Chapter Seven
Otacon awoke from dreamless sleep. He strained his ears to hear the noise that had awakened him, but after a mere few seconds of silence concluded that his over-tired mind must have conjured it.
He lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling and listening to the soft camera-like clicks of his eyelids when he blinked. He wanted to be back at his computer, searching for some sort of loose end that had been left untied. He wondered for the hundredth time about Snake's whereabouts and prayed silently that the download would work. Despite what they'd agreed during Shadow Moses, their relationship had become so much more than strictly business.
After a while, his back grew too accustomed to the bed and he wanted out. Rising, he clicked the small reading light beside his bed on and picked up his glasses from on top of his book. After placing them gently on his face while considering whether contacts would make things easier or harder he left the small wall outlet that passed for a bedroom and stepped slowly into the main room, his bare feet gingerly tracing over splintered wood. He almost instinctively walked to the blue monitor that provided the room's only light, but remembered that the files would take at least another few hours to translate into the nanomachines. A cigarette end stood solitary in an ashtray beside the keyboard, reminding him of his friend's peril. He felt totally helpless; but it was a feeling that he had associated with the work desk from which he had monitored Snake's many missions since 2005.
A noise disturbed his thought pattern, stirring him once more to awareness of the physical world. It was a faint ratting, followed by a small series of scratches, repeated continuously. He'd heard it the night before, when he slipped in the kitchen floor and Snake had returned...
Had that been Snake? Otacon pondered as he squinted around the darkness for whatever could be making the constant sound. Snake was certainly the only person he knew of who could evade the security system that the deceivingly dilapidated apartment contained. But Otacon questioned why Snake would disappear so soon after returning, especially with Patriot activity suddenly becoming an issue again. If he'd been captured by a bounty hunter or a squad team then it would have been announced all over the news and the tabloids would be full of Philanthropy's terrorist activities. Unless it served the Wiseman's Committee better to keep someone close to Snake in the dark...
Shit...
Otacon cursed as the thought crossed his mind. He slid open one of the workstation's drawers as quietly as he could, still training his eyes around the black room. His fingers, now shivering, closed around the handle of a berretta and drew it silently but quickly out of the drawer. If Snake had been captured without the press knowing, Otacon had already had enough time to get out of the city. He cursed himself for his blindness, shoved his berretta down the back of his pyjama bottoms and heading slowly towards the security controls. He meant to leave immediately, packing only essentials.
Suddenly, there was the noise again, nearer this time. Otacon longed for the light switch at the far side of the apartment. After a few seconds of silence and rigid stillness on his part Otacon headed towards the door, wondering what he was going to do when he left the apartment complex in nothing but his pyjamas and a badly concealed M-9. He would have to hide somewhere until it was safe to return. He pictured himself huddled in a bus shelter with a can of baked beans, asking passers by for a quarter to use the nearby phone booth and headed towards the apartment door.
He never reached it. In an instant, a strong hand closed around his mouth and another turned him with expert silence to the ground. His back met the unforgiving wooden floorboards with a muffled thud, and the hand again stifled his cry. For what seemed like a minute Otacon was held there in absolute silence by the smothered figure before the rattling sound began again. It was coming from the man's chest or midsection. Otacon looked up at the attacker's face as he looked down at his. The light from the computer monitor provided nothing more than a silhouette of the man's head.
"We are safe for now," the man growled in a voice that Otacon recognised immediately. His eyes closed with relief, as for the third time that night he was reminded of his friend.
"Snake?"
Although it sounded as though Snake had been on a diet of rusty nails for a week, there was no doubting from a half awake Otacon the voice's origin. There was no reply for the longest time. The rattling stopped again, and Otacon got the impression that the man was listening for something. Otacon strained his ears, but only silence met them.
"No." Came the eventual reply. The man released a confused Otacon and stood firmly upright. "I am VII." He pronounced it "seven", but something about the respect he gave the name made Otacon imagine it in Roman Numerals. He tried to squint through the darkness at VII, but saw only a black outline of a chiselled body.
"You have to leave here. They are coming for you."
"How did They find me?" Otacon asked in his head, and then iterated.
"By following me." VII replied. Before Otacon could ask how he'd found him, something whistled between them and smashed into the far wall. VII pushed Otacon easily to the ground and snatched the berretta up from the floor. Otacon covered his head as VII ran to the maggot-framed and recently smashed window to scope for the sniper. The moonlight cast a shadow across VII's body, but his back was turned to Otacon. His long, ragged hair covered his shoulders and muscles shaped the tight fabric he wore. He seemed unarmed.
"Go!" VII commanded without turning around. "Run to a friend's house. I can follow."
Otacon didn't argue. He crawled into the bedroom and slid a pair of jeans on. He banked that his wallet would still be in the back pocket. As further shots broke the window and threw glass across the apartment floor, Hal Emmerich left the place that had been his home for five years, never to return.
The door closed with an echoing slam. He heard other patrons beginning to stir in their respective rooms. He ran across the corridor towards the stairs, keeping his head as low as possible. As he passed a badly watered plant, the vase holding it exploded an instant after the window behind it had shattered. VII's deterrent doesn't seem to be helping much, Otacon thought, as his bare feet crunched over broken glass shards. Otacon was being hunted, perhaps by more than one sharpshooter.
He practically flew down the staircase, covering his head with his hands and flinching when soft "thips" announced the arrivals of more plaster- breaking sniper bullets. The stairs came to an end, and he ran blind down the final few. The entrance in sight, Otacon ran right into someone. It barely registered to Otacon when a bullet exploded out the side of the man's head, adding another colour to his once white vest. He didn't look up, but felt warm liquid spray across his face as the man dropped to the floor. He took a deep breath, and ran out the front door of the rundown complex.
A police siren split the moist air as Otacon stepped onto the street. Half expecting his life to end, he ran across the empty backstreet. This might've been a highly trained Patriot sniper, but there was no way he was just going to stand still under a neon light for the bastard. He stood with baited breath under the bus shelter that faced his apartment, waiting for further fire.
None came. Confused, he almost stepped out of his urine-soaked haven before remembering what someone he cared very much about had told him long ago, mere days before she died in the barrel of a sniper scope. The best sharpshooters could wait as long as weeks for their prey to emerge.
For some sort of sign from VII, he cast his eyes up towards his apartment's window. He was shocked when he saw the figure of his new ally standing bolt upright, their enemy apparently vanquished. He glanced down at Otacon (his face still an enigma) for a second, before swiftly retreating back into the darkness behind the window frame.
He'd lost yet another home, his friend was still missing, and he was on the run again. Refusing to dwell on this, Otacon began to move in the direction of the place he knew he must go to first. With a bit of luck, he'd reach it before sunrise.
Subterranean transport was out of the question, Otacon thought as he turned a street corner. He couldn't risk passing the police and security guards that are standard in train stations. Busses were out too: even if one was available at this time of night there would be too great a chance of someone recognising him. Walking through the streets would be suicide with all the bounty hunters that were hanging around. A taxi was his best option.
He spotted a phone booth across the street. Holding the receiver with his head and right shoulder, he reached into his back pocket and was relieved to find his wallet still there. He put a quarter into the machine with one hand, and picked up the tattered phonebook that hung from the door with another.
Still shaking, it took him ten minutes to find a taxi service number and a further thirty seconds to dial it.
"Liberty Cabs," hawked the woman on the other end of the line with something that Snake had once described as a "New Yawk" accent. Otacon muttered his location and destination. He had to repeat himself when the woman told him to speak up.
"We'll have one with ya in twenty minutes," she cawed eventually. "So long." It took half an hour for the cab to arrive. Otacon looked up in the sky in exasperation.
"Queens," Otacon told the driver. He just hoped Jack hadn't moved house without telling him.
VII stood alone in the dark room, the gun still warm in his hand. He reflected once again on his mission objectives, which pointed in his mind towards a single goal. He allowed the weapon to slip from his gloved hand, knowing that the tape around the grip would prevent any forensics team from obtaining Otacon's fingerprints.
He stepped towards the unhelpful light and nervous stuttering of Otacon's workstation. The monitor read "Download Complete." VII reached around it and gripped the back of it with his powerful fingers. Air rattled into his lungs, and in another instant he had ripped the screen from the desk it had been nailed to. Sparks flew across the floorboards as VII crushed the computer tower's protective casing in a destructive embrace. Sharp pains ran up his forearms, but he had got passed the point where electricity could do him harm.
Satisfied that all techno-evidence had been destroyed, he retrieved from the kitchen a box of matches. A few minutes later, and he could feel the blaze warming his skin even through his improvised mask. He'd be long gone by the time the NYPD's best response time was up, determined not to lose a vital piece of his master plan. But for now he watched to make sure the fire spread.
He spared a brief moment to think about what his other must be going through at this moment, only to find that he didn't care. Rescue was no longer his objective. Nevertheless, he did have a goal. Before that goal was to be achieved, trust must be earned. People must be lied to. And a dozen men must die.
Revenge is a great motivator.
--
Author's note: Sorry I haven't posted in a while, GSCE's have been taking up most of my life recently. This chapter is a bit shorter than the last, but I hope you can forgive me owing that it had more action in it. I'll try to update A.S.A.P.
So, what do you think of VII? Got any theories regarding his origins, or this goal he can't seem to stop thinking about? And what about the announcement of Raiden! Can he be trusted? Write a review and reveal your opinions!
I'd like to dedicate this chapter to my great uncle, who is in hospital this week, battling against lung cancer. My families' prayers are with him.
Also, a good luck goes out to all those who are doing exams at the moment. They're tough, but worth passing in the long run. And remember, there's no such thing as an easy exam.
If you're looking for a good accompaniment to this story, I'd recommend A Fox's Last Hunt by Prey Mantis. I did overlook the project, but calling me co-writer is a little flattering. Still, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did as it slots very handily into the history behind one of the key characters in Legacy of Blood.
See ya in the funny pages.
Otacon awoke from dreamless sleep. He strained his ears to hear the noise that had awakened him, but after a mere few seconds of silence concluded that his over-tired mind must have conjured it.
He lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling and listening to the soft camera-like clicks of his eyelids when he blinked. He wanted to be back at his computer, searching for some sort of loose end that had been left untied. He wondered for the hundredth time about Snake's whereabouts and prayed silently that the download would work. Despite what they'd agreed during Shadow Moses, their relationship had become so much more than strictly business.
After a while, his back grew too accustomed to the bed and he wanted out. Rising, he clicked the small reading light beside his bed on and picked up his glasses from on top of his book. After placing them gently on his face while considering whether contacts would make things easier or harder he left the small wall outlet that passed for a bedroom and stepped slowly into the main room, his bare feet gingerly tracing over splintered wood. He almost instinctively walked to the blue monitor that provided the room's only light, but remembered that the files would take at least another few hours to translate into the nanomachines. A cigarette end stood solitary in an ashtray beside the keyboard, reminding him of his friend's peril. He felt totally helpless; but it was a feeling that he had associated with the work desk from which he had monitored Snake's many missions since 2005.
A noise disturbed his thought pattern, stirring him once more to awareness of the physical world. It was a faint ratting, followed by a small series of scratches, repeated continuously. He'd heard it the night before, when he slipped in the kitchen floor and Snake had returned...
Had that been Snake? Otacon pondered as he squinted around the darkness for whatever could be making the constant sound. Snake was certainly the only person he knew of who could evade the security system that the deceivingly dilapidated apartment contained. But Otacon questioned why Snake would disappear so soon after returning, especially with Patriot activity suddenly becoming an issue again. If he'd been captured by a bounty hunter or a squad team then it would have been announced all over the news and the tabloids would be full of Philanthropy's terrorist activities. Unless it served the Wiseman's Committee better to keep someone close to Snake in the dark...
Shit...
Otacon cursed as the thought crossed his mind. He slid open one of the workstation's drawers as quietly as he could, still training his eyes around the black room. His fingers, now shivering, closed around the handle of a berretta and drew it silently but quickly out of the drawer. If Snake had been captured without the press knowing, Otacon had already had enough time to get out of the city. He cursed himself for his blindness, shoved his berretta down the back of his pyjama bottoms and heading slowly towards the security controls. He meant to leave immediately, packing only essentials.
Suddenly, there was the noise again, nearer this time. Otacon longed for the light switch at the far side of the apartment. After a few seconds of silence and rigid stillness on his part Otacon headed towards the door, wondering what he was going to do when he left the apartment complex in nothing but his pyjamas and a badly concealed M-9. He would have to hide somewhere until it was safe to return. He pictured himself huddled in a bus shelter with a can of baked beans, asking passers by for a quarter to use the nearby phone booth and headed towards the apartment door.
He never reached it. In an instant, a strong hand closed around his mouth and another turned him with expert silence to the ground. His back met the unforgiving wooden floorboards with a muffled thud, and the hand again stifled his cry. For what seemed like a minute Otacon was held there in absolute silence by the smothered figure before the rattling sound began again. It was coming from the man's chest or midsection. Otacon looked up at the attacker's face as he looked down at his. The light from the computer monitor provided nothing more than a silhouette of the man's head.
"We are safe for now," the man growled in a voice that Otacon recognised immediately. His eyes closed with relief, as for the third time that night he was reminded of his friend.
"Snake?"
Although it sounded as though Snake had been on a diet of rusty nails for a week, there was no doubting from a half awake Otacon the voice's origin. There was no reply for the longest time. The rattling stopped again, and Otacon got the impression that the man was listening for something. Otacon strained his ears, but only silence met them.
"No." Came the eventual reply. The man released a confused Otacon and stood firmly upright. "I am VII." He pronounced it "seven", but something about the respect he gave the name made Otacon imagine it in Roman Numerals. He tried to squint through the darkness at VII, but saw only a black outline of a chiselled body.
"You have to leave here. They are coming for you."
"How did They find me?" Otacon asked in his head, and then iterated.
"By following me." VII replied. Before Otacon could ask how he'd found him, something whistled between them and smashed into the far wall. VII pushed Otacon easily to the ground and snatched the berretta up from the floor. Otacon covered his head as VII ran to the maggot-framed and recently smashed window to scope for the sniper. The moonlight cast a shadow across VII's body, but his back was turned to Otacon. His long, ragged hair covered his shoulders and muscles shaped the tight fabric he wore. He seemed unarmed.
"Go!" VII commanded without turning around. "Run to a friend's house. I can follow."
Otacon didn't argue. He crawled into the bedroom and slid a pair of jeans on. He banked that his wallet would still be in the back pocket. As further shots broke the window and threw glass across the apartment floor, Hal Emmerich left the place that had been his home for five years, never to return.
The door closed with an echoing slam. He heard other patrons beginning to stir in their respective rooms. He ran across the corridor towards the stairs, keeping his head as low as possible. As he passed a badly watered plant, the vase holding it exploded an instant after the window behind it had shattered. VII's deterrent doesn't seem to be helping much, Otacon thought, as his bare feet crunched over broken glass shards. Otacon was being hunted, perhaps by more than one sharpshooter.
He practically flew down the staircase, covering his head with his hands and flinching when soft "thips" announced the arrivals of more plaster- breaking sniper bullets. The stairs came to an end, and he ran blind down the final few. The entrance in sight, Otacon ran right into someone. It barely registered to Otacon when a bullet exploded out the side of the man's head, adding another colour to his once white vest. He didn't look up, but felt warm liquid spray across his face as the man dropped to the floor. He took a deep breath, and ran out the front door of the rundown complex.
A police siren split the moist air as Otacon stepped onto the street. Half expecting his life to end, he ran across the empty backstreet. This might've been a highly trained Patriot sniper, but there was no way he was just going to stand still under a neon light for the bastard. He stood with baited breath under the bus shelter that faced his apartment, waiting for further fire.
None came. Confused, he almost stepped out of his urine-soaked haven before remembering what someone he cared very much about had told him long ago, mere days before she died in the barrel of a sniper scope. The best sharpshooters could wait as long as weeks for their prey to emerge.
For some sort of sign from VII, he cast his eyes up towards his apartment's window. He was shocked when he saw the figure of his new ally standing bolt upright, their enemy apparently vanquished. He glanced down at Otacon (his face still an enigma) for a second, before swiftly retreating back into the darkness behind the window frame.
He'd lost yet another home, his friend was still missing, and he was on the run again. Refusing to dwell on this, Otacon began to move in the direction of the place he knew he must go to first. With a bit of luck, he'd reach it before sunrise.
Subterranean transport was out of the question, Otacon thought as he turned a street corner. He couldn't risk passing the police and security guards that are standard in train stations. Busses were out too: even if one was available at this time of night there would be too great a chance of someone recognising him. Walking through the streets would be suicide with all the bounty hunters that were hanging around. A taxi was his best option.
He spotted a phone booth across the street. Holding the receiver with his head and right shoulder, he reached into his back pocket and was relieved to find his wallet still there. He put a quarter into the machine with one hand, and picked up the tattered phonebook that hung from the door with another.
Still shaking, it took him ten minutes to find a taxi service number and a further thirty seconds to dial it.
"Liberty Cabs," hawked the woman on the other end of the line with something that Snake had once described as a "New Yawk" accent. Otacon muttered his location and destination. He had to repeat himself when the woman told him to speak up.
"We'll have one with ya in twenty minutes," she cawed eventually. "So long." It took half an hour for the cab to arrive. Otacon looked up in the sky in exasperation.
"Queens," Otacon told the driver. He just hoped Jack hadn't moved house without telling him.
VII stood alone in the dark room, the gun still warm in his hand. He reflected once again on his mission objectives, which pointed in his mind towards a single goal. He allowed the weapon to slip from his gloved hand, knowing that the tape around the grip would prevent any forensics team from obtaining Otacon's fingerprints.
He stepped towards the unhelpful light and nervous stuttering of Otacon's workstation. The monitor read "Download Complete." VII reached around it and gripped the back of it with his powerful fingers. Air rattled into his lungs, and in another instant he had ripped the screen from the desk it had been nailed to. Sparks flew across the floorboards as VII crushed the computer tower's protective casing in a destructive embrace. Sharp pains ran up his forearms, but he had got passed the point where electricity could do him harm.
Satisfied that all techno-evidence had been destroyed, he retrieved from the kitchen a box of matches. A few minutes later, and he could feel the blaze warming his skin even through his improvised mask. He'd be long gone by the time the NYPD's best response time was up, determined not to lose a vital piece of his master plan. But for now he watched to make sure the fire spread.
He spared a brief moment to think about what his other must be going through at this moment, only to find that he didn't care. Rescue was no longer his objective. Nevertheless, he did have a goal. Before that goal was to be achieved, trust must be earned. People must be lied to. And a dozen men must die.
Revenge is a great motivator.
--
Author's note: Sorry I haven't posted in a while, GSCE's have been taking up most of my life recently. This chapter is a bit shorter than the last, but I hope you can forgive me owing that it had more action in it. I'll try to update A.S.A.P.
So, what do you think of VII? Got any theories regarding his origins, or this goal he can't seem to stop thinking about? And what about the announcement of Raiden! Can he be trusted? Write a review and reveal your opinions!
I'd like to dedicate this chapter to my great uncle, who is in hospital this week, battling against lung cancer. My families' prayers are with him.
Also, a good luck goes out to all those who are doing exams at the moment. They're tough, but worth passing in the long run. And remember, there's no such thing as an easy exam.
If you're looking for a good accompaniment to this story, I'd recommend A Fox's Last Hunt by Prey Mantis. I did overlook the project, but calling me co-writer is a little flattering. Still, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did as it slots very handily into the history behind one of the key characters in Legacy of Blood.
See ya in the funny pages.
