Chapter Text
He wakes to darkness.
No. No, that’s not entirely true—not really. He can see the stars far up there in the sky, can see their light and their radiation and too many things that no human really should be able to tell.
But then again, he’s not really human anymore, now is he?
It’s silent, wherever he is. Well, mostly silent, because he can pick up the gentle swoosh of the wind poking at his form, and there’s a bite in the air that definitely signals him being somewhere either way up north or way down south, but he can’t be sure. Everything is bunched up inside of him and such a damn mess that he can scarcely make heads or tails out of any of this.
“You’re awake!”
For a moment he scrambles against the ground at the sound of that sudden, mechanical, voice, and lets out a shriek when the sensation of free-falling registers in his mind, but then there is darkness once more before he opens his optics to see an intimately-familiar Ghost look down at him.
He’d like nothing more than to lie and say that it doesn’t hurt to see her again, but—yeah, that… that would be the biggest lie he’d ever have to try and convince himself of.
She looks just like he remembers her—red and gold and orange and every single shade in between with the most brilliant blue color in her eye. His own Little Light, his Buddy—the partner who never left him.
“Do you have any idea how undignified you just managed to introduce yourself?” the Ghost—stars above, Sundance!—demands and sounds as if he’s just insulted someone’s family at least ten generations and counting. “Hah! Talk about a complete lack of grace!”
This is how Cayde-6 wakes up once more.
He spends an awfully long time just staring at the little machine in his hands, gently stroking her fins and mumbling nonsense as he cradles her close to his core systems—to his heart.
She probably has no damn idea about what is going on.
And Cayde can barely make heads or tails out of any of this himself.
Nothing about any of this makes any sense here, because Cayde remembers and he knows for a fact that Guardians, Exo or not, are very much not supposed to remember anything of their former lives. But he does. He remembers everything from before, everything that led him to his final stand and every single mistake he’s done to get there.
He remembers the fiasco that is—is it is or is it was? He has no idea—the Prison of Elders. He remembers Petra’s panicked surprise, remembers flying through the air on top of a burning command center, remembers a truly spectacular landing and then getting his metal ass thoroughly thrashed by the Scorned Barons—by the Hanged Man who put him through walls and the Scorned who stripped him of any dignity that he might have had left afterwards.
He remembers Sundance, that fateful, stupidly idiotic moment where he pulls her out and he sees her shell shatter in a million pieces.
He remembers Uldren and the bullet that was put through his chest by his own gun, of all things.
He remembers the Guardian crying above him as his life is leaving his body and everything going pleasantly dark afterwards.
He remembers thinking “No, not now. Not like this.” and wishing more than anything that he could have one more chance. One chance to get things right—to save Andal, triumph over Taniks, not send so many Guardians to their deaths in the Red War.
But he doesn’t remember why he is here now, how he is back and what he can do here.
Why he is back here at the very beginning, Cayde has no fucking idea, but if this is a second chance then he won’t dare risk it—won’t dare risk anything.
“Something wrong?”
Sundance’s question wrenches him out of the melancholic thoughtscape that he’s almost trapped himself in, and Cayde looks down at his Ghost, so innocent and wondering, sitting in his hands and looking up at him with that one, wonderous blinking eye.
“No,” he manages to get out past the imaginary thick lump in his throat and strokes her fins as carefully as he can. “No, I was jus—bit overwhelming all of this, yeah?”
“I suppose,” Sundance agrees. “But I wouldn’t know, never tried this before.”
They sit there on the edge of the cliff for quite a while, Cayde stroking his Ghost softly in his hands and switching between watching her and the stars dancing across the night sky so far above the two of them.
“What is your name?”
Her question takes him by surprise once more.
“My name?” he blinks. “You don’t know?”
If a Ghost could roll their eye, this would be how they looked. “I knew you were my Guardian, not your entire backstory, you dunce.”
That… honestly, that actually makes pretty reasonable sense.
“Cayde,” he eventually gets out. “My name’s Cayde.”
“Well, Cayde,” Sundance leaves his hands and floats up until she is on eyelevel with him. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.”
“Likewise,” he smiles and for a moment everything is fine.
Everything is perfectly fine.
It’s afterwards that all of the doubts begin to set in proper.
Sundance won’t understand, because how could she ever, and Cayde has no intensions of ever telling her about this.
If she learns that he remembers everything she’ll probably think that something is wrong, that a reset might be necessary for him to keep functioning, and Clovis Bray might very well be gone, but Cayde knows that their wretched machinery used for resetting Exos is still very much in business.
Like Hell that he’ll go through all that once more.
So, together they make their way to the Last City through mountain ridges and enemy territory and Cayde finds that he revels in it—revels in the challenge and the unpredictability of wild nature that simulated mission-runs and listening in on strike comms cannot truly replicate.
All those years in the Tower, no matter how necessary, only solidifies to him how detached he has become and how overwhelming it actually feels to be in the field again.
“You certainly seem happy,” Sundance notes when Cayde fords a river and he sends her the widest, happiest grin that his mechanical face can muster. “Damn weirdo.”
He gives her a token complaint before crawling up the muddy bank on the other side. “You love me anyway. Admit it.”
Her resulting laugh is like balm to a wound he wasn’t even aware that he had.
The City looks almost like he remembers it from back in the early days, although the walls are not quite as high and there are far fewer people.
Not finished yet, he thinks morosely as he wanders through one of the gates and into what will probably only be a gathering of all his worst and best nightmares come to life once more.
Cayde is right on that last part.
He never could have foreseen Andal Brask being back in the picture.
Seeing Andal again… seeing his brother alive and well and breathing is a shock to his system if he’s ever had one before. He can’t really remember clearly what being suckerpunched feels like, but he’s willing to bet a pretty substantial amount of glimmer on what he’s feeling right now to be just slightly similar.
“Andal…”
“Yup, that’s right,” the oblivious asshole has the nerve to smile at him, as if he isn’t uprooting all of Cayde’s carefully formed walls with every second that passes. “I’ll be your mentor until further notice, seems we’re lackin’ a Vanguard at the moment, sadly.”
Oh, fuck.
Fuck, fuck fuck fuckFUCK
“Vanguard?” Cayde’s voice is pathetically small as he throws out his query and Andal, bright and idiotic man that he is, takes the bait without question.
The brilliant, blinding smile that almost seems to light up the room somehow dims every so slightly as Andal’s face takes a more morose tone.
“Yeah, fuckin’ Exo—no offense meant, of course—decided to bail on us. Last I heard, Caliban was out scouring Saturn’s rings and no one has any idea when the bastard means to be back.”
Caliban.
Caliban.
The first thing that rushes through his mind is joy—Oh thank the fucking Traveler hanging in the sky, there’s time yet—before the dread and caution swiftly kicks it all to pieces.
Can he do this?
Can he actually be clever enough to make it so that he never issues that fucking Dare, so that Andal never dies?
The real question that plagues his mind is whether or not that he can outsmart Destiny on this one thing.
Well, Cayde sighs, he can certainly try.
But nothing is ever easy, now is it?
He tries, he really does, but Andal is nothing if not a magnet for trouble everywhere and Cayde automatically attaches himself like a baby animal imprinting on its mother the very first time that it sees her. The same happens with Shiro—and isn’t that just a fucking riot when he sees Shiro once more, but somehow smaller and more insecure and definitely not the straight up professional Guardian that he knows from old times, who would do the craziest shit if the dare and the spoils were anywhere good enough.
Cayde spends an embarrassingly long amount of time dry heaving in an alley after the oil and the odd bits of food still left in his system are splattered all over the Tower’s white marble-slabs.
Sundance never says a word.
Taniks finds them.
He finds Cayde and his friends and Cayde spends the entire aftermath firmly awake and refusing to shut his eyes for even a moment as he struggles to get everyone safely back to the City and its high walls.
For once, he thinks, their protection doesn’t feel stifling.
Lush loses his Ghost, just like last time, and Shiro gets carted off to the middle of bumfuck nowhere the moment that their mismatched crew lands their shellshocked asses in the Tower.
And Andal…
Andal takes it the hardest out of all of them.
Cayde remembers how he was the last time, how he seemingly disappeared into mapping out routes, researched contacts all over the system, rigged who knows how many communication lines between the Fallen out there, all in the name of finding and destroying Taniks.
Oh, how naïve they were.
How naïve they still are.
Cayde doesn’t let him.
He drags him out into the wilds, still close enough to easily slip back into the City if it becomes neccesary, and doesn’t stop no matter what slurs and screams are hurled at him until Andal is ready to drop dead from exhaustion.
“Go on,” he tells the human, his best friend, his brother. “Get it out.”
Andal goes for his throat.
Both of them do, if he’s being honest. They throw everything that they have under their belts at each other, screams over the injustice of the Universe and how it has thoroughly fucked them up the ass in one fell swoop.
It ends in a fucking fiasco that Cayde has wanted to evade for as long as he has been back here in the world from the beginning—from his beginning.
If nothing else Cayde is a professional, fucking fool.
He’s brought alcohol, because that is apparently the only way for him to cope with anything that the last forty-eight hours have thrown at him, and there is plenty enough to share of.
Somehow, and this is really quite ridiculous, he ends up in the same place, in the same company, and under a brilliant and clear night sky he drunkenly spits out the Dare to Andal.
Just like last time he tries to retract it.
And just like last time, Andal stubbornly clings to the promise that they’ve made to each other with pilfered booze and broken dreams and enough bruises to paint both of them every color of the rainbow.
History has a pretty funny way of repeating itself.
They find Taniks, or Cayde does at least—quite by accident is not said out loud—and he proceeds to load enough lead into the guy until the walls and floor and ceiling of the crashed Fallen ship they’ve found themselves in is painted a dark red.
This time he slits the bastard’s throat, just for good measure.
He has no idea if Taniks will stay down from everything he’s done, but he’ll be damned if he won’t at least try to keep him down for good.
That it also feels fucking good to do is a whole other thing.
Andal becomes the Vanguard once more.
He succeeds the empty spot that Caliban-8 and Kauko Swiftrunner both leave behind when they just up and disappear as the years go by.
Cayde spends the day of Andal’s inauguration deep in his cups and avoids any and all company. He can’t do it, can’t face his everything when he knows how bad everything will go if he doesn’t do something, and soon.
Because Cayde can’t do this again.
He can’t sit there and just do nothing when Andal disappears to who knows where and the only thing they’ll find of him will be the tattered cloak from Taniks’ bloody hunt wrapped around the mauled remains of his body, and a Ghost’s shell shattered not far from the scene of the crime.
So Cayde gets going.
He plans. He considers. He tries to ready himself for the inevitable to happen.
He is so very proud of himself when he spots Andal leaving one summer morning and follows behind as soon as he possibly can.
Taniks won’t get him this time.
Cayde feels like a god from the moment that he has Taniks firmly in his sights, and the sniper rifle’s trigger itches to a profound degree as he watches the Fallen slowly corner Andal in the middle of nowhere.
When the shot goes off, it takes Taniks by surprise long enough for Andal to wrench a few dozen knives into the bastard’s body, and he goes down with Andal on top of him, screaming himself hoarse in revenge of his Ghost’s life.
Cayde returns to the City. His mission is fulfilled. Everything is right in the world, for once.
Andal comes back, hollow-eyed and shattered from the loss of his Ghost, battered and bruised and bleeding but alive, and Cayde tackles the man the very moment that he sets foot in the hangar. He ignores everyone around him as he just clutches the human to his chest, whispers his name again and again and again until his voicebox threatens to short circuit from overheating and the tips of Andal’s ears are bright red.
Celebrations commence immediately in the Hunter Barracks and it isn’t long before the moonshine is flowing and more than a few Guardians are swinging from the rafters.
Cayde keeps himself plastered to Andal’s side, obsessively and possessively like he’s never been before, and glares heatedly at anyone who dares get near to take away his time with the man.
Pretty soon the partygoers learn not to get too close to the Exo and human.
“Sharing is caring, Cayde,” Andal laughs, but his voice sounds hollow and without the usual luster of happiness and life that it has always held before.
Cayde can sympathize, he still feels the ripple from Sundance’s death sometimes when he slumbers long enough for his subconscious to draft up dreams.
It won’t ever heal, not even now when he has her back somehow—when he has both back.
Something doesn’t feel right.
He ignores it, ignores his Ghost and how she keeps looking at the horizon, almost as if she knows something that he doesn’t.
The night belongs to Andal and his success, and nothing is going to take it from him.
So, apparently, Taniks had a backup plan in case of his—in Cayde's numble opinion—timely demise.
The City is attacked in the night as fifteen Fallen ketches descend upon the Tower.
Cayde finds Andal fighting in the courtyard, handcannon ablaze and roaring orders left, right and center, and standing as the last line of defense together with Ikora’s Void and Zavala’s Arc. The billowing smoke is choking, or it would be if Cayde was a human and not an Exo, but thick enough to obscure any form of visibility that the Guardians might have here.
Andal never sees it coming.
The shot, coming from who knows where, rips through his chest and sends the Hunter—Ghost-less oh Traveler no not Andal not again no I can’tdothispleaseAndalnotyouanyonebutyouican’tdothisagainpleasejustwakeup—Vanguard hurtling through the air.
Time stops.
Cayde runs.
Andal’s blood is warm and sticky as it flows freely from the bulletwound directly in the middle of his chest—a mockery from the Universe if Cayde has ever seen one—and Cayde howls.
He doesn’t register Zavala’s outraged cry when he flings himself in the direction from where the shot came, doesn’t deign to spare Ikora a glance as he finds an old friend—enemy—Pirrha, that fucking bastard—at the end of the courtyard.
He doesn’t feel it when the bullet rips through his own outer casing and digs into the delicate machinery beneath it. He barely lets it slow him down.
He also doesn’t feel it when a horde of Vandals drag him to the ground, stabbing their blades into his body again and again and again until he is more shrapnel than war robot.
But he does feels the pain of Andal’s loss, of his death once more but this time right in front of him, and Cayde closes his eyes.
When he wakes up to stare up at the starry skies above him, lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere with a familiar Ghost looking down at him, Cayde screams.
Not out of fear or surprise from being scared.
No, he screams in frustration.
His lungs have no need for oxygen, but still he screams until the phantom-yearning to breathe properly is strong enough to make him whoozy and lightheaded until he passes out.
It doesn’t help one bit.
He’s pretty sure that he has scarred Sundance for life as he sets out once more for the City.
This Ghost is quiet, never asks for his name and shies away from him whenever he deems it necessary to stop.
Cayde can’t do this again, he just can’t.
Why the fuck is he even here?
“Name’s Andal. I’ll be your mentor until further notice, so buckle up, yeah?”
It’s familiar and it’s strange and Cayde wants to do nothing but curl up and die.
He loses Andal again.
Cayde handles it about as well as the first—what should have been the only—time.
He screams—and that is about as useful as the first time he’s done this but it feels good and that is all that Cayde needs right now.
Once more everything goes to shit, even as he tries to be everywhere at once, tries to have everyone ready for an assault, tries to make Andal know that he can take somebody with him to find Taniks, and when he finally does, it is Cayde who is chosen.
But Cayde being there changes nothing.
Taniks overpowers them, still ruins Andal’s Ghost, and Cayde is trapped beneath a broken plate of concrete that even his enhanced Exo-muscles cannot move as Taniks strips Andal of his life once more.
Somehow, seeing it happen right in front of him is almost easier to bear than not really knowing how it happens.
At least this time Cayde doesn’t have to imagine all of the terrible things that Taniks does to Andal.
There’s just one tiny thing that shakes him to the very core, about all of this.
The things that Taniks does do to Andal are much, much worse.
He wakes up on the cliff, stars and Sundance above him, heaving for air that he doesn't really need, as the screams of Andal still rings in his ears and the feeling of his red, sticky blood yet to fade from his sensors.
Cayde curls up and screams himself hoarse in the night.
He tries again.
Everything replays as if they’re stuck in a neverending loop of an old Golden Age movie.
Cayde switches it up every single time.
He keeps coming back in that same spot over and over and over again, keeps trying to save Andal in a million different ways, and every single time the end result is the same.
Andal always dies. No matter what Cayde does, it is never enough to save the man that he loves.
He’s taken to marking himself for every month that he gets right. There’s not enough room on his body to do it on a day to day basis and it’s the only way for him to stay sane at this point, the only way that he can keep a tight ship in this fuckfest of a storm that he’s found himself at sea in.
Practically religiously at this point, he carves a distinct line across his arm and does his very best to ignore the noise that the metal makes in protest. No one will see the lines under all of his clothing, and he’ll probably have to invest in some longer, more everything-resistant leathers soon, because with the way that he keeps throwing himself into danger, into battle, as if he has nothing to lose, the easier it will be for someone—Andal, his mind whispers treacherously—to see.
And he doesn’t want anyone—Andal—to see, not this.
Sundance is waved away when she freaks at the sight of him sitting there in an isolated corner of the barracks with a knife to his arm and small whittles of metal in a ring around him.
Because this is all that he has as proof that this is real and anyone who wants to try to take this away from him can fucking come.
He doesn’t show anyone the scratches, not even Andal, because Andal will try to make him stop, will probably see it as self-destructive, and fuck yeah, it’s self-destructive but it’s all that Cayde has at this point.
It’s all he has.
But all those lines on his arm doesn’t save him one bit when Andal’s severed head is delivered skewered on a spear three days later on the outskirts of the City’s walls.
Cayde lets himself fall from the top of the walls with Sundance in his arms and begs her for a final death during the entire fall. She must grant it because he lingers in the darkness long enough to know that it won't be long before he's back at the beginning once more.
One cycle starts and ends worse than the rest.
Cayde is tired, tired of everything and simply hurts.
Both of them, him and Andal, are horribly, terribly drunk and absolutely nothing good will come of any of this, but Cayde still tugs him closer, still strips their clothes and lands both of them in the nearest bed.
He is vicious and aggressive and gives as good as he gets, and the two of them are riddled with scratches and bruises come morning. Andal never comments on the many lines that are notched into Cayde heavier metal-parts, and Cayde is grateful for it—just one less lie he’ll have to tell Andal at some point.
In any case, neither ever speak of the sleeping-together thing again and Andal is gone from within the week.
This time Cayde ends everything early by himself. He sends a bullet through Sundance first before blowing his own brains out, because he just can’t do this—can’t continue in a world where he has had the taste of love, real love even if it was experienced drunk, with Andal, only to have one Fallen who just can’t stay fucking dead take everything away again.
Cayde just can’t do it anymore. Not now, not when all of this has culminated into one night of bad decisions.
Bad decisions that has made his heart ache and cry out for a man that he can probably never have.
Everything still ends up the same after another botched attempt, and Cayde’s arm is blank under the light of the stars.
And so, it continues.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
It’s always the same.
It’s always the fucking same, even with the small variations here and there.
Sometimes they fall in love and their romance is a trailblazer across the Universe that always gets snuffed out, because Guardians just aren’t allowed to have nice things in their life.
Sometimes they are the most bitter of enemies there is out there, sniping at each other and fighting for dominance in something that scarcely even resembles the close bond that they’ve shared together so many times before. Cayde always hates it when that happens, even as he tries to remind himself that it is necessary if he is to grow cold and unattached.
Sometimes they are just friends. Very nice and simple friends who have put themselves into familiar, safe boxes in their brains and are happy to simply stay right where they are.
Cayde reels from the domesticity that inevitably finds its way into nearly all of the outcomes.
Cayde-6 comes back to life on the edge of a cliff in the middle of the night with the shining stars above him, but he can’t see them anymore.
All that he sees is the Moon hanging in the sky, and in the distance there is the faint shape of the Traveler hanging silently in the sky above the Last City.
He narrows his eyes.
This time he never says anything, never acknowledges Sundance who helplessly trails behind him for days, crying out to him as Cayde-6—but is it really just 'Cayde-6' that is his moniker now, or should he rather just attach a fucking infinity-symbol at the end of his name now?—stalks through the Wilds to the City, gets his hands on the first jumpship that he can, and immediately flies as close to the Traveler as he possibly can.
He’s never been up close and personal to Humanity’s very own physical God before.
Being this close is… strange.
He can see everything, from the off-white material that makes up its… well, skin, to the millions (if not billions) of scratches and tears and small rips that are only visible this close.
A strange sense of peace slowly fills him as he breathes in the Light that emanates from the Traveler, as its very own Light begins to wrap around him like the softest of down blankets, as worries and doubts and fears begin to take a backseat inside of his brain.
Cayde breathes in deep before he lets loose the pandemonium that now lives inside of him.
“Why was I brought here?!” he roars at the Traveler. “Why the fuck was I brought back if I can’t even be allowed to change anything for the better? Why?! Why did Andal have to die?!”
A knife is in his hand before he knows it and instinctively, he hurls it. Almost with a sort of detached melancholy draping itself over his thoughts, he watches as the small weapon arcs through the air and collides with the Traveler’s shell with a sharp ping. The knife is stuck and Cayde heaves for unnecessary breath
“Guardian, what are you doing?!” Sundance screams both in the physical world and inside his head, but Cayde snarls wordlessly at her and sends her flying when she tries to move in front of him, tries to intervene in something that has absolutely fucking nothing to do with her!
“Either take me back to wherever it was that you found me and leave me there, or give me a damn answer!” Cayde roars and Solar energy flares around him.
This close to the Traveler it almost feels like a magnificent abundance of energy, very much similar to that one time where he and Shiro got high as kites on electricized graphite. It builds and it coils inside of Cayde until he feels like he’s going to burst and before he knows it the Golden Gun is in his hand and pointed directly at the largest black, crackled spot that he can find in his immediate vicinity.
“I am done, d’you hear me?!”
Sundance is still screaming at him to stop and think about what he’s doing.
Cayde is done stopping. Cayde is done thinking.
He has seen enough. He has been through enough now, seen countless Andals smile and scream and love and die right before his eyes, but no more.
NO. MORE.
He. Is. Fucking. Done.
“You will give me something.”
The Gun burns brighter, the influx of Light feeding it until the brightness is almost that of a small Sun and even Cayde has to shield his eyes from the rays that are emitted. This close the Traveler seems bathed in the golden light that shines from his Gun, but Cayde sees nothing but an inanimate object that has done fuck-all for anyone ever since the Golden Age. An ancient relic that no one even knows what to do with anymore, something that has risen up to be worshipped like a God.
Cayde is fucking sick of it.
Then, the Light suddenly goes from soothing and gentle to sharp and painful as something digs into him, hooks claws inside of his mind, and with a roar Cayde stumbles back as meaning suddenly flashes inside of his head.
He stumbles over the edge of the hovering jumpship, somehow managing to trip over thin air, and then he is hurtling towards the ground as something akin to understanding washes over him.
A shame, really, that he doesn’t really get to dissect any of it before he collides with the roof of a skyscraper and everything goes black.
This time it’s different.
Darkness is everywhere as far as the eye can see, and Cayde floats in the middle of it. Gently, it rocks him back and forth and Cayde understands.
Because this darkness is not the Darkness. No, this the darkness that one sees when they close their eyes, the soothing lack of light for tired eyes and sleepy minds, the kind that belongs in the bedroom. The kind of darkness that he could get lost in for days in Andal’s eyes, that goes unspoken, even if he thinks it.
But it is also cruel, for the darkness that he floats in makes Cayde understand.
It hurts incredibly for who knows how long—understanding, that is.
So much information, much more than everything he has ever experienced in his life so far, is being pressed inside of his head. The sheer amount of it hurts to think about, but it forces him to anyway and Cayde screams as understanding and acknowledging fills his tired, weary head.
I see now
Andal’s eyes look up at him, unfocused and unseeing—dead.
No, please
A reality that he truly cannot escape. A reality that Cayde cannot hide from behind cards and jokes and late nights at a bar with a drink in his hand and music playing in the background.
He has spent years, decades, probably well over a century in total by now, on trying to prevent the one thing that had once taken everything from him, and yet… Andal’s death is completely, utterly inevitable. It can never be avoided, and in reality, then he shouldn’t even have tried, because the Universe obviously works in mysterious ways, and there are apparently just some things that are meant to happen, whether they are wanted or not.
Cayde does not deal with that in any sort of progressive way.
He screams and he rages at the darkness that envelops him, struggles as he is pulled deeper, further into the abyss that is waiting to swallow him up like he’s a tasty morsel of food and not a Guardian who just threatened the closest thing to true divinity that humanity has seen since… well, since ever.
To Cayde, Andal is everything. He is everything that Cayde has done right, that Cayde has done wrong, and letting him go will never happen.
It can’t happen.
If Cayde does this, if he lets go of Andal, then where will he be? Who will he be is probably a much better question at the moment.
So Cayde rages.
He screams and tears and rends at the ink black darkness all around him and refuses to bend when it tries to break him, and in return it only twists around him, much, much tighter.
But the darkness isn’t finished with him, not by a long shot.
The understanding, the information that flows through his head never ceases its overwhelming pressure, and Cayde sees everything.
The Battle of Mare Ibrium—the Great Disaster. A necessary evil that must be allowed to happen. By now, Cayde has seen it countless times before and there is no doubt in his mind that he’ll see it again, probably.
Twilight Gap, where they will “lose” Ana Bray, where Shaxx will stand his ground and roar the Fallen into a screeching retreat against all expectations.
The Black Garden. Cayde still shudders to think about how he might be involved, be it as mentor for the Guardian who will lead the march for the destruction of the evil within, or as the comedic effect ever-present and ever-bound to the Hall of Guardians on Earth.
The second coming of Crota, the coming of his father, Oryx.
Cayde sees it all. And in the midst of it he sees himself, alive and without Andal by his side, but with a fellow, faceless Guardian instead. A Guardian who he knows intimately as a friend, someone who can always be relied on in any shitty situation that the City manages to drag itself into.
A Guardian who he will have to cast to the wolves in order to keep going and stay sane.
Or, at least as sane as he possibly can in this hellhole of an existence.
He sees so much more.
The Reef and the Prison of Elders flashes in his mind as a tower wreathed in dull fog rises in the distance, and a mouth of needle-sharp teeth grinning at him from afar. Jade coins and toothy smiles, a chalice of gold and a crown wreathed in the foul arcana of the Hive—so many things flit through his mind and it overwhelms him time and time again. Every time that he almost seems to have it under some measure of control, it all falls away as something new rushes into the ever-expanding place within his brain where all of this is seared into his vast banks of data.
At some point he sees himself.
He sees himself, hidden beneath a white sheet and the only identifying mark being his gun placed gingerly on top of it. He sees a crumbling Vanguard, Guardians torn between two alternatives and warring with each other, sees dark shapes from beyond the Milky Way slowly encroach, following the Traveler’s Light like a flock of sharks smelling blood in the water.
This is the fate that he was saved from, what befell everyone after he had gone and outdone himself in sheer stupidity.
“We’re going to fight him,” Ikora’s voice snaps in the darkness and Cayde recoils. The venom and animosity that he hears is scalding. “Do you hear me? All of us. Every Titan. Every Warlock. Ever Hunter.”
He never wanted this. He never wanted to be placed upon a pedestal as if he has become untouchable. All he would have wanted was to be remembered and toasted, maybe given a thought every now and then. Not… not this manhunt for a prince he couldn’t even be bothered to give a single fuck about.
“We are not an army.”
Who would have thought that Cayde would ever have agreed so much with Zavala?
Because Cayde absolutely agrees. He has seen the fields of Mare Ibrium, seen how hordes of Guardians fell beneath Crota’s wicked blade the last time that an army from the Last City was let loose, and he knows intimately just how spectacularly they can fail.
Wherever Uldren goes after his stunt at the Prison will be decimated by war and the Light raging against anything already living there, and as it stands, he knows that the City cannot take another invasion after everything that the Red War viciously uprooted.
This cannot happen, he can’t—no, won’t—let it happen.
Ikora, his dear friend who barely knows the Wilds from upside to down but will absolutely wreck anyone’s ass any time in the Crucible, means well. He adores the fact that she will readily avenge him, should anything ever happen, but that timeline is gone now. At least, he hopes that it is. He keeps coming back, time and time again, because he somehow fucks something up that should never have been fucked with from the beginning. And he already knows what that is, even if he is loath to admit it.
Andal.
Somehow, he keeps getting stuck every time that he meets Andal once again, disgustingly obsessed with trying to save a dead man, even if nothing that he will ever do can save him.
Cayde can almost see Andal in front of him, smiling that crooked, wry smile of his that he does sometimes whenever something that he sees is infinitely more amusing than what he’s actually supposed to be doing. Oh, how he longs to see that smile again, to see Andal unburdened by his duty to the Vanguard or those who have been affected by Taniks and the terror that he has spread. To see him smile like that once more, unburdened and simply living his second chance at life one day at a time, that would be more than Cayde could ever hope to have, even if he has to preserve the memory ten different ways in order to never forget the exact shade of Andal’s eyes or how he smells or even how his skin feels beneath the miniscule sensors imbedded everywhere in Cayde’s body.
Maybe that is when he realizes it. When he realizes that he needs to let go.
Even if he doesn’t want to, Cayde has to let go—of Andal, of his memory, of trying to save the man, the brother, that he loves more than anything else in this world.
The darkness wraps around him, caresses his cheeks like a lover, and Cayde closes his optics in understanding.
“I’m ready now,” he chokes out. “I understand.”
And bright Light fills his vision.
The night sky and the cliff are both there to greet him as he wakes, understanding and heaving for unnecessary breath.
His arm is blank.
Cayde, for the first time in who even knows how long, silently cries in the middle of the night as the stars shine brightly above him, blinking down at him and his dirt-caked, filthy unmarked arm.
So, Cayde has to let go.
He’s never really been good with stuff like that. He clings to the past, what he’s had before, like a dog worrying at a bone, and for all the grief that it has given him over the many years that he has seen pass by on repeat.
But he does as best he can.
He comes to the City like a good little Guardian, takes up arms in the name of the Light and the Traveler and the Last City of Humanity as its enemies come waltzing up to the gates from left, right and center. Cayde watches as Andal strides into his second life, blazing like a star and just as bright up close as their friendship blooms immediately, as Shiro is taken into the fold, followed by Lush who is just as hard to greet that very first time as Andal was.
The four of them—the things that they do, oh, but he loves it. He’ll see them all again, just one more time before everything will go to shit, before he’ll take up the mantle of Vanguard for Andal’s sake—Andal’s legacy, more like—because if anyone deserves an honorable memory it’s him.
He’ll probably fail again, the knowledge that he will is seared into his mind and hangs like a guillotine’s blade above his neck every night that he closes his eyes and prays for the day that Andal’s murder by Taniks sneaks closer and closer.
The fact that he knows it’s coming is almost worse, somehow.
“Hey,” he pokes at Andal with his foot one evening, Exo-liquor in hand as he is lying on the roof of the Tower, staring up at the night sky above the two of them. “What do you think happens… after?”
“After what?”
“After, y’know, death.”
Andal raises himself up on his elbows. “Damn, someone’s gettin’ grim tonight, huh?”
Cayde chuckles and swirls the bright liquid in his bottle. “Jus—just kind of thought ‘bout it all just now. No one really knows, do they?”
Andal smiles at him, that somber, soft smile that makes Cayde feel fuzzy all the way down to his toes. “I like to think that the Traveler takes care of us… well, afterwards.”
“What, you mean like after a real RTL?”
“Yeah,” the human nods and rests his head back against the roofing of the Tower. “Yeah, I like to think that.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Cayde sighs before taking a swig of his bottle. “Maybe…”
“What’s with the mood, though?”
Cayde’s brow rises in confusion. “My moo—what mood? I ain’t in no mood.”
Andal’s laughter echoes slightly as it rolls across the roofing. Cayde saves the sound almost immediately, covets it like a dragon covets its hoard.
“You know exactly what I mean, you smarmy bastard. What’s with the mood?”
“Jus—” the words almost seem to get stuck in his throat. “Just have a bad feeling, is all.”
It’s not a lie, he has that working for him.
“Cayde, are you sure about this?” Sundance asks inside of his head. “Be honest with him, you owe him that.”
“You never know how long you got after the Traveler wakes you up again,” he elaborates when Andal doesn’t say anything to his first bout of talking. “I just wanted to—what I’m trying to say here is that you never know which day is going to be your last, and I guess that I just wanted to be sure that there was somethin’, y’know… after.”
“Look at you being all philosophical here in the middle of the night,” Andal laughs again, but this time it’s strained and Cayde notices, because at this point, he might as well be attuned enough to Andal to know if his fucking heart beat in the wrong rhythm. "This is the last time I let you take graphite again, just you watch me."
“‘M just bein’ careful, Andal,” Cayde grouches, but even so he wrestles himself off the roofing and instead leans closer to Andal, booze bottle still in hand. “You’ll be careful out there, yeah?”
Andal stills. His laughter cuts off and even his Ghost pops out in a flash of bright Light, blinking owlishly at Cayde with its singular, blue eye.
“Cayde, is something wrong?”
Damn, he’d forgotten how easy it is for Andal to slide into the role of staunch protector.
“No,” Cayde shakes his head as a wistful smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “No, nothing’s wrong, Andal. I just… I love you, you know that, right?”
Andal blinks. Somehow, Cayde’s words seem to have surprised him. Damn, that’s not exactly something that happens all that often.
It makes what’ll come soon only that much harder.
Cayde carries on, though—he’ll lose his bravery if he doesn’t. “You’re my brother, Andal, in anything but blood. I don’t… they always say ‘don’t get attached’, but damn it if it hasn’t happened anyway.”
“Cayde, you’re worrying over noth—”
He cuts Andal off abruptly with a tight hug, burrowing against him as close as he can get. “You’re my brother, Andal. I love you, and I just needed you to know that. Just promise me you’ll be careful wherever you go.”
There, he’s done it. He’s said what he needs to say. And he hasn’t fucked with the timeline, at least not in any way that’ll make everything whip back to the cliffside in the middle of the night with the stars shining above him like cut diamonds. Oh, he hopes so.
Andal, meanwhile, seems properly lost for words at Cayde’s sudden confession.
Finally, as realization makes his eyes light up for a moment, Andal seemingly gets it. “This is about my trip, isn’t it?”
“So what if it is?” Cayde mumbles against Andal’s neck, his free hand bunching up the fabric of his cloak—Cayde’s cloak.
“I’m coming back, Cayde,” Andal soothes and runs a hand over the back of Cayde’s head, even scratches lightly at the plating there. “There ain’t nothing out there that could keep me away from the City, from you.”
“Don’t make a promise that you can’t keep.”
Andal draws back at that, frowning now instead of smiling. “Cayde, is there something that you’re not telling me?”
Cayde can’t face him, not now, not like this.
“Cayde.”
He needs to say something, he knows that, but he can’t.
This will be the last time that he will ever talk with Andal and he can’t fuck this up—he just can’t.
“Nah,” he finally croaks out and leans back as well to look at Andal, to really look at him and committing everything that he can about the man to memory. “No, I’m ju—urgh.”
“What?”
Exo can’t cry, not really. Sure, they can simulate sobs and their voices can get wobbly from the emotional response that their brains try to make work in a mechanical body, but real tears ain’t something that they can do.
Cayde sure does feel like bawling, though.
“You’re… I wanted to apologize, I guess,” he finally relinquishes after Andal’s eyes are beginning to slowly bore a hole into his skull. “For how I’ve been acting.”
“Hmm?”
“About how I’ve been acting with you, Andal. Traveler knows that I’ve been a fucking ass.”
“Oh, Cayde…”
The tense expression on Andal’s face morphs into a relaxed grin as he reaches out to bring Cayde back in a firm embrace. His hand comes up, warm and calloused, to rest once more at the back of Cayde’s head. His eyes, this close at least, are warm and softer than Cayde has seen them in a fairly long time. The man sighs wearily as he drags Cayde closer, just tight enough for his beard to scratch against his facial plates.
“Something’s not right, Cayde,” Andal murmurs against his brow-plate. “I just can’t—after that last stint with Taniks I just… I just want to be sure, that’s all.”
It feels like issuing a death sentence, but Cayde leans into Andal’s touch nonetheless, clings to it like a thirsting man chugging water. His optics slide shut as his own hand comes up to rest against the back of Andal’s head. “I know that I can’t tell you what to do, but just… be careful out there, yeah?”
Andal’s lips press against his brow, warm and chapped and slightly wet from the alcohol they’ve been drinking since sundown.
“Aren’t I always?”
The bottle of Exo-liquor is bright green against the matte tiling of the Tower’s roof as both of Cayde’s arms sling around Andal’s shoulders.
When Andal leaves the next morning Cayde stands in the hangar, waving him off with a wobbly smile as his fist is clenched tight enough to bend steel.
He marks off yet another month in the quiet of his barracks room.
Cayde doesn’t say a single word for a week following Andal’s death.
He is silent as he steps into the Hall of Guardians unannounced, carrying Andal’s bloodstained, torn cloak and his handcannon. The Hall is silent, even Shaxx’s eternal shouting stills as Ikora’s voice yells a desperate “NO!” and Zavala’s stoic shock is painted across his face.
Logically, he knows that he’s not alone in his grief, but a lump grows in his throat every single time that he tries to say something to the Hunters now looking to him for guidance on what their now-deceased leader would have wanted them to do. He does his best and Sundance is right there beside him the entire time as he struggles to put out the words that need saying, as he organizes patrols and plans supply raids on Fallen all while juggling everything needed for Andal’s Wake—the old patterns from before the Prison are almost soothing to fall back on every single day when he finally puts down his comm after speaking with the arrangers.
Somehow he has ended up already acting like the Hunter Vanguard before he is even officially approached about the position.
But they do, eventually.
Surprisingly it is Zavala who approaches him about the whole thing.
“I’ll do it,” he spits before the Titan has even said a word, momentarily looking up from the mountain of reports that he is sorting through. “I’ll take A-Andal’s… place.”
The last word is spat out like it’s poison to his ears, and in some ways it is.
“You already knew?”
“Not hard to guess,” Cayde leans back in his chair and stretches his back out, sighing when metallic joints click into place. “Any Hunter worth their salt would have put two and two together by now, what with the way you and Rey have been eyeing me lately.”
“You have shown remarkable leadership during this unfortunate time, Cayde-6,” Zavala rumbles and steps forward. The hand that he places upon Cayde’s shoulder is heavy and warm, a much-needed anchor in the midst of the storm that the Tower is holed up in. “That deserves recognition.”
“Such a shame that it had to manifest ‘cause of a dead man, eh?” Cayde’s snappy comment is completely without fire as he puts down the datapad with shaking hands and stares directly at the desk in front of him. “Shouldn’t have happened this way.”
“The Vanguard is by your side, be that as either fellow mourners or confidantes, should you need us,” Zavala promises. “We are here for you, Cayde.”
Cayde’s eyes immediately snap up to look at the Awoken.
This Zavala’s face is less burdened than the one that Cayde originally knew from so long ago. Less deep furrows across his forehead with the two smile lines on both sides of his mouth instead much more prominent. Even his posture is more slouched, if that is even possible, instead of the ramrod straight stance that he remembers his first Commander having both day in and day out, no matter the time or the weather or even the date.
But this Zavala is smiling down at him, hand still heavy and warm upon his shoulder, and almost against his will, Cayde feels the corners of his mouth twitch upwards in the smallest of smiles.
“Thanks, big guy,” he sighs and nods. “Really, I mean it.”
“We will see you later then, Hunter Vanguard?” Zavala’s eyebrow is raised in query and even as Cayde feels the chills from those two last words run down his spine he struggles to get out a nod anyway and gives the man a sloppy salute before going back to the reports.
His inauguration as Hunter Vanguard is a quiet affair handled right after Andal’s Wake where a million candles, if not more, have been collected to light up the Tower grounds in waves of soft, golden light.
Andal’s cloak, now cleaned of the blood and gore that clung to it when it was delivered by the Fallen, hangs from his shoulders and for the first time in a very long, long time, Cayde-6 actually feels like himself as the Speaker says words that he knows like the back of his own hand.
That it took the death of a good man to get there is his own burden to bear.
Years pass by, lines are still etched into his arms month after month, and after those are full he turns to the rest of his metal body.
The habit is too ingrained for him to stop now, but he is far more careful about it now than he was before his Vanguard days. As he has relived his Guardian youth time and time again, he seems to have forgotten just how perceptive his colleagues actually are.
Ikora means well, deep down he knows that she does, but when she tugs him aside a few weeks after he has been handed the title of Hunter Vanguard and quietly asks him to speak with her if he needs to get some things out of his systems, he recoils.
The marks are his!
Those marks are the only reason why Cayde still has any sort of sanity left inside of his fucked up head. He doesn’t need her to realize that what he’s doing is wrong, he already knows that they are and that what he is doing is incredibly unhealthy.
“Cayde, if you need anything at all, never hesitate to ask.”
They respect him more this time around than they did in the original timeline, the one where he had responded, quite immaturely too, might he add, to the task of being the Hunter Vanguard by shirking his responsibilities for well over a month before he actually went and got his shit together. It’s probably the only reason why Ikora even asks him such a personal question, but it is not something that Cayde wants to welcome. He can do this by himself, without the help of the Vanguard.
“It—everything’s fine, Ikora,” he spits out, surprising himself with how venomous he comes across, before excusing himself to do some ridiculously obscure task.
She doesn’t buy it for a moment, Cayde’s probably willing to put good glimmer on that, but nonetheless she lets him go, even if her hands linger over his gauntlets a bit longer than what is proper respect for personal space.
Cayde can’t even think straight as he’s heading out of the Tower, out of the City—he just needs to be somewhere where it’s just him, his Ghost and a good, old fashioned bonfire crackling out there in the woods.
Those marks are his last lifeline to a world long gone and he’ll be damned if anyone will take it from him.
The Chosen of the Traveler is a fucking Warlock, because of course they are.
This time around, his mind can’t help but whisper as Cayde watches the confused Exo stumble their way into the Hall of Guardians, following an excited Ghost who brags to anyone who will listen about the Archon that they’ve just brought to its knees and finished off in the middle of nowhere out in the Cosmodrome.
He shouldn’t be thinking like that, really shouldn’t wish that the Guardian that he will come to know, maybe even love, would be flesh instead of metal and a cunning Hunter instead of a world-wise Warlock.
But he can’t help it.
By now it's been well over seventy years since Andal has died, but the wound is slow to close and he quickly finds that he sees the ghost of his brother almost everywhere that he looks.
He didn’t have that the first time around.
Perhaps it is a byproduct of the Darkness that he has sensed coiling around the Last City for the past few decades, or perhaps it is simply something that only exists in his own head—he doesn’t know, and that is the long and short of it.
“Speak to the Hunter Vanguard, Warlock. He has information on the Cosmodrome that you might find useful,” he hears Ikora mention from behind the mountain of maps and supply lines that he is quite busy with, not that she cares in the least, the wretch.
His hand halts over the map that he is currently busy with.
No, he doesn’t mean that—he knows that she cares, maybe a bit too much, at times.
“Hunter Vanguard?”
The male Exo sounds almost cautious as he stops a few feet away from Cayde, more than willing to let him have some of that elusive personal space that seems to be far gone most days here in the Tower. Cayde almost doesn’t want to look up at him, too scared to see anything but what is actually standing right in front of him.
“Guardian?”
“Master Ikora told me to speak with you regarding the Cosmodrome. She said that you have quite the wealth of information on that particular area.”
“Well, well… someone’s been dishin’ out compliments, I see,” Cayde grumbles and glares at Ikora over the top of the reports he’s surrounded by. “Not that she’s completely wrong.”
He takes a chance and glances at the Exo.
‘Sleek’ and ‘aerodynamic’ are probably the first two words that spring straight into his mind as he looks at the fellow beside him. Probably just slightly taller than Cayde if he stands on his tippy toes, and painted a metallic silvery gray from top to toe. The two fins sticking out from either side of his head is just pronounced enough to be called ‘charming’ instead of ‘distracting’. His eyes and backlights are a bright purple, just sharp enough for the view to be slightly jarring, but other than that Cayde truly struggles to find anything obnoxious about the poor fellow. Anything more eye-catching than that is hidden beneath the ridiculously poof-y robes that the Exo is wearing.
All in all, unnervingly casual if a bit flashy. A dangerous combination in Cayde’s personal opinion, if a Guardians wants to go for a more subtle approach in their campaigns against the Darkness out there in the Sol System, but then again, who is he to judge if the man wants to look like a Dawning confection?
“So, anything you can tell me about the Skywatch?”
Oh, could I ever…
Cayde grimaces inwardly as he thinks of what lies below the Skywatch, thinks of RASPUTIN and all the shit that got unleashed the last time that someone fiddled with the AI’s personal man-cave.
This is going to be one for the history books, for sure.
His name is Acer-15.
Cayde spends the day obliviously drunk the moment that he learns it.
Knowing a Guardian’s real name makes it harder to blur the lines between personal and professional attachment. To Cayde, who sees Guardians come and go like leaves floating in the wind, it only serves to make it all that much harder to ignore if they go MIA or have a full RTL happen to them.
It’s never easy once you learn their names, and Cayde intends to drink his troubles away until they start making sense in his tired, weary head.
He refuses to see the Acer-15 as the Guardian, his Guardian, who he’s guided through anything from the Black Garden to pick up Tevis’ bow, to help navigate the Dreadnought as Hive arcana pushed in from all sides to try and separate the two of them.
They’re—he’s—not that one special spark that Cayde has shared drinks with, they have none of Andal’s tenacity, none of the cheekiness that he adores in his Hunters, and all of this is incredibly unfair.
The Guardian comes back from so many things—Crota, the Vault of Glass, even takes down Skolas with Petra’s help.
Cayde can’t do it, he just can’t see them as the right one.
He just can’t fucking do it.
It’s evening and the Moon hangs in the sky above the Last City, lonely and cold and filled to the brim with Hive just waiting for a tasty Guardian to lose their way up there.
To Cayde, the Moon is everything that has gone wrong and right and so many things lately that he can’t quite follow. If he’s lucky, it’ll be the one to solve his problem too.
But he doesn’t mean that, not really. Even if the first Guardian he’s met again since everything’s started going to shit isn’t the one that he knows and wants back, it’s not as if the world will end if they do what his original Guardian did.
“Sir?”
The moment that he hears a voice behind him, Cayde bristles like a cat left out in the rain and is damn near ready to run whoever it is through, before Sundance interrupts everything by bursting into existence.
She would never do that if there was any danger, Cayde knows that. So, mournfully, he sheathes the knife that he is clutching.
“Something wrong, Cayde?”
It’s just Acer.
Cayde shrugs and scowls down at the millions of lights that flicker in the night beneath him.
“Dunno, jus’ in a mood, I s’pose.”
Oh, he’s in a mood, alright. A murderous, walking, talking disaster of a mood.
“Don’t know much about those, I’m afraid. Master Ikora says I need to work on the emotions, apparently I’m too ‘stoic’.”
“Eh, you’ll get there,” Cayde waves off as he reaches into his vest to pull out an old hip flask and take a swig of it. “You kinderguardians just need to find your feet is all.”
“If you say so.”
Acer comes up beside him and leans against the railing with his arms, fiddling with something in his hands.
“Found something out there in the Cosmodrome, y’know,” he eventually mutters and holds both of his hands still so Cayde can see whatever it is that the other Exo is toying with. It’s a Queen of Hearts. “Thought of you.”
Cayde swallows audibly as he reaches out to take the offered card. The woman depicted on there looks regal, overbearing, as she glances off to the side, holding a scepter and a delicate-looking fan. She looks like everything that Cayde wants and desires to have back once again.
“Yeah,” he forces out through gritted teeth. “Thanks, kid.”
He’s never wanted his Guardian—never wanted Andal—back more than he does right now.
The Guardian—Acer-15—dies.
Earth holds its’ baited breath as the Awoken Fleet engage with Oryx’s Dreadnought, wails as every Awoken soul is wiped out and all desperate eyes fall upon the Tower and the Guardians.
Acer is on it immediately, takes off in a blaze of glory with Cayde’s stealthdrive and Ikora’s faith, only for everything to come crashing down around their ears.
Something aboard the Dreadnought goes wrong and Oryx’s forces mobilize too fast for anyone on Earth to react before it is too late.
As Cayde watches the Hive sweep over Earth like a devouring shadow, he vaguely recalls Ikora’s cries of anguish when the last broadcasts of Acer’s Ghost reach them.
The Exo’s voice sounds absolutely desperate and scared beyond belief as he roars in defiance at the hordes of thrall that overwhelm him, and the last thing that comes through, before the feed cuts off abruptly, is the sound of torn metal as Acer’s screams change from anger to mercy.
Cayde doesn’t even need to look at the hordes of Hive that overwhelm him from behind to know that it won’t be long before he sees the cliff once more, arm blank and body ready once more to enter the Traveler’s service.
Cayde wakes up on a cliffside in the middle of the night and just lies there.
He’s back at the beginning once more. He’s back at the beginning with a blank arm.
Sundance watches silently as he screams into the ground and flings a large rock at the Moon hanging up there in the sky. She continues to watch silently as Cayde then goes on to scream every single obscenity that he knows at the natural satellite, only intervening when he is dangerously close to falling off the cliff’s edge.
To know that he has gotten so close, only to fail because of one fucking Guardian getting overwhelmed in the one place where they just couldn’t afford to lose is a kick to the face if he’s ever had one before. And he’ll have to do this again and again and a-fucking-gain until someone manages to crack the code the entire way through.
If it ever happens, it’ll be a goddamn miracle.
Cayde turns out to be right. He turns out to be very right.
He doesn’t get it right the next time, nor the next few ones after that, for that matter. It always seems to boil down to him either being too invested or not nearly invested enough, and it’s enough to start driving him absolutely spare.
It’s almost scary how little Fate needs to be twisted before everything goes irreparably wrong.
But he can’t escape whatever it is that he has gotten himself trapped in. He keeps having to relive his own turn at being a Kinderguardian, of running with Andal, losing Andal, getting thrown at the Vanguard-schtick—all of it running around in an endless loop that never really seems to get quite enough suffering out of him.
Sundance has no idea what kind of Guardian she awoke from the grave, and the guilt drips from him every time that he’s forced to let her inside of his head. Their first spat—in this latest incarnation, that is—was truly something.
“What is all this?”
The first time that it happens he is utterly unprepared for such a simple question and just blinks owlishly at his Ghost who is doing a truly impressive job at looking quite perplexed—overwhelmed by the information stored in his memory banks, probably.
“Uh… what?” is his very-much-impressive answer to his Ghost, but Sundance only flits around his head, as if everything he says is muted to her. “Sundance?”
“Who is Acer-15?”
Cayde shuts down, or something very close to it, at least. He just stares blankly at Sundance long enough for her to have a right proper fright, while his mouth-plates do their best to imitate a fish gasping for breath.
“It—he’s…”
He is storming out before she can say anything else, ignoring everything around him—even Sundance whose cries become louder and louder as he forces more distance between the two of them.
For all that he loves her, she is and always will be a nosy little shit.
He almost comes to like the Guardian when they are a Reefborn Awoken who’d rather shoot first and ask questions later.
She is almost the Hunter that he misses, that he keeps telling himself that he needs, but she dies in a blaze of glory against a once more-resurrected Taniks, taking the wretch out in an explosion seen all across the inner system.
What changes everything this time is that he only powers down the day after, willing himself to never wake again, and the darkness gladly takes him.
He’s scared, for the first time in a long, long while, Cayde is fucking scared.
The darkness does as he asks, and that means whatever is doing this to him in learning.
The darkness is out there, learning.
Cayde fails once more.
A terrorist attack in the Last City, of all things.
This time he’s always grateful for the new, fresh start, even if he has to start all the way back at the very beginning.
In the end it seems that the Traveler, or God, or whatever is watching over everything on Earth, take pity on him, because Cayde finally gets her back.
He gets his Guardian back.
It’s raining, just like the very first time that they met oh so many years ago now, and Cayde is for once not buried in a mountain of reports that need sorting. Instead he has managed to wrangle Ikora into a very distracted game of Go Fish, while Zavala shifts between sending Cayde disapproving glares and Ikora utterly confused ones, almost as if he cannot quite understand how he got her to agree to this in the first place. Shaxx is yelling, like always, whenever some poor schmuck drags themselves over to his little alcove, Eris is being her regular, creepy self and a steady stream of Guardians walk back and forth between the courtyard and the Hall of Guardians.
All in all, a very boring day indeed.
Cayde suppresses the yawn that is threatening to break free and instead focuses down onto the three aces in his hand. Ikora probably has the last one, he’ll bet anything that she does, but he can’t really ask for them since then she’ll be on to him and no one likes that, now do they?
Eh, fuck it, he’ll probably ask her anyway.
“Done strategizing over there, Hunter?” Ikora asks as she takes a quick glance at her own cards before returning to her datapad, typing in something at a frightening speed.
Cayde sticks out his tongue at her. “Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on over there, Rey. Got any aces?”
He wiggles his fingers at Ikora, grinning when she makes that little cute frown she always done whenever he’s being particularly frustrating, and snickers out loud when his opponent hands over the last ace. The ace of hearts stares back at him, lying innocently in his hand as the skies outside flash with lightning from the passing storm.
Cayde frowns.
Something’s not right. There is… something out there, hiding on the boundary of what he can sense with his Light, and chances are pretty big that it ain’t something friendly. No, scratch that, it’s never something friendly, because apparently the City and its Guardians are highly allergic to anything even close to resembling friendly.
It really fucking sucks.
So of course, in the midst of Cayde being distracted like a fucking four-year-old, a new Guardian wanders in, drenched to the bone, with the look of someone on a mission.
He doesn’t notice her, though, not at first.
He keeps looking out through the windows, his game of Go Fish with Ikora long forgotten as he places his cards on the table and instead slowly walks towards the fog-stained panes. The outside is dark gray and he can barely see more than twenty feet before it gets too dark for even his vision to pick up anything.
It’s almost like time stops around the two of them.
He can still hear the small noises of the Vanguard’s Hall around him, Zavala’s familiar rumble as he asks operators for reports on the City’s perimeters, Ikora’s soft murmurs with whoever it is she is keeping in contact with over her comm and datapad. But time, that is the one thing that almost slows to a complete halt when he sees something in the reflection, something that should not be possible, something that couldn’t possibly be true.
Cayde turns around in an instant, and that is when he sees her.
She looks just like he remembers her, dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin and a scared expression on her face, as if everything around her is awe-inspiring and enough to shatter everything that she thought she knew. Even as she stands there, dripping rainwater all over the floor and dressed in little more than barely-covering rags, she is still as magnetizing to behold as when he first met her.
She is here now.
For some inexplicable reason, Fate has seemingly decided to finally grant him a pause in the hellscape that has become his daily life, and instead grant him something nice for a change, someone that he knows, that he can let down his barriers around, and he’ll love her for every moment that she is there.
And then it hits him, like a million bricks all at once, that it’s her.
It’s her, his Guardian—it’s Meera.
Sundance’s fins twirl in the air as she shifts her eye between him and the newcomer, utterly confused by the elation and happiness that is swirling around inside his mind. Their minds connect briefly, just long enough for Sundance to be hit by the brunt of Cayde’s joy at seeing someone that he recognizes, and he almost lets out a chuckle as he briefly locks into eye contact with his Ghost.
Do you get it now, ‘Dance?
Yeah, I think I do…
Cayde’s eyes then lock onto Meera’s, and there is a tense moment where the two of them simply look at each other, until he spots her lower lip quivering and a glint of recognition in her eyes, and then he knows.
He knows.
It’s her—it’s his Meera, there is no doubt about it—and Cayde wastes no time in crossing the room to meet her, dragging her with him the entire way without a word as he ignores Zavala’s questions and Ikora’s raised brow, until they’re both safely hidden away in a remote corridor with no one around to interrupt them. It is only then, with shivering hands and an almost fearful expression on his face, that he slowly cards his fingers through her hair, looks her over with every single means that he has access to.
His finger pads trail over her skin and sends back a staggering amount of information, enough that Cayde has to take a moment to process everything, and even then it is almost still too much.
Finally, as she shuffles and lets out a soft whine, he opens his eyes once more, still not completely believing what he is seeing right in front of him. He has to ask, has to make sure that this is real and not just some illusion that has taken hold of him.
“Meera?”
“Cayde?”
There are tears in her eyes as she looks up at him and her mouth keeps on opening and closing, almost as if she is trying to force out the words trapped in her throat.
“It’s really you?” she whisper-sobs and her own hand rises to press against his facial plates. “Cayde? It’s you?”
“Yeah,” he rasps out and presses his lips to the palm of her hand. “Yeah, it’s really me, Mee.”
“Oh, Light,” Meera sobs and her arms are around him in an instant. “You’re here.”
Automatically his own close in around her and he buries his face in her still-wet hair as she cries into his neck. He has no idea for how long the two of them stand there, him stroking her hair and just basking in her presence, and her making a rather valiant attempt at burying herself inside of his armor. There’s a hand fisted in the back of his—Andal’s—cloak, making itself known every now and then as she nudges closer against him. Cayde is sure as shit not complaining about any of this development, but the fact of the matter still remains that Meera has recognized him, and if that has happened, then who else might?
Of course, Meera beats him to the questions.
She leans back and sniffles as she rubs her cheeks with the back of her hand. Her eyes are bloodshot and there are flushed spots on her cheeks as she looks up at him with wide, almost scared, eyes. “Cayde, what happened to you?”
He sighs and steps away from her. Almost automatically, the hand wrapped around her neck slides down to squeeze her shoulder instead, and Meera somehow manages to give him a meek smile as she latches on to the hand with surprising strength. He tugs at the hand briefly, but she only shakes her head firmly and steps closer to him once more.
Alright, no lack of contact until further notice it is, then.
“Shouldn’t I be askin’ you that?” he questions softly and strokes her shoulder. “You’re the one who just woke up in the beginning—your beginning, probably.”
Meera pales at his words and Cayde, almost automatically, tenses.
“How long?”
He should be over this, he really should, but the walls come screaming in from all sides in seconds. The openness, the easy way that they’ve always seemed to click just vanishes without warning, and he feels almost cold as he stands there.
“Cayde,” she presses on nonetheless, “How. Long?”
Cayde scoffs and looks down at the ground, even as his hand never leaves Meera’s shoulder. “I dunno, how long as the Earth rotated ‘round the Sun?”
“Cayde, be serious,” Meera admonishes and steps closer to him, takes his hands in hers. “All of this is fucked up, this isn’t just something that we can shoot at until it goes away. If I'm going to help you, I need to know this. I need to know if there's a plan.”
Cayde’s scoff becomes a laugh.
“Help me?” he sneers. “No one can help me, not with this. One fuckup, just one, is enough for whoever is behind all of this to send me back right from the very moment that I opened my eyes as a Guardian, and then I’d have to relive all of this one more fucking time.”
“I watched you die,” she murmurs and Cayde just stops.
Wait just a diddly damn minute there, please tell me you’re not—
“I didn—”
“I was there with you,” Meera continues on as if he hasn’t even spoken. “I sat there in that… in that fucking prison as you died, and I—and I d-did as you asked b-but everything fell apart a-and I—I—I was back in the beginning, and then I watched it again a-and again and again and aga—"
“Meera, please, just brea—”
“YOU DIED, CAYDE!”
Her voice echoes in the empty hallway and Cayde physically takes a step back in surprise. The tears are streaming down her cheeks now, even as she angrily rubs at them with her hands, and Cayde has no idea where he can even try to place his own hands on her because she obviously needs comfort right now, even a fucking idiot would be able to catch that, but he has no idea if it’ll even work.
“I watched you die,” she spits out as a well of fresh tears spill over. Meera stops rubbing at her cheeks and instead clenches her hands hard enough for blood to begin appearing. “Again and again and again. It just kept going in some sort of weird, fucked up loop until I just finish—”
Meera interrupts herself before she says anything else but Cayde nonetheless hones in on
“Meera,” he breathes, already dreading the answer that she’ll give him, no doubt about it. “What did you do?”
She looks at the ground, even as he tries to twist and turn her, as he tries to do whatever it will take for her to actually look him in the eye.
“Meera, please?”
“You kept dying in there,” Meera whispers brokenly as she stubbornly keeps her eyes trained on the floor right by his feet. “I—you jus—I saw that bastard kill you off again and again and again, and I just couldn’t stop it!”
“Oh, Meera…”
Oh. Oh no.
He’s died more times than he can count, has been fucked over so many times because he just couldn’t accept that Andal had to die for everything to go the way that Fate intended, and this is the result, something that he could never have foreseen.
They’ve been linked.
All this time, the two of them have been linked, with both of them being sent back if either one or the other fucked up, probably.
Merciful Traveler above, all of the times where he has simply given up…
Cayde isn’t a human anymore, but that does little to make him resist the nausea sweeping over him as Meera’s words behind to process. Without another word he draws her in, this time as tight as he possibly can, and mutters soothing noises to her as a new bout of crying sets in.
“I am so sorry, Meera,” he whispers into her hair as he gently rocks her back and forth. “I am so, so sorry.”
Because he is. He is so fucking sorry that any of this has happened. But him being sorry won’t make any of this magically disappear as if nothing ever happened, and it certainly won’t help fix this mess that he’s found the two of them in, but it can maybe be a start.
A much-needed start.
“I thought it would make it s-stop, Cayde,” Meera wails as her hand clenches the fabric of his cloak once more. “I thought it would make it stop but it didn’t. It just… it just reset everything.”
He feels his knees buckle beneath him and the sound of them crashing against the floor echoes in the hall, just like Meera’s earlier shouting did, but this time it is nowhere near as loud as that. Without a word he gathers her into his arms and drapes her across his lap, letting his mind go blank for just a moment as he wordlessly starts stroking from the top of her head down to her back and up again.
Again and again, he keeps up with the repetitive motion as Meera’s cries quiet down to the occasional sniffle. A comfortable silence falls over the two of them as she burrows closer, pressing her head beneath his chin, and Cayde simply lets her.
For the first time in over seventy years, much longer than that on the grand scale of things, Cayde allows himself to just… stop for a moment. He stops thinking, stops worrying, stops moving and just enjoys the quiet together with the best thing that has happened to him so far in this whole disaster.
“I don’t know what to do,” he eventually says when the silence becomes too stifling to endure any longer. “All I know is that I keep gettin’ sent back every time something apparently doesn’t go according to plan.”
“You won’t die this time around,” Meera says quietly and her lips press against his chin. “I won’t let you.”
“Listen, if I need to die, then—”
“I. Won’t. Let. You. Die.”
Cayde quiets down and so does Meera, the only noise being the subtle noise of their breaths.
“Oh stars above,” Meera suddenly groans and burrows closer.
Cayde’s brow plate lifts in confusion as he glances down at her. “What?”
“I just realized… Crota and Oryx are still alive at this point,” she spits out and the most adorable frown appears between her brows. “Fuck.”
It is such a sudden shift in conversation, a sorely needed one but still unforeseen, and Cayde suddenly bends forward as laughter bubbles up within him—it’s loud and just on this side of hysterical, but it’s laughter and he hasn’t needed to laugh more than right now for a very long time. It takes a little while before Meera is apparently infected by his sudden bout of mirth, but she too starts chuckling for a few moments before descending into deep belly-laughs that echo down the hallway, but this time it’s a happy echo instead of the dreadfully tense ones that have filled the corridor before.
He has her back, he has Meera back, and there’s no doubt in his mind that together they’ll figure this whole thing out.
They sit there in the middle of an abandoned hallway for quite a while. At least, long enough for Cayde to receive several messages on his comm from both Ikora and Zavala inquiring about his whereabouts and when he intends to return to the Hall of Guardians.
Sundance appears above the two of them, taking in the Guardian in his lap and the somewhat shellshocked appearance of her own Guardian before settling in the small nook in his scarf where she usually hides away on slow days.
“D’you have to go?”
Meera’s voice sounds like sandpaper is getting dragged across her vocal cords and Cayde winces in sympathy.
“Don’t really want to,” he grouches and leans the back of his head against the wall behind him. “Chances are that Zavala will come a’knockin’ if I don’t get my ass in gear.”
“Can’t have that, now can we?”
“Mhmm,” a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “Plus, there’s the whole thing with me draggin’ you off to do who knows what in dark corners of the Tower that we’ll have to address as well.”
“Oh, fuck,” Meera mutters and drags a hand across her face. “I am too tired to deal with that shit right now.”
“Seconded like no other,” Cayde sighs but even so he nudges her off him and moves to stand. Meera is right behind him and immediately begins to dust off both of them. “Doesn’t make it a valid excuse to skip out on work, though.”
She stops for a moment, one hand hovering over his shoulder as she bites her lip as if in contemplation. “You’ve changed.”
Another rise of his brow plate occurs. “What d’you mean, ‘changed’?”
Meera’s hand rises up to rest against his cheek. “You weren’t like this before. Not this focused on your responsibilities, at least.”
Cayde’s curious face turns somber at her observation. “When you’ve seen everything go wrong as many times as I have, you get to a point where you just get tired, Mee. I got tired of actin’ up, it never did anything but make those around me angry.”
“That is surprisingly mature. Not sure how I like that yet,” she smirks and despite her words he is only met by a fond look.
“Eh, give it time to sink in,” Cayde grins and leans forward to press his lips to hers. “I’ll rub off on ya at some point, yeah?”
“Mhmm, I’m sure you will.”
“Now, come on. We have an internal relations disaster to unravel!”