Chapter Text
Eris has been in the Tower for barely three weeks when she gets the message.
It should come as more of a surprise, but Eris has known since she crawled gasping out of the Moon’s tunnels that she would not have peace for long, even in the Tower. Even after she’d been discovered and inspected and questioned, spoken softly to and coddled and ensconced gently in her own private quarters— quarters in the civilian wing, far away from her old rooms.
“All your things are still in storage,” Ikora had told her that first day, watching Eris look around her new bedroom, empty save the large windows looking down on the memorial gardens. The view is of the Firebreak section; Eris had refused anything where she could see the names of the people she’d known, where the City planners had just yesterday taken down the stone inscribed with her own name.
She still hasn’t retrieved any of her things, the ragged cloaks or the blankets or the chipped mugs she’d stolen from the Hunter’s Lounge. She thinks about going into that dark room filled with the markers of her past life, sometimes. Sometimes she thinks she will open the heavy metal door and her old self will be standing there, surrounded by the past. Sometimes this is a dream; more often it is a nightmare.
Every few days, Eris sneaks into the supply closet at the end of the hallway and takes one of the chain locks from its carefully-labeled container. She installs them carefully, tests her weight against the door to see if it gives: fragile charms against some future ruin. She knows anything she is truly afraid of could not be stopped by something so mortal, but the action gives her hands something to do; material action, however useless, in service of her own protection.
(She’d done the same on the Moon, before they’d ventured down into the pit: the six of them, holed up in some small lunar colony outbuilding, she and Vell nailing sheets of spinmetal to the doors to keep out wandering Hive in the night. The chalk of bone dust in her throat as Toland had hung Hive-charms over each threshold, humming to himself.
Sai had looked at him, grin questioning. “Are those going to blow us up?”
Eris knows now they would’ve done much worse.)
She hauls herself to her feet, examines her handiwork. If Ikora saw her, she’d call Eris obsessive. Eris knows she is; she wants something new to obsess over. Wants to think of nothing but Crota, to dream of nothing else until his great luminescent corpse is rotting in his Throne. This is why, when her comm chimes with the one-two tone of a summons, she turns toward it with an eager expectation. Maybe Ikora has convinced the Vanguard to listen to her, finally.
The message is from a channel she’s never seen, not before she entered the Hellmouth or since. There’s no text, just a string of coordinates and, at the bottom, a series of pictographs. They’re not Hive runes, have none of the sinuous incomprehensibility.
Eris, the habit worn into her, has her suspicions. But she speaks of them to no one, has the feeling she’s guessed the importance of the secret she’s been entrusted with.
The message has no date attached, so she waits a few more days before acting. She spends that time in a stupor, drifting around her little room, sometimes venturing to the library or to the secluded back hallways of the Hidden to ask for information. She still keeps to the shadows, because no one in the City or the Tower has grown used to her presence yet. Idly, she considers the idea that she is making her problem worse, only alienating herself further by refusing to come fully into the light, to let herself be seen. In these in-between days, she cannot bring herself to care.
She considers leaving without telling anyone. She does not think she will be gone long, and she does not need permission to leave the City. But she considers what the Vanguard, already suspicious of her, would think, what conclusions they would draw. What Ikora would think if Eris disappeared into the night, like she’d done with Eriana so many years ago.
Finally, she sneaks into Ikora’s office.
Eris wastes no time on formalities once she sees Ikora's figure behind her desk, piled high with reports. "I am leaving the City for the afternoon," she says. It is not a lie, because she is loathe to hide anything but what she must from the one person who has tried to welcome her back into the City, who still sees her as an equal. "I am not going off-world. I should be back before tomorrow." The words feel stiff in her mouth even as she says them, but she is still relearning conversations not conducted in whispers or screams.
Ikora does not beam at her, does not over-indulge her, but Eris can still feel the warmth of her Light radiating outward. “Alright," she says, "Radio if you need any assistance. And let me know if you see anything unusual. I’ve been receiving strange reports, lately.”
Eris hopes that isn’t a warning. She inclines her head, leaves without a word.
She departs immediately, before her paranoia can get the better of her. She flies over the Cosmodrome for half an hour before inputting the coordinates she’d long since memorized— some Hidden practicality had made her delete the message almost as soon as she’d read it. She comes to the location soon enough, a little clearing tucked into some foothills. Still on Earth, which she privately considers a blessing. She does not know if she would have been able to leave it, yet, not when her wounds are still so raw.
Eris parks her little ship in the shadow of a few trees. She feels secure having it a physical presence near her, a concrete mode of retreat. It’s more than she’d ever had in the tunnels.
She picks her way across a stream, climbs to the top of a small hill that rises over the clearing. She sees the figure immediately, cutting a striking figure against the weak afternoon light. Even from here, he hurts her eyes to look at. She grimaces, continues down towards him.
As she grows closer, the figure grows more obvious: Osiris. She’d had her suspicions, driven by what she’d remembered of his writings before his exile, Toland’s ravings. Even the message had a certain Warlock quality to it, a mystery, a challenge. She and Eriana had crafted just such a message with their own hands once, join us in our quest…
Osiris looks as she remembers him, though she’d only ever seen him from a distance. Eriana had disliked him, had hated his presence as Warlock Vanguard. Despised his position because of the power it gave him over the Praxic Fire, who stood in clear opposition to everything he'd gradually become.
(“I don’t see why he’s so desperate to understand them. I’m tired of trying to simply understand,” Eriana had groaned once, servos whirring, bent over some ancient tome. “I do not need to know the Hive to raze them to ashes. I only need to know what they have taken from us.”)
Forgive me, Eris thinks. She will not get her vengeance without fully comprehending everything the Hive are, without learning the weft and weave of their existence so that she can unravel it.
She blinks and she is standing before him. “Osiris,” she says. Maybe it is her memories of Eriana but she feels like a newly-Risen, again, standing before him. He is a figure cut neatly from her past and transplanted into the present, unchanging, looking down at her.
“Eris Morn,” he says, and Eris does not startle but she is, for some reason, surprised that he knows just who she is. She knows that it is her own tortuous journey that has made him seek her out, that it is her pain that has made her valuable. Some part of her rails against it, even as she is desperate to turn her nightmares into something usable, to prove to herself that their deaths were not meaningless, that they have done something other than feed the Hive’s ever-eager desire for suffering.
Osiris is looking at her strangely. Eris tries to stare back, but her eyes skitter sideways off of him, the afterimage of his silhouette burning in her eyes. She must make another face, because Osiris’ Ghost slides close to him, spinning intently, and the aura of his Light fades to a shimmer over his skin.
“I know you have information regarding the Hive,” he tells her. “The City ignores your warnings.”
“As they ignored yours.” It is not meant as a challenge, but everything she says sounds bitter, now.
Most of his face is covered, but the tilt of his head changes. “Yes. But we both know what is coming. The question is how to stop it.”
Eris has never been good at these Warlock-games, at talking in circles, hinting closer and closer to what lies plain before them both. “I think I know how to kill Crota,” she says, because she needs to get to the heart of the thing that has been eating her alive. She needs to tell someone who will understand.
And she thinks Osiris will understand, because he has not been through the Hellmouth but he does understand what it is like to exist utterly alone with the enemy, to be shaped by your experience of something completely alien. To be so utterly changed that everyone around you can only think you mad.
“Tell me, then,” he says, and so she does.