Slipping through the cracks of a dark eternity
With nothing but my pain and the paralyzing agony
To tell me who I am, who I was, uncertainty
Enveloping my mind 'till I can't break free
Bad Apple! – Nomico
?
There is pain and disorientation and you are being torn from your seams. There is a gaping hole bleeding off reality and sanity and you are heartbroken. Heartbroken. Brainbroken. All of your thoughts do not work, they do not start where they should and they do not end, spiraling ever down into nonsense and pain and an unfamiliar presence that you automatically reject, it's shoved haphazardly in your skull like a dull needle and you want to throw up, expel it from yourself but you could never find where it ends and you begin.
Spark is not here.
You reach out but all you find is flight feathers and pyramid bricks where there should be- infernos and flapping banners but there is something completely different there, all Arc-wise momentum pulling as you bank a Sparrow, the spray from rapids and starlight so clear it pierces your soul instead of- him, how could you ever begin to describe him, he's always there- but no, he's supposed to be there, not him, not her-
"Azra?" a voice says, and the implications echo outward- that's the right name but it isn't, the voice is familiar in two different ways, two different sets of thoughts clash against each other, feedback building as they fail to mesh and the resonance shifts up in pitch-
"Are you alright?" the voice asks.
"No!" you gasp, both of you (and you realize there are multiple of you) know something is deeply, deeply wrong. You are shoved together like two ill-fitting puzzle pieces, much deeper in your mind than you are supposed to be and you can't tell your own thoughts apart.
You need to focus on the physical sensations, your hands against the worn concrete and the distant sound of birds-
No, that never works. You must find the quiet within, the unreachable point of light in the sea of darkness, unwavering-
"I'll send a team out immediately-"
That's met with two different reactions- relief and rejection. Stubbornness and humility.
"Where is Sagira? What happened?"
Right here.
But you're not Sagira.
But I am.
You're not supposed to be.
You're not who you're supposed to be, either.
With that, it became clearer, and Azra was able to grip her thoughts and set them in order with a mind shaking like battle-shocked hands. She (and Spark) had found the artifact and put Sagira's shell in it. That had caused-
"You put me in some random artifact?" Sagira cries. The disbelief shocks through the Hunter, the foolhardiness, the stupidity-
Azra focuses, queasiness rising in her, distracting but not overwhelming.
Yet.
And oh, how that one thought, one fragment of a thought, sets them off. Yet means such incredibly different things and Sagira thinks about that and Azra ends up one breath away from the edge of insanity again, pushed into a maelstrom that her Ghost normally helps to pull her from-
"STOP," she's commanding out loud (unnecessarily, Sagira is right here). By some miracle, Sagira stops.
"Can you hear me?" Ikora asks.
Azra leaped at the opportunity. "Stop the rescue mission." It's much too fast, a perilous jump from one thought to an end goal she just trusts to make sense. It shouldn't feel perilous, it should feel like intuition.
"Are you sure?" Ikora asked. Sagira wanted to say no, no we are not sure, because her first instinct is restraint and critical evaluation, counterbalance to a Guardian who is very confident-
"Nothing is wrong that you can fix," Azra stated. Sagira recognized the truth. This was entirely unprecedented. "Just… give us a few minutes," the Hunter bargained. "This is…"
This is wrong. This is so, so wrong.
"What happened, exactly?" Ikora asked.
"Sagira," Azra ground out, "is in my Ghost."
"I think I am your Ghost right now," Sagira commented.
"Oh," Ikora said. "That would be… you and Spark have incredibly advanced neural symbiosis-"
"And now me and Sagira have incredibly advanced neural symbiosis," Azra interrupted. "And it makes me want to throw up."
"Hey, your mind isn't a pretty place to be either," Sagira complained.
Azra fumbled her way into a sitting position, worried that any wrong move would send pain lancing back through her body, but none did. She rested her head on the stone wall behind her and let the world slowly swim its way back into focus.
Sagira levitated her own shell out of the artifact, examining it with morbid curiosity. "What even was your plan with this?" she complained. "Throw me in some random bit of Vex tech-"
"Wasn't random," Azra rasped. (Had she been screaming before?) "Brother Vance-" She winced as the weight of Sagira's judgement broke across her thoughts, nearly drowning her in skepticism and annoyance.
"He was our best lead on this," Azra soldiered on. "You were inactive and you weren't waking up and I have no fucking clue what is happening in the Infinite Forest but it's obviously something bad and everyone here is dead." It wasn't until she stopped to catch her breath that she realized that she'd been yelling. Sagira and Ikora were both stunned into silence.
"I need some fresh air," Azra announced. She needed to be out of the room full of bodies and Vex tech. She grabbed Sagira's inert shell out of the air and stomped her way up the stairs. Sagira didn't protest, following the Guardian out into the dim blue light of the EDZ.
Azra removed her helmet and took deep breaths of the forest air. A breeze was coming in from the East, washing away the smell of gunsmoke and spilled Ether from the earlier fight. Azra tasted only pine and rain. She slowly lowered herself and sat against one of the legs of the radio tower.
"You're still transmitting video and stuff to Ikora, right?" she asked Sagira.
"Am I?" the Ghost rifled through her own systems, checking on the dozens of protocols Spark had left running in his wake. "Yes, yes I am," she confirmed. "Wow, the comms system has really had an upgrade since I've-"
"Ikora," Azra interrupted. "You should probably still send someone recover the bodies. And figure out what all this tech they've squirreled away is for."
"The Praxic order is already scrambling a team," Ikora replied.
Azra took another deep breath. Sagira still engrossed in the new comms protocols, leaving Azra fairly alone in her head and feeling more stable. "Do you want me to wait for them?" she asked.
That brought Sagira's attention back. "Wait? No, we need to go, now," the Ghost urged. She needed to find her Guardian. He could be hurt, or worse-
"Hold on," Azra said, directing her attention at the Ghost. That should have been the first question asked. "What's going on with Osiris? I'm practically blind on this."
"Panoptes," Sagira said gravely. "Do you know what the Infinite Forest is for?"
Azra rubbed at her temples, trying to quell the headache she could feel brewing. "It's a giant prediction engine. Running simulations to help the Vex win their battles."
"It's a lot more than that. There are secrets hidden in there, special protocols." Sagira clicked the bits of her new shell together, agitated. "Osiris saw something, and it terrified him. Nothing terrifies him. I know he's trying to stop whatever's happening, but he's in major trouble. He needs help. He needs me." Sagira's mind spun with an urgent need to get up go run check save him protect him.
Azra clenched her fists and tried to calm her racing heart. They were not combat-ready right now. Sagira bounced back and forth in her mind, always a misstep away from tripping over something unpleasant. Azra was still reeling from this new situation. "If we just go running in half-cocked, we'll be getting ourselves killed," she reasoned. "We-"
Azra stopped, her train of thought coming to a halt with an almost physical jerk. If we go running in, she'd thought. She'd pictured herself and Spark at the gate, unprepared and vulnerable. But Spark wasn't there.
"I'm pretty sure he's just… sleeping," Sagira said. She skipped past that worry, imagining herself and Azra at the gate-
But Spark wasn't there. He'd always been there, from Twilight Gap to the Great Disaster, her proudest moments to her most despairing ones. Even in the Red War they hadn't been separated. He'd stayed with her through the darkest pits of hell-
"You fucking saved my life. You've saved my life a thousand times. You stayed with me in that ravine and kept me from going crazy for fifty-seven Traveler-forsaken years. For… a damned eternity. In the most literal sense. You are my best friend and I will not stand for anyone talking smack about you, even you. You are the best Ghost. I'll stab anyone who says different."
"What?" Sagira said. "Ravine? Eternity?"
Sagira could see that? "The Vault," Azra managed to choke out.
"You were in the Vault of Glass," Sagira said incredulously. "You."
"We were in the Vault of Glass," Azra corrected. She could not have survived without him, and not just for the literal reason of his ability to heal her. She couldn't have carried on by herself.
"How long-" Sagira asked, reaching for Azra's memories. Azra had the distinct sensation of being read like a book, scenes flashing behind her eyes as Sagira tried to remember secondhand. There was Kabr, the Waking Ruins, the Oracles, her desperate flight through the Vault's back passageways, her desperate last stand-
And falling.
"Stop," Azra demanded. "Stop-" Sagira ran afoul of her tangled memories, endless loops and breaks and time reversing, water running uphill, hanging motionless in the void, sinking and rising at the same time, stuck in perpetual weightlessness-
Azra shoved it all away, locked it in a box in the back of her mind and did her best to drown out the echoes with the sound of her own heartbeat and the distant birdsong. She was hunched over again, nausea making her head swim. She fought for stability.
One moment stayed in the front of her mind, suspended in perfect crystal memory:
She let loose the cannon one last time. For a split second, everything was still.
And then.
And then.
Atheon fell. And the Vault cracked. Not physically. But some fundamental aspect of the Vault broke. Azra could feel the force of the universe suddenly come into play, shifted into gear.
"That's why you're like this," Sagira exclaimed. Her awe took Azra's breath away. "The chronon readings, these flashbacks… That's why that simulation always fails. You're the anomaly!"
"The anomaly?" Azra said through gritted teeth.
"The Vex, they keep simulating some events over and over. Like they can't figure out what's wrong, what's missing. They're missing you!" The Ghost was doing the laps of the tower now, caught up in her own reasoning. "The Vex don't simulate you. It makes perfect sense."
"The Vex don't simulate me?" Azra asked. "I thought- well, they've had…" Fifty-seven years? Forever? "They've had a lot of time to study me. I'd think I'd be one of the most stable datasets they have."
"That is a good point," Sagira mused. "There must be some other factor."
Praedyth looked at her and shook his head. "How could you? You're blinding. In more ways than one. Even if the Vex could comprehend you leaving, and that is an enormous if, why would they let you out if it meant you'd turn into this?" He gestured to her and Azra looked down at herself, to the decent but plain armor she'd scrapped together, the practical guns, the scars. She raised an eyebrow at him.
Praedyth shook his head. "Before, they might have been able to make approximations or sway your actions. Now?" He took a deep breath, eyes blazing. "You rip apart this space just by being in it. Your past self dims in comparison, like a poor copy, a flat actor. They would not give up that, their best chance at learning the Light, your poor and brittle spirit, in exchange for you." He gestured again to the battle-hardened Hunter. "You've reborn yourself an angel of vengeance."
"Can you please stop that?" Azra complained. "Whatever that is you're doing."
"Fascinating," Sagira said. "This is all because you died in the Vault?"
"It hurts," Azra spat, and Sagira backed off in shock. Azra went back through the process of counting her breaths, focusing on the way the radio tower's leg felt against her back, the way the early morning light played across the clouds. Dealing with this had been so much easier with Spark.
Ikora sounded apologetic as she interrupted on the comms. "A contingent of Praxic Warlocks will be there in twenty minutes," she said. "They're going to want to interview you."
Azra levered herself upright, shaking off the nausea. "Then we'd better get moving." She was still disoriented. But it would be better to sort this out in her Jumpship or back on Mercury, rather than waiting to be detained for the Praxic Order's curiosity.
Sagira was in agreement. She let out a few absentminded clicks as she ran a query. "Your ship is nearby."
"You have the transmat codes, not me," Azra pointed out.
The cool interior of her Jumpship was familiar and unfamiliar. Azra settled into a seat molded to her contours after hundreds of hours of flying. The controls were perfectly adjusted. Her hands primed the ship for warp travel in automatic motions.
Yet Sagira was in a new environment. She scanned the dashboard, memorizing the control scheme. She ran through the blueprints from Spark's memory banks. She peeked curiously into the cargo hold until Azra's sense of hurt privacy drove her back to the cockpit.
Azra expertly maneuvered the craft into orbit. Normally Spark would run the calculations for interplanetary travel, but Sagira was preoccupied with the way Azra felt when flying (the rumble through the rudder pedals, the resistance of the yoke, the exact angle the momentum pressed at her). So the Hunter shook her head and booted the autonav instead.
"Next stop: Fields of Glass, Mercury," Azra said. They entered warp with silence in the cockpit.
There were several moments of quiet. Azra breathed. Sagira sorted through weapons, making sure she can find what Azra needs when she needed it. Azra held the yoke with a firm grasp and did her best to not think about what had just happened.
"For the record," Sagira interjected, "I'm not enjoying this, either." It was distressing as hell to suddenly wake up in someone else's brain. She was just as horrified and uncomfortable with this arrangement as Azra was, but comfort was the least of her worries right now. "We just have to roll with the punches."
Roll with the punches. Azra was good at that, or she was supposed to be. She was the resilient one. The resourceful one. She had taken ever curveball life had thrown at her and had come out on top. Survived literal impossible odds. She had stared doom in the eye without flinching.
But Spark wasn't here. That was the one thing she thought would never change, the one assurance they whispered to themselves when things were the darkest. As long as they were alive, they would always be together.
"…Promise me he'll be alright," Azra muttered, half to herself. Already she felt the hole acutely- she missed his little in-flight speeches, she missed the way he would cuddle up under her chin when she was upset, she missed how he always noticed she was thirsty before she did…
Sagira materialized a canteen on her lap. Azra let the autopilot take over and took a drink with shaking hands. "You know I can't promise that," the Ghost said gently.
"I need you to," Azra said. I need you to have stakes in this too. I need you to care.
"You might not survive this," Sagira said. "I might not survive this. I can't guarantee anyone's safety."
Azra closed her eyes. "I need you, when this is all over… I need him back. I need you to promise me you'll do everything in your power to make sure he's around."
Sagira was about to joke, what, I'm not good enough for you, but she touched the Hunter's mind and felt the despair there. "Alright," she murmured. "I promise."
Sagira was anxious, too. Osiris had been hers for centuries. Now he was alone and vulnerable, and the Vex schemes only complexified and tangled in her imagination. "We just have to keep going," the Ghost said. If Azra needed Sagira to promise her Ghost back, Sagira needed Azra to be invested in this conflict. Osiris had been written off for decades. That couldn't be the case anymore.
There was no question in Azra's head. I'm here, aren't I? However badly she wanted her Ghost back, she recognized the larger threat. She had priorities. She knew how to compartmentalize, shove the helpless grief away and focus on the task at hand.
She just missed him, was all.
Some alarm on the dashboard beeped. Azra pulled back on the stick and felt a familiar shudder as the ship entered realspace. Mercury bloomed into existence before them- sun-baked, cracked, dead.
Sagira didn't have to be told to hit the transmat this time.