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I repeated: come with me, as if I
were dying, and no one saw in my mouth
...the blood that was rising into the silence.
Even in the beginning, his true motives are obfuscated.
He’s born on a battlefield, you see. Cut out along dotted lines from the womb and extracted with unsanitary hands. Around him, there is gunfire and explosions, so if he cries, there is no one to hear it. His face remains smooth and unfettered, almost at peace. His audience, his mother and father, the Cobra Unit, they all think him dead.
He opens his eyes instead of his mouth, and simply stares, his eyes tiny black beads. The first thing he smells is smoke, the first thing he hears is the empty clip of an assault rifle. Knowing his mother, the sensations are comforting.
He falls asleep.
-- --
That is his first and last rightful memory of his parents. When he wakes, an unfamiliar figure is carrying him, and it is then that he utters his first noise. The sound is not a cry, or even a whine. It is more a sigh of resignation, of frustration.
Someday, he will play his part.
He is in Russia by morning.
-- --
From a young age, he is treated more like a subordinate than a son. Volgin is not the fatherly type, and so he never thinks of him as one, even when he is nothing more than a toddler. For most of his life, the only sights to be seen are numerous rooms and corridors--the classroom, the dining room, his bedroom. He seldom goes outside, and the frigid bite of Russian winter doesn’t suit him, so he doesn’t particularly mind.
He’s four when he learns to read and write in Russian, five when he masters English. By the age of seven, he is fluent in seven different tongues--English, Russian, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian--a language for every year.
He surpasses every expectation laid out for him. It makes him smug, cocky, proud. His pride is what earns him the name of Ocelot, which he starts to use over his real name. He takes pride in that too.
-- --
Raikov is there too. Ocelot doesn’t know his first name, doesn’t care to.
Raikov is there, and only a few years--maybe two or three--older, really. He’s more charming than Ocelot, but not as smart or talented. He resents him, really, for being a person solely of style. There is no substance to Raikov, only bells and whistles and spectacle--formless and wisping into evaporated gas once the shape is taken away and the bows are untied.
Still, the two of them spend the bulk of their childhoods together, trapped under the same roof. They even share a bedroom. Ocelot is quietly entranced by Raikov’s transition from boyhood to adolescence, watches hair sprout in whiskers from his face, hears his voice deepen, but not too much. It still cracks like embers.
Objectively, Ocelot knows what puberty is. At ten years old, he’s been given the basics about the birds and the bees, but aging, maturing? It looks destructive and pointless on the older boy.
Raikov is feminine looking, Raikov is beautiful, Raikov looks how Ocelot imagines angels to look. It’s the only thing that he likes about his peer, and time even rips that away from him.
For two years, it stays like that, and time passes with little incident. The biggest development of that time is that the two of them are granted extra privileges, like the novels issued to them. Raikov cannot read in English, and so he quickly loses interest in many of the books. For Ocelot, it is an escape, a haven. He comes to fall in love with the dreamy feeling of reading a Western, scanning through the same novel over and over again, enraptured with his nose buried in the pages, often straining his eyes in the dark to memorize each word.
Raikov grows taller, and he shaves the tiny hairs that prick at his face, leaving no stubble in his wake; everything about him is smooth. Ocelot secretly likes it--it is a call back to earlier times--but he often teases Raikov about being unable to grow a beard, a taunt that is usually promptly met with a curt “fuck off”.
Ocelot is twelve the first time it happens. His sleep is disturbed in the middle of the night by Raikov stumbling into the room that they share. Ocelot can do nothing but sit up and stare at the other boy, squinting through the dark at the vague direction of the door.
“I’m trying to sleep,” he tells the older boy, who gives him no reply. Raikov strips out of his clothes, throwing them haphazardly into the hamper before slipping into bed.
When Ocelot wakes the next morning, he checks the hamper. Raikov’s underwear is spotted red with blood. He doesn’t know what it means.
-- --
He continues to age, and so does Raikov--Ivan. He’s heard Volgin call him Ivan in passing now, he’s heard Volgin groan out his name in ecstasy through the wall for a few years now. Raikov no longer shares a room with Ocelot, which is both a blessing and a curse. Ocelot never liked him, but the presence of the older boy left him feeling like at least he had a comrade, a brother-in-arms. Now, Ocelot knows that Raikov was nothing of the sort. Ivan was a whore, practically a concubine.
-- --
The first time Ocelot holds a gun, he is thirteen years old. It’s heavy and awkward in his small hands, but by the end of the day, he has grown comfortable firing it at targets. When he returns to his room that day, he is told to address Volgin as ‘Colonel’. Ocelot wonders if he’s become a soldier just because he can pull a trigger.
To his credit, he can throw a knife too; never misses.
-- --
Adolescence comes for his innocence in much the same way that it did Raikov’s. Ocelot is a late bloomer, shooting up like a reed.
Volgin tries to come to him the way he came to Raikov. Ocelot cuts the man’s palm open with his pocket knife. He earns a black eye, but the man never touches him again.
-- --
When he is eighteen years old, he is nearly killed. Raikov wakes him in the middle of the night with a slap to the face. “You’re leaving, Adamska.”
“Ocelot.” He corrects, not even fully awake. “Where am I going?” He’s never been on a mission, wonders if this is his chance to prove himself.
Raikov shrugs. “Orders from up above. You’re needed elsewhere.” It doesn’t answer any questions, but Ocelot rises anyway.
-- --
It isn’t a chance to prove himself. It isn’t even a battlefield that he’s sent to. He’s sent to a room, where he’s forced to sit and wait. The fact of the matter is that Ocelot himself holds no value for those around him, but there is a strange importance on his life that forces everyone around him into consideration.
It’s here that he learns of The Philosophers. They speak to him in darkness with hushed voices, making his existence feel like a secret. It’s here that he learns just what kind of role he has to play.
He learns of his parents, of The Joy and The Sorrow, and how bliss and melancholy run through him in harmony. It’s appropriate, Ocelot thinks. The Philosophers tell him that one of them must die, and that’s why he’s here--insurance.
The sad part of his roots wither and after a few hours, he is released. He feels nothing, but walks with a swagger in his step.
When he returns, Volgin names him Major.
-- --
Tselinoyarsk isn’t his first mission, but it’s the first of any consequence, and his inexperience shows in every way. Ocelot has next to no experience being a double, triple, quadruple agent, but the secrecy of it has him interested. The KGB, CIA, GRU...they all think that his undying loyalty is to them.
Ocelot is loyal to no one, maybe not even himself. He lets The Philosopher plant the seeds of him being an NSA codebreaker that defected. It seems even they know that he has the air of a traitor.
The first time he sees Snake, he has him at gunpoint. Ocelot is overcome, and for the first time in his life, he feels something close to excitement.
-- --
Watching from the helicopter, he knows Snake survives the fall. It isn’t something that he knows in his brain, the knowledge comes from his blood.
There’s no time for that. He looks at The Joy--The Boss--and wonders if she knows. Truth be told, Ocelot feels sick to his stomach, a feeling that’s intensified once the Davy Crockett is fired.
-- --
He ditches the Makarov for two revolvers. In his room, he practices spinning them in his hands. He’s nothing if not a show off.
-- --
He’s late to the rendezvous, and his spot is taken by an unknown third party. She intrigues him, but he resents her at the same time. Ocelot feels as if something has been taken from him.
So he settles into his new role. This is nothing but a bump in the road. Ocelot is flexible, malleable. He can be anything and anyone the situation calls for.
Once he has Snake at gunpoint again, he even debates pulling the trigger, but he pauses, glancing into the man’s eyes. He wonders why The Boss chose this one over him. Maybe he resents Snake too.
The hornets come. He knows Snake survives that fall too.
-- --
After she strikes him, he follows her, like a dog that has been scolded. At Groznyj Grad, he sticks to her side. When they are alone, he speaks.
“My name is Adamska.” He tells her, and he expects some sort of reaction out of her. She gives him none.
“I know who you are.” She cracks a knuckle, and then another. Her gaze is fixed over his shoulder, out the window and into the night. She seems irritated, like this moment is an inconvenience to her.
“You don’t care?”
“We have a mission,” she answers. Now, she looks at him. Her gaze is piercing, much in the same way that Snake’s is. He wonders if he learned it from her. They both have a sharpness to them that Ocelot feels genetics failed to give him. “ You have a job to do.”
Ocelot swallows, kicking his feet at the concrete and leaving a scuff. “It’s too late, isn’t it?” He asks her, not really looking up from the floor.
There are lines etched deeply into her face, and they deepen when he finally does glance at her. “You’re a soldier. We are soldiers.”
“So?”
“So be one.” She leaves.
Ocelot shivers. It figures. Snake is her son, not him.
-- --
He isn’t sure when his interest in Snake turns to obsession, and then to devotion, but it does.
John. He reminds himself. John John John John John John John.
He’s told two people his real name voluntarily. It makes him want to spit. He and The Boss really are just the same.
-- --
When he hears that John has retired, Ocelot can do little but laugh. A man can quit war at any time, but a snake? It has no agency. All it does is kill.
He finds Snake living in isolation. The man is trying to become a hunting guide of all things. It would make Ocelot laugh if he didn’t find it sickening. When Snake answers his door, he looks older and disheveled. Ocelot has him at gunpoint, a twisted grin on his face.
“What are you doing here?” Snake asks him.
“You’re a soldier.” Ocelot tells him.
“So?”
He could say a lot now. Mostly, he wants to fall to his knees and kiss Snake’s hands. Be a mentor to me , he wants to say. Be my mentor like my mother was to you , he wants to say.
“So be one.” He answers.
Snake peers at him through his one eye for a long moment. His gaze is piercing.
Ocelot is disarmed with little to no effort from Snake. All he can do is laugh.