There is a clean divide, inside and outside the tent. Inside it is small and dry and static but safe, and who the hell knows what is outside in a place like this? You'd have to get up. You'd have to check. You'd part the opening and stare out into the jungle, all unwelcome and crawling and wild with wide-eyed life, glittering in the light from your lamp, a burn and crawl of scales building up into a chatter of bats, flitting around like birds unable to get some sleep or air. The humid atmosphere would cling inside your lungs, heavy smoke, headache-heavy atmosphere, all sweat and mud and blood. Tomorrow, it will rain. Tomorrow, it always rains. That's the nature of where you are.
"I came up with a better method of catching food," Snake says, idly, lying flat on his back. He's watching the dark shapes of the leaves trace over the too-thin tent, like claws. Face streaked with mud and paint he looks like he could melt back into the earth at any moment. "Better than Miller's method anyway. Didn't get the same quality, but I got more than he did."
"What's the method?" you ask him. "What was your little trick?"
"Plunged my hand in the river. Let that work for itself." He shifts, slightly agitated. "Caught quite a few."
"I'm amazed you still have fingers left."
"They weren't that big," he says, glancing around. "What are you imagining? Piranha?"
"I don't know," you respond, aching inside at how much this is like the sort of thing Boss would witter about. Dull, stupid, and slightly bizarre. And concerned with gourmet tendencies. "What are you imagining?"
"I've got some here," he says, rummaging through his supplies, bringing out an empty food tin. The way it sloshes as he pulls it out sets a squirm of queasy dread, and it isn't appeased when he pulls off the lid and pulls out one of his catches.
You look at the dripping, squirming leech between his fingers, at him – looking at you with a naïve expectancy that doesn't suit his features – and your own catch – a small python, freshly dead – and wish you weren't so hungry.
"Are you sure it's even safe to eat?"
"Not really. That's the fun part," he comments, mouth remaining serious, eyes smiling. It's so much like something Boss would say you want so badly to just reach out and pluck out one of his eyes, hope it rewards him with the wisdom he needs. "Finding out. What do you say?"
"What do I say to what?" you respond, trying to look exasperated rather than amazed.
"What do you say," he repeats, the leech still wheeling around in his hand, "we make a little drinking game out of it?"
You don't miss a trick. "Since when can you drink leeches?"
"They're mostly fluid on the inside," he says. "You can just slurp them right out. Drinks. Not like I'd ever order one in a bar, though," he adds, wryly, dislodging an errant tail-sucker that had latched onto his thumb, "but…"
"What would this drinking game entail?"
"What do they usually entail?"
The only ideas you can come up with involve the effects of intoxication, and something inside you suggests that Hirudo medicinalis has a very low alcohol content. And it isn't as if they are desirable to consume. It shall have to be played as an endurance contest.
"Here's the rules, then," you declare, and Snake grins – or comes as close to it as you'd expect from him. "For each one I eat, you eat one too."
"And vice-versa, no doubt."
"Absolutely."
"Think the Master will want in?" Snake asks, pointing off over to where Master's tent must be.
"If he does," you say, "he's not very sane." The leech has made a last-ditch and rather futile attempt to escape up Snake's arm and over his shoulder – he grabs it and squeezes it into a little O to prevent it biting him. You realise something. "How did you get them off? Burn them off with your smuggled-in cigarettes?"
"No," he says. "Miller says you should never try and damage a leech. When it's startled, it can regurgitate the contents of its stomach into the wound, and that's just asking for infection. The idea of burning them off with a lit cigarette is just an urban legend – a stupid one, too."
You close your eyes bitterly. You bet he wouldn't bother checking his batteries after eating a luminescent mushroom either.
"Anyway," he suddenly adds, "how did you know I'd smuggled cigarettes in?"
"I know you better than anyone else," you answer, simply. "Of course you've smuggled them in. You've done so every other training session since you joined FOX-HOUND." You still have the cigarette he gave you in Outer Heaven, crushed slightly in your pocket after however many wars. Someday you plan on burning it, smoking it, filling the room with poisonous, carcinogenic incense that burns as you breathe it in, his scent on your skin and clogged in your hair for days afterwards. Trapped there. But so far you haven't been able to do it, keeping it as a talisman or a lucky charm or something like that. The rough paper, the curls of tobacco, rubbing off in your fingers, before you dive into battle.
It's not long before you realise Snake should never know about it, under any circumstances, ever.
He gestures towards the tin, and you put your hand in – one attaches itself hungrily to your thumb. You declare it your victim, and dangle it above your mouth, feeling its weight pulling slightly on your skin.
"Ready?" he asks, narrowing his eyes in determination, smiling slightly at the corners of that familiar mouth. It needs more lines around it. Or a beard.
"When you are," you counter.
You don't need to count each other in, but still eat your leeches at the same time. It's foul and bitter and sour and burning and juicy – Snake was right about that one at least – and you eventually manage to choke it down and start scanning his face for signs of weakness.
You both stare for a minute, and Snake finally finds words to comment.
"Eugh," he says, thoughtfully. "Not great."
You burst out laughing and it's a little while before you can get yourself under control.
"Think the second will be as bad?" you ask, eager to watch him again in case he winces this time.
"Only one way to find out," he responds, slamming his hands down, pulling himself up cross-legged. He nods at you, and you nod back, both plunging your hands in at the same time. You notice with some appreciation that he's grabbed the smallest one out from under your fingers, and settle for the next smallest.
This time, you do count the two of you in, not because you need the timing but because it makes it more like a game.
"They really are quite horrible, aren't they?" you comment as lightly as you can, wiping the juice off your chin. He's trying not to laugh – it's written all over the way his mouth is squirming – and succeeding quite well, although it looks as if he doesn't let out some air soon he might explode or something awful.
He tries to snatch a breath to talk, and ends up letting a chuckle out instead – there, you think, you've won. He tries again. "Think they'd taste better cooked? Barbequed?"
"We don't have a fire. We're using an electric lamp." It's giving off a faint smell of burning hair, but it had been giving off the same smell for the last three days and Snake's constant and repeated dismantling, cleaning, polishing, swearing at, and eventual reconstruction of the device failed to do anything except exacerbate the problem. You enjoy watching him take things apart with his hands – precise, pragmatic, everything you wouldn't expect. He gets a particular way of handling devices when he's trying to understand how they work, a sort of analytical systematic examination working down deeper and deeper into the mechanism. Watching him accurise a gun is so satisfying. That detail, that attention, the careful click of the metal, a hard deadly weapon that seems almost a part of him. He doesn't mind you watching. He's even better than you are.
"What did you think I was planning to light up with?" he says, rolling his eyes, fishing out his lighter that he smuggled out god-knows-how, holding it out to you.
"Careful," you point out. "It's probably too dangerous. Even if we don't end up somehow managing to torch the tent, Miller will –"
"He'll what?"
"Never mind. I'm sure they explode if you cook them anyway."
"Yeah," he agrees, staring at them. "They look like they'd burst. Better finish them up."
"Raw?"
He frowns. "We can't cook them. How else would we eat them?"
You wonder if it might be possible to boil the tin itself without setting fire to the tent, and can't decide if it's worth the risk.
"Three at once," you offer instead. "What do you say?"
He nods, and selects three long ones, grinning. You select three more. Already the tin is more scummy jungle water than it is leech.
"One," he says.
"Two," you continue.
"Three," he calls, somewhat triumphant, and you shovel in your handful.
The burning bitterness, trickling down your throat. Chew, chew, mechanical…You swallow a small mouthful. Still some more left. You notice he's starting to wince, and redouble your effort, wondering how much of the bitter fluid is Snake's blood –
– his blood. He lured them with his blood, and they drank it. Inadvertently his blood now runs in your veins, in whatever trace amount. You are well aware of how illogical it is, but cling to the thought regardless. There is something of him in you. There's something of Boss in him. No, there's everything of Boss in him. You can only tell them apart by counting the eyes.
No, that's just as wrong, you think, squinting at him, forcing himself to swallow. He's slimmer than Boss, and carries a sort of silent, gaunt, stiletto knifeishness that Boss had never had. His hair is fairer, with no grey in it at all, although that's to be expected considering the fact that this Snake is barely twenty-four and looks it and that Snake is sixty-nine and no doubt would make no end of dirty jokes about it if it wasn't for the fact he was lying dead. Oh, you miss his sense of humour. Snake's is based on irony and sardony and quick under-the-table flashes of wit that you don't notice until several hours later when you suddenly collapse laughing against a wall as the punch-line occurs – except for times like this when all rules fly away and he's joking the way Boss does, obvious and funny and stupid and all the funnier for being stupid.
How could two people, you think as you finally swallow the remains, look so damn identical and be so fundamentally opposite?
You go through the usual rigmarole of trying not to gag while laughing as you watch him swallow the last of his mouthful and finally give in and wince. You lean forward, trying not to show the look of disgust on your own face, but he catches it anyway and you end up both laughing hard. At each other's sudden lack of stoicism, maybe, or at your own stupidity in doing something like this anyway. It doesn't really matter.
After about thirty seconds of blank silence once the both of you have finally stopped laughing in order to breathe, he comments, quietly, no emotion in his words at all.
"You're thinking about the Boss again, aren't you?"
You feel your stomach tighten up painfully, and blame it on the torture you've been giving it in the name of friendly contest. His blood is in your veins now. "What makes you think that?"
"You've got that look in your eyes," he says, breathlessly. "Is there any water around here? I'm gonna be tasting that for days."
"I was laughing earlier," you deny. "I couldn't have been thinking about him."
He's not bothered enough to argue his point, and starts rummaging in his pack for his flask.
"People say I look like him," he says, idly. "Don't see the resemblance myself." He tosses out a few medical kits, and eventually finds the metal flask. "You want some?"
"I have my own," you resign, making no attempt to grab your bag, trying hard not to think of Boss in case it becomes plastered across your face – and of course telling yourself not to think of something just makes it a hundred times more prominent in your mind, a hundred times worse. A sudden curiosity occurs to you. "What's the story between you and the Boss?"
He gulps down some water. "I'm not sure what you're talking about."
"You fought him, didn't you?"
"That's right," he nods. "He was the leader of Outer Heaven. Gave so much convoluted intel – I assumed he was just finding it hard to find detailed information because of the tightness of the security there," he says forlornly, and pauses to take another sip, "but it seems he was just trying to lead me off. He did a great job of that. But…" His eyes close slightly. "He was a great man. Shame it had to end that way."
"You respected him," you suggest, emptily.
"Who didn't?" he responds, taking another swig. "I admired him, same as everyone else." A sudden ferocity boils in his words. "And I don't deserve admiration for leaving him for dead, either. It was a hard fight and I didn't even win by a coin toss. Certainly wasn't skill. It couldn't have been."
"Do you think," you suggest, dreading yourself saying it and making it real, "that he might have wanted it?"
He's quiet for a while. "Yeah. That's what I think. I think he wanted it."
You can't even begin to imagine wanting death for yourself. But it doesn't mean you don't understand entirely on some primal level inside you.
"I took something from him, though," he continues, "as he was dying. He said something about wanting me to have it. I brought it with me. Luck."
An heirloom from father to son?
"Show me," you demand, wanting to know what could be so precious that only his carbon copy could have it, and certainly never you.
He reaches into a pocket of the pack, and brings out a small square of folded material which he unfurls.
No, your eyes tell you. No. He couldn't have given anyone that.
"Let me see that," you ask, grabbing it out of his hands, pulling it close to your face.
It's clearly been through a lot of wars. Scarred, sun-faded. It has been re-dyed at some point, and occasionally you can still greenish patches where the midnight blue has worn away. At one point along its length there is a diagonal seam where another piece of material has been sewn in, probably to extend it. The ends are so worn they look like they might fall away in your hands. It's a long chain of war stories all stitched up together. Down, through generations, through battles, passed on like a cursed treasure from some ancient king's tomb, changing hands only when one person dies.
"You seem interested," Snake says, slyly. "I know. Didn't think he was the bandanna type. I've never seen him wear it. It's just a rag."
"Not a rag," you intone. "It's a favour."
"A favour?" he repeats. They share the same annoying way of asking questions – regurgitating the last few words of what you've said. But there's no way that could be carried through the genes – had to be coincidence.
You shove it towards him. "Put it on."
"What?"
"I want to see what you look like with it on," you repeat. "Is that so much to ask?"
"Well, no, but –" He sighs heavily, unable to come up with a response, and takes it from you. Finding the centre, he spreads his thumbs, pulling the material tight, bringing it against his forehead and –
"I don't know how," he admits, sullenly. How glorious.
You scramble over to help him. With him kneeling in front of you, you take both ends from him, scrape back the hair at the front, arrange the hair at the back, and then crown him. A simple double knot, and he's the king. You pat him on the shoulder, and shuffle backwards to admire your handiwork.
He stares at you, slightly embarrassed, no longer anything except your Boss. Lengthened, the bandanna doesn't hang utilitarian, tickling the base of his neck. It falls to mid-back, and it's like a proud banner, flying behind a warrior, a knight in armour.
You're so deep in admiration it takes you a second to realise he's spoken.
"What's the verdict?"
"Wear it more often," you advise, unable to take your eyes off the way the tails swing and flow, highlighting even the slightest movement he makes. "If he gave it to you, it must have been very important to him."
"That's all well and good, but do I look ridiculous?" he asks. You laugh at his vapidity, and shake your head.
"Not at all," you tell him. "You look a true successor to the Boss."
His eyes glint with suppressed pride. "Really?"
He's trying to keep his voice monotone, but can't quite manage it. He'll get the hang of it eventually. He's the type to suppress things. That's not a bad quality for a soldier to have.
You nod. "Absolutely. Wear it more often. Anyone who sees you will be too scared to even think about fighting back."
"No-one's going to see me," he says, with utter confidence, reaching up to take the bandanna off, and you can't have him stop being your Boss yet – you grab his wrist, accidentally knocking over the can of leeches in the centre of the floor.
It takes you about five minutes to finally gather up all the leeches and return them to the tin and snap the lid back on and mop up the scummy pool of water so one of you'll have somewhere to lie down.
You then play a quick game of rock-paper-scissors to determine who has to go out of the tent in the blind dark and dump Snake's catch back in the river about fifty metres away, which doesn't sound like a lot until you remember you cannot possibly see anything you're doing and there'd no doubt be a large snake or crocodile or something nibbling at your ankles on the way. He wins the best of three, naturally. Went for scissors each time. You should have seen it coming, but you didn't. Lucky bastard.
You eventually return to the tent with a greasy, empty tin, and a bruise on your leg where you caught a root on it, and crawl in, rolling onto your back and lying there.
"How'd it go?" he asks, and you notice that the snake you'd caught to eat is no longer there. He's eaten it in your absence – it's the only valid explanation. You won't forgive him for this.
"I'm fine," you say. "I want the lamp next time, though."
The bandanna is lying on the floor, limp and dead. You sigh, and stare up at him. You reach your hand up hazily to touch his features, those distinct bones, the set of his eyes and mouth, your first meeting all over again. You'd gazed at those features and been choked with amazement, and he'd looked on, blank.
He doesn't mind the contact. You hand comes away, streaked with a little mud.
"Put the bandanna back on," you command. There's no room for a question. You're no longer his friend, but his commanding officer. He obeys, meekly, able to put it on this time, but struggles a little with the knot.
The faint light from the electric lamp makes the sharpness and contrast of his features even more extreme – it gives an illusion of years of age which certainly hadn't happened to him yet. His muddied hair looks almost greyish, his face haggard. One eye is lost in shadow. You feel your body reaching up.
As you kiss him you explore the shape of that mouth and can't find a difference in anything except the flavour. Cigars taste so much better, you think to yourself, briefly, and pull away. To his credit, he's not as clueless as Boss. He comes close, though.
You smile at him. He frowns slightly, and then smiles back.
"I don't get it," he says, smiling wider.
"Moron," you respond, reaching your hands around his head. The soft edge of the bandanna tickles your hand, and you feel those identical lips rubbing against your cheekbone, down to the soft area just underneath, scraping your mouth. With your thumb, you close his right eye, pressing on it gently to prevent him opening it. You hear him mutter something about depth perception, but it's utterly distant and lost into your mouth.
There's not a lot of room inside the tent, but there's as much as you need, and your back is pressed hard against one tent wall, stretching to accommodate it, tilting the structure slightly, the scrape of the leaves in this quasi-windless world your biggest reminder, because gravity is the least of your concerns right now. You're straining with nothing less than love for both this pretender and the king he usurped, and he's grabbing at you, grasping at you as if he's trying to capture you and drag you off to be killed.
"How do you think we should start?" he says, wickedly, and you have to wait for him to release your mouth before you can respond.
"You're the Boss," you reply.
He sees nothing in it, and you sigh with relief at his oblivion to your Freudian-slipping misuse of that simple title. Maybe he did notice, and he's simply choosing to ignore it. Why would he? Surely in some part of himself, he would want nothing more than to be just like Big Boss, the person he was clearly meant to be. He doesn't even realise it himself, but it must be the case. After all, you would if you were in his position.
There's the faintest movement off in the distance and you both freeze, his hand half-way along your stomach. Miller. Could he possibly have heard? You both wait in still silence until the movement stops, and then retreat to each other again, and he curses quietly about how hard it is to get these uniforms off – you hear it in your throat.
"Clearly," you say, with great diplomacy, as soon as he lifts his mouth away, letting your hand hunt through his bag for his medical kit – anything, some ointment, better than nothing – "we'll have to be quiet. We can't get caught."
He salutes, half joking. Half serious. Discarding layers of thick clothing with his free hand as if he was snapping off chains. "I'm good at that. I never get caught."
He is quiet. It's hard to hear anything except the way you're both moving, the chirps and squeals of the outside jungle nightlife setting the air electric, drowning out everything except your breathing, and you've no idea how he can stay so soundless – you're clasping him and grabbing him and trying to find some hold and his fingernails are digging into the groundsheet and he tilts his head to the right and gives you a sidelong gaze with an eye that shouldn't be there, and it's so close to insulting you force his head around to the left and kiss him so he can't break away. In this world, this jungle, humid and dark, you're already both flushed and damp, your eyes already dark holes, and even before you contacted you seemed beyond ready.
He draws himself up as best he can in this tent, trying to regain some dignity, but you're too desperate. You don't want to let him move too much, and so he clumsily presses his way a little across the floor, kicking away your clothes, knocking over the lamp which rolls to the edge of the tent, catching against the canvas. The light-shift changes the shape of the shadows, reminds you who you're up against, but you pull on the tails of the bandanna like reins before moving your hands back to where they were, simple, mechanical motion, forward-back, and still he won't bend down, the temperature of his skin rising under your hands, and he's perfect – young and strong and a mirror into the past; what time paradox had brought him here? Did time even move any more? The scrape of the leaves had stilled, and even the noise of the jungle is stilled for a moment, and it's just you. Just you and him – and Him, in the shape of that face, the pride in his body.
And you hate yourself for using him this way, revile yourself, but love both men enough not to care, and you feel It start to strain up inside you and you force it back – not yet, not yet.
He's first, and he makes absolutely no sound as he does – at first you only know because his body tenses under you, each muscle standing out in a carved hard ridge, shape clear and utterly hard to the touch, and finally he can't hold sound back any longer, gives the softest growl in the back of his throat, and lands dizzily to his knees, dislodging your hands which grab futilely at his hips in an attempt to claw their way back, knowing it would be fruitless. You've done it. You've broken him. The satisfaction of the knowledge mixes with the satisfaction as you let yourself breathe again, feeling the heat work its way all up your body from your hips down to the ends of your fingers, a frenzied glow, and you feel your lungs gasp softly before finally letting go of him, falling to the floor – your mind screams Boss! but at the same time you know you could never have him again and you're smart enough not to let the cry out of your mouth, instead locking it up as a mental image, a lingering sensation, a phantom, nothing.
He turns to face you, still breathing heavily, skin still dewy. The mud is sweat-streaked down his face like an obscure camouflage pattern.
"How're we going to explain this to Miller?" he says, casually, glancing over the mess.
You let your eyes close. How can he be so offhand? You're still struggling to get any sort of breath, still burning warm to the touch, and he's acting like it never happened. Denial. He must be used to it. Had he even entirely let himself go?
You voice your concern. "Is that all you have to say?"
"What should I be saying?" he says, a little starkly, still panting a little. He leans back a little, and begins to root around his uniform to find the cigarettes he smuggled out god-knows-how, takes the lighter he'd stored in the box, gently rights the fallen lamp as he takes his first breath of his first cigarette of the training session. Miller couldn't stand them.
"Well," you counter. "Didn't you enjoy it? Even a little?"
The tip of the cigarette glows redly as he pulls in the smoke, and he smiles slightly.
"Not something I enjoy, as a rule," he says, thoughtfully. "Anything like that. Men, women, my hands…I have better things to do with my time." He lowers the cigarette. "But," he adds, "I've done worse things."
"So I'm a thing now, am I?" you say, well aware he didn't see the double entendre.
"Yeah," he deadpans. "It's just not in my nature to want things like that. I like them," he seems to feel compelled to add, "I like the physicality of it, but it's not something I rate highly or think about a lot."
"Then why didn't you say so?"
He moves in towards you again, and gives you the same look Boss would give you, kind and sly at the same time.
"Because I trust you," he says. He thinks simply like that. "Because you're my best friend."
It means a lot, coming from him. He's not the sort of person to toss words around like that. Or, for that matter, physical contact. Even a blow to the face isn't meaningless if he's behind it.
"If there's ever anyone watching my back, I want it to be you," you say, and that's your romantic mush over for the evening – with a quick reach you grab your clothes and begin to dress, and Snake follows your lead. Once you're both fully dressed and doing your best to clean up the mess, you sigh, and turn to face him.
"Do we have any food?"
"I'm not going out to catch any more leeches."
"We were given rations at the start of this exercise, and –"
Snake visibly shudders. "If you want to try it, you can. Had a look. Not the most promising meal I've ever seen in my life."
You make a point of looking in his backpack rather than your own for the rations. He ate your snake, after all. Bastard.
It's not the best meal you've ever had in your life. The leeches were better. At least you could taste them. Not to be put off, you work your way through something unrecognisable in taste, smell and appearance which claims to be a sausage roll in the same way Master Miller might claim to be Para-Medic. The small packet that reads 'CHOCOLATE' in cheerful, encouraging capital letters yields only a waxy brownish lump about the size of a box of matches that tastes faintly of paraffin. You bite into it, swallow a chunk, and stare at it thoughtfully in the hope that it might somehow magically become less disgusting.
"Let me have a piece," Snake asks, and you break off half. He eats it thoughtfully.
"I preferred the leeches," you admit. He nods, and eats the rest, washing it down with another lungful of smoke before discarding the cigarette, crushing it against the groundsheet and then flicking it outside the tent.
Lamp off, you lie back, and listen to the sounds of the jungle.
He whispers. "Think Miller heard anything?"
"Snake," you whisper back, fretfully, "if he did, he was probably convinced we were doing something unprofessional and inappropriate the second we started laughing about eating huge ones and swallowing them whole, juices and all."
"Oh," he says, and rolls over.
You can't get over how little like the Boss he looks when he's asleep. Was it just the fact he was younger, still in his twenties, faintly Japanese eyes and mouth not yet lost to the creases of age? Was it just that Big Boss never relaxed? You doze off, mind warring over the differences between them, the similarities. It would be nice to declare that physicality was as deep as it went, but every now and again you'd find a vein of Boss's personality shining through the dirt and rubble of his own, littered there by an environment, the things he'd seen and survived which the Boss never had.
Then again, it would be nice to declare your absolute loyalty to him, but as long as you remembered the Boss that would never happen. It didn't matter how dead he was in the real world. In your mind he's there, guiding you, ordering you and protecting you, and you know if his ghost somehow ordered you to kill this fascinating usurper you would –
And you wouldn't hate him, you wouldn't revile him, you could never hate that face, it's too deeply imprinted into your head, you could never prove your love to him more by obeying that whim and killing him, and in that moment he would be consumed by it all, and he'd be more like the Boss than he'd ever been, because he'd understand how much love there was for him in that fighting, that bloodshed. And could that be enough? Could that possibly change him into everything he wasn't? Would he wake up the next day and revile the world and long for absolute warfare to fill his bones and mind and heart and the world around him?
Making him the Boss would be the kindest thing you could do, because it was what he was clearly meant to be.
But if you could have brought yourself to do it, you would have done it by now.