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Once again, this whole solo investigation thing isn’t going well.
First the carved artifact he’d been eyeing gets blown up – carved osmium, the Hive took the trouble to dig it up and work it, there’s a purpose there – and then the Scorn who destroyed it decided Ghost-chasing was their new favourite hobby.
The thing Fynch hates most about the Scorn – they’re not reasonable. They don’t get lured into pits or over cliffs and just decide it’s too much of a hassle. They just keep going forever until something more important comes up – or they’re being steered by something, someone, which is scarier and much worse.
He’s finally lost this pack though, squeezing through tunnels and dinging his shell in narrow crannies where nothing bigger than a moth could follow. Now he’s free and clear, with... nothing to show for it. This happens a lot, but it’s an extra sliver of disappointment each time.
Without any other pressing threats to his life, the trek back to his usual spot is dull and uneventful. He doesn’t like leaving it for too long, mostly for Ken’s sake. It’s absurd, but he has this recurring worry that a pack of thrall will come through and carry him off in several pieces, and he’ll have to enlist help just to chase all the bits of him down....
Even without that coming true, Guardians tend to get a bit too curious for his comfort – just like the one stooped over Ken as he turns into their little niche.
Weird, there’d been only a few pings from other Ghosts in the area, and all distant. How’d this one sneak up on him?
He puts on a burst of speed that he wasn’t sure he had in him, whipping around to bristle protectively over his (dead, awful) partner. “How about some space? You know, just because he’s got three eyes isn’t a good reason to forget all your manners –”
The Guardian steps back, lifting her head. She also has three eyes.
“Oh. Uh.”
“I am sorry,” Eris Morn says, scourge of the Hive, one of the slayers of Crota and Oryx and all-around really notorious person. “I have not had a chance to see much of the Lucent Brood firsthand until now. But this is your Guardian. I overstepped.”
She says it so plainly that Fynch can’t even be annoyed about it. She doesn’t even pause before calling Ken a Guardian, too. Most people don’t even think about using that word for any of the Brood. It’s a... territorial thing, and he doesn’t begrudge them for it, but it’s hard not to notice. The downside of an inquisitive and suspicious mindset – you can never turn it off.
“It’s fine,” he chirps. “Everyone who comes by wants to take a peek at him. It just doesn’t seem like it’s very restful, you know? If he’s staying dead, he might as well get some peace with it. I figure that’s usually in short supply with these guys.”
Eris frowns. “Indeed.”
“So what brings you to our neck of the ascendant woods? Got any queries, anything I can help with? Not that you really would need help with any of the Hive stuff, but I’ve got loads of info on Scorn, too.”
His spines itch as she doesn’t answer right away, looking at him with her head tilted.
“You guard a corpse,” she says. “You help other Guardians, strangers, but not your own. Is it difficult?”
All the nervous energy bleeds right out of him. Ouch.
“Yeah, well... other Ghosts have had to deal with that too. It’s not all that special.” And knowing that could happen at all – that your Guardian could be so hurt that leaving them to live out a more ordinary life would be the better option, or so cruel with power that you abandoned your duty entirely – is part of why he’d been willing to look outside of the Vanguard, to risk something new. And it’d still ended up like this. Funny, that. “There’s bad luck and bad choices all over. At least I’m still doing something good with it.”
He believes that! He really, really does. But half the time he’s asking for favours from a slowing trickle of Guardians – there’s something else on Mars worth more of their attention than a Hive god’s throne world, apparently – or passing on information to anyone on comms at the time. Just a helpful voice on the line, if that.
It’s not worth caring about. Ages ago he’d figured out on his own that being made and chosen for just one person, and he’d find them and nothing would go wrong ever again – that was all a big hopeful scam. Good for getting bodies off the ground and into the fight, but when you look at the actual chances, how likely you are to find someone in a universe full of corpses, and then the chances of it all working out –
It hurt to turn away from it at first. It hurt worse to try that hope on one last time and have Ken crush it under his heel.
Still. It would be nice to have it be true. To be needed, and appreciated, and seen for himself, not just as the most useful asset in the area.
She’s still looking at, or through, him. “Yes,” she says. “You stayed, though none would have asked it of you.”
“Who else was going to? Someone had to try and figure things out.” It’d be nice to say the Vanguard had only gotten this far with his help but... Fynch is sure they would have cracked it eventually, between the Hidden digging and Guardians bashing their heads into enough walls. He’d stayed to prove something to himself.
But has he?
“You get it, right? There’s... a duty. You can’t just leave it alone, even if it’d be safer.”
“A duty,” Eris repeats thoughtfully. “Not just to the Light, but to yourself, and what you have endured.”
Fynch flinches in surprise, his shell flaps twisting. Does she have the Wizard knack for getting into people’s heads, or is he just really that obvious?
“I know that weight well,” she says, and her expression has changed from the earlier frown to something that’s harder to read. Then she turns back to Ken. “And what part of your duty binds you to him?”
“What?! I don’t – I don’t owe him anything. If anything, he owes me. For fooling me into thinking this could work.” Talking about Ken still gets him all twisted up. He chose all of this – because he thought he could, what, make things better? Help him?
And now they’re both stuck.
“Then why stay?”
He spins slowly, trying hard not to actually think about the question. “I don’t know. Call it a grudge, I guess. I just want him to stay dead until he actually listens. So he knows how he messed up.”
“Hm,” Eris says helpfully. She looks at Ken for a long moment more, and then: “You said you have information on the Scorn’s movements?”
“Oh man, do I.”
The thing is, after that, he keeps running into Eris again. Usually to drop something off that she needs scanned, and he’s more than happy to rattle off material compositions and analyses to someone who gets it. Sometimes he even gets to hear her theories on stuff he’s noticed himself, like the variation in the crystals the Hive use for rituals, and why some only work for specific purposes and not others.
It’s... nice. It’s a hell of a lot better than just assembling and handing out gear to mildly appreciative passersby.
“So what you’re telling me,” he says, peering over her shoulder and into the big, dented wok she brought along this time, “Is that these glowy green things grow on the moon too? That’s not in any of the Vanguard files.”
“They were hardly significant until now. They only grow in the deeper lunar tunnels, and glow orange there. They are tough and impossibly bitter raw, but when cooked... palatable.” The cooking lesson is a bit of a surprise, but all of the things she brought – tiny shelled creatures and half a dozen roots and plants – are all things he or the Hidden had gone over before. Now Fynch gets to annotate them in the growing database with the welcome news that they’re fit for non-Hive consumption.
Eris glances up at him before turning back to stirring briskly. “I did not think you would be interested in such details.”
“Knowledge is knowledge, right? Food might not be important to me, but what if someone ends up... I dunno, trapped and starving? In a Hive pocket dimension, with no idea of what’s safe – you can imagine, right?” Oh. She probably really can. Moving on. “It’s... really the least I can do, helping out like this.”
“The least you can do,” she says back to him, which always makes him nervous. As if he’s said something he didn’t consider all the meanings of. “And what are you making up for?”
“You know that already! Getting caught up in Savathûn’s schemes. Believing in...” His shell flares out in an evocative gesture, taking in the whole throne world. “...All of this.”
Eris continues stirring, with brief pauses to add salt and spices. It’s a shame he doesn’t have a nose – it probably smells pretty good in here by now. “What Savathûn offered you was her most effective trick of all.” Her mouth twists. “The hope that things could be... better. There are few who could turn away so easily.”
Fynch should feel better, hearing that. He very much does not. “Well yeah, but... if I had, if I’d just thought about it even a little more –”
He hasn’t admitted this to anyone before, not even Ikora (who might already know anyways). “People wouldn’t have died. I killed a Ghost. Not by myself, but because of me, they died! I brought someone back to life who should’ve stayed dead, and I made the world worse. And I’ll never make up for it!”
“No,” Eris agrees, taking the food off the fire. She curls her fingers and the fire snuffs out with a stifled, brittle sound. She ladles the finished meal into two bowls. “None of that can be undone. But it is also within your power to make the world better.”
“I am,” he protests, though he’s already landed on where she’s going with this. Two bowls, huh? “There’s no way bringing him back will help anything. I know that now.” At least this way he won’t get in over his head again. If it’s just him with the comms network and bounties and solo investigations, then no one else will get hurt.
“Perhaps. But it may help you.” He scoffs, but she keeps going. Not angrily or urgently, but with this intent calm all the same. “You said you wanted him to listen to you. If nothing else, a confrontation will grant you certainty to turn away entirely. To leave. You need not be bound to him and what he has done forever.”
Eris holds out her hand, palm up, and after a moment he settles onto it. He’s shaking a little, his shell twitching against the rough material of her glove. “I wanted it to be good so badly,” he tells her. “Sometimes I wish I could just go back to that second when everything felt right. You wouldn’t let me, right? You’d kill him.”
“I will,” she promises. “But your resolve is not so flimsy a thing. You are yourself first and foremost, not because of your Guardian, or despite him. You will hold true.”
It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to him. “Yeah... yeah! You’re right. I never needed him in the first place, and I’m doing just fine now.” For a relative degree of fine. “I’ll just get him up to tell him how much I don’t need him, and that’ll be that!” It’s what he wants that’s the problem, but he’s gotten real used to disappointment by now. What’s a little more?
Floating back into the air, Fynch looks down to Ken’s quiet form. He knows he’ll get distracted or lose his nerve or start overthinking if he doesn’t go for it right away. So he... he just does. The flash of Light from his exposed core is as warm and fulfilling and right as it was the first time. Like he’d always been meant to do this.
But he’s not going to get suckered again.
With an avalanche of a rumbling groan, Ken opens his eyes, and rises. And rises. With him on the ground for months, Fynch had forgotten just how tall he was, how implicitly threatening. But Eris is right there, and as Ken looks from Fynch down to her, his eyes widen, and he reaches for a weapon he doesn’t have, because obviously Fynch dumped them all in a hole.
Before he can get to a part of his murder process that involves just tearing them both apart, Fynch zooms right up to his face, fixing his glowing eyes with his own. “We need to talk. Really need to talk. And I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen and maybe you’ll even get to stay alive at the end, not that I have high hopes about that – anyways, this whole ‘unilateral slaughter’ thing? It’s not working out. I don’t want to be with a murderer who takes and takes and doesn’t care about anything else –”
Ken’s shoulders twitch, and he reels himself in. As cathartic as all the details are, he’s wasting time. “So this is your one chance to prove you’re better than that. You got it? Your only chance. Mess it up, and my friend here, who is a legend at killing Hive by the way, will kill you. And I’ll leave! I’ll leave, and never look for your body, and you’ll stay dead not just for months, but forever.”
“Coward,” Ken rasps, but he keeps looking between the two of them, his third eye narrowed. Eris shifts, but doesn’t intervene.
“No, I’m not. That I’m even bothering with this means I’m not. And you were alive for weeks. You don’t even know what bravery is yet! There’s so much that I’ve seen, that I could tell you about, but do you care? Did you ever listen? No, all you do is smash things!
“But,” he says, trying to get all of his racing thoughts come out in a way that makes sense. “But I’m still here, for some reason. And you’ve been dead for a while, so you’re probably hungry, and there’s food and if you sit down and behave and don’t try to kill either of us... you could have some. And this is practically gourmet too, there’s spices and everything. It’ll probably be the best thing you’ve had in your short life.”
He eases back, just out of grabbing and crushing reach. Eris hasn’t moved, but he’s seen her use Stasis before – no matter what Ken does, she’ll be faster.
“So, that’s... that’s the offer. Take it or leave it. Live or die.” Which kind of sounds terrible out loud, but it has to be something he understands, right?
It’s quiet in the wake of all of that. Fynch shivers, the frenetic energy that let him just talk vanishing.
“No,” Ken says, and Fynch’s core plummets right to the ground, even though he knew this would happen, no way he could change –
“Not a coward.”
What?
“Then you’ve already learned something,” Eris says. “Only a fool overlooks their Ghost.”
Painstakingly, watching her as if she’s going to bite him, Ken sits down, shoulders hunched defensively. “I will eat,” he says, the Hive tongue making even that statement sound savage.
Eris has that faint ghost of an expression again as she sets one bowl down in the middle ground between them. Just as slowly, Ken takes it, bringing a handful to his mouth to taste. His eyes brighten.
“You talk too much,” he says. “But you spoke truth.” He takes another handful, and then another.
Still stunned – Ghosts don’t exactly dream, but he would put good glimmer on this being one – Fynch backs off to let him eat in semi-privacy. Maybe being well-fed will help keep the peace too.
“Do you know how to tell apart a false hope and a real one, Little Light?” Eris asks. He’s sure she’s smiling now, though it’s tucked away and more than a little tired.
“Uh... I don’t know anything right now, really. How?”
“It is real,” she says. “When you make it yourself.”