Ouroboros
It's drugs, that he's being sent to fetch. Snake, a lot of it, and that alone almost makes him back out until Von smiles unpleasantly and nods toward the hatch of his ship, and the bunker outside. The implication is clear. Neil is a hostage, and Von isn't exactly the brightest star in the sector but he knows enough to know that threatening Mike with harm to himself won't be sufficient to keep him under control.
So Mike nods. Grits his teeth. Feels cold hatred rising in his gut like acid. Fucker.
He's allowed to take Florence, anyway, and he watches Miranda get big in the window and looks down at the wide swatch of blue that covers part of its surface, and he thinks about the beach again. It had all been so simple then. Too simple, before Tom, before everything.
Tom. Could he go to him? Could he ask for help? He feels his stomach clench. He's probably being watched, and Tom's no longer got any authority... and to get him dragged into this...
It doesn't seem fair. He's not pulling anyone else down with him. Tom can't know. Not yet, he tells himself, and he knows that part of it is shame, part of it is that he's too fucking chickenshit to admit what he's allowed to happen, and he hates that too.
There are two men, and he meets them in Siam. First for a drink in a hold-in-the-wall bar, and the usual formalities--You got the cred? Sure I do. Where's the stuff? Pay up first. We'll take you there, you pay on the way.--and then he's following the two of them out, fingering the wicked little blade up his sleeve, and once they're far enough back in an alley, the first one's throat is cut before either of them can do anything, staggering forward and spraying blood, gurgling it out through his nose and mouth, stumbling and going down with his face in a puddle of cold piss. The second one is up against the wall and gibbering, offering twenty different deals, and Mike gets the one he wants.
At the stash, that's where he takes care of the other one.
He doesn't worry too much about the bodies. Enough people die like that in Siam. If he got caught, not even that would bother him too much... but there's Neil. And if Neil is a reason for him to come back, he's a reason for them to keep Neil alive.
He sits in Florence's cockpit with blood on his hands and a hold full of pure Snake, and he wonders just how things could go so bad so fast. And he knows. It was him. Shit he's done before, he doesn't get to wipe the slate clean just because it's inconvenient not to. But he wants things. He wants to apologize to Neil's mother. He wants to stab out Von's eyes with his thumbs. He wants to go back to Neil and pull him close and hold on and not let go.
He supposes that all three might yet be possible.
First things first.