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Touch prompt list: #20, Ikora/Drifter?

Prompt #20: bandaging/stitching up an injury

It happens to everyone the first time.

Lightbearers aren’t used to such concentrated Darkness. They especially weren’t before the Enemy itself folded humanity’s planets away into seething pockets of gravity and entropy. The first time you play Gambit you get a burn, like a sunburn in reverse, from the proximity of whatever it is in that Bank.

And then it goes away easy, and you become, well, any of the things you can become nowadays: outlaws and Dredgens and sports stars.

It took a long time for Ikora to decide to try Gambit. It wasn’t right, she thought at first. Then: it wouldn’t look good. Then: Darkness is everywhere else, I need to hold this line. Then: Darkness is everywhere else and the Drifter does have a silver tongue and Ophiuchus won’t speak up to stop me and

I miss Crucible.

I’m lonely.

What does it hurt?

So, Ikora plays. Ikora wins. Ikora sits in that musty, cold ready room while black sludge swirls behind glass and the Drifter turns the feeds off and busies himself, disappearing with a data pad into a back hall. Everyone else who played is already gone. He is done for the day, he says, and that match would give them enough to talk about for weeks (although of course it’s back on for tomorrow), he says. He doesn’t gloat, exactly, just lets her know from the grease in his voice and the swagger in his movements that he’d won. Maybe he always moved like that after a game.

Ikora feels good too — proud of the win, and she had missed the simple satisfaction of gaining the top of a leaderboard. Maybe the high of that too is why she keeps looking as the Drifter walks away, thinking about his hands.

The darkburn prickles. Ikora still sits on the stairs, the ache running up and down her leg. It’s concentrated midway between her right knee and ankle.

She works her right boot off. Once she rolls her pant leg up the wound reveals itself: a black-edged burn, wide and shallow.

The Drifter clatters up the gangway and stops at the bottom of the stairs. He traded the data pad for a wet washcloth and a dry roll of bandage.

He holds the cloth out. His expression is unusually serious after the crowing during the game, or the slimy persuasion he had turned on her the last time he had tried to convince her to play Gambit. “This’ll take the sting out of it. Cancels itself out.”

“I expect you want me to ask what’s in it.”

He laughs. “Not if you’re as smart as they say.”

She doesn’t take it, not because she doesn’t want it but because the idea of applying it herself feels exhausting. “Maybe a Ghost could fix this right away. But Ophiuchus and I don’t talk.”

She knows exactly why she’s revealing things to him. She doesn’t talk to Zavala much any more. The Vanguard have been keeping secrets from each other, so it hasn’t felt right. The Drifter is known to be untrustworthy. There’s no alliance there to break. That’s comforting.

He crouches below her on the stairs so he’s eye level with her, one hand on the railing, the unguent dripping from the other. It makes black dots on the metal step. His expression looks like he’s swallowed something foul. His breath smells meaty and sour. “I know what that’s like, sister. But sometimes it’s right to heal on your own. Take pride in it. Letting them bring you back is so easy.”

Tower rumor says he’s been a predator, a cannibal. Everybody has rumors. Many of the more frightening ones about Ikora’s abilities to see truths, to read minds, are true.

In the Drifter she reads lies upon honesty upon lies upon … down and down and down into a past with a Ghost like hers.

“I’m tired of pride,” says Ikora. “Where has it gotten us lately? I just want to … “ Her eyes almost shut. It’s quieter here than in the Tower, only the one locked-down mutter of the Drifter’s thoughts and the crashing-wave presence of the thing behind the glass. “Rest.”

The Drifter hefts the cloth next to her leg and meets her eyes for permission. “You want me to do this myself, you just say so and lay back there.”

She does. She leans back on the steps and tells him, mind-to-mind, what she wants.

It’s a flex, and the fact that she scares him makes her lips quirk. Still in charge. The Drifter leans back and whistles low, and then there’s some real anger in his expression and his dim voice in the Light.

“We coulda been something great together back when,” he says. “Get the Guardians to work together instead of fighting, forget the trinkets and the choices and just work on stuff. Your buddy Eris was down for it. Why not you? And there’s no good makin’ rules in wars. But I gotta ask. Don’t do that mind-reading stuff on me. I’m feeling watched down here every minute by every weird bit of space dust anyway. That work for ya, Vanguard?”

“Fine.” She hadn’t planned on doing it again anyway. “I didn’t need it to win that game, and I don’t need it to talk to you.”

The Drifter laughs and kneels on the bottom step to slap the wet cloth against her leg. That stings too, but soon enough the unguent works. The pain fades, left behind with the wide circles he makes on her skin. Ikora shuts her eyes again, thinking of what else she told him mind-to-mind — of the way she watched him, of her loneliness, of the barriers she will not bring down and the promises she will not break.

The salve eases the pain and the red and black burn, leaving her skin looking untouched. After he’s done, but before he picks up the bandage, the Drifter cups the back of her leg in a gloved hand. Ikora enjoys the solidity of the touch lingering there.

He’s close enough to her that if she sat up and bent forward she would be able to put her face against his hair. Besides his breath he smells clean, keeps his hair neat. Looking down as he is to start wrapping her leg, she can’t see the greasy sheen on his face or his cannibal lips. He wraps the bandage, cuts it with a knife from nowhere, secures it tight. Inside his head float greed and opportunistic jumpiness and fear and an endless hunger, but no desire to hurt her.

As he sits up from the finished bandage he gives her leg another light slap on the side like she would pat a repaired Sparrow. “Good as new.” The words are soft. The tone would be a surprise except for what she put in his mind before.

I just want a little bit of time. No strings. Just someone to touch. Gloat about it as much as you want. You look good when you gloat. Just expect nothing back.

So, she leans forward and presses a kiss into his hair on the top of his head. His hair smells clean, just a hint of something sour on his skin. She lingers, shutting her eyes, breathing in the smell of another person, enjoying herself.

Then she sits up, the pain in her leg gone, energy enough for another game singing in her loud heartbeat. The Drifter looks up at her with a smug, crumpled grin.

Ikora murmurs with a laugh in her voice. “No one will ever believe you.”

In response he cups her leg again. Before, he could have been operating with the clinical competency of a battlefield medic. Now he hungrily caresses the hard muscle, tracing sharply defined dips and curves with fingers still gloved. He leans in to kiss her knee, and Light she likes the way he looks there. The Drifter kisses from her knee down to where the burn had been. The Drifter kisses from her knee down to the bandage. He is undone or pretending his best, his face out of view but his mouth warm and wet against her skin. She watches his heavy breaths move him. Clarity fills her, every touch messy and precise at the same time. At the bandage he stops, his breath on her skin, as if considering what to do next.

“That’s enough,” she says, and reaches for him. Her gloves are thin enough she can tell the texture of his beard but not tell whether his skin is slick. She lifts him by the chin until he’s standing up off the stairs, looking at her with a slack satisfaction that she can feel mirrored in the pit of her stomach. As she stands she pushes him farther away, giving her space to move to the top of the stairs and roll her pant leg down.

He’s watching her for a long silence. “You oughta play the game more often,” he finally says as she buckles her boot. When she looks up he’s licking his lips, then looks around the ceiling as if for their Ghosts.

What a thing to have in common. Not speaking to our other halves.

“You’ve taken enough of my Guardians. I won’t encourage any more,” Ikora says. “But there is one secret I’d like my Guardians to pas among themselves. When the Darkness is everywhere, we need it.”

“What’s that?” The Drifter’s expression is closed and suspicious now, a card player’s screen.

“We all need some rest and some comfort sometimes," she says.

When Ikora transmats out it is with a smirk of satisfaction and a lightness in her limbs she has not felt since Crow arrived. Maybe she’ll visit the Derelict again, and maybe not. A cure with a kiss was just what she needed for now.

Fuse said no thonk, especially DURING HOSTAGE

Request by @veennomm