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THE LONE MAN was placing a bouquet beside a gravestone.
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The words inscribed upon the stone read: IN MEMORY OF A PATRIOT WHO SAVED THE WORLD. No dates of birth or death were to be found on the stone slab, nor any name.
This was, after all, a cemetery for the unknown. For unknown soldiers buried in solitude. For those whose identities were not permitted to be recorded. Carpeting the cemetery grounds were white flowers, called stars-of-Bethlehem, a name that evoked the light of heaven.
But the graves here belonged to those cast out from the world.
This was a potter’s field, so named after the field of a potter that Judas purchased with his blood money and turned into a cemetery.
A graveyard for the outcasts, for the exiled, and for the abandoned.
The True Patriot, exiled, her name stolen, her remains lost, left nothing behind but her gravestone. Only the blanketing stars-of-Bethlehem, white and virtuous, reflected any memory of the grave’s owner.
The Joy. That was her name.
She loved her country more than anyone, and her country was always in her thoughts. And yet this proud, beautiful woman was exiled, buried here, and stripped of her name. By all rights, The Joy’s remains should have been properly laid to rest at Arlington, not abandoned in distant Russia.
At the site of that same grave, fifty years earlier, Big Boss’s battle had begun.
Big Boss—who always hated that code name given to him by the president—had also come to the cemetery. Back then, the stars-of-Bethlehem had yet to bloom. Big Boss stood at her grave, his head tilted back to keep his tears from spilling. With that sorrow, that lonesome tableau, numerous battles were to begin. And fifty years later, those flowers he laid to rest there had spread to carpet the graveyard grounds.
And now, Big Boss slept beside her.
Snake stood before his grave. In southern Africa and Central Asia, Snake had fought this legendary mercenary and won. How had Big Boss felt, seeing his own copy turn against him? Could he have kept his head in battle, when the face of the man trying to kill him had once been his own?
But Snake and Liquid’s fight had been similar. Aside from a genetic marker, the two clones shared the same genes. In the end, perhaps Snake had only traced Big Boss’s life. As Big Boss killed The Boss, Snake killed his father in Zanzibar Land. As Big Boss faced his clone in battle, Snake had fought Liquid. And the fulfilment of Big Boss’s desires to free the world from the confines of prediction and control came by the hands of none other than Snake himself.
Snake offered a bouquet to Big Boss’s gravestone.
To the fight he’d passed down to his sons.
You are to infiltrate the enemy fortress Outer Heaven, then destroy their final weapon Metal Gear. That mission, given to him upon joining FOXHOUND, must have come from the Patriots—no, from the machinations of Zero. Zero sent Big Boss’s own clones against him. The spite beneath this act was now as clear as day.
This was the form taken by Zero’s deep, seething hatred toward the comrade who had betrayed him; a twisted declaration of victory: If I want to, I can create you.
But in the end, all three Snakes created by the Patriots turned against their creators.
Snake had to wonder: if he remained, would history repeat itself again?
But that wouldn’t happen. Snake had come here to end his life.
Snake lifted the hem of his suit jacket and withdrew the pistol from his waistband. He pulled open the action and confirmed the round in the chamber. Then, as if in prayer, he kneeled before Big Boss’s gravestone and thrust the barrel into his open mouth.
The gun was terribly heavy. His hand trembled for more reasons than fear alone, as keeping an object that heavy in his mouth was a grueling task.
Snake may have spent more of his life holding a gun than not. In not one day since he first killed another man in the Iraq War had a gun ever felt light in his hands. Not the difference in heaviness noted from one specific firearm to the next, but the weight brought on by the gravity of the weapon’s nature as an implement for killing and for war.
Perhaps the soldiers under the SOP hadn’t felt that weight; the System had whisked it all away. But the Patriots’ destruction signaled the end of the era of war without pain.
Each time had its own wars. War has changed. Our time has ended. Our war was over. But Snake still had one more thing he must do; one last punishment he must endure: to erase his genes, to wipe that meme from the face of the earth.
This was Snake’s final mission.
Before he pulled the trigger, Snake spoke.
“At least I wasn’t alone.”
Nothing awaited him now. Snake feared going to a place of nothingness.
He remembered the faces of those who had fought at his side.
Emma, Mei Ling, Naomi, Meryl, Sunny, Campbell, Raiden, and Otacon.
“I can’t allow myself to harm their world. If my death will prevent that, so be it.”
His trigger finger tightened with conviction.
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And finally Snake could pull the trigger.