#mark g313

Ferrets under the cut

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As soon as they're well enough to do so, the Gammas start patrolling.

The impulse is instinct beaten into them. Establish a basecamp and then monitor it and its surroundings. Two go and one stays with Mom. She nods and lets them because recon is important and just because ONI isn't on the Spirit of Fire doesn't mean they're safe. Someone is always watching.

The captain. The AI. The medical team. The IIs.

Red team may be apologetic about the circumstances they met under but IIIs don't do manners. Or socialization. It's why during a scouting trip past the onboard gym they heard themselves described as "feral".

At least you could count on marines to be too dumb to be anything but loose lipped and honest.

Years undercover aren't undone overnight. The tangled strands of who they were then and who they are now can never be the same. Some strings are cut to survive. Some parts lost. Habits that kept them alive are viewed as nervous tics and hypervigilance by people who had the luxury of sleeping through the worst of the war.

Maybe that's unfair, but so is their existence. The Gammas are the most volatile of the IIIs. They can never forget it. Revealing their need for smoothers meant handing over their leash. The need for a chemical tether never bothered them so much as the supplier. Nothing is ever certain but the mission. The mission's over now. Everything is uncertain and without each other to ground them, the Gammas would be lost.

Ash thinks of Onyx and Kurt. He thinks of being a leader and what sacrifices are necessary.

He listens to his brother struggle to breathe and wake up choking in the night. He holds Mark closer these days. He hears the sacrifice in his slower words and sees it in his far-away look.

"Exitus Acta Probat" - the ship's motto haunts his thoughts. Exploring yet another colony ship retrofitted for war should stir something in him, but Ash is tired. They're all so tired. Livi had gathered information on one of her patrols and then she had returned to their quarters and slept. And slept. Exitus Acta Probat: the end justifies the means. But what is the end? And where is the limit?

Ash doesn't know, but he'll lead his team as long as he draws breath. He makes Mark lean on him on the way back from patrol, shouldering his brother's weight with his head still on a swivel.

Eyes on them. Rescuers and witnesses to the means. In the end the mission was a success. Intrepid Eye was no more. The Keepers failed. Life goes on, for most.

A young man tucks his family in and then sleep takes him. He dreams of caves and phantoms and the sight of Mark still in the water.

For them, it was the best meal of their life. For you, it was lasagna day.

I love this and I fully agree. Very few of them recall home-made meals as children but it’s a very distance memory, Fred happens to be one of them. Like certain smells will click that memory in his head but he can never fully grasp it. Kelly teases him about it and tries to figure out what food he’s talking about but they can never put two and two together. It happens to be Blue Team’s greatest mystery they can’t solve.

But you make them food after they come back from a mission, and they are shocked. For Spartans, being cared for is alien to them, so they happen to be touched by this gesture. John and Kelly cannot sit together cause they will try to steal each other food, Kelly’s worse about this and you have to call her out cause she will try with Fred and Linda [who just about stabs Kelly’s hand with her fork.] when they aren’t looking. John will swipe a bite from Fred’s and Fred pretends not to see. For whatever reason when you make food for them, hell breaks loose and they will fight, Linda always ends up winning.

Mark-G313: Damn.

Fred-104, doing an immediate double take: F*ck you.

Fred, now doubled over in pain: I mean, damn. Ah shit, that hurt.

*Red team cackling in the background*

Today is his -514th birthday!

Mark was orphaned by the Covenant and conscripted into the SPARTAN-III program at the age of six. Like all Spartan-IIIs, he was taken to Camp Currahee on Onyx to be trained and was assigned to Gamma Company. After the devastating losses in Alpha Company, Spartan Kurt Ambrose decided to do things differently with the Gammas. Determined not to suffer the same losses, he secretly had the Gammas treated with a cocktail of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. While this made the Gammas faster and stronger, it also made them more mentally unstable. The Gammas required the use of "smoothers", drugs which would counteract the mental imbalance.