Let Out // Locked Out

The cold cuts were lukewarm, and so was the coffee, but Harriet Parkin - formerly Jackson, formerly Moran, formerly McVey - didn't mind.
A tray with a plate of one and a mug of the other sat untouched on the armrest of the ready room seat - precariously balanced, at least to the eyes of an outside observer. Less so by the standards of someone with the reflexes to reach out and steady it at the slightest hint of a wobble, even as tired as she was.
 
Well. "Tired" was relative. Tired onboard the Watch Your Step didn't hold a candle to tired back at Camp Curahee, and unlike back then it could be solved by a quick nap right where she sat. The handful of other pilots, and certainly her fellow crewmates, often laughed that it was a superhuman feat to be able to fall asleep in the ready room seats - and, well, maybe it was.
Then again, to call it a ready room might be a bit of an overstatement. A closed-off corner of a converted cargo bay, with a few creature comforts hastily shoved in, would be a more accurate description. But fatigue always made her thoughts wander. Sometimes she'd end up imagining herself sat inside the belly of some vast UNSC Navy ship; sometimes it was even the Infinity, with the rows upon rows of pilots' chairs immaculately laid out in her mind's eye. She'd only seen glimpses of them in the flawlessly polished ViDocs put out by the UNSC; blatant propaganda, every last one of them, but impressive nonetheless. 
Maybe some of the kids she grew up with were onboard the mighty vessel right now. Maybe some of them were dead - Lethe, most of them probably were. 
Maybe she would be, too, if she hadn't been thrown off as surplus to requirements just before she got her augments. Just after JAILBREAK. 
-----
With a sigh, Harriet sank deeper into her chair. It wasn't often that her mind wandered into this territory, and she always hated it. She didn't covet the idea of her teammates being pumped full of drugs and shipped off to fight. She knew it wasn't much of a life. She didn't savour the knowledge that there's every chance that she would have been dead in a ditch by this point, anyways. 
She didn't envy them. Just... well, sometimes she almost did.
Sometimes she thought that it might not be so bad. Sure, she'd be cooped up on that tin can if she even made it at all, but it'd be home - a home of people, if not of a place. She'd be doing it with her teammates. Her friends. 
It's not as if she didn't like the crew she was with now. They were friendly enough, in the standoffish way she'd grown to expect from merc groups, from spacers as a whole. There was a strong self-sufficient streak to them; something that just grew naturally in a world where pilots pulled double duty maintaining their craft, or engineers moonlighted as mess cooks when extra hands were needed. She imagined her parents might have been like that once, from the few fragments of them her mind still hung onto. Some days, she was surprised she still had any of those left.
Every band she'd fallen in with had done their best to accept her as one of their own, even back as a pimply-faced teen escaping her hundredth set of temporary carers, but they just didn't speak the same language as her. They didn't know a word of the dense lingo she'd picked up back on Onyx; they found it weird just how easily she could catch others sneaking around in the dark, or how jumpy she was at them. They were freaked out by how comfortable, how casual she was around weapons for a kid, and-
Who was she kidding. She was still a kid. Just a kid who knew a dozen ways to kill anyone she met - double that if they were an alien - left strapped in, sat in the launch tube, a hair away from takeoff before being pulled out for an abort without rhyme or reason. She'd been trained, sharpened, only to have the blade pulled away from her at the last second... and, in spite of herself, she'd jump at the chance to get that blade back. 
Even if it meant being cooped up on another tin can. Even if it meant constantly drilling as if she was ten years old again - against her friends, against the new, much-publicised round of would-be heroes. Would-be Spartans.
She still thought of herself as one, in spite of everything. She still grew up as a Spartan, grew up with them, even if now they'd still be faster, stronger, better than her in every way. Even if little Lyzander would tower over her by now - but what did it matter when she would probably never see the one-time crush, or any of the others, ever again? She was different now; apart, separate from them too. Them and every other human in the Orion Arm.
She had been offered - no, been given independence from the eagle and its bolts, whether she wanted it or not. Even ONI's leash around her neck wasn't quite as tight, quite as obvious, as before.
But only a blind fool would call her free from the program. 
-----
"-ay, Lightweight? You still in here?" A voice called out, its owner silhouetted in the hatchway.
"Yeah," came her response, with a slightly forced brightness to it. "Sparky's an hour behind, but after he worked overtime to fix Bird Gamma's RCS before, I figured I'd stay here a bit longer and give him a lie-in." 
"You're way too nice to work here, kid." The figure strode off down the passageway with a chuckle, and she was left alone with her thoughts - with a logbook to finish checking over, and a hundred other mundane things to get done. Like a regular person. Just a kid who spent a few years play-acting as those heroes plastered all over Waypoint; a kid who had to grow up now that she was "free" of all that.
Hari took a moment to swig down a gulp of room-temperature coffee, glancing up at the clock above her. 0054 hours, shipboard time. Her fellow pilot was closer to two hours late at this rate, but she wasn't really tired. After all, "tired" was relative...
 0055, now. 
Hmph. Of course it was.