TW: Suicide. Panic Attack.
I swear it gets better.
Help Needed
She knows she's dreaming. Or at least she's not awake, but lodged in-between, where thought and sensation make for the oddest of bedfellows, trading in hopes and dreams and an inexhaustible supply of realities.
This one is another yesterday.
She knows which one.
It's a dreary April. In 2019. She's fled work early and now she sits in her car, her hands locked around the steering wheel while the news anchor on the radio prattles about Mars. About a Tomorrow made of Sacrifice.
She'd turn the radio off if she could. Except she can't take her hands off the wheel. There's a choice coming, after all. She has to make the right one. Can't blink or she'd miss it.
So she doesn't blink. Every detail around her stands out. From the fine scratches in the leather of the wheel to the chip in the windshield and the dust on the console. Dust she ought to clean but never does. She forgets.
Her eyes flick up. A Wunderbum dangles from her rearview mirror. It's a sun-faded black with a splash of pink, its scent faint because replacing it is another thing she forgets. She's good at that. At forgetting.
Wild Child, the bottom of the little tree reads.
Nicole hasn't ever been particularly wild.
The Wunderbaum moves. It doesn't spin lazily like it usually does. Instead, it lifts, as if someone pinched it by the trunk and is pulling it back, stretching the thin rubber cord until it forms a straight line from the front of the car pointing at the boot.
Gravity shifts. Her gut lurches.
When she looks up, a dark river rushes up at her, its waters churning.
She screams. The car impacts.
The steering wheel strikes her like a mallet, breaking her apart around it. She dies, but it isn't quick. She dies— but it doesn't stick. Heat snatches at her heart. It pulls her back together, sorts her pieces into place. Some on right. Some on wrong.
The car lurches backwards. Out of the water. Up onto the bridge. It rightens itself, screeching the wrong way around until she sees the car in front of her flashing its brake lights all angry and red and STOP.
Here's her choice.
She doesn't stop. She never does.
The steering wheel presses down hard on her chest. A weight worth a hundred worlds. It wrenches left. The traffic barrier between her and the drop going down the bridge sits there. Waiting. It knows she'll barrel through it.
She ought to brake. But she never tries to. Never wants to.
Her foot slams the gas pedal.
Over and over again, Nicole goes over the edge. She hits the water. A clap of agony snuffs out her world, only for hot talons to come digging into her and tear her back up. Over. And over. Again. Seconds tick backwards, put her on the road where the red light flashes.
She makes the same choice each and every time. And above her, ever watchful, sits the Traveler, its bleached bones bleeding blackened moths made of soot.
Dear Traveler, Ghost recorded quietly as he sat upon his shelf, the apartment filled top to bottom with nothing but a hush and a lot of darkness. No matter how much a thin sliver of light tried changing that, peeking around the edge of the curtains like a shy guest.
Yeah, so he should have been resting.
But how did you rest after a day like that? A day where you found out your Guardian had risen differently. So different, not even Ikora Rey or the Speaker knew exactly where to start sticking the right labels. Maybe Ophichus would have had an opinion about it if he'd bothered to show himself, rather than staying out of everyone's collective hair (or lack thereof).
It's 04:21 and I think I've decided that sorting pre-Golden Age music alphabetically was a terrible idea. So I'll be sorting it by genre again.
Or maybe by artist? Hm. What do you think?
His eye flashed briefly, adding a tinge of blue to the room. He shuttered it again a moment later.
Oh. Right. I forgot. You don't talk to me. Ever. Like how you didn't tell me that 'Hey, Ghost of mine, I gave you a Speaker-Guardian. She'll be in need of extra attention — so here are some detailed instructions on how not to make a complete fool out of yourself when you get started with her.'
His circuits charged with what came together as an inward-turned bristle, and his background processes stalled, freezing up towards the tail-half of the letter B. Something with a Breaking Benjamin.
Frustrated, he started over. Not that he had to, strictly speaking, but he was desperate for something to help occupy his mind.
It wasn't working very well.
Much like sleep wasn't working well for his Guardian.
Fitful as the nights prior, her sleep was punctuation by small, miserably noises. Sometimes he wondered if he should float his purely speculative butt over there and wake her. But she'd had a long day. A very long day spent mostly wandering the streets aimlessly after they'd left the coffee shop.
Wandering and not talking.
He squirmed and flashes his eye on again, dimming its glow as to not bother her by accident as he looked at her from all the way over here.
Dear Traveler, he continued.
How can someone be so quiet? You'd think she'd have a lot of questions after all of this, but all she did this afternoon was get lost and wear out that piece of paper Shephard gave her.
Ghost lifted off the shelf, his shell clicking together lamely. His still very broken shell, he reminded himself, keenly aware of how the tape holding one of his tips on had started peeling at the edges. Maybe he should ask for a new one?
His eye flicked to the kitchen table, to the paper sitting on it. She'd folded it and unfolded so often, the letters had become hard to read. But it'd been all she'd been doing, really. As if the words printed on it had her under some sort of spell.
She wasn't looking at anything else. At all. Like the City wasn't even there. Like I wasn't even there. I mean, she walked into four people. Four! I counted. How do you not start looking where you're going after the first one. How? And all the while it's like she forgot how words work.
He floated to the curtains and nudged at them, peeking outside. Out there, the City teemed with stubborn life. A show of brilliant, dancing lights with the Traveler looking on above it. All stoic and, ah, quiet.
Nevermind. Something, something apples and trees, right?
He'd have probably hovered there for a while longer, staring out at nothing in particular and lending half a mind to sorting his music collection, when his Guardian let out a stifled cry.
Ghost wiggled back. The curtains fell shut.
She squirmed under her blanket, her feet kicking and her head tossing left and right while her eyes remained tightly shut. Nightmares. Real bad ones, too. Bad enough to throw her vitals up the wall and send an invisible ripple of confused Void Light through the room.
A shake later, that same light manifested in thin, ashen-purple tendrils bleeding out from under the blankets.
Ghost hung there, frozen. "Guardian?"
She kicked again. Her lower back arched. Her arms twitched violently, and the Void Light sung a deep-seated, mournful tune.
He inched forward. "Guardian, you're, ah. You're having a nightmare." He looked around the room. Then back at her. The light show began to worry him. Mostly because his scans couldn't make much sense out of it, but something told him that the way it collected so densely was probably bad. "I think you should wake up?"
Traveler help him, what was he supposed to do?
Guardian, a voice calls. A glitch. It doesn't belong. Not in here. Not with her. But it's maddening and familiar and cracks her world in half.
Turned out that he should have woken her from a little farther away. Not with one of his fins almost touching her cheek when she hadn't heard him the first few times.
He managed one last quiet "Guardian—" before the Void Light building in her core erupted in a wave so tight, it knocked him into the nearest wall.
A searing, bright burst of Light followed. Tore right through him. And snuffed him out like he was no more than a sad little flame on a sad little candle.
Vertigo yanked at her when Nicole woke. Disorientated, and with her heart hammering against the base of her throat, she struggled to breathe and to think and to generally be. Every sensation was too much. Every pull of air too hard. Even her shirt tried to suffocate her, clinging on way too tight. She pulled on it, wanting room, and found it practically soaked.
Gross.
Then came the oesophagal spasms — those bloody things she'd thought'd kill her when she'd had them the first time, convinced she was going to have a heart attack. But, nah. No heart attack. Just a panic attack offloading itself into her chest, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing as if someone'd stuffed a hand down there. Some things never changed.
Nicole knew better than to fight them lying down.
She slid out from under the covers, planted her legs on the ground, and at sat the bed's edge as straight as she could. And that was how she remained for a while, drawing in shallow breath after shallow breath. Waiting. Hoping it'd pass. Which it would. Eventually.
Her jaw clenched so tight her teeth groaned. Or would it? She locked her eyes on the empty room in front of her, vividly and terribly missing the pad of claws on the floor and the face-full of fur that came after, along with Thor's familiar and comforting weight. He'd been a horrible guard dog. But great at warding her from herself. A whimper crawled up her throat and she squeezed her eyes shut.
No Thor. Thor was dead. Probably died in a shelter, alone and terrified, because at the end she'd left him behind.
Like a coward.
She'd been a coward.
Nicole opened her eyes. With trembling lips and tears blurring her vision, she focused on the sharp pain instead. On how it came and went and came and went, not making any show to ease up anytime soon. When her tears dried, she looked at her flat. Her creepy, creepy flat with a sheen of light filling half of it.
That gave her pause. The light did, anyway. Nicole frowned. She could have sworn she'd closed the curtains. Had done so a pointed yank, too. A don't touch sort of yank, which had clearly done no good, because here they were. Half-way open and swaying gently.
Shivering, she leaned her weight on her feet and made ready to get up and close them again, when her eyes landed on a bunch of familiar shapes on the floor. Trianglebobs. Fins.
Ghost's shell.
In pieces.
She stared dumbly.
"Ghost?" she managed, hoarsely.
No answer. Just her heart and the City's murmurs splashed against the window. Say what you want, but the noise isolation in this little box was pretty good.
. . .
She shook her head. "Ghost, this isn't funny."
When he didn't respond once again, Nicole admitted to a rush of ice welling from her chest. Did it make her forget about the pain that'd made its home there? Maybe. She jerked to her feet.
She found one fin, then two. She also found her new shoes, turned over and shoved against a wall. Confused, Nicole took stock, carving a moment out from between all the panic, hurt, and irritation. Everything not nailed down had moved. As if a strong gust of wind had come through and rearranged the place.
Her brows scrunched together and she— "Auwh!" Nicole yelped when something bit at the sole of her left foot. It'd been real sharp, so sharp she thought for a second she'd stepped on a Lego.
Except it wasn't a Lego at all. Standing awkwardly on one leg, Nicole looked down to find Ghost's fin tip. The one she'd taped back on after he'd lost it in the swap. This was bad. This was very bad. And then she found the rest of him, tucked under the curtains. Another fin. A palm-sized ball sat next to it.
Nicole half-hopped over there and dropped to her knees.
"Ghost?" she echoed and made to reach out, only to hesitate with the tips of her fingers a hair's with from touching the small dark ball. "Are you in there?"
He should be, right? This was the voice box sitting at the centre. The bit with the eye on. His core-thing.
Silence.
She swallowed once. And then, carefully, scooped it up into her cupped hands. It? Him. Yeah. Him. That was right. Her infuriating Ghost, all condensed into a surprisingly heavy lump of dull metal. Heavier than she remembered, at any rate. And so so so so quiet.
"Come on, say something," she said, getting back up.
More nothing. The ball rolled between her palms, slowly turning from one side to the other. Large indents were set into its surface, like perfectly round pits, the largest of which was at the front, framing the eye. An eye she suddenly wished to be flashing blue, rather than sit there, empty.
One by one his subroutines called home, each and every one of them flooded with errors. Nothing critical though. Just a lot of misalignments that'd sort themselves out eventually, so Ghost dismissed them wholesale until he finally reached his sensor logs while the rest of him came online one by one.
Always check what knocked you out, he'd learned years ago. Unless you want to blow a circuit because it got damaged by an arc trap and then limp back home at a crawl, of course.
Which he'd totally not done.
No. Of course not. He knew better.
(He hadn't. Not back then.)
Fortunately, this time it hadn't been an arc trap that'd knocked him out. Neither had it been a superheated slug smacking him out of the air. Rather, it'd been his Guardian's Light quite literally blowing his Light out. He, for one, hadn't known that was even possible, but here he was, coming back around with his logs telling him all about it.
It was really quite graphic.
Oh. And he'd lost his shell. Which made the realisation that he sat in his Guardian's hands unexpectedly jarring.
Ghost panicked.
One moment he was here, the next he was gone, dissipated in a puff of blue light. Making an unflattering noise, Nicole dropped her hands as soon as the weight in them lifted. She took a startled step back.
"Ghost? Are you— are you okay? What happened?" She turned in a circle, the sole of her Lego'd foot clinging to an ounce of pain. But at least her pipes had stopped seizing.
"I'm good," he said, not sounding it. What with his voice pitching irregularity. "I'm fine. Perfectly okay."
Nicole stuck her arm out and waved it at nothing, like a cat batting after a wink of light. "And where are you?"
"Here. I'm right here."
"Quit faffing about. You know this isn't one bit hilarious."
"I'm not faffing," he explained, sounding like he'd come a little closer. She grabbed into the general direction his voice had come from. What she caught was a whisper of air and a curious: "What's faffing?"
"You're not telling me the world forgot faffing. That's tragic."
Silence came after that. Enough for her to pick up the soft electronic whirrs and clicks that followed him around everywhere.
"Ha," he said all of a sudden, startling her, right before he shook himself out of a shower of blue motes. "Thought so. I am definitely not faffing."
Nicole folded her arms. Ghost, in turn, seemed to catch himself in the air. His eye turned away from her, fixing on nothing in particular instead.
"I looked it up," he told the wall. "Not faffing."
An unexpected smile wrestled her lips up, chased by a barmy giggle bouncing around in her chest. She kept the giggle down because that was mostly hysteria, but the smile could stay.
"You're embarrassed," she said.
His eye flicked to her. "Look, I don't usually fly around without a shell on."
She quirked a brow. He wiggled left and right — and looked very much like a few ounces of tightly packed together shame. Ridiculously small, too. Much smaller than even Darrow, despite how John's Ghost had a perfectly round shell that must have sat tight to his core.
"It takes some time to get used to," he added. "That's all."
"Mhm. So. What happened?" She waved at him, then at the bits on the floor.
"Oh. Aaah. Ahaha. You did."
Nicole's arms dropped. So did the smile that'd been trying hard to start a life, dying before it got the chance to. The giggle right up imploded, sucking all remaining joy into the void with it. "What?"
"You were having a nightmare," Ghost said.
She gave him a lame nod. "I remember that. Thanks."
"A rough one from what I could tell. Lots of tossing. And turning. Then some more tossing. Nightmare stuff. So I thought to myself 'Hey, Ghost, you should probably wake her up.' Except when I did—" He paused and wiggled back an inch. "—wham."
"Wham."
"Wham. You hit me with a Void Light shockwave and then some. Knocked me clean out." His voice lowered. "It smarted."
A heavy chill collected in her chest. Granted, it didn't outright try and choke her, but it served as a good reminder to what she'd woken up from and what she'd woken up to. Swallowing hard, Nicole retreated to the bed and sat. She laid her hands out on her knees, staring at them. Her perfectly normal looking hands attached to perfectly normal looking arms. Yet nothing was just that.
Ghost promptly followed her. "I'm fine," he insisted. "The, ah, the apartment is fine. Nothing broke. Except for my shell, but that was going to fall off soon anyway. And you? You're— ah—" He placed himself into her field of vision. "—you're okay?"
She raised her eyes to him. "I wish you'd stop asking me that."
"No can do."
Ghost stood his ground, even if his Guardian didn't much like his answer. Or, well, technically he hovered his ground, really. But nevermind that, because who in their right mind got hung up on terminology like that when they had a Guardian sitting in front of them who sat at the knife's edge of a spiral.
"This is just going to get worse, isn't it?" she asked once she realised he couldn't just be stared out of the air like that. He wasn't budging. Wasn't going anywhere. She needed him.
Though need or not, he didn't know how to answer that. Nothing reassuring came to mind, at any rate. All he had was a lame probably.
"And then one day— tomorrow— day after— in a week— I'll hurt someone?"
Ghost jerked up. If he'd had a shell it'd bristled. "What, no. You're not going to hurt anyo—"
"I blew your shell off," she interrupted him. She did that a lot. Interrupt him. "I hurt you."
"Pfah. That? That was nothing. I was being dramatic."
Her jaw set.
Not helping, you pint-sized shank.
"But," he added, trying anyway, "if you're so worried about controlling your Light, then all you have to do is tell Ikora you've thought about her offer and that it sounds great and yeah, you'll take her up on it."
She swallowed and looked down. Her fingers splayed out on her knees, trembling. Hard to believe he'd caught her smiling earlier. Not much, no. Just a little. But that was gone. Traded in for a thin-lipped frown, clammy looking ashen skin, and haunted eyes.
It broke his heart, okay? Or core. Whatever. It broke something, shut up.
How she withdrew so damn quickly, slamming every door and window and leaving nothing but an invisible wall for him to crash into.
"We'll keep it quiet too, like Ikora said. No one needs to know about any of it, about the Speaker bits and the Light bits. It'll be a secret until you're ready."
'Good luck with that,' Shephard had said to that and pointed a finger to the coffee shop entrance. Three unbound Ghosts had hung at the edge of a window, peering in. Ikora had frowned at him. And his Guardian had shrunk behind her cup.
"I guess," she said now.
Not no. Not yes. A guess. Was that good? Or bad? Was he making a good case for it and was she going to extend the couple of days she'd given him?
So many questions. No hooting answers.
Ghost floated to her left shoulder. Then over to her right and back around, deliberating as he went. "So. Ah. That nightmare you had? Do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
Wall. Meet Ghost. But a learning animal he was not and a shake later he gave it another go. Full throttle ahead.
"Did it have a wolf in it?"
His Guardian shook her head.
Good. Good. A glancing blow against the wall this time. An answer. Answers were good. Though now that he had one he didn't know what to do with it, so he tossed it aside and just hung around motionless for a while.
So did his Guardian, turning herself into a hunched forward statue, her shoulders dropped low.
He looked at her. Looked away. Looked at her again — and finally turned to flick a scan over the apartment. In particular over the sad pieces of his busted shell.
"Tape won't fix that," he said, mournful. "This is my fourth shell, you know."
"Fourth? So, you can just grow a new one?" She sounded almost hopeful there.
He blinked. "No. Don't be silly. I can't grow a new one. That'd be like you growing clothes."
She huffed. "So… can we get you a new one?"
He swung around. We? We? She'd said we. Excitement spiked in his circuits, even though his Guardian kept her eyes turned down as if she'd found something exceptionally interesting on the floor between her bare feet.
He nodded. Which meant he bobbed the entirety of his exposed core up and down. Probably looked like a real fool doing so, but hey. Wasn't like anyone was watching.
"Where from?"
"The Tower," he said at length.
She accepted that with a faint nod. "And the Tower, like the City, never sleeps?"
"Mhm. Never."
His Guardian nodded again, this time with a pinch of conviction. She also got to her feet. Ghost bumbled aside.
"Let's go get you a shell then. How does that sound?" Her eyes came up. Still haunted and so very, very weary.
"Perfect," he admitted. "That sounds perfect." And because he meant it, he added, quietly: "I'd like that very much."