Disclaimer: I don't own Metal Gear. Even if I did, I wouldn't have a place to park it.

First off, thanks to those of you who left reviews. Always a pleasure to hear feedback about my work.

And, as i persudo-predicted, this story will be more than two parts. Right now, three or four seems more likely, possibly with a short epilogue tacked on to the end.

Any-who, enjoy, and please continue reviewing.

Beauty is Only Skin Deep

Part II: The Shallows and the Depths

Solid Snake was normally a quiet man, partly a result of his profession and partly a quirk of his character. Hours spent in situations where breathing too loudly could mean death tended to be an excellent instructor in the art of brevity of word, and on a personal level, Snake generally preferred to let his actions speak for themselves, leaving the long-winded speeches to the coronel. However, neither played a role in the silence greeting the innocent-sounding, almost childish question that came from behind him. The refusal to reply was, in this case, a combination of other things. Namely, a nauseous feeling in his stomach, one so strong that he did not trust himself to open his mouth without running the risk of throwing up, coupled with the sensation that all the air had been driven from his lungs and that his throat had been grasped by an invisible, vice-like grip, preventing him from remedying the former situation. In a very literal sense, his body refused to allow him to answer, because that would require the admission of a terrible, horrific, devastating truth.

Unfortunately, the cripplingly mesmerising voice was unwilling to let him ignore it without a fight.

"Do you like me?"

This isn't happening! NOT AGAIN! Snake wordlessly screamed, begged, but the last vestiges of denial were slipping as the voice again reconfirmed what he still wished to reject. The desire to escape the reality of his situation, the fear of the crushing emotional defeat that stood just a stride to his rear, became so strong that it engaged the raw, animal-like fight-or-flight mechanism that military conditioning was supposed to displace. For the good of soldiers, this reflex had to be supplanted with a more rational variant, lest they freeze or panic in times of stress. It had been years since Snake had felt this crude, uncontrolled instinct, so long in fact he had come to believe it's controlled, calculating cousin had actually replaced it completely. However, it would have told him that trying to flee in this position was at best futile, and at worst suicide. But try this vain route of escape he did, and he paid the price.

After taking a sharp step forward in the first pace of a sprint towards the nearest pillar, the weapon being held just behind his head swung down and struck him in the cleft of the neck and shoulder, filling his vision with stars. His wounded legs, usually capable of carrying his body a few steps without the help of his brain buckled instantly. He spun as he fell, and landed hard on his back. From this position on the ground, his assailant was in full view, and when his sight cleared his eyes confirmed what he had dreaded. Unwaveringly training her Desert Eagle directly at his head, Meryl stood over him, her eyes cold and a pitiless, sadistic smile plastered on her lips. She had almost a corpse-like quality to her; even beneath the slick of the FROG's blood her usually warm coloured skin looked flushed and sickly where exposed on the sleeveless, short legged variant of the B&B bodysuit she wore. Her hair was limp and slimy with what looked like equal amounts of blood and sweat, sticking to her forehead and neck. Eye-sockets sunken and dark, she drew breath in rasps as she almost floated towards him, continuing the duplication of the last time she and he had been in this position, each word twisting the knife Snake felt buried to the hilt in his chest.

"Hold me, Snake." She moaned as she approached; the voice sensual, the situation anything but. Still stunned by from the pistol-whip and the miserable scene playing out before him, Snake was a statue. It was all so wrong, and despicably unfair. It had seemed her life had finally moved beyond the curse meeting him had laid upon her; having found comfort with Johnny, her own sense of self that was beyond the hero-worship she had displayed for him... for lack of a better concept, a life all her own. Soon she would have been rid of him all together, the sooner the better from his point of view. But no, once again because of her fleeting association with him she was tortured, her existence shattered and fractured. Destruction of lives, it seemed, was a talent so strong to him that it fell upon everyone he came into contact with, even ones he endeavoured and prayed would be immune to it.

Meryl's course had brought her over his legs by the time his mind began processing information in an even rudimentally analytical manner. Without losing her aim, Meryl dropped to her knees and straddled his stomach. She was cold, so cold he could feel the chill even through his suit; however, she did not shiver but was as still as only the dead were. The physical contact was enough to focus Snake's thoughts back into the previous rush to extradite himself from this place by any means, but once again it was a meaningless gesture.

"Hurry... hurry..." She whispered, almost as if she were oblivious to him as he began to turn on his side and tried to slide out from under her legs, but the struggle and any thoughts of her unawareness ended abruptly when she jammed the muzzle of her oversized sidearm under his chin. The unflaggingly dark grin conveyed her willingness to follow through with the threat, and Snake reluctantly stilled. With a sigh and an abrupt, disconcerting giggle, Meryl lowered her head to beside his and began nuzzling his unblemished cheek, still distressingly whispering to him.

"Make love to me..."

There was no way to force his way out of these circumstances. In his grief-triggered indecision, Meryl had established a position of advantage that would be difficult to overcome against an opponent he had no compunction in killing, and that was not the case here. He had difficulty stomaching the idea of striking this woman, no matter how hostile and lethally inclined she was towards him, let alone embarking on the deadly series of actions that would be required to disengage her from his frame without becoming exactly one head shorter. That left him with his weakest skill-set, the spoken word.

"Meryl, stop this. This isn't you." He grunted out. He knew it was weak, that she deserved more, but it was all he could do.

"But what is me, Snake? Do you know?" She asked, raising her head to look into his eyes again, running her free hand through his hair. Apparently not really wanting an answer, she dropped her gaze back down again before continuing. "I am nothing but that which those around me have created. An Ocelot, an Octopus, a Raven, a Wolf, a Mantis, and two Snakes... the ghosts of my past that shaped me. Turncoats, liars, madmen, sadists, murders, tyrants, deserters... What else was I to become?"

"So much more, Meryl." Snake replied, choking back the cracks that threatened to destroy his voice. "You were supposed to move on, to forget about us, to live. What about the people of your present and future? What about Jonathan, and Ed? What about Johnny? Even I can tell that you... that you love one another."

Meryl giggled again, and raised herself into a sitting position, still holding the Desert Eagle to his neck and running her other hand down his chest, up her own, stopping with her fore and middle finger at her lips. She froze in that position for a moment, before like a cobra she snapped back down, her face hovering dead center with his own, with only fractions of an inch separating them. Her eyes bored into his, the tingle of her breath meeting his, their scents co-mingling. Dirt, sweat, blood, and cordite. That was her perfume, and his cologne. It reminded him of once upon a time where a naive green rookie had met a cantankerous seasoned veteran in Alaska, and the few months of happiness, the greatest of his life, she had brought him afterwards. It only made the next statement worse.

"Snake, I want you..." She murmured, before moving to kiss him. It was this that finally tipped the scale between the protection of his life and preservation of his humility. No matter who she was now, for the sake of his memory of her he would not let this violation of the innocence she once possessed come to pass. Before their lips could meet, he drove his forehead into hers, and made a grab for the pistol, waiting to be commuted to hell on the easily imparted vehicle of a bullet. Much to his surprise, and a certain degree of disappointment, his hand captured the barrel of the weapon before it went off. Wasting no time he ripped it from Meryl's grasp, and threw the woman's body from his, scrambling away on his hands and heels until he was backed up against the first tier of computer terminals. As Meryl picked herself up off the floor, Snake trained the captured firearm on her, though he might as well have been pointing a toy at her. He could never fire. She seemed to know this too, as undaunted she advanced on him again. In the scant seconds between being face-to-face with him and now, Meryl's appearance seemed to have changed again. She looked taller and slimmer, despite the fact that her shoulders and head sagged, arms limp at her sides. Once back in earshot, Snake noticed the rasping in her voice had taken on a distinctly more metallic, echoing quality, almost as if she were now breathing through a tube. Or a gasmask.

"You really don't like girls, do you Snake?" She asked, but it was not her in her pitch. It was a voice that, if there was in fact a god, should never have been heard by human ears ever again. The grating timbre belonged to Psycho Mantis, a man Snake had seen die with his own eyes.

"I assemble a force of the most beautiful, deadly, cold hearted women in the world, whose only desire is someone to hold them, and you cast them aside like they were nothing. And I present the one woman you have ever cared for to you on a platter, and you resist."

"Why her, Mantis?!" Snake roared, standing but not making a move towards Meryl. He had been right, it hadn't been her. Mantis, somehow, had taken control of her mind, even from beyond the grave.

"Believe me, if I had had a choice this would have been the last person I would have decided on." Mantis replied flippantly. "She was, and still is, a useless woman. Weak, feeble minded, disgustingly compassionate. But, her's was the last mind I touched before you destroyed my old body, and you know what they say about beggars not having the luxury of being choosers. I must admit, however, her trusting nature did make it easier to control her once I had established myself in her mind."

"You son of a bitch."

"But don't let me take all the credit, Snake. Even with the echo of my consciousness embedded in her, I could never have gained a foothold without you."

"What do you mean?" Snake rebuffed aggressively, confused and bothered in no small way by the suggestion that he had somehow played a role in this depraved state of affairs.

With a chuckle, Mantis allowed his voice to slip back into Meryl's softer tenor, and brought her body language back in line with the woman's natural posture.

"During all the pain and the shame there was one thing I was sure of... a single hope that I held onto... And that hope kept me alive... Snake, I wanted to see you again..."

"Surely that sounds familiar to you, hmm?" Mantis asked once he had finished, returning to his own gravelly speech momentarily. "That Drebin fellow has kept you well informed about the spiral my little girls followed into insanity. Perhaps I should refresh your memory?"

Switching between the suffering tones of the prior three previous Beauties, Mantis recited part of each back story Drebin had given him on them, as if from their own point of view.

"'So I let the fear take control, and I butchered the bodies of the ones I loved, and laughed while I did it. And as I bathed in their blood, it gradually turned from deep red to jet black. To me, it looked like the ink of an octopus.'

'One by one, their bodies were picked apart by raven's beaks, until finally the flock came for me. But by some miracle, their beaks cut my bonds instead. And like that, I was liberated. In that instant, I was filled with an uncontrollable rage, and it smothered my soul. I ripped the ravens picking at me to pieces and then went after the soldiers. And when I finally caught up with them, I waited until nightfall like a hunter awaiting its prey. They say when a raven cries, a man dies. And that's exactly what happened that night. Screeching and cawing, I killed every last being in that camp, both the soldiers and the civilians they'd enslaved.'

'My brother wasn't crying anymore. Horrified, I pulled my hand away, covered in sweat and spit. He wasn't breathing. They say wolves eat their own pups when they die. I was spotted wandering through the thick of battle carrying my dead brother in my arms. I had visions too – a wolf walking alongside me. Every night, the wolf would howl and cry, just like my brother did that day.'"

The recreations of their voices was so flawless Snake could almost see their tormented faces overlay on Meryl's as Mantis mimicked.

"Didn't it ever occur to you," the twisted man behind Meryl's skin asked, "that Meryl should be just like the rest of my Beauties? The woman endured traumas that no normal person should have to cope with, yet she displayed no serious psychological damage."

"Ocelot's torture?" Snake asked, cursing himself for not considering what was in hindsight such a clearly plausible connection. Mantis cut back to Meryl's voice.

"And things worse than that. When I resisted his electrocution treatments, he decided to try another approach. Ocelot had me stripped and bound, and deactivated the sexual suppressants in the Genome Soldiers. I was beaten. I was violated. Dozens of men, ones I had bunked with, even considered friends, all participated without hesitation. Following orders. I was about to break, when I saw you Snake. You told me to hold on. To let you be my strength."

Mantis smiled at the wide-eyed look of disgust on his room-mates face.

"Do you understand, Snake? Each of those wretched souls bundled all those horrific experiences up and turned them into some apparition, some avatar of their pain. An octopus, a raven, a wolf... At first it was a shield that they hid behind, but in the end it consumed them. Meryl was nothing special, she was hardly able to stand being shot without having an emotional breakdown. But when the time came for her mind to crack under the strain, I used you; took advantage of her love for Solid Snake to carve myself a niche. The only thing that distinguished Meryl from any of the other droves of victims of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome was that I was there to take the reins of her mind rather than some random psychotic spectre, to take possession of a new body." He paused, crossing Meryl's arms and bathing the room in look of malevolent smugness so strong it seemed to have substance.

"And it is all thanks to you, Snake."