Taffer Notes: I am so excited and happy to bring you the first chapter co-written with Maverick-Werewolf. She'll be writing John's POV sections since both him and Darrow are two original characters plucked right out of a Sci-Fi story collection she's writing. And because we love writing stories together. So! New POV! This chapter will be shared between Nicole and John.

In which Nicole keeps fretting over a set of green eyes, Ghost outs himself as needing a little coaching on matters of privacy, and John gets his first shot at picking up a Kinderguardian.

Kinderguardian Pickup

Life composes a tune for us, names it fate, and counts on us to dance to every note. You'd think it expects us all to be born dancers. Some aren't.

Destiny is a row of tracks in the sand. They match the shape of our feet perfectly, but sometimes we can't help but stumble from their path. Roam.

And yet, when it matters, we're always exactly where we're meant to be.

"John Shephard," the man with wolves howling at each other on his breastplate introduced himself.

"Nicole Brennan," she replied in an instant, more on instinct than anything. But it took her a moment to notice how he'd extended his hand and how it hovered there, leisurely. Patiently waiting for her to shake it. A moment which she spent choking down the flutter of dusty, dry moth wings.

She didn't. Couldn't.

All she could do was stand there, her eyes locked on him and a noose snaring her chest together tight. It wasn't even that he looked threatening, the rifle on the strap and armour notwithstanding. The opposite, really. He held his head slightly cocked, curiously so, and yet all she wanted to do was turn around and be elsewhere again. Not in front of him, surrounded by dead things.

A recurring thing, that.

Swallowing hard enough to make her throat click, Nicole fidgeted on the spot and let her arms dangle. This was really frelling embarrassing but what the hell was she supposed to do?

John Shephard and his Ghost passed a look between each other that lasted only a tic but seemed to say a lot.

"He's with the Vanguard," her Ghost interjected, breaking the silence as he shot past her to float around John's head, dodging around the other Ghost with a downwards twirl. "With the City."

John shot him a smirk. It bunched his lips up into the unkempt scruff clinging to his chin and added a glint to his already unsettling bright green eyes. The hand that'd been waiting for her to grab it (finally) moved up to wave Ghost off.

"What happened to you, buddy? Flew into another eagle?" His eyes tracked Ghost.

Ghost puffed out his shell. "Fallen," he said and dodged a lazy gesture from John, who followed his every move with a gloved finger.

"Ouch. The red is a cute touch though."

With a huff, his shell snapping back together, Ghost returned to float by her shoulder.

"Alright," John said. "Let's be gone before the afterparty starts. Darrow, get the ship. And you, young lady—" He turned to Bjarte, who'd kept to being her exceptionally silent self, grabbed her under the shoulders, and hoisted her up to perch her on his shoulders. She went up with a quiet squeal of delight and immediately clutched on to tufts of his hair. Second later she began babbling in Scandi. Not like that deterred John. He joined right in, his American accent turning the words around a little like someone singing a song just a little off-tune.

When he started walking, skirting corpses and debris and walls to head out of the ruins and out into the streets, Nicole found her legs heavy and unwilling to move.

"So… he's… a Guardian? And you know him?" she asked, keeping her voice low while she watched Bjarte up on John's shoulders and Darrow buzzing on ahead.

"Shephard?" Ghost inched forward. "Yeah. Hard not to."

She took her first step, though it felt a bit like lifting her feet out of a tightly packed swamp. The ones after that came a little easier.

"He's killed a Hive God, see. Actually, come to think of it, there were two, except one was more of a God-Prince and Traveler knows what the other one was by the time he got to him. Oh! And then there was that time he took down the Kell of Kells with nothing but two rounds in the chamber and—"

She threw him a sideways glance, her teeth scraping over the inside of her cheeks. He'd go on forever, she knew that by now. Keep saying words that made no sense to her. So she butted in.

"Ghost?"

He hushed in a hurry and swung his eye at her.

"Remember that— ah— that vision? That thing that happened to me when I…" More moths beat their dry wings in her throat and cracked her voice. "Oh bloody hell this sounds bonkers saying it out loud."

"When you died," he said for her. "Yes, I remember. You saw the Traveler. And lots of lights. And—"

"A wolf," she blurted and awkwardly clambered over some rubble in their way. "I saw a wolf." Nicole's stare snapped back onto John's back. He was leading them along the road and throwing the occasional look over his shoulder, checking on them.

Ghost, in the meantime, narrowed the blue light on his eye as he looked at her. "What? No. You're not saying that he— no."

"The wolf had a black coat," she added. "He has, ah, black hair."

Ghost had slowed down enough to have returned to her side — close enough for the tic tic tic of his shell twitching to make the side of her head itch. She reached up. Scratched at her ear. Then her neck. And her shoulder, too. Gosh, she needed a shower.

"And its eyes were green."

"That— that's ridiculous," he spluttered.

Right when the air got picked up by a gust of wind. Dust swirled wildly from a roof to their right, chased off by a large airship.

Nicole's knees locked up and she almost fell right to the ground.

"It's okay!" Ghost said quickly. "That's a City Hawk. That's Shephard's ship."

"Oh." And imagine that, this one didn't go and shoot at them and neither did it spit out any Fallen. It looked considerably different, too. Not bulbous and rusty and… alien. It was sleeker, the main body coming together in a sharp nose, and painted almost entirely in a dull black. Scrapes lined it from top to bottom, the brighter metal underneath shining through. At the end of its wings hung a pair of turbines which rotated as she watched.

They caught the Hawk midair, slowing its descent, and when a few heartbeats passed and it still wasn't shooting them down — and John kept marching towards it as it angled itself over the flat remains of a city square to begin sitting down — she figured Ghost was right.

"And ah, Guardian?"

She glanced at him.

"Might be best to, uh— uh— not tell him? Not right away. About the wolf, I mean."

Exhaling slowly, Nicole nodded. Maybe he was right about that, too.

John led the way back toward the lowered boarding ramp of his ship — or, well, he tried to lead the way. Darrow, of course, floated on ahead.

"Darrow," John chided lightly. Darrow wheeled to face him, but he didn't say a word. Surprisingly.

"Here we go," he said, setting Bjarte down at the base of the ramp and she seemed happy enough to scamper on inside, Darrow floating in after her. John, though, turned and watched Nicole and… Ghost. Imagine that, maybe he'd finally get a name now?

Or maybe not yet, from the way Nicole — looked. Moved. Talked. John frowned for half a second thinking about it.

She really didn't look comfortable with anything at all. Granted, she didn't have much reason to, especially considering what she was wearing. Still, he couldn't help but have a thought he wanted to kick himself over a moment later. Rude, John.

But that thought was: she didn't look like a Guardian. It kind of came with the territory to be built from grit or something like it. To, at the very least, have some of that under the surface. Have some muscle, be athletic, or maybe lithe and mean.

Her, though, she didn't really look the part. She wasn't short, not really, but she wasn't exceptionally tall, either. Straight nose, maybe just a tiny bit on the bigger side, and imperfections on her skin that were a far cry from battle scars. Acne wars, maybe; definitely a veteran.

Still, in a word, she was… soft, with long brown hair completely mussed up to the point of making her look like she'd been living in the bushes for a few days. Very scary bushes that were trying to eat her, that she had to run from and constantly stay on edge.

The brown eyes were soft, too. Her looking everywhere with them like she expected a shadow to jump out and kill her any second only added to that, even if, right now, she seemed to have acquired some kind of grim resignment to everything and moved toward the front of his ship like someone who'd decided there was nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other.

But she was coming, so John turned and ascended into the ship, himself. Once he did, though, he caught himself waiting again, looking over his shoulder.

That one foot in front of the other he'd mentioned stopped pretty abruptly when she reached the base of the ramp. She just stood there, unmoving. Then Ghost floated over and right past her. Only then did she come up after him.

John gestured her inside with a friendly smile, lifting the ramp in her wake. She still didn't speak, glancing around but not seeming to really take her surroundings in so much. Not yet, anyway.

They were nice, though. Her surroundings. This was his home, for all intents and purposes, so he tried to keep it cozy. The front was mostly business: weapons locker, armor stash. Weights. Those kinds of things. He'd even kept half the passenger seats against one of the walls, leftovers from the Hawk's troops transport days before he'd refurbished it. But towards the back, especially behind the curtain cording off the rest of the ship, was where the fun started.

Anyway.

Letting the smile slowly melt away, he cocked his head ever so slightly and prompted, "How long you been out there?"

"A while," she said vaguely. From the way her eyes suddenly looked a little distant, he wondered if she even knew.

"Two days," Ghost added. "Her and I, anyway. Bjarte there, she's a local. Was a local, we found her after we ran into a— a— Fallen trap. Yeah. A trap. Oh! I should probably give you the coordinates to the village and—"

John mulled around the ship while Ghost yammered on, and had another thought. With Darrow still hovering ominously around his head, he turned to Nicole.

"You should get out of… all that," he said, putting on another smile. I can't imagine it's very comfortable." He nodded to the curtain at the back. "You can change back there. Promise I won't peek."

C'mon, smile once. Just a little.

She didn't smile. She only nodded and then looked around like she was looking for said clothes. What she found was the weapons locker. She stared at it and tensed up all over again.

"I'm sure they won't fit," he warned. Then he looked at Darrow, who was busily holding a silent staring contest with Ghost, and said, "Find her some better clothes, Darrow. I need to get us in the air."

"Oh, of course, your highness. Should I fetch you a drink while I'm at it?"

Not missing a beat, John replied genuinely, "No, thanks. I don't want to push the drinking and flying envelope when I have passengers. But it's very sweet of you to offer."

Darrow grated out a mechanical sort of huff and floated off. Meanwhile, John turned his attention to Bjarte, who had occupied herself peering out the front of the ship and trying not to lean too far over all the controls. The moment he approached, she turned a little timid and stood flat on her feet again, like a little soldier waiting for orders.

John just flashed her a lopsided smile and directed her over into one of the passenger seats, helping her buckle in before fetching a powerbar and a bottle of water, crouching in front of her with one in each hand.

"These don't taste too great," he said to her in Scandi, "but you should eat it. If you eat the whole thing, I've got some awesome suckers – I kinda hoard them like a dragon. I'll give you one before we get back to the Tower. Sound good?"

He gave her a gentle nudge on the shoulder before he rose to his feet again and turned to the pilot's chair – just in time for Ghost to come zipping right up to him.

"Thank you," he said. Hey, someone said it. Not that he needed to hear it, but he did appreciate it. John gave him a slight smile and a nod.

"You're welcome," he replied, taking a seat and getting the ship fired up.

Ghost lingered in the corner of his vision. "What were you doing out here?"

"Tracking our mutual Fallen friends." John shot him a look. Then, after a pause, made a wry face and said, "I thought it was boring. I thought it'd be boring. But hey, now I got to save your butt and even do my first Kinderguardian pickup."

The laugh that Ghost half-tittered, half whined out – as much as a Ghost could do those things – sounded so nervous it almost gave John second-hand embarrassment. He blinked.

"Relax; you'll blow a fuse. She'll be fine…"

"Or maybe she won't," Darrow said as he floated up on the opposite side of John's head. John took a lazy swipe at him, and Darrow deftly dodged aside.

"Best behavior when we have guests, Darrow," John chided.

"This is my best behavior," Darrow replied, his voice flat.

"Anyway," John looked at Ghost again, "she'll get used to it. She just needs time. Not everybody slides right into the whole Guardian," he said dramatically, "thing instantly. It can be a pretty crappy existence sometimes, especially when you get told about it before you get to live it. And then you get Fallen chewing your ankles, first thing. I'm sure she'll do great."

Ghost's shell flared out briefly, then came back together so nervously each piece almost grated on each other. Kind of reminded John of somebody setting their jaw, so that prompted him to do exactly that. Probably in anticipation of whatever Ghost wasn't saying.

Finally, after a few long moments—

"Spit it out," Darrow snapped. John frowned at him.

"She remembers," Ghost blurted in a tiny whisper, like he was afraid someone would hear.

John froze. Stared. Right by his head, he heard Darrow's shell practically fly to pieces in sheer outrage. About the same instant, John rediscovered his ability to speak.

The same time Darrow did, in fact.

At once, they blurted: "She what!?"

Darrow flew right in front of John's face trying to get in Ghost's theoretical face and started ranting as fast as his electronic little voice could possibly go.

"Are you completely out of your mind? I knew you were entirely clueless but this reaches new and untold levels of jaw-dropping incompetence! Do you understand what—"

"I didn't do it on purpose—"

"Oh, well, even better!" Darrow shrieked.

"Kids," John snapped. Both of them turned their little glowing eyes to him, Ghost's wide and Darrow's furious. John took a deep breath and said, "Don't make me pull this ship over."

That earned him a glare from Darrow and unmollified silence from Ghost, who slowly lowered himself out of sight.

Nicole pulled the curtain shut — and for the longest time stood there, a hand bunched into the thick fabric, the clothes she'd been given shoved under her arm, and her eyes fixed on her shoes. Her soggy, dirty shoes. The feet in them hurt.

Around her, the ship grumbled noisily.

"Hang on back there!" John called, his voice bouncing through the ship loud enough he might as well have been standing right in front of her.

She tightened her grip on the curtain when the grumbling of the ship turned to a meaty roar. The floor jerked. Tilted, just a bit, and then they were up in the air. Her stomach though? That took a while to catch up.

Honestly? She felt like she was going to be sick. Not from the flying, she'd never minded that. Ever. Even if this felt different, considering they were going up straight. Bit like a helicopter, except not and she'd not ever been in a helicopter anyway so what did she know?

Bile rose in her mouth. Back here behind that curtain, doused in the dull glow of a row of soft lights overhead, it was just her, her dirty clothes, that tugging on her heart, and vultures for thoughts. Nicole swallowed and tried to think about something — anything — else. Like the walls. They were plastered with posters. Colourful ones. Plain ones. Pretty retro ones, too. Where some looked like they'd been ripped right out of comic books, others could have been album covers.

She didn't recognise any of them.

Of course she didn't.

Nicole stepped away from the curtain, popped her shoes off, peeled her socks off her feet, and dropped the heavy, dirty coat on top of all of it, keeping it all far away as possible from the well trodden carpet covering half the floor.

The carpet led up to a mattress at the back. No bed frame or anything, no. Just a mattress, with plain grey sheets neatly folded on one end and two wrinkle free pillows on the other. A metal box pretended at being a nightstand table on the other, which shared that space with a stack of hardcover books. The books were pinched between heavy looking bookends. Probably so they didn't go sliding about when the ship turned, she figured. And propped up against the metal box sat a guitar. An old acoustic one. Made of dark burnished wood. Its neck was fixed to the wall with a leather loop.

She stared at it while shedding her trousers and kicking them onto the pile, too. A pile which looked mighty fine for burning by now, she thought.

The trousers she'd been given didn't fit. Naturally. They were too long and too wide, but that was what belts were for. She'd gotten socks, too. They felt a bit like heaven.

But heaven wasn't a thing that lasted.

Nicole squirmed out of her shirt next, her arms, shoulders, and every string of muscle in her back protesting all the way through. When she pulled it over her head she saw through the holes in it. Big. Gaping. Holes. She chucked it onto the pile, her stomach lurching into the opposite direction the ship leaned into around her, and bit down her cheek.

Tears welled in her eyes.

Blinking didn't help. Neither did looking down her front. All she found there was skin. Unbroken. No holes. She dug her fingers into it. Tried to find where she'd gotten shot, but there was nothing.

She slumped against the wall and cried.

Things in the cockpit had settled down, with Darrow having abandoned floating by John's head to go have a huff to himself somewhere in the back of the ship. Not that John minded. He focused on flying.

Flying was, after all, his favorite escape. One of the only things he found truly relaxing, other than playing music. Plus he had his own personal auto-pilot system built into his head, so he could happily space out without risk of—

"She's been back there a while," Ghost suddenly said. John stirred from his trance and looked just to his left, where Ghost had resumed floating by his side. But that one blue eye of his wasn't on John or on where they were flying – he stared into the back of the ship, right at the curtain that currently concealed Nicole from view.

"I should go check on her."

John licked his lips and hummed a reluctant, thoughtful sort of sound. "Iii… wouldn't, really. Maybe she needs some space."

"Just to make sure she's okay," Ghost clarified. John opened his mouth to say something else, but Ghost instantly took off floating toward the curtain with remarkable speed.

"Whoa, hey, Ghost, maybe don't just…"

Nicole screamed. John bit his lip.

Maybe don't just bust in there, John finished mentally. Little late.

Ghost came shooting back out like a bullet, repeating, "I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry!"

A shoe came sailing out from behind the curtain after him, but it missed its mark. Something absurd in John wanted to laugh, but he didn't.

"I just wanted to see if you're alright, Guardian," Ghost half stammered, wheeling around to face the curtain again. Right in time for Nicole to come out, while sticking her arms through the sleeves of an entirely too-large shirt.

"Stop calling me that," she said. "Don't call me that. I'm not—" she huffed and tried readjusting the floppy shirt, "a Guardian."

"You put yourself between the Fallen and Bjarte," Ghost said brightly, all puns intended. Bjarte, hearing her name, looked up like a cat just called to supper. "That's a very Guardian thing to do."

Nicole didn't exactly look inspired. "That's a decent human being thing to do," she countered flatly.

Briefly, no one said anything. John, after a short bout of chewing his lip, decided to break the silence. It was way too uncomfortable in here.

"She has a point," he put in. That got Nicole's attention. When she turned to regard him, John managed a small smile and motioned her toward the seat beside him with a jab of his chin.

The fresh clothes were nice. Considerably too wide and too long all across the board, but nice. So Nicole tried to focus on that. On the weight of the shirt on her shoulders, falling around her like a tent and carrying a crisp, heady scent. Much better than blood and sweat.

Her lips twitched. It didn't take two steps and her mind was back to wandering, starting with the weapons in that locker. The guns— small ones, big ones. Snub-nosed ones. Long barrelled ones. And the knives. Very large knives. Everything looked exceptionally clean.

By the time she made it to the front of the ship and sat like John had indicated her to, she'd forgotten about the weapons. They weren't important anymore, not with all the dirty clouds getting sliced apart by the nose of the ship and a brilliant blue sky opening up around her. Out there, somewhere— she turned her head slightly left, eyes set on nothing —something tugged again. Harder this time. More insistently. The angler reeling in their catch. Unfortunately, she was the one at the end of that line, and the hook had sunk into her heart where it kept tearing and tearing and tearing.

"Seatbelt," John said. The line snapped.

Nicole stared down dumbly, her hands groping at thin air cause they didn't know where to start looking. At least until Ghost nudged the harness with his shell.

"Ta." She dragged it over her chest, snapped it in place, and then looked up to find a bunch of eyes on her. Ghost. Darrow. John.

They were all staring in some way or the other. Ghost had his eye set on her with his shell a little deflated and his blue light almost dull. Darrow was… squinting. His round shell— made of sections painted mostly in rich purple —pulled down like so many eyebrows.

And John? He carried a faint, unnervingly hard to read smile. Not like she'd ever been good at that anyway. Reading people. Miss Gullible, reporting for duty, Sir. Plus, all she saw were the sharp green eyes of the wolf, fixed on her out from the smothering dark. It made her world spin.

So she set her jaw and John turned to flying again. His glances cut from the view out there to the screens set into the console around him. Screens that were hopefully telling him that they weren't about to get shot out of the sky. And for a while that was how the minutes ticked by; in stifling silence.

Least until his attention shifted back to her. Because why not?

"When did you die?"

Caught off guard by the question, Nicole stared at him, her throat working quietly and her thoughts reeling off to the side, out the back of the ship, and off into the nether.

Did he know? About how something had gone wrong? From the way he watched her, curious, she figured he did.

But— aright. This was something she could answer, even if she glanced at Ghost first. The back half of his shell ticked left once and he bobbed up and down in a faint nod. Go ahead, the gesture read.

"April 2019." Being able to say it and it going well were two different things, apparently. Because saying it felt like choking up a bucket of sludge. Or water. Cold, bloody water tasting of bent metal and a decision made through tears.

One of John's eyebrows hiked up into his forehead — and both Ghosts snapped their eyes at each other. Right before they exclaimed, in unison: "That's when the Traveler arrived in the system!"

If John hadn't raised his hand, they'd have probably kept going.

"You're pre-Golden Age then," he said, his eyebrow still cozy with his hairline. "Before the Traveler. Before we went to Mars and started uploading people into robots."

She stared blankly. Was he yanking her chain?

"Me?" John continued. "I don't know when I died. The first time, anyway. He does, but he won't tell me." His eyes cut to Darrow. The Ghost rolled his body like someone might roll their eyes.

John's gaze fixed back on her. "We're not supposed to know," he said. Gravely. Though without judgment or concern. Not like when Ghost had found out, anyway.

"So I heard."

"There's a good reason for that. If you don't know who you've been, you don't come loaded with all the baggage from that life. There's nothing to distract you. No chasing after yesterdays—" He gestured vaguely. "Or trying to find family or thinking you have to pick up where you left off. We're meant to be raised as clean slates so that all we have is tomorrow. Supposedly that makes it easier. Especially if you don't have a point of reference to compare today with. Gets rid of all those questions, ya know?"

His brow was furrowed slightly and his jaw jumped. Like he didn't much buy what he was selling.

"Plus, we don't have to unlearn dying. We—" He paused, looked at her for a moment, and then tapped at his chest. "It makes us Guardians treat death a whole lot different than the Lightless do. I mean, you're more likely to risk your neck for someone, or something, if you know that breaking it isn't really a big deal, right?"

Nicole looked down, at her fingers curled into the trousers, bunching the fabric together just above her knee.

"So when you went and stuck your neck out for Bjarte like that? Sure, you're right saying it was a decent thing to do, but it was a whole lot braver coming from you than it'd have been from any other Guardian. Take me, for example. Far as I'm concerned this is all I've ever done and will be doing until Darrow decides he's done rezzing me."

The pause that followed made her look back up — at John still staring at her. He'd put on a smile that seemed oddly weighted. Like something darker hung off it.

"You on the other hand? You don't just have an entire life behind you— something I can't say I do —but also one in front of you. Now… what you do with that second chance is up to you."

His smile kicked up. Brightened. "And if anyone says different you tell them to come talk to me."

Nicole leaned back into the seat, her thoughts a jumbled mess. They kept falling over. How was any of this real?

"Nicole, right?"

She glanced at him. Nodded.

"You'll be okay."