#also sorry if the letter screenshots are abysmal quality

[doom-dreaming]

I wanna know how he'd react to an anonymous love letter

"Welcome back, Blue Team," Roland greets. "Chief, there's a message waiting for you in your quarters."

The green and gold helmet tilts just a few degrees to one side. "Send it through to my HUD, I'll read it on the way to S-Deck."

"It's not digital, sir. It's paper."

There's a healthy pause. Chief nods. "...thanks."

Roland salutes and the holotank flickers back to gray.

John's mind drifts as he goes through the post-mission motions. Paper meant official. At the very least, paper meant important. Not even the frequent attempts to put him up on a different, higher-ranking shelf usually come to his attention through such formal avenues. He wonders what's wrong. He wonders if someone else has died. If his team has any thoughts on the matter, they're keeping quiet about it.

They've all drifted in separate directions by the time he makes it to their quarters. Kelly had nudged his shoulder and jogged off down a hallway. Fred had mentioned getting something to eat. Linda had simply disappeared somewhere between the equipment lockers and the door. He enters the room alone.

The letter sits on the desk. The envelope is plain, unmarked; no seals or insignias, just his name and his number, printed in writing that looks as though it's trying to be cleaner than it naturally is. John-117. For a second, he considers it might be Halsey, but she would have dropped the number altogether. Besides, he knows her handwriting. This isn't it.

He turns it over in his hands, crosses the room, reaches under Fred's pillow for the knife they all knew he kept there. He opens the letter with a clean, careful cut. Official or not, it still had to mean something to the person who'd sent it. Why else would they have gone to all this trouble?

The message inside is handwritten in the same script as the envelope, but there's less care paid to its appearance. Letters bleed into one another, words are scribbled out and rewritten; there's a sense of desperation in it. Not life or death, not the frantic scrawling of someone running out of time, but the desperation to get the right words out in the right order, no matter how messy the process was.

He reads it over again. Three, four times. Different phrases find sticking points between his ribs on each pass. Whoever had written this was right. Technically, this letter was nothing new. But it was...earnest. Heartfelt. Sincere in a way so different from the usual flavors of attention he received.

If he really wanted to, he could find out who wrote it. But anonymity was a precious miracle amidst the meticulously-tracked digital trails of the modern age. It felt borderline disrespectful to rob this person of that, along with their hope that he might...

He shakes his head. Folds the letter. Returns it to the envelope. Whoever they were, he could do them this simple favor and hope that, somehow, they could feel it.

#this was fun but man the words still aren't being kind to me #but i hope you like this #whoever you are :) #my writing #halo #halo fanfic #also sorry if the letter screenshots are abysmal quality #i tried to make the margins the same width as the tumblr post for minimal scrunching #tumblr scrunched em anyway