Disclaimer: Metal Gear Solid and its characters belong to Hideo
Kojima. Doronin belongs to Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. Anything else you don't
recognize is mine.
Rating: NC-17, for anything I can fit in it.
Notes: "Privideniya" is
a Russian word for "ghosts". Thanks EAG, Croik,
and Grayswandir for tireless beta,
and AmZ for answering all my stupid questions. They
made this fit for human consumption.
* *
*
There
was no hope for him this time.
Ocelot
had forgotten how to be worried a long time ago, but he was still painfully
aware that after fifty years, he had found his way back here just to die.
Dawn
broke over the mountains. The air was thin and cold, so clear it seemed to put
up no resistance, no friction at all. Ocelot held his breath to keep white
clouds of condensation from fogging the lenses of his scope. Slivers of ice
formed in his mustache from the damp chill, and gray crystals stuck in his
eyelashes.
He
had found this small shelf of stone the day before. It jutted out over the
downward slope of the mountainside, leaving him with an unobstructed view of
the plateau about a hundred meters below.
Up
against the cliffside, the fortress of Groznyj Grad rose out of the breaking sunlight like a
ghostly warship. Ocelot didn't believe
in much - certainly not omens - but he couldn't ignore the shiver that raced
down his spine at the sight of those old stone walls and new steel doors.
Fifty
years ago, a nuclear explosion had stripped the fortress to its steel
dragon-bone skeleton, but even that hadn't been enough to level it. Groznyj Grad had been designed so that 500 men could hold
off an army of 50,000. Only one man had ever gotten past its defenses, and that
man was dead. In this country, someone with a secret wouldn't find a better
place than this to keep it.
Ocelot
scribbled mental notes, furious and accurate as a court stenographer.
Everything above the first floor of the west wing was still just a steel
frame. The northeast courtyard was
stacked with crates – computer equipment, no doubt – to be unloaded.
Most
of the personnel would not be awake yet. The security would be lax. One
well-placed explosion could set construction back months. He knew he could
orchestrate something like that, set it all up over a slow lunch hour. But that
wasn't what he was here to accomplish.
Slowly,
Ocelot's gaze swept away from the complex, over the black tarmac and past the
outer ring of electric fences. He didn't know quite what he was looking for,
but he was confident he'd know it when he saw it. There would be a large
maintenance bay; it was likely it would be underground, where the surveillance
satellites couldn't spot it. The earth would be displaced somehow, as though
over a fresh grave.
Already,
there was a dull ache building in his left hand. A twisting
constriction just beneath his skin. Ocelot's jaw tightened,
and he shifted his grip on the scope, methodically straightening each of his
fingers in turn, flexing them. It was
always worst in the morning, and he knew that if he could do this now, he would
last the rest of the day.
It
had been three months since the drugs had worked as well as they should have.
He
had a little time left, enough time. The specialists had told him it would be a
year, two on the outside before he would lose the use of his hands, before they
would begin to throb and stiffen and stumble over delicate work. Like
reloading, like shooting… Ocelot hadn't listened much after that.
There
were strong painkillers he could have taken, but they would have only fogged
his judgment and slowed his reflexes. There was an operation to replace the
joints – fine microsurgery that could have made them like they'd been when he
was young – but Ocelot had no intention of ever going under the knife again.
He
had a year, and that was more certainty than he was used to.
He
waited while his hands throbbed, tightened, then relaxed again. The shaking
subsided. Ocelot's eyes narrowed a little; he was smiling.
A
gale of chilly wind ricocheted like a bullet down the side of the mountain,
singing in his ears and tearing at his clothes. His long hair, tucked into his
collar out of the way, slipped free. It battered the sides of his face,
sticking in the corners of his mouth.
He,
who had spent ten years in the taiga and never shivered, felt the cold now,
into his very bones.
He
swept his scope once more over the ground below. But even his trained eye found
only the familiar contours of the fortress; smooth new blacktop, and the
clutter of construction. Maybe what he had been looking for wasn't really there
at all…
Ocelot
sighed and let his hand fall. He wasn't used to going away with nothing to show
for it; this wasn't a retreat. He only needed a new way of looking at the
situation.
He
turned to go. His knees ached as he started down the steep incline, but he
ignored the dull pain. The sun threw his shadow across the rocks. Long and lean and dark, gilded by the dawn.
But
there was something inside it: a core, a heart of something darker. Something that watched him with cold blue eyes. Ocelot
turned to look, and already it was gone.
He laughed, shook his head slowly. "It's no use," he said quietly. The wind picked up again, whipping red dust around him, turning the sunrise to blood. "There's no hope for me this time."