S3 for Trolljima (please to enjoy!)
Oh, dear me! I seem to have misplaced Christmas and come in five days late. Also, very, very long.
trolljima asked for many things, and I hope I was at least able to deliver this one. It's an MGS3 Western AU (with showdowns and revolver spinning, in particular).
It's fine and safe for work. There's a little bit of hinted Ocelot/Big Boss.
The glass windows rattled in their wooden frames, so loud they almost drowned out the wind itself. The whole saloon creaked and swayed, and a woman living through her first dust storm sobbed into her husband’s shoulder in a corner booth.
“The Apache howl,” shouted the barman to a young blond man leaning indifferently against the bar. A shot glass dangled between the man’s thumb and middle finger. “No good ever follows it.”
The young man replied with a single, silent laugh.
“Think you’ve seen it all, don’tcha, kid?” the barman said with mild irritation. “How old are you? Nineteen?”
“Twenty,” the blond answered, surveying the crowd that had taken refuge in the saloon. He had strolled into town last week like he owned the pit of mud and ramshackle buildings that was Salida del Sol, a band of sharp-dressed but trail-worn cronies in his wake. Though he had no horse, he wore silver spurs which he polished each day on the front porch of the sheriff’s office.
“And how does a boy of twenty come to see so much?” the barman asked.
“How does a man of your age come to know so little?” He still did not look at the barman as he spoke. “White men are full of nonsense about the Apache, think they’ve got some power, some special connection to the Earth.”
“White men? You say it like you ain’t white as they come.”
The blond laughed again, this time with a derisive snort. “I grew up with the Apache. Called me ‘Ocelot’ after some trickster cat in their legends. Nothing special about the Apache. They bleed and die same as you and me.”
“That’s not a thing to say ‘round here. This town’s friendly with the Apaches.”
The blond man the Apache called “Ocelot” turned to the barman. For the first time since the boy had arrived in Salida del Sol, the barman saw his face properly. He had high, prominent cheeks and thick-lashed blue eyes the barman swore he had seen before. A devilish smirk passed across his lips but was instantly replaced by a deep frown. His eyes narrowed as he said, “But you don’t agree with the town, do you?”
The barman’s tremble, mouth slightly agape, betrayed his answer wordlessly. Ocelot was too like her not to be a relative, too like the woman who leaned over the banister with a sheriff’s badge gleaming over one fleshy breast, the woman who had forced him to pour bourbon for the animals that had killed his wife and daughter.
A steady wind lingered throughout the day, spinning red dust devils that twisted down Salida del Sol’s main street. Though Ocelot’s lips were smeared with pig fat against the arid wind, they felt drier than ever, caked with dust that tasted like a blacksmith’s shop. He still polished his spurs in the high heat of the late afternoon, then a pair of revolvers, and as the evening burst crimson against the Acantilados Vírgenes in the distance, a hand grasped his shoulder.
Ocelot sprang to his feet with the catlike grace for which he thought he had been named. Both guns, though only one was loaded, pointed into the composed, pensive face of the town’s sheriff.
“I’d put down the peashooters, son,” she said.
“P - pea… p - “ he stuttered. “No girl sheriff of some one-horse town can tell me what to do.”
Silently, the sheriff raised one finger and drew a circle in front of her face - the Apache sign for “surround”. Ocelot spun around, counting the four men who aimed their weapons at him. A figure covered head-to-toe in a dark veil wielded what appeared to be a small cannon. The shriveled old man who always slept in front of the store across the street glared down the barrel of a rifle. A swarthy man with spindly limbs had somehow materialized behind Ocelot with a crossbow. To his left, a barrel-chested Apache carried a strangely lumpy gun that vibrated slightly and buzzed as if it were made from - but it was impossible - bees!
“My deputies,” the sheriff said with a half-smirk. “I call them ‘the Cobras’. Don’t know who you are and why you’re here, son” - here she gazed over his head as if talking to someone else, perhaps a distant face carved into the cliffs - “but you’d best not interfere. The storm is coming back. We are only in its eye.”
As she walked away, impossibly white boots clicking across the wooden porch, Ocelot found that he had lowered his revolvers.
Ocelot was up before the dawn and, he thought, before the town. The first rim of light over the Acantilados Vírgenes absorbed more stars each minute while Ocelot stood alone in the street. He drew one revolver, hooking his finger through the trigger guard, and flipped it upward, letting its weight twirl it back around his finger in a graceful spin. He flipped it around his finger again, faster and faster until it blurred into a disk of dark metal. With his other hand, he slid the second gun from its holster and spun it around his other finger. He tossed the first revolver into the air and caught it behind his back, the constant thwip thwip of the other providing a beat for the music of metal meeting his leather gloves. Now he let the other fly and reached his hand back to catch it.
“You’re improving.”
Ocelot’s revolver hit the dusty road, and he raised the other, turning to the voice.
“Sorry, son. Thought you were alone, didn’t you?” the sheriff said, pacing toward him, arms open at her sides to show she carried no weapon. “Been watching every day since you got to town. You’re good, no doubt. I might be able to use you.”
“No one uses me.” It came out as a snarl. The woman was old, at least twice Ocelot’s age. Her hair was starting to go that dusty blond that comes before gray. He had known when the government sent him that the sheriff was a woman, and he had laughed when they told him she was dangerous. Now he saw why - she was meddlesome, like all women, never content to let the world turn around them without their input. But he couldn’t kill her; that was another man’s job.
“Of course not,” she said, but her steely eyes, narrowed so like his own, said, "You’re already being used.”
Ocelot picked up his revolver from the ground, groping a moment while he kept his eyes on the sheriff.
“Why did you come here, Ocelot?”
He didn’t remember ever telling her his name, but word travels in a small town, he supposed.
“What do you need from me?” he asked, hoping he had been sufficiently coy. Her trust, the government’s trust, the barman’s trust, his trust - Ocelot had to win all of them before he could be betray any of them.
Sunrise brought a new man to town with a brown mane wilder than his horse’s. The sheriff had seen him as a dark dot drifting across the plane of rock between Salida del Sol and the Acantilados Vírgenes. She had ridden to meet him on her own white horse, and they loped into town together, conversing like old friends. It was him; Ocelot knew it like he knew the moment that his revolver would drop into his leather glove after he tossed it. Now that Ocelot saw him, he wasn’t sure what he had expected the government to send - perhaps someone older, uglier, a bit more official. Beneath a tangle of bangs tied sloppily with a bandana of indistinct color, a pair of dark blue eyes sparkled with innocence and integrity. His trust would be easy to secure. Ocelot grinned and was surprised, even alarmed, when the man returned his smile with lips almost hidden under several weeks of stubble. The government man shouldn’t have known about Ocelot. This would make it all much more difficult…
The man’s horse passed, flanked by the sheriff’s like a hero’s procession, and Ocelot watched the man’s muscles tighten as he urged the horse on. Shaped by suede pants worn smooth where they bounced against the saddle, the man’s own hindquarters curved in at the sides like his horse’s. Though Ocelot envied the ease with which this man spoke to the sheriff and especially that gaze of childlike awe he gave her, he was glad of his view.
That night was cold even before the sun had sunken fully. The man hunched in a lonely corner of the saloon, one elbow on the table. To the untrained eye, he seemed deep in a lustful fantasy about Eva, the dancer upon whom his eyes were fixed, but Ocelot saw his gaze flicking over the room at intervals. Staring at Eva was his cover, and just as well. She had arrived on a train from Sacramento three days ago, a mediocre dancer with a singing voice only a dog could love. If even the back alley shows in Sacramento didn’t want her, she could never be good enough for this man. He deserved better, and, Ocelot thought, it was time for an introduction.
Ocelot took the seat across from the man, sitting in it backward with his arms crossed on the top rung of the ladder-back. The man shot him the quickest of glances and turned back to Eva who now straddled her own chair, rocking it back and forth just off the beat of the music. As a rule, Ocelot avoided making enemies of people before he betrayed them, but he had downed perhaps a few shots of bourbon past his limit while watching the man at the table. The triumphant little smile Eva gave him the next moment did nothing to calm his temper, and when she flounced across the room and drew her lily-white hands through the man’s hair, Ocelot forgot his own rule. He swept his arm over the table, knocking the man’s full glass of whiskey at Eva’s bead-encrusted white dress. She screamed, and then the saloon was silent as the brown whiskey seeped down the front of her dress, dripping through the glass beads like blood being drawn.
“What the hell’s your problem, kid?” the man growled.
“Have a problem with me?” Ocelot asked with drunken petulance, and before he could stop his six-shooters from talking for him, he added, “Wanna make it a showdown?”
“We don’t do that sort of thing ‘round here, son,” said the sheriff as she pushed her way through the crowd that had gathered. She swept Eva to her side, seemed to embrace her briefly with one arm, and then whispered brusquely, “You’ll live. “
She pushed Eva gently into the arms of one of her deputies - the crossbow fighter with a face shaped like an anvil. Eva looked none too happy to have his long arms around her and sneered at Ocelot before following the deputy into the crowd.
With a click of his spurs, Ocelot turned back to the man. He had not even left his chair and stared up at Ocelot with a somewhat bemused grin.
“So,” Ocelot said, sliding one revolver into his hand, spinning the cylinder, clicking it back into place, “what time tomorrow morning, uh… what was your name again?”
He hoped it had come off casually enough.
“Snake,” said the man.
Ocelot laughed, but remembering that he had come into the saloon without his cronies, he stopped abruptly. “I’m Ocelot, but they call me ‘Revolver’.”
The sheriff wrapped a warm, astonishingly strong arm around his shoulders. “Alright, Revolver, you should go outside and play with your friends. Let me take care of this.”
Before he could feel his own cheeks reddening, Ocelot had spun to face her, revolver cocked. His eyes barely registered her arm hooking him by the elbow, but his body felt it as he slammed nose-first into Snake’s table. Blood bubbled over his mouth, and he fumbled for his other gun only to find it missing.
“Go,” the sheriff said in a low, icy voice. “Play your little game of cowboys and Indians somewhere else.”
Ocelot backed toward the doorway, wagging a finger at Snake. “I’ll see you tomorrow, nine o’clock, in the main street… Snake.”
At a quarter-to-nine the next morning, Ocelot stomped down the stairs of the hotel, spinning his revolvers which he had found arranged neatly on his bed the night before. He had been up again well before dawn, drawing his guns on the apparition of Snake which had occupied his mind all night. He whistled as he crossed the hotel lobby, wondering briefly what Snake would be wearing, hoping even more briefly that it would be very little.
Ocelot opened the front door on a showdown already in progress. To the east, with the Acantilados Vírgenes like a painting behind him, loomed Snake, curling and uncurling his fingers against his leather holster. Facing him from the west was the barrel-chested Apache, bees circling his head. Without warning, the Apache raised his hand, and a swarm of bees shot toward Snake. Snake ducked instinctively, drawing his revolver as he hit the ground. The bees veered toward him but stopped as the Apache fell. Snake’s gunshot echoed off the flat fronts of the buildings even as the man himself disappeared behind a sundries shop.
“Snake!” Ocelot shouted. He skidded into the street, and his gang, who had come to watch his fight with Snake, flocked around him.
“Out of my way!” he cried, shoving them aside and dashing around the shop. A short alley opened into an expanse of desert. Snake was gone.
The gangly Cobra was the next to die. Ocelot found him in the early morning curled in the street like a spider. Though no one had seen Snake since his fight with the Apache, Ocelot knew he had killed the deputy. Single bullet to the forehead. He was pretty good.
Ocelot hovered at the sheriff’s side that day, watching for a sign that she was afraid, but she was impassive as ever. Once, he saw her unfolding a piece of parchment - the map of the Acantilados Vírgenes the government said she had. She bent over him as he was polishing his spurs that afternoon, smoking a cigar in silence. At dusk, she lifted her head from what appeared to be a nap, glanced at the false window in a rooftop across the street, and nodded.
“You look like you want to help me,” she said to Ocelot.
“What makes you think that?”
“You’ve been hanging ‘round my neck all day. Figured you might be waiting to help me.”
Ocelot grunted.
“Well, should you decide to help, you might want to get everyone out of the street. I’d hate to see anyone get shot who isn’t supposed to.”
Ocelot couldn’t say why exactly he listened to her. He told himself, while herding the bewildered residents of Salida del Sol into their homes, that her doleful eyes had not affected him, that he had not felt compelled to obey her sharp whisper, that he had made the decision to clear the street of his own power. As he wiped his brow, watching from the porch of the sheriff’s office another, smaller dust storm forming in the west, he heard the first shot.
It was from a rifle. No sound of flesh hitting rock followed it. Ocelot craned his neck to see as much of the street as possible. The town was filling with red dust, as were his lungs. He tore at the cravat tied around his collar and pulled it over his nose. The sheriff stood beside him, white bandana over the bottom half of her face, arms crossed like a chieftain. She did not flinch as another rifle shot sounded in the nearly invisible street. A minute later, two quick shots from a revolver twanged, followed by a thump and a short groan. When the storm had cleared, the old deputy lay dead in the street, his rifle laid across his chest.
The only Cobra remaining was the veiled man. He sat arrow-straight in front of the sheriff’s office the next day while patrols shuffled up and down the main street. Most of the town had stayed home, and those who braved the open street hurried to their destinations, casting glances at every dark corner.
“You’re Apache, aren’t you?” Ocelot asked the veiled man.
“What of it?” said a gravelly voice from beneath the veil. The eyes that showed through the slit were black and inscrutable.
“I’m Apache too… well, half, they said.”
“So?” He was apparently not a conversationalist.
“There’s gold in the Acantilados Vírgenes. That’s why this town's here, right? To protect it?”
“We care not for gold.”
“Of course not. That’s why you and the tribes of the Acantilados killed twelve families who came looking for gold.”
“It is the Apache’s land. They protect it.”
“And they had you, relics of the war with the Mexicans. Tell me, how long do you plan to - “
“That’s enough, Ocelot,” snapped the sheriff. She had appeared soundlessly at Ocelot’s side wearing, instead of her usual chaps and vest, a simple white dress which fell to the tops of her feet.
“Why haven’t the Apache come to your aid? You came to theirs, didn’t you?” Ocelot said, a part of him wishing she was about to say they were waiting in the alleys for Snake to show his unkempt head.
“Things changed. Two years ago, I...,” the sheriff said. “You say you’re half-Apache? Your father…”
“Was a spirit-talker.”
Ocelot had met his father only a few times, and really “met” was not an apt description. His father had been… elsewhere… wandering. He had lived among the dead, and Ocelot wondered whether he even noticed when he joined them.
“Yes,” said the sheriff. “He…”
“Was killed two years ago.”
“By a white… man?”
“Are you - “
Snake’s appearance at the east end of the street wiped the words from Ocelot’s mind. Snake wore chaps blue as the night sky and a lighter shirt, open at the throat. The same bandana wrapped his forehead though his hair was shorter, slicked here and there with pomade.
The sheriff had noticed too. “What are you wearing in your hair?”
“Just trying to look nice for you, boss. Bought it at your general store.”
“Not the wax. The bandana. It was cute the first time but not after you’ve killed my comrades. You can’t live in the past and destroy it at the same time.”
Snake frowned as if he really had hoped for a compliment. “You coming to fight me?”
“Not yet. You’ll have to get past the Fury first.”
The veiled man rose, hefting his miniature cannon from the ground beside him. He stepped into the street and rested the cannon on his hip. Fire shot from the barrel like the breath of a dragon, rushed past Snake, set fire to a few bits of fringe on his chaps.
“That was a warning shot,” said the man called the Fury.
He never had time to fire a real shot. As the Fury convulsed in the street, blood pouring from a wound in his chest, the sheriff floated to his body like a ghost. She drew her gun silently, quicker than Ocelot had ever seen, and after a shot that drew even more onlookers to their windows, Snake stumbled, clutching his left shoulder.
“No!” Ocelot shouted, flinging himself off the porch. “Leave him for me.”
The sheriff fixed him with eyes that seemed to burn in the dying light. “Stay where you are, Ocelot.”
She returned her gaze to Snake and dropped her gun. “Snake, I didn’t teach you to fight with a gun. Fight me with your hands.”
Snake fired a shot into the ground between her feet. She glanced down with a wan smile. He aimed another shot at her face, but she sidestepped as if pushed by an invisible force. With each shot, she stepped closer to Snake.
“When are you going to take this seriously?” On the last word, she twisted the revolver from Snake’s grasp and pinned his arm against his back. Snaked rolled her over his shoulders; she landed on her feet.
The barman joined Ocelot on the porch.
“Closed for the night already?” Ocelot said.
“No one’s drinking anyway. And I got a bet on this. Ooh.”
The sheriff had landed on her back with a grunt though she avoided Snake’s next blow. She drew a pearl-handled knife from her boot and sprang to her feet.
“Your bet’s on Snake, then?” Ocelot said.
“Naturally, boy.”
Snake’s knife, plainer, serrated - a hunting knife - had left a gash down the side of her neck. The sheriff dug her thumb into the wound on his arm. He swiped at her with his other arm, and in her exhaustion, she moved too late. His knife slid deep into her rib cage, and she slumped.
“Oh,” she gasped. “Oh, hell.”
With a wet cough that left a film of blood on her lips, she fell onto her back.
“Snake,” she said, “if you ever loved me, ever respected me… kill me. Shoot me now.”
She felt for her gun and passed it to Snake, who took it as if he had never seen one before. She grasped his wrist and pulled him closer, face white with strain and blood loss. Ocelot could not hear what she whispered, but when she let go, Snake held a folded piece of paper in his hand. He stowed it in his back pocket and lowered the revolver.
The town, even the wind, seemed to hold its breath. Eva, who stood in front of the stable with Snake’s horse, hid her eyes in its mane. When the shot finally came, the barman gave a sigh that would have been a whoop of triumph had the moment not been so solemn. Snake turned away almost immediately and whistled for his horse. He stroked its mane a moment and lifted a foot into the stirrup.
“Wait!” Ocelot sprang into the street. “I’m not though with you.”
“Go away, kid,” Snake growled. “I didn’t come here to fight you.”
“No, but you…” Ocelot searched his memory for a passable excuse. He couldn’t let Snake leave with the map.
“You killed my father,” Ocelot said, selling it with a dramatic point of his finger.
“Who?”
“Uh…” His name… something about sorrow… “He Sees Our Sorrows.”
Snake laughed as if privy to some sick joke. “Never knew him.”
“You lie!” Ocelot drew one revolver and slid one cartridge into its empty chamber. “One bullet, Snake. One bullet between these guns. Watch carefully.”
He tossed both revolvers lightly between his hands, then into the air, catching one in front and the other behind his back. He spun them, switched them, feinted another toss, and laid both in the street.
“You get first pick,” he said.
Snake stepped forward hesitantly. Ocelot knew the easiest way to get that paper, the map to the Apache gold, would have been to snatch it from Snake’s pocket as he bent to pick up his revolver, but the growing whispers of the crowd, the fast-falling night, Eva’s haughty smirk upon him, and the shape of Snake’s body when he crouched urged him to prolong the fight.
Snake chose the gun to his right, the loaded gun. Ocelot took the other with an impish grin.
“Alright, Snake. We’ll take seven paces, turn, and fire.”
Ocelot counted his steps aloud, moving ever closer to the two bodies Snake had already left.
“Seven,” he heard Snake say. He turned and for a moment envied Snake’s choice of revolver. The shot rang. The muzzle flashed. Ocelot laughed.
“It was a blank,” Ocelot said, “clever little invention.”
He rushed at Snake, not nearly strong enough to bowl him over. He felt Snake’s belt, a leather strip stamped with the shape of two entwined rattlesnakes. Below it, the top of a pocket crossed one side of his pants; a rough bit of paper stuck out above it. He lost his grasp as Snake shoved him off. Ocelot threw his arm around Snake’s neck, slipped the other hand into his pocket, and replaced the map with one he had drawn on parchment the night before. Snake shook him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach. He swung onto his horse, leaving Ocelot gasping.
“Don’t…,” Ocelot managed, grinning inwardly at the map clutched in his palm, “go. This isn’t over.”
“It is, kid. The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be.”
Snake’s horse pranced a tight circle around Ocelot, and Snake looked down, grinning indulgently. He had shaved, but a layer of stubble still covered most of his face. He untied the bandana from his head and wrapped it around his injured arm. Then, with eyes that had lost all innocence, he gave Salida del Sol a final glance.