Donec mortuus anima liberatur huic hosti a gravibus eius
Adversarius eius arripuit laminam e munimento
Sed mortuus anima impedivit ictum mortiferum
Nunc redimus ad terram illam ignis
Intenti sui secreti reserant
| Just Different | |
| Protagonist | Leon Sikowsky |
| Author | Anonymous ONI agent |
| Author's Rating | Graphic Violence Strong Language Mature Humor |
| Next Story | The Fifth Wheel |
| Story Series | Halo: Terra Ignis |
| [Source] | |
Prologue[]
Spartan Leon Sikowsky found himself once again toying with the safety on his rifle as he waited for a sitrep. Although he realized that it probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, he always seemed to start doing so anyways whenever he felt anxious; it had become a nervous habit. Leon hated being uninformed. If he felt unsure about what was going on around him, he felt helpless, almost as though his body was moving on someone else's accord rather than his own. The repetitive motion and soft clicking noise of the weapon's safety served to placate him somehow; it made him feel grounded.
Finally, Angela Forrester, the designated marksman of Fireteam Valiant, looked up from the scope of her suppressed DMR, and Sikowsky's heart nearly skipped a beat in excitement. "What did you see?," he snapped, though he hadn't meant to. Angela didn't give any notice of his rude tone, however. She, like the rest of Valiant, had grown used to Sikowsky's quirks.
"Looks like we're dealing with Covies and Prometheans. Again. A lot of them too."
"Be more specific."
"They've got plenty of Crawlers, hingeheads, turkeys, gas suckers, and I saw at least a dozen Knights alone."
"Fucking awesome," chimed in a sarcastic Corin Davis, Valiant's automatic rifleman. "I remember back during the war when sometimes all I had to fight were shitloads of Grunts. Why is it never like that anymore?"
Brian Donaldson, one of the team's riflemen, chuckled. "Maybe it's 'cuz you're a Spartan now," he told Corin, who didn't appear to listen, arms crossed and not showing Brian any sign of acknowledgment. "Besides, we've handled worse," added the team's other rifleman, Christopher Dorton, with his peculiar tinge of a German accent.
"Shut up, you three," Leon ordered. "Angie, I want you to stay here and provide covering fire while the rest of us head down there for a closer look." He turned to the rest of the team. "No one else fires unless I give the word, understood?"
They nodded in unison.
Leon gestured to his team, and the four Spartans descended down the steep rock face, stepping carefully to avoid making too much noise. As they descended down the rocky slope the incline became gradually more shallow, until it terminated in the smooth chrome floor of an artificial canyon, which was perforated at relatively regular intervals by the cyan glow of a variety of small lights built into the metal surfaces. Thankfully, these fixtures did not provide much in the way of illuminating the environment, so the Spartans were able to stick to the shadows and better conceal themselves from enemy detection.
Soon they reached a narrow chokepoint, about 250 meters from their original position, taking cover there. Leon motioned for his teammates to stay put, then shouldered his rifle and peered around the corner. His eyes met those of a Jackal sentry, which squawked at Leon in surprise.
Leon snapped back behind cover and signaled for his team to open up a private comm channel.
"They saw me," Leon told them.
"How?," Corin asked. "What the fuck did you do?"
"Bad luck, I guess. A Jackal was looking right at me when I poked my head around."
"Fuck."
"Keep holding fire. Angie, prepare to take him and any buddies he brings along down."
"Roger," she acknowledged.
Leon listened as footsteps approached him and his team. A lone alien rounded the corner to see them, opening its mouth wide to alert its allies. However, the only sound that was made was the wet crunch of a bullet smashing into the alien's cranium, then a muffled splat as its brains blew out from the opposite side of its head, spattering the floor with skull fragments, brain matter and dark purple blood.
"Why weren't there mo—"
"Look out!," yelled Dorton, cutting Sikowsky off. Leon looked up to see a Watcher above their heads as it began to teleport Crawlers to Valiant's position.
"Open fire!"
The Spartans retreated, firing at their Promethean pursuers as they ran. However, Valiant's escape was cut short as a Knight materialized in their path.
Leon leapt onto the metal beast, making it double back. He grabbed the blade attached to its left arm and tore it from the grasp of the energy field which held it in place. He flipped it around and held it like a sword, then jumped off of the Knight, slicing off its right arm near the shoulder as he did so. Leon charged once again at the now helpless Forerunner construct, ramming the blade into its face. The behemoth toppled as he released the blade from his grip, and began to disintegrate into hundreds of tiny luminous flakes. The Crawlers, apparently intimidated by Leon's impressive show of force, spun around and began to retreat to the safety provided by their stronger allies.
"Well, that went well," Sikowsky noted sarcastically. "Let's head back up to Angie's position and regroup. We need a new plan."
Chapter One[]
Twenty-four-year-old Kaitlyn Sikowsky arrived at her apartment door to find her seven-year-old son, Leon, sitting beside it. As she walked over to Leon, he silently stood up and put away the dated hologaming device that he took with him everywhere, acting as though nothing was out of the ordinary.
"Leon, why are you here?," she asked him. "You know that you're supposed to stay after school for daycare."
"I don't like daycare," Leon moaned. "So I rode the bus home."
"But you know it's dangerous to be here unsupervised. And wouldn't you rather play with your friends instead of wait for me right here?"
Leon shook his head. "No. I wanna be alone. Other kids are loud."
Kaitlyn sighed and shook her head. What am I going to do with you, Leon?
Kaitlyn was a single mother. After a drunken one-night-stand with a boy at some party (whose name she never even knew), she had given birth to Leon when she was only seventeen. Thankfully, her parents remained supportive of her and did the best they could to help her care for Leon, and unlike most teen mothers Kaitlyn had decided to stay in school so that she could still get a good, well-paying job and give Leon a decent childhood. Currently, the two of them lived in an apartment together in New Alexandria, where Leon had been born, and Kaitlyn took classes at the city's university while her son was at school.
She unlocked the door and Leon bolted inside, dumping his things into a messy heap before running into his room.
"Leon, how many times have I told you that you're supposed to organize your things before you go and play?"
"But mommy..."
"No buts. Take care of it now. You're already on my bad side for not staying after school."
Leon marched out of his room and over to his things, arms crossed and pouting in a highly exaggerated manner. Nevertheless, he complied and began tidying up the mess.
"Oh, don't you make that face. You're supposed to do this every day, and you know that."
Leon just groaned, and Kaitlyn rolled her eyes.
"Why don't you tell me about something interesting that happened today?"
Leon stopped and thought for a moment. "I missed story time today because I had to do a test."
"What kind of test?"
He shrugged. "It was a really funny test. No one had told me I was supposed to take it before, and no one else had to take it except me. It didn't seem like a test too."
Kaitlyn lifted her eyebrow at this. "Why?"
"They didn't have me write anything on paper. I had to do things with shapes and point to things and stuff."
"Okay," Kaitlyn said, unsure of what else she could say. She agreed; it was weird, but Kaitlyn didn't know enough about Leon's school curriculum to know why he might have taken it.
I guess I'll just forget about it for now.
Kaitlyn was at lunch in a sandwich shop near the location of her next class when the ringer on her chatter went off. She set down her food, wiped her hands off, and looked at the number. It was Leon's school.
She answered it, and a woman with a heavy but still easily understandable Hungarian accent immediately greeted her.
"Hello, is this Missus Sikowsky?"
"Uh, it's just Miss."
"Oh, apologies. My name is Agnes Herrmann. I'm the psychologist at your son's school."
"What happened?"
"Nothing. Everything is just fine. However, I'm calling to inform you that we've diagnosed your son with Asperger Syndrome."
Kaitlyn's heart skipped a beat. "With what?"
"Asperger syndrome. It's a form of autism that mostly impairs social interaction."
Kaitlyn's body instantly went numb. Autism? Leon has autism?
"That can't be right—"
"We tested your son two days ago. He met all of the diagnostic criteria, more than any other child we've tested."
That must've been the test Leon told me about...
The woman continued. "I'm sure that this is hard for you to hear, Miss Sikowsky. But we can still help your son—"
"You can cure him?!"
"No, we cannot. This is a permanent condition. He will deal with it for the rest of his life."
"B-but—," Kaitlyn stammered, beginning to break down. "I did this to him, didn't I?," she thought aloud, tears beginning to run down her face. People began to stare and whisper, but Kaitlyn was simply too distraught to contain herself any longer. "I did this to my son..."
"Miss Sikowsky—"
"I had been drinking heavily early on in my pregnancy," Kaitlyn sobbed. "That did it. I broke my own son! What kind of mother am I?!"
"It isn't your fault. There is nothing you could have done differently to change this. It's a genetic condition. Either you or his father carried the gene. Alcohol does not cause Aspergers."
Kaitlyn took a few moments to refocus. "You said you can help him. How?"
"We can't cure him, but we can treat him and allow him to live a mostly normal life. We can give him behavioral therapy to help him socialize better and make accommodations so that he can do well in school. But there's a possibility that he may still need someone to look after him his entire life."
"What can I do for him?"
"You should have your son see a psychiatrist. He can tell you more. But remember one thing: Your son is fine. He's not broken or retarded. He's just different."
Chapter Two[]
"Hey boss," shouted Davis. "I've got something."
Finally. Comms had been down for the longest time, and without reinforcements or updated intel, Valiant had been unable do anything but sit and wait.
"How much are we getting?"
"Just some bits of chatter here and there. I'll see if I can patch us through to Infinity ops command, but the Covie's damn scramblers have a way of making this far more complicated than it should be."
Davis tinkered with his TACPAD a bit more. After a minute or so, he let out a celebratory "Aha!" accompanied by a victorious fist pump.
"There you go. I'll keep an eye on the on the signal. Make sure it doesn't shit out on you."
Sikowsky had to consciously remind himself to make sure he was transmitting before starting to speak. He had a bad habit of starting to speak the moment he opened the channel, sometimes cutting off his first syllable or so.
"Infinity Command, this is Spartan Sikowsky of Fireteam Valiant. Do you read?"
Sikowsky held his breath as he waited for a response. He had a feeling his teammates were probably doing the same.
"This is Infinity Command." Spartan Palmer's normally grating voice had never sounded so sweet, despite the fact that her tone was as impatient as ever. "Where the hell have you been, Valiant? Team Kodiak has been waiting for your sorry asses for ten minutes."
"We're about a klik and a half from the rendezvous point. Our intel was off; we encountered heavy resistance and our cover was blown, so we had to fall back. We need reinforcements."
Sikowsky could hear Palmer let out an exasperated sigh on the other end of the comms. "My hands are tied Valiant. I don't have any fireteams to spare at the—"
Suddenly another voice cut in. "Infinity Command, this is Spartan Tyler, Fireteam Nocturn. This area is almost clear; we can be at Valiant's position in about three or four mikes."
"Huh. Alright Valiant, you lucked out. But no more setbacks. Damn eggheads have been breathing down our necks for the past week to have that grid secure."
Sikowsky fought back the urge to protest Palmer's use of the word "eggheads". His relationship with Annette, a member of Infinity's science team, made him want to speak out in their defense. But he also knew better than to backtalk Palmer.
"Roger that. Valiant out."
Sikowsky signaled his team. "Alright. Nocturn's coming to bail us out. I want you ready to move on a moment's notice."
"Leon, focus!"
That was the third time in fifteen minutes that PAuLA, short for Paraprofessional/Autism Learning Assistant, a model of 'dumb' AI that Leon's school assigned to aid special needs children like him, had needed to divert his attention back to his teacher. He doubted it would be the last, too, considering he was in math class, and had found something more worthy of diverting his attention to than silly numbers.
The subject of Leon's attention was 13 year old Noel Ward. She had moved to Reach from Arcadia, as apparently her parents were rich folk who were afraid that the group of aliens (which Leon could never seem to remember the name of) whom had destroyed most of the Outer Colonies, would return to glass their planet, despite having been driven off of it the year before Leon was born. Leon doubted this however; all of the newsfeeds said the UNSC were close to defeating the aliens, and that they would be unable to continue attacking planets within the next year or so.
While the vast majority of the other seventh graders in Leon's school had already been dating for some time now, Leon had no interest in such things. Still, however, he couldn't help but feel an odd bit of excitement when a girl his age looked at him or spoke to him a certain way. Noel was different, though; Leon found himself transfixed by her, and couldn't help but gaze longingly at her.
"Leon!"
For a brief moment, Leon considered switching PAuLA off, but quickly decided against it, as last time he did that they made him stay after school to lecture him. Leon hated school, and staying any longer than was absolutely necessary was a prospect he found nothing short of unbearable in the extreme.
His thoughts soon drifted back to Noel, and he found himself wondering if she had a boyfriend. Leon didn't keep track of who was dating whom; it changed far too frequently for him to possibly keep track. At this point he had simply begun to believe that 'normal' people had a natural ability to sense whether or not someone was single. After all, he couldn't possibly imagine that anyone could ever keep track of something so complex yet frivolous, Aspergers or no.
Regardless, normally someone so new to the area would undoubtedly be single, but Noel was so pretty that despite her 'newness', Leon still felt a pang of doubt as to her being single.
However, his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of whispering behind him, and looking over his shoulder he caught sight of several students glimpsing and pointing in his direction. It was probably a safe assumption that someone had noticed his staring.
For the sake of hopefully not being ridiculed or thought of as a so-called "creeper", Leon decided it was in his best interest to give into PAuLA's incessant pestering and begin paying attention to his teacher, regardless of how mind-numbingly boring the subject matter was.