Hey, so I wanted to write something dark, angsty and smutty. I love Autonomy, but I just don't get to properly angst there. So this will be a series of loosely interconnected one-shots. I've always wanted to write a story like this, so here we are. It's smutty, it's sexy and damn I love writing it. #noshame. I also really wanted to get back more into the canon instead of the far out AU I normally write in. Obviously this is AU and isn't going to be canon compliant, but I miss writing in a more military environment. I'd love feedback, it's different than what you guys are used to from me.

Everything was on fire.

No, not really fire. John had seen fire before. When the Covenant had glassed planets and he looked down as the inferno blazed until there was nothing more to be consumed, that was fire.

There was a certain vitality to fire. Fire was life's greatest asset. Where there was fire, there was life and creation. Fire could be beautiful, it propelled the human race from cooking food to electricity and even faster than light travel.

He looked down at Earth as the Composer wrought nothing short of destruction upon the planet. There was nothing he could do. The Didact was gone and defeated, but there was no way for him to deactivate the composer quickly enough to avoid the horror he was witnessing.

Infinity and an entire fleet of ships firing their MAC guns at the blasphemous Forerunner instrument.

Before it was destroyed, it would consume billions of lives on Earth. Men, women, children, the Composer did not discriminate. In his quarters from orbit he was able to see the horror that was human life composed into pure data.

There was no creation in this. There would be no rebirth after the fire.

At least for Humanity.

"John–"

He felt a soft hand on his shoulder and he roughly shook it off.

No.

Cortana never, in all of her time existing as pure thought, would've imagined feeling dissatisfied with being able to touch John. She had imagined it over and over again, what her own organic fingertips would feel against his firm body, what the air in the room would be like, what he might smell like.

Touch was inadequate compared to the closeness they had shared a few hours ago. She would've given anything to be inside his head, inside of his thoughts and burying herself deep in his bones, his heart and his breath, making it her own, the only home she had ever truly had. But that wasn't the choice he had made.

And she was realizing rather quickly that his choice was killing him.

When she had split herself into clones, she had expected to die. There was no way that she had expected to make it. But if it had saved John, she would've been okay with that. She had been rapidly deteriorating, her rampancy would've consumed her sooner than later anyways. She would've been happy, happy to die for John.

Somehow, that hadn't happened. When he had had the chance to deactivate the Composer, he hadn't.

She had still been in its system. He hadn't known what would've happened. He'd chosen to wait.

The Composer left nothing for humans.

But for her, it brought change, a change that she had secretly longed for though never admitted.

Somehow, someway, she was organic. Perhaps it was just that she had existed as pure thought, something similar to a composed being. Maybe she had been the coherent version of what composition yielded. She had heard the thoughts of composed humans, and they were mere shadows of what they had once been, fractals of personalities and impulses.

There were things worse than death. So, so, many things far worse than the cessation of a heartbeat.

But for better or worse, the Composer had made her human. The feeling of air in her lungs had been simply stunning. Everything, overwhelming. She had experienced organic functions through John. She had understood the mechanics, but now, she could feel them, she could know them.

It left her feeling shock. There was no other way to describe it. Stunned by her existence, stunned by the feelings and the simultaneous sensation of being limited and limitless.

She watched John. His hands were gripped tightly upon the windowsill as he looked down at the horror. She stared at the shadows cast across his face. He was out of his armor, simply in his biosuit. She'd only seen him like this a handful of times in his career, more often than not he had been injured when he was out of armor. He didn't look simply upset. He looked disturbed–his mouth was fixed into a straight line and the intensity in his blue eyes was honestly frightening to her.

She felt hurt as she pulled away her hand from his shoulder. He'd never even been cruel to her. His approval had been all that mattered to her in the past, his own way of expressing affection, his wants, his dreams, his needs, his desires...all had been not only known to her, but had been her life, her entire world.

She left his side and sat down on the edge of his bed–she hadn't been assigned a bed, and she didn't know where to go so she had just followed him. She rested her cheek on her knees and looked at his strong profile as he stared out into space.

He was once again a mystery to her. Not long ago, he had been her everything, the only thing she had ever wanted. She'd found him captivating. He'd been her drug.

"Why did you do it?," she whispered.

She had never thought that silence was something you could feel until now. It filled the room and settled itself in between the two of them, widening the already unbearable distance between the two of them.

"Why, did you do it?," she repeated, her voice shaking with either anger or grief.

She watched his grip tighten and his knuckles turn white.

"Everything changed." His voice was throaty from what she was sure was the tension he was holding in his body.

"What changed, tell me, why didn't you destroy the Composer when you had the chance, why did you do that?," she was starting to collapse into hysterics.

Give me something, give me anything.

She watched him open his mouth to speak but his words failed him.

She wrung her hands together, a nervous habit she hadn't fully understood until she had had a body of her own.

He wanted to break something. He wanted to run, he wanted to be away, far, far away from her but he knew that such a thing would be impossible, that he couldn't leave her for reasons he simply did not understand.

She listened to him angrily pace around, similar to the way she had seen footage of animals in captivity pacing.

She stood up from the bed and moved to the door, her hand hovering over the panel that would open it.

"Where are you going?"

She glanced over at him.

"I don't know."

He ran a hand through his hair. He could feel a headache building. Every muscle in his body was tense, quivering with the cocktail of anger and adrenaline he felt flooding him.

Her presence was overwhelming him. He'd had her literally inside of him, inside of his mind and body existing in a part of him to the degree that he had sometimes doubted if there had been a true ending or beginning to either one of them. That feeling paled in comparison to her physical presence.

"Don't leave."

She put her hand on her hip and glared at him.

"Why the hell not? I don't need this bullshit, I don't need to sit here and feel guilty for being alive when I didn't even ask for this," she spat.

She watched his expression turn dark again.

"Why did you do it? Why?," she demanded again.

He felt his vision tunneling. He clenched his hands into fists so tightly he thought that his palms might bleed from the bite of his nails. He was so aware of her and her presence that he felt a strange galvanic response creep up his arms, causing his hair to stand on end.

"John!"

John. John. John. John.

How could she not understand? How could she not comprehend that in those moments he had given everything for her. Everything he stood for, everything that mattered to him completely gone the second he'd chosen her over billions of lives on Earth. All of the good he had done, the cause he had dedicated his entire life to was meaningless, he'd exchanged it, every last moment of it for her. What did she want from him? Did she want him to smile, to be okay with the fact that she had changed him, changed him into something he didn't understand or even recognize, something he feared.

He'd given her everything, what else did she need?

I may as well have killed them all myself.

He felt anger, anger sharp like a knife that started in his stomach and spread through his entire body. The room was red and he could feel his muscles tense and contract.

"John?," she murmured one last time.

He snapped. He moved so quickly that her eyes had a difficult time tracking the movement and his hands were on her arms, gripping them so tightly she was sure she would bruise.

"Do you want to be away from me?," he growled, his face so close to hers that their noses almost touched.

Her eyes were wide with fear. She had never felt afraid of him until this moment, and she had to admit that part of her felt absolutely exhilarated. The primal look in his eyes, the way his jaw clenched and his tight grip on her stirred something inside of her that she wasn't even close to understanding.

"Do you? What do you want? Anything, at this point it doesn't matter, just take more of me," he said angrily, pushing her against the wall roughly.

"What are you talking about?!," she struggled against his grip, though a part of her sincerely doubted her actual desire to break free.

I need to know. When did it become about her? Was it a single moment or did it happen gradually over the years?

When had he realized that she was everything, that life without her simply wasn't worth it, that he'd rather literally watch the world burn than exist for moments without her. She was the axis upon which his world spun, she was the sun, the moon, stars and everything in between. Without her, he was a Godless man with no purpose or cause, that much had been revealed to him when he had been faced with choosing between her and billions of human lives.

He'd do it again.

Something deep inside of him knew; some primal part of him that simply had not been able to be completely erased from him knew why he would literally let rivers of blood flow for her.

He loved her.

He hated what she had done to him. It wasn't what he stood for. He had spent his entire life defending humanity. He had been called upon to serve. The road was difficult. He sacrificed whatever he had needed–his childhood, his mind, his body, he had become the best that they could've possibly made him, a perfectly calibrated instrument of destruction.

All of it, completely tossed away in seconds because of the love he felt for her.

I couldn't sacrifice her to complete my mission.

She was all he had ever wanted. Everything he had ever dreamed of. And she was here. The feel of her skin, the smell of her hair, it was all-consuming.

She kissed him.

He reflexively jerked away. She took the momentary distraction as an opportunity to pull free from his strong grip. She grabbed his shoulders and pushed him roughly to the edge of the bed, his feet falling out from underneath him. She straddled him and continued to kiss him. He gasped and she shoved her tongue in his mouth. She was firm and insistent.

He grabbed her waist and pulled her flush against his body, grinding her into his cock with little restraint. He didn't have any more restraint, it was all gone, disappeared as if it had never existed in the first place.

He had never felt want like this. Never imagined what a want like this could feel like, but it possessed him, it controlled him. He didn't understand what he was doing, he had been reduced to the most basic of desire. He ripped the t-shirt she'd been wearing apart as if it were thin as gossamer. Her breasts bounced from the swift motion and before he could even acknowledge the impulse he kissed her breast.

She let out a throaty moan that sent blood rushing to his groin. It was the most erotic thing he'd ever heard, which was strange because he had little to no experience with things of this nature, so he had no idea how he was even able to label it as such. She frantically clawed at his biosuit, her passion clouded mind having difficulty making sense of the clasp.

Without missing a beat he reached behind his head and pressed the release which made the suit fall loosely from his shoulders and aided her in pulling it down his back as he continued to press opened mouthed kisses across her breasts.

The room was suddenly unbearably warm. He shrugged his arms out of the biosuit and it fell to his waist leaving his torso bare.

She immediately ran her palms over his chest, sighing at how surreal it was to touch him. Sure, she had known what he looked like, she'd understood every part of his body on some level but the physiological response she experienced actually touching him was all-consuming. She lingered on scars she remembered. His muscles felt corded beneath skin that was surprisingly smooth, the sensation made her feel short on breath.

His hands made their way up to her breasts and he left sloppy kisses up her throat, this time she couldn't hold back a breathy sigh and she was rewarded with a groan from him.

She roughly grabbed him and kisses him, biting his bottom lip and she's sure it'll bruise. Their teeth knocked against each other's giving her a rush of satisfaction that she could've never imagined.

He hooked a finger on her shorts, elastic compression shorts that belonged to him, and pulled them down her legs with no hesitation. He had given up on any sense of propriety, he'd lost any real sense of honor when he'd chosen her.

She made a strangled sound as he touched her. He had no idea where this was coming from, why he knew that this was what he wanted, all he understood was that some base part of him wanted this more than he had known was possible. It wasn't simply the animal instinct part of him that longed for release, no, he had denied that for his entire life, it was her that he wanted and her alone. She was all consuming, she was his only true desire.

He bit at her earlobe and she can't handle it anymore. She pushed her hips against his hand and rocked against him in a movement that was a mimicry of what she knew she truly wanted and she pulled the biosuit down his hips revealing the flesh-toned undergarment worn with it. He kicked the suit off of his legs with little difficulty.

She glanced down at what she knew was his erection straining against the undergarment. She was too curious. She pulled the briefs away and down his legs and grabbed him without any inhibition. The shocked whimper he let out sent blood straight to her head. She watched his eyes glaze over with sheer desperation. She knew he was strong, he could break her with minimal effort but she knew she could undo him. She knew him and she would own him. He was her's and her's alone and she would make sure he accepted that.

He couldn't wait any longer. Any sliver of restraint he had had left was completely gone. He grabbed her waist and roughly pinned her underneath him on the bed. He kissed her again, this time he fisted a hand in her hair and the other squeezed her breast.

She pressed her hips up against him, the way she rocked against him making her intention clear. He parted her knees and settled himself above her, his hands on her shoulders trying to touch every inch of her.

"John," she sighed. It was the closest thing to begging he would ever hear from her.

He would've been surprised by his complete and utter lack of hesitation had she not said his name like that. Hearing his name from her lips was his undoing. It wasn't Chief, it wasn't Spartan, it was John, everything he had ever wanted from her all wrapped up in his name. It was John who had chosen her. John had beaten the Chief and the Spartan. He didn't deserve that title anymore, the Chief never would've picked an individual over the lives of billions, but John had in a heartbeat with no remorse. He pushed into her and they both groaned, her fingernails dug into his shoulders and she lifted her hips up to meet him, encouraging him, begging him to move. She was surprised at the complete lack of discomfort she had anticipated. No, any discomfort she was feeling was from his lack of movement. She couldn't stand this stillness. She wanted him to move. No, she needed him to move. She wrapped her thighs around his hips.

After the initial shock of what they were doing, of her being there, he couldn't hold back anymore, and he could tell she didn't want him to. It was hard, it was bruising and it was fast. She wasn't sure if she was crying out in pleasure or pain but she didn't want him to stop until she had it figured out. The feeling of him, the physicality between the two of them dwarfed anything they had ever experienced, it was closer than close, it was beyond anything she could put words to.

His thrusts started to get uneven and irregular. He leaned down against her and buried his face in her neck she felt more than she heard her name as he groaned it.

She felt what could only be described as electricity inside of her. Some primal, animal part of her knew exactly what she was headed toward, the normally rational, grounded part of her completely gone as she dug her fingernails into his shoulders desperately.

"John, please," she'd never imagined she would beg, but she'd never imagined that she'd want something this badly, that she'd be so close to such a wonderful discovery. All the knowledge in the universe would never compare to this feeling, the anticipation and the strange combination of pleasure, pain and desperation possessing every part of her drove her to a place she'd never even imagined. With a touch of his fingers, she was gone, her body unraveling and breaking into pieces, pieces she would never be able to pick up completely, a part of her would now always long for this and she didn't even care if it changed her.

He closed his eyes tightly, stars and fire coursing through his entire body. The feeling of her around him, her pleasure on her lips and apparent in the way she squirmed beneath him undid him. He swore and collapsed on her, moving slowly now as he rode out his pleasure. She felt the sweat on his body as he pressed his chest against hers and his frantically beating heart. She kissed him again, enjoying how he felt inside of her still and the aftershocks she still felt. He gripped her hair and face lacking the restraint she was so accustomed to from him.

They were silent in the long minutes afterwards, listening to the MAC guns fire at the Composer repeatedly as they crescendoed into what was surely the finale of his choice.

Light flashed across the ceiling in a blinding conclusion. He ran his hands over her body absent mindedly distracting himself from the consequences of his decision.

She reached for his hand and laced her fingers with his own.

"You need to lie on your after action report," she whispered.

His hand tracing circles on her breasts doesn't even pause. "I will."

Alright, I went there. The rest of this will probably continue in a similar vein. Shouldn't detract from my other story, updates will be whenever I feel like. I hope you guys enjoyed, I think this fandom really needs some smut so I'm happy to contribute shamelessly. :P