http://gawdamn.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] gawdamn.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] singularityderp2011-02-15 10:59 pm
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Re: FIESTAAA

[identity profile] royali.livejournal.com 2011-02-19 06:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Song is 'Sleeping Sickness' by City and Colour. WHY SO ANGSTY, PLAYLIST. (hilariously, the songs on either side of it are more comedic. 'Big Balls' by AC/DC and 'Bitches' by Mindless Self Indulgence.) LA LA LA ENTIRELY UNEDITED LA LA LA? As with the Emile piece this probably could have just... gone on indefinitely. Fffff.


--



He'd been on the team eleven months before Pegasi ever even came up. The OP that wiped out most of Beta them wasn't something Thom liked to talk about, much less dwell on.

"Message from Lieutenant Commander Ambrose," Kat told him. Communiqués from the man – the Spartan – who trained them were rare, succinct, and generally welcome. Thom had never met a III that didn't respect him, wouldn't die for him.

"What's it say?" he asked, throwing himself down on Kat's bed. The others are gone on some day OP they got grounded on. Pulled the short straws. Emile had promised to bring back an Elite head, but Thom was pretty sure he'd been joking, as much as Emile ever joked.

"The usual. Nothing else would make it past the sensors. The new AI – Endless Summer – is much more stringent than Deep Winter. Everything is monitored more closely."

Thom nodded, rolling onto his back to make a brief contemplation of the ceiling. Most of the Spartans lived up to the frugal nature of their namesakes, but her room had managed to sneak fragments of her personality into it. Oh, it was nothing overt – no pictures on the walls, no hidden diary in pink bound leather (why had he thought about that in such specific terms?) – but the room just felt like Kat. Of course, it could have been the three monitors she had hooked up to her officer-issued commpad.

"Wonder how the new kids are doing. Gamma, right?"

"Gamma," Kat confirmed. "They're undergoing their augmentations soon. The Lieutenant Commander has added three new compounds to their chemical cocktail. I haven't been able to find out what they're meant to change; their coded designations do not actually exist in any database, UNSC or otherwise. I only know about them at all because I chased a signal from Ambrose to Ackerson, caught an embedded ghost file."

Kat. Fingers in every pie across the UNSC. There was not a morning he woke up and didn't thank whatever higher powers were out there that she was on their side. "Hope it helps them," Thom said quietly. "They need every edge they can get."

"Indeed." Kat's voice had slipped down a notch from its usual even-keeled chill right down into glacial.

Pegasi had killed two hundred and ninety-one kids from Beta. And they'd been kids – soldiers first - but most of them hadn't been much over twelve. With ten years on that number, Thom's had time to accrue the hindsight necessary to know just how young they were.

They're both thinking it, he just says it first. "Why'd you get pulled?"

She inhales in the way to which she's prone when she's dealing with delicate circuitry. "You know, none of the IIs can match my record for hacked files, enemy or otherwise? Even then. But after Alpha... I think the Lieutenant Commander was looking for any excuse to save as many of us as he could. He foresaw the danger, acted accordingly."

It was strangely sentimental, for a II. At least, for the legends of the IIs. They were supposed to be completely impenetrable. Devoid of emotion. They'd been built up so long in Thom's mind that to have the final nail driven in the coffin of the Elcee's perfection was a bit dizzying. Jorge he could accept – the big man was one of them. Lieutenant Commander Ambrose had always been set above them.

Kat was quiet for a moment. Like Thom, she'd have no doubt given anything to have participated at Pegasi. Even if it would have killed her. He knew the thought process – maybe if I'd been there, it would have gone differently.

Then,
Edited 2011-02-19 18:26 (UTC)

Re: FIESTAAA

[identity profile] royali.livejournal.com 2011-02-19 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)
"You?"

She already knew. She'd have known the moment he was assigned to Noble. But he appreciated her asking, giving him a chance to talk about it. It was as close to therapy as any of them ever got and most of them ever needed.

"Blew my inner ear three days before we were scheduled to drop," he said, rolling his right shoulder. "Poked my head up out of the dirt in time to be in close proximity to an anti-tank mine that went off." He gestures at the scars he has, the shrapnel that had lacerated his cheek and neck and into his hairline. That'd been a weird experience, pulling off his trashed SPI helmet later. It'd been entirely vacuum sealed, he hadn't wanted to take it off mid-mission and so had dealt with the blood sloshing around inside. When it came off, it was with a noise he'd never forget, one that made him think of leeches.

"In-situ cloning takes two weeks. There was no way I was going to lead India with no balance. I tried to sneak onto the drop-ship anyways; Mendez caught me and hauled me off. We'd all seen him act mad, you know? But before then, I'm not sure he'd ever actually been angry. I thought he was gonna hit me." Thom laughs a little at the memory. It'd have hurt Mendez more than it might have hurt him. Might have even broken the old man's hand. "He had me slapped in cuffs and I spent the night in the brig instead of the hospital. Pretty sure that if I wasn't a Spartan, I'd have been 92'd so fast... instead I got the lecture of my life. How leading a team when you're unfit to do so is not only stupid, but irresponsible. He yelled at me for about twenty minutes, I don't remember him stopping once to take a breath."

Kat kept her eyes on the screen as he spoke, which he didn't mind. It was a free and clear sign that they'd be able to pretend that they hadn't talked about it at all later.

"Stuck with me, all these years later. You know, I'd have turned down the promotion if Carter hadn't been the one pinning bars to my uniform."

Kat snorted. "Times like this, I can't tell if you're a martyr or a masochist."

"The world may never know," he told her teasingly.
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