My brother and me - how could I play through in any way but in co-op? - booted up the level after taking a break for food. We thought it was going to be the grand finale, some huge explosive thing that would justify the horror and death we had seen up to that point.
But we hadn't been to Reach. We didn't understand.
We should have realized things were different from the start, but it took a minute of just looking around. I think it was the light, ultimately, that betrayed everything. Harsh enough that you couldn't see more than a hundred yards in any direction. After the huge and sweeping vistas of the entire rest of the game, there was a certain inevitability implied by the light. The world had drawn in, shrunk down to this microcosm where we were dooomed to meet our end. It was me, and my brother, and whatever monsters were lurching in from the light. Yeah. Yeah, it was the light that betrayed everything.
The first thing we did was run for the shack - for the shadows. We braced ourselves there, pulling out our DMRs, scoping our surroundings. We saw them out there, shadows moving against the background of the universe. Neither of us moved - it was probably only fifteen seconds, but it felt like a long time. We talked for a minute. We knew what was coming. We agreed on one thing:
We would stay by each other. We would not die alone.
The battle was almost meaningless, but those final moments had more meaning than can be communicated in any other way. We picked off Grunts whose heads exploded like firecrackers, throwing grenades behind the defensive lines of Jackals and picking off the remainders. He would handle the Grunts who supported them with his DMR while I lay down suppressing fire with my Assault Rifle, giving the Jackals no opportunity to come together. For one long minute we were unstoppable avatars of death, and I felt Heroic, as if I had earned the title.
Then the Elites came.
It didn't last long. A grenade that fell between us nearly killed us both - I took the worst of it, was knocked down into the red health. To my own credit I never stopped firing. I saw the one who threw the grenade, and I stuck him, and he died in a hail of blue fire. My brother was peppering the lot of them, tossing grenades to make them jump, trying to buy seconds.
When things ended, it was my fault. I broke the line, but I was dying and I was angry and I was afraid. I picked one Elite with a fancy crest on his head, and I said to my brother "That one's mine." He didn't argue. "Go for it," I remember him saying.
I did. I went forward, and every round from my DMR found his head. I threw a grenade, he jumped, I tracked, I kept firing. The other Elites were bearing down on me, my shields were gone again and my health was evaporating, but I got in its face with that last round and bashed in its skull with the butt of my rifle. It was the sweetest kill I had ever made.
Then one got me in the back and it screamed in triumph as I fell. I saw my brother kill it, leaping onto its back and pulling back its head and jamming his knife into its neck. He fought after that, but nobody could last long. One grenade thrown, a few Assault Rifle bursts fired into the unfeeling throng, and then an Elite hit him from behind.
"Hey," he said to me as I lay in the dirt, "we did good, didn't we?"
"Good?" I said. "Good? Little man, we conquered the world."
Then we died together. Fifteen hundred miles apart, me and my brother died together at the end of a long journey that had been frought with dying. This death was final. It was the end of everything. I can't explain what it was like, lying there in the dirt as my brother died.
But I think you know. You were there. You have been to Reach.
