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| - "We left him." Jake-G293 closed his eyes and let Cassandra's voice wash through the air around him, unwilling to let his mind process the unspoken horror that her words and tone carried with them. Over the course of the past day he'd discovered that if he just focused on the statistics--two teammates confirmed killed in action with a third missing in action and presumed dead--then the ache in his gut and the crushing weight on his chest eased ever so slightly and he was able to go about his duties without breaking down into an incoherent wreck of a thirteen year old. And while he technically was thirteen years old, as a team leader in the SPARTAN-III Gamma company he had a certain image that he needed to maintain, and the three words that Cassandra had been repeating off and on ever since they'd rode that battered Pelican up out of Mamore's atmosphere were threatening to tear down that image and replace it with a person that Jake would really rather not think about. "We left--" "Yeah," Jake snapped, his eyes snapping open and glaring at where Cassandra was seated across the small, shipboard barracks. "I know we left him. I was there. We left him. Simon's gone, and so are Mary and Terrence. He's no more dead than they are, and if we'd gone in after him than we'd all be dead. Stop dwelling on it!" The last sentence shot out like a full-blown rebuke before he could stop himself. Cassandra didn't even blink as she fixed him with a gaze full of guilt and suppressed pain. "He was alive," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "He was begging us to come back for him." Jake looked away, refusing to let himself remember the voice of someone he'd trained and grown up with screaming and pleading for a rescue as the Insurrectionists who'd already killed two of their friends closed in on him. "There were too many of them. If we'd gone in there, they'd have shot us down and gotten those nukes back." He closed his eyes again, praying that Cassandra would let the subject drop. But his prayers went unanswered. "We left him," she repeated again. Her hands curled around the sheets of the cot she sat on, tugging the folds of the covers under her whitening knuckles. "He thought we'd come back for him, and we just left him." "Just drop it!" Jake snapped again. "Forget it, alright? He's dead. All three of them are dead. We're done with Mamore. We fucked up, and now three of us are dead. Do we really need to go over that right now?" "So we just forget them?" Cassandra insisted, uncharacteristically persistent. Normally she'd have taken the hint and stopped talking, but this time she pressed on doggedly. "Simon could still be alive--" "He's dead!" Jake snarled. He couldn't believe that he was actually getting angry at Cassandra of all people. "Don't go screwing with my head like that! He's dead, and that's the end of it. Stop making things like that up!" "I'm not writing him off--" "I can't believe I'm getting this from you. I can get why Ralph's not talking to me, but I thought you'd at least know how to deal with something like this--" He stopped himself before he ended his sentence, but it was already too late. Cassandra flinched and looked away at the reference to her first team. She'd watched her friends on Team Kopis slaughtered by the Covenant half a year ago before being transferred to Jake's command in Team Jian. Simon had also been there when Kopis had died, which might explain her refusal to accept his death as a fact, and she'd only just been able to really recover from the grief of losing four people she'd trained and lived with in a squad for years. Jake's comment, coming right at a moment when she was coping with losing three more teammates, must have cut deep. Feeling ashamed of himself, he looked away, no longer able to meet her gaze. "Just forget it," he muttered. At the end of the day, there was no point hiding from the facts. He'd screwed up, and now half his team was dead and the other half was too busy licking their wounds and mourning their losses to be trusted to fight effectively. And with the reports trickling in about the Covenant's incursions in the Sol system... some were even talking about an invasion of Earth itself. The UNSC was going to need all the Spartans it had at its disposal, and this disaster might just have cost it an entire team of SPARTAN-IIIs. Jake gritted his teeth, suddenly angry at Terrence and Mary and Simon for being dead, at the Insurrectionists for killing them, at himself for letting them die. All those years of training, all those times when he'd done the right thing and brought everyone back in safe after handing the Covenant another defeat, and he'd managed to get his team smashed by Insurrectionists. It was a nightmare that he couldn't wake up from, and now he'd gone and upset his teammate over something else as well. "Sorry," he muttered, knowing full well that he wasn't supposed to be apologizing to his subordinates like this, even if they were also his friends. "That was stupid." "No," Cassandra returned, and for some reason she sounded equally embarrassed. She stood up from her cot, her bare feet scraping against the cold floor. "I'll go see if I can cheer Ralph up." Jake nodded, grateful for an excuse to be alone, if only for a few minutes. "I think he's off on the observation deck." Cassandra nodded and headed for the door, but stopped just in front of it and looked back at him over her shoulder. "But I know he's alive," she insisted, reaching out to open the room's sliding metal door. "He's still out there, back on Mamore." Jake kept nodding, burying the sinking feeling in his gut with false agreement. "Okay," he said. "He's alive." "And," he added with a sudden burst of inspiration that only made him feel worse. "Once this war's over, we'll go back and find him. The three of us, we'll find him and get him back." Cassandra offered him a small smile as she stepped out into the hall. "Sounds like a plan," she agreed as the door closed again, sealing Jake in to be alone with his bitter thoughts. He shook his head, furiously wishing that he could share his teammate's optimism.
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