Work Text:
This is a prison.
The Vex do not care about him, he knows, no more than a machine can care about that which wishes to destroy it, wishes to seek out its heart and cut it out. He is stuck here, dead and not, never existing, outlasting all of humanity. Eternity in a paradox, cut away from the pattern, from reality, is all he can foresee.
No, no, no, he thinks, there’s always a crack somewhere. There’s no waste driving himself mad in here. That’s been done before, or will be done, wherever and whenever Toland is, unstuck from time in a way that likely doesn’t feel like a constant drowning. Lucky. Praedyth is dead, probably, definitely, in any measurable sense. But some bit of him is still clinging to the bones of the Vault, and he’ll be damned if he lets Kabr’s work go to waste.
Work, sacrifice: the same thing, to the people at the Tower. The same thing here too, maybe.
The door slips, giving away a few scant inches. She’s there, like she always is; this time, she’s staring straight on, eyes unblinking. Praedyth starts, feeling a surge of dull pain at the realization that he hasn’t seen anyone else with two eyes in centuries, not since he hit Venus. He blinks, nods, holds up his transceiver. In the milliseconds before the door slips shut, he thinks he sees her nod back, heft her rifle.
No transmissions that loop, he thinks tiredly, was too busy remembering how to say hello. Damn. He looks to his right, sees the grey-green frame of a gun lying beside him. From a century ago, maybe, or the next decade, or tomorrow, or now. Whenever it comes from, it’s here. He sighs, grabs it, tests the weight. Stands weakly, hefts it like she did. Nods- to himself this time- sits, gets to work.
It’s done in a few decades, thin wires circling the muzzle like hoops of linear time, sleek and exact. Sometimes, when the door opened, when he wasn’t transmitting messages, she looked at him. He’d raise the rifle, nod; she’d nod back, and the door would close. A work-in-progress, he’d mouthed, once. She’d chuckled as the door closed.
Now, he summons up whatever energy he has, searches for discontinuities in time around him. There’s one in front of him, half a foot above eye level, and he tilts his head, traces it backwards and forwards and through a million timelines. It’ll do, with the right amount of intervention. A crack. A crack in time, but that’ll still let the Light through.
He sets the Rifle adrift. The door creaks open.
She’s there, nearer than she’s ever been, like she could reach through the door-
She is-
She-
He is bones and dust and Light, faded Light. She blinks, swears, swivels, takes in the room. It’s dim, save the corner he died in. She swears again, taps her comm, vanishes into nothingness. Above her, around her, he watches.
Never did get your name. You never got mine either, I suppose. Eye for an eye, name for a name, gun for a gun.
---
The Vex see their death, he sees the Vex’s death, the Vex sees his death, and he sees his own death. A loop, a pattern. Patterns are getting tiresome.
Light, radiolaria: what’s the difference, anymore? One is his and one is theirs. One was Kabr’s, one was Pahanin’s, one would seep in and claim the Vault one day, tomorrow, yesterday, when?
Kabr and Pahanin and he opened the door; Pahanin closed it and Kabr cracked the Vault open and took his Light and made a shield and Praedyth became some part of it, trapped, waiting for Traveler knows what.
Traveler, Traveler, he thinks, slumped over, watching the door, listening to his own heartbeat and the humming of mechanical life, watch over us all.
There is not existing and there is not existing.
He remembers the nervous chattering, Kabr’s rambling, Pahanin muttering and talking and laughing. The wonder and fear fading into fear fading into despair, hope trapped in his brain like it was under ice. The climb back up, the fight, Kabr holding them off, Pahanin running and making it through, the door closing, tell them I’m alive, I’m alive!-
His Light is still extant; some of it, at least. Hope is a hell of an idea, he supposes, sending a tendril of it through a crack in the wall, out into the Vault. Looking, looking-
There. He floats, sticks a small piece of his consciousness in his Ghost, a vessel that is uncomfortable but functionable enough. His Ghost is shut off, deep in stasis, nothing online but her core. Dreaming, floating through time like he did.
Here, time is just as visible. She flutters, enters his brain, tells him what she saw. He struggles to remember, to categorize, to compare the new and the old. Flashes of black and white and grey, a higher power here to consume. Not now, but soon, he thinks.
He leaves a piece of himself with his Ghost, as much as he can spare, checks her core memories. Good enough to explain a few things.
Well, he still has some time- that’s about all he has, here. He returns to his cell, fiddles with his communicator, records a few more messages. By now, the very first ones he sent out should be hitting the Tower. He looks at the pieces of dust and time and refracted Light that flitter through the Vault, the ones that blink oddly and always reminded him of Ghosts. He siphons some of his Light into a few of them, sets their frequencies so they’ll pick up his messages at the right time, sends them out through the cracked door.
His Ghost still isn’t set to pick up his last transmission. That doesn’t matter, though. He’ll deliver the last message himself.
He chuckles, coughs, grabs his old rifle, inspects it. It’s ancient and rusted and brand-new. His fall sure hasn’t happened yet. It’ll happen again, too.
Praedyth isn’t the first to make his own fate deep within the Vault. Hopefully, he won’t be the last.
He pulls the trigger.