Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

His earliest memory - the earliest he’s been able to recover, at least - is of metal. 

There was metal in his leg, shrapnel embedded from an explosive that went off wrong (or had it been right?). 

There was metal in the knife another boy was using to dig it out, red blood quickly coating his hands. 

He bit on his tongue, pain overtaking everything else in his body, and there was metal there, too, in the taste, in the blood. 

The men praised him for his resilience, for how he didn’t pass out from shock, for how he stood up, after, and took the other boy’s hand, and urged him to run to safety. 

The next year, he had been handed a gun and pointed in the direction of men with bigger guns and bigger bodies and bigger motives. His AK, his small six-year-old body, his hunger - nothing, really, in the face of all that. 

He remembers how his white-blond hair, shaggy and knife-cut, kept getting in his eyes. How it felt when he ran, light as air against the back of his neck. 

Some things hadn’t changed. Everything else, though, had. 

– 

When he wakes, he wakes from a nightmare into another nightmare, a nightmare far worse, the kind he knows he won’t wake up from. 

He knows this, because the sensation of the hands on his legs, on his arms, pulling at him - they’re all too real. 

They’re saying words, and he knows they’re speaking English, but he can’t tell what they’re trying to say. If they’re even talking to him.

He had a mission - 

Kill as many as you can / Take out the enemy / Extract Big Boss’s body / Find something to believe in / Escape / Live / Reason / Purpose - 

He doesn’t think that what’s happening now, what his reality currently is, is any part of a mission. Any of them. 

They’re pulling at him, and he can’t move, and he’s felt pain before - pain that was unbearable, pain and how he’d do anything and kill anyone to make it just stop - but this is different. Worse. 

– 

He wakes again to darkness. He can tell that his eyes are open, but he can’t see anything. There’s a voice, and he can sort of discern the words, every so often. 

“...still need to…and hook up the nerves…visual receptors…” 

And another voice.

“...not yet viable…did we go too far?”

And the first voice, again.

“...he can take it.” 

And then nothing.

– 

He wakes again to hands, pulling at him. He opens his eyes and everything is so grey, so…

This is a lab. He’s in some lab. 

“Oh, fuck - Jack! You’re awake?” 

His eyes focus. There’s a soldier, one of Big Mama’s men, a guy he remembers from her compound, and he’s fiddling with something at his feet. 

The soldier called him Jack.

He grunts. He tries to talk. He tries to - 

It’s not working. There’s something wrong with his throat, like he hasn’t had any water in weeks. He knows what it feels like after a few days. This is worse than that. 

He grunts again, the only sound he can make. The soldier looks over his shoulder. He starts to squint, to see - but he doesn’t need to squint. He can see, watch, as a pair of Big Mama’s soldiers walks forward from the far-off distance, from the kind of distance he’d have to squint to see, usually. He has perfect eyesight, but no one’s eyesight can see that far - 

He blinks. Even that, something so ordinary, feels so strange. 

One of the soldiers is holding a sword in his hands, delicately, almost as if it’ll leap up and bite at him. He recognizes the blade. It’s his. It’s real.

“I know, it’s a lot, but we gotta get you out of here,” the first soldier says. The other two soldiers are touching him now, too, hands on his shoulders. He tries to jerk away, but his body - 

His body - 

His body? 

He looks down. 

He sees metal. 

Where his chest should be, his stomach, his hips, his legs, his arms, his - 

His body. Metal. 

Breath - is it even breath? From what lungs? - catches in his throat - is it even a throat? - and he does jerk, now, whatever kinds of signals the metal and his brain communicate with finally talking, moving, syncing, and the soldiers, all three of them, back away - 

There’s a gunshot, in the distance. He sees the three soldiers look at each other, look at him, and some pieces are slowly coming together, here. The cruel puzzle is starting to come together. 

This is his escape plan.  

This is their mission.

Saving him? 

The soldiers finally finish their tasks, and they help him sit, they help him stand, they help him walk - limp - and somehow - 

Somehow - 

They make it out. 

Chapter Text

After two weeks, too many tests, and long-awaited clearance from Big Mama’s medical team, he gets the address he needs from her. It’s the information she could have told him a month ago, and maybe, just maybe, this would’ve been avoided, could’ve been prevented - 

There’s no point in trying to wind the clock back. 

She tells him the address, and there’s almost a note of regret in her voice, or maybe pity, and that hurts, some sort of mixed-up mess of a thousand emotions - 

It’s strange how nothing really hurts the same way it used to. He has all these jumbled-up memories of stinging bullets and blood and scars. And they’re all gone, all the scars. 

He barely has the memories, though he’s regaining more and more of them with every passing day, every nightmare-filled attempt at rest. 

When she gives him what he came for, he doesn’t reply. He still hasn’t regained his voice. Every attempt makes the throat catch, the half-metal voice box lock up. Where he used to have tone and timbre, there’s just gravel. Just vague, pained noises that can’t communicate anything. 

He doesn’t need a voice for this. He doesn’t intend to talk to anyone, to entertain negotiations. 

He doesn’t need a voice to do what he had set out to do in the first place, before deals and trades and bargains.

The journey to the site is a blur, a sleepless day preceding a sleepless night.  

He crouches in the woods, wind whipping his hair across his face. It’s shaggy, knife-cut, and it’s patchy, parts overgrown and other parts barely there. The Patriots - when they’d taken him, destroyed him, built this - 

They hadn’t cared about his hair. 

He’s glad it’s still there. The feeling of it against his cheeks is something of a comfort, even now. Every strand is a part that still feels like his.

He’s not sure if it’ll grow out again. Big Mama’s medics had shrugged when he’d asked. It wasn’t something they were particularly concerned with, amidst the metal muscles and ghost-white blood. The Patriots, of course, hadn’t been particularly concerned with it either. 

He swallows, a strangely unfamiliar motion now, and runs the metal fingers through his hair, tucking it behind the artificial ears. He remembers the time he used to spend on his hair, the careful application of products to shape it - to shape himself into the person he wanted to be. 

There wasn’t time for that this morning. The moment he had been cleared to leave, he left. 

And what use is there, anyway, in shaping himself into anything, in searching for who he could be, when the Patriots had already made him this? 

Reality, he has learned, is such a nebulous thing. He didn’t need proof of it at all a year ago, and now it’s all he can do to hang onto it, scrabbling for anything that signifies what is real. 

In those long days after the nightmarish truth had crashed into the carefully-constructed dissociative dream, all that had felt real was his own hands on his own skin. 

That proof is gone, now. 

He closes his eyes. The cold against his eyelids, his long eyelashes, is real.

This is real. 

He is here. 

He is here, and the sword, his sword, the one Solid Snake had given him, the one Olga had wanted him to have, is here. 

The weight of the sheath is a comfort, too, where it rests against the metal spine. A second spine, a support. 

The leather trenchcoat he wears is a comfort too, shielding the metal from view - his own view, and everyone else’s, too. 

He breathes a long exhale. It’s visible in the cool night air, a sign of life. 

He steadies himself, forcing himself to return to the mission. In front of him, through the trees, is a hospital. It’s one of the hospitals owned and operated by the Patriots, and it’s outfitted with guards accordingly. 

They’re pacing, and he easily tracks their orderly little pathways, their clockwork movements. 

The first time he had walked on his own, after - 

Well, he - 

He shakes his head. 

Hair on his cheek. 

Steel across spine. 

Leather against thighs. 

A pause.

A breath.

He moves. 

– 

He makes his way out of the forest and around the guards, leaning on stealth rather than his sword, and he reaches the grate he’d seen in the files on this place. He kicks it open, the snow on the ground muffling its fall, and he crawls his way in. 

There’s a certainty in his mind, now. He knows how to do this. Somehow, some way, the shell that has taken the place of his body knows how to do this. 

It’s natural, more than anything else. 

The map practically burned into the backs of his eyes helps him find his way to the wing her room should be in, and he drops down out of the vent. 

He notices the strange emptiness first, how the wing seems completely devoid of guards. There aren’t even doctors, or nurses, or orderlies. There aren’t any visitors. 

There is only him, and, he presumes, her. 

Once he finds proof, he will move to the second stage of this mission, and after that, he will find her. 

He’s still on alert, though. For all the emptiness, there could still be cameras, a lone guard lurking in the shadows. This is a hospital owned by the Patriots, of course. And while he got away once, changed, maimed, distorted as he was - 

He steps, quietly, carefully, cautiously. Knees bent, heels steady. Low to the ground, sword ready. It’s all different, now, the way these metal limbs move - but the intent and the outcome are nearly the same as they were before. 

He’s alert, but there is no threat. There is no attack. 

Up on his right is a nurse station, loaded to the brim with cotton gauze and individually-sealed packets of needles and - thankfully - a computer. He stalks over to it, determined, quiet. 

Even better, it’s already on. It’s logged in, too, which seems odd. Surely, whoever was using this computer last could not have gotten far. But luck is luck, and he’s taking advantage of it now. 

He types the name in his head into the chart software - typing itself feels strange, now, like he’s struggling to reach even half of the words-per-minute score he used to be so proud of. 

And there it is. There she is. There’s a photo of her, too, a black-and-white portrait of a baby that somehow possesses a full head of white hair. She looks like her mother. 

Her room is located in this wing.

First stage complete. Now, then, for the second. 

Chapter Text

If this mission is to have any hope of working out - if he is to have any hope of succeeding - he knows he has to begin the second stage. He has been dreading this part, the idea of adding this variable to the delicate equation that this mission is. 

Amidst all the other feelings in him, indistinct and ebbing and flowing like tides, the dread - and the hope, the strange optimism that somehow hasn’t yet managed to abandon him - has been a constant. 

Hope is harder to come by, now, but he finds the strand of it within himself, traces it to its roots, and grabs it. 

He ducks into an empty breakroom near the nurse station and raises a hand to the metal neck, thankful that, amidst everything of the prior month, he still has this. 

He can still talk like this.

He calls Solid Snake, who, shockingly, immediately picks up. He doesn’t even know what time it is, wherever he is. 

“Uh, is that you, Jack? Didn’t expect to hear from you. It’s been years.” 

That name. 

“It’s Raiden.” It’s a shock to hear his own voice, from within himself, coming through on the codec. It sounds unfamiliar, now, after so long without use. 

He missed it. 

“What’s going on, Raiden?” 

He appreciates how quickly Snake drops the other name into the void, far, far away from here. 

Not that “Raiden” was a name he chose for himself, or one that felt like his, either, but at least it didn’t carry the past of the other name, the roles and responsibilities of a child molded into a soldier too small to even hold the gun that had been thrust into his hands. 

“Raiden” still had possibility - and maybe, if things worked out, a future. Even now. Even - 

Raiden exhales, a breath he didn’t quite know he had been holding releasing into the empty hallway. 

“If I send you some coordinates, can you do me a favor? I’ll need a ride in 30 minutes. I’ve found Olga’s child.” 

The request hangs in the air between them. 

“Olga’s child?” 

Raiden almost expects that question to be accompanied by a retort, Snake’s insistence that he should step back and wait so they could go look for the child together. A few years ago, that response would have been a certainty. 

But, somehow, that’s not what happens now. 

“Send the coordinates. We’ll be there. Be ready for my signal.” 

The call ends just as quickly as it began. 

He’s thankful for Snake’s lack of questioning, for the absence of “how” and “why” and “what’s gotten into you” - he doesn’t have a proper answer. 

What’s gotten into him is the knowledge that a child might die, and it would be his fault. All his fault, just like with his own - 

A pause. 

A breath.

No time for that, now. 

He sends the coordinates to Snake. 

Now, it’s time to confirm the emptiness of this wing, to verify that the mission will continue to go smoothly, as best he can. This is always one of his favorite parts of a mission, the part that feels like detective work, scoping out the scene. 

He glances around the breakroom. It’s empty, just like everything else here, but there are items scattered around on the long tables, on the kitchenette counter. It’s clearly a space that has been used before, and probably not too long ago. 

He adds this information to the risk assessment running in real-time in his head, counting the ways this could go wrong and pushing for the one precious way it could go right. 

Breakroom assuredly empty, Raiden peeks into the adjacent rooms, scoping for any staff who may have - unluckily for them - decided to hide out there, abandoning any sense of duty to care.

The emptiness of the ward, the emptiness of the breakroom, it’s all so odd. He hasn’t exactly been to many hospitals, but he knows they aren’t ever this… abandoned. 

No one is in the women’s locker room, and it feels unused, just like the breakroom. 

On first glance, at least, the men’s locker room appears just the same. The perimeter is devoid of signs of life, missing the forgotten hats and car keys one would expect. 

At the back of the locker room, though, there’s a sink. Along the edge of it, by a mirror deeply in need of cleaning, there’s a black tube that catches his eyes. 

It’s eyeliner, he realizes, recognizing the slender shape and brand name - 

It’s the same brand he used to wear. He had last put it on before attempting to fulfill Big Mama’s request, tracing dark outlines along his lashes, just as he had every day before that, leaning his hip up against the ceramic sink in his cement-walled room or the bathroom counter in Rose’s apartment, intently staring into the mirror, careful hands shaping careful lines. 

He hasn’t worn it since, hasn’t looked in the mirror, hasn’t seen himself - 

Hasn’t looked at this unnatural merging of man and metal - 

He looks up from the eyeliner tube to the mirror.

He sees his blond hair first, the shock of it shining in the dimly-lit room. It’s shaggy, which he had already learned from touching it, running metal fingers through it. He misses the feeling of human hands, his hands, how he’d brush his hair back from his face, trim it himself when it got too long, which was only when it wouldn’t stay out of his eyes - 

His eyes. They’re blue as ever, flecked with grey, and they are still his. 

His eyes, though, are immediately drawn down to the metal neck, the orderly arrangement of plating and half-exposed wires and metal muscle, and if there was anything like a stomach in this machine he thinks he’d be throwing up, now, as the wave comes over him - 

There’s a creak, loud and echoing in the room, and he looks down to see that he has cracked the sides of the sink from gripping it so tightly. 

He wants to run. He wants to throw up. He wants to - 

He doesn’t know what he wants. 

Before he knows it, he’s holding the tube of eyeliner in a metal hand, and then there’s the familiar liquid ink tip, and there’s the way Raiden feels like he’s shaking as he draws himself back onto his face, as he makes himself into himself again. 

Raiden drops the tube. 

He looks into the mirror, at the small space he’s reclaimed, those dark lines around his eyes. 

He turns, a silent thought of thanks in his mind for whoever left that tube there in their rush to leave. 

Raiden leaves, retracing his steps to the breakroom. 

Chapter Text

He passes by a clear window, and he catches sight of a mangled body, constructed from too-smooth, too-bare metal and false tendons, full of jagged edge. 

Raiden hadn’t looked in a mirror since he returned to the world of the living, not until a few moments ago. He’s shied from them, something instinctual in him looking away, even though he used to spend thirty minutes every morning on his hair, his eyes, readying himself, creating the mask that would protect him throughout his day. 

But here he is, here it is. Cold metal where warm skin used to be. And thin lines of reclaimed space around his eyes.

This isn’t important right now. He knows that. 

A pause.

A breath.

He lets his eyes refocus as he walks towards her door. The sign to the right of it says, very simply:

Gurlukovich

ISOLATION

That’s all the confirmation he needs. He’s surprised, though, to see the tag for “isolation,” given her age. She was young, he knew. And he couldn’t think of any reason why a little kid would need to be isolated. 

Still, though, this is a Patriot hospital. 

There’s a keypad below the sign, of course, and thankfully, Big Mama had thought to give him the code he’d need as well. He doesn’t know where she got it from, but he knows he’s unlikely to get any answers where she’s concerned any time soon.

He types in the code. The little light on the keypad turns green, and he pushes open the door with a shoulder. Raiden knew what to expect, but he doesn’t know - 

There’s a girl. 

He quietly shuts the door behind him, hearing the click of the keypad reactivating and locking again. 

He turns back to the girl. 

She’s sitting up in bed, clearly just awakened by his entrance. Her bright eyes are wide. 

What catches his eyes, though, is her hair. It’s silver, long. 

It’s like his. 

Raiden had had a dream, once, the kind he hesitates to even recall and remember, of a child - his child - with silver hair, a soft, sweet face, maybe a sharp chin, dark eyes like hers - 

He closes his eyes.

A pause.

A breath.

He opens his eyes.

He wants to speak, to talk to her, to reassure her. He tries to clear his throat, hoping against hope that maybe now, in this moment of need, his voice will return, everything will align, and - 

All that comes out is a grunt. Real life is never magical like the movies, is it? 

She’s just looking at him, her eyes so wide, her hands clutching the sheets. 

And then she moves, leaning forward, her gaze never leaving him. 

She’s so small.

“H-hello?” She says, asks. 

Not knowing what else to do - but wanting to do something - he slowly raises a hand. He moves it into a shape approaching a wave. 

She gasps. He realizes, too late, that that motion had shaken the sleeves of his coat down towards his elbows, and the truth of the metal and wire was on full display. And she gasped, because of course she did, because this is who he is now, this is the monster - 

“You’re…a r-robot?” She asks. Is that …excitement in her tone?

A robot, really. Really. A robot? 

Raiden shakes his head. 

She squints. “Huh,” she says, thinking, curious.

“You - you weren’t always like this? A…cyborg?” 

He is not anywhere close to ready for this conversation. He can feel it in how he instinctively draws himself away, finding the door at his back when just moments ago he had been slowly approaching her. 

He doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know how to know. 

This isn’t the right time for this.

Maybe she senses the confusion, the unsteadiness radiating off of him, because she offers a smile, and it’s such a hesitant and shy and quiet smile. He doesn’t quite know what to do with that either. 

Raiden matches it with one of his own, and it’s lopsided, he knows.

They have to get moving. He also doesn’t want to break this fragile moment, to create an inflection point between smiles and curiosity and running from the Patriots. 

He tries to talk again, but nothing, of course, is coming out of him. Just grunts and wheezes, metal attempts at lungs and a throat and a human mouth failing to communicate, despite his best attempts.

A thought. He motions to his neck, miming how he would call her on the codec, if he could. 

She tilts her head, questioning. 

“Oh!” she exclaims. “The c-codec! I have one, too.” 

He nods. 

“Do…do you need my f-frequency? It’s… 140.48.” 

A chill runs through metal. He knows that frequency. 

It’s Olga’s. Or, well, it was Olga’s.

How would they have known? 

Why would they do that? 

This isn’t the time.

There’s so much, and it’s never the time. 

He calls her frequency, and they’re connected in an instant, and he can finally talk again, like this. 

“My name is Raiden,” he says. “You’re Sonacheka Gurlukovich, right?” 

“Yes, but…I pr-prefer Sunny.” Her stutter is still there, even in the codec transmissions. There’s something about the way she talks that reminds him of himself, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. 

“It’s nice to meet you, Sunny. I wish we could talk more here, but we need to get you out of here. I have friends coming to meet us. Are you ready to go?” 

“We’re…we’re leaving?” 

“Yeah. It isn’t safe here for you.” 

“C-can I trust you? They said…” 

“Sunny, I knew your mother. She told me to take care of you.” 

In that moment, he realizes that he just told this little kid that her mother is no longer alive, and he’s so far from the right person to deliver that kind of news, and this is not the way to do it - 

But she seems completely unfazed. Maybe she didn’t realize? 

“Okay. We…we c-can go.” 

“Alright. I’m gonna get you out of here. You’ll need to hold on to my hand, okay? If things get rough, we’ll need to run.” He thinks a second, remembering how small she is. “If you can get on my back, that might make things easier, but you’ll have to hold on tight. Don’t worry about hurting me.” 

She nods. 

He disconnects the call and reaches for her hand. She takes it, and she’s so warm, so real, and he’s so glad he’s here, now. 

He’s not glad for what has happened to get to this point. He’s not sure he’ll ever be. 

For now, though, being glad for any of it is good enough. 

He kneels down so she can climb on the metal back that's a part of him now, wrapping her limbs around the torso. He reaches up to touch her arm. She shivers. 

He closes his eyes. 

Breathes. 

Moves. 

Chapter Text

Raiden darts from shadowy doorway to shadowy hallway, Sunny clutching tight to him and never moving an inch, even as he moves. 

Luckily, he hasn’t managed to alert the guards, at least not yet. At least not as they move throughout the building. 

Their way to the snowy outdoors is relatively easy, unmarked by the violence and gunshots he’s used to dealing with in situations like this. 

Just before he reaches the grate, he calls the most familiar frequency on his codec.  

“We’re about to leave the hospital. Do you have an ETA?” 

“Approaching your location now.” He’s never been happier to hear that gruff voice, honestly. “Otacon says there’s a lot of enemy activity on the radar. Be careful coming out.” 

“Got it. Thanks, Snake.” 

He calls Sunny next. 

“Hey, Sunny - we might run into some trouble soon. I need you to be brave, okay? We’ll be alright, but it’s not going to be easy. Just lean against me,” and listen to my heartbeat, he had once said, but there’s no heartbeat to hear now, “and we’ll get through it.” 

“Okay. I’ll…I’ll try.” 

Time to go. He draws his sword, the metal singing in the dark hallway. 

Rather than going through the grate, like he did on the way in, he pushes through a nearby door instead. There’s no way he could make Sunny go through that grate with him; it was too cramped and confined, even by his standards. 

The door led straight out into the forest, a side door the guards probably used for their smoke breaks and chatting on the clock. 

Once, he would have glided through the door, nimble and quick and so sure of himself, even with everything he didn’t know.

Now, he wills himself to step forward, and the metal complies, somehow. He’s still not in sync with the artificial muscles and tendons, and they move just a few clicks behind the synapses firing in his brain. 

Pause, breathe, move. 

He darts out into the trees, using the natural cover to hide from watchful eyes and cameras. From tree to tree they go, Sunny holding tight around metal that can’t feel anything anymore. He remembers soft arms around his chest, the sweet pressure of trust and faith and he closes his eyes - 

Pause, breathe, move. 

Back against a tree, he looks around. He can see the soldiers moving along their routes, the careful footsteps bracketed by whistles and exhales. Each one is holding a gun, ready to act whenever needed. 

He has his sword in hand. He never knew how comfortable steel could feel in his hands. Even in these hands, these metal hands, the weight is familiar and comforting. It’s a weight he knows well. 

Pause, breathe, move. 

Tree to tree, snow dusting up around the shins, sword in the hand, Sunny holding tight. 

He’s almost to the edge of the hospital grounds when he gets a call on the codec, and he crouches down behind a bush to take it. 

“Jack - Raiden, we can see you - we’re about a mile out. Think you can make it to us and avoid a firefight?”

“Otacon! Yes, thank you. Heading to you now.” 

“Kid, be careful out there. Not gonna be easy getting through them.” 

He hears the warning tone in Snake’s voice, crisp and clear and certain. 

“Got it.” 

The call disconnects. 

He calls Sunny, then. 

“Hey, Sunny, how’re you doing back there?” 

“Uh…I- I’m okay.” 

“Good. We’re gonna have to be really quiet now, and things might get a little crazy. I’ve got you, though, and you’re going to be alright, no matter what happens.” 

“Oh-okay.” 

“If something does happen, and I can’t help you, I need you to call this frequency, alright?” He sends her Snake’s frequency. 

He feels her nod, her hair brushing the nape of his neck, the few nerves there bursting into life at the sensation. 

He disconnects the call and tightens the grip on his sword, readying himself for whatever battle awaits. Snake wouldn’t warn him if it wasn’t going to be serious. 

He walks forward, decisive step after decisive step. He looks around them, trying to see through the trees. A guard at the edge of his vision steps out from behind the cover of night, and he knows that he sees, he sees them - 

A step, forward. 

Another. 

A quick sweep. 

The guard didn’t have time to call for backup. 

He leans down, checking for breath. Finding none, he stands back up. 

Sunny shudders behind him. 

He runs, then, metal powering motion, and he knows they need to make it a little further, just a little further - 

The wind picks up around them, whipping his hair across his face. He looks up, and he feels Sunny tip her head back too as the helicopter, not too far from them now, starts to descend. He can just barely make out Otacon at the helm and Snake at the open door, unrolling a ladder. 

He hasn’t told them. They don’t know. 

If he didn’t have Sunny here, if this wasn’t a rescue mission, he’d fade away now, before Snake sees him, before everything unravels, before he knows. Before he sees what a monster he’s become. 

But Sunny is here. This is a rescue mission. He owes this to Sunny, to Olga, to Snake, to himself, maybe, even. 

So he walks forward, runs forward, metal bone and muscle carrying Sunny to safety. 

He grabs the ladder, tight grip holding fast, and they soar up into the sky.

Chapter Text

Strong hands pull them up, gripping Raiden under the metal shoulders to lift them into the hull of the helicopter. Sunny immediately falls off of the metal back, crouching against the wall and looking around. He realizes, then, that this is probably all quite a shock to her. Here, there are more friendly faces than she’s probably ever even known - and she doesn’t even know, yet, if they’re actually friendly or just getting ready to trick her. He knows that feeling all too well.

He can’t think about that for too long, though, because Snake is staring at him, staring at the metal pieces that make up the sorry excuse for a body, and he’s staring, he’s staring, he’s staring - 

Raiden turns away, hiding his face. 

Snake grips the metal chin, firmly, but gently, pulling him back into focus. “What… Raiden, what happened to you?” 

He’s never heard the great Solid Snake so shocked before. 

He tries to respond, but of course, the gravel in the throat, the artificial voice box and the trauma and the pain stop him, and he just coughs, coughs, coughs, and there’s something coming up, then, and out of him, and it’s white - 

Snake pulls back, eyes wide. 

“Otacon!” he yells over the helicopter’s blades, already moving to the cockpit. “Switch with me, now!” 

Otacon’s suddenly in his field of vision, big glasses reflecting back an image he doesn’t want to see. He’s glad, very glad, then, that he had found that eyeliner, because with all of the surprised looks and staring eyes around him, at least there’s one part that they’re seeing that is him, that is actually the real him and not a shoddy metal replacement. 

“Raiden,” he breathes. “What happened to you?” 

Raiden coughs up more of that white substance in response. Even if his voice did work, nothing but that would be coming up anyway right now, he guesses. 

Otacon reaches behind him to grab a towel, holding it against the metal chin. “Here, to… to catch… whatever that is?” He leans in, trying to get a closer look. 

“Raiden,” he’s saying, and Otacon sounds so far away now. 

He is floating, back against the current. 

“Snake, I think that's his blood!"

Silence. 

A pause.

No breath.

No movement. 

Out. 

-

When he wakes, it’s to the feeling of some sort of pressure against the metal chest. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to have to think about any of this stuff anymore. 

But he doesn’t get to sleep, he doesn’t get to stay ignorant, because there’s a hand on his cheek, now. He feels that, loud as a gunshot, and his eyes fly open. 

Snake is there - 

It’s Snake’s hand on his cheek. 

He doesn’t remove it. 

“Raiden, kid, what happened to you?” He asks when he sees Raiden’s open eyes. 

Raiden grunts and tries to sit up, but the pressure is too much to bear. 

“Hey, don’t sit up,” Snake is saying, hand slipping from his cheek to the metal shoulder. He misses the touch of Snake’s skin on his own, the reality and truth of how that warmth felt. 

“Otacon got you set up with a transfusion, so you should be feeling better soon,” Snake continues. “You’ve got the rarest blood type on Earth now, kid. I don’t know how he managed to get this for you. You owe him one.” He coughs, a rough, ragged noise, and Raiden’s eyes go wide. 

Snake waves his hand at him, as if to brush the look on his face away. “Focus on yourself,” he grumbles. “You lost too much blood. Almost didn’t make it. Don’t even know how you did that, seeing as you weren’t shot. Otacon said it might’ve been from running around so much, all the adrenaline.” 

Raiden nods to himself. 

“So, your voice’s gone?” 

Ah, so we’re starting with that. 

Raiden grimaces and raises two shaking fingers to his throat, asking to talk in the only way he can these days. 

Snake sighs and calls him. 

“Thank you, Snake. Yes, my voice is gone. I don’t know when it will come back or why it’s gone, exactly, but codec is the best way to talk right now.” 

“Huh… So, how’d all of this happen?” 

“It’s a long story.” 

“Do I look like I have somewhere to be, Raiden?” 

“...No.” 

“Go on, then. Neither of us are getting any younger.” 

The impatience is surprising. Snake will get what he is asking for, always.

Raiden sighs, a breathy, too-loud noise in the empty space between them. 

“Well, things weren’t great after we parted ways. Not to say I wasn’t grateful for everything you did, of course, but I couldn’t just… go back and be a husband, be a… father, be anything but a too-young kid with a too-big gun fighting a war I shouldn’t have had anything to do with.” 

He feels tears at the corners of his eyes. He’s thankful he doesn’t have to show his face on the codec calls anymore. 

“None of that matters,” he continues. “What matters is that I made a deal. I’d do a job, and in return, I’d learn where the Patriots were keeping Sunny.” 

Sunny.

“Snake, where’s Sunny?” he asks, voice rising. He tries to sit up again, and Snake gently pushes him back down. 

“She’s okay, Raiden. You did good. Otacon’s getting her set up with a place to sleep.” 

He nods. “Thank you. Thank you, to you and Otacon. I could get her, get her out, but I knew I couldn’t…” 

“It’s nothing. So, on that job, that’s where… that’s where this happened?” 

“Yes.” 

Even though he doesn’t have to use his throat to speak on the codec, he can feel the tears streaming down his face, feel his shaky grip on the here-and-now slipping away. He disconnects the call and turns his face away from Snake’s gaze, staring at the metal wall and the distorted reflections of the metal body reminding him how he got to be here in the first place. 

Snake’s hand is gentle against his cheek, gentler than he deserves. 

He can’t keep the sob from escaping him, the loudest noise to leave his throat since all of this happened. 

“Raiden,” Snake breathes, sitting at his side and moving his hand up to brush his fingers through the shaggy mess of Raiden’s hair.

“I’ll never ask you for more than you can give,” Snake says softly. “All of us, you, me, Otacon, Sunny - we all have our ghosts. You don’t get to live as much life as we have, in this world, without collecting nightmares. Your nightmares are your own. You know as well as I do that I can’t promise you solace, but I can give you peace until you’re ready to find your new purpose.”

Raiden turns to look at him, and thankfully, Snake’s hand stays buried in his hair. He hasn’t been touched so kindly, so gently, so softly, since before he can remember. 

He closes his eyes, leans into the touch. He doesn’t know what kind of purpose he could hope to have, now. He had managed to rescue Sunny, to free her from the captors who stole her from her mother, to fulfill the last mission she had given him. 

Now, though, he doesn’t know where to go, what to be, what he even is now. 

He feels aimless. It’s not dissimilar to the feeling he had when Snake last left him. 

“Raiden,” Snake continues, and his voice is fading, growing quieter, as Raiden feels darkness come over him. He can’t open his eyes. “You are safe here. I can give you that.” 

Snake stays, hand in Raiden’s hair, at least until he’s asleep.