Archive of Our Own ^beta

“For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all. . . alone”
-- Jose Chung, From Outer Space

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
-- Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

The first few days after Shadow Moses are like, ugh. There's a helicopter ride to a hospital and a lot of pain and you black out for a while and you think there’s a surgery in there somewhere. Snake borrows Otacon's cell phone to call his nearest neighbors and ask them to check on his dogs, when they call him back to say they're all okay you're pretty sure you see him cry? Just like for a split second. And for a second he looks as tired as you feel. Otacon has a quiet panic attack in the waiting room and another one next to your hospital bed and you sleep for twelve hours and everyone mutually persuades each other that you and Otacon sticking together for a little bit isn't a bad plan. "And you're close enough that I can keep an eye on you" says Snake, which would be menacing if you hadn't seen him cry over his dogs like, an hour ago.

The awful thing is, you kinda do need someone to be around. And like, you’re not living with Campbell, that’s for damn sure. But your doctors sit you down and go over the results with you -- tell you you got shot three times (and you’re like yeah man I know I was There). Left leg, right leg, left arm. Two of those you got basically the luckiest anyone has ever gotten when it comes to getting shot with a big ass sniper rifle. It’s gonna take time for your right leg and your arm to be healed up all the way. Your left leg, on the other hand, is gonna hurt for a while. Like, a long while. So that’s basically: super great. You’re going to need crutches. Like, you manage to walk some and it hurts like hell but you can manage from one side of the room to the other okay before they discharge you. But you can’t stand much and you can’t lift much and the pain is always there and you’re one big bruise all over.

Campbell sets up a place for you to stay for a while while you go through physical therapy. You ask him to find you a two bedroom place, and he does, like, really quick.

When Snake tries to sell you on the idea of you and Otacon living together for a little bit, you feel pathetic. “I don’t need your help,” you say.

He grumbles in a way that means he doesn’t agree. Which is fine. He doesn’t have to. “Look, I just don’t think he should be on his own.”

You know what he’s trying to do: make you feel more like a co-conspirator and less like a charity case. It works anyway. “Fine,” you say.

But later you hear him giving the same pitch to Otacon when they both think you’re not around. Snake has that same faux furtiveness, that same sort of unsubtle sales pitch. “It’d be a big help,” he tells Otacon, and of course that works. Otacon’s a sucker.

The thing is, you get Snake’s reasoning. You’re an unlikely pair but -- you both lost nearly everything. So there’s that.

When you get to the apartment, there's a box with all your shit right inside the doorway (you hadn't even had time to unpack yet really back at Shadow Moses) and a couple boxes of Otacon's shit too. Campbell had sent someone to pick up some things from the site, though from Otacon's mournful itinerary of his junk they'd only grabbed what looked like important stuff and not everything.

The apartment's an apartment. It's like basically as bland as you can get. It was one of those pre-furnished deals, blah blah, though you figure the sheets on the beds and the food in the cupboards was probably Campbell.

He's put your favorite cereal in the cupboard. You throw it in the trash. “I call dibs on the bigger room,” you say.

“I think they’re the same size,” he says, still digging through a box.

“Well I call dibs on the better one then,” you say.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s fine.”

Pushover.

You awkwardly navigate your shit into a room by pushing it around with your crutches -- you could bend down and pick it up maybe, but you might not be able to with your left arm how it is, with your legs how they are, and then Otacon would see you like that. So you nudge it around until it’s past the threshold of a bedroom. You try to slam the door shut but can’t quite manage. There’s a bed and it’s got sheets on it and everything, so you sit down on it, exhausted already.

The doctors say you need like, an inordinate unreasonable amount of rest. You’re like, okay, whatever, sure, that’s fine, but it’s not that fine. You lay down on the bed and stare at the ceiling and try not to think.

You spend the first week terrified mostly of the possibility that Otacon could develop some sort of awful crush on you. Or worse: that you'd get all funny about him. Not that that was likely. He wasn't exactly your type, but stress and proximity do weird things. Example: Shadow Moses. Example: Sniper Wolf. Example: how you'd both looked at Snake, at the end there.

You also spend the first week trying to not show any Weakness around him, weakness being defined as: inability to walk from one end of the apartment to the other without needing to stop and take a rest, difficulty in completing tasks like “picking things up off the ground” or “doing the dishes” or “standing,” any sort of tearful admittance of pain. You wish your mom was here. You don’t wish your mom was here, because there’s about ten conversations you don’t want to have with her. You wish your mom was here.

But your mom’s not here. The only person here besides you is Otacon, which, like, who is he to you? The only thing you two share in common is a shared moment of trauma and -- you suspect -- a brief but momentary infatuation with Solid Snake. He was some sorta super genius guy, you'd only made a begrudging attempt at community college (for your mom’s sake, before she'd let you sign up). And he’s like four or five years older than you or something which means he's basically ancient, practically half dead.

So you avoid him at first. Would make yourself scarce when he's around but mostly you don't have to because he'll hole himself up in his room for what seems like days on end. What probably is actually days on end. You’re having trouble keeping track of time.

It's the phone calls that make you reach out to him. Okay, the phone calls and the fact that at some point someone’s going to have to do dishes and you are like actually physically incapable of it. Okay, the phone calls and the dishes and the still lingering urge to make yourself useful to Snake, to make him think you did a good job. “Look after him,” he'd said to you, and the guy did save your life, so maybe like, yeah. Anyway. Phone calls. Dishes. Et cetera.

You knock on his door. “Uh, yeah?” says Otacon.

You take this as all the invitation you need to slam the door open, assess the situation briefly (dirty clothes on the floor, food wrappers, empty liters of Mountain Dew, one scrawny guy sitting at a pathetic excuse for a desk hunched over a computer), and throw your phone at him.

He misses like, woah. He misses harder than you thought a dude could miss. Whatever it's a Nokia so it's not gonna like break. “Excuse me?” he says.

“My uncle keeps calling me and I don’t know how to make my phone not let him,” you say.

“Oh okay,” he says. “I thought maybe you were just mad or something.”

“Yes. I am. At my phone.”

He stares at it like he’s never seen a phone before.

“So?” you say.

“So what?” he asks.

“So can you fix it?”

“Oh!” he says. “Yeah, shouldn’t be hard. Give me five minutes.”

Your first instinct is to stand in the doorway looking as cool and/or not pathetic as possible until he fixes the phone, but you can’t actually stand for five minutes anymore. Your second impulse is to push through the pain and just stand there anyway. You’re like, a tough dude. Things don’t hurt, or whatever. But there’s a difference between how much pain you can handle and how much pain your body will like, let you handle at this point.

So you go and sit on his bed. Which is weird, but anything else is weirder. You don’t know why you feel the need to justify your own actions to yourself, jeez, maybe Otacon’s inability to deal with other people in his personal space is starting to rub off on you.

You take a moment to look around his room some more. It is, of course, a total mess. Besides the obvious dirty clothes, Mountain Dew bottles, etc., there’s also a more mechanical detritus: a dozen little piles of wires or boards or circuitry or something you don’t understand scattered on every available surface, like he was used to picking things up and working on them for a moment and then setting them down again. Distracted, maybe. Bad at fixing things, maybe. Too bad your phone is already in his hands. This does solve the mystery of where the tv remote remote went to -- it’s gutted, on the dresser.

“Hey, I needed that remote,” you say.

“Oh, sorry, I’ll have it back in a little while,” he says.

Not a lot to say to that. Man oh man does your leg hurt. A moment passes, or maybe three, or maybe ten minutes, and Otacon turns back around to face you and hands the phone back to you. “It should be fine now. I mean, you can block someone really easily on a phone? But now he’s more ‘comprehensively’ blocked if that makes sense.”

“It doesn’t,” you say. “Thanks. Help me up.”

“What, you can’t stand up on your own?”

“No, I put my crutches down in a stupid spot and your girlfriend shot me three times,” you say, and regret it. “Sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“Sorry,” he says.

“No, don’t apologize for me being a dick,” you say, and take the hand that he offers.

This isn’t the first time he does this for you, but this feels more like a handshake, or an apology -- from which of you you’re not sure -- than other times before. By necessity you’ve leant on Otacon before. On his own he’s self-contained to the point of standoffishness but your limbs don’t work correctly so he kind of has to Deal. But this is the first time he doesn’t -- freeze entirely, maybe. Get incredibly tense when you put a hand on his shoulder or arm or whatever. Maybe it’s because you’re the one who made things awkward for once, maybe it’s just because he’s acclimated to having to navigate you around. Either way, he feels more like a person when you hold onto him. You feel more like a person. Jesus, the pain is making you think weird.

“Seriously, thanks,” you say, your hand still wrapped around his wrist. “Hey, for real though, what are you doing with the remote?”

He never actually tells you.

There’s a unique sort of humiliation that comes with relying on a guy like Otacon to do household chores. By “relying on” you mean: every so often you knock on his door and go -- “Hey there’s no clean dishes left” and he goes “okay?” and you go “I can’t like, stand for that long” and he goes “okay?” and you go “so like, you need to do some” and he goes “oh.” And you do that three or four times and eventually like, he goes and does the dishes.

You’ve never thought of yourself as a tidy person, but there’s a big difference between “lived-in” and “filthy.” You didn’t survive three gunshot wounds and a dramatic exodus from an exploding research facility to die of black mold or bacterial infection or grossness or something. You’re pretty sure Otacon had resigned himself to dying in his own filth or something. You’re pretty sure Otacon had point blank given up. You sit at the kitchen table and supervise the dish washing.

“Okay, like, have you actually ever washed dishes before?” you ask, because he’s like, struggling.

“Takeout,” he mutters.

“Fair,” you say. “I mean, still ridiculous and now I’m like, concerned in various ways I wasn’t before I guess, but okay yeah sure. You don’t actually have to dry them off just stick them in the rack.”

“I’ve never lived somewhere without a dishwasher before,” he says, which super isn’t an excuse for the frankly pathetic like capital D Display of incompetence you’re seeing here. Just bad form all around.

“Yeah,” you say.

At least you can mostly manage your own laundry. Not folding it and putting it away or anything, but you’re content to just let everything coalesce into loose piles around your room.

You feel so lazy, it’s driving you up the wall. ‘Oh Meryl, you’re not lazy, blah blah, gunshot wounds, blah blah blah’ and you know it’s practical to let yourself heal up, to not push yourself so soon. But you’re a woman of action -- or at least you like to think you are -- and sitting and waiting doesn’t suit you.

“Aren’t you supposed to keep your legs elevated?” asks Otacon, snapping your attention back to the moment.

“What?” you ask.

“Your legs,” he says. “I thought you were supposed to keep them up.”

“What do you even know,” you say.

“That you’re supposed to keep your legs up.”

You put up your legs. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“I didn’t,” he says.

“Just finish the fucking dishes,” you say.

He shrugs. You shift your left leg a little and it hurts worse than you thought it could. You grit your teeth and sit there and he grits his teeth and cleans and it sucks, pretty much.

New Message From: Unknown Number

Mei Ling

>Hey meryl! This is Mei Ling

Meryl

>From shadow moses???

Mei Ling

>Yeah!

Meryl

>Okay??

>Can i ask why yr txting me???

Mei Ling

>Oh yeah :) I just thought we could maybe talk sometime?

>I heard u over codec but we nvr talked

>And u kno we were both there. We have ppl in common. It seemed like a nice idea :P

Meryl

>Oh ok

Mei Ling

>So whatve u been up 2?

Meryl

>Haha not much. Physical therapy and hanging out w otacon

>It turns out getting shot a bunch has a lot of physical consequences

>More than u would think

Mei Ling

>Yikes sry that sucks

>Wait r u 2 living together??

Meryl

>Yeah i think im supposed to be babysitting him

>Or hes supposed to make sure i dont hurt myself doing chores or whatever

>Which is kinda ridic but hes not too bad i guess

>Kinda more quiet than i thought he would be

>Enough about that tho

>What are you up to?

Here’s your first big secret: sometimes you’re not okay. Like, okay, you’re fine, right? But also: maybe not so much.

It’s not a big tragic hero backstory thing or anything just -- sometimes you’re not great. It happens. Sometimes you just freeze in the middle of doing shit, like you hit the pause button on your brain.

Here’s the second secret: sometimes you’re not okay, but Otacon helps. Kind of. In his own way. The impulse is to put “helps” in quotation marks.

The first time you have a truly earth shattering panic attack it hits you while you’re sitting in the living room. Just minding your business. You can’t even say what sets it off -- your train of thought, the light in the room, an errant sound -- just one minute you’re doing your best to not give in to your impulses and do more exercises and the next you feel an icy fear overtake you, freezing, frozen. You squeeze your hands into fists, but your left hand hurts so bad you yelp. You’re frozen and it’s the worst because it’s the middle of the apartment, you couldn’t even crawl off to hide if you tried, your legs are too jacked up. It’s shit like this that put you in this spot. You’d be fine if you hadn’t just frozen, back there in Shadow Moses. You wouldn’t be in fucking Alaska if you hadn’t just stood there like the idiot you are, like the absolute child you are, practically begging for a sniper to shoot you. That moment of absolute stupidity looms in front of you so large it threatens to swallow you whole. If only you weren’t such a --

“You okay?” asks Otacon. He’s standing in front of you. Shit that’s right he was in the other room.

You try to say “Yeah, I’m fine,” but it doesn’t quite come out. You try to say “sorry” but that doesn’t come out either.

“Oh okay,” he says, like your inability to formulate even the most basic of answers actually answers all his questions.

He pours a glass of water, sits down next to you on the couch. There’s a glass of water in front of you. It’s cold and you can hear the wind and you are such a piece of shit.

“This happens to me sometimes,” he says. “You should drink the water.”

“Can’t,” you say. You want to curl into yourself. You don’t want anyone to see you, or to be seen, and you’re just out here in the open like this, and you’re freezing, and you’re about to get yourself shot.

“Do you want a blanket or something?” he asks. “That can be good.”

You nod. It doesn’t solve the oxygen problem but it sounds nice, maybe. He pulls one off of a nearby chair and gets it around your shoulders okay. You pull it up further, like a shawl. “I’m gonna die,” you say.

“Don’t worry Meryl, sooner or later everybody does!” he says and this is so fucking incredibly unhelpful that it swings around to an odd sort of comfort.

“Thanks, asshole,” you say.

“What?” he asks. “It’s true. Drink the water.”

You drink the water.

Later, when you’re back in a state of mind to like, go, “wow that was sort of fuckin embarrassing” you go and find him.

“Hey,” you say. “Uh, please don’t tell Snake about all that stuff? Maybe? Or anyone ever, for sure, but definitely maybe not Snake especially.”

He frowns. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

“I just! I don’t want to look -- weak. I guess. Which is stupid, but I don’t want to, he’s --”

“Do you think I’m weak, then?” he asks, and he’s maybe typing with a little more force than he was a minute ago.

“No?!” you say. “Or -- I mean, it’s not like, a bad thing to be. It’s not, it’s not that sort of weakness. I just. . . that’s not who I am. Or who I’m supposed to be.”

Otacon frowns again and looks at the computer and says “I wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No,” he says, but he says it in that way where what he’s saying is “fuck off,” but he can’t say “fuck off,” because there’s some sort of cosmic rule that says that Otacon can’t say fuck.

So you leave and you go in your room and stare at the ceiling. Time passes weird. Whatever. Same as it ever was.

Here's how things used to be for you: you got up, you worked, you failed, you got better. You got better than better, and you don't know if you liked the idea of fighting in and of itself, but you liked being the best at it. You liked pushing yourself, and you liked being the sort of person who pushed yourself. You fucking had goals, you know? You had aspirations. Your mom told you stories about your dad and your uncle told you stories about FOXHOUND and you went to bed at night knowing what you were about.

But -- so now what?

Like, okay. You shouldn’t complain, because you’re alive and you’re mostly in one piece, but.

New Message To: Mei Ling

Meryl

>Like i guess i dont kno what 2 do now?

>I had an idea of what my life was gonna b like u kno. And now thats changed?

Mei Ling

>I guess u can do w/e u want is the thing!! Think of it as an opportunity?

Meryl

>At least u can just do school stuff and shit thats something

even if like u said ur tryin 2 think of diff stuff 2 do now

>im just starin at the ceiling

>literally staring at the ceiling rn and tryin 2 figure out if i can stomach any more dbz

>not that it matters bc hes been pissed at me lately

Mei Ling

>That guy wasnt kiddin about the anime thing huh

>Whatd you do??

Meryl

>I mean its distracting ill give him that

>I didnt do anything!!

>Mostly anything

>Hes kinda high strung

Mei Ling

>A very sensitive young man

>Maybe if u apologize he’ll unlock the top tier anime 4 u

Meryl

>Is top tier anime just a blank screen with no sound

>Cause jeezy creezy i could go for that right now

Here’s the third secret: he’s not okay sometimes either, but okay that’s less of a secret and more like on the top ten list of breathtakingly apparent facts about Otacon. He kinda waves you off like “it’s fine, it’s fine” whenever he’s upset which like, okay, first of all: No. Second to whatever to infinity of all: no. Actual God’s Honest Truth: you usually assume Snake conned both of you into being roommates so that he could go sneak off and start a life of mushing and alcoholism without either of you bothering him. Actual even more honest God’s Honest Truth: you think he thought Otacon might slouch off to die without someone to bug him.

After your, you’re gonna call it a “fight” even though it’s not really a “fight,” you don’t talk much for a few days. You know you’re being sulky and he’s being sulky, but there’s a lot to sulk about in general, and you’re too tired to be a big girl about it.

But then it’s late at night and you wake up, and you can hear the tv blaring too loud, so you go into the living room and you’re like okay what the hell is he watching.

“Can you turn it down?” you ask. “I’m trying to sleep.”

He nods and turns it down a little, and he looks kinda not great. Like in an acute way, instead of that classic Otacon low level way. “What’re you watching?” you ask.

“NGE,” he says.

“I don’t understand what that means,” you say. You sit on the couch.

“It’s a show,” he says. Well, like, thanks dude. “I hate it.”

“So why’re you watching it?”

“Because it makes me feel like crap.”

You like, cannot even.

“Stop using anime to hurt yourself, that’s literally the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.” You teeter over, take the remote from him. “Do you have anything not garbage on your computer? Or is there anything on tv? Watch something else.”

“Everything is garbage now.”

“Oh my God,” you say. “Give me your computer, I’ll look.”

You wrestle his laptop from him with your good arm, start scrolling through his shit. “Oh, sick, The X-Files. There you go. Good clean fun.”

"You watch The X-Files?" he asks.

“Of course I do, I’m not a fool,” you say.

"Do you wanna, uh, watch The X-Files with me?”

You kinda do, actually. “I kinda do, actually.”

“Start from the first episode?”

“I got nothin better to do,” you say. “Plus, Scully looks beautiful in the pilot.”

You’re halfway through the fourth episode, blah blah, Mulder’s tragic backstory, when you’re like, “Are we ever gonna talk about it?”

“Huh? What?” says Otacon, looking startled, like he’d forgotten you were there or something.

“Shadow Moses, man. Obviously you’re hung up about something, so like, we should, talk about it I guess?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“‘I’m Otacon, I watch tv that makes me feel like crap on purpose,’” you say, imitating his voice. “Hey, is it about that stuff I said the other day? Is it still bugging you?”

“Sorry, it’s fine,” he says.

“Okay, no,” you say. “Come on, you gotta be real with me. Just say what you mean, it’ll be okay.”

He looks like a man who has very little left to lose. There’s a weird energy? To this time and place? It makes you want to open up. It maybe makes him want to open up too. You think.

“Oh, you know, I just sort of really am kind of an embarrassment in a thousand different ways, and I know it’s embarrassing that -- that anything really. That I ever anything, and I just I’m really sorry that I’ve made you live around me, I know it’s kind of awful and stuff, sorry you had to put up with it. I hope me being around to make sure you can get around and everything has helped make it a little less terrible that I’m here.”

There’s like thirty leaps in logic you have to take to follow how he got from where you were to that speech.

“What?”

“Don’t make me repeat that whole thing,” he says.

“No, I mean, I heard you,” you say. You shift on the couch, wince. Shift on the couch, wince. “That’s the most bullshit thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth in like, a week.”

“Sorry,” he says.

You finally reach over to pause the episode. Scully’s staring pensively at something. “You’re not. . . a nuisance. I mean, okay. There’s a lot of shit you can’t do, and it’s the same shit I can’t do, like wash dishes or do laundry and really you have got to learn to do dishes better. But -- you’re helpful. You help, I guess. I don’t hate it, you being here. It’s kinda nice, having company.”

“Thanks?” he says.

“You really do have to keep the anime down to a more manageable volume.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.

“So we’re cool?” you ask.

“Yeah, we’re ‘cool,’” he says.

“We stop being cool if you air quotes at me,” you say.

He ignores you, hits play on the episode.

Otacon’s the person you talk to the most, those months after Shadow Moses, but weirdly enough you get kinda used to chatting with Mei Ling too. You like talking to her. Okay maybe for other girls that wouldn’t be weird. But for you it’s like, woah. Like, it’s nice talking to another girl who’s like, your age? You’ve never thought of yourself as someone who gets along that well with other girls, but Mei Ling’s pretty easy to talk to. Keeps you abreast of what’s happening with everyone else, which means you never have to listen to Campbell’s voicemails.

“I think Nastasha might want to come and check on you guys,” she says one day.

“I thought she was in hiding?” you ask.

“Well, it’d be a secret visit,” says Mei Ling conspiratorially while laughing.

“I never got to actually meet her, just heard her over the codec sometimes,” you say. “She seemed pretty cool though.”

“She’s super neat,” says Mei Ling. “And I think she’s got some other stuff she wants to talk to the two of you about? I think she might have been talking to Snake too, I’m not sure.”

New Message To: Nastasha Romanenko

Meryl

>Hello?

Nastasha Romanenko

>Yes hello. Glad Mei Ling passed on my number

Meryl

>Same! She said u wanted to talk about a book or somethin?

Nastasha Romanenko

>Among other things.

>I was wondering actually if you’d mind if I stopped by and visited for a day or two

>For the book and for other reasons.

Meryl

>Oh yeah! That’d be fine I think?

>It’d be nice to meet you for real.

It took you and Otacon less than a month to fall into a sort of cohabitation that you’re afraid will look kinda weird to someone like Nastasha. What you mean by “someone like Nastasha” isn’t clear even to you. It’s not that it’s messy -- because you really do manage to bully Otacon into a simulacra of a tidy individual about seventy-five percent of the time -- but how very co it is. Laundry gets done all in one batch because it costs a dollar twenty-five in quarters for every load and yeah maybe you can afford that but any time you want more quarters someone has to make a trek out into the frankly unreasonable temperatures, so it’s all or nothing. All your shit’s just mixed in together in the laundry basket, which neither of you have bothered to put away yet. The handouts your physical therapist gives you for all the exercises you’re supposed to do are muddled in with his magazines and crap; when you guys sit on the couch to watch shit you end up sharing blankets because the heat in this place is kinda faulty and you refuse to die of cold or something.

When she walks into the place you feel on edge. Maybe just because she reminds you of all the shit you just went through, but it doesn’t really feel like that sort of badness. Doesn’t necessarily feel like something bad either. Just, like --

Nastasha’s shorter than you expected, but far more commanding, at the same time. Her presence takes up space. She looks like a harsh portrait or a good dream. Realistic, but slightly unreal. You feel awkward around her, gawkish, lumbering and too tall. You trip over your words introducing yourself. Stupid, she already knows who you are. And you trip literally, wrench something in your leg. She steadies you. “Why don’t we sit down?” she asks.

You do. So does Otacon, and he sits next to you on the couch. It feels like a parent teach conference or a job interview. You want to impress her, but you’re not sure how. Otacon’s having one of his less mopey days so you let him chatter; sit there and hope like you don’t look like a sullen child.

At some point she gracefully cuts Otacon off, segues into what she’s actually here to talk about. “I’m writing a book about Shadow Moses, and I’d appreciate it if you’d be able to contribute some information about the incident. Perhaps confirm what my other sources have told me?”

You and Otacon look at each other. Boy oh boy you do not want to do this. You wish you’d had some warning but then you’d have spent the past week dreading this moment. “Sure,” you say. “What do you want to know?”

Otacon hesitates. “I don’t know. Have you talked to Snake? He probably knows more than we do.”

“He doesn’t have your perspectives, and he certainly wasn’t everywhere,” says Nastasha. “Here: I need to step outside for a moment. I’ll give you two a chance to think about it.”

She leaves, and you exhale for the first time in minutes.

“Why’d you agree to that so quickly?” asks Otacon.

You wish you could put your head in your hands without fear of it making something hurt worse. “I don’t know! It seems like something we should do! We should help her, right?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” says Otacon.

Otacon has literally never wanted to talk about anything about himself ever. “You’ve literally never wanted to talk about yourself ever,” you say. “Come on dude, we probably owe it to people or whatever.”

He deflates. “Yeah, you’re right I guess. I just hate it.”

“I hate it too,” you say. “I don’t -- I try not to think about it?” It’s weird. You’ve never had to spend so much time actively not thinking about a thing. Shutting doors constantly every time some memory flared up. Everything reminds you of Shadow Moses and at the same time the whole thing resists examination.

“Yeah, I know.”

Like he has room to talk. “Whatever.”

Maybe this’ll be good for Otacon, even if it’ll hurt for you. And it’ll help Nastasha, and at least it’s something you can do that’s useful.

So she comes back in and she asks you questions and you try to answer them and Otacon tries to answer them and Otacon tries very hard not to cry. Actually he does pretty good all things considered. You feel distant during the whole thing, running on automatic, recalling details and reciting them without putting much thought into it. Which is fine. Helpful even. And the story’s getting old anyway: girl gets kidnapped, girl breaks out, girl tries to help, girl gets shot, girl tries not to die.

You’re still stuck on the “tries not to die” part.

You can’t help but look at Nastasha too much while she’s talking, while Otacon’s talking. You should stop because she’ll notice and then it’ll be weird, but it’s fine, it makes sense you’d want to look at her when the only person you’ve been regularly interacting with is Otacon of all people. It’s a delightful change in pace; her eyebrows and the quirk of her lips and the set of her shoulders and the way she looks intently, writes quickly. You need to focus. On her, yes ok you already got that part down, but you need to focus on what’s actually going on.

She says something and looks at you in particular, and something shoots through you. Some sense of desire, in a way you haven’t felt in a while. But also: oh no, why’s she looking at me? Does she know? And then you think: does she know what? What’s there to know. And you think you know what there is for her to know, but you don’t know if you really want to know what there is for her to know. So many edges of your mind are uncomfortable these days, and this is sort of almost one of them: a thing you’ve butted up against time and time again but shut down. A like, persistent refusal to Deal with some stuff. God, “some stuff,” you are such a coward. You should be thankful for this diversion from the slow monotonous horror of your existence. Nastasha pauses whatever she’s saying to give you an encouraging smile and you smile weakly back.

Nastasha leaves and you feel as disappointed as you are relieved. You would run into your bedroom if you could but that option’s been taken from you. You’d flop down dramatically onto the bed but, you know. Your whole body hurts, your whole body races in a way that doesn’t feel unlike a panic attack, but isn’t one either.

You try very hard -- and almost manage for a minute or two -- to lie still on your bed and not think about anything. It’s an art you’ve nearly perfected in the past month; a careful blankness comfortingly settling over everything. To stop -- this. Whatever it is. But you’re not stupid, and you know what it means when you can’t stop thinking about Nastasha; the way she looks when she smiles, the curve of her neck, the brusque dignified way she talks. You know because you’ve known for oh, however long, that you’ve liked women -- but it’s also something you didn’t know, at the same time. Which doesn’t make sense but is nevertheless true: you knew all along, you didn’t and now you did. It’s just been something easy to push away, to forget about, to not turn over in your head enough for it to become a concrete thought. You didn’t know know because you didn’t let yourself think it over long enough for the thoughts to coalesce into definitive statements. Whatever. Now there’s so little to distract your mind away from this line of questioning -- what else do you have to think about? Everything once important in your life now feels covered with a slimy grease of shame, regret, death. So you’re stuck here, thinking about what you want and how badly you want it.

Just -- why’d it have to be here? Why’d it have to be now? Why’d the last straw have to be an older woman who, realistically, isn’t ever gonna like you? Why couldn’t it have been when you were younger with someone you knew better -- or when you were older, even. Just not now. Not now, when you shouldn’t be thinking about shit like that. When it feels almost, like, disrespectful. If you’re going to think at all, you should be thinking about the people you’ve lost or the damage you’ve done or what precisely you’re going to do now, not fantasizing about some lady you barely know who came here to do a serious job.

Thinking about everything does make different things click into place, but it’s like, duh. Yes, of course you’re terrified of women because they intimidate you. Yes, of course, blah blah, easier to hang out with guys, blah blah blah. Like, you knew, even if you didn’t know. It’s easy to be confident around people who you don’t respect, is the problem. That’s what made it so easy to feel like you knew your shit, as long as Snake wasn’t around.

You think there’s probably no way that Nastasha’s not going to pick up on your awkward bumbling crush. No way you’re not going to telegraph shit hard and loud. But you want -- you think you want someone to know. Not her, obvs. Like not her ever. Still, if you let yourself have this, this feeling, you want recognition for all the goddamn hard work you’re putting into thinking about your bullshit, jeez.

You feel awake for the first time in a while, restless in a way not directly attributable to sheer lack of physical activity. Alert, in a way that’s as exhilarating as it is scary.

You think: Sniper Wolf was kinda hot, and you want to punch yourself.

You have to tell someone. You have to tell someone or you’ll die, simple as that. The energy of keeping everything private feels almost painful, like something about to burst. You’ve never been one to be able to keep things to yourself.

“Hey uh can I talk to you?” you ask Otacon like, super casual, before Nastasha shows up the next day.

“Yeah?” he says. “We’re the only ones here, I’m not sure who else you would talk to.”

He has a huge point, unfortunately. “Okay. Cool. Cool.” You sit down. You put your head in your hands. Well, one of your hands. The one that isn’t attached to the hurt-y arm. This has been absolutely the most horrible day and a half of your life. This is somehow ten times worse than getting shot. The worst part is how you're going to confide like deep dark secrets to Otacon. Otacon, who cries over the fact that all his figurines were inevitably lost to the snows of Shadow Moses. Otacon, who barely ever chews with his mouth closed. Otacon, who you habitually have to kill spiders for. But -- you realize with a dawning horror -- he is the closest thing to a friend you have. And like, he hasn’t said anything to you about it, but like, he's deffos not straight at least. So maybe he'll get it.

“What's wrong? Are you sick or something? Did I do something to make you angry? You were getting all weird last night.”

“No, dude, I'm cool I just like -- I think I might be gay? Like really very gay?” And now that you've said it out loud it seems truer and truer.

“Oh,” he says. Fiddles with his glasses. “Good job?”

Good job?? “Good job? That’s what you’re going with?”

He’s always polishing the damn glasses. They can’t need to be polished that much. “Sorry, I’m not great at talking about this sort of thing. Or I mean, I guess, I just never really have with anyone. But it’s a good thing, right? That you are?”

“I mean, yeah, I think?” you say. “I think, yeah, I think it’s good, of course. I just don’t know what to do, you know?”

“You probably don’t have to do anything,” says Otacon. “Not that I know for sure. But it seems like the kind of thing that just happens.”

“No, thanks, I totally thought there was a form I needed to fill out,” you say. “I just mean, like -- obviously I don’t have to do anything, you know, but I want to? Or just. . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a big deal and I’m making kind of too big of a deal about it. But for me it feels like it changes everything, and it’s frustrating that there’s no visible change. That you can’t like, see that something’s different, you know?”

“You could get another temp tattoo,” he says.

“I’m like, trying to be semi-serious for once in my life,” you say.

“Sorry,” he says. “Talking about this kind of stuff is kind of a lot. Not in a like -- it’s not bad, I’m definitely not saying that it’s bad, it’s just a lot. It is a big deal, and it makes sense you’d want to share it with people. I think I’d want to too.”

You’re like, okay, I super know that Otacon’s not straight, but maybe he’s just not comfortable talking about it? You kind of wish he was. It’s not a fair thought, but it’s the one you have.

“You can talk to me about stuff if you want, you know,” you say.

He waves you off. “This is your time to have a neat realization about yourself, haha, not mine. And I don’t really think I’m super, I don’t really like, like talking about, er, stuff like that, I think. Or romance stuff. Or just, all of that. I’m not very good at it. You probably already guessed that.”

This whole convo is the verbal equivalent of watching people who are really bad at sports play sports, except you’re the one playing the sports. “I’m not great at talking about it either. Or at it in general I guess. God, I told Snake the government destroyed my taste in men -- can you believe that?”

“Well, I can certainly believe you said that.”

“I guess I just never had any interest to begin with. That makes like, way more sense.”

“Hey, I’m really happy for you, really,” he says. “Sorry I’m so bad at talking about it, it’s just, you know.”

You don’t really know but you think he’s trying to say like, “you know, I’m Otacon, I’m bad at talking about a lot of things.” Which is true. “Yeah,” you say. “I just really had to like, tell someone you know. And. . . I kinda trust you? I guess?”

“That’s a weird thing to say,” he says.

“I know,” you say. “But man, there’s like, a lot of people I don’t really know if I can tell about this. Like, most of the people we know.” Like any girls. You wish you could tell Mei Ling, because you like talking to her about stuff, but obviously you can’t.

“What about Nastasha?” he asks. “You could talk to her about it, right? After the stuff she said yesterday, about having a girlfriend and all that.”

You can feel yourself get all tense, feel the blood rushing to your face even as you’re like, okay, come on Silverburgh, play it fuckin cool. “What about Nastasha? Who said anything about Nastasha?” you ask, hoping that Otacon’s general lack of awareness will cover for your lack of self control.

Unfortunately, Otacon’s the least perceptive motherfucker out there but he has got your fuckin number. “Oh, I get it,” he says. “Wait, did you figure out you were gay because you suddenly developed a crush on Nastasha?”

“Whatever!” you say.

“She’s very pretty and cool, it makes sense,” he says.

“This is humiliating,” you say, and it is. “I hate this.”

“It’s good,” he says.

Nastasha comes back later to go over a few more points with you and clarify some answers to some questions, though mostly you think she’s trying to subtly-not-that-subtly rope Otacon into helping her and Mei Ling out with some research they’ve both been doing. Better luck to her.

Nastasha keeps catching you looking at her, and it’s terrible. You wish she was trying to get you to volunteer for some super secret project or something. Otacon keeps giving you Looks, which is also not helpful in any way.

Then, towards the end of the conversation, after you’ve gamely pushed through all the Shadow Moses talk, right when you’re at the limit of your like, emotional endurance:

“I should head out soon,” says Nastasha.

“Oh, already?” you say, even though you’d very much like a nap and maybe to not talk to anyone for five years. But still: you don’t want her to go. It is, of course, humiliating. But what isn’t, these days?

She starts gathering her things, pauses. “You know, I had a girlfriend like you once,” says Nastasha. “A long time ago.”

“You’re not that old,” you say.

She laughs. “I often feel like I am. But my point is: you’re going to do just fine, kid.”

You think for a second she’s going to ruffle your hair and your face heats up with how much you want that. “I’m not that young,” you say, like a petulant child.

“No, you’re not,” she says. “But you’re still pretty young. Good luck out there. Both of you, I’ll keep in touch.”

And with that, she’s gone.

“I will pay you a million dollars to never ever speak to me of this again,” you say to Otacon, who’s been sitting very still as if that means no one will see him.

“Sounds good,” he says. “You sure you don’t want to, er, talk about it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thank goodness” he says, and opens his computer.

New Message From: Mei Ling

Mei Ling

>So how did it go w nastasha?

Meryl

>With nastasha?

Mei Ling

>You know

>Her coming to see you guys and talk to you about whatever it was she wanted to talk about!

Meryl

>Oh that! that went good i think! haha!

>The apartment has never looked this clean and never will again

Mei Ling

>Nice

>I told you she was cool

>Shes really pretty too

Meryl

>Oh really haha

>I guess so

>I didnt really notice i guess

It’s not that you really want to actively hide anything about yourself, it’s just that you’ve finally started being friends with a girl around your age and you don’t want to blow it by there being some sort of awkward thing because you’re gay and she’s straight. But it’s awkward anyway. Maybe this is why it was always so hard for you to make friends with girls, and you just didn’t know it?

Mei Ling

>Well im glad everyone got along ok

>Oh also can u give me otacons number

Meryl

>Uh why

Mei Ling

>Bc i have some info for him and it seemed more polite 2 ask u than to just find it on my own

Meryl

>Cant u just call him on the internet using his hacker name

>Or u dont want to open urself up to counterhacks or whatever i guess

Mei Ling

>Yes counterhacks thats exactly what we call them

Meryl

>Well whatever u send him its cool

>He needs the distraction i think

You give her Otacon’s number, and you’re smiling at your phone, and this is nice even if you can’t tell her all the things you want to say.

You by joint agreement don’t talk about your awkward crush on Nastasha. The gay thing in general: yes. The Nastasha Thing: no. You add it to the list of things you try not to talk about: Sniper Wolf, your families, any time he’s ever caught you crying.

You settle into something approximating routine. Otacon drives you to doctor’s appointments and shit like that, fidgets around with computers and gadgets like he’s half heartedly almost building something. You try very hard to develop patience, pester him whenever he’s doing something that’s vaguely interesting, desperately brainstorm what your next move might be, text Mei Ling, watch tv. You both watch a lot of tv. You try and do stuff for Nastasha too sometimes, fact checking for her and reading over what she’s written. You feel a little pathetic whenever you do; helping her is when you feel the best and when you feel the worst. You think for Otacon it’s just when he feels the worst. Mei Ling’s been trying to rope him into some sort of project but it makes him antsy, and so does looking at Nastasha’s book.

And then there’s this: a week or so after Nastasha leaves you’re arguing with Otacon again about his responsibility for like All Of Shadow Moses in an attempt to distract him away from lecturing you about how you should take it easy more.

You’re both grumpy and on edge from reading over the draft of a bit of Nastasha’s book, and that’s what does it. That’s when you finally get it. He’s launched into a miniature version of his “Because-Metal-Gear-I-am-Awful” speech, a speech you have memorized at this point, but you’re able to pay attention differently now.

He wants something from you.

“I’m just saying, even if you had realized earlier what they were doing with Rex and stuff, they still would’ve forced you to build it. Or woulda gotten someone else to build it, maybe, but then you wouldn’t be around to stop it. Stop beating yourself up over hypotheticals, Jesus.”

“And I’m just saying that you shouldn’t be trying to displace the blame, here.”

You look at him, fussing over some mechanical fiddly thingy that you don’t get, poking at it with a screwdriver, getting angrier and angrier. The fact that Otacon can experience anger instead of just self defeated sadness or a nihilistic blankness still delights you in a way.

“You didn’t mean to do anything, and you like, solved the problem.” At least with Otacon, he has the reassurance that his whatever stemmed mostly from him being like, hypercompetent in his chosen field, unlike you where the issue is largely like, how bad you did.

“But I made the problem in the first place. Making problems is all I do.”

“Whatever,” you say. This is generally the part where shit gets frustrating.

“I do!” he says. “You only think I’m lying because you don’t know how awful I am.”

This is usually the part of the conversation where you say something vaguely peacemaking-y and de-escalate, because it’d been hard to get really riled up, because it seemed kinda wrong to yell at a guy like Otacon, because you just couldn’t muster the energy or (shamefully) the motivation. But your head won’t sit as still anymore and you’re so sick of this argument, so sick of how he has these weird hesitant moments of openness and then just descends into insulting himself. It feels at once intimate and distant, like you’re watching him argue with himself in private. You hate how he rushes to your defense as quickly as he rushes to blame himself. You hate this and for a vivid second you almost hate him -- but you can’t.

“Are you trying to get me to yell at you?” you ask. “Are you like, trying to convince me you suck so I’ll do the yelling for you?”

“No,” he says, not looking at you. “That’s silly.”

“I don’t think it is,” you say. “I think I’m right.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

“You don’t want to talk about anything, except for how you suck,” you say.

“You don’t want to talk about anything except for how you suck, so, whatever,” he says.

“I cannot believe I’m trying to like, talk about feelings with you,” you say. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“Why do you even bother?” he asks.

You think to yourself: why am I even still in this conversation? But, you realize, it’s because for all his stupid asinine self excoriating speeches, for all his shitty anime and his inability to meaningfully interact with anyone’s emotions in any way, in spite of the fact that you like literally trip into long stilted guilt filled convos about your various regrets once a week, you kinda actually really do care about Otacon. Vividly, in a way you couldn’t before, when you couldn’t let yourself think about anything too much. You’re both messy and emotional at the weirdest times and share things too openly in ways you regret later. He can’t fold laundry for shit, and always lets you have the warmest blanket.

“Because it sucks watching you do this to yourself.”

He sighs. “Sorry, I just -- wish there were things that I could say or talk about, but I can’t, to anyone, but I wish I could. So that someone could get it.”

“I’ve lived with you for over a month, I know everything,” you say. And you don’t know everything but you really do know some things. Or at least feel like you have an idea of his whole thing. He hates talking about his family, his life, anything about himself. He goes by what sounds like a shitty internet handle -- that tells you enough already. He’s closed off and persnickety and feels most at ease when he’s working, except now for him working is ruined too. You don’t think you’ve ever met anyone who hates themself as much as Otacon does.

“You don’t understand,” he says.

“Okay, what don’t I understand?”

He pauses, like he’s teetering on the edge of a precipice. Like he’s fighting himself to try and say something and he’s losing. “I can’t,” he says. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Okay,” you say. “But don’t act like you’re gonna get me to pry it out of you because like, I’m not doing that.”

“It’s just --” He finally gives up on whatever it is he’s fiddling with, puts the screwdriver down. “I really don’t like myself very much.”

“Yeah,” you say.

“Thanks,” he says. “I’m trying here.”

He is, probably. Which like, is kinda pathetic, but whatever.

“Go on,” you say.

“I --” He’s internally gearing up for a speech, but still nothing. “Sorry, I just don’t have it in me. I feel like, oh I don’t know, that’s kind of a let down.”

“Oh my God, whatever,” you say. “It’s your shit to share.”

“I ran away from home when I was seventeen, because of bad stuff,” he says, in a rush. “And that’s, er, it.”

It looks like that took something out of him. You’d ask follow up questions, but now’s not the time and honestly the fact that he did that much is sorta, like, you don’t know. A thing. A huge olive branch. A massively big thing. Sharing with intent, like a promise. He’s one of the few people to see you cry and you suspect you’re one of the few people he’s ever volunteered anything personal to.

“Well, whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault, you total numbskull. I have to admit, you don’t seem like the running away from home kinda guy.”

“I’m good at running away from my mistakes.” You roll your eyes at him. “Stop it!” he says. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

“Well, I already knew you were a mess,” you say. “I mean, blah blah, I’m sure there’s more, but I did kind of already know you were a shambling disaster zone of a human being.”

“Gee, thanks,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

“Whatever,” he says.

“Don’t ‘whatever’ me,” you say. “Only I get to whatever you. I’m serious.”

“Well it wasn’t your fault you got shot, then! If we’re not ascribing blame to people!” he says.

“That’s different! I just stared at the laser for like ten seconds, I’m smarter than that, I knew she was about to shoot me!”

“You panicked because that’s what people do in combat scenarios sometimes!” he says. “It’s a natural physiological response to danger!”

“Well, then, like, all your bs, like, same! Jesus, dude, you were seventeen. You were like, a kid.”

“You’re only a couple years older than that.”

“Yeah, well, that means I remember being seventeen. And I was a kid. Just like -- I don’t know. I do think you made some mistakes with Metal Gear. But I don’t think that means, I don’t know, that whatever happened to you when you were a kid was justified, or that you deserve to die, or like, that you shouldn’t be around. Especially since you -- I mean, I believe you, when you say you didn’t know they were gonna use Rex to shoot nukes. I’ve spent enough time around you now to buy into that being a thing you didn’t realize. And you stopped it from happening. And, I don’t know.”

“I wanted to turn it around and make all my mistakes into something positive, right after we left Shadow Moses. For all of a few hours, I had this whole idea that I could fix what I’d done, make the world better because of it somehow, and then I lost it and came here instead. Just hiding out, hiding away from everything I’ve done. Just like last time.”

“It’s been like six weeks,” you say. “You did almost die like thirty times. Give yourself a minute to catch your breath.”

“I just think you should take the same things into consideration for yourself, Meryl. You’re always pushing yourself, but you’re the one who got shot. And none of it was your fault, the whole mess.”

“I could’ve done more,” you say. “God, I’m so stupid. I could’ve.”

“I think you did okay,” he says.

“Don’t think we’re not gonna talk more about that stuff you said about when you were younger,” you say. “We totally are at some point.”

“I look forward to dreading it entirely,” he says.

You reach across the table to pat him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about Sniper Wolf,” you say. “I know you liked her.”

“I’m sorry she shot you,” he says. “I know you didn’t.”

“It’s okay,” you say. “I mean, it’s not okay, I did get shot a bunch. But it’s not your fuckin’ fault.”

“Sorry I told you all that stuff, I wasn’t going to. I didn’t mean to.”

“Nah, we are definitely going to talk more about that at some point. Like we don’t gotta for a while, but it’s not like, a thing that’s gonna go away.”

“I’d prefer if you just forgot all about it,” says Otacon.

“I’m the least forgetful person you know,” you say. “Mind like a steel trap. Sorry.”

“You’re not that sorry,” he says.

“No, I’m really not,” you say. He gets you.

And after that, it’s kinda -- different. Not really, but enough.

You and Otacon go and visit Snake after a while. You tell Snake like, two hours before you leave, because you want to give him enough time to Brace Himself or whatever but not enough time to back out of it. You’ve talked about it. “I think he was just hanging out alone in Alaska for five years? From what Campbell told me?” you tell Otacon. “And before that, he was doing the same thing for a while? I think maybe if you let him he’ll just. . . hang out in Alaska for five more years, until the next major crisis comes along.”

“But he said he was going to look for a purpose,” says Otacon.

“Yeah, well, don’t you ever forget to do something really important that you really need to do because -- I don’t know, you’re too busy being sad, or you just get distracted?”

And he frowns and goes “Yeah,” so you think he gets where you’re going with this.

So: calling Snake, finding a rental car with tires that can deal with the snow (which, it’s Alaska, so that’s a lot of them), listening to Otacon go “oh my God, you’re not even old enough to rent a car, are you???” like ten times like it’s the funniest shit ever, getting lost once or twice on the way there (“it’s just all snow, man, it’s just all fucking snow, it’s April, what the hell”), rolling up to Snake’s place and yeah it’s a cabin the man lives in an actual cabin Little House on the Prairie style. Little House on the Frozen Tundra style, whatever.

He looks disgruntled but like sort of in a “I have to look disgruntled because that’s my thing or whatever” kinda way. Not really actually that disgruntled. Tired, maybe. But who isn’t.

And of course he has like -- you wanna say “he has like thirty dogs” in a really exaggerated way, but he has more than that, like actually has more than that. “I gotta go feed ‘em,” he says, and that’s the first thing he says.

“Can I help?” asks Otacon, because of course, and you roll your eyes and follow a little ways behind them.

“Otacon didn’t even really wanna come here,” you say, and you feel a little bad when Snake’s face sort of almost imperceptibly falls, because it was a joke, so you go, “I mean, he’s just after you for your dogs,” and he laughs.

“Hey!” says Otacon. “That’s not true.”

“He wouldn’t stop talking about them,” you say.

“That’s definitely not true!”

It’s a little true.

You’re shivering, hoping you can keep straight the difference between these dogs and Sniper Wolf’s wolves, hoping you can stay cool. The first dog walks up to you and starts sniffing and you’re like haha okay hi there little murder beast, and Snake looks at you and is like, “You can go inside if you want.”

Which he doesn’t mean as a challenge but it’s a little bit of a challenge. You look at the dog. It looks kinda like one of Sniper Wolf’s, but at the same time, not really, and it’s snuffling at your leg in a way that’s definitely friendly and not aggressive and it’s not like the damn wolves ever hurt you they were just part of her fucking aesthetic or whatever so it’s cool, you’re cool. “Nah, it’s fine,” you say, crouching down to scratch the dog behind its ears. You look over at Otacon, who is basically neck deep in dogs. He is literally getting dog-piled. “Haha oh man, looks like dogs like him almost as much as nerds do.”

“As much as nerds do?” asks Snake.

“Yeah, we went into a comic book store this one time, and he started telling me about something and before you know it there was like this little flock of nerds around him talking for like half an hour before he could get himself out.”

“So you two are getting along okay?”

“Yeah,” you say. The dog is thwumping its tail in a way that you decide means it's pleased. “Better than I thought.”

“Are you two ---”

You look at him like “oh my God really,” which you don’t say, but instead you say “Actually, uh, I’ve been thinking about some stuff a lot lately.”

“Some stuff?” he asks.

“Yeah, just, stuff in general.” This is a lot more awkward with someone you don’t share snack packs with. “And I don’t think I really like guys like that at all.”

“You said the army had destroyed your taste in men?”

You said a lot of things during Shadow Moses, okay? A lot of conversing happened. “Okay well that might have been sort of bullshit, or rather, I think probably I just assumed it ‘worked’ because I never really liked ‘em in the first place.” You scuffle your foot in the snow, which, predictably, elicits a twinge of pain. “I think I might just be a lesbian or whatever.”

You don’t know why you’re so nervous about this. Okay, you do, it’s because you have an unfortunate amount of respect for Snake. But it’s like, ridiculous. It’s probably ridiculous that you’re sharing like, Updates about your life Sitch with him as if he cares. But then again: you think he does. And you feel like you’ve kinda got the vibe from Snake that he’d be Cool about this kind of stuff but like, you’re not sure.

“Makes sense,” he says.

“So like I think the whole thing with the like, whatever that was, it was just stress talking, I wasn’t really into you or anything.”

“Into me?”

“What I mean is,” you say, giving the dog a last pat on the head, “Sometimes you become infatuated with the idea of a person, and not a person themselves, like, a character that’s sort of like them? and that idea or character seems really attractive for like, ten hours. I don’t know if I wanted to be with you or I just wanted to be you, ya know, someone who was that good under pressure, who just knew how to fight, who had that sort of perfection normal people don’t have.”

He looks uncomfortable, or upset, or something. “Meryl, I’m not. . .”

“I know. That idea isn’t you, is the thing. You’re not perfect at anything, not even at the stuff you’re best at. I think you can be that person, that like, perfect idea, like” -- you wave your hands -- “archetypally? Otacon’s better at this than me. You can inhabit, or something, that idea for a little bit but it’s not you. And I don’t want to be with you -- like, no offense, but even beyond the whole guy thing you’re not really my type -- and I don’t want to be you, either. You’re sort of a loser.”

“Thanks, Meryl,” he says.

You punch his arm. “I mean that in the nicest possible way,” you say, because, like, he is, you know?

You both stand there, awkwardly, in the slushy April remains of February snow, until you get the impulse to hug him, because shit, you’ve both had a rough while here.

“My real name’s David,” he says, in your ear, which is unexpected, and also, like you just do not peg him for a David, but that’s not important what’s important is that he’s telling you that. It’s like getting entrusted with a piece of him, you guess, one that’s not got anything to do with the battlefield or like being a soldier or whatever or even what you’ve gone through together.

You break apart. “David, huh?” and then, thinking back to Otacon, you ask -- “You want me to call you that, or Snake?”

He shrugs.

“‘Kay,” you say. “Dealer’s choice. Tell you what, Snake, I’ll whip out the Davids for when you’re in serious trouble.”

“Like a full name kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” you say. “Solid Dave Snake, you are in real fucking trouble now.”

He smiles a little and you smile and so you’re okay, the two of you, you think. You’re all settled up.

Snake looks over at Otacon, and you do too, and he is still sitting there petting those dogs, like he has not moved, but he’s got that thoughtful look on his face that’s a sign of him thinking too much. Snake must recognize it too, because he says, “He’s gonna freeze his ass off,” and walks over to him.

They talk for a second and Snake shoos the dogs and grabs Otacon’s hand and helps him up. Otacon trips and sort of leans into Snake and Snake keeps a hold on his hand a little bit longer than he needs to and they laugh and part of you goes oh my God and doesn’t stop for the next eighteen months.

Snake’s place is weird because it's not actually all that weird. Like, he is not gonna win interior decorator of the year or anything, but there's a rug and lamps and not like an arsenal of weapons on the walls or anything. He's got a bookcase. The bookcase has books. There are knick knacks -- not like, a lot, but like, a novelty ashtray. A little wood carving of a fox. A few pictures in actual picture frames.

Most of the pictures are turned so they're facing down, so you wait until Otacon and Snake go to feed Snake’s dogs again before you look at them. Mostly they're of Snake and other people, younger Snake, oh my God he looks like such a baby in some of them too. Most other people in the pics are smiling but Snake’s not, not really, though at this point you're pretty sure that's who Snake is. He doesn't look like a twenty year old dude trying to look serious -- okay, yeah, that a little, but -- but he doesn't have the same sort of swagger guys that age who try to be serious have, the same chest-puffing importance you’re painfully familiar with. He looks like a really solemn toddler, oh my God, which would be cuter if it wasn't like you know, you're pretty sure some of the people in these pictures are dead. This one guy who's at least a couple years older than Snake crops up in a few, including the only picture you see where baby Snake is smiling a little (the other guy’s hand on his shoulder, turned in towards each other like the photographer caught them in the middle of a joke) so like yeah you're pretty sure there's some unfun backstory there.

This other guy keeps showing up too, some older man with sunglasses and at first you're like “who's this douchebag?” and then you're like oh fuck it's that douchebag, Miller, the one Liquid pretended to be. You turn the picture back down again. You wonder if Liquid used the same glasses, or if he supplied his own. Probably the former, which, yikes.

Okay but like, you have got to see what's on the bookshelf of a guy like Solid Snake.

Turns out that there's like a lot of French shit. This book might be Russian? You'd heard that The Legendary Solid Snake spoke a ton of languages but you hadn't thought about how that translated (har har) in a practical sense down to Snake the guy you know. About half the stuff in English looks like pretentious garbage.

New Message To: Mei Ling

Meryl

>snakes bookshelf is full of pretentious garbage

>u like pretentious garbage right

Mei Ling

>its my favorite kind of garbage! :O

Meryl

>trying 2 figure out if snake will kill me if i take a pic of his books

Mei Ling

>please i need all the deets concerning this ludicrous refuse

Meryl

>maybe u 2 should start a book club

That whole night is like, ultra weird in a way you find difficult to parse in the future. Weird enough that you and Otacon share Significant Looks anytime someone proclaims something (Naomi related shenanigans, nanomachines, supervillains with ghost arms) the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to them. The three of you look like the setup to a bad joke, emotionally stunted in different ways and still living the past -- the same past -- over and over again in your heads. Snake’s like, he was like, your hero -- and now he’s trying to show you how to whittle while he shares stories about his Foxhound days. “They didn’t call him Hellmaster for nothing,” he says to you.

He too, you realize, feels like he owes you something.

You’re pretty sure Otacon’s sneakily (“sneakily”) gone and thrown out half of Snake’s cigarettes, because living with you has made him bold or stupid or something, but Snake seems only mildly beleaguered by him. There’s a weird thing where you both keep treating Snake like you treat each other, like he’d been living with you for months, even though technically you’ve only met a few times. Maybe Otacon fucking with his stuff communicates the same sentiment as your whole embarrassing speech to Snake earlier -- he clearly doesn’t idolize him.

That night calcifies something between the three of you. You hear Snake say more in an hour than you did during the whole of the rest of your acquaintanceship. Like, his word count does not even begin to eclipse yours and Otacon’s, but it’s still way more than you expected. The three of you like, have conversations, like normal people. It reminds you of your few hazy memories of sleepovers, back before you decided the whole practice was too awkward. You always fell asleep first.

You fall asleep first here too. You’re mostly out but not quite as out as Otacon and Snake think you are when you hear the tone of their conversation -- distant background noise -- shift. They’re talking quietly but not that quietly; when you open your eyes the tiniest bit they’re both silhouetted by the fire Snake started earlier, sitting close. Otacon’s got his earnest face on. Snake just looks tired.

“I wish I could fix things. Try and fix things, maybe, I don’t know,” says Otacon. “Meryl says it’s not all my fault, like, big chunks of it aren’t, but it’s still my invention. I still made it. And it’s still out there.”

“You can’t just fix things.”

“Not on my own, no,” says Otacon. “But, hey --”

Snake grumbles, like he knows what’s coming next. “What?”

“Have you thought about what you want to do now?”

“Otacon. . . I don’t know about this. Fighting doesn’t lead to peace. I don’t want that life again.”

“I’m not talking about fighting! I didn’t say anything about fighting, or developing a weird PMC, or becoming a nuclear power or something incredibly silly like that” says Otacon. “I’m not talking about combat, I’m talking about. . . about. . . the free spread of information! About not letting anyone get away with this kind of stuff again. About setting right what we -- what I -- put wrong.”

“There would be some fighting.”

“Minimal fighting though? But -- that’s not really why I’m asking you. I think. . . Nastasha and Mei Ling would be for it, for sure, though I don’t know how much either of them could do. Just in terms of time constraints, that is. Between the three of us we could get a lot done maybe but you’re better at a lot of things than we are. Not just the physical stuff, though yeah, that’s certainly true.”

“Nastasha could give me a run for my money,” says Snake, and he’s like, deffos right.

“Anyway, it’s not just that. You have a. . . a clarity of thought that none of us do, if that makes sense.”

“It doesn’t,” says Snake.

“You know what you’re doing? And I don’t?”

“I don’t,” says Snake. “I just take orders from people, that’s all I do.”

“That’s not true,” says Otacon. “If that was all you did, me and Meryl would both be dead.”

“You’re really serious about this thing, aren’t you?” says Snake.

“Probably? I just -- I didn’t think I could do anything. I’ve been sitting and waiting for something to fall in my lap, or to just keel over and die or something, but I don’t think Meryl will let me, and I’m starting to maybe not want to as much. I know you have regrets about how everything happened. I know you don’t want people like Liquid or Ocelot or -- or anyone! To have the sort of power they’re after.”

“All I wanted was to come back here and be alone,” says Snake.

“Yeah, I know that feeling,” says Otacon. “But you told me and Meryl to stick together for a reason, right? I can do more with you, and you can do more with me. I don’t want anything where anyone’s giving anyone else orders, I don’t want to order you around and I don’t want you to tell me what to do. I want -- I want a partner. I’m good at building things and at hacking things and at just generally being a fuckup I guess, but if I did this on my own -- even if I did it with Mei Ling and Nastasha -- I’d be lost without you.”

“What about Meryl?”

“Meryl’ll probably end up helping me whether I like it or not,” says Otacon.

Snake rubs his face with his hands, sighs. “I don’t know why I’m making you try so hard to talk me into something I’ve already talked myself into. You’re right -- I don’t like sitting around like this. Not anymore. Feels wrong. But I don’t want to be some sort of hired gun. And that’s not what you want. So we’re on the same page. But I need to think about this. You need to think about this.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Otacon. “Mei Ling and Nastasha keep sending me intel on different things to distract me or cheer me up in a weird way, haha, and I’ve talked to Mei Ling a little and Nastasha some when she came to visit, so I have an idea of what they’d be willing to do, but -- I’m making it up on the spot mostly right now, I just know I want you along or it won’t work.”

“Talk to Meryl about it,” says Snake. “Do that at least. She’s alright.” He puts a hand on Otacon’s shoulder. “You’re alright too. Doing better than I thought you would.”

“Gee, thanks,” he says.

“Hey,” you say, a week later. “If you’re creating some sort of secret superhero team to fight Metal Gears or something, you gotta deal me in too.”

You’d thought about not bringing it up, waiting for him to do so. But he’s been doing a lot more of what he likes to call “serious hacking business” lately and also you have to strongarm him into most serious conversations you want to have.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Otacon. He’s doing the dishes, but under duress. As per usual.

“I’m serious, man. I want in.” You don’t want to tell him that you overheard him and Snake talking, because the dude doesn’t need to be more paranoid about people overhearing him than he already is. “I kinda have got the sense that that’s where everyone’s going. And I don’t want to be left out.”

“It’s --”

“If you say ‘it’s dangerous’ I really will kill you,” you say. “Mei Ling’s totally in on it, isn’t she? She’s even younger than me!”

“Jeez, well, fine then,” he says. “You’re in.”

You feel like there’s an unspoken like, “despite the fact that you can’t do anything useful” thing here. “I feel like there’s an unspoken like, ‘despite the fact that you can’t do anything useful’ thing here.”

“What?” he asks. “No!”

“Dude,” you say.

“‘Dude,’” he says. “You keep comparing yourself to Snake, maybe.”

“Don’t do the air quotes thing at me, also, I don’t keep comparing myself to Snake.”

You really do though. “You really do though,” he says. “It’s fine, I get it, me too. But you’re not Snake -- you’re not a weird super soldier or a clone and you don’t have the same experiences he’s had, you can’t do things the same way he can. But you snuck up on him a couple times, right, and you can do other stuff too. But you’re never going to be Snake and that’s maybe something you have to get over, you know? You’re never going to be Snake or your dad or anybody else, you have to deal with the fact that you’re you. Start from that and then, I don’t know, figure out what you can do from there.”

“Cool, great, thanks for the life advice, Otacon.”

“Besides, weren’t you paying attention while we were at his place? He doesn’t have anyone to talk to, doesn’t have much to do besides take care of his dogs and stew -- Snake’s a mess. I don’t know if you want to be him.”

“I thought you thought he was really super special and cool and hot and stuff.”

“I never said that!” he says. He scrubs a pan emphatically. There’s no way he’s not scratching it. “And it’s not like he can’t be a mess at the same time. I think. . . I think Snake’s really good at a lot of things. But I don’t think he’s good at not locking himself away to brood when he gets hurt sometimes.”

God, like he is even one to talk. “Like you’re even one to talk!” you say.

“I mean, obviously,” says Otacon. “I know more about this than anyone.” He finishes washing the last dish. “Anyway it’ll be awhile before we actually do any, uh, any of the stuff that I think we’re going to do.”

“The superhero stuff,” you say.

“The non-governmental organization stuff,” he says. “We’re going to try and do at least some of it aboveboard. Nastasha says there’ll be paperwork and everything.”

“Plus the sneaking and the spying and the hacking and all that,” you say.

“Yeah, plus that” he says.

“So what’s next for you, then? Like, before that stuff,” you ask.

“I’m going to visit my mother? In England? Pretty soon?” says Otacon.

“Why are you saying it with so many question marks?” you ask. “Like, are you not sure about the mother part, the England part, or the soon part?”

“Haha, well no I’m not uncertain about any of it, I just haven’t seen her in a really long time, and I figured now was a good time to see her, since you know.” He gestures at like, the apartment, at the like, whole state of Alaska, at your general life situation. “I’m thinking about stuff and it just seemed. . . a good plan.” He takes his glasses off to clean them, which he really shouldn’t do with the corner of his shirt like that, he’s gonna get them all scratched up. “Do you think it’s a good plan?”

“Doesn’t seem like the worst idea,” you say. You’re not even gonna bother asking about the why when it comes to why he hasn’t seen his mom in a long time. Otacon doesn’t like talking about his family bullshit, and he has a lot of it.

“What if she hates me?” he asks.

“Then she hates you I guess?” you say. Which is like, you know. You never claimed to be good at comforting people.

He sits down at the table. “What if she doesn’t like me,” he says.

“Isn’t that the same thing?” you ask.

“No, it’s not,” he says. “And, I don’t know.” He makes a face, an Otacon Face.

“What don’t you know?” you ask.

“This is embarrassing, I shouldn’t tell you about it,” he says.

“Your whole life is embarrassing,” you say.

“It’s just really silly, and maybe kinda rude, but I sort of want her to call me Otacon too? I guess I don’t have to do that.”

“If it bugs you for people to call you something else, then I say go for it,” you say. “Like, yeah man, it’s definitely silly. But fuck it, so’s most things.”

“I don’t want her to not. . . like. . . the person I’ve grown up to be,” he says.

“Well, you don’t like you,” you say. But you get it. You’ve been putting off calling your mom. You’d promised her once a week, but it’s been three. You can’t talk to her anymore -- now that you feel like you’ve become someone different, now that you know that she was a different person all along.

Predictably, Otacon doesn’t find any of this reassuring. “Thanks,” he says.

“If she hates you, it won’t be the end of the world,” you say. “Just call me and complain about it and I’ll listen to you shittalk, it’s all good.”

“It’d be a little bit the end of the world,” he says.

You pat him on the back. “Ain’t it always.”

You have so much affection for Otacon; unrepentant loser that he is, nerd that he is, and yes, shambling mess of a human being that he is. You’re both saddled with each other, your lives have been almost inescapably linked, but it works. You would never have become friends with a guy like this like, intentionally, but with him you’ve found someone who’s almost a mirror of you. You’re different in almost every way possible, but at the same time, not. A funhouse reflection of a man.

He cries and hugs you before he leaves for England, and you cry too, and only hate yourself a little for it.

After he leaves, you start to pack. You’re not sure where you’re going yet, but you think you’ve seen enough of Alaska for now.

New Message From: Otacon

Otacon

>my mom just told me shes gay and i thought of you

>also i asked her if i could tell you so its okay im not being a weird dick

Meryl

>oh my god

>otacon

>your mom is cool

Otacon

>i kno shes the coolest she worked for nasa and everything

>and then ppl made fun of her for being gay so she told them to fuck off for like ten years

Meryl

>lmao are you drinking buddy

>thats the only time i ever hear you swear

>you are such a lightweight

Otacon

>akdjf she just asked if we were a thing

>also yes maybe

Meryl

>oh my god please tell her absolutely no under no conditions and also im a lesbian

>please tell yr mom im a lesbian and do the lesbian nod thing at her like i showed you

Otacon

>u kno i cant

>i just told her i didnt want her to call me hal

>thats when she told me about how ppl called her strangelove

>bc they were trying to insult her and she ws like whatever man

>i hope she doesnt hate me

Meryl

>dude she was clearly telling you that to like empathize with you dont be ridiculous

>i told you itd be okay

>golly its almost like im right about everything all the time

>its hard being me

You call Otacon once he’s overseas, because, well, someone’s gotta make sure he’s still alive. "Mulder, it's me," you say, when he picks up.

"I'm going to regret watching The X-Files with you, aren't I?"

"Maybe we are just like Mulder and Scully,” you say. “A super cool incredibly deadly chick and a total square. Together they. . .” Well, you didn’t as much fight crimes as commit them.

“Uncover conspiracies? Expose the long reach of the military-industrial complex?"

“Yeah, something like that,” you say.

“In my defense, there were a lot of reasons it took Mulder a full eight seasons to get fired from the FBI. It’s not like he was better at his job than me.”

“Being the Mulder isn’t necessarily a negative. Like, Mulder’s not bad, he’s just sorta ridiculous and weird and thinks a lot of weird things and acts all disdainful sometimes of UFO enthusiasts even though he’s president of the alien abductions explain lots of weird shit fanclub and probably leaves sunflower seed shells everywhere. But he cares a lot about Scully, and he’s kinda funny, and he’s really driven and he wants to find out the truth, so he’s pretty alright. He cares a lot and he tries hard.”

“Then why does everyone always want to be Scully?”

“Come on, Scully’s superior in literally every way. And she’s super hot.”

“I guess I didn’t think of you as Scully because I always think about Scully’s qualifications first,” says Otacon.

“Are you saying I’m not qualified to Scully? Are you calling my license to Scully into question?”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t think, I guess, about what made Scully Scully besides her ability to analyze cases from a medical perspective. She’s the ‘straight man’ to Mulder too, but that’s not all.”

“This would be a good time to make jokes about the straight part,” you say. “On account of how --”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. They care about each other, is the point. That’s what makes Mulder and Scully work -- not as much the discrepancy between what they believe, but how they’re willing to act to defend each other even when they don’t agree with each other. Scully sticks up for Mulder when everyone thinks Mulder is some weirdo --”

“He is a weirdo,” you say.

“Yes, but he’s her ‘weirdo.’ She’s loyal, and she’s not afraid to be proven wrong if the evidence is strong enough, and she fights for her friends. That’s what makes her Scully.”

The level of thought he’s put into Scully’s character would be sorta touching if you didn’t think maybe he’s trying to lead you away from the “haha Otacon you’re totally Mulder” conversation path, which in turn makes you think maybe he’s, like, hiding something? Look, Snake might be the one who goes on sneaking missions but Otacon’s the one who’s actually sneaky.

“Wait, Otacon. . . you got fired from the FBI because you tried hacking them or whatever, right?”

“More like I successfully ‘hacked’ them, but yes.”

“Okay but like, did you do it to find out about whether or not there were actually aliens?”

“I’m not answering that question,” he says.

So that’s a yes, then. “So that’s a yes, then,” you say.

“You’ll never know.”

“Oh, come on!” you say. “Dude!”

“Scully, some things you have to accept on faith,” he says, and you can like, fuckin hear how smug he feels right now over the phone.

They don’t ask you for help directly until their first mission goes bad. And not like -- you don’t mean “the first time a mission goes bad” you mean their first mission goes bad.

“What do you mean ‘it was like The Matrix?’” you ask over the phone when you get the call, but they’re planning something else and you head to California anyway, meet up with them and Nastasha in one of Nastasha’s carefully guarded hidey holes.

You nod at Nastasha when you come in, and she nods at you, and it’s a little awkward still but not the worst thing ever, and there’s Otacon too, and Snake, not looking too worse for wear. They look better, actually, and a part of you resents this: that you couldn’t help either of them as much as they can help each other. That they have -- whatever. Whatever. They called you here, they want you here, so you aren’t useless. And they did like, deffos get kidnapped by some shady dudes and drugged and put into a weird VR dream or something so like, point proven, they can’t go off and do everything on their own.

“You needed backup,” says Nastasha. She doesn’t smoke around other people but you can tell she wants to from the way her hand is curled around the lighter you know she has in her pocket. “That was your first problem.”

“I wasn’t trying to get kidnapped,” says Snake.

“Coulda fooled me,” you say, because you can. “Anyway, okay so like, what’s up?”

What’s up, Otacon explains (with air quotes and everything, God), is that he’s gotten a lead on some other company who also might be trying to build their own Metal Gear because like why not you guess.

“And you like, double checked this info?” you ask, because someone’s gotta.

“Yes, Meryl,” says Otacon. “Mei Ling says the intel seems legitimate. Anyway, they’re going to have some sort of demonstration of whatever new they have for some army officials in a couple of weeks, we think that if they’ve got anything close to a Metal Gear that’s probably when they’ll bring it out.”

Everyone talks over the specifics some more. Blah blah hacking, blah blah Metal Gear, blah blah The Truth Is Out There. You’re still not sure where you fit in.

“Why do you want me, anyway?” you ask.

“You know people, you’re smart, you have connections, we trust you,” says Snake.

“I’m a rookie. A rookie who got burned, I’m not exactly on anybody’s favorites list. Half of the people I might have ‘connections’ to are dead.”

“You grew up around military guys and stuff, didn’t you?” asks Otacon. “So you still know people from then.”

“So you want me to call Campbell, essentially, all the time,” you say.

Otacon shrugs. “Or call the people Campbell knows yourself. Or something, I don’t know. People who might be nicer to you than to me. And it’s not exactly like Snake can go poking around everywhere. It’d be nice to get info in a way that didn’t involve hacking or risky stealth missions.”

“So you want me to talk to people,” you say. “People and also Campbell. Totally what I’m best at.”

“Better you than me,” says Snake. “I do solo work.”

“Don’t discount the importance of the last reason Snake gave,” says Nastasha. “Trust is a valuable and rare commodity, especially these days.”

“And -- you said you wanted me to call you. So I called you,” says Otacon. He says it like he’s making a point or winning an argument, but you don’t think that’s how he means it.

You look at your unlikely -- coworkers? allies? friends? -- and shake your head. Your leg hurts, but not as bad as it did yesterday. Later, you’ll talk to Nastasha, and later still maybe you’ll call Mei Ling. You haven’t seen your best friend in months and now he’s asking you to help him rob megacorps. “Okay,” you say. “Let’s get started.”