Placement Test
A Spartan's Graveyard
Lieutenant Singer, a Spartan and officer of the UNSC stood among pebbles. People were not pebbles, Spartans were not rocks– he stood among tombstones. There were shiny, marble slabs and geometric, square boxes made of stone. Some were adorned with crosses, some with purple hearts, and some with nothing at all– a symbol to indicate that the body was never identified. All had numbers, somehow.
He found it uneasy, but he wasn't sure why. It wasn't that his commanding officer, General Ashley was dead, was it? No, he'd become complacent on the topic of death.
He expected to either lose himself, or all he'd known eventually. He kept replaying it in his mind–reliving what it was like to lose his fellow Spartans.
He tried to remember, but couldn't think of how Aaron Ashley became a General, maybe that was what made the situation uneasy. General Ashley had at least two stars, without passing a day beyond the age of thirty.
Which was, theoretically, impossible.
But that didn't bother Lieutenant Singer, either.
General Ashley wasn't the first from the team they'd lost, either, so that wasn't what the bother really was.
He wrung his hands together and stared at them– pale, white, dirty pink fingernails– untrimmed and unkempt. His knuckles were worn raw, and a blue vein crawled up his wrist like a deviant, hungry spider. He hated seeing his veins, it looked more like a visible weakness than anything else he had– a bigger weakness than the glassy, lifeless look he had from looking at tombstones.
It wasn't a weakness, because he was always on alert since General Ashley's death, and glassed irises would never change that. Was it a fear? Or maybe that's why he was uneasy.
He heard footsteps behind him and looked up from his hands, and behind him was Private Stephanie Jonah, the other remaining member of the team he used to be on. He turned back to the tombstone without really looking at her. He already knew who she was and what she looked like; the only surprise could be what she could possibly muster up to say when he knew they should both be speechless.
"Hey," she nodded. Her hair didn't move with her, what was left of it was pulled tightly into a bun on the right side. Her left side was shaved to treat a scar that stretched from above her frontal lobe to the bottom of her cheek. It didn't fracture her skull or take her eye, which still would've been luckier than the rest of their company.
When they started they had four Spartans, six marines, and a plethora of available tech. All of it proved useless, their mission failed, and Doctor Halsey congratulated them anyways. Maybe that was what bothered Lieutenant Singer, how she'd been so nice and warm-hearted– it was like some evil twin replaced her. That was his assumption, anyways, when his previous thoughts of Halsey involved her being cold to those who weren't Spartan II's. He wasn't sure how she treated Spartan IIs, but he was sure it was better than how she acted to everyone else.
Maybe she felt goddamn sorry for them since they'd failed so miserably.
Something else seemed off, though, but he couldn't put his cold, dead–esque hands on it just yet.
Private Jonah tried to connect again, since he'd ignored her the first time. "I'm sure they're in some better place somewhere, the lucky bastards," She kept her eyes cast down, almost worse than his, also glassy. Her first team as a Spartan was all gone so quickly.
She didn't know that Lieutenant Singer was still new to it, too, considerably. He knew there were so many who'd seen worse, but he wasn't sure how to handle this one. He couldn't have saved anyone else, but he could've saved the General. If he'd just realized sooner that he'd have to pick up slack, if he would've taken initiative– this is what he told himself over and over again.
"They say that…" Private Jonah tried one last time to talk, it was her last attempt before, she decided, she'd just walk away and leave her Lieutenant alone to watch the shadows sneak over the stones in the evening. "They say that Spartans never die, and when one does, they just report it MIA– that's what I've heard," She swallowed a lump in her throat, feeling almost light headed– maybe it was the scar.
He looked up from his hands, from rubbing his knuckles raw, from his veins and his fingernails and his every detail that he could imagine taking a different action. He looked up and became sucked into the thought of the tombstones– each different shape and style that somehow still lined up perfectly into the squares and shape of the graveyard. All evenly aligned, in a perfect square, even with the different sizes and shapes, each had the same space. Each had a number. He looked down at the General's epitaph, his Spartan tag at the top in engraved numbers– numbers, they all had numbers.
They don't report Spartans dead.
They don't hold funerals.
They don't bury bodies.
His uneasiness rose with his gaze, and looking to the fading sun, he was finally able to see what was wrong.