The next half minute bled into a lifetime of disorienting haze, blurred green, blue, the shapes comingling with an onslaught of hues, swirling infinitesimally, making a ruin of her eye's colour cones, and in the dizziness of their shared lapse into the sky. Otacon was equipped with a parachute of his own, but in their failed leap from the plane, half stumble and half fall from its open mouth, they had gone face first, and begun a violent swirl between their shared weight.

The wind ripped at her hair, skin, eyes. She could see nothing, and at once saw too much. There was only the light's multicoloured recession of coherence and the sun periodically giving her an illusion of her surroundings. She felt wet all over her face, the mist of the altitude severe even so low to the ground. Otacon was pressed hard against her, hands digging as much into her shoulders as she dug into his. It was unpleasant only in the periphery of her mind, with the ripping agony of their freefall the more concerning displeasure.

Lara had little choice in manhandling the younger man. He had no weighted understanding of how to react, and after initially going limp, stiffened the muscles of shoulders, chest, and procedurally made it more difficult for her to guide their weight through the tumbling trajectory that accelerated all the time. They rolled over and over end dozens of times, her view spinning with the only mainstay being Otacon wrapped in her grasp however tenuously. As the plane disappeared from any proximity, and only the treeline approached ever faster, Lara roughly adjusted his body weight with hers, trying to right their position to an extent where she could let him go and they could deploy their chutes.

Maybe ten seconds had elapsed. Maybe a few hours. She couldn't tell. Time seemed to stretch out into the infinite. It was not something she could contain as a concept in the vagary of their ruined flight.

For a moment, the barest shimmer of their bodies coalesced, and she could guide him to face the earth, the trees, its populous of leaves and branches. She pressed one leg low on his, used a hand guiding his collarbone up, and in but a moment, they had slowed their descent just enough that they, hand in hand, ended their panicked scramble into the ether. Each of them had their legs and arms extended, like a bellyvault into water that would never come. After a moment, she managed to catch Hal's eye, and in a glance did her best to reassure him. Speaking was useless. The wind seared away vowels and snatched at her lips. She didn't try, so she was grateful that he looked relieved, if surprised, and still afraid.

Lara tapped a chord on her chest, made eye contact again. Held up five fingers.

Otacon raised an eyebrow at her, struggled with her pantomime for a moment. She watched understanding bloom on his face in the parching light. Lara prepared to release his hands, and would have to hope he could guide himself from there.

She held up four fingers. Otacon took hold of the chord on his harness, its ringed release.

Three fingers.

Two.

One.

The jolt was immense, sudden in a way that water's enveloping of a diver is sudden. It was jarring and Lara felt a yank on her ribs, shoulders, thighs, lungs, breasts. Her head went light in the expansion of the parachute, and the air evacuated from her with such velocity she was worried, at the wind's insistentence, if she might be able to regain it. Her descent, however, had already begun its slowing, and her relief was nothing short of exhilarated prayer.

The ring of her ripchord was still clutched tightly in her palm, like a set of oblong brass knuckles made instead of polymer, and she let it fall to the earth and disappear into the trees. It was then that she thought of the height they had to have jumped from. Lara looked to the ground, and tried not to wince. They might have leapt from a hundred and fifty, maybe as high as two hundred meters. She had no idea. But they were in free fall for so long, they must have scraped by the skin of their teeth. Lara thought of the story it would make later, and tried not to smile at her own adrenaline's aphrodisiac qualities.

Then she thought of the other pilots, and Otacon.

And of Snake.

She cast an eye about for the younger man, finding him behind her and above her by only slight significance. They were a safe distance from each other, which had been a concern, and she was thankful it had ordered itself sensibly enough.

Lara then peered around for Snake. Aside from their rustlings, and the sound of the (much dimished) wind chilling her skin, she saw nothing. The sky was clear, and the only thing that met her eyes were the array of trees and their occasional gaps.

The ground, regardless of the parachute, was nearing her faster than expected. She hoped Snake had managed it in the interim while she was still trying to collect the both of them into an opening position. There was no other sight she could see, at least, and the plane was likewise absent from the sky. Lara wondered idly of their supplies, in an attempt to try and divert from her more pressing anxiety, one that only grew once she was on the ground.

They landed in one of the few spaces between, onto a vacant patch where a river bubbled over rocks nearby. Twin steering cables in either hand, Lara steered her chute to the opening, unable to avoid landing in the water. She ran with the force of the landing, finding it harder than she remembered, having to remind herself that normal drops were a bit more collected. Before landing, she spotted what looked like a bit of debris from the plane, but had no time to investigate. Losing her footing, she rolled forward, still with enough sense of mind not to fight the inertia, and tucked her limbs inwards. The stream bed's rocks had all been ground down into pebbles and round edges, and although she was less satisfied with being made to traipse about in wet clothing, she was infinitely grateful to be back on ground that could not drop her hundreds of meters to an unpleasant demise.

Lara was removing her harness when she heard the crash, and Otacon's nearby yell. She finished up and moved into the brush to find him. She was surprised that he had, with some perspective, done relatively well considering his lack of experience. Otacon was tangled in the branches of a monument to botany, its myriad arms evanescing higher than most of its surrounding flora.

"Don't suppose you need a hand, Hal?" She moved to him, just a few feet off the ground, and she needed only stand on her tiptoes to help him out of the harness.

"That went a lot better than I thought. I wasn't sure we'd make it." He was out in just a moment's aid, and took a brief look around.

"I don't guess you grabbed my glasses, huh?"

She shrugged, put her palms up.

"Ah, man. I think I have an extra pair in my bag, but that's with Snake. He probably busted 'em on the way down. That guy, I swear." He instinctively tried to apply them further up the ridge of his nose, and it wasn't until after his comment did Lara bolt back to the stream.

She ran to the small pack that she'd spotted

Crouching down, she picked it up in her hand. It was a canvass bag with a small wealth of preparatory items inside.

Otacon approached from behind her, crunching pebbles underfoot and splashing slightly in his sneakers.

"Hey, what's up?" Otacon said. When Lara didn't reply, he came over and examined Lara's find. She stood up. "What is all this?"

Lara looked into the woods. The treetrunks offered nothing. She wandered out, carefully and being certain of the sounds around her and any disturbance they might offered. The soil grew less damp and grass came in to fill the water's absence the further she got. Moss grew in tufts around tree roots. They wired themselves into the ground in thick ropes, mushrooms with thin stalks on the perimeter. She did a rough perimeter of the stream, going north of their landing area, then south.

When she spotted the parachute, Lara called against her better judgement to Otacon. She didn't care if anyone else may have heard her, although it ultimately mattered very little.

Otacon approached, and inspected the find.

High in the branches of a tree was a deployed parachute, its beige harness yanked almost all the way through on one side, where a leg would have been secured to a waist.

There was blood on the edge of its thick fabric, but no bootprints, no other trace.

"Lara, I don't get it," he said. "Obviously he made it down, but why would he leave? Where'd Snake go?"

Lara stared out into the jungle, facing away from him.

"I don't know."