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He dreams of familiar hands and unfamiliar distance.
The air is saturated with pitch-black droplets like thick spring pollen, darker than congealed blood and just as viscous. Jolyon has never managed to brush his fingertips across one of those perfect little spheres or catch one cupped in his hands. They slip through his grasp like oil suspended in water. Like so many other things in his life.
It’s the third week, yet again. Two more days until he wakes up back at the start, wrestled out of sleep by the worst images his mind could conjure.
The Dreaming City isn’t carved out of time in static shapes; they all know this now. It’s rock and the curse is water, pouring down in endless rivulets, carving channels for itself to drive the flow. Maybe the right pebble could divert the whole thing. Maybe it couldn’t. There’s no sense wondering. Guardians flit in and out of the pattern, pushing it this way and that, overflowing the Well, and nothing ever really changes no matter how differently the Guardians act. Water wears away at stone no matter which direction it flows.
Jolyon fits himself against the scope of his rifle once more and breathes. He marks each exhale with a neat snap from the Supremacy and the distant crumple of a Scorn corpse, the crack of Hive bones, the scream of Taken returning back to whichever space-between-atoms they ripped themselves out of.
He sits up, pulls back the bolt, and lets the spent cartridge fall to the ground. He won’t find it there in two days. He might find it there in three weeks. He slides in a new magazine with a practiced motion, pulls back the bolt, feels more than hears the bullet in the chamber.
Feels more than hears the presence of something behind him.
The body falls solid to the ground when he sweeps its legs out, and he finds barely any opposition crawling over it to press the edge of an atom-fine knife to its neck.
And then a soft light breaks over him, and a voice says, “Oh! Excuse us!"
Jolyon backs off and stands. His knife stays nested firmly in his hand, like an old friend.
“It’s bad form to sneak up on someone.”
“We’re sorry,” the Ghost says, managing to be both cheerful and dejected. “We just thought the view would be nice up here.”
Its Guardian is silent, wary, still on the ground with their hands braced behind them, taut as a bowstring. Jolyon shakes his head and turns, picking up The Supremacy.
“Spot’s yours,” he says.
He walks past the Guardian and doesn’t offer to help them stand. They’re on their way to it anyways, sitting up slowly and fixing the impractical cloak draped around their squared, defiant shoulders.
“Sorry,” the Guardian murmurs, sounding decidedly unapologetic.
Jolyon's blood freezes.
"Petra." He walks in front of her before she can turn to face him. The sheer cliffside yawns next to them, dissolving into soft mist some hundred meters down. "You didn't say anything."
He doesn't want to say it out loud. Doesn't want to make it real. Whatever she sees in his face must be enough to clue her in as to what he means.
"Jolyon," she says carefully, like he's something fragile, "after our last…" She trails off. Jolyon waits. "I didn't think you'd want to know."
"You didn't think—" He closes his eyes. His chest feels raw, flayed open, fingertips numb. “You didn’t think.”
Blood rushes in his ears as he opens his eyes again, vision swimming. Petra’s brows are furrowed, her jaw tight, and her lone eye is filled with sympathy.
“Jolyon, the other Guardians—” She glances around and steps close. “He keeps away from them for good reason. Be careful.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asks bitterly, not bothering to keep his voice down the way she is. “No, actually, don’t bother. I don’t want to know. You’re right. I never cared about–”
Petra grabs his arm.
“You cared about him,” she says fiercely, “and I won’t let you lie to yourself or anyone else about that. I’m sorry.” She squeezes his arm, gently, but doesn’t let go. “I’m sorry.”
She's never really understood him. It's no surprise that that still hasn't changed.
He slides out of her grasp and turns away, not breaking stride as he grabs an extra box of ammo and puts himself on the roster for three days' worth of patrols.
“You again,” Jolyon says curtly.
He doesn’t need this today. The Dreaming City breathes beautiful, open breaths, free of corruption. The sky is multifaceted and clear and cold. His assignment is taking him on his favorite patrol beat. His magazines are full and ready to drive out the Hive and Scorn lurking across the Mists. And now—
“I didn’t go looking for you,” the Guardian supplies, low, defensive. “I was trying to find someplace without Guardians.”
Jolyon doesn't know what to say to that.
The Ghost spins its shell, blinks, and looks between them before nudging the Guardian’s shoulder.
“People shake hands to introduce themselves! And make friends!” it supplies warmly, and flits around to butt up against the Guardian’s elbow, making his hand jerk forward an inch.
Neither Jolyon nor the Guardian move.
The Ghost blinks and looks between them again, expectant, joyful, shedding soft light between them as it bobs in the air. Jolyon sighs.
“Your name?” he asks. He wonders what he could possibly offer in return that wouldn’t tear him apart to hear in a familiar voice.
“I don’t have one.”
That throws Jolyon off more than anything he could have braced himself for.
"I see," he replies. His voice is clipped and terse, almost rude. The alternative would be worse. "Well met, Guardian. I am a Crow in service to the Queen."
The Guardian is silent for a moment. Jolyon can still picture the thoughtful, piercing look Uldren used to wear, but the way he lowers his chin – bracing, unyielding – is something entirely different. The Guardian holds out his hand to shake.
"Well met, Crow," he echoes, and in the familiar grip of his fingers, the weight of a palm that has touched him and held him, killed for him and bled for him, Jolyon drowns.
The Guardian is again, suddenly, with a rush like air into lungs, like fire bursting to life. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to resurrection. His boots find purchase on solid ground, splattered with a mix of acrid blood and Dark Ether, and he looks up to find the Crow in service to the Queen staring at him with a mix of—
Horror. Revulsion. Fear. Eyes wide, face pallid. So familiar ground, then. The Guardian finds his stomach sinking, even though he had no reason to think this man a friend. Ten awkward minutes of picking off Scorn in the same general vicinity does not indicate anything even remotely resembling friendship, and yet, and yet, the Guardian finds himself extinguishing a thin flame of hope.
“Are you injured?” the Guardian asks, even though there’s nothing he could do if that’s the case. He doesn’t know anything about first aid. His Ghost has healed everything that’s ever hurt him. There’s blood – real blood, not the dead sludge that’s pumped through Scorn husks – on the Crow’s hands, staining the crescents of his cuticles.
“No,” the Crow replies, breathless, like he can’t get enough air into his lungs, and he rubs the blood off onto his thighs. “You saved my life.”
He can be resurrected in a matter of seconds. A Corsair can’t. That’s some fairly easy math. And besides, the Corsairs in this city have treated him nothing like all the other Guardians. Too sad or withdrawn to offer any proper companionship, but better than open cruelty by far. If saving one life keeps him in their good graces, he could stand to do it more often.
“You don’t owe me a debt,” the Guardian says.
The Crow doesn’t say anything for an uncomfortably long time. He doesn’t move, either; he just sits, still curled halfway over his rifle and twisted back, like he’d been when the Guardian had shouted a warning about an incoming Raider before diving in front of him and taking all that Void-flecked shrapnel in his stead.
“I don’t owe you a debt,” the Crow finally repeats, and shakes his head as if in disbelief. “Well, then. Out of the goodness of my heart, let me help you with any of your– you call them errands?”
“Bounties!” Ghost chimes in. “We call them bounties! They’re mostly pretty easy, but–”
He waves his Ghost away, hoping the movement doesn’t look frantic. Yes, they’re easy for the most part, simple tasks, but if this man is offering to spend time with him– to be allies, to be companions, to be two people working together without any of the strings that he seems to trail no matter how hard he tries to cut them off—
“Thank you,” he says, words rushed, and he tries to tamp down on the tiny swell of hope rising in his chest. “I’d like your help.”
Later, much later, his Ghost remarks that the Crow had been so startled by the Guardian’s death, as if he’d never seen a rez before. That his hands had flitted over every wound that’d been meant for him, not for the Guardian. That he’d stared up at the Ghost with panic and hurt and a million other things on his face before the Ghost had reassured him that everything is okay, and that they just need a few seconds to gather up enough Light to come back.
The Guardian doesn’t ever figure out what to do with that knowledge.
Jolyon isn’t sure if he’s doing this to prove a point to Petra, or to himself, or to the memory of times long past.
Definitely partially to Petra. It had been clear from their first (and only, until recent events) conversation on the subject that she hadn’t understood just what he’d said to her, not really. He’s angry at her decision to keep this from him, and it's exhausting.
There’s no sense in denying that he’s doing it for himself, too. Proving that he’s strong enough to face this new reality. Selfish enough to want to hear his voice again. Weak enough to fear being shown what’s under that helmet.
He’s not obligated to do this. He’s not even sure if he wants to, if it’s worth the dull, constant press of garbled emotion that rises in him with every minute he spends in the Guardian’s company. He feels stuck and aimless and drifting and unmoving. At least like this, he can lose himself to the simplicity of an uncomplicated task alongside someone else.
A brief glint of light catches his eye. The fog out past the Spine of Keres is thin, just enough to soften a shape but not erase it, and Jolyon watches as a dark silhouette resolves itself into familiar broad shoulders. The Guardian’s head is turned towards his Ghost in conversation, and then the Ghost spots Jolyon and bobs in excitement, starlight glinting off its Awoken-made shell. Familiar in its unfamiliarity.
To hell with it all. The life of every Awoken on the Reef and in the Dreaming City has been thoroughly destroyed. There’s nothing to be done except build a new normal from whatever rubble he can manage.
So Jolyon nods at the Guardian when he gets close enough, and calls in greeting, “Guardian.”
The Guardian tilts his helmet up, the fine silk of his hood glowing in the diffuse light that cuts through the fog, and he calls back, “Crow.”
True to his reputation, Jolyon fills their time together – irregular hours, though slowly growing in length – with tales, tall and otherwise. Stories of that one time, with some Corsairs, a Paladin, another Crow; a narrow escape, a flashy trick, some unlikely fumbled comedy. (Not the time with Errol Mayz and Petra and Uldren and Nascia and the Archon – that one’s best told over good food and better drink, and they have neither. But, Jolyon thinks, maybe one day.)
The Guardian listens in silence. At first, Jolyon thinks it’s because he’s disinterested. Soon, he figures out it’s because the Guardian has nothing to offer in return.
Later, he realizes that the Guardian is angry as all hell.
It comes slowly: first as a trickle, a quiet snap when yet another Guardian veers away from him, and then a stream as a whooping trio blazes carelessly past them into a temple and a stabilizer fin slices his arm open to the bone, and as a flood when someone looses a Void arrow that lodges in his chest and eats away at his limbs, when he’d been doing nothing more than coaxing a baryon bough into blossoming again. His anger is a shimmering explosive knot of frustration that, much like any star, will take millenia to burn out.
The stories come slowly, too, to fill in the gaps: about how the Guardian has been shot and stabbed and decapitated and blown up, has woken up to his guts in his hands, his limbs mangled, his body riddled with bullets. Has woken up to befuddling monologues about guilt and temptation, disjointed and senseless tirades about loss and grief and love. There is plenty for him to be angry about. Plenty to resent. At least in the Dreaming City, the Guardian confesses, the Corsairs treat him solely as the outsider he is.
Jolyon wants to strip him bare, carve him open, prove to him that this city bleeds the same blood he does. That nothing the Guardians have done to defend the Awoken makes a difference if this is how they treat one of their own.
Instead he watches as the Guardian throws himself into waves of Hive without an ounce of fear or self-preservation, as he dances into a pack of crawling Scorn and sets off an explosion that makes Jolyon's ears ring even so many meters back, and then his Ghost brings him back to life without a scratch or splash or acid blood on his armor and he does it all over again.
The Guardian is angry. No careful, polished veneer, no silver-tongued civility.
Jolyon finds that likes it.
"Wait," breathes the Crow, and presses a hand against the Guardian's shoulder.
It is the first gentle, careful touch he has felt in this life.
He feels dizzy, incorporeal, like the only thing grounding him is the pressure of the Crow's hand through slim armor. It feels like he can suddenly breathe, or like he suddenly can't, and all the blood and Light in his veins is flowing in the opposite direction.
The Scorn Chieftain finally lets out a low, frustrated growl, and waves his company of snarling Raiders and Wraiths past the nook hiding them both. The Crow doesn't move his hand until the sound of their lumbering footsteps fades.
"That could have been worse," he murmurs.
The Guardian huffs in annoyance.
"I could have easily killed all–”
"You could have," the Crow interrupts, "but not me. Do think of us poor, unfortunate mortals from time to time, Guardian."
His eyes are cold, mouth hard. The Guardian matches his steady gaze. This is an old injury he's prodded open, that much is clear. He opens his mouth to offer something – a rebuttal, an apology, an explanation he doesn't know, something, anything to feel that soft touch again – and then a prickling awareness presses against him, pulling at his Light. He turns, glancing over the far end of the cavern, but there's nothing save for a handful of dim lamps and flickering mothforms coming out of hiding, now that the Scorn and their flames have moved on.
"What is it?" The Crow's voice has fallen soft again. The Guardian wonders how utterly stupid of him it would be to lean closer.
"Taken," he replies. That endless hunger is impossible to mistake, even distant and faint. And if he's right– "I think the Scorn are about to run right into them."
And there, right on cue: a roar of outrage, matched by screams that echo between his ears and deep in his bones. It's chased by a flash of fiery heat, and the sharp detonation of Arc charges. Two armies made of corpses trading blows.
"That's our exit blocked, then." The Guardian stands and shakes out his hands, works the discomfort of a crouch out of his knees.
"And what's your plan now?" the Crow asks, resigned.
"You, poor unfortunate mortal that you are, hang back," he says, smiling even though the Crow can't see it, "and watch me dance."
He sinks into some elaborate bow his body concocts on the spot, or maybe remembers from a life long past, and the Crow's eyebrows twitch upwards in surprise as the Guardian sheathes himself in Arc light and leaps forward with two shimmering blades in his hands. Nothing missing but some music, he thinks, and he begins to hum quietly to himself as his sharp Light meets dark nothingness.
“Do you know who I am?” the Guardian asks one night, when he and Jolyon sit around a fire on the sheerest cliffside ringing Rheasilvia. “Do you know what I’ve done?”
Jolyon has never heard this voice ask this question in this tone. Uldren had always used it as a lure, as the final piece of his snare; as the moment before watching someone fall spectacularly. Do you know who I am, he’d ask, eyes cold and a smirk flitting across his lips.
This is different. Jolyon’s mouth is dry.
“Yes,” he answers.
"Is it a secret?"
"No. I wager the whole system knows what you've done."
"A secret from no one but me." He laughs. It's not bitter, or broken, but darkly gleeful, breathless. Familiar. Firelight licks up his armor, setting the soft silk of his cloak aglow. Dangerous, Jolyon thinks. Beautiful. “Fine. Let it be a secret.”
The Guardian watches the flames. Jolyon watches him.
“You don’t want to know?” he asks. Just to be sure.
“I remember nothing,” the Guardian says, and the bitterness finally creeps back into his voice. “Even if someone told me I’d committed the worst of crimes–” Jolyon does not flinch or blink. “–I remember nothing. You could tell me anything, and it wouldn’t make a difference.” Fire reflects off the edge of his helmet, hard and bright, and he reaches under his vest. Something thin and glittering falls across his fingers. “I woke up with a burial shroud, a ring, and no knowledge of anyone who mourned this body. Or if anyone even did.”
The slim band shines in the firelight.
Time stops.
Jolyon can’t move. Can’t breathe.
The Guardian doesn’t even notice. He just shoves the ring and the chain back under his vest, and his cloak soaks up the warm glow of firelight, casting it back softly onto the contours of his helmet.
“I’m sorry,” Jolyon whispers, throat dry, tongue clumsy. Firewood snaps between them, and casts a shower of embers into the air. “I’m sorry.”
The Guardian stares at him for a long time. It’s impossible for him to understand the scope of what Jolyon is apologizing for. Jolyon himself isn’t quite sure. But eventually the Guardian lowers his head, and the firelight softens the movement into something gentle.
“You’d be the first,” he says, a little ruefully, and Jolyon feels a very dangerous seed start to bloom in his chest as he smiles back.
“Tell me about the strangest place you’ve ever been,” the Guardian asks, reclining against a patch of moss. A baryon bough bends towards him, like it’s photosynthesizing and he’s the sun. He pulls its blossoms into new constellations absentmindedly.
The questions are commonplace, now, almost a game. Tell me about your most dangerous sorties, he’ll ask, about your wildest missions, and Jolyon is always happy to indulge and spin him a tale. But this is different, and Jolyon wishes he could have hesitated before replying, “The Black Garden.”
“I’m not sure what that is,” the Guardian confesses, but his voice is bright.
“I’m not sure either.”
“What was it like?”
The thrill in his voice makes Jolyon sick. He doesn’t know any words that could properly convey what the Garden had done to him. To them both.
“Horrifying,” he finally decides.
“You went alone?”
The Guardian’s curiosity turns tamer, more polite, but Jolyon feels no less sick.
“I was with—”
He can’t do this.
His vision blurs and the moss around him grows into new branches of unexplored mathematics. Jolyon clenches his fists and looks up at the frozen starlight instead.
“I was with someone I should have done better by,” he says curtly. "The Garden took him from me."
The Guardian gives him a long look, full of a pity that doesn't sting, and then the broad, smooth brow of his helm lowers, glinting.
"He's been gone a long time," Jolyon continues. He doesn't know why he's telling him this. What the point is. If he's doing it to preempt empty offers of sympathy or… for some other reason. "I've done my mourning."
It's true. Whether he likes it or not. Uldren is dead. He's been dead. And the man before him is a testament to that.
"I'm sorry, Crow," the Guardian says, quietly, and the baryon bough weaves itself across his palm, bright fibers prickling forward to slowly bridge the gap between the two of them. It's a cool night, but not uncomfortable. Something about the Guardian repels the creeping Blight that lurks in the darker corners of the Dreaming City, and it's a welcome comfort. A breeze ruffles the soft grass between them, making the bioluminescent lichens flicker under new shadows.
"My name is Jolyon," he says.
Surprise fill the Guardian's pause, and he stills. Another breath of wind sighs between them, and the Guardian's voice is warm as he murmurs back, "Jolyon."
And just like that, weight he hadn't been aware of is lifted off his shoulders.
Jolyon finishes his hike up the knoll, slowing as he approaches the familiar silhouette seated at the crest and calls his usual greeting.
The Guardian turns and brushes his hood off of his bare head.
The air leaves Jolyon's lungs as if it had never been there. His chest feels like it's collapsing, crushed by the sudden weight of gravity, but it's not the planet's core pulling him in.
The Guardian is not smiling. It’d be worse if he was, Jolyon thinks. His fingertips are numb. The Guardian watches him, sharp but not careful, curious but not wary.
“Why lose the helmet?”
The Guardian shrugs.
“You know who I am,” he replies. “It makes no difference to you. And no one else is around to care."
Jolyon hasn't thought of him as Uldren in so long, so long, and now it feels like reality is collapsing all over again. Reminding him of this sick joke the Traveler has played on them all. Reminding him that he's been happy to be played. That he’s—
Jolyon takes a slow breath.
The Guardian wears his hair pulled back, as if the universe remembers all the times Jolyon had told Uldren to get his hair out of his eyes. It's in a knot at the crown of his head, mussed from hood and helmet, baring one gleaming strip of coarse silvery-gray and leaving no shelter for the scar between his brows. An ugly, soft whorl, brutally precise in its placement, framed by familiar, straight brows, just slightly furrowed.
Jolyon is silent for far too long.
The Guardian looks away.
"It does make a difference," Jolyon finally manages. "Because it's you."
"Me?" He laughs bitterly. "Just what am I, then, if you're looking at me like that? "
"A Guardian," Jolyon replies. The word is heavy on his tongue from the weight of altogether too many truths. “A friend.”
He kisses Jolyon in the Gardens of Esila.
No, that’s not quite correct.
What happens is:
Jolyon’s body knows every crag and crevice of the Dreaming City and he climbs the warm sheer tumbles of rock without another thought. By contrast, the Guardian is hilariously graceless. Even assisted by quick, sharp pushes of air under his feet, he can’t quite make it up the cliff, and Jolyon finds himself fighting back laughter at the mix of panic and resignation on the Guardian’s face when he makes (and fails) his fifteenth attempt.
“There’s a handhold–” he starts, for about the fifth time, and the Guardian snarls, “I know,” jumps, and promptly misses it by about five inches. Jolyon is no longer able to hold back a snort, nor is he able to keep the smile off of his face.
The Guardian shoots him what should be a nasty glare, but it’s spoiled by the leaves littered all over his cloak. This time, Jolyon catches him by the wrist when he jumps again, and finally, finally, the Guardian’s feet find purchase, his other hand finds the little lip, and Jolyon hauls them both upright. His fingers linger around the Guardian’s wrist one second too long.
“Saved only by your grace,” the Guardian says wryly. He catches Jolyon’s hand before it can slide away, and cuts into a familiar, deep bow. “You have my gratitude.”
Warm lips graze the backs of Jolyon’s fingers. The breath stills in his lungs.
Hours later, his fingers still tingle with the echo of soft pressure.
Jolyon kisses him deep in Harbinger’s Seclude, where the light filters in softly and the lofty halls echo with silence.
The kiss is slow and deep and Jolyon thrills at all the unfamiliar ways the Guardian presses back against him: the dauntless push of his fingertips through Jolyon's hair, the inescapable pull of his palm curved around the back of Jolyon's neck, the soft yielding pressure of their thighs as they twist together on this ledge overlooking a garden of pavilions.
"Tell me," the Guardian murmurs against his lips, and Jolyon thinks yes, anything, "that this isn't about whoever I was before."
Jolyon opens his eyes to the Guardian's bright stare.
"Yes," Jolyon says, feeling drunk and slow, "No, I— yes, at first." The Guardian's eyes are brassy and hard, like embers. "But you're not him."
"You hated me before, then," the Guardian says. It's not quite a question.
"No," Jolyon breathes, "no. No." His clumsy fingers fumble at the Guardian's neckline, dipping under soft, thick silk to find the chain he knows is there.
The Guardian's hand stops him before he can draw out the full length of the chain.
"So then tell me," the Guardian repeats, "that it's not about who I was before." His eyes are burning. Jolyon feels more and more intoxicated by the second.
"It's not," Jolyon says, and then again, it's not, muffled in a breath against the Guardian's lips. It's not. It's not. It's about sparks of Arc dancing along clever fingers, about the reckless freedom of fearlessness, about curiosity and anger and loneliness. About the way he'd kissed Jolyon's fingertips with a wry, amused smile unlike anything Jolyon had ever seen.
“Good,” he whispers back, and his eyes are full of a fragile hope that makes Jolyon ache in a way he never thought he could feel again.
“...lyon. Jolyon.”
Jolyon cracks an eye open. The Guardian is still sitting next to him, one leg resting gently against his side where he’s stretched out on a soft patch of grass. All of his guns are still spread out in neat groupings, with a small pile of dismantled material and Glimmer off to one side. He’s got two sniper rifles in front of him and a frown on his face.
“That one,” Jolyon says, points, and stifles a yawn. “Fluted barrel. Load it with armor-piercing rounds.” He resettles his hands behind his head and closes his eyes again. The starlight is so warm here on these weeks where the Blights are at their weakest.
“No,” the Guardian says, and Jolyon squints over at him again. “That’s not what I… Which one was it?”
“That one,” Jolyon says, and pushes himself upright. The Guardian sets the rifle in question aside into a separate pile, then turns to look at him.
“If I left the Dreaming City, would you come with me?”
“I don’t know if I can leave,” Jolyon says.
“I know.” The Guardian’s hand brushes against his thigh.
“I want to see Pallas again.” Jolyon touches the back of the Guardian’s hand, and his fingers twitch under Jolyon’s touch. “Vesta. The Tangled Shore.” He smiles wryly. “I’d love to see what that Fallen bastard’s done to it. I would. If I could.”
“Maybe this curse will break soon,” the Guardian says. There’s no hope in his voice. Just the grounded reality that this may well persist forever. Jolyon pushes stray hair off of his temple and up into the small knot he’s taken to wearing, and the Guardian leans into his touch. “Maybe I’ll be the one to break it.”
“I think,” Jolyon replies, letting the Guardian interrupt him with a kiss against his palm, then the corner of his mouth, and then, finally, softly against his lips, “that it’d only be fitting.”
The Guardian smiles, and they sit together, trading kisses drenched in warm starlight.