in the quiet loop. (solid snake x reader)

03 - got this

And you... you would just watch the ceiling. You wanted to tell him that he wasn't alone, but Snake didn't do comfort. He never asked for help, and you didn't push where you weren't invited. So you listened, night after night. Then in the morning, you would never bring it up.

----

You sat hunched over a dimly lit laptop in a room that used to be a pantry, the walls lined with peeling floral wallpaper and empty power sockets. Hal sat to your right, half-asleep with his glasses slightly crooked, scrolling through encrypted traffic with a coffee cup long gone cold. The only sound was the whir of outdated fans and the occasional rustle of paper as you cross-referenced old project codenames with fragmented chatter.

You should've been asleep, but you knew better by now. You leaned closer to the screen, fingers flying as a chain of keywords finally pinged. Something in a buried offshore security feed.

Codename: Arsenal

Location: Big Shell Offshore Facility

Activity: High-frequency deployment

Your pulse quickened. Buried in the metadata was a manifest that was half-redacted and half-corrupted, but the words that remained were enough to tie the noose around your breath. Something along Metal Gear RAY under active reconstruction, the Sons of Liberty, and a global strike mobility through an environmental front.

You sat up straight, the weight of it hitting you instantly. You turned to Hal.

"Hal," you said, voice low but sharp enough to slice through his fog of fatigue.

He blinked, startled out of whatever half-nap he'd fallen into. "Huh-yeah? What is it?"

You angled your laptop toward him, eyes locked. "Wake Snake."

He looked at the screen, then looked at you. Then he pushed back his chair and stood without a word. You turned back to the feed, watching a low-resolution satellite image of the Big Shell flicker under outdated encryption. A cluster of hexagonal platforms, floating like a mechanical bloom in the water that was clean on the surface, but rotten underneath.

The hairs on your arms stood up. The floorboards groaned behind you, knowing Snake was awake now. He stood in the doorway watching you and Hal from under his tousled hair, eyes sharp despite the hour. He hadn't even pulled on his vest yet. Just jeans and a dark shirt, one hand rubbing the edge of a burn scar on his wrist like it was a habit.

"You said there was something," he said, voice low.

You nodded and turned the laptop slightly toward him.

Hal stepped forward. "It's worse than we thought."

Snake's eyes scanned the display, the footage, and the schematic. The overhead view of Big Shell was innocuous on the surface. It seemed like an environmental clean-up facility and was government-sanctioned.

Snake squinted. "Metal Gear RAY?"

"Under reconstruction," you confirmed. "At least two units. Possibly more. Based on modular parts recovered from the wreckage of the tanker."

Snake leaned in, jaw tightening. You didn't miss how his gaze hovered just slightly longer on the words, "Sons of Liberty". Hal clicked through a few layers of data, bringing up a schematic that looked almost marketable. It had sleek renderings, clean labels, and sanitized engineering.

"They're dressing it up like a mobile deterrent platform," he muttered bitterly. "Same PR angle as Shadow Moses with clean energy, minimal footprint, and public transparency."

Snake gave a dry, humorless huff. "Funny. I don't remember clean energy carrying warheads."

Hal's fingers flew across the keys, decrypting deeper. "It's the same story, just with a new face. Whoever's behind the Sons of Liberty such as remnants of GRU, rogue elements, and maybe even mercenaries, they've got backing. Real funding and infrastructure."