Heroes and Madmen
The Metal Gear muse is something that doesn't come to me often, but it hits me really hard once it finally does. I love that game and everything about it... I wrote this after beating Twin Snakes for the first time, so it was a really long time ago. This fic means a lot to me, because that muse flung me up into it's whirlwind strong enough to bring me in at a point in my life when there was nothing I wanted to do less than write fanfiction.
After you've woken up in the morning again for so many years, after the same dream and living the same day repetitively afterward, you wonder how long it will take until you won't wake up again.
It isn't like I'm too old or anything; it's just that any spice that once came from life no longer seems to fill me anymore. Things have gone on the same way for so long, I can't seem to remember where I once tasted the sweet salts of thrill, and I just find myself craving them again.
But how can one find those things when they can't even look themselves in the mirror? And when all they see when they dare to spare a glance is a coward that solved their problems by killing them. Needless to say, I haven't looked at my reflection for a while. I have long since taken the front off of my medicine cabinet, so I wouldn't have to face the thing I am most scared and ashamed of – myself.
How can one really experience those elations when they get strangled in the silver-sweet adrenaline that comes from a combat high? When all they can remember is watching themselves from a distance as the bullet escaped the gun and hissed through the silent air to end a life that was never different from their own... How could I have ever found such exhilaration from killing a person, when I knew that person was probably never unlike me? Blindly following orders and being led into so many mazes, being used and manipulated… we were never different, and yet I knew I had to kill them to survive. But of what relevance was that? Does it really matter whether it was I or he that was killed, if we were always the same? Would he have ended up where I am now, sitting in a hotel in Manhattan drinking too much after falling back from a journey to Jupiter? Would he be sitting next to someone who could quite possibly my only friend, typing away at the computer while the glow illuminates the room?
Bring on the future, and I will draw out any meaning that I can find out of it. Bring on the martyrdom so that I could have at least filled some kind of purpose. Bring me all the pain in the world, because what doesn't kill me can only make me stronger, because having gone through what I have, things can only get better from here. I'll leave behind the past because the best has yet to come.
