Disclaimer: I don't own MGS3, I'm not making any financial/material profit from this piece of fanfiction, and no infringement is intended. In other words, please don't sue.

Sleight of Hand

"You need a hobby," he was told, "one that doesn't involve pissing people off."

So Ocelot learns how to play cards, although he doesn't bother with the rules, because the only thing that they do is hold you back from winning. He watches his men play, watches the ones who cheat, the ones who don't, and most importantly, he watches their hands. It's not the cards that are important so much as the way that they hold them, and when he catches his first sleight of hand, the card disappearing like quicksilver down the slip of a sleeve, Ocelot knows that this is a game that he can play. More importantly, he knows that this is a game that he can win.

He learns how to play cards but more importantly he learns how to cheat, and the cards flash legerdemain through his fingers.

At first, he wins 50/50 and that's good for a beginner but it's not good enough. Most of the men that he plays with play quietly, poker-faced, relying on simple tricks like marked cards and rigged decks to give them that extra edge. It's not enough.

Ocelot scorns their lack of ambition.

If he's going to do something, he'll do it with flair. He can shuffle cards in a blur, arcs of colour from one hand to the other, mesmerising and everyone else is so focused on the flamboyance of the gesture that they miss it when Ocelot cuts an extra ace or two into the pack and conveniently deals them to himself.

Ocelot doesn't bother with a poker face. He sits there, lounges there, with a smirk on his face that says he doesn't care about being a gracious winner. The point of winning, Ocelot believes, is so that others /know/ that you have won. He's a frustrating man to play with. He does all the wrong things at all the wrong times and with his kind of skill, they become the right things, just not for the other players. He laughs when he gets a good hand, throws his head back and gives one of those full-throated chuckles that kills the smile of every other player. He smirks when the cards are weak, goes narrow-eyed and predatory, and then he points his fingers at the others, smirks a little wider, and they never even catch the card tucked along the back of his hand.

It's more fun when he gets to cheat, but it's the winning that counts, and after awhile, Ocelot just doesn't lose anymore. It's luck and it's skill, and it's Ocelot's ability to gamble as if he wasn't gambling at all.

"You cheat too often," one of the men, Mishka, warns him. "It's not about the winning, it's about the playing."

The others won't play with him anymore. They don't play for money but entirely too many of them have received the duties that Ocelot decides to gamble with as forfeit for their failure to catch on to him.

"That," Ocelot says lazily, arrogant and assured, "is why you keep losing."