It has been a month now. She'd suffered through this for a month and hated it. At least she could walk at those times, but her condition was too fragile for that, the doctors said.

  She wanted to move, but she knew doing so would fuck her over in the long run. She sighed, and turned on the pad beside her. Grabbing it, she checked through the entertainment section.

  She mindlessly watched and played until she realized she actually had messages.

  She was currently on reach, having been transferred after being put on cryo after emergency surgery, until an actual facility could attend her. That meant she had access to relatively reasonable communications from earth.

  So she had one from her parents, that was expected. But she also had one from the army, with a sub-notice of ONI correspondence. That... Bodes. Ya, it bodes.

  She decided to go through her parents message. What she red shocked her.

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  It... turns out she had a brother now... She... She...uh. whatever she expected, it wasn't that. The kid was 10 and they had... fucking why?

  They kept a brother secret from me for ten years? That...

  She was hurt. That had hit her harder then a frag from 5 meters away. She didn't know what to think. They gave excuses about not wanting to worry her and tripe like it. They didn't want to 'Distract her from whatever she was doing.'

  Well then. Spite? Maybe... In retrospect she hadn't explained anything that has happened during her service. When she had gotten her limbs removed, she had simply tried to reassure them that she was just 'a bit banged up.'

  If they knew even a percentage of the shit that went on, that they were actively and vicious losing, that no matter what the UNSC tried...

  Nivka was sure her parents were inundated with propaganda, likely about Spartans, the navy's glorious struggle to protect the colonies and other shit, but she knew, from being dirtside that most, if not all of it was worth less then dog shit.

  The army had been fighting from day one with the colonial militias and had been getting their shit kicked in every time. Sure, they had managed to hold, and even push back ground troops, but when the void war was inevitably lost, as it had dozens of times, then the glassing would begin, and their efforts would be for nothing.

  At that point it was a rush to evacuate troops, which worked a fraction of the time, and then it was off to cryo sleep, then back to another planet to hold the line, and fight another desperate defense to hold off the covenant.

  Was she wrong in not sending her experience? To want to protect her parents, and apparently brother, from the soul crushing reality that if things kept going the way they were, that humanity would be destroyed?

  She wanted to cry. Out of anger, sadness, hopelessness, or something in-between, she didn't know. She turned off the pad gently before she crushed it, and set it aside. She laid back, and started to sleep. She would think on this later. It was... It was just too much, right now.