Peck.

…

Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck.

…

Peck. Peck. Peck-

Gillion snapped awake. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes…to observe the bottom end of a bird beak. He groaned. It chirped. The thing then reared its head back, looking around before settling back on him.

Don't you dare-

Peck.

This thing was cockier than a bloody seagull. An achievement to say the least, then again, maybe this thing was the seagull of this planet.

Gillion brought his hand up to his forehead in a sluggish attempt to swat away the thing. It did a little hop backwards, and crooned, twisting its head left and then right. To it, he was probably the strangest being to ever exist. An alien, literally. Maybe the little thing's world was just utterly blown up and dismantled in the face of the unknown.

Yeah, me too buddy.

It wasn't as dark as when he fell asleep. Enough sunlight seeping through the leaves around him meant that it was day, morning probably. His bag still lay besides him, relatively clean considering the things he'd been through with it, as did all of the knick knacks in his pouches. The uncomfortable pressure of a pistol pushing into his hip was strangely absent, though perhaps he'd simply shifted it in his sleep.

Gillion sat up, turning back to fully observe the avian critter that so rudely woke him up. It looked like a crow, but as if someone had dunked it in a bowl of curry from beak to tail. The thing was entirely orange, bar the occasional yellow highlight at the tip of its wing feathers and the red of its beak.

It crooned, giving its wings a small flap.

"Hm. I'm gonna call you Monty."

The formerly nameless bird responded with a small chirp, hopping around before disappearing behind the leaf walls.

Gillion stood up as best he could given the low ceiling, rubbing his back where it was sore from sleeping on the hard soil, and looked around once more. The Elite was gone from where it lay, leaving behind a shallow dent in the soil. Of-fucking-course it'd be gone.

Gillion breathed in the morning air. Silence. The forest outside was still.

Nothing more than the occasional chirp broke the stillness, which normally should've been a reason for concern. But this place was bizarre, invalidating almost every bit of his knowledge on survival in the wild. Here, the silence was normal, welcoming even, not the sign of a stalking predator as it was on Earth.

Though, looking at that dent in the soil, perhaps it still might be. It's gone, out of his sight and thus out of any sense of predictability.

Chirp~

A familiar voice came from outside, followed by a red beaked and orange feathered head poking through the leaves.

"What? Just cause I gave you a name doesn't mean you get to pester me."

The absence of the Elite was worrying, but there was nothing he could do about it right now. Searching for it was utterly pointless, given both how those fucking things were both larger, faster, and stealthier than him. And even if he did find it, what would he do then? He had what he needed, as did it.

Chirp~

Monty dipped back out, rustling the leaves behind him. Probably off to do his morning rounds for some bitches.

However, that wasn't entirely true. It sought him out yesterday, and clearly slept in his vicinity. The alien needed something from him, though his bag lay undisturbed. The Elite seemed to be there for protection, though the irony of such a situation was not lost on him. He could barely wield a gun, and then the idea that what he could do was enough to defend himself foremost was…debatable to say the least.

The Elite was here for the gun, and yet he still had it, which didn't make sense. It should have stuck to him, given that two had a greater chance of survival than one. And yet here it was not.

Gun.

His hand struck quicker than the realisation had his mind, only to land on an empty holster on his hip. Absent a magnum and the spare rounds next to it. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfu-

Craw~

"What?! What do you want, you feathered cunt?"

Once more the curry coloured crow dipped out of the leaf shelter, and into the silent forest. And, bag on back, Gillion had no other choice but to follow him.

The canopy blocked less sunlight than it did in the other parts of the jungle, letting brighter rays to push through and cast upon the shrubbery. Despite this, the ground here was almost completely absent of foliage, bar the occasional shrub here and there. The closest one still had his vague outline indented into its leaves.

The soil was soft, made up of a green moss that stretched over dark wood chips, or at least a material that looked very much like them. The areas beneath the trees were absent of both the moss and chips, instead made up of simple, hardened mud. The gaps in the tree roots left many passages to look through, unobscured by the usual abundance of bushes and shrubs that blocked one's sight.

From one of the overhead branches Gillion heard a chirp, and looking up he was met with the sight of Monty, and a smaller bird that looked similar to him, though lacking the bright yellow spots at the edge of its wings.

"Ah, I'm assuming that's Mrs. Monty? Is this what all that chirping was about?" The bird jerked back and forth its head, letting out short, fast-paced chirps. "Yeah, yeah, I get it. You got a girl. Though flaunting isn't really fair either. All I got to work with is a hand and my own imagination."

Surprisingly, Monty got down from the branch, landing on Gillion's shoulder with a small flap of his wings. Black talons dug into the strap over his shoulder, saving him the pain of a puncture wound.

"So what, you're gonna show off your chicks and then just tag along? Have you ever even met an Elite, Monty?"

Craw~

"You're like twenty centimetres tall. But fine… just don't shit on my shoulder."

Speaking to the bird, huh. Maybe the lack of human interaction had finally gotten to him. The Elite was barely better though, certainly more sapient and talkative, even if it didn't exercise it's ability to do so very often. But for now, Monty is all he had.

The Elite had left very little to follow, and at first Gillion was truly out of ideas on how to track it. Its footprints were strange, two toes, fingers?, whatever they were, extending out of a main, broad foot. He'd had to track these before, though curiously they always seemed larger than what he was looking at now.

Pat Pat Pat Pat Pat Pat Pat.

Monty had elected to drop down from his shoulder, and took to walking beside him, little talons tapping softly against the occasional stone or hardened dirt. The bird wobbled left and right as he walked, looking around with large eyes. It occasionally took to hopping around, dashing to a spot of soil where it plucked a green worm-thing out of the ground or grabbed a leaf to hold.

Gillion looked around. During the day, when most of the forest wasn't obscured in shadows and when he didn't have to worry about large predators or detonating equipment, the jungle was quite serene. Flora unlike anything he'd seen before hung from the overhead branches, purple leaves carrying golden berries on their stems, vines that shone a faint orange from their bulbous ends. This place, he had to admit, was stunningly beautiful.

So, in the relative peace that surrounded him, Gillion let his mind wander.

There was a lot to think about, that was rather obvious. First and foremost, why the UNSC mothership slipped away so quickly. It was a question that chiselled away at his mind for every still second; why did his own abandon him so, and furthermore, why did the Covenant ship slip away just as quickly? Had the circumstances been calmer, perhaps he'd have been more mad at his fellow soldier for leaving him so, but in the face of all of the oddity around him the pilot could only feel curiosity.

It was possible both of the ships saw, or detected, something that warranted immediate retreat, or perhaps was simply more dangerous than the current enemy. None of the other pilots received anything, and considering that the Covies continued chasing him, neither did they. Whatever it was that they saw, Gillion was sure it wasn't on the surface, or at least on this island. From the view he got barreling towards this planet, it seemed almost completely untouched by humanity or the aliens. What could you even possibly do with a bunch of scattered islands filled with trees?

Perhaps it was in the oceans? This planet was covered in mostly water, and the disappearance of the Phantom clung almost as tightly to his mind as the prior thought. Clearly, there was something big enough here to drag a ship into the water, and that something had some measure of intelligence given how it dragged the ship well after it had stilled and gone silent. That…it frightened him to consider that idea, another thing that he couldn't do anything about.

Helpless. That's how he felt. With the ship gone, there was no way to send a distress signal, nor was there any hope of getting off the planet by other means. He couldn't make thrusters and air-tight cockpits from trees, and repair of the Pelican was so infesable that the idea of doing such a thing pushed a pitiful laugh out of him. No, he was royally, utterly, totally fucked. Whatever took the Phantom was still out there, and despite the serenity that surrounded him, Gillion knew there were probably more of those tiger things out there.

He absentmindedly ran a hand down his torso, hoping that by some miracle it'd run into a spherical form hanging from one of the belts. No luck.

Distant screeching pierced his thoughts, and Gillion quickly turned around, kicking a green, overgrown rat that was attacking Monty. The thing let out a pained squeak, scuttling away into nearby bushes.

"Get up." He extended his hand down to the bird, waiting for it to awkwardly make its way back on to his shoulder. "You alright?"

Monty chirped, head locked on to the bushes his assailant fled to.

Gillion rubbed the top of the crow-like avain's head, looking around for any sign of the Elite. Bar the footsteps that grew sparser and harder to read with every metre, there was none.

The Elite. Another subject of his musings, though one he spent a fair amount of less time on than the rest. It, or she as labelled by its own accord, was strange. Disappearing or reappearing at will, seemingly neutral to his plights but helpful nonetheless. It was because of the alien he wasn't dead, for at the crash it had every opportunity to shoot him. It didn't, and neither did he. The split lips seemed to have some sort of obsession with honour, though he didn't know how honour was expressed through theft. Maybe their definition of honour was different from his.

She. He was reluctant to give it a gender, given how slippery a slope that seemed to humanising the thing. If, when, he'd eventually have to kill it, he didn't want anything weighing on his conscience. A pilot had burden enough on his mind, he didn't need more.

Yet, the alien did have sentience, aspects of what made a human 'human'. It spoke with him, formed a truce, accepted help. Laughed. He didn't remember the last time he'd laughed like that. It was just orders, despair and false bravery.

A steady stream of blood flowed from a large hole in the ODST's yellow visor, staining the grey armour with an uneven coat of red. His hands, limp by his side, clutched the broken form of an MA37 assault rifle, the weapon having detonated from a stray plasma shot.

Yeah, fuck that. No such thing as laughter in this world. Yet laugh she did, and what right did she have to do that? it was her kind that rid him, them, of that. She was Covenant, the enemy, the reason he had to carry that damned weapon on his hip in the first place.

She didn't have the right to choose if they'd die. She didn't have the right to choose if he'd die. She didn't have the right to spare him. She should've just-

"Human."

There she was, standing in between a set of tree roots, weapon in hand. It was pointed at the ground.

He wondered when he'd stopped moving, why he didn't hear her approach or why he didn't hear the screams of the bird on his shoulder. Maybe he was too deep in thought, maybe he was just reminiscing a tad too much. Ah, but what did it matter.

She just stared at him, silent, maybe waiting for him to say something first. That's what he did back then, right? He just talked, repeating orders and calling for backup. The rest of them moved up, leaving him at the coms to request an evac. That's what that Pelican back then was, the one that got shot down. The one he saw after they were already dead. Talk.

Gillion walked up to her, hand outstretched with his palm facing upwards.

"I believe the weapon would be more useful in my-"

Just talk. That's all there was. God he was so fucking useless.

Her head swung sharply to the right, half of her mandibles extended. The punch sent a sharp sting of pain up his left forearm, forcing him to clench his teeth. Gillion opened his arms, charging into her torso and clamping around her waist, sending both him and the alien on the ground.

Another swing, and then another, and then another. With every punch, more and more of her scaled face turned red, blood smearing from the teeth-shaped wounds on his knuckles.

The Elite punched him in the chest, sending him off her and onto the ground. In the next moment the world turned upside down. He felt weightless for a second, before slamming into a tree with his back. A small gasp left his mouth, all the air pushed straight out of his lungs.

Four thick fingers wrapped around his neck, squeezing down tightly.

His one arm raised above his head, clutching by the throat a wriggling Marine, the other holding an energy sword. The Elite thrust the glowing blade into the Marine's stomach, pulling downwards to slice the human appart. His two legs swung like ribbons in the wind, a torrent of blood and chunks of flesh pouring from the open wound.

Where's the one they left behind? He should've been here minutes ago. There should've been a Pelican with a Scorpion in tow landing in this very street moments prior. The rest of them are gone, and the outpost is overrun, the helljumpers dead. He let his mind wander.

The clamp around his neck eased up, letting him take a precious gulp of air. His throat and lungs burned, legs weakly flailing around and kicking against the tree.

He stopped when the alien growled at him.

She let him go a second later, the pilot dropping to the floor with a heavy thud.

The forest was silent around them, absent of the usual chirping and rustling that once drifted through it. He didn't like the silence, it was what happened after there was nobody left to talk to. And yet silence there was, hanging in the air like a thick, ugly ornament. The other pilots, the last people he'd spoken to; did he remember what they even said?

Another thud to the left of him.

Before the bright flash of light, the explosion. There was that ODST, the one that took his radio. The other pilots were there too, descending to the planet with him… No, they weren't. Otherwise he wouldn't be so alone here. There were three Phantoms then, and one of the other pilots had shot two of them down. She was celebrating then, he thought.

Shouldn't he be doing the same?

Gillion looked up, weakly twisting his neck from his lying position on the floor. The Elite was staring off into the distance, a thick, black tongue wiping the smears of his blood from her face. The Magnum was on her hip, the one furthest away from him, her hands mindlessly fidgeting and drifting across the soil and moss.

She had no intentions to kill him, so no, perhaps he shouldn't be doing the same.

"Do you know why they left?"

She didn't react at first, and he thought that maybe she'd ignored his question. But after a moment of silence, she answered.

"No. We were alerted to the slip moments beforehand, though the Kig-Yar refused to turn back to the mothership. He claimed that killing the heretics was our final duty before death, a last trial before the Great Journey to salvation. I did not believe him, but lower rank prohibited me from questioning him."

She huffed, awkwardly rubbing her mandibles.

"Heretics, you still believe that?" He asked.

"Yes." The response was instant. "You go against the Great Journey, and soil the ancient artefacts that help us achieve it. Your actions here, however strange may be, are not enough to counter the great sin your kind has committed."

The gentle flap of wings came from above him, and shortly thereafter a, now quite familiar, red beak strode in his peripheral vision.

"Sin? It isn't our kind glassing planets, killing by the millions. Your religion, cult, whatever you call it, is a fucking lie. If you want to kill me for saying that, go right ahead." Gillion sat up, trying to avoid hitting the bird dancing around him. "It'll just prove my point, maybe make things easier for the both of us."

A little more effort, and the man managed to stand up. "Just know that whatever this journey of yours is, it can't be too great if you're walking on a mountain of innocent corpses." He braced himself against a nearby tree, extending a hand to the Elite.

Surprisingly, she accepted it, pulling herself up from the ground. Though she was a slight bit smaller than the average Elite, she still weighed what felt like a tonne, nearly ripping his arm right out of his socket. Perhaps not the wisest choice.

"I'm keeping the weapon regardless." Is all she said, giving her mouth an experimental flex.

When Gillion began limping further into the forest, she followed, matching his pace and keeping a wary eye out for any surrounding threats. To her, the human was fragile, weak. Uncontrollable and unpredictable, but the closest thing to an ally nonetheless.

They stood in front of a large pond, covered entirely by a thick canopy of leaves and thus hidden from sight. Lily-like plants drifted on its surface, and the occasional water snake reared its scaled head above the water before promptly diving back in. Thick roots extended from around the edges of the water body, connecting to the nearby trees, from the branches of which thick vines hung.

The most eye-catching sight, however, was the metallic structure that stood on the opposite bank of the pond. An entrance, hidden by moss, trees and soil, that led to some place unknown. Forerunner in design, the structure simultaneously blended in with, and stood out from, the surrounding nature.

The Elite, unsurprisingly, was the first to reach it, moving in front of him and quickly moving around the pond to stand at its gaping maw. She stared into the darkness, unmoving, as if to test if she could see anything below.

Gillion eventually caught up to her, neither saying anything as they stared at the metallic thing.

"We should probably eat before we go inside." Gillion spoke.

The Elite glanced over to him for just a second, nodding, before returning to her staring.

He was somewhat surprised by her acknowledgement to be honest, but ignored it in favour of his first proper meal since yesterday. The cooker was set up, the meals heated and consumed - she took one too, sliding the food into her mouth in a single go despite his warnings - , and they were finally ready to head inside.

Perhaps this is what would tell him why both the Covenant and his own fled so quickly.

The Elite stepped forward first, activating a light in her helmet, before calling out to him. "Let's go."