Chapter Text
The invitation arrived with all the ceremony of a secret file drop, slipped under your door in the dead of night. At first, you thought it might be another field assignment like some covert summons dredging you back into the web of intelligence work you’d sworn you were done with. But when you opened it, it wasn’t sealed orders.
You stared at the package, unmarked except for your name scrawled in ink you didn’t recognize. You’d already received one mysterious summons, and you weren’t eager to fall deeper into whatever orbit this seemed to be pulling you toward. But curiosity, that old soldier’s curse, finally got the better of you.
You peeled the tape back slowly, as though the box might be booby-trapped. Inside wasn’t anything you expected. Instead, it was a photograph.
Your breath caught when you saw it. It was you and John, captured in a fleeting sliver of time you hadn’t realized someone else had recorded. It must’ve been taken in those fragile moments after Operation Snake Eater, when the Cold War had briefly loosened its chokehold. John stood beside you, hair unkempt, his arm slung casually at his side, and his eyes fixed on you with the same intensity he carried into the battle. While you smiled, unaware of the camera, like he was the only man in the world.
On the back, scrawled in a hurried, sharp hand, were coordinates. There was also a note at the bottom with the words, “Don’t keep him waiting.”
The signature wasn’t a name, but the mark of Diamond Dogs stamped at the bottom, too. The style was unmistakable, knowing that kind of precision that belonged only to Ocelot. Your fingers lingered on the page, tracing the faint indentation of the words.
You almost laughed, imagining the spy-themed party hosted by actual soldiers of fortune. Diamond Dogs was a name you heard in whispers, and the rumors that had followed it. Still, what made your chest tighten was not the name, nor the extravagance of the event. It was the fact that this was how fate chose to pull you back toward him.
It had been ten years since you had last seen John. Not as the Naked Snake, not the soldier who was mythologized as Big Boss. To you, he had been John – the man on the other end of the radio back in 1964, the one you had guided through the labyrinth of the Cold War.
You’d parted ways with him two years later, after the Cold War, not by choice, but by circumstance. You’ve been reassigned, rerouted, and consumed by operations that swallowed whole years. You’ve written letters, dozens of them, yet they never reached him. Orders kept you from seeking him out. For so long, you hadn’t known if he’d given up on you, or if the world had simply conspired to keep you apart.
As if ten years hadn’t already been the cruelest wait of your life. You almost didn’t want to go. The rational part of you whispered every reason not to. But then you looked again at the photograph, remembering the man who stood beside you, the one who had made you laugh in between missions, and the one who had taken you out to dinner after Snake Eater. At that moment, you could almost pretend the world was kind.
Then, you remembered the dress, tucked away in the back of your closet all these years – simple, elegant, and black with a neckline that made your younger self feel like she could stop time with one look. He used to stare at you all night back then, not with lust, but with that strange reverence of a man who had spent his life buried in duty and was stunned to find beauty waiting for him at a dinner table.
You hadn’t worn it since that night. But when your hand found the fabric again, sliding it off the hanger, you felt the weight of memory in every thread.
If you were going to step into the lion’s den, you thought, you might as well do it wearing the ghost of the woman you once were.