Chapter Text
She's carried it with her for as long as she can remember. That hollow feeling. That emptiness.
She thought she could fill it in with her old memories, but they no longer fit in that space. She is too far removed from the person she used to be. Time has changed the outlines. Or rather, someone has been busy filling in the gaps when she wasn't looking.
It's the sort of closure that people speak of when they look to mend what has been lost. She should be grateful for it. But she can't help but feel like this isn't fair. Those who came before deserve to be put to rest, and the only way for that to happen is to experience that pain properly.
She has never been afraid of pain. She knows she would recover from it with time. But she hesitates to rip open old wounds again. It's an ugly process. She worries that it might warp her again, and she'll be back where she started.
She doesn't say any of this out loud. Not even to Zeller. It already sounds insane in her own head.
She especially does not want to say any of it to Louis. But he's gotten dangerously good at getting words out of her without her even opening her mouth.
It starts when he asks her to help him bake sweet bread during the Festival of the Lost. Apparently, the tradition of the festival goes far back, long before the Golden Age. According to Louis, there were many ways in which humans commemorated the occasion. His family had their own traditions, which included making sweet bread and setting it out on a small altar. Offerings, he called it.
"You know, when Eva told me you were good at baking, I thought she was pulling my leg," Louis says as she approaches with a plate of freshly-baked sweet bread. "I really thought you would just throw a solar grenade in the oven and call it a day."
"I considered it," she replies.
"Please don't give her ideas," Zeller exasperates.
Louis laughs as he accepts the plate from her. "Thanks for not setting my kitchen on fire."
They make their way to the rooftop garden, where Louis had set up the altars. Normally they would be inside the home, but Louis thought the garden made for a nicer setting. Zeller agreed.
"So, we set up these offerings," Zeller begins, "and the spirits of the dead come to visit?"
"That's the idea," Louis answers. "Not literally, of course. I don't know for a fact that anyone continues to exist after death, but…it's the thought that matters, right?"
"Sounds like one of Eris's Hive rituals," Zeller whispers to her when Louis is out of earshot.
In the center of the garden are two altars. One of them is covered with flowers picked from the City, with a list written in Louis's handwriting of the names of his family pinned in the center. The other is more reservedly decorated, with a few rows of candles lining small bundles of wildflowers picked from the surrounding wilds.
She reaches into her holster and sets the Ace of Spades into an empty space in the middle of the altar.
It had been Louis's idea for her to make an altar this year. Originally he'd suggested it be for her family, too, but she rejected the idea. It felt disingenuous to try and commemorate people she barely remembers, let alone mourns. Eventually, she settled on Cayde.
The Colonel wanders up to Cayde's altar and begins pecking at the plate of sweet bread set in front of it. "Those aren't for you, shoo!" Louis admonishes, followed by a string of words that she's fairly certain are meant to be crude insults towards the bird.
"It's fine," she says. "It's Cayde's own fault if the Colonel eats all of it first."
As the evening goes on and they settle down in front of the altars, Louis begins to talk. He talks about the future, the Golden Age, the Collapse, the Last City. He talks about his time on Kepler and the Nine, about Ikora. About her.
She listens as he says all of this out loud to his family as if they were right there, and not a list of names written on a piece of paper. She looks at his left eye and wonders if, maybe, he really can perceive them in some way.
She turns to Cayde's altar. She doesn't know what she should say to him. There had never been any need for superfluous words between them. Even if Cayde could really hear her, she thinks he would prefer to just sit in silence.
The emptiness within her stings.
She thought that, when Cayde left on his own terms, it would finally bring her closure. That she would stop feeling the pain.
Instead, she misses him more than ever.
She wants him back. She wants him to help reclaim what humanity has lost. She wants him to be there for Zavala and Ikora, his fireteam. She wants him to meet Louis. The two of them would get along splendidly.
But Cayde chose his own fate. To give her Light back to her, to bring Zeller back to her side. To reunite with Sundance.
As well meaning as the offerings were intended to be for her on Louis's part, she knows she could never ask Cayde to leave that place.
"Zahara?" Louis's hand is warm on her back. "Is everything okay?"
She looks over at him. His eyes are filled with concern.
Her current body is incapable of crying. Clovis Bray had deemed it an unnecessary function. One of the few things they agreed on.
She doesn't know if that's a good or bad thing right now. Each breath into her lungs feels like a knife.
"Hey, hey," Louis says softly, pulling her gently into an embrace. "It's okay."
If Louis were ever to leave, would she be able to do this for him? Build him an altar, tell him about her days without him, as if nothing had changed? Would she ask him to come back?
She has to. She owes it to him, to remember him the way he would want to be remembered. She won't forget him like she forgot her family.
Louis presses his lips to her head, and says a word that she recognizes. Breathe.
She draws in a breath. In the candlelight, it hurts a little less.