Part I:
"You're not even trying, are you, Kat?" said Carter.
He had one hand at her waist and the other was gripping her limp one. They were shifting awkwardly around the studio, mostly trying to avoid the other dancers.
"Are you ordering me to, Commander?" Kat replied.
The song stopped and a new one started, with the dance instructor clapping and calling out the steps in his too-cheerful voice. Kat trudged on, reluctantly. Her functional shoes clunked against the wood floors. Despite her coiled Spartan grace, she felt large and ungainly in this roomful of young women with their butterfly skirts and light, skittering heels.
"I don't see why you have to make this so hard," said Carter. He grunted as he tried to maneuver her into a box-step. She refused to move her feet in anything remotely resembling a box-step.
"I don't see why we have to do this at all," Kat shot back.
Carter released a long-suffering sigh. "We're doing this because Jorge wants dancing at the wedding."
"I highly doubt that."
"Alright, so the bride wants dancing at the wedding. And what she wants, he wants. And what he wants, we provide." He said it in his authoritative commando voice, the let's-get-it-done-and-get-home-safe-Noble-Team voice that she used to hear over the radio right before a mission. Apparently, making their teammate's special day as perfect as possible was a mission he took as seriously as neutralizing a Covenant threat.
"Besides," said Carter, "Jun looks like he's having fun."
He turned her around so she could look over his shoulder.
"He's grimacing, not smiling," said Kat. "And Emile looks like he's about to murder somebody."
The instructor had sidled up to Emile and was vigorously massaging the Spartan's broad shoulders. "C'mon!" he chirped. "Loosen up, big boy! Let the music flow through you!"
"Something's going to flow," Kat muttered. "His blood, specifically, if he keeps that up. Come on, Commander, can we at least skip the etiquette lesson?"
Carter raised an eyebrow and gave her a stony stare. She sighed, relenting, and decided that it wasn't wholly unpleasant to have the Commander's hand against the small of her back, and to rest her chin on his shoulder from time to time. It was almost nice.
They almost never touched like this, gentle and unhurried and without the threat of danger or discovery. She wasn't unused to touching him, of course, but this was different, very different from being slung across his back while fleeing an explosion, or being pulled bodily into a Warthog at 130 kilometers per hour.
It was different than even when they touched in… other capacities that weren't strictly professional. But she pushed that to the back of her mind.
X
"If I see another bowl of soup, I'll puke," Jun groused from behind her, as the group stepped out into the afternoon sun.
"Puke all you want after the wedding, rifleman," said Carter, even though Jun hadn't fired a rifle in combat since the war ended.
Kat walked ahead of them, stretching out her neck, glad to be free from the confines of the mirrored dance studio, and the pastel-colored dining parlor that smelled perpetually of soup and cheap champagne.
The air was cool and the sun was pale yellow on the pathway that led away from the building. They were on the cusp of one of planet Reaping's mild winters and warm springs, before the days would grow hotter and hotter, with the sun blazing gold over the wheat fields waiting for AI-controlled machinery to rumble through the summer harvest.
Kat adjusted her muffler against the wind, and was distracted by the smell of roses. There was still a sheen of frost over the grass and it crunched under Kat's feet like sugar as she wandered away from the others.
"… if he poked me one more time with that posture-correcting stick, I was going to shove a 7.62×51mm cartridge sideways up his…"
"Be niceto the civilians, Jun," Carter said mildly.
"Don't see why Jorge has to be so fussy about this anyway."
"He just wants his special day. And after all he's been through, I'd say he's earned it."
Jun huffed. "Right. I hear he's retiring so he can play civilian. Really, a melon farm? A Spartan can't want that for the rest of his life."
"Maybe, but do you really want to tell the big man what he can or can't want?"
"…Good point, sir."
Their voices faded as Kat roamed to the left of the path. She found a rosebush with dark green leaves, silver-tipped with frost, and flowers growing in fat clusters, red as blood. She touched one of the curly petals with her good hand and rubbed it between her fingers like she was testing good velvet.
The perfume stirred a memory in the back of her cool, analytic mind, one so distant that it was a blur of sounds and colors. But the scent of roses was very sharp in her memory. It surrounded her, like it did now. Her eyes fluttered and she inhaled deeply.
She remembered a bowl of them, fat, nodding roses that drooped low to the table. She remembered her child's hand, dimpled and pink, reaching for one of the blooms while standing tip-toe on a chair. She remembered pursing her mouth with longing to taste the roses, wondering if they'd be very sweet, if they'd melt in her mouth like ripe strawberries. Behind her in the kitchen was a woman crooning a folksong while grease popped in pan.
Kat pursed her mouth in the imitation of her childhood self. Impetuously, she reached behind a rose and plucked at it from the sepals.
"Vandalism, Kat?" said Emile. He came up behind her, startling her but not enough to make her jump. "Didn't know you liked pretty flowers."
"I don't," she said defensively, pulling her hand back in a clearly guilty manner.
He looked pointedly at the rosebush and then back at her.
"It's just that…" She gave an awkward shrug. "It's roses. The smell. It reminds me of… you know. Things. From before."
Emile didn't reply, and he turned away unsmiling.
Most Spartans had a "trigger," a sight, smell, color, or taste that sent them back to a childhood memory, a memory that was as vague as cloudy soup, but sweeter than sugar and sharper than a wound. It was something secret and deeply emotional, something that went beyond the pain and the fire and the regimental training. Something buried, like a single sweet cherry that had sunk to the bottom of a glass. Something that proved they had a life before the war, that they had a home other than camp Currahee, that they had family other than Lieutenant Ambrose, Chief Mendez, and the other Spartans.
It might have been the smell of good coffee, or the sting of a bee, or the crunch of bicycle wheels on gravel. For her, it was the heady perfume of roses.
She looked at Emile's retreating back, military-straight, as he rejoined the others. She sighed, almost apologetically. He was the only one she knew that couldn't remember anything at all.
X
Notes: So, this takes place after the war. Jorge, being older, has retired from active duty. Hope you liked the first chapter! Thanks very much for reading and please review!