7: PEEK-A-BOO

October 28, 2559

Marines were pretty much everywhere. Most of them looked like they hadn't had a decent moment of rest – or a bath – in almost a month. A month, specifically, of rolling in dust, grime, blood and sweat, not to mention other things found randomly lying around in a shelled-out city like this one. Some buildings were flattened, heaps of rubble with structural support bones sticking into the air. Some had some walls still up, but these usually never soared any higher than a little into the second story level. Mostly they were about six to ten feet high, and capped off at the top with ragged, bomb-shelled imitations of crenellations.

But the haggard, ragged conditions were hardly what was on his mind; sitting on the edge of the bunk with his helmet in his hands, Chief Petty Officer Spartan Flint 093 was staring at the reflection of his own face in the golden visor. He knew he'd seen the face somewhere else that day, but that wasn't why Spartan Tori 138 had had to drag him back from the fray.

He hadn't felt phantom pain without cause in forever. Hadn't looked into the eyes of his own face in about as long. Tori didn't know, or she hadn't mentioned if she did.

This mission was about to get majorly complicated… because those eyes had looked back. There was a certain instinct in every living being that could tell when another being knew something. Knew a communal thought. And Flint knew there had been a communal thought happen just then.

He'd felt it when the Marine took a spike through the middle of his back… had felt him pull on it. Had felt the medic yank it out, and fill that ragged hole with biofoam. Stepping over from the corridor, Tori ducked through the doorway, turned, and sat down next to him.

"Hey." She greeted.

"Hey."

Tori heaved a sigh. "You're not usually this quiet."

Flint just shrugged.

"What happened back there, Flint?" She pressed, sounding agitated. "You had me thinking you were hit. I thought you'd been broken in half, the way you doubled up. What was going on? Your armor isn't even scratched."

He heaved a sigh. "It wasn't me."

"Oh yes it was." Tori argued. "You did, I watched you. You doubled up like you'd been hit."

Lifting his head, he looked at her, meeting her gaze. Her large, liquid brown eyes met his round gray ones, and her arched eyebrows rose across her chocolate forehead.

"Is there something you left out of that admission, Flint?" She asked, softer.

"Yes." He briefly considered filling in the blanks, but there was too much time between the last time and this time. Understanding, at such a point as he knew he'd reached, could never be easily achieved. "I don't like the mission."

Then she really frowned at him. "Flint… we've blown through missions like these before. They're easy. Just break the line, let the Marines take over, and we're off." She started to shrug, but stopped shy of completing the motion. Dropping her Mjolnir-clad arms into her lap, she cocked her head at him and sighed. "Flint… come on, tell me the truth. What happened?"

When he didn't answer immediately, instead looking back down at his visor, she slid a hand up his arm, until she had it slung across his shoulders, her head tucked against his.

"I'm concerned, okay? I can say that." Tori said. "Can you say what I want to hear you say?"

He smirked.

"What happened? What do you mean that it 'wasn't you'?" She pressed.

Flint sighed. "I… felt him."

Tori tipped her head against his, leaning away far enough to look at his face without it being too close to focus on. He partly turned his head, to look back. "Felt who?"

"Frank."

.

October 30, 2558

By dusk, the Brutes had been run back somewhat, back enough that there was a quiet night for the first time all month. It really was a marvel what one – or two – Spartans could do, given time and room to work. Together, that duo that had come in the back entrance of the bunker cleaned out nearly the whole frontage, hinting at aggression towards the east for nearly a mile. As a result, the Brutes had pulled back to rethink their position.

One thing Spartans always did, though, was leave a wake of destruction in collateral damage – meaning the city – almost as wide as their sloop was long. Still, it had only taken them a day to get it done, and while it was only one battlefield, it was a start. It was, after all, only one day after their arrival. The lull gave the Marines time to lick their wounds and get some rest, and Frank had already gotten surgical attention. With his innards put back together and the hole through his skin patched closed, he felt better.

But he had questions, and there was only one person – or two, who knew? – that could answer them. Maybe ONI would howl at him for talking to a Spartan, but he knew he had to find out the truth. He had to know. Had to. So even though he knew that neither Spartan was around, Frank had walked across the mall parking lot to the sloop, and sat down against the forward strut holding under the nose of the craft. The strut itself was nearly as big around as he was, so it made a good lean-to to sit against. And the sloop – about the size of a small apartment building on the exterior – was nice and broad, so it made a dandy shade from the otherwise searing summer sun. Fargo was a little like Eridanus I in that respect – on All Hallows Eve, it was still feeling like an Earth-August.

Until it opened, there was really no telling just where the sloop's hatch was, so he figured he could wait until the Spartans came back and found him before he tried something as rash as going inside.

He dozed off sitting there, unable to tell if the Spartans were planning to run night ops, but even though he felt hungry before he felt tired enough to nod off, he didn't feel it enough to make him move and risk missing their return. He was still there, his chin on his chest, when the duo returned.

Tori pulled out the remote control pad and had keyed open the hatch before she even noticed Flint had stopped walking a few paces back. She turned to look back at him, but paused halfway when she spied the snoozing Marine tucked against the front strut.

"Oh, for goodness sakes." She grumbled, sparing the moment to tuck away the control unit and smear the Brute blood on her breastplate some more. "Those guys will sleep anywhere."

"Yeah." Flint answered, sounding distant. Looking back at her, he gestured at her to make her start walking again, but when she did, he only followed her a few strides before pausing again, and looking back over. "They do that…"

Tori disappeared inside the sloop, likely to spend a little while before returning. Having spent most of her life as a scientist in a sterile environment, she would always wash her armor and oil it down practically between shots fired. Flint found it amusing, but only when she didn't hold up his own progress by insisting on doing his armor, too.

Turning from the entrance, he walked across the distance under the ship to the strut under the nose, where he stopped. Doubtless it was the feeling of a half-ton creature stomping up to him that stirred him, but the Marine raised his head, and turned it to look at Flint's knees before tipping back and meeting his gaze.

Flint watched him get to his feet, aware of every single tender twinge he afforded to his middle. Making no personal move, spare to lift his head to follow the Marine with his eyes, Flint considered asking him what he was doing… but he already knew which one he was looking at. There was that communal thought thing again…

Lifting the bucket helmet from his head, the Marine spared a moment to scratch his grimy scalp with his other hand. Then, helmet at his side, he cocked his head at the Spartan. Flint crossed his arms.

"Hell of a greeting." The Marine mentioned, sourly.

"Greeting?" Flint echoed. "You're snoozing on my ship."

"Sure I am." The Marine answered. "Wanted to talk to you."

Flint wanted to rebuke him, wanted to tell him to go away, but ultimately, couldn't. How would he ever justify that? Defeated, he conceded the point; "I figured." The longer he stood there, though, the more he realized that long foggy memory wasn't as warped as time would have made him believe. The Marine stood about six foot four, roughly a little more than a head shorter than Flint. He had broad shoulders, and big arms – chunky in all the same ways. He wore the same round face, high cheekbones and all. He even had the bright golden blonde buzz cut and the same crinkled blue-silver-gray eyes in his head… if he was a little higher up, and there was a glossy sheen, Flint felt confident he'd be staring at a mirror, and not another man.

And despite the mirrored visor over his own face, he thought he already knew the Marine knew just exactly who he was. "Feel like I know you." He was saying, looking as if he were trying to peek through the visor at Flint's face. "From a long time ago."

Flint inhaled, tasted his lips, and – what the hell – uncrossed his arms. "Frank, then?"

Eyebrows bounced up. "Yeah… that's me… how'd you…?" There remained some doubt, then. Some need to verify, to explore. To be certain beyond a hunch.

Flint reached up, hit the catch seals on the throat of his helmet, and when it was loose, he lifted it off his head, taking it down in front rather than to the side to keep the Marine from freaking out before he had it all the way off. The world looked a little different at dusk without the visor tinting it, and the colors came back sharper, the wind evident against the skin of his face almost before the helmet was even off.

Looking at the Marine – at Frank – all he saw was blatant shock. Now the man also saw that same mirror image that Flint did. Taking a breath, he said, "Hello."

Frank stammered over his own tongue for a moment, before his brows met, and he tried a real word. "Wh…? Fuck…"

Flint half-smirked. "All I said was hello."

"Flint?" Frank squeaked, obviously still not over his shock. "It's really you? You're… you…? How did…? Why…? What the hell?" Gathering his wits, he added, "You're a Spartan?" Of course, there had been the implications, forewarnings, supposition and evidence… but how could it actually be true? Frank blinked twice just to be sure he wasn't seeing things.

"I well imagine that I am." Flint mused, tucking the Mjolnir helmet under an elbow. "What are you?"

Frank burst out laughing, but if it was either his last leg of sanity or merely amusement, it was hard to say. When he got a handle on himself, though, he sufficed with a grin only. Extending a hand, but hesitant to touch, he asked, "I watched you… die…" Morose concern etched abruptly through the grin, staining it with pain.

Flint nodded. "I get that a lot."

"I felt you die, Flint… I knew…"

"I am," Flint pointed out, "allowed to mess up once in a while. I'm still just Human."

Frank finally landed the extended hand on a Mjolnir-clad arm. "I felt you come back."

"That part hurt." Flint admitted.

"You never came home, Flint." Frank said, sounding hoarse. "They said that boy was you, they said you were dead. But I knew. I knew, and I was right… you're standing there… you're still alive, Flint. Why didn't you ever come back? Why didn't… you didn't write, or call… I was looking for you." The last came out like a bitter accusation, and it even twisted his grizzled expression.

Flint shook his head. "I work for ONI, Frank. Never going home is part of the job description. They made me a Spartan. I am the forefront of every war, every battle, and I will be until the day I don't come back from the dead."

Frank's face twisted again, this time more so. "You…" his voice failed for a moment, before he cleared his throat out and tried again. Defeat was clear in his voice this time, though, making evident that he'd changed what he was saying mid-sentence. "… got awful tall."

Flint smirked at him, earning an identical one in reply. "We all did."

Frank closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to waver. When Flint reached out to steady him, well knowing he really ought not be on his feet so soon after taking a stomach wound, he toppled directly into the Spartan, leaning his down-tipped head on the Mjolnir armor plating there. At a bit of a loss, Flint rested his free hand on his brother's shoulders.

"I remembered you, Frank."

"I know." Frank mumbled. "Saw you every mirror."

"I imagine I don't have much of a story to tell, do I?" Flint asked. "Seeing as how all you lack are the visual and audio?"

"Not all of the audio." Frank sighed, straightening and lifting his head to look back up. "Every time you got hit, I filled in the blanks for you."

Flint's smirk returned. "I'm sure you did."

"Can I ask, though…? What the hell was April to September of twenty five fifty eight?" Frank asked, sounding as though he had no fond memories of the date mentioned.

Flint frowned, thinking back, trying to place events around the date. Finally, he was about to shrug when he remembered at last – and his brows rose a little before he pulled his mouth out into a thin, flat line. "Oh, that."

"I thought I was going to die…" Frank grumbled. "They kept thinking I had this, or that, or the other… but I was clean. I knew it had to be you. What the hell did you get into? Do you know how hard it is to keep a good meal in a body when all you can feel is overwhelming nausea?"

Flint grimaced, but he did half-grin, too. "I, uh… that one's particularly embarrassing…"

"What did you do?" Frank demanded.

"Flood infection… minor… mostly… I lived."

Frank gagged at him, pushing away almost too fast, causing Flint to reach out and catch him again to keep him from dumping himself onto his ass. "Flood?"

Flint cast him a concerned look. "Are you sure you want to be getting excited in your condition?" There was an after-sound at the end of the sentence that made Frank wonder if he'd almost added "sir" on the end. Not unusual, but possibly omitted for a reason.

Frank grimaced, before lifting Flint's hand off his shoulder with both of his own. "I'm pretty sure you know just exactly what this momma feels like, so yes. I'm fine." The last two words came out through his teeth, though, causing the Spartan to roll his eyes.

"I do believe that I tuned you out because I was trained to tune me out, Frank. You, on the other hand, aren't quite so prepared." Flint told him.

Frank leaned bodily against the sloop's strut, then, and exhaled tiredly. "Flint… what were you doing… when you were… fourteen?"

Flint grimaced. "I'm not going to tell you." He looked away.

"Flint." Frank begged.

He looked back, but shook his head resolutely. "No."

"Why not? What could you possibly be expected to accomplish, at fourteen? You were… we were… just kids. What mission was that one?"

Flint shook his head again, his jaw tightly clenched.

Frank's eyebrows rose just a little. "Okay, hotshot… what about that girlfriend I know you're hiding somewhere?"

Flint groaned, and covered his eyes with a hand. "Good god, Frank."

Frank grinned. "Ha," he said, weakly. "Got you."

.

November 1, 2559

For all the attentive silence of the past forty-one years, Frank James O'Neil still couldn't get much out of his long-missing twin. Flint was, he discovered, still Flint, still plucky and sarcastic, but mainly quiet. There were scars, things witnessed, things performed, things lived through. Quite possibly surviving public execution was among them. If anything, the Spartan II was a little more bottled than the six-year-old boy that had left home and never returned.

Eking words out of him took effort, and sometimes Frank just didn't have the strength to try. Whatever bits of the story were not buried under black files in an ONI base somewhere still had a hard time coming out… and though the silence was still more or less an overwhelming factor between them, Frank got the idea that his augmented brother had one or two things he'd kept even from ONI.

Not surprising. That was another aspect of being Flint.

"Where'd you find her?" Frank asked, one arm wrapped around his middle, the fingers of that hand playing with the tendrils of drooling plasmic fluids weeping from his surgical slice. The wound would heal, but it would do so a lot better if he wasn't stubbornly on his feet all the time, yanking on it by trying to use his gut muscles to walk.

"Asteroid laboratory." The pair had found a flattened chunk of crete to sit on at the peak of a heap of rubble, and were looking out over the low end of the city's ragged remains. Towards the farthest end, the occasional blink of brief light suggested there was a firefight happening out there. The distance dulled the sound until it could barely be heard under the harsh, scraping wind.

"They need Spartans for scientist control?" Frank jibed.

"I guess."

Frank sighed. "I spend forty fucking one years looking for your ass and I can't even get three words out of you."

"I've said more than three words, Frank." Flint told him.

"Not in a string." Frank argued.

"You mentioned someone tried to replace me?" Flint offered, apparently in a bid to make peace.

Frank provided a feral grin, but it was more to hide the pained grimace from the twinge sent up from his spike wound. "Yeah, looked just like us."

"Did he tell you what his name was?"

"Frank."

Flint cast him a look, but said nothing to that.

"At first I thought he was just being hard to live with, but when I got him alone that first night, he kept on insisting… as if I wouldn't know which of us I was." Frank grumped. "I had to sit his ass down and tell him how it was before he backed off."

Looking back at the distant hints of battle, Flint said, "He wasn't lying."

Frank cast him a critical look. "What do you mean?"

"When my boots hit dirt on Reach the first time, I was Frank-057. So the flash-clone they replaced me with was, in exchange, also Frank." Flint said. "They wanted you, Frank. Not me."

Frank sat silent for a long time before finally asking, confused, "I don't understand… why did they take you if they didn't want you?"

"Because I lied to them." Flint said, tapping his armored fingers on the Mjolnir plating on his knees. "I told them I was you." He cast his brother a glance, then, meeting his gaze. "You were supposed to be the Spartan."

"Me?" He looked little better than shell shocked… as if that were the last thing he'd expected to hear. "Wh… why? What made me better than you?"

Flint shrugged. "I never asked that one."

Frank whistled. "Wow. That's a hell of a hitter. How come you never tried to come home, Flint?"

The Spartan's face wrinkled. "I was six."

"You're forty-nine, Flint. More than capable."

"Eridanus I is glass." Flint countered.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't always." Frank stated. "You could have returned before then. You didn't even try, though, did you? Why?"

"You're assuming."

"I'm not wrong." The Master Sergeant stuck a finger up at his twin. "You can't lie about what you were doing, because I was aware of every last twitch, every fistfight, every firefight, everything. I even knew when you crashed your plane."

"Home," Flint answered, softly, "was what I was defending. There was purpose."

"What about me?" Frank begged. "We never did anything separate until that mess happened, and you disappeared."

Flint just shook his head, and set a hand on the helmet he'd perched to his side. "I don't know how to justify it in ways you'd understand, Frank. You're outside the… system. You still value different things."

"Yeah, well." Frank looked back out over the city, pulling his hands down into his lap. It was more to make himself stop messing with his injury than anything else. "So about that shoulder. Was it really bad enough to make you ambidextrous?"

Flint nodded. "Had to, or I couldn't shoot."

"What made you wait so long before you let them fix it?"

He cast Frank a look. "What do you mean? They fixed it as soon as I got back to Human space… November sometime."

Frank shook his head. "I mean when they really fixed it, not when they patched it over for you. Some… what… two? Four months ago?"

"Oh, that." Flint looked away again, then, seeming to brood a little. "That wasn't the UNSC."

"It wasn't?" The comment earned him a look from the Marine, but when he refused to answer right away, Frank pressed. "Well, what did you do? Mine doesn't hurt anymore so yours mustn't, either."

"It's fine." Was all Flint would say.

"You are so very full of secrets, little brother."

"I'm bigger than you, Frank." Flint cast him a wry look.

"I'm older." Frank protested.

"Yeah, by five minutes!"

"Fifteen!"

.

November 5, 2559

"I can't see it."

Marines all around lifted their heads, and looked curiously at the Spartan standing in their midst. Of all the things they expected a typical Spartan to say, that wasn't among the imagined dialogue. For one thing, the "I can't" sort of stood out.

"What do you mean, you can't see it? He's right there." Frank stuck an arm out, pointing, though after about a thousand yards, the breadth of his fingertip could have swallowed whole city blocks, top to bottom. "Second story, fifth window on the right, second building from the crater."

"Yeah, but the scope… I can't make it… arg." Flint dropped the sniper rifle and tugged on the expensive range-finding scope on the top of the gun. "How does this thing come off?"

"Off?" Frank asked, puzzled. "Hey, stop." He reached over, brushed the Spartan's hand away, and dialed out the clamp screws holding the device to the rifle. Once it was loose, he flipped up the lock switch and lifted the scope off and away. "Like that."

Shouldering the weapon once more, Flint lined up a bead, so the Marine stuck his binocular up to his face and found the target in question. Jackals with beam rifles were difficult, but a Brute holed up with one wearing shielding and being more or less immune to everything they had that was outside the Brute's own gun range was more so.

When Frank had dragged up the high-powered sniper rifle with the plasma-display system scope mounted on the top, it seemed the perfect solution. But the gun was a refitted .60, making the recoil a bit too much for a pack of war-weary Marines that had been hunkered down behind MA5B's for so long. Handing the rifle to Flint had been the next logical step – Frank had never seen anyone hold so very unnaturally still for so long until he'd stood there and watched his brother try to find the target through the scope. This time, though, the Spartan took the shot – and then the second shot directly – almost as soon as he'd gotten his binoculars up to his face.

Through them, he saw the Brute first stagger, then when his shielding popped and died, the second round tore out the back of his head and dropped him like a rock. For the distance, a headshot was a bit beyond remarkable. Frank whistled. "Dead on."

"That was better." Flint mentioned, dropping his aim. "Could see him."

Frank looked up again, past his binoculars. "Something wrong with the scope?"

"Oh, no." Flint mused. He tapped a finger against his domed golden visor. "It's the suit. Older model of scope, doesn't synch well with the Mjolnir subsystems, so I have to jimmy the position and sometimes that doesn't work so well." He shrugged. "Scope's probably just fine."

"So you don't technically see through that visor, then?"

"Well, I do." Flint answered. "If the HUD lost power, I could still see out. It would just be… dark. Probably fuzzy." Tucking the overpowered weapon into an elbow, the Spartan scanned the area downrange with what seemed a nonchalant air.

"Or you could just take your helmet off." Frank offered.

"I could." Flint didn't sound willing, though. "Ties into those subsystems, though."

"So if you took the helmet off, your shields would turn off, too?"

"Yup."

Frank blinked. It was the first non-formal word he'd heard his brother utter yet. The significant lack of sir to anyone at all remained, but conversely, he didn't look inclined to make anyone here call him that. It had the Master Sergeant a little puzzled. "Which would be a bad thing?"

"Yup."

Frank couldn't help it; under his bucket helmet, he grinned from ear to ear. Either his twin was warming up to something naughty, or he was deciding it was okay to be friends with his brother again. "You're not too fond of having your shields turned off, are you?"

"I like my suit." Flint answered, nonplussed. "It does its job."

"I like your suit, too, that doesn't mean I get to have one." Frank countered, jokingly.

That comment, though, made the Spartan look at him. "If you tried to wear this armor, Frank, it would rip you apart." He held out a hand, as if to prove a point, and added, "It's an accelerator suit. The only reason it doesn't tear me up is because I was augmented to handle it."

Frank's expression sobered, and he narrowed one eye. "When you were fourteen."

Flint's posture sagged. "Not talking about that, Frank." He looked back downrange, then, and either did spot something or pretended to, but he didn't immediately raise the scopeless rifle. He looked like he might, though.

"Oh, come on." The Master Sergeant complained, resting his elbows on the concrete hump in front of him. They and some six or eight other Marines had come down to the front edge of a counter-push the Brutes had employed, but anyone trying to get any farther down the street had gotten their brains splattered by the Brute Flint had just serviced. "I already know all there is about it, and even when, so what's the big deal? Just don't you go and get boiled by anything else, understand?"

Flint emitted a sound not unlike a cross between a choke and a hiccup. The gold visor turned back to look at him. "Boiled?"

"That's how it felt." Frank admitted, carefully not looking back.

Flint grunted. "I don't recall… was too out of it to really note what anything specifically resembled at the time." Frank saw him give the slightest of shrugs, but that was all.

"And then you had to go and get up… couldn't leave me alone for a second. Think I must have busted Steve's eardrums when you fell over." The Marine grumbled, tucking his binoculars to his face again and roving some uninteresting scenery.

"I didn't fall over."

He looked up, then. "What?"

"I didn't fall over." Flint repeated, now actually sighting down the barrel of his scopeless rifle at something. "I was pushed." Punctuating the elaboration with a shot, he waited for the sound to diminish before adding, "Kelly, think it was… caught me getting up. Tried to stop me. Said it wasn't a good idea."

"Oh?" It was as much voluntary information as Frank had heard yet; he wasn't about to interrupt beyond a prompt.

"Staff came in about that point," he said, aiming again, and this time tracking something over the course of an inch before shooting that, too. "Kelly was all that was holding me up by then, really. Shaking like there was no tomorrow, the both of us. Staff tried to separate us, get us back to our original positions… gave me a push." He lifted the rifle to rest the butt on his hip, the barrel in the air, and then he looked back at Frank. "Over I went."

Frank wasn't sure whether to grin at the terminology, or grimace in sympathy, so he just stood there and stared blankly at the Spartan for what felt a small eternity.

"What?"

"Oh." It was all he could think of to add, though he felt cheap saying it. Some forty years had passed and it seemed neither could think of much to say to the other. It made Frank itch more than anything else.

"Who is Steve, by the way?"

.

November 9, 2559

Viktor Magrasse ducked under the crushed doorway, shimmying past the wrinkled, ruined door itself, to drop onto the floor beyond on his knees. He grimaced, having lost his knee guards a while back to excessive damage, and when he stood up again he dusted his legs off of the clinging bits of broken plascrete.

"Smelly apes." He griped, glancing back. Moving forward, he picked his slung MA5B up and began to trot, cutting a shorter path underneath a pair of large, sprawling malls to make it back to the bunker from the ridge. His SRS had been entirely ruined, nearly split in half, by countering a blow from a twin-bladed spike rifle, so he'd left it behind. The ridge had been lost, and he was really the only one up there anymore, so he'd had to abandon his post and come running back or be killed.

Without radios working worth a damn, it was that or make Frank wonder just what had happened up there, and when. And he'd be forced to send more people to get swarmed and killed just trying to find out. It was better this way.

Out the other end of the maintenance tunnel – a more or less straight line that was tall but not broad and had tubing and pipes running the ceiling overhead – Magrasse climbed out over the tangled, burnt-out remains of what had been a car. He couldn't tell if it was a generic econo-box or if it had been sporty anymore, but it still more or less resembled a mangled car, so he knew what it had been. There was one tire, slagged around the bent wheel, but all the rest of the flammable things were gone.

That was the thing about plasma fire… it would ignite anything at all. Even some low-temperature sensitive metals, like aluminum. Watching aluminum burn away was hard on the eyes, but also fascinating. Magrasse had seen enough non-flammable things scorch into vapor though that he'd lost the ability to marvel at it.

Ducking through a hole in the wall of the old hotel across the cratered street, Magrasse turned around the heap of desk crumbles and dropped nimbly out the mortar hole in the other wall. He landed next to another Marine, but the guy was missing some forty percent of his body and had been laying there for a while. The only thing brave enough to come and get him was bugs, so he looked and smelled pretty bad, but what there was of him had not been scattered or pulled apart yet.

Magrasse clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and pressed on, struggling not to breathe what was doubtless a bubble of nauseating air until he was well past the dead guy. There were quite a few fallen, bug-eaten carcasses in the city, but most of them were not Human. The fighting was so brutal, though, that nobody really had any time or gumption to do anything about them.

Past the carcass, Magrass trotted swiftly up the street toward an intersection where the lights had been blasted away. Here, left would take him around the shelled building in front of the main entrance of the bunker, and straight ahead would take him up the road two more blocks to the second entrance. Since both of these had been picked off and shelled shut already, either direction was fine. But when he went ahead and took the corner in favor of a long straight stretch, he ran right into a Brute patrol that ought not be there.

"Mein gott!" Magrasse squeaked, backpedaling fast and ducking back around the corner again just in time to miss a dozen rounds of plasma and six hot twelve-inch spikes. "Ar, for the radio." He grumbled, tucking his back to the corner and checking his assault rifle to be sure he was ready for this.

"Come out, puny Human!" The Brute called, the sound of the patrol's steps drawing closer a little faster than before. "I just want to talk to you."

"Believe that, heh." Magrasse snorted. He jerked his leading elbow around the corner and half his head, sighted down the barrel already. The first target he found was a Grunt. He splattered it with bullets, then swung to the next one and did the same. Neither had been hit bad enough to die, but it gave them hesitance to rush so boldly forward, and that was mainly all Magrasse needed.

"After him, you worthless whelps!" The Brute protested, as Magrasse tore out from the corner and ran back the way he'd come with every ounce of speed he had to give. At the very first next corner, he swung himself blindly around it and tucked against the wall again, willing to take the risk of probable enemy in favor of taking the risk of known enemy. Magrasse wasn't about to test his luck quite that badly yet. And he would need cover if he was going to take down a Brute, four Grunts and two Jackals. By himself.

When he felt the sounds of their footfalls meant they were close enough but not too close, he flung a grenade around the corner without looking, then ducked into his knees and covered his helmet with both hands.

"Grenade!" The Brute called. When the frag went off, Magrasse was up and running again, hitting the alley's dead-stop corner with a boot and bouncing into the side of the building he'd been against earlier. He reached up and caught the decorative brickwork exterior and pulled upwards with holds barely as deep as his fingerprints.

For a heartbeat, his forward momentum gave him enough upwards momentum that he managed to get high enough to grab the lip of the first mortar hole. From there, he swung free of the corner and hooked a boot into the broken crete and glass wall, and tucked into a roll over the lip to freefall onto the other side just as the patrol made it into the alley.

"He's gone into hiding! Find him!" The sound of the Brute's voice was unmistakably agitated. He wasn't going to let Magrasse go that easily, but Magrasse had a few tricks, too. Here, the detritus had piled in slopes against the walls, so he rolled as soon as he hit until he was nearly in the middle of the building. Shaking the dizziness out of his head, Magrasse picked himself up, and checked his gun again.

He reloaded it, glanced at the wall he'd come over, then began to ascend the slope he'd just rolled down from. At the top, he took a fist-sized chunk of the detritus at his feet, bounced it in his hand for a moment, then flung it at an angle to hit and ricochet from the taller wall of the building he'd just come all the way around from.

When it hit the wall at the top and fell down into the street, Magrasse had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing; "Grenade! Fall back!"

He only had one more frag, and he wasn't going to waste it. But there was nothing here he could really use to his advantage… looking back up at the wall's broken top, he wondered if he could pick them off as they came over the wall. But that entirely depended on them climbing it, like he had.

He was about to make a decision based on the location and circumstances of the moment when he heard something affix to the other side of the wall between himself and the patrol. His brows met, then his mind conjured a good possibility for what that might be, and he jumped from the heap of detritus and ran for it. When he got to the other side of the broken building, where the front wall was entirely gone, Magrasse heard the charges detonate… and then the squeals and guttural screams of the Grunts and Jackals as the pile of detritus swallowed the alley. They hadn't counted on the wall holding up so much junk, and they'd paid for it. Turning around, Magrasse aimed his rifle and waited for the dust to clear.

When the first alien mounted the spread pile of settling detritus, the Marine opened fire, hammering the lone Grunt with half the magazine. At that range with an MA5B, it was necessary. The Grunt dropped onto its face, dead and oozing orange blood from a dozen different holes. But behind it came the shielded and better-armored Brute, and he had one of those switch-back bladed grenade launchers at his hip.

"Stupid Human!" The Brute roared, thrusting the weapon forward. Magrasse ducked and ran for it, sideways, to avoid the raining hail of flak and fire as the launched grenades came down around him.

"Fokking hell!" Magrasse found the shelled front of another building, but couldn't get in through the tangle of rebar, so he kept going. Running across the street, he jumped through a smaller hole punched through a glass front, and scrambled through the shattered glass fragments into the open back, the utter lack of a ceiling or upper story floors making it seem a very exposed place indeed. Grenade fire followed him across the street, then broke out the last of the glass front behind him.

"Come back here, Human scum! You cannot win, and you cannot escape! The Chieftain demands it!"

"What? Chieftain? Uh-uh, not me, not today." Magrasse tucked sideways again, shouldering through what had once been a wooden fence rail in the alley he was now in, but was now so burnt that it was just standing charcoal. It shattered around him, and he dropped straightaway into a crater. "Augh!" he tumbled as his footing disappeared, then splashed down in the bottom in the middle of a huge pool of water. "Ew, gross, eh…" But it wasn't sewer. Just a broken water main… it still had nasty crap floating in it, though, and he sloshed through to the other side quickly, trying not to look too closely at any of it.

The Brute came out the back of the building behind him, and blew the water into the air as he scrambled out of it on the other side. Shrapnel tore chunks from the buildings around him, clods of detritus, crete and dirt from the ground, and sent shattering fragments of the broken walls overhead down on him. What had Magrasse worried was that he could feel the shrapnel itself embedding in the armor on his back, too. As he got to the end where it opened up again, he jerked the grenade off his belt and hooked the pin out of the spoon. He spun around and flung it right at the Brute, then ducked through the new opening into the third street over.

He had to get rid of that tail before he got to the bunker door that still worked, or else the alien'd just report where it was and it would get shelled shut too. He paused at the opening, and turned around to face it, rifle first. There was no way he could hope to win a duel against a grenade launcher with just an assault rifle, but he couldn't get any closer to the bunker without doing something about the Brute. They had enough problems without needing to find somewhere else to hide.

The Brute shouldered through the alley up to the hole, and when Magrasse opened fire, the shielding popping outward broke the hole bigger, and showered both of them in collapsing fragments of the otherwise freestanding wall. The Brute roared, forcing his bulky weapon around in the tight quarters, and fired three consecutive rounds straight at Magrasse.

He dropped back, letting them sail over his head, but he kept firing, now from between his knees. When his magazine was empty, he looked up for a split second, having noticed something up there moving, and when the Brute saw his expression change, he too glanced up.

Neither had time to move before the wall crumbled down atop them.