#117s

Happy Belated birthday to the platonic love of my life ans Bestie over @glorykill

Noticed Trauma Starters (ALWAYS ACCEPTING)

When Rosita Roselyn was a child, she was known for being a weak and timid cry baby. Or so her mother often scolded her for. A child who cried when she was screamed at, cried when she fell, and cried when she was alone. Always too emotional,    always too fragile,    not built to survive in this world.

She cried when her best friend withered away slowly and died in her arms, deformed and unrecognizable by time. Unnatural and Wrong. Then she just never cried again. 

That is the first thing they break out of you when you join the UNSC. Because crying was for the weak, for those who will die -- you had to learn early on to cry was to only waste the tears.  It helped her to cope, thinking that way. But at the same time it felt like all the tears she had to shed had died with little Kyle. 

   To be an ONI officer was to learn that knowledge is power and your body was an expendable weapon like all tools in the trade.  As a 17 year girl, she didn’t cry when she was laid out beneath an insurrectionist waiting for the ODST who had come too late. It was just another job. She didn’t cry when Nova beat the stutter out of her and put out her cigarettes on her hand and arms just to make her tough. It was was needed to be done. When the covenant war began, the time of tears was truly no more. Too much death, and not enough tears to spend.  She didn’t even cry finding out Kyle, the real Kyle, had in fact lived, and suffered a great deal without her. After years of suffering that plagued their universe, Rosie thought herself the ideal Intelligence agent who smiled in agony and laughed in fear. She led Spartans II to their victories, and some to their demise, but still for their sake and morale she had no place for tears when they all needed a stone.

But even stones have to crack. Not even planets could be saved.  She though Rosita Roselyn had died with the little boy she thought to be her best friend -- Truth was, she died with the rest of her family and friends on that day. Burning, screaming, not a soul to hear it. Madrigol glassed.  Nobody had ever stood a chance..

    When the news had arrived through the vine, it settles into her slow and agonizing. The chilling reality that now there really was no home to turn back to crept on her like frostbite climbing through the nerves.  At first she felt nothing ; Disbelief, denial, perhaps shock. Shock had become such a welcome response to trauma in her that it stunted her emotional and physical response to a variety of pains. In her mind her first instinct was to think of her Spartans, to think how Kyle would respond to the news, and how she would have to react accordingly to soften that blow for him.  The UNSC had already stolen his life from him for the sake of service, for the sake of Humanity, and for all the good he did, it wasnt enough to protect his parents from their greatest enemy. She hadn’t done enough to protect her mother, and her father suffered that death because Rosie was negligent in being a dutiful daughter. 

Still, she had no place to cry... She wasn’t the only one to have lost her family. An entire planet... with people who probably had friends and family on other colonies, in the service, who all probably think the same thoughts she did as they stand there digesting the cold reality of how short life is in war times. They would all be crying....   but tears don’t win wars. Tears don’t make it better.      Soldiers like her don’t cry anymore. They plan a counter and act. 

    Her silence was to be expected, however in the coming days there was too much to be planned that would not afford a second of rest. Accounting dead, amassing data for their next place to make their alien enemies rue the day they fucked with humanity. She may have kept a close eye on Kyle and the team, trusted that the Spartans would do good in keeping their brother afloat in their time of grief, Rosie’s place was among the generals and fleets for their next strike. She’d work for days and would be seen very little.. until even she burned out. In the realm of the living, Agent Valentine was in perfect control of her emotions -- smiling and pleasant and deceptively clever behind her cute short physique -- She had no real control of what her body did while she sleeps. She had a bad habit of curling up in random corners where she wouldn't be found and letting herself cave there. She forgets John-117 had come to know her and her habits just as well as she knew her Spartans.

In her dreams, Rosie thinks back on the very last memories she had in her childhood home, shared with her mother and father before they split ways over her. She remembers most the beaches... the water so clear the child she was thought she could see beneath the waves for miles. The little fish that swam in the shallows and nipped at their toes. In her dreams she remembers the warmth of sunshine as she splashed and chased her little best friend on the shoreline, the both of them laughing and rolling through sand until the sun set on the horizon. Camellia, her mother with her same face, stood at the doorway of their beach home as Roland shuffled down the scrub grass with the Reyes parents to collect the two children worn out by their play. The feeling of sand and dried salt sticking to the skin as Rosie lay in a sandy waterhole with little Kyle is one she could never replicate. Her father was younger in those days, not yet salt and peppered by the stress of political affairs, and his smile held the warmth of a thousand suns. He chuckled down at the little girl, and in the dream his voice and laughter echoed and engraved itself into her bones and mind. 

“ Are you ready to go home, sweet girl?”  Roland spoke softly, teasingly as he squatted down in the sand to grab her. From her peripherals she watches Kyle’ s father scoop up the sleeping toddler and carry him a way with a farewell to herself and Roland. Rosie turns her head up to see her father so close, she can smell that vintage cologne he liked as he hooked his hands beneath her chubby arms. She raises her ups up to be lifted,  gripping his shirt and peering up at his face as he looks down upon her with the look of fond admiration -- suddenly he wasn’t moving. Rosie sat there in his arms, anticipating, confused, watching as his mouth moved to say her name but the rest of him did not.

“ Rosie... Rosie..” The hands that held her shook her lightly, then the corners of her dream began to distort. So did her father’s voice.  In a panic fear began to climb in the girl’s throat and thunder in her little heart as a blackness splintered the frame of her colorful world and her father’s voice grew distant. Why did he sound so far when he was so close?  Again, he repeated her name, his voice warping with every rattle of her small frame, more aggressive than the last,  “ Rosie, you have to wake up.. You have to..” 

Her world went black 

 Rosie jolted, gasping in terror as she woke up in  pile of paperwork and files.  Her heart thundered in her chest just as it had been in the dream, the adrenalin of fear caused her body to tremble with the initial disorientation of suddenly awaking. She stared at the ground and took seconds to familiarize herself with the scene ; Papers lay beneath her shaking hands, their image blurry as her head senselessly sways from side to side... a few more seconds, blinking in hopes that the image clears, but the hand that touches her cheeks realizes why its not.  Her face is hot and wet with what she can only assume are tears. Her fingers wipe the edge of her eyes just enough to clear her vision, her hands then simply fall limp on the table when she sits up. At some point she must have fallen asleep on her mission details... and now they were all smudged with her tears and drool. Fear is slow to subside, in its place finds exhaustion, exasperation, and annoyance.   “ God fucking...” She starts to mutter, before she realizes there is a weight and warmth on her shoulder. How long had that been there? Ignoring the pain in her neck, Rosie numbly tilts her head and peers up to find Chief standing there with his usual observant (as she likes to call it) expression. Her neck bones pop as her head falls back, she remains staring a few seconds, before she wills a bashful smile onto her face,  “ Oh, hey John... How long have you been there?”  She laughs, hollow and perfectly practiced, snapping her head back down to wipe her cheeks in her palms, “ God im such a mess, im asking for scoliosis at this rate if I keep falling asleep at the --” 

“You were crying in your sleep.”

John stops her mid sentence, as curt and straight forward as he always is... Rosie finds her mouth to shut quick.  For a moment she seems suspended there, looking down at her tingling hands as the the numbed nerves are slow to awaken in them. She says nothing at first, debating her response, before her lips curl again and she muses out a chuckle,