fic - Pieces Missing, originally for mgs_fanbook
arghfff I don't have time to write new things right now ;__; so here's an old thing I've never posted online before - my mgs_fanbook shortfic of what the tl;dr fff am I ever going to do something shorter next time. Slash-gen rather than slash, BB & Fox familial hc with some pairings creeping in at the corners. It ties in to a few fics I wrote early last year, but that's not too important.
Thanks to everyone who beta'd this before I mailed it in for the fanbook last year - daniela_lynx, saphrawn, karose, and anyone else I forgot :( Also thanks to zoeiona because it is totally her fault.
Title: Pieces Missing
Pairings: Slight BB/Ocelot, Fox/Snake
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Torture, violence.
Summary: Big Boss and Gray Fox have got to stop meeting like this.
i) 1971
Jack found the kid in the hospital garden. It was the first place he'd looked when he'd found Frank's room empty - he'd a feeling the boy didn't like being cooped up, or being within sight of the whitecoats. Medical facilities were cloying enough even if you hadn't been imprisoned in them for years; little wonder that he preferred being out in the open, where everything smelt of rain and hibiscus and there was less to remind him of what had happened.
Null - Frank - was sat crosslegged on a bench, wearing someone's castoff fatigues, at least a size too large and rolled up at the knees and elbows. His collar was folded upward against his neck; even in this balmy heat, he still liked to cover his throat. He was alone. Not surprising. The army of defectors had been accepting each other's past deeds, and their own, rubbing shoulders and running missions without rancour - but for one of them, it wouldn't be that easy. Give it time, he thought, as he crossed the lawn to join him. They need it as much as he does. The rest of Gene's army had allowed Null to be brainwashed and used as a weapon, had sheltered behind his unnatural combat skill, and now they were afraid of him. And so he sat in the garden, alone and confused.
The boy's hands were twitching - slowly clenching and unclenching in his lap. He seemed unfazed when Jack sat beside him, greeting him with a flicker of his eyes. No saluting, no protocol; they weren't on the battlefield, the kid wasn't his underling, and it would probably make this easier anyway.
"Frank." It wasn't enough, but he had to say it. "I fucked up." Frank looked up at his words - not surprised, but coldly interested. "In Mozambique. I shouldn't have left you with people I had no reason to trust." It wasn't the worst mistake he'd ever made, but it stung him to know that he would never have discovered what that lapse of judgement had led to but for the slimmest of chances - if it had been chance, rather than some sadistic design -
Frank shrugged - awkwardly, as if he were merely mimicking the way people expressed indifference. "It wasn't you who took me from there and...put me in the tank." His voice wavered, and Jack realised that his grasp of what had been done to him was still weak; the course of his life as much a mystery to himself as to everyone else.
"No, but I should've guessed it would happen." Nothing as odd as you stays unregarded for long. "The Philosophers could have had their eye on you before we even met."
"Philosophers...who...?" Frank's eyebrows scrunched together, as if flicking through his mind for the word. Jack gave him time, not wishing to interrupt him with all the answers. "Gene. They made a legacy, and he wanted to take it...take what they'd made...and use it."
"Yeah."
"And they made me."
They thought they had. Gene thought they had. Jack figured people weren't put together that simply. He sighed. "You're not the first person I've met who they've fucked with. They used to raise people from the cradle to be their spies."
"What were they?"
"A group of people who thought they could control the world. They tore themselves to pieces a long time ago, but - there were a lot of pieces. Some of them are still festering." Jack would have felt mad trying to explain this to most people, but Frank was nodding as if it merely confirmed the image of the world he already had in his head. "They ran the USA, and the USSR, and China before the Revolution. When they started out, it was simple to rule over everyone by manipulating only a few." And they died because they didn't adapt. To do something like that now, I guess you'd have to be more sophisticated... "What was left of them had to look in less obvious places for things to use," things like you, "But - Frank -" He took half a second to react to his name. "Do you remember being anywhere else before Mozambique?"
Not that it mattered whether they'd found the child before he had or stumbled over him after Jack had left him, unarmed and easy pickings; he had done their work either way. But Frank, looking away over the garden, seemed caught by the idea. "I don't know, but... I didn't belong. I know that."
"I was there for six months and you were the only person I ever heard speaking German. You don't know where you picked that up?" Frank shook his head. "I wish I'd asked you back then. I should have -" Should have, could have, the words were so much dead weight. He only try to make the world right here and now. "I stopped asking when you said that your family was dead."
"I said that?" Frank looked confused - and strangely happy. "I didn't think that I ever had one, but if I said I knew they'd died, I must have..." He gave a small smile that stabbed Jack in the guts. "I should try to find that memory. I could sleep on it - I used to dream about when I'd had allies. So maybe I could dream about a family, but -" He looked down. "When I sleep now, I only dream about being in the tank."
He didn't reply, but he understood. That's the fear you don't let out when you're awake. He had enough of his own, many far less rational than that - dreams of fanged things that sucked away his blood, unnatural things... He left the boy to his musings for a minute, but Frank just curled his fingers and didn't make to say anything else. No breakthrough there, so - "What happened after I left you?"
The mistake tasted bitter, grainy. Whatever the answer was, he had caused it, he alone.
"I don't remember." Jack could tell by the curtness of the response that there were things there that Frank didn't want to remember. "But I remembered you." He bent forward, a hand clutched to his head. Grimacing in pain. Jack stole a glance at the door, thought of yelling for a nurse, thought better of it. More whitecoats wouldn't solve anything. Instead, he took Frank's left hand.
"Don't try to charge it down. It's always better to sneak up on things." Frank was squeezing his fingers hard, but the words seemed to calm him. Maybe... He pulled his hand away and yanked up the corner of his shirt, pointing to a thick scar between his hipbone and his ribs. "Remember this? Because you should."
Frank peered at it. "Did I...?" Jack nodded, and a methodical look settled on the boy's face. "What was I using?"
"Just a hunting knife. You killed a hell of a lot of Portuguese with it." And one of my own lieutenants. But I won't lay that on you now. I won't.
"Glancing blow. Did I miss, or did you dodge?"
"Bit of both. Visibility was shit -"
"- it was raining. And smoke -" Frank froze, and put a hand to his head again. "I don't remember." Yes you do. "You..." A strange smile came to his lips. "How many times have you shot me?"
"Plenty. Hell, I poured a clip at that machete before I finally got you. How did you do that?"
Frank stretched his right hand out in front of him, gripping nothing with two fingers and his thumb. "By not remembering how I did it. I think." He grinned, and Jack returned it. Laughing voices - that was what he'd said he wanted, so Jack would worry later about the brainwashing and the blankness and the perfect way he'd fought. For a second he wished they had something to talk about other than fighting - but what did either of them know more of than that?
Another thing he owed, though. "You want it back in your hand."
Frank stared again at his own fingers. "I do. I'd...recognise it, and...there's not much here I recognise." He looked up into Jack's face. "Not much at all."
He nodded. That was why he'd had to come looking for Frank again; that he had caused this, and that the kid didn't have a single damn other thing in the world. "I kept it, you know?" Frank's eyes widened. But it had seemed natural, to carry Null's machete from the battlefield, return to Hawaii with it slung on his back and stash it in his quarters beside the Patriot; if you fought people who mattered and defeated them, you looked after what was theirs. "When you leave here, I'll make sure you get it back. Wherever you choose to go."
"So when can I leave?"
"Don't rush it," Jack replied lazily. Give yourself some goddamn time. But he felt more wary deep inside - though the kid was healing up well enough, physically, the doctors were still wanting to keep an eye on him - there were shrinks asking questions and refusing to say whether they wanted Frank as a patient or an experiment, which didn't sit well with Jack at all. Had to get the boy away. But to where? Wherever he wanted to be - but Frank had endured a strange history and was still lost inside its folds, and Jack wasn't even sure if he knew how to want, and was quite sure he should be too wise to trust by now. Even - maybe especially - now he was, for the first time in his life, almost free.
He thought of all the offers and promises he could make this time, but responsibility whittled down the choices until only one remained. There's only one safe place for you, he realised, and damn, but it's right by my side.
ii) 1976
Anything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong.
Fox had been scouting alone, which was a dangerous preference in the first place, even if was one Jack had always shared in. The rest was garbled fragments and he'd have to ask for more answers later, if Frank could remember, if Frank would tell him, if he could stomach asking the goddamn questions. As best he could make sense of it, the first shot had gone straight through Fox's radio and the shoulder behind it. The second had come while he was bleeding in the dirt and trying to rewire his radio - while Jack had still been trying to figure why the hell he was cut off - and had lodged in his right leg, cracking the femur.
A shot was a reveal, a fix, and Fox possessed masterful dead reckoning; Jack had found the sniper on the hillside later, a bullet lodged square between his eyes. Luck. Luck, for all three of them; the third shot would've killed Fox, and if Jack had caught that sniper alive, the state Fox was in now would be a trifle in comparison - and Jack would not have forgiven himself for any of it.
Fox's mistake to make. That's what happened when you go it alone and fuck up; you get fucked. Agents died for such mistakes. Frequently. And you mourned them and moved on. And if you found them still alive you got them out and hoped they'd stay that way.
This was their job, Jack's fucking job and his only purpose in life, doing battle for the Patriots, and he slammed a wall up and did his duty with the same hierarchical detachment as if it had been any other agent. If your scout's gone MIA you can bet he found what he was looking for, or it found him. This is what you came for. He took a couple of squads. They found spilled blood and a tree notched with machete cuts - nine strokes of impromptu Morse. Cute. Unnecessary. Tracks leading down the river, something being dragged through the dirt, still bleeding. Jack had looked at his watch and counted back to Fox's last transmission - and that was another mistake right there. An hour and a half, two hours, three before they'd found the ramshackle camp and approached it under cover. Shouldn't have checked. Shouldn't be counting. It didn't matter how long, because you could kill someone in less than a second, if you wanted them dead.
If you wanted them dead.
They were preparing their attack when they heard Fox scream, and that was their signal - while the enemy were distracted by their plaything, while his operatives knew Fox was alive and weren't thinking a step past that - so they went in. They killed everyone who didn't run. They moved toward the sound as fast as they could, and with every step Jack knew that the keening, stomach-twisting, fading, sobbing yell would be cut short before he took another - but it never stopped.
When every enemy was dead, when the techs were poring over the wreckage and sifting through radio signals, when his snipers were looking for fleeing men, making sure that nowhere was safe for the people who'd done this, Jack sat by the field medic and radioed Campbell to tell him that yes, they would be needing that air ambulance after all.
He laid steady hands wherever the medic needed one - pulling bandages tight, holding up facial tissue that hung by a thread of skin. Fox had passed out as soon as he'd seen them, and that was the only good fortune they'd had all day.
Agents fucked up, and if they survived their mistakes, they went home with pieces missing. And if you were their CO, you just kept doing your duty - to them, to yourself. The young man being airlifted to Johannesburg is your lieutenant. Your best-ranked operative, but you treat him the same as any other operative. If he's also your only son - not by blood, but by law and by conscience, by things you never fucking talk to each other about, the only family you've had since you were a child - then you put that out of mind.
You retrieve his machete from the enemy's armoury because it's his only sentiment. He's a strip of steel, a killing tool, an operative. He has no family.
He's just like you.
*
Just another operative. He would never walk away from a battlefield over a personal tie. He owed it to himself, to all his troops, and to Frank, and to her, to be detached and even-handed. He kept catching Campbell watching him warily, trying to raise the topic in non-existent conversation. Campbell had a younger brother, he recalled, a teenager who had just enlisted in the US Army. If it had been one of Roy's own blood, Jack knew the guy couldn't have stayed detached from it. Some soldiers didn't see the mission as a severance of the rest of their lives. Some soldiers kept caring even while they were killing.
Men with guns.
In a few weeks they watched it become, in stages, fucked to the point where there was no productive application of killing tools any more. That was how their vision went, these days - they mapped out the world's weak points, then Jack took FOXHOUND in to make problems, and the Patriots filled in the gap with Zero's version of a solution, and the world became a little less divided. Like doing surgery with a sledgehammer. He didn't rush it, but conferred with Zero nightly, and declared the mission over when it was over. His troops went home on leave, and he went to Johannesburg to watch over his son, an unfamiliar weight strapped to his hip under his coat.
Frank was at least half-asleep when he entered, face bandaged up to the eyes with just a small gap around his mouth. A monitor claimed that his heartbeat was running patient and steady. He displayed no alertness at the sound of the door closing, or as Jack sat heavily in a chair; doped up on painkillers, maybe? Even so...Jack studied his posture, knees curled a little under sheets, and was reminded that there were few things Frank hated or feared more than doctors. He was playing dead. Jack put a hand to the young man's own, a firm touch just below the plaster cast.
"Boss," murmured Frank, "I fucked up."
He squeezed at his hand. "You got fucked," he agreed.
Frank twisted under the crisp sheets, until he was halfway sat-up against the pillows. Jack wished he could see the young man's expression; his eyes were betraying nothing, as cold as if there were nothing behind to betray. "I didn't tell them anything."
Frank, I don't care, I wouldn't've cared if you'd given up our base coordinates, or told them how to unscramble our transmissions. I wouldn't've cared if you'd told them my real name. What matters is that they're dead and you're not. "Good," he said, because he was damned if he would take the young man's pride. Gray Fox had lost enough out there as it was.
"Mission?"
"Over. Politics." Frank nodded. Politics, they both knew, were like the weather; an unavoidable climatic factor which one could prepare for but not avoid. (Yet. The Patriots' grip was tightening, a finger at a time, an armed faction here, a nation-state there, building to a supposedly perfect control. World with no borders. Jack believed in that end, felt suffocated by these means.) He could tell Frank wanted details, but Frank could tell he was in no mood to provide any. Let them get some goddamn distance before he had to explain what they'd staked lives on and for what purpose they'd left half of his face on the table. Til then, he'd lock it away with the rest of his costly errors. He wished he could throw away the key. He wished he'd never been given so many chances to fuck other people up, because it kept on happening. He was always the one who pulled the trigger.
He hadn't come here to think. He'd come here to do his duty.
"You healing up?"
Frank scowled with his eyes, which tugged at a line of stitches that ran up to his hairline. "I guess. They keep making me sleep." Jack frowned. Surely necessary, but any soldier would detest such enforced helplessness. To Frank, who had once been kept asleep for most of three years, sedation was purgatory. That was wrong.
Everything had gone wrong. Frank was glancing to the door; shut tight, with no shadows visible beyond the glass, but his eyes were still edgy. Hunted. "There's something I -" He broke off, as if suddenly unwilling to go on.
"You're safe," Jack promised. I'm here. We're allies, family. I love you and, "I'll have you out of here ASAP, I swear."
"Can I still fight?" Jack raised an eyebrow, noting the three plaster casts, the yards of bandages, the row of stitches slanting up his forehead - the least of his hurts, but the most visible. Frank merely glared in response. Couldn't walk, but he sure could glare. "After this, Boss," he added insistently.
"You don't have to fight - we could assign you to any work you wanted to -"
"It's what I'm good at." He lay back down, turning his head away.
"You're good at a lot of things." Piloting, spying, plotting - "How many governments have you brought down?"
Frank's voice remained flat. "Only three." (In his better moods, if they had been somewhere he felt was secure, he would have added 'And Nixon had it coming.') "So can I fight?"
Jack's teeth grated against his lip, but his damage assessment was honest. "They didn't break anything vital. No spinal or organ damage. The bullet wounds will be okay, if you go easy on that shoulder. Your feet are the worst -" bones beaten into fragments, and he wished he'd hurt them before killing them "- but you'll walk again soon enough. Everything else is..."
"...cosmetic," Frank finished coldly. "And I could give less of a shit about -"
"Fox," he grated. Goddamn it, but he couldn't see another way around the walls his son had put up - not one he was prepared to take, at least. He watched his agent turn to him, drawn automatically by his tone of voice, and he pulled off his eyepatch.
Frank had seen it before, a handful of times; he always responded with the same curious, silent horror. The flesh burned raw, sucked into a hollow within the socket, cracked and white and filling in a monstrous absence. Pieces missing. Getting out alive, but every mirror you ever passed for the rest of your life would tell you that you weren't the person you'd been before.
"They told me," he said, laying the patience on thick, "that they're worried about your - nerves."
Frank reached his good hand up to the bandages on his face, toying at them with his nails. "Is that what they call it now?"
"I call it torture, Frank." He paused, but he had to ask - "You knew them, didn't you?"
"No." His voice was rough. "They knew me." Anger at himself. For not knowing - for having no recollection of the allies he'd had in Mozambique in the past, or of the people they'd killed together. For not being perfect, when Jack had once battled him with gun and memory to save him from perfection.
He thought back ten years, to a rainy evening's knife-fight against a fair-haired hunter child. Wouldn't do you a lot of good to remember... But he wasn't the one who'd had his face hacked up by someone who'd known him in the past as a comrade. "Frank," he said, there's no such thing as enough time, "If you want to go back to the battlefield - I trust you to tell me if you can trust yourself still."
Through that gap in his bandages, Jack saw teeth. "I can't walk. Can't sleep without dreaming it. Don't know what I look like any more -" and that one would hurt a man who knew so little else about his life - "No weapons, and no allies here except you. But I still know what I believe in."
"Which is?"
"Freedom. At any cost. Even if freedom isn't possible any more - Boss, you need to -"
"Just tell me," he interrupted, "that you go back there again and not snap in two."
Frank's eyes hardened, until Jack couldn't see the truth behind them any more. "Of course I can."
It was what any soldier would've said.
Jack reached for the sheathed machete, and tossed it over Frank's legs to rest by his uninjured arm. "Here, then. There's one thing fixed. We'll get the rest sorted soon enough."
"The nurses won't let me keep that," Frank said, a little sheepish, but he took the hilt in his left hand. Not his usual, but he was nothing if not adaptable. He slid the blade out a few inches, and tested the edge with a thumb.
"I wasn't planning on leaving you with them," Jack replied. "I need you back on base in America so we can plan something more competent than -"
"No. Fuck -" Frank raised up on his elbows, holding his eyes, almost panicked. "We can't go back. You can't. I -" He fell back, grimacing in pain. "Have to tell you something, something fucking crazy. I..." He peered around. "It's not safe here, is it?"
"Safe from what?"
"From us. The Patriots." He glanced to the door again. "Fuck, but if it wasn't safe he wouldn't have come here to tell me." Jack blinked at him. "Your -" Frank's hand curled, fingernails digging into plaster. "Ocelot. He came here."
"Ocelot?" He wasn't shocked. But he was instantly suspicious. Ocelot, who measured a man's character in lost hours, come to see his tortured son? And hadn't told him? "Why?"
"Asshole had something to get off his chest. To me. Because he hadn't the balls to tell you -" There was no love lost between Frank and Adamska, but Frank was rarely so caustic about it to his face. "Clark, and Zero. When you got laid out in '72 -" and damn the Viet Cong, but these things happened "- they, Clark, she had - you know what she's even been working on these last ten years?"
"Some genome crap, isn't it?"
Frank nodded. "Human cloning. Ocelot says they made clones of you in her lab and Eva fucking bore them to term."
Jack said nothing.
- unnatural things that took his blood and used it used him consumed him and made him weak blood thin cold always night and always followed no end to them to replicating to taking what he was and -
"He showed me fucking photos, Boss. It's true. There's three of them. Now tell me you want to go back to base like nothing's happened. I'll go to base - I can still do your work from the inside - but there's no free world for you any more."
iii) 1996
Someone was holding his hand.
He was not yet used to reading that sensation - that flush of artificial nerves that told him that someone else had picked up that piece of shaped metal and touched it as if it were still real. It wasn't. The touch wasn't real. It was flesh to steel. Nature to snatcher. He knew his hand was touched because there were surface-level pressure sensors that stimulated dead nerve clusters that had been wired up to his brainstem by Madnar's minute tools. His senses were a map, not the territory. It was like the difference between seeing something on a surveillance feed and seeing it with his own eye.
It wasn't Ocelot. He wouldn't have risked another visit in the name of sentiment. It wasn't Eva either, for all she'd done to help him stay alive, for all the resources she'd diverted from her own hideout nearby - she knew he would not have her near him ever again. So those fingertips resting lightly over his steel carapace - the steady breaths he heard by his side - He recognised his ally, even before he could fumble through how to turn the new joints in his neck.
"Fox, what the hell are you doing here?"
"Watching over you."
Statement, echo, vocation, their bond, their family. There were wires in his brain, cutting his feelings into these robotic verbal quanta. "No," he hissed. "You need to go back to FOXHOUND -"
Gray Fox laughed softly. "They think so too. Dead or alive. My own fault, that - mine and Ocelot's."
"Ocelot? Why would he -"
"So he wouldn't be suspected of helping me defect, why else? Don't worry, Boss," he added lightly, "I'm alive, and you're alive -" one of those statements is true "- and all's fair, for now. If he goes any further I'll repay him for it." Fox released the hand, and tapped the patch that covered his ruined eye. The Madnars had offered to restore it. He had refused. "I'm only sorry it took me this long to find you."
The voice said he was lying. There's something else. Something else happening while Madnar and his daughter had soldered this new corpus together. Something important. "So what were you doing all this time?"
"Bluffing through an inquiry, watching our unit get taken over by the Patriots, searching for you..." Fox fell quiet for a moment. "I spent a lot of time with your son."
"He's not my son," he snapped, seeing the traphole and diving headfirst into it anyway.
He turned his head, mechanically awkward, expecting to see that thin sardonic smile on Gray Fox's lips. He saw nothing of the sort. Just his lieutenant standing by him in anonymous-looking civvies, scarred face framed by hair far whiter than he recalled, and tired eyes softened in thought. "I'm afraid I told him otherwise."
"Why?"
"To open his eyes," Fox replied. "It won't stop them using him, but at least he'll know it's happening. And why. I wanted him to know why." Not reproachful, and not - never - insubordinate. Fox knew what he was doing, fucking things up like that. Saying what others wouldn't. He wouldn't berate Fox for it; part of him, some animal part that couldn't be digitised, suspected that it was the right thing for Fox to do - something no one else could have done.
He looked the agent over. Alert, and too vigilant to sleep, by the looks of it. Good stance, and half an eye on the door. Gun holstered under his clothes - but what in hell, no machete? "Fox," he said. "What happened to your -"
"I left it with your son." That word again. Trying to make him feel - nothing, just trying to make him feel, to accept the Patriots' lab-grown pawn as his own. "I taught him to use it, and...I want him to remember that."
"He hates blades." He'd learned that much about the cast-off clone.
"I know. Not like you. I think there'll come a time when he'll need to know how to use one. He's not like you," he repeated, "Not like you at all." Again, his voice was speaking half a smile that wasn't there in his face -
Fox looked into his eyes, and he saw grey, red, bittersweet - and a mechanical analysis through the tangle of wires said oh good god but I haven't seen that look on your face in eight years and I - do - not - want - to - know but that tiny flicker of warmth there bit into him and he did know, damn fucking well. And his legs didn't work yet; Ellen Madnar came in every day dressed in labcoat and pink silk ballet shoes, poked the axles in his knees with two minuscule cattle prods, watching circuits slowly knit into vat-grown nerve cells. His legs didn't work so he couldn't walk the hell away from Fox's stricken-mad eyes and whatever he'd shared with not my goddamn son.
Fox's hand touched his again, and his thoughts were extinguished by that non-feeling of rough fingers brushing against highly-calibrated sensors. Lab-made things. The clone was no more unnatural than he was. And it's not wrong, that animal awareness whispered, to share secrets with your mentor's son -
It wasn't right, was never right, Fox had never been right, and he could never walk the hell away. He should have learned by now that he couldn't save Frank from himself. Not by keeping him close, not by keeping his distance, not even by leaving him to think he was dead.
The touch vanished, like a switch flicking from one to zero, senses all binary, and Gray Fox leaned against the wall with arms crossed and face grim and mind suddenly all business. "Boss. You can't leave here yet but that doesn't mean we can't get things moving again. I don't imagine you've not been working on our next move -"
Fox knew him, alright. "I'm going to fuck them up. I've been working out the plan with Madnar. Last time we fucked up by thinking too small -"
"What do you need me to go do?"
He took a deep breath. He was mad. Frank was mad. They'd never been right but he had a plan and if Madnar's information was sound they could hold the whole world to ransom. "There's two things I need sorted." He was mad. "I want all the children that were at Outer Heaven. And any other war orphans who need shelter - we've got to find them, and take care of them. And I want nukes. All the nukes as we can get hold of."
Fox raised an eyebrow. "I'll see to the nukes, Boss. We'll have a delivery mechanism?"
"Madnar's going over the blueprints again already. All we need is a pilot -"
Frank smiled, flashing pointed teeth.
***
Thanks to everyone who beta'd this before I mailed it in for the fanbook last year - daniela_lynx, saphrawn, karose, and anyone else I forgot :( Also thanks to zoeiona because it is totally her fault.
Title: Pieces Missing
Pairings: Slight BB/Ocelot, Fox/Snake
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Torture, violence.
Summary: Big Boss and Gray Fox have got to stop meeting like this.
i) 1971
Jack found the kid in the hospital garden. It was the first place he'd looked when he'd found Frank's room empty - he'd a feeling the boy didn't like being cooped up, or being within sight of the whitecoats. Medical facilities were cloying enough even if you hadn't been imprisoned in them for years; little wonder that he preferred being out in the open, where everything smelt of rain and hibiscus and there was less to remind him of what had happened.
Null - Frank - was sat crosslegged on a bench, wearing someone's castoff fatigues, at least a size too large and rolled up at the knees and elbows. His collar was folded upward against his neck; even in this balmy heat, he still liked to cover his throat. He was alone. Not surprising. The army of defectors had been accepting each other's past deeds, and their own, rubbing shoulders and running missions without rancour - but for one of them, it wouldn't be that easy. Give it time, he thought, as he crossed the lawn to join him. They need it as much as he does. The rest of Gene's army had allowed Null to be brainwashed and used as a weapon, had sheltered behind his unnatural combat skill, and now they were afraid of him. And so he sat in the garden, alone and confused.
The boy's hands were twitching - slowly clenching and unclenching in his lap. He seemed unfazed when Jack sat beside him, greeting him with a flicker of his eyes. No saluting, no protocol; they weren't on the battlefield, the kid wasn't his underling, and it would probably make this easier anyway.
"Frank." It wasn't enough, but he had to say it. "I fucked up." Frank looked up at his words - not surprised, but coldly interested. "In Mozambique. I shouldn't have left you with people I had no reason to trust." It wasn't the worst mistake he'd ever made, but it stung him to know that he would never have discovered what that lapse of judgement had led to but for the slimmest of chances - if it had been chance, rather than some sadistic design -
Frank shrugged - awkwardly, as if he were merely mimicking the way people expressed indifference. "It wasn't you who took me from there and...put me in the tank." His voice wavered, and Jack realised that his grasp of what had been done to him was still weak; the course of his life as much a mystery to himself as to everyone else.
"No, but I should've guessed it would happen." Nothing as odd as you stays unregarded for long. "The Philosophers could have had their eye on you before we even met."
"Philosophers...who...?" Frank's eyebrows scrunched together, as if flicking through his mind for the word. Jack gave him time, not wishing to interrupt him with all the answers. "Gene. They made a legacy, and he wanted to take it...take what they'd made...and use it."
"Yeah."
"And they made me."
They thought they had. Gene thought they had. Jack figured people weren't put together that simply. He sighed. "You're not the first person I've met who they've fucked with. They used to raise people from the cradle to be their spies."
"What were they?"
"A group of people who thought they could control the world. They tore themselves to pieces a long time ago, but - there were a lot of pieces. Some of them are still festering." Jack would have felt mad trying to explain this to most people, but Frank was nodding as if it merely confirmed the image of the world he already had in his head. "They ran the USA, and the USSR, and China before the Revolution. When they started out, it was simple to rule over everyone by manipulating only a few." And they died because they didn't adapt. To do something like that now, I guess you'd have to be more sophisticated... "What was left of them had to look in less obvious places for things to use," things like you, "But - Frank -" He took half a second to react to his name. "Do you remember being anywhere else before Mozambique?"
Not that it mattered whether they'd found the child before he had or stumbled over him after Jack had left him, unarmed and easy pickings; he had done their work either way. But Frank, looking away over the garden, seemed caught by the idea. "I don't know, but... I didn't belong. I know that."
"I was there for six months and you were the only person I ever heard speaking German. You don't know where you picked that up?" Frank shook his head. "I wish I'd asked you back then. I should have -" Should have, could have, the words were so much dead weight. He only try to make the world right here and now. "I stopped asking when you said that your family was dead."
"I said that?" Frank looked confused - and strangely happy. "I didn't think that I ever had one, but if I said I knew they'd died, I must have..." He gave a small smile that stabbed Jack in the guts. "I should try to find that memory. I could sleep on it - I used to dream about when I'd had allies. So maybe I could dream about a family, but -" He looked down. "When I sleep now, I only dream about being in the tank."
He didn't reply, but he understood. That's the fear you don't let out when you're awake. He had enough of his own, many far less rational than that - dreams of fanged things that sucked away his blood, unnatural things... He left the boy to his musings for a minute, but Frank just curled his fingers and didn't make to say anything else. No breakthrough there, so - "What happened after I left you?"
The mistake tasted bitter, grainy. Whatever the answer was, he had caused it, he alone.
"I don't remember." Jack could tell by the curtness of the response that there were things there that Frank didn't want to remember. "But I remembered you." He bent forward, a hand clutched to his head. Grimacing in pain. Jack stole a glance at the door, thought of yelling for a nurse, thought better of it. More whitecoats wouldn't solve anything. Instead, he took Frank's left hand.
"Don't try to charge it down. It's always better to sneak up on things." Frank was squeezing his fingers hard, but the words seemed to calm him. Maybe... He pulled his hand away and yanked up the corner of his shirt, pointing to a thick scar between his hipbone and his ribs. "Remember this? Because you should."
Frank peered at it. "Did I...?" Jack nodded, and a methodical look settled on the boy's face. "What was I using?"
"Just a hunting knife. You killed a hell of a lot of Portuguese with it." And one of my own lieutenants. But I won't lay that on you now. I won't.
"Glancing blow. Did I miss, or did you dodge?"
"Bit of both. Visibility was shit -"
"- it was raining. And smoke -" Frank froze, and put a hand to his head again. "I don't remember." Yes you do. "You..." A strange smile came to his lips. "How many times have you shot me?"
"Plenty. Hell, I poured a clip at that machete before I finally got you. How did you do that?"
Frank stretched his right hand out in front of him, gripping nothing with two fingers and his thumb. "By not remembering how I did it. I think." He grinned, and Jack returned it. Laughing voices - that was what he'd said he wanted, so Jack would worry later about the brainwashing and the blankness and the perfect way he'd fought. For a second he wished they had something to talk about other than fighting - but what did either of them know more of than that?
Another thing he owed, though. "You want it back in your hand."
Frank stared again at his own fingers. "I do. I'd...recognise it, and...there's not much here I recognise." He looked up into Jack's face. "Not much at all."
He nodded. That was why he'd had to come looking for Frank again; that he had caused this, and that the kid didn't have a single damn other thing in the world. "I kept it, you know?" Frank's eyes widened. But it had seemed natural, to carry Null's machete from the battlefield, return to Hawaii with it slung on his back and stash it in his quarters beside the Patriot; if you fought people who mattered and defeated them, you looked after what was theirs. "When you leave here, I'll make sure you get it back. Wherever you choose to go."
"So when can I leave?"
"Don't rush it," Jack replied lazily. Give yourself some goddamn time. But he felt more wary deep inside - though the kid was healing up well enough, physically, the doctors were still wanting to keep an eye on him - there were shrinks asking questions and refusing to say whether they wanted Frank as a patient or an experiment, which didn't sit well with Jack at all. Had to get the boy away. But to where? Wherever he wanted to be - but Frank had endured a strange history and was still lost inside its folds, and Jack wasn't even sure if he knew how to want, and was quite sure he should be too wise to trust by now. Even - maybe especially - now he was, for the first time in his life, almost free.
He thought of all the offers and promises he could make this time, but responsibility whittled down the choices until only one remained. There's only one safe place for you, he realised, and damn, but it's right by my side.
ii) 1976
Anything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong.
Fox had been scouting alone, which was a dangerous preference in the first place, even if was one Jack had always shared in. The rest was garbled fragments and he'd have to ask for more answers later, if Frank could remember, if Frank would tell him, if he could stomach asking the goddamn questions. As best he could make sense of it, the first shot had gone straight through Fox's radio and the shoulder behind it. The second had come while he was bleeding in the dirt and trying to rewire his radio - while Jack had still been trying to figure why the hell he was cut off - and had lodged in his right leg, cracking the femur.
A shot was a reveal, a fix, and Fox possessed masterful dead reckoning; Jack had found the sniper on the hillside later, a bullet lodged square between his eyes. Luck. Luck, for all three of them; the third shot would've killed Fox, and if Jack had caught that sniper alive, the state Fox was in now would be a trifle in comparison - and Jack would not have forgiven himself for any of it.
Fox's mistake to make. That's what happened when you go it alone and fuck up; you get fucked. Agents died for such mistakes. Frequently. And you mourned them and moved on. And if you found them still alive you got them out and hoped they'd stay that way.
This was their job, Jack's fucking job and his only purpose in life, doing battle for the Patriots, and he slammed a wall up and did his duty with the same hierarchical detachment as if it had been any other agent. If your scout's gone MIA you can bet he found what he was looking for, or it found him. This is what you came for. He took a couple of squads. They found spilled blood and a tree notched with machete cuts - nine strokes of impromptu Morse. Cute. Unnecessary. Tracks leading down the river, something being dragged through the dirt, still bleeding. Jack had looked at his watch and counted back to Fox's last transmission - and that was another mistake right there. An hour and a half, two hours, three before they'd found the ramshackle camp and approached it under cover. Shouldn't have checked. Shouldn't be counting. It didn't matter how long, because you could kill someone in less than a second, if you wanted them dead.
If you wanted them dead.
They were preparing their attack when they heard Fox scream, and that was their signal - while the enemy were distracted by their plaything, while his operatives knew Fox was alive and weren't thinking a step past that - so they went in. They killed everyone who didn't run. They moved toward the sound as fast as they could, and with every step Jack knew that the keening, stomach-twisting, fading, sobbing yell would be cut short before he took another - but it never stopped.
When every enemy was dead, when the techs were poring over the wreckage and sifting through radio signals, when his snipers were looking for fleeing men, making sure that nowhere was safe for the people who'd done this, Jack sat by the field medic and radioed Campbell to tell him that yes, they would be needing that air ambulance after all.
He laid steady hands wherever the medic needed one - pulling bandages tight, holding up facial tissue that hung by a thread of skin. Fox had passed out as soon as he'd seen them, and that was the only good fortune they'd had all day.
Agents fucked up, and if they survived their mistakes, they went home with pieces missing. And if you were their CO, you just kept doing your duty - to them, to yourself. The young man being airlifted to Johannesburg is your lieutenant. Your best-ranked operative, but you treat him the same as any other operative. If he's also your only son - not by blood, but by law and by conscience, by things you never fucking talk to each other about, the only family you've had since you were a child - then you put that out of mind.
You retrieve his machete from the enemy's armoury because it's his only sentiment. He's a strip of steel, a killing tool, an operative. He has no family.
He's just like you.
*
Just another operative. He would never walk away from a battlefield over a personal tie. He owed it to himself, to all his troops, and to Frank, and to her, to be detached and even-handed. He kept catching Campbell watching him warily, trying to raise the topic in non-existent conversation. Campbell had a younger brother, he recalled, a teenager who had just enlisted in the US Army. If it had been one of Roy's own blood, Jack knew the guy couldn't have stayed detached from it. Some soldiers didn't see the mission as a severance of the rest of their lives. Some soldiers kept caring even while they were killing.
Men with guns.
In a few weeks they watched it become, in stages, fucked to the point where there was no productive application of killing tools any more. That was how their vision went, these days - they mapped out the world's weak points, then Jack took FOXHOUND in to make problems, and the Patriots filled in the gap with Zero's version of a solution, and the world became a little less divided. Like doing surgery with a sledgehammer. He didn't rush it, but conferred with Zero nightly, and declared the mission over when it was over. His troops went home on leave, and he went to Johannesburg to watch over his son, an unfamiliar weight strapped to his hip under his coat.
Frank was at least half-asleep when he entered, face bandaged up to the eyes with just a small gap around his mouth. A monitor claimed that his heartbeat was running patient and steady. He displayed no alertness at the sound of the door closing, or as Jack sat heavily in a chair; doped up on painkillers, maybe? Even so...Jack studied his posture, knees curled a little under sheets, and was reminded that there were few things Frank hated or feared more than doctors. He was playing dead. Jack put a hand to the young man's own, a firm touch just below the plaster cast.
"Boss," murmured Frank, "I fucked up."
He squeezed at his hand. "You got fucked," he agreed.
Frank twisted under the crisp sheets, until he was halfway sat-up against the pillows. Jack wished he could see the young man's expression; his eyes were betraying nothing, as cold as if there were nothing behind to betray. "I didn't tell them anything."
Frank, I don't care, I wouldn't've cared if you'd given up our base coordinates, or told them how to unscramble our transmissions. I wouldn't've cared if you'd told them my real name. What matters is that they're dead and you're not. "Good," he said, because he was damned if he would take the young man's pride. Gray Fox had lost enough out there as it was.
"Mission?"
"Over. Politics." Frank nodded. Politics, they both knew, were like the weather; an unavoidable climatic factor which one could prepare for but not avoid. (Yet. The Patriots' grip was tightening, a finger at a time, an armed faction here, a nation-state there, building to a supposedly perfect control. World with no borders. Jack believed in that end, felt suffocated by these means.) He could tell Frank wanted details, but Frank could tell he was in no mood to provide any. Let them get some goddamn distance before he had to explain what they'd staked lives on and for what purpose they'd left half of his face on the table. Til then, he'd lock it away with the rest of his costly errors. He wished he could throw away the key. He wished he'd never been given so many chances to fuck other people up, because it kept on happening. He was always the one who pulled the trigger.
He hadn't come here to think. He'd come here to do his duty.
"You healing up?"
Frank scowled with his eyes, which tugged at a line of stitches that ran up to his hairline. "I guess. They keep making me sleep." Jack frowned. Surely necessary, but any soldier would detest such enforced helplessness. To Frank, who had once been kept asleep for most of three years, sedation was purgatory. That was wrong.
Everything had gone wrong. Frank was glancing to the door; shut tight, with no shadows visible beyond the glass, but his eyes were still edgy. Hunted. "There's something I -" He broke off, as if suddenly unwilling to go on.
"You're safe," Jack promised. I'm here. We're allies, family. I love you and, "I'll have you out of here ASAP, I swear."
"Can I still fight?" Jack raised an eyebrow, noting the three plaster casts, the yards of bandages, the row of stitches slanting up his forehead - the least of his hurts, but the most visible. Frank merely glared in response. Couldn't walk, but he sure could glare. "After this, Boss," he added insistently.
"You don't have to fight - we could assign you to any work you wanted to -"
"It's what I'm good at." He lay back down, turning his head away.
"You're good at a lot of things." Piloting, spying, plotting - "How many governments have you brought down?"
Frank's voice remained flat. "Only three." (In his better moods, if they had been somewhere he felt was secure, he would have added 'And Nixon had it coming.') "So can I fight?"
Jack's teeth grated against his lip, but his damage assessment was honest. "They didn't break anything vital. No spinal or organ damage. The bullet wounds will be okay, if you go easy on that shoulder. Your feet are the worst -" bones beaten into fragments, and he wished he'd hurt them before killing them "- but you'll walk again soon enough. Everything else is..."
"...cosmetic," Frank finished coldly. "And I could give less of a shit about -"
"Fox," he grated. Goddamn it, but he couldn't see another way around the walls his son had put up - not one he was prepared to take, at least. He watched his agent turn to him, drawn automatically by his tone of voice, and he pulled off his eyepatch.
Frank had seen it before, a handful of times; he always responded with the same curious, silent horror. The flesh burned raw, sucked into a hollow within the socket, cracked and white and filling in a monstrous absence. Pieces missing. Getting out alive, but every mirror you ever passed for the rest of your life would tell you that you weren't the person you'd been before.
"They told me," he said, laying the patience on thick, "that they're worried about your - nerves."
Frank reached his good hand up to the bandages on his face, toying at them with his nails. "Is that what they call it now?"
"I call it torture, Frank." He paused, but he had to ask - "You knew them, didn't you?"
"No." His voice was rough. "They knew me." Anger at himself. For not knowing - for having no recollection of the allies he'd had in Mozambique in the past, or of the people they'd killed together. For not being perfect, when Jack had once battled him with gun and memory to save him from perfection.
He thought back ten years, to a rainy evening's knife-fight against a fair-haired hunter child. Wouldn't do you a lot of good to remember... But he wasn't the one who'd had his face hacked up by someone who'd known him in the past as a comrade. "Frank," he said, there's no such thing as enough time, "If you want to go back to the battlefield - I trust you to tell me if you can trust yourself still."
Through that gap in his bandages, Jack saw teeth. "I can't walk. Can't sleep without dreaming it. Don't know what I look like any more -" and that one would hurt a man who knew so little else about his life - "No weapons, and no allies here except you. But I still know what I believe in."
"Which is?"
"Freedom. At any cost. Even if freedom isn't possible any more - Boss, you need to -"
"Just tell me," he interrupted, "that you go back there again and not snap in two."
Frank's eyes hardened, until Jack couldn't see the truth behind them any more. "Of course I can."
It was what any soldier would've said.
Jack reached for the sheathed machete, and tossed it over Frank's legs to rest by his uninjured arm. "Here, then. There's one thing fixed. We'll get the rest sorted soon enough."
"The nurses won't let me keep that," Frank said, a little sheepish, but he took the hilt in his left hand. Not his usual, but he was nothing if not adaptable. He slid the blade out a few inches, and tested the edge with a thumb.
"I wasn't planning on leaving you with them," Jack replied. "I need you back on base in America so we can plan something more competent than -"
"No. Fuck -" Frank raised up on his elbows, holding his eyes, almost panicked. "We can't go back. You can't. I -" He fell back, grimacing in pain. "Have to tell you something, something fucking crazy. I..." He peered around. "It's not safe here, is it?"
"Safe from what?"
"From us. The Patriots." He glanced to the door again. "Fuck, but if it wasn't safe he wouldn't have come here to tell me." Jack blinked at him. "Your -" Frank's hand curled, fingernails digging into plaster. "Ocelot. He came here."
"Ocelot?" He wasn't shocked. But he was instantly suspicious. Ocelot, who measured a man's character in lost hours, come to see his tortured son? And hadn't told him? "Why?"
"Asshole had something to get off his chest. To me. Because he hadn't the balls to tell you -" There was no love lost between Frank and Adamska, but Frank was rarely so caustic about it to his face. "Clark, and Zero. When you got laid out in '72 -" and damn the Viet Cong, but these things happened "- they, Clark, she had - you know what she's even been working on these last ten years?"
"Some genome crap, isn't it?"
Frank nodded. "Human cloning. Ocelot says they made clones of you in her lab and Eva fucking bore them to term."
Jack said nothing.
- unnatural things that took his blood and used it used him consumed him and made him weak blood thin cold always night and always followed no end to them to replicating to taking what he was and -
"He showed me fucking photos, Boss. It's true. There's three of them. Now tell me you want to go back to base like nothing's happened. I'll go to base - I can still do your work from the inside - but there's no free world for you any more."
iii) 1996
Someone was holding his hand.
He was not yet used to reading that sensation - that flush of artificial nerves that told him that someone else had picked up that piece of shaped metal and touched it as if it were still real. It wasn't. The touch wasn't real. It was flesh to steel. Nature to snatcher. He knew his hand was touched because there were surface-level pressure sensors that stimulated dead nerve clusters that had been wired up to his brainstem by Madnar's minute tools. His senses were a map, not the territory. It was like the difference between seeing something on a surveillance feed and seeing it with his own eye.
It wasn't Ocelot. He wouldn't have risked another visit in the name of sentiment. It wasn't Eva either, for all she'd done to help him stay alive, for all the resources she'd diverted from her own hideout nearby - she knew he would not have her near him ever again. So those fingertips resting lightly over his steel carapace - the steady breaths he heard by his side - He recognised his ally, even before he could fumble through how to turn the new joints in his neck.
"Fox, what the hell are you doing here?"
"Watching over you."
Statement, echo, vocation, their bond, their family. There were wires in his brain, cutting his feelings into these robotic verbal quanta. "No," he hissed. "You need to go back to FOXHOUND -"
Gray Fox laughed softly. "They think so too. Dead or alive. My own fault, that - mine and Ocelot's."
"Ocelot? Why would he -"
"So he wouldn't be suspected of helping me defect, why else? Don't worry, Boss," he added lightly, "I'm alive, and you're alive -" one of those statements is true "- and all's fair, for now. If he goes any further I'll repay him for it." Fox released the hand, and tapped the patch that covered his ruined eye. The Madnars had offered to restore it. He had refused. "I'm only sorry it took me this long to find you."
The voice said he was lying. There's something else. Something else happening while Madnar and his daughter had soldered this new corpus together. Something important. "So what were you doing all this time?"
"Bluffing through an inquiry, watching our unit get taken over by the Patriots, searching for you..." Fox fell quiet for a moment. "I spent a lot of time with your son."
"He's not my son," he snapped, seeing the traphole and diving headfirst into it anyway.
He turned his head, mechanically awkward, expecting to see that thin sardonic smile on Gray Fox's lips. He saw nothing of the sort. Just his lieutenant standing by him in anonymous-looking civvies, scarred face framed by hair far whiter than he recalled, and tired eyes softened in thought. "I'm afraid I told him otherwise."
"Why?"
"To open his eyes," Fox replied. "It won't stop them using him, but at least he'll know it's happening. And why. I wanted him to know why." Not reproachful, and not - never - insubordinate. Fox knew what he was doing, fucking things up like that. Saying what others wouldn't. He wouldn't berate Fox for it; part of him, some animal part that couldn't be digitised, suspected that it was the right thing for Fox to do - something no one else could have done.
He looked the agent over. Alert, and too vigilant to sleep, by the looks of it. Good stance, and half an eye on the door. Gun holstered under his clothes - but what in hell, no machete? "Fox," he said. "What happened to your -"
"I left it with your son." That word again. Trying to make him feel - nothing, just trying to make him feel, to accept the Patriots' lab-grown pawn as his own. "I taught him to use it, and...I want him to remember that."
"He hates blades." He'd learned that much about the cast-off clone.
"I know. Not like you. I think there'll come a time when he'll need to know how to use one. He's not like you," he repeated, "Not like you at all." Again, his voice was speaking half a smile that wasn't there in his face -
Fox looked into his eyes, and he saw grey, red, bittersweet - and a mechanical analysis through the tangle of wires said oh good god but I haven't seen that look on your face in eight years and I - do - not - want - to - know but that tiny flicker of warmth there bit into him and he did know, damn fucking well. And his legs didn't work yet; Ellen Madnar came in every day dressed in labcoat and pink silk ballet shoes, poked the axles in his knees with two minuscule cattle prods, watching circuits slowly knit into vat-grown nerve cells. His legs didn't work so he couldn't walk the hell away from Fox's stricken-mad eyes and whatever he'd shared with not my goddamn son.
Fox's hand touched his again, and his thoughts were extinguished by that non-feeling of rough fingers brushing against highly-calibrated sensors. Lab-made things. The clone was no more unnatural than he was. And it's not wrong, that animal awareness whispered, to share secrets with your mentor's son -
It wasn't right, was never right, Fox had never been right, and he could never walk the hell away. He should have learned by now that he couldn't save Frank from himself. Not by keeping him close, not by keeping his distance, not even by leaving him to think he was dead.
The touch vanished, like a switch flicking from one to zero, senses all binary, and Gray Fox leaned against the wall with arms crossed and face grim and mind suddenly all business. "Boss. You can't leave here yet but that doesn't mean we can't get things moving again. I don't imagine you've not been working on our next move -"
Fox knew him, alright. "I'm going to fuck them up. I've been working out the plan with Madnar. Last time we fucked up by thinking too small -"
"What do you need me to go do?"
He took a deep breath. He was mad. Frank was mad. They'd never been right but he had a plan and if Madnar's information was sound they could hold the whole world to ransom. "There's two things I need sorted." He was mad. "I want all the children that were at Outer Heaven. And any other war orphans who need shelter - we've got to find them, and take care of them. And I want nukes. All the nukes as we can get hold of."
Fox raised an eyebrow. "I'll see to the nukes, Boss. We'll have a delivery mechanism?"
"Madnar's going over the blueprints again already. All we need is a pilot -"
Frank smiled, flashing pointed teeth.
***