#johntana

[lacys-corner]

[teememdee]

oh i have not been emotionally distraught like this in a while. how could they do this to me personally. they might not have said i love you but i sure heard it

[fawntana]

Tanabell ✨ 🧚‍♂️

[midnightanddiamonds]

"Look at us. We just keep saying goodbye, don't we? But this isn't an end. It's a chance to make amends. To rectify mistakes."

Halo 4 | Halo 5: Guardians | Halo Infinite

[doom-dreaming]

Do you think she said/he heard something funny enough that got him to smile/laugh and look away for a fraction of a second. Do you think she felt enamored and secretly tried to get him to laugh again. Because in midst of chaos she's never really seen him simply laugh and rarely seen him smile.

"You always take me to such nice places," she remarks. It's half-sarcastic (the body of the Jackal they'd ambushed is floating down the creek at the bottom of the ravine) but there's an undercurrent of sincerity to it - it is a nice little place. Leaf-filtered light dapples the grass under John's boots. High overhead, the glittering curve of Delta Halo's alien landscape fades into a cloudless blue sky. Her sensors pick up birdsong; she runs a quick comparison scan through her database...no match to a familiar species. Interesting. She files the call under a new entry.

A nice place indeed.

John shoots two more Jackal snipers off their perches, sending them sprawling limp against the rocks. Shouts echo up the cliff walls from somewhere beyond the range of both sight and sensors; Unggoy cries of alarm, silenced by a swift Sangheili command.

"Seems like we've crashed our own surprise party."

John drops from the ledge and hits the ground running, clearing a gap in the rocks around the waterfall with the effortless grace of a jungle cat. Cortana swears she can feel the mist swirling past his shields. He meets the oncoming Covenant as he always does, a wall of metallic green titanium, an unstoppable force and an immovable object all, somehow, rolled into one.

The next thirty seconds are a blur of bullets, brutality, and blood. Cortana wanders. A frog, an unremarkable little brown thing only a few inches long, launches itself from the bank of the creek, kicking through the water to the safety of a submerged rock. A dragonfly as dazzlingly blue as Cortana herself alights on the flowering stalk of a reed. A lizard with a brightly-colored tail three times the length of its body skitters up a nearby tree. A shiny black beetle, unperturbed by the chaos around it, trundles under a clump of fallen leaves.

This ring is alive in a way so different from the first, with an entirely separate ecosystem— "Wait." She folds in on herself, collapsing back into the confines of the Mjolnir, pressing at the barrier separating her—just barely—from the electrical storm inside his brain on the other side.

He stops.

"...I wonder if there are fish in that creek."

A mixture of amusement and confusion splashes up against the barrier, but he humors her curiosity without a word, picking his way over the rocks, deeper into the ravine.

Sure enough, there they are. Tiny silver things wriggling at the edges of stones and within the stands of reeds, breaking the surface tension to swallow up pinprick-small insects resting on the water, leaving behind perfectly round, glistening bubbles.

She relaxes again, swelling outward, soaking in everything she can touch. The rocks here are slick with waterfall mist; moss grows in the crevices, lush tracks of green and pink. Somewhere close, another frog croaks. Insects buzz. Leaves rattle in the breeze. There's no gunfire. No alien shrieking. No radio chatter. It's serene.

"Hard to believe these were built to be weapons," she muses, focusing on a miniscule spider as it climbs across a branch over their head. His head. She had to stop doing that. "...we should keep going. Regret has to be close. Sorry about the detour."

Calmness and nonchalant acceptance greet her from John's side of the neural barrier when she tucks herself back into the nooks and crannies of his armor. Part of her—a rather loud part of her—wants to stay and analyze the intricacies of this halo's flora and fauna and how it had all developed and fit together, but...they have work to do.

She can't resist one last quip as John navigates through the winding cavern out of the ravine. "On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate this date?" She's not expecting a response, but he surprises her. It's nothing more than a huff of air and a low sound in the back of his throat, but Cortana feels the chemical-electrical rush of amusement behind it and knows what it's supposed to be.

And in spite of the frogs and insects and birdsong, it's the sweetest sound she's heard since they landed.

[thehushedcasket]

Gaucho

[mxchineandnerve]

Good Morning, Sunshine

“Go. To. Sleep.” Said one very impatient artificial intelligence. She could handle her Spartan’s stubbornness in small doses, but this was just infuriating! Said Spartan was as reticent to do so as could be. There was little time for rest, especially in a place like this. The Index was so close. If the Chief so much as closed his eyes, he’d practically be gift-wrapping it for the alien zealots. No, something as useless as sleep could wait, at least till the ring was in no more danger of firing.

“Passing out will help approximately....oh wait, NO ONE!”

“I’m not gonna pass out.” Said one very miffed Spartan-II. “Yeah you kinda said that the last three times, too. Look, there’s two of us in here. You may be able to hide your fatigue from everyone else, but everyone else can’t see your melatonin levels.” “Where am I even supposed to sleep?” “You’re one of the smartest humans I know; you can figure it out.” The Master Chief sighed an exasperated sigh. Knowing Cortana, if he didn’t stop for a breather now, he’d never hear the end of it. Something as useless as sleep was apparently something he just had to do. It wasn’t like their was anything important he had to do. The Library was still a good half-day’s march to the east from the snow-capped summit they stood on. If he continued without stopping, the Chief would have made it there by sundown. But he instead relented and paused in place, if for no other reason than for her to stop barking at him. While he immeasurably appreciated his companion’s concern, it was getting a bit out of hand. The first order of business was to find shelter. The unnatural wilderness that surrounded them both seemed bereft of anything resembling the mouth of a cavern, eliminating that option pretty quickly. The Chief was also lacking rope, a tarp, and anything one would first think of for making shelter. For a Spartan like him, a lack of supplies would not be a hindrance. There was one supply that was readily and abundantly available to the Chief; snow and lots of it.

____________________________ By the time the artificial sun dyed the horizon a burnt orange, the Chief had his shelter; an icy cave hewn from as much snow as he could dig up with his hands and propped up by whatever loose stones and branches he’d scavenged earlier. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do with what he had. Resourcefulness was always one of his strengths. As for the temperature, his MJOLNIR would take care of that. The bodysuit that the plating sat on was more than capable of regulating his body temperature. John was never too hot nor too cold when in armor. The easy part was over, now came the hard work of actually forcing himself to sleep. If he just sat in the silence, his brain would become a monkey. It would swing from vine to vine and branch to branch, never satisfied and always on the move. He laid himself flat on an alcove he’d dug into the snow. It wasn’t long before he started shifting, fidgeting, and doing everything but sleeping. The glow of his HUD didn’t help either. There was no way to escape the blue glimmer of his exoskeleton’s many system and statuses. “I can dim them if you want me to.” Cortana calmly announced. “Thanks.” It hardly helped, but John always appreciated the sentiment. He must have been awake for at least three hours. That was his closest estimate when he got bored enough to actually count the seconds. When all else failed, he tried to recall something Linda taught him. His memories were not without the sting of guilt. Blue Team had only been separated for five weeks, but that such a short time did nothing to quell the Chief’s worries. With little contact with his team, he could only assume the worst. John-117 could very well be the last of his kind, the last stubborn stone that neither wind nor rain could erode away. He chose to grapple with carrying their legacy the same way he’d always dealt with his demons; by locking them away. He just had to do that thing Linda had taught him. He had to do nothing but think only of his breath. In. Out. In. Out. What was he going to do if he was- No! Not now! In. Out. In. Out. In..Out.. In...Out... In....Out.... The Spartan’s dream was incoherent, a mishmash of lived experience and imagined fantasy. It was not a pleasant dream, that much was certain. Though she was did not have access to every corner of her Spartan’s mind, she had studied human sleeping habits enough to know what the twitching meant. If only she could enter his mind and pacify his frenzied dreaming. It was painful to watch the man who for all intents and purposes was her elder sibling suffer. Worse still was knowing that she could do nothing about it. She just had to stay in place, shut her facsimile of a mouth and wait for dawn. Before the newly-rested Spartan so much as opened his eyes, a giggly cry of “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, it’s time to get a move on!” jolted him back into consciousness.

[w4shington-b1ue]