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He's alone when he does it. Not because he needs to be. Because he wants to be. He'll allow himself this small self-indulgence, at the end.
Around him are the tools he'll need: syringes with drugs that will make him less lucid, less able to resist; images; audio files. He's become so good at it that, under normal circumstances, all he'd need are a few trigger words to repeat and his own imagination. It's different this time, though. Permanent.
It won't take the time it took the last time he made this permanent. This time he's simply tearing down, destroying - kicking something over is always easier than building it back up. What he'll replace it with is paper-thin and ankle deep. A persona they'll believe because they want to. Because he's spent the last fifty years crafting the excuse to such utter perfection he considers it his masterpiece.
Not even Zero saw through it.
Not even you.
Waiting won't make it any easier, so he begins:
He doesn't need his childhood. What few scraps of it are left that aren't fiction; casualties of his early experiments before he knew how to bring the pieces back together. He remembers a gravelly-voiced cowboy on the radio; walking in the snow. Endless hours of memorization in languages he no longer speaks. He recalls tiny fingers too weak to depress the spring of a magazine. Loading it with his palm.
Whatever happened, it taught him discipline. This persona's childhood taught him nothing of the kind.
Gone.
He doesn't need sharp, crisp winters. The flush of blood to his extremities with hot food or strong liquor, the stinging bite of the cold. He doesn't need habitually dour-faced men turning into children flinging themselves into snow piles. He doesn't need steaming baths or vigorous massages or the faces and bodies of the men he languished with there, the voices that cheered him on when he performed his little weapon tricks and shot at the air just beside your head. He doesn't need stirring songs, the ones he knows by heart, nor the familiarity of the one place he'd call his homeland, though he'd tell you that was America.
It's one of his few badly told lies. He doesn't need Russia; Russian. His new persona knows neither.
Gone.
He doesn't need firearms. He doesn't need pistols or revolvers or the few times he brought a rifle because shooting a handgun from a helicopter was a little too ridiculous, even for him. He doesn't need the crack and bang that've worn his hearing down over the decades almost as badly as it has yours. Nor the smell of gunpower, the recoil against his palm and the way he's always disliked it, faintly. The tiniest of flinches. He was a deadeye before he met you - after you told him to give up pistols he's spent his thousands, tens of thousands of hours attaining skills a handful of people alive possess.
His new persona is not one of them.
Gone.
His vision blurs and he blinks, no longer recalling why. It doesn't matter. It's only going to get harder from here.
Most of the faces and names are simple enough: he kept them at armslength and they truly mean nothing to him. These aren't lies. Men and women who've followed him over the years, men and women he's followed. Zero he doesn't need to forget, only alter. The costume he's set to wear, that empty, shallow shell knows him, and despises him. He chips away at the layers of complexity in those feelings until only that remains.
He doesn't need his mother. She was nothing more than a whisper, an echo. A shadow that looms large but one he stepped out from under long ago. If they met now, she would kill him.
More lies. He'd kill her. But isn't that a little too close to the truth?
He doesn't need Eva. This new man knows her, distantly, but knows nothing of her. He's seen her weaknesses and her strengths; her vanity and her resolve. All of her contradictions: she loves you, truly, yet she does not follow you. She is one of the few who loves you that doesn't, and never did. Content to make her own way in the world, her own choices. Her own woman. He considered her his enemy. He considers her his closest friend. He's ridden behind her on her motorcycle, impressed; drank with her while she doubted herself and cried and made terrible decisions he told her not to make, and she threw the bottle at him and called him a coward and spineless and your bitch in Mandarin.
He remembers it fondly. Eva is one of his favourite people. So strong-willed, so clever, so charming, so observant.
Everything she believes about him is a lie.
He doesn't need Miller. He doesn't need Kaz. Had you figured that one out? It's one of his better falsehoods. Miller so consumed by his own emotions, Miller so impulsive and bridling with hate, regret, loss, wallowing in the past. Miller who loved you. Miller who followed you. Miller who killed you, truly.
Miller the man he knew for as long as he knew you, if reckoned minus the time you'd spent apart, asleep, or living lies. Whose tangled, greasy, sweat-matted blond hair he'd reached out and touched with his glove off one night in 1981 as the other man slept, passed out in a cheap hotel room in Guatemala during the peak of their civil war, after the longest, bloodiest battle they'd ever fought. He hadn't fought it with you. He fought with him. He felt nothing, though. All his loyalty lay with you.
Of course it did.
Get off him a snarl his blood is flowing he's breathing moving again if it's the last thing he does soft damp fragile flesh he pushes inward starts to give
Foam at the corners of Miller's lips. Miller crawling over broken glass.
He definitely doesn't need that. He shouldn't have kept it in the first place.
Gone.
And then, there's you.
He can't get rid of you entirely. You are the focus, the center of the world around which this lie turns. It is supposed to hate you and love you both at once. Admire you and despise you. Strive to surpass you and impress you.
What does he feel? That's a complicated question.
To which anyone else could give you an answer so quickly it brings a smile to his lips, even now.
He no longer needs the name Adamska. He gave that to you to say, and you'll never say it to him again. You are men, with names. True, but names are stories. He could have called you anything else and you would have been you - all the other names you've been called are proof enough of that - and he, him. You are men, that much is true. You preferred Adam, anyway. He doesn't need that either.
He doesn't need the way you and only you called him that, in his adult life. Every time a little warmth; a secret shared. A beautiful pretense that you and only you knew him for what he really was.
Ocelot will do. It has for decades.
He doesn't need the way you breathed it, low and eager while he gripped the bars of the headboard. You liked it when he kept his gloves on; your weight on top of him is smothering, but it grinds his cock against the sheets. The way you fuck him is utterly artless and uncomfortable but it is innocent in that discomfort in a way it won't be later and he gets off on it all the same. Learns to like it. Learns to miss it.
He doesn't need the way you gasped it, him pinned beneath you with your thighs wrapped around his waist, his hands on them so eager - one of his favourite parts of you - so heady at the sweat-slicked sight of your heaving chest and the ecstasy that is being buried inside your impossibly strong, impossibly tempting body that he forgets himself. John, John - this is paradise.
No, he doesn't need it. He doesn't need the thrill of youth, the pounding of his heart and the feel of yours, just as quick. He had no expectations of you, borne out of this. You had none of him. Not like she did when she molded you, not like Eva did when she wanted you to love her, not like Miller did when he wanted you to rule at his side.
Just a fuck, right John?
Just a fuck, after thirty-five years? Hahahahah You're an even better liar than he is.
Gone.
He doesn't need the agonizing bedside vigil and the accompanying despair. He doesn't need the false confidence he exuded for everyone who believed in you; for you. He knows you're flesh and blood. Just a man. Starved of oxygen your brain would shut down the same as any other man. Did shut down. But Zero'd said you'd want it this way, want it to be him, and he judged that Zero was probably right. He had other projects underway but, frankly, it was nothing he couldn't handle. Protecting you. Protecting the man he thought you loved. Carefully building a foundation of Cipher corpses on which the fake you could stand, clearing a path with knives in the darkness through which the real you could escape.
He'd sleep when he was dead. Or so he told himself. Realized it wasn't a very good lie when he'd aged five years in one and the nurses found him passed out cold at your bedside nearly every time you visited.
He's just a man, too.
Gone.
He doesn't need the man he later became at all. You weren't there. It's nothing to him. A never-ending performance - a dance, he was always so good at dancing and you never were - for their entertainment with the smallest of respites to drink sweet wines and stroll with an old... friend? Who? Lovely, feminine laughter. No one. The curtain closed on all of it when he'd finally lost that other son, the one he'd really meant when he'd recited practices lines with... who? A man. A man he'd bled for. A man who said he'd become his enemy but didn't really mean it.
Then they'd known whose side he was really on all this time, in spite of all the blades he'd shoved into your back to convince them otherwise. Some of them so very, very deep.
Gone.
He doesn't need the last time he saw you. Be honest: will ever see you. He doesn't need the forced smiles and fake contentment he felt when he could see behind your eye that you were done. Done fighting. Doesn't need the iron weight of knowledge he dragged behind him, shackled, through Zanzibar Land that they would never let you keep this. That no matter how many empires you built, they would tear them down again in an endless cycle. You told him that you would rebuild as many times as it took, but you're a liar.
A sweet liar; still so handsome to him. Age suits you, and that is the honest truth. Grey looks distinguished on you; normally, that's a very pretty lie people tell old men, but your body and jaw are still strong, your command presence has only grown, and you're an excellent lover now. ...Someone...? Taught you well. You told him that you thought the same of him while you ran fingers through his long hair, and he flatters himself with the idea that you really meant it.
Gone.
He doesn't need the way you grin when you wrestle him because it's all play. If he wanted to kill you, he could. But he doesn't, so you could kill him. He doesn't need the warmth of his cheek pressed to your broad back; your calloused fingers through his hair telling him you liked it longer; the smell of your sweat and the smell of your smoke and the way you'd been the one to call him back for one last light, one last touch, some final reassuring words before you parted ways.
I'll miss you too, John. Would've been true.
You did come back for him: the creak of your leather jacket, the purr of the engine, the smell of blood on you, on him, the rest shrinking wincing terrified of the legendary wielder of pain who becomes other men's nightmares while you stride confidently across fresh corpses to him, War on a black steel horse, to take crimson Death in your recoil-warmed hands and make him yours.
...Maybe he'll keep some of that last part. This farce he's becoming is in awe of you, after all.
The rest is gone.
He won't keep the last time he spoke to you. It reminds him that you were mortal, after all. You're not dead - if you were, he wouldn't be doing this - but you were weary and sentimental and vengeful in the end. Maybe... someone...? ... some other man, understood you best, after all.
And so is he. He'd cried. Oh, how he'd cried. Like you've never seen him. Like a child who'd lost his mother. So pathetic anyone who'd known him would have been astounded.
That's the whole point, though. They don't know him.
Burn it all down.
Anything for you, ...
There was something he used to call you. It's gone now. He vaguely knows the English translation, but it isn't the same. It sounds cloying. In English you'd call a sweetheart that. In... ...the way he'd meant it, you said it to a brother. A son.
Anything for you, John.
The backs of his hands are slippery and damp before he manages to give that one up. He knows he has to. Nobody but him calls you that.
Calls you what?
It's not that he thinks it's romantic to die for you. There is nothing romantic about death. It's not that he doesn't have plans of his own. He set them in motion ages ago and they no longer require his presence. It was simply that this was the only way to do what you'd asked; he can do this, his partner can't. So she will see you again, and he will not. It is that simple; that unsentimental. He trusts her to protect you, though he no longer knows why.
He will do what you couldn't: either because you weren't capable, which he can't imagine, or your lingering affection for Zero stayed your hand, or you were simply not willing to commit to the catastrophic levels of collateral damage this will require. History will call you a hero and a monster both. You were neither.
You asked, so he will: rip them out by the roots and topple the system they built with them. If the world burns with them, so be it.
There is one memory he'll keep. The day he first met you, untainted and whole, staring down at him with both eyes in empathy, amusement, a delight he shared. The day you should have killed him but despite everything everyone will ever say about you, you don't like killing. On his back and helpless but glad as the world went dark. He buries it shallowly, so that it'll trigger when he needs it to.
It's the last lie he'll ever tell himself, when he dies: that if the two of you went back to the beginning, started over, it could have been any other way.