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The sun has just risen by the time Arin wakes up. She distangles herself from the covers enough to sit up, rubbing sleep from her eyes and vaguely aware that something is off about the situation. This is not her bed, for starters. The empty skull of a Fallen captain eyes her from the dresser, a broken Cabal shield burnished bronze in the morning rays filtering through the half-open curtains.
It has Shaxx written all over it. Fitting then that this is his room, she thinks, as the true absence finally strikes her.
Shaxx is not here.
The familiar weight of the titan isn’t bearing down the other side of the mattress as it should of be, and there are no sounds of activity from the other end of the small apartment, no burning bacon, no rambunctious singing or boisterous chatter between him and Dahlia. An unfortunate lack of good-morning kisses.
Rose petals float in through the open window, dusting the sill and floors of Shaxx’s quarters with a crimson, idle snippets of conversations from the streets above ebbing in and out with the breeze. ‘Bonds’. ‘Crucible’. ‘Crimson Days’. Ah.
Traveler, has it been that long already?
Her first Crimson Days spring to mind, watching the petals tumble across the floor. Barely a year after her rez, fresh off the back of slaying an army of Vex and their supposed God, no competitive experience but a whole lot of legend in its place; some turned their noses up at her, refused her on the grounds of tenure, and others decided her prowess against non-Guardian combatants meant she would outshine them, and everyone wanted to catch the eye of the Crucible handler back then. Ironic that their refusals caused Shaxx to take her into the Crucible himself, and fighting side by side brought them both a little more than they bargained for. Shaxx was no stranger to fleeting trysts, and Arin was a new Guardian with little memory of what had come before.
‘It feels like cradle-robbing,’ he’d told her between kisses, tucked away in a corner of the old Tower. He’d shown his face to her not long before that, and she still remembers the warmth that bloomed in her chest when he smiled, and the soft chuckle she’d drawn from him when she answered with some snarky quip about age and experience being entirely unrelated, and they’d laughed together into the kisses that followed. Oh, if only they’d known.
Arin briefly wonders if she has finally reached the age where the years begin to run into each other, decades vanishing between the open and close of her eyes; it feels like yesterday she was racing around after Sena and Kiara handing cookies and other silly trinkets out to the denizens of the Tower, watching Mae’s foolhardy attempt to charm the Drifter with something other than her body, Dawning lanterns gleaming through the snow. The Festival of the Lost could of been last week, laying candles and wreaths and crying herself hoarse over Cayde, again, because several lifetimes worth of grief would still not be enough to measure the loss of the Hunter Vanguard. Xol. Osiris. The Red War. All past and done with, faster than a warlocks blink.
The realisation is crushing in it’s melancholy, and Arin finds herself sinking back down and drawing the covers almost over her head as her Ghost floats up, pinging softly with a message. Shaxx, most probably, wondering where she is; normally by this time she’d be stood by his side, offering the favour of a Crimson Bond to lone Guardians like he’d done for her, all those years ago.
The Hunter’s yellow eyes peek out from the edge of the duvet, her Ghost’s blue optic blinking back. It makes a mechanical chirp: “I’ll tell him you’re not feeling well. He’ll understand.” Arin nods, and her Ghost floats over to bump it’s shell against her forehead before floating off out the window.
Those lone Guardians will have to forge their own path, she thinks, closing her eyes against the sun. The weight of time and loss is bearing a little too heavy on her heart today.
She should talk to Kiara. Perhaps they’re no longer so different after all.