Archive of Our Own ^beta

He's never been good with grief. There's something about it that is horrible and aching and burning and it makes him realise that he isn't all cold hard edges and the steel of a revolver barrel.

It's the day after Christmas, 1999, and Adamska is drunk. He's also clutching a smoke-stained coat, and if she didn't know better, Eva could swear he had been crying.

She leaves him on the couch not by choice but because she passes out after the third bottle of gin.

He had gotten the call halfway through Christmas Eve when he'd been about to get on a plane to Berlin. No rest for the wicked. Adam had shoved his way back out of the line (he hated being in civilian clothes) and picked up his cell phone, a little brick thing from Nokia that didn't break no matter what you did to it.

"What," he snapped down the line.

"Your plane ticket was voided. You're getting on a different flight."

Zero was ninety and didn't look like he was kicking the bucket any time soon. He sure didn't sound like it over the line, his voice was still as British and reedy as it had ever been.

"Why."

"You're going to Zanzibar Land. By dawn you'll have a John Doe to pick up. Get it back here." The line clicked off.

Adam stood there, holding the cell phone numbly in one hand. He stared across the San Francisco airport terminal at a shitty souvenir store, showing off 'Save Me San Francisco' t-shirts and crappy mugs and bad plastic toys. There was music, over there. And light. He turned back to the plane. The woman stood standing, staring, waiting for him. He slowly put his phone back in his bag.

"It seems I had the wrong flight," he said to her, walking over, with his best disarming smile. She paused, and then smiled back. "If there's anyone else who needs to get on, just give them my ticket." It was a first class ticket. He handed it to her. She took it.

Adamska turned away and shoved his passport into the inner pocket of his suitcoat. It said his name was Frank West, 53 years old, born in Wyoming. That wasn't his name. Or his age. Or where he was from.

He didn't care. He walked across the terminal to the souvenir shop and let the overly bright lights and tinny Beach Boys music assault his eyes and his ears. His laptop bag was heavy on his shoulder. He put his hand on his hip.

He wanted his gun. He wanted a target. He wanted a live man, not a dead one. Instead, he clenched his fist in his pocket, closed his eyes, let out a slow breath and scanned the shelves. He needed something to take his mind off of things.

There was a rack of those shitty plastic keychains with names on them. Adam paused and stepped closer. He idly spun it. There was one. Adam 

He pulled it off. And looked downward.

There was one. Eva.

He pulled it off, and spun the rack around and looked at the J section. Jack. James. Jeremy. Jim. Jimmy. Johann, for some goddamn reason. 

John.

For a long moment Adamska paused, and then he pulled off the John tag. He grabbed a bag of cashews and a bottle of water, since he figured whatever plane flight he was getting rerouted on by the man that ruled the world probably wouldn't be taking off any time soon. He paid with a credit card and a flashy smile that was all lies to the girl running the cash register—she had to have been about fifteen. Sixteen, maybe. In High School. She had braces, and short dirty-blonde hair that was pixie cut close to her head, with one red streak dyed in her bangs. 

He'd never understood dyeing your hair for aesthetics. Changing hair colours was for missions, disguises, and death wishes about getting shot. The more average you looked, the less you had to worry about.

The irony of the fact that he was a man in his mid fifties with a whiteblond cowboy moustache and greying hair that reached his shoulderblades when he left it down was not totally lost on him. Right now, his hair was tied up in a loose ponytail at the back of his head, draping over one shoulder. It kind of ruined the businessman look, even if at the moment his spurs were in his luggage. Even he wasn't that dramatic; he could travel without drawing attention to himself.

Mostly.

"Have a nice day," the girl mumbled. Her nametag stated that her name was Jeannie. Adamska filed it away with the thoughtlessness of how he filed everything away, little scraps of information to be kept just-in-case and forgotten in the tightlylocked file drawers of his mind. He took his stuff and left to find a wall of cheap television sets displaying the next outbound flights, looking for something close to the border, clearly, since Zanzibar Land had a UN ban on traveling into the country (Adam didn't blame them). It wasn't hard to find a flight that was chartered to the middle of nowhere, South Russia. Who cared about the destination—he wasn't going to where the flight was landing anyway 

Wandering through, looking for the terminals, Adamska eventually found the gate with the flight. It seemed to have about half the people travelling already piled into the seats, and he sat down between an elderly Russian woman knitting with wooden needles and a young boy, playing with toy trucks. The boy's parents cooed to him in soft Russian.

Adamska closed his eyes, mechanically ripped open the bag of cashews, and ate them without tasting them. He couldn't taste anything at the moment. Just ash. He listened to his own heartbeat, and thought about how to clean a gun. 

Before that moment it had never occurred to Ocelot that maybe Zero could trust him too much.

The flight to Russia was one that he didn't even feel. He was awake the whole time, by preference (he never slept well on planes, never slept well anywhere) but was nothing near tired when they set down at the airport. It was an unimpressive ticket that Zero had managed to secure him and he'd picked up at the gate back in America, somewhere in economy, and he didn't care.When they landed he slowly made his way out of the plane in the crush of people, hardly looking where he walked, moving mechanically.

The entire trip out of the airport was one that he took like a dead man. Walk to the luggage, get his bag (helpfully rerouted by his contacts). No rental car. He just went back out to find that there was a man holding a sign that said West held by a soldier badly pretending to be a civilian. Adam walked over, and Ocelot stopped in front of the stranger.

"I am Frank West," he said it in quiet, controlled Russian. The man nodded and put his sign away.

Ocelot tossed the empty bag of cashews and the tags with names on them into the nearest bin, and followed.

No limo for him, just a sand-coloured jeep. In the driver's seat the soldier, well-trained, drove silently without moving more than his hands, feet, or eyes. Ocelot sat in the passenger seat, reassembling his guns. Barrel locked in, check the hammer. Trigger pull once, just to make sure it was aligned right, the click of it while empty. His holsters, belted on already. Into each one he slipped a revolver, sitting easy. His spurs, clicked onto his boots, and then he tapped down the sun visor and fixed his hair back with gentle fingers, all mechanical.

The car came to a halt after about an hour and a half and Ocelot opened the door, strapped on his bandolier and settled it around his belt, running his fingers along the top of it to see if there were bullets in every slot. There always were. You could hide a lot from the limited, mediocre airport security if you knew what you were doing. If you were internationally wanted. If you were in the one business that never went out of style—death.

The soldier got out of his side of the truck and settled himself standing in front of it, his gun hanging from his shoulder. Ocelot ignored the man as he slid into his duster and flattened it down to settle it around his body to hang comfortably.He pulled an old, worn hat from the pocket of his duster and settled it onto his head (it had seen better days; no longer red, now some odd sort of sad, lost brown that did not more than shade his eyes) before he slipped on red gloves that had been new thirty years ago, old leather worn thin until there was hardly anything left to it but the bare pads over his fingers.

That was all that he needed.

They moved on in silence, until they came to some location where the soldier stopped of his own accord, frozen in place. Ocelot stopped with him and reached down to caress the handle of his left-hand revolver mindlessly, feeling the slow curve of the metal beneath his fingers, and thought about the last time he had been here. It had been several years before, involved a lot of foot travel, but it had been worth it to see their mind-child and the smile on his face.

The smile that had taken him back thirty years, to before missing arms and missing eyes, when the inside of his heart was a warm, lost, naïve thing. Before Ocelot had done his part to harden the man into the branded scowl and the ruined musculature he was now. Or had been.

He had been back one time since, and that was when he had dragged him free of a wrecked building, staunched the blood that flowed so freely from his chest while he kept taking feeble, shaking breaths, staring into space.That was where his scarf was gone, now. Ruined by blood, more blood than any man should have to bleed in their lifetime, as he had kept staring him in the eye and saying you smug fucking bastard don't you dare die on me like this; keep your eyes open; keep them open or I swear I'll put another bullet in you to really worry about. 

He had survived. Barely. If the trade off was him or a scarf that Ocelot had only much later realised was one of the few things he had of his mother, he would trade him in a heartbeat.

And now he was back again.

He stopped rubbing the metal of his revolver. The soldier looked to him, lost almost, and Ocelot tilted his head at the ground. "Wait here," he commanded, terse. "I assume it's done." The soldier looked restless. Had he been loyal? Had anyone ever been loyal?

Ocelot was loyal. Ocelot might be. Ocelot must. He was the would, could, should, did, had, was, always. He would be loyal to his bones until the day he died, and the blood that wasn't on his hands but could be on his hands would haunt his soul until someone did him the same favour, of whatever kind, and put him in the grave permanently.

"Yes," the man said, finally.

"Wait." Ocelot commanded. Then, alone, he started down the rocky outcropping, grabbing sand and stones with thin-gloved hands, sliding down the gravel on the solid soles of his boots.

He could see smoke, sitting there on the horizon. It billowed into the air. It didn't smell like anything, not at this distance. It would smell when he got closer.

At the base of the cliff he found a white horse tethered, waiting for him, with a two day supply of water and food. The irony left a bitter taste in his mouth, metallic, like the carbon-burn after you fired a gun too close to your face, the vicious oxide that haunted his veins instead of blood. 

He mounted the horse and rode.

By the time he was really out into the empty desert the sun had set and it was cool, cool enough to stay alive with occasional swigs of water and the occasional stop for the horse. When he got close enough to the perimeter that he could see where the kid they had made into their scapegoat had escaped—the ruined fence, the dead bodies that marked his path—he dismounted.Perhaps for the memory of another horse that had seen too much bloodshed. Perhaps for himself. 

Standing idly by and watching his mother die, helping her die, contributing in his own way to the final, permanent blow had been hard enough. At least for that there had been a reason; he had known that then.

There was no reason for this. There was no rhyme, there was no logic.

This was senseless.

Ocelots were loners, they cared for themselves and when they had them, for their mates or their kits. He had no mate, no kits. Not any more. He was nobody's puppet, and yet he was. He hated it so, it rankled with his body. But there was no choice. He did his job. 

Maybe in the end he would be the one who got to pull the final trigger, if he could dream. Ocelot had always assumed that dubious honour would fall to him, to he who had started it all with a gunshot in a field of flowers. But now, it was, of course, clear. 

It was no honour. It was a burden.

And, like all the burdens they had gained through the years, it would fall to his shoulders to be the one to carry out the final blow. It was Ocelot's job to leave with hands so bloody they made his red gloves moot, and his job to be as much the martyr in white as she had been, but for the red hole gaping in her chest.

He had refused.

And thus why Ocelot had ended up here.

The kid had done a thorough job, that much he had to admit. The remains of Outer Heaven reminded Ocelot of Groznyj Grad, only the bodies weren't just sleeping. They were dead and gone for good; he hadn't used a tranq. He was his father's son, though. Shots were made to kill. Bodies were left in innocuous places. Everything was efficient, effective, deadly, and even better than the last time Ocelot had climbed through his wreckage to find the one person he had left behind.

He took the time to do what the boy had not done. He closed the eyes of men that died with them open. He gave them back their guns. Zero might hold his hands tied with the very chains that he himself had built, but there was one thing Zero didn't hold—the fact that he could still give honest men who had earned it some sort of final rest.

There was no hurry, after all. He wasn't going to be greeted by a man desperately gasping, leaning against a wall, two fingers shoved into a bullethole in his chest inches from his heart, in a pool of blood, half-way unconscious but alive enough to keep whispering his name over and over again as they waited for a helicopter to land. This time he didn't know what kind of man would greet him; but it sure wouldn't be a live one. 

There was no point running until he couldn't breathe, until he couldn't see, when there was no blood to staunch.

Zero didn't make mistakes twice.

Climbing the stairs of buildings deserted by their guards or wiped out by a kid with a gun, Ocelot followed the plan laid out in his head to get deeper and deeper in. He could guess where he was headed by the plume of smoke, smoke that smelled like flesh and burned metal. He kept one hand on his revolver in case he needed it, but nothing living hopped out to greet him. It was all ghosts, quiet whispers against the back of his mind that led him deeper and deeper. They whispered of pain, of quick bone-breaking, of footsteps, of death. They whispered on the edge of his eyes, just like they always had where there was too much death.

They had visited Japan, just once. They had been in Hiroshima for maybe fifteen minutes before they hit him like a tidal wave and he had ended up on the ground heaving by some steps where a sooty outline was permanently charred into the stone, screaming hoarsely over and over again as they ripped apart his mind, screamed their broken fear and pain, tried to find their revenge, rip through his body, speak to him of the devils that had left them like this.

He had been dragged out of the city by strong arms, and spent the next two days curled in some cheap hotel heaving helplessly and having fever dreams about imagined firestorms and bombs while he had whispered quiet promises that it would pass.

Here they were quieter.

Soldiers were always quieter.

It was because they resigned themselves to death right away, right at the start.

Ocelot followed the whispers. There slowly got to be more of them, until he finally reached the hangar, and felt a twisting in his gut. He knew what he had to do, what he had come here to do. The door had been all-but ripped off of its hinges and he stepped inside the room, pushing it out of his way. The wrecked remains of what had probably once been a Metal Gear were collapsed on the floor, and around them a massive char stain, fire had caught and spread. It was quiet; the quiet that always sits with death, hand in hand. He could feel the weight of it like he always did, almost like what some people would name pressure in their ears, his legacy he had never asked for.

Ocelot approached. His footfalls on the ground were slow, methodical, the click-chink of bootheel and spur one after the other. He pulled one revolver just in case he needed it—he knew that he could outshoot anything that might move in here. Even this upstart brat. Unlike some people, he had never seen anything to be gained from a fair fight. If he was going to do battle, he was going to do it his way.

A bullet between the eyes. Theatrics, in this room, could be damned. Still, it was a nervous habit, and he spun his revolver in his right hand, slowly, never fast. Slowly like the way he walked, over to the centre of the char mark.

Of course. Only his son would run out of ideas and then resort to lighting something on fire. Ocelot would have saved his last shot, run until the bastard was out of bullets, and put one in his knee and then broken the neck. Flames were the weapon of an amateur who didn't know how to plan yet. Effective. Disgusting. Pointless.

They had done their work though. Ocelot approached with trepidation, and stopped when he got close enough to see the scene.

An aerosol spray can and a lighter had been abandoned. Now he was just more ticked than before—that was even messier. You couldn't control a spray like that. Not to mention, it wasn't hot enough to make it a quick death.

The cold feeling like lead in his gut was the knowledge that he had died suffering, slowly, as he lost oxygen. The fire wouldn't have been hot enough to kill him. Just maim him, char him, destroy his body. Slowly. He wouldn't have been engulfed by it. It would have been a drawn-out, awful process as the kid slowly burned him to a crisp and he suffocated, choked by the aerosol fumes and the lack of oxygen, starved to death by noxious gasses and carbon monoxide.

That was not the way that he was supposed to die.

Before he did anything else in the room, Ocelot went back outside and just let his roiling stomach do what it wanted—he threw up in the sand by the hangar, wiped his mouth clean, and ignored the aftertaste rather than waste his water. It was better than dealing with this all through a twisting stomach; even prepared for something like this it would still leave him feeling ill.

There was death, and then there was senseless, disgusting death. This was what that was.

He had a memory, of about ten years before, when they had been together in Hawaii for about a week. It had been when he was starting to feel his age, and Ocelot had worried about him for about two days and then been shown in no uncertain terms that he had absolutely nothing to worry about.

That night, laying in the darkness, listening to the creak of crickets, the slap of waves on the shore, the whisper of wind in the trees, and the sound of nighttime animals, he had spoken, quietly.

"You know that when everything is said and done, Zero's going to put me in an early grave."

"You're past the point of an early grave now," was all Ocelot had responded. His shoulders had shaken with a small bout of laughter. "If Zero wanted you dead that much, he probably would have told me to shoot you the next time I laid eyes on you."

"Did he?" He had turned over then, one blue eye visible in the moonlight through the window, open but for netting. Ocelot had smiled.

"No."

"Are you lying?"

"No." It had always amazed him, to be trusted despite the fact that he was untrustworthy as a viper. But, Ocelot had been given it, from just one man, and in spades. He wasn't worthy of it.

"Good." He turned away again then, and Ocelot shifted closer after a moment to wrap around his back, their bodies tucked together—one bulky with bunched muscle, shifting under the skin with every breath, a broad chest, too many scars, one replacement arm. The other all wiry corded muscle, thin, lithe, whip-fast. They fit in a way that he had never fit with anybody else.

"Why are you asking?"

"Because I know he's going to. If not now, later. Eventually I'll be too much of a liability. That man was always been an easy read." Ocelot could hear the scowl in his voice, but knew he was right. Zero was a hell of a planner, but he had never been all that good at disguising his thoughts. Not like Ocelot was, not like Eva was. "I don't know what he'll do, but I doubt it will be good." He got quiet then, for so long that Ocelot thought he had fallen asleep. But then—

"Whenever he decides to get rid of me, don't let him." Ocelot froze for a moment, his fingers splayed around his stomach, before he whispered,

"What do you mean? Kill Zero? Given the chance I would but—"

"No." His voice was hard. "Whenever he decides that he doesn't need me any more, I want you to put a bullet between my eyes. I want to die with a gun in my hand beside a friend in battle. I don't want to die in whatever way he'll make it happen. It won't be right." He paused, and swallowed thickly, and set his remaining hand on top of Ocelot's, squeezed his fingers. 

"Besides, you've been itching to do it for more than twenty years. Might as well let you be the one to finish it."

Ocelot hadn't said anything then.

He didn't say anything now.

Ocelot stood and walked back into the hangar. He held tight to his revolver, grounded himself on it. He did a cursory search first—there was nobody hiding anywhere in the wreckage waiting for him with a gun (or an aerosol can and a lighter). There was nobody at all. Finally, he didn't have any more choice.

He turned back to the char mark and walked into it. The soot scraped off under his boots as he approached the centre of the mark and stopped, stock-still, frozen in his tracks.

He realised, abruptly, that he was crying. Ocelot stopped and wiped his eyes off on his other sleeve, but it was pointless. The tears just kept coming, silent and slow. 

He found he didn't care.

Ocelot walked closer and stopped above the body tossed there, like a bomb in the middle of its blast radius, and stared down at John. He wasn't Naked Snake, he wasn't Big Boss. Not like this. Like this he was John.

When a man died you gave him his name. 

John looked like hell. Not really surprising, considering what his son had done to him. He was sprawled on the floor, his body still mostly intact. His eyes were closed, maybe done by David, maybe he closed them on his own. It was hard to know. It had been long enough now that the rigour was just beginning to set in, and he was splayed the way he had fallen. Ocelot felt his heart clench.

John was almost unrecognisable. The entire left side of his face was burned off—plus a blast on the right side that he knew had to have come from the man smoking a cigar as he died (really?). His body was charred all over on the left, his right half mostly intact. He had kept his good eye on his son, all the way until the very end. Smart man. His shirt was ruined tatters still barely around his right hand and arm, his pants burned to shreds, his boots melted rubber and singed leather. Almost all his thinning grey hair was gone, so was his beard. His eyepatch strap had been fried by the fire—it left the empty scarred socket of his bad eye visible, and the same old twinge of guilt hit Ocelot, but lighter than it always had before.

John was dead now. He couldn't be blamed for that any more.

He crouched slowly, and rolled John onto his back. His body wasn't entirely stiff yet—he was still able to move. "You old bastard," he said, quietly, after a moment, smoothing back the remaining unburned hair, and then sighed. "At least it wasn't a bolt of lightning."

Ocelot had dealt with dead men before. He would deal with dead men again. He did the requisite clean up with some of the supplies he got when he retrieved his horse, and then hauled John's body up and swore under his breath, "What the hell have you been eating, bricks?" because he weighed more than Ocelot remembered, and then did his job.

He dragged John down to the morgue, pushed him into one of the preserving boxes, and settled down to wait.

He didn't wait in the morgue.

That was too much.

Instead, he waited outside, let the cool desert night fall around him, and smoked a cigarette while he leaned on one of the railings. Closed his eyes, listened to the spirits, and waited for dawn.

Christmas Day dawned like all other weather in the desert dawned—disgustingly hot and dry. Ocelot celebrated the only way he could: he sat next to John's body in the morgue and had a cigarette. He left an extra one on the ground and let it burn down to a stub. For John.

"Merry Christmas," he said, to himself. "My present is you finally being out of my hair."

He didn't mean a word of it.

The helicopter didn't arrive until that evening, just as the sun was starting to set. It landed slowly in the sandy courtyard just in front of the hangar, and Ocelot stood waiting for it. It wasn't Zero coming for him, he was too old to travel, even for this. Instead, it was Sigint. Donald. Whatever.

"I didn't know he'd sent you," the DARPA chief said, and Ocelot made himself smile. It was cracked and he felt like it should have been bleeding, but it was believable.

"I'm just sad I got here after the deed was done. Would have liked to finish it myself." Sigint looked at him, and then shook his head slightly.

"I don't even want to know." He pushed past Ocelot to walk toward the hangar and then paused. "Where is he?" 

Ocelot jerked a finger over his shoulder. "Morgue." He didn't say anything else, but watched Sigint walk off with the team of people he'd brought and stood there with his hands hooked into his holsters. Ocelot waited, as he was so good at, frozen and patient. He listened to the wind, and hated himself for doing this. Whatever they wanted John's body for, it wasn't good. And here he was, just waiting for them to pick it up, take it and walk away.

What was he supposed to do? Shoot the lot of them and commandeer the helicopter and then fly away and find Eva? John was dead. Dead and gone. He would spend the rest of his life hating himself for this but—damn it—he had to do it now. They had things to do, and he wanted to someday put a bullet in Zero's head.

If he killed more of them now, he'd never get the chance.

Instead, Ocelot waited. He waited for them to bring out John in one of those awful black bodybags and then he watched them load John onto the helicopter, hands caressing his revolvers. He watched Sigint climb in, nod to him once, and close the door. Ocelot watched the helicopter take off, blades warming up to full speed slowly, and he narrowed his eyes as it rose up toward the evening sun and started back to wherever it had began. He bit his tongue.

He had done the wrong thing and he knew it. Ocelot knew he'd be cleaning up whatever mess he had just started for years before he managed to get it back the way it was meant to be. Eva would be so mad at him later, but what the fuck was he supposed to do. Not go? Not let Sigint take John? Not leave the idiot alone, defect from Zero and protect their martyr in the white flower field with his life? 

There was a taste like iron oxide in the back of his mouth. It was a taste that always accompanied failure.

Eventually the sun set fully and it started to get chilly before Ocelot went back inside to make sure there was nothing else there before he left Zanzibar Land one last time. He checked the remains of the Metal Gear, he looked around the hangar, made sure he swept John's room and office (and ended up with a few treasures for his hard work: a bandana that had belonged to his mother, an old M1911 that had belonged to his father and then to John but brought back memories of only one of them, a few tattered old photographs of himself, of John, of Eva, in different places through different years. Overwhelmingly it was pictures of Ocelot). He made sure there was nothing left to do, and then plodded back to the hangar.

If Ocelot hadn't stopped to eat dinner next to his horse, sitting in one of the few clean spaces left, looking mindlessly at the wall, he wouldn't have noticed it. As it was, he still barely noticed it; the crumpled brown cloth was tossed in a tiny corner, almost invisible behind a stack of crates.

Ocelot left his dinner and walked slowly over to it. The fight between John and his son must have ranged a lot wider than he had thought—it had just culminated in the charred floor. Here was where it had started, clearly.

He stopped in front of the cloth, knelt, and shifted to see what he had found.

It was John's jacket. His FOXHOUND jacket, the old thing he'd been wearing for years and years. It was still in good shape, though—he put in a lot on the upkeep of the thing. Slowly, Ocelot picked it up off of the ground and turned it around in his hands, before he slowly slipped into it.

It was too big for him. John had always had a couple of inches on Ocelot, even in shoes, and the jacket had been tailor-made to fit him when he was wearing boots. As Big Boss of Zanzibar Land, he didn't do a lot of sneaking missions any more; but even if he had, the man could be just as silent in combat boots as he could be barefoot. He had always been significantly more built than Adam's lean, wiry physique, so the jacket was too long and too loose. But it smelled like John, especially the collar, wrapped up around Ocelot's face.

Smelled like the heady thickness of cigar smoke, the metallic edge of weaponry, and some unidentifiable scent of earth that John had smelled like since the 60's; like he had spent so much time in field paint and in the dirt that it had been ingrained in his skin into some sort of musk. It hit Ocelot's nose like a punch to the face, and he stayed standing for about ten seconds longer before Adam hit the floor hard, pulled the coat tight around his shoulders and body, and cried into the collar like a child after a nightmare. He cried until he felt sick, cried until he couldn't cry any more. He cried until he hiccupped, until he had sobbed and screamed and he lay on the floor on his side, wrapped tightly in John's coat with its soaked collar.

Adam cried because there was nobody there but him and the ghosts of the dead, and he wasn't even good enough at sorting through them to find John's and talk to him just one last time.

Eventually, Ocelot got back up. He took the coat with him, bundled and folded and tucked into one of the large pockets inside his duster.

He tossed out his remaining food for the carrion birds, drained the rest of his water, and rode back to the soldier he'd left waiting.

If someone had asked him later, Ocelot wouldn't have been able to tell them how he got from Russia to eastern Poland. He had no memory of how he did it. He had no memory of much after he left Zanzibar Land. He just knew that late on the night of Christmas Day, he knocked on the door of an apartment. It was silent inside. He knocked again. Nothing moved. 

Adam leaned his head against the door without the eyehole and said, quietly, into the crack of it,

"Eva. Let me in."

The door opened a moment later, and they stared at each other. It had been about five years: for a multitude of reasons they didn't keep up correspondence. She looked older, her blond hair with a few grey streaks at the roots where the dye had started to fade. She was wearing a loose shirt and jeans, the most relaxed he had ever seen her. Her hair was down and long again, in a braid over one shoulder.

Her eyes were red and bloodshot, her nose swollen, her mascara running. She was holding a bottle of gin in one hand, and she stared at him. 

"How long?"

"Sunset. He'd been dead about a day." Eva stared at him for a much longer moment, and then stepped forward slowly, carefully, into his arms.

They held onto each other for what seemed like eternity as slow white flakes drifted out of the sky to pepper the top of Adam's shoulders, sink into his hair. He breathed in the scent of EVA's hair (she had a new shampoo—peach? Ginger?) and held her tight in his arms. She pressed her face into his shoulder and sobbed, silently, with great wheezing intakes of breath. He cried too, slow and quiet into her hair, there in the snow and the light from inside her apartment. 

Eventually, Eva pulled back, wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Adam paused and pulled out a handkerchief to clean his face.

"I didn't know you had tear ducts," Eva said, her voice hoarse and quiet. Adam half-cracked a pained smile.

"Neither did I."

They went inside. Eva had the news on her television, and had dragged an older, smaller one out of storage to play it in black as white from a different channel, as well as the radio. The fall of Zanzibar Land and the internationally renown Big Boss had hit almost every news station. No doubt the entire world knew of it now.

Eva poured him some gin. Adam tossed it back and held out the cup for more, and they drank in silence as the radio and the televisions played the news, tucked together on her old couch, until he finally put down the cup when he'd had enough to make his heart feel like it was on fire instead of shattered into a thousand pieces, and pulled out the coat from his duster. He slowly unfolded it and set it on his knees.

Eva reached one hand over and touched the collar.

"Why did you do it?" She asked, quiet.

"I don't know." Adam replied, hoarse. "I…really don't know. Zero told me to. So I did." He hadn't thought about why he was continuing to be a double agent, not with John dead. Now it didn't matter. Now nothing mattered. "But they have him, now."

"He's not in a coma this time," Eva said, quietly. "Is he?"

"I didn't feel a pulse." Adam stared down at the coat in his hands. "I wouldn't be surprised if they found away to get him back to life and keep him alive just a little bit longer, though."

"What would they even want with him?" Eva whispered, leaning against his shoulder. "He's charred. Fried." Her throat closed for a moment before she added, "Why did you do it?"

"If I knew, do you think I would be here crying and drinking myself sick?" Adam snarled back, and then quieted slightly, "I wish I'd shot Zero when I had the chance."

"I wish we'd all shot Zero when we had the chance. I wish we'd convinced John to break his neck years ago." Eva paused. "We had plenty of opportunity to."

"What's done is done." Adam stared at the television, muted, captions playing. Watched over and over again as they flashed photographs of Big Boss, military-quality, and the one portrait he'd had taken as dictator. There wasn't much to it. Just a bust shot of him in the stupid coat, a half-smile on his lips. If Adam looked closely, he could still see the young man hiding in that craggy, scarred face. The bright blue eyes, the mop of brown hair, the smile hidden in the corners of his mouth. 

"What will they do with him?"

"I don't want to know." Adam felt the corners of his mouth tighten. They'd know before too long. They could figure it out when the time came. "Whatever happens happens. We'll deal with it when it gets here." Just like they always had—the fine, beautiful art of improvisation. Eva was a master, so was he. John had been better than both of them; as much as Adam hated to admit it.

So for now, they drank, in silence. They drank and listened to the news until there were three empty bottles on the coffee table and Adam had to haul Eva to her bed and prop her up with pillows as she crashed into unconsciousness. He slumped on the couch after, dry-eyed but feeling like there were tears of fire caught up behind his vision, drunker than he could remember being, and for the first time in his life wishing something illogical.

He wished he had been the one to get loaded into a helicopter in a black bodybag, and John and Eva were here instead of him. They could have handled it together. John could handle anything; it came in his job description.

Adam had the sudden horrible realisation that he had never truly realised just how much of his own insanity he had put off handling until he suddenly had to deal with his locus being gone.

When John woke up, he was in an apartment, staring at the ceiling above him. There was a lot of medical equipment shoved into the corner of his vision.

He'd been in a coma twice before. It was nothing new. John knew what was coming. Still, he slid one leg out of the edge of the bed, and found that he could move on his own. He sat up. He tested his feet on the floor, and stood.

So maybe he didn't know what being in a coma was like. Or at least not this particular coma. John stumbled to his feet, checked to see if he was hooked into anything (he wasn't) and then walked to the window to look outside. 

No matter what changed, New York always looked pretty much like New York. For what felt like an eternity he stared outside, and then turned back to the apartment, one good eye roaming around to try and see what was there that might give him some clue about when he was.

Where was easy. When was harder.

And then it was there—a pile of brown cloth at the foot of his bed he recognised, and a letter. Slowly, John walked over, picked up the letter, pulled it out of the envelope, and sat down to read.

Adamska's handwriting hadn't changed a bit. 

John—

If you're reading this, Eva and I are both dead. If either one of us made it out of this clusterfuck, we planned to greet you ourselves. This has just been left here, in case neither one of us survives. 

Clearly, neither of us did.

The year is 2014. You've been in a coma for fifteen years. Sigint and Clark are dead, so are Liquid and Solidus. Solid's still alive, although I doubt he's going to last much longer. Zero's still alive. His location is at the end of this letter. He's yours. Do what you have to.

The letter went on, across another four pages in Adamska's cramped, efficient cursive. It explained fifteen missed years to John as quickly as possible, leaving out any unnecessary information, until he had a pretty clear picture of what he had missed. Of what the two people who had missed him had done to turn the world on it's head. Done, and succeeded in doing. 

When he had read the entire letter, John turned the last page over, only to see something written on the back, in Eva's American-Grammar-School cursive, impossible to miss. 

John. I'm sorry neither of us are here to see you. It's the gamble we took when we started this whole mess. 

I know Adam didn't write it because I read his letter, but you kn o w what he means. I love you, endlessly, past my grave. I know he does too.

If anything, he loves you more, and loved you first. Please take care of him. My children will take care of me.

Eventually John set aside the letter. He unfolded the cloth beneath, and found that it spilled out into his old FOXHOUND coat—much more worn that he remembered it. There were more powder burns on the cuffs than he remembered there being, and he soon figured out why. 

Adamska still smelled the same, even after fifty years. That scent was ingrained into his coat now, over where it used to smell like him. Gunpowder and gunmetal, the quiet shampoo he had always used (something herbal that John had never been able to pin down), and the quiet musk of his own body. Not to mention blood. But the blood had been ingrained long before Adam had taken the coat as his own.

Slowly, carefully, John stood and slipped on the coat. It was a little bit too short—Adam had tailored it up to fit his shorter frame but longer legs. The sleeves were cut back some as well. All over, it had been tightened; brought in to fit thinner arms and a more catlike torso, slender shoulders and strong thighs. It clung to John's skin just a hair's breadth from too tight, but he buttoned it up all the way anyway and smoothed down the cloth, adjusted the collar.

He had missed this.

He flexed his hands, felt his old muscles move. Well, not his muscles. Muscles now attached to him.

It wasn't the first time he had lost a limb. He was at least used to it.

Big Boss slowly walked to the door, slipped on the shoes left there, and then stepped out onto the helicopter pad.

There were not miles to go before he slept, but there were a few important things that had to happen. And those things…those things would happen.

And then, Adamska and Eva would be waiting for him. Just like they had been for fifteen years.