Some of you kindly made me notice that yes, I tend to make some mistakes and typos. I repeat, this story isn't betaed and I'm not a native English speaker so please, really, cut me some slack. My official beta is currently under a lot of stress because of her PhD and the other story I'm writing, I don't want to bother her with this one too, considering she doesn't even know squat about this fandom. I'll try my best to be better at editing but I can't promise much. Sometimes Italian grammar overlaps with English and random mistakes appear. Thank you for your consideration.


"Rise and shine sleepyheads, dawn is breaking."

Quiet opened one eye and saw Snake jolting awake as Ocelot's voice echoed in their earpieces via radio. "I'm awake…" he mumbled. "I'm awake!" he then repeated in clearer voice.

Knowing perfectly well that no patrol would dare a sandstorm of that magnitude, they had simply decided to skip taking turns and they both slept. Waking up like that wasn't exactly the best way to rouse.

Wiping sleep from her eyes, the sniper observed Snake while he stood and patted around the dust off his clothes. He stretched and his bones popped and cracked, then he opened the door. The bright morning light flooded the shack, much to her gratitude. With the sunlight she felt the energy coming back in her limbs.

"Got something for us?" asked Snake to Ocelot.

"Actually, I do. One of our intel teams found that there's an interesting prisoner being held in the compound just north of your position. Were you heading that way?"

Snake rubbed his eyes, slipping his fingers beneath the eyepatch. "Yes, actually. We'll check that out after breakfast."

"Do you really need to? If you go now, you may catch them off guard while they're still sleepy."

"Ocelot, I'm hungry as fuck, Quiet needs a shower or she'll wither like a plant in the middle of the desert, literally!" he spat in the radio. "Let us have breakfast then we'll extract this guy. Snake out."

Well, thank you for that.

"You need help?" he asked. "I can keep the water tank up so you can soak in without too much effort."

Quiet nodded and he lifted the tank above her head then poured the lukewarm liquid over her. Between the sunlight and the water, she felt energized and ready to run around Afghanistan for a week. She would have never lasted a full week without water, but heck, the burst of energy of the first drink of the day was always overwhelming.

Once she was soaked water, she stopped him and sat down on the chair she had occupied the other night to let the water adsorb through her skin and feed the parasites, while Snake had his breakfast.

Wonder what the Soviet put in their ration packs for breakfast.

"Let's see what we have here." He pulled a cardboard box from the backpack and opened it. It contained three cans, no labels on them though, and some flimsy plastic cutlery. "Suddenly I miss mess hall on Mother Base," he commented with a sigh.

When he opened one of the cans with a multitool he had in his pocket, she understood what he meant. The smell that came from that thing was revolting. What the hell is that?

"Smells like a dirty locker room after a bunch of sweaty teenagers swept by and forgot to pick up their underwear," he stated, pulling the lid all the way. From the wiff that swept by her nose, she couldn't agree more and Quiet couldn't help but giggle at his rather colorful metaphor to describe the acrid smell of what looked like barley porridge and another alien gooish substance she couldn't identify but she thought was supposed to be some kind of fruit jelly.

"If I weren't starving I'd probably leave it, but seriously, I'm hungry as fuck!" And he dove in. By the grimace printed on his face as he chewed on the gelatinous overly processed food, the taste was as awful as the smell. "Gah," he lamented when he finally swallowed the last bite. "I'd need a gallon of coffee to wash that taste down. Next time we do rounds, Support Team is in charge of rations. Procurement on site doesn't work for food. Not when the Soviets are in charge."

Quiet laughed, and she noticed a hint of a smile on his face. "At least you don't have to eat this shit. You're lucky. Ready to go?" She nodded. "Then go ahead. I'll clean up and get close with the jeep. If I remember correctly, it's a closed compound so they're probably keeping the prisoner somewhere closed. Check every nook, alright?"

She nodded and once she had gathered her equipment, she sprinted out of the shack, reveling in the sensation of the direct sunlight on her skin. Being unable to get sunburnt was a great perk. Before the treatment, she easily got the worst sunburns with little to no sun exposure and was forced to cover herself in tons and tons of sunscreen so she wouldn't reduce herself to a walking lobster with blue eyes. Now? Not a problem anymore.

She just couldn't soak up in a bath anymore, and that sucked, but hey… there were worse things.

Like being dead.

The Soviet compound appeared behind a rocky hill, ahead of her. It was a run-down squared building, more like a long wall with a large courtyard in the middle, four watch towers in the corners and two gates on the eastern and western side. Surveillance was tighter than in the places they had visited the day before, she counted thirteen men just during the first and cursory exam of the area performed from afar. She marked them all on the iDroid, then cloaked and got closer. Six more men were inside the rooms. There she found the prisoner, chained to the wall. He didn't look too good.

Once she made sure she had marked every enemy, the prisoner and why not, resources she saw, she pulled away from the compound, find a more than suitable sniping post and waited. She noticed Snake climbing on a cliff on the side of the road to get a better look at the compound.

"Seems like they want to make it harder for us," he said through the microphone. "Alright, what do you think? Snipe them all from here?"

She shook her head and his answer seemed to be a direct reply to that gesture. "No, they would spot us, one way or another. Did you see any decent point of entry?"

She did, in fact, found a breach in the perimeter. A drainage canal that had been left open, without its cover, on the western side of the squared building. She promptly marked the general area she had seen it on the iDroid so Snake could see it. "Uh, alright," he stated. "It's gonna take me a while to get there, keep your eyes open."

As she observed Snake cautiously approaching the compound, she realized she needed a better scope. Snake had provided the tranq rifle with a more than decent scope, but some locations had very bad sniping posts she could occupy, places far away from the action, and she required a better magnification to help him as much as she wanted to.

"Heck, it's hot today…" he murmured as he slid beneath a car to hide from an incoming patrol.

Don't tell me, I'm evaporating out here.

"I'm too old for this shit…"

Quiet chuckled. He was fun to listen, when he infiltrated. He wore a laryngophone, a microphone wrapped around his throat that could pick up even the tiniest sound he made right from his larynx, and he tended to speak a lot, or at least make short, caustic comments about his surroundings. Sometimes he was cute. He saw animals sometimes, tranquilized them and attached them to one of the Fulton balloons and had them carried back to Mother Base to a special platform built only for them.

It wouldn't be bad to see it.

Through the scope, she saw Snake drag a soldier in a bungalow and disappear. The poor guy, when questioned, was happy to talk, before being put down for a while.

"Private Maksim just confirmed that the prisoner is being kept where you saw him and they have no other place to keep him. He also said he's a weapon engineer that tried to defect to the USA. I wonder if this guy would like to join us."

Even if he doesn't like it, Ocelot will convince him one way or another. It worked with me.

"Now, would you mind put the guard there, in front of the gate?"

Quiet found the guy he spoke about and shot. Only to realize there was another soldier in line of sight. Through the scope, she saw the man react to the sudden fall of his comrade.

Fuck… she thought as she trained her rifle on the soldier that came to investigate.

Snake was approaching and she noticed the shocked look on his face when she dared to move the scope from the neck of the soviet. Quick as always he pulled the gun from the holster and after a brief second to take aim, he shot a tranquilizing dart at him. The small needled vial hit the man on the arm, and it took the anesthetic a bit to be effective. When the other man suddenly became sleepy and feel on the dusty ground, Snake snuck out of cover and proceeded to move the two unconscious bodies out of view.

"Careful Quiet," he murmured as he tied the two men together and gagged them with a piece of cloth he had torn from one of the men's shirt. "I have a limited amount of ammo on me at the moment, if we fuck up, we're dead."

She grunted. Don't I know it?

"Oh don't worry, this is nothing to worry about. Infiltrating in broad daylight is a shitty job, but we do it nice enough."

I just wish others on the base would stop spitting on me. Why do you think I take so many showers?

If only he could hear her thinking.

The rest of the infiltration just went as predicted. Snake crawled in a service canal, emerged just inside the courtyard and managed to avoid every guard in the whole complex, knocked some of them out and managed to extract the prisoner in less than an hour. Despite the little mess up with the two men, things went extremely smooth. When Snake reached her sniping point with the prisoner, now visibly relieved, he lay down prone on the rock and took his own sniper rifle from his back and looked up at her. "Let's have some fun!"

Quiet smiled, shaking her head, and decided to put down her gun. You have fun, for once. She thought.

"What?" he asked. "You don't want to…" She shook her head. "Oh… are you alright?" A nod. "You want me to have all the fun?" Another nod. "Oh come on!" Quiet stared him down for a while, and he shrugged, looking a bit intimidated. "Alright, alright. Let's see if I'm still as good as when I got my marksman certificate."

So he had some sort of certification in the end. No wonder he managed to get me, he's trained.

She observed him, as he tranquilized the Soviet soldiers one by one. Their techniques were different, he was more cautious with his shot, while she tended to be more impulsive and that caused her to miss sometimes. He took more time to carefully aim at the right spot and shot only when he was sure. Putting soviet soldiers to sleep seemed like a task he took very seriously, while she tended to do it almost nonchalantly, tried to do it as quickly as she could and get the job done.

After all, she had been trained to be fast and efficient, XOF wanted things to happen quickly, so the cleaners could come in and wipe traces away from the face of the earth.

"Here, done," he stated at some point as he stood up. "Come on, let's call Pequod and head to Mother Base. I don't know you but I don't think this guy can stand the desert for too long."

"Boss, how's the prisoner?" asked Ocelot through the radio, barging in their conversation for the first time since that morning.

Snake looked at the man, who sat on a rock with his canteen in his hands, holding it for dear life.

"Thirsty, malnourished, but not too bad. If Pequod gets here soon enough, he'll be even better." The man raised his head and nodded. He clearly understood English. "And he seems pretty happy to join us."

They helped him walk back to the compound where Pequod was set to land in ten minutes or something. The man looked at her as if he had just seen a ghost, his eyes often diverted from her face to her rack, to the point she had to jab him with her fist and make him look up to her face multiple times, until Snake had enough of it.

"Look at her that way one more time and you'll be on toilet-cleaning duty for your whole life."

That was more than enough. To avoid any possible mistake or wandering eyes, he stopped looking at her, completely.

It was in that moment, while she helped him pack the few things that were worth taking with them immediately before Support Unit would come and grab everything else, that Snake didn't seem fazed by her lack of adapt clothes. He always looked at her straight in her eyes, not once she had caught him staring at her boobs like most of his men.

She wondered why. Not that she would have appreciated, but Quiet knew men, she had even lived with them for a long while, she knew how they reacted to skimpy clothes or lack of them, at least how most of them did. Snake, apparently, wasn't one of them.

Well, he was nearly fifty, born and raised in another, more serious history period, maybe he had been educated that way. Or a lifetime lived within the tight discipline of the military gave him the ability to avoid wandering eyes.

Snake looked at her like she was a person. Not an object.

It felt nice, really.

"Hey Quiet, want some water?" he asked throwing her a plastic bottle filled with ice cold water.

She grasped it and nodded, with a smile. He seemed really to care for her.

"Here, let me help you," he grumbled after he tied a soviet guard to the disabled comm antenna. He brought a second bottle of water, opened the cap and held it over her head. She slipped out of her boots and he tipped the bottle over her head. Her skin immediately sucked in the water like a withering plant and she shivered.

"You alright?" he asked. "You just shivered, is it too cold?"

She shook her head. No, not too cold. It's actually wonderful.

"Oh, alright. Just… you want some more?"

Nah, just fine. Two bottles were more than enough. Even too much, perhaps.

She was trying to comb her soggy hair when Pequod arrived and landed in the courtyard. "Hey Boss!" he blared from the loudspeaker. "Everything alright?"

Snake glanced at her, then at the prisoner and shrugged. "Just right, Pequod. Come on, let's go home."