Flying solo was not Jack's area of expertise. He was used to being a weapon, having someone aim and fire him. He was used to having someone do the thinking, the preparation for him, and then being left to look after the complicated yet simple task of keeping himself alive in a combat zone.

Oh, he wasn't an idiot. After getting the hell out of "FoxHound" Jack had struck out into the world, feeling like he had opened his eyes for the first time. Fight for what you believe in, Snake had told him. He had never known what that was, in Fox Hound. He had just being trained to be a gun, waiting to be pointed at someone. Now, after the Big Shell, he remembered that that had been his life, since he was a child. He had never been anything except a mindless weapon. And he had had enough of it.

Knowledge of the Patriots, and Metal Gear, was everywhere if you knew what to look for. To those who followed their actions, hidden as they were, he was a celebrity. Earning their trust had been difficult, but once he had they had allocated to him all the resources he needed. They had set up his own small team, recruited him a hacker to find targets and a tech/weapons nerd to maintain and develop his equipment. For the first time, his masters were looking down the wrong end of the barrel. He would find them, and stop them from creating another Raiden.

It was for this aim that he was currently crawling through a ventilation shaft in a factory in the middle of the Amazon. His current hacker, a somber German named Max who rarely spoke but apparently did amazing things with aerial photography, had located what he thought was a factory with Patriot ties some three days walk south of Santarèm in Brazil. The factory, Max believed, was manufacturing parts for Metal Gears which were most cheaply made using chemicals banned in North America.

Why the Patriots would be manufacturing more Metal Gears, Jack had no idea, but they had gone to the trouble of creating Arsenal Gear and its army of Rays just to create a suitable training environment for one man, so he had no doubt that they could very well be involved.

His job now was to find proof of that, as well as hopefully why they were once again expressing an interest in creating Metal Gears. Destroying the factory would be an added bonus.

His techie, a young Californian with some Army training, and Max had coordinated to have him dropped from a plane into the vicinity of the factory. He had been set up with weapons and communications by Chris, the techie, and instructions and briefed with satellite maps by Max. The parachuting, despite their poor directions, had gone well, and he had managed to infiltrate the factory without being sighted. From there on in he was on his own. Max had been unable to turn up any intelligence on its interior design, and only vaguely able to speculate what different areas of the compound might before.

Jack, upon scrambling out of his parachute, had gone for the main building and slid in through a ventilation shaft.

He had been crawling through ventilation shafts for what felt like hours now. He wasn’t even sure they were working properly; the air in them felt even hotter and more humid than the air outside the factory had. He had passed over several empty corridors, and a couple of storage rooms packed with wilting cardboard boxes, but as of yet he hadn’t seen anything which looked like an assembly-line set up, much less anything more sinister.

Tired, knees and elbows aching, Jack stopped and lay down in the vent, put his finger to his neck to click on the tiny mic-radio set up. Nanomachines were much more convenient and safer from the perspective of being discovered by the enemy, but they were expensive and without a medical expert on the team, quite possibly dangerous. They had opted for a small earpiece and mic at his neck with enough sensitivity to relay whispered conversations reliably.

“Max?”

The voice which replied right in his ear was not the low-pitched German-accented tones he had expected, but a higher, more laid-back one. “No, it’s Chris. Max is offshift.”

“I need some data on the layout of this building. And by some, I mean any. I don’t know where the fuck I’m going here!”

“I can try to get into Max’s computer, but I’m pretty sure he’s got some major firewalls up. Can you hold on a sec?”

“I guess.” Tense and frustrated, Jack lay his head down on the warm metal of the shaft. Damn, Snake was lucky. He had snagged himself a techie and a hacker in one go. And one that gave a damn about missions. Max and Chris both had bones to pick with the Patriots, but they saw the way to do that through their research work more than guiding him through his missions. Which was goddamn annoying when he was risking his life on them while they were taking time off.

“Raiden?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s a no go. He’s got all his stuff password protected, and I can tell you right now he’s not going to give it to me. I think if he knew anything, he would have given it to you, though.”

“He could still be looking,” growled Jack, annoyed. “My ass is on the line here.”

“I’ll call him up and tell him if you want, but it won’t get him moving. You know Max, moves at his own pace.”

More accurately, Jack thought, I know you and Max. He frowned. Another problem Snake didn’t have to deal with. A one man team couldn’t not get along with himself.

“Fine. I’ll keep looking. Let me know if you find anything useful.”

“Right.”

“Raiden out.” Jack cut the feed off at his neck again, and twisted his body into a crawling position once more.

----------------------------------------------------

Almost a hundred meters of ventilation later, he finally found what he was looking for. The factory’s roof had been flat on the outside, which had not helped him in deciding which side to enter from. He had expected the area with the actual manufacturing gear to have been housed in a larger building, but none had been evident on arrival, or from the aerial photographs for that matter. Now he knew why. It was half underground.

Rather than building a taller section, the architects had elected to instead sink the factory a story underground, effectively creating a space two floors tall but only one story above ground. A few barred windows were placed around high above the floor which in the day might have provided some murky light but were of no help now several hours after sunset. The light in the room was instead coming from long electric lights, several of which were burnt out.

The factory floor was silent, huge hulking metal machines that were to Jack’s eyes totally unfamiliar sat scattered around the room at apparently random intervals. Conveyer belts, also shut down, connected many of them. Many of these were covered with various mechanical parts. Jack considered calling Chris, but he knew he would never be able to describe the things accurately enough for the techie to be of any help, and he had no way to send photographs back to the base. Solo work, he was beginning to realise, was not as easy as he had always figured. He was also beginning to realise, as this mission wore on, that in terms of planning where Big Shell had been a 10 (and the world knew what a fiasco that had been) this was about a 3. Possibly even a 2. Oh, it all sounded all right when you were talking about it in the briefing room, full of pre-mission adrenaline and jumping to just get out there and get going that you didn’t pay much attention to the fact that the exit strategy was pretty much non-existent. Those sorts of thoughts only crept up on you when the initial adrenaline wave had worn off and you found yourself in a ventilator shaft with black and blue knees and elbows wondering how exactly it was you were going to get home. By which time, of course, it was too late.

Screw it, thought Jack. He was in the middle of fucking no-where Brazil saddled with a guiding crew who didn’t give a shit about him with no exit strategy and goddamn mush for knees. He would drop in, get the photos, and get out. And when he got back, he would start thinking about what he really needed to be doing with his life.

That was what he was thinking when he slammed out of the ventilation shaft above the factory floor. What he was thinking as he fell the two stories directly onto a group of patrolling soldiers- probably a replacement shift the ever-calm part of his mind supplied helpfully- was oh shit.

He tried to spin in mid-air so as to land in the middle of the group kicking. It didn’t work quite like that. Instead the guards, alerted by the sound of the vent being thrown out, looked up as one to watch the descent of the white-haired man into their midst. The one who he had been planning on round-housing raised his AK and brought it around to meet Jack’s leg with a familiar crack of agony. Balance thrown off, broken leg searing, he landed badly and nearly blacked out as all his weight was thrown onto the injured leg.

He managed to pull a knife out even as he twisted to escape the descending circle of rifles and dodged forwards into a guard who helpfully fell out of the way when Jack stabbed the knife through his ankle and pulled.

He was fucked. It was three point two meters to the nearest cover, and the rest of the guards already had a bead on him. He managed one staggering step before bringing his weight down again on the broken leg. This time, he really did pass out. The last thought he managed was, where’s all the light coming from?

------------------------------------------------

Jack woke to the sound of a gunshot. Instinct kicked in and he lay perfectly still not daring to blink, to breathe. This is it, he thought, I survived for years in an impossible situation, finally found my place in life, finally found a life, and I get shot by some night-guard in the middle of fucking nowhere. Rose, I’m sorry. God- he clenched his teeth and waited for the final shot. It didn’t come. Confused, he shifted slightly and found that he wasn’t lying on a cement floor, but rather on something softer, probably dirt. He also found that he was covered in a blanket, and lying on another one.

As he relaxed, no longer sure he was going to be shot in the head at any second, he found that he was undoubtedly outside. The air was moist but cool and was filled with the sounds of a forest at night. Trees shifting in the breeze, night birds cooing, insects buzzing. And the crackling of a fire. Something cracked sharply, and even as Jack winced he recognized it not as the sound of a gunshot, as he had thought, but of wood splitting in the fire. Now completely baffled, he opened his eyes slowly.

He was lying under the shade of a green plastic tarpaulin which had been slung between two huge boulders. The boulders formed a sort of shallow V shape, leaving enough space between them for perhaps two men to lie if they did so with a rock at their heads and their feet. He was lying in this position, covered in a sleeping bag. Shifting further, he discovered his leg had been set and splinted, and didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. His head, however, also felt muzzier than it should have. Drugs?

He turned his head slightly, and although it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the sudden light of the small fire that burned there, everything began to make a kind of sense. Sitting on a log next to the fire, holding a long-handled pan with a cloth, was Hal Emmerich. He swirled the pan around slightly, then looked over at Jack.

“Oh. You’re awake,” he said flatly.

“Hal?”

“Otacon will do for now. We’re still in enemy territory.”

Jack pondered this for a minute. “What are you doing?”

“Making porridge.” He gave the pan another swirl, turning to watch it for a minute. Whatever it was he was looking for he apparently didn’t find it, as he put the pan back over the fire.

“Why?”

“I was hungry, and Snake hates beans.”

“Snake? Snake’s here?”

“Who do you think carried you out of that factory, after you almost got yourself killed?”

“I, what? That was Snake? Snake was there? You two are here to check out the factory?”

Otacon muttered something that, to Jack's fuzzy mind, sounded like "goddamn morphine," and then looking up answered in a louder voice, "yes. We've been scoping it out for the past two days. We would have roped you in, if you hadn't gone haring in after your drop. How were you planning on getting out, anyway?"

Jack, who was considering vaguely whether snakes ate hares, and if so how they managed to get them, caught the tone of the question but missed the words. "What?"

Otacon sighed. "Never mind. I'll ask you later." He pulled the pan out of the fire and set it down on the ground, turned to pull a pair of bowls out of a tall, thin backpack covered in compartments.

Something was niggling at the back of Jack's mind. "Where's Snake?"

"I'm not good enough company for you?"

At Jack's blank stare, Otacon rolled his eyes and began to pour porridge from the pan into one of the bowls. "He's out finishing what we came here to do. He'll be back soon."

"Yeah?" Asked Jack. The world swayed alarmingly, crisp lines of the fire becoming a big orange blur. "How's he gonna catch the rabbit?"

"Jack?"

Darkness.

---------------------------------------------------------

Jack woke sometime later, probably due to the pain in his leg. It was aching dully. His body felt warm and heavy, as though he had been sleeping unusually deeply. To his right, a fire was crackling. He compared this with his recent memories. They were a confusing mix of clear memories and impossible ones. He and Otacon hadn't really had a discussion about rabbit hunting, had they? But Otacon and Snake were here, he was sure of that much at least. And it had been Snake to save his ass, once again.

Strangely, he felt no irritation. He didn't feel much of anything, really. Even the aching in his leg seemed a long way away, like a movie he was watching. It was there, and he knew it, but it didn't really affect him.

There was a quiet conversation going on over by the fire. Feeling very calm, he opened his eyes.

Snake and Otacon were sitting together on one side of the fire, on the same fallen log Otacon had been sitting on earlier. Otacon was sitting hunched in a jacket which was too big for him, arms tucked away in the pockets. The firelight glinted off his glasses every so often, but when it didn't it seemed to Jack that he was amused. Snake was sitting on Otacon's further side, wearing a sneaking suit and eating porridge out of a bowl. Even in the poor light Jack could see that it was steaming, and Snake paused with each spoonful hovering in midair to allow it to cool.

"-asked how you were planning on catching rabbits, or something. How much morphine did you give him, anyway?"

"It was a bad break." Snake shook the spoon morosely. "Any less and he'd have been waking up screaming."

"Well, he was gone and past the other side of lucidity, so you can ask him yourself what he was doing in there when he wakes up."

Snake ate another spoonful of porridge. He seemed to hold it in his mouth a long time before swallowing. "...why did you make oatmeal, anyway?"

"You hate canned beans."

"I know for a fact that we brought supplies other than oatmeal and beans with us."

Otacon muttered something.

"What?"

"You took the goddamn can opener with you." Otacon glared at Snake.

"I did not," shot back Snake, apparently surprised.

"It's on your Swiss Army Knife."

"What?" Snake dug around in a pocket and produced a knife, which he opened to present an array of metal tools which gleamed in the firelight. "Huh. So that's why you wanted it. But I left you a knife."

"What?" It was Otacon's turn to look surprised.

"I left you a knife. It should be in the pack." Snake turned to indicate the long backpack lying on the ground behind the log.

"You want me to open cans with a knife?" Otacon's tone radiated scepticism.

"Sure, it's easy if the knife's big enough."

Otacon turned to face Snake, showing Jack only his back, but whatever his expression, Snake shrugged defensively. After a minute, Otacon turned back to face the fire. Jack had the impression he had missed an entire conversation in facial gestures.

They sat in silence for a while, Snake finishing his bowl of oatmeal and scraping at the bottom. "Want some more?"

"No! That's okay." He put the bowl down behind the log and pulled out a square package. He shook it once, and pulled something out of it.

"Snake! You're supposed to be quitting!"

"I get one after missions," he retorted defensively. Otacon snorted. "Geez, Otacon, could you mother hen any more?" Snake pulled out a lighter and lit the cigarette up, taking a deep breath.

"You don't have enough things trying to kill you that you have to add to them?" He coughed as Snake blew another lungful into the fire.

"Life's short. Enjoy what you can, while you can."

"You're only making it shorter."

"Do we have to have this conversation every time?"

"Yes! Until you quit."

"You don't think I can outlast you?" Snake's tone had an edge to it that hadn't been there before.

"Well, since you mention it, no I don't. That's what this is about," spat back Otacon.

There was a tense pause. Something in the fire cracked loudly. Otacon jumped visibly, while Snake just twitched.

Otacon slumped slightly, turned to the fire. Behind the disguising glasses, he looked suddenly old. Snake leaned back slightly, but after a moment of consideration flicked his cig into the flames. Even the half foot of distance from the fire seemed to cast his face into shadows, and Jack couldn't read his expression. Neither man looked at the other, and Jack had the impression that this was a conversation they had had several times, and knew the inevitable outcome of.

Eventually, Snake leaned forward again, dropped a heavy hand onto Otacon's shoulder. The slighter man sighed, and looked up. "Well, you want first shift or second?"

"First," replied Snake immediately.

Otacon turned to look at him in what was apparently a suspicious way, because he raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. "Hey, only one cig after a mission." After a second, he grinned. "I just don't want to be the one awake when the kid comes to and starts whining."

"I'll bet. Well, if he wakes up in the middle of the night and tries to strangle me, we'll know whose fault it is." Otacon stood up, shrugged off the coat and handed it to his partner who, after a second's consideration, took it and threw it about his own shoulders.

Jack watched with fading energy as Otacon cleaned away cooking utensils and bowls, and was asleep again before he moved over to the tarpaulin.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The third time Jack woke, he had no idea what it was that woke him. His leg was still aching, perhaps a bit more than before but it was still nothing more than a bother. He felt lighter now, and less warm. Perhaps the drug was wearing off and he was beginning to sleep and wake naturally? If he could think such thoughts, it occurred to him, then that was probably true.

Something nearby was making soft noises. He opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the green tarpaulin, darker now than it had been before. The fire was much quieter; it must have died down considerably. He turned slightly to look to his right.

Otacon was lying next to him, sleeping wrapped in the blanket that had been draped over Jack earlier in the evening. The sounds Jack had heard was the other man, sighing softly in his sleep with each breath. Rather than sleeping curled on his side, as Jack tended to imagine civilians sleeping, the engineer slept flat on his back with his limbs lying loose but in straight lines. Even without his glasses, he still looked older than Jack, who had spent years fighting to live.

"Try to strangle him, and I'll be forced to take action," said a low voice by the fire.

Jack propped himself up slightly, wincing at his lack of coordination. The fire had indeed died down, and was now glowing dark red in the small jungle clearing, barely providing enough light to see from one end to the other by.

Snake was sitting further away from the fire than he had been before, face now even more in the shadows than it had been then. And he looked old. Oh, Otacon had as well, aged from too much worry and not enough activity. The age that came to someone with too much on his mind, and no way to distract himself from it. He had looked more than his late-thirties. But Snake looked like an old man.

He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the trunk of a tree, watching Jack. The intense glow of the fire was reflected in his eyes and lit his strong cheekbones, but otherwise most of his face was cast in shadow. Although Jack knew that he must be sitting straight, with his knees only slightly bent and his arms resting in his lap, he seemed to Jack to be weighed down by age, hunched down around a weakening core. The fire aided this, creating wrinkles which did not yet exist out of slight lines, making a straight back into a curved one, strong legs into withered ones. This wasn't Snake now, Jack knew. But in a few years, it might be.

In the two years since he had first met the legendary mercenary, he had already aged visibly. No one had said anything, but Jack had looked up old photos. The earliest he had been able to find had been taken by the Cypher on the Tanker. But even in the two years between that picture and his first meeting with Snake, there was a perceivable difference. The difference between the picture and now seemed to be more then ten years, in only four. Snake was aging at least twice as fast as he should have been. If he had suddenly chosen this lifestyle after years of being a couch potato, Jack might have understood. But he had been bred and raised to fighting. It made no sense. But these two, Snake and Otacon, obviously knew what was going on. Otacon at least was worried about it, and Jack couldn't imagine that Snake wasn't. What had Otacon said? Something about knowing he could outwait Snake? Was the man dying?

Only one way to know.

"What's wrong with you?" As he began, he suddenly remembered the sleeping man lying next to him and awkwardly pitched his voice down in the middle of his sentence. Otacon didn't stir.

Snake grinned slightly. In the firelight, his face seemed to take on a serpentine aspect. "In what sense?"

"You're getting old." Even as he said it, it sounded stupid.

"That's the way time works, kid. Only goes one way. We all go over the waterfall eventually."

"I've done the math. You can't be older than Otacon. But you look like you've got almost twenty years on him."

Snake shrugged. "Fate's a bitch."

"Otacon says you're dying." It was a long shot, but it might work. Snake's eyes shifted for a minute, flickering to the man lying in front of Jack. But when he looked up to meet Jack's stare again, his expression was steady.

"It's not nice to lie, kid."

Jack snorted. "Like that ever stopped you two. I'm not sure we had a single conversation during Big Shell where you two didn't mislead me." Only after he spat the words out did he realise he could have played dumb and might have led Snake out. Well, he had never been one for subtlety. "Will you just tell me what's wrong with you already?"

Snake raised an eyebrow. "Or what? You'll come over here and beat it out of me?"

"Fuck, are you under a vow never to give anyone a straight answer? I'm worried, okay? You're pretty much the only guy who hasn't jerked me around the block." You only went half-way around, he finished mentally.

Snake shifted somehow so that the fire lit up more of his face. The impression of great age vanished, to be replaced by one of sharpness. "No, you're not. Him, he worries," Snake gestured at Otacon. "He worries so much I'd drug his goddamn coffee if I didn't know he'd rewire the house in retaliation. You, you're trying for manipulative but all you're managing is Pissing Snake Off. You do not want to piss Snake off."

Jack, despite himself, found that he was recoiling.

"Look, kid," continued Snake in a more reasonable tone. "You're in over your head, okay? Just drop it and go to sleep. This is my advice, as someone who only jerked you half-way around the block."

Jack stared for a minute. Snake smirked, and dropped back into the shadows. Reluctantly realising that discretion probably was, at least this once, the better part of valour, Jack lay back and closed his eyes. Only then did he realise that Otacon's breaths had become quieter and less even. Bastards, the pair of them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

He dreamt about puppies. He brought one home for Rose and Kate, a little golden retriever pup too young to have learnt much coordination. As the dream continued, the pup was suddenly replaced by a wolf, then two, fighting in a tangle of teeth, claws and fur. No matter where he moved, they seemed to come after him, pausing their fight occasionally to bound towards him before one leapt on the other again, bowling them both over. He couldn't move properly, limbs dull and leaden. He tripped over something, a burnt-out fire pit, and the wolves rolled closer, snarling, before finally leaping for his throat-

Jack woke with a jerk. Someone had shoved his leg.

Snake was striding rapidly away from the sleeping area under the tarpaulin to Otacon, who was standing on the other side of the burnt-out fire pit, holding something which was beeping softly. It was early morning, just before dawn, and the jungle was alive with the sounds of its creatures waking and greeting each other.

"Where is it?" Snake, tense, looked at the small black box Otacon was holding. The engineer shrugged.

"I don't know. It's not location based. Something passes through the sensor and it sends the signal to the array. They don't have individual signals; there's no way of knowing which one it was."

"Where's your gun?"

"Huh? In my bag over-" Otacon turned to indicate a pack lying near Jack. He didn't manage to finish the gesture. Snake hadn't turned to watch him, but instead was watching the jungle behind his partner. Jack turned to watch as well, and so saw when a huge black cat leapt out, claws and teeth bared, for the engineer.

Before Jack could sit up, Snake had thrown himself into his partner, knocking the slighter man into the dead fire pit. As soon as he hit the ground himself he was rolling, coming up to his feet in less than a second and running for his own pack tucked behind the log near the fire pit. The jaguar snarled, turned, and lunged for its target again. Jack had by this time pulled himself up and was rifling through Otacon's pack. The gun, a beretta 9mm, was at the top. No way the weapon had the power to take down the cat. He clicked off the safety all the same and aimed. Before he had a chance to pull the trigger, several shots rang out.

Snake had gotten to his pack and pulled out a Socom. How he had moved that fast, Jack had no clue. Perhaps his head was still fuzzy from the painkillers. The cat continued in its pounce, but Otacon had pulled himself out of its path, and it did not attempt to correct. It hit the ground with a thud and slid into a heap, twitching once. Snake and Jack fired in tandem, and it fell limp.

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