"Do you have a musical preference?" Lara asked, eyes half lidded, feeling weightless, the player piano tapping out bright ivory plinkings like the sound of snow in midday.
"Brit rock?" Snake was holding a collins glass with ice and scotch.
"Why, that's a brilliant idea, hold on." Lara began scanning the shelves of vinyl recordings, LP's, EPs, rows after rows of stacked records for something appropriate. She felt sufficiently sauced from the wine with dinner, which was becoming an odd sort of bonding source between them both. She so rarely had alcohol that the past week's consumption seemed ribald in comparison. She did not imagine there would be much room for recreation in the months to come, so she was not discomfited by their use.
"This was your idea, you know. You could be less broad. If you want, we could go to the conservatory, although there's a few more things in there we could break if we weren't careful." She was still flipping through the titles and artists, looking for something that might suit him. Lara couldn't imagine trying to buy for him, let alone find him music.
After their conversation of his past, there was a great deal of discussion as to their future. Otacon had left on the tablet a series of maps and documents regarding Bolivia. He had dug up information regarding a budding nationstate in its rainforests as to a potential upheaval of the Bolivian government calling themselves el Che's Chico, or The Boys of Che.
It was a poorly organised group, but included in the files was a series of photos that had been smuggled out of the country of a pair of massive metal legs, like rectangular versions of a cat's. It was just the pair and a hips holding them together amongst a large outdoor construction, the haziness of the photograph lending not much aid to any other potential intel that could be gleaned from it. Its construction had been housed underneath a series of networked scaffolds, webwork meshes that both concealed the area surrounding the scaffolds and provided a rough protection from the elements. Mist made it almost impossible to discern much more than its size, easily three stories high or more.
"Good god," she had said. "Is that how big the bloody thing is? Is that REX?"
"No," he had said. "REX had more armor than that, and REX had been completed. This looks similar, and Otacon's note says the leg motor is only similar, whatever that is. And this thing doesn't seem to be armed."
Lara picked up the glossy paper, examined its shabby camerawork. "Is that really what you've destroyed?"
Snake poured himself a water from a carafe they'd had provided with dinner. "More or less, yeah. Metal Gear has always been designed with two legs and a nuke in mind. The definition's a little more precise than that, but as a warfare tool, that's been its strategic advantage. I don't know what the hell a pair of legs would be doing in Bolivia yet, though. If the government there found out, they'd be burned to a crisp along with the rest of the rainforest."
Lara had shaken her head at him. "No, there's too much foliage. They'd need a defoliant of some sort if they were ever going to find something like this, especially if they're buried deep in its wetlands. There's too much forestry for them to cover every part of it. It's actually rather elegant. So, what does this mean? Did Otacon intend to take this information to the authorities?"
Snake had looked at her.
"What? That's not an unreasonable question. I know you both want to get your hands dirty, but some level of authorisation has to see the light of day, doesn't it?"
"Not a chance. The US interfering with foreign affairs about a weapon that shouldn't exist and has been kicked around in some form or another since Big Boss's days as a mercenary doesn't seem like it has a chance in hell of ever getting the attention it'd need for dismantling."
"It raises questions about your government that no one's particularly interested in answering. Still, isn't there something we can do before…?" She mimed blowing up with her hands and small accompanying sound effect.
Snake looked displeased about it being 'his government,' but didn't fault her logic. He had paused, looking at her with some degree of visible sympathy. "I know how you feel, but if this thing gets off the ground, the Big Five just became the Big Six."
"The US, Britain, France, China, and Russia aren't all nuclear powers."
"No, but they're at the big kid's table. If a South American nation shows up with the biggest gun at the show, they have to let them speak. It's not dangerous on its own, but it sets a dangerous precedent, one North Korea has been attempting to prove for years."
"Power means diplomacy."
Snake nodded. To an extent, it was already true. "Proliferation died with the end of the Cold War, but we're about to enter another era of the nuclear age."
They went back and forth like that for a while. There was a lot of ground that laid in a nebulous grey area, ethically or otherwise, and she wasn't very keen on sabotage out and out, but if it came to that, it was something she was resolved to put forward if necessary. Snake seemed more convinced that it would boil down to not if but when, and how. She did not share his pessimism.
Periodically, she asked him more questions about Metal Gear, conceptually or otherwise. About his two previous outings against the superweapon, Outer Heaven's Uprising and the Zanzibar Disturbance. She'd never heard of either until he filled her in with its unpleasant details. The establishment of a mercenary dispatch nation, The Outer Heaven Mother Company, its fall, the sudden influx of mercenary groups spread across the globe in the late nineties. Again, she found it as terrifying as riveting in its grotesquerie.
She also allowed bits and pieces of her own past to leak out, at his slight prodding. A bottle of red wine passed between them helped somewhat, to be certain. There was a great deal of it he already knew, which she thought was cheating, and said as much.
"Cheating? What do you mean?"
Lara had laughed. Midnight was a blur speeding closer all the time. "The things I've done don't really involve heroism no one can ever hear of."
Snake had waved off this claim with his hand, like she'd produced something nascent. "Hero's a strong word. I just got blackballed into doing something nobody else would, that's all," Snake said. Before she could protest, he refilled her glass. "And no more of that hero stuff, I got enough of that shit from Meryl."
Again, laughter. "Modesty's not becoming of you, Snake," she said. "It doesn't matter. You're cheating because if you open up an internet search, there's always some busybody prattling about something I've done. Usually mistaking paleontological or archaeological terminology, at that. Or misquoting me directly."
"I can't imagine the trouble you have sleeping at night, not being quoted right in Newsweek."
"Oh ho, that's sarcasm, there's no end to your bad habits."
"C'mon," he said, "give me an example. It can't be that bad."
She cleared her throat. "Really, Snake, can't you take my word for it?" When he just met her stare with a smirk and raised, skeptical, eyebrow, she folded. "Fine. Once, I was talking to a journalist early on, before I knew better. The press are easily some of the hungriest scavengers on earth."
"You should see them at the White House Correspondent's Dinner."
"No doubt. So, I'm speaking to him, and he asks if it's difficult being a woman in my profession."
"So?"
"So, like a complete twit, I tell him I like it best hard. Didn't occur to rethink the phrasing until I got the newspaper the morning after."
The air hung silent for a moment.
Snake clicked his tongue. "Okay, I can see how you might have thought that one out better. Was it as bad as it sounds?"
"Worse. The road to hell is paved to journalists. I hope. I didn't hear the end of those jokes until almost two years later." She sipped at the wine he'd provided, eyes drawn consistently to the photos again. Anticipation had begun its slow burn.
"Really, I like what I do. Love it, in fact. There's nothing quite like not knowing whether or not you'll make it out of this one."
"Or in how many pieces," Snake said.
Lara tried not to glow. "Mhmm. It's scary, but that's part of the fun. I was in Nairobi a few years ago, a place not traditionally kind to women, or to whites, and the land there is beautiful. I think that's what I like most. When I'm alone, when there's just the dirt and the wind and the sky, it envelops me. The earth, I mean. The land. I can convince myself that one day everybody will figure out we're just part of one unified body."
"No East, no West," Snake said.
Lara concurred with a clink of glasses. "Being away from civilisation all the bloody time is just a fringe benefit."
Snake lifted his head, peered around the gently lit room. "You got anything to listen to around this place," Snake said, "Chamber music not withstanding."
Lara stood, extended her hand to him. He took it with less hesitation that she'd expected. "Follow me."
That had been an hour prior. It was already past the witching hour, and the moon was just a blued face behind cloudcover outside. The music room was broad, with a low roof, insulated walls like foam on the major surfaces, and a carefully maintained atmosphere.
"I didn't think you were much for music, Snake."
"I'm not, really. I didn't have a whole lot of it growing up, but there were almost six months of lessons when I was a kid."
"You," Lara glanced over her shoulder at him, "do not seem the sort inspired to hold court with tune."
"Hnh?"
"You don't seem like a bloke who likes song."
"Oh. Yeah, not really."
She laughed. "This was your idea, you know. If you want, we could go to the conservatory, although there's a few more things in there we could break if we weren't careful."
Snake was lounging on one long, leather couch, and seemed perpetually only mildly interested in his surroundings, as if they were a breed of some new plant that had only slightly different leaves. Lara was intent on finding something useful, and after placing a record on in the background, joined him on the leather cushions, the space between them bigger in her head than she had hoped.
Snake looked at a loss.
"You don't know what a conservatory is, do you, Snake?"
He shook his head. She giggled, biting one lip.
"Room full of plants," Lara said.
"Oh, is that the glass room on the side of the house? The greenroom?"
"Mhmm. So tell me about this music you were on about a bit ago?"
Snake shifted himself to face her a little more directly. "I was with my third family. They—"
"Third family?" Lara asked. "You mean you were a foster child."
He only gave a shrug. "Another in a series of reasons I never even thought Big Boss could be related to me, later in life. I remember noticing the resemblance, but…" When Lara didn't pry, Snake continued. "I had been there a few months, and they wanted to help me acclimate, so they tried music. I was about eight. After a lot of lessons, I think they understood it wasn't going to take."
"Oh, that's so sad. I mean, relatively, of course. I was never very musically gifted," Lara said.
"Really? I wouldn't have expected that."
She shrugged. "My mother insisted on a classical education," Lara said. "Math was never a very interesting topic, and I hadn't really discovered history yet, so my mum believed I might spread my wings with scales and pentameter. No such luck. After four lessons, I threw a tangerine at my music teacher's head after he said I was tone deaf and that was the end of it."
"Hum a few bars, I have to hear it."
"Oh, for god's sake, Snake."
"You owe me. All we talk about is me, anyway."
She did. Five notes. Snake seemed impressed until the last two, where she was first off key, then could not maintain the note. His expression indicated there was a foul scent.
"Do not make faces!" Lara said, slapping at his hand. "I'm not doing you any more damn favours, I'll say that."
It was the last of their casual time together, and a memory that stuck out after the fact, a metric to weigh their other experiences.
The bomb.
Alaska.
Manhattan.
Lara felt something, maybe only in the trickery of her mind's retrospect, like déjà vu, as though it were inevitable that their lives would sour. But when Snake started laughing, Lara joined him. That was what she remembered best.
His laughter, like a stones shuffling on a riverbed, and the closeness of her body to his.
