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There is one recording that every Friday, Director Allison Church watches in the darkness of her office, a bottle of wine as her only company.
They used to be three separate videos, but she eventually spliced all three together, to seamlessly watch them one after another.
A reminder of why she started Project Freelancer and who she's doing this for.
The video opens in a lab, full of equipment that she’s become innately familiar with over the years (both from watching and from using it herself). Leonard Church steps into frame, a white lab coat over his uniform, a grin wide across his face.
It’s at this point that Allison pours the first glass, but doesn’t drink it.
Not yet.
She barely focuses on the words (she’s long since memorized them), instead her attention is on his face; the glasses half pushed up, the green eyes bright with excitement as he’s explaining about how great Point Zero is and how much he misses her and the kids (“has Junior learned to walk yet?” “Tell Beth and David that I’ll be home next month and to behave”) and how it’s great to finally begin work on his A.I. studies. She takes in the wild hair, the bright red roots (he must have forgotten to touch them up, as he always did when he got too focused) and attempts (as she always does) to memorize him.
To memorize how alive he looks.
The video lasts almost half an hour before she reaches the end of it. Leonard turns back to the camera, leaning up against a counter.
“You know, this is the part where I say goodbye,” he grins a sly grin that takes years off his face, reminding Allison of the teenager she once knew and loved.
This is the part where Allison downs the first glass of wine and pours the second.
“But I know you hate goodbyes. So I won’t. I love you.”
He ends the video at that; the screen going dark for a minute.
Point Zero had been a top secret laboratory where the greatest minds in the UNSC had gone: Leonard had been asked to run a group working on A.I. Neural Mapping; the main goal was to see if there was a way to extend a smart A.I.'s lifespan; to get them to last for longer than seven years and other such ideas, based off of his own work and papers and theories.
(Theories that Allison has taken and warped and proven to work. What Freelancer’s done, what she’s done, has her damned, but she’s gone too far to stop now. Texas is a success. Beta is a (partial) success. She’s so close and yet so far. She can't stop now.)
The Covenant had bombed Point Zero less than a week after Allison received his message. No survivors and no bodies were ever recovered.
If anyone was going to die in the line of duty; it was supposed to be Allison. Allison, whose tours were on the front line. Allison, who only survived the massacre of her squad by the virtue of a broken collarbone.
Not Leonard, not the medically unfit (his fucking asthma ruining any plans to enlist) scientist. Not brilliant Leonard, who was supposed to be safe.
Allison survived his death; she had three children to take care of, all aged ten and under. She couldn’t fall apart.
And she didn’t.
Not yet.
The next video starts up and Allison swallows her next drink as her second ghost appears on the screen.
David is frozen forever at 18, blond hair shorn short, face tired. This was week four at basic training on a planet that Allison doesn’t even remember the name of.
Allison had joined the military because she felt it was her duty to fight the good fight. Bethany had joined to follow in her mother’s footsteps and prove something to herself. Leo eventually joined because everyone else in his family had.
David had joined because he wanted to.
David was talking about the hard-ass instructors, the curfew, the harsh training, and of course, the terrible cooking. And about how he was loving every second of it. He’s in the middle of asking about how Leo is doing when alarms go off in the background.
“What’s going on?” He calls out, an edge of nervousness to his voice. He doesn’t cut the feed as someone grabs him by the shoulder and tells him to get up, they need to get to battle stations; something’s entered the atmosphere.
David nods before he gives one last glance to the feed, face calm and voice even.
“Mom, I -”
Static fills the room as his feed is cut off.
That something had been a Covenant Super-Cruiser, targeting UNSC training facilities to provoke fear and lessen their recruitment numbers, glassing planets, scorched earth style.
It was a brutal tactic that worked and David had been unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire.
Bethany had been a daddy’s girl, adoring her father, wanting to follow him everywhere. She had been almost eleven when he died and she had taken it the hardest, refusing to look in a mirror for months, not wanting to see her father’s eyes staring back at her.
Leo, barely a year old at the funeral, never knew his father. Or at least never remembered him. He had followed Bethany around everywhere, much like Bethany had with Leonard. While Beth had found it annoying, David, five years Leo’s senior, thought it was cute. It still hurts, sometimes, to look at Leo, the baby that almost never was (two months pregnant when her squad was killed and she didn’t even know). The very image of his father with her eyes (she doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse). The helmet and the name of Epsilon makes it easier to look at him and not see Leonard, David, Beth.
But David had been hers. Her little boy, inheriting her temper (the Kyle boy nearly lost vision in his eye) and Leonard’s patience (he waited three years to get his revenge) with her blond hair and gray-blue eyes. Her little opposite sex clone, Leonard would have said. Allison would have privately agreed, although she had no idea where the freckles had come from.
But David wasn’t the loss that broke the camel’s back.
That straw came only seven months later.
A desert camp is the background of the final video. Bethany paces back and forth within a tent, in her full FFO, holding her helmet. She seems uncertain (so unlike her, confident Beth, who knew what she wanted and god help you if you stood in her way) as she tries to find the right thing to say.
“Hey, mom …” she begins, a hand running through her hair, pushing it back. She’s cut it, her usual ponytail gone. “The brass think they’ve found a way to stop the war,” they always think that, and they’re wrong. The war is still ongoing, but Allison cares more about Charon and the Insurrection than the aliens.
“A bunch of this is classified, but intel says there’s something in a temple here that might help us beat the Covenant once and for all; a great key or a monitor or some artifact or something else entirely. Something that the Covenant wants badly and we got tagged for retrieval. Because we’re the best,” something she normally would have been proud of, but now she just looks tired.
“I know that it’s so soon to be back in the field after David, but I’ll be fine,” she gives a small half-hearted grin, before she looks down at the cyan stripe on her helmet. “After all, ‘if we were any better, we’d be Spartans’,” she mutters her squad’s (unofficial) motto, before facing the screen again, her face hardened. She had always pushed herself to be the best, to have the highest marks, to get the best scores, which led to her transfer to the ODSTs. And she hadn’t been ready to stop; she had plans to eventually join the 105th, the Helljumpers.
“Don't worry about me, I just wanted to let you know that I’m still alive. If everything goes according to plan, next month the war will be over and we all get to come home and no one else will die.”
A voice in the background tells Beth to hurry up, they’re getting ready to form up and she gives a grin to the screen that matches her father’s perfectly.
“Tell Leo that I say 'hi,' and let him know that I’ll call him as soon as we finish here. I’d say goodbye, but I know how much you hate goodbyes. So I won’t.”
She ends the video, unknowingly echoing her father just as Allison finishes her fifth glass of wine.
The Covenant forces were more numerous than expected and it had been a slaughter, not unlike what happened to Allison’s squad years before. It had only been luck (and a broken collarbone) that had Allison pulled from duty right before they had left for that fateful patrol. She had thought she had cheated death when she heard what had happened.
She had, but death doesn’t like to be cheated.
Death takes it due and much, much more.
Allison begins the video again, listening to the last words of her husband and children.