"It's all the possibility of what you might have remembered," Alice had explained. She had a soft voice, gentle, cool, soothing, her accent strong but unobtrusive, and he had thought then and still thought now that there were worse voices he could hear in his head - like Hans's, which he was starting to understand, starting to be able to cage down further when he started up, although he hadn't heard his voice at that time. But Alice never used her voice to talk any sense, and at the time he had never thought even for a second he might ever get a word of sense out of her.
He'd told her so much, in short simple words she wouldn't be able to misinterpret. All she'd done was sigh heavily, as if to tell him that her own patience was powerful and infinite and there was no point in him testing it. He knew different. He'd managed to make her lose her temper enough times, even by then, to be able to see through her little act.
"There's no reason to act as if I don't know what I'm talking about," Alice said, resolutely. "It's the unique properties of this world. We're...I can see outside, you see, and our world was never even meant to exist."
He'd nodded as if he understood, until he'd remembered she couldn't see it over the Codec, and responded with a flat and noncommittal grunt.
"And so I can help you channel them."
"I don't know what to say," he'd responded. He'd meant that he had no idea what she was talking about, and she no doubt knew it. "Should I be grateful?"
"I - " She'd hesitated. "I don't know yet. They're ghosts of memories, of things that never happened, of people that were never born. All I do is reach through your mind using the CHAIN, and I can dredge up a memory for you. Of all those brave and wonderful people who never existed."
She'd sounded almost sorrowful, then. He'd ignored it. If she wanted a shoulder to cry on, he'd thought, she had Roger there, and he'd be more likely to provide one than he ever would. He wasn't good at dealing with outpourings of emotion - from himself or from anyone else.
"I still don't understand."
She'd made a faint hissing noise between her teeth. "Then don't try. Just call me when you need my help."
"Snake," cut in Roger, effortlessly, "you have to trust her. She knows what she's doing."
Snake rolled his eyes. He was starting to feel like a little kid again. Don't do that, don't go in there, don't look, don't touch, don't argue, just do what I say. He was a soldier and he was meant to seek rigidity, and that was what he wanted. Roger was giving him none - no straight orders, just appeals to Snake's human side like some sort of psychotic parent, sending his child off to war.
He'd called her on her offer, because he had been desperate, and also because the situation was grim enough that even if she failed it would at least cause him some pleasure before he went away.
"Alice," he'd called, running as fast as he could, nostrils filled with gunsmoke. Bullets sparked down the steel walls - bright hot metal dust burned his cheek and he yelled in pain involuntarily.
"Snake! You don't need to tell me what's happened. How many are there?"
"Just one," he snapped, cursing his stupidity. "But he's tenacious. And I don't have any decent weapons."
"You've got...guns with you, haven't you?" He realised she must know nothing about guns. No-one who knew anything would be that unspecific.
"And he's got armour," Snake retorted, being deliberately unspecific because she wouldn't understand a full technical explanation. Some wild instinct pulled his body into an alcove and the spray of bullets and concrete dust missed him by some godless miracle. He lost his mental hold on the Codec for a second, and cursed under his breath as he picked the connection up again. "The bullets aren't getting through."
"Then listen to me," Alice said, in a husky, resonant voice that made him listen, even in the predicament. Black spots whirled across his eyes like mad dancers.
He felt strangely heavy, as if the air was made of iron - he finally managed to look straight at the soldier. He was reloading, body held behind the shield, suspended in a strange slow motion.
"Raise your gun," Alice asked, and Snake did, pointing the SOCOM straight at the man's body, controlled and in a strange, empty clarity. A stuttering mess of thought and voice rose up in his mind, and he realised he was shooting, and screaming wildly as he did so - not out of passion, but out of sheer terror, mad uncontrol.
The man fell. The corridor smelt moist, like blood. His body moved forward, and he checked the man for a pulse and felt nothing.
"He's...dead..." he heard himself say, before his vision blurred and his face felt hot. "He's dead and I killed him."
He knew they weren't his words, but was too swept up in this foreign emotion to do more than observe, and remain by the soldier's side as his heat melted away.
"You're weeping," Roger observed, and finally he was himself again. He stood, sharply, and wiped his eyes.
"Yeah," he said. "He always weeps. Cries all the time. Cries at the end of movies."
He realised he was smiling fondly.
"I don't understand," came Roger's voice. "You -"
Snake flexed his shoulders and busied himself reloading the SOCOM, bullet at a time - inefficient, but it was a good way of checking his hands were steady.
"I don't know how Alice did it, but that wasn't me," he explained. "That was someone else."
"Who?"
"I don't know his name," he admitted, and fumbled with one of the bullets. "But he was..."
"What was he?"
"He was my best friend," Snake admitted, feeling a strange haze of loneliness, "and I never even met him."
Alice drew in a long, slow breath, and then let it out hazily. She sounded just as drained as Snake was. "I let him see someone, Roger. He had a very strong connection to him emotionally. It was easy for me to show him."
"So you mean this is one of your mysterious powers?"
"'Mysterious powers'…" Snake echoed, rolling his eyes. Even though he'd wiped his face, his cheeks still felt cold with his strange, thoughtful, guilty friend's tears. "Do you have anyone I was supposed to know who's less emotionally maladjusted?"
Alice laughed, briefly, genuinely. It was the first time he'd heard her sound like the kid she was. He found himself smiling in response, and checked himself – he could share this nonexistent friend's emotions whenever he needed to, but sharing anything with Alice would be letting her win. "No, I'm sorry. You trod a cold, lonely world."
"Cold and lonely?" he repeated. Whatever happened to the concept of peace and quiet? Why was wanting it always indicative of some fundamental personality flaw?
"It was your job, Snake," Alice said. "You're a soldier. Everywhere. It's what you were born for."
Of course, he thought. Of course she'd bring that up.
"You were among the best," she continued. "And because of that, you only dealt with the kind of people who killed for a living and loved it enough to become perfect at it."
"A gallery of psychopaths," he sighed. "Just great."
"But –" Alice's voice spiked suddenly, as if she had knocked her headset somehow in a moment of particular intensity – "but no matter how dangerous they are, I will always, always keep them from hurting you. You have to trust me."
Naturally, he said, "I'm not so certain."
Alice merely made a faint pursed sound between her lips. Then, like some angry mother he'd never had, she asked him why he never trusted her.
"Maybe," he suggested, "it's the fact that you're a sixteen year old girl who thinks she's some sort of witch just because she can do a handful of parlour tricks."
He didn't expect for her to get so choked.
"I –" she stammered, "I can't believe you –"
"How're you doing it?" he rounded on her. "Nanomachines? Subliminal messages? Hallucinogenic drugs in the CHAIN? Whatever it was, you did manage to save my life with it, and I'm grateful. But you're not –"
"Snake," she said, intense, all the tears in her voice gone. "I have powers. I showed you them and I'll show you again. I'll continue to demonstrate them until you believe them."
He agreed, in the end. He assumed that as long as it worked he might as well accept her 'help'.
He became lots of people on that mission. Teliko shared it all with him.
La Clown had too, naturally, but that was because she (he?) was able to become anything he (she?) wanted to anyway. He didn't understand why sh-h-that person came under his connection, under the set of people he used to know, and he'd used it as evidence to back his theory that Alice was a hack until he'd gone and accused her about it.
"You're on a secure line," she'd explained. "Don't tell Teliko. But the truth is it's not this world that isn't meant to exist. It's…the world around you. You're a singularity. You're the same as you always are, with minimal differences. And that makes the boundary between you and the other world weaker. You're special. You can see things, connect with things, that Teliko can't – that I can't. Do you understand?"
He didn't, but he was satisfied with the answer, in that it answered his question. He was not satisfied with it in the sense he liked what it meant. He wasn't happy with the idea of reality breaking just because of some extra-dimensional probability failure, although he wasn't entirely surprised that his entire existence was a terrible metaphysical accident.
His best friend became rather useful. Every time Alice connected them together (the bloodshed, his friend's guilt) he could feel him closer – sometimes he'd feel a voice, a lingering thought, a flash of light off glasses, a terrified yell or a soft, intelligent smile, and he filed it all down mentally. This is the kind of person I'm meant to love. This is the kind of person I could belong to. One time he heard his friend call his name in the fraction of the second before he fired with that incredible burst of hard, desperate sorrow that somehow made him hit things he usually couldn't – and the name he cried was not Snake. He called another name. He assumed it was his, but he'd never heard it before. The only bad part was that he was unable to remember it when the effect faded; only that it was short and boring, which made him feel better somehow.
He grew almost used to having all those people staring over his shoulders, and he'd been good enough about it to only be horrified, not frightened, when he'd seen Teliko clawing over a corpse like some sort of scavenger. She'd been looking a little peaky before - she'd asked Alice to give her something for it.
"Teliko," he'd snapped at her, and she'd let out a cold hiss of air, and he'd realised there was a wound on the man's shoulder and she was actually drinking the blood. There would have been a silence if not for that terrible rhythmic slurping.
"Oh, dear god..." Alice had said, finally, voice quaking in fright. "I didn't mean for that to - I'm so sorry, Snake -"
"I'm not the one you should apologise to," he'd said, and turned his back stiffly. He had a mission to go on, after all, and wasn't going to be held responsible for some crazy parallel-dimension vampire.
Eventually Teliko had recovered, and he'd asked her about it, and she'd brushed him off, but with a guilty expression that reminded him of the days back when he was her age, when he felt like that all the time. That had been when he'd realised neither of them really felt like talking about this whole damn thing, and when he'd gained a note of respect for her. He knew she felt guilty, and she knew that he was there to support her, and so actually saying anything was pointless because he couldn't deal with outpourings of emotion anyway - it was rare to find a rookie who understood that unspokenness.
At the time he'd just smiled at her, and she'd given him a wry sad look for a fraction of a second before whirling around and shooting a camera - just as it would have panned over them like a badly-directed horror movie. He would have cursed himself for not noticing it if he hadn't have been filled with silent approval for her.
"Snake," Alice had whispered once, hoarsely. "You're on a secure line again, so Teliko can't hear. I sent Roger away for a while, on an errand. You've got until he realises the file I sent him to fetch doesn't exist."
Snake had leant into a wall cavity, crouched, and sighed.
"Why is your commander going on an errand for you?" he asked. "You haven't used your 'mysterious powers' to make him think he's your secretary?"
"Stop it, Snake," she responded, sounding uncharacteristically hurt. "And grow up. If you want me to be honest with you, I think he knows I'm making something up. But he's smart enough to trust me when I want to be alone. With you."
Snake narrowed his eyes. "I'm not going to ask you what you're wearing or anything like that, so forget it. You're not my type."
"So, what is your type?" she deadpanned.
"Old enough to drive."
"Ha," she said, stiffly. "I knew you'd say something like that. Ultimately you're a very predictable man."
"I always make the best decision," he said, uncomfortably. Predictability meant anyone could learn what you would do - your enemy, for a start; your commander; people crazy enough to use you and manipulate you in every way imaginable until you weren't even sure who you were.
"Hasn't it occurred to you yet," Alice replied, "that perhaps I might be trustworthy? That perhaps I might genuinely care about you as a human being, not just an objective means of getting things done?"
"Is that what you went to all this trouble to ask me?" Snake responded, knowing entirely that it wasn't. "Get on with it, or you won't have enough time to get your skirt back on before Roger gets back."
"I -" Alice began, but gave up. "Snake. I connected you to someone, a while ago. The first one I showed you."
"What about him?"
"Nothing. He's a kind and brave and intelligent and funny man. Isn't he?"
Snake paused. "Well -"
"When I showed him to you, that was the first time I heard you smile. I could hear it, in your voice." There was a smile in her own voice. "You care about him, don't you?"
Snake was silent while he wondered how to answer.
"I would if he was real. Why?"
"Because he called out your name, Snake."
He tried not to visibly start. "How would you know that?"
"He's the type who would."
Her voice was incredibly gentle, soft, understanding. Normally that way of speaking almost frightened him - he wasn't equipped to deal with it. For some reason, though, he didn't mind.
"So, what was it?"
"What?"
"Your real name. What was it?"
He shook his head. "I can't remember. All I can remember is that it wasn't Hans Davis, so that solves that problem."
Alice breathed. "I knew it. You don't know it yourself, do you?"
"I don't have a real name," Snake responded. "I don't need one either. After all, I'm alone. Who do I have to say it?"
Alice's voice dropped in volume until it sounded like she was whispering, very close to him, like she was his little daughter and he was leaning over her bed to say goodnight.
"I know why you don't have a name," she said. "I know these things. You're a child of science. You never had real parents, or a real family. But you had brothers." Her voice cracked. "You had seven brothers who grew in the womb along with you, and every single one of them died. And they weren't the only ones, either. How many hundreds of your brothers grew in different mothers and died silently, before they even had fingers or eyes or bones or even a real human shape? But you survived. You were unique among your brothers. You were the lucky one. Or were you? From the second you were pulled, screaming, into the world, you were naked and vulnerable and completely alone, with the siblings you'd grown together with stillborn one by one before you, tiny little corpses that looked just like you. Even now, forty years on, nothing's changed. You're as lonely as that baby, born without even having a mother."
Snake leant heavily against the wall, noticing the slight grains and irregularities in the plaster, glad the muscle-suppression effect of the suit was preventing his hands from shaking.
"And...they were going to give you a name," she continued. "A real name, to call your own, to make you different from those seven brothers who they'd wanted to live. If just one more of your siblings had survived - just one - you would have had a name of your own. But since you were unique they didn't need to give you one."
"Unique," he echoed, softly. He'd never thought that was a word that could describe him.
"Ever afterwards you've chosen whatever name you felt like, made one up, strung together some sounds you like, some characters you like. You have a separate name for every facet of yourself. Even calling you Solid Snake doesn't do you any justice. Solid Snake's only the name of the part of you that's a soldier. Solid Snake ignores the human parts of himself. Maybe it's his name that lets him do that."
"Alice," he said, quietly, "are you... "
He wasn't sure what to ask. He could accuse her of hacking government files, or accuse her of being crazy, but he didn't feel like being horrible to her for the first time in his life. Maybe if he asked her if she was alright, she might -
"Why don't you pick a name for yourself?"
"You sound very insistent," Snake commented, calmly. "Why does it bother you so much?"
"It - it doesn't," she protested. "You just - it's a human right. Everyone should have a name."
"I don't need one," he said, again. "I'll go and save a name for someone who does."
"Just promise me you'll think about it."
"Why?"
"You don't deserve to suffer. You deserve a normal life. With a name." He heard her swallow. "Just because you weren't born the same way as everyone else - it doesn't stop you being a human being, with thoughts, and emotions, and talents -"
Snake laughed, bitterly. "In case you haven't noticed, my only real talent is mass murder -"
"Snake," she said, very softly. The Codec automatically compressed and normalised her volume so he could pick up every word, but even so he could hear the half-whisper in her voice. "Please. Please think about it."
Images came to him, unbidden. Flashes of that friend of his who was never even born, and the way his presence made him feel. There must be someone out there, someone like that, someone he could genuinely love - he knew in his heart he wasn't at all deserving of any in return, but it didn't mean he couldn't feel like that towards someone else, even quietly, gently, without needing love back. It seemed such an ideal.
"Maybe," he told Alice, "maybe I'll think about it."
"Oh, Snake," Alice said, laughing.
"What?"
"Your voice sounds weird when you're not using it to sling insults at me. I'm not used to it."
"Don't get used to it," he said, and Alice laughed again.
"I don't expect to. I don't mind so much. I think you're a good man, really, but you're just so utterly…lonely. Maybe if you had someone…"
"Maybe you're right, Alice," Snake told her, quietly. He had no idea why.
"Gotta go," Alice said, suddenly. She sounded like a teenager talking to a friend over the phone. It was so easy to forget how young she was. "Roger's coming back. Good luck."
The Codec clicked off between his ears, and he half-smiled for a second before carrying on.
The bullet exploded through the containers, and Snake threw himself to the floor, silent, waiting in the dark. It felt natural to fight from a hiding place.
He listened to Leone's heavy footsteps and was glad that stealth was at least on his side. It wasn't much. Even drugged to an inhuman level of combat ability, Leone was at least delirious; at least happy. Everything Snake had respected in him had died a death, and maybe that meant it wouldn't be so much of a sin killing him.
"Where are you?" Leone boomed, voice echoing from the ceiling. "Come out! I said I'd show you my garden!"
Snake remained completely still even as the anti-tank rifle rang out and the container above his head burst through the middle, spraying him in something dark and greasy that he thought was oil – not that combat drug, please –
"Snake, no!" Alice yelled, and his vision shot black. She was doing it again. He would have yelled at her if he hadn't had been trying to stay completely hidden, so instead gritted his teeth –
And all of a sudden it didn't matter any more, and he stood up, and walked with his body proud and regal out of his hiding place. He noticed Leone. He had been a proud and skilled and noble soul, thought the foreign part of his mind. This Leone had a chance to do what no-one else had been able to do.
"Leone," he called.
He caught sight of Teliko's face peering around a distant container, her expression a picture of horror. She didn't need to be afraid, he thought.
Leone laughed, and shot.
There was a spray of concrete from the wall metres behind him.
"You missed," he said, voice aching. "Are you useless?"
He noticed the mechanism of the gun before he heard the noise of the bang fade into the swish of the deflected bullet.
"What are you doing? Can't you kill me?"
The container to his left exploded in a shot. The flames washed in front of his vision and behind him but he didn't even feel the heat. Shrapnel scattered around his feet. He took a step closer.
"Bring me an end, now!"
He heard the empty tink as the grenade was tossed to his feet, where it smoked harmlessly and died. He kicked it aside casually.
"Kill me! Kill me now!"
And then he laughed. Leone was reloading. Didn't he learn?
"So useless," he breathed. "Just like all of them."
His arm cocked in anticipation, and for a brief moment he wished he could turn the gun on himself before firing in a neat streak across Leone's middle.
He stopped, and choked, and bled, and Snake laughed until tears rose in his eyes at the irony of it all.
"Has it ever occurred to you," Teliko told him, hushed, in a sealed side-room, "that they're all about killing people?"
Snake thought about this for a while.
"Alice said they were all messed up. I'm not surprised."
Teliko's hand slid up her hip.
"How many messed-up people do you think there is in the world? I know it depends on your definition, really, but I can promise you that not all of even the craziest are killers."
Snake continued undoing the straps on his suit, one by one. Eventually the belts came free and he started on the body armour, trying to ignore the wooziness.
"My – friend," he said. "He's not a killer."
Teliko sighed, then moved over to help him get the jacket off. "Be careful. Don't put too much of a stress on that arm just yet."
At the start of this ordeal he would have snapped at her that he'd had worse, but now he just nodded and let her help, because she was right.
"Knife buried in, up to the hilt," she said, with an awkward expression on her face as if she didn't know if she should be impressed or scared, but would settle for both.
"I know," he said, grasping the hilt idly, and then letting his hand fall back down. "I messed that one up."
It wasn't much of a joke, but Teliko laughed anyway.
"Excuse me," Alice said, in both their heads at once, "but just so Snake knows, I can't administer any more painkillers via the CHAIN."
"Oh really?" Teliko asked. "Loaded, is he?"
"Er. Quite. He's doing about the maximum dose – that he can manage without passing out or getting drowsy or too high to fight or whatever – for – " there was a pause while she checked the computer – "...um, hang on, codeine, ketamine, tramadol, nicomorphine, methado – look, just name it, and he's got some in his system."
Snake rolled his eyes, but smiled. "That explains why I've been so out of it lately. Wonder I'm not dead with all that in me."
"Oh yeah," continued Alice, "there's also Benzedrine. They told me you fight better when you're on Benzedrine, so I put some in there."
"And that," Snake responded, trying to get the underlayer of his suit off around the handle of the knife without wrenching it out, "explains why my skin feels three sizes too small. I'm going to fall into a crash for days after all this."
Teliko pinched the handle of the knife, and he inexplicably felt it as if it was a part of him.
"You haven't slipped any psychedelics in there, too?" he asked. "Because I could do with a fascinating spiritual journey. For all I know I'm on one now. I'm on a mission, I'm hopelessly confused, and there's a beautiful woman trying to pull a knife out of my arm. I'm pretty sure I've had dreams like this."
"You have dreams about Hans Davis?"
For a psychic, Snake thought, Alice had absolutely no concept of a joke.
"I won't find Hans in my head," he said, voice as steady and calm as it usually was.
Inside he felt sick.
He knew how Hans thought, he knew how Hans felt, he knew what he was thinking, doing, knowing, could feel his hands, see his eyes flashing in the dark of his own –
Realistically, he thought, he could remember committing enough terrible things to last him until he died, and Hans was just adding a handful more sins into an already hellbound curriculum vitae.
But for some reason Hans seemed different. He felt different.
Had he really been that desperate for a successor that he would –
"Alice," he asked, "Teliko's got a point, actually."
"You mean about you being loaded?"
"No," he said. "The part about all those... people...only being good for killing."
"That's not true," Alice said, shaking her head. "There are some who do different things. Like...there's one guy who just leaves you drunk for a very short while."
Snake frowned. "Prove it."
Teliko gave the knife a tiny, subtle pull which sent his arm into a spasm of pain.
"Are you trying to get drunk on a mission?"
"Argh!" he gasped, and then continued. "No. I'm just sceptical. Do your worst, Alice."
Alice was smiling. "Okay, then!"
Snake wasn't sure what happened next, but it was in a state of that delirious happy drunkenness when focusing on things became hard and everything you said sounded clever.
A little while later he came around.
"No hangover," he observed, and then looked to Teliko, noticing the knife was lying on the floor and he had his suit on again, with the hole covered with a small stick-on patch – white, for Teliko's suit, rather than blue-grey for his. "What happened?"
"You were babbling about the Cold War," she sighed, "and capitalism and Communism and shoes. It didn't make a lot of sense. I wasn't paying much attention."
Snake shook his head. "Doesn't sound very exciting. Thanks for fixing my arm up."
"If I got wounded, would you do the same?"
"Huh?"
"You're a legend," Teliko continued, just as inexplicably. "You could probably do this whole thing on your own."
"You've got my back," Snake protested. "You know that."
"Yes," she said, folding her arms and tilting her head away from him. "I do know that I've got your back. I'm glad you told me."
Snake sighed heavily at her bitter tone. Women.
It had been an amateurish mistake.
All he'd had to do was take out a damn camera, but standing underneath it he couldn't make the shot. He'd backed out, slightly, until the end of his gun was neatly framed like the barrel shot at the beginning of a Bond movie, and for the first time since he'd got here the camera wasn't being monitored by the kind of deaf, blind, braindead narcoleptic that tended, in his experience, to end up monitoring cameras.
He crouched low in the vent. A grenade bounced in front of his face. He threw it back seconds before it went.
"Alice," he whispered, and she audibly jolted.
"Not now. I'm trying to help defuse the bomb. On the plane. Remember? I'm talking a kid through it – she wasn't affected by the drugs – I – "
"I need you!"
"It's not that simple!" she cried. "It's like...it's like drawing cards! You can draw cards from a deck and there's a good chance you'll get a jack or a queen or a king but every now and again you just draw spot cards and that's all! It's chance!"
"Damn!"
"Maybe – maybe Teliko – " Alice stammered, and the line clicked off.
One of the soldiers crouched down and stuck the nose of the rifle straight in the vent. Snake reached for his own gun, ready to shoot, but then there was a loud yell and the man fell back.
He shuffled forward.
Teliko, he thought, watching her grappling with him with her arms around his neck. That knife he'd seen on her belt but never seen her use was out, her M9 in her other hand, balanced in a way he'd never seen before.
She snatched the gun from his grip, holstered it herself, and sensed a man coming behind her – the point of the knife jarred resolutely towards her hostage's throat as she swung him round, and in the moment of hesitation she shot him with her off hand, straight in the side of his neck, and he dropped just as the man in her arms passed out.
"No place to hide!" she barked, gesturing at him stiffly. "Get out of there! Run!"
He clawed his way out and charged down the corridors after her until they broke into the cold night, where she pulled him into the bushes.
They lay silent for a while, side by side, until he heard her laughing very softly into the palm of her hand.
"What?" he asked her.
"I...I liked that one," she said, giddily. He realised it had worn off. "I think I knew him."
"You knew him?"
"I think he was my boss." She smiled and then repeated her last word. "'Boss.' I – never mind."
"Your boss?" he asked. "But Alice told me – "
"I knew him," Teliko said, and he left it at that. He didn't see the sense in asking how she knew him. After all, he had no idea how he knew his friend.
The only one that really scared him had been one he'd taken on in desperation, and he'd asked for it as well.
"Alice," he'd growled. He'd mostly made amends with her at that time. "Get someone to make me stronger."
"I don't know what you – "
"Teliko's down. They've got her. She's still conscious," he'd snarled, "and I need someone who can make me strong enough to take down the unit before they kill her."
He watched from his alcove as the men descended on her, carrion hungry. He could hear her panting, crying in agony as one of them crushed his boot down on her stomach. They were taking it slowly – they probably wanted information. Even if she lived he'd probably have to carry her out of the building to give her medical care, and even if that happened she probably wouldn't be able to fight for the rest of the mission without some help from Alice's cast of thousands.
"I can –" Alice stuttered, "I can do that, but –"
"I don't care!!" he roared. "I've got to save her. She's my only hope of completing this mission! I don't give a damn about the consequences, how crazy the person is – I've got to save her!"
Alice made a quiet whimper, and his head lurched with the usual black dot Pollock pattern, and an insane, unrelenting hate seared through his veins, combining with his own anger – he started, dangerously, and charged out to face the men, screaming a bitter note.
Four of the five men raised their guns in surprise. One of the five men raised his gun in attack. Even without the heightened awareness Snake would have been able to detect him, but with the new perceptions it seemed almost comically obvious – he brought the power of the charge into a fierce spinning kick, an uppercut, and a headbutt which sent his own skull ringing and connected in a spray of blood, and it was so satisfying, so brilliant watching them hurt, and yet so sickening I must be stronger I must be stronger I'm so weak –
"What's wrong?!" he yelled, mocking, timbre of his voice the same but accent not his own, bringing down a foot, feeling the bones in the man's right arm snap like dry twigs, but then two of them were shooting at him and his new unearthly speed carried him safely out of the path off the bullets and between them where the spray of bullets drilled across their centres in a trail after his running body. "Are you really that weak?"
The fourth skidded, trying to find safety, but Snake was too quick, and darted in with three unnaturally strong punches straight to the man's face, and he dropped – and then there was the last, shivering with terror, shouldering his gun. He liked the terror. He'd never expected someone as inferior as him to inspire so much.
He smiled with a smile that wasn't his own. "Look at this," he said. "Look at all your comrades. You did nothing to save them. No –"
A sudden twist of pain shuddered down his arm, more intense than anything he'd ever experienced, and his vision blurred for a second – he screamed, and lurched to his knees, grabbing at his chest as the pain burst again and again, each time more intense –
Roger howled down the Codec, "Your heart rate is off the scale, Snake! You're having a –"
"FOX –Ddhh–!!" he screamed, only the presence in his head knowing the meaning of the word, body locked in spasm after spasm, until finally the noise of his own panting vanished into the white noise in the back of his mind and he collapsed, not even the voices from the Codec breaking into his consciousness.
He roused himself, eventually, adrenaline-hungover and queasy, Teliko's large eyes the first thing he was able to really discern. He checked her over for wounds – she'd stitched and bandaged herself up quite competently, but her skin was still a shade too pale.
"What happened back there?" she asked.
"Teliko…" he said, instead of answering. "Are you alright?"
He watched the muscles in her throat tighten as she swallowed.
"I'm going to live," she said, voice steady with a foreign certainty. Snake realised she was channelling someone, but he wasn't able to work out who.
"Who is it?" he asked.
"Never mind about that," she said, the strange forcefulness still there, eyes dark with shame. "He's no-one. He's just a survivor. You're the one who knows him best, anyway."
He didn't know what to say to that.
"What about the soldiers?" he asked, instead.
Teliko pointed. He heaved himself up, and looked over. Every single one of the ones he'd left alive had a round neat bullethole between the eyes, like a penny. Teliko had been thorough. He identified the last soldier, the one he hadn't touched, lying there just as dead as all the others.
"I got to him before he got to you," she said, by way of explanation. "The last one was trying to work out why you'd died, if you were faking it. I came round just as he was standing over you."
"I'm not dead," Snake said, flatly.
Teliko frowned. It was very much her own facial expression - the effects of the channel must be wearing off. "No. That's the amazing thing. It seemed like you were. Up until about two minutes ago you had no pulse."
"No pulse?"
"None that I could feel. I know it sounds ridiculous." She shivered. "You look...fine. You've just had a - a heart attack, and all you seem to be is a little pale. It's not natural."
Snake drew himself up to his feet, stretching himself, listening to the cracks in his ageing joints.
"It wasn't me who died," he said. "That was someone else."
Even now he could feel some of that abject, uncompromising hate lingering in him as if it had somehow tarnished him inside. Forcing himself to remember who the man had been, he was able to catch a snatch of light hair and darker skin and a mouth he was sure he'd seen somewhere else in a taut smile he didn't recognise.
"It never happened to me," he continued. "It was just an illusion. So it can't hurt me."
Teliko half-smiled at him, but said nothing.
Card reference –
Otacon – COST 6. "Scientist". Attaches to weapon. Adds: anti-armour, ATK + 10, HIT + 10
Vamp – COST 6. "Bloodsucker". Takes half of damage dealt and adds it to user's LIFE.
Fortune – COST 10. "E.M. Device". The next 20 bullets automatically miss.
Granin – COST 0. "Order of Lenin". Sets user's current cost to 15.
Naked Snake – COST 13. "John Doe". Executes random CQC technique.
Liquid Snake – COST 4. "FOX-DIE". ATK + 40, HIT + 40, REA + 40. User collapses after 20 COST.
Solid Snake – COST 6. "Survival". User's LIFE +500.