I'm on the moon. It's made of cheese.

But of course, we can't do that, she says. Don't wanna use anything that might throw off the readings on the special sensor doohickey Ikora gave her, she says. Can't just blast it with a Solar Trace Rifle or an Orbital Laser or something, no, we gotta get ol'Drifter to be a weed whacker.

And then she says the thing that gets me every time. She tells me she's fine goin' alone if I don't wanna go. And you know… you know Drifter ain't good with that. Not after the Dreadnaught. Me and her, we're a fireteam now. We have each other's backs. Even when it's hack and slash through jungle in the hot sun for hours on end chasin' who knows what, on whatever bullshit Hidden side quest she's decided we're doing for Ikora, even though I am not Vanguard and I don't do Vanguard, because I don't… But I do help Eris.

Anyway…

At this point she and I have been doin' stuff together long enough that my ghost is good at swappin' her loadout as much as it is mine and, after several hours with no end in sight, Eris Morn, Bane of the Swarm, Many-Mouthed Hunger, Knife-Edged Truth, God of Vengeance decides she is done with being poached inside of her armour and she calls my ghost over to swap out her clothes so she can stop bein' a chitin-wrapped baked potato, cookin' from the inside out.

Now, as you can expect, me bein' ass over teakettle in love with this woman and finding her to be hotter than the blazin' sun beatin' down on both of us, sees Eris wearing a bikini top, shorts, boots, her Loud Lullaby hand canon in one hand and her mean nasty lookin' Night Terror sword in the other, showing more skin out in the open than she has in the past two centuries right behind me, and I get… extremely distracted.

So yeah, Drifter starts finding it a bit challenging to face the other way in order to keep makin' a narrow pathway of jungle salad. So of course I keep comin' up with reasons to be able to turn around. And she? Well… let's just say Drifter's not the only one into seein' their partner half-naked all sweaty in the sun.

There I am, doin' a lot of turnin' around, walking backwards, not lookin' where I'm whackin', and we're doin' the thing we're always doin' where she's razzin' me, and I'm needlin' her, and the insults are flyin', and the cut up leaves and vines are flyin', and my ghost is flyin' on overwatch doin' long range scans to make sure nothin' don't sneak up on us that could kill us while we are flirting our way through this steamy jungle (but, bein' my ghost, don't give a crap about anything that's not gonna kill us - which becomes important shortly).

Now, you've been on Venus. You know about the jumping tree crabs, right? Ambush predator, catches Batadactyls in flight? Not big enough or toxic enough to take out something human-sized but big enough to be real scary if it surprises you because you're hackin' up its home turf and it jumps at ya all startled-like?

Yeah.

So… about the size of a dinner plate, suddenly goin' at ol' Drifter's face is one of them things seemingly outta nowhere (but in reality very logically outta the jungle Moondust and I are lawnmowerin' our way through).

You don't live as long as me without having some very, very quick reflexes, and I don't scare easy, but you also don't live this long without havin' a very healthy startle mechanism and Drifter's startle mechanism involves bullets.

So I see somethin' comin' at me outta the corner of my eye and I don't even think. I jump back and shoot at the same time, splattering the damn thing with the business end of Trust before it can touch me - but uh… not before lettin' out one of the most embarrassing high-pitched screams of terror I have had come outta my mouth in a very, very long time.

Eris, also a survivor, also and especially, not very chill regardin' things that got exoskeletons and chitin, has her own startle mechanism, and it involves Soulfire and the kinda force blast you normally get when you pop a Cursed Thrall, just a whole lot bigger, and, thankfully, with a small protective radius on the inside.

So my vision goes bright malachite green, and by the time I can see again, Eris is standin' over me, sword out, gun in her hand, with me on my back, gun out, and we've both fired several rounds into that poor tree crab that probably was just tryin' to tell me to screw off and leave it alone, but is now eviscerated nine ways from Sunday, and the jungle around us is blown back into a crater about the size of a Goliath Tank.

So much for not upsetting Ikora's sensitive doodad. Oops.

It takes us few minutes to figure out what the heck just happened, but we do, and then we start laughing. And ya gotta know that Eris Morn is not the type of person that gets the giggles. This does not happen with her. Ever. But the combination of what it was that freaked me out, with my oh so pathetic panicked scream, and the sun and the heat and the humidity, and the fact that at this point we are both dead tired, sets her off. And you know me. I love her laugh. There ain't nothin' in this universe I love more than Eris Morn's evil little laugh. So I start laughing too. And that makes her laugh more. And then I'm jokin' about crab boil for dinner, and she's using magic to levitate one of the poor thing's dismembered legs and wigglin' it at me to make me shudder, and soon enough we're both flat on our backs in that crater, like starfish, laughing and starin' up at the Venus sky.

And every time we go to get up and get back to work one of us says something and it gets the other one laughing and we're back down again with the giggles. Look, we both been through it - real bad. Ain't had a lot of good times. Gotta hold on to these moments when they happen. So we did. We took a break. Ikora's sensor thing had to calm down and recalibrate anyway. We held hands and stared up at the sky and just… appreciated bein' alive for a little bit. It was… pretty damn romantic, if we're bein' honest. And we were so damn tired. After a while she flopped on top of me and sighed and, as the sun beat down on us two sweaty, laughed-out messes, she fell asleep for a little bit.

'Course I didn't wake her. You don't get half-naked Eris Morn laughing herself to passing out lyin' across you in the middle of a jungle on Venus every day. I lay there smiling and didn't say a damn thing till she woke up again. My ghost came by a couple times to check on us but it just made sure nothin' was comin' our way and left us in peace. And it was peaceful. You could hear all the sounds in the jungle all around us. There was a very light breeze that, the only reason we could even feel it was because Eris had Hive-nuked us a clearing. Once in a while a yellow cloud floated by up above. It wasn't that long, maybe an hour?

But uh… the thing I didn't think of at the time is, as you well know, Eris don't strip down outta that armour too often, and her skin is not used to lyin' passed out in the sun for an hour with nothin' on top of it. So that poor lady's traditionally very Moon-cave goin' flesh (love 'er to bits) got completely burnt to a crisp by the sun while neither one of us was payin' attention. We didn't notice until later when she woke up just how bad it was and, can I say, it did not improve her mood one bit.

I was burnt too, but nowhere near as bad as Eris, and she was gruuum-py. Everythin' hurt and she couldn't put on her armour because it hurt too damn much. And I know what you're thinking. She's got a Throne World now, right? She's omni-potent there. She can just disprove that sunburn's right to exist. Of course she can. But the thing about Eris is she's not only a badass, she's also a creature of pride, and to get to her flat next to the Market District with the slice in reality so she can enter her Throne World, unless we were takin' one of her Hive portals or doin' one of them unauthorized transmats inside the Last City the Vanguard hates and makes people do so much paperwork for, we'd have to walk past Ikora in the bazaar. And the last thing Eris wants to deal with is Ikora giving her the "I told you so" face. Whether it's for goin' out and doin' things her own way, or because of hangin' out with yours truly, Ikora's totally gonna give her that look that Moondust calls her "disapproving mother face" and Eris is not havin' it. Especially when she's sunburnt and pissed off as all hell.

Not to mention, she's fine being around me with barely anythin' on but she is not fine wandering around the Tower like that and she can't get her armour on because even if it didn't hurt like hell her freshly roasted skin would'a fused to the inside and ripped right off.

So why not just Hive portal over there? Well, the small Soulfire nuke she set off to defend my temporarily crab-o-phobic ass took a lot out of her (which is probably also why she fell asleep in the first place). So I tell her fine, we transmat up to the Derelict and treat her sunburn there until she feels better. And you'd think… you'd think that'd be it, right? Easy solution. But Eris is a very single-minded person, and she had it in her head that we were not going anywhere till we were done the mission. And the thing is, me and Eris? We snipe at each other all the time but actual arguing? Generally, no.

Someone like Eris? She's used to everyone and everything pushing back at her at every turn. It's always "No, Eris. Don't join the First Crota Fire Team." And "No, Eris, don't go back to the Moon huntin' the Lunar pyramid." And "No, Eris. Don't go yell at that tree on Io." And you know what happens when you tell Eris Morn not to do something? She goes and does it anyway, usually on her own, with no backup.

At least, she used to, until after we learned Stasis on Europa together with Stranger. And then, after that, she went with me. And how did ol' Drifter get so lucky? I don't tell Eris Morn what to do, is how. I just watch her back while she's doin' it.

So when Eris says we finish the mission, I don't argue, but I do send my ghost out lookin' for plants - some very specific plants - the kind that are spiky but soft in the middle and full of cactus juice. I squished up some of the leaves my ghost brought back and, after some snarling, when she was willing to pause long enough to check her map, she finally let me put it on her skin. Ten minutes later she was a whole lot nicer and started asking me to goop her again.

So we do that for a while until we finally find the thing she's lookin' for in the middle of the damn jungle. Weird structure. Looks real old. Full of magic. Her department, not mine. She says she's attuned to it or… something… so she can keep the doors closed and feel if something's coming, which is good since we end up having to stay there overnight because, of course, at this point a massive storm's blown in and it's mucking with the transmat signal. Eris says it's reasonably safe, so I'm not freaking out over her still not wearing a lick of armour on her extra crispy skin. I find some relatively dry vegetation and get us a fire goin' and start roasting some Batadactyls I nabbed on our way in. (Don't tell Failsafe - but they taste like a cross between snake and the dark meat from a turkey. Not half bad.)

Eris' skin is all dried out again and she asks if I got any more plant goop. I've run out and I'm not wanting to send my ghost out where it can't transmat to get us any more, but I hate seein' her suffer, so I tell her I got an idea and to just sit there and let me at it.

So I start real gentle at one of her shoulders, and use my fingernails very light-like, just on the surface layer while she's eatin' her roast Batadactyl. And yeah, I did deliberately get her preoccupied, but the combination of her munching and me scratching lightly to soothe the itch was distracting enough for her to not figure out what I was doin' until I had a good piece free. And by that time she turns to me with that disgusted face I love so much and asks me if I am peeling her… which is a reasonable thing for her to ask because that is, in fact, what I am doin'.

I hold up a nice palm-sized bit of translucent Eris-skin like she was a three eyed lizard havin' a molt and give her that good ol' Drifter grin. Her eyes get all bright and she's kinda pissed off but before she can start in on me I ask her "Feels better, right?" And she stops for a moment and thinks about it and then reluctantly agrees that yes, it does. She makes a few half-hearted comments about it bein' "unsanitary" so I stop and then not half an hour later she sighs and looks over at me across the fire and asks me to peel her more.

And yeah, it is a little weird, come to think of it, that she peeled so quick, because normal human sunburn on Earth takes a few days to get to that point, but maybe she got some advanced healing when she got turned into a god. I don't know and I ain't complainin'. Weird or not, I love the shit outta that woman and her skin.

So gently, oh so lovin'ly, in the middle of a thunderstorm, in some wackadoo pyramid, in the jungles of Venus, I got to peel all the sunburnt skin offa Eris Morn - gigglin' on the inside the entire time because there's something' real special about someone like Eris lettin' someone do that. Ain't no one else she'd let do it but me. But… I don't think she was intending on me doin' what I did after.

Nah, that's a lie. I damn well knew she wasn't.

I got her to lie down on the sleeping bag by the fire and just let me scritch away until she fell asleep. I kept watch till mornin'. Just before dawn the storm cleared and I was able to send my ghost out for more cactus so I could goop her when she woke up.

Wasn't till we were packin' up to go that she noticed. As soon as she started lookin' around, pickin' up bags, moving stuff and looking under it, I knew I'd been found out.

She turns to me all red like a fresh boiled lobster, still beautiful, and goes "Where is it?"

"Where's what?" I ask her, tryin' to be chill, knowin' I aint' foolin' no one, especially her. She really is so damn hot when she's pissed at me.

She says "The sloughed off integument from last night. It is gone." and at that point I can't not laugh because while I totally know what she's askin' based on context, she's doin' that thing with over complicated words and might as well be speakin' Hive for how much sense it makes.

She knows why I'm laughing, and she is not laughing and she grabs me and snarls in my face and goes "Where… is… the skin?"

"Oh that!" I say, tryin' to make it sound like nothin'. "I uh… I got rid of it for ya. You weren't like… wantin' it for anythin', were ya?"

That might've gotten someone else misdirected, but not her. She just growls at me and repeats herself in my face "Where… is it?"

I coulda tried to lie to her, told her I tossed it into the fire. Ol' Drifter's had a good eight to ten centuries of lyin' out his ass an' makin' people believe it, but thing is, ain't no one ever been able to see through my bullshit like Eris Morn. Probably one of the reasons we get along so good if we're bein' honest. And on top of all that, I didn't want to. I don't like lyin' to her. It's nice to have someone you don't have to lie to. I ain't never really had that before. So, I got all quiet and just sat there giving her my best guilty puppy eyes.

Her eyes narrowed (all three of 'em) and her face made that super disgusted Eris snarl as she realized exactly why I wasn't tellin' her what I done. And now there ain't no point in me trying not to laugh again so I do.

She starts cussin' me out with big words like pestiferous, rebarbative, execrable (can't tell me that one don't sound dirty), odious, and my new personal favourite: louche. She was on a roll and I just kept grinnin' and laughing. I couldn't help it.

After she ran outta steam my ghost showed up and we transmat out of there and back to the Derelict. I manage to convince her to let me give her actual, non-cactus, first aid before we go. She's still way too sensitive to put on her armour but is threatening to do so anyway. I get her to compromise with some oversize Gambit hunter gear, a bunch of gauze-wrapped padding, and a helmet so no one can see it's her. We sneak past Ikora in the bazaar and get to her apartment. I called the Bento shop on the way to make her favourite stuff and picked it up as we went by. Gave it to her at her door and didn't set foot inside. I figured she wasn't gonna talk to me for a week after she grabbed the food but then, as I went to walk away, she snarled after me that I had not yet earned her forgiveness and I could start by finding more of that cactus to put on her skin.

Soon as she said that I knew she wasn't mad-mad any more, just cute-mad. Couldn't help getting in one last little dig though. As soon as she was lying down, covered in goop and sighing in relief at how soothing it was, I told her: "You know, the taste wasn't bad."

It had been a hot minute, so she didn't immediately know what I was talkin' about.

"Kinda like a really thin pork rind," I explained to her. "Would've been better with some salt." Then I tell her, "Next time we sun burn ya, we should do it by an ocean so it gets some seasoning in there."

Yeah… she threw me out of the Throne World.

warm summer rain on our faces distant thunder fading far off lightning crackling ripples along the bottoms of the low clouds glittering and illuminating the wide dark sky you had been struck bringing me a tree I had snapped apart pieces of your wooden offering and built a fire

we ate dried meat and seeds you claimed to have never been kissed in the rain and I did not believe you the ploy seemed too contrived, and yet I felt such fondness for you that the desire to indulge you swelled within me I took your hand and led you back out into the warm and muggy downpour

your clear delight was as infectious as your laughter our feet sunk into the mud up to our ankles we slid and leaned on each other for stability the cloth over my eyes had become so clogged with muck that I could not see your face exasperated, I removed it and I think that may have been the first time you saw my unbound eyes

your hair plastered down with rain water dripping from your nose into your beard your face reflected joy joy at my eyes the light of my eyes on your face brought you joy

eyes which for so long had instigated revulsion, pity, and terror in others brought you joy I closed my joy-bringing eyes and turned my face up to the sky it was the first time since before the Hellmouth that I had felt rain on my eyelids the first time rain had ever touched the lid of my third stolen eye and you watched, transfixed, radiating love

I remember your hands were warm you held me close and placed your face against my neck nuzzling, the water squishing out where you pressed against me as though your beard had been a sponge I felt it run down my neck under my already soaked clothing and when I tilted my chin back down your face was so close to mine that our noses touched and then, our lips and then, our tongues you smelled of damp wood smoke, ozone and burnt hair from your electrocution

I remember the dusty taste of the rain on your lips how you pressed us against the stone walls of the ruined church your body pliable, conforming to the shape of mine my fingers in your hair pulling you closer I did not want the kiss to end did not want to let the moment go I would not let you go we paused to breathe, the rain still pouring onto us, slipping into our upturned mouths and we swallowed together, drinking the sky

entrapped in my throne world, alone your anguished voice gone I leaned back against the stones and remembered your weight pressing us both against different stones the low rumble in your chest as you chuckled a sound more enticing than all the thunder in the sky the loud wet rush of summer rain filled my ears drowning out the oppressive silence and I clutched you to me through time holding you close tasting the rain on your lips exploring your mouth with mine refusing to let go This one is the third in a set that I've been adding to in each iteration of the Solare Embrace Zine that I've been a part of over the years. The other two are: Rain, Wind Fire and Fire, Water, Earth Be sure to check out the rest of the zine for another story by me!