Metal Gear, it's characters and settings belong to Konami/Hideo Kojima, and are being used here without permission.
Aurochs and Angels
"What did you say?"
His eyes are half-closed. His gaze never leaves the ceiling. Dirty brown
ceiling, crossed with cracks that intersect the dark waterstains like railroad
lines on a map of the Old Country. He's thinking hard, something he is
unaccustomed to, trying to figure out why I'm here, lacing up my boots in the
almost-dark and the not-quite-cold.
He ought to be wondering why he's here instead.
"Nothing. I just said, you remind me of your father."
"No, I don't."
Whether he says that because he understands, or because of some sudden flash of
insight, or just to be self-deprecating, I don't know. He's never been very
bright, but sometimes he manages to surprise me by figuring something out all
on his own.
It's the way he looks. His blond hair and his dark skin; his nose, a little
flat at the bridge, a little crooked from a bad break early in life; his hands,
shaped by newer, better, deadlier guns. His eyes, which are never as blue as
they are in my memories.
But it's not just the way he looks. Maybe it's actually a lot of things. Maybe
it's only a few.
"You're a dirty old man," he mutters.
"Are you really that surprised?"
He rolls his eyes. "Have you got a smoke? I'm in the mood for a slow
suicide…"
Who isn't?
He tilts his chin back and I reach down to slip a cigarette between his lips. I
light it for him and the match throws strange, ghostly shadows over his face.
It reminds me of something, and I think that if I can remember what that is,
then I'll finally understand everything.
He smokes slowly, thoughtfully, and then pushes the shrinking cigarette to the
corner of his mouth.
"Do I really?" he asks; a few ashes fall from the end of his
cigarette, into his hair. He ought to cut it; he'd cut it if he weren't so
vain. If he weren't gazing endlessly at his reflection in a pool…
"Do you really what?"
"Remind you of… you know…?"
"Of your father?" I say, and then, just because they're different
things, "Of Big Boss?"
"Yeah," he says. It's dark, but I can imagine that he might be
blushing. I don't, really, but I can imagine that I might pity him. "Yeah,
that."
"Sometimes," I tell him. Only when I'm not looking for it. Only when
I'm not looking at him, do I catch a glimpse of something familiar out of the
corner of my eye, like a movie ghost lurking in the back of the frame.
I'm looking forward to the day that I am responsible for his death. He'll never
be closer to his father than he is at the moment he realizes he's been
betrayed.
It's what we both want. He just hasn't realized it yet.
He looks a little skeptical. "Sometimes," I say again.
"Sometimes you remind me."
"But not now."
"No, not now."
His mouth twists into a pout, the ineffective pout of someone who's not
accustomed to getting what he wants anyway. "Then why are you here?"
I shrug. "Because I'm just a dirty old man. A character from Nabokov. What
about you?"
"Why not?" he says. "I've been in worse places then this."
He sounds like it doesn't bother him, and maybe it doesn't. But… I wouldn't be
surprised if it does.
"I've done worse shit than this," he says.
And I know that this is the only immortality you and I can share.