Vigil

Before even opening his eyes, he knew he was in his bed. Back in his bed, precisely.

How…? Who?

Well, the mattress was familiar, yet strangely… off. The blanket, as well, lacked softness, prickled ever so slightly, but Otacon couldn’t bring himself to find it strange. In fact, this felt less strange than the previous bed, blanket, claustrophobic air. A warm light filtered through his closed eyelids but something cold still clung to his back, reptilian and sick—he needed a few more seconds to realize it was his own sweat, which he was drenched in, and which rolled in heavy, round drops from his forehead. 
He managed to twitch his eyes open and winced at the familiar sound of lashes stuck together from crying too long. The ceiling was wood, ran across by bountiful and strong beams. Disorienting but so, so familiar in a way that made fear creep up on him.

He almost yelped when Snake appeared in his field of vision and his heart leaped to his mouth, almost spilling past his lips as he could taste its erratic, metallic thrumming.

“Finally awake?” His familiar, playful voice rang to Otacon’s buzzing ears.

Not again. Please, not again .

The fever was pulsating steady under the thin skin of his temples and he knew what was going on at that minute—he was delirious.
The mattress dipped under Snake’s weight as he sat next to him and a muffled yowl escaped his cracked lips when one of the man’s hand came to cover his forehead. Otacon’s stomach twisted and turned. No more, please, no more .

“I didn’t know if you’d be awake for dinner or not. Sunny is out there watching over the fishing lines. Do you think you’ll be hungry enough to eat with us?”

Otacon didn’t answer, half because his voice had buried itself somewhere near his unstable heartbeat and refused to come out, half out of the fear that speaking would make this moment vanish. He struggled to even see Snake, his face a haze pierced by muted blue eyes. Dread climbed his already cold spine with its frozen arachnid legs as he wondered how much of the man near him was real.
Seeing his partner’s lips mouth a word that he couldn’t voice, Snake brushed a few loose locks out of his eyes and offered a low, soft chuckle. 

“Alright, you need some more rest. The fever has gone down a bit but you still looked completely dazed.”

His hand caressed Hal’s temple and Hal felt himself wrecked by a shudder, a sudden craving which had him press his face into Snake’s palm, a prayer carved into his aching chest.
And with that, Snake left the bed, a placid smile on his lips as he exited the room. Otacon’s throat tightened with each step David took and eventually his airway felt crushed and torn, the name he wanted to call and his whimpered pleas wrung out of his throat—he tried to rise from the mattress and reach for Snake but his weight was anchored to the pool of sweat left under his back, his arm not even strong enough to flail. Snake closed the door behind him, careful and slow. The latch bolt clicked back in its place and Hal tried to call David’s name again but nothing left his lips other than a flat, toneless lament that slipped like spit past his dry, cracked lips.

He begged his eyes to stay open.
He begged his eyes to stay open.
He felt himself progressively sink to the floor, swallowed by the sickly cold mattress. He tried to grab into the blanket that weighted over his chest, heavy enough to be Atlas’ burden under which each of his bones bent, slowly suffocating him.
The fever was liquifying his ligaments and tendons and he watched as his hands struggled and failed to grab onto anything substantial.
Please stay awake. Please stay awake.            
He didn’t know what would be of him when he’d wake up again.
He didn’t want to know what would be of him when he’d wake up again.
Snake Snake Snake Snake Snake David Dave…
He couldn’t say it. He struggled to even breathe.
When he forced his eyes closed to dispel the fever from his dazed gaze, he felt himself losing his grip and, in a dreadful, panicked second in which he heard himself choke out a low, terrified whine, he was asleep again.

He breathed out a febrile puff, voice distorted in a sob, and jolted up—or at least, as "up" as his weakened body would let him. 
The fever, he thought as his confused, tear-misted eyes gradually focused, hadn't disappeared.
His consciousness slowly dawned—to the same sweat-stained bed, to the same irregular, dark wood floors, to a light a lively, healthy orange as the afternoon sun filtered through the red curtains.

Snake walked into the cabin, careful to not make too much noise cleaning his boots against the doormat. His eyes met Hal's and, realizing his partner was awake, David's lips curled fondly. Otacon blinked. The fever was slowly fading. 

"Do you feel any better?" Snake asked as he sat on the edge of the bed, his hand rummaging through Otacon's hair before meeting his forehead, inspecting the intensity of its warmth.

Hal looked at him—he was goddamn blurry, of course, and the fever seemed to have robbed Otacon of some more of his remaining eyesight, but he could still see, ornamenting Snake's face, a smile restful and kind, a warm twinkle in the icy blue of his eyes. A wrinkle, not deep enough to be old, at the corner of his lips. A handful of gray hairs tucked behind his ear.

Counting them brought back to Otacon's mind his desperate, limping trip to Debrin, begging him on his fucking knees to help find a way to stop Snake's accelerated aging, pain wracking his chest as they collided head-on. He had barely met the guy and he was already a sobbing mess on his carpet, body convulsing as anguish threatened to make him throw up. 
Debrin had taken—or so he thought, he almost hoped—pity of the mess he was. With each new injection, Debrin assured him that the composition of the nanomachines was altered in the hopes of stopping the progression of FOXDIE, which was more or less literally eating away at Snake, picking up speed with each passing day.

Eventually, Snake had found himself bedridden. His breath was a rattling, struggling huff, having stopped smoking a few months earlier not enough to grant him better lungs as FOXDIE made its nest in his cells. Otacon held his hand, held onto his hand, clung to the prominent bones and protruding veins. He almost feared he would break Snake's enfeebled bones but Snake held him back, his gray eyes wide, open to the ceiling. Fearful, almost.

Raiden would pay them a visit, sometimes. He didn't look as bothered to be there as Otacon thought he truly was. His cybernetic enhancement clicked and ticked, metal against metal, as he paced around, sometimes pulling a seat to keep them company. 
Otacon would look at him a lot. His left eye had been damaged enough to warrant a patch-like prosthetic over the socket and, under the weight of his new body, he had aged—not much, really, just enough for his young face to morph and mature.
It was all so familiar. So sweetly, sickly, painfully familiar.
Raiden would tell a mindless Otacon about this PMC with a name sounding too much like "despair" for him to lend a careful ear. Before he would leave, Raiden would sympathetically place a hand on his shoulder, sometimes gripping him just a bit. His hand was heavy.
So, so heavy.

Eventually, the seventh generation of nanomachines rolled around. They were injected right at the base of Snake's neck—by Otacon, Snake having grown too weak to hold anything, and Debrin wishing to leave a cautious space between the man and himself.
From what Otacon could gather, the nanomachines absorbed those already parasitizing Snake's enervated organism, like a fetus consuming its twin in the womb.

One day, Snake woke up. His rustling pulled his partner out of his own sleep as he had laid, too exhausted to walk away, over Snake's chest. Otacon met eyes more sky than ice, and when Snake spoke, his voice sounded cleared—not by much, by any stretch of the imagination, just enough for Otacon to pick it up, just enough to make his throat tighten in a sob that bubbled up behind his tongue.

"I'd say I want a smoke, but I don't want to disappoint you."

Hal's mouth fell open in an exaggerated, unhinged scream. Joy slapped him across the face so hard that he forgot to breathe and he burst into tears, loud wailing muffled as he threw himself over a confused, slightly dazed David. A large, if unsteady hand came to pat the back of his weak head. He felt his chest flutter as Snake chuckled under his weight.

David blossomed like a field let loose to the wildflowers and grass after years of its soil left bare and dry.
Even with the nanomachines reversing their predecessors' deleterious process—a miracle , Otacon had thought, something he wouldn't have even dared to dream of—Snake still looked slightly older than he was, but Otacon didn't care. He couldn't care.
Snake didn't pick up smoking again. A wrinkle anchored itself at the corner of his mouth, some more at the corners of his eyes, but it didn't matter. It couldn't matter.
He still had his damn lumbago, and every time he complained about it, Hal drank his voice in, inebriated on his tone, on being able to hear him again.
He would, um, probably have to tell him about this sometime.

Otacon blinked out of his memories and sharply rolled on his side. He threw his arms—as best as he could, fever protesting his sudden movement with a pang of headache—around Snake's waist, pulling him close and himself closer, his weary head washing ashore Snake's strong thighs.
David brushed a light hand, ever so slightly deformed by calluses, through Hal's soaked locks.

"Nightmare again?" he asked.

Otacon audibly swallowed and his grip around his partner's waist tightened. 

"Dreamed of something sad."

Snake mindless petted his hair for a few minutes, listening to his breathing speed and slow, grow heavy with sorrow that David banished with a sweep of the palm.
Eventually, when Hal's body had gone limp, tension and fear having been sweated or caressed out of his limbs and spine, David bent over his restless head, and pressed a kiss to his temple thrumming with a troubled heartbeat.

"You need to stop thinking about so many horrible things, they keep following you when you sleep. You deserve better than that."
"We."

Snake cocked an eyebrow.

"Mmh?"
" We deserve better."

He watched Otacon attempt to roll on his back to look at him and fail, trapped by his own (perfectly justified, mind you) desire to keep his arms around Snake.

David brushed Hal's illness-reddened cheek with the back of cool fingers, still smelling faintly of lakeside soil and pine tree. They stayed in silence for a while. Outside, Sunny was chirping after a migratory bird. The distant sound of a fish splashing in and out of the calm waters echoed to Otacon's ears, almost in perfect synch with the low, deep hammering of Snake's heart behind his ribs, against which Otacon was motionlessly listening.

Hal drifted in and out of sleep three, four, five more times. Fear would wake him by snapping its rotten teeth near his marrow, making his breath hitch in panic, the seconds before consciousness came a lonely, cold blue haze he feared he would stay stuck in.
And yet, every time he emerged, Snake was still towering him, arms guarding his sides, watching him as he twisted and turned in his superficial sleep. At some point between two blinks, Sunny had decided she wanted to lay on the wooden floors next to the puppies. She blinked back at him.
Emerging from the shallow depths of sleep, still disoriented and apneic, Hal eventually anchored in wakefulness, pulling himself on his arms. Sudden dread washed over him as he realized Snake had left his side.

Then his head peeked through the door. The cold evening air came waltzing in, unexpected but not bothersome guest, through the gap. 

"If you're feeling any better," Snake offered, "care to join me outside? Grab a coat, this sure as hell isn't spring yet, but the sunset looks incredible."

And as to emphasize his point, he pushed the door fully open.

Hal wrapped himself in the heavy blanket, determined to not drop it for a coat, and fever-wobbled to David's side.
It was so damn cold. The mountains surrounding the lake were still coated in snow the same way Otacon was coated in sheep wool. The water gleamed yellow with the setting sun.

Snake playfully counted two gray hairs in Otacon's disheveled mane and welcomed his still ever-so-slightly feverish hand in his.

"Stop thinking about so many horrible things," David repeated, voice getting lost as he hummed into Hal's messy hair. "You deserve better than that."

Hal went in for a cheeky, playful elbow in the ribs and ended up hurting himself, presumably pulling a muscle from having stayed in bed all day.
David still laughed.
They took place in the folding chairs Snake had a habit of keeping in front of the cabin, Hal scooting over to attempt to lay his head on his partner's shoulder, which ended up being satisfactorily successful.

" We deserve better," David added after silence had set and the sky had turned just a little bit more gold.

Hal nodded solemnly, more glad that he had remembered his incoherent rambling from earlier than anything.
He meant it.
And he knew Dave did too.