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| | | Snake's word count for days. #1 | |
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Snake Eater
Posts : 18
Join date : 2012-07-21
| | Subject: Snake's word count for days. #1 Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:34 am | |
| - Spoiler:
Snake felt the snap of the mechanism before the sudden jolt of animal terror made his eyes flash open. Instinctively, he grabbed at the autoinjector and pulled it from his neck, fumbling at it with shaking hands.
It wasn't nanomachines; just epinephrine. His heart was stuttering away in his chest like a distant machinegun, but it couldn't have felt further from a combat high otherwise - instead of the mixture of hysterical fear and total serenity, it was a purely physical response, purposeless and unfulfilling. He forced himself to regulate his breathing, and as the high wore off he noticed a dull throb on his hairline. So the blood everywhere was his, he realised, wiping it out of the indentation under his eyebrow with his thumb. Perfect.
"Otacon," he said. "Thanks."
Otacon, Snake noticed, had backed away from him after setting the injector to go off, a long-distance detonation of a bomb capable of killing in blind panic.
"Snake," he replied. "There's been a change of plans - wait, don't stand up yet - "
Snake was already straightening his knees. He staggered a little; the air around his head twinged, and a cold whistle started in his ears, but he made it onto his feet.
"Don't worry about me."
"I don't try to, geez. You're just always getting yourself into these situations."
Otacon gave a wan smile - it seemed genuine, but Snake could hear that his breathing was quick and irregular; see the puffs of cold air mushroom from his nose and mouth too fast.
"I noticed you weren't responding about fifteen minutes ago," he carried on, without waiting for Snake to ask. "I don't have bio-feedback records at the moment, so I can't check exactly how long you were out."
He approached Snake, his feet moving over the noisy corridor steel so slowly as to make hardly a sound. When they'd first started the organisation together after the full enormity of Otacon's mistake had hit them, it was something they'd done because it was the best way to carry out their personal duties, with no other reason; and they'd both been wary of each other, until time had gone on and they'd both realised they trusted each other too much for that. Seeing Otacon's reticence now made Snake very aware of what kind of a state he must have been in.
With a little amazement in his voice, he asked, "Who did this to you?"
"Don't remember."
"Oh."
"Think whoever it is must have got the jump on me."
"But how? You go into full guard mode if you hear so much as me getting up to go to the bathroom."
Otacon chuckled, a little too loudly, and then turned slightly away, hand to his eyes. He held like that for a second, and then turned back.
"Whatever happened," he said, in a slightly choked voice, "we've got to get out of here, as soon as possible."
"Why?"
"I just told you, weren't you listening? There's been a change of plan."
"Otacon - "
Otacon adjusted his glasses, and gave a sigh.
"I wasn't able to get any more information on the slush fund than we already had. The way it transfers money is absolute genius - it's all tied up in the stock market and sold off algorithmically in ways that appear random to anyone analysing the stocks themselves, but serve to keep all those billions under the control of - whoever's fund it is. Actually - there was one thing. I thought at first it was a botnet doing everything, but now I'm pretty certain that it's based on predicting financial trends."
"Predicting financial trends?"
"Yeah. The majority of stock trading takes place automatically, governed by AIs working faster than the human mind ever could. So to be able to manipulate money that exactly without being in control of every single machine, the owner of the slush fund needs to have information on the workings of every AI and know how to exploit them to get them to move money to exactly where the owner wants it."
"We already knew they were high up."
"Yeah, but not this high up. In fact, I don't even believe any one organisation could have enough information to build an AI like that. The owner of the fund is either a huge group of organisations all working in perfect lockstep, or - "
" - Or an AI itself," Snake finished. "But we knew that's what our 'generous friend' would be, anyway, once we found out how long he'd been dead."
"See what I mean? Useless. I was hoping to be able to find some evidence of what the trading algorithms were that were being used to keep the fund alive, but I didn't have any luck. It seems like all that information is being hosted somewhere away from the main bank - it's being sent these blind, encrypted instructions from some server that's completely impregnable, and trust me I don't say that lightly."
"So the fund was a dead end," Snake said. "What about Jack? What happened on his side?"
"That's the other thing. Jack disappeared just a little while before you did. He went off-radar, too. Didn't say anything to me about it. I've got no idea where he is."
"Why'd you come after me and not him?"
Otacon gave him an innocent look. "I thought he'd be with you."
Snake folded his arms.
"So we can't get any information on the AI that's feeding us funds, Jack's missing - "
"And there's someone here who was able to sneak up on you," Otacon carried on. "Even though the security in this place is mostly automatic - "
In the spaces between Otacon's words, Snake detected the tell-tale sound of a gun-camera motor at the end of the next corridor, and froze.
"How'd you get past all the sentries on your own?"
Otacon hesitated.
"Well," he said, "I - I had my ways. Okay?"
"You had to do something you're not proud of, huh? What is it that you can't trust me with it?"
"Don't worry. It's all taken care of now."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's not supposed to mean anything!" Otacon said, in a slightly petulant voice that made Snake immediately know he was acting offended to prevent pressing. "I hacked into the security system, okay! None of the gun cameras can recognise us as targets. No more trouble for us."
"Thanks, Otacon," Snake said, trying to sound gentle - Otacon reeked of sweat and nervous energy, and now would be a bad time for him to crack. "But I wish you'd done that earlier. Getting past those things earlier wasn't the best experience I've ever had."
"You made it past, didn't you?" Otacon said, nudging his arm affectionately. "You don't really need my help."
"Don't be stupid," said Snake. "I need all the help you can offer. Especially right now. We've got to get hold of Jack somehow before we bail."
"Yeah."
"You put a passive transmitter in him, right? He should be on the Radar."
"Well," Otacon admitted, "I was going to. But he asked me not to."
"What?" Snake clenched his fists. "Why would he ask you to do that? Privacy concerns?"
"Uh. He didn't give me a straight answer. But you know what he's like." Otacon hesitated. "I didn't think it would be a big deal. I mean, he still had the active biofeedback transmitter running so I thought it would be fine. But either something's blocking his reception or he's switched it off."
"Why?"
"I don't know why."
"I don't want to speculate about this," Snake said. "But he could be planning something."
"That's what I was wondering," Otacon confirmed.
Snake looked at Otacon's face and the red rings around his eyes, thinking hard about what the hell Jack would want.
"Snake," Otacon started, "do you think Jack could… sneak up behind you?"
"No," Snake said. "He can't be the one who knocked me out. He's on our side, and we know it."
"I don't want to suspect him either. But he's got the skill - "
"He was probably concerned about someone else picking up the signal. Right now, let's worry about things in front of us." He took his hand off his hip. "Where was he when he disappeared? The East Wing?"
"Y — yeah. Like you, he was searching for — well, you know."
Snake paced down the hallway, deactivated gun cameras bowing their heads as they passed, like vassals. He strained his ears to hear enemy movement, but heard nothing, except for a subsonic throbbing he could feel in the sound traps on the soles of his silent-boots. Otacon carried on after him, each step hard and reluctant. Four years, and he still wasn't cut out for combat zones, Snake rationalised.
The card key door leading to the 5F Central Plaza was in front of him, white sprayed metal decorated with a yellow sign insisting those without proper clearance could not enter. Snake could make out the sound of the fountain, vomiting an endless stream of bubbly water into the plastic plants on the ground floor. When the civilians evacuated this place, they'd done it in a hurry enough not to care about turning it off and saving the power bill.
"Through here," Snake confirmed, waiting for Otacon to get over there with his hacked PAN card, weight on one foot.
"I - I don't want to go that way."
"It's the quickest route to the East Wing. Jack might need our help."
Otacon attempted to steady his breathing.
"Otacon! What's gotten into you? Hurry it up!"
"I'm sorry," he said, taking the transparent card into his hand and approaching the doors, which parted.
Snake noticed the smell of blood even before he realised the walkway was lined with the dead bodies of security personnel, slumped, some hanging over railings, others with hands bent backwards bleeding through the stamped holes in the metal floor. There were at least six on the walkway itself, and others, behind the glass walls of the offices, and lying in a constant stream of blood on the staircases like huge beads strung on a thin red string. Behind Snake, Otacon gave a strangled sob.
"Not cut with a sword," Snake said, which was the first thing he thought. The bullet holes were clear, punched obviously in the thick grey uniforms of the security staff. "A machine gun. Otacon, did Raiden do this?"
"Snake - I'm really sorry."
"What do you mean?" Snake snarled. At the same time, his eyes ran between each of the gun cameras studded on the pillars and the roof.
"I — it was the only way to get to you."
"The gun cameras!"
"Snake, I didn't do it like that, not really — "
"Otacon! What the hell did you do — "
And as Snake turned, the entire front wall of the building exploded.
Instincts in control, Snake grabbed onto Otacon's side and pushed him back towards the door as the heat blazed against his face. There was a yawn of surrendering metal. The walkway sagged, and as Snake pulled Otacon through the doorway, keeled, tearing itself free of the walls. Drywall melted inwards, cameras sucked into the long void of the hub, and both men dashed down the hallway as the outer wall, its black0ut-glass no longer supported, collapsed under its own weight in a shower of glass. They passed office cubicles and server rooms, the floor leaning outward further and further; Otacon, grabbing at Snake's arm, pulled him into a long room, going further back in the building. He dived for cover behind a desk - Snake pinned himself to the opposite wall, and watched until the collapse stablised.
The sky outside was orange, smeared with stripes of featureless yellow cloud, and against the sunset Snake could make out the hunched, black, froglike shape of the Hind. Snake's tinnitus finally melted into the clamour of the rotors, ringing from the walls underneath.
Otacon crawled out from under the desk, the wind drawing a glittering stream of dust from his hair.
"What's happening?" he shouted.
Not answering, Snake stood at the edge of the gaping wound in the building, twisted iron and crumbling plaster splayed around around his feet, bent like a frozen wave. White cement dust flowed over the edge, bright against the faint night-blue band at the edge of the sky, and all of a sudden Snake was thinking of snow, and a Hind piloted by someone else, someone who survived only by clinging to someone else's life.
"Who are you?" he roared at it, voice immediately absorbed by the pounding of the Hind.
The Hind hovered. Snake's Codec flickered into life.
"Snake, it's me," said the voice in his ear. "I know the circumstances between us, but I'm here to help the two of you. The situation is worse than you think."
Somehow, through coaxing and reassurance and no other way out, nowhere else to go, Snake and Otacon ended up on that Hind. "Liquid" wasn't piloting, which left him to pace around the midsection of the vehicle and gesture enthusiastically as he explained the situation.
"The culprit gathering funds from the stock trade--you were right, Brother. It's an AI," Liquid smirked, folding his hands behind his back as he came to a half in front of the two men. His eyes gleamed something dangerous.
"But I bet what you didn't know why you were getting a cut of that cash, or their goals," he chuckled, Snake grumbled, Otacon crossed his legs uncomfortably and adjusted his glasses. The Hind's propellers still blared and thrummed rhythmically outside.
"Go on," Snake knew his brother only wanted to goad him, make him beg for the information, but he wasn't going to. Liquid wouldn't have contacted him like this if he was only planning to withhold; this fund transfer obviously involved him too somehow.
"Another army, Brother! And you were doing all the work for them. Destroying Metal Gears only wiped out the competition, like a bacteria only getting stronger when you wipe out the weakest kin. You, Brother, cut them down to the strongest few and allowed those to breed and fester. You gave them the advantage to encroach in and dominate the market," Liquids arm were held out by now, a large, sweeping gesture. The man was begging the world to come weeping into his arms.
"Cut to the chase, Liquid," Snake's voice was a gruff bark. Knowing everything he'd done to help had only done the opposite--it wasn't pleasant, and unless Liquid was just here to rub it in his face, he expected a suggestion to a solution.
Liquid lowered his arms, clasping his hands once more behind his back, "They're not just after Metal Gears, and they weren't just funding your destructive natural selection. You were all guinea pigs, being trained and used to gather data--that friend of yours, the weird...feminine blonde one?"
Otacon and Snake both had their attention piqued (Snake in particular thought Liquid was one to talk about weird blondes). Otacon sat up slightly, nervous and adjusting his classes again, "You mean Jack?"
"Yeah, that one, they took him too."
*
The air was palpable, thick and ripe with sweat and blood. Something warm and wet stuck to his wrist and wreaked of a metallic odor, but not blood.
"Handcuffs...," and a moving truck, light stropping through the small spaces between the top of the car and the canvas serving as the roof. Last time he checked, he was inside the East Wing of the building he and Snake were infiltrating.
There was a sharp pain on the back of his head, so he reached back with both hands to give a feel. Dried blood, hair sticking to the wound. This wasn't good. From the looks of it, he hadn't been the only one captured either.
On either side of Jack were a few more men, some still passed out, others awake but clearly just as confused as he was. He was about ready to suggest they just jump out the back, it was only canvas after all, when he spotted the guards armed with AK-47s and some futuristic armor. There were so many grooves, joints, and sensors attached to them, joined seemingly to the skin--it looked almost like they weren't wearing armor at all.
"Cyborgs...," Jack found himself muttering under his breath.
*
"Do you know where he is?" Snake gruffly barked, rising to his feet and having had just about enough of Liquid.
"Now, now Brother," Liquid motioned for Snake to sit, a sneering smirk on his lips, "I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Isn't that how it works?"
"You'll get more than a scratch if you keep playing me like this." Snake's voice held tight anger, barely controlled aggression, couched below the rasp. "Where is he; who's got him."
Otacon's voice, never more than a decibel away from hesitance, interjected. "Snake..." Twin pairs of flat blue eyes slid to him, accompanied by silence. The scientist cleared his throat, adjusting his glasses. "Liquid has a point. Everything has it's price, right?"
A savage smile seared across Liquid's face, teeth glinting fragments of light. "How right you are, Dr. Emmerich. Everything has it's price." One broad, blunt fingered hand swung to quirk two fingers at Snake. "You destroy what you have wrought."
Snake's face etched into lines of confusion, suspicion. "What the hell are you talking about."
The smile dropped from Liquid's face. "I said before you had left only the best of the best behind. You are the only predator who can eliminate them; you have to.. level the playing field, you might say." Again, the smile, only now it had a predatory edge to it. "Either you kill them, or they will kill you."
Snake's only response was to stare impassively at the bulky form of the other man, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from Otacon. "You're wasting your time," finally came from Snake's mouth, in a hollow, flat sort of tone. His face was flat, and it seemed as though invisible wires manipulated his face to talk, for all the expression he had. "I'm retired. And even if I wanted to do this-- I doubt if I could."
The sharp smile on Liquid's face curdled. "I seem to have made an error in presenting this as voluntary. You will be going out there. If you don't, they will do more than just kill you. They will hunt down everyone who has ever aided you, befriended you, supported you. And when they are done with that, they will shoot you like a dog, and harvest your data."
A long silence fell between them.
Finally, in a deathly whisper, Snake echoed, "Everyone."
Liquid stood before him, less than an arm's length away, arms crossed, legs together, drawn up to his full height, his eyes throwing the meager light back in flickers as he searched Snake's face. Otacon had stilled, almost instinctively.
Finally, Snake's voice whipped out again, like a strike. "I guess I'm going in, then." He did not meet Liquid's eyes when he asked, "Who is it, exactly, that I'm working against."
Liquid's bravado was gone, replaced by a slow, stony drawl. "We'll send the information to you. And the equipment you will need. For now, you'll just need to prepare yourself." Liquid's lip curled. "Never thought we would be working together... eh, brother?"
The drop-off point was at the edge of a forest. From what Snake had been told, he'd have to hike in to the facility at its center, some sort of research institute. It all would have been run-of-the-mill if it wasn't for three things. First, of course, was the fact that Liquid was around and a part of this in any way, but in a way Snake had grown accustomed to his brother cropping up like a cold sore.
Second was the fact that the people behind this were apparently the leftover Genome soldiers from the Shadow Moses incident. Just thinking back to that time was enough to put a bad taste in his mouth, but there wasn't much that could be done about it. His arm was literally being twisted here.
Finally, there was intel that Raiden had been captured and was being held there. The kid wasn't even supposed to be a part of this mess, so Snake was going to have to get him out.
With an M9 in hand, he started hiking through the woods, though it wasn't long before a call came in over the Codec. He pressed up against a tree and answered it.
"All right, Snake," Liquid's voice came through. "Dr. Emmerich--"
Otacon's voice cut in. "You'll need to use codenames from now on."
"Of course, how could I have made such a careless mistake?" Snake got the feeling that it had been intentional, which just annoyed him further. "Otacon and I will be supporting you from here."
"You don't need to tell me," Snake grumbled as he started to stalk forward, eyes and ears open for any sign of guards patrolling the area. It would have been careless for them to not have placed sentries out here, even if it was the wilderness.
"Snake," Otacon's much more welcome voice continued, "let us know if you see anything that stands out. We aren't as well briefed about the facility as we should be, so you'll need to be ready for anything."
None of that was new to him, and while Snake felt his muscles ache under the strain as he scaled an incline, he seemed doomed to undertake these missions time after time, no matter what he did to try and get away from it. Maybe that was what happened when you got your hands so dirty.
There was too much about this that was familiar, and in the wrong way. He'd never trained much in the wilderness like this, but the man he'd been bred from had. Here was another Snake, slithering through the trees -- but he wouldn't be living off the animals here. Sometimes it felt like he (and Liquid, for that matter) couldn't ever escape their own genetics, but that wasn't going to stop Snake from trying.
"Let's say I get hold of the kid and we get out," he said, pausing for a moment near a fallen log, "what then?"
"We'll have the helicopter ready to retrieve you," Liquid's accented tone explained.
Snake didn't like that. He preferred to be more prepared, but this had all happened too fast. If the slightest thing went wrong, both he and Raiden might be paying for it.
Before he could respond, he heard the telltale sound of a cracking twig, and felt his back straighten automatically in response. He cut off the codec and tightened his grip on his tranquilizer gun, ready to do what he did best.
Snake spun around fast, elbow against the tree bark to steady his aim. A doe stared back for a split-second, her wide brown eyes so near he could see himself reflected in them, and then she sprang away. She was gone in seconds, bounding over ferns and rotting stumps and flashing her white tail in alarm as she disappeared into the thick underbrush. In her wake the leaves swished quietly before falling still.
The forest around him showed no signs of human life. No wiring, no cameras, no trails. If the genome soldiers were patrolling it, they were covering their tracks with skill Snake hadn’t seen in Shadow Moses. Of course, after the screw up that had been, any decent commander would have knocked the survivors right back into basic. No good assuming their skills were as sloppy as they had been the first time around.
Although untouched by humans, the forest was alive with noise – branches rustling, birds calling, trees creaking. It made scoping out enemies with hearing almost impossible, and with the amount of cover available the chances of visual detection were pretty damn poor. Snake glided through the tall trees slowly, the constant awareness that a well-placed sniper could pick him off with no trouble making him grind his teeth until his jaws seemed to be fusing together. The chattering nanny had seemed like an annoyance at the time, but he’d have traded all his gear to have her soliton radar here. As it was, a tranq gun and some body armour was a poor defence against a well dug-in facility in the middle of the wilderness. But he’d survived worse odds.
Snake chose a deer trail to follow, just a barely noticeable path through the ferns with a few fresh hoof-prints picked in the damp earth, wet from recent rain. It was going in the right direction, and it avoided the steepest inclines. It was purely chance, but chance had saved his life before.
Following the trail, he noticed the hoof marks disappear where the beaten trail didn’t. And then, stopping, saw the spider-silk-thin wires crossing through the air. Near the ground, water was beading on them as it would a web. He tracked the wires back to the nearest trees, and after searching for a moment located the grenades hidden in against the bark. The wires weren’t a wall by any means – it would be easy enough to slip through them. But one trap hinted at more.
In his ear, the codec chirped. “Snake? Why have you stopped – is something wrong?” Otacon, sounding more cautious than worried.
“No – just some good old-fashioned trip wires.”
“Can you get by?”
“No problem. Just want to make sure I don’t step into something worse.” He paused, eyes sweeping the terrain for a moment. And then, jaw tight again, “Is everything okay there?”
“If you mean am I still present and accounted for, brother, the answer is yes.” Liquid sounded jovial as usual. And why not – he was getting what he wanted with the added bonus of watching Snake squirm. “Not to worry, Dr. – I mean, Otacon and I are getting on swimmingly.”
“Everything’s fine, Snake,” said Otacon, speaking through his teeth.
Snake squatted down into the ferns, the security of their cover allowing him to let some real emotion to seep through his cold vigilance. “It’d better damn well continue being fine, or I’ll walk right out of here.”
“And then they’ll torture all your secrets out of your golden-haired boy, and his as well. Or maybe just take him apart to see what makes him tick – he’s the next best thing after us or Big Boss,” replied Liquid, sharply. “Two can play at that game, Snake. And I have more leverage than you.” He didn’t have to say any more; he was sitting right next to it.
Snake took a deep breath, and Otacon broke in hastily, heading off the the outburst. “It’s alright, Snake. He’s right – you need to get Raiden out of there.”
“And fulfill our part of the agreement,” added Liquid, smug enough that Snake’s hand fisted of its own accord.
“I remember,” said Snake, tartly, and cut the feed before things went off the cliff that was looming. He closed his eyes and sighed, let the hot anger run out of him and waited until he could feel the soft brush of leaves against his legs and smell the pine in the air.
Coldly attentive again, he stood and stepped carefully over the nearer trip wire and then ducked under the next. More concerned now with avoiding potential traps than leaving a trail, he struck out walking across the thickest ferns and avoiding the hidden mud between them.
Up head, the forest was getting brighter, the trees and underbrush thinning out. Snake slowed his pace, and crept up to the edge of the trees. Squatting low against the trunk of a thick fir, he got his first look at the research institute in the dell beyond – a concrete bunker surrounded by a good dozen yards of grass on all sides. An asphalt square on the far side, barely visible around the corner of the facility, hinted at a helipad. With the helicopter as his only realistic extraction method, he would have to cross the complex to get out again. Nothing was ever easy.
Behind him, something crackled again. Flicking off the safety on the M9, he swivelled sharply. It wasn’t a deer this time. Snake’s finger closed on the trigger before the startled guard had his M4 aimed. He went down with a tranq. dart in his neck.
Snake stood, holstered his gun, and grabbed the guard by the arms. The ferns gave adequate cover for the body. He liberated a bowie knife, a bandage and a ration from the unconscious man, and then got to work stripping off the uniform. He wouldn’t, at least, have any trouble passing himself off as a genome soldier.
Snake was developing the impression that the facility was intended to be as low-key as possible - the kind of place that only existed on a need-to-know basis. He found it guarded by many more traps than people, and his progress was meticulously slow. At least his stolen uniform was serving its purpose effectively; the scientists ignored him, and the few Genome Soldiers he encountered all took him for one of their own until it was too late.
He didn't call upon Otacon. The whole situation with Liquid was a dangerous distraction from what should have been the main purpose of his operation. They were dealing with the devil. Snake had made worse compromises in the past, but cooperating with Liquid was intrinsically painful. Even if they succeeded, he had no trust in Otacon's safety and that wasn't something he could waste time thinking about now.
Gradually, he explored the whole facility. He soon realised that it was both a research institute and also a secret prison, with all the horrors that implied; equipment for torture and sensory deprivation, a bunker area designed to contain psychics, cold storage vaults full of euphemistically labelled psychoactive drugs. There weren't many inmates, but he stole glances whenever he marched past one of their cells and determined that he recognised most of them; people who he and Otacon had found listed as 'disappeared'. This was the place people were taken when the Patriots didn't want them to exist any more, but might still occasionally wish to speak to them.
They didn't look to be in very good shape.
He checked through the extra-security wing and the places of torture; no Raiden. He wasn't sure whether to be frustrated or relieved. He gave the lead-lined bunker that held the psychic subjects only a cursory visit, and turned his attention to the medical research facilities, his stomach sinking.
Unlike the prison cells, each room was sealed rather than barred and he could only see into them through frosted plate-glass doors. Snake marched calmly past a soldier patrolling the area, mimicking his stance and the minuscule nod of his head, and then pivoted on one foot and shot him in the back of the neck. He caught the man as he fell forward, lowering him gently to the floor. Great, now he was alone he could get some of these doors open. His first objective would be to find a good place to leave this guy to nap. He stepped over the sleeping body, and opened the nearest door; it was empty, and seemed to be an operating room. He left the man in there and hurried on down the corridor.
He glanced into laborotaries and operating rooms that could easily have been covers for more torture. Each bed he saw was fitted with restraints. He wasn't sure how much time he had before the alarm was raised -
- There was movement beside him. A silhouette shifting in the glass.
He slid the door open with his gun raised, and she looked at him before he could pull the trigger. She was standing over a steel box, fingers resting on its surface.
"Naomi? What are you doing here?!"
She looked at him calmly. "Keeping him alive. I thought you'd come here," and her eyes closed briefly, overcome by a moment of wistful pain. She seemed unchanged from that night beneath the ocean before Shadow Moses, a young and brilliant face that hid a thousand secrets, most of them painful to her or to someone.
She stepped away from the box that had held her attention, and Snake walked up to it, his gun still trained between her eyes. "Who are you working for?"
"Does it matter?" she replied. "I have a lot of experience of keeping people alive when they shouldn't be. He needed me, Snake. Isn't that enough?"
He looked down at Raiden through the thick glass of the tank's roof, and tried to see how he'd been damaged and what Naomi had done to stitch him back together. "What happened to him?"
"I have only limited information -"
"Sounds familiar. Was it classified?"
Her eyes narrowed. "I don't know if anyone else survived the explosion that wrecked him. For all I know, there's nothing to classify."
"So someone wanted him alive?"
"I wanted him alive."
"Why?"
She curled her arms around herself and stared at him like he'd wounded her. "We're all the same, to them. Just beasts to be controlled. If I can free one person from the destiny that's been forced on them, then I will."
"This is freedom? A culture tank in a prison camp?"
"It's not yet death. Not like Frankie. There's hope of a new dawn for Raiden, beyond life as a ghost or a animal."
"So can he walk?"
She looked at a display on a wall-mounted monitor. "I think so. I've only tested his nervous clusters virtually but I think he's adjusted to his new central motor functions."
"New central motor functions?" She nodded, unassuming as ever about her work. "So is that what you're working on now?"
"As I said, I learned a lot about keeping people alive. I'll set him to wake up," she added, leaning over her desk and opening a black command line. "He's been asleep for quite some time now. He'll be glad to see you."
"I was expected?" She kept typing commands just as if he hadn't spoken. "Just tell me one thing. How did Liquid find out Raiden was here?"
The look on her face told him that he'd finally learned to ask the right questions. It was in his blood, maybe, the lingering virus of distrust for her, the knowledge that anyone would cut a deal with anyone if it would help them achieve their goal. He hated knowing that he was silently doing the same; she clearly knew this place, clearly knew what Liquid wanted, clearly knew the way out and that was a good enough trade for her life even if he could have killed her.
He could never have killed her, or even left her.
He activated his codec. "Otacon, I found Raiden."
"Excellent work, Snake," answered Liquid. Snake scowled. "I hope you appreciated my intel. Now, what about your side of the bargain?"
"What about my engineer?"
"I'm still fine." Otacon's voice shook and Snake tried not to think of everything that could possibly be wrong. "Just let us know when you need me to move in with the helicopter."
"You see, Snake? I am a man of my word. I hope that you prove to be the same." The disconnection sound in his ear was more jarring than usual, and Snake's reflexes seemed to recall every punch and bullet he'd put into Liquid, every blow he'd struck to no avail.
Naomi was bent over the culture tank, flicking switches rapidly. She stepped back, and the lid opened.
Snake takes an instinctive step back, eyes fixated on the tank with a dread that transitions into morbid curiosity as the cryogenic liquid clears. The body that still retains a familiar face floats noncommittally, glassy eyes open but unseeing.
How much of this was patriots’ workmanship and how much Naomi’s?
He turns back to said doctor for explanations. From her lack of response, Snake figures he wasn’t going to receive any, and he doesn’t feel like egging anything out of her tonight. Instead, he takes a few cautious steps closer to the tank, trying to discern if the silver mounds of muscle made Raiden’s skin---
Only to be sent spiraling back into the wall, the landing impact against an industrial centrifuge almost breaking his shoulders. Scowling, he fumbles for his gun and sits up. “The hell—”
Red eyes stares back at him, flickering around before finally making contact with his own. Snake lowers his gun, and Raiden jumps back up in one swift movement. The kid had always been agile, but never this damned fast too.
“Made a few modifications to him, did you?” he rasps, hoisting himself up.
Naomi snorts, still hovering over the terminal. “I hope you haven’t taken to repeating the obvious again, Snake,” she replies curtly. Snake growls, but doesn’t grace her with an answer, and she turns to Raiden.
“How are you feeling?”
The humanoid in question still stands with an inscrutable expression. Raiden flexes his arms, and hums quietly, as though assessing it for himself. He turns his back on Snake, whose eyebrows furrow at the sight of spine that protruded from synthetic muscles.
“Fair enough.”
He spoke too soon. Doubling over in a fit of coughing, he grips the metal bars to regain his footing. Snake is startled to find white liquid oozing from his hands as he straightens back up.
Naomi draws a syringe from her kit, and jabs it into the small of his back in one swift movement. “Don’t be alarmed,” she says, “you’re immune system has not yet been fully configured to accept your blood. The process has been automated, so it shouldn’t pose any problems.”
The humanoid grunts, snapping his neck forwards. “Aren’t we going, yet?” he asks, the first address directed to Snake.
Snake just shrugs and turns to the doors; Raiden could walk, that was more than he had hoped for. He doesn’t ask his questions, not yet. His curiosity could wait until Otacon was secured from Liquid. Raiden follows close behind, steps not making a single sound against the floor, and Snake turns back every so often to check he was still following. It disquieted him, and putting aside even the entire restructuring of his body, there was something fundamentally changed about Raiden. The way he walked, the bitter edge that had somehow crept into his voice during his ordeal.
“Don’t think you won’t get caught, Snake,” Naomi calls from her station, but doesn’t make a move to stop either of them.
Snake doesn’t look back.
As far as he was concerned, he no longer had any business loitering around the facility when conversation could clearly be had without the unpleasant presence of Liquid.
He presses two fingers to his ear.
"Otacon, get ready to land. And don't--- don't try anything, Liquid. Or you'll never get it."
Will you do it, then?” David Oh stared at the boy across the table, waiting for an answer, but the boy stuffed his mouth with potatoes and sauerkraut as if he were not the linchpin upon whom this entire conversation and, in fact, quite possibly David’s life, depended.
The boy himself, had he known that was how David thought of him, would have protested at being called a “boy” at all. He had turned twenty almost three months ago and had already been promoted to major. Back home (he grinned inwardly at the thought of calling the USSR home when he often told those curious about his past that he had “many homes”), he commanded his own unit, and now some graying bureaucrat with a military rank (no higher than his own, he would have added had he been speaking) had dragged him to Berlin to offer him a deal. Ocelot, as the boy thought of himself, scoffed, choking a bit on a chunk of potato.
“You may want to slow down a little,” David said. The boy glared at him and scooped another forkful. A string of sauerkraut the same color as his hair dangled from his chin. David fought to urge to make the boy wipe it off. The boy may be young, but his mother had been younger.
Ocelot had determined well before arriving in Berlin that he would accept Major Oh’s offer of a free meal, learn all he could about Oh’s intentions in Tselinoyarsk, and then politely refuse on the grounds of Soviet patriotism. He had so far gotten three free meals out of it, and Oh’s patience was wearing as thin as Sokolov’s hair. Ah, Sokolov. Ocelot suspected Oh was more involved in that particular puppet mission than he let on. Oh had quickly, and not particularly adeptly, evaded any mention of The Boss or the incident on the bridge in Dolinovodno. Drawing out Oh’s thoughts had become a game for Ocelot, and he didn’t want David to disappear before talking about The Boss. She was the big mystery here, all-American to a fault, and at first her defection had shocked even Volgin. But not David.
TBC 7074 words. | |
| | | | Snake Eater
Posts : 18
Join date : 2012-07-21
| | Subject: Re: Snake's word count for days. #1 Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:35 am | |
| Continued - Spoiler:
“I’m leaving for London in an hour,” David said though he felt he was speaking to a brick wall with an eerily familiar smile. “I need an answer. It is perfectly acceptable to refuse.”
The boy lowered the forkful he had just lifted back to his plate and fixed David with a pair of eyes so much bluer than his mother’s. A part of David’s brain he had suppressed for almost a year while planning these missions reminded him coldly that this was the closest he’d get to seeing her eyes again.
“I had planned to refuse,” the boy said.
“But…” David beckoned him to continue.
“The Chinese spy. As you know, we aren’t too friendly with the Chinese. Maybe I can do us both a favor. I get rid of her. You get rid of The Boss.”
Oh blanched. “Her?”
Shit. Ocelot wasn’t supposed to know about EVA yet. “The way you described the spy, I thought it was a woman,” Ocelot said quickly. “Was I wrong?”
“Uh…” Oh was clearly uncomfortable now, shifting in his seat to glance at the other diners. “We cannot be certain whether it’s a man or a woman.”
“You sent a woman.”
“And also a man. This is not a conversation I’m going to have. Are you going to help us or not?”
Oh stared back at Ocelot, not aware he had just slipped, that Ocelot now knew Oh’s involvement in the “failure” of the Virtuous Mission.
“I’ll do it,” Ocelot said, and David Oh, former lovesick fool and unwilling pawn of the Philosophers, breathed freely again.
“You will do it?”
David Oh had not been entirely straightforward with the young man in Berlin, but he'd have to be far more careful with this one. Young—too young they were, all of them, too young to be thrown back and forth between battlefields without even being given leave to call their grim workplaces that. But conscience mattered little now. David went back to Zero—no more foolish flukes in referencing films—and fixed his gaze on his current companion.
He could manipulate this man. Probably easier than Ocelot, too, because he had his trust (for what, he was less and less certain).
Zero could make him go.
Jack took a last draft of the cigar Zero had been thoughtful enough to bring—thoughtful, of course, in more ways than one—and looked up. "I can't say that I want to, Major.”
“No more than I want to drop you into an irradiated wasteland.” Zero extinguished his own cigar, thinking of how much nicer things would be if Jack could ever be persuaded to have tea with him. “However, under our present circumstances, we cannot pick the conditions. Everything rides on your performance in this mission, Jack.”
They're just looking for a scapegoat.
“How long did you say I have?”
“One week. Ideally, less.”
“So in a week at the most, The Boss should be dead.”
“It'll be her dead, or the two of us. And that's not to mention the political fallout.”
Jack was looking the other way now. Zero let no trace of displeasure show, concentrating on the camera in the corner of the room instead. He did so surreptitiously, using only his peripheral vision to make out the offending shape, but he was sure that Jack was someone to pick up on that sort of thing. The younger man frowned.
“Major, I...”
You were her last apprentice. Screw this one up, and we'll both be six feet under. There's no choice.
“I'll do what I can to carry out the mission. That's what The Boss taught me. But it's—”
“Ironic? Quite so.”
“Well, and I can't help thinking it's all in someone else's interest. Someone...other than you said earlier.”
Zero felt his heart skip, without even the caffeine rush to blame.
“I'm the one who's asked all the questions ever since I got here for recovery”—Jack spat the word out like it was the last thing that could be relevant here, and Zero admired his quick-thinking skill—“but it's obvious they all know more than me.”
It was fortunate for Zero that his face could show nothing as he wished. “Wait,” he ordered in that rare voice he hardly ever used with someone like Jack.
He exited the room, feeling the other's gaze like a burn mark on his back; more question there, no doubt. More than he could or should care to answer. He rounded the corner, walked down the sterile corridor (all the while flanked by a security guard who was not as inconspicuous as presumably intended), until he stood in front of the small cubicle that contained whoever there was monitoring the monitors. He knocked, entering without waiting.
“Room 387, I need the camera off.”
A suspicious look met him halfway, which seemed to be all the dubious courtesy the surveillance man was willing to extend. Then ensued a short quip about procedure, about the necessity to survey ICU units round the clock and then some, and a barely-informed-largely-fabricated jab at what Zero was at the facility to do in the first place. None of it was going to make a difference. David Oh, once upon a time, had been obliged to learn how to get his way by means of the trademark mixture of force and diplomacy, and Zero was not going to be thwarted now.
Even if he might be in for quite some explaining later, if word of this strange order got out.
And it was that, after brief wrangling with the system, Zero found himself back in the bland room in what could not have been more than a few minutes. The question was still written all over Jack's face—although, as Zero could tell, he had already noticed the absence of real-time monitoring. There was true silence now, free of static. It was only the two of them.
“Jack,” he began.
Indeed, there had been a time not too long ago when the look Jack was still giving him would have been enough to make him reconsider, to pull one string here and another there in an attempt to soften whatever would be coming. He could rarely do more than that, but what he could do, he did.
But now Jack was approaching the bitter years, a state Zero was entirely too familiar with. Playing the henchman to take down The Boss could just turn out to be that push over the edge. Zero wasn't sure when it would finally happen or how obvious it would be when it did—only that he would be complicit.
He knelt in front of Jack's slumped figure, resting his hands on the bedding either side of the man's legs. When he spoke, it was soft as though the cameras were still watching. “Look at it this way. Out there, you're Snake. It doesn't matter what you want or don't want to do. It doesn't matter how you feel about having to do it. All that matters is that you do it.”
Jack nodded, half-hearted but determined. Zero wanted to tell him something more, something—
“If we lose not only The Boss but you as well, it will help or solve nothing.”
If we lose both The Boss and you?
If I lose.
Zero was going to have less explanatory nonsense to cook up than if the two of them had been taped just then, that much was beyond certain.
All that matters is that I do it?
Jack rolled the words around in his mind as the Major left him, and tried to figure out why they hurt. He's lying to me. I don't matter at all. They only need me because it's her. The Boss. The woman who taught me technique and told me about loyalty.
The woman I know nothing about.
His body had more or less knitted itself back together - well enough to be put through hell again, anyway. He hadn't much longer to prepare for the mission. Out there, he would be Naked Snake; in here, he was little more than a rat in a box, trying to evade the shockrod.
She'd talked to him about what loyalty meant. He had an order now. Given to him by a hierarchy she'd never fit into; brass didn't come more top than her, and whatever he'd said, however much he loved his country, a word from her would overrule it. And his country had asked him to betray her. That was the trap he was in, in a nutshell -
- or maybe it was a test?
Not of personal loyalty to her. She was never personal. Maybe it was a test of his ingenuity, in having to obey an impossible order. Maybe of his ability to resist that force of the times that she had spoken of. What better way to teach warrior spirit, than to force him to choose between patriotism and her?
A test. That's what was happening. Like being exposed to the blasts at Bikini Atoll; tests could change you as well as prove something. He just had to get through it. He just had to play their game and then listen to that voice inside that screamed no and find the right way to obey it. That was loyalty. Not gunning your mentor down, but saving her even when the times were against her.
Accept, he told himself. Inject. Intercept. Then defect.
*
Jack found it became a lot easier once he'd decided. He didn't feel sick inside any more. He didn't have to think about how he'd been abandoned again - instead, the Boss had signalled to him to follow her across the Iron Curtain. All part of her plan. He would be loyal to her without question. He sat sullenly through briefings, itching to be in Russia. He memorised everything he heard, same as always, and as the plane flew out into the East he picked apart the information he'd been given for a new purpose. Against them.
His pod shot over the open unknown, sending him towards its green embrace.
He kept his eyes open as he fell, but he was looking at nothing. He remembered his more gentle HALO descent to the same place - then, he'd had Asia, behind him or below him or whatever zero-gravity word you could use to speak of something you saw if you tried to look at your own feet, and Russia stretching north forever. He tried to picture the limits of Volgin's little kingdom, stabbing between them like a rip in the Iron Curtain where the light of nuclear testing shone through.
In his pod descending at terminal velocity he couldn't see that fragile and irradiated land. Even if he had, Tselinoyarsk was just a tiny speck of something else. He remembered Volgin's fear of Khrushchev. Mostly, he remembered the blinding cloud of the Davy Crockett, the mushroom-form that still burned on his retinas in the bare light of the pod.
And he'd sooner follow someone who would do that than someone who'd told him to kill her.
The clock in the back of his mind went off and he pulled the cord, feeling his parachute unfurl as the pod opened under him.
*
He couldn't defect to her personally. He hadn't planned to. She had dismantled his convictions in front of him and he didn't want to hear what she would have said about his decision, didn't want to involve her and her words in that process. He needed someone more explicable to approach, someone who might leave him with a little pride and power.
He allowed himself to nurse a hunch about who that might be.
He went through the motions of infiltration, feeling his way into the currents of power, and waiting for their encounter, wanting his chance so hard he could taste it among the snake-blood and honey. Who else could it be? He needed someone ambitious enough to take the bait, but who didn't have what it took to kill him.
So when Ocelot finally looked at him and said, "I've been waiting for this moment," Snake almost replied; "Me too." He admired Ocelot's gun and belittled it, knowing that by doing so he was making himself more valuable.
"You don't have what it takes to kill me," he said, and watched in the confidence that nothing would happen as Ocelot pulled the trigger. He let EVA get to her motorcycle, and ran after Ocelot, knowing his presence would make it hard for her to shoot. "Stop," he demanded, and held his gun aside. "I need to talk to you."
Ocelot slowed, and turned, his unloaded gun still in his hand. "What is it you want from me? A fair fight before I kill you?"
"I want to defect," he replied, and tossed his gun to the ground at Ocelot's feet.
The boy's perpetual smirk faltered, floundered. He stared at Jack with unabashed suspicion; it was as if he'd handed him a box, inside of which might be a fist-sized diamond, or a grenade, pin pulled, ready to explode.
“You think I'm that stupid?” Ocelot said. His back was arched, fingers fluttering over the trigger, and though he bristled with conviction Jack knew he wouldn't succumb to his temper. Too proud to lose control, this boy, in his fresh-pressed uniform and fine leather boots, polished to a fine sheen beneath the forest-floor muck. “I won't let you humiliate me. You, or her...” he indicated the retreating EVA with a sweep of his hand, dismissive, as if she were some lowly animal. “...or anyone else.”
“You have my gun,” Jack said, and held out his arms, swept them up to show there were no weapons hidden, no secondary firearms. It would scarcely convince the boy, of course, and nor should it – naïve he might be, but stupid he was not, and there were innumerable places a smart man might hide a gun. Jack could see from Ocelot's wandering gaze (travelling the length of him, paying a certain attention the shadowed places, the curved spaces between limbs) that he was thinking just that. “I want to defect. I recommend that you take me seriously.”
There was a moment of contemplative quiet, in which insects whirred and clicked in time with the imagined workings of the boy's mind, sharp as a knife even through the haze of his own arrogance. Blue eyes appraised him critically, noting his broad American build, the unkemptness of his hair, all the things that marked him out as different. Jack let him, patiently, palms held outwards. It did not pain him to act out submission. He'd acted out worse.
“That woman...” Ocelot began.
“I know as much as you do,” Jack replied. Was it a lie? Not entirely, he thought, recalling the ease with which she'd slipped into proceedings, a well-greased part in a complex machine. There was no guarantee she'd had anything to do with the NSA – it wasn't as if he could ask for references – and yet he was compelled to trust her. Had to, in truth, since there was nobody else to trust. Least of all the man opposite him, still toying with the trigger as if his gun wasn't spent and empty.
Ocelot frowned. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. The disappointment was vivid in the creases of his face, the downward pull of his too-feminine lips, and it occurred to Jack that a bullet in the sternum might well have been easier for the boy to take. Oh, it'd make a mess of that beautiful uniform, certainly, but there was a strange pride in it, in bearing the scars of a fight well fought. But there would be no fight now, no great romantic standoff, no silhouettes against the sunset, drawing blood and uttering clever one-liners. He'd shattered the boy's fantasy in a single sentence.
“Volgin won't believe you either,” Ocelot said. “Why should he? He has nothing to offer you. Russia has nothing to offer you.” He paused, pulling Jack's gun towards him with the toe of his boot. Insurance, Jack thought. In case the American dog changed his mind.
They might kill him. The thought had crossed his mind, several times, and in several configurations; each ended with blood, pooling out onto the stark grey concrete, and his own hot entrails emerging from between his shaking fingers. They might do that, and if they did, well, his failure would pain him only as long as it took his synapses to die. It didn't matter; if it was the Boss' will that he should follow her, defect alongside her – and he felt in his marrow that it was – then it was better to die trying than to cower from the challenge. Rather evisceration in a strange country than the betrayal of his own.
“I have something to offer you,” Jack said.
For the briefest of seconds, Ocelot's eyes reached dinner-plate proportions. His swift return to composure was commendably subtle.
Ocelot tucked Jack's gun in his waistband. It rested there, a barely conspicuous disturbance in the sharp lines of his clothing. Idly, Jack wondered how the cold American steel felt against his white Russian skin. Whether the sensation was alien. Whether it was pleasant.
“Fine,” Ocelot said. “But don't expect open arms.”
Jack's narrowed eyes and firm, unsmiling mouth suggested he'd been expecting no such reception.
"I thought you said he wasn't coming with us."
"I did."
It didn't surprise Jack that Volgin was so deferential to her, even now. They stood in t he yard, Jack's breath misting before his eyes, Volgin's body giving off volleys of ominous sparks in the muggy, cold air. The Boss had already relieved Jack of his equipment, all the concealed weapons and gear that Ocelot had spectacularly failed to locate, and now he stood before her completely vulnerable. He couldn't get the upper hand against her with CQC; he couldn't even get it with a gun. He felt naked. The chastising, cold look she was giving him wasn't helping, either. Jack was not a weak-willed man, but those ice blue eyes made him feel completely humbled.
"Didn't you learn anything, Jack?" she berated. "You have a mission to finish. What the hell are you doing here?"
"Boss-- this was what you wanted," Jack defended himself sullenly. "Wasn't it..?"
"Defection isn't your style."
"It's not yours either," Jack countered. He'd never been afraid to fight her.
"We talked about this, Jack. I'm loyal to my purpose."
"I thought this was what you wanted..."
"I already told you what I wanted."
That could mean anything. She'd told him a lot of things, and asked him a lot of questions, and given him a lot of choices. And even now with her here, looking at him with eyes icy enough to freeze him, he still felt sure that he'd made the right choice.
He looked away, frowning deeply.
"And I told you... I follow who's in command."
"I'm not your commanding officer. I haven't been for a long time."
Jack looked up at her and said nothing. He'd said he followed the President, that he did what his orders told him to do, but... now that he was here, he realized that wasn't quite true. She had more authority over him than he'd ever realized.
The silence was punctuated by the obnoxious swisha-swisha of Ocelot's revolvers. The kid had brought him in and was now leaning up against a truck, not getting involved but not leaving either, and Jack could feel Ocelot's eyes intently on him. He guessed it was supposed to be impressive that he could do those revolver tricks without looking, but it was more annoying than anything.
In the end, it was Volgin that broke the silence. His impatience to get this finished with and go attend to something more entertaining was more than obvious in his tone.
"Well, is he staying or not?"
That impatience had an implication, of course; if the Boss said no, Jack would be killed where he stood. Volgin wouldn't leave it up to her this time, not on his base. They both knew that, and she hesitated to respond. Jack didn't look at her, just listened to the scrape of Ocelot's trigger guards against his gloves and the sweep of the barrels through the air.
"Fine." The Boss turned away, walking back toward the hangar without another glance at him.
Ocelot caught his revolvers by the handles and sheathed them in one fluid movement.
--
Jack heard the click of spurs against the concrete from the other end of the corridor, and of course they stopped outside his quarters. There was a moment's hesitation before the owner of those spurs knocked, two brisk raps on the door.
"It's not locked." Jack wasn't going to get up to let him in. His gun was spread out in pieces on his bunk, the cleaning cloth in hand and his fingers black with oil.
The door swung open, revealing Ocelot, inevitable and sour.
"You should lock that," he told Jack haughtily, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. "You have no idea what prowls these corridors at night."
"Nothing I couldn't handle, I'm sure," Jack replied, though from the look on Ocelot's face he suspected the boy wasn't referring to himself. He wasn't surprised to see Ocelot here, but he was surprised by the bottle in his hands. He'd expected more bullets and showdowns, not camaraderie. "What's this?"
"How about a toast to your defection?" he didn't exactly sound joyful about it, but Jack was never one to turn down free booze. Ocelot leaned against the wall at Jack's side, a study in nonchalance, and uncapped the bottle. The glass was opaque with frost, obviously chilled outside before it was brought here. The kid had put thought into this.
"I didn't see you at dinner," he said, trying to keep his tone casual. He took an aggressive gulp of vodka and held the bottle out to Jack. "Too good to eat with your new comrades?"
Jack shook his head, and took the offered bottle. "No,' he replied. "It's just... the food doesn't really agree with me." He took a somewhat more conservative sip from the neck of the bottle, and felt his eye twitch. Jesus Christ. That was bathtub liquor if he'd ever had it.
"Doesn't agree with you?" Ocelot echoed incredulously.
"Yeah. It... tastes like crap."
Ocelot gave him a disbelieving look. "So you just didn't eat?"
"Of course I did."
There was silence for a long few seconds, before Ocelot snatched the bottle back. "Are you going to explain or not?"
"I went off base and shot one of those goats," Jack replied. "It was pretty good, I guess."
Ocelot paused with the bottle halfway to his lips. "You what!?" He pressed his lips together until they whitened, his eyes flashing. "You bastard!"
"What?" Jack frowned a little. "I was hungry!" Ocelot was flushed, from the alcohol and now from the anger.
"There was food here! Don't kill the animals! Have a little respect!"
Jack sulked. "That barely counts as food..."
There was a long moment of silence during which Ocelot gulped at the vodka like a fish. Finally, Jack reached up and took the bottle out of his hands, taking another sip himself.
"So did you seriously just come here to ask me why I wasn't at dinner?"
"Psh. No. But you should be careful, going off base like that... Some might get the wrong impression. Nobody here exactly trusts you, you know."
Jack grinned. "Even you?"
Ocelot made a sour face, rolled his eyes and looked away. When he didn't respond, Jack passed the bottle back companionably. He went back to work on his gun, happy to keep his hands busy without pestering Ocelot. It didn't exactly matter to him if the kid was here or not.
"So..." Ocelot held the bottle tightly around the neck in one hand, and made a loose finger-gun gesture with the other. "You came here because of her, right? Because of Voyevoda."
"...Yeah." Jack frowned a little. "I think so, anyway."
"What do you mean, you think so? You do know why you defected, right?"
"I think she wanted me to defect with her. I think..."
"You aren't even sure, and you defected anyway?" Ocelot swayed a little, chuckling to himself around another mouthful of moonshine. "Hnh. Loyalty like that... that's rare." He knew a thing about loyalty, after all, not that he was going to get into that with Jack. In fact, that made things rather awkward now. He would have preferred not to work against the ex-American agent; not that he had any particular reason to feel loyalty to him of all people. He just sort of... did.
Jack looked up, scrutinizing Ocelot for a moment. The kid was clearly far too drunk to realize the importance of what he'd just told Jack. His cheeks and nose were flushed a fetching pink, his eyes a little glassy. And as if the thought had been shared, Ocelot chose that moment to sway a little, and stagger away from the wall to take a more secure seat on the bed.
"Hey... what's your name?"
"My name?"
"Yeah... Snake isn't a real name, any more than Ocelot. What's your real name?"
"It's John." It was the plainest name imaginable, so Jack was a little surprised when Ocelot made a face. "What?"
"Ugh. We already have one Ivan around here and that's one too many."
Jack wasn't entirely sure what he was referring to, but he also didn't really care. Like Ocelot had said, he was here for the Boss. "Can call me Jack if you like it better."
"..." Ocelot sulked, leaning his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, setting those full lips into a surprisingly sensual pout. "Fine," he said. "Aren't you going to ask me what mine is?"
"What is it?"
"Adamska," he said. "My name's Adamska. You can call me that if you like."
"Sure." Jack didn't exactly object to Ocelot, but whatever made the kid happy.
"Hey..." Ocelot leaned in, shoulder to shoulder with Jack. "So -Jack - ...What you said in the jungle... about having something to offer me..."
He grinned.
Jack raised an eyebrow and set down his gun, taking the bottle out of Ocelot's hands and setting it down on the floor. "You've had more than enough for tonight," he scolded. Go figure the kid couldn't hold his alcohol. He didn't even look old enough to be drinking yet, although Jack guessed it was a little different in Russia. Still, he had no sense of his own limits. Jack put his arm around Ocelot's shoulder and shooed him out to the door.
--
It wasn't until the following day that Adamska's derision over his name explained itself.
There was only so long Jack could stand being indoors before he had to get outside. He was waiting for the Boss to start talking to him again - the difficult thing was that with her he could never tell if he was being tested or if she was actually angry with him. But he had to occupy himself, even if it was just running through some drills in the rapidly cooling mountain air. It wasn't winter yet, but it was getting close. The soldiers posted here ignored him - probably mistrusted him, but Jack hardly cared - and he was already very much accustomed to being left alone. Which made it all the more remarkable when someone went out of their way to get Jack's attention.
"Hey! Hey, you! I'm talking to you!"
Jack grunted with annoyance and straightened up. He wasn't exactly sure what he was expecting, but what he got was a faceful of indignance and aggression - from a man with a very familiar face. What had happened to that mask, anyway?
"Huh," Jack said. "Your lips move..."
"...WHAT!? What the hell is that supposed to mean?" The young man bristled, clearly already furious about something, not that Jack had the first clue what. A quick glance at the bars on his epaulets, however, indicated a rank that Jack was certain from one glance that he was not qualified to possess. "Do you know who I am?"
"Not really..."
"My name is Ivan Raikov, and that's Major Raikov to you! Don't forget it!"
Ah. Ivan. That explained it.
"I'm on to you," Raikov continued. "I know you're a spy, you American son of a bitch, and I don't know how you persuaded Zhenya to let you stay but I won't let you destroy what we're doing here!"
"But I really def--"
"I've got my eye on you!"
Jack spread his hands. Zero's advice on what to do if he ever met the man the mask was based on was ringing very clearly in Jack's memory: beat the crap out of him. Maybe that wouldn't turn out to be such a bad course of action.
"Don't you have anything to say?"
The orange glow of a lighter flickered on, disrupting the pale, frigid darkness of the room. He lit a cigarette, and shifted softly in the sheets, the smoke curling fluidly from his lips.
"What do you want me to say?" he muttered, eyes flicking over to the woman pressed snugly up against his shoulder. One of her arms had hooked around his bicep, and she sat up, face narrowing subtly in a half-frown.
"Anything."
He was silent, save for a long, wistful drag. She clawed a few stray wisps of hair behind her ear, and when she moved, she pulled a fold of the blanket up over her breasts; it was strange, unsettling even, for her to act so feminine. He felt her watch him, those prying, calculating dark eyes searching over and over for something that wasn't there.
"Why do you always get that look in your eye when you smoke?"
"What look?" He glanced over at her again.
She paused, the frown deepening. Now she just thought he was baiting her. "You really don't know?"
He sighed heavily, closing his eyes. Her other arm snaked around his neck, and she pulled herself even closer somehow, drawing him in like a white, bony-shouldered spider.
"It calms me down when there's a lot on my mind," he offered, in his tense growling whisper. "Maybe that's what you mean."
"What is on your mind, Snake?" He would have looked away again, but she held him fast, that pointlessly hurt, vaguely girlish expression making her lips pout. He took another drag, tilting his jaw back with the exhale, wishing he could breathe her out so easily. She certainly felt more poisonous.
It didn't matter, though, he reminded himself – what did he care what she thought? She saw only a distortion of him anyways, some hyper-romanticized hero who could've stepped right out of one of those dime-a-dozen love stories spewed out by Hollywood each year. She loved to think she was so different from them all, but no, she ate it up just as eagerly, hypnotherapy and all. Very few people could tolerate a reality as horrible as theirs, much less prefer it to fantasy.
And so she saw depth where he knew there was none. She had decided how beautiful, how profound he could be. She had anthropomorphized an animal, and when it broke her heart, she fished for pity. He wasn't sorry for her. He had tried to like her, he really had – maybe she could drag him back to normality – but her eyes were too clouded, blinded by imaginary love. It repulsed him further.
He didn't know what was different in that moment of weakness, when she'd stood by the door and glanced back over her shoulder at him, her neck framed by the fur trim of her parka. She was going into town, and asked if he wanted anything, and he felt himself edge up close to her, unconsciously, like gravity had pulled him. And in one shaky breath, they closed whatever gap remained, and he could tell, from the aching way she kissed, that she'd been waiting for him.
It was an impulse. He hoped she understood that much. She had been something much simpler, much more primal, just a lovely shape arching and intertwining and whimpering in the faint glow of Arctic dusk. Now she was Meryl again, the warm, muscled body clinging to him.
"Can't we just sit here?" He gently peeled her arm away, and she shrank back slightly, like she'd been physically wounded. "I'm not good with words."
She was quiet for a while, before she slid away from him, the lines of her body blurred by the haze.
"Go ahead," she murmured emptily, standing, half of the blanket pooling at her ankles. The soldier's sharpness trickled back into her tone, her posture stiffening, that lovelorn, lucid-dreaming part of her receding for now. "I'm going to freshen up."
It was her fault for being hurt, he told himself, as a pinprick of guilt jabbed at him. She was just like everyone else. Always expecting so much from a man who could give so little.
At first the smell bothers him, the way it clings to everything, as though spiteful that even a hint, a trace, a memory of it might be banished. He spends some time with his nose wrinkled, but doesn't have the wherewithal to do anything about it.
The fact was it wasn't necessarily an unpleasant smell; he'd smelled far worse, sometimes in the next cubicle over when one of the team forgot (or or refused) to bathe. But for whatever reason, the faint undertone of tobacco that his new roomate was infused with seemed to turn his stomach.
It might have been the nature of the drug, nicotine as much a chemical as amonia. He might be particularly sensitive to it, though he never got out his googling fingers to check it out. It could have just been he was so unused to it, through no fault of it or its user. (Hal might have been tempted to say "abuser", but for whatever reason common thought didn't apply this to smokers who didn't have cancer, and the only sign of their indulgence a raspy voice.)
Growing up in the waning days of tobacco popularity pretty much ensured that few people he lived or worked with smoked. And he always had no problem telling them it was both a health hazard, and it reeked, beside.
Although his father grew up during the smoking heyday, he was never a smoker; Julie never smoked, but there were certain, unique scents she had that he couldn't stand anymore either. Considering he spent the beginnings of his adult life faily sequestered, the first time he encountered a smoker that he had no choice being around was when he started working for Arms Tech. And it was kind of rude to tell the company big wigs not to smoke the cigars they favored so much.
Maybe he was still keyed up. He's not what you would call an adaptable person. He has his particulars, and as of late, his safe routines and habits had been disrupted pretty violently. It was just that his maladaption wasn't entirely crippling or anything, considering his personality when totally comfortable still wasn't anything to write home about. That was him: non-confrontational, a little high strung, laid back, and pleasant. This was just carried to extremes when subjected to a lot of undule pressure.
Which was probably why he was having such a problem saying anything about the smell. For one thing, this guy was so far beyond his normal social experience, he had a hard time figuring out how to talk to him normally. He seemed to be content to smoke and drink and sit in hours of silence, sometimes watching some old movie on TV, but mostly as noiseless as the coils of smoke that drifted from the tip of the ever present cigarette. Sometimes he dozed, the lit cigarette still smoldering between his lips or clamped between his fingers. Hal wondered how he never burnt himself or lit anything on fire.
One evening over a dinner of canned beans and game meat, when there was still snow on the ground, and the sky was undecided if what it was sending down was a particularly cold rain or a very wet snow, Hal finally said something about it. He decided it was then or never, as he watched the gnarled hand practicedly tap a cigarette from the pack and slip it between his teeth.
"When did you start smoking? I mean like, uh... pick up the habit?" He was glad his tone was light and curious.
Dave's gray eyes flicked to him, focusing on his face, from their blind study of the table before him. He considered Otacon for a few seconds, as if turning over the words in his mind, as he drew in a lungful of smoke, and turned his head to blow it away from Otacon.
Finally, a quick shrug tugged at his shoulders. "Long time. Probably since I was a kid."
"Oh." He didn't know what his response was supposed to mean. Mostly because he didn't know what Dave's answer, concise as it was, was supposed to be. "I'm surprised you're as healthy as you are."
Dave shrugged again. "Lucky, I guess." His tone, while for the most part noncommital held a strange note of what could have been bitterness, or irony. Hal wasn't sure what to do with that either. He traced his thumb over the tabletop, thinking.
Finally, sounding a tiny bit surprised with himself, as though words exiting his mouth was a rarity in and of itself, the soldier said,"It's habit. But it reminds me of a lot of people, and a lot of places. Mostly good people, and even if the places were a hellhole, the people made it okay. If I can remember to enjoy it, I think of them."
His words stopped as abruptly as they started, and all Otacon could hear was the snain pattering against the roof and windows. It took a second, but it clicked that what Dave was saying was that it was a comfortable smell. A safe smell. A little of the tension seemed to run from him, as he considered this. Otacon nodded, half at himself and half at Dave's words.
Even super soldiers had to have good memories, right? He couldn't stop the smile from twitching at the corner of his lips, and he stood and stretched, allowing himself to privately wonder at what memories the soldier might have.
It was time to let it go. "Hey, I think I picked up some icecream like a week ago. You want some?"
n the flashes of perception, he sees a figure in white in a bright room, kneeling over a computer or asking him questions he is never permitted to remember. He sinks in and out of it like a dream. Sometimes, he feels the sound of her high heels reverberate through his suspension fluid, and they are the only thing that breaks through the nothingness, and remind him that he is now alive.
Once he sees, with the heat-eye embedded in the centre of his hairless brow, that her hand is pressed against his glass. He watches as her breath turns the glass yellow-green in front of her face. She bares her sky-blue teeth beneath her orange-red lips, forming the hiss of an 's', and he reads her lips as she says, "Snake. I'm sorry."
Too many people are in the streets for the stealth camouflage to be an option – too many collisions, too few real hiding places for recharging, no cardboard box that a protestor or rioter isn't living in. At first, he walks the streets in a long magenta plastic raincoat lifted from a camping store from where the compressed gas heaters and water purifiers and canned food had been looted long ago. Eventually he realises no-one cares at all what he looks like, and gives it to Naomi – it's huge on her, and billows out around her like a flag. When the troubled clouds do eventually split into rain, he finds he can perceive each individual droplet as it hangs in the air, soft and round, a subtle dish in the middle like the sides of a blood cell. He lets one strike his face, and doesn't feel it – he only feels the rachets grind in his temples as his visor automatically slides closed to prevent water and radiation damage.
He keeps her close and defends her. A few times he has to kill protestors who attempt to take Naomi's water, and a few more times he has to kill them because Naomi tells him to do so. Little things that used to change his perception, like light and darkness, no longer affect him – everything is perpetually lit, and everyone's eyes shine bright white like the eyes of animals. He'd lose track of the time if a mental display wasn't shouting it in the back of his thoughts. Days and nights pass, but he remains in perpetual twilight.
"I can't enter the radioactive exclusion zone," Naomi reminds him. "I'll be waiting behind. You know your duty."
She is exhausted from lack of sleep, and her face looks small and flat with no makeup. He remains on guard, hand on the hilt of Frank's sword.
"Tell me what your duty is."
"Hunt down Liquid and terminate him."
"That's right. Terminate Liquid. Terminate his men. Terminate anyone else working with him. We absolutely cannot let him shape the world any longer." She looked straight into his eyes, despite the visor being in the way. "It's our revenge, and you've been given the opportunity to take it. And then I'll let you go back to wherever it was I took you from, but with your mind at peace."
He approaches a small band of soldiers dressed in lead-lined gear and masks, firing on an NBC helicopter passing overhead. He does not hurry. The machines moving his limbs stiffen his gait into that of a lurching dead man.
"Where is Liquid Snake?" he asks them. Their leader glances around, confused, then back to the chopper, which is veering unsteadily away, shedding pieces of camera. Snake remembers that he should be moving his lips to talk to the living. He slides his visor back, and the lenses implanted in his eyes automatically adjust the light levels for him, a thousand times quicker than his human irises could. He tries to lick his lips, but his mouth doesn't produce moisture any more.
"Where is Liquid Snake?" he asks, with his face.
The soldiers stare at him in confusion. One of them, on the back left, lifts a banded glove to gently touch his own face – noticing the resemblance between twins, Snake realises, in a flash of inspiration that leaves his head sizzling, a little more of his soul dragged back into his body.
"Man, you're – " says their leader, and then he laughs, nervously. A tiny drop of spittle lands on the inside of the clear screen of his breathing apparatus. "You're that one without a shirt from the cell, the one Wolf captured. The boss's brother. He said you were dead."
Snake feels the exoskeleton's stealth field pass over him, a shudder as easy and involuntary as skin prickling in the cold. He steps. He is behind them. His body re-emerges just as their leader finishes blinking his eye. Making sure his left hand is clamped firmly around the leader's neck, he flicks his right arm to flip the gun attachment from his forearm and straight into his hand, and rests its barrel against the man's temple. He isn't thinking about it. The suit knows what to do.
The soldier's nerves finally transmit the sensation to his conscious mind and he gives a weak and miserable little scream, that has no power behind it, because Snake is forcing away all the air.
Obviously the soldier's comrades start firing, and Snake feels the blade in his left hand vibrate and buzz as it effortlessly carves the bullets out of the air, the minds Naomi wired into his artificial arms calculating target and trajectory and power even faster than his human mind could.
"Take out your radio," Snake says with his body voice, no longer caring enough for civility to make his jaw open and close.
The man in Snake's arms grunts and Snake sees bright orange grow from the man's crotch and flow down under the cloth of the man's uniform, all the way down his left leg and onto his boot. More than anything, it's familiar, and Snake sees an image of someone in his mind's eye, a man he really liked, but it's overshadowed by the image of the man he loved, the man he loved the way an ember loves a cigarette.
"Take out your radio, and raise Liquid."
The man does, and Snake loosens his grip, letting him talk, and listening not to the words but to the long, impossibly low heartbeat-red rumble of the radio signal. He tilts his head until he finds the angle at which it's loudest, and then
murder isn't a sport!
he fires.
"I read your psych profile, Snake," Naomi says, in his head. "In fact, I memorised it, because it was the one taken of you on December 23rd, 1999, from just before you killed my brother. I used to read it every night, and tell myself I was looking at the twisted mind of a killer."
Naomi had wired herself into his head. He can faintly remember how on the Discovery she had anaesthetised a small patch behind his ear and bored the Codec unit straight into the coating of his brain. But when she had been flushing the dead parts from his brain, she built in a system connected straight to his thoughts. She spoke, and he could hear her words, forever.
"It mentioned you had a remarkably strong desire to live, a survival instinct unlike anything else your psychologist had ever encountered. Even my brother took years to recover from brain death. But somehow I knew you would take less time than that. It's one of the reasons I chose you."
"It couldn't have been because I'm able to beat Liquid," he thought back at her.
"You can still beat him. You're the closest thing to him that I have, and now you're a walking tank yourself – I can't think of a more deserving way for him to die."
"Is this what you think I deserve?"
Snake's lie detection algorithm requires more sophisticated biometric input data than just a tone of voice to be remotely accurate, but even so, it starts sending him needle-nosed warning thoughts when she changes the subject.
"But what I really want to ask you was that it also contained information about your faith, Snake. Seeing as you were entitled to a burial appropriate to whatever you believed in."
"You didn't bury me."
"It's a pity that you never practiced Voodou."
Snake knows what she's about to ask, with a damaged human part of his mind, and doesn't want to continue this conversation. His transmitter is busy spraying Liquid's frequency out in every direction, attempting to triangulate a position with the signal he caught earlier. But it's Naomi asking, and his rebuilt, microchip mind can't imagine disobeying an order from his Bokor.
"According to the report, you had no mainstream religious belief, but some spiritual beliefs that you appear to have arrived at on your own. Almost like a folk religion, splintering off from the 'religion' of being a soldier, and killing, and what it is you do." And here her voice darkened, "It said you believed strongly in an afterlife. Is that true?"
"Yeah. I did."
"Were you right?"
Snake can feel, on his Soliton radar, the cold green lines of a parked APC, smeared with static from the EM interference spat out by the warhead's broken atoms, but bright and distinct.
"I don't know."
"But you've seen death. How could you not know?"
"Where I went," Snake thought at her, "there was nothing."
"Nothing? No clouds? No magma? No waist-deep rivers with banks of flame?"
"No-one was there waiting for me."
"Then, why are you still not sure?"
The APC is dressed with spray-painted nose art of a grinning Disney-style snake coiled around a missile, and, on Snake's radar, the blue fans of gazes that clipped through it like a shroud – something he'd been dependent on even before his eyes were augmented with cameras and his arms were solid metal. The gun flips into Snake's hand, automatically inhaling bullets with a click.
"I never was arrogant enough to think that when I died, I'd get to go to a good place."
He kicks the doors open, in against their hinges.
Liquid isn't in the APC, so he kills the people who are. It is a warning shot, injuring Liquid rather than killing him. They never even turn around.
Snake stares at their limp bodies, slumped and comically empty, and he remembers corridors pungent with antiseptic and blood, a corridor that looked the way Snake used to believe Hell looked like until he saw it himself, and he feels for the first time that even in this body he is still who he used to be. It is agony, and he leaves the APC, not bothering to close the doors. It's the feeling that followed him around ever since that minefield, ever since he beat a man to death, as passionate as a soldier murdering a target isn't. It's a deep and toxic shame, and the metal parts of his mind panic, because those parts weren't prepared to accommodate feelings of that magnitude.
"Snake, why aren't you focused on the mission?"
"Naomi – "
"This is your last chance. Find that APC again, and don't rest until Liquid and everyone he's working with is terminated. Go!"
"Naomi. You didn't choose me because I'm strong, or because you want revenge on me."
"What is it, Snake?"
"It's because even though I never knew him well, we understood each other when I killed him. I'm his legacy. Not yours."
"Snake, why aren't you focused on the mission?"
And Snake realises – this isn't the real Naomi, it's just the Naomi Personality Complex, a computer simulacrum given the basic ability to monitor Snake's behaviour and respond upon it in real time the way Naomi would. NPC's AI can't find anything else worth commenting on, so she's looping.
He ignores her, and thinks of Liquid raising that huge foot and the sound Fox's spine made when the plating cracked. And he thinks about how he wasn't able to save him, or Meryl, or Otacon, and the shame wakes him a little.
"I'll get back to it," he tells NPC.
"Good luck, Snake," she tells him. Adorable. Just like old times.
Liquid's radio frequency isn't responding to his signal spray the way it did before – he's either changed bands or destroyed his radio. So Snake sends off a scattergun blast of transmission on all frequencies, runs, blasts again. It's just a burst of white noise, the kind that will blend right in with all the EMP interference. He senses a few yellow-electric buzzes of radios recalculating their tuning depending on his output frequency, and he triangulates his points in his head, a constellation of electricity. He's got no way of knowing which one of those would lead to Liquid or not, so he resolves to work his way up from the nearest.
The nearest turns out to be a civilian news crew – this one from FOX – using radios to compensate for the knocked-out phone mast. Snake flickers his jet black carapace into an outline of bent air and carries on. They don't notice him, but they notice the electrical signals from his camouflage interfering with their camera. They don't realise how lucky they are that Liquid's men haven't come across them.
The second nearest is a Genome and his partner, engaged in intense conversation. As Snake slips closer, he realises they're trying to figure out how to smoke cigarettes under their breather masks. He runs the shorter one through with his sword, and his bleeding body shakes and quivers in pain as he soaks up his partner's fire in the fraction of a second before Snake fires his gun. It takes off a medium-sized chunk of skull, like a spoon on top of an eggshell.
"Good job, Snake," says NPC, noticing his behaviour. "Move onto your next target quickly. We don't have time to lose."
Even though she's just a machine, the machine part of his mind takes the praise as real and genuine, and he just can't feel the shame. He owes everything to her, it's insisting, because she brought him back from that place.
The human part of his mind knows that the real reason he owes everything to her is that she's the only person who can send him back there.
The bleeding man is still holding his packet of cigarettes, probably now sodden with fallout – even more cancer. Snake brushes back the man's fingers and takes them.
The man holding the third nearest radio is different. Snake disables the lock, crushing it in his metallic hand, and eases the doors of the APC open. Hunched up in a standard-issue special forces sleeping back is a young man whose face shines cooler than the rest of him – water evaporation. He has been crying in his sleep.
Orange heat soaks the crotch of man's jeans, and then Snake, hand wrapped around the man's throat, looks at the his face and finally sees. He hesitates. The machine part of his mind is struggling to rewire itself to accommodate the new memory.
"Otacon?" he says, realising too late he isn't using his mouth voice. "Why are you working for Liquid?"
He lets go and Otacon drops to the floor, lips moist with slime, panting for air in long, pained heaves. His skin is darker than before – he's sporting a radiation tan.
"It's like you understand better than anyone. Survival."
Naomi wants him dead. Naomi told him so herself – terminate Liquid. Terminate everyone working for Liquid. And as Otacon talks, all Snake can see is how delicate and unarmoured his throat is. He'd be dead in a second, entrails spilling out from that white radiation suit, warmth steaming off them golden-green in the cool air. And it's what Naomi wants, he thinks, it's all I'm alive to do.
The suit compresses synthetic muscle underneath jet black plates of carbon ceramic. The small minds embedded in each of his arms flicker on, and prepare to move –
I can't do it, Snake thinks.
His body seizes up, and some gear somewhere in his chest makes a terrible shudder that grinds right up through the remains of his organic skull, but he is stilled, and he and Otacon are still talking.
He makes himself focus on Otacon's eyes as he answers his questions. It's not love that keeps him from killing him so long. It's shame.
"It doesn't matter who wins in a nuclear war," says Otacon. "All we need is some hope that life will go on."
And Snake knows. Snake knows why Liquid was here, and why Otacon is protecting a man he knows to be a monster. He can even take a wild guess where Liquid is going to end up going. It's not hard for Snake to think like Liquid.
If the Genomes, Liquid's chosen children, monsters of science, survive like cockroaches when the missiles begin to fly, it's still life. Their broken DNA , their disease susceptibility, their weaknesses – who the hell is Snake to judge?
He tells Otacon Naomi has his arm, the one still attached to his body after Ocelot took his slice of the pie. His own genes aren't much better, but they're all he has to offer.
And when he leaves, he carves the sword deep into the ground, a long X, feeling the blade buzz through the tender tar and carve straight through the stones in the earth. The urge to attack is too painful to ignore, but he. can't. do. it.
Washington D.C. does not shine in the distance. It has no spires of glass or city lights; no people to light them. Naomi crawls out of her tent, and reattaches her rebreather. She isn't speaking to him. She is too angry.
Snake scrapes a fingertip along the unpolished steel on the side of where he had once kept a ribcage, and white-hot sparks follow the path of his finger. One of them catches the end of the cigarette, and he almost sighs just looking at it, at how beautiful it is and how much he needs it, right now. The taut dead skin of his face, bolted onto his metal skull, is getting harder and harder to move as it cures, but he manages to open his mouth wide enough to insert the tip of the cigarette onto his numb tongue.
"Snake," Naomi says, finally able to break the silence. "You don't even have lungs."
"Got nothing to lose, then," he tells her. He can sense the temperature rise as he draws hot smoke into the artificial air sacs pocketed off at the bottom of his abbreviated bronchial tube – tiny compact bladders with no respiratory function, merely there to provide air for vocalisation.
"Did you even see your lungs? Black and purple and white, like spoiled meat. I preserved as much of your body as I could, but I had to throw those out."
Snake feels a strange sense of disgusted pride at that, like the feeling of excavating a long ingrown hair.
His air sacs are thick and leathery, and while transmission fluid does circulate through the membrane, he lacks most of the parts of his brain nicotine works upon. It's amazingly unsatisfying, he's unable to even feel the burn in his mouth, and so he stares down at the cigarette in his hand and realises he's a zombie, mindlessly copying the human behaviour of its life without understanding its purpose.
"The good news," Naomi says, "is that we haven't necessarily lost Liquid. But the bad news is that we don't have the time to go searching for him. The best way we can hurt him at this stage is shattering his dream of nuclear war."
She folds her arms, and looks hard into Snake's faceplate, just above where his eyes are.
" America will make its first strike in revenge against the terrorists, to satisfy the people. It may fire at a small, unarmed nation, underneath the nuclear umbrella of an ally. Or it may simply choose the option we always believed it would choose, and attack Russia, or China. Whatever the case, it would spark retaliation after retaliation. To prevent nuclear war, all we have to do is make it impossible for America to make the launch. And I need you for that."
Snake inhales smoke, and feels nothing.
"How many members of Congress are still alive?"
"I don't have enough information to answer that question. And on top of that, there's then the automated systems – the missile defence projects, the judgement databases, bipartisan engines. The black projects from the 80s; the "Strangelove Devices", doomsday bombs. But if we want to survive, it all needs to die."
She says this matter-of-factly, like a doctor discussing surgery that needs to be performed.
"How do we know there will be a retaliation?"
"Thousands upon thousands of people are dead in the worst domestic disaster in history. America needs blood. It's desperate for a war."
"Even a nuclear war, with no chance of a win? Naomi," Snake tosses the cigarette to the ground, "the government has done a lot of things to damage this country, and hurt people I care about. I'm not denying that. But it's not stupid. Nuclear war is in no-one's best interests."
"You're very talkative today," Naomi says, but behind her blank expression Snake can sense fear.
"Let's stop thinking about how we can beat Liquid. We should join him."
"What?"
"Liquid's a big thinker. He'll want his own country to rule over; a nuclear power not on the nuclear map. He's going to take Zanzibar Land and feel like he's able to attack."
Naomi swallows.
"But I'm not interested in attacking," Snake snarled. "I'm tired of fighting in a war that won't even happen. We shouldn't be out changing the world that way. Right now, all I want to do is get somewhere safe."
"Where? Where's that?"
"The only place safe from a nuclear war would be a facility made of concrete one hundred floors down. Fortunately," Snake smirked, "I've been to one."
Naomi presses her hands against her thighs.
"But you've overwritten your programming. You're fully autonomous now. So why? Why do you want to protect me?"
Snake looks at her. "Because all we have left is each other."
"Snake – "
"I'm getting you out of here."
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| | | | Snake Eater
Posts : 18
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Join date : 2012-06-04
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