Illara Desh, Vangaurd Titan and member of Fireteam Cerberus. Sloppy origin fic under the cut, tw for domestic abuse and the horrors of deep space entities unraveling people on a cellular level and putting them back together???? About 4k words total.
Ocean air scraped through the garden, wearing the white stone and scuffing her cheeks a warmer, deeper brown. Summer was a heavy scent in the air, tugging the red tomatoes on their stalks and crushing the weakest leaves of her mother’s herbs underfoot. The stones reflected the heat of the sun, smooth as glass this close to the sea and slippery under her calloused feet. “Illara,” mother called, muted in all that heat.
She hadn’t found it in the Steppes, but even the Steppes are warmer than space.
There is a constant sound of machinery at the Cosmodrome—Exo and their lessers moving through the halls, the stream of vehicles in and out of the gates. None of the jets rev quite the way a bike does, and there are no cliffs to echo with a single roar. The sound would draw her inside when mother’s voice could not, but that was—colder months, when her feet were softer, the stones new and rough. That Summer, she listened to the engine straining on the final climb and walked deeper into the tomatoes and sage, soft red skin to soft brown and the little black bird hopping one stalk ahead to escape her. His left wing dragged in the dirt, glowing green as an oil spill in the light.
He was soft—actually oily—when she scooped him in both hands. His ugly feet curled as if for flight and he flapped, cried, tried to grow in her grip with fury and sound. Familiar as the growling engine, that was, and she smoothed his ruffled feathers down his head until he surrendered.
“Illara,” mother cried, please all underneath. The engine was close, and her feet were very dirty.
“I’m coming,” she called over her shoulder, eying the steps between where she was and the drop of the cliff. Eying her prize: how far would he have gone to escape her? “I’m only trying to help.” She brought him up, nestled him in the hollow of her throat and jaw. He scratched her collar and made to bite her ear: she held him away. His wing was already broken, and it would be cruel to squeeze him.
“Don’t make me,” she whispered, the phrase echoing around her head like baba’s engine dying at the front of house.
-
The lights are out. She presses the child into her mother’s arms and hands them each an oxygen mask before placing the panel back over the hole. As long as whatever was with them in the belt didn’t scan the room with anything but eyes and lights—as long as the outage didn’t affect the air supply—
“What will you do,” mother asked, when first she pulled the panel away from the wall. “You don’t have a gun.”
“I’ll get to the suits, I’ll go to the next ship and see if they’re alright. If one of ours comes along with a gun, go with them.”
“Illara—”
She punches the corner of the panel back in place, runs her palm over the wall to test the gap in the dark. No irregularity. Logically, she isn’t alone until she leaves the room. The door will be where it always is, light or no light. She’ll hear anything move in the dead ship.
And it will hear her. She doesn’t have a gun.
The floor is a grid of bolted steel plates, she crawls with her fingers tracing forward-left-forward-left until she grips the edge of the doorway and leans her head into the hall. The metal of the ship is cold against her palms, a bite she feels in her joints. Further down the hall, ambient light filters from the windows. She’s facing the sun, sitting in a portside bedroom: she needs to go left.
There’s enough light to see in the hall, but dread weighs her to her knees. Every hair on her body is electric with the terror of looking outside, like a child’s mad dash to the bathroom in a hall of dark rooms. She stays below the windows and stares directly at the floor, moisture gathering in the corners of her eyes.
Be brave, she thinks: find the way out and go back for mother. One hand and knee in front of the other, the metal gleaming faintly beneath her. She lifts her gaze to the end of the hall, afraid to see more than her own shadow. What she wouldn’t give to be a younger girl, to have someone press her in a mother’s arms and seal her safe in the wall. What she wouldn’t give to have her baba with her, his fists raised against the dark. He would raise them for her. He would do it right, if she were waiting in the dark.
“Selfish.” The word grinds in her throat and tears leak onto her hands, cold by the time they reach the floor. Her fingers are numb, and she brisks them up her arms when she gets past the bars of light. She hasn’t thought of her father in years: it figures she’d only want him now.
“For mother,” she gasps, rising on shaking legs and riding them into the dark.
-
The bird slept in a basket with several towels, interrupted on their way to baba’s workshop. Mother gave her a syringe with the formula they used at the office, milky white protein with antibiotics and steroids that he tolerated after several tense nights of starvation. He cried when baba turned on the radio, and she was made to cover him with a towel to head off the growls that didn’t echo from the rocks. “Hush-hush,” she would say, putting the towel over the basket and her own head. Breathe in the musky scent and run her finger over his head. He rustled back into the folds of his nest, hiding under his good wing, until her patience waned and she left him to sit at her father’s feet.
Baba huffed a sigh and his hands in her hair were a release for all the tension in the house. “Let me braid it,” he said, and she nodded, leaning against the chair. His knees parted and wedged on either side of her shoulders, and his rough fingers combed up against the soft hair at the back of her neck. Her hair was dark and thick, full of saltwater and sunshine from the long day.
“What would you do if I shaved it off,” she teased. The clink of dishes drifted in from the kitchen. Mother was always careful not to make any noise when baba came home. The rest of the time, she was yelling Illara’s name down the cliffs.
His hand tightened against her hair, pulling, but not enough to hurt. “The barber knows better than to touch what is mine,” he said, and she laughed. “But baba,” she pressed, “it would keep the boys away.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he warned. “Your mother had bleached her hair, some fake color from a magazine. I still wanted her.”
“What if she did it now?”
“She wouldn’t.”
The dishes clicked gently together in the washer, and a pause followed, waiting. Baba hummed and resumed carding his fingers through Illara’s dark hair.
I’m not mother, she thought.
-
She’s shaking too deep to breathe when she reaches the docking bay, even in the relative warmth of her suit. Her breath steams the air, and she prays they don’t freeze in their niche, that body heat will sustain them for—however long this takes. There hasn’t been sound or sight of another officer on ship, just frightened passengers who clawed at her arms and made her bite off a shriek in her palm. They begged for answers she did not yet have, and she made them promises she likely cannot keep. She coughs, a hideous sound in the dark. Tears stream steady through the oil on her face, and her hair hangs limp to one side, sticking to her flop sweat. The shaved sides prickle as the limp hair moves over them. Sweat gathers cool and ugly against the back of her neck, down her spine and the crack of her ass.
She coughs again, mucus fear similarly coating her insides. The air of the vessel has always been dry and artificial, and without the humidifiers on, she feels like she’s choking on her own fluids. “Stay here,” she tells the passengers cognizant enough to follow. “Get a mask and strap into the seats at the front of the room, I’m going to open the door and find out if the next ship over has an officer aboard.”
“What should we do in the meantime?”
“Find the fucking mechanic. Find a way to keep everyone warm, I don’t know how far the next ship is.”
“I don’t think you should go out there,” the man says, even as he pushes his partner into a seat and straps him in.
Illara forces herself to look out the bay door, eying the space between them and the next cluster of asteroids that might contain a ship. She wasn’t trained for this, but she was trained to do whatever she had to to get to those in need of medical attention. In theory, asteroids are easier to dodge than bullets.
Nothing moves beyond the window, but her desire to look away increases. “I don’t think it matters,” she replies. When she turns back to them, she tries to stand taller, tries to sound like she’s brushing the man off. “I’ll have my jetpack and internal radio. If we can get communications back online, we can figure out what we’re dealing with.”
“Don’t you think that’s what the other officers are doing,” he asks, before clamping the mask over his head and tilting it, to await her answer. “We don’t know what they’re doing,” his partner says, reaching across his own seat to cover the other’s hand. “Let her go. I don’t like sitting here either.”
“You’re going to sit here with me until I say otherwise.”
He turns his hand over and grips with all of his fingers. “Of course.”
Illara turns on the dim room and shakes her helmet onto her head, waiting for it to lock into her suit. A series of gentle clicks, ticking her down to the vacuum of space.
-
“My own daughter running around with those boys, did you tell her she could go? Did you do anything?” Baba had mother by her wrist and held it over her bowed head, shaking her down to her toes in short jerks. “First she doesn’t want to go go the shop, now she lies—”
“I was called away, the farm down the road has foxes—”
“Meanwhile the foxes come for our own!” He shook her again. Illara lifted the towel over the bird and put her head under, staring at his black eyes. Is she really a bird, helpless and shivering in the dark? When the boys chase her down the beach, she doesn’t feel it, soaking up the warmth of the sun and laughing with all of her breath.
“Do something,” she whispered, watching it test the pull of its own wings trying to flatten itself to the ground. Its beady eyes punctuated its open mouth on either side, and no sound came after.
-
The Cosmodrome was her idea. Mother took her aside one night, holding tight to her own side while baba slept on the couch. “I won’t leave you with him, but I cannot stay here. You know I cannot stay.” She smoothed her other hand down the side of Illara’s face, catching her hair and carding it with her nails. “Where do you want to go, Illara?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she answered, thinking of the cliff and the beach and the boys who chased her across the sand.
“Anywhere, Illara.” Her hand cupped hard to Illara’s cheek, nails digging in and making her look her mother in the eye. “I will follow you anywhere away from him.”
-
Illara closed the door of the neighboring ship and clicked her helmet away from her face, gasping against the urge to vomit. None of her training was quite like the first spiraling journey through space, untethered from the craft and aiming herself toward the unknown. Her skull aches, all of her sinuses aflame and her throat tight with the need to be sick.
The hangar is as dark as her own, as empty. “Is anyone there,” she calls, cringing at the echo of her voice.
Not alone, whatever the answer. She thumbs the mic in her wrist, “Entrar-6 to Conductor, do you copy? This is Corporal Desh, requesting assistance. There are ships caught in the belt without power, can anyone hear me?”
A cough answers her, and she flattens to the wall, scanning the space. A breath rings louder than her own, a long gasp that turns to cough to breath to wheeze. A dark shape in the corner sits up on its elbows, lifts its head.
Glowing eyes pierce the dim, white and slanting before a snarl—
Illara leans off the wall to retch, trapping the smell in her helmet when she clips it back on and runs for the door.
-
The bird graduated to bugs from the garden after a week: she’d been grounded, and her mother effectively grounded with her, and hunting for bird food is as good a pastime as any. Her mother was much better with it, taking the towel off the basket when Baba was gone and letting it explore the living room. “Did you name him?”
“I’m seventeen, not seven.”
Thirteen, twelve, eleven—
“Mm,” mother hummed, “but did you name him?”
“No.” She looked down at the bird and her lip curled back from his teeth. “He’s too pathetic.”
Her mother laughed: “So that isn’t a grasshopper in your hand for him?”
“I didn’t name him,” she argued, “I didn’t say he should starve.”
When the engine cut the ridge to the house, mother shooed her. “Put him away, quickly. Put him outside, he’ll be fine.”
The bird was limp and blinking in her hands, quiet after an afternoon of chasing grasshoppers across the floor. He did not look like he would be fine. The engine roared louder when it hit the slope. A growing whine that cut the air no matter how hot the day, grinding in her skull. She loved the sound at seven; she hated it then. Her hands tightened around the bird, and he opened his mouth, but didn’t protest.
Compared to her mother’s touch, he was only half-alive in her hands.
The door from the garage slammed open, clattered shut. Illara grit her teeth, was replacing the towel when her father came in through the kitchen. “Is that filthy thing still here,” he asked. Her hands tightened at her sides, but she felt a crawling on the palms—for the first time, she considered what it might feel like if he meant her.
Anywhere, Illara. Just tell me.
“She gets dirtier visiting the shop,” mother said. Illara watched him round on her, watched her mother’s eyes hardly widen when he stepped up to back her against the kitchen door. Why would she provoke him? Why would she ask Illara to put it away, only to invite his ire? Staring at her father’s broad shoulders, his heavy back, the familiarity struck her. She had always seen his back, always felt his hands gentle in her hair. Only then was she tall enough to see her mother on the other side, her hands flat to the wall and her eyes bird-black and beady around her silent, opened mouth. He picked up her chin in his hand, shook her by it, and she didn’t look at him. “My shop is dirty now? The woman who works in a barn says this to me?”
“Baba,” she said.
“I tell you to stay here, to be a mother, and you bring the work into my house? Next she learns to birth a lamb in the bathtub? Did you use the same hands to fix my dinner as you did to touch that filthy thing? You want us to die of salmonella so you can pack up your things and go?” Illara couldn’t see his hands, couldn’t see from her mother’s face if there was any harm, but harm was an oil film on the air. Harm was a stink of sweat and fear, of punctured skin and engine grease. Baba was his engine, burning fuel and going through the motions, day after day, and mother was the hill, challenging him and winding him to a steady and horrible whine.
“Baba,” she repeated.
“Why don’t you go, then? Bleach your filthy hair and go to the cities where they live forever.” He spat on the ground and put his foot between hers, wiping it on the floor and shoving his knee against the doorway, pinning her in place. “Too good for this place, too good for me. I know how you feel, I know, I know—”
“Baba,” Illara cried, both heads turning to her. His gaze was wild, her mother’s terrified. She took the bird in both hands and held it cocked like a gun, her thumb under its fragile throat. “It’s just a fucking bird,” she shrieked, pulling until she felt bone pop against her palm, “a dirty fucking bird!” She flung the carcass at him before she made the leap, six feet of Summer sun and beach legs throwing her against the mountain of his body. Off-balance, his head hit the door and she swung on him, throwing her weight behind her arm and careless with her aim.
She landed three punches before her mother pulled her away, arms tight around her ribs and hauling with all her strength. Baba reeled back into his chair and sat heavy, blinking with nothing behind the eyes.
He cried as she packed, but he let them go.
-
She nearly misses the ship, rolling desperate through the belt like she can crawl her way out of the nightmare. The door opens and closes, the hatch sealed as the pressure changes around her. Someone is still in the hangar.
Shaking in her suit, Illara climbs upright against the hatch door, lifting herself enough to peer over the edge of the window. The dark of the hangar is all encompassing under the emergency light of the hatch door, and a voice is counting down the last minute before it opens. Something turned the auxiliary systems on.
She doubts it was the mechanic.
A pair of lights blink and dart away from her vision. Another pair, fainter, yellow. A third in electric blue. She presses back against the opposite door and stares balefully at the light, reaching with her left to turn it off. “Can anyone hear me,” she says to her right wrist, “please, oh please—”
Thirty-three, thirty-two—
She thinks of her mother, closed in the walls and waiting. Would they have found her by now? How long could she have been out in the belt?
Twenty-five, twenty-four—
The soft, electronic voice continues to count, pressure rising in the chamber until her helmet responds, unsealing from her suit. If she doesn’t open the door, she won’t be able to keep the hatch closed. If no one responds to her radio, she could run out of oxygen before she finds a working ship. She still doesn’t have a gun.
Only her hands.
“Don’t make me,” she says, under the rolling retch of her breath. “Don’t make me, don’t make me—”
Two, one—
The hatch opens. She pulls her helmet free and swings it like a club at the dark, makes it three steps and there is no scream when her cells slip from their sheaths and fall apart.
-
“And: three, two, one—breathe?”
Illara hears the gasp before she comprehends the sense of hearing, skips comprehension in favor of the pain. It is incredible, even for the second time, to sit up in the universe and exist. Time and Space slapping her in the face, and the voice says breathe, and her body says please don’t—but she breathes.
Black.
Black.
She expects the ship, when she opens her eyes. She expects the black eternity of space punctuated by asteroids and bodies, the first Awoken staring down at her with new stars in their eyes. Nonexistence, followed by the pain of existence, followed by—violence. She remembers violence.
“You’ve been dead for a very long time. You will not understand what we are about to do, but you must do it. They are coming.”
“The wolves,” she asks, tongue numb and dry in her mouth. There’s a chirp to her left, and she turns her head with muscles made of sand. “The wolves are coming, warn—warn—”
“There’s no one to warn here, unless this counts: get up or die again, Guardian.”
“Die—” she breaks off, laughing with the dead air still popping in her lungs. “Die, die, die. That’s fine, let’s be dead again.”
Pins and needles tell her she is a being with two arms and two legs, still. Peel the glove back as feeling returns to her hands: still purple. “Not a dream, why is it never a dream.”
“It is sometimes,” the voice says. Illara wonders if it exists purely to disagree. She turns her head again, and a floating eye blinks at her from the center of a childs toy. “Bullshit,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, painful in her throat. She says it anyway. “Bullshit.”
“I am your Ghost, Guardian. I have been searching for you.”
“Bullshit.” Her legs shake the sand from her muscles.
“You may name me, but I would prefer that not be it.”
An inhuman scream rings out beyond the walls. Illara looks around the room: corrugated metal ceiling, sun slipping between ventilation ports. The walls are rusted, weeds growing up through the floor and twisting around the cots. Very few are left standing. The bones of a human leg hang over the edge of the nearest one.
Anywhere, Illara.
The Cosmodrome. Smells like autumn and the inside of an oil drum. Illara breathes it deep, until her chest remembers being full, with something beyond pain.
The scream echoes through the structure, grinding and rising with frustration. “I hope you knew how to fight,” her Ghost says, pressing against the back of her neck like it can force her to stand.
“Not really.” She looks down at the hole burned in the armor plate over her chest, the purple flesh catching the light underneath. She looks up. “But I don’t know how to die.”
