Each petal splashed off the on pouring liquid in an erect satisfactory that gave Sunny a slight tingle of unwholesome joy. They were stupid and blind to their own undoing, just as she had been. For all they knew, it was water they were so anxiously soaking up and accepting into their roots. When the jug in her hand was empty, she tossed it aside and picked up a second one and spreaded another coat of the contents over everything in the garden that emitted color and beauty or had ever given her any faux feeling of happiness. They were placebo treatments for happiness that she had indulged herself into before she knew any better. She didn't know what the actual ingredients for happiness were anymore or if they even actually existed...but she knew that nothing that she could drench in vinegar to kill was it.

As she reached down to grab the third container, she felt it suddenly rip from under her hand.

"What in the hell are you doing, Sunny?" Mei Ling clung the last jug into her chest as if it were a baby being prepared to be thrown off a cliff.

"I don't want them anymore."

"But...you and Hal planted these flowers together. Half of him is in this garden."

"Their all ugly and I don't want them."

Mei Ling observed the damage the little girl had already done and picked up the two empty jugs from off the ground. "You don't want to do this, Sunny. You're just upset. Maybe we can dilute the vinegar enough with water so that nothing will—"

"I hope they all die." She delivered directly to the garden before turning and walking away from it.

Snake only looked up when he heard Mei Ling throw all the jugs in her hands down to the kitchen floor. The empty ones bounced in opposite directions while the rescued one pummeled into the tile and rolled away from her into a cabinet.

She brought her hand to her forehead. "I don't know what to do with her, Snake. She's beyond hurt at this point. I just caught her trying to kill the flowers in her garden with vinegar." She turned to face Snake. "You...you have to talk to her. She listens to you." Snake directed his stare back to the view of the floor as Mei Ling made her way over to him. "I really need you to pull yourself out of this rut and talk to her. It's like she's trying to erase Hal from her life completely. She barely even acknowledges him by name anymore."

"I...I can't."

"What? No, Snake...listen to me. She needs you. She feels lost and completely abandoned by Hal. You need to show her that she still has you."

"She doesn't need me. She needs Hal. There's nothing I can do, Mei Ling. "

"But Hal isn't here..." His tone reminded her of a doctor giving up the fight to save a patient because he couldn't find his stethoscope. The comparison in her mind made her push Snake sharply in his chest. "Don't you do this to me, Snake. Don't you dare do this to me!" He stumbled back as she continued to shove and strike him wildly, the next blow a little harder than the last though none of them effective enough to really hurt. The last one landed square on his shoulder and released the tears that had been building in the previous hits. "I don't care how you treat me, but you're all she's got now, Snake...and you're pushing her away!"

"I'm not pushing her away, Mei Ling, but I don't even know where I am right now! How in the hell can I guide her back?"

"I'm not asking you guide her back...I'm asking you to show her she's not wandering alone."

Snake pushed this palms on either of his temples and closed his eyes. "I can't do this. I'll just drag her further down."

"So that's it?" Mei Ling spat in disgust. "You're not even going to try?"

"What do you want me say to her?"

"It doesn't matter! Say anything to her...but don't walk around here like you're the only one that's upset Hal is dead! Oh, God..." She placed her hands over her face and shook her head. The stark addressing of Hal's death hit her like meteor and for a moment and she couldn't stand up straight from the impact.

"Mei Ling..."

"You push everyone who cares about you away. One day, you're going to look around and there's not going to be anyone left to push. Is that what you want, Snake? It's what happened with Meryl, isn't it? You put up wall after wall between you until she got tired of trying to break them all down."

Snake felt the meteor that had hit Mei Ling earlier boomerang and strike his own heart, mortally wounding it in the process. He turned away from her in search of a place to disintegrate under the barrage of it all.

"Mei Ling!" Sunny emerged from her spot in the hallway where she had been lingering in for the past several moments. It had been Snake's rare look of a painful and somber existence that had served as her warning sign. "Why are you saying that to him?"

"That's it, Snake," she continued as if she didn't feel the little girl tugging on her arm in great protest to the words leaving her mouth, "just turn your back on everything you don't want to deal with. Or send it away, right?"

Mei Ling's eyes widened in great shock of her own statements. She felt as if she had suddenly zapped into her own body again with all the knowledge of what the thing that had invaded her had said before. "Snake, I--"

"Go on and say it, Mei Ling," Snake calmly fixed his eyes on her, "You think Hal would have been alive today if I wouldn't have pushed him away."

Sunny stepped in front of her and commanded an answer with her gaze when she stayed silent.

"I didn't mean--"

"I think you should go now, Mei Ling." Sunny put her body firmly between the two of them when she attempted to move closer to him. She heeded the silent warning the little girl gave with her eyes and retreated out of the room.

Sunny turned back to see Snake's back slide down the wall to the floor.

"She's right." He said.

"No," Sunny folded her legs underneath her and sat on her calves next to him. "It's not your fault, Snake."

"He heard me when I was talking to Mei Ling. He knew I was going to send him away. I gave up on him and he knew it."

"Hal left because he wanted to. No one made him. Especially not you."

"It should have been me."

"What are you talking about?"

"It should have been me in that casket a few days ago. Not Hal."

Sunny pulled the mercenary into her arms and brought a calm over him that evaporated his urge to resist her. As she held onto him, he kept his arms to his sides feeling undeserving of the little girl's efforts to comfort him.

"Don't say stuff like that." She told him quietly, as if it could release something evil into the world.

Snake, for the first time in his life, felt like tempered glass waiting for the right condition to initiate his shattering. Sunny moved her hands up and down his back in a subconscious, even rhythm, letting his breathing be her beat to go by.

"I let him die," he confessed, his voice clearly representing the parts of himself crumbling in the strange sense of security of the little girl's grasp. "He trusted me to save him and I couldn't do it. He should be here with you. I'm worthless, Sunny."

The amount of guilt Snake carried started to weigh down on Sunny heavily but, from somewhere, she conjured up the strength to extinguish the burn in her eyes and keep it together, if only for the soldier she was holding on so tightly to now.

"Snake, please don't do this to yourself. You did save Hal, remember? You brought him back home. But...Hal didn't want to be here with us anymore and he left. I wish more anything that he wouldn't have but, he did...and that's not your fault. None of this is your fault."

Snake clutched the little girl to him, buried his face in her shoulder, and prepared for the pieces of his being to spill warmly and rigidly onto her. The sharp jolts of his body in her grip alarmed her momentarily until she realized it wasn't coming from the beginnings of a coughing spell.

"Snake?" She lifted his face up in her hands to look at him and ran her thumb over the dampened area of his cheeks. "Are you...crying?" She had toned down the surprise she had said it within her head and replaced it with the pity that ached for him in her chest.

"I'm sorry."

"No, no, no," she said quickly, realizing he associated the action with weakness within himself, "Don't say 'sorry'. It's okay. It's not a crime."

He blinked at her in curiosity. "I always thought..."

"What is it?" She urged softly.

"I always thought...you hated me."

"I've never hated you. Why would you think that?"

He shook his head, his amount of unusual honesty with her finally registering. "Forget it. Forget I said anything."

Sunny pinpointed the exact second Snake's vulnerability snapped shut and the barrier went back in place over it. He shook all contact she had on him and rose to his feet.

"Snake...are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Did I say something wrong?" She asked, willing to fix whatever it was immediately.

"No, you didn't do anything wrong." Snake took her shoulders in his hands using the gentlest grasp he could being that he was a trained killer handling an angel, "You're too young to play patron saint to me. That shouldn't be your job."

"What's a patron saint?"

"Don't worry about it, Sunny. Why don't you go and see if Mei Ling is okay?"

"But she said all that mean stuff to you..."

"She was just upset. She didn't mean it."

She nodded and left Snake to himself. The pieces of himself slowly started to recollect in the silence and he closed his eyes to feel them all as they did. It had been a long time since he had lost any part of himself like that and couldn't even begin to trace his way back to the origin of his sudden breaking. He took a deep breath as he wiped the tears from his eyes and chin in the same manner he had cleaned blood off his face in the past on the battlefield. When it all boiled down, there was little difference between the two to him—they were both things that hadn't come from any place good in his life.