Chapter Text
He sits down, scowling in the gas light at the half-empty bottle of vodka that he’d just opened. Time seems to get away from him more nowadays.
The access to Cipher’s deep pockets and political connections helps. Skilled as he was, Ocelot wasn’t sure that he alone could have moved the amount of ketamine he needed, certainly not with his ever-growing responsibilities.
And god, did they grow . He knows that the GRU are, if nothing else, a strategic position geographically for the time being. But every time they pull him away from Dhekelia he feels a sinking feeling in his gut, that this could be the last time he sees John.
That will have to go .
In the meantime, all he could do was plan and hope. He had perhaps more power at this moment than any one person ever had, or ever would. To create a figurehead in Big Boss’s image. There were requirements, on the face of it. He had to be close enough not to raise questions, but how many people knew Big Boss, really? A handful in any meaningful capacity, fewer still who were alive and able to dissent.
And two fewer once he was done .
Indeed, with the mangling injuries of the attack on MSF, only the barest of resemblances would really be needed.
“Adamska,” he starts. He films in Russian. It will take best, he’s figured, tapping into his earliest memories of the mother tongue he’d gotten from his father. “The man before you is Big Boss. He is Snake, Venom Snake. You met him for the first time in 1964, in Tselinoyarsk. He is your brother in arms and by love if not by blood. You are to be his most trusted advisor and confidante.”
He still sees John in his eyes as he reads these sentences. John with his wry smile and strict, if unorthodox, code of ethics. With any luck, those would stay the same, he thinks. Improved, even.
The idea brings a tear to his eye, that there will be thousands of men who will never know the original, the blueprint. Done right, he knows, there will be no reason even for them to go looking.
He presses play on his own recording, it speaks back to him. “Adamska…”
The combat medic’s body lies before him. It’s a pity, he thinks, to be forced to make a butchery of one of Miller’s toys. But she had too much brain damage to be likely to have any memory of him, or the practice of medicine, or even her own self, and for that reason she was an ideal candidate.
Miller certainly could pick them, Ocelot has to admit. He looks over her scarred body. She’s strong, even with the atrophy from sitting motionless in a hospital bed she still has some muscle definition. A kind of determination even in her non-functioning body that he has to admire. He can’t help but thinking that if he had to pick a woman it would be one like her.
He catches himself in the thought and remembers that soon enough, she wouldn’t be a woman at all.
The question crosses his mind as to whether she had already stopped, or if she would be a man after the surgeries, or if it was only after the personality transplant was complete that she would finally be a man.
Not as if she’s around to answer the question though.
If a body belonged to a woman who was now brain dead, was it still a woman’s body?
If a woman falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, does she make a sound? He feels a nervous chuckle building in his chest.
Back to work, this is stupid. He thinks. What would be necessary?
He’d done cursory research into the topic, but it wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d use in practice. Mostly it was a fun threat for those particularly tough nuts to crack, and then it was rather more often the other way around. Women didn’t tend to squirm quite the same way as men did when he mentioned chopping off their balls in glorious detail.
“You are looking at the man the world knows as Big Boss, he is known to you and the rest of his team as Venom Snake…” the tape continued. Hearing his own words describing her as a man felt discordant. He’d have to work on that.
Hormones, step one. They’d do the bulk of the work for the first couple of years. But how would they keep applying them? Just jab him and tell him they were supplements? Perhaps immunosuppressors would be believable, for transplants. Not that there would likely be a need for organ transplants, but he’d never need to know that. Or, well, how long would John need, once he was on the run? How long would this phantom need to function? A couple years? He could find a long term release pellet or some such device. Then he’d have an expiration date, at least, in case he tried to rise up against John.
In life she’d never shown even the slightest dissent, and he couldn’t see her somehow overriding that after he was done. But, then again, he considers, what if giving her John’s memories– Big Boss’s memories, he corrects himself, the more truth he could conceal in the lies the easier it would be to keep them straight–what if becoming Big Boss makes him so determined to live that he decides he needs to challenge the competition?
I’m inventing all new psychology just for you, John , he thinks, Are you impressed?
He would give anything for a response, even the slightest fluttering of eyelids, the twitch of a single muscle. He doesn’t get one beyond the slow, steady beep of the vital monitors.
The late hours of the night slowly drag on into small hours of the morning, as he scrutinizes every inch of the medic’s body for ways it might be able to be brought into line with what people expected of Big Boss. For now, until they started to recover he could administer treatments himself. He wouldn’t be able to do much in the way of surgical reconstruction himself, but that could wait until they were both more stable.
The eyes will be the real challenge, he thinks, surely everyone will notice that his once bright blue eyes have changed to something earthier. And he can’t very well expect V to put colored contacts in every day.
In the meantime, though, he knows they’ll need to start somewhere, and if he’s going to take away her body, well, maybe he owes it to her, if she’s still in there somewhere, to start this himself.
You’ve given up so much for him, he thinks to her as he takes out a syringe and a vial of a hormonal solution. He’d like to tell her that he’s sorry that it’s come to this, for taking her withering body, displacing her very soul, but instead he settles on reassuring himself that in the next best scenario she would already be long dead. He was, if anything, keeping her legacy alive by erasing her from the picture.
The body doesn’t so much as flinch, or breathe, or even increase its pulse when he inserts the needle and pushes the plunger.
No longer just a woman, not yet a man, he thinks, and for the first time Ocelot feels a kind of revulsion with what he’s doing. How would he ever make her, him, it , fill the shoes in front of them? It was a step above a cadaver. And if that’s all that’s become of the combat medic, of Big-Boss-to-be, then that makes the Big-Boss-that-was…
He swallows, feeling bile rise at the back of his throat. Big Boss isn’t dead. Big Boss wouldn’t die, couldn’t die. He’d never gotten his last fight in. He’d never…
No use thinking that way, he knows, John will wake up in his own time. He knows this like he knows that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, like he knows that things fall down when they’re dropped, like he knows that whatever happens after death, there’s no heaven waiting for him. John might keep him waiting for months, or years, but he’ll wake up.
And someday, sometime after, Ocelot could go to him.
And nothing like this would ever happen again. Over his dead body.
Once he’s finished his preliminary list of modifications that would be made to the new Big Boss, he turns off his tape and crosses the curtained divide in the room. He knows he needs to leave quickly, the sun will be rising soon and being spotted in the daylight is one more unnecessary risk, but he can’t bear to leave without seeing John, his John, real John, at least one more time, now, while he can still remember.
His breath catches in his throat and his eyes water when he sees John’s body in the hospital bed, trapped in flux between life and death.
Ocelot can almost imagine for a moment that he’s not in a hospital, but that they’ve retired to a civilian dwelling. He can imagine what it would be like to see that face in a shared bed, and for a moment he feels a flash of envy for Kaz, swiftly overtaken by regret over not begging him to leave fieldwork behind sooner. He could have done it before the Les Enfants Terribles project, even. Could have told him what Zero was planning and run away with him. None of this would ever have happened then.
He wishes he could say something, but he can’t come up with the right thing to say, and it’s not like John can hear him anyways.
Despite his painfully apparent absence, Ocelot approaches the bed with trepidation, as though he might accidentally wake him from his sleep, or somehow be admonished by John’s displaced soul.
The tubes make him sick to see, but he touches John’s hand. It feels almost deathly cold, and he places it under the thin hospital blankets. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Fingers feather-light, he cups John’s face. How beautiful he had always been, even now the atrophy making his features gaunt gave him a severe expression. Still, unconscious like this he could almost be mistaken for harmless.
Ocelot pressed his lips to John’s forehead, only briefly, before stepping back, fearing divine retribution for taking what hadn’t been given to him.
On his way out of the hospital, away from Dhekelia, he could think of nothing but every regret held for never coming out and telling John everything. Every moment he could have changed his fate but hadn’t.
Yes, that would have to go.