If he concentrates, he can smooth out the sand in his voice and sound fluid and liquid-smooth, Liquid-smooth, a voice with years spent being trained into voices and acting rather than years spent being dried and dusted with cigarettes, being burned by alcohol with a high enough proof to strip paint, cold Alaskan air freezing and cracking his throat, but it clearly wasn't that simple –
– they'd spent forever, too long, listening through stolen tapes of radio transmissions from missions that weren't supposed to exist, and Snake had measured the hours with chainsmoked cigarettes, packets and stubbed-out ends piling up one by one, and sworn viciously whenever he heard a voice coming out of the radio that was definitely his but couldn't have been because he wasn't born then –
– and that meant Liquid must have trained his way out of it. Liquid was an actor. He'd been trained as an actor, to slip into anyone's skin and get information.
Clearly wasn't in the genes. Snake can't act at all.
He emerges, damp, longer hair now bleached Liquid bright, parted to hide the small shaven patch of hair where Mei Ling's latest implant had gone, under the skull, buried in the soft, vulnerable matter beneath (and he'd had to do it because he was the only one Snake trusted near his brain and he still wasn't sure if that was a sign of a very weird relationship or a very normal relationship and a slightly bizarre circumstance). He looks for all the world like a cross between some bad eighties rocker and his usual self, and strangely he looks nothing like Liquid – something in his eyes, maybe, clichéd but possible.
"You look ridiculous, and this is the worst secret identity ever," Otacon comments. It must have been three years ago now that he would have been unable to say that, still too awed by his power and the fact that someone like him could even pretend that he was like someone like him, even in a joking sense, even in a flattering sense, there was clearly nothing they shared because he was just too amazing. And then he'd grown a brand spanking new backbone and a brain to go with it and realised that he'd been right all along and he'd just been blinded by little things – like how he didn't like blood and how Snake wanted to die by drowning in it.
And Snake just laughs. "Yours are always worse."