THE LAST MISSION
The hills of Bosnia were quiet now, but Solid Snake carried wars inside him that silence could never erase. Since the year 2000, when he took up his cyber peacekeeping mission, Snake had lived like a monk. He made a vow: never again would he lie with a woman unless it was within the sanctity of marriage. To him, sex without commitment was betrayal — betrayal of her, of himself, of the mission.
For two decades he kept that vow. Twenty years of celibacy, his only intimacy the cold weight of a trigger, the bitter sting of cigarettes, and the steady rhythm of loneliness.
But then came the pills. The doctors gave him medicines to extend his life, though to Snake they felt more like poison. They dulled his edges, made his body ache, and left him believing death was stalking him with every dose.
One night, when he thought the end was near, a friend dragged him to a massage parlor. Snake told himself it was nothing — just business, no strings, no betrayal. A last chance to feel human before the grave. But as soon as it was over, shame gnawed at him like a hungry wolf. He had crossed a line. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t the life he had promised himself.
Sitting in a dim safehouse, he confessed his failure to Angelina Jolie, who had come to Bosnia as an advocate for the displaced. She listened with the patience of someone who had heard countless stories of broken men.
“The doctors keep me alive with drugs that feel like they’re killing me slow,” Snake said, his gravelly voice cracking. “When I thought my time was running out… I just wanted to touch a woman again. To know I was still alive. But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t what I want.”
Angelina put a hand on his arm. “Snake… you’re human. You can’t erase that. But maybe that pain is what keeps your heart alive.”
Snake stared into the firelight, his shadow trembling on the wall. “What I want… is something real. No drugs. No transactions. No lies. Just her.”
“Her?” Angelina asked.
Snake’s lips curled into the faintest of smiles. “Nelly. I hope… she’ll marry me. In her mother’s village. Bosnia. A place that’s known nothing but sorrow — maybe that’s where peace can begin.”
The image haunted him: a wedding not in the palaces of the powerful, but in the ruins of a small village, where survivors knew the price of war. A marriage built not on conquest but on endurance, on the simple truth that love was the only mission worth dying for.
For all his years as a weapon, as a ghost, as a shadow in the world’s darkest corners, Snake’s final mission was not to kill. It was to be reborn in love. To take Nelly’s hand before God and her people, and let Bosnia — scarred yet unbroken — witness the soldier lay down his gun.
And in that quiet village, where the mountains stood like eternal guardians, Snake hoped at last to find what every war had denied him: a home.