Chapter Text
A single console stood in front of the massive Forerunner door. On every console he’d seen on this Ring, there seemed to be a raised hardlight button, but he’d never used it as he’d simply place Joyeuse in the local systems, but since she wasn’t here, he had to use the console as intended…
He pressed the button, and a circular display popped into existence with a soft electronic sound and was taken aback because he could somehow read and understand it. Taking advantage, he opened the door and entered the facility.
There were numerous levels, each seemed to contain an apartment block of sorts with a bedroom, washroom, and mess hall. Each level had 20 rooms on both sides, and he swept and scanned all of them. Finally, he reached the bottom floor, and opened to a hallway, again. But this was different. It opened into a massive obstacle course arena at the top, and once again he scanned the rooms, finding nothing.
He took the elevator down to arena level and let out a scan pulse.
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Cortana knew he was here. The doors opened thirty-two minutes and sixteen point seven seconds ago, and upper level rooms were being swept in five seconds flat, ten seconds apart.
She felt him come down to her level, and the scan pulse. If she just stepped out…
Her awareness of the Chief’s suit vanished as she did, and even Offensive was thrown off.
Cortana had been standing in the middle of the hallway, near-total darkness surrounding her other than the faint light from the floor lights, when the blue glow of the Chief’s lightrifle illuminated the back of her head. She raised her hands in a surrender gesture and dared not do anything else.
“Cortana.” He was understandably weary, but none of that showed in his voice.
“John…”
“How?”
A slightly shaky breath in, then: “Offensive?”
The lights come back on, and one detailed recap of the last month, a few (a lot) of reassurances, and a file uploaded to his armor later, the Master Chief nodded, and the rifle (that had been moved away from the embodied AI but was still kept at the ready) lowered as he eased into an alert carry posture.
“So you’re a Spartan?”
“I’ve got the body, but not the skill. Yet.”
A soft, unheard, huff of amusement that he was unable to stifle. “Chief? Can I see you?”
Cortana’s back has been facing the Chief since Offensive started to talk. Wanting to test her abilities to find solid evidence of what they had said, the Chief flashed Cortana a green signal light, and he saw her immediately stiffen in surprise, before relaxing and turning, slowly.
It all lasted only five seconds, but for warrior and witch, it was an eternity as more and more of the other was revealed to them.
The gold visor of the Chief’s armor drew Cortana’s eye immediately, but she swept over the armor. Still clearly Mark VI, and mostly unchanged since she’d seen it from a real-time image Atriox had put up…
The Chief had never actually expected to find Cortana, much less in human form. But here she stood now, her body a perfect, human copy of the last avatar she’d used.
He couldn’t care less about her heterochromic eyes, or the fact that her sapphire eye seemed to literally glow in the lighting, all he cared about was the look in them.
She hadn’t forgiven herself. He knew it, those were the eyes of someone who’d done more than her fair share of things and had lived to regret it deeply, but still he recognized fondness and uncertainty.
She was so beautiful with that small, trepidatious yet hopeful smile on her face, but the sadness in her eyes overshadowed everything.
He would do whatever it took to take that sadness out of her eyes, he decided.
And that was when he knew: he wasn’t talking to the Witch. He was talking to the Princess.
His Princess, of flesh and blood, light and reason.
And that was a damn good reason to smile.