Chapter LXI: Amateur Psychology
March 7, 2542 (UNSC Calendar)/
UNSC Inconvenience, in orbit above Aztlan, Eta Cassopie System
"What the fuck doc?"
"Hey, it's not my fault that the guy who sewed you was an idiot with Parkinson's."
"It still hurts," I said after wincing.
"Why didn't you come here earlier?" he asked me.
"Well, let's see, I was unconscious for a day, then I was exhausted for another day, next day I was released from the hospital, then we were brutally pushed back by an enemy offensive and then I got here, two hours ago."
"Why weren't you here two hours ago?" the doc said as he pulled on a string.
"Ouch! Cause I- Fuck, take it easy will ya?"
"aaand there it is," he said after pulling out the last stitch. "You try to take it easy for a couple of days will ya?"
"Yeah right," I mumbled.
He reached for some biofoam and poured it on the wound, making the sting worse. The white foam went inside the wounds and bound the tissue together. The injury was already healed, but pulling those stitches out had opened up a whole new set of bloody cuts.
"Your leg is gonna have an ugly scar," he said. "Unless you have some surgery done, but I take it you'll boast about that scar in particular."
"This one?" I said, turning around on the infirmary bed. "Not likely, I fell ass first to the floor and a metal rod went through my leg, nothing to be proud about in that one."
"You could always lie about how it happened," he pointed out.
"Not likely," I said as I pulled my pants back up. "Not easy to show, not worth bragging about."
"Good point," doc admitted. "Still, at least try to take it easy."
"Will do doc, thanks."
I left the infirmary with a wounded pride and a bloody thigh. Not much I could do about it, so I simply hopped along on my good leg. The ship was surprisingly full, the entire marine unit on board had been chased out of their position by a covvie spearhead, they now functioned as reinforcements wherever they were needed, transported quickly by pelican. B company was helping in evacuation in some city or other, but they would soon need to be evacuated themselves if things kept going like that.
I bumped into a couple of shoulders on my way to my room, but didn't bother to apologize. People should know better than to walk in a Helljumper's way. The barracks section was really crowded, but most people moved aside to let me pass. A man dressed entirely in black in the Marine Corps was something you treated with respect, whether you wanted to or not. I went through the general population barracks and then headed into the aisle that contained the officers' rooms and my own.
"Hey bud," Pavel said from his bed.
"Yo," I replied.
I walked towards my bunk and pushed his feet out of my way before finally reaching my bed. I winced a little bit as I sat down, but eventually managed to find a comfy position.
"You ok?" he asked me.
"I'm fine."
"Your ass ok?" he asked sheepishly.
"It is not my ass ok! It's my mid-thigh that got run through with a metal rod. You're just smug because it is usually you the one that gets stupid injuries."
"So you do admit it is a stupid injury," Pavel said.
"Screw you," I said as I let my head sink into my pillow.
It wasn't a stupid injury, there had been no way to avoid it once the cliff came tumbling down, in fact, I was lucky that an iron bar through the leg was the only injury I got. Pavel was even luckier that he came out of a fucking rockslide without any physical harm.
Pilot was lucky that our cliff got brought down, that way she was rescued. I hadn't really had time to beat myself over actually deciding to let the poor girl die, but that mental pain would come soon enough. I still didn't know her name, only that the doctor told me that she would live despite massive internal bleeding and a couple of cracked ribs.
Just as I was about to fall asleep and probably have a very nice four hours of sleeping before I was woken up for some emergency or other, someone knocked on the door. I groaned loudly and Pavel yawned. Since my groan better expressed my laziness and because I was actually injured, my friend stood up and went to open the door after some complaining.
"Frank!"
"Oh shit," Pavel said, "it's the missus."
"What?" I asked.
"Frank!" Marina yelled.
"Crap," I muttered, a little bit too loudly perhaps, because next thing I know she's hitting me pretty damn hard.
"Ouch, what the fuck?" I asked. "Why you hitting me for?"
"You arrive on the ship and you don't even bother to visit me?" she asked.
"Yeah, I just remembered that I've got that… thing." Pavel said and promptly left.
"Why you hitting me for?" I asked again.
"You didn't even tell me you were here!" she yelled.
"Shit," I said. "Stop hitting me!" I finally got tired of being physically abused by my girlfriend and grabbed her wrists.
Then she kneed me in the balls.
I collapsed to the floor grabbing my junk.
"God…" I said in a high-pitched voice.
"Oh shit," Marina said as she brought her hands to her mouth. "I am so sorry, I totally didn't mean to do that, it was an accident, I swear."
"I… it… why?"
I whined for a couple of instants while my groin throbbed in pain and the room around me dimmed at the corners. Marina had kneed me with such viciousness that I was that close to loosing consciousness. It hurt so bad, so really bad.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit, I am so sorry."
I could only groan in response.
Eventually, the pain subsided so that I only felt a dull throbbing and occasional waves of hurt. I was able to get up (with Marina's help) and sit down in my bed, wincing a little as I sat. I glared at my girlfriend hard enough for her to back of a little and then fell backwards to my pillow once again. I closed my eyes and tried to block of the residual pain and the shame of having been brought down by a thin and relatively petit woman with no actual combat training other than basics and just a little bit of personal defense.
"What. The. Fuck."
"Shit, I said I was sorry."
"You hit me. So hard."
"I am sorry," she said, now she sounded annoyed.
I glared at her once more and then took a couple of deep breaths before I managed to find appropriate words.
"Why Marina, what happens that you are so mad at me?" I said in a very sarcastic tone. Probably not the best course of action, but man, I was pissed off.
She was obviously annoyed by my tone, but she took the high road instead and decided to ignore my sarcasm.
"I am just worried about you, you seem… distant."
Distant, seriously? What is this, the opening scene for a romantic comedy?
"Distant how?" I asked instead.
"Well, for starters, we haven't talked in a while-"
"Ah yes, about that, I was fighting a war. You know, my job."
"Let me finish," she said, her tone showed that she was now obviously annoyed. Her tone then suddenly changed and she sounded like a patronizing woman explaining a fact of life to her child. "It has been a while since we last had a date, whenever you're here you barely seem to know that I am in front of you, yet your eyes still shift all over the room, as if you were expecting an attack-"
"That is completely justified," I complained.
"-and," she went unfazed. "you seem like a different person than before, at least to me. You used to come say hi every time you arrived back on board. Hell, one time you somehow managed to bring me flowers!"
I smiled at the memory, short deployment, had time to steal a bouquet of roses from an abandoned flower store while Pavel bashed in an elite's skull with the butt of his gun. Quite probably one of the most absurd moment in my entire life, but it had been worth it to see Marina happy. Oh, and also some very great thank-you sex.
"Well, the point is, I am worried about you," she concluded. She actually had an expression that made me feel like I had something sticking out of my chest and I was about to die.
"And because you're worried, you had to kick me in the nuts?" I asked. I was still really pissed.
"I said I was sorry," she said, only this time she said it calmly.
I looked at the only female friend I had, in fact, she was one of my only two friends in the entire universe. She looked beautiful, as she always did, wearing her baggy and oversized cargo pants and an extremely tight and form-fitting tanktop. I couldn't help but smile at the sight of her, and that was all it took for me to forget that she had just kneed me in the balls very hard. At least for now, I was sure to say something to make her feel slightly embarrassed or perhaps minor public humiliation when the opportunity arose.
"Fine," I said. "I might have been behaving differently in the recent past," I conceded. In truth, I had been behaving differently, differently enough for even me to notice it. I was only slightly pissed that no one had told me earlier. "I will try to behave normally, but you have to understand that I am not changing on purpose."
Huh, this talking things out thing feels good. Like a metaphorical weight of my shoulder. Who would've thought?
"Ok," Marina said. "I'm glad you admitted this…"
If she says that admitting to your problem is the first step I will not let her get absolutely any of this for the next year.
That thought was immediately followed by:
Well, next week. Oh, I'll find some other way to annoy her that doesn't involve me giving up sex.
Then:
I am an asshole.
"Doesn't it feel much better now?" she continued.
"It does," I admitted.
"Now," she said with a familiar smile. "What can I do to make up for hitting you?"
I certainly knew what she had in mind, but the very nature of the place where she had hit me made it impossible for me to participate in said compensation.
"Yeah, it kind of hurts like hell right now," I said, glancing at my injured area, "so no."
She shrugged and there was evident disappointment in her face. Perhaps after all women did want sex as much as us men did. Seemed like something unfathomable. They always seemed to be able to go for extended periods of time without any sort of sexual contact.
That's what they want us to believe!
If only there had been some sort of accompanying music fit for a reveal, that single thought would've been the best moment in my entire existence.
"So, how's it going?" I asked her.
"Not good, we've been mostly ferrying wounded, as usual, but every time there are more and more, and even I know when we're falling back," she added with a humorless smile. Marina was notorious for being almost unable to read any sort of map. How she made it through selection and flight school and managed to become a warrant officer was beyond me.
"Most of the Army is now concentrated on Agra, the other cities are being either evacuated or slowly abandoned. Most people can't do either due to the fighting."
I shook my head. It was nothing unusual, in fact, some might argue that this was actually going well even though we were loosing. We still had a sizeable Navy up there doing their jobs comparatively well, the Army had made the covvies pay in blood for every inch of land they lost and the Marines had made them pay in body parts to go with the blood.
"Well, I guess that I'll probably be forced to something incredibly stupid before we finally abandon this moon," I said.
"You can't really think that."
"That I'll do some shitty mission?"
"No, that this is just a rock."
Look, I don't want to get metaphysical or anything like that, but in the grand scheme of things, this place was just a rock, in fact, it wasn't important to the war effort. The resources it produced could be gotten someplace else, the recruits coming from Aztlan were some thousands in the UNSCDF which numbered close to fifteen billion. The planet could've been abandoned and that would've actually been better for the war effort with less time and resources wasted. Still, we were humans and we couldn't simply let some 30 million living, breathing human beings at the mercy of genocidal aliens.
"You know I didn't mean it like that. I just meant that this place is a rock, as in the geological definition of the word."
She smiled. "Do you even know the geological definition of rock?"
"Umm, a naturally occurring bunch of mineral stuff and the like that is solid?"
"Huh, that was actually pretty close," she said.
"How would you know?" I asked.
She simply laughed and stood up form her seated position and climbed into bed with me. Marina wasn't known to be a big fan of cuddling, but then again, she was a girl and most girls have a weak spot for doing just that. In this, Marina was no exception. She did the classic 'shuffle yourself into position while discretely rubbing your butt against your partner's crotch thing' and then put her head on my pillow and pulled my arm over her so that I was hugging her waist. For a brief instant everything was as close to perfect as it could be. Hey, I know I sound corny as hell, but it was true. For that brief instant there was nothing to worry about, no war, no death, no loss. Sure, there was a throbbing pain in my crotch that was very slowly disappearing, but everything else felt like it was right where it should be.
"Anything else I should know?" I asked.
"About what?"
"The war…"
"Oh," Marina said. "Why are you so worried?"
"You know that I'll be dropped of one more time. Something incredibly stupid, remember?"
"Yes," she muttered. "Didn't think you were serious."
"Hey, it's not up to me what ops I take part in," I told Marina. "Whenever Albaf or Wilkins calls me, I have to be there, no matter how incredibly wasteful and stupid their mission seems."
"Must be depressing," Marina said. "Going out on missions-" she did air-quotes as she said the word mission. "-with no real purpose."
"I hadn't really thought of it that way," I said. "Only took it as a downside to the job, but thank you, from now on I won't be able to help feeling depressed…"
We both chuckled a little for a few moments before Marina started coughing.
"You alright?" I asked.
"Yeah, I think I'm coming down with a cold." She appropriately sniffled and wiped her nose with her arm while she said that. She was about to say something when Pavel barged in holding a girl's hand.
"Yeah, Frank, I'm going to need you to leave for a while."
That girl in question was not his girlfriend.
"Pavel…" Marina said, realizing what was going on.
That girl is insanely hot.
"Oh, sorry, didn't know you were still here," he said. "Heard you screaming at him so I figured I could ask good ol' Frank here to lemme borrow the room for a while." While Pavel said that he made an effort to conceal the girl behind him with his body. He wasn't entirely successful. Ignore that, he failed utterly and completely.
Ok, should I congratulate him on his catch? Or perhaps just look at him disapprovingly and shake my head?
"Frank, you do remember you have a-"
"an appointment!" Pavel interrupted. "Yes, thank you for reminding me." He turned around and faced his newest catch. "Sorry, we're going to have to do this another time."
The girl just smiled at him and pecked him on the cheek. She winked at him before she shrugged and turned to leave. The door closed behind her impressive rear and Pavel turned around to face Marina and me with a sheepish face and a blush that would've made anyone feel embarrassed for the guy. Anyone but my girlfriend.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Marina yelled at him. She jumped out of bed as she said that, her butt pressing into my still tender balls and making the pain resurface for the briefest of instants.
"Ugh," I mumbled as I reached to grab my crotch."
"Something wrong with you mate?" Pavel asked.
"Yeah, Marina kneed me in the balls. And since when do you say 'mate'?"
"Yeah, just came out of nowhere," he said.
"Don't try to avoid the issue!" Marina said.
"I tried," I mouthed to Pavel with a small shrugged.
Marina went hands akimbo and opened her legs just slightly. Her curled up fists were firmly planted on her waist. If I could've seen her face I would've been the victim of one of those death-glares that can melt through solid steel no problem. Right now I simply stared at her well-formed ass with a little bit more satisfaction with myself than was necessary.
"And stop staring at my ass!"
"Dammit," I said under my breath.
"That girl loves you! Loves you, you hear me? And what do you do to repay that? You find the first easy piece of ass that is willing to sleep with you and you bring her into your room," she yelled at him. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Don't tell me how to live my life!" Pavel yelled back. "And since when do you say piece of ass?"
Shit. Now I'm going to have to pick a side.
"What the fuck do you mean that I can't tell you how to live your life? You're cheating on my friend and-"
"Exactly your friend, not you!" Pavel interrupted.
"So what? I can simply tell her and-"
"And what? Break up our relationship?"
"Seriously, you're blackmailing me?"
This went on for several more intense seconds while I simply braced myself for the moment when one of the two would turn around to face me and have that look in their faces that told me that they really wanted my help on the issue, and so help me god if my opinion didn't match theirs.
"Frank?"
Shit.
"I'm talking to you here," Marina said.
"I, uh, huh?"
"Who. Is. Wrong?" Pavel asked.
Well, that's straightforward. "Ok, please don't get me into this…"
"Frank," Marina said, her voice threatening. "Who is right and who is wrong?" Her tone had that 'if you don't take my side in this you won't get laid for two years' ring to it that made me flinch visibly. Surprising how quickly the mood can change in the briefest of moments.
"Well, I think you're both wrong."
"What?" they said unanimously, like they didn't believe what I had just said.
"Well, Pavel, you can't cheat on your girlfriend, that's just rude." To put it mildly.
"And Marina, if he does cheat on his girlfriend it isn't really your business."
I waited for both of them to team up against me. Instead, they both tried to storm off angrily, bumping into each other. Marina took a step back and let Pavel leave the room, then she just turned around and glared at me for a few seconds before she sighed and sat on a bed opposite me. She glanced at me, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. She then simply shook her head and stared at the wall.
"It's his life, you know?," I said. "He can screw it up as much as he wants and you have no say in that."
"Oh, don't get all righteous on me," she said. "Like you are so perfect."
I shrugged. She was pissed; if I said anything right now I risked making it worse. Sometimes you had to keep your mouth shut or risk being rendered a prude for a couple of months. Hey, even if I am being moralistic for selfish reasons I am still being moralistic, so it counts. Also, I have repeatedly told you not to judge me, so don't.
"Hey, come here," I said, opening my arms as if to hug her. I really, really wanted to get laid, even if it hurt. Marina stood up after making a show of not really wanting to and sat in my legs while I hugged her. "Just forget about it," I told her. I hugged her a little bit tighter and kissed the back of her neck.
"Wow," she whispered. "You really want to get some, don't you?"
"Hey, can you blame me, just look at you."
"That," Marina said with a smile, "was the right answer."
Thirty minutes of glory later, Pavel walked into the room with a sheepish expression on his face. He gave a quick glance at us and had enough sense to look away. "Frank, Wilkins wants us in the pod bay ASAP. I'll see you there."
I turned my head to face my girlfriend and gave her a sad smile. "I told you so."
Marina gave me a quick kiss. "Of you go," she said sadly. "Go do your incredibly stupid mission. And do it well."
"I intend to do that," I told her. "I'll be back for dinner."