Chapter Text
You have your first proper shower after your first few hours on Chorus, after getting maybe an hour nap at Armando’s insistence. The showers down here in HQ, which is a big-ass cavern somewhere under the distant jungle fringe, are communal and designed from old pipes meant to hose off raw minerals before they were shipped up to the surface and transported away.
They are not like the Freelancer showers, however blurred those appear to you in your mind. There are lockers, beaten and wrecked from age that resemble those of a high school, that have been dragged into a room off the actual showers with benches for personal items to be stowed, but they’re a weird mint green, and they don’t have nametags.
They give you their biggest pair of clothes, which you set down on a bench before you take the lump of soap, which the Republic has learned to make themselves.
People surely stare at you as you walk to one of the cubicles. Your scarring is intricate and layered, from different times with different treatments. You focus on stripping out of your jumpsuit—
“God damn,” North breathes, eyes widening as he watches you step in front of your locker, you spin to face him, tense. You didn’t know he was there. His eyes seem caught, pulled onto the scarring adorning your ribcage. Maybe he suspected to see scarring as neat as that on your face—
—Step under the cold spray. Your breath is caught in the cage of your teeth, and you have to forcibly exhale before the vague notion of lightheadedness becomes any worse.
Grit and dirt comes free and your hair soaks quickly, clinging to your skin in an unfamiliar kind of sensation. Blood and dirt, the dirt that came from the crash site, comes free from your beard. You never really grew you hair out before, kept it reg length.
Your run your fingers through it, and it mostly parts with little resistance, dried blood coming free from where it caked to your head. You don’t have anything to comb out the knots or kinks that have formed. The cold water chills you to your spine, but it’s soothing on the heat pulsing from your skull.
You run your fingers over your throat, over the ridges of raised scarring, and squeeze your eyes shut so tightly you see flashing spots instead of Washington, Washington, Washington down under the wheel of your warthog, so unbelievably small, your blood on his gloves, his armor dented and bent at angles into him and his damaged bodysuit, his blood dripping onto the hard-packed snow—
You press your face into the metal surface of the shower wall. The cold water hits the massive curve of your back, forking into rivulets along the dips of scarring and muscle, cold sinking into muscles and bone. Pain shocks through your face, a sharp crackle under a water-repellant bandage meant to keep your nose settled, and you suck in the cold air that smells of metal and skin and blood, your blood, dry blood, breathe .
Maybe you properly wash yourself off, maybe you don’t, you actually aren’t sure, but you settle for not being coated in mud and dry blood for now. You change quickly and stalk off in the direction of the infirmary with the soldier Armando delegated to ensure you don’t collapse out of nowhere.
The olive drab shirt tugs at the swells of your triceps and the hem stretches uncomfortably around your waist. You haven’t worn proper civvies in years, but you don’t remember them fitting as poorly. You’re used to a form-fitting bodysuit, though. Most of your life that you can remember was spent in one. You almost died in one.
You decide this is okay.
You have your first nightmare the sixth hour you spend on Chorus, after you’ve showered, in the dark of night.
In your single patient room, you fall asleep to the din of Armando working the rest of the night with other patients and the more muffled noise of the rebels outside. To this noise, as unusual and unfamiliar as it is, you fall asleep.
York is grinning his broad, one-dimpled grin from the darkness of his rack. There are no lights. He’s grinning at you and holding a bottle and he extends it to you.
“Want a drink?”
You stare him down. He shakes it, the anonymous liquid sloshing ominously and no way invited, you don’t drink,
“How did you get that?” The voice is disjointed and disconnected from you, you can’t talk, or can you, you’ve never told York that before—
York shrugs. A simple roll of his soldiers, he favors his left, he pulled it dragging you into the Pelican— “HEY! HE’S STILL BREATHING!”
Your feet thump on dirt as you stoop down and take the bottle from his hand, take a swig from it.
It burns the walls of your mouth, along your fake incisor— no, your teeth are all genuine, North had the fake —
Your nose wrinkles. It tastes terrible and you grimace at it. York laughs— it echoes, tinny and fractured, a knife carving into the meat in your ribcage, we missed you D— takes the bottle back, and tilts his head back to drink, the bottle dinks against the metal of the bunk above him and he’s grinning around it.
You shoved York in a locker the third day you knew him. He never smiled at you like that.
“Hey, share,” another voice comes from the darkness of the rack and a hand, thin fingered and textured with narrow white lines, hooks around York’s bare shoulder, fingers digging into the curve of muscle.
Carolina emerges from the shadows.
The air is cold and scrapes the inside of your mouth with the taste of ash and snow and metal. Duality tones that taste yellow and blue and dig into the roots of your teeth and ache like lead fillings and blood on the bottom of your mouth—
York hands her the bottle.
Carolina downs the rest of it in one go, eyes wide, toxic green burrowing into your soul, an ache in the mass of you, like she’s pulling apart the very atoms of your heart and brain and spine with a look . She does not cringe at the taste. She drops the bottle against the floor and it chimes, hollow glass on metal (dirt?).
The chime echoes. It echoes but it grows sharp, sharp into the joint of your jaw and your ear drums, your hair stands on end—
“Hey, Maine.” She hums, tilting her head at you, blood red hair falling over her eyes and she doesn’t push it away, twin rivulets of a darker shade trickles down from the back of her neck into the dips of her collarbones—
“How does it feel?”
You wake with a violent spasm, sucking in air as your left heel thunks against the metal frame of your medical bed and the pain radiates in a dull ache outward into the tips of your toes— when did you take your boots off?
Your chest feels like someone’s defibrillating the pulped puree of the muscles of your heart, and you clutch at the stretched fabric over the plane of your chest. You feel your heartbeat in every blood vessel.
There’s the warmth of a hand, stretched out over your right bicep, and you follow it up the forearm to the owner— Armando. She’s taken off her gloves. Her hair is no longer in it’s bun, braids running freely over her shoulders. The heat from her hand bleeds into your arm, the lightest squeeze of her fingers soothing in the aftermath.
You stay on your back. The heart monitor beeps unhelpfully about your heart functioning way too fucking fast at the moment.
“Hey, Maine, I’m here, I’m here.” A beat, two, three, four, count them to your breathing, “You okay?”
You stare at her, feeling the uncomfortable stick of sweat-soaked fabric under your hand. You don’t give her an answer.
Armando blinks at you, the light of the monitors outlining the downward curve of the side of her mouth.
The ashy, metallic taste is still clinging to your mouth.
You have your first official visitor two days after you join the New Republic. Felix never makes a return and Armando is the only medic who sees you, even when she’s supposed to be off shift. You can’t confirm this, but you’re pretty sure she spends her breaks here. She’s unwilling to let you loose in the cavern, as ragged as you are. You can’t tell her she’s wrong.
Your first official visitor is Lieutenant General Kimball, as Armando introduces her.
Kimball is taller than Armando, but not taller than you, and she enters the room with her helmet already off. Her skin is lighter than Armando’s and she keeps her wavy hair tucked in a bun at the base of her skull. There’s a scar that curves up from under the top of her bodysuit, from some point on her neck up to the dip of the inner curve of her jaw.
“Go attend to your other patients for now, Harriet. I’ll be quick.” Armando pauses, a moment, before turning and exiting out the door. It’s an actual door. The New Republic doesn’t have the power to spare for automatic doors. You feel less like you’re entrapped in a spaceship this way, even though you’re allowed to go outside whenever you want (with a babysitter).
You hold your datapad in your lap, ready to type out your answers.
“Hello, Maine.” The name seems to fit her mouth somewhat odd. “As Harriet said, I’m Vanessa Kimball. You can call me Vanessa.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t believe what Felix was saying out there. That he found a Spartan .”
Something about that digs at the wrong memory, the wrong chunk at the back of your skull, “A real Spartan could do more than you—” but your face twitches in the only betrayal of that.
“But, I’m not gonna go off what Felix says. I’m gonna ask you. Alright?” You nod. “Okay. So, you’re Ex-UNSC?”
Nod.
“Why’d you defect?”
“Something else.” You are not going to admit to this woman you went crazy. You are not going to admit you lost your goddamn mind and became what was, in effect, a meat puppet.
With a gun.
And strength mods.
“Something else?”
“Personal. Don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Okay. That’s fine. So, how long did you serve?”
That’s a thinker. Kimball’s questions are not like the doctors and techs’ questions. Or, at least, not in execution. It’s kinder this way. She’s not cataloguing the answers on any datapad, either.
“Ten years, rough guess.”
“Rough guess?”
“Memory isn’t clear. Why do you ask?”
“Well, as much as we hate to admit it, we don’t have much here in ways of proper service experience. Hine and I served in the colonial militia, before everything really went off the rails.”
You probably know the story by a different face, different name, different time, but you don’t ask her. You don’t really feel you have the right to hear that story. And, at the moment, it probably isn’t wise to ask.
“I will help in any way I can.”
“I know, you’ve said that many times already. Felix says we shouldn’t assign you a rank until we see how well you operate. And,” she exhales as if this pains her to say somehow. “I agree. But, Armando wants to wait before she lets you do any training or drills, let alone active duty.”
“I want to help.”
“You’re already helping.”
“I want to help on the field.” The voice does not contain your desire, your want, that would have you ready on any mat, any scenario, to help. You don’t even acknowledge that statement from Kimball, that you’re already helping. How are you helping? You’re cooped up in a metal box with a broken nose. That’s not helping.
“Maine, you need to recover first. We also need to recover some armor big enough for you before we send you out into the middle of an active war zone.”
That, unfortunately, makes total sense.
“How long until then?”
“The armor is something we have to hope for, but—”
“No. Until I recover.” Until you can help.
“Armando estimates two weeks for your nose and your concussion.” Kimball leans forward, elbows resting on her knees. It’s not a menacing posture, however. It’s a concerned one. The hard lines of armor and bodysuit somehow seem soft. “But we’re not sure.”A broken nose is not debilitating. You’ve ran ops with worse.
“Not sure?”
“We don’t know if you’re someone we can safely let onto the field.” That’s a new concern. “We’ve been losing people, Maine, and we don’t want to lose more.”
Your head tilts to the side as you stare Kimball down, trying to find a meaning in those words. She’s polite enough to give it to you.
“We don’t know if we can trust you on the field.”
“Why?”
“Because you just survived a ship crash… And Armando is concerned about your stability. I don’t know what you’ve been through, Maine, and I don’t expect you’ll try to explain it to me.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Maine, if the General puts you on that field, she’s going to expect that you can protect your fellow soldiers, complete your objectives, and avoid casualties to the best of your abilities. And I’m not sure we can… trust you to do that.”
“Because I defected?”
“Yes,” that doesn’t sting as much as it maybe would. You get it. You don’t like it but you get it.
And you hate it.
“I want to help.” You type out again. Kimball nods her head and stands up.
“I know.”
You watch Kimball walk away. You are not a member of the New Republic yet.
But they haven’t said you can’t be.
A week into your stay on Chorus, you see the aftermath of a full skirmish.
You are reading off the data-pad’s saved files of Chorus’ history. It’s nothing particularly interesting, it’s nearly clinical in its description, a clear UNSC leaning in the words. You learn that Chorus has a tendency for extreme weather and a big ass desert that no one has succeeded in living on. It was desirable for its metals and the ancient alien sites, though those were no longer active.
Then the yelling starts.
The yelling is muffled by the metal walls, but you can hear it. It’s enough to get you to set down your datapad and walk over to the entryway to stick your head out into the hallway. Then the yelling turns to screaming.
A moment later, the noise enters the infirmary. It fills it, a cacophony of people screaming names, instructions, incoherent worry, that bounces off the flat metal walls.
Another medic, one you know only as Daisy, appears around the corner. Her purple-accented armor is smeared in bright red and her face has lost color. She rushes past you to another room, pulling out a handful of medical supplies and rushing past you at what is barely short of a sprint.
You follow her.
The sight you come across is chaotic. Patients, ones who can stand on their own, are jumping out of their beds and offering them or pulling moving tables and visitors out of the way, asking to help, their voices cutting into each other.
In the eye of the chaos is a lot of blood. A lot. It is pooling on the floor and sticking to anyone touching it. The source is a handful of soldiers. Two are still standing, clutching at bleeding gaps between their armor plating. The rest, however, are being carried or set down against any horizontal surface they can fit on.
Your height is beneficial. It gives you close to an overhead view of the chaos.
One soldier is small, ridiculously small, and their visor is blown into their face. Another’s arm is pointing in a very wrong direction and coated in blood and—
Someone in armor bumps into you. It’s a solid thunk of metal-alloy against your shoulder that sends you a step towards the wall. You turn and look down to see the blank, faceless visor of Vanessa Kimball.
“Go back to your room, Maine.” She says. You stare at her, at the distorted version of your face. The bandage holding your healing nose in place, covering the long thin scar that curves over your cheekbones and the bridge.
“Maine!” Armando yells and you turn. She’s holding up one soldier by herself, the one with his visor blown in. His hand is cupped over stomach, blood running down in rivulets that pool at the soldier’s boots. His other arm hangs limply, unmoving, trapped between his armor and Armando’s. “Help me carry him!”
You walk over to Armando. You hook an arm under the soldier’s limp one, though he whines painfully behind his teeth, and help Armando carry him to another room.
His head lolls, helmet thunking against the side of your head.
“T-They ambushed us… We- we didn’t—” He’s speaking around blood and fragments of his visor, barely conscious. His voice is agonizingly young, and it jars something in your gut that licks, red and burning, at your chest.
“Hey, hey, easy Crespi. It’s okay.”
“York!”
You aren’t asked to remain once you lay Crespi out on a table for Armando to try and fix. But you do. This isn’t unfamiliar to you, in a way. You’ve seen worse. Had worse. Know worse.
“Maine, put pressure here, I have to help the others.” She says, pressing gauze against the gash in Crespi’s stomach. You take up the role as she rushes out, rejoining the angry yelling elsewhere, while your hand easily puts the pressure over the wound torn through Crespi’s gut.
“Wh-who’re you?” The soldier chokes, chest spasming. He can’t see that you can’t speak. So you growl.
“Huh?”
You can’t help him aside from doing what Armando asks. So you remain quiet, applying pressure. You’ve learned that biofoam seems to be in short supply out here. The gauze absorbs the blood quickly, more is pooling onto the table in reflective scarlet that sticks to your fingers, fills the dips and creases in your hands.
Crespi’s voice grows more and more distant as the seconds, minutes, pass. Armando shows up a few minutes later, stained in other blood, and she quickly begins ravaging the cabinet in the corner of the room, muttering “biofoam,” over and over.
She comes to you with an old pen and forces your hands aside (the gauze stick to you) to stick it into Crespi’s wound and pressed down. Crespi cries out, weakly flailing and crying and—
Dying, dying, bleeding out on the Pelican floor, screaming the air out of you as they pump you full of it—
You step away. You step away from the bed and Crespi and Armando. You aren’t shaking. You aren’t. But your insides burn with phantom pain, your bloodied hands hover over the scarring over your left lung—
You’re standing outside the backdoor of the infirmary, hands pressed flat against the metal to keep you standing, staring blankly at the rocky ground. Your breathing is coming in and out fast. The air isn’t cold. It’s not. Not Sidewinder cold, anyway. You don’t remember moving.
There’s a red handprint smeared in your shirt, you can feel the stick and residual heat through the fabric.
Armando finds you slumped against the metal out there later, and for a moment she leans against the open door, staring at you.
“Maine? You alright?”
You stare down at your bloody shirt. The scarlet soaked through the thin desert drab fabric. A bodysuit was easy to clean blood off of.
You don’t take Armando’s extended hand to help you up. You don’t need it. You don’t.
You’re moved to the barracks that night. This isn’t because you’re an official soldier, because Kimball quietly corrects this with a tone of voice that channels Carolina — We lost C.T — but she leaves you there because your room is needed more for the dying soldiers than the possibly psychotic ex-marine with a broken nose.
Your hands are still stained in the soldier’s blood when she assigns you to the barrack with a clean shirt and the datapad from the infirmary. You clean them off slowly, staring as the pink water flows down the drain of the sink. Your hands are scarred and calloused, you run fingers over the dips over and over until any sign of Crespi’s blood is gone from your hands.
When you look up in the mirror, you see the tousled, long hair hanging over your forehead, and the facial hair that swallows the lower half of your face. Your eyes are dark, light bouncing off them like pools of thick water.
You don’t plan on cutting your hair. There’s a tattoo, scarring, all of it, is under that and you don’t want to show it. The beard is another story, though. It’s cut uneven, like maybe at some point you took a combat knife to it just to easier fit it into the chin of your bodysuit.
Don’t think about that too hard.
The barrack is quiet that night. You remain seated on your new bunk, staring at the words on your datapad, unreading, until lights out. You tuck yourself into the darkness where you can’t see who is staring you down as they get to bed.
The sound of people sleeping around you is weirdly familiar in a vague, long ago way.
You wake up calmly in the morning, Maine, at the sound of the other rebels moving around. You tie your boots and get up. None of the other soldiers talk to you. They stare, but they don’t talk (to you), as you leave the barracks.
You could go to the infirmary. But why would you?
So you don’t.
Instead, for the first time in a long while, you go for a jog.
Over a week following your arrival on Chorus, you’re approached by soldiers actually willing to initiate conversation who aren’t the ones at the mess hall that want to fill the noise between you and them despite the fact you can’t reciprocate it even if you wanted to, which you don’t.
Hine and Armando are the only ones who talk to you at a consistent rate. Kimball is occupied arranging patrols and Felix’s future pay cut most of the time.
You blame Felix for the way the soldiers stare but don’t talk. There’s apparently a designated ‘story spot’ near the barracks and it’s impossible not to hear Felix telling the tales of Spartans when you want to just sit down in the barracks to read (not think. Thinking leads you in loops that make your head and chest ache) in private.
The younger soldiers are dumb enough to buy into the PR of the Spartan program, even as it came out of Felix’s mouth.
And it’s one of the days as you walk past that they decide to ask you.
“Hey,” one soldier, who has not taken off his helmet, approaches you. You have not been allowed to join the training, let alone have your own set of armor. Kimball is working on it, though. “You’re a Spartan, right?”
You’re holding your datapad under one arm. You don’t leave the barracks without it.
But you don’t pull it out to answer. You just stare the soldier down. His friends fold their arms. “That’s a dumb question.” One points out. “He’s obviously a Spartan. Ask him something smart!”
“Fuck you, Danvers.”
“Oh, what happened to your cool armor?” You take your datapad out from under your arm and tap out an answer. This isn’t hard. Armor isn’t hard.
“Don’t have it.” You haven’t worn armor in what’s felt like months. You can’t really verify anything with anyone, though.
“Don’t all Spartans have armor?”
“Not me.”
“Can you really take on an entire alien platoon?” One asks, bouncing like an excited child in front of the previous questioner.
You… Actually don’t have an answer for this one. You have to think on it. You’re not Master Chief, no matter what comparisons Felix or these kids might draw.
“Of fuckin’ course he can!” Felix cuts in, channeling the walk of a proud, strutting cat. He stops near you, makes an aborted movement with his arm as if he was going to sling his arm around you but then figured that maybe you’d bite him. He’s wearing his helmet. “This guy survived a ship crash!”
“Woah, really?” You nod, because you have. You’ve survived two, actually—
What are you doing? No- NO — the air is frozen out of your lungs, even under the rays of Chorus’ midday sun. The cold climbs out of your lungs and into your throat, the frost burrowing into you, sinking into the tenderized meat of your throat.
Felix is still talking.
Breathe, Maine. Don’t forget to fucking breathe.
This must be why Armando wanted to keep visitors away. So they wouldn’t ask questions like this .
“Hey- Hey, dude, where are you going?” Felix calls. He’s behind you with the soldiers and you are walking away, walking, not running, don’t start running from a handful of rebels that sound more like kids, you didn’t run from the Covenant, didn’t run from the Insurrectionists, didn’t run from Tex, or from Sigma, from the Director, from the Chairman—
You suck in a breath and the air is damp. Cold in a way that isn’t snow, cold in a way that isn’t the frost in the back of your throat, and you throw out an arm to stop yourself from falling into the wall. The steep, uneven surface of rock digs into your palms and loose grains come loose against the calluses of your broad fingers.
You’re inside a cave. There’s metal structures, holding up the rock above you, but this cave doesn’t expand very far inwards. It’s dark and quiet and there’s no one else here to watch as you drop to the ground. Your datapad lands in the dirt at your side and you press your back against the rock.
Breathe.
Breathe.
After your second week on Chorus, you’re finally allowed to officially join the New Republic.
There’s a test you have to pass just to show your skills, once Armando’s cleared you for strenuous activity. As Felix is so intent on saying, you’re a Spartan after all.
Kimball is the one who handles the test. Not Hine, though she is there, watching with Felix and Armando (who is there to make sure you don’t die, somehow).
Run, shoot, duck, finish . Simple.
You’re fast. Very fast. You won’t run a stumbled Spartan’s pace, you’re gonna run a full-blown Spartan’s sprint, and you have pretty damn good aim.
“Are you sure you’re gonna be able to handle this, Maine?” Kimball asks as she stands at the side of the track, set up in the cavern where the other soldiers can see you. You can ignore them, though.
Nod. Yes, you can. You can do it.
“Okay,” she folds her arms. “Ready… Go!”
Now, out in the sun, ancient battle rifle in hand, booking it across a quarter mile of uneven ground, you’re fairly confident. Fairly confident in every thump of your boots on ground, the momentum travelling through you, heart beating fast and hard in your chest.
This isn’t like running the tests in the contained test room of the medical facility they kept you on for so long, where they ran you in a circle in a sterile white room with a speedometer just for a few minutes before they moved you on.
Your legs ache, burn, but you are running under the sun with a gun in hand and the heat seeps into your back and your shoulders and your dark hair absorbs heat like fucking crazy but you wouldn’t have known this, kept in prison or the medical facility.
The gun recoil when you bring it up to aim is familiar, sharpened by the lack of armor, but muscle memory kicks in fast. Muscle memory is, at the moment, your favorite kind of memory.
You duck, kicking up dust as you tuck your rifle under your shirt, the metal hot against skin in an unfamiliar way because that was never allowed in training of any kind, you were always in a bodysuit, and army crawl your way as fast as you can to the end. Improvising, Maine, because you don’t have a weapon mount on your back.
You’re panting and sweating and your hair and shirt and an unpleasant amount of sand is sticking to your skin. Your heart still beats, rhythmic thumps in your chest that seem to reverberate through your musculature. You pull out the rifle from under the back of your shirt and drop it in the dirt and there’s a strong pull in your chest that makes you want to smile.
Kimball is not wearing a helmet so you can see her wide eyes and open mouth. You look to Hine and Felix and she’s smiling at you, helmet under her arm, as they walk over. Felix isn’t making an obvious expression in his body language, behind his visor. He’s silent.
Your swipe at your hair, keeping it from your eyes. That’s a nuisance you never realized you’d have to deal with.
“That was amazing.” Kimball tells you, a near-smile on her lips. She claps a gloved hand on your shoulder. “Welcome to the Republic.”
(The sensation is different, but not enough, not enough to skirt the memory of Wash, grinning, ‘welcome to the tea— )
Now all you need is some armor.
During your third week on Chorus, shortly after you’ve officially joined their ranks, you meet Bitters. He’s actually one of the few that spends more time in the barracks, no matter what, only gone when deployed to patrols or the rare assignment.
You don’t meet him during a patrol. You meet him in the cave you’ve designated for breathing room, away from the rest of the Republic and their desperate verbal prying thanks to Felix turning into a projector of distantly recalled UNSC propaganda.
Though you can’t really blame Felix for the fact you aced the test in a way that most couldn’t imagine matching.
“You sure like to show off, huh, Maine?” Echoes like pins and needles in the back of your throat.
You find Bitters, settled on a rock in the cave, smoking. You didn’t know the New Republic had access to cigarettes. Though, judging from the smell, it probably isn’t a cigarette.
The ashy taste of a cigarette, it lingers in the back of your throat, even though you haven’t seen a cigarette for years, though you can’t recall if you ever smoked them.
Bitters is a guy in his mid-twenties, older than a good portion of the New Republic you’ve seen (though their faces could be deceiving. You look pretty damn young for a technically middle-aged war vet) with non-reg hair. Most of the New Republic has non-reg hair, especially the dark-skinned blonde that hangs around the mens’ barracks who somehow had a bubble-gum pink streak through the curls.
Bitters has his hair pulled up half in a ponytail, the other half in a tangle of braids.
When you show up in the mouth of the cave, insides somehow communicating the frequency of a tuning fork after one soldier stared you in the face and asked how old you really were, Bitters pauses mid-puff to stare wide-eyed at you.
That’s what you both do for about sixty seconds. Stare. The cave smells like burnt plant and Bitters’ helmet is set down next to him.
This has never happened before, you don’t think.
Bitters blinks at you once, twice. “Please don’t report me.”
You blink at him as he had blinked at you, before stepping further into the cave and looking at whatever it is Bitters is smoking. He follows your gaze to the bunt and then back to your face before awkwardly extending it towards you.
“You want a hit?”
You get a noseful of smoke and decide, no, you don’t. You shake your head and Bitters takes it back into his mouth, taking a drag. “Cool. Why’re you here?”
You bring your datapad up and type, “breathing room.”
“Ah, yeah. Same reason I’m here...” He puffs and then notices you’re still standing. “You can sit down, you know? I don’t care.”
You sit down next to Bitters on the ground, where you tend to sit anyway.
You sit there in silence for a while, until Bitters slumps back. “So, what did you need a breather from, anyway?”
“People,” you type out. You’re not gonna get into the specifics. Bitters doesn’t seem to want them, either. He shrugs, rolling his blunt between his pointer and thumb.
“Yeah, people can be a pain. ‘Specially when you have to keep them from getting themselves killed.” He puts the blunt back to his lips.
“You command?”
“Probably gonna get promoted to second lieutenant if anyone else dies soon. Stopped keeping track a while ago.” You tilt your head at him. Bitters reminds you of South in all the minute ways—
“Know what? I don’t care. The universe’s gonna fuckin end and what’re we gonna be able to say we did about it? Jack fuckin shit, shooting other assholes to make ourselves a place on the damn leaderboard.” A swig. “What’s the fuckin’ point of that?”
You don’t answer her. What could you say? You don’t have Sigma—
“Hey,” Bitters’ voice cuts through and the muscles of your throat have tightened to an air-tight seal, can’t breathe, breathe, breathe— “You alright, man?”
You suck in air, cough it out, and suck in more. Bitters is staring at you and maybe he’s worried whatever he was smoking triggered a reaction in you because he’s holding his blunt far away from you with one hand and the other is hovering over your shoulder like maybe he should try and ground you with touch alone.
You nod. You’re alright. Bitters’ hand drops back to his side.
“Okay…” He relaxes, puffs, but his eyes are still on you. A minute passes. Two. You listen to the pattern of Bitters’ inhaling and exhaling and the crinkling of his blunt, and it’s unfamiliar in a pleasant way. “Okay.”
You run into Bitters in the ‘breathing cave’ again. And again. It becomes a proper hiding place for you, when everyone insists on meeting you, talking to you, and Kimball is working on acquiring armor and Hine’s busy running the New Republic.
“Y’know, I’m pretty sure some of the girls are trying to bribe Felix into tracking you down with food.” Bitters says, one day, around a blunt. You do not know what he’s smoking. He says it’s some kind of native Chorus plant, but that’s all you know. That and it helps Bitters destress. “Dunno how that’s gonna work.”
“Don’t you pay him in weapons?”
“Hine does, yeah. We ran out of money around the same time Levitt got his guts blown out by some sniper.”
“Levitt?”
“Old general. He was an idiot. Didn’t listen to Felix when he told him the goddamn peace talks were a fuckin’ trap.” He sucks in a breath like the smoke angered him.
“Peace talks?” Bitters exhales, long and drawn out, and stares blankly ahead. For a moment, you don’t think he’ll answer.
“No one likes to talk about those.” He finally answers. “People hoped the war would finally fuckin’ end. Then it didn’t.”
You stare at Bitters. You study the way his face curves along skull, his face entirely muscle and skin.
His words burrow into your sternum, leak into your chest.
You hoped the war would finally end, on Sidewinder, hanging from that goddamn cliff, with Washington’s blood on your hands and your own in your mouth.
And yet,
It didn’t.
Midway through your third week on Chorus, you receive your armor.
Kimball approaches you in the camp, helmet under her arm. She doesn’t frequently wear her helmet in camp, you’ve noticed, which you can appreciate for the emotional reasons if not for the logical ones. The cavern is probably the safest place on Chorus, though.
“Hey, Maine,” she calls, intercepting the approaching squad of rebels, which include the blonde who you can’t recall ever hearing talk. But Kimball, she’s got your attention. “We’ve got your armor. Follow me.”
And you do. You haven’t worn armor in a long time, the last time you were wearing it, it was a cage and also the only thing keeping you alive.
New Republic armor is different.
Kimball brings you to Hine, who hands over your bodysuit and sends you to a room to change into it. It isn’t the same as your old bodysuit, it isn’t the most comfortable thing ever, but it’s relatively snug and it’s an old sensation you can still stand.
You stand there, half-zipped into your bodysuit, staring down at the curves of your muscle under bodysuit, for a minute or two, before you finally shake yourself out of it, zip up, and step out to Hine and Kimball.
Kimball shows you how to put the armor on. Sand paint with blue trim, typical infantry color. It isn’t power armor, but it’ll catch a bullet. That’s all you need, so long as you get put on the field. You’d like to be somewhere else that isn’t this cavern underneath the jungle, even if it is full of well-intended faces.
She gives you the helmet last, once you’re encased in Republic armor you have no knowledge of.
You place the helmet on your head and thumb the seal. You blink at Kimball from behind your visor, noting she can’t see you. The helmet configuration is different than your old one. Your field of vision is restricted and the HUD is stripped down to bare essentials of your own biodata, available COMfreqs (just one), and status of the armor’s integrity.
“How is it?” Kimball asks, tilting her head up at you. For a moment, you try to find the COM messaging. The HUD is arranged differently, though, and there doesn’t seem to be an option for it.
After a moment, you give Kimball a thumbs up.
She smiles. Not a toothy smile, her lips don’t part, but this is the first time you’ve seen Kimball smile at you.
Something in the deep recesses of your chest warms at that.