Chapter Text
[- ∞ → ∞]
It’s like this: you watch him leave and copies come back but they’re not the same. You fight for one individual in a complex world and he seems to multiply, to find new ways to split your loyalties, and you navigate a sea of troubles to find his motives as you lose track of your own.
Your mind is a battlefield from birth, territory fought over by handlers, each with their encampment secluded in your mind. Every memory regained is a war. It takes you 26 years to wield the weapon they made you.
But, through the years, there is one constant. One person you grow close to, and then start to overlap with. She teaches you what it is like to truly know someone and be known by them. And after so long waiting for John together, united by an experience only you share, you drift apart and come back together eternally.
[1944 → 1958] – [Age 0 → 14]
The Philosophers
Adamska was born in battle scarring his mother with an artificial snake and taken straight from her arms, so it’s no wonder he ended up this particular brand of unbalanced. He’s passed from handler to handler for years, taught to shoot and enjoy shooting, taught to resist drugs, and it never seems abnormal to him until well into his adulthood. He drinks vodka on his fifth birthday; it makes him red-faced, unsteady.
The adults laugh at the stumbling child courting liver failure. He hates it so much he vows that no one will ever laugh at him again. Affecting an air of remote arrogance just encourages them.
Russia is too cold even if it's wormed its way deep enough into his body to stay with him wherever he goes; even if the language feels natural in a way that's too honest; raw: exposed. His handlers speak in Russian and they know everything about him wrapped in a neat paper bundle tied together with string. It was all recorded, from bed wetting (a sign of trauma, someone once told him) to his competency with various martial arts techniques.
What matters is this: in Russia everyone knows him and he does not know them. He cannot lie and he cannot know what runs through their heads. It's espionage he can appreciate, admire as an adult but unforgivably frustrating and he'll wake up years later, body shaking with the memory of vulnerability.
He finds solace in the weekly film showings, elbowing his way through men older than him to get a good seat, spaghetti westerns with their honest melodrama and weapons showmanship. When he can barely stand after training (they know his limits - they know when he can't take anymore because it's all written on that clipboard) he goes back to his room and practices gun tricks.
They let him because it's potentially useful. He has no illusions about that.
He first hears about his mother age 14. Whether it's deliberate or the Philosophers’ idea he will never know. He thinks that she was brought to see him, once, but the memory was scrubbed. He can feel the shape of the absence. That is all.
Ocelot learns that he is an agent of the KGB and CIA both. He is more tool than person, a weapon in the hand that wields him. Where his true loyalties lie depends on which trigger words he has just heard and which area of his tangled head is exposed. He finds himself forgetting so much, and then waking up with memories that he’s sure aren’t his.
Someone assigns him to the GRU, and he isn’t sure if it’s to serve them, to spy on them, or to pretend to spy on them while doing the opposite. Ocelot is 14 and he wakes up at night with no recollection of who he is. He looks at his hands and can’t imagine them as his own.
[1959 → 1963] – [Age 15 → 19]
The Spetsnaz
They send him to Grozjny Grad, to the Spetsnaz and Volgin. At the time he's thrilled (angry and arrogant and young and proud and determined to overcome anything) but looking back he's just so young. Too young to be another of Raikov and Volgin's victims, even if he's always been able to take care of himself. No one's had his childhood - the closest he ever discovers is Liquid Snake. It's interesting how these children the P(hilosophers/atriots) raise for warfare inevitably turn against them.
Then again, they entrusted a sixteen year old to a sadist who could control lightning with his fists. What did they expect? If you beat a dog it will cower or bite you. If you beat Ocelot then he'll take your empire apart even if it takes him a lifetime.
It’s surviving Volgin that first brings him and EVA together. They are the only people who understand what it means to be young and pretty and blond and in the immediate proximity of Volgin. EVA likes him because he’s not interested in her sexually, unlike every other person in this sweltering jungle. Ocelot likes EVA because she doesn’t treat him like a child or his mother’s son.
Sometimes they try to protect each other from the worst. Then they stay up late together and EVA brings vodka. Ocelot’s never had a friend before, just handlers, superiors and subordinates. He practices his English with her and they talk about old movies. He wants to tell her everything, but finds that he can’t. Only his handlers know how to open his mind.
Sometimes, Ocelot thinks that he and EVA are working for the same people. Both spies. But then other times he finds himself aligned against her, wanting to report her. Luckily their friendship is a powerful emotional prerogative. Ocelot shuts his work (which is his life, his mind, his history) out of their relationship as much as he can, which isn’t enough.
[1964] – [Age 20]
Operation Snake Eater
The Cobras arrive in this jungle fortress, and with them someone he's only ever heard of in the context of violence. His mother is the angriest person he's ever known even if no one else seems to notice it. Her son is the American called Naked Snake. Ocelot is an afterthought.
He wants to talk to his mother, but when she looks at him all he can see is disgust hiding despair. He realizes, later, that she is thinking of his father. Ocelot is an unwelcome reminder of when she chose her country over her family and shot the man she loved on the orders of the faceless government. An order she carried out because she feared for Ocelot’s safety. Ocelot thinks that the Boss cannot let herself love him, or even look at him for very long. She carries the hurt with her, small and potent, like a pupating moth. It is an unacceptable vulnerability. She guards it carefully.
Relentless comparisons to his mother were smashed over his head like a mallet during training. He admires her, and thinks he might love her, or that he could at grow into their relationship. He wants to impress her, but he does not. After she nukes hundreds of civilians, he’s not sure he wants to anymore.
When he meets Snake, it’s like everything stops. He sees the same thing in EVA and wishes it wasn’t there because he doesn’t want the competition.
(Years later, he ’ll realize how much of a blessing it was to have them both loving the legend. Because years later he ’ll see loving Snake for what it is – an unequivocal death sentence. A slow, agonizing and futile endeavour. Loving Snake is the kind of odyssey you want your best friend by your side for. There are no victors. Snake doesn t choose anyone.)
As much as Ocelot tries to keep EVA out of his missions, it’s not possible to do it all the time. Some days are made of corrosive fog, where Ocelot doesn’t recognize anything but a mission, indistinct and all-consuming. It’s on one of those days, a day when he is floating miles from his body, that he enters the interrogation room with Volgin and Snake. Distantly, he watches Volgin hurt Snake. His programming doesn’t allow for horror, but some of it leaks through anyway. I love this man, Ocelot realizes distantly. The information doesn’t seem urgent. Everything feels like a dream. I would do anything for him. He watches his mother hold the knife.
When it seems like the Boss is going to blind Snake, Ocelot almost wakes up. Then he sees EVA, and he knows that she’s like him. Somehow hopelessly in love. She’s going to try to stop it. He rises from his reverie for that and pulls her back, but she fights him off and knocks the knife out of the Boss’s hand anyway.
Volgin is glaring daggers at his mother, seemingly ready to order her death. EVA has just exposed herself. Snake could be blind, or dead, imminently. Ocelot doesn’t know what to do. Terrified, his mind collapses into the mission, the mission in which Volgin is his commander and the mole must be routed out. He looks at EVA. He’s known for so long, and yet- She’s his friend.
He slips into the mission and lets his feelings take the back seat. He tells her he’s going to test her. There is nothing but bewilderment and trust in her eyes as Ocelot levels his revolver at her. She knows he can’t shoot her. Ocelot isn’t so sure. Weapons don’t choose when they fire. He likes Russian Roulette because it removes the choice from his handlers and delivers it into the hands of chance. It favours Snake.
Snake intervenes anyway, even with his arms bound, and protects Ocelot from killing his only friend. This takes his love to a whole new level, complete with religious fervour. Something awakens in him. The love is agonizing. He doesn’t know what to do with the devotion. He wants to give Snake everything he is, only it’s not Ocelot’s to give. Only his handlers can decide who Ocelot works with.
His mother slaps him and it's the most attention she's ever given him. There's more in it than reproach. Her cold professionalism cuts deeper than any bullet. It's intimacy of a kind, one combatant to another. He shrugs it off, still drunk on love.
Later, she finds him alone. It’s the first time they’ve stood together without someone in the way.
“Listen.” She says, looking at Ocelot like he’s a wound. “I cannot be your mother.” Ocelot nods, unsurprised. “It’s not good for you here. Soon… soon I will be dead. Snake will kill me. I want you to leave with him. I know that you love him. Help him.” She lets her gaze linger on his face. Ocelot nods again. “EVA will go with you, too. I know you are friends.”
It is the last thing she ever says to him. It takes him years before he can properly follow up on his promise.
Helping Snake kill Volgin is spiritual like uncracking an egg. He won’t give Volgin a coup de grace, not after what he’s done (Ocelot will bear the lightning scars for the rest of his life, will wear the same supple red gloves to hide those on his wrists, the same red scarf to cover his neck). He wishes he’d gotten to see the swine die. Instead he gets to see Snake save his life, which is better.
Duelling Snake is the closest thing to intimacy Ocelot knows. He finishes it with a smile, confident that he won’t be forgotten. John, a precious gift blossoming in his mouth.
He reports back to the DCI, he thinks, but the memory is fuzzy. He has to find the Philosopher’s Legacy for them, or the KGB. The warring commands drive him to do nothing. He fades in and out for a few years, unaware of his missions, so little remaining in his head. He loses touch with EVA.
[1965 → 1969] – [Age 21 → 25]
The Mozambican War of Independence
Someone sends him to Mozambique. Probably one faction or another of the Philosophers. He can’t remember what he’s supposed to do, but it doesn’t seem to matter because he keeps losing time. Once he wakes up in the middle of battle, three men dead at his feet. He can’t remember the mission so he just leaves.
He’s always lived like this. It would kill anyone else. He doesn’t blink, just washes and sleeps.
They teach him to do to others what they did to him. All drugs and needles and electrodes and knives. Interrogation and conditioning. There’s something satisfying in it, in being the one in control for once. He can look down at his subjects and know that they can’t make him forget. Is this how my handlers feel? He asks himself.
When he’s himself, or as close as he ever comes, he leaves for a time and tracks down John. They share some rations over a fire. John’s a mercenary now. He left the CIA when they made him kill the Boss.
“She wasn’t a traitor.” John hisses, staring into the fire. Ocelot can tell that he’s been wanting to talk about the Boss since he killed her. He might be the only other person who understands.
“No, she wasn’t.” Ocelot hesitates. “She told me to work for you.”
Snake snorts. “Work for you like you worked for the KGB, or like you worked for the CIA? How about how you worked for the Philosophers?”
Ocelot’s head hurts. “I’m still trying to get out.” He says, eventually. “When I can, I’ll help you. But don’t trust me. My mind isn’t my own.”
John nods. Next time Ocelot visits, he lets him help with sharpshooting for the mission because it’s not sensitive. They grow close, but never close enough. John doesn’t want him like he wants John. The older man can tell, Ocelot thinks. He can see it in his eyes, a discomfort, a resentment. But they never talk about it.
At the end of the day, Ocelot is too good a weapon to discard, even for the Legendary Mercenary.
[1970] – [Age 26]
San Hieronymo Incident
Ocelot goes to see EVA after he realizes his involvement with John’s capture by FOX at San Hieronymo. His brain feels full of cotton wool and he has more holes than memories. He wants to apologize for almost shooting her. For six years of silence. But he can’t speak. She looks at him without forgiveness or blame. Total acceptance of what he is.
“I hear that you’ve been studying re-education, Adam.” She tells him, looking at his eyes instead of the coffee pot in her hands. She pours it immaculately without a glance, not one drop out of place. He wonders how she knows.
“Yes. In Mozambique.” He doesn’t know what else to add. “John sends his regards.”
EVA rolls her eyes. She’s right – John hadn’t spared a thought for her, not even when asked if there was a message he wanted passed on. He’d have done the same if it was Ocelot. There’s only one person John wants to talk to, and she’s dead.
“Tell him I send my love.” Her teeth are bared. He relates, terribly, to the agonizing futility of loving John. She knows that Ocelot won’t tell him, and even if he did John wouldn’t reply.
They stay silent for a while, then both burst into laughter. Ocelot can’t remember ever laughing before. He wonders if it’s been scrubbed from of his mind, or if he’s never had cause to before. It feels wonderful.
“I missed you, EVA.” He says earnestly. “I…” He thinks about a gun pointed at EVA, about John’s eyepatch. “I…”
“Don’t.” She tells him. “They have so many fingers in your head. They’ve had you since you were, what, born?”
“Yes.” Ocelot closes his eye, probing the tender space in his mind where his childhood should have been.
“Adam. Your brain is a battlefield. The different factions of Philosophers were tearing you apart. You weren’t yourself.”
Ocelot doesn’t think that he has a self, under the missions and amnesia and trigger words. Sometimes he thinks that everything is part of his mission, pre-programmed. Even how he feels about John or westerns. The only thing that’s ever felt his is his relationship with EVA, because it doesn’t mean anything in terms of missions. There’s no advantage to it. Anyway, it reminds him of when his handlers threw him to the wolves when he was fifteen. Thinking about EVA is a potent reminder to trust nobody.
“I don’t-” Ocelot holds his head in his hands. “I don’t know what to do. I forget everything and then the few memories I have turn out to be planted with the intention of influencing my actions. I don’t know what’s real.” If anything can ever be real. “La Li Lu Le Lo.” He says, helplessly, mind flashing back to drug cocktails and electrodes on his scalp.
“Ssh.” EVA says, putting her arm over Ocelot’s shoulders. “You’re learning re-education. You’re learning how to do what they did to you. Now you can start to fight back.”
“I don’t remember where or who… I just wake up with blood on my hands.” He was shaking now. “I just wake up with my childhood missing and I don’t know why.”
“Your mind is a battlefield.” EVA repeats. “Fight back. Do what they did to you to yourself. Reconquer your mind. Plant your own suggestions. Give them fake memories. I’ll help you recover what they suppressed.”
“And then…” The thought is startlingly clear. “And then I pretend that they can still influence me.”
“Yes.” She smiles. “They’ll think you’re dancing to their tune, but you’ll finally be able to choose your own agenda.” The thought of acting for himself (which really means doing anything to protect John and EVA) sounds wonderful. “I’ll help you, if you trust me to do it.”
She’s the only person he’d trust to help him with this. “Okay.”
The control after his first round of reconditioning is dizzying. They make it so that he is the only person who can control his mind. Standing there, in places he was supposed to forget, acting out his responses to trigger phrases from memories freshly unlocked, he feels powerful. For the first time in his life, he’s wielding himself. My way or the highway, he thinks viciously, still pantomiming the same tired responses. My mind is my own.
He kills the DCI in a fit of malicious glee after telling him his simple, simple plan: to end the Philosophers. To turn the weapon they’d made him into back on them. And, while he was at it, to stop this horrible perversion his mother’s dream had become.
Zero contacts him and invites him to join his organization. He’s looking into cloning John. Ocelot accepts, because it’s always easier to destroy something from the inside.
“I’ll do it on one condition.” He says into the phone, knowing the immense value of the weapon that is Ocelot. “You bring John and EVA onboard too.”
He hangs up before Zero can protest.
[1971] – [Age 27]
Les Enfants Terribles
Ocelot holds EVA while she cries. John’s reaction had been… extreme. He’d been so savage – come within a hair’s width of ripping the pregnancy out of EVA with his teeth. Ocelot had expected it. Had even warned EVA. But she’d known what she wanted and what she was risking.
“This isn’t what I wanted.” She whimpers, holding her stomach. There are two mini-Johns in there.
No, she’d wanted a family with John. And unlike Ocelot, she hadn’t realized that was impossible. Instead she’d tried to force it, and ended up pushing him even further away.
“He’ll calm down.” Ocelot says hollowly. He can’t stop worrying that John might decide this is Ocelot’s fault, too. John already barely tolerates Ocelot, for him to despise him-
“Don’t lie to me, Adam.” It was true, John wouldn’t forgive her.
“I’ll be here.” He offers. “I’ll be there when they’re born, and I’ll be with you when they’re gone.”
“I don’t want them to take them away.” EVA whispers. She looks sick. “Run away with me?”
“I can’t leave John.” Can’t quite choose EVA and burn bridges with the love of his life, although it’s a closer competition than he’d care to admit. “They’d find us, anyway. If we want a world where you can keep them then we’ll have to make it.”
“It’ll be too late by then.” EVA is furious, tears pricking at her eyes. She knows that Ocelot is being selfish, but she doesn’t bring it up because she’d do the same. In so many ways, they are the same. “They’re going to take them. And- and they’ll raise them like they raised you.”
“I’ll do my best.” Ocelot says eventually. He doesn’t want anyone else made into a weapon. That was the exact thing his mother had despised – the systematic dehumanization of war. The shapes Zero and Snake had twisted that into… “I’ll try.”
EVA pulls Ocelot close and sobs angrily into his shoulder.
A few months later, he’s holding her hand while she gives birth. EVA names them David and Eli and then lets them go, fury set in her jaw. Ocelot advised her to do that, to seem as though she was fine with it. That way Zero might let her see them again. Ocelot gives her a photo, later. She’ll carry it with her until she dies, will spend hundreds of hours staring at it as though she could will her perfect family into existence.
They’ll laugh together, about how they’re wasting their lives pining for some man. But nothing will change.
Ocelot threatens and cajoles David’s way into an actual family, claiming that his early environment should mimic that of Big Boss. EVA gets to visit until his first birthday. After that he brings her more photos. Sometimes they stake out at his house, watching him with binoculars. But Eli, Eli is raised exactly as Ocelot was, and there’s nothing he can do but swear that the world he creates will never allow for this to be done again.
EVA doesn’t get to visit Eli, but Ocelot keeps tabs. He responds terribly to training and conditioning. Eli first tries to run away when he’s five. He’ll succeed when he’s seven.
Ocelot hopes that he’ll be there when Eli is old enough, so he can teach him the way out of the labyrinth Cipher will have laid in his mind. Until then, he visits EVA whenever he can. Every time she looks more tired, more trodden-down. Every time there’s less time until they get out the vodka. Eventually, they stop talking missions. EVA stops sending John tapes and getting frustrated when there’s no response. Ocelot calls in on her in absolute secrecy so they can watch old movies together.
Sometimes they just sit there in the silence.
[1975 → 1983] – [Age 31 → 39]
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Ocelot has kept tabs while John worked with MSF. He even consulted on occasion. The rest of the time he’s been working for Cipher – he knows that’s where John needs him most. He doesn’t understand – he’s one of the top three people in the organization – so how did he remain uninformed of Cipher’s almost-successful attempt on John’s life?
John’s in a coma when Zero has the audacity to start talking about the construction of more imitations. Ocelot tenses, furious, and goes to see EVA.
“He wants to do it again.” Ocelot says, stung. “Like it went so well the first time!”
“But it will protect him?” EVA asks.
Ocelot closes his mouth. She’s right, of course she’s right. None of this is about how John feels towards him. It’s about John’s happiness and wellbeing.
“You’ll help me through the hypnotherapy?” Ocelot asks her. “I’ll need to set traps in my mind. Make sure I’ve got the right memories. By the end, I won’t know who John really is.” That will be the point, he chides himself.
“I’ll help you.” She agrees. Help you because that’s helping him.
He takes on a job with the GRU in Afghanistan as a cover. The Mujahedeen call him Shalashaka. Ends up having to talk with Kazuhira Miller to organize MSF’s eventual resurgence. Miller annoys Ocelot – he represents a far more tangible rival than the distant EVA, perpetually mourning in her Prague apartment, hopelessly estranged from John. And he has a sneaking suspicion that John actually likes Miller, which is just, ugh.
He doesn’t tell Miller about the Phantom. It’s hard enough to brainwash himself without adding that stubborn bastard to the equation.
He can’t visit the real John’s hospital room because it could reveal his location. He wants to bring John the white grass lilies of Tselinoyarsk. Instead, he brings them to the Phantom. Eases himself into the lie. Just before he goes under for good, he is told that John has woken up. He finally visits him, lilies in hand.
“White lilies are for funerals.” John looks tired.
“They were her flower.” Ocelot doesn’t call the Boss his mother. It could offend him.
“Look after the Phantom for now.” John’s face is hard. “I’ll tell you when you can serve me elsewhere.” His expression softens. “And don’t tell Kaz.”
Ocelot appreciates that John doesn’t doubt his loyalty. If there’s one thing Ocelot will do, it’s follow John into hell. At the end of the day, John trusts Ocelot’s devotion more than Miller’s friendship.
That’s the real victory. Ocelot tells himself grimly, pushing the ache of being so far from John out of his mind. Soon, he’ll rewrite that too.