Title: MGS drabbles
Pairing: none
Rating: G, SFW
Summary: 2.5 snippets of fic ideas that never went anywhere.
Warnings: Watch out for steep dropoffs :P
Your name is Justin Halley, and you are 20 years old. You are shit hot, make no mistake about it. You could break someone's leg with just one finger, if you felt so inclined. Which sometimes you do, especially after a deployment and you're stuck behind three billion mothers and their screaming crotch droplings, shifting your 12 pack of beer against one hip and wishing you could be closer to the counter so you could stare at the cigarettes and fantasize about the taste of nicotine against your tongue.
Right now, you are doing none of these things. In fact, this is one of those moments where you hurry up and wait. Halley had been given orders to report to Commander South at 18:00 sharp, and 18:00 had come and gone, and he was still waiting on the aide to check back with South to see if he was ready to see Halley yet.
You decide not to speculate about what this could be. It could be a range of things, none of which you are willing to dwell on. Anything from a gouge, to a pre-briefing, to your friends enmeshed in hell halfway across the world. You want to think about that lattermost least of all. But you do, comstantly; it occupies much of your thoughts, when it isn't focused on training, or boobs, or food.
Finally, the aide leans around the corner and says, " Cap'n Halley, you're up."
Halley takes a breath in the quiet corridor, and stands from the plastic chair. "Thank you, Sergeant," you say. You start to take the 102 steps (you've counted them before, especially when you know that a gouge is in your immediate future), before the aide calls out, "In the briefing room, Cap'n!"
You stop, puzzled, before nodding and reversing directions to the conference room that has served as a pre-mission brief ever since the Snake Men have been quartered here. You can feel your heart thump painfully in your chest, and you figure it's more eagerness than nerves.
You have a feeling you're headed to Ishkabibil.
------
The jungle's heat is intimate, clinging to your flushed skin like a lover. Your crotch, armpits, chest, and back are drenched with sweat, and you crouch in the shade to guzzle some electrolyte mixture.
Around you, the old growth stretches and yaws like a thing alive, watchful and impartial. Colorful birds flit from tree to tree, insect the size of your foot are scuttling and flying, and you can hear the low gurgle of the river encircling the camp.
In the base, you can hear the roar of a diesel engine as a 16-ton fires up.
As you stand, the dark, deep smell of crushed grass surrounds you, and you pull out the binoculars you lifted from a truck to scan the compoind ahead.
You're ready to go.
Your name is David. You feel heavy, and your whole body hurts. It hurts to breathe, which you are doing in deliberate, horrible heaves, like some giant hand has a hold of your rib cage and is lifting it up and down.
You don't know where you are; there is light everywhere, but no comfort. You feel like crying, partly because of the pain that is everywhere, and partly because you don't know where you are, but mostly because there is a sadness that is sticking to your throat like that drink you knock back to say goodbye to a friend.
You float in this miasma of pain and sorrow, asking where you are (you think out loud, but you can't be sure), until a haze covers your eyes, and you sink back into a waiting dark, where you can distantly hear birdsong and gunfire.
Your name is David, but you only use that name when you're not halfway across the world getting shot at, blown up, and trying to figure out what that guard just said in Arabic. When you're not doing that, and are trying not to fall asleep during a long powerpoint presentation where it's nice and dark, and just the right temperature to drool on your CO's shoulder, you go by your last name and rank. But you haven't heard your last name spoken by your buddies in years, and mostly you just go by your codenames, or a shortening.
You wonder why these scientists are calling you by the name that only your mothers used, and you wonder if this is a kind of torture, or if you're just going fucking insane.
You have had enough of scientists. Entirely enough. You've had it to your back teeth with them, and you'd rather they'd just leave you alone. But they try to talk to you, and they jab you with IV lines, and you wonder if you've been captured, but that makes no sense. Unless you really have been captured, and you haven't finished your mission.
You can't remember which last name is yours anymore. You've had a lot of them over the years, and you can't quite remember which was the one you enlisted with. David has been the only name that has been constant. That and Snake. You prefer Snake; it has been spoken with more warmth more often than David ever has. Wrapped in another person's arms, while you try to fight off hypothermia, and your name-- your codename-- is said with such love that you want to try to stay awake to hear it said like that again.
In this empty room, with it's bare white walls, and it's no-noise, and what he thinks may be a monitoring machine near him, he desperately wants to hear someone say his name like that again.
Somewhere, you think you can hear a scream. It is achingly familiar, and you're not sure whether it is a man's, or a metal beast's.
You can feel wet tracks on your face, soothing your skin, and you don't know if you're crying because you're scared, or because you are mourning. Maybe it's both.
He stooped before the playpen, one of the soft, warm blankets from the mother's room under his arm. It had a light perfume, and something more subtle and human, woven in with the threads of the material.
In the purple dusk, the child gazed at him with large blue eyes, silent. But Snake could sense a tenseness in the little face, balanced on a knife's edge of a baby's version of fight-or-flight: cry to draw attention or stay quiet to remain unseen.
Her perfect stillness and helplessness struck something inside Snake, something he didn't want to examine.
He took another step closer, foot settling on the industrial carpet, and then leaned over the wooden gate, blanket stretched between his hands, and got a grip under the baby's arms and lifted. Her chubby little legs drew up as she left the floor, tucking into the folds of the blanket. He settled her against his body, careful to keep the blanket around her bare limbs, and she pivoted to look into his face. They studied each other for a few moments. There was a strange intelligence in her eyes that he hadn't expected.
Then, he rose a hand, and gently stroked a finger across her cheek. He knew his skin was rough, and hers was as soft as a flower's petal, and he tried to be mindful not to discomfort her. Her eyes never left his face.
The codec chirped in his ear, but he ignored it.