Chapter Text
If Halle Emmerich was in an anime, she’d be one of the side characters sitting in the back of the classroom, hidden in the shadows. Not anyone particularly noticeable.
And that was just how she liked it.
Too much attention meant people like Julie, who still tried to get her to respond to her letters and emails. Halle didn’t bother. Not after opening one out of boredom once and reading about how E.E. thought that Halle hated her for what had happened that fateful day, in their backyard pool.
Attention also meant dealing with people who wanted something she couldn’t give, whether it was the leering men at the internet cafes she’d lurk in after the Incident, or the men at MIT trying to score a quick fuck by flirting with the only available girl in the program. And bonus points if they managed to get some free code off of her when they did, right?
She was flattered, at first. Men, showing her attention? Most men didn’t find girls like her worth their time. She wasn’t sexy, not like a pin-up girl or some Hentai character with a tiny waist and big bust - and that was what men liked, right? Not girls like her - mousy at best, with round coke-bottle glasses and scraggly hair thrown into a messy ponytail at the nape of her neck.
With her awkward, lanky frame and tendency to hunch in on herself at all times, it was no wonder to her that people only called her pretty when they wanted things from her.
Some would even go on to tell her that she was beautiful. They even got her to believe them sometimes, despite the fact that she’d much rather be called beautiful by a pretty girl than another horny MIT geek, and she was so starved for attention that she went along with it half the time.
(Julie had always called her beautiful. Called her mousy gray hair unique and special, her bony limbs and soft curves adorable. But these men were nothing like Julie. Julie at least bothered to pretend she loved her after she had Halle fuck her.)
Sometimes, even the occasional pretty girl would make her believe she was worth a damn. But soon after, they’d drop her like hot coal when she inevitably panicked after the first kiss. She could hold hands and go on cutesy dates with girls all day, but the feeling of soft lips meeting her own only reminded her of everything she'd fucked up.
(Julie’s lips had always felt unreasonably soft, despite her lipstick. Halle remembered that she always had to wipe it off her lips before Huey came back, the red staining them like blood.)
In her opinion, being left high and dry was the least she deserved for being the cause of Huey’s death and causing Julie to seduce her. For almost killing E.E. and tearing her whole family apart. To her, she didn’t deserve to be loved, no matter how much she craved it.
Not after what she did.
But that didn’t mean she had to put up with being used, either. Not when someone stealing her ideas would lead to her being kicked out of MIT and losing her housing and food with it. And why else would any of the students at MIT want her besides her brain? They all knew she had plenty of brains to spare and nothing else worthwhile to give.
So Halle decided it would be best to lurk in the background. The freaking FBI only caught her hacking into their database because she’d been especially careless one day. If she had actually slept the two nights before instead of trying to dig up everything she could, she probably would still be working there to this day, fading into the background like strangely colored wallpaper.
Hell, she may have been the head developer for Armstech's part of Metal Gear REX, but even her own coworkers didn’t think that she was actually the Doctor Emmerich when they first met her. They thought she was just some other lab tech wandering around, serving coffee to the harried scientists and carting around materials.
Robotics was a men’s field. Never mind that her parents had only met because her mother was a roboticist, or that her father had groomed her to follow in both of her parents’s footsteps. No matter how far a woman got in the field of technology, people rarely took them seriously. Never mind that it was the 21st century already, either. She’d still had to work twice as hard for the same recognition her peers got… and that was just the recognition she’d garnered through her own genius and talent, not through her father’s name and connections.
That was just how it was when one was an unassuming woman with a doctorate in a STEM field.
Oh, well. She didn’t care what all of the sexist old men she worked with thought of her, as long as she could build her robots. She had plenty of experience ignoring them and what they thought of her, anyway. And even more experience blending into the background.
She’d almost managed to the day the revolt had happened.
Almost.
But the members of FOXHOUND weren’t elite soldiers for nothing. They saw through her in a mere matter of minutes. And as of then, she hadn’t done anything worthwhile besides making one of the terrorists boom with laughter at her quivering knees and teary face, while their leader gave her an especially disgusted glare.
So there she was, stuck finishing her work on REX for the people holding her and her team hostage. Sure, it was scary. But she couldn’t quite understand why the Terrorists would want a Mobile TMD finished so quickly. Maybe there was a Nuclear Missile they were trying to stop?
But, then again, why would anyone be sending a Nuke towards the middle of rural Alaska, of all places? Not even the Russians were dumb enough to target an area devoid of civilization when they could target an urban center and really make a mark.
Even then, REX was a novel prototype, designed to improve current defensive missile launching technology by leaps and bounds. Of course someone would want to get their hands on it, she thought. Why wouldn’t they want to get their hands on her baby?
All of her best projects were her babies, but she was starting to resent REX just a bit for upending her new, quiet life on Shadow Moses Island. She was just starting to open up a bit before the revolt, to do things that weren’t working on REX and indulging in her Otaku hobbies all alone in her room. She even willingly socialized with her team outside of work and meals, for long enough to learn that one of the other scientists was as big of a fan of anime as she was, if not even more of one. But now…
Now, the only respite she had was burying herself into work and hoping for the best. Because if she didn’t… there wouldn’t be anything left of her to hope.
Halle was too scared to approach the wolfhounds at first. Often, she'd see the soldiers limp back from the cave Sniper Wolf kept them in with fresh bite marks, even despite all the layers they wore to withstand the bitter cold.
But Sniper Wolf was always gentle with her dogs, even if she was one of the terrorists that took over the base. And after Halle had expressed interest in helping with the dogs, Halle liked to think she was almost gentle with her, too. She did give Halle a handkerchief with her scent on it so she could gain the trust of the pack, and even put her in charge of feeding them. That counted as being nice, right?
Halle had always loved dogs. Huey never allowed her to get one despite her pleading, but she would always go around and coo over every dog she saw around just to spite the man. So any opportunity to be near a dog was golden, in her book. They were just so cute! Why wouldn't anyone want to go up to one and bury their hands in all of that thick, soft fur?
She couldn’t help but fall in love with Sniper Wolf just a little bit after seeing how she treated her pack. Why wouldn’t anyone be attracted to a beautiful woman who treated animals with kindness? She didn’t even care that Sniper Wolf was a terrorist and that logically, she probably would put Halle down with little to hesitation if Halle defied her. She was nice to both her and her animals, and it had been a long time since Halle had met a woman who had actually wanted her around for something else besides high expectations she’d never hope to meet.
Maybe one day, she hoped, Wolf would treat her just as gently as she did her dogs. She thought that would be especially nice, after everything.
Halle tended to lose control of her bladder when she was especially stressed.
It was a blessing and a curse - it had saved her butt a few times when someone saw her as an easy target in a bad part of town. After all, if she wet her pants, then whatever mugger would always get too grossed out to keep trying anything. So she’d hobble away, wet pants chafing at her thighs, before collapsing elsewhere and having yet another panic attack about narrowly escaping imminent doom.
But maybe having a panic attack in front of the crazy Cyborg with the katana while sitting in a puddle of her own piss wasn’t exactly the best idea.
But hey, it was Halle’s funeral.
Literally, since the Cyborg was definitely about to kill her.
And then he had shown up, drawing the Cyborg’s attention away from her.
The Cyborg spouted some BS one liners about how all he wanted was to fight this guy to the death, and all she could think was “This is just like one of my Animes!”
She might have even said that aloud, judging by the look her rescuer gave her.
Whoops.
As soon as the newcomer and the Cyborg were distracted by their fight, she turned tail and hid in the nearest locker before continuing to panic about how the Cyborg would most definitely try to kill her if this guy didn’t beat him. Which was fairly likely, since she doubted any soldier, despite performance-enhancing Nanomachines being the new military standard, could actually beat a Cyborg in a fight.
So she’d accepted her death then and there. She supposed she deserved to die, even if she had just started trying to make up for her sins and using her scientific knowledge for good. At least REX would live on when she died, right? That was nice. She’d have something going for her, at least.
She heard a strange, distorted scream, and then quiet footsteps approaching the locker she was hiding inside.
She tried to take a deep breath and brace herself for what was sure to be a painful death, but she could barely breathe through the tightness in her chest. She was going to die, she was going to die, she was going to die -
Whoever was approaching knocked on her locker.
“Hey, are you coming out of there?” the soldier said gruffly. And it was definitely him, since he wasn’t rambling and his voice wasn’t distorted to high Heaven and back.
She opened her mouth to speak, hoping for once that she’d actually have something worthwhile to say, but ended up just letting out a pathetic whimper.
“Are you… okay?” the soldier asked.
Obviously, she wasn’t okay. But he probably knew that.
“Here. Uh… I’m going to open the door. You’re safe now, alright? He’s gone.”
The door opened, and Halle looked up at her rescuer with teary eyes.
The man cocked his head, taking her in. He didn’t seem too impressed, which tracked. She doubted any self-respecting military man would find anything worthwhile in some nerdy Otaku engineer with a pants-wetting issue.
He sighed and helped her up, leading her towards one of the room’s shitty chairs - which she sank onto with little grace, taking deep breaths and adjusting her glasses while trying not to think about just why her pants were sticking to her thighs.
“So. Doctor Emmerich, right?”
Halle nodded.
“Huh,” he said, looking her up and down critically. “You know, I expected you to be some old guy with a scruffy beard and bad breath, not a cute, nerdy chick…”
Halle gave him a funny look.
This had to be some sort of joke, right? Maybe in an anime, the hero would flirt with the girl he’d just rescued and they’d ride off into the sunset, happily ever after. But this was real life, not one of her shows. She wasn’t anything like one of those girls, and this man probably wasn’t too concerned about picking up the nearest available girl anyway.
“You don’t have to pretend to be interested in me to get me to tell you what I know, you know,” she ended up murmuring. “It’s nice of you to pretend, but I think we both know you’re not.”
“Uh, well, I didn’t really mean it that way,” the soldier said awkwardly, “Trust me, you’re not my type."
“Oh. Okay. Good,” she said, taking a deep breath to steady herself under her rescuer’s unyielding stare. It seemed a bit familiar. In fact, it was almost a dead ringer for how Liquid Snake, the terrorist leader, would look at her when she fumbled while giving him a status update. Upon looking closer, she could definitely see the similarities between the two men.
But she definitely knew this man wasn’t him. For one, his hair was the wrong color and length, and his voice was completely different, gruffer and lacking Liquid’s British accent. And for the other thing, his chest was covered with more than just a battered trench coat. Maybe the man happened to have a moderately less evil twin brother?
Yeah, that’d be the day.
She pushed up her glasses and looked him in the eye.
“So, what do you want to know?” she asked.