Archive of Our Own ^beta

Osiris pauses on the threshold of his Tower workspace. He raises his hand to snap burning life to the candles around the room, then sighs, drops his hand. A pained laugh escapes him and he shakes his head. "Ridiculous."

It is not a predictable process, forgetting, – there are some days when he never misses his Light at all, and others when every movement aches with loss. Perhaps one day he will shed himself of the habit of reaching for his Light entirely.

He hopes not.

He closes the door behind himself and squints into the semi-darkness. The main lights are too bright for his tastes, but the electric lamp over by his desk will suffice while he lights the candles.

A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. A shadow out of place and–

The click of a hand cannon. The feeling of cold metal against the back of his head.

His mouth goes dry. He stays very still, but his heart is racing, the sharp knowledge that it could all end here seeps down his spine. How anti-climactic, to survive the Witch Queen and the Witness' Final Shape, to die to a bullet.

Had Eris felt the same in those last seconds?

Not the time.

He curls his fingers into invisible threads, and begins to bend the Weave to his will.

"If you truly intended to kill me, then you would have fired already." He tilts his head slightly, a test. "Either that or you are incompetent as an assassin."

He has needed to learn more caution since he lost the Light, but he refuses to change himself entirely, even in the face of death.

"Bring her back."

It is a broken mirror of a voice and Osiris recognises it immediately.

"Drifter."

"You heard me."

He had. It doesn't mean he's processed them, and there's a cold sweat on the back of his neck, and if he twists the strands this way he could have Drifter strung up in a second, but a second is all it takes to fire a gun and–

Drifter snarls and the gun is gone. Osiris drags in a coarse breath, chest aching, mortality clinging to his bones.

"Fuck," Drifter groans. Osiris hears the safety being engaged, and turns in time to see Drifter drag a hand across his face, before he throws himself onto the couch. There are empty bottles on the ground next to it, and Osiris certainly is not responsible for them.

He stands there, watching. Uncertain. He hates uncertainty, but what can he say?

Drifter grabs one of the bottles, opens it to release a pungent ethanol scent, and takes a long drink.

"I'm going to turn the light on," he settles on after a moment. Drifter is still armed after all, and in his current state, probably twitchy. A cornered wolf.

"I don't give a fuck," Drifter says, waving dismissively.

The light does not make things better. It illustrates the ashy hue of Drifter's skin, the exhausted circles around his eyes.

Osiris remembers seeing the same in the mirror when they had found Saint's tomb, and again when he had been unable to locate him using the Sundial.

"I–" he begins.

"Don't," Drifter says, his voice broken glass. His gaze meets Osiris'. "You an' I both know how fucking hollow those words are."

He takes a breath and nods.

"Platitudes," he agrees, and goes to sit on his armchair where he can see the other man. "A prescribed response to avoid dealing with the… messy reality."

He has heard so many of them over the course of his life. There had been parades of them after the fall of the Iron Lords, words from people who had never known them except as figures of legend, and he had been expected to display that same distant, public grief as Vanguard Commander, when those lost had been his family.

"See, you get it," Drifter says. "Had enough people come to offer their 'condolences', pretty words and treatin' me like glass."

"Is that why you broke into my workroom?" Osiris asks.

"I broke in to threaten you," Drifter replies, and he touches the gun briefly. "Still might go back to that."

Osiris is fairly sure that the danger is over. Drifter would never have dropped his guard if his heart was truly set on the threat.

"It will not help," he says. A flat fact, not the condescending gentleness that another might offer.

"Won't it?" is Drifter's sharp response. "Seems to me like there's one of us in this room who's already broken reality to bring someone back from the dead. Seems to me like making threats might help a whole lot!"

He jerks the bottle towards Osiris violently enough to spill a good bit of it on the floor, then swigs the rest and slams the bottle down. He pushes himself to his feet and begins to pace, gesturing wildly.

"I saw what you did to bring back your knight in shining armour. I helped you. I think it's time you help me." He goes still and gives Osiris a vicious look. "Bring her back."

Osiris looks away, guilt curling in his belly. "It is not that simple."

Platitudes.

"Like hell it ain't!" Drifter snaps. "Eris deserved to live. Everything she's done for this whole damn city…"

"I do not dispute that," Osiris says. "Eris is… was… extraordinary. But I–"

"Whole damn lot of you… Mara Sov and her Throne World, you and your Sundial… every idiot five-minute raised sucked in the Cosmodrome… You all get back doors to death but not her?"

"Do you think that I don't wish that it were possible?" Osiris says, allowing that ragged grief to make itself known in his voice. Eris had been a friend at a time when he had had so few friends. She had supported him through the loss of Sagira in a way that no-one else had been able to. Her loss is something that the Last City will never recover from. "Do you truly believe that I do not think about all of the lives that I could not save? Those who died in the assault on the Witness, during the Red War or the Great Disaster. Do you think that I do not dream of being able to save the Iron Lords… Felwinter?"

That the idea of being able to save Sagira does not haunt him even now?

"Dreaming doesn't save anyone," Drifter replies. There is a defeated note to his voice that Osiris does not think he has ever heard before. "Why didn't you?"

"You know why," Osiris replies, and it comes out sharp, long years of habit honing his words into a blade even when he does not intend to use them as such. He sighs and scrubs a hand across his face. "It was only possible to save Saint because of where he died. And because his death was… inconsequential, in the greater scheme of things."

No trail of revenge and murder, no curse, no dragon-wishes. Just the grief of the man who had failed him.

Eris Morn had died far from lost Mercury, and her death has already rippled across the system. Guardians hunt her killer and carve a path of destruction through the Dreadnaught. He has no doubt that her death has already reached Savathûn and her brood, and it will not go ignored. The greater consequences of Eris' death are still to be seen.

"But not for you," Drifter says. "I saw you, tried to act all high and mighty, like you were doin' everyone a favour saving Saint, like you aren't as petty and selfish as I am."

Osiris winces. "No, not for me."

He had felt his Echoes act out the grief that he had kept contained. He had considered following them more than once. Times when he had considered exactly how far he would go to save Saint, and only the knowledge that Saint would not forgive him had been enough to pull him away from plumbing the depths.

Had he not seen all too clearly where that path could have led him in the shadow of the Conductor?

"There is nothing inconsequential about Eris," Drifter says. "I can't– it can't just end like this. There's gotta be something. What use are you if you can't even save her!" He throws himself back down onto the couch and reaches for another bottle. "What use am I?"

Osiris thinks that he suddenly understands all of those rote phrases that people bring out at times like this. It is far easier to say them than to navigate the minefield of other people's emotions.

"Drifter…"

No response, but he drinks like he intends to drown himself before the alcohol can get him.

"Wu Ming," Osiris says instead, an older name, from a darker time. A time when death had been a constant companion.

Drifter goes still, bottle halfway to his lips. "You sure that's a name you want to invoke? Wu Ming wouldn't've hesitated to shoot you if it helped him. He didn't care about anyone 'cept himself." And then, more quietly, "Wu Ming had the right idea. Gone soft here. Never should've let myself…"

Whatever else he says is rendered incomprehensible when he takes another swig from the bottle.

"Wu Ming climbed the mountain to get revenge for a village of people he barely knew, years after the fact," Osiris says. He remembers watching from the shadows of Felwinter's chambers as he talked with Wu Ming. Much as he had disapproved of his mentor entertaining the barkeeper, he could not deny that the cause had been just. It had piqued his interest in the man, and despite his misgivings, he has never truly regretted it.

Drifter snorts. "Maybe he just wanted to make sure someone paid for ruining a good thing he had going on."

"Maybe Wu Ming was more like you than you wish to accept, and you are just pretending he is some other person because it hurts less to think that Drifter is an aberration and you can go back to not caring about anyone but yourself."

Cruel, perhaps, but better than the empty sentiments that they both despise.

For a second, he thinks that Drifter may throw the bottle at him. He doesn't – just snarls, finishes it off and drops it onto the ground next to growing pile of debris.

"You think you fucking know me?" Drifter says, leaning towards Osiris. The dark circles around his eyes are pits of grief and pain. "You think I came here to talk about that Traveller-forsaken bar?!"

"Didn't you?" Osiris asks, meeting his gaze squarely. "You came here for a reason."

"Yeah, to get you to damn well do something useful for once in your life!"

Osiris crushes down the flare of anger that the words invoke in him – everything he has done has been to save humanity! His work on the Veil had been what allowed them to face the Witness, he has done so much that will never be acknowledged, that he will never even speak of and to have it thrown back in his face…

All of that had meant nothing in the face of losing Saint. He would have given it all up in a heartbeat. How can he blame Drifter for counting his work as less than nothing when he had thought the same thing?

He takes a slow breath, wishing that he was better at channelling Felwinter's unshakeable calm. His temper has always run too close to the surface, but he can try.

Drifter had done the same for him when the Conductor had wrapped Saint in her lies.

"You could have gone anywhere, but you came to break into my study and–"

"I told you, the Sundial–"

"Do not think that I am stupid enough to believe that you don't have copies of the schematics and equations for it," Osiris snaps. He does not like being treated like he is a fool.

Drifter's lips tighten and he looks away, and Osiris knows that he is right. "Figured they might sell, assuming you didn't end reality."

Even as ill-adept as Osiris is with people, he recognises this as the bluster that it is. An attempt to keep a collapsing wall from crumbling further.

"Liar."

"Go on then, hotshot, if you're so smart. Why am I here?"

That is the question, isn't it?

Osiris sighs and reaches for one of the bottles still left unopened. "The same reason I broke into the Derelict." He uncorks it and grimaces at the scent, but takes a mouthful. It burns as he swallows and tastes of nothing but alcohol. "There are occasions when the only person you can stomach dealing with is one who knew you when you were… unformed. One who saw the Dark Age and the worst of humanity."

There are some things, some parts of his past, that precious few had shared. Even Saladin, with as much brutality as he had seen, had been surrounded and beloved by the fellowship of the Iron Lords. Osiris though… there had been a reason he had gravitated towards Felwinter, and towards the odd familiarity with the keeper of the bar at the base of the mountain. That feeling of being an outsider, even amongst your own people.

"You always were too damn clever for your own good," Drifter says. "No wonder you never got invited to drink with anyone."

Osiris smiles grimly. "Except Wu Ming."

Drifter rolls his eyes. "I take it back. Wu Ming was an idiot." He rolls the bottle between his hands, stares down at the floor. "You'd think I'd've learned by now. Getting close to people just… rips you apart."

"Do you truly believe that it would have been better if you had never become close to Eris?" Osiris asks, steering things back towards the path they were meant to be on. It is something that he has become adept at over the centuries, although usually the scope has been the future of humanity and life itself.

Somehow this is more nerve-wracking, and it settles uneasily in his stomach. Or perhaps that is just the alcohol.

"Think it would hurt a damn sight less," Drifter says.

"Perhaps," Osiris says. He can think of many times when not caring would have kept him from grief – how much easier would his exile have been if he had simply not cared? – but he can never regret loving Saint, and allowing Saint to love him in return. "Is that not what made the Witness so compelling to some? The chance to live a life free of pain?"

To exist forever in a single moment frozen in amber, unchanging, unending.

"I'm not talkin' about philosophy," Drifter spits. "The Witness was a charlatan, and I should know. Didn't understand a damn thing about people. How we're just too damn stubborn… too damn stupid to lay down and die, even when it might be easier on us."

"Survival is a difficult habit to break," Osiris replies. "Useful, of course, but… double-edged. It all too easily becomes a barrier to living." Fear of pain, of loss… natural, universal fears, and all too easily twisted into violence or isolation.

"She survived. Survived more'n any of us. She wanted to live but that won't happen because…"

Osiris waits. He knows the words that are coming. Knows the guilt, the self-loathing. Even now, with Saint alive and safe, he feels that poison waken in him. It is always there, dormant, but ready to sink dripping fangs into his flesh the moment he drops his guard.

"I got her killed." Drifter gasps and grabs for the bottle, as though he can wash the taste of the words off his tongue. "It's my fault. I should've stopped her going."

Saint, laid out in the tomb, because Osiris had allowed petty anger to drive him. Sagira, her shell broken, because he had been too stubborn, too selfish and arrogant to listen to her.

"Eris Morn is not a woman who would take well to being told she is not allowed to do something." He had not known her well prior to his exile, but when they had met in the Dreaming City at Mara's behest, he had seen a core of steel resolve beneath the uncertainty, and she had only grown since then. Even when the Last City had seen her as someone to mistrust, she had remained firm in her resolve, and in doing so, she had helped to save them all.

Drifter scowls at him. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth. "At least she'd be alive to take offense. Even if she wanted nothin' to do with me afterwards… at least she'd be around to hate me."

"When Saint…" Osiris begins, and trails off, mouth suddenly dry. Drifter watches him with the wariness of a wolf. "We want them to thrive, even without us," he settles on, after the moment has drawn out too long. "That means accepting that they are masters of their own fates, even if it means that they come to harm."

Even when Saint had believed that their relationship was a lie… Osiris would not have forced him to remain if there had been no way to mend things. He loves Saint too much for that.

"Very poetic," Drifter drawls. "It isn't fate, she didn't choose this. Stop tryin' to make it more than it is. Not everyone gets a do-over to have their perfect happy ending."

"No, they don't," Osiris agrees. He cannot help but look down at his hands where they curl around the bottle. They look old. He feels stiffness within them as he never had when he had borne the Light.

There is never enough time. Years seem so short when you have been accustomed to measuring your life in centuries. Will Saint one day sit here with someone, with the same grief in his eyes as Drifter?

"What will you do now?" he asks, and swallows the words down with a mouthful of this vile alcohol.

Drifter lets the bottle dangle from his fingers, his brow furrowed. Then he shakes his head.

"Hell if I know. Never intended to stay here this long in the first place.You people've made me weak," he spits, though there is no real heat to it. Just exhausted resignation. "Sloane's got people trawling the Dreadnaught. Painting the ship red with the blood of whatever's left in there." He grimaces. "Or whatever colour Dread blood is. Assuming they have blood."

"Sloane is a formiddable opponent, and a capable commander," Osiris agrees. "I trust her to wring every secret out of that foul place."

"Hope so," Drifter agrees. His gaze darts around the room as though searching for something, and then returns to fix on Osiris. "Part of why I came here," he admits. "Hive tech. Messy at the best of times. We're struggling to access to Dreadnaught systems."

"And you assumed that I would be able to help." It isn't a question.

Drifter shrugs. "Had Savathûn in your head, or you were in hers. Figured you might've picked up a bit more than just the existence of Neomuna."

Osiris frowns, lips pressed tight together in displeasure, and he grits his teeth, the memory of what had led to Sagira's loss flooding him. Had the trap been laid even then? A perfectly crafted lure? Or simple bad luck?

"I mean, either that or I go to drag Toland out of whatever pit he's slunk into, if you don't know. Guess he did have better understanding of the Hive," Drifter adds casually.

Osiris bristles at the mention of the other Warlock, and his eyes narrow. "You are trying to needle me."

"I'm succeeding," is Drifters unrepentant response. There's the hint of a smirk on his lips, a ghost of what it would normally be, but better than the defeat that had been there.

"Toland is a fool," Osiris hisses. "His obsession with the Sword Logic blinds him to greater truths." His knowledge of the Hive is great, but knowledge born of worship is liable to miss anything that contradicts belief.

"Maybe. But if he can get me into the Dreadnaught systems, then he's a useful fool," Drifter says.

He thinks about refusing to help out of sheet stubbornness, but there are greater things at stake than his pride. "I know how to access the Dreadnaught systems. I did even before my experience with Savathûn."

Drifter snorts. "Figures. Should've had you as part of my crew before we both got… respectable."

"I hardly think that either of us is respectable," Osiris replies. "And if I had decided upon a life of crime, you wouldn't have been able to afford me." He had caused enough chaos when he had been attempting to be a respectable member of society. Imagine what he could have achieved if he had never bothered at all.

"Well, maybe you'll waive payment this time," Drifter says, his grin widening for a moment. "Got some vengeance to enact."

Vengeance, yes. Against the Dread, and the Hive. Against Xivu Arath's brood.

"In the name of Vengeance, then," he says. "Though I hope that you are not squeamish."

"When have I ever been?" Drifter drawls.

Osiris leans forward, and pulls over a datapad. "The Dreadnaught systems are partially organic. Biotech. So you will need an organic component to access them…"

He sketches out the details of what Drifter will need, dredging up the memories of that expedition. Sagira had complained the whole time.

Sharing information like this, over a pile of bottles, surrounded by the stench of cheap alcohol… it feels like it could be many lifetimes ago, at the base of a distant mountain, swapping datachips of illicit information. Angry at the world, at being helpless despite their power, at the sheer unfairness of it all.

It is still unfair, so many have died. But perhaps this once they can see that some justice comes to pass.