"Every story is true if you tell it right."

Andal told him that once. Back before that first round with Taniks, back before the Vanguard and the Dare and the second round with Taniks and all the other shit that Cayde got himself involved in back when he was young and cocky and stupid.

Traveler above, he was stupid back then.

Oh, he was quick in a fight and a Gunslinger practically born with a Golden Gun in his hand, but inside his head? All Cayde had in there back then were lofty ideas of loot, alluring women and booze. And Andal, of course—can't forget him.

The Shore is a fucking mess.

The perfect place for a Gunslinger—just enough chaos for no one to keep a close eye on them, yet not crowded enough that the chaos works against their agenda.

His agenda is simple: get to the Guardian, kill anyone standing in his way.

Honestly, it's foolproof. Easy. As simple as his old plan back in the day with Ghaul that involved nothing else but him, a Vex teleporter and a gun.

So, of course, it goes utterly, completely wrong.

Oh, everything is nice and easy in the beginning of it all. He's running towards the coordinates that his Guardian's Ghost throws at him and Sundance before too much interference cuts them off, guns blazing, knives ready and not giving a damn about the fact that practically every living being with a working set of eyes can see who he is.

The stench of gunpowder, blood, body fluids—it all throws itself at his sensors and Cayde revels in it. This was how it felt when they took back the City from the Cabal, the ghostly touch of an adrenaline high rushing through his body, the feel of his gun in his hand and the finger clenching the trigger, the recoil when he pulls it and the bullets are let loose from the chamber, the raw strength of the weapon.

He loves it.

He misses it, already.

Cayde vaults over a boulder, a knife ready for the Fallen dreg that's screeching at him with everything it's got and a bullet for the Vandal close by.

Both are dead before the thought to reach for their weapons is processed; Cayde is left standing ready to blow the spoke from the barrel of his gun.

Yup, still got it.

His mad sprint towards the Guardian continues.

He hears Sundance scream at him through their connection—she calls him every rude thing she can think of, in English and then in Eliksni when she runs out of things to say in the first language. She must'a overheard him and the ol' guys sometimes from back in the day with the things she's spewing out of her nonexistent mouth.

Cayde cracks a grin, reloads his gun, and is off again before he ever stops to catch a not-needed breath.

He wonders, how will this story need to be told?

Is it going to be like those old western movies from before the Collapse, him standing off against some criminal scum, mano a mano?

Maybe all he needs is rush in, gun blazing like a fucking firework show and just start shooting them before they shoot him. The idea could work, he's not against it…

"Perhaps what you need is an overview of the situation before you go in and get yourself killed, hm?"

He has no idea how she does it but Petra's back and Cayde's never been happier to see her, even if she does stink just a little bit of Fallen guts and has gore in her otherwise-impeccable hair.

"What happened?"

"She went off to think and the next thing I know there's a horde of Scorned around the place. The Guardian rushed in there," Petra gestures with her free hand towards a gaping hole in a tombship not far from where they are, "shrieking like a woman possessed, and the Hive disappeared after that."

Wait.

Wait just a gosh diddly-dang damn minute, now.

"There are Hive out here?"

Petra's grim, for once looking quite scary and plenty wrathful for a Queen-less Wrath of the Queen, but she's dead serious as she nods.

The screech of something ungodly reaches his audio sensors—it's coming from inside that Tombship.

Fuck.

"They're stragglers," Petra elaborates. She's waving her gun at the tombship like it's a wasp tittering too close to her face. "There's just enough of them to pose but a minor annoyance to the Fallen and their operations out here. Our only problem is the fact that the Mindbender apparently has the whole bunch of them wrapped around his little finger."

The Mindbender…

She was talking about him when Cayde first got here, something about him still needing locating.

Well, someone obviously got impatient waiting for their date to turn up.

"Not long after she went in there, I heard her Ghost scream 'Guardian down', and then I waited here for you."

"So they're both in there?"

"No, just her. Or, well, her body."

The way Petra's talking about his Guardian lying dead in a ditch somewhere in a crashed tombship is enough to have serious shivers running down Cayde's spine.

"Where's her Ghost?"

"Somewhere close by, he keeps moving in order to make sure that the Hive doesn't notice his location."

"Smart little guy."

Cayde's gotta give'im that.

Little guy knows when to stay down and what to do if his Guardian loses her shit and goes off on a crazy rampage on her own.

He'll have words with her about that when they're back in Spider's lair, back in their room and he can have her for himself for only a few minutes—long enough time to talk things over and make a plan.

Because they need a plan.

This isn't working as they are right now, and he's barely even been here for over 48 hours.

Finding the little Ghost is easy, almost laughably so, but then again, they have Sundance to thank for most of the help while Cayde's constantly scared out of his damn mind that some asshole Fallen is going to sneak up on them with a gun and take her out.

Petra's cool as a cucumber about the whole fucking thing.

His Guardian's—Meera's—Ghost? Not so much.

"She's in there, and she's alone!"

The Ghost is wailing. Cayde has absolutely no idea how he does it, but the little guy is wailing and practically falling apart at the seams as his lens flickers back and forth in front of the giant hole into the tombship.

"You're not goin' in there, at least not alone," Cayde orders without a second thought because fuck no is he losing the Light of one of his Guardians, more specifically his Guardian.

Fuck. No.

"She's alone in there, Cayde!" the Ghost just screams at him but even it knows not to just disappear straight into the Hive den.

If it does, the Guardian is as good as dead. For real this time with no second chances.

Petra's sharp intake of breath distracts him for a moment and he catches her eye, a question begging to be released. She shakes her head at his silent question.

They can't keep a Ghost from their Guardian; to do so would be cruel beyond measure, and both of them know it. Cayde has seen it firsthand from when Fireteams have returned, broken and shellshocked from the enemy being far stronger than they had anticipated. Petra has probably seen several scores of Guardians falling to pride while out in the Reef and watching as their Light is ripped from them by cold, hard reality.

"We'll get you to her," he soothes the Ghost and rubs a gloved finger over one of the Ghost's many spikes. "We'll get you to her, and you can rez her until you're exhausted down to the core. That's a promise."

"I'm half between wanting to ask you to just chain her to the wall somewhere and letting her throw herself at every damn Scorned like she's a battering ram," the Ghost moans. He's mollified, if only slightly, at Cayde's words, but the nervous hovering has yet to cease. "She's a Hunter, not a Titan, Traveler above!"

"Good luck getting that through to her," Petra snorts.

Cayde responds with a rude gesture. He graciously overlooks how Petra simply ignores it all in favor of checking her sidearm.

"How do we get in?"

"Uh, through the front door?" the Ghost quips like no one's business. Cayde's still not sure if he likes it or not. It's still up in the air.

"Alright, let me rephrase that one. How do we get in, without ending up like a Ghost-, Guardian- and Awoken-flavored smear on the walls?"

"Through the front door. With guns."

Alright, he takes all and every doubt back. This Ghost is going places.

"And people wonder how you and your Guardian has survived for so long."

"Shut up."

They find her with her hand stretched out towards an auto rifle and a horde of slaughtered thrall around her.

Cayde just stands there, frozen. He takes in everything, from the empty, un-seeing look in her eyes to the way her fingers are starting to stiffen after who knows how long. He hasn't tried to make sense of the time since he ran out of the Spider's lair like a bat out of Hell. It's there somewhere, code imbedded into his core systems that knows what the time is.

Blood drips from the walls—black from the Hive specked with dots of crimson. Her blood.

Her eyes—Meera's eyes—are just staring straight ahead, sightless. A puddle of blood has formed under her body, too. It's sticky and beginning to form the tiniest of crusts around the edges.

"Gods…"

The sound that his Guardian's Ghost makes at the sight of her is inhuman. Like nothing he's ever heard before.

"Meera!"

A flash of light, the form of Light that the Traveler has blessed the Solar System with, blinds both him and Petra and then the eerily quiet tombship is filled with heaving, ragged breaths as her broken helmet is ripped from her head and thrown somewhere behind her.

Her whole body seizes as life returns to it, as it courses through her veins, and a desperate, wild bout of coughing echoes loudly within the tombship's halls. Cayde is at her side in moments, on his knees and brushing her sweat and blood-slickened hair out of her face with a gentleness few have ever witnessed. Her Ghost buzzes around her, his surveying beam scanning every single scrape that's to find on her skin and healing it immediately. Cayde gets her turned onto her back and tangles his fingers with hers as he just keeps stroking her cheek, murmuring quiet nothings to calm her down.

"C-Cayde?" her voice is quiet and her eyes are wild—wild and flickering and disbelieving.

"Yup," he's grinning through the pain, through the shock of seeing a Guardian—his Guardian, damn it!—dead on the ground like a butchered animal. "'m right here, sweetheart. I'm right here."

"T-the D-Darkness," she's still heaving for breath as he gets her off the ground and right into his arms instead. "It was e-everywhere, touching me!"

Delirium is edging in now, flavoring this twisted mockery of a lovers' reunion in sour, dour notes as her hands dig into his shoulder pads and the harder padding that protects his sides.

"Shhh," he hushes her with sweet croons and gentle motions. Out of the corner of an eye he sees Petra glance at them briefly whilst circling the chamber they found Meera in. When the Wrath stops for a moment to get a better look at her condition, he shakes his head as subtly as he can and makes a motion for her to continue scouting the perimeter with his hand.

Surprises won't do them much good in here.

"Meera!" her Ghost cries and burrows against her neck, shivering as if cold and sounding all-together quite miserable. "You're alive."

"I'm alive," she nods against Cayde, hands still tightly buried in his armor, and the delirium still present. It's making her voice high and scratchy—it's almost enough to start hurting his audio sensors. "Traveler above, I'm alive."

"Deep breaths, kid," Cayde murmurs. "Deep, deep breaths now."

"Perimeter's safe," Petra calls from wherever she is in the room.

Cayde won't ever admit to anyone how much those two words relaxes him.

"Check again, for safety's sake," he answers her and barely waits for Petra's accepting shout before his attention focuses in on the shivering Guardian in his arms.

Her sickly pallor and the stiffness from the beginnings on rigor mortis are fading as her Ghost works its magic and erases all traces of her being gone, dead to the world. The tears and rips in her armor cannot be mended, but if Cayde is being completely honest here then he's not so sure that she even cares about that at this point.

How could he?

"Meera," he's muttering against her hair now, "Meera, you're safe. We've got you."

"You're still here…"

"Of course I am!"

If he looks offended at her choice of words Cayde wants to count that one as a win in his book. Because he is. Her emotions are going haywire and he's not sure if it's the stress she's been under for so long, or if it's from seeing him alive again, but he's fucking done with this shit.

It must show on his face because almost as soon as the words from before leave his mouth she's struggling to get out of his arms and onto her own two, wobbly feet.

It's almost pathetic to look at.

"I have to get going."

Her words bring the chill back down Cayde's spine. He stares at her in shock, in utter disbelief because there is no fucking way that anyone can be so fucking stupid—

"The Hell you are!"

His shout echoes. Petra glances at them from the entrance in worry, but Cayde ignores it. All he can think about right now is the woman in front of him—the woman he thought was his but aren't and he can't accept this because she's here and he's here and everything is wrong.

Everything is right too, at the same time, but it's weird and strange and all he really longs for right now is just to shoot the first unfortunate fucker of a dreg that comes within viewing distance for him and a long drink.

Not necessarily in that order, either.

She's scared. He can see it plain as day.

But if she's scared then why, in the name of all that is holy, is she staggering towards the giant opening where all the Hive-y sounds are coming from?!

"What are you doing?" he hisses and gestures towards the hole leading outside. "Exit's that way, you idiot!"

"Only good thing about this is that the Mindbender came out of hiding," he hears her say. When he looks over at her, a wicked grin has spread across Meera's face. "I am not letting him get away again!"

"There's too many! You won't make it!"

She's looking more feral beast than human in that moment.

"Watch me," is all she says before she disappears through the hole, ignoring Cayde's yells the entire time.

He doesn't follow.

He wants to, oh how he wants to, but he doesn't.

Instead he waits for her. He waits for her to come back to him, just like back at the Farm, just like back at the Tower before he touched stuff that shouldn't be touched, and he simmers in anger.

Petra checks her gun again. She does that quite a lot out here, actually, but he stores it somewhere in the back of his mind.

Right now, all he wants to focus on is her, Meera.

Why did she go? Why couldn't she just come back to the hideout with him and they could figure this out, he could figure out how to make her stop this shit, because it's tearing her apart and leeching the Light from her body with every moment that she is spending out here.

But she doesn't come back.

So, he waits in silence.

When she returns to the Spider's lair she is covered in bruises from top to toe, holding the shredded remains of the auto rifle they found her reaching for, and positively vibrating with energy.

The Darkness is coiled around her like an oil-covered viper.

Cayde spends the time before she comes to their shared room dry heaving, despite the fact that he doesn't have a stomach to empty and all that comes out of his mouth is small spills of oil and other lubricating substances that keep his body running.

He doesn't look at her when she enters. Just keeps on listening to Sundance as she hovers above his shoulder and mutters encouragements to him through their private connection. It's comforting and familiar and right now this is what Cayde needs because he is barely keeping it together, as it is.

Meera doesn't look at him.

Her Ghost hovers above her shoulder, and even Cayde can feel how the uncomfortable atmosphere is weighting the poor guy out.

"The Mindbender is dead."

Four words is all it takes.

He's looking up at her, the back of his hand wiping at his stained mouth-plates. He's disappointed in her. It's thick in the air between them.

"Meera," he starts. He needs to continue this, pussying out of this is not acceptable. "Do you have any idea of what is happening right now?"

"I'm avenging your death."

"Listen, this ain't right. You know this, I know this."

"I did—I'm doing this for you; I've ripped through the Barons for you, Cayde!"

"Yeah, well, I never asked you to!"

He watches as the Guardian stills almost immediately, completely stiffens before him. He's never raised his voice to a shout, not to her—not for a very long time.

But he ain't done yet.

No siree.

"This… this quest you've gone on to avenge me of all things is first of all, insanely stupid! Second, what were you thinking going against these Fallen on your own? Did you not read through any of the materials that we had on the Prison of Elders?"

He's furious—actually sees red, because in his mind there's just no way that a Guardian singlehandedly could manage that many adversaries against them, no matter how powerful they were.

There's just no fucking way.

"They slaughtered you!" she yells right back at him, fury glittering in her eyes and hands clenched tight enough to whiten. "They killed you and you expect me to just take that lying down?!"

"No, I would have expected you to at the very least take enough backup so that you would never be in a position like the one you were in today!"

"The Vanguard forbid it! What was I supposed to do when they said no to every single solution that I dished out at them?!"

"Obviously they weren't good enough, or they would have acted!"

"Is that what you think, that what I asked of them was just some half-assed idea that I hadn't thought through? They did nothing for you or me, Cayde! Zavala held speeches, like he always does, and Ikora, for all that she raved about revenge, never got off her ass and did something about it!"

"They both have responsibilities at the Tower to you and the rest of the Guardians that're still out there in the galaxy, risking their lives and doing their fucking jobs!"

She goes silent, just stops and stares at him like he's told her the most horrible thing that she cannot come to terms with.

"'Doing their fucking jobs'?" she repeats softly before she hurls the wrecked gun in her hand towards the farthest wall. The noise grates against his audio sensors. "'Doing their fucking jobs'?!"

Wrong thing to say, cowboy.

"Listen, what I meant was—"

"I stopped everything for you, Cayde," she interrupts, her tone of voice deceptively quiet as she stalks closer to him. "I was the one who held everything together for three weeks straight after you died in that fucking prison. I was the one trying to guide the new Guardians as they wandered around, looking lost and confused without a Vanguard to guide them, because Traveler knows that Zavala nor Ikora had time to help the new Hunters. No, they let us do that ourselves. I was the one trying to bring reports together because every single senior Hunter ditched the Tower the moment that someone would mention the Vanguard, and I was the one—"

Cayde sits down at the bed at this point, hearing everything she is saying and still feeling angry because he should have been there! She never should have had to try and shoulder everything, Zavala and Ikora had a duty to help her out because being thrown into everything like that was horrible, he'd tried it himself with Andal back in the day, and oh, how he had been so fucking lost those first days before Ikora had finally taken pity on him and sat him down, explaining everything.

She had done this shit alone for weeks and no one had done anything.

"—Petra contacts me and says that she's found them, she's found those fuckers who just watched you get executed and butchered like an animal, and I just let go of everything, because the Hunters were simmering and wanted blood, but no one would do anything, and I was tired! I was tired of—"

"Alright, enough!" he screams at her, stands up from the bed and has his hands wrapped around her arms in seconds.

"Let go of me!"

"Not on your fucking life!"

"Cayde, I said let go!"

He doesn't answer her this time, just tightens his grip and stares straight into her eyes as she begins to rave and scream at him, calling him every curse word she can think of on the spot, and it continues like that for who knows how long.

This solves nothing.

Them screaming at each other for the other's faults is poisonous, it feeds the Darkness that already clings to his Meera like a second skin, and Cayde… Cayde is fucking tired.

"This has to stop, Meera."

His words make her stop shaking in his arms, stills her long enough for him to catch her eyes.

"This isn't—I don't want…" Cayde sighs. "I have to go back, Meera. Back to where I came from."

She freezes.

"No."

"Listen, kid, I have to—"

"No!"

His Guardian is falling apart right in front of him.

Tears are rolling down her cheeks as she looks at him with despair in her pretty eyes. Her lip is quivering, he notes. All of this shit is because of him. He did this to her, made her into this mess of a woman.

"You… you can't do this!"

Cayde steels himself. He has to do this because this cannot continue, this future that he's found himself in simply cannot be allowed to continue.

"If I don't do this, things are gonna end real bad, and we both know this. The Traveler—"

"Fuck the Traveler!" she screams at him. "It did nothing when you died! It did nothing when the Cabal attacked the Last City! If the Traveler is supposed to represent the Light and everything good, then why did it let you die?!"

Cayde looks at her, just looks at her, and sees a broken, terrified girl look right back at him. From outside the room he can hear Fallen chitter as they pass through the hallway. He doesn't move a muscle.

"Don't go. Cayde, please!" she is sobbing, just looking up at him from where she has collapsed in the floor. "Please, Cayde…"

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Cayde sighs and kneels down in front of her, wipes off a smudge of dirt on her cheek. He smiles and tries to look reassuring, tries to be what she needs him to be right now. "If I could make this right all proper I would, you know that I would. But I don't belong here."

"Cayde…"

"Every moment I stay here, we're that much closer to something fracturing that ain't supposed to get broken. I might not be the brightest there is, but I at least get that. Gimme some credit where it's due."

She doesn't answer him. She just sits there—this wonderful, broken, scared little girl who's just had her entire reason for being out here taken away from her, and revenge screaming in her ear to just keep on going, keep on making the assholes who killed this world's Cayde pay with everything they've got.

"This… this ain't right, Meera," Cayde sighs, thumbs still caressing her cheeks. "It ain't right and we need to fix this. I don't belong here."

"But you do! You're still Cayde!"

"I'm not your Cayde, though, am I?"

"That doesn't matter!"

"But it does matter, Meera. Somewhere out there in whatever dimension I came from, there's a Hunter Guardian named Meera, just like you, who's missing her Vanguard. I've seen what's happened when I die, I saw that here, today, and I saw how you coped with the fact that my killers were close at hand. I don't want my Meera to ever experience something like this."

The tears are still running down her cheeks.

"I don't know what to do anymore, Cayde," she cries and leans forward. He accepts her without a word. "I don't know what to do, and I'm s-scared."

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry."

He can do little else but hold her. Hold her, tell her that everything will be alright, even if he knows, deep down in his heart, that nothing will ever make this right.

Nothing.