Just something short that I couldn't get out of my head after finishing the game.

The Looming Shadow

Aloy sits frozen, half gulping down a sob, as she stares at him: Crouching before her, the creases at the corners of his eyes laughing and the line of his mouth almost unbearably soft even as he tries for a stern and disapproving façade as he attempts to teach her a lesson about something or… other.

Rost looks like always – a little wild, a little dangerous (for her trained hunter's eye cannot miss the hidden strength in his every movement, or the way his eyes always dance across their surroundings to search for possible threats), and so terribly fond of her.

Seeing him like this-

Oh, it breaks her heart, and Aloy cannot say whether it is a blessing or a curse that there is no voice to come with the familiar motions of his lips, even though she could identify half the words he spoke, if she were of a mind to do so, knowing him as she does.

It was an accidental recording, one she discovered bare days ago when clearing up the memory of her focus. Apparently, it is limited, and a short inquiry to GAIA led her to… well, this.

Sitting here, on the ledge, a bare four paces away (she measured them-) from where he crawled over, despite the pain he must have been in, and pushed her down into the abyss below in a desperate attempt to save her-

Oh, there is his grave, and she has spent many an hour there, telling him the stories and truths slowly unravelling before her and Sylens, but this… for this, she wanted to come here.

To see him again in this place, where she lost him – a remainder, perhaps, that, even though he might look as alive as he always did, he is still lost to her, and for all the seemingly magical abilities of the focus and the machinery of the Old Ones… he will never return to her side.

Rost, the only family she ever had, is gone, forever out of her grasp.

Forever.

Even crouching down to smooth her palm against the cheek of Elisabet's helmet, in realisation that this woman was, in a way, her mother, and that she, too, was lost to her, was not nearly that painful-

"I did it for you, Rost," she whispers, finally allowing the tears to freely stream down her cheeks, and allows the recording to be played again.

Everything about his movements is oh so familiar, and she almost reaches out to touch him, despite her better knowledge.

In a way, Ted Faro was right… knowing what they knew, being capable what they were capable of – does not make life any easier, or any less painful. Ignorance is bliss, she remembers having read in one of the many facilities she searched through, and that is a sentiment she can only agree to. (And while she might understand Sylens' reasoning, while she might be able to comprehend most of his decisions and value what he did to atone for his mistakes… she will never be able to forgive him for starting all this, for taking away what peace they had, and triggering the events that, ultimately, took away her choice, and forced her to seek knowledge, in order to do what was right.)

If she could at least hold out the hope that, after she herself has died, Rost will be waiting somewhere for her, his wife and other daughter at his side-

…

He was the only family she ever had, Aloy painfully realizes once more, eyes still locked on the crouching figure before her, the hand outstretched, almost begging to be touched- …

Oh, others have tried to earn their own places in her heart, to perhaps make her family – Avad, Erend, Teb, Nil, Varl, even Sona… And Erend is close enough to being considered a brother by her, after everything they have gone through together, but they will never, never, be able to give her what Rost handed out so freely and without hesitation, they will never… fill the void his loss left within her.

Hiccupping slightly as a heavy sob convulses through her she reaches out after all, only to feel naught but air against her fingers as the projection is displayed against her skin instead-

"I wish you could be here, now," she forces from her uncooperative lungs, desperately gasping for air amidst the tears and sobs, her knuckles now white as she clings to the ledge beneath her in a desperate attempt to not search out a touch after all. Taking a tumble down, as she knows from experience, can easily be survived with a little luck on her side, and knowing how to roll in order to take the momentum off a fall-

"You would've loved it – the peace we now share with the machines, and the way the Nora have learned to accept those who are different."

He always wanted her to be fully part of the tribe he so loved, a Nora in every sense of the word, and perhaps, in this new world she helped create… it might have been possible for him to return, too, so that they might have had a family home in Mother's Watch, within the embrace… together.

"I did it for you," she repeats what she whispered earlier, her tears slowly drying up but her face still distorted in a mask of desperation, "I did it all for you!"

She remembers the recording of GAIA's conversation with Elisabet, how her mother taught the girl who would become the scientist to preserve life against impossible odds that caring was important… and Aloy cares, oh, she does. It is not the Nora she thusly risked her own life for, though, it is not the countless innocents out there, the men and women and children, not even Erend and Avad and Vast or Sylens – it is Rost.

Her memory of him, of what he would have wanted, was what kept her going when nothing else would have, and the desperation to make him proud, after all, lent her the strength to confront even HADES himself.

"I did it for you, so that you… so that you'd be proud of me, after all. I fought, so that this world… would be a world you'd have enjoyed living in. I did it for you."