Chapter Text
As usual, Decima was the last to teleport back up to her ship, lingering down amongst Io’s fetid radiolaria pools just long enough to irritate him. She wore what he had come to know as her ‘war suit’: black and gold robes with grandiose bejeweled wings springing from her upper back like a mechanical cherub; arms wrapped tightly with bandages and silver gloves. She had removed her catlike helmet, revealing the bright orange half skull face paint that was her signature mark, almost a brand burned into her deep auburn skin.
Snug tight around her upper right arm was the mark of the Gensym scribe. Time and again he had warned her that such frivolous trinkets provide no true protection in the face of battle; time and again she had rebuked him, with jeering words and improper wit, so callous and puerile that he could not help himself but rise to take the bait, bitter in his mouth as it left him spluttering indignities and shrieking across comm links at volumes warped into static.
Of late she had found other ways of silencing him, and though he complained about them with the same fervor she had come to know and expect (love?), he liked them much more: her nose against the muscles of his neck, her breath on his ear… even chaste kisses across the markings of his face, and her strong hands working the kinks out of his back.
“When was the last time you let someone take care of you?” she had asked.
Time immemorial.
Because this kept happening. It happened with his fireteam and it happened with Eris and it was happening once again.
She was riding off to war and leaving him behind.
Asher didn’t mind so much this time. He had his own battles to fight. Since the skies of his bone-riddled planet had become thick with the ships of the enemy, he had felt something amiss… something akin to peering down the barrel of a gun, though instead of a bullet in the chamber, it was the beady iris of some vein-shot eye. It was looking at the Vex and it was looking at him, too.
The dark ship sought to take the secrets of the Vex for itself.
But Asher Mir had already staked his claim, and he was prepared to defend it.
If Decima noticed the curtness in his goodbye, she did not say. Even in their familiarity, they had never made bidding farewell a dramatic scene. Usually, Decima received a comm from Ikora, her main handler, or from that thick-headed Exo that lead her fireteam, and her Ghost zapped her up to the Zygomatic Arch— “It is a horrendous name for a ship, Decima; I experience a vast sense of ancillary embarrassment on behalf of your vessel, inanimate object though it is,”— and she went whirling off into the far depths of space without so much as a by-your-leave— or, in her case, a smell ya later, Smasher!
She summoned her gilded, cat-faced helmet in a hail of subspace particles and spun it in her fingertips.
“See you soon, Asher,” she told him, smiling with that inexplicable confidence, the complete and total fearlessness that comprised her entity. Decima Zula was heading off to stare the Darkness in the face— capital D-for-Darkness, that timeline ending power which had smothered universes— unfazed.
Asher tried to formulate a response but the words promptly caught in his throat so he waved her away with a flick of his hand and a deep, chesty grumble. She was a flash of blue as he turned and just like that, one of the only people he had ever… cared… for… (the words snagged on his heart and his mind churned a mile a minute to explain them away) and had reciprocated his feelings, perhaps moreover, was gone for the final time.
He had not been able to say goodbye.
Was he a coward? He was about to embark on such a simple undertaking and yet he could not even bring himself to bid his dear friend farewell.
As Asher Mir watched the Zygomatic tear into orbit for the last time, it occurred to him that he had not expressed how truly satisfactory he had found some of her work.
Or, rather, her, her very being.
He briefly entertained the thought of leaving a letter but the sentiment felt shallow and left him feeling inadequate. Asher Mir was many things— genius, scholar, master of wit and repartee, engineer supreme— but inadequate was not one of them. He had to focus on the task at hand and mollify that aching bit in his chest (heart?) with the thought that there was someone better out there for her, and the knowledge that he would end up right where he belonged.
He soon stood at the gate of the Pyramidion. The Vex responded exactly how he knew they would. Decima laughing across the comms as he choked on his own words because she riled him so. He was prepared. Decima painting that scabrous orange skull all over the walls of his little cove, claiming herself Prankster extraordinaire. He piled their broken corpses on the plates and continued inside. Decima running face first into the shield repulsion of a Taken Phalanx and shattering her spine on the Warbase support pillars, the noise like tinkling glass caught in his ears forever.
He destroyed the first hundred Vex. Decima trying to hide the pallor of her skin after he inundated her up with Taken radiation, blaming her stumbles on untied shoes and biting her tongue to keep from slurring her words. Then he destroyed the second. Sitting on the cliffs behind his research station, spitting in her face, telling her he would not miss how she made him feel. A Minotaur roared into being before him and he crushed its radiolarian core with his metal fist. Decima grabbing the collar of his robes and dragging him down for a kiss— their first— reminding him to be alive while he was. He climbed forward over their twitching, still warm limbs. She pulls his ghastly robotic arm behind her and presses it against the small of her back, urging him to draw her forward, undeterred by the horror of his mutilation. He slipped in the radiolaria slathered rocks, the reflective liquid stinging his mortal flesh; there was blood in his mouth and his ears began to ring as though someone had just dropped a ship from orbit through Io's atmosphere. He clenched his eyes against the last views of his planet, his research, his Warlock, and continued.
He navigated the mazes of laser grids and moving doorways like an old friend returning home. Around him, the world danced and phased in and out of existence. He passed it all by, held safe in the calm of his broken heart.
The Vex watched him pass; he strode by them, moving unfettered through their witless red gaze. He went until he could feel the cold light upon his face as he looked up into the vast radiolarian lake, secured in an iridescent Penrose vortex.
He reached up his metal hand to take hold of the edge…
and jumped backward as the sound of scratching slap rifle shots and the eerie, echoing screeches and beeps of the Vex guards springing to life clawed him out of his self-martyring stupor. Hunched over like a child caught reaching into the cookie jar, Asher Mir scowled over his shoulder.
The air bent as another Minotaur strode through some gap in time-space and breached beside him. A moment later, he was tossed aside in a spray of sparks, radiolaria, and giant metal pieces as it exploded.
Asher hit the ground on his back and rolled once. It jarred a cough out of him; he pushed up on his hands and knees, glaring through his confusion and frustration. Had the agents of the Pyramid followed him? Come to take what was his? His stomach dropped to his feet. What was left of him but his own fate? What choice remained to him but how he died?
With a bi-tonal shriek, another Minotaur appeared, striding over him; it, too, fell with an explosion.
Something white-hot and smelling of metal hit the ground in front of him with a high-pitched tink. It rolled in a perfect semi-circle. Asher snatched the object in his metal hand and held it close for inspection.
It was a bullet. A large calibre of long-range bullet.
It was a Guardian’s bullet.
All at once, the breath went out of him and the temperature in the Pyramidion spiked to uncomfortable levels. Vex were pouring in from doors and rifts and white clouds of teleportation fields all around him, all converging in the way he came. A rhythmic knocking filled the air, growing faster and faster and echoed by the shrill cries of dying Vex and the glass-breaking sound of their bodies being ground to dust.
Stray sparks flew over towards him and burnt the ground. He stumbled to his feet, staring through the impenetrable horde of Vex soldiers…
…as an arching slash of pure fire tore through the air and smelted them immediately into useless heaps of ore.
The flame branded the ground and split the Vex like something out of an ancient story, some all-consuming power called down to smite evil. Asher shielded his eyes against the heat and light that dissipated just in front of him, glaring out across the chaos, half morbidly confused and half infuriated that his single victory was being taken from him…
…and saw her, flying above the masses, wings of flame spread from her like an avenging angel. And lo, she took her fiery sword and with a great swing smote another iteration of Vex, and another, until her eyes landed on him, and even under her helmet he could tell she was smiling.
“Get Asher and go!” Warbird-64’s voice crackled out through the air, and Asher realized the rhythmic, helicopter-like whooshing had been her cranking her massive, flaming hammer around in a circle. She, too, perched on the shore of the lake, but instead of tipping it as he had planned, she unfurled something great and red off her back and slung it over the edge, like a ladder.
“What are—,” you fools doing here, he tried to scream, but then Decima was beside him and the heat and magnificence of her stole the breath from his lungs. She turned to face him, couched her sword, and thrust forward. For a moment, Asher thought she meant to run him through, and she would right to, he thought— but the immolated blade struck out above his shoulder and drove deep into the heart of a Minotaur which had not even halfway manifested out of wherever the panicked Collective had summoned it from.
Time stood still as all around them was the explosion of radiolaria hearts and the heavy metal clunking of Warbird’s Sunbreaker hammer. The waves of Solar Light flowed from Decima like the Sun itself, and the warmth surrounded him, as though willed. Asher’s lips were dry and his eyes winced through the brightness, and he did not know whether to scold her for her impudence or drop to his knees and beg her for mercy. An unfamiliar feeling struck up through his stomach to his tight throat and he realized as he stared into this cleansing and vengeful flame that he was terrified, scared beyond death, and he could not place why. He could not see her eyes, golden and fierce, beneath her mask and he wanted to claw at the metal until he scratched it off and he could see her face, see her intentions, because if not to erase his inconsequential being from all realms of existence, what was she doing here?
“Decima!” Warbird’s voice cracked over the Warlock’s comm and the spell was broken. The Titan’s flames were fading and she was hauling ass back towards the way they had come in, a smoldering fire leeching from the tops of her shoulders and her back, trailing into gray smoke the longer it burnt. Around them, Goblins and Hobgoblins exploded and shattered as the now apparent sound of sniper fire was softly discernible in the distance.
Still, Decima’s Light raged on, showing no signs of stopping.
“You’re coming with me, little princess!” She yelled at him, and the impudent wretch bent and slammed her shoulder into his gut, hefting him bodily over her back like a sack of potatoes.
“Decima! No!” Distraught, Asher was reduced to pounding on her back and screaming intelligible insults into the wings of flame which wreathed from her— flames that now came to swallow him, but held no burn or even the slightest discomfort.
She leaped into the air now, clearing the height of entire Vex Minds in a single bound. From above, Asher watched the Vex boil and surge like an unforgiving tide; Warbird, by sheer force of will, was still barreling back towards the entrance gate. Decima swung her sword and helped to clear the path.
One leap landed them well out of the fray, where their fireteam’s third and final member cranked out shots with deadly precision. Asher had the wherewithal to realize her sniper rifle was impossibly old just as Decima landed and slung him to his feet.
“You— you inconsiderate fucking wretch!” Asher roared— he had to stoop a bit, even in all her flame and glory the top of her head still barely came to his nose— “Did you ever think, at all, once, in your stupendously selfish crusade, that maybe, this is what I wanted?!” He jammed his mechanical arm in the direction of the lake. “That… that moment has singularly been my undivided reason for existence ever since I was butchered, the only thing driving me forward, and for what? For what?” He was pacing now, two steps left, two steps right. Still, Helena was shooting. “For some incessantly prattling, idiotic dullard and her two plodding sidekicks to step in and steal from me the single iota of consequence my life is ever going to have?!” His voice had reached a fever pitch and his throat burned from yelling.
She just stared at him, unspeaking, unmoving, as the flames crowned around her. Their crackle, the blood in his ears, the boom clunk-clunk of Helena’s rifle an echo of his heartbeat the only sounds. His right hand twitched uncontrollably and there was a sting on his wrist and a dull spot on her helmet when he realized, too late, he had struck her in his rant.
“I thought you were supposed to be the smart one,” Helena said, sudden and quiet. Asher fixed her in a glare meant to melt steel, but she didn’t bother moving her eyes from the battle. “Instead, here you are screaming in the face of the person who saved you. Who also happens to be on fire.”
“You lummox,” Asher hissed, “I didn’t want to be saved.”
“You don’t always get what you want, Asher.” Boom, clunk-clunk. She sounded for all the world like a beleaguered mother explaining to her young child why his pile of Dawning presents was so small.
“Except for me,” Decima spoke, finally, her voice staticky behind the guise of her helmet. “I get what I want.”
Asher stared at her through one incredulous eyebrow. He spread his arms out wide— very dramatically. “This. Here. The Pyramidion. That lake. Them.” He pointed to the hoard of Vex merging on their location— Warbird had finally made the climb up to the little ledge they stood on and popped a tall shield to defend them from Vex rifle fire momentarily— “They are my life’s work. Knowing. Understanding. Fixing. Removing.” He clenched his mechanical fist so hard it sparked. “I will not let anyone or anything take that away from me.”
“You won’t have much of a choice, soon,” Warbird countered, stepping between the two fighting Warlocks like a bull charging through a Phaseglass field. “We gotta move. Now.”
Helena was up, quick as a dancer, but instead of walking away from the battlefield, she walked towards it. Asher was inclined to do so, too, but his body shifted a centimeter and Decima grabbed him by his upper arms.
Her mask phased away in puzzle-blocks of blue and she stared up at him, her eyes run orange-hot and the skull seeming to burn against her skin.
“I won’t lose you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion and meaning quite unlike her. Still she flowed with flame.
Asher found his eyes beginning to water, blamed it on the proximity to her vibrant Light. “I am dying, Decima,” he said, throat dry and chest clenched, “you could at least let me die with dignity.”
Helena dropped to one knee at the cusp of the ledge they perched on. Below, the Vex had begun to scale the metallic cliff face. Bright purple torch hammer rounds shook the earth around them.
Decima cupped his cheek with a warm, gloved hand. “Asher,” she said, running a thumb over the markings on his face, “you are far too clever and vivid to die with simple dignity.”
Helena brought the scope to her eye.
“You are going to stay alive and indignant for as long as you possibly can. And once we’ve fixed the world— 'cause we will— and your arm— we’ll fix that, too— then you can go out with dignity, ‘cause it’ll be whatever the hell you want it to be.”
Helena’s finger found the trigger.
Asher felt himself being pulled in towards Decima’s gravity like he so frequently was. His forehead crossed the field of her flame and pressed against hers. He found himself buying into that horribly logical fallacy of hope that she was right. She was right and things would be okay. She was right and he could have this, and more.
“I’ll tell ya what dignity ain’t,” Decima said, her voice a low, husky growl. “It ain’t dying at the bottom of a lake of Vex milk.”
Helena pulled the trigger and the sudden crack made Asher jump back. Almost in slow motion, he calculated the trajectory of the bullet, of what Warbird had done, of the chain of massive explosives the Exo had hurled over the edge of the radiolarian lake. There was a tremendous blast which put the Almighty dying to shame as the frame of the Penrose vortex deliquesced and the radiolaria began to spill, shocking and crisp, into the space between. Another shot set off another sequence of demolitions and soon a great wave of opaque, iridescent, microscopic silica-based organisms began to flow towards them.
The Vex just cresting the lip of their ridge turned to look at the commotion and watched their brethren on the ground get swallowed up in billowing, snapping light. Asher swore he saw their jaws drop, but he was so buzzy with relief— not that he would mention it— it was probably a visual hallucination.
What wasn’t a hallucination was Helena sprinting past them.
Decima turned to face the divulging lake and spread her arms wide, summoning a wall of fire that completely barred the way back towards the center of the Pyramidion. The world became bathed in a penumbra of orange light and Asher could not help but watch, open-mouthed, at the sheer force of it, for even when Decima grabbed his wrist and lifted into the air to fly back to the complex’s entrance, the wall stayed strong; and even when the entire contents of the lake slammed against it, filling the air with the horrendous sound of evaporating radiolaria, a million trillion tiny organisms, the biological heart of the Vex, vaporized so thoroughly they ceased to be, it did not break; even when Decima snatched Helena’s outreached hand and continued to haul them both towards the surface and the barrier was out of sight he knew it did not break.
Decima’s wings did not fail until they had emerged, all four of them, into the mouth of the Pyramidion where it looked out over a darkening Io. And even then they did not go out as a taxed heart or crumbling bridge would, with a complete and utter failure, but they went down slowly, piece by piece, as though she was purposefully storing them away for later use.
Warbird’s armor was fractured and broken, she was leaking from line rifle holes punched through her, and smoke billowed from her like coal that had been doused in cold water. She was the only one of the team who seemed to have taken damage. Helena was spotless aside from the dent in her shoulder from the kickback of her rifle, and Decima was pristine as the contents of a newly decoded engram.
Around them, the Vex were stirred into a tizzy; the ground beneath rumbled and threatened to give way, and the sky above was blackening with the Pyramid’s giant heft.
The four of them regarded the chaos in silence. Decima wrapped her arm around Asher’s waist.
“Like it or not, you’re one of us now,” she told him. It was less an observation and more a command.
He scowled at her. “I don’t remember volunteering to be a participant in your little World Savers club.” His voice was scathing out of practice; in truth, he was relieved. And terrified.
“Don’t think any of us volunteered,” Warbird chimed in, pushing herself off of the pillar of dead bodies he’d left in his wake at the start of this venture. “See you at home,” she said, trans-matting skyward in a haze of blue.
Helena followed without a word.
“You get drafted,” Decima said.
“More like dragged, screaming and crying, against my will,” Asher Mir grumbled.
“You sure did a lot of that, for someone who was trying to die with dignity,” Decima said, earning her an even more profound frown. She stole his words by spinning him in a circle, and her Ghost called them to the Zygomatic Arch as Io began to break apart.