Ocelot knew he was not alone.

He had sequestered himself in his quarters and locked the door. He had scanned the room until he found the little security camera hidden in one of the corners, and he had dragged the table and chair across the floor until they were positioned directly beneath it, out of sight of its unblinking red eye.

But he was still being watched.

He felt urgent. He was hurtling forward, toward some unknown destination. Faster as the days he spent in this place stretched into weeks, and he wasn't as certain as he once had been that he was going to be able to stop what had been set in motion.

Ocelot dug two fingers beneath the hem of his glove. His joints ached, but obeyed, and he pulled the folded leaf of paper loose.

He rested it a moment in the palm of his hand before he began to peel apart the creases, laying the paper flat on the table in front of him.

His lips pressed thin as he read the words printed across the top of the page:

Net Output of Ionized Radiation for Groznyj Grad Facility.

Two columns ran down the center of the paper; a series of dates in the first, and a Geiger Counter readout in the second.

The earliest date was two months ago. There had been only a whiff of a radiation in the air then. .27 gray was only a taste of poison. But, if it were left untreated, even a taste would kill over time.

The readout numbers held steady for three weeks, hovering between .25 and .3. They didn't spike for three weeks, but when they did, they flew up past 1 gray. Past 3, past 6, to a steady plateau at 6.37.

Ocelot read it over twice, just to be certain.

It had been years since he had learned any physics. Decades. But he remembered this.

This was complete saturation. These were the levels of radiation in Chernobyl's air before the clean up. In Hiroshima after the bomb.

If he had been exposed to this, had absorbed even a portion of it, then he was already a walking ghost.

Ocelot's eyes flicked again over the columns, before they were drawn to the words written in the bottom corner of the page. Scrawled in pencil, the letters shaky and with great effort, some of them crooked and malformed in places. The way a young child wrote.

Fear Death by Water, it read.

Ocelot felt a deep pain in his hands, and his fingers curled like claws inside his leather gloves.

Fear Death by Water.

He read it again, hearing the words aloud in his mind. Spoken softly; the way Innokenty spoke to him when he was confiding a secret.

Ocelot read it again.

And then the lights went out.

Ocelot gasped, and his hands fell over the paper, hiding it. A deep cold descended almost instantaneously; knifing through his coat and into his bones.

"Ivan?" he whispered.

"Not quite."

The words came from nowhere in particular. They rung around his ears, as though jerked from the air itself.

Ocelot took a deep breath, and the cold burned his lungs.

"Go away, Liquid."

"I don't think so. I'm not through with you yet."

"You're dead," Ocelot said flatly.

"I've heard that one before. It's a nice sentiment, but not true. I died. But I'm not dead. Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know. There's something you want, I suppose."

"Something in the blood, is it?"

Ocelot shook his head.

There was amusement in Liquid's voice. Ocelot had played enough hands of poker with him to know that Big Boss' favorite son was terrible at keeping secrets.

He knew something. There was a mystery that needed unraveling.

But, for the first time, Ocelot didn't care.

"I'm an old man now, kid," he said. "What do you want with this body anyway? I don't have much time left, you know."

"The walking dead?" Liquid smirked.

"Aren't we all?"

"You have no idea," Liquid said. "You haven't been where I've been, Ocelot. Don’t ever forget that. When was the last time you had to fight for your life? When was the last time you really feared death?"

"That's cute, Liquid. Coming from the man who couldn't even kill his own brother."

"You don't know what death is like…"

"I will, soon enough," Ocelot said quietly. There was something about Liquid that brought out his morbid side. The decapitation, perhaps, or the psychic cannibalism.

And it was as if Liquid smiled a little when he said, "you know, when that time comes, you'll fight for every moment. Every breath. There won't be any other choice."

"Is that all you want, Liquid? Life…"

"I want another month. Another few days. It doesn't matter. And what I want, I take."

"You already had it," Ocelot hissed. "You lost your chance. You just weren't good enough. And I bet I know what you really want…"

Ocelot closed his eyes, and tried to remember the last time he had seen Solid Snake. The face his mind conjured was almost the same, but completely different.

"Revenge on your brother?" Ocelot went on. His voice sounded hard, the way it would have if Jack had never been a part of his life. "Am I getting warm, Liquid? You're so banal. Everything you do is so predictable."

Liquid was quiet for a while, almost long enough to make Ocelot think he was gone.

But then he said, "You're getting weaker, aren't you?"

"I don't know what you mean," Ocelot said.

"Been feeling tired, Ocelot? Fatigued? Sick to your stomach? Aching? Do you know the symptoms of radiation poisoning?"

Ocelot said nothing. And Liquid, as usual, took it as an indication to go on.

"Then again, maybe you're getting stronger," he mused.

"You can't have it both ways, Liquid."

"No? But you've been seeing things lately, haven't you? Jumping at shadows…"

"More than just shadows," Ocelot said.

"Have you seen my father lately?"

Ocelot hesitated a moment.

"Don't lie to me," Liquid said. "I'll know."

But there was no reason to lie.

"No." Ocelot shook his head. "He never comes to me. He never has before. I don't even dream about him these days."

"Why not?"

"Maybe he doesn't have anything to say."

"He never had that problem when he was alive."

Ocelot smiled faintly, as though savoring a fond memory. "You still hate him, don't you? You ought to. You have good reason."

"I don't—"

"He wasn't hard enough on you," Ocelot said. "He didn't make you strong enough when he had the chance. I'd be angry, too."

"I don't hate him!" Liquid said sharply. The air reverberated with the words, like a plucked wire. "I don't hate him. But I should have been the one to kill him."

Ocelot sighed.

"Perhaps. That's a sight I would have liked to see."

"Come now, Ocelot. Didn't I just say I'd know if you were lying?"

"You say a lot of things."

Liquid had rarely ever been able to surprise him, but he did, when his voice softened then and he said, "What was my father to you?"

"You don't want to know that."

"What if I do? Are you just going to take it to your grave, Ocelot?"

"I said, you don't want to know."

"Because you don't want me to know? Or because you don't even know yourself?"

Ocelot smirked. "You haven't changed at all. Not since you were a child."

"I'll make you tell me," Liquid said.

"All right, Liquid," Ocelot said thoughtfully. "You're welcome to try. But I won't make it easy for you. I fought you off once before."

"But it's different now. I'm inside you. I'm worse than cancer. I'll squeeze the life right out of you…"

Ocelot's fingers moved around the piece of paper in his hands, as though he could trace the words scrawled there by memory alone.

Fear Death by Water, Innokenty had written.

That boy, who understood death only as a series of ones and zeroes. Who knew fear only as it appeared in the psychological interviews left behind by warriors most of the world had forgotten.

Ocelot knew there was something of him in Innokenty. Just a piece. Small, but significant. He had contributed to what that boy had become.

There was something of Jack, too, and of all his sons, the dead ones and the dying. There was something of that kid, Raiden, whom Ocelot remembered the best from the years they had spent together in Liberia. Something of Fortune, whom he had killed for no real reason, and something of Vamp, whom he had spared for no reason except that Solidus had asked.

Innokenty would outlive them all, and he would outlast a world that had any need for soldiers.

But Ocelot didn't resent the boy for that. Instead, he felt a distant affection, and a gnawing sense of pride.

The way he might have felt if he'd had a son.

"Go away, Liquid," Ocelot sighed. "I have things I need to do."

"Promises to keep, is it?" Liquid said. "Or miles to go before you sleep?"

"Just a mission to attend to. And I always complete my mission."

And Ocelot knew, even before the lights flickered back on, that Liquid had left him.