Winterbirth

A Halo Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet

A/N: Sorry for the delay. Been working on some non-fan fiction projects of late. But I kept thinking about this so I ended up writing out a new chapter in the hallway outside my eye doctor's office. And I wanted to acknowledge a very lovely person who has made some beautiful pieces inspired by Six/Carter and my fic. Netprincess put together a very lovely piece of Six and Carter outside the cave from chapter 18 and I love it. See link below (remove spaces after copy/pasting. And as always, much thanks to my loyal beta-reader, EternalEntity.

netprincess. deviantart art/Halo-Carter-and-Noble-Six-344928741

Twenty-five: Collateral Damage

August 23rd, 2552

The skyscrapers of New Alexandria were still smoldering but Jennifer knew that at least some of them were empty pyres thanks to her efforts. It had been a long day and normally she would have taken pride in her accomplishments, patted her own back, and know that she deserved every word of praise. But New Alexandria was still burning and she was beginning to truly realize that there was nothing she could do to stop the glass.

But you saved the people, said a voice in the corner of her mind that sounded suspiciously akin to that of somebody she used to know. Cities are people, not buildings. And now we fall back, regroup to fight another day. We lose ground but maybe we'll get that other day and maybe we'll win. But we have to live long enough and make sure the people around us live long enough, especially the ones that mean something.

And now she had to face the people that had begun to mean the most. And, for some strange reason, facing them was more nerve-wracking than flying a Falcon across a burning skyline or coming to terms with the inevitable, whatever the inevitable proved to be in the coming days, hours, minutes; could she even approximate how much time was left? How much time was left, for the war, for Noble Team, for herself, for the all-time team leader and the one-time lone wolf to figure out where they stood? But Jennifer was quick to remind herself that she had put a stop to that last speculation that morning and she had every intention of keeping it that way.

That did little to make things any easier when she did see him again.

Jun was surveying the city's destruction when she slipped into the ruins of the once grand Olympic Tower, her helmet braced against her hip, her step so quiet that she was practically tiptoeing through the shattered glass by Spartan standards. A pair of well cared for binoculars braced against the bridge of his nose, Noble Three was looking outward rather than inward, as Jennifer was beginning to wish she could.

"Look at this place," the sniper said quietly, training his gaze –amplified by a helpful set of lens –from target to target. He might have been talking to Kat as she sat fiddling with the interior of a comm unit, the device gutted by her gloved hands, its mechanized innards scattered across the floor. Jennifer couldn't tell if the lieutenant commander was completing a necessary task or busy work to keep herself distracted. Either way, the Spartan could not blame her counterpart. Jennifer could have done with a distraction herself.

Jun continued his narration: "Alexandria used to be the crown jewel. Beautiful place." He lowered his binoculars, rubbing at his eyes. "Look how that turned out." He looked to Jennifer: her arrival an influx his binoculars had not foreseen. Good thing she was a friendly. "Hey," he said by way of greeting. "You made it."

His tone was pleasant, amiable as always; he might well have been greeting her arrival at a backyard barbecue. Emile seemed to pick up on this; a snort of derision echoing from behind the painted skull, the other warrant officer flipped his kukri around in his hand and sliced at a bit of torn cabling with a newly sharpened blade. "It's a regular family reunion."

The offhand statement became the epicenter of a wave of tension that rolled through the atrium; the wreck of crashed Banshee suspended in the cabling and cords above them seemed to tremble even if the members of Noble Team, their reactions programmed with the familiar charade of Spartan stoicism, did not. The focus was quick to shift, however, from Emile's remark to Jennifer herself. She could feel her face warm as though it were targeted by four pairs of lasers; she was half-tempted to double-check and make sure Jun's sniper rifle was still propped up against the windowsill as it had before and there was no actual red light flickering against her bare face.

Perhaps merciful in his intent, Carter moved, breaking the silence with a rustle of armored plates as he joined Jun at the window. Equally mercifully, he said nothing, his mouth a grim line as he observed the devastation through bare eyes. After a moment, Jun turned back to the skyline as well, although his binoculars were already clipped to his belt and Kat turned her attention back to the disassembled comm unit. Emile did not budge, did not back down, and the red eyes of the painted skull soon proved to be more than twice as arresting as being lazed by anyone's scope. But, in truth, Jennifer wasn't sure which induced more guilt: Noble Four's cavalier, offhand remark or the crimson-eyed intensity of his glower. But what could she do?

She raised her hand, uncurled her fingers, and showed him the dogtags in her palm, the chain slipping between her gloved fingers to dance in the fading sunlight. What else could she do? Emile said nothing; the red eyes seemed to trace the raised lettering, the curve of the J and the O and the R, the swoop of the G and the harsh, flat lines of the E followed by the numbers she had committed to memory. Emile was silent still, as were the others: at the window, Jun cast a glance over one shoulder, wordless. Kat remained intent on her work, the minute squeak of the turning of a screw the only sound in the atrium besides the sparking wires above. In contrast, Carter was as still as the statues the Covenant had crumbled across the city; Spartans weathered better than stone monuments against the calamities of a newer age.

After a long moment, Emile reached out with the hand holding the knife, the blade pinched between his gloved fingers –"Don't cut yourself," he had said once before handing the weapon to Kat –and angled the handle against the underside of her outstretched hand, dragging the carved wood against her fingers and pushing the hilt against the knuckles until her hand had closed over the dogtags again.

"Keep 'em," he told her quietly. "He gave them to you." She dropped her closed hand back to her side; he flipped his knife back around, grabbing the handle once more and pointing the blade at his chest. "I'll honor him my own way."

"Get yourself killed that way, Emile," muttered Kat from her seat on the scarred and pocket-marked floor. "If I tell you once, I'll tell you a dozen more times. Stabbing things will end with you getting stabbed."

"Jealous that I'm getting up close and personal with the Covvies?"

There had been a day not too long ago that Kat would have retorted in response, snapped at Emile, listed the number of times he had nearly gotten himself killed just to see the splash of blood on his knife. But the game had changed. The mood had shifted; everything from the tone in Noble Team's respective voices to the sunlight itself seemed to have altered, darkened, as though the imminent change of season on Reach was bleeding into its inhabitants. And sure enough, the shadows had never seemed more obvious on Kat's face as she leaned over her work. For the first time since Jenifer had first met her, the lieutenant commander looked older than her age. She glanced over at Jun and thought for the first time that she could espy wrinkles bisecting his tattoo. Jorge had outdated them all in his forties yet he at the moment of his untimely death would have seemed of an age with this new incarnation of Noble Team.

For his part, Carter looked as worn out as ever as he stood overlooking the city; only Emile with his skull-faced helmet remained seemingly untouched. Or was he? Or was he merely flaunting his inevitable fate, taking the bitterness out of a cold, hard truth by displaying it to the world? For the first time, she –both Jennifer and Six –looked around the room and fully understood that everyone she was looking at would eventually die. It was different than being told in training that they could die; that they were being sent into scenarios where death was probable. The best any of them could make of it would be to choose when, where, and how, and to make it count, if possible, as Jorge had. Her fingers closed more tightly around the dogtags.

"Jorge always said he would never leave Reach," said Jun to the slowly dimming sky as though he had followed Jennifer's train of thought.

Emile snickered, finally turning away from Jennifer and leaping onto a chunk of a collapsed balcony that had fallen to the lower level. Whipping his knife absentmindedly at a clump of dangling wires, he replied, "The big man always was sentimental. Figures his last action would be a damn sentiment."

"His last action was giving his life thinking he'd just saved the planet," Carter cut in, the first thing he had said, the first time she had heard his voice since she had left that mess hall. He turned to look back at the lot of them save Jun at his side. "We all should be so lucky."

"Lucky to die?" she repeated incredulously before she could stop herself. For the first time since she had walked in, Carter looked at her. She looked back, telling him and only him, "Jorge didn't 'give his life' so we could 'be so lucky' as to die."

"Six…"

Jennifer ignored Jun, eyes fixed on her commander. "You make it sound so pretty, Carter, so romantic: 'giving his life.' You make it sound like a damn sentiment. Well, I was there. And it wasn't pretty. It wasn't romantic. He let himself get blown up because he figured he had no choice 'cept to have me come home, mission accomplished. That's not a fucking sentiment and that's not 'giving his life.' So don't hype it up like it is."

"That's enough, lieutenant." She had seen Carter snap before, seen him raise his voice, seen him shout, but this cold disappointment trumped all else. "He died fighting for something. It's a dishonor to his memory to act like he didn't."

He died fighting for something that was already lost, she wanted to tell him. He just didn't know it then. But for some reason she was struck by the fact that such a statement seemed too harsh, too cruel, for this warfront. Carter was still looking at her from across the atrium, his expression half-apprehensive, half daring her to push further, harder, force him, her, all of them to drop the charade. But she didn't. She backed down, for her sake as much as theirs.

There was something else hovering between the members of Noble Team in this ruined atrium with the Banshee swinging precariously above them with every distant or not so distant blast. Out of the corner of her eye, Jennifer thought she saw Kat and Jun exchange a glance before Jun asked Carter: "Sir, is it true that Gauntlet, Red, and Echo Teams have been assigned to civilian evac ops?"

His reaction was immediate; the commander looked to his lieutenant commander. "Those are senior level communiques."

"I hear what I hear." Kat looked back at him, her expression as frank as her tone and choice of words. "Point is, why are we putting Spartans on defensive deployments?"

"We're not putting anyone on anything. We're the ones being deployed. Or going to be deployed, if you could get me that link to SATCOM already…"

"I'm chasing it, but what am I supposed to make of a console that has more shrapnel than transceivers?"

"A link. Which I need now, Kat."

"You're not answering my question."

"You're not getting me my link."

"Answer it."

Carter was quiet and Jennifer was certain he was bearing the weight of all four of Noble Team's other surviving members' gazes as they awaited the answer to Kat's question, to the question that they all had but only she so bluntly voiced. But he had to answer, knew he had to answer, knew he owed it to them, all of them, to answer, but he answered with another question: "You want to know if we're losing?"

Jennifer was instantly reminded of that night so many days ago, where Carter had been keeping watch in another makeshift safe house and he had turned to her and asked, "What do you do when you think you're losing?" and she hadn't known what to say. But it had been different then; one supercarrier –even a supercarrier like the Long Night of Solace –was only one supercarrier arriving after what had been a victory. And one supercarrier was not an entire fleet dropped on their heads when they had already expended their resources to defeat the latest threat; when they had already sacrificed Jorge. So this time, it wasn't a matter of wondering if they were losing…

"I want to know if we've lost," Kat replied, meeting his gaze steadily.

But no one seemed to have an answer for that: not Jun, the eternal realist, not Emile with his eternal sarcasm, not even Jennifer herself, although she thought she saw Carter's gaze flicker towards her for a moment and she thought for that same moment that maybe he remembered that conversation in the mouth of the cave too. But he said nothing along with the rest and was mercifully rescued from having to say something by the arrival of static and comm chatter that could only mean more bad news.

"…near the southwest quadrant of the city, over? Sierra Two-Five-Nine, if you are receiving, I am authorizing override of radio security protocols to link with this channel."

"How long for a secure link?" Carter asked Kat.

Noble Two was staring down at the comm unit in her hands, an expression akin to shock washing over her face. "Colonel Holland? What's he playing at, hailing us over an open channel?"

"Kat." He took a few steps forward, snapping his fingers at her to get her attention. Jennifer felt a strange twist somewhere between her lungs. "Secure link. Now."

She threw up her hands as static continued to blare from the still untapped channel. "You're asking for miracles. 'Secure' doesn't exist anymore."

Running a hand through his hair, Carter let out a sigh of pure exasperation. "Make it exist." Kat glared up at him. He sighed again. "Could the Covenant trace it back to us?"

"I could." Jennifer couldn't help but roll her eyes slightly at Kat's response and caught Jun's eye. The sniper offered her a smirk, which she returned somewhat half-heartedly. "Besides, are you planning to stick around here?" Kat continued.

"Noble Leader, this is a Priority One hail. If you are receiving, acknowledge immediately."

"Immediately," Emile mimicked under his breath but no one laughed. Kat tossed the comm's earpiece to Carter who caught it as she told him to keep things brief. He shrugged, lifted the device to his ear, and paced off in the direction of the staircase across the room, speaking quietly enough that Jennifer could not hear him. At the window, Jun refocused the lens on his binoculars and then dropped his arms slightly, looking through the glass with bare eyes, frowning, before replacing the binoculars. "Looks like we've got movement. Multiple Covenant vehicles are vacating the area."

Jennifer joined him at his vantage point, bracing her DMR against the sill and looking through the scope. Observing a grunt shuffling across broken pavement to clamber into a Banshee and the jackal more gracefully following suit, she commented, "Looks like they've got places to be."

"Doesn't seem like a redeployment though," replied Jun, zooming in himself. "Plenty of things left for them to try and kill in this sector, namely ourselves." He smirked.

"Offended?" Jennifer inquired, looking over at him.

He smirked again. "Maybe slightly."

"Don't get your hopes up," interjected Emile with uncharacteristic foresight. "How often do you see Covvies run away for no reason?"

"Tactical retreat?" Jennifer suggested.

"Still gotta have a reason to make it 'tactical.'"

"Radiation flare!" Kat said suddenly, cutting off Jennifer's retort before it even begun. All heads save Carter's and Kat's own turned in the lieutenant commander's direction. Eyes darting back and forth between readings displayed on her armguard's display, Kat rattled off numbers: "Twenty… thirty… forty roentgens!" She looked up and toward the window as though she could see the flare's source with her bare eyes alone, her face unusually pale. "Guess we can assume what they're running from."

Across the atrium, Carter removed and readjusted the earpiece Kat had given him before walking back over to them, saying, "Just lost Holland. What the hell is going on?"

Kat paused in her recitation of the readings. "Atomic excitement scrambled the signal." She glanced back down at her armguard. "Ninety million now!"

"Source?" Carter demanded as Jun set aside his binoculars and slipped his helmet back over his head.

"Airborne," was the answer. "Close," she added after the briefest of moments.

"How close are we talking about?" Noble's commander pressed as he buckled his own helmet back into place. "Miles? Yards?"

Had she been looking at anyone else, Kat's expression would have turned to something like scorn. Still, her response more than made up for it. "If it were yards, we'd be dead."

Jennifer had just opened her mouth to say something when the shockwave hit. In the flash of an instant, the ground was inches rather than feet from her eyes, palms braced against the rubble, Jorge's dogtags and chain splayed out inches from her fingers. She blinked once and then twice, ears ringing and vision flickering; Jun had hit the ground beside her and she turned to look at him, instantly coming face to face with his scout's visor. For the first time in what felt like a while, she wished she had her own helmet permanently welded to her armor.

She snatched up the dogtags, shoved them into the compartment of her armor that already housed the ONI datacard, before getting back up unsteadily. Around her, Carter and Jun did the same and Emile sprung up to his feet, as lithe as ever, having been sitting and therefore never been knocked down in the first place. In contrast, Kat scrambled to retrieve her helmet as Jennifer donned her own; the younger female Spartan coughing slightly as she said, "That close."

The ground was shaking, her legs were shaking, she was running in unstable and unfamiliar territory and her helmet was doing little to block the screech of Covenant ships outside the tower. The Banshee trembled above Noble Team as they stumble-sprinted towards the dual elevators, weapons in hand. Jennifer's DMR was secure in her grip, what remained of her stock of grenades was equally safe on her belt, but they weren't running to fight. This time, Noble Team was running to run.

There has to be a time when you stop running, when you turn and face whatever is chasing you," she remembered Carter telling her once, just before they had departed on the semi-suicidal run to the Sabre launch facility –"suicidal"? What a pathetic adjective to describe a Spartan operation –but as Jennifer turned to look across the room at her commander as Kat fumbled with the elevator controls, she grimly noted that the time to stop running and turn and fight was not now, not here, in a ruined city with the glassing ships overhead, with everything they had been trying to stop since day one on Viery on their heads. If the suicide super soldiers were turning and running, then this had to truly be the moment when they –Holland, Halsey, Carter, Kat, Jennifer –could truly mark the hour of their defeat.

Kat shut the elevator door behind Jennifer, albeit with a moment of fumbling at the controls –uncharacteristic Kat, Jennifer vaguely noted but was more preoccupied with reloading her DMR; she had no idea what was waiting for them downstairs. God knew the Covenant would eagerly fight suicide soldiers with suicide soldiers. But it took her a moment as the elevator zoomed downwards in a perfect parallel to its mate that housed Carter, Jun, and Emile that her hands were still shaking as she attempted to install a new cartridge.

"First glassing?" asked Kat wryly before sliding her helmet on to conceal her grim smile. Jennifer didn't answer. "Me too." Jennifer vaguely recalled a conversation where Kat called herself a newbie and smiled faintly under the helmet, all the while trying to shake her feeling of dread.

"Kat. Options."

"Best bet's a fallout bunker in Sublevel Two. Ninety-six meters northeast." And, of course refusing to give up her usual give and take with her commander: "We get orders from Holland?"

"We're being redeployed to Sword Base." And, judging from Carter's tone as it crackled over the channel, he wasn't very pleased about it.

"Sword?" Jun chimed in this time, his tone incredulous. "That's… not exactly ours anymore."

"Sword Base is the Covvies' bitch now."

"Which is why they want us for a torch and burn op now," explained Carter, slightly exasperated himself and choosing not to argue with Emile's assessment. In the adjacent elevator, Jennifer leaned the forehead of her helmet against the right wall and sighed heavily. "Keep Halsey's excavation data out of enemy hands."

Kat grumbled as the elevator doors slid open. "If it hasn't already," she muttered.

Jennifer's eyes scanned the open ground lying between them and the bunker's entrance. It looked clear; surely enough, Carter, Emile, and Jun had managed to get more than halfway across without interference. She and Kat quickly darted forward, sprinting to catch up. Ahead of them, Carter answered Kat's muttering with: "Holland swears up and down that the Covenant are still looking for something there."

"He can swear up and down as much as he likes," Kat refused to back down as Noble Team save herself and Jennifer reached the bunker's entrance. Jennifer felt a prickling at the back of her neck but ignored it; they were so close. Four more strides, three more, and maybe they'd be untouchable, the glass couldn't get to them. They could stop running.

Kat continued: "I don't know where he gets off calling a torch and burn Priority One–"

And then Kat stopped talking, cut off midsentence. It was such a quiet thing –the absence of the lieutenant commander's voice in her ear drew Jennifer's attention more than the thump as Kat's armored body hit the ground, a star-shaped hole, a splintering sunburst of fractured glass where here once immaculately polished visor used to be. A split second glance back toward the bunker's entrance revealed Carter in his familiar blue armor darting forward, assault rifle in hand, taking blind shots at the Phantom hovering above them, the ghost none of them had foreseen or noticed in the heat of the moment, of the argument. It hadn't even been a firefight that had distracted them; it was an argument over a comm channel but in truth, what could any of them have done anyway? What could they do now, as the Phantom swooped away and out of range?

Carter looked as though he wanted to run to Kat's body and to the alive Jennifer beside it but Jun had placed himself deliberately in his commander's path, probably to keep Noble Leader from doing something desperate and putting himself in unnecessary harm's way. So Jennifer did what Carter could not; she hoisted Kat's lifeless body up by the waist and dragged them both –dead soldier and living soldier –towards the bunker. She wasn't even sure which one of them was weighing them down anymore but she kept moving forward, a strange imitation of some kind of funeral procession with no coffin and a single pallbearer. But Jennifer did not stop moving forward until the shadow of the bunker enveloped them all and Emile hit the panel to slam the blast doors shut.

She gently lay Kat's body down on the floor and then leaned back onto her haunches. In the pitch black darkness –none of them had hit the lights yet –illuminated only by the glow of her visor's night vision settings, she watched as Carter pulled off his helmet and crumpled to his knees beside his lieutenant commander, hands darting out across her chest plate and wrists as though to check vitals. Jennifer could have told him it was useless, that she was gone, but she did not. She looked up at Emile and Jun, still standing, silent spectators, and then back at Carter. In the green glow of night vision, they all looked like ghosts.