Chapter Text
Brontide
Something is moving beneath the ground.
She can feel it, hear it, a sensation in her teeth, a shuddering in her light.
It aches and growls and groans like a restless glacier, and yet – it's less a feeling and more like a premonition.
Ice shards snap underfoot as she stamps through them into the rough Martian sand beneath, finding purchase against a steep incline. Beyond sand and rock, frigid cliffs tower over a restless ocean, but it's not the waves that cause that tremor in her bones.
Something big is tunneling, worming its way deep, physically or otherwise, and given the Hive presence here, it's likely both.
“Readings?” she asks.
“Big,” replies Lunchbox. “And that's not my name. I know you're thinking something stupid.”
She says no more, because nothing more needs to be said. From her vantage point on the hill, she can see into the broodcaverns – and the frozen shelf of ice sheltering them from orbital strike trajectory.
Unfortunately for the Hive, it cannot protect against the variable trajectory of one determined Thundercrash.
Yevird grins, sweeps her helmet into place with one practiced movement, and with a roar of lightning that flashes the surrounding snow a blinding blue, she gets to work.
-----
Catharsis
Baizhu'ul is sick.
Alkahest is sick too.
On the surface, it makes no sense, for a Guardian and a Ghost to fall ill, but Baizhu'ul knows better.
He knows that it's the ice sickness, clinging deep to his insides, even with a body that was made of it and cradles it – cradles it like a container of steel holds acid, slowly eating away at it from within. He doesn't want to know what will happen when the edges give way and the cold drops out into the rest of him.
He knows Alkahest feels it a lot harder than he does, wasn't even built for proximity with it, let alone the relentless exposure.
It builds and builds in his head, like a stormcloud. Lightning flickers on the horizon, and he knows the flash and glow is the threat of something disconnecting, ghosts of images sparking and dying.
“We will die if there is no way out,” he says, carefully, haltingly. Alkahest's movements are lethargic, cold. The harsh metal paneling on his shell seems heavy for him to carry. “You should have said earlier.”
“I didn-n-n't think it wa-as something- co-ould be solved,” the ghost grits, words smearing like a corrupted image. He must be in pain, or something as similar to pain as he can feel. “You a-are what you are. It was my-y fault.”
“Nobody's fault,” Baizhu'ul insists.
The pressure in his head is getting hard to manage. His movements are all wrong. Newborn. He staggers as far as he can, where red channels run deep in the ice, and the Europan structures are a distant thought, and sits until his breath does not rattle.
He has never felt temperature before, but the heat in his throat is almost gone, and his fingers feel cold.
If he uses the ice again, it will consume him.
“What is the... purple?” he asks at length. “The others use it.”
“Pur-ple? Vv-void. It's... the-e emptiness betwee-en the st-stars. The space bey-yond our farthes-st reach. The draw-w of the unknown. It is a-a... balance. A counter-r.”
Baizhu'ul sits back. “It is good,” he murmurs, one claw tapping against Alkahest's scrap spikes.
When he pushes past the ice – hungry, yearning, craving and never satisfied – the void reaches back to meet him, and when it does, it is less like a lightning strike and more like--
The sun, blooming in his chest, and rushing through his limbs, and racing up his spine into his throat. He breathes, and smoke curls white and soft from between his teeth, and it's eating the ice away.
Alkahest's eye glows bright.
When he spreads his claws wide, it is to encompass a sphere of emptiness, pure and utter nothing, ringed in bounds of flickering violet.
“You did it,” Alkahest breathes in wonder, floating close to inspect the ball of void. “That's the Light! I didn't think you'd-” He stops, shaking himself, almost giddy with excitement.
Baizhu'ul can still feel the ice clawing deep in his head.
It fights back.
But he can stop it, now. He can feed the Void, give it power through using it – give it power by pushing all of the frigid pressure of stasis in for it to devour. With his free hand he scoops his ghost out of the way, and slashes down into the snow with the other, a furious carving motion that carries a blade of void in its wake.
The land shatters.
Baizhu'ul takes an hour to dig his way out of the massive chunks of ice and packed snow. When Alkahest rematerializes, all he can do is blink.
Around them, the landscape is unrecognizable; half of the ice, once solid, is a crumbled ruin kilometers deep in a ravine, and the ceramic rumbles of the destruction still echo eerily through other connected chasms.
But the pressure in Baizhu'ul's head is gone, and the sun kindled in his chest fills him with something he thinks might be warmth.
“Better,” he says.
-----
Ink
“You're getting it all over your fingers.”
Furiously, the exo scrubs at her hands, only succeeding in smearing graphite dust further over herself. Her loose tan robe is already patched with fingerprints, and there's even a smudge of it above her left brow. “Remind me why I have to do this again?”
Page after page of wobbly drawings and poorly-constructed letters and strings of words surround the two of them where Damascus sits cross-legged on the floor.
“You're not cleared for active duty until your hand-eye coordination improves,” Constantine recites dutifully with Ikora's dry intonation, and the warlock makes a frustrated noise in her throat. “Means you can't shoot straight, and you can't do your own paperwork, so you're not allowed outside until you do your homework.”
“Yeah okay, I get it, mother,” Damascus grumbles sarcastically. “It's just not sticking.”
Her ghost sighs. “You've only been at this for a couple of weeks,” she gently reminds her.
The scratch of whittled pencil-tip to recycled paper resumes. Constantine leaves her to it while she looks over reports coming in from the moon, and time passes in relative quiet.
Until it's too quiet.
When she glances up, it's to see Damascus hunched, staring blankly where she's tried writing a letter over and over and getting it slightly wrong every time, getting it worse, until she gave up, digging the blunted pencil tip into the surface. The ghost gives her a quick scan to make sure it's not an episode, but... it's not. She's just upset.
An upset that becomes known when Damascus' chest hitches with a repressed sob.
“Okay. Okay. Hey,” Constantine whirs her shield plates, but Damascus doesn't look up. Her hands clench, crinkling the latest page until it tears. “Hey. You're doing fine. We can take a break.”
“What if it never comes back? What if I never get better?” Her voice breaks, as does Constantine's heart, to hear her like that. The despondence, cracking her right down the middle.
There's not much else to do but let her cry.
“It's okay. We'll get through this,” Constantine murmurs, nudging against Damascus' collar in as close an approximation of a hug as she can give.
It takes almost twenty minutes for her to calm down. There are no tears to cry, but her systems are stressed, and she still won't look up. She sets her recent failed page aside, and Constantine sighs.
“Alright. Look. I was saving this until... later, when you'd gotten a bit better with your hand stability, but... we'll give it a go now.” She transmats in a beautiful handmade board with carefully crafted paper sheets, the fine-grained and bleached sort, and a thick brush and a little pot of black liquid.
“It's an inking set,” Constantine explains, “-a design from the Golden Age. I had it commissioned back when you first started practicing letters. The Drifter helped sort out the design and our friends in the city sourced an artisan.”
Damascus traces the edge of the board, dark-stained wood glossy and rich, her upset forgotten for a brief moment. It rises again when she inspects the pot of liquid, finding out that it's ink. Her alloy fingers rattle against the glass shape of the vessel, and she puts it down before she can drop it.
“I can't. I'll ruin it,” she says, voice quiet and thick.
“That's what it's made for. Here, look, we can put the ink here and fix it in place-” Constantine busies herself setting up the workspace, stacking the shameful attempts of writing out of the way, and clearing away several pencils broken when they were clenched too hard.
Damascus sits and lets her, feeling miserable.
“Okay! I think it's all ready. You'll have to clip the pages down yourself, since you're the one with the hands and all.”
She does so, and takes a brush, smoothing its fine bristle tip, but hesitates before she dips it in the inkwell.
“...I don't think I know how to draw.”
Her ghost looks at her.
“Damascus. I know you can't. But it's not about that.”
Her shield panes whir into pieces as she projects an image onto the paper – and it's one Damascus recognizes, the elaborate curling design that sits engraved and enameled into her back, but mirrored to make a full shape. It's large enough to not be fiddly or delicate, spilling over the edges of the page and across her lap.
“Give this a go.”
Damascus sighs, and steels herself, and dips the brush.
It's horrible, and it's wobbly, and she misses some of the spirals and drips blots over the rest, but all of that comes later when her fingers are blackened and wet and she's somehow got ink in her mouth, when she sighs and sets down the brush.
Because in the moment, she didn't have to worry about being careful, or whether the shapes were right, or how unsteady her hands were; in the moment, all she knew was that she was being helped by someone who cared enough to do it. That the sweeping, trembled brush movements trace over lines from her own history that someone centuries gone had made carefully, painstakingly, for her.
Past and present joined in ink, and she is... content.