"The same way a slut at the bar draws attention, I assume?" Always sarcastic and highly cynical, by his nature, a man such as himself couldn't help but throw the ever present verbals jabs. "Just like a quarterback, I think? You get all the attention but you just can't do the work to get it." A gloved hand rose, two fingers found themselves close together. "You come close, you do." His expression, thankfully, was hidden behind the myriad walls he wore with such careless ease, as much a part of him, at this point, as his very breath.
"Yes, sort of. Some come from the Marines, some come from the Academy. We are, however, not Marines. I was never a Marine, nor do I care for your orders or your rank. I was raised as a Hell Jumper, I've spent my entire life perfecting my trade. Funny how that works, the longer you do it the less you give a flying f*ck about what sits on someone's uniform, what rank is given by an arbitrary system based either on actions we all should take or seniority. We parade heroes around, we draw a line between heroes and mortal men, we give awards and rank to men who do what everyone should do, given certain circumstances. Better we promote the men who were smart enough to never need to be heroes and let the heroes be martyrs.. We're not going to get along, are we?" A moot point, he didn't really care. He'd come here for one reason, one reason alone.
Killed in battle, he could, of course, stomach that. His breed, insane or not, were the ones who should die in a blaze of glory, not under the torturer's knife, alone, lost but never forgotten. Even to this day, months later, the image of that warehouse lingered in his mind. A man used to being bathed in blood, he wore his mental armor with the same skill he wore his carbon fiber variant.
Always them, never us. Failing that, make them pay for each life. If one of us dies, ten thousand of them die. We pave the road to hell not with good intentions but with broken bodies. We don't jump feet first into hell, we land on a bed of broken enemies. Such were the things that had been pounded into his skull, long and hard. A fanatic's belief is rarely logical and no amount of change, no amount of exposure would ever do away with that.
He'd thrown the name of his posting around before, he knew the reaction it'd get from someone who understood the words. A dry laugh followed, suitably. "Yes, I saw that coming. Drop a name, people understand. Anyways, business, right?"
"Here's the long and the short of it. I came here when I tried to jump, ended up jumping into slip space, so I'm here. Through what I understand, to save face, the UNSC is laying some blame on me so the public back home feels satisfied. They really, and I'm serious here, contracted a private company to come kill me. This while they sent another Jumper here to talk to me, he wouldn't have shot first, there's no way. We don't do that. This brings me back to the point, Spartan. There's more here that I don't get. They send someone to talk to me, they send a private company to remove me. Which do they want, or do they want the company gone? They can't hope that a single company is going to be able to do anything." Here he paused, here he shrugged. No bravado, simply facts. "They sent the hired guns into a suicide mission, you know that. If they want to kill a Jumper, or a Spartan, for that matter, and they were serious, they'd have tasked a brigade to do it, not some random contractors. My thoughts are pretty simple. The public is happy knowing that the UNSC sent someone to deal with what they term as a defector. I don't die, they report that they don't know. They then send someone in to talk to me to figure some things out, the why and the how. Seems clean, doesn't it? The only problem is the first person they sent to me died, Bonnard killed him. I can't kill Bonnard yet, I need him to report the failure so they send another person to come find me. I talk to him, I kill Bonnard, it has to be in that order." A sigh skipped a beat, he's not used to talking this much, not at once, at least.
"I'm an operative, not a front line soldier. I need to be able to jump, I need to be able to call on firepower that I don't have or really know how to use. You be that firepower, your guys, I can afford to slip in and do what I need to do. I don't need literal firepower, I just need the threat. That gives me more and more time to wait for the next Jumper to come find me, see what I'm getting at?" Normally an eloquent man, prone to rants and rambles of fancy, he had to stop himself. This was just business.
"That's the idea, make it obvious. Get attention, back me and I'll back you. I mean, who in the world is going to f*ck with Spartans and a Hell Jumper? So, scratch my back, I scratch yours. I know you, as a group, frown on murder. I don't. So, you do the work that's above the board now, and if, in the future, you see that you've got a slight issue that needs to be taken care of in a dark alley, don't get your hands dirty. I can't clean mine fully, what's a few more stains?" With the ghastly grin on again, he turned and headed towards the door.
No, he paused, just for a second. "Oh, wait. That's how it's always been, right? Someone has to be the diva, someone's got to do the work." A rivalry that ran as deep as this, at times deadly, at times friendly, wouldn't end quickly, not at all. "So, yeah, we'll be in touch...." David paused and laughed, low and in his throat. "Superstar."
