Undone

The shove was hard, it threw him onto his back, but he scrambled up in an instant. Just in time to watch it all end.
“Go! Run!” Detrick screamed over the COMM, urging Callum to live to fight another day. But he couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t abandon the last bit of family he had in this world, impending explosion be damned. If they went out they’d go out back to back, together as one. 
“Curahee.” He muttered underneath his breath, sinking his hips in preparation to rejoin the fray. Then they skewered him. 
Before his eyes Callum saw his leader, his friend, his brother lifted into the air on the prongs of an energy sword. He flatlined on TEAMBIO in the blink of an eye. Suddenly B042 was alone, and nothing was coming to save him.
Spartans don’t feel fear. They were weapons of war, death itself, the emotion was forced foreign to them. That’s what they’d had drilled into their heads from the start. He’d believed every word until now, now he was afraid.
He should’ve fought, he should’ve charged at them in desperate fury, been laid to rest alongside the corpses of his team for a brief moment before they were vaporized. But in that moment he became nothing more than a child again, sobbing over his father’s corpse with his screaming brother in his arms. For the first time since he’d become a Spartan, Callum was utterly terrified. The elites weren’t targets for his rage anymore, he saw them for what they were.
Monsters.
As one stepped towards him, mandibles twisting into the imitation of a smile, Callum didn’t fight, he ran. Like a scared child he turned and ran. His bravado was gone, replaced with nothing but dread. He had to escape, he had to survive. 
His boots slammed against the floor as the Spartan soared towards what he prayed would be an exit. Fear fueled his adrenaline as he raced towards the concave purple halls, and loud roars behind him only made him go faster. They were coming for him, they were going to kill him like the others. The first bolt caught the back of one of his shoulders, compounding the existing pain coming from the scorched slash across his chest. Callum didn’t care, pain was nothing, all that mattered was escape.
As the plating on his shoulder boiled away and cooled in an instant, it’s new form now ensnared itself with the armor covering his torso. Without a thought he reached up and yanked away the malformed piece, twisting his torso just enough for another bolt to catch his side. Without breaking stride he staggered into a wall and bounced off it, eyes locked on a door ahead. It was the exit, it had to be the way out. He couldn’t let them get him too.
The aliens jeered in their tongue as the Spartan, in the moment more child than soldier, fled for his life. His tormentors has been right, he wasn’t meant for this. He wasn’t brave. He didn’t care about the mission, he had just been angry, and now he was just scared.
When everyone else around him laid down their lives for humanity he’d turned and run for a chance at escape. As he closed in the door slid open, a lone grunt stood at the exit, frozen in fear at the sight of the Spartan bounding towards him, it knew the elites on the demons heels didn’t care about saving it. The same terror that kept Callum running locked it into place. Normally it would’ve been a death sentence, but now the panicked Spartan simply shoved the grunt aside and continued racing towards the cliff side.
As his boots met the sand another bolt caught him, this time at the back of his leg. Once again the pain didn’t stop him, but the limb refusing to respond slowed him to a desperate hobble. Just a little farther and he’d be away, they couldn’t take him. Callum couldn’t let them take him.
He neared the edge of the cliffs, sure of his escape when an alien hand reached out and snatched his hand, and threw him to the ground. Looking up Callum looked into the eyes of the sneering monster, who raised up his weapon and leveled it with his head. There were explosives in his reach, in an instant he could vaporize himself and the enemy, die with some semblance of honor.
Voices called out inside his mind, screaming for him to detonate his charges, to do what he’d been trained to do. But another voice, a louder, selfish one told him to run. Time seemed to move in slow motion as the chorus of voices called for action, and at what felt like long last he made his choice. The cowards choice.
He rolled in the blink of an eye, plasma turning he sand where his head had laid to glass as his hand found purchase, gripping the edge of the cliff and pulling himself over. In an instant his mind was silent, and he was tumbling down towards the waves below. Another bolt of plasma glanced his visor as he crashed into the sea, boiling away only to be cooled in a flash as the cold sea flooded in.
As he began to sink the reality of his choice dawned on him, and his regret was only compounded by the thunderous explosion above. The depths of Pegasi’s ocean saw light for a flash and the once cold sea began to boil at the surface for but an instant. They were gone. They were all gone now, and he was here, alone.
He should’ve drowned, let himself be counted among their number in the after action reports, but something inside him screamed for him to swim. He would have to live with his cowardice. He would have to face the monsters again, even though the thought filled him with dread. Callum began to kick upwards to the surface, and the damned existence it would bring him.
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