Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

FREEHOLD, MERIDIAN BAY, MARS
CITY AGE

The building is still standing—a miracle, Elsie thinks, as she weaves her way between piles of rubble. Broken glass crunches under her boots. There is not one window left whole and the wind moves freely across the space, bringing in clouds of red martian dust that dances in the air and settles on every surface in a thick layer. Her clothes are all dirty-copper already, and she can taste it grinding in her mouth.

She can barely make out the shapes of what once had to be expensive credenzas and fainting couches, their rusted skeletons peeking out of the flood of sand. Funny how she thought she knew these rooms well enough to navigate them with her eyes shut, and now even making out the door, indiscernible from the rest of the dirty wall, turns out to be a challenge. Her hands slide across the surface leaving long marks in the layer of dust, come across a crevice, wedge in, and pull.

The corridor. It is dark, much cleaner for the sake of being windowless, and does not even appear to have been particularly looted; a chipped porcelain vase still stands on a decaying corner table, and a set of bright blue optics gazes back at her from a dirty mirror. All doors are in place, too—and suddenly Elsie feels her heart in her throat when she looks past her mother’s chambers and in the direction of the north wing.

Sand grinds against metal when she pushes the door open. The winds must have been far weaker from this side, because the two windows are still intact, and what is left of the furniture is covered by a thick blanket of fluffy dust rather than the red dirt. And there is surprisingly much left, too — the bed, its mattress decaying and canopy hanging limply from the metal frame, the angular desk and the shape of a chair underneath, a cracked monitor above it. The digital photo display on the bedside table flickers with desperation, no photo of her father showing up anymore. Everything is as she had left it the last time she slept here, fourteen months before her disappearance.

She is glad her mother did not repurpose her room—even after she had gone missing and was presumed dead, even after Ana and Willa and Alton gave up on searching and went on to settle their lives without her. Did she grieve? Or did she simply wait, up until the world ended, used to her flighty daughter who ran and came back in circles and was never quite gone for good? Did she die in one of the fauteuils in the living room, eyes closed and hands folded gracefully in her lap, waiting for her wayward child to finally knock on her door again?

Elsie walks towards the desk, careful not to step on the carpet and avoid stirring a cloud of dust into flying up in the air. The computer seems to be dead beyond revival, whatever useful logs it could have hid wiped out, but it doesn’t bother her much; she is not even sure if she would want to see them if she could. It feels like unearthing a corpse, in a way, coming back to this tomb of a home shrouded in silence and red sand and memories. But a glint of sunlight on glass draws her eye, and she wipes away a layer of dust to find a plastic photo frame lying flat on the tabletop.

Ah, Ana. For all her ingenuity she has always been so sentimental, desperate fingers digging hooks in the past to hold her in the present. She read paper books and held most of her records in notebooks, and kept albums of family photos all printed and neatly categorised. Of course she would teach Rasputin to communicate with poetry and pre-Golden Age music and of course Clovis would scoff at the idea, and of course it would turn out to work spectacularly. The photo behind the glass is old and faded, but Elsie can still make out two childish faces staring at the camera with bright, innocent smiles.

She rides off on her Anseris half an hour later, when the sun begins to set over Freehold’s jagged landscape. The shape of Phobos peeks out from between the blushing clouds, and for a moment everything is golden — the sand, the sky, her quivering lip as she tucks her cloak closer around herself and holds a hand over the photo safe in her breast pocket. She does not turn around to see the sunlight shimmer off the building’s rusting frame, and never, in any of the multitude of timelines, comes here again. 

Chapter Text

THE BLACK GARDEN
NOW

Elsie’s hands hurt from tearing through the thicket in places where vines have cut into the artificial padding of her palms. The landscape has fused into a blur of sharp-edged leaves and tangled branches, dark-green and featureless save for the occasional boulder she notices only when her boot catches on it, or a sliver of sky peeking through the canopy. Praedyth is beside her, the only indication of it being his shallow breath and the rustle of disrupted greenery. They have been walking for hours. There is a rhythm to it—sort of a trance, really, her feet hitting the ground and hands tearing through the verdant curtain, Praedyth’s exhale, a branch catching on her cloak, left foot out, hand pushing the vines away, right foot out, Praedyth’s inhale, hand reaching for the vines. If she stopped moving, Elsie thinks, her legs might just give way under her.

They do stop, eventually, at the bank of a radiolarian river running through the dark undergrowth like a sizzling white ribbon. Praedyth all but collapses onto the grass, sighing with relief, and there is an odd, lightheaded sensation when Elsie lowers herself to sit down beside him and falters. She closes her eyes to chase the dizziness away.

When she opens them, she sees movement on the other bank.

For a moment she isn’t sure what she is looking at, and strains to discern the shapes out of the dark-green blur—two silhouettes, smaller and rounder than Vex frames, gesticulating as they walk along the riverbank, their features shifting like vision-spots until they emerge from the shadows and Elsie can see them clearly. She is on her feet before she even realises she has moved.

Alton and Willa are standing there, across the river, just far enough she cannot quite hear their conversation but sees the expressions on their faces. Her sister’s full lips are spread in a cheeky smile, eyes twinkling wryly as she shoots down Alton’s arguments, and he gestures in that sharp, pointed manner of his, a crease indicating deep concentration marking his forehead. They look like they’ve just sauntered out for a smoke, blazers pulled over lab coats, a laser pointer attached to Willa’s breast pocket she goes on to unclip and fiddle with as she talks. Light reflects off the silver tips of Alton’s bolo tie, the same one Elsie gifted to him on the tenth anniversary of his writing debut, with a green agate geode that reminded her of a strange, alien eye.

For a moment, just as long as it takes to reach out her arms and lunge forward, she forgets.

Something grabs the fabric of her hood and pulls, painfully hard, and her vision spins as she is suddenly jerked back—radiolarian river, opposite bank, sky, Praedyth's face as she swirls around with the momentum and almost loses her footing.

“It's not real!” His hands grip her shoulders as if he were about to shake the words into her. They come to her muffled, almost driven out by the hum in her ears.

She screams back, “Everything here is real!”

“This isn’t something you wanna tell yourself to stay sane.”

She struggles against his grasp, finally breaking away and doubling up, knees hitting the soft earth. The world spins again. Her eyes flick back to the opposite bank and there is nothing there—no Willa or Alton, just the edge of the simulation billowing.

Praedyth’s voice comes distant, as if through a wall, “Elsie?”

She bunches up grass in her fists. A needle-sharp feeling of bereavement pierces her when she realises her fingers have no nails to feel the soil under.

“I’m fine,” she musters up and raises her head to look at him, trying to maintain focus on his face; but he is still staring at her with that same expression of concern.

“Elsie, can you hear me?”

“I’m fine,” she repeats—did the words make it through her mouth before, or maybe she just thought they did? She realises his arm has been circling her back only when he removes it.

Her head is pounding as if she’d been hit, a pulse almost like a heartbeat, and Elsie presses both palms to her eyes to rub away the spots clouding her vision. She is still doubled up and on her knees, face close enough to the river’s surface she can feel the cool, prickling sensation of arc coursing through radiolaria.

She should know better. She’s spent lifetimes within simulations, battled thousands of Vex mind tricks. She should be immune to it.

Slowly, she lifts herself up into a sitting position and looks around. They’re still in the clearing. False sunlight seeps through the canopy in diagonal misty beams. In front of her, the radiolarian river sizzles, and to her left Praedyth is kneeling and watching her with concern. She stares at his face, focusing so hard it becomes a nonsensical amalgamation of disconnected features—eyes and nostrils and chapped lips, a chin and a forehead.

What if he’s not real either?

She knows it’s paranoia, the Garden getting to her head, but she cannot curb the spike of fear that makes her stomach coil. She must look mad, because the way Praedyth reaches out towards her is like one would reach out to a wounded cat, carefully and maintaining eye contact—but he slowly puts his hand on hers and lets her squeeze it. It is warm and fleshy under her fingertips. Firm. Real.

“I’m here,” he says. “We’re both here. I’m with you.”

Her fans stutter, but she nods. They sit like this for a minute more, reality rippling and settling around them.

Then Elsie stands up on wobbly legs and reaches for her sword, her arm trembling only a little.

“We should move.”

Chapter Text

THE TOWER, THE LAST CITY, EARTH
THE FUTURE

Everything that has ever happened, is, somewhere...

In the ruins of the Old Tower, under the charred trunk of an oak tree, Elsie Bray sits with the corpse of her friend in her arms. Below, the Last City still smoulders. The tombships have gone, but the scars of their passing are fresh on the area: toppled buildings, charred walls, cracks in the pavement where kiosks and benches and people used to stand. The evening rolls in slowly above, darkening the Traveler-less sky and dappling it with stars.

...always still happening.

There is a gentle, gingerly touch of a hand on her shoulder. Elsie does not flinch, does not swivel around whip-fast, does not try to defend herself. She is tired, tired, weighed down with both the grief and the knowledge of what she is bound to do next, and so she glances behind almost as an  afterthought. Praedyth is standing there, staring at the corpse in her lap. Elsie blinks, and her vision shifts.

Everything that will happen is happening now.

“That's Ikora Rey,” Praedyth says.

“Yes,” Elsie replies at length. So they are still in the Black Garden. That is to say: they are in the Old Tower, yes, and also in the Garden, and in all the other places at times where she has and has not yet killed her sister—and she is tired. Slowly, she rolls Ikora's corpse off her lap and lays her down on the ground, a broken thing on broken stone. Her knees hurt. How long has she been sitting here? She does not remember how they got here or why the vision began, or where to look for an exit. There is always a somewhere that this is happening, everything—they only need to find a place, then, where it is not happening. But she is so tired. Tired, tired, trapped in the confines of her own body, trapped in herself.

Praedyth’s grip on her shoulder becomes insistent. “Elsie?”

“Mmhm. I’m here.” She forces herself to stand up. It is a herculean task, like willing a mountain to move with thought alone, but she succeeds. “I’m sorry. It’s… difficult to remember this isn’t real.”

She is wrong, factually; everything here is real. But as Praedyth told her once before: this is not a thing you want to tell yourself to stay sane, and she values her sanity more than technical precision. She forces herself to step back from Ikora's corpse, and not look at it, and to forget the sickening sensation of blood cooling and drying on her hands—and when she glances down, the blood is gone.

It’s not real. It wasn’t real. Don’t think about it.

“These are Festival of the Lost decorations,” Praedyth says, in awe. He is examining a banner—or the charred remains of one, really—hanging from a lamp post. Purple fabric embroidered golden with a no longer discernable motif. “They were… celebrating, when this happened.”

“Ironic,” Elsie mutters. She doesn’t have the energy to be sad. She follows Praedyth across the ruined Courtyard, past broken Frames and the husks of buildings, the corpses, the dark-eyed dead Ghosts, and she feels like a ghost herself. She feels like they are disturbing a grave. A fresh grave, be it, and not real (not, not, not), but one nonetheless. She steps over a Hive rune drawn in soot on the tiles and rubs it away with her boot.

When she raises her head, Praedyth is standing before her with a candle in his outstretched hand. Where on earth did he find it, she doesn’t even ask. She only stares at it, and at him, and he gives her a wane smile.

“I thought we might… I don’t know. Pay respects. Before we leave.”

She nods absently. (Tired, tired.) There is no good spot for a memorial, really, when the whole Tower is a blast zone full of corpses, but they end up circling back to the broken oak tree and Ikora’s body, and Praedyth places the candle down with utmost caution. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a lighter, because of course he is the kind of man who always has a lighter on him. Sparks crack in the evening gloom.

They stand in silence, side by side, watching the flame slowly devour the wick. Wax beads and rolls down the shaft, pooling on the ground.

This is not a real grief, because this is not real, but something in Elsie’s chest still twitches and curls painfully. She does not look at Ikora’s body. She does not look at the smoke rising above the empty streets. She only looks at the flame.

Everything that has ever happened. Everything— Everything—

She close her eyes, and feels Praedyth takes her hand—

—and when she opens them, they are back in the Garden.