Sub Rosa
"Is that it? Is that her?"
Jack whipped around through the white October air at a voice so familiar and at words so penetrating. He tensed there with his bootheel biting into the cold, dying grass and watched, squinting up and down at a body he didn't immediately recall. The man shifted his weight onto one foot in the anxious silence, and finally Jack sighed out a cloudy breath and let his posture fail.
"I didn't recognize you without the uniform."
"I didn't recognize you with one."
A vaguely uncomfortable pause.
"Still alive, huh?"
"I wanted to come back after, you know, however long it's been." Hands slid into pockets with a victorious grin. "It's not half as cold as Russia."
Jack spared for him a wry look that fell just shy of a smirk.
"…So that's her, huh," said his companion after a time, tactfully smoothing flat the reflexive upnote to his tone. Jack was appreciative.
"Yeah. What are you doing here?"
"I just—" A shake of the head. "I just kinda wanted to see her. I only met her once, but she seemed… interesting," he finished anticlimactically. Jack understood completely.
"…and I kinda wanted to see you, too."
Jack couldn't have seen his face at that time, shrouded entirely in the black periphery of his erstwhile right eye. In a way, though, he wouldn't have wanted to. Not with that imagined look of his, no, and not with the harpoon-tether twinge that deployed sharply and sunk in at the base of his spine. "Why?"
A dead leaf slapped and stuck to the X in The Boss's smooth, engraved 192X and it occurred to him that although the eyes were the only thing he remembered of the man, he didn't know what they looked like in the slightest. Without waiting for his answer (which was slow in coming), he continued: "Feel like a drink?"
"Never more," came the reply, choked out awkwardly on a laugh.
It was no wonder, anyway; after all, friends came so few and far between out there. In the Cold. He couldn't blame the guy for being so inordinately happy to see him.
Nor himself.
"You're Snake, aren't you?"
"John."
"What?"
"It's John."
"…Are you shitting me?Talk about coincidences!"
Jack just smiled and shook his head, and later over scotch on the rocks he thought to compliment Johnny on his English— until there interposed a tongue he cared about much more.
