AN: Hello all! I'm back! This is probably the quickest update I've made on this story in a long time, which I'm happy about, and I'm glad to be back in the swing of things.
Two things before I let you read. First off, thanks so much to Ladyreclaimer for betaing this chapter. She's an amazing writer and and an amazing person, and her story is more than worth checking out. Secondly, I posted a note in my profile with a list of "theme songs" for my OC characters and ships for all of my stories including this one. Check them out and let me know what you think. The list isn't final, and I'm taking suggestions for changes.
Anyway, I'll let you get on with reading. Please be advised. This chapter can get brutal, so please be ready for some angst, feels, and blood. Until next time Spartans.
"When both sides are convinced they're about to lose, they're both right."
-excerpt from Murphy's laws of combat operations
Location: insurrectionist controlled planet Taurus VI, Taurus system, 11:00 standard military time, January 7th, 2558
Lassiter stepped off the pelican and into the station's loading dock as his men began to offload the UNSC prisoners. They supported the Lieutenant by placing his arms over their shoulders and unceremoniously dragged him through the halls of the station towards the brig. The Sedated Spartan needed to be strapped to a stretcher to be moved. Even in her subdued state she had proved very difficult to restrain. How someone in such a suppressed state had managed to give three of his men black eyes and broken noses was still beyond him.
Even though it probably should have been, the Spartan had ended up being the least of his concerns. What really had held his attention during most of the extraction was Ramirez's reaction towards being so close to the Spartan. He hadn't taken his eyes off of her, and every time she stirred, he would throw an infuriated glance her direction as though her resistance was a personal affront to him.
He wondered if this stemmed from when he had trained her. Lassiter already harbored little trust for ONI and anyone who had worked for them, including Ramirez, but learning he had trained Spartans took his distrust to a whole new level. Did he really know the an who the man supplying him intel was?
He watched as Ramirez barked a few more orders to the men escorting the Spartan before returning to Lassiter's side. A fire of anger was burning behind his eyes that Lassiter couldn't ignore, but he wouldn't mention for the time being.
"What's the plan?" Lassiter asked flatly.
Ramirez barely met his gaze. He was preoccupied with a file on his compad. No doubt it was a record of one of the two prisoners. More than likely it pertained to the Spartan.
"The plan is that we first determine whether or not the UNSC knows they've been captured, and then figure out what they've found."
He quickly put away his compad and spun on the balls of his feet to follow the men who had hauled the UNSC spies away without giving Lassiter a second glance.
"I'll interrogate the Spartan. Report back to me when you're done."
Ramirez's slapdash reaction infuriated Lassiter. He had just undertaken a dangerous gamble by capturing these two, and he wasn't about to put up with any more of Ramirez's crap. He grabbed Ramirez's shoulder and yanked him back around so they were face to face.
Ramirez was not amused by the action.
The glare Ramirez shot Lassiter caused him to take a few steps back. He was more than angry about the interruption. He was furious. This Spartan was clouding Ramirez's judgement, and Lassiter couldn't have that, especially not now that they had the UNSC right on top of them.
He straightened up and stared Ramirez down.
"You need to pull yourself together," he snapped, "I don't know what's gotten into you, but I won't let your vendetta against this Spartan affect my people."
Lassiter's tone snapped something inside Ramirez. His face contorted, and he kept his angry, level gaze as he inched closer to Lassiter. He didn't speak until their faces were nearly touching
"You hired me for this kind of thing," he said coldly, his voice thick with malice, "to do the kind of thing that you never could. Dirty work like spying, extortion, torture, and kidnapping. Do not get in my way while I try to do my job."
He nearly spit in Lassiter's face as he finished the sentence, and a second later
pulled back to a safe distance, his sadistic grimace not leaving his face even for a minute.
"You should tell the Lieutenant the Spartan is dead, break his hope and his will, and then proceed with the interrogation..." Said Ramirez.
The statement baffled Lassiter. What use could they get out of him if he believed their only leverage was dead. Before he could even open his mouth to ask, Ramirez's sadistic grin answered for him. He didn't care about information or strategy. He wanted nothing more than for these two to suffer.
"But you won't," he finished, "you simply are not cut out for the brutality of war."
And with that Ramirez walked out of the room. His pace was slow, and he didn't breathe another word.
Lassiter stood in stunned silence for almost a minute. He had seen bad sides of Ramirez before, sides he wished he didn't know existed, but none of that had come close to the sheer brutality his voice had conveyed in those few sentences.
Lassiter briefly contemplated stopping him, but he decided against it. Ramirez was right. This was war, and in all out war there are no rules. He was doing this to protect the colony he had worked so hard to build up. He wouldn't let this tear it all down.
Location: insurrectionist controlled planet Taurus VI, Taurus system, 11:15 standard military time, January 7th, 2558
Lieutenant Brandon woke with his head face down on a cold, metal table. A metallic taste lingered in his mouth, and he felt nauseatingly dizzy.
He tried to piece together the events of the night before, and how he had been captured. He vaguely remembered being ambushed in his hotel, and Alison's quick thinking that had allowed them to escape only to be trapped in the parking lot of their hotel. He remembered turning over onto his side moments before the URF officers had injected him with a sedative and seeing her laying on the ground, covered in blood and struggling. Her eyes were closed shut in pain as she fought the officers trying to restrain her.
No, Alison, he thought, his mind still in a haze.
He tried once again to peel himself off the table, only to groan in further pain as he felt the wounds that two rubber shotgun slugs had left on his chest. He knew at least one of his ribs was broken, and possibly his sternum as well. At least his lung wasn't punctured. He would be long dead.
He tried to stand up, but found himself yanking on a pair of zip cuffs. They bit into his wrists hard. They had to be made of steel cable or something about that heavy. He was trapped and there was no way to contact ONI or anyone else.
As his vision slowly began to blur once again he heard the door to his sterile, white cell open, listened as a figure walked towards him, and sat down across from him calmly.
He found himself face to face with captain Lassiter, who was carrying a tray of food. He expected him to be angry after all the damage he had done to his men, but his expression was even, and it didn't change as he sat down across the table from him.
"Lieutenant," he said coolly, "I believe you and I got off on the wrong foot."
Brandon stared him down coldly. He wasn't about to forget what he had seen him do to Alison and play his good cop bad cop game. As Lassiter pushed the tray of food across the table towards Brandon he immediately spit in it. He wasn't going to give him anything.
"Where is Alison," he deadpanned, cutting straight to the point.
Lassiter frowned. He pushed the food to the side and set his elbows on the table, glaring over at Brandon intensely.
"She's, fine Lieutenant," he said quickly, "but she isn't what I'm here to talk about. I know who you are, I know you work for the UNSC, and I know the woman you brought with you is a Spartan. What I need to know is what you've found while you've been here, and if the UNSC knows you were captured or not."
Brandon leaned back in his chair and smiled. The insistence in his tone told him Lassiter was desperate, and Brandon wasn't some common criminal. Police interrogation tactics weren't something he would cave to. He had been trained to withstand interrogation by Sangheili, and he'd survived battles that had put him through worse. If Lassiter thought he was getting anything out of him, he was wasting his time.
"Who said I'm with ONI?" said Brandon with a knowing smile, "I'm just a logistics technician looking for a job."
Lassiter gave him a cold stare. Brandon met its intensity with a glare of his own. If Lassiter wanted to know anything about what was going on he would have to meet Brandon half way.
"And unless you get Alison in here and prove to me she's alive," he continued, "that's all I'll ever be."
The taunt set Lassiter off. His cold, calm look flashed in an instant to one of bitter anger. He leaned forward onto the table and looked threateningly at Brandon. Until now Brandon was betting on the fact that Lassiter was a cop at heart and he would be too soft to interrogate him, but now he wasn't looking quite so weak.
"I'll be frank with you Lieutenant," he said with a twinge of anger, "I have no time for this. Either you tell me whether or not ONI knows where you are now, or I force you too. If you won't cave to that, I'll kill you, because the absolute last thing I need on my planet is a live UNSC spy. You make us a target."
Brandon set his face into a neutral frown and stared directly ahead of him. He didn't need to show Lassiter that some part of him believed him, or that he was in any way afraid. His training had taught him that nothing scares and frustrates captors more than a prisoner that doesn't fear death.
"Then you've only got so long before ONI blows this place out of the sky. I suggest you start running."
Brandon tried to use exertion from his injuries to mask just how much he feared that statement. If Lassiter was serious, and Alison wound up dead because of him, he wasn't sure what he would do with himself. He had already caused too many deaths he couldn't stand being responsible for another.
As if to cement his thoughts, Lassiter reached into his pocket and pulled out a tacpad. He began to scroll through personnel files until he finally found Brandon's.
"2547," said Lassiter coldly, "you saw your first action during the battle of Skopje with the 52nd airborne, lost half your unit and became the second highest ranking officer in your division, and for your efforts they promote you. At the battle of Minab you lose another half of your unit, and become the last commissioned officer in your division. On Reach you lose the rest of your unit, and somehow, only you make it out alive. History doesn't lie Lieutenant. Everywhere you go, everything that can possibly go wrong does go wrong for everyone but you. Don't make that happen here."
Brandon found it hard to meet Lassiter's gaze. He wasn't sure where he had found those records, Brandon was sure no one had seen them in years, and he certainly hadn't talked to anyone about them in at least that long, but here they were back to haunt him. It felt as though the ghost of those dead men had come back and was asking for revenge upon him.
He tried not to falter, but as the images of his men, dead and dying on the battlefield, came back to him, he felt hot tears of anger begin to run down his blood caked face. He screamed out in agony at Lassiter.
"If you hurt Alison, I'll make sure ONI destroys everything you've built here. I've got friends in high places. I'm sure one of them could dig up a ventral glassing beam," he spat in Lassiter's face.
At the mention of glass, Lassiter snapped. His mind shot back to his family, trapped on the glassed surface of Eridanus II, stumbling through the ash choked landscape and struggling to find shelter. In the distance Lassiter had seen a small aircraft that was in good enough shape to get them off the planet. He had picked up his daughter and grabbed his wife by the hand, securing the gas masks they wore before he began to half carry half drag them towards it. It took what felt like an eternity to reach it, and when they did Lassiter had quickly opened the cargo bay door, not thinking twice to look for danger. He payed for his mistake.
The door swung open and revealed two Jackal scavengers sorting through a mess of crates in the ship's loading bay. Lassiter had reached to draw his M6C, the service weapon he had carried as a police captain, but before he could even clear the leather the jackals were on him. The first one through a knife, impaling his daughter, while the other one shot a single bolt of plasma wide over his head, striking his wife. He fought to end the memory, and the agony it held, but he couldn't. He remembered tearing the gas mask off his daughter's face and cradling her close to his chest, comforting her as she breathed her last.
All of that could have been prevented if those Spartans had waited only a moment longer for them, but they couldn't be bothered to rescue meaningless civilians like them. He had no time for this Lieutenant's concern for inhuman monsters that were more powered armor and biofoam than person.
Lassiter grimaced and yelled in rage, now completely blinded by anger. He picked up the metal tray of food he had brought with him, emptied it onto the floor, and swung it at Brandon as hard as he could. The tray connected with his jaw and knocked him to the side. Had he not been restrained it would have knocked him out of his chair. Brandon was dazed for a moment and it took him a little longer than he would have liked to recover his mental faculties.
He spat blood onto the floor and tried to sit back up. His eyes connected with Lassiter's for a moment, and he swore he saw reluctance, even pain in them. For a moment it looked almost as though he really didn't want to do this. Before Brandon could capitalize on his reluctance and use it to remind his captor that he was a human being who would be missed, the tray connected with his head once again. The corner of it met his temple and sent him sprawling once again as his vision exploded into color. He fought to recover once again, but before he could the tray met his head several more times until it was bent nearly in half.
Brandon struggled to sit up one last time. His vision was blurry, and he knew recovering from a hit like that would take time. He knew both his lips were bleeding profusely. The pain in his chest from where the rubber slug had hit him earlier only intensified as he breathed harder. He was probably black and blue. He knew that no matter what kind of brave face he put on now Lassiter would still know that was not something anyone could put up with for long and still keep a straight face.
Lassiter stood before him, heaving from exertion with the tray clutched in his right hand. He threw it across the room and met Brandon's bloodshot eyes with another angry, cold glare.
"Why are you here and who knows?" He yelled at him, "tell me now or I'll kill the Spartan and then I'll kill you."
"Go to hell!" He screamed in response.
Lassiter gave him one last, angry, cold stare. Brandon half expected him to kill him where he stood, but he stopped only seconds before he did. With fire still blazing in his eyes, he then turned to face the door.
"Have it your way," he said coldly as he walked out.
Brandon felt a cold, dreading feeling wash over him as he began to wonder what he had just done. If he had truly just doomed Alison to die he would never forgive himself.
Location: insurrectionist controlled planet Taurus VI, Taurus system, 11:15 standard military time, January 7th, 2558
Blurry vision, a splitting headache, and pains in every fiber of her being were all Alison could feel as she woke up. Her body screamed in protest as she tried to clear her vision from the fog it was in and tried to ignore the throbbing pain she was feeling, but it was to no avail. She must have been under the influence of some kind of sedative, or else her augmentations would have allowed her to sort out a small vision problem.
She fought to recall how she had ended up here. She remembered being shot, beaten, and sedated, and little else after that other than waking up restrained in a dark room and in serious pain. She hadn't seen anyone since she had woken, and no one had tried to treat her injuries. She had struggled against her restraints and hadn't been able to budge. They were heavy and hard to break and the sedative that had been placed on her made gathering enough strength to break them impossible.
Did the URF mean to let her rot here and die of her injuries?
She supposed it was better than a lot of alternatives, but that wasn't what concerned her. What concerned her was what had happened to the Lieutenant. She hadn't seen him and that worried her deeply. What if he had been killed because she didn't protect him?
She tried to make him seem unimportant in her mind. She tried to funnel the rage she had felt when he had tried to reassure her that everything would be alright when she had found that Spartan's helmet, but his words had been just that, reassuring. Despite how badly she wanted to push him, away she found that as the possibility that he had died on her watch came over her she couldn't write him off as someone she could forget.
She had known him. Maybe she had known him for only a few days, but a few days were more human interaction than she had had with anyone in years. She couldn't take the pain of his death being on her.
She heard the door across from her slide open as she fought and failed to push these thoughts from her head. She tried to harden her eyes despite the fact that, because of either blood loss or sedative, her vision was still all too blurry.
The figure silently walked across the room. She was vaguely aware he was holding something, maybe a weapon, but it was too hard to stay focused on him and she let her head drop instead. It wasn't important what he was holding or what he intended to do to her, she would resist just as she had been trained to.
She felt him grab her chin and make her look at him. Her eyes were half lidded, and his face was blurry, but something about him seemed oddly familiar. A cold chill of fear washed over her. She tried to suppress it, but it wasn't the kind of thing that would stay hidden. The chill felt more like a memory than a physical shiver. It was a memory of pain and fear.
"Alison-065," said the man nonchalantly, as though the fact that she was a Spartan wasn't surprising or worrying in the least, "where have you been all these years?"
The chill that had washed over her became a wind of freezing cold. She remembered that voice all too well.
No, this can't be happening, she thought to herself.
Her sedative must have been causing a hallucination. She hadn't heard that voice in many, many years. That voice and the man attached to it had left her life years ago never to return again. Daniel Ramirez had been her instructor during her training and augmentations. The things he had done to her had been awful.
She didn't want to think about it, but after hearing his voice she couldn't stop herself. He had done things to her that were far beyond the normal level of brutality that the Spartan program trainees endured. He had hurt her I'm ways she would never recover from and abused her in ways no little girl should ever have had to witness.
He was the sum of all her fears, and he was standing right before her. Her vision began to clear and focus on him, but she snapped her eyes shut in defiance. Every part of her went into overdrive from her muscles to her immune system as she struggled against the heavy sedative that kept her pinned to the chair she was sitting in.
She managed to let out a muffled yelp and begin to strain on her restraints. She listened to the metal pop and she thought for a moment that she might actually get free. If she did, she would pummel this man, her abuser, into a bloody, pasty pulp and make sure that no trace of him was ever recovered.
Before she could break free, she felt a sharp pain in her arm as a needle pierced her skin and more sedative was administered. It was strong, strong enough to kill a regular human, but only enough to throw a Spartan into a daze. God only knows that Ramirez knew how to torture her.
"Why?" She spat out, "what are you..."
She couldn't finish her thought before the substance took hold and she went back into a dazed state.
"Why?" Laughed Ramirez.
She heard him pick up a large metal object off a nearby table. The sound of it scraping against metal told her it was a bladed weapon and a sharp one at that. She cringed and tried to fold in on herself. She had endured pain in her life, most of the time it hardly affected her, but the thought of the pain he had caused her before was too much for anyone to bear.
"There is no why," he continued, "I didn't come looking for you. I was done with you years ago when I finally made a soldier out of you. This meeting is entirely by chance."
Alison hardly had time to dwell on any of what he said. She didn't have time to consider that he believed he hadn't done anything wrong, and that the awful things he had done to her as a little girl had made her into a great soldier.
He spun around, and in what seemed like one, quick motion, he put the knife all the way through her shoulder.
The sedatives calming affects left her immediately and she screamed and reeled in pain. She promised herself she wouldn't cry, and that she wouldn't show weakness in front of this man, but she felt hot tears stream down her face anyway. Even though she was easily the strongest woman alive, she felt entirely powerless.
Ramirez smiled at her as he twisted the knife, eliciting another stifled scream. He laughed lowly. His enjoyment burned in the back of his eyes. He wanted to make her suffer and writhe for his own enjoyment. He wanted to torture her on a level she didn't even know she had.
"Your Army friend is dead," he whispered into her ear, "and you'll end up the same if you don't cooperate just as I ask you too."
In that moment Alison's fear was overcome by sheer blinding rage. Her eyes snapped open and locked onto his. She ignored the pain and tried her best to sit up straight and resist. If he had killed the Lieutenant she would personally kill him as well.
He had killed the last good thing to ever come into her life. That alone was worth his own.
"You're dead," she snapped.
Ramirez did nothing but smirk and twist the knife's handle.
Another cry ripped through her. The pain was overwhelming and she could feel blood running down her chest and soaking her clothes as he dug deeper. The knife tore away the identity she had built after her training. Her infallible strength was gone. All that was left was the small girl who had seen the worst the world could do to someone.
Alison folded in on herself, screamed out in agony, and for the first time in an untold number of years, she cried.