Thirty-seven: Wind Back the Clock

September 2552

Winter had won. Winter had won Reach like it had so many other colonies, other planets, and that was the future that Jennifer, Halsey, and the rest of humanity had to accept. It was an old wound: reopened again and again, ever since first contact, first contention, with the Covenant. But, she considered as the sun went down and and the cruiser she had shot down smoldered with it in the distance, this would likely be the last time fresh scars would be sliced open. Could be sliced open. Now the flesh was peeled back to lay their beating heart bare: Earth. Final ultimatum. Either they mended their shipyards and their ribs, knit their conviction and courage back together like healing flesh, or the Covenant would bleed them dry for the last time.

Standing alone on the dying planet, Jennifer knew the odds were not likely that she would witness either outcome. But winter had not won her. Not yet.

She climbed back up to the mass driver and tried not to feel as if she were climbing the steps to her own scaffold, her own gallows, feet ready to swing. Rain splattering down hard now, she climbed back up, stepping over zealots' bodies and risking becoming her own corpse, and looked over the edge, to where Emile had disappeared for the last time. Vanished, seemed like. Not really, of course. Jennifer knew that with grim certainty. Emile wasn't a wizard. He was a Spartan. Past tense, because he wasn't missing in action either. She found him. She could report.

That was if she could find someone alive to report to.

Emile and the zealot had tumbled over the platform's edge, but they had not fallen far. Looking over the brink, Jennifer saw that it had been a drop of ten feet to the ledge below. It had been the elite's energy sword and the Spartan's favorite knife that had been each other's death, not the fall. Now they rested in uneasy peace together, sinking into sand: two corpses in one open air grave.

Not for long. Emile deserved better. She could do better for him. She would do better for him, and she was going to do it now.

Sand turned to mud around her boots as she hazarded the drop to her fallen comrade's side. It was probably the last chance the dirt had to make that metamorphosis, change its state with the rain coming down hard. She didn't know how it worked when the rain came down on glass instead, if it just slid off or collected in pools. She didn't know if the weather still worked on a glassed planet. It was working now like a sprinkler system, and the dirt was bubbling up, rising like dough around her boots and the bodies. Reach was rising up to claim its dead like a blood sacrifice.

Lifting Emile the way she had lifted Kat, becoming an unsung pallbearer one more time, Jennifer staggered for a brief moment under the weight of his armor; it was his armor, it had to be his armor that made her ankles roll when they shouldn't, made her spine turn concave when it shouldn't. She remembered what he had said to her once, something about—

"I bet you're pretty fragile under all that armor."

Pot, kettle, Jennifer thought in wry retrospect as she hauled her former teammate -no, not former, nothing about her relationship with Noble Team would ever be 'former', not from where she was standing -toward a maintenance closet, its hatch half-mooned from beneath the steep stairs back up to the mass driver. Kettle, pot. Pot, kettle. I don't have to out-Emile Emile. I don't have to out-anyone anyone. Kettle, pot. Pot, kettle. Although it hadn't been Emile that Carter was afraid she'd turn into, not in the beginning. She remembered—

"She just reminds me a little too much of Thom for my peace of mind."

Did I? she demanded, anger bubbling in her throat like bile. Do I? Was I the one you had to watch for self-sacrificial tendencies? Was I the one who pulled a fucking kamikaze? She had tried. She had tried to go down with the Long Night of Solace. Jorge had pushed her out of the supercarrier before she could. Still. How's your peace of mind now, Carter?

She was so angry with him, not at him, with him, even as she tried to do right by Emile's memory, even as she hit the latch on the closet and pulled them both inside and out of the rain and the war-zone. Even if they, if Jorge, Kat, Carter, and Emile were all at peace, she wasn't. Far from it. Completing the mission objective hadn't given her the peace she had been hoping it would. Putting Emile to rest amid spare parts and scrap metal wasn't doing it either, not when it was the dead burying the dead. She didn't have peace of mind, or peace of the grave, or peace of mission complete, or peace of anything else. She didn't have anything.

She didn't want to die like this.

Funny. She was real funny. As if anyone really had a choice in how they died. Even Jorge and Carter had taken the ways they'd gone out of implied or obvious necessity. Jennifer decided that she was fucking hilarious.

"Sorry," she whispered to Emile, as if there was any danger of being overheard. "I don't mean to…" To what? Take up his time with her own bitterness? This wasn't a funeral. It still felt like it should be his time. Jorge had gotten a tumble through the atmosphere and then a trek through the wilderness. Kat had gotten three days in the bunker and a night-vision-lit vigil. Carter had gotten… nothing. That was okay. He'd probably understand. She was probably going to get nothing too.

Still, she was going to do right by Emile. Whatever right was. With the limited resources at her disposal, 'right' was shuffling around gears, empty boxes, and drained power cells until she had cleared a small space against the back wall. It wasn't much, dark and grimy, but there were worse coffins. This was the small metal box that Emile would be laid to rest within; she laid him down parallel to the wall, knife and shotgun at his side. She almost lost her grip at the end; he went down heavier and faster than she had expected. It was the armor, all that armor…

And it was the helmet too. The skull. It was staring at her, leering at her, accusing her. What? she wanted to ask. What? she wanted to demand. It didn't answer, of course. It was as voiceless as she and Emile both. The dead bury the dead. Jennifer was tempted, extremely tempted, to pull the helmet from its armor's shoulders and find the human face beneath. Close the eyes. Say goodbye. She was tempted, but she didn't. She wasn't sure if she wanted to do it for Emile because it was Emile and he deserved the moment, or if she wanted to do it for Emile because she couldn't do it for Carter. She didn't even know if Emile would have even wanted her to, even if it truly was for him. He'd kept his helmet on, pretended it was his true face, even more than she had. So she didn't, and, standing, she turned away. Keep your secrets, Emile.

The door clicked shut behind her. She didn't bother with the lock. The Covvies weren't about to raid a closet; not when they were raining down glass from atmosphere. The time was over for petty pillaging. The time was over. Even if she wanted to go back. God, she wanted to go back.

Emile's final, fatal friend was still there on the platform, waiting for her. It took her a moment, a long moment, to decide what to do with the zealot's corpse, still and starting to smell, lips pulled back to bare gums and sharp teeth in one last snarl from beyond the grave. Just pushing the body off of the platform's edge was an option to consider. It had been what Emile intended to do when he took them both over. She could just finish the job. Again, she was tempted, but, again, she didn't. Instead she left the zealot there and walked away. If the Covenant wanted to come and claim their dead, she wouldn't stop them. But Jennifer didn't plan to be there when they came, if they came, either. She wasn't their dead to claim. She wasn't dead yet.

She didn't want to die like this.

So how exactly did she want to die? Again, fucking hilarious, Jen. And yet. And yet. There was something to that question. She had time. Hell, she had time to kill before the Covvies tracked her down. If they were looking. Probably not. She didn't think she was that special. But she had time, whatever time she had left. Now she just had to decide what to do with it.

No mission objectives. No AI in her ear, or colonel, or commander. And it made her… uncomfortable. Self-direction made her uncertain. Squeamish. Shifting from foot to foot. Looking one way, then the other, but moving in neither direction. What the actual hell? Where was the lone wolf? Where was everything that had put Carter ill at ease? Where was Six?

What was the point of rebelling when there was nothing left to rebel against?

One thing was obvious: she couldn't stand here and have an existential crisis. So, just like when she had woken up in the desert and found out that she wasn't, in fact, dead, she started walking. Climbed back up the ladder to the mass driver. Slid back down the ramps back to the platform where she had delivered the package to Keyes and refused to be gracious about it. What did you think was going to happen? Did you think you were going to hand off the package and then blow up? Why did you never think about what would happen afterward?

Not quite. She guessed that some stupid hopeful part of her had figured that she would be leaving Reach with the package. Regrouped with the fleet, and maybe Jun. Gotten a new mission objective. Found a new superior to exasperate with lone wolf antics. Should've known better. She wasn't even sure how she would handle a new superior after the last one flew himself into a Scarab after they'd screwed a couple nights before. And he'd been good too.

It wasn't supposed to have been a one night stand. It shouldn't have been. It just wasn't fair.

God, she wanted to go back.

She was going back. The sun was going down. The rain was going harder. But she was going back. It was like she didn't even have a choice in the matter, a new mission objective compelling her forward. Or backward. Either way, it was like she blinked and she was out of the roan-dampened dry dock and back in the shipyards' interior, protected from the wind and the rain and the Covenant but assaulted by ghosts of another nature. She didn't have to flick on her night vision to find them. The troopers were gone, but their bodies remained. Like Emile's. Like Kat's. Jorge had probably disintegrated in atmosphere: one blow that Spartan armor couldn't protect him from. And Carter… did he burn up? Did it hurt? Did he hit his head again on impact, smash his skull, and felt nothing at all? Did he hurt?

She didn't want to know.

She had to know.

God, she wanted to go back.

She was going back. She was looking for peace of mind since she'd been robbed of the peace of the grave, at least temporarily. She was putting whatever time she had left to good use, whatever good use was. For now, it was walking. Jogging, really. God, she loved to run, always loved to run, but she had to pace herself. She wasn't superhuman. She knew that now.

Coming out of the facility, she looked for the 'borrowed' Ghost, the one ghost that could be physically useful to her, before she remembered how she and Emile had crashed it. Trashed it, really. They hadn't been planning on a return trip, or at least Emile hadn't. She remembered the things he had said, something about taking a good long 'nap.' Jennifer wondered if Carter had inspired him. She wondered if they had been supposed to feel inspired. Didn't feel particularly inspired. Yet here she was, on pilgrimage. Something that sounded distinctly Covenant, but Jennifer didn't know what else to call it. She guessed she was trying to give Carter his time too. She was trying to stop being angry at him. She was trying to stop being angry.

"You have to stop being so mad," the psychic on the side of the road had told her, just after she'd said all the bullshit about Jennifer knowing when she was going to die, when it was going to be the end, about how if she did everything right she'd have no regrets about it. "You have to stop being so angry."

That had made her angrier. She'd liked all the stuff about precognition and no regrets, but to stop being angry? Anger pushed her forward. Anger got her to get shit done. She was a soldier, not some monk. If she didn't have anger, at the Covenant, at her superiors, at whoever, she'd have died a dozen times over. But she didn't want to die like this.

She followed the Ghost's tracks back to the grounded frigate and took a moment to survey the empty field. The ship, downed like a blood-splattered beast, whispered with the wind, and she listened. Wondered what the Grafton might've had to say, back when they'd won everything and then lost everything. Immediately. But this wasn't that field, and it had different ghost stories. Jennifer wouldn't know any of them, would probably never know any of them; she'd only shown up at the end, and everyone who had been here only hours before, human and alien both, were dead and gone. Dead or gone, really. She guessed she was the only one stupid enough to come back and reminisce.

Picking her way across the ruins, Jennifer realized that this was probably the only time she'd ever revisited one of her old battlefields. Not true, not true. Sword Base. They'd gone back the four of them, Carter, Emile, Jun, and Jennifer together, and buried it at sea. Hell, that had just happened. Why was she making out like it was an eternity ago? The psychic by the side of the road; that was an eternity. Not the return to Sword Base. That had just happened. But then Winter Contingency had just happened. Carter had just happened. Everything had just happened, in less than two months. A sixth of a year. A hundredth of a decade. A blink of her life. Why was she going back for this?

There had been other battles (countless). There had been other teams (a few, before command had figured out that she didn't play well with others). There had been other guys (less than a few, even if everyone else in Beta Company had been kissing everyone else). The sex had been good with Carter, but not that good. They hadn't known each other well enough, they hadn't learned each other well enough, there hadn't been time…

She started climbing back up the cliff-face. The rain made the rock slippery; hard to get a good grip. Going down, taking the jump and remembering to lock her armor, had been a hell of a lot easier than coming back up. By the same token, becoming Six had been a hell of a lot easier than turning back into Jennifer. She hadn't even really been Jennifer before; there hadn't really been a Jennifer besides the ink stamped onto paper and typed onto forms and into databanks. But she'd had help climbing back up that time, or rather falling back down to Reach. A friendly push from a supercarrier. A pair of frosted-over-ice blue eyes to pull her back. Twin scars like X marks the spot under the left. She'd pressed her lips there on impulse and he'd laughed.

God, she wanted to go back.

Not that Jorge and Carter got all of the credit. She'd done the legwork, the hard work. It had been her choice and she had made it and she had executed it. But they had chosen to help when they didn't have to. They had helped. And now they were dead. No regrets, my ass.

With a groan, she pulled herself up and over the edge, finally lying flat, belly up, on solid ground. Breathing in and out, letting her sore joints and aching muscles decompress, even within the shell of her armor, it felt so good. And she felt so guilty for it feeling so good. Dying with her eyes closed, belly up, ready for a stab or a needle, was not her style. But, right now, it might feel nice. But, right now, she had a pilgrimage to finish.

She rolled over. She rolled back up onto her feet, spine unfurling like a new leaf. And she rolled back into the cave, the second cave. It was in that little patch of sunlight between this cavern and the first that…

A blink of her life. That was all this had been. Just a blink, even if it was the blink that had probably etched new lines onto her face and probably streaked preternatural grey into her hair. Even if it was the last blink. The sunset. And no one left to watch it with.

She didn't want to die like this. Alone, she meant, this time. She supposed she could easily fix that. Run out into combat. Find a nice crowd of Covvies to bring down and then let bring her down. Finally cash in on that energy sword that Carter had saved her from at the start. She could. She was tempted.

She went into the second cave instead. It was waiting for her, after all, but not in the way she might have hoped. The water was still. The only steps that echoed through the spiral stone chamber were her own. If this was some kind of holy pilgrimage, where the hell were her visions? She could do with a few visions. She just wanted to say goodbye. Hell, was that all this was? She just wanted to say goodbye? Seemed an awful lot of work for one overrated word.

If that was so, why was her throat closing over at the thought?

There had been no goodbye. There had been no last goodbye. She'd failed at that, flunked that test. One of many, she was sure. But since there wouldn't be many more to come, she was all the more mad at herself.

There it was again. The anger.

Cool rain greeted her as she came out on the other side. No, not that kind of other side. Not yet. It misted her visor, cooled the violent red of her paint and the darker burgundy-brown of the blood splattered against it. Emile's blood, mostly. She was pretty sure there were bits of that poor trooper, the second Sara, staining her too. Bits of Jennifer too. Bits of Six because they were one and the same in the end.

Was this the end?

Not quite. The rain was putting out more fires than her armor. The water dropped down into the canyon too, hissing and smoldering as it made contact with the wreck below. Far, far, far below. She couldn't see the bottom in the dark.

Her breath jumped in her throat. She couldn't see the bottom. She couldn't see what was down there, or not down there. There were no answers for her in the void. There was nothing to say goodbye to. So what was the point? What was the point of coming here, of wasting the precious time she had left?

Curling back down, knees tucked to her chin, she balanced on the balls of her boots, sad and sick with it. "I am so sorry," she whispered to no one in particular. "I didn't do everything right. I was supposed to do everything right and I didn't. I am so sorry."

"You might just be saving Earth."

"Yeah, maybe, but I couldn't save you."

Saved herself, though. She was still selfishly breathing. Last one standing, disregarding wherever Jun had gone too. Maybe nowhere. Maybe he and Halsey hadn't made it far at all. But she had, with the package. Now it was gone, flown away to God knows where, and she had nothing strapped to her back to tell her not to despair.

She'd watched Reach lose. She wasn't so sure she wanted to watch Earth do the same.

Carter was down there somewhere. Maybe. She didn't know. Maybe he was up there somewhere instead. Maybe. She never claimed to be an authority on the subject, despite her constant and consistent brushes with death. For all she invoked God's name, she wasn't really a believer. How could she believe in anything, with the things she'd seen? But still. Maybe.

The rain was beating against her head, pushing her down. So she stood up to meet it. With all she'd been through with the things she'd seen, how the hell was she going to let a little water make her sink into the ground? There were other reasons. Better reasons. Thinking about them. Looking down into the black. Thinking about it.

But she didn't want to die like this.

That hit her hard. Suddenly, she was a little girl with dead parents again, waiting to be a lab rat, hiding on the other side of the bed from the wind, telling herself that the jump did not exist. That there was something wrong with her for even thinking about it. There had always been something wrong with her. Something disconnected, maybe between her brain and her heart, maybe between her brain and her armor. Something wrong. Maybe that's why she should take it.

She didn't want to die at all.

That hit her harder. That was new. She almost stepped backward, staggering under its novelty. She didn't want to die at all? Strange choice of career, then. But it hadn't been her choice, not back then. Wasn't that the whole point? But this here? This was. This was. And she made it.

"Bye," she whispered down into the void.

Six jumped. Jennifer did not.

We're still going! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me and this story for so long! Apologies in advance - I won't be able to respond to reviews for a while since my lovely computer is going into the shop in less than an hour and I don't have an ETA on when I'll have her back again. I'll still get to see them on my email! So apologies. But I wanted to get this out before I was computer-less!