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Chapter Text

“I keep going back to that place when I sleep.” He shifted on the stone pillar, digging his elbows into his thighs as he supported his chin with a palm. “It’s not real— but it is. You know how the Void works.”

“I do know how the Void works. And I know that your kind find it a bane as much as they do a comfort. Is it truly distracting you so?”

“It was something that I made.” He worked the vague statement over in his mind as Hunhow waited for him to complete his thought, patient but not wholly interested. “Something to keep me safe after the Void jump. And then I… couldn’t get out. Every time I go back there, I’m never sure if I’ll get back out again.”

“You are afraid,” Hunhow observed; not sagely, but a solemn sort of recognition. “That place is your prison.”

As was the Zariman, as was a Narmer Veil, as were the vaunted halls of the Orokin before that, Drifter thought but did not say.

“The Shadow will accompany you,” Hunhow decided, and Drifter sputtered on an incredulous noise. He pushed himself off of the pillar to land with a soft puff of dust on the atrium dais, glaring up at the Sentient.

“I don’t need him to— I don’t think he’d appreciate coming to Duviri either,” he protested, glancing to Shadow for confirmation. Shadow gave no indication that he’d even heard Drifter’s plea for help, let alone was possessed of any urge to respond to him.

“The Shadow is stronger than the hollow shells conjured up in those churning wastes. Think twice before you turn down his assistance.”

Drifter crossed his arms and he played his weight from heel to heel, tracking a hazy fog of heat rippling across the glass barrier of the atrium. He couldn’t bring himself to look at either Shadow or Hunhow; they always got their way. Because they were right, but Drifter bitterly tossed that thought aside. This was about his pride.

“I’m not a natural when it comes to controlling Warframes,” he finally answered. It was meant to be another, weaker denial. Instead, it sounded merely petulant, and pointless when his menagerie had grown to three.

“Then you are in luck. You have no hope of controlling the Shadow. You will have to work with him,” Hunhow corrected. Drifter’s brows pinched and he frowned, but couldn’t think up any acceptable other reason. The low, firm set of Hunhow’s voice brooked no argument, so Drifter knew that the time for excuses was over.

“Go on. Let us see if you can handle it.”

Drifter had no more argument left. Like many things in his life, this was happening and he had no real choice but to roll with it. At least in Duviri— before this— the cycles wiped away his embarrassments. Mechanically, he untied the blindfold from around his wrist and fastened it over his eyes. As the red fabric covered his face, he closed his eyes; vision sinking into fuzzy black, and then the wisping impressions of Void energy. It was easier to perform Transference when the outside world was blocked out; otherwise, he was anchored too firmly to his own body.

Transference always made him dizzy at first. He reached his consciousness out until it brushed along the edges of Shadow’s, a heavy red coalescence of Void energy, and leaned against the barrier with the expectation that it would thin, part, and allow him to take command. That was how it worked with Warframes; there was no consciousness, only the barest amount of life. There was no will.

Shadow had a consciousness. Shadow had a will. As Drifter pushed, he met resistance, and felt his boots meet the ground as he took a step back on the worn, pitted sea-stone. He felt also, in the tepid and humid air, Hunhow’s low chuckle.

“Not at all like your lifeless metal puppets, is he, Drifter?”

Long moments passed, seconds that felt like hours as Drifter strained against Shadow’s impenetrable consciousness, until Hunhow spoke again. “Unless… is the Drifter not worthy of you, my Shadow?”

“Weak,” Shadow hissed. Drifter dug his heels in even as the urge to flinch surged up with force. He’d not heard Shadow talk for a long while. He didn’t know other Warframes could talk at all, and so it took him by surprise every time.

He scoffed in the back of his throat, indignant and tight with frustration. “Weak? You’re not working with me!”

Shadow’s Void energy rippled, then shifted; he was moving. Shadow was stalking, slow and easy steps along the atrium dais.

“Why should he work with you, Drifter? Prove yourself.”

Somehow, the original point— that Drifter did not, in fact, want to enter Transference with Shadow, and also did not, in fact, want Shadow to accompany him to Duviri— was entirely overshadowed by this new challenge.

“Alright,” Drifter growled, hopefully sounding resolute instead of uneasy. “If you wanna be difficult, I’ll be difficult right back.”

Transference was, as far as he experienced it, fundamentally one-sided. His consciousness took hold of the Warframe and he controlled it. There was no barrier. No blockage. The familiar sensation of something to grip onto was entirely absent in Shadow’s form, and Drifter threw his consciousness against it to no avail. He reached for his Edun, eyes narrowed behind the blindfold and shutting once more to allow the crimson, wisping presence of Shadow in the Void to guide him. Light pulsed and swirled in his hand until it took the shape of a scythe.

Hate.

Though he had never yet beaten Shadow in a fair fight, both Shadow and Hunhow approached every bout with the goal of teaching him something. As long as he learned, they were satisfied— for as exacting and demanding as the pair could be, Drifter found their expectations pleasantly reasonable. Drifter knew better than to expect much mercy beyond his life this time.

“Now you wanna cooperate. Typical.”

Shadow reached out a hand— the one not holding Hate— palm-up, open and indicative— and crooked his fingers. Beckoning.

Drifter rose to the taunt and lunged, sweeping Edun low at Shadow’s knees. His heart picked up in his chest, rablit-fast and hard. Drifter barely caught the quicksilver flow of energy as Shadow stepped back, avoiding the lash of the polearm, and surged into the empty space left by Drifter’s sweep. Hate rammed into his chest; bright and blunt pain jarred his ribs. He stumbled back with a grunt. No time to wallow in the pain— he fixed his grip, pulled Edun vertical with a trained, snappy motion, blocking off space between their bodies. Shadow was already back. The red smear of his energy in the Void burned.

Drifter scraped his teeth over his lip and forced himself to wait. They circled each other, Shadow waiting for Drifter to crack and attempt to strike him again, Drifter waiting for the same. His chest ached. His stomach turned. He’d initiated. He had to do something. Unlike other opponents, enemies that he could cut down without a care, he didn’t dare take his attention off of Shadow for a second. That would be a major and decisive mistake.

Hate sliced through the air, closing the distance fast and Drifter barely a second to react. It met Edun with an immense clang, making Drifter fall back, jarring the bones up his arms. His shoulders twinged, tensing against pain, and Drifter grit his teeth and steeled himself for the next blow; swinging around, a vibrant, deadly beacon in the blackness of the Void, the scythe and the unstoppable body behind it refusing him space to recover or retaliate.

His heel caught on the pitted stone and instead of catching himself he let himself fall. His back hit the ground; rounded, rolling, the scythe passing through the space where his neck was only a millisecond before, springing to his feet and taking advantage of Shadow’s own recovery to score a forceful blow to his side.

A blow that did not hit; the scythe was there, batting Edun’s shaft away with practiced expertise.

Still, it was something. It was something. Drifter pressed his meager offensive and flipped Edun in his palm, seizing the polearm with both hands once more. Shadow struck; he reacted, following the curve of his arm and the bright, searing glow of Hate, to catch the scythe by the blade and force it down the length of Edun’s shaft. Shadow yanked the weapon away, shook his wrist. Drifter was getting somewhere.

He rocked back on his heel and jumped, Edun above his head, to strike from above while Shadow was recovering.

Shadow deflected. Edun’s blade was knocked to the side, avoiding Shadow’s body. Drifter let the movement keep going, intuiting Shadow’s next move— inwards, with Hate once more— to catch the scythe and redirect it. The heavy blow moved away from him, harmless.

He was fighting Shadow. That was true. There was another thread of action, reaction, attending to Shadow’s movements and intent as Shadow attended to his that felt decidedly different than fighting. Hate cleaved the air in two, and Drifter caught it just at the end of its lethal arc to guide the movement in a smooth, distant swoop. The fear edged downstream. Bright, though closely restrained, elation settled in its place.

Drifter was under no illusions that he was winning this fight. Yet, strangely, Shadow was not going in for the kill like Drifter knew he easily could. Though Drifter was no novice, he was not Shadow. This fight could have been over before Drifter managed to click with him. To launch into whatever strange flow state he was in now, where Shadow’s movements were as natural to him as his own. Like going through forms, muscle memory and familiarity; he caught Hate on Edun once more and pushed forward, the weapons crossed between them, and shoved Shadow back.

That was a mistake. Shadow used the distance to flick Hate down, breaking the weapon lock, and club Drifter in the side with his other hand. Drifter’s vision exploded with red as Shadow was suddenly in his space, and no longer exchanging blows but rather shoving Drifter back by the poncho.

He caught himself, but the damage was done, and he couldn’t react in time to Shadow’s rapid, brutal offensive.

Hate’s vicious blade came in contact with his cheek; the barest bit, drawing a thin line of blood and shearing his blindfold into two strips of fabric that fluttered to the ground. Drifter grit his teeth and skipped back, and even as wan light cast red over the blackness of the Void he forced himself to attend to Shadow’s movements. The black, inky greasepaint on his cheeks stung the wound. His own blood was hot and bright, and out of the corner of his eye he could see blue Void energy clinging to the open wound. Attracted to his suffering, perhaps, or emanating from him.

Shadow’s imposing figure cut through the black, forcing Drifter to guard or else receive new wounds. Whatever flow state they’d been in earlier, that was gone now; whatever point Shadow, or Hunhow, or both of them, were trying to make, it had been made. It was now up to Drifter to put that knowledge into motion.

But– like the first time, he didn’t know how.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t trying, or didn’t want to try, and he wanted to defend himself even though neither of him had accused him of that.

He redoubled his efforts, and in doing so allowed his attention to slip. That was the moment of his undoing, as Shadow swept his legs out from under him and sent him crashing to the stone with a dull thud. Drifter held Edun up in front of himself. Shadow struck past it, ripping out one of the daggers embedded in Drifter’s shoulder armor. That was a clear message.

The next time, it would be his throat. Once again, Drifter had to do something. Back in the Zariman, floating abandoned amongst the corpses, he often stared out into the Void and pretended that something out there was speaking back to him. Drifter already knew he was nothing if not resilient.

He kicked Shadow’s knee out in the very same moment that Shadow raised his scythe. It startled the Warframe, allowed Drifter to scramble to his hands and knees to roll away and then begin to stand, but Shadow recovered more quickly than he did and kicked him in the side, back to his hands and knees, and then again, to his back, stunned.

Shadow knelt by his legs and leaned over to seize him by the throat with one hand. Shadow’s hand was large, warm, sword-steel covering his throat and hauling him up as Shadow stood. The scene changed; flashed, for the barest of moments, to the interior of the Orbiter. Drifter spasmed and kicked his legs; the vision faded and once again only the atrium was there.

Drifter gasped. His hand came down hard on Shadow’s shoulder and he released a flood of Void, reflexive and startled, and the expected explosion of power did not come.

Instead, he was drawn violently inwards. The world flipped around, and he was staring out of Shadow’s neuroptics. The world pinched and swirled and he lurched forwards, and then painfully, abruptly out, sprawling on the atrium dais with a harsh gasp. Edun dropped from his hand and clattered across the stone. Shadow hissed; surprise. Disorientation. Not anger. Drifter scrambled to his feet and snatched Edun back. Now would be the time to press the offensive; he’d gotten into Shadow’s head before.

That was not the point. Shadow was just about finished clutching his head and in only a few moments would be on Drifter again.

His head cocked as Drifter let the weapon drop once more. His heart was beating painfully hard again, banging around between his ribs and pulsing in his throat, and a high, tight pain was building behind his forehead. He took a step forward, just enough to clear Edun, and made a pretext of eye contact with Shadow’s red-grooved helm.

Slowly, indicatively, he bent his knees. He went down slowly, settling into a kneel as he might before meditation. Even if his hands shook— he set them on his legs. He breathed out, centering himself, and shut his eyes once more. This time, he did not push with Transference. Shadow was still there, a heavy and crimson fog at the corner of his awareness. If he wanted to strike out with Hate, Drifter was defenseless. Hunhow was silent.

In the deep, undulating black, the scintillating echoes of Stalked hesitated. A low ripple followed from his fingers to his arm, Hate twitching. The same blade to draw his blood— it dripped from the clean, shallow cut on his temple. Drifter dared not draw breath as the lethal Shadow took his own step towards him, closing what little gap there was.

Relief and pitiful, grateful surprise rushed through him as Shadow lowered himself to a kneel across from Drifter. Only then did he allow a questing surge of Transference energy to brush up against Shadow; not demanding, this time. Asking. That same nebulous, exhilarating sensation he’d felt when they were dueling. After a moment, the barrier thinned. The dizzying sensation of his body consigning itself to the Void, his consciousness inhabiting the Warframe— Shadow’s strong, powerful hands flexed at his urging. The heavy presence of the Warframe encompassed his, and unlike when he was controlling Caliban or Xaku, those cobbled-together aberrations of Void, he felt like a much smaller part of an entire whole. It was not entirely unpleasant.

It wasn’t unpleasant at all. Wrapped in Shadow’s sword-steel, he felt unstoppable.

“The Shadow knows you.”

Drifter jumped at Hunhow’s voice. He turned, angling his gaze up at the immobile figure of the massive Sentient, his hand flexing around Hate. Though Hunhow’s voice was steady and unemotive, the new familiarity afforded by Shadow revealed that he was… pleased, an edge of warmth and satisfaction that Drifter would have missed if he were to be only himself.

“The sleep of the Tenno is merely Void. The Shadow will now follow you there.”

He bent his head in acknowledgement. Shadow changed his bearing to a formal stiffness that he’d long since forgotten, alert focus that he was more accustomed to. Shadow didn’t seem to mind having Drifter in his head.

There was a pulse of emotion, wry and amused. Then, a lower and deeper thrum, like the Warframe was sighing at him. After another long moment of simply feeling the bond, Drifter released it. On the other side, Shadow allowed him to release, and Drifter opened his eyes to the Shadow across from him.

They stood, shifting to their feet as a mirror of each other. Drifter sighed. Air filled his own lungs, suddenly alien for how long he had been himself. Similarly, Shadow examined his hands, and then hilted Hate on his back. Drifter returned Edun to his own back.

“So I guess I’ll be seeing you, then?”

Shadow inclined his head. Drifter was reaching out, he noticed. Brushing against Shadow in the Void; not to join with him, but to feel him there, solid and strong.

Chapter Text

The barrier between the Void and Duviri thinned to a whisper in the Undercroft. Today, Dominus Thrax was afraid. The piercing, sour terror crept into every corner of Duviri, swamping the spiraling planes in sickly, oppressive fog. The sky burned sallow yellow; the elaborate Dax spat lightning. The whole world was on edge, balanced on the head of a pin, with only the slightest push necessary to spin things entirely out of control.

Preventing that was Drifter’s job. For as much as every little inconsequential thing seemed to push Sythel, Drifter had to push back; even knowing that despite his best efforts there was no calming her, he had no choice but to try.

He used to hide with her, before. Her little shack above Titan’s Rest was constantly swarming with onrocs, flying porcelain creatures left swift and famished from the paranoid woman. Drifter found refuge behind her boarded-over door, the cluttered and windowless house, and even her neurotic ramblings; for as much as she cringed and wailed when he let himself in, she just as quickly turned to her scrabbled walls and fevered conspiracy and paid little attention to him in the corner. As long as he didn’t move, he could stay there for hours until the Dax hunted him down again. Now, he rarely visited except to check that she was still there and not making trouble somewhere. It was trouble that he, inevitably, would have to resolve.

Her fear made the Undercroft suffocating. When Drifter slept, he’d dreamt of Shadow, and the Warframe demanded his attention over the pale imitations of others in the cave. As Drifter Transferred in, the array of weapons not yet made real receded and left in their place the three weapons Drifter knew Shadow possessed. He’d plucked them from their pedestals, tucked them into holsters or attached them to himself, and leapt headfirst into the Spiral.

And now he was here, in the Undercroft, picking off armies of memory with Sirocco as Shadow made quick and lethal work of the others. Sythel’s oppressive haze rolled in great banks across the twisting hills and the amphitheater, clammy and heavy and chilling him down to his bones even through the heavy leather poncho and his tough, protective pants. She just had a way of doing that— fear had a way of doing that, worming past all his defenses to settle, panicky and loud, in his chest.

Shadow occupied himself with cutting down a group of Grineer. Drifter struck down a twisted Dax, and then another; and then, at his back, a heavy mallet slammed into him and sent him skidding into the dirt.

“Back in your place!”

The roar— a guttural and hideously loud noise— forced Drifter’s mind blank. He hated the brutes more than the archers, more than even the knights. His back ached and spasmed, his finger closed on Sirocco’s trigger, and with a quick and clear shot the Malleus went down.

Seeing him drop, doubly lifeless, into the mud didn’t help Drifter at all. A cold tingle weighed his body down and the rest of the world— the twisted Undercroft, a transitory space where the real and the unreal twined into one like a hideous wyrm— faded to a distant, pulsing whine. He push-pulled himself to a rocky outcropping and pressed his back there, chest heaving. Sirocco burned in his palm.

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t keep doing this. He needed…

Whatever he needed, his spinning mind would not provide. He never asked to return to Duviri in dreams.

He wanted to wake up. Despite knowing that this sleep was a false and pitiful sleep indeed, nothing more than a gateway into this nightmare made real, he wanted to wake up. The rest of the world didn’t matter, even as the sound of gunfire thickened into a steady, relentless thunder around him.

Shadow was there, standing above him. A sudden pang of shame burned him from the inside out; he covered his face with an arm, hyperventilating.

“Don’t— don’t look at me!”

Shadow did not look away. He put down an encroaching Grineer with a flick of his wrist and a deadly throwing-knife, but his firm and unrelenting attention was set firmly on Drifter. He must be disappointed. Ashamed, to be trapped here in this nightmare with a weak, ineffective partner. This was Drifter’s world, supposedly. He was supposed to be the master of it.

He was just so afraid.

He buried his face in his arms and let his rapid, heavy breathing drown out the sound of gunfire.

Shadow reached out— Drifter felt himself being drawn in nearly without his own input. He was merely responding to Shadow’s urging. Even through the fear, Drifter felt Transference. Shadow was steady, and calm, and confident; Drifter wasn’t even offering any input. He may as well be a passenger, observing how the lethal Warframe took down the endless enemies streaming over the hill like ants from an anthill. Drifter searched for anger or disappointment across the link and found none, only acceptance that Drifter was incapacitated and in danger and then resolve to do something about it. It was almost too simple, that Shadow wanted to help him; to keep him safe. The few times before that Shadow had accompanied him to the Undercroft, the mission went off without a hitch.

Almost despite his own efforts, Drifter found himself calming down. Shadow wasn’t giving him much of a choice. His own consciousness was powerful and close, pressing down on Drifter’s, but the sensation was far from Sythel’s overwhelming, suffocating mire. It was strong, presence and pressure, but Drifter knew Shadow now, and found it familiar and comforting as few things were. He pushed across the bond, a hesitant and half-formed question, and Shadow pushed back. A bad dream, and one he had lived through many times before; he had to fight on, to finish the Spiral, to bring the story he was in to a satisfying and fitting climax, and only then would the world he’d created let him go.

The time spent drifting in the bond was almost too short. Before long, the Undercroft was stable enough that Duviri itself began to call him back. The dreamer, once stirred, often fell back to sleep. Drifter wanted to wake up. No matter how fiercely he clung to the bond, it was dissolving, and Shadow’s presence was fading back to Void. He gathered up his resolve; pushed across the bond, felt for Shadow’s acknowledgement, and released.

He stumbled out of the Undercroft portal, hand clenched around Edun, and glanced behind himself as the glassy, flickering pane of Void thinned to air.