Believe it or not, this started out as a very simple story. I had actually laid out the plot for Solid Snake's Soldier in less than 30 lines and 10 minutes over messenger. But somehow, I started writing and it started to develop into something that needed notes at the end!

I think I was going for a world record for this story: Which character can cry the most without getting dehydrated. It's got drama and tears...and even a few super natural elements. Sorry if the backstory stuff is a little sloppy...I'm not used to writing stuff with plots!

Note: In case you're wondering, yes, I did upload this and deleted it a few hours later. Sorry, subscribers. I didn't realize how long 9,730 words was until I saw it all jumbled together. So, I deleted it, split it into two parts, and reuploaded it. This way is much more enjoyable, trust me.

Hal felt the hands on his body and opened his eyes this time only to get a look at the person's face. Not to fight, resist, or even remember it. All of that was pointless. The hands would do whatever they wanted to him anyway and find the few places on his body that didn't wear a bruise already. His body was desensitized to the beating. At least he wouldn't give them the pleasure of feeling anything. He just wanted it to be quick. He went through the motions of every hit that struck the numbness hoping one of them would rupture something vital and end his suffering. But he knew the will to see his angel again was the reason he was still alive. The only reason.

His sudden realization that the faces of his captors were passing by in a veil of crimson hurried his focus on the face of his carrier.

"S...S...Snake?"

"Hi, Hal." His voice flowed as smoothly and carefree as his movements were.

"You...you came..."

"I'm sorry it took so long."

"How... long?"

"Two months." He finally said, clearly disappointed in himself for such the long time frame.

"Doesn't matter...you're here. Thank you, Snake..."

In the next motion, Hal was looking up at the clear skies of Europe. He squinted at the severe onslaught of sunlight and wind that was being kicked up by the helicopter rotors he heard. They passed quickly under them and Hal felt his body pass into the grip of a woman. He shifted his gaze to her petite outline and collected her darkened features covered in a trademark concern.

"My God...what did they do to you, Hal?"

"He's in pretty bad shape. We need to get him out of here, Mei Ling." Snake urged, climbing into the aircraft. His body hacked with a few coughs but only enough to be blamed on dust to anyone else. Hal knew differently, though.

With that, the outline disappeared from his eye line and into the control chair of the helicopter. Hal's head finally connected everything that was happening and he pushed out the one name from his heart that mattered to him.

"Sunny..."

"She's waiting on you back home. Save your strength and don't talk. We have a long ride back to the States."

Hal tried to nod in agreement with Snake and closed his eyes when he felt the ground they were on carelessly floating away.

He was going home.

He was going to see his angel.

Sunny sat down next to Hal once again in the tiny bit of sofa in front of him. He hadn't moved since Snake had laid him there a few hours before. She patted his arm softly for the umpteenth time to confirm his actuality. He was there. Weary and damaged...but alive. Her heart had broken when she first looked at him as he was being carried through the door by Snake. He had lost against the fatigue at some point and shared the physics of an aging rag doll as he had been lowered onto the sofa. While watching him, in her less confident moments, she had put her hand in front of mouth and nose to make sure she was able to feel him breathe.

His body bumped into hers in a subtle stir from behind and Sunny moved to kneel next to him.

"Uncle Hal?" she called to him in an attempt to rush him into a conscious state. His eyes focused and softly landed on her face.

"Hi, angel."

She had missed hearing him call her that and had gone a full two months without it. Two full months without him.

"I missed you so much!" She rushed a hug around him forgetting the pain the rest of his body may be experiencing. He cared even less about it and he gripped her back with the small amount of strength he had regenerated in his short rest.

"I missed you, too, Sunny. I missed you so, so much. I thought about you every day, you know that?" She nodded with her head on his shoulder and responded in an outpour of emotion that caused Hal to hold her closer to him. "You kept me alive. I knew I had to see you again. I owe you my life." Sunny pulled back to look at him. The tears in her eyes influenced the well of the ones in his own.

"You don't owe me anything, Uncle Hal. I'm just happy you're home." In a sudden remembrance, she got up fetched a slender but colorful bouquet of flowers from a vase on the other side of the room. She handed them to him. "These are for you."

He smiled. "Are these from your garden?"

She nodded, a bit ashamed. "I'm sorry there's not more. I wanted it to be bigger but everything stopped growing while you were gone. I guess the flowers missed you as much as I did."

"They're perfect, Sunny. Thank you."

Hal struggled to lift himself to sit up but the fatigue that resonated through out his body still proved to be too much and kicked his attempt out from under him.

"You shouldn't try and get up. You haven't been resting for very long. Snake hasn't even gotten back with your medications yet."

"I feel like all I've been doing lately is laying down." Sunny reluctantly helped him into position when she saw him try again and after a moment, he rescanned her last words in his head. "Snake went out to get medicines for me? Did he take me to the hospital?"

"I don't think so. Rosemary wrote them and sent them here for Snake to get."

Hal couldn't help but look relieved. How many people knew about what had happened to him? Had Snake found out? What was he going to say to him? His slight panic subsided when he heard the mercenary's footsteps enter the room. Hal noted the white paper bag in his hand as he watched him sit it down in front of him.

"How are you feeling, Hal?"

He let the cool concern that could only be pulled off by Snake seep into him before answering. He was the only one who could tell when he was truly worried and not just making conversation with a question like that.

"Like my head is going to explode."

"Well, I think your presents from Rose should fix that." He opened the bag and read each label as he took out the bottles. "Vicodin, Valium, and...Zoloft." he said a bit to his own surprise.

"I guess she thought of everything. Only thing missing is a full time medic in case I try to off myself."

"'Off yourself'? What does that mean, Uncle Hal?"

"It means nothing, Sunny. I was just making a really bad joke."

Snake's hand landed firmly on his shoulder. "You're going to be fine, Hal."

"I know."

"I'm going to take really good care of you and I'm going to get you anything you need." Sunny declared, "Snake says the walls in this house are paper thin so I'll be able to hear you call me from wherever I am. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get you well again, Uncle Hal."

"I know you will, angel."

"Well," Snake said, shaking his head lightly as if to shake invisible cobwebs, "I'm sure Sunny has a ton of stuff she wants to catch you up on. I'll be around if you need anything." Sunny noticed the slight unsteadiness in his first few steps and jumped to her feet when he barely caught his body weight in the door way.

"Snake! Are you--"

"I'm fine. I'm just exhausted."

"You're still sick. You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up."

"Hal needs you, Sunny. Worry about him."

"What about you? Who's going to worry about you?"

Snake pushed himself off the wall and used it as a brace until he was sure he support his own weight again. He could feel Sunny's eyes on him, scrutinizing every step he took as he left the room. Once he knew he was out of her watch, he took the wall for support once more. This was the way it had been last time before his body completely shut down on him. Small signs that equaled the severity of flu symptoms. A small stagger here, a brief moment of weakness there--all until it caught up with him and lunged onto him with the kinetic force of a freight train. He had tricked death once into passing him by, he knew he couldn't do it again. No one was that good. Not even him.

"You know, this should be the other way around."

Hal smiled at Sunny as she put the sandwich and milk down in front of him at the table. At that moment, the only thing that reminded him that she was a child was the nightclothes she was wearing—a long pink nightgown sprinkled in little sleeping moons and stars. At 3am, it had been her comforting him from a nightmare and her suggesting that they go to the kitchen so that she could make them sandwiches. A part of him felt completely worthless as he looked at Sunny. She was 7 years old with no friends her age and nothing but him and a dying soldier to call her family. But, she treated him and Snake like gold and went about her imposed responsibilities with a great seriousness and care. If her situation bothered her in least, she never showed it or told.

"I remember you doing this for me when I was a kid and had a nightmare." She reminded him as she climbed into the chair next to him.

"Yeah, but that's my job. And you still are a kid, Sunny. You should be making paper hearts for the boy you like in class or having slumber parties. Not doing this."

"What's wrong with taking care of you and Snake?" she asked curiously and chewed the second bite of her sandwich. To her, that was as normal as anything Hal had mentioned.

He shook his head. "Nothing. I don't know what me or Snake would do without you, angel."

Sunny stared down at the stretch of table between them, her face deep with a worry far beyond her years.

"He's getting worse, ya know."

"I know. I could see he was deteriorating when he came to Europe for me. He was only a few coughs away from it being a mission to rescue him."

"I tried to get him to send Raiden for you but, he said it was his fault for not protecting you and his responsibility to bring you back."

Hal shook his head. "That's not true. It wasn't his fault. It was mine. I knew they had our number...I just thought we were too good to get caught. I guess when you've narrowly escaped situations as much as me and Snake have over the years it's easy to fool yourself into a false sense of immortality. Maybe those guys had every right to do what they did to me."

"What did they do to you, Uncle Hal?"

Hal smiled softly and reached over to touch her face.

"Nothing you need to worry about, angel. It's all over now."

"But...they must have done something terrible to you. You had a nightmare about it."

"Yes, and do you know why? It was because I dreamt they told me that I'd never see you again...and that's the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me."

Sunny bit her bottom lip in dissatisfaction of his decision to put such a sugary coating on his nightmare for her now. She had watched him earlier as he begged and pleaded to an invisible enemy for his suffering to end and been there to provide an embrace for him as he sobbed out nearly incoherent apologies for only God knows what on her shoulder. When they were both finished, she cleared the table and washed the dishes they had used, silently creating every scenario in which all the bruises and wounds she had seen on Hal could have gotten there. She felt like smashing anything that was breakable when she thought of anyone hurting him in any way.

When she looked back in on him in the dinning room, he was asleep. Left arm extended across the table serving as a pillow, right arm tucked into his chest. Sunny couldn't imagine the position being very comfortable, but she was happy to see him calmed and with a low snore exiting on his exhales. After she successfully retrieved his glasses from his face, the bruises and cuts they had been covering made her insides knot. With a subtle shift, Hal's shirt uncovered just enough of his side for Sunny to realize the bruises weren't only on his face. She gently lifted his shirt and revealed a deep purple band of flesh that wrapped around to his stomach. He hadn't even hinted to her that his time away had resulted in injuries like that and she knew that had been intentional now. Had Snake even examined him? Did he know the damage they had done? When she placed her hand over Hal's stomach, it tingled with the sensation of the blunt object that had been rammed repeatedly into that spot and it materialized into a jolt of pain in that area on her own body. When she touched his back, she could hear the sound of make shift batons crashing down unmercifully onto his spine. And when she touched his chest, she felt the warmness left behind by the angry flesh that had impacted with his. Tears stained her cheeks as she brought her hand to his face. On immediate contact, images flowed in a furious blur of colors, distorted snapshots, and screams that had come from Hal's own anguish and pain. Nothing stood still long enough for her to see anything definite but the ferocity of the whirling happening in her own head told her the events had happened in much of the same fashion for him. Her hand jerked away and she crumbled in a pile next to his chair. She wanted to scream until her lungs exploded and her heart stopped. The tiny pins of agony that rippled over her skin made her want to rip it off. But everything amounted to nothing more than more hot tears running down her face, more uncontrollable sobs for her Uncle Hal.

"Sunny?" Hal brought his hand down on top of her head, encouraging her to look up at him. "What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry they hurt you so badly, Uncle Hal."

"That pain is mine. I never wanted you to feel any of it."

"I wanted to take it away from you." she admitted.

Hal urged Sunny to him. He felt that for a moment, he had regained the role of adult as he wiped her tears away with his hand.

"You don't have to do that. I promise you it doesn't hurt now, angel," he told her, "not anymore."

Snake caught himself on the edge of a counter top when he felt his legs giving away right from under him. His head still whirled and his ears still rang from the sudden and violent outburst of coughing in the stillness of the house. As he fought to catch his breath, balance, and anything else that had escaped him in the moment, he felt a small hand rest on his back.

"I'm fine, Sunny."

"You're not taking care of yourself, Snake. I know you're not."

She was right and he didn't have his train of thought or air back in his lungs yet to argue with her.

Sunny didn't look at Snake the same way she had two months ago. She couldn't. Especially when she saw him like that.

When Hal had been gone, it had just been them for the first time ever. In that time, she had seen Snake be his own unique version of an emotional mess. Bouts of crying and sadness for a normal person were replaced by sessions of quiet meditation for Snake where he often looked as if he was in some other world, fighting off all the worst case scenarios that threatened to make their way into his thoughts. They both wanted the same thing and it forged a connection that Snake didn't remember existed until his body went into a spasmodic fit and he needed her. His pride and military mindset wouldn't let him admit when he did and very often, he fought the attentive care of her. But it was an act that never discouraged her. He was reckless and in the two slow months it took for his and Mei Ling's plan for Hal's rescue to come together, he practiced a level of it that only Sunny could dilute. He was a hazard to himself in the way he wanted to throw caution and plans to the wind and simply bogard his way into an unsafe situation but Sunny, with soft suggestions and tone, would remind him that that kind of behavior wouldn't do anyone any good. Even with Hal back, and safe, she could see he was still reckless and in, more or less, the same fashion.

"Hal needs you more than I do," he said.

"He's fine," she countered, "He's resting. Like you should be."

Snake took what little stand was left in his legs and used them to move himself to the nearby sofa.

"With rest, Hal's going to get better." he told her, "I'm not." Her face quietly softened at the brash reminder. Snake still hadn't found his tone with Sunny and often times found himself being too blunt with her. "How is he?"

"He's...okay." she responded, surprised by the amount of concern he let slip through the words, "He's barely eating, though. I'm worried about him."

"I'm sure once Hal recovers a little more, he'll be more in an eating mood. Just give him some time. He's been through a lot."

"He was doing really good until the nightmares started. It's like he just...gave up."

"Some people deal with things differently. Maybe some days are better than others for him."

"Snake...who were the guys that did this to him? Why did they take him?"

He didn't quite know himself but the question took him back to a few days before when he saw Hal for the first time. At first when he approached him, he wasn't even sure it was him. Bruises and cuts covered much of his face, completely obliterating the child-like glow Snake had been used to seeing in him. And though amazingly he hadn't lost much weight, his body was fragile and clearly shattered by something evil. When he had touched Hal, he had flinched and not from the surprise of the contact...but out of pure fear. It had taken him several seconds to figure out the best way to pick him up without initiating a panic in him and less time than that to stop caring and decide to get him out of there the best way he could while he still had the chance.

"They did awful things to him, Sunny."

"Like what?"

"It's not important. He's safe now. Besides, I don't think it's anything your ears ever need to hear."

"Snake...please tell me. I promise I can handle it."

"I don't know exactly what they did to him, Sunny. Only the state I found him in. He won't talk about it."

"Then tell me what you know."

Snake questioned his own morals and scruples for giving into a 7-year-old's pleas for the details of the events and sighed. "After we destroyed GW, a lot of soldiers were left without a real direction or purpose left in life. It didn't take long for a small group of them to form a Resistance and begin to seek out the people responsible for their torment. It took them no time at all to successfully link the events back to us. Me, you, Hal, Mei Ling, Meryl—all of us. Hal and I knew they were out there, looking for us, but they covered their tracks well and we didn't try hard enough to catch their flaws. Looking back, maybe we even underestimated them a little bit. But, we knew what they wanted: the person responsible for the actual destruction of GW."

"But...but that was me! I finished the code that destroyed it. Why didn't they take me?!" she said almost regretful that they hadn't.

"When they found out how old you were, they thought it was a cover up, something we had set up to throw them off course. So, they went to down the line to Naomi and when they realized she was already dead, that lead them straight to Hal."

"So that's how they knew to get Hal on his way to visit Mei Ling. They were watching us!"

"Yes, they were watching us...but that trip was a set up. Mei Ling had never contacted Hal about visiting her. The email, the tickets for the flight...it was all a ruse to get Hal where they wanted him: without you or me to interfere."

In that moment, Snake took a new found joy in taking his knife and slicing it cleanly through the necks of every last Resistance member he had come in contact with on his way to find his friend. The blood on his hands and body that poured out from the openings he had made wasn't nearly enough to pay for what they had done to Hal but nothing ever would be in his eyes. The anger erupting in him suddenly triggered another violent attack of coughing and Sunny took the opportunity to firmly urge his body to lie down on the sofa. She kept her hand on him, feeling every jolting reverberation of his chest, until he calmed down. Again, he didn't fight her.

"Rest." she simply said to him and tested her own bravery by reaching out towards his face.

"Sunny," he got out between the last coughs of the spell. He grabbed her hand before it could touch him. "I'm not worth it. You're wasting your concern."

"But--"

"Listen to me. I know what you're thinking...but I'm not going to magically be cured to live a normal life. I was born to be nothing but a weapon and trained to be expendable just like one. The only reason you feel any kind of closeness to me is because I was a body to give all the affection and love you had for Hal in the months he was gone...but he's back now and he needs you. There's nothing left for me. I'm practically already dead."

Sunny blinked rapidly in semi confusion when she felt a hot flow of tears rushing forward.

"Stop telling me who I should and shouldn't worry about, Snake!"

His body violently jerked again with another coughing fit that ripped the air out of circulation in his lungs. Sunny could hear him reaching into the depths of his chest, trying to bring up the memories of the air that had filled them.

"Snake...you have to calm down!" As far as he knew, he was being calm but the air around him refused to move in the way he needed it to. His lungs crumpled like a depressurized paper bag and lost nearly all motivation to move. Sunny watched him come in and out of a twilight existence, threatening to rapidly fade out all together. She called to him but he was slipping away quicker than her voice could travel to catch up. As calmly as her situation allowed her to be, she picked up his hand in hers, closed her eyes, and placed it on her chest, letting it move with her slightly exaggerated respirations. Snake tried to keep his focus on her even as everything else swam in the enveloping darkness. The only light that remained was the one around her and he could tell it was beginning to dim, too. When she felt his pull away from her become stronger, she pressed his hand harder to her and deepened her chest's movement. Soon, Snake felt his body abruptly initiate the will to breathe again and life shoot back into every part of him almost as quickly as it had tried to leave. Sunny held onto him as he exchanged the lead in his lungs for air...and put several heartbeats and seconds between himself and death once more.

"What...what did you--"

"Snake! Thank God! Are you okay?"

"God had nothing to do with that, Sunny. What in the hell was that?!" Everything raced and verbalized faster than he could formulate the oxygen to say them. Snake didn't believe in the supernatural but he believed everything his eyes saw the little girl do...even in his weakened state. She ignored his curiosity and continued to watch him slowly come back around.

"It's not your time, Snake."

"Like hell it isn't! I should be dead right now. We both know that." he said much calmer as the rush of everything evened out, "I could feel you breathing for me, Sunny,... like you were giving me the air out of your own lungs..."

"You should sleep. You'll feel better when you wake up."

"But--"

"Rest."

With a slight brush of her hand against his face, Snake felt his eye lids suddenly become too heavy to want to stay open anymore. He used his last few moments of consciousness to think back to four months ago, lying on his deathbed and his sudden, untraceable recovery. For the first time, he questioned just who had been responsible for that.