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Snake wore a peaceful expression as snow crunched beneath his boots. Night had fallen early, and Snake glowed in the dim light reflected off the snow. Otacon followed and kept his eye on that expression. He wondered how his own face looked. Had he looked at the ground, he surely would have compared even their footprints. Snake’s perfectly uniform paces carved the powder like cookie-cutters, while Otacon’s staggering footprints wove around them. His socks were wet.
Across the field was a barn-like structure with several yards of fenced-in land behind it. Snake motioned to knock on the door, but first looked sternly at Otacon. “Stay out here.”
“Right.”
He knocked. On the other side of the door came a gentle cacophony of sniffs and whines. Otacon stood as still as possible while Snake fed his huskies.
They were well-behaved. Some cocked their heads towards him, but a grunt in a language Otacon had never heard before and they were brought to attention.
Beautiful
animals, with fur like ink and eyes like mercury. None of them jumped, not even on Snake when he got down into a squat and let them lick his cheeks. The sandpaper-like sounds of tongues on stubble made even Snake smile.
“They seem to really like you,” Otacon said.
Snake looked quickly from Otacon back to the dog demanding his attention. “I’ve never asked. I bring the food, so I guess they must.”
Inside the house proper was very little of interest. Snake must have put all his funds into caring for those animals. Empty packages were strewn about, garbage bags and empties sat in the corner, and a transistor radio crackled intermittently from somewhere unseen. The door to the bedroom was open.
Snake had lit an oil lamp and gestured to the four corners of his alleged house. “Desk. Chair. Half bath. Bed’s a twin, so go make yourself comfortable on it.”
“What? Snake, no! It’s your house…”
“I’m being a host. You’re the guest. Guests get the bed. Isn’t that how things are done?”
“It-it doesn’t feel right.” He laughed. “No offence, but there’s nothing here. What would you do, sleep in a box?”
He glowered. “What? You saying it can’t be done?”
“N-no, I don’t doubt you could, just, that can’t be good for your back.”
Snake rolled his shoulder. “Hrmph. Then cover me.”
Otacon started. “You mean...with the blanket?”
“No. As in watch my six. Back to back. Can you do that?”
“Of course.” He was not conditioned to say no to such a question.
So the bed was not a bed but a mattress, and the blanket was not a blanket but a couple of towels and a sheet of Mylar. It wasn’t a bad mattress. It was firm enough and too full of the scent of cigarettes to smell like anything worse. He pressed his back against the brick wall with a pulse that was Solid Snake.
“Watch the windows,” he growled gently. “Never know.”
“Um, Snake-”
“What.”
Acutely aware of how small his voice was compared to his, he asked, “Where do you keep the pillows?”
“One under your head’s not good enough?”
Whatever it was was indisputably not a pillow. “Well…never mind. Good night, and...thank you. For having me over.”
“Thank you for your company,” he droned, already falling asleep. The man could turn himself off like a light. With a sigh, Otacon wriggled out of his coat and balled it up in front of him.
When morning arrived Otacon awoke not with the sun, but with a shove and a grumbled “Get off me.”
His eyes shot open. His bare arms were outright stuck to a squirming Snake. “Sorry! I’m sorry, I-”
Snake performed a series of dizzying judo moves to break his arms - no, break
free of
his arms - and rolled onto the floor with a thud. He left the bedroom without looking back. Otacon’s gut went cold.
Over breakfast (bland rations and two cans of tepid soda Snake had clearly been saving for a visitor), he tried so, so hard to explain. “Sorry.”
“That’s the tenth time.” Sip. “You didn’t even do anythin’ wrong.”
“But wasn’t that
weird?
Didn’t I look like a creep or something?”
“Thought you were armed.”
Otacon gawked and couldn’t help but laugh. “I-?! Have you met me? Why would I ever do that to you?”
He half-shrugged. “Reasons. So what are you sorry for?”
“I have to hold onto something as I sleep. It’s beyond my control; it’s… I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“A disease?”
He pouted. “Yes, I guess you could call it that, if you really had to.” He shook his head. “But things are hard at night! It’s when the body is most vulnerable to cold. Don’t you ever get like that?”
“Nah.”
“You’ve never been
cold
, Snake?”
“No.” There was a touch of humour in his tone as he walked away. “Vulnerable.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
They were miles from civilization, which was the way Snake liked it. Fewer sounds meant fewer dangers. The cicadas were a new one, but harmless and easy to tune out. There was a delicate silence here that lulled him into an almost meditative state, but every new sound of every new place kept him out of the trance, glued to the real world.And then there were the sounds that followed him wherever he went. They. They went.Otacon was a scattered sleeper. When Snake was aching for the stuff, his partner was often still up and about writing notes or working with some boxy machine. It gave him another perspective on the other side of missions. He spent all day pushing buttons and all night queueing and exploring the web. All helpful and vital things. But then…“Can’t you put that away?”The screen blazed with some neon animal dancing beneath a music staff. Apparently that meant Otacon was busy. “I can’t save here, Snake.”“Gimme a break,” he said from the edge of the bed. “Should I call someone for help?”He chewed his lip indignantly. “I’ll be fine, thanks. Just a few more games and then I’ll come to bed.”“Games? ”He couldn’t see a point to it - to any of these sounds - but he tried to out of respect for the man who helped him save countless lives. Typing at odd hours. Victory chimes. More rarely, whispered swearing as his virtual opponent virtually killed him. None of it made sense to him.“It’s a stress release. You have your smokes, I have this. It’s-it’s an otaku thing.”As part of their deal, they shared one bed when on excursions to save money. As part of Otacon’s weird koala disease, he needed a body pillow to cling to. As part of whatever it meant to be an “otaku,” one in three nights he wouldn’t even touch a pillow until his thumbs were numb from gaming.But worst of all, when he finally went to sleep on nights like that, Otacon whined. Far, far more than he did consciously. People grew out of dreams - the same way they grew out of video games. How’s anyone supposed to sleep next to this? He thought.It was annoying. Too much. Not tonight. Snake heaved himself onto his side, not caring if it woke him but not wanting to sacrifice much of his own comfort either. “Hey.”His lips were shaking. In the grey light of the room his sleeping face glistened with...something. It was humid but not enough to be sweating like that. Somehow, clearer than in daylight, Snake saw the dark lines under his eyes; without his glasses he almost looked sick.Snake just watched his face, trying to glare him right out of the dream. It didn’t stop. His whines took the form of a woman’s name, then plunged into loud half-sobs of apology.“Otacon, wake up.”“No. No.”“It’s alright. You're dreaming. Hal!”He gasped and thrashed awake. He looked right at Snake but couldn’t see him. “The water. So much water, I couldn’t-”“Snap out of it, Hal. There’s no water. I’m here.”He stopped crying and fell into short asthmatic breaths.“I’m real. You’re awake; you’re safe.”“Dave.” He winced but held tight. “You’re real.”He lowered his voice. “Yeah that’s right, I’m real. See?”Otacon’s breathing slowed. His eyes fell down, along Snake’s body. Once he was sure he really could see that he was there, Snake offered him his arm.With his still-wet cheek against his partner's bicep, Otacon fell asleep almost instantly. Snake stared at the wall and listened to the cicadas.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Snake snored like a tiger when he was well and truly out of it. Otacon could sleep through it some nights, but most of the time, his partner’s comfort meant a lack of his own. Lucky guy. He could probably sleep through anything.
He sat up with a huff. The day’s mission had been hard on them both, but a success nonetheless. Nothing could be done about it. Dawn would be arriving soon. He’d tried in vain to sleep, but Snake was positively
narrating
. What he could make out sounded like comebacks to arguments he could only hear one side of, or like he was performing a one-man show.
“Honey…” And who on Earth was
that?
“Where’re ya going?”
Otacon looked down at him. His massive arms splayed across a tangle of pillows and linens, eyelashes fluttering in sleep. There was a glint of a smile. Talking to some imaginary lover.
Otacon chose to play along. “Just getting a drink, dear. Do you need anything?”
He muttered something that ended with “on the rocks” and a snort. Otacon lingered to see if there was more, but only snoring followed.
On his way to the kitchenette Otacon went through a mental list of everywhere they’d gone back and forth between recently. Tap water was safe to drink in this part of the world, right? Did this place have its own well? He looked outside. The moon sat over pines. Right. Yes. This was a safe place.
They actually had a fridge in this flat. Mini-fridge, technically, but more than enough. Snake actually liked the taste of rations, but every once in a while Otacon would buy a piece of fruit or a package of something fresh. He tossed some ice into a glass. Then he thought of the person back in the room and retrieved a second glass.
“Water on the rocks for you, Dave.”
Snake gave a tired, purring laugh. What was said next was mumbled half into a pillow and half into Snake’s own lips. It barely carried through the air. “Love you, Hal.”
It took all he had to keep both glasses from smashing on the floor. That couldn’t have been right. Snake had surely forgotten they had anything other than codenames. It couldn’t have been
him.
It wasn’t like there was another Hal, though. Was Snake dreaming? Was
he
dreaming?
He sipped his drink, put the other on the bedside, and fell eventually to sleep, clutching a pillow.
The next day was normal for about half an hour. Snake brewed a pot of coffee and brought both a mug and the pot with him to the kitchen table. He managed to sit across from and next to Hal simultaneously - the perfect angle to make him squirm.
Hal did his best to keep his eyes on the notes in front of him. Steeled his nerves. Kept it casual. This was just another morning and they were just two partners who traveled the world together and shared a bed whenever possible.
“Say, Snake.”
“Mh.”
“Were you aware that you talked in your sleep?
He took his face out of the pot of coffee. “Talking in my sleep…hn...” He squinted at the ceiling. “I think I’ve been told I do that. Yeah.”
“You said...something. Were you sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Were you dreaming?”
“I dunno. Probably not.”
“‘Probably not?’ That just complicates things even further.”
Snake perked like he’d heard a dog whistle and made full eye contact with Otacon. “What sort of things did I say?”
And his nerves hit a wall. “Um.”
“C’mon, out with it.”
Snake was dangerously close. His breath tasted like black coffee. Those eyes, blazing like mercury, were inches away.
“I...think you said that you…”
He leaned in further. “Hm?”
“Y-you’d said…”
To anyone else, Snake’s voice would have come across as commanding, but he knew by now what it sounded like when he asked for something he needed. “Say it again.”
Hal was gripping Dave’s shoulder and pulling him desperately closer before he even realized what was happening.
“‘I love you.’”
His lips tasted like coffee, too.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“When did you know?”Snake unburied his face from Hal’s neck. “Hn?”“How’d you know you...didn’t like only women?”He glanced aside for a moment. To answer that question he had to do more self-reflection than he was fully comfortable with. He took the quick and easy answer for now. “The same way anyone knows anything. The pieces came together.”“Hm…”“What about you?”“Uh.” Hal averted his eyes for a bit. “It took me a while. I guess I’m kind of slow.”“Don’t say that about yourself.”He sighed gently. “You’re always trying to get me to change how I feel about myself…”“Because I love you.” The smaller the distance, the easier it was to say.They just laid there for a while, looking at each other. Hal’s crows’ feet, his tumbleweed of hair, the dusting of scruff that he just couldn’t part with - separately all traits that wouldn’t make sense, but together they made a person so amazing to look at in the ambient light of their room that he just couldn’t explain it. Not even to him. So he did the best he could manage: continue to look whenever he had a chance.“You ever heard of a ‘honeypot?’”This made Hal laugh for some reason. He made his voice a bit lower. “Honeypot, huh? ”“Yeah. It’s an espionage term for when someone gets enticed by an agent.”“Oh. That’s interesting.”“And before...you...there were other men. But they were all honeypot situations. You do what you have to do on the field. Sometimes I liked it.”“Do you remember any of their names?”He wondered if he should answer. No, of course he should. “Not many. Most weren’t very memorable, period.” He coughed. “So there you go. And the pieces came together.”“Thank you for telling me. Well, you’re full of surprises, Snake.”He smiled. “Your turn, then.”“Um.” His breathing got shorter. “Well it started with, uh, cartoons.” Cartoons? He held his tongue.“And there were comics too - oh, these guys were just so cool. Men with fast cars and mysterious auras. I’d thought maybe I just wanted to be like them. I felt that way about some women too, but looking back on the shows and books I had, I think I had it the other way around.”“So who was the first real person?”A beat. “Actually,” Hal whispered with more confidence than Snake had ever heard in him, “You know him.”It was like a butterfly emerged inside him. “Oh.”“But...you know how sometimes, things only make sense when you’re sleeping? I couldn’t make sense of anything I was feeling, and I was having such odd dreams, it was like they weren’t even mine. Then one day I woke up and knew exactly what I wanted.”“So it made sense after you woke up, hm…?”His breathing was shallow as a rabbit’s. His arms tightened around Snake’s waist. “I still don’t think I know exactly what I like or who I like, but...I want you .”He took one more long, awe-filled look at his Otacon. He brushed his thumb across his lower lip, then went right back to nuzzling him like the world was ending. “Mm. Want you back.”“Ah! Snake-!”He chuckled into Hal’s neck and kissed the area he’d bitten. “Poisoned.”Hal would need to wear a turtleneck the next morning, but it’d be worth it. It always was.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Something was wrong with Snake.
If he’d stopped to think about it, he would have seen the signs as early as 2008, when Sunny was as helpless as could be. It wasn’t that they took turns with the kid, but it wasn’t exactly shift work either. This was mainly because she commanded both their attention, at all times, to this very day. In some ways, soothing her was a relief from saving-the-world business. In others, it was just as overwhelming as disarming a bomb.
Snake hadn’t felt overwhelmed. Had he looked back, he wouldn’t have remembered
what
he’d felt. There was a baby that needed someone, and Hal was neck-deep in encrypted data, and it had always been his philosophy that whatever needed to get done would get done by he who was able to do it.
During his turn, or shift, or whatever it should have been called, his arms had stopped working.
He’d been holding her as if his arms were a basket, rocking her for the better part of an hour. Then his core shuddered - he held back a cough. The harder he refused to let it out, the stronger the jets of pain surged from his lungs to his shoulders to the very veins in his wrists. He wouldn’t wake her. He kept his lips locked til his eyes bulged and when the sensation had passed, eternity in twelve seconds, there was an ache sitting firmly on his arms. He could tell without moving them that he simply would not be able to.
Like a vision after a storm, Hal appeared from behind the couch and pecked him on the cheek. “Is she down?”
His eyes fell on the baby’s full-moon face, and he said nothing. Otacon often knew how he’d answer before he said a word. He scooped her from his arms, leaving him to stiffly shake them out.
Time went by too quickly.
One day he woke up to someone else in the mirror. The man’s skin was dry, and tired cracks and lines crossed his face haphazardly like a broken window. A warrior’s face. No, more like some kind of bad movie makeup. He’d tried to laugh it off, but when his reflection did the same, he felt a pang of something like terror.
Snake suddenly thought about the years he’d given to Foxhound. He thought of his brother, and he thought of the toddler curled up and sleeping away in a milk crate in the room opposite him, and he pushed the terror down. They bought her a proper bed the next day.
More weak joints and frayed nerves kept showing up, but he didn’t bother bringing them up to Otacon. Tomorrow it would be something else not worth slowing down for. And they didn’t slow down. They wouldn’t.
Crawling had gotten hard. Jumping was harder. Landing was hellish. Weeks turned to months and brunette turned ash-blond and his partner still hadn’t asked him what was wrong. Not directly. Otacon acted like nothing had changed, but
Hal
was a very bad liar.
“Snake,” he once said from the other side of the table, “Is it okay if ask you some questions?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Hal inhaled, exhaled, took his glasses off, put them on again. Snake found that his age was showing, but he was one to talk. “How do you want to be remembered?”
“Little morbid.”
“The man who never gives up. That’s what they call you. You know, I know how you feel about being called a legend, but that’s the long and short of it.”
He ground his teeth.
“So why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Give up. Sometimes. You don’t have to give everything up, just...take a break.”
“Can’t. There’s too much to do and you know it.”
He bit his tongue to revise whatever he was about to say. “Why not let someone else do it?”
Anger boiled up. “What?”
“You’re... You’re tired, Snake. You have to rest.”
“I was born for a reason, Otacon. Me. I’m not just some appendage of Philanthropy. I was created to leave an impact, and I’ll live and die by that. There’s no time to rest.”
Then he coughed, and it tasted like iron and ink. And he kept coughing. He felt his forehead go cold as if his pride was physically leaving him, bidding him goodbye in Miller’s voice -
you’re on your own, here, Davey
- and he was a child again at the top of an obstacle he couldn't see a way down from. At some point in this, Hal had taken his hand.
Snake looked at nothing, looked away from as much as he possibly could. He blinked hard. He stopped coughing. Finally. Finally. He’d reached the bottom. He couldn’t look at Hal.
“I
give you permission
to rest.”
His fingers found the spaces between his.
“The world can wait
,” Hal continued. “You owe it
nothing
, David. Just one moment. Just a few hours at a time. Take something for you.”
His eyes found the couch. “Will you rest with me?”
Snake would not look back on any of this. What mattered to him was what followed.
They found themselves with a convenient surplus of slow days. Philanthropy missions had become, generally, much less physically demanding. They napped often, waking up just as the sun was getting wrung out. Time didn’t mean much to the legally dead anyway. When they held each other, Hal pressed his ear deeper to Snake’s chest.
One late, sleepy afternoon, Snake was putting in so much effort to keep the two of them on the narrow couch that Hal was practically on top of him. It was hurting his chest, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He wouldn’t.
“Hey Dave,” Hal stirred. “What’s your last name?”
Snake breathed and searched but his mind was quiet. He stayed on pause as if hoping someone else would say it. But nothing came. “Don’t remember.”
Hal put his hand over his. It felt warm. Jesus, he was becoming totally reptilian. “We could take you to a hospital, but they would need an identity. A first and last name, and neither can be an animal. No adjectives either.”
He rumbled in thought. “I could use yours.”
“That’s…” Hal started, ”An idea. Are you implying we…?”
“Could forge a legal document.”
“What kind of a document?”
“Hmm. Birth certificate? Maybe I could pass as your father.”
“Snake, you’re so stupid.”
He chuckled into his hair. “Yep.”
~*~
“Uncle Hal.”
Bleary eyes tried to make sense of the bedside clock. It was after midnight and before dawn. He was sure he’d just fallen asleep
seconds
ago.
Hal rolled to face the tiny figure standing in the light of the doorway.
“What is it?”
Sunny’s mop of silver bobbed nervously. “I...i-i-it’s…” She’d all but grown out of her stutter, but it got agitated whenever she was under stress. She kept opening and closing her mouth, sighing and restarting and - “Sunny, come here.”
She came with a bound and folded like paper into his chest.
“It’s too quiet,” she sobbed.
“I know, Sunshine.”
“Where’s all the smoke…?” Never in his life could he have imagined a child asking for dirtier air and noisier living conditions. Never could he have imagined Sunny. To be fair, he doubted he could have imagined Snake, either.
“Breathe with me, now. Stay here.”
“I wanna sleep here.”
“Of course, of course.”
There were pillows scattered on the floor, and there they remained.
Sunny trembled for a while longer as he held her, arms like a fortress. He murmured words in Inuktitut. Words he'd heard a lifetime ago. Calm, calm. Eventually they slept, and against all odds, they dreamed