It's nighttime, or at least whatever passes for nighttime out here on the Shore—with that weird, fucked up light the entire place is bathed in, one can never really be too sure.
Cayde is bored.
The Guardian is slumbering beside him, completely out of it and curled around him as if she's afraid that he'll leave if she lets go.
He'd be scared too if the roles were reversed.
But still, he's bored, and at the same time really not in the mood for leaving the bed. It's nice and cozy down here beneath the blankets, and honestly, who'd want to move when they have a beautiful woman plastered against them?
Then again, Cayde is the farthest thing from objective on this particular specimen.
Still...
The datapad he finds in her backpack doesn't take long to hack and set up to bring sound only to his receiver.
What he finds on there isn't something he'll need to wake his Guardian for. Just a li'l peek, that's all he wants.
"Cayde?"
It's only her Ghost but he startles anyway, tension is surprisingly high in his body and it probably will be for the rest of his time here in the Tangled Shores.
"Hey there, little guy."
Cayde's absent as he looks through the video files, finds the section he's looking for and directs the datapad to run them.
What he finds almost makes him wish that he hadn't.
He sees arrogance, mischievousness, elation—feelings he's sure to experience when or if he leaves the Tower, but seeing his own face, even at a distance, make such an utter fucking fool at himself is embarrassing beyond belief.
Seeing Sundance get killed because of his carelessness makes him let out a sound like a wounded animal but then she's there in a flash of light, gently bumping against his horn and he gently cups his hands around her, let her nuzzle against his neck and make soothing chirps and whirrs. He only sees it happen after the deed is long done, but everything inside his mind is screaming at him to cradle her close, never let her go and at the same time shoot himself for being such a fucking idiot.
Traveler above, this has to be the most idiotic thing he's done in a long-ass while.
Cayde breathes, shakes his head.
She's alive.
He's alive.
But something's missing. Something that's been bugging him ever since he heard it happen.
"You're looking for your death."
He looks up at the Guardian's Ghost and nods after a few tense seconds.
"I need to understand."
"You won't like it. She won't either."
"She doesn't need to know."
"I thought you'd stopped obsessing over my Guardian long ago."
Yeah, he thought so too.
Wait, obsess?
He knows that she got injured during the Red War, pretty serious too, because he'd pulled the Vanguard-card on Zavala and effectively locked him out of the loop completely about what would happen to his Guardian while she recovered. He'd been such a restrictive asshole back then, he could see that now, of course, but back then all he could think about when she set out again was that she was never going to come back again. They'd get a report from some of the other still-Lightless Guardians out in the field that she and the remains of her Ghost would be found, riddled with bullet holes. And that would be it. A romance he'd barely begun to think about would be nipped in the bud and he'd have to find some new kid to teach all his tricks, to use as his little replacement goldfish for the hole she might just leave behind if they weren't careful.
He never got around to demolish that base on Io completely, nor paying Mars a lovely little visit either, now that he's thinking about it.
Huh…
But that never happened. It wasn't needed after all.
She always got back again from missions after a few days, all bright and victorious with the biggest grin on her face as if she wanted nothing else but haul him into a supply closet and thoroughly kiss him long enough to fry a circuit or two.
His mind's a dangerous place when it wants to be.
"Never stopped, little guy," Cayde scoffs when he returns to the now and leans back against the headboard, one hand clutching at the datapad and the other curling around the Guardian's naked shoulder. She makes a content noise in her sleep and moves, searches for the warmth she had gotten from his body before he shuffled halfway out from below the covers. His answer is to get closer to her instead and let her drape herself around him like a starfish all she likes.
He knows what she's like in bed after having fun.
Ghost blinks at him a few times before he sighs and Cayde sees a new file appear on the datapad in his lap. When Ghost disappears in his own little flash of light, Cayde doesn't even bat an eye, already engrossed in the video.
"CAYDE!"
"He didn't feel a thing."
"How… how's my hair?"
"There's nothing I can do… I'm so sorry."
"This ain't on you, kid."
"You tell Zavala and Ikora… the Vanguard… is the best bet… I ever… lost."
Traveler above, no wonder she had been close to losing her fucking mind when she saw him and he kept insisting that yes, he was in fact the real deal. She'd had to try and cope with this shit, his death, on her own with only her Ghost to keep her from falling completely to pieces but it wasn't enough.
He looks down at her, oblivious in the throes of sleep. His hand strokes her hair, lingers between her shoulder blades and strokes the skin there softly, afraid that anything firmer will wake her from this much-needed rest.
"What happened to you?"
The question haunts him for the rest of the night.
It's morning, or at least what counts as morning here on the Tangled Shore.
He's slumbered off at some point during the night because he wakes to soft, human lips kissing their way down his chest and a soft wiggling body on top of his.
She's desperate with her motions in the same way she was yesterday. Pleasure is sought hard and fast. If it was any other place and any other day, Cayde would be over the moon for a surprise like this—and in bed no less, he's allowed to be lucky every once in a while, ain't he?—but the thought that something's wrong is still digging further into the back of his head. Normally he's all for quickies, he's gotten plenty of them too after they retook the City, too, but something about this strikes him as wrong.
Something's wrong. He doesn't know exactly what, but something's definitely wrong.
Then she wraps her lips around his cock and all logical thought abruptly flies out the proverbial window.
Neither of them leave the bed until much, much later.
And it continues out of bed, he ain't shy where affection's concerned.
Cayde's only too shamelessly smug to admit that he still has his groove when he manages to thoroughly distract his Guardian in the shower stall.
After all, anything can happen in a shower. She might slip and fall, and with all that delicate and soft skin there's no telling what horrible injury could befall her. So, naturally, he's with her to ensure that nothing goes wrong, that she doesn't miss a single spot when getting clean, and helping her get a little extra sticky in certain… places before she really does have to get out there and continue on with her little revenge spree.
The way she doesn't stop rubbing that spot on her neck where a hickey is blooming does stroke his ego, though.
Just a little bit.
Petra's curt announcement that she's en route to Spider's lair has both of them quicken up as well.
Just a little bit.
Petra takes one good look at him before the knife-trick he always gushes over is hurled directly at him and pins him to the wall.
First thought that comes through his skull is, OW!
The second goes something along the lines of that he really shoulda seen it coming, at least when the Guardian reacted pretty much the same.
Internal warning notices pop up all over his vision while he's busy howling one expletive after the other at Petra. The Guardian is just looking at the two of them with a shit-eating grin on her face, the damn traitor.
He's going to find a much better use for that mouth before the day is done, that's a promise.
Sundance makes a gagging sound over their private connection that tells him everything he needs to know about what she thinks of his relationship with the Guardian. Cayde responds very maturely by blowing a raspberry at his Ghost.
Pfah, like he cares.
Just a little bit of course, she is his Ghost, after all.
"How are you alive? How?!"
"I didn't die, not on my end, PV," Cayde sighs and runs a hand over his face, tips catching on his horn briefly. "I never even knew about this rampage of revenge-business until she-" he points at the Guardian, wincing because of the wound until Sundance finally takes pity on him, "-told me about it."
Petra's lips are pressed thin and she doesn't look happy about his answer, and honestly it is kind of shitty if he has to be frank, but it's the best he has.
"Then how are you here?"
"Trust me, you really don't want to know."
Oh, now his Guardian decides to defend him. Wonderful.
Petra's eyes narrow.
"At least not where Spider can overhear," Ghost elaborates with a barely concealed bout of laughter.
Cayde flips him the middle finger behind the Guardian's back. Ghost makes a rude noise back at him.
He's horrified. Absolutely horrified. Whatever happened to the cute and cuddly Ghost that brought back an equally ruffled and oh-so-confused baby Guardian fresh from the Cosmodrome?
The kids sure grow up quick these days.
Petra keeps looking at him just like the Guardian did yesterday—like he's going to disappear in a fistful of smoke when she blinks or turns her head or just takes another step towards him. It hurts, a little bit, that his friends and dear ones can't fully accept the fact that he's here, but he… gets it.
They saw him die, one of them right before their own eyes, and if he'd been in their shoes there's little doubt that he'd have reacted in the same way.
By the Traveler, if Andal had walked in through the front door in the Tower, tipping the edge of his cloak like he was wearing a damn top-hat and grinning that daft smirk he always had on his face, Cayde'd have been up the wall and aiming a gun at him the second after. He'd never believe it, he saw the corpse that was brought back, something that would never fade, no matter how many times he'd get reset.
Never.
So he doesn't blame them.
He throws the knife back at Petra, grinning when she catches it and sheathes it with a huff.
Still the PV he knows, all business until you crack through that tough little shell'o hers. Then she's the softest, cuddliest Awoken he can think of.
At least a cuddly Awoken with a penchant for throwing knives and sniper rounds at her problems until they fuck off.
One of the weirdest things happen when he saunters back to the hideout with Petra and his Guardian in tow, and they pass through Spider's lair.
The Fallen almost looks as if he's doing a double take at Cayde when he walks by and mock-salutes the big guy.
The guttural yell of Eliksni stops Cayde dead in his tracks and has him reaching for the handle of his Ace within seconds, but then Petra's there with a hand on his shoulder and dragging him off down the hallway while the Guardian—his soft little Guardian walks over to Spider and starts trading barbs and insults like she's done it her whole life and not just for three grueling, blood-filled months.
"She'll clear it up, Cayde," Petra hisses into his audio units, grip tightening when he struggles to get loose. "Whatever that was, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about."
Her words ought to satisfy him, but they don't.
She throws him into the room he shared with the Guardian just this evening, wrinkling her nose at the smell of stale air and sex that still lingers faintly.
Cayde just starts to pace.
Sundance pops into existence and plants herself in one of the folds between his neck and his scarf, constantly rubbing against his plating there and simply just being there in his personal space.
He's almost embarrassed to admit how effective that little act alone is in making him calm down. But he doesn't stop pacing. He doesn't stop the scowl he sends Petra when the Awoken spits at him to sit down instead of acting like a child. He's allowed to act childish—although, really he's not—and therefore flips her a rude gesture. Petra then flashes her knife trick.
Cayde sits down after that.
He starts tapping the tips of his feet against the floor instead, one hand reaching up to scratch at Sundance as she nuzzles closer to his neck-plates and gives off small, soothing chirps.
He has the most awesome Ghost in the whole system, and he'll fight anyone who says otherwise.
The atmosphere inside their room only grows more tense as the minutes roll by, Cayde just about ready to vault up at even the smallest of sounds and it's getting on Petra's nerves. He can tell. She's glaring at him from the corner of her eye, following every motion he makes as if she still cannot truly believe that he's there.
His Guardian looked at him the same way when he'd blown his own cover.
"I, uh…"
Nothing comes to mind. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. There's nothing he can think of to start a conversation.
It's a little embarrassing.
Petra looks at him. He's stopped pacing and just stands in the middle of the small room with wringing hands and tries to look at everything and nothing at the same time. He's not really succeeding in not appearing like some sort of illusion.
"It makes no sense," Petra spits out from where she's sitting and turns away. "It makes no sense!"
"Trust me, I'm as weirded out 'bout the whole thing as you are, Petra."
She lets out a bitter short-lived laugh at that comment. "Oh really? No quick-witted remark or bombastic solution to the situation? You don't much sound like the Cayde I know."
"Well, I've had a lot happen to me within the last forty-something hours. Cut a guy some slack, would ya?" Cayde says and leans against the wall.
A smile plays on his lips but only just. If he openly grins at Petra, he's afraid she'll stick her fucking knife in him again. This time somewhere not as easily healable as his shoulder.
Fortunately for him, the door opens without warning and the Guardian stumbles inside. She looks… weird, eyes unseeing, almost as if she's not all there yet.
"Guardian?"
Petra's by her side immediately and for a moment as he watches his old pal take his Guardian by the hand, and lead her towards the bed, he feels… annoyance? Annoyance at Petra? For taking the Guardian's hand? Jeez, what's the world coming to…
"It was… weird," Ghost says from where he's hovering beside his Guardian. "The Spider kept asking when Cayde had gotten here."
An eyebrow-plate is raised delicately in a mock of a curious expression. "Excuse me?"
"That's what she said as well," Ghost gestures to the Guardian with a dip. "He was very confusing."
"But… she told him yesterday!" Cayde exclaims as a hand comes up to scratch at his beautiful, blue horn. "I—we traded quips! For a moment there I actually thought we had a connection!"
"Cayde, be serious!" Petra snaps.
"I am being seri—"
"He forgot you."
The Guardian's quiet remark has everyone silent.
"I'm sorry—what now?"
"Spider," she elaborates. Her hand reaches out to curl around Cayde's and he lets her tug him closer without a thought. "He'd forgotten about you completely. Almost as if—" she cuts herself off before the sentence is finished, and Cayde is screaming inside.
As if what? AS IF WHAT, DAMN IT?!
"As if you were never here to begin with."
"Technically I'm not."
The grip around his hand turns into a vice.
"Yes, you are," his Guardian denies, rather vehemently at that. "You're here. You're alive."
"Not necessarily the Cayde that you know," Petra argues. "I've no doubt that this is Cayde, or at least a version of Cayde that we all here recognize, but he might very well simply be just that: a version of Cayde."
"You're talking about multiple worlds."
Petra nods.
"It is possible," Ghost agrees. He's slow in speaking, but agree with all of this nonsense he does.
Cayde is just feeling more and more like something cold is crawling beneath his exterior plating.
"But—no!" his Guardian spits out Her hand is twitching around his as if it wants to clamp down even harder than it already it. "This doesn't make any sense! The chances of Cayde being thrown into another reality, a reality where he's in a relationship with me, are too small."
"Normally I would say yes," Petra nods in agreement, but it's almost as if it doesn't really go all the way up to her eye. "However, the Universe still holds secrets for us. There's no telling how it came to be that he landed here, but I doubt that it was by mere coincidence."
"But I got here through Vex tech," Cayde joins the discussion now, there's no way in Hell that they're gonna talk over his head when he's in the damn room. "I know they're not exactly set in stone when it comes to all the variables, but I have to stick with my Guardian on this one. The chances of them throwing me across not just time, but space, and then into another dimension where I just so happens to have a relationship with the aforementioned Guardian?"
"The chance is still there."
"Not big enough to influence so many things."
"You need to take this serious, Cayde! We don't really know how you even got here," Ghost is stuck on this one, he can tell. "All we know is what you told the Guardian and I about the Vex technology that you were tinkering with. Who knows if you did something that altered where the portal went."
"I am taking it serious!"
"The first time you kissed me," the Guardian suddenly asks. Her voice is quiet but it cuts through the escalating discussion with ease. His attention is back on her immediately, but what he meets there almost has him reeling. Her eyes are practically begging him for something that he's not even sure he can give.
"This is hardly the time for—"
"Shush," Cayde hisses at both Petra and Ghost—he doesn't take his eyes off the Guardian in front of him.
"When you kissed me for the first time," she repeats, almost hesitantly now. "Where were we?"
He's silent as he looks at her, long and hard as if the answer's hidden somewhere inside her eyes, but he doesn't see an answer no matter how hard he's looking. If Petra is right about this, if he really is from some other reality where Cayde-6 hasn't fucked off without giving proper notice or warnings to his own Fireteam, then…
Then there's no real answer to her question. There's no way for him to know if what he'll say is right, if it's wrong. Traveler, he hopes this ain't it.
She's had enough taken away from her already—humanity, self-preservation, happiness, love—and now she might just be about to lose everything that she has just gotten back.
"Cayde."
Her voice is sounding like a rusty door jammed on its just-as-rusty hinges—it grates on his audio units, sends harsh static over every sensor he has like nails against a chalkboard, or metal whining against metal.
He closes his eyes and steels himself for whatever's going to happen after this.
"The Tower," he answers resolutely. "The first time I ever kissed you was during the first Dawning after we had retaken the City from the Cabal."
Her eyes are still staring at him, completely unblinking. He just stares right back at her, can't help it.
Then, they dim.
The fire that's been burning inside of them ever since she realized that he was real just… dies out.
She releases his hand and moves to stand up. When he attempts to go closer to her she shies away from his touch, and it burns.
"Guardian…"
"No," she says and shakes her head. Her eyes are fastened at the ground. "Not right now."
"Guardian, you can't jus—"
"No," she repeats and heads for the door. She's out of the room and down the hall before either Petra or Cayde can say a single thing. Her hands are clenched tight enough for the leather to creak under the pressure.
"Meera!" her Ghost yells out and immediately hovers after his Guardian.
Cayde just stands there. Petra is moving closer to him, his systems pick up her motions automatically, but he doesn't move. He can't.
She's not his real Guardian. He's not her real Vanguard. But if they're not each other's, then whose fucked up idea was this that he was supposed to end up here?
"Cayde, I'm…" Petra is hovering awkwardly beside him. She looks remorseful, honest-to-God remorseful.
He couldn't give less of a fuck right now.
"Don't," he sighs. "Don't—don't you dare say that you're sorry. Sorry doesn't fix this, doesn't fix the fact that neither of us have any idea what's goin' on, and now we have to deal with the fact that I'm not even from the same dimension as you."
He's taking it out on her and it's not fair, not fair at all. He knows that—he fucking knows, alright?!
But he can't help it.
"I'll… I'll find the Guardian," Petra says quietly and steps away from him, eye downcast and a sour grimace is stretched across her face. Good. Cayde hopes its eating at her just as much as it is him.
When his friend leaves him alone in the room he doesn't even look up. He's still standing there like a complete ingrate.
"Cayde?"
Great, 'Dance is out now. Just fucking great.
"Cayde, you need to calm down," she says but all he can think about is that her trying to reason with him is just about the cutest thing he's ever heard.
He's not real, not in this world at least. Here he's dead, buried six feet under by a Vanguard that's barely even functioning. Cayde's been in shittier situations, sure, but this… this really tops all of it.
"I don't know what to do, 'Dance," he says, head buried in his hands as he flops back down on the bed. "I fucked this up good, and I don't know how to get out of this one."
"Well, she didn't exactly make it easy for you, did she?"
He knows that she's talking about the Guardian, about Meera, who had smiled like he'd hung the Sun and the Moon and the stars too, for that matter, just this morning. They had been happy, believing nothing could go wrong as they fooled around in bed.
And Petra had crushed of all that without even a hint of subtlety.
Just one question—one fucking question was all it took for everything to fall down around their ears.
That weird feeling of wrongness is growing in the back of his mind, pulsing and twisting the more he pays it attention.
Cayde leaves the bed. He jumps up onto his feet, swings his arms back and forth a few times before he walks over to the nearest wall and slams a fist into it.
Breaking something helps, gives him something to work with, something to center on that isn't human and teary eyed and hanging on his every word.
A screech from his comm has him jerk in surprise, hand still buried halfway through the wall and ready to power the damn thing down, but Sundance is quicker than he is and has accepted the incoming message before the thought is even finished on his part.
The sounds that come through cuts into his audio units like a dull razor into flesh.
Screams of some kind, he can't tell if they're human or Awoken or even Fallen, are glitching through, and over it all he hears a familiar static-y voice.
"—yde? Sundance? Requesting backup, Guardian down, Guardian down!"
It's her Ghost.
It's his Guardian's Ghost.
Cayde's up before he hears the repeated 'Guardian down' and storming down the hallway. He passes Fallen on the way but Spider must have spread the word that any Guardians found on his premises are not to be harmed because they are jumping out of the way for him before he gets too close.
Sundance is out of sight—neither of them trust the creatures around them not to try and take a shot at her. And after what he saw last night about how she died here in this time and reality, he's only going to be even more protective of her.
He has no idea where Petra is, why Ghost hasn't mentioned her in the slightest, and as he grows more and more agitated, he begins to feel it again.
Solar Energy. His Golden Gun.
There in its holster he feels Ace tremble—feels the hand cannon react to its wielder's want and desires and yes oh how he's missed this!
Action again, real proper action that's not a simulated training exercise or a Crucible match he can't even compete in because Shaxx still refuses to let him within five feet of any of the arenas.
He's not going down without a fight, he's not going down, period.
She's in trouble, his Guardian is in trouble, and there's going to be fucking Hell to pay if whoever the enemy is so much as scratches her.