Hey everyone, Paradigm of Writing here with a brand new one-shot (it's been literally a year and a half since I wrote just a one-shot, all I've written are chapters for my multi-chaptered pieces) called Noon. This is line with the series called Amissum which is Latin for the word 'lost' and it is the title for a series of connected one-shots about an AU where the stadium was nothing short of a disaster. I may actually write a full piece for it, but actually having these one-shots make it just as fun. Since I love some of the zany pairing choices I can use, this is a Snake x Peach piece, because... why not? I haven't visited this universe in quite some time, and I cannot wait, as this is going to be a whole lot of fun.
In order, remember, the series goes Dark Tech Tethered on Darkness - Fading - Oasis - Disturbia - Nine Hundred and Thirty Three Days - Yesterday, and now here with Noon, the new entry. A fair warning if you're going to read all six again, that 1 and 3 are Rated M, and 1-4 feature Marth x Ike and Lucas x Ness, as an FYI. But, without further ado, here's Noon. Enjoy! And Seth, this one is for you.
She can hold her breath for fifty-five seconds exactly. She knows because she's counted, plenty of times, whilst submerging herself under the bathtub water that sloshes gently over the side onto the tiled floors. Her eyes flutter to the sound of the ticking clock as she sways back and forth, shoulders leaning up against the tiled wall, chills encompassing her entire body in saran wrap, a tightness where she cannot breathe and the cold air fills her lungs, fills her heart, and swamps her.
The water smells musty because they cannot afford a better house that has better plumbing, the air smells of rust and copper droplets, that he automatically deduces to be blood. The carpet in the master bedroom is torn up by cat claws - he jokes that is Bowser going to town on the design due to it offending him, which she shudders at - and mice droppings act as presents every forty inches or so. She knows it is forty inches because she measures.
A desire lingers in the air between them that they need to move, but Snake is not budging, and Peach has started to become attached to the disaster of a place that they now call home, constantly hiding, constantly terrified of what may come out of the dirt and dust devils that terrorize their house in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. She longs to go further, to escape the dreadful northwest and get away from the glove with the ominous laugh, but they're both so damaged, bruised, and bloodied that he relents in hiding out in the run down shack, until both become content and decide to stay.
It is perhaps the worst decision of her life. Not the fact that she ran away from the Stadium and the brawling and the translucent blizzard tyrant. Not the fact she is staying in something that royalty back in the Mushroom Kingdom would be horrified to discover that she is living in. It all boils down to the fact that she's with Snake, the Metal Gear agent of all the occupants in the Stadium that she could've become a fugitive with.
He's decent company at best, she muses constantly between rounds of coffee and painkillers, but it just has to evolve into something more while she settles down. She wonders constantly why the two of them cannot be like Marth and Ike, or Robin and Samus whom roam the country, staying in hotels or in their cars, enjoying life, while still being on the run. Instead, they're more so Lucas and Ness or Lucina and Shulk who do not leave their city block out of the fear of getting caught. It is all in the way you look at things, Peach gambles. Often sitting high atop her throne, the view is skewed from the ground, and she's larger than what she actually believes herself to be.
Humiliation is painful. Self-realization is demeaning. It is what Princess Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom needs.
Peach steps out of the tub, her hands lacing around the towel hanging on the back of the closed door. She looks at herself in the cracked mirror, a mirror full of memories. A flashback to a vanity in a much more well-decorated room, where everything is drowning in a strawberry shade, where Peach douses herself in conditioner and perfume and cosmetics because it is what royalty does. To mask her fear. To cover the bruises. To extinguish the flames burning her heart down to the ground. To keep herself on top of the totem pole in terms of superiority.
Her reflection is broken down the middle in the mirror, a fault-line that separates the good from the bad, a distortion of reality warped up in a crystalline contraption of torture. One hand is still gripping the snow-white cotton of the towel hanging on the door, the other hand limply floating side to side. Peach tilts her head ever so slightly over, craning her neck to the left, observing, scrutinizing. Breathing it all in.
That life is gone, her old life. The life she wishes she could have had when she receives the letter on a sultry August morning to join the elite of the elite of fighters across all the realms. With her ivory crown on her head, and sunbeam hair that rivaled the radiance of the life orb itself, she stands on velvet steps gripping her suitcases, diamond eyes wide as saucers, a heartbeat drumming inside her skull.
Her fantasy crumbles.
Whenever she sees the color purple, having the symbolism associated with finery and the upper-quality and upper margin of those living in the 1%, it fills Peach's heart with loathsome disgust. The crown is shattered in multiple pieces somewhere in the mansion, perhaps Master Hand's reminder of an era long lost to the wind and now just stories for a generation worldwide. Her dresses are torn in tatters in one of the house's closets, as she cannot bring herself to throw them away, she cannot let go of the pink silk and simply forget. She'd love to, that'd be her dream, but she cannot. It remains, her old life, her old past, and she forges a new future.
Nowadays, her hair stays frizzy and curly, resting against the napes of her neck where she can pull on a curl ever so often when she's nervous. No makeup is applied to her face, as when the logs that are on fire are falling from down around her, she does not have time by Samus's insistence to run - when the bounty hunter is screaming, "RUN!", so that her voice mirrors a lifelong smoker, one runs - and the eyeshadow and the eyeliner and the blush all burn up in the inferno, where her tears finally dry, and he's soothing her and rubbing her back.
She really, really wishes she could've had a better companion than Snake. Even when she's thousands of miles away from the tyrant, it still it can pull its tricks and mess her up.
Peach raises her left hand up to her naked body. The years have not been kind to her, she realizes, with saddening clarity. There is no longer a regiment she must stick to, out of fear for the snap, or for the slap, and she is no longer competing with any other femme fatales to be the one holding the golden trophy. Her waist bloats, her arms fatten, her thighs cannot squeeze together like they used to. The daintiness in her face is smashed, a porcelain plate chucked from the highest of rooftops where her cheeks now are heavy, and even if she manages to find lipstick, it is a far off look from the glory days. It is perhaps how the mirror she is staring at cracks in the first place.
At the very least Peach has kept her sense of humor.
Has the tub finished draining so she can go back in and not hold her breath?
Her hands go up her body now, at her chest, and Peach's heart sinks. Has she been this low for so long now where she can actually recognize her full-fledged deterioration? The thought actually quite scares her. She lets go of the towel, raising her head. She does not need to cover herself up, that's silly. Who, besides Snake, is going to see her?
Someone's seen her naked before, she realizes, with a shudder. She tries thinking of him as little as she can.
Ike.
She thinks of him, and it is painful. It is the Stadium and the Mansion and everyone is hiding their scars, blushing up the bruises, wiping their tired eyes until their eyes are screaming in pain from being rubbed raw.
She shall not entertain the thought any longer.
Both of her hands limp by her side now, and she turns to the door. The towel still hangs there, on that stupid silver little hook, like a China doll stuffed away in some rustic box to never be opened again. Peach grips the doorknob, pushes the bathroom door open, and steps into the hallway, the frigid air immediately hitting her whole body.
Peach walks barefoot down the hall, looking around, ears expectant for any noise. Nothing, but she's used to it by now. She rounds another corner into the house's living room, and there he is, Snake, sitting on the couch, holding a newspaper, drinking his coffee, and he's in his normal routine.
For a minute, all she does is stand there, smiling ever so slightly. Does she not warrant his attention any longer? She is this close to clearing her throat when Snake reaches the back page of the newspaper, meaning there are not two sides spread out in his vision, which means that half of her body is now brought to his attention.
His mahogany eyes scan the page, catching the off handed end of a line, and he briskly glances out to his right, catching something out of his peripheral. Her smile enlarges as he swipes his gaze back over in her direction, before he puts the paper down on the couch next to him.
"Do you mind going back and getting the towel?" he asks. Not a 'hello, how are you', or a 'you are a beautiful woman' like Peach is expecting, but a cold, harsh, distant remark that is so reminiscent of the blue-eyed, navy-haired brat, that Peach makes a fist with her hand.
"No," is her response. She can play his game, if he wants to sit down and take chess by the horns. Then, softer, as if he'll explode like a foghorn, "You've seen me naked before."
"During sex," Snake articulates. "This isn't it." Peach raises an eyebrow, about to open her mouth, but he raises a hand. "This is not an invitation."
Peach frowns, crossing her arms over her chest. "I thought you were supposed to love me if we were husband and wife."
He stands up from his seat on the couch, leaving the paper where it is. Snake goes up to her, towering over her by a good eight or nine inches, whereas Peach lost all the form she had in her body, he's rigid, upright, broad-shouldered, eyes a stormy gray mixed in with the brown, a steel forged by the years of Siberian winters and the slate screams of guns and black sniper rifles. "I never said I didn't love you," he says, leaning in and kissing her, Peach still having her arms crossed together. "Don't twist my words. We're not in the Stadium anymore. There's no one here to lie to."
She lets the kiss linger on her lips, a glass of Chardon left half empty, a cherry taste that coagulates on the skin and boils over, a festering wound, where she is reminded of dark hallways and swinging chandeliers, and a lock of blue. His words haunt her - he has not lost the subtleties of conversation, she'll give him that, mentioning Master Hand and the Mansion and Melee whenever he gets the chance. He's lost real-life ammo, now he needs figurative ammo instead - but her protest dies on her tongue.
It's always died there.
Peach follows him with her eyes as she steps into the bathroom after her, but not to shower, as she is stuck standing there waiting. Waiting for him to apologize. Waiting for... for something.
She's been waiting for so long she's forgotten exactly what she's been waiting for.
Somewhere in the house a clock strikes noon, and Peach mentally notes this is the twelfth time in twelve days her husband, her Snake - how his name is fitting is beyond her and the linguistics team at the moment and time - has mentioned the Mansion.
Peach gets her headache at noon.
All at his behest, the jackass.
He's not supposed to be up this late. It is exactly midnight, the darkest part of his evening, and normally if his mind decides to work the way it had been programmed, Snake is to be sleeping. She'll join him later, sitting at the dining room table designed for two playing the crossword puzzle on the morning paper. It is how the routine in their house goes. He stumbles off to sleep the dredges of the day away, and she'll stumble in afterwards, drunk on moonshine, because she drinks when no one is watching. Then they'll curl up against each other and she'll kiss his shoulder blades, he'll mumble incoherencies, and the moonlight will watch it all take place. Every night, this happens, and there has been no break in the scheduled programming.
It hits him twelve times over the course of twelve days that there are no crickets by their house. Back in the Mansion, Snake is unable to sleep as there is a heavy wood by the building and the crickets go town over each other, constantly chirping even when the moon is in full display. He rights himself on one elbow, rubbing his eyes as he's lying awake, staring outside the open window at the stars. Someone put them there, but he does not know who, nor does he honestly at this moment and time care.
There is a small journal - one of the only things not covered in soot as the world that he has known for years falls apart - by his bedside on his nightstand. There is no lamp to provide light, and he is always lazy to walk over into the kitchen since Peach will stop drinking, throw some bottle at his head and they'll start fighting. He's exhausted from all the fighting, on and off the arena stage. Snake grips the tiny pencil that is left resting against the journal, flips to a random page, and scrawls down, No crickets... why?
When Snake does not know something, and he has had to admit to himself that there is information out there he does not know, it goes down into the journal. These thoughts are often the brain children of alcohol and sleep deprivation, or oxygen depravation since he gave it all up yelling at the top of his lungs at Peach over who did Master Hand damage the most. She shows the brand, he shows his scars, she shows the cuts, he shows the stab wounds, she shows the missing body parts, he shows her his missing soul by kissing her and then chairs fall over after that. It is too risky to have a car. He can only ever visit the nearest town on foot for one thing at a time. If they need groceries, he goes for groceries and nothing else. If it's for the morning paper, it is the morning paper. Snake has yet to go to the library and look up his questions, which rest in his journal.
A goldmine of untapped knowledge, a jackpot where Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Newton all faint, and Snake has only written down twelve questions. Some of the pages are lost, some torn in a fight, some he misplaces, some taken by dust devils, and others by true demons that neither occupant of the house cannot deem where they come from, that only twelve questions remain in the journal, and Snake has them all left unanswered. In his brain. In his heart. He's always wanted to write down a thirteenth question, it be his unlucky thirteenth, but he's not into superstition. He believes what he can see in front of his face, like his own hand.
He's wanted to write two words. Two. Simple. Words.
Why her?
Of everyone he has met, she is his polar opposite. He fights the top percentile. She is the top percentile. Snake destroys the liars and those who cheat to get ahead. She is the biggest lie out there. Yet, when he looks at her, all he sees is cinders and ash falling behind her frame, as the heat clashes with her lemonade hair, and wisps of soullessness refracts in her eyes. She's his. She's... perfect.
The bed shifts slightly, and there she is, rustling in, nestling in, her head resting between his shoulder blades, a pressure, a constant pressure on his behalf. Why did the universe draw them two together? He's reaching for the notebook, in his mind, to write down the question, to read them aloud, to then look at his wife, and ask. How can he be the only one thinking this? These twelve stupid questions, with the twelve hours of day and the twelve hours of night, where the Smashers used to be in twelve... Snake wishes numbers could all collectively get in one bag and jump off a cliff.
Her arms wrap around his side, the two side-by-side, facing west out the window.
"What was your question? I heard you writing it down."
"Crickets," Snake says softly, softly as she is porcelain and he does not want to break her. It has never been his desire to break her. He loves her, so he thinks. So he knows. So he believes, so he testifies. "That there aren't any out here. That I can sleep. Why are there no crickets around here?"
Peach shifts slightly behind him, arms tightening. "I hardly think that matters, darling. If you have all these questions, why not walk down to the library for the one trip sometime and get them all answered. It'll save you the torment."
"Something always comes up that we need."
"Like what?" her tone is playful, comedic, and bitter.
"Milk."
"Milk?" he can sense her smile, as his synapses fire, a drawback of a gun, the empty shell colliding with his arm, sizzling in the sore sear. "We can live without milk."
"No human can live without milk."
"Then what about the people who are lactose intolerant, Snake?"
"Do not give me existentialist thoughts at midnight."
He turns to her, so he's facing her, and she connects her lips to his. For a single second, there is harmony. There is love, at last, Snake thinks bitterly, and he wraps his legs around hers, trapping Peach so she cannot escape, so he can get the dirty conversation out of the way, and then, maybe, after she's shed enough blood they can finally sleep. When the two break apart, she is out of breath, perhaps out of her own willingness to go the extra mile and be exhilarated, as his eye contact falls away from hers.
"I love you," Peach says, smiling into the bedsheets. He cannot remember the last time she's ever truly said this to him, in a way where she meant it, in a way where she is not goading him for something, where the residue of Princess Toadstool bleeds into Peach for a second, souring the fruit down to the core, down to the seeds, when she herself caused the eternal winter she is experiencing.
"Do you mean it this time?" he asks.
"I always mean it, Snake."
"No," Snake sighs, rubbing his forehead, where his arm obstructs her vision for a second. "No, you don't always mean it. Normal couples everywhere do not mean it."
"Are you saying we're not normal?" the smile from her exhilarating high dwindles, like the rush of a game of poker, as it never lasts, and Snake wants to tally it on his arm, preferably with a knife, that he predicts this conversation to go down the normal route. That's all their life has been. Routine. A daily, exhausting, exasperating routine. Exploitation at its finest.
"I wouldn't call ourselves normal, Peach. No one except those in the Mansion live like we do. We cannot dare buy a car since it'll put our names down on a list that we can tracked by. I always have someone else buy our groceries while I'm at the store. I give a blind man a coin to practically steal his newspaper. Name someone who lives in a 9-5 situation, has a white picket fence, a wife, a dog, and two kids who lives like we do," Snake has leaned himself closer into her personal space, where the delicate blue clashes with the rugged mahogany, a swirl of emotions, a fight against opposite ideals. "Master Hand will always be hunting us if it ever finds out where we are by a single slip-up, Peach. We cannot risk it."
At the mentioning of Master Hand, Peach's face grimaces, and it goes completely white, like the gloved beast itself. She sits up, her body thinly covered by the bed sheets, probably naked again, and she sits at the far right edge of the bed closest to the open doorway. Snake frowns as he finishes speaking, sitting up too, but staying on his side. A lioness with retracted claws is no less scary; it is still a lioness that will tear his face off should he poke her the wrong way.
He scoots forward somewhat, to rest a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it off coldly.
"Why?" she rasps, the syllables catching in her throat, an estranged cry, an estranged moment of vulnerability.
"Why, what?" Snake furrows his eyebrows together.
"That Mansion was the worst thing any of us Smashers experienced, yet you name drop every single occupant like its the fifty states!" Peach shouts, throwing her hands up, before wrapping her arms tight around herself, twisting slightly, as if the action is giving her comfort instead of giving her spine a heart attack. "You exceeded your normal limit today. Normally you say its name once and then that's it. No, you did it twice!" she looks back, and he leans back somewhat against his pillow as she has tears in her eyes, where even in the room where there is hardly any light, he can see her crying. "I want to know why Snake. Tell me!"
He flinches at her shout. It is not often that she ever raises her voice. Snake presses the bridge of his nose. "If I can't even talk about our horrors, how are we ever going to past them?"
She gets closer to him, perhaps not by necessarily choices of her own making, because even as Peach shuffles over to her husband, there is hesitancy and anxiety rampant on her face. "You throw them under the rug like everyone else! No one talks about their problems anymore. And besides, we can't get past them!" Peach throws her hands back up in the air. "You said it yourself. We're on the run from it! How is that dealing with our problems?"
"Some do it differently than others, Peach."
"And I deal with mine by shoving it under the rug."
"Like how you dealt with Ike?"
If Peach is somehow able to have her face go any paler than normal, it does, and not only does her face lose all of its color, she presses a hand to her throat, a symbol for self-comfort, and the years have not warped her to be a woman dealing in self-comfort. Snake regrets the words immediately after they spill out of his mouth, and he's biting down on his tongue as hard as he can, so hard that copper starts to linger in the basin of his mouth, staining his gums a ripe ruby red, and her voice comes out raspier and harsher than the foulest, most vile thing ever created.
"Ho- how dare you!"
"I- I'm sorry, forgive me... Peach, please forgive me, I misspoke..." Snake starts babbling over himself, words that tie together and makes a mess that he has never run into before.
It all plays in his mind, as she's only said this story once to him, the day it happens between he and her, when their knot is tied, and the wedding bands are slipped over their fingers. It is the talk of the Smasher group, for Peach and Ike to be a couple, though neither involved party use such a nefarious word. One day, as Snake sits across from Peach diagonally at the breakfast table, with Ike on his right, that the bluenette is not listening to his lover speak to him, talking about the latest nightmare. Ike's eyes are following, searching, wandering.
Peach remembers, as Ike's gaze falls onto Marth, the lithe swordsman currently in a relationship with the bounty hunter, Samus, another clash no one expects, but everyone agrees to. It hits her, right then, that this is a possibility. That she has failed somewhere down the line. It is then, it is there, that morning, she drags Ike back to their room. It starts slow, it always has started slow. But now the pace is faster, she's urgent, she's demanding more and more. He is tall above her, naked, sweating, panting, moaning, Peach lying underneath him wantonly.
She's screaming. She's yelling. She's pleading. She's crying. To give her a piece of faith, that she has not failed, that she has not somehow turned this to be a complete waste of time. Peach, well, the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom has never been rejected. She has never been dumped by someone else. Lest, she has never caused someone to change their sexuality due to her terribleness that she has never known to exude. The two fight, Ike has a broken nose, and their entire relationship crumbles into dust.
It is no surprise when Marth and Samus crumble likewise, a shattered glass on tiled floors while the two argue out on the wide expanse of a beach under the bone-bleached azure sky that haunts her now - Peach, that is - whenever she sees a color. The last she's even seen Ike except in her dreams is of a postcard the two send them, somewhere in the Grand Lakes, about to go cliff-diving, and she rips the postcard up into a million pieces.
And now Snake has mentioned his name again, a name that sinks her deep into depression, a name where all Peach does is sob against her pillow because she's failed and royalty never fails. His heart sinks, all the while Peach begins to breathe rapidly, shallowly, and fast. A speed only blue hedgehogs ever reach.
Her panic attacks come at the worst moments.
"Peach, honey, please try to breathe normally... okay..." he coaches her.
In an instant, it is the same old fakery he has experienced forever, as Peach's sobbing face turns into that of wrath, and she launches herself against him. "I hate you!" she screams into his chest, pummeling him with her fists, but it is as if she is hitting a brick wall for all the good it has done her. "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! IhateyouihateyouihateyouIhateyou..."
He sits there, on his knees, in bed, doing nothing but let her hit him. He deserves it, for all he's said, for all he's done, for all he continues do.
"Why her?" he thinks. "I could have had any other woman in the mansion, but I get her. I get her and she has caused me all of this turmoil. My pain, it is nothing for her, my mind sits on the brink of destruction. What can I do against such a force? And why, out of everyone, it's her, that I am irresistibly drawn to. Why... why her?"
At one point he gives up, wrapping his arms around her, hugging her tight, so now she cannot lift her arms to hit him, and he's kissing her head, kissing her scalp, kissing the waterlogged, water ruined strands of sandy hair that is now an off-blonde, muttering half-word musings and pleas of the holy kind. "I'm so sorry, Peach. Forgive me, please. Please forgive me, okay? I'm so sorry. I love you Peach. I love you more than anything, please forgive me."
She does not meet his eyes, nor does he expect her to. He does not expect this, rather.
"I love you too, Snake. Forgive me."
It is high noon somewhere in the world, the twelfth time now that this happens, as it is routine for he and her to hiss at each other like venomous vipers in the New Mexico desert, in their quaint love shack since they cannot afford a new place. It is midnight now, as they argue, as the Mansion's breath breathes down their necks, the twelfth time in twelve days they scream and kiss and scream some more. Noon passes, and they're still picking up the mess they left.
They love one another.
As their hourglass runs out.
Snake kisses her again.
She kisses him back.
"I love you," he whispers to her.
"I love you too."
She means it. He cannot reach the gaze of her eyes.
The thirteenth, unspoken question lingers in the back of his mind.
Why her?
Why her?
Whyherwhyherwhyherwhyher...
Another one of the Mansion's mysteries.
A clock strikes midnight.
Well, that sure was a feel-good piece, wasn't it? I have to say, I wanted this to be a 5k one-shot, and I wanted to be finished by 1 AM before I went to bed, and here it is at 12:49, with a 5.1k one-shot word count and I beat both my requisites! Yes! Woohoo! Anyways, this was Noon, the seventh installment of the Amissum series, and now I can chalk up this piece on that list too.
This one is a lot deeper than I intended it to be, as I started crying while writing this Snake section, and if you all remember or go back and check and factor in the canon of the characters, you can see why I'd probably get emotional. I hope you all enjoyed this one-shot... or tried to, and please review! Let me know what you thought! I cannot wait for the next one, #8, which is still in the works, a Luigi x Zelda piece called Finite Sections of Saturn, which is going to be a bit more like Yesterday than all the others.
You guys are the best! I love you all so much! Have a great day! Bye!
~ Paradigm