DISCLAIMER: I will own Halo the day you can play ice hockey in hell while pigs fly overhead keeping score.
REVIEW RESPONSES:
Rhavis: Duh. Google it.
Halloween265: Thank you.
"Invader jrek": I know! I was like "WTF? That could've come in useful earlier!"
ArbiterLover: Thank you.
Touketsu HerutsuandNai Homare: I hope it does too, but armour will at least be customizable in multiplayer, hopefully.
Karl-591: Sorry, I don't think there're any psychiatrists that would treat K'tal, him being the big, scary alien that he is. Plus, he wouldn't be able to fit on the couch, nor do I think it could support his weight.
Hal44: Thank you.
"Random Reader": Yes, yes it could.
Oblivion's Oathkeeper: Thanks.
Kirei Ryuusei: Yeah, K'tal's a tad loopy.
RamenKnight: No, just reviews.
"Wolf": Thanks.
"dj": That's your preference. However, in canon, Spec Ops Officers (i.e.. K'tal) have jet-black armour. I prefer black because it kicks ass.
Manga154: Thanks.
WildCard-Yes Man: Done.
Falcon87456: That's my plan.
A/N: Hey, y'all! Sorry about my absence. Here's Chapter 8!
KEY:
"Speech"
'Thoughts'
CHAPTER 8: RECIPROCATION
CAIRO STATION, SEPTEMBER 16, 2552, 1105 HOURS
K'TAL
After waking up, K'tal went through his morning routine: two hours of meditation, followed by an hour of exercises and practicing techniques for unarmed hand-to-hand combat in extreme close quarters; the small size of his room had come in handy for that. After that, it had been an hour of sword exercises, with the swords disabled, of course; no reason to possibly damage something important.
After the sword exercises, he spent an hour working on increasing his ability to speak English, as the humans called it. The humans' language was difficult for him to speak, as his mouth was a different shape, and his larynx had difficulty making some of the noises required, but he was improving.
After that, he went to eat his morning meal. The marines had by now acclimated to the Sangheili living on the station who always came into the cafeteria at exactly the same times every day, got two silver wrapped packets from the mess sergeant, and sat in the far corner where he could watch all the doors while he ate.
"Hey," a human greeted, sitting down at K'tal's table with his tray. K'tal nodded politely, then went back to gnawing a piece of dried purple meat from the Sangheili equivalent of an MRE.
"What's that?" the human asked, gesturing at the meat K'tal was gnawing.
K'tal stopped chewing. "Narthak jerky." he answered.
"Huh?" The human was confused.
"Narthak," K'tal said, making sure the human heard clearly how it was pronounced. "Grazing animal. Native to my homeworld. About the size of a Wraith. We raise them for meat and eggs."
"If they're that big, how do you, you know, keep them corralled, or whatever?"
"Narthak are very docile. They have very few natural predators once they reach full adult size, and they are only ever hostile when defending their young. Even then, they never go further than bellowing and flaring their crests."
"Okay," the human blinked, obviously still a little confused, gestured at a small part of K'tal's sectioned-off tray containing azure paste mixed with a liberal amount of hard chips and flakes coloured off-white, "What's that?"
"Bonemeal. Sangheili make it out of Narthak bones after they slaughter them. The bones split open and the marrow is removed and dehydrated, and the bones themselves are ground up into flakes. Then the dehydrated marrow and the bone flakes are mixed together along with vitamin supplements and vacuum-sealed. You add water before eating it and you can go all day on nothing else if absolutely necessary." K'tal explained, then chuckled at the look of semi-disgust on the human's face. "Yes, I eat bones; Sangheili are carnivores, after all."
"That sounds, uh . . . interesting," the human said weakly. "Is it any good?"
"You mean the taste?" K'tal asked. "No. Bonemeal tastes awful. It keeps you going though, which is what counts." he held up another piece of jerky, having eaten the other piece. "The jerky, on the other hand, is quite good, if a bit dry. It's the only reason a lot of Sangheili ever eat these meals. We use the jerky to 'wash the bonemeal down,' so to speak."
"Uh," the human said, evidently trying to phrase a question, "Could I maybe, uh, try some?" He pointed at the jerky.
"Certainly," K'tal answered. He picked up a new piece, carefully tore off a small piece, about an inch long, then handed the strip to the human. "Be warned though, it is very tough."
The human looked carefully at the purple meat, then hesitantly popped the meat in his mouth and started chewing, with visible difficulty. His eyes widened a fraction. "This isn't bad," he said around the piece of meat, "A little funny tasting, and really hard to chew, but not bad. Not as good as beef, but that's just what I think, being a human and all."
"What is 'beef?'" K'tal asked. The word felt strange to pronounce.
"Well I guess that's fair. You told me about your food; I might as well do the same. Beef is . . . well I guess you could call it our equivalent of your Narthak thing. It's the general name for meat we get from cows, which are herd animals we raise for meat and milk. Or at least we used to anyway."
"What is milk used for?" K'tal asked, head tilting to the side quizzically, "I know what it is, more or less, we have some mammals on Sanghelios that produce it to feed their young, but nothing beyond that. And what do you mean 'used to?'"
"To your first question. Milk and things made from milk, like butter or cheese, is a major part of what we eat, it's actually a whole food group on its own and it's where we get most of our calcium."
K'tal nodded; he understood. Sangheili got all of their calcium directly by eating bones and eggshells, but he could see how other races might need to get it differently.
"Second question. By 'used to,' I mean that cows can't be raised commercially any more. There's not enough farmland left that we could use to farm cattle any more, all of it is used for other stuff. Traditional farming wouldn't supply enough beef anyway; there're too many people on Earth now. It's more convenient to just grow the meat artificially."
K'tal nodded. The Sangheili had encountered that problem earlier on in their history, though it had been solved after they founded their first colony and dedicated it to food production.
"So," the human spoke up again. "Why do you always sit alone over here?"
K'tal shrugged. "I can watch the doors from here. And I sit alone because I doubt any of you want me sitting next to them," he answered matter-of-factly. "Plus, I have more leg-room at an empty table." It was true. K'tal was only comfortable sitting at the table because he was able to stretch his legs out underneath, which he wouldn't be able to do it there were very many humans sitting at the table as well.
The rest of the meal passed in silence.
...
1 HOUR LATER
K'tal walked into the armoury, intent on doing maintenance to his weapons. He had been neglecting it since he had come to the station, and the old Sangheili who had trained him as a swordmaster was probably rolling in his grave because of it.
Truthfully though, that was just an excuse for him. Going over the events of the previous night, K'tal was even more certain that he had made a terrible error in judgment, and no amount of giving himself mental pep talks and advice was helping. He needed to distract himself, and doing so by immersing himself in the simple monotony of weapons maintenance sounded delightful at the moment.
"Hey," the human in charge of the armoury said distractedly, not looking up from the rifle he was reassembling.
K'tal cleared his throat loudly, getting the human to look up from his task. The human jumped, and nervously asked, "Uh, what can I do for you?"
"I would like to know where you have my weapons stored," K'tal said. "I need to perform maintenance on them."
"Oh," the human said, noticeably calming down, "Normally it would be my job to do that, but I have no idea how to work on the weapons you brought. Come on, I'll show you where they're kept."
K'tal nodded in agreement, and they walked over to a counter off to the side of the armoury. The human opened a compartment on the wall next to the counter and started hefting K'tal's various armaments out of it. K'tal stopped him and said, "Don't bother. I can get these out myself, and I was going to work on my swords first anyway."
"Alright," the human agreed, "But make sure you close up the compartment afterward. This is an armoury; I don't want unsecured things shifting around in here. So of it is explosive."
K'tal nodded, then turned to the counter and laid out his sword handles on it. Removing the power cells and setting them to the side, he unclipped his field kit and laid it out on the counter as well, then took a small bundle of weapon maintenance tools wrapped in a soft cloth out.
For the next while, K'tal worked slowly through cleaning all of his weapons, starting with his swords and finishing with his needle rifle; scraping plasma lines clear of the residue from discharge and coolant, picking fragments of needler crystal out of vents so they would not clog, and lubricating firing mechanisms. He was so absorbed in his work that he did not notice the sound of footfalls behind him, and so he was taken completely by surprise by the sound of someone greeting him.
"Hello, K'tal."
...
SIX
Six went looking for K'tal after she finished her workout. She knew that it was probably going to be difficult to find him, given that he didn't really have a fixed schedule that she knew of beyond the times that he ate at.
On a hunch, she decided to check the armoury. Maybe he would be there doing weapons maintenance. If he was feeling as strangely about the incident the previous night as she was, he might be looking for something to take his mind off of it, and weapons maintenance had proven, for her at least, as a great way to distract oneself from dwelling on something.
Walking into the armoury, she immediately noticed the hulking figure of K'tal off to the side, working on something. He seemed completely oblivious to everything except whatever he was working on, and obviously didn't hear her walk up behind him.
Six paused just as she was going to call out to him. She had absolutely no idea what she was going to say. Nobody had ever expressed . . . feelings . . . for her before. This was likely a result of the fact that the only people that could have had even a small chance of relating with her in any meaningful way were other Spartans, with whom relationships beyond friendship and camaraderie were basically impossible; not to mention the fact that the Spartans, for the most part, all regarded each other like siblings. And Spartans never really had the time nor the inclination to start shacking up with anyone.
But when K'tal admitted how he felt to Six, it sparked a number of emotions within her, one of which - despite how she might want to deny it - was longing. Six had always been the outcast: she never had any friends at her playschool on Jericho VII, she had been distant from her parents, then when brought to Onyx for the Spartan program, she had been the loner freak that all the other children teased and taunted. That had been the real impetus for her "lone wolf" tendencies. She had thrown herself into the training, pushing herself to her absolute limits and then some, determined to prove herself, both to the others and to herself. When they did sparring, she was the most aggressive and the least willing to tap out, an attitude that earned the nickname of "Little Wolverine" from the hand-to-hand instructors, though whether it was complimentary or not was debatable. When she had been pulled from Beta Company and assigned as a black ops agent, she had been simultaneously ecstatic and depressed. On the one hand, she was free from the other trainees; though the taunting had stopped as the other children matured, she had always been the odd one out, and it was nice to finally be away from it all. On the other, it meant she had basically wasted her efforts while training. She had wanted to make something of herself, and it had come back to bite her in the ass. Noble Team was really the first time Six had really felt like a part of something, and they all got killed, except for Jun, and she didn't know what exactly happened to him.
All in all, Six was rather starved for positive influences in her life, and now K'tal had dumped his confession on her. And she really didn't know what to think.
'Would it really be so bad if this is something I want?' she thought. 'I never really had a chance at being normal. Maybe all I want is a small taste of what a normal life might be like. So what if he's not human; its not like I can relate to other humans anyway.'
His response in itself was both startling and a little funny. K'tal's head snapped up sharply at the sound of his name and it bashed against a low hanging lamp that was illuminating the worktable he was at.
He clutched at the spot he had hit against the lamp and hissed something harsh-sounding that was probably a curse. K'tal then turned around and tersely said, "Yes?" Then he saw it was her that had spoken.
"Oh, my apologies, Six," he apologized, not looking at her. He glanced back at the counter he had been hunched over. "I was doing some long-overdue weapons maintenance."
"K'tal," Six said, "I want to talk about last night."
K'tal blinked several times rapidly, and his mandibles twitched, then he seemed to finish processing what she said. "Uh, yes," he said, seeming to get flustered, and he reached back to rub the back of his neck in a strangely human gesture, "I was meaning to talk to you about that as well. I realize that I acted rashly last night, and..."
Six was only half-listening as K'tal rambled. Her lips quirked upwards; it was somewhat funny to watch him like this.
K'tal's chattering was starting to get a little irritating, though, and Six couldn't really think of a good way to get him to stop. Except one. 'Ah, hell with it,' she thought, and she raised her hands and set one on each side of his head, lightly gripping the curves of his lower jawline, feeling the slight roughness of his skin, and gently drew his head down closer to hers. He had smartly closed his mandibles, likely so he would not accidentally nick one of her hands with a tooth.
"You talk too much sometimes," she said softly, their faces only a couple of inches apart. She could see right into his eyes, the brilliant green orbs seeming to draw her in. She ran her thumb over his cheek, lightly brushing his scar. She closed the short distance between them and pressed her lips to his closed mandibles in a soft kiss.
A/N: And there was Chapter 8, with my attempt at a sappy, fluffy chapter ending. Please review and tell me how I did and whether you thought it was good or bad or whatever.
Also, to those of you who are going to say something along the lines of "oh, you made the romance go too quickly", or whatever (you know who you are), sorry, I know I probably went a bit too fast with it, but I was annoyed and frustrated with writing this chapter as I have been attempting to fight through writer's block for like two months. And getting through the romance subplot is pissing me off, as I have no experience in writing anything similar to work from.
Review please, and if you have criticism, that's great, just make sure it's of the constructive variety. So no flames!