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It isn’t painful when you lose your Light. Ghaul sucks it from you before you realize what he’s doing, and at first all you feel is surprise. Then all of the fear you’ve felt since the invasion of the Tower comes rushing back as you fall to the ground and see Ghaul stomping towards you, towards your Guardian, and you cannot speak or move or cry out for her to run, Guardian, leave me and get away while you can -
But she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. She reaches out and drags you to her, your shell scraping against the metal floor as she pulls you into her, underneath her, keeping you safe - until Ghaul punts her across the Tower, sending you flying out of her grasp and down into the City below.
The last thing you see as you fall is her reaching down, all her focus on you even as Ghaul looms behind her, lit by the flames that wreath the Tower.
You count it as a mercy that you hit the ground before you have to watch your Guardian die.
You are hiding under a bridge, watching your home crumble to pieces around you, looking for your Guardian. You have found bodies - too many bodies - none of them hers, but you’re weak enough that you can’t tell until you get too close. You can’t believe she’s among them. You won’t. And even if she is - well - you’ll find her. You can do that much. You can be with her, in the end.
“Guardian!!!” Calling out is dangerous, the Cabal could find you, Ghaul could find you, but you don’t care. If she’s out there - if she can hear you - “This is awful. This can’t be happening.” But it can, it is, it’s a living nightmare and you’re trapped in the middle of it.
Debris clatters, and you see a hunched figure catch itself on a pile of rubble. You’re moving before you’ve even confirmed her identity, you know it’s her, it has to be. You don’t realize you don’t believe yourself until you see that it is, it is her, and relief washes over you like a Sunbreaker’s fire.
“You’re alive!” you gasp, and are choking out the next part before you can stop yourself. “I thought I’d lost you.”
She gives you a weak wave, waggling her fingers in the way that means I’m okay, don’t worry about it. But she is hurt, so hurt, and you do what you can but it isn’t enough. You try to explain, nearly tripping over your words in your desperation for her to understand.
“I can - heal you, but I can’t resurrect you. Not since…” You’re struggling to put the situation into words. “Guardian, the Light is gone. They’ve taken the City, the Traveler… everything… The Red Legion is killing powerless Guardians. We have to get out of here.”
For a horrifying moment, you’re afraid that she won’t listen to you. That she’s going to shrug off your words and claw her way back up to the top of the Tower to take it back or die trying - because that’s what she does, that’s what she’s always done, but this time she only has one chance and you need her not to take it.
Before you can put any of that into words, before you can even think to, she’s ducking into a tunnel and leaving the City and Tower behind. You want to thank her, but you stay silent instead.
The camp of dead Guardians makes you sick with fear. You should feel bad; you should mourn their deaths. But all you can think about is what killed them, and the fact that Guardians now can be killed, and the way your Guardian is lackadaisically tugging a gun from the grip of a corpse.
“Guardian,” you whisper. “If - if you die… I can’t resurrect you.”
You know she can hear you. She must be able to hear you. But she doesn’t respond, busy checking the magazine in the weapon she retrieved.
“We need to be very careful,” you emphasize - and of course, at almost the same moment, the camp is beset by Cabal war beasts.
Your Guardian doesn’t respond, but of course by now you’ve learned to translate the way she communicates without words. All the answer you need is in the way she keeps her distance from the beasts, fighting from afar and avoiding the risky close-quarters combat that she’s used to.
Every encounter in the Twilight Gap adds to your tension and stress. There are so many ways your Guardian could die, outside of being shot by the Cabal or eaten by a war beast. There are environmental hazards - cliffs, rock slides, the snow. You curse the fact that your Guardian is a Human, without the naturally cold blood of the Awoken or immunity to the elements like an Exo; then you bless the fact that she is a Hunter, with the survival skills to build a fire and the energy to keep moving long past what she should have been able to tolerate.
You hover anxiously nearby one night, watching her huddle over the small fire she was able to create. The sight of her breaks your heart. Your Guardian, who you rose from a scrapyard on Earth, who carried you with her as she slaughtered Vex, Fallen, Cabal; as she conquered the Taken, as she slaughtered Oryx, cutting the feet from beneath the bodies of gods before they even learned how to stand on them. Your Guardian, once emblazoned with glory, clothed in the spoils of her conquests and accomplishments only days before - and now she is wrapped in rags, beaten and bruised despite your best efforts to heal her, gazing out over the fire with one hand on the hilt of the gun she wrested from the grip of a dead comrade.
Something shrieks in the night, and you spin wildly to look in that direction, to scan for danger - to do something, anything, even if it’s just to give your Guardian time to escape -
Darkness engulfs you, and you nearly shut down from panic before your scanners recognize that you’re covered in a familiar fabric, that you know the touch of the fingers gently cupping you in their grasp.
“Guardian,” you whisper, peeking out from beneath the part of her cloak she draped over you. She’s taken her helmet off, and you can see yourself reflected in her eyes. You look the way you feel - small, helpless. Useless. For her part, your Guardian looks exhausted; you are constantly monitoring her vitals, you know she is hungry, tired, cold. You wish there was something you could do.
“I’m - ” you begin. But before you can get the sorry out, she shakes her head, pink bob dusting against the freckles that cover her cheeks.
You watch her, unsure of what she means: don’t apologize? You should apologize? But before you can work yourself up into a frenzy overanalyzing the simple gesture, she tilts her head to the side and winks at you.
“Guardian,” you wail, because she is smiling and you are crushed with the weight of the knowledge that one misstep on your part could mean you never see that smile again.
She brings up her hands and gives you a double thumbs-up. Then she picks up her cloak and wraps it around you, like you’re cold and she’s trying to warm you up. You squawk as she starts to roll you up in the fabric.
“You need this,” you insist. “I’ll be fine, but Guardian, you -- !”
She doesn’t listen to you, arranging your bundled form so that you are nested in her lap and looking outward into the night. You could transmat yourself, of course - out of her grasp, back to the perimeter of the camp, patrolling for enemies - but you can’t quite bring yourself to do it. So instead you stay with your Guardian, listening to her breath deepen and slow as the night drags on; and for the first time since the Red Legion invaded, you feel like you’re home.
The Golden Gun burns in your Guardian’s hand. You can feel the fire of a thousand hundred suns coursing through her veins, searing her blood; the inferno spills from her eyes, her tongue, bleeding out of every orifice as she basks in the Light and tears down enemies with bullets made of starlight.
And you are there, too: you can feel the heat of her flames as it washes over you, watch her leap and swivel and take out the Fallen with immaculate aim. You tap into her nervous system and feel the pounding of her heart, the race of her adrenaline, the explosion of life, and something stutters inside you as you realize just how much of her you’d lost when Ghaul took her Light.
The Shard gave us a gift! you had said. Let’s use it. And you had known that she would, but you hadn’t known that it would be like - this. Like the two of you are coming back to life, after lingering too long at the edge of death. The Light feels like the embrace of an old friend, wrapping through you, around you, and you want to let out a triumphant scream. Instead, you settle for being smug as the last enemy falls.
“If that was a test, I think we passed.” There are no bodies; a shot from the Golden Gun has the same effect as setting foot on the surface of the sun. Your Guardian spins her hand cannon around her fingers before tucking it back in its holster. It’s a whimsical display that you haven’t seen her exhibit in a long time.
As she walks toward the portal, you hover over her shoulder, practically bubbling over with delight. “It’s amazing that even a corrupted Shard can still do so much good!” you gush. That’s what you say; what you mean is you’re alive, you’re alive, I don’t have to be afraid anymore because we’ve regained the Light and if you die I can bring you back and you’ll be alive.
Your Guardian has no voice, and you admire her no less for it. But you can feel every fiber of her being straining to scream in outrage as Ghaul becomes an ethereal being of the Light, looming between the Traveler and Earth like a horrifying breed of avenging angel. You watch in horror as he monologues over his victory: you can’t defeat that. Nobody can defeat that. Certainly not your Guardian, who has already been run ragged, has not stopped firing her gun from the moment she set foot back in the City and cannot be expected to continue. She is running on pure adrenaline, burning herself out, you and the Light the only things keeping her on her feet. She is the City’s last hope, the Champion of the Vanguard, and there is nothing more that she can do.
Then you hear a click, and realize that she is reloading her gun.
“No,” you gasp, and then you scream it, because for the first time in a long time you feel the fear that nearly drowned you when the Tower fell. This is your Guardian, preparing to go up against an enemy she cannot hope to defeat. She plans to fight the Light itself - and if she is killed, you don’t dare to believe it would let you bring her back.
She isn’t listening. Everything seems to slow down as you watch her pull up her hand cannon, leveling her right arm in front of her chest like a table and using it to steady her trigger hand. She is going to do it. She is going to shoot Dominus Ghaul, the Cabal who has become a god by consuming yours, in the face. And maybe that will buy some time - time for the Vanguard to do something, time for the Traveler to free itself - but the cost will be her life.
And yours, of course, because no Ghost worth their Light would leave their Guardian to fight an impossible battle alone.
Then the Traveler does free itself, consuming Ghaul in all his arrogance, and you’ve never felt glee over the death of another living being like you do now. You turn to your Guardian on the deck of the Immortal, and she flips her Sunshot around and slots it into the holster strapped to her thigh before raising a loosely curled fist to you. You need no further invitation to bump yourself against it, maybe a little harder than necessary, filled with all the enthusiasm and relief and delight of saving the galaxy.
“Another job well done,” you tell your Guardian. She nods, then gestures to the deck of the Immortal in a pointed manner.
“O-oh,” you stammer. “Uh, good question. How are we going to get back? Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.”
Your Guardian waves a hand vaguely. The motion would mean nothing to anyone else, but you are connected to her neural network, know the intent behind her most subtle microexpressions, and so you can translate it just fine:
You always do.
You failed your Traveler, Ghaul had roared. You let your City die. Give up. You have nothing to fight for. You have nothing to die for. And yet your Guardian overcame, conquering every obstacle he threw at her, even with an apparent lack of motivation.
So you are not surprised by what you see in your memory banks, trying to recover the time Sagira took from you. The Infinite Forest is a forbidden terror, one of the primary reasons for Osiris’s banishment, incomprehensible to the mind of man – and your Guardian plowed through it with single-minded determination. She even made it look easy. You bristle at Sagira’s compliments, at how contrived and fake they sound. You don’t have to try to impress me. I’m already impressed.
She wasn’t trying to impress anyone, you wish you’d been able to snarl. Certainly not you – body-snatcher, Guardian thief. That’s just the way she is. Brilliant. Amazing.
“Incredible,” you say. You don’t realize you’ve said it out loud until your Guardian eyeballs a jump, leaps, and turns out to have miscalculated. Her body falls into a Mercurian abyss, and you flinch away from the impact.
“Incredible,” you mutter, but the irritation in your tone is fond. You bring her back to life, because you can, because the Light of the Traveler bleeds from both of you, because of course you do.
Because after all, after everything, what are you without your Guardian?