Snake sat in the USPF locker room. The bastards had suckered him into another damned "mission". He rubbed the scratch on his hand idly wondering just how bad the Plutoxin 7 virus could be. Would he really "bleed out"? "Not really the kind of thing you want to test, especially not on yourself." Snake thought. His eye turned suspiciously to the pile of flame retardant clothes that were stacked beside him on the bench. "What USPF blackbelly wears a trench coat? None. So why have it?" That left him with one answer. The coat and the rest had been made, pre-made even, for him. They had to have been made or at least ordered long before his capture in Thailand. His hand ran over the smooth synthetic coat. These took more then two weeks to make, two weeks being the time that had elapsed since all the helicopter bullshit in New Vegas.
Snake ran his hand through his hair. "How long had they known?" He speculated and more importantly what did that knowledge mean for the "mission" they had for him. It all seemed more and more like Leningrad, rewind, set up and tear down bullshit.
Plissken pulled off the tattered brown jacket and grimaced at it wondering if they'd hold it for him. Sure it was a battered piece of crap, anyone could see that but for Snake it was a vestige of his past. Taylor had bought him this jacket for his 21st birthday. Sophia had worn it those first few years like a stolen trophy. Snake gazed down at the floor slowly closing his eye to stave off the guilt. He had lost so much time he could have spent with her because of arrogance or fear or both. After all this time he still caught a brief smell of her perfume from the leather or maybe it was all in his mind like so much was these days.
The jacket had seen Siberia and France, Mexico, Thailand and the Cuban front, New York Max on both sides of the wall and a whole string of other imprisonment and internment sites scattered across this country and a couple others. Reluctantly he hung it in one of the lockers. He'd come back in here for it even if they had ordered him to dispose of the "ratty brown leather". He smiled to himself, the jacket, his jacket hanging defiantly among all the USPF uniforms in the middle of their barracks. It was leather, a big blaring red illegal item on their crime list. Even his jacket seemed to defy them by lasting this long against the odds much like its owner.
His fingers ran down the rough tattered sleeve bringing back more memories then Snake cared to remember. His hand slipped away from the leather and he turned back to the neatly stacked pile of black synthetics. He glared dubiously at them and then glanced back at his jacket.
"I'll be back for ya baby." He whispered to it before resigning himself to his new black, USPF issued attire. That thought left a terrible taste in his mouth and a Machiavellian defiance burning inside. These bastards would learn the price for fucking with a poisonous Snake when it wished to be left in peace.