Chapter Text
”Okay, we really need to get moving. Like, NOW.”
Your Ghost bonks you in the head, and a hollow kind of thunk sounds on your helmet. The noise jars you to your senses as your head cants slightly to the side. You were standing over the bodies of a handful of slain Eliksni, the barrel of your auto rifle still smoking. A manic sort of laugh bubbled up from the base of your throat. Fueled by fear and disbelief, the laugh soon took on a mind of its own. It wasn’t long before a high pitched cackle was reverberating off of the rusted, metallic walls of the Cosmodrome.
”... Guardian?”
The worried tone of your Ghost’s voice brought you partially back to yourself. The terrible, hysterical noise gurgling up from your throat died down. Sighing, you lowered the Khvostov to your side, bringing one hand up to run over your face in an attempt to center yourself. The helmet you woke up in blocked your hand from ever reaching your face, but the motion served its purpose. A couple deep, calming breaths later, and your mind finally began catching up to everything that was happening.
”I’m alright little buddy, I’m alright. I just-”
Another deep sigh. ’Alright, come on. Get it together.’
”Yeah, you’re right. We have to get moving. We can’t stop here, and I really need to talk to you.”
You took another moment to yourself before you moved, keeping your breathing even and steady. Once you no longer felt the panicky bubble of the manic laughter in your throat, you took off along the metal catwalk.
”I- Okay. Alright, just. Just wait for me Guardian, I’ll light our way.”
If you thought your Ghost sounded concerned before, then he absolutely did now. A directed beam of light flooded the area immediately in front of you, adjusting to a soft glow after a few moments, flooding the area around you in a warm light.
The walls of the Cosmodrome alternated between closed, winding quarters and vaulted empty spaces. You were in one of those vast, echoing chambers now, and you tried your best to keep the sound from your footfalls to a minimum. Still, even just your weight on these ancient, pre-Collapse structures was causing a significant amount of creaking and groaning. You had no doubt that if there were any Eliksni in the area, they knew exactly where you were. That they saw exactly what you did to their friends.
You glanced up at your Ghost bobbing along beside you, having no trouble keeping up with your quick gait. His standard issue Ghost shell was practically luminescent in the pitch darkness of your surroundings, and it struck you in that moment just how small, how vulnerable, he was.
’I really gotta replace that shell. He’s practically asking to be used as target practice as he is.’
The thought made your stomach lurch, but you carried on in silence, not sharing your thoughts about his shell. Poor guy was probably worried enough about you, and you didn’t want to add his own safety to what you were sure was a growing list of anxieties. ‘Still,’ you thought, ‘I’m absolutely going to be putting him in something less reflective when we get out of this.’
You carried on, following occasional direction from your Ghost when the need called for it. Thanks to his scans, you never found yourself stuck in a dead end. The bobbing light of your Ghost lit your way, and you caught him glancing at you every so often, too. It made sense. You nearly had a nervous breakdown not too long ago, and he’d spent so long looking for his Guardian. Hundreds of years, he had said. Your stomach dropped. Poor guy just had to get saddled with you.
Catching the faint sound of scraping metal to your right, you whirled to face it and fired on instinct you didn’t know you had. A thud sounded on the metal flooring, followed by more rapid footsteps, and soon the catwalk was alight with muzzle fire. It was a short firefight, and you both came out unscathed. You gripped the rifle in your hands tightly in an effort to keep them from shaking.
”I knew you had it in you, Guardian.”
Your Ghost’s tone was warm and proud. Relieved.
Right. Keeping yourself safe was keeping him safe, and that thought helped banish the wobbly, anxious feeling that had taken up residence in your gut. It was replaced with determination, a solid feeling you could build something more on.
You were going to keep him safe. You wouldn’t let him suffer just because his Guardian was off kilter. You wouldn’t put him at risk because you remembered your past. You wouldn’t let him die because you knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that you weren’t supposed to be here.
”That should be enough to scare the rest of them off. The Fallen are scavengers, alien pirates that keep to the shadows and leech off humanity’s lost technology. I don’t think they’ll risk coming after you for a while after seeing you in action like that.” He sounded so satisfied. So proud of you.
”Eliksni.” You were still distracted by the recent firefight, so you forgot to hold your tongue. As a result, you responded before you could stop yourself, and you felt your little Ghost’s gaze whip around to face you. Sighing, knowing you ruined the moment, you chose to double down. “They’re called the Eliksni. We call them the Fallen. That isn’t what they call themselves.”
A deafening silence followed.
’If the little bugger had a jaw it would be on the floor about now.’
You nearly chuckled at the thought. Forcing a chipper tone, you said, “Come on then. Better keep moving. You know what they say; ‘The night is dark and full of terrors.’ ”
Continuing on, you walked beyond the soft flood of light emanating from your Ghost, surprised that you could still see relatively well in the darkness. Not that you needed to for long, as the light rapidly caught up to you. Coming to a halt directly in front of your face, brightness mercifully turned down, you stared at the little, unblinking optic of your Ghost.
”How is it possible for you to know that?”
He floated before you, shell twitching and whirring anxiously. Reaching up, you cupped your hand around your Ghost, pulling him to your chest in a kind of embrace. A wave of relief washed over you when he let it happen, when he didn’t dodge out of the way of your touch. Dipping your head down, you nuzzled the front of your helmet into his shell. Your voice came out quiet, pleading, with more than a little fear laced through your words.
”Like I said little buddy, I really gotta talk to you.”
A resigned huff came from the small floating construct as he tried to wriggle out of your grasp. “I’m not that little.”
You let out a laugh, a genuine one, as relief flooded your body. Releasing him, he floated up to eye level, bobbing forward to tap your helmet with his shell playfully. “I’m holding you to that, you know. The talking.”
Moving around him, you carried on down the path of the tutorial of Destiny 2. “Oh, I know. Now let’s get through all this so we can, yeah?”
”Sounds good to me!”
You’d broken out into a trot about an hour ago, and you once again marveled at the seemingly endless stamina of your new body. Not only had you basically not stopped moving since you were first rezzed, you’d also gotten into more than a few shootouts. You weren’t exactly a couch potato before this, but there was no way you’d ever be able to achieve this level of cardio. You weren’t even breathing heavily. ’Well, that’s super soldiers for you, I guess.’ Still, this was dragging on longer than you had hoped it would.
”Hey, are we almost out of here? I’m a little worried that I’ll go blind in the sun if I spend any more time in all this dark.”
Even if you felt like you could run forever, you didn’t really want to. Especially not in the dark, rusted walls of the Cosmodrome. ’I do not remember this portion of the tutorial being this long. Guess there are gonna be variances between “life” and the game.’
The sudden thought startled you a bit. Accepting what was happening, all of this, as ‘life’ so readily threw you for a bit of a loop, but it wasn’t like you had any other choice at the moment. Either this was actually happening to you, or this was a very vivid, very lucid dream. While you’d always been able to remember your dreams in pretty good clarity, you’re one hundred percent certain you’ve never felt pain like the gunshot that clipped your leg in a dream before. At this point it was either accept that this was really happening to you, or die a horrible death and take your Ghost down with you.
’Yeah, better not.’
Your Ghost, who had previously been tucked safely away in your Light at your insistence, popped out and made a few mechanical chirps and beeps as he scanned the area. “Not far now, we’re almost out. Once we are, I’ll be able to do a scan and see if there are any workable ships in the area. We’ll need one to get to the Last City.”
He paused before continuing, as if expecting you to ask, “The Last City?” No such question came, however, so he continued.
”Uh, right. So, up around this corner there should be a giant ventilation fan, and it looks like there should be a break in the wall to the right of it. We can get out through there.”
Following your Ghost’s instructions, and the convenient marker on the view through your helmet, you soon found the massive ventilation fan. Sunlight was filtering through the plant life that had grown up around it, glittering on the water pooled in the mud around its base. The break in the wall was just where you expected it to be, and you were out.
The relief you felt at finally being free of the damned Cosmodrome walls was brief and ended in sudden gunfire and sounds of groaning metal. Your eyes barely had time to adjust to the harsh light of day before Fallen swarmed you. In a flurry of motion that you barely had to think about and would remember even less, you were dashing from the small pile of bodies left in your wake, seeking cover from the fire of a massive Walker.
”Shit, shit, shit, shitshitshitshitshit I forgot about the fucking WALKER!”
All sense of decorum or poise long abandoned, you sprinted headlong across a field as fast as your legs would carry you, screeching expletives as you went. Once you found adequate cover against a thick, reinforced concrete wall, you slid down it, trying to steady your breathing. You ran erratically enough through the debris of the Cosmodrome, so it didn’t seem like anyone had followed you, or had a lock on your position. ’It’s the little things, sometimes.’ After a moment, you began loading shells into a shotgun you found after a previous firefight while you were still in the walls.
”So”, you manage to get out between nerve rattled breaths, “I’m gonna have to kill that thing, aren’t I?” You didn’t bother to conceal the very sharp edge of panic in your voice. After all, he was your Ghost. He’s in this shit with you, right?
”Yeah, probably. Actually, no I would say definitely.”
A panic laugh barked out of you as you fumbled with the shotgun ammo. “Don’t suppose you can sense anything with a little more juice laying around this fucking junkheap, can you?” If he was startled by your sudden uptick in vulgar language, your Ghost didn’t let on. Ever the helpful saint of a little fella he was, he simply responded, “Well, you could use your grenades.”
You stopped what you were doing, turned your head to look at him, and responded rather stupidly, “But I don’t have any grenades.”
”Well, no, not PHYSICAL ones, but you have your Light! Reach into your Light and focus on what you want. It should come pretty intuitively.”
A moment of silence, at least between the two of you as there were still ambient explosions and gunfire in the distance, passes and you just go, “Huh. So that’s how that works.” After another beat, “How about something bigger? How does that work?”
You shied away from calling it a ‘Super’, as that was pretty specifically video game terminology, and you didn’t want to seem any weirder than you already did. At least not before you got a chance to talk to your little buddy about this.
His response was immediate. “Just the same, but bigger. MUCH bigger.”
Grinning, you reached inside yourself to the warm glow you’d noticed when you first woke up here, feeling hopeful about your situation for the first time. Your Ghost had spent a good amount of time in that space, so you knew where to look for it. You tugged at its edges, and it responded to you. Without trying, you knew you’d be able to pull what you needed from your Light. Intuitive indeed.
A sudden wave of calm clarity washed over you. ‘Right. I may be the same person in my head, but I am a Guardian. An honest to fuck Guardian, a literal super soldier, and I can do this.’ You continued to load your shotgun, hands now only trembling slightly. “So, got a name, little guy? Feel like I should learn it before we run headlong into our deaths.” You felt a manic kind of grin tug at your lips, and you were glad for the helmet covering your face.
”Okay, one, we’re not going to die, and two, no. No, I don't have one. It’s customary for a Ghost’s Guardian to name them.” There was a hint of sadness in the way he said that. You supposed a couple hundred years was a pretty long time to go without having a name.
”Well then, guess I should do the honors." You paused for a moment, giving some thought to it, when the perfect name came to you. "How about Poe?”
“Poe?” Your Ghost’s body tilted to one side, looking very much like a confused, mechanical little puppy. “Not that I don’t like it, but does it mean anything?”
Finishing up loading the shotgun, you rose to your feet, dusting off the seat of your pants as you did. “There’s this pre-Golden Age author I like. His name was Edgar Allen Poe. Wrote mostly poems, short stories, stuff like that.” Checking yourself over, you made sure the Khvostov was fully loaded and at least semi-functional. “It was all horror. Pretty spooky stuff. So, seeing as you’re a ‘Ghost’, and I’m technically undead, I thought it might fit.” You flashed a smile he couldn’t see but hoped he could sense in the tone of your voice. “Also it’s cute.”
At that, your Ghost mimed shaking his head, which was really just shaking his whole chassis and you struggled to keep the cooing that was threatening to well up from your throat at bay. Amazing what knowing you were packing infinite, Light-fueled ammunition did for one’s nerves. “Well, I don’t know about that last part, but I like it. I wasn’t expecting so much thought to be put into it, honestly.” He paused and looked around at everything but you, as if working up to say something else. “What… what’s your name?”
’Oh. Guess we didn’t cover that either. Oops.’
”Oh! Yeah, uh it’s-” Just as you were about to give your name, your real name, you stopped. Something about it didn’t feel right, for some reason. “It’s uh. It’s Nevret. You can call me Nev, though, if you want.”
”Nevret!” He chirped happily, bobbing up and down with excitement. You weren’t able to stifle a giggle at his antics this time. “I like it! What does yours mean?”
At that, you could only laugh. Couldn’t exactly tell him it was a gaming handle you came up with when you were fourteen and had used ever since. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess?” Poe visibly drooped at that, his shell going a little limp and he dropped an inch or two in the air. Feeling a little guilty, you reached out to him, drawing him close to your helmeted face, nuzzling him gently. “Sorry, little guy. Didn’t mean to disappoint.”
At the use of your nickname for him, he began wriggling out of your grasp, huffing in exasperation that you suspected was a little less than genuine. “I’m not that little!”
Laughing you reached out to him with your hand again. “You are to me. Now, back into the Light with you, we’ve got a Walker to nuke.”
”Well that could have gone better.”
You pulled yourself up from the dirt after your latest rezz, shaking your head slightly and trying to reorient yourself as quickly as possible. You had another few moments this time due to the fact that your body had more or less been vaporized by an energy blast from the Walker. So, Poe was able to flit to an area with slightly more cover to get you up this time. ’It really is the little things.’
Poe darted around your head, giving you a once over to make sure you were set to go. “We’re so close! You almost got it that time. Another few good hits and we’re good to go!”
”Yeah, another few hits on the Walker, and another million on the small army of Eliksni that keep shooting at me from a distance. I thought you said these pricks tended to avoid fights they couldn’t win?” Reloading your shotgun for the umpteenth time, you mentally ran through all the spots you saw groups of the Fallen hanging around before you were vaporized.
”Oh, they absolutely think they can win this fight. In fact, most Guardians would be completely in over their heads right now.”
Whirling to face him, you transmatted your helmet away, a trick you learned over the course of this very long fight, and shot your Ghost your best whatthefuckdidyoujustsay look.
He shrugged his shell at you. “It’s true. But I knew you were different from the moment I rezzed you!” His voice managed to be both proud and defensive at once. “Well, from the first fight you got into I should say. You’re a natural, and I had complete faith in you.” You just kept staring at him in disbelief. “Okay, the small army of Fal- Eliksni coming out of the woodwork was a bit surprising, and I was pretty worried for a bit there, but you’re handling it so well!”
”Poe, I’ve died like. Fifty times.”
Scoffing, he just responded, “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’ve only died eleven times.”
”You know, it’s standard for a person to only die like, once, so forgive me if I’m still getting used to this.” There was no bite to your words as you snarked back. The banter between the two of you had become easier over the past few hours, natural. It was nice. You’d been worried about your relationship with Poe since he woke you up, but you were glad it was looking like you didn’t need to be.
Reaching into your Light for a final check, you were satisfied with what you found. Your firepower recharged really quickly, and using your Solar abilities was immensely satisfying. Done with your final checks, you signaled for Poe to return to your Light. He bobbed over to you, nuzzling the side of your neck before disappearing. Once he was safe and sound, you leapt out from behind your cover, unloading everything you had into that damn Walker.
You were currently stood on top of the spent and sparking body of the Walker, triumphant and pissed off. You just sunk multiple waves of Solar grenades and knives of all sizes into the felled metal beast, and were currently shooting after the Eliksni retreating into the wall of the Cosmodrome. Grunting in frustration at their retreating figures, you hopped down from the lifeless automaton, landing amidst scraps of metal and empty bullet casings.
“Oh, so what, they all run off scared now that I’ve proven to be a threat? Bullshit.” You transmat your helmet off, keeping the hooded cowl tight around your head, and spit blood onto the ground at your feet. More than one elbow to the face left you bruised and bloody, and the Eliksni had four arms each. “Stay and fight so I can pay you back and loot your fucking bodies, jackasses.”
[Well, I did tell you. They’re cowards. Typically.] He spoke to you from his safe little spot in your Light, his voice sounding directly in your head. Bit of a weird sensation, but you were quickly getting used to it.
’Almost like my internal monologue can answer back. And is becoming increasingly snarky.’
[By the way, you’re acclimating to combat very quickly. I suppose it makes sense, with you being a Hunter and all. You all tend to be a little … enthusiastic when it comes to being on the battlefield.]
”Hey, I’ll take it. Better than being a Titan or a Warlock. I’d get claustrophobic in all that heavy armor, and those robes are not my style.” You popped your helmet back on, pulling it from the convenient storage space Poe taught you how to use after one of your rezzes.
[...Right. So, I’ll uh. I’ll do a scan for a ship now that things have quieted down some.] Poe wasn’t questioning your unusual and impossible, at least from his perspective, knowledge anymore, but you could tell it was really eating at him.
’Well, we’ll be able to talk soon. If what comes next actually happens in the way I remember.’
A series of beeps and pings play across the mental space Poe occupied. [I don’t sense any functional ships in the area. Not even NON-functional ships. There’s … there’s nothing.]
”Hey, now,” you comforted, “how about doing a scan of coms signals? Who knows, we might get lucky.” You kept your tone hopeful and upbeat, encouraging your dejected Ghost into doing another scan. You were pretty certain he would pick up something, but you still found yourself holding your breath until-
*I repeat. This is Shaw Han. My Vanguard operation has been compromised, I’m separated from my strike team.* The transmission came across through Poe, so it sounded directly into your mind.
’Bingo.’
Things were progressing as you expected them to, which was a massive relief. You didn’t play very much, just the tutorial and the beginnings of Beyond Light, but knowing something to help you get your footing was about the only thing keeping you sane right now.
Poe’s response was all frantic excitement. [Vanguard! They’re from the Last City! We might be able to help!] There was a pause as Poe attempted to patch into the com signal Shaw was broadcasting from.
The transmission continued with Shaw calling out to the other members of his strike team, Poe’s attempt at communication going unheard. [Something’s interfering. I don’t think he heard us, but I’ve got a lock on his location.]
A white marker flickered into existence in the view through your helmet, and you took off after it. Broadcasting through your comms attracted some attention, however, and you soon found yourself neck deep in Eliksni assailants. Your shotgun came in handy with the close quarters, and you cut through the winding, tight hallways until bursting out into an open courtyard.
A lone figure stood over the body of a large Hive creature, sunlight filtering in through the open ceiling of the space very cinematically. The figure whirled around to face you, gun up, at the sound of your footsteps. You were quick to throw your free hand up in the air, shotgun pointed at the ground.
“Oh! Thank the Light.”
‘Annnd cue cutscene.’
