#it’s a slow burn of the highest caliber and worth every minute of waiting

[ahhrenata]

a little sketch for @not-so-austen ‘s ‘fix-it’ fic Fighting the Fall. It’s such a beautiful story that made me fall absolutely in love with the idea of these two. I’m so glad I found it 🥹 they deserve everything good in this world.

[talyn-the-warlock]

(Hey, Guardians! Ready for some angst? I wrote this some time ago when I was very, very upset as a vent piece, but now that I read it, I think it's good enough to post!

Also, for flavor- this is fanonically what happens in this scene for Talyn. Soooo..keep that in mind going forward.

Trigger warnings included for gun violence and canon character death.)

Nothing Left to Say

“The line between Light and Dark is so very thin…do you know which side you’re on?”

The forsaken Prince leered defiance through his wounds, glaring mad hatred into the Guardian before him. Talyn Maj caught his eyes only through the sights of her lost friend’s gun. They didn’t intimidate her. There was no way this shadow of a man could have made her back down now. Not after what he’d done. Not after all he’d stolen from her. Even without his sins considered, Uldren was on his last legs. With the state he was in, staggering and bleeding and wasting his fading strength on soliloquy, he certainly couldn’t fight back. If she left him, he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. He would be refused the honor of a duel, or the mercy of her Light. Rage churned through her mind in words left unspoken. Murdering bastard. Deranged psycho. Self-righteous prick. This bitterness was her truth as much as it was the woman to her left. Petra’s sidearm was trained on Uldren the same as Cayde’s cannon, her drawn face reserving all the same disdain her friend was unabashedly radiating. If the Guardian didn’t end this herself, his sins would be repaid by the Queen’s Wrath. It wouldn’t come to that. The choice had been made the moment this would-be Prince turned the Ace of Spades on its rightful owner. Anger so vitriolic poised on the tip of Talyn’s tongue felt like a mouthful of acid. With a deep gulp, she swallowed it and ignored how it burned her throat. He wasn’t worth acknowledging, let alone debating. A bullet would be the only repartee that mattered now. The Ace of Spades felt so heavy, so full of a symmetrically horrid emotion. Vengeance sat chambered in steel, waiting to be unleashed. This half-baked conversation was over.

Talyn had nothing left to say.

She closed the distance until she was almost on top of him, slow strides quaking with an unrelenting fury. What had happened to Cayde replayed in the Warlock’s mind ad nauseum as she scoured the Tangled Shore for mark after mark. One after another, unmatched bloodlust had broken them. It was savagery she didn’t know she was capable of, furious violence that made even her best friends slink back in surprise and fear. Slaughtering Uldren’s pawns hadn’t sated her. Painting the Reef in Scorn blood wasn’t enough. Talyn knew she’d never be satisfied until the man who stole from her knew what it felt like to be destroyed from the inside out. It was no secret Mara’s sacrifice had driven him to this, turned him from dutiful brother to unhinged menace. He thought he knew loss. He thought he understood pain. Talyn’s jaw clenched at the mere thought, the barrel of that borrowed cannon trembling in time with her arm. Uldren didn’t know a damn thing about what it meant to suffer. Not yet. It would be no cut to black that put the exclamation point on his story, no ambiguous gunshot that sent him tumbling into the void. This moment would be hers alone, hanging suspended in her racing, fury-addled mind. Cayde’s last breath flashed across her imagination again, encouraging her to make the final push. Talyn didn’t hesitate. She couldn’t.

The instant she stopped, Talyn let her finger close in a white-knuckled fist. The Ace of Spades bucked in her hand, barked its rage in lead and fire where her tongue couldn’t. She’d hovered the dot sight directly over Uldren’s creased forehead, right between his furious, exhaustion-ringed eyes. At point-blank, it was impossible to miss. His head snapping backward spared her a good look at the wound, the way he sprawled across the polished floor uncanny and wrong. Crimson pooled beneath him in the same shade as his killer’s vision. She was still infuriated beyond her ability to express, still wired with homicidal lust alien to her. Taking his life wasn’t enough. Talyn thought this would be what calmed her, but it wasn’t enough. The gun shook so hard she almost couldn’t aim it anymore. It was making her arm hurt to hold it aloft like this, a steady ache forming in her bicep and her tightly-clenched hand. It was still so damned heavy, just as unsatisfied as the heart threatening to pound through her chest. Letting herself of this boiling blood was the only thing that could help her now, but she couldn’t have known. The fire overcame her all at once, a hiss passing her teeth as her face twisted in unbridled emotion. He deserved worse. He deserved more. There was no convincing her not to see the debt repaid in full.

Cayde’s gun screamed itself hoarse. High-caliber bullets embedded themselves one after another in Uldren's chest, making his lifeless body jerk from the repeated impacts. Blood blossomed from the Prince anew, holes punched in his tattered garbs staining the floor with yet more red. It wasn’t as cathartic as it should’ve been. All it did was stoke the feelings inside her, coax them into new disgusting shapes. A tornado-force maelstrom of darkness tore her insides to pieces, threatening to consume her in its unstoppable wake. Her rage was a spigot that could never be dammed, gushing fountains of cold brutality that made her sick to drink from. It was seductive. Painful. Infinite. A hand cannon’s magazine wasn’t. The Ace of Spades said all it had to and went silent, save for the rhythmic click of it’s hammer striking nothing. It was satisfied, more than content with the display it had shown this worthless murderer. A terrible jealousy rose in Talyn when she couldn’t find that peace herself. Her mind hadn’t quieted an iota, the violence in her still roiling like a storm-tossed sea. Freezing salt-water overtook her prow again and again as the waves crested all the higher. No, damnit, no! There must be more ammunition, there had to be new ways to tear his broken body asunder. Talyn searched for them with every futile pull of a useless trigger. The dull report of an empty chamber begged to differ. No, no, no. It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t done killing this son of a bitch, and it wasn’t fair.

The Warlock’s breath came heavier as panic dug talons into her neck. Revenge was all she had, her sole motivation to carry on as grief laid her low. Finally sighting the bastard up and snuffing him had become her hyperfixation, and she’d done much to convince herself it was her only reason to fight anymore. This was supposed to make her whole again. Wasted and pathetic, a gun she hadn’t earned balled in her fist, Talyn could only feel more broken. Why hadn’t it worked? Why hadn’t her heart changed? Why was the night inside her no less implacable and asphyxiating? There was no delusion that could have convinced her this would bring Cayde back, but it should have at least laid him to rest. It should have mattered as much as she wished it could. As her epiphanies filled the Awoken’s most sacred halls, Talyn wished like a child that she hadn’t killed Uldren for nothing. She begged the stars for something, anything to assure her this was the right path. That wherever Cayde was, he was proud of all she’d done. That this outburst was warranted, and her wrath was for once directed as it should be. In spite of all her wishing, no answer came to her. No being heard what she so deeply desired. Nobody cared. The silence of this sleeping place was an insult beyond any she could abide.

Shrieking her discontent, Talyn stalked away from the lifeless Prince and snapped her cramping gun-arm to the side. Heat behind her eyes clouded her vision just as it did her judgment. It seemed she’d never be finished making mistakes. As she whirled on the spot, petulance twisted her actions into those of a reverent yet again. She felt the Ace of Spades leave her hand, heard it clatter across marble and ding unceremoniously into a pillar. The noise drew her eyes just as they widened with regret. Even through a mist of tears, Talyn could see the worn frame of the precious revolver discarded like an empty bottle, spinning lazily in place as the kinetic force of her blind rage ebbed from it. She hadn’t meant to throw it. She wasn’t thinking. There was no way Talyn would have consciously disregarded her only memento mori of her dear lost friend. Intention didn’t matter. Not to her. Not to Cayde. No share of guilt would absolve her from the act itself. This was the highest disrespect, wrought solely by the hand of someone who claimed to love all the Ace of Spades now represented. How could she? Why was she yet still incapable of staying her fury? Of preventing all she cherished from becoming detritus in a gutter? Of being normal? The weight of these questions brought Talyn to her knees, arms wrapping around herself in some simulacrum of a friend’s comfort. The clouds in her starlight eyes gathered tightly, a storm choking the whole world before her. Now-quiet halls were the amphitheater in which sorrow was to be spoken, and with no reservations a Guardian made her choked anguish heard. It rained in the Dreaming City. Torrential. Unending. A flood that would sweep away all things, a disaster that would spell the doom of everything she thought she believed in. Nothing could save her from drowning now. Nothing, except-

“Talyn…?”

She didn’t lift her head to acknowledge the voice, but it was enough to mute her broken sobbing. There was no mistaking it. Petra. She’d faded into the background as Talyn’s vision tunneled, her friend secondary to the righteous murder unfolding before her. Now there was no ignoring the Queen’s Wrath, all her own opinions and emotions brought back into sharp focus as Talyn cried the red away. Petra must hate her now. The Warlock’s true colors had been painted in fat, uncoordinated strokes across the whole of her queenless domain. Destruction following the wake of a hot-blooded feud dropped squarely in her lap. She couldn’t have believed Talyn wanted to help, not after watching her butcher a man for the sin of slighting her. Like so many friends before her, Petra must be afraid. Shocked that such a display could come from a woman like her, that she was even capable of this bestial horror. Surely she would never see her the same. The world continued to turn around her as she tortured herself with the thinking. No matter how Talyn had convinced herself, reality was so much kinder. Petra proved her wrong.

Dropped on one knee, pistol holstered, she braved a hand on the Guardian’s slumped shoulder. An even squeeze debunked every anxiety. She couldn’t possibly understand, but she was there regardless. Reliable as always, courageous in spite of it all. A pillar, just as undeserved as the hand cannon she’d tossed aside. Talyn didn’t consider how little she’d done to earn it. She leaned on her friend, face buried in fieldweave as her lamentations redoubled. Petra couldn’t fix her. She didn’t have to. She would consolidate the pieces with her steady arms, gently gathering a broken woman into a dustpan with a whisper on her lips. It wasn’t enough. But for now, it was what Talyn needed.

“It’s over,” she candidly said. “Let’s get you home.”