A/N: A Merry Christmas to you all - hope it was lovely. Happy Boxing Day to you Aussies out there. Happy Hannukah to the Jews, and a good Feast to those of you who claim Islam. Salaam.

This chapter definitely has a more spiritual feel - I think the season is getting to me. If it's too much, say so. ;-)

And I have completely flipped the bird to slip-space travel times for plot convenience. Nyah.

Chapter 11: L'Art d'Introspection

The camp was quiet, covered by the velvet darkness of artificial night. A soft breeze stirred the brush that ringed the clearing. The remains of a fire burned low, glowing embers sending waves of warmth to the sleepers that ringed it. All were silent and asleep, even the Chief. He lay on his back, hands folded on his chest, helmet off, relying on his armor to keep him warm through the night.

Cortana watched him from the visor of his helmet, which sat nearby, close enough at hand that he could slip it on should combat beckon. She sat on the edge, legs dangling, arms crossed over her chest.

Mendicant Bias was patrolling the perimeter only as a sleepless AI could. She could see his soft green light flitting to and fro amongst the trees like a phantom.

Deep in her heart, Cortana distrusted the Forerunner intelligence. He was so different from the Monitors - so much more intelligent, calculating. Guilty Spark had a certain level of frivolity to him: the way he constantly whistled that inane tune, his exclamations proclaiming his wisdom, his blind, peppy optimism. Mendicant was none of these things.

Even Bias' flight patterns were different from Spark's. The AI always took a straight and true path, completely lacking the capering lurches that Spark seemed to indulge in. She shivered - something she never would have done before... rampancy.

Her body was something she was only becoming more aware of as time went on and she focused more and more upon herself, the way she felt. It was a new experience, a new, terrifying set of feelings that coursed through her. For one, modesty had exploded onto the scene - a horrific realization that she was naked. Previously, 'nakedness' had been associated with her transistors, her wiring being exposed, and that was not a huge taboo. But every time she used her avatar, she had a horrible sense of exposure, and she understood neither why nor how she felt as she did.

The gamut of human emotions - joy, rage, suspicion, hatred, sorrow, pleasure, love - had descended upon her, and she hardly knew how to deal with them except to shut down and try to take them one at a time. They were not computer impulses - she could not control, turn off, adjust her feelings as she saw fit.

It was a frightening, disorienting experience that left her feeling... helpless.

Yet, as her gaze fell again upon John's sleeping face, she felt that faint spark in her chest again, like hot magma swelling within her, that told her that he loves you, whether he knows it or not, and he will protect you. He will die to protect you.

Then: God... if You're out there, and You listen to AIs... don't let that happen.

John was not asleep.

He lay there, eyes closed, breathing easily, but his mind was very busy.

He could sense Cortana sitting on the visor of his helmet, almost as if he'd seen her before he lay down. He could also sense her pain and confusion, and that rampancy was taking a harder toll on her than she would tell him.

They hadn't spoken about anything outside of procedure in the last two days, which left him feeling detached, loosed from her - just as lost and alone as he'd felt back on Earth. Going through the motions like the mindless robot everyone seemed to think he was.

"Sir! You are a walking tank, sir!"

But that's not the only thing I am.

The world expected the Spartan to be a simple creature: a born-and-bred killer whose greatest joy was eviscerating split-jawed aliens with 7.62 mm hollow-point bullets. But humans are not meant to exist only on such primitive impulses. No matter how much ONI tried to beat it out of him, John-117 was still a human being - capable of weakness and vulnerability just as much as strength and competence.

Unable to stand the ache in his gut, he rolled over and sat up. Cortana jerked at his sudden movement, drew her legs up as if to cover herself. Her eyes were wide, face raw with a level of emotion that the Spartan had never seen before.

"Sorry to scare you," he said, offering an encouraging look - at least, one he hoped was encouraging.

Cortana responded with a wan smile. "No harm," she replied. "I thought you were asleep."

John shrugged. "Can't. Thinking too hard."

"About what?" the AI wanted to know.

The Spartan cocked an eyebrow, passed his friend a sheepish look. "Well." How to say it? "I was... thinking of you, actually."

That made a flicker of amusement cross Cortana's face. "Oh?"

"We haven't talked about... what happened on High Charity," the Chief began lamely.

"Which is another way of saying you worry too much," Cortana replied, weariness creeping into her voice.

"Should I be worried?" John asked pointedly.

Cortana sighed. She should have known that it would come to this. And really, she should have told him sooner. Guilt made its presence known on her face. "You know, you should," she answered bitterly. "I've... there's something I haven't been telling you."

John arced an eyebrow. "Oh?"

Cortana lay her head down on her knees, forced herself to look away from him, his eyes glimmering in the firelight. "When I was in High Charity, the Gravemind... introduced a malignant virus into my system."

The Spartan's attention sharply focused. He stiffened, quickly realizing what this meant. "What type of virus?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," Cortana admitted. "It's... strong. Too strong for me to eradicate, especially in this state. I think it was intended to wipe out my Zero Sector."

"To take you," the Chief interpreted grimly, remembering the Flood intelligence's -

- voice but an amalgam of others' voices torn by agony and wrenched into the formation of words... creeping malevolence wrapped in a being who truly believed that he was God Incarnate -

"Yes," Cortana replied, voice firm, final.

The Chief shook his head, sighed again. He'd been doing that so often lately - he felt something that he simply couldn't pin down. He felt... drained, sick, disgusted.

Cortana had been compromised: this virus would impair her operations and potentially turn her into an agent of the Flood. Distantly, he felt the military man in him saying that he needed to activate the failsafes, erase her immediately, never jeopardize the mission, the mission ahead of everything...

No.

Never.

"John?"

The Spartan looked up. The AI was looking at him, eyes filled with... longing. "Yes?"

"I... thanks."

The Spartan knew he was a transparent man without the helmet. She knew what he'd been thinking, and she knew the conclusion he'd come to. It brought a small curve to his lips - the first smile he'd indulged in since... since forever. Something warmed in his chest, and the smile grew wider. "You're welcome."

The urge to say something more began to weigh on him, and he knew what the words were - this time. They wanted to come - but as he looked at her sitting there, small and frightened, he reminded himself for the fiftieth time you're crazy, Spartan. Even if she... did... how the hell would that work?

How the hell does any of this work?

The UNSC Montanawas a very special ship. One of the last Prowler-class deep-space vessels built at the famed 'SkunkWorks' Lockheed-Martin shipyards, it was built for the hunt, built to be a scout, a harbinger for the huge, hulking dreadnoughts that searched and destroyed humanity's foes.

It had streaked across the galaxy, searching for the last, greatest enemy to the UNSC, and now, it had finally arrived.

The Ark spun lazily below them, aglow with its own light. Jack Bauer stared out the viewshield and folded his arms. He had seen the images of the Halos, and later of the Ark, but seeing it up close... was different.

Rear Admiral Goldstein stood behind him, issuing orders to the crew in a low tone, lost in his own mental gyrations.

Jack considered his mission again, ran over the briefings in his mind in the greatest detail. The AI was rampant, potentially murderous, like a Havoc warhead primed to explode. John-117 was likely not going to let the AI go without a fight, so he had to go, too. Which went against Jack's personal involvement in the Spartan-II program.

Well. He had to start somewhere, and what better place to start than with John-117 and the AI they called Cortana?

The trick was finding them.

Only one way to start.

Turning, he caught Goldstein's attention. "Prepare a single pod for a hard-drop. And start the scanners. Look for active IFF tags," he ordered, voice rough from disuse.

Goldstein looked at him incredulously. Officially, the mission was to retrieve the AI, Cortana, but both he and Bauer knew that in reality, it would come down to killing Spartan-117 and forcefully taking back the AI. Yet Bauer wanted a single pod? "You'll be going in to scout...?" he asked hopefully.

Jack turned, one eyebrow arced. "No. I'll being going in to speak directly with the Master Chief."

Dumb shit's going to get himself killed, Goldstein thought derisively. And, of course, I will get blamed for it somehow. Keeping his annoyance from his face, he pushed a tone of condescension into his voice and said, "You realize that if you go in alone, we can't help you from here."

Jack kept his face rigid, unmoving, lips just short of a scowl. "I know."

Goldstein sighed, covered his ass: "If a hostile moves to take you out... you know you're on your own."

Son of a bitch, Jack thought, annoyed. You think I'm a glory hound, don't you? "I know."

Goldstein nodded evenly, played the innocent. Bauer did not outrank him, but the Admiral was loath to cross a spook, and thus, cross ONI. He gave an internal shrug, tried to keep too much deference from making itself obvious on his face.

"All right. I'll... I'll have it prepped."

Corporal Hook slumped down and let her helmet fall to the earth beside her. Across from her Maximus was lovingly polishing the blades of a lone spiker that they'd found aboard the Dawn.

"Nice mess we're in, isn't it?" she muttered in the brute's general direction.

Maximus looked up and let fall the dirty rag in his hand. He examined her tired face for a moment, his dark eyes peering through the silvered fur that ringed them. "But you have the look one who has been in many places such as this," he replied, his tone speaking as if this were an obvious fact - one that he was reminding her of.

Jana cocked an eyebrow. "By which you mean...?"

The old Jiralhanae laid the spiker in his furry lap; it was actions like those that continually reminded Jana that without his power armor, the brute was naked. Ignoring her blushing look - mostly because he did not know what it meant - Maximus explained: "The look of one who's been tested is universal."

The Corporal responded with a sarcastic grin. "Yep. You aliens and us humans. We're so alike."

"You would be surprised," Maximus answered. His large, furred paws were dexterously manipulating some crude controls on the pistol grip of the spiker.

Jana expected an explanation, but when he did not continue, her curiosity pricked her. "Like what?"

Maximus nodded, chuckled. "We are both soldiers, are we not? We both carry the scars of war. And as races - do we all not love, hate, forgive, bicker, argue?"

"Some more than others," was Hook's sardonic reply.

"No doubt," Maximus came back equably. "...and that sounds like the voice of experience."

"You - a brute - asking me? About my life?" Jana asked incredulously, raising her eyebrows. Maximus noted that they seemed remarkably well-groomed for a soldier's.

"Why not?"

Jana shrugged, looked away, mystified. "Yeah... why not? Why not tell my life story to a brute?"

Maximus mimicked her shrug, baring his fangs in a show of amusement. "What better do we have to do here?"

Jana looked back, the look in her eyes empty and distant. "Well. I'm twenty-four earth years old. Joined the ODSTs - part of the human army - when I was twenty-two. Distinguished myself on Macedon Station back on Earth, and got promoted to Lance Corporal. And here I am now."

"What were you before you were a warrior?" Maximus wanted to know, deciding to ignore the fact that he understood approximately half of that.

"A fool," Jana responded bitterly, and said nothing more.

Maximus grunted, once again nonplussed. "What happened?" he asked gently.

Jana gave a harsh laugh. "Not even sure why I'm telling you this," she said huskily. "I never thought I'd be psychoanalyzed by a brute."

She took a moment to collect herself; Maximus allowed it, realizing that he had begun to tread upon ground that was still scorched by unknown fires.

Jana finally looked up, obviously trying to keep back tears. She smiled weakly. "I fell for a guy in the Marines named Terence. I was eighteen. He said he really loved me, wanted to marry me. Promised he would, too, when he got back from Basic. Training, that is."

"...and he failed to make good on his promise," Maximus finished.

"Worse," Jana growled. "He had some little army slut on his arm. He was... completely different from the man I knew."

Maximus repressed a growl, but kept his face an impassive mask. He had done some independent study of humanity in order to better understand them. This was an age-old story among them, apparently. Among brutes, the matter wouldn't have been a problem; the returning warrior would simply have kept both women. But humans seemed to place some kind of importance upon monogamy. It had a certain romantic appeal to Maximus; he had only one mate, himself.

But Jana evidently wasn't finished. "I had a friend..." she began, steadying her voice. "...his name was Matthew. Matt, for short." She sighed. "He was great to me after Terence..."

Maximus nodded sympathetically, letting her take her time. She went on, haltingly, the memory washing into her eyes, a window into a thunderstorm.

Her mind slowly plodded back onto territory that she would rather have not walked but that the brute before her seemed to draw out, in his own demure, understated way.

"Matt literally saved my life. I was suicidal for a long time afterward... and I was cruel to him. He'd visit me at work, bring me food, listen while I cried and screamed, then he'd just quietly say exactly what I needed to do." She looked up, and tears were in her eyes.

"He had... a disease... that made his bones weak. Vrolik's syndrome. And one night, we were sitting in his car, and he was telling me that 'hanging onto Terence' was killing me. And I started hitting him. I... broke both of his collarbones."

Maximus winced. These cultural elements she referred to were utterly foreign to him, but the guilt and the shame was universal. "I see..." he murmured.

"Oh, but it gets worse," she intoned caustically. "Instead of helping, I said a polite goodnight, got up out of the car, and - and - and I left him there."

Maximus watched her face as she worked to keep back tears, and decided to let it alone for now. Some things... simply took time.

The armor looked good, sitting there in the wall mount, just waiting for him.

Jack had never gotten to wear the Mjolnir Mark V armor that his fellow Spartans had received. But he'd been told that it was like holding a delicate goblet in your hand: a sense of control, and of fearful power - knowing that a single wrong move could crush the fragile glass into a thousand shards.

The armor looked frightening, sitting there in the wall mount, just waiting for him.

An amazing dichotomy. One that he forced himself to ignore.

Turning, he examined his personal weapons cache. An M5C 2x2-scoped pistol awaited him: a special holdout that ONI had kept aside in the event that such a high-powered weapon would be needed. Clipped into a wall mount was a pair of needlers: the weapon ONI had identified as most capable of killing John-117. An S2-AM sniper rifle flanked

And there, in the wall rack, backlit by hundreds of white, gleaming diodes, was the armor.

Mjolnir Mark VI, permutation 9.01.03: Counter-Tactical Powered Assault/Recon Armor - shipped from the Misriah Armory to the Songnam testing grounds, then up into orbit to the Montana. He knew the specs by heart: the basic Mjolnir armor system with hundreds of minor improvements. The chestplate employed specialized heat-repellant ceramic anti-projectile ablative plating with an internal layer of magnetized nanite weave designed to partially repel plasma in the event of an exoskeletal breach. The frontal plates were lamed, standing at odd angles, capable of deflecting bullets fired from forward positions. The armor was matte military green via a thick coat of radar absorbent iron ferrite paint that absorbed the H-FR (high-frequency radar) used by motion trackers.

The servomotors that powered the armor had been upgraded by Asriel Biomechanical Solutions, off of Earth itself. They were now capable of delivering blows with a concentrated force of nearly 600 fps - easily enough to crush bones and pulp flesh. The drivers that powered the leg segments of the armor had been fitted with the equivalent of a perpetual motion generator - using the energy Jack would expend while running to increase his top speed. He would now be capable of sprinting at close to sixty miles an hour for short bursts.

The helmet utilized the standard design, but widened the visor to increase the peripheral, more reminiscent of the Mjolnir Mark V. It contained all requisite systems: onboard cameras, full HUD, gamma filtration, heat/night/EMP vision modes, holocam projector, and targeting software. The technicians at Misriah had also added two little gems: a wide-band communications decryption-capable onboard computer and the human edition of active camouflage. They'd offered him an AI, but Jack wasn't very fond of that idea.

Back on Earth, his hands and his eyes had always served him well enough to protect him. It was the lone failing of the Spartan program, he thought: the tendency of ONI to rely on technology, which was thus transferred to the Spartans. Yet at the same time, he was eager to wear this armor. It was unique to him, specially designed for a task such as this.

He quietly admitted to himself that he was torn - this, as he pulled on his rubber undersuit. On the one hand, he wished that he could have done his part in the war with the Covenant, but he could now see that if he'd been involved in that, he might not be serving humanity today in this way.

And he was torn on a much deeper level.

While he and John-117 had never been close, he knew and respected the deeds of the Master Chief. And he knew that he and John were the last Spartans alive. He did not want the title of 'Last Spartan' - much as he did not want to engage in a conflict with 117. Yet at the same time...

...everything else in his life depended on the success of this mission.

The choice was an easy one, but that didn't mean that he liked it.

And now, here he was, about to go down to talk to the Chief himself instead of just overpowering him with Skyhawk jumpjets and a few platoons of ODSTs because his damn sense of honor wouldn't let him finish the job cleanly. Always have to make it complicated, don't you?

The technicians helped him get into the chestplate, closing the EV seals, locking him into the suit. As they began working to squeeze the pauldrons and vambraces onto his arms, he stared into the reflective golden visor of the helmet, and wondered why he always was chosen for the impossible.

John had an odd feeling that MCPO Mendez would have killed him if he could have seen this. Dr. Halsey had encouraged this when he was going through training, but Mendez always said that he should spend more time studying war than... that.

John paused for a moment and looked around at the opulent surroundings. The shining gold and cut-glass chandelier in the center of the room was jarring to his senses, almost as if his eyes simply couldn't take in the sight of solid gold. In some ways, he wanted to be back outside in the trenches of Masyaf II, fighting alongside Blue Team.

But the UNSC hierarchy here wanted a word with him, so here he sat in his armor, helmet tucked under his arm, waiting in a huge reception room on the main floor of the Dar al-Harb, as it was locally called. 'House of War.' He'd been sitting for a while... must be what had driven him to this.

Sitting behind an old grand piano and... wanting to play.

The piano was aged and out of tune, the ivory keys yellowed and cracked with age. The Spartan took a guilty look around to make sure no one was looking. He set his helmet atop the closed lid of the instrument and carefully popped the EV seals on his gloves, slipping them off to reveal the fingerless rubber underneath.

He brushed the keys nervously, wondered - will I remember how? - then pushed it aside and...

...he remembered.

Somehow, his fingers began to coax a gentle, sweeping melody from the worn strings, a swelling press of minor key notes that quietly throbbed in the high-ceilinged chamber. It awakened something in his cold heart, something that he hadn't felt since he was twelve years old, playing this same song in a dingy basement during a night exercise on Reach... waiting for morning... waiting for dawn.

Waiting for light.

Suddenly, a blue glow washed over the keys, and he instinctively looked up. Cortana was standing on the visor of his helmet, a pleasantly surprised look on her face. "You play piano," she exclaimed quietly, making John stop in mid-phrase, the melody abruptly ending.

John smiled sheepishly. "Not the most public part of my life."

Cortana sat down, gave him a look that made a soft rush of adrenaline swell in his chest, shortening his breath. "What did you stop for?"

The Spartan shrugged, felt strangely out of place, tried to make light: "You interrupted me."

"Right," Cortana replied evenly, shooting him a grin. "You should play more often."

"Don't usually get a chance," the Chief replied, turning his gaze down to the keys resting beneath his fingers. "Or the urge."

"Would you do it more often if I asked?" Cortana said, a mischievous glint in her eye and a smirk on her lips.

To his own surprise, the Chief instantly replied, "Sure."

Cortana arced an eyebrow at him, winked. "Away, Maestro."

The Spartan sighed, suddenly wishing that he had a piano under his fingertips, that he could dance his rough, calloused fingertips over the keys - classical music like Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and Bing Crosby, or even archaic: Bach, Chopin, Mendelssohn.

His gaze fell on his helmet, sitting next to him as he poked at the ashes of the fire, waiting for the rest of the camp to awaken. Mendicant Bias was still making his tireless rounds in the early half-light. And the Chief knew that Cortana was asleep - he'd checked.

His mind could not shake a word that had plagued him since his momentous re-entry to the Ark. Love.

And one question tormented him, wrestling in his head like tangled, twisted bars of steel whipped by impossible forces. What is love?

He knew all the philosophical musings of all the most famed philosophers and thinkers of the 1st through the 24th centuries: Ptolemy, Christopher Hitchens, Shien Seguro - none of them, he felt, had the true answer. Something had caused him to fall in love with this AI - a phenomenon that he was certain had never happened before. He didn't know even the slightest what to do with this feeling, what it meant, what was intended in its inclusion in humanity.

Frustrated, he tossed a handful of wood onto the fire and started to break open an MRE. Why did this happen now, and why in the hell does it have to be such a pain in the ass?

He knew about marriage, 'romance,' all the mechanics, and had believed that he had a fair understanding of it. But now, confronted with it and all the chaos that it wreaked upon his mind, he realized just how truly inadequate it was. A few disjointed thoughts came together for a moment, something from St. Paul...

...damn it. What was that?

"Love is..." ...what?

He glanced up. Sergeant Kramer had collected some books from the crew's quarters - he had them in a small box on the trailer. Rising, the Chief spared a glance for Mendicant Bias, then strode over and quickly located the plasteel container. He dug through several contemporary titles -

- there. A cracked leather binder presented itself to him: The Holy Bible - New King James Version, c. 1998.

He quickly flipped through the yellowed onion-skin paper to the Letters of St. Paul. A page tore slightly under his rubber-clad fingers and he sighed. A book like this was valuable; Christianity had mostly died out in the last two centuries, save on Earth, where it remained the dominant religion. But Bibles were scarce, particularly ones such as this. This book was a reprint of a manuscript that was six hundred years old - something quite remarkable.

There it is.

The First Letter to the Corinthians gave up for him the passage he sought in the holy book. A quick scan took his eyes to the thirteenth sector, the fourth passage: Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not proud; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails.

The words were so foreign, so out of his understanding, that they fell from his lips in a whisper of wonder: "...bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And never fails."

Was that it?

Was that what he found growing in himself?

Was that what he wanted?

More importantly - was it what she needed?

And, as he closed the book and gently tucked it into its place in the crate, he did not hear the distant roar of an HEV pod entering the atmosphere and plummeting to the earth a mere three kilometers away.

For the first time in his life, the Master Chief was completely and hopelessly distracted.

Dari the grunt had absently wandered away from the camp at an early hour, leaving the others sleeping in a loose circle about the campfire, leaving the Holy Oracle to patrol the grounds.

This was how he found himself flat on his face underneath a rotted log, covered in mud, cold, terrified, and generally certain that he was about to die. Again.

He recognized the huge metal beast that had descended through the air, roaring like an angry Sangheili zealot - the very thought made him cringe - and smashing into the ground with enough force to completely decimate several trees and bury itself halfway in the mud.

The underside of the metal was glowing an angry orange. Nothing had exploded out of the pod yet - no gun-toting humans, blood-crazed brutes, homicidal kig-yar lusting after grunt flesh...

- the door of the pod moved.

It creased just a bit near the top, as if whatever was inside was trapped, trying to get out. This enheartened the grunt somewhat, and he rolled out of his hiding place. Evidently whatever it was, it could be just as susceptible to bad luck as a grunt.

This was about the time that the door of the pod suddenly slammed wide open, smashing a divot in the mud and revealing the most horrifying thing Dari had ever seen.

Another Demon.

His semi-rational mind fled him, and he turned and raced back into the woods toward the camp as fast as his stubby legs would carry him.

Why did it always happen to him?

A/N: Jack's armor is my own design. I haven't really war-gamed it much, but I'm fairly certain it's all workable.