Aka an AU I screamed at the Content Box @orbdotexe @formallyacrypitd and @luna-light-eclipse about
The gist of it is:
-Cayde ends up stowing away on the escape ship that Mara and Uldren were on, and gets caught up in the whole Collapse thing
-Mara figures she can make this loser useful and makes him Uldren’s bodyguard.
-Cayde and Uldren end up becoming best friends…but like the kind of best friends who bully and bicker with each other. Uldren keeps calling Cayde ‘stowaway’ while Cayde keeps pranking Uldren.
-Also, thanks to the whole light and dark thing that created the Awoken, Cayde is shinier and glowier than your average exo. And he Awoken just think all exos are like that-until they run into another one and wonder why they don’t shine.
-This shine, amusingly enough, nearly blinds the entire Awoken Royal Court, so they end up having to cover Cayde head to toe in matt powder.
-Now, while Mara tolerates Cayde’s…eccentircities due to the fact he’s good at his job, and while he does get along well enough with Uldren and Petra, near everyone else in the Reef mistrusts him as an outsider.
-When it comes to Guardians, Cayde’s closeness to Uldren ends up coloring his views on them-he doesn’t hate them as much as the Prince, and is more than willing to put on a friendly face for them, he doesn’t exactly trust them.
-Anyways, Oryx happens and Mara ‘dies’. Riven gets into Uldren’s head, causing him to go off the deep end. Cayde realizes Uldren’s lost it, but can’t bring himself to leave his friend’s side. So he sticks with him.
-Forsaken happens-gonna say Shiro is the Hunter Vanguard who gets murdered. Sorry Shiro.
-Fast forward to the finale of Forsaken. With the Guardian and Petra closing in, Cayde decides to go and hold them off to buy time for Uldren
-It’s brave, but all for naught: Cayde lasts all of what, five seconds before getting killed, while Uldren is eaten by a Wish Dragon, spat out, and shot dead
-See though, the Cayde we’ve been following here wasn’t Cayde-6. It was Cayde-5.
-Cayde’s grave ends up being found by Sundance. So…yeah. Cayde-6 is reborn
That’s what I got so far. Kind of scatter brained, but lemme know what ya’ll think of this!