fic - Snake/Fox
I started writing this MG2 fic as part of toastybat's epic birthday plot against tarastara (<333333). I said I'd make a nice, shippy, SFW drabble, and that is how I ended up with this heap of creepyass porn. :[
There's some butchered bits of canon here, but if you want to know how their dialogues go in MG2, you can check the script on Gamefaqs and ctrl+f for 'Gray Fox' and for '#####', which the faq uses to mark dialogue for the Number One Fan.
Title: Merry Fucking Christmas
Pairings: Gray Fox/Solid Snake
Rating: NC-17, for srs
Warnings: Phonesex, ie. masturbation, voyeurism/exhibitionism. Also disturbing content: that MGS "You enjoy killing!"=sex stuff, some mild but eroticised gore, :/
Summary: Zanzibarland: where #1 Fans get #1 Fanservice.
The first of the calls came when Snake was face-down on the rough ground with gravel digging holes in his elbows and the sun slowly roasting his neck. The ground ahead of him was open and clear, but he'd been waiting. Knowing something was wrong, knowing someone was watching him, and keeping still until it made a move. The radio call should not have been it, and he answered without looking at the frequency, expecting that it was the Colonel with new orders or Holly with some chirpy advice or Jacobsen talking about scorpions.
"Snake. Watch out. You're in a minefield."
The voice was synthesised into some neutral valley where he couldn't have guessed its nationality, age or even gender. It was the strangest thing he'd ever heard outside of a nightmare.
"Who are you?"
*
"I'm your number one fan. Keep up the good work." And merry fucking Christmas, Fox didn't add as he closed the channel.
He flicked the cockpit release with a finger, another three still curled tight around the voice distortion unit, and he swung out one-handed and landed on the floor in a crouch. There was still no one else around. He'd sent the patrols elsewhere, and the scientists and technicians were all under cover - except for Madnar, who was avidly preparing for his role as decoy. The plan was an elaborate, so-far-no-further array of little-knowing pawns, the sort of thing Big Boss had less taste for back when he was human. He trusted Fox to oversee every move.
He hadn't authorised this one.
Fox paced down to the hangar's entry on the balls of his feet, flexing muscles that had grown lazy in the confines of the cockpit. Small spaces, not being able to move and kick and run, maddened him. He looked up to the trapdoors in the roof, knowing that all would be ready if Snake could make it this far - feeling anticipation itching in his hands and feet. The die had been cast, but he didn't know how far their infiltrator was going to get, or how much more he'd have to interfere.
He'd said his piece, and let the device in his hand wring his identity clean out of it. Just a 'fan', and Snake couldn't have known how he'd meant that. It could be sarcasm. It could be the god-honest truth. He could be lying about the mines, diverting him from his mission. It could be nothing, and it should be nothing. His hand clenched around the distorter until he could feel its plastic case creak, and he wondered that he'd made the call at all.
He told himself he would have done it for any agent. Fucking horrible way for a soldier to die - alone, in a trap, in pieces. The thought burned. If Snake was going to die in Zanzibar, then Zanzibar was going to kill him better than that.
He slipped it into his pocket. Might need it later, if Snake survived long enough to need more advice from a friend with no name. If. It had been a game of odds right from the start - the chance that they'd try to send Snake to Zanzibarland (high), the chance that he'd accept the mission (very high), the chance he'd see it through until the end game (slim, if he'd been anyone else), the chance that they'd told him everything he ought to know. (Zero).
There was only one certainty left.
He tuned his radio back to the patrol report frequency. His troops were looking for an intruder.
*
Snake pulled off the gas mask with relief, enjoying his peripheral vision and taking shallow breaths, stretching his senses to tell if he could still smell the poison. Clean air. Too clean. He needed a cigarette, but hadn't the time to stop. Had to find the STB soldier, Gustava. He grabbed a cigarette and lit it as he ran, crouched against the wall and -
- Soldier ahead. He dropped to the ground and began firing three seconds later, getting the kill on the second shot. He waited, prone, for five more seconds, then got up and started moving again, grabbing his still-smouldering cigarette from the ground. Breathed, tasted it, feeling like the smoke-cloud he exhaled was the only thing stopping these walls from closing in on him.
The fortress was trying to kill him. Everything in it was a tool or a hazard or both, and there was no escape path until the mission was over. Until then it was one step ahead of another, over rough floors and packed earth, swampground and sand that sang, past enemies, through traps, alone, living inside this mission and not the one he needed to forget -
Focus. You shoot the guy in front of you, not the one in your mind. It was easier when there was a guy in front of you to shoot. An enemy was a problem he knew how to solve, unlike the rest of this place. You didn't have to trust them. Didn't have to worry about their motivations, or yours. They didn't feed that grain of doubt he held against everyone and everything.
Killing was so goddamn uncomplicated.
Some Christmas Eve this was. He wasn't much for celebrating, and it wasn't like he had anyone to celebrate with, but they could've picked another time to pluck him out of Canada for a solo mission. There was no one and nothing on his side here bar himself and his smokes -
- and someone who called themself his 'number one fan'. What the hell. But if they helped him find Marv and get out of here alive, he wasn't going to question it.
*
The cockpit was so high and shielded that Fox may as well have been in another room - he didn't feel the explosion, only saw it, detonating in a blast of light and ripping the bridge apart and lifting the woman like a twig. The Metal Gear's tremor sensor spun into the red, and through the lower camera he could see Madnar cowering behind the robot's legs. And laughing. The madman clung to a huge iron foot as the ground shook under its tread, and maybe he looked like he was choking for air, but Fox knew he was not.
At least Madnar felt something. The closest Fox could come to feeling the destruction he'd caused was seeing the look on Snake's face. And Snake had been such a good agent at Outer Heaven. Done his duty, defeated the base commander, never let any emotion slip out.
There. That was your warning shot.
Snake knelt on the edge of the chasm beside the broken corpse, looking up at D as if it were a ghost returned from hell, and Fox knew -
- when you took the narrow bridge between the two of you and burned it -
- when anyone who gets in the middle of this is missile fodder -
- when you had to kill him, destroy him, and couldn't stop calling him your friend -
- when you could have pulled the red switch and sent a nuke into the earth just to pull the rift wide enough to swallow the both of you and you didn't -
- if Snake came one step further they wouldn't both live to see the next morning.
So for old times' sake, he got a warning shot and a message to get the fuck out. Go home. Have a nice Christmas for me.
And if he stayed, Fox would help him on the way, every step, every time he needed to be told to keep up the good work. He sent the robot stomping back through the tunnel in reverse, and radioed the Four Horsemen and told them to get in position, just in case. Hidden in the elevator. Fifteen minutes or never. Fox said he'd keep them posted, and that they weren't to attack until he'd given the signal. Fox might need to send another message first.
Death didn't ask any questions. He was a good merc. Followed orders. Didn't worry about what his superior officers believed in.
*
Snake was trying not to think. Trying to look over the edge and picture nothing, not the ground far below rushing up at him and breaking over - not bodies tossed to the ground like ragdolls, not the way she'd looked back as the bridge had -
His cigarette was crushed between his fingers. He tossed it away and grabbed another as he watched it fall. He lit it, he breathed, and somehow the ritual held him together.
He had a call.
That frequency again, 140 and nothing and nothing. Why? "It's me. Your number one fan."
Found him on the edge again.
Where were you when she was shot out right in front of me?
"You can only jump from there when the wind's blowing north. It normally blows south, but sometimes it changes, just for an instant."
Showing him the way through the minefield -
*
The Four Horsemen were dead. All of them. Fox had watched the whole thing over a dim surveillance feed. Famine first, clean headshot, no messing around. War got too close and took a kick to the knees and then a bullet as soon as she hit the floor. Death was bleeding in six places before finally expiring. Pestilence had lasted the longest, largely by using War's corpse for cover.
It had been a challenge, and Snake had passed through it. Fox felt a little bruised, a little satisfied. He had said they were speaking for the last time and he had meant it.
This wasn't him. This wasn't anyone. He could either say this to Snake, or let him fall -
"- That's your chance. Don't miss it."
"Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
You never used to ask 'why'. "I told you. I'm your number one fan." And I'm acting under orders from the man Big Boss used to be.
I'm being loyal to myself.
"Keep up the good work."
*
Snake turned a corner too fast, and ducked back an instant before the guard would have seen him. Fuck. The rush. He had to regain his patience. He could still see the Four Horsemen when he closed his eyes, still feel the shots that hadn't killed him.
He was holding to what he'd been taught - to fight until the end, to fuck the odds, to believe. He was holding to the man who'd taught him that. The man he'd shot three years ago.
There were knots of thought that he pushed to the back of his mind. Kyle Schneider. The children who'd been told to look out for him - the one-eyed man they reported to. That they'd recalled him for this mission. That -
Gray Fox.
- The mission. Couldn't think about those other things. Couldn't let them tangle together.
He watched the guard. Saw his eyes roam, waited for him to move on out of his way. Come on - The radio flashed. Madnar again?
"Snake."
It was his number one fan. "Got any more great advice?" he snarled.
"You need to calm down. You're being affected by combat stress." No shit. "Do something to make yourself relax. Wouldn't want you to get careless and let yourself be mown down by a grunt."
He slid into a crouch behind a steel crate, back to the wall and skull ringing against the cool stone. "What do you have in mind?"
The emotionless voice replied, "What does any man do when he needs a little satisfaction?"
He turned off the radio monitor. HQ didn't need to hear any more of this. They weren't to know how - far - he'd -
The rush. They flew through his mind - not faces, corpses, Red Blaster and Running Man and Kyle and Big Boss - There was the hot-blood-feeling of adrenaline swelling his veins, making his whole hunched body throb. He put a hand around his gun like he was caressing it, and raised himself to one knee. Raised his gun over the top of the crate. He took the receiver from his ear and placed it near the muzzle - the silencer was good, but it gave enough of a choke to carry over the radio.
The guard walked into his sights four seconds later.
He put his earpiece back in, and the voice spoke again almost immediately. "Nice shot, Snake. You're alone now."
"Except for you," he said sceptically.
"I'm no one."
"You can see me. You've been watching me."
"Yes."
Not an answer. He'd asked the real goddamn question earlier and got none then, either: why? Spying he understood, but no spy would alert his target to his presence. A traitor within Zanzibarland? Then why didn't they identify themself and help Snake out for real? Why were they just watching?
Maybe his number one fan enjoyed watching. "I don't know who you are."
"You like it that way."
He slumped against the crate. There was a rivulet of blood running past it now, in a crack between two rows of tiles. He hunched his knees against his chest, and he realised that whatever he thought he thought, his body agreed with the stranger; he liked it this way.
Liked it a hell of a lot.
He reached down to where his cock strained against his sneaking suit, and stroked it through the fabric, circled the head with his thumb. "Guess I do."
"Show me how much."
"How much - ?" He was opening the zip as soon as the words had left his mouth. Fuck, he wanted to. He needed to. Maybe he just couldn't resist the order. He'd done stupider things on the battlefield.
(Like shooting my CO).
He wrapped a gloved hand around his cock, gently squeezing as if the cool touch could quell the raging in his blood, but it only made him harder. Because he needed it. The numb way his fingers couldn't feel it but the rest of him could. Could pretend it was someone else -
- he didn't know who this person really was, why they were using him like this, could hear their words but had no idea what they really wanted - how was it any different from anyone else involved in the mission?
Just a strange touch, the smell of sweat and gunmetal, and the blood on the floor. Killed a half-dozen strangers already today. No faces, no names, not his, not theirs.
It occurred to him that this wasn't a stealth objective, and he parted his knees and shifted til his shins lay flat on the ground. The empty voice sounded in his ear again. "That's better."
He grinned. "And I - was beginning to think - you didn't care. Any more - advice?"
"You're alone here. Make a bit more noise."
"Uhhhhn...right. Anything - uh - else?"
"Just keep up the good work, Snake."
He reached his other hand down to stroke the base of the shaft, hold it tight, like it had something to push against. Nothing. Just a watcher who he couldn't see, couldn't imagine. A fan. "Ahhh..."
Someone else. He threw his head back and closed his eyes, trying to see nothing. Kept seeing them. Running Man, the mine exploding under his feet. The blood - He was trembling, getting closer. Anything else. You've been watching me kill them -
- you like watching, you -
Anything. Something that fucking mattered. Nothing left. No one who told him the truth.
He was picturing her bleeding to death in his arms. When he came, he was hearing her last whisper.
"Frank..."
*
Fuck. Metal Gear D was well-equipped, boasting state-of-the-art missile technology, vulcan cannons and access to all surveillance and radar feeds in the base including a few that no one else knew about, but Pettrovich was no soldier and had never thought to stash any tissues up here. Fox pulled his shirt off, and mopped at the instrument panel.
The things a man would do for old times' sake.
He imagined tossing the distorter out of the cockpit and crushing it to dust with D's foot, flattening all his betrayals, all his passions with it, but no. They weren't done yet. Snake had a long way left to go, and he'd plant keycards and tell Snake where to find them if that's what it took to get him here.
And then?
He touched the panel, brought up the live monitoring feed and rewound it to their earlier standoff. Watched it happen again. Snake crouched by a bridge blown to splinters - and Fox heard his own voice, speaker-tinny and doubled by the echo of the chasm, offering a chance to leave with his life.
Why hadn't he taken it? Snake wasn't even in FOXHOUND any more. There was no duty binding him to Zanzibarland, only a few old personal ties. But he hadn't considered the deal for a moment.
When you didn't know how far you could push someone, sometimes they pushed back. That was what Snake did. What he'd always done.
Snake, that's why I believe in you.
And his duty was to Big Boss, who had ordered him to stop Snake at any cost.
Some days, he couldn't believe in anything except death.
***
There's some butchered bits of canon here, but if you want to know how their dialogues go in MG2, you can check the script on Gamefaqs and ctrl+f for 'Gray Fox' and for '#####', which the faq uses to mark dialogue for the Number One Fan.
Title: Merry Fucking Christmas
Pairings: Gray Fox/Solid Snake
Rating: NC-17, for srs
Warnings: Phonesex, ie. masturbation, voyeurism/exhibitionism. Also disturbing content: that MGS "You enjoy killing!"=sex stuff, some mild but eroticised gore, :/
Summary: Zanzibarland: where #1 Fans get #1 Fanservice.
The first of the calls came when Snake was face-down on the rough ground with gravel digging holes in his elbows and the sun slowly roasting his neck. The ground ahead of him was open and clear, but he'd been waiting. Knowing something was wrong, knowing someone was watching him, and keeping still until it made a move. The radio call should not have been it, and he answered without looking at the frequency, expecting that it was the Colonel with new orders or Holly with some chirpy advice or Jacobsen talking about scorpions.
"Snake. Watch out. You're in a minefield."
The voice was synthesised into some neutral valley where he couldn't have guessed its nationality, age or even gender. It was the strangest thing he'd ever heard outside of a nightmare.
"Who are you?"
*
"I'm your number one fan. Keep up the good work." And merry fucking Christmas, Fox didn't add as he closed the channel.
He flicked the cockpit release with a finger, another three still curled tight around the voice distortion unit, and he swung out one-handed and landed on the floor in a crouch. There was still no one else around. He'd sent the patrols elsewhere, and the scientists and technicians were all under cover - except for Madnar, who was avidly preparing for his role as decoy. The plan was an elaborate, so-far-no-further array of little-knowing pawns, the sort of thing Big Boss had less taste for back when he was human. He trusted Fox to oversee every move.
He hadn't authorised this one.
Fox paced down to the hangar's entry on the balls of his feet, flexing muscles that had grown lazy in the confines of the cockpit. Small spaces, not being able to move and kick and run, maddened him. He looked up to the trapdoors in the roof, knowing that all would be ready if Snake could make it this far - feeling anticipation itching in his hands and feet. The die had been cast, but he didn't know how far their infiltrator was going to get, or how much more he'd have to interfere.
He'd said his piece, and let the device in his hand wring his identity clean out of it. Just a 'fan', and Snake couldn't have known how he'd meant that. It could be sarcasm. It could be the god-honest truth. He could be lying about the mines, diverting him from his mission. It could be nothing, and it should be nothing. His hand clenched around the distorter until he could feel its plastic case creak, and he wondered that he'd made the call at all.
He told himself he would have done it for any agent. Fucking horrible way for a soldier to die - alone, in a trap, in pieces. The thought burned. If Snake was going to die in Zanzibar, then Zanzibar was going to kill him better than that.
He slipped it into his pocket. Might need it later, if Snake survived long enough to need more advice from a friend with no name. If. It had been a game of odds right from the start - the chance that they'd try to send Snake to Zanzibarland (high), the chance that he'd accept the mission (very high), the chance he'd see it through until the end game (slim, if he'd been anyone else), the chance that they'd told him everything he ought to know. (Zero).
There was only one certainty left.
He tuned his radio back to the patrol report frequency. His troops were looking for an intruder.
*
Snake pulled off the gas mask with relief, enjoying his peripheral vision and taking shallow breaths, stretching his senses to tell if he could still smell the poison. Clean air. Too clean. He needed a cigarette, but hadn't the time to stop. Had to find the STB soldier, Gustava. He grabbed a cigarette and lit it as he ran, crouched against the wall and -
- Soldier ahead. He dropped to the ground and began firing three seconds later, getting the kill on the second shot. He waited, prone, for five more seconds, then got up and started moving again, grabbing his still-smouldering cigarette from the ground. Breathed, tasted it, feeling like the smoke-cloud he exhaled was the only thing stopping these walls from closing in on him.
The fortress was trying to kill him. Everything in it was a tool or a hazard or both, and there was no escape path until the mission was over. Until then it was one step ahead of another, over rough floors and packed earth, swampground and sand that sang, past enemies, through traps, alone, living inside this mission and not the one he needed to forget -
Focus. You shoot the guy in front of you, not the one in your mind. It was easier when there was a guy in front of you to shoot. An enemy was a problem he knew how to solve, unlike the rest of this place. You didn't have to trust them. Didn't have to worry about their motivations, or yours. They didn't feed that grain of doubt he held against everyone and everything.
Killing was so goddamn uncomplicated.
Some Christmas Eve this was. He wasn't much for celebrating, and it wasn't like he had anyone to celebrate with, but they could've picked another time to pluck him out of Canada for a solo mission. There was no one and nothing on his side here bar himself and his smokes -
- and someone who called themself his 'number one fan'. What the hell. But if they helped him find Marv and get out of here alive, he wasn't going to question it.
*
The cockpit was so high and shielded that Fox may as well have been in another room - he didn't feel the explosion, only saw it, detonating in a blast of light and ripping the bridge apart and lifting the woman like a twig. The Metal Gear's tremor sensor spun into the red, and through the lower camera he could see Madnar cowering behind the robot's legs. And laughing. The madman clung to a huge iron foot as the ground shook under its tread, and maybe he looked like he was choking for air, but Fox knew he was not.
At least Madnar felt something. The closest Fox could come to feeling the destruction he'd caused was seeing the look on Snake's face. And Snake had been such a good agent at Outer Heaven. Done his duty, defeated the base commander, never let any emotion slip out.
There. That was your warning shot.
Snake knelt on the edge of the chasm beside the broken corpse, looking up at D as if it were a ghost returned from hell, and Fox knew -
- when you took the narrow bridge between the two of you and burned it -
- when anyone who gets in the middle of this is missile fodder -
- when you had to kill him, destroy him, and couldn't stop calling him your friend -
- when you could have pulled the red switch and sent a nuke into the earth just to pull the rift wide enough to swallow the both of you and you didn't -
- if Snake came one step further they wouldn't both live to see the next morning.
So for old times' sake, he got a warning shot and a message to get the fuck out. Go home. Have a nice Christmas for me.
And if he stayed, Fox would help him on the way, every step, every time he needed to be told to keep up the good work. He sent the robot stomping back through the tunnel in reverse, and radioed the Four Horsemen and told them to get in position, just in case. Hidden in the elevator. Fifteen minutes or never. Fox said he'd keep them posted, and that they weren't to attack until he'd given the signal. Fox might need to send another message first.
Death didn't ask any questions. He was a good merc. Followed orders. Didn't worry about what his superior officers believed in.
*
Snake was trying not to think. Trying to look over the edge and picture nothing, not the ground far below rushing up at him and breaking over - not bodies tossed to the ground like ragdolls, not the way she'd looked back as the bridge had -
His cigarette was crushed between his fingers. He tossed it away and grabbed another as he watched it fall. He lit it, he breathed, and somehow the ritual held him together.
He had a call.
That frequency again, 140 and nothing and nothing. Why? "It's me. Your number one fan."
Found him on the edge again.
Where were you when she was shot out right in front of me?
"You can only jump from there when the wind's blowing north. It normally blows south, but sometimes it changes, just for an instant."
Showing him the way through the minefield -
*
The Four Horsemen were dead. All of them. Fox had watched the whole thing over a dim surveillance feed. Famine first, clean headshot, no messing around. War got too close and took a kick to the knees and then a bullet as soon as she hit the floor. Death was bleeding in six places before finally expiring. Pestilence had lasted the longest, largely by using War's corpse for cover.
It had been a challenge, and Snake had passed through it. Fox felt a little bruised, a little satisfied. He had said they were speaking for the last time and he had meant it.
This wasn't him. This wasn't anyone. He could either say this to Snake, or let him fall -
"- That's your chance. Don't miss it."
"Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
You never used to ask 'why'. "I told you. I'm your number one fan." And I'm acting under orders from the man Big Boss used to be.
I'm being loyal to myself.
"Keep up the good work."
*
Snake turned a corner too fast, and ducked back an instant before the guard would have seen him. Fuck. The rush. He had to regain his patience. He could still see the Four Horsemen when he closed his eyes, still feel the shots that hadn't killed him.
He was holding to what he'd been taught - to fight until the end, to fuck the odds, to believe. He was holding to the man who'd taught him that. The man he'd shot three years ago.
There were knots of thought that he pushed to the back of his mind. Kyle Schneider. The children who'd been told to look out for him - the one-eyed man they reported to. That they'd recalled him for this mission. That -
Gray Fox.
- The mission. Couldn't think about those other things. Couldn't let them tangle together.
He watched the guard. Saw his eyes roam, waited for him to move on out of his way. Come on - The radio flashed. Madnar again?
"Snake."
It was his number one fan. "Got any more great advice?" he snarled.
"You need to calm down. You're being affected by combat stress." No shit. "Do something to make yourself relax. Wouldn't want you to get careless and let yourself be mown down by a grunt."
He slid into a crouch behind a steel crate, back to the wall and skull ringing against the cool stone. "What do you have in mind?"
The emotionless voice replied, "What does any man do when he needs a little satisfaction?"
He turned off the radio monitor. HQ didn't need to hear any more of this. They weren't to know how - far - he'd -
The rush. They flew through his mind - not faces, corpses, Red Blaster and Running Man and Kyle and Big Boss - There was the hot-blood-feeling of adrenaline swelling his veins, making his whole hunched body throb. He put a hand around his gun like he was caressing it, and raised himself to one knee. Raised his gun over the top of the crate. He took the receiver from his ear and placed it near the muzzle - the silencer was good, but it gave enough of a choke to carry over the radio.
The guard walked into his sights four seconds later.
He put his earpiece back in, and the voice spoke again almost immediately. "Nice shot, Snake. You're alone now."
"Except for you," he said sceptically.
"I'm no one."
"You can see me. You've been watching me."
"Yes."
Not an answer. He'd asked the real goddamn question earlier and got none then, either: why? Spying he understood, but no spy would alert his target to his presence. A traitor within Zanzibarland? Then why didn't they identify themself and help Snake out for real? Why were they just watching?
Maybe his number one fan enjoyed watching. "I don't know who you are."
"You like it that way."
He slumped against the crate. There was a rivulet of blood running past it now, in a crack between two rows of tiles. He hunched his knees against his chest, and he realised that whatever he thought he thought, his body agreed with the stranger; he liked it this way.
Liked it a hell of a lot.
He reached down to where his cock strained against his sneaking suit, and stroked it through the fabric, circled the head with his thumb. "Guess I do."
"Show me how much."
"How much - ?" He was opening the zip as soon as the words had left his mouth. Fuck, he wanted to. He needed to. Maybe he just couldn't resist the order. He'd done stupider things on the battlefield.
(Like shooting my CO).
He wrapped a gloved hand around his cock, gently squeezing as if the cool touch could quell the raging in his blood, but it only made him harder. Because he needed it. The numb way his fingers couldn't feel it but the rest of him could. Could pretend it was someone else -
- he didn't know who this person really was, why they were using him like this, could hear their words but had no idea what they really wanted - how was it any different from anyone else involved in the mission?
Just a strange touch, the smell of sweat and gunmetal, and the blood on the floor. Killed a half-dozen strangers already today. No faces, no names, not his, not theirs.
It occurred to him that this wasn't a stealth objective, and he parted his knees and shifted til his shins lay flat on the ground. The empty voice sounded in his ear again. "That's better."
He grinned. "And I - was beginning to think - you didn't care. Any more - advice?"
"You're alone here. Make a bit more noise."
"Uhhhhn...right. Anything - uh - else?"
"Just keep up the good work, Snake."
He reached his other hand down to stroke the base of the shaft, hold it tight, like it had something to push against. Nothing. Just a watcher who he couldn't see, couldn't imagine. A fan. "Ahhh..."
Someone else. He threw his head back and closed his eyes, trying to see nothing. Kept seeing them. Running Man, the mine exploding under his feet. The blood - He was trembling, getting closer. Anything else. You've been watching me kill them -
- you like watching, you -
Anything. Something that fucking mattered. Nothing left. No one who told him the truth.
He was picturing her bleeding to death in his arms. When he came, he was hearing her last whisper.
"Frank..."
*
Fuck. Metal Gear D was well-equipped, boasting state-of-the-art missile technology, vulcan cannons and access to all surveillance and radar feeds in the base including a few that no one else knew about, but Pettrovich was no soldier and had never thought to stash any tissues up here. Fox pulled his shirt off, and mopped at the instrument panel.
The things a man would do for old times' sake.
He imagined tossing the distorter out of the cockpit and crushing it to dust with D's foot, flattening all his betrayals, all his passions with it, but no. They weren't done yet. Snake had a long way left to go, and he'd plant keycards and tell Snake where to find them if that's what it took to get him here.
And then?
He touched the panel, brought up the live monitoring feed and rewound it to their earlier standoff. Watched it happen again. Snake crouched by a bridge blown to splinters - and Fox heard his own voice, speaker-tinny and doubled by the echo of the chasm, offering a chance to leave with his life.
Why hadn't he taken it? Snake wasn't even in FOXHOUND any more. There was no duty binding him to Zanzibarland, only a few old personal ties. But he hadn't considered the deal for a moment.
When you didn't know how far you could push someone, sometimes they pushed back. That was what Snake did. What he'd always done.
Snake, that's why I believe in you.
And his duty was to Big Boss, who had ordered him to stop Snake at any cost.
Some days, he couldn't believe in anything except death.
***