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Winter was in full swing and David’s joints ached, but it had become almost a good ache, a twanging reminder that he was alive and still able to feel at all.
He sat bundled up on a park bench and found himself strangely relishing the discomfort of the cold seeping through the ass of his pants and how his bare fingers fumbled at the sandwich in his hands, tearing off chunks of meat and bread. A cluster of fearless pigeons had congregated around him, just out of reach of a kick, eyeing his food pointedly.
“Sorry fellas,” he grunted, licking a smear of mayonnaise off his thumb. “Not that kind of old man.”
Eve snuffled inelegantly beside him. She was a very round, very old bulldog with flecks of gray in the pudgy folds of her face and a penchant for rolling on her back in a constant state of lusting for belly rubs. She didn’t need a leash, she just sprawled on the bench at David’s side or followed him around or, when particularly lazy, wheezed until he carried her the rest of the way home.
The plan had been to get Sunny a puppy, but somehow Sunny fell in love with the mother instead. Sunny always did like old dogs.
David was the one who named her Eve, still not entirely sure what possessed him to pay tribute to his not-quite mother in this way.
It was probably a terrible tribute. For one thing, Eve drooled.
Passersby were not entirely charmed by this picture of a scarred old man with his snorting ugly dog at his knee, but David was used to getting odd looks from time to time. He didn’t care.
The only thing that mattered was the bells from campus ringing the end of the hour.
The number of students in scarves and messenger bags increased, navigating the browned snow-slush clumsily, and David was watching an older redhead, thinking vaguely of Meryl, when finally someone plopped down beside him with a huff.
“Busy day?” David asked, stuffing the last bite of sandwich into his mouth and crumpling up the deli paper.
“I hate grading essays,” Hal whined. He was turning into an old man himself these days, at least middle aged, but it seemed to do his features good. His coat was fashionable, nothing he would have touched in his twenties, and his sleek leather gloves and matching briefcase were, if David was perfectly honest with himself, tantalizing.
But Hal himself never changed much, did he?
He leaned over David’s lap to ruffle Eve’s ears.
“Some of these kids still don’t know how to think beyond parroting their textbook,” Hal said slowly, not meanly but certainly with a hint of weariness. “Bit of a problem for an Ethics class.”
“That’s where you come in, hmm?”
“I hope so. I just didn’t think teaching would involve such…” He made a gesture like a hammer. “Forcing their brains to work!”
David smiled crookedly under his mustache. “I think I knew a kid like that once,” he said. “Except he had plenty of ethics, just no common sense.”
“Harsh,” said Hal, but he was smiling also.
The sky was gray and it smelled like snow, that cold nondescript smell that tells you to get inside with a warm drink sooner rather than later. As such, the two men got to their feet, and because Eve was feeling thoroughly sluggish, David hefted up the fat dog in his arms, knees creaking on the way up. Hal made a fondly exasperated noise.
It was only because David was a very observant man that he noticed the same red-headed student from before walk by, more slowly this time, as if doubling back. She caught sight of Hal and perked up, immediately approaching them, her hair longer than Meryl’s but the same bright red tied back in a braid slung in her coat hood.
“Professor Emmerich,” she said, eyes flitting only briefly to David then quickly away. Didn’t like what she saw, apparently. She focused very pointedly on Hal. “I thought I might find you here. Did you grade our papers yet?”
Hal’s smile was more than just polite, a bit of genuine eagerness on his student’s behalf. “I don’t think I got to yours yet, Charlotte. Gimme the weekend, though, and I’ll have your grade for sure!”
“That’s what you said last week,” she chastised, but with no real venom. She seemed to like Hal, or maybe that’s just how all the savvy college kids acted around professors they wanted a good grade from.
Her eyes finally fell on David, reaching a point in the conversation where she couldn’t ignore him any longer. The alarmed disgust on her face was also perhaps reminiscent of a younger Meryl, however veiled it was by her nervous smile. David didn’t blame her. His face was not pretty to look at these days, half of it warped by burn and also two unnatural-looking scars slotting from the corners of his mouth down his gaunt cheeks… People often looked at him with wariness.
They could see what he was, they just didn’t realize it. A part of them knew this was a man from a different, harsher world, one they could never quite comprehend from their own comfort.
But Hal’s smile broadened, and he pressed a hand firmly against the small of David’s back.
“This is my husband,” he said.
Hal always said that so easily.
Her gaze softened, still unnerved, but now with something closer to recognition.
It was like she realized with those words that he was human.
“Would shake your hand but they’re full,” David grumbled, Eve drooling against his chest languidly.
“Ah, well, nice to meet you!” said Charlotte.
They all three exchanged pleasantries until Charlotte seemed to meet some social quota and took her leave back to campus. Hal’s hand rubbed up and down David’s back a few times, finally coming to hook around his waist.
“Home?” Hal asked, as David’s body automatically leaned into his side with familiarity.
“Home,” David agreed.
Eve licked up her own drool strands happily.
x
They had a small house close to campus, surrounded almost alarmingly by student renters and, at the corner of the street, a gas station that single-handedly doled out most of the campus’ weekend alcohol. On the outside, their house was a skinny old-fashioned place like the rest of the block, but on the inside it was crammed full of the sort of technology that had helped save the world almost ten years ago.
This same technology had also saved David’s life.
There was a catch, of course. It wouldn’t be life without a catch. Every day for about two hours, David had to hook himself up to what Hal carefully called “Enhancements.” It was a similar system to Jack’s cybernetics, and indeed had been supplied through a string of favors starting with Raiden. Of course Hal had made his own minor adjustments, unwilling to leave David’s fate in the hands of anyone else.
It was essentially a removable cybernetic suit that closed in on David’s body, clasping at various contact points that dug straight to his bones, the holes in his skin and muscle rimmed by a partly organic compound, flexible yet shining a metallic silver color. The headpiece connected at his jaw, causing the scar lines around his mouth, and most importantly three small plugs were inserted at the top of his spine, where circular incisions made a triangle in his flesh under his hair. The cybernetics interacted with his nanomachines to rebuild him day to day. At least those were the layman’s terms.
It was something of a half life. He didn’t regain his lost youth, and his body was still perpetually tired and aching, worsening the longer he went since his last recharge. But he wasn’t dead yet. No one quite knew how much time he would get in this arrangement, but he would have time, and perhaps that was all that mattered. He even got to keep his own body as part of the deal, however beaten up it might be.
Didn’t make two hours of sitting in a metal suit less boring, however. Hal always hovered during recharge when he was at home. After years of this, he’d upgraded from constant nervous chatter at David to casually reading books and grading assignments while his husband watched tv. But he still hovered. Hal was only too aware that this technology holding David together was something he was partially responsible for.
Today he pulled out the essays, starting with Charlotte’s, and sat beside David in this now familiar but still very strange scene of a bionic man lounging on the living room sofa. David’s “enhancements” were mostly a shining black color, reminding him vaguely of a sneaking suit, and after the first hour they became vaguely warm to the touch, like an overheated laptop. Near the end of the recharge, one could smell a slight metallic tang in the air, and for some reason this smell always made David crave a cigarette. He’d quit but something about this whole scenario made him want to throw that away more than anything.
But Hal was sitting beside him in a turtleneck with a pen cap in his mouth, frowning slightly at his work, and David wouldn’t betray him like that.
The egg timer on the coffee table—Sunny’s, which she’d helpfully adjusted for two hours—finally went off and David groaned with testy relief. He stood, legs emanating a hydraulic hiss.
“I just have to finish this paragraph and I’ll help you out of that,” Hal said, but David leaned a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine on my own.”
“No really, I’m almost—“
“I’m fine,” David said, more firmly.
Sometimes he had to do things on his own just to remember he could.
Hal glanced at him over the top of his glasses, assessing, then nodded and went back to his work.
David made his way clunkingly to their shared bedroom, and sitting on their too-small bed he slowly and methodically removed each piece of metal armor, yanked out each plug without ceremony. It was an unpleasant feeling, not quite pain but certainly a pinching discomfort, like getting a flu shot. The knowledge of the needle was half the ordeal.
He laid out the pieces carefully across the bed, but got lazy when putting his clothes back on. He felt overheated from toasting in the suit, and so settled for pulling on his boxers and sitting mostly naked and sweating in the cool room.
He still wanted a cigarette, but the desire was drifting away slowly, like the pains in his joints.
Revival. A regular Lazarus. Who’d have thought?
His military training never died, though, and for that reason he heard the small shuffle from the closet just then. It was only a tiny incongruence, there then gone again, but it was enough for him to look up sharply and watch the door like a hawk.
Very slowly, the closet door creaked open. Then a little telescopic lens peered out, attached to a long neck.
“Are you decent, Snake?”
David relaxed. “Yeah, I got my pants on.”
The door pushed open just enough for a small robot to roll its way out. It was similar to the MkII and MkIII systems, a square little body on spindly legs, with a lens-like face. It was baby blue, however, with a large flower painted on one side, and when its screen swung open it revealed the face of Sunny smiling at him toothily.
Her hair was getting long. She was older, turning into a tomboy like her mother with overalls and chunky gloves, but she had also recently learned how to apply make-up. In David’s opinion, she was very pretty.
“What are you doing hiding in the closet?” he asked, as the robot came to roll up beside him. They called this little guy Sunny Cam.
“I wanted to get you alone,” she said, as Sunny Cam craned its neck to peer into the hallway conspiratorially. “You know what day it is Saturday, right?”
Admittedly, David had to think about it, but in his defense the date did ring a bell.
“Hal’s birthday,” he said.
“Forty-three!” said Sunny emphatically. “That’s pretty ancient, but that’s a big deal, right?”
Most birthdays were a big deal in Sunny’s opinion. Truthfully, neither David nor Hal had been accustomed to celebrating their own birthdays much, not even when they were living together during Philanthropy. It was hard to start a habit when it had never been there before. But when Sunny came along and they made the effort to give her proper birthday parties every year, she insisted on returning the favor.
Onscreen, she was grinning. “I’m gonna come home this weekend,” she said. “I’ll take the train. Don’t tell him though, I want it to be a surprise.”
“Need somebody to secretly pick you up at the station then?”
“Yep! Friday around 3.” Sunny Cam did a little wiggle and extended its neck towards David now. “I have a project he’ll be excited about too. What are you getting him?”
David shrugged and she scoffed.
“You guys are the worst.”
“I’ll take him out to dinner, how’s that?”
“Since he’s the one who makes the money, probably not great. But he does need somebody to coax him out and about sometimes.”
“Good to have your blessing.”
Sunny Cam shook its little head. “Geez, Snake.”
She had stopped calling them Uncle long ago, but she still called him Snake instead of David in private. It was not impersonal, just what she was used to. In a darkly funny way it had become something like Dad.
He found himself smiling fondly, very grateful in this moment that he’d been able to watch her grow up like this.
“How are the spaceships?” he asked, wanting to talk to her.
“I’m still really liking Solis!” she said. “Everybody’s really excited about what they do around here, you know? It’s nice to be with… fellow nerds.” She laughed a little self-deprecatingly, in a way that reminded him of Hal.
“They respect you even though you’re younger,” David pried, and the excitement on her face was answer enough to that.
“I feel like everybody’s baby sister, but they know I’m better at robots than they are.”
“Good.”
Sunny Cam extended a long thin arm to pat David’s knee clumsily.
“I actually gotta get back to work now that my stealth mission is over, but I’ll see you guys at dinner.”
“Fair enough,” said David. Then, with utter honesty: “I’m proud of you.”
Her smile was very bright as the screen closed. She was a happy young woman with an expansive future stretching out ahead of her.
That made just about everything worth it, probably.
x
That evening, as Eve waddled her way around the house, nails tapping on hardwood then shuffling to carpet, Hal and David made dinner. Neither of them were much for cooking, but they’d at least mastered a few simple spiceless casseroles. At the end of the day, they were both tired, and worked back-to-back in comfortable silence in their small kitchen.
After everything was in the oven, they perched themselves on the two stools at the center partition with a pair of decaf coffees, side by side.
They heard a small voice from afar and the whirr of Sunny Cam’s wheels. No doubt, Sunny was back and taking some quality time with Eve in the other room.
“Charlotte’s essay was pretty interesting,” Hal said, the casual start of a conversation. “She’s pretty bright. A little, er, cutthroat when it comes to her grades, but I think she has a lot of potential to do good things for her field.”
“Got yourself a protégé, huh?”
“Ha. Not sure I’d call it that.”
David thought absently of Meryl again. If Meryl was one step better than his generation, perhaps Charlotte was yet another step in that direction, everyone walking year by year farther away from the pain that had created Solid Snake.
Or maybe that was narcissistic. Maybe their happiness had nothing to do with him at all.
“Dave… Have you ever considered coming to speak at the school?” Hal asked.
David snorted. “And say what? Hello, I’m a top secret military clone?”
“Not that part. I meant… the meaning of it. What you stand for.”
“I still stand for something?”
Hal leveled him with a very solid look that forbade further joking on that subject. “You’ve always stood for something. Not always the same thing, but… Your whole life has had meaning, and that doesn’t just go away because you’re retired.”
No, David supposed it didn’t. The only way he’d found not to have unbearably many regrets in life was to always dedicate himself to something bigger and better. It had started as atonement perhaps, but it changed as time went on. New reasons, new meanings, taking him further away from his aimless youth of alcoholism and loneliness. Maybe caring about the world’s wellbeing, taking it on as a responsibility, wasn’t only his duty but also some backwards way of combatting that loneliness. It was important to be together with humanity, right? It was more important than fate or genetics.
David shook his head with a small smile. “I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You want me to interact with this future we worked to create.”
“That you sacrificed so much for,” Hal corrected, but he was watching David intently.
“No, that’s not for me,” said David. “I only wanted to protect the start, not guide what would come out of it. Now it’s time for me to just watch and let it be, I think. I’ve always preferred disappearing.”
Hal was smiling warmly, seemingly content with this answer. “That takes a lot of faith,” he commented.
David barked out a laugh at the word choice and lowered his mug. “Maybe.”
He’d never believed in a god, but maybe this was what his spirit clung to instead. Humanity, its faults and cruelties, a great big mess doomed to die out in some far future and render all its struggles and desperation meaningless… But it would be a beautiful thing, wouldn’t it? A beautiful scrambling, for all its long story. Maybe David loved it.
He loved Hal, at the very least.
They’d spent almost twenty years together now. And there were many years left to spend.
Forty-third birthday, huh?
Hal leaned closer slightly as if sensing exactly what David had in mind. David kissed him, an end-of-the-day coffee sort of kiss but when Hal cupped the scarred side of his face, an intensity tightened David’s chest, a desire to kiss Hal very thoroughly indeed.
If David was younger he might have worried more about his own appearance, old and cragged as he was. He’d worried when the aging first started. But he had watched Hal during their final missions, he had seen Hal’s face all through the years that Old Snake was dying, and he’d known through every second of that pain that what Hal wanted more than anything was time.
He wanted David, and that worked out just fine because David wanted him as well, here in their home together in something like peace. It was more than anything David had ever allowed for himself.
Sunny Cam rolled off the living room carpet onto the hardwood, Sunny making a grossed out noise from the screen as it approached the kitchen.
“Caught red-handed,” Hal said close to David’s mouth, and David pressed his lips forward for one last quick kiss before they pulled apart.
“You want a minute?” Sunny asked, wrinkling her nose, but also grinning.
“Naw, dinner’s almost done,” said David.
Off at Solis, Sunny had herself a bowl of curry and raised it with a “cheers!” from her lap.
A family dinner with the two people who loved him most.
It seemed a very strange end for Solid Snake, too quiet and warm, but he would hold these moments dearly through whatever the future would bring.