À la lumière de l'amour de ma mère

When they stepped into the storage unit in the early morning, she hadn’t budged.
It’s not that Otacon had expected anyone to come in and run away with the shell—he expected it more to have crawled to their apartment in the dead of night. Could very well happen at this point, right?

The shell was still cold when Otacon came close, inspecting the neons, the door panel; there still was, somewhere deeper, some kind of warmth. It brushed against the very hollow of his palm when he laid his hand very flat against the smooth black coat. He imagined it was similar to a computer tower, running in its sleep mode, cooling itself through the air regulators. She was sleeping. She kept her eye closed when Hal circled around, checking the power outlet, circling back.

His fingers grazed the door opening panel. He thought of the loose, inoperative button of last night, the dent in the metal where someone had tried to pry the shell open like one breaks apart an oyster for a pearl—the eye that came to life, burning golden and red, staring straight through him.
Mom’s voice, booming and otherworldly.
He had to open the pod. Snake was very silent, very still, very much like his namesake, observing Otacon from a distance.
His fingers felt the line where the door met the rest of the shell. He could hear his own pulse knock soundly at the back of his throat, in the hollow under his ears—persistent, unnerving, and a bit too much like someone, he thought, knocking on the inside of the pod, hitting repeatedly the cradle of his palm, attempting to reach, attempting to—

“Dave?” he called, and his voice cracked formidably with an adolescent shame. Thankfully, all Snake did was jerk his head upwards and met his eyes, awaiting the rest. “Can you check the inside of the pod for me?”

Snake was not unfamiliar with Otacon’s spiraling, catastrophizing thoughts, nor was he unfamiliar with his own; he walked to his friend’s side of the pod and gently gestured him to step back—a signal that had grown to be familiar to Hal.
Instinctively, Otacon placed his fingers on the panel button before Snake could: demanding to be let to do this, this at least, if he was too much of a coward to see inside for himself. Snake let him.
Hal pressed firmly and felt, reminiscent of the keys on his old mechanical keyboards, a frank bump under the button. A tiny light crowning the switch like the dot on an "i" turned red and the door moved on its hinges.

Hal stepped on the side. He glued his eyes to the bottom of the door, hoping he wouldn’t catch a glance of anything inside.
He observed the smooth, reptilian way the hatch came open: moving outwards of the thickness of the shell before sliding methodically to the side, following closely the curve of the cylinder. It stopped with a dull sound, something clicking in place as it settled open. Hal stepped back further. He raised his gaze only when he was sure he couldn’t see the inside of the shell.
He caught Snake looking at him. He received a firm, determined nod, and just like that David took a step in the core. Hal pressed his back against the smooth coat of the pod. It was warm even through his jacket.

Red cradled Snake when he stepped in. He thought it could have looked like epidermis, like flesh, like exposed muscle, but it didn’t. It was warm like human skin, for sure, but he found himself surrounded by memory sticks, modules of all shapes and sizes, wires running up and down the length of the shell like corset boning. It looked like the insides of Hal’s computer towers when he pulled them apart for no damn reason. (It looked like… well. Hal. The other one.)
In the center of the pod, barely taller than him, a tower was neatly arranged in rows and rows of precise, definitively fragile hardware. Probably the memory boards Hal had mentioned. He could walk around it to look at it, but he couldn’t understand it anyways—that was going to be Hal’s job.

He circled around, feeling the cold kiss of the outside world against his arm every time he passed by the door. The storage unit wasn’t awfully cold, but the pod was quite toasty.
Where the bottom part of the shell met its walls, Snake could see rust. It looked darker in the red light of the metal cocoon, had spread in lovely, almost organic patterns, but was very contained. It had been taken care of to limit the spread.
It didn’t look like blood—or at least he didn’t think it did. The red light wasn’t helping, but he had seen blood, how it twirls, grows, flows with a mind of its own: this wasn't blood. He still thought that Hal was going to think it was. Couldn’t help it.

There were handprints. They were faded, barely ghosts against the metal. Lots of them, close to the hatch. The tiny, desperate scratches of nails against metal.
He ran a finger over them.

His breath was growing pearls of vapor on the walls, and he decided to get out: he didn’t want to damage the data still preserved in all these delicate circuits before Hal could get to it.

Hal raised two timid, apologetic yet questioning eyes to his face when he emerged. He was dizzy and stunned for a split second, as if he had gotten back to the surface from the deepest of dives.

“Looks fine,” Snake said. “A lot of bits and pieces I don’t really understand but I’m sure you would.”

“Do you think I could get them out with a screwdriver?”

“A small one then. Or maybe get the lockpicks.”

“Understood.”

Otacon was already walking to his backpack, discarded in the room, when he was interrupted by Snake clearing his throat. He cocked his head to the side.

“There are…” Snake dug for his words. “Handprints.” He watched Otacon’s face fall pale. “You won’t see them unless you really look. No blood.”

He didn’t really know if this last part made it worse or better for Hal. He watched Otacon bob his head up, down, up, the universal sign for “okay”—but his eyes had already widened, the blue of them turning pale. He was scared shitless. Snake bit the inside of his cheek and cursed himself for telling him that.
Otacon picked up a screwdriver and a set of lock picks. He weighed them in his palm. Snake saw how his legs shook.

Hal stood by the door.

“If you need anything, I’m staying right there,” Snake said. Then, when Otacon glanced at him from under one of the temples of his glasses, lips tightening with what he knew was fear, added: “I’m not closing the hatch on you. I know I have a weird sense of humor but I’m not putting you through that.”

Hal’s shoes landed on the bottom of the pod.

The memory boards, of sizes varying between the length of a pinkie and of a palm, were to be pulled one by one. They came out of their slots with a single but sturdy turn of the pick or screwdriver in a small notch beneath each, and caught between fingers as they slowly slipped out. They would hit a bump as they slid out of their case, keeping them from falling off, and Hal had to pick them between thumb and index, gently pulling them out and away.
Eventually, he decided to open each slot first and pick them all later.
It would take hours. Days, maybe.

His breathing filled the shell. He heard himself loud and unsteady in the metal cocoon. The embrace was warm, not suffocating, not suffocating yet. The open hatch allowed him to peek out to take a few deep breaths when the atmosphere got too heavy, his own breathing too heady, his pulse unnervingly loud—but he rarely ever did.
In a twisted, almost masochistic way, he wanted to stay there. To inhale the copper-filled, depleting oxygen growing warmer with his own breath. To lose his sight in the jungle of circuits and boards that seemed to reach out to him.
In a twisted, almost masochistic way, he felt held, strangely held.

The modules glowed, some white, some red, some varying shades of oranges; hundreds of vertical, colorful sticks that slowly crawled out of their hiding places as Hal worked tirelessly around the core.

“I’m having some kind of déjà-vu,” he nervously chuckled. It was, in fact, very funny, but the environment wasn’t really ideal for jokes.

“Hm?”

David’s head appeared in the aperture of the hatch. Hal looked at him, sweat beading under his heavy cloud of hair. “You would know,” he replied, a smiling toying with the corners of his lips.

He watched the cogs turn in David’s brain for a few seconds before he left out a hearty, amused snort. Hal was back to work.

They discovered the modules were numbered. It made it easy for Snake, who received every once in a while a batch of modules he was told to handle carefully, to lay them down in order. Otacon had no idea how he would make use of the data they contained, if he could make use of the data they contained, but in a sea of uncertainty, he was at least thankful to know they’d make a logical sequence.

When his fingers started hurting from picking/unscrewing/pulling/giving, the familiar tingles of wrist pain rising from his arm, he joined David looking over the neverending stack of memory boards.
Some looked familiar, closer in shape—and possibly function—to RAM modules; others were a deep black from a material that brought back memories.

“They’re, um, magnetic tape,” Otacon started when Snake offered a quizzing look over a particular module. “The same thing we make—well, used to make cassettes out of.” He knew Snake knew what cassettes were, but his eyes still grew more questioning. “I assume I could salvage them, I could salvage whatever data is on these ones that way.”

Snake weighed a module in his hand, balancing it on two fingers.

“Would they work with a tape deck?”

“Well, I suppose I could make it work… I’d have to make some serious adjustments but I think it’s doable. I could sort them into cassettes and number them to be able to replay them, if there’s any replayability to be had.”

“So you’re telling me I should be on the hunt for blank cassettes.”

“Well, I’m not saying anything, I just—”

“I spotted a place getting food the other day. Tell me when you’re done.”

Otacon watched him place the module back on the coat they had laid out for protection, and simply nodded.

There was something Hal noticed, elbows settled between two precariously-stacked towers of blank tapes, eyes squinted to two lines in the low light of the monitor, magnifying glass getting foggy with his breathing so close to it.
Two “voices” were carried by some bits of the magnetic tape. One was indecipherable, seeming clean and ordered. It had been methodically laid down to make the most use of the tape. The other, superimposed over it like a rough photographic double exposure, was a coarse, clunky set of dots and spaces—ones and zeroes.
It hadn’t overwritten the first line per se, he realized as he looked closer, but he could understand why someone would think that. It hadn’t been written to fit on the tape. It had been thrown and pressed on like a dry flower and could be peeled away easily.
It wasn’t hard to pull it apart from the sharp, structured language underneath—he could even decipher that binary if he tried, magnifying glass in hand, but it made his eyes hurt and his head hurt more (he decided he’d keep the modules for the tape deck and hope for the best).

The idea that the pod had received whatever information these numbers contained, swallowed and digested it, saving it within itself by itself came to Hal’s mind—he shivered.
He thought about the black shell in the storage unit.
About her getting a little chilly in there.
He furiously shook his head.

Snake stepped in the room, pulling Otacon out of his tape-sorting trance, drawing eyes on him.
Snake looked at the tape deck and the disk drive and the cables and the innumerable bits and pieces of hardware whose purpose he had no idea about piling like bones all around Otacon’s chair; Otacon looked at him.

“Making progress?” Snake asked.

Otacon turned to his screen, as if a bit dumbfounded.

“Well, I’m saving all the modules with magnetic tape on cassettes. It’s faster than I expected.”

Snake raised eyebrows and shifted his weight on a foot. Otacon followed his eyes and caught the hints of sunrise licking the horizon.

“Um. Well, speed is relative.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Working on these,” Otacon replied, pointing at the rest of the boards, prickly and delicate. “I think I can just handle them with my current hardware. I just hope they won’t make my computer go crazy.”

Otacon directed his gaze back at Snake. He saw him shift his weight around some more. His eyes were scolding him in his own familiar, used-to-Hal’s-shit way. Otacon still offered a guilty pout.

“I’m waking you up before 3 PM anyways,” Snake eventually said. With that, he slipped out of the room.

“G’night!”

Hal heard him slither under the blanket and echo his words, heavy and thick with sleep.