AN:This is an amalgamation of phrase prompts sent to me from a prompt list on tumblr. Enjoy!
She passed hands a few times, and by now she wasn't sure who was carrying her. She thought it was Mark, maybe, since she could hear his voice close by. Was it just coming from her earpiece? Did it still work? Was she even awake?
She looked up to ask Mark if she was awake and found Fred there instead. Which was bizarre. Team Leads shouldn't be burdened with injured people. She would tell him that, but later.
More words. Fred's voice this time. Emergency evac orders were now given, and they were calling mission abort. She struggled to follow along beyond that. Her head was fuzzy from a heavy narcotic, but she could feel pain lurking deep somewhere, just out of sight. She couldn't move much of anything, but her arms felt like they were purposefully immobilized.
A hand grabbed her leg, squeezing. "Stop moving," Fred said to her, his voice startlingly clear. "Evac's on its way."
"Mark—"
"They're keeping our route clear." He knelt down for a moment but didn't put her on the ground. She zoned out again, heard him speak to Blue Team, and felt him poking around at the service panel of her armour in the back. She knew she should be sweating in SPI, but all she felt was ice. Her head relaxed against Fred's bicep, like iron beneath his armour. Nothing about any of this was comfortable, but she wasn't about to complain about the crowding.
"Stay—Lopis." A finger tapped the visor of her helmet. "Stay awake. Two minutes. That's all I need." His voice was so close, inside her helmet, rapid-fire.
She thought she replied that she was awake, but couldn't be sure. Fred continued to fumble around at the service panel, holding her awkwardly. She wanted to tell him to just put her down. He was crouched over her, his other arm tucking her legs tight to his chest. His shielding flashed gold and glinted off her visor, and then the suit of her armour jolted ever so slightly. The movement was enough to break through the fog of analgesics and agony lanced through her entire upper body. She wanted to scream at the pain, but any further movement only made it worse, so she sucked in air through an open mouth and stared wide-eyed up at the bulkhead of the pirate ship they were on.
"Keep up." Fred was moving again, not speaking to her. She heard Linda's voice, calm and cold as ever. The crack of a rifle punctuated the din of plasma fire and the sound of LMGs. Her ferrets were close by.
"Mom!" A direct line opened inside her helmet, coming from Ash. "Sir, her vitals—"
"Keep moving," Fred repeated. "We're two hundred forty metres away from pick-up. She'll make it that far."
Lopis did not like the implication that she may not make it any further than that, but she didn't have the lung capacity to complain. Perhaps Fred was just being pragmatic and not wanting to over-promise. Perhaps she was closer to dying than she was aware of.
"You'll make it," he said more quietly to her. His voice sounded laboured and fast, not his usual steely battle calm. Maybe he'd been injured, too. She nodded against his arm, not being able to do much else.
The techs had to peel Lopis out of her armour—what was left of it. A good chunk of the right side had been caved in and bent to the point of puncturing, and the steel had to be sautered off in order to be removed properly. They did this in between keeping pressure on the half-dozen open wounds on her body and trying not to jostle the mess of broken bones that had been practically pulverised on her right side. He'd been on that table before, being crowded by techs and nurses, but he had the luxury of reinforced bones and decades of training. She wasn't screaming, and he didn't know whether to be impressed or worried.
There were a hundred different things happening at once around the medical bay on top of Lopis being prepped for emergency surgery, not least of which was Kelly helping to keep him still while a nurse attended to a burn on his shoulder.
"I watched your shields," she was saying to him. Her words were an enraged, low whisper. "Ninety-three percent to zero in seconds."
"Pirates got in a lucky shot," he replied. She glared at him. There was no response offered, but he knew she would interrogate him about it later.
He looked over at Lopis again. None of the Gammas were out of their gear yet, using every excuse they had to help the nurses shed her armour and get her ready for surgery. They'd be pushed out soon, and he'd have to keep them calm while they wheeled her into ICU.
"Hell of a mess," he said to the nurse binding up his shoulder.
She nodded. "They'll do what they can."
He gritted his teeth. He knew what that meant.
His comm beeped, a hail from the captain. Another thing to deal with.
"You'll be done in a moment, Lieutenant," the nurse said. He glanced at Kelly and nodded towards the Gammas. She frowned at him for a moment, then stood up and limped over to them. They were getting in the way now, and he could hear the panic in their voices. They needed some proper herding.
He let the nurse dress his burn and then shoved into a shirt. Linda was already up on the main deck giving a prelim report, since she was the only one out of Blue Team who hadn't actually been injured, but he needed to give the full debrief. Explain why he'd scrubbed the mission and pulled out right before they'd recovered any critical assets.
When he got to the deck, the captain was accompanied by Osman herself. He snapped a salute despite the burn and stood next to Linda. Her fists were clenching and relaxing at her sides, unnoticeable to the other officers on the deck.
"Linda has given us a detailed account of what happened," Osman said, looking directly at Fred. Apparently he was not reporting to the captain, who was off to the side and looking vaguely panicked. "Now I would like you to explain why you put yourself in a sustained, direct line of fire with your shielding disabled."
No small talk, then. "Ma'am," he responded immediately. "I chose to scrub because Lopis was the key point of access to get further inside the ship. Once discussion with the pirate captain deteriorated and she was injured—"
"That is not an answer to my question."
He cleared his throat. "It is part of it. May I continue?"
She nodded her dragon's head at him, and he took a deep breath. The bandages at his shoulder pulled with the movement.
"Lopis was flatlining, and her armour's core power supply was destroyed when she was flung against the bulkhead. I made the decision to reroute shielding power to her suit's systems to keep—"
"I have a detailed event log of all of this," Osman interrupted him again. "I am asking you why."
He tried to discern what angle she was coming from. Linda was stock-still beside him, and he didn't dare look at her for help.
Fred took a guess and hoped he was right. "The cost-benefit weight of letting Lopis die or not was clear. Her team would have to be repurposed elsewhere, and this mission would have to be abandoned. The pirates still believe we captured her, and rebuilding the rapport she has with them would have taken months. I am also far more accustomed to taking plasma fire than the Inspector," he added, though he restrained a smile. "And Blue Team had me mostly covered."
"Mostly," Osman said, looking at the lumpy padding on his shoulder beneath his shirt. She looked like she was going to say more, then shook her head slightly and sat down in the captain's chair. "I'd like all of what you just told me in your write-up. And show your work, Lieutenant. I want to see what math lead you to that decision." She waved a hand. "You're both dismissed for now."
He snapped a salute alongside Linda, and it hurt just as much as it had the first time.
Getting all six Spartans out of the medbay did not actually make them less hectic, it only moved their manic behaviour elsewhere. Linda and Kelly, to their credit, were doing a pretty good job of keeping the Gammas contained while he tried to write his after-action. They became more riled with each question he asked them, though, and he wondered how long Linda and Kelly could keep them from yelling and breaking things.
"Why is that even relevant?" Ash snarled. He hadn't stopped moving since Lopis had gone in for surgery. Linda had stationed herself at the eastern door of the rec room, both to keep other people out and to keep Ash from stomping around the ship. His pacing met her stern expression, so he turned heel and paced in the other direction.
"Because I need to populate this pairwise comparison matrix, and I need numbers to do that," he explained. "I'll just look up how much your armour costs if you don't want to tell me."
Kelly snuck a glance at his screen. The first chart he'd drafted, provisionally called pairwise comparison for potential field casualties with respect to UNSC equipment assets, was woefully empty. And it was only the first of many charts he had to make. Very, very many.
"Why does the math matter?" Olivia asked. She was curled up on the couch. Her voice didn't hold the same anger that Ash's did. She just sounded upset.
He let his expression soften. "Because it's the explanation I gave to Osman, and she wants me to prove it was the right one. You know how brass is with cost analysis."
She shrugged and looked away. Maybe she didn't know. It was sometimes difficult to remember that they were only fifteen. It was even more difficult to remember what it was like when he was fifteen.
"Was it the honest explanation?" Mark asked. He was gripping the back of the couch Olivia was sitting on, staring Fred down with his regular intensity. "You saved Lopis because you ran some numbers and happened to stay in the black?"
He kept his tone patient. "That was part of it," he explained. "Every strategic decision I make has to take cost and time into consideration. And the lives of the rest of my team," he added through clenched teeth, far less patient, when they glowered at him. They did not have a monopoly on being upset. "Don't ignore a decade of training because you're worried. It'll get you all killed. And certainly do not mistake a calculation I made for callousness. My decision was weighed against a multitude of factors, not the least of which was your own safety. Where would you all go if Lopis wasn't around?"
Olivia and Mark looked to Ash, still defaulting to Saber's old command structure. His shoulders drooped, and his eyes flicked between Kelly, Linda and Fred. He looked like a little boy. "It just sucks, you know?" he finally said. "Talking about how much Mom and her armour is worth while she's in there getting cut open."
Kelly put a hand on his shoulder. "I know," she told him. "But Fred needs your help to make the case for why he did what he did so that we can make these decisions again in the future. Especially since he's severely damaged his Mjolnir for the third time in under a year now," she added, looking at him with a grin.
The humour dissolved some of the tension in the room. Mark's fists unballed from the couch cushions, and 'Livi allowed herself to smile a little. Ash simply looked more deflated.
"I've been on the other side of the table," he said to all three of them, reigning in his anger. "I know it's not what you want to talk about right now. But we need to square away this business so that you can spend time with the Inspector when she gets out of ICU."
"If," Mark muttered, and Olivia turned around to hit him. She didn't have any argument, though.
"When," Fred repeated firmly. "Linda and I didn't get chewed out by Baby Dragon just to let Lopis die."
"So keep your answers short," Linda added. "Let's make this easy."
Ash nodded and huffed out a defeated breath. "Okay," he said. "What do you want to know?"
There was a lot of everything, she decided. That was about as firm an assessment she could make on the reality that was happening around her.
A lot of tubes, a lot of wires, a lot of figures moving in and out of her field of vision. She knew she was lying down because she could see the ceiling above her, though this one was a sterile steel grey.
Things happened in waves. There were periods when she was more lucid than others, and that was when the pain would flare up and make it difficult to do much more than moan. The nurses would appear then, patting at her bandages and giving her a fresh IV. Sometimes she'd wake up and see a different patch of slate bulkhead, and then be moved back to the original patch.
She heard voices a lot, too. Real voices, she thought, because she recognised who they were. They were her ferrets mostly, talking in hushed, fearful tones. She dreamt of her mother, and woke up to them calling her mom. They sounded so small and terrified that she didn't have the strength to correct them even if she could speak to them. She remembered smiling at them at some point, and seeing Ash's floppy, wobbly grin in response. He had so much hair now.
Reality rolled along in a foggy sort of way, until she became aware of her own thoughts at some point. It was as if she'd been jolted back into the present as an active participant and not just an idle viewer. Things would happen and she could respond to them, and they would respond back.
Of course, that meant that the pain was there to greet her. She didn't know if it was worse or better than before, but she did know it was a lot. She wasn't sure if she could move and didn't bother to try. She could breathe easy for the most part, and so she would stick to doing that for now.
More familiar voices. She looked to her right, keeping her head still, and saw the Gammas in her periphery. They were sitting in a circle playing a card game on the floor.
"Are you guys allowed to do that in here?" she rasped.
Ash swivelled around immediately and bounded up to his feet. "Mom!" he shouted, and then Olivia jumped up and clapped a hand to his mouth. "You're awake," he muffled, pushing her aside.
They flocked to her bedside and stood over her, grinning. "How do you feel?" Olivia asked.
"I don't know," she responded truthfully. "A lot hurts."
"Yeah, you got messed up pretty bad." Ash fiddled with a wire out of her field of view. "You had us worried."
She flexed her fingers and found they didn't hurt. She fumbled for his hand, keeping her arm still, and he squeezed her fingers—very gently. "I think I saw you guys in here."
"Not surprised," Mark said. "We've all been here a while."
"What's a while?" She frowned and saw the two boys had a decent amount of scruffy facial hair, though Ash was terrible at growing out anything more substantial than peach fuzz.
"A few days," Ash said vaguely. "The nurses kick us out a lot though."
"Well, I'm awake now, so go get showered and cleaned up," she said with as much authority as she could muster. They could not fall out of a routine just because she was injured.
"But that's what we've been waiting for," Ash said, dangerously close to a whine.
She couldn't shake her head, so she pegged him with a stern look instead. "And I want to spend time with you when you aren't scruffy and stinky."
"We aren't—"
The medical bay door opened and they all looked up. She couldn't turn to see who it was, but the voice made its owner known soon enough.
"Glad to see you're awake, Inspector," Fred said, and she heard the door close again behind him. He stepped up to the foot of her bed and gave her an encouraging, tired look.
She frowned at him. "Am I going crazy?" She looked to her ferrets and back to Fred again. "Why do you all look like ragamuffins?"
Fred seemed a little taken aback at the sudden insult, but Olivia stepped in to explain. "He's been doing a lot of math," she said, as if that cleared everything up. "It's getting to him."
"I'm fine," he cut in, giving Olivia a hard look. "Paperwork's been heavy, and we've all been given a couple weeks of leave, so I don't have to shave twice a day right now." He ran a hand across his jaw. "I hope it's not too offensive for you, Inspector."
"Nah, it's a good look for you." She paused and frowned at something he said. "A few weeks of leave? That's a long time."
"You've been in ICU for like a week," Ash said. "And Osman is being nice. I think the captain is getting sick of us being all over his ship, though. Six Spartans in a corvette gets kinda crowded."
"A week," she repeated. "What…."
"The three of you get cleaned up," Fred said then. "I'll explain the situation. There are too many people in here as it is."
The Gammas grumbled about him eavesdropping on their conversation, but they shuffled off without anymore complaint. She raised a brow at Fred, who came over and sat down in the chair beside her bed.
"I'm impressed," she said. "They usually put up a fight."
"I've been bossing them around for a week," he replied, watching the door shut. "They've gotten used to it."
He didn't bother with any preamble and told her what happened then. About her being whipped into the ship wall and having her armour crumpled, about aborting the mission and running for evac, about her being in and out of surgery for the past week.
"It was pretty spotty for the first forty-eight hours," he concluded. "Your team wasn't handling it well. We've all been trying to keep them busy."
She felt sick. Not because of his recounting of what had happened, since he'd been light on most of the gory details, but because of her Ferrets. "They weren't handling it well because I promised them I wasn't going anywhere."
Fred was silent for a moment. "That's not something you can promise." His voice was pitched low. "It's not something any of us can promise."
"I'm in charge of them," she argued on anyway. "I'm responsible for who takes care of them, who leads them during ops. And it will be nobody but me."
He gave her a rueful half-smile but didn't say anything. She wondered if anyone had made the same promise to him.
"You injured yourself," she noticed, seeing the lump of bandages beneath his shirt. "When did that happen?"
"While we were prepping for evac," he said. "Caught a plasma round in the shoulder."
"Must have been a hell of a round."
"It's a long story."
He didn't elaborate, and silence filled the room. He looked exhausted and perhaps a bit angry. There was a week where she'd been out, and he'd had to handle the Gammas with Kelly and Linda on top of everything else. She was sure his leave time wasn't being spent relaxing.
"Olivia said you were doing math," she forced out to break the silence. "What was that about?"
"Insurance, mostly," he explained. She frowned and he continued on. "I made a reckless tactical decision and Osman's been holding my ass to the fire until I prove it was the correct one to make."
"Which was?" She could certainly sympathise with his position. The woman demanded high-yield, low-collateral results, and any deviation from that standard was met with ruthless questioning.
He hesitated before responding "I re-routed the power from my shielding to your gear to keep your life support going. Your SPI's energy supply had been damaged when you impacted the bulkhead, and you would've died if I hadn't done it. That's when I got this," he said, touching his shoulder.
Fred didn't explain any further, but she fit the rest of it together easily enough. Putting a Spartan fireteam leader in immediate danger to protect a comparably replaceable ONI agent was a very stupid choice to make.
"She wants you to prove her own budget back to her?"
Fred nodded. "Because I told her it was why I did it. I think this is just a form of punishment more than anything else," he added wryly.
"Was it?"
"Was it what?"
"Why you did it?"
He looked down at the blanket covering her and thought for a moment. "I had to fudge the numbers on the chart a little," he responded. "I don't think she'll notice, though."
She opened her hand. There was a pulse oximeter and a few other wires in the way, but after a second of consideration, Fred took it. She noticed the warmth of his fingers in a way that was entirely different from when Ash had squeezed her hand. She swallowed past her dry throat and gave him a smile.
"Thank you," she said. "For keeping my team safe."
"There were a lot of reasons why I did it," he said, and she felt her heart thud in her chest.
"Either way," she continued past the beating heat in her face. "It was fun having you carry me around."
He raised a brow. "I'm surprised you remember that."
"I remember a lot of it," she responded. His face flushed hard, and she suddenly wondered if there was something she absolutely did not remember.
She couldn't move, damn it, so she settled for smiling until it hurt her face. "You're sweet, Fred. And I meant it when I said that's a good look."
He looked away at the compliment, but his mouth twitched into a smile. "I have to finish Osman's homework," he said, his words mumbling a little.
"I wouldn't want to stop you." She squeezed his hand and felt him squeeze back.
He didn't move for a few moments, staring down at their hands. Then he shoved up from the chair and left the medbay with only a nod. She turned her head to watch him leave despite the pain, smiling at the awkward bunch of his shoulder blades.
"I'll get it for y—"
"You will not." She grabbed for Ash's wrist to keep him away from her desk, but slipped away from her and landed his weight on his back foot. "How did you even get in here?"
She stared at him. He stared back. No explanation was offered.
"Leave," she ordered.
He pursed his lips. His hand was still held out, perfectly still and ready to strike when she wasn't looking. "I want to see how you can possibly brush your hair with your arm in a sling."
"I'm not in the mood for an audience." She snuck a glance at herself in the mirror. The nurse had washed her hair, something she'd barely tolerated as it was, but this was another matter entirely. Her left arm was free and mobile, sort of. She could get used to using it for the time being. Probably.
Her split second inattention was enough for Ash to grab the hairbrush of her hand, and he jumped back before she could reach for it—or smack him.
"Turn around, Mom."
"No."
She stood her ground. Or sat, as it were. This was not negotiable.
"Shouldn't have broken all those bones then," he replied. There was a smile on his face, but his eyes were still full of worry. And they called her mom!
She wanted to shrug, but that was physically impossible at the moment, so she settled for glaring instead. "I can get ready by myself," was what she decided to say.
"I've seen your daily routine," Ash responded, ignoring her completely. "It doesn't look difficult. I can probably use your straightener, too—or," he added, seeing her glare deepen. "We can just dry and brush today. Nothing fancy."
Veta eyed the door to her room. Ash was in the way, but he probably wouldn't wrestle her to the ground if she decided to leave, given her whole… well, upper body situation. On the other hand, it would mean walking around looking like a wet rat, and then the nurses might insist on doing more than helping her shower. She had a very difficult decision to make.
Finally she sat back in her desk chair and sighed. "What's our agenda for today again?" she asked. Maybe she could just stay in her room and forgo any decision-making.
Ash knew she was conceding, but he did his best to hide his triumphant grin. "Osman gave the Lieutenant access to our training curriculum and he's got a big list of stuff he doesn't like about it, so he wants to go over it. I think he sent it to you," Ash added.
She gave him a look at the prodding question. Veta grabbed one of the multiple pill bottles off her desk and rattled them at Ash. "I'm running on twenty percent brain right now."
"Well no wonder your hair looks so bad."
In the end, she lost. Ash was an unending force that she didn't have the wherewithal to fight, and she could only deny reality for so long. Ash scrunched his face in concentration as he parted her hair and combed through it, and while she hated being doted on, she found his earnest effort to help out endearing.
She did insist on walking by herself, though. The hallways and bulkheads were enough support to get her to the mess hall, though that didn't stop Ash from hovering around her like a frantic bird. The smell of coffee emboldened her to keep moving forward, and they managed to get to the cafeteria in relatively good time.
They found Blue Team and the other Gammas all there. They'd commandeered a few tables and shoved them together, and they were all seated around their set-up when Ash and Veta walked through the door.
Olivia and Mark gave her concerned frowns that she ignored. Linda was picking her nails, and Kelly was attempting to steal a cracker from Olivia's plate while looking like she was reading something instead. Fred was frowning at a holopad, and looked up at them through his lashes. He raised a brow at Ash and tapped at his wrist.
"The nurses abandoned Mom in her room and I had to help her with her hair. And stuff," he added, as if the first reason was not sufficient alone to explain their tardiness.
Fred's eyes flicked to her and a small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. She hadn't seen him since he'd left the medbay a few days beforehand, and she was just as ready to pretend nothing had happened as he apparently was. "Is something funny, Lieutenant?" she asked. Her hair did not look that bad.
"No," he said, and pointed to some free chairs. "Good to see you're doing better. I'd like to get a move on with these revisions, though, so please."
"They're fine," Kelly cut in, munching on the cracker she had successfully stolen. "Lopis has already seen the modules you sent her and the Gammas. It's more of the same."
"Osman asked me to review these, so—"
"You mean you asked her if you could," Linda interrupted. He grimaced at her from across the table.
"Anyway," he began again. "Now that the two of you are finally here—"
"Let me get that for you," Mark said, jumping out of his seat to wheel out Veta's chair.
"I can still move," she grumbled, and slumped down in her seat. Mark stood silently behind her, looking upset. She forced her sour look away. "Thank you."
"I got you some food, Mom." Olivia shoved the plate in front of her Veta's way. She looked down at the food and then at Kelly, watching her shove the rest the cracker into her mouth. She did not try to break eye contact.
"Thank you," she said again, looking to Olivia.
"And some coffee."
"That's very—"
"Also a sweater," Olivia added, grabbing it up from the back of her chair. "Because I know the special shirts they give you that slip over your sling are crappy and this one is really baggy—or it'll be baggy on you—so I'll help you into it if you want."
"Okay, guys." She braced her one good hand on the table. "Thanks for all this. I'm fine, though, really."
All three developed identical frowns of skeptical concern. She looked to Fred for help, maybe, or at least for solidarity. He looked torn between annoyance and amusement.
"You've been out of ICU a few days now," Fred said slowly, though he was looking at the Gammas. "And you look more than capable of handling sitting down and eating."
"Forty-eight hours," Ash mumbled under his breath.
"What was that, Petty Officer?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Then sit down," he repeated, this time with steel in his voice.
Her ferrets still hesitated. They fidgeted, clearly unsettled by their own delay in following an order. But they didn't move to sit.
"Maybe you didn't say the magic word," Veta whispered to Fred. He looked at Linda and Kelly, then back to the Gammas.
"Am I not making myself clear?"
"Mom was almost dead like two days ago," Ash finally offered. "And now we're going over homework."
"Not homework—"
"I'm just saying, it's fast for someone like—who's not a Spartan," he corrected himself, seeing her narrow her eyes. "And you don't even seem concerned."
"I was and am," Fred replied. "And we've had this—"
"Boy, were you," Kelly muttered, and he cut a hard glare at her.
"And we've had this discussion already," he repeated. "The Inspector is clearly fine. Your duties do not stop when a team member is injured. Our priority is making sure your training is going well, and I'm facilitating this review. The longer you stall, the longer Lopis has to be out of bed."
The Gammas all slipped back down into their seats without another word. She caught Fred's eye and shot him a smile, which he returned with a twitch of his mouth.
"You've finished your homework, I see," she said.
"The numbers have all been properly fudged," he replied, his eyes twinkling. "Now let's review their training curriculum, hm?"
She gestured with her good hand and grabbed the coffee Olivia had passed her. "Lead the way, Lieutenant."