tws: referenced abortion, violence, caesarean, gun violence, unwanted pregnancy
Oh she killed him rather quickly / Man that woman was truly sickly / But lord not any sicker than according to plan / Like a soldier, one foot in front of the other
- Regina Spektor, Mary Ann
1: those who die as cattle
She loves the conflict, the explosions, the dried blood under her fingernails so much that they call her The Joy because no fire can be brighter than her smile. She leads them into battle grinning and it's a joke to them all, nothing wrong here, because she's a woman and isn't the way she tears out people's throats with her teeth funny? It's so sweet, the way she takes people apart, how she doesn't throw up or recoil the first time she kills someone. Daddy's little girl playing at being a soldier.
And then once she's done ten times more than any man before her she gets recognition of a kind: a subtle shift. From the innocent girl who doesn't know what she's doing straight to the mother, straight to responsibility and forced femininity. Her subordinates call themselves her children, expect emotional comfort and encouragement from her commanding officer. She scowls. Her job gets harder.
Here is a fact: George Washington is the highest decorated person in the United States army. When they award officers more ranks and decorations and someone breaks that glass ceiling, they give the dead white man more medals to place on his grave so no one can overcome this legend. This is what the patriarchy means to her, the soldier, this is where she sees how truth shrivels and dies once off the battlefield.
The SAS motto, "he who dares, wins" gets the "he" knocked off in tribute to her. They give it to her; an offering; a plea.
She's a soldier. She obeys orders and just thinks if I do this well enough, if I can overcome this last mission and quests relentlessly for recognition. She does so fucking well. Any man by the point where you know your country is going to get you killed, wants you killed because they're scared of how good you've become, would flee or defect or start some stupid gulag oil rig mercenary company in the middle of the ocean. She wins. Keeps winning. Ignores internal politics and utilizes her skill as brute force.
They call it unrivalled charisma, but it's more than that. Violence. Dominance. Raw. Pure. This is what they put on their posters; this is their goal incarnate.
2: monstrous anger of the guns
A quick fuck with The Sorrow to vent some stress between battles evolves into a pregnancy she thought herself incapable of having. At first all she can think about is cutting it out. Holding a small red dying thing in her hand. But she lets too long lapse and the sap with glasses who sees ghosts seems so happy and she thinks that maybe she loves him (how could she let this happen?) so she thinks, hell, I'll go into battle until the end. Expects a bullet to do the job for her.
She fights without grace or skill for the later months, using the child as a human shield. It was supposed to be easy, getting the little thing disposed of, but it's almost like the enemy don't want to hit her. This thing is supposed to make her a target but instead it helps her, and she half-jokingly suggests to her lover that they should give all the soldiers pillows to wear, jutting out of their fronts. Form a pregnant woman battalion and scare them to death. No one laughs.
Nine months in it's really getting too late. Every time she sheathes or draws a weapon she runs it along her belly first. Considering. This cannot be allowed to be born. It's bad enough being the mother of all these demanding strangers without some small wrinkled thing that's 50% hers. The Sorrow runs his fingertips along her navel (a promise) and she jerks away. No. It's this parasite in her body, weighing her down, making her sick in the mornings and her back ache at night.
When they mount that last great offensive, they try in earnest to keep the heavily pregnant woman at home. The Boss is angry, swollen, lacking control. She can't vocalize. Fights her way onto the boat, hits anyone who tries to send her back, runs panting onto the battlefield with belly thrust forward like a prayer.
When the bullet hits she just thinks thank fuck before they're hauling her off. They say it's hit no major organs. She says thank God. They say it hasn't harmed the baby. She starts crying, maybe from unrelenting frustration, and they call it relief. Cut her open right there just like she wanted, take the wriggling leech out - but no one crushes it beneath their boot. She sees the small thing for only a moment, resting in The Sorrow's arms (and maybe she can tolerate it with him, maybe the two of them would be okay somewhere safe, if she could leave to do her job and return in the evening to protect them) before it's whisked away.
The Philosophers take it and she can handle that. They've done worse. It's The Sorrow who cries when their son is gone, and The Joy who wraps stoic arms around him for a time. But his grief makes him repugnant to her, she's never been able to tolerate weakness (and he's so open, raw, this trust is not something she is ready for), and it's her who leaves him.
All the child leaves her is a winding, ugly scar shaped like a snake.
3: hasty orisons
The CIA pin something on her. Doesn't care. They're scared of her, want to send her as far away from them as it's possible to go. Out - out of this world.
She meets a woman so volatile that sunlight would set her ablaze. Strangelove only goes out at night. Gets taught about constellations and mythology, tolerates the classical rambling because she knows that she can apply the knowledge to navigation. People with albinism grow lentigines and keratoses and moles and freckles in multitudes even if they never see the sun. This is the map she needs, the mountain ridge of gentle brown speckled down the inside of Strangelove's thigh. A map to bliss and escape route from the memory of a sad man with glasses crying over a lost child in the rain.
She's domesticated in a way, for a while. As soon as the fighting stops, as soon as she goes three weeks without choosing to kill someone, it's all she can think about. Flashbacks and nightmares and wishful thinking of maybe the bullet should have hit vital organs. She hates her son. Nothing should stand in her mind like he does. Strangelove makes her acrid coffee which gives her hand tremors; gives her alcohol to lull her into a stupor; kisses her like she isn't a murderer.
Sometimes when she's drowning under the covers with Strangelove she puts her hand where the foetus used to jut out. She's glad the parasite is gone, it's nothing to do with that, but there's something disconcerting about her hand clenching on air. There's a part of her out there. Feels like a phantom pain.
They tell her about radiation risks. She knows that if they put the project off for a few more months, let the Reds get ahead, they would have time for tests and proofing. As it is, whoever walks out of the shuttle (if they do - that's hardly perfected either) will be damaged. They don't know how yet, they conjure images of Nagasaki or Hiroshima but tell her it'll just be infertility. They said that before she had Adamska. Maybe it'll stick this time and strangers will stop calling her their mother.
Under her guidance The Boss takes to the heavens. Sees the planet as more than a few disconnected battlefields, as some kind of whole. Almost dies on the descent back into reality. When she wakes up she hates herself for wondering where her son is. Tells Strangelove that this can't work, because she can't stand this happiness and she needs to fight. It's too sweet, too pure. Weak. Tamed.
She asks the CIA why they don't publicize it - she was the first person in space. She's American. Surely they must want one extra step in the space race. But it turns out that gender comes first and nationality second, and it's the first man in space. Russia gets a woman up in 1963. Heaven forbid Yuri Gagarin was forced to tread in a woman's footsteps.
She purses her lips. They show her a picture of her son as a threat and send her on another mission. She never sees Strangelove again.
4: no prayers nor bells
When you strip away the packaging and the projected mother image, what you find beneath is vicious. She shoots the last thing she's capable of loving in the eye.
It's raining. Adam's life on the line. She's walking out alive: she's certain of this. And she wants the child to die instead of The Sorrow, really does, until the picture looks like a human, like one of the people she's killed, like his father. The Sorrow says that it will be okay, that she should kill him, and then waits patiently for her to argue or shoot herself in the face.
She can read it on him, for all his psychic powers. Maybe she loves him, and he definitely loves her (she can smell it), but he expects her to be some selfless mother and surrender herself for the good of others. There's supposed to be an argument and a noble, heroic sacrifice befitting the Mother of the Armed Forces. They expect her to choose to shoot herself and spare them: to put others before herself.
It's an expectation she's always had to deal with as a woman. They suppose she will care about a small screaming thing, to want to give up fighting to care for it. Adamska was taken away because they thought he would make her retire. It's why they condone her savagery and celebrate it: they see her as a mother protecting strangers dubbed her children. A woman enjoying violence – this is beyond them.
She's crying with laughter and something else she's incapable of acknowledging when she shoots him, point-blank. Walks out of there triumphant. People forget that she took joy from battle, from war, from force. She's savage, wild, and she knows that Strangelove can never see her again after this.
His ghost follows her. The Sorrow doesn't accuse her of betrayal. Doesn't speak. Doesn't chastise his murderer - he expects her natural guilt to be enough. And, yes, she wakes up gasping thinking about the residue of her lover splattered on her hands, but this isn't guilt or regret. Maybe it's fear and maybe she loves him enough to shudder every time his pale incorporeal hand passes through her. But she's angry and wounded and liable to lash out and there's no possible universe where she wouldn't have shot him. She can't regret when she would make the same decision again in a heartbeat.
She decides to find their son for him.
5: choirs of wailing shells
She takes her reputation apart with relish, relinquishes the role of mother, of virgin, and embraces bitch. Tells Snake to go fuck himself. The traitor turns that into a message of forgiveness and if she was alive she'd kill him for the unintended mercy.
Virtuous Mission. Snake Eater. She meets her son for the first time in Groznyj Grad, Tselinoyarsk. He's a high-strung kid who's watched too many movies. Doesn't belong here. His arrogance disgusts her. Twirls his guns like a showman. Pines after John, her almost-equal who she trained with appropriate distance, like a puppy. Takes his eye and prematurely declares a predisposition to torture.
Volgin has no pretence of controlling her. She goes where she pleases and notices the small things. Her son hisses, spits, makes himself bigger like a cat when threatened. Practices aiming in his room for hours and all those pointless theatrics. Looks out for Naked Snake at every opportunity. Eats raw snakes to get closer to this idol of his. She hopes he's attracted to what she left in her apprentice, somehow wishes that he's chasing her afterimage. It's parental bonding of a kind. She never would have been good at the conventional method.
They try to redefine her as her father the philosopher's daughter. This does not matter to her because she tells herself that it doesn't.
They capture her apprentice. She's mostly indifferent, shows up to see how he'll handle being helpless for the first time in his life. Tatyana suffers more on a daily basis and she's never killed anyone or infiltrated anywhere. There's no justice here or anywhere, and she doesn't flinch when Volgin puts blinding on the table. Violence is the first; last; only truth.
She slaps Adamska because he missed and she wanted to touch him in the only way she understands, not because he hurt John. He interprets it as an order not to hurt her apprentice. She lets him. It's sentimentality or detachment or both.
Her life is her Cobras: The Pain is the snake scar Revolver Ocelot left; The Sorrow is the light brush his ethereal form makes against her back; The Fear is something she doesn't know; and The (her) End is Naked Snake.
The worst part of dying is being surrounded by flowers. It's romantic and nothing like her. She's always hated the things, suffered from aggressive hay fever for her entire life. She dies with puffy eyes and a runny nose, and maybe if they'd added that to the eulogy then she could have tolerated it, but instead they just recreate her into this virgin; mother; martyr; lie: a focal point of unreality.
6: glimmers of goodbyes
She doesn't go down in the textbooks, not even a name (although she's got plenty of those: Mecury Lady, Mother of the Special Forces, Voyevoda, The Joy - she'll take The Boss). The martial arts style she developed is attributed to her apprentice, her legacy is appropriated by countless individuals and hoisted up as a banner under which to justify atrocities.
The stain she leaves behind is raw, red, angry. She's a wound, a scab, which Snake and Zero just won't leave alone, her memory is peeled and she bleeds anew, washing the world with scarlet blood tasting of biting iron.
The Patri(ots/archy) fall, but not really.
When her protégé dies he doesn't shift the body of her son into a grave next to hers. He falls onto the ground delicately layered over her rotting corpse and crushes it, crushes her, obscuring her grave from sight. When they bury him besides her with no one's consent people come to visit him, to salute, and if she had a fraction of her son's father's psychic powers the world would long be reduced to ash.
AN:
o The thing about George Washington is true.
o Section titles are from "Anthem for the Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, title is from "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse.
o I deliberately excluded The Boss training Big Boss because my headcanon is that she didn't even like him and the canon is that he trampled all over her legacy and literally killed her
o Some of the things The Boss says are canonically incorrect (e.g. Tatyana never infiltrated anywhere) but that's because of the information she had access to at the time (thinking about it this could be wrong – please tell me if it is and I'll change it)
o This is written from The Boss's perspective, none of the opinions reflect my own
i can't believe i gave the boss fewer words than i gave the snakes mfw