fic - Raiden/Gray Fox
-Saph added this pairing tag just for my last post, so I may as well continue to abuse it.
-this is a direct continuation of the Raiden/Fox drabble, so forgive me if it starts abruptly.
-I think this is a Part 1 Of 2 but I don't know if or when I might add more to it, so I'm posting it as a stand-alone for now.
-uh, I've never used the concrit tags before, but I guess
never fails.
Title: The Finland Station
Pairings: Raiden/Gray Fox
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2500
Warnings: Just subtext in the slash department, but a fair lot of gore. Also crack. Spoilers for MGS2 but nothing else.
Summary: Raiden is floating in a tank in the Madnar Laboratory, and his mind is roaming in VR.
It wasn't always possible to keep the other man within sight (the other man, the other machine ghost program washed-up soldier like himself). But he could always follow the trail of corpses. Sometimes they were in groups, piles arrayed almost neatly in maintenance tunnels; sometimes he found them singly, bleeding a streak of red into the river or scattered in several pieces across a flowerbed. Raiden kept tracking the other from one carcass to the next, tirelessly, thoughtlessly.
He wanted to call mission support to say that he had a feeling he wasn't in Alaska any more.
That was when he remembered it wasn't real and that his whole world had been coded by crazy scientists and Ellen Madnar could destroy it any moment. Any moment. There was no mission support, never had been; just him alone in a fractured world that someone else had made and then broken. No escape from this isolation save for a trail of bloody footprints.
At first he'd thought it was carelessness on Ellen's part, leaving him to get lost in here while they made him a new body. Maybe it was more like a breadcrumb-trail laid out to lead him to where he'd always been headed.
Wherever the hell that was.
After crossing a narrow and sheer ravine (where he might have lost his quarry had it not been for the flock of vultures that shed feathers between corpse and corpse, following with as much hunger as he did), Raiden came to a wall with a door that swung inwards when he touched it, the remains of a tough magnetic lock lying in pieces on the ground. That didn't mean a goddamn thing here. Ellen could have done it. It could have been superfluous. He could have walked through the walls, except that he was no more real than they were. But inside there was another body. It was rolled halfway off a ledge, one arm and one leg dangling over the precipice as they set into rigor mortis. He didn't recognise the uniforms they wore here, only the hammer-and-sickle on the sleeve, and the equipment so outdated he was amazed someone had bothered to simulate it.
He might have studied the man's face, but his head had been severed at the neck.
A long ladder dropped from that ledge down into the darkness below. He set his feet on the blood-spattered rungs, and from somewhere deep inside the program, he felt music.
*
At the foot of the ladder he found himself in a small room that opened out onto a wider tunnel. There should have been a vicious draft sweeping back towards the place above, but there was nothing. A defect in the stimulation. He should call mission support about that -
He stepped out. It was a station platform, tiled in white - there was none of the litter on the tracks or stench in the air that he would have expected from the New York subway. No graffiti save for the blood painted on the walls. It looked clean, unused, more like a plan than a place. He wondered if the rails were really electrified, and if it would be worth it to find out.
The cyborg was sitting on a bench facing the rails, his high-frequency blade laid across his knees. Finally.
He took a step towards it, and was fixed by that unblinking red eye.
Something flipped; a row of switches turning from 1 to 0. Raiden froze, thinking to wait out the loading scene, but there was no pause in the transition - just an exoskeletal shell disintegrating into telltale white-edged hexagons, colour bleeding into the nothingness underneath the whole scene, until the cyborg body was completely gone.
In its place was a sharp-faced blond in a weatherbeaten trenchcoat, FOXHOUND insignia worn to barely-recognisable threads, sword still unsheathed, eyes still holding Raiden's with mechanical focus and a gloved hand rummaging in a pocket. "Want a smoke?"
Raiden stumbled a few steps closer. Yeah. "Sure." He stood uncertainly by the edge of the bench. His instincts didn't like to be inside the reach of that weapon - but fuck, it wasn't like any of this was real anyway. He took a cigarette from the offered pack, and leaned down to accept a light.
This was why soldiers learned to smoke; so they could share a smoke with other soldiers when they wanted to be sociable but hadn't a fucking clue who was on who's side or what the hell anyone had to say. When two men make a united stand against the no-smoking sign on the wall behind them, that makes them buddies. Though Raiden would never learn to like smoking, even in VR.
There were words on the tiles opposite, partially obscured by the gory décor job the cyborg had performed before his arrival. "...Shibuya Station? How...why the hell -"
"Ellen." Short answer. Good answer. He waited for the longer one. "It's not just about military research, for her. She has wider interests. Ballet, drama. She likes Kabuki, and Beijing opera. Most of all, she likes bringing opposite sides together."
"She likes cyborgs."
The other guy let that hang for a moment without replying. "Cyborgs," he said eventually, "are just a means to an end. And her end is destroying the border. Any border." A grin crossed his face, for all of a split second. "There's no passport control on this line."
Raiden could guess how seriously this guy took the idea of passport controls.
"The dreamers up there..." He waved a hand, maybe indicating the real world he didn't exist in any more. "They've been wanting to do it for decades. They've designed imaginary bridges over glaciers. They've dug tunnels under the sea." He exhaled, and the smoke didn't dissipate right; it was gone far too quickly. "Wanting to join all the lines together, but always running out of money or failing to match gauges. Ellen's done it. It just took a little creativity. She's grafted planners' simulations together into a virtual overmap that's as good as the real thing." He paused, his expression scrunching scars together. "As far as I know, anyway. I've never been to real Tokyo." That faint smile was back. How fucking aware could you be of your own non-reality, your own undeath?
Well, Raiden was slowly working that one out. "So the trains here go to...?"
"Every railway station in the whole fucking world. You can get anywhere, and fast, so long as it's connected. Right now, I'm on my way to meet a friend." His voice hung on the last word a little. Doesn't use it often, right?
He could hear the low thunder of an approaching train. Gray Fox tossed aside his cigarette and rose to his feet, sword in his right hand, the left reaching for a gun holstered under his coat. The air moved, now, but in a too-perfect, too-scentless rhythm that Raiden's brain failed to believe in but which had his hair quite carried away. He stood at Fox's shoulder, ready for the next screen.
He couldn't read the words spelled out in lights on the front of the train. Something Cyrillic. "What's that say?"
"Finlyandsky vokzal," Fox replied. That meant no more to him. "The Finland Station. You can come with me, if you want."
"What happens if I don't?"
He shrugged. "How the fuck would I know?"
Raiden wasn't sure what he'd expected from the passengers on that train - smartly-dressed salarymen, perhaps, or the fashionable delinquents who rode subway trains in NYC.
What they got was a platoon of Arsenal Tengus, leaping from the train in black-clad pairs.
*
They'd slumped in adjoining seats, both breathing hard in spite of the lack of real oxygen. Gray Fox was cleaning his blade with a handkerchief. Raiden didn't have one, so simply wiped it off on the seat beside him, letting dark blood soak into the plush fabric. It would fade soon, he knew - if he walked a few carriages away, he might return to find it vanished entirely. He knew VR.
There was a faint breeze as the train rushed through the city, because part of an Arsenal Tengu was still stuck in the door. A leg - looked to be a left one, hacked off at the thigh, the toe of its boot caught between the closing doors. There were other oddments scattered about the carriage - a couple more limbs and a few fingers, some brain tissue dotted over the floor near the other exit, and even most of a head, pearly eyes fixed open behind its mask. He wasn't sure how many different individuals these gory fragments had come from. None, he reminded himself. There were no Arsenal Tengus. They were just part of the game.
That led him to a question, one Raiden should have been afraid to ask but simply wasn't any more. "So why are you here?"
"I told you," Fox replied shortly. "I'm going to meet a friend."
Raiden shook his head. "That's not what I mean. I mean, why did Ellen Madnar put you in this fucking program?"
Fox turned aside, laying his sword on the ground by his feet. "Finally," he murmured. "A FOXHOUND agent who can think outside the box."
"I'm not an agent. I only ever thought I was with FOXHOUND."
"FOXHOUND only ever thought I was with them. Not a whole fucking lot of difference." Nice parry. Raiden waited for the counterattack. "I'm here for you, why else?"
He nodded. "Figures. Virtual missions only exist for the benefit of the trainee." He let the thought walk onwards from there. "So what am I being trained for?"
Fox looked at him sharply, and Raiden knew exactly why. He hadn't asked that question when he'd been through his previous VR training; he certainly hadn't asked it when he'd been a child in Liberia (- and that thought could have swept him clean off the rails, if he hadn't known, from whispered secrets embedded in old training modules, that Gray Fox had been born to that same hell). How many of their kind had ever asked? Many, perhaps, but always too late.
After a while, he received a word in reply. "Survival."
"Right." Not jungle survival, or desert survival. Something more absolute than that. Survival in a body twisted into a machine, because it was the only way life could still hold you. And Gray Fox would be the perfect instructor -
- He caught himself in the tail of his own thoughts again. Gray Fox would, indeed, be a great instructor, because he's been through all this and is now utterly, irretrievably dead. It was GW all over again - Fox wasn't talking to Raiden. Raiden was talking to Raiden. And taking a shape from Shadow Moses because Shadow Moses was the only damn thing he'd ever believed in. "You're not real," he hissed. "You're just an illusion I made up. How the fuck are you going to instruct me in anything?"
He half-expected Gray Fox to fall to pieces before his challenge, like his AI Colonel once had. Maybe disintegrate, or just delete himself from the simulation without a word, like a ghost struck by daylight. But he simply raised his left arm and laid it over the top of the row of seats, close to touching Raiden's shoulder. "I'm as real as you, your sword, this train, and the rail bridge from Japan to Korea. Is that good enough for you?"
His eyes were set with determination hard as stone, and Raiden felt his own ideas breaking against them. God, was there nothing that could stop this man from -
Fox, you only believe in yourself because that's what you're programmed to do.
"If you're real, you need to tell me something," he said. This was a test. A latency test, a server ping. "Tell me something that I don't know." Fox waited patiently for him to elaborate. "I mean, tell me anything. Anything that you know that I don't."
He thought for a moment, then said, "Pettrovich Madnar has been clinically dead since 2002."
"Something Ellen doesn't know either," Raiden snapped.
Fox raised his eyebrows a quarter-inch, as if he were a little taken aback. "Fine," he said, then fell quiet, and Raiden decided that he couldn't do it. There wasn't enough of him; Gray Fox was just data wrapped in a digital avatar - an exoskeleton, an old trenchcoat - and any answers he had were part of the software.
It's just a game and there's nothing new here.
Right?
"Something I've learned that you and Ellen haven't? Try this." Fox swung in his seat to face him, his arm still resting close, his boots brushing against Raiden's own. "When you fall in love with someone and then the whole fucking edifice - the Patriots and all their machinations - tear the two of you apart, that doesn't make you stop loving them." Raiden's mouth opened, but no words came out. "It can't. They don't have the power to do that. All their twisted bullshit ever does is make you love more."
Raiden saw the flying landscape at the windows turn to nothing. That bridge Fox had mentioned, he guessed. The one that had never been built in the real world. They were crossing some hypothetical plan of it that Ellen had stolen from an architect, so of course there was no background sim. Just girders flowing over the sea.
Something had to give, as they crossed the bridge over nothing. If he was real and Fox was real and the bridge was real then -
Rose doesn't exist.
Love doesn't exist. It can't exist. It would be a crazy antigravity, clawing harder and harder the further it gets away. Who could even simulate that?
Love is an error code, and Rose doesn't exist.
Fox had settled back in his seat, still holding his eyes. "You should try that one on my friend. She has something to tell you too."
She? Damn, these programs were predictable. "Something about...?" (love?)
"Survival," Fox said. "We should be there soon. Depends how long it takes to bypass China and Siberia."
"Shouldn't we be travelling at the speed of light?"
"We should be thinking at the speed of light - are we?" Raiden blinked. "You're getting faster, though. You'll be deflecting bullets in no time. It's all in the mind, that, you know?"
***
-this is a direct continuation of the Raiden/Fox drabble, so forgive me if it starts abruptly.
-I think this is a Part 1 Of 2 but I don't know if or when I might add more to it, so I'm posting it as a stand-alone for now.
-uh, I've never used the concrit tags before, but I guess
never fails.
Title: The Finland Station
Pairings: Raiden/Gray Fox
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2500
Warnings: Just subtext in the slash department, but a fair lot of gore. Also crack. Spoilers for MGS2 but nothing else.
Summary: Raiden is floating in a tank in the Madnar Laboratory, and his mind is roaming in VR.
It wasn't always possible to keep the other man within sight (the other man, the other machine ghost program washed-up soldier like himself). But he could always follow the trail of corpses. Sometimes they were in groups, piles arrayed almost neatly in maintenance tunnels; sometimes he found them singly, bleeding a streak of red into the river or scattered in several pieces across a flowerbed. Raiden kept tracking the other from one carcass to the next, tirelessly, thoughtlessly.
He wanted to call mission support to say that he had a feeling he wasn't in Alaska any more.
That was when he remembered it wasn't real and that his whole world had been coded by crazy scientists and Ellen Madnar could destroy it any moment. Any moment. There was no mission support, never had been; just him alone in a fractured world that someone else had made and then broken. No escape from this isolation save for a trail of bloody footprints.
At first he'd thought it was carelessness on Ellen's part, leaving him to get lost in here while they made him a new body. Maybe it was more like a breadcrumb-trail laid out to lead him to where he'd always been headed.
Wherever the hell that was.
After crossing a narrow and sheer ravine (where he might have lost his quarry had it not been for the flock of vultures that shed feathers between corpse and corpse, following with as much hunger as he did), Raiden came to a wall with a door that swung inwards when he touched it, the remains of a tough magnetic lock lying in pieces on the ground. That didn't mean a goddamn thing here. Ellen could have done it. It could have been superfluous. He could have walked through the walls, except that he was no more real than they were. But inside there was another body. It was rolled halfway off a ledge, one arm and one leg dangling over the precipice as they set into rigor mortis. He didn't recognise the uniforms they wore here, only the hammer-and-sickle on the sleeve, and the equipment so outdated he was amazed someone had bothered to simulate it.
He might have studied the man's face, but his head had been severed at the neck.
A long ladder dropped from that ledge down into the darkness below. He set his feet on the blood-spattered rungs, and from somewhere deep inside the program, he felt music.
*
At the foot of the ladder he found himself in a small room that opened out onto a wider tunnel. There should have been a vicious draft sweeping back towards the place above, but there was nothing. A defect in the stimulation. He should call mission support about that -
He stepped out. It was a station platform, tiled in white - there was none of the litter on the tracks or stench in the air that he would have expected from the New York subway. No graffiti save for the blood painted on the walls. It looked clean, unused, more like a plan than a place. He wondered if the rails were really electrified, and if it would be worth it to find out.
The cyborg was sitting on a bench facing the rails, his high-frequency blade laid across his knees. Finally.
He took a step towards it, and was fixed by that unblinking red eye.
Something flipped; a row of switches turning from 1 to 0. Raiden froze, thinking to wait out the loading scene, but there was no pause in the transition - just an exoskeletal shell disintegrating into telltale white-edged hexagons, colour bleeding into the nothingness underneath the whole scene, until the cyborg body was completely gone.
In its place was a sharp-faced blond in a weatherbeaten trenchcoat, FOXHOUND insignia worn to barely-recognisable threads, sword still unsheathed, eyes still holding Raiden's with mechanical focus and a gloved hand rummaging in a pocket. "Want a smoke?"
Raiden stumbled a few steps closer. Yeah. "Sure." He stood uncertainly by the edge of the bench. His instincts didn't like to be inside the reach of that weapon - but fuck, it wasn't like any of this was real anyway. He took a cigarette from the offered pack, and leaned down to accept a light.
This was why soldiers learned to smoke; so they could share a smoke with other soldiers when they wanted to be sociable but hadn't a fucking clue who was on who's side or what the hell anyone had to say. When two men make a united stand against the no-smoking sign on the wall behind them, that makes them buddies. Though Raiden would never learn to like smoking, even in VR.
There were words on the tiles opposite, partially obscured by the gory décor job the cyborg had performed before his arrival. "...Shibuya Station? How...why the hell -"
"Ellen." Short answer. Good answer. He waited for the longer one. "It's not just about military research, for her. She has wider interests. Ballet, drama. She likes Kabuki, and Beijing opera. Most of all, she likes bringing opposite sides together."
"She likes cyborgs."
The other guy let that hang for a moment without replying. "Cyborgs," he said eventually, "are just a means to an end. And her end is destroying the border. Any border." A grin crossed his face, for all of a split second. "There's no passport control on this line."
Raiden could guess how seriously this guy took the idea of passport controls.
"The dreamers up there..." He waved a hand, maybe indicating the real world he didn't exist in any more. "They've been wanting to do it for decades. They've designed imaginary bridges over glaciers. They've dug tunnels under the sea." He exhaled, and the smoke didn't dissipate right; it was gone far too quickly. "Wanting to join all the lines together, but always running out of money or failing to match gauges. Ellen's done it. It just took a little creativity. She's grafted planners' simulations together into a virtual overmap that's as good as the real thing." He paused, his expression scrunching scars together. "As far as I know, anyway. I've never been to real Tokyo." That faint smile was back. How fucking aware could you be of your own non-reality, your own undeath?
Well, Raiden was slowly working that one out. "So the trains here go to...?"
"Every railway station in the whole fucking world. You can get anywhere, and fast, so long as it's connected. Right now, I'm on my way to meet a friend." His voice hung on the last word a little. Doesn't use it often, right?
He could hear the low thunder of an approaching train. Gray Fox tossed aside his cigarette and rose to his feet, sword in his right hand, the left reaching for a gun holstered under his coat. The air moved, now, but in a too-perfect, too-scentless rhythm that Raiden's brain failed to believe in but which had his hair quite carried away. He stood at Fox's shoulder, ready for the next screen.
He couldn't read the words spelled out in lights on the front of the train. Something Cyrillic. "What's that say?"
"Finlyandsky vokzal," Fox replied. That meant no more to him. "The Finland Station. You can come with me, if you want."
"What happens if I don't?"
He shrugged. "How the fuck would I know?"
Raiden wasn't sure what he'd expected from the passengers on that train - smartly-dressed salarymen, perhaps, or the fashionable delinquents who rode subway trains in NYC.
What they got was a platoon of Arsenal Tengus, leaping from the train in black-clad pairs.
*
They'd slumped in adjoining seats, both breathing hard in spite of the lack of real oxygen. Gray Fox was cleaning his blade with a handkerchief. Raiden didn't have one, so simply wiped it off on the seat beside him, letting dark blood soak into the plush fabric. It would fade soon, he knew - if he walked a few carriages away, he might return to find it vanished entirely. He knew VR.
There was a faint breeze as the train rushed through the city, because part of an Arsenal Tengu was still stuck in the door. A leg - looked to be a left one, hacked off at the thigh, the toe of its boot caught between the closing doors. There were other oddments scattered about the carriage - a couple more limbs and a few fingers, some brain tissue dotted over the floor near the other exit, and even most of a head, pearly eyes fixed open behind its mask. He wasn't sure how many different individuals these gory fragments had come from. None, he reminded himself. There were no Arsenal Tengus. They were just part of the game.
That led him to a question, one Raiden should have been afraid to ask but simply wasn't any more. "So why are you here?"
"I told you," Fox replied shortly. "I'm going to meet a friend."
Raiden shook his head. "That's not what I mean. I mean, why did Ellen Madnar put you in this fucking program?"
Fox turned aside, laying his sword on the ground by his feet. "Finally," he murmured. "A FOXHOUND agent who can think outside the box."
"I'm not an agent. I only ever thought I was with FOXHOUND."
"FOXHOUND only ever thought I was with them. Not a whole fucking lot of difference." Nice parry. Raiden waited for the counterattack. "I'm here for you, why else?"
He nodded. "Figures. Virtual missions only exist for the benefit of the trainee." He let the thought walk onwards from there. "So what am I being trained for?"
Fox looked at him sharply, and Raiden knew exactly why. He hadn't asked that question when he'd been through his previous VR training; he certainly hadn't asked it when he'd been a child in Liberia (- and that thought could have swept him clean off the rails, if he hadn't known, from whispered secrets embedded in old training modules, that Gray Fox had been born to that same hell). How many of their kind had ever asked? Many, perhaps, but always too late.
After a while, he received a word in reply. "Survival."
"Right." Not jungle survival, or desert survival. Something more absolute than that. Survival in a body twisted into a machine, because it was the only way life could still hold you. And Gray Fox would be the perfect instructor -
- He caught himself in the tail of his own thoughts again. Gray Fox would, indeed, be a great instructor, because he's been through all this and is now utterly, irretrievably dead. It was GW all over again - Fox wasn't talking to Raiden. Raiden was talking to Raiden. And taking a shape from Shadow Moses because Shadow Moses was the only damn thing he'd ever believed in. "You're not real," he hissed. "You're just an illusion I made up. How the fuck are you going to instruct me in anything?"
He half-expected Gray Fox to fall to pieces before his challenge, like his AI Colonel once had. Maybe disintegrate, or just delete himself from the simulation without a word, like a ghost struck by daylight. But he simply raised his left arm and laid it over the top of the row of seats, close to touching Raiden's shoulder. "I'm as real as you, your sword, this train, and the rail bridge from Japan to Korea. Is that good enough for you?"
His eyes were set with determination hard as stone, and Raiden felt his own ideas breaking against them. God, was there nothing that could stop this man from -
Fox, you only believe in yourself because that's what you're programmed to do.
"If you're real, you need to tell me something," he said. This was a test. A latency test, a server ping. "Tell me something that I don't know." Fox waited patiently for him to elaborate. "I mean, tell me anything. Anything that you know that I don't."
He thought for a moment, then said, "Pettrovich Madnar has been clinically dead since 2002."
"Something Ellen doesn't know either," Raiden snapped.
Fox raised his eyebrows a quarter-inch, as if he were a little taken aback. "Fine," he said, then fell quiet, and Raiden decided that he couldn't do it. There wasn't enough of him; Gray Fox was just data wrapped in a digital avatar - an exoskeleton, an old trenchcoat - and any answers he had were part of the software.
It's just a game and there's nothing new here.
Right?
"Something I've learned that you and Ellen haven't? Try this." Fox swung in his seat to face him, his arm still resting close, his boots brushing against Raiden's own. "When you fall in love with someone and then the whole fucking edifice - the Patriots and all their machinations - tear the two of you apart, that doesn't make you stop loving them." Raiden's mouth opened, but no words came out. "It can't. They don't have the power to do that. All their twisted bullshit ever does is make you love more."
Raiden saw the flying landscape at the windows turn to nothing. That bridge Fox had mentioned, he guessed. The one that had never been built in the real world. They were crossing some hypothetical plan of it that Ellen had stolen from an architect, so of course there was no background sim. Just girders flowing over the sea.
Something had to give, as they crossed the bridge over nothing. If he was real and Fox was real and the bridge was real then -
Rose doesn't exist.
Love doesn't exist. It can't exist. It would be a crazy antigravity, clawing harder and harder the further it gets away. Who could even simulate that?
Love is an error code, and Rose doesn't exist.
Fox had settled back in his seat, still holding his eyes. "You should try that one on my friend. She has something to tell you too."
She? Damn, these programs were predictable. "Something about...?" (love?)
"Survival," Fox said. "We should be there soon. Depends how long it takes to bypass China and Siberia."
"Shouldn't we be travelling at the speed of light?"
"We should be thinking at the speed of light - are we?" Raiden blinked. "You're getting faster, though. You'll be deflecting bullets in no time. It's all in the mind, that, you know?"
***