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This fanfiction article, DT 2021: My Disease, was written by Distant Tide. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission. |
Tainted.
Merlin-D032’s eyes examined the scene that laid out before him. The endless tarmac runway cutting to the horizon despite being less than a kilometer long. The open blue sky decorated by a spring breeze and the salt scent from the nearby sea.
Furthest Point. He called this remote colony world home for who knows how long. Almost a year or more? More than six months certainly?
The young Spartan rarely stayed in one place under the circumstances of a temperamental galaxy. This was the first home since Earth he felt choices and time belonged to him and him alone.
Time spent waking up late in the day. Constructing whatever architectural nonsense came to his mind or his friends. Swimming in the gentle sea. Watching civilians go about their lives from dusk till dawn. Exploring the depths of the remote Bouvet star system.
It was almost a year ago when Merlin last had to pick up a weapon in anger.
Hard to imagine now that this was goodbye. Maybe for now, but the Spartan didn’t know for how long.
“Don’t get sappy-eyed, kiddo,” Callum-B042 remarked with a soft grin plastered on his lips. His brunette hair seemed to glow in Bouvet’s soft sunlight. “You know what you need to do. Go do it.”
Without his Spartan armor, he looked different to Merlin. Far better than the time Merlin saved him from a BDS hit squad sans a leg on Oyster Point. He still had a robot leg now, but he seemed more whole. They came a long way together, returning to a remnant of the UNSC and friends fighting a war already lost.
Callum stayed with the UNSC despite the predicament, but he gave Merlin a choice that no one else did. To walk away.
In Merlin’s wildest dreams, he never considered it a possibility. Yet he took it.
Callum respected the choice, and Andra-D054 followed suite on her own volition. Despite everything that happened to her, Merlin realized she was the most loyal Spartan he ever met.
Her brown, almost black hair whipped in the sea breeze, obscuring her ever-piercing eyes. A rare and dangerous sight. A million thoughts must have screamed through her head at that moment. Merlin couldn’t tell, which spoke volumes to how much change occurred between them since their forced split by the Created. All he could do was project his intuitions onto her.
A sad smile crested Merlin’s face as he responded to Callum. His eyes remained on Andra’s hidden face. “I have no idea what I need to do, Callum. I just know I need to go and figure it out.”
The Spartan girl, once standing beside Callum, stepped forward with furious footfalls as her boots clacked across the hangar bay. Merlin faltered just a little at her ferocity, his heels slipping an inch closer towards his Pelican gunship and his ticket off-world.
“So, this is it then? No plan, nothing?”
Andra’s questions were a figurative poke to the chest but unsurprising to Merlin as she voiced the same desperation over the previous weeks.
“No plan at all. I just can’t stay here. I can’t make you and all the people here share my burden.”
“A burden…” Andra mumbled, testing the words on her tongue. She licked her lips before grimacing, revealing a nervous tell.
“You’ve been inside my head now. You know what happens if I stay.”
The female Spartan’s left hand hauntingly drifted to her neck, and to Merlin’s own horror his own hands twitched to do the same. He crushed the impulse and held them at his sides, turning his fists bone-white.
Andra didn’t miss the jerk reaction, her dark eyes twinkling down towards his fists. Her own reactionary shiver said all she needed.
“You really believe you’ll turn people into some bloody hivemind… You’re delusional Merlin…”
Merlin’s eyes turned downcast, unable to meet her or her denouncement. She offered him an out. He knew better than to take it.
“I wish I was,” The young Spartan whispered to his last childhood friend. His last best friend. “But I also know I’m sane. I’m a disease, Andra.”
The girl gave up the fight to protect her fragile fiction and stepped forward into a scarier reality. She closed the distance with Merlin as he remained rooted in his spot in the shadow of his space transport.
Andra’s breath tickled his nose, as did her hair as she kept approaching. “Don’t you dare die on me, Showerhead. You come back to me no matter what. If you don’t, I’ll go find and kill you myself.”
Merlin didn’t say a word in a vain attempt to not get her windswept hair in his mouth. She kept closing as her hair swallowed his nose and cheeks.
Something soft touched his lips, but the truth was that Andra stopped moving a step ago. Did Merlin move forward? Or her? It was hard to tell as their noses touched and their foreheads clicked together in an amateurish manner.
Merlin tilted his head right so their lips properly connected. This was real. It felt soft, but scratchy from dry-peeling skin. He didn’t revolt from the contact, neither did Andra. Their lips remained together as he felt her hot breath intermingle with his. Her undeniable but unplaceable scent dominated his nostrils.
The contact wasn’t like the sappy romance films that Major Duceppe showed them what felt like a lifetime ago. Merlin didn’t understand the practice then, he still didn’t now. But something about it felt borderline…nice?
Andra backed away first at a snail’s pace. Merlin took a full step back, leaving her cold despite a weak embrace holding them together.
The male Spartan had a sudden urge to run. The skin-crawling effect grew ever by the second. His eyes darted towards the dark hangar behind Andra, Callum, and the few local flight technicians helping with takeoff preparations.
A cold smile greeted Merlin there. An ever present and familiar mop of brown hair, a clone of Andra’s visage. A tangled mass of arms and legs by count of tens. A ghostly nude form that appeared more parasitic green than transparent white. Evident pus dribbled from open-visible wounds despite distance and shadow. Foam bubbled at its lips.
The creature waited in expectation. It wore Andra’s face frustratingly well, pretty and unnerving as ever. Merlin didn’t freeze, he didn’t jump. Its visage followed from the corners of his eyes, always there. He long since gotten use to its shivering presence, even on the hottest of days.
“I’ll come back to you. I always will.” Merlin finally promised to Andra, fixing her with his most determined look.
She pulled him into the tightest squeeze she could muster and planted a second kiss on his cheek for good measure. A little out of character for her but nothing about this last year or so was in-character. Everything was out of shape, from the macro-galaxy to the smallest of details.
Merlin stepped away from the farewell party and waved off Andra and Callum for the final time. They would have each other to rely on from now no. Merlin had a meeting with his monster ahead.
He clambered into the gaping cargo bay of the Pelican, noting the same creature of his overactive imagination tucked into one of the bolted chairs. It even managed to get the seatbelt over its nude chest in an almost absurd manner. Merlin marched passed, slapping one of its off-jointed arms on his way to the cockpit.
A frosty sensation lingered on his hand from the contact as his eyes focused upon the tarmac through the cockpit window. Pulling on his MP helmet, he found some reassurance in the virtual glow of a hooded young woman sitting in the co-pilot chair next to him.
“How’s diagnostics looking, Althea?”
The Smart AI nodded, her Andra-like face bobbing towards Merlin with an eagerness that reinforced the Spartan’s resolve. They needed to go, and she would be there with him all the way.
“All systems green. Without money, I can’t replace some of the big-ticket items but we won’t need to replace anything on this bird for a couple years I suspect. The Ambrose’s Refuge might be a different story but I think that laundry list can wait for another day.”
Merlin hummed in appreciation. “Alright, let’s get going. Let the tower know we’re off.”
“They’ve already cleared us as of three seconds ago.”
“You’re too good at this,” Merlin smiled.
“Can’t help being an AI, Petty Officer.”
The AI and Spartan shot each other looks of silent mirth. They were of a single mind right now, AI and human brain connected over a neural lace with a mission in mind but no destination and no time frame to meet. They just needed to get this done.
Merlin glanced down at the virtual camera as he flicked through manual switches, footed pedals, and pulled levers. His eyes fell on Andra-D054 once more through the all-directional aircraft VISR. She looked small beneath the hangar, broken and alone.
He was leaving her again. His heart wrenched and his fists curled against the flight controls. The churning of the fusion engines as the Pelican hovered over the tarmac sounded just a little harsher.
He wanted to stay. Really, he did. But he needed to do this, or he wouldn’t be the only one having their sanity eaten up by an ancient alien warfare network. The Forerunners were a vile species for creating the Silent Garden.
“Merlin, you okay there?”
The cold creeped into Merlin’s shoulders as four broken arms and a leg curled around him. A Flood tentacle joined the appendages, wrapping around his legs. Something like vomit dampened against his hair.
“It’s on my head again…”
The Smart AI’s hologram rose from the co-pilot chair into Merlin’s view as he pushed the Pelican into a gentle climb, leaving the runway behind in four seconds. Althea’s arms danced against his shoulders seeming to shoo away the monstrous objects.
The cold presence receded momentarily, replaced by a ghost of heat like that of a friendly campfire.
“It’s okay, the apparition is gone for now. If it comes back, let me know. I can’t see her, but I can protect you for a time.”
Merlin nodded solemnly. His eyes burned as he directed his Pelican over the open sea and continued to climb. Low orbit awaited him even as a tear or two prickled against his eyelids.
He wouldn’t be coming back for a while, maybe ever.
The Spartan really hoped it wasn’t forever. But a part of him whispered, a part of him corrupted by that thing told him otherwise.
[It/She] has been waiting for a hundred-thousand cycles for him. [It/She] will hold onto him for a hundred-thousand more.
This broken painting of Andra-D054 would haunt him forever. Unless he did something about it. The thin and silver profile of the starship Ambrose’s Refuge hovered just within sight and above Furthest Point’s low orbit. Merlin barely registered the 20G climb as he propelled towards it and his new direction.