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Hal never liked the cold. Even after spending years on Shadow Moses, the freezing temperatures never agreed with him. Dave, on the other hand, couldn’t be more content to pad around the cabin in bare feet and a t-shirt despite the merciless cold of North Alaska. How he does it without catching anything, Hal will never know.
He’s spent the better part of the day helping Dave with jobs around the cabin. Feeding the dogs - all of them practically jumping over each other to get to Hal, excited for their meal, cutting firewood - a reminder of how unfit he is, and then dinner - simple rations out of a cupboard. He must look worse than he thinks because while they’re eating Dave tells him to go lay down, he can clean up. He looks disappointed.
He lays on the mattress, on his side, facing away from the door, and closes his eyes. He’s exhausted, worn out from the day’s work but his mind races. He can’t help that feeling of failure that weighs on him tonight, heavy on his chest like water in his lungs.
He’s kept himself busy for years, running around studying and working and designing and building nuclear weapons and telling himself that it’s the right thing to do but never looking hard enough to make sure. And where has it gotten him?
He needs to stop thinking and go to sleep.
But when it’s nighttime it’s easier to get caught up thinking about things. One thought leading to another, like how he led his family to ruin. Shattered it. And ran away before he could face the consequences. Like a coward.
He shouldn’t be thinking about that. But he holds onto it. Pathetic. What type of person betrays his father? Abandons his sister? For what? To feel loved? To feel like someone will be there? And where’s Julie now? He never read her letters. Threw them out after seeing her name on the envelope. Even now, her name fills his stomach with bile, stings his throat. He killed his father so he could pretend to be an adult. How immature. How disgusting.
And what about Emma? He left her behind. If you love someone, you should be able to protect them, right? And he couldn’t. Didn’t. He can’t do anything, can he?
His face is hot, eyes burning and mouth quivering. He rubs his face with hands that will never be clean, his breathing short, uneven. He cries for the first time in a while. He’s pathetic. Tries to stifle his sobs so Dave doesn’t hear. Poor Hal, unable to deal with the real world. A failure. He cries, silently, until he can’t anymore. He’s just choking on air now, trying to control himself and failing.
He needs to sleep. Closes his eyes. Deep breaths.
Dave comes into the room a few minutes later, takes his half of the bed. The mattress dips under his weight. Hal doesn’t turn around. They decided they’re sharing the bed for practical reasons. Alaska was cold, even in the summer - if that even exists up here. Plus, it’s not like Dave had expected any visitors while he was up here. Hal had just inserted himself in, trying to get Dave to join his cause: come back to the field to destroy the Metal Gears (that he designed, that he made ) that keep popping up. Dave was polite enough to not throw him out into the snow.
Dave’s settling in now, on his back. Hal pretends to be asleep. They lay side by side in silence, the sounds of their quiet breathing filling the room. He feels sick, and wonders why Dave hasn’t told him to leave yet. Maybe it's out of pity. Maybe he can sense Hal’s weakness and knows if he tries to navigate back to society he’ll be defenseless. Defenseless like he was when his sister…
He shifts a bit, tries to get comfortable so he can fall asleep. Shake off the thoughts. It’s time to relax.
Relax he does not. He tries to think of something less bleak than his past, but he can’t think about anything else. He can’t exactly plan for the future right now. Has Dave even given his proposal a second thought? He hasn’t given a yes, hasn’t said no either. He’ll probably say no and send Hal on his merry way back to the real world, where his creation, his family’s creations, will bring the world to its knees and he’ll be powerless to stop it. Maybe Hal deserves to watch it happen. Maybe he shouldn’t have even tried to come here.
“Can’t sleep. Going for a walk,” Dave says. Could he tell that Hal wasn’t asleep?
“In this weather?” He hopes his voice doesn’t sound too raw, or uneven, or broken.
“Yeah,” he doesn’t sound shocked that Hal’s awake, “need to get my mind off some things. You can come with me, if you’re up for it.”
Hal can’t say he doesn’t want the distraction. He grumbles an agreement and gets up to find something to wear.
The cold bites at Hal’s face. The dogs are asleep in their kennels, waiting for the next day to begin. It’s mostly trees out, nothing that Hal can distinguish in the dark. Dave closes the cabin door behind them and starts walking. Hal follows.
Hal hopes they’re not going to be walking too long - he’s not fit enough to keep up with Dave on a hike - but he doesn’t ask where they’re headed and Dave offers no commentary, so he tries to keep up. He can’t really tell where they’re going but he trusts that Dave won’t take them somewhere too dangerous.
Thankfully, after a few minutes they reach a clearing. There’s a small pit in the ground and a thick, sturdy log next to it. There’s less trees crowding the sky and when Hal looks up he can see the moon and stars shining brightly in the black night. Dave dusts the snow off the log and sits down, patting the spot beside him, an invite for Hal to sit next to him.
They might sleep on the same mattress at night, but somehow this feels much more intimate. Like he’s learning about Dave, what he likes about the world, instead of what Hal sees hiding behind a computer screen.
They sit in silence for a while, gazing at the dark sky. There’s no light pollution like there is in the city, so all the stars are visible, little white lights that twinkle against the sky. Hal doesn’t hate it as much as he thought he would. It’s peaceful; there’s no wind, and the night is quiet.
“Do you know any constellations?” Dave asks him. Hal points at the big, white star in the sky, “that’s the moon.”
Dave laughs, loud and genuine, and when he stops laughing he’s looking at Hal with amusement glimmering in his eye.
“That’s the moon,” he agrees, “it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he adds, quietly. Hal nods.
“I think I can see, uh, the big dipper,” he points upward and a bit to the left, “which I know is part of Ursa Major. The bear constellation, right? I can’t see Ursa Minor though.”
Dave hums thoughtfully at this. He reaches into his pocket and fishes out his pack of smokes, half empty already. Gets the lighter out of his pocket and lights one up. Usually Hal would complain, give him a lecture about the many effects smoking has on your health and how it smells awful, Dave, but tonight he doesn’t have it in him.
Dave points next to where Hal was gesturing, “looks like Ursa Minor.” Hal follows his finger and sees the spoon-shaped constellation. “You can see those two all year long,” Dave adds.
“Huh,” Hal had never given constellations much thought - didn’t need to, he spent most of his time inside - but Dave clearly had, “are there any other ones you can see all year?”
“Cassiopeia’s visible year round, but I can’t see it right now,” Dave peers at the sky, searching for something, “it’s shaped like a W , it’s not hard to recognise when you know what you’re looking for.”
Hal tries to look for Cassiopeia. He sees what Dave’s pointing at, he thinks. When he points it out Dave nods in approval, “that’s the one. Next to her is the hero Perseus. You can only see him around this time of year.”
Hal might not know much about constellations, but his Greek mythology knowledge is solid. “Perseus? He slayed Medusa the Gorgon! Hunted her down to an island and used the reflective shield given to him by Athena to reflect her petrifying gaze. Then he beheaded her and stored her head in a knapsack, because her gaze could still petrify even though she had been killed. That’s where we get the word petrifying from, by the way, it comes from the Latin ‘petra’ meaning stone; when you’re scared, you go still like you’re being turned to stone.”
Dave hums at this, watching Hal as he talks. There’s a small smile on his lips, Hal notices, but he looks back up into Dave’s eyes as he continues.
“Basically, the king of Argos had a daughter, Danaë, but was disappointed that he didn’t have a male heir. When he was warned by the Oracle at Delphi that his own grandson would kill him one day, he kept his daughter in a bronze tower in order to stop her from having a child. But, she was impregnated by the god Zeus anyway. That’s how Perseus was born.
“Because he didn’t want to upset the Gods by killing Zeus’ child, he sent Danaë and Perseus into the sea, where they washed up on the island of Seriphos. There, the fisherman Dictys took them in and raised Perseus as his own.
“The king of the island, Polydectes, fell in love with Danaë, but Perseus tried to protect his mother from his advances. The king decided to host a banquet where each guest had to bring a horse as a gift. Because Perseus didn’t have a horse, he told Polydectes he would bring whatever the king asked him to; that’s how he ended up hunting Medusa in the first place.”
Dave considers this carefully, “I got told he was put in the sky because he slayed the sea serpent Cetus, who was attacking a nearby kingdom.” He stomps out his cigarette, “it was said he was so brave fighting Cetus for someone else that he was given a place in the stars forever.”
“That was when he was returning to Seriphos,” Hal tells him, “the queen of Ethiopia boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the sea nymphs that accompany Poseidon - called the Nereids - and he was so angry that he flooded Aethiopia and sent Cetus to destroy the kingdom!
“An oracle said that the only way to calm Poseidon would be to sacrifice the king’s daughter, Andromeda, so they chained her to a rock on the shore. Perseus came to her rescue and beheaded Cetus, then married Andromeda. Isn’t that romantic, Dave?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
They lapse back into comfortable silence. Hal goes back to looking at the sky, trying to make shapes out of the stars. Dave pulls out another cigarette and struggles to light it. Hal takes the lighter out of his hands and does it for him, earning him a quiet thanks. He looks at Dave’s face again, stuck on how the moonlight illuminates those cheekbones, and finds Dave looking right back at him.
The eye contact is too much, Hal has to break it and look away into the trees, the sky. Dave goes on smoking his cigarette. There’s something more between them than just a few inches of distance, Hal realises, and one day he’ll do more than look. But not tonight.