Chapter Text
Aloy feels the absence of her friends most starkly when she is alone at the base. It's rare for Beta to leave the premises but she's getting braver, and feeling safer, and she had been excited when Zo arranged for them to visit Plainsong together. She knows her sister is in good hands.
Even though Gaia's presence is a comfort in and of itself, it cannot replace a person. Despite their lengthy conversations since recovering her from the Zeniths, something has been lingering in the back of Aloy's mind.
What Tilda thought she could do.
She thought she could remedy her biggest regret, renew her chance with Elisabet. Tilda was just like the other Zeniths, selfish and cruel, prepared to wait centuries for Aloy's will to break and accept her companionship out of desperate loneliness. Tilda didn't see a person. Tilda saw a blank slate.
She is not Aloy. She is Elisabet remade.
She is a means to an end. She is a replacement. She is a tool. She isn't even the only tool.
(Anger rises in her belly over the injustice done to Beta, whose treatment gives words to the feelings Aloy could not define. Dehumanized. Depersonalized. Objectified.)
A key. A curse. A threat.
The weight of an entire planet on her shoulders. One she has only seen on a hologram.
She knows Gaia misses Elisabet.
She knows Tilda missed Elisabet.
She knows they are not the same.
Gaia made her out of love for the world, the love Elisabet imbued in her code. It was not selfish, it was selfless, it was desperate and hopeful.
I am their daughter, she reminds herself. But how many times could she do that until it didn't feel like a balm on an unhealing burn?
Tilda had the very thing she wanted at her fingertips, but Beta was a project to her just like the others. A plaything. Temporarily novel. Immediately disposable as soon as Tilda had found and coveted the more desirable model. Aloy was something Tilda could alter to her liking and manipulate into the ghost of her former lover. A plaything.
She was never a person.
Outcast, Anointed, Clone, Saviour, Champion.
Aloy.
To make matters worse, she keeps having nightmares. Some are memories, some are her imagination running wild. The cage over the Sun Ring with Helis goading her beyond its bars, in the flooded chasms of the Hades Proving Lab with Erik and the Spectres hunting her, a vast unending whiteness of VR Dissociation that Beta had described, a soulless white-metal room with a single window looking out at the stars.
She watches Rost die, she watches Varl die, she watches Vala, Ersa and Ourea die, all of them warping together into one monstrous form. She hears them whisper and cry, shout and choke, and is left deafened by their silence.
The dreams usually stop there, with silence, with the wound of their absence, with her heart pounding and a cry in her throat. It keeps going, and she watches her friends dying just out of reach, and she the perpetual survivor. Erend caught in an explosion, Alva drowned in a surging flood, Zo choked by the Blight, Kotallo thrown from a mountain.
She wakes up screaming, unable to breathe from smoke water sickness altitude, dizzy and disoriented. Her ears are ringing and her throat is raw. Her chest burns, and it feels like her heart will kick its way out of her ribs as she wrenches herself up from her bed. She blindly grabs her spear and the nearest bow, the most basic armour. Dragging in air, in air, in air, out, in, in, in—
Go! Faster! Get out!
“Aloy,” Gaia's voice cuts through her, making her jump. “Your vitals indicate that you are experiencing a panic attack. I can guide you through some exercises—”
“I can't breathe!” Aloy bites out, on her feet as soon as she gets some footwear on. “I need some air!”
She staggers into the common area, just as a gust of cold air hits her.
“I just vented cold air into the Base—"
A strangled, angry cry leaves Aloy's throat when she sees him.
Turn your face to the sun, girl.
“I'm still dreaming I'm still dreaming I'm still dreaming!” she gasps, a groan like a wounded animal leaving her throat as she lurches toward the door. “I killed you! I killed you!”
She bolts down the corridor to the East exit, unable to differentiate her heartbeat from pursuant footsteps.
The scream cuts through Kotallo like a cold blade.
He knows it was Aloy. There is no one else here. Gaia had told him she was asleep in her room when he returned to the Base two hours earlier. He had gathered the materials he needed to wash off his body paint, lathered up the special soap he carried with a small sponge, and scrubbed himself with it before rinsing off in the showers under a hot spray of water. He had grown rather fond of them and how much less time it took to get oneself entirely clean of body paint. However, he had spent the time he had saved indulging the hot water, which helped considerably with the electric ache he has felt through his shoulder and into the remnants of his left arm.
He had not redressed in his armour, merely his boots and some linen shorts with leather tassets that his clanmates consider casual. He had remained bare-chested following his shower, and his peers would consider this reckless. Unless one was in the heart of a large settlement, it was unsafe to go without even a minimum of protection, even to sleep. He was wearing sub-minimal protection, but this base was the safest safe could get.
Until he heard Aloy scream.
Kotallo grabs his nearest weapon, clearing the door to his room in three bounding strides. There is a sudden hum and a rush of cold air just as he watches Aloy stagger from her room.
“Kotallo,” Gaia's even voice reaches him through his Focus. “I've just vented cold air into the Base. Aloy is experiencing a panic attack and may need assistance with regulating her breathing.”
He only processes some of the AI's words, his gaze locked on Aloy's flushed and rawly fearful expression. Never since he had met her had he seen her look that scared. The only exception, perhaps, was what he saw on the recording from Varl's Focus before he was slain.
The sound she makes when she sees him takes him by surprise and stays him where he stands. He watches agony write itself across her face, anger and desperation.
“Kotallo, are you willing to intervene—“
He misses the end of what Gaia says, and all of what Aloy cries before she is racing for the East door, with only her spear, one bow, and hardly any armour on.
“I killed you! I killed you!” Her voice tears from her throat, directed at him, but not him— something else, something else.
He runs after her.
“Commander!” he calls firmly, only a few steps behind when gets through the door. “Stop, Aloy— don't make me chase you!”
Kotallo comes to a skidding stop at the edge of the cliff, watching Aloy inelegantly leap from it and open her glider. He watches her land and begins his own descent.
“Gaia, what is a panic attack?” Kotallo asks as he climbs down from the ledge.
“It is defined as a sudden episode of extreme fear, wherein the body reacts as if it is in danger. Aloy's pulse is very high and she is hyperventilating, which may be adding to her disorientation.”
Kotallo frowns, scanning for Aloy's tracks and beginning his pursuit. “She didn't recognize me, Gaia. It was like she was seeing someone else.”
“Under normal circumstances, it is unlikely that your lack of body paint would sufficiently confuse her, therefore I believe she is also experiencing a flashback.”
“Explain,” he says with slight impatience.
“Following significant traumas, it is possible for the body to react suddenly and intensely to stimuli it deems similar. A person may feel as though they are enduring the event again, which leads to disorientation.”
Kotallo's heavy breath clouds out in front of him. “I am familiar with such episodes,” he admits tightly, not specifying if that familiarity was first or second hand (or both). “How do I help her?” he asks.
“My efforts to redirect Aloy verbally have failed. Physical intervention is ill-advised as she may fight you.”
“I am not worried about that, Gaia,” Kotallo replies. “Continue.”
Her heart is still hammering in her chest, but she is breathing better— her throat burns and her eyes sting and so does her skin. It's a crisp night, but the instinct to flee keeps her going, down the path from the base, with the rush of water nearby.
“Aloy!” Kotallo's voice cuts through the night, and nature goes quiet for a moment. Aloy's heartbeat does not cease to thunder, sounding so like racing footsteps that when she skids to a halt by some trees, she does not realize just how close he is.
Her scream doesn't meet the night air, muffled by a large hand across her mouth and her back pressed to something warm and unyielding. Just as quickly the hand is on her forehead, suddenly exposed to the jolt of cold, copper-tainted breaths and she inhales sharply.
Aloy throws back an elbow, twisting away from the firm body behind her and going for her spear. It's too dark to see him clearly, but his hand catches her spear before she can wield it, yanking it and her bow from her person and tossing them away. Aloy tries to leap past, but he just keeps coming—
“Aloy, stop!” Kotallo says firmly, loudly enough to shake something loose in her. “I will not fight you.”
She is hyperventilating again, a whine leaving her throat, but just as quickly replaced with a startled yelp when Kotallo grabs her around the waist and hoists her over his shoulder.
“What— what are—“ Aloy gasps “—are you— doing!?” She wriggles, still trying to free herself from his grasp, but the angle he's holding her at hurts her belly if she doesn't focus on engaging her core.
“Helping,” Kotallo replies gruffly.
He walks them the rest of the way down the path, following the mountain stream to the pool at its base. Part of an ancient satellite dish sticks out of the water close by, and another stands at its far end.
Kotallo walks straight into the pool, with only a heavier breath in reaction to the temperature as he wades in.
He kneels, letting the water come up to his navel.
“Brace yourself,” he says, and promptly drops Aloy into the water.
She yelps, grappling for purchase and finds it on Kotallo's forearm. He lifts her out of the water with a hand on the back of her neck. He keeps her in place, holding her steady as she sputters and gasps.
“Relax your legs and let yourself float,” Kotallo says firmly, “You are above water, take a deep breath.”
“Cold!” Aloy grunts, resisting his instruction, but ends up floating anyway as she squirms. She ultimately surrenders to the water, focusing on the warmth of his hand on her neck and back of her head, and takes in a deep breath.
“We will stay here until you are calm again,” Kotallo replies.
He adjusts his hold on her, watching tendrils of her wine red hair float around his hand as he shifts to brace her head by his elbow while his palm supports the back of her neck. She grabs onto one of the leather pieces on his tasset but does not struggle further.
“I didn't know you,” she whispers, gaze raking over his bare face, looking half-stunned. “Kotallo,” she breathes as if reaffirming the knowledge that she does, indeed, know him.
“You were having a waking-nightmare,” he says, and when he hears her breath hitch, he models the deep slow-paced breathing Gaia had told him about to help calm her down. Aloy follows him for several breaths.
Something shifts after that, a small whimper, and when he looks at her again, he sees her lip quivering and tears welling in her eyes. He doesn't say anything, satisfied as she continues to breathe slowly.
“You were thrown from a mountain,” she says, a pain in her voice that has nothing to do with the cold water. “In my dream. I was too far away. I watched you fall.”
White-out conditions, thin air, icy cutting snow, the stench of blood and smoke, machines and shadowy figures. Kotallo struck by a large attacking machine, thrown, right over the edge. In her mind's eye, she falls to her knees, onto rock and snow, reaching into the mist—
“I am with you, Aloy.” He speaks before she can be sucked back into the fear. She clears her throat, trying to focus on breathing again. “It was just a dream.”
“But I didn't know you,” she says. “It was like I was still dreaming... I was seeing... someone...” Helis.
Kotallo's bare features are moonlit and in shadow in ways she has never seen them. She watches him swallow, watches his jaw clench.
“Let me up,” Aloy grunts when the cold becomes unbearable.
He eases her up and she gets her footing, grimacing at the tingling in her legs. She makes it a few steps back to shore, looking back in time to watch Kotallo go under the water and resurface with a slight groan and sharp intake of breath as he quickly turns to wade back to shore.
“Let's retrieve your spear and bow,” he says, steam coming off him as he passes her.
She doesn't need to be told twice.
“May I send a machine to take you back to base more quickly?” Gaia asks both of them.
“The trek will warm us sufficiently,” Kotallo replies, a few strides ahead of Aloy.
She collects her spear and bow from the bush Kotallo threw them into, and they continue their trek back up the mountain in relative quiet. His breathing and the sounds of insects and animals nearby her only company. She wouldn't be surprised if he could feel the weight of her gaze on his back as she takes in the elaborate tattoos that decorate his skin, even by the shadowy light of the moon they are contrasted strongly against his skin.
Aloy warms with the hike, just as Kotallo said. She couldn't say how quickly she'd run down from the Base, but the journey back takes double that at least, even at the quick and deliberate pace Kotallo has set.
This is a better feeling, a safe feeling, her heart beating steadily with her exertion, controlled breaths.
She is still aware of the cold air, but it's more of a kiss than a bite by the time the familiar shapes of the Base come into view. A slight shudder crawls up her back, and she realizes then just how tired she is.
Kotallo doesn't hesitate to begin his brief climb up the small cliff. She waits until he disappears over the ledge before climbing up herself, appreciating the slight ache in her muscles as she hauls herself up the rock face.
He is there waiting for her at the top, hand outstretched to help her up. She keeps holding it even after her feet are firmly planted on solid ground, and they stay there for several heartbeats until he turns away and heads inside.
“I would recommend changing into dry and warm clothes,” Gaia says, directing the audio throughout the Base.
Aloy only just registers the words, quite distracted by just how different Kotallo looks without his paint. Moonlight was not enough to truly see him by, which makes her understand much more painfully why she had mistaken him for a dead man in her disorientation.
Her panic-addled mind would reasonably see the tan skin, the broad bare trunk, the brown leather tassets and boots up to his knees, and put a broken picture together. Not even the tattoos had been able to spare her the confusion, but now it's so clear, so clear who he is and was not.
“Are you alright, Aloy?” Kotallo asks, having stopped several paces ahead, realizing she had paused.
“Yes.” Aloy blinks, and looks away, cheeks burning with shame. She goes back to her room without another word, seeking dry and warmer clothes.
Kotallo changes into some comfortable leather pants. He may be of the Sky Clan but he is not beyond seeing warmth when it is available, and thus he wraps a blanket over his shoulders like a shawl.
There is a knock at his door, and he strides over barefoot to open it.
Aloy stands just beyond, in a style of clothes Alva had discovered in her studies: thermals, long sleeves and pants, suitable underlayers. She is also wearing leather moccasin boots.
A slight smile replaces her expression of uncertainty when she sees he's wearing a blanket, but it falters again when she meets his gaze.
His gaze drops first, an ache in his chest seeing that look on her face. An expression so vulnerable he does not feel worthy of receiving it. There is something unnamed in her searching gaze, not the absence of recognition that had chilled him so, but the presence of... determination— perhaps a will to divorce the ghost of her past from what she sees now, in his unpainted state.
“I'm sorry,” she says smally.
Kotallo looks back up at her, a frown knitting his brow.
“It is I who should apologize,” he says quickly, stepping out of his room and into the common area with her. “You have never seen me without my paint, it can be a surprise to anyone—“
She grabs his wrist, looking at him imploringly. “I didn't know you, Kotallo,” she says, as if reminding him of a slight she has committed against him. “I can't... I don't want to make that mistake again. I...” She clenches her jaw, shaking her head at a loss for words.
“What do you need?” he asks, prepared to give her world.
Her cheeks flush. “I don't want to overstep,” she says quickly. “We haven't gotten a chance to discuss Tenakth history, I don't know about the significance of the paint, it would just be helpful to see you... so I can know you...”
Kotallo is nodding before she even finishes, taking hold of her arm and guiding them to the middle of the room where the overhead lights are brightest.
“That is not too much to ask,” he says, letting go of her arm and tossing the blanket onto the nearest bench.
Aloy breathes a laugh, clearing her throat. She starts with his arm, taking it in her hands. His gaze relaxes as she examines him, the proximity between them different than anything they've shared since meeting. With every even breath he takes in, he is committing her scent to memory: a mixture of electrified metal and petrichor.
He remains still and at ease, utterly aware of her as she disappears from his periphery on his right. Aloy's calloused hands hold his arm, turn it to look at the tattoos, some grey, some starkly black. He is distracted briefly, reminded of the stories he lost with his left arm, until he feels the stark absence of her touch as she steps behind him.
Aloy's presence is palpable. He can hear her breathing. He closes his eyes, wishing he could see what she sees, what she is trying to unsee. His own breath catches slightly when he feels the ghost of her calloused hand near his back as if she were hovering just shy of contact.
“You may touch,” he says, with more grit in his voice than he intends, and feels her sharp exhalation.
They share silence for several heartbeats, and when a dozen pass he expects her to retreat. Just as he is about to turn to her, her hand touches his shoulderblade. Kotallo exhales slowly as he feels Aloy loosely trace the intricate patterns inked over his back. It had been a long time since anyone had done so, and even then, their intention was much different.
“Who did you see?” he asks, quiet.
She sighs taking a moment to reply, fingers and palm moving over his shoulders until she is but a hand's width away from the remnants of his left arm.
“His name was Helis,” she says, voice a little hoarse. “He was the leader of the Eclipse, a faction of the Shadow Carja. A powerful pawn for one of Gaia's rogue subfunctions... the first I encountered. Hades.”
She takes a slow breath, her hand moving lower, away from his residual limb, examining his middle and lower back. Her voice is closer to his left side now.
“He was the one who attacked The Proving... a Nora rite of passage similar to the Kulrut... but for Braves coming of age. He nearly killed me there.”
Aloy comes around to face him again, gaze focused on Kotallo's chest now. She hesitates again, to touch, but he gives her a nod and she does, lightly training three fingers over his tattoos. The hair on his chest and stomach is soft, a result of consistent body paint application (he does not allow himself to dwell too long over whether she notices).
“He killed Rost,” Aloy says. A name he knows. “Right in front of me. It was on a snowy mountain top, and the first time I experienced the sound of heavy artillery. I don't remember anything after the explosion, but I fell from the mountain.”
Her voice is thick when she pauses, continuing to examine him in silence. He understands her confusion and her pain.
Kotallo is glad that she does not trace lower than his diaphragm, lest his composure be betrayed, and again his breath catches when her hand finds his neck, her fingers pressing slightly more than they had before. He closes his eyes, letting her lift his chin, wondering if she could feel his heartbeat beneath her searching fingertips. If she does, she says nothing.
“He tried to have me sacrificed in the Sun Ring,” she says, her voice a little stronger now. “That didn't happen.” There is a touch of smugness to her tone that makes him smile, much like he had when they'd shared their first conversation. It won't be easy. It never is.
“And I killed him,” she says finally. “I drove my spear through his chest, and as the life drained from his face, I spat the very first words he said to me back at him.”
He feels a warm sense of pride, a familiarity in her fierceness. “What was it?” he asks.
“Turn your face to the sun,” she says cooly.
When Kotallo turns his head to look at her, she slips her hand back to his neck.
Her gaze is ablaze.
“I know you,” she whispers. There is conviction in her voice, but shreds of uncertainty remain as if the fear of her lingering ghosts is a betrayal to him.
He wraps his arm around her middle and hugs her, surprising them both.
Aloy sucks in a startled breath, but quickly relaxes and winds her arm around his broad frame. Her other hand remains pressed against his neck, her face half-pressed against the other side.
“You gave him a more honourable death than he deserved,” Kotallo says. He feels her swallow thickly, nodding against his neck, and by the tickle of her lashes, he knows she has closed her eyes. He doesn't quite expect the feeling of her warm breath against his skin as she takes a few slow inhalations. He gives her a slight squeeze and feels her sigh.
“I know you,” she says, voice vibrating against his skin, and this time there is no doubt.
Kotallo drops his arm when she pulls back, and for the first time, he sees how tired she looks.
“Would you do something for me?” she asks, half embarrassed.
“Anything,” he says, quick enough for her to notice.
“Will you stay with me? I... don't want to be alone.”
He nods. “Of course.”
Aloy does not intend to fall asleep after she asks Kotallo to start telling her about Tenakth history. His presence brings her a comfort she did not know she needed, and as the minutes pass, her eyes get heavier, though she enjoys watching how animated he gets as he progresses with the stories. He nearly loses the blanket off his shoulders with his gesturing, and she laughs sleepily when he does.
At some point though, she does fall asleep, and when she wakes she finds herself surrounded by darkness and his blanket. The ghost of Helis's hand may still choke her, but she does not know his smell from the smoke of a campfire. Aloy tugs the blanket above her ears, nuzzling her nose into the fur. She knows Kotallo, as soon as she'd taken a breath of him, that scent of musk and paint and pine had grounded her in a way sight and touch could not.
Aloy is warm. She drifts back to sleep and does not dream.