Chapter Fifteen

John was getting his armor taken off when I walked into the armor bay. The rest of Blue Team was nowhere to be seen.

Now that John had GEN2 armor he could use the machine, but I'd heard when we got back from Requiem he'd had to have his armor taken off manually, like I still had to. Though for me that was as much because of my height as my armor style.

I walked up to the machine next to his and set my helmet down on the tray.

"Hi." I smiled at the fully-covered technician.

The tech nodded to me and grabbed the controls for the manual arms. She called another technician over to help control a second arm.

I stepped up in front of the actual machine and held my arms out in a T.

When I looked over to my right I could see John. He was mostly armorless, with just his boots and gauntlets on. Then his machine pulled the gauntlets off and opened the boots.

He stepped down and nodded to the tech. Then he stripped out of his techsuit, leaving himself in just his undersuit, and pulled his grey cargo pants on.

The two technicians at my machine used the arms to unclasp the armor on my chest and back.

The plates fell to the ground, each with a resounding noise. It wasn't a boom, like John's armor, but a mix of that and a metallic clang.

John stepped up in front of me as they pulled the armor off of my hips and thighs. Then my shoulders and upper arms.

He was so drawn, and pale. I looked up at him with serious concern in my green eyes.

He tried to reassure me that he was fine, through the bond, but his insistence fell a little short. He was exhausted, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

The techs removed the armor on my forearms and calves. Then my gauntlets and boots. I pulled my biosuit off.

When I was in my undersuit I picked up my ostomy bag, which had been left on the tray, and resealed it to the wafer through the hole in my suit. I pulled on my socks and boots. Then I grabbed my grey sweatpants and threw them over my arm.

"How's your knee?" John asked me when I walked up to him.

I shifted my pants up to my shoulder and grabbed his left hand.

"It's fine," I said, ignoring the pain in my knee. "How about you?"

"Me?"

I shot him a look; he couldn't pretend there was nothing wrong.

He sighed. "I'm alright, Tawny."

"I don't believe you," I admitted.

"Why not?"

I re-fed him the exhaustion and fear I was feeling from his side of the bond.

He was silent as we walked out of the armor bay. He was silent because I had a point; he was hurting.

Before our bond, no one could really do anything about his unhealthy coping mechanisms. Sure, his team would worry and fuss, but what could they really do?

I could show him his emotions, how they felt to someone who wasn't him, and show him just how worried he was making the people around him.

And I really was worried. It barely showed outwardly, but he was moving sluggishly. Sluggishly enough for his fellow soldiers, even the unaugmented ones, to notice.

Slow enough for me to see that something was wrong with him, without the bond and without my empathy, even if my eyes couldn't tell me exactly what was wrong.

When we got back to his room I draped my pants over the back of his massive desk chair and pushed myself up onto the bed. On the bed I was taller than him.

I was standing up, facing John with my back straight. I wanted to talk face-to-face.

John stepped up in front of me, his gaze level, and waited for me to say something.

I looked down and took a breath. "John, you need to talk to someone-"

"No." His voice was hard, but his gaze was soft. Weary.

"You can't keep going like this!" I tore my hands through my hair. "John, you're going to collapse! O-or make a mistake, and get shot!"

His blue eyes were dull. "I'm fine."

"No, you're not." I fought to make him see.

He glanced up at me. For a moment his eyes sparked in defiance, but then the light faded again. He was absolutely drained.

I took another breath, releasing most of my tension when I exhaled.

"Will you at least sleep with me tonight?" I asked softly. "Please?"

He wanted to. But he was afraid to, for reasons he couldn't entirely articulate.

I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his neck. Tears were trying to spring up in my eyes, so I screwed them shut.

But they leaked through anyway, staining John's skin.

I felt his jaw tense. He latched his arms around me and turned his face into my hair, taking a deep breath.

His chest seemed to swell with pain and loss. He was so desperate to hold onto what he had, but at the same time he wanted to distance himself in preparation for when we all inevitably died.

Everyone would die before him.

That was his worst fear; he was convinced it would truly happen.

He'd already thought me dead more than once. Linda had almost died several times. Kelly and Fred had had a few scares.

Kelly nearly succumbed to the after effects of their augmentations, when they were only fourteen. And so many of his siblings had died on those tables, or a few months later.

Johnson was dead. So was Sam.

I straightened up and pressed my forehead against John's. Neither of us spoke, but we seemed almost to merge with each other in the bond.

His pain, my fear, everything, was one. Ours.

And John really was exhausted.

He sat down on the bed, still with his arms around me.

I shifted so that I was still facing him. When he was sitting, his head reached my chest.

He leaned forward and buried his face in my chest. He didn't cry - sometimes he did, but not this time.

He just closed his eyes and let me hold him, and we wished the world had been kinder to so many people. Ourselves included.

I wrapped my left arm around him and ran my right hand over his freshly-buzzed hair.

I grounded myself and branched out towards him with serenity. He fought with himself, wanting to refuse it but needing the reprieve.

His body seemed to loosen when he touched the contented emotions. Tension visibly drained out of him.

He wrapped his arms around me, his eyes still closed, and laid down. I ended up on top of him, my head on his chest.

He reached lethargically down and pulled the bedspread up over us. Then, still with his arms around me and still wrapped in my calmness, he fell asleep.

oOOOo

Infinity did end up leaving Paris IV, immediately, for a new assignment.

First thing Saturday morning, we all packed up and jumped into slipspace. We'd been in the jump for a few hours now; we were about halfway there.

Ellen was conflicted about our destination. Arcadia.

It was where I'd met her.

Little had I known, it was also where she was from. She'd lived on Arcadia until ONI kidnapped her, like it did me, and forced her to work for them.

I was sitting in her lab, watching her buzz from machine to machine.

I would have been spending the time in slipspace with John or Fred or Linda or Kelly, but they were all doing their mandatory PT. I would just get in the way.

I was, however, keeping tabs on John through the bond.

Now that he'd slept he was feeling better, but not completely. His pain was more than physical. Sleep had helped, but it hadn't fixed it.

I didn't know how to fix it.

Ellen brushed past me again as she rushed to another clunky machine.

Now that the war was over she was staying with the UNSC of her own volition. She was studying much more than just me, too.

Right now, she was trying to get a reading on a strange Forerunner artifact that had been found by a team near Reach's southern pole.

Mainly it was busy work. She didn't want to pause and let her grappling emotions overtake her. She missed her home, yes, but she rather hated the people in that home.

I spun around in my rolly chair to face her. "Ellen...is there anything you want to talk about?"

"No!" She slammed her hands down on the flat surface of the machine in front of her.

She realized instantly that she'd overreacted a bit. Her shoulders rose in a sigh.

"No," she said, more calmly this time. "If I start talking about it I won't stop talking about it."

"I-is that bad?"

She nodded. "I'm here to help the UNSC understand these relics. I'm not here to have a meltdown all over my partner."

I tilted my head. "I'm your partner? I thought- I thought you were studying me."

"I am." She offered me a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "But you're also helping me with the terminal. We're working together."

"Oh." I felt a surprised, happy blush warm my cheeks.

She jerked her head. "Now, come here. I can't tell what this shard was part of; can you find out?"

"I'm- I think so," I said as I followed her to the artifact she was studying.

It was an old, rusty spike of metal that looked like it had been sheared from a much larger chunk. A control mechanism, maybe?. It wasn't too big; about the size of my hand. Maybe a little bigger.

I would have questioned if it was truly Forerunner if I wasn't able to feel the pulsing aura surrounding it. This thing, like me, was definitely Forerunner.

I wrapped my hand around it, drawing it out of the gravity field, and closed my eyes. I sent my mind through the shard and tried to draw out the knowledge Ellen needed.

But the knowledge was elusive.

It was like trying to remember something from when I was a small child; intangible and fleeting. The knowledge was there, but I couldn't perceive it very well.

Some things were easier to discern than others. The Domain was fickle.

I pulled back into my body and sighed. "I-I'm sorry, Ellen, I can't...I can't see what it's from. If I had more-"

"It's fine," she said with a dismissive hand. "I'll just keep running tests."

I put the shard back into the gravity field.

By the time I spun my chair around, Ellen was already at another machine. She was scrolling desperately, trying to pull up a certain setting on the monitor.

I readjusted so that I was on my knees backwards in the chair, and rested my chin on the backrest.

She was so tense, the balled-up emotions were radiating off of her in waves. They clogged up the air around her and made me tense, too.

I wanted to help her. And not just because her freakout was freaking me out.

"Ellen?" I ventured.

She didn't look up. "Yeah?"

"I-I really think talking about it would help."

"Tawny." She levelled me with endeared exasperation. "Not everyone needs help. I know you've got a lot on your plate with that SPARTAN, but not everyone has a soul-crushing problem that warrants your attention."

I blushed again. "N-no, but you're my-my friend. I want to help you. Even if it's not super traumatic, something i-is making you upset."

She straightened her spine and pulled her long black hair out of its bun. "I'm okay, Tawny. Really."

I just looked up at her with concern in my eyes.

"...We're just going to be close to my home while we're there, and I don't know if I want to see my mother again or not." She pulled her hair back up into a bun. "She's not...a bad person. She's just…"

I didn't say anything; I was surprised she was actually talking to me about it.

I knew she had trouble with mother figures - she downright despised Dr. Halsey, who had been her mentor for a while - but she'd never said anything to me about it.

"She's just a hypocrite," Ellen eventually said. "She expects me to succeed so she doesn't have to. The only thing she's done with her life is marry rich. It pisses me off."

And then she returned to her machine, as if she'd never spoken. I could feel faint waves of embarrassment; she didn't mean to say any of that.

But talking about it had helped her release some of the tension that coiled the muscles between her shoulders. She was moving more fluidly now, a little more at ease.

I looked down, thinking for a moment. "You don't have to see your mom if you don't want to. W-we're probably going to be really busy, anyway."

"Yeah." Ellen took a soothing breath and turned to face me. "We'll definitely have our hands full. Most of the surface of Arcadia is unmapped, but satellite imagery suggests as much as ten percent of the surface is covered in Forerunner structures."

My eyes widened. "Wow. That's...that's a lot."

She nodded. "We're not going to study nearly all of it, of course. We're just going in first to make sure none of it is active or dangerous. Our first destination is a Forerunner structure in Kinross; that's on Eire."

The way she said that made me think her words held a deeper meaning than just telling me our assignment.

"You're from Eire, aren't you?" I asked gently.

Ellen didn't meet my eyes. "I'm from Pirth; it's on the western border of Eire."

"Oh." I bit my lip. "Are- do you know if we're going to be close to the border?"

"We're not." She took another breath, shedding her nostalgia like water. "Now, I have work to do."

oOOOOo

Author's Note: Sorry it's so short!

Also I'm still looking for someone to help me with the Sikh characters in my RvB fic if anybody's interested :)