also be bringing a sword." She turned her three-eyed gaze down to the Drifter.

"Now hold up," he raised both his hands, palm up, at the two women standing above him. "You're making it sound like I should be bringin' a sword too. You know I don't do that shit." He pointed at Eris. "That's your department."

"Of course," Eris said as she gestured to Sloane. "If you feel incapable and are afraid of demonstrating your ineptitude we shall protect you."

Sloane snorted again.

"Dammit!" The Drifter stood as well, brushing breadcrumbs out of his beard and the rest of his outfit. "Fine. I do have a copy of Chivalric Fire."

"Hmmm…." Eris made a dismissive hum.

"There was a Gambit ornament for it!" he continued to justify. "Doesn't happen often that they even remember Gambit exists. Of course I kept one."

Sloane followed them as they bickered.

That's what friends do, ain't it? The Drifter's statement from earlier bounced around her head.

Yes, Sloane supposed as she went with them, feeling weirdly protective of two people she had not in the past felt protective toward at all, that is what friends do.

Chapter Text

It is our third day in orbit around Callisto and while our investigations have been somewhat disappointing in their lack of results, the time spent together on the mission has been pleasant.

While my rooms on the Derelict and the ritual area cleared for me in the cargo bay are sufficient for my needs, we have both have a tendency to become absorbed in our work, which, in turn, has led to periods of extended isolation in different corners of the ship in the past, resulting in a feeling of solitude despite being ostensibly in close physical proximity.

We are thus trying out an experimental variation in our workspaces.

The Drifter has cleared out a corner of his workshop for my use and created a makeshift study area for me out of shipping crates and several larger pieces of salvaged scrap metal. I have a reasonably comfortable chair, room for several books, candles, and reference materials along with pen, ink, and smaller ritual objects, and a compact surface upon which to enact minor arcane invocations.

This enables us to work together in the same room. The Drifter is currently engaged in performing an upgrade on our tracking sensors in the hopes of widening the range through which our investigations are being conducted. He is convinced that the signal we were tracking may still be emitting at a different frequency. I have meanwhile been charting the positions through which the signal has moved through the Astral plane. It is our hope that when his work is complete, we will be able to use his technology in conjunction with Hive magic to triangulate an origin. However the success or failure of this endeavor remains to be seen.

The new arrangement in our workspace has aspects which are both beneficial and detrimental to our individual productivity. I find myself pausing often to watch my companion. He has been very careful to avoid making too much noise, knowing how much I prefer silence. However the mechanical nature of his work naturally produces various clangs and bangs and revving of engines and other various and sundry sounds. I initially thought perhaps some music might help to even out the auditory landscape and make the noise less disruptive.

However, over time I have found myself welcoming the interruptions. I tend toward irritation when my focus is impeded but the sound also contributes greatly to the sense of his presence near me, something I find comforting and uniquely pleasant. I will also admit, it is not simply auditory distractions which pull me away from my studies.

The Drifter's upper body is currently half-swallowed in machinery. Moments ago I witnessed his hand feeling about near his waist for a wrench he had placed on the ground. He was mistaken regarding its location. The vile magics of the Hive have done so much evil in the world. It does give me a small amount of pleasure to have used that power to levitate the tool he was seeking and place it near his hand. A waste, perhaps, of the tithes which fed my Hive morph and enabled my ascension to godhood, but at the same time, it feels cathartic and emotionally healthy to occasionally repurpose the genocidal horrors of the Hive for such mundane and supportive ends.

It also pleases me to see that Trust is not wedged into his pants. The hand cannon is still nearby. The Drifter's peculiarities do not generally permit him to be separated from a weapon for long without unease. It sits on his toolbox, close, but not immediately within reach. I suspect the warding I have placed upon the Derelict and my instruction to him regarding not just the wards' positioning, but in being able to monitor them himself have eased his mind somewhat.

The Drifter has proven to be an apt pupil for some of the more minor and practical applications of Hive magic. His own innate sense of how things function based upon a combination of experiments and his time as a Dredgen in, as he puts it, "the evil cult of evil," has been of great benefit to him. However, he does still struggle with the necessary invocation of will and the instantiation of desire. These are not impediments based upon competency, however, but his own mental reluctance to impose his will upon spaces external to himself.

Still, his aid has been invaluable, in particular in the area of schematics, diagrams, and practical notes for implementing ritual magic. His mind is especially keen for spatial representation and mathematical manipulation and I have found myself preferring his diagrams of multiple subjects and conceptual workings even to my own. He has assisted me in creating reference materials for several writing projects which have been much improved by his contributions. The benefits of his collaborations with me are numerous, but I will admit sometimes I find myself overwhelmed with distracting feelings of attraction whenever he demonstrates especial cleverness or particularly keen insights during our research.

As the Drifter has put it, I find "smart" to be "hot."

He told me himself that as soon as he realized my proclivities he began seeking opportunities to demonstrate his intelligence. The fact that he knows this makes him more desirable to me makes him all the more insufferable. There have been instances when we are working and become greatly derailed due to him demonstrating cleverness, noting my reaction to it, and then manipulating my responsiveness to for his own, non-mission-focused ends.

I also find myself not minding these derailments in focus as much as I would have in the past. It is not that there is no urgency to our work, but the Drifter's hedonism is not unwelcome and the small losses of productivity come with increased mental and emotional well-being, a sense of life, comfort, and delight in our sometimes ill timed and not always appropriate joint pursuit of joy.

Fond memories of his lavishing physical affection upon me often bubble to the surface when I am mentally interrupted from my work by sounds from something he is doing. It is not the sound of an engine or of metal impacting metal which evokes these thoughts (although I do find that his occasional verbalizations, grunts or sounds of physical exertion as he works, have a tendency to conjure up my memories other situations where he and I have been… physically exerting ourselves… and this, too, can be a not-unwelcome distraction for my mind), but even now, as I write here at the table he has cobbled together for my use so that we might be near each other as we work, I find my stolen eyes stray to the parts of him that are visible to me (in this particular case his waist, legs, lower arms and hands) and I feel a surge from within myself that can only be accurately described as... lust.

Human eyes would look upon him, half-devoured as he is by the machinery his working on, and it would be difficult to find much about him that is attractive. His arms, perhaps. The way his fingers manipulate his tools with a dexterity that has… considerable practical and sensual uses. He has one knee bent and the other extended, and he is currently clearly attempting to loosen something deep within the bowels of the machine that is slightly to one side because his torso is at an angle compared to his lower body.

But my eyes see his innate Light and the Darkness which swirls around him. It is not that I do not see his clothing, but it obfuscates considerably less than it would to human eyesight. I perceive his blood flow, the heat dissipating from him, the flatness of his buttocks against the metal floor, the curve of his hips. I find myself desiring to place my hands and mouth upon him in places not normally used for human eroticism. The back of his extended knee. The sole of his foot. The alluring curve of his waist.

A particularly distracting thought at the moment is my intense desire to bite him. Not so hard as to inflict pain, but enough to startle and get his attention. I wish to restrain him and bite him mercilessly as he yelps and squirms in torment. He is so deliciously pliable with me when he wants to be, and so intensely defiant when he thinks it will frustrate me in ways that will increase my desire to insist upon his compliance. I often find myself thinking of ways to frustrate him in return.

His current positioning within the machine he is upgrading is such that I could, if I chose, sit upon him, hold him in place, and bite him relentlessly until he begs for mercy. He would protest, of course. Colourfully.

I shall not do this, of course. I do not wish to disrupt his work with either injury from flailing under the mechanism nor do I want to put him in a position where he might end up breaking (and then having to repair) the contraption due to my licentious desires.

What an odd thing to realize about oneself after so long thinking that the term licentious would not ever apply. My beloved rogue would insist he his wearing off on me, pulling me down to his level. Yet, I do not feel debased by the allure of our physical relationship, even when thoughts of what I might like to do to him intrude upon my work.

No. This is… good. It is fun. I am overwhelmed with a sense of playfulness, of whimsy.

Joy.

Until recently, the thought of myself being distracted from my work by thoughts of pursuing sensual delights with my companion would have been strange to me. But then, so too was the idea that I would feel so fully alive, content, and fulfilled.

And so, despite its inconveniences and tendency to encourage and enable distraction, I do appreciate this new variation in our workspace configuration a great deal. It is a welcome improvement. An upgrade.

And, I will admit, as the Drifter would put it, I find myself… admiring the view.

Chapter Text

"Hey Moondust! I wrote a poem!"

There once was a guardian named Rex
Got romantically involved with a Vex
Went in Vault of Glass
Seeking hot Wyvern ass
Now he's stuck having infinite sex

Chapter Text

Surrounded by swirls of green Soulfire and glittering Hive runes hovering in the air around them, the Drifter stood in front of Eris Morn in the ritual circle they had constructed together in the cargo bay of the Derelict. The Drifter's eyes were closed and he was concentrating, his arms out to his sides, palms facing down. Eris, close behind him, held the palms of her hands under his, guiding his hands to shift the magical essences around them both.

"Now," Eris intoned. "Command the forces to obey your will. Compel them."

The Drifter frowned and bit his lip. He took a breath and knit his brows together but, almost immediately, he shook his head.

"Hey um… Maybe we should take a break."

"Hmmm…" Eris stepped back from him and dispelled the swirling occult essences around them with a wave of her hands.

The Drifter heaved a sigh of relief and opened his eyes.

"You do not wish to enforce your will," Eris said as she walked around to look at his face.

The Drifter shrugged. "Don't feel right. I just. I don't like it."

"You don't like it," Eris repeated back.

"Yeah. It just… It feels really… wrong."

"Hmmm…" Eris stared at him, contemplative for a moment, and then reached out her hand. He took it and she led him out of the ritual space toward the kitchen. "How do you control your Taken if you do not enforce your will?" she asked as they reached the door to the main hall running down the middle of the ship.

"I don't really," he explained. "It's more like redirectin' a river than ordering it around."

"Manipulation, rather than outright control." Eris summarized.

"Yeah. They wanna kill something. I give em something to kill. Want a grilled cheese sandwich? I could really go for a good grilled cheese right now."

"I was not hungry until you mentioned grilled cheese, but now I desire one, yes. How do you convince the Taken you are redirecting to kill something not to kill you?"

"I mean… Mostly I don't. I just kill em first. But uh, there's been some times where I needed to get 'em to do things and it's less of a controlling 'em to do what I want and gettin' em' to believe it's what they wanna do. Sorta I guess… projecting that so they want it too. It's uh… well it's… I mean… in sexual terms it'd be uh… topping from the bottom." He gave her a shy nervous smile and a wink as he opened another large metal door for her to step through.

"Tsch. Your personal proclivities aside, I am curious regarding the mechanics involved."

"Well it's all about the Motes really."

"Explain."

They stopped in a converted utility closet that the Drifter had deemed his 'pantry' and he pulled out a loaf of bread in a vacuum sealed package to hand it to her before they continued through the doorway into the ship's galley.

"Well uh… see using the Darkness Motes is kinda like throwing your voice."

"Throwing your voice," Eris repeated back as she followed him into the kitchen and stood beside him at the counter, still holding the bread.

"Yeah… like the voice trick with the puppets."

Eris tilted her head. "I do not know the voice trick with the puppets."

Drifter grinned at her and opened his mouth slightly.

"Like when you make a voice sound like it's comin' from somewhere else," his voice said from behind and to her left.

Eris turned to look, frowning, and then looked back at him, paying close attention to his lips.

"Also useful if you're in a firefight and need people to look in a direction that isn't you," his voice said from her right.

Eris turned sharply toward where his voice had seemed to come from and then regarded him carefully. He winked and smiled at her.

"Ventriloquism," she said softly.

"That's the word! Yeah."

"Your repertoire of parlour tricks continues to impress."

"Not only is it good for dealin' with drunks and children, it can also be pretty useful when you're tryin' not to get shot."

"Hmmm…" Eris looked him up and down appreciatively and he gave her his best come-hither grin. She handed him the loaf of bread. He immediately shifted his attention to it and began opening the package.

"But how is this relevant to your control of the Taken?" Eris asked as she pulled out two small plates from a nearby cupboard.

"So…" he began as he rummaged around in the fridge for butter and cheese. "When I use the Motes to get 'em to do something, they think it's coming from someone or somewhere that's not me. And it doesn't tell 'em what to do, it's tellin' 'em what they want and then they do it because they wanna but it's not… it's not a new order to them… when I do it (and it works, it doesn't always work, but… when it does work) they don't decide to do somethin'. For them it's what they were gonna do anyway."

He pulled a frying pan from a nearby cupboard, placed it on an element and turned on the heat before picking up individual slices of bread and buttering them thickly as he talked.

"Fascinating," Eris murmured as she continued to listen to him.

"Really, it's just… lying with extra steps."

"But how, precisely, and how do you use the Darkness Motes from your game, to do so?"

The Drifter made little stacks of pairs of buttered bread, butter-side in, on both their plates.

"So… when the guardians kill stuff in the game they make the Motes, and then I use the motes to kinda… open up a tiny hole and let some stuff out, but then when they kill that stuff… that makes more Motes.

"More than you used to summon and control them?"

He looked up and grinned at her again. "Now you're catchin' on."

"Hmmm…" Eris' hand darted in to the open stack of cheese the Drifter was pulling from and stole a slice. He laughed and offered her another. She accepted his gift and began to nibble on one corner of the first slice while holding the other one in her other hand.

"You know how with Stasis, Stranger taught us that we need to keep the emotions in check, but still have 'em… get that inner core of self and hold it so we don't lose who we are to what we're feelin' but we still feel… Acknowledging the Darkness as part of who we are."

"Yes," Eris said through a mouthful of cheese.

He opened up one of the butter sandwiches and placed both slices of bread butter-side down in the frying pan, then did so with a second pair of buttered slices. Then he laid two slices of cheese on top of each piece of bread, followed by a second layer of buttered bread, butter-side up.

"And how you were way better at it than me because you had the love and support of the people around you (till it was taken away when they all got ganked in the Hellmouth) and you have that resilience that, as you've pointed out, I uh… don't have."

"Yes, but, you also have developed such extreme self-reliance that in the face of overwhelming chaos," Eris gestured with a cheese slice. "Even when your very sanity is being fractured, you are driven to survive, as I have been, and… up until our mutual decision to become a fireteam, you rendered yourself through… extreme hardship… capable of enduring a level of loneliness and solitude that would drive most people mad with grief." Eris took another bit of cheese while looking at him lovingly.

He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled gently. "We're two sides of the same coin, really," he explained. "You survived because even in death, the love of your fireteam, and your love for them, kept you going… meanwhile I survived by not lovin' or bein' loved by anyone… well… till you."

He checked under each slice of bread. They were not brown yet.

"Precicely however… it was not until we found each other," Eris said, folding her second slice of cheese into quarters as she spoke. "That middle ground… your detachment teaching me distance from my emotions, and my attachment teaching you ways of rekindling yours… that we both became so much stronger and more capable of wielding Stasis safely, without giving in to its inherent corruption."

"Right. So, the Taken - and I don't pretend to be no expert here, this is just what I've figured out…"

"You are literally the expert on Taken in this system," Eris interrupted before popping a square of cheese into her mouth.

"I think that's you actually." The Drifter checked under one sandwich, found it sufficiently browned and began to flip each one over carefully, making sure the sandwiches did not come apart as he did so.

"I can command lesser Hive," Eris said. "I cannot command Taken. You can."

"You're the one that's taught the guardian how to kill Oryx…" Drifter said as he flipped the remaining sandwiches. "…the Taken King…"  He looked over his shoulder at her.  "Twice."

"Tsch."

"Look, we can go back and forth on this all night if you want but the point is, with Taken, when they get took, they have a choice. Most choose to survive, and in doing so, it seems like they lose their wills. But they ain't just mindless zombies."

"No." Eris finished her cheese. "They are not."

"And some do retain some, or all, of their wills… Even if we exclude Riven who is a uh… special case…" He gestured with the spatula.

"Indeed," Eris agreed.

"But others still have it partially… and that's not even gettin' into the crazy shit Sloane was able to pull off with Ahsa."

"Yes, of course."

"But the important thing is that there is a will there. It's just more collective… not like the Vex… but more like… a drop of water in the ocean." The Drifter leaned back against the counter as he talked. "And like the ocean it can be pulled on, like tides… or redirected, like a river… or built up until there's pressure and it's released."

"Interesting."

The Drifter checked the bottoms of his sandwiches before continuing. "And the thing about that last bit is that it doesn't need to be a lot to direct somethin under pressure when it's bein' released. Just like water in a container. If you make a hole, you can push what comes out with just a little manipulation, redirecting that stream. And you can't point it just anywhere. You only got a range of options, but there's a lot you can do in that range with just a little push."

"And the Motes provide… the push."

"Yeah, just like a fingertip over part of a hole." The Drifter walked over to the fridge, opened it, and pulled out a jar of pickles.

Eris sat up straighter on the other side of the counter. "So your control over the Taken is less of a command and more of a… suggestion?"

"Yeah, and it's not like I'm suggesting very forcefully, but they're already under so much pressure just with being Taken that a little bit of pressure, like on a lever with a fulcrum, a little bit goes a long way." He rummaged inside a drawer until he found a fork.

"There would still need to be truth there," Eris countered. "Power for them to sense, even if you are using ventriloquism and suggestion. How do you do this if you are eschewing the direct control of them with your will?"

"I um… well…" he paused to hold out a pickle to her on the end of the fork.

She took it.

"I fake it."

Eris' three eyes narrowed as she bit into the pickle. "How?"

"You know how you've always said I'm such a convincing liar because I don't just lie to everyone around me I literally lie to myself and make myself believe it?" he said as he speared and dragged out four more pickles from the jar to lie on the plates in front of him before sticking the fork into the jar and sliding the entire jar over to Eris.

"Yes." Eris caught the jar and continued to eat the pickle he had given her, savouring each bite.

"When you're scared enough and in a bad enough bind… at least, for me anyway… maybe it's because of all the practice from everything I had to do for all my lives? I dunno… It's literally like channeling fear into a lie and makin' 'em believe you're badder and meaner and have more will than they do." He went back to the sandwiches and flipped all four of them over again in the pan and turned off the heat.

"Add in throwin' the voice, so it's not comin' from me, it's comin' from someone else… and that it's a suggestion, something they just want, not an order they need to obey… with beings that have basically suppressed their wills, they don't question it because there is no them there to ask the question. The water drops don't ask what the fuck the wave is doin' - they are the wave."

He used the spatula to stack the sandwiches on top of each other, slid the flat end below the entire stack of sandwiches, then lifted them over onto a cutting board.

"Fascinating," Eris said as she used the fork to spear another pickle from within the liquid in the jar. "Your innate aversion to controlling others and desperate need to avoid being the centre of attention has resulted in you developing an immense ability to control entities by… not controlling them at all… suggesting to them things which they believe innately are simply what all other… droplets in the wave… are already performing."

"Yeah, which is why on the Dreadnaught with the Dire Taken, I couldn't do shit." He separated the sandwiches into two stacks of two sandwiches before using a large knife to slice them into triangles from one corner to the other across the bread. "Dire Taken, they aren't like that - they're more… directly controlled by… something… I still dunno what yet. It wasn't the Echo. Oryx didn't tell 'em to kill you. Something else did. Something that wanted you dead… and then you were dead."

He carefully put two sandwiches on each plate beside the pickles, separating them and twisting them so that they stood up along the long, cut edges of the bread, then brought both plates over to the steel table that was bolted to the floor.

Eris followed, pickle jar in hand, and sat across from him.

"I couldn't control 'em," he continued. "Couldn't redirect 'em, and couldn't shoot fast enough. I ain't ever been that low since Eaton. Screamin' for help. Worse than Eaton really, Eaton I was still in shock… so horrified at what was goin' on around me I didn't rightly know what was happening inside my own head… with you I knew… and I still couldn't save you." He looked at her across the table over the food, his eyes hollow.

Eris reached across the table and took his hand. "You did save me."

He squeezed her hand back. "That's not the same thing."

"You helped the guardian reforge Willbreaker. You conducted the ritual to free me. It was you who directed my beloved Acolyte in gathering the Tithes to conjure me forth from my nature."

"Anyone with sufficient knowhow could'a talked to Toland and got that intel." He kept hold of her hand and picked up a sandwich.

"No," Eris insisted. "It had to be you. It had to be someone for whom my return was ontologically essential. Who had tethered my presence in their life to the core to their sense of self. Not just someone who loved me. Someone who had willingly bound themselves to me. Someone who needed me so completely they would cut through the fabric of reality to be with me again."

He rubbed his thumb across hers. "I uh… I guess that's accurate."

"Hive magic is enacted through force of will," Eris said as she picked up a grilled cheese sandwich in her other hand while still holding the Drifter's on the table. "There is no one in possession of that level and purity of devotion to me other than yourself. There is no one alive who needs me as much as you do."

"Heh. That's gotta be a first. Bein' so damn needy it's a superpower." He raised his toasted bread in a toast to her and took another bite.

Eris also bit into her sandwich and was silent for a moment. Her three eyes closed briefly, savouring the buttery bread and molten cheese, before she swallowed and reoopend her eyes, continuing to speak. "You have been alone for so long. And now you have found me. And I, who have been doubted at every moment, at every turn, am given not just strength from your devotion to me but… temperance… restraint… an anchor in the sea of screams… a tether… a reason to be cautious with myself… so that my beloved need not bear the loss of me again in future." She squeezed his hand again and took another bite of her sandwich.

"Yeah I'd appreciate it if you could not die any more please… I can't go through that again." He laced his fingers between hers and continued eating with his other hand.

"I will do my best to survive, as will you. There is still so much for us to discover together."

They were silent for a short while, hands clasped as they ate. Eris occasionally smiling down at her remaining sandwiches and pickles or shifting her gaze to the Drifter. Him watching her adoringly as he also ate.

When there was only one pickle left on Eris' plate and nothing on the Drifter's she continued.

"Perhaps, in addition to my instructing you in the workings of Hive magic, you can teach me how to throw my voice with Motes of Darkness in order to influence the Taken."

The Drifter shrugged and picked up both their plates, walking them over to the sink. "I mean… it's dangerous as fuck but… we can try… "

Eris followed him and stood behind him, still holding her last remaining pickle.

"More dangerous than informing me that you… top from the bottom?"

He turned to face her with a nervous laugh. "Ah shit."

Eris placed her hand on his chest and gently pushed him up against the fridge. "I expect it will be… highly instructive… for me to learn your techniques." She leaned in against him and forcefully bit a chunk off of the pickle inches from his face and chewed it slowly before swallowing while maintaining eye-contact with him.

"You're hittin' that double-whammy again, Three-Eyes."

"And what is… the double whammy?"

"I am both completely terrified and extremely turned on right now."

"Hmmm…" Eris smiled and pressed the rounded end of her half-eaten pickle into his mouth, watching as his lips obediently opened to accept it. "Good."

Chapter Text

Eris was guarding the entrance to the ice cave they were in, hand cannon and glowing orb at the ready, as the Drifter dragged the last of the salvageable wreckage deeper into the back of the frigid cavity. Together they had gathered not only their broken Sparrow, but also the left leg of a House Salvation Brig, two Fallen backpacks (one from a Vandal, one from a Captain), half of a Servitor and a mostly-intact but very unresponsive bullet-riddled Shank.

The rest of the Fallen patrol was already mostly covered in blowing snow. All trace of them including the tracks of their salvage from the battle to the cave would be blanketed by the blizzard within the hour.

The Drifter tossed the Brig leg into their pile of parts and returned to Eris by the cave mouth.

"My ghost was able to bounce a signal off of Variks. Elsie knows we're stuck. Didn't give coordinates in case someone else was listenin' in."

Eris' frown deepened as the wind wailed outside. "It is unlikely anyone but Vanguard would be monitoring our comms."

"Yeah but we hit that Fallen patrol hard and without a Sparrow we're sittin' ducks here. Only advantage we got is being basically invisible in the storm. My ghost is printin' ammo for two people right now. Let's not try and run him dry."

The Drifter's ghost hovered between them and emitted its single tone. Eris looked down at it.

"Thank you, little light," she said, gently.

The ghost's red eye seemed to briefly glow brighter at her words.

"Ha! Little light. That's hilarious."

"What is amusing about it?" Eris turned away from monitoring the outside to monitoring the Drifter's face.

"That asshole knows what he is."

In the cold, the Drifter's blood flow (as displayed by his innate Light) was more visible to Eris in contrast to both the tendrils of Darkness slithering around within him and the cold of their environment.

"Does he deserve your treatment of him?" she asked.

The Drifter met her three-eyed gaze with the hollow-eyed stare of a nameless man who had seen far too much.

"Yes." His voice carried an edge that he did not usually use when speaking to her.

He was speaking the truth, or at least, something he genuinely believed was true.

Eris looked down at the Ghost. It seemed to be unable to meet her gaze and floated off to hover and twitch near the Drifter in a way that seemed almost… guilty.

"Hmmm…" Eris looked back outside. "The storm is worsening and the temperature is dropping. If we are to proceed with your plan of repairing the Sparrow, we should build a fire and I should set warding for a perimeter alarm so that we can block up this entrance to keep out the wind."

"Yeah. My fingers are already goin' numb. What do you mean by warding? Hive Shit?"

"Yes. Hive shit."

"Can you do that from in here or do you need to go out and walk around?"

"The latter."

"What?"

She pulled her makeshift scarf to better wrap her face. "I shall not be long."

"Hold up! On your own? In this visibility?"

"My visibility differs from yours. Focus on the Sparrow. I shall return."

"Oh hell no. If you're goin' out there. I'm goin' with you."

"I do not require your assistance."

"Didn't say you did, but I'm coming with you."

Eris's lip curled and she prepared to say something unkind but it left her immediately as she turned and saw the way the Light and Darkness writhed in his stomach. He was radiating fear. It did not make sense for him to be this fearful for her. They had been working together on Europa now for weeks with Elsie Bray. This was something else. Something he was not articulating and was hiding with a smile but which was twisting his intestines in knots.

Eris' eyes narrowed. "Very well."

Drifter nodded at her, his face not reflecting any of the fear that was apparent to her alien eyes. "Ghost! Mark this entrance and then keep close in case we get lost."

Eris sighed. "I have the labyrinth of the Hellmouth, twisted by vile Hive sorcery. I shall not become lost in mere snow."

"Good to hear, sister! You lead the way."

Eris did lead. And he followed. At first they were simply close by each other, but the wind, a force unto itself in this barren landscape, cut their ability to hear and, after the Drifter fell and Eris had to backtrack to find him, they held hands.

Eris led them in a circular pattern around their location, stopping every few minutes or so to mutter in the gutteral language of the Hive, drawing symbols which glowed briefly in the air before dissipating as the Drifter stayed near her and the blizzard raged on.

His relief was palpable as they reentered the cave together and, once inside, the Drifter moved quickly to gut the un-exploded half of the Servitor in order to use its outer shell as a makeshift fire pit. The Drifter's ghost transmatted in logs of wood and the Drifter snapped his fingers, summoning Solar energy to start the fire. As soon as the logs started to catch, he returned to help Eris relocate large chunks of snow and ice across the entrance.

"Be sure we keep a hole open to the outside so we keep fresh air movin'."

"I am aware," Eris intoned.

"That otta do it. Should be invisible from the other side already but if it ain't it will be soon. That wind is vicious."

"Yes."

Eris followed him to the now crackling fire and both huddled in close to the flames.

"Keeping fuel within your Ghost's inventory is clever." Eris eventually said to break the silence.

"I really hate freezing to death," the Drifter said. "It's a bad time."

"I agree."

"I'm assuming the biggest reason you ain't dead from the cold yet is Hive magic."

"It does provide me with considerable protection from the elements, but… not from discomfort." Eris explained, pulling her gloves off to expose her greyish fingertips to more heat from the fire.

He eyed her hands as she turned them to soak up the warmth from the flames. After a few moments he grunted and then he, too, removed both his rebreather and his armoured gloves, letting the warmth from the fire soak into his fingers. Eris found herself noticing various scars from past injuries written on his flesh. It was the first time she'd ever seen his un-gloved hands. She felt an innate kinship well up within her for someone else who had also chosen to keep their scars.

Huddled side by side as they were, hands held out toward the flames, Eris repressed an instinctive desire to take his hand into hers and examine it. She was uncertain if he would recoil from her touch or misinterpret it as a romantic or sexual advance. Neither option was desirable to her. She simply wished to examine his hands as objects of interest to her, both visually and with her heightened sense of touch. Another time, perhaps. This friendship was still in its infancy, if it was to be considered a friendship at all.

No. Eris corrected herself. This was friendship, even if the Drifter sometimes pulled away like a frightened animal, metaphorical teeth bared, at the thought of interpersonal relationships.

Eris had already decided she would accept his albeit tentatively made offer of "friends" however amorphously the Drifter defined that word. She did not trust him fully, but he had thus far proven himself a capable, albeit obnoxious, ally. And, she had to admit, the more she learned about him, the more interesting the nervous, ill-smelling, abrasive, quite cowardly, vicious, and intelligent man became.

The Drifter, too, seemed as interested in their two sets of hands as she was. She turned her knuckles to the fire and purposefully exposed her open palms to his sight. She watched through the corners of all three of her eyes as the Drifter's eyes immediately locked upon the scars and calluses on display there, stories writ in broken and hardened skin. She had seen him do this before, become momentarily mesmerized by some aspect of her. Was it attraction? Or simple fascination? Attention to detail? Kinship? Or a mind seeking new methods of manipulation and insights into character.

His lips parted and for a moment Eris wondered if he was about to place his palm on top of her own. His hand closest to her trembled briefly. Then he blinked and turned away.

"I better get started on that Sparrow." He stood and walked over to their badly mangled vehicle.

Was he saying it more for her, or for himself?

"Actually…" He paused and snapped his fingers, summoning his Ghost to his palm. It shook its misshapen shell as it materialized.

"Pot of water and a cup." He pointed at the ground.

The Ghost turned to the patch of snow at their feet the Drifter was pointing at and obediently opened up a conical beam of light to transmat in the items he had requested.

Eris watched as the Drifter pulled two pouches out of the inside of his coat and emptied them both into the pot before using a long metal strut from the inside of the Brig leg to pull out a log and set the pot on it at a slight angle.

"What it it?" Eris asked.

"Rice and dried broth," he explained. "It's not much, but if we can't get this thing working, we're gonna need our strength for the walk back."

Eris nodded, looking forward more to ingesting something warm than any sustenance this might bring them. She remained crouched by the fire as the Drifter pulled a flashlight from a pocket, twisted the end of it to turn it on, and then began to examine the wreckage they'd salvaged.

His first move was not to disassemble the Sparrow, as Eris had assumed he would, but to place the flashlight in his mouth and use both hands to tear off two large chunks of thermal shielding from the Brig leg. He flipped one down in front of the Sparrow and brought the other over to her, tossing it down beside her near the fire.

Eris looked up at him and waited for him to explain.

He pulled the flashlight out of his mouth and used it to point at the shielding. "Sit on that, not the ground. It'll help keep your heat in your body, not leakin' out yer butt."

"Hmmm…" Eris nodded appreciatively and followed his lead, flipping the shielding over to sit on it, enabling her to shift her position and bring her feet even closer to the fire as she watched the Drifter, flashlight between his lips, proceed to methodically and efficiently disassemble their "shot to shit" Sparrow.

If they were in any of the areas of Europa commonly frequented by the guardians, with less inclement weather, electromagnetic interference, and Darkness zones, the Drifter's ghost could simply reconstitute the destroyed vehicle the way any Risen's ghost normally could. But they were not in a normal area of Europa, and this was not a normal Sparrow. They had modified it together while the Exo Stranger, Elsie Bray, was working to teach the Guardian Stasis.

Europa was not universally accessible. Several regions were what the Drifter referred to as "no-go zones… out of bounds." Driving a Sparrow into one through regular routes would be fatal. Usually the driver would get several warnings of immanent mechanical failure from their vehicle as a clear indication to turn back. If these were ignored, the Sparrow would implode from the combination of hostile terrain, electromagnetic interference, and Darkness energy, in most cases, killing its occupant. Likewise approaching on foot would result in similar effects generally resulting in death.

This, of course, made these areas all the more interesting to Eris Morn. And one thing she realized early on regarding her overly paranoid and easily frightened companion, was that he shared her intense curiosity and instinctual desire to go anywhere someone or something was actively preventing anyone from going. Together they had mapped the edges of these no-go zones and then began combining their knowledge for how one might traverse such areas safely. After several experiments between Stasis training sessions, they came up with a combination of stolen Eliksni technology, the Drifter's harnessing of Taken Darkness energy, Stasis, and Eris' Hive magic which would grant them safe passage.

The Drifter called it their "Hall Pass" - what "hall" he was referencing, Eris could not fathom and he had not elaborated - and with their modified Sparrow they had indeed been able to enter areas not even the guardians could traverse.

This was their first foray beyond simply dipping in and out of the edges of the out of bounds areas and, while they had not found anything of particular note, they had come across a House Salvation patrol which, according to the Drifter's understanding of Eliksni, had been traversing this inhospitable terrain in order to ambush helpless civilians fleeing Europa to join the House of Light.

They could have left them. And the Drifter did advocate they do so, but Eris could tell by the edge in his voice, the cold flat look in his eyes, and the turmoil visible to her within his gut, that he did not actually wish to. She had become better at reading his various misdirections now. One of the reasons the Drifter was so apt at deception was because the person he was most skilled at lying to was himself. Not always, of course, but at times he would choose to believe his own lies within his mind to make them feel more genuine when he spoke them out of his mouth.

Eris, with her altered sight, watched the emotional turmoil otherwise hidden perfectly under his demeanor as he joked that "sometimes the crabs cook themselves" and they could simply wait and then "break out the garlic butter" to supposedly consume the bodies of the dead once the slaughter was over. He began to suggest a recipe.

She saw the relief within him when she cut him off and refused his recommendation, insisting that if he wished he could cower behind a snow bank, but that she was more than competent at taking out Fallen patrols on the Moon by herself, and that this was no different.

A strange look had come into his eyes then. Admiration? Gratitude? Adoration? It was clearly the decision he wanted to make but had convinced himself was not viable. Eris' insistence somehow shifted the situation from him "sticking his neck out" for random Eliksni to him "watching her back" and that, within his mental gymnastics and whatever internal logic he used to justify his actions, enabled him to shift from not wanting to get involved to an active desire to assist her in preventing the massacre of innocents.

They had driven in at full speed, with the wind, the sounds of their engine hidden by the blizzard as much as the driving snow obfuscated their physical visual presence. Stasis, Hive magic, and their combined excellent marksmanship had reduced the numbers of their opponents by half before the patrol had even fully understood that they were under attack.

They had utilized the Sparrow recklessly, heedless of the damage it would take in favour of the advantage it gave them. The Drifter pulled the vehicle into a sideways slide through the highest density of their enemies as Eris leapt off. As she had become a whirlwind of death, slicing, freezing, and shattering her opponents as they staggered in confusion, the vehicle had taken the first volley of return fire, the Drifter using it as a shield before throwing a series of Glacier grenades to give them both cover.

Dodging and weaving, using the bodies of their enemies to absorb stray gunfire, and working with the storm to render themselves more difficult to target, the two of them soon reduced the patrol down to only its Captain and the Brig. Eris had liberated two Arc blades from dead opponents and was using them competently against the Captain wielding four when the Drifter had tackled her to knock her out of the way of the Brig's Void arm cannon which would have otherwise struck her.

They had both hit the ground rolling and had tumbled in opposite directions. With the help of Eris' Ahamkara bone freezing the Captain for the Drifter to shoot and shatter, they were then able to split the Brig's focus enough for the Drifter to run in and stick a Fusion grenade to the most vulnerable part of its chest. The white-hot fire of the grenade reduced the Brig's outer shielding to nothing.

They had both emptied their hand cannons into the glowing core of the giant bipedal war machine while tumbling and dodging until it had finally erupted in a satisfying explosion.

As they had stood there, back to back, guns ready in the wreckage, the elation of a successful battle with, only a few bruises on each of them, Eris felt it. Their connection together was strengthening, deepening. He had saved her life, at great risk to himself. And now they were breathing heavily, the bodies of their enemies strewn around them, and Eris felt that part of herself that was slowly reawakening. The sense of someone willing to follow her, protect her, and accept her protection in return. The feeling of once more having kinship… belonging… a fireteam.

And now, now Eris watched the Drifter as he worked, observing his blatant lack of reliance upon his Ghost. The drone was there, and the rogue was occasionally directing it sharply, "cut this," "weld that," "make me a bolt that matches this one," but he was the one repairing the Sparrow, not the Ghost. It was a skill set most guardians did not bother to obtain because most Ghosts could perform repairs or simply reconstitute entire sparrows in areas that were not no-go zones. It was something Eris had to learn herself, through trial and error, when stranded on the Moon with no Ghost.

She found herself genuinely appreciating someone else who was competent at "doing it the hard way."

The Drifter stood and, flashlight still in his mouth, walked over and began pulling apart the Shank.

The Drifter also refused to use his Ghost as a flashlight. For all his unkindness toward the drone, he took great care to ensure it did not expose itself unnecessarily. And the amount of time he allowed it to exist in Eris' presence spoke volumes regarding his trust in her even if he continued to verbally insist that he trusted no one, including her.

"Is there anything I can do to assist?" Eris asked. She expected him to refuse, preferring independence, but she loathed inactivity.

"Uh… yeah." He stopped what he was doing and picked up the Sparrow's burnt and half-melted steering and navigation controls and brought it over to her. "See if you can get any of that close to what it's supposed to be when it's workin'." He jerked his thumb toward the small shuddering drone. "Ghost can test the circuit for you when you need, just ask him."

It flew over to her and emitted its single tone as the Drifter returned to pulling apart the Shank for parts.

"Do you have pliers and wire cutters?" Eris asked the Drifter over the flames.

The rogue Lightbearer did not look up from what he was working on. His arm reached out, he snapped his fingers and pointed at his ghost.

The Ghost transmatted the tools Eris asked for next to her in the snow. It brought her the Vandal's backpack as well. It was filled with random salvaged electrical components.

"Thank you," she told the Ghost as she picked up the tools and began to work.

The Drifter returned to stir his pot of broth and rice a few times over the next twenty minutes using a length of metal ripped out of the half-Servitor. Eris noted with a bit of relief that he took care to heat the metal in the flames of the fire thoroughly first, burning off anything that might have negatively impacted the food.

Eris had managed to get the first of the seven distinct mangled circuits functional when the Drifter placed a metal mug of broth and rice next to her.

Eris looked over at it, steaming in the snow. She had not asked for any, but it did smell good. She left it there to cool for a few moments before putting aside her work and reaching for the mug.

The hot brown liquid felt good inside of her. The rice was somewhat chewy but still quite edible. When she had finished, the Drifter held out the pot to her, emptying the last of it into her mug before placing it in the snow for his Ghost to transmat away.

"I did not expect it to be so flavourful," Eris said to him. "Thank you."

He gave her a half-smile across the flames. "Wait till you taste what I make when I'm actually cookin'." He winked and then returned to the Sparrow.

"Preferably something other than Hive eyeballs."

"Ha! Don't knock 'em 'till ya tried 'em."

"Strange you think that I have not."

His head reappeared over the fire to look at her, his eyes glinting with amusement. Eris watched the blood flush in his face as he grinned and then quickly looked back at his work. Was he… blushing?

The banter they had shared over comms on Io had been extensive and Eris had, admittedly, found herself amused at his tenacity and willingness to continuously profess attraction to her while she found endless ways of noting her displeasure with him.

But it was not until they had started working together on Europa, weeks ago, learning Stasis from the Exo Stranger, Elsie Bray, that Eris was able to use her Hive-enhanced vision to observe his physical reactions to her sniping at him.

She had assumed he was flirting as a matter of course, something she had observed him do with nearly every other sentient being he interacted with, from Zavala to Rahool. Yet here in Europa, where targets for his innuendos were limited to herself, Elsie, and the Guardian, Eris could not help but notice the difference in his responses to everyone other than her.

Perhaps he had a fetish for being degraded. Or he genuinely was attracted to her. Or both, Eris mused. The veracity of one did not disprove the validity of the other. Two things could be true.

"Drifter."

"Yeah?"

"Why were you so afraid of me going out to set the wards?"

She watched his body tense. The flush of blood left his face and coiled instead in his abdomen.

"Who says I was?"

"Hmmm…"

A few moments passed. Eris waited.

"We shouldn't separate," he finally said from the other side of the fire. "Not when it's like this."

The Light and Dark within him shifted in his unease. He was telling the truth, or at least, something he believed to be true.

"Why?" she asked.

More tension. "Look it's… bad past experiences. Now's not a good time for stories."

Again, truth and fear, sharp and discomforting.

"I have a hard time believing someone as individualistic as yourself fears being alone in a storm."

"Nope."

Truth.

"You doubt my own abilities to survive?"

"Hell No."

Truth.

"What then?"

He sighed. "Long story. I don't wanna get into right now but… I don't wanna have to question… whether or not you're you."

Truth again, laced with fear.

"I see. Ahamkara?"

Eris was familiar with those who wore the faces with others. She had killed many in her time.

"I don't think it was but… similar kinda situation. Went out with a whole crew. Sixteen people on that ice ball. I was the only one that survived."

"You fear… being placed in a position where you would feel you need to kill me."

White hot snakes of fear writhed throughout his entire body and a wrench clattered against metal. He looked back up at her over the fire, his expression still neutral, betraying nothing of the turmoil Eris' eyes could see.

"Really would rather not do that, yeah. I like your style. Would be real shitty to have to kill you. And I would… very much rather… not."

Eris met his gaze over the flames.

"The feeling is mutual."

Her words relaxed him and he smiled at her. Not his usual conniving grin nor a licentious leer. A genuine smile. Small, sad, and strangely vulnerable. It was the most honest expression Eris had ever seen on his face. She found herself surprised by it. Drawn to it.

He swallowed and looked away.

"Keep talkin' like that and people are gonna start thinkin' we're friends." He chuckled.

"Hmmm… it is possible I might not even object." The words left her mouth without her even realizing it, as though that small genuine smile had pulled them out of her.

"Awwww…." He was back to his usual sly demeanor, the snake-like quality returned to his voice. "Easy to say now. But bein' friends with ol'Drifter has consequences most people would rather not have to deal with."

Hot and cold. Or, more precisely, close and then distant. As though that brief moment of intimacy, admitting they would prefer not to kill each other, was too personal, too much like forming attachment. It was a pattern Eris had been observing for some time now. He had insisted they should be friends upon numerous occasions. He was constantly finding ways to point out their compatibility together. And yet, as soon as she reciprocated, responding with anything other than derision, he pulled away.

He seemed to yearn desperately for understanding, for closeness, to make a connection one moment, and in the next, he would step back, the walls would snap in place, and the mask of the meretricious rogue would reappear.

But Eris was not yet done digging and here, here he was her captive. She would still need to proceed with caution, least he feel trapped and retreat into his love-no-one-trust-no-one shell completely, snapping it tight. But for now, he had simply stepped back, and, rather than let the matter drop, Eris found herself drawn to step forward toward him.

"Such as what?" she asked. "A… tarnished reputation? Perhaps people will… not trust me?"

"Ha!" The Drifter had commented upon several occasions now how strongly he disagreed with the general distrust of Eris by the Vanguard and the Last City, insisting that they had valid reasons to distrust him, but not her.

"Or is it more the general assumption of wanton inappropriate sexual behaviour?"

His head popped back up over the fire. He licked his lips lewly and winked.

Eris stared at him, her face impassive.

He laughed again and returned to the Sparrow. Eris waited a moment and then returned to her own work on the circuitry in front of her.

"More like people tryin' to kill you," he said from the other side of the fire. "Ol'Drifter's friends don't uh… tend to live very long."

Eris tilted her head. "Similar things have been said about… many friends of mine."

His face popped back up, solemn. Eris looked over at him, a silent acknowledgement, before returning her focus to her work.

"Well then," he continued. "You probably understand more than most what its like to find someone you like… a lot… and then stayin' the hell away from them… so they keep on breathin'… and you can watch 'em from a distance, knowin' that, when they die, at least it wasn't because of you."

"I am familiar with the sentiment, but, the counter argument is that the connection and closeness, the privilege of having known someone, is worth the pain of loss."

"Sister, you're what… three… four hundred years old? That's still pretty young, comparatively speakin'. When you get as old as me, you stop wanting to watch everything and everyone you care about be destroyed… get sick of watching strong badass people… like you… drop like flies. It's like gettin' injured in the same place over and over with no fancy Traveller'-special-baby magic healing. Eventually the nerve endings are gone and you just can't feel anything because that part of you is dead… along with everyone you ever cared for."

"That sounds very lonely."

There was a metallic twang and a bolt snapped off from the chassis the Drifter was working on.

"Ah for fuck's sake. Sheared right off. So damn cold the metal is brittle as fuck. Ghost!"

The twitching drone appeared next to him. "Get that outta there and find me a replacement. Or make it. Whatever. That's load bearing. We need that."

The Drifter sat back and sighed in frustration as his ghost scanned the broken piece.

"Old Earth saying…" he said to Eris. "If you love something? Let it go."

"I am familiar with it, yes," Eris replied, wires between her fingers. "But… there is more to that proverb."

"Huh. If there is, I don't know it. Always figured it was pretty simple. Stay away from anything that matters so you can't fuck it up."

"If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours. If it does not, it never was," Eris intoned.

She watched him as he stared at the ice walls of their cave for a long moment.

"Never heard that second part," he said quietly. "Changes the whole thing."

"It does."

"Huh."

Eris felt more than saw the aching loneliness radiating from him… it was familiar. This gruff, often unkind, frequently coarse and off-putting man with his foul odor and offensive comments was a mask. She had known this for a long time. But what was below that… below the layers of manipulation and evasiveness, of refusals to answer, truths masquerading as lies, the emotional equivalent of a titan's bubble… What would happen, she wondered, if someone were able to enter that shield and not harm him? How much damage would they take from being close to him? Or, if someone could get that far, would they be protected fiercely with all the zeal of starving animal guarding its only source of food? And then, if so, would the fate of such a person be truly friendship? Or would they be doomed to be devoured? Consumed by his fervor and fear. Eris wondered what kind of passion would be awakened if she could teach him how to feel again. And would that passion exist within him… or perhaps herself? A strange thought.

On the other side of the fire, the sparrow engine turned over and continued running. It rattled loudly on the other side of the fire.

Eris looked up from her work and nodded toward the Drifter appreciatively. He rubbed his hands together, once more smiling his characteristic grin.

"All right, all right, all right. That was the hard part. Everything else is gravy. How's your stuff doin?"

"I have six of seven circuits rewired," Eris told him. "The seventh is proving to be… challenging."

He stood up, walked around the fire, and crouched down next to her. "Let me see."

"If you see here," Eris pointed. "The test works fine."

The Drifter's Ghost ran the test and clicked its twitching flaps to demonstrate for him what Eris was pointing out.

"But as soon as it reaches this circuit, the test fails. Yet, I am certain my wiring is accurate."

He looked down at the wiring Eris was working on, looked back at her, and bit his lips, clearly holding back laughter.

Eris stiffened.

"Today I learned Hive eyes do not see colours the same way human eyes do."

Her three eyes narrowed behind her blindfold. "They do not. However colouring is for interpretation, not function, my understanding was we were not seeking to make it aesthetically pleasing, simply to get it to work."

He nodded. "You're right. It's just kinda cute how you made rainbow spaghetti."

Eris glared at him.

"Looks right though. I don't know why it's not working neither."

"I suppose you are going to suggest it is probably best for you to pull it apart and start over," she said icily.

"Nah," the Drifter picked up the mess of wiring and turned it over in his hands while he talked. "That last circuit just gives us the display. Stabilizers should still work. I can hook it up directly, bypass the visuals, and we can just fly the damn thing blind."

"Without the display, the instruments will not be able to alert us to a malfunction."

"Oh, we'll know if it malfunctions. We'll stop movin'. At which point, we find another tunnel and go at it again."

He had complete confidence in her wiring, despite her apparent failure to match wire colours. Eris found herself quietly pleased with his acceptance and his trust in her workmanship.

"Hmmm… You are correct. This resolution, while poor, will meet our needs temporarily. Although I doubt the vehicle will be able to be used again in future."

The Drifter shrugged. "Even if it melts by the time we get back. It still beats walkin'." He leaned in close to her with a smile.

"Agreed." Eris held out the tools she had been using flat on her hand for the Drifter's ghost to transmat away as her companion stood.

"When we were out there doin your Hive bullshit, you were able to nav real good." He held out his hand to help her stand.

Eris stared at his grease stained fingers for a moment. She did not have difficulties standing and neither of them were wearing gloves. He raised an eyebrow.

It was clearly being extended as a courtesy, not an insult. Eris grasped his hand in her own and permitted him to assist her to her feet.

They shared a wordless glance as she stood. Eris purposefully gripped his hand for slightly longer than was necessary, prolonging the skin on skin contact, before releasing it. Something nameless flickered across his eyes.

"Yes," she answered him, pulling on her gloves as he turned away and began bolting the engine back on to the chassis for the Sparrow.

"You see far better than me in this mess," he said as he assembled the seat.

"I do."

"All right then. Since we're driving blind, and you got fancy eyes, I'll snuggle in back. You drive."

Eris walked over to the air hole they'd left at the top of the entrance to the cave and peered out at the whiteout conditions outside.

"We should lash ourselves together."

"Lash, huh?" He smirked. "Didn't know you were into that but uh… I'll try anything once."

"Tsch. As if someone as old as yourself has not experimented in the past."

His surprised laugh exploded out of him.

"With a rope," Eris clarified, smirking.

"I uh… I have experimented with rope in the past, yes. You into that too?"

"Tsch. We should be tied together. Your Ghost carries rope in his inventory, does he not?"

"Yeah he does." His head turned to look at her. "How'd you know that?"

"You have been practical enough to bring fuel for a fire, not just a cooking pot but potable water to go in it in case of inhospitable conditions, and rope is particularly useful and resourceful. You are very apt at survival and your Ghost's inventory reflects this. Plus… it is something I would bring."

Resting his arm along the seat of the Sparrow, the Drifter propped his chin up on his fist with a smirk.

"Eris Morn, are you hitting on me?"

She looked over her shoulder, about to push the chunks of ice and snow out of the cave to open up the entrance. "No." The wind howled outside, no longer kept out by their temporary barricade.

"Damn. Got all hopeful for a moment there."

"Why?"

"I mean, if you were, I wouldn't complain. Got a nice cozy cave here we could use it before we go."

"So you can use physical affection to provide yourself with an outlet that will enable you to avoid actual emotional attachment?" she said as she returned to him, the snow crunching under her boots.

He blinked, licking his lips.

"A.. roll in the snow…" Eris continued. "So that you can write off any feelings you have as simply sexual urges that are then satisfied and can be safely disregarded?"

He looked up at her from where he was crouching next to the Sparrow. "Is that a yes?"

She leaned forward. "No."

He shrugged.

"But I do prefer we both arrive at our destination alive."

"Now you're gettin' almost romantic. Quickest way to a man's heart is wantin' to keep him alive." He winked before replacing his rebreather and his gloves.

"Tsch." Eris walked over to the now assembled sparrow and straddled it. "Tie yourself to me tightly so you do not fall off."

Chapter Text

"Absolutely not."

"Aw c'mon, please?"

"No."

"You got your big fight tomorrow. This is probably the last time I'll be able to."

"Good."

"I wish you'd change your mind.

"I have no desire to be a spectacle for you to gawk at."

"Bullshit. You know it ain't like that."

"It is you who are spewing bullshit. You announce frequently enough in your games that you have always wanted a pet Hive."

"And I do! But you ain't my pet. If either one of us is a pet it's me, not you. And I said Hive! Not Hive god."

"Ugh. I do not want to deal with you waltzing in here, going 'Ooooh!' and making a mockery of this vile transformation."

"Look. I know part of this whole thing is you unleashing your emotions and lettin' it all out, gettin' good mad-mad and givin' the Hive what for to the max, and I am all for it, one hundred percent behind you all the way. If there's one thing I can get behind, it's vengeance. But don't you fucking dare sit there and insist I'd be like that to you when I ain't never done that to ya and never will. Do not fucking say that shit, Eris. I don't treat you like that and I ain't gonna start now. Anyone else? Sure. But not you. And you damn well know it."

"Then why do you keep insisting that you wish to come and see me in this form when I have told you, repeatedly, that I desire this privacy from you?"

"It's not privacy! Everyone's seen you like this but me! You even let Rahool see ya as a Hive god."

"And he fled in terror. I prefer not to cause the same impulses in you."

"Like I'd ever turn tail and run away from you."

"You are the most fearful creature I know."

"Yeah. And you also know I ain't stupid. Running would be suicide. If I was well and truly scared I'd shoot faster than you could blink your three fancy eyes."

"Then it is better for my own health that this form remains obscured from your vision."

"You don't trust me. Par for the course, really, I guess. I dunno what I was expecting."

"What? That is not it. That is not it at all."

"You really think I wouldn't be able to tell it's you."

"No. Drifter, I…"

"I thought you knew me better than that, but that's what it is, isn't it?"

"No."

"Alright then what? Why can't I see you how you are right now?"

"Drifter… I care for you… deeply… The Hive have already taken so much from me. I do not wish this form to take you from me as well."

"How? It's you, Eris. I wanna see you. I wanna know you. All of you. Even the Hive god parts. It's part of you. I wanna know it."

"It is not… a physically appealing form."

"Well no shit. It's Hive."

"If this mission is unsuccessful…"

"Then you might be stuck in it forever. I know. I get it. All the more reason to let me see ya now."

"Why?"

"So you can know goin' into this that it don't matter."

"Drifter… I do not even have lips."

"I know."

"That is your favourite part of me."

"No. My favourite part of you is you. Your lips are… really beautiful. And when they're attached to you I wanna kiss 'em more than anything, yeah. But I wanna kiss 'em because they're you. Someone else with your lips wouldn't be you. Right now, with no lips, you're still you. Let me come kiss your chitin and prove it to ya."

"I do not want you to kiss my chitin!"

"Then I won't. Not gonna lie, it's a bit disappointing 'cuz I'd really like to but… I will respect that. Just like I'm not coming to see you unless you let me. But I really want you to let me, Moondust. I wanna see you. I wanna see all of you."

"Ugh!"

"You're my beam of moonlight. Whether you're a Hive god or not. Whether you're all covered in chitin or not. Spikes or nails or teeth or whatever else ya got goin' on. I still want to see you. I still wanna make you understand that I know it's you in there. I ain't afraid of you, because it's you, Eris. And I… Dammit, Eris… You know how I feel."

"Drifter…"

"You're still sayin' no, and I accept that. I don't like it. I don't wanna. But I accept that. I just… really wish you'd change your mind so I could show you. So you'd believe me. Otherwise it's just words and I been lyin my ass off for so long it's no wonder no one believes a damn thing I say. I don't believe a damn thing I say either half the time. I just… I wanted to show you… so you'd know… So you could see it and know what I'm sayin' is real. That I mean it."

"I… Very well."

"Wait… what?"

"Come to me. See me in this form. And… if you wish… and only if you wish… you may… kiss my chitin."

"Yeah?"

"Yes but… no jokes."

"You got it."

"And… Drifter… If you would…"

"Yeah?"

"Stop by Sanctuary on Luna."

"Ok."

"Bring me my sword."

"Hell yeah. Hey… that's gotta be some sorta thing… bein' the guy who brings the Hive god her sword."

"I… suppose it probably is, yes."

"One freaky scary-ass nasty sword comin' up for the three-eyed woman of my dreams."

"Hopefully I shall not become the three-eyed woman of your nightmares."

"Can't become that 'cuz ya already are. You are absolutely terrifying when you are pissed off. And that's got nothin' to do with any Hive god morph shit goin on. That's all you. You get scary. But you know what's the scariest thing about you when you're my nightmares?"

"What?"

"You leavin'. Not bein' there no more. Tellin' me to go kick rocks. Not wanting me to ever see you again. That's the worst thing ever when it comes to my nightmares of you. Absolute worst is you dyin'. Don't ever do that to me, all right? I will not be able to handle that. I don't care what form you're in as long as you're alive, Moondust."

"Tomorrow is not without that risk."

"Nah. You know what you're about. This is your bag, Moondust. You got this. And when it's all over, I'll be here waitin' for ya… Whatever form you're in."

"I feel the same way about you. Please also, yourself, do your best not to die."

"Can't now. You said I get to some see you be a god tonight and bring you your sick evil looking mean sword. Surely that's an achievement about to be unlocked… Wait a minute… what's the guy that brings the knight his sword before the big showdown in the old middle-evil books 'n shit?"

"Middle-evil books… Medieval? A… squire?"

"Yeah! if I'm bringin' you your sword before your big day tomorrow, does that make me your squire?"

"No. It makes you my friend, my companion and… my fireteam."

"Heh. Seems like a sweet job. I'll take it."

Chapter Text

A deep sigh escaped the lips of Eris Morn in her flat in the last city. She was seated at her work table, her unbound three glowing eyes glaring at a spiked colourful object floating in the middle of several intersecting circles drawn in ashes on her table. She adjusted two of the Hive runes glowing around the perimeter and frowned. Nothing happened.

Behind her and to her left she heard a key inserted into the lock of her apartment door. The floating object lowered to the table and Eris stood, approaching the entranceway as the Drifter, carrying multiple paper bags, one of which was held by its folded top in his mouth, used his back to push open the door.

Eris took the bag from his mouth as well as a second one from his arms.

"Thanks," he gave her a grateful smile. "Careful with that one," he pointed with one finger before tucking the keys in that hand into a pocket. "It's hot and liquid and I don't trust the lid."

Eris nodded. "I had not realized the time."

"Ya usually don't. I needed a break though and I figured you wouldn't complain since you probably haven't eaten all day again."

Eris sniffed the bags. They smelled delicious.

"Your assessment is accurate."

He followed her into her main room and went directly to the long coffee table in front of her couch.

"That's pretty," he said nodding to the colourful object as he walked past her work table with the ritual in progress. "Radiolite?"

"Yes," Eris kept pace behind him. "It is from Failsafe. She is assisting me in my research."

"That's interesting. And sparkly! Get anything out of it yet?"

"No. It is not responding to my investigative attempts." Eris sighed deeply once more as she sat on the couch. "I miss Asher. He would know how to proceed."

"Well…" The Drifter slid in beside her and began to open up the first of several paper bags. "I ain't part Vex and don't got a rail gun but uh… want some help?"

"Do you have experience with Radiolite?"

"Not a shred," he grinned. "But it's Vex tech and ol'Drifter's been takin' apart Vex for… a real long time now." He handed her a spoon.

"Your assistance is always welcome and appreciated, but I do not wish to take you away from…"

"Nah." He waved her off and continued to pull out the contents of the bags. "It's Festival of the Lost. The two dozen people actually playing right now can use a break. Love 'em to bits for their dedication, but it's not like I got people lined up out the doorway of Annex down the hall right now. My numbers are the shittiest they've ever been. Vanguard's new Portal for assignments, which oh so conveniently does not include Gambit, is seriously harshing my style. This is what happens when you try to go legit. Wake up one morning and you are de-prioritized."

"So I heard."

"Anywho…" He finished pulling take-out containers from the bags and stood, walking over to the Radiolite in the ritual circle on Eris' table and snapped his fingers holding his hand out flat. His ghost materialized, shuddering and sparking.

"Scan that," Drifter pointed down at the object on the table. "Get me spectral, E and M, sound, and chemical, special Darkness bullshit readings in all the ranges, including the experimental ones we added last month, and add in anything else you can think of."

The Ghost's light turned blue and then red. A cone of light illuminated the Radiolite while bits of the ghost's broken shell expanded and slowly rotated around it.

"In the meantime," Drifter walked back to the couch and sat down next to Eris once more. "Lunch!"

He pulled the lid off of a shallow bowl and handed it to her.

Eris leaned forward to smell his offering. "Curry?"

"Green curry prawns with coconut broth and veggies, bit of lime."

"That sounds fantastic."

"That's cuz it is. Also some pork belly and a noodle dish. I told 'em to surprise me. No clue what it is other than noodles and smells a bit like peanuts but I know it'll be good."

"Indeed."

He picked up his own shallow bowl and for a few moments they ate in silence.

"Oh hey," the Drifter said with his mouth full. "…something you said just now reminded me of a thing I've always wondered. Did you know that for the longest time some guardians thought you was a Awoken?"

"What? That is ridiculous." Eris examined a prawn on her spoon before placing the curled crustacean into her mouth.

"I know! Anyone who knew ya before knew you were human, but then you get these newly rezzed babies, two weeks out of the grave, up and spouting bullshit on VanNet…"

"VanNet! No wonder. That digital space is a cesspit of misinformation and revolting behavior."

"My kinda place, yeah! I know!"

Eris sniffed dismissively, placing her bowl on the table and began looking for rice. The Drifter pushed the relevant container closer to her without needing to ask what she was looking for.

"There was this big blowout years ago. Full on flame war between people who knew you were a human and people who thought you were Awoken, and I always meant to ask you over something that got brought up in that."

"What disgusting speculation did they come up with that still has you confused?" She scooped some of the steaming rice into her bowl, inhaling the coconut scent wafting from it.

"One of the pieces of supposed evidence for you bein' Awoken was guardians hearing you call Asher Mir your cousin. And since Awoken always call each other cousin, they figured that sealed it."

"Preposterous, and ignorant as well."

"I mean, yeah. Back when you had two eyes they didn't glow. Well… not like Awoken eyes glow, sometimes ya got sparky what with bein' a Arc Hunter."

The corner of Eris' lip quirked slightly but she gave no other response.

"And your skin isn't the healthiest color… bein' stuck in the Hellmouth for a hundred years'll probably do that to anyone… but even so, it sure as hell ain't blue.

Eris frowned, looking down at her hand and arm, bare to just above the elbow in the loose shirt she was wearing, and then back at the Drifter.

"What colour is my skin?"

"Kinda… greyish? Bit on the green side of grey but that's probably just the Soulfire reflecting on it."

Eris' lip curled as she swallowed another mouthful of food. "Like… a corpse?"

"Nah," Drifter put his spoon down and pulled her hand gently toward him. She allowed it and watched as he kissed her knuckle and squeezed her hand, looking lovingly into her eyes. "Much more like a Cryptarch that stays in a windowless room in the basement of the archives for decades on end and never sees the sun." He winked, kissing her hand once more before releasing it and returning to his food. He popped a piece of pork belly into his mouth and continued speaking while chewing. "Your complexion's closer to Rahool's than a corpse… only, you know, less pissy."

Eris sniffed the air dismissively. "I am not certain a comparison to Rahool is more favourable."

"Hey now, even Rahool can be fuckable in the right light. Get him talking about something he's real interested in and he'll let you do damn near anything to him if you convince him you're actually listening."

Drifter winked at her and popped another piece of pork belly into his mouth.

"Tsch." Eris rolled her eyes.

Drifter's face lit up.

"Oh damn. I never had an issue with you hiding your eyes and it always felt special when you let me see 'em… and it don't feel any less special about bein' able to see 'em now when everyone else can too, but I gotta say… bein' able to actually see you roll all three of your eyes? That's fuckin' magical. I wanna make you roll your eyes all day."

"Ugh."

The Drifter giggled as he pulled out two forks and began using them to move heaps of peanut-sprinkled rice noodles with chicken and bits of egg first to his own curry bowl and then then into Eris' bowl as she held it out for him.

They ate in silence for a while. The Drifter put his bowl down and pulled a Datapad out, tapping it a few times while looking over at his ghost.

"Anything?" Eris asked.

Drifter tapped it a few more times. "Not yet. Just baseline biometrics right now… is it even biometrics if it's Radiolite? Is Radiolite alive? I dunno. But he's only just gettin' started. He'll be at it for a while. Thankfully, we got food!"

"It is very good. Is it from Alice?"

"Yup. Quoc was just a pair of arms in a steam cloud when I went to grab it. Left glimmer on the table and snuck out the back before they even realized the order was from me so Alice couldn't throw me out without charging me again. So anyway… I always wondered… Why did you call Asher your cousin? Was it just a Awoken greeting thing? Or did he like… adopt you?"

"He is literally my cousin… or, rather… he was."

Drifter squinted at her, confused. "All right, I'll bite. How? Guardians don't have blood relatives."

"They do before they become guardians."

"What? But that would mean… Oh… Oh this conversation just got a whole lot more interesting." He leaned forward. "The dragon, right?"

Eris picked up a piece of pork belly between two fingertips. "On Io, during the Great Hunt, one of my assigned targets attempted to bribe me with details of my past life." She popped the pork belly in her mouth. All three of her eyes closed in pleasure as she savoured it.

"Huh… Always wanted to ask you about that. How'd it happen? Did you make a wish while killing it?"

Eris chewed for a few minutes in silence before swallowing and reopening her eyes. "No. I believe it was hoping to tap into the latent curiosity all Risen feel, and leverage that to convince me to spare its life."

The Drifter held out the container of pork belly toward her. She eagerly took another piece.

"I'm assuming it was uh… not successful."

"Accurate." Eris placed another piece of pork belly in her mouth and her eyes unfocused slightly. "This is… so good," she said while chewing.

"Heheheh… well cooked pork belly will do that to ya. Fucking glorious."

"It is," she said, reaching for another piece. "It really is."

He smiled, placing the container in front of her for easy access.

"So the dragon… did it tell you how pre-Risen-you died?"

Eris shook her head. "That was omitted, I am assuming for… reasons of enticement."

"It just… told you stuff for no reason?"

Eris nodded, chewing for a few moments before responding. "It claimed the memories were… a gift."

"Ugh!" The Drifter shuddered. "Gift from a wish dragon. That's almost as bad as my gift from the Nine."

"Hmmm… Yes… a similar situation." She ate another piece of pork belly.

"So… in the memories it gave ya, of who you were before… you remember Asher?"

"Yes. We were children in the last city. My uncle married one of the Awoken who left the Reef. Asher, their child, was my cousin. We were close."

"Guardians are always told not to find out about who they were before… Always seemed a bit shitty to put that on a person with no memory… tell 'em not to find out… to just live with having no past. I mean, I do it, but I don't do it because I'm following rules. Drifter's got enough baggage already. Don't need more. And also, everyone I've known who found out… it changes 'em."

"Some people do not have a choice." Eris took another piece of pork belly. "Ana Bray was first raised with her name tag attached… Crow's memories were a 'gift,' similar to mine, only his came from Savathun… Cayde was particularly haunted by ghosts of memories… emotional impressions he could not clarify….

"And you?" the Drifter asked gently, pulling more noodles into his bowl. "What did it do to you to know that?"

"It made me… sad."

The noodles were lowered and quickly forgotten. "Sad?"

"The memories… if they even are real… which should not be trusted, considering the source."

"Good point."

"Were not positive or negative. They were fleeting and largely consisted of… emotional connections to people who were… gone… or who, like Asher, no longer remembered me from that time… I was more a ghost within them than I am now… haunting the past.

The Drifter sat quiet, blinked his eyes, and waited for her to continue.

"The memories made me feel… hollow… and alone… I tried to tell Ikora… but she was in the process of making her own wish… fundamentally altering herself to become someone else… She told me to focus on the task at hand and would not listen… Asher tried, and he believed me, but he did not understand…"

The Drifter's hand reached out tentatively toward her and Eris took it in her own, glad for his touch.

"To receive such a gift, as it were, is to be altered against one's will… To be othered… Set apart from everyone around you due to the uniqueness of your experiences."

"Yeah," he muttered. "It's… alienatin'… Ain't no one else can relate so you just… don't talk about it."

"Yes."

They held each other's hands in silence for a bit, both staring off into nothing. After a few moments Eris squeezed the Drifter's hand and leaned forward to peek into the pork belly container. Only a single piece was left. She offered the box to him.

He shook his head. "All yours, Moonlight. I'll get extra next time."

Eris smiled a small smile and snatched up the last piece as though he might change his mind at any moment. She placed it in her mouth and chewed it with lips that were slick from the oils in the food.

The Drifter, temporarily mesmerized by the light glinting off of Eris's lips, smiled and leaned back, delighting in watching her.

"Do you ever regret it?" he asked. "Killin' all those Ahamkara?"

"No."

"Huh. Why not?"

She took a sip from the bottled drink he'd brought her, cold tea with jasmine and elderflower. "It was… vengeance."

Drifter nodded. "They sure did pull some shit… still… genocide's a bit much though, no?"

Eris met his gaze and held it. "Not with them. Not with the Hive."

He offered her the last of the noodles. She shook her head.

He shrugged. "We know there was at least one that wasn't bad. Taranis? Was that his name? Come to think of it, we know at least one Hive that ain't bad too. Well… ok… Luzaku's Lucent Hive, which is different."

"In many ways worse… but yes, there are always exceptions. I assure you my assigned targets during the Great Hunt were far from innocent."

"I figured." He dumped the remaining noodles into his empty curry bowl. "Who were you avenging?"

"Many," Eris leaned back and sipped her cold tea. "So many. But… one in particular. A guardian named Nahid. I greatly admired her and she felt similarly about me."

"Oh?" The Drifter's eyes flickered in that way they did when when he noted something particularly important. "Lovers?"

"No. It was not physical… and we did not choose a label for it but… we were very close. It was almost sisterly but… romantic? We would kiss… but it was never sexual…"

"Non-sexual kissing…" the Drifter grinned. "Ok… not gonna lie, that sounds very hot…"

Eris rolled her eyes again.

"Ha!"

"Nahid's presence was as soothing as her aim was excellent. She had long dark straight hair that would gleam in firelight or in the sun, but few people saw it. She kept it wrapped within a cowl - a practice I took up in her memory."

Drifter put his food down on the table and settled in to watch Eris as she talked, his favourite pastime.

"Her eyes were soft and gray. She had a wise, knowing, but not arrogant, smile…" Eris continued. "She was graceful and always composed, yet warm to those she was close with. I was lucky enough to be one of them. She had a quiet beauty… a serenity about her. She moved like wind on water. It was always a comfort for her to be near."

"Heh. Warlock?"

"Yes."

"Figured. They're usually the soothing ones."

"Only sometimes."

"She ran afoul of an Ahamkara?"

"She went out seeking one… for reasons similar to so many - as a way of dealing with overwhelming grief."

"Can't blame her for that. I've been there."

Eris reached out her hand and wove her fingers between his. "I know. We are very lucky I was not dead."

"I'd have done anything…" His voice had become gruff, heavy with emotion. "Given anything… I didn't care what it took… I just needed you back…"

Eris nodded. "Nahid felt the same."

Drifter looked down at their hands and placed his other hand overtop of where their fingers were clasped. "Who'd she lose?"

"A family. Like so many guardians she encountered a small group of Lightless and fell in love with them, pledging herself to protect them, their children, their children's children…"

Drifter nodded quietly.

"Their continued existence became central to her sense of self," Eris explained. "Nahid was their guardian, their protector, their shield. And then, like so many guardians, there came a time when she was unable to save them."

"Yup." The Drifter sighed. "What did them in? Fallen raid?"

"The Fallen were the weapon used, but the treachery came from within. They were betrayed by one of their own. Their outpost defenses were deliberately disabled. Retaliation for some… petty squabble. By the time Nahid arrived there were only bodies to bury."

"Seen that happen more than my fair share too. Did she try to wish 'em back alive?"

"No. Nahid was not stupid. But many of the bodies were never recovered. She had reason to believe some might have survived. She asked to know what had happened to them so that she might attempt to locate them."

"What did it take from her for that?"

"Her ghost."

Above Eris' work table the Drifter's ghost stopped its scan. It looked back to both of them with its single red eye. The Drifter, hands still around Eris' hand, looked back at his ghost.

The ghost emitted its single tone and resumed scanning.

"Did she get what she asked for?" the Drifter asked.

"Some members of her chosen family had indeed survived the initial assault, and then were hunted down, starving and afraid, scurrying in the ruins, picked off one by one. Their deaths were painful, slow, and not merciful. In granting her wish, the Ahamkara made Nahid experience each of them, perpetually, in the present moment. All the terror. All the pain.

"Ah shit."

"She knew it all because she lived it all. Her sense of self dissolved. Nahid became a myriad of people… A host to a cacophony of voices of the dead… No longer able to speak with her own voice, she could only echo the voices of those now in her constant waking nightmare."

"Damn," the Drifter whispered softly.

"Nahid's mind was irreparably fractured. No medical care could assist her. She was hospitalized. Drugs helped to dull her distress but… they always wore off. She did not recognize any of her friends. She did not know who I was."

The Drifter squeezed Eris' hand.

"One night she escaped her restraints and was found in the morning, having… clawed her way into her own torso."

"Yikes."

"In her last breaths she informed those attempting to save her that she was… looking for supplies."

"Well that's gruesome."

"It was. Such is the nature of bargains with the Ahamkara."

They sat together in silence for a few moments, feeling the weight of the narrative Eris had told, sitting with it between them, letting it exist. After a while the Drifter released Eris' hand and reached for his drink, a simple cold beer, the glass of the bottle containing it occluded with condensation.

"Did you get the one that did it?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And you put it down… so it couldn't do that to anyone else ever again?"

"I did."

Drifter nodded and lifted his beer in a toast to Eris before taking a sip. "Good."

"Yes."

The Drifter looked over at Eris and leaned back, laying his arm across the top of her couch. He raised one eyebrow in a wordless question.

In answer, Eris moved over and pressed herself up against him, letting him put his arm around her and hold her close.

He clinked his beer against her bottle of tea. "Even before you went down into the Hellmouth you were vengeance."

"I was."

"You always have been."

"Yes."

Eris leaned her head against his shoulder. He leaned his head against hers.

"Thanks," he said quietly into her hair.

"What are you thanking me for?"

"Bein' you." He kissed the top of her head and sipped his beer before returning to rest his cheek against her hair once more. "I can't explain it but… the way you are… World needs it… I need it… I need you. More than even, this… I just… I need you to exist. Someone's gotta get the bastards back for what they done. And… you do. And that means… everything."

Eris sighed deeply and nestled herself against him even closer. "I know."

The sound of the Drifter's ghost clicking and whirring as it continued its scan was the only thing they heard for some time.

"Still hilarious they thought you was Awoken."

Eris looked up at him with a wry smile and sipped her bottle of cold tea. "I have been accused of being far worse."

"Ha!"

"Deranged… Obsessed… A hybrid… A Hive-tainted witch…"

"I mean… that last one sounds pretty cool, not gonna lie… Bet they didn't say it to your face though." He chuckled.

"They did."

"And they're still breathin'?"

Eris smirked. "Yes."

The Drifter chewed his lip. "Who was it? Maybe I can get 'em in a Gambit match… have a uh… transmat malfunction… right into a pit of oh, I dunno… six or so Primevils?" He grinned down at her and took a sip of his beer.

"It was Empress Caiatl."

The Drifter choked and sputtered, struggling to avoid spitting the beer in his mouth, not wanting to get it in her hair. Eris sat up so he could wipe his face with a napkin from the table.

"So please do not," she continued, still smirking. "We do not need any more conflict with the Cabal than we have already."

"Damn! You're right but… huh… Now I wonder who would win. Caiatl or six Primevils? I'm sure she could take out one but all of 'em together? In a cage match?" The Drifter pursed his lips, pondering the statistical odds.

"Tsch."

"You remember how she was when we all fought the Witness. She ran out of ammo and started to punch things. Those Dread literally splattered."

"I do recall, yes. Calus' daughter is a formidable force to be reckoned with."

The Drifter leaned back with his arm out again and Eris resumed her previous position, nestled up against him.

"I wonder if she could punch one of the meatballs so hard it'd go blind. Probably could. But could she do it six times, is the question. Hmmm…. Still surprised she'd say that to you after you helped her so much though," he continued.

"It was before I assisted her with the nightmare of Dominus Ghaul… our interactions have vastly improved since then."

"Did she ever apologize?"

Eris finished her tea and placed the empty bottle on the table. "Not explicitly but… in her own way she has. She is far more accepting of my counsel now, and I have come to consider her a valuable ally and… while in the past I never would have thought it possible… I do now think of her as a friend."

"You sure do have a lot of friends in high places, Moondust: Ikora, Mara, Caiatl…"

"And low places." Eris turned slightly and reached up to tangle her fingertips into his beard.

He leaned forward and kissed her wrist. "Hard to get lower." He said softly as he stared lovingly into her eyes.

"Hmmm…" Eris pulled his face toward her, into a soft kiss. One kiss became two, and then four, and then more…

The Drifter's ghost emitted its single tone triumphantly and turned away from the Radiolite on Eris' desk. A stream of data began scrolling on the Drifter's datapad screen where it sat on the coffee table by his knee.

Neither the Drifter nor Eris paid it any mind.

The Drifter's ghost looked from the couple kissing each other gently on the couch, back to the Radiolite and then extended the flaps of it's soldered shell out slightly, raising and lowering them in physical mimicry of a sigh before transmatting itself away.