Hal and Dave belong to Hideo Kojima, but they run off and kiss each other when he's not looking.

Echoes

"But how could she know Russian?"

"The hell if I know." David was still looking at the Cyrillic on the window. They had been drawn with a finger, and not long ago. Her earlier meaningless squiggles were already misting over. The letters could have been taken for a random collection of shapes she'd seen, if it hadn't been for the meaning of the word. Snow. Still... "It could be a coincidence."

"So ask her something," said Hal. "Ask her what her name is in Russian."

"No point."

"What? We're on the verge of making a breakthrough in communications! You can't just say there's no point in trying it out." His eyes narrowed. "Can you even speak Russian?"

"Moje skorostnoje sudno poino ugrjej,"(1) retorted David. "But it won't do any good. Have you ever heard her make the slightest sound? Not just speaking, anything? A shout? A gasp? Anything?"

"Well..."

"And neither have I. She doesn't have any vocal cords, and-" he put two fingers between his lips and whistled so loudly that Hal jumped. The girl by the fire didn't twitch. "She's stone deaf."

That doesn't prove anything." Hal stamped on the floor as hard as he could. She lay down on the rug and rolled over to look at him. "See?"

"She felt the vibrations through the floor. Go out into the next room and scream your head off. I guarantee she won't react." Hal walked towards the kitchen, but the girl got up and followed him, presumably hoping for food. As soon as both of them were through the doorway Dave gave a blood-curdling yell. "Anything?"

"Oh, wow! She's just looking at me. You might be right!" He went to the fridge and poured her a bowl of juice. They'd got her to drink from things that were tabletop-level, but not to pick up a cup. If you gave her a mug, she'd look at it for a moment, then try and lick what she could out the top. Hal couldn't face the pathetic spectacle, or the juice all over the floor, so he let her drink from of a cereal bowl, despite nagging worries that he was reinforcing her negative behaviours. "But why would you make a genetically modified weapon deaf? Unless it makes her be more aware of her environment, or -"

"She's not a weapon. She's the antidote factory, and doesn't need to hear." Two quick jabs with a metal probe, and you'd removed a whole level of stimulus that could spook her. He didn't say that to Hal, though. Leaning against the door frame, he watched her thoughtfully. "But she can write."

"I don't think she really understands the whole tool-using thing, though. Do we have any wax crayons, or chalk?"

"There's some chalk in my toolbag." Suddenly, a thought struck David. "I've got a better idea. Find some spare dishes, or saucers or something," he said, sidling towards the front door. "Distract her, would you? I need to get outside."

"No problemo." Hal took a chocolate biscuit from the heavy jar on the kitchen worktop, then turned back to the girl and held it above his head. "Look! What's this? Is it like a cookie? Would you like a cookie?" The girl had suddenly focussed all her attention on the biscuit, and although she turned around when Dave shut the front door, it was too late. She looked at Hal, who slid the treat onto the table in front her. "I'm sorry! It's cold out there. You'd freeze!"

The girl ate the biscuit, and seemed to forget that David had just gone out, because she seemed surprised when the door opened again, and wasn't quite fast enough to leap over the table and escape. Silver paint cans rolled over the tiles, and a rolled-up A2 flip chart pad sprang open. David lead her back to the chair she'd knocked over, and set it upright again. "Hal, dishes?"

There was a stack of foil pie dishes in the cupboard under the sink. Since neither man made good pastry, Hal decided they could be pressed into service. "How many do you need?"

"Well, I've got five colours."

He stood up. David was pulling out sheets of paper, and laying them in front of the girl. "Fingerpainting?" Asked Hal, putting out five foil trays.

Levering the lids of the cans off with a screwdriver, David asked, "You got any better ideas?"

"No, I think it's good!"

Since the paint was household emulsion, there had been a limited selection of colours in the shed. There'd been cream, beige, magnolia and off-white. Luckily, he was a pack rat, and he'd also found the black he used for windowsills, yellow and red that he painted in stripes on anything that needed to be visible outside, and tester pots of pale green and blue he'd tried out when first decorating the place, before deciding it was cold enough without blue bedroom walls. He poured a little of each into the dishes, and put them up on the table.

The girl looked at him.

"OK. I'll go first." He dipped his index finger in the black paint, then started drawing.

"What are you writing?" Hal couldn't help pronouncing them like Roman letters, and just making clicking, guttural noises when there was a letter with no known equivalent. "Wow, it's like Klingon." David glared at him.

"I wrote, 'What is your name'. I don't think she's getting this at all, though." The girl was looking at him with neither confusion nor comprehension in her eyes.

"Try something simpler," offered Hal. "Just words. In fact, try writing what she wrote. Then she might understand what you're doing."

With his fingertip, David traced out 'snow', then 'house', 'dog', 'fire', 'girl', 'ice', 'tree', anything that he could think of that she might have seen. She reacted no more to the words than she did to anything they said. "Dammit, this isn't working."

Hal took the girls' hand, then put her finger in the blue paint and dragged it across the paper. He drew a green line beside her blue one, then made it part of a box with a triangle on top. The box got smaller rectangles in it, and the triangle got a short, straight line with a long wiggly line coming out of it. "Now write 'house' next to that."

When David wrote beside Hal's picture, that got her attention. She reached over, refreshed her blue paint, and coloured in the triangle roof of the house. Then she sat back, waiting.

"Um, our roof isn't blue, is it?" Asked Hal, confused.

"No, and we don't have exactly four windows, and smoke isn't a green spiral. She doesn't know what it is, she's just joining in." David repressed a growl of frustration, and instead drew a Christmas tree shape in green. "Decorate that."

Hal put red lines of tinsel across the green shape, and a yellow star above it. Once again, the girl filled the shape in with blue.

David drew a long triangle with two shorter ones on top of it, and two dots for eyes. Moving out of turn, her hand hovered briefly under the drawing. The two men stared at the swirling squiggle.

"My Arabic is rusty, but I'll bet that says 'dog'," said David, eventually.

"That's a-? Oh... I see." Hal drew a circle, then a longer horizontal line that seemed to pass behind it. Above the line, he traced the outlines of a trapezium. When he pulled away, the girl finished his picture, adding a series of struts around the outside. "Oh, my God! This is crazy!"

"What's it meant to be?" Asked David, tilting his head. She kept going, tracing a squashed triangle on the side without the circle and a flatter one on the other. "It's the car, isn't it?"

"From her perspective." He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, only narrowly missing smearing them with paint. "This means she's been paying attention the whole time!"

They stood back and watched as she grew more involved in the fingerpainting. She drew picture after picture, some they recognised, some they didn't; a grid of black squares must surely be the inside of her cage, but a cluster of circles could have been anything. Every now and again she'd squiggle what could be a word. David could translate the French, the German, the Japanese and the Russian. He could recognise the Korean, the Greek and the Arabic. Hal went and fetched his laptop, and they eventually worked out that other words were in Hindi and Coptic. More still were unrecognisable, either because of the nature of the medium, or because the languages had been dead for thousands of years.

"She's a space alien," said Hal, in conclusion. "They've been monitoring our communications since human civilisation began. Her ship crashed, and she was captured. The government ordered Biocorp to create supersoldiers from her DNA."

"She's a girl who knows fifty words in twenty languages. She can't pick up a spoon. I really can't see her in a space ship." David knew better than to get annoyed; frankly he was surprised that Hal had been able to keep a lid on his bizarre theories for this long.

"What if the space aliens made her as a decoy, or an information-collecting probe, or as a vector to spread a deadly virus among humankind so we're softened up before they invade?"

Dave prodded the man in the stomach. "How much softening up do you need? Besides, those two from the company would have got in contact if there was anything unusual in her DNA."

"Shouldn't they have gotten in contact with us by... now... anyway..." Hal asked, trailing into silence even as it occurred to him.

There was a long, silent pause. He sat on the floor and started typing rapidly on his laptop. David was still frozen. "Shit. I knew I should have killed those little bitches."

"I'm not finding anything about a brutal double murder," said Hal.

"They'd have trained their goons better than that. They'll have dragged them back to the company, or eaten them or something." His hand went to his cigarettes as he paced in agitation. "Maybe the toxin reduces your body to nothing more than dust and slime. No news is bad news, Hal, very bad news."

"I'm going back down all the routes I first found them. If none of them have changed in the past few days, that's going to be unusual, but even if that's the case, it doesn't mean they've been slaughtered." The light from the screen reflected in his glasses, turning his eyes into blank disks. "I mean, it hasn't been long. It can take two weeks to get certain test results. Every thing's going to be – huh."

"What?"

"'Hello, Otacon. I am on an extended sabbatical. I'm sorry about running off on you like this, but there's nothing else I can do.'"

David hesitated. "That's an obvious plant."

"Maybe... but it's hidden in the source code for a page of gene sequences in geraniums." He was still tapping keys, more slowly now. "You could be right, but... This was done really fast. No encryption, and not hidden from any but the most casual observer. It's so pathetic, no one would expect us to believe Hank did this."

"But he's a geneticist, not a programmer."

"Geez, Dave, a fourth-grader could do better than this. It has to be him. Any decoy would be cleverer."

He crouched down beside Hal. Strings of numbers and gibberish filled the screen, except for the few lines of text he'd read out. "Fuck, it's all Coptic to me. If that's what you think, I trust you. But I still wish I'd killed them while I had the chance."

"Why didn't you?"

Hal's tone was mild and unaccusing as ever. David stared at the stone tiles between his feet for a moment. "They look like kids, Hal. I can't shoot a little girl. They were tied up. It would have been murder. If I'd woken up and found them clawing you, I'd have done it in the heat of the moment, but shit, shooting your unarmed prisoners is a whole level I hope I never go to."

The programmer put his hand on David's back, and opened his mouth to say something reassuring. Then his brows furrowed. "Wait, woken up? I thought you said you were on watch?"

"Well, I... might have... closed my eyes, for a second." There was a hollow clunk. "Oh look, a distraction!" David jumped to his feet. The girl had run out of blue paint, and pushed the empty tray onto the floor. The sheets of paper in front of her was thickly coated with glyphs, symbols and pictures. "I do not understand how she kept this brain secret from us."

"It's probably something to do with the whole genetically modified laboratory experiment space alien thing. We really ought to find someone who knows what they're doing to look after her."

"Who can we trust?" David asked, refilling the paint tray. He carefully lifted the damp sheet of paper and put it on the kitchen side to dry, and pulled another one in front of her. "And what if more of those things come after her?"

"But what are we going to do next time we have to go?"

"Well... She can look after herself, right? If we left some dog biscuits open, and a tap dripping -" He caught Hal's horrified stare. "I'm kidding! We can get in contact with Naomi, she'd probably be fascinated in her."

"I don't want her to get dissected!"

"Naomi wouldn't dissect her." Probably.

"She could back you up! You saw how she shot those two things."

"No, I didn't. I was unconscious. For all we know, they could have tried to talk her into going back, and she didn't want to."

Hal sighed, and looked down. The girl had started painting again on her fresh sheet of paper, just two pictograms. A thick line made by two fingers, with two dots under it, and a pair of circles with dots in. "Hey... has she painted us?"

David grinned, and put his hand to his bandanna. "I think she's really captured you, Hal." He reached for the red paint, and drew a curved red smudge with two eye-dots under it. "That's you!" She didn't respond, so he drew a long, narrow arch with a thin triangle on top. "You're the one with red hair and claws, see?"

"I thought you said she was deaf?"

"She doesn't understand, anyway. Do you? Not a freakin' word." As he said that, she looked at him and raised the index and middle fingers of her left hand to her forehead. Disbelief at what this previously silent, motionless creature was doing had long ago been displaced. "Or maybe we're still in the process of devising a mutual lexicon."

She turned to Hal, made a c-shape with her hand and held it up to her eye, as if adjusting imaginary glasses. The man gave a short, hysterical giggle, and copied her. "I can't believe it! We ought to be recording all this. It's got to be incredible evidence of something!"

Her sign language had left tribal markings of blue on her face, and while her clothes were reasonably clean except for the dangling sleeves, David realised Hal and he were spattered with paint. He glanced down. "Hey, Hal. There's paint on your computer."

"WHAT!" Hal jumped to his feet, panicking. "Ahh! It's everywhere!"

"You're just spreading it around. Put it on the worktop, and I'll have a go at it with white spirit later."

"You stay away from my laptop!"

"Scared I'm gonna read your gay porn?"

"I don't have any gay porn!"

"Sure, Hal, sure." He'd led the girl over to the sink, and was trying to wash their hands with washing up liquid. It wasn't really working. The bits that were still wet washed away, but the paint that had dried seemed to have ingrained itself into the pores of their skin. "You're gonna have to shut down your computers. The washing machine sucks up power like a bitch."

Hal was still poking anxiously at his laptop, too worried to really rise to David's bait. "Oh, God! What if it never comes off?"

"Write the letters on top of the paint."

"That's not the point!"

Knowing there was nothing he could do or say in a situation like this, David raised the girl's arms and tugged her jumper over her head. "Just stick everything with paint on it in the utility room and lock the door, then you can let the dogs back in. And put the boiler on overtime."

No matter how desperate the circumstances or how urgent the mission, whenever they stayed in a hotel, David stole all the miniature toiletries. It was almost a compulsion, developed by years of on-site procurement. And who's laughing now, he thought grimly, as he poured tiny bottles of bubblebath under the running water. White froth foamed up like soapy snow. He took the girl's hand and put it in the bath, trying to gauge her reaction which was, of course, non-existent. He added more cold water.

"Better too cold than too hot, huh? If your teeth start chattering, I'll make it warmer," said David, as he pulled her clothes off and lifted her into the tub.

Downstairs, full-throated barking was steadily increasing in volume, until Hal got the door open and the huskies flooded in. He was shouting futilely for their attention, but the dogs raced upstairs, baying like hounds on the scent. Ignoring the shouts of the two men, they charged into the bathroom and leapt at David, licking at his face and hands.

The girl knelt up and put her hands around the muzzle of the dog closest to her. It fell silent. She repeated the process with the next one, and, as the rest of the pack noticed, all barking ceased.

"You're going, before you replace me as pack leader," David told her.

"All this time, she's been communicating with the dogs," said Hal, a note of wonder in his voice. "Why didn't we notice?"

"A lot of dog communication is body language," the musher pointed out. "If she's deaf, she probably couldn't even tell that we were talking."

"Wow, just imagine." Hal's eyes were wide. "Trapped at the mercy of species you can't even tell if it's possible to understand." Suddenly, his mind seemed to process the scene in front of him. "Hey... what are you doing?"

David scrubbed at the girl's paint-streaked face with a flannel. "Playing the violin to the King of France, Hal, what's it look like?"

"But, um, she's naked."

"That is generally considered the most efficient manner in which to bathe."

"Well, shouldn't..." Hal blushed. "Shouldn't I be the one doing that? I mean, I'm the..."

Swivelling to look at him, David eyeballed Hal. "I'm gonna assume that you're so gay, you can't tell the difference between a woman and a lab experiment. And what about that anime stuff, huh? All those prepubescent girls wandering around bareass? Sailor Moon? Elfen Lied? Who's the closet perv here?" He rubbed bubbles into the girl's hair, making it stick up in brown spikes, like a hedgehog. "And who gave you the monopoly on homosexuality?"

"Hey! That's... Wha?"

"Jesus, this shit's indelible," said Dave, attacking the paint on her hands with a pumice stone.

"No! You can't be gay! You're always making fun of me!" He hesitated. "Which annoys me because I'm not gay!"

"Shut up, Hal."

"What about Sniper Wolf? What about Meryl?"

"No, really, shut up. You have the simplest psychology since a jock locked a nerd in a locker. You're hopelessly drawn to people who're bigger and stronger than you. Liking dogs helps, too." He gave up with the pumice stone, and started washing the girl's back. "Fuck it, you can look like Vulcan Raven until your skin sheds."

Hal was going bright red. "But are you telling me you're gay?"

"Things are never black and white on a battlefield, Hal. Ah, you're as clean as you're gonna get." David stood the girl up and wrapped a big, white towel around her before lifting her out of the bath and pushing a dog out of the way with his foot so he could put her down. "You going to stand there and discuss psychology, or do you want to find her some clean clothes?"

"When have you even watched Elfen Lied?" he shouted as he went to see if there was anything left in his wardrobe that might vaguely fit her.

"You know what the bad guys are like for thinking crazy shit up. Who knows where they get their inspiration? Forewarned is forearmed."

"Is that a really bad pun?" He returned with spare clothing, picking his way through the thronging huskies to stand beside David. "Do you think shorts will be okay?"

David took the long, baggy shorts, and began manoeuvring her into them. "Can you order skirts on the internet? There's got to be an easier was of doing this."

"Maybe she'll learn to dress herself."

"She already can, she's just doing this to wind me up." He pulled t-shirts and jumpers over her head, working her arms through the sleeves. "Ah, there we go. Very pretty."

The girl stood there for a moment, until she became aware that she was free to go. She ran out of the bathroom door, and the twenty dogs leapt to their paws and rushed after her in happy, heedless, tail-wagging silence. It was more than enough to knock Hal off balance. He yelled and grabbed at David, who seemed also to slip and trip over backwards. Hal shrieked as they fell, until they splashed into the water.

When he opened his eyes, all he could see was white bubbles and David's face above him. "You meant to do that!" He gasped, trying to wriggle out from under the man.

"What if I did?" David was lying on top of Hal, his hands behind their head, twined in their wet, blonde hair. He grinned, pinning the man more securely as he tried to get free. "What a way to wind up, huh?" He lowered his head until his mouth was level with Hal's ear, and whispered, "This answer any questions for you?"

"Ah, uh..." David shifted his weight again, and Hal realised that was not his gun. "Um..." The man above him gave a rumble of laughter, and pressed his lips to Hal's. Any thoughts the smaller man was trying to form crystallised and shattered. When David nuzzled his chin up to kiss and nip at his throat, he managed to beg, "Oh God, Dave, please -"

Sliding his hand between their bodies, David began stroking Hal through his wet jeans. The man responded very favourably indeed, pressing his hips towards David's hand, so he undid their flies and reached for Hal's cock. He pressed the man down into the bubbles and kissed him hard as his palm slid over their wet flesh.

Hal threw his head back and gave a desperate cry through gritted teeth as he came, the sound making Dave ache with need. The man went limp, gasping for breath and trembling all over, and for a moment David thought he must have misjudged their signals. Then he slid his legs out from under the muscular soldier, knelt up, and struggled with shaky hands to undo their belt and trousers.

Oh, he hadn't misjudged at all. Hal bent his head to lick and kiss and suck, while David shut his eyes and tried to keep still. "Fuck, yes," he hissed, wrapping his hand in Hal's hair and trying not to yank. "Hal, I'm gonna come," he gasped. The man didn't pull away, but redoubled his efforts until Dave was a quivering, whimpering wreck.

Sitting up, Hal effortlessly pushed David over backwards and lay on top of him, panting for breath. David reached up, pulled him close and kissed him, pushing his tongue into Hal's mouth possessively. They lay together in the warm water, listening to the bubbles pop.

"Why did you do that?" Hal asked, resting his head on David's chest.

He raised his hand to stroke their wet hair. "Because I like you."

"How much do you like me?

"I love you."

A hot, red blush spread over Hal's cheeks and seemed to sink into his whole body. He snuggled closer to David, but suddenly noticed something missing. "Hey, where are my glasses?" pushing himself up a little to search for them, he noticed something else. "Gaah! The door is wide open! What if the girl had just wandered in?!"

"She wouldn't." One hand still around Hal's waist, David fumbled around for their glasses with the other. "You didn't lock the front door when you came in. She's running through freshly fallen snowdrifts with the huskies." His questing fingers found a wire frame. "Got 'em."

"Oh God, I completely forgot!" He clambered out of the bathtub. "She's not wearing any shoes, we'd better find her before her toes drop off."

"You'd better change into dry clothes first, or you'll freeze solid." David stepped, dripping, onto the rug. He pulled his shirt and trousers off, then turned to Hal. "Want some help?"

"Dave, no! We've got to..."

"I know." He peeled the wet shirt from Hal's skinny chest. "But if I leave the room, can I be sure you won't just change the subject when I come back in?"

"I won't." Hal took David's hand, and kissed the damp palm. "But lets go and find her before we make hot chocolate and curl up on the sofa, okay?"

It was sensible advice. They dried themselves, and smiled at the awkward moment when they had to go into their separate bedrooms to get dressed. In the kitchen, puddles of water on the floor indicated where snow had recently been allowed to blow inside. The men pulled on their boots and jackets, then waded out into the two feet of fresh snowfall.

"Hey, kid!" David yelled.

"Don't you know she's deaf?"

Hal and Dave turned as one. A man dressed all in white Arctic gear stood against the wall, regarding them calmly.

"And she's mine."

(1)"My hovercraft is full of eels."(2)

(2)No, really.

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