Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The wounds have healed but the anger is still fresh when Snake finds him in France. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re staying at the same hotel. Snake passes him at the bar and leaves him a crumpled piece of paper with a room number on it. He blends in better with society these days: his well-kept greying beard, his long khaki coat, his smart blue suit. Only the eye-patch marks him apart from the other eccentric CEOs who clog up joints like this, getting their kicks from cocaine because they’ve never felt an honest jolt of adrenaline in their lives.

Kaz can’t believe the audacity. Can’t believe that Snake thinks that he’ll actually-

He doesn’t take the elevator. He labours up every single fucking stair so that the pain shoots through his remaining limbs and reminds him that this is a mista-

Kaz doesn’t knock. The door isn’t locked. Snake is waiting for him, looking out the window over the glittering Parisian skyline. He knew Kaz would come, of course. He’s Big Boss. Everyone comes around eventually. Kaz falls back against the door and clicks the lock shut. One of two things is going to happen in this room and no one should have to walk in on either accidentally. He says nothing - it’ll feel like defeat, if he’s the first one to talk.

“I’ve... been offered the command of FOXHOUND,” Snake says, in that low rumbling voice of his. “I’m considering taking it. Eventually.” He pauses, characteristically hesitant with declarative statements, like he hasn’t planned out what he’s going to say quite yet. And of course he hasn’t - who does something like plan out the first words you’re going to say to your estranged lover in over a decade? Not John fucking Naked Snake Big Boss, living goddamn legend and saviour to soldiers world round.

Snake turns to face him and even though the room is lit only by the city lights and the setting sun, his remaining eye is still so bright and clear and blue. “There’s a command position waiting for you there. If you want it.”

The laughter boils up inside him before he can even process the full reality of what’s been said. Kaz heard the words, but he can’t quite believe them. He has to brace himself against the door or he’s gonna kick his cane right out from under his feet from how hard he’s laughing

“I… I was thinking of what the absolute worst thing you could say to me was and that’s… that’s all you got?” Kaz spits on the floor. “Fuck you.”

“Kaz…”

“No, fuck you. You took everything from me and you think that you can just give it back like that? Who are you, God? Shit, Snake.”

This isn’t what he came here to do. What he briefly envisioned on the trek up the stairs, between blinding shots of rage and buried hurt and physical pain, was that he could come into this room, listen to what Big Boss had to say, and then leave without saying a single goddamn thing in return. It’s stupid in retrospect: he thought that he could look… what? Cool? Undamaged? Did he think he could win for once?

Of course that’s not what he wanted. He came here yell, to spit in the Boss’ face, to -

“Kaz, it’s not like that…”

“Then what is it like?”

“There were too many unknowns when I first woke up. Everything that I did was necessary in order for me to-”

“If you dare say the words ‘achieve our dream’ to me right here and now, Snake, I swear I will kill you. I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.”

Snake folds his hands behind his back and calmly says nothing. Even though it’s a hollow threat. He looks so fucking refined and distinguished when he’s dressed in a suit and not covered in animal shit. Kaz hates it.

“You left me to die.”

“I arranged for your rescue and escape once I knew for certain where you were.”

“Ha!” Kaz throws back his head and laughs. “At my lowest you sent me a stranger who wore your face! Who I… who I let fuck me when I was vulnerable! What gave you the right!? When I was tied up in the hole, I swore I could hear your voice. I hallucinated your face so many times and then… when you actually came for me it was a phantom. It wasn’t even real. What a joke.”

“Do you wish I’d left you to die?”

“I wish I’d never met you. No- no, I wish that the grenade had gone off and I’d killed you, and myself. I wish we were both dead. I wish we’d died together.”

That makes Snake smile, makes him let out a throaty chuckle. He moves and Kaz panics, fumbles with the lock, but the Boss is wider than him. Much faster and stronger too, even though it wasn’t always that way. His cane clatters to the ground and Snake pins him against the door.

“We… we didn’t have to die in that jungle either,” Kaz says, dry mouthed. Snake hooks the bridge of his sunglasses with one thumb. Kaz can’t stop him, not with one arm. He whispers: “We should have burned together in the ocean. We should have gone down together, with the MSF.”

“There’s my Kaz. The honourable samurai longing for a death that has meaning.” Snake takes Kaz’s hand in his and sets it on his cheek. “Your palm is soft, only a penman’s callous. That’s not how it should be. You live in this civilized world, now, but in your dreams you hear the echo of gunfire.” He folds back the cuff of Kaz’s coat and presses his lips to the handcuff scars on his wrist. “Kaz, show me how they hurt you. I want to see.”

In the last three years Kaz has entertained the possibility that Snake is a sociopath but no, that’s not it. Snake’s an animal - he understands a few things: unconditional loyalty, instinct, survival. Anything more complicated than that eludes him and that’s what makes him so brilliant. And here was Kaz with his heart in his hands, earnestly grasping at something fragile with a man who loved him the same a person loves a dog, a gun, their military unit.

Kaz doesn’t stop Snake from pulling loose the knot of his tie. He doesn’t stop Snake from slowly undoing his shirt a button at a time, from pressing him against the wall with both hands, his calloused thumb stroking the dip in his jugular. He isn’t going to stop Snake from doing whatever he wants.

Why should he? If he leaves this room he still won’t have anything. Not his pride, not his limbs, not his dreams, not his partner, or the things they built together.

As Big Boss - the real one - kisses him for the first time in twelve years, Kaz catches the last strains of light setting over the Seine and the Conciergerie. It really is a pretty sunset.

If Kaz were to be honest he would admit that there was always something masochistic about it, even when it was good. Even when it was better than good. His first (real) night in the MSF was insane. One minute the Boss was kicking the shit out of him, the next they were sitting side by side in the grass looking at the stars and telling each other about their lives, their hopes and dreams. Then, they were knocking someone else’s head on straight, fighting back to back in the jungle.

By the time they stumbled home to base, Kaz was breathless and more than a little turned on. He understood now what it was about the guy that had made his own men betray him to join up. He was ready to pull the Boss into the nearest tent and say: “Take me. I’m not even gay, I don’t think, but just fuck me. I won’t tell anyone.” And: “while you’re at it, punch me in the face again.”

He heard all the rumours, of course, that Big Boss didn’t go for that sort of thing. That he’d been lovers with his mentor and swore never to touch another woman, or man for that matter. That he had some lover in Russia who he was staying true to. That he was practically asexual and only found thrill in battle. Kaz saw it too, how Snake edged away from flirtatious hands, how he glazed over blatant come ons - it was questionable how feigned the ignorance was.

That made it a challenge. He’d make Snake come to him. That’s the contest he’d win. (And he did the day Snake slammed him up against the back wall of their grimy, little office and growled: “What the hell am I even supposed to do with you, Kaz?” and Kaz, as an answer, artfully loosened his scarf.) In any other Operation a guy called “The Boss” would have the pick of the crop, and that’s where Kaz fucked up. Just because he was the only one Big Boss came to, the only one he actively pursued, he got sloppy. He forgot -

Well, Kaz never forgot, not for a moment, that they weren’t equals. But in the dead of night under the sheets, if Snake wanted to talk pretty and act like they were? Hell, if he wanted to do it in the middle of the day too, that was fine. It was intoxicating to have a living legend act like your “partner”, act like he meant it - even act like he believed it. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth.

When the Lockheed rep makes his toast to the end of the Gulf War and everyone else in the banquet room cheers, Kazuhira Miller just takes another shot of whiskey. This is the kind of thing he can get away with - even at a table full of career army jarheads - as a known eccentric. Wacky Master Miller with his tin leg and his plastic arm and his weird anecdotes about guerilla warfare and edible frogs. No one knows where he’s actually from or why he never takes off his sunglasses indoors. He’s got some pretty un-American opinions sometimes, but what else would you expect from the ol’ Hellmaster?

Kaz should have thrown the invitation to the Secretary of State’s white tie event in the trash where it belonged. With all the shit he’d seen in his life, whatever primitive tech the corporations were planning to haul out to impress DARPA held no interest for him. Besides - he knew what the real purpose of the dinner was. FOXHOUND had just completed its first Operation in the Middle East under the exemplary command of returned American hero Big Boss, and it had succeeded beyond all expectations. It wasn’t the sort of thing the military could brag about in the paper, so why not hold a self-congratulatory dinner and get drunk?

Once the speeches are over, Kaz’s Green Beret buddies disperse into crowd, hoping for the chance to talk to an incognito FOXHOUND operative. Hoping for a chance to get near the Big Boss.

He should have thrown the invitation in the trash, but he didn’t. Yeah - Kaz knows exactly why he’s there. And he knows exactly what he’s doing; a conspicuous guy like him, sitting alone at a table in the back with four empty glasses laid out in front of him. It takes maybe fifteen minutes until the familiar shadow darkens his table.

“Kazuhira Miller.”

“Hey, hey - The name’s McDonnel Benedict Miller now, don’t you know? I’m an American.” He doesn’t look up, but he gestures to his beret, indicating his recently earned honorary position in the United States Army Special Forces.

“As American as apple pie. Weren’t you crawling through the mud with the S.A.S. just a little less than two years ago?”

That gets Kaz’s attention. He looks up and sees Snake smiling, just the slightest quirk of his lips beneath that thick mustache. He’s entirely grey now, and aging with an elegance that simply isn’t fair. In his smart pinstripe suit and black trench-coat, he looks downright regal.

Kaz glances away. “Keeping tabs on me?”

“Of course.”

“Why? Do you want me for one of you extra operations?”

“Kaz, I’ve made my amends with the American Government. I’m back in charge of FOXHOUND - there are no more “extra operations”.”

Snake says it in such a determined monotone and with such a dourly straight face, that it draws an honest laugh. Kaz kicks back in his chair and points with his free hand, the prosthetic one.

“Maybe it’s because there was a time you were honest with me, Boss, but you are such a terrible fucking liar.” Kaz swirls his glass - maybe a bit too enthusiastically. The whiskey sloshes over the rim, gets all over his real hand and his uniform sleeve, but he’s drunk on the euphoria of calling out the man of the hour in this room full of stiff suits and DARPA assholes. Hissing secrets right under their pampered noses.

He doesn’t belong here and Snake most definitely doesn’t belong here. Big Boss looks more like a costume every year, a wild beast wearing a man’s skin with the stitches just barely showing.

“It’s all going to come crashing down around you soon. You’ve never been the kind of man to juggle secrets while walking a tightrope - that’s why you always kept people like me and Adamska around, to watch your details and cook your books. Soon you’ll stumble and it will go up in flames. And I’ll be there-” Kaz holds his glass aloft, letting it catch the fractured light from the chandeliers. “- ha, I’ll be there to toast over the ashes of your legacy.”

Big Boss chuckles and grabs Kaz’s prosthetic arm. He yanks him to his feet, yanks him close, but not close enough to look like anything but two old friends trying to hear each other better above the din of clinking glasses and dulled conversation.

“Kaz…” Boss breathes, squeezing so hard that the polypropylene creaks, “you know, no one talks to me like that anymore.”

Kaz grins, “Yeah? I bet they don’t.”

Snake’s eye flashes with a brief glimmer of animal hunger and for a moment, Kaz is afraid that he’s going to cast off all illusions of civility to throw him against the wall and fuck him right here, in front of all these four star generals. The thought is exhilarating with the whiskey clouding his head. It’s probably more a fantasy than a fear, and isn’t that pathetic? A hop, skip and a jump from fifty and still having improbable fantasies about a man he met when he was twenty-five.

What Snake does instead is that he steps back and smiles. He raises his hand and shoots Kaz a subtle hand gesture - a lazy half-circle, counter-clockwise, just slightly off from the US C.R.E.’s official signal for ‘Rally Point’, then he saunters out of the banquet hall with his hands in his pockets. Back in their MSF days, this was Snake’s sign for ‘me and the Manager are going to step out to talk alone for a bit’, but Kaz often used it to mean ‘let’s go make out behind the mess hall while everyone else is drinking’.

Kaz doesn’t hesitate. He downs the rest of his drink in one go and follows. Snake leads him through the bustling kitchen, down to the service hallway and then out back, to the convention center’s loading alley. No one stops them - two guys in uniforms with obvious war wounds? They’re scary looking and they know it.

It’s a mild night, with a slight drizzle misting up the streetlamps and the sound of laughter and classical music cutting through the haze of traffic. There’s a heavy fog rolling in from Staten Island that hides the moon and makes the narrow alley-way feel like it’s a pocket universe, a world apart.

The moment they’re outside, Snake grabs Kaz by the waist and pulls him near. They stand like that for a few minutes, just fucking breathing on each other and Kaz thinks that he really doesn’t get laid often enough anymore because this is the most intense thing he’s felt in years.

Snake runs his hands though Kaz’s hair, pushing his beret off so that it falls to the ground. Tenderly, he lifts up Kaz’s shades and sets them atop his brow. He kisses him gently, almost with reverence.

He whispers: “Come to Outer Heaven.”

Kaz laughs. Well, it’s half a pained scoff, but good enough. He turns away from the second kiss. “You can’t think this will work.”

Snake walks him back against the wall and kisses the corner of his mouth.

“I can see your warrior’s spirit, it shines through this government disguise you wear.”

“You’re wearing one now too.”

“Even after all these years... you’re practically trembling with rage. You'd kill me with your own hands, wouldn’t you?”

“Honestly, Boss, that’s too good for you.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to see you pushed off your pedestal. I want you to die ignobly and shamed. I want you to die and fade into obscurity so I never have to think about you again.”

“Hmm. Defeated, betrayed and still your pride is indefatigable. You never stop fighting, Kaz, no matter what happens to you, how many humiliations you face. Do you know what a rare quality that is? That’s why there is no one I want by my side more for what’s to come. You belong on the battlefield. You belong in Outer Heaven.”

And Kaz shudders because there was a time - a precious few moments in the splintering glare of the African sun - that those words were exactly what he wanted to hear. A salve to his thirty seconds of weakness, six years too late.

“Tell me…” he shuts his eyes and leans his head back against the cold brick, “tell me you need me instead, and I’ll… consider it.”

He counts out half a minute of silence, barely breathing. When he opens his eyes, Big Boss is staring at him with a vague expression, flat mouth and relaxed jowls. He looks sad, maybe, but not quite disappointed. Yeah - that’s what I thought. Called the motherfucker’s bluff. There is some satisfaction in that at least.

“Like I said-” Kaz pulls down his sunglasses and sighs. “You’re a terrible liar.”

Sometimes it seems like the Militaires Sans Frontières was some sort of strange, beautiful fever dream. Meeting rich and powerful men in their leaky little shack off the Barranquilla coast, pouring over the budget while Oye Como Va blared on the radio, singing American Pie around the campfire with the troops, covering the make-shift buildings with nets and palm leaves when the sound of choppers cut through the afternoon haze.

And later - Cécile, cooking in the raw heat of a Caribbean afternoon, stripped down to shorts and a men’s tanktop, unaware entirely of her beauty’s effect on the men. Amanda, running drills and Chico trailing at her heels imitating the way she and Snake holstered their guns. Strangelove, dressing Huey down in the R&D lab, always so willing to take on whatever stupid project Big Boss suggested if it would make him miserable. And Paz...

Paz: holding court on the docks, teaching Spanish and Portuguese to the foreign recruits, her white hair adrift in the breeze like a cloud, or a halo, the MSF’s own personal mascot, their Angel of Peace. She wasn’t the only lie at Mother Base, but her's was the deception that cut down to the bone. Her’s was the lie that grew a cancer at their heart. And Kaz had been complicit in it, so y'know, he had no one to blame but himse -

It didn’t last even five years, not even five fucking years and Kaz still wakes up sometimes expecting to hear the roar of an Amazon rainfall against a tin roof, or the soft lap of the ocean crashing up against Mother’s Base’s steel legs. He meant what he said when he told Snake he wishes that they’d died there, buried in the ocean with the only true home Kaz had ever known. He wishes that Big Boss hadn’t poisoned those memories, hadn’t betrayed him in such a personal way, hadn’t used him and tossed him away like a soiled handkerchief... hadn’t embarrassed him in front of fucking Ocelot -

- he can feel the call of South Africa so deep in his soul that it’s a physical pain sometimes, comparable to the pain in his missing limbs. If he thought for a moment that he could run away to Outer Heaven and still retain his pride, he’d do it.

It’s a good feeling, that it only takes him thirty seconds to button his shirt all the way up these days. It’s a good feeling that doing a half-windsor knot every morning no longer makes him feel like he’s Sisyphus, pushing that rock up a hill.

It’s a good feeling that when he schmoozes with the Colonels these days, when he goes out drinking with the Navy boys from the other base, when he makes good natured jabs at the new recruits, that his laughter no longer feels like a mask. It no longer feels like he’s made a suit of skin built out of his younger self that he shucks off at night. This morning there’s a message from Nadine on his answering machine, suggesting that he take some leave this weekend so that they can drive up to Virginia Beach for their one year Anniversary. He calls her back and says that they should go to Monongahela instead.

He feels normal sometimes. Not un-broken normal, but sometimes he feels like what he imagines people who retire to middle class American suburbs must feel like - a far cry from his childhood in the slums of post-war Yokosuka . He hasn’t been awoken by gunfire in nearly a decade. Nadine has never asked him about his eyes. He caught some of his students calling him ‘Uncle Hellmaster’ behind his back. “You’re a hardass, sir, but you take care of the men.” He could stay here for a while, yeah. He does push-ups in his driveway on Sundays and the nice little old lady who lives next door makes small talk with him, imagine that!

It’s a good feeling to not think about revenge every day.

But that doesn’t mean he never thinks about it at all.

Today is a Wednesday, which is Kaz’s favourite day, because it means that he can run the new recruits for the 7th SFG through a double-shift training session. Even better is that it’s raining like horse-piss. A hurricane skimmed them by the day before and the base was hit by the brunt of the storm, meaning that everything not paved is a mud pit and the winds are still up to 65KM/h. It’s the perfect day to send some kids out into the woods with nothing in their pockets but a knife.

Kaz ties his hair back and puts on a cap before heading out into the storm. The recruits stand to attention the moment they see him. He’s a lot more casual with them since he doesn’t hold an official rank within the US Army, but the new kids are still terrified of him, especially at four in the morning.

“Twice around the field and then give me fifty! We’re doing standard warm-up routines today! If you want to go down to la costa brillante, you’re going to have to get used to swimming on land!”

He shucks off his uniform jacket and goes jogging with the troops. He usually does push-ups and crunches with them on light workload days too. His prosthetics aren’t Russian made, that’s for sure, but they’re not half shabby. And he still feels like he’s got years of catching up to do after letting himself go soft with self pity in the 80’s. The new guys always find it weird at first, but Kaz just can’t shake his guerilla roots: the honcho in charge gets down in the dirt, just like anyone else.

“We’re doing shelter construction again today, boys and girls, this time under extreme duress. Not only will you have to contend with the wind and the rain, you’ll have to contend with me.” Kaz gives them their assignment for the day - go into the woods in groups of three and build a water-tight, camouflaged shelter. He makes them leave their watches, their water bottles, their guns, their compass - everything but their knives.

“I’m going back to my office to do paperwork for three hours and when I’m done, I’m going to come looking for you. If I manage to find you in under two hours, you fail. After the two hour mark, I’ll send up a flare to call you home. Clear?”

“Yes sir!”

“ - and those shelters better be water-tight. If I find you, I want you dry as a fine chardonnay! Is that clear?”

“Yes sir!”

“Well, what are you all standing around staring at me for? Go!”

Kaz watches after them as they scramble to find partners, feeling vaguely paternal. His assignments are always a bit looser, a bit more creative than the ones the army boys come up with, but the reason they call him Hellmaster is that he comes down ten times as hard. It’s not that he delights in cruelty, it’s just that he knows the real cost of slip ups in threadbare circumstance. Improvised tactics need to be every bit as water tight as pre-planned ones.

He heads back inside with his jacket slung over one shoulder. As he’s wrenching the water from it in the entrance hall, an old student of his approaches him.

“Um… Master Miller, sir, may I have a moment of your time?”

“Of course, Corporal Dines. What do you need?”

Dines glances around nervously. “Could we talk in your office?”

Ashley Dines was one of his favourite recruits of the previous year, so naturally he says yes. She’d had a difficult first few months. Although things were changing for the better, Fort Bragg still saw women pass through on a 100-1 ratio. Kaz, however, was used to fighting alongside women who were just as - if not more - capable than their male counterparts, so he treated her no differently than anyone else.

Additionally, Dines was mixed race - Korean on her father’s side, Ghanese on her mother’s, so he understood her experience to some extent. The hazing she’d faced upon arrival had been emotionally brutal, occasionally sadistic, but she’d preserved through sheer skill, brilliance and tenacity. The kind of woman Kaz wouldn't have dared hit on, even during his most shameless years. She reminded Kaz a bit of Amanda, complete with a chain-smoking habit she couldn’t quite kick.

Today, however, she looks harried. When she sits across from him in his office, she folds her hands in her lap and shifts from side to side in the steel chair.

“Sir, may I ask you a favour off the record?”

“It really depends. I can’t promise not to report you unless I know what you’re asking me.”

“It’s nothing treasonous, Master, I promise. I just need you… to write me a letter of recommendation.”

Kaz tips down his glasses, enough that she can see him quirk an eyebrow, but not far enough to show the damage to his eyes. He thinks he knows where this is going.

“A letter of recommendation?”

“Yes. I was recently approached by a scout from FOXHOUND. I’m scheduled to take their physical entrance exam in two months, however I need an introduction letter from a superior officer. Or from an instructor. But you know how FOXHOUND is...”

He does “know how FOXHOUND is”. It was technically beneath the umbrella of the US Military, but operated independently, more like a PMC. Military top brass were beginning to get wary of Big Boss scalping all their most promising rookies, so FOXHOUND recruiters tended to keep everything on the down-low until the applicants were actually accepted.

Kaz starts to read Dines’ body language differently: she’s not afraid, she’s excited. Excited in that terrified way that only people who choose to do war for a living understand. He leans back in his chair and rubs his temples.

“Corporal Dines… Ashley. You’re on track to be promoted again by the end of this year. When you first joined up, you told me that being a member of the Green Beret was your life’s dream.”

“Yes, sir, but when I said that, I never expected to be scouted by Big Boss.”

Hearing the name spoken so reverently used to drive cold daggers through Kaz’s lungs. These days all it does it give him a headache.

“You know what kind of work they do, don’t you?”

“With all due respect, sir, I would never have joined up if I were the sort of person to balk at a little blood on my hands.”

“This isn’t normal military work we’re talking about, Ashley. They’re into some serious black ops shit. Assassination, toppling regimes, clean-up work - that means civilians.”

“The Green Berets hardly have a clean reputation themselves. If you deem one kind of killing okay and another kind not okay, there lies the path to madness. At least…” she brushes her dark hair behind one ear, “- at least that’s what I think. A soldier is like a gun. It is very rare that we get to choose who is holding the trigger. I am a rare soldier who has that choice.”

Kaz has to bite his lip to muffle a scream. It is prime Big Boss bullshit coming out of her mouth. He wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, tell her that Big Boss is just an illusion of a man lying to himself the same way he lies to every single person he deems fit to use. But it’s really not his place. He’s not her dad, or her friend, or even her actual superior office. He quells his temper and holds up his hands, a mocking pose of surrender.

“All right Ashley. I don’t like it, but I’ll write you that letter. Come back tomorrow before morning drills.”

She smiles with heart-breaking sincerity and gives him a quick salute before leaving the office. Kaz doesn’t write the letter yet. He’s still got two and a half hours until he needs to go hunting for his students in the woods. That’s enough time to makes some calls and pull some strings - he wants to see what the buzz is, who, exactly, Big Boss has been picking out from the Green Beret since the beginning of the year.

Because Kaz has always been the kind of guy who is good at making connections, it only takes fourty minutes for him to get a classified envelope delivered directly to his office along with a cup of coffee. He tears through the papers, registering the names. Mostly people he doesn’t recognize, and the ones he does don’t surprise him. Then he stumbles across a familiar profile - sharp nose, dark eyes, angular jaw darkened by a five o’clock shadow that never quite fades. It’s a boy who looks almost exactly like Snake.

‘David’, no last name, but currently going by Reese for identification purposes. Veteran of the Gulf War, spotless record, orphaned at birth, shuffled from home to home but always under the watchful thumb of the military. He’d been selected for FOXHOUND exactly two days after his transfer to Fort Bragg had been finalized.

That completely, absolute -

Kaz locks his door before he makes the phone call. No one knows that he has this number. He shouldn’t have this number. He listens to the line pick up on the other end and shuffle through several levels of encrypting. After three minutes of listening to static and clicks, a familiar voice answers.

“How did you get this number?”

“It’s me.”

“That doesn’t change my question Kaz.”

Kaz twirls his desk chair around so that he can stare out at the rain while he talks. “I just had an interesting conversation with a former trainee of mine. She wanted me to write a letter of recommendation for her induction to FOXHOUND.”

Big Boss laughs. “Ha. She can’t have known… I would take anyone that you endorsed. You may have poor judgment in some matters, but you do know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“Oh? What if I just wrote: ‘fuck you’ a hundred and fifty times.”

“Kaz -” oh, and it’s a goddamn warning tone. Snake is talking down to him like he’s still a wide-eyed twenty-five year old trailing after his “Boss”. Like they aren’t both old, shitty men now. Old, shitty men who are too old to be having an immature pissing contest like this.

“This student of mine, she’s not the only asset you’re stealing from our base.” Kaz shakes the papers in his hand, even though he knows it’s ridiculous and Big Boss can’t see him. “David. You know that we’ve been trying to get him transferred to Fort Bragg for a year now.”

“Funny. There’s a quiver in your tone that suggests you feel some sort of propriety over that boy. You do realize that he’s my son, Kaz.”

“I thought you didn’t give a shit about that. All these years, you denied that you ever wanted to have anything to do with the clones, so why now? What are you planning?”

Snake is silent on the other end. Kaz has no idea why he bothered wasting any breath asking questions. Big Boss hasn’t said an honest word to him since 1975.

“Fine. You can have him. I don’t care.”

“If you want to train him so badly, why don’t you come to FOXHOUND?”

Kaz spins back around in his chair. He needs a hard surface to slam his hand against. “Are you serious with this?”

“I meant what I said: there will always be a position open for you here.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Kaz slams down the phone and fumes. He stares at the photographs and the commendations on his wall, but the images and the words are all blurred together. And then he gets a crazy idea.

“Sure,” he mutters to himself. “Y-yeah, sure. Why the hell not?”

Something snaps inside of him. He’s past anger, past bitterness. For the first time in nine years, he can see clearly. He has a moment of perfect, serene lucidity - he could move to the goddamn arctic and he would never be free of Big Boss’ shadow, so why not join FOXHOUND? Why the hell not? If the whole thing was gonna go down in flames all over again, at least he’ll a front row seat and a bowl of popcorn.

He calls Nadine and says: “Sorry babe, I can’t do this weekend after all. Just got a new job offer that I have to take.”

Then he calls Snake back and says: “Okay.”

The first time they fucked, that was fine. It was exactly what Kaz had expected: quick, rough and up against a wall, digging cuts and marks into each other’s skin. That’s because he’d been the one leading. Neither of them made it all the way out of their pants and their lips didn’t touch once. Afterwards, Kaz - imagining how cool he looked - tipped his shades down and said: “Just do the damn paperwork like I asked, Boss.”

The second time - later that week in Kaz’s quarters - thesecond time, that wasn’t fine. It got out of hand the moment Snake kissed him, which was the first thing he did after standing awkwardly in the doorway, deliberating with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. They didn’t touch the wine, but Snake touched him. All over, slowly and sweetly with a tenderness that seemed foreign to his large hands. It was a little like being tortured, Kaz thought at the time, because what he’d wanted was something like a good fist fight and what Big Boss did to him was that he laid him down and kissed him the way you’d kiss a woman you intend to marry. Held him like a prey animal, so that he couldn't escape.

And then he got it in his head that all kinds of things were okay - like staying in the bed afterwards, like pressing their heads together and whispering secrets in the dark. Like calling Kaz up on the radio just so they could sit on the roof together and look at the sky and Snake could tell him about how he used to be afraid of Draculas.

One day Kaz was shaving in the shower room and because no one else was around, Snake came over and pressed a damp kiss to his temple. Then he left to do morning drill. That was it. Kaz was dumbfounded. He stared in the mirror for a long time before realizing: ‘Shit. Shit, he thinks we’re a couple -’ because how the fuck did he arrive at that conclusion!? Especially when Kaz was still sleeping his way through practically every female soldier that signed on.

It was as if in order to operate as a weapon on the battlefield, in order to exist in the jungle as a creature of pure instinct, Big Boss had constructed an impassable barrier that separated his violence from his personal life. He was a warm friend, a patient mentor, a gentle lover. Anything he did, he went full haul, and for someone like Kaz - still young and proud enough that emotional intimacy made him antsy - it was terrifying and suffocating and addictive. He’d started playing at this game to have something to hold over the head of the man who forced him to surrender, but when Big Boss eventually told him to choose between the women and their relationship, Kaz chose to surrender again. And again, and again.

But really, this time, no more.

The first call he gets about Big Boss’ death is from FOXHOUND Internal Intelligence. Every staff member on site is called into the mess hall so that they can focus on damage control.

The second call he gets is from Roy Campbell, who needs to be talked through it all just to do his job properly. “How can it be true? How could I not have known?”

Kaz feels a little bad for not telling him about the dangers inherent in being X.O. to the legendary Big Boss, especially when he’d been sitting there all evening staring out his office window with a drink in one hand, waiting for the news to come in. He’d never had any doubt that Solid Snake would succeed. It must have really bit in the end, for the old man to see all his carefully crafted plans destroyed by the son he never wanted.

The third call he gets - rerouted several times over - is from Amanda Valenciano Libre. Kaz is honestly surprised - the last time they had talked, she’d cussed him out in Spanish when she found out that he was running training drills for the US Marines.

“Some strange reports have been filtering through our foreign intel departments, Mr. Miller. I need to know if it is true.”

Amanda was one of the few Sandinista Comandantes who managed to retain a high-ranking position within the Nicaraguan Cabinet after the 1990 elections. She’d worked with the MSF and Diamond Dogs until the Sandinistas finally managed to overthrow Somoza in 1984; of course she would have been watching the spy networks the moment the words ‘Outer Heaven’ cropped up. Weren’t those the words Snake had used to recruit her in the first place? Weren’t they the words he’d used to recruit them all?

“Amanda, please, I can’t give out American Military secrets to a foreign power.”

“We are not talking as politicians right now, Mr. Miller. We are talking as former camarada.”

“We’re talking on a monitored phone line.”

She’s silent a moment. “You seem calm.”

“I am.”

“But Mr. Mil - Kaz, he was your… compañero. Your-” her voice gets low, she doesn’t quite seem to know the phrase in English for this. “... los hombre aficionado.”

Kaz’s hand tightens around the receiver. World’s greatest stealth agent his ass - Naked Snake was about a subtle as a freight train.

“Amanda, that was twenty years ago.”

“We bled and killed together, all of us. We were compas. No matter the distance and the hurts, we are still bound together. That is why I am calling you even though you sold your soul to los yanquis.”

“Thank you for the call, Amanda. I appreciate your concern.”

She scoffs at him. “You’ve really changed, Mr. Miller,” she says before hanging up. It’s funny that Amanda think he’s the one who changed - a potent reminder that Big Boss is still a genuine hero to almost everyone who knows him. That’ll be over soon, Kaz thinks, there’s no way the State Department can keep this out of the news forever.

Kaz finishes his drink and then he makes a call to his wife.

“Hey Nadine… uh…”

“Has something happened?”

“Yeah. I won’t be home tonight. Maybe not tomorrow either.”

“Are you okay?”

“I…” Kaz stares out his office window. It’s so dark that he can barely make out the mountains in the distance. Am I okay? he wonders. He doesn’t feel joy, or sorrow, or... anything, really. He doesn’t answer Nadine’s question. He can hear her breathing hitch - the moment she goes from worried to angry.

“Let me guess? You can’t tell me.”

“No. I really can’t.”

“You know, McDonnel, when I met you, you told me that you weren’t a military man proper. You told me that there would be none of this black ops shit -”

“Nadine, listen - I really have to go. We can talk about this later.”

Nadine is silent on the other end of the line, but Kaz can hear her steady breathing, can hear her gearing herself up for an argument. The clear, piercing howl of a baby crying cuts her off before she can start. She sighs, “Catherine’s awake. I… have to go put her back down.”

“Yeah. Hey - after this, I’ll probably be able to take some leave time. I’ll probably be able to… take a lot of leave time. We’ll talk about things then.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Love you.”

“Mmm hmm.”

He doesn’t blame Nadine her bitterness - he was only working three days a week when they started going out. She was an accomplished cardiologist who’d been on track to head her entire department when she got pregnant. That was three months after he took his post at FOXHOUND - the maternity leave she’d been forced to take has probably damaged her career trajectory irreparably. Luckily that was all over now. Hell, he could tender his registration tomorrow. Maybe he would.

There’s a knock at the door. It creaks open and a young soldier peers in. “Master Miller, sir?”

“What is it?”

“The Colonel’s arrived. He wants to talk to you.”

Roy looks like shit. He was off-site handling some political business when the whole Operation went up in flames and HQ got locked down. There would be endless investigations, hearings, recriminations - the CIA and Department of Defense would be combing over their budget for years, trying to find the loose threads where Big Boss funneled funds into Outer Heaven. They would find nothing, of course, but Campbell’s position was unenviable. He would have to answer for a lot of shit that he’d never been in the position to know about.

“Listen, McDonnel. I know this isn’t your department, but I need you to help debrief Operative Solid Snake.”

“He can’t be back already. South Africa’s more than an ocean away.”

“No, of course not. But he won’t talk - the unit that picked him up... Commander says the kid looks shell shocked.”

Well of course he is, Kaz doesn’t say out loud, that’s part of the life. The “kid” is barely out of his teens - younger, even, than Kaz’s Snake had been when he was sent into Russia to murder his mentor. Roy Campbell is a kind man. He’s killed before, he’s been kept as a POW, but he’s never really gotten his hands dirty.

“I’m a drill sergeant, Roy. This isn’t my department.”

“McDonnel… you knew Big Boss when he was young, didn’t you? I promise, everything on your end will be strictly off the record. David trusts you.”

And, well, how can anyone say no to that?

Kaz takes a long walk around the edge of the base on the way back to his office; he needs some fresh air. When he arrives back, the soldier detail that usually flanks the security door is conspicuously missing. Kaz un-holsters his gun and cautiously makes his way through the dimmed hallway. His instincts aren’t what they used to be and neither are his reaction times for that matter, but his soldier’s sixth sense? That never fades. He examines the lock to his door and observes just the slightest chipping of paint along the wall panel. Slowly, he eases the door open and sweeps in with his weapon drawn.

The moment his left foot clears the threshold the door slams back shut. Kaz turns on his heel, but he’s not quite fast enough to stop the sharp blow to his wrist and the grab that spins him back around in the other direction. He’s slammed against the wall, but not hard enough to daze. The throw was deliberately gentle. He looks up and, of course. There he is! Big Boss is wearing a woolen commando’s sweater over his sneaking suit, and a pair of thick, leather gloves. As a greeting, he dismantles Kaz’s gun in under ten seconds.

Kaz isn’t even fucking surprised. He holds up his hands in surrender. “Looking great for a dead man, Boss.”

Snake eyes him suspiciously, “Kaz, you were only carrying one gun?” He sounds so disappointed.

“I work in an office. Are you telling me that you’ve been strolling around FOXHOUND HQ all these years with an entire artillery hidden under your trench-coat?”

Snake’s answer is a vague grunt. He pockets the magazine of Kaz’s gun and lets the rest of it fall to the floor. The slide lock bounces across the laminate flooring and skids to a stop at Kaz’s feet. Kaz looks up.

“So, how did you do it?”

“How do you think I did it? Didn’t I have a program put in place for exactly this sort of scenario?”

“Venom Snake,” Kaz murmurs. “Hah. Of course. I should’ve known you’d never have put yourself in the way of that bullet. That’s not the kind of man you are anymore.”

“Outer Heaven was his project too. He’s been running it since I came back to the states.”

A memory flickers through Kaz’s mind. New York, four years ago… so when Snake asked him to come to Outer Heaven, it was really being run by…?

He must look upset. Snake seems to think so. He speaks low, almost comfortingly.

“Are you upset? You helped make the Phantom who he was. You had to have cared for him.”

The question hits Kaz like a physical blow. He- (steady voice in his ear, in the crook of his neck. Their fingers entwine around the hilt of the gun. Side by side watching the coffins burn. There are still ashes on their faces when they make love. Snake’s mouth tastes like brimstone. ‘I’m already a demon, Kaz’. I am too, Boss, we’ll walk the path to damnation side by side, like we were always meant to. Ten days in a hole and Snake comes to him... the way Snake says his name is like a benediction. When Snake lays him down back at Mother Base, Kaz feels like he’s the one who’s been in a coma for nine years, like he’s sleeping beauty waiting for someone to break the curse, to bring him back to himself. Snake kisses him with heart-breaking tenderness. We’re not joking around anymore. This is real. This is everything. Kaz remembers hooking his arm around Snake’s neck and dragging him down. Come down into the hole with me, he thought, into the darkness. It’s unbearable to be here alone, but if we’re down here together I can do anything.)

- Kaz inhales sharply and takes a step back to lean against his desk. He removes his sunglasses and rubs his eyes. They’re stinging with the phantom pain of long-gone injuries. It’s a pain he hasn’t felt in half a decade.

He thought that he was beyond this. At the time he felt so hollow, used-up, raped. For years he chased himself around in circles in his head, trying to figure out what the rationale was, what Snake was thinking while all of it was going on. Who the hell programs a body double to fuck their lover? Even if they’re not quite sure they trust them anymore? Who programs a body double to love someone who -

“No. I don’t care at all.” If I did, I’d be crazy by now.

“Is that really true, Kaz?”

“Yeah. You - you, I hate. Him? He was nothing to me. I thought he was you and when I found out that he wasn’t, the only thing I saw him as was a tool.” There, remember that. I can be cold and ruthless too, you sick fuck.

Snake makes a humming noise in the back of his throat. He takes a step back to lean against the wall. In the shadow of Kaz’s bookshelf, he’s invisible - but just for a moment, until he lights up a cigar.

“Are you here to kill me, then? Want to clean up the loose ends, everyone who knows anything about Outer Heaven?”

“Kaz, how could you say that?”

“Well, you’re in my office in your infiltration gear. You disposed of the guards. What else am I supposed to think?”

“If I did try to kill you, would you fight?”

“Tooth and nail,” Kaz says quietly. “Until my last breath, and then some.”

“ ‘Rip out my throat with your teeth’, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve imagined a beautiful death for yourself Kazuhira, but I’m not here to kill you. And I’m not here to die either. I still have work to do. I’m just making a few stops before I go on my way.” He exhales a lazy thread a smoke that turns blue in the moonlight. “This is your last chance to come with me.”

Kaz opens his mouth to make a crack about ‘you know what they say about doing the same thing again but expecting different results’, but he can’t quite get it out. Something is swimming behind his vision, turning over in his stomach. Amanda’s words about compas is ringing in his head. You’ve killed together and shed blood together, if you just let go of this anger, it could be how it used to be. Snake had made that much clear. Kaz had not adequately steeled himself against the request because he’d honestly believed that it held no temptation for him anymore.

“You’re actually going to do it. You’re going to rebuild again?”

“Will you come with me?”

“With Nadine and Catherine at home? Boss, your sense of humour never improves.”

“Don’t deflect, Kaz. You know that you’re not doing them any favours pretending at this kind of life. You’re just going to hurt them in the end.”

“Even if you’re right, I’d be a coward not to try.”

“Do you think I’m a coward?”

“Does what I think mean anything to you at this point!?” Kaz snaps. “Did it ever?”

“You know the answer to that question.”

“- the battlefield doesn't only divide people into allies and enemies. Sometimes it tells you more than just who's an ally or who's an enemy. Sometimes it helps reveal your true comrades.”

“Like you and me, huh?”

Another poisoned memory. Kaz swallows the poison down. Carefully, he says: “… all this time, I’ve never asked you… why you did it.”

“Someone once told me that having personal feelings for your comrades was the greatest sin that a soldier could commit.”

“The Boss...”

“For her, it was an indescribable pain.”

“Yes. You told me that she killed her lover in combat, a side effect of the Cold War.”

“What happened to us in Central America proved that what she said was true. I needed to separate what I felt from what I needed to do in order to accomplish my goals.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this ten years ago?”

“If you had asked at the time, Kaz, it’s what I would have told you. Would it have made a difference?”

“... no. Absolutely not.” Kaz sets his glasses on his desk and looks Snake in the eye. “And here I thought that we were building the Militaires Sans Frontières so that soldiers would be able to avoid that kind of pain. Don’t you see the sick irony in that? When did you become a hypocrite?”

“A good soldier uses the enemy’s tactics against them in a desperate situation.”

“Snake...”

“Kaz - I made a tactical decision. Where I needed you, what I needed you to do… if I loved you, it didn’t matter. Like anyone else, you were another soldier. It was nothing personal.”

Kaz is stunned for a moment - he was not ready to hear the word “love” thrown into the conversation like a damn tactical nuke, especially not in the same breath that Snake tells him that he was simply not a valuable enough war asset. And still isn’t - if he was, Snake would at least pretend to apologize.

He starts laughing - gross, hacking, ugly laughter. He used to be really good at laughing instead of crying when he was young - it was nice laughter back then, handsome laughter. Since Diamond Dogs, this is what he does instead. He sinks against his desk, feels his prosthetic leg almost give out underneath him.

Big Boss watches him until he’s silent. He finishes his cigar. Then he turns to leave.

“Don’t go,” Kaz whispers, almost so quietly he can’t hear himself. He didn’t mean to say it, he only meant to think it. His hands are shaking. Suddenly he’s in his thirties again, grasping at an aching arm that doesn’t exist. He’s back at Mother Base, in that helicopter, watching everything burn around him. He’s in his twenties again, seeing Big Boss for the first time: larger than life, face ringed in a halo of hazy, tropical light, like some old Byzantine painting of Jesus. He’s just punched Kaz in the gut and now he’s offering him his hand. “Please, Boss, don’t... leave...”

Snake turns around and studies him cooly in the darkness. He’s so sturdy and proud and Kaz is ashamed of himself, about to lose his shit like a damned kid. It’s always been like this - Snake as grand and tall as a rock-face and Kaz crashing against him and breaking like the waves. It worked when they were younger, Kaz is certain that he wasn’t imaging it. No one really understood the Boss, couldn’t tell when he was joking, couldn’t understand the things that drove him or why he craved conflict. Kaz had always felt like a translator, a mediator back then - he was Snake’s bridge to the real world. He kept him steady when he got lost in jungle of his memories. There were things he could do that Snake couldn’t, and he did it with a wink and a smile. So Snake needed him. He -

- he is certain that he is not the only person who's felt like that about Big Boss.

“Kaz, tell me what you want.”

“Stay with me. I just… wanted you to stay with me. To be with me, by my side in the dark.”

Big Boss crosses the room in four easy strides. He takes Kaz’s face in his gloved hands. Kaz is burning up so hot that the leather feels like ice against his cheeks.

“I’m here with you right now.”

“That doesn’t heal the past. It won’t heal the future.”

“For people like us, there is no past and future. The here and now is all there is.”

It’s not self deception, Snake honestly doesn’t think he did anything wrong. And of course he doesn’t - that he’s always strived for absolute certainty is why Kaz loved him with such blind devotion. It’s the sort of absolute certainty he’s been searching for his whole life - a cause worth dying for. Cleanse your soul through eternal warfare. Redemption through handing your life over to a man with a vision that was pure. Snake has finally become the man he was meant to be. It would feel good to give himself over to that - to break through the last, tiny sliver of resistance that he’s been holding on to for over twenty years, the only thing that ever kept him from belonging entirely to Big Boss.

Kaz hooks his thumb into the knot of his tie and artfully loosens it. The motion is not as fluid, not as seductive as it was when he was a young man, but it works. It stirs the memory. Big Boss’s smile is so fond that it’s almost condescending. He dips in to kiss the soft skin on the side of Kaz’s neck, but Kaz stops him.

“Don’t leave any marks,” he says, voice hoarse. “Remember - I’m a married man.”

Kaz laughs for real this time when Snake licks a line up to his ear and bites down hard. For a moment, the old bastard really did think he’d won.

So, the thing is…

The thing is Kaz always suspected that Snake had misinterpreted the Boss’ will.

The suspicion ran pretty close to the surface, actually, but he never managed to articulate it because… hell, he didn’t know the woman. And it wasn’t like he could even begin to fumble at an alternate interpretation. The Boss was as enigmatic as she was legendary.

- and back then, Kaz agreed with most of what Snake said. Thought he was a bit unfocused, y’know, like a maelstrom - but a maelstrom that could be directed, and hey, that was what Kaz was for! He was good at detail work, he was great at helping Snake hone his focus! Before Kaz, Snake didn’t always charge enough for his services, he didn’t actively advertise, he and his men were content to live in tents and subsist on field rations and local fauna. Kaz had vision, Snake was a vision, they were such a good team. And their philosophies were so compatible. But...

- yeah, something always seemed kind of off. The death of her lover, her determination to die for a country that abused her trust, the lessons she attempted to impart to her student even while she lived and died doing exactly what she told him not to do... Kaz felt like he had all the pieces - and they were completely different pieces than Snake was holding - but he couldn’t put them together to say any different. Maybe no one ever would. Maybe she hadn’t known herself.

It was the puzzle that drove Doctor Strangelove mad, and Kaz feared it would drive Snake there as well. Kaz hated watching his Boss brood and tear himself up with an uncertainty that honestly did not become him, so he never said anything. He was a great buddy about it, never abused the trust Snake had placed in him telling his side of the story. Kept it to himself, never brought it up unless necessary. He always did his best to shit-talk Snake out of his spirals.

Well, no. That wasn’t the only thing he did. The other thing he did was that he used it. Big Boss knew in theory what he was after, but he’d left a string of guerilla groups, mercenary squads and Special Ops divisions orphaned in the ten years after Operation Snake Eater. Even MSF was just a loosely collected collation of various militant bands united only by their enthrallment with a single man when Kaz was “persuaded” to join. It was easy - so, so easy - to tip Snake’s vision in the direction he wanted it to go, exploiting that malleable idea of a world with no borders, a heaven for soldiers.

“Boss, how about we-” “No, Kaz, it sounds like a bad idea.” “But what if this and that. It will make us more independent! It will make us more powerful! It will make us more like what you want us to be! But I mean, it’s your decision in the end! Don’t worry about what I think. And never, ever ask me where the money really comes from.”

Kaz used that last, lingering thread of confusion - the conflict that gnawed on Snake’s bones - he used it to get what he wanted.

And then, he did the same thing all over again with the Phantom.

Getting old is acknowledging that you are complicit in the creation of the monsters who destroyed you. That’s responsibility.

When Snake leaves, it takes Kaz a good while to get composed. He makes his way to the staff bathroom and examines himself. It wasn’t rough, not like it used to be, but he looks like he was mauled by a wild animal anyhow. It’s a good thing he has an excuse not to go home for a few days. If Nadine confronted him about it, the lie would probably be awful. “I hired seven prostitutes because I don’t love you enough.” He can’t exactly explain that he’s just chosen her over a man that he’s loved and hated and worshipped to no avail for nearly half of his life.

That isn’t what happened anyway.

Security restrictions on HQ ease up by the time the sky starts to lighten, at least for high ranking staff. Kaz goes for a short drive. He pops into a gas station and buys a cheap cigar, then he drives out to the base of the mountain and watches the sun rise.

He thinks: time to let it go. Sure, the Boss isn’t really dead, but he’s ruined now. And that was the end, for real; whatever they were - Snake and Kaz, Miller and the Boss, it’s finally over. So why not let it go? He sniffs the cigar once - and shit, it smells like all 99 cents that it cost - and then he lights it.

“Okay,” he says aloud, mostly to convince himself. “I’m done. I’m over it.”

He inhales deep, holds the breath for a few seconds, and then exhales ten years of anger and hurt along with the smoke.

He’s on his third cup of coffee when Solid Snake calls him to ask about Singing Sand.

“Weren’t you in Iraq, Snake? Surely you’ve heard of this before?”

“Master, this is different. It’s not the same thing as the wind rolling through the dunes. When you step on this sand, it emits a tangible squeaking noise.”

Solid Snake is so serious and earnest about everything. Kaz often can’t help but laugh at him, even when he’s saying perfectly innocuous things. At twenty-seven, he’s starting to grow into his serious demeanour a little bit, but when he was a new recruit at FOXHOUND, his solemnity was an ill-fitting mantle. Instead of going to movie night with the other soldiers, he’d sit in his bunk and read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Campbell. He used ancient Iraqi metaphors in everyday conversation. The only time Kaz ever saw him smile was when he was interacting with dogs. FOXHOUND was filled with freaks and rejects - it was war orphans and science defying wonders of nature all the way down; David often seemed so aggressively well-adjusted that it was off-putting.

“Ahh, you mean barking sand then...”

“What causes the sound?”

“No one knows, really, although it’s possible that barking sand is made of granules of sand that happen to be more perfectly spherical than regular sand. I’ve heard that it also tends to have a high concentration of quartz, that’s what gives it the distinctive colour. You have to make a pretty significant strike with your heel to make any sound at all, but with all that gear you’re carrying and the weight of your sneaking suit, it’s no wonder you’re having trouble. You should be fine if you -” Kaz yawns. “- if you crawl...”

“Master, are you okay?”

“Snake, you might not know this, but it’s four o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles.”

“Oh. I’m sorry - I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Don’t start with that. I may be a civilian these days, but I signed onto this mission officially. Roy nudged me in on the payroll and everything. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.”

“Affirmative.”

Kaz is sitting on a stool in his kitchen, leaning over the blocky laptop FOXHOUND has lent him for the Operation. There’s only one light on in his apartment, but the blinding Los Angeles skyline never sleeps. The smog traps the the light meaning that it never really gets dark, not when you live on the thirteenth floor. Well, Kaz reflects, maybe it gets dark for other people, but he’s used to the absolute, ink thick darkness of the South American jungle, and the darkness of a broken city that doesn’t have enough money or infrastructure to light its streets. Being able to see your hand in front of your face after the sun goes down is still a novelty.

David calls back a few times to confirm suspicions with regards to some of the local wildlife. He sounds surprisingly good for a man pulled out of early retirement. FOXHOUND offered David an honourable discharge after Outer Heaven, which was honestly the least they could do considering how brutally the kid had been jerked around by his C.O.. Kaz remembers the debriefing clearly - David keeping his voice steady as he talked about the orphans handling guns, the fight with Metal Gear, the shape Grey Fox had been in when he found him. David stared straight ahead at the wall as he described his fight to the death with “Big Boss” - the man who had been his mentor and idol - and his voice did not crack once. The burgeoning PTSD was clear in every flinch of his muscles, but the kid was a consummate professional Of course, he’d had impeccable training.

Kaz thought he’d be more affected, back when he met him for the first time, but the truth was that he didn’t really look all that much like Big Boss. It was probably because Kaz met David at the age of twenty-one, and he hadn’t meet Big Boss until the man was already on his way to fourty. David was a bit leaner - darker eyes, darker hair, sharper cheekbones - Snake had told Kaz once that he had Japanese ethnicity in his bloodline as well, and it showed in his clone’s facial structure.

David was different from Big Boss in other ways too. Careful and methodical, less honed to the teeth. He was brilliant intellectually. He would deconstruct a mission like it was a puzzle. Reading his debriefing files was a bit like reading someone describe how they solved a rubik's cube. Kaz’s Snake had never been able to articulate how it was that he did what he did - he was a natural, a man born to be a weapon. David was merely artificially engineered to be one.

Kaz goes to drain the last dregs out of his coffee maker when he gets a call from Campbell.

“McDonnel, are you following the mission reports?”

Kaz rubs his eyes and goes to sit back down. He takes a few sips of the stale coffee and taps open the radar feed window.

“What is it?”

“I… are you sitting down?”

“Yeah, Roy. Go on.”

Roy’s heavy sigh is audible even through the scratchy quality of satellite burst-conversion. He sounds like he’s picking up something heavy and putting it right back on his shoulders. The man was already old when Kaz met him at thirty-five. Now that he’s going grey, he sometimes reminds Kaz of a sad Santa Claus without the beard. He gives all his troops the gift of genuinely caring.

“In the jungle surrounding the outer walls, the soldiers have split off into pairs. They’re using a very peculiar and particularly effective method of scouting.”

“Go on…”

“Two men, synched back-to-back. Moving in a serpentine motion to watch each other’s blind spots flawlessly and cover as much ground as possible. You know it?”

Of course Kaz knows it. He- (“Snake Synch!” “Kaz, it’s called ‘S Formation’.” “Yeah, ‘S’ for Snake.” “Kaz…” “The alliteration's great! And when you’re fully synched - ha ha, you can, aha ha, you say ‘Snake In!’.” “Kaz, we’re not calling it that.” “Boss, Boss, c’mon. We have to define our brand here!”)

- he named it. He exhales a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Of course he suspected it from the moment Campbell briefed him on the Operation. He-

“Snake says that the guards are using CQC as well. And not that knock-off brand you sometimes find in Central Africa or the Arabian Peninsula. This is the real thing.”

- because the reason they sent Solid Snake in was due to reports of a Metal Gear-esque weapon being constructed. Of course, ever since pieces of ZEKE and Peace Walker began to wash up on the shores of Central America, every two-bit terrorist group wanted their own bipedal weapon. The survivors of Outer Heaven had scalped the wreck of the TX-55 for all it was worth on the black market. Anyone could say they were building Metal Gear, but to actually make the real thing you needed...

“McDonnel, are you still there?”

Kaz snaps himself out of it. He takes another drink of coffee and begins to file through the mission report backlogs, to find all the pieces he should have seen earlier. “Do you suspect it’s him, Roy?”

“How can it be? He died in Outer Heaven. We have the corpse.”

You have A corpse, Kaz snorts to himself. Out loud, he says: “Big Boss is a tenacious bastard. I wouldn’t put it past him to fake his own death.” Thoroughly, with ten years of careful planning.

Kaz never exactly regretted keeping the truth about Big Boss to himself. It seemed natural that part of being free of the man’s shadow meant un-involving himself completely with his bullshit. Testifying to it would open himself to a lot of uncomfortable questions, besides; his record wasn’t as squeaky clean as he liked to pretend He wasn’t Snake’s keeper anymore - what Big Boss did was hardly his business, or his responsibility.

But this? This he feels guilty about. Big Boss’s thumbprints were all over Zanzibar Land from the very beginning. Kaz feels like he must have blocked out the evidence on purpose. He feels guilty for sending his former student in unprepared - Solid Snake had already killed his Commander with his bare hands once. Who could have expected that he’d have to do it all over aga -

- Big Boss. Big Boss probably expected it. Kaz’s Snake had always been involved in some on and off secret society shit that Kaz was never clear on the details of. Cipher, something about the Philosopher’s Legacy, his complicated relationship with his former Mission Commander… who’s to say he hadn’t manipulated events to get exactly what he wanted? His son, with him in his soldier’s Promised Land. Kaz realizes that he’s broken out in a cold sweat.

“I wanted to apprise you of the situation, McDonnel, and get your read on it.”

“You want me to be the one to tell Snake?”

“No. It would only distract him. We don’t know enough - maybe this is just an old man’s paranoia. Besides… we’ll know soon enough. Campbell out.”

Roy still has doubts, but Kaz doesn’t. Now that he’s taken a step back and looked the whole thing over, it couldn’t be more obvious. He finishes the rest of his disgusting coffee and then he goes to take a walk through his apartment. He has to step carefully over the dolls and toy trains strewn everywhere. Catherine had been forced to entertain herself for most of the day, with her father hunched over the computer, pouring through intel reports and blurry satellite photographs. She’d had a busy afternoon of smashing barbies and engines together while making dinosaur noises.

He steps into her room. The door was open, just a crack, so he could keep an eye on her from time to time. He pads over to the bed and kneels at Catherine’s side, brushing her dark bangs away from her face so that he can get a good look at her. She looks more Japanese than he does, strangely enough, but she’s got Nadine’s proud, french nose. Genetics are funny sometimes.

He never thought he’d like having a kid around, not with his young adulthood spent rounding up unmanageable child soldiers, but Catherine gives a purpose to his retirement. Technically, he was only watching her until Nadine finished her tour with - ha ha - Médecins Sans Frontières, but he was considering asking for dual custody.

Big Boss really had his number when he’d said that Kaz was not the type for settling down. What did him and Nadine in wasn’t the lies - it was the day he decided to start being honest. He should have realized that any conversation that begins with “my real name is…” was likely to end in divorce. Still, he’s glad he made an effort. The attempt had been pathetic, but without it, Catherine wouldn’t exist.

As he makes he way back to the kitchen, he tries to imagine what this day would have looked like from the other side, if he had gone with Big Boss the last time he asked. Or the second time, in New York. If he had gone with him the very first time. If he had never left Big Boss’s side. Would it be him and his Snake sitting in the X.O. room, watching security footage of Snake-the-younger taking down their best men with a familiar ferocity and ease?

Would he be the last man standing in Solid Snake’s way? Would Big Boss have asked him to go out there and defend the dream?

“I need you to go out there and let Solid Snake kill you. I need you to make it look real - put up a good fight, just like when we met, Kaz. Fight him until you’ve got nothing left. Make him believe it. I know you can do this. There is no one else who can.”

Would Kaz have said yes, knowing that this was the death he’d asked for when he first surrendered to Big Boss? Would Big Boss have kissed him one last time before letting him go? He imagines it for a moment - Snake taking off his sunglasses and kissing the lids of his ruined eyes. It’s like the two ends of his adulthood fold together for a moment; it doesn’t seem so long ago that Kaz could have believed it to be a romantic end.

Solid Snake finds out about Big Boss sooner than Kaz expects. The words die on the lips of an old comrade of his, a resistance leader that Big Boss had once kept prisoner. After that, the entire Operation falls apart. The death toll rises, alarms begin to go off in Intelligence Agencies all over the world. Big Boss sends his best men to kill his son and every single one of them dies at the younger Snake’s hands. The last is Frank Jaeger - a man who had been dominated by Big Boss so thoroughly on the battlefield that he had no choice but to follow him. It all sounds so familiar.

In the end, Solid Snake calls Kaz. His voice is ragged and thin. He asks: “Master Miller? What do I do?”

Kaz has no idea what Big Boss said to him, but David sounds younger. He sounds lost. He sounds the same way Kaz did back in 1995 when, for five minutes, he considered taking his place once again at Big Boss’s side.

“Listen,” Kaz says quietly, his flesh hand trembling against the casing of the laptop. “That man is a monster. He is a mad dog that needs to be put down.”

“Master Miller…”

Kaz is lightheaded, euphoric. He wants to throw up. “Snake, send him to hell.”

And that is exactly what Solid Snake does.

He picks a few memories to store away, puts them in an imaginary jar.

(Chico spins Paz around and around. She’s laughing, trying to corral him. “No, no - Chico. Not like that, like this.” She pulls away from him and does a curtsy.

“You told me that in this dance, I need to be like a bull!” Chico makes horns with his fingers. He doesn’t like being scolded, but he likes Paz. That’s clear to everyone. He’s blushing all over.

“The El Torito is a dance that the woman leads, Chico.” Paz’s eyes are sparkling. She whirls around to look at Kaz and Snake, who are leaning back against the cool steel of Mother Base’s tall walls, smoking. She claps and says: “Snake! Why don’t you come here and show Chico how it’s done!”

Snake has obviously not been paying attention, the way he snaps to so suddenly. He was staring at the sky “Hn,” he says. “What are we talking about?”

“I need a partner for the El Torito.”

“I’ve, uh, never really been much good at dancing, Paz.”

Kaz elbows him. “What? You’re kidding me. Isn’t that the kind of thing they teach in spy school?”

“I wasn’t that kind of spy, Kaz.”

“Dancing is graceful and powerful, Snake. It is like your-” Paz taps her chin, trying to recall the term, “- your, ah - your CQC!”

Snake looks affronted. “CQC isn’t a dance,” he grumbles, grinding his cigar between thumb and forefinger. His pride is dense in strange places and difficult to ruffle, but Paz is good at getting under his feathers. She laughs.

“Hey, hey -” Chico interjects. “Snake’s right, huh! I’m good at CQC, so it’s nothing alike! CQC is que chido!”

“What about you, Mr. Miller?”

Kaz adjusts his shades and runs his hands a hand through his hair, looking - he hopes - incredibly suave. “Well… I’ve been known to dance from time to time.”

Paz snaps her fingers. “Come here then!”

“Of course! I never refuse a lady’s request.”

Snake snorts. “This dance requires letting a woman take the lead. Are you sure you can handle that, Kaz?”

“Snake!” Kaz sputters, “what do you take me for?”

Snake lifts an eyebrow and just gives him a look, and now Kaz is the one flushing under the collar, hoping that he doesn’t look even an inch as besotted as he actually is.)

He’s able to sort through them, now, the ones that hurt and the ones that don’t.

(They’re all taking a smoke break, hiding from the sun beneath the shadow of ZEKE’s hangar. Huey’s trying to sell them on the benefits of his junky e-cigarette, but no one’s having any of it.

“You’ll see - the reports are coming in and they say that smoking is hazardous for the health!”

“Oh, scientists like you are so alarmist!” Cécile laughs, twirling her thin, European cigarette between two perfectly manicured fingers. “Smoking is a national pastime in France. There will never be any laws passed against it.”

“And even if it is dangerous,” Amanda grunts, “does anyone care? Life can be short and brutal. You never know what day will be your last. Why not do what you enjoy?”

“Amanda’s right,” Kaz agrees, trying to hide the way he carefully never actually inhales on his pipe. “In a crazy business like ours, who has the time to care about what our lungs are going to look like at seventy? Hell - we’ll be lucky to live that long!”

“Talking to you all is impossible,” Huey waves his hands, sounding disgusted. “I’ll bet you by this time in twenty years, you won’t be allowed to smoke indoors in most of the first world. I’m just preparing myself for that eventuality.”

“Even if your prediction is true, Doctor,” Snake says, “smoking will never disappear completely. You make a fine imitation, but humans senses are sharper than that. We crave authentic experiences.” He rolls his cuban under his nose, takes a big huff before lighting it up. “Ahh - like that. There’s no better smell in the world.”

Kaz remembers this conversation often in the years that Snake is in his coma. Sometimes, when it's been particularly rough, he’ll buy a cigar and light it up. He doesn’t smoke it, he just tips it into an ash tray and lets the heady, authentic scent of the smoke fill the room.)

It’s respectful to think of the dead now and then, to remember who they were, not how they ended or what they became.

(“Ah - look at that. The moon’s so red tonight.”

“Mmm.”

“Kinda scary.”

“Mmhmm.”

“It makes me think of this story from when I was a kid… y’know, those of us born right after the war, our parents never really explained to us why all our cities were in shambles. Our whole country was like the walking wounded for years. We knew that there had been a war and that we should do our best to stay clear of the Amerikajin, but when you’re a kid it’s hard to think of humans as scary. So we used to make up stories about monsters to talk about what happened. That’s probably why comics got so popular in Japan when my generation started getting older.”

“Hmm.”

“During a red moon like this, the older kids in Yokosuka used to tell us all about Jiangshi. Have you ever heard of them?”

“Hn?”

“It’s the Asian version of the vampire. In Japan, we called them kyonshī. They have a lot in common with western vampires - sleeping in coffins, associations with creepy animals - but in actuality, they’re more like zombies. They’re defined by being wracked with rigor mortis, so their appearance is usually rigid and unnatural often with a crook in their neck and their straightened toes dragging along the ground as they float…”

“Kaz-”

“The scent of rotting flesh accompanies them. Unlike Dracula, kyonshī are ruled by a sort of primal evil. They can’t be reasoned with. The Chinese say that a kyonshī is made when all a person’s Hun leaves their body after death and they are overtaken by their Po. Po is both evil and foolish, so the kyonshī thirsts only for death. They float up behind you in the night and wrap their long, bony fingers around your-”

Suddenly, Big Boss rolls over him and grabs his face. He kisses Kaz hard, all animalistic and desperate. The kiss goes on for a very long time. When they part, Kaz is confused and short of breath. “B-Boss… what the hell?”

“Is this the only way to make you shut up?”

“What?” Kaz examines Snake’s face - omni-present scowl, deep jowl lines, one eye glinting blue in the moonlight. What’s going on? There’s a slight tension between his eyebrows - the skin around his jaw is pulled taut beneath his patchy beard. “Are you okay?”

“I… just don’t like talking about vampires.” Snake leans in for another kiss, but Kaz stops him with both hands.

“Hold up - are you… scared, right now?”

“No.”

Kaz starts laughing. “Oh my god, you are. You’re frightened of vampires.”

“Kaz…”

“This is incredible. How did this happen? Was Dracula the first movie you saw? Did you fight some spooky, Russian experiment with artificial blood sucking fangs? Were you lost in the woods and -”

Snake grabs both of Kaz’s wrists and pins them to the ground above his head. He leans in real close and whispers smooth as gravel: “Kaz, do you really want to keep talking about vampires right now, or do you want to do something else instead?”

Kaz’s heart flips over inside his chest. His eyes flutter shut, but he can’t stop himself from giggling. “Yeah, okay Boss. Consider the subject dropped.”

Snake kisses him much more nicely this time.)

Yeah, these are the good ones. These are the ones he’ll keep.

Kaz didn’t realize that David had moved to Alaska, which is why he has to do a double take when he answers the door. He has to check to make sure he’s got both eyes. David’s hair is overgrown and he’s sporting a real mountain-man beard - neither suit him, nor are particularly in character. He holds a twelve pack of draft beer aloft as a peace offering.

“Master Miller, it’s been a while. Want a drink?”

He looks like hell, so Kaz lets him in.

They crack open the beers and watch the aurora borealis paint the sky brilliant. David says nothing for a long time, long enough that Kaz starts to feel awkward. There’s something hollowed out about the kid’s gaze - he’s staring at the sky, but not really seeing it. Kaz recognizes that darkness, he lived in it for years. He used to wake up every night in cold sweats with the meaty sound of saw-blade shredding muscle and bone grinding in his ears, feeling a pain that crawled beneath flesh that had long since been thrown out to the wild animals.

Kaz’s huskie, Yukino, pads into the living room and sniffs at David’s hand. He rubs her snout with the base of his palm and instantly earns her trust.

“Master-”

“Hey, I’m not your Master anymore. If you’re going to sit in my house and pet my dog, call me by my name, huh?”

David hesitates. “... McDonnel-”

“My name’s Kazuhira, actually.”

The kid glances at him, shocked. “Kazuhira…” he repeats slowly. “Japanese for peace. How did a man like you end up with a name like that?”

Kaz takes his sunglasses off - without them, you can see evidence of his mother’s lineage more clearly. “I’m half Japanese. I didn’t actually start living in the states permanently until the 90’s. I changed my name to avoid questions.”

“And McDonnel…?”

“Most American name I could think of,” he chuckles and takes a swig of his beer. “You know - like the hamburger.”

David gives Kaz the most withering cocked eyebrow that he’s ever seen. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well - that’s one thing he and his father have in common, Kaz thinks, no goddamn sense of humour.

The room falls silent again, nothing but the sound of the wind whistling over the tundra.

David begins: “In Zanzibar…” and Kaz was certain it would go a little bit like this. He lets the kid talk. “Before I killed him, Big Boss claimed that he gave people like me a reason to live. That once we’ve tasted battle, we can never go home again. He said: ‘It doesn't matter who wins here. Our fight will continue. The loser will be liberated from the battlefield, and the survivor will live out the rest of his days as a soldier.’ Those were his last words.”

“It was true for him. That doesn’t mean that it’s true for everyone.”

“But he was right. I did go back. Even when I vowed not to return.”

“Listen: if you hold those words in your heart, they will eat you alive. Big Boss is an impressive man. When he speaks directly to you, he can make anything sound like the truth. Remember that - what you heard was only the sound of the regard you had for him.”

David mulls over those words. His fingers clench and unclench around the base of the beer can. The subtle wrinkling of aluminum fills the room.

“You... sound like you know something about this.”

“I do. I used to work with him.”

“In FOXHOUND, right?”

“No, I mean before that. A… a long time before that. When I was your age, just about. In fact, I was his business partner and X.O. We ran a private military together in Central America, back in the 70s and 80s.”

“That far back? Strange - you two always seemed chilly when you interacted at HQ.”

Kaz grimaces. “Well, a lot can change in twenty years. Back then, though, we were inseparable. You know… when he met me, he said: ‘I didn’t know there were still Samurai left in Japan’. Can you imagine someone saying such a thing in 1972? But it got under my skin. It made me feel like more than the sum of my parts. I would have followed him anywhere. I almost did.”

“You were pretty close, huh?”

“Yeah…” Kaz stares out the window. His voice softens when he realizes that it doesn’t hurt to admit anymore. “Yeah, we were.”

“So what happened?”

Kaz tips back the beer, takes a long, good drink. “He betrayed me.”

David’s eyes follow the motion of the can, his gaze shadowed. “You’ve never told me any of this before. Why now?”

“I used to believe in his ideology. I also thought that I belonged on an endless battlefield, that I could never be content living quietly, I always had something to prove. I didn’t think that I could be happy in peacetime. Believe it or not, but I was wild when I was young. I felt like a different species than civilians. I thought that I was his kind - Big Boss’s kind.”

“But you got out?”

“Yup.”

“And you’re… content.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t miss it?”

“What part? The shitty food? Sleeping in the mud? Complete lack of privacy, living on nothing but water and adrenaline for three days straight? The camaraderie, when even people who piss you off are like family? Hell yeah, I miss that sometimes. But -” Kaz sweeps his arm out, gestures to the horizon, towards the mountains and the glaciers beyond. “- this is good too.”

David shakes his head. His hand falls to rest on Yukino’s sleeping head. He scratches between her ears thoughtfully. “I meant… the killing.”

Kaz doesn’t have anything to say to that. It’s a horrifying question, full of all kinds of uncomfortable implications. It’s also a question that answers a few things about Big Boss if all that crap about genes is really true. Kaz never actually relished the killing. Sure, he’d been inundated to cheap death at a young age, but the part he liked was the battle high, and the aftermath of the battle high, and the idea that when you died, it would not have been for something cheap. You had to kill, of course, but shit, you really shouldn’t like it. The only time he ever relished pulling the trigger… well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

David’s lost in his head again. He hasn’t touched his beer since opening it. Kaz finishes his and gets up to fetch another. He pauses behind David’s chair on his way to the kitchen. From the back, the man looks like a shadow. When David speaks, he sounds like the howling of the wind across the Alaskan plain.

“In Navajo legend, yee naaldlooshii means ‘with it, he goes on all fours’ - it is the name they give to Skinwalkers, a monster that used to be a man."

“I’ve heard this legend too. The Skinwalkers are healers who choose to use to use their powers to harm.”

“They gain their power through breaking sacred taboo and take the form of animals.”

Kaz doesn’t have to think very hard to get the parallel David is trying to draw here. Members of FOXHOUND cast off their civilian titles to live in the skins of their kindred animal, much the way “John” held onto the codename “Snake” until he died, even imparted it to his progeny. Soldiers are healers, in a way, who heal with death.

David continues: “For Skinwalkers, clizyati is the highest level of priesthood. The surest way to attain it is to kill your own blood - brother, sister, mother. Father.”

Kaz sets a steady hand on David’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it so much, kid,” he says. “Monsters aren’t real. The worst the world has is just us human beings.”

David nods, but Kaz can tell that it’s probably going to be a while until he’s alright.

“Be honest. Did you ever think of doing something else?”

“No.”

“You can say it that easily, huh?”

Snake is clicking his lighter futilely over and over again. The noise is getting on Kaz’s nerves, so he fishes out his kiseru and his zippo. Mostly, he carries them around to look cool and fashionable, but part of his six step plan of getting closer to Big Boss involves actually using them once in awhile.

“C’mere. Let me light you”

They lean their heads close and Kaz gets both the pipe and cigar in one shaky handed go. He’s been practicing for just such a moment. The Boss sighs gratefully and eases back to enjoy his smoke. They’re sitting cross-legged, side by side beneath a rocky outcropping near the river bed. Big Boss wanted to scout out some possible hunting routes. Kaz was desperate to pitch a new idea he had for recruitment. Instead, they got caught in a vicious and sudden Amazonian storm.

The rainforest is unlike anything else. Most forests get real quiet when it rains, but so much of Colombia comes alive the moment the clouds set in. Kaz shivers and watches the river jump and the mist roll in. Even shrouded in clouds, the scenery is still vibrant. Kaz is fucking freezing and soaked to the bone, though, so he needs to talk.

“But seriously-”

“No.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I lied so that I could join the military a month before I turned fourteen,” Snake says, voice all grit and tobacco. “That’s how I ended up in Korea.”

“No kidding? So you were a big guy even back then?” Kaz elbows Snake, friendly like. His tone’s more than a bit flirtatious. That’s part of the six-step plan as well.

“Mmm,” is all Snake says, but he doesn’t move away. Kaz takes a risk.

“There was no one at home, worrying about a little boy throwing himself on landmines half a world away?”

“I don’t know,” Snake says, exhaling a hazy wreath of smoke.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m here, so I had parents. But I can’t place their faces, or their names. I don’t ever recall being held. Maybe I lived at an orphanage at some point? I can’t remember.”

Of course - Snake was born during the depression. Malnutrition, rampant poverty, tenuous access to vaccines. Is that what it was? Was he some anonymous street urchin, brain damaged by untreated scarlet fever? His brain boiled until the only parts left were the ones that made him fucking insane.

The moment suddenly feels very fragile. Kaz has told Snake everything about himself, but he’s not sure how far he’s allowed to pry in return. Snake plays his cards close to his heart. It made you feel for the guy, too, because when he talks about pain, he obviously speaks from experience.

“You joined the military to… have a home? Get an education?”

Snake shakes his head. “No. I knew that I was good at it. Violence always came easily to me. I’ve always been good at surviving. Even at my lowest, even when I’ve wanted to die, my body keeps fighting. More like a beast than anything else. Sometimes I used to think that I would just disappear into the woods someday. Leave behind speech, leave behind relationships, eat raw animals until I forgot that I was ever human. These… trappings of civilization don’t suit me. They’ve always felt like performance. It… doesn’t come easily to me.”

“Boss…”

“I was like that until I met her.”

Kaz isn’t proud to admit that he feels a stab of jealousy whenever Snake talks about his mentor. It’s entirely inappropriate, for multiple reasons. She and Snake weren’t lovers. He and Snake aren’t lovers. But Kaz can see that the shadow she casts on Snake’s life is the same shadow Snake has already begun to cast on his.

“She pulled you into the world of the living, huh?”

“She taught me how to be alive on the battlefield in a way that allowed me to retain focus in the rest of my life. But the further away I am from her lessons, the more I’m afraid that I’ll lose myself again. That’s why it's not about the money. And that is why I keep people like you around, Kaz.”

Kaz is puffing very delicately on his pipe when Snake says it. He inhales down the wrong tube and comes up coughing. Did he… did Snake really just say that? Kaz plays it cool when he recovers. He taps the end of his pipe so the the ash dusts his knees. He smiles appropriately. He says: “Gee, Boss, I’m flattered.”

“I’m being serious, Kaz. You’ve got a strong heart. You’re a survivor as well, but you can navigate both worlds with grace. Without people like you in my organization, I’d lose my way quickly. Thank you, Kaz. For being my partner in this.”

Kaz sidles in and pats Big Boss on the back. It starts as a manly kind of thing, but it slowly turns into a rhythmic, comforting rub. The man gives off heat like a radiator. Kaz shifts closer and Snake rolls back his arm to make room for him.

“I think you’re selling yourself short, Snake,” Kaz says. “Your compass always points north far as I can tell, otherwise I would be dead right now.”

“Hn,” Snake replies.

Kaz goes for it and wraps his arm all the way around Snake’s shoulders. “But either way, I’m with you.”

“Even knowing the work we have cut out for us, forging a new world?”

“Yeah, Boss. Of course. Every step of the way.”

“No matter where it leads?”

“Into hell and back if need be.”

“Well, then,” Snake chuckles and flicks the butt of his cigar out into the rain. “In that case, I think I’ll be alright.”