She remembered.
The golden man.
"I know you want to help, but it's too dangerous. You're too strong, and this situation is fragile. It'll do more harm than good."
The reason.
"We all have our parts to play."
"Parts."
"Yes. Like actors taking a role in a play. We wear our human faces and harbor our dramas and fantasies, but it's the same individuals playing the parts, as the play starts anew on a different stage, with different faces and forms. If it all goes well, a figure from the crowd joins the stage for the plays that follow, and the roles are refined."
She remembered things she couldn't possibly know.
The fragments radiate outwards, shedding and dropping their protective shells as they sail into the black, empty void.
They are children. Offspring. They travel the void, hoping to encounter another habitable world.
This is the beginning.
Things lost.
I saw faces in the crowd. Young women riding a monster, blocking my path. More than any of the others, they were strangers in the manner I'd identified the rest of the crowd before. People I had some connection to, all the more strange because of the lack of recognition.
People kept getting in my fucking way.
Things gained; a duality through sacrifice.
'A force of nature. Impossible to control or prevent.' The words crossed my mind, and they were my words, but they weren't my thoughts.
'Reminding me of the bad old days, Passenger?' I thought to myself. My bugs continued to gather around me. A familiar and comfortable presence, considering everything that was happening.
'I'm not giving up!' My voice, sounding so far away, even in my own head, so young.
'Damn straight.'
The blurring.
"I don't-" I started. What had I been saying?
Not me. The passenger. I had to relax. Allow myself to speak.
Death.
So many stars. The universe so vast.
'We're s- so very small, in the end.'
Aching loss and emptiness on one side. 'Why did she have to go? Why did Mom have to die!?'
A pervasive sense of incompleteness on the other.
Surprise, excitement, now. 'Come on Ems! We gotta go find more!'
She remembered now.
Hello, Passenger.
It was odd, remembering how… hobbled she'd been, there at the end. It was rather embarrassing, actually. Where before control of her body had felt fragmented, now it was just… detached.
She could already feel that need. There was none of the fuzziness that it had caused before, but she still knew that she'd do better with conflict, with direction.
Somehow, her body —her self— wasn't as affected by the brain surgery that Panacea had done. Was it because she was made of Light, now? Kali said it was so far beyond physics that it didn't even obey cause and effect, that it was what allowed Risen to react faster than thought, to not just bend but outright break reality.
She felt her other-half following down that line, remembering the things she'd learned about Light, about Kali and what she was now. Her second death, at the hands of a Cabal Centurion, and how she'd outright rejected it, bringing herself back into being through sheer force of will, blazing like the sun. The Cabal ship. The Broken Legion. The Reef. The Queen. The Awoken.
She felt interest, insatiable curiosity drawn from memories of when she was younger.
'Alright, alright. But we need to fix me first.'
It was her body. Her Light. The connection to her Passenger was regulated through that lobe in her brain. So she just needed to figure how to change that.
There was no way she was getting her bugs back. Not without Panacea, who was likely long dead.
And wasn't that a can of worms she didn't really want to open right now. Six hundred years.
Back on track. Pollentia. Out of control.
The thought of being Khepri again gave her chills/apprehension. …Even her passenger knew it wasn't a good idea. Not in this time, this solar system that held creatures like the Hive and the Vex, the Jovians and the Harbingers, monsters like Crota who feasted on reality itself like it was the finest flesh. Unlike what she knew, the rules now were variable, liable to change at the will of the one you opposed.
The best thing she could think of to help her was the Techeun's augments. From what she understood about them their powers were largely mental and brain-based as well. Still, that didn't tell her how to go about limiting herself now.
…This was going to require so much meditation, wasn't it?
Five hours after she arrived, Weaver's eyes fluttered.
Zachary's Ghost bumped him, quickly bringing him to awareness even as Kali rushed over to her Risen's prone form, the shifting jagged edges that made up her shell fluctuating faster than ever before.
"Weaver?"
The woman groaned, raising her right hand and massaging her forehead with the heel of her palm. "You really don't appreciate having two limbs until you've dealt with not having one."
"What?" Kali asked, and then shook herself. "No, wait, that's not important. What happened, Weaver? Are you okay?"
"Taylor."
"What?" Kali repeated.
"My name. It was— is, Taylor. Weaver was just a codename," the dark-haired woman answered, slowly lifting herself up.
"You… you remember your past? Your first life? How?"
"I guess you could say I had a backup? Kinda? Um." She struggled for a moment. "Do you know what that one Kell called the Queen? 'An empty thing with—"
"'two dead souls', yes, I remember," Kali said. "It was meant as an insult."
"I… I guess you could say I found my second soul again." She laughed, the sound carrying a dark edge. "A dead thing with two empty souls."
Her Ghost shrunk. "Y-you don't really believe that, do you?" she asked, sounding hurt, and Weaver —Taylor—, blinked, her eyes widening as she looked at Kali.
"Oh God, Kali. No. No." Taylor reached out and grabbed the black Ghost, hugging it to herself, and Zachary started to feel that he was intruding on something deeply personal.
He also wondered how the heck Taylor was managing to avoid stabbing herself, but that was another issue.
"I didn't mean it like— Ugh. You're my Ghost. My… my—" And Taylor uttered something guttural that rolled out of the back of her throat.
"That was Eliksni," Zachary's Ghost whispered to him. "It's complex, but roughly translates to something like a platonic soulmate, a 'life-sharer', literally 'one who will always come first that I am stronger with and weaker without'."
"So, you're okay now?" Zachary asked, drawing her attention to him.
Taylor grimaced. "Kind of. Um. I've regained this background ability that's pretty scary that I don't have a lot of control over right now. I…" She sighed. "If someone gets within sixteen feet of me, their body becomes… mine. A puppet. And I can't stop it. It looks like it doesn't work on Risen, because of the Light, so until I have control of it, I'm going to have to stay away from normal people and immediately push them back out of my range."
That was… mildly terrifying, if he was being honest.
Still… "It's a good thing you're in the Tower, then, with all the Guardians," he noted, and she nodded.
"Yeah, this is probably the best place for me, right now," she said, shifting her legs off of the hospital bed and sitting up straight, Kali nestled in the wrap around her neck. "So what sort of stuff do you do around here for fun?"
He shrugged. He'd not actually spent a lot of time in the Tower itself, the past few weeks had been split between almost non-stop missions and resting at his apartment. "There's people you can talk to, like the gunsmith." She perked up at that. "…There's the Vanguard leaders," he said, thinking. "Oh! And there's Shaxx and the Crucible!" Taylor tilted her head in curiosity. "It's this live-fire arena where you fight against other Guardians. It's like a way to practice."
"That sounds interesting," Taylor admitted.
He nodded. "I… think the Warlocks have an archive-library? But I've never been there. There's restaurants, too."
At that very moment, Taylor's stomach gurgled, and she flushed. "Food sounds… good."
Zachary grinned. "Food it is, then."
A/N: O hai ther QA.
