Taffer Notes: Before we get started this time, I'd like to take a moment to thank my readers. All of you. The quiet ones. The ones that leave me notes (I read all of them and I say THANK YOU every dang time and hope your ears itch cause I just thought about you).

Ghost in a Shell

By the time Nicole had worked up enough courage to leave the flat, the sky had lined itself with a thin ribbon of faint light. Not as if she'd needed daylight to see, no. The Traveler gave off plenty light by itself, throwing back starlight and moonlight and the city light below - easily outshining the round, fat moon lingering off to the side.

Must have sucked, she thought. Getting dethroned from being the fanciest thing in the sky, reduced to an afterthought ready to slip back beyond the horizon. She squinted and stopped walking, idly grabbing for a lamp post to steady herself. A scarred afterthought?

Since when'd the moon have scratches? She rubbed the bridge of her hand over her eyes and looked again. Nope. Still there.

"Ghost?"

"That's me," he said immediately. From a coat pocket, no less. The left one on her chest, which he'd snuck into when she'd not been looking, turning himself into a soft, warm lump snug against her ribs.

At least he was considerably more compact without the shell on. Didn't mean it hadn't startled her and made her turn red as a tomato with how ribs and breasts kind of took up a lot of shared space.

Nevermind that though.

"Does the moon have scratches?"

"Uh. Yes," he said in exceptional detail.

"I can't fathom what'd manage to gauge up the moon of all things."

"They're fissures. From under its crust. It's— ah— there's a lot going on under it," he said, cryptically. "Hive. A lot of Hive."

"Hive. There's things. On the moon." Nicole dropped her eyes from said moon shoved her free hand into a pocket. Her fingers touched the paper tucked in there. The one that read Help Wanted, because she'd not found it in her to leave the flat without it. Crumpled and twisted as it was. Now she clung to it like that'd undo what she'd just heard.

It didn't.

"Mhm," Ghost hummed before he launched into a quick-fire ramble. "Shephard spent a lot of time up there, I bet he could tell you just about all about it. About the Ocean of Storms— that's the scratches, by the way —and all the abandoned lunar bases and the Hellmouth." He paused. "That's where he and his fireteam took out Crota. A Hive god. God prince. Either or. It was a pretty big deal."

Nicole rolled her eyes and let go of the lamp post and walked on. Nope. She wasn't going to dwell on how there were things crawling under the moon's skin. Rather, she tried to put some distance between thoughts of that and her, which ended with a whole lot of fidgety steps and with her eyes wandering.

And Ghost kept up his history lessons — or, rather talking about John, really. It was still all moon adjacent, like that part where he'd hitched a ride with him and Darrow once, running an errand for someone named Eris. Who, to quote, smiled even less than her.

She half-listened, half didn't, while her eyes kept darting to shadowy corners and into the direction of every noise imaginable. Familiar or not. Footsteps. Echoes of footsteps. Voices. Doors. Early rising pigeons taking off with the whistling beats of wings.

Everything had teeth. Far as her nerves told her, anyway.

And so engrossed she was in being flighty, that she didn't even notice Ghost had stopped fanboying over the, air quotes on, Young Wolf, air quotes off.

"You're safe here," he said all of a sudden, shifting ears entirely and with his voice muffled by how she'd hugged her arms to her side, effectively squishing him. "We're inside the City walls, it's the safest place you can be."

"Is it? I'm not deaf. I heard Ikora talk about dead Guardians and the dead Ghosts."

"Well… ahh." The weight in her pocket and the pressure against her ribs suddenly lifted. Ghost appeared in front of her, a dark ball mostly made of an animated eye. "I don't know what that's about, but don't worry," he declared. "I won't let anyone or anything sneak up on you." He spun left. Then right. His eye let a thin sheet of light sweep the area with what she assumed to be mostly show, right before he orbited her head once before settling in the air a little above her left shoulder. "I'm very observant, you know."

"Uh-huh…"

"So, you don't need to be scared — is what I am trying to say."

"That's my secret, Ghost," she started, looking at him with her head slightly tilted. "I'm always scared."

He leaned his entire body to regard her, the light his eye was made of briefly widening. "Oh."

Right. A few hundred years too late for that.

That the reference fell flat didn't surprise her. It stung instead, reminding her how nothing of what'd once made her who she was and who she wasn't, mattered any more.

None of it.

Sure, the City technically never slept. Someone was always awake somewhere, going about important City duties and whatnot, but it was the Guardians who kept the Tower lit and busy all night long. Fireteams rolled through at any possible hour, chasing heroics and parties and contests and that general state of revelling that didn't care whether the sun was up or not.

Ghost had always liked coming back to the Tower for exactly that reason.

Though at the crack of dawn? The hour where night and day traded places? That was when even Guardians put on a slouch. The ones who'd been up all night showed a bit of wear — some because they'd returned from a patrol, others because they'd forgotten to sleep — and the ones who'd only just gotten up were trying to convince themselves they were ready for another day.

Ghost rather liked that, too.

His Guardian though seemed generally unaware of anything and everyone. Sleepy fireteams included. Where she'd stared before (at least a little), she now generally kept her eyes down and trudged after him as he led her across the main Tower plaza.

Least until she raised her chin and, out of the blue, asked: "So… is Ikora a Guardian?"

He paused midair. She stopped — and didn't take another step until he floated on forward again.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course."

"Don't all Guardians have Ghosts?"

"They do. Generally. Though there are some who lost their Ghosts and still fight for the City regardless. See, if you lose your Ghost, Guardians still have their light, but there's no coming back from a death." When she opened her mouth, he quickly added: "But, Ikora still has hers. His name is Ophichus. He just— ah— they're not on speaking terms and he likes to keep a low profile." He bristled (on the inside, naturally, since he had no shell to puff out) and his voice grated out in half a mutter that tapered off into a conspirative whisper towards the end of the complaint. "Though I'd have thought meeting you would have gotten his attention. With the whole Speaker thing, you know?"

"I see."

Aaaand down to the floor her eyes went again.

Grand.

Ghost darted into a narrow doorway framed in decorated, aged copper. Nicole gave it a cursory look. Plaques were fixed all around the open doorway missing an actual door, most bearing symbols that made no sense to her. A few were English with what she figured was the glimmer price attached to them, though even those made no sense. Safe for the bit about shells and armour, the rest read like technobabble out of a sci-fi novel.

Right. That was what this all was to her, wasn't it? She swallowed and stepped inside.

Past the threshold, things were pretty dark. Not dark dark, but a universal lack of light when the sun was meant to come up but hadn't quite yet — though you'd already switched off most of the lights. It was also stuffy. Second-hand stuffy, married to the scent of metal and oil.

"Need a hand?" a man's voice called from her left, making her jump and stuffing a knot down her throat.

Which she hated. She hated her nerves. Hated the jitters. Hated the fear. Hated that shopping had gone from terrifying to horrifying. Or horrifying to terrifying. Whichever one was worse.

And she hated not having words while a perfectly normal-looking fresh-faced young lad with bright orange hair asked her a perfectly normal and perfectly polite question.

Really, really hated it all.

Ghost rolled in front of her, and the lad put two and two together.

He lifted his arm to point into a maze of crowded, narrow spaced shelves. "Shells are in the back."

"Thanks," Ghost said cheerfully and then practically herded her out of view.

Two shelves in, Nicole finally dislodged the clump from her throat.

"What's this then?" she asked, stopping by and vaguely indicating a suit of armour draped over a skeletal metal frame standing in a gap between shelves. "Some sort of thrift shop? This getup looks like its been places already."

A sturdy, faded green and brown material made up most of it, with thick padding around the shoulder and arms and what looked like a plate set into the chest. It had gloves, too. And bracers which were on all lopsided, and legs that came with enough leather straps to make any goth jealous.

There were also knee-pads. Well. No. One knee-pad. Because fuck the other knee, right?

She lifted a hand to poke at the helmet perched at the top. A hood was fixed to the back of it and it'd fallen over the brow, halfway concealing a wide, black visor. Nicole stuck her finger under the fabric and tried to lift it so she could get a better look, when the entire damn thing tilted and fell off.

She took a startled step back, caught the helmet, and fumbled with it, bouncing it between her hands like a hot potato. Ghost rolled in from the side when she almost dropped it again and promptly reverse printed it straight out of the air.

"I don't know what a thrift shop is, but this here is a good place to get used gear. Guardian armour and tech isn't cheap to make, see." He angled himself next to the armour stand and made the helmet reappear, neatly perched on the frame's neck. "Do… do you want to look around for—"

… why'd he have to sound so hopeful there?

Nicole's lips twisted at the thought of sticking her head into a helmet someone else had worn while they'd been about getting bloody. She waved him off. "No. We're here to get you a shell."

"Obviously. Yes. Shell. This way."

After the helmet incident, Nicole decided to keep her hands to herself. Hands were, after all, not made for looking.

"Hm, what about this one?" Ghost asked, his eye fixed on a round shell kept in place with wires sticking out of what might or might not have been a tennis ball. Was tennis still a thing? Anyway… the shell had three sections at the top and three more at the bottom, all made of metal with football sorts of patterns stamped into them. (What about football? Proper football. Not eggball.) Two more narrow sections ran along the sides. Cheeks, she thought. This shell had cheeks. Rich orange cheeks, too, while the rest of it was painted a matte black.

Nicole leaned forward, her hands steepled behind her back, and considered the shell with a tilt of her head. It wasn't purple, but...

"You want to be like Darrow? Round?"

"What? No. No. Never." He wiggled back. "Not this one then. How about that one?" He zipped up to the ones at around eye level and began a slow sideways glide punctuated by the once in a while odd Hmm noise.

"You're not very decisive, are you?"

"Hey, to some of us shells are a deeply personal thing. Especially the very first one our Guardian gets for us. It's special. A once-in-a-lifetime thing."

"So, what, the white one was the stock one? The one that all my stalkers float around with?"

"We're made with one of those, yes." He turned to regard her. "And I think they can't help it? To them, you probably register like a tiny, walking Traveler. I can't think of any unbound Ghost that wouldn't want to come and look."

"Right."

"Right," he echoed and went back to hemming and hawing over shells.

Which there was a lot of, to be fair. And they ranged from the eight-pronged fin shape she'd almost gotten used to, to round and everything imaginable in-between. There was even one that looked like a rather large starfish. The glimmer price tag on that one was twice of what she'd paid for her clothes. All of her clothes.

Their colours were also all over the place. Matte and subtle. Garish. Outlandish. It was all there. No wonder it took him forever to decide.

"I should be exhausted," she suddenly said, the thought coming to her and bubbling up without her explicit permission while she studied a round shell half-covered in pink glitter. "I mean, I am. I'm knackered and all, but most of that's from the nerves?" She looked down and lifted her right knee. "Like, my legs? They are kind of solidified jelly from all the walking. But they should be goop."

"Guardian perks," he said, not looking back at her.

"Yeah, okay. That why I don't get winded? Used to be I'd be out of breath after a set of stairs, now I can run up slopes and whatnots."

"Mhm."

"But my hip padding? That's still there," she mumbled two shells later, her hand idly squeezing at said hip. "What's up with that?"

This time, Ghost swung around and blinked. "Your what?"

. . .

"Nevermind. Forget I said anything."

"It's very hard for me to forget anything." Ghost said mysteriously while he ticked left, then right.

"I just… I mean… on one hand, I'm still me, but on the other, I'm not? This shoulder here?" She raised her left arm. "I used to have a kink in it where I couldn't get the arm up all the way without it smarting a little. That's gone. And my eyes used to be awful. I mean awful. Now they're not." She dropped her arm just enough to direct her hand to her nose, a finger wanting really badly to nudge a pair of phantom glasses up along the bride of it. "And the funny thing? I kind of miss my glasses and that's probably the last thing I ever thought I'd be sad to see gone. Ever."

Nicole sighed and looked at Ghost, who hovered there, staring back at her in silence (for once). When he went back to inspecting future shells, her idle right hand snuck down to her trouser pocket. Unsurprisingly, it didn't find what it was looking for.

"I also miss my phone," she said, feeling exceptionally lame. Because she missed a lot of things that were so much more important and had a lot more meaning. But right now? Right now she could have gone for some idle scrolling to take her mind off a world she didn't understand. Instead, she swiped the first shell within reach off the shelf to turn it around in her hands. Though she wasn't really looking.

"Your what?" Ghost wiggled over next to her.

"My… phone. Like you keep in touch with other people with it and use it to look at cute animal pictures. And sometimes you watch cat videos. Or—" Nicole lifted the shell next to her head like she was putting on headphones. "—listen to music." A memory which, without asking her if it was alright to, got her head to bob to a long-lost rhythm and her hips to give a minuscule sideways swing.

Ghost's eye got exponentially bigger before pulling together into a tiny dot.

"Well," he said. "That's what you have me for now." His eye (and in essence the whole ball that was him) bounced up to the left, a gesture which was so reminiscent of a human trying to remember something, that it was a tad creepy. A tick later, a data stream poured into the air in front of her and came together to form a palm-sized kitten. It had more floof than strictly necessary and struggled valiantly against sleep, its tiny head drooping and a half-open mouth presenting a picture-perfect blep.

Nicole choked up a quiet laugh. One so raspy and sudden, it must have knocked something loose in her chest. Something sharp, but not unkind. It slid right into her heart — and because she wasn't prepared to experience anything else than dread and grief or a desolate numbness, she felt a bit like crying.

A whole lot of a bit.

She fought off the tears with a swallow that made her throat click. It worked, some, and she even managed a morose smile when the kitten finally flopped over. The hologram winked out. Goodnight, little floof.

"I also have music," Ghost blurted and inched closer. His enthusiasm was back. With a vengeance. "A lot of music. The most."

"The most," she repeated and quirked a brow.

"Well. I mean. Yes. The majority of it is very old, too. Pre-Golden age." He glanced at the shell she held in her hand before adding: "From your first life."

Nicole leaned back on her heels and glanced to the floor. She didn't know what to say to that. What to do. All she could do was stand here and weigh the shell in her hand because she couldn't figure out how to deal with that condensed bundle of I'm trying real hard hovering in front of her.

This isn't his fault, she suddenly thought. Not really.

But she blamed him anyway. Admitting that made her heart sink.

"Hey, Guardian?"

Her lips twitched down and she raised her eyes.

"I think I like this one." He shimmied closer to her hand.

Nicole held up the shell and turned it around. It was one of the eight-pronged ones. With the fins. Faded orange — a colour that cosied up with the thought of being brown — covered a lot of it, with a dark leaf pattern cupping the centre like two hands held together by the wrist. Some of its tips were a tarnished, light grey, and so was the last inch of the bottom fins. Small symbols marked it there. Symbols she'd seen scattered around the City on all her sight-seeing trips where she'd been doing very little seeing or sighting at all.

"This? It looks very used."

"It's a City shell," he said as if that explained everything. Which maybe it did, considering how he'd blabbered on about the place. Over. And over. Again.

"I mean, alright. If you like it you like it, I'm not going to argue. So how does it go on? Do you need my help with it or… ah…" She held it up a little higher.

"No, I've got this."

And in a shower of what she more and more thought of as data sparks, Ghost and the shell disappeared, leaving her to catch the tennis ball and wire before they dropped to the floor.

When he reappeared, he'd donned the shell already, its front and back spinning wildly into different directions.

"Ha!" he exclaimed and stopped spinning to wiggle each individual section. His eye turned like he was a person checking out the sleeves of a new coat. "How do I look?"

"You look fine," she said. "It fits. The colours are alright, and there's no pieces missing."

"Hm." Ghost paused. "Not entirely true. There's something missing." And when he looked at her again, his eye squished into an upwards turned arrow. It didn't last long and maybe she'd just imagined it, but for a moment she thought that'd been a smile. "I bet they have tape here. Come on. Let's go find some tape."

"Tape," she echoed quietly, not getting it. "Alright. Why not. You do you, Little Light."

Ghost groaned and zipped back into the maze of shelves, his quest for a shell completed, and that for tape just begun.

Chewing on her bottom lip in concentration, Nicole sat a little ways off from the shop, her arse planted on a cold, hard bench. Ghost perched in her left hand, his shell held perfectly still while she carefully fixed a short strip of electrical tape over the edge of his topmost and forward-facing fin.

Red tape. It'd had to be red.

"Honestly, I didn't think that's what you wanted tape for," she said, flattening out one end with her thumb.

"What else could I possibly need it for?"

Every modulated word got his shell to vibrate ever so slightly — and for some reason or the other that startled her. A little, anyway. She splayed her fingers out away from him and held him up at eye level.

"I don't know. Ghost stuff?"

He lifted off her palm and she snuck that hand back into her coat. The other one followed a moment after, its fingers finding paper. That piece of paper.

"Well, I like it," he said, turning the back of his shell in an idle circle, unaware of how her mind wandered.

"So you're sentimental. Got it. A sentimental Little Light."

As expected, his shell went ahead and bristled. He squinted at her.

Nicole snorted.

"Sorry," she said and got to her feet, eyes raised to the crest of the wall, from where a sheet of morning sunlight lanced out across the City. "It's quite fetching, don't worry. The tape, I mean." She shifted on the spot. Fidgeted. Looked left to the shop entrance and then over the way they'd come from.

A tightness grabbed at her chest. A restlessness. Something that told her she ought to not stand around for too long, lest all the pain would catch up. And if it did, what'd she do?

"Say, Ghost—" She pulled the paper from her pocket and held it up.

He swung around in an instant. "Yes?"

"Take me back there?"

His eye flicked to the folded note, then to her, and gave an oddly reassuring pulse followed by a nod.