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Motherbase.
Venom Snake stood on the deck, the steel beneath his boots humming with the rhythm of the sea. It was early. Far too early for even the horizon to decide between night and day. The wind tugged at his coat, salted, heavy with ghosts. Outer Heaven was quiet but never silent. The hum of machinery was always a reminder: a man built this place, and it wasn’t him.
Ocelot’s voice came from behind him, dry, controlled. “You’re up early.” Venom didn’t turn. He rarely did. His eye caught the dim reflection of Ocelot in the glass of the command room window: gloved hands, the faint sway of a trench coat, the unflinching calm of someone who had already lost everything worth losing.
“I don’t sleep much.”
“Neither do I,” Ocelot said.
There was a smile in his tone. But it wasn’t filled with amusement, not really. More a kind of mutual understanding. The shared insomnia of men who lived as revenants.
The silence between them was heavy enough to be honest. Ocelot stood beside him, both of them staring out at the bruised color of the sea. Venom could feel the proximity… Ocelot never stood too close to anyone else. The faint smell of gun oil. The quiet, measured breath of someone used to being near death but not yet ready to greet it.
Venom looked at him finally, and for a moment the lines blurred.
Ocelot’s profile caught the rising light: the scar tracing his cheek, the golden hair streaked with gray, the sharpness of his eyes. Sharper enough to wound. He saw her then. Not as a memory, not even as a hallucination, but as a bleeding ghost inside his skull.
White camo stained with the soil of Groznyj Grad. Her eyes softer than her voice, yet harder than any command he’d ever obeyed.
The way her body fell beneath the white petals. He remembered it as if he’d been there, though he hadn’t. The venom of someone else’s past, injected into his own. The gun, the scar, the endless sky. Her. Big Boss’s mentor, mother. The woman he had killed.
Venom’s throat tightened. But not with memory, but with memory’s residue. Guilt like an inherited disease. The woman who had taught him everything. The mother of ideals, of war, of sacrifice. Her ghost had lived inside him ever since, reshaping itself through every act of violence, every lie told in her image.
He saw her in Ocelot, in the way he hid his pain behind command. The resemblance was not physical… It was spiritual. The same unspoken grief, the same armor of duty.
It made him sick. Because that same, so small part of him wanted to reach out and say: You remind me of her.
And another part wanted to tear that reminder apart until nothing of her remained.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Ocelot said. His voice was steady, almost distant. It was always distant, even when he was standing right beside him.
Venom’s words came slow, as if dragging themselves out of the trench. As if they needed hesitance before pressing. Like a bruise. “You remind me of someone.”
Ocelot turned his head just slightly, one brow lifting. “That so?”
Venom didn’t answer. The wind did it for him, sweeping across the deck and clattering a loose chain against the rail. It wasn’t something he could explain. Ocelot wasn’t her, not in any surface way… but something in his presence stirred the same ache. The way his voice could cut through chaos with precision. The way he spoke of loyalty as if it were oxygen. The way he could look at you and make you feel like a soldier again, even when you didn’t know what you were anymore.
Ocelot had that same impossible poise. That same refusal to break. But, the resemblance was wrong, twisted. She had been light through fog; Ocelot was fog made flesh.
Venom looked back to the ocean, but the reflection of Ocelot still burned behind his eye. You remind me of her. The thought repeated itself like a heartbeat he couldn’t silence.
He could feel the ghost inside him shifting, the phantom memory rising through the cracks in his rebuilt mind. Her voice. Her lessons. Her death. The Boss had given everything to an ideal, truth beyond nation, beyond self. And he, or the man whose shadow he carried, had repaid her with a bullet.
Now, that betrayal lived on in him, festering. And Ocelot's every gesture reminded him of it.
He remembered seeing her body. Her finalized form. The memory not ever truly his, but seared into him as if it were. The Boss, lying still, her wound clean and final. He remembered staring, feeling the pit in his stomach that no logic could explain. He remembered the scar along her chest, the symbol of her sacrifice. The smell of earth and rain and rot. She was the planet. He only orbits, like a shadow. Like the moon.
That was John’s memory. Big Boss’s. But now it was his.
And Ocelot. Ocelot had been there, somewhere on the other side of that history. Fighting for her. Against her. With her. Never knowing what blood they shared.
Venom sometimes caught himself studying the curve of Ocelot’s jaw, the cut of his coat, the way he handled his revolvers with a devotion that bordered on reverence. He told himself it was tactical observation. It wasn’t. It was mourning. He didn’t know who for.
Ocelot, for his part, never looked long enough to meet his eyes. He didn’t dare. To him, Venom was Big Boss. The ghost of a man he had once followed into hell with a grin. The only shadow left that resembled the one he loved. So he believed. Kept the game alive. Kept the phantom breathing.
Sometimes, when Ocelot spoke in the dark, his voice softened in ways he didn’t mean it to. When he gave orders, it was with the warmth of old trust. When he brushed past Venom over the deck of the base, it was with a hesitation that betrayed too much. He never let it show for long. But it was there.
He had once loved John. A soldier, a leader, a man half made of myth. He had never said it, not even to himself. Love was weakness. Obsession was loyalty by another name. But the truth had rotted in him for years, buried under layers of loyalty and loss. And now this phantom, this… copy, walked in front of him, breathing, bleeding, believing.
He couldn’t remember the phantom as something. Someone that wasn’t John for too long without feeling sick.
Venom felt that sickness too. A mirrored nausea. The uneasy gravity between two ghosts orbiting a lie.
Ocelot loves a ghost. Venom is one.
They orbit each other like planets around the corpse of a sun, trapped by gravity, by this odd illusion of warmth. Something they both silently craved. The aching thirst for each other’s insides for a place to nest that felt like home. Venom wonders if The Boss felt the same when she looked at her protégé, when she realized she had to die by his hand. A lesson in loyalty. In inheritance.
He feels it again. The pit in his stomach, that crawling sickness. The more he looks at Ocelot, the more he sees her, and the more he feels the weight of every buried memory pressing through the seams of his identity. Leaving a big, broken purple mark.
He thinks sometimes of the blood in the grass, her body cooling in the rain. Ocelot was there too, young, foolish, with a grin too sharp for his age. He didn’t know she was his mother. Didn’t know how their lives would coil together in this absurd pattern of devotion and denial.
“Boss,” Ocelot said after a long silence. “You ever think about what comes next?”
Venom’s voice was rough. “Every day.”
“I don’t mean war.”
“What else is there?”
Ocelot smirked faintly, but his eyes didn’t match it. “That’s the problem.”
They stood like that, side by side, the horizon bleeding from violet to gold. The world waking up beneath their feet. For a moment, it felt almost peaceful. Two men who were not who they thought they were, watching the dawn rise over something they’d built together out of lies and loss.
Venom broke the silence first. “You ever regret it?” “Regret?” Ocelot echoed. He seemed to taste the word before answering. “I regret nothing. But I think of everything.” Venom turned to him. “What do you think about?”
Ocelot’s eyes flickered toward the sea, then down. “People who stopped existing but kept walking.”
Venom didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.
He could feel the weight of Big Boss’s memories pressing against his skull, like someone else’s heartbeat pulsing in his veins. He could feel The Boss’s dying breath, Ocelot’s half, love, John’s guilt, all of it converging inside him, a man sculpted from another man’s penance.
The sea roared beneath them, relentless.
Venom looked at Ocelot. really looked, and for the first time saw not resemblance but reflection. Both of them haunted by someone they could never touch again. Both of them pretending to be something for the sake of the dead.
Ocelot adjusted his glove, the faint snap of leather punctuating the morning. “You’ll need rest before the next sortie,” he said, turning toward the stairwell. Venom nodded but didn’t move.
“Ocelot,” he called, his voice low.
Ocelot paused, hand on the railing.
Venom met his gaze. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For staying.”
Ocelot’s smile barely formed. “Don’t thank a ghost for haunting you.”
And then he was gone, vanishing into the hum of the base, the same way she had vanished into legend, and John had vanished into war.
Venom stayed where he was, the wind threading through his hair.
He closed his eye.
Maybe this was his cause now. To live as the phantom. To bear the weight of another man’s sins. To mourn the mother and the son through the reflection of the one who never knew either of them.
Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s longing. Maybe it’s the residue of someone else’s sin, echoing through the wrong flesh.
He tells himself again. It isn’t real. None of it’s real.
But he can see Ocelot when his eyes close. And for one unbearable moment, he can almost see her behind those eyes. the horse, the voice, the scar. The mother. The lover.
The ghost.
And Venom, half of a man, half of a myth, feels the sickness settle into him like ash in a wound.
Because he knows now; what he feels for Ocelot was never his to begin with. It’s just another inheritance of pain.