MGS: Intervention
Aug. 14th, 2010 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: Intervention
Series: MGS
Pairings: Snake/Otacon, although more in the past than the present
Rating: PG
Notes: Written two years ago for the mini!bang, I think. Takes place between the final act of MGS4 and the Epilogue.
Summary: Hal takes a ride with an unexpected ally.
There was a hollow thumping that kept trying to wake him. It was uneven, unpredictable, and every time he had nearly managed to nod off again, it knocked sleep away again.
Hal opened his eyes, and realised the sound was his head, bumping against the window.
“What’s going –”
This wasn’t their car, wasn’t the grimy old Ford truck that Snake insisted on keeping despite the carbon taxes and the better, safer models on the road. And it wasn’t Snake in the driver’s seat.
Which explained why his head was moving through heavy thickness to slowly cracking open, and the plastic restraints trapping his wrists and ankles together.
Hal came awake fully, drawing away from the grey-haired man in the driver’s seat while his eyes narrowed. His glasses has been jolted to sit crookedly over the bridge of his nose, magnifying the right side of his spectrum of vision and blurring the left.
“Who are you?”
The man in the driver’s seat glanced over at him, grey-green eyes surprisingly unconcerned, and Hal’s heart skipped a beat.
“Who are you?” he repeated, disbelief running like a knife over his nerves. There weren’t any left, Liquid’s body frozen in a block of ice, Solidus rotting in a Washington cemetery, Big Boss burnt to ashes in the Netherlands. Snake dying by inches on the couch, heading steadily towards a resolution Hal just couldn’t think about anymore.
“Your concierge let David Marlett into your building. Complemented me on my new style.” It was David’s voice, a shade less gritty, a shade deeper. David’s contemplative voice, the one he hasn’t used in a long time. Not since everything turned black and white and he’d found there was no point in reflecting on melancholy memories because the days now were all bitter and no sweet.
“My concierge would confuse you for Richard Nixon, and he’s been dead for 20 years,” said Otacon in a flat voice. He flexed his wrists, resting awkwardly in his lap, not expecting any give and not finding any. Mouth thin and hard, he continued in a softer, harsher tone. “There aren’t any more. I looked into that after the Big Shell, made sure. Only three viable clones, only one made it past 40.” Paused to run his eyes over the dark suit, the grey hair, the beard. And beneath those obvious markers, his carriage, the tilt of his head, the focus of his eyes. Even with skewed glasses, it wasn’t a mistake he could make sitting right beside the man. “You’re not him.”
The driver looked back to the road, negotiated the car – a Honda hybrid, smooth handling but shocks wearing down – into the left lane to pass a straggler. Beyond the road’s shoulder green fields were flashing by, punctuated here and there by barns or small houses. A highway, in the country. Definitely not Boston, which was the last thing he remembered. Coming home with groceries, mac and cheese for Sunny, Thai stir-fry for him and Dave, getting out of the car and – how long had he been gone? Where were they?
“About a hundred miles out from Boston,” said Snake’s voice, jumping in on his thoughts with disturbing accuracy, a talent David always kept up his sleeve like an ace, but hasn’t used in long time.
“Who are you?” he asked again. There weren’t any more. No more undiscovered brothers, no more surprises, no more teeth planted to spring up tall and fully-armoured from the soil in their way. He knew it, held the fact perfect and sure in his hands. But there weren’t any left, either. Only one, for what little time he had, and then there would be none.
“A dead man. Dead too many times to count. More deaths than I could live through, and more lives than were mine.”
“I’m afraid I’m not very good at riddles,” said Hal, turning to stare stiffly out past the windshield.
“John will do, then.”
“Big Boss died in Outer Heaven.”
“And Zanzibarland. And Russia.”
“And I thought Snake had bad habits,” said Hal, dryly. “Do you really expect me to believe you’re Big Boss?”
“You could ask Snake – ask David. I know it’s not an alias,” said John, throwing the name out cavalierly, like a bad hand of cards, while Hal struggled not to flinch. “He would tell you.”
“He’s not here. Funny, the man who could identify you not being here.”
“I hadn’t heard you were so cynical.”
“I reserve it for Snake and people claiming to be related to him.”
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to cloud over. The dashboard clock read 4:53. David and Sunny would be expecting him back. Would be beginning to worry, maybe. Hal closed his eyes. “What do you want? David? You could have gone up there and talked to him. Me? I don’t have anything that could help you, and I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.” The seatbelt cutting across his neck was beginning to chafe. He stifled the urge to try to shrug it away.
“What would happen if I showed up on your doorstep to talk to David?”
“If you are who you say you are? He would probably shoot you. If you had come a while ago, maybe not. But –” He’s grown so hard. Refused to let anything matter. Taken relief in his work to keep from having to think about himself. Become a soldier so he doesn’t have to worry about being a person. Being alive. And what that means. “He’s not very compromising right now.”
“Still following orders?”
There was no sarcasm there, no insult. A flat tone with just enough of a catch that Hal looked over and read in the lines of the face he knew without knowing the man under it, a kind of nostalgia mixed with the bizarreness of a funhouse mirror.
“He was always good at that,” John continued meditatively. “I had hoped that by now he would learn to make his own decisions. Would have learned following orders wasn’t always the right thing to do.”
“He knows,” said Hal sharply, eyes flashing, slightly shocked and not a bit sick at hearing this from the man who had tried to teach the lesson by forcing David to kill the person he respected most in the world.
“It’s ruined his life, again and again, and yet he still goes back to it when he’s in trouble.”
“Must have been trained well,” flared Hal, unable to help himself, rage burning hot and bright and singing his throat like neat alcohol.
There was a jagged silence, John returning to the slow lane, Hal wishing these were the old days when David had been so concerned for his safety as to make him wear a weapon when leaving the house – although surely John would have taken it, and even if not … He sighed.
“Look. What do you want? Because I can tell you, even if I go back with you, Snake … I don’t know what will happen, but it won’t be good and it will probably do him a lot of harm, if that’s something you care about.”
“You have the girl now,” said John, out of nowhere, and Hal turned so fast the seatbelt contracted over his chest, fear drying his mouth and running over his voice like sandpaper.
“Don’t –”
John raised a calming hand without looking away from the road. “It’s not a threat. Just a fact. You still have someone, after David. I don’t. That last mission destroyed everyone I had left, except for him.” John looked over, met Hal’s eyes from under heavy brows. He spoke with a calm factuality, as if discussing simple mathematics. The same tone David had used to tell the long and heart-wrenching story of Zanzibarland and Outer Heaven. “He is the only person left alive I still have ties to. Who I have to do right by. You say he’s following orders again. Let me help.”
Hal felt a cold shiver run down his spine, the hairs at the back of his neck standing on end. Casting his mind over what David had told him, he knew that it was true. Hal was losing David an inch a day and it was tearing him apart. But if John was who he claimed to be, he had lost Ocelot, Eva, and even Zero and Liquid in a sense, all in one shattering blow. His men, his lovers, his friends of decades. All gone.
He cleared his throat with a short cough. “Help do what?”
“If he’s following orders, it means he’s trying to protect the greater good. Means he’s been given the option of killing himself, or everyone else. Means he’ll take the former.”
The old M9, hastily tucked into the lockbox in the closet top shelf again and again. Yes. Oh God, yes.
Hal looked stiffly out at the road, jaw locked.
“I can stop him. Convince him to do what’s right, not what he’s told to. Convince him to live for himself again.”
Do what you can’t. Do what he doesn’t trust you to convince him of anymore. Save him with the words he won’t listen to from his best friend, from his once-lover.
“How?”
“All I need is to talk to him. Alone. Somewhere that he’ll listen. Some time that he’ll listen.”
“I don’t have any influence on that anymore.” Not since I chose life over him. He didn’t regret it, didn’t regret choosing life over death, even with David. It still hurt, every day.
“Really? He loves you.” Another ace, laid down like a deuce. Hal narrowed his eyes.
“Maybe, somewhere. He doesn’t listen to me. Not in this. Not in anything regarding his life. His death,” Hal added, in a harsh, choking voice.
“He will. You don’t have to ask. Just… arrange a time to be gone. And tell him to visit me.”
John slipped a knife out of his pocket and, before Hal could react, slit the restraints on his wrists. Then, from the cup-holder between them, picked up an index card and gave it to him. Hal took it hesitantly, and read. Arlington, 45.
“He’ll know it,” added John.
Hal flipped the card over, to find a phone number scrawled in blue ink, the numbers tilted slightly, the 4 written in one stroke rather than the usual two. David’s writing.
“Tell me when you’ll be gone. I’ll be there.” John flicked on the turn indicator, and took a right at Freeburn 405A.
“He still might try to kill you.”
“I think I can handle it.”
“And you?” Hal flipped the card over between his fingers, watching John. The old soldier didn’t take his eyes from the road.
“I never really thought of them as my sons, you know. What was done was done without my knowledge or consent. But I never wanted them – never wanted him – to die before me. I won’t fight him, Emmerich. Not now.”
Hal sighed, and replaced the card in the cup-holder. “A friend of ours is getting married next week. We leave on Tuesday at 10:00. Snake’s not coming.” Hal tapped his fingers on his leg, watching as they drove through the outskirts of Freeburn towards what looked like the small downtown area. “I’ll tell him. Whether he comes or not probably won’t depend on that, though.”
John slowed the car to a stop beside a crowded sidewalk, and handed Hal the knife for his ankle ties. “You need to give yourself more credit. He’s the only one of the three – of all of us – who has had something like a family. Like happiness.”
Hal dropped the knife in beside the card and reached for the door. Turned to look back over his shoulder. “You should give him more credit. He’s the only one of all of you who chose it.” He opened the door and stepped out. “But, thanks. If – if you can help him – thank you.”
If you can help me save his life, even for one day –
Hal closed the door behind him, turned, and looked around for a bus stop. When he turned back, the car was gone.
Series: MGS
Pairings: Snake/Otacon, although more in the past than the present
Rating: PG
Notes: Written two years ago for the mini!bang, I think. Takes place between the final act of MGS4 and the Epilogue.
Summary: Hal takes a ride with an unexpected ally.
There was a hollow thumping that kept trying to wake him. It was uneven, unpredictable, and every time he had nearly managed to nod off again, it knocked sleep away again.
Hal opened his eyes, and realised the sound was his head, bumping against the window.
“What’s going –”
This wasn’t their car, wasn’t the grimy old Ford truck that Snake insisted on keeping despite the carbon taxes and the better, safer models on the road. And it wasn’t Snake in the driver’s seat.
Which explained why his head was moving through heavy thickness to slowly cracking open, and the plastic restraints trapping his wrists and ankles together.
Hal came awake fully, drawing away from the grey-haired man in the driver’s seat while his eyes narrowed. His glasses has been jolted to sit crookedly over the bridge of his nose, magnifying the right side of his spectrum of vision and blurring the left.
“Who are you?”
The man in the driver’s seat glanced over at him, grey-green eyes surprisingly unconcerned, and Hal’s heart skipped a beat.
“Who are you?” he repeated, disbelief running like a knife over his nerves. There weren’t any left, Liquid’s body frozen in a block of ice, Solidus rotting in a Washington cemetery, Big Boss burnt to ashes in the Netherlands. Snake dying by inches on the couch, heading steadily towards a resolution Hal just couldn’t think about anymore.
“Your concierge let David Marlett into your building. Complemented me on my new style.” It was David’s voice, a shade less gritty, a shade deeper. David’s contemplative voice, the one he hasn’t used in a long time. Not since everything turned black and white and he’d found there was no point in reflecting on melancholy memories because the days now were all bitter and no sweet.
“My concierge would confuse you for Richard Nixon, and he’s been dead for 20 years,” said Otacon in a flat voice. He flexed his wrists, resting awkwardly in his lap, not expecting any give and not finding any. Mouth thin and hard, he continued in a softer, harsher tone. “There aren’t any more. I looked into that after the Big Shell, made sure. Only three viable clones, only one made it past 40.” Paused to run his eyes over the dark suit, the grey hair, the beard. And beneath those obvious markers, his carriage, the tilt of his head, the focus of his eyes. Even with skewed glasses, it wasn’t a mistake he could make sitting right beside the man. “You’re not him.”
The driver looked back to the road, negotiated the car – a Honda hybrid, smooth handling but shocks wearing down – into the left lane to pass a straggler. Beyond the road’s shoulder green fields were flashing by, punctuated here and there by barns or small houses. A highway, in the country. Definitely not Boston, which was the last thing he remembered. Coming home with groceries, mac and cheese for Sunny, Thai stir-fry for him and Dave, getting out of the car and – how long had he been gone? Where were they?
“About a hundred miles out from Boston,” said Snake’s voice, jumping in on his thoughts with disturbing accuracy, a talent David always kept up his sleeve like an ace, but hasn’t used in long time.
“Who are you?” he asked again. There weren’t any more. No more undiscovered brothers, no more surprises, no more teeth planted to spring up tall and fully-armoured from the soil in their way. He knew it, held the fact perfect and sure in his hands. But there weren’t any left, either. Only one, for what little time he had, and then there would be none.
“A dead man. Dead too many times to count. More deaths than I could live through, and more lives than were mine.”
“I’m afraid I’m not very good at riddles,” said Hal, turning to stare stiffly out past the windshield.
“John will do, then.”
“Big Boss died in Outer Heaven.”
“And Zanzibarland. And Russia.”
“And I thought Snake had bad habits,” said Hal, dryly. “Do you really expect me to believe you’re Big Boss?”
“You could ask Snake – ask David. I know it’s not an alias,” said John, throwing the name out cavalierly, like a bad hand of cards, while Hal struggled not to flinch. “He would tell you.”
“He’s not here. Funny, the man who could identify you not being here.”
“I hadn’t heard you were so cynical.”
“I reserve it for Snake and people claiming to be related to him.”
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to cloud over. The dashboard clock read 4:53. David and Sunny would be expecting him back. Would be beginning to worry, maybe. Hal closed his eyes. “What do you want? David? You could have gone up there and talked to him. Me? I don’t have anything that could help you, and I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.” The seatbelt cutting across his neck was beginning to chafe. He stifled the urge to try to shrug it away.
“What would happen if I showed up on your doorstep to talk to David?”
“If you are who you say you are? He would probably shoot you. If you had come a while ago, maybe not. But –” He’s grown so hard. Refused to let anything matter. Taken relief in his work to keep from having to think about himself. Become a soldier so he doesn’t have to worry about being a person. Being alive. And what that means. “He’s not very compromising right now.”
“Still following orders?”
There was no sarcasm there, no insult. A flat tone with just enough of a catch that Hal looked over and read in the lines of the face he knew without knowing the man under it, a kind of nostalgia mixed with the bizarreness of a funhouse mirror.
“He was always good at that,” John continued meditatively. “I had hoped that by now he would learn to make his own decisions. Would have learned following orders wasn’t always the right thing to do.”
“He knows,” said Hal sharply, eyes flashing, slightly shocked and not a bit sick at hearing this from the man who had tried to teach the lesson by forcing David to kill the person he respected most in the world.
“It’s ruined his life, again and again, and yet he still goes back to it when he’s in trouble.”
“Must have been trained well,” flared Hal, unable to help himself, rage burning hot and bright and singing his throat like neat alcohol.
There was a jagged silence, John returning to the slow lane, Hal wishing these were the old days when David had been so concerned for his safety as to make him wear a weapon when leaving the house – although surely John would have taken it, and even if not … He sighed.
“Look. What do you want? Because I can tell you, even if I go back with you, Snake … I don’t know what will happen, but it won’t be good and it will probably do him a lot of harm, if that’s something you care about.”
“You have the girl now,” said John, out of nowhere, and Hal turned so fast the seatbelt contracted over his chest, fear drying his mouth and running over his voice like sandpaper.
“Don’t –”
John raised a calming hand without looking away from the road. “It’s not a threat. Just a fact. You still have someone, after David. I don’t. That last mission destroyed everyone I had left, except for him.” John looked over, met Hal’s eyes from under heavy brows. He spoke with a calm factuality, as if discussing simple mathematics. The same tone David had used to tell the long and heart-wrenching story of Zanzibarland and Outer Heaven. “He is the only person left alive I still have ties to. Who I have to do right by. You say he’s following orders again. Let me help.”
Hal felt a cold shiver run down his spine, the hairs at the back of his neck standing on end. Casting his mind over what David had told him, he knew that it was true. Hal was losing David an inch a day and it was tearing him apart. But if John was who he claimed to be, he had lost Ocelot, Eva, and even Zero and Liquid in a sense, all in one shattering blow. His men, his lovers, his friends of decades. All gone.
He cleared his throat with a short cough. “Help do what?”
“If he’s following orders, it means he’s trying to protect the greater good. Means he’s been given the option of killing himself, or everyone else. Means he’ll take the former.”
The old M9, hastily tucked into the lockbox in the closet top shelf again and again. Yes. Oh God, yes.
Hal looked stiffly out at the road, jaw locked.
“I can stop him. Convince him to do what’s right, not what he’s told to. Convince him to live for himself again.”
Do what you can’t. Do what he doesn’t trust you to convince him of anymore. Save him with the words he won’t listen to from his best friend, from his once-lover.
“How?”
“All I need is to talk to him. Alone. Somewhere that he’ll listen. Some time that he’ll listen.”
“I don’t have any influence on that anymore.” Not since I chose life over him. He didn’t regret it, didn’t regret choosing life over death, even with David. It still hurt, every day.
“Really? He loves you.” Another ace, laid down like a deuce. Hal narrowed his eyes.
“Maybe, somewhere. He doesn’t listen to me. Not in this. Not in anything regarding his life. His death,” Hal added, in a harsh, choking voice.
“He will. You don’t have to ask. Just… arrange a time to be gone. And tell him to visit me.”
John slipped a knife out of his pocket and, before Hal could react, slit the restraints on his wrists. Then, from the cup-holder between them, picked up an index card and gave it to him. Hal took it hesitantly, and read. Arlington, 45.
“He’ll know it,” added John.
Hal flipped the card over, to find a phone number scrawled in blue ink, the numbers tilted slightly, the 4 written in one stroke rather than the usual two. David’s writing.
“Tell me when you’ll be gone. I’ll be there.” John flicked on the turn indicator, and took a right at Freeburn 405A.
“He still might try to kill you.”
“I think I can handle it.”
“And you?” Hal flipped the card over between his fingers, watching John. The old soldier didn’t take his eyes from the road.
“I never really thought of them as my sons, you know. What was done was done without my knowledge or consent. But I never wanted them – never wanted him – to die before me. I won’t fight him, Emmerich. Not now.”
Hal sighed, and replaced the card in the cup-holder. “A friend of ours is getting married next week. We leave on Tuesday at 10:00. Snake’s not coming.” Hal tapped his fingers on his leg, watching as they drove through the outskirts of Freeburn towards what looked like the small downtown area. “I’ll tell him. Whether he comes or not probably won’t depend on that, though.”
John slowed the car to a stop beside a crowded sidewalk, and handed Hal the knife for his ankle ties. “You need to give yourself more credit. He’s the only one of the three – of all of us – who has had something like a family. Like happiness.”
Hal dropped the knife in beside the card and reached for the door. Turned to look back over his shoulder. “You should give him more credit. He’s the only one of all of you who chose it.” He opened the door and stepped out. “But, thanks. If – if you can help him – thank you.”
If you can help me save his life, even for one day –
Hal closed the door behind him, turned, and looked around for a bus stop. When he turned back, the car was gone.
