ODSS Chapter 33

Kathleen's eyes slowly opened. Every part of her was in pain and she couldn't breathe properly. There were cracks all over her visor and her armor systems were all down. It was hard to see past the blood that she'd exasperated across her visor, and without her systems online there was nothing she could do about it. She tried to get up but there was something that was weighing her down, keeping her pinned in place. Kathleen reached up with one hand, though every movement caused her more pain, and hit the release on her helmet, pulling it off. The air around her was smoky and it was hard to see much of anything.

Kathleen tried to see what was on her and she realized what it was. Blade was lying over her back, his weight pinning her down. She tried to look around more and she could see the faint outline of one of her soldier's arm through the smoke and about half of another body. She wished she'd had her HUD to check to see if they were alive. For now she'd just have to assume that she was the only one alive.

The weight on her moved and she looked back to Blade his eyes slowly opened and the elite struggled to try to get up. He got over to the side far enough out of the way so that he was no longer pinning Kathleen to the ground. Kathleen moved, trying to get to her feet. One of the legs of her armor was locked up, or at least she hoped that was what happened. She coughed and could see the blood that hit the ground. She tried to pull herself up but found that one of her hands wouldn't support the weight. She looked over at it and sat the large spike of metal that was impaled through the back of her hand. Her free hand reached over, grabbing the spike as tightly as she could and she pulled. It wouldn't come free. She didn't have the strength to remove it.

Kathleen tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a bit of a blur. She remembered the falling sensation, the gravemind retreating. She didn't remember hitting the ground, though when she looked up she could see what looked to be a slightly crumbling wall of a forerunner structure. So that was what had happened. They must have crashed into some sort of building on…well she didn't have any idea where they were. She knew that High Charity had come out of slip space, but she still had no idea what had been on the other side.

A hand grabbed the spike and Kathleen looked to Blade. He looked her in the eyes and she nodded slightly. His other hand moved to her wrist and with one great yank he pulled the spike free. It didn't hurt as much as it should have, which wasn't a good sign. It meant that whatever her current injuries were, a spike in her hand was barely anything to her. Her vision started to blur and she was slightly aware of Blade leaning toward her. She felt his hand touch her cheek before everything went black.

A wraith shot streaked through the sky overhead. Kathleen tracked it as it passed over until it hit a small building. She could hear the people inside screaming in terror. Why then, was she still sitting here on this broken warthog? She should have been doing something, but she couldn't. Her body didn't move, didn't follow her mental commands, just stayed still.

"You know, I always wanted to go to Harvest." Kathleen looked to the voice and found Sheila sitting beside her on the ruined jeep. "I always heard how pretty the fields of wheat and plants were. Such a wide open planet. Guess it's probably not so pretty any more, seeing as it was glassed."

Kathleen ignored the words. She didn't care about the ramblings of her former teammate. "Where are we? I don't recognize this place?"

Sheila shrugged. "Some random battle inside our mind I suppose. I have been dead for years after all. Hell, for all I know it's the same place I died. I don't actually remember what planet I died on even."

"Miridem. You died on Miridem." Kathleen glanced again toward the building of soldiers. "Shouldn't we be helping them?"

"Why do you remember that?" The question caught Kathleen off guard and she stared at Sheila, not sure what to say. "Why do you remember when I died? Shouldn't you forget about me, and all the other Spartans? Shouldn't you let go of such useless information?"

Kathleen didn't have an answer. She'd struggled for years to really let go of the Spartans. It was hard, harder then she had ever expected. It was as hard as it would have been for her to forget her family, not that she'd ever tried. "I don't know."

"Why is it that when you are so badly hurt, that you seem to always come back to the members of our team? You did after Reach, and now you're doing it again." Kathleen was getting annoyed with the other woman.

"I suppose I turn to you guys because you're all dead, and because I can't turn to my own soldiers. If I need to talk to someone, that someone needs to have a face that I trust, and I trusted our team." Kathleen closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.

Kathleen opened her eyes and found herself staring up at the ceiling of what seemed to be the interior of a phantom dropship. She didn't know how she'd gotten there, or if it was just another image made up by her mind. A figure moved above her and she could only barely make out that it was an elite. It grumbled out something in its own language but Kathleen couldn't really understand any of it. It wasn't that she didn't know the language, because she knew some, but rather that she just couldn't make sense of anything. Her head hurt and all the words seemed to be muffled as though they were on the other side of glass. Kathleen tried to move but a hand settled on her chest. It kept her in place. She looked at the face but didn't recognize it, only knew that it was an elite. An engineer floated overhead and did something, though she didn't have the energy to sit up enough to see what it was doing. Her eyelids became heavy and she could no longer stay conscious and everything went black again.

Kathleen stared across the room at the blinking screen. She was watching it, not sure really why she was sitting on the floor of an ONI lab. She tried to read the message on the screen but it was blurry and she couldn't bring anything into focus. There was something familiar about the room, but she felt that way about just about any ONI lab.

"An elite killed me, you know." Kathleen looked to Joshua. She hadn't realized he was there until he'd spoke. The other soldier was sitting on the ground beside her.

Kathleen turned her attention back to the screen. "I remember. I was there after all. I don't see why that matters though." It was staring to annoy her that she couldn't read the screen. She should have been able to see if even from this far across the room.

"I got killed by an elite, you were there, and now you're friends with one of them. That's just so wrong." Joshua shook his head. "Fraternizing with the enemy. Honestly I never expected it from you."

"I'm not friends with any elites. I've only worked with them." Kathleen turned back to Joshua and frowned at him. "I would never be friends with one of those split-lipped fools."

"Don't lie to me, Kathleen. Come on, you are friends with that one with half a mouth." Joshua grinned a bit. "You do realize that since I'm dead—"

"That it means that inside I believe I'm friends with him but still on the outside I'm fighting to not be friends with him. I'm well aware that you're my subconscious." Kathleen rolled her eyes. "So maybe I am a bit of a friend with him. I still want to kill him." She hesitated for a moment before she spoke again. "Do you think he survived?"

"So, you're asking yourself if you think that what's his name lived. Do you realize how silly that is?" Joshua chuckled a bit.

"Oh, be quite and just tell me if you think that Blade is alive." Kathleen wanted to smack him, but she realized that smacking a figment of her imagination would be ridicules.

Kathleen stared up at the ceiling above her. She didn't recognize it at first, and then it hit her. It was the ceiling of a Covenant cruiser. It explained why it was so far above her, and was a familiar purple. A face leaned over her and she recognized the two mandible face. There were some bandages on his head that she could see, covering a part of his face. She felt his hand settle on her arm. She looked toward his hand that was loosely gripping her forearm. She looked back up to him and tried to tell him to get his hand off of her but when her mouth opened no words came out.

Blade's hand gripped her arm a bit tighter and he said something, but she only caught a couple words. He said something about sleep and work. She just filled in what she thought he had said and figured he'd instructed her to get some sleep. Hopefully there'd be things to do when she woke up.

Kathleen stared at the locker, not sure why it was it was open. Maybe she was supposed to get something out of it. An arm settled over her shoulder and Will sat down beside her, grinning happily. She stared at him and she felt the familiar weight of loss weighing down on her. Kathleen reached up, touching his cheek. "What, you look like you've seen a ghost?" He shifted his head a bit closer to her hand.

"For all I know I'm looking at one." She leaned against him and set her head against his shoulder. "You and Fred ran off, left Earth to my soldiers to protect."

"Well, then we left it in good hands." Will's hand moved from her shoulder down to her waist. Kathleen sat up and pushed his arm off of her. He put up his hands to ward off any attack. "Hey, I'm a vision of your mind. Don't blame me if you want me to put my arm around you."

"It's not that I want it, it's that I expect that from you." Kathleen sighed and slumped a bit. "I think I did something bad, Will." The male Spartan raised an eyebrow and Kathleen continued. "I put my team's life at risk. For all I know they are all dead. I know Blade survived, but I have no idea about my soldiers." She looked at the locker ahead of her, just staring at the gray metal. "Did I make the right choice?"

"Did you do what you had to do?" Will asked.

"I guess so. We had to stop High Charity, but I don't know if we really did any good. I haven't been awake long enough to get any real understanding of if our plan worked. For all I know everything we did was pointless. We put our lives at risk, my team might even be dead, and all of it for nothing." Kathleen shook her head. She didn't know why she was now doubting her choice. She'd made it, so she should be sticking with it. Maybe it was because all of this was in her head, or maybe because she might never wake up and denying her worry was pointless.

"You made a choice, and you can't change it now. As a leader you have to make choices, and sometimes it means that your soldiers will die. They were willing to do what you told them, and I don't think they'd hold it against you, even if it all was for nothing. I've followed John into some stupid things that have probably been pointless. How many times have your team and the Spartans fought on the ground, not even saved anyone, just fought, only to lose the planet in the end?"

Kathleen admitted that he was right. "But those missions were never our choice. They were what we were ordered to do. I made the choice, gave the order to go onto that station. I can't blame the brass for it. We can't write it off as another time that Command sent us on a mission that could kill us without realizing it wasn't going to help."

"But you don't know if it did or didn't help. You were just trying to do whatever you could. The officers can sometimes only look at the big picture. They think of how much a platoon can do, think that's what it takes to make a change. You've seen single soldiers take down hunters, you've seen some ODST take down elites with just a knife who aren't on your team. They don't see that, and you do. You knew that your team could do something that could be more than just cleaning up the Flood on Earth. You took a risk, but you knew that in the end your team was going to fight to get the job done." Will moved his hand over so that it was lightly touching hers. "No one can fault you for having faith in your team."

Kathleen looked down at his hand but didn't pull away. "You know, if High Charity had detonated as it was supposed to, then whatever it was that we were on would have been destroyed, and we should be dead." She moved to lean her forehead on his shoulder. "We failed."

"You only fail if you don't even try." Will pulled her closer to him. "You tried, and you are alive. I wouldn't call that failing. I mean you and Blade are still alive. I'm sure the two of you could take down what's left of the Covenant armada and destroy all the Halos."

Kathleen groaned. "You sound like Fred. That sort of warm hearted, nice-guy thing where you say things that can't actually happen just to make me feel better or stroke my ego."

Will chuckled. "Is that such a bad thing? Maybe if I was more like him, you would have chosen me rather than him." Kathleen ignored him, closing her eyes and moving closer to his warmth as she relaxed.

Kathleen slowly opened her eyes, squinting a bit in the light. For once she knew right away where she was. It was a UNSC medical bay aboard a ship. She looked around the room, ignoring the beeping machines that were hooked up to her. On one side of her bed Tym sat in a chair, slumped down as he slept. Max sat on the floor beside him, snoring lightly. On the other side of her bed sat Luke and Peter, oddly trying to share the same chair. Right beside her bed Tobias had pulled up a chair. He was leaning on her bed, arms crossed on the mattress and his head resting on them as he drooled a bit. At least it wasn't getting on her sheets. She wondered if this was all that was left, or if the others just couldn't fit in the small room. She hoped it was the latter, but she wouldn't put money on anything at this point.

Kathleen thought of waking the soldiers, as it seemed they had obviously all been there to see that she was all right, but she decided that they deserved the rest more. She wondered what ship they were on, where they were, was there an Earth to be heading to, or what that gone and they were just running from what was left of the Covenant? There was no answer to any of her questions and the calm sounds of the medical room lulled her back to sleep.

Kathleen could hear the strong and steady heartbeat under her. Her hand absently moved over the man's chest and she didn't even bother looking up at him. She already knew who it was. After all there was only one person who her mind would set her up like this with. She felt his hand trailing lazily over her back and she was content just to sit there in the silence. Apparently he wasn't.

"I wish you'd stop putting yourself in danger like that. I don't like it when you end up like this, this hurt." Fred's arms moved around her, pulling her body to fit against his.

"You were always so weak. I can't believe I let myself doubt myself like you would." Kathleen scowled. She had worried about having failed her team. There was a time when she would have scolded Fred for such a thing, but here she'd done the exactly same thing. "Can't I ever do what I say others should do?"

Fred shifted a bit under her. "I have no idea. You won't forget the Spartans, even though you tell your soldiers to forget everyone they know. You worry about your soldiers after you tell me for years that I shouldn't do that. You tell your soldiers to follow orders, and then you turn around and ignore orders."

"Now just a moment, I tell them to do that and they don't follow orders anyway. I don't get mad at them for it, I just say to follow orders cause that's what I'm supposed to say." Kathleen sat up enough so that she could look at him. She frowned as she realized he still looked the same as the last time she'd seen him at Reach. Had she really not seen an image of him since then? She pulled herself up and set her forehead against his. "Also, I only doubted my choice once. You doubted yours all the time."

"You're really going to argue with me?" He was about to say more but Kathleen put her hand over his mouth. Fred sighed and she removed her hand. "Fine, I won't point it out, but you know it." She did know what he was going to say. He was just in her head, and she couldn't blame a figment of her imagination for the faults of the man. "Also, for a guy that you thought was such a bad leader, I got through Reach, and I'm the leader of the Spartans. With only three of us we stole a Covenant ship."

Kathleen rolled her eyes. "Oh, what an impressive action. John did it with just one Spartan, two marines, a pilot, and an officer, which I think counts against his total number of soldiers."

"Except the two soldiers were marines. I think in your book that counts up to two normal soldiers," Fred pointed out. There was a slightly triumphant look on his face.

"Yeah, but a Spartan is worth like five marines, and about half of one of my soldiers. So the math still works out to you having done it with more soldiers." Kathleen frowned at him as he tried to fight back. "You argue with me anymore and I'm waking up."

"You don't have any control over that." Fred scowled. She wasn't sure when this had turned into an argument or fight, but at some point it had.

"I'm pretty sure that if I were to get off of you I'd wake right up." Kathleen moved one of her hands up from his chest to his neck. "I don't really want to though."

"So you'd be willing to just lie here with me forever? Never wake up? Never get back to the fight?" Fred arched an eyebrow.

Kathleen smiled down at him, leaning in toward him. "As long as it's you, Fred, I don't care about fighting." She closed the gap between their lips. They broke apart a moment later and Fred looked confused and hurt. "You aren't Fred, even if you do that bad imitation of Will's technique." She put a light kiss on his cheek and sat up on him. "You're nothing but a figment of my mind, clinging to a man that's probably missing, or dead." She looked down at him and sighed. "You aren't really him, so I can't stay." She moved off of him onto the grass beside him.

The light above her burned her eyes as they opened. It was suddenly pulled back and she realized that it must have been a flashlight. There was now a medic leaning over her. He turned away and shouted for a doctor. She wasn't in the same medical room on the ship as before. This one looked more like it must have been on a base. There was more equipment than before, and she wondered where they were. The famous medical ship had been destroyed, and it was the only thing more equipped than the ground bases.

A doctor came in a minute later. Kathleen just did as he instructed as he tested her awareness. She answered questions when asked and just waited for him to tell her what happened. He didn't, he just informed her that she would have to stay in bed for a while so that she could be monitored.

As soon as she left Kathleen sat up in her bed. She looked around, trying to find something she could wear other than the paper gown. She wasn't going to sit around and be monitored, that was for sure. The door to her room opened and she was surprised to see Tobias, David, and Luke. David stayed by the door while Tobias moved over to Kathleen. He put a bag down on the bed and she opened it. Inside there was a fresh set of ODSS fatigues. She nodded to him and started to get dressed. Luke and Tobias turned away as she did.

"You were out for like…what, three weeks?" Luke nodded and Tobias continued. "Apparently Shadow Blade radioed a nearby Covenant ship. They sent down a phantom and picked us up. Their ships aren't really set up for taking care of us, so once we'd gotten back through the portal, we were transferred to another ship. From there we were moved to Earth."

Kathleen froze at that last part. She slipped on her shirt and sat down on the cot again. "So Earth is still around? Guess they handled the flood that was here."

"From what we can tell they did all right without us." Tobias turned around to face her. "The elites have gone back to their own planet, but apparently Lord Hood is in talks with the Arbiter for peace between the two species."

Kathleen nodded. That was good news. Humanity couldn't fight off the elites right now. They needed to rebuild, not get into another war. "And what about High Charity?"

The three soldiers exchanged glances before Tobias spoke. "Something went wrong and the station didn't detonate. Instead it crashed into the Ark, which is what was on the other side of the portal. From what we understand the Master Chief and Arbiter detonated a half constructed Halo right there at the Ark to destroy it and the flood. The Arbiter made it back through the portal, the Master Chief didn't."

Kathleen took in the news. So they had failed in their objective, but John had gotten the job done. At least that part of it. The gravemind was a danger, but not all the flood had been on that station. It was still out there, and it was still a danger. "What about the rest of the team?"

"Well, most of us are still supposed to be in our medial beds, but we decided that was pointless. James is still having some treatment for his burns, Edward is still bandaged up quite a bit and he's got a cast on one of his arms. Emily still hasn't woken up, but Edward is pretty sure she'll wake up."

Kathleen nodded. Not all of her team was dead. That was all that mattered. She stood from the bed and moved out of the room. Her soldiers fell into line behind her. She made a few stops as she moved through the building. James was laying on one of the beds, a nurse injecting him with something. From the way she was laughing he must have been hitting on her, though she didn't seem all that interested. His burns seemed to be healing and she was certain it was only time before he would get back out. She then made a stop at Emily's room. Edward was in there, sitting by her bed, leaning back in a chair. His left arm was in a cast while his right hand was on the bed, holding his partner's. Emily just lay in the bed, a breathing tube down her throat, though from the look of it her heart was beating on its own. Kathleen didn't like seeing one of her soldiers like that. Helpless and unable to fight what had happened to them. All the worse, it was her fault. She'd forced Emily back into combat when she'd been badly hurt. The guilt weighted on her shoulders and Kathleen had to turn away. She moved out of the medical building and Tobias showed her the way to the area that was their barracks.

It was an old storage building that they'd simply cleared out and had set up cots in. They'd even gotten some gym equipment and set it on one side of the room with a mat for sparring. Kathleen moved to the cot she knew was hers. She only knew it was hers because someone had left her bloody broken black helmet at the foot of the bed. She picked it up and sat down on her cot. Kathleen looked around the room. When she'd come in there had been an air of tension, but as she looked around she realized what it was. The soldiers didn't seem to know what to do with themselves.

Matthew sat on a cot, staring at a datapad, though Kathleen had no idea what he was reading. David had gone to his cot and had started to clean his boots while Max was picking through his medical kit, making note of what he was missing. Luke had gone over to Peter's cot and had laid down with the other man. Patrick was typing away on a datapad, probably hacking into something. Tym lay on his cot, staring up at the ceiling and Tobias was now sitting on his cot sharpening a knife carefully. There was something to all of it though. Nothing was urgent, nothing had the same determination. They were all just busying themselves, trying to make it last until they were giving something to do.

Kathleen moved to her footlocker and put the helmet away in there. There was very little in the footlocker, just a pair of boots, a combat knife, some clothing, and three helmets. Her Mark V from Reach ,her Mark VI with the broken visor from the first time that Blade had smashed it, and now her helmet from the Ark. The only real proof that they'd taken part. Well, the helmets and the scars.

Kathleen moved back to her cot and lay down. She could already feel the scar tissue on her side stretching to accommodate her range of movements. She raised her hand and looked at the marking from where the spike had gone through her. She didn't even want to think of what other new scars she might have. She reached up and felt where the flood form had tried to infect her but Blade had saved her.

Her mind went to the elite, wondering how his team had faired. She pushed those thoughts aside. For now she had to focus on her team, and whatever might be their next task.