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It's a year after Shadow Moses and only a month after Meryl left him to go back to the lower forty-eight when there's a knock on his door. It's a nearly singular event in Snake's life. His cabin is in the middle of a small patch of Alaskan forest, twenty miles from the nearest town, and he has no neighbors. The dogs only scratch, and the men that retrieved him before Shadow Moses didn't bother with formalities like announcing their presence.
Subsequently, it takes Snake a good ten seconds to recognize the sound for what it is, and another five to remember he's supposed to go open the door now.
On the other side is Otacon, a man so poorly built for the weather, Snake finds a pleasing irony in the fact that his eyes are the exact same color the sky during a snowstorm. He hadn't noticed it before, perhaps because Otacon's glasses hid them so well before. The new pair of tasteful rectangular glass has that twenty-bucks-extra coating that keeps the light from reflecting and obscuring. It makes the man look different. Less invisible, he thinks.
"Natasha and I, we're starting an organization," he says, wisely skipping annoying small talk. "We thought you might be interested."
Snake studies the man, finishing his mental cataloging of all the minute changes that last year has had on him. There's more than Snake expected. Satisfied, Snake nods and backs away from the door.
Hal is not the same person Otacon was, it takes Snake too long to realize. He can't put his finger on what exactly is different. It's more than the way Hal sometimes looks him in the eye now when Otacon was too nervous too. It may have something to do with the way he speaks, steady and sure as he explains the purpose of Philanthropy, but no, his voice still wavers as he asks Snake what he thinks, if he's at all interested. Hope is raw and tangible in his voice.
Snake pretends to think about it for a long moment, watching how Hal's face slowly, slowly colors in embarrassment as the silence stretches. He holds it as long as he dares, trying to pinpoint what it is that makes the engineer in his kitchen a stranger.
Snake sets aside the question, certain he'll have time to figure it out later. He already knows what his answer to Hal will be, but he presses for more information anyway, this time really listening.
Philanthropy's first mission doesn't come quickly. Snake wonders what they need him for if all they do is research and gather information. After a few months, he asks Hal about it, tone carefully neutral so not to send Hal into a fit for dragging Snake away from his home. ("There are more worthy causes than drinking and training dogs, Hal," Snake had replied the first time Hal had felt guilt over recruiting Snake. "Don't worry about it.")
Now, Hal rolls his eyes and tells him they didn't expect to have missions lined up soon. "If you'd said no, we'd have no agent to carry them out anyway."
"But I didn't say no," Snake points out mildly.
"Well, I had no way of knowing that before, did I? Hindsight's twenty-twenty, but foresight's legally blind." Hal smiles at him for a brief second before looking back to his work.
It hadn't occurred to Snake that Hal would have expected him to say no. That seems so pessimistic for him.
Then Snake thinks maybe they really don't know each other at all and never did.
Suiting up for infiltrating the Discovery (and that joke is not lost on him), Snake examines what he knows about his partner.
When he thinks of Hal, he thinks of sound. Hal can fill a room with noise easily, either of typing, of music with lyrics he cannot understand, or of his own recitations of statistics and plans and general inanity. It's a comforting sort of white noise that doesn't drown out the rest of the world; it heightens Snake's hearing, makes things clearer.
He would never have accused Hal of being bold, but the man's shyness sometimes surprises him. He's gotten so used to the fairly casual, open atmosphere around them as they work, Snake has to catch his own puzzlement when Hal is unable to meet someone's eyes and his voice drops to something quiet out of some sort of self-defense. What he's defending himself from, Snake has no idea.
Mostly, Snake is preoccupied with how simple Hal can be. His goals are always so uncomplicated and he only seemed to be aware of the world around him on a purely academic level. Nothing was real until the implications were pressing down on him in a way that was impossible to ignore. Maybe a result of all the media Hal absorbed; simple, technicolor worlds with simple, technicolor plots that even the most unsavvy could predict.
Snake is uncertain who the man he met in Shadow Moses was, but the one he shared this apartment with, Snake was fairly sure he knew him.
He was wrong.
There is nothing cut and dry, nothing simple in the eyes he's staring into as he shakes from the freezing water. There's just a turbulent mess of emotions contained in transparent irises, a storm locked in a clear glass bottle. He has no idea where the hell Hal had been hiding that before now, because it's so damn obvious now.
Funny how near-death experiences put Snake's world into focus. Could've been the soldier in him.
Funny how it takes nearly drowning to notice how very warm Hal's hands are.
Hal can talk for long stretches of time, but now that Snake's listening again, he can hear the lack of substance to Hal's words, how little of himself is in the sound. Now, Snake hears the intense quiet that surrounds the engineer and the volumes more it says about him.
Now, Snake sees that Hal isn't nearly as calm with him as he thought. Hal's eyes will meet his, yes, but only fleetingly before they've flickered away to something else. A million little things that Snake hadn't seen before, now so painfully obvious. He still doesn't know anything about the man. Does that mean he's behind? That Hal knows him more than he knows Hal?
Still waters run deep. If that's so, then Hal is an ocean in a paper cup.
After Snake's recovered from the complete catastrophe that was the Discovery infiltration, he watches Hal feed all his hard copy reports about RAY into the paper shredder, careful to take out staples and the only put five sheets in at a time. His face is oddly blank through it all.
"What are you doing?"
"Shredding." The 'duh' is silent.
"But why? Isn't that your only copy of that information?"
"Ate ni naranai chizu yakute shimaeba ii sa," Hal explains. His pronunciation is perfect even though Snake is certain that the individual words mean nothing to him. The message is clear enough though, and that's all that matters.
"Hal..."
Hal looks up from the crinkly photo in his hands, a yellow snapshot of Hal holding his little sister in a loose, easy hug. He meets Snake's gaze evenly. Something he sees there makes Hal smile kindly, the first since the Big Shell. "Don't worry, Snake. I'm saving my breakdown for later."
That stings the soldier, the presumption in Hal's words. Snake shakes his head and replies, "Hal... you're not a burden to me."
Hal blinks, then laughs, as if this were a joke. "Yeah, okay." It's not skepticism in his voice, but flat-out disbelief.
Snake wants to reassure Hal that he's serious, that he didn't see Hal's emotional nature as a burden, but Hal's already looking through Emma's things again for a clue to her computer password, and the conversation's over. There's work to do.
Hal Emmerich is going to drive him insane, which, considering what Snake has gone through and come out of mentally intact, is quite a feat. But paradoxes have always captivated and confused him, and Hal is nothing if not contrary. It's like two completely different people are inhabiting the same body, but rather than being a case of DID, they are undeniably linked and whole.
Which, Snake realizes, makes no sense, and now he's back to square one.
Where Otacon is effortlessly confident in his abilities and a master of Occam's Razor, Hal is utterly devoid of that, fragile and brilliant like blown glass. He habitually traps spiders under empty cups and releases them back outside, yet when he finds out Snake didn't manage to kill Ocelot, his lips press together in a severe white line. He's dwarfed by the sheer expanse of most rooms he's sitting in, but when Snake manages to catch his eyes (provided Hal doesn't quickly look away), there's a crushing depth there. When he's been awake for too many hours, burning midnight oil to stay awake, Snake imagines falling through the smoky glass of Hal's eyes wouldn't be like falling down to the ground, but up into the sky, endless tumbling into space with no sign of end.
"Penny for your thoughts," Hal says, snapping Snake out of his disjointed wondering.
Snake keeps watching the mousy brown hair tousled around the back of Hal's head, measuring the words in his head over and over before letting them escape: "Is it possible to completely understand a person?"
"Sure." Hal's head bobs in a quick nod. "That's maybe what love is, I think."
That's a tall price, Snake thinks, and hopes Hal's wrong.
It's not until a few years later that Snake finally tells Hal he makes no sense, even after all the time they've worked and lived together. Of course, Snake doesn't just come out and say this. Instead, he says, "This is a depressing game."
Hal glides his chair across the tile to look over Snake's shoulder. "You're up to the last Needle, huh? Let me know when you get to the End screen, I have this theory about the Dragon being an analogue for the player."
Of course you do. Snake smirks. "This is a very depressing game," he says again, because sometimes Hal completely forgets the subject at hand and needs to be reminded.
"No more than any of my games," Hal replies, leaning against Snake's shoulder slightly to watch the screen. "This one's just more jarring because it's so colorful and... cute, I guess."
"Kind of your thing, isn't it?" Snake points out casually. "Deceiving appearances."
Hal frowns, and Snake can see Hal flipping through his mind's catalog of media, checking and verifying. "I... Uh, yeah, you're right, I suppose. But I've grown up on this stuff. I never assume something's going to be simple and light-hearted just because of its style."
"Matter of perspective."
"And mine comes pre-skewed," Hal says cheerfully before sliding away again. Not for the first time, Snake wonders which of them is more damaged.
It's Philanthropy's sixth anniversary, also falling exactly ten months after their last field mission. Snake's laid on the sofa stuffed into a corner of the apartment in a classic bachelor sprawl, the beer in his hand making a dark ring of condensation on the knee of his jeans. He's too busy staring dully into the light of the ceiling lamp to really care though. When he blinks, there's a red and yellow flare in the same spot, stark contrast in the darkness.
"You'll injure your eyes like that," Hal says as he tumbles down into the space next to Snake. By the oddly playful tone, Snake guesses his partner too knows the significance of the day.
"How many different vision prescriptions have you let your computer burn through, Otacon?"
"That's different. Sitting in front of a monitor sorting information is my job."
Snake grunts vaguely, conceding the point before taking a long drink of his beer. Hal's warmth is spreading along his side like water drowning a beach in high tide. A shiver skitters along Snake's skin, asking to break over. He remains still, ignoring it.
"Can ... I ask you something?" The unusually hesitant tone draws Snake's gaze away from the light to a different kind of brightness. He meets Hal's wary eyes steadily and nods. "With... Philanthropy's been slowing down for a while, ever since the Big Shell. I've been wondering if..." Hal's gaze shifted away, either out of embarrassment or the usual nervousness Snake was long since used to.
"What?" Carefully quiet, prompting.
"You don't have to- You could go wherever you want, maybe back to Alaska, maybe somewhere else."
Snake frowned, wishing Hal would look at him when he said things like this. "As opposed to?"
"This." A vague gesture encompassing much more than just the apartment. "I don't want you to feel obligated to..."
"To stay with Philanthropy?"
"With me."
Idiot, Snake thinks, meaning the both of them at once. How many times had Hal asked? How many outs had Snake turned down? How could Hal still be so confident in his idea that no one would want to be with him, after all this time?
"David?"
Snake sighs and offers Hal a faint smile. "Why, Hal?"
"I... I don't know. You've dealt with me for so long without complaint. I feel like I'm driving you crazy," he admits sheepishly.
"I like crazy." The words tumble out before he can think about them, impulsive and right. "I'm not going anywhere unless you want me to."
Hal smiles, soft-edged joy clear on his face, and Snake returns it easily. He lifts an arm, letting his partner slide along the sofa until he's resting against the soldier's side. He's relieved to see that threatening maw of distance and awkwardness that'd stopped him so many times before is nowhere to be seen. Hal just moves until he's more comfortable before relaxing with his head on Snake's shoulder.
"Oh, um, by the way: Happy anniversary."
Snake chuckles almost soundlessly, thinking Hal has no idea how true that is. "Same to you, Otacon."
Seeming satisfied that his conversational duties are done, Hal pulls his socked feet up onto the sofa, curling up against Snake. Snake lets him, wraps his arm loosely around Hal's shoulders, and tries to place the smell from Hal's shampoo. Coconut, he decides after a while
Silence is a common state for them, and the lack of noise wraps around them like a wool blanket in winter, blocking out the rest of the world. For a moment, Snake lets go and stops being careful.
"Hal?"
"Hm?"
"Tell me what you're thinking."