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The daysweeksmonthsyears before Crow are not measured by the methods the Risen use to mark them but in bodies. There was a lot of death before the Traveler, and a great deal more after it arrived. There is no shortage of bodies to go through.
In his first thirty years he scans twenty thousand bodies. In approximately forty-four percent he encounters someone or something else that is alive.
His partner probably is meant to be a human or an Awoken as most seem to be. Is he certain? No, but he knows none of the bodies prior are his partner. None so far he’s scanned so far have felt right. There’s a whole universe out there; the Risen say the Traveler has been all over it, running.
He is a part of the Traveler. The humans, the Risen, they tell stories among themselves, about the places the Traveler has been, what it must have seen. It sounds fascinating, and for a moment, all he can think about is how much his partner will miss while they’re looked for. There’s so much that’s out there: maybe they’re not even a human, or an Awoken at all. The Fallen used to be the Traveler’s chosen; maybe his partner is one of them.
So, he begins to scan as much as he can. He runs his scans against Golden Age databases and books and anything he finds in his travels. He asks humans and Awoken questions when the data isn’t there. There’s so much. All he has is time but the world is very big and he is very small and there is a lot to catalog and scan. It’s a purpose, though. There’s someone out there, and whoever they are, they’re important. He knows that truth down to the core of his Light.
It’s too much to ask that they would be directly under the traveler, though. Overhead, the Traveler hangs and shades him from the glare of Earth’s sun while he and a few other ghosts work.
After a time, he runs out of bodies under the space of the Traveler. So many of the creatures on Earth seem interested in him in life that he starts to scan their bodies once he runs out but none of them are right either. It’s a problem many other ghosts have already encountered and they have gone off, picking a direction to begin working, passing flickers of Light, impressions, back and forth over their connection to try and help each other.
He gives himself one long look at the Traveler from a distance, the furthest he’s been from its shadow and then shakes his plates out once, twice.
Picks a direction.
Flies.
Various animals interact with him along the way, just as humans and Awoken do. Most are shoved into his memory after categorizing and documenting them. A few stand out.
The lizards are fun: he spends an entire battlefield just flitting after them on the sunbaked sand. They’re far, far too small to be a guardian, but he admires the way that they’re able to move across the wide open spaces, how they dive for the shadows and manage to avoid being seen without a scanner.
“Maybe more of you would have lived if you were lizards,” he tells the corpses under the sand. Then, realizing that’s rather mean. “Sorry.”
A lizard skitters under the shadow of a tree and he bobs after it.
For a while, a bird follows him; he can’t fly quite as quickly, but he thinks he does rather well keeping up with her. She’s the first he’s ever seen out in the thickness of the woods; there are bodies even this far deep for him to scan but he’s fascinated by her feathers and talons. Even better: when they get out into the open, she dives suddenly, faster than he can fall. He follows and registers a new death where she is, too small to be hers. The creatures here don’t have Light, not the same way that the more complex creatures do, but they have hearts and breath which is enough.
Under her talons is a fat mouse, its coat shiny. Its fate is about to be rather gruesome, but he hasn’t seen one before and the fascination wins out, dipping down close enough to scan it. His plates flare happily.
“Garden doormouse,” he informs the bird cheerfully because it’s been six hundred bodies since he’s encountered someone else who speaks. She eyes him, satisfied he’s not going to steal her meal, and tears into it.
He gives the corpse a scan. Just to be sure. It’s not his partner, which is good because it’s torn to pieces and then down her throat and she’s back to staring at him, head tilting back and forth. She couldn’t hurt him; more likely she would hurt herself, but when she hops a bit closer he poofs his plates up just a bit.
“I would really rather you didn’t,” he tells her. She probably doesn’t understand but he pretends she does, because she ruffles her feathers in response and vaults upward.
They work well together; there are so many bodies to scan here as in so many other places on Earth. The difference is that there are fields here, places for creatures to live and grow and thrive.
He pokes into all the nooks and crannies he can and scares little creatures out: lizards and mice and so many other things she hunts. She learns that when he hovers over certain areas there’s something there he’s scanning and dives. With her help, there are dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of new bodies to categorize and learn about; she eats better than she has in ages.
They last two thousand, nine hundred and sixty-three bodies together before he runs out of bodies even with new death. The bird raises nests and he scans and categories and documents her and her mate and their hatchlings.
The bird is older now and he has been around long enough to understand the signs of age in her. A few weeks left, maybe. Time will get her before starvation; food hasn’t been a problem in ages even with all of her children.
Once, another ghost comes upon him guarding the nest from those little creatures that keep trying to sneak in and steal the eggs. She’s also missing her partner, but as she finishes scanning the last body, she scans him, like she’s checking to make certain he’s functioning this far from the Traveler.
“Are you marking them for someone to get?” she asks curiously, trying to peek into the nest where the eggs are; he rises up and lets her scan them.
“No! Creatures keep trying to steal them so I’m keeping them away.” His plates shift happily. “Have you noticed? There are more of these birds here now! I think this is the last clutch she will have.”
From her long pause she hadn’t noticed.
“Good luck with that,” she says, and zooms off to the next thickest patch of bodies, skipping a whole swathe of them that he knows they can both feel. Bemused, he scans them just to check and feeds her the information; she flicks a bit of Light back at him but doesn’t respond so he goes back to the nest.
In the span of time the interaction takes, the bird’s mate passes. He hadn’t felt the same attachment to her mate or her hatchlings, but he scans the corpse to record it and then returns.
These birds mate for life; he’s been made aware through the bits and pieces of texts and information that have been passed to him over the years. They seemed a very unlikely option for a potential guardian, but they did work well together. Maybe he missed something; the other ghost had skipped over so many.
He ought to be sure.
Stay a little longer.
Most of her children have survived and he has them documented; he could find one of them next. He reaches out a few feelers, tries to gather from the bits and pieces of feed from the other ghosts. When he comes back to himself it hasn’t even been that long, not really when he thinks about how long humans and Awoken live, but one moment she’s there and the next there’s a flicker, like someone’s blown out a candle.
It’s unremarkable. She is, technically, unremarkable. A common hawk. In the next ten thousand square miles, there is a slow growing but significant population. He’s been told that ghosts don’t feel emotion, not like humans or Awoken and he thinks that’s probably true. It isn’t technically the same because he doesn’t have tear ducts to activate, or a nose to get stuffed up. It's a loss, though. He tries, just in case, to revive her but it doesn't feel right. The scan feeds him information, but the body lies there and doesn't move.
"It was nice to meet you," he says, very quietly, and then goes on his way. A little part of her lives, he supposes, as long as he has record of her, remembers her. That's enough.
He isn’t certain what he is but the loss sticks in his wiring and tangles in his Light oddly and he spends the next eight hundred bodies along a road, meeting people, talking to them, suddenly desperate for the interaction. For someone to talk back, for the reminder that there are people who are alive out here among all the death.
At night, he talks to the other ghosts, long after the human and Awoken have gone to rest on their journey to the space under the Traveler where more and more are rallying.
“A bird,” Ophiuchus repeats, iris blinking slowly, considering. “Plenty of birds die.”
“Well, yes,” he bobs back and forth, not quite anxious but not certain how to articulate it. “This is different. Did you never consider what if your partner wasn’t human?”
“Never so bad I thought about scanning a bird,” Ophiuchus says frankly. “What good would a bird do to help?”
He thinks about how well she’d eaten and how much he had learned in just a few short years together, the lizards before that. Ophiuchus’ theory is that ghosts and guardians complement each other in their strengths or weaknesses. Ghosts and guardians complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses, and a guardian could be something other than human or Awoken, maybe, isn’t so much of a stretch.
Besides.
Even if that’s not true, the Traveler still came here. This world, this universe. They’re an extension of the Traveler’s will and the Traveler has to have a plan of some kind. For now he can be an extension of the will he understands: protect this planet. Find a partner, when he finds the right one.
“I suppose it would be difficult if they were a bird,” he says finally, scanning the last set of bodies around them, “They would have a difficult time holding a gun. Everyone seems to love guns here.”
Ophiuchus beeps low and long in response.
The next morning, he says goodbye to all of them and travels down a different road, scanning.
Pulled Pork as he is now called, hitches a ride in a six-seater full of rowdy guardians, two hundred thousand bodies scanned.
They’re loud on the high of good Crucible rounds, now on the way to the Reef, turning in bounties. Pulled Pork and the other ghosts have been talking quietly outside the pocket space in the Light they occupy; he’s not able to access it the same way they are without a partner. They’re kind about it, even if there are comments about how long he’s been looking.
Some guardians he’s met before: the warlock he contacted asking for a ride to the Reef was a guardian he’d met before on a prior trip, along with her friend, a barrel-chested hunter who was a terror with a shotgun. The others are unfamiliar but unthreatening, if loud.
“Pork, can you come here a sec?” Rianne calls from the front over the sound of raucous laughter as Cadrot-3 reenacts something with one of the Titans where they’d done something particularly clever in Crucible. “Hey. We’ve got time. I plugged in a different route, wanted you to crosscheck it against your flight records so we’re not doubling up.”
Pulled Pork’s front plates twist left and right. The Light in him flares brightly at the kindness and he bobs twice, happily as he considers the flight path and the direction he can feel the tug. It’s the oddest sensation. Faint, it’s so faint, barely there but he feels closer than he’s ever felt in centuries. “The path you plotted is all new ground. If it’s alright, I’d like to go wherever you’re going.”
“Oh, us?” Rianne grins, her ghost rolling in the air with a mocking beep now that they’ve made sure Pulled Pork can scan along the trip. “Hey, shut up. We’re going—”
One of the others catches on that they’re talking about their destination and slings his arm around the pilot’s chair. “We’re going to visit the Reef to do business, trade some things, and then go. Ri’s just freaking out because they’re gonna meet a Queen.”
“Not much of a kingdom unless you loooove scrap,” one of the warlocks calls from the back where their feet are floating above the console, kicked back in their chair as they work on their guns. “Just saying.”
“Don’t just say that around them,” their ghost chastises quietly to poorly muffled snickers.
Rianne’s knuckles rap against the ceiling of the ship; everyone falls to attention like it’s a gunshot. “Get it out here because I mean it: we do our job, trade, whatever, we’re here two days but no diplomatic incidents, okay? Ikora will kill me herself if we mess this up.”
There’s a resounding chorus of yeses and Pulled Pork takes the moment to scan a body in the debris, then another, and another. Nothing, nothing. It could just be the high concentration of guardians, but the tug feels just a hint stronger.
“I already met her, anyway.” Rianne continues like she’s admitting something she knows she’s going to get hassled over. “Over comms, I mean. She said I was supposed to bring her a gift and to ask Eris Morn about it.”
More hollering, whistles; guardians are resurrected in perfect health, including their lungs and they’re using them. It doesn’t take much to gather everyone has strong feelings about the Queen they’re supposedly meeting, positive or negative, along with Eris Morn.
Pulled Pork doesn’t have ears but his sensors are sorting through all of it as quick as they can; he tries to scan for the box she’s holding but misses what’s in it, distracted by movement. One guardian swings a fist, hits another in the shoulder. It looks like an attack but they’re still laughing, playfully smacking at each other over the course of the ride with fists and with words.
They hover in the assigned space with guns from the Awoken fleet on them the whole time; Pulled Pork had scanned everything all the way here but weirdly the pull felt further. Tangled. He trails after Rianne and her little box, hovering a respectful distance back from her ghost as they stand in the court.
“We were informed it has a gift,” Queen Mara Sov says, eyes barely passing over the rest of them, lingering on Pulled Pork, focusing on the box in Rianne’s hands. Her face is stone but he traces a few readings: increased pulse rate, heart rate, the twitch in her hands and jaw. She's not tense and threatened at the sight of them, but she seems almost resigned as she looks at him. He supposes that’s why she has so many guards: she doesn’t need to threat assess them again after all the others had.
One long, slender arm reaches out and Rianne puts the little box in her hand; the Queen doesn’t open it. Instead, her glowing gaze returns to Pulled Pork. “We have a gift in return.”
Pulled Pork spins, looks behind him. No one is there and when he turns back, she is still looking in his direction. “Um.”
“For you,” she says, and meets his iris unblinkingly, the glow of her eyes like the Light inside her is just too much and has to spill out somehow. There’s very little in the world that can kill a ghost; Pulled Pork has the very unique feeling that if she wanted to, she really could destroy him. The Light she gives off feels odd somehow; not bad but...odd. The shell that materializes in her hand is pretty: a purple so deep and iridescent it’s pink to red in parts, traced in silver.
Pulled Pork’s basic white shell spins, glancing back at Rianne and her ghost, worried. “For me? But I—”
“It would question a gift?” Mara Sov’s head tilts and Pulled Pork draws back in a sharp arc before shaking back and forth. “The guardians are well compensated.”
Pulled Pork considers it a long moment and then transmats it over his base, tossing the white into storage to keep. The new shell is comfortable, roomy. Extra room for mod slots. It’s a nice shell, it just doesn’t make any sense why she’s giving it to him. He spins his shell faces around idly and then twirls in a pleased circle. “Thank y—”
“Remember this,” Mara Sov interrupts so he stops and focuses on her, listens. “The spider’s web extends further than it knows, even its reach has its limits. Its grasp is short but grows in danger the closer you are to the center. Nothing is permanent. Not even this.”
“Of course Ms. Queen Mara Sov.” It makes no sense but Pulled Pork bobs in an approximation of a nod. Mara doesn’t touch him, but she reaches a palm out and curves it close near his shell. She doesn’t smile. “I’ll remember.”
Pulled Pork follows the trail to his guardian where and when he can. Three hundred and seventy-six thousand bodies scanned, no closer to the Light or his partner.
It wouldn’t be half as frustrating if he could track down where it was coming from. He’s certain that it’s there, but where there is constantly changing.
Once, he comes close.
Another set of guardians again, less rowdy than the last but no less competent. Back to the Reef again they go, turning something over to the Queen.
“Hope her brother’s not there,” Armin mutters as they come in close, checking to make certain comms aren’t on. “Dude’s a dick on a good day.”
“Just doesn’t like guardians,” Brandt-8 returns, shrugging. “We don’t need him to like us, just his sister.”
Pulled Pork scans the wreckage of another ship and comes up clean. “Why doesn’t he like guardians? The Queen seems to like them!”
Armin laughs, brief and short. “The Queen likes allies and her plots, but that’s about it. The minute she can turn around and stab us in the back, she’s gonna go for it if it’d help her.”
“In the LZ,” Brandt-8 calls, flicking a few switches, their ghost piloting them down further until they can transmat down together. The chatter stops; they make their way into the Reef and split off, some returning bounties, some trailing after Armin to meet the Queen. It’s the oddest sensation.
Arriving, it had felt like he was in the right place, but every time he tries to scan, there’s nothing there. He seems to be functional, judging from his internal workings, but he’s also certain that his guardian is here, somewhere. Alive, maybe. One of the guards? Maybe he’s been away from the Traveler too long.
There’s a man there, with her.
He’s all sharp edges and anger and burns in a different way than Mara does. Her Light is like a sun, housed within her chest, radiating outward to the point it’s almost pain to be so close to it. Her brother’s is muted oddly, flickers of Light rising and licking off of him like flames that have gone too far from their source, miniature sunspots radiating off of him with flickers of Darkness under it. All Awoken feel that way in some capacity, caught in the line between Light and Dark, but this one—
He is, Pulled Pork learns, a dick, just as the other guardian had noted.
Mara leaves to take care of business, but her brother follows them, escorting them back to their ship like he’s making certain that they leave.
“You’re the Master of Crows?” Pulled Pork asks, dipping back to speak with him flitting back and forth as he takes in the network of Crows tied to this man as their owner, instructor, and flits through what data is available and unencrypted. “That must be exciting, knowing all kinds of secrets!”
Uldren Sov looks at him a long moment and his lip curls in disdain, turning to the guardian he’s come with. “One machine wasn’t enough, you had to do with a second?”
“He’s looking for his partner,” Armin explains over her shoulder, frowning at Uldren like he wants to say more, but thinks better of it. “Thought they might be here.”
“In the Reef.” Uldren says, dubious. To Pulled Pork: “Maybe they don’t want you.”
“In the Reef!” Pulled Pork agrees, flitting in lazy circles around Uldren’s head while he takes inventory of all the weapons, the Crows, everything happening around them and ignores the comment about wanting him. It’s much more exciting with so many people here; he could spend hours, days scanning everything, drinking in all the sights for his partner eventually. “I’m not sure, but I think —”
“I don’t care.” Uldren bats him away with a backhand; he doesn’t connect, but it’s the casual cruelty of it that stings more than anything else. Armin pauses ahead and glances from Pulled Pork to the prince, lips pressed in a thin line. “Do me a favor, guardian.”
The venom in his voice is enough that Pulled Pork would zip over to her even if Uldren hadn’t tried to smack him. “Depends on the favor,” he answers, cautious.
“Take your unwanted, useless scrap metal and get out of our Reef.”
Eventually, the body he scans is the one.
Pulled Pork knows it, down to the wires and circuits within him, down to the very core of his Light that this is his guardian, this is who he’s searched through hundreds of thousands of bodies for. The excitement is too much to bear but as not-Uldren’s breaths begin to even out Pulled Pork begins to realize the number of problems they are now faced with.
Not-Uldren is disoriented and Pulled Pork knows that he doesn’t remember anything which means it’s easy to forgive the earlier actions thousands of scanned bodies ago. The question is whether others will find it as easy.
They steal a Fallen skiff; not-Uldren asks why he’s able to pilot, why he knows where all the switches and levers are and Pulled Pork finds he doesn’t really have a satisfactory answer to that.
Guardians don’t remember their pasts he tells not-Uldren gently. Muscle memory stays, sometimes. They’ll have to figure out how to address who, what he was at some point but for now, he just wants to get them off this planet, closer to Earth. Just as they clear orbit and Pulled Pork starts to relax, alarms scream.
He has just enough time to warn Crow before the impact hits, sends them spinning, alarms firing, crashing into atmospheric debris. Not-Uldren’s second resurrection goes much like the first. He wakes, gasping for a breath. What’s different this time is there’s no breath to be had.
The damage to the hull depressurized it and not-Uldren’s suit; Pulled Pork realizes the mistake after the fact, watching not-Uldren’s face as he gasps for air that isn’t there. Suffocation is an ugly death.
Pulled Pork watches as not-Uldren’s hands twitch against the steering apparatus, drag against the glass as he suffocates a twenty-third time. They thought they fixed the sealant leak, but it proves that they hadn’t, a hole in the chassis of the ship that is too far outside for them to fix.
Not-Uldren dies again, with a series of panted, high-pitched gasps for air that isn’t there and this time, Pulled Pork doesn’t revive him. He’d been asked to: not-Uldren’s armor was patched on the thirteenth death and gives him about an hour or two of oxygen if Pulled Pork brings him back fully but that just means he dies again in an hour or two.
Again and again and again.
Suffocation, drowning, bullets, there are countless ways that guardians have died. Pulled Pork’s seen many and heard about more, but this one, in his admittedly limited experience, he thinks is the worst.
Not-Uldren’s corpse lies there, and Pulled Pork does his best not to look at it, not because of any particular horror outside the idea of his partner being dead and gone and Pulled Pork being useless, but because something else has caught his attention.
Everyone says space is silent, but that’s because they’re human, Awoken. They don’t have the ability to reach sensors out across miles and miles to find what’s out there, they’re limited. Besides. It’s plenty loud enough in here, alarms screaming, hull creaking with the press of space, their engines sputtering and dying out. There are radio waves, transmissions, data, bits and pieces of information that are transmitted across space via the satellites scattered throughout. A few ships pass by; Pulled Pork doesn’t dare reach out to them, not with who he has on board, not without being able to verify who’s onboard theirs.
Finally, nearing sixty resurrections the desperation starts to set in. Something comes close, edges onto the ends of his sensors. Salvation, maybe. Another Fallen skiff, and a slightly larger Fallen ship come to the edges of where they’re crashed and Pulled Pork runs the data again. Allied with the guardians, but not a guardian. Someone who hopefully won’t know who Uldren is. Pulled Pork debates it for what feels like forever; it’s a risk, he’s putting not-Uldren at risk, but the alternative is worse. At least with the Fallen they have a chance; all he can do is hope it's the right choice to make.
Still, he hesitates. There will be other ships. Uldren isn’t going to get any more or less dead. The Fallen are a risk; if he’s going to revive not-Uldren and get them out of there, he has to do it now before they notice and —
The ship comes closer, like it can see them, see him. Pulled Pork sinks low, into the cold of not-Uldren’s hands in his lap, and makes the decision. He activates the distress signal and watches the skiff loop around, circling them like vultures before thier ship is transmatted onto the larger one. Pulled Pork faces their rescuers, two Fallen wearing a symbol from the Shore, an eight-legged creature in white.
The Fallen’s head tilts as he observes them both, considering. “The Sovereign of the Shore welcomes you. Baron Spider sends his regards; he’s been looking for you for a long time.”
After, when they are Glint and Crow, not Pulled Pork and Uldren Sov’s corpse, they run into another set of guardians while on mission. They are one hundred and thirty nine deaths in to Crow’s life.
The death is accidental; Glint’s too busy trying to monitor all the feeds, giving information to Crow, trying to make certain that the Scorn they’re battling don’t sneak up behind and flank them like they’re trying to do.
“Three o’clock,” Glint fizzles out just as Crow inhales, holds, fires. Glint reappears behind him, mimicking the lizards, dipping in and out between shadows, “Guardian on radar. Two more, left-”
“I see them.” One, two. Crow huffs out a pleased little breath at landing both shots. The guardian across the way sees them too; Glint watches them aim down the scope as they sight the field they’re shooting over, and then sweep it back. Level it at them.
Allies! Glint transmits to the other ghost, realizing. They show up as allies on the HUD, their signal friendly, but the guardian switches out their weapon and Glint has a split second to utter Crow’s name in warning before the rocket launcher connects.
Glint vanishes in a haze of sparks, and when he reappears, the guardian is gone and so is Crow, just a wet splash against the hot baked sand. Ghosts aren’t programmed, weren’t created with the ability to hate, not really. Jury’s still out on whether or not they feel things the same way humans or Awoken do, countless scholars arguing over it in their books over the years.
Looking down at the remains of his partner, Glint thinks hatred could be very easy to learn.
He begins the work of stitching Crow back together again, reconstituting, reconstructing him until he lies in the halo of blood from his old body and comes to with a gasp for air so loud it sounds like it hurts, scrambling back against the bank of rocks hiding them, trembling.
“You’re okay,” Glint tells him, and it’s not a lie, not in the technical sense. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
Something flies across the horizon, briefly blocking out the sun over them and Crow flinches, hunkers down a bit before they realize it’s a bird, not another rocket launcher. His laugh doesn’t have any humor, no levity, head ducked between his knees as he fights panicked breathing. “So that’s a no on the guardians being okay with me being out here if I’m helping, huh?”
Crow’s one hundred and seventy-third death feels mildly less traumatic for both of them.
Glint can name all of them from perfect memory, has record of each one in his memory banks. Crow doesn’t remember most of them which is a relief. There’s no reason for him to: bad enough he remembers the guardians attacking him, worse, when the guardians come up close and personal and make it known why they’re doing this.
Death number one hundred and seventy-four comes at the hand of a Vandal; an unlucky shot as Crow tried to dart around and provide cover for a guardian out in the field. Glint revives him, and then revives him from death one hundred and seventy-five a few moments later when the guardian loops back around on their Sparrow, spitting fury at them as he realizes who it is.
Death one hundred and seventy-six through one hundred and eighty-three comes at the hands of Baron Spider, furious at their tardiness when he had needed them but Crow was too busy being dead. Apologies don’t cut it; Crow is killed, Glint revives him and the Baron looks at them a moment too long, considering. What else could he hope to do to them? The bomb’s casing hangs heavy in his shell, no longer as roomy and comfortable with its addition.
“If that’s all, Baron,” Crow rasps, crumpled in a heap that could technically be called a bow.
Baron Spider allows them to leave to Crow’s room and Glint busies himself with flying circles around the room like a particularly angry bee.
“Well,” Crow says after he’s stripped out of the Spider’s regalia, washing up over the Dawning bowl that Glint had given him around his eighty-eighth death. “That’s a record, right?”
Glint pauses his angry loops around the room and glances over, already feeling like he’s going to regret this. “...What is?”
“Number of deaths in one day,” Crow gives him a lopsided smile. “Ten's the new record.”
Glint hovers there in disbelief; nothing from guardians’ prior lives is supposed to carry over, but from everything he’s learned about Uldren, it seems his terrible sense of humor somehow survived. “I think that's a record we can safely try not to break.”
Death three hundred and twenty-four, something changes.
Glint doesn’t point it out initially, not wanting to risk being wrong, but he thinks — he thinks he saw the other guardian pick off the Cabal that was chasing Crow into the cave. Could’ve been sheer dumb luck, but Grayson-1 is, by all accounts, a great shot.
If he meant to hit Crow, he could’ve. Glint tracks the trajectory and confirms it, which is just more confusing. While Crow’s fighting through the lost sector, Glint dips out back toward the entrance so he’s close enough to communicate.
“Stay in here a moment,” Glint recommends, flitting around the tiny cave entrance anxiously as he tries to figure out why Grayson-1 isn’t moving. Waiting, maybe? The guardian’s ghost reaches out along the connection, and instead of asking for a death confirmation, it’s — “You want to help?”
Letia pulses happily along their connection of Light. “I caught that your guardian was protecting mine! We just wanted to make sure you were okay in there. Do you need help?”
“We’re—” Glint has to stop a moment, genuinely not certain how to process. “We’re just fine. Thank you for checking!”
The deaths in the three hundreds are odd. Some are intentional, retaliation for finding Crow and him being unlucky enough to have the same face as the man who murdered Cayde, but after the mask Crow dies less frequently. He runs missions with Lord Saladin and Osiris on point. He chats with Amanda Holliday over comms, they make plans to go and get drinks together.
On the field, when Crow dies it shifts from intentional to other guardians watching his back. Glint goes to call out an enemy at six o’clock, but the enemy’s taken down by another guardian, who vanishes in a rush of sparkling blue with a lazy salute.
“It’s just because they don’t know who I am,” Crow tells him late one night, field stripping his gear in the middle of his bedroom. “I mean, it’s nice, but—”
“That’s why Mr. Osiris has you doing all of this, right?” Glint bobs back and forth in lazy dips and rises, watching Crow’s hands work over the fine machinery. “So when you’re not wearing your mask, everyone thinks about all of the good you did!”
Crow’s lips twitch faintly. “I guess we’ll see, huh?”
Death number four hundred and sixty eight is accidental during a Gambit; Drifter sucks in a breath over comms, “ooh!” as Crow goes down and Glint waits over his corpse for his abilities to cool down to rez him.
From the right, someone jumps down with a fistfull of motes. Crow had revived them early and they return the favor now on the way back to the bank. Crow comes to with a ragged, shuddering gasp and reaches for his gun on instinct before realizing there aren’t threats nearby; he sweeps up a mote that’s next to him when he finds his rescuer’s already full.
When they raise their fist, it’s to knock their gloves against each other before Drifter calls the opposing team’s bank full, Primeval up.
“Eyes up!” the hunter shouts over the scream of an engine dropping Cabal on them and Crow laughs incredulously at being included.
“Eyes—”
Glint revives him twenty seconds after the Cabal drop pod kills both him and the other guardian, but doesn’t mind.
Death six hundred and forty five is a stupid one, objectively.
Glint hovers over the crumpled remains of Crow’s body tangled with Sparrow slag and waits furiously for the cooldown to finish. This close to a combat zone, the period of time is longer, his processes needing longer to redirect.
Seconds, but seconds can mean all the difference out here.
“It is alright, Glint,” Osiris calls from where he’s sliding off his Sparrow; Saint touches down with a burst of air and a clunk of boots.
It’s not, but Glint doesn’t argue, he just threads his light through all the broken parts and pieces of Crow’s body and knits him together again. Fuses bone to bone and muscle over it. The cape is a lost cause but Glint swaps it out for a different one that adds roll capabilities to Sparrows and then finishes.
Crow revives and it’s with gasping, loud laughter and when he raises his head he’s smiling so bright Glint would say he outshone the Traveler himself. The guardian is stepping out of their own pile of wreckage, a tree branch through their leg like it’s a splinter. He’s walking on it gingerly, using a burning blade to slice off either end so they can limp closer.
“You weren’t kidding about the drop!” Keahu shouts, while Crow fists both hands in his hair and sucks in a greedy breath. To Saint, demanding. “How did you land that?”
Saint’s booming voice fills the clearing they’re in as he laughs, landing deceptively light for how heavy his armor and body is. He’d cleared the ramp and dumped his Sparrow for transmat, hitting his jump at the last possible minute to avoid collision that the other two had missed entirely. “Practice! You are still young. You have not had time to learn.”
“Do not give him too much credit,” Osiris says dryly. “He has done this with every set of new Lights he can, lately.”
Crow’s head lifts to ask a question; one massive, armored hand smacks Crow’s back so hard he loses the breath he’d only just gained and he wheezes through his laughter.
Glint flares warningly at Saint and the Titan puts his hands up. “I just put him back together! Gently, please!”
Crow groans dramatically and falls back onto the pile of debris and Sparrow parts he’s absolutely destroyed, heedless of the mess. “Sorry, thought I had that.”
For a moment, Glint wonders if he’s actually upset, but no, he’s still smiling that very happy smile. Which Glint is happy about, to be clear. It’s just. It’s not like Crow needs encouragement to throw himself headfirst into danger.
“That was incredible.” Crow nearly catches his hair on fire when it slips back too far and rests against steaming metal. Glint rolls his iris and reconstructs the Sparrow with a flicker of Light; Crow falls back onto nothing as it transmats away. “Thanks!”
Glint sighs, wearily. “I know this is a guardian rite of passage, where you’re no longer afraid of death, but would a little self-preservation hurt—”
“Watching guardian deaths is a different sort of terrible for ghosts,” Osiris says wryly; this time, when he talks about Sagira, he doesn’t flinch. “Sagira used to complain of it frequently.”
The other two look over at him warily as if anticipating the heartache that comes with mentioning his ghost, but Osiris only reaches a hand down and offers it to Crow, clasping forearms tightly. “Eyes up, guardian.”