Chapter Text
The howl of the wind was mostly muted by the sealed doors, but Somnia could still hear it. It was the kind of wind that could knock you off your feet or muffle your gun shots. It carried with it armfuls of snow that had initially fallen so comically fast that Somnia and Eris had to scramble to pull their equipment inside to keep it from being buried in the blizzard. Now Somnia sat with her back to the central terminal, eyes trained in a futile watch while snow continued to bury them. It had long since risen past the glass of the doors, exchanging Somnia’s view of the outside world with fresh and impenetrable white powder. Cold slithered through the dome surrounding the structure and into Somnia’s cheeks, but she liked it. It kept her awake.
She’d done it. She’d told Eris. And Eris accepted her. Wholeheartedly, fully, unconditionally accepted her! Somnia wanted to jump and pump a fist in the air and, hell, throw in a heel click for good measure. She felt immeasurably stupid for ever having worried, and felt even worse for how long it took her to talk to Eris about it. If only she’d stopped worrying so much and just gone to her…imagine the memories they could have made.
Well…maybe not. There was the whole Cabal invasion fleet and the Traveler getting slapped in a light dampening diaper. Osiris coming back–that was a thing. And then, surprise, a whole ass Worm god was frozen under Mars and wasn’t all that happy about it, and then…Cayde. Then a lot of things. Somnia had been moving non-stop since long before even Ghaul showed up. They all had. And, for a chunk of that time, Eris had gone completely radio silent to hang with Mara and prep for our inevitable final battle with the Darkness and whatever asshole was running it. It wasn’t much, but there was some comfort in that; knowing that it wasn’t just fear that had kept them apart.
It was only a matter of time before the chaos ensued again, though. One way or another, Some devotee of the Darkness was going to show up and make it everyone’s problem, especially Eris and Fireteam Olympus’s, and, once again, Somnia would be thrust into the frontlines of the battle for all life everywhere. Thoughts of Eris would have to be hidden away until they were safe to think again. It sucked, but…that was the life they signed up for, right? Iron Lord and Guardian. They carried those burdens and weathered those aches so others wouldn’t have to. It was what drove them to act and to fight–even Eris, without her light. Well…that and the vengeance.
“I can’t sleep,” said Eris, causing Somnia to fumble the knife she’d been dancing between her plasteel fingers once–twice–three times, before she caught it. “With you thinking so loudly.”
Somnia swivelled about in her cross legged seat and leaned around the central terminal. She narrowed her eyes. “I’m pretty sure that’s the blizzard.”
“You,” Eris said, more carefully than usual. More tightly. Like her words were being gripped with each syllable. “You’re brooding. I can feel it in the air.”
“Now you’re just making things up,” said Somnia, dropping her chin to one hand as she propped a silver elbow up on her knee. “Also, why are you talking like that?”
“Like,” Eris said, enunciating the word. “What?”
“Like you just had some bad ram–Eris, are you cold?”
Somnia could make out the slightest ripple of muscle in Eris’s cheeks as she clenched her teeth together. “No.”
Somnia had transmatted out of her armour hours ago and sat cross legged on the pre-fab metal floor in her sleeveless undersuit. Sure the cold nipped, turning the tip of her nose and the ridges of her cheeks a deeper purplish-blue, but, attuned to solar light, it was a comfortable nip. Eris, on the other hand, was wrapped in thick, thermal winter garb and sheathed in a thick, padded, puffy sleeping bag like an Eris burrito. Somnia’s lips curled into a lopsided amused grin, against her better judgement. “Oh yeah?”
“I had nearly forgotten,” said Eris, now through chattering teeth. “How insufferable you can be.”
“It’s one of my charms,” said Somnia–though there was a part of her that wondered if she should dial it back, given the fact that it had been two long years since she’d spent any significant time with Eris. Why waste it with snark? Even if it was her most fluent language…
Eris fidgeted, rotating within her cocoon of thermal gear. An unasked question hung in the air. Somnia normally would have relished in waiting for the woman to finally let down her walls and ask it, but there was a chance Eris would let herself freeze to death first.
Somnia rose from her seat only to cross the room and drop to a squat beside Eris’s bunk. She pointed a finger down into the soft edges of the bed and locked eyes with the other woman. “Come closer.”
Initially, Eris seemed intent to resist, but she eventually, begrudgingly, scooted closer. Somnia snapped her fingers, igniting a wave of solar light across her inorganic palms. Threads of it stitched together between her splayed silver fingers like a web of roiling flame. Eris moved even closer.
Eris exhaled a shuddering breath of relief. She tried to hide it; conceal it within a shifting of movement and a clearing of her throat. But there was no way she thought that was enough to keep Somnia from noticing. Her body, still wrapped in layer upon layer, curled around Somnia’s extended hands.
“Just let me know if it’s too warm,” said Somnia.
“Could such a thing even be possible in this place?” Eris wondered aloud.
“A fair point.”
“Your voice,” said Eris, changing subjects abruptly. Somnia looked from her hands to the focal points of light in Eris’s eyes. “You have changed it?”
“Sort of,” said Somnia. A rush of anxiety twisted in her stomach. Was it bad? Did Eris hate it? Somnia stretched her neck to one side and swallowed the feeling down. “I’m trying, anyway,” she continued. “It still sounds really deep in my ears.”
“It is pleasing to listen to,” said Eris with a surprising amount of warmth in her voice.
Somnia wasn’t sure she believed that, but it brought a smile to her lips anyway.
“There have been times…” began Eris, her words trailing off as the chattering in her teeth lessened. In the low light it was hard to read her expression. Somnia could tell Eris wasn’t certain if she should continue, and for a time Somnia thought she might not. Somnia nearly spoke up just to have something to talk about again when Eris started over. “Oftentimes, when the nights are long, and the lingering shadows seem more impenetrable, I will listen to your messages. Older ones. When transmitting our voices was a safe practice.” Somnia felt a flutter in her chest. Her lips parted to speak, but Eris, it seemed, hadn’t finished. “Hearing your voice, even as it repeated messages I had long since memorised, brought me a level of comfort in those moments. Even if the comfort was fleeting and the moment brief. It allowed me to…” Eris’s voice drifted as she searched carefully for the right word. “Pretend,” she settled on, “To dream that we lived lives other than the ones we live now. Where we were not Eris the last and Somnia Kingslayer. Where we could stop fighting. Where we could simply…live.” Eris’s body curled further around the solar heat rolling out from Somnia’s plasteel hands in waves. She pulled her forehead towards her knees, obscuring her eyes from Somnia’s reading stare. “It was…” her voice was so soft, so quiet as she spoke. “Nice.”
Somnia didn’t know what to say. Eris had never been so expressive of her thoughts and feelings before. Maybe it was the cold. Or some unspoken fear. Somnia always waxed emotional when she was afraid, but that wasn’t Eris’s style. Somnia squeezed her eyes shut tight, attempting to shut off the analytical part of her brain that tried to read every micro expression and movement in a person’s body to translate what they really meant when they spoke. As Somnia played Eris’s words over again in her mind, a similar conversation she’d had with the Drifter summoned itself to the surface. Without realising it, it drew a chuckle to her lips.
“Does…this amuse you?” Eris asked, sounding almost wounded. “To know the truth of my heart?”
“What?” Somnia’s eyes widened in realisation before she shook her head rapidly. “No no no, Eris, no, I…” her thoughts were interrupted as her hand brushed against Eris’s. The touch lingered for a moment before they both moved to allow the other more room. “Eris there aren’t enough words in all of the languages in the galaxy to express what hearing that means to me. It’s not always easy to know where you and I stand, or whether what I do is wanted or not. So no, I love it when you tell me the truth of your heart.” Somnia’s lips spread into a smile that reached her eyes. “I genuinely don’t know what to say.”
“So I have made you speechless?” Eris asked, an amused hum to her tone. “A first.”
Somnia smirked. “Yeah, well…don’t get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Eris. The small smile that had hidden itself in her voice vanished, though, as she tilted her head. “What did amuse you, then?”
“Just…something you said. You’d mentioned ‘living’, and it couldn’t have been more than a few months ago when Germaine had told me something similar,” said Somnia. She flexed her fingers as she recalled the memory, smiling fondly at the late night conversation over cards while Somnia’s jump ship refuelled at the Derelict. “He’d said ‘Dark days ahead, sister’,” Somnia did her best approximation of Drifter’s voice. It earned a small grin at the corner of Eris’s lips. “‘You ask me? You’ve done enough. Go live your life for once’.”
“And what did you tell him?” asked Eris.
“That I knew he was overcharging me for fuel but that I still owed him from that one time so we could call it even.” Somnia smirked, but when Eris didn’t look amused, the Iron Lord continued with a frown. “I told him that it was a nice dream, but…dreaming about and hoping for a life outside of all of this war was all someone like me gets to do until the war is over. That…someday, maybe, yeah, I could hang up the guns and try to live, but...not yet. Not now. Not until we end this.”
Eris fell silent. Her body curled, trying to draw closer to the heat. Or maybe it was for comfort for whatever heavy, private thoughts drifted through her mind. “He told me that once, too,” she eventually said. “It was not long after we had parted ways, when last we met. He had said that, for someone like me, lightless and ghostless as I am, that I had given enough and should leave this all behind and live my life. That I would not find a happy ending otherwise.”
Somnia’s artificial shoulders sagged at the thought. She leaned gently against the bunk. “What did you tell him?”
Eris paused–perhaps reconsidering the answer she’d given. “At the time, I asked him if he thought those with ghosts would find happy endings.”
“What’d he say?”
“That ultimately, ghost or no ghost, light or no light, no one gets a happy ending.”
Somnia frowned. “Hell of a way to live,” she said. “Thinking that it’s all for nothing in the end.”
“There was a time when I would have thought you a fool for believing otherwise,” said Eris.
“That what you call me when I’m not around to defend myself?” Somnia’s lips tilted into a lopsided grin, but it faded. She had to know. “What would you call me now?”
“A romantic?” Eris considered. “Hopeful? A bit foolish, still, but…heroic, perhaps.”
Somnia huffed a single laugh. “Keep talking like that and you’re gonna make me blush.”
“Only half of me is warm,” said Eris, as if Somnia hadn’t spoken. And for the first time since she had curled inward on herself she looked up towards Somnia, the emerald attention of each of her eyes focused so deeply on the Iron Lord’s. They glowed with a bridled need that made Somnia’s cheeks blush anyway. “Please join me.”
The heat already rising in Somnia’s cheeks magnified tenfold and thawed the numbness that had started to grow there. She felt the heat rush past them, to the tips of her ears, to the nape of her neck. She felt it envelop her. It made her feel a little dizzy. A little drunk, even. Her lips parted to speak, but instead found themselves so stunned by the request–by hearing Eris state so clearly what she wanted–that they were only capable of relinquishing a visible cloud of surprised breath.
Eris broke Somnia’s sudden silence by adding, “Unless it would bring you discomfort.”
“I–no,” said Somnia, coming to her senses. “Being close to you would never bring me discomfort.”
“Then please,” said Eris. She turned in her small cocoon of thermal layers to unzip the sleeping bag. “Join me.”
Somnia leaned to rise to her feet and hesitated. Part of her feared what this would do. That they would lie beside one another, sharing warmth and each other’s company. Then they would part ways again and the shape of the other would linger as a cold imprint on their bodies; a reminder of their isolation and the things they both wanted but couldn’t have. Another part of Somnia–the more vocal part–could feel every cell in her body ache for the closeness. The accidental touch of their hands earlier had filled Somnia’s entire being with electricity that still thrummed down to her bones. She couldn’t deny that she had spent nights wide awake, dreaming of exactly this; of lying beside the woman she loved and feeling her close; of listening to her heartbeat and hearing her breathe. And here she was now inviting it. Somnia lifted her gaze to find Eris, only to find the other woman’s eyes ready to meet her, patient but waiting.
Somnia lifted from her knees and climbed over Eris’s prone form. The air mattress made it an inelegant movement that drew muted huffs of amusement from them both. Eventually, Somnia found stable enough purchase to slide the rest of herself over and then under the thick, padded sleeping bag beside Eris’s cold, half-shivering body.
Eris shifted beneath their coverings and Somnia became keenly aware of every place where their bodies touched. At first, they moved in an unsynchronised, graceless dance of adjusting and repositioning, as if every time their bodies touched it stung them both unpleasantly. Eventually, they eased into the reality that there was no feasible way to lie in this space without practically enveloping each other and their fits of shifting ended. Eris’s body cautiously aligned with Somnia’s; her back against Somnia’s chest, her legs twined with Somnia’s own. Somnia rested her head against the pillow and was so close to the other woman that she could see the faint glow of her own amber eyes within the weave of Eris’s veil. She inhaled and tasted the familiar mixture of sage, cinnamon, and smoke that she always associated with Eris. That she could only ever sense when they were closer than they both knew they should be. Somnia’s heart had hit a pitched gallop in her chest. It had been two years since they’d even seen each other, two painfully long years, and now…there she was. Here she was. If only for the night.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Eris asked, breaking the silence that had stretched since Somnia joined her.
“Chances are pretty high, yeah,” said Somnia with a fox-like grin. When Eris began to turn, Somnia chuckled lowly. “Forgive me,” she said; voice barely above a whisper. And with confidence born from the high of the moment, she took her arms and wrapped them gently around Eris’s body. Somnia felt the other woman inhale. What had once been a focus of heat within the palms of Somnia’s Braytech hands spread up her artificial arms and wrapped around her thinly covered frame. Solar light pulsed from within Somnia in waves, keeping time with the rhythm of her heart, each ripple like disturbed surface tension just beneath the skin. It radiated from her and seeped into the thick fabric of the sleeping bag and the thermal clothing surrounding Eris and the layered cloth beneath them. The temperature in the small space the two occupied climbed rapidly, leading Eris to let out a gasp of surprise and relief.
“You are forgiven,” breathed Eris after a moment. Somnia had been aware of the tension in the other woman’s body in the way it pressed against her chest and abdomen. From head to toe, Eris felt pulled like a too-taut string, but the longer she sat, now blanketed in the warmth of solar light, the more the tension slacked.
“You are lucky,” said Eris, “to have your light.
“I am,” said Somnia. She felt Eris’s hands move, no longer gripping to her own sides in a futile hug to retain warmth. They shifted beneath the cover of the sleeping bag until the exposed skin of Eris’s pinky brushed against the plasteel surface of Somnia’s. Somnia prepared for the feeling of Eris moving it away…but she didn’t. “In a lot of ways.”
Somnia felt the tension in her own body diminish as a comfortable silence fell over them. What inhibitions they still held about touching one another faded the longer they stayed there, enveloped in solar heat. Their bodies became fully aligned; only fabric between them as every conceivable inch of their forms found ways to become closer to the other still. It was like living in a dream, she thought. Having this moment with Eris. This whole night, really. With all of the lingering looks and touches, there was no denying that it meant similar things to them both, which all at once excited and confused Somnia. Ever since the tragedy that befell Eris on the moon, and, more recently, Cayde’s death, they’d both been so careful to not get too close. They both knew the deepest kind of loss and it fused an even deeper fear of experiencing it again into the very cores of their beings. They said it in the looks they gave each other when they expected the other to not be looking– I cannot survive in a world where I love you only to lose you . That fear had become such a part of them it made up the foundation of their every interaction. Every look, every touch, every word said so meticulously measured and careful to not be too much, to not draw too close, to not open the parts of themselves they had chained up and boarded closed. Maybe that fear was just as much the reason for their distance as it was for their closeness, now. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would one day have to face the consequences of centuries of longing and denial and the built up scar tissue of loneliness. Feeling indivisable and equal parts joy for stemming the pain of that denial and fear of the repercussions it would have on her heart made a storm brew in Somnia’s chest.
“What are we doing, Eris?” asked Somnia..
“Dreaming,” said Eris, with the weight of impending agony in her voice so clear it nearly broke Somnia to hear it. “Hoping.”
Somewhere in the darkness, their hands found each other and their fingers slowly intertwined in a gentle lattice of skin and plasteel. The two breathed in unison. It was so simple a thing, Somnia thought. To hold Eris’s hand. It was both a healing poultice to a deep, lingering wound and the incision of a knife to make a new one. Somnia could feel the hesitation in Eris’s movements, even as she made them, just as she could feel her own. They could already feel how this would make tomorrow so much worse than it was already going to be. But then Eris turned–shifting awkwardly until their eyes met in the scant few inches between them, and they both knew, in that moment, that it would at least make tonight better.
Slowly, they tested each other’s comfort–threading and unthreading their fingers, as if to ask, simultaneously, ‘Can I touch you like this?’. With each passing second of movement and consent, their exploratory caresses became the eager tracing of fingertips against the other’s palms. Somnia’s silver fingertips slid against the soft skin of Eris’s wrists and Eris ran her pale touch across the connective material of Somnia’s artificial joints. Their fingers came to glide feverishly in an awkward but meaningful concert. They manoeuvred through the spaces between each others’ fingers with gentle but purposeful pressure, and let their nails (or the roughened edges of artificial fingers in Somnia’s case) run across each others’ knuckles and the paths of veins up into their forearms. How could something like touching hands be so exhilarating, Somnia thought. Was it the fact that neither of them had experienced being touched by someone that loved them before? That going their entire risen lives without this feeling left their cells primed to burst from the simplest caress? They had kissed once. Was it three Dawnings ago now? Four? To this day, Somnia could still feel the cold of Eris’s lips against her own. Could still taste her. It kept her awake at night sometimes and visited her without warning in her dreams. What would this feel like in a month? A week? A day? Could Somnia’s skin memorise Eris’s touch in the same way? She hoped for as much. For a chance to remember warmth instead of the cold of Eris’s absence.
After a time, Somnia felt Eris take a shuddering breath. She turned again, rolling so that her back was once more pressed against Somnia’s chest. Without eyes to watch or lips to read, Somnia was at a loss for what it meant. Relief? Regret? As if Eris could read Somnia’s thoughts, she nuzzled her veiled cheek against Somnia’s arm, silently telling her to stop worrying. To relax. To be present in this moment. Her hand finally collapsed into Somnia’s own and resumed its gentle hold, lacing fingers between fingers.
“Are you warm now?” asked Somnia.
“I am,” confirmed Eris.
“I should let you get to sleep, then,” said Somnia.
“Do you think me incapable of sleeping with you by my side?”
“No,” said Somnia with a shake of her head. She sighed and her forehead came to rest against the back of Eris’s veil.
“Tomorrow will hurt,” said Eris quietly. Somnia felt the other woman’s thumb rub gently over the surface of her hand. “Let tonight heal.”
“Okay,” Somnia breathed. “Alright.”
“May your dreams bring you peace,” said Eris; her voice just above a whisper, her breath warm against Somnia’s arm. It sent the equivalent of a tingle up through her nerve response sensors.
“Yours, too,” said Somnia, knowing full well now that she would dream of nothing but the life Drifter had told them both to live.