Chapter Text
It is blue everywhere else. Faint Denali sun in the place it sets wrong and low, and he sees that sad pink.
He sleeps like the dead in the days it never sets, and could sleep for longer now, but he isn’t alone out here.
The dogs are out of the hutch and trailing hay and that smell with them into the undisturbed snow. Quiet, lean-backed creatures in the gloom of the scant light of day. There is steam from their bodies and breath, and in this simple way he is no different than a dog.
The cigarette hangs off his lip and it is perpetual like the other vice sat in the snow by his thigh. Heat pours off of him like the smoke and his arms burn from the woodpile but it will be lost to him soon, so he drinks. Melt leeches into his sweatpants and sweat beads along his brow to pearl in the cold, so he drinks.
Light flashes on from behind in the cabin and he knows he is at the sliding glass door watching. Yellow catches in the dogs’ eyes and there is a wild there he likes to look at.
The light stays but he feels the eyes pick up and leave. Paper curls to ash at his mouth and drops from the cigarette; the virgin expanse will bear the yoke of man and there is no escape even here.
The sun starts falling down.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
[STERLING, ALASKA]
He has half a foot over the kickplate of the door when he starts at him.
“You should cut back on that,” he tells him and he already knows this part, has sat through it a thousand times before. “The nanos can only work so fast. Your liver is going to give up before lunch.”
Otacon is at the sink and he has only the back of his head to stare at—that mousy brown hair in the light of the unshaded bulb above the basin. Of the things he notices, it is long enough now to catch in the shower drain.
The laptop is on the square dining table with the wood splint under the one foot. The ethernet cord runs in from the living room, and he knows he will trip on it later and pull it from the router and Otacon will have another row with him until he drinks himself to apathy. The thousand times before.
He claps his hands on his arms over the flannel and snow scatters as he shucks his boots off on the towel by the jamb. He takes the beer into the living room and sets it on the flat of his thigh when he sits and knocks an empty cup of ramen off the ottoman. A chopstick rolls and clatters onto the floor before the rug.
“Did you hear me, Snake?”
Ceramics grind in the far; he listens to that burr and bounce of water in the sink. It will be his turn tomorrow. It is how they make order in the heaven that is becoming hell. Routine. Never mind that the man never had the military or a steady mother that taught him to clean. Never mind that Snake trails behind him to do it all over again.
For now he sits and stares at the dark TV, at the man in it that looks like him, and thinks he ought to be with the dogs in the hutch.
There is a small longing there that he drinks into submission.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He knows it was mean to ask it and that is why he did it at all. For all the parts he drinks down, there are few that surface. They sun themselves on his beach, the somethings buried in silt from many hands of many ages, now slit-eyed buoys jumping in a rush to above when everything falls quiet.
Miller beat the neuroticism of movement out of him early but some things remain. The whole of his nature is tuned for observation, but some is sublet; a keen fixation on cause and effect, what they can bring; cruel child wonderment alive in man.
Otacon pisses when frightened and squeaks like a girl at small rodents and Snake likes pushing him further if there is an opportunity. Like taking the legs off a spider.
Spindly fingers pause on that backlit keyboard. He turns an interesting shade of pink and tilts his chin down so hair falls in his face. “Why would I think that something would?”
What do you think is going to happen if we share the bed?
Snake is leaned against the counter for stability but the heady cloud cover of the ferment hops will be gone and gone even sooner if Otacon decides to magic it out of him. A steady threat he doesn’t quite know the reality of. For that, there is some urgency.
“You just seem pretty opposed, is all. Like you’re worried I might do something.” He roughs his foot on the old faux laminate he laid himself. “Or like you might.”
Otacon clears his throat. “Sorry to break it to you, but I like women.”
“So do I,” he replies easy. “So what’s the big deal? Afraid you’ll piss the bed?”
His glasses catch a sheen from the floor lamp he dragged into the kitchen. The rest of his face runs hard and Snake’s grim line for a mouth sets deeper; that is not what he wanted.
“No, but I’m afraid you might.” Otacon looks down at the computer and the screen takes over the refracting obfuscation of the lamp and Snake knows it is over. “Good thing you sleep in the bathtub most nights. Should be easy cleaning for you.”
Nails of sobriety pick at him and he sulks for it.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
[A WEEK LATER]
It is quiet inside himself when he wakes on the couch and he knows it will be a good day. It is the kind of calm he can reach at the almost dregs of a day, and only rarely sober. Mornings are bad and nights are worse. His body aches in a way the nanos can’t touch and the faces haunt him out into the snow, to the hutch, to the bottom of the bottle until they blur and mix and are nothing at all.
Today is good. He flexes on the couch in a tight stretch and feels in tune with the stock of banding muscle that moves under his skin. He feels ripe in the way fruit might; like the early days of Foxhound in his prime. Though he is old now and it will get worse but he can’t think of it. Today is good.
He bins the ramen cups from the ottoman and vacuums and mops the bathroom. Otacon is asleep on the comforter with his jeans on, face pressed to the mattress, and he leaves him be. The sheets have run from a corner of the bed.
What Snake knows of him this way is from what Miller put in him. The thing more intense than he would likely admit to, the thing that climbs from rational to strange; know the room, the people within it.
He knows he drools and talks in his sleep. He knows the other sounds he pretends not to out of courtesy and he knows he cries when he gets after him too bad. That is the resetter, out of bounds territory like sleeping in his bed with his tennis shoes on.
An interesting animal, the man he lets in the house.
You and your fuckin strays, kid.
His music taste is half from the motor pool and half from when he used to listen to radio and Miller put that in him, too. Yet the record store was only his that lifetime ago.
He tosses a damp rag over his shoulder and fingers through a small stack of records by the TV to spear one on the turn table. He got it in a trade with another rookie in first platoon and it is a rogue faint hurt knowing that he will never see any of them again.
Snake hears him long before he speaks. He looks over his shoulder as he tunes the knob.
Otacon is smiling. The first in some time. “Someone’s in a good mood.”
He grunts. “Someone’s up before noon.”
He hears him stretch, the meaty popping up along his spine and fingers. For a moment he has perfect posture before the instinctual nautical hunch fades back with the tide.
Otacon exhales and it is a light and airy thing. “Go ahead. Deny it,” he says as he shuffles toward the kitchen. His voice grows louder as he goes. “You only listen to Abba when you’re vaguely happy.”
Snake moves to the wide mouth of the kitchen and leans against a timber support with his arms crossed. “You’ve never seen me vaguely happy.”
He is bent at the waist looking through the fridge. “Hmm.” His thumb plays at the dent in the door Snake put there a year after Zanzibar. “Well, what were you last supply run?”
Mei Ling, I could kiss you. Christ, I could.
Snake rolls his eyes and shoves down the smile he can feel raking up his face. “I went two weeks without cigarettes.”
The door closes and the bottles and cans inside clack on one another like a discordant windchime they both know the broken tune of. But when he turns, that smile is still there. It is nice, in a way.
“God forbid, huh?”
His fingers twitch but he promised not to take drags inside. Snake knows that he knows he smokes in the bathroom but it is the one thing he doesn’t harp on; the acceptable sin and balm for the dreams.
Snake lets out some air and pulls the towel from his shoulder and cracks it at him idly before turning back to the living room.
“God forbid.”
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
Sometimes he will drink with him, though it is that Denali sun. He will polish the neck of a bottle and that is it and Snake will down the rest.
They have the chairs from the table pulled close to the sliding door. The cold creeps in at the seams but Snake was liberal with the rock wool before hanging the drywall.
The lights are off everywhere and the milky way is a large crack in the sky and leaking white. One dog begins to howl out in the blue and then all of them.
“Yknow sometimes,” Otacon starts, leg crooked up on the chair while the rest of him is uncharacteristically loose, “sometimes you act like you’re ancient. Like you’re gonna die tomorrow.”
He is fossilized in amber. A thing that rightly should not exist. He does not say these things.
“Feels like I am. Like I might.” She never told him how long.
The chair feet chirp on the floor as he shifts. “You’re not. Ancient, I mean. I read your nanos every day, you’re healthier than you oughta be.”
“Won’t last.”
“Won’t last for anyone, Snake.”
“You know what I mean.”
The white catches in his glasses as they bob and dip under his fingers. He digs his knuckles in his eyes like he aims to take them out completely and then he sighs long and terrible. “Your outlook on life, sometimes…”
“What?”
Otacon drags the hand down his face and resets. “Nothing. I’m sorry, I’m a little out of sorts.”
“No,” Snake nudges. He hates that. “Finish what you were saying.”
He looks down at his hands and there is something grandmother-ly in the action that hits Snake strange.
So many things Miller couldn’t get out of him; that small fascination for creatures, people like the engineer included. Something to study, to prod. An enviable wealth of knowledge and rich emotion.
Hate the way you look at me, kid.
Why?
He only spoke to him—really spoke to him—drunk. Then Snake became much the same.
“I wanted to do this project with you because of your viewpoint,” he continues and Snake drifts back. “The way you see things. I already know you’re beyond physically capable, but. We’re a lot alike. In some respects. Our lineages, our ghosts.” He pauses to consider, then looks at him in the dark and Snake wonders how much he can see. Average in a way he wishes he could trade for. “Just, sometimes, you worry me.”
He hates that, too. He looks away and drinks and listens to the yowl out there while the faces hang and blink phosphate in the treeline. Nothing moves.
“No need,” he eventually says. “Perfectly fine.”
“Snake,” he tries. “You know you can… talk to me, right? If you need—”
“Don’t need anything.” He stands ungracefully and strongarms the chair back under the hang of the table. It knocks into the metal pole and the whole unit rattles and scrapes. He feels him jump.
The mean-spirited part of him bubbles at that and in his sudden rancor and he takes the exit instead.
“I’m using the bed.”
“Snake. Please.”
It makes his mouth go sour. Thing in amber.
He is unconscious when his head hits the pillow.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
The world is on its side so he leaves with the dogs. Otacon is on his computer in the living room and he says nothing when he cuts through to the kitchen.
He feels the eyes on him, that want to say something, but he is gone before anything falls over further.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He never goes far but he keeps the gun in his waistband every time.
He takes the dogs down the stream and toward the base of the raised fjords in the distance, like god’s fingers buried in the soil, but no further and they have their raptures. They drive slow then hard and every one of them is steaming and panting by the end of it. He smokes.
Snake’s arms burn and so do his legs and it is nice even if the half life is sloped hard after the initial kick that reminds him of the before. Everyone thought they were dying in basic but it was just Miller and his hell, and for a time it was the Tiger Balm that found every open palm more than the dirty centerfolds.
It is at the edge of the property that he cuts them loose and they run and bound like rabbits as he shoulders the cables and harnesses for the sled. They come to crowd his legs as he coils the rope around his forearm and follow him into the kennel to put the toboggan back on the pegs by the door. When he is done he pats the snow from his pants and sits in the large pen, back to a twined bale of new straw hay and the sawdust bedding clings to him like the snow did and they follow him there just the same.
One lays across his legs and his fingers get lost in the black fur between its ears and even now he feels the heat gliding off their skin as fog might.
Motley. Cranberry to his left and it is quickly a pile and the closest thing to comfort he can stomach sober.
Dog sweat and sawdust. It is warm and their breathing is rhythmic and Snake falls under and there are no dreams.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He finds him there and Snake only wakes when the dogs are herded up and out. The dynamic weight of many limbs tripping and shifting away hauls him back to the living with hair in his mouth and drool crusted on his chin.
“Don’t know how you sleep like that,” Otacon mutters. The last to leave knock into his legs and he fights for balance against the tide. “They were smothering you.”
Snake is a quick start—unconscious then not. He drags a slow hand down his face with an inhale and stands and looks at the waify figure in the large parka. His face is surrounded by the hood with the fur trim and his hair, and the glasses snare the light and he becomes momentarily unreadable.
He frowns. “How long was I out?”
“An hour, maybe two.” Otacon fidgets and Snake is privy again.
“What’s wro—”
“I made dinner.” He cuts him off and it is a rare bird. His face is suddenly flush and his breath clouds are choppy. “Just, just pasta. But. It’s for both of us.”
Another thing they alternate and it is never a special thing. Snake is a cudgel but by and large the better cook and has taken the lead with it like most other things in this tentative life; he sees the man run from the shower to the bedroom for clothes and he sees the fingers of his ribs wrapped taut under his skin and that is enough seeing.
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you hiding?”
His spine is straight and Snake feels the slight height difference more acutely than before and it is a surprise how it picks at him. Things he only notices and takes issue with sober.
Snake looks at him long and wonders. “You clogged the drain again,” he surmises and shakes his head. He walks around him. “Told you to stop jerking it in the shower, you’ll fuck up the pipes.”
He makes some horrible noise. Snake is by the door but then Otacon is breezing past in some attempt at a shoulder check that is too kind with the coat.
“Dinner is ready if you want it,” he snaps and that is also new. He turns brusquely at him then back as he marches unsteadily toward the house. “But eat with the dogs! Go on! See if I care.”
Snake watches him go, watches him trip and hit the glass door with his hands with a squeak and grunt before sliding it back rough and falling in even rougher.
In all states, he has a sense of wonderment about the man and it is the only real thing he feels apart from the high of driving the dogs or the underlying dread. The other million things he is unable to parse or articulate.
There is no one quite like him though he is ordinary most ways and that is precisely the draw; generic whole-life in him where Snake is specific death. A routine creation over acute facsimile. Snake is that sad Denali sun but he is something else entirely. A sunrise from the far that he has never seen—might never see.
Things like him live in the dark and die in the dark but it is the times where he gets the other man sparking and combative that he feels the light at all and it is an addiction of its own; warmth on his skin.
He follows him in.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
The pasta is a step above al dente and he realizes he hasn’t eaten since yesterday but it is nothing. He had eaten the defac back then and everything after has been just as bland and tasteless.
Otacon pushes the fork around his plate with his chin on his fist, elbow on the table, and says nothing. Snake ate so as not to taste and has been done for a time. He looks at the fridge but stays seated. He has control but there is not a part of him that wants the world raw. Yet something gnaws on him like shame so he sits. He waits as he was told some years before.
He folds like Snake knew he would.
“I’ve been, ah, been laying the groundwork for a bit. Nothing worth showing yet,” he itches at his scalp, “but I think we’re getting to a good place with it.” He looks at Snake from the edge of his eye like a nervous animal. “Philanthropy.”
He digs a nail into the soft wood of the table and the halfmoon stays. “That’s what we’re calling it?”
Otacon deflates in grades. “I thought—” He frowns and shifts and drops his fork with a clattering noise Snake’s lip nearly picks up at. “You said you liked it. When I was brainstorming. You said—”
“It’s fine. I like it.”
He likes nothing but what he hasn’t touched since yesterday. It takes effort to stay down but Miller put it in him.
He pouts but there is a deeper hurt there Snake is stringily irritated at.
“Snake, I…” He hesitates and looks at his hands again like a grandmother would and Snake starts to sweat under the shag of his hair in the back. “Do you even want to do this? With, with me?” Otacon’s eyes go wide and frightened. “This project.”
“I said I did.”
He laughs once and it is a step away from sad. “You say a lot of things.” He puts his elbows on the table for the hands in his hair. “Well, I suppose that’s not true, is it.”
Snake bounces his knee and he can hear the reprimand. Nausea climbs up his throat and he coughs to clear it. “I say what I mean.”
“Then say you want to do this,” Otacon tells him, eyes over the rims of his glasses. He looks tired and Snake doesn’t know when that happened. That irritates him, too.
“I can’t do this on my own.” Otacon blinks and peers down at his plate. “I can’t, can’t do Armstech again. I can’t.”
Snake forces his knee to a standstill and his patience goes wafer thin.
“I don’t know what you want from me. You’re the brain, you knew that going into it.” Odd anger squats in his teeth. “Point me in a direction,” he gestures, “I’ll do anything you tell me.”
The strain in Otacon’s face is uncomfortable to look at.
“I want your support, Snake. That’s what I want from you.” He stands up rough and the chair trips and skids back with a bang. “The man I met said he wanted to… help fix the world,” he goes quiet with a sigh, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you want anymore.”
He is staring at Snake but he won’t look at him. He feels sick and hateful suddenly. Otacon throws a hand and stomps to the fridge and rips the door open. It is a whistle; Snake goes sharp and stiff when Otacon slams a can down onto the table.
His throat jimmies painfully.
“I know what you want,” Otacon tells him and it is raw like split wire. Copper everywhere. “Can’t even have a conversation with me without,” but then he stops and scoffs. The skin stretched over his knuckles is white and the can cracks tinnily before he goes limp when Snake finally looks at him. His face is writ in plea. “You don’t need it, Snake, please just—”
Snake shoots up and the chair hits the wall. He locks himself down before he hurts him.
I taught you better than that, kid.
“What,” he starts and his throat spasms again. His jaw pops with a click and he is Atlas for keeping his eyes on his face. “What business is it of yours how I handle my own shit.”
Otacon grips the table and his face spirals open. “But you don’t!” He rips a hand through his hair. “Jesus. You don’t handle it, you drink yourself numb!” He pushes away a foot or so and throws a hand before moving askance. “People care about you, you know? And you’re just-just—”
The thing once buried get teeth.
Snake sneers. “What, like you?”
Otacon turns back and from the collar up his face is red. His eyes are shot and wet. “Yes, I fucking care about you!”
It gets quiet and strange. There is only ragged breathing and a slight wheeze and Snake is now sweating through the flannel. The hate leaves him alone with the sick.
Otacon digs at his eyes under the glasses and heaves.
“I hate this,” he warbles. “I hate it here. I hate the way you are here. I hate what I turn into around you.”
Snake has nothing to say.
He leaves Snake in the kitchen for the bedroom and he hears him crying through that thin pinewood door.
Something like shame.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
His hands shake. He took a shower for the sweat but it is sickly and constant and he lays shirtless and tacky on the couch.
There is debate inside but Otacon went quiet some time ago, apart from the fan of his computer, so he gets up. The world sloshes and he makes his way slowly.
He knocks.
“I don’t want to talk,” the reply comes after a minute. Snake opens the door anyway and Otacon is on the edge of the bed with the computer on his knees, face patchy in the low light of the screen. The glasses sit on the edge of his nose and he sees his eyes are pink as they quickly skirt over Snake’s top half and away. “I said everything already. Please leave me alone.”
“No,” he says and it is thick in his throat. He could vomit again. It takes an unsettling moment of staring before he figures out how to speak without doing it. “You don’t like it here.”
He looks at him like he is stupid. “Yes.”
“You want to leave.”
Otacon goes timid. “I don’t know.”
For all the legs he has pulled, Snake feels like the one under glass. Insecure and unwell and quietly afraid.
“Will you?”
He holds the side of the screen but he is looking through it. Other fingers idle on the trackpad.
“Mei Ling found an apartment in Newark.” Again, the animal stare. “New Jersey.” His tongue darts out to wet his lip as he sets further in his hunch. “Would you come with?”
Sweat rolls down his back.
“I’d be the exact same in Newark, New Jersey as Sterling, Alaska.”
Otacon gains some sinewy hope as he moves the computer to the bed.
“You don’t have to be. We could start over,” he says like it is simple. “We don’t have to be here. You don’t.”
The anger gets him like the hate and he shoves that down, too. More pressing is the graduation of the blind fear.
When he stands he holds his hands in front of his shirt, some old thing of Snake’s because when he left with him he left everything he had.
Snake was set to die out here and Otacon was the unexpected wrench. All that life in him got into Snake and so did the rush from holding a gun for a reason other than contemplating how it would feel in his mouth. Then the things he saw on Fox Island with that stupid catching philanthropy that was never his made him think he was something other than he was. He brought him home with more faces and everything Snake left was waiting for him at the door, smiling and blinking.
It is dangerous talk coming out of Otacon’s mouth. It is dangerous thinking for a living relic.
His head is pounding.
“Snake?”
The bile burns in his throat and he tries to swallow it but it doesn’t work. He trips on the hallway runner behind the couch on the way to the bathroom and barely makes it to the toilet.
“Oh, no.” Otacon follows him in and the air that comes with is cold and hot and Snake heaves. “Are you okay?” There is a hand on his shoulder and it is freezing and nice and he flinches away. “You’re sick.”
Snake wipes his mouth. “No shit.” He sits on his ankles with an arm crooked around the seat and breathes a rattle as he pulls the handle.
“Let me check your nanos,” he murmurs almost under his breath.
When he leaves, Snake manages to stand and lock the door behind him. Then he rinses his mouth and grabs the wood splint on the sill and shoves it under the window. The top of the trim is sticky with film when he drags his fingers over it but then he finds the cache and pulls a cigarette from it and the old zippo. The sheen of sweat drenching him dries as it surfaces when Alaska crawls in the window.
There is knocking at the door. “Snake—”
The zippo starts and starts then lights, and the shakes calm on that first drag but don’t go away.
“The onset is rapid, but I think you’re going through—”
“Leave me alone,” he calls with a rasp around the stick. Then there is nothing.
Faces in the tree line out the window, but he can see them and they don’t move and the cold keeps him alive.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
When he wakes on the bathroom floor, it is different. There is a brief disorientation in the dark in this room outside of time, but then his body adjusts and he settles. The nausea is abated, the sickly feeling left behind only dull and a type of sore he is used to ignoring. His eyes burn with sleep but are waking and he is mostly still; and all that is left is the sweat.
He showers and laments the ashy brown wisps clogged in the drain. The boxers from earlier are damp with sweat and so are the flannel pants, so he wraps a towel around himself and exits the bathroom in a humid swathe that curls languidly over the rounds of his shoulders. The damp carton of cigarettes sits loose in his hand.
Otacon is asleep in the recliner with the laptop tucked between his side and the flattened arm. He stirs and wakes at the click click clicking of the lighter. He watches him rub his eyes under the glasses and frown at the smoke coming from Snake’s mouth but he says nothing of it. His eyes dart to the towel once and never again.
“You’re looking better,” Otacon tells him a little pitchily.
He takes a long pull and comes round to sit on the couch.
“Feel better.” He pushes the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, then gestures at the laptop before picking a piece of lint off his tongue. “Know it was your witchcraft.”
He goes slightly awkward. He pushes his glasses up his nose just for them to fall back.
“Well. You’re welcome.”
Snake grunts. The TV is on but the worn tape of Absolutely Fabulous has run its course and is stuck on the credits, static leaping in a circuit and peeling the corners. He can see part of Otacon’s reflection in the bowl of the glass and he watches like he watches him.
“You’re still sweating,” Otacon says. He frowns again and cracks open the laptop to jimmy his fingers on the pad. The screen jumps along his glasses in smears like a feverish dream from far away.
The couch clings at him but he is cold and hot and his skin starts to tighten and release again like he has flies.
“It’s hot in here.”
“Liar.” He sighs and looks away from the computer and something uncomfortable crawls onto his face and beds down. “...We’ll have to get it out of the fridge before long.”
His throat seizes. He sucks on the cigarette until it nips at his fingers and he remembers when Miller had him eat the whole pack when he found it that time during basic checks.
Think you’re better than everyone else here? We’re here to suffer. You get no vices in this life.
“I don’t want to talk about the fridge.”
“Okay.”
Then there is quiet. Snake relaxes in intervals and it is a concerted effort. He had him eat all his cigarettes and then taught him total mastery over every muscle and he used it then to not vomit and uses it now to focus on nothing at all.
Otacon clears his throat after a while.
“I don’t actually,” he starts and coughs again. “You know.” He gestures vaguely. “In the shower.”
Snake blinks. He runs a thumb over his eyebrow and doesn’t smile, not quite.
“Yeah, you do.” Otacon flushes that interesting pink. “S’alright, I used to, too. But I’m serious about the pipes.”
Otacon looks away, tilts his face toward the kitchen with his fingers tight over his mouth like the grandmother he is becoming in Snake’s old sweaters and wool socks.
“You are…” he shakes his head and feels at his eyes, “everything and nothing like I thought you’d be.”
Snake does smile. Some sardonic thing he manages just fine over the shaking. “‘Never meet your heroes’, right?”
He finally looks at him and there is some lively exasperation there—disbelief, raw and funny.
He laughs once, airily, and it is novel and bright and Snake is oddly fond.
“God, just like that. You act like, like,” he waves a hand, “like you know everything.”
The sweat rivers down and between the valleys of his chest and back and the towel is too much and not nearly enough.
“Not everything.” He draws down a ragged take and it rounds off the grate of his voice and nerves and vague nausea. “Just you.”
That animal stare again. “How? You hardly know me.”
Snake blows out smoke and ashes the cigarette in the empty Top Ramen cup on the ottoman.
He shrugs. “Takes one look to know everything about you. You’re an easy read.”
He looks morbidly caught. “Really?” Snake just stares at him and he goes timid again. “I don’t think I believe you.”
He knows he hides in his hair. He knows that sharing the bed terrifies him for reasons beyond what Snake gets after him for. He knows that no one ever took the time to teach him how to pick up after himself the right way and however he learned to fend for himself was by fire; he knows something happened to him young to make him so pliant and afraid; eager to be easy and useful yet quick to snap when stepped on.
Snake reclines back and readjusts the towel and Otacon looks away and itches at his hairline.
“Then tell me something,” Snake tells him simply. “Something I wouldn’t guess just by looking at you.”
Otacon peers at him over his glasses. “Like what?”
“Well, you’re pretty adamant about liking women,” he ventures and Otacon goes from pink to red. “Tell me about your first time. I really can’t picture it.”
“I’ve had sex.”
“Sure.”
“I have.” He goes stiff at the shoulders and jaw. “It was in college.”
Snake nods. “Go on.”
His brows pull. “...What do you mean?”
The cigarette butt hisses when he tosses it in a nearly empty cup of water.
“Details. Was she hot? Did the carpet match the drapes? Was there carpet?”
Otacon’s face goes slack and the flush travels under his collar. “You’re terrible.”
“And you’re worse than a girl. Can’t even tell me if it was a good fuck or not.”
“Jesus,” he hisses under his breath. He hikes his knee up and over the other and Snake watches.
A minute goes and he reaches a point. He throws a hand. “Well,” Otacon huffs. “What about your first?”
“Was it a good fuck?” Otacon pinches at the sweater and nods stiffly. Snake continues. “Yeah, it was alright. Probably not for her cause I didn’t know what I was really doing. I was fourteen, fifteen.” He can see it clearly. “She was staying in Fairfax on vacation. We met at the record store.” He wipes sweat from his neck. “The last night, we went to a movie and we were the only people in the theater.” He rolls a shoulder. “Lasted a minute but managed to pull out. Came on her thighs and the seat like an idiot.”
Otacon twists himself up further in a ball and Snake is getting nauseous again, but he feels a warmth winding in his kidneys and it is instinctual how he pushes it away. It is lonely together and it is the memory and it is nothing.
Otacon coughs. His mouth clicks when it opens and is partway wet and he swallows whatever was there.
“She was in my integral calculus class,” he tells him. His eyes are far away. “She came over to study and, you know.” He laughs once and it is quiet and bashful. “Nearly… came in my pants when she sat in my lap.”
Snake’s thigh muscles flex and it kills whatever was trying to see light.
Getting chubbed up over some pussy-bonding? Didn’t realize you were so fuckin pathetic.
Otacon’s eyes go glassy.
“It wasn’t really the first time, but I count it as the first anyway.”
He says nothing. Snake gets another halfway damp cigarette from the carton and busies himself with sparking up.
Otacon grips and releases the arms of the recliner before standing with his hands idly in front of himself. Snake can still see it but it is lonely together and it is the memory and it is nothing.
“Please excuse me,” he mutters.
Then he is gone.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
It is Snake’s nature that he hears. It has happened countless times before and it was nothing—nothing, like it was in the barracks, nothing, like the centerfolds, but now it is a point of focus and odd.
He stays on the couch with his head hanging over the back, wooden beam under the upholstery digging at the top bend in his neck with his face tilted up at the ceiling. The cigarette is burning down and forgotten between his fingers as he hears what rightly is nothing, just soft rapid breathing and that other whisper of a sound he knows well enough.
A headache curls around his eyes like a dog and he shuts them from the hanging face on the ceiling and thinks of the fridge. He salivates and it aches in his jaw and he hasn’t had water in days but it is not what he wants.
Another sound behind the door, then the toilet flushing and Snake thinks about the pipes again.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
It is 1987 and he is on another man’s bike. He lifted his keys when he bumped into him in the alley and it was as easy as breathing. He’d scouted him in the morning and watched him head into the Quantum Computer Services building for work and now the world is ripe and tender and his until five.
He is outside the record store that is his and no one else’s, the one place no one else knows he leaves at four in the morning for; when it is that blue outside as he leaves the academy and the mourning doves follow him down the bypass like an omen before he hitches a ride in the back of a truck heading that way. The thousand times before.
He is posted up on the moped with his forearms draped over the handlebars. He eyeballs the tall brunette browsing the stacks through the window and drools. Her friends notice his staring and they laugh and trade glances in the girl way he is learning to appreciate.
He lights a cigarette to occupy his mouth and the one he is looking at looks back at him and he runs a hand through his hair like he has seen men do in the movies.
She comes outside slowly and timidly and he is taken by her immediately.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.”
She hardly looks at him. She smiles at her feet and tucks a chunk of hair behind her ear and he likes that.
He breathes out smoke and tosses the cigarette in the gutter to put both his hands on the throttle and break.
“Wanna go for a ride? I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
He blinks and it is Otacon where the brunette was. His insides jump but it is 1987 and he is as calm as he ever was.
“Anywhere?” He bites at his lip.
Snake nods. “Name a place.”
Otacon looks down the street and back with a squint against the cutting sun shuttering through the trees and buildings.
“Well, I always wanted to go to Jupiter. Got enough gas in that thing?”
He flips the kill switch and kicks the engine and it growls into a rumble. He tosses his head back. “Hop on.”
So he does. He watches him clamber on the back from the corner of his eye, then the reflection of the store window and it stops him dead. There is an old man’s face on his own and it is one he knows.
Panic rakes at him and he attempts to stand but arms wrap around his torso and pull him down onto the seat. A hand fixes around his jaw and makes him look at the window. Miller sits behind him now, the bulk of his frame cast over his back with his mouth by his ear.
“Don’t bitch out now, kid,” he tells him and the old man’s eyes go wide and his face begins to fade to bone. “You haven’t finished the job yet, have you?”
Snake wrenches himself away and falls off the couch and onto the floor. It is cold against his skin and the towel is stuffed in the crack of the cushions. His breathing is strained and rough and he just keeps himself from vomiting and choking on it.
The shaking is tectonic, foundational, and blooms worse at the face in the woodgrain that it is his and not and the fear that gets him is the worst he has ever felt in life.
He gets to his knees and slams a hand on the ottoman and it skids, but then he gets to his feet and is fine once he is there.
The world crashes against the walls in evil tide and flips them on their sides. He hears Miller and he is not better than the thing he needs.
His shoulder hits the wall as he trips into the kitchen and it rattles his teeth. He manages to get to the fridge and his head is howling and he pops the cap off the bottle on the edge of the counter and takes a piece of pressed wood with it.
When it touches his tongue, the effect is immediate. His body gives like all his strings have been cut. The pain is ignorable and distant and there is nothing in him to feel shame.
He takes bottles from the back of the fridge with him into the bathroom and sleeps in the shower. There are no faces and there are no dreams.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
Knocking at the door. He wakes at a slant and there is that Denali sun coming in faint through the window.
The porcelain is cold on his skin when he moves and briefly he wonders if he imagined the sound before it comes again.
“Snake?”
He had sucked down a few drinks in the night and chipped the enamel on the side of the tub with the caps and he doesn’t remember that but it is fine. His body is thrumming, though slowly, and it will be gone soon as he knows it to be but it is fine.
“Yeah,” he calls and rolls his eyes under the lids to get rid of the sleep. He takes care to not let the bottles touch but gets up quick and almost agile. He stands on the rug before the sink and catches a sliver of the man in the mirror and it is unsettling to see him.
What now, kid?
“Are you okay?” The knob rattles.
Snake takes the trash out of the can and puts the empties in the bottom before piling it all back. Then he takes the sealed one and moves the tank lid of the toilet and sets it in the cool still water. All is done silently, with only a rasp of that grinding ceramic as the lid goes back in place.
He flushes the toilet and coughs loud and runs the sink before shutting it off.
“I’m fine, one second.”
His hand is on the door when he finally looks down and realizes he is naked. He rips the hand towel from the hook as that is all that is left of the clean linens in his impromptu pen and he holds it over himself carefully.
Otacon’s eyes go wide when the door swings open. They jump down then away and he does not look at him again.
“Uh, are you,” he coughs in a rolling way, “why are you—are you…alright?”
Snake has his hand braced on the door by his head. “Never better.”
He looks at him from the outer rind of his eye and something about it has Snake fighting novel amusement.
“You were in the tub again,” Otacon tells him.
He always knew how but Miller taught him how to perfect it, and he is buzzed now in the pleasant way that allows him to function seamlessly; lying comes easy.
“Got sick again. Figured it was the best place to be.” He nods at him. “You alright? Looking a little green.”
Otacon burns red at the ears. Then there is howling in the distance and Snake starts and breezes by. Otacon jumps out of his skin about a mile wide.
“Shit,” Snake grunts at the barking as he heads into the bedroom.
“T-they’ve been doing that for an hour.” His voice is raised so he can be heard from the living room.
Snake hikes on a pair of jeans and no underwear with only mild discomfort. The shirt was on the bed and it is an old one for how tight it runs across the shoulders.
“Don’t know how you didn’t hear it.” Otacon stares hard as he goes by for the shoes at the door. “You, you don’t seem right. I should check your nanos, make sure the booster—”
Snake wraps a hand around his arm and Otacon instinctively rolls his wrist to get out of it, but then he stops. It takes Snake a handful of strange seconds to come up with something convincing but then he does.
“Come with me,” he urges.
Otacon’s mouth opens but the rest of him is frozen.
The thing comes out but it is different. Snake’s thumb runs over the meat of his arm, skinny as it is.
“You’re always on the computer,” he continues, voice careful. He spooks easy. “Spend the day with me. Work can wait.”
He is mystified and it is exactly what he was going for.
“O-okay.”
Snake smiles and lets go. More howling.
“C’mon.”
He gets his shoes on and tightens his belt while Otacon shuffles into his parka and then gets the oil lamp and sets about lighting that.
The sun had already tripped and is falling and it is growing dark as they go into that day.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
They bark and sing as he scrapes spent hay into a pile in the corner of the hutch. The kennel is heated and warm and soon he is sweating in the shirt that doesn’t smell like him. The doors are open and they come and go. Some stay.
Otacon sits on a bale with his parka unzipped and a hand on Motley’s head. Cranberry is a line across his feet.
“What do you do with all that?”
Snake stops and breathes and he can already feel the lactic acid eroding. He is just faded enough to appreciate it. That will be gone soon, too, and he hates how hard it is to come by; for once it is a nice glow.
He leans on the shovel and hooks a thumb back.
“Pile it up, move it out back by the shed to compost.” He runs a hand under his nose and gets back to it. “The man who sold me the land uses it for his farm. Comes by every other year to take it.”
“I just can’t believe it,” he says. He shirks the parka and it stays stiff around him as he takes his arms out. “That you’ve done all of this by yourself.” His voice takes a quiet edge. “I wish I could be that self-reliant.”
A part of him wishes it, too. He does not say that.
“You were alone a lot as a kid,” he tells him and it takes a dumb moment to realize it should have been a question.
Otacom hums. “Stamped on my forehead, huh?"
He shrugs. “More or less.”
He does not say that it is textbook; that the man seemingly thrives with solitude but suffers in it anyway. He does not say that he knows what it is like.
“Nothing to be ashamed of.” He looks at him and it hits him how small he looks there. Snake takes a part off of himself and offers it; “I refused to sleep in my own bunk until I was ten.” He drags a hand across the back of his neck. “My academy brother, advocate, whatever, just about hated me for it."
Otacon smiles and it is a growing thing.
“Really? That’s kind of… cute.”
He snorts. Motley barks. He drops the shovel against the wall and puts his hands on his hips.
“Kept you waiting, didn’t I? Hungry?”
Motley barks again and Snake looks at Otacon who is amused and still smiling and the dream comes to him in slivers. He clears his throat and folds it wrong to put it away.
“Want to help me feed seven malamutes?"
“So long as they don’t eat me,” he offers, fingers interlaced over his knee.
Hay drops to the floor as he claps his hands together. Things still stick to him.
“No promises.”
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He gives them fresh bedding hay while they eat and closes the hutch doors and leads their two-man team toward the house. The snow is up to his thighs now in this last winter push and it is hard to move through and even harder for Otacon bringing up the rear.
He turns and watches him trip into his footholes like craters and fall but not far for the snow holds him up.
“Almost there,” he calls. “Hanging on okay?”
“More or less,” Otacon echoes loud with a lopsided smile. He fights the hood back from his eyes and it is hard to differentiate the fur from his hair, that ashy brown against the rabbits Snake killed for him the first week they got here.
“This is nothing like Minnesota,” he continues. “Never seen snow like this in my life. Fox Island wasn’t even this bad. We had snowdozers, a shoveling crew.”
Snake turns back around. “You wanted to come with.”
I’ll take you wherever you want to go.
“I remember,” he replies, tone still light despite the dark in Snake. “Maybe we should take a trip to Jupiter.” He pauses. “Say, you never call me by my name, y’know.”
You don’t have a name now. You’ll learn to come to this one, Solid Snake.
They never give out duplicates. Why is mine one?
Ask me another question and I’ll kick your teeth in, kid.
It is cold. His hand finally lands on the door handle. Something in him is afraid.
“You never say mine.”
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He wants to go to the bathroom for the bottle floating in the tank but he cannot leave him alone.
I should really check your—
Snake had touched him again, easy on the shoulder, and led him to the living room. He doesn’t know what he would see at this point and that unknown is enough.
Otacon went still but was pliant and Snake knows well he is toeing a line.
“You’re staring,” Snake tells him after a while. He is putting ramen cups into the bin in his hand and Otacon is watching. “Rude, when I’m cleaning your mess.”
His eyes narrow. Then he knocks his head at the record player and takes the bin from him. “Trying to figure out what Tom Petty means.”
Snake sighs loud and grabs the towel from the crack of the couch.
“You were already off the mark with Abba. Take your time.”
Otacon rolls his eyes. “You’re not as impossible to read as you think you are, you know."
The buzz is long gone but that odd part of him is still there. That other part of Otacon as well. The nervous animal traded for something with teeth to match the drowning dog in Snake that now bites at everything.
His eyes flick over Otacon while his back is turned and it is lonely together and that is it. Hair falls in his face as he is bent at the waist and wiry fingers tuck it behind his ear. Upendeding echo.
Snake’s insides jump.
When Otacon looks up, he makes like a deer in headlights.
“Now you’re staring.”
Swallowing takes effort and his throat goes funny and earnest. “Just, see more of your face than normal.”
“Oh.” He pushes the glasses up the flat slope of his nose and they fall right back. “Is that,” he starts awkwardly before stopping completely. “Never mind.”
He hates that. “No, say what you were going to say."
Otacon stands up fully but his shoulders inch in.
“Is that… a bad thing?”
For a moment his mind goes blank. Man like an oyster; Snake could crack him open and get everything he wanted, weak and delicate that pink flesh, but nothing can compare to patience and steam.
The dream comes at him and the brunet is out of it.
“Snake?” The walls come back and he blinks. Otacon smiles sympathetically. “Where’d you go?”
Man like an oyster; Snake snaps closed. He clears his throat.
“What was she like?”
His brow dips. “Who?” Then realization dawns on him like the weak-wrist sun and he straightens out. “Oh. She was, was nice. Assertive. I prefer that in a person.” The couch’s broken springs click and sink when he sits down. “Lets me figure out where I should… be.”
“In a relationship?”
He shrugs. “In anything. I like structure, I guess.”
“No offense, but you don’t make it well on your own.”
Otacon smiles sheepishly. “I guess I don’t. Good thing I got you here, right?” His eyes go wide when he says it. “I just mean—well. Sorry.”
“For what?”
Hands pull through his hair. He sighs.
“I don’t know. I just have a habit of sticking my foot in my mouth.”
Snake pushes off the wall and throws the towel in the hamper by the kitchen. He flips the record over.
“Doing fine so far.”
Better than you.
“Thanks.” He says nothing for a while and Snake is too sober for it. “What do you like in a person?”
The world goes brutally still and bright.
“Are you asking my type?”
That interesting pink again.
“I-in a sense, I suppose.”
Women. Every kind, that is his type. Lucky Strikes, his type. A cold Natty Light and The Thing on VHS. Something else he is again too sober for.
His hands have started to shake and he is not better than the thing he wants.
“I need a minute,” he tells him and leaves.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
It solves every problem.
The tank hardly makes a sound when he moves it and sets it back, and then he is sitting on the seat and putting the shakes away. He rips the shirt up over his head and sweats and smokes and drinks until the man he is sure he isn’t fades back into the wall.
The insides of his teeth are rough under his tongue. His knee bounces and he is back again.
Cut that shit out.
But Miller’s face is in the woodgrain and the tile and the tree line and not here. Otacon is the only thing alive after it all and he sits with that. Snake is in the in between.
Life isn’t all about loss, you know?
He presses the wet bottle to his cheek and breathes until it comes easy. Condensate and well tank water drip down his chin and onto the floor between his feet.
“Snake,” he calls through the door.
Then nothing. He swallows it all down.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
There is little a single bottle can do to him anymore, but he is calmer and when he leaves the bathroom the only thing that comes with is the smoke.
He could smell the burner and hear the snap of the knob when Otacon turned it on. His back is to him, that willowy outline as he stands unmoving at the range.
“Watched pot never boils,” Snake tells him and he watches him clear out of his skin.
“Jesus.” His hand goes to his chest. Hair is still tucked behind the shell of his ear and when he tilts his head down in habit only a few pieces come loose. “Can’t do that to a guy. Need, uh,” he gestures, “need to put a bell on you, I don’t know.”
He sets his back to the half-wall between the kitchen and the living room. The thing is loose again and Otacon withers in the silence.
“You’re staring,” he states with a nervous half-laugh, half turned toward Snake and half to the stove.
He shrugs. “So are you.”
Otacon rings the hem of his shirt.
“Well,” he rolls a ball in his throat, “you’re shirtless and it’s probably fifty degrees in here. And most people don’t, don’t look like you.” He hears the light upset curling in his tone at the end.
His skin is tacky and almost cold. “It’s hot.”
Otacon laughs again. “Liar.”
He lets go of his shirt and runs his palms down his jeans and jimmies his hair so it falls back normal. Snake frowns.
“I’m-I’m thinking pasta, again. We’ve got that leftover beef chuck,” he says and moves to the fridge and there is slight alarm in this, but Snake is calm. “Oh, and sauce. We have to use that or it’ll go bad.”
The bottles rattle when his shoulder clips the door for the ground beef in the back and again, the alarm, but the haze keeps him steady.
Otacon pauses and withdraws slowly. “Snake.”
The fridge light floods in his glasses as he angles his head back and it is unsettling. Then his gaze goes to the door but it is the same as it has been and he rescinds completely. The door shuts but the seal doesn’t stick and it drifts to hang open an inch.
“There was half a case and three bottles left in the back.”
Snake draws a thumb over his eyebrow and looks casually at his feet. “You counted.”
He is eerily calm. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“Not particularly.”
His mouth opens and shuts, then opens again as he attempts to walk past.
“I need to check your—”
Snake has his hand around his wrist and he rolls it again but he could break his arm if he wanted.
“Do not touch me,” Otacon hisses and there are broken bits of opalescent shell in with the raw flesh.
The dog chokes. Snake lets go.
There is stomping on the way to the bedroom and then dragging and the Macintosh bootup. He hears him swear. A minute passes and there is rapid staccato typing and Snake stays and lets his focus go soft on the dented fridge door.
Then he is back and he leans in close enough to smell him.
Snake goes rigid.
“Where is it? Where have you been hiding it?”
“Hiding?”
His eyes roll to go canny and then he leaves again but for the bathroom and Snake follows. Otacon rips the curtain out from inside the tub and tears through the medicine cabinet and the anger comes back at a slow boil.
“I’m not hiding anything—”
Otacon laughs. “I can—” he looks down behind the commode and Snake flexes his hand, “—smell it on you.”
He stands up straight and his hair moves a certain way and Snake’s stomach jumps and pools oddly and there is no label for what he feels.
“Where is it?”
Then his foot hits the trash can and it makes a sound. He looks down and kicks it over and trash and the cure go spinning in tandem across the floor. It is hard to look at him.
Again, his throat clicks and the anger is overtaken by strange fear.
“I don’t need a fucking caretaker, kid.”
“Kid?!”
He is nearly screeching. Exhaustion then comes to sit on him heavy, and his face is torn up and down. He drags his hands through his hair meanly.
Nothing happens for a moment, then he is shoulder-checking him on the way out and Snake is a statue. A statue until the crack he would know in madness.
He breaks for the kitchen and Otacon is ripping tabs off the cans for the floor and dumping them in the sink to bleed out. The water is boiling over on the stove and hissing but Snake sees nothing else.
“What are you doing?”
He goes for the bottles and takes another piece of the counter off as he pops a cap onto the floor. He holds the bottle over the sink and the beer gags at the neck before vomiting out.
There is no thought and the bottle breaks on the floor when he lunges and water sings as it floods over and evaporates on the burner. The door to the fridge bangs against the wall and stays where the handle sunk into the plywood. He has Otacon’s collar fisted in his hands and there is plain terror in his face. His shoes are half a foot off the floor and Snake’s feet are bare and wet and cutting up on the tabs and burning. Otacon kicks but his heels just smack a salvo against the cabinet while pale fingers scrabble over the gamey-thick bands of Snake’s fists that have killed bigger men for less.
“Why,” Snake starts, but it is hard to concentrate with the smell. He shakes him instead and Otacon’s teeth crack and rattle like his glasses that fall off his face onto the floor.
“‘Why’?” He thrashes. “‘Why’? Because I care about you, asshole.”
“Oh, really,” he sneers.
“I w-want the best for you—”
“Why?”
He swears and yells and seethes in a way Snake has never seen.
“Jesus, are you so fucking self-centered you can’t fucking accept someone would care for you? Even like you?”
Snake drops him and he slides down the counter and stays there, breath coasting choppily over his face. Then he shoves him and Snake grabs his jaw and he goes slack. There is nothing but heavy breathing and that toothy animal glare that folds unsteadily back into fear.
A moment goes and Snake relaxes but then he feels it. Otacon’s eyes shift away.
The buzz is gone and the dog wants blood.
Snake presses into him and Otacon breathes roughly through his nose, eyes crammed shut.
“Thought you liked girls, huh?”
“Stop it,” Otacon mutters as his brows pitch up. His shoulders pitch in and he grabs at Snake’s arm.
Snake does it again and the heat in his kidneys flares hot and he pushes it away. Otacon grunts and his eyes splay wide and white and it is tender-weak like he wanted but it tastes sour and sickly.
“Please, Snake.”
He releases him like he burned him. Otacon hardly settles before kneeing him in the groin and he bends over while the pain rakes up into some pulpy organ by his stomach and his mouth waters thickly.
Otacon is crying. He says nothing until he makes it to the living room, but when he speaks it is dense and serrated.
“I hate you.”
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He tracked blood into the living room from his feet after he shut off the stove and picked up his glasses to put them on the table.
There is shuffling coming from the bedroom. Snake stares at the black TV screen and feels he could vomit but he doesn’t and he sits there a long time.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
He sees the void of his reflection on the TV. A silhouette against the light flushing out from the open doorway.
“I’m leaving,” he tells him. He is quiet in the way he now realizes he never wanted to know.
“Okay.”
His mouth tastes rancid.
Otacon breathes and steadies and when he speaks it is clipped.
“Mei will have supplies on the helicopter for you. The regular.” He hesitates and then spits: “Do what you want with it, I don’t care."
“Okay.”
A minute goes. The door shuts.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
Huh?
You heard me. Or, or do you think it’s a bad idea?
No, it’s not bad. A bit crazy, but… I think I like that about it.
Really?