The stench of mud was everywhere, the thin film of ice biting into his hands. Even the rifle, which normally felt like a part of him, didn't reach its full beauty in winter. Even through the clouds, there was occasionally a thin flicker of anaemic sun over his skin, and that was enough for the nature living under it. His body had cooled to a temperature of that of the mud, and occasionally the British lights would slice across his vision, but beyond that he simply was the night.
He was unable to detect who started it, but at some point, in one of the trenches, a voice echoed across No Man's Land, in song, and though the words were English, he recognised the tune. A carol. Of course. It was Christmas.
The call and response echoed back and forth until it all blurred into one – choirs of men singing their carols in whichever language they could; the English taking a stab at the German, the German trying the English, all distorting it with blurry accents until only the melody remained. They staggered out of the trenches like startled prisoners, and around them lay coils of barbed wire and shattered bags of sand as one of them brought out a leather ball.
He played on a team with a mix of some of his friends in his trench and a bunch of nice-looking Englishmen, because they were sick of playing on their country's side. He was easily the oldest one there – the rest were fresh-faced young boys, the youngest fifteen, and he was in his forties with skin prematurely aged by the sun and the symbiotic lattice under his skin. In faltering German, the boy had asked him why his hair and skin was greenish, asked him if it was a kind of trench rot and what he should do if he caught it. He'd told him about how the Plant had lived inside him, ever since he was a child, thriving on the light and feeding him energy; told him how he hardly needed to eat. The muddied, ragged cigarettes sped them, he told him, because the carbon dioxide in the smoke fed the Plant, gave it what it needed to grow, although he'd been avoiding them since a mild outbreak of tobacco mosaic virus he caught a while back. The boy took it all in sceptically, occasionally snorting at spots of bad English, but listened and believed him, even when he mentioned he could change the behaviour of other plants.
"Well," he said, in cheerful English with what he thought he identified as a thick London accent, "when the frost is over, make some more poppies. I like poppies."
The football game turned out to be a tie after they had spend the evening skidding on the ice and mud, illuminated only by the searchlights, two craters from mortars being marked out as goals.
In the trench someone revealed they had a cigar – they passed it around, calmly, listening to the English carols being belted out from the opposite trench and joining in with the song. Huddled under the blankets, he called out to the spirit of the rats in the trench, made them gather around him, a desperate plea for warmth, and they listened to his call. He fell asleep at some time during The First Noël, lost in the lack of hatred. He knew all the propaganda, and the people back home on both sides believed that the enemy was inhuman. The soldiers understood more.
After the war, in the late thirties, he encountered a girl, hardly eighteen years old, with long, wavy blond hair and a mole underneath her right eye, who looked young and beautiful and completely fearless. With the December sun streaming through the window he could feel himself thriving, but even the energy of that was nothing compared to the way she'd gripped his hand. She was unusually strong. Maybe she was gifted, the way he was.
"You saw it, didn't you?" she told him, stroking a thumb across the leathery skin. "That Christmas in the first World War, in the trenches, you saw war for what it really was – fought by ideologies, with faceless soldiers on either side following orders they don't believe in. If you join me, I'll give you everything to believe in."
He moved a little way towards the sunlight, basking in the faint rush, longing for summer. She met his eyes
"I was there," she said. "I was not born then, but I was there." She pressed a hand to her breast. "I am the blood of every soldier who sang that Christmas and died on Boxing Day. I have everything to lose, but I will fight, because that's my nature. And," she continued, "isn't it Christmas today? It's funny how the world works – it's a giant ouroborous, the same thing repeating over and over. Join me, and we can fight that pattern," she closed her eyes, "until it swallows us up. Join me, and we can save your motherland - I know you love it, and I know you have no sympathy for the madmen running it, and so to free it from him would be a blessing."
He saw she had the eyes of that boy, wide and brave and wise, and her slight English accent was all it took for him to be fully convinced.
They sat in the pews in absolute silence, the gleaming cross directly overhead like a sword just ready to drop.
Irritably, he regarded the masked soldiers patrolling the rows, and finally stared straight at the waxy parcel that they'd placed on the altar. He'd seen a few bombs before, but none that actually looked like bombs – this one had wires and an aerial.
His little sister had dozed off in his arms, and it was her breathing which was keeping him from lapsing into panic. The cardboard star he'd carried in the parade earlier lay at his feet, covered with his nativity drawings in pen – he'd always enjoyed irritating the neighbours early in the morning by singing at them, and it had been what he looked forward to more than anything, but it didn't seem at all important now.
His mother's expression was pursed and fierce in a way he'd never seen before, her eyes fixed on one of the terrorists – one with his sleeves rolled up, shouting at another in a foreign language.
"He's the ringleader," she whispered in his ear, her long dark hair tickling his neck. Somewhere in the back of the church, a man started sobbing. "But the others aren't doing what he's telling them. He's frightened. That means he might do something dangerous."
"The bomb's got an aerial on it," he whispered back.
"That means they want to be out of the area before they blow it up," his mother agreed. "They're not suicide bombers – they're debating who gets to leave and who gets to stay and make sure we don't leave. Their plan doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't even think they're well-trained. That's frightening. It means they won't act rationally."
His sister murmured in her sleep, and he rocked her gently until she nodded off again. For some reason, the fear hadn't yet sunk in, instead pressing against his mind like it was in a vice.
"What should I do?" he whispered to his mother.
"Just stay quiet," she responded, taking his shoulders in her hands. "Just stay still and don't move - "
At that moment the ringleader shot a loud tattoo and one of the women in the front pew flopped over backwards, staring at the ceiling.
His mother crumbled, grabbing him tightly, weeping into the nape of his neck, finally unable to withstand it any longer. Awkwardly, he reached out, trying to comfort her – she'd been so brave a moment ago, he thought, staring at the terrorists like she owned the place, even knowing this whole place would be bombed if the army didn't arrive and maybe even if it did – and normally he was the one who got frightened and clung to her, and that was when the fear boiled up inside him, and all of a sudden he was crying with fear and anger – fear for his own life, anger for his family's.
"What should be do?" he begged her, shaking against her.
"You're in church," she said, softly. Her nails dug into his arms. "It's Christmas. All we can do now is pray."
He marked a quick, lopsided cross against his chest with a shuddering finger.
Oh, father, he started, in his head, mouthing the words between his lips, oh Lord, oh Christ, Mary, anyone, please. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I never want to die. Ever. I never ever ever want to die -
The next thing he heard was a loud scream of pain. The man who'd been crying earlier had leapt at the ringleader, and they were trying to subdue him, and then there was a loud click and a sudden ear-shattering explosion and choke of bright light and the world came tumbling down.
When he came to, he thanked God for listening to his prayer before realising that the crucifix above him was straight through his body, pinning him to the floor, his little sister dead between his chest and the soles of Jesus's nailed feet.
"What did he give you, sir?" asked Austin.
Jack looked down at the brand new carbine – an American-made import – in Austin's hands, and wished that he had one like that. His own AK-47 served him well, but it was heavy, and difficult to carry around. Austin's had been made for special forces – light, with a customised grip. For the sake of reducing his own envy he decided it wasn't reliable.
"Nothing yet," Jack said. "He said he had something for me, but I haven't seen it."
Austin smirked, probably at the thought of getting something before their father's favourite did. A bolt of anger flashed up in Jack's head, but he stopped himself from hitting him in the knowledge that he definitely wouldn't get a present if he did.
It was nearly the end of the day when their father approached Jack, kissed him on the forehead, and handed him a beautiful sword like nothing he'd ever seen before. He gave it a quick stroke in the air and it flashed in the December sun.
"All the way from Japan," he had said. "My grandfather was born there." He patted Jack on the shoulder. "I can see already it suits you. You're going to have to learn to use it before you can take it into battle, but you'll be a master."
For the first time in his life, Jack wondered what would happen if he decided not to learn to use the sword, if he didn't go into battle, if he didn't fight, if he somehow managed to avoid being shot like the other children he'd seen refusing to go to war. Would his father hesitate? He was his father's favourite, he knew – he was the only one who was given a sword, after all.
"You should head back, Jack," his father commanded. "You'll get twice as much food tonight, and even a cigarette if you're lucky. It's Christmas, after all."
Jack looked at his father's reflection in the blade of the sword. He'd always thought of him as a big man, but now he realised he was a lot younger than he tried to look. That was why his father was so good to him – he'd gone through the same, hadn't he?
"Thank you," he said, starchily. "I – Merry Christmas, sir."
"Merry Christmas," his father smiled back, and Jack fled.
"Here's the schematics," Otacon said, gesturing at the screen – Snake moved away from the unconscious guard on the floor, having patted him down for a PAN card. That'd help when they had to get out later.
Of course it was Metal Gear that stared back at him, all in neat wire frame. Otacon dragged the model around with the mouse.
"You can see, here," he said, pointing at the screen, "they've shaved about fifteen or twenty inches off the length of the railgun. That means fifteen or twenty inches less recoil absorbtion. They've probably changed the material the joints were made from."
Snake narrowed his eyes. "Doesn't look different to me."
"Yeah," Otacon agreed. "It's not really very different at all." He paused. "Says here - " he moved out of the blueprinting program and into a text file, "that they're using a new OS for it." He scanned the description. "Judging by their program outline it lacks sensor response. And it says here that it's currently too buggy to use – in the simulation it locked up when tracking multiple targets, and the tester was trapped in the cockpit for three hours before they worked out how to pry it open."
"So it's just a third-rate imitation?" Snake asked.
Otacon lifted his head as if he was about to nod, but then something caught his eye, and he gave a little laugh.
"It's Christmas."
"What?"
Otacon moused over the clock in the corner of the screen and was assured by a tooltip that it was December 25 2006.
"Yeah," Snake said. "I guess it is."
"Haven't got you anything."
"I haven't either."
Otacon reached out and grabbed his arm for a second.
"Let's finish this in time enough to get back and watch a movie before the end of the day, alright?"
"As long as it's not It's A Wonderful Life. Damn if I don't know every line of that by now."
"You're seriously not suggesting spending Christmas without watching It's A Wonderful Life?" Otacon joked, and then turned his attention back to the monitor. "I'm just going to wipe the file."
"Then what?"
"Then we blow the computer up," Otacon said, patting it on the side. "For insurance."
"How long have we got left?"
"How long are you going to need?"
Snake smirked. "Five minutes."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Otacon said, and hit Delete.