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dustbunnyteeth13 · 8 days ago

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The View Between Villages

Read on AO3 Status: WIP (2/4) Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Pairings: John-117 x OC, Riz x Vannak (mentioned)

Summary: This wasn’t home. It felt like someone else belonged here, and perhaps someone else did. He stopped being the boy who did the moment he called on that coin. Childhood came spinning to an end as soon as it came up heads.

Inspired by The View Between Villages by Noah Kahan

Part Two: Ghosts

Eerie familiarity settled into him as soon as they stepped into the first lab.

He was reminded of his visits to Violet’s own as the beam of his mounted light swept across the room. If he hadn’t known better, he would have assumed that the staff would return to it any moment. Equipment sat out on the work tables like everyone had stepped out for lunch. A chipped coffee mug sat beside a microscope draped in the silver threads of spiderwebs. Dust and decay blanketed the space in a thick layer that left the air heavy and stale like he had stepped into a tomb. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath against it until Cortana reminded him to exhale.

With a final sweep, he cleared the empty space around him and stepped between the stagnant work tables. He knew he would find nothing within the labs when they arrived; habit and training had driven him like he was piloted from within when he told her to wait at the door. Despite the silence, the room felt occupied; a lingering presence that made him stiffen with anticipation like he was waiting for someone just beyond the door to step through it. The beam of his light fell to one of the tabletops as he lowered his weapon, flashing against papers filled out in a blocky neat hand. He lifted the papers and scanned over the handwriting before he lowered it to the counter again beside the empty space in the accumulated dirt it left behind. Gloved fingers brushed along the tabletop and John watched the thick layer of grime it left on his fingertips tumble back to the table.

A second beam of light blinked awake from the doorway behind him to join his own. “Find anything fun?”

He turned to find Violet still in the doorway where he had ordered her to stay when he entered ahead of her. The sight of her clearing the doorway with pistol at low ready made his lips tug up behind his visor. Her focus remained on the room before she stepped beside him and holstered to switch to her flashlight. Cortana’s proud murmur that she was improving was met with a nod. Perhaps the nights spent at the range when it was his turn to pick their date night activities were paying off. Her handling became more controlled and comfortable with each evening that she weakly fought him on at first.

It had surprised him when she hesitantly agreed to his request for her to join him. The reluctance that edged each of her motions hardly surprised him throughout the evening. The unsure way she moved through the space hadn’t been so unlike his first visits to her greenhouses; like she was determining how she fit into a place that he moved through so comfortably. She was happy to watch trepidatiously from where she sat until he was able to convince her to at least try it once. With some convincing, she handled the pistol like it was a feral animal that would bite without notice, and offered him a weak smile when he joked that it wasn’t going to go off on its own. He felt her settle only when he stepped behind her to adjust her grip before reminding her to breathe. The rigid way she stood relaxed momentarily to lean into his chest and listen to his instructions before she shot one of the most pathetic groupings he had ever seen at ten yards. He didn’t say a word about it when he leaned down to kiss her cheek and take the gun from her shaking hands.

He had only been surprised for a second time later that night when she asked to go again after he slipped into bed beside her. When he teasingly asked about the sudden change of heart and turned over to turn out the lights, the whispered words that came moments after darkness fell over the room twisted at him. The way her breath shook and her eyes stayed fixed on the spin of the ceiling fan while she whispered that she didn’t want to feel helpless again after Demeter was the only explanation he needed. He was more than happy to take her as often as she asked; Tuesday nights became hers to plan, and Thursday nights were spent at the range until her groupings started to improve. Besides, he didn’t quite mind the press of her body against his or the catch of her breath each time he had to correct her stance with a few carefully placed touches and lowly whispered instructions. Or the activities that followed as soon as the apartment door closed behind them, for that matter.

“Depends on your definition of fun,” he called back.

Her flashlight passed over the room. The thick layer of dust that was illuminated in the glow made her sneeze without the filtration system of a helmet to block it. Her light fell upon the overhead lights above them, the casing cracked, yellowed and full of dead insects.

“ Obviously its spooky dark rooms. Honestly babe, do you even know me at all?” Violet snarked, earning a roll of his eyes that she couldn’t see, but she smirked just the same. Her flashlight swept from the lights to rusted steel catwalks that lined the walls. “Cortana, anyway we can get some lights on in here?”

“I can try, but the electrical system hasn’t been used for over thirty years. Might be a long shot. Just a moment.”

Somewhere above, the rumble of backup generators sputtered into a weak roar. Violet flinched when a few of the ancient bulbs popped overhead and went dark before the rest flickered awake in a dull glow. The dim light threw a sickly gray haze over the dismal room, a far contrast to the almost aggressively bright wash of light that illuminated her own labs. Violet made a disappointed noise before she swept her flashlight across the room again to the tabletops.

“Sorry, Vi. That’s the best I can do.”

“That’s alright, Tana. I appreciate you trying,” Violet said.

Bright light crossed over the rotting papers and rusting equipment that littered the tabletops as she ventured deeper into the labs. The beam turned to the walls, the plant life that crawled along the instacrete and settled into the cracks throwing leafy shadows across the room. He followed behind her, staying close to the edges of the room where desks sat separated by rotting dividers. Personal desks, he assumed, by the sight of the items that sat atop them. Picture frames and knick-knacks that must have belonged to the scientists that occupied them sat atop the tables.

He lifted a hinged frame from one and wiped the grime from the glass with his thumb to reveal the faded pictures below. One side of the frame held the picture of a tall, balding man between two teenage children, the other of the same man with his arms around a woman with short blonde hair as they smiled cheek to cheek. Eyes felt like they followed him across the room. He set down the frame before that feeling could intensify. She stopped at one of the tabletops to sort through the scattering of documents that occupied it and tuck a few into her bag. She looked up at where he lingered with a soft smile and returned to her task, but her eyes didn’t fully drop back to the tabletop.

“Katie invited us over when we get back home,” she said softly. Her voice filled the room that already felt cramped, cutting through the silence that felt thick enough to chew. “She feels bad that we’re missing Christmas this year.”

The shift in attention lifted his eyes from the tabletop to her. He followed behind her as she turned her flashlight back to the more dimly lit corners of the room.

He tried to keep his tone flat as he asked, “That depends; are they still doing that ‘no red meat, no sugar, no soy, no gluten, no actual food’ thing?”

The corner of her mouth quirked up. What little hope he clung to faded away when she nodded and sighed, “They sure are.”

He bit back a groan. A night spent surviving another very bland, very beige meal at the hand of his sister in law’s current fad diet of choice hardly seemed like a celebration of the holidays in his eyes, but he nodded in acknowledgement anyway.

“To their credit, they look great.” Violet shrugged.

“They look hungry,” he grumbled.

Violet rolled her eyes, but it seemed halfhearted to him when she fought a smile. She bumped her shoulder against his arm gently, “Elliot will be excited to see you. I think this is the longest he’s gone without seeing Uncle John since, oh, I don’t know, February?”

“May,” he corrected. She nodded, but he knew despite her question, she was well aware of the length of his absences. He saw the days numbered on the calendar in her home office each time he returned. The mention of the boy lessened the airtight seal the room seemed to have placed on his lungs. He wasn’t entirely unconvinced that his nephew wasn’t the reason why the year they agreed upon before they started trying for children of their own continued to lessen by a month or two each time the topic came up, or why the number of children he was comfortable with jumped from only one to the four that made Violet’s eyes pop. He nodded, “We promised to take him sledding when we get back.”

“I remember,” she smiled. “Though, he said Uncle Van should maybe stay at his house this time because he doesn’t play nice with snow.”

He chuckled as he recalled the snowball fight Violet initiated with the boy last winter. In a moment of forgotten strength, Vannak’s final throw had lifted his wife off of her feet and left a bruise well into the new year. The moment of amusement was fleeting as he scanned around the room once again and the tug in his chest returned. The glow of dirty windows nestled atop the hill from where they sat below it came spinning back into his mind. He wondered if a Christmas tree had once shone from those windows the same as it would through his in-laws. Had he sledded down that hill under the watchful eyes of his parents? Had his mother called to his father to be careful the same way Violet did as she watched from below at the park? The first Christmas spent with the Harris family had been the first he truly celebrated, and the first in which he understood the breathless way in which they all spoke of the day. If things had been different, would his mother have joined the gathering of women around the kitchen with glasses of wine in hand as they chatted? Would his father have fallen asleep to gravball highlights in the recliner beside Bill’s after dinner? Or joined himself and Vannak in helping Andy assemble new toys while Elliot and Elise watched excitedly? He swallowed down the thought and turned his focus back to the sweep of her flashlight across the lab.

She sneezed again and rubbed her nose with the back of her gloved hand, “Well, let’s get what we came for and head out. This dust is killing me. Cortana, can you record for me?”

John rolled his eyes at Cortana’s chipper response before she assembled herself beside Violet, bathing the room in a wash of cobalt light. The two women spoke to each other like John was absent from the room, which was not an uncommon occurrence. He doubted that when Halsey illegally implanted Cortana into his mind that she had done so with the purpose of her highly advanced AI system becoming his wife’s best friend, but frankly, that didn’t seem to stop either of his girls as they gossiped in whispered tones about the members of Violet’s team that they suspected were romantically involved.

Before the conversation could shift to Violet playfully chastising Cortana for snooping through her teams’ personal inboxes for further proof, John cleared his throat. “Focus, you two.”

The two women shared a look and Violet snorted out a laugh when Cortana rolled her eyes. Violet’s flashlight washed over the dark room again, lifting it to search the perimeter as she spoke aloud to the AI. Cortana walked alongside Violet as she dictated, “Doctor Violet Renee Harris, accompanied by research field team ‘Jarilo’ and Spartan Team Silver. Arrived at Elysian City Research Facility, Lab One on December the 19th, 2553 at approximately 1620, accompanied by Master Chief Petty Officer John Harris and UNSC Artificial Intelligence serial number CTN 0452-9. No sign of life within the facility. Preceding with the identification and retrieval of project systems and equipment as authorized by-.”

She continued throughout the room as she provided authorization numbers and the official titles of her superiors. He half listened as he watched her - the polite, academic tone she took on as she spoke was the same she used when speaking on her pad to coworkers, and entirely different than her own. He’d learned that pointing this out only confused her and got him in trouble, so he kept the observation to himself while he absently sorted through a stack of papers he assumed were nearly as old as he was on the desk beside him.

The same several drew him back. There was something familiar about the blocky handwriting that covered them. That same eerie feeling crawled through him as he turned his own light onto them, unable to place exactly why it settled into him. He had seen it before, but he wasn’t sure where. It was an unreasonable thought, he told himself. He’d never been to this place before. But even that felt like something he couldn’t quite convince himself of. Why would any of this be familiar? Fingers traced over the faded letters and he couldn’t shake that feeling.

The steady drone of her dictations stopped mid sentence. John looked up to find her at the desk beside him, her own eyes locked on the image of a young child smiling up from a frame with an infant in her lap. The tone he hardly recognized as her own was replaced with a whisper as she glanced from the dirty glass in front of her to the one he hadn’t realized he was still holding.

“What do you think happened to them?” she asked, her voice small.

To his relief, Cortana answered before he could. “Most of the population was killed off in 2517 when an unauthorized transport carried in a plague that rapidly spread through the installation. A quarantine order was put into place before evacuations began.”

“I know,” Violet said softly. “I mean… Look at this place,” she turned her light unto the desk below them that was frozen in time. Notes jotted down on scraps of paper curled with age, gum wrappers and uncapped pens that were now unusable. A disintegrating wallet sat atop the desk like its owner had walked out without it, unknowing that it would be left abandoned. “I bet he got all the way home before he realized it was gone, and just assumed he’d be right back tomorrow.” Her light scanned across the empty lab once more. He assumed when she rubbed at her eyes with a gloved hand, that it had little to do with the dust. “I bet they all did,” she murmured.

They stood in the too loud silence of the deserted labs before Violet’s eyes fell again to the framed pictures. She touched the picture of the girl and turned away with a sniffle before she continued with her dictations. He returned the frame he held to its place on the long forgotten desk that felt more like a shrine than a workspace. He paused in front of it a moment before he stepped away to follow behind her, her voice echoing through the dark. She trailed off as she spoke of the systems they had been sent to retrieve when she reached the center of the room and looked upwards.

She tapped her fingers to her lips as she looked up to the cracked ceilings and mumbled, “If I were ionic chambers, where would I be?”

John glanced upward to join her scan and pointed to the steel tracks that ran the length of the ceiling in a path similar to the ones he had seen in the Demeter greenhouses, “There’s a hint.”

She nodded, her face scrunched in thought, “But I didn’t see a testing area though. Or a greenhouse when we got here, for that matter. It was still an experimental system thirty years ago, so I doubt it was fully integrated…” she murmured. Her eyes followed the catwalks that circled the building to one of the several ladders that extended down from it, brown with rust and hardly what John would consider stable. She shrugged and set off towards the closest one, “Guess there is only way to know for sure.”

The bottom rung of the ancient ladder groaned under the weight of her boot and John stiffened at the sound. Violet tested her weight again before she tucked her flashlight between her teeth and started her ascent up the creaking metal. John took a step towards the ladder with his hand extended, prepared to snatch her off of it before the corroded metal could crumble under her.

“Your blood pressure is increas-.”

“I’m aware, Cortana.”

“Goose…” he called after her. The exasperation in his voice did little to deter her as she continued to climb upward. Metal clanged under her feet as she stepped onto the grates that served as the flooring of the catwalk, spotted with the same deep brown stains that covered the ladder. She peered over the edge down at him with brows raised and removed her flashlight from her lips.

“John…” she called back.

His shoulders tensed uncomfortably as she walked the length of the catwalk with light raised, paying little mind to her path as she searched the ceilings for the equipment they had been sent for. He unclenched his jaw only to grit out as she breezed right past the safety harness tracks, “Maybe I should do that?”

“I’m fine, big guy. I’ve done this millions of times,” she leaned over the railing to offer him a reassuring smile that did little to ease the tension that tightened his body in a vice grip at the sight of her above him. “I did this same thing for four years, and I climb a sixty foot wall at work almost daily. This is nothing!”

“I don’t like you on that either,” he muttered. “At least clip in.”

“John, I don’t need to clip in. Really, I’m fine -.”

Her reassurances did little to soothe him as they were interrupted by a loud crash. Violet gasped out a string of curses as the grate fell away under her foot and tumbled below. John lifted an arm to block the sheet of metal that fell towards him and caught her leg as it fell through the new hole in the catwalk floor that shook and clanged around her. Her stunned expression turned from her foot, that no longer rested on the metal that sat on the instacrete floor beside him, to her husband, whose expression she could read through his helmet when he cocked his head expectantly. Wordlessly, she lifted herself back up, stepped over the chasm, and clipped into the safety harness before she continued.

Walking a bit more cautiously, she cleared her throat. “Cortana?”

An amused tickle crawled down his neck before Cortana spoke. “I’m listening.”

Sidestepping the dark stains that spotted the metal, Violet continued down the length of the catwalks. Her light stayed fixed on the tracks, calling out the occasional notation to Cortana while she searched. John stayed in step with her from below, still distrusting of the decaying structure and the thirty year old safety harness that he doubted fared any better than the rest of the decrepit equipment around them.

Metal creaked underfoot. Violet paused and lifted her foot from the grate, testing the floor around it with a few carefully placed steps before she continued and turned the corner. A hopeful smile split her face at the sight of the engineering terminal that sat ahead of her. She turned her flashlight onto it.

“Oh gotcha!” She gasped. Her pace quickened, the events of only minutes prior forgotten as she neared, sending down a shower of corroded metal flakes with each step. John lifted his own light to where she stood on her toes to reach up and detach the equipment from the tracks above the terminal, preparing to catch her when the whole structure inevitably came down. She smiled when a soft click echoed through the room and the housing released from the wall. Lowering it to the ground, she sat and began to dig through her bag for the few tools she tucked into it before leaving camp.

“There you are. I’ve been looking for you,” she murmured. She turned the equipment over, turning her light onto it as she examined the weathered casing and prodded at it gently. He couldn’t imagine that anything was salvageable from the bucket of bolts she struggled to open. “Project systems located. Preliminary disassembly will determine if systems are stable enough for transport. External damage… is extensive.”

“Are they still functional?” He called up.

“I won’t know for sure until I get it back to the ship,” she grunted as she pried the rusted casing away with a loud pop. She tucked her flashlight between her cheek and shoulder to use both of her hands to inspect the innards, mumbling out a soft thank you when John lifted his own to give her some more light. “I don’t have the right tools here. These are early ionic chambers, so they’re a bit more unstable than Persephone was. I’d rather not chance it.”

A bright smile split her face when she turned over the casing in her hands. The catwalk groaned as she knelt down and held the casing out to him. “Look at this,” she held her light to the metal when he took it from her, illuminating the sets of initials and date scratched into it. She gestured to the engraving in the middle; The I.S.S.A.C Project; 8/17/2514

“That’s the inaugural date of the system,” she explained. She gestured to the grouping of initials that surrounded it. “The team that developed it left a bit of themselves in it. We did the same at Demeter; we all studied this project in school. These guys were like superheroes to us. Really nerdy, dorky superheroes.”

Although eight sets of initials circled the project name and date, one stared back up at him in the light of her flashlight. He brushed the dirt that obscured the etching away to reveal the same blocky hand he’d seen all over the lab. Three letters were etched below the project name neatly, all even in size; JAS. He brushed his fingers over the uniformed cross of the J. He crossed his own the same way.

“John?”

He looked up at the sound of his name. The sheepish smile she met him with told him that she’d said it more than once from where she crouched behind the half disassembled chamber. She pushed it across the grate with a metallic scrape, struggling with it slightly when she lifted the dissected equipment over the edge toward him. “Take this from me, please? It’s not as light as the carbon fiber ones I’m used to.”

With a nod, he reached up to accept the equipment before she carefully retraced her steps back to the ladder. The tension that hardened his shoulders did not loosen once her feet were back on solid ground, or when they left behind the stale air and sickening light of the forgotten lab. Those initials stared back at him the entire time he secured the equipment under the rain that had turned from a drizzle to a downpour while they were inside. Wet snowflakes joined the rain, the bitter cold turning Violet’s cheeks pink while she waited for him under the cover of the lab's doorway. What little light that broke through the gray above them fell closer to the horizon and brought the temperature dropping with it.

He didn’t look back at the building when they pulled away from it. He wasn’t sure what he avoided as he kept his eyes straight ahead while ignoring the instructions of the unreliable navigator beside him to listen to Cortana’s directions instead; the building, or the carving that looked so much like his own. Rather, he lifted a hand to rest on Violet’s leg, focusing on the automatic way she toyed with his fingers without looking up from the field reports she tapped out on her pad instead of the swirling in his gut.

He kept his eyes forward. That seemed to be all he could do since they arrived; keep his eyes forward. Focus on the mission. Not dwell on what laid around him in ruin that had once been his. It didn’t belong to him. He knew that. It never had been his. He couldn’t mourn something that wasn’t his to know in the first place. So, he kept his eyes forward, determined to preserve what unknown that he could still cling to.

But his eyes strayed from ahead of him when her head lifted to look up the hill as they passed, and the wheels turned with it.

---

The air left his lungs as soon as he saw the windows from below.

The warthog felt possessed as it turned off the muddy path to the house. It was easier to believe than to acknowledge that he turned off himself. He wasn’t sure why he stopped, nor what drew him towards the house like a magnetic pull. He had felt a similar pull here before when he was faced with this place the first time. Curiosity, perhaps. But he wasn’t sure he sought the answers to that curiosity as fiercely now as he had then. He reasoned with himself in the nights before they left that he preferred not to know. That he preferred those curiosities left unquenched and questions unanswered. He preferred not to know.

But familiar roads pulled him along like he had been retracing his steps until he found them in front of that place. He felt like he had been following the lines of a map that he had the haziest recollections, and despite his best efforts to do so, could not get lost. Old roads lay muddied and overgrown and he wondered who had been the ones to pave them. Who had followed them to the homes that shadows moved freely between now.

Had the streets been named? Would this have been another address he could recite without thought like their own, as if it was etched into his skin? Had he known the steps between school and home the same way he knew the steps down Cornelia Street? Did his shoulders relax the same at this door as they did at his own? He knew every step to that door; every crack in the pavement on 8th and Cornelia and twist of the paths that led him to the fourth floor to the last apartment on the left. If things had been different, would each footstep here bring him that same sinking warmth that each along their street had knowing that the same feeling would exist beyond this door, too.

He swallowed it down. He didn’t want to know.

Arrive, retrieve, leave, he had told himself. He would not search like he once had. The search left him feeling like an exposed nerve, bloody and tender and raw in the months he tried to stitch himself back together. His own stitches had been clumsy and done little to repair until she took the darning from unsteady hands and completed the mending herself. Violet stood beside him, rain cutting through the grim that dulled her reflection in the glass, wet snowflakes sticking to her hair. Her eyes never left the house as she stepped to his side. She didn’t question why he had turned rather than continuing towards camp, or why he had led her up the hill to stand before the rotting ruins of his childhood home. She only stood beside him, her hood turned up against the half frozen downpour. He looked up at the cracked windows that once contained a boy and found only the reflection of a man in the dingy glass. The boy returned for the second time, standing beside his wife as he questioned what possessed him to return to it again, or if anything remained for him beyond broken walls.

The air did not return to his lungs then. Instead, his chest remained an empty chasm as he stared.

He willed his feet to move and carry him away. To turn from this place and chalk it up to a moment of… what , he didn’t entirely know. Instead, he remained planted to the spot, unable to go back but unable to go in. He stood like a man caught between worlds; the one he occupied for a short time as a boy, the world he existed in before her, and the one he knew now. Parallels never meant to cross that crept towards one another. The collision of those worlds felt too cataclysmic. The notion of them crossing in an armegeddonous eclipse felt destined for failure as the world around him ceased to exist. He knew what that world was now; a graveyard.

She was quiet as they both stared up at the dismal house. It felt warmer in his dreams. Had they been dreams? Or rather visions? They had felt real, he knew that much for certain. Each felt just as real now as they did when he first experienced them in flashes of memory. It was the same warmth that flooded into him as soon as he crossed into their apartment on that rainy afternoon. It had felt like a home. Like a family. Like what Violet had built for him within the walls of the home they would return to.

“I lived here,” he said. His eyes didn’t leave the wet that raced down the filthy glass. “This was my home.”

The word caught in his throat like it wasn’t meant to be used by him. It was like hearing words in a foreign language he didn’t know, and now didn’t have Riz to translate for him. It only existed in the crumbled ruins of who he once was, and what had existed here. Those images flooded his mind and he hadn’t know where he was, but knew exactly where he was. He didn’t exist there anymore. For a while, he hadn’t believed himself to exist anywhere. Simply a ghost who passed through unnoticed from place to place until she called him in with a smile and stated that she preferred her home haunted. He once questioned if she truly wanted a demon within her walls, but Violet only proved that her version of heaven had been through hell and back, much to his relief.

But this place had once been home, too. It didn’t feel that way anymore. Home stood beside him and looked up at him like she found home there as well. This bridge had been burned before he was old enough to understand the meaning of the phrase. Now he stood in the ashes of the home he once belonged to, questioning if it was this in which he rose from, or the damnation that he felt since removing the pellet.

Violet nodded grimly. The contents of each fractured memory was something he shared with her early in their coupling. Just another thing her patience had coaxed out of him in those first months. They blurted out of him, pouring from his lips in a display of uncharacteristic vulnerability after his first deployment spent with someone waiting for him at home. He watched her fuss over the plants on their balcony like they were children one morning, whispering to them as she watered as if they would speak back. His dad had done the same in his memories. Violet listened to his clunky, tight explanation as to why the sight of it left tears slipping down his cheeks when she found him trying to regain his composure in what would become their bedroom.

It all came pouring out; his memories, how he was brought into the program, every detail of their training and what had happened upon discovering the Artifact on Madrigal. He knew that she knew the bitter details before they ever spilled from his lips. Cortana had eavesdropped on her surprise meeting with Miranda and reported the details of what had been shared as she snooped through the surveillance systems back to him. Violet didn’t speak a word of it to him when he returned. Only continued to surround him with the same steady affection she had shown him before her knowing. It wasn’t spoken of- instead a shared fact between the two that didn’t need addressing. He preferred it that way. It was easier that way. But as the story poured from him, it felt as though a weight that pressed into him had been lifted and he could finally draw in a full breath. He spoke it, and the heartbreak he had been reluctant to see in her eyes was absent to the softness that lived there instead. When he feared she would turn away and deem him simply too much, too strange and unusual and his burdens too heavy, she stayed.

He hadn’t known why he cried. He stood stiffly beside the bed, unable to meet her eye in his embarrassment. She only watched him gently as he wiped the tears from his cheeks and forced the rest back. She had never seen him that way before. He had never intended for her to. He hadn’t expected tears, nor for them to continue when she sat him upon their bed and crouched before him to rub his legs as she listened and brushed them away before he could do it himself. No one had ever listened as earnestly as she had. No one had believed the stories of images left forgotten that returned to him as soon as his hands brushed against stone ancient and unknown. She looked up at him like she heard him - truly heard him rather than the dismissive or suspicious looks he had been met with before he crumpled against that wall nearly two years ago. It was almost too much when he could no longer find the words, only to be replaced by the tears he fought so desperately.

Spartans didn’t cry. They didn’t lose the fight to the tears they tried to swallow down until their hands trembled under her touch as she took them in her own. A Spartan wouldn’t have folded into her like a child and clung to her as he wept for a life that had barely been his. But people did, she explained. People sometimes needed to cry thirty five years worth of tears into the shoulder of a woman who met him with all of that gentleness that once confused him. They remained that way until no more tears stained the fabric of her sweatshirt and he remained wrapped tightly in her arms as she ran her nails through his hair and he felt renewed. She didn’t speak. She hadn’t needed to. He only longed for that again in the quiet of their home and to feel human again in her steadying embrace. He reached for her hand in that same silence and felt the weight of gloved fingers in his own, calling him home like the steady glow from the shore that drew him from angry waters.

It felt like a macabre antithesis to when she brought him to her childhood home. She had glowed the entire train ride as she took him back to a place that had felt sacred. That glow only grew with each step she led him along shady sidewalks down the streets she once walked as a girl. No glow radiated from himself as they stood atop decaying leaves and stared up at a home that had decayed just the same.

There was no walk along tree lined sidewalks in the shade. There was no happy discussion of the places he pointed out. No smiling faces waiting at the door to welcome him home with introductions in the entryway only to fawn over her in a barrage of questions as they gathered around the same table. It existed as a shell. A husk just as empty as the manufactured world around him to try and fill with what little he knew of it. Her own world had been overflowing. It felt fitting that the one he presented to her only contained droplets that barely wet the bottom. But she gathered it up in both hands like it would spill over just the same. She pressed to his side and wrapped an arm around his own.

He wasn’t left with fond memories. Only a blur of what had been before he woke in the barracks surrounded by other children who couldn’t remember how they had gotten there and all shared the same wish: to go home. Those memories didn’t return until his hands fell upon that artifact and he wished almost immediately to return to the unknowing he had lived in only moments before. It had been easier not to know. He preferred the unknowing rather than the ache that ate at him in every resting moment. What had they been like? The question circled his mind like the water that circled the shower drains each time he allowed his mind to wander in the spray.

It was a question that only intensified the ache and left him lying awake as he combed through those memories for the answers. Who were they? Had they loved him? Had they thought about him? Those questions had been what led him back to the pull of the Artifact again and again, hoping to find a glimpse of the answers in the visions that came. Knowing never came. Instead, it left him filled with a brokenness that left him enraged by what had been taken from him then, and had continued to be taken from him in the thirty years he had spent without those memories, and what had been taken from him by their return.

There had been meaning for a few moments in those flashes of memory. The bark of his dog, the stretch of his skin, the voice of his mother. For those few moments he had been happy, even if that happiness didn’t belong to him. It all washed over him as he looked up at the ruins of where they all had existed before and John was angry again. At what, he wasn’t entirely sure; Halsey for pulling him from who he could have been. The Artifact for shattering the blissful unawareness he existed in. Violet and all of her ‘feel your feelings’ bullshit that left him wholly aware of the bitter conglomerate that swirled in his gut and spread through him. White hot anger rolled into a dread that tightened his throat. It sat heavy in his gut and burned through him as he thought of the boy who should have grown in innocence. Who should have known the same love that existed in those fragments. Who should have been left to sleep in his bed rather than standing in the ruins feeling like a gaping wound left to fester.

The things he had lost here were too monumental, as were the people he had known and whose names he couldn't remember that were left now to surround him, suffocating him with their presence. That momentous feeling should have been his to feel. Not stolen away and leaving him to stand in the graveyard of it as a man who couldn’t remember why it had been worth feeling in the first place. His skin itched, his head painfully full and his chest just as painfully empty. The world felt like it was closing in on him, surrounding him along with the graveyard of his memories filled with nothing but ghosts, their arms outstretched to welcome him home.

This wasn’t home. It felt like someone else belonged here, and perhaps someone else did. He stopped being the boy who did the moment he called on that coin. Childhood came spinning to an end as soon as it came up heads. He closed his eyes and turned to her to tell her that they should leave, but the green did not leave the green that surrounded where he had been raised in.

“It must have been pretty,” she said softly. Her fingers wrapped into his own in a tight squeeze as he dropped his eyes to meet hers. She offered him a soft smile before tilting her head up the hill, “The house.”

He nodded and returned his stare to match her own, “I think it was.”

Silence fell over them again as they watched the dirty window. He watched her reflection turn up to look at him, her fingers still gripped tightly in his own. She watched him for a moment before she turned back to the glass.

“Would you like to go in?” She asked softly.

The question twisted his chest painfully. Cortana spoke before he could answer, but his throat felt like it had been pinched shut.

“Chief, your norepinephrine, adrenaline and cortisol levels have all drastically spiked since we have arrived. Your heart rate is increasing as well. I highly recommend that you-.”

“No.” He shook his head and swallowed down the hard lump that formed in his throat. “We should continue. I want to get back to camp before sundown.”

She nodded, still staring up at the shadowed building. Neither moved. Neither spoke. Instead, they stood in the looming presence of it like it somehow left them both petrified, unable to look away. Her gloved hand squeezed his own.

“Could I go in?” She asked.

“There’s nothing to see,” he said quickly. He turned from the house, desperate to put as much distance between it and himself. He crossed back to the warthog and called over his shoulder, “It’s getting dark. Let’s go.”

She turned to watch him over her shoulder, but didn’t move. He didn’t turn to see the expression that creased her face. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, or if it would stop the buzzing in his ears that only continued with each step he took, unable to free himself from the tether that attempted to pull him back up the hill. “Baby, it might be good to go in and-.”

“Violet,” he turned to bark up the hill. “Now.”

Her mouth snapped shut and her reflection tensed in the glass. The sharp way her voice left his mouth made him stop, his stomach sinking as he closed his eyes. He hated the way he’d spoken to her since they arrived. They’d barely spoken at all since arriving, and each time was the same tight, blunt way he delivered orders to his team that made her shoulders sink each time. Hurt flashed in her eyes before she turned from the glass, hugging herself against the cold.

He sucked in a breath through his nose before huffing it out, already thinking of the ways he planned to make up for the god awful week once they returned home. He hadn’t known what it was like to long for home until he had one waiting for him on Reach. Now all he wanted was to return to it. He wanted to stand in a hot shower until the water ran cold and took with it every ache he’d felt since arriving. He wanted to draw the shades over the bedroom windows and sleep well past sunrise with her in his arms. He wanted to wake up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the sound of her talking to the dog. He wanted to return to the man he was within those walls and leave the man he’d become over the previous days behind when they left this place.

He lifted a hand to where she stood above him, outlined in the glow of the dusky colors of twilight illuminated by the dirty glass. His shoulders felt less heavy when her waterlogged glove slipped into his hand, wiping snow from a flushed cheek with a soft smile as she stepped down to join him. He wrapped an arm around her and pressed her to his side before he dropped his brow to hers, warmth crawling through his chest when she pressed her own against it and smiled that Violet smile.

“Let’s get you back,” he said softly, guiding her away from the house. “You’re freezing.”

---

She nodded and pressed to his side, her eyes forward and teeth chattering as he led her back down the trail they’d followed up to the house. His own didn’t remain forward. They turned over his shoulder to trace up the path that led to the glass for a moment longer, the cold beyond the windows somehow warmer in the glow of dusk.

He pulled his eyes away before he could wonder if this same path had brought him home then, too.

Violet stared down at the collection of rusted metal that littered the worktable. They seemed more akin to junkyard scraps than the remains of rather important government research, but she figured that’s what over thirty years of neglect and weather would get you.

She assumed she was going to need new tools after the several hours she spent trying to pry apart pieces that had fused together over the years without destroying the most corroded parts. Casualties had included several screwdrivers, many a rag and spray can of penetrating oil, and a small army of wire brushes. She assumed that a stiff drink was also high on her list of needs after the ordeal, somewhere below a tetanus shot or two.

Another bandage joined the growing collection on her fingers as Violet stared down at the scattering on the table top. She twisted the adhesive around the small cut that still stung from antiseptic and drummed her fingers against the table. She lifted one of the parts to the light; was it a fusion cell? No, the field generator maybe? Each piece looked the same at this level of decay. She returned it to the strange autopsy with a sigh and lifted her paper cup of instant coffee to her lips. She toyed with one of the other parts she had been able to identify; a pulse regulator that had fared better than rest of its companions. The parts were familiar enough. Each bore some resemblance of what was housed in the carbon fiber casings of the Persephone System, and she knew that inside and out. However, still felt inclined to tell her boss that he had sent a botanist to do an engineer’s job, but that hardly felt important at this point.

“Cortana, any ideas?”

The digital rendering they’d spent the better part of the evening creating flashed across the terminal screen. She flicked into the rendering, reviewing the pieces that had already been identified and labeled on the diagram. Large expanses of nothing surrounded the few pieces that glowed red.

“I have a few theories,” her voice echoed through the terminal speakers. “Would you like me to cross reference with the Persephone plans? It may be helpful.”

Violet scrubbed her eyes with her hand and took another sip of lukewarm coffee. She sighed and nodded, “Worth a shot. Thanks, Tana.”

Familiar plans appeared beside the dismal rendering a moment later. Violet leaned against the table and studied the images, but nothing came to her from it. It felt like trying to put together a puzzle without looking at the picture on the box. There was nothing on the project for her to reference; not a single file in the archives that she could use to piece together this puzzle. Other than what she knew of the project from lectures in classes nearly a decade ago, and a few crumbling papers she’d retrieved from the lab, she was completely on her own.

She spoke into the empty lab, dictating her few hypotheses that Cortana recorded before she leaned her elbows against the tabletop and rubbed her temples. The whole mission felt like she was chasing a ghost. Like she was trying to catch a wisp of smoke in a jar before it could fade away in hopes that it would now start a fire. The thought twisted her stomach as she recalled the way he stood stiffly before the ruins of the house. She assumed she wasn’t the only one chasing ghosts. His own haunting began before they ever stepped foot off the ship.

Her spoken notes slowed, fading into a soft, breathy murmur before she paused, her lips stretching into a loud yawn she couldn’t stifle. She blinked at the late hour displayed on the chrono—four hours spent hunched over the rusted carcass, and her body felt every minute of it. The ache in her lower back and the numbness that tingled through her legs reminded her just how long it had been since she’d moved from the workstation, but the project was all she had been able to focus on since they returned from the lab. She stretched, hoping to will some life back into her buzzing legs and grunted softly when her knees popped noisily.

Two hours ago, she’d sent her team off to bed, insisting that she’d catch up after a few final checks. John hadn’t come to say goodnight like he had the last few nights when he’d join her to catch a few moments of sleep himself as she worked in silence. She felt that silence settle into the space around her more acutely in his absence, an emptiness where his familiar presence usually filled the gaps in their familiar quiet.

“Maybe it’s time to call it a night? You’ve made the same note on electromagnetic coils three times now. I’m happy to hear it a fourth time, but I think you’ve earned a break.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but another loud yawn escaped instead. She rubbed at her eyes that just couldn’t seem to focus. How long had it been since she got a decent night's sleep? She hadn’t known one in the days she’d been out of cryo. The last time she slept soundly was in their bed beside him with the comforting drone of his snoring echoing off the bedroom walls. Sleep was harder to come by on the nights she spent without him; their bed felt too big, their room too quiet. A stiffening kind of silence that made the room feel stagnant and left her alone with the worries she’d come to manage better as she grew used to his deployments. Some nights, the silence felt louder than others. It allowed her thoughts to race until sleep felt impossible. Usually, a few laps around the pond would do the trick, but the same luxury of a midnight run through an unoccupied park was not awarded here. Instead, she stood in the too loud silence, thoughts of injuries or fears of the knock on the door she hoped would never come now replaced with those of reflections in dirty glass and the retreat that followed.

She nodded and tossed back what little contents remained in her cup. “You’re probably right.”

“I usually am.”

She rolled her eyes, her lips tugging up into a grin, “And very humble, too.”

“Careful,” Cortana’s voice shifted from the terminal speakers to Violet’s earpiece and she flinched. She could understand John's occasional complaints if this is what living with Cortana in his head was like. She talked terribly loud. “ You’re starting to sound like your husband.”

“You know what they say; you become who you marry,” she teased, tugging on her bulky coat.

“Is that so? Then when will John develop an affinity for vampire romance holodramas and overpriced iced coffees that he only drinks half of?” Cortana snarked, earning a chuffed gasp from Violet as she zipped up her coat. “Because that would make my job way more fun.”

Violet chuckled and shook her head, “Alright. You win. I’m going.”

“I must say, getting you to indulge in basic human needs is far easier than convincing John. I figured you’d put up more of a fight.”

Cold air rushed into the lab as soon as she pulled back the door, the rush of frigid air cutting through her coat and stealing the breath from her lungs. The sky stretched above her, dark now since she entered the lab, with only a thin sliver of moonlight breaking through the dense canopy of trees that surrounded them. Shadows stretched by the fire at the center of camp flickered across the snow-dusted ground. Just beyond the tree line, she could make out the faint outline of the ropes course that stretched between the trees. The ropes swayed faintly in the wind, creaking under their own weight. Her stomach knotted uncomfortably as she watched; he’d stood below them that afternoon, staring up between the trees like he was waiting for something he knew would never come.

“Is he alright?” she asked quietly, her eyes never leaving the swinging ropes. Cortana didn’t ask for clarification.

“All of his scans show that everything is in order.” Cortana chirped, but the way her usually chipper tone wavered only confirmed to Violet that she was holding back.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. Cortana paused for a moment like she was collecting her words, leaving Violet to watch the snow before she sighed softly.

“This has been difficult for him, Vi.”

Violet held back a scoff. Difficult didn’t seem like a strong enough word. Difficult was a word used to describe the resurrection a forgotten project with just breadcrumbs. Returning to the ruins of the home he’d been ripped from to be carved open when he was barely a teenager and crafted into a weapon, only to return to the home he’d been manipulated into forgetting to find nothing… Difficult hardly seemed to scratch the surface. It wasn’t even on the list of adjectives she would use to describe her husband’s week.

Cold wind stung her face as soon as she stepped out of the tent. The rain had stopped at some point since she entered the tent to leave behind thick snowflakes that tumbled to the ground in the freezing temperatures. A sharp gust fluttered the canvas of the tents that made up the research camp. Although she’d sent her team off with instructions to sleep hours ago, a few members of the team sat around the fire Vannak carefully tended to all evening. Ghostly twists of smoke rose from the flames, glowing silver in the moonlight against the deep purple skies. Violet watched the smoke dance between snowflakes, stretching until they dissipated into nothingness against the glow of the planet’s ice rings. She watched the silver-white glow of the ice rings in the planet’s atmosphere for a moment. They reminded her of a muted version of the auroras back home. She wondered if a younger version of the man who watched those auroras from their apartment balcony stared up at these lights the same.

She blinked hard, pushing down the way the thought twanged in her stomach as she secured the lab door and stepped out into the camp. The gathering that sat chatting around the fire was made up of a few lab techs and researchers she’d selected for the small field team. She’d hoped to have Meredith accompany her, but she guessed honeymoons took precedence over research missions. It was probably for the best that Meredith didn’t attend - Violet doubted her presence would do little to raise John’s spirits, anyway.

One of the lab techs looked up from the fire and waved to Violet. “Hey Doc! Come join us!”

“We thought you went to bed hours ago!” Another called. “Any luck?”

Violet returned their calls with a short wave and a small, continuing towards her tent. “Nothing yet! I’m going to turn in. Hopefully fresh eyes will get us somewhere in the morning. You guys enjoy, though! Goodnight!”

“Night, Doc!”

She smiled and called back her good nights before she reached the tent that served as both her living space and the administrative offices. Another icy gust blew through and scattered the flames, sending frenzied shadows across the camp for a moment before the blaze steadied again. Violet shivered and opened her tent, hoping that the heaters in both modules of the tent would be an apt enough substitute for sleeping next to her husband’s furnace-like body heat.

She glanced beyond her tent into the woods that surrounded them at the thought of John. Another fire glowed between the trees below the ropes course.

“Is he around?” She asked, watching the firelight ebb and flow in the wind.

Cortana’s voice spoke through her earpiece a moment later. “He’s on patrol.”

Her brows scrunched, “I thought he was on patrol two hours ago?”

“He was…” Cortana sighed. “He took Vannak’s shift as well.”

Violet sighed and nodded slowly, her breath clouding in the frigid air. Space, she reminded herself for the hundredth time. Give him time. Difficult, impossible, devastating—it didn’t matter which hollow adjective she clung to. None captured the weight that settled over him since they arrived, each day pulling him further into the quiet recesses of his own mind. If he needed time, if he needed distance, she’d give it to him. She would carve out as much space as he needed, a vast and aching expanse for him to feel whatever words or thoughts he deemed momentous enough to share once he allowed her to sit in that space with him.

“Is he planning on picking up Kai’s too, or should I wait up?” She asked, stripping off her heavy coat.

“One moment…” Cortana murmured. Violet tossed her coat over the chair of the small desk in the corner, waiting for Cortana to pass along the message that had gone ignored when she sent it hours before. Cortana’s soft sigh came before her response. “He says not to wait up.”

She straightened the coat with a sigh, her fingers lingering on the seams, and asked Cortana to pass on her goodnight and request that he get some rest as well that she assumed would go ignored. With a soft groan, she lowered herself to crouch in front of the heater, the warmth licking at her bandaged hands. She flexed her aching fingers, willing the stiffness to ease, though the cold had already set deep into her joints. Her gaze drifted toward the tent's entrance, watching the snowfall in the firelight through the canvas. Its soft glow reminded her of the sunset earlier; how the light had struck the cracked glass on that ruined hilltop. How he stood before it as though it held some secret only he could see.

What had he seen in that fractured pane? What had stilled him, his silhouette stark against the crumbling structure as though he were caught by something too fragile to touch? What had drawn him up that hill? She’d stood back, watching, unsure of what words to offer him in the heavy silence that fell between them. What lived in those fragments of glass that called to him? What ghosts resided in the walls beyond, whispering to the boy he once was—the boy who had grown within them, who had dreamed and hoped before it was all taken away?

She hugged her arms to herself, drawing in a shaky breath as she thought of how hard he’d tried to hide the turmoil beneath his usual stoic exterior. But she saw it; the flicker of something raw and unsettled as he stared up at the house and drew back behind the walls she’d coaxed him from. The questions swirled in her gut as she watched for a few moments longer, still crouched beside the heater before she lifted her gloves from it and stood.

“Cortana?” She asked. “When did you say he’d swap out?”

“They are working in two hour shifts. His second started about thirteen minutes ago, so that leaves him with one hour and forty seven minutes until shift change.”

She shrugged her coat back on and fumbled around her cot for her flashlight. “And how long of a walk back to that house?”

“About 22 minutes.”

“Great,” she tossed her field bag over her shoulder. “Let’s set a timer then, shall we?”

“Starting a timer for one hour and forty seven- hey! We’ve been over this! I’m not a kitchen speaker AI!”

Violet laughed at her curt tone as she holstered her sidearm. Better to be safe than sorry, she figured. Besides, the light John had added to it shortly after Kai purchased it was far brighter than her flashlight. She assumed she’d need the extra bit of light. Cortana hummed disapprovingly in her ear, “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

Violet stepped out of the warmth of her tent into the cold again. One of the lab techs had disappeared from the fire, leaving behind only the two she’d chosen specifically because of the way they flirted over worktables back in The Ponds. One slid closer to the other, their voices dropping to a whisper as Violet set out from the camp. Her boots crunched in the snow with each step and her breath puffed out in shaky clouds. She watched it twist into nothingness against the dark skies as she continued towards the treeline.

“Should I make John aware of your little walk through the woods?”

“Don’t bother him,” she said, tucking her face down into the collar of her coat. “I’ll be back before his patrol ends.”

“Isn’t Rule #23 that you can’t use me to keep secrets?”

Violet rolled her eyes. “It’s not a secret. It’s just… on a need to know basis.”

“Violet…” Cortana sighed heavily as Violet continued up the unused roads, covered in a thin, patchy blanket of snow. She paused for a moment, glancing back down the path she followed. Through the gaps in the trees, the faint, golden glow of the fire danced in the darkness, the ropes courses shadowed in the light. She turned back up the path and tugged up her hood.

“I need to know.”

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