Twenty: A Demon Drifting

John didn't know what to do with himself after that. For so long he'd just expected that they would be able to intercede in the Human-Covenant War, that they could stop the slaughter of humankind. The Covenant worshipped the Forerunners as gods, and there were Forerunners in the Fleet, so if one talked to the other…

But no. Their Sight, such as it was, had never lied to them yet.

He vanished into the wilds of the Greater Ark for the better part of a millennium, still monitoring from afar but avoiding contact with the outside. Ferial had offered to give him back his farm, but he had declined; her poisoner's nook was now essentially a forest of toxic plants, with a few small transplants in the Fleet itself, and he didn't want to ruin all her hard work by turning it back to just a farm.

After a while he started ranging between out-of-the-way facilities on the Ark, making sure they were functional, enacting repairs for the Librarian if they were required. It wasn't really necessary - the Greater Ark had more Sentinels and repair drones than any other installation or even several combined - but it gave him something to do, something to focus on, rather than the grief that was sure to come.

How many people would he lose? How many Spartans? This was another universe, but these Spartans were still his shield-brothers and sisters, even if they never actually knew him. Would their losses be the same, or would they be different? By the Battle of Installation Zero-Zero, there had been, what, fifteen of them left? Would it be more? Less?

None?

That brought a fresh wave of grief. His siblings-from-another-mother-in-another-universe weren't essential to his being, but Graveminds were greedy, dammit. He wanted them to live.

But their Sight had never lied to them yet.

But what the voices had said… what did it mean, they would have bigger problems? (And what were the voices themselves? Gods? Demons? Something worse?) Was something going to happen with the Ecumene at about the same time?

That in and of itself was concerning. The Third Ecumene comprised more than a hundred billion souls. The Flood would not break containment until 2552, UNSC time, and there had been no sign of it attacking from the outside, so what could possibly threaten them?

Strife from within.

True enough. But it would have to be very bad indeed, a lot more than Insurrection-like squabbles, to shake the Ecumene to its foundation.

The Insurrection brought humanity to its knees once before. Possibly more than once.

...Also true enough.

John stepped through the door to the storage facility and let the rain sluice off of him in the entryway. The place really wasn't much to look at, just container after container of raw materials stacked in neat rows, but what was most important for him was it was out of the wind and rain.

It was hurricane season on the Greater Ark, which John found pointless because even with the false sun, the installation's major weather patterns - including hurricanes - were almost entirely artificial. [Librarian, I know you want things to be as natural as possible here, but is this really necessary?]

'Perhaps not,' the imprint replied, 'But I do like having things as natural as possible. If that means including the destructive forces as well as the creative, so be it.'

[Mm.] The Spartan dropped his pack against a stack of crates and pulled off his cloak, draping it over the top to let it dry.

Outside the hurricane continued to rage. Barely more than a puff of cloud to the ships in orbit overhead, but to those in it like him, it was their entire world. He could hear the howling winds even through the walls of the facility, together with the heavy drumming of the rain and occasional crack of thunder.

John sank down against another stack of crates and let his head fall back, eyes drooping shut. The sounds of the storm reminded him too much of war; he wouldn't be getting any rest while this was going on. Even so, he could at least take a moment to relax.

The vision caught him lightly, so lightly that he almost didn't realize that that's what it was, and lasted for barely a handful of seconds.

More than half asleep, he stretched in his bed in his quarters - bigger now than it used to be, but he was no longer sleeping alone.

She was curled up against his side, her back bare to the faintly chilly air, and even though he was almost hot under the blankets, he still pulled them up higher to keep her warm and wrapped his arm around her. She sighed and squirmed closer, throwing her own arm over his chest.

John came out of the vision with a blink. He had never heard her sigh quite like that before, but still he recognized Cortana's voice.

Some of the others started cheering and catcalling. 'Get it, Commander!'

He shot them a look, but they just laughed at him. [Such disrespect I get here.]

'You know we love you, boss. We'd follow you to the edge of the universe with only mild complaining.'

[That is a fucking lie; you all would be bitching to high heaven the whole way there.]

'That's true, but we'd still follow.'

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Time passed. The Spartan eventually came out of his self-imposed grief-induced seclusion to rejoin the galaxy at large, though he was still very much at loose ends. The Mysterious Voices™ implied that there would be Problems roughly concurrent with the Human-Covenant War, but that was still a long way off.

Human society finally reached the period known as the "Neolithic Revolution", and John shuffled their fleet to have the stealth corvettes on watch as often as possible, plus enough listening stations planetside that it would have made ONI envious; hopefully at some point in the future, anthropologists would be able to look at the vids and intel. For now, though, the Lifeworkers went nuts with monitoring and reporting, wanting to witness the rise of a civilization they had helped shepherd, even if only through a kind of benign neglect.

John just watched them with exasperated indulgence, all of them together observing the second rise of the human race.

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Eventually, after the creation of the Internet, "Venera, Kenera, what are you two looking at?"

"Memes, boss! Human memes!"

He exchanged a mental glance with his Flood self, who said, Don't look at me. You're the one who infected them.

"...Letting you all observe humanity was a mistake. It's all downhill from here, I just know it."

And it was.

(In more ways than one.)