thequantumwritings:

savior-of-humanity:

ok but like, one of my major headcanons is that when chief was a kid/back during training, he’d like, eat bugs. raw. and alive.

Which, when it comes to survival training, is alright when you don’t really have much to eat out in the forests of reach, but it’s a whole other thing when he sees the biggest fucking alien equivalent of a cockroach he’s ever seen, and he is extremely tempted to eat it right then and fucking there in front of a full platoon of marines and spartan IV’s.

And Cortana or Roland or whoever has to physically tell him, please, don’t fucking crunch on the damn bug like it’s a juicy, disgusting, wriggling hotdog.

When the Spartans showed up on Jericho VII we had never seen anything like them. No one had. And they were terrifying. They were taller than a hingehead and armored like some kind of luxury-model Scorpion, and they moved so fast you could barely see it. Add in the glassy mirrored faceplates, and they might as well have been robots. Hell, we thought they were robots until Blue Two opened her mouth and cracked a joke. I was too shocked to even remember it.

But there was one moment where they seemed more human than anyone i’d met in the 10 years since the war started.

O’Callaghan was sitting against a tree cleaning his rifle to prep for the assault, and this nasty fucking bug started crawling down the trunk. Now, I’ve been stationed on enough different rocks to know that the big ones aren’t usually poisonous but they’re violent motherfuckers. And this one climbing toward O’Callaghan’s ear was the size of a golf ball even if you didn’t count the legs.

Before I could even say anything, it disappeared in a blur of green, and there was Blue One, holding it between his fingers as gently as you please and looking at it with his head tilted a little bit like there was nothing in the world more important at that moment than really truly appreciating this weird ass bug, like someone had told him to stop and smell the flowers and he took that advice totally and completely to heart, even on the front lines.

He took off his helmet. I don’t know what I expected, but the man underneath it was definitely not it. He was human alright, but he couldnt have been even 25 years old, even though his scars and the look in his eyes made you think he’d been fighting for 30.

But then he did something that rocked me to my very core. Something almost as bizarre and alien as the Covies we were here to kill. He took that giant ass bug, struggling as hard as it could between his fingers, and fucking ate it. Just popped the whole damn thing in his mouth, started chewing, and put his helmet back on like it was nothing. And then Blue Five spoke up.

“John, what the hell?”

I don’t remember the rest of the battle. I spent it trying to wrap my head around the fact that he had the most normal fucking name in the army.