An Exo sat on a sizable lump of ice, his lofty, layered coat collars pulled up as high as they would go around his ears (-Audials? Audio sensors? Head? Sometimes he hated how human he still was) against the stinging cold Europan wind, fumbling to keep a guttering cigarette lit. At his back, the brightly painted outer walls of the long-abandoned Bray Exoscience facility caked in rapidly gathering snow, sheltering him just enough to keep the thing lit if he sheltered the ember with one hand.
Although the hollowed, empty sides of his mechanical jaws didn't do shit for creating suction, he'd found if he pulled air into his artificial lungs with enough force, he could gain a tenuous draw anyway. The taste and smell of smoke and a particularly pungent brand of tobacco filled his throat and assaulted his olfactory sensors, and while the chemical buzz would never reach him, the smell of it was just as soothing.
Or close enough at least, if he didn't think too hard on it.
He wondered if he'd sat here for a smoke before.
He looked down into his lap at the treasures he held gathered up into a half-folded trench coat draped over his knees. Unconventional, and mostly worthless to most, to him they meant everything.
The remains of a crumpled, half-spent pack of cigarettes. Pain relief gel. The most beautiful hand-cannon he'd ever seen, the sight of its aged but nearly immaculate glossed black and gold enamel making his chest tighten.
A set of Bray Exoscience Employee ID tags. They both read SECURITY. He snorted softly. He knew what that meant.
One badge had the face of a human he didn't recognize at all. His face was pallid, dark eyes shadowed and tight. He looked angry. He looked like he hurt. He hated the sight of him.
The other, by contrast, was alarmingly familiar.
His own amber eyes stared bitterly from the shade of a low-hung cranial ornament, its goldenrod paint standing starkly against his obsidian black chassis. He was a bit scuffed up now, and he was a long way from the "-5" iteration of the Exo named on the tag, but there was no doubting his own visage. Especially when he was wearing his favorite coat. Especially when he thought he could remember the day that photo was taken.
Both IDs had the same name as him: Damien.
Damien-14 took another hard drag on the cigarette, smoke billowing from the gaps in his face, and he hunkered down with his prizes against the wind with a grumble.
He hadn't wanted to come to Europa, but once they had, it'd been all too easy to retrace footsteps centuries forgotten back to the innermost hallways of the facility behind him, straight to his locker and the bunk he'd sometimes slept in.
He figured that Damien Blake guy on the other ID had used it a fair bit more, but he couldn't remember that for sure. What he did remember was enough to make him grateful he didn't recall more.
"Eew. Cigarettes? Where did you find those?"
Damien looked up when the puff and gust of the wind broke suddenly, blocked by another body standing over him. Damien grunted and quickly swept the rest of the pack, along with the unnoticed ID cards into an inner pocket of his coat. He stood, tucking the hand cannon into a belt and pocketing the pain gel, then finally turned to fully face his companion.
"Locker," he said, plucking the nearly-spent smoke from his jaws and chucking it into the snow, snuffing it with a boot heel.
Aspen-3, the other Exo accompanying him, shivered visibly in the cold as he eyed Damien.
Damien didn't like Aspen much.
No.
That wasn't true. He did like him. More than most people, though he didn't like people in general very much at all. It was just that Aspen was bright and energetic and bubbled over with enthusiasm and an appetite for life that Damien simply could not wrap his head around. Too much time with Aspen felt like trying to stare into the sun. Neural receptors started to feel like they were cooking.
"Does it...work?" Aspen asked, violet eyes flickering and moving to track the descent and demise of the cigarette before darting back up to Damien's face.
Damien stared back blandly, then raised one hand. It took little more than a thought to gather a little globe of pure Solar Light in his palm, and not much more effort to bump it gently into the air to drift over to the other Warlock. Aspen's eyes brightened in delight, and he raised his hands, cupping the all-too-welcome source of heat against himself with a soft coo of relief.
"It's... Nostalgic," Damien offered. "Otherwise..." He shrugged. He didn't want to say they were useless. He couldn't face acknowledging that. It was too itchy to think about his mechanical body that hard.
He remembered. He knew he'd wanted this Exoframe. Knew it was different than Aspen's. Better, as promised. He knew he'd...worked... hard for it. But there were just some things the human psyche wasn't meant to face, and the complete separation of one's mind and the meat suit it had piloted was one of them.
Most of the time it didn't bother him so much, but today he felt uncomfortably close to the Damien of the flesh he'd once been.
Aspen was nodding at him. Perhaps he didn't understand entirely, but he still got what Damien meant. Got that it wasn't a topic they should poke at. All Exos knew the dance. DER was a spooky enough thing that even Guardians dreaded it.
"Are we done here?" Damien asked, before the other could try and strike up a conversation. Aspen's eyes flickered again as if he'd just remembered where they were. Yep, he'd interrupted him just in the nick of time. They could talk on the ship. This miserable place was cold, and creepy...and haunted by their pasts.
"Err- Yeah. Yes. Yeah."
Damien held in a snort and turned, beginning to trudge off through the snow and the gradually intensifying wind.
"Good. Let's go."
He'd spent more than enough time here in his last life. He wasn't interested in lingering any longer.
