The Rest of Us
Nicole waded through foggy fits of rest, and each time she came to— groggy and confused —the world briefly made sense. She was home. In her bed. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. Until, unfailingly, it wasn't.
Yesterday's ridiculous nightmare twisted around on itself. Solidified. Became real. Became truth, took everything away. Her bed. Her home. All gone.
When she opened her eyes this time, morning had crept in through the missing ceiling and poured timid light across the floor. It'd been hardwood once, the floor. With a bunch of carpets thrown on it. And dog hair. Lots of dog hair. Now it was just rubble and dust.
"Guardian? Are you awake?"
She exhaled. Sharply. "No."
Soft, electronic chirps tickled at her ear. They stuttered at the end and the Ghost… thing… fell into her field of vision with his shell pushed outwards like a bird ruffling its feathers at her.
"Funny." The blue light at his front flickered and all the angles on him pulled back together with a muted click. "Are you alright?"
Nicole clenched her jaw. "What sort of question is that?"
"Ah," the ghost said, tilting to one side and then the other.
"I'm not alright. How can I be alright?" She pushed up, stiff muscles pulling and pinching, and sat on her knees. "My life is… gone. My dog, my friends, my family, they're all gone, aren't they? I'm not going to wake up and this will all go away. Am I?"
"No," he said. "But if—"
"Plus, I'm hungry and I'm thirsty and if I hear one more word about some Traveler and a City I'm going to fucking scream." Bristling, and with her heart in her throat because it wanted out, Nicole got to her feet to shove past the Ghost. He danced out of the way with a quiet, distressed chirp. "So don't start with that again. I don't understand it. I don't understand me. Or you." She paused briefly, and then, staring at him, asked: "Where is the rest of you anyway?"
He froze. "The what?"
"The rest of you. Where are you." She gestured vaguely into his direction before picking her way out of the ruined room.
"This is me," he supplied in a huff and zoomed past her shoulder to float on ahead of her. "There isn't anything missing, thank you."
Oh. That made… no sense. Yet it also did.
She hated it.
Grimacing, Nicole filed it away under all the other bullshit that'd been piling up, but not before giving him a look. A longer look. A better look, one where she studied the blunted, four-pronged star shape of his shell around a small, dark ball at the centre. That was probably where all the noise came from, she figured, and the pale blue light on the ball, arranged like a diamond trapping a dot, was some sort of eye. He was a strange contraption, and the longer she looked, the odder he got. Especially when she realised how the individual sections of the shell weren't connected — something she'd seen last night when he'd done that thing. That thing she'd have preferred to have dreamt up. The one with the pool of blue light, laced with threads of bright silver that had made the cold go away and had hooked into the dimming knot for a sun she carried in her chest.
Shivering, Nicole climbed back down the broken stairs.
His Guardian stepped outside the house, walked two steps, turned around, and… stared at it. Quietly. If it wasn't for the subtle rise and fall of her chest and the breeze tugging on her hair, she would have made for a really good statue.
When she kept doing that (along with pretending he didn't exist), Ghost swung a little ways off to hover in front of a small section of glass still lodged into the bottom of a broken window. He squinted at his reflection hovering behind a layer of grime — and, yeah. He was all there. All hundred percent of him. Nothing missing. No loose screws, no awol plate. Not even a dent, which was a miracle considering how long he'd been out here by his lonesome. And the eagle incident? That'd been years ago and, no, you can't ask about it.
Where's the rest of you? he heard her say again. The rest? Pah.
Puffing himself up, Ghost swung back around, aaaand she was gone.
Poof. Just like that.
"Guardian?" His shell shook open an inch. "Guardian! Oh for…" He whizzed back to the front of the house, his scan sweeping the ground and walls in a frantic pattern, but it wasn't until he pushed up into the sky that he spotted her again. Two streets over and climbing an obliterated barricade stoppering the town's exit.
He tumbled after her, skirting trees and jagged walls, and caught up just as she'd cleared the last slab of concrete between her and the open road.
"Please don't run off like that," he said, which got him about as much of a reaction as if he'd asked water to stop being so wet all the time.
Yeah, she ignored him. Because why wouldn't she? Why ask him for directions if she could just… hike on ahead as if she knew the place. Which she did. Know the place. Had known the place. Past tense. Way-back-when-tense. Big difference there, he thought, and at this rate she'd try and walk back in time until her feet bled.
So when her stomach rumbled and she idly bunched a fist into her shirt, he took a chance.
"There's a settlement nearby," he said, speeding up to fix himself to her left. "Not even an hour from here." Except she continued ignoring him, naturally, and kept staring stubbornly down the road. Though when he added, all quiet and innocent like, "They'll have food there," she finally faltered. Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth and her brow furrowed, and maybe, just maybe, it'd worked?
"Which way?"
Yes!
Ghost spun in front of her. "Thataway," he said, wiggled backwards a few steps, and then spun forward to hover steadily ahead. "Follow me."
They reached a bridge that'd been thoroughly pounded into the bed of a gently bubbling river — and yeah, he figured he'd phrased that a little awkwardly, but that didn't change just how little of the bridge remained. What was left of it stuck out of the water one large, bleached chunk at a time.
His Guardian stopped just short from toppling down where the road had been broken clean off, staring at the dark water like she planned to take a dive. Her jaw jumped and her fingers pumped into fists— close— open— close— open— until she finally took a deep breath and turned to look at him.
"What happened here?"
Ghost fell slightly to the side, peering around. "Here?" He sent a scan burst down along the riverbed, uncertain what he ought to be looking for.
"No. I… I mean… everywhere." She glanced around, her brow pulled down and jaw doing the whole jumping thing again. Oh, and her throat bobbed.
No-no-no, he thought and would have really preferred to keep the chirpy little whine that came next to himself. Please don't cry.
He inched back, joints whirring, and began juggling every single speech he'd collected for the occasion, but ultimately dropping them all one by one. They were terrible. Agonisingly awful.
"Well. Ah. Some time after you died," he said, only to regret it the moment the words had come out. They chased his Guardian right off the side of the bridge, where she slid down the slope and left him hovering up here feeling like a real idiot.
But he'd started it and so he'd finish it.
While she hopped from one chunk of bridge to the other, he told her about the Traveler. Its arrival. What it'd given humanity. Though she didn't seem to care, not even when he waxed on about the Golden Age and how people lived for three hundred years back then. She just balanced on the thin edge of some concrete and then jumped off to land on the grainy shore on the other side.
From there on, he led her along the river heading east.
The Collapse he opted to blunt a little. Gloss over. It seemed like a good idea, okay? She deserved to hear more of the good bits before someone had to get into the nitty-gritty about humanity's darkest hour.
Someone. Not necessarily him.
But the next bit? His shell quivered. That was his favourite.
"… and then, in its dying breath," he said, wiggling himself in front of her and giving a little twirl, "the Traveler made us. The Ghosts."
"There are more of you?" she asked — the first words she'd said since they'd started walking — and stopped by the water to hunker down on her haunches.
"Yeah." He paused. "Well. No. Not exactly like me. The only thing all Ghosts have in common is what we were created to do: to find our Guardians and to bring them back so they can continue where the Traveler left off. What it sacrificed itself for."
She scoffed (Ouch.) and extended a hand to stick it into the water. It stayed there for a while, folding left and right as she watched the current run over her fingers. Then she stuck the second one in, cupped them together, and scooped water from the river. She was going to… drink it. Just right out of the river which could have Traveler knew what in there.
Ghost pushed his shell out in alarm and darted in so close he almost bumped right into her forehead. Which… startled her. Of course it did. She thumped down on her ass with a loud huff and an odd little noise trapped in her chest.
Whoops. His shell bunched down sheepishly.
"You, are a Guardian," he continued, flicking a quick scan over the water. What was left of it anyway, considering she'd spilled most of it down her front. "And like every other Guardian, you have a spark. A spark that led me to you, and when I brought you back, it…" He rolled to the side, his processing core bouncing the next word back and forth lamely. "It ignited."
She glared. A confused glare, yeah, but a pretty convincing one nevertheless. It made him shrink a little, though he wasn't about to back off.
"Guardians can wield the Traveler's Light," he added. "Which means you can wield it, too. But we'll get to that later. For now, you can just go on and drink the water. It's safe."
Yeah, right.
. . .
She threw it at him instead.
With droplets still drying on his shell, Ghost told her about the rise of the City. About the Fallen. Why they'd come, why they hated humanity so fiercely — but the Vex? The Hive? That'd all have to wait, as it turned out.
"Is that smoke?" she asked, stopping dead in her tracks, eyes fixed on a thick canopy of trees beyond an open stretch of land cobbled together from tilled fields, crops of stalky corn, and patches of vegetables.
He tilted towards it and— yes. There was smoke. A row of thick, black columns curled out from between the trees, grasping for the wispy clouds in the sky like greedy fingers.
Great.
Ghost shuttered his eye closed and sighed.
This was going poorly.