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Snake isn't sure if he's caught in some kind of dream, or if he's finally met his end.
He's... somewhere. A river, but not the Hudson — this one is only waist-deep, shallow enough for him to wade through, though he's slowed to a walking pace by the muck and current. Mangroves surround him on all sides, stretching on forever, crackling and burning while embers float down like snow. There's the distant shrieking din of unfamiliar animals in the trees, but to his relief, the smell of charred flesh never hits him.
He pushes forward. To where exactly he doesn't know, just that up-river feels like the path he's supposed to follow.
After a minute or two of treading water, it starts to rain. A light drizzle at first, though it quickly turns into a steady downpour that helps to extinguish the fire lapping at the roots and branches. As the flames die down, a thick, cold fog begins to seep in between the trees, choking out the smoke and ash, and soon the only source of light comes from the occasional flash of lightning tearing through the midnight sky, punctuated by an ominous rumble.
It's eerie, but it doesn't make Snake pause. No, what does make him stop dead in his tracks is the cloaked figure rising up from the riverbed a couple feet ahead of him.
"Death is tragic... but life is miserable... don't you agree?"
The stranger floats upwards until he's hovering over the flowing waters, like a puppet suspended by invisible strings. In spite of the unnerving similarity to Psycho Mantis, he doesn't hesitate to draw his gun on the other man.
"Who are you?" Snake demands.
"A host of sorrows," comes his reply, "of which you... are one of them."
He's not sure what that's supposed to mean.
He watches as the stranger pulls off his hood, the rest of his cloak dissipating like smoke in the wind — he seems human enough, ignoring his ability to levitate. He's wearing an olive turtleneck and tactical camo pants, but there's no missing the holster strapped across his chest.
"You may call me the Sorrow. We are more alike than you may think... two souls, filled with pain, with sadness. So sad..."
By now Snake has the feeling that whatever questions he may has, he isn't going to get any useful answers from him.
But what about Hal?
He's reaching for the codec at the same moment that thought crosses his mind, tapping into the familiar frequency from muscle memory.
"Otacon, do you read me?" At first there's only garbled static before he can start to pick out Hal's voice. Even through the heavy distortion, there's no missing the frantic urgency in his tone, something that makes Snake's blood go cold.
"—ake, can you hear me?! Snake?! SN—"
"Otacon?! Otacon I'm here, what's going on?" Snake barks. But no matter how much he tries to get through to him, it's like as if his partner can't hear him on the other end, leaving him to listen to his terrified voice. Begging for him to wake up, pleading with him.
Like he just went and...
"This world... is one of sadness. Battle brings death... death brings sorrow... a tragic, fitting end... for the son of light."
Died.
"Is that why you brought me here? Because I'm dead?"
"Yes... and no," the Sorrow answers.
The Sorrow lifts a finger towards him, and in that moment a chill washes over Snake, like Death's settling its icy hands on his shoulders.
"The path you walk... has no end. Each step you take is paved with the bodies of your enemies."
He's heard those words before. He's never been the type to believe in the supernatural, but everything about this is just so... eerie.
"The living... may not hear them. Their voices... may fall upon deaf ears... but make no mistake. The dead... are not silent."
The Sorrow begins to float away, up along the river, and Snake follows him if only because there's nowhere else for him to really go.
That's when he starts to see the bodies.
No, not bodies. Ghosts. They're unfamiliar to him at first, but when he recognizes the uniforms they're wearing that apprehension turns into cold horror, and he's suddenly all too aware of just how much blood he has on his hands.
Iraq. Outer Heaven. Zanzibarland. Shadow Moses.
"Now you will know the sorrow of those whose lives you have ended."
Is that what this all this is, then? Some kind of test, or supernatural attempt at vengeance? He doesn't know.
The only thing he can do here is keep pushing forward, shoving past spirits both vengeful and benign while they shriek and howl at him, wailing their miseries, their lamentations, their rage. Their hands claw at skin and hair and sneaking suit alike, but he never feels their physical touch, just that awful sensation that can only be described as Death trying to rip his soul straight out of his chest.
Dirty Duck, Fire Trooper, Machinegun Kid, Shotmaker...
There's nothing he can do for any of them. There's no point in dwelling on the past. Or at least that's what he tells himself until he sees the silhouette of Big Boss emerging from the mist.
He knows it's not really him; the shrapnel horn and prosthetic arm are dead giveaways, not to mention that he has too many scars in comparison to the real thing, but it doesn't make seeing him again any less haunting.
The Phantom never lunges for him, nor does he say anything. He simply lets Snake pass by, watching him with a strange, unidentifiable look in his eye, before he dissolves back into the spirit fog.
Black Ninja. Running Man. Red Blaster. The Four Horsemen, Jungle Evil, Night Fright...
Curiously, the real Big Boss never makes an appearance. He's not sure what his absence means, but a part of Snake is relieved that he won't have to see and smell him burning alive again.
Sniper Wolf. Vulcan Raven. Decoy Octopus. Mantis and Liquid don't show up either, and that too is sort of relieving, though still a little worrying. Regardless he knows that whatever reason for this little trip down memory lane, the Sorrow isn't through with him quite yet.
The tide of dead dies down, save for a few stragglers here and there, from the rare times he's had to kill for Philanthropy. Since he's started working with Hal he's gone through the effort of trying to deal with his opponents non-lethally, but there have been times where he simply had no other choice.
He's getting tired. It's hard trying to avoid grasping hands when you're forced to wade through waist-deep water upstream, and even harder when your life force is slowly being sapped away with no means to stop it — because how can you fight back against something that's already dead?
There's something floating in the river ahead, ignorant to the current rushing around it while the Sorrow hovers above it. As Snake pushes forward, it becomes identifiable as a body; not a spiritual apparition but an actual body, cold and clammy and draped face-down over a piece of metallic flotsam.
He doesn't need to see the face to recognize his own corpse.
"It's time for you to wake up, rookie."
Snake barely gets a moment to process those words or whose mouth it came from before someone grabs him from behind, throwing him over their back and straight into the flowing water, and then they're on top of him, one hand pressed down over his face to keep him pinned under the surface and down into the riverbed while the other crushes his windpipe.
The dexterity and strength of his attacker, as well as the fox-like cackle filtering through the surface, is far more real and tangible than any vengeful spirit. He claws at him, gasping, water filling his mouth and throat and lunges while his body spasms and fights for breath that will never come.
He fights, because it's all he can do. It's all he knows how to do. He can see the Sorrow hovering over Frank's shoulder while his mentorpartnerlover drowns him. His vision's already starting to go dark, inky spots swimming in his vision, and in the moments before everything goes black he swears he can see another figure fade into view. A mirage of someone clad in white, blonde hair, the eyes of a warrior.
Snake fades away, and in that brief lapse between worlds, he wonders if this is what peace feels like.
Something forcibly drags him back towards life and in the next blink of an eye he's awake, rolling over onto his side and vomiting bile and river water onto the floor of the getaway boat.
He's barely aware of Hal's presence, his frantic voice, his hands on his body as he tries to evaluate his condition. It all comes rushing back to him — the mission, the tanker, the explosion, Ocelot and RAY...
"David— oh my god, oh my god you're okay, I thought I was gonna lose you and- and-"
He hates how terrified Otacon sounds, his relieved babbling and crying about how he thought he lost him, but he can't do anything to reassure him now. They aren't out of the woods yet.
"Drive," Snake rasps out between wheezing coughs, and that finally spurs his partner into action as he drives the boat back down-river, away from the burning wreck of the tanker.
(He doesn't tell Hal about what he saw that night. He doesn't want him to be even more worried than he already is — being knocked unconscious and almost drowning in the Hudson has put him out of commission for a few weeks. He still doesn't know what any of it was supposed to mean, or if it was even real. A part of him wants to believe it was just a particularly vivid nightmare, something his brain conjured up while sitting on the knife's edge between life and death.
But he also remembers the single, pristine white petal that'd been stuck to the inside of his bandana, discovered only when he'd taken it off to check for head injuries, and he wonders whether it was really a nightmare at all.)