Guardian

A/N: Hey guys, I'm really tired while writing this. I have no real excuse for my absence except for the fact that college is kicking my ass. I've wanted to write a Destiny story for a while now ever since Taken King came out way back in D1 and now that I decided to redownload the first one over again and replay that sweet sweet original story once more, this idea popped up into my head again.

I literally wrote the first half of this in class yesterday and the other half while I was taking a break from writing a 10 page essay for my English class. So, lemme know what you guys think of this. Leave a review and let me know if you want the next chapter I pump out to be Chapter 2 of this or the next Chapter of Bonfire. I'm not gonna promise an upload schedule or anything because I don't know when I'll be able to make time to write like this again at least until Winter Break. And sorry about any inconsistencies or grammar errors, like I said, I'm really exhausted at the time of publishing this.

EDIT: I fixed the errors guys.

Also, Happy belated Thanksgiving, I hope all your holidays were amazing.

Without further adieu, I present to you, Guardian!

Now I'm going to sleep.

Eyes Up

"Welcome… to a world without Light."

~?

"Alright boys, you ready?"

I heard my own voice echo through Julian's headset that happened to always be turned up way too loud.

"Oh yeah.", Antonio's voice cut through the PlayStation party like glass. I could practically hear his beak-like nose scratch against his broken mic as everyone put their high level gear into the vault before logging out of our characters at the same time. It was about ten thirty so the darkness of the night and the pale light of the moon had already claimed the sky over an hour ago, leaving me to be the only person awake in my house.

"Not with that attitude, you won't."

Michael's snarky voice passed through my headset as I quickly heard Jayden mimic him in the dumbest voice I'd ever heard immediately afterword. I really could not deal with this group. They were my friends and all, yeah, but by now they should know to just not argue with Michael since he was literally the embodiment of a troll. As in, you get angry and he laughs. All the time.

I sighed before repeating myself, "Alright, everyone ready?"

I heard a chorus of confirmation from the other five members of the party, eliciting a blink from me at the sudden response. You see, it was very rare to get anyone to respond to you on the first go in our little group without having to repeat yourself at least twice let alone everyone at the same time. But, nonetheless, I appreciated the oddity and proceeded to create a new character.

What we were gonna try to accomplish now was beating the world record of getting to Light Level four hundred in the shortest amount of time. To this day, I still don't remember what the record was, but, after that night it became the furthest thing from my mind.

"Michael, start the clock."

I heard the beep from his iPhone and everyone hit confirm on the character creation screen at the same time.

Bzzt.

My power went.

Everything in my room shut down immediately.

I grabbed my phone of the charger that was no longer providing power to the device to check something and, sure enough, the WiFi was out too, so it was safe to assume that it was a blackout for the entire house. Not only that, but, since everyone else was asleep, that meant it'd only be dealt with in the morning if ConEd didn't come during the night to fix it themselves.

"Oh fuck me, I guess we're not breaking that record this weekend."

"What the fuck? Xavier? How come your voice is still coming through the mic?"

I blinked, "Julian?" I took my headset off and sure enough, it was off too, the lights were out. I put it back on quickly despite the notion that I was probably hearing things.

"Yo did everyone else's power go out too?", Pedrow's voice came through next. This was really starting to freak me out, especially since my system was off. Multiple "yeahs" came through in confirmation and Michael was quick on the draw to sum up the situation.

"I guess our headsets are possessed by Satan now." A snort fled my nostrils before I broke out into a laugh at his next words. "Time to throw them out."

"Boy!", Antonio came through next through, voices his thoughts on the incredulity of the statement. "You woulda fuckin' thought I was throwing out these hundred and fifty dollar headphones!"

"No one told you to buy headphones that cost that much, bozo.", I told him. "I got my shits for twenty and they've worked fine for more than a year. You bought the same pair three times over the summer and they broke the same day and Turtle Beach still hasn't gotten back to you about the refund."

I heard a snicker come from Pedrow's end so I continued. "We understand you have a job now, money man, but that doesn't mean shit if you're broke the day after you get every paycheck because you have no fucking money management."

A chorus of laughter finished off the roast and I could practically hear Antonio breathing heavily in anger.

But, just before he could reply, our magical headsets cut out. I blinked before taking them off to examine them. Flipping them over I muttered to myself, "Damn, and the convo was just getting good too."

I set them down on my dresser and picked up my phone, noting that it was actually fully charged just in time for the blackout. "Nice", I grinned.

Bzzt.

I glanced at my tv and jumped out of bed and onto my feet when I saw a bright green eye staring back at me. It was a magnificent jade with just a hint of a gradient within. It narrowed at me, it's squinted form somehow making its vertically slitted onyx pupil seem more menacing than it already was. In all seriousness, I should've freaked out at this point, but, that eye… there was something mesmerizing about it. And there was something strangely familiar about it, too, I just couldn't put my finger on it. And then, it spoke.

"Mmm, yes. You shall do nicely."

I blinked and then everything went black.

(...)

"…an…"

I couldn't move. I felt like I was being pinned to the ground, not by somewhere laying over me, but rather like my body was filled with lead. But, in the same vein, I felt as though I was weightless, floating on the surface of a body of water with the sun glazing over me.

"…ardi…"

My ears twitched at the sound, as if they were now way more sensitive than they could've ever been. I could tell it was a shout, but, though it sounded really far away, I could tell it came from not two inches from my face.

"…ardian!"

Ooh, my head hurt. It wasn't all that bad, but it was strong to grab my attention away the voice calling to me through the black.

"Eyes up, Guardian!"

The voice shattered the inky darkness around me and I opened my eyes, welcoming a world of white as all the pain of my headache was suddenly gone. I blinked slowly, watching as a plethora of color finally faded into view just as the smell of copper and rust assaulted my nose. And then the soreness settled in. It felt as if I'd slept on a bed of nails with my head hanging off the side.

Don't ask me how I know what that feels like, it's just what came to mind at the time.

Sitting up, I stretching my arms to the sky before rolling my head to get rid of the soreness and almost immediately I found myself sighing in relief at the loud pop that resonated from my neck when I angled my head down toward the right side of my collarbone. Looking around, I took in my surroundings.

My heart skipped and my palms started to sweat.

This is definitely not my room.

A massive wall of stone stood a few ways to my right, expanding along the plain as far as the eye could see, the top seemingly crumbling away as I sat there and stared at it. Gulping I looked over to my left and saw a sea of completely rusted cars and melted tires. They were literally everywhere and the more I took in my surrounding the more I began to realize where I was and what I was on. A massive highway went through the wall and, presumably out to the other side.

I say presumably because a large chunk of the wall had collapsed over the entire portion that went through it.

"Hey!"

A ball of light just suddenly appeared in my face and all but shouted at me. It happened so fast with no pretense that it actually nearly made me piss myself.

"Gah!

I quickly realized what I was sitting on just as I reared back from the light and was sent tumbling down a mountain of rusted pickup trucks and sedans. First I hit my shoulder on a side mirror, breaking it off before I effectively smashed my side onto the hood of a minivan, causing me to bounce right off and over the side again just as hit my head on a sharp piece of rust.

All that before I landed painfully on my ankle.

I laid there in shock, the adrenaline keeping me from feeling the pain that an ankle looking like that should've caused. Breathing heavily and blinking rapidly, I started to count the spots floating in my vision before they suddenly disappeared. Along with the adrenaline.

"Ah!", I screamed in pain, my left hand quickly moving to grip my right thigh, trying to stop the pain from my ankle spreading up my nerves to no avail. My right arm laid beside me, unresponsive. I glanced at it and noticed that it was very dislocated. Gritting my teeth, I brought my head back down to the dusty and cracked asphalt below me. Tears in my eyes, I looked up and saw that same ball of light from before. It wasn't inherently scary, it was just the shock of its appearance that knocked me off of the stack of rusted cars.

"Oh my gosh! Are you okay?"

An aura of ethereal cyan energy laid over me like a second skin before I winced at the feeling of my shoulder popping back into place while a sharp yelp escaped my lips when I felt and saw my foot twist into its natural position while my ankle slid back to where it was supposed to be. I sat up slowly, eyes widening ever so slightly when I felt no pain whatsoever. Sitting up straight, I watched the ball of light at my side move in front of me and now that I got a good look at it, I realized it wasn't a ball of light at all. At least not in the literal sense.

It was a Ghost.

I gawked at its plain white exterior, looking closely at the the small scratches in its shell as it floated lazily in front of me, its-

"Hello Guardian. You don't know how happy I am to meet you."

-her individual pieces spinning with barely contained whirring sounds. I blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then I almost passed out. Almost. Instead, I began to hyperventilate, the sound of my heart beating against my ears. She quickly realized something was wrong as her eye flashed a bright cerulean for a moment.

"Guardian?!", her panicked voice barely reached my ears as I gripped my plain blue tee. "Guardian?! What's wrong?! Oh no, did I resurrect him wrong? I knew I should've been more patient, but I was just too excited that I found him!"

My breath hitched and I felt my eyes flutter closed.

"Guardian!"

Then I passed out.

(...)

She sighed.

This was definitely not how she expected to meet her Guardian. She sighed again, something she felt would become a habit of hers in the near future, but allowed herself to smile in her own way. She had met with the Vanguard after she woke up before she was deployed in search of her Warrior of Light, leaving her to spend one thousand two hundred and thirty seven hours looking for her Guardian.

Not like she was counting or anything.

But, she did count herself lucky considering the things that exo Vanguard, Cayde, had told her before she departed.

"Don't be discouraged if you don't find them right away. There are some Ghosts that take centuries to find their Guardian."

That stuck with her and worried her more than she could possibly begin to imagine. And it was completely irrational too! It wasn't like she was racing against time; she didn't have anything better to do and it wasn't like the Last City was short on Guardians. She just wanted to find him quickly so when she did manage to find him relatively fast she was just so excited that she couldn't help but snag his attention away from his surroundings the first chance she got.

She didn't mean to make him fall off of the tower of cars he was laid up on!

It just… sort of happened, okay?

She could heal him from injuries galore, but, she couldn't help exhaustion or mental overload so she sat there on his slowly rising and falling chest and just looked at him. She didn't scan him or anything, she just took all of him in. Almost immediately she realized something that was rather concerning. See, just about every Guardian she saw during her voyage to find him was fairly aged, as in they were all somewhere in between their late twenties to mid thirties in Earth years. But, this one…

Her Guardian was young.

He looked as if he were still maturing, he barely even had any facial hair. The stubble that was there was so light that if you didn't look directly at it and know what you were looking for, you wouldn't see it. She looked at the black tee shirt he wore and stared confusingly at the two dimensional man donning orange and blue robes on it for a moment before turning to look at the dried blood caking the hair on his legs. She looked back at his peaceful face and if she had eyebrows to raise, one would be just short of flying off of her forehead.

"I hope he's not too mad about the whole falling thing when he wakes up."

They would need a ship to get back to the Tower and she had no idea how she'd find one. She probably should've used the time she had while he was unconscious to go out and look for one close by if there were any, but… that could wait a while. With that, she established the mental link with her Guardian and powered down, the light of her eye dimming until it was barely on and allowing herself some rest from her journey. No, Ghosts didn't inherently need rest, but by God was she tired.

(...)

When I woke, the moon was high in the sky, hanging among the stars in a sea of inky darkness. It was a beautiful sight and I could swear that I'd look at it forever if I could. But, I immediately knew something was wrong when I felt the dirt and gravel beneath me. Sitting up slowly, I looked at the pebbles in my palm, letting them slowly fall between my fingers. I looked up to my left and saw the mountain of rusted trucks and the spatter of blood on the corner of one near the bottom.

"So it was real…"

Suddenly a weight shifted in my lap, causing me to look down.

"Hi."

The feminine voice kept it short and sweet, attempting her best to keep her parts from moving so as to not frighten me again. Except, I don't think I was as scared as I was excited. Slowly and gently, I moved my hands beneath the small machine and lifted her up so I could get a closer look at the light in its center that served as its eye, taking in every detail of every scratch and dent of her shell. I could feel myself smiling. It was a Ghost. Not some metaphysical Halloweeny shit, but an actual hyper advanced AI birthed by the Traveler itself. The conclusion of my surroundings smacked me like a ton of bricks and I immediately accepted it. Coma or insanity or any other rational explanation be damned, I hoped this would never end.

With a grin stretching from ear to ear I spoke, "You are are the coolest thing I've ever seen."

Her eye brightened considerably just as the Ghost lifted up and out of my hands before doing a little twirl in front of me.

"Why, thank you!"

Standing with a grunt, I raised my hands high above my head and stretched, feeling my bones pop as if I had woken from a thousand year nap. "So", I started as I glanced up at the full moon before beginning to make my way around the pile of rust, smiling when I saw that familiar tutorial path. "Where are we?"

She whizzed in front of me, moving to my left shoulder and hovering above it, "Oh that's right, they said you wouldn't remember anything. Well, we are on a planet called Earth, but right now we're in the Cosmodrome in Old Russia."

I nodded that same smile still plastered on my face as I continued walking down the path. That is, until I was reminded that i was still in nothing but a t-shirt and basketball shorts when I stubbed my toe on a stubborn rock.

"Ah! Damn it!", I raised my foot and squeezed my toe within my hand, trying to stave off the pain just before a flash of light shined over it and it was gone. Looking at it briefly in surprise, I planted my foot back down on the ground, careful to avoid such things on the ground as I kept walking. "Hey", I spoke without looking at her as I stepped over a particularly sharp piece of rusted metal hiding in the dirt. "You don't happen to have any shoes do you?"

I was hopeful.

Yeah she could heal me, but, stepping on glass and shit still hurt.

"As a matter of fact.", she whizzed in front of me, effectively rooting me in place in the process. Her eye suddenly shot out a beam of concentrated light focused into a horizontal line and slowly slid it over me from the tips of the hair on my head to the bottom of my feet. "I do."

In a flash of light I had the starting armor on.

I blinked and lifted my hands, flexing the surprisingly fitting white gloves around them before knocking on the armor plates covering the back of my hands, listening to the hollow clangs with delight. I looked at my feet and saw the faded white boots adorning them before I lifted my hands up to my head, running my gloved fingers over the scratched metal of the helmet. The armor looked tanky and by the lack of cloak and robes, it was safe to assume this was the Titan set. And the best part of it all? The armor felt as if it weighed nothing more than a feather.

I looked back up the Ghost and before I could say anything, she vanished in a flash of light just before my view lit up, that familiar radar appearing in the top left of the screen while the Ghost appeared in the top right as a spinning icon.

"Sorry I don't have anything better, it was the best I could do with the Glimmer I had.", she spoke up as I started walking again, kicking the next stone I saw on the ground away from me as I distantly noticed the crack in my view over in the bottom right, almost as if it were glass. "Once we find a ship and get back to the Tower, I'm sure the Vanguard will outfit you with something better."

"Ah", I said, playing along. "So that's our goal right now? Where would we even find a ship?"

Her icon spun once in my view before she gave me an answer as I walked up the stairs into the darkness, "My scans are picking up a faint radio signal on the other side of this complex, the kind of vessels used during the Golden Age."

Her icon vanished and once again she was at my side, banishing the darkness to the corners of the room I was in. I followed the area from memory, climbing the stairs until I came across a short, grated bridge and a flash of red blinked in my peripherals.

I stopped, frozen. It took all of my willpower, the little bit of it that I had, to keep from pissing myself. That's right, I told myself, this was where you pick up the auto rifle. That's when I saw the eyes in the darkness ahead of me.

"I see you!", I pointed over at it, my voice wavering as I wagged my finger at it. "I see you over there mother fucker! Fuck you!" I might've been announcing my presence to the other creatures scaling the walls deeper in, but, I didn't give a fuck, I was scared out of my mind.

"Guardian, that's a Dreg."

Her voiced drawled through my helmet like she was disappointed in me, but, as if remembering I wasn't a veteran killer and not to mention that I wasn't even an adult yet, she corrected herself. "Come on, you got this. I'm gonna provoke it, you wait for it to come to you and punch it in the face as hard as you can, okay?"

"W-what?! N-no don't do that!", I screeched just before her flashlight became the most powerful camera flash in existence, brightening up the entire room and irritating the Fallen. The Dreg rubbed it's four eyes briefly before charging me, dagger in hand. I turned to run, before a soothing hand caressed my mind and dissolved my fears. Looking back on it, I can vaguely recall my hand growing hot as I balled it into a fist.

It came to me, slashing its knife at me. I saw its eyes widen as I blocked the dagger with the armor plating on my forearm before I slugged it right across the face.

Zzzt!

I saw my hand for the first time since it started heating up as it soared into the alien's face, watching in awe as sparks of cerulean electricity raced out from my fist and into the Dreg, electrocuting it and causing it to float upwards, disintegrating into the atmosphere.

I stared at where it last existed before looking down at my hands, watching the lightning dance through my fingers. I felt the unfamiliar buzz of what I assumed to be Arc energy funneling through my veins, filling me with energy I didn't know I had. Wisps of electricity leapt from my fingertips briefly before fizzling out of existence.

"Whoa.", I breathed, unironically breathless.

"See?", I looked up to see the Ghost appearing before me, parts spinning in excitement. "I said you could do it, didn't I?"

I shook my head, smiling like a loon all the while, "Yes you did."

I held my right hand over my face, concentrating on the feeling from before. A frown crossed my features and I was almost going to give up, before small sparks of blue lightning began to dance across my palm. I smiled and closed my fists canceling out the energy.

Striker Titan.

…

"Fuck yeah."

As if she read my mind, the Ghost vanished from sight in a flash of light, her icon appearing on my visor as I took off down the path, a new sense of courage welling up in my chest as my boots pounded against the metal beneath me, the sight of the Vandals in the distance not even phasing me.

(...)

"Thank you."

The Guardian gave her a curt nod before his Ghost transmitted him back up to his ship. She briefly watched it fly off into the distance, becoming little more than a black dot amongst the pale green sky before she turned and started her path. She needed to find them, she didn't want to be here any longer than she needed to. She'd find her Guardian, find a suitable ship, then circle back for the Guardian to revive them so they could get back to the Tower as soon as possible.

A pulse of light fled her body and left something of a marker in its wake, showing her the general direction of where she'd find her Guardian.

The first time she used that ability had been after the Vanguard-fun lot, they were-had sent her off when the Guardian that'd brought her here had smacked into her by accident. The Light flew out of her shell and went straight up. Thank the Traveler that he had been a chivalrous fellow, else she probably wouldn't have even made it off planet, let alone all the way to Venus.

Glancing off to the side as she flew through a dirt path littered with rusted out Golden Age vehicles, she spotted a stray Goblin in the distance, keeping watch in front of a building. She'd rather not deal with them, but, one look at the direction of the faint light path and how it curved around the bend and towards the back of the compound it was guarding, one of the things she needed to find was most likely in their territory.

Audibly sighing in exasperation, the Ghost pushed on, determination in her eye.