#and im still bitter about what they did to d2 but right now i think it'll be a comfort anyway

[zerobotic]

warframe may be the game i come back to when im quarantined for covid and stressed out about that and need something to do for 10 hours a day when im trapped in my room.......but, it turns out, when im really struggling with anxiety in a way i havent in years, that’s enough to get me to finally reinstall destiny 2 after over two years of not playing it. i just...need to see some old friends, right now.

[scarletrebel]

@mrpinstripesuit replied to your post: im loving all of this stuff about forsaken thats...

how Does avia feel about the fallen/variks ? It must have been weird right cause the queen owned some of them right? Do you think she’d of fought alongside any before? ( also like her feelings on vex/hive/cabal/taken in general if you wanna)

oooh good good question!

so interestingly when i started playing destiny and was thinking up avias backstory (around house of wolves time was when i really, really started to think about it), the one thing i knew above all else was that she hated the fallen the most. they just, reminded her too much of being on the reef, especially considering if i have my lore right the queen would have become the kell after petras sister died, so right after avia started to question everything in the reef

(i dont think she’d have fought alongside them whilst at the reef, i think maybe mara might have just sent them out as a force of their own. avia was always eager to do things alone in an effort to impress the queen anyway, so she would have heavily resisted any help, especially from the fallen.)

in the beginning she was petty and bitter, and convinced herself she wasnt seeking them out on purpose, its just a coincidence she spent most of her time on earth, the moon and venus

variks is something different. whilst she was at the reef she stayed clear of him, he was the queens business and no one elses but. i like to think variks foresaw her jumping ship before anyone else did and didnt say anything. variks sees the fallen as ‘lost’ and technically they are, they’re ruined after the traveler left them. so he understands running away from what you thought you were fighting for when it starts to fall apart, when you start to feel like a slave, and trying to find something else. 

still, avia doesnt like the small, slyly arrogant way he speaks to her, like he knows something about her that she doesnt. (he just gets her, in a way that he may never digress, unless the opportunity arises in forsaken) i like the idea of a conversation between them, but i dont know how it’d go. its not that she doesnt like him, she just doesnt know what to make of him. theres a part of her, after becoming a guardian, that thinks she may understand him better now. though shes loathe to admit it. 

(after cayde, after uldren, after everything. after certain actions become commonplace; ignoring vanguard messages and shushing levi on the regular, she stands before someone she once called her sister and demands revenge. a clicking emerges from behind her, chuckling. she doesnt want to admit it - she wants to hear this. wants to hear variks convince himself he doesnt care to see her rip uldrens throat out. 

‘our guardian wants to kill the little crow, yes? once and for all.’)

as for the enemy factions in general:

shes sees a lot of the reef in the fallen. she thinks that maybe if they had anything close to the queen (and skolas came close, but that wasnt her business, she made it so) they might actually be formidable foes. no ladders to climb, no vandal above you to kill, no captain, no kell. but its hard enough for the houses to get along, so she doesnt see them as a threat. and has a massive amount of respect for the titan orders for keeping them out of the city so long ago and basically making it impossible for them to rebuild. 

the vex she used to hate quite personally as well, but only on the words of the exo stranger. she believed they posed a threat to taking away the light, and her light, her second chance, which wasnt going to happen. in my head avia was the guardian to take on the black garden and the destiny story and just kind of chilled out after, the story of d1 is what she needed to give her clarity and put her on the path for the rest of her journey. now theyre just freaky future simulating robots that she keeps having to kill, no thanks to osiris constantly fucking up the simulations cause hes bored. 

as for the cabal, she never, ever saw them as a particular threat in d1. the outbound signal on the skyburners ship gave her cause for concern though, (as i kind of wrote about in the first chapter of good intentions) and she started trying to keep an eye on them, but obviously that didnt help. after d2 she started to take them a lot, a lot more seriously for obvious reasons, and now she just sees them as territory hungry war mongers and nothing else. she doesnt really care for whatever ikora/whichever warlock of the time is looking into calus and the rest of the empire are telling her about the cabal as a species. they nearly destroyed her home. 

the hive and the taken she kinda just lumps together in her head (to griers great, great dismay). everything they do reminds her of oryx and toland and after CoO, the dark future. she can handle it, she’s acclimatized after spending so much time with grier and being on the dreadnaught for so long when they did the raid. but sometimes she just. needs a break from them. from trying to convince herself she isnt hearing some sort of laughter coming from whatever vacuum the taken she’s killing are getting sucked into. they’re the only enemy type she gets that feeling from. 

she understands the hives hierarchy quite well though, its one of the things shes glad she picked up from grier and carver and scarlet. it helped her figure out what toland was trying to do, even if she didnt understand it fully. all she had to gather was that the sword logic demanded whatever was powerful enough took the space that it killed, which would only lead to more death. somewhat reminiscent of the fallen, but it was mostly the queens iron fist that made it all click, the idea that if you were to challenge the most powerful thing, you would die trying. no ifs or buts. which is why no one ever challenged her, or oryx. that, avia understood very well. 

[scarletrebel]

of madness and truth: the dark future details

i was going to do this in two sections cause i do wanna go through the present parts of the fic as well. mainly exactly why avia is torturing herself by wanting to see the simulation, why she decides to tell grier, and why osiris helps her. also, why osiris saw the simulation and what my perception of his opinions on toland are. 

but im too excited to share all the dark future ideas i have so uhh here you go @mrpinstripesuit if you have anything to add please please go for it!!

man why do we like torturing our kids aha

(also i broke it down like, a lot a lot not to be patronising but because i didnt wanna overwhelm people with bullet points aha)

“I guess I’ll have to explain it to you, like usual,” Grier says. “Since we killed Oryx? Three years. Since you snuck into my throne world and tried to kill me? Two and a half years. Since you killed Toland and trapped yourself in the Hive Overworld? Two years.”

three years: back in ttk days, grier chose to become the taken king after they killed oryx, so the rest of the clan had to get out of dodge and leave him. 

two and a half years: avia was very, very lost after that happened, and sought grier out by herself (and against the advice of literally everyone) just to talk to him. but, toland being the piece of shit he is, intercepted her and wouldn’t let them meet. then he convinced grier that she’d come to kill him and toland stopped her. avia then convinces herself that if she figures out how to kill toland, grier will be okay.

two years: in the split second after avia killed toland, in a complete panic grier trapped her in the overworld. he was the one who scratched the runes into the wall, theyre basically a strong but hurried version of the hive traps. 

the scene itself, the timeline that present avia sees is set just after the events of d2, around the time the savathuns song strike would have been undertaken. it’s the first time they’ve spoken since avia killed toland, but avia knows grier was responsible for trapping her. him telling her that shes there because she killed toland is the first notion that he’s there to lie to her to get her on his side, because he’s in denial and needs to know if savathun is actually coming to the system. hes not sure he’s strong enough to take her on, so he needs avia to take on the role of toland (or something advantageous to him at least) to give him an advantage. so he lies through his teeth.

“Yes – no,” Avia retches. “The singing,” she spits. “All she does is sing and sing and I can’t take it anymore!”

“Who?” Grier asks, sharp. “Who sings, Avia?”

Avia’s mouth opens around a name, but then she stops, and lets out a dry laugh. She drops her hands and pulls her head up to look at Grier. “Oh. Oh, are you telling me you don’t know?”

“It’s nor Ir Yut,” Grier ruffles, but shakes himself and addresses her with all the manner of a teacher dealing with an uncooperative student. “She’s gone. It’s not his daughters either, and no ordinary Deathsinger on account of how far it stretches across the system. I have my suspicions but you, are the only one who knows.”

Avia pierces him with her eyes, unrelenting and patronising.

“You know,” she says. “You know who it is.”

grier is…….. fucked up. he had toland whispering in his ear that he was doing everything right and he was getting oh so powerful, whilst withholding information about whether either of the sisters would come and kill him bc its toland, all he cares about is the sword logic. if he was actually alive when they came he’d probably just watch grier die with a smile on his face. 

then avia kills toland, and grier is so, so alone. all he has are the tablets of ruin, which explain the sword logic with such clarity, all the info that toland withheld from him, and he starts to get Worried. and then he hears savathuns song.

avia hears savathuns song, too. she actually started to gain control of herself in the hive overworld after she heard it. until then she was having all this information shoved into her head against her will. she knows a lot about the hive similarly to toland, because shes heard all these other songs and all this knowledge. she doesnt want to know, its far too much for her to handle, but she doesnt really have a choice. 

but then savathuns song made her realise the best way to get griers attention, so she just started screaming. every now and then, the screams would affect griers throne world. and that’s when he decided to go to her, to try and manipulate her with all the tools toland had given him. he had a feeling she was transforming into something, but went into the conversation just trying to convince her that she needed to help him.

“If you’re right, if I’m a liar just like Toland was, then even if I told you how they all died on my doorstep, you wouldn’t even think I was telling the truth.” A tilt of his head, the white matted fringe dangles slightly, helplessly. “Would you?”

none of the clan are dead. the eos’s did try and get avia out after rook was patrolling the dreadnaught and heard her voice, screaming. he couldn’t convince the vanguard to deploy a mission cause there was just no proof that avia was alive after sneaking to the dreadnaught to kill toland.

carver used his Hidden talents to track her down, got as far as the room where she was but the hive were about to overrun them. carver knew that avia wouldn’t want them to die in a rescue attempt, so he gets himself and his wife and child out of there and regroups with the others. carina is mad about it, but her mum and dad aren’t giving up.

the only other member of the clan who’s seen grier is rook. after the eos’s got back, he figured fuck it and went to get avia, his heart too broken to have the same clarity that they did regarding if he died.

that part grier wasnt 100% lying about -- rook actually finds the room, and grier is waiting for him. it’s a close fight, grier gets the chance to kill rook in the end, take his ghost and crush it under his heel but. he cant. so he tells rook to run, and if he ever comes back he wont just kill him, but he’ll make avia do it. (more lies about avia not remembering who he is probably idk)

grier lying to avia about their clan mates dying isn’t something he went into the conversation knowing he’d do. he was getting pissed at her holding back info out of spite, and thanks to this little comic by pin I wanted to play with him bitterly making her more and more upset by lashing out in such a vile way. grier is a hard character to find faults for aha but his quick anger and bitterness were interesting to play with when I dialed them up to eleven.

avia’s biggest fear is getting the people she loves and cares about killed, and grier still retains enough of himself to know that. so he just kinda, finds that vein and twists and pulls at it until avia breaks down and believes that she’s all alone -- that it really is just them two now. 

“I, I wouldn’t – no!” Avia yells, and the room shakes once more. Grier takes stock of it this time, his face twisting in amused curiosity as she rages on.

avia is turning into a deathsinger. 

in my head her ahamkara claws loose their silver plates over time and eventually, some time after her and grier talk she hears the ahamkara/worm gods/whatever with a scary amount of clarity, amplified by the fact that shes trapped in the overworld. they just convince her that shes not a guardian anymore, that shes something better, something more powerful. she spent so long being a soldier, a fighter for a dying cause, wouldnt this be better? to forge her own path, to listen to the songs and become something greater?

eventually she’ll decide (or think that she decided) that grier’s the only person she can protect anymore, and begins to accept the transformation. she adopts the same powers, I guess, as oryxs daughters. being able to weave reality and bend it to her/griers will. she’s basically ‘griers deathsinger’. her grief and anger fuel how powerful she is.

(i love...... corruption tropes so yeah this is basically whats happening to her aha.)

its an ironic parallel also because as i said before, grier is alone with the tablets, and avia is alone with the ahamkara. but grier said it was just them. theyre both transforming and changing at the same time into things they dont necesarily want to be because they couldnt see the consequences of their actions after one decision was made. but, they do eventually come together, just them, as grier makes avia believe -- as its meant to be. 

Afterwards 

i like to think eventually the clan decides to take grier on together to try and save avia, but they just get taken one by one instead, basically becoming different members of griers court and only making him stronger. they’re all far, far too attached and know that theres most likely no coming back if they do this. but after the city falls, theres no better time. no vanguard to stop them, no mission protocol. they regather after ghaul attacks and all decide to strike out by themselves. but it goes horribly wrong. 

avia’s full deathsinger transformation makes all of her armour look like the silver plated ahamkaras (because thats just her, in d1 they were my fave exotic and they’re very much a part of her character in that era for me) minus a helmet, and the silver is definitely more rusted. her eyes blacken over entirely and her cloak is massive and swishy and the hood almost covers her eyes, and thats in place of the skirt a deathsinger would normally have (a skirt just doesnt seem right for her aha)

avia becomes a very loyal, very cutthroat deathsinger. she’s literally at griers beck and call. like omnigul for crota, or as it said in the fic ir yut.