Concurrence Chapter 4-8

2278 words. Still trying to tweak this bit, but I felt bad for not posting for a few days, so here you go. 

“So,” she began, lowering her carbine so she could nudge her way through the debris littering the floor. “can this sleeper agent contact you only through those ‘phones’?”

“My helmet’s communicator got trashed a while back, so yeah. Pretty one-way though.”

“How did you know he would direct you to this place?” she asked, glancing down at him. “What if we had not been close enough to hear the phone ringing? What if there had been no power, how would you know to come in this direction?

“I didn’t,” he replied, pushing his way between a waist-high gate that spanned the hallway. “I would have come up with something else, but it looks like being on home soil has its perks.

“You don’t seem very bothered,” she noted, stepping over the gate. “I was sure we would have to make a stand against the Phantom.”

“We operatives have to always keep a cool head when we’re backed into a corner,” he said. “We’ve always got to have a backup plan, or be ready to make one up on the spot, cause we never know when the Covenant’s gonna bring the hammer down on us. We’ve got to be ready to slip away at a moment’s notice, cause help’s not coming.”

“What about your team?” she asked. “Do they not help you?”

“They do, but… when you’re all stranded behind enemy lines, there’s gonna be casualties, and sometimes I’ve finished ops where I’m the… last one. I’ve been an operative for eleven years,” he continued after a pause. “but the team I have now, I’ve only known for the last three. It came to the point I just started calling my replacements by their nicknames, it was… easier that way. Not much, but still.”

“Sounds like a very… lonely life,” she said, the two travelling up another staircase. “At least I was given ample time to mingle with my kinsman, arrogant and impertinent though they may be, forming connections with the precious few who saw me as a fellow warrior. Perhaps Humans deal with isolation differently than we do.”

She got the feeling he wanted to add more in the following silence, the Human mulling on her words. She remembered the day she had heard news of her first brother’s death, how she wept for his loss, tempering her mourning with the thought that he had died well. This Human must have gone through something similar, if he had been on a first-name basis with his teams in the past.

“You get used to it,” he eventually replied. “I’ve gone for weeks without so much as uttering a single word, not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. At least you’re around to change that,” he added with an amused huff.

“Glad to be of help,” she replied, smirking down at him. Seela only realised that they had shared a quiet chuckle after the fact. It seemed nearly getting cut down by a Phantom gunner had done wonders for their animosity towards one another.

The Major

Beneath the Streets of New Mombasa

Nine Hours After Rupture

Given his past experiences with train stations, the Major decided to stick to the platforms and avoid trudging down the tunnels this time around. He didn’t head straight for the nearest exit, that Phantom could still be in the area, so instead they hopped over a couple of platforms until he was confident they wouldn’t immediately be greeted by Covenant if they had decided to sweep the immediate area.

His visor outlined the edges of the rectangular rooms as he and Seela climbed up another stairwell, the next area reminding him of a terminal at an airport, with numerous metal detector arches and filter gates protecting every branching direction. Judging by the various gift shops and corner cafés lining the area, this must be the hub of the metro.

“I must stop,” his companion said, lifting one of her long legs up to rub at her calf, the Major frowning back at her over his shoulder.

“We need to orient ourselves as soon as possible,” he replied. “Already lost enough time thanks to that Phantom.”

He didn’t hear her following, so he sighed, turning round to see she was lingering ten or so meters back, her foot still raised as she examined herself. From this angle, the strange shape of her legs was more defined, obvious, the Major taking a moment to look them up and down.

They were digitigrade, like the hind legs of a dog, her thighs thick muscle, her sparse armour leaving little to the imagination about their weight and power, ending in a pair of wide hooves, like a deer’s. Her legs were huge by his standards, but proportional on her large frame, and to other Elites she probably passed off as slim, more lithe, sporting a balance between muscle and grace, as she was demonstrating at this moment – standing on one foot without even bracing herself against the wall.

He tilted his head at what she was focusing on. There was a nasty scorch mark between her first and second knee on the left leg, her form-fitting bodysuit melting like candle wax in a rough patch the size of his palm. She must have been hit when they were fleeing the Phantom.

“You okay?” he asked, holding his shotgun one-handed as he adjusted his rigging.

“Oh yes my melted skin doesn’t hurt at all,” Seela answered with a roll of her eyes. “of course I’m not okay, fool, I told you I must stop, didn’t I?”

“Still have the medigel,” he reminded her, fishing in one of his many pouches. Seela batted a hand at him from across the floor.

“Forget your gel, it will not work on me, I’m not human.”

“I don’t think it discriminates,” he said. “It heals tissue, and you look flesh and bone to me.”

“I said forget it. I need but a moment’s rest.”

He began to complain, but restrained himself, Seela was too stubborn to warrant another argument. He internally winced when Seela hissed through her mandibles as she prodded a finger at her wound. It looked painful, did she expect to just let it heal on its own?

“At least run it under some water or something,” he mumbled.

“Do you see any water around here?” she asked.

“There’s a bathroom right there, go turn a tap on.”

“How was I supposed to know?” Seela shot back, walking over to the door he was pointing at, flexing her mandibles at him in the same way one would pull a face at a hated colleague. When she pushed the door open, she turned around and glared at him. “Did you just snort?”

He had, she’d heard him even through the helmet, her senses must be much better than he thought. “That’s the men’s bathroom,” he chuckled.

She threw open the door again, which had closed while he was talking, pointedly strutting inside despite his words. After a moment, he heard her call out from inside. “Where’s the water?”

The Major sighed, seeing that any urge to hurry might as well be buried now. He let his shotgun hang in its sling as he entered the bathroom, checking over his shoulder for contacts before moving inside.

There were three cubicles on one wall, and just as many sinks on the other, the place looked untouched compared to the rest of the city, tucked away as it was. Seela was standing in front of one of the stalls, her tall helmet brushing the ceiling, her hands on her wide hips as she appraised the cubicle.

“Should I use the water in there?” she asked, gesturing at the toilet.

Part of him wanted to see her dunk her foot in it, but she’d probably punch him in the brain if she managed to piece together what toilets were used for, so he didn’t bother. “No use the sinks,” he said, leading her over and demonstrating how to turn one on. “Blue means cold, red means hot. Now hurry up.”

The top of the counter was below waist height to the giant alien, and she pulled a leg up on it like she was vauting over a railing, placing her giant hoof into the sink. She grumbled as she tried to find a right position to put her injury beneath the faucet, angling her leg in ways that would have sprained his muscles if the Major had tried to copy her. She never stumbled, however, never lost her balance, her other leg completely straight and anchoring her to the ground.

Eventually she found a proper position, her leg angled awkwardly across the counter, her knee on one side of the basin, and her ‘foot’ on the other. She reached over and turned the cold water on, hissing through her mandibles as it began to wash over her burn.

The Major stood to one side of the exit, switching his attention between watching the exit, and watching her. A plasma shot like that could send a human straight to the infirmary for weeks, but she’d walked all this way without voicing a single complaint. He knew Elites were tough, but seeing it for himself was no less impressive.

He began to tap his foot, Seela occasionally twitching as she adjusted her pose. She sighed every now and then, the Major imagining how the cool water was relieving her pain. The silence dragged on into the minutes, until Seela glanced over at him.

“Could you stop that?”

“What?” he asked.

“Your foot, it is twitching. And you are also tapping on the wall, it’s annoying.”

He balled his hand into a fist, he hadn’t noticed he’d been flexing his fingers against the wall all this time. “You are disconcerted,” she noted. “I will not so slow us down, injury or no.”

“It’s not that,” he replied. “I know you can just shrug off anything that comes your way. It’s…”

“Don’t keep me waiting,” she chided when he went quiet.

“I’m just not good at standing around. Makes me nervous.”

“One should relish for the quiet moments,” she said, turning the water down a notch. “It is the only chance a warrior has to reflect. How can simply standing make one nervous?”

“I’m always on the move. Or fighting, or drawing up strategies. My whole life revolves around those things, I’ve practically made them my identity. When I’m not doing any of that, I start to… reflect, as you put it, on things I’d rather forget.”

“… I too, wish to stay ahead of some memories,” Seela replied. “Take the infant I almost killed, for instance. That moment is always there, burned into my mind like the afterimage of a bright light, and sleep is no longer the welcome reprieve it once was.”

He had a jab about what she dreamed on the tip of his tongue, but he held it back, not wanting to interrupt her. “but a warrior cannot let regret weigh them down, lest they crumble rather than fall, when the end eventually comes.”

“Just keep moving forward, huh?” he said. “Guess that kind of outlook isn’t limited to just humans. Easier said than done, though,” he added, crossing his arms over his vest. “I’ve lost a lot of friends during my years with ONI, and tonight isn’t the first night I’ve my whole team’s gone dark. The other operators gave me a nickname, wanna here it? Lone Wolf,because people assigned to me had a habit of never making it back nine times out of ten.”

“You feel responsible for their deaths?”

“Of course I do,” he snapped. “I’m supposed to get them out, not leave them to die. That’s why I stopped calling people by their names, thought it would help cope if and when they died, like a defence mechanism, but it’s ended up fucking me and making me a stone-cold, miserable sack of... But you wouldn’t get it,” he finished with a shake of his head.

“I am also a leader, remember?” Seela said, a strange expression on her face. “I may not have led a fellow Sangheili in battle, but I do know of the duty and obligation one feels for their charges. You think after a battle on how you could have done things differently, how you could have minimised casualties, but you must banish these thoughts. To dwell on the dead, when you remain among the living, is a foolish endeavour. Perhaps on some level, I do ‘get it’. I may even see a shade of me in you, Major.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have both made war our livelihood, yet cannot seem to rationalise its consequences no matter how hard we try. We seek any means of distraction if it means ignoring our troubles, be that moving, or fighting.”

“Yeah, well, what else can we do?” he asked, his hands raised in exasperation. “All I’ve ever known is how to kill and fight.”

“On the contrary,” Seela said. “You have meticulously avoided confrontation whenever possible, and you have failed to kill me.”

“So I can’t even do that right, good point…”

“I meant that as a compliment,” she added. “You are not so bad a leader as you might think. Despite my complaints, your insistence on avoiding open battle has brought us this far, has it not? Perhaps if more of my fellow Ultra’s were as dedicated to their tasks as you are, this war would be long over.”

“Yeah, I’d lose all your soldiers,” he mumbled.

“Do not let the losses of your teams discourage you, no amount of lament will undo their deaths.”