Spartan-938
Happy Birthday
I smirked and laughed a little. My family back on Earth had sent me a birthday card and a present. The card was a happy birthday message with a picture of my family on it. My son, smiling, my daughter, waving, and my darling wife smiling and looking hopeful. I was in the ship's cargo bay, when I had found the package. Another ship delivering mail and such had just delivered it to the men. We were stained far away from Earth so it was very hard to get a good connection. I opened the package and saw a small scrapbook. I looked through its pages, seeing print out files and photographs of missions we had been on. I found one of the old Fireteam, such good memories. I remembered our groups last fight. Fighting on that pitiful little world colonized by the UNSC. I also remembered the bad. Johnny vaporized by two Hunters firing on him, Leena being impaled by a Zealot. And my brother, a Plasma Grenade sticking to his face, and oh how I cried. Cried and fought, the second the grenade had gone off I killed the Elite that had thrown it and all his buddies. And my soon to be wife, shouting and crying for me to come back. I blew up a Spirit and used one of their own Plasma Grenades to get revenge on the bastard elite that had killed brother.
Then there was lots of good. Our groups first victory, our brilliant destruction of a small army using a Pelican, a SPNKr and a lot of Trip Mines. I reached the end of the scrapbook, on the last page, was an envelope stuck to the page with some adhesive. I peeled it open and slid out the three pictures in it. Me and her, eighteen years old on Harvest, sleeping, leaning on each other as if we were both pillows. Brother had taken that, never let me live it down. The pulled the second picture up and put it over the first. I giggled with glee. It was an aryl view from the rear bay of a Pelican looking down on a burning fire on the dirt that spelled out "WE WON!", the fire was cause by shooting the methane tanks of the grunt bodies we had used to make out the words. And then the last picture. This one was special. Us on our wedding day, kissing each other.
I headed from the cargo bay to my bunk in the Lieutenants quarters. I stuffed the card and scrapbook under my pillow. I headed to the mess hall, chow time. I sat down on a bench and began to eat away at the food in front of me. One of my friends walked over to me and sat down, along with a couple others. "Hey, what's for dinner tonight?"
"S-O-S."
"Heh….what's S-O-S again?"
"Same-old-shit."
All the men at the table laughed.
"So, anyway, I got you what you get every year. But this time it's a surprise!"
"How can a grenade be surpassing in any way?"
The exchange of a grenade to me on my birthday was a little thing my friends and me did. Each year my best friend gave me a frag grenade. The next time me and my team were planet side fighting, I'd use the grenade to see how many enemies I could kill with it. Last years record was Fifty Elite's and twenty-eight grunts. The previous squad that had been in the area had rigged the structure with explosives. I hadn't known that and threw the grenade into the first floor to kill ten Elite's. It exploded and so did the rest of the building. I won an award for bravery He held up a small box. I opened it and there sat a small blue sphere.
"I immediately shut the box and held it under the table. "Where'd you get this!?"
"I snagged it from the armory, we captured some Covi tech! There were plenty so I just grabbed one and ran."
"Nice, I'll probably be able to do some real damage with this."
A commanding officer walked up to our table.
"Lieutenant, we're gonna be dropping out of Slipspace soon, your presence was requested at a UNSC base on Reach, the upgrades to your armor has been authorized."
"Great, when am I coming back?"
"September 1st , this is also going to be a small rest period, granted by the Captain."
"Great, this is the best birthday ever!"
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New notes: This was a fanfiction I made a year ago to post on my birthday. For the hell of it I decided to release it now. It used to be longer and had an real ending but it was overly depressing some comments made by marines to Covenant seemed like abridged versions of racial slurs from today's current age. For my birthday this year, 8/17/08 I 'ment to release an exciting feature but I scrapped it and am saving it for Tales of Union along with Shinigami. Shinigami is on hiatus until Tales of Union begins, which will hopefully be soon. Don't worry, this hiatus was planned from the beginning and I wont be offline for a year again.
Original Notes: This is something I made for the heck of it, my birthday is tomorrow (08/17/07) and so I felt like celebrating in a way. But I finished this up in spare time a day early so, here it is. Also, I'm considering making this a short fic about said marine's struggle to live on Reach during the Battle of Reach.