Fic: We Were Soldiers Once: People Spend A Lifetime This Way (HALO: Spartan Ops)
Title: People Spend A Lifetime This Way (And That’s How They Stay)
Fandom: HALO: Spartan Ops (web series)
Rating: T
Genres: gen, with dashes of het
Summary: Three days ago, Thomas Lasky threw Sarah Palmer out of his ready room and she has no idea how to salvage their friendship from the wreckage Osman's order left behind.
A/N: I should stop with the overly long titles, shouldn't I? Also, until further notice last part of We Were Soldiers Once (except, maybe, that prequel I still keep mulling over in my head). Next part probably depends on when we'll get the next season of Spartan Ops. Unless I encounter cute little bunnies with their little rifles pointed at me that make it impossible to say no to them because they're pointing those rifles at me, that is.
Also, Palmer totally surprised me in this fic and believe me when I tell you that I did not see that one coming but she insists on it and I feel myself unable to say no to her (she's the one who supplies the bunnies with their lethal hardware). I hope you like that little twist :S
( In Now For The Kill )
( Down Upon My Knees (And You Have Broken Me) )
( Foolishness and Self-Deception )
People Spend A Lifetime This Way (And That’s How They Stay)
“What a shame we never listened
I told you through the television
And all that went away was the price we paid
People spend a lifetime this way
And that's how they stay.”
Robbie Williams feat. Gary Barlow, “Shame”
One of the very few perks of being a commanding officer on board a war ship as big as Infinity is that you have your own shower and you even get it en suite. Not that the suite is very big but it’s got a bunk fitted to her height and is reinforced to carry her augmented body’s weight, a terminal with access to nearly all data on the ship, except a very few but including some ONI data (she’d never tell Tom because he’d draw all the wrong conclusions), and enough space for push-ups and sit-ups and a SPARTAN really doesn’t need more than that to be a regulation amount of happy.
Thank God those of her fellow Marines who are still alive and still occasionally find themselves sleeping in a sandbagged ditch under a sodden tarpaulin don’t know about this or she’d never hear the end of it.
Anyway… she’s got her shower built into her quarters which means that she doesn’t get stared at by everyone and their mother out of her bodysuit even more than when wearing the thing. And it means that there’s at least one occasion less she could run into Tom.
Which, basically is all she can think about, ever since he threw her out of his ready room three days ago. It was her own damn fault and she knew that, the moment she left his room. There’s a dent several centimeters wide and deep opposite his ready room’s door testament to that. But he’d kept digging into the hole that Osman had drilled into her head during augmentation, the one that had taught her absolute loyalty to the UNSC, the ONI and CINCONI, most of all. And she just hadn’t known how to keep him out of that hole any other way than throwing whatever she could think of right back into his face.
And that had been so, so stupid.
Of course she knows nothing about Circinius IV. The records are still classified and not on the list of those she has access to, just like Tom’s personnel record. She heard whispers about it but mostly the bits and pieces everyone gets taught in history classes, anyway. It was home to a bunch of kids of UNSC personnel trying to become soldiers at the age of fourteen and upwards, until it wasn’t anymore.
She knows Tom went there because he once told her so, without elaborating when and with whom, and she really did always assume he’d been as quiet, diligent and decent as a cadet as he’s now as an officer, occasional outbursts of subversion not-withstanding. She knows who let the Chief go back on Requiem. His reaction to her taunts… whoa. She’s pretty sure she never saw him that pissed off ever before and he hadn’t even been yelling when he threw her out.
Every time she thinks about it, she starts to become so tired, despite knowing that SPARTANs don’t get tired and don’t even need much sleep in general. But it’s happening again and she sits down on her bunk, completely naked. Sometimes, she likes to feel nothing but her skin and really, she’ll put on the body suit again in a minute.
Groaning, she covers her face with her hands, hoping Roland isn’t listening in again. He’s been kind of anxious about this rift between her and Tom lately, trying to push her in Tom’s direction to “kiss and make up” - he actually used that phrase, albeit only once because she threatened him with demolishing another terminal if he kept that up - and generally being a pain in the ass.
He even ran an emergency drill yesterday, complete with four hours of cryosleep for every personnel, including her and Tom to see “if I can still fly this girl solo”. Fly this girl solo, her ass. That had been a none too subtle hint to man up and apologize to Tom for the hell of it. It’s just that she…
A knock.
A fucking knock on her cabin door. Whoever that was better has a really good excuse because they’ll see a half-naked SPARTAN in a second and God help them if they don’t know where to keep their eyes, she thinks as she winds a towel around her body, thank God long enough to cover everything essential. She is so going to kill…
Tom?
So. In eight years they managed to get around seeing more skin of the other than what isn’t covered by their respective branches standard uniform - and PT gear, before she became augmented - and suddenly, he’s wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and track pants and she is wearing… Well. “You better come in before anyone sees us and I have to shoot them before they open their mouth again.”
He doesn’t answer at first, just nods a little resignedly and walks in, looking a little forlorn for a moment, then deciding to settle on her bed after a short look of gaining permission from her. She nods, considering to sit down next to him before remembering that it’s part of her combat readiness to keep her body suit on at any given moment. Also, being half-naked in Tom’s presence possibly just blew up her own personal scale of awkwardness. She clears her throat. “I just need to… I’ll be back in a minute.”
The way he looks up at her makes her think he’d not been in her cabin a moment ago. He’d been somewhere pretty far away. She just nods again, trying to uphold at least a minimum of both their dignity. Then she turns around, grabs her body suit and makes her way to her tiny shower stall, wondering how the hell she’ll get the thing on in there.
And yeah, only five minutes later, she knows she’ll never get the damn thing fastened in here. Too fucking small to reach behind her and get the fastenings on her back done. And this is why she usually does this in the main… “Come here, I’ll help you.”
Huh? “Do you even…”
“Just get your ass out of there and let me help you.” Damn. Whenever he sounds like that - slightly irritated, and he probably rolled his eyes, too - it’s better you do what he says because you don’t want him to become more than slightly irritated. With a roll of her eyes of her own, she gets out of the shower and turns her back to him. Immediately, she starts to feel him tugging and pressing at her back, and once or twice his fingers fleetingly touch the bare skin between her shoulder blades. It’s a good thing for both of them that their friendship isn’t a physical one.
“So,” he says in between tugging in the pre-last of the fastenings, “her name was Chyler Silva, and she was a model cadet who couldn’t do a wrong step even if tried.”
Ah, so this really is what it’s about. She turns around, not caring that he isn’t quite done yet. “Tom, I never meant to…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he just says and gently turns her back so he can finish his work. “Bear with me. I’m only doing what I should have done years ago.”
He’s done now and she turns around, facing him and making a point of looking him straight in the eye when she says, “No, you don’t have to. I’m sorry that I ever…”
A little exasperation shows in his face. As if he had a plan of about every second of how this was supposed to go. If she didn’t know better, she’d actually call this cute. “Damn, Sarah, would you please let me finish this?”
She shrugs and gestures back to her bunk. “Okay, fine, have it your way.”
He gives her a raised eyebrow, like he always does when he knows she’s bullshitting him and doesn’t exactly approve of it but sits down on her bunk eventually. “Thank you.” She decides that it’s really fairer to the both of them that she sits down on the bunk as well, seeing as he usually has to crane up his neck to look at her, already.
She sits down next to him, maybe ten centimeters space between their shoulders. She tries not to read too much in the way he hesitates before leaning his back against the wall next to her. “I was a cadet at Corbulo.” Yes, well, she knew that. “My brother went there before me and I didn’t have a say in it, either.” Okay, she didn’t know that. Actually, she didn’t even know he has a brother? Or had? “What Colonel Lasky wanted, Colonel Lasky got. And she wanted both her sons to be soldiers.” Ah, so… his mother, then.
She frowns. “What about your father?”
There’s a shrug, or maybe it was a wince from him. “Didn’t have one. That is, I did but I never got to know him. She wouldn’t tell us what happened to him and we didn’t ask.” Must have been some kind of family life, then. “Anyway… I was a freshman, member of Hastati Squad. You’d have hated me.”
She can’t help but snort. No way. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“Oh yes, you would.” She’s not sure if she really likes that self-deprecating grin. There’s just too much sadness mixed in it. “If there ever was an underperforming cadet, it was me. Really bad at cooperating with my squad mates, always doubting the team leader’s orders, making a fool out of myself with useless solos…”
“Okay, revise everything I just said. I would have hated you. Big time.” Or at least she would have hated the cadet that Tom just described. For some reason, she just can’t conceal the image of the squad troublemaker and underperformer with Infinity’s captain and her best friend.
At least she made him smile with her admission. She missed that. The realization of that hurts in strange ways. “They called me an innie lover, because I had the gall to voice my doubts over fighting a couple… what did I say? Ah yeah, “overtaxed farmers”.” Colonial insurrection. Yeah, at forty-five he’d be old enough to remember, as opposed to her who’d only been four when the Covenant War had started. To think that there’d once been a time where humans shot at humans on a regular scale… “Actually, sometimes it felt as if there was exactly one cadet who didn’t hate me.”
Well, that’s an easy one, actually. At least easy enough for an educated guess. “Chyler Silva.”
There’s honest surprise in his face when she says that and his reaction is another little smile. “You got an amazing head on your shoulders, Commander.” If this had been just anyone else than Thomas Lasky, she’d have thought he was just flirting with her. Thank God he doesn’t wait for her to comment. “Chyler was the only one who always put up with me, even when I was probably insulting her parents on a daily scale. They both died in combat against the overtaxed farmers.”
She considers that. Wonders what made Silva stand by him, even when he probably didn’t share her beliefs. She finds it remarkably, scarily easy to relate. Can’t resist a little jibe to lighten the mood, though. “You must have been one special snowflake that she put up with you.”
It gets her a frown and a growl that she didn’t know he was even capable of, “Watch it, Commander.”
At that, she just has to snort and it’s nice to hear him join her in her silent chuckling a moment later. She can’t even resist mimicking his growl and his words before sobering up again. His story’s not finished, not be a long shot. So she tries to see if she got the crucial point right. “What happened to her?”
“Killed in action.” Yes. Of course she had to step right into that. She should have known that, they way his voice softened every time he mentioned her name. And the dog tags in his hand that she only just saw now. How long has been running them through his fingers again and again? “Only a couple hours after we kissed for the first time. Actually, the only time.”
Aw, shit. She lost buddies, too, fellow Marines that bought it one way or the other. One of them even had been something of a fuck buddy or maybe boyfriend. But she didn’t lose either of them in freshman year. Somehow, some way, a lot of things concerning him she always wondered about are a lot more clearer all of a sudden. She nearly takes the hand that’s fiddling with the dog tags just to make him stop. “God, Tom…”
“It’s alright.” So he wouldn’t want her pity and she knows that. Only it’s not pity she’s feeling. It’s something a lot deeper, a lot sadder. “It was a Covenant surprise attack. They said no one could have predicted it.” His voice nearly gives out for a while and she gives him time to recover before she hears him add, “For a while, I even wanted to believe that,” sounding so bitter that she thinks she realizes where his personal aversion against ONI stems from, the one that doesn’t have anything to do with him being woodentop Navy.
There’s a moment of silence between them in which she doesn’t know what to say, if she should apologize again to him for using Circinius IV to wound him when she had no idea how sharp the blade she’d been wielding against him had been. It takes her a few minutes to finally settle on, “How did you survive?”
He snorts but there’s nothing humorous about it. “You’re gonna love this. Master Chief.”
Aha, no way. Nuh-uh. Um-um. “Now you’re fucking with me. He can’t have been more than fifteen at that time.”
And then she remembers what she learned about the SPARTAN program history during augmentation. But before she can correct her mistake, he says, “Believe me, I’m not kidding you. It was Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 who pulled me and two of my fellow cadets out of the wreckage of Circinius IV.” And she’s so, so grateful for that. Next time she sees the Chief, she’s gonna have to buy him a beer or whatever else the II’s drink to unwind. “Wouldn’t be sitting here today if it hadn’t been for him. Gave me this piece of Hunter armor after I helped him down it.”
He holds up a piece of rounded, smoothed shrapnel hung on the same chain as Silva’s dog tags. It’s nearly indistinguishable from a stone that might have washed up on a shore but she still believes him. Tom isn’t the sort of person to make something like that up. There really is only one thing left to say in this moment. “Well… fuck me.”
There’s so much to process right now, so many things she never knew about Tom, so many things she didn’t know about herself and she doesn’t even know which ones she needs to stop thinking about sooner. Thank God the story isn’t finished yet, though. Maybe she can stall having to cope with what he told her for at least a few more minutes. “What would have happened if there hadn’t been the Covenant attack?”
He shrugs. “I probably would have left Corbulo the next day.”
Huh? “Why?”
His answer surprises her. “That emergency drill number Roland did on us yesterday…”
“What about it?” Because she’s got no idea what that has to do with Corbulo. Tom for his part doesn’t answer directly, instead starts to pull his shirt over his head… to reveal blisters and raw skin and an awful shitload of small scars on the skin of his back. As if this has been happening regularly to him and he couldn’t always stop himself from itching hard enough to draw blood.
Good God. “Shit, Tom, that’s some serious Freezer burn.”
He shakes his head and she actually has to force herself to keep looking at his maltreated back. That must hurt like a bitch. “No Freezer burn. Cytoprethaline allergy.” A… what? “Only about every fiftieth-thousandth person gets it.” Okay, that would explain why she never heard… “Results in raw and blistered skin, along with respiratory…” as if on cue, a really bad cough is wrecking his body, sounding like he really should see a doctor about this, “respiratory problems after cryosleep.” He coughs again and instinctively, she wants to reach out to him, put a hand on his back, just anything but he waves her off, straightens up again and after a few deep breaths that didn’t sound very reassuring, either, says, “No, it’s gonna be okay, Sarah.”
Like fucking hell. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
He puts on his shirt again and says, his voice a little muffled until he pulled it down over his head, “Trust me. A couple years ago they invented a drug, some kind of antihistamine or something that counters the effects of the cyto.” And why hasn’t he been taking it? “I just have to wait a couple hours after cryosleep before I can start injecting it.” Oh, right. “Another hour and I’ll be mostly fine.”
Err, what? “Mostly?”
“It usually takes two or three injections for the stuff to take full effect and when that happens, everything’s back to normal. I swear.” It’s his “don’t pity me” face, mixed with “let it go” and “I’ll make your life hell for the rest of your life if you tell this to anyone outside this room”. As if she ever would. And damn him for not even letting her say that out loud by diverting her attention with, “Now you.”
Yeah, well. She’d known she’d have to own up to what had caused her violent reaction during the fight in his ready room sooner or later. Of course she’d known that and she’d wished she hadn’t. But then again… it’s probably only fair. She takes a deep breath herself. “She was there, during augmentation. Shortly before Parangosky bought it.”
Being the smart kid he probably was even back at Corbulo despite trying to make her believe differently, Tom immediately picks up her pace. “Osman? What was she doing there?”
Yes, what had Osman being doing there, being Parangosky’s anointed and all that? She takes a deep breath and leans her head back on the wall, almost closing her eyes to go back the four years to a period of pain and survival. “Teaching us a bit of the SPARTAN program’s history.” She wonders just how classified Osman’s personal history is and then thinks fuck it, this is Tom and he just told her about his first time in combat. “She was supposed to become one of the IIs herself, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.” He doesn’t sound as surprised as she expected. To be honest, he sounds more weary and like he half expected something like that to happen already. “What happened…”
“She said she “washed out of the program”. Told us how they tried to make her into one, how Halsey…” She closes her eyes, trying to get the images out of her head that Osman planted there by showing them pictures of surgical teams in sterile rooms operating on children that looked to be too young to be doing anything but getting in fights at school and finding the other sex “icky”. “How she… they were ten, eleven, twelve when they started augmentation, Tom.”
He doesn’t say anything, for a very long time and when she risks a glance to her left, she sees him staring straight ahead, with his forehead slightly knotted, like he always does when he’s pondering something especially difficult to process. He saw her after her last surgery, still in a hospital bed. She’ll never forget his look when he sat down next to her and saw all those fresh new scars on her arm alone.
It doesn’t really surprise her when he finally comes up with, “She really, really hates Halsey, doesn’t she?”
For a moment, she’s tempted to tell him that really was a no-brainer but then again, he very obviously didn’t know the extent or Osman’s hatred towards Halsey. She hopes she could alleviate at least one of his worries. She nods. “Yeah. And honestly, after hearing that…”
“Did she tell you who backed Halsey? Because she can’t have done it all alone.” Okay, not what she expected he’d say. Sometimes, she hates it when he’s so fucking right about things.
So fucking right and making such a good point. And the only thing she can put against that is, “No, she didn’t.” He wants to interject something but she keeps on talking, because he needs to know what she has to tell him. “For us it was enough to know what they did to the IIs. They’re like… our older cousins, the people who paved the road.” They’re even more than that to her, even though she knows the IIs probably don’t see it that way. “They’re our kin, Tom.”
He nods, slowly, probably taking it all in, and not even judging her, if she’s lucky. Then he says, in this thoughtful tone he sometimes has when he isn’t quite done thinking about something but needs to voice an opinion anyway, “And she wants to use us for her dirty work.”
Aw, not that again. “I…”
“You’re smarter than that, Sarah. You know she does.” Apparently, he’s done thinking about it and he still stands by his decision to refuse to execute Osman’s order. She wishes he’d stop that, if only to escape Osman’s wrath. She heard Osman talk, she heard the cold in her voice when she talked about all those people who did terrible things to her body and soul and what she was going to do to them once she found them. She heard whispers about Kilo-Five as well. Osman’s personal bloodhounds, sniffing out every trail she put them on and ripping the offender to shreds once they found them.
Her heart clenches when she imagines them being set on Tom’s trails. She doesn’t tell him that, though. He wouldn’t believe her, anyway. So she falls back to the tried and true. “Halsey’s still a war criminal, Tom.”
He gives a short humorless laugh, probably because that’s nothing she needs to emphasize, not to him. They never had issues about that. “And we still need to put her on trial.”
He’s right, of course. He’s been right with that ever since their fight in his ready room, ever since she told him she’d taken over the order from him so he wouldn’t end up in front of a court-martial for not executing it. It still rankles her that he just has to be so decent and rational, while she always feels her blood pressure surge and her fight-or-flight response pumping up her body chemistry whenever she hears the name Halsey. Maybe they should all just hope that the hinge-heads tire of her and take that problem off the UNSC’s hands.
As if hoping ever solved anything. She nearly sighs. “What are we gonna do now?”
There’s that humorless laugh again and he leans forward, his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands, his voice muffled a little when he says, “Fucked if I know, Sarah,” and very clearly audible when he lifts his face a little and repeats, “Fucked if I know.”
She looks at him, at his hunched posture and sees all those years edged into his face, onto his body. She sees it in so, so serious those eyes, and in those so, so calloused hands running through his hair and with just the slightest tremor, and in those little lines pricking at the corners of his eyes.
It’s funny, she thinks. She always thought they were lines of laughter because he could make her laugh, and she just never seemed to have realized that his laughter always sounded like he was the last survivor of a planetary massacre, that his eyes saw countless friends and fellow soldiers and subordinates die, just as hers and that his hands took a dying friend’s dog tags from her when he was fourteen fucking years old.
I love you.
So. This is how Commander Sarah Palmer should have reacted when she realized she loves Captain Thomas Lasky: incredulous, ashamed, enraged, scared, panicked.
This is how Commander Sarah Palmer feels when she realizes she loves Captain Thomas Lasky: relieved, unsurprised, just like she always feels concerning Tom. Because since eight years ago, he is just there. Even when he’s not sitting in her quarters and competing with your regular smart AI in trying to think himself to death, he’s there. There’s comfort in that knowledge and even someone like her needs something like that.
Though apparently, hers doesn’t come solely from knowing that the only thing her armor can’t protect her from is herself and the key to being invincible is learning how to protect yourself from your own worst enemy, like she always thought.
Fancy fucking that, she thinks and just stops herself from smiling that smile her SPARTANs hate because it means she just found a new and very creative way to keep them busy - or, as they would say, torment them - and is very, very pleased about herself. Tom always suspects that she found a new and very creative way to keep him busy by tormenting her SPARTANs when he catches her doing that.
I love you.
She smiles it anyway. “So… are there any stories where you didn’t totally lose?”
He looks up and leans back against the wall behind them, gingerly and she wonders if he’s really going to be okay as fast and as easily as he tried to make her believe. He frowns at her. Shit, she thinks. I did it again. Hit the landmine full front, gonna be blown to bits right away. “Well… not a lot of them, to be honest.” Okay, not gonna be blown up right away. Maybe it’s a time-delayed detonator. “There is one, though…”
“Come on, don’t be shy, share it with the class, Cadet.” Make me laugh, Tom. Make yourself laugh. Let that story have a happy ending.
“Alright, alright.” He raises his hands in defeat and clears his throat. She hopes it’s just stalling because that cough a couple minutes ago did not sound healthy. “It was the last exercise of the term and they’d made me team leader, probably one last time before they were kicking me out anyway or something. Anyway, it was Capture the Flag, right? So, what happened was this…”
He tells her about how he used the lesson on Hannibal he and his friends had only a couple days earlier to confound the enemy team and even makes passing out from the allergy sound funny as hell and she’s so glad that he’s still here and tells her stories he never before told her and makes her feel less like an asshole for trying to use his Corbulo days as a weapon against him.
Maybe they still have a chance to get through this with only a few bruises instead of Osman ripping their trachea out and their friendship apart. Maybe they’ll find themselves in front of a firing squad as soon as next week.
No use thinking about it now, anyway. She’s got her captain to keep safe and sane for as long as she can and that means she’s got to keep herself safe and sane for as long as she can and right now, that involves sitting on her bunk with him and making sure he doesn’t go on imitating a rampant AI. What else is there to do for you when you’re his de facto second in command and can’t bear to see him beat himself up?
~*~
TBC in A Hundred Tanks Along the Square.
Fandom: HALO: Spartan Ops (web series)
Rating: T
Genres: gen, with dashes of het
Summary: Three days ago, Thomas Lasky threw Sarah Palmer out of his ready room and she has no idea how to salvage their friendship from the wreckage Osman's order left behind.
A/N: I should stop with the overly long titles, shouldn't I? Also, until further notice last part of We Were Soldiers Once (except, maybe, that prequel I still keep mulling over in my head). Next part probably depends on when we'll get the next season of Spartan Ops. Unless I encounter cute little bunnies with their little rifles pointed at me that make it impossible to say no to them because they're pointing those rifles at me, that is.
Also, Palmer totally surprised me in this fic and believe me when I tell you that I did not see that one coming but she insists on it and I feel myself unable to say no to her (she's the one who supplies the bunnies with their lethal hardware). I hope you like that little twist :S
( In Now For The Kill )
( Down Upon My Knees (And You Have Broken Me) )
( Foolishness and Self-Deception )
People Spend A Lifetime This Way (And That’s How They Stay)
“What a shame we never listened
I told you through the television
And all that went away was the price we paid
People spend a lifetime this way
And that's how they stay.”
Robbie Williams feat. Gary Barlow, “Shame”
One of the very few perks of being a commanding officer on board a war ship as big as Infinity is that you have your own shower and you even get it en suite. Not that the suite is very big but it’s got a bunk fitted to her height and is reinforced to carry her augmented body’s weight, a terminal with access to nearly all data on the ship, except a very few but including some ONI data (she’d never tell Tom because he’d draw all the wrong conclusions), and enough space for push-ups and sit-ups and a SPARTAN really doesn’t need more than that to be a regulation amount of happy.
Thank God those of her fellow Marines who are still alive and still occasionally find themselves sleeping in a sandbagged ditch under a sodden tarpaulin don’t know about this or she’d never hear the end of it.
Anyway… she’s got her shower built into her quarters which means that she doesn’t get stared at by everyone and their mother out of her bodysuit even more than when wearing the thing. And it means that there’s at least one occasion less she could run into Tom.
Which, basically is all she can think about, ever since he threw her out of his ready room three days ago. It was her own damn fault and she knew that, the moment she left his room. There’s a dent several centimeters wide and deep opposite his ready room’s door testament to that. But he’d kept digging into the hole that Osman had drilled into her head during augmentation, the one that had taught her absolute loyalty to the UNSC, the ONI and CINCONI, most of all. And she just hadn’t known how to keep him out of that hole any other way than throwing whatever she could think of right back into his face.
And that had been so, so stupid.
Of course she knows nothing about Circinius IV. The records are still classified and not on the list of those she has access to, just like Tom’s personnel record. She heard whispers about it but mostly the bits and pieces everyone gets taught in history classes, anyway. It was home to a bunch of kids of UNSC personnel trying to become soldiers at the age of fourteen and upwards, until it wasn’t anymore.
She knows Tom went there because he once told her so, without elaborating when and with whom, and she really did always assume he’d been as quiet, diligent and decent as a cadet as he’s now as an officer, occasional outbursts of subversion not-withstanding. She knows who let the Chief go back on Requiem. His reaction to her taunts… whoa. She’s pretty sure she never saw him that pissed off ever before and he hadn’t even been yelling when he threw her out.
Every time she thinks about it, she starts to become so tired, despite knowing that SPARTANs don’t get tired and don’t even need much sleep in general. But it’s happening again and she sits down on her bunk, completely naked. Sometimes, she likes to feel nothing but her skin and really, she’ll put on the body suit again in a minute.
Groaning, she covers her face with her hands, hoping Roland isn’t listening in again. He’s been kind of anxious about this rift between her and Tom lately, trying to push her in Tom’s direction to “kiss and make up” - he actually used that phrase, albeit only once because she threatened him with demolishing another terminal if he kept that up - and generally being a pain in the ass.
He even ran an emergency drill yesterday, complete with four hours of cryosleep for every personnel, including her and Tom to see “if I can still fly this girl solo”. Fly this girl solo, her ass. That had been a none too subtle hint to man up and apologize to Tom for the hell of it. It’s just that she…
A knock.
A fucking knock on her cabin door. Whoever that was better has a really good excuse because they’ll see a half-naked SPARTAN in a second and God help them if they don’t know where to keep their eyes, she thinks as she winds a towel around her body, thank God long enough to cover everything essential. She is so going to kill…
Tom?
So. In eight years they managed to get around seeing more skin of the other than what isn’t covered by their respective branches standard uniform - and PT gear, before she became augmented - and suddenly, he’s wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and track pants and she is wearing… Well. “You better come in before anyone sees us and I have to shoot them before they open their mouth again.”
He doesn’t answer at first, just nods a little resignedly and walks in, looking a little forlorn for a moment, then deciding to settle on her bed after a short look of gaining permission from her. She nods, considering to sit down next to him before remembering that it’s part of her combat readiness to keep her body suit on at any given moment. Also, being half-naked in Tom’s presence possibly just blew up her own personal scale of awkwardness. She clears her throat. “I just need to… I’ll be back in a minute.”
The way he looks up at her makes her think he’d not been in her cabin a moment ago. He’d been somewhere pretty far away. She just nods again, trying to uphold at least a minimum of both their dignity. Then she turns around, grabs her body suit and makes her way to her tiny shower stall, wondering how the hell she’ll get the thing on in there.
And yeah, only five minutes later, she knows she’ll never get the damn thing fastened in here. Too fucking small to reach behind her and get the fastenings on her back done. And this is why she usually does this in the main… “Come here, I’ll help you.”
Huh? “Do you even…”
“Just get your ass out of there and let me help you.” Damn. Whenever he sounds like that - slightly irritated, and he probably rolled his eyes, too - it’s better you do what he says because you don’t want him to become more than slightly irritated. With a roll of her eyes of her own, she gets out of the shower and turns her back to him. Immediately, she starts to feel him tugging and pressing at her back, and once or twice his fingers fleetingly touch the bare skin between her shoulder blades. It’s a good thing for both of them that their friendship isn’t a physical one.
“So,” he says in between tugging in the pre-last of the fastenings, “her name was Chyler Silva, and she was a model cadet who couldn’t do a wrong step even if tried.”
Ah, so this really is what it’s about. She turns around, not caring that he isn’t quite done yet. “Tom, I never meant to…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he just says and gently turns her back so he can finish his work. “Bear with me. I’m only doing what I should have done years ago.”
He’s done now and she turns around, facing him and making a point of looking him straight in the eye when she says, “No, you don’t have to. I’m sorry that I ever…”
A little exasperation shows in his face. As if he had a plan of about every second of how this was supposed to go. If she didn’t know better, she’d actually call this cute. “Damn, Sarah, would you please let me finish this?”
She shrugs and gestures back to her bunk. “Okay, fine, have it your way.”
He gives her a raised eyebrow, like he always does when he knows she’s bullshitting him and doesn’t exactly approve of it but sits down on her bunk eventually. “Thank you.” She decides that it’s really fairer to the both of them that she sits down on the bunk as well, seeing as he usually has to crane up his neck to look at her, already.
She sits down next to him, maybe ten centimeters space between their shoulders. She tries not to read too much in the way he hesitates before leaning his back against the wall next to her. “I was a cadet at Corbulo.” Yes, well, she knew that. “My brother went there before me and I didn’t have a say in it, either.” Okay, she didn’t know that. Actually, she didn’t even know he has a brother? Or had? “What Colonel Lasky wanted, Colonel Lasky got. And she wanted both her sons to be soldiers.” Ah, so… his mother, then.
She frowns. “What about your father?”
There’s a shrug, or maybe it was a wince from him. “Didn’t have one. That is, I did but I never got to know him. She wouldn’t tell us what happened to him and we didn’t ask.” Must have been some kind of family life, then. “Anyway… I was a freshman, member of Hastati Squad. You’d have hated me.”
She can’t help but snort. No way. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“Oh yes, you would.” She’s not sure if she really likes that self-deprecating grin. There’s just too much sadness mixed in it. “If there ever was an underperforming cadet, it was me. Really bad at cooperating with my squad mates, always doubting the team leader’s orders, making a fool out of myself with useless solos…”
“Okay, revise everything I just said. I would have hated you. Big time.” Or at least she would have hated the cadet that Tom just described. For some reason, she just can’t conceal the image of the squad troublemaker and underperformer with Infinity’s captain and her best friend.
At least she made him smile with her admission. She missed that. The realization of that hurts in strange ways. “They called me an innie lover, because I had the gall to voice my doubts over fighting a couple… what did I say? Ah yeah, “overtaxed farmers”.” Colonial insurrection. Yeah, at forty-five he’d be old enough to remember, as opposed to her who’d only been four when the Covenant War had started. To think that there’d once been a time where humans shot at humans on a regular scale… “Actually, sometimes it felt as if there was exactly one cadet who didn’t hate me.”
Well, that’s an easy one, actually. At least easy enough for an educated guess. “Chyler Silva.”
There’s honest surprise in his face when she says that and his reaction is another little smile. “You got an amazing head on your shoulders, Commander.” If this had been just anyone else than Thomas Lasky, she’d have thought he was just flirting with her. Thank God he doesn’t wait for her to comment. “Chyler was the only one who always put up with me, even when I was probably insulting her parents on a daily scale. They both died in combat against the overtaxed farmers.”
She considers that. Wonders what made Silva stand by him, even when he probably didn’t share her beliefs. She finds it remarkably, scarily easy to relate. Can’t resist a little jibe to lighten the mood, though. “You must have been one special snowflake that she put up with you.”
It gets her a frown and a growl that she didn’t know he was even capable of, “Watch it, Commander.”
At that, she just has to snort and it’s nice to hear him join her in her silent chuckling a moment later. She can’t even resist mimicking his growl and his words before sobering up again. His story’s not finished, not be a long shot. So she tries to see if she got the crucial point right. “What happened to her?”
“Killed in action.” Yes. Of course she had to step right into that. She should have known that, they way his voice softened every time he mentioned her name. And the dog tags in his hand that she only just saw now. How long has been running them through his fingers again and again? “Only a couple hours after we kissed for the first time. Actually, the only time.”
Aw, shit. She lost buddies, too, fellow Marines that bought it one way or the other. One of them even had been something of a fuck buddy or maybe boyfriend. But she didn’t lose either of them in freshman year. Somehow, some way, a lot of things concerning him she always wondered about are a lot more clearer all of a sudden. She nearly takes the hand that’s fiddling with the dog tags just to make him stop. “God, Tom…”
“It’s alright.” So he wouldn’t want her pity and she knows that. Only it’s not pity she’s feeling. It’s something a lot deeper, a lot sadder. “It was a Covenant surprise attack. They said no one could have predicted it.” His voice nearly gives out for a while and she gives him time to recover before she hears him add, “For a while, I even wanted to believe that,” sounding so bitter that she thinks she realizes where his personal aversion against ONI stems from, the one that doesn’t have anything to do with him being woodentop Navy.
There’s a moment of silence between them in which she doesn’t know what to say, if she should apologize again to him for using Circinius IV to wound him when she had no idea how sharp the blade she’d been wielding against him had been. It takes her a few minutes to finally settle on, “How did you survive?”
He snorts but there’s nothing humorous about it. “You’re gonna love this. Master Chief.”
Aha, no way. Nuh-uh. Um-um. “Now you’re fucking with me. He can’t have been more than fifteen at that time.”
And then she remembers what she learned about the SPARTAN program history during augmentation. But before she can correct her mistake, he says, “Believe me, I’m not kidding you. It was Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 who pulled me and two of my fellow cadets out of the wreckage of Circinius IV.” And she’s so, so grateful for that. Next time she sees the Chief, she’s gonna have to buy him a beer or whatever else the II’s drink to unwind. “Wouldn’t be sitting here today if it hadn’t been for him. Gave me this piece of Hunter armor after I helped him down it.”
He holds up a piece of rounded, smoothed shrapnel hung on the same chain as Silva’s dog tags. It’s nearly indistinguishable from a stone that might have washed up on a shore but she still believes him. Tom isn’t the sort of person to make something like that up. There really is only one thing left to say in this moment. “Well… fuck me.”
There’s so much to process right now, so many things she never knew about Tom, so many things she didn’t know about herself and she doesn’t even know which ones she needs to stop thinking about sooner. Thank God the story isn’t finished yet, though. Maybe she can stall having to cope with what he told her for at least a few more minutes. “What would have happened if there hadn’t been the Covenant attack?”
He shrugs. “I probably would have left Corbulo the next day.”
Huh? “Why?”
His answer surprises her. “That emergency drill number Roland did on us yesterday…”
“What about it?” Because she’s got no idea what that has to do with Corbulo. Tom for his part doesn’t answer directly, instead starts to pull his shirt over his head… to reveal blisters and raw skin and an awful shitload of small scars on the skin of his back. As if this has been happening regularly to him and he couldn’t always stop himself from itching hard enough to draw blood.
Good God. “Shit, Tom, that’s some serious Freezer burn.”
He shakes his head and she actually has to force herself to keep looking at his maltreated back. That must hurt like a bitch. “No Freezer burn. Cytoprethaline allergy.” A… what? “Only about every fiftieth-thousandth person gets it.” Okay, that would explain why she never heard… “Results in raw and blistered skin, along with respiratory…” as if on cue, a really bad cough is wrecking his body, sounding like he really should see a doctor about this, “respiratory problems after cryosleep.” He coughs again and instinctively, she wants to reach out to him, put a hand on his back, just anything but he waves her off, straightens up again and after a few deep breaths that didn’t sound very reassuring, either, says, “No, it’s gonna be okay, Sarah.”
Like fucking hell. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
He puts on his shirt again and says, his voice a little muffled until he pulled it down over his head, “Trust me. A couple years ago they invented a drug, some kind of antihistamine or something that counters the effects of the cyto.” And why hasn’t he been taking it? “I just have to wait a couple hours after cryosleep before I can start injecting it.” Oh, right. “Another hour and I’ll be mostly fine.”
Err, what? “Mostly?”
“It usually takes two or three injections for the stuff to take full effect and when that happens, everything’s back to normal. I swear.” It’s his “don’t pity me” face, mixed with “let it go” and “I’ll make your life hell for the rest of your life if you tell this to anyone outside this room”. As if she ever would. And damn him for not even letting her say that out loud by diverting her attention with, “Now you.”
Yeah, well. She’d known she’d have to own up to what had caused her violent reaction during the fight in his ready room sooner or later. Of course she’d known that and she’d wished she hadn’t. But then again… it’s probably only fair. She takes a deep breath herself. “She was there, during augmentation. Shortly before Parangosky bought it.”
Being the smart kid he probably was even back at Corbulo despite trying to make her believe differently, Tom immediately picks up her pace. “Osman? What was she doing there?”
Yes, what had Osman being doing there, being Parangosky’s anointed and all that? She takes a deep breath and leans her head back on the wall, almost closing her eyes to go back the four years to a period of pain and survival. “Teaching us a bit of the SPARTAN program’s history.” She wonders just how classified Osman’s personal history is and then thinks fuck it, this is Tom and he just told her about his first time in combat. “She was supposed to become one of the IIs herself, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.” He doesn’t sound as surprised as she expected. To be honest, he sounds more weary and like he half expected something like that to happen already. “What happened…”
“She said she “washed out of the program”. Told us how they tried to make her into one, how Halsey…” She closes her eyes, trying to get the images out of her head that Osman planted there by showing them pictures of surgical teams in sterile rooms operating on children that looked to be too young to be doing anything but getting in fights at school and finding the other sex “icky”. “How she… they were ten, eleven, twelve when they started augmentation, Tom.”
He doesn’t say anything, for a very long time and when she risks a glance to her left, she sees him staring straight ahead, with his forehead slightly knotted, like he always does when he’s pondering something especially difficult to process. He saw her after her last surgery, still in a hospital bed. She’ll never forget his look when he sat down next to her and saw all those fresh new scars on her arm alone.
It doesn’t really surprise her when he finally comes up with, “She really, really hates Halsey, doesn’t she?”
For a moment, she’s tempted to tell him that really was a no-brainer but then again, he very obviously didn’t know the extent or Osman’s hatred towards Halsey. She hopes she could alleviate at least one of his worries. She nods. “Yeah. And honestly, after hearing that…”
“Did she tell you who backed Halsey? Because she can’t have done it all alone.” Okay, not what she expected he’d say. Sometimes, she hates it when he’s so fucking right about things.
So fucking right and making such a good point. And the only thing she can put against that is, “No, she didn’t.” He wants to interject something but she keeps on talking, because he needs to know what she has to tell him. “For us it was enough to know what they did to the IIs. They’re like… our older cousins, the people who paved the road.” They’re even more than that to her, even though she knows the IIs probably don’t see it that way. “They’re our kin, Tom.”
He nods, slowly, probably taking it all in, and not even judging her, if she’s lucky. Then he says, in this thoughtful tone he sometimes has when he isn’t quite done thinking about something but needs to voice an opinion anyway, “And she wants to use us for her dirty work.”
Aw, not that again. “I…”
“You’re smarter than that, Sarah. You know she does.” Apparently, he’s done thinking about it and he still stands by his decision to refuse to execute Osman’s order. She wishes he’d stop that, if only to escape Osman’s wrath. She heard Osman talk, she heard the cold in her voice when she talked about all those people who did terrible things to her body and soul and what she was going to do to them once she found them. She heard whispers about Kilo-Five as well. Osman’s personal bloodhounds, sniffing out every trail she put them on and ripping the offender to shreds once they found them.
Her heart clenches when she imagines them being set on Tom’s trails. She doesn’t tell him that, though. He wouldn’t believe her, anyway. So she falls back to the tried and true. “Halsey’s still a war criminal, Tom.”
He gives a short humorless laugh, probably because that’s nothing she needs to emphasize, not to him. They never had issues about that. “And we still need to put her on trial.”
He’s right, of course. He’s been right with that ever since their fight in his ready room, ever since she told him she’d taken over the order from him so he wouldn’t end up in front of a court-martial for not executing it. It still rankles her that he just has to be so decent and rational, while she always feels her blood pressure surge and her fight-or-flight response pumping up her body chemistry whenever she hears the name Halsey. Maybe they should all just hope that the hinge-heads tire of her and take that problem off the UNSC’s hands.
As if hoping ever solved anything. She nearly sighs. “What are we gonna do now?”
There’s that humorless laugh again and he leans forward, his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands, his voice muffled a little when he says, “Fucked if I know, Sarah,” and very clearly audible when he lifts his face a little and repeats, “Fucked if I know.”
She looks at him, at his hunched posture and sees all those years edged into his face, onto his body. She sees it in so, so serious those eyes, and in those so, so calloused hands running through his hair and with just the slightest tremor, and in those little lines pricking at the corners of his eyes.
It’s funny, she thinks. She always thought they were lines of laughter because he could make her laugh, and she just never seemed to have realized that his laughter always sounded like he was the last survivor of a planetary massacre, that his eyes saw countless friends and fellow soldiers and subordinates die, just as hers and that his hands took a dying friend’s dog tags from her when he was fourteen fucking years old.
I love you.
So. This is how Commander Sarah Palmer should have reacted when she realized she loves Captain Thomas Lasky: incredulous, ashamed, enraged, scared, panicked.
This is how Commander Sarah Palmer feels when she realizes she loves Captain Thomas Lasky: relieved, unsurprised, just like she always feels concerning Tom. Because since eight years ago, he is just there. Even when he’s not sitting in her quarters and competing with your regular smart AI in trying to think himself to death, he’s there. There’s comfort in that knowledge and even someone like her needs something like that.
Though apparently, hers doesn’t come solely from knowing that the only thing her armor can’t protect her from is herself and the key to being invincible is learning how to protect yourself from your own worst enemy, like she always thought.
Fancy fucking that, she thinks and just stops herself from smiling that smile her SPARTANs hate because it means she just found a new and very creative way to keep them busy - or, as they would say, torment them - and is very, very pleased about herself. Tom always suspects that she found a new and very creative way to keep him busy by tormenting her SPARTANs when he catches her doing that.
I love you.
She smiles it anyway. “So… are there any stories where you didn’t totally lose?”
He looks up and leans back against the wall behind them, gingerly and she wonders if he’s really going to be okay as fast and as easily as he tried to make her believe. He frowns at her. Shit, she thinks. I did it again. Hit the landmine full front, gonna be blown to bits right away. “Well… not a lot of them, to be honest.” Okay, not gonna be blown up right away. Maybe it’s a time-delayed detonator. “There is one, though…”
“Come on, don’t be shy, share it with the class, Cadet.” Make me laugh, Tom. Make yourself laugh. Let that story have a happy ending.
“Alright, alright.” He raises his hands in defeat and clears his throat. She hopes it’s just stalling because that cough a couple minutes ago did not sound healthy. “It was the last exercise of the term and they’d made me team leader, probably one last time before they were kicking me out anyway or something. Anyway, it was Capture the Flag, right? So, what happened was this…”
He tells her about how he used the lesson on Hannibal he and his friends had only a couple days earlier to confound the enemy team and even makes passing out from the allergy sound funny as hell and she’s so glad that he’s still here and tells her stories he never before told her and makes her feel less like an asshole for trying to use his Corbulo days as a weapon against him.
Maybe they still have a chance to get through this with only a few bruises instead of Osman ripping their trachea out and their friendship apart. Maybe they’ll find themselves in front of a firing squad as soon as next week.
No use thinking about it now, anyway. She’s got her captain to keep safe and sane for as long as she can and that means she’s got to keep herself safe and sane for as long as she can and right now, that involves sitting on her bunk with him and making sure he doesn’t go on imitating a rampant AI. What else is there to do for you when you’re his de facto second in command and can’t bear to see him beat himself up?
~*~
TBC in A Hundred Tanks Along the Square.