Chapter Text
It had taken months of gentle cajoling to convince Dave to go on this trip. Months that, at the time, Hal wasn’t sure he had.
Dave was of the opinion that the place The Boss died wasn’t all that important to him. He’d never known her, for the longest time he only knew anything at all through rumors about Big Boss that had spent a decade (or two or three) floating around FOXHOUND before they got to him. As far as he was concerned, she was a strong woman and a skilled soldier, but not as important to him as his currently living squadmates.
But Hal had argued at great length that if nothing else she was something like a great-grandmother to Sunny, and that she deserved to understand the events that had led to her family being the way it was now. And surely, he’d said, if Dave could understand why he would want to visit a holocaust memorial despite his complicated estrangement from his own family, he could understand why Sunny might benefit from knowing about her adoptive family’s trials and tribulations, and how they’d blossomed out into the loss of her mother.
Dave, despite his reluctance to think of anyone outside of Hal and Sunny as family (“and maybe Jack, but don’t push it,” he had admitted once in a weak moment) had to admit Hal had a point. If nothing else, The Boss’s death set off a chain of events that led to Sunny being separated from her mother, just like The Boss had been separated from her son. Even if he didn’t consider her family, he couldn’t pretend she hadn’t contributed to the creation of the one they had.
So he had eventually relented, on the condition that Hal take Sunny alone to the history center and let Dave connect in his own way. And so here he was, in
He had read about a thousand times the declassified logs from Operation Snake Eater in Tselinoyarsk, but it was different to be here in person. Not much had changed in the 50 years since, it seemed. The human installations were different, yes, overgrown and broken down, but they were recognizable. Dave found himself recalling passages of the logs.
Did he know by the time he got here that he would have to kill her? Is this where Ocelot met him for the first time?
What if he’d let Eva take the shot when she had the chance?
Big Boss wasn’t his father, not exactly. He’d grown up passed back and forth between foster families and “aunts and uncles” that he’d figured out long ago were a smokescreen to make him feel more normal. He didn’t need a father. The idea of having a ‘dad’ was foreign, the word wouldn’t even have formed on his lips.
But he couldn’t help but feel the familial resemblance as he made his way through the wilderness. Choices that had once seemed strange when he had read them as text on a page suddenly made all the sense in the world, because he would have done them just the same.
He wondered as he walked if he would have made the same choices as Big Boss did if, say, he was told he had to kill Hal to preserve the world’s still-fragile peace. Could he have done it? Would it have turned him into a monster too?
It didn’t take him as long as it had taken Big Boss to make his way across the land of the no-longer-virgin cliffs. There were no longer patrols, nor for that matter would there be any large consequence to being caught even if there had been men this far out. In his retirement, though, Dave had become less physically resilient. He was tired by the time he saw the lake spread out beneath him, with its shore still covered in flowers.
Big Boss had said in his reports that at The Boss’s death, the flowers had turned red. Dave had assumed for years that he was taking poetic license, trying to externalize some fraction of the trauma that comes from killing a comrade, but as the sun fell down the horizon, the field gave the impression of a wildfire. Indeed, if these blossoms bled out every sunset from here until the end of time, they might never return the pound of flesh that the world was likely to owe Big Boss for going through with the impossible.
Hal and Sunny had beat him there. This was no surprise, he’d been taking his time.
He had nothing to say, really. He was familiar with the story that they’d just read. Perhaps the memorials were a touch harsher on Big Boss than he deserved, if only because of the recency bias of his later infamy, but the narrative was about right all the same.
Hal embraced him. There wasn’t much he could say either. They’d stayed up many a night, passing a bottle back and forth, commiserating over their shared membership to the shitty dead dad club. Everything that could ever have been said already had, long before Sunny had entered the picture.
If he closed his eyes here, Dave could almost imagine none of it was real. He could be lost in this love that enveloped him in the smell of fresh soap and warm sweaters (he was glad that this had gradually replaced the smell of sweaty nerd and stale coffee), that this was just a lovely field of flowers and not the site of a great violence that had caused him to come into being.
He only looked down when he felt a small tug on his elbow. Sunny wasn’t a baby anymore, but she was still so small and precious that he felt a kind of guilt for exposing her to the horrors of war, even in a protected way like this.She stood, toes pointed in, with a hand behind her back.
“P-P-Papa!” She said, “I have something!”
“What do you have, Sunny?” He asked, trying to chase the hollowness from his voice.
She thrust her arms forward, producing three circles of leaves and blossoms. “Crowns!” She said, “One for you Papa, one for you Daddy, and one for me!”
Dave and Hal each took one of the large crowns, and Sunny put the smallest one on her own head.
“Are we royalty, then?” Dave asked.
Sunny screwed up her face. “Kings? No. That’s silly.”
“No?” Hal asked, “What, then?”
“I think we can just wear crowns.” She said, “No kings. No princesses. We’re just wearing crowns. Flower crowns. ”
“Just wearing crowns it is, then,” Dave chuckled. Sunny’s sincerity always managed to melt the stone around his heart in a way even Hal never could. He just hoped that whatever was underneath wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Sunny took off for the helicopter. “Last one back’s an egg!” She yelled.
“Hey!” Hal called back, “It’s not fair to say that after you start running.”
“I cheated!” She giggled as she ran.
“Better hurry up, Hal,” Dave deadpanned, “Wouldn’t want to be a rotten egg now, would you?”
“Not a rotten egg,” Hal mused, taking his hand, “Just an egg. I think I can live with that.”
They took off as the horizon dragged the last clawing fingertips of sunlight into sweet dark oblivion, flying away from the scene of the slaughter just as Big Boss and Eva had done fifty years before.