Something tells her to make a detour on her way back to her quarters. Something very strongly tells her to stop by to see the Hunter Vanguard. She knows that he’s off duty and he’s not in any of his usual haunts, so she stop by his place.

The door is open. She undoes the buckle on her thigh holster and takes a look inside, her optics easily adjusting for the low light levels.

When she spies Cayde sitting with an empty glass in one hand, his head in the other, Atsuko swears she can feel a tightening in her chest. Psychosomatic, the brain jockeys in white coats would say at Clovis Bray. Operant conditioning surfacing as near autonomic reflex due to subconscious memories from the original subject’s imprint.

Bullshit. She knows what she feels. She knows, in the very least she thinks she knows what he feels. Or that he is feeling. He’s feeling too much, so much that he can scarcely move.

Atsuko carefully enters, quietly closing the door behind her. “Cayde.” She speaks softly, but clearly. “It’s Atsuko. I’m coming in, okay?” It’s not so much a question but an advanced warning. She doesn’t want to surprise him.

She takes even steps over to him and stops next to Cayde. She rubs his back with her right hand, slipping it beneath his cloak to make gentle circles against the soft leather armor, while her left hand rests on his bicep. She lays her cheek upon his shoulder and closes her eyes, the metal plating of her faux eyelids blocking out the white light from her optics. “I’m right here, Cayde. You’re not alone. Not any more.”

Captain Yuè Qīngshuǎng. Fireteam Leader, Titan, Sunbreaker. She was found by Warren, her Ghost, in the Old Cosmodrome on the Amur Oblast. Her remains were situated in such a way that her hands appeared to be holding a pair of Pinming cups.

She is old enough to have fought with distinction at the Battle of Six Fronts and the Battle of Twilight Gap. She still wears the Mark of Six Fronts, as well as her Iron Banner gear. She is a proud Young Wolf, long an admirer of her Titan mentors Saladin, Shaxx, and Zavala, and personal heroes such as the Lady Jolder, Liu Feng, Wei Nin. She is a capable commander and quick-witted strategist who will often take up support roles at odds with the stereotypical Titan combat model.

Since learning that, in this version of the City, she and her fireteam died in the Great Disaster, she has been beset by nightmares of the Hellmouth. She will stare at the fractured surface of Luna and think of how she failed her best friends, her fireteam, and how their remains are in the sky above while they’re still alive in the room next door. She’ll think of how the Light-starved Thrall in the deepest recesses of the damned pit are sucking every last molecule from their bones, and how she could have prevented it. How she should have listened to Shaxx. How she should have known the Consensus had no idea how to run a military op, especially one against the Hive.

Yuè spends a steadily increasing number of hours in the field, on patrols, running bounties, collecting supplies wherever she can to support her fireteam and their newest…Kinderguardian. It’s not completely altruistic; while the team needs glimmer and raw materials, Yuè avoids interpersonal confrontation. She will defend a friend or a stranger without hesitation. When it comes to her own defense, unless the threat is a danger, she doesn’t know how to proceed. Her emotional and mental well being are two states she is ill-prepared to address. Instead, she hides in her work, running away starside to avoid seeing a relationship develop, opting instead to push herself to the edge of her limits and get shot.

The Hunter

Atsuko-5 is the second-in-command of the fireteam and the balance between the team leader and the team medic. She is older than her Captain, but younger than her junior in terms of years.

The Exo was resurrected by her Ghost in the Forgotten Shores of the Cosmodrome. She had no artifacts with her, little in the way of nothing to point to her life prior to being Chosen by the Traveler other than the fact that at some point she had been human and she had gotten a trip to Encecladus courtesy of Clovis Bray.

The remains of a long disbanded military’s battalion dress uniform were natural considering she was an Exo. There was hardly anything left of the material despite it being a high-grade impact-resistant fabric. Akio, her Ghost, theorized that while he had discovered her in a cave, the surrounding rocks evidenced activity over the centuries, so she likely started off on the plateau several hundred meters above and lost her pants that way.

Like most Exos, she has remnants of her original memories, and flashes of shared memory from another Exo. Atsuko-5 has no idea of who those fragments are from, and has no frame of reference for her own scant recollections.

Unlike her Fireteam Leader, the Exo Hunter is old enough to have been a part of the City Age and she helped protect pilgrims en route to the Last City, providing watch along the Takanome Trail as a sniper. She fought at the Battle of Six Fronts and the Battle of Twilight Gap. 

She is one of the few Bladedancers remaining and, as a Hunter, she is skilled at scouting and reconnaissance and has proven herself to be an accomplished hacker and thief. In the field, she is naturally on point and providing over-watch as a sniper. This behavior carries over in some small fashion to the way in which she takes care of her fireteam. She is the calming influence on Yuè those rare times she loses her composure and the voice of maturity for Severin on the multiple occasions he acts impulsively.

Atsuko-5 is a woman of few words, opting for a less is more approach, with Akio being of a similar mien.

The Warlock

Simultaneously the oldest and the youngest of the fireteam in terms of age and behavior respectively, Jonathan Martin Severin is a Warlock of the Praxic Order and a Reef Awoken. He is the team’s medic and is a Sunsinger, a sub-class that is for all intents and purposes extinct.

His Ghost located him in wreckage of a Galliot that had crashed on the outskirts of the European Dead Zone. Severin and his ship had been there for some time. There was no evidence of Fallen scavenging, however. Outside of the catastrophic damage it had sustained on atmospheric entry and landing, little else had occurred over the ages aside from nature taking its course.

Severin believes he remembers some elements of his life prior to being Chosen. After being granted entry to the Reef, he felt he gained more access to those parts of his memory. When the Dreaming City was opened to the fireteam, he had expected a better sense of who he had been. It’s something that Severin is still working through.

Generally, his personality is that of a flirtatious, somewhat foolish man who seems naive one moment and cunning the next. He will go to sometimes outlandish extremes to make others laugh and uses his charm as a cover for his ruthless side. The usual targets for his flirtations are his fireteam leader, who returns them in kind, and the Exo, who takes great delight in blowing him off.

This was not being discussed with anyone. This was not being shown to any member of this Guardian’s fireteam, or to a member of the Vanguard, or to a Cryptarch, a member of the City’s Medical Response Team, no one.

This was being kept a secret.

Suffice to say that their Ghost was less than pleased with the situation.

“Let someone take a look at you.”

“No.”

“I don’t understand why you won’t.”

“It’s because I’m fine, that’s why. I’m okay.”

“For the millionth time, you’re not. You’ve been running a near constant temperature of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That is not normal for a human.”

“I’m a Sunbreaker.”

“That excuse got old a week ago.”

“A fever of a hundred is nothing. It’s barely a fever.”

“It’s fever enough to see someone.”

“Still not happening.”

“What about the headaches?”

“Everyone gets headaches, come on.”

“And the pain in your eye? Your left eye?”

“Still not seeing the big deal. Get it? Seeing the big deal?”

“Yeah, no. Those scars were there when I first resurrected you. Why would they start hurting now, hundreds of years later?”

“Delayed psychosomatic sympathy pains? I don’t know. You keep telling me I put myself under too much stress. Maybe this is all stress induced and all I need to do is sleep more.”

“…I don’t think a nap is going to help this.”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll bite. You seem to have formulated an idea as to what ‘this’ is. So?”

“Your eye…sometimes it doesn’t look right.”

“What does that mean?”

“When you’re sleeping, or when you’re focused on something, and the fever peaks, your eye almost looks like it has a…glow. It looks like it has a dark glow.”

“A dark glow.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“I know, but I am telling you what I’ve seen.”

 “Constant fever, headaches, pain in my eye, dark glowyness in eye, is there anything else I should know? Have I grown horns? A tail?”

“Don’t mock me, I’m only trying to get you to get some help.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“I know. I’m sorry too.”

“Listen. I’ll…I’ll suck it up and have Sevvy give me a work-up tomorrow. I promise, Warren.”

“Thank you, Qiangshuang.”

The Ghost floated over to her and nuzzled into the crux of her neck. Yue cupped a hand around him and cuddled him there. “I’m sorry to have worried you, little Light,” she murmured to him.

Warren hummed in return and gently maneuvered away. “Get some rest, Qiangshuang,” he said softly, turning the interior lights of the Glass Minuet’s cockpit down to evening mode.

“Good night, Warren,” she said to him, easing herself back into the seat. She tilted the seat back, angling her view of the Earth down and away, and settled in to sleep in orbit high above the Traveler and the City.

While her Ghost rested in transmat space, Yue entered into a fitful slumber. It was one filled with dreams of the Hive, the Taken, the Dreaming City, the Dreadnaught, the Ascendant Plane, the Worm Gods, the Sister Queens, and an undying Ahamkara.

As her fever increased, the three scars on Yue’s left eye darkened, and a familiar ichor began to ooze down her cheek. A faint bluish-black glow illuminated the skin, and as her eyelid fluttered, the tails of an evil flame licked out briefly before being drawn back in.