Title: Take Two
Fandom: Horizon: Zero Dawn
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2120
Summary: Aloy experiences a New Game + rewind, is understandably confused, more news after the Proving.
Aloy wakes to silence. It - the waking - is not entirely a surprise, even if she'd felt like she would never wake again once she fell asleep for the last week straight. Saving the world is like that. Fixing the world in the aftermath even more so. There is always too much for her to do, and too many places that she needs to be. The silence is similarly accounted for. Save in the Jewel south of Meridian and the valleys of the Sacred Lands, few places begin the day with much bird-call.
She blinks, allowing the heady pull of sleep to fall away at its own pace. The netting on the ceiling above her is familiar-unfamiliar. She knows that if she gets up, it won't take her more than a minute to remember where she is, but even after the bulk of damage is dealt with, she is exhausted. Thought of clearing rubble or tracking remnants if corruption is enough to make her want to pull her blanket over her head. So she does.
And even the blanket smells annoyingly, achingly familiar. Like herbs and smoke and dried bunches of fire kiln blossoms. Like the hut tucked away high up on the mountainside that she hasn't seen since she returned to the Embrace with the war party to resupply for her journey out into the Sundom. Like she is a child again, with nothing to worry about but practicing her hunting skills and keeping Odd Grata fed.
Aloy hasn't been back. Hasn't wanted to know what the Eclipse have done to her home. Even with the double blows of the Proving and the War Party massacre, she can't believe that bandits could make it so far into the heart of the Sacred Land. Teersa had said they buried Rost there, and that is as much a balm - Rost is hers, more than the tribe that had cast them both out - as it is infuriating. The Nora were everything to him.
And they don't even give him the dignity of burying him with them. Aloy was accepted by the tribe. More than - they think she speaks for All Mother. She could have shared his mourning with his people. But that didn't happen. It won't happen.
The tribe keeps to its ways, and she keeps Rost's name to herself.
She can't go back. Working on the North Gate is hard enough, close and fresh enough to pull at the ache deep in her chest until it is barely shy of bleeding. She won’t go back.
But it is nice to be back home, for as long as this waking dream lasts.
She spends so long luxuriating in the impossible experience that it isn't a surprise to see piled furs and busy workbench, and plants drying in clumps on the net wall when she does rouse. Her bow fits her hand like a habit, worn and familiar. Her tunic requires even less thought. Clothes pulled into place, Aloy pokes her head out. The air is cold and crisp. The path is buried in snow, just like she's walked it a hundred times. She barely notices the absence of the grave marker, too enamored with the idea of an untouched Embrace to explore. She dismisses it without a thought. This is the home of her childhood, just as she left it.
Her breath mists in front of her like a shot of chillwater. The chill is almost too pleasant to bare after weeks in the dry heat of the Sundom. The less that is said about dust in her presence the better. Meridian might escape the storms by being so high, but Sunfall does not.
Aloy inhales, allowing sure feet to carry her forward as she pulls the crisp mountain air deep into her lungs. There will be rain soon. She wants to get into the shelter of the valley before it arrives. Throws herself at the short climb before the zipline, and very nearly drops straight back down with shock.
She blinks up at Rost's shadow, stark against the light and clear blue sky, her steps slowing. She's dreaming. Has to be. Any moment now she'll see corrupted machines and Hades and the embrace will burn and she'll wake to the fallow emptiness of the Forbidden West to start another day's long trek back to the Tribes.
She has the supplies. She can stay out there for a full week, away from everyone, until she decides what to do next. She doesn't have to go back to the Embrace. She doesn't even have to go to Meridian. She could stay near Sunstone, build a little shelter for herself, maybe settle with the rest in the reclaimed bandit camp and clear out the remaining corrupted machines. It’ll be … fine. A life she won’t mind.
She doesn't wake up.
*
After surviving the conversation, drifting through it in a daze - she remembers it as being longer, more confusing, filled with frustration and evasions, but she wasn't in the mood for asking questions, and Rost wasn't ever one to volunteer more information than he needed to - Aloy makes her way down into the cool damp hush of the trees. The gleam of the rising sun on mist reaches up and swallows the mountain from her sight. It’s dreamlike. Peaceful. She has a scrapper target for today, and whatever shards she can pick up along the way. Has a lot she wants to trade for. Scrapper pile would have best yield, but located at furthest extent of Embrace, it's too far to reach the harvest and the spot where trade and also reach Rost at dusk.
By the time she’s down in the valley, picking off rabbits for Gratta, her memories feel like nothing more than dreams. She pauses in a patch of redtipped-tallgrass to feel the skin of her throat. Smooth and unscarred. Just like it's meant to be.
Shakes herself out of it - it was a dream, nothing more - and scans and tags a nearby watcher. Calls it over. A little help getting the lens for Karst wouldn’t hurt. Realises and corrects at the last minute, driving her spear up and into core. She has no override. Can hardly believe it exists, safely here in the embrace. It’s not the sort of thing that exists. Except by the will and ingenuity of the Old Ones.
Once her trading with Karst is done - he's his usual ornery self, she gives as good as she gets, the way it always goes - she turns to cross the valley again, back towards home and Odd Gratta. It's a quick trip, half the climb done when she gets to Gratta. Unless ... unless she has to backtrack to find prayer beads on the outlook. Not that they will - a dream is not the future, is not the present, and even if she’s about to pick up another collection task, how could she know? She can’t.
Still, she turns her straight line into a loop towards the gate. It's more efficient. If the beads are even there. If they aren't ... well. It's not as if she loses anything. Her tasks are done, all save for the delivery of meat and fur. And it's not like she ever has any difficulty tracking Gratta.
Scrambles up, scattering birds from their root – with a full quiver, Aloy has no need for fletching, so she lets them go - and stops to take in view from beyond the gate. She ran across the top of the gate to get here, and there's no way to hide the view from the mountain, but there is reason this place is known as the lookout. Perches on seat, looking out at All Mother mountain and the metal devil half entombed in it, stalling for time before she opens the container.
Aloy finds Gratta's beads, right where she's expecting them to be. She also finds a trio of shards, which she pockets out of sheer practicality.
This may not be a dream.
The thought hurts, and thrills, and itches away like grass-seed caught next to her skin. She sits down, carefully, and pulls out a mouthful of dried meat, containing her reaction. She wants to run, and fight, and hunt, and rappel from the tallest point she can find and also curl up small and hide in safety of her bed. Aloy does none of those things. She chews, and she swallows. She forces herself to breathe. Aloy stands, her feet steady, and turns once more towards where Gratta sits at prayer.
*
When she first fought - or had dreamed she fought, but things keep repeating, too often and too similar to what she remembers for her to dismiss her premonition as utterly as she would like - the Sawtooth, Aloy had been cautious. It had been a new machine, bigger than any she'd previously faced in her life. She had found its route with the hidden safety of her focus from cover, frozen like a rusted machine for a full two of its circuits before she could make herself sneak up behind it and lay blastwire in its path. The combined force had been enough, she knows now, to fell a Thunderjaw.
This time, Aloy wants to test her skill, not her weapons. She still uses the tripcaster - it had taken an entire trip across the valley to get it, after all, and she’d used the last of the modifications she'd found at the scrapper site to improve it - but sticks with three stands of shockwire to cover the route to her back. She knows the trick of salvaging it now: it won't go to waste even if she doesn't end up using it. Not like the early days when she'd had to set it off with a flung rock or risk the safety of next traveler through the area.
She circles round, ducking in and out of cover until she gains the vantage point, and there she waits until the Sawtooth appears from the gloom. The first component takes three arrows to remove. The difference between this and her new bow, forged by the best of Carja and Oseram artisans, is noticeable. But she can adapt. She's done nothing but adapt to new weapons and enemies since - well, since she first encountered someone who wasn't Rost.
*
Saying farewell to Rost goes ... better than it had. Knowing that he will be watching over her, that even if she never sees him again - and she will, she had meant what she said, before, about tracking him down after the Proving - he is still alive, is enough to keep emotions, and tempers, in check. She can't afford to be angry. Not when she is dealing with Nora, especially ones that haven't started that Anointed nonsense.
And she is, has always been thankful for the lessons he taught her. Even if she never got to tell him that. That had been a mistake she had lived with, once, and one she will not repeat again. And now that she knows he won’t leave her, that he still cares, she won't let him disappear from her life. Even if he tries.
It's still hard to turn away.
*
The noise of Mother's Heart is less of a blow, now that she has walked Meridian's streets. Less of a homecoming too, for all she is set on fighting for her place in the Tribe. The crowd is full of unfamiliar faces, people she had not wanted or had the chance to know. People lost to the Massacre and Shadow's invasion, who had fallen against corrupted machines and bandits sneaking through unguarded boarders.
Aloy lets herself linger, a ghost walking unseen among ghosts. She sits in on a tale of All Mother and the Metal Devil with a crowd of children. Surprisingly accurate, if different from Rost's version.
The outfit Teb made for her isn't a surprise this time, but she appreciates it as much as she ever did. Doesn’t hope that it will let her pass unnoticed, but … Teb, at least, wants her to be Nora. That's three, now. Him and Rost and Teersa.
Teersa is as welcoming as ever. Aloy thinks, maybe, if she had been born and not created, that having a grandmother would be like watching Teersa talk her way through a crowd, clearing a path to the ceremony of lights. Then again, she might’ve had a grandmother like Lansra.
"For Rost," she whispers to the flickering warmth of the lantern, "who raised me as his own. And for Elizabet Sobek, who gave life to us all."
Fandom: Horizon: Zero Dawn
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2120
Summary: Aloy experiences a New Game + rewind, is understandably confused, more news after the Proving.
Aloy wakes to silence. It - the waking - is not entirely a surprise, even if she'd felt like she would never wake again once she fell asleep for the last week straight. Saving the world is like that. Fixing the world in the aftermath even more so. There is always too much for her to do, and too many places that she needs to be. The silence is similarly accounted for. Save in the Jewel south of Meridian and the valleys of the Sacred Lands, few places begin the day with much bird-call.
She blinks, allowing the heady pull of sleep to fall away at its own pace. The netting on the ceiling above her is familiar-unfamiliar. She knows that if she gets up, it won't take her more than a minute to remember where she is, but even after the bulk of damage is dealt with, she is exhausted. Thought of clearing rubble or tracking remnants if corruption is enough to make her want to pull her blanket over her head. So she does.
And even the blanket smells annoyingly, achingly familiar. Like herbs and smoke and dried bunches of fire kiln blossoms. Like the hut tucked away high up on the mountainside that she hasn't seen since she returned to the Embrace with the war party to resupply for her journey out into the Sundom. Like she is a child again, with nothing to worry about but practicing her hunting skills and keeping Odd Grata fed.
Aloy hasn't been back. Hasn't wanted to know what the Eclipse have done to her home. Even with the double blows of the Proving and the War Party massacre, she can't believe that bandits could make it so far into the heart of the Sacred Land. Teersa had said they buried Rost there, and that is as much a balm - Rost is hers, more than the tribe that had cast them both out - as it is infuriating. The Nora were everything to him.
And they don't even give him the dignity of burying him with them. Aloy was accepted by the tribe. More than - they think she speaks for All Mother. She could have shared his mourning with his people. But that didn't happen. It won't happen.
The tribe keeps to its ways, and she keeps Rost's name to herself.
She can't go back. Working on the North Gate is hard enough, close and fresh enough to pull at the ache deep in her chest until it is barely shy of bleeding. She won’t go back.
But it is nice to be back home, for as long as this waking dream lasts.
She spends so long luxuriating in the impossible experience that it isn't a surprise to see piled furs and busy workbench, and plants drying in clumps on the net wall when she does rouse. Her bow fits her hand like a habit, worn and familiar. Her tunic requires even less thought. Clothes pulled into place, Aloy pokes her head out. The air is cold and crisp. The path is buried in snow, just like she's walked it a hundred times. She barely notices the absence of the grave marker, too enamored with the idea of an untouched Embrace to explore. She dismisses it without a thought. This is the home of her childhood, just as she left it.
Her breath mists in front of her like a shot of chillwater. The chill is almost too pleasant to bare after weeks in the dry heat of the Sundom. The less that is said about dust in her presence the better. Meridian might escape the storms by being so high, but Sunfall does not.
Aloy inhales, allowing sure feet to carry her forward as she pulls the crisp mountain air deep into her lungs. There will be rain soon. She wants to get into the shelter of the valley before it arrives. Throws herself at the short climb before the zipline, and very nearly drops straight back down with shock.
She blinks up at Rost's shadow, stark against the light and clear blue sky, her steps slowing. She's dreaming. Has to be. Any moment now she'll see corrupted machines and Hades and the embrace will burn and she'll wake to the fallow emptiness of the Forbidden West to start another day's long trek back to the Tribes.
She has the supplies. She can stay out there for a full week, away from everyone, until she decides what to do next. She doesn't have to go back to the Embrace. She doesn't even have to go to Meridian. She could stay near Sunstone, build a little shelter for herself, maybe settle with the rest in the reclaimed bandit camp and clear out the remaining corrupted machines. It’ll be … fine. A life she won’t mind.
She doesn't wake up.
*
After surviving the conversation, drifting through it in a daze - she remembers it as being longer, more confusing, filled with frustration and evasions, but she wasn't in the mood for asking questions, and Rost wasn't ever one to volunteer more information than he needed to - Aloy makes her way down into the cool damp hush of the trees. The gleam of the rising sun on mist reaches up and swallows the mountain from her sight. It’s dreamlike. Peaceful. She has a scrapper target for today, and whatever shards she can pick up along the way. Has a lot she wants to trade for. Scrapper pile would have best yield, but located at furthest extent of Embrace, it's too far to reach the harvest and the spot where trade and also reach Rost at dusk.
By the time she’s down in the valley, picking off rabbits for Gratta, her memories feel like nothing more than dreams. She pauses in a patch of redtipped-tallgrass to feel the skin of her throat. Smooth and unscarred. Just like it's meant to be.
Shakes herself out of it - it was a dream, nothing more - and scans and tags a nearby watcher. Calls it over. A little help getting the lens for Karst wouldn’t hurt. Realises and corrects at the last minute, driving her spear up and into core. She has no override. Can hardly believe it exists, safely here in the embrace. It’s not the sort of thing that exists. Except by the will and ingenuity of the Old Ones.
Once her trading with Karst is done - he's his usual ornery self, she gives as good as she gets, the way it always goes - she turns to cross the valley again, back towards home and Odd Gratta. It's a quick trip, half the climb done when she gets to Gratta. Unless ... unless she has to backtrack to find prayer beads on the outlook. Not that they will - a dream is not the future, is not the present, and even if she’s about to pick up another collection task, how could she know? She can’t.
Still, she turns her straight line into a loop towards the gate. It's more efficient. If the beads are even there. If they aren't ... well. It's not as if she loses anything. Her tasks are done, all save for the delivery of meat and fur. And it's not like she ever has any difficulty tracking Gratta.
Scrambles up, scattering birds from their root – with a full quiver, Aloy has no need for fletching, so she lets them go - and stops to take in view from beyond the gate. She ran across the top of the gate to get here, and there's no way to hide the view from the mountain, but there is reason this place is known as the lookout. Perches on seat, looking out at All Mother mountain and the metal devil half entombed in it, stalling for time before she opens the container.
Aloy finds Gratta's beads, right where she's expecting them to be. She also finds a trio of shards, which she pockets out of sheer practicality.
This may not be a dream.
The thought hurts, and thrills, and itches away like grass-seed caught next to her skin. She sits down, carefully, and pulls out a mouthful of dried meat, containing her reaction. She wants to run, and fight, and hunt, and rappel from the tallest point she can find and also curl up small and hide in safety of her bed. Aloy does none of those things. She chews, and she swallows. She forces herself to breathe. Aloy stands, her feet steady, and turns once more towards where Gratta sits at prayer.
*
When she first fought - or had dreamed she fought, but things keep repeating, too often and too similar to what she remembers for her to dismiss her premonition as utterly as she would like - the Sawtooth, Aloy had been cautious. It had been a new machine, bigger than any she'd previously faced in her life. She had found its route with the hidden safety of her focus from cover, frozen like a rusted machine for a full two of its circuits before she could make herself sneak up behind it and lay blastwire in its path. The combined force had been enough, she knows now, to fell a Thunderjaw.
This time, Aloy wants to test her skill, not her weapons. She still uses the tripcaster - it had taken an entire trip across the valley to get it, after all, and she’d used the last of the modifications she'd found at the scrapper site to improve it - but sticks with three stands of shockwire to cover the route to her back. She knows the trick of salvaging it now: it won't go to waste even if she doesn't end up using it. Not like the early days when she'd had to set it off with a flung rock or risk the safety of next traveler through the area.
She circles round, ducking in and out of cover until she gains the vantage point, and there she waits until the Sawtooth appears from the gloom. The first component takes three arrows to remove. The difference between this and her new bow, forged by the best of Carja and Oseram artisans, is noticeable. But she can adapt. She's done nothing but adapt to new weapons and enemies since - well, since she first encountered someone who wasn't Rost.
*
Saying farewell to Rost goes ... better than it had. Knowing that he will be watching over her, that even if she never sees him again - and she will, she had meant what she said, before, about tracking him down after the Proving - he is still alive, is enough to keep emotions, and tempers, in check. She can't afford to be angry. Not when she is dealing with Nora, especially ones that haven't started that Anointed nonsense.
And she is, has always been thankful for the lessons he taught her. Even if she never got to tell him that. That had been a mistake she had lived with, once, and one she will not repeat again. And now that she knows he won’t leave her, that he still cares, she won't let him disappear from her life. Even if he tries.
It's still hard to turn away.
*
The noise of Mother's Heart is less of a blow, now that she has walked Meridian's streets. Less of a homecoming too, for all she is set on fighting for her place in the Tribe. The crowd is full of unfamiliar faces, people she had not wanted or had the chance to know. People lost to the Massacre and Shadow's invasion, who had fallen against corrupted machines and bandits sneaking through unguarded boarders.
Aloy lets herself linger, a ghost walking unseen among ghosts. She sits in on a tale of All Mother and the Metal Devil with a crowd of children. Surprisingly accurate, if different from Rost's version.
The outfit Teb made for her isn't a surprise this time, but she appreciates it as much as she ever did. Doesn’t hope that it will let her pass unnoticed, but … Teb, at least, wants her to be Nora. That's three, now. Him and Rost and Teersa.
Teersa is as welcoming as ever. Aloy thinks, maybe, if she had been born and not created, that having a grandmother would be like watching Teersa talk her way through a crowd, clearing a path to the ceremony of lights. Then again, she might’ve had a grandmother like Lansra.
"For Rost," she whispers to the flickering warmth of the lantern, "who raised me as his own. And for Elizabet Sobek, who gave life to us all."
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chasethestars
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Comments
Love this! The meta take is very interesting. I love the way Aloy takes it in stride somehow despite everything that happened (will happen) and finds her footing in this new (familiar) world.