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On her tray sat a third of a normal meal. It was the eighth consecutive one they'd been subjected to, and by now she was feeling the ache. All of them were, and no one handled it less gracefully than John.
He sat across from her at the too-small mess table, shaking his head at his measly portion of potatoes. His thumb worried the knuckle of his index finger. He was going to develop a callus, she'd told him. They were all going to become potassium deficient, so what did it matter, he'd replied.
He noticed her staring and looked up. His glare came in through dark blonde eyelashes, so easily bleached by a few hour's exposure to sunlight, but his ire waned when he caught her smiling. A sharp breath blew from his nose instead.
She made a fist of the hand in front of her and tapped her open palm to it. I didn't say anything.
He shifted in his seat as his jaw tightened. You didn't need to.
He was right. They didn't need to say anything. Twenty-four years into the war meant any small-time officer with a lick of power could handwave special accommodations under the guise of preserving their rations for permanent servicemen. A single team from NavSpecWar with temporary berthings in between deployments, blacked out records and a novel's worth of accessibility forms made most planetside bases cringe. And that was before they figured out they were Spartans.
But a few thousand calories weren't enough to start an administrative war over, and she didn't want to give the LTC the satisfaction of confirming his assumptions that they were the unstable, expensive hassles about which he'd been warned. Or worse, snitches. She just needed to convince John there was another way to win.
She wrapped the table with her knuckles and slid up out of her seat. The tops of her thighs tingled as the feeling returned to them now that the chow table support bar wasn't digging into them. She pushed her tray towards Fred and Linda for them to pick at, waving away their confused frowns. "Going for a run. Too small and stuffy in here. Come," she tossed in John's direction. Torn between the need to eat what little he had and the desire to follow her, his decision took him a few moments.
Kelly got as far as the east barracks when he finally caught up to her. Their previous deployment had gone on for months, and it was almost bizarre to seem him out of armour now. She knew the loose off-duty sweats they all wore made him look thinner than usual, and she told herself the tightness to his skin was a combination of rare exposure to sunlight and psychosomatic anxiety. They knew how to be hungry, and they'd dealt with far worse deprivation for far longer. However, he was certainly being dramatic enough about it to almost warrant such extreme homeostatic changes in so short a time, she mused.
"Storehouse is in the opposite direction," he said as he fell into step beside her.
She rolled her eyes. "Forest's this way."
"Not in the mood for grass."
"Not in the mood for stealing."
His snort suggested that was open for debate, but she knew he wasn't serious. Or much, anyway.
Kelly made one small detour to their quarters to switch out her shoes and grab her knife. About the only thing the base in Indigo Loop had been able to properly supply them with was personnel gear, and that was only because Blue Team had arrived with a modest provisions drop that included custom kits. She suspected it had been more of a bribe to house four resource-intensive naval personnel on an army base than a gesture of genuine goodwill, but regardless of the motivation, the result was the same. This late into the war meant everyone was short on everything, and she wouldn't turn her nose up at proper boots, even extortionist ones.
John watched her only for a moment before catching on and doing the same. Their hiking boots weren't the familiar, sleek-black squid-slippers worn on naval vessels; New Carthage was an obnoxiously jungled planet, and the thick rubber teeth fused to the soles were a testament to that. She flicked a finger at the hard heel and felt her nail sting pleasingly in response.
Her knife was slipped into the armpit pocket beneath a small pack she slung over her shoulder. John stopped behind her to shove a few bottles of water inside before zipping it back up. His own knife found a home in his sweat pant's pocket, unconcerning but handy if needed.
"It's going to rain," he told her, frowning down at his watch as they stepped outside. She shrugged her response.
"Makes hunting more interesting," she said, and his mouth pulled into a grin as he realised the intent of their trip.
She set a quick pace for them both, following the regular ruck trails the infantry ran around Indi-Loo. The path was only wide enough for one person, so she let John take up the rear.
Kelly sent him a small data packet from her watch as they jogged on. Linda had managed to squirrel out some information on the fauna surrounding the base and had given it up for a portion of Kelly's green beans yesterday. That intel was supposed to be shared base-wide with all personnel, visiting or otherwise, and the LTC didn't have the excuse of limited rations this time.
It wasn't something she bothered herself to get angry about, though. If that was how Colonel Yerman managed to feel tall standing next to a Spartan, she'd happily ignore the step-stool. Blue Team didn't need any handouts, especially not from pudgy officers whose only contact with the frontline was through debriefing feeds. Maybe on their last day she'd ask him if he was concerned about the new plasma-spring on Covenant carbines to see how quickly he told her Army R&D was already investigating that new development she definitely hadn't just made up.
As she day-dreamt about making a fool of fool-worthy officers, her autopilot had taken them to a fork in the path. She slowed to a walk and then stopped, resting at the beginning of the southern tine. Kelly turned to look at John and waved a hand at the dirt. Thoughts?
He held his breath and listened. Only a light breeze disturbed the dense tangle of overhead leaves, and the canopy was so thick that she'd mistake it for late evening if she didn't have her watch on her. The slight wind was still enough to stir up a cacophony above them, and the other sounds of the forest were so foreign as to be nonsensical to her, even with Linda's handy welcome package. She didn't bother to look at the motion tracker at her wrist; everything moved in here. Even the creaking of the trees sounded alien. She decided she didn't like New Carthage, though it had done nothing to deserve her disgust except to be another strange place inhabited by petty, uncaring people. Her eyes found John's and saw he felt the same. His smile dulled her distaste, and the lines around his eyes softened when she returned the expression.
After a long two minutes of taking in the atmosphere and hearing nothing of value, he gave up listening and simply reached into the neck of his sweater.
"Heads for south," she announced, tamping her foot into the narrow path beneath her. His hand emerged with his old American quarter between his fingers. He unhooked the quarter from his tag chain and it twirled into the air with a deft flick of his thumb. It dropped back into his palm and he turned it over in his hand.
He grinned and looked up. "Lead the way."
Two kilometres into their ruck, the trail tapered off into the open jungle. Dirt became rotting leaves and fungus, and that was when they slowed down to listen again.
Screeches and squawks and wails were a constant din, so loud that even if they broke into a heavy sprint the sound of their feet would be drowned out by the forest. It was good cover, but it made focusing on any one specific noise a chore. John stepped out from behind her to weave between the thin, dense trees, a slight frown at his brow. Her focus on finding a meal slid into her periphery as she watched him instead, head cocked and eyes bright and alert for the promise of food. Memories of hunting across Big Horn and Emerald Cove came unbidden, but she let them be. The nostalgia was wistful for once, not painful. The tangled flora of Indi-Loo might be some random locale they had no particular attachment to, but their task was no world-saver, and the relaxed hunch of John's shoulders reflected that respite from responsibility, however brief. Purple-wood oak and thick opalescent leaves were not the quiet, ancient pines of Reach, but they would do for now. Home was not such a stationary affair as to be unreachable in these wilds, and she was in no place to play a discriminating beggar anyway.
The sound of sharp tongue click, a perfect mimic of a comm microphone popping as it opened, disrupted her thoughts. John was now crouched, not standing, his head cocked behind his shoulder to signal her, and she mirrored his movements as he wove toward a target she'd been too distracted to notice. Kelly smiled as she followed. Today was simple. She need to focus on today. There would be time for thoughts of tomorrow and yesterday later.
His pocket had been relieved of his knife, now held with a measured grip in his right hand. She readied her own, and caught on to the hunt quickly; a flightless bird-like thing that had been making a horrific racket was the focus of two hungry Spartans. It was making a mess in the dirt, flashing feathers and fins about in a ridiculous display. Squat and fat and in the throes of heat, the bird was determined to craft a reality in where it was much larger, much brighter, in the hopes of attracting the attention of discerning peers.
"Yerman-bird," she whispered to John. His knuckles whitened on the grip of his knife, at first scared it would run at the sound of her voice, but it was too caught up in its own festivities to notice them. His shoulders shook with silent laughter, and then his left hand flicked off into the brush. She stepped around the yerman-bird's patch of mud and feathers to flank it, circling behind its field of view. Its prey-oriented eyes were large and clammy in the jungle heat, and she was surprised by its apparent apathy at their presence. Unless it was that stupid. For the sake of its new namesake, she hoped that was the case.
She couldn't see John from her position, but she knew he would be close, where the animal's head was pointing—its most likely direction to flee should she not be fast enough to bring it down in a single lunge. Hah. The muscles in her calves twitched from the hike, warm and eager, and she exploded out from between the trees the moment she cleared its field of view.
The bird finally stopped screeching and scratching at the ground to instead wail at her approach, but its terror was only audible for a moment before her knife slid into its thick throat and it sunk into the ground with her on top of it. The jungle swelled to answer back its death knell with panicked and seemingly infinite squawks, but all she cared to listen to was John laughing triumphantly in the nearby brush.
The jungle's boundaries were carefully policed by pockets of thick reeds that seemed to spring up at random in small fields. In the middle of a clearing they'd found sat a large pond, its top filmy and orange with algae and smelling of petrochur and rotten eggs. Her head tipped up to the sky, now visible in the open field, and found clouds gathering above them.
"Might just want to head back," John said, surveying their surroundings with disapproval. The grass was so thick as to be unnavigable without a sizeable machete—or Mjolnir.
"You're being impatient. And we can't start a campfire cookout on base."
She didn't catch his indignant murmuring with all the rustling going on around them. Kelly was just as eager to dig into the dead bird hanging from her pack as he was; she just kept that to herself. Smiling, she pulled up the topography of the area on her watch. Much of it was thick jungle, only broken up by those strange sulphur ponds and the odd paved road leading back to base. They could sit in the forest and cook there, but the danger of starting an undergrowth fire, however minor, was not a risk she wanted to take.
Rain drops smeared across her watch's screen. John's eyes bored holes in the side of her head, but she ignored him. "Southwest, only a few clicks," she reported. "Cave system."
He made a grunt of approval that sounded dangerously like the huff of a curmudgeonly old man and ducked back into the trees without another word. Kelly rolled her eyes and followed. John made an obvious path through the leaves and grass as he forged ahead, no longer concerned with being either quiet or careful.
"You are insufferable when you're hungry," she said, smiling. His knife had returned to his pocket now, his hands free to wave away branches.
His response was another old-man grunt.
Their walk to the caves was spent in amicable silence, despite John's earlier gruffness. The rain quickly grew heavier, managing to slip through the thick tangle of leaves overhead more and more often. The distant rumble of thunder was what worried her more. Lightning hadn't yet made an appearance, but she couldn't be certain when the sky wasn't visible. It was a struggle to remember the last time they'd been on solid ground and not been in Mjolnir, which usually negated the danger of nearly any weather event short of CAT5 wind storms. But she remembered the ferocity of the thunderstorms on Reach they endured while scavenging in the pines, and was not in a hurry to be caught in one again.
They came across more patches of open field with those bizarre sulphur-algae ponds on their way to the cave. Mostly the only thing of note was how horrible they smelled, but John slowed to a stop to peer between the trees at something, and she put a hand on his shoulder as she stopped beside him to look.
She frowned after a moment, see only reeds. Her index finger tapped his shoulder, and he indicated a large insect hovering over the pond. It looked like a dragonfly, its slender body a brilliant blue.
"Don't tell me you want to catch that too," she said, only half-serious. He gave her a sly look out of the corner of his eye.
"No," he replied slowly. "But it reminded me of you. You hair," he added, his eyes flicking up to her head. "Before they cut it. Same colour."
She ran a hand through it at the mention. It was much longer than it had been on Reach, long enough to be tied back into a tight bun that sat at the base of her skull. She'd been allowed to grow it out when they'd all graduated—provided she kept it her natural colour. She hadn't thought about hair dye in a long time.
Kelly felt her mouth pull into a smile and knocked her shoulder with his. "Come on then," she whispered, though she wasn't sure why she was being quiet. Perhaps for the dragonfly's benefit. "Let's go eat."
When they finally came upon the cave, lightning cracked in the sky and made the hair on her neck stand on end. The air had taken on an almost a waxy quality to it, and the inside of her mouth was unpleasantly filmy. She resisted the urge to spit and rolled to her knees to inspect the mouth of the cave. It dug down into the earth and then sloped back upwards into darkness. The spongy, pocked texture of the rock looked like a bizarre kind of limestone, but she decided to save her analysis on the geological makeup of their hideaway until they were both safely inside.
She looked back at John, and he gave a nod, so she pushed inside. It was a tight squeeze. Water collected in the slope of the opening, soaking her pants and palms with muddy rain. She had to unsling her pack and pull it behind her to fit. A few decent kicks against the wall were needed to push herself inside, but she managed to shove her way in after a moment of struggling.
It wasn't totally dark inside, as she'd originally thought. The limestone opened overhead as a thin, continuous crack that ran above their heads, but the rock caught the rain and it trickled down the walls to settle in divots on the ground. The cave itself only went as high as her shoulders, but she didn't see anything inside besides some bugs and a few small rodents that found homes in much smaller openings.
John cleared his throat behind her and she turned to look down at him. He'd gotten his head and one arm through, but his shoulders were wider than hers. He reached a hand up in a plea for help, and she grabbed a hold with a grin to help him wriggle through.
It took some maneuvering. The limestone was chalky and brittle, which made widening the hole fairly simple, but by the time John had scraped his way through the opening he was covered in mud and yellow silica. He let out a short, sharp cough as he stood up, let his head press against the wall of the cave, and frowned.
"I suppose it'll do," he said, brushing off his hands and then reaching for her pack. Their kill was a little worse for wear from their spelunking, and he gave it a good shake to slough off the water and mud on its feathers.
While John attended to the bird, Kelly cleared the centre of the cave floor and started a small fire. The one-strike matches most marines used to light cigarettes also made for good fire-starters, and the kindling kit she'd brought along was more than enough to stoke a small campfire. The open seam in the rock overhead provided decent ventilation, and the small waterproof tarp she laid out for sitting on almost made the cave cozy.
"Yerman-bird," John murmured to himself amusedly as he skinned the animal. He looked up to give her a grin before focusing back down at his work, and she grinned back. It hadn't been a question, exactly, but she answered it anyway.
"I'm hoping it'll catch on," she replied, putting the matches back in their pack. A slight shiver ran through her. Both of their sweaters were damp and splotched with mud, and the air inside the cave was cool. Kelly held out her hands to the fire. "Can't remember when we last did something like this."
"Typhos," John said, making a discard pile for the bird's skin and entrails. "Near the southern pole."
"Right. Will and Linda went seal-hunting."
"And got frostbite," he muttered, his tone turning paternal. She smiled again.
"Well, it's much ni—" Thunder boomed overhead, loud enough that they both looked up to watch the sky light up with the lightning that followed through the crack in the cave. "Ah, well, it's less cold."
They ate and spoke nothing more of the weather. The meat was warm and rich, if a bit chewy, but it was a stick-to-her-ribs kind of meal that warmed her up more than the fire did. Conversation ground to a complete halt the moment the meat looked cooked enough to be safe, and John packed away an exact half of the bird. She felt a little guilty afterwards, thinking of the mealy vegetables and cardboard crackers the rest of Blue Team was suffering through back at base. Maybe they'd come out hunting again tomorrow and make a day of it. She smiled at the thought.
"Good hunting," John said, his shoulders drooping from the effort of finally eating a full meal. The walls were wet with rainwater and made good places to wipe their hands clean, so she followed his lead and then dried her palms on her pants.
"Very good," she agreed. He'd come around to her side of the fire while the food had been cooking. His cheeks were pink from exposure to the sun and rain, and his hair had taken on a light strawberry. Kelly ran her hand over the cave wall again, and when it came away damp, she wiped at the chalky dust that was smeared across his cheek.
He started at the touch, and she soothed him with a pat to his arm. "Hold still," she said, flicking some dust off his nose. He wrinkled his face in protest, and she smeared her wet hand across it in response.
"Ugh!" He dove out of her reach, but she was faster, and followed him as he lunged to the cave floor. On top of him now, she wiped more water over his face.
"That's not—my face is clean!"
"It isn't!"
Halfway between a laugh and groan, he pinned her arm and rolled so that she was under him, then held her there on the tarp. In the small space, their laughter and breathing echoed off the cave walls and mingled with the constant drip of rain.
She smirked up at him, not bothering to struggle out of his grip—mostly because she quite liked this arrangement. "There," she breathed instead, a stray laugh escaping her. "All clean."
"Is it?" He rubbed his face into hers, his skin damp, and she protested just as loudly as he had. He promptly ended her grumbling with a kiss. She did struggle from his grip then, but only to throw an arm over his neck.
"The storm'll be a few hours yet," he whispered, his mouth moving up to her nose.
"Mmm," she hummed. Between his body heat, the fire, and the warm meal, she felt her eyes begin to droop. Now she had to make the difficult decision between either kissing him some more or falling asleep underneath John's warm body.
He made the decision for her and pressed another kiss to her mouth. She hummed again in agreement and arched up into him. He tasted like that obnoxious bird they'd eaten, but his skin smelled wind-beaten and warm, and it made her heart clench. So much of their time spent alone, sparse as it had been, was usually spent on starships with recycled oxygen and dry, dusty air. She'd gladly take now—covered in mud and sweat and rain—over any pristine cot they'd ever shared on a naval ship.
Another wave of thunder made them break apart. It boomed loud enough to shake the earth, and she grabbed a hold of him on reflex.
"Just thunder," he murmured. His hand brushed her cheek with reassuring fingers.
She nodded. "Just thunder."
His forehead pressed into hers. He didn't move to kiss her again, and she didn't let go of him. Instead she sighed deeply and felt him sink further against her. The rain took up the silence left after the thunder, trickling faintly around them. No, no private cot could outdo this.
"It's time for a nap, I think," she whispered, not wanting to disturb the quiet around them.
It was John's turn to hum in agreement. He sagged further into her, his full weight now resting on her.
"Not on top of me though."
"Maybe," he mumbled, sounding like he was already half asleep. She wrapped her arms around his back and rolled them onto their sides. He went limp and became difficult to manoeuvre on purpose, no doubt revenge for her earlier prank.
In spite of his deliberate unhelpfulness, she got them properly settled on the tarp. The only downside of John not lying directly on top of her was that she had less contact with his body heat, so she pressed her back up against his chest to compensate. A thick arm wrapped around her waist and wormed its way up under her shirt in its usual resting place, cupping one of her breasts. She shivered at the cool touch of his fingers but had no intentions of complaining.
His face pressed into her hair and he tightened his arm around her. "Good hunt," he murmured. She didn't remind him that he'd said that already. The fire sizzled beside them, catching stray rain drops that weren't diverted by the cave's walls.
"It was. We'll have to do it again with the rest of us tomorrow."
Suddenly aware that he'd be hungry again within several hours and presented with the same problem they'd come out here to solve, his next words were said with a discernible frown. "Right."
"More Yerman-birds."
"Wouldn't hunt anything else."
John quieted then, and let out a deep breath. She wriggled her own hand under her sweater to find his, lacing their loose fingers together. She relaxed back into him and listened to his breathing as it slowly evened out. They had four more days on this planet, and if this is how they were going to spend the rest of them, she'd happily revise her earlier opinion of New Carthage.