Rising Sun [Metal Gear - The Joy/The Sorrow, PG-13]
FINALLY.
Title: Rising Sun, 3/3
Author: athenemiranda
Rating: hard R
Warnings: M/F sex.
Word count: 2500
<--PREVIOUS
High and dry. Breathing hurts, like your lungs are fighting against the desert air for moisture. Your hands hurt - they're a mass of bruises and scratches, and they ache from how little they've accomplished in the last who knows how many hours. (Three, one of the dead says. He was their brigadier. He didn't fade as fast as the rest did.) Her grimness hurts, her stone eyes and her resolute struggling with the broken bodies of the motorcycles.
The dead were not contrite about what they'd done - no more than she was contrite about killing them. They'd come across your equipment, and heard the gunfire while they were still discussing what to do - and had decided to wreck your means of escape before joining the fight. You went with her to speak to their corpses, folded on the ground beside the rainbow-sheens and scraps of rubber.
They shot out the engines and ripped the tyres with knives. The Japanese camp has no motorcycles, and any hope of escaping the desert in one of their trucks vanished when she destroyed their petrol stock. The only other supply line is a stable of mules. She made a meal of one, and the flesh is as tough as rope but it's the first fresh meat you've had all month.
The dead radio operator dictates the evening's radio call for you, and you wonder how long, how many mistakes, it will take before they realise the base is compromised. They'll blow it to pieces as soon as they realise. You need to leave before that can happen, but there's nowhere to go.
Out of options, she had used her last resort; after much jury-rigging to boost the signal, she used the radio to make a coded transmission that would, given luck, should a good wind carry it far enough, reach a Philosophers outpost in Siberia. She knew not to cry for help to China. You are the help. But until a response is made, you're stuck in a Japanese outpost in Mongolia, with no way out of the desert, few supplies, thirty corpses and each other, and only a few radio codes to use to bargain with your masters for your rescue.
You think of pictures you've seen of the pyramids in the deserts of Egypt. Those are tombs too. The dead don't much care for the stones that mark them, but they care about their legacies. It is likely that you will leave none.
*
The only things in the world that shed light are the stars and her smouldering cigar. It's almost no light at all. The night is entirely silent and empty except for the presence of the dead, and eventually the two of you will go huddle in their barrack and try to sleep. Not yet.
She's quiet. She's played her last card, and now her hands are empty, with not even the gun occupying her able fingers. This is not the time to be continuing the gradual refining one's life-work. And you, you curl your knees against your chest and hold yourself tight. You feel like the night is inside you, an aching void of stardust, empty even of death.
You might survive. Maybe the Soviets will hear you and decide you're worth rescuing. And that narrow hope pushes down on your mind like a huge weight, pinning you beneath the uncertainty. You're not hoping you'll survive - you're just terrified that you won't.
Even in the quiet and the no-light, you don't think the woman beside you shares that feeling. You've seen her unwind with a cigar so often, and she seems no different from ever - breathing out her frustration with every puff of smoke, coming home to what she - always, impossibly, one word, one emotion - is. As, you suppose, are you. Hugging your knees with just enough hope to be terrified of that thing that you are.
"Hey." You can see little of her save the tip of her cigar, but it's enough to know that she's lying on her back, stretched out over ground as dry as bone. "You don't like to look at the stars?"
"No," you whisper, and bury your eyes against your trousers.
"They're the same here as they are in America. Or in Russia," she adds. "Everyone in the northern hemisphere sleeps under the same banner."
You feel your hands unclenching. You both travel unmarked, without passports or insignia, but you need no such prompting to catch her meaning; forty-eight stars on her homeland's flag, one hollow yellow one on yours. China has its round, white sun, now covered by night and who knows what might become of it before morning - but these are the emblems of matters as distant from you as the sky.
What the Philosophers do to hold their firmament together is far out of your hands.
Your only part in it was the mission that you've failed.
You look to the little orange glow that marks her presence, and find it burns so low that you can almost see her face; cheekbones stained and beaded with sweat, hair a nest of gold. Her eyes look upwards, unblinking. "Is this why..." Why she's so utterly clear and simple. "Why you give yourself to the mission so completely?"
She shifts the cigar to the corner of her mouth. "Yes. Everything else...it's all one."
You look up. It's all beautiful.
Minutes pass before you say what you're really thinking. "You're not afraid to die?"
"No." Her voice becomes perplexed. "You're afraid to die?"
No, no, no, it's not the dying - you've felt it too often and it's awful but at least it could be quick and while the dead do nothing but mourn until they are pulled away entirely, that wouldn't even really be a change. That's not what the terror is. The terror is huge and unnamed.
"I'm afraid of not living any more," you say. There's a curtain slowly closing over you, and you only now realise that all this time you've desperately wanted sunlight. "There's so much I've not done yet." You know your words are small and stupid. "I - I'm not ready to die."
You're twenty-one years old and you've done nothing with your life but talk to ghosts.
"Sorrow."
And the stars don't care and can't hear you, but she does. "Yes?"
Her words are warm and fierce. "I'm always ready to die. That's what makes life worth living. When you're fighting, you have to give your all to every moment, because it could be your last. You have to be always ready. Always complete."
You want to protest, say she's young and beautiful and herself and that there's so much she could do - but this is the essence of her. This is what she can do, now and ever. This is her spirit, the light she sheds.
"I - wish I could live like that." But she's her, and you're you.
"And why can't you? What is you think you've missed out on?"
Everything.
You don't know what to say.
Before the dead began to speak to you, you had dreams of what your life might be like when you grew up. Working a farm like your parents did, with a wife beside you and a son of your own - a strong, fair-haired boy who would dance towards the future in the way of all children. Could you tell her about that? It wouldn't mean anything to her. She's the Philosophers' child: she never dreamed little things like that. In the core of the dream lies a more understandable regret, and what you think you will say is, "I've never loved someone." But there beside her - you with your head on your knees and she lying on the earth with her hair unbound, her presence smelling of salt and smoke and mingling with your own like sunshine behind the clouds - you know that would be a lie. A euphemism for what it is that you've never done.
You don't have a name for it. You've never been there, so how could you? You can only use the name for where you are now. The name of the empty space between the space where you sit and the space where she sits.
"I'm a virgin."
You're not ashamed. Just sad.
She laughs. She's not mocking you. Maybe it's an 'I thought so' laugh, or an 'I never guessed' laugh, or a 'You're so young' laugh. You can't hear the thoughts of the living. Only their words. "What, is that your only regret?"
You're about to say 'No,' but then her hand finds your leg, in the dark, finds the place where your cheekbone rests on your kneecap and strokes it with a rough and definite touch, and you realise it wasn't a question, but an offer. You clasp her hand, and hold it against your face.
Maybe she can feel the breaths gulping hard in your throat. You feel hot with the rush of your heartbeat, so hard it's pummelling your dreams into dust. This isn't what was meant to be. You had longed for a wedding night, cosy comfort and God's smile on you both. Not this empty, starlit place you're going to die in.
She's sitting up and pushing your spectacles up into your hair, framing your face with her hands, and they smell of oil and dry earth, and even she isn't sure about what you'll do next. This is the edge, and you must either stop here forever or dive over it into the vastness beyond.
You'll die without ever marrying, and this is the woman who'll never be your wife.
You kiss her.
You're damp-eyed and your heart brims with mourning for everything the two of you will never have, and her lips are soft and warm and feverishly insistent, tasting of tobacco and blood and water. The feeling in your heart is like spilt tears, flowing into every extremity, and your fingers are suddenly so alive that the feel of her hair in your fingers is like touching her with your soul. You're too hot and too sensitive, pulling off her bandanna and feeling the skin of her brow, so young and alive and her that you can do it. You can empty your cup on the ground and live with nothing to lose. You can be like her, giving your all, ready to die.
Your hands drop to her shoulders, shift down her back, because you're desperate to live and you don't know how much you dare. She's cupping your head from behind, stroking your neck, running her tongue over your lips, and it's like your blood is the river raging through your veins, scalding your flesh from the inside. You're gripping her waist, finding warm skin under folds of filthy cotton - and you never meant to but this is what she has offered, and you're holding her in hot hands and opening your mouth and her tongue is compelling you to lift your hands and -
You stop with your thumbs touching silk, and turn your head away from her lips. It's not right, and you don't know whether you're being a beast or you've been a fool. What was it worth, all those weeks of averting your eyes and treating her like a lady, if you've ended up sitting on the dirt with your hands on her breasts?
It was all one moment after another.
She's resting her head against yours, breathing into your neck, rising into your touch with every inhalation. When she speaks, it's to your bones and your rattling heart, not to you. "What would it take to make you happy?"
You answer without hesitating. "More time with you."
It's such a foolish answer, because if anything had ever been worth dying for -
You feel her lips curving against your neck. "This is our time."
She's kissing your throat and pulling at your too-hot clothing, letting night sting your skin, and it's like the whole universe has listened to your worries, and replied. You open her shirt and her bra with fumbling fingers, but every moment you spend touching her makes you feel a little more calm, until you're calm enough to realise that you're living what you barely dreamed of and that it's okay, and it's real, and that even if you die here you'll still have this moment. And your body - her hands are on your belt, and you'd tell her to slow down except you really don't want her to - your body wants this as much as your spirit does, or - her hands - more.
She only stops to get properly undressed, and you do too; she pulls you down onto the ground with her, touching you with restless hands, and you dare to do the same, running down her back, over her hips, touching firm places and soft, not quite believing what it is you're holding, but holding all the same.
Your cock is hard between her fingers, as if her touch is drawing all the blood from your heart towards her. You've never wanted anything so much. You want this more than you want to live.
She rolls you over on your back, untangling her legs from yours and moving to straddle your thighs. You look up at the stars, and she guides you inside her with one hand. She makes a no-sound, a hard-soft exhalation of breath that you know very well. She does it every time she kills.
You didn't know that it would feel so good.
You didn't know it was so simple. Not a matter of barren miles and high, forbidden walls, with the angels and saints keeping guard. It's just warmth and movement, as basic and profound as holding her hand.
*
And you are lying beside her in an undiscovered country, an arm around her shoulders, her fair head resting against your neck. Your hands are still passing over her, not exploring it but pacing out a circle the two of you have made, from firm shoulders to soft breasts, her heart dancing beneath her skin, her breath coming in warm murmurs that tickle you, like life itself is hissing over your chest.
She says your name, a name you could not possibly be feeling less. But it is what you are. And this is where you are.
You've found its name on the inside, written on her flesh and in the light in her eyes, the light you've always seen there and yet are now seeing as if for the first time. You can call love by its name and mean it.
"Joy."
***
Title: Rising Sun, 3/3
Author: athenemiranda
Rating: hard R
Warnings: M/F sex.
Word count: 2500
<--PREVIOUS
High and dry. Breathing hurts, like your lungs are fighting against the desert air for moisture. Your hands hurt - they're a mass of bruises and scratches, and they ache from how little they've accomplished in the last who knows how many hours. (Three, one of the dead says. He was their brigadier. He didn't fade as fast as the rest did.) Her grimness hurts, her stone eyes and her resolute struggling with the broken bodies of the motorcycles.
The dead were not contrite about what they'd done - no more than she was contrite about killing them. They'd come across your equipment, and heard the gunfire while they were still discussing what to do - and had decided to wreck your means of escape before joining the fight. You went with her to speak to their corpses, folded on the ground beside the rainbow-sheens and scraps of rubber.
They shot out the engines and ripped the tyres with knives. The Japanese camp has no motorcycles, and any hope of escaping the desert in one of their trucks vanished when she destroyed their petrol stock. The only other supply line is a stable of mules. She made a meal of one, and the flesh is as tough as rope but it's the first fresh meat you've had all month.
The dead radio operator dictates the evening's radio call for you, and you wonder how long, how many mistakes, it will take before they realise the base is compromised. They'll blow it to pieces as soon as they realise. You need to leave before that can happen, but there's nowhere to go.
Out of options, she had used her last resort; after much jury-rigging to boost the signal, she used the radio to make a coded transmission that would, given luck, should a good wind carry it far enough, reach a Philosophers outpost in Siberia. She knew not to cry for help to China. You are the help. But until a response is made, you're stuck in a Japanese outpost in Mongolia, with no way out of the desert, few supplies, thirty corpses and each other, and only a few radio codes to use to bargain with your masters for your rescue.
You think of pictures you've seen of the pyramids in the deserts of Egypt. Those are tombs too. The dead don't much care for the stones that mark them, but they care about their legacies. It is likely that you will leave none.
*
The only things in the world that shed light are the stars and her smouldering cigar. It's almost no light at all. The night is entirely silent and empty except for the presence of the dead, and eventually the two of you will go huddle in their barrack and try to sleep. Not yet.
She's quiet. She's played her last card, and now her hands are empty, with not even the gun occupying her able fingers. This is not the time to be continuing the gradual refining one's life-work. And you, you curl your knees against your chest and hold yourself tight. You feel like the night is inside you, an aching void of stardust, empty even of death.
You might survive. Maybe the Soviets will hear you and decide you're worth rescuing. And that narrow hope pushes down on your mind like a huge weight, pinning you beneath the uncertainty. You're not hoping you'll survive - you're just terrified that you won't.
Even in the quiet and the no-light, you don't think the woman beside you shares that feeling. You've seen her unwind with a cigar so often, and she seems no different from ever - breathing out her frustration with every puff of smoke, coming home to what she - always, impossibly, one word, one emotion - is. As, you suppose, are you. Hugging your knees with just enough hope to be terrified of that thing that you are.
"Hey." You can see little of her save the tip of her cigar, but it's enough to know that she's lying on her back, stretched out over ground as dry as bone. "You don't like to look at the stars?"
"No," you whisper, and bury your eyes against your trousers.
"They're the same here as they are in America. Or in Russia," she adds. "Everyone in the northern hemisphere sleeps under the same banner."
You feel your hands unclenching. You both travel unmarked, without passports or insignia, but you need no such prompting to catch her meaning; forty-eight stars on her homeland's flag, one hollow yellow one on yours. China has its round, white sun, now covered by night and who knows what might become of it before morning - but these are the emblems of matters as distant from you as the sky.
What the Philosophers do to hold their firmament together is far out of your hands.
Your only part in it was the mission that you've failed.
You look to the little orange glow that marks her presence, and find it burns so low that you can almost see her face; cheekbones stained and beaded with sweat, hair a nest of gold. Her eyes look upwards, unblinking. "Is this why..." Why she's so utterly clear and simple. "Why you give yourself to the mission so completely?"
She shifts the cigar to the corner of her mouth. "Yes. Everything else...it's all one."
You look up. It's all beautiful.
Minutes pass before you say what you're really thinking. "You're not afraid to die?"
"No." Her voice becomes perplexed. "You're afraid to die?"
No, no, no, it's not the dying - you've felt it too often and it's awful but at least it could be quick and while the dead do nothing but mourn until they are pulled away entirely, that wouldn't even really be a change. That's not what the terror is. The terror is huge and unnamed.
"I'm afraid of not living any more," you say. There's a curtain slowly closing over you, and you only now realise that all this time you've desperately wanted sunlight. "There's so much I've not done yet." You know your words are small and stupid. "I - I'm not ready to die."
You're twenty-one years old and you've done nothing with your life but talk to ghosts.
"Sorrow."
And the stars don't care and can't hear you, but she does. "Yes?"
Her words are warm and fierce. "I'm always ready to die. That's what makes life worth living. When you're fighting, you have to give your all to every moment, because it could be your last. You have to be always ready. Always complete."
You want to protest, say she's young and beautiful and herself and that there's so much she could do - but this is the essence of her. This is what she can do, now and ever. This is her spirit, the light she sheds.
"I - wish I could live like that." But she's her, and you're you.
"And why can't you? What is you think you've missed out on?"
Everything.
You don't know what to say.
Before the dead began to speak to you, you had dreams of what your life might be like when you grew up. Working a farm like your parents did, with a wife beside you and a son of your own - a strong, fair-haired boy who would dance towards the future in the way of all children. Could you tell her about that? It wouldn't mean anything to her. She's the Philosophers' child: she never dreamed little things like that. In the core of the dream lies a more understandable regret, and what you think you will say is, "I've never loved someone." But there beside her - you with your head on your knees and she lying on the earth with her hair unbound, her presence smelling of salt and smoke and mingling with your own like sunshine behind the clouds - you know that would be a lie. A euphemism for what it is that you've never done.
You don't have a name for it. You've never been there, so how could you? You can only use the name for where you are now. The name of the empty space between the space where you sit and the space where she sits.
"I'm a virgin."
You're not ashamed. Just sad.
She laughs. She's not mocking you. Maybe it's an 'I thought so' laugh, or an 'I never guessed' laugh, or a 'You're so young' laugh. You can't hear the thoughts of the living. Only their words. "What, is that your only regret?"
You're about to say 'No,' but then her hand finds your leg, in the dark, finds the place where your cheekbone rests on your kneecap and strokes it with a rough and definite touch, and you realise it wasn't a question, but an offer. You clasp her hand, and hold it against your face.
Maybe she can feel the breaths gulping hard in your throat. You feel hot with the rush of your heartbeat, so hard it's pummelling your dreams into dust. This isn't what was meant to be. You had longed for a wedding night, cosy comfort and God's smile on you both. Not this empty, starlit place you're going to die in.
She's sitting up and pushing your spectacles up into your hair, framing your face with her hands, and they smell of oil and dry earth, and even she isn't sure about what you'll do next. This is the edge, and you must either stop here forever or dive over it into the vastness beyond.
You'll die without ever marrying, and this is the woman who'll never be your wife.
You kiss her.
You're damp-eyed and your heart brims with mourning for everything the two of you will never have, and her lips are soft and warm and feverishly insistent, tasting of tobacco and blood and water. The feeling in your heart is like spilt tears, flowing into every extremity, and your fingers are suddenly so alive that the feel of her hair in your fingers is like touching her with your soul. You're too hot and too sensitive, pulling off her bandanna and feeling the skin of her brow, so young and alive and her that you can do it. You can empty your cup on the ground and live with nothing to lose. You can be like her, giving your all, ready to die.
Your hands drop to her shoulders, shift down her back, because you're desperate to live and you don't know how much you dare. She's cupping your head from behind, stroking your neck, running her tongue over your lips, and it's like your blood is the river raging through your veins, scalding your flesh from the inside. You're gripping her waist, finding warm skin under folds of filthy cotton - and you never meant to but this is what she has offered, and you're holding her in hot hands and opening your mouth and her tongue is compelling you to lift your hands and -
You stop with your thumbs touching silk, and turn your head away from her lips. It's not right, and you don't know whether you're being a beast or you've been a fool. What was it worth, all those weeks of averting your eyes and treating her like a lady, if you've ended up sitting on the dirt with your hands on her breasts?
It was all one moment after another.
She's resting her head against yours, breathing into your neck, rising into your touch with every inhalation. When she speaks, it's to your bones and your rattling heart, not to you. "What would it take to make you happy?"
You answer without hesitating. "More time with you."
It's such a foolish answer, because if anything had ever been worth dying for -
You feel her lips curving against your neck. "This is our time."
She's kissing your throat and pulling at your too-hot clothing, letting night sting your skin, and it's like the whole universe has listened to your worries, and replied. You open her shirt and her bra with fumbling fingers, but every moment you spend touching her makes you feel a little more calm, until you're calm enough to realise that you're living what you barely dreamed of and that it's okay, and it's real, and that even if you die here you'll still have this moment. And your body - her hands are on your belt, and you'd tell her to slow down except you really don't want her to - your body wants this as much as your spirit does, or - her hands - more.
She only stops to get properly undressed, and you do too; she pulls you down onto the ground with her, touching you with restless hands, and you dare to do the same, running down her back, over her hips, touching firm places and soft, not quite believing what it is you're holding, but holding all the same.
Your cock is hard between her fingers, as if her touch is drawing all the blood from your heart towards her. You've never wanted anything so much. You want this more than you want to live.
She rolls you over on your back, untangling her legs from yours and moving to straddle your thighs. You look up at the stars, and she guides you inside her with one hand. She makes a no-sound, a hard-soft exhalation of breath that you know very well. She does it every time she kills.
You didn't know that it would feel so good.
You didn't know it was so simple. Not a matter of barren miles and high, forbidden walls, with the angels and saints keeping guard. It's just warmth and movement, as basic and profound as holding her hand.
*
And you are lying beside her in an undiscovered country, an arm around her shoulders, her fair head resting against your neck. Your hands are still passing over her, not exploring it but pacing out a circle the two of you have made, from firm shoulders to soft breasts, her heart dancing beneath her skin, her breath coming in warm murmurs that tickle you, like life itself is hissing over your chest.
She says your name, a name you could not possibly be feeling less. But it is what you are. And this is where you are.
You've found its name on the inside, written on her flesh and in the light in her eyes, the light you've always seen there and yet are now seeing as if for the first time. You can call love by its name and mean it.
"Joy."
***