Fragment: Dawning Realization
Jan. 25th, 2021 12:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rekindledtitanThe snow is starting to drift down again, painting over the slick-freezing patches of meltwater, the rucks of churned snow and mud. The scattered armor and the still-smoldering corpse. The alien stars above prick weakly past the warm glow of lantern lights drifting up and away. A solitary point of light descends past them, outshining their glow as the little Ghost returns to his Guardian.
A flicker of shimmering blue light illuminates the snow as he sweeps a scan over the body lying there. Cataloging the damage in a snapshot. Recording the details. The price paid.
Minor abrasions: anterior cranium; right scapular plates.
Superficial burns: face, covering upper mandible and mid-face.
Three (3) inter-plating wounds, non-critical, detailed:
One (1) laceration to anterior throat, fatal, detailed…
Organic contaminant detected: sputum, human-
It takes a moment to see. Another moment to store away in his memory, in the spark of Light at his core. Its twin calls up from the corpse beneath him: he reaches out, kindles it to life again-
Restores.
She sits up in a rush, golden eyes flitting over nothing: he knows once again she’s parsing where and when and who she is. Only a moment. A hand goes to her face, but the warm spatter of contempt is gone: he's already wiped it away. Ghost hovers close, anchored tight by concern as she focuses on him.
“Well,” she says simply, “’least that’s that.”
“...Maybe not.” He tips his shell; her eyes follow his down to a dagger, lying in the snow beside her. It's covered in a pale fluid, catching a shine in the twin glow of their gazes. Blaze pinches the blade between thumb and forefinger as she picks it up. Her brow plates are drawn together.
“She, uh. She really doesn’t listen, does she? I told her this goes no further.” Won’t take the truth for an answer, won’t talk to Steve herself, won’t understand final is final.
“Guess we’ll have to give it back to her.” The blunt matter-of-factness in her tone specifies it’ll be handle-first. They’ve got no further obligation to play along with Amelia’s version of reality.
“Let me store it, Ghost says, and it disappears in a transmat shimmer at her nod. He’ll keep it safe in containment. “Are you… all right?”
“I’m fine, Ghost,” she tells him, of course. “Not the first time I’ve had my throat cut.” She lets out a ‘heh’, adds softly, “Not even the first time it’s been her.”
But this is different, he thinks. The thought aches and grates like rusted wire beneath his shell. Guardians get used to being torn apart, burned, beaten, broken, maimed. But this isn’t the same as fighting a monster for the sake of innocent lives, or a clean fair death in the Crucible, or even the dark dreams she means now. Ghost knows that all violence leaves marks, but all violence isn’t interchangeable.
“You catch much of that?” she asks, looking up at him direct now. Unsure how far away he was hiding.
“No.”
Another nod. Ghost studies her expression: relieved? She pushes to her feet, marches toward the diminished pile of armor nearby. The black parts make a scatter of sharper shadows in the snow. “You didn’t miss much. Steve and Nike?”
“They went back to the Tower a few minutes ago.” He’s known her from the moment of her raising. He’s never heard her say a fight wasn’t worth being there for. “Did you hurt her?”
“Didn’t get a chance. Tossed her around some, set off a steam explosion in proximity- not too close, I guess, I didn’t see any burns. She kinda went to pieces soon as we got up close.”
She unbelts her mark, folds it respectfully before setting it aside. Ghost stares at her back, his points twitching. “…And then she slashed your throat open?”
Blaze shrugs. “Well-“ She lifts the chest-piece, voice muffling a second as she pulls it over her head, “I guess ’having a breakdown’ and ‘violent’ aren’t mutually exclusive.” She stoops, twists round, pulling on greaves, rerebraces, cinching her pauldrons into place. Reassembling the Titan, albeit a little damper.
“Good news is,” she says, hunting down her gauntlets and boots, shaking snow off them, “she wants nothing to do with Steve. Might hassle him anyway, but he can handle himself.” Ghost relaxes a bit. It should be regrettable, another door closing on someone Steve used to care about. Someone who might have been a friend to him again. But after this… Steve has enough dangers to contend with.
There’s no going back to making cocoa and telling stories, a while yet before they have to meet Adia and Caspar. The lights and sounds of the Dawning celebration reflect down the street as they head for Blaze’s preferred bar a block away. It’s quiet, tonight. She steers past the mostly alien clientele to sit at the counter and orders one of the two things on the menu that she’ll drink. Ghost trails along after her.
Her order comes in a thick glass, the liquid inside glowing softly. Ghost doesn’t bother to scan it. Blaze has a few swallows, nurses both the drink and her buzz for a few minutes, deep in her thoughts.
“Are you okay, Ghost?”
His points twitch as he looks up, jolted out of his own ruminations. Where to start? How to give a shape to the things that claw at him? What has he a right to share?
He settles on the guilt. “…We brought Steve to the Tower together. Your decisions were mine, too. If people are angry, we both bear the responsibility, but you’re the one getting hurt.”
“Course I am. I’m your Guardian, remember? That’s what I do.” Her hand closes warm and protective over him, pulling him closer to her chest. “I take the lead, so I take the fire. And there’s no way in the multiverse I’d let you be her next target.” He can feel the warmth rolling gently from her, the fire within burning bright again. The steady whisper of telemetry signals from the sensors in her chestpiece…
“Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about sharing punishment,” Blaze is saying. Sitting on her thoughts has never suited her. Once she’s started talking through them they all come rolling out. “I don’t think that’s what that was, exactly. I mean, that’s what it sounded like. She got hurt and she wanted to knock my head, lay into me for it. Seemed fair to me. Hell, I thought maybe once I’d heard her out she’d even cool off and listen. And you know, I thought… I know what it’s like to be mad at something you can’t do anything about. Sometimes it feels like a fight is the only thing you can win. Even if it’s the wrong one.”
She knocks back the last of her drink, lifts the glass to request another with a frown. “But the way things went out there, none of it sits right. I know it’s Amelia, but that just wasn’t… hey, Ghost, what’s wrong?”
He’s moved away from her, folded in on himself and looking into space. It takes him a minute. “I pulled the audio telemetry from your armor.”
The armor. The armor left sitting ignored and nearby In the darkness as she chased Amelia through her wall of fire. “Oh. Shit. How much did it, uh-?”
“There’s… there’s enough.” The points of his shell are trembling. “The way she talks to you- and…” Blaze leans over him anxiously as he struggles with his words. To process it. To contain himself.
“She talks about Steve as if he’s not even a person.” He can hear his voice shaking. “As if he’s… some thing that belonged to her. She… she doesn’t even care what he would have wanted, or if he wants to find out where he comes from, or what he’s feeling! All… all she talks about is how she’s entitled to know about him. She- she never even asks if he wanted that. And she acts as- as if she’s the only one who- as if we didn’t care about him just as much!”
He shuts his stuttering outburst off, shuddering with a weight of unfamiliar emotion. He’s always the quiet one, the subtle one, the careful word to Blaze’s full-throated challenge. Her eyes don’t leave him as she sits back, lifting a hand for him to bump against for comfort. The barkeeper ventures close enough to set down her order, then beats a hasty slither elsewhere.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Blaze’s voice is rarely so soft. “Amelia wants him hidden away from her, but you’ve been there every single day, watching over him. Keeping it all in, never saying a word. Watching him be someone new.”
“We- we all have,” he points out, quiet with embarrassment. “You, and Thor…”
“Ain’t the same, though. He meant so much to us, but he and you… if you had any more of a connection I’d have been out of a job.” It’s the wrong time to joke, she sees that as soon as he flexes in alarm, and she closes her fingers over him with a low sound of reassurance.
“Hey, it’s okay, I’m kidding.” Mostly. “But if I’d gone first, and you survived… he’d have been the right choice, is all I’m trying to say.” There was a time not long ago when she was sure it would end that way, and if not for Steve… She strokes Ghost’s shell with her thumb, feeling his Light flutter against her palm even through the hardened mesh. “I can’t weigh what Amelia’s feeling; I don’t know her that way. But we both know she’s not the only one whose heart got broken.”
“…He was my second friend, ” he whispers finally, lost for the words to encapsulate all of what he’s feeling, the unspoken truth she’s finally called out.
“First one you didn’t dig up yourself,” she agrees- teasing a little, but it matters. The first friend not bound to him by shared destiny. She was still new when they met Steve. Much less sociable. No fireteam to run with, so new to patrolling populated zones or meeting anyone outside the Tower besides a fellow Guardian - or a hostile alien.
The memory crowds in on her readily: Ghost as he was then, a terminally shy presence at her side, focused so intently on his Guardian alone. He’s gotten quieter since the Fallen took him, quieter again since Steve died. But he’s never gone back to that.
“Kaolin, the others… they were kind. They were my friends because they were yours-” all that mattered to an anxious Ghost protective of their new Guardian, “but Steve made friends with me.”
“You made friends with him,” she points out, slugging her drink.
“...He saw me differently. Not just as your Ghost. Of course he didn’t really know what a Ghost was anyway, but…” She nods; he doesn’t need to explain it to her. “...When I found you, I wasn’t alone for the first time in centuries. You were the end of my Nightmare. But Steve… was something else. He was… special.” Utterly inadequate. Steve was something he doesn’t have the words for. Something he never tried to examine and now it’s too late. Now Steve is another man, one who has a Ghost and it’s not right to say anything, it’s not right to want to get close…
“He carried the Light,” Blaze says solemnly. She pulls her hand back and pokes Ghost gently, snapping him out of it. “Hey. Remember the picture? Get it out for a minute, would you?”
It’s tucked lovingly into the most secure compartment on their ship. Ghost pulls it into the air between them with the whisk of a transmat, and Blaze takes off a gauntlet to unfold it with care. It’s a page out of a sketchbook, pencil lines in a familiar hand. Ghost drifts close to study it with her. The drawing shows two people: a blonde woman in uniform, confident, direct, ready to go toe-to-toe with the world; and behind her, hand on her sleeve, a shorter man. He’s slightly built, half hidden by his companion, but there’s presence in his curious expression as he looks around them, the touch that could be asking reassurance as easily as lending guidance.
“…Steve was always real good at seeing people for who they were.” She can’t help the wry tone. He called this one better than he could have known. “Remember, the man who drew this isn’t gone as long as we honor his example. Keep his legacy alive. And we're gonna do that for him.”
“...Of course we will. We... made a promise.” He's trying to reassure himself. They never back down from their duty. At least… his Titan never would. He has to ask himself if he can really live up to the same. For now, Ghost huddles closer to her, away from the hollow ache he feels. Blaze shifts her arm, making a nook for him while she drinks and he absorbs himself in pencil lines and memories. A respite before the next battle.
He can’t help wondering how Steve would draw them now.
A flicker of shimmering blue light illuminates the snow as he sweeps a scan over the body lying there. Cataloging the damage in a snapshot. Recording the details. The price paid.
Minor abrasions: anterior cranium; right scapular plates.
Superficial burns: face, covering upper mandible and mid-face.
Three (3) inter-plating wounds, non-critical, detailed:
- Puncture, left rear abdomen, above existing scar, penetration to depth…
- Puncture, right clavicle above plating, penetration…
- Puncture, upper left throat…
- Puncture, right clavicle above plating, penetration…
- Puncture, upper left throat…
One (1) laceration to anterior throat, fatal, detailed…
Organic contaminant detected: sputum, human-
It takes a moment to see. Another moment to store away in his memory, in the spark of Light at his core. Its twin calls up from the corpse beneath him: he reaches out, kindles it to life again-
Restores.
She sits up in a rush, golden eyes flitting over nothing: he knows once again she’s parsing where and when and who she is. Only a moment. A hand goes to her face, but the warm spatter of contempt is gone: he's already wiped it away. Ghost hovers close, anchored tight by concern as she focuses on him.
“Well,” she says simply, “’least that’s that.”
“...Maybe not.” He tips his shell; her eyes follow his down to a dagger, lying in the snow beside her. It's covered in a pale fluid, catching a shine in the twin glow of their gazes. Blaze pinches the blade between thumb and forefinger as she picks it up. Her brow plates are drawn together.
“She, uh. She really doesn’t listen, does she? I told her this goes no further.” Won’t take the truth for an answer, won’t talk to Steve herself, won’t understand final is final.
“Guess we’ll have to give it back to her.” The blunt matter-of-factness in her tone specifies it’ll be handle-first. They’ve got no further obligation to play along with Amelia’s version of reality.
“Let me store it, Ghost says, and it disappears in a transmat shimmer at her nod. He’ll keep it safe in containment. “Are you… all right?”
“I’m fine, Ghost,” she tells him, of course. “Not the first time I’ve had my throat cut.” She lets out a ‘heh’, adds softly, “Not even the first time it’s been her.”
But this is different, he thinks. The thought aches and grates like rusted wire beneath his shell. Guardians get used to being torn apart, burned, beaten, broken, maimed. But this isn’t the same as fighting a monster for the sake of innocent lives, or a clean fair death in the Crucible, or even the dark dreams she means now. Ghost knows that all violence leaves marks, but all violence isn’t interchangeable.
“You catch much of that?” she asks, looking up at him direct now. Unsure how far away he was hiding.
“No.”
Another nod. Ghost studies her expression: relieved? She pushes to her feet, marches toward the diminished pile of armor nearby. The black parts make a scatter of sharper shadows in the snow. “You didn’t miss much. Steve and Nike?”
“They went back to the Tower a few minutes ago.” He’s known her from the moment of her raising. He’s never heard her say a fight wasn’t worth being there for. “Did you hurt her?”
“Didn’t get a chance. Tossed her around some, set off a steam explosion in proximity- not too close, I guess, I didn’t see any burns. She kinda went to pieces soon as we got up close.”
She unbelts her mark, folds it respectfully before setting it aside. Ghost stares at her back, his points twitching. “…And then she slashed your throat open?”
Blaze shrugs. “Well-“ She lifts the chest-piece, voice muffling a second as she pulls it over her head, “I guess ’having a breakdown’ and ‘violent’ aren’t mutually exclusive.” She stoops, twists round, pulling on greaves, rerebraces, cinching her pauldrons into place. Reassembling the Titan, albeit a little damper.
“Good news is,” she says, hunting down her gauntlets and boots, shaking snow off them, “she wants nothing to do with Steve. Might hassle him anyway, but he can handle himself.” Ghost relaxes a bit. It should be regrettable, another door closing on someone Steve used to care about. Someone who might have been a friend to him again. But after this… Steve has enough dangers to contend with.
There’s no going back to making cocoa and telling stories, a while yet before they have to meet Adia and Caspar. The lights and sounds of the Dawning celebration reflect down the street as they head for Blaze’s preferred bar a block away. It’s quiet, tonight. She steers past the mostly alien clientele to sit at the counter and orders one of the two things on the menu that she’ll drink. Ghost trails along after her.
Her order comes in a thick glass, the liquid inside glowing softly. Ghost doesn’t bother to scan it. Blaze has a few swallows, nurses both the drink and her buzz for a few minutes, deep in her thoughts.
“Are you okay, Ghost?”
His points twitch as he looks up, jolted out of his own ruminations. Where to start? How to give a shape to the things that claw at him? What has he a right to share?
He settles on the guilt. “…We brought Steve to the Tower together. Your decisions were mine, too. If people are angry, we both bear the responsibility, but you’re the one getting hurt.”
“Course I am. I’m your Guardian, remember? That’s what I do.” Her hand closes warm and protective over him, pulling him closer to her chest. “I take the lead, so I take the fire. And there’s no way in the multiverse I’d let you be her next target.” He can feel the warmth rolling gently from her, the fire within burning bright again. The steady whisper of telemetry signals from the sensors in her chestpiece…
“Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about sharing punishment,” Blaze is saying. Sitting on her thoughts has never suited her. Once she’s started talking through them they all come rolling out. “I don’t think that’s what that was, exactly. I mean, that’s what it sounded like. She got hurt and she wanted to knock my head, lay into me for it. Seemed fair to me. Hell, I thought maybe once I’d heard her out she’d even cool off and listen. And you know, I thought… I know what it’s like to be mad at something you can’t do anything about. Sometimes it feels like a fight is the only thing you can win. Even if it’s the wrong one.”
She knocks back the last of her drink, lifts the glass to request another with a frown. “But the way things went out there, none of it sits right. I know it’s Amelia, but that just wasn’t… hey, Ghost, what’s wrong?”
He’s moved away from her, folded in on himself and looking into space. It takes him a minute. “I pulled the audio telemetry from your armor.”
The armor. The armor left sitting ignored and nearby In the darkness as she chased Amelia through her wall of fire. “Oh. Shit. How much did it, uh-?”
“There’s… there’s enough.” The points of his shell are trembling. “The way she talks to you- and…” Blaze leans over him anxiously as he struggles with his words. To process it. To contain himself.
“She talks about Steve as if he’s not even a person.” He can hear his voice shaking. “As if he’s… some thing that belonged to her. She… she doesn’t even care what he would have wanted, or if he wants to find out where he comes from, or what he’s feeling! All… all she talks about is how she’s entitled to know about him. She- she never even asks if he wanted that. And she acts as- as if she’s the only one who- as if we didn’t care about him just as much!”
He shuts his stuttering outburst off, shuddering with a weight of unfamiliar emotion. He’s always the quiet one, the subtle one, the careful word to Blaze’s full-throated challenge. Her eyes don’t leave him as she sits back, lifting a hand for him to bump against for comfort. The barkeeper ventures close enough to set down her order, then beats a hasty slither elsewhere.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Blaze’s voice is rarely so soft. “Amelia wants him hidden away from her, but you’ve been there every single day, watching over him. Keeping it all in, never saying a word. Watching him be someone new.”
“We- we all have,” he points out, quiet with embarrassment. “You, and Thor…”
“Ain’t the same, though. He meant so much to us, but he and you… if you had any more of a connection I’d have been out of a job.” It’s the wrong time to joke, she sees that as soon as he flexes in alarm, and she closes her fingers over him with a low sound of reassurance.
“Hey, it’s okay, I’m kidding.” Mostly. “But if I’d gone first, and you survived… he’d have been the right choice, is all I’m trying to say.” There was a time not long ago when she was sure it would end that way, and if not for Steve… She strokes Ghost’s shell with her thumb, feeling his Light flutter against her palm even through the hardened mesh. “I can’t weigh what Amelia’s feeling; I don’t know her that way. But we both know she’s not the only one whose heart got broken.”
“…He was my second friend, ” he whispers finally, lost for the words to encapsulate all of what he’s feeling, the unspoken truth she’s finally called out.
“First one you didn’t dig up yourself,” she agrees- teasing a little, but it matters. The first friend not bound to him by shared destiny. She was still new when they met Steve. Much less sociable. No fireteam to run with, so new to patrolling populated zones or meeting anyone outside the Tower besides a fellow Guardian - or a hostile alien.
The memory crowds in on her readily: Ghost as he was then, a terminally shy presence at her side, focused so intently on his Guardian alone. He’s gotten quieter since the Fallen took him, quieter again since Steve died. But he’s never gone back to that.
“Kaolin, the others… they were kind. They were my friends because they were yours-” all that mattered to an anxious Ghost protective of their new Guardian, “but Steve made friends with me.”
“You made friends with him,” she points out, slugging her drink.
“...He saw me differently. Not just as your Ghost. Of course he didn’t really know what a Ghost was anyway, but…” She nods; he doesn’t need to explain it to her. “...When I found you, I wasn’t alone for the first time in centuries. You were the end of my Nightmare. But Steve… was something else. He was… special.” Utterly inadequate. Steve was something he doesn’t have the words for. Something he never tried to examine and now it’s too late. Now Steve is another man, one who has a Ghost and it’s not right to say anything, it’s not right to want to get close…
“He carried the Light,” Blaze says solemnly. She pulls her hand back and pokes Ghost gently, snapping him out of it. “Hey. Remember the picture? Get it out for a minute, would you?”
It’s tucked lovingly into the most secure compartment on their ship. Ghost pulls it into the air between them with the whisk of a transmat, and Blaze takes off a gauntlet to unfold it with care. It’s a page out of a sketchbook, pencil lines in a familiar hand. Ghost drifts close to study it with her. The drawing shows two people: a blonde woman in uniform, confident, direct, ready to go toe-to-toe with the world; and behind her, hand on her sleeve, a shorter man. He’s slightly built, half hidden by his companion, but there’s presence in his curious expression as he looks around them, the touch that could be asking reassurance as easily as lending guidance.
“…Steve was always real good at seeing people for who they were.” She can’t help the wry tone. He called this one better than he could have known. “Remember, the man who drew this isn’t gone as long as we honor his example. Keep his legacy alive. And we're gonna do that for him.”
“...Of course we will. We... made a promise.” He's trying to reassure himself. They never back down from their duty. At least… his Titan never would. He has to ask himself if he can really live up to the same. For now, Ghost huddles closer to her, away from the hollow ache he feels. Blaze shifts her arm, making a nook for him while she drinks and he absorbs himself in pencil lines and memories. A respite before the next battle.
He can’t help wondering how Steve would draw them now.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-22 10:56 pm (UTC)"I do not know what that would even look like. What that would change....what it would mean." Nike admits in a voice so small it's nearly lost to the dormitory they're crowded in. "I do not think I am your equal. Were we to face each other..." She can't even imagine striking down Blaze. Though she can imagine with very certain clarity the titan breaking her.
Nike stars at the hand outstretched to her. When she reaches up it's to grip at the sides of Blaze's gauntlet with both of her own hands rather than giving the Exo hers.
"I fear as an equal all I would do is let you down. I am no Guardian."
no subject
Date: 2021-03-28 11:09 am (UTC)She pauses, her eyes focused elsewhere for a moment as she takes in Nike's whispered fears and too many of her own memories cry out in echo. "I know it's... frightening, this kind of change. Better than almost anyone, I'd guess. It's terrifying, when you feel-" it all coming apart, shuttering into darkness, every thought falling away to horrific nothing" "like your only anchor's crumbling away. When you don't know what's going to be left of you on the other side." Her gaze flits over nothing; then she shudders a little, deliberately recalibrating.
"But. But sometimes- sometimes, when you choose it - when you have a purpose to hold to-" she reaches out half-consciously as she recalls the Forge, and a warm wind brushes over her fingers, "turns out it's a good kind of frightening. The kind that comes with being free suddenly."
She turns her hand in Nike's hesitant grasp, to touch the angel's fingers. Her glowing gaze is seeking Nike's again. "I don't know all of what it would change, either. Or who you'd become. But I think maybe you want to find out. So I want to help you."
no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 10:52 pm (UTC)"I've already been freed, Blaze. You freed me from a life lived in constant fear, chained by my birthright to be nothing more than any of my kind."
And she is afraid of losing her place at the Exo's side. That someone else will replace Nike as the titan's faithful servant. But more than that...she's afraid of letting Blaze down after all of that.
"The contract can be broken." Nike hears herself say, even though the words feel ice cold in her throat. "I would stay to hear your renegotiation proposal."
no subject
Date: 2021-04-04 10:12 pm (UTC)Some tension goes out of her armored shoulders, when Nike accepts her offer. Blaze nods quickly, her fingers curling over the angel's delicate hands and squeezing cautiously. "Great- then we can do it whenever you think you're ready. I figured you might want some time to think over what you'd want out of the deal. Any guarantees, things you'd want me to do for you. Or... not do."
no subject
Date: 2021-04-05 08:30 pm (UTC)Her gaze sweeps over Blaze who is visibly relaxing. Watching her body language, watching her grip shift to squeeze Nike's own fingers and suffuse them with warmth. This result...pleases Blaze. This is what the titan wants. It's made her happy.
Nike has...made her...happy.
Even if she is afraid of what this change will bring, is it not worthwhile if it pleases Blaze? Seeing her mistress-no. Her fireteam leader--no, again. If they are not master and servant, what else is there? Seeing her...friend? Is that what they are? Nike has made her happy, whatever Blaze is to become to her. And that feeling still spreads warmth beneath Nike's skin as much as it ever did. It makes her stop trembling so much.
"I...won't know how to do any of that, Blaze. But I'll try."
no subject
Date: 2021-04-05 09:33 pm (UTC)She gets up to leave, needing some space herself as much as she expects Nike will. "Try to get some rest, all right? It's been a long, strange night."
But she pauses in the doorway, looks back. "And Nike? Lord Saladin's next induction for the new Guardians is coming round at the end of next month. I expect to see you there, understood? Have a good night."