A/N: This one's kind of long. But, such as it is, it's the last of the set-up chapters, for now. Next chapter will get back to 'real' story.

Thanks to Tarva for implicitly granting permission to use some elements of her excellent fic, 'Veneratio Jiralhanae.' Go read it. Now.

And, as always, enjoy.

Chapter Eight: Sommeil avec l'Ennemi

"A brute?" Cortana exclaimed, voice filled with disbelief.

Kramer looked nervous as he watched Eugene Roe and Briggs trying to drag the still-unconscious beast from the back of their Warthog. "Er… yes, ma'am. A prisoner."

The Master Chief could just feel the AI crossing her arms inside his head. "Why?"

"I thought maybe we could get nearby Covenant locations and thus avoid them," Kramer replied testily.

"Do you realize the situation we're in?" Cortana asked incredulously as Briggs and Roe dumped the huge beast onto the floor of the cargo hold. "That thing is a risk to our safety." She paused for a moment, as if thinking, then: "Kill it. Now."

Corporal Hook stiffened. "With all due respect ma'am, I promised the grunt that neither he nor the brute would be hurt."

"Without my consent…" Kramer rumbled softly.

Cortana sighed. "If we kept the grunt, that's not a problem. He's harmless, and if your elite can convince him, he could even be useful. But brutes…" she trailed off.

"Brutes are big, angry, obnoxious bastards," the Chief finished for her.

"They're right, Corporal," Kramer sighed, not feeling in the mood for a confrontation with Hook. The girl was a good soldier, but she could be ridiculously stubborn.

Just then, Private Roe stepped up to their little circle. "If I may, sir…"

Kramer rolled his eyes. "Go ahead, Gene."

"Let me check this ship for some norepinephrine. If I c'n wake this fella up, maybe ya'll can 'splain the situation to him, an' he'll be some use to us," Roe requested gently, his easygoing voice defusing the situation.

Kramer had to admit the old Southern doctor was a persuasive man. "All right. I guess it can't hurt. You object, Chief?"

The Spartan scowled beneath his helmet, but he guessed that it was better to do it just to satisfy all involved. Better to settle the matter with bullets and leave happy than to argue over it and wind up with someone dead or the unit fragmented. "Nope."

Cortana sighed, knowing what the Chief was thinking, so she acquiesced despite her misgivings. "I guess if the Chief's okay with it, I am too."

"There's a med lab on the fourth level, across from the officer's quarters, if I remember rightly," Roe said, and with that, he grabbed his rucksack and was gone.

Dari watched all this in quiet terror. First, there was the presence of the Demon - and that was enough to terrify any self-respecting unggoy. Then there was the constant threat against Maximus' life.

He had decided that he could trust the human female - Jaynah was her name - the healer, Yoojeen, and, of course, the Sangheili, 'Ulee Dakol. The Sangheili had always been the grunts' protectors. The three of them had been kind to him when they were not required to. But the grunt didn't like Craymer or Breegs. They were hard men, unmerciful.

And the Demon… well, that went without saying.

An hour later, Fireteam Zulu and the Master Chief had finally gotten the brute's motionless body dumped onto the floor of an emergency op center. They took the time to restrain the beast by tying it to the zero-gee handles along the wall with industrial steel cable.

Roe had found his norepinephrine, and was preparing a 20 cc hypo.

"20 cc's?" Corporal Hook muttered incredulously. "Isn't that way too much?"

Roe winked at her, grinned, his gray eyebrows rising. "He's a big boy, ma'am. Ought to wake him right up."

And with that, he turned and jammed the overlarge medical needle right into the brute's chest.

Instantly, the huge creature was thrashing as if having fits, jerking against the restraining cables, eyes wide open and full of fear and rage. It snarled, head smashing off of the deck over and over again, uncontrollable.

"Ought to wake him right up," Corporal Hook shouted sarcastically over the noise.

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, the brute stopped jerking and lay motionless. For a moment, the Master Chief thought he was dead, but Cortana quickly dispelled that notion: "Heart rate's way too fast, but he's okay," she said.

The brute raised his head and looked around, eyes rimmed red. His huge, gray-furred extremities shook - the Chief couldn't tell whether it was from rage or from the drugs - and he seemed to be trying to say something.

Dari pushed his way to the front of the group, trying to squeeze his little head between Hook and Briggs. "Maximus!" he exclaimed in Tterran, the universal language of the Covenant.

The brute stirred, grunted. "Eh, is it little Dari?" he responded groggily, speaking the same tongue. "What's going on?"

The humans parted to let Dari draw close to the brute sub-chieftain. "We've been captured, my lord," the grunt responded, shamefaced. "They set upon us when you fell in the jungle."

Maximus chuckled darkly and looked around at their captors. "I'm sure you gave them what for." Feel no shame; the fault is not yours.

The grunt couldn't resist a smile. "Tooth and claw," he replied. Thank you, my lord.

As the two Covenant warriors conducted their reunion, Kramer came into the room, wheeling 'Ulee Dakol before him. The elite was comically lashed into the too-small wheelchair, looking proud yet distinctly uncomfortable at the same time.

Dakol insisted upon wheeling himself over to the prone jiralhanae, where he quickly introduced himself in Tterran: "Greetings, chieftain. I am 'Ulee Dakol, of the Separatists."

Maximus eyed him for a moment, and Dakol noted that the brute seemed remarkably in control of himself, considering his situation.

The jiralhanae spoke: "Sub-chieftain Maximus, clan Rakuta, at your service, Minor Dakol." Then, with a rather wry grin, he added, "Not that I have much of a choice."

'Ulee nodded. He had heard tell of clan Rakuta. "You were under the Chieftain Recolitus?" he stated more than asked.

"Quite so," Maximus replied. "Recolitus was - is - a mighty warrior, and a credit to my kind."

Dakol sighed, his mandibles puffing in thought. Then, asking: "Do you speak the humans' tongue?"

"Fluently, actually," Maximus replied.

The humans glanced back and forth at one another. "Great," Kramer mumbled. "No hiding anything from him."

Dakol shot his sergeant a look, but wisely refrained from saying anything. Even as a sangheili, he was one of the few elites who felt that humans were their equals. Kramer was ranked higher than he in the UNSC/CS hierarchy, and he respected the man as such.

The elite awkwardly rolled his chair back to allow the others to get a better look at the brute. "His name is Maximus," he reported. "Perhaps some of you can explain the situation to him better than I."

The Chief felt a nudge in his helmet, and instantly knew what Cortana wanted. He held out his hand, palm up, and Cortana appeared on the holoscan gauntlet. "You seem pretty reasonable for a brute," Cortana said, hands on her hips in her trademark display of irreverence. "I'm going to put it to you bluntly: we're all trapped on this Ark, and we'll all die if we don't find a way to get off of it."

Maximus raised an eyebrow and tilted his chin to get a better look at the AI. "I am already fully aware of this, construct. Your point?"

Cortana crossed her arms and fixed the brute with a dark look. "We're going to have to work together - Covenant and UNSC - if we want to survive this."

Maximus laughed softly. "Female, you obviously fail to realize that I have nothing to lose. Whether I aid you or not, I am going to die. Whether here at your Demon's hands, or later, beneath the fist of humanity as a whole, I will die. I will have my Journey. Little Dari will have his Journey. He and I shall go to our reward, and you… you are destined for wrath."

The Master Chief had felt Cortana grow frustrated simply by the resonant feeling in his neural lace. Thus, he wasn't surprised at her sudden outburst: "You brutes have got to be the slowest beings in the galaxy. Don't you get it? There is no Great Journey!"

Maximus smiled softly, winsomely confident. "I have had my faith for my whole lifetime, construct, and my forefathers for lifetimes before that. We have placed our hope in the Journey, and it shall not be swayed by the words of a… computer."

Cortana turned, looked up at the Chief. "Stubborn, you said."

John couldn't resist a small smile beneath his visor. "I did."

Then, turning back to the brute: "If you will not hear the truth, then I will show it to you."

At those words, John was ripped back several months to Delta Halo, squirming in the Gravemind's god-like grip as the huge beast bent its malevolent will upon him and the Arbiter.

Foul breath washed over his atmospheric filters, overloading them with the odor of rotting carcasses as the monstrosity's vast head tilted and viewed the two beings struggling in its tentacles with something bordering disdain.

"…then I will show it to you."

Those were the exact words the Gravemind had used on the Arbiter… and Cortana had just repeated them.

Damn.

He shook himself out of his stunned reverie in time to watch as Cortana shut down his suit's external holoprojector, killing an artificial image of 343 Guilty Spark.

Maximus was still lying on his back, restrained, but his huge body no longer showed the tensile strength of a warrior. He lay limp, defeat, crushed. "It comes from the Oracle's own voice…" he murmured. "I cannot deny it."

Beside him, Dari was staring in open-mouthed horror at where the hologram of Spark had been.

"This mean… all lies?" he asked softly, voice cracking. "All unggoy, dead for nothing? No… no Journey?"

Maximus looked across the deck at his attaché with grief and pity. "No, Dari… no Journey."

The grunt stood motionless for a long time, shoulders shaking softly in the unggoy expression of deep grief. Then, he abruptly sat down, rolled onto his side, and closed his eyes.

Maximus felt at where the steel cables had chafed his wrists. "He is grieving," the brute explained, looking toward where Dari lay, in foetal position, on a bunk. He had not moved, even when Corporal Hook and the Master Chief had gently lifted him and laid him down on the overlarge bed.

Roe felt at the grunt's pulse and shook his head. "He might as well be dead, slow as his heart's beatin'," he said.

"The unggoy go into a short period of hibernation to express respect for their fallen, particularly at the end of a war or a battle," Maximus explained.

Then, glancing toward 'Ulee: "The Covenant usually did not allow such a grieving period. We drove them from one battle to next with as little regard as if driving nerfs."

Kramer looked up from his lit cigarette. "Well. What's next for us?" he asked.

Cortana looked over at the sergeant from her place on a terminal. "The Dawn's space antenna is essentially useless. We can't send any kind of high-powered signal much further than the Ark's atmosphere. And that beacon that I dropped can only send a signal so fast. It'll take years before the signal even gets close to UNSC colonies."

"So what're you saying?" Briggs asked as he shifted his grip on his ever-present assault rifle.

Cortana shrugged. "I'm saying that the Ark is our best chance of survival."

"You don't mean… colonization?" the Chief asked hesitantly.

The AI smiled at him. "No, no. I mean we can use the Ark's facilities to send off a deep space burst message - or, at least, we should be able to. If this place doesn't have deep space communications, I'll be very surprised."

"So… where to?" Corporal Hook asked, blue eyes deeply confused.

Cortana looked toward the Chief, and the Spartan again knew what she meant: "We're going back to the Cartographer."

John worried.

Not many people knew this, but the Spartan worried about a lot of things. He was always concerned about the state of his armor, his weapons, and his teammates - whether Spartan or otherwise - but there was one thing that he had always worried about with great regularity:

Cortana.

And she had severely concerned him lately.

Outbursts of different emotions seemed to come for her as easily as hacking a Covenant system. One minute, she was angry, next, she was smiling at him. And the… quirks. Like the way she'd repeated the Gravemind's words - exactly. He was certain that that was no coincidence.

And now, as she sent the Marines off to fetch things from the ship while he and Eugene Roe helped 'Ulee and the wounded brute onto bunks, he couldn't help but notice the fact that he'd worried about her more than anything else these last few days; he'd never had time to consider it, before.

Something felt different. Not just within her, but within himself.

He was regarding her differently.

At their first meeting, she had been a tool, then had progressed from tool to teammate, then, from teammate to… friend.

And it hit him. The silly, stupid, idiocy of it hit him square between his biologically enhanced eyes, and his jaw almost dropped in realization.

He loved her.

He… was in love… with an AI.

Oh, Spartan, you are a mess.

He glanced back at her computer form, fiddling with something in her terminal.

Something else not many people gave John credit for was his intelligence. He was a soldier, a guns-blazing, grenade-hurling soldier known for his Covenant-killing prowess. He was not known for being particularly verbose, and thus, people assumed that he was a stereotypical 'jarhead' - good for killing, but little else.

The opposite was true.

John-117 had a highly analytical mind, capable of developing theories, plans, and hypotheses in moments. During his education under CPO Mendez, he had studied in great detail the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other more modern philosophical scholars, such as C.S. Lewis.

Lewis was one of his favorites. The Englishman had divided the concept of 'Love' into four categories: agape, selfless, chosen love - considered to be the purest form - storge, the love of a parent for a child, philia, brotherhood, and, of course, eros.

John already knew that he had philia for his fellow Spartans. He knew that he was physically incapable of maintaining eros for very long. And he had never known storge. This meant only one thing. This… love… for Cortana was agape: selfless, chosen love.

He had made a decision at some point to love this computer construct.

And, for some reason, the thought both thrilled and terrified him.

CTU-Africa, East African Protectorate
Cairo, Egypt
March 13, 2553, 03:28:19 AM

"Well, then, who the hell are we gonna use?" Mason shouted, and slammed his file folder onto the glass table top. "Can't we find one damn operative in this whole place who we can trust to handle it?"

Special Agent Tony Almeida gave Mason his trademark you're bugging me look that just made George Mason want to wring the mother-lovin' spic's neck. "I already gave you one suggestion, but you didn't like it," Almeida responded sarcastically.

Mason sighed and slumped into his leather chair. He looked out the glass walls of his office to the floor of CTU-Africa, a hive of cubicles filled with computer geeks doing the tech work for his operation. "I can't believe I'm going to go along with this."

Tony shot his boss an easy grin. "I knew you'd come around, George."

Mason ran a hand over his nearly bald head and gave a crooked smile, fixing Almeida with his watery blue eyes. "Bauer's a risk for this operation and you know it. Guy's got a history. But he's a damn good agent. I can't deny that."

Almeida stood and swept up his own files. "I'll activate him right away, have him brought in," he said as he stepped out the door.

George nodded, then shouted after him as an afterthought: "Any injuries this time, you're doing the paperwork, Almeida!"

Spartan Jack-004.

Chief Field Agent Jack Bauer.

The two people were one and the same.

But if you were to ask him, he'd tell you that he was born in California, in the United North American Hegemony, back during the Rebellion. He would tell you that he had a father, Phillip, and one brother, Graem.

It would be a lie.

ONI Facility, Reach
DTGS Unknown
2525 AD (c.?)

The haze of morphine dulled his brain, but he jerked uncontrollably. His impulses were completely uninhibited, violent, making his hideously strong body lurch across the gurney, slamming himself against the rails. Two male nurses were doing their best to hold him down, but his small body was too strong.

Doctor Gorman muttered in frustration as he struggled to hold the patient's arm down, trying to keep the ever-important IV in place. "Dammit, give him point-oh-eight cc's of vecuronium. Get him quiet. He'll kill himself at this rate."

The only female nurse in the OR complied, whisking up a syringe and stabbing it into a secondary vent on the plastic tubing. "Done."

After a few seconds, the patient finally calmed, and his body stopped moving, tangled in the torn paper sheets. The male nurses stepped back, one glancing at the now twisted and dented rails. He whistled, long and low. "Who the hell is this, anyway?" he asked, quiet with awe and a kind of reverence. "He's just a kid - what, sixteen?"

Gorman looked up. "You'll know soon enough."

The room was black.

For some reason, that was all that could get through Jack-004's head.

The room was black.

This bothered him.

He tried to move, and suddenly, he was sitting upright in bed, like some kind of tightly-strung Frankenstein. The room was still black.

A familiar voice spoke, coming from the inky ebony in front of him. "Jack."

He blinked, once, twice. Tilted his head up in the close darkness and squinted, trying to make sense of what was presented. "Yes, Dr. Halsey?" Something felt different about him. His arms were light. He lifted them, felt them. They seemed larger.

Dr. Catherine Halsey folded her arms and sighed. Jack was number three, and once again, she had to tell the awful news. "I'm afraid I have bad news, Jack."

The young man nodded, trying to focus, but the aftereffects of the powerful sedatives still dampened his mental faculties. And his vision was refusing to clear.

He tried to make everything concrete, keep it simple: OK, bad news, Jack. She has bad news. Listen up. "Yes, ma'am?"

"While you were in surgery, Jack… something went wrong with the occipital capillary reversal, while the doctors were trying to perform the thyroid implant. Your eyes… rejected the procedure, and your retinas ruptured so badly that they had to be removed. The surgery was never completed."

That made it through. He slowly leaned back into the mattress. Focus, Jack. Focus. "Oh." It was all he could get out. "I see." The bitter irony of that phrase suddenly came to him, and he grimaced. He tried to maintain discipline and professionalism as he realized what this meant.

"However, your doctor, Henry Gorman, tells me that he is capable of performing surgery upon your eyes, replacing them with cybernetic implants."

Jack turned his head up in Dr. Halsey's direction, a hopeful look spreading across his face. If he could see, maybe he could…

Then, Dr. Halsey clarified for him: "The cybernetic eyes are too fragile to place you in a combat zone, however. This means that… you're no longer a part of the SPARTAN-II program, Jack." She stopped, looked down at her feet. "I'm sorry."

Jack was, at heart, a true Spartan. He was immeasurably proud of this. His brothers and sisters-at-arms were his family; he had never known another. And now… it was gone, along with his eyesight.

Halsey tried to muster some cheerfulness, give some hope to this suffering young man, murmured, "You would not be able to… rejoin the Spartans, but you will be able to lead a normal life."

He forced himself to speak. "Okay." He could not coax any more words from his mouth. Dr. Halsey understood. She reached out a tentative hand… laid it on his shoulder for a moment. Understanding. That helped Jack more than anything. But then, the cool, smooth skin left his shoulder, and he was alone again. Alone in darkness.

The surgery was successful, and Jack received his implants. They were like much like organic eyes in many aspects, better in some ways, poorer in others.

This, he pondered, as he examined them in the mirror. They looked like human eyes as nearly as possible, save for the otherworldly hardness. As a 'humanizing' factor, the eyes had false irises, a deep shimmering blue composed of real human tissue. The pupils, actually metal diaphragms peering through a gap in the synthflesh and ceramic orbs, were black holes into dark circuitry and transistors, machinery. They mirrored the mind that lay behind them, left to stagnate and grind upon itself.

The image presented to him in the mirror was odd - his eyes made a false infinity loop in the mirror itself, sending images of the blonde, sandy-haired, grim faces deep into oblivion. The eyes themselves presented a normal view of the world to Jack. Color was brighter, clearer. Images were sharper. The mechanisms were neurally linked to his lace, so that he could call up a primitive HUD that gave him the date, time, and a small map.

He nodded. It was efficient, yet it was fragile. EMP could eliminate his sight. In the presence of extremely powerful magnetic force, the optics would become sensitive. Breakable. Like his treacherous body.

He sighed, rubbed his tired face with his left hand. He ticked off the plans in his mind. ONI had given him a few very specific orders during his debriefing and discharge, the greatest of which was to keep his past a secret. No one must know that he had been part of the SPARTAN-II program. So they gave him a new name, a new past, a new home.

He pulled the papers from his messenger bag and looked them over again.

Name: Jack Bauer
DOB: Unknown
Born: California, United North American Hegemony
Personal:
- Father - Phillip
- Brother - Graem
Currently living: New Mombassa
East African Protectorate
1800 Greek Lane

Jack Bauer. He pondered that. His new name. His new identity. His new life.

He bent down and picked up his messenger bag. Within were his only possessions: a few changes of clothing, his precious M9 sidearm, and food and money for a week. A secure bank account containing a substantial amount of money in government bonds, stocks, and cash had been ferreted away for him. He was set for the next few years of his life… plenty of time to get familiar with what it meant to be a civilian.

Hanging his bag from his now thickening frame, he turned and left the ONI hospital, never to return.

At seventeen years old, he was alone in the world.

Cairo, Egypt
1800 Greek Lane
March 12, 2553, 04:12:47 AM

He opened his eyes. The servomotors activated, and images streamed to his brain. The moon was pouring into his bedroom window, and he felt a strange chill in his altered bones. He spared a glance for the slumbering figure beside him, and a quiet rush warmed him. He carefully rose from the bed, his movements so controlled that the mattress hardly shifted. His feet felt the cold hardwood of the bedroom floor, and a second chill rushed up his legs as he moved to the window and looked out.

Jack felt strangely conflicted.

Somewhere, beyond those stars, his fellow Spartans had been hurled into battle with the Covenant over the last forty years. Much had been made of them here on Earth and elsewhere in the Colonized Worlds. ONI Section Two had done a good job with the propaganda effort. Nothing but praise for the program dripped from the news media, glorifying the foresight of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the vast wisdom of the United Nations Space Corps. Yet when battle reports came back and were printed in the paper, Jack would read these and instinctively know that something was horribly wrong.

Each time, casualty reports would be... strange, somehow. No KIAs. But plenty of WIAs and MIAs. The circumstances that surrounded these events were... suspicious at best. And Jack knew. Despite the facade that ONI Two was building, his brothers and sisters were dying in space. That hurt him, pressed horribly and filled him with guilt.

For here, in post-invasion Cairo, Egypt, he was happy.

His gaze roved to the feminine figure lying tangled in the sheets. His wife. Terri. And their adult daughter, Kimberly. He was retired now, but he once had a job with the East African Protectorate Central Tactical Unit as a field agent, using his military skills to engage in planet-side investigations in Covenant terrorist activities. But as much as he enjoyed it, he knew what he wanted to be doing.

And he knew what he would be missing if he was doing what he wanted to do.

Shut up, Bauer. You're torturing yourself for no reason. Go to sleep.

So he went back and slid beneath the blankets. He tenderly enfolded his sleeping wife in his arms, and he slept.

That morning, he rose before Terri and went into the kitchen. Just then, his dumb AI, Croesus, appeared on the holopad in the table. "Good morning, Mr. Bauer," he smoothly intoned, one hand lightly ruffling his golden robe.

Jack nodded, already distracted by the morning paper that scrolled across his flimsiplast holoscan. "Morning. Could you… start some coffee for me?"

Croesus glanced at him with languid surprise. "Of course, sir, but do you not wish to see the message?"

Jack looked up. "Message?"

The AI nodded amicably and gestured. A small blip on Jack's screen grew substantially. "It was encoded, with strict orders to make it your-eyes-only."

Jack frowned. Who would send me a YEO over civ bandwidth? He tapped the message, glanced at the header. "Tony Almeida..."

Then, looking up at the AI: "Croesus, would you wake up Terri?"

The AI nodded. "I shall do so immediately, sir," and, in a spray of golden computer code, he vanished.

Jack scanned the letter. Exactly what he'd expected: SA Almeida wanted to activate him in his old capacity to do something highly sensitive for ONI -

"…Section Zero."

"Section Zero?" he whispered aloud. Section Zero wasn't even supposed to exist. The United Nations Space Command denied that there was, ever had been, or ever would be a Section Zero. There were, of course, some conspiracy theorists who proclaimed that Zero was actually the section of ONI that controlled the government, but thus far, there was no proof that such a thing existed...

"I know you told me you'd never come back, but this is a huge deal, Jack. It's straight from the top - Parangosky herself.

"I hate to say this, but George told me that if we activate you, you've got no choice in the matter. ONI's going to invoke §104.2.5 - Emergency Covert Operations. Don't blame me - it wasn't my fault.

"I can't talk about the details here, but I'll just say that it's going to be hell, Jack. But I know you can pull it off. Please just come in today, hear us out. Maybe you'll want to get back in the game.

"Either way, once you've finished reading this, this letter is going to be purged from our system. If you decide to come in today and make this easier on us both, then say the following key to your AI: 'The Laecdamonean has returned.' This will trigger a cycle that we encoded into his software. You'll get a new entry code to headquarters, and Croesus will be deleted, so as to prevent any record of Section Zero contacting you.

For Terri's sake, Jack, if no one else's… just come in today.

Tony."

Jack sighed and rested his chin in his hand. Well. He contemplated it for a moment, and looked around at the kitchen. Croesus had evidently gone ahead and started his coffee - it was starting to simmer in the pot.

Jut then, Terri came into the kitchen, tying a bathrobe around her waist. "What's going on, Jack?" she asked sleepily. "Croesus came in and woke me up."

The ex-Spartan passed his flimsiplast to his wife. She quickly looked it over, then tossed it on the table. "You've got to be kidding me," she said softly. Then, coming to Jack's side, taking his arm, suddenly worried: "What are you going to do?"

Jack kissed her temple and put an arm around her. "What do you want me to do?" he asked quietly.

Terri rested her head on his shoulder and sighed. "You don't have much of a choice, do you?"

"I guess not."

Just then, Croesus reappeared. "Coffee's ready, sir."

Jack looked up, nodded: "Thanks, Croesus."

Then, before the AI could respond: "The Laecdamonian has returned."