When I said I'd live a life that was a different one
I meant a different one
Not always picking up the pieces of a former one
I thought I'd find a different world under a different sun
But there's no different sun
Yeah, there is only one

Under a Different Sun – Radical Face

March 12, 2961; Crew's Camp, the European Dead Zone, Earth

It was well past midnight when Azra got to the relevant parts of the story. There was a lot to cover, and well, Azra was still processing some of it herself. She'd never been a fantastic storyteller in the first place. She appeared to have the engagement of her audience, at least. Sylas's expression was as stoic as ever, but Cayde and Shiro watched with rapt attention. Occasionally, someone would interject with a question. For the most part, they sat and listened, growing concern and apprehension flavoring the air with sharp mint and ozone.

Nobody really had much to say until-

"Hold on," Cayde said. "What?"

"… I went back and took the Vanguard seat?" Azra repeated. "There was a party and everything. It kind of sucked." Cayde's reaction confused her. He'd sat and listened without protest so far- through his own death, through the reaction of the Vanguard, through her revenge spree. It didn't make sense that this was what made him speak up; this was the one outcome he should have foreseen.

"No," the Gunslinger said. "You didn't… no." He had disbelief and dread on his face. "For how long?"

Azra hunched a little, self-consciously. "About eight months? Not the longest-"

"Eight months?" Cayde half-shrieked. "What happened?"

"I mean- you said you'd wanted it," Azra explained. "You told me you were glad it was me doing you in."

"Because I wrote you out of my will!" Cayde exclaimed.

"I'll do it," she offered quietly. She couldn't sit here and watch him writhe in agony anymore.

Cayde let out a sigh of relief and sprawled back against the floor. "Thanks," he rasped.

She raised the gun to point at his head, but hesitated.

"It'll be alright," Cayde reasoned. "Everything'll work out." It didn't really sound like he believed it, but what other option did they have?

"Love you," Azra whispered.

"Love you too," Cayde wheezed. "And Shiro and all that. 'Kora and Zavala- they know."

He let his head fall back. "If it's someone taking me out," he murmured, voice just a crackling whisper, "I'm glad it's you."

There was a beat of silence. Azra's brain refused to process this new information. Eventually she managed to fumble control of her mouth. "What."

"I was probably glad 'cause… well, I'd decided I don't really want to pass on the job to anyone else." He crossed his arms, optics flicking between the three of them, daring any of them to protest. "And I wrote you out of my Dare… I didn't think it likely you'd kill me, and it's not like you wouldn't try your best in the chair, but I knew the job'd just about kill ya."

Azra winced. Cayde went from looking upset and defensive to looking horrified. "No," he whispered. "No, no no. I… I left you a cache, and set up a message…" When Azra couldn't look him in the eye, he sounded so defeated. "I had like four different backups."

Azra stared at her hands. They were shaking. All this time, she thought he'd wanted her there. That he'd asked her to do this. How many times had she thrown herself back into the chair with the thought of honoring his last wish? But he'd been glad because he'd thought nobody would be in the chair. That he'd found a way to spare them all that torture.

With a bit of surprise, she realized she felt tears on her cheeks. Had it all been for nothing?

She let out a strangled noise, something between a laugh and a sob, and hid her face in her arms in a vain attempt to block it all out. A hand fell on her shoulder. She reacted instantly, all muscle memory- the knife was already in her hand, fast as a thought, angled to guard against-

Cayde. He'd backed off almost immediately, hands up in a gesture of peace. He looked scared: not of Azra, she realized, but for her.

"Jax," he said, voice cracking. "I'm so sorry."

Grief was the main taste in the air. Sylas was concerned, not as worried about whatever had happened in the past as he was about how Azra was doing now. Shiro looked shocked. She could almost hear what he was thinking: How did he let that happen?

Spark, she could hear thinking. It was all vague, indirect, but she felt him piece together how it had all gone down. Where the path would have lead. Somewhere along the way, Azra had given up.

"Can… can I hug you?" Cayde asked. His voice was shaking. Azra still had the knife pointed at him. "Please, Gods, I-"

The knife hit the dirt. Azra just kind of… stood there. Cayde approached gently, ready for any sign of fear. He took her by the shoulders, and suddenly it was all real- a bright, burning truth: it wasn't his fault. It wasn't her fault. It had all been an accident.

She fell into his arms and wailed.

March 12, 2961; The Last City, Earth

Cayde-6 was being frustratingly difficult to find. Ikora understood, really. It wasn't as if he were hiding from work; in fact it appeared he'd been running about nonstop since Azra Jax had woken up. It was obvious he had important matters to focus on. Ikora was happy to let him spend some time on family matters- except there were some things that needed his approval. Bounties, mostly, and he hadn't signed off on next month's patrol schedule. It shouldn't take more than half an hour.

She'd expected to have to seek him out in the Wilds- in the Dreaming City, or meeting with some far-flung Hunter at their camp. Perhaps even the Tangled Shore. He'd been leaving the City much more frequently to deal with business since the incident (to great effect, both Ikora and Zavala had to admit. Cooping him up might not have been the right call in the first place.)

But she didn't find him on some far-flung locale. When she searched for his last known coordinates, she was surprised to see an active ping from inside the City. Not just that- from inside a library. The East Stacks of the City Archive. A stranger place to find him there could not be.

He was in the basement. Ikora, frankly, was getting used to find him holed up in odd places. It seemed he had a hundred hidey-holes or secret rooms throughout the City, often in the most mundane places: utility tunnels, forgotten storage rooms, old cellars. Hunters could be protective of the spaces they'd carved out. Ikora had learned to approach with caution.

The door was silent on its hinges. The lights had been set to comfortably dim. They were bright enough to make out the forms of Cayde-6 and Shiro-4 seated at a table covered in papers and data pads, but dark enough to leave the corners in relative shadow.

"Both of them," Cayde said. "You're sure."

Shiro leaned back and sighed an exasperated sigh. "I'm telling you, there's no sign of any foul play. I've looked for everything I can think of. It seems to have been a genuine network error, both times. Different errors. I don't know if someone could have arranged it."

Cayde shook his head. "Bullshit. It can't be a coincidence, not with this. I looked for my paper note, too. Missing, somewhere. What's gonna happen when I go check up on the cache?"

"I want answers just as much as you do," Shiro said. "Don't you think-"

He'd finally noticed Ikora standing in the open doorway. His expression shifted, making Cayde turn to look.

"What's going on here?" Ikora asked. "Cayde, you're angry." He was a seething ball of flame in her senses, sloppily ejecting fear and rage into his surroundings.

Cayde swept the data pads off of the table and threw his chair backwards. "I'll be back in two hours," he growled.

"Calm down," Ikora soothed. "Tell me what's-"

"Don't you tell me to calm down," Cayde spat. He pushed roughly past her, leaving no more room for argument as he slammed the door behind himself.

Ikora looked back to Shiro-4 for an explanation. The Exo just shrugged. "Not my story to tell," he rasped. He bent to pick up the scattered data pads, cradling them with care. They were important. Whatever was happening here was important.

"Just…" Shiro was reconsidering his decision. His mind turned in a tactical way, trying to find a path between usefulness and respecting privacy. "We've all been waiting for eight months, hoping something would change, you know, stuck with this constant reminder with the fact that she'd been hurt and maybe wasn't coming back." This was about Azra Jax, then. Ikora listened to the words unsaid. To Shiro, it had been wonderful and terrible to have Azra right there- so close, knowing that she wasn't dead, it wasn't hopeless- but looking into those eyes every time and seeing absolutely nothing behind them. It was like being strung along, and some part of him accepted long ago that this story would not end well, if it ever did end.

"Azra's had a very different experience," Shiro continued. "Just… be patient. It's not a pleasant story she's told." He looked down at the data pads and grimaced. He muttered half to himself, "Something tells me we haven't heard the worst of it yet." A memory flicked by, almost too quick to catch: Azra almost screaming with grief and pain, clinging to Cayde, Shiro sitting back and knowing that somewhere, somewhen, he'd watched something horrible happen and had done nothing about it.

Ikora had known something had changed. During their session yesterday, Azra had been unusually cagey. Ikora had thought they'd long been past the point of mistrust- after their countless talks over tea, their collaboration on Vanguard missions in the Dreadnaught and post-Red War investigations, she'd seen the Arcstrider open up in a rare, treasured way. Ikora had considered her a friend- a close one, at that.

But Azra had been angry, like Cayde had been angry. Even if something had happened to shake Azra's confidence, a mistrustful Azra would have just gotten shy, shutting down and watching everything nervously. But she'd been so much more than mistrustful- she'd been furious. Hurt. Ikora couldn't think of why. Was it because she hadn't sent Vanguard forces after Azra when she'd been kidnapped? But the Hunter would still have had enough respect for Ikora to want her opinion on the matter. She'd looked terrified.

"It may be easy to assume you know things about the situation, and then look at her and think she's being unreasonable." Shiro paused. "But Azra… well, she's been through Twilight Gap and the Vault of Glass and the Red War, and she's never once given up on who she is." There was admiration there, a feeling Ikora shared. Shiro shifted the stack of data pads, making it a bit more stable. "I think maybe it's more useful to take what you know about Azra and ask yourself what could make her act like this."

But Ikora Rey couldn't begin to guess.

March 14, 2961; The Last City, Earth

It didn't take long for Azra to get antsy. She'd let herself have a nice cry, then had let Cayde bundle her into the sleeping space and tuck a blanket around her. The sheer emotional exhaustion of the day she'd had caught up with her, and she'd slept soundly.

The camp was empty when she woke up. Spark reported that Sylas had left almost as soon as she'd fallen asleep, promising to fill the rest of Fireteam Dauntless in about recent events. Cayde and Shiro had left a few hours ago to do an investigation on the VanNet messaging system.

She kicked the coals of the fire back into life and fried herself a few eggs for breakfast. The soft sunlight seemed almost unreal. It had been so long since she could relax. So long since she had chicken eggs, or a cast iron skillet to fry them on.

But, it didn't take long for her to get ansty. There was so much happening, so much to catch up on, so much she still needed to do. She still needed to talk to Veera, to Lord Saladin, to… well, everybody.

Even though logically, she should still rest, take it easy and take time to process things, she decided she needed to move.

First things first: if she had knowledge of the future, knowledge she could use without causing paradoxes, she was going to use it. That, unfortunately, meant a long debriefing session with Ikora Rey. At least Cayde showed up to provide moral support. He was upset and clingy, hovering like a protective parent. He was never more than a few feet away from Azra's side. It was… nice, even if he was obviously stressed about something.

Azra skipped over most of her time in the Vanguard. Later, maybe, she could talk about past operations. Ikora had taken to the 'divergent timelines' idea with relative ease. But the real juicy meat wasn't what had happened- it was what was going to. She had six months' worth of future information that was still ripe.

Azra realized the problem with her plan rather quickly. "This really couldn't have happened at a worse time," she commented. She stared down at the maps, racking her brains for any scrap of information she could remember. "Weeks ago, I could have told you something. But March 11th is when I lost all the official intel." Even before then, things had been fuzzy. If Spark had made the jump with her- if he'd kept his files, they could do a lot more. Azra was only human, and a human who'd been suffering from extreme sleep deprivation at that. It tended to cause memory issues.

And that was when she still had access to the Net. Afterwards, she'd only had the picture of a few major operations: the assault on the Scarlet Keep (and the phantoms that had infested the moon afterwards), a few strikes she'd witnessed here and there, some rescue ops she'd anonymously leant a hand in. It was paltry.

"Things have progressed differently this time," Ikora said. She'd been eyeing Azra almost warily. It made Azra's skin itch. But far be it from her to hamper potential Vanguard operations because she couldn't stand to be in the same room as Ikora Rey. This was something that could actually help: a counterweight, however small, against the chaos she'd caused when she'd left.

"We'd have no guarantee the information you could give us would be accurate in the first place," Ikora continued, frowning at the map of Mare Cognitum Azra had drafted. "We will have to keep a closer eye on Luna. Though I don't see much use in a preemptive assault."

"The Vanguard operation seemed entirely successful," Azra agreed. "And Eris knows what she's doing,"

"That's an idea, though, Ikora," Cayde commented. "Maybe we should be looking at what's different. See if the original timeline solved some problems we haven't been able to."

Ikora's eyes narrowed. "The Curse on the Dreaming City,"

"The what on the who-now?" Azra asked. Curse?

"The Dreaming City," Ikora explained. "A sacred place for the Awoken-"

"I know what the Dreaming City is," Azra interrupted. "I oversaw the repopulation efforts myself." Back before things had started falling apart.

"You moved the Awoken back in?" Ikora asked.

"The Awoken moved themselves back in," Azra corrected her. "We just helped with the sweep-and-clear operations. The Scorn can be insidious little bastards. Did you say it was cursed?"

"What about the Taken?" Ikora asked.

Azra made a face. "Listen, I'll voice no opinions on Mara Sov's maybe-doomed Throne World quest, but at least she made sure the Taken weren't an issue. The Dreaming City has protections against interplanar visitors. The Techeuns repaired them once they were un-Taken." It had taken a few weeks, but there had been no reports of instability afterwards.

"So the Techeuns were taken, in this alternate timeline," Ikora mused.

Azra put her head in her hands. "Everything up until Cayde's death is exactly the same," she repeated for what felt like the hundredth time. "The Techeuns were Taken before then. Now please explain what you mean by the Dreaming City being cursed? Did we just not notice?" Nobody had noticed Azra's curse until it was far too late. If she'd left an entire people to her fate-

"It would be kind of hard not to notice," Cayde drawled. "The Dreaming City's stuck in a time loop."

You look up at the hulking creature above you. Riven twines around the pillars like a giant snake. Darkness roils like fire behind her teeth. The eyes- ten of them- stare at you, glittering and filled with hunger. You have a purpose here, one whispered to you in metaphor, in the spaces between words. Both of you have a purpose. Azra and Riven are puzzle pieces, carefully shaped and slotted together.

Savathûn knew desire, but she was a linear being. She could not fully understand how a time loop would work, what it would look like. She'd acquired Quira for that purpose. But even though the Vex Mind could perceive the ways that spacetime could bend, it was incapable of wanting. The Vex had no creativity, only the Pattern.

You, on the other hand- you are Human, and you had fallen in the Vault of Glass. You are always, in a way, falling in the Vault of Glass. You alone are capable of both comprehending what is needed and understanding how to want it.

You have been told to want it. You can do nothing else.

?

She was on the ground, on her back. There was a figure over her. Azra reacted with pure instinct, with Arc in her leg and a foot planted firmly on its sternum, and the figure went flying.

Azra was on her feet, one hand braced on the table, the other reaching for her Staff. It wasn't until Cayde hit the opposite wall and thudded gracelessly onto the floor that she realized what had happened. He'd probably been freaking out about her collapsing-

"Azra?" Ikora said on her right, closer than she was expecting. Azra flinched away, teeth bared, Staff held in a clear threat of violence. Ikora made some room, but Azra didn't feel any safer. She retreated to the far corner of the room as Cayde collected himself.

He approached cautiously, and damn, Azra hated being treated like a feral animal, everyone talking in soothing voices and making slow moves like she was liable to bite-

You did just kick Cayde across the room, Spark pointed out.

Maybe I am acting a little wild, Azra thought back. But this still feels patronizing.

They're just trying to help, Spark soothed.

There was nothing they could possibly do to help.

"What happened?" Cayde said. "Talk to me. What was that?"

"I remembered," Azra said quickly, carefully.

"Usually a little reverie doesn't make people pass out," Cayde said. "What'd you remember?"

"I remembered how the Dreaming City got cursed," she said. "I did it. I cursed it."

She looked over and Ikora was staring at her, horrified. Ikora made eye contact and her expression shifted- from horror to confusion, then to a grave sort of uncertainty.

And Azra realized that was a bad thing. She didn't want Ikora doubting her. Things couldn't go back to how they were before, back when they could spend the whole night talking over tea. Azra didn't know if she could just trust the Warlock Vanguard in such an uncalloused way again, but she could just not go back to the cold cruelty that had replaced it.

It would be so much easier if she could just cut herself off. But she'd never really stopped caring about Ikora Rey. In the cold, isolated months of her exile, Ikora was the only one Azra ever wrote letters to. Even if it was risking her life, if Ikora hadn't come around, even though Azra couldn't look for responses, she'd still written.

"Azra," Ikora said, aghast.

Azra stuttered. "I… they made me. She made me wish for it. I couldn't… I wouldn't. You know I wouldn't, right?"

Ikora continued to look disturbed. She took a step forward, and Azra instinctively pressed her back to the wall. The Warlock Vanguard continued towards her, until Azra's instincts screamed danger at her and she raised the Arc Staff again. She hadn't let it go- now she clutched it in a defense stance, gripping it white-knuckled to still the shaking in her hands.

"Azra, what happened," Ikora asked, and there was enough gravity in her voice to make Azra's stomach turn.

"I… I wished for it," Azra said. "The timeloop. I care about the Awoken," she swore, "I helped them move back into the Dreaming City, I worked with Petra Venj." She'd never doom them willingly. Ikora had to believe it.

"Azra, I can hear your thoughts now," Ikora said. "When you think them loudly enough. Your symbiosis with your Ghost isn't as active as it normally is."

They were healing, but they weren't back to their normal selves. So Ikora could hear her, she knew Azra would never do it on purpose-

"I do," Ikora said. "I'm not here to blame you. Before that- what happened? You said you left the Vanguard. You never said you were exiled."

Cayde beside her went tense. He grabbed her elbow, ignoring the static still arcing off of it.

It was too much. "I don't want to talk about that," Azra said. It would have been easier, in a way, if Cayde's first reaction had been anger or hurt. She was used to people being angry at her. But this guilt that welled up was like rotten marsh gunk, oily and clingy, and she could not bear it.

It wasn't just Cayde's. Ikora, too, looked at her with sorrow. "I don't understand," Ikora murmured. "I wouldn't have. We're… I consider you a good friend. I would never vote for that."

"You did a hell of a lot worse than exile me." The words slipped out without Azra's consent, and she did not enjoy the sting of pain in Ikora's Light they caused.

The room was too small, too stuffy. "I need to go," Azra said. "I can't- I can't do this anymore. Maybe later." How did she keep getting herself into fights she had to run from? She couldn't even look at Zavala anymore. And Ikora was practically dripping with sympathy, but it made Azra's skin crawl.

"We'll wrap up," Cayde offered quietly. "You can go. I'll talk to you later?"

"Yeah," Azra said, hating how that needed to be a question. How answering still felt like a promise.