rekindledtitan | Fragment: Rebirth (April prompt for nexus_crossings yes I know what the date says)

Guardians always ask about your own rebirth.

I don’t mean that as criticism. It’s more than understandable when you’re trying to understand who you are - who and what - and how you came to be here. You know, stumbling up from the wreckage in a world you don’t recognize, surrounded by creatures who want to kill you. That’s the kind of thing that’ll hold your attention. It’s different for us Ghosts. We all know who we are. We know what we’re supposed to be doing. The same thing we’ve been around doing for centuries - unbroken centuries, at that. Nothing but searching, until I found you. It sounds simple when I put it that way.

I’ve never told you very much about what it was like.

Year after year alone in the wilderness. Sheltering from mountain storms in logs and crevices. Hiding at every noise and scanning for enemy signatures. I’d have company for a few moments whenever I ran across one of my fellow Ghosts, but that was all. We all had only one thing on our minds. Every pile of bones or tattered suit made me hopeful at first. I learned how to spot bunker entrances and overgrown wrecks and wriggle my way inside. I learned to spot when Fallen were tracking me, and how to give them the slip.

Seeing other Ghosts with their Guardians for the first time, and beginning to understand what I was searching for. Hearing stories of creatures worse than the Fallen: Light-devouring monsters and merciless robot hives. Seeing more and more of the others find their Guardians, while I stayed alone. Finding more and more of them fallen on the battlefield. Wondering if we could have helped. Wondering where you were. What you’d be like. Whether I’d find you at all.

I used to look up at the planets and worry that I was in the wrong place. Perhaps you were on Mars, or Venus, or Luna, or out drifting among the asteroids while I was circling uselessly around Earth. Or perhaps you were sealed away in some bunker I’d passed by, or shut up in a tomb I couldn’t break into. Once I snuck aboard a scouting Warlock’s ship, hoping the Light had sent him to guide me to you.

I did find you in the end, of course. I think what I’m trying to explain is that up to that moment the search was my life. It was everything. And it was a very long search. For all the beautiful things I saw, it was long and lonely and frightening. Then one day I looked in the belly of a rusting freighter and there you were. Just like that. A persisting Light inside a dead shell, waiting for me all that time.

Did you know that when you call me Ghost you don’t say it the way you do to other Ghosts, or the way other Guardians talk to me? I don’t think you realize, but you do. Did you know that in the century before I found you I exchanged as many words with another sentient being as in the 2.51 minutes after I raised you? Can you imagine how it felt to feel protected by you? To hear you answer me? To charge a pack of Fallen instead of cowering and fleeing? How it felt to defeat them?

It’s why I’m so very afraid of losing you.

Maybe someday I’ll tell you all this, but I don’t plan on it. I don’t think you’d like the idea that so much of who I am depends on you. But, well, I’m a Ghost. I can’t really help it. I waited for centuries just to speak your name. And then just like that, everything I used to be was over. I may not have literally risen from the dead, but I did get love and friendship and crazy adventures into the unknown. The chance to matter.

It’s a whole new world for us, Guardian. I’m just happy to share it with you.