by K.A. Rose
Metal Gear characters copyright Kojima Productions, 1987-2008. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.
This story is rated T:LST, meaning it is rated Teen (ages 14 and up) for reasons of brief coarse language, mild sexual innuendo, and topics described.
Everyone/Snake. No, really.
-----
David
Naomi had given him six months. He lasted almost a year.
It came as little surprise. He was him. He was always doing the impossible, right to the end.
The year swirled around their little family as a hurricane of questions, kept off by a buffer of dummy accounts and decoys while they stood, assessed, and lived. The end, when it came, was a mundane one, a matter of one beep to the next and a shift in how he held Hal's hand.
There were tears, very different from the kind Otacon had to shed in the past. Sunny did not cry. Not because she didn't understand, but because she did. She buried her face in her caretaker's sleeve as his body shuddered with silent grief, and there would be no words for a while.
Relief. Sadness and loss, but relief. A weight upon the world had lifted.
-
The surface of the water exploded above him, and two strong, gloved hands pulled him from the deep."Steady," said a voice he knew, a voice even now he could hear crackling over an obsolete radio from 20 years ago. The hands grasped him hard by his shoulders as he staggered, coughing. "That's it."
The sand beneath them made a sound as they walked. The other walked; he stumbled.
Big Boss looked the very same. The bastard. Healthy and sad, one clear blue eye gazing toward the ground. "You were in there for a while," he said. "Had us worried."
An expression, but without too much meaning behind it. More like they were 'concerned.' They had felt his tension as though vibrating along unseen strings, each connected to one he knew, who was here to meet him.
Those were the strings that had pulled, the current that had urged him. Always, inexorably, the flow toward the far shore.
It had felt like an eternity, his time in the River.
David looked back over his shoulder, looking to the shallows of the delta from which Big Boss had pulled him. The Sorrow was gone. Other souls to ferry. Always other souls. Some would be through here more than once.
Snake looked back to the other. Even now, he had no idea what to call him. The hesitation pressed at his lips, finally breaking with "Sir--"
"There's no need. David. There's no need."
There was no artifice here. No codenames, no titles or ranks. The harder David looked at him, the more apparent it was that he could see to the very center, where the thread between them lay coiled with the many thousand others. No secrets here. No filter. All lives, all life, borne out in plain sight, if sight were even the word for it.
"The River is a conceit. Once you're to the other side-- things are different."
John smiled, his one eye crinkling.
-
The dead stood or wandered aimlessly. It was neither dark nor light here, just shades. A muted Space Between. Some that stood waiting for him held explanations, quantum mechanical justifications for why this was space and yet not space, why they were separate beings and yet one being, how it all might fit.He didn't care that he understood Naomi's gibberish for the first time in his life. He cared instead that her eyes shined, and her skin glowed. She had her father and her brother here. She had her parents. She had the truth.
She did not ask, 'Why did you lie back then?' Because she knew it was not a lie. Just a way of saying what was meant.
These strings were weaved in interesting ways. No two alike. Stories he could never have understood if simply told.
"Really?" he asked Frank Jaeger at one point, after brushing something new, and yet, something he supposed he should have pieced together by now.
"Really," Frank answered, smile flickering. He was whole again, or roughly so. "But nevermind. You look--"
"Terrible."
"--like you've lost weight."
David was silent as he mulled over that one, scowling. Ultimately, he decided to punch him.
Some things about this space between remained. As much as they passed through one another, they could also connect. Distinct, yet together. Every form, every age, every shape was equally real, equally tangible under one's fingers.
Frank was good looking as a 20-year-old. He didn't hit as hard, but he was fast.
-
He saw everyone. In the River there was little time: it was reflection for oneself, not the other. Beyond the shore was the time for others.Olga deserved to see him first. He let her enter him, move through him and glide over remembered flesh and crystallized memory, catching views of a daughter she had never seen face to face, feeling David's arms around her as he held her the way her mother never could.
David had never seen Olga cry before, or look so happy.
He didn't ask, 'So who was the father?' because the answer lay in the omission, as simple as the not-lie once given to Naomi. Olga's smile was enough. He understood. He shook his head and chuckled.
Emma visited. As did Kyle Schneider. Gustava. Raven. Raven was perplexed.
He saw his brothers, and found he didn't have much to say.
-
"It will take time," John told him, when David visited him again. There were children around him. How many hundreds of children drew lines from their hearts to his? "They have not yet been to see me, either."Even if there were apologies to be made to James? Even if the body he wore was more George's than his own?
"It's difficult," John confessed. "That is the reason for this."
The girl in his lap had thick curly brown hair, dressed in pigtails. She wore a red jumper that was singed at the edges.
Her face had been in his dreams more than once. Until that moment, David had never known her name.
-
Time. It was spoken of, and so it had to pass, but the measure of it was uncertain here.It might have been two weeks or more before David realized whom he had not seen.
"Ah," John said, his eye seeming to darken. Shadows had their thick and lean sides, their moments of confusion as well as their points of clarity. "He is still in the River," he said eventually. "He may be there for some time."
It had been a year since Ocelot's death already. Perhaps far longer; who could say? David didn't know how long he'd spent in the River himself. And he, who had taken pleasure in killing and spent his life trying to get away from that truth, had clean hands next to Ocelot.
-
He saw Wolf. Night Fright. Duck.There were a lot of people to see. A lot of things left unsaid which needed to be answered now. Far more that passed between two people than a bullet and a thank-you.
He saw Mantis, no longer wracked with pain, his ghosts gone. Less of a filter now than he'd ever had with his mask, but for as much as he saw, he saw further still. Past the hurt. To the essence of someone.
"That girl," he said, groping through the many strings thick and thin.
"Ah. She married."
"You didn't go."
"Nn."
"I see you had a date that day."
David blinked at him for a moment, and then his frown deepened.
"Does it bother you, that everyone can do that here?" he asked finally.
Mantis fell silent, annoyed. He didn't need to answer.
-
His mother was young and beautiful. While John avoided his two distanced sons, Mama did not. She would be with her children now. Her own, and the man she considered effectively so. David, James and George. Names she hadn't chosen, but had held dear for forty years.She was beautiful, Mama... but looking up at her from below was strange.
-
The Nariko sand squeaked beneath their feet as they walked. David found himself spending a great deal of time with John. His commander, his father, his brother.John was 60 today. David was 18. The fluidity of time and shape was magnified near the shore of the River. It encouraged it.
It had been roughly a year since David's death. A year spent without Hal and all their broken, silent moments. A year without Sunny's hand-me-down combat boots thundering down stairwells, the clattering of 3 AM keyboards. Two years since his last cigarette.
Ocelot had not yet arrived.
They didn't speak of it. Lighting onto other topics was preferable. Though the tension along the strings connecting them to him seemed to vibrate all the worse at the slightest glance.
Did anyone ever fail to finish the River in its length? Was that possible?
"Did you meet the others yet?" John asked. Meaning the other founders.
"Oh and Anderson. Not Clark yet."
"You should see Jane. She always thought of you as her own."
"What she did to Frank--"
"We do not see," John said, staring out across the dark delta of the River, "all of how the stream might wind and bend. We can only--"
"Go with the current." Somewhere further inland, the little girl in pigtails smiled. He felt its vibration along her string. "But this is where it stops."
"This is where things collect," John corrected.
A woman came.
She shone like a star amidst the gray. She was dressed in white, her uniform still riddled with the cuts and bullet holes that laid out like a legend of her final student's skill. She appeared abruptly beside them, rather than walk as most did. Just emerged in space.
"Jack." She called him that still, out of preference. "There's a problem."
"What is it?" John asked, meeting her gaze.
She inclined her head, gray-golden hair drifting at her shoulders. "It's Adamska. I need your help."
David looked at her, seeing into her and through her, to all the wires thick and thin which weaved off into eternity. One string in particular, very familiar, was pulled taut.
Of all the things he could not have predicted.
"Of course," said John. He moved a hand just once to David's shoulder. "Wait a moment."
And then he was gone with her, up the River.
Adamska
The dead wailed. They had died screaming. He knew. He'd been there.
Huddled in the shallows, knees drawn up to his chest, hands covering his ears. He had been rooted to this spot for three months, eight days, fourteen hours. Perhaps.
They circled. They screamed.
A thousand, a hundred thousand, each clawing for that shriveled black thing remaining to call itself life.
He had none left to give. He had no life. He'd given it already, to a puppet show, the strings of which were no longer there to hold. His last living memories were flashes in the dark. Hard muscle twisting under his fingers, and a silhouette against the sunlight, which he had grasped for and could not reach.
But a hand reached for him now.
"The 80s. That was one of your busy periods."
It was a voice he had labored for fifteen years to fill the world again.
It should not be here.
"John..."
"Up. Come on."
Had he been here so long, that Big Boss had surpassed him again?
Adamska moved his hand to grasp the one before him, but it shook too much. He couldn't reach.
Didn't want to reach.
He kept it curled in a fist at his side, beneath the water.
"Adam."
We wanted to see you live, John.
"Adam." The dead kept screeching around them.
We died so that you could live what don't you understand
"Adam. I do understand."
That made him look up.
He saw them there. Those two. They stood at the bank of the River, so close he could have brushed it with his hand, and yet in all this time had never noticed it.
One of them he had only known as a photograph.
They held each other's hands at their sides, and never in his life could he have imagined it. The placid normality of it. The truth of it in its simplicity.
And Adamska knew this should not be possible, that John's and his mother's presence was forbidden by some order much higher than nature. That the very fabric of a space he could not conceptualize was threatened to be torn to pieces by this, the barest of contact, this infinitesmal reprieve from the guilt his actions had wrought.
And a single word more, by John or his parents or damn-it-all Adamska himself, and it all would shatter.
Just this would do.
The rest of the distance didn't seem so much.
-
They were there to see him when he reached the shore.All of them.
A hundred thousand, a million, whole nations he had murdered and had cursed his name. He had seen flakes of their lives, shades of creatures, howling at him from the stream, but now these shadows were quiet. The anger had been washed away.
But the questions hadn't. Friends betrayed, lovers scorned, every one whose face he knew and forgotten, and all of them wished to know 'why?' And he owed them an answer.
He could not speak. The words didn't come. He had died aged 70 drained of the last of his life and will but only now did he seem old. Frail. Vulnerable.
He who had always held all the cards; held all the strings in his right hand
(his own, long gone)
had not a thing to say now, just as sure as death had made him mute.
He might have wept. He wasn't sure.
-
Ultimately, he did not speak to any of them. Not his mother, his father, Kim, Naomi or Sergei. Not Oh or Clark or Anderson. Not James or George, and both of them had plenty of things to say to him.He went instead to see the man who had helped him in the River. The one who had made it worth going forward.
John was walking with David. They were the same age today, a smooth-skinned 30, all youthful energy with a mature posture. Adamska stopped in his approach and for a full moment genuinely could not tell which was which.
He suppressed a sigh. They were both so easily amused.
But sight was the weakest of senses here. And for all that Big Boss's doubles had distracted (amused, enraged, aroused and spited) for all those years, he could always tell which was his.
"Heh," David said, when Adamska picked the right one on his first try.
Adamska glared.
"Stop," John told them both.
Adamska did not release John's sleeve. He was here. He was almost warm.
"Nothing was said before," Adamska pressed. He shut out David's presence as best he could, although awareness could not really switched off here. Everyone was connected. "I want us to speak."
Fifty years of things.
"I know," said John. Two eyes shone back at him, whole and healthy and clear.
"Then leave him."
"It's not leaving, Adam."
"Then let him play with his friends a while," Adamska said crossly.
"Hngh," David grumbled, looking away. "Whatever you need."
Which was a strange thing, at last, to say to the man who had tricked him, used him, toyed with him since the day he was born. But David had heard the truth. Enough, at least, to go on. He had always shown more sympathy for the devil than he should have.
David looked back for a moment, and their eyes met: designer green in stolen sockets; the steel blue of a Normandy sky. And between them too much of what was, and too little of anything else.
When you had every reason living or dead to despise a man, and didn't, you've finally been washed clean.
coda
It had been four years.
People kept arriving. Some that David knew, many that he didn't. The Space Between had room for all of them, and yet, after a time some seemed to vanish. The oldest ones, the quietest, who had nothing more to ask and answer.
What lay beyond this place, no one knew. But none feared it. Death had happened. The rest was processing.
Four years since John had allowed Adamska to take him by the arm and go somewhere for the two of them. David still sensed them, dimly, in the edge of his awareness, but what was said was between them. He didn't go to see them, and he didn't wonder.
There was no end to patience here, and no end to time.
Would he stay here until Hal came? Until Sunny arrived, wizened and timelessly beautiful, her face unrecognizable and her old mannerisms smoothed into an aged grace? Would he see Jack-- Meryl-- Mei-Ling-- all the people of the new century, the survivors of the age? What would they leave, and what would hold them here?
"What keeps you here?" he asked Frank one afternoon. They had made it afternoon, in this spot near the bank of the River.
Frank was shifting from 25 to 40, the scars multiplying like a timelapse across his skin. He stretched, and they moved and faded over the ever-tight muscle of his back.
"The Madnars," he answered at length. "They may never die. That's one issue we are faced with in this century, the irrelevance of the flesh."
People like Raiden. People like him.
"The will can still die," said David.
"Yes, it can," Frank agreed. "But it measures its time differently than do the senses."
Have you been back and forth along the River more than once?
Frank smiled.
"Let me ask you," he said. "Did you accomplish all you needed to, when you were alive?"
David fell silent. Words were only so useful, and only to a point. The old senses were weak. They were a knot of string, no true beginning or end, only rationalized through and by each other, by everyone here.
His answer came, unhurrying. A ripple, a vibration from one awareness to the other, and a sigh.
Yes, maybe. And if he hadn't, it would not have mattered.
There was time for everything, somewhere.
the en d
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finished on: 27 May, 2009.