Who You Are With The Lights Out

''
"This is what you are, what we all are. This is who you are with the lights out, when no one is left to see. Embrace it."''
Callum leaned against the cave’s wall and looked over the Onyx slab in front of him. The dark monolith bore hundred of names, one freshly etched by the tip of his knife. He’d thought he’d be carving more, but someone had beaten him to it. Dieter, Abdul, Marcella, someone had already put them there, FEUDAL too. So many names, his friends, his family. And someone else had been the one to inscribe them. They hadn’t known them, not as he did, they’d probably only pulled the names from casualty reports, yet he’d never made a point of coming until now. Coward.
Patel’s words bounced around inside his head, how she’d hardly sounded like the same person. There was a glee to her voice, every syllable had dripped with pride. She was proud of it, what he’d done, what the Hangmen did, and for a moment he’d been too. But it’d been fleeting, a flame that burned in him for years that died in an instant. He rolled the hilt of the knife he’d clutched for hours in his hand, feeling the handle pressed against the techsuit. Just to feel.
She was right, wasn’t she? 
All he’d needed was an excuse, then he’d been no better than them. Worse even. They deluded themselves, swore it was the will of the gods. Callum had known it was no one’s choice but his own. He wanted to pray, to cry out to God for help, but why would the almighty spare a minute for him? A hundred thousand times he’d prayed for strength, for the safety of the innocent, for no reason at all. He’d sworn to live as he should, to the extent he could. And he’d lied.
To everyone, to Jamison, to God, to himself. Callum saw the little ones in his mind’s eye, twisting and dancing to the beat of impacting plasma bolts. They’d fallen so quietly as if it were just a game and not death’s embrace. He wasn’t sure what disgusted him more, his own actions, his guilt over said actions, or the sheer audacity he had to think feeling guilty for slaughter was somehow weak. 
In a morbid way, he was glad he felt it, the stinging guilt meant she was wrong, didn’t it? If this was all he was, he’d have felt nothing but that sickly sweet pride that had swelled in his chest when he saw the abject terror in his enemy’s eye, and when he’d plunged its own blade into its chest. Something familiar flickered inside, the more he thought on Spartan Patel.
She didn’t know him, she didn’t know him at all. For a year she’d watched him hesitate, hold back, and cling to what shreds of morality he had left. And now what? She thought since she’d seen him succumb that she understood him? How dare she.
When she’d sat in a prestigious school and felt the embrace of a loving family, he’d been running drills in the Onyx jungle. While she’d laughed and loved, he’d been pounding dirt on besieged colonies across the stars. She hated the Covenant because of holovid broadcasts and rousing speeches, he hated them because he knew them. He’d seen the mangled remains of bodies feasted on by grunts and jackals, ripped apart by brutes, cut down by elites, trampled by hunters. He wasn’t like her, he wasn’t like any of them. They were sick, he was broken, there was a goddamned difference.
Callum realized too late that he was only making excuses. The aliens blamed the prophets, he blamed the aliens, it all went round and round, the pile of bodies growing with each revolution. Where does it end? He wondered somberly. Was it when they died? He and the enemy? Or was it when all sentient life wiped each other out, caught in the vicious cycle? Maybe that was it, maybe nothing they did mattered and it’d all come to an end anyway. Maybe it’d be better if he just took the gun from his side, put it in his mouth, and fired up. No one would need to bother, he’d go and let the Lord tell him how disappointed in him he was before he cast Callum into cinders. Maybe that was just fate?
But he remembered something from a long, long time ago.
"You either do it or you don't son, there is no goddamn maybe."
Mendez, he hadn’t thought about the Senior Chief in a long time. He wondered if he could see him now what he’d say. Nothing good, of that much Callum was sure. But as ever, his adages held true. There were no half measures for Spartans, no resigning oneself to fate. If Callum felt so terribly, was so horribly distraught by the low he’d let himself fall to, then it fell to no one else but him to do something about it.
He looked at Jamison’s name, etched into the wall, felt Abdul’s knife tight in his hand, and he got up. The Spartan stood in the dark, alone where none could see, and dipped his head and paid his final respect to his brothers and sisters. He would not be this, not anymore.
The Spartan turned on an armored heel and walked out into the rest of his life.