Not Love
Metal Gear belongs to Konami and Hideo Kojima.
Notes:
This story started out as a single sentence, and turned into something much longer and more convoluted. Still I think there are a few good spots that may make it worthwhile...
FOXHOUND had an unspoken rule. A rule because soldiers like rules – black and white boundaries unlike those ambiguous gray pieces of humanity – and unspoken because soldiers know not to discuss certain things – never even think about them.
This particular rule they set it out in a way that truly did not require words and although unspoken, the rule was clear and straightforward so that it tinted the consciousness of even the dumbest agent.
Never fuck your buddies. Don't fuck your buddies over, and don't fuck them up the ass.
Snake understood what it meant to be fucked over, and however skewed or twisted his moral compass became, some part of him always balked at the idea of screwing others over. He took no pleasure in fucking up people – even his enemies or the ones who really did deserve it. Some people thought this made him a hero. He knew it only made him easier to manipulate; it made him expendable.
But a soldier is nothing if not expendable, and FOXHOUND produced the finest of soldiers. Even before he stopped believing in his unit's purpose, Snake and his comrades had no delusions or false hopes about their existence. They all knew that when the time came and they had fulfilled their function, their superiors would dispose of and forget them without a second thought – dusty relics from a spoiled child's chess set.
Not a pleasant thought, even for hardened super soldiers, and so a need for the unspoken rule. Don't fuck your buddies over, because they are the only ones who won't do the same to you. While this tentative half-trust necessitated the first part of the rule, it made the second part more seductive.
Don't fuck your buddies was a simple enough concept to understand, but surprisingly difficult in practice.
Snake never loved anyone at FOXHOUND but that hadn't stopped him from fucking. Men or women – after a point gender did not matter anymore than appearance or personality. He did not look for companionship or good conversation; he needed something deeper and more unobtainable – certainly something no street whore or one-night stand could provide.
He had never loved anyone at FOXHOUND but he could remember the terror and loneliness that did not consume him during a mission – never on a mission – but always afterwards in the darkness of the bunker. After a mission those feelings, buried under a veneer of cold professionalism and the bravado of apathy, hit as hard and fast as a sniper's shot to the head.
But no bullet hurt quite like that, and Snake lost count of the nightmares – dreams that appeared lucid and painful like reality but somehow more intolerable. He could not remember how many times he woke up, clawing at his face and gnashing at his wrists, but he could not forget the way his screams rang silent in the heavy air. Such nightmares required another unspoken rule at FOXHOUND; don't ask about another's dreams, and don't tell.
FOXHOUND had not wanted Snake to fuck his buddies, but only a buddy could understand that the sex was not about love or even lust. The sex was pain, pure and simple; it was desperation and futility and all the body's chemicals and instincts that those entailed.
Although he did not need love, he needed understanding and like any bad habit, Snake could never bring himself to quit. He could never make himself stop, despite knowing the consequences of breaking the unspoken rule.
Fucking a buddy was not dispassionate and uninvolved. It did something, changed something, no matter how casual the encounter. It became easier to love the other person, or hate him, and a true soldier does neither. A soldier knows that the time might come when the mission decides former comrades are in fact enemies, and then you better fuck them over good and proper.
That was messed up enough without bringing sex into it.
But Snake had never loved anyone at FOXHOUND, no matter whom he fucked or how often. He always placed his skills as a soldier before his individuality just as his unit taught. As a soldier he had no problem watching buddies die or killing them if the mission required it; he could fuck them over without a flicker of guilt or hesitation. Even with the one that should have mattered, even with Gray Fox, he managed to put a bullet through the other's head.
No hard feelings, no regrets, though Fox was more to Snake than a buddy, more than a lover or friend. He was a name, and Snake clung to the words "Frank Jaeger" as closely as he had to the man himself.
Soldiers lose their names on the battlefield, and during those long days within Outer Heaven, Frank's identity became more real to Snake than his own. Even as reality itself collapsed around him, Snake held onto that one bit of truth – that little piece of humanity.
But as real as Frank was, the mission remained more so. They both understood that the day they looked down the barrels of each other's guns, because they were true soldiers. The past and future mean nothing in the face of the mission, and certainly things flimsy as friendship and personal loyalty do not.
The mission comes first, and soldiers do as it dictates. And for that mission Snake and Fox had fucked each other over more than they had ever fucked. They broke both parts of their unspoken rule, and neither came away unscathed.
Snake became an alcoholic, and Fox...Fox became a ninja. FOXHOUND had nothing to say about buddies you fuck who later turn into cybernetic ninjas single-mindedly trying to kill you, but Snake didn't care much for his former unit's rules anyway. They fucked him over more than Frank ever did and unlike with his buddy, he had no reason to forgive them.
Because he had forgiven Fox – in as much as he had the right to forgive anyone – just as he forgave the part of the man, tortured beyond recognition, that still lived in Cyborg Ninja's metal husk.
Snake forgave Frank Jaeger and then watched him die for a second time, for the last time. At Shadow Moses he saw that little bit of life, corrupted by electronics and experiments, extinguished, and in that moment he felt something for Fox.
Certainly he felt more then than when Meryl left him – her face hurt and angry, holding back tears as she imagined good soldiers did. She could not understand that good soldiers don't cry in the first place, but he saw no reason to tell her so as she stormed out.
It would do no good, and at least she knew enough to leave him. After only a few short months she realized that he did not have what she expected or needed, though he never made any pretense to the contrary.
Meryl left, and he watched her go without a single feeling, good or ill, toward her. Although he wanted to feel something, anything, he remained empty – a good little soldier. Snake never loved Frank as he tried to love Meryl, but somehow his buddy still meant more.
When Fox died, he did not feel regret or love; those were intricate emotions that required a depth of feeling and layers of humanity that Snake simply did not have. Although Frank was a buddycomradeloverfriendname, what he felt was not so complex as a full-fledged emotion.
Instead it struck, primitive and straightforward, like an unspoken rule of FOXHOUND that even the dumbest soldier, the most naive agent, could understand. With Frank's death Snake felt loss – nothing more but also nothing less.
He felt something, and that moved him one step closer to humanity – one more hole in his already battered facade of a soldier. FOXHOUND had understood what it meant to fuck your buddies; you end up fucking yourself as well.
Snake wasn't a hero and by fucking his buddies, maybe he wasn't much of a soldier either.