A/N -- This is my first MGS fic. It's set up to diverge from canon right after Shadow Moses. I will take some techie liberties with stuff like nanomachines and viruses, but hey, if Kojima can pull crap out of his butt, so can I right?

I'm relatively new to the MG world, but I've gotten hooked on it after watching my husband play 1, 2, and 3 after buying the box set. Needless to say, I heart Solid Snake.

-SL

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A Humble Life

Prologue

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He'd made it.

Cold rain poured over him, washing his dirty hair into his eyes. He swiped at the strands absently, taken with the sight of the city in front of him. A twinkling line of electricity and life, shimmering against the almost constantly rainy night sky, for a moment, it brought him to a sense of awe that before now only the grandeur of nature's own spectacle would have done. Nearly four months it had been since he'd last laid eyes on a heart of civilization, weeks and weeks spent in some of the harshest wilderness he had ever traversed, but now he was here – a jungle of it's own, the city of Seattle.

There had been cities he'd passed, highways crossed along the way, but only now did he dare to re-enter a heart of mankind's dealings. It had been the deal he'd made with himself when he left Alaska -- it was just himself versus the wild, and nothing but unless he survived to Seattle.

In all honesty, now that he found himself walking along the state highway that led across part of the sound towards the city center, he hadn't expected to ever arrive. Or at least something in his heart had hoped that the forests and mountains would have swallowed him whole, but that would have been too simple, really, and his mind oftentimes had this frustrating ability to trump what his heart wished. He hoped he wouldn't make it, but he knew he could.

And now that he was here, the question that he'd been wishing to avoid was ringing in his mind: what now?

It wasn't as if he'd never been alone before. After all, most people who went to live in the parts of Alaska that he'd spent his time between missions were those who wished for the stark solitude of the last American frontier, but this time… Well, this time no one else actually knew where he was, and he had no surefire way of knowing where to find the people who might care to know that he was still around.

There were only three people who actually knew that he hadn't been killed during the Shadow Moses incident: Colonel Campbell, with whom at this point he had no wish to have any more contact; Meryl, who was part of the reason he'd gone on this recent journey and who he was sure didn't care much at all where he had gone off to, and deservedly so; and last, Otacon. Maybe he'd find a way to let at least Hal know that he was OK, and apologize for not being there to start the project they'd been talking about. He'd tried Codec a few weeks back and found that it was flat out not working, and he was still unsure of why.

He felt the cold stares from people in their cars as they passed him. He was sure that this wasn't normally a foot path to get into the city, and that he must be a sad looking figure in his tattered clothes with an old oilcloth draped over his back to keep the drenching night's rain at least out of his pack, his head and face a mass of wild overgrown hair and beard, like the mane of a mangy old lion. Likely to them, another of the countless vagrants that came to raid the dumpsters and sleep in the alleyways of the city, certainly not a much-valoured warrior, and definitely not the man who had single-handedly stopped the menace of the Metal Gear from ever being known to anyone beyond the highest levels of the military and government.

"I'm sure that there's plenty of real war heroes on the streets… normal guys turned into monsters of war, then forgotten about, thrown away to let their demons eat them away in the gutters," he thought, shooting a sharp look at a woman on her cell driving a large, gaudy SUV, whose haughty disregard of him turned to mild fear when their eyes met – the lion may be mangy, but he's still nothing to take lightly. She tore her attention away from him and sped on faster than before, even cutting off a couple cars down the road.

"Men far better than I ever have been… Men who chose to serve their country, men, born, not made, who had lives and hopes and dreams beyond the war and the battlefield."

He kept his pace: steady, slow, meaningful, his body at that place just on the edge of exhaustion, where in his training he could force himself to go on almost indefinitely. He had traveled thusly since he had grabbed the sparest of his gear and belongings and walked into the woods alone and didn't look back. His intention then was chasing his own mortality, to see if fate wanted to have her way with him. But like the other woman in his life, fate had decided to reject him and send him on his way, to try and figure it out for himself. And as he walked on, he felt that perhaps he was to find a new fate here; either that, or he felt it fitting to fade away in the streets with the other forgotten refuse of war.

Once on the other side of the bridge, Solid Snake did what he was best at: he disappeared silently into the shadows of the city.