Disclaimer: I do not own a thing from the franchise. Kojima Productions, Konami and all companies own the Metal Gear does. I just do the fan-stuff via writing half-assed, quasi-philosophical fanfictions.

A/N: I never played any of the Metal Gear games. I just saw a 'let's play' of MGR: Reveangence, read few articles on metal gear wiki and saw couple of YT videos. So yeah… do not expect me to be an expert or that this work would be caked with references to the other games. It's not.

A/N2: I presume the timeline of this work stretches from the end of Metal Gear 4 to the start of Metal gear Rising: Reveangence.

the sleep of the just

By your-biohazardous-friend

"Sinners never sleep

Wake up, please, with me (…)"

/be myself – Aiden Grimshaw/

First months together, as a family, had been tough for them. Raiden had his own set of habits of a lone wolf, with leaving his weapons all over the place among them. However with time: No weapons in the house! Mutated into: No weapons on the dining table!

For Raiden having a family was not normal. That he had wife and a child to come back to. That he had people who would lovingly call him Jack, not Raiden – never Raiden, without sounding ominous or scared. That he had a house, at which he could look ridiculous while wearing baggy trousers, tacky t-shirts and fluffy slippers. That he could practice katas with his son or marathon movies with his wife, throwing popcorn at TV with disgust when his favourite scenes from his favourite movies were butchered in the newest re-makes - Simply being the man, he used to be before all the trauma contributed to his downward spiral of heavy drinking and self-abuse.

Of course, that didn't mean he's all happy, cured man now or that everything was A-OK in their family dynamics but they were progressively getting there.

One day at a time.

As he got back to the New Zeland it was already late at night, or rather extremely early morning. The man punched the security code onto the panel. The device beeped, red light changed onto green. Without any thought he stepped inside the building, went left, then down the stairs. Raiden shuffled around the basement in total darkness as he put the rest of his gear, that wasn't stored at Maveric SC's HQ, to a specially designed strongbox. He knew that if he didn't do that now – right after coming home - his wife would be furious at him, to put it mildly.

John was waiting for him. Or rather, he tried to. Toys and comic books were scattered across the living room, but their owner was dozing off on the couch. Of course, John didn't mange to stay awake – he never did. But he tried anyway each time Raiden phoned saying that he's already on his way home.

The cyborg smiled. No VR mission or test prepared by Doktor taught him more efficiently the need for caution than life at home. Gently he took his son up on his arms, fixed the blanket Rose draped around her offspring earlier. Boy's head lolled on the man's artificial shoulder. The kid was a heavy sleeper.

The warrior carefully walked to the kid's room, tucked him in. He finished the routine by running his artificial hand through silky locks of his son's white hair. If Raiden closed his eyes, and focused hard enough, he could feel the softness numbed down by inaccurate artificial nerves.

Nights had always been an issue, but never for John - He had his mom with head full of stories and ninja-spy-dad to keep monsters lurking in the darkness at bay. Neither under-the-bed-crawlers nor wardrobe-lurkers could survive encounter with the high-frequency blade his father wielded.

At the beginning, during their first year together, the real drama begun shortly after little John closed his eyes. It was a time when both Raiden and Rose dropped their happy, but somewhat fake, acts. Night after night, nightmare after nightmare Raiden would leave their bed to 'sleep' on a couch, or even leave the household entirely just to wander around streets with a Katana in his grasp. It was also a time when a crime rate was the lowest in their neighborhood. However, so was Raiden's self-esteem – Jobless, PTSDly broken soldier who did try his best not to run away, yet his subconscious was betraying him again and again. Many times, during his sleep-deprived walks, he found himself in a different town and had to use the top speed of his ninja run to come home before sunrise or before anyone would notice that he was gone. However, every since that faithful evening at hospital, he always came back. Yet, no matter how he tried to sugar coat it, how he tried to pretend the issue wasn't so overwhelming, the fear of the night remained.

'The solution' for Raiden's insomnia came one day in a form of a newspaper. Or more precisely, with a small article at the bottom corner of a last page. The piece of information was about a man at whom an entire house collapsed at night. Since that incident, he didn't sleep a wink.

Meditation was what that man needed to avoid his demise.

Detached but whole.

Resting but aware of the surrounding.

It was logical - well, at least for Raiden.

Sinking of a mattress woke Rose up. It always did – at first of fear of abandonment, now of anticipation. It had been years since Raiden slept properly. Ages, if all the PTSD episodes he had were taken into account.

She waited until he stilled, not fall asleep, since he still was haunted by the nightmares each night, but 'switched to a stand-by mode' as he would jokingly call his meditation sessions. She studied his face for a while. His eyes were closed, face almost peaceful. No new scrapes or cuts, no broken bones, no bruises – although, she immediately reminded herself, there was just a little patch of him that could be damaged in a traditional way.

The ninja wasn't technically sleeping, but still the meditation served it's purpose of mimicking good-night-sleep - either as a real aid or being a simple placebo effect – Rosemary didn't care less as long as her husband was well rested and stable. He looked as healthy as possible and battled against his inner demon. In that semi-conscious state of his, he was dividing emotions from blood, work from blood thirst, present from past, Jack from Jack the ripper.

Since he started meditating at night, the crime rate spiked up in their neighborhood but so did Raiden's self-esteem. He looked better, healthier. He found a job, maybe not the one that both he and Rose hoped for – Maverick SC wasn't a normal employment - but it was more of a makeshift solution for imperfect times.

Ex-spy swung her arm around her husband as if testing his boundaries. He didn't scooted her away or got up as he used to. He didn't do that in a long time.

Rose nuzzled closer to him. His body wasn't radiating any form of warmth but she didn't mind. She sighed, when her skin made contact with the cooler surface of his artificial body. She knew, however, that within minutes, the graft made of metal, ceramic and synthetic fiber would respond to her warmth and radiate the temperature back. Giving her a fake feeling, that Raiden had his own, normal, body temperature, which, at brink of a sleep, would make her feel almost sure that all those spying for Patriots or Big Shell Incident, or any other Incident they went through, never happened – that it was all a bad dream.

From which she would wake up any minute now…