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He knows the name Cora Harper - long before, he thinks, she knows the name Desmond Ryder. But it doesn’t stop him from smiling and shaking her hand as though they’d just met. Before he can ask - say, offer, commiserate - she’s whisked away again by his father.
They don’t get much of a chance to talk in the next couple of months. Too much going on - too much training, prepping, and psyching themselves out. He sees his father a handful of times - his father sees him even less. But it’s okay, they’re about to spend 600 years right next to each other. Him and Adrien joke about the time, shoving each other back and forth, passing the fear between them like a particularly hot thermal clip.
He’s still buzzing from adrenaline, smoke in his eyes and blue in his veins, when he hears Cora say something - “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious,” - and realizes a couple details are definitely missing, and were definitely missed in the panic. There’s no time to be hurt, or annoyed, or even confused - there’s just the go, go, go , of his father’s call.
There may be a mean little smile that doesn’t fit right on his face when he rams an ugly bastard over the railing of the building, blurring past Cora in a streak of blue, and hearing the startled sound in his wake - but he doesn’t get to enjoy it long. They still need to move forward.
Forward, forward, forward.
Stop.
There’s no stopping to breathe. No stopping to process, to… to anything really. It should probably hurt, how much it doesn’t.
Liam looks at him like he can’t decide if he trusts him, but he wants to.
Cora looks at him like she can’t decide if she hates him, but she wants to.
And the rest of the crew are too giddy to be on their way to look at him too closely to have much of an opinion. Except Lexi - Lexi’s fond voice is a balm, and when she turns the monitor dedicated to Adrien’s vitals to face him - shows him how to redirect them to his quarters - he about collapses in her arms and she smiles sadly, her grip firm on his shoulder to keep him upright.
“We should talk.” She doesn’t startle, even with her back to him. There’s a soft pneumatic hiss as the door shuts behind him, offering some measure of privacy from the prying eyes huddled around the research table. Desmond wonders idly if Gil’s making any bets. Or if Liam’s trying to pretend he’s not interested. He already knows Vetra’s slipped some credits Gil’s way.
They both have good control. He’d expect nothing less from a Huntress. Wonders if she expects less from him. But there’s still a thrum of energy in the air - filtering blue at the edges of his sight. She shakes her head, he imagines, to get rid of it.
“...Yeah, we probably should.” She says, straightening from where she’d been spritzing a handful of small vines.
He settles back against the door, arms crossing loosely over his chest as she turns to face him.
“He never told me you - and Adrien? - were biotics.” She starts, almost accusatory as she mirrors his position against the back wall.
“He never told us about his good luck rock.” He shoots back.
“He asked me to be his second.” And her voice cracks - and there it is. Desmond sighs softly, dragging a hand down his face as he feels his shoulders lose their tension - feels the weight of the past few days press down hard.
“I didn’t ask for this Cora. Hell, I don’t want it - no offense SAM.” There’s a soft ping from the bank of computers - SAM’s way of acknowledging without interrupting. Funny - the AI had more tact than his creator ever did. “I’m not… I know what I’m good at. And this isn’t it.” He pauses, breathing around the lump in his throat. “And I could use some help.”
It’s not all placating, though that could be seen as the goal, he supposes. He feels a gulf forming where he’s used to a body, and he doesn’t even have the lighthouse to pull him forward anymore. Cora was closer to that lighthouse - but she’s just as lost at sea as he is. If they don’t figure out how to work together, they’re both going to drown.
She seems to reach the same conclusion, after a long, quiet moment, the tension bleeding out of the room as she steps forward, and he mirrors her. When they clasp hands in the middle, he thinks, maybe, she wants to hate him a little less.
“It must have been great,” she says, offhand, as they’re stretching in the cleared out cargo hold. Desmond raises an eyebrow, glancing over his shoulder at her, question clear. “Having your dad around, while learning this stuff.”
He frowns and turns back to pressing his forehead to his knee, feeling the stretch pull at his back. He can practically hear her matching frown, feeling her eyes on his back.
“Dad, dad, look what we can do!” They’re ten and impossible to tell apart, and they’re a blur of blue and mud from where they’d been wrestling outside. Alec looks up briefly before looking behind them to their mother.
“That’s great, hey Ellen, can you come look at this?”
“He ever help you with your training?” He asks as he pushes himself to his feet, bouncing on the balls of his feet to shake out the last of the tension.
She snaps her jaw shut - looks like she’d been about to ask another question - eyeing him up and down. “...No. The Huntresses took care of that. I joined the Initiative…”
“And were already the top of your class?” He offers with a small grin. She pauses, then relaxes herself, pushing a hand through her hair as she stands as well.
“Something like that.”
“Yeah. Dad was super proud when we graduated from the Academy with special marks for biotic tactics. ‘Bout the only time he talked about it actually.”
She’s quiet then, running through the first of the breathing exercises he’d gotten used to seeing by now. They’re different than what he and Adrien learned, but follow the same principle. He follows along with his own, feels the fuzziness in his veins settle heavy in his fingertips.
“...He told me I was great at control. Told me he was proud to have me as his second.”
“He told us when we graduated that it was great we could now work with him.” He pauses, then sighs, shaking his head, “But he’s right - you are.” There’s a thread of teasing jealousy in there, and she picks up on it, grasping for something she can use to steer them both out of dangerous waters. “We learned how to hit hard - our fine control came later, and to be honest, mine still ain’t great.”
“Mm… let me show you what the Huntresses showed me.”
“You’re used to fighting next to another biotic?” They’re both sweaty and gross, and still peeling off armor pieces from the last stint on Eos. It’s an odd question, one that gets her his full attention
“Well, yeah. Adrien and I were always in the same unit. And most of our unit ended up being biotic by the end, though only a handful of us were really permanent. Met one guy who stayed with us for a bit before he moved on to a better post - Kaidan something? - one of the best I’ve ever seen honestly, schooled both me and Adrien something fierce, but gave us some nifty new tricks too.”
“The shield trick. Can you show me?” She sounds…excited? And he pauses, digging back in his memory for what she was talking about. It had been a blur of fire, smoke and painful impacts out there honestly, and he was a little foggy. She huffs at him and lightly shoves his shoulder - still wary, but they were working through it. “Fixing my shield?”
“Oh!” He frowns, “You can’t do that?”
She snorts inelegantly, flipping her hair and dropping the last of her armor in the locker. “I can merge shields. Everyone can do that. I can’t stitch my shield into someone else’s. Those are completely separate fields, different wavelengths and resonance - hell, even different pulse strength.” Another gentle shove as she moves past him, heading for the mat set out for their stretching, “Come on, I know you’re still buzzing too.”
She was right, and he grins, following after her. “Adrien and I figured it out pretty early. Easier for one of us to focus on hitting, the other shielding you know? But we couldn’t give up the shield completely…” He rubs at his arm, the sting of a half-gone memory pulsing under his skin. “Sit down, back to back.”
She goes readily, without even the wary look she would have shot him less than two weeks ago.
“Okay - you ever seen those really old frame reels, the ones you spin to create the animation? It’s kind of like that.” He weaves together a shield in front of him, passing the wavelengths from hand to hand for a moment before pushing it around him and letting it fall - Cora picks up on that easily enough, blocking up her own shield where his ends. He lets his fall completely, only to thread it back together when she comes around back to his right side.
Around and around, faster and faster, blocking and threading, stamping and weaving, and eventually, the edges blur, like they would with a merge - only to streak and overlap.
Its hard to do this without Adrien - they’d always been able to thread together, various abilities that made them a hellish matchup on the battlefield. He could generally do little things with other biotics, like the shield stitch - but it was always easiest with Adrien. And even as he feels that gulf that should be a body growing each day, he also feels like they’re getting closer to that lighthouse - all of them.
It doesn’t look so much like his father anymore.