A/N: Check out Dragon Ball Z: The Space Train for my other work alongside my lovely coauthor Feraligreater.
Prompt 9: RAID BOSS
River remembered helping to carry Andal's casket.
The metal of the poles running its length were cold, and it was the heaviest weight she'd ever carried. They had placed the casket into its niche in the mausoleum, pushing it back. Her and Cayde stood side-by-side as it was covered with its marker, sealed into place.
She'd performed that one final rite of remembrance - helped Cayde take his old cloak off, and fastened Andal's onto his shoulders. With a watery smile, she'd tugged the hood up over his head, and they hugged.
Cayde took the Hunter Vanguard job, and when he found out where Taniks was, he had immediately, quietly assigned it to River, Shiro, and Wren: the old guard. They had headed down, a fireteam of three, into the moon's bowels and chased Taniks to his end. With absolute, unparalleled firepower, they exacted revenge - by the time they were done, Taniks had not only died, but suffered for it.
The Deep Stone Crypt team was Daniels, River, Aurora, Silas, Kimi, and Claire. It wasn't that hard of a raid: they'd had worse, all of them, especially after their fairly-recent defeat of Aksis. It was going well, genuinely.
And then.
And then.
There was Taniks, leaping out of a cryopod as if he had never been murdered. River's hearing faded to a high-pitched whine as she stared, dumbfounded, bow clattering to the ground from her slowly-loosening grip. Taniks slammed his fist, hard, into the glass between them over and over, and it spider webbed, threatening to shatter. But then… he gave up, skittered up the glass like it was nothing.
Daniels grabbed her shoulders and she nearly jumped out of her skin, rapidly scrubbing her arm across her face. "Hey, whoa, are you okay?"
She snagged her bow back off the ground, wiped her face one more time for good measure. "That's Taniks."
"Yeah, it was," he said, gently holding her again. Everyone else was doing their damndest to look away.
River shook her head. "I'm gonna kill that son of a bitch."
Then she shoved away and went to look for how to follow through on that. Aurora grabbed Daniels's arm after a moment. "Hey, who's Taniks?"
Everyone else - except Claire, who knew the story and was also looking around - gathered to hear the answer. Daniels sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. "Uh, Taniks killed the Hunter Vanguard before Cayde. He was kinda Riv's mentor. They were all really close. She was a pallbearer at his funeral."
"Oh, shit," Aurora managed, with Silas saying, in tandem, "Well fuck."
Kimi crossed her arms, glanced over at her mother. "Let's get this son of a bitch then."
And they did. They killed a Fallen-turned-Exo, averted a nuclear explosion, and found Taniks in the ruins of the Morning Star orbital station. And just like River and her fireteam had before, they went at him with everything they had. His death was down to the wire - everyone was exhausted by fighting the teleporting Fallen abomination, sick from dealing with the nuclear cores, and sore from being shocked.
Shaking, exhausted, all six burst into Light - a final stand. They rained fire and ice down on him, but it was Aurora who got the final hit, running in from the side, up a piece of debris, and launching up as far as she could before she charged a Nova Bomb and chucked it down as hard as she could.
It might as well have been a nuclear explosion, the flash nearly blinding the raid team as the shock wave burst outwards. Taniks howled and exploded, too. A cloud of smoke shot up into the sky, quickly blooming into a mushroom. Aurora landed hard, looked up at her handiwork, and grinned. "Got him!"
River threw her head back and laughed, collapsing backwards into the snow. "Fuck yeah, you did!"
Each of them quickly checked in on River, who declined to get up from her spot in the snow, and went about scrounging for loot. River didn't care, just laid there staring up at the stars. For just a moment, whispering around her, she could hear Andal like she was in his office. The stars shifted above her into his big, cheesy smile. "Listen, kid. If you just wanna be average, that's up to you. But you can be more."
River sighed, and smiled peacefully up at the sky. "Hope you're proud, bud."