Destiny (c) Bungie

Ace of Spade

Chapter Three

"You know that you can talk to me. I am your ghost..."

Dusk hovered at his shoulder and Acker acknowledged her with a brief glance, but otherwise remained silent. His greyish-blue eyes half-hooded and staring out over the city below. He'd been sitting on a bench of the Tower Plaza, his gaze unfocused as the reality of his new world settled on him.

Of course, there was plenty of work to be done as Dusk kept saying. The lot of the Guardian was to defend this city from some primal evil. A simple enough objective in theory, though decidedly less so with the execution.

That grandiose vision however was the least of his concerns at the moment. Now that events had finally slowed down enough for him to get a good grasp of his situation, Acker found himself feeling lost and entirely frustrated. He supposed this was a feeling most new Guardians suffered through, but that stray thought didn't make him feel any more at ease.

Dusk, his personal Tinkerbelle, had explained that all guardians experienced this amnesia. But even the amnesiac undead could dream it seemed.

Acker had tried to settle down for the night in a small cot in the Guardian's barracks. A temporary dwelling until a room had been assigned to him, but every time he tried to catch a few winks of sleep he'd have the same dream. He didn't dream of anything in particular, just a… suffocating null space where he was nothing. An all-encompassing emptiness that filled him with a sense of overpowering dread, fear and failure.

But in that darkness, there was a point. A single point of life. Something fragile and warm. He'd heard a lick of flame then a single thunderous crack like a gunshot. He awakened with a jolt, adrenaline pumping through his veins.

Sleep didn't come after that.

So, at some point past midnight and well into the ungodly hours of morning, Acker had sat at this very bench trying to use the City's ambient light to scrape away the shadows. It wasn't until now that dawn's first light broke over the city, that he'd finally chosen to break his silence.

"Ghost…" Acker rolled the word over his tongue, his voice distant and absent any of yesterday's quips or witty mannerisms. "Cute word. It's appropriate I suppose, but you'd think they'd call us the 'Ghosts'. We're the ones yanked back from the great beyond to fight. We're the dead folks here; haunting the world we'd already lived and died in."

Dusk considered her next words, sifting through her memory coils before she formulated her response. "If it were simply dead tissue reanimated, that'd make you closer to Revenants than spirits if my historical archives are correct."

"Revenants?"

"Spirits reanimated from the other side to fulfil the purposes of its master. Or in other folklore, brought back by their own will to avenge the death of a loved one or some other attachment so powerful it transcended death itself." Dusk explained, her fins whirred. "But, if those same historical archives are correct, what a Guardian is would be closer to the fantastical archetype of a Lich. However, in this instance, neither are technically accurate since they are among the dead and you're… well, not."

"Both sound morbid and creepifying." Acker mused, vaguely interested by the fact.

"Transcends death itself…" He repeated, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "I suppose there are some things that not even death can scrub."

"And there are fates worse than death," Dusk supplied with a touch of melancholy entering her mechanical voice. "I've seen quite a number I wouldn't care to mention."

"Yeah, don't doubt that you have..." The words came out but Acker wasn't exactly attentive when he spoke them.

Dusk's all-knowing blue eye peered at his profile. "Regardless of whether or not you were among the living or the dead twenty-four hours ago, you are living flesh and blood now. You can eat, you can sleep. I may have rekindled your light and it's my duty to ensure its survival, but you are the master of your own fate - your own path. I walk it with you, but I don't dictate where you go. I guide and assist."

"Yeah," Acker drawled. "Pretty words for 'dictate'. Usually when someone 'guides' they really mean 'shut up and follow my orders', it's just phrased more as a suggestion."

His lip curls up into a weak smirk at his own quip, but there is still a defining lack of energy and enthusiasm behind it. "Plus, I figure some folks would say you 'float' along with me, not walk… unless you plan to sprout legs. That'd be a sight to see."

"You know what I mean." Dusk's irritation came across loud and clear, until it was like a gear clicked in her metallic chassis.

"Wait a moment, does that - did that mean you remembered something?" There was a palatable excitement in her tone and a sense of it through their bond. Though Acker chose not to reply just yet.

"Is there a chance I could remember anything?" He asked after a minute, casting his mind back to the vague visions of the acidic woman he'd turned his back on.

"Some do."

"And?"

"Sadly, most don't."

"And I'm supposed to be at peace with that?" Acker stared at Dusk, his brow furrowing into a scowl. "Am I supposed to be sanguine not knowing who or what I was? Am I supposed to be okay that I'll probably never find out?"

Dusk was silent. He could sense not only hesitation but uncertainty too. "I don't know. It's a question every guardian has had to wrestle with - and to many, it's without an answer. Some struggle with all their might to remember, while others are content with a clean start and a new life. But you do remember something, even if its small? You remembered your name – or names. That is more than most."

"I remember names. I haven't the damnedest clue if they're mine." Acker corrected.

"I'd argue at least 'Ace' is correct," Dusk replied, pointed looking at his left hand then back at him. "If that tattoo on the back of your hand is any indication."

Acker chose not to answer again, running his thumb over the back of his hand. A single black spade marked his skin, detailed with symmetrical curved lines. It made for a pretty cool looking tattoo, and he could sense a strong attachment to it. But there was also a great hollow pain in his chest. It was just one more question demanding an answer.

Exhaling softly, Acker stretched out a rising stiffness in his arms and legs before resting his hand against his right knee, his fingers curled slightly as phantom pain came with the memory. "Enlighten me: if I had been shot in the head and not the shoulder in that Cosmodrone, what would have happened then?"

Dusk hummed quietly, lowering her tone. "I would have just brought you back again. So long as the Light still burns within you, I'll keep bringing you back as many times as I have to. As many times as needed."

Acker's brow twitched. "Sounds less like I'm a person and more just a machine for you to fix when its broken."

To her credit, Dusk seemed to realise her poor word choice. "That's not what I meant… I-I mean it is, but… my purpose as a ghost – as your ghost, is to act as your conduit to the Light."

Acker grunted. "Always comes back to the Light business, and I'm sure there's someone who'll be happy to explain how I'm supposed to use it?"

"In time – and with training - that will come." Dusk tried to sound placating, but Acker waved it off.

"Yeah, but you said yourself this city doesn't exactly have much time left. So, either we have time, or we don't. There's no in-between."

Dusk seemed appropriately chastised, and from her demeanour Acker got the sense of a child pouting. "… well, I spent the last twenty-four hours eating my own words. I suppose I'll have to eat those too."

"I'm glad we agree." The Guardian chuckled weakly, leaning forward on the bench. "So, apart from being brought back from the great beyond and the whole elemental powers things, what other boons come with this 'gift'?"

"You, like every other guardian, are immortal." Dusk began, "But there's a difference between immortality and invulnerability."

"Important distinction, that. Thanks for the clarification."

Now, he felt sorrow and regret from her. "One that the Guardians had discovered the hard way, many times over and many times again. A second permanent death does exist for those who lose their light."

"And until then? I'll fight and die and be reborn again until I reach that second death?" It was a prospect he enjoyed less and less the more he dwelled on it.

"Or perhaps your second death won't find you at all," Dusk suggested, trying to insert a level of optimism into the conversation. "Already, some would say Guardians defy fate by rejecting their original deaths in the first place."

Acker peered at her. "By my reckoning, Guardians are only capable of doing that because of your intervention."

Dusk nodded. "That is true, but if we're to look at things in the matter of pure objectivity… while my mind is that of a sentient being, what I am – what a Ghost is - is simply a tool to defy the rule this world has given to people like you."

"And in turn, what am I? Just another tool for the city to use?" Acker scoffed, slumping back on the bench, an unreadable expression on his features. "The prospect of doing the same thing over and over again the rest of eternity doesn't exactly strike me as one worth living. If anything, it's the definition of insanity."

Dusk recoiled. "You're not saying you prefer the void, are you?"

Acker pondered the question, then answered with a subtle shake of the head. His mind cast back to the fierce half-forgotten desire to search. "No. No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that living to fight another day may be the pragmatic idea, but what's the point of perpetuating an endless cycle?"

"Is this not enough?" Dusk's singular peering eye looked out over the City, she floated closer to the railing and Acker hauled himself to his feet to join her. "Hundreds of thousands of people, innocents trying to live their lives in peace – what little of it remains in this dwindling age."

"You're not catching my meaning," Acker told her, waving a hand vaguely towards the landscape below. "What is the point for me as an individual? Even if I never recover a single piece of who I was, will I have the opportunity to live? Not just survive?"

"Now who's posing the distinctions?" Dusk hummed.

"It's an important one to me." Acker answered quietly.

"Isn't it a little bit selfish to be asking about these things now, after everything you've learned?"

"I haven't learned a goddamned thing. Just some big scary boogie man has its sights set on this city, and that giant white snooker ball in the sky is taking a snooze." Acker retorted, perhaps with a little more venom than he intended.

He felt his frustrations and anger simmering just below the surface. "Seems to me to be the perfect time. Safe and secure inside these walls with no one ready to jump out from behind a corner and shank me."

"Clearly you haven't been in a Crucible match," Dusk muttered in undertones.

Acker leaned casually against the guard railing. "Evil exists, Good's getting its ass kicked. I'm not too sure if you've noticed, but that's the way the world has always worked. Even an amnesiac dead man like me could tell you that."

Dusk huffed. "I wish you'd stop referring to yourself like that. You are not dead."

An uncomfortable silence fell between the two of them as they looked out towards the city below. Acker locked in his choleric thoughts while Dusk formulated a response.

"If that's truly how you feel? Then why don't you act to change it?"

Acker turned to look at his ghost, eyebrow cocked at the challenge. "The wheel will keep on turning, and the cycle will continue as you rightly pointed out. Problem is the circle is one of attrition, and we're withering away. It won't break so easily."

"Then that's the fate I choose." Acker said, turning back to face the tower. Guardians moving alone or in small units. "If the game's rules are stacked against us, then fuck them - I won't play that game. I'll play my own."

"You make it sound that simple."

"Because it is. In a game stacked against you, the only ways to win are to cheat or play a different game altogether." Acker replied, crossing his arms. "And from the sound of things, if I go down the same road everyone else has, the big baddies win regardless of what I do."

"You are one enlightened individual."

Acker couldn't quite tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

"You may be a guardian, but you are still just one man. And a newly Risen at that." Dusk warned, "The ideal sounds daring but what makes you think you can pull it off as you are now?"

"What's the old saying; Bite off more than you can chew, then chew like hell?" Acker allowed the shadow of a smirk to cross his lips. "Besides, you were the one who suggested it. You again have said that my path is my own to walk. You wouldn't have put the idea in my head if you didn't think I could do it."

"And the trend of me eating my words continues..." Dusk grumbled.

Acker smirked and nodded in agreement. "You have been shovin' your metaphorical foot in your mouth. Is that a habit of yours, or just something you picked up being paired with me?"

"It's my guardian defying my expectations."

"Well, I'll try not to disappoint. Assuming of course that is a compliment?" He couldn't keep his lip twitching up into a slight smile.

Dusk hummed in thought. "Would you rather I be honest or tell a fib?"

Acker gave a short low chuckle. "I like you."

He pushed himself off the railing, wrapping his knuckles lightly against it. "Better get started, eh?"

Author's note: Sadly, I've had the wind taken out of my sails for a little bit. I have an assignment due in a few days and an exam at the end of the month. I'll try and update as I can, but I do need to study for these otherwise I'll... well, I prefer not to fail. I'll attempt to update again soon... ish, but once the term's over, I'll be able to go back to rapid-fire updates.

Until next time.

Aurora313