Chapter Text
Just like a big husky.
That was Hal’s first thought when he saw the kid rooting around in the playground sand like it was his own personal litter box. The boy wasn’t necessarily on all fours, more so crouched under the afternoon sun in his grey cargo shorts and big white velcro shoes. There was a hawkish look in his eye as he surveyed his surroundings, before he threw himself into a clumsy roll that landed him right in front of Hal’s sandcastle (which was an amazing feat of engineering, if he could say so himself).
The kid threw his razor-sharp gaze at Hal, eyes as blue as the summer sky itself. All Hal could do was simply stare right back through the thick frames of the glasses that he’d been trying to get used to for the better part of the week.
“Hi,” squeaked Hal, subconsciously guided by the way his mother always reminded him to try talking to other kids.
“Hey,” muttered the kid. He averted his gaze quickly, focusing instead on the sandcastle before them. “Nice.”
Hal had made sure to get the inside of the castle mould damp with a splash from his water bottle so that the sand would hold its shape better, and it showed with how the brick textures were nice and clean on the sides. There was one main castle from the mould and two spires that he’d shaped himself— Hal hadn’t quite figured out how to bridge them together yet. He pushed his glasses up with clumsy hands and started to explain himself.
“Thanks! I’m- I’m trying to make a bridge.” He looked at the piles of sand between the spires. “Uhh, I can only make a ground one though. It kinda looks lame.”
“Does it have to be made out of sand?” asked the kid. Hal curiously noted the dark bandanna around his head, the ends trailing after him in the wind.
“Uhh, mm…” Hal shrugged as he picked at the straps of his overalls. He hadn’t considered another option.
Without much of a warning, the boy picked himself up and marched off beyond the sandbox. That had been enough interaction for him, Hal thought, until the kid stomped back to his spot with a handful of sticks and leaves soon after. Without looking at Hal, he laid the birch sticks down in the sand between them.
“These look nicer than the other ones.” He was likely referring to the pale birch sticks that he’d grabbed, which were less common than the usual darker oak sticks that were scattered across the playground thanks to the abundance of lush oak trees that surrounded the park.
“Yeah.” Hal picked up a stick from the row that the kid was organising by length. It earned him a huff still devoid of eye contact. “What’s your name?”
“...My name? I’m Dave. But call me Solid Snake.”
“Snake?”
“You can’t know my real name.”
But Hal obviously did, and it made him cock his head in confusion. This must be one of the games kids like to play, and although Hal didn’t exactly think of himself as a kid, he eventually decided on going along with how Dave wanted to play. Dave glanced at the stick that Hal held in his hand.
“Wait, it’s not long enough— Try this.” Dave snatched the stick from Hal’s hand and replaced it with two sticks that were suitably matched in length.
“Okay. Um, I’m Hal,” he giggled nervously. “Mom says it’s from her favourite movie.”
Dave gave a noncommittal grunt. He stared at Hal’s hands for a second, and only then did he lift his eyes to look at Hal’s face— which felt like more of an examination than anything, with how Dave peered from one of Hal’s big silver eyes to the next.
“You gonna make that bridge or what?”
“Oh, yeah.” Hal squinted at the sticks, more out of habit than actually needing to clear his vision. He stuck them between a spire and the main castle parallel to each other, then pulled back to examine the fit, surprised at how the colour of the sticks complemented the yellow sand perfectly. They did look quite nice. He smiled at Dave to silently thank him for the good choice. Dave was already looking at something else again, now picking at a few leaves in his hand.
“I dunno what your favourite colour is, so pick.”
In his little hand were a few leaves of the yellow and green variety, yet Hal felt spoiled for choice. His little giggles turned into a laugh at the idea of only legally being allowed to have green or yellow as your favourite colour. He and Dave stared at the leaves together, and Hal decided that he liked the other kid very much.
Like Dave, he wasn’t really a fan of looking at other people, but he could tell Dave liked playing with him because of all the things he was doing under the guise of helping Hal find a solution.
Or maybe Hal was just quick to like people. He grabbed a few yellow leaves with a smile.
“You like building things too?” Hal’s little smile turned into a toothy grin as he imagined all the fun he and Dave could have with his Lego sets at home — even better if they messed with his dad’s more complex collection.
“It’s fun,” said Dave with a smile. Hal hoped he was imagining all the fun that they could have together too.
“Then you can borrow my stuff! We can- we can build castles together,” Hal cheered as he set the leaves on the bridge as fast as he could, just so he could shove his sandcastle moulds into Dave’s hands, accidentally sending the rest of the leaves flying. “I saw My Little Pony yesterday and there was this amazing castle in the sky—”
“My Little Pony?” Dave parroted.
“Yeah! You’ve seen it, right?” Hal watched him take a mould, turn it over in his hands, and peer inside the colourful plastic. Only then did he think of the sinful implication of watching something that was meant for girls, and his pale skin flushed pink as he stammered, “My sister— s-she was just watching by herself and I caught a little bit of it anyway.”
Ooh, here it came. The moment where Hal messed up and made other children think he was weird again. He never meant for it to happen and didn’t want to feel embarrassed of his interests, but it wasn’t like it was hard to tell that he was a little different. Not in too many ways, but enough to be noticeable. Hal didn’t even have a sister.
After a heart-pounding second, Dave simply looked up at him while packing sand into a mould. “It’s okay I guess. The show. Eli watches it sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking.”
“Eli?” Hal asked hopefully. He carefully listened to the sounds of the other kids playing on the main playground structure that looked like a large pirate ship, and hoped they weren’t already making fun of his accidental confession.
“Eli. My brother.” Dave shrugged. “He wants to ride horses because of it and stuff, but that’s weird if they’re basically people.”
Dave did have a very good point that was already making Hal reexamine his own thoughts about horse people. Hal continued to build up his bridges and little towers around Dave’s while getting lost in his thoughts.
“He didn’t wanna come because I ate his jelly beans. But who just leaves them outside if they’re gonna whine about someone else eating them,” scoffed Dave, making Hal laugh. The towers he was building were all surrounding Hal’s, spiraling in a nice little pattern that made Hal proudly think about his inspiration. Dave was working with him!
Hal didn’t have siblings. At home it was mainly him and his mother, where she taught him about all the interesting topics his regular school missed out on by day, and snuggled with him to watch their favourite sci-fi shows at night. She did seem to get quite irritated when his dad would come home extra late (sometimes even in the early hours of the morning while Hal was preparing for school) and eat all her snacks instead of the meals she cooked.
Hal scooted closer to Dave in the sand until their elbows bumped, smiling as he looked at the little lumps Dave was making around the base of their castle. There was no doubt that they were meant to be clouds.
“I’ll be your brother, Dave— I mean Snake! You can have my jelly beans.”
“No.”
Hal was maybe a little heartbroken at Dave’s flat disagreement. He picked at his overalls with fidgety fingers. “Well, why not?”
“You’re nice. My brothers are all…” Dave made a weird little noise, which made Hal think that his brothers had to be some weird little people. It was comforting, the thought that maybe Dave didn’t believe he was a weird little person like them.
“Sure, I’ll just be your friend then.” Hal bumped Dave’s elbow again with a little smile. Dave looked up at him with a glimpse of a smile on his little face, before they were interrupted by someone else stomping into the sand pit with them. Hal was soon met with a wooden stick brandished in his face— he looked up in horror, where his wide-eyed gaze was met by a bigger blond kid, somehow zipped up to his nose in a large grey jacket despite the afternoon heat.
“Solid Snake!”
Dave leapt into action, on his feet in no time at all. “Gray Fox!”
What was the deal with all these names, Hal wondered. They reminded him of superspies in the movies, though those spies always came up with much cooler names than animals. He watched Snake toss him a winning smile, like a promise to protect him from this absolute stranger, before trying to tackle this Gray Fox and take the makeshift sword down with him.
He looked down at their castle in the sky, complete with bridges through nearly every tower and smiled. At least his mom would be proud.
-
It would be a while before Hal caught a proper glimpse of the mysterious Solid Snake again. Knowing how his family moved from city to city for his parents’ work, he wasn’t expecting to really see Dave again after they had moved on from Springfield, though he could never really stop his tender little heart from hoping to catch a glimpse of him elsewhere. Their friendship hadn’t really progressed beyond seeing each other in the playground the rare few times Hal was dragged out of his house to ‘socialise like the rest of the world’, in his mother’s words, but he enjoyed every moment of it.
A few years down the line and a few major scientific projects later, Hal ended up moving back to that very town where he met Dave— though he never really remembered it that way.
Oregon was delightful to return to, compared to the rest of the modernised cities that Huey would bring them to. Now that both he and Hal’s mother had picked up work once again, Hal was left to his own devices, which meant walking everywhere by himself.
Walking to school alone for the first day of the year was daunting enough, but it took him past that familiar playground that his mother would bring him to during the months she was away from work to raise him. It had been a few years, and now the memory of Solid Snake chasing Gray Fox away with his own sword was blurred at the edges from age. It still didn’t fail to make Hal smile.
Wistfully, he wondered what Dave was like now as he walked through his new school’s hallways. Dave was the first proper friend that he’d made himself, who wasn’t just a group partner from a robotics class or the son of a family friend. Dave had been a little bit of light in Hal’s otherwise quiet life— and now, he was sitting right at the back of Hal’s new classroom with neat hair and a chequered shirt.
“Introduce yourself, Hal,” spoke his new teacher from the side, and inwardly Hal panicked as he wondered how he reached his homeroom so fast. He must’ve been way too lost in his thoughts to notice the teacher speak as he stood before the rest of the students, like a lost toy on display.
“Uh, hi everybody,” he squeaked in his usual fashion. He felt himself shrink back into his white coat and into his shiny new sneakers, willing the ground to swallow him up. “I’m Hal Em- Emmerich. I moved here from, uhh, L.A…”
Hal shrunk into himself even more as he felt the eyes of everyone in his class on him. Now feeling like his presence was proverbially dwarfed by even his backpack, embarrassed thoughts about being younger and smaller than everyone in this class raced through his mind, even though it was his gifted nature that earned him a place in classes beyond his years. He was mousy and he knew it. It wouldn’t take much to eat a guy like him alive.
He felt Dave’s eyes on him like when they’d first met, gaze still as piercing blue as ever. It would hardly be wise for a mouse to approach a snake, but he did so anyway after he was released from his too-public introduction, his sneakers squeaking their way to his designated seat right next to Dave. Hal still couldn’t bring himself to look right at him as he settled in for class, which was ironic considering how their first meeting went, and the way Dave’s eyes were still on him.
Hal felt a foot kick at him. “Why the fuck did you move back here from L.A.?”
He jumped, now forced to stare at Dave with wide eyes. “Why’d you kick me!”
“What, you’re just gonna pretend we don’t know each other?”
“No!” Hal crowed defensively, clutching his bag to his chest as he tried to retrieve his pencil case and textbook. “Sorry, Solid Snake.”
“Oh, for god’s sake.” Dave put his face in his hands. He was already swearing like a sailor, something that Hal’s eleven-year-old mind was completely in awe of. It sounded so natural. Dave couldn’t have been older than twelve, but that gap of a short year between them seemed to stretch out like they were in completely different stages of life.
“What was that even about?” asked Hal with a little laugh. The teacher was beginning to talk and he knew he should pay attention, but it’s not like the introductory class would have much that he couldn’t find on the internet if he ever needed to remember what was taught. Besides, Dave had caught his interest.
Dave tossed him a sharp look, his feathers now ruffled and thick brows furrowed. “Look, it was just kid stuff. Playing pretend. I was eight. Now why’d you move back here? I haven’t seen you in forever.”
Hal felt himself loosen up enough to chuckle a little more. This was a very good sign. Dave still remembered him somehow, and Hal wondered if Dave had also wondered where he’d gone to after he moved. There hadn’t been much time for him to tell anyone that his family was moving on such short notice, and there weren’t a lot of people to tell except Dave anyway, so it likely seemed like he’d just gotten spirited away from Springfield sometime in the late summer.
“My dad liked this place I guess? So we just came back here after he and my mom finished up stuff in L.A.,” Hal kept looking at Dave, who kept looking right back at him, unblinking. “They’re really cool scientists, so… we go wherever they have to work. Why are you still here?”
Dave gave him a deadpan look, before moving his unflinching gaze to the whiteboard where their teacher had written Hal’s name, and was now in the process of erasing it to replace it with some written classroom rules for the year. “I fucking live here. Duh.”
“Well… yeah…”
“...Yeah.”
Dave kept his eyes on the whiteboard, but Hal didn’t feel like any offence was taken on behalf of his question. He was wondering why Dave’s family was still here, if they just liked settling in a small town in a pretty city like this, or if other kids just didn’t move as much as he did— but he supposed he could have phrased it differently. He thought to ask Dave again later, once they weren’t meant to be actively paying attention to class.
“L.A. sounds pretty cool though,” mumbled Dave.
Was it, really? Thinking back to the City of Angels brought Hal back to memories of sitting in smoky bars with his father, and overcrowded streets that made the back of Hal’s neck start beading with sweat at the mere thought. Los Angeles was for rockstars. Hal wasn’t anything of the sort.
“It was okay.” Hal idly scribbled the date onto his notebook to get his notes started, or at least pretend to. He felt Dave’s eyes watch him eagerly. “I missed Springfield though.”
He expected a brow raise, or a disapproving reaction akin to that of a middle-aged man who had lived too long in his childhood town, but Dave just nodded.
“Yeah. I’d miss it too if I moved.” Hal chanced a peek at his friend and found Dave smiling. “I should reintroduce you to the place. Lots of new stuff since you left.”
“That- that would be awesome!” Hal started beaming.
It was a big enough miracle that he and Dave just clicked back into place like they’d never grown beyond those playground days. Now, Dave actually wanted to spend some time with him, and not just for school projects! It took all that he had to not start shaking like he had rabies from pure excitement.
Hal squared himself away for the moment after the conversation, not wanting to bother Dave too much while they were meant to be studying. He wondered if they’d stick together for the day, since a guy like Dave surely would have other friends to hang out with— not that he had to ask, in the end. Between classes, Dave would wordlessly get up and help Hal get to his next classes, most of which they thankfully had together.
The crowded hallways made it easy for a weedy kid like Hal to get pushed around. Dave made sure to grab him by the back of his collar so he wouldn’t get lost, making Hal laugh from feeling like a scruffed kitten. He was grateful.
“How’d you recognise me?” Hal eventually ended up asking as they sat down for recess. Normally, the amount of kids packed into one hall would make him start to sweat like a cornered animal, but having Dave beside him made him feel better.
Dave shrugged. He started unpacking his lunchbox for the day, and Hal looked on with slight jealousy at the handwritten note from who he could assume to be one of Dave’s parents that came along with it.
“Dunno. Not many kids named Hal.” Dave took one quick look at the clumsy mayo-laden ham sandwich that his dad had packed for him and started scarfing it down, speaking with a full mouth when he came up with something to say. “Probably the glasses.”
Hal supposed glasses weren’t too commonly worn by people their age. Then again, it wasn’t exactly common to stay up all night on a thick laptop trying (and only somewhat succeeding) to hack his way into the school’s systems for fun either. Or to lose track of time watching anime with his nose practically touching the computer screen until he got forcibly tucked into bed by his mom. Or maybe Hal should just stop rationalising it and consider the fact that he’d essentially been wearing the same style of hair and glasses since he was six.
“What’s on your shirt?” asked a rough voice that Hal couldn’t recognise.
“M-my shirt?” Hal stuttered, looking up at the newcomer, whose deep-set grey eyes were framed with platinum bangs and a frown as he considered Hal’s scrawny form. He looked older than them, much older thanks to his harsh features. Hal felt cold sweat behind his ears.
“Stop scarin’ him, Frank,” grumbled Dave. He nudged Hal with an elbow. “Are you gonna eat something or what?”
Hal didn’t have anything packed, so he’d been picking at the eggshell-coloured plastic coating of the cafeteria table, wondering if it was worth getting in line for food while the place was still packed. Maybe he’d just get something from a vending machine instead. While Hal considered his choices quietly, shrinking in on himself, Frank sat himself at the table opposite the two.
“I just wanted to know, it looks like one of those uh… Japanese thingies.” Frank’s hulking form was only emphasised by his grey army-style jacket and the way he sat with his arms crossed on the table. All that intimidation factor was however lost on Hal, who fixated only on the mention of one of his greatest obsessions in life.
“Anime!” Hal exclaimed. “Are you an otaku too?”
A real otaku would’ve known the popular characters on Hal’s shirt and about the fact that anime was more than just ‘one of those Japanese thingies’, but Hal was just too excited about the possibility of making a new friend to think about the facts of the situation.
“Uh, no,” muttered Frank, more out of confusion than disgust, but his surly expression had lightened into something akin to interest.
Unfortunately for him, it was already too late. Hal had instantly taken his word as permission to shed his coat to show off his shirt, and talk about why his favourite shows were the best in the world, all while Dave watched on with veiled caution.
Frank had been his good friend for years, but Dave wouldn’t let himself be outdone so easily.