Chapter Text
[YOU]
The first thing Kazuhira does when the door to his office falls shut is throw his entire uneven weight into Venom Snake’s chest and pin him to the wall. He presses his cane up against Venom’s jugular and hisses: “What the fuck did he tell you about me?”
Kazuhira’s anger has had time to percolate. This is the storm after two weeks of gathering calm during which Venom received every single mission briefing from Ocelot. Twice he passed Kaz on his way to R&D and was not even dignified with acknowledgement. Venom likes to think that he has his own learned understanding of his X.O.’s moods by now, an understanding not whispered into his ear by their mutual Master. Slow builds, outbursts delivered in quick, calculated violence and the long dark afterward; somewhere - in the dim back of his skull - there is knowledge that Kazuhira Miller hasn’t always been like this.
Venom weighs his options. He curls a gentle hand - the real one - around the end of Kazuhira’s cane, but he does not move it back. Softly, he says: “Kaz…”
“Don’t. Not in that tone, not in that voice.”
“This is my voice.”
“No, it’s his. Everything that you do, that comes out of your mouth, is just shit he told you. So tell me - what did he tell you about me? How did he tell you to act with me? What did he tell you to do with me?”
The cane vibrates beneath his palm; Kazuhira’s arm is shuddering, and not just from anger. Venom holds the metal still. “If you allowed time for your head to clear, you’d realize that there is no way for me to remember that.”
“Isn’t there? The human brain is an amazing thing. I know all about the delicate mechanics of brainwashing, it’s part of this job - there is no known method to erase a human being entirely. That’s the benefit of sapience: a man can’t be programmed like an animal.” Kazuhira chuckles unkindly, “or are you admitting that you aren’t really human? That you’re just a thing, a tool, Big Boss’s goddamn pet dog-”
Venom yanks hard on Kazuhira’s cane and sends it flying to the other end of the office. Before his false leg buckles beneath him, Venom snaps out his bionic arm and catches him by the neck. His mechanical fingers click and whirr as they tighten a half inch, constricting the trachea just enough that whatever breath came out in Kazuhira’s strangled grasp won’t be replaced. Beneath the sunglasses, Kaz’s eyes widen - shock, panic and a bright flash of familiarity. Venom lifts him off the ground, just a little bit, so that his toes can’t quite find purchase on the floor.
“Is this the only way to win your respect?”
Kaz stops struggling when he hears that. His arm falls limp at his side and his lips twitch around wet, guttural breaths. It takes a few seconds, but he manages to crack a smile. Venom cranks his hand two centimetres tighter and watches the colour drain from his second in command’s cheeks. This sort of thing is second nature - instinctual - to Venom, to watch for signs of oxygen deprivation, to wrench a man to sleep almost gently-
- no no - extracted prisoner’s eyes are bulging, the rope pulled so tight it has scraped the skin off, left the flesh above his lymph nodes all bloody. No time to cut the rope, we need to punch his windpipe open, hand me a - too late, his lips all blue, it’s too la -
Pain shoots through Venom’s skull, like the shrapnel imbedded in his forehead is drilling right into his brain. He lets Kaz go, lets him crumple to the floor in a heap. His vision is spinning, turning into bright colours and sparks at the edges, shadows moving with purpose just beyond the scope of his peripheral. He braces himself against the wall and steadies, breathes slowly and focuses on what around him is definitely real: the Diamond Dogs flag hung behind the desk, the view of the Indian Ocean through the porthole window, the military grade cassette player sitting next to Kaz’s neatly stacked paper-work.
Kazuhira has struggled to knee and elbow, doubled over wheezing and dry heaving. His hacking turns to coughs, and then to laughter. His sunglasses clatter to the floor as he tries to fill his lungs. They land in the foamy pool of spittle and bile forming beneath him, next to his hand.
“I… I knew…” he croaks, “I knew you didn’t… have the guts to… actually do it.” He whips his head up and glares at Venom, triumphant. “That’s why you’ll never really be him.”
Venom presses his eye shut for a moment. When he opens it again, the hallucinations have passed. He gazes down at Kazuhira - flushed, wounded, a string of saliva dangling from his jaw, and still somehow he manages to act like he won. His bravado is dented, but it’s not hollow.
“Is this really how you’d prefer I treat you?”
“What does your programming tell you? How did you feel when you did that to me, huh?”
‘Nothing’ is what Venom felt. It hadn’t felt any different from strangling any anonymous PF sentry in the wilds of Zaire. Now that it’s over, he feels dirty and empty, like he needs to take a shower and pet his dog. Like he needs to have a few beers to remind himself that he’s still human.
“Is that how-” Venom starts to say, but thinks better of it. It’s too late, however - Kazuhira caught the implication of the question. He’s sitting up now, massaging his bruised neck. Venom has looked into Kaz’s face while Kaz has begged him to commit murder, but somehow his eyes have never been quite so hateful.
“You don’t know the first thing about our relationship,” Kaz hisses.
Venom goes to collect the cane. Kazuhira takes it without a fuss, but he smacks Venom’s hand away when he tries to help him up. When he is finally standing, Venom says: “I’m sorry, Kazuhira. I didn’t mean to presume.”
Kaz takes a minute to clean his aviators off on his jacket. With one arm, it takes twice the time it should. When his shades are back on - all his walls back up - he turns to Venom. “When we’re alone, you call me ‘Commander Miller’. You got that?”
There are two instincts at war inside Venom: one that knows Kaz sometimes needs to be kept in line by unusual methods, and one buried in the murk, in the mists of before, that takes its orders from this man. Whatever their Boss did to him, Venom suspects that inclination was very carefully and intentionally kept intact. There’s a third thing too, more a feeling that an instinct: a part of him that wants to win Kaz (back?) on his own terms.
He replies carefully. “If that’s what you want.”
Kazuhira snorts and makes a dismissive gesture with the crutch of his cane. “Get the hell out of my office.” He doesn’t even look at Venom as he leaves. Of course - even now, the only thing he sees is Big Boss.
[ME]
The first memory you have, the first memory you really, truly have is of looking in a mirror and seeing two reflections. After that everything is survival, trial by fire, crawling through glass, hands shuddering around the butt of the gun he hands you, your arms and fingers slick with blood that is not your own. You think - you thought - Ishmael might have been a hallucination, a phantom manifestation of your atrophied skills hovering over you like a guardian angel. He says run and you run. You know now that it wasn’t guidance, it was a leash, but Big Boss is a great man and when he tells his men to heel, that is him catching them when they fall. Whatever part of you could have harboured resentment was wrung out of you along with your old identity. The voice in your head is his now, it knows the things he knows. That voice quiets your bones, instills them with purpose. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s -
Mostly, you are confident about the things you say and do. You feel like you are his hand - his right hand, because the left hand is always kept in darkness. You are an extension of him that breathes and moves with accurate and objective aim Your brain is like a part of his nervous system, the reptile pod to his mammal. Often, you don’t second guess or analyze your decisions. If you thought it, then he must have thought it too.
You do wonder about her, however. The girl. Long after she’s gone, you find yourself wandering the back end of the Med Bay strut, listening for the pounding back beat of american pop songs, searching for the scent of rainwater and gunpowder.
When he starts speaking to you again, the first crime Commander Miller throws at your feet is her life. “The Boss would have killed her,” Miller swears with unwavering confidence. His faith in Big Boss is unbreakable, even when that faith is based in hatred. “He never would have brought her here and he especially wouldn’t have let her cavort around arrogantly the way she did. Even if he did, she would have stayed in her cell. He never would have allowed what you did.”
Is it true? Quiet listened to you. You never thought her arrogant - you thought her strong, and unapologetic about her strength. That’s something you understood about her - she had nothing to prove and even less to lose. It was calming to sit at her side, examining the enemy route maps as she quietly hummed and cleaned her gun. At Mother Base, Ocelot and Kaz were always subtly jockeying for approval and authority, and sometimes watching them wield their respective weapons - opportunity and anger - put pressure on your skull. There are moments where your programming falls apart, where the scripts come loose and the words begin to crumble apart letter by letter. When your lieutenants snipe at each other over game-changing decisions, you block them out and go with your gut.
Ocelot’s argument about usefulness didn’t even register. When you stood over her gasping, bloody body, it was as if you were guided by some unseen hand to spare her life. As if the fingers puppeteering your mind eased up for a moment, crawled out from between the spaces in your grey matter and finally gave you time to breathe. In that dark, dusty silence, you eased off the trigger and saw into her soul.
You didn’t save her for Ocelot, or for Big Boss, or for Diamond Dogs - you saved her for you (hands in her guts, shuddering around a thing made of steel and bolts, you saved her you saved her, she), because her silence matched the silence in your head. Quiet was like you - a tool so efficiently honed that she lacked human pride.
You don’t try to argue with Miller about her, or try to remind him that he'd eaten his words about her before the end. There was no point to argue after the end when you didn’t argue with him from the start. When he still thought you were the real his Big Boss, he read you the riot act over “siding” with Ocelot. Your response was to set your hand in the crook of his elbow and gently tug him closer. You said: “Kaz, I know what I’m doing. Trust me on this - if she steps out of line, you’ll be the first to know.” His human pride is what drives him. You’d say that he has too much of it, but you know that it’s all he has left.
Touch and intimacy worked - still works, really - to disarm his fury, to dismantle his arguments. Intimacy makes him feel included in your decisions even when you blatantly disregard him. Something as simple as pressing your shoulder against his will slowly reel him in when he begins to spin out into unreasonable demands or petty vendettas.
It didn’t feel manipulative when you didn’t know - it felt normal. Wasn’t that how it had always been, after all? - Miller and the Boss: lighting their cigar and pipe from the same zippo, walking through the helipad with their arms pressed flush and Big Boss reading from the papers Miller was carrying, heads always together about the budget or the next mission. At the staff parties, they always remained in orbit and Miller would refill the Boss’ cup without asking, always threw one arm around him when photographs were taken, his beaming grin the natural partner to “Vic” Boss’ dour half-smile. When the Boss was on missions, Miller whirled around base doing his paper-work and X.O. check ups with a radio always hooked in one ear. He signed off on requisition forms and read through personnel complaints all the while supporting his partner from the other corner of his mouth.
Sometimes you saw him wandering the edge of camp, or the upper levels of Mother Base’s R&D Platform, with one hand cupped over his free ear and one arm braced on a tree, or slung over the railing. Days like that, everyone knew that something went wrong. Haven’t seen Commander Miller for a few hours - Boss must be hurt.
(You, you, how did you see that if you were out on- if you were the one getting hurt? Sometimes you can almost see what the sky looked like from behind two eyes, you can almost see your old hands -)
- he’s still like this, you can hear when he’s biting the inside of his mouth over the radio, how ragged his breathing would get when you entered a shroud of mist. He actually touched your face in front of the men when you went to speak with him after your experience at Nzo ya Badiabulu. He reached out and rubbed a line of soot off your cheek with the heel of his palm. No one said anything - no one would dare talk like that about you, and especially not about him.
So no, it didn’t seem manipulative at first, but now you realize that this is probably exactly what he told you to do, how he told you to treat Kazuhira; how to reign in a willful Second in Command who didn’t always ask permission. But Kaz is fragile now, putting a leash on him shouldn’t be necessary, seems cruel. Maybe he’s always been fragile. You want to go to him, but you know (instinctually, deep down, almost like a voice whispering in the back of your head) that you need to wait for him to come to you. He will always come to you.
The first time he does, it’s only been a week and a half since the Med Staff released him full time. He comes to deliver a Supply Report to your quarters personally. You still aren’t used to his new look, how he cocoons himself in layers of authority. It’s been nine years for him, but you’re only a few months removed from the old Commander Miller, with his buttoned down shirt collar and his rolled up sleeves - the only insignia of rank he wore was his confidence.
After you discuss the paperwork, Kaz lingers, starts making a show of examining the single photograph on the wall and the discarded remnants of ammo casing and magazines on the table.
“Something else you want to discuss?”
Kaz shakes his head, “no. Boss… I…”
“Are you feeling okay, Kaz?”
Kaz shudders and falls back against the door. He takes off his sunglasses and rubs his eyes, wipes something away before putting them back on. “No, Snake, I’m not fucking feeling okay. I’m all fucked up and my limbs are missing and I still can’t believe… I wake up every morning not believing that you’re back. And everything is still so fucked up. I’m sick and I’m…”
You cross the room and take his face in your hands. He flinches at the contact, but doesn’t move away. He sets his cane against the wall and raises his hand to clasp over your fingers.
“I’m terrified,” he whispers, “of what we’ll have to become. And of you… seeing me like this. I meant to be better than this for you.”
“Kaz-”
“I’m broken like this. Barely useful to you. How can you even look at me?” Panic rises in his voice and you can see his pupils darting back and forth beneath his swollen eyelids, looking past you, at something only he can see. “I’m pathetic. I… I didn’t beg them when it was just my fingers and toes - I… laughed at them. But I begged for my hand, Boss, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I begged for my leg.”
“Kaz, you’re spiralling, lost in dark thoughts.”
He can’t hear you. His hand is slowly tightening around your fingers, putting pressure on the knuckle joints. The leather of his glove creaks in the yawning silence of your quarters. “I didn’t… I didn’t care what happened to me, I begged for you. I knew you were coming back and that you would need me whole. If you… if you’re keeping me around out of pity, Boss, I swear… God, if it’s pity, just put a bullet between my eyes right now and throw me in the ocean. I couldn’t bear that.”
You move your thumbs to ghost over his cheekbones and lift his face, pull down at the flesh around his eyes so that he has no choice but to look at you. “Kaz, it’s okay. Calm down. Stay with me.”
His vision snaps clear and he stares at you with wide, wild eyes. “Don’t insult me,” he almost laughs, a cracked, haggard sound. “You don’t have to ask me that. I’m with you. I’ve always been with you. It’s you who -” he surges forward and grabs your collar, thumb on your throat. “You have to promise me. Never leave me. If you leave me again, I-”
You kiss him because it seems like the right thing to do. He kisses back hungrily, claws at your hair, bites down on your lip - accidentally, maybe, he’s working your mouth like he’s a drowning man gasping for air. It’s mechanical, instinctual for you - for him it’s all passion and buried need. This is what he came to your quarters for. In between kisses, he snarls: “if you ever leave me again, I won’t forgive you.” It’s not an empty threat.
… but even after that, there’s something off, something that numbs your fingers when you touch his face. He won’t talk to you about the torture, turns his head away and grimaces when you try to ask about the work he did in the nine years between. You see him from the outside, but the space between his cracks is unfathomable.
You wondered why you couldn’t pull his walls down the way you used to, the way you must have done in the past, for his devotion to you to be this all consuming. If you think back to that night - to your hands on his wrist and his hips, in his hair - you can almost see it, the shadow of the man who stands between you.
[AND HIM]
The tape crackles and skips. Someone turns the recorder off, then on again. A chair is scraped across the floor and the hiss of an ignited flame fills the room. The scent of smoke soon follows. He sighs.
“About Kazuhira…”
“John, we’re running low on time. Miller knows what to do, your Phantom won’t need to tell him. Are you telling me you don’t trust your second in command?”
“Kaz is perceptive and you told me that he’s grown suspicious over the years.”
“Paranoid’s more like it.”
“He’ll suspect something’s up unless he knows how to act. Besides - if he’s going to succeed, he’ll need to know how to keep Kaz in line. You said you’ve worked with him a bit in these past few years - you must know how he is.”
A snort. “I know how he is alright. Not half as much as you do, I expect. But - technically - I’ve known him longer than you; I’ve vetted him thoroughly this last decade, out of respect to you. I get why chose him, why you kept him around in the past, but going foward? I think that he’s a security risk.”
“Trust me on this one, Adam.”
“Don’t tell me you’re getting soft and sentimental in your old age.”
“Funny. You, of all people, accusing me of making business personal. Don’t worry - after everything that’s happened, I have my priorities in line. This is important.”
The chair is set down nearby. It makes a dull thud in three stutters as the rubber feet hit the linoleum. “To understand Kaz, you need to know how we met. He and I, you and him. Actually, you were there, weren’t you? Of course you were - because you are me. But in another life, you saw this story from a different angle.”
He tells the story. It’s… familiar, as if viewed through fogged glass by an observer. It rolls through like a film reel - the flash of bomb blasts, the roar of gunfire, the ridiculous proclamation, a voice almost obnoxiously confident despite having suffered total defeat.
The story ends with a fond chuckle, “ah - this is why don’t always kill them. Occasionally you’ll find diamonds caked beneath all the mud and gore. A man who fights that hard when he can’t win? That’s a man who will give you everything he has and then some.”
“This is the most important thing to know, the most important thing for you and I to remember: every man and woman who follows your orders, they have given themselves to you, heart, body and soul. You must use that responsibly. For those like us who are drawn to the battlefield, there is a certain propensity for bloodlust that coils in the lungs. It is your job to tame that in your men and teach them how to use their talents effectively. And because you give them purpose and direction, they give you everything.”
“What’s different about Kaz is that he expects something more in return. It’s that economically minded part of him; in the same breath he milks pennies and dimes out of the offshore bank accounts, he’ll haggle for the price of his soul. All you need to do is show him a part of yourself that you’ve never shown anyone else and you’ll earn back every inch of work that went into recruiting him. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Adam, refrain from the running commentary. As you said - we don’t have much time.”
“Sorry, ‘Boss’.”
His voice comes closer; steady, confident steps. He reaches up and takes hold of the hanging lamp above, tips it. “With Kazuhira, be patient,” the light shines right down, blinds out everything else. “Occasionally, allow yourself to be tender. Give him enough rope and he’ll do amazing work for you - give him too much rope, he’ll hang himself. Don’t worry - he likes to be reeled in, no matter how much he protests.”
“Never knew you were such a romantic, John.”
The voice fills the room with laughter hard as slate rock. “On the battlefield, love doesn’t exist. I don’t know what love is, so neither will he.” The light is removed and the voice softens. Distant, but still inescapable.
“What does exist is loyalty. Not loyalty to a nation or a cause, but loyalty to the man next to you in the foxhole. Everything else is either arbitrary or transitory. That is the highest virtue we can show each other, and that is what Kaz is to you. Keep him in a privileged position at your side and he will gladly follow you into hell.”