Opening Notes: This little... whatever it is has been bouncing around in my head for an admittedly long time. It is not to be taken seriously in any form.


"Thanks... thanks for listening to me." The Boss, once known as The Joy, felt her lips tremble ever so slightly as they curled upwards to form a sad smile as tears filled her eyes. The man she had raised and trained looked at her in silence as they stood among the white flowers. He had not uttered a word as she had shared a small but poignant portion of her past. Unlike, he did not seem to be reacting much to anything. "I feel... content."

He continued to just stare at her, as if processing every word she had said.

"Snake..." Blinking away the saturation around her ocular organs, she turned around and reached for her radio. It was time to end this. Only one of them would walk away from the lunaresque blooms.

She brought the communicator up to her head. "Comm-"

The Boss would never be able to finish the command. An all too familiar sound screamed out as she felt as if a tiny but powerful fist slugged her in the back over and over again. Then came the burning... and the sensation of something wet seeping down past her shoulder blades.

It all was enough to send her to the ground, dropping the radio in the process. The pain... oh, the pain. It did not take a genius to figure out what had happened.

The ground crunched has her protégé walked over to her and looked down at her, the barrel of his handgun still smoking. His focus briefly left her as a static-lined voice emitted out of the discarded radio. Snake made it even more discarded by kicking it away.

"You... shot me." The Boss rasped out the two words, struggling to breathe.

"That's sort of my thing," Snake replied bluntly. "Losing this-" he pointed to the patch over his right eye, "- put me on edge. I'd apologize for taking advantage, but that would be lying."

He felt a chill run down the right side of his face. Looking over, he suppressed a groan. There he was again. That... that damn ghost, smiling as if he knew a secret Snake should have been aware of. Having had enough of Russia and everyone in it, Naked Snake pointed to the phantom. "And I'm just plain sick of you, too!"

The Sorrow just kept on smiling. Why would a ghost worry about what the living thought of it?