#n313s

"You're staring at me like you're trying to focus a sniper rifle - should I be worried?"

Of course he shouldn't - and he won't. Being Big Boss had perks, like being able to wave away criticism and being absolute in his position. Who would challenge Big Boss? One 'broken gun' trick was usually enough to discourage an uncooperative attitude.

He wasn't entirely sure felt that way in present company. Snake was an overachiever, and Naked Snake had been an overachiever too, always pushing too hard, and taking on too much.

"Are you questioning me?"

His response is both the hammer and the anvil, and he knows it, because it rings the same way it did when the Boss said it.

(Are you telling me you know better?)

Big Boss doesn't need to try especially hard to disarm her, and he never has. He's an expert in the art of CQC, after all. He pulls Snake into something that almost seems like a stranglehold, but lacking any significant force otherwise. He's not trying to choke her. Just keep her still.

"When I tell you to stop, you stop. That's an order. If you contradict my orders again, we're done here."

How many times has he needed to hear that, staggering after the Boss until she threw him on his ass and told him to go home?

Big Boss, being the soldier that he is, has perfected the art of sleeping in small moments. There are rumors that he sleeps with his eye wide open, or that he never sleeps at all. Neither of these are completely true. He can sleep while he's leaning here or there, arms crossed - and he can sleep in the leafy undergrowth of the forest, but he does sleep.

At some point, he must have nodded off during transit and stayed there. The back of a convoy truck can be pretty relaxing - it's the perfect dark corner for a Snake to crawl into to catch his bearings, and a quick nap.

Why did they come all the way out here again?

In the fraction of a second it takes for his senses to register some kind of disturbance - one instant, where his body detects a shift in sound, the air, her shadow in front of the light -

- his arms are around her neck before the rest of him is even awake.

"Talk."

"That's fine."

The wind is picking up. Rain is pattering down onto steel and concrete, plunking into the ocean in heavy drops. Solidus Snake retreats into an oversized cloak, shielding all his shiny new machinery from - either sight, or the elements, or both - and looks more severe and bloodless than ever.

"Dead Cell will go down in history as traitors and terrorists with a dark and sordid past. The Patriots will continue to knit truth together with lies, omitting all the people they've murdered to push their narrative. I don't have enough time left in this world to list their atrocities."

What are they now? Four people? Fortune has no combat experience, and she can barely see through her own tears. Fatman is powerfully unpleasant to be around - his unchecked ego and love of his craft border delusions of grandeur.

Vamp has been there since the beginning, a war orphan and recluse laden with the burden of taking life to survive, created by atrocities of hate and the cold calculations of the Patriots that turned him into something worse.

"Big Boss was the greatest warrior that ever lived, and to the Patriots, the greatest man. You are his daughter by blood, and my sister by circumstance. We are both a product of eugenics - attempts to create a new Big Boss. We have hundreds of dead and deformed siblings created by the Patriots' attempt to replicate their ideal.

Wolf has a peculiar presence outside of her training at Foxhound - she's one-of-a-kind beautiful, a young woman that would stand out even with her face veiled in snow, sand, or mud. Her lashes are full and dark, and her gaze, matching her impossibly steady hand, could cut through brain matter like a laser, and yet -

- she's simply more unsocialized than she lets on. Saladin was her mentor from childhood, and what experience did he have modelling sociability? Part of her is still in the snow, still in the dunes, or in far away mountains, distant from the world of human beings and their idiosyncrasies.

"What's arranging dick chairs?"

She's better in a shootout than she is in a conversation.

Joy.

Big Boss' single eye lights up like molten rock, and he feels the plates of the Earth shifting beneath his feet. That's it. That's where the technique becomes real, where the truest understanding begins.

The first time he bested his Boss - had he been 16?

He felt his heart in his throat - his stomach tying itself into a knot as he pressed the gun beneath her chin, his knife at the ready to slit The Boss' throat.

The way she smiled at him had been just as divine as it was maddening.

He couldn't kill her and he knew it. He was no apex predator yet - he'd gotten lucky, but on the battlefield, even stupid, blind luck could be a decisive factor.

"This time? You got lucky." he smiles like she's merely threatening to trim his beard.

"You don't seem too phased by the fact that America has an entire shadow government dedicated to making free speech a myth.

... I guess it's hardly a surprise once you've been around government types enough."

Solidus laughs. He can't help it- or her. It shouldn't even be funny anymore after the first dozen times someone's asked him to stand up, but from Solid Snake herself - it's funny.

"Sure - but I can't help you if it means getting up."

He can get up and down a handful of times a day, but he really would rather save that miserable plight for something more necessary.

What he can do, however, is wheel his way over to her and hit a full stop on her toe.

"You're looking for a sign that Jack's still alive, aren't you? Because that's all I can help you with."