please tell us about cayde learning how to be exo instead of human
he can’t remember the first days. just a vague sense of being both within and without his body. and the cold. seeping into everything. that planet of ice, planet of death, would kill anybody fool enough to step outside the facility. ( maybe that’s why they’d hosted it there; no escape. no turning back. ) there’d been a ‘transitioning period’ but he doesn’t remember it. unable to move his body of his own accord. and a headache so profound he’d asked them to put him under------ REALIGNING.
not all wars are fought on battlefields. sometimes you’ve gotta do the menial grunt work. the boring tasks that pay well enough but leave you restless, itching for a fight. turns out exos make excellent guard dogs: tireless, without hunger. he’s assigned to SUNDARESH, MAYA M.D. who works for the ishtar collective. doesn’t know what she’s working on ( doesn’t need to know ). only that she won’t ( can’t ) stop working. barely eats. barely sleeps. this should be boring, and for the most part, it is. but every time her eyes skate past him, he feels something bloom in his stomach, something he hasn’t felt since before. feels a strange heat in his cold limbs. but he may as well not exist. she’s the sun and he’s just one inconsequential asteroid, caught in her orbit. it makes him feel empty. or really, emptier than he’d been feeling. they talk a few times. she asks him to help her move some pieces of equipment. she asks him for his name. that same blooming feeling comes back; his facial plates shift in what he can only hope looks like a smile. different set of muscle movements now. it’s taking too long to adjust. REALIGNING.
there’s people that stare and point. people that throw slurs. MECH-HEAD. GARBAGE CAN. his personal favorite is being called a ‘fucking toaster oven’. exos scare them. most don’t know what they are, besides war machines ( killing machines ). and those that do abhor their existence. an affront against nature. a man, well into his 200′s if the wrinkles around his eyes have anything to say, mutters ‘abomination’ when cayde passes him on a busy street. cayde wonders how many surgeries and synthetic organs the guy’s had put in him to reach his age. there are ‘protests’ and there are even cults. cayde spends as much time off earth where the brunt of the hatred lives. so called fucking ‘purists’. part of him wants nothing more than to just be nothing but a killing machine. and maybe then they’d stop with their bullshit rhetoric. maybe then it wouldn’t really piss him off. REALIGNING.
he likes to hunt. loves it, really. tracks bounties daily. ones up for the ahamkara. need to get them out of existence. too dangerous. too much power. too much cunning. he wonders whether or not the traveler had meant to create them. there’s those that think of the traveler as a god, and think the ahamkara hunt is blasphemy. KILLING GOD’S CREATIONS. he’s got no qualms about stepping up against those who claim ‘creation’ though. those who play god. the hunt goes as smooth as you’d expect when going after something as powerful as an ahamkara. they lose two, one human, one exo. the rest celebrate. he watches a trio of warlocks pulling bones from the carcass. says nothing of it. a hand grabs his, gloved and armored but he knows the difference between a human grip and an exo’s. something bursts in his chest at the sight of an exo smile, the way facial plates shift around optics. uniquely beautiful and expressive. she presses her forehead against his, and his chest feels like it might be burning; he laughs, bumps his head back against hers, his mouth against hers. maybe that’s how they kiss. maybe showing affection can be that simple. REALIGNING.
the first time he has sex is with another human. he can’t remember the last time he’d felt sexual desire. maybe it was something that’d been suppressed, like his hunger. maybe his mind’s just slowly been unlocking these parts of himself, over time and resets. the sex is good. it’s like he thinks he remembers, only now he’s tireless, and now, he has to watch his grip, among other things. afterwards he doesn’t know how to feel. something so human had seemed outside of his scope, his range. apparently not. REALIGNING.
years blend. the resets do that. and the light. and maybe being an exo doesn’t help. he loses friends. to fallen. to hive. to vex. it gets no easier. he resets when it gets too much. but fragments stay alive. he’d never been one for crying much when he was human, but he hates that he can’t now. grief boils in his chest, and he only knows one way to let it out. killing shit. there’s nothing to improve on anymore, muscle memory and exo subroutines making his job efficient. not easy. almost never easy. but this much he’s good at. he’s reckless. he knows it. and that’s human, because his programming tells him not to be. but he’s learned how to ignore what had been built into him. he’s learned how to compensate between the human parts of him, and the not-so-human.
