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Your name is Volleyball.
Well, actually, you name is Cameron but everyone calls you Volleyball. It's just a nickname that came around due to the fact that you're on the team for your school, and, well, you're the best player on said team. You're very proud of that fact.
You live on Chorus, a backwater planet on the literal edge of colonized space. You weren't born on Chorus; no, you're from Casbah on Tribute originally. When the Covenant started their siege on Tribute, Casbah was evacuated and your parents decided going to Chorus - which was so far away from Earth that not even the Covenant cared about it - was the best idea.
So, you live on Chorus now.
And it's nice.
Well, it's nice up until the Great War ends, because then Chorus is forgotten about. The UNSC just... leaves. It abandons Chorus, leaves the people on it to fend for and look after themselves. It's nice for a while, since UNSC jurisdiction was never strong here and the people are used to having to take care of themselves. But, what they aren't used to is governing themselves, and that's where the problems arise.
It starts off simple. The Federal Army of Chorus deals in some shady things; the laws start to get stricter, start putting pressure on people who aren't so fortunate. And then there's a "peaceful protest" outside the Capital Building. It's peaceful up until there's a shot and a protester goes down.
You see it all on the news. The protesters congregating and waving their signs, calling for the new laws to be pulled and for changes to be made. You hear the shot - it makes you jump - and then there's people screaming and a girl in a pink-and-white sundress going down, red pouring from her chest and staining her pretty dress. There's mass confusion, the cameras are still rolling. There's rocks flying through the air, colliding with the heads of politicians and soldiers. The cameras finally cut off when the soldiers descend upon the crowd, batons in hand.
The girl was called Rain. They tell you that on the news that night.
The violence, the death of an innocent girl, sparks something in the people of Chorus. A woman, wizened by her years in the army, finally decides she's had enough. Commander Stark, she's called, and you learn of her name when the broadcast of your favourite reality show is interrupted by Stark's hijack, informing the people of Chorus that she and others have waited long enough for changes to be made in the way things run. She says they're finally taking action.
She says she's part of the "New Republic".
She declares war.
The broadcast ends.
--
Less about the war. More about you.
So, you're sixteen when Commander Stark declares war on the Federal Army. You try not to let it get to you, since the bulk of what's happening is going on in Armonia, which is miles and miles away from where you live. You carry on as normal, playing volleyball and chewing bubblegum. You ignore the news on TV, try to ignore the "breaking news" that interrupts your shows to show you scenes of violence and death and speeches you couldn't care less about. You're a teenager, not a politician or a soldier. You're just a teenager fighting her way through high school and trying to decide what she's going to do once she leaves.
You're in the middle of repainting your toenails pink when you decide you might as well do what you're best at: volleyball.
You may as well. Your name is Volleyball and you're the best player, so you might as well.
You play volleyball, you chew gum, you struggle your way through high school. Some new girl walks into school on the first day back after Christmas. You're in Biology first thing, and the seat next to you is always available. A boy would try being your lab partner every week for the sole reason of trying to work up the courage to ask you out, but you just ignore them and keep chewing bubblegum or give them a sharp slap around the face for even trying. You don't know how many times you have to explain that you have the least amount of interest in boys. So, the seat beside you is empty at the start of each week.
And the new girl decides to sit there this time.
You watch her walk in. There's an air of dottiness about her, a look in her eyes that says she's not all there. She's short, stick-thin with brown skin and long, unruly black hair. Her purple skirt ends just before her knees, and you can see she's wearing pink kitten band-aids over obvious cuts. She stands at the front of the class, one hand on her hip and the other resting on her brown bag. She purses her lips, sees the seat free next to you and smiles before practically skipping over.
"Hello!" she says in a little sing-song voice when she sits next you. When she smiles, you can see she's got a gap between her two front teeth. "Nice to meet you. I'm Emily!"
"Cameron," you say, taking her outstretched hand. "Everyone calls me Volleyball."
"That's a weird nickname. People back at my old school used to call me 'crazy' or 'insane' or 'nut-job', but I prefer Emily."
She's so upbeat about it you're not sure if she's serious or if she's joking.
Emily Gray turns out to be a genius. She corrects everything the teacher says, excels in every single class. She speaks three different languages: Sudanese Arabic (her mother tongue), English and Bedawi, and she tells you she's learning to speak Farsi next. She loves history, spitting random facts at you at random points without your prompting, and you find that she likes to sing Opera.
You like her a lot.
--
You and Emily end up being best friends. You're not exactly the most conventional pair, however. There are lots of differences between the two of you, from the things you're interested in to looks to music tastes. But, the two of you are still friends.
Emily's smart. You tell her that often. Other people call her crazy and unhinged because she likes gore a little too much and is sometimes a bit too keen on dissections in Biology, but you make sure to tell her that's she's smart, not insane. She smiles when you tell her she's a genius, and you love it when she smiles.
She comes to your volleyball matches and sits in the very front row of the stands every time, holding up a sign that reads "GO CAMERON". Every time you see that sign - white with the words painted on in pink glitter paint - you feel an extra surge in your limbs and it pushes you to play better. Emily tags along to your training sessions and your gym sessions too, alternating between doing her homework and letting you bench-press her (for such a skinny little thing, she's surprisingly heavy and good to use for practice).
On your eighteenth birthday, she shows up at the front door of your house, hands you your present (wrapped in pink wrapping paper with a little white bow) and kisses you.
After that, you're more than just best friends.
On graduation day, she tears across the green after the ceremony and jumps into your arms, planting a kiss on your lips. Your mother gets a photo of the two of you from that day, standing side by side. You're kissing her cheek, and she's smiling, teeth out and eyes shut. You frame that photo.
She goes to med school the next month. The two of you promise to keep in contact.
--
Her medical school is bombed.
The news report says no survivors.
They tell you it was the Feds.
--
You don't take action. You're an eighteen year old volleyball player with a dead girlfriend, not a soldier.
That's what you tell yourself as you're on your way to college, the graduation day photo in your hand and tears in your eyes. There was no body, so there wasn't a funeral. Instead, you had to settle with lightning a purple candle for her.
It wasn't much, but it had to suffice.
You tuck the photo into the pocket of your shorts when you see your college coming up. You pick your duffel bag up from the floor, sling it over your shoulder and squeeze out into the aisle of the bus. You notice you're the only one getting off. The driver hops off with you, pulling your heavy trunk from the luggage compartment. You thank him and turn to the college, eyes looking over the sign above the entrance, which reads SERANZA STATE COLLEGE. You pop a fresh piece of bubblegum in your mouth, put on what you hope is a convincing smile and step onto the grounds.
--
The college campus is huge. You get lost three times before you find the registry office, and get lost twice more looking for your dorm. Thankfully, a group of passing kids point you in the right direction when you stop and ask them where the hell the dorm is. You make your way over and lug your trunk onto the second floor, dodging the students coming and going from their rooms.
The door to your dorm room is already unlocked, and there's a girl already sat inside. She looks like she's about the same age as you, all curly hair and big, brown eyes. She's sat on the bed when you walk in, playing with her pink cat t-shirt nervously and obviously waiting for her new roommate to arrive. She grins at you when you walk in, showing off her braces.
"Hi!" she says when you finally manage to get your trunk into the room. "I'm Katie Jensen. I take it we're roommates now."
She's got the heaviest lisp you've ever heard, but her friendliness and her enthusiasm reminds you painfully of Emily.
"I guess so," you reply with a smile. "I'm Cameron. People call me Volleyball."
"Why?"
"I play volleyball a lot."
You like Katie a lot. She's nice. She chatters away as you unpack your things, and you find out she's majoring in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Biology (yet another painful reminder of Emily). She helps you pack your stuff away, makes room for you in the closet so you can put your things in. Katie's a smart girl too, and she babbles away endlessly if you give her the chance too.
Once you're finished packing away all your things, you pin the photo of you and Emily to the cork-board above your bed. Katie glances over.
"Is that your girlfriend?" she asks, sitting on the end of your bed.
You stare at the picture, manage a smile. "Yes."
"She's pretty."
Swallow the lump in your throat. "Yeah, she is."
Katie thankfully drops the subject.
--
Classes start the next day. Katie doesn't have her first class until 10:00am, so she stays in bed when you get up and leave early, on a mission to find coffee. You're halfway through stirring the milk and sugar into your drink when you hear the first plane. You glance out the window of the canteen, other students crowding around you to see the military jets circling over the college.
You only realise what's happening when they release the first bomb.
--
Dust. That's what you see when you come to.
Your eyes crack open; you inhale dust and cough. There's a pressure on your abdomen that's making it difficult to breathe, a wet substance on your cheek that you guess to be blood. You can hear the fires, the screams. You can hear people shouting for help. The jets are flying back over the college, back in the direction they came from.
You see that they have the Federal Army's insignia on their wings.
Move.
You can't. That pressure on your chest is a metal column that's fallen over. You try and lift it, your muscles straining under the effort, but you only manage to budge it down by a centimeter and the pain gets even worse. You try and keep calm, try and think clearly, when you hear someone shout, "There!"
Crane your head around. See a burly guy in tan-coloured power armour vault over a pile of concrete towards you, followed by two others. The guy skids to a stop beside you, kneels down and hooks his hands under the column. One of the other two helps him, and the pressure on your chest is gone. The third soldier helps to pull you out, and the column gives an almighty clang! when the first two soldiers let it go.
"You okay?" the first soldier asks, kneeling down in front of you. You can see your distorted reflection in his visor and look away.
The carnage around you shocks you into silence, the sheer amount of blood and fire and smoke. The canteen is completely gone, the tall buildings and dorms reduced to smoking rubble. You can see other soldiers in armour, digging through wreckage and helping injured kids. There's a couple of students who are stumbling around, pale in the face and covered in dust and blood, obviously in shock. One girl's on her knees, hands gripping the sides of her head as she screams and screams, only stopping to take gasping breaths. You can see two soldiers holding back a student who's trying to run to a pile of wreckage, screaming that his brother was in there somewhere. You know they're holding him back because they've already found his brother and they don't want him to see what they've seen.
There's a body lying not too far from where you are. Whoever it was took the full force of an explosion, since they're now nothing but splattered guts.
There's a sudden churning in your stomach, and you turn away to throw up. The burly soldier holds back your hair and rubs your back.
"We need to get moving, Smith," one of the other two says. "There's still kids trapped."
"You go on," 'Smith' says, one hand between your shoulder blades. "I'll help this one."
The other two soldiers are gone in an instant. You sit back on your heels, wiping your mouth on the back of your hand.
"Are you okay?" Smith asks. You manage a nod this time.
"I'm John Smith from the New Republic," he says. "I'm here to help you. We're going to get you and the other survivors to safe place. Can you stand?"
You can feel both your legs, so you nod again and get to your feet shakily.
You're following Smith through the campus when you see the remains of your dorm and remember Katie. You take off at a run, Smith tearing after you and shouting at you to wait. You almost slip on something as you approach, realise it's a photo. When you bend down and pick it up, you find it's the photo of you and Emily, charred around the edges. You start panicking.
Half of your dorm is gone. Half of it is reduced to rubble, whilst the other half is still standing. Your room has disappeared into the rubble, and you don't waste time digging through in your search for Katie.
"Not again," you're saying as you lift debris. "Not again, not again -"
Smith finds Katie, lying on her side and trapped beneath a fallen wardrobe. It takes the two of you to push it off, and your racing heart finally calms once you find Katie's pulse at her neck. Smith scoops her up carefully and carries her bridal style to the New Republic Pelicans waiting just outside the college's gates.
You don't get in with Katie, however. You stay behind and help.
--
You're at the New Republic's base a week later when you decide it's time to take action.
You tried convincing yourself once that you weren't a soldier, but you have no choice now. You have to be a soldier, or you're collateral damage.
So, you chose to be a soldier.
Commander Hardy - the leader of the New Republic since Stark's death - seems shocked when you tell him this. The two of you are sat in his office at the New Republic's jungle base. You can hear the sounds of soldiers running training outside, can smell the food from the canteen two floors below. Every so often, a Pelican flies overhead and makes the water in the glass on Hardy's desk tremble. You sit back in your seat as he stares, chewing your bubblegum.
"You?" he says, eyeing you up and down. "You want to be a soldier? Why?"
You pull the charred photo of you and Emily out and set it down on his desk. "For her."
He stares at you.
You don't break eye contact as you slowly blow a bubble and pop it.
--
You're being fitted for armour the next day.
--
Katie ends up becoming a soldier too. You see her in the locker room one morning, sitting in her tan armour. She grins at you, all braces and freckles.
You can't help but thinks she looks too out of place. But you can't say much.
The two of you run training together. Some overly hyperactive kid called Palomo starts talking to you, and Katie gets chatty with a guy named Bitters who looks like he's dead on his feet.
Smith's always waiting for the two of you in the mess hall, a tray of food for each of you.
You chew bubblegum; you train; you ignore Palomo and you eat with Smith and Jensen at dinner.
It's not much, but it's the best you can get these days.
--
You stare at your reflection, and your reflection stares back.
You look different, you think. You've got shadows under your eyes, a bruise blossoming on your left cheek, courtesy of some idiot in training yesterday. Your hair is a mess, your bangs hanging in your face. Your skin's looking a bit paler, not looking as brown as it used to. You have a new tattoo on your shoulder, since it turns out one of the new recruits is a former tattoo artist and offered to start off a sleeve for you.
There's make-up on the shelf before you. Tie your hair back off your face. You pick up the foundation first, cover up the bruise and conceal the shadows. Add some rogue your cheeks and blend it in. Blue eye-shadow next. Mix in some silver. Then, put on your eyeliner. Make sure the wings are exactly the same. Mascara next before you apply your baby pink lipstick. Pick up your pink hijab from where it's resting on the edge of the sink and put it on, fastening it to the side.
You look at yourself in the mirror.
You feel more like you.
Well, as much like you as you can these days, since you spend most of your time in armour.
--
You're still called Volleyball.
Even here, in the New Republic, people call you Volleyball. You've not played Volleyball since high school. But, you guess a nickname like that sticks.
Bitters calls you Volleyball; Palomo calls you Volleyball (he called you 'Sweet Cheeks' once and you broke his fingers one-by-one); Smith and Katie call you Volleyball. Hell, even your superiors call you Volleyball. You even stop referring to yourself as Cameron, because Cameron was the girl who watched reality shows and had a girlfriend called Emily. Volleyball is a soldier - a soldier who likes pink, but a soldier nonetheless.
Volleyball runs training drills with her squad every morning. Volleyball kicks the ass of any punk who tries to grope Jensen whilst her back is turned. Volleybal chews bubblegum all day long.
Volleyball can count the amount of friends she has on one hand nowadays, since most of them don't come home.
--
The New Republic loses two leaders whilst you're serving them. Commander Stark is dead months before you join, killed in action during the massacre at Armonia. Her successor - Commander Hardy - is killed at a peace conference two years after you join up. Half of the squad that went with the Commander are killed, but Felix - the New Republic's hired mercenary - manages to get the others out. There's upheaval in the camp that night, eulogies held in honour of the soldiers killed that day. Bitters and Palomo, who survived the peace treaty, sit in silence the whole night. You know they're in shock.
Commander Humbert is Hardy's successor, and her time as Commander is short lived also. Within a year, she comes up with a plan to leave the planet and seek help elsewhere. When Katie walks in - tears on her face and her frizzy hair falling out of her pigtails - to tell you that Humbert's ship was shot out of the sky, you can't say you're surprised.
The New Republic's new leader is Vanessa Kimball.
She's barely 32.
You chew your bubblegum and bet she'll be gone within six months.
--
She actually makes it to two years, which is quite the feat. You think things are getting better.
--
There's renewed hope in the camp with the arrival of the Reds and Blues. Sure, you lost half of them to the Federal Army and their own mercenary - the infamous 'Locus' - but you have half of them here, living and breathing. The greatest soldiers in the galaxy; the ones who brought down the infamous Project Freelancer.
Honestly, you're a little starstruck.
You're assigned to Captain Simmons' squad along with Jensen and two other girls - Bela and Kari. Smith ends up in Captain Caboose's squad, Palomo in Captain Tucker's (thank God) and Bitters is assigned to Captain Grif's. It's decided that the squads are to be colour coordinated according to the colour of their Captain's armour. Since Simmons' armour is maroon, your squad's armour trim colour are to be some variation of said colour. Katie chooses the same maroon as Simmons' armour; Bela takes a more crimson colour and Kari takes a bright red colour.
You?
You choose pink.
--
Simmons chooses Katie to be his lieutenant.
She's giggling with excitement when she tells you this.
You smile and ruffle her hair, feeling pride swelling in your chest.
--
Simmons and the other Captains up and leave one day without saying a word to their lieutenants or their squads.
You're so angry you chew your way through an entire pack of chewing gum.
--
Felix comes back and tells Kimball that the Captains are dead.
Katie breaks down the moment she steps into the room and you spend the whole night cradling her and rocking her back and forth.
You think that's it.
You think there's no hope.
--
The New Republic is marching on Armonia less than three days later.
The death of the Captains has sparked something in all of you, a kind of fury that keeps you going the long drive into Armonia. Katie's been sent off in a squad that consists of herself, Smith, Bitters and Palomo. You're praying she's okay and that she doesn't get hurt.
You're in a jeep with Bela, Kari and some kid called Jason. The four of you are silent the entire drive, save for the small pops each time you pop a bubble. At some point, you take the graduation photo from the compartment at your hip and run your fingers over the yellowing edges. It's hard to think that it was taken five years ago, because so much has happened that it feels like a life time.
And you're getting so close to the finishing line. You're so close to the end of this war.
You don't care about winning anymore. You just want it to be over.
--
You survive.
You find out everything's happened for nothing, that this whole civil war was a charade.
The person who shot that girl at the protest seven years ago wasn't a Fed. It wasn't the Feds who bombed Emily's school. It wasn't the Feds who bombed your school. Felix and Locus - the mercenaries - were part of a group who's goal was to let the people of Chorus kill each other off by keeping up this civil war charade.
You don't know why and you don't want to know.
Everyone who has died did so for nothing. Emily died for nothing.
You feel like you've ended up worse off.
--
Katie's alive.
You only meet up with her again back at the base. She leaps off her Mongoose and runs straight for you, smiling but crying at the same time. You're so happy she's alive that you start jumping up and down as the two of you are hugging, your face buried in her frizzy hair.
The Captains are found alive and uninjured - well, uninjured for the most part - in the desert. They're picked up and brought back to camp, along with some Federal Army Doctor that they somehow picked up along the way. Captain Tucker is severely injured, but he's patched up in no time and back on his feet within two days.
There are Feds in the camp. General Doyle - leader of the Federal Army - arrives as well, and spends hours upon hours in Kimball's office with her, drawing up peace treaties and contacting bases to call for ceasefires. The Feds and the New Republic's soldiers slowly stop going for guns when they see each other as the days pass, and slowly start getting comfortable around each other. You have to admit, it's nice walking around and seeing Rebels and Feds training together, sitting together, laughing together. It's a lot nicer than killing.
You stop carrying your gun at all times.
The Fed doctor the Captains brought back is speaking with Jensen one day. You're passing by, out of armour and on your way to grab some food, when you spot both Jensen and the doctor sitting together. The doctor's still in armour but her helmet is in her hand, and she's facing you.
You make eye contact with her.
You stop dead.
She stops mid-conversation.
You don't even realise you're running until you slam into her and almost knock her off her feet.
But, you do realise you're crying. And you don't care.
"You're alive," you gasp. "You're alive, you're alive, you're alive."
"Of course I am," Emily giggles, her breath hitching at the end. You step back, see she has tears in her own eyes.
You pull her into a kiss.
When you pull away, she's grinning at you. Your bubblegum isn't in your mouth anymore.
She blows a bubble, pops it and the two of you laugh.