It wasn't the presence of a wolf in the Syrian Desert that told Big Boss something was amiss. It wasn't the wolf's size– nearly three feet tall at the shoulder and five feet long, far too large for what he assumed was perhaps a female just leaving puppyhood. It wasn't even the wolf's coloration, a dark yellow with almost a greenish tint in the moonlight.

What told the old soldier he was facing something different was the wolf's eyes.

They were an intense blue, not the pale blue seen in normal dogs and wolves. The alien features of her canine face were a veil over her emotions (though most people would think the flattened ears, raised hackles and growling clear enough indicators), but her eyes alone lifted the veil. In them Big Boss could see human fear, confusion, and reactionary anger born of the two.

It was possible he was wrong, that he was imprinting human feelings onto her. But there was one way to check.

Big Boss sheathed his combat knife and held his open palm out to the wolf; "It's alright. I'm not going to hurt you."

Her reaction was instantaneous. The juvenile's hackles lowered, her ears perked up, and she stopped growling; slowly she came over to sniff his palm, tail still between her legs. After only a sniff or two, she licked his palm.

Big Boss scratched the odd wolf's head with furrowed eyebrows and a thoughtful frown; she couldn't be some obscure breed of domesticated dog– despite her size and color, her features were pure wolf. She reacted too quickly to his words, too much to have simply been hearing his tone. The only explanation he could think of was that she had understood the words themselves, and what they truly meant.

The wolf hovered beside him even when he stopped scratching her, and after he'd fed her one of the desert lizards he'd caught for himself she sat beside him, studying him with those bright blue eyes of hers. He let her stay, and when she lay down to sleep even let her rest her head in his lap.

Bones snapped and shrunk, fur retracted, and Big Boss got the answer to his question when it was no longer a wolf sleeping there, but a naked, scrawny thirteen-year-old girl.

Her name was Ferişteh, and Big Boss learned three important things while traveling with her out of the desert:

1) She was a Kurd who had grown up during the Iran-Iraq War; she'd lost everyone important to her during the gassing of Halabja– everyone who also shared her power.

2) She had been taught English and trained with a sniper rifle by a fireteam of Gorkhas– a remnant of the British soldiers that had been stationed in Halabja for decades, Big Boss reasoned– and was a damn good shot for such a young girl. The Gorkhas had abandoned her for reasons Ferişteh didn't know but Big Boss could probably guess.

3) Nobody had taught her how to control her power. Her transformations were essentially random, and she was always wild and frightened immediately after.

She couldn't very well put her skills as a sniper to use if she was turning into a wolf whenever it pleased her (and more likely when it didn't please her), but Big Boss didn't have the knowledge or the time to help her understand that part of herself. So instead he used technology, tracking down the people who had made that boy's gas mask and asking them what they knew about wolves.

Two months after he brought her to America, Big Boss placed a collar in Ferişteh's now clean but still bony hands.

She stared at the collar with her intense eyes, which in this face looked more animal than human; "A choker?" Her grammar was nearly flawless, but her English was coated in a thick accent. He suspected it always would be– Sorani Kurdish wasn't a widespread language. That accent would perhaps be the only connection to home she'd have.

"It makes it so you won't transform unless you want to," he explained. "Though they did tell me it can't stop you from turning at midnight on a full moon– Nothing can stop you from turning then."

Ferişteh's mouth twisted into a scowl and her hands shook; "You're collaring me. Are you going to chain me to a post next? Muzzle me?"

Big Boss moved to put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched away from him, and he sighed; "It's not ideal, but I can only teach you how to be a soldier, Ferişteh. Someday you'll find someone who can teach you what you need to know about this– maybe you'll learn all of that on your own. But for now, this will have to do. Can you accept that, Ferişteh?"

The girl curled in on herself, hiding her eyes with her hair; she nodded all the same, and when he moved to touch her shoulder this time, she let him.

Ferişteh was a fast learner, and got even faster once she put on the collar. Big Boss had a brief month more to spend on teaching her, but by that month's end she was well on her way to mastering every technique he knew with a sniper rifle.

He made no secret to her that it would be a long time before they saw each other again. Perhaps that was why she did so well– so he could leave her proud, and maybe want to come back sooner. But he knew she stayed behind the scope for herself, too. She had spent too long in the very heart of war, its scars ran too deep for her to ever leave it behind. But if she could watch from the outside, close enough to see it without being hurt and not so far that she forgot, perhaps she could make her own peace with everything.

Big Boss knew for a fact she was trying not to rebel against the collar in his presence so they wouldn't part with bad blood between them. But every other night he would find the collar lying on the floor of FOXHOUND's base, and hear barking from the surrounding forest. He never brought it up to Ferişteh. But he left the collar in her room for her every night.

But even then, she followed his footsteps as she had in the desert. She listened to his every word in enraptured silence. She called him Saladin. Despite how she disliked the collar, he was the first person who had really tried to help her with her transformations. Uncontrolled as they were, they frightened her the most. And though he was leaving, he wasn't abandoning her– it was a simple parting of the ways. And destiny being the malleable thing it is, perhaps he'd even return to her one day.

She was a strange creature, but she was a fairly typical child of war– it was only natural she'd adore the most recent person to treat her with kindness. He hoped she would grow enough to distinguish true kindness from momentary kindness. He trusted her enough to do that much alone.

When he left again, it was an hour to midnight on a full moon. Ferişteh had smiled, wished him well, and hoped they'd meet again. Her animal eyes hid the truth of her feelings to him, but her tight smile, too-stiff shoulders and trembling handshake betrayed her.

When he drove away from the base, the moon was in the center of the sky. A long, lonely howl echoed through the night.

1) Ferişteh isn't a proper Kurdish name per se (as far as I could find, anyway), but it does mean "Angel", so I suppose it could be used as one. That name far predates this fic idea, which is why it has nothing to do with wolves or at the very least foxes (more on that next chapter).

2) I have no idea where it was said in any resource that Wolf was trained by Ghorka soldiers, but according to the MGS wiki she was and I basically take anything not in the "Unconfirmed History" section on there as canon enough for my purposes. My research told me British soldiers were stationed in Halabja as late as World War I, but I couldn't find anything telling me if any were still around by 1988, so I'm gonna fake that in MGS-land at least a few Ghorka were.

3) Though I have no love for MGSV, I'm pretending the kid we saw in the trailer truly was a young Psycho Mantis, so I'm also pretending Big Boss knows what the gas mask does for him and that it is indeed a property of the mask and not just a psychological thing.