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It's late at night, in the renovated guts of the place now known as Zanzibarland, that Ocelot urges Big Boss once again to leave the public eye. The Phantom's death had taken everyone by surprise, Solid Snake and the US government perhaps excepted. Not that it had mattered all too much who came out on top, but it said something fearful about the state of their intelligence that they'd been wrong.
With the Phantom gone and Solid Snake still at large, the odds of an attempt on John's life had doubled, and if they ever lost their leash on Eli...
“I just think that it would be wise to consider your options,” Ocelot says to the back of Big Boss's obstinate, silvering head. Time has been catching up to them all lately.
“I have, and this is the best one.” He doesn't even bother to turn around to shut Ocelot down. Knows he doesn't have to. Wouldn't have to elaborate, either, but he has a long forged and hard won respect for Ocelot—one Ocelot counts as his most treasured possession—and so he does, however briefly: “The men need me here. I won't leave them. Not like she did.”
Ocelot knows there's no appealing to sentimentality or self preservation with John. Only the mission, even when it's entirely self-inflicted. “The men will need you in the new millennium more than ever,” he says, “if you're on the move, you'll be harder to find. And you can start spreading the good word while you're at it. It'll help the men more in the long run, and you can come back when it's safer.”
“You don't understand, and I don't expect you to,” Big Boss says, as though he's trying to skirt around the birds and the bees with a toddler. He steps closer to Ocelot, “my dream is here. Our nation of soldiers is already here, but the world we've been building...it's inevitable. They will bring it to fruition, one way or another.”
“But with you here...”
“With me here, Adam? Alive, I am a figurehead. A commander, a head of state—I'm just a man. Dead, though. Dead, I can be fully subsumed into the cause. I will be a martyr. A saint. A god in death.”
Ocelot couldn't fault the logic of it. He'd gladly agree, even, if only it were anyone else. Anyone more personally disposable to him. Miller would have been a perfectly good fall man, for that matter, had he not run off in the 80s. Not that Ocelot particularly relished the idea of his death, but at least it wasn't John.
“I just think if the men can carry on without you, then they will. Regardless of why you're really gone. And you're more of an asset to them alive than dead.”
He's not sure what it is that causes the switch to flip. Maybe it's challenging his authority one too many times, maybe it's referring to him as an asset, but Ocelot swears he sees sparks of pure hellfire ignite in front of the Boss's field of vision.
He lets himself fall into the strike, straddling the fine line between reality and performance. John has always liked a show, but not so much when he felt he was being humored.
Ocelot's head cracks off the wall behind him with a bit more gusto than he'd intended, but the Boss doesn't seem concerned as he stalks closer, eyes brimming with cold fire. Ocelot tries and fails to suppress an anticipatory shudder, feeling the ghosting sensation of the hands he knows are about to be wrapped around his neck. He sees a long night laid out before them.
He goes limp, becoming a doll in Big Boss's arms, to be maneuvered as his Boss sees fit. He feels the world spin around him as he's thrown face-up on John's desk. He sees the dark shadow of Big Boss's form from his peripheral just before the hands close on his throat.
“Who are you working for?” The question is toneless.
“Y-You, Boss,” he wheezes as best he can.
“Who sent you? Who is trying to get me to leave?”
“N...No one...just...ghhk!” The hands tighten further, a crunching sound signaling nothing good happening in his windpipe.
“Do you even know how to tell the truth anymore? You're working for the Patriots, aren't you? Zero's tin can told you to get me out of here?”
He can't speak. Can't make a sound. Can barely even see, as the world is currently at the far end of a cave. He tries to shake his head, but he's not fully sure if he even manages that as the distance grows and his field of vision narrows.
Then air rushes into his lungs. The hands have loosened, if only for the moment. One stays in place, the other moves to his shoulder, pinning him, as if he'd move even if he thought it wouldn't get him killed.
“Who are you working for?” He asks again, switching to Russian. Still completely toneless. Not angry, not frustrated. John's interrogation tactics have always left something to be desired, it's part of why that was Ocelot's primary job, after all, but he would have answered any question on earth for John.
“Only you, boss.”
“Lying.”
“I would never...not to you.” He's still reeling, seeing stars. John doesn't normally push him this hard.
“Then why,” he asks, the venom finally boiling up his throat, “are you asking me to abandon my men?”
The hand at Ocelot's throat teases tighter. Answer truthfully, or this time you won't have a chance to worry about dying.
“For you...” he whispers, “Really, Boss, I just don't think that you should be treating yourself like a pawn to be thrown away, I...”
Ocelot's words are stopped by force, hand snapping shut.
“You think that you get a say?” Big Boss asks. Ocelot has practice in reading his muted expressions, and he can see the way his gaze changes from appraising Ocelot as a potential threat to a piece of meat. An ill-mannered dog to be disciplined.
So it doesn't surprise him when the hand on his shoulder starts to trace its way across his chest, sending shivers down his spine, only to rip his shirt open as easily as if it were tissue paper, sending popped buttons across the linoleum floor.
“We need to work on this attitude of yours, Adam,” Big Boss says. “It's not fitting for my top officials to be at odds like this.”
“I u-understand, Boss.” he stammers, less from fear and more from whiplash.
“I'll see that you do.” The paranoia, the insecurity, reminds him of a place far away, a time long ago, a man altogether different from this one, and he has to steel himself to stay inside his skin.
The teeth are in his shoulder before he can react, and he screams as invasive tongue teases ragged wound edges. It's not as if anyone will hear him. Not as if anyone would come for him if they did.
He's all ecstasy, as Big Boss pulls back, spits his own saliva mixed inextricably with Adam's blood back in his face, knowing this means the skin is broken. Knowing that he will scar in the shape of John's beautiful, ruthless mouth. Branded like an animal.
The hands disappear from his body and he finds himself painfully deprived of sensation, contact. He hears the telltale jingle of John's belt, and chances his first movement. A slide forward, off the desk, sinking to his knees in front of John.
A hand fists his hair and yanks him forward. A wordless command to start licking at the head of the half-hard cock in his face.
He knows this isn't love. Doesn't think he'd want it if it were. Big Boss doesn't fuck for affection. He claims property with merciless dominance. When he pulls back and slams in hilt-deep, Adam's eyes roll back in his skull just to think that he's important enough in this moment to merit the reminder.
It's supposed to be demeaning, this show of force, but it's less humiliating than an exercise in humility. He relishes every gasp of musk-thick air that John affords him, in between the long moments with his nose pressed into the pillow of John's pubic hair against tight snaps of his hips, throat convulsing against the intrusion.
He's meant to be embarrassed of his own hardness, rather than trying to memorize every detail of this encounter for his late nights alone.
Adam resists the urge to reach his hands out, cup John's shapely thighs, ass, pull him closer, hold him close with claws extended. As much as it pains him to restrain himself, he needs to seem suitably cowed by this punishment.
When the hand releases his hair he looks up, doe-eyed, the way he learned from those whores in the charm school, as best he can through the tears. John doesn't even bother to meet his gaze, staring off into the distance.
John takes a single step forward and it shoves Adam back, cracking his head off the side of the desk. He takes a single cigar from his drawer and lights it up, smoking over Adam's upturned face.
He digs the fingers of his free hand into Adam's shoulder, wiping sweat into the wound as he continues to drill Adam's head into the corner of the desk, cock throbbing in Adam's mouth with the excitement that Adam is all too proud to be the source of. Somewhere beyond the borders of his body, Adam is aware of a sticky heat running down the back of his neck, and knows he'll have an uncomfortable conversation in the infirmary tomorrow.
Adam is only tethered to his body by the acute tearing in his shoulder of John's probing fingers, the burning of his own sweat salting the wound. The pulse of John's thrusting no more salient than a memory.
Adam wonders for a moment if he really is going to die. It's a silly thought for someone as practiced in refusing or delivering death as he is, that life is fragile enough to end from one too many little bumps to the head.
The question is fairly well answered when he is dragged, kicking and screaming back into his body by a pinpoint burning and the smell of singed hair. John has put his cigar out on his chest, and the sound it drags out of him is enough to send his beautiful Boss over the edge down his throat.
He starts to cough and splutter the moment that Big Boss pulls back, releasing him, letting him drop to the floor. The world is spinning, and he knows that to get up now would be an insult to Big Boss' dominance anyways.
“You're not as irreplaceable as you think you are, Adam.” Big Boss says, not bothering to spare even a glance at the broken pile of man on the floor as he composes himself.
“I don't think I am. I think you are.” Ocelot tries to say. It doesn't come out. His tongue is heavy as lead, and his ears seem to have been filled with cotton.
“And if I ever, ever, get so much as a hint that you've started working with the Patriots behind my back, you'll be six feet under before you can say 'la-li-lu-le-lo.'”
Tomorrow morning, before the Boss gets back for the day, Ocelot will drag himself off the floor and down to the sick bay. Next week he'll just as likely do it all again. Tonight, though, he waits until the door slams behind Big Boss's exit before he lets the sobs start to wrack his body.