the rabbit and the pointed gun

[sideways]

Title: The Rabbit and the Pointed Gun
AO3: Link
Rating: PG
Series: Destiny (Shin Malphur, Jaren's Ghost)
Wordcount: 3,932
Summary: The City falls. Shin does some teetering of his own.
Remarks: A very belated cross-posting! Honestly, I like this one better in pieces than as a whole - canon changed on me in the middle of writing it, and I don't think I quite rose to the challenge of guiding it to a different ending than the one I'd planned. There is still satisfaction to be had in completing it, and in covering some scenes long-imagined. And in learning. Always learning.

◘◘◘

There is smoke on a horizon unseen, and Jaren’s Ghost falls out of the air.

 

It's bad timing. Too little rain followed by far too much has worn away at the path down this side of the mountain and left it crumbling dangerously along its edges - when Shin steps sharp and sideways to throw out a hand and catch her, the ground sinks under his feet. It shouldn't matter, should be thoughtless instinct to move back to steadier footing, but something is seizing in his chest like he’s grabbed a fistful of snapping electric wires instead and static white-out is burning the world from his eyes, so when the ground goes Shin goes with it.

 

He snags against a stubborn bush on the scraping, scrabbling fall down, and it slows their descent enough that the rock that follows cracks his visor and not his skull. He's still left blinking through a cloud of black spots by the time he fetches up at the base of a slope-angled pine, blanketed in dirt and shale, badly winded and aching in a way so long unfelt it might just be someone else's skin he's gone and tumbled into.

 

But the hand he lifts is his own: torn glove and bleeding wrist and a tremor that runs hard through to the joint of his shoulder. He flicks a clinging leaf from his helmet on the second try; moves a leg that doesn't thank him for it on the third. The Ghost's still a firm weight in his other hand, silent and secure.

 

A small victory, in the middle of what feels a hell of a lot like unexplainable defeat.

 

Ambush drops a hand to the Word at his hip; but the accusation finds little to bear it to truth. Through the cracked glass of his visor Shin can see the stars starting to light the sky, but no grim silhouettes come hovering overhead. Can hear the faint clatter and scrape of dislodged stones still tumbling, the heavy drag of his own breath pulling painfully into a cage of bruised ribs, but no crack and hiss of bullets winging down from the high ground. Can feel-

 

He feels like-

 

He’d been five and still shy at his second father’s heels when they’d brought in a logger who’d collapsed mid-swing, slung on a stretcher made of tied coats and branches. No misjudged tree-fall to blame, no snakebite nor sniping burn from a wire rifle – something inside her had failed against all sense, left her gasping for breath that wouldn’t come and bleeding bright red into one eye. She hadn't lasted past nightfall.

 

Shin lays his hand down stiffly over his chest, over the heartbeat stuttering inside it. There is a coldness creeping that has nothing to do with mud or winter, an emptiness like a town built about a poisoned well.

 

“Am I dying?” he asks of the sky, wondering. Hadn’t thought that a privilege he was allowed these days. Either he was dead or he wasn’t – neither he nor the Ghost had much patience for the business between, anymore.

 

When no voice makes answer, though, he rolls his head to the side. The Ghost is a silver starburst clutched unmoving in his fingers, and there's a rising wrongness to it; she tolerates a touch, comes in close to share a murmur, but she's no stone to be placidly plucked and held.

 

She'd plummeted like one. Made a single, staccato noise, too garbled to be any kind of meaning in it, and he'd glanced her way to see-

 

Shin twitches his wrist to bring her closer and looks straight in the face of the empty, lifeless dark at her core.

 

It’s a struggle to rise - a struggle he loses. His head's a sickly swirl and his arms shake as soon as he puts weight on them, so he ends up half-leaning, half-collapsed on his side, curled hands a careful shielding keeping her above the grit. Shin has seen Ghosts shattered and Ghosts left empty; he has taken aim and dropped them from the sky. There's a cold and careful part of him that notes the casing's more whole than he is right now, no bullet scar to be seen, and she holds together in his palms without sign of going to fragments.

 

The rest is fixated on dead, dull grey.

 

“Ghost.” He calls her once, just so, and then, when she stays silent and dark, he calls with the name kept private between them – the name that stays in his head and off his lips, the name given in envious presumption by a small boy watching her flit about Jaren like a bird darting about branches. It wrenches out of him, tight and demanding. “Gēzi.”

 

She doesn’t answer to it as a rule; she had another name first. But now there’s a twitch against his fingers, a pulse of blue faint as a distant, dying star. Blue as parted lips wheezing for air.

 

He looses a lungful of his own; lets his head hang, low enough that the curve of his helmet bumps against her skymost flange. She makes a soft, wordless sound beneath him, the eye brightening in small measures and focusing somewhere around his face. There's a stirring in his head, barely. It might just be sunlight after a week's rain.

 

When he rolls onto his back he lifts her with him, setting her cradled on his chest. A moment's breath taken: man and Ghost lying together under the star-brushed start of night in the middle of dusty nowhere, making the usual count of narrow fortunes.

 

A bird calls from somewhere in the twilight. It's the only other living sound to join them.

 

"Marksman," Shin says first, hoarse and low, "off the heights," but he's dismissing the last clingings of that notion even as he airs it. Aches and pains he has a-plenty, but none that's the deep, life-sapping drain of a bullet sunk home - man-made or otherwise. He feels wounded, no denying it, something raw and beating clawed out of him and mortally missed; but what has been laid open lies somewhere between his ribs and the empty spaces atwixt the stars overhead.

 

“The Light.” It’s a whisper, pale as her spark. “It’s gone.”

 

“Gone?"

 

"Like a cut tether. Shin, there's no Light at all."

 

As well to say someone has put out the sky. Even in the darkest corners of the worlds he has walked, even palming a bone-edged weapon whose ceaseless whispers gnaw at an ear with six inches of solid steel and the length of an atmosphere between, the Light doesn't mark itself an absence.

 

Shin's is a memory full of fire: warm hearth in cold winter, the sour stink of a home ablaze, and the moment a dead man's Ghost struck sparks under his skin. He raises a hand and pinches his fingers around the familiar burn.

 

There's nothing but the pulse-point of his own heartbeat running to and from his bruised fingertips. Somehow the sky keeps on hanging there.

 

Numbness settles into the empty space like an old friend, flattening his voice to a shadow and holding it steady. "How?"

 

“I don’t know.”

 

"You can't tell?"

 

She blinks slowly, unevenly. "This isn't something that's happened to us. It's something that's happened, and we're feeling it. The cause is…"

 

Cracked jaws and deep hunger. A gun that swallowed its own echo. He's been hunting. "Hive."

 

“I don’t know.”

 

He's heard her curt, pragmatic, disapproving, singing an electric trill to herself when she thinks his attention elsewhere. In all his years, Shin's not heard her sound at such a loss.

 

His fingers brush the pyramid spike of a flange when he lowers them; plain grey no longer, but mottled silvers shading into silty shadows, soft and cloudy save the two black lines banded stark around the one that sits at what passes for a Ghost's brow.

 

Light lost. Light consumed. There's always been more than a chance at this end.

 

"Was it like this with Jaren?" he asks. Doesn't know why he says it aloud, except that he's lying flat in the dirt with the spikes of dead pine sticking into the back of his neck through the fieldweave, and there is nothing but cold ash left in his veins, and countless years gone past since Gulch and Ridge don't feel much more than a boy's startled blink right now.

 

She's silent for long enough that Shin thinks the intention is to consign his flap-tongued idiocy to unwanted memory, and doesn’t blame her for it.

 

But then her light flickers, and the words come: brittle, quiet, and ruthless. "No. He died far worse."

 

 

 

It's a slow climb back to the path. His, Jaren's, Ghost sits quietly in the sling he makes out of the folds of his cloak, tucked close to his sternum like a wayward heartbeat. Means any bullet that takes one of them will surely find the other soon enough, but she refuses to bend away into the safety of subspace and he hasn't the means to make her.

 

The hollowing feel doesn't ease, but it gets easier; like treading down a path long overgrown, but still holding true to its foundations after fire has razed it clear again. Far from being another's skin, his own sits closer than it has since he agreed to play the part of kindling.

 

Could even be he has allergies again. Palamon's son, come home in the truest sense at last.

 

The moon is bright enough to provide the light that neither he nor his Ghost have at hand, enough to find firm grips and careful footing. Once or twice the Ghost runs a weak, flickering scan ahead, picking out the details of topography and the winding rills that warn at eroded ground for further guidance. They don't run across signs of any others, human or no, but Shin's spine doesn't stop itching with the awareness of danger, which is likely because there's no getting away from it.

 

His foot slips and he thinks: snapped ankle, slow starvation, death.

A worse fall. Broken rib, punctured lung, death.

Nothing at all. Brain bleed in a town of folks never heard the word aneurysm before. Death.

 

Old words and old warnings; old habits never set too far aside. Guardians don't know what it is to look at the world and see an end waiting in every patient piece of it. Guardians scarce know the meaning of end. That is their compact: bend and be straightened, break and be mended, perish and be pulled back. The body is a body; everything they are is in the Light.

 

The Light's gone and fled, and he wonders how many will know what to do with the body left.

 

He pulls himself up onto a flat, nothing but hard granite and relief from gravity's demands, and his Ghost stirs in her nest, a flick of a glance tracing some line through the air beyond his seeing.

 

"Wait," she says tersely. "Yes. Here."

 

At her beckoning, Shin draws her loose and lifts her to the sky, then leans back against stone as she unfolds, unhooking his helmet to drop it to the ground. He presses a hand up under his ribs, taking slow breaths to ease the ache; lifts the other to his mouth to suck blood and grit from the slow-scabbing cut at his wrist, laid open again with the exertion. Bacteria. Infection. Death.

 

The Ghost spins herself wide, and the weary effort in it is clear. Shin doesn't know what she's running on now, whether it's his own strength or something that comes with a surer limit. Whether in an hour or ten she'll drop again, and this time there won't be any hope of a waking. He spits tacky copper-salt at his feet, and the taste of it sticks in the back of his throat.

 

"A message. On loop. Cabal in the City, an invasion force." Her voice is thin. "They've taken the Traveler."

 

"Taken it." The notion hits the very marrow of his fear, and he looks up sharply, sore muscles pulling wire-tight and sending the space between his shoulders to screaming. Not now. Not yet. "You don't mean-"

 

"No." The pause is heavy with the threat of futures tempted, but she speaks again, calmer. "No. A conquest, but a conquest of their own making. The City is overrun by Red Legion, and the Light…" She drifts higher, straining. "They have some sort of device. I've never heard of anything like it."

 

Cabal. Shin's been to Mars a couple of times; kicked red dirt underfoot that might have blown in from the deserts and mountains of Earth. The giants that lumbered across its wide plains had been easiest kept at a distance, being of little interest and lesser need. Rocket and mortar, brute strength and steel - good prey for the reckless and undying. He'd honed himself sharper than that.

 

Of all the shapes he'd thought the last, great arrogance might take, he hadn't expected it to so clearly capture his own.

 

"Casualties?" he asks.

 

She pulls together slowly, stilted, like each piece takes concentration to lay back in place, and says, "The Vanguard has called a full retreat."

 

No answer, but answer enough. Retreat is not a well-worn passage in the City’s constitution. There are no other shelters, no second bastions of security and strength. The promise, the moral at the end of the story, exists only for those outside the walls: when all is lost, there is still a home that may hold you yet.

 

Thought he’d learned long ago how much stock you could put in legends. The tightness in his throat says otherwise.

 

He angles his face towards the horizon, but the quarter-turn of a planet lies between their position and the pale behemoth whose shadow marks the boundaries of supposed paradise. There is no hope of laying eyes on it from here.

 

All the same, there's a moment he thinks he sees smoke.

 

 

 

Shin has dry rations, clean water, and a sleeping roll where most Guardians keep little else but an armoury, because in the first, second, tenth year that a Guardian learns to bring war on the enemies of humankind, Shin learned hunger, thirst, and pain you had to wait on healing. Learned the chill of teeth fresh-scrubbed with mint-thistle, the puckered agony of an insect bite when foolishly scratched, the press of a warm hand palming gently over a forehead damp with the last sweatings of a fever.

 

Learned to strip a branch clean and spiked for a snare, and the sweep of the blade is soothing. One sharp edge that's not been dulled.

 

His Ghost is restless throughout the assemblage of the camp. Doesn't speak a word against it, or on the choice of location - an old den for Fallen going by the smell and the decaying rags in faded Devil colours, and long-abandoned by the amount of weather that's blown through - but it's clear she isn't best pleased. She settles, at times, on the cloak tucked into the upturned helmet; but then she rises to hover about the coals of the fire or, increasingly, to drift out to the door, her gaze turning inevitably towards the clouds.

 

The clouds, and a sky full of satellites, far distant planets, and the slow orbit of the ship he has not yet asked her to call.

 

He can feel the question sitting in the back of his skull, somewhere under the headache still throbbing its complaint of injury and fatigue. Likely he should be the one to speak it, but somehow the inclination isn't taking root. Pettiness, maybe, or the instinct of an animal already wounded and wary of further exhaustive effort. It's hard to say.

 

In the end, she makes another pass overhead, stilling briefly as though his growing pile of wood-shavings holds any kind of interest - and she's uneasy in her movements still, he can't help but notice, none of that quick grace returned - then drops in close to eye-level and says, "This changes things."

 

"Changes it some, anyhow." He takes a last stripe off the snare's post, tests the point of it against his thumb. "Anything new?"

 

In the scarce messages coming out of their lost City, he means, and his Ghost blinks the question aside in a soundless negative.

 

"Long retreat," he murmurs, and there's the twist of old unkindness sitting just behind the words.

 

She hangs in his orbit, a lone star outside its constellation; but she's never kept company the way some of the other Ghosts do, so he doesn't know where this sense of severance is coming from. Not for the first time, he wonders - at hierarchies, ecologies, the chain of Traveller to Ghost to solar flares and electric charge and the sucking void between matter walking around in flesh that doesn't always have the sense not to stick a curious hand down a dark hole. Like a cut tether; but the first had been slashed through long ago, and the loyal gun at the other end left where he fell.

 

Segments twitch, and Jaren's Ghost says in a low tone, "I want you to tell me what change you see."

 

He raises an eyebrow, sheathing the knife and unpouching a twist of wire. Common steel, not sapphire. "That a perspective needs asking after?" When long silence is all that meets him, though, he lifts his head, finds the blue waiting, unblinking. The question made unavoidable at last. Resigned tiredness drags deeper through the heart of him, like fingers through thick mud. "...Right. It does, then."

 

"It does," she says, "because I'm not looking to have a conversation with Zyre Orsa."

 

He gives her a flat look that's straightaway reflected. Been too long for them not to have grown thick layers against the other's stings, but it doesn't make the pricking less deliberate. "Name's a name."

 

"Name's a following," she retorts. "A plan and an intention."

 

"You knew its making-"

 

"So it's not one I need lecturing on."

 

Headachey and irritable, he says, "Well, I'm kind of short a golden gun."

 

There's a pause, and then: "Not looking to hear from him either," she says quietly.

 

And Shin, who for all things does still have the measure of who came first, and before, draws a bracing breath like cold iron and lets the quiet fall and settle. Some words are better not spoken at all than spoken too soon.

 

Time was he'd let them fly. Time was he'd be riled and bristling, high temper only ever a short remark away and any hinting that she still saw the boy the shortest pathway yet. He'd taken Jaren's guidance more easily than he had the last echoes of him; the silent watcher of his childhood suddenly seeing fit to put pointed questions to his ear at every turn. She'd hesitated before she lit his fuse, and it had taken near a decade for him to forgive her for it.

 

The forgiveness is long-settled, though, and it has been a longer time still since Shin let anger alone choose his steps.

 

She follows him out of the shelter when he goes, down through the scrub to the spring that trickles out from somewhere higher in the mountain, the stifling scent of wild basil rising with every crushing footfall. Dawn's light will be touching the peaks soon, and bringing with it the livelier movements of the world.

 

He sets his snare in as likely a place as he can see something poking its head through. With that gamble settled, he cups a winter-cold mouthful of water to soften the newest edge to his thirst, wipes his palm dry against the rough fabric of his leggings, and holds his hand out, fingers crooked and expectant.

 

A heavy moment later, his Ghost drops Thorn into it.

 

Not the first, of course. Its shadow. His own creation, crafted for the sake of divining the craft, trialled and tempered and still, ever, insistently hungry. His vision dims a second, then sharpens. It doesn't feel as different as he'd thought it might; maybe sits a little more comfortably in his grip. There's the blood taste on his tongue again, even though the fresh clean cold of the spring water hasn't finished tingling on his teeth. If he reached out and pinched fingers here, now-

 

He doesn't. That's the point of it.

 

Shin says, "Wasn't Jaren who saw this day coming."

 

She flicks a flange delicately, then says, "Wasn't Yor who prevented it."

 

"There's a truth for sleepless nights." He cocks Thorn's quieter cousin; snaps it immediately off again before the next twitch can take him past the trigger-guard on instinct. It should feel different. There is no Light left in him but the spark that exists in all living things. The balance has changed.

 

It should bother him that it doesn't feel different.

 

He looks to his Ghost. "The last death of an ideal. That's the change I see." She makes a disagreeable noise. "You think I'm off the mark."

 

"I think you're being quick. It hasn't even been a day."

 

"Quicker than the dying'll be." Dark humour flickers. "Guardians aren't much good at knowing how to stay lying down on a mortal wound. No, I'm not saying it's an end that'll be done by sunrise. Doesn't change that it's an end."

 

Except nothing does - feet slip, bodies fall, and then a body picks itself up and limps to the next path. This path. The mortality is the wound. All this time fearing darkness and the world went and speared each of them through with life.

 

Orsa would say catalyst. Renegade, well, he had some strong feelings about right ways.

 

It's Shin, no other, who says, "Thought we had more time, is all. Sounds a fool sort of thing when I say it out loud."

 

"No," Jaren’s Ghost says sadly. "It doesn't."

 

It's the why of her asking, after all. Renegade and Vale both, they're creatures of belief. Neither of them carry the hope.

 

 

 

Shin Malphur's not there the day they lose the City, and here's the truth in the mirroring: he won't be there the day they win it. There's small regret in the absence he makes, a creature strayed from its natural habitat; burning homes, memories made long, and the shape of the world forever changed.

 

He'll be there long enough to catch the looks he expects to see, though. A world of Guardians that's lost the unworldly powers granted them; a starving desperation says filling the hollow's going to be a lasting preoccupation.

 

He'll catch something else too, though, unexpected - the looks that slide the way of one of their own. Shin knows the stock that should be put in legends, and it means he knows the making of them too.

 

He sups lukewarm soup in old rubble, listening to softly argued rumour about the last Lightbearer, chosen among chosen. It puts his mind to constellations. To hierarchies, ecologies, links in a chain.

 

To snares.

 

You don't catch a thing by chasing where it's been, he knows; and to dwell on what was is the greatest sin, he knows that too. He's always been one for dwelling.

 

"They could use guidance," his Ghost whispers; her first words since a creekside conversation.

 

There's a bandage around his swollen wrist, tight and expertly tied for the healing. Thorn sits at the small of his back, under the cloak; an insistent, aching pressure against his spine, crawling the length of it to settle in his teeth.

 

"It's what I aim to give," he says.

Comments

[cloudwrack]

Deepest empathy re: canon changes throwing a spanner in the works (/eyes Wake Up & /eyes Iron Lords series even harder), but this is still one of my favourites of yours. I love the exploration of Shin's uniquely weird position during the Red War so much. ♥

[sideways]

<3!

Oh, the poor Iron Lords... Were you a fan of Felwinter's sudden reveal? I know it's the danger of writing slowly in an evolving canon, but Destiny really likes its wild curveballs.

[cloudwrack]

(Please excuse late comment!)

A slightly embarrassing admission: it took me forever to get around to reading the new material because I was so attached to my own headcanons re: the Iron Lords and Felwinter in particular. Once I did, though, I liked the twist a lot (it got me more interested in Rasputin as a character, too). Still thinking about how to work it into future Iron Lords fic, if and when that happens...