Chapter Text
The stones strike the surface of the water, but do not skip, because a fatherless child is not taught to skip stones.
A father (not his father) stands behind him on the lakeshore, a few paces back, eyelessly watching the hills that rise around them, bathed in late afternoon light. His hand rests lightly on the hilt of the blade, unexalted at his side, and in the rare moments when he isn’t watching the hills, he watches the child who isn’t his.
The stones strike the water as though in anger, as though the boy who throws them wouldn’twant them to skip, even if he knew how to skip them. Pain and fear and helpless, childish rage find their expression in the stones he throws at the surface, at being orphaned yet again.
But Natah was never a mother. The Tenno cannot be a child. And Umbra is no longer a father, though those same feelings still stir from deep within him, as he watches the boy on the lakeshore.
“The worst part is the way he thinks he’s helping!”
Another stone strikes the water.
It’s not the first thing he’s said, but it’s the first proper outburst, the Tenno’s voice rising and cracking slightly with emotion, revealing the tantrum for what it is. He’s been ranting quietly to himself ever since he started throwing stones. His words have mostly been lost on the wind, mutterings caught on the breeze and blown to all corners of the Plains of Eidolon, though Umbra has caught and heard every one of them, and the anger and pain that they carry.
“Like he thinks I need her, like I ever needed her, because I didn’t and I don’t!”
Now he shouts loud enough that Umbra lifts his head slightly, alive and aware of his own volition. Unlike the puppets that fill the Orbiter, waiting obediently high above the surface of the Earth, and the mad, tragic Cephalon who cannot hear what’s being shouted about him, and the form he has chosen to synthesize as he passes on alerts and directives from all corners of the Origin system. As though he’s helping.
Lately the Operator has responded to fewer and fewer of these. Lately, he has instead chosen to spend his time on Earth, in Cetus or the plains around it, and in the flesh, rather than hidden away within the Somatic Link, endlessly dreaming.
And lately, perhaps for lack of anyone better—because he has been fatherless for millennia, and motherless for months now—he chooses Umbra’s company.
Another warframe would stand empty and dead on the shore behind him, an empty cage without a bird within. Another warframe would not wait or watch or guard the Tenno’s flank, or listen as he throws a tantrum on the shore of Gara Toht lake, and disturbs stones from where they’ve rested for millennia, to make ripples upon the water that last only moments.
“I found something to do without her. I found my own mission. And I’m doing it—we’re doing it—without her. And without him, pretending to be her.”
The Operator is only mad because he’s desperately lonely. And while it’s obvious that the Operator is mad, the only reason Umbra knows the Operator is lonely is because there’s only room for one mind within a warframe, and when the Tenno seizes control of Excalibur Umbra, Transference flows both ways. And the pair of them flow together, kindred in ways beyond blood and flesh.
And so Umbra prefers to stand on the shore at the Operator’s back, watching him rage impotently at the emptiness of his life without the Lotus. Umbra has borne fathomless rage and unimaginable pain and boundless grief across the course of countless centuries—and yet the quiet, hidden pain of a motherless child, forlorn and lost in an uncaring universe, seems somehow to wound him anew.
Another stone strikes the surface of the lake, and then falls, silent and meaningless, into its depths.