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Chief goes to sleep; Cortana stays awake. Her chip is still in his helmet, so they tote him around like a glorified memory stick, plugging him into whichever ship needs Cortana most. Or that’s what it feels like. Like she’s the brain and he’s the brawn, and the brawn is always the last ditch solution. One too useful to keep awake, the other too useful to put to sleep.
These are only assessments – he doesn’t hold resentment for any of them. It’s just…
Chief gives his head a shake, tells himself to stay on task. It’s only been an hour since they woke him up. All his edges are still smarting. He’s thinking too much.
It’s just him and Cortana in the armoury. The back-up is minimal on this one, and the soldiers are still in the process of getting ready. Standing between racks of SMG’s and pistols with nothing but time on his hands, Chief is restless. They’ve woken him too early; they should know by now how quickly he can move from cryo to a mission. He’s not supposed to have this many minutes to himself.
Cortana stands on his hand, listing off some sort of mission info or parameters that he knows he won’t be able to remember. Thinking is antithetical to winning a firefight – that’s why Cortana does most of it for him. He merely watches her expression animate, her form flicker, the way she waves her hands when she talks.
When she finishes, she crosses her arms and looks up at Chief without much expectation. At this point there’s nothing for him to do but wait. Cortana knows the drill just as well as he does, even if she’s more likely to ignore it. That’s okay when you’re Cortana.
“So… watch any shows lately?” Cortana quips. She follows it up with a big grin, and she doesn’t expect Chief to reply. Obviously, he hasn’t watched anything lately. And obviously, he doesn’t laugh at her jokes. That’s how they work.
Yet, something urgent sits on Chief’s tongue. A response, a word, an admonishment? He can’t tell, he just knows there’s something he needs to say.
“I missed you,” he says, and immediately it’s too much. The words don’t fit between them, that isn’t the kind of thing they say. He wishes he could take it back. He can’t.
Cortana fizzles for a moment, face blurring in and out of focus before settling on a soft look of surprise. Not the sharp expression she gives leadership when they’ve done something she thinks is stupid - this one is different.
“I didn’t know you could feel things in cryo,” she says.
And she’s right. Cryo is a darkness so deep and unknowable that Chief can barely comprehend that he enters it at all. But there’s a few seconds, right when they pull him, that she’s gone in his head. Helmet UI down, no orders to follow - no Cortana. And he misses her.
“Somewhat,” he lies.
“Oh, uh, I don’t know what to say. I don’t miss you. I don’t think I know how to miss anything.” Cortana is blunt, as always. She doesn’t say any of it to be cruel – Chief knows what that sounds like.
“Not Doctor Halsey?” he asks through the sudden tightness in his chest. Halsey is the only other person he thinks he might be supposed to miss – he doesn’t. But maybe Cortana feels differently.
Cortana shakes her head. “Nope. I don’t think about her very often. She’s not usually relevant, is she?” Her gaze drifts somewhere over Chief’s shoulder, eyes unfocused. “Huh, I’ve never thought about how little I think about her before.”
Silence falls between them for a moment. Cortana thinking or running some process in the background that Chief has no hope of understanding. Chief is thinking too – but they’re all the wrong thoughts. The kind that cling to the recesses of his mind, jumping between his ribcage and his conscious thoughts. Not good, not so close to a mission.
“Do you think about me?” he asks, and it’s close to blurting as he’ll ever get.
“Hm,” Cortana hums, looking back at him. The visor is opaque, but it always feels like she can see his face. She turns her head to show she’s thinking - an artificial habit, or he assumes it is. “I suppose I do. You’re always relevant to my mission, after all. You’re like a fly, buzzing around my head.”
Cortana grins but something about Chief’s reaction is wrong. His face doesn’t change but she can read him so well, she just knows somehow.
“This conversation made you sad. Why?” Cortana isn’t cold, she isn’t even emotionless - but she isn’t human. In the same way John isn’t. At times they’re like two incorrect wires, sparking at each other desperately like that might force them to connect.
Footsteps echo down the metal hallway. Sounds like a pair of soldiers.
“It doesn’t matter,” Chief replies. He lowers his hand, waiting for her image to disperse before returning it to his side.
“If you say so,” she says, voice tinny with the familiar sound of his in-helmet speakers. Chief knows it better than the sound of his own voice – some days, it’s the only thing he hears. He listens for Cortana before he listens for his own heartbeat. The fuzz of her open mic is the sound that reminds him he’s alive.
Two soldiers walk into the armoury, already dressed in their active camo armour. They look young. New. As soon as they see Chief they clam up, mouths thin, eyes darting about. It’s only when Johnson enters the room that anyone dares speak again. Chief ignores it, listening to Cortana’s voice when she’s speaking, and her fuzz when she’s not.
They continue with the mission, as they always have. Success is the only option, and it’s Master Chief-and-Cortana; of course they prevail. Chief walks back to the cryo bay, listening as the fuzz between his ears disappears and Cortana is drawn away to other, more important tasks than him. As the technician leads him through the cryo process (again) (again) (again), Chief thinks that if everyone on this ship disappeared, he’d feel the crushing feeling of having failed humanity, but he’d only miss one person. And he's not even sure anyone else considers them people at all.
Chief goes to sleep; Cortana stays awake.
--
The next time they wake Chief up, it’s the same. Different ship, different orders, same job. In the moment of darkness before they fully free him from cryo, he misses Cortana. Then he buries the feeling, shakes his head, and heads for the bridge.
“Hey,” Cortana suddenly says, just as he’s stepped out of the cryo bay. Chief stills: is something wrong? The tension must read on his vitals because Cortana scoffs. “Chill out, I just wanted to say hi.”
“…Hi,” he replies, still on edge. He gets the feeling that she’s rolling her eyes. Someday he’ll have to ask how she does that.
“Come on, say hi to me for real. We can spare a minute; I promise I’m still running everything I’m supposed to be running.”
Moving to a maintenance hallway, feeling like he’s doing something wrong, stealing something, Chief lifts his hand. Cortana explodes outward in a wave of light, bright enough in the dim hallway that Chief’s world is awash in her particular shade of blue.
“I missed you,” Cortana declares, apropos of nothing, a smirk on her face.
“You… what?” Chief replies, confused and refusing to let go of confusion lest something else take its place. He’s lost, so lost, but the grounding feeling of Cortana in his hand reels him back in. “You said you couldn’t miss anything.”
“I couldn’t, but it seemed important to you, and since you said you missed me, I wanted to know what it felt like.” She looks nonplussed for a moment. “It feels kind of shit, actually, but… also kind of good at the same time.”
Chief is totally still. He has no idea what to say, can’t come up with a plan to navigate through this for the life of him. It’s an utterly unfamiliar feeling. Some part of him yearns for a gun, or a battlefield, but all he has is this maintenance corridor, and Cortana in his hand. Blue, and stubborn, and Cortana. He blinks, and he thinks he misses her in the darkness in between.
“How…?” he says. He doesn’t need to finish; she knows him well enough.
“I wanted to miss you, so I taught myself how.” Cortana smiles up at him – no sarcasm, no tricks. “Welcome back, John. It’s good to see you.”