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Three years ago, staring over the hills in the rubble that was once Outer Heaven, Snake had lit a cigarette, taken out his radio and sent a final transmission, ignoring the taste of blood in his mouth.
"It's all over - " he'd forced out, "everything, at last."
Gray Fox sat on the earth beneath a scorched tree, nursing his wounds. The hostages he'd escorted free looked back at Snake with hollow-faced stares. Snake turned away, not able to give them whatever it was they wanted from him now.
"Solid Snake returning to base. Over."
He shut off the radio, hand shaking a little over the button. His eyes stung with the thick ball of smoke pouring out of the tower in the distance, the back of a beheaded animal, and he wiped the water from them with his forefinger. The adrenaline was being soaked up by his system, and he was beginning to be aware of the pain of the wounds he'd hardly noticed receiving. The blow from the augmented fist of one of the Arnold twins, the forest of bullet nicks and cuts from too many fights gone wrong, the throbbing ache of his calves from the electric floor.
The radio, he noticed, he'd set to Big Boss's frequency. It had been automatic, barely conscious, his thumb rolling the Tranciever's wheel into position independently of his mind.
Something turned in his stomach, but he swallowed it back down and headed off to the chopper site.
--
It stayed in his mind that night. Even with a hero's welcome and a line of identical salutes as he walked up the steps to his bed, he'd not been able to sleep, seeing only flashes of bullets and screaming and death which shook him from his dreams and left him staring at the ceiling, panting with exhaustion and heat and nausea. It occurred to him that even with Outer Heaven gone, his life was going to carry on. Even if Big Boss's wouldn't.
He thought for a while about quitting and burrowing deep into some wilderness where no-one could bother him. Seeing the world without the knowledge he'd have to turn a gun on it. A desert. A wasteland. Somewhere peaceful. But it was all too damn incomplete, and whenever he let the idea sit in his mind for long, his hands would ache for the smooth hardness of a cocked gun.
He decided to stay. It wasn't over.
--
John Turner was the first of his men to die. Either his life had been taken as soon as he'd entered the building, or it had happened years before he and John had ever met. The Impostor's lies became increasingly agitated and desperate, and the fear in them made Snake think about turning it off, like Big Boss had said. Three years was too long to keep playing the same game. John had shot and Snake had shot and John had staggered and died. Snake had admitted what had happened to Nick.
Neither of them had any idea what had happened, and they tossed around between them all the information they had, which was little. John Turner, from the Navy, a stealth expert far more experienced and reknowned than Snake, but placed under his command. Nick Myer claimed he didn't understand people enough to understand that John had been the Impostor - in business school he'd learned to quantify people down to their basics, view them as commodities rather than elements. It was a way of thinking that led its way to battlefield thinking, killcounts and strategy, and that had been when he'd chosen to ignore his family and join the Marines. He told Snake he'd wanted excitement that he wouldn't have found in the boardroom. He told Snake that nowadays he thought of everything as being like one of his bombs, ready to explode.
It had been just the two of them left, without John, and with Jennifer's signal blocked by the radio scrambling towers. Nick, showing his inexperience, asked Snake if they were pushing on with the rest of the mission. After all, they'd used his bomb on the mass produced Metal Gears. The Ishkabibil nuclear threat was severely reduced, if not eliminated entirely. At any time, they could summon the pilot and fly back home.
"We've got to get Jennifer out, at least," Snake said. "Not even spies like her can hide forever. For all we know, her cover might be already blown."
Nick agreed, "alright, Lieutenant," taking off his beret and wiping sweat from his shaved head. They moved on together as partners.
Together, they demolished radio towers and stole each other away through enemy patrols. Snake, arm clad in a thick metal skin of the enemy power armour, crushed walls in his way, exhilarated by the new, artificial strength. Nick had taken out his medical kit, threaded the wires tenderly into his muscle, working neatly over his shoulder with the obedience of the young soldier he was, as much as Snake insisted rank didn't mean a damn thing with only two of them left. His hands against Snake's back were the first time anyone had touched him kindly since his training with Big Boss.
On the ground floor of the castle, Jennifer had called, begging for a rendezvous on the roof. Snake agreed, shut off the radio, and turned to Nick, covered in dust and exhaustion.
"We've found her," Nick said, and beamed at Snake - "it's over. Everything, at last."
He looked so damn young, and Snake saw something of what he'd been before, and wanted it. He took Nick's body with his powered arm, and hugged him tightly. Just as he was considering how even he wasn't stupid enough to start a love scene here, Nick's mouth teased along his cheekbone, down, and to his mouth. He didn't taste of much besides blood from his wind-dried split lip.
"I'll go and meet her," Nick said, into his mouth. Snake ached against his warmth, the smell of his sweat and the bitter almonds of his bombs and the sickly truth gas on his uniform. "You secure an escape route. It's quicker if I go alone."
He was next, of course, with an apology-laded transmission and a hiss of noise. Snake had found him in person, lying face down and panting in some side room he'd staggered into to hide out of the way of the guards.
"Did I do the right thing?" he'd asked. Snake didn't have the heart to tell him he'd located him by following the trail of blood on the floor.
Jennifer was a double agent, Nick said. She'd shot him.
"Kill her," Nick begged, through blooded saliva. "Please do. Or it'll never end."
"Killing someone isn't going to end anything, except their lives."
"Snake, they've got a new one," he said, eyes pink with blood and tears. His ragged breathing hardened. "It's seven times more accurate - the technology used in the warhead is new. The mass-produced units were decoys, we made the wrong call - "
"It's him," Snake snarled, "he's the only one who had the plans - "
But it was over for Nick, and he wasn't able to say.
--
The underneaths of Snake's nails were black with blood from stealing everything on Nick's dead body; his Ingram, his bullets, a good pound of C4. His uniform was bleached from sand damage. Once again, he was staggering into Big Boss's inner heaven, half-dead and half-crazy, having pushed through too many things he was too stupid to die in. It wasn't going to be over just because he was the last one left.
"Snake," came that voice, "I hoped I'd get to see you again."
"Was that what all of this was about?"
Big Boss's mouth opened. Snake thought he heard a whirr of machinery. By now, he was tired enough that he wouldn't be surprised if he'd dreamt it.
"Don't act like you aren't grateful to see me again."
His face wasn't familiar from the end of Outer Heaven. That had been a rush, a magazine rattling against the floor, rapport stinging in his ears, and then stumbling towards the emergency exit hearing the countdown timer echo along the cement walls. His face was the story of Snake's training, back before this had all begun.
Big Boss rose. He tossed aside the black raincoat he wore, indoors, in a country with nearly no rainfall. Brilliant white machinery, stitched together with wires and gears, an ugly scar chipped into the metal underneath the coating in the s-shaped curve of a snake. Snake touched his own powered arm, concentrating on the human muscle inside.
"See?" Big Boss laughed, waving the nose of his Patriot at it as Snake uselessly clenched the artificial muscle. "Both of us were turned into machines to better perpetuate war. We are made of Metal Gears! Even if I die here, the war won't end. Countries consuming other countries, fathers giving birth to the sons which will destroy their ideology, perpetuating the chain. It's what you crave. And as long as you desire it, it will never be over."
Snake had never had the chance to stare into the face of his old mentor like this, on the other end of a gun. It reminded him a little of innocence, of letting Big Boss touch him as he arranged his posture during hand to hand training.
"It's not over yet!" Big Boss screamed. Wires and artificial muscle strained, snaps and clinks of fire rising through the joins of his armoured chest. Heat settled in the room like a haze. Battlefield adrenaline hit Snake's mind like a drug.
The weight of Nick's last bomb was comfortable in his still human hand. Snake smirked, joylessly.
--
In the end, he didn't kill Jennifer. He was running out of time, and it seemed natural to untie her and drag her out.
She shut down Metal Gear with her access code, slamming it into the computer and rendering it lifeless. She hadn't wanted a nuclear strike any more than anyone else on Earth wanted it. Outside, on the helicopter, she'd caressed the numb metal of his powered arm while she said what she, and the CIA, had done.
"What he was talking about was a revenge upon you - but 'Snake's Revenge' never happened," she'd explained. "It doesn't exist. It wasn't part of the cycle. It was all something the CIA cooked up. You have that spark in you that could make you a great leader, but you insisted on wasting it following orders. I thought with this - " the wind blowed through her long hair from the chopper door - "you'd realise. But he realised too. That's why he captured me."
Her hands clutched over her lap.
"You're not trying to kill me."
"No."
"That means you're going to come with us."
"No," Snake said. "If this wasn't part of the cycle, it means I'll be truly free at the end."
Jennifer was silent.
"I don't know how long I'd have to wait for that if I kept fighting," he said, "until I die, maybe until I'm an old man inches from a natural death. And killing you won't end anything, and this world doesn't need more death in it."
--
He let her unpick the wires from the armour all the way home. She wasn't gentle and she didn't grope around, but she tried her best not to make it hurt.