trans_9 | Glory be to Paddy, but they're drinkin' it straight. [OPEN, R for Cussing]

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Glory be to Paddy, but they're drinkin' it straight. [OPEN, R for Cussing]

Earlier, somewhere in the Vatican's outbuildings:
Carefully, Murphy poured a little of the precious liquid into a dish, then placed the bottle far, far away. He nodded to his brother who then, with great ceremony (and from a safe distance) lit a match and tossed it in.

The flame burnt fast, bright, and blue.

The twins grinned.

******

The next flame burnt a decidedly different color, and distinctly higher. The boys jumped back, laughed, and Murphy pointed at his twin.

"You're trying it first!"

Now, nearly everywhere:
Connor and Murphy paraded through the city, past the library, the sensoriums, through the sleeping quarters, winding their way to the cafeteria. The two, who had been strangely difficult to pin down lately, were now laughing, chanting, and banging on pots they'd scrounged from somewhere. They'd each a large jug or two slung on make-shift straps over their shoulders, and their chant seemed to go something like this:

"Two Irishmen, two Irishmen were digging in a ditch,
one called the other a dirty son of a
Peter Murphy, Peter Murphy, sitting on a dock;
along came a bumblebee and stung him on the
cocktail, ginger ale, five cents a glass.
If ya do not like it, ya can ram it up your--
Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.
If you're hit with a pail of shit, PLEASE CLOSE YOUR EYES!"

Between rounds of it, they were sipping from flasks and shouting "Come on, it's fuckin' Saint Paddy's Day! Free drinks in the mess! Get your arses in there with yer fags put out, or we're fucking partying without ya!"

[ooc note]

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"Kelly's forty-two?" He hadn't quite meant to blurt that out, but it was still surprising none the less. "Cryo sleep is very good on the skin. And the mind." Sharp as a tack didn't even begin to describe that girl.

Though his brain was operating a bit less efficiently than usual, it was still operating quite well, so 42 - 30 =

"You and her joined the military when you were about... twelve?"

Edited 2009-06-15 16:42 (UTC)

"No. Cryosleep, remember?" He gives one temple a tap. "I've been under longer than I even know. Could probably calculate it out if I had a complete log of all my jumps, but I don't."

Six, actually. But the Chief will be damned before he'll give up any information on the Spartan project, particularly that little chestnut.

They'd been a huge boost of morale for humanity when their existence was finally permitted to go public, but the details would destroy all of that if they were found out. Especially now that the war was over.

He's taking no chances that the real word might possibly get out in his own universe somehow. The Chief already senses that his future, now that the war is done, is going to be dragged down into politics if he lives. And this would only worsen matters.

So yeah, he's going to lie.

There was a brief look where it obvious Leon was turning over that little nugget of information. Those numbers he was running were coming out to less than twelve each time.

He was considering pressing the issue, he was an investigator, after all. He job was to dig through lies for the truth. But, at best, that would only glean him knowledge that wasn't useful to him, which wasn't worth antagonizing the Chief.

"So what else can you tell me about Kelly?"

"She's another Spartan. Practically family. We did most of our training in the same unit," he replies. "I'd trust her with my life."

She's almost a sister to him. Kelly was one of his first friends in the program, she and Sam were the best friends he's ever had. Sam, however, was killed when they were fourteen. And until recently, the Chief had believed Kelly (and all the rest of his Spartans) dead too.

"Given the choice, I'd prefer she were at home. We're always needed. A Spartan's work is never done."

"I wouldn't doubt that." He wasn't about to test the loyalty between the Chief and Kelly, though.

"She sounds like a good marine."

"She'd have to be, she's a Spartan," he confirms simply. Though really, the difference between a Spartan and a marine is like that between a wolf and a large dog.

"What line of work did you come out of?" he asks, partially to get off this subject but also because he'd like to know.

"Law enforcement." It was the simplest answer, as well as an honest one. "Started off as a regular cop, moved up to a federal agent." The details behind that he really wasn't going to go in to.

"Lieutenant Commander Bennet is a cop, I think there might be a few others." He shrugs, watching the celebration going on. He seems ill at ease and out of his element with it.

"I won't ask," he adds. It'd be hypocritical to do otherwise.

He had to smirk a little. "Not many people do." Funny how so few people seemed to ask questions about each other on this ship. Though, admittedly, there were about a million questions about the ship itself that people really needed the answers to more.

Leon has always been a relatively observant guy, so he notices how tense the Chief is.

"You never were much of a party guy, were you?"

"I've never had time," he replies. "I'm a busy man. I've attended formal functions, but nothing like this." He doesn't like it much more than that, either. Even out of their armor and in dress uniform, Spartans are an eerie presence. They'd always tend to drift off to one side and stick to their own, not speaking much.

The most at ease the Chief's ever been was with his squad, but even then he'd rarely join in with the jokes and camaraderie. He's always been the leader, he has to be the serious one. That's what they need from him, so that is what he is.

"What do you normally do to relax?" If the Chief ever did relax.

He never does, Leon. He never does!

"Meditation. Vid log review. Exercise." He raises and lowers one shoulder. "Downtime is as valuable as any you spend on a mission."

He's starting to figure that out.

"And how did you and your team celebrate a successful mission accomplished?"

"Sleep's usually a reward all its own. More often than not we didn't have much time before we had to move on to the next mission."

"We often didn't have much to celebrate."

The most helpless feeling in the world, for the Chief, is sitting on the bridge of a ship watching as the planet you just saved in the ground war is turned to nothing more than a piece of molten slag by Covenant ships.

"Oh." That sounded like a hard life. And probably the only one the Chief has ever known.

"So you've really never had this much downtime before?"

"Not much," he'll confess to that. Really though, anything on the meatship doesn't seem like it would count as downtime to him. It's all potentially dangerous. It's occurred to him how strange this probably is, but his entire life has been like this and he can't imagine it differently.

"Hn." Interesting.

Though he shrugged it off with a bit of a grin.

"Guess we're gonna have to teach you to relax a little, Chief."

"Oh, are you now?" he quirks an eyebrow in a "really, I'd like to see you try" sort of way. The idea is kind of amusing.

"Yes." The gauntlet has been thrown down, Chief. You will learn to have fun and YOU WILL LIKE IT! Have I made myself clear, soldier? "Its something everyone needs to learn.

"Hell, I'm just as much as a workaholic as you are, and I'd probably still find 'fun' to be a foreign concept if I didn't have a best friend who saw fit to track me down once every few months and drag me out for a good time."

Claire Redfield... Leon couldn't really help the small smile on his face as he thought about her.

"What would be your definition of a good time?" he asks, highly doubting it coincides with his own and, as a result, a bit suspicious.

His own probably involves running over Covenant soldiers with a warthog, mind.

Considering Leon's would likely involve taking out zombies with a rocket launcher? They may not be all that far apart.

"Well..." he had to chuckle a bit, thinking of some of the crazier things Claire dragged him in to. Most of the time he just let Claire be Claire, and simply hung on for dear life. "...it depends.

"I can't say the party scene," he motioned to the chaos around them, "is my thing, but it's a nice change of pace every now and again. I'm much bigger into sports, though. Hockey, football, basketball... that kind of thing. They have any kind of sports where you're from?"

"I've never followed them much, but gravball is pretty popular. I got banned from it when I was a kid. Didn't win so gracefully." He was six at the time, and a bit of a jerk really.

"I used to play a mean game of paintball, then we moved up to stunner rounds. We had a lot of modified playground games during training, anything with low setup time and easy rules."

"The snowball fights," he adds, "were something to see."

Alright, so maybe the Chief did sort of have a childhood in there somewhere. It was a long time ago, though.

He raised both eyebrows in a bit of surprise. But after a moment, his expression started to shift to something a bit more mischievous.

"I think we can work with that."

"Do I want to know how?" he asks, picking up on the mischief. The Chief is getting the sense that he's not going to escape from this any time soon.

Do not trust that particular grin, Chief.

"You'll find out."

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prettycoolguy - 2009-06-15 23:07 (UTC) - Expand

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