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Fred snapped into consciousness, breath trapped in his throat, and stared at the bottom of the bunk above him.
Not again. Not that same stupid dream. He looked at his watch. Made it to 0200 tonight. I think that’s a record.
Blue Team’s leader listened to the room around him. The steady thrum of Pillar of Autumn’s engines. Kelly and Linda breathing—they were both still asleep. Good. Some of us should get some rest around here. The climate control circulating. Footsteps and hushed conversation outside.
It was a dream. Fred tried to force his heart rate to settle. You’re not there. You’re here. It was a dream.
But it was also a memory.
Fred turned onto his side. Kelly was in the bunk above his, Linda in the bunk across from that. And the bunk under Linda’s….
Kurt.
The fourth bunk in the cabin was unoccupied, the bare mattress defying Fred to imagine Kurt sleeping there.
He would have woken up by now. Hand signaled to ask if I was OK. And then not believed me when I said yes.
Of course, if he were here, I wouldn’t be having this dream.
Why do I have to dream about watching him die and wake up to a world where he’s still not here?
Fred sat up and rubbed his eyes.
It was a dream. This is real.
And Kurt’s really gone.
Fred carefully got out of bed and slid his feet into his shower shoes. He needed to go somewhere else. Somewhere the darkness and silence didn’t feel so suffocating.
Somewhere the empty bunk didn’t remind him of Kurt.
Fred meandered down the empty hall to a deserted recreation area and sat on the bench nearest to the door. He began sorting the remnants of a card game scattered across the table. It was something to do. Something to distract him.
Cards. Poker. Kurt was terrible at poker. He was so damned expressive. Jorge always used to beat him.
“Can’t read my poker face!” Kurt’s voice, the memory well over twenty years old, rang in Fred’s mind.
“You don’t have a poker face.” That was Jorge.
“I know. That’s why you can’t read it.”
Fred gave up on the cards and dropped his head onto his forearms. Kurt was dead, and somehow he kept turning up everywhere. In a vacant bed, in an unused seat in the mess hall, in three status lights where there should be four, in a deserted rec room, in an abandoned deck of cards, in the lulls in conversations he would have filled.
I wish he were here. I wish he could walk in and sit down next to me and tell me everything’s OK even though it’s not. I wish I could watch him lose at poker again. I wish I could hear him laugh all the way across camp. I wish he’d been on Reach with us. It wouldn’t change anything, but at least he’d be here.
I didn’t used to have nightmares. I didn’t used to have dreams. I didn’t used to have memories, not like this.
Spartans didn’t usually have this much time to think. One mission ended, the next began. Any downtime was filled with debriefs, patching up injuries, upgrading and servicing equipment, training, and receiving new orders. Ever since the frenzied evacuation from Reach, though, Blue and Silver Teams had been forced into infuriating idleness. John and Vannak and Riz were all at least occupied with recovering from their injuries. Without even his armor, Fred felt as useful as tits on a bull, as Chief Mendez would have put it when he thought the young Spartans couldn’t hear him. Commander Lasky did everything he could to keep Blue Team busy, but it was still too much time. Too much time to think and feel.
None of this was a problem before Kelly knifed that pellet out of me.
“Fred?”
Fred jumped and sat up. “Kelly.”
Kelly shuffled in, her eyes half-closed and her hair mussed. “Are you OK?” She was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a dark blue T-shirt that technically fit, but were obviously cut to suit a man’s body. “It’s the best we can do, Spartan,” the quartermaster had said sheepishly as he handed the clothes over.
“Did I wake you up?” Fred asked as Kelly sat next to him. His eyes lingered on the oddly-fitting outfit. There was something about it…he didn’t know what it was. But he liked it.
“Yes.” Kelly’s answer was blunt but not unkind. She looked at the mess on the table. “Did the cards do something wrong?”
“They were here when I came in.” Fred picked up an ace of spades and fiddled with it. “Do you remember how bad Kurt was at poker?”
Kelly let out a surprised laugh. “That came out of nowhere.”
Fred tapped the card’s edge on the table. “Do you remember?”
“Can’t read his poker face because he doesn’t have one?”
“Yeah.” Fred managed a tiny smile. “That’s…I was just thinking exactly that.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Kelly said. “Are you OK?”
Fred stared unseeingly at the card between his fingers.
“I hear you every night,” Kelly said softly. “When you wake up.”
Fred sighed and put the card down. “I thought I was being quiet about it.”
“You are. I can still hear you.”
Kelly could always hear him. Ever since they were kids. “Did I wake Linda up, too?”
Kelly grunted. “Linda could sleep through a twenty-one-gun salute.”
Fred hummed in distracted agreement.
“Do I have to ask you a third time?” Kelly prodded after a few moments.
“Do you ever have dreams?” Fred stammered.
Kelly’s face scrunched up. “What?”
“Dreams.” Fred puffed a short sigh. “At night. While you’re sleeping. You know?”
“I…” Kelly seemed to think. “I don’t think so. None that I remember.”
“Well, I do.” Fred crossed his ankles, uncrossed them, and crossed them again. He never used to fidget, either. “Every single night since you knocked me and Linda unconscious and took out our pellets.”
Kelly ducked her head to smile at him. “Are you trying to get me to apologize?”
Fred sat back and folded his arms. “Taking out the pellets was one thing, but don’t you think knocking us out was a little much?”
Kelly laughed and leaned her head on his shoulder. “And what would you have done if I’d sauntered up to you and asked you to let me dig around your spine with my combat knife?”
“All right, that might not have gone over very well,” Fred conceded. “Still had to come up with a cover story for the black eye.”
“Sparring?” Kelly ventured.
“Bedframe,” Fred answered with a smile. “Linda got to the sparring line before I could use it.”
Kelly was still leaning on his shoulder. We used to sit like this, Fred remembered.
“What do you dream about?” Kelly asked.
Fred chewed his lip.
“Is it Kurt?” Kelly guessed.
Fred sighed heavily. “How did you know?”
“I came in here and the first thing you said was about Kurt being bad at poker.”
Fred leaned forward, reluctantly breaking contact with Kelly. “It’s always either Kurt or Reach.” He slid one of the cards over the tabletop and absently listened to the soft scraping.
Kelly bent forward. “What was it tonight?” Her arm brushed against his again.
Scritch. Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. “Kurt. When he—”
When he died.
Kelly gently put her hand over his wrist.
She did that all the time when we were kids, Fred remembered. Anytime she’d needed to get him out of his head and bring him back to the present. Guess it still works.
“Did that Delphi mission seem wrong to you?” Fred finally gave voice to the question that had been eating him for a week.
“Did it seem wrong to you?”
“Don’t answer my question with a question.”
Kelly released his hand, and Fred internally wilted a little at the loss of touch. “It does now. Without the…the pellet.”
I’m not crazy, Fred thought. Or if I am, someone else is at least in the crazy with me.
“It didn’t make any sense.” Fred furrowed his brow. “You don’t send an entire Spartan team on a recon job at an old shipyard. And if they wanted Spartans, they could have picked any other team. Why pull us off the line for it?”
“I never thought about it,” Kelly murmured.
“None of us did.” Because none of us could, Fred added mentally. Because Halsey made sure we couldn’t. “It was too orchestrated. The whole thing.” He swallowed. “It was almost like someone wanted Kurt to disappear.”
Kelly sat up straighter and pushed her hair over her shoulder. “Why would someone want Kurt to disappear?”
Fred’s hand twitched with a subconscious urge to sort the few errant strands clinging to Kelly’s sleeve. “Parangosky needed us to disappear.”
“Right, but she didn’t fake our deaths,” Kelly said. “We just went dark one day.”
Fred gave her a sharp look. “You think Kurt’s death was faked?”
Kelly’s eyes widened in surprise. “I…” she pursed her lips. “There’s no reason to think that,” she answered haltingly, like she was trying to make herself believe it.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Kelly looked troubled. “Who would do it? And what for?”
“I don’t know.” Fred shook his head. “That comm satellite, the Prowler shadow…too much of it just doesn’t add up.” The whole situation bothered him.
It didn’t bother me before. Nothing bothered me before.
“You’re right.” Kelly clasped her hands in her lap. “Now that I think about it, it doesn’t.”
“Remember how Kurt was acting before we jumped?” Fred frowned at the memory. “How distracted and twitchy he was? How he barked at Linda when she asked if he was all right?”
Kelly nodded. “Maybe he knew something was wrong.”
“He always knew when something was wrong,” Fred murmured.
Kelly wound her fingers around his. Fred pulled their joined hands onto his lap. Something else they’d done once upon a time.
“What do you think Kurt would be like without the pellet?” Fred wondered.
Kelly seemed to think for a moment. “Probably the same as he was before the pellet,” she reasoned.
“Mm.” Fred nodded, thinking back to their younger years. “Oh, he used to talk so much.”
Kelly laughed again, and the sound was a balm to Fred’s aching heart. “To anyone who was around to listen.”
“Even if no one was around to listen,” Fred chuckled. “You know how many times I thought he was talking to someone else and I’d walk in and find him just…” he laughed harder. “Just talking to an empty room?”
“I don’t think he was capable of thinking without talking,” Kelly mused.
Fred ran a hand over his face. “I don’t think he was capable of not talking, period.” He sobered. “Before the pellet, at least.”
Before Halsey took away everything that made us human.
Kelly rested her chin on his shoulder. “You know, the way Kurt was acting at Delphi…that’s how you were acting before Visegrad.”
Fred paused mid-breath. “Yeah.” He looked at Kelly. “I wasn’t right, wasn’t I?”
“Nothing’s been right since Delphi.” Kelly hugged her other arm around herself.
Nothing’s right without Kurt.
“I wanted to tell John that he was right.” The floodgates were open and Fred couldn’t stop. “At Visegrad. I wanted to tell him the Covenant was on Reach. I wanted to. I tried. It was like…like there was--”
“A wall?” Kelly broke in. “Like you knew what you wanted to do, but something was stopping you from acting on it?”
“Yes.” Fred sat back just enough to look at her. “You felt that way, too?”
Kelly nodded. “Never noticed it until I took my pellet out.” She looked at the floor. “I wanted to tell John about the Covenant, too.”
Did we all feel this way? All our lives? Did Kurt know something was wrong at Delphi, and he couldn’t make himself say it?
“Sometimes it felt like there was another part of me,” Kelly kept going. “Some piece of who I used to be. Telling me I should say or do something, and I couldn’t.” She squirmed.
“We could have saved Reach,” Fred whispered.
“Fred.”
“We knew.” Fred clenched his free hand into a fist. “Kelly, we knew.”
“Fred.”
“We knew the Covenant was on the planet.” Helpless rage clawed at Fred’s insides. “We knew what that meant, we knew what would happen, and when ONI told us to keep quiet, we did.”
“Fred.”
“I would have told Admiral Keyes.”
“John tried to tell Admiral Keyes,” Kelly reminded. “He didn’t listen.”
Fred’s mouth had gone dry. “And now Reach is—the whole planet is—"
Gone.
The Wilderness Preserve where they’d trained. The auroras they’d sneak out of the barracks to watch. The clear, bright winter nights and the dense morning fog. The mountains. The firing range. The barracks. The mess hall. The running trails.
Fred had seen so many planets glassed. For all he knew, his birth planet was one of them. But Reach was his home. Now the Covenant had taken it, and the UNSC had let it happen. If not for a desperate transmission that Pillar of Autumn miraculously received, and Commander Lasky’s decision to make a risky slipspace jump, Fred would have died under a glassing beam with the rest of Reach.
“We were on the ground.” He felt his shoulders tense up. “We watched it all burn. And we didn’t even care.”
“Yes, we did.” Kelly’s brows were pinched and her mouth set in a firm line. “Those damn pellets just wouldn’t let us feel it.”
“They left us there.” Fred fought down another swell of anger. “They took our armor and left us on Reach to die. We give the UNSC our lives, and that’s what they give us?”
“Hey.” Kelly’s voice was firmer this time. She grabbed Fred’s cheek with her left hand and made him look at her. “I mean it. You need to stop. This won’t help anything.” She gave him a cautiously playful smile. “You know, Kurt would tell you you’re overthinking this.”
“And I’d tell him to shove it up his ass,” Fred harrumphed.
“You’ll have to tell me instead.” Kelly’s smile turned sad.
Fred brought his hand to cover hers. “It’s not the same.”
Kelly’s smile collapsed. “It’s not, is it?”
Fred leaned closer to her, as if caught in a gravity well. Oh, he’d missed this. He’d missed her. No matter how much time passed, no matter what was happening around them, Kelly was still his safe place.
I can’t lose her, too. He quickly banished the thought. He couldn’t even consider it.
“Kelly, what if Kurt’s not dead?” Fred rushed out.
Kelly ran her thumb over his cheekbone. “Fred….”
“What if someone did take him?” Fred knew the idea was outlandish, but he couldn’t help himself. “What if he’s in trouble? What if he needs help?”
“If Kurt needs us, he’ll find us,” Kelly said confidently. “Or we’ll find him. No one could ever keep us apart for long.”
Fred noticed Kelly wasn’t trying to refute the idea that Kurt might be alive.
“If he’s…” Fred’s throat tightened, and he had to cough before speaking. “If Kurt’s still…” a stinging haze clouded his vision. “He knows we wouldn’t give up on him, right?”
“Of course, he does.” Kelly reassured. She slid her arms around Fred’s neck. “He had a way of knowing everything.”
Fred relaxed into her arms and buried his face in her hair. He didn’t ever want to go another twenty minutes, never mind another twenty years, without holding her again.
“Fred?” Kelly said tentatively. “I miss him.”
“So do I,” Fred whispered.
“I miss Reach.” Kelly’s confession was muffled in his shirt.
Fred blinked. His vision was still fuzzy. “It’s gone, Kelly.”
Kelly’s body shook and she held him tighter.
“Reach is gone.” Fred blinked again and a droplet of water landed on Kelly’s shoulder. “Kurt’s gone.”
“I know,” she hiccupped.
“It’s all gone.” Drip. Drop. Fred couldn’t wipe the moisture away fast enough. “It’s just—it’s all—”
Kelly pressed her face into his neck. “I know.”
Fred’s next breath came on a shuddering gasp and the room swam into a blur of gray and white. When was the last time he’d cried? Maybe when over half their class had died or been left crippled following augmentation. He couldn’t remember if he’d even cried when he was taken for the Spartan program.
However long it had been, the streak wasn’t going to last. Fred clutched Kelly to his chest and they both wept for the first time since they could remember.