"You," responded Hal. "I love you."
"I love you too. You don't know how long..."
"Let's not wait."
"That's not fair," said Snake quietly, mentally noting that he would have to check the rooms for bugs every night from now on.
"You edited that together. That never happened!" Hal said loudly, looking to Dave for confirmation. Snake said nothing.
"Why would I make my grandson look like a little faggot?" Roy sneered.
"Then someone else did it. It never happened." It wasn't Roy's words that hurt Snake. It was the total disbelief in Hal's voice. He didn't believe he could have said that he loved Dave. "Snake, back me up, will you?"
Snake frowned. If he lied, and Otacon ever found out, the engineer would never forgive him. He had to tell the truth. "You... you were drunk when you said that."
"What!?" Roy's words hadn't phased him. Nasty names were things that happened on the battlefield sometimes, even amongst professionals. "You took advantage of me!" It was the way Hal's accusation ripped through the air that put holes in his heart.
"I didn't take advantage of you, Otacon. You know me. I'd never do that."
"You... that night! You wouldn't let me leave the apartment! You had it planned all along!"
Snake grimaced. Didn't Hal know him better than that? Even when he was drunk, he'd never so much as looked at Hal askance. Never mind actually making a plan to try to get Hal into bed with him when he was sober. What kind of cold-blooded, immoral man did Hal think he was? "Look, Hal, it wasn't me pretending to be Arthur so I could get you all worked up at three in the morning only to put on the brakes without any warning-"
"Oh my God, I woke up without anything on, you must have-"
Oh for- "I didn't do a damned thing-"
BANG!
"I hate to interrupt," said Roy, reholstering his gun, "but I don't want to hear your gay lover's quarrel. The fact is, disgusting little sodomites or not, you are still our best agents out there. I don't want to see Canada or Mexico gaining superiority. None of us do. So I can't just kill you."
Snake looked around at the guns pointed at their heads. "Could have fooled me."
"You found out about this whole little plan of mine completely by accident. It really doesn't have anything to do with anything, except of course that you might end up exposing me if we continue on your little adventure. Tyler couldn't keep you in line, so it's time for me to take some direct action. I'm going to have to wipe your minds clean of everything from a month before Chernobyl. And then I'll have to make sure you remember something else. I think Tyler would believe you'd taken a trip to Alcupulco... to research some Metal Gear related thing that didn't work out."
"This doesn't make sense..." Otacon said, looking away from Snake. "I don't even understand what you were covering up."
"Hal..." Roy said in a kinder tone. "Grandson... I was covering up the biggest social engineering project I have ever tried my hand at. I was trying to change the destiny my son... your father... chose for you. And not only that, I knew I had failed. The rest of the Patriots would disown me for that. Failure is not taken well among such as us."
"So you were covering up... me?" Hal asked miserably. Roy stood and walked to the helicopter.
"Hal..." Snake said softly. The other man didn't so much as turn to acknowledge Dave's existence.
Roy pulled some unidentifiable things out of the helicopter. "These will erase your memories. There might be some... side effects. We haven't used this particular model before, but all the others have worked, with moderate to severe side effects. They've only caused one death, and that was at the adoptation stage of the technology. Really, they're quite safe. You'll probably feel like you have a really bad hangover. Still, if either of you dies, I think we'll stage it as a lover's quarrel gone horribly wrong. Gay men are always killing each other. Too much testosterone."
"How can you talk like that about your own grandson?"
"My grandson?" Roy stopped and smirked at Snake. "He's a clone of his father. A gay clone. Being gay isn't natural, and actually acting on it is a sin. And cloning is certainly not leaving anything for God to do. God would have cleansed his mother's womb of this abomination, but Arthur took it into his mind to be his own kind of God. Just like your 'father' did. If the two of you weren't such good agents for us without knowing it, I'd have you both killed."
The hell with this. The men here weren't going to kill them. They were probably even told not to shoot. Now that the two of them knew the whole damned story, it would be stupid to have to start all over again...
I'd rather fight my way out of this than let someone take my memories away.
Snake pulled his arms over his head with a grunt of pain, kicked the gun away from the man beside Otacon, and flipped the man beside him to grab his weapon.
"What do you hope to prove, Snake?"
He fired on the men who still held their guns, shooting each in the hand to stop them from firing. "It's time for me to ask the questions," Snake growled, aiming at Roy.
"Even if you escape now, it won't help you, you know. We have people everywhere." There was a bead of sweat on Roy's forehead.
"I could just kill you."
"No!" Hal said, quickly waking from his self-imposed stupor. "He's my grandfather, Snake. He's... he's family..." Hal looked away again, the sad and hopeless expression returning to his face.
"Your grandson is worth a lot more than you," said Snake angrily. Roy didn't respond. "Fine then. So all of this was to keep anyone from knowing about your failure to control your family, is that it?" Roy said nothing. "Why was Ocelot involved in this?" Roy blinked. Interesting... he didn't know, did he... "What did Liquid have to do with the whole thing?"
"I needed to see if it worked. Which one of you he'd choose. You were the more moral of the pair. I thought if he picked you, it meant he wasn't going down the same track as his pervert father."
"What happened to the nuclear materials from Chernobyl?"
"They used half of it in their little Metal Gear projects. The other half was sold to a dummy corporation of mine."
He's being talkative... "Who are the Patriots?"
Roy smiled. "I don't think I'll tell you."
Snake fired a shot. "I don't care if you're his grandfather. I've never had a problem with killing my own messed up family, so I'm not going to have any killing you."
"I know something you don't know, Snake."
Snake growled. "And what's that?"
"That was your last bullet."
Roy dove towards Snake as Snake tried pulling the trigger. The gun was knocked out of his hands as Roy tackled him. Hal was mumbling something, but Snake didn't have time to listen to it, focused as he was on avoiding Roy's punches and jabs.
Roy's hands were flying, but Snake knew how to use his whole body in his defense. With Snake's hands tied, the two of them were on an almost even playing field, with Roy having only a slight advantage over him.
Punches, kicks, jabs and head-butts, the soldiers used every trick they could think of against each other.
In the end, it wasn't Roy that got him down, it was Hal. Hal, with the bindings on his hands cut, not even putting up a token defense as one of the first two soldiers put a gun in his face. Hal, staring blankly at the gun, as though he didn't know the purpose of such a weapon. Hal, giving a start and then looking down the barrel with acceptance.
The sight shocked him into stillness, and Roy took the opportunity to hit the back of Snake's head.
Hal sat silently beside the small pallet, back leaning against the wall, studiously avoiding the examination of the other man sharing the single-occupancy prison cell. There wasn't much to look at other than the slumbering Snake, of course, but Hal was trying to keep his mind busy in trying to come up with ways to escape the small room.
The room's walls were made of padding. Hal had tried pulling the padding away, but there didn't seem to be any way to get under it. Every layer seemed to be covering another padded cover.