Chapter Text
The most Tucker has ever heard about tombs has been in old Bible stories. Mainly the one about Jesus. But in those stories, the people never stayed in their tombs. They always got up and left.
Technically, you could say the desert temple was a tomb. But it wasn't CT who killed Tucker the first time.
It was Wyoming, in Blood Gulch, and you could hardly call that box canyon or the Red Base a tomb .
He stumbles. He puts too much of his own weight into the shove as he pushes Caboose towards the cover of some rocks because he chose to run away from the ship and towards the danger.
His free hand scrapes the sandy dirt of the canyon, the other one clinging to the rifle as he tries to regain his footing.
The bullet misses his spine.
It misses his heart, too.
It cuts through bodysuit, skin, muscle, veins, organs. It almost feels like it comes up Tucker’s throat in a clot of fresh blood that splatters on the inside of his visor when the ground impacts his chest, radiating pain through him like an earthquake.
“TUCKER! NO!” Church screams, just like he’s already screamed for Caboose and Tex before. Tucker.
Time keeps moving forward.
Caboose shrieks, though all Tucker hears is the loud beeping as his armor helpfully informs him he’s been shot, in far too many words. Blood and bile spills through into parts of the body it doesn’t belong, burning and dragging his body down harder than the weight of his armor.
Tucker kicks out, tries to crawl for cover from the wide open field, but he can’t.
It’s too far away.
The bullet is a throbbing, burning bruise in his chest, blurred by adrenaline.
Fingers claw into dirt, trying to lever him forward, but there’s not enough . His body shakes with the effort, the core of himself lighting up hot red. He gags on his own blood, hot copper in his mouth, teeth, throat, lungs—
“No,” comes out in a clot of blood and desperation.
His vision is going blurry, he can’t even see if Tex is running, if Wyoming shot Church while he was screaming, if Caboose got to cover, if the tank is still going, his radio is white noise, screaming, gibberish.
“No, no—” it’s in his lungs, all the blood, possibly the bullet, too. He can barely hear himself in his own helmet. “No! fuck—” a bubble forms in his throat, following the pinching of the muscles.
He doesn’t want to die .
The hilt of his sword is solid in his trembling hand, attached to an arm too heavy to lift it. It won’t save him. Tucker knows, he knows it won’t save him. The plasma blades light up, useless on the dusty ground. It warms his hand, hot smooth metal in his palm. Even through the snot, the blood, the bile, the visor of his helmet, he can smell the ozone of it. Or is he tasting it? Is it the memory, not the real thing?
His entire body is too heavy for him now. All he can do is choke on his own blood, hemorrhaging into his chest, his stomach, his lungs.
His eyes close.
No one ever told Tucker that death was supposed to feel warm. He always thought death was supposed to be cold.
(Well, death was also supposed to be permanent, wasn’t it?)
His body lights up bright white, through the core, through the bullet wound, and Tucker can’t even open his mouth to scream. It’s a desperate, painful noise behind his teeth, drawn out like a whining dog, a storm wind outside, a primed plasma grenade the seconds before it goes off.
And then it’s painful, burning, all consuming like when one goes off, too.
But there’s no ringing, no sizzling flesh, but a rumbling in Tucker’s bones, in his blood, in the hollow between the organs and flesh put there by Wyoming’s bullet.
And then there is no space, there is no bullet, there’s the humming of energy and the smell of ozone and the fading taste of copper in his mouth and a rumbling in the marrow of his bones, tightening in the joints, pushing him to get up, to open his eyes and get up and fight .
Tucker opens his eyes.
“Well, great, glad we could help.”
Tucker gasps, his hands trembling around the rifle— there is no hole in his armor, in his lung, anywhere. There’s no blood in his mouth. He presses a hand to his stomach, feels the pulse of his heart through the bodysuit, too fast and too hard but there .
“Tucker, what the fuck?” Church turns to look at him.
“Holy shit,” he breathes, dropping the rifle. “What— what the fuck.”
“What in the great heavens,” Wyoming says, and Tucker looks up at him. “You, wait…”
“He still remembers.” Gamma’s voice manages to sound frightened, despite the text-to-speech nature of it.
“What are you guys talking about?” Church asks, looking between the three of them. “Tucker, what’s happening? Are you dying? This is a really inconvenient time to have a fucking heart attack.”
“No, I— I was— I did— he shot me, I— it’s happening again .” Tucker reaches for the plasma sword, still at his hip.
“Ah!” Wyoming points the rifle at Tucker. “Uh-uh, now, you’re not touching that.”
Tucker’s hand trembles above the hilt. It feels like he’s waiting for a static shock to his palm, like the air around the hilt is buzzing, pulling for him like a magnet.
And then Texas’ arm snaps around Wyoming’s throat.
Her body weight counters his, keeps her feet on the ground as she tilts back and takes that advantage from him, throwing off the aim of his rifle as he kicks out in blind panic.
“Gotcha, motherfucker!”
Tucker grabs hold of the sword, the plasma blades sparking to life. It thrums like a second pulse, laid back over his own, fast electric coursing up into him, lungs, heart, stomach, brain —
And then he’s holding the rifle again.
“Well, great, glad we could help.” Church says in that same annoyed tone. That trembling heat lingers in Tucker’s core , under his heartbeat, thrumming when he inhales like a plucked guitar string. Gamma’s turret turns toward him, both a skeptical eye and a warning threat. Tucker doesn’t think he’ll miss this time. “I’m sure if you give us enough time we’ll just kill ourselves, save you some ammo.”
“Yeah, what do you want with my kid anyway?” Tucker voice sounds like it’s supposed to, like he’s confused, annoyed, and not like his heart is beating so loudly like a war drum in his blood.
“You don’t… Remember?” Wyoming asks, turning to him, and he can’t see the sweat already beading on Tucker’s face.
“Remember? You never told me anything!”
“I think it worked that time,” Gamma notes, briefly shifting the turret away from Tucker.
“Apparently.” Wyoming’s rifle, however, stays turned towards Tucker. “Keep a better eye on him next time.”
“Maybe we should—”
“The fuck are you guys talking about?” Church interrupts, which Tucker simultaneously hates and appreciates, because what was Gamma about to say? “Or, you know what, keep talking. Waste time ‘til Tex kills you.”
“Oh, right, dear Tex.” Wyoming lowers his rifle. Tucker knows what comes next. “You mean, her?” Tex’s camo burns away as the stock of the rifle impacts her neck, sending her crumpling to the ground.
Tucker’s heart thumps as he drops his rifle to one hand. It thumps again as he grasps the hilt of his sword.
“Oh, poor Tex.” Wyoming starts. “Never could tell when she’d been—”
By the time the rifle clatters on the ground, it’s too late.
By the time Gamma has registered Tucker’s movement, he’s already there, and Wyoming’s heels leave the ground as the force of the plasma blades stabbing through the armor, bodysuit, flesh, muscle, blood, bone, lifts him.
“ Beaten ?” Tucker finishes for him as the words are punched out with a puff of steam, water separated from the blood. Wyoming gasps, head knocking back.
“Oh dear,” he manages to get out, before Tucker pulls his sword back.
No blood follows. There’s never blood on a plasma sword. Just steam, like a dying breath of Wyoming’s entire body as it crumples onto the roof of Red Base.
“Reggie!” Gamma cries out.
“That’s right, bitch! I take care of my kids!” It comes out almost feral, breathless, but so incredibly righteous . Tucker is grinning behind his helmet.
It doesn’t last.
At the end of the day, his sword is gone, Tex is gone, Junior is gone, Andy is gone, O’Malley is gone. The victory is hollow. Church doesn’t talk as much anymore, may as well be gone himself.
Only three people know that something happened to Tucker that day. Gamma, Wyoming, and Tucker. He knows better than to tell Freelancer when they already look at him sideways for the alien baby as is. By the time Tucker is reassigned, Gamma is just as dead as Wyoming and Tex, and there’s nothing to be done about it. There is no scar, which Tucker blames on the time-loop bullshit.
So, Tucker pretends he forgets.
He wakes up in the middle of the night with weird sounds lingering in his mouth. He pretends he forgets.
His pupils reflect light in the mirror when he goes into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and he pretends to forget that, too.
Sleep can do weird things to the brain and there’s no reason to look in a mirror when you’re wearing armor all of the time.
His fingers keep twitching, a nervous tic he tells himself, and he pretends he forgets that too.
Everyone gets reassigned. Church doesn’t let anyone know where he's going, but that seems to be because he doesn't know where in the backwater fuck the UNSC is actually sending him. Caboose doesn’t shut up about where he’s going. Tucker can barely bring himself to care, not until he's extracted by a fancy, smooth ship that is not a Pelican. When he is, he's pulled aside by someone in a black suit who says they work for the Office of Naval Intelligence.
"We have a special assignment for you, Private Tucker."
The special assignment is Junior. They don't tell him that, though.
Junior is handcuffed and without armor when Tucker is brought to a small, windowless room onboard. Handcuffed and without armor but alive. His son warbles in hesitation, smart enough to recognize that aqua armor didn't inherently mean dad.
Tucker wrenches his helmet off despite the ONI officers' objections and Junior screams "dad!" louder than Tucker thought he was able. He starts crying and before he knows it, Tucker is too. The officers aren't quick enough to intervene before they're hugging on the floor in the middle of the room.
He pets the protective scales on the back of Junior's neck and kisses his son's head. His son, alive, unharmed.
"I'm sorry," Tucker says, the words wrenching from deep in his chest so hard it hurts. "I missed you so much." A noise rumbles in Junior's throat, like a purr, as he clutches his dad and makes incomprehensible sounds. Tucker hopes it's forgiveness.
The ONI spooks don't seem to know what to do, as if this wasn't the reaction they expected. It was probably why they had handcuffed Junior.
They return Tucker's sword, stolen with his son by Tex, almost as an afterthought. There's a hollowness in the bones of his hand that he didn't realize was there until it's gone, filled by the weight of the weapon.
Tucker isn’t reassigned to another Freelancer base to continue in the fake war. He knows Red and Blue is the same, that the fighting doesn’t mean anything, and apparently ONI knows that he knows, too, and decides his efforts are better spent as part of the Diplomat Corp.
As long as he stays with Junior, he tells them, he doesn’t care where he goes.
If they think he’s lying, they don’t call him on it, they just send him off. Despite the fact he's technically not supposed to be a combatant anymore, he's permitted to keep his sword and his armor because the brass at ONI don’t trust how Junior would respond to him without it. As if they didn’t trust his son to identify him out of armor or without the sword. He's grateful for both, though, when he's finally told his reassignment.
It’s Sanghelios.
A.K.A, an active warzone. The after effects of the Great Schism (which Tucker barely reads the report about) have absolutely wrecked the order of the planet, combined with an entire war culture suddenly no longer having a galaxy-wide war to focus on, leading to civil war. When it’s been more than just a few months after the Covenant collapsed, the Sangheili will start calling this time period the Blooding Year.
(It will become the Blooding Years eventually, when Tucker is no longer there)
The UNSC dumps him in the middle of the Sangheili wilderness without a map and tells him “good luck” with the tone of someone telling you “go fuck yourself.”
Tucker’s the only human around and that automatically puts a target on his back, as if his son didn’t already have one big enough for an entire family.
It’s not long, barely two days, before the Sangheili that aren’t friendly (which outnumber all the Sangheili that are) come across him and Junior trying to get to the nearby city Tucker can’t pronounce the name of. They don’t ask questions. They see a human in UNSC-issue armor, holding the hand of a Sangheili adolescent, and decide that’s good enough reason to try and put plasma in his brain.
All he has is a sword and a rifle with limited ammo. Even wielding the sword itself seems to make the plasma rounds come faster, the angry alien screeching come louder.
So Tucker tries to run. He scoops up his son in one arm (he's beginning to get too big for it), clutches him to his chest, and tries to run.
If Tucker had thought getting shot in the back by Wyoming’s regular metal rounds hurt, getting shot in the back of the neck with plasma rounds is agony.
He goes down instantly, spinal cord severed from the spine, blood pumping at high-pressure through the arteries of his throat, too high pressure to be cauterized despite the overwhelming heat of plasma and splattering across the top of Junior’s head; he screams.
Junior screams, probably continues to scream, as his father’s corpse collapses on top of him.
When all the nerves in Tucker’s body light up into a bright white something, he can’t say he’s expecting it this time, but he doesn’t make a sound. He can’t. In obliterating the top of his spine, in severing the cord and twisting the spigots of blood in his throat all the way to the left, he lost his vocal chords too.
His son needs him. Tucker knows that. He can’t leave Junior alone, out here, in the middle of nowhere. Junior is trapped here and if Tucker can't protect him, his son will die, and that thought is intolerable. It pulls him, like there’s invisible hooks in his bones, pulling to the surface of his skin, propelling him to move.
Life comes back into Tucker’s body fast, sharp, cold in the heat of the plasma burn. When he sucks in a breath, it hurts, like the skin of his throat is raw from drinking something too hot too fast.
“Human,” an alien voice says. Tucker gasps, coughs on spit, not blood, and when his eyes open he is looking up into the Mars-red of the Sanghelios sky with one of its native creatures staring down into his face. “Human,” it repeats.
Tucker inhales so hard he almost throws up.
“Dad!” Junior yells, and there’s a sudden weight on his chest as Junior flings himself on top of his dad to hug him. “Dad!” He repeats again, alien vocal chords struggling with the word and his mandibles trembling with relief.
“Hey,” his voice cracks as he speaks. “Hey, kiddo, hey.” He sits up, clutching Junior to his chest. His sword hilt is deactivated in his hand. He doesn’t even consider letting it go.
When Tucker glances around, he sees a small collection of Sangheili, and an equal number of Sangheili bodies. These Sangheili don’t point their plasma weapons at him, thankfully, indicating they are some of the few friendlies he has around here.
The fight is over.
Tucker hugs his son. He presses his face into Junior’s scaly neck, disregards the fact his helmet is gone for the fact he can smell blood and ozone and burnt meat and sweat and the leathery smell of Sangheili scales.
“We thought you had passed on, Great Warrior,” The other Sangheili says calmly.
“Yeah,” Tucker manages, noting that there’s something new in his voice, in the smallest underlying intonations. There’s an underlying electricity to his words, he can feel it in his throat when he answers with; “Me too.”
It’s harder to pretend to forget about what happened in Blood Gulch after that. Tucker can’t pretend it’s just Wyoming’s special fancy gadget that did it anymore. It’s something with him .
There’s hardly a scar left. Despite the hole in the bodysuit serving as indisputable proof that something happened , there’s hardly an indication that Tucker’s throat was blown from his neck. Just a slight discoloration, a patch of skin lighter than the rest of it, and the way his vocal chords feel like they’re vibrating even when he stops talking.
The dreams come back. He wakes up more than once mumbling something, with Junior staring at him with sharp eyes like mirrors of his own, down to the way the pupils reflect light.
Junior never knows what Tucker is saying in his dreams, either. Even when he picks up actual Sangheili and not their pidgin assemblage of sounds, he doesn’t know what Tucker is saying, and Tucker doesn’t either.
It doesn’t stop with the dreams.
Tucker starts to trace the symbols in his sword hilt with his fingers. Initially, it’s a nervous tic, re-tracing a pattern he knows to keep himself calm. That Is, until he’s replicating it in the Sanghelios dirt with his hand. And then it isn’t just the sword symbols. It’s arches, swirls, lines that stretch out into something else, like a mural.
Junior asks him once, peering at the scratching on the old brick floor of the city plaza, taps it, and makes an inquisitive clicking sound with his mandibles.
“I dunno buddy,” is all Tucker can tell him. “Just lines.”
The sect of Sangheili willing to accept Lavernius Tucker Junior as their Lord and Savior want to give Tucker something more permanent to show his loyalty to Junior. And of course he accepts, because otherwise they won’t let him stay, and he’s not leaving Junior with a bunch of weird aliens who he can’t trust to protect him. (It’s not like the UNSC plans to get him off the planet anyway)
Turns out their skin stain idea is much more like scarification on the very non-scaly, very soft skin of a human being.
By the time Tucker realizes this, he's only wearing a borrowed tunic around his waist, and he can't exactly back out.
He knows what they’re carving into his back as they do it. He’s not supposed to, but he feels it, and he knows. The acidic ink feels like it's running down into the creases of a mold that isn’t actually there, not being spread out with old Sangheili tools, fitting into patterns that he knows by rote. In his bones, his gut, his brain, he knows what they’re putting on his skin.
When it’s all over and Tucker’s finally unclenched his jaw, he sees it in the chrome surface of an elaborate Sangheili helmet.
The mural he’s been sketching out for the past week stares back at him from the red, inflamed skin.
Eventually, months later, the UNSC realizes the idiot they dropped on the alien planet is still alive when they decide to try and coordinate research efforts with the Sangheili Arbiter. They manage to act un-surprised when they ask him to assist on a research team.
Junior is moved to one of the Joint Occupation Zones, or the JOZ, as the ex-UNSC diplomat Tucker meets keeps calling them. The diplomat is from one of the planets in the JOZ, though he doesn't clarify which one, and Tucker mainly only trusts the guy because the Junior-following Sangheili trust him (a high bar to clear). He's an ex-soldier, it's clear in how he speaks, how he holds himself, in how both of his arms are cybernetic from his elbows to his fingertips. For a moment, Tucker thinks he's like him, before he remembers that he technically never was a soldier. Not in the mind of ONI.
It’s safer in any JOZ than with Tucker, with just the UNSC or with just the Sangheili. Tucker doesn't trust human children to treat his son well, he doesn't trust Sangheili adults to do so either. Even if Junior just stayed in the sect of Sangheili that were loyal to him, that believed him to be some sort of messiah even without the sword his father wields. Tucker may not know a lot about cults, but the sect of Sangheili that practically worship Junior certainly seem to fall into it, and that can't be good for a child's development.
He should give Junior the choice, Tucker knows. He should let the kid pick. But he knows Junior will choose to stay with him and Tucker can't tolerate the danger that puts him in.
There’s a lot of crying, a lot of begging and swearing in English and Sangheili, tiny fingers clawing into his bodysuit, but Junior deserves normal kid things like going to school and making friends and playing sports, not growing up on a battlefield surrounded by freaks who want to either worship him or kill him. Tucker promises Junior it won't be forever. He promises Junior that he'll see him again. He desperately hopes he can keep both of those promises.
So Tucker entrusts Junior with the war vet off to somewhere in the JOZs with another promise to get back in contact with him soon and the key to an encrypted channel he'll be able to use later to check up on his son.
Then, Tucker goes into the desert with a UNSC dig team and Sangheili researchers.
It is the second biggest mistake Tucker has ever made, following up his joining the army at all.