call me Drifter.

      ❛  you’re  lucky  you’re  handsome.  ❜

Rainy days were better where he was at the moment. The sound of rain muted the little he heard at the annex, and he found himself both calmer, and more productive.Never a good combination, as Efrideet better than anyone would know. His eyes would be glued to his project, and the rest of the world would be silent. Except when she walked in. She made silence tolerable with her steps. Her warmth would radiate to all corners of the annex, and his body would force him to look wherever she moved.

There was some part of his mind that told him to not trust this man’s words, to try and see if he can look past that toothy smile and see if there was anything deeper he was truly hiding. Despite it all, he will pry for the answers he needs, ones he needs to determine how he’s gonna protect the people he loves so dear.

He stares at the Drifter’s face as he speaks. He stares for a long while and listens close too, analyzing tone and face and drilling into those dark eyes to see if there was anything else that could possibly be stashed away in there. If there was anything that this man was not telling him. He was vigilant, and perhaps rightly so. 

He sees no deception now.

No, he does not see deception. He does not feel the telltale waver in tone and face that he picks up in lies. No, he was getting this one’s truth, his own personal truth and ideals; he was looking straight into the eyes of a millennia of pain, terror, and delving into the grey twilight zone with nothing but a flashlight.

The motivations? Well grounded and… respectable. Trying to save the Solar System from the Collapse 2, at the base of it all, who wouldn’t want to respect a guy who wants to prevent the extinction of all of Humanity? Anyone would want to prevent the extinction of their own species, he thinks.

It was the method that was making him so uneasy.

Playing with the Taken in a game meant to prepare for the doom of all these worlds– The Taken! Fighting the Taken was the closest thing you could get to looking the Darkness right in the eye, the Taken War and more had proven that more than enough. The curse in the Dreaming City had proven that enough. While those entities that had controlled them may have fallen, they still roam the worlds as a force to be wary and reckoned with; and a force that the Drifter had been trying to make his own. 

Yes, that is what scared him. That is what made him fear for his pack’s safety. He glances to the bank and watches the blighted energy swirl and churn in there, it was cold and sickening; A bad shiver runs up his circuits and he quickly looks away.

“I… I think I get what you’re really trying to do now.” He nods once, head hanging low as he forced his sight to anywhere but the bank. He did not want to look at the dizzying amount of Blight in there. “But even so… I can’t shake the dread I feel looking into that cylinder of glass… Seeing what’s in it, it’s…”

He pauses for a moment, let his words gather. He was still quite scattered, and the contained Darkness in the vicinity prickling at his head didn’t help. A tired sigh.

“Even if I end up agreeing with you, I… I grow uneasy thinking that my friends might be using that to fight the Darkness.” A nod to the bank as a tone of fearful disgust edges on his voice. “And I… I am especially not prepared to fight using something so vile.”

“If that bank over there gives you the creeps, you’re not ready for what’s comin’”

And that was a pitiful realization. A reinforced bank holding blight within it was nothing. Summoning taken with a mote of darkness was nothing. Drifter could easily write books about what he saw in a year of living in the cold hell planet that would make the strongest of guardians shiver in fear.  After all these guardians have seen and lived, they choose to fear something that a lightbearer has complete control over. Of everything they had seen and lives, they couldn’t possible be afraid of this bank? Drifter’s frown was almost dripping with frustration over this one’s fears. If only they would take a moment to listen to what he offered, they would know he was ready to pull anyone who dared follow a path they could never get out of. 

He didn’t wanted to become the next Yor. No, he wasn’t going to let himself or anyone under his crew become just like him. Drifter had spent years separating himself from the shadows, ensuring he would never be linked to them and their nauseating obsession with this myth--

“Listen, we’ve reached a point we can’t just be picky with what we use or not when it comes to those guys”, there wasn’t any time to be gentle, or lie. The darkness was coming, the big guns were getting ready to destroy everything they held dear. Gambit was nothing to what he knew, with the shrieking of those creatures he saw, to how they ripped his other crewmates with teeth and claws and how the light was sucked right out of their lifeless bodies and-- He shook his head without noticing, and returned his gaze at the guardian. No, he couldn’t keep thinking on what he saw. Drifter had a plan had a vision, he could make this work if the damn tower would stop doubting of his abilities and started looking away from that goddamn ball in the sky, he could--