Bold Endings
Destcember Day 7 - Bold Endings - Ao3
Glint and Ghost talk after their discussion with Micha, Eva, Ophiuchus and the other Ghosts.
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“I’m…sorry I wasn’t more open during our talk earlier,” Ghost says, his voice low as he and Glint hover at the edge of the Tower.
Their Guardians are somewhere behind them, on a secluded platform sharing a bottle of wine on a couch, close enough that they lean into one another. It’s a rare day off for their Guardians, in the middle of the Festival of the Lost, it was all Glint and Ghost could do to convince them to take some time off, but they seem to be making the most of it. Glint can feel the warmth spreading through Crow through their bond, radiating from the heat of the wine in his gut and the feel of the Guardian pressed against his side, their legs resting atop his as they lean back, Crow’s feet kicked up on the low table before them.
Ghost and Glint had found them after they’d left Eva and Micha earlier. Speaking with the other Ghosts had been nice, but draining, and Glint can’t help but think Ghost didn’t say everything he needed to. It will take time, they both know that, but he also knows there’s some things Ghost will only say around friends. Being the Ghost of the Traveler’s chosen certainly comes with its challenges, that much Glint is sure of, not to mention everything he’s been through because of it.
“It’s alright,” Glint promises, nudging his shell against Ghost’s. The comfort isn’t only for Ghost’s benefit, though he knows his friend has come to appreciate the touches from the way he presses his shell back into Glint’s when they touch. Glint likes to think the growing familiarity between the four of them is a comfort to all of them. He already cares for the Guardian a great deal, having accompanied them on plenty of missions before, and he knows Crow would always look out for Ghost if he needed it, his Guardian’s protectiveness clear as day since Ghost sacrificed himself to kill the Witness and they all realized how dire the consequences they faced could be.
“No one there expected you to say anything you weren’t ready for,” Glint says. He and Ghost watch as a ship departs the Tower hangar, slowly fading into a streak of light in the sky. “I certainly didn’t.”
“I know, I just…” he pulls in what looks to be a deep breath, his shell expanding, then closing once more as he pushes out the artificial sigh. Ghosts can’t breathe, but Glint hopes the movement grounds Ghost the same way it does for his Guardian when he lets out a heavy sigh. “I know I should probably talk about it more. I know I shouldn’t keep it all locked up.”
Glint waits, staying close to Ghost, offering him his presence and his silence, patience and time for Ghost to formulate his words, to think and parse out what he wants to say, but after a long moment of waiting, Ghost only stares at the streak of the fading ship in the sky.
“It’s strange,” he murmurs.
“What is?”
“My death. Thinking of it as a tragedy. Micha said—I’d never thought—” he shakes his shell around his frame, softly so he only brushes Glint’s fins with his own. “I hadn’t thought of my death as a tragedy. It just felt necessary.”
“That makes sense,” Glint agrees, and when he steals a glance back at Crow and the Guardian, Ghost’s eye follows. They look together at their Guardians, pressed together nearly from head to toe, their conversation low enough that Glint can’t quite make it out. He watches Crow laugh softly, his head turned to the side so Glint can see his profile, his nose wrinkled just slightly, his teeth bared in a grin. “I think I would feel the same way if Crow were ever in that kind of danger. Protecting him feels like what I’m meant to do. Not tragic, but necessary,” Glint says, looking back at Ghost. His gaze tracks over his own Guardian as they slip the wine bottle from Crow’s hand and take a sip, then drop their head onto his shoulder, smiling up at him. “But your death was a tragedy, the way the Witness hurt you—”
“I know,” Ghost’s voice is brittle enough that Glint breaks off immediately. He only felt briefly what it was like to be held in the Witness’s grasp. He doesn’t know what kind of scars Ghost still bears from feeling it so repeatedly, over and over again, another impossible sacrifice he bore for them. Ghost’s shell trembles in the air beside him and Glint presses his own into it. He wants to apologize, but even doing so feels like dragging the topic back up when he should let it lie. Ghost presses his shell back into Glint’s, and they’re so close Glint can feel his Light, tense and flighty, breathing in the contact of Glint’s own.
“Sometimes Crow asks me to keep a scar or two of his when I revive him after a hard battle,” Glint says after a long minute of silence. He knows Ghost does the same thing for his Guardian. He knows from the patchwork of scars Crow likes to kiss over the Guardian's body, the new ones he’s noticed whenever he’s around the Guardian while they wear their sleep clothes. “I think it helps him think about what he’s been through, to validate it. Is it hard when your shell doesn’t have anything like that?”
“Sometimes I think so,” Ghost admits, “but other times I’m glad I don’t. Sometimes it’s hard enough having to carry around the memory of it happening.”
He watches Ghost look over at him, his eye tracking over Glint’s shell, considering.
“I never asked you where your scar came from.” There’s a small scrape towards the inside of Glint’s shell, close to his center eye, a gouge in the paint of his shell, revealing the metal below it. Glint feels his shell shift around him, holding the fin that bears the mark a little further from his core.
“It came from Spider, when he put the bomb into my shell.”
Glint remembers the terror of that moment, both his and Crow’s, the fear of being paralyzed and the suffocating, nauseating anxiety that came afterwards, wondering if at any moment, that bomb might go off and destroy him, whether Spider chose it or not. He remembers the way Crow wept after the bomb was finally removed, once they’d made it to the City and the explosive was carefully disarmed and dismantled in a lab. He remembers being sealed away in a vacuum chamber while a technician operated on him in an oxygen starved environment, just in case. He remembers the Praxic technology that held his shell open and his fins still. The look on Crow’s face, distorted through glass. He remembers what it was like when he was finally free of it, when he and Crow were finally alone and Crow’s tears finally fell, his hands cradling Glint close to his chest.
Glint closes his eye for a moment, pushing the memories from his mind before he looks at Ghost again.
Ghost nods in recognition of his words, though he doesn’t hold Glint’s gaze. “I’m sorry I haven’t asked you much about it. If you wanted to talk about it–”
“It’s okay,” Glint promises. “You’re going through a lot.” He’s not here to talk about his own traumas, it’s Ghost that needs help right now.
“I know,” Ghost says, meeting Glint’s eye again, “but it couldn’t have been easy.”
Glint tilts his shell to the side. “I don’t think any of our lives have ever been easy.”
“Maybe,” Ghost allows. “It used to be easier, before the Red War.” He looks back at his Guardian. “That was the first time I ever really thought I’d lose them. It feels like everything changed after that.”
Glint remembers the Red War from the suffocating feeling of being robbed of his Light, and the terrible, terrifying indecision of whether or not to return to the Traveler and the Last City, to offer his aid and risk being close to the danger or to stay and wait until the threat had passed, and wonder if it ever would.
“Have you ever talked to your Guardian about any of this?” Glint asks him. “Crow and I sometimes have a hard time, but I think it helps. We were only able to get through what Spider did to us by going through it together.”
“Not all of it.” Ghost’s eye looks out towards the city again, his shell tight around his frame. “I had a list, once, of things I wanted to say to them. I’ve tried talking about it more but,” he shakes his shell again. “They think I’m a hero for what I did, for sacrificing myself, but I’m not. They do so much for the city and for humanity but when we were fighting the Witness, I didn’t think about what destroying it would do for humanity and for the system, I was only thinking of them. I just wanted them to be safe, and I think it hurt them having to be the one to channel their Light through me. I couldn’t stop them from knowing how painful it was.”
Glint might not have been with Ghost when he sacrificed himself to kill the Witness, but he watched beside Crow when they poured over the footage of the final battle, first with the Vanguard and again on their own. He’d heard Ghost’s agonized screams, the way he’d howled when the Guardian channeled their Light through him. He can’t imagine what something like that would do to Crow. It was always clear that Ghost wouldn’t have lasted much longer even if he hadn’t sacrificed himself, but he can’t imagine the pain the Guardian must feel to have any relationship to his death, to have been the one to cause it, even if it wasn't their fault.
“Maybe it would help them to talk about it, too,” Glint suggests, and Ghost stares towards the Guardians again, where his Guardian’s head rests, tucked against Crow’s neck.
It’s not like the Guardian escaped the Witness without scars. Ghost dealt the final blow but Glint knows they’d have had a long recovery ahead of them had he not come back to them. The scars they received from the battle still linger on their skin, darker than the rest, like the moment without Light was enough to permanently etch them into the Guardian’s skin. He’s seen what Ghost’s death has done to them beyond the physical, too. The first few nights after the Witness’s defeat, they spent wrapped in Crow’s embrace, more than once jerking out of sleep with tears wetting their pillow. On one of their rougher nights, after they and Crow struggled to reach sleep, overtired and exhausted the Guardian had woken from a fitful sleep and fell quickly into rough, aching sobs, cradling their Ghost to their chest while they’d cried. Glint remembers the way he’d pressed himself into the Guardian’s cheek, Crow cradling them in his arms.
“I don’t know if I can–” Ghost breaks off and Glint nudges his shell against his friend’s.
“That’s okay,” Glint promises. “You don’t have to, not if you’re not ready.”
“I don’t know if I ever will be ready,” Ghost tells him. He turns away from the Guardians again, looking out towards the city once more. From the pain in Ghost’s tone, Glint almost wants to call his Guardian over, to ask them to hold him, to comfort him, but maybe that isn’t what Ghost needs. Glint has been through enough, seen enough, talked with Micha and Eva enough to know that it will take time for Ghost to come to terms with anything that’s happened to him, but it doesn’t make the time in between any easier. It almost hurts worse knowing there’s nothing he can offer him that will make it any better.
“That’s okay, too,” Glint says, and Ghost’s shell shudders against his when he lets out another trembling artificial sigh. From behind him, he can almost feel Crow’s eyes on him, his awareness pulled to their bond as his Guardian looks back at him from the couch he and he Guardian sit on. He can feel the warmth Crow sends down the bond to him, reassurance and well-wishes, the promise that he is there and that whatever Glint and Ghost are going through, Crow and the Guardian will be with them. He sends his own warmth back to Crow along their bond and tries to muster it up, to imbue his Light with it as he leans his shell a little further into Ghost’s.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk, too.” Glint watches the ships gliding through the City airspace, the line of lights formed up in the traffic pattern that will bring them into the Tower hangar, Guardians coming home for the night. He pulls himself and Ghost into the present, offering them a hint of something grounding. “It’s okay if all you want to do is stay right here, and we don’t have to talk at all unless you want to.”
Ghost’s next breath comes a little easier, his shell a little more relaxed when he presses into Glint, into his space and his touch. He looks out over the city, his shell drooping around his frame. “Thank you,” he says quietly, and Glint stays with him for as long as he needs.
