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Adam doesn’t have to leave the heated interior of the car to feel, deep in his bones, the muggy humidity in the air. Seeing the dusting of snow on the still rotting jungle floor of Tselinoyarsk is enough to take him back to being seventeen again, shivering in his dress uniform, soaked in icy sweat and sore everywhere.
Adam could do without John’s relentless attachment to his nostalgia, sometimes.
Zanzibar Land is both not too different from Outer Heaven and completely, viscerally different. The hollow-eyed children ganging up on a tired-looking Gray Fox on the training grounds are a definite difference. Venom never let the kids have weapons - still acted as if Miller was glaring over his shoulder disapprovingly.
Miller is nowhere to be found in John’s utopia. It’s probably why it looks like it needs a new coat of paint, to be honest.
John is in many ways an incredible man, with enough personality to run a nation - but managing it, Adam learned in the eighties, requires much more than personality and raw charisma.
Adam knows John tried to convince Miller to come with him until the very last second. He doesn’t hold it against him. He’s not jealous.
He knows that Miller would make things better, but that he’s irreplaceable.
Men stand on attention as Big Boss himself comes to welcome their envoy. John has fully embraced the military dictator chic and it looks good on him. The red beret is a nice touch.
He doesn’t look older than the last time he’s seen him, but when he falls into step at his side he could swear he’s a little shorter.
Even legends have a best before date, after all.
John takes him on a tour of the grounds. The kids stop their roughhousing to clumsily salute. Adam smiles, thinking back of Miller smacking Eli’s gang with his crutch when they saluted. He nods briefly at Grey Fox, and gets a nod back, his deep-sunk pink eyes boring into him with that weird intensity of his.
“He’s good with kids,” says John as they walk away. “They like him. Has a little sister, did you know?”
“Hmm. I heard.” Little Naomi is doing excellently well in medical school, last he’s checked on her.
The tower is a haunting presence from the grounds, but inside it’s not so different from the command tower on Mother Base. Officers busy with their jobs, communication operators tangled in wires, coffee mugs and paperwork. It’s kind of nostalgic. Here and there, a scrawny piece of tinsel hanging across a doorway. Christmas is only a few weeks away even in Zanzibar Land.
John’s office is almost at the top, huge, decked wall to wall in books. It’s doesn’t look like a place somebody works in. It has nothing of the organized mess of Ocelot and Miller’s office back in Diamond Dogs, with the piles of maps and ledgers and charts and coffee stains on every surface not occupied by half empty mugs that smelled suspiciously of bad gin.
Even Venom’s Outer Heaven office had pictures on the walls, DD’s plush bed by the desk, a sunlight lamp for Quiet. It smelled like wet dog and wilting flowers rather than cold emptiness.
“Your nation seems to be running quite smoothly,” he says as John sits in his huge leather chair, zippo already out to light the cigar he’s cutting the tip of. “But how are you?”
John takes a long drag, the tip of the cigar glowing orange in the dim lights of the office. “I’m fine.”
Adam runs his fingers through his white hair. He’s surprised when he leans into his touch rather than swat him off.
“You don’t seem fine, радость моя.”
John wraps an arm around his waist, pulls him into his lap. “I am what I need to be, котенок.”
They switch to Russian then, not so much a security measure and more of a habit.
“Sometimes I think Kaz was right. I’m not made to rule, just to fight alone,” he sighs against his neck.
“Isn’t ruling a bit like a battlefield?” chuckles Adam. He taps John’s lips with his finger when he pulls back to grumble at him. “Honestly, you’re well over sixty, John. Have you thought of retiring?”
Major Ocelot retired with full honors four years ago, a little before the fall of Outer Heaven. They gave him medals and everything, his unit made him presents.
He almost threw everything away, like he’d done with his worn out Diamond Dogs armband when he left for good. But he kept the worthless medals, like he kept his diamond. Symbols mean nothing to Adam, but they mean everything to those he works with.
“This is my retirement,” grunts John. “I’ve become what I never wanted to be. A seat warmer. A face on a poster. A symbol.”
“Would you rather still be crawling in the mud and getting shot at?” Adam takes the hint the heavy hand resting in the small of his back is implying. He slides fluidly to the floor, under the desk, between John’s legs. “Your knees aren’t what they used to be, John.”
Neither are Adam’s, to be honest. Occupational hazard, he supposes.
Thick, rough fingers thread through his hair, press his face into John’s crotch.
Never been big on foreplay.
Neither has Adam. He makes short work of the fly of his dress uniform, relaxes his jaw and throat when John shoves himself into his mouth to the hilt, breathes slowly through his nose.
“That’s where my place is,” he chokes out, short nails digging into Adam’s scalp. “Not behind a desk, rotting away inside out.”
“Being behind a desk can be fun sometimes,” says Ocelot when he’s done, wiping stringy smears of come off his moustache. “You should get a nice boy to sit under it when I’m not around. I’m sure there’s plenty of cute blondes out there who’d die for the job.”
John grumbles. “I’m done with cute blondes for life.”
“Rude,” smiles Adam, knowing he doesn’t mean him.
John gets up, tucking himself into his pants. “Come. I want to show you something.”
They are back to walking the grounds. Adam squeezes a little into his duster. The humid cold really gets into his bones nowadays. He’s gotten too used to tropical and sub-Saharan weathers.
The lake in Rokovoj Bereg has eroded the ground into swampland, what used to be a field of white now muddy and dusted in dirty snow. John kneels in it anyway, by a rough rock that stands between the sparse, sickly trees.
Adam puts a hand on his shoulder.
“When I die,” says John, staring at the rock. There is no writing on it. There doesn’t need to be. “Will you bury me here?”
“Of course, John. That’s quite a way off, though.”
John touches the mossy surface of the rock. Adam wonders if he dragged it here himself.
“These days I’m starting to feel as if I already died here, all those years ago.” He grunts a chuckle. “Maybe it would have been for the best.”
“Nonsense, John. You did great things. Touched many lives.”
“I guess I did.” He closes his eye. “I’m so tired, Adam.”
Adam gingerly sits by him in front of the crude memorial to his - their - mother, his head on John’s shoulder. They sit until snow is starting to pile on top of their heads. They say nothing, because there’s nothing to say.
***
John squeezes his shoulder when he says goodbye three days later. “We’ll meet again,” he says in Russian. Their good luck charm that has never worked.
“Of course,” lies Ocelot.
He cries on the way back. He’s so tired, too.
But there is a lot work to do, and nobody else that can do it but him.
It will be Christmas in five weeks. And then afterwards, perhaps even Adam can finally rest.