Author's Note:

Would you believe this one was pretty difficult to come up with an idea for? I like to have stories basically follow the timeline of the game, which I approximate as the real-life update schedule. Unfortunately, between Second Dream and War Within, there were only two things I would call events: Rathuum and Silver Grove. Having Doan and Secret involved in both of these felt pretty unlikely.

I'd also like to apologize to those excited for my promised RWBYframe fic, which is coming more slowly than I'd like. It's coming, don't worry - I'm already 100k words into it - but I want to have headway into the next section of the story before I start posting it, and the last six months have brought me almost no progress for various reasons, which combine schedule issues, motivation, self-confidence problems, and more, often combined in different ways at different times. I have something coming up this weekend which I hope will allow me to break through this, make some progress, and feel confident enough to post a little bit of that fic within the coming months.

I hope you enjoy this chapter. It's got few of the laughs of earlier chapters, but I suppose that's something that happens when one makes these things up as they go along.

Doan Tana had not seen a sign of Secret for three months. This was unusual. This was so unusual, in fact, that she'd started imagining Secret in shadows. Minor inconveniences like inactive doors, a ship running out of fuel, half a base being drowned in lava, and even a particularly nasty hangnail got blamed on him.

-Just seeing if you were paying attention. Still factually accurate, though.-

-Are you saying you wouldn't drown a Grineer base in lava?-

-Alright, but as Doan pointed out, it was the half of the base she wasn't in.-

Secret was on her mind all the time, because he'd never gone this long without giving himself away somehow. For all their reputation as ninjas, it's fair to say most Tenno are completely out of practice when it comes to real stealth. Invisibility is all well and good, but when thirty Grineer fail to report for duty, a discerning mind connects the dots. Even the Tenno who have the will to hold back from the dead simple thinning of the herd are still two-meter-tall masses of colourful biometal. If it weren't for present day helmet design, everybody would hear those things hit the ground.

-Because their armour works.-

-No, I'm serious. Modern day helmet design can be blamed on the invention of ferrite armour in the year 591. With truly effective armour, helmets could actually protect their wearers and full-head protection… why are you sitting down?-

-But you never just listen.-

-This is what you're interested to know? Out of everything I've talked about? This?-

-I'd love to, Secret, really, but… maybe after the story? I promise I won't forget.-

-Thank you. You, too.-

Doan was used to seeing Secret. It made her life boring not to see him. Boring, in this case, also meaning successful. She'd started making a name for herself, had the attention of commanders and captains in any fleet she traveled in, and even had her own pick of squad members. If it hadn't been for Belyri and myself arranging a moratorium on her assassination under the guise of information-gathering, she no doubt wouldn't have survived Secret's inattention.

-Of course I didn't tell you.-

-Go thank Belyri. She's the one who noticed when Silence started picking up Ind and not Doan. I was a little busy picking up after…-

-You know I do, too, kid.-

She'd also been considered, again, as a participant in the Rathuum. On this particular day, watching a live feed of the event with Ind and a few members of her squad, she was grateful she'd stalled on that particular career path.

"Ouchie," Ind observed, with her usual perspicacity. The other Grineer agreed with varying degrees of enthusiasm and horror. After all, they'd just seen the initial results of Kela de Thaym allowing a Tenno into the Rathuum competition. And they'd all liked that particular Executioner, too.

"Shh, kitty," Ind tried to tell the screen, as if that might calm everything down and let Kela leave with her dignity intact.

The words had as much effect as one might expect, and at first Doan watched the end of Rathuum unfold with the same mixed emotions as everyone else.

-True.-

Everyone except Ind. Slowly, though, she started to experience the same complications her intelligence often brought to her.

Where most Grineer can manage up to two emotions at the same time, and some can even handle three without loss of consciousness due to increased oxygen requirement to fuel the burning, there aren't many Grineer at all who can have two emotions in conflict. It's simply not done. Want Grineer experiencing such a cataclysmic event will invariably decide that it is time to go shoot something, and the issue will be resolved.

Watching Valkyr slaughter some of the "best" of her kind, however, Doan was simultaneously taken by the graceful carnage and saddened by the loss of so many of her people.

It was the first time her loyalty to the concepts of Tenno and Grineer really clashed. Before, she'd successfully admired Tenno from afar and protected the Grineer she could. Secret and Silence were exceptions, but they tended not to attack Grineer when around Doan and Ind, and Doan was of the opinion that anybody going out of their way to attack a non-hostile Tenno probably wouldn't have lived long, anyway.

Leaving the specifics for later, the point is that Doan found herself watching the last Rathuum and seeing the entire war in that one fight. A Tenno, glorious and powerful, fighting to defend…

Well, according to Miss Tana, she tried to think the next part, but it didn't quite work. All she got was a headache and a vague sense of pity for all the Grineer involved, plus a pervasive anger at the Grineer defectors the Tenno were fighting for. That's the best I can explain, given later context.

… fighting to defend Grineer who just wanted to be left in peace, against the greatest Grineer soldiers, forced to fight their own kind for entertainment.

The entire war, lined up all at once, with Tenno fighting a battle against infinite numbers of disposable soldiers who were still all individuals, whether they were clones or brainwashed.

Doan got up and left. The thoughts hurt, both because of how close they came to interfering with her programming and simple cognitive dissonance. After months without Secret, she'd suddenly realized something about him that she'd never been able to consider before.

Even she isn't completely beyond her origins, and as she left the room, she had to hide away so she could pull off her faceplate and wipe away blood from a nosebleed.

You thought I was being facetious. Grineer really aren't designed for this level of thought. It's dangerous and, in this case, it was also sign and consequence of dissent. Not something she wanted anyone seeing.

So she walked into a corner of the base, one of those bubble domes Uranus is so famous for. You know the kind. There she sat, feet in the water, watching the sharks swim by, until the door opened behind her.

"Doan Doan?" Ind asked before Doan could put her faceplate back on.

Doan wiped her nose again, which promised to rub raw pretty quickly, given it was metal plate against flesh. Not that she cared.

"Ind." The word was more like a sigh of relief.

"Doan hurt?"

Doan didn't reply to that immediately. To her credit, Ind didn't repeat the question. She just waited for Doan to think about her answer.

When it comes to matters of Grineer programming, navigating is much like a dance on thin ice with stilts.

-While Teshin judges your technique.-

-I thought that might make my point.-

So Doan took her time replying, letting her thoughts settle in whatever way they could, then trying to adjust them to fit what she was actually feeling. The process repeated for a couple of minutes while they both sat together.

"Yes," she finally answered. "I hurt. Tenno are dangerous. Powerful. Fast. Built well. They give gifts at Cycle Celebration. Feel sad for ones who die. Tenno are very alive. Grineer are loyal, strong, can build and fix and break. We are so many. So, so many, we need so much."

She reached out and laid her hand on Ind's, tapping her fingers on the back of Ind's knuckles.

"We are good, aren't we?" Doan asked. A shark outside ate through a school of fish; Doan claims she could see it more clearly than anything right then. "We build as best we can, like the Orokin should have. We have friends."

Doan squeezed her friend's hand and kept tapping her knuckles. "We are at war. We will kill each other. Grineer, because we are told to. Tenno, because that is who they are. I don't want the Grineer to be killed. I think the Tenno…"

But that much, she couldn't possibly say.

According to Doan, Ind understood, anyway. "Tenno not scum."

Doan gave a jerky sort of half-nod, the best she could manage. Ind nodded in return, and they both returned to sitting in silence.

It took almost two weeks before Silence visited again, but after that it was less than a day before she passed on the message to Secret and myself. The message, in Ind's words, that, "Doan sad. Sad sad."

Secret was there later the same day, but not in his usual sense. Or maybe I should say, not in his usual frame of mind.

-Too late, that joke is going to last until the end of civilization as we know it. My gift to the system.-

Doan had been going off on her own often in the last couple of weeks, which may have had a lot to do with why Ind eventually called on Secret. She kept following Doan and sitting with her, but it wasn't helping. Doan just kept stewing and Ind watched, until one day Doan wandered off with Ind trailing behind and the both of them nearly walked into an unfamiliar Warframe.

The Warframe in question was the usual height, but shaped nothing like Secret or Silence usually were. This one was curvier, with a single horn on its face, coloured in a way that was simultaneously beautiful and frightening, with a flower on its shoulder.

"TENN-" CLANG

Doan slammed a hand over Ind's mouth, which didn't actually do anything to stop her talking since they were both wearing their faceplates, but it still silenced her.

The two traded looks, which mostly consisted of, "why?" and, "that's a Tenno, do you want to die?"

I repeat, they were both wearing faceplates. I have absolutely no idea how they managed to communicate this much. Maybe they'd been learning from Secret and Silence. Either way, Doan managed to quiet Ind, and Ind stayed quiet.

For those wondering why Doan would keep Ind from sounding the alarm, which would likely only be newcomers and Grineer, Doan saw a Saryn waiting in a side room of her base and concluded that either she was dead or everyone in the entire base was. It all depended on what the Tenno wanted.

It raised a finger to its faceplate.

Skipping over the suitably dramatic reveal that this was, in fact, Secret, soon enough Doan and a very different-looking friend were sitting together while Ind stood watch nearby. It was a generous offer that Ind made by way of a simple, "Doan talk," then walking out of the room.

Secret, of course, couldn't talk, so he… she… alright, I'm starting to see why so many Tenno refer to themselves in the plural. Or at least gender-neutral. In any case, Secret waited for Doan to start talking.

"Where have you been?" she asked first, which I have to say was terribly unsporting, since asking a question of somebody without a mouth is a pretty difficult thing to accommodate.

Secret gave her a look that asked something along the lines of how he was expected to answer that.

"Have you been traveling?"

No.

"On Lua?"

Secret thought about that, and eventually nodded.

"Why haven't you visited? Have been busy?"

He started to nod, then caught himself and shook his head.

"Which is it? Busy? Or not busy?" She paused to give him time to respond to each part of the question, but he just froze, like he expected the answer to just appear between them.

-Her words, not mine.-

-What did you expect? You showed up after months without talking to her and barely talking to Silence, in a new frame, without me to translate, and…-

-How was she to know that?-

-Alright, I know. But there's a reason you had to explain it later.-

"I've been busy," Doan said. "Training Grineer. We're going to attack Earth, purge the forests. Maybe that's good. Maybe Grineer deserve the Earth if we can clean it up. Maybe I remember that little village we brought presents to, and I remember how a Tenno brought hundreds of gifts. Maybe I remember when Rathuum was on every channel, and I remember how a Tenno sunk its claws into Executioner Nok's chest and hips and pulled him apart."

Doan's head sunk into her hands. "He was twenty. Can you imagine? So old, and still fighting. He would have been so easy to pull apart, if the metal weren't holding him together. Barely there. Just a little flesh left, hanging on. Maybe I'll live that long."

She left her faceplate in her hands when she looked up and turned to him. She says he flinched when he saw her face.

-It's okay. She says it made you seem Grineer. I think she means human. Mortal. Normal.-

"Do you think I could? I'm… smart. Would you still protect me, when I get slow and weak? When I need more metal than flesh?"

Secret, bless his heart, nodded. And he meant it, too.

"What about Ind?"

And again, he nodded.

-Caring about somebody and saving their life wasn't really a normal Grineer thing at the time, remember?-

Doan put down her faceplate on the wet metal walkway and quickly undid the binding on her gauntlet. Even with it off, one of her fingers had a tendon across the back of the hand replaced with a metal link. The original had been too weak to do the job on its own. Hand and face exposed, she touched her own cheek.

She says it surprised her how warm it was.

"I'm just like all the others," she said. "Just like Ind. Would you save all Grineer?"

-Golden Seven. Is that what started this? I don't think I'd have seen it if you hadn't just made that announcement, but is this what started it?-

-That long ago? Then this…-

-You've got a big heart, Secret. Even for an Operator.-

At the time, Secret couldn't answer. He was too busy with all his own thoughts at the time. This had all taken him completely by surprise. He was even more of a wreck for a couple of days, and he'd basically been unable to do group missions for a while, in any case. All this hit him hard.

But Doan didn't know that.

She sighed and shook her head. She says it felt weird not to have her own breath bounce back at her off her faceplate. A very unique feeling of freedom. "It wouldn't matter. We Grineer wouldn't let you. So many of us couldn't understand a non-Grineer protecting us. Even Nok was strange, letting himself be protected and hidden away, safe. He was old, so he should have died fighting, or maybe been recycled. If a Tenno… if anyone… cared for us like his commander cared for him, maybe Grineer would live longer. Be kinder."

She turned her head, just her head to look at Secret. She still slumped forward. He still watched her. Eventually, she reached out with one hand, one finger extended.

"Why are you wearing that?" Doan hesitated with her bare hand centimetres from Secret's faceplate. "Will it kill me?"

Secret managed to laugh without a mouth, a talent even I don't understand, and I'm basically a floating digitalized surrealist painting. Who laughs.

-I laugh!-

-Well, I'm not going to do it on command, that's not how it works.-

-I'll make sure to record it for you next time, then, sir.-

Doan didn't move, though. Instead, she watched as Secret stopped laughing and shook his head. Without her faceplate on, he could see her watching him, see her wary bemusement, even see the slightly different foci of each of her eyes.

"You don't laugh the same way," she said slowly, like voicing it too quickly might startle him. "It's less… like you. More…"

She trailed off. She didn't have the words to describe what she was seeing, after all. She saw danger and recognized that, but she couldn't know that it came from the dark humour of Saryn. She didn't have any context at all to understand what seductiveness is. Same for patience, though that was an issue of example, not culture - and if Doan had had some videos of herself over the past year, she might have recognized it.

What Doan saw and didn't realize she saw were the little things that didn't make Secret Secret. Those little things had reassured her earlier. These little things scared her, like walking into a room and sensing an ambush and wondering which shadow was the clue.

Still, her hand was frozen halfway between the two of them, and she didn't move when Secret reached out and mirrored her hand, one index finger out.

They touched, then Secret took her hand in his.

Doan flinched, then tilted her head, raised an eyebrow, quirked her mouth just slightly. Little signs Secret had never seen before.

"You're warm," she whispered, almost laughing.

Secret raised a finger to his faceplate, as he always did, but he'd barely completed the motion when Doan broke out in a real smile.

"You're warm!" She lurched forward and wrapped Saryn-Secret in a hug, laughing all the while.

To Doan, it was a revelation. Oh, she'd known Tenno were warm, in that abstract way taken from a textbook, but she didn't, as the saying goes, grok it. The intuition wasn't there. By touching Secret, this strange new Secret, he and his life became real to her in a way she'd never considered before. He was a person. More than that, so was she. They were both people. Real, feeling people.

While Miss Doan Tana was busy breaking apart an entire foundation of her Grineer indoctrination, Secret was being hugged.

Oh my god.

Seven and the darkness beyond, I just realized. I'm not explaining why Tenno aren't used to hugs. I have to explain to most of this system why hugging is important.

-No, I know you know, but that's its own complication. Secret, the Grineer don't usually hug. And it's not like how Tenno don't or like Corpus don't.-

Corpus are simplest; they repress that kind of display of affection as part of their culture. Grineer just don't form those kinds of close attachments. But Tenno know. Every Tenno knows what hugging is and how it's about expressing closeness, they just have more intimate ways of showing that they care.

More intimate, but not as simple. This hug was something Doan had learned from Ind. Dead simple, and pure because of it.

It was the first hug Secret had had in…

-You're making me feel young.-

… Technically a very long time. More subjectively, to him, at the time, it was his first hug. Ever.

Doan got her revelation about how she was closer to Tenno as a being than the Queens would ever let her acknowledge, and Secret sat, stunned, as he realized somebody else was holding him.

It was the most protected he'd felt since he could remember.

-You didn't need to tell me.-

-Secret… do you know how loud Silence can be? Silence, the thing, the quiet that comes when nobody is talking, can be just as loud, with just as many shapes and sounds. I spent months as part of a ship filled with the loneliest, most naked silence I've ever heard.-

-Have you ever heard the phrase, "who guards the guardians?" It's supposed to be us, the Cephalons, protecting the Tenno. We can't protect you from everything, and you were alone and under attack from your own doubts. So you didn't need to tell me how you felt when Doan hugged you, because I could tell the moment you came back.-

-I thought that was obvious.-

-The silence changed.-