Halfway between misery and serene nights

The Spider's Web (10/?)

crazybeagle — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 02:21:39 GMT

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Alphonse, Edward, Mustang, OC's
Genre: Suspense, Drama, H/C
Rating: T
Summary: Two weeks after the Promised Day, the largest organized crime family in Amestris kidnaps Alphonse, to punish the brothers for a double murder that they can't remember committing.
Disclaimer: But alas, not mine.

As it turned out, Al never did have to worry about not waking up that particular time. In fact, he felt like he'd barely closed his eyes at all before Marie was back in the cell, her arms full of a soaking wet bed sheet that she must have taken from one of the other cells or from the old prison stores, telling Ed to prop him upright. Apparently, she deemed it more important that they get the swelling in his arms down than it was to have him sleep, and Ed agreed.

She wasn't her usual nervous self, or flitting about the cell now—now that she had a definitive task to do, it seemed, she was focused, levelheaded.

"Hold him steady," she was saying to Edward, actually taking Ed's arms in her hands and wrapping them tightly around Al's stomach. "It may not hurt now," she continued, "but it will in a few minutes, and he may not be able to help struggling. A bad fall off the bed is the last thing he needs."

Al was too busy eyeing the sodden sheet in her arms with trepidation to be bemused at the fact that she was speaking as though he couldn't hear her.

His guess was, the second the swelling began to go down, he was going to remember acutely just how badly his arms were broken.

"Better this than no arms at all, right?" said Ed's voice in his ear, in an attempt at reassurance.

"Yeah," Al managed in reply.

But he nearly retched a few seconds after the sheet touched his skin. He felt Ed's arms tighten their hold around his middle as Marie twisted and maneuvered the sheet to twine its way up and down his arms. The sheer coldness of the thing pressed into his chest like a sheet of ice, and all at once, his arms seemed to come to life again, like exposed, crackling electrical wires had tightened themselves around every inch of his bones.

It wasn't until it was done with—his arms swathed in a wet gray mound of cloth that sat on his chest—that Al realized he'd been crying, or shaking. Ed was laying him back down on the cot. They'd managed to coax some water and more acetaminophen pills into him, but the soup Marie had brought was a lost cause. He was barely confident he could keep the water down right now.

He blinked his stinging eyes, doing his best to ignore the entire existence of his arms.

Well, so much for a brave front…

Marie's fingers lighted on his forehead. "No break in the fever," she said, handing Edward a rag. "With a poison engineered to replicate a believable illness, I'd expect there to be at least some fluctuation in his temperature, but…" she trailed off, with a bit of a helpless shrug, her eyes grim.

Ed swore under his breath at that. He swiped his thumb at a tear or two on Al's cheek, before laying the rag over his eyes. His hand slid around to the back of Al's neck and gave it a brief squeeze.

"Thanks," Al croaked.

"Yeah."

"You can try and rest now," Marie was saying. "But when you wake up, you've got to eat something."

"Okay."

"Rest wouldn't be a bad idea for you either, Edward. There might not be space on the cot for the two of you, but—"

Marie's words died away quite suddenly. They were replaced by one long, shaky inhalation as another sound echoed through the cell, and, from the sound of it, down the hallway outside, reverberating all-too-sharply off the walls.

It was the unmistakable clack-clack-clack of a woman's high-heeled shoes.

"Viv," Marie breathed.

Al felt Ed tense. "You haven't been to see her yet, have you?"

"No." The word was barely audible.

As the footsteps grew louder, Al tried to turn his head, and dislodge the washcloth—the last thing he wanted was to be rendered both immobile and blind around this viper of a woman—but Ed's hand pressed down over the washcloth, hard. He felt Ed's other arm reach across his stomach, in what he immediately knew to be a protective gesture, though his hand was balled into a fist and his whole arm was trembling. But not from fear, that much was apparent, to Al at least—but from anger. Heaven help this woman if she was fool enough to keep a wall of steel bars between Edward and herself.

"What do you want?" he heard Ed demand the moment the footsteps came to an abrupt halt. His tone was low, mutinous.

Somewhere off to the side, there was a rustling, as though Marie was rummaging for something.

"Checking on Maria's patient, of course." That was Vivian. Obviously. The odd part of it was, he'd have thought that such words would be accompanied by some sort of vindictive sarcasm, coming from a woman as sure of herself as Vivian Valera. But there was none. The words were spoken with cold precision. And hatred.

"I was going to come to you," Marie muttered. "We agreed—"

"We agreed you'd come when the job was done, Maria," Vivian cut in, impatiently. "Not hours and hours afterwards. I had urgent matters to attend to for Uncle, or I'd have come and seen to the whole affair myself…"

"Affair," Marie repeated, quietly. Incredulously. "And does it matter?" she shot at Vivian, her own voice rising now. "Just look at him."

There was a brief silence, and Al heard Vivian take a step or two closer to them before uttering a thoughtful "Hm."

"Well? Are you satisfied?" The question was bitter, subdued.

"No," Vivian said, slowly, as though she were speaking to a dull-witted, disobedient child. "Because, Maria, you were explicitly instructed to—"

"To hell with my instructions," Marie hissed.

There was a beat of silence before Vivian scoffed, and Al guessed that though Vivian was the one person in her family that Marie was actually willing to stand up to, it probably didn't happen very often.

"There's a plan, Maria," Vivian snapped. "Stop being a child."

But it seemed that the floodgates had been opened. "A child?" Marie repeated. Her voice shook—Al almost wished he could see her. "I'm not a child. He is."

"Maria," Vivian repeated, her own voice taut with an unspoken threat.

Then there was an odd sound—a stomp-stomp-stomp of purposeful feet crossing the cell floor, followed by the tinkling of shattered glass.

Vivian inhaled sharply, and it sounded as though she had taken a step back. Even Ed, who had said nothing during this whole exchange, made a small startled noise.

Wait, did…

Had she just thrown the syringe at Vivian through the bars?

"There's your proof," Marie practically spat.

Yes, it seemed she had.

There was a long silence. Then, another crunch of glass—Vivian must have stepped on some fragments of the syringe—followed by a sigh.

"You choose to be blind to all of the things that these children have done," Vivian said, coldly. "They ruined us."

"No, they ruined Uncle, and that's just your opinion, Viv," Marie was nearly shouting now. "Yes, they're prodigies. Nobody's denying that. But come now, do you honestly believe that all of the military's elite, not to mention the Flame Alchemist of all people, would have remained blind to the fact that their whole system was rotten to the core if these two hadn't been there? The Fuhrer—"

"Maria." Vivian's voice was deadly.

Another silence. All Al could hear was Marie, panting slightly.

"Maria, you're to come back with me and report to Uncle," Vivian snapped. "Now."

"No." Marie's voice was quiet.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm staying here," she repeated, her voice a bit shaky but louder.

Almost immediately, there was a crashing, jarring noise that set Al's teeth on edge—as if something, or somebody, had just collided with the wall of bars. He heard Marie cry out.

Al started and tried to turn his head again. Vivian must have pulled at her arm through the bars and slammed her bodily into them—or something equally unpleasant—but Ed pushed his hand down even harder over his eyes. The message was clear. Don't.

And then Al understood what Ed had been trying to do. He could feel that Ed was shaking all over with positive fury over what he was witnessing now—could feel the very same gut urge to get up and do something to stop this—but he realized why Ed was staying put, and keeping him still. It was to deflect Vivian's attention. For all she knew, Al was unconscious right now, and if that was the case, she had no reason to enter the cell, to come near him again. And he was grateful for it, but his stomach took a nosedive as Marie stifled a pained whimper.

"Perhaps I should remind you what's at stake for you here, Maria." Vivian's voice was a snarl now. Marie cried out again.

"If y-you hurt Lissie and A-anthony," Marie managed, haltingly, through gritted teeth, "I will kill you, Viv…."

Vivian barked a laugh. Short, loud, and harsh. Near manic. "Do it."

TBC—

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (9/?)

crazybeagle — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 01:38:55 GMT

AN: This chapter is more of a short interlude than anything else- giving Ed and Al a moment of peace before all hell breaks loose….and before I bring Vivian back in to meddle with things…

At some point—Al didn’t really register when—Marie’s knee was replaced by Ed’s underneath his head, and something wet and cold was placed over his eyes. He tried to protest, because the cold of it drove dull spikes of pain into his skull, but he found that his mouth wouldn’t quite obey his brain. He settled eventually for shaking his head minutely from side to side, at the very least to get Ed’s attention if not to knock the thing loose.

A heavy hand fell over his eyes, and his vision went pitch-black. “Leave it,” came Ed’s voice, gentle, but his hand didn’t budge.

Al couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and just laid there, dumbly, dazed and freezing, but glad that Ed was there in any case.

But…

Something wasn’t quite right here. Well, that was a near-absurd understatement, but aside from everything else that was quite obviously and dreadfully wrong right now, there was something—

And then it hit him. He might not be able to see the room, but it was completely silent in here.

And why was it suddenly Ed he was using as an impromptu pillow, and not—

He made some sort of questioning sound—he didn’t think his tongue was quite coordinated enough at the moment to actually say her name, but Ed must’ve understood, because he said, “Marie’s fine.”

“W-where—” he finally managed.

“Well her sister and her uncle didn’t get their hands on her yet, if that’s what you mean.” There was a low, vicious edge to his voice. And suddenly Al was quite sure that it wasn’t any ill treatment of Marie that had put that fury there.

Marie’s not the one dying here, you are…

….Don’t think about it….

He gulped.

Do NOT think about it. Not right now. Not until we’ve made it out of here.

But why was it so damned hard to be brave about this? Maybe because he knew it was coming. Knew how weak he was. Could already feel it coming.

But Ed’s voice interrupted these thoughts

“She went to try and find something for your arms,” he said, flatly.

Al winced. So Ed had seen them, then.

“They’ve started to swell pretty badly against the ropes, and she doesn’t want them to cut off your circulation.” Al felt the edge of the blanket being lifted off his chest. “Bastards,” Ed muttered under his breath. “I wouldn’t have thought that there’d be enough of your arms to swell, but apparently I underestimate their ability to tie knots.” That fury had return to his voice full-tilt.

“Can’t feel it,” Al offered, weakly, but Ed huffed.

“That’s not a good thing, Al. You could lose your arms. And believe me, we don’t wanna add double automail surgery to your laundry list. Winry would kill you.” There was a weak sort of a smile in his voice at that, but Al wasn’t sure whether if he wanted to laugh or cry.

“I asked her to forget about the swelling and just find something to cut the bonds,” he continued, letting the blanket fall back onto Al’s chest, “But she’s still convinced we’re gonna die here no matter what we do, and that they’d just retie it if they caught us and maybe add a few extra fractures in there for good measure, so she wouldn’t do it.”

“They’d hurt her,” Al pointed out, gritting his teeth as the sound of his own voice made his head throb. “If they thought t-that she was gonna t-try t’help us escape…”

“I know they would.” Ed sighed. “Which is why I didn’t argue with her when she said she couldn’t.”

“And I take it that t-there’s nothing in the room,” he guessed. The place was bare as a bone, and he didn’t need to be on his feet and looking around to be pretty certain of that fact.

“I tore the place apart while you were sleeping, believe me. Nothing,” Ed’s voice was something akin to a frustrated growl. “Of course I had stuff hidden on me when I showed up here. Knives, a lock pick even. But they weren’t stupid enough not to strip-search me first thing when I arrived.” He made a derisive sound. “Can’t say they’re not thorough, though. They were convinced I had stuff hidden inside my braid.”

Aha, so that’s why his hair was down. Al couldn’t help but smile faintly at that. “Well did you?”

Ed sounded distinctly pissed off now. “Well yeah, but it’s still damned inconvenient for us…”

Al chuckled.

“Don’t see what’s so funny,” Ed groused. Al could feel his fingers messing restlessly with the hem of the blanket. “If we don’t get your arms free—”

“We have no alchemy,” Al finished, smile fading.

“…Yeah,” Ed agreed, quietly. “And unless you can think of a decent Plan B, we’re gonna need that.”

And Al certainly didn’t have a Plan B. Locked up in a place of unknown size and layout surrounded by an unknown enemy, their only shot at scape was freeing himself to use alchemy—a force to help break down walls, create doors, and dodge bullets. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure it would still work for him with both of his arms broken as badly as they were, but if he had to force it, he would.

“If I hadn’t switched to Northern, I couldn’t popped open the hatch and taken a gear or something outta my leg for us to use, but it’s screwed shut on this model, so no dice.” Ed tapped the foot of the leg in question against the ground, hard. “Probably why they let me keep it instead of detaching it as soon as I got here.”

“Well don’t talk too loud,” Al said. “Don’t give them any ideas. Besides,” he said, with a yawn as the drug tugged at his consciousness once more, “If you took your leg apart, how’d we be able t’get outta here?”

“I’d put it back together.” There was a bit of sulk in Ed’s voice.

“There’s a reason Winry never lets you mess with it yourself, Brother.” Of its own accord, his head began to slump sideways on Ed’s knee.

“Al?” There was a note of panic in his voice now, and Al felt a gentle pressure on his cheek, as if Ed was trying to push his head back upright.

“’M’okay,” Al slurred. “Jus’ tired.” That awful cold numbness hadn’t gone away, but it was more distant now, and he wasn’t so petrified that he wouldn’t wake up this time. After all, he had to—he wasn’t about to die in Ed’s arms and leave him at the mercy of these people without his only shot at escaping. So not waking up was out of the question.

…But then again, at the moment, so was staying awake.

Ed lifted the cloth off of his eyes then. Al blinked against the sudden assault of the light on his eyes, but when his vision cleared, he could see Ed holding the cloth up in his hands—it seemed to be a bit of the bed sheet that he and Marie must’ve torn off and wet in the old sink—and, well, Al really wasn’t sure what Ed was trying to do with the thing. Scrunching it up, wringing it out though no water fell from it, and re-folding it again, all while frowning and squinting at it as if in deep concentration.

Al watched him, eyes growing heavier, and not liking one bit how pale and utterly exhausted Ed looked. He wondered how much sleep Ed had gotten—if any—since this had all started.

“You need anything?” Ed asked, after a moment, once he finally seemed satisfied with the way he’d folded the cloth. He’d wrapped it loosely round and round itself like a flattened-out jelly roll.

“Yeah,” Al muttered sleepily, letting his eyes fall shut. “Chicken pot pie and some tea’d be nice.”

He heard a snort, and felt Ed whack his forehead lightly. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on that.”

***

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (8/?)

crazybeagle — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 01:58:22 GMT

Marie watched, her breath caught in her throat, as Edward Elric's fingers closed and tightened around the empty syringe. She didn't know what had possessed her to hand it over to him, but an empty syringe could be lethal in more ways than one, and she'd just given his brother a death sentence. At the moment, she couldn't see his eyes for the hair that was hanging loose in his face, so who knew if he wanted to kill her or not.

Well it had been easier to just give it to him than offer any sort of explanation, at any rate. She knew Uncle would have told him all about Anthony and Colin by now, and that he could put two and two together about the poison from there. When he'd been tossed into the cell, his face bruised and his hair down and tangled around his shoulders, dressed in some baggy old uniform of dark denim that must've come from one of the prison supply closets, his eyes had been positively murderous. It had made her hair stand on end.

That is, until those eyes found Alphonse. Something fractured in his gaze then. And within seconds, Edward was on his knees next to the cot, taking Alphonse by the shoulders and repeating his name over and over, voice growing louder and splintered by panic when Alphonse didn't open his eyes.

Every one of those desperate "Al? Al!"'s had cut through Marie like a knife. Well if he was going to kill her, she thought now, watching his fingers clenched around the syringe, she probably deserved it. Hell, it could be for the best. She didn't know if she could live with herself otherwise, even with Lissie and Anthony in the equation. And even then, she could name about five other families in her apartment building alone who would be happy to take them in, who would love them, who would keep them safe from all this when she was gone.

In his sleep, Alphonse's brow furrowed, and she could feel his thin shoulders shuddering in spite of the mounting fever coloring his cheeks with splotches of red. She bit her lip—I did this, I did this—and set a hand gently in his hair, moving her fingers in slow circles. It helped Lissie and Anthony sleep at night, and it was a habit she'd continued while working shifts in the pediatric ward. And though Alphonse wasn't exactly a child—yes, he is, he's half my age and so weak already, and I murdered him—it seemed to calm him just as well.

The motion caught Edward's attention; his head snapped up. Marie froze, but even as she watched, the unbridled rage that had filled his eyes when he'd been locked into the cell drained away to nothing. He was looking from the syringe to Alphonse and back again, as if he'd momentarily forgotten that Marie was even there. And he had that look on his face, that devastating look she'd observed more than once, back at the hospital.

Marie had been juggling a few different patients at the time, but even before Vivian had called with the hostage order, Alphonse had required the most round-the-clock attention. She had never figured out what had actually happened to him that had ravaged his body so completely, except that it was somehow linked to alchemy, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know. She wanted no part in it, whatever force it was that could make somebody look like a prisoner of war, who was in Alphonse's case literally wasting away to nothing, instead of young and strong like Edward was, like Alphonse had every right to be.

But one look at Edward, even two weeks ago, was enough to tell her that as much all this disturbed her, it had absolutely nothing on how Edward was being affected by whatever had done this to his brother. Despite his best efforts, the boy had no poker face whatsoever—for both him and Alphonse, it was all in the eyes, big and overly expressive, and as good as a death warrant if they'd been born into one of the syndicate families. But Marie saw it all—the way he'd watched Alphonse while he was asleep, the look on his face suggesting that the too-small body might spontaneously splinter and crack into a thousand pieces if he looked away for a moment. The anxiety—and inexplicable guilt—that flashed in his eyes before he could clamp down on it, when they'd weighed Alphonse for the first time, when the results of his first blood test came back less than stellar, when the readings on the vitals monitors bespoke weakened organs.

A smirk and a smartass comment later that earned a smile or a mild reproach from Alphonse, and he'd be seemingly just fine again, the same obnoxious punk that seemed to have no concept of the term "visiting hours." But Marie knew the motive, if not the specific reasons, behind her finding Edward asleep in a chair half-slumped over Alphonse's bed during every night shift, when he had his own room, his own bed, and not to mention his own injuries. Once, she'd swallowed back a hard lump in her throat and nearly had to leave the room altogether at the sight—Edward with his face stuck to the sheets and snoring softly, and Alphonse asleep against the propped end of the bed, looking content but too still, his face nearly as white as his pillow. She wondered if it had looked anything like this the day Anthony had died.

Watching Edward's face now as he looked down at Alphonse was like some kind of horrible slideshow. Fear, disbelief, and horror chased each other across his features, settling at last on a look of such utter devastation in those too-wide eyes that it made Marie's chest ache to witness.

It wasn't until a very long moment had gone by that she realized he'd spoken.

"What?" she asked, blankly. He was looking at her now.

"I said, they coerced you, didn't they?"

Marie blinked. There was no hatred in his voice, no blame. But the question was very quiet.

"Yes." She nodded, too quickly perhaps. "I never would've—"

"Yeah, I didn't think so."

She felt a bit of the tension go out of her shoulders at that—at least he knew—but how did he know?

He must've seen the question in her eyes, because he looked pointedly from her face to her hand to where it rested on Alphonse's head and back again. "'Cause I seriously doubt you'd be risking your neck to stay in here and take care of him while your family sits around wondering where your real sympathies lie otherwise, would you?"

She just stared at him. And suddenly she thought that this might all somehow be easier to bear if he did hate her for it. It was bad enough that Alphonse didn't seem to, that he'd really never stopped being kind to her until the moment he'd passed out.

"But you think you're already dead no matter what you do, don't you?" he asked her, slowly. His eyes were haunted, fixated on the slow rise and fall of his brother's chest.

"I don't know," she whispered. She'd had the foresight to leave a note with old Mrs. Dale, the neighbor, that had insinuated a possibility that long term plans for Lissie and Anthony might have to be made, in case she wouldn't be returning to Central. But the thought of never seeing them again left her dizzy and tight-chested with panic. Even if that was selfish, and that it might be better this way—there was a chance that in her death all her children's ties with the Valera name could be cut. Because God knew Uncle wouldn't last much longer, and when he was gone, what could Viv or Malcolm do?

She was so preoccupied by those words that she hardly noticed until she felt Alphonse's head shift a bit that Edward was kneeling by the bed again. She saw him wince when he touched the side of Alphonse's neck, and she knew without a doubt that he could feel two things there—a high temperature and a thready pulse.

Without looking up, he asked, in a way that pretty much confirmed that he already knew the answer, "Is there an antidote?"

And she was about to make herself do it. To tell him that it was hopeless, that engineered poisons had to have engineered antidotes, that they were two separate matters altogether from what little she knew on the subject, and that alchemy would only complicate the whole thing. That if by some miracle one of Uncle's alchemists actually had managed a stroke of brilliance to rival Anthony and had discovered an actual, stable, reliable antidote in such a short time, Edward would have to find the research lab (if it was even in Betterton), single-handedly take down however many alchemists were protecting it, alchemists and hired hands that wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet through his head if he even got within a few blocks of the place. The Valera influence may have waned in Central, but Betterton was still theirs, and Edward's time would be far better spent by Alphonse's side for however long he had left.

But she never had to say any of it, because a second later, Alphonse's eyes had fluttered halfway open, into a vague, glassy stare that was directed at neither of them.

"Al?" Edward's voice was somewhere between ecstatic and frantic, and there was a bit of a hitch to it.

Alphonse blinked once, twice, and muttered what sounded like a halting "H-huh?" When his eyes failed to focus, Edward leaned in closer until their foreheads were nearly touching.

"Al," he repeated, slower, louder. "Need you to wake up for me now, got it?"

Alphonse made another small, unintelligible noise, his forehead creasing as his shuttered eyes finally zoned in on Edward's face.

"That's good, Al." Something about the subdued tone of Edward's voice made Marie's vision blur. "That's really good. Just keep your eyes open, okay?"

And at that, Alphonse's eyes finally did open all the way. Marie felt him give a little start against her, heard a sharp intake of breath, and she could tell by the shift in his expression—the widening of his eyes and his thin, bluish lips falling open—that he'd fully woken up, and realized at least to some degree just what was going on. "Brother!" His voice was small and creaky but it was clear that he was somewhere between relieved at the sight of Edward and very alarmed.

And it probably didn't help matters that Edward looked a little worse for wear, either. It was clear that he'd been on the receiving end of a decent beating—courtesy of Michael and Silas, she was sure—judging by the dried blood under his swollen nose and his busted lip.

"Yeah." Edward managed a smile. "Hey there, lazy bones, have a good nap?"

Alphonse just blinked again, concern clearly winning out over relief as the crease in his forehead deepened. His eyes scanned Edward's face, and Marie guessed he was taking in the injuries.
"Well, I hope it was a good nap," Edward went on, as though he didn't notice, "'cause you're not getting any more shuteye until we figure out how to bust outta this dump, alright?"

Alphonse hesitated, but he nodded. At the same time, Marie found herself saying, "You can't."

She didn't mean it to be cruel—she just didn't want them to make this any harder on themselves than it was already going to be—but for the first time, anger flared hot in Edward's eyes as he looked at her. She bit back a gulp.

"And why not?" His voice wasn't loud, but something about it warned her that if she valued her well-being, she'd choose her words carefully. "You come and go, don't you? It's not like there aren't doors in this place."

"Ed," Alphonse said, quietly. His eyes were starting to droop half-shut again, but his gaze was focused on Marie now. "I think she's just t-telling us not t'do anything stupid." He broke off with a yawn.

No, I'm telling you not to do anything at all if you have any sense of self-preservation whatsoever, she thought, looking down at those stark, awful circles of purple and gray that ringed the bottoms of Alphonse's eyes. Don't make it worse.

I did this I did this I did—

"I'm gonna get you outta here, Al," Edward was saying. He was messing with the edge of the blanket pulled up around Alphonse's neck, clearly unsure as Marie herself had been whether she wanted to tuck it around him against his conspicuous shivering or uncover him to combat the fever. She hoped he didn't uncover him just now—he hadn't seen what Vivian had done to Alphonse's arms yet, and she didn't think it would be particularly good for his state of mind at the moment.

Alphonse watched him, a weak grin tugging at his lips at Edward's obvious indecision, before he let his eyes fall shut. "I believe you." A second later, one eye cracked back open. "'Cause I'm gonna get you out of here, too."

Tbc~

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (7/?)

crazybeagle — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 02:26:08 GMT

It took a few minutes, but with a thrill of terror Al realized that his whole body felt impossibly heavy, his legs jellylike, and that he couldn't stop shivering. This stuff was supposed to take weeks, wasn't it? A gradual death. Unless his body was too slight and too weak for the usual rules to apply.

He steadfastly pushed away the thought that he was going to die—refused to think of anything at all except not succumbing to the treacherous exhaustion tugging at his eyelids and slowing his breaths. He couldn't, not until Ed came. If Ed came. And while the thought of Ed being at the mercy of these people himself made him sick, he really did have no other hope of getting out of here unless Ed showed up with some sort of plan.

Not five minutes could have gone by when Marie's leg shifted under his neck. He heard a quiet sniffle, and glanced up at her. She was staring over his head in the general direction of the cell bars. "I have to go," she whispered. "Vivian…I have to show her the…" She trailed off, and Al's stomach turned. Of course, Vivian would want to see the empty syringe, probably present the thing to Valera as proof. She slid a hand beneath the back of his neck, another behind his head to gently lift him off of her.

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked, tentatively.

"Yeah," he croaked out, through a mouth that had gone very dry. "Don't leave." You just poisoned me. The least you can do is not leave me alone in this place.

She froze, and after a long moment, let his head fall back down on her leg and slumped against the wall behind her. Her fingers found his hair again, slowly moving back and forth. It made him sleepy, but it seemed to keep her calm—or at least keep her from sobbing all over him again—so he bit the inside of his cheek and said nothing about it.

"Your brother will be here by tonight," she told him softly, after awhile. He didn't answer, but he felt his throat tighten. She peered down at him through hair that was loose and frizzy—she'd torn out the bun some time ago—an odd, sad little smile quirking at her lips. "You look so much like him," she said, tracing a finger along one of his cheekbones. "I noticed at the hospital. If you were well, you could be twins." A peculiar shadow flickered across her face.

He tasted blood on his tongue—he must've bitten his cheek too hard. He did his best to gulp it down through a throat that felt as cold and leaden as the rest of him, and asked, "Why did you go north?"

She smiled ruefully down at him. "Would you stay here?"

"No."

She was silent for a long time, and Al thought she wasn't going to get any better answer. "Fell in love with the wrong person." Her voice was barely audible, with a note of self-derision. "Some kind of terrible cliché, really."

"And you got pregnant?" he asked. It was blunt, and probably rude, but at this point, he couldn't bring himself to care.

But she just nodded. "Yes. With Lissie and…Anthony."

"Twins?"

Another nod. "Nearly eighteen months old now."

"And you didn't want the father to find out about them."

She snorted. Her fingers fell still in his hair. "I was so naïve. Stupid. I mean, Vivian slept around with the opposition all the time. Still does, I'm sure of it. It should've occurred to me that it mattered that Malcolm's father was a major investor."

"Why didn't you use an assumed name when you left?" he asked, tiredly. The cold had settled into his chest now; he wished Marie would throw the blanket over him.

"Uncle wouldn't hear of it," she said, a touch of anger coloring her voice. "It was like my name was some kind of ammunition against me. To remind me who was in charge." She ran a hand across her face. "The intent was to have me living in fear. I was terrified, every day, that either Malcolm's family would find my children, or that Uncle would use them as leverage for…something like this." She had tears in her eyes again, but beyond the sadness he saw a deep, smoldering fury there. And for the first time, Al saw the family resemblance between Peter Valera and his niece.

"You know what the worst part of this is?" she asked, voice low and shaking. "Despite what Uncle would like you to believe, this was never about you and your brother. Not really. You were just easy targets, and I was easily manipulated."

The cold in his chest tightened its grip. "What?"

She swiped at her eyes in an almost frustrated way. "Peter Valera is a petty man. And a ruined one. That's a deadly combination."

"What do you mean?" Al asked, slowly.

She looked down at him for a long moment, then shook her head. "It doesn't matter. You should rest." Her fingers resumed the soothing motion in his hair, and it was suddenly quite hard to think again.

"Will I wake up?"

She bit her lip, and hesitated just long enough for dread to worm its way into his gut.

"The point of this was never to kill you before Edward arrived. It was…" she trailed off, and her shoulders slumped.

"It was for him to watch me die?"

"That was the idea, yes," she said, her voice subdued.

Al let out a breath, tried to calm himself. "How long…" he let the question hang, not sure he had it in him to finish it.

"I…don't know," she said, sliding two fingers to the side of his neck as if to check his pulse. "From what I understand under normal circumstances, it takes a couple weeks. But for you…" She sighed. "You were getting better, but you're not…"

"Healthy?"

"…So I honestly couldn't say," she finished, helplessly. "I'm sorry."

His heart sank. "Is there an antidote?"

"Not that I know of." The back of her hand was on his forehead, ad he thought she was checking his temperature. It was warm, and it felt good on his freezing skin. "If there was one, only Anthony would've known it."

He nodded tacitly. His vision blurred.

"Go to sleep, Alphonse," he heard her whisper.

"Can't," he whispered back, through teeth he distantly realized were chattering.

"Why?"

"Cold." Because this was the true danger here, what Marie didn't see or understand—the ice that was slowly devouring every vein in his body, black ice that was going to steal his breath long before Ed got here.

She frowned, and flipped her hand so that her palm rested on his forehead. "You're not cold." There was a little crease between her eyebrows. "Actually, I'm worried that you're already running a temperature…"

"'M cold," he insisted.

Marie looked torn. "If I put a blanket over you, you're just gonna feel worse when you wake up."

"Please."

She said nothing for a moment, thumb skimming along his jawbone again. "Okay," she mouthed, eventually. Something about the pity in her eyes drove a spike of panic hard into his chest, but when the blanket fell over his body, heavy and blessedly warm, his own eyes fell shut and did not open again.

…

Syndicates were full of douchebags.

Ed growled low in his throat as the big guy on his right, some thug that the others were calling Silas, dragged him forward with a crushing grip on his bicep, apparently not satisfied with his pace. He bit back a hiss where the man's enormous thumb pressed into the wound where his arm had been pinned by rebar on the Promised Day. He dragged his heels, just to spite the guy, but that only earned a tighter grip that probably busted a stitch or two, and the other one—a smaller, stockier, but still formidable guy called Michael—yanking his other arm forward.

It wasn't as though he didn't want to reach the destination in question here, though—these clowns were taking him to Al no matter what he did. And, he knew with a horrible certainty that made all his insides tangle themselves into impossible knots, Valera had done something to Al. Something that he wanted Ed to see for himself. He hadn't said what it was that he'd done, but the second he'd started going on about "just desserts" for the deaths of his nephews, which he'd already explained in gratuitous detail while Michael and Silas had pinned Ed to a chair, Ed's heart had begun to race. He had a feeling—and hoped with every fiber of his being that he was wrong—that he knew what constituted as just desserts in Valera's mind.

This place wasn't big, but what was distinctly unnerving about it was that everything about it seemed to be hiding in plain sight. The abandoned police station in the seedy part of town had seemed such a terribly predictable location, but there wasn't another soul in sight on the streets when he'd shown up. Surely there were more people here than just Silas, Michael, Vivian, Valera, Al, and the nurse Marie, but if there were, Ed didn't know where. Unless they were that confident that Ed and Al posed so little a threat to them.

And why not, whispered a traitorous voice in the back of his mind, when everybody in Amestris knows that the Valeras rule Betterton.

At some point, Ed saw that they were in some sort of round antechamber, brick and windowless like every other damn room he'd seen in this place, from which a series of yawning black caverns of hallways opened off. He found himself being dragged towards a section of wall on which a long switch plate was mounted.

It was Michael who stepped forward, dragging Ed's right arm along with him. He let go of it with one hand so that he could reach for the switches. But even if Ed had thought he'd stand half a chance of finding Al on his own and busting out of this place he still wouldn't have been able to resist Michael's single-handed grip, as thin and atrophied as his right arm was.

And Al's whole body was like that, so whatever these people were doing to him, he couldn't take much of it. Ed shoved that thought down and gritted his teeth.

"Number four, was it…?" Michael was muttering, reaching for the corresponding switch.

And with an electric hum and cackle, one of the hallways to their left lit up, a fluorescent glow on dark brick illuminating a double row of what appeared to be holding cells.

He felt his pulse quicken at the sight. Al was here, if he was anywhere.

He shot a glare up at Michael, who seemed to be counting off the numbers of each small, dilapidated cell that they passed, mumbling under his breath as he went. They were all pretty much the same—bare cot, toilet, and a thick coating of dust, with narrow-set steel bars in front and solid brick running between and behind it all.

"Are you taking me to Al?" he asked. Because if they changed their minds, decided to stick him in another one of these moldy old cells while they let Al alone to starve or freeze to death or he didn't want to think what else in another, then so help him, he'd—

"Hey," he snapped, when Michael ignored him. He angled a slight kick with his left leg at the man's knee—not enough to do any damage, but enough to gain his attention, and annoyance. Whatever Valera's reasons were for not having taken his leg away in order to incapacitate him he didn't know, but he wasn't complaining.

Michael spared him a glance now—more of a full-out scowl than a glance, really. "That was the plan, yeah," he said, through his teeth, and Ed smirked. Good. So it had hurt.

At the same time, relief had washed over him. Whatever else happened, at least step one wouldn't be locating one another. They would figure this out.

But it was a relief tinged with trepidation. How many cells away were they now? They'd nearly reached the end of the hall, three sets of footsteps echoing too sharply off the walls and ceiling. The sound reverberated through his sore head—he'd taken more than one punch to the face during the course of his little chat with Valera, when he'd been feeling less than genial towards the man. He had a split lip and a potentially broken nose, and his skull felt like it was full of angry buzzing insects.

It was two cells down from the end of the hall, on the left, when Michael and Silas both stopped, abruptly, just before he was at the proper angle to see what, or who, was on the other side of the bars. Michael wore a vindictive grin. "Here ya are," he said, jerking his head towards the bars. "Home sweet home, punk."

Silas looked indifferent, bored even, as he reached for both Ed's arms, holding him fast while Michael reached into the pocket of his jacket for a key. Ed still couldn't see into the cell, as much as he fought Silas to take a step forward or stand on his toes to get a glance, but seconds later, the door was swinging open, and he was being shoved inside.

He came down hard on his knees, and he heard the door slam behind him.

At the same time, from in front of him, there was a sharp gasp.

He looked up. Sitting ramrod straight on the cot, her eyes round and wide and her back pressed hard against the brick behind her like she'd heard them coming and had wanted nothing more than to disappear into the wall, was the woman that he knew to be Marie Valera.

"Your sister'll be by later, 'cause she ain't exactly thrilled that you haven't been to see her yet," came Michael's voice from behind them, and Marie started, one hand flying from where it had been scrabbling against the wall and coming to rest on the side of the pale, thin face that was propped against her leg. Its brows knit a bit at the contact, but its eyes remained closed, too-dark shadows smudged beneath them.

And then Ed was off the ground, lurching forward.

"Al!"

The Spider's Web (6/?)

crazybeagle — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 03:21:12 GMT

"Anything in particular he was researching?" Al ventured after a moment. Aside from serial killings…

And then Valera's head snapped up. His eyes were murderous. "Well you would know, wouldn't you," he spat, "if you and your brother hadn't burned down his lab along with all his notes and research."

…

“That was an accident,” Al said. And it had been. It had happened so fast, he’d barely had time to register what was going on, but one minute Arthur—well, Anthony—had been pointing the gun at Ed, and the next Al had been diving in front of him to tackle the man to the ground, or at the very least get the gun away from him or give Ed time to get himself out of the line of fire. He’d already killed ten people, that they knew of; they weren’t about to wait around to see whether or not he was the sort of man who’d shoot a fourteen-year-old point blank. Especially now that said fourteen-year-old had just effectively ruined his life. Al wasn’t sure what exactly was knocked over in the ensuing chaos—either an oil lamp, or some flammable chemicals sitting on one of the work surfaces, or both, more likely—but it only took minutes before the entire room was engulfed in flame, beakers exploding, fumes igniting midair. In seconds, Ed and Al were already on their feet and making a mad dash for the stairs—the lab had been in the basement of Anthony’s home—but Anthony had just sat there where Al had knocked him down, dazed, staring openmouthed at the flames around him. So Al had picked him up, giving him no choice in the matter.

But Valera didn’t look like he was buying it. “An accident,” he repeated. “Alright.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, Alphonse, do you have any idea what that accident cost my nephew?” he hissed. “What it might very well have cost the world of modern medicine?”

“Modern medicine?” Al frowned. “What do you mean? Wasn’t he just trying to develop the—” He tried, quite stupidly, to gesture at the syringe with one hand, but all it earned him was a near-blinding surge of pain. He’d discovered that he could move his hands, somewhat, as it was mainly his wrists and forearms that had been bound, leaving his hands free to flop around near his elbows. But he soon discovered that he paid for it if he didn’t hold them very still. He couldn’t suppress a slight grunt and wince, and grit his teeth when he saw a flicker of amusement in Valera’s eye. He inclined his head toward the syringe instead, and ground out, “Wasn’t he just developing his poisons down there?”

Valera scoffed, but his expression darkened. “Hah. No. Anthony was never cut out for that sort of thing. That he developed this was just a fortunate accident. I did say second greatest accomplishment, remember? And I doubt the bleeding heart kid would’ve even told me about it, if his brother hadn’t told me first.”

“His brother?” Al straightened up a bit at that. Another enemy to contend with, maybe?

“His late brother,” Valera corrected, every syllable sharp as glass as his eyes bored into Al. “Colin Valera. My former heir.”

Al gulped. “How did he die?” And what exactly did he mean, his heir? To the corporation or to the syndicate, or both?

Valera steepled his fingers. “Well suffice it to say that Anthony’s only half the reason you’re here right now, Alphonse. Colin died because Anthony died. All thanks to you, and your brother.”

Colin Valera, Colin Valera… Now that was a name Al had heard before, somewhere... In the papers, maybe. He couldn’t remember.

“You still haven’t explained how Ed and I are responsible for Anthony’s death,” Al said, shaking his head. “Or what was so important that was in the lab. And as long as I’m your prisoner, I’d like to know what my crime was.”

Valera scowled. “Very well.” He twirled the syringe between a skinny thumb and forefinger. “Do you have the slightest inkling of what this little tube contains? Aside from the poison, I mean. Chemically, this,” he brandished the syringe, “is damn near miraculous. Combine the key ingredients in a slightly different way, and add one or two extra chemicals, and do you know what this does?”

“Kills en masse?” As good a guess as any.

“Quite the contrary.” He lifted it to his eyes once more, swirled the contents around a bit. “It has the power to lift a death sentence.”

“Like a Philosopher’s Stone?” It came out with a slight yawn—despite himself, Al felt exhaustion tugging at his mind and his eyelids, the same that had prevented him from carrying on any conversations of reasonable length during his stint in the hospital. He wished that the man would stop being so evasive. He doubted that he’d take kindly to it if Al fell asleep in the middle of their conversation.

“Nothing so archaic as that,” Valera said, apparently not noticing the yawn. “But a cure. You see, Anthony’s goal was to discover a cure to a very specific disease, a disease of the blood, that unfortunately runs in the family.” His mouth pressed into a grim line. “Anthony was diagnosed with the disease himself at the age of twenty-two.”

Al opened his mouth, closed it again.

Oh.

“Is that how he—”

“Of course that’s how he died,” Valera snapped. “You think that a federal prison gives a damn about the state of health of the inmates that are sentenced to life without parole?” He was rolling the syringe in his fingers again, but his hands shook, his voice heavy and low with barely-suppressed fury as he stared at it. “The costs of his medicine by that point were exorbitant, far beyond what the state was willing to cover. The money was no object for us, of course, and Colin offered to get them to him when he went to visit, but he was beyond help by that point. He died a month and a half into his sentence.”

After a brief, stunned silence, Al finally found his voice. “We didn’t know,” he said, quietly. Because crimes notwithstanding, the idea of anybody wasting away alone from a long-term illness in a jail cell made him nauseous. And Valera was right about one thing—without knowing it, Ed and Al had condemned Anthony to just that.

“Oh, you didn’t?” There was a deeply unsettling edge of sarcasm to the man’s voice.

“No. I swear we didn’t.” And then something occurred to him. Anthony certainly hadn’t looked like a man six weeks away from his deathbed, and certainly not like somebody who’d been fighting a losing battle against a fatal disease for the past few years. Maybe a little overtired and thin, sure, but that wasn’t exactly an uncommon appearance among zealous alchemists.

“Well maybe that was because he was doing just fine until you two pulled the rug out from under him,” Valera said. The glare he fixed him with reminded Al of a viper, poised to strike. “That lab was his salvation. It was the reason I funded it in the first place. He seemed so sure there was something to all of those theories of his—”another jab of the syringe in Al’s direction—“and it turns out he was right.”

“So you gave him the lab so he could find a cure for himself?” Al found himself staring at the syringe now. He was concerned, to say the least, that Valera had brought it with him into the cell.

“Well that was the way that I viewed it, of course,” he said. “The immense benefit of some of his other findings was unexpected at the time. And it was actually Colin who approached me with the idea in the first place, and he was begging on behalf of Anthony’s life.” A faint smirk tugged at the corner of Valera’s thin mouth. “You know, it’s funny. Colin was perfect. Everything I could’ve wanted in an heir and more. I had no children of my own, and despite what Vivian may think, this is no kind of life for a girl like her, so I wasn’t about to foist it on her, no matter how badly she wanted it. She’d be killed in her sleep within a week.”

“Are Vivian and Marie Colin and Anthony’s sisters?”

“Cousins,” Valera corrected. “Viv and Maria are the daughters of my older brother, heaven rest his soul, and Colin and Anthony were the sons of my younger brother, may he rot in hell.” His eyes were distant. “The four of ‘em were practically raised like siblings. And that’s why Viv doesn’t like you very much, Alphonse.”

Yes, that would explain a lot.

“Colin, though…” He shook his head, a little rueful smile on his face. “A cold little bastard from the day he was born. Perfect for my purposes. Heartless. But charming. A smooth talker, and a damned good liar. And he loved the life. Can’t tell you what an asset he was to me. Barely even had to show him the ropes, kid was a natural.” He snorted softly. “And his little brother was everything he wasn’t. And that was alright by me. Bleeding hearts don’t make it far in this business, and I wasn’t about to force a round peg into a square hole when I already had my right-hand man picked out.” Another flick of the syringe. “And I knew he had his own set of talents that might prove beneficial down the road, even if he wanted no part in it.”

Al frowned a little. The memory of the man who had pointed a gun at Ed didn’t exactly do much to convince him of said “bleeding heart” tendencies.

Valera chuckled. The sound was devoid of humor, almost desperate. “You know something, Alphonse? Between you and me, I don’t think Colin ever gave a damn about another living being in his life, I mean really gave a damn, until the day Anthony got sick.” He leaned back a bit in the chair, eyes shuttering. “I suppose I should have taken that as a warning.”

“What do you mean?” Al asked, uneasily. Then, “How did he die?”

Valera’s eyes opened once more, eyes tracing the cracks on the ceiling. “Surely you heard about that one in the papers. Even our best efforts couldn’t keep it from making front-page headlines.” He held up his hands, as if spreading the words out above his head. “‘Nephew of Peter Valera found dead in hotel room in Central City. Circumstances of death unknown.’ Thankfully, we were able to keep those mysterious circumstances just that—a mystery. Didn’t want the whole country reading all about how Colin visited Anthony on the day he died, went back to his hotel room, and ate the muzzle of his own gun, now did I?”

Al gulped. “He—”

“I’m sure the hotel staff had a delightful time getting bits of his brain out of the upholstery,” Valera cut him off, still watching the ceiling.

A silence. Then, “Oh.”

Valera barked a laugh—it was a harsh, dry sound, somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “Oh?” he echoed. “These boys were like sons to me, Alphonse. And one of them was the future of the Valera name. Both taken from me. And all you can say is ‘oh.’”

Al switched tactics. He had to keep Valera talking—getting the man to talk himself out of pinning the blame on him and Ed might be a shot in the dark, but it was the only shot he had left. And his energy was flagging too much to provide a sufficient defense of his case, so he had to think of what the right questions to ask were here, and use them to his advantage. Failing that, it might at least wear Valera out and get him to leave. Give him more time to think. …And sleep.

Al met his gaze levelly. “So this…cure. How did Anthony develop it?”

Valera’s lips twisted into a sort of bemused, condescending smirk. Al got the distinct feeling that the man knew exactly what he was doing, and was willing to play along, not detecting it as a threat. Al resisted an urge to shiver. Well at least the bastard liked to hear himself talk. “Anthony was a med student in his last semester when he received the diagnosis. A good student, too. Not a prodigy like you, but well on his way to getting exactly what he wanted, and what we were gonna let him have for his own good, and that was an out from the business. One of the med professors at Betterton University’s a bio-alchemist himself, and offered some classes as well as an apprenticeship.” He shrugged. “Never would have pinned someone like Anthony as an alchemist back then, considering the, ah, moral flexibility involved with the whole practice, but he took a liking to the professor, and he saw all these ways he could integrate it into practicing medicine. Filled his head with all kinds of ideas. Now when I had Colin reporting back to me once a week after he’d visit him in Crystal Ford, he told me that the kid’s notebooks would all be filled up with the most extraordinary things…lucky for me, that’s how I found this beauty.” It was a wonder that the man didn’t break or depress the syringe by accident, considering how much he was waving it around, and no matter that the needle had some kind of rubber coating.

“Wait…” He bit back a yawn. Urgh. Stay…awake… “Colin cared so much that he shot himself the day Anthony died, but he had absolutely no problem spying on him and handing over secrets he knew you’d abuse?”

Valera scoffed. “Well why not? Anthony wasn’t naïve; of course he knew what Colin was doing there every weekend without fail making him take his medicine when they’d spent their entire lives not seeing eye to eye on, well, anything. And obviously Anthony was gonna give Colin leeway to follow my orders, especially seeing as the whole clinic and lab setup, his dream come true for three years, was Colin’s idea in the first place.”

“So the big change of heart happened after the diagnosis.”

Valera opened his mouth to respond, but his words were forestalled by an abrupt coughing fit. They made a dry, hacking sound, and he pounded a bit on his own chest, hunched over on himself for a few seconds, before he was able to speak again. “It’s the blasted damp in here,” he rasped, eyes watering, before leaning back in the chair once more. “Anthony was every bit as surprised by it as I was, believe me. As far as I could tell, Colin never even gave a damn about his own mother, and much less Anthony, or so I thought.”

“He gave a damn about you, didn’t he?”

Valera smiled ruefully. “He respected me. Believe me, there’s a difference. He was my best employee.” He shook his head. “But even an old hardass like me knows that unless you’re some kind of sociopath, which Colin wasn’t, you can’t go through life without giving a damn about somebody. I think it just took that diagnosis for him to realize that that somebody was his brother. Guess he always assumed Anthony would be safely out of the way when it came to the business, like he was once less annoyance to be dealt with, but in the back of his mind maybe he thought Anthony’d be protected that way.” He sighed, and it struck Al how old he looked. “You can see how the disease would come as a nasty surprise.”

“But Colin was still willing to spy on him?”

“Like I said, it was a condition I set. In the process, though, Colin arranged it so that in the span of a few years Anthony could have the life he always wanted.” He glared at the floor. “More or less.”

“He was sick,” Al guessed.

“Yeah,” Valera said. “Only visited him out there once myself, but the first year and a half were terrible for him. Had to hire a live-in housekeeper to look after him and make sure he didn’t die in his sleep, he was so sick all the time. And of course, a backwoods clinic probably wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he was in school, either. With his name and his connections through that professor of his, he had job offers up to his ears from every cutting-edge alchemic research facility in the country. But if he wanted the freedom and the means at his disposal to find a way to save himself, he needed some way to skirt around the red tape that’s involved in joints like that, because he didn’t have the time for it.”

“So that’s where the assumed name and the private practice came in, right?”

“I think he came to like that part of it.” Valera looked thoughtful. “There was another doctor or two in town already, so he wasn’t overrun when he was too ill to work, and he had ample time for his experiments. But he liked to help people.” He chuckled, and Al almost thought by the dry, wheezy sound of it that it would start him in on another coughing fit. “I told his mother it was like he was an embarrassment to the family, helping people…”

“And the cure?” Al pressed.

Valera’s eyes narrowed a bit—he could tell Al couldn’t care less about the reminiscing. “He discovered the formula just after that first year and a half,” he snapped. “And just in time, because based on the things Colin had been telling me about his condition, I’d begun to make funeral arrangements.”

“But it wasn’t a cure, was it?” Al shook his head slowly. “Not if he had to keep taking it.”

“He did have to inject himself with the stuff every morning to keep the disease at bay, I’ll grant you that,” Valera said, “But it worked. Brilliantly. Did he look sick to you?”

And now Al finally had some ammunition. “Mr. Valera,” he said, carefully, “If Anthony developed that formula with alchemy, then he knew the inherent rules, even if he chose to ignore them. All that formula was doing was prolonging the inevitable.”

“See, that’s where I think you’re wrong, Alphonse,” Valera said. His eyes glinted in the harsh lights overhead. “You’re forgetting that his work was a fusion of alchemic theory and medicine. Of course he knew that shooting himself up every day was a quick fix. He wouldn’t have stopped there, no matter how desperate he was. And the last report that Colin ever gave to me, before you arrested him? He told me that Anthony had been up all night in the lab for two days straight, and that he didn’t understand half of what Anthony was telling him, but you know what Colin said to me, Alphonse? He said, he did it. I think he finally did it.” He leaned in. “And all the notes he made, and the prototypes he developed for the formula that would have saved his life and who knows how many others, you burned.”

Al nearly flinched at the look Valera was giving him. He gulped, and then said, in a voice that sounded rather less brave than he’d hoped, “But the poisonings, Mr. Valera. Even if it hadn’t been Ed and me who were sent out to investigate, somebody else would’ve been. There are more investigators and more alchemists, including bio-alchemists, with far more years of experience than us at the military’s disposal. And with all due respect, he was murdering, and he wasn’t doing enough to cover his tracks. We’re not bio-alchemists and we put two and two together—”

And then, without warning, Valera was lurching off the chair and towards in a startling show of strength for a man so apparently feeble. Before Al quite realized what was happening, the man had his hands wrapped around Al’s broken and bound arms, and was lifting him off the bed and into the air by them, slamming him hard into the wall behind him. Al nearly passed out.

“You think he’d have hurt a fly unless I forced him to?” Valera hissed, his face inches from Al as Al fought not to give into the blinding pain where he was pinned to the wall. His vision was blurring at the edges. “The boy had me wrapped around his finger, and I’d never have laid a finger on anybody he cared about, but I took advantage of the fact that he didn’t know it because the poison was too valuable a discovery. So yeah, I made some vague threats against Colin, against Maria and Vivian, against his mother, and it was enough. And let me tell you, it about killed him inside, so don’t you dare presume to know a damn thing about my nephew. Am I clear?”

Al nodded tightly. Jolts of white-hot pain ricocheted up and down both arms, and he was sure he was going to be sick.

He could see Valera’s jaw twitching, sweat beading on his forehead, lips still curled in a snarl of rage. Nothing about the man looked weak or sickly anymore. He made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, and then Al felt himself being flung by the arms straight over his cot and landing, sprawled out on his back, head spinning, on the concrete floor. Pain exploded throughout his entire body at the impact—he didn’t have anything substantial in the way of muscle and fat to cushion this kind of fall. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes.

When his vision cleared, he realized Valera was bending over him, dangling something in front of his eyes. It was the syringe.

“This I will leave in the hands of your capable nurse.” He smiled. “An eye for an eye.”

“N-no—” Al breathed.

“Just in time for your brother to get here, too,” Valera continued, eyes frigid, “to watch you rot.”

…

When Marie found him, he was still on the floor, barely conscious. It was nice in a way; he felt oddly numb, detached, almost float-y, and if it wasn’t for the insistent pain in his arms he could’ve almost been in the armor again. He thought an hour or two had gone by, but he had no way of knowing. He barely even remembered the conversation with Valera—aside from a tightness in his chest and a feeling of dread that made him want to sink into the floor and hide himself at the memory of the man’s skeletal face.

When he found himself in Marie’s arms, tucked against her chest and being gently lifted onto the cot, he vaguely registered that her eyes were red and puffy, and that she wouldn’t look directly at him. When something wet hit his cheek, managed to nudge her weakly with the side of his head. “Wha’s w-wrong?” His words were slurred, and he blinked a few times, trying to wake up.

Her eyes closed, more tears leaking out, and she pressed her quivering lips together hard. She shook her head once, and set him down on the cot. Instead of wadding her coat up for him, though, she laid him down so that his head was propped up on her thigh. Looking blearily up at her, Al could see that she had a hand pressed over her mouth like she might be sick.

And then he remembered.

His entire body went rigid, and he sucked in a shuddering breath.

Marie started, and looked down at him. He tried, to no avail, to wriggle away from her, but she set her hands on his shoulders as if to keep him steady.

“You’re going to—y-you got sent here to—”

Something broke in her expression. “Yes,” she said, he voice very small. She looked devastated.

He was shaking his head. “Why?” he managed to croak, through lips that felt oddly numb. And he knew why, of course he knew why, but why her?

Her face crumpled, but when she answered, she was finally looking him in the eyes, meeting his with her wet, wide brown ones. “Because he’ll kill my children if I don’t.”

“Oh.”

She was still looking at him, something about her expression imploring. And what did she honestly expect him to do? Grant her some kind of absolution? She was about to kill him.

“And if I don’t do it,” she said, her voice low and wrecked, now reaching for something that was just out of his line of vision, “Viv will.” She let out a shuddering breath. “Your choice.” Al could see the syringe in her hand.

His own eyes burned. I can’t die here. I can’t. Not after everything Brother and I did... It took everything he had in him to force the next words out. “You. Not her.”

She opened her mouth to answer, lips twisting into a sort of fractured smile, but all that came out was a sob. She set a hand in his hair, brushed the bangs back from his eyes.

“I never blamed you and your brother for what happened to Anthony and Colin.” She shook her head. “You were doing your job, and they were doing theirs.” Another sob. “And I gotta do mine.” She leaned down until her forehead was touching his. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed.

“I’m sorry too.” He hadn’t realized he was trembling until Marie slid her hand onto the back of his neck in what seemed to be a calming gesture. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, and Al squeezed his eyes shut as he felt the prick of a needle in his left arm.

Tbc-

And if you are suspicious about the Valera’s actual power and motives at this point, then good. More to come within the next few weeks, hopefully. The next chapter’s got more on Marie’s story, and Ed’s long-anticipated arrival…

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (5/?)

crazybeagle — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 22:29:06 GMT

Al had no perception of time in this place. The pills had blessedly taken the edge off the pain, and he'd been able to get at least some sleep. But some time later when those had worn off, he'd woken up, nauseated and teeth on edge, to find everything exactly the same as it had been. With the exception of Marie's presence.

Nighttime, then?

Al had no idea, but he was grateful she'd left the lights on when she'd gone. It was freezing, though, or maybe that was his starved body's inability to keep warm on its own. The concept of temperature was somewhat foreign to him, at any rate—he didn't trust his own perceptions of it. But cold was cold. He shivered, and attempted to wriggle a bit under the covers to get warm, but even that small motion made the edges of his vision go grey when his arms tugged against the ropes. He promptly gave over the attempt, staring at the plastered ceiling and trying very hard to think of nothing else until exhaustion overcame physical discomfort.

Wasn't easy, though, even without the physical aspect of it. Objectively, the place looked benign enough—it didn't appear to be a prison, but rather some kind of large, abandoned police office. Of course, he could be wrong, it wasn't like he'd seen all that much of it. The true threat of this place—the factor that simultaneously infuriated and terrified him, and made his pulse quicken and breath catch the second he'd realized that Marie had left—was the factor of the unknown. He was completely at the mercy of a force that had already been more than happy to demonstrate its cruelty to him and could very well do the same or worse to Ed, a force that he otherwise knew nothing about aside from the supposed notoriety and might of the family name. Just what kind of power did the Valeras have, that they could be so smug in their assurance that they could get away with what was about to be a double kidnapping right under the military's noses?

Well, the homunculi had had that kind of power.

But these were humans.

And what did they want, anyways? Marie was a distinctly, willfully unhelpful information source in that regard, which Al found ironic considering that the only bit of information she had let slip was a murder accusation.

This was making his head hurt.

Eventually, though, weakness of the body won out over restlessness of the mind, and the next thing he knew, Marie was there again, touching his shoulder lightly. "Alphonse?"

"Huh?" He blinked up at her. Her hair was damp from a shower and pulled back into a messy copy of her sister's impeccable bun, and she'd changed into a sort of black cotton shift that looked slightly too small for her. He wondered if she'd had to borrow it from Vivian—they were both small women, but Marie had a curvier, less compact build than her sister, who seemed to be made entirely of slender, vicious angles. The fabric stretched snug across Marie's chest and stomach as she leaned over him, a loose curl or two working itself free of the knot on top of her head and falling around her shadowy eyes. She looked as though she'd slept badly.

"I have food for you," she said quickly as she tugged the blanket off of him, voice full of an odd eagerness that unnerved him. It was almost manic. "And more painkillers if you want them." Nervous fingers darted out and tugged at a corner of his shirt, still the thin hospital-regulation scrubs he'd been wearing for the past few weeks. "Pity they wouldn't let me find you some new clothes before they bound your arms up like this," she was saying, words still tumbling out at an unnecessarily rapid pace. "You'll catch your death of cold, thin as you still are…. I'll see if I can get you some sweats, or at the very least an extra blanket—"

Al cut her off. "What's going on?"

She seemed to deflate. Her shoulders slumped. "Let's just get you ready for the day, okay?"

"You owe it to me to be honest here." He didn't mean it to sound cruel, but he sure as hell meant it.

She opened her mouth, closed it again. She wouldn't look at him, but he could see her jaw working. Then, barely audibly, "My uncle's coming to speak to you today."

His mouth suddenly felt very dry. "Oh." His heart sped up a bit. Well, at the very least, after today he'd know why he was here.

If there was an "after."

…

He was barely able to eat any more today than he had the night before and could barely manage to gulp down the water required to take the pills, his stomach was wound up so tightly. Marie chastised him for it, laying a hand on his shoulder, which he hadn't realized was trembling—his whole body was—and told him that that was probably due to low blood sugar in addition to the fact that it was chilly today. Or maybe, he couldn't help thinking with some bitterness, it's because I'm afraid your uncle the mob boss is going to kill me and I'm doing a terrible job hiding it.

She wrapped him in the wool coat before she left, as well as the blanket, and propped him up against the wall. "He'll be here soon," she said over her shoulder as she left the cell, as if that was some kind of reassurance.

Al closed his eyes, tried to take a steadying breath. Whatever happened, he thought, his goal was to make it through the day. Ed would be here by tonight. And while that thought sickened him, it was also the only thought that kept him sane in the hours-long wait that followed.

By the tail-end of the wait, though, impossibly, he'd dozed off, because it was Vivian's sharp voice that jolted him back to alertness, causing him to bump his head hard against the brick wall behind him.

"Stellar first impression to make on the most powerful man in Amestris, Alphonse," she sneered from the other side of his bars. He blinked the sleep from his eyes, and saw that she was as impeccably dressed as the day before though all in white this time. A thin, bearded, gray-haired man in a dark three-piece suit was clutching her elbow, as if for support.

"Alphonse Elric," the man said, raising a bushy eyebrow. His voice was easy, genial, his city accent even stronger than Vivian's. Nothing about it suggested the frailty that was causing him to cling to his niece's arm so tightly. "Peter Valera. I believe I owe you an explanation."

"Yes." The word was out of Al's mouth before he could stop it.

Valera grinned. It was wolfish, and suddenly Al understood where Vivian had gotten it from. And he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was in trouble.

Two minutes later, a folding chair had been set up, facing the bed and about five feet away from it, by none other than Silas, who had been following along behind Valera and Vivian in the hall. Al's breath caught at the sight of him. But he merely smiled, inclined his head at Al, and set up the folding chair, before taking up some sort of guard post outside the cell, with his back turned towards them facing the hall. Vivian helped Valera stumble into the cell and lowered him slowly into the chair, and it wasn't until they were seated across from one another that it struck Al just how ill the man looked. His cheekbones stood out sharply under sallow, yellow-tinged skin, his eyes sunken and hollow. Vivian hovered for a few seconds after he was situated, but Valera waved her away, knobbly wrist sticking out beneath the cuff of his suit.

"I fetch your cane and leave it with Silas," she said, turning to leave, shooting him a last concerned glance.

"Fine, fine," he said, impatiently, before turning back to Al. Apparently a little hurt at the dismissal, Vivian let the cell door slam behind her on the way out.

Valera turned back towards him, thick brows drawn together, scrutinizing him. "I saw you once," he said, at last. "In Central, when I was there on business. It was from a distance, but at seven feet tall, you were a bit hard to miss."

Al said nothing.

He looked intensely curious now. "Now as I'm sure you know, Alphonse, I have top-notch intelligence forces at my command, who look out for the good of my business. But in the process of going through their reports, I find out more than a little bit of everything that goes on in this country." He leaned forward a bit. "Now I can't say that I know all the specifics regarding your particular situation, but I'd wager that I know enough. And while I highly doubt I'd make the same decision in your position, I can respect it." His voice grew softer. "It'd be a shame to watch your brother grow old and die without you, wouldn't it?" He fell silent again, turning that appraising eye on him once more that made Al shiver harder.

His brows shot up again. "Are you cold, Alphonse?"

Al nodded, minutely, because he figured that would be a better response than no, you just freak me out.

"Hm." And then Valera was reaching into his breast pocket with spindly fingers, and drawing what looked like small, clear glass cylinder out of it. He held it out for Al to see. "Well we can fix that." Al looked at the thing. He realized, with a little thrill of fear, that the thing was some kind of syringe, full of colorless liquid.

"Do you know what this is?" The question didn't sound inherently threatening.

"No, but I bet you're gonna tell me, aren't you?"

Valera looked genuinely startled at that. And damn it, why did Brother's tendency to mouth off to all the wrong people at all the wrong times have to rub off on him now?

And then Valera was laughing. A deep, delighted sound, his head thrown back. When he looked back at Al, that wolfish grin was planted firmly back in place, and Al's skin prickled. "And they told me your brother was the smartass," he said.

Valera flicked the syringe around between his fingers, and Al suddenly couldn't take his eyes off the thing. "You're right though, I will tell you." He pointed the syringe needle-first in Al's direction. "This right here is the second-greatest accomplishment of my nephew, the late bio-alchemist Anthony Valera."

"I don't know who that is," Al said slowly.

"Yes, yes you do." And all traces of humor were suddenly gone from Valera's face. "Because you, Alphonse, you and your brother are the reason he's dead." His eyes were hard. Al saw grief there.

And, beneath it, unmistakable rage.

"How is that possible if we've never met him?"

"Two years ago," Valera said, steadily, eyes never leaving Al's. "Crystal Ford. A little town thirty miles east of here. A young doctor by the name of Arthur Newbury. Yeah, you've met him alright. Your brother arrested him in on charges of murder and illegal alchemical experimentation on human subjects."

Huh?

The Newbury case? The name brought back vague memories—reports of people in the town dying of some mysterious, untraceable illness, their young doctor apparently unable to save them—the parcels of top-notch alchemical equipment that Ed had found on the doorstep of the doctor's home, express-shipped from Betterton—the doctor himself, handsome, dark-haired, maybe in his mid-twenties, but with a look of utter desperation and pain on his face as he stood in his own lab and leveled a handgun at Ed's chest—the resigned slump of the doctor's body as Al had scooped him up and carried him under one arm from the flames that were fast engulfing his clinic, knowing he'd earned himself a one-way ticket a Central prison cell.

"Arthur Newbury was Anthony Valera?" Al blinked. The Colonel had certainly never mentioned that to them, if he'd even known. "I didn't—"

"Really?" Valera looked a little startled again. "In that case, no wonder you're confused right now. You have your commander to blame for that. Of course, we, ah, persuaded the press to keep the Valera name out of the Newbury case, but…" His eyes narrowed. "I'm sure the military was in an uproar over it. In fact, I know they were. Frankly, I'm very surprised you and your brother never learned just who you'd caught."

Al was shaking his head. It made sense, though, that Mustang—and probably Hughes, for that matter—would try to keep Brother well out of the way of the entanglements of organized crime, to protect him, to protect them both from something so vast and deadly when they had another mission to accomplish. And he was grateful for that.

"Last I heard about your nephew, though," Al said, "he was in Central doing a life sentence. I never heard that he died."

Valera ignored that. He held up the syringe. "Do you know what this is now?"

And Al did know. "That's what he was using to kill all those people, isn't it?"

Valera nodded once, eyes focusing on the syringe with a gleam that could only be called pride. "It's brilliant, really. Completely untraceable. In a matter of weeks to a matter of days, depending on the victim's overall state of health, they start to die." He cracked a smile. "Of apparently natural causes. From what I understand, it causes fever, delirium, and the eventual failure of the vital organs, over an extended period of time. And to all but perhaps a fellow bio-alchemist, the cause of death would appear to be nothing more than a sudden, unfortunate illness." He tapped the syringe lightly against his arm. "This, Alphonse, is how I've been eliminating the most dangerous of my competitors for the past year and a half now."

"Are you a bio-alchemist?"

Valera shook his head. "I'm not an alchemist at all. But I have many in my employ. Dozens, who have been able to take the prototype that Anthony sent to me and replicate it."

"So he was working for you?" Al asked, suddenly feeling ill. "All those people…" Had their deaths merely been test-runs?

Valera suddenly looked thoughtful, staring down at the syringe. "Yes and no," he said. "I funded his research, and gave him the freedom to do as he pleased with it, provided he reported all of his progress back to me." He paused. "It was his dream to have a lab of his own. He was a good kid." For a moment, it seemed as though Valera had forgotten Al was there.

"Anything in particular he was researching?" Al ventured after a moment. Aside from serial killings…

And then Valera's head snapped up. His eyes were murderous. "Well you would know, wouldn't you," he spat, "if you and your brother hadn't burned down his lab along with all his notes and research."

tbc~

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (4/?)

crazybeagle — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 01:53:29 GMT

Ed stared at the receiver in his hand, vaguely surprised it hadn't snapped in two from the force of his grip.

Those. Bastards.

The Betterton address. The Valera nurse. The fact that they'd called the phone in the barracks right in the middle of the day, apparently flaunting their confidence that the call would go unmonitored.

So this was the doing of the syndicate. Had to be.

And if that was the case, then Ed didn't doubt for a second the threat to Mustang. These people had been under the military's radar for years, and if Hughes, who had discovered Bradley's plot ages before anybody else, couldn't get any dirt on these guys, then Ed knew there had to be rats. Rats who'd been well-established in Central for years, and who were obviously alive and well in the wake of the Promised Day, under the guise of allies.

And what better time to arrange an unfortunate accident for the Colonel than in the chaos of an overturned government.

Ed slammed the receiver back onto its hook.

Why, though? What the hell could the Valeras want with him, and why now?

What was perfectly obvious, though, he thought, as he trudged numbly back to the dorm, was that they weren't giving him a choice.

They were hurting Al.

At the sound of that woman's flat voice, completely indifferent to his brother's cries, which carried clear as day over the phone, Ed had thought he was going to throw up then and there. His hands were still shaking.

Well fine, they could have it their way. There really was nothing he could do but walk right into whatever trap they'd concocted for him. He'd be on the first train south, tonight.

But they were going to regret it. He'd make damn sure of that.

…

A few hours later, Marie made good on her word, re-entering the cell with a bundle of sheets and blankets under one arm and a thermos and box of saltine crackers under the other. Al had tried to sleep, but anxiety for Ed, and pain, had made it impossible. He'd spent half the time with his eyes half-lidded, taking shallow breaths, trying not to be sick on Marie's coat as the throbbing in his bound arms worsened. It was better that they were immobilized, he supposed, but he felt nothing but heat and tightnessand wrongness as a constant hum that under-rode the pain. He wondered if they'd swollen beneath the ropes—wondered if there was even enough of his arms to swell.

Marie set him down in a corner of the cell while she worked, making quick work of the sheets. Al nearly rolled his eyes at the sight of the neat hospital corners she'd made. The blanket was folded at one end, and, in the apparent absence of an available pillow, she'd rolled up her coat for him. She said nothing, even when she knelt next to him and helped him eat one or two of the crackers and take a few sips of what proved to be lukewarm chicken broth. His stomach was too queasy for anything else. It was only when she produced two small white pills from her pocket, and he eyed them suspiciously, that she broke the silence.

"They're just painkillers, I promise," she said. "Acetaminophen."

"And why are they letting me have these?" His voice was raspy—it was the first he'd spoken in hours.

She dropped her gaze. "Because Uncle wants you to be able to listen when he talks."

…

"You should rest," she said, sometime later, when she'd lifted him back into the cot, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and perched herself on the edge of it, near his head. Her hand lighted in his hair, shaky fingers petting it softly, somewhere between a nervous gesture and a motherly one. He wanted to turn away from her, but he didn't have the energy. He didn't especially want her here at all—no amount of taking care of him was going to make him forget that she'd kidnapped him, let him be imprisoned and badly injured, and without any explanation whatsoever, called him a murderer.

But he didn't really want to be alone right now, either.

He felt his eyelids getting heavy.

…

Damn it all.

Edward was gone. Roy stood in his empty dorm as dusk fell outside, and with it, the tenacious, lingering chill of the retreated winter months.

Hawkeye was at his heels, her eyes wide and lips pressed together tightly, failing to hide her own concern behind her usual mask of unflappable calm.

He'd obviously left in a hurry—bureau drawers stood open, sheets and blankets in a tangled, unmade heap hanging half-off the bed, papers littering the desk and floor.

Edward wasn't stupid. Sick with worry for Al or not, he had far better sense than to rush in and try to take on an entire syndicate by himself in some half-assed attempt at a rescue mission, especially now that sans alchemy, he was virtually powerless on his own.

Which meant that he'd been coerced somehow.

And Roy didn't even know where to begin to combat this.

Okay, that wasn't technically true—the first logical step would be to sic an investigative team on Ed's trail, to at least figure out where he'd gone, though if the Valera name was stamped on all of this, the first place to check would be Betterton.

But Betterton was a big city.

And that aside, by sending one of their own people to kidnap Al—Marie Valera had indeed disappeared from her apartment the night of Al's disappearance, leaving a bewildered elderly neighbor to look over her toddler son and daughter, twins—weren't they being kind of obvious about it?

Too obvious.

It was like they were rubbing it in their faces. Taking advantage of whatever invisible strings they were still pulling to whip the famous Elric brothers right out from under their noses. While the entire government was in shambles. When they didn't have the energy, personnel, or organization for anything more than a shoddy investigation. This Valera girl hadn't even bothered to hide her identity.

Either they were flaunting their complete untouchability for its own sake, or they were trying to make some sort of sick demonstration out of Ed and Al. Or both.

A growl of frustration came unbidden to his lips. He felt a dull pounding behind his eyes.

"Sir?" From behind, Hawkeye's hand touched his sleeve.

He shook his head, though it wouldn't help. Since the transmutation that had restored his eyesight, he'd been prone to frequent headaches, and with a country to rebuild and miles of rubble and red tape to wade through in the process, it had done nothing to improve his patience, or his temper.

And now that Ed and Al were gone…

Agitated, he let out a breath. "Coffee," he grumbled, resignedly, knowing she was about to drag him out and insist that he take some sort of break anyhow. "I need coffee."

Or something stronger.

She nodded her approval and practically steered him out of the room. She was looking a little pale herself, dark smudges under her eyes, a gauze bandage still peeking out under the collar of her uniform. She was very recently out of the hospital herself, and while Roy wasn't exactly thrilled with the fact that she wasn't at home recovering as her doctor had prescribed, he quite sure he'd be floundering without her right now. It hurt his head to even look at paperwork most days, and the still-healing wounds on his hands made it hard to hold a pen. He must've looked pathetically grateful her first day back, when she'd strode into his office, given him a salute and the tiniest of smiles, and wordlessly taken an enormous stack of files from the "to-do" pile on his desk.

Fifteen minutes later found him slumped over on the couch in his darkened office, his arm thrown over his eyes, the cleansing burn of liquor in his throat. Hawkeye had gone to fetch some of the older intelligence files on the Valera family, and apparently sensing his mounting headache, had refused to allow him to accompany her. And for the time being, he was all too happy to comply. "At the end of his rope" didn't begin to cover the way he was feeling at the moment.

He'd almost nodded off when, with a long, sharp, jangling noisethat seemed to bounce around like angry hornets between his ears, the phone rang. Force of habit had him bolt upright at the sound, but he regretted it at the immediate stab of pain in his head that nearly doubled him over.

By the second ring, he'd stumbled over to his desk.

"Mustang," he groused into the receiver.

"Yes, I'm aware," said the voice on the other end. It was a woman's, smooth and matter-of-fact, with a touch of the Southern urbanite accent. It made Roy's hair stand up on end.

"Who is this?" he demanded, eyes narrowing at nothing in particular.

The woman ignored him. "Consider this just desserts for the Anthony Valera affair," she continued, tone turning to ice.

Venom.

"Anthony Valera?" he repeated, blinking. Didn't matter that he hadn't dealt with a Valera case in ages, something about the name tugged at his memory in an unpleasant way…

And then he remembered.

Oh.

Oh.

Shit.

The woman must've taken his lack-of-response as understanding. "If you and your people leave well enough alone, then maybe at least one of them can make it back to you alive."

Roy's hand tightened around the receiver; it pulled at the stitches. The vague dread that had been eating away at him for days solidified into something solid, tangible. Terrible. "Define 'leave well enough alone,'" he growled.

"You halt your investigation, as of this very moment. You stop looking for them altogether, or your little prodigies die tomorrow. Count on it. And if that's not incentive enough, I'm holding the lives of your other subordinates as collateral on this promise." A pause. "Do I make myself clear, Colonel?"

A roaring silence.

Then, "Yes."

Through gritted teeth.

Because he couldn't very well say anything else.

"Excellent."

The line went dead.

Tbc~

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (3/?)

crazybeagle — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:39:53 GMT

Al felt bile burn the back of his throat; his eyes watered. This woman, still looming above him with a gun angled at his chest, had just snapped both of his arms like twigs—with a twisted, practiced kind of precision, and without a second's hesitation.

And aside from the prick of an IV needle and a few vaccines he'd received in the past few weeks, this was the first actual pain he'd experienced in years. His eyes shuttered, and he willed himself not to be sick.

"Vivian." Marie's voice, floating somewhere above him, was quiet, disgusted.

Vivian snorted delicately. "Had to be done."

"Not like this." And suddenly Marie's voice was much closer—he felt a hand light on the side of his neck, his cheek. "You could've killed him just now from shock alone. Look at his arms."

Al was suddenly quite glad he couldn't see them. He kept his eyes shut tight.

"I thought you just wanted to bind them," Marie continued. "That'd have kept him from doing any alchemy just fine, right?"

"And bind them we will," Vivian said, impatiently, as though Marie had just said something spectacularly stupid. "Right now, in fact. And while we're at it," she added, thoughtfully, "may as well kill two birds with one stone and contact that brother of his."

Al's eyes shot open at that. Vivian was looking down at him, amusement tugging at the corner of her lips. There were about a thousand things on the tip of his tongue at the moment—what do you want with him; if this is a hostage situation you're wasting your time; ransom money's no object if that's what you're after; if you lay a hand on him then so help me I will find a way to— but the stomach-turning pain that shot up both arms muddled his words before they even made it out of his mouth. Vivian was talking again.

"Pick him up, Maria," she said, with a light snap of her fingers. "Silas is waiting for us."

Al must've passed out in Marie's arms, because the next thing he knew he was in a different room altogether—more like a wide, round antechamber, windowless as his cell had been, with four hallways of dark brick splitting off from it. More fluorescent bulbs, brighter than those in the cell, hung above him, giving the whole scene a harsh, exposed cast.

He was on a chair—no, that wasn't right, it was too warm and uneven for that. He tried to wriggle around to get a look, but started when a pair of arms tightened around his middle. Instinctively, he reached down and tried to dislodge them, but cried out and let his hands drop as the pain reasserted itself.

"Keep still," a voice breathed in his ear. "Please." That was Marie.

It was all he could do to nod.

Vivian was sitting on a chair, legs crossed, a pair of reading glasses low on her nose as she flicked through a thick file folder that sat open on her lap. Next to her, an ancient-looking telephone box hung suspended half-off the wall by a collection of thick cords and wires. At the sound of Alphonse's yelp, her head snapped up.

She arched an eyebrow at the pair of them. "Whatever you're trying to tell him, Maria, don't waste your breath." She stood, clapped her hands. "Silas?" she called, her eyes searching a spot somewhere over Al and Marie's heads.

Another set of footsteps, behind them. Heavy, resounding, and horribly slow.

"Sometime today would be nice, Silas," Vivian snapped, turning towards the phone and picking up the receiver. She fished a slip of paper out of her pocket and glanced at it for a second before entering a number into the rotary dial with a finger that was now gloved in white leather.

And then a huge, close-shaven man wearing a tailored suit and an easy smile stepped into his line of vision, blocking his view of Vivian completely. In his hands was length of thin, bright yellow rope that Al guessed must be made out of some kind of twined plastic, and a tarnished cigarette lighter.

"I'm guessing you're Silas then?" Even to his own ears, his voice sounded small—tired, scared, and cracked by pain. So much for a brave front, then. Ed was always better at that, anyways.

The man's grin broadened, and he inclined his head slightly. Marie's arms squeezed him tighter. He wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean, but he took it that it wasn't a good sign.

"Get on with it, Silas," said Vivian between the click-click-click of the phone dial. "I'm nearly finished here."

Wordlessly, Silas knelt in front of Al, measuring out a length of the rope between the massive span of his arms, looking thoughtful. He smelled of sweat and cologne.

A second later, he'd caught hold of Al's forearms in his ham-like fists and was pressing them roughly together, and Al nearly fainted. Pinning one of his wrists to the inside of his opposite elbow while grabbing for the rope, Silas afforded Al a clear view of exactly the damage that had been done to his arms. It was easy to see, sans any substantial muscle or fat on arms that were rail-thin, the bowing of the bones where Vivian had stepped on them.

"Don't struggle," Marie whispered needlessly in his ear, and Al was struck with an odd, hysterical urge to laugh. He might have responded that he couldn't have anyways, if he hadn't thought that he'd vomit if he opened his mouth. His eyes burned.

Vivian, meanwhile, was apparently too engrossed in the telephone to take any heed of anything else happening in the room, her back to the rest of them and the receiver pressed to her hear. Her booted foot tapped the floor, a hand on her hip as she waited through the dial tone.

Silas tightened the first knot, and Al bit back a yell.

Vivian wheeled around suddenly, a chilling grin on her lips. "Edward Elric," she said into the receiver.

...

Thirty minutes later, Al was staring up at the ceiling of his cell, broken arms bound tight across chest with countless tight, fat knots of plastic rope. It was pointless to struggle against them; he'd have had better luck trying to free himself from iron shackles. He couldn't even work at the knots with his teeth, which had been his only idea before Silas had pulled out the lighter and melted the plastic around the knots just enough to fuse them together.

Marie had carried him back. She'd helped him use the cell's toilet, which he was far past the point of feeling embarrassment about, given him some water, and helped him lie down, tucking her coat around him again. She wouldn't meet his eyes the entire time, but she muttered something about bringing food and proper bedding for him, and painkillers if they'd allow it, later in the day. At the moment, she was sitting at the edge of his cot, head in her hands like she was fending off a migraine.

He knew he should be making her talk, get her to open up about who she was and just what the hell was going on here, but pain and dread kept him silent. He shivered, remembering Vivian's clipped, one-sided conversation with Edward.

Betterton, she'd said, every syllable crisp and clear as a bell, her accent notwithstanding. The boarded-up police station at Twenty-fifth and Rosen Avenue. You be here by midnight tomorrow, alone, or we wring his scrawny little neck.

So this was Betterton. He'd suspected as much—headquarters of Valera Steel, and the northernmost of the Southern industrial cities.

Vivian had held out the phone in his general direction after that bit—and he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Ed had heard every strangled cry and yelp he'd failed to stifle while Silas was tying those knots. Anger seethed in his gut. They want him to think I'm being tortured…

She'd twirled the phone cord in her fingers, silver eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

Tell a soul about this and my people put a bullet through your commanding officer's brain. Am I clear?

At that, she'd hung up.

He hadn't noticed the tears—whether borne from anger, pain, or desperation, he didn't know—until Marie was swiping his cheek with a thumb. Her hair hung in her face; he couldn't see her expression.

"Why are you doing this?" Why did you take me away? Why are you helping these people?

She was silent for a long time.

Then, barely audibly, "Because you're a murderer."

tbc~

The Spider's Web (2/?)

crazybeagle — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 04:04:59 GMT

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Alphonse, Edward, Mustang, OC's
Genre: suspense, drama, h/c
Rating: t
Summary: Two weeks after the Promised Day, the largest organized crime family in Amestris kidnaps Alphonse, to punish the brothers for a double murder that they can't remember committing.
Disclaimer: But alas, not mine.

When Al woke again, it was to the sound of an argument—one voice was a woman’s, low, almost a hiss, and the other was more hushed and quavered slightly. That second one was Marie, his mind supplied blearily as he blinked around in near-complete darkness, looking for the source of the voices, each tone sharp in his ears and making him grimace. His head was pounding. The voices were overlapping—each seemed eager to talk over the other.

“—was I supposed to know, I wasn’t given any information beyond just taking him and—”

“—be so dense, honestly, Maria, he’s an alchemist and one of the most powerful in the country to boot.He could’ve transmuted a wide-open hole in the side of the car and slipped right out onto the highway—”

“—was on an extremely high morphine dose and he’s kitten-weak, so I seriously doubt that, and at any rate, you have him and it’s done with, so just tie him up now if you want—”

“—lucky if Uncle doesn’t hear about this, honestly, how could you be such an idiot—”

“—wouldn’t do that to me, Viv, you can’t,” Marie’s voice was now just as sharp as the other, with anger, but there was a definite undercurrent to it, one of terror. “You know what he’d do…”

“Then I suggest you don’t screw up again,” said the other voice, Viv’s, coldly. She had a distinctive accent, Al thought groggily, trying to determine the direction the women’s voices were coming from through the dark. She hit her vowels hard, and her consonants not hard enough, and it was an accent he’d definitely heard before—it was one that was widely associated with the industrial urban sprawls of Southern Amestris, big ugly cities that were mazes of factories and warehouses and smog. Al hated them. And while they might be the financial hub of the country, it was common knowledge that these polluted hell holes were lorded over by mob dynasties.

And at that thought, Al suddenly felt as though he’d swallowed a chunk of ice. He’d been about to make some sort of noise, let these people know he was awake and ask where he was and what they wanted, but he thought better of it. He held his breath, and continued to listen.

“Again?” Marie sounded nearly hysterical. “What the hell do you mean, ‘again’? I’m going home first thing tomorrow. I am not you people’s errand girl. Not anymore.”

“I think you’ll find you are, Maria.” Viv sounded bored with this conversation now. “Or are you so eager to disown your family? Besides, Uncle needs you to stick around for awhile. Look after our prisoner.” Something about the way she said it made Al shiver.

A beat of silence. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“You’re the nurse in the family,” Viv continued, nonchalant. “Can’t have the little invalid fouling up the bedsheets, now can we? Come now, we have to show a bit more class than that.”

“You don’t give a damn whether the boy wastes away completely in there.”

“And neither should you,” Viv snapped. Then she added, quietly, viciously: “Or are you forgetting what this boy has done? What he’s capable of?”

A pause. “No.”

“You’d do well not to.” Al heard footsteps—a sharp, echoing tap-tap-tap—and what sounded like the flick of a switch. Suddenly, the room was flooded with light, and Al was blinking back tears as spots flooded his vision and his head gave a nasty throb. That was one thing he was still having trouble getting used to, having eyes that were actually sensitive to light intake, and were rendered completely useless in the absence of light, or, like now, by the presence of too much of it.

He drove the heels of his hands into his eyes, willing the nausea away, and started when heard his own name in Viv’s cold voice.

“Alphonse Elric.”

He drew his hands away from his face. He was lying on his side on a cot, the wool coat still tucked around him, in what appeared to be a dilapidated holding cell of some kind. Three walls were brick and smelled of damp, his bed pressed lengthwise against one, while the fourth, across from him, was made entirely of steel bars that stretched floor to ceiling. The whole scene was lit by dreary, flickering fluorescent bulbs.

Standing on the other side of the bars and staring in at him were two women—there was Nurse Marie, curls in wild disarray and face haggard with exhaustion, wearing some rumpled, ill-fitting blouse and skirt. She was staring quite fixedly at the ground, hands clenched at her sides. And next to her, the fingers of one hand curled like talons around a bar of the cell, was the woman who he presumed to be Viv.

She was attractive, Al supposed, in a severe sort of way, and looked to be around thirty. She wore a blazer and skirt of pristine black, perfectly-fitted, her dark curly hair that might’ve resembled Marie’s wound into a tight knot on the back of her head. Her eyes were hard, silvery, and currently giving him an appraising look that made Al’s skin crawl. The very white smile she flashed him reminded him of wolves and serpents.

“Vivian Valera,” she continued, still smiling, apparently satisfied by the fact that her mere appearance was enough to unnerve Al. “And of course you’re already acquainted with my younger sister, Maria Valera.” At the sound of her name, Marie’s eyes fluttered closed for a fraction of a second, but she gave no other acknowledgement that Vivian had spoken.

Valera?

Oh, this was bad…

Al made a valiant attempt to drag himself upright, but couldn’t quite manage it. Marie must’ve been right about morphine in his system; his arms trembled like sticks below him and he collapsed back onto the cot. “What do you want from me?” Flopped out on a cot behind bars and panting from exertion, he couldn’t have looked very intimidating, but he glared at them both nonetheless.

“Recompense,” Vivian said, her grin sliding off her face. “Exact recompense.”

Al blinked. “Recompense for what?” As far as he could remember, he didn’t think he’d ever met a member of the famous Valera family, and he hadn’t even known that Marie (Maria?) was a Valera. Nonetheless, as light glinted off of a key that suddenly appeared in Vivian’s hand, which she slid smoothly into the lock of his cell, something horrible coiled in the pit of Al’s stomach.

“I’ll save the pleasure of that explanation for my uncle,” Vivian said, her lip curling as she strode into the cell, brandishing the key, Marie a fretting shadow in the open doorway.

And before Al quite knew what was going on, he’d been dragged from the bed and thrown down hard onto the floor, the force of it nearly driving the breath from his lungs. He heard the snick of a gun being cocked, and his heart rose to his throat.

“Move and I’ll shoot,” Vivian said flatly, from above him. “Spread your arms out.” She gestured down at his chest with the muzzle of a handgun.

“Viv—” Marie started to protest, but Vivian threw up a hand, and she fell silent.

“I’m only doing what you should’ve all along, Maria,” Vivian said, a smirk tugging at her lips as she watched Al spread his arms out to either side of him, fingertips sweeping the gritty concrete floor.

And then, with a sharp stamp of Vivian’s foot and a sickening snap, Al felt his right arm break.

Tbc~

Fullmetal Alchemist: "The Spider's Web" (1/?)

crazybeagle — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:02:00 GMT

There was a reason that Roy Mustang had kept the Elric Brothers far, far away from any cases that involved the deadly, sprawling spider’s web that made up the syndicates of organized crime across Amestris. It wasn’t really his division, anyways, and beyond his depth of comprehension and experience, so it was certainly not a can of worms that he was about to foist upon any of his subordinates intentionally. Ed and Al weren’t naïve; Roy knew that to at least some degree they realized that many of the notorious atrocities that had made the news—or ones that at least had reached the investigations division that Hughes used to try so desperately to keep away from the prying eyes of the press— were a little too clean, too baffling, too calculated to have been the random crimes of some wayward soul.

And then, of course, there were the names that everybody knew to watch out for, rumors that spread and circulated far and wide about Amestris’ infamous families.

Namely, the Valeras.

Valera, Valera…. The name had been a thorn in Roy’s side, and, more namely, in Maes Hughes’s side, for years. After Maes’s death, Roy had been far too preoccupied with the more immediate threats within the government to pay any heed to the celebrated family of steel magnates from the South. Much of the railway lines across the country were comprised of highest-quality Valera steel. Its current CEO, Peter Valera, was famously wealthy, and kept his name in the newspapers not for being one of the most cold-blooded orchestrators of mass-murder Amestris had ever known, though that was common knowledge by word of mouth, but for his charity work. Hell, there was even a Valera Orphanage in Central. Funny, though, that two weeks after its opening, three bodies had been found chopped to bits in a dumpster in South City, half-mauled by rodents by the time the police had found them, and there had been no doubt in Roy’s mind who was responsible.

The brilliance of Peter Valera was that none of his allegations could ever be pinned on him. They never once even made it to court. Maes had suspected that it was because he had rats, a perfectly orchestrated network of rats, working in the military and police forces. But every attempt to do the same, to even get a single military operative inside Valera’s well-oiled murder machine, always wound up in the disappearance or gruesome death of said operative in an unfortunate “accident.”

And so Roy had always kept the Elric brothers steered quite clear of such cases because he knew that it was exactly the sort of thing that, if they ever got a firsthand taste of the horrors such a man could unleash by lifting a finger, they’d never be able to let it go. It was exactly the sort of gross injustice that neither of them would be able to stand, especially Ed, with that damned hero complex of his that he was lucky hadn’t gotten him killed years ago. But Roy certainly wasn’t about to have them die for it, especially when they had their bodies to regain.

And after the Promised Day, that goal fulfilled, it never even crossed Roy’s mind that a soulless killing operation so flawless as the Valera corporation could ever touch the Elric brothers.

That was, until the night that Alphonse vanished from his hospital bed in Central.

He’d been there for two weeks already, frighteningly frail and hooked up to various tubes and machines while his body struggled to recover from its years left to waste away in front of Truth’s Gate. But every time Roy had seen him, he’d looked perfectly content, if exhausted, and whenever Ed was with him, deeply happy. Whenever the two of them were wearing twin lopsided grins over some shared joke, or gold eyes flashing with mild irritation or amusement when they were arguing over something completely stupid like whether or not Ed had a crush on “that pretty nurse with the curly hair,” it struck Roy how alike they were in physical appearance, as well, especially the more Alphonse recovered. He’d gained a bit of weight, and his cheeks didn’t look so hollow, and some benevolent nurse had cut Al’s hair short. That was one physical difference that was probably for the better—long hair may have suited Ed fine, but on Al, the lank, heavy, dead length of it had just made him look more ill.

Ill he certainly still was, too weak to stay awake through the day and only just beginning to eat solid foods again, not even strong enough to get out of bed. And now he was missing.

When Roy had gotten the call, and then promptly drove to the hospital at a breakneck speed that would’ve gotten him arrested as a civilian and burst into the hospital room to see for himself, his gut plummeted as though he’d missed a step going upstairs. There was the bed, neatly made, all of the machines disconnected and turned off, the IV line still hanging from its hook and slowly drip-drip-dripping its contents into a puddle on the ground.

And there was Ed, hunched over on the edge of the bed, toes brushing the linoleum floor, looking pale and stunned.

It was the sight of Ed first and foremost that stopped Roy dead in his tracks. Up to this point, Roy had been a whirlwind of activity, seeing red and with a sick feeling churning away inside him at the very thought of somebody doing such a thing to Alphonse Elric of all people, and he’d already assumed that Ed would be in an absolute uproar by the time he arrived.

But something had stopped Edward dead in his tracks. Roy stepped into the room, slowly, noticing the clipboard that sat on Ed’s lap, clutched in his very white knuckles.

“Edward?” Roy set a hand on his shoulder.

Ed looked up. His eyes were bleak, devastated in a way that almost hurt to look at. He wordlessly handed over the clipboard.

Roy took the clipboard, eyeing the notes scrawled on the paper. It was a list, in the neat, clinical handwriting of what he assumed must be one of the hospital’s head doctors, of all of the people who had come into contact with Alphonse over the past two weeks. Several of them were civilian volunteers, as the hospital was severely overworked and understaffed in the deadly wake of the Promised Day. He skimmed it, both vaguely appreciating that Ed had already done as much as he could before he’d gotten there and also the cooperation of the doctors to come up with such a complete list given the inevitable disorganization of the hospital after such a disaster.

But one name, near the very bottom of the list, made Roy’s heart stop.

Primary Nurse: Marie Valera.

***

The first thing that Alphonse noticed when he came to was the low rumble of an engine. He felt it, like a deep throb that spread from his chest to every inch of him and made all his newly-restored nerves rattle and ache. The side of his face was pressed against warm leather, and something dark and woolen—and a more than a bit itchy—had been tucked around him like a blanket. He shivered nevertheless as he blinked dully up at a low, dark ceiling. It was chilly, and his fingers curled around the wool.

And that was when he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on, or where he was.

He tried to push himself up on an elbow, but his body refused to listen. The muscles of his shoulder and arm felt like jelly beneath him, and he didn’t know whether to attribute that to still-severe atrophy, or to…something else. His head felt fuzzy, his every thought muddled and slippery, and suddenly all he wanted to do was lay his head back down and go back to sleep. Whatever was going on, Ed could explain it to him later.

And with that thought, he was jolted into alertness.

Ed.

Ed wasn’t here.

But where was here?

“H-hello?” he managed, around a tongue that felt thick and dry and gummy. It was barely audible over the continued, painful thrum of the engine. A car, he realized, with a sense of vague dread. Something wasn’t right here. “Hello?” he repeated, louder.

And then, from somewhere in front of him, he heard a little yelp, and something changed in the movement of the car. He heard tires skid. It seemed the car had lurched suddenly to the side before righting itself, as though the driver had been startled badly enough to momentarily lose their grip on the wheel. Al’s stomach took a nosedive at the sensation.

A throat cleared. “So, you’re awake.” The voice floated back to him—a woman’s, trembling slightly, but trying valiantly to sound matter-of-fact.

And then Al was confused again. He knew that voice.

“Nurse Marie?” he asked, slowly, squinting at the dark silhouette he could now vaguely make out in the driver’s seat. And then he saw them—just black shadows against the harsh glow of street lamps, like wisps of smoke, but there was no mistaking them—there were those corkscrew curls of hers that Ed hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of.

“Mm.” The noise neither confirmed or denied it, but there was a frightened edge to her voice. She paused. “Are you cold?”

He stared blankly at the back of her head, the stiff way she seemed to be holding her neck. “A little,” he said, and shivered, though he wasn’t so sure it had to do with the chilly air at all. “Where are you taking me?”

She said nothing for a long moment, then let out a breath. “Just try and sleep now, Alphonse,” she said.

And Al fell silent at that, dread tightening his chest even as exhaustion fogged his brain and made his eyelids heavy.

He did drop back off, but not before he heard Marie’s shaky whisper.

“I’m sorry….I’m so sorry….”

tbc~

The Desert Ague (Chapter 2/?, EdWin, Jerso, teen), written for FMA: CYA

crazybeagle — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:49:32 GMT

Title: The Desert Ague (2/?)
Author: crazybeagle
Rating: T for innuendo/language
Prompt: I would like some hurt/comfort with Ed in Creta or some other country in the east. Het please, but nothing explicit.....I'm looking for hurt/comfort with some sexy twists. Don't take yourself too seriously, if you can put in a few bits of comedy, I'd love it, but it's OK if you want to go with the more angst laden h/c.
Word count (chapter 2): 2600
Summary: When Ed attempts to make the trek to Xing to attend Ling's coronation as emperor, things go disastrously wrong. Turns out it really is a bad idea to cross the desert with automail. Good thing Winry tagged along, both to keep him alive and to call him ten kinds of idiot for having set out in the first place.

Ed had seen the desert before—hell, he'd traveled what amounted to its entire distance during the trip to Xerxes and back. But there was still something arresting, and distinctly unnerving, about seeing the gently-rolling landscape of Amestris drop off so abruptly into so much nothing. There was too much sky here, he decided—it left a person too open, too exposed. Home of his ancestors or no, he didn't care for it.

Not to mention, it was too damn hot.

But not when they'd first stood right at the edge of it, watching it swallow up the land before their eyes, it wasn't. It was early March then, and in northeastern Amestris, it was still chilly.

When Winry, confused and shivering a bit, had mentioned as much to Jerso, Li Feng had rolled his eyes, and Jerso had chuckled. "That ain't gonna matter any by this afternoon, sweetheart, you'll see," he said, with a glance at the sky. He patted the flank of his horse—a massive, good-natured palomino, a draught breed that was probably the only sized breed in existence large enough to hold his weight. Must have been an exclusively Xingese breed, Ed thought, because he'd never seen horses that large in Amestris. "Well," Jerso said, after he'd swung himself into his saddle with a grunt, "mount up, everybody."

Li and Winry did so easily—Li looked to be a natural horseman, though the way he held himself on his own gray gelding, stiff and just-so in that damned expensive carved leather saddle, only further convinced Ed of what he already suspected. This guy was most likely going to be a broody, pretentious pain in their asses the entire way to Xing and then some. Unless he couldn't be bothered talk to them at all, which seemed to be the case so far, and that was fine by Ed. Winry was good with horses—some neighbors in Risembool owned a few, and she'd taken care of them on and off for years, as well as ridden them for fun every now and then, and she was decent on both counts. Her horse was a small mare with an oddly speckled brown and white coat that Jerso was calling an appaloosa, and it whickered softly when she swung herself into the saddle and patted its withers.

Ed and horses, however, did not get along so well.

"You just gonna stand there, Elric, or are ya comin' to Xing with us?" Jerso looked between Ed and his horse, an ill-tempered bay stallion, with which Ed was currently having a rather heated staring contest. Everything about this particular horse annoyed him, from the threatening way it swished its tail whenever he walked too close, to the awful smell that would hang around it whenever it munched on onion grass, to the way it seemed to try its damndest to get extra spit and snot and horse-breath on his face and hands whenever he tried to put on the bit and bridle, while it'd drool and snort and chomp and shake its long head. Oh, and to cap it all off, its—his –name was Majesty, apparently, though the reason for that was beyond him.

"Ed?" Jerso's voice was an amused rumble from atop his saddle. "We leavin' anytime soon?"

"Yeah, I'm coming, I'm coming," Ed muttered, and after a few tries, during which he could hear Winry biting down on a giggle or two, he finally managed to hoist himself unceremoniously into the saddle. That's another thing he hated about good ol' Majestyhere: by anyone's standards, Majesty was a big horse. Not as big as Jerso's draught horse, but big nonetheless. And that was immensely irritating, because all the pride he'd felt once he'd finally reached a height at which nobody could really call him "short" anymore—he was of fairly middling height still, but at least he now had several inches on Winry, and he wasn't too far behind Al—was promptly deflated at the sight of this stupid horse's back so far up in the air. It took a few ridiculous contortions, and some hopping, for him to even get a foot in the damn stirrup.

Winry was openly laughing at him now. "You alright over there?"

"Shaddup," Ed muttered, getting a tight grip on the reigns while Majesty pawed and stamped at the ground, impatient. He heard what sounded like a quiet scoff coming from Li's direction, but he didn't look over.

Bastard.

As the morning went on, Ed quickly found out what Jerso had meant about the season not mattering out here. They rode across what at first looked like light-colored, hard-packed dirt and clay, the horses kicking up a fine dust all around them. It was a sort of worn-down path marked with huge, tumbled- granite boulders that doubled as mile markers, which Jerso explained was an old caravan trail that they could follow almost the entire way to Xerxes. Xerxes itself, of course, would mark their halfway point to Xing.

By the time they'd stopped for lunch, Ed was sweating, the skin around his port uncomfortably hot. His legs ached from sitting on that giant of a horse for the past several hours, and he kind of hobbled awkwardly over to the boulder marker they'd stopped by—half-sitting, half-falling onto his ass while Jerso and Li were tethering the horses, and leaning back.

And then Winry was standing over him, one hand on her hip, another holding one of the cloth bags that held their supplies. She dumped it in his lap. It was heavy. He grunted. "Lazy," she said, shaking her head. "You've been sitting all morning. You could help with lunch."

"What's there to help with?" he muttered, rubbing absently at his leg. "We pull stuff out of bags, and we eat it. It's too hot to build a fire or anything."

She let out a little huff of irritation, but didn't argue that point. She knelt in front of him and took the bag, though, and while she was rummaging through it, Ed could see that her cheeks and the tip of her nose and ears were already pink with sunburn. Like the rest of them, there was a thin coating of dust on her skin and in the folds of her light cotton shirt and pants where the horses had kicked it up. Ed now understood why Li had wrapped a wide scarf around his mouth and nose before they set out—he hoped his lunch didn't taste too much like the grit coating his teeth and tongue.

Before his fatigue combined with the soothing, rustling sounds of Winry's sifting through the bag could lull him into any kind of stupor, she was flinging neatly-wrapped parcels of flat bread and beef jerky hard at his chest.

"Lunch is served," she said with a smirk as Ed belatedly swatted the air in front of him and grumbled.

"You shouldn't be sitting right on the ground," she said, scooting herself back so that she was seated next to him, her own parcels in her lap. "There needs to at least be a layer of leather or plastic or something under you," she added, snagging a bit of his linen pant leg in two fingers. "To keep sand out of the port."

"What sand?" Ed asked, picking up a handful of the fine loose dust that surrounded them and letting it slide back through his fingers.

"Must you always argue with everything that comes out of my mouth?" she shot back. "You could at least get it up off the ground." And then, without warning, she was leaning over him and grabbing at his thigh with both hands, tugging upwards.

A hiss of pain escaped him before he could stop it, and he hoped she couldn't feel how hot the metal was through the fabric.

She let go, brow furrowing. "Ed?"

He propped his leg the rest of the way up, knee bent, trying not to make a face as he did so. "I'm good," he said, dismissively, grabbing for the parcel of beef jerky. "Just haven't ridden a horse in awhile, is all." That was actually the majority of the issue here, anyways. The damn horse was too big—it was like having a freaking mountain with a mind of its own between his legs— and his thigh muscles would be sore by now automail or no.

"Hm." She didn't sound convinced.

He tore off a chunk of the jerky with his teeth. "And I made it just fine to Xerxes and back, remember?" he said.

She rolled her eyes. "Don't talk with your mouth full." She paused. "And how exactly were you feeling once you got to Xerxes?" she asked him, her eyes daring him to lie to her.

"Fine," he snapped, reaching for the bread.

She raised an eyebrow. "Fine?"

"Yeah," he said, though it must've lacked conviction, because she looked skeptical. That, and worried. He thought back, searched his memory to confirm the truth of it. What stood out most clearly of course, from that trip, had been the discovery that Lieutenant Ross was still alive, the run-in with the Ishvalans, and of course the discovery of the mural of the Philosopher's Stone among the ruins of the city. Sure, he'd been hot as hell on the way, complaining and cursing the fact that there hadn't been time for him to change out of his black clothing, and wondering whether or not it really was possible for somebody's blood to boil... But all it had taken to rectify all that was a quick cannonball into the ancient city's well, and he'd been perfectly fine again.

Or so he'd thought. Because another memory was surfacing, hazy, and more in snatches than in one continuous sequence—a memory of camping beside the ruins that night, right before they'd headed back to Amestris. At first, the smell of the cooking fire and the excitement of the day had left Ed absolutely ravenous, but when somebody had pushed a supper bowl into his hands—a stew with vegetables and some rice from the East—his stomach turned, inexplicably, and he'd declined it. He remembered staring into the fire while everybody else ate, sipping from a canteen, feeling odd and hot and uncomfortable, and then practically falling into his sleeping bag after having excused himself early, wondering why his automail felt so heavy. He woke once, thirsty, and after stumbling to the well to drink too much water and then vomiting it all up into the sand, he went back to sleep, thoroughly miserable. But because he'd been alright, if a bit groggy, the next morning, he'd barely remembered that night at all until now.

He figured he didn't even need to bother to explain the specifics—she was wearing an I-told-you-so expression, eyebrows disappearing beneath her bangs.

She reached over, set a hand on the side of his neck. Her lips were pursed.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking your temperature," she said, and softly tapped his thigh with the finger of her other hand. "Remember what I said about major arteries and automail?"

Now it was Ed who was rolling his eyes. "Winry, it's only been four hours. I'm fine."

She didn't take her hand away. There was an odd, faraway look in her eyes for a moment; her gaze went out over the rock-strewn horizon and she let out a shaky breath.

"Winry?"

Her hand slid up the back of his neck, fingers catching in his hair. She turned back to him, that odd expression replaced by a sparkle of mischief in blue eyes. "That's not all I was doing."

And then her lips were on his.

Ed made a noise of surprise—a bit of an mmpf!—and then he caught on, gave into it, and kissed her back. She tasted good, like the aloe balm she'd bought at an outpost yesterday to keep her lips from cracking in the sun, and tea, and more than a hint of desert dust, too, but he couldn't bring himself to mind. Hell, he had to taste like beef jerky right now, but she obviously didn't care.

A loud snorting noise come off from somewhere to their left, and they both started, nearly bumping noses as they did so. Winry whipped her head around so fast that her ponytail smacked Ed in the face.

"I take it I'm interruptin' somethin'," Jerso drawled, arms crossed, eyes crinkled and lips pinched, looking as though he was finding it very hard to maintain any sort of composure.

"What do you need?" Winry said briskly. Ed was glad she was doing the talking here, because if it had been him, he'd either be yelling, or muttering something idiotic and unintelligible, or some combination of the both. All things considered, he was impressed that Winry wasn't doing the same.

"Was just gonna offer to fill the canteens," Jerso said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture, but now grinning broadly. "There's an old well that trade caravans use not too far from here, and I dunno if I wanna leave it to His Excellency back there." He jerked a thumb back towards the makeshift camp where the horses were tethered, and swiped at his broad, sweaty face with a sleeve. "He can take care 'a the horses if he wants, and he ain't half bad, actually, but seein' as he hardly spoke a word to me for weeks the whole way here, I'm afraid he might try ta slip us all arsenic one 'a these days if I stick him on canteen duty." He shuddered. "Hate these political types."

Well, Ed thought, Jerso would know what he was talking about in that regard, having been a guest of the Xingese court for the past year. From what little Ed had been able to discern about it so far, it seemed that Xingese politics were a strict game of facades and decorum, which left plenty of room for backstabbing. It made him nervous for Al. About Li Feng himself, Ed could determine very little—around thirty, short-haired, clean-shaven, and with a very serious, austere demeanor, Li seemed everything that the Emperor-to-be was not. But that aside, he kept quiet and kept to himself, bringing up the rear during the ride and tending the horses in between. Ed sensed a cold resentment in him. He wasn't to be trusted, to say the least.

Winry had fetched the canteens from the packs and thrust them hastily into Jerso's hands. She was looking determinedly away from him, from both of them, high spots of color on her cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun, lips fuller and redder than usual. "Thank you, Jerso," she said, pointedly.

"Alright, alright, I can see when I'm not wanted," he said, shrugging huge shoulders and grinning again. He turned and waved. "Bye now."

Winry's shoulders slumped, and she sank back down beside Ed, head dropping down between her knees. Ed heard a little agitated growl from the back of her throat.

"Well…cat's outta the bag," he offered, lamely.

She sat back up, ramrod straight, and shot him an incredulous glare. "Honestly, Ed. We live together. There never was a bag to begin with. What were they supposed to think?"

"That…you're my mechanic?"

She blinked. "You're an idiot."

He scowled. "Gee, thanks."

And then her hand was wrapped around his neck again, but her lips lighted on his forehead. "A complete idiot," she murmured against his brow, and kissed him.

To be continued~

FMA Oneshot series- "Pillars"- Parts 1 and 2

crazybeagle — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:41:52 GMT

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Edward, Alphonse, Winry, Mustang, Hawkeye, Hohenheim, more to come
Genre: tragedy, h/c
Rating: T for non-canon character death, language
Teaser: Pillars...or, the pillars that never fell. A series of oneshots requested by my Tumblr followers, who sent me names of FMA characters and asked for a ficlet featuring said character's death...and Ed's reaction to it. So far we have Al and Winry, and coming soon are Mustang and Hohenheim.
Notes: Manga/Brotherhood 'verse. No real pairings.
Disclaimer: Moo! 'Tis I! ARAKAWA! BOW DOWN BEFORE MEEEEEEE--- *flails and dies*

Winry

It was stupid, completely idiotic really, that it had never occurred to him that this could happen again. That the cosmos would gleefully take another opportunity to fuck with them again. That there really was nothing in his and Al's lives that was allowed to be safe, to be sacred, to be home.

Another epidemic in Risembool.

The same epidemic, in fact, that had carried off Mom, but a different strain. Which was exactly why it hadn't even occurred to Ed as a possibility--a vaccine had been developed after last time--but the illness had returned, with a vengeance, and had once again devastated the already-scarce population of Risembool. And all while Ed had been safely tucked away in some damned library in East City, sucking down coffee and complaining about the rain outside.

It took Winry.

By the time Ed got the call from an unnaturally quiet Granny, a sick feeling in his gut that he desperately tried to ignore for the entire duration of the train ride home told him that it was already too late, she'd be gone or very nearly so. The train ride took two days. For Mom it had only taken a day and a half. Al must've been thinking the same, because he barely spoke a word the entire trip. Once, though, when Ed had come back from the bathroom, he'd come back into the train car to find Al with his helmet pressed up against the window, a soft, desperate sobbing noise coming from somewhere inside him. Ed put a hand on his shoulder, but said nothing about it. There was nothing to say, really. It was beyond his capacity to even attempt to offer comfort at this point.

It turned out they were right. By the time they arrived, Winry was so far gone, Ed doubted she knew they were there. She looked terrible. 48 hours had completely ravaged her--her skin was drawn and gray; her cheekbones sharp. Her eyes were open and glazed, roving aimlessly around the room, lips moving soundlessly, fists clenched weakly around the sheets. Her chest rose and fell with what seemed to be a tremendous amount of effort, and she wheezed a little each time. She looked like she couldn't have moved if she tried.

Ed tried to say something, but behind the surgical mask he'd been required to put on before coming in here, his jaw worked silently--he couldn't make the words come. His eyes were burning, and he felt a little dazed. No. Wrong. This is all wrong....this wasn't supposed to happen. Not to her. She was supposed to be safe here.

"Winry?" Al finally said, timidly, behind him.

Winry's eyes did focus a bit at the sound of his voice, as if some part of her mind were trying to place it. At that small shift in her expression, Ed suddenly, finally felt jolted into the need to do something, however pointless it might wind up being in the end. If he could get this stupid mask off, she might actually be able to recognize them, at least one of them.

But if Ed caught the epidemic, nobody would be around to get Al's body back. His hand clenched at his side. He did, however, manage to walk over to the bed and sit down. Granny would probably make him burn the clothes he was wearing later; he didn't care. He put a hand on her forehead, her cheek. "Winry?"

This time, he did get a bit more of a reaction from her. Her eyes rolled towards his general direction, and she made a vague sound in her throat, which turned into a wet cough. Something in Ed's chest ached. His hand didn't leave her face. "Hey. It's Ed. Al and I came to see how you were doing." He wondered how in the hell he managed to keep his voice so damned calm and even and reassuring--he'd been sure that it'd have been Al who'd be doing all the talking anyways when they got here. All of a sudden the air in the room felt very hot, stifling.

Winry blinked, once, twice. "E-ed?" she finally managed. Her eyes didn't focus, and her voice was completely wrecked--it sounded like it was coming from a throat full of gravel.

His eyes stung, but he nodded and smiled, even if she couldn't see it behind the damn mask, even if she wasn't seeing anything right now. "Yeah. I'm here. We both are."

And then her eyes were closed. Screwed shut, more like, a hard crease between her eyebrows. "N-n-nnn...."

"Winry?" He and Al both said it, alarmed, and in two giant steps Al was right next to Ed, looming over both him and Winry.

"N-n-no," she finally managed, her voice a weak moan. "N-not here."

"Yeah we--"

"East C-city," she breathed. "Safe." And then, as if a switch had been flipped, her eyes were bright, and the words were tumbling out in a rush. Her hand, trembling a bit, reached up to grab onto Ed's with surprising strength. "T-told Granny not to t-tell and th-they never come anyways u-unless f-f-f'r automail stuff...." And then her hand was falling back on the bed, her chest heaving hard. "Safe...t-they're safe...." She sounded winded.

"Winry, we came to see you." Al's voice sounded small over Ed's head, devastated. Ed nodded.

Winry was shaking her head. Something at the corner of her mouth looked suspiciously like blood, and Ed's stomach lurched when he finally noticed the stains on the wadded-up tissue in her hand that was farthest from him. Now that he was looking for it, he could see a tinge on the very edge of her nightgown's collar, and a few dark spots in her limp, colorless hair. "Dream," she gasped out.

"No--" Ed began, but Winry cut him off.

"D-dream," she insisted, "B-b-b't good one..." Her bleary eyes finally zoned in on his face. "S-stay?" She broke off into another coughing fit at that, and by the time she'd finished, there were flecks of blood on her chin, her chest. Her eyes were closed.

"Course we will." Above him, he knew Al was nodding.

Damn it all...

"'M-m-m g-gonna s-sleep now, k-kay?" She gasped out, after a minute of nothing but increasingly labored breathing. "D-don't leave," she repeated.

"I won't." His voice cracked.

A sigh, and then she was gone.

***

Alphonse

Ed had been in explosions before. For an alchemist, it came with the territory. Hell, he was pretty sure it must be some kind of unwritten rule for State Alchemists, Thou Shalt Withstand Explosions Many and Varied. And it was typically never a problem-- burns could be annoying, and so could shrapnel, but either he could protect himself from the worst of it with alchemy, or else Al could shield him from the blast. The sheer weight and thickness of the steel was usually enough to keep them both perfectly safe.

Until the day that it wasn't.

The case should've been harmless- it was like so many Mustang had sent them on before, some errand involving shutting down the operations of some wayward alchemist in some one-horse town who was stirring up trouble and sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. The man himself should've been harmless, too-- a Mr. Cal Collins, who owned a jewelry shop, was suspected of forging his own precious metals with alchemy. It wasn't even like the guy was fucking with the economy on a massive scale--once Ed and Al did some investigating, it seemed the guy was just some crabby, jewelry-obsessed old-timer who didn't like or trust mined gold, silver, or platinum, and preferred to make his own, more refined versions. Sure, they expected the guy to be a pain in the ass, but it should've been an easy enough operation to shut down. Ed was really expecting to back on a train bound for East City before the weekend was out.

But what he and Al didn't account for was the fact that Cal Collins was a madman. And a narcissist.

And it was this very oversight that led Ed to return to East City three days after, flesh hand and shin still bandaged from rummaging around in the wreckage of Collins' shop, alone.

Or at least, without Al. Because even with Mustang and Hawkeye--who had come for him as soon as they'd gotten his very quiet, very abrupt report over the phone-- playing the role of his concerned shadows, Ed had never felt more alone in his life.

Collins' shop had been open for a good 25 years--and he'd spent 20 of those years trying to perfect his alchemic formulas in his shop's heavily-padlocked back room. In the last five years, business exploded for him, the quality and quantity of his wares going through the roof, and he was gaining county-wide renown for it. But it was all happening too fast, and money was changing hands too quickly, which is why Ed and Al had been sent to investigate it in the first place. What they should've reviewed a bit more closely when going through his bills and papers, however, was exactly what Collins was doing with all of that wealth.

Because, Ed would remember later, there were several scattered bills from the last five years that came from a mining supply company. At the time he and Al had written it off as purchases of precious metals for the sake of his research, but as it turned out, it wasn't a raw materials supplier those bills had come from; it was an equipment supplier.

Specifically, a supplier of mining explosives.

And it wasn't until after Ed and Al told Collins that they'd be shutting down his operation that they found out.

The bastard had been stockpiling those explosives for years, keeping them packed all around them, in the walls, in the closets--in the event that he was caught, he didn't want anybody to find out his secrets, and was prepared to blow the whole place to hell to make sure that didn't happen.

Well, he did blow the whole place to hell.

Blew himself there, too.

Ed and Al never even saw it coming. They'd been in the back room, Collins screaming himself hoarse at their apparent disrespect for his art and his life's work--them on one side of Collins' expansive, cluttered worktable and Collins on the other--and then Collins was reaching behind him to pull some sort of lever he'd been standing in front of--

Al, at least, realized what was going on at the very last second. He yanked Ed towards him, wrapping both arms around him and ducking his head. Both their backs turned away from Collins, Ed felt a blast of pressure and heat unlike anything he'd ever felt before slamming into him like concrete wall, coming from behind his back. He was tossed forward like a ragdoll, ripped from Al's arms and being hurled, headlong and hard, into--into...something. The door frame, maybe? He couldn't hear. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. Everything was all white and gray, swirling dust and debris and heaven-knew-what.

For a second, Ed just lay there, flat on his face--what had just happened? What was going on? Where was he again? Everything in his mind was suddenly soupy and slippery and hard to hold on to, and every inch of him--well, every flesh inch, anyways--hurt like hell. Especially his head, fuck, his head felt like it was about to split open, and he could feel some wetness running down his forehead, and his ears, which hurt in a deep, throbbing way, and which still might as well have had soundproof pillows pressed over them. He couldn't hear a damn thing.

And where the hell was Al, anyways?

He blinked a few more times, willing his head to clear, or his ears, or at least some of this stupid dust that was swirling around. And then, very slowly, it clicked. Collins. Workroom. ....Lever?

...And then Al had grabbed him, and now...

On all fours still, Ed managed to maneuver himself a foot or so towards the general direction he'd thought the explosion had come from. His head hurt him so bad at even that small movement, though, that he'd had to stop and vomit, and then once more to just press his palms into his eyes, breathing hard, feeling like he was going to fall sideways off the face of the earth.

Shit. Come on. Focus.

To give himself something to do until he could move again, he decided to try calling out Al's name. At least that didn't hurt his head, he couldn't hear it anyways. Yet. But he was able to make out what he thought to be piles of rubble now through the white cloud, and through his nausea a surge of panic finally got him moving.

"Al!"

He distantly heard himself that time. Blood began to trickle into his eyes. He could feel splinters tearing at his skin, and he could smell burnt hair. Eventually, he could make out what appeared to be the legs of the worktable through the swirling fog in front of him, now overturned.

And, in front of it, a heap of mangled steel.

***

It was the local police who had dug Ed out of the ruins of the shop and brought him to the town's small clinic to be treated--for a concussion, smoke inhalation, burns, abrasions and embedded debris--and it distantly occurred to him how insane he must've looked when they'd found him. Al's blood seal had been shattered, along with the entire back half of his body, and digging through the rubble in his desperation Ed had even managed to find two of the shards where the seal had been. He'd been holding them, so tightly that his flesh hand bled, when they'd found him. No one dared try to take them from him.

He stayed at the clinic until the Colonel and Lieutenant arrived. He'd told them, dully, over the phone that he didn't need an escort, but when Mustang snapped that they'd be on the next train into town and that he'd better not go anywhere no matter what the doctors told him--and that's an order, Fullmetal--Ed didn't have the energy to argue.

And when the pair of them actually showed up in his room the next morning, when he'd been staring blankly down at a stack of pancakes and a glass of orange juice that a kind nurse had left him--he found he wasn't even able to look up at them. It was the oddest thing; since that day, his body seemed to be running on a sort of disjointed autopilot--some things, like brushing his teeth, or making that report over the phone, he was capable of doing, but with others, like eating, sometimes, or looking people in the eye, his body just refused to cooperate. He was pretty sure the doctors all chalked it up to the head injury, and he let them think that.

Whatever it was that Mustang said, it just sort of washed over him; he wasn't really listening. He didn't think he could have listened properly if he'd tried. It sounded gentler, though, than the Colonel's norm. Apologetic.

And sad. Very sad.

Ed watched a fly crawl over the sticky surface of the top pancake.

Then he fell silent for awhile. Ed would've thought he'd left, if it hadn't been for the fact that he hadn't heard the sound of two pairs of heavy boots making an exit.

Eventually, though, Ed heard him mutter something to the Lieutenant--Ed did make out the word "doctor"--and then boots squeaked on linoleum as one of them left the room.

He heard what sounded like a small, frustrated huff from the remaining person--and recognized without even looking up that it was the Lieutenant. She'd made that sound at the Colonel's antics before; she'd made it just as often when she was frustrated or worried about a mission, or a comrade. It was one of the few sparse displays of emotion she allowed herself on the job.

But what truly surprised him was when he felt the tray being lifted off his lap, and the springs of the bed squeak as she sat down on the edge of it, and pulled him into a hug.

He didn't resist; he was really too shocked to even if he'd wanted to, so he'd kind of melted against her, head buried in the shoulder of her uniform. She smelled good, like East City and typewriter ink and everything that was normal and right and never would be again.

He hadn't even realized he'd been crying until she'd let him go, brown eyes wide and worried and sad, and he'd seen the dark blotches on the blue fabric.

***

Important- Will be renaming my LJ and many other accounts.

crazybeagle — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 02:56:23 GMT

For work-related purposes. I need to make sure that all of my online activity is kept personal and private, and I've had this penname for too long and in too many places. When I actually do it, I'll let y'all know!

Fullmetal Alchemist: Choose Your Own Author- The Desert Ague (EdWin, Jerso, teen, part 1/?)

crazybeagle — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 19:45:19 GMT

Title: The Desert Ague
Author: crazybeagle
Rating: T for innuendo/language
Prompt: I would like some hurt/comfort with Ed in Creta or some other country in the east. Het please, but nothing explicit.....I'm looking for hurt/comfort with some sexy twists. Don't take yourself too seriously, if you can put in a few bits of comedy, I'd love it, but it's OK if you want to go with the more angst laden h/c.
Word count (so far): 4350
Summary: When Ed attempts to make the trek to Xing to attend Ling's coronation as emperor, things go disastrously wrong. Turns out it really is a bad idea to cross the desert with automail. Good thing Winry tagged along, both to keep him alive and to call him ten kinds of idiot for having set out in the first place.
Notes: To my prompter- I am SO sorry for the lateness and incompleteness of this. An ongoing medical condition and a badly-timed family emergency got in the way of things, and I'll finish it as soon as I can. I hope this is a decent start.

In retrospect, Ed should have known it was a stupid idea. Winry had told him; hell, Winry was still telling him, had told him just this morning while holding his hair out of his face as he was, rather pathetically, puking his guts out. He should've known that just because he'd made it to Xerxes once didn't mean that crossing the desert to Xing couldn't turn out to be a disaster. And a near-fatal one at that. That everything she'd warned him about would come back to bite him in the ass. It was a combination of sheer luck and a whole lot of determination on the part of Winry and of Jerso that he wasn't currently six feet under in some sandy hole with scorpions chewing on his shriveled-up hide.

And Winry was never going to let him forget it.

At any rate, here they were—he, Winry, and Jerso, crowded, damp, and irate—in some leaky shack of a backwoods clinic, in some muddy one-horse outpost at the outskirts of Xing while a storm raged outside. And they were stuck here for what could be a matter of weeks until the one road out of town wasn't flooded, meaning that they'd probably wind up missing Ling's coronation anyhow. Not to mention Ed was still too damn sick to get out of bed.

Needless to say, this was almost hilariously far from what he'd envisioned when he'd told Winry before they'd left Amestris that this whole ordeal would be "like a vacation." And she wasn't going to let him forget that, either, anytime soon.

At the moment, though, Winry was slumped over on the sagging mattress, her head near Ed's hip, fast asleep. Her hair, loose, tangled, and lighter than usual from weeks in the desert sun, spilled onto the blanket and obscured her still-sunburned cheeks, and poofed forward a bit where it fell in front of her nose and mouth with each slow, even breath. Idly, Ed picked up a strand of it and twirled it in two fingers, listening to the rain hammering the tin roof above them and marveling at the fact that Winry could sleep through it.

"She's still runnin' herself ragged worryin' about ya, kid," Jerso's voice rumbled from his spot on the threadbare couch in the corner of the small room. Ed started a bit; he'd been sure Jerso had been asleep, too. His eyes had been shut, chin resting on his expansive chest, but he was currently regarding Ed a raised eyebrow. "For her sake, ya better get yourself healthy again."

Ed looked from Jerso to Winry to Jerso again, and nodded, guilt as well as a bit of residual nausea twisting his gut. "Working on it," he said.

"'S it true what she said a few days back? 'Bout the two of you bein' engaged and all that?"

And again, for the umpteenth time today, Ed's stomach lurched, but this time it had nothing remotely to do with nausea. He'd nearly forgotten about that.

He gulped, but managed: "You mean on the way into town, or did she mention it some other time?"

Jerso smirked. "No, I mean on the way into town." He regarded Ed with amusement. "What's the matter, kid? You look like ya just swallowed a bug."

Ed fidgeted a bit and glared at the sheets covering his knees—well, knee, he amended, as his eyes met the empty space where his left should be. Of course the automail wasn't attached; it hadn't been for days and he knew that, but it was always unnerving to see it gone. Winry hadn't even begun to discuss when she'd be able to fix the damage to the port, let alone when he could have his leg back. And Jerso might be as good a bodyguard as any, but if they were ambushed somehow…

And he couldn't rule it out. Not once word of Li's death reached the Capitol. Li may have been a minor prince, but a prince he'd been nonetheless; a prince who'd just been beaten out for the throne and whose family could well be enraged enough to take it out on the new emperor's Amestrian friends. Though Ling would understand better than anybody the harshness and unpredictability of the desert, an entourage of three Amestrians and one Xingese that happened to result in the death of said Xingese did not exactly paint them in a positive light. Rumors would spread. Technically, Xing and Amestris were allies, but if they didn't watch their step, both now and when they reached the Capitol, the fallout of one stupid accident could be catastrophic for both nations. He felt a dull pounding somewhere behind his eyes, and pressed the heels of his palms into them, letting out a long breath.

Talk about a diplomatic nightmare.

"So the prospect of married life bothers ya that much, huh?"

Ed's head snapped up. "Huh?" he blurted, rather unintelligently. Then, when he remembered what they'd been talking about, "…Oh." He fidgeted again. "Shut up."

Jerso shrugged. "Suit yourself." He made a vague gesture at Winry. "Think this one's a keeper, though, if ya ask me."

Ed grimaced. "Yeah, well, I didn't ask you."

Jerso just chuckled.

He hadn't given much thought to Winry's word choice on the day in question—at the time, he'd been out of his head with fever, the driving rain like icy needles on his skin, being carried like a ragdoll against Jerso's chest while he fought to keep his eyes open. Even though Winry was barely a few feet ahead of them, he could barely make out her words over the din of the storm as she raced across one of the two rickety wooden bridges that were the town's only entrances: Help, please help us, my fiancée needs a doctor, he's very sick…

Looking back, Ed supposed he could understand her reasoning—like it or not, it was basic human psychology. Add a romantic element of any kind into any situation, and you'll get people's attention. My fiancée needs a doctor sounded more impressive somehow, more dramatic, than my friend needs a doctor or even my boyfriend needs a doctor.

And whatever he was to Winry, he was glad it warranted a stronger word than friend or boyfriend, even if she'd been dramatizing. It had worked, too. Minutes later he'd been brought to this place and tended to, which wound up saving his life.

But the thing was?

He'd never proposed to her.

Sure, his whole half-of-your-life-half-of-mine speech had been genuine. That had begun as some blurted-out, last-ditch effort to quit beating around the bush long enough to ask Winry to wait for him, and not to see other people while he was gone. But it had morphed into something else entirely, and they both knew it. He still wasn't quite sure what yet, but he guessed it was his own damn fault if she translated what amounted to I want to spend the rest of my life with you to I'm going to marry you. Especially after the…events…of the few nights following his return from Creta. He'd knocked on the door, and then she was in his arms, and then before he was quite aware what was going on they were kissing, and…well.

One thing led to another. Fast.

And it had all felt right in a way that few things in his life ever had.

His gaze had drifted to Winry again, and he must've been staring, because Jerso was chuckling again.

"Y'know, you could try minding your own business," Ed snapped.

"I could," Jerso said, raising an eyebrow. "But it's damn near impossible to tune the two'a you out. It's like somethin' outta one of those radio soap operas, except at all hours'a the day, what with the way you stare at each other all sappy whenever ya think the other one a' you's not lookin'." He paused. "That's when you ain't bickerin' with each other, of course. Ain't never seen an engaged couple at each other's throats all the time like that, I gotta say."

"We're not engaged!"

Jerso snorted. "Not so loud, loverboy. Let Miss Rockbell catch some shuteye before you start pukin' all over everywhere again."

"We're not engaged," Ed grumbled.

"Whatever you say, kid."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I'm going back to sleep." Making sure to jar his leg port as little as possible, Ed turned himself so that he was facing away from Jerso, and hiked the blanket up around his face, wrinkling his nose a bit at the strong mildewy smell of it. The whole process took him an almost embarrassingly long time to complete. It didn't help that his arms felt like noodles, or that Jerso's prediction about pukin' all over everywhere might not be too far off with the way his stomach kept flip-flopping at the slightest movement he made. He'd only just been switched from an IV to solid food—if you could call transparent broth and mushy rice solid—this morning, and he'd hadn't exactly done a stellar job keeping it down. Hyperthermia was obnoxious like that. They'd been out of the desert for over a week now, and even here in Xing's borderlands it was the rainy season, and legitimately cold. But apparently his body never got the memo. Even though he wasn't as ill as he has been, he still had one hell of a stubborn fever and had been spending days lying flat on his back trying to stave off waves of dizziness and queasiness, especially whenever Winry tried to examine and tinker with his leg port.

Winry deserved a freaking medal for her role in all of this, though, as far as Ed was concerned. And so did Jerso, for all that he could be a real smartass. The young woman who ran the clinic, Lien, was kind and generous, but not especially helpful owing to the fact that she was both hugely pregnant and had no assistants at the moment. Her husband ran the general store at the other side of the village, and her only assistant had left two weeks before to purchase supplies from the nearest larger town but could not return to the village because the rain had flooded out the roads.

The net result? The majority of Ed's caretaking was left to Winry, the only available person with any medical knowledge to speak of. Due to the village's close proximity to the desert, Lien certainly knew how to treat patients of hyperthermia and heat stroke—they called it desert ague here— and had the necessary equipment on hand: the IV, the glucose drip, the fever pills, and a light, moveable basin for bathing. But at eight months pregnant, it wasn't like Lien could do much more than direct Winry and Jerso as they lifted Ed in and out of the cool baths, cleaned him up and changed the sheets when he gave into his nausea, and in essence monitor Ed 24/7 to ensure that he wouldn't take a turn for the worse. Which, apparently, could happen very quickly if they weren't careful, especially when the fever had overstayed its welcome.

Then of course, Lien knew nothing about automail. And that was exactly what had gotten them into this mess in the first place, hadn't it?

Well, that and the unpredictability of the damn desert.

Winry was certainly right about one thing in all this. Ed didn't really have to make this trip. Of course he wanted to see Al again, and see how he'd gotten on with the chimera research, and it would've been a nice surprise for Ling if he'd shown up to the coronation. But as far as Amestrian-Xingese relations were concerned, there were dozens who'd have fit the bill just as well as he had.

But when the Colonel—well, now it was the Brigadier General, wasn't it—had called him up in Risembool with the offer to fill the position of diplomat and honored guest, as a gesture of good faith in the coronation of the soon-to-be-emperor Ling Yao, Ed had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that he'd be going. His trip to Creta had turned out to be a complete failure. Over a year's worth of in-depth investigation of Cretan alchemy—as well as a return to Milos for the same purpose—had turned up a whole lot of nothing. In fact, he'd spent more time than anything doing virtually the same thing that he'd done in his days as a State Alchemist, sticking his nose in where it didn't belong, causing a whole lot of trouble, and managing to help (as well as piss off) a few people in the process. He'd gotten himself a reputation in Creta, but no valuable leads to speak of. And he'd had to return home empty-handed.

Of course, he'd been thrilled to see Winry, but he'd whiled away the two months after his return feeling aimless, useless, and, more than anything, restless. Winry herself had plenty to do—she'd learned all she could from Garfiel, and rather than try to immediately open up her own place, she decided she'd take time to save some money for a down-payment, as well as apply her talents where they'd be most sorely needed, and that was at home. There were plenty of brilliant automail engineers in Rush Valley, more than enough to fill the demand. But that wasn't so in the rural East, plenty of whose citizens still bore the scars of Ishval. And to put it bluntly, Granny wasn't getting any younger, either.

But Ed didn't know what to do with himself. Sure, he researched, when he could, but he only had access to so many materials, and now that he wasn't technically employed, it wasn't easy to muster the funds to travel to the major libraries in Amestris. So in the meantime, he worked odd jobs—herding and even shearing sheep for some of the neighbors, and minding the desk at Risembool's grocery store on the weekends. It was nice in a way, he supposed, especially when all it really took to melt away the day's tedium and frustrations was a smile from Winry.

But damn it, he wasn't even twenty years old yet, and even though he may not be the Fullmetal Alchemist anymore, he sure as hell wasn't ready to settle down anytime soon.

Just because he wasn't military anymore, though, didn't mean he hadn't kept in touch with his ex-commanding officer—more with scattered letters and telegrams than with actual visits to Central. Completely reconstructing the government of a nation from practically the bottom up while keeping the entire civilian population none the wiser was demanding nearly all of Mustang's attention. But in the midst of the process, an almost staggering number of military operatives and agents, as well as some deserters, who had been forcibly turned into chimeras under Bradley's command had come forward. Mustang had been keeping him posted on both the growing numbers as well as any information that said operatives were willing to give on the transmutation process. It was apparently traumatic enough, though, that even Jerso was pretty reluctant to talk about it—that made something Ed's gut twist hard when he thought of Nina.

Part of this exchange of information, however, had been the humiliating admission that after a year and some change in Creta, he had turned up nothing substantial. It was almost like filing all those empty reports every time he'd returned from yet another bogus lead on the Philosopher's Stone. Mustang had even sent back a snide reply in a telegram—

Well—STOP—Doesn't this sound familiar—STOP—Old habits die hard don't they Elric—STOP…

Bastard.

But Ed did know that Mustang tacitly understood Ed's frustration, and growing sense of restlessness.

Because as soon as an official envoy from Xing showed up—an envoy consisting of one lesser princes of Xing, one Li Feng, as well as an unnamed Amestrian who had been sent along as a companion—to cordially invite an honored guest of the Amestrian government's choosing to the coronation of His Excellency the Emperor Ling Yao, Ed had gotten a phone call.

Upon Mustang's recommendation, Ed made the trip to East City to meet up with this unnamed Amestrian—Jerso, who had been selected due to the fact that being part-toad made the desert an easier trek for him than most, and also as a gesture to the Amestrian government to ensure that there would be no foul play on the journey back to Xing.

One conversation with Jerso over coffee later—while a rather sunburned Prince Li Feng had sat scowling and sipping tea in a corner— and Ed had made up his mind. According to Jerso, Al was faring better than he was in terms of chimera research, and along with Mei, himself, and Zampano had begun to develop a theory involving the utilization of alkahestry to distil human and animal souls into temporary physical vessels. Ed still knew nothing of alkahestry—he'd been hoping to leave that to Al while he investigated the forms of alchemy that the West had to offer, but he'd been disappointed to find upon closer that Cretan and even Milotian alchemy did not differ much from the alchemy he'd studied growing up, and that the chimera transmutation process was more or less the same as well. But if Al had made some sort of discovery? Well that made one of them. And even if he couldn't do alchemy himself anymore, he'd be damned if he wasn't there to help in some capacity.

That aside, he was the perfect candidate for the journey. As Mustang had explained it, this sort of thing was a delicate but routine maneuver of international diplomacy. In this case, each nation would provide one individual with some title or repute, and with a third party in place as an arbiter of sorts (and in this case, a guide who had made the trip before), the journey to Xing would be made; the coronation witnessed and friendship between the countries cemented. However, both candidates selected for the journey would ideally be what Mustang had called "empty medallions," or people who held showy or impressive-sounding titles, but titles that were in essence meaningless. In other words, those with no true value to either state. The trek across the desert was brutal and sometimes deadly, both countries knew, and if there were to be any casualties along the way, it would be best if the loss would not be a crippling blow to either government.

For Xing, a lesser prince qualified, particularly an embittered one who'd been vying for the throne, and who needed a sound reminding from His Excellency (and half-brother) that he'd better know his place now that he'd lost his chances at the throne for good.

And for Amestris…

Mustang had been right to call Ed up with the offer, because he really was a perfect candidate. With time, the Fullmetal Alchemist would fade from the minds and imaginations of the citizens of Amestris, but it hadn't quite happened yet. And those present hadn't forgotten his role in the Promised Day. However, he was a civilian, and frankly, he was of absolutely no worth to the government any longer. But thanks to Ling, the citizens of Xing would certainly know his name, and Amestris sparing one of their heroes to make the notorious desert journey all in the name of the country's friendship would look like a magnanimous gesture.

Telling Winry, though? That was the tough part of all of this. He'd been anticipating some sort of explosion from her, so he had waited to break it her until the next day after he'd returned from East City. Mustang had said to be prepared to have an answer within the week. Winry was no fool; she'd known something was up from the moment he'd gone to East City to visit some "old friends," but had said nothing and let him go. The atmosphere between them when he returned was friendly, but strained—they both knew she was waiting for him to spit out whatever it was he had to say. So the afternoon following his return, Ed had brought it up as casually as he possibly could while he was washing dishes, and Winry was drying.

And he should have known that just because Winry didn't have any wrenches on her person or within the immediate vicinity that he wouldn't get out of this unscathed. Because hardly three seconds after the words had left his mouth, the tip of a wet dish towel had snapped him, whip-like, full in the face. He dropped the stack of plates he'd been holding; they shattered at his feet as he grabbed at his stinging nose and cheeks with sud-covered hands and squeezed his eyes shut. "Gah—ow—what the hell, Winry?"

When he finally managed to open them again, she'd wheeled around to face him, fixing him with an utterly furious glare, one hand on her hip and the other still brandishing the dish-towel, menacingly. Well, Ed thought, ruefully, eyes watering and still holding his nose, let it never be said that pretty girls in aprons can't be intimidating as hell…

"You're leaving again?" he'd expected her voice to be shrill, argumentative, but instead, it was quiet. Dangerous. Barely restrained.

"Winry…" he began, in some attempt to sound placating, or maybe just not to get himself whipped in the face again.

"You leave for a year," she continued, "more than a year, barely bothering to contact me more than once every several months and leaving me up nights worried sick about you sometimes…" Anger was finally beginning to break through her voice, making it shake. Her fist clenched around the towel. Ed was tempted to back up a step. "And then you come home for two months," she added, voice rising, "Two months, and now you're leaving again?" She gestured around her with both hands, the towel cracking menacingly in the air. "What is all this to you, anyway, Ed? Some kind of pit stop?" Ed could see angry tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Something in his chest clenched.

He took a step towards her now, put his hands over her shoulders. "Winry."

He half-expected her to pull away, but she didn't. Instead, she looked up at him, anger now replaced by a kind of tiredness. "Your nose is bleeding," she said, putting her hands over his and turning to pull him towards the kitchen table. "Come on."

Ten minutes later, with the very same dish towel wadded up under his still-throbbing nose, Ed had explained the situation in its entirety and was doing his utmost (and failing miserably) to warm Winry up to the idea of his departure. Her first objection, logistically, had to do with his automail.

"Desert sand is gonna be hell on your leg, Ed," she said, her back turned. She was putting on a pot of coffee, and Ed suspected that she was keeping herself occupied (and looking away from him) so that she could keep her temper in check long enough to discuss this rationally. "And believe me, I'd know. Rush Valley's in the canyons, and you wouldn't believe the damage that sand can do, or the pain it'll cause if it embeds itself inside the nerve connectors. Not to mention the heat that a hunk of steel attached right near a major artery can generate…."

Ed waved a hand. "I made half the trip with twice the automail before, and I was fine. I had a horse to keep me up out of the sand, and guides who knew what they were doing, and I will this time, too."

Winry turned and set a coffee mug down on the table in front of him, a little too hard—some sloshed over the side and onto the worn tabletop. "You heard the stories when we were kids. We both did. People head into the desert and don't come back. It happens all the time. Even without automail."

He took a sip of the coffee. It tasted burnt. "Well Lan Fan made it with her arm, and Al made it too, didn't he?"

"Only after waiting two damn years to make sure that he was strong enough to stand a chance," she snapped. "And believe me, I'm not thrilled that he ever went, either." Finished with her coffee and out of excuses not to face him anymore, Winry flung her apron across the back of her chair and sat down hard, clutching her mug and frowning.

Ed decided to switch tactics. "Look. I talked to Jerso, and he thinks that Al could really be onto something."

Winry took a gulp of her own coffee. "Well that's great. And when he's done all the research there is to do over there, he can get his ass back home and show it to you." She wasn't looking at him again.

And suddenly Ed was quite sure that this wasn't about the desert anymore. At least not per se. "Winry?" he said, after a moment.

"I thought the whole reason you went West and Al went East was because of the automail anyways," she said, softly. Her head was ducked slightly now, her bangs hung in her eyes.

"Well that was one of the reasons," he conceded. Now he wasn't looking at her either, but at the surface of the coffee—bubbly, muddy brown. Of course, he'd told Al that that was the main reason, at least out loud, but they both knew that Ed couldn't very well be trained in alkahestry.

But now that Al actually had a lead…

Maybe Ed could only sit and watch, but he'd give damn near anything to feel like he was doing some sort of good, somewhere. He reached across the table, and set his hand, still a bit tacky with his own drying blood, over Winry's. "I'll be fine."

"I know you will." She looked up, abruptly, at his touch. There was a hard glint of challenge in her eye. "Because your mechanic will be going with you."

To be continued…

Two Fanarts

crazybeagle — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:11:22 GMT

Previews of two fanarts by me-
Top is titled "Literary Woes," featuring chibi-Al experiencing the joys of Victor Hugo.
Bottom is "How Bad Can I Be," a collaboration with wingsonghalo of Tumblr, featuring Greed-Ling alongside the Once-ler of the Lorax film.

"Literary Woes":

Ed: Well if it's upsetting you, then quit reading it.
Al: B-but...it's so beautiful... *sniffle*

References from FMA Chibi Party, Conqueror of Shamballa, and the first anime.

"How Bad Can I Be"

Once-ler by wingsonghalo. Greed-ling by me.

If you haven't read The Lorax or seen the movie, the Once-Ler is portrayed in the book as a pair of green-gloved arms whose body is never shown. He is supposed to be the embodiment of corporate greed, but in the film, they give him a face, and he becomes a proper, human character, whose intentions and motivations are painfully recognizable. ...But that aside, heartless-jerk-Once-ler is...just really, really fun, okay? And I think he and Greed, particularly Greed/Ling, would get on swimmingly. And probably become our supreme overlords, given half the chance.

Title from the song "How Bad Can I Be," the Once-ler's villain song: [link]

If you're into The Lorax, check out wingsonghalo's tumblr- she's the evil genius behind the definitive master list of Once-ler fans: [link] She's kind of a big deal, you guys.

The Tie That Binds- Chapter 4/?

crazybeagle — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 05:35:57 GMT

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Edward, Alphonse, Truth, Hohenheim, Mustang, Winry, Mei, Izumi, and anybody else who's still around by the end of the manga/Brotherhood.
Genre: Drama, angst, hurt/comfort
Rating: High T for gore and language
Teaser: "You've grown presumptuous indeed, alchemist." Ed has made his offer to Truth. What if Truth refuses to accept it? Equivalent exchange. A toll must still be paid…
Notes: Set during the final chapter of the manga/the corresponding Brotherhood episode. Not a death-fic. Canon divergence. Be warned, though- the "toll" is pretty brutal... A gen fic for the most part, but canon pairings will likely be given a nod.
Disclaimer: ALL YOUR FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST ARE BELONG TO ME. ....Yeah. Not so much. And I'm sure Arakawa (and Ed and Al) are happier that way.

Al didn't remember a whole lot after that. What he did remember came in snatches, brief and terror-filled. Being yanked forcibly through the Gate for the second time in his life, for instance, felt a bit like being ripped apart all over again and reconstructed, only to be dropped in a heap on the ground in spring daylight. Miraculously, though, he still managed to hold onto a fistful of the tatters of Ed's shirt, and wound up sprawled almost on top of him. His own blood just about froze then at the sight of Ed's blood, suddenly not being held in by the arms of the gate anymore, spilling out onto the ground at an alarming rate. The trip through the gate hadn't woken him; Al wasn't even sure if Ed was breathing anymore, his hands were shaking too much to tell.

After that, it was all shocked exclamations erupting all around him, but they were muted over the roaring in his ears—

"Edward!"

"Fullmetal!"

"…Alphonse?"

He wasn't sure what he said in response to those voices, to the figures that converged on Ed and the hands that pulled him gently away and wrapped him in somebody's coat. But he thought he must've called for Mei, for Dad, Dr. Marcoh, anybody to help Ed, and babbled something about don't use a stone, please don't use a stone, he wouldn't want that, even though it was damn near impossible to say that when Ling had appeared with Lan Fan and held one out to him, or when Marcoh did practically the same. There was shouting, and more blood, and he thought Ed might've woken up and started coughing, though he couldn't see him very well for all of the people surrounding him. And he was trembling and trembling, and he thought he might have been sobbing, and somebody had their arms around him. Teacher, his mind had hazily registered.

After that, he wasn't sure how he came to end up where he was now, opening his eyes to find himself in a hospital bed, Mei curled up in a chair next to him, dozing, Xiao Mei curled up in a ball on her scrub-covered knees.

His return to consciousness had come with a torrent of sensory information that he could hardly begin to process. The sheet and blanket pulled up over his chest were heavy, the feel of them and the scrubs he wore underneath chafing and uncomfortable against his skin. His breath was loud and rattling in his own ears, the smell of antiseptic he supposed must go along with a hospital sharp and almost burning in his nose. An aching that set his teeth on edge was coming from one arm, and glancing down at where it sat on top of the sheets, he could see an IV line taped in place there.

And it was cold in here, too. But then again, maybe that was just him. He shivered, his eyes scanning the room. Window to the right of him, its blinds open to reveal what looked like early morning light, which threw dappled spots onto the bed and made Mei's hair look soft and glossy, unbound from its braids and spilling down her back in waves. A door in front of him, closed at the moment. To the right, a closed curtain partition. Somewhere on the other side of it he could hear a faint, steady beeping noise.

For a moment he couldn't quite figure out what was going on. If I'm here, and I'm…uh…myself again, then where's…

And then he remembered. The force of it was like a brick wall.

Brother.

"Mei!"

Mei yawned, her nose wrinkling slightly, and squinted blearily over at him. "Alphonse?" And then her eyes went wide, her face breaking into a tired but genuinely delighted smile. "You're awake," she said, and looked for a second as though she couldn't decide whether to fling herself at him. She stayed put, though, apparently deciding against it, though she bounced once or twice in her seat.

"Y-yeah," he said, forcing a small smile back. "Mei, can you tell me where my brother is?"

Her smile faded a bit. She suddenly looked uncomfortable, and sad, sitting up in the chair.

"Mei," he repeated, while his mind started up a desperate litany of don't-be-dead-please-please-don't-be-dead….

She pointed at the closed partition. "He's through there," she said, quietly.

"So he's—"

"Yes, he's alive," she said.

His shoulders slumped. Suddenly that beeping seemed a whole lot louder than it really was. Vitals monitors always did, he supposed.

Mei's eyes followed Al's to the partition. "We did everything we could. Me, and your father, and then the medics afterwards." She leaned forward a little, and set Xiao Mei, still sleeping, on the sheets near Al's legs. When she came near, Al could see all too clearly the scrapes and bruises on her face, fatigue palpable in her wide eyes. "We got the bleeding under control in his throat, and on the, um, stumps—" the word gave Al the sudden sensation that he'd just swallowed lead, and Mei winced before continuing—"but I've never healed injuries as extensive as that, and even with alkahestry it's too dangerous to transmute something you don't completely understand." She twisted the sheets up in her fingers. "I think Mr. Hohenheim has dealt with wounds that large, but I'm guessing he relied on the Xerxes souls for that kind of power, so he didn't try it either. And," she added, softly, finally meeting Al's eyes, "he told me it's easier on an automail patient if the wound doesn't have to be completely re-opened before the surgeries."

Al nodded, dumbly. The first time, Granny had waited until Ed had been just recovered enough that he could physically handle the surgeries, but no longer. It was less invasive, that way, with less of a chance of automail rejection, which could spell death for the patient.

But he could scarcely bring himself to believe the fact that there was even going to be a second time, that they were seriously sitting here, at what should have been the end of their journey, discussing the logistics of how Brother would survive now that the original price he paid had just been doubled.

Ed had held up his end of the promise, because here Al was now, flesh and bone and all, but…

Needless to say, Al had failed to hold up his own end. Something ached in his chest. And suddenly, he felt very, very tired. That persistent beeping from beyond the curtain seemed louder than ever.

After a moment, Mei slipped her tiny hand under his. He started, the feeling of her skin against his own not exactly unpleasant, but a bit like a battery shock. His wrist and fingers were thinner than hers, and through near-translucent skin he could see veins, joints, and the outline of bones all too clearly. Somebody had cut his nails short.

"You should know," she began in a hushed voice, and when she looked up at Al, her eyes were round and bright. "Before he wakes up, I mean. You should know what else was taken. He won't be able to—"

"He won't be able to talk," Al finished, vaguely and distantly shocked at the fact that he could come right out and say that with such apparent ease. "I know."

"Not ever, we don't think," Mei said, biting her lip. Her hand that wasn't under Al's reached out to pet Xiao Mei behind the ears. "The, um, vocal folds in the back of his throat were torn out."

Al just nodded. Now he finally felt like his own throat was closing up. He didn't think he could stomach the prospect of never hearing Brother's voice again. And for me. Because of me. But he swallowed a few times, blinked back against the hot stinging feeling in his eyes, and willed himself to calm down. Losing it right now was not going to get them anywhere. "Can I see him?" he asked. His own voice was hoarse.

"He hasn't really woken up yet, they don't think," she said, her hand finally coming to a rest on top of Xiao Mei, and fingers of the other twining themselves a little with Al's. "You'd have to ask somebody. After he got out of surgery, they've kept him pretty well drugged. The doctors figured you'd want to see each other, but because Edward's needed so much attention, they kept the curtain closed so they wouldn't wake you."

Al nodded again, and glanced out the window, the morning light hitting the waxy leaves of a flowering tree outside the window. He blinked again, this time impatiently—he was exhausted, and it couldn't have been more than a few minutes he'd been awake. "How long has it been?"

"The Promised Day was yesterday," she said. Xiao Mei stirred a bit, wrinkled her nose, and yawned.

He looked at her a little more critically. She was pale, her hair disheveled, and the dark smudges on her eyes as pronounced as those bruises. She was in a pair of scrubs herself, and Al wondered if she'd received treatment herself yesterday. He knew she'd hurt her leg, and he didn't know if he'd ever seen her attempt to heal herself—they'd had to take her to Dr. Knox along with Lan Fan when she'd been hurt after their first descent into Father's tunnel, after all, and he didn't even know if Mei could use her healing abilities on herself. "Have you gotten any rest since then?" he asked her.

She looked sheepish. "A little."

"You haven't been in here this whole time, have you?" The thought made him feel equal parts guilty and flattered.

A hint of blush crept into her cheeks. "No," she said, a little primly. "I was just making sure you were alright."

He grinned a little despite himself. But at the same time, if she had been with him most of the time since then, he didn't quite want to think about what kind of state she, or anybody else for that matter, had seen him in when he'd first come back. He'd been…well, not wearing anything, for starters, but what little he remembered about the ordeal told him that before he'd passed out (because he figured he must have somewhere along the line), he'd been a frantic, weeping, blood-covered mess clinging to his limb-less brother. His stomach roiled suddenly at the memory of his fingers coated in that sticky red, and his fists clenched.

"Alphonse?" Mei had withdrawn her hand, and was frowning, watching him with concern.

His eyes slid shut, and he willed himself to get a grip. He turned a hand over and held it up to his eyes after a moment, not even sure why he was doing it—there was no more blood there, of course there was no more blood there, he'd already seen that there wasn't, but—

"Are you—" Mei began.

Al let his hand drop. "Yeah. I'm okay. Sorry." Hold it together, hold it together, come on, it won't do any good to—"Um, can I ask you something?"

She nodded.

"If you're here, does that mean—" he broke off with a yawn, and blinked a few times. That in itself, some distant part of his mind registered, was a new experience—blinking, or even closing his eyes at all. Before, he'd never been able to block out his vision, except in a total absence of light, or if someone had covered his head. It almost startled him, the room repeatedly going dark as he fought fatigue and exhaustion that already sought to pull him back into unconsciousness. "D-does that mean that Ling and Lan Fan never left, either?" he managed.

There was a beat of silence. "No, they haven't," she said slowly after a moment. She sounded…worried, and, if he didn't know better, somehow guilty. "And when you're feeling up to it, we need to talk about that…"

"We can t-t-talk now—" he yawned again, his eyes shuttering a few times of their own accord.

Suddenly, she had that steely, determined look in her eyes, the same look he remembered from when she'd been attempting to teach him the beginning principles of alkahestry. It was quite different finally seeing it—seeing her—from his own eye level. "We'll talk later," she said firmly. "Sleep first."

He didn't want to sleep, he wanted to see Ed, and really, all they had to do was open that curtain. "I've been sl—"

"Well you need some more," she snapped. She scooped Xiao Mei up and set her back down on her lap. Xiao Mei, apparently sleepy herself, gave a little grunt of protest but did not move. "And as soon as you can handle it we have to get some real food in you too. Do you have any idea how undernourished you are?"

"Um," he began, sheepishly. His eyes traveled to his knobbly wrists, sitting on the sheets in front of him. His curled fingers reminded him of spiders' legs. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen himself yet. He only had a vague idea of what he looked like, from the few meetings he'd had with his unoccupied body by the Gate. He knew he'd looked horrible, a skeleton with skin stretched tight over it, but truth be told, one of the things that had jarred him the most was just how long his hair had gotten. As long as Brother's, if not longer, and all pale. Without much conscious thought, his hand made its way to his head. Yup, all that hair was still there. It felt dry, though, he realized, yanking his fingers through it, and brittle, though of course it'd been so long since he'd felt anything at all that maybe that was just what all hair was like. But Mei's didn't look like it felt like that…

"It's a little long, isn't it?" Mei said after a moment.

He nearly jumped. "Oh. Uh..yeah." He held a limp strand of it up in front of his eyes, and twisted it.

Mei leaned forward and plucked a strand of it up herself. Al felt his stomach do a nervous flutter at her proximity. Somehow Mei's inherent lack-of-shyness at physical proximity made him feel more…awkward…now that he wasn't in the armor anymore.

"Hmm…it's mostly dead ends," she said, frowning at the strand. "Didn't you tell me once that it used to be short?" She looked at his face, like she was trying to visualize his hair short, but then her gaze landed on a spot somewhere near his shoulder, and her eyes narrowed.

He fidgeted, uncomfortable under her scrutiny but also quickly becoming too exhausted to care. "What is it?"

"They didn't do the best job cleaning you up, is all." She reached out and touched a bit of the hair that fell over the shoulder closest to her. "They had a lot of other patients to take care of, and they were trying not to wake you so they did it quickly, but…" Her fingers pinched another strand of hair he couldn't see. "There's still some blood, here."

He stiffened. Suddenly he felt wide awake. His stomach churned. And the beep-beep-beep from beyond that stupid curtain now seemed deafening.

Mei didn't fail to notice his change in demeanor. "We can wash it out," she said, quickly. "I'll get a nurse to bring a basin."

He gulped back nausea, staring straight ahead, trying very hard not to let any of his hair enter his line of vision, or imagine Ed, at age eleven or at age sixteen, bleeding out in his arms.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

"Alphonse?"

"Huh?" He thought his voice sounded small, strained. Mei's eyes were wide with worry.

"I said we can wash it out, but, um, if you want, I—" she reached into a pocket of her pants, and produced one of her small kunai. "The hospital's over capacity right now, so it might be awhile if we ask them for anything that isn't really important. I know it's not a pair of scissors, but it's definitely sharp enough if you want me to try and—"

"You want to cut my hair?" In any other situation he might think it was hilarious that she was offering to cut his hair with a kunai, but at the moment it seemed like more of a godsend than anything else.

Her head bobbed up and down, earnestly. "It probably won't look like it did before, but I've used these to trim off split ends in my own hair. And you wouldn't think so, but once you get the hang of it it's actually pretty easy, if—"

Beep. Beep. Beep. That curtain must have been awfully thin.

Al gulped again, and nodded. "Go ahead."

…

To be continued…

Previous chapter here.

Fullmetal Alchemist Art: "Defend"

crazybeagle — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:06:49 GMT

Another cross-post from DeviantArt, called "Defend."
Set during or after the final manga chapter.

Ze full size;

I'm willing to bet that during/after the events of the final manga chapter, while Al's still recovering, Ed's probably obnoxiously and endearingly protective of him. It's probably better for Ed's sanity that they head east and west for awhile at the end; I bet it'd be a hard tendency to shake after they worked for so long to get Al back the way he was.

Not quite sure what's going on here. I doubt anything would legitimately threaten them once they're back in Risembool, but you never know. Maybe on the way back, or before they leave Central. Use your imagination. Roadside robbers. Enemies of the state. A herd of rabid wildebeests. A cute bunny hiding in a bush. But heaven help whoever's facing the wrath of Ed here. I assure you, Al's probably less afraid something's going to happen to them than he is dreading that Ed's going to maim somebody on his behalf. I am quite confident that recovering or no, Al could still take somebody down with alchemy as well as or better than Ed could with his fists, but hey. Big brother instincts don't have to be logical. ^^

My DeviantArt: http://crazybeagle.deviantart.com. The page for this piece actually has some hilarious conjectures as to what could actually be going on here in the comments courtesy of a few commenters.

Fullmetal Alchemist Art: "Safe"

crazybeagle — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 03:45:40 GMT

I don't really crosspost, but I've been fairly active over on deviantART for the past few months, and I've gotten the the point with my Fullmetal Alchemist art at least where I don't need to follow references so closely anymore and can start imagining my own scenes.

Ed and Al, set early on in the recovery year following the transmutation. I imagine Ed's just had a particularly rough day, or a nightmare, or both, and Al's trying to help him get some rest.

Graphite plus a combination of a few photoshop filters.

Preview:

This scene is actually semi-based on a snippet from a post-manga fanfic I wrote called "Quarantine," which is fairly Al-centric, but includes this bit:

  "Besides," he added, "I owe you for sticking by me for a year's worth of automail recovery."
  "No, you don't." It was Al's turn to roll his eyes.
  "Still." He tapped his left knee. "That big old tin can body of yours was a hell of a lot better than any icepack, let me tell ya."
  That had been especially true that winter and early spring. His memory from that time was a haze of fever, delirium, drugs, the agony of nerves being fused to wire and screws being drilled into bone.
  And the long days and nights between and after the surgeries spent curled up against cold steel.
  Of course, all the fleeting relief that that had provided had always been followed fast with the raw, gnawing fear that Al hated him for what he'd done.
He wished he'd realized then that the contrary was true.

The master post is here: http://crazybeagle.livejournal.com/11582.html The second chapter has its own lovely artwork, a gift from dzioo, included at the end.

My dA account: http://crazybeagle.deviantart.com/

The Tie That Binds- Chapter 3/?

crazybeagle — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 06:16:41 GMT

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Edward, Alphonse, Truth, Hohenheim, Mustang, Winry, Mei, Izumi, and pretty much everybody else who's still around by the end of the manga/Brotherhood.
Genre: Drama, angst, hurt/comfort
Rating: High T for gore and language potential
Teaser: "You've grown presumptuous indeed, alchemist." Ed has made his offer to Truth. What if Truth refuses to accept it? Equivalent exchange. A toll must still be paid…
Notes: Set during the final chapter of the manga/the corresponding Brotherhood episode. Not a death-fic, nor a parallel universe fic, or anything of that sort, though obviously an alternate ending of sorts. Be warned, though—said toll will be pretty brutal. Poor, poor Edward.... No real pairings planned, though if they're given a nod they'll be canon.
Disclaimer: ALL YOUR FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST ARE BELONG TO ME. ....Yeah. Not so much. And I'm sure Arakawa (and Ed and Al) are happier that way.

The Tie That Binds
Chapter 3

"Stop!" Al raged with all his admittedly negligible strength against the invisible steel grasp that held him back. "Stop it, you're killing him!"

Eyes wide as coins and roving around wildly, Ed could only gag and retch as his mouth was forced wide open by dozens of cords of twisting shadow. Blood bubbled up at the corners of his lips.

At long last, Al wrenched himself free of—or was released from—whatever grip Truth had on him. Still unable to move far at all on his own, he threw himself towards Ed. He came down hard on his palms and elbows barely a foot away, his hands slipping on a floor that was slick with a swelling pool of his brother's blood. Blind panic nearly froze him as his fingers scrabbled for purchase in a sea of red, the startling sensations of hot and wet as good as an electric shock to his newly restored nerves. But he managed to swipe an arm at the tendrils currently choking the life out of his brother, one arm braced against the slippery ground.

To his surprise, it actually worked. The tendrils vanished when he touched them, dissipating into grainy wisps of black dust that wavered and then re-solidified in the air above them. They snaked their way back down, a few of them lacing chillingly through his fingers and wrapping themselves almost lovingly around his wrist, before joining their fellows that were still pinning Ed down fast.

Or, what was left of him. Many of the black hands had affixed themselves, parasite-like, to the bleeding stumps where three limbs had been moments before. Al almost went to tear them away before he realized that they were probably the only thing keeping Ed from bleeding out on the spot.

As soon as Ed's mouth was clear, he sucked in a shuddering gasp that quickly broke into a wet, vicious cough. His eyes screwed shut, and he turned his face to the side and hacked again, a mouthful of blood spilling out over blue-tinged lips and down the side of his face.

Al pushed himself up on his knees and slid a hand carefully behind Ed's neck, the other already splayed across his chest. Ed's head jerked up at his touch, and his eyes snapped open, unfocused and bright with agony.

"Ed," Al said urgently, fearfully. Ed's eyes flicked to his. His face was colorless.

"What's wrong? What'd they do to you?" He thought the more pertinent question was What DIDN'T they do, but Ed was coughing blood, and if something inside of him had been destroyed, or taken…

Ed opened his mouth as if to respond, but succeeded only in making another mouthful of blood dribble sickeningly down his chin. Al could feel him shuddering, hard, beneath his hands. His own head snapped up towards Truth. "What did you do to him?" The question was half snarled, half desperate.

-Equivalency, young alchemist. Truth had Ed's arms crossed across its chest, one thin and atrophied and one still bleeding. –I assume you wish to return from this place intact.

"Intact?" he repeated blankly, even as he helped turn Ed's head to one side so he could spit out more of the bloody froth filling his mouth. It took almost more strength than he possessed to even lift his head—and he fought a fresh surge of dread at the realization that if they were expected to cross the threshold between this place and their world under their own power, he wouldn't make it very far on his own, let alone with Ed in tow. As it stood now, even with the countless hands pressed to the wounds, Ed had minutes at the most before he bled out completely.

-Yes, intact, Truth continued, quite conversationally. –There is a unity between the body, mind, and soul, a unity that is not usually broken except in death. It paused. You, of course, are an exception.

Ed's eyes rolled back, and his head went limp in Al's grip, slumping against the ground.

"Brother!"

Truth continued talking. –But this unity is costly. Once broken, it's not easily regained.

"But I'm back together again," Al said, shakily, after he'd pressed an ear to Ed's chest and stuck a hand under his mouth and nose to confirm that he hadn't slipped away—and after, of course, he'd remembered that he was once again capable of utilizing his senses to confirm life at all. "The three parts are designed to fit together, and they're drawn to one another, so how—"

-That is true. Truth had sat down again, arms wrapped easily around one flesh knee drawn up against its empty chest. -But affixing a soul to a foreign object for an extended period of time? That complicates matters. That complicates matters a great deal. After all, the soul is quite mutable. There was a touch of what almost sounded like academic interest in its voice. Al watched it, incredulous, while fruitlessly attempting to swipe some of the blood off Ed's cheek with his thumb.

-Obviously, the tie between the three elements has re-established itself within you, it said, but such a unity is tenuous at best when the very fabric and composition of the soul has been so drastically altered.

Altered?

Al must've looked startled at that, because for the umpteenth time, Truth grinned broadly. –A hasty transmutation of a spiritual substance into a crude physical anchor and then back again has its consequences. If the bond between a soul and its corresponding mind and body isn't re-established, with time that soul is likely to slip away, because it is no longer made of quite the same stuff it once was. It won't, shall we stay, stick. It gestured at Ed with a sweep of a hand. Fortunately for you, though—it began, before its voice morphed and changed mid-sentence. No longer booming or hauntingly multi-tonal, but young and male.

-Your brother's just solved that predicament.

The voice was Ed's.

Al was sure his heart just about stopped at the sound. His breath caught, and whatever-the-hell Truth was saying about something being wrong with his soul suddenly didn't matter anymore as he grabbed for Ed's chin with one hand and forced his mouth open with two fingers of another.

"What did you take?" he demanded, while his fingers performed a hasty sweep of the inside of Ed's mouth. It was difficult, very difficult, with next to no dexterity in fingers that were no longer huge or gloved, and that were now tipped with jagged, overly long nails that he accidentally scraped across Ed's tongue a few times. Of course, he was relieved that Ed's tongue was still there at all, because that had been his first fear. But aside from a great deal of blood mixed with spittle that he managed to get all over his hands, his search turned up nothing. The source of the blood was obviously not the mouth itself, which must mean—

-I believe that you would refer to them as vocal cords, it answered. –Hardly necessary for human survival.

Vocal cords.

Oh, God…

And it was enough to make him physically ill, hearing this thing answer him some warped, impossibly detached version of his brother's voice.

Blood began to leak out of the corner of Ed's upturned mouth once more. He was still out cold, hardly breathing. And, despite the dark hands having merged into three pulsing, miasmic masses that still clung fast to the stumps and caused the bleeding to become sluggish, Ed was still deathly pale, Al's shaking hands coated in his blood.

"Let us go," Al's voice was low, vicious.

Truth cocked its head to one side.

"We've paid, now let us leave." He gently turned Ed's face towards the ground again to keep him from choking, icy fear gripping his chest. "You know we can't get out of here on our own, so help us. I know you can."

-Clearly presumption runs in the family. Its—Ed's—voice was cold. When Al said nothing, Truth inclined its head, in a humoring gesture. –Very well, it said.

And then Al was being yanked backwards.

TBC.

The Tie That Binds- Chapter 2/?

crazybeagle — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:23:59 GMT

Important: in the last chapter, I ended with a repeated quote from the manga: “Will you offer up your own soul?” Turns out the scanlation I’d used to read FMA for the first time wasn’t the best… I just reread the final chapter last night using a far better scanlation, and the question Truth uses is worded as “Will you offer up your own being?” This makes far better sense in the context of the chapter itself, and it’s a vital distinction for this story, so I’ve gone back and changed it.

Also: I am so sorry for this chapter. I am so, so sorry.

So, alchemist, it said. Al thought it sounded smug. –I repeat my earlier question. Will you offer up your entire being?

“What?” Al heard himself breathe.

Ed glared at Truth. “Is that what you want?” he asked it. “My entire being?”

And that was Al’s cue to speak up. He glanced between the two of them, suddenly sick with apprehension. “Brother, you weren’t planning on—”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said, his eyes never leaving Truth. “I never came here planning on not coming back. This guy just didn’t like what I was offering.”

“What were you offering?” He hadn’t given much thought to what might happen after when he’d traded for Ed’s arm: Ed would have died otherwise, and his seal had been cracked anyhow. And when he’d told Truth that he was sure Ed would come back for him, he didn’t mention that he hadn’t the faintest idea how Ed would manage it—he wouldn’t have used a Stone, and (at least he was pretty sure) he wouldn’t have used himself.

Ed jerked a thumb over Al’s head at the Gate behind him. “One of those,” he said. “Except mine, not yours,” he added.

“Your Gate?” he asked, startled. “But why…” he trailed off, and then he got it. “Your alchemy.” His voice came out slightly hushed. Ed minus alchemy... Now that was tough to imagine.

“Yeah.” His eyes cut to Al briefly, before returning to Truth, making a face that could only be called a scowl. “But apparently these things are, what was it, fixed objects?”

--That is correct. Another unnerving, toothy grin. –Now tell me, have you anything else to offer?

“You never answered my question.” Ed raised an eyebrow, planted a hand on his hip, the picture of frustration. But Al could practically hear the gears whirring in his brother’s mind. “So you tell me, is that what you’re after? My entire being?”

--Your being would provide a sufficient toll, yes.

“Sufficient?” Ed asked, raising an eyebrow. “It’d be more than sufficient. You’re hedging here, pal. That’s not the only option and you know it.”

--Oh? Truth sounded amused. Curious, but amused.

Al’s stomach was tying itself into knot after knot watching that empty being direct its somewhat ravenous smile at his brother. Al himself couldn’t quite yet see what Ed was getting at here. But at the same time, he knew that if anybody could out-reason Truth, Ed probably could. He was surely the only one out there with the nerve to try.

“Yeah,” Ed said. He brandished his skinny right arm. “I traded this to get Al’s soul back. And a complete human being’s comprised of three necessary components, the body, mind, and soul, right?”

Truth said nothing. Al didn’t like that.

Ed paid him no mind. “Now arguably,” he continued, “The soul’s the most vital ingredient out of the three, as the essence of the person itself. It can’t survive forever without the other two, obviously, but it’s still the key component.”

Something flickered in Truth’s body; the vague shape of its left leg shimmered and solidified into pale flesh. –And you would know, wouldn’t you, alchemist?

Ed’s eyes lingered for a second or two on his own missing leg, his expression unreadable, before they flicked back up to Truth’s blank face, burning with defiance. “Right,” he said through gritted teeth. “Anyway,” he continued, voice clipped, “even if a soul is worth that much, all you took in exchange was my arm.” He clenched the fist of his raised arm, stared at it. “A body and mind are worth no more than the soul.”

And then Al understood.

No.

Nonononono…

“Brother, you can’t—”

“You got a better idea, Al?” Ed dropped his arm and turned. He’d snapped the words, but when he looked at Al, Al caught the faintest traces of very real fear beneath otherwise hardened features. He doubted anybody else would’ve noticed it. “’Cause I was planning on us both making it out of here alive, and trust me, whatever this guy’s asking for, you can’t afford to give right now.” His eyes gave Al a pointed once-over, taking in a body that he knew must look half-dead as it was. Al looked away. Because, damn it, he didn’t have a better idea. Ed wheeled back around. “Well?” he demanded.

Truth stood with its arms crossed over its chest. –You’re not wrong, alchemist. Its voice was inscrutable, though the corners of its mouth were still upturned. –It will be as you wish. I’ll accept a suitable alternative from you. Although, he added, --know that it will be a toll of my own choosing.

Ed hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Fine,” while at the same time, Al was saying, “Wait.”

Ed and Truth both turned towards him.

“What are you going to take from him?”

“Al…” There was a slight warning in Ed’s voice, but Al ignored him and stared resolutely at Truth.

--I will take what is fitting, Truth said simply, chillingly. –No more and no less.

Fitting? Al thought.

Despite what Ed had said, something was telling him that what was fitting here was exactly what Truth had said earlier—a life for a life. He himself by all rights should be dead, after all… Whatever Truth was going to do could simply be a more creative, roundabout way of claiming his life.

Brother can’t die here…he can’t die for me…

Al glanced at Ed, his own mounting fear and desperation met with what he was sure was supposed to be a reassuring nod, though Ed could no longer mask either the reflected fear, or the sorrow, in his eyes. “It’ll be okay,” Ed told him, softly.

Al couldn’t bring himself to respond, panic constricting his throat, but he nodded.

“Alright,” Ed said, addressing Truth once more, though he backpedalled a few steps until he was standing next to where Al still sat. “Claim your toll. And don’t lay a finger on my brother.”

--Very well, Truth said, and suddenly all its teeth were visible once more in a too-large mouth. –I don’t intend to harm your brother. What I do intend, it added wryly, as Ed’s old left leg rematerialized from nowhere on its body, --is to claim a complete set.

Ed went rigid beside him. Al heard his breath hitch. A “no” tumbled out of his own lips before he could stop it, and all his insides froze. But before he had time to think, a deafening rumble erupted from the Gate behind them.

He turned to look, just in time to see a yawning crack in the double doors, from which shot a thousand tendrils of darkness, each supporting its own miniature, grasping hand. Before Ed could even turn to face them, they’d all launched towards him, swept his feet out from beneath him, and pinned him to the ground, countless tiny fingers splayed out across his chest, arms, legs, around his neck...

“Brother!”

Ed’s eyes were wide, shocked, but before he could say a word, Truth’s cold voice suddenly boomed all around them.

--For the soul.

And Ed’s right arm disintegrated, ripped to shreds by the threads of darkness that converged there. He screamed.

--For the mind, it said.

His left arm.

Al tried to lunge forward to close scant the few feet between them, grab for Ed, do something, anything, but an invisible force seemed to hold him in place. All Al’s own most horrific memories were stirred up at once at the sight, his whole body being torn apart by the very same forces. And for Ed…this was the stuff of half the nightmares he’d had for the past five years once more come into being. That fact was reflected in the near-primal terror in his eyes and each raw, devastating cry that was ripped involuntarily from his throat as his limbs were torn from his body—but Al couldn’t do a thing about it. He couldn’t even move.

--For the body.

Ed’s right leg, boot and all, vanished beneath a swarm of clawing, razor-sharp hands, leaving only emptiness—and blood, an expanding pool of scarlet startling against the white of the floor—in its wake.

As each limb was claimed, it slowly flickered into re-existence on Truth, who, somehow, was now standing directly over them. Al swallowed back bile at the sight—all four of his brother’s limbs, attached to a formless trunk, shrouded by pulsing blackness. Ed’s eyes rolled up to land on Truth, his breath coming in tight, shuddering gasps.

--And finally, Truth said, looking down at them both, --For the tie that binds them.

With that, a dozen or so tendrils detached themselves from their tight grip on Ed’s chest, to shoot straight at his bone-white face, force their way past his tightly clamped lips and straight down his throat.

To be continued…

Chapter 1 Here.

The Tie That Binds, A Fullmetal Alchemist Fic- Chapter 1/?

crazybeagle — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:22:08 GMT

Truth laughed.

The sound was enough to chill the blood.

Edward stood before the Gate, shoulders squared, his breath and his heart still racing from the fight he'd left behind. "What's so funny?" he asked, not turning around, though a thrill of panic shot through him. Was it not enough? It had to be enough….

But Truth just kept laughing.

Now Ed did wheel around. Truth had a wide-mouthed grin on its face, flashing all its teeth at once. "I've already told you, I can get by without it, so what's so damn funny?" he snapped.

Truth stopped laughing, but the grin did not disappear. –You have grown presumptuous, young alchemist. Presumptuous indeed.

"What, is that not a fitting toll for you?" he demanded. "Why the hell not? It's a part of me."

–I'm afraid it doesn't work like that. The grin widened. –It's a fixed object. It won't budge.

Ed felt an icy stab of fear in his chest—this had to work, it had to, he had nothing else to offer—but he stuck his chin up. "What do you mean?"

–What am I, Edward Elric? Ed, refusing to play along, didn't answer. –I am many things, but perhaps more importantly where your situation is concerned, I am YOU, remember?

"Yeah, you said that the first time…" He watched, breathing hard, stomach in knots but anger burning hot in his chest nonetheless, as Truth actually stood from its spot lounging on the white floor, stretched its arms up high as though stretching while the blotchy clouds of dark nothingness that outlined the thing swirled and pulsed. With what sounded like a contented sigh, it let its arms fall back down before closing the few steps' distance between itself and where Ed stood before the door. Now barely a foot away from Truth, who'd reached out a single shadow-encased arm to lay a flat palm on the door, Ed could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, the proximity to the being making him feel rather…odd. It a disorienting, almost lurching feeling, as though he'd skipped a step going down the stairs, and his heart did an alarming, painful flip-flop in his chest when Truth's hand lighted on the carved stone. When Truth slowly turned its head to face him, its grin was wider than ever.

–If I am you, it said, its voice a silky, sinister whisper that seemed to come at Ed from all directions, –Then it follows that this door is already mine. You are merely a part of me. Of the whole. You know this. It ran its hand lightly across the stone. Ed suppressed a shudder. –And are you really so arrogant as to believe that you can cut yourself off from me? That you can escape me?

"I never said I wanted to escape you," Ed said, voice surprisingly even, all things considered. "This is your gift to man, right? The gateway to alchemic knowledge. I'm just returning it."

–Gift? It scoffed. –This is not your gift, alchemist. This is your existence. He patted the gate. –Transient and insignificant as your mortal lives may be, this here is what makes you human. You should know. You've seen the other side. Alchemy, after all, is merely the manipulation of one's understanding of the universe, no different than any other scientific pursuit. Whether one rashly tears these doors open by force as you and your brother did, or glimpses its secrets in the usual way, by the mere observation and study of the world around them, humankind uniquely possesses the ability to seek what lies beyond them. Apart from this—it lifted its hand from the gate and turned to face Ed—you are less than beasts. This IS you.

Ed shook his head, mostly because he wasn't sure what the hell else he was supposed to do. Wasn't like he had a backup plan here. "I don't buy that." And he didn't, he couldn't buy it, because he'd been so damn sure this would work and had staked everything, staked Al, on that surety. But this was Truth talking here, and he was barely managing to stave off the mind-numbing terror that had plagued his nightmares for five years, that he'd experienced the very first time he'd ever encountered Truth—the blossoming dread that told him he had made a mistake, a terrible mistake.

Still. He had a little more nerve this time around.

Ignoring Truth, who watched impassively, he bowed his head, clapped his hands together, and even as the circle he'd created in his mind's eye began to glow and hum with envisioned energy, he felt the electric cackle of potent, destructive alchemy shooting through his arms, causing the wounded left arm to ache and the restored right arm to tremble with weakness. Focusing and concentrating the power in his hands, he smacked his palms against the gate and willed it with all his might into the very essence of the stone—

–Only to be thrown backwards by a sharp, electric, invisible force that he caught full in the chest, picking him up and tossing him in the air like a ragdoll and leaving him sprawled on the hard ground seven feet away, his chest on fire, the breath driven from his lungs. He thought he could smell singed hair.

Rebound, his mind supplied hazily as he blinked up at the white nothingness overhead, struggling to draw a breath through lungs that felt rather like they'd been both been run through by lightning. No, wait, that can't be right… That hadn't even been full alchemy, only utilization of the destructive step. And even if that somehow had rebounded, it shouldn't have affected him at all—he'd engineered the deconstruction to respond to the granite within the gate, and any backlash should have been virtually harmless to him. Well, it hadn't ripped him apart, but it certainly hadn't been harmless. He coughed once, then managed to push himself up on his elbows. "What the hell…" he croaked. Obviously he knew less about this place than he thought. And that scared him.

Truth was bending over him. It wasn't smiling anymore, but it didn't seem overly concerned, either, though of course on a faceless being it was difficult to tell. –That wasn't wise, it said mildly. –I wouldn't try it a second time, unless you have a death wish.

Ed pushed himself up and lurched to his feet, rubbing his sore sternum with his knuckles, trying to coax some more air into his body. Think, his mind urged, panic tugging more frantically at the edges of his concentration at the realization that, after that little stunt, everything he thought he knew about this place had just fallen apart. Come on, think, think, damn it, think….

"Al," he found himself saying, a moment later. It came out as a wheezy whisper—he cleared his throat, turned towards Truth, who was sitting again, and demanded, voice slightly raw but strong nonetheless, "Where's my brother?" He certainly didn't have another plan as of yet, but if Al had his own, separate gate, and he'd examine that first, make sure he had absolutely all of the factors to take into consideration here before….

Before what, exactly?

He couldn't think about that. Not yet.

Truth pointed vaguely over Ed's shoulder, the blackness surrounding its arm churning even more violently than before. "Over there." It sounded faintly amused.

Ed wheeled around. And all of a sudden, another dark, intricately carved gate loomed over him, a familiar gate, and one that he was positive hadn't been there a second before. And beneath the gate, hunched over on his hands and knees, was the emaciated form of his brother. His hair, pale and unkempt, hung half in his face, his one visible eye wide. The second he appeared, Ed lurched towards him as fast as his legs would carry him.

"Ed!" His voice, now lower, weaker, and without its usual tinny quality, was still slightly shrill with the panic that Ed had been clamping down on this whole time. Spindly arms trembled, trying and failing to push a skeletal frame up off the floor. Ed sank to his knees and gently helped lift him back into a sitting position, unable despite the situation to rid himself of a surge of wonderment—It's him, oh God, it's actually HIM, it really was Alphonse looking back up at him right now, gold eyes big and concerned in a painfully thin, white face. Frail, but unhurt. Ed could've sobbed with relief.

"What happened?" Al asked straightaway, hands seizing Ed's wrists to keep himself upright, eyes scanning Ed up and down as though checking for something. "I couldn't see anything…I didn't even know you were here, but then there this banging noise out of nowhere, and then I heard you scream…" He paused to catch his breath—he'd been panting like he'd just ran a marathon the whole way through his explanation, and Ed guessed Al's lungs must be as weak as the rest of him right now. "I tried to get up and find you, but I couldn't—" he looked down at himself, making a vague, helpless gesture with one hand.

"It's okay, I'm fine," Ed said, quickly, moving Al's hands from his forearms to the ground before getting up and moving to the gate behind them. Al glanced over his shoulder.

"What are you—"

"There's no time to explain." Ed clapped his hands, carefully directing a much smaller, much slower flow of the same deconstructive power, hardly a trickle, collect there. "I'm really sorry about this, Al," he said, before gingerly setting his hands on the gate.

"Brother, what—ow!"

When Ed turned back around, Al was clutching at his chest with one hand, and his eyes were screwed shut.

Ed swore under his breath, and knelt back down, bracing his hands on Al's knobbly shoulders. "Are you alright?"

"Y-yeah," he managed, after a moment, shuddering a bit. He opened his eyes. "What was that?"

"Proof that we're not getting off as easy as I thought," Ed said, grimly.

…

"What do you mean we're not—" Al began, still trying to blink back tears at what had felt vaguely like a small, electrically charged spike being driven through his chest. He had no way of knowing how bad it would have felt to anybody else, but as the first taste of actual pain he'd had in five years, it had jarred him badly. He felt shaky and sick, his newly restored nerves so sensitive he could hardly even stand the mere feeling of Ed's hands—one of which, unbelievably, was made of flesh again—on his shoulders.

He trailed the question off, as he realized Ed wasn't going to answer him. His brow was furrowed in concentration and his mouth was taut, eyes distant. A moment later, he'd hopped up and begun to pace back and forth. For the first time in years, it was weird to finally be looking up at him, Al thought.

And, for the first time in a very long time, Al finally, acutely, knew what it was to be the younger brother in every sense. Ed looked…well, almost scary right now, and nothing about him brought to mind the word "young" by any means. Blood coursed sluggishly down from the wound in his left arm—which they'd need to address soon, or he was going to pass out before they even made it out of here—and dribbled from his forehead into one eye and from the corner of his mouth. What was visible of his chest over a torn shirt now looked slightly bruised and slightly burnt—that was new, and he was pretty sure it'd had something to do with the noise and scream he'd heard earlier—and the sight of the ropey band of scar tissue and protruding metal pieces around his new arm on their own was enough to make anybody cringe. And to cap it all off, the unnervingly bleak expression he'd worn since turning away from Al's gate would've looked far more fitting on a man twice his brother's age.

Al saw the exact moment that the extreme concentration in his brother's eyes melted into a resignation that terrified him, which subsequently hardened into resolve. Ed glanced down at him, something wavering for the briefest second in his expression, a fist clenching hard by his side. Then he looked up into the white abyss above them, jaw set, shoulders squared. Al's stomach churned.

What on earth is he about to do…?

"Truth!" Ed roared. "Get your ass over here!"

Al started when the empty figure flickered into being hardly two feet from Ed. It smirked at him.

–So, alchemist, it said. Al thought it sounded smug. –I repeat my earlier question. Will you offer up your entire being?

To be continued.

Supernatural People- I need help!

crazybeagle — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:35:47 GMT

Hi all-

So due to a whole bunch of reasons (senior year of college plus obsessing over a few mangas), I'm spectacularly behind on season 7- I've only managed to catch the first 7 episodes, everything up through "The Mentalists." I don't know where to find them so I won't have to pay for them, now that TV Shack and Megavideo are no more. There are only the latest 2 or 3 on the CW website. If you know where I can find them streaming (I'd rather not download if I can help it), I'd love you forever and possibly write something for you if you'd like. But I want to be able to read you guys' fanfics again, and since November, that hasn't been happening all that much.

>is sheepish<

Hetalia among other things.

crazybeagle — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:55:43 GMT

So yeah.
In the process of becoming anime-literate (apparently I'm going to a con with my roommate in a few months and if I don't know a thing about manga and anime I'm afraid the experience is going to be lost on me), I've been consuming manga and anime at a rather rapid rate. Not nearly rapid enough, but I consider having gotten through both Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist in their entirety in a few months to be an accomplishment (where have they BEEN all my life!?!), considering that I'm in my senior year of college and the last thing I should be doing if I want to graduate is blowing my time on this.... But current projects in the foreseeable future include Bleach (which I'm trying not to dwell upon the sheer length of too long or else I'll get intimidated and stop reading/watching), Immortal Rain (which is mercifully short), and Hetalia.
Oh, dear lord, Hetalia.
The easiest thing to blow through quickly given I've got Netflix and they're 5 minutes apiece. I'm about halfway through.
Hetalia, which makes racism, war, and life-or-death international affairs hilarious and mildly sexy.
I'm a bad person.
Heh.

Japan: What do you think about "Axis"?

Germany: "Axis"?

Japan: It mean we are all connected together by an axis, and when we prevail, the world will turn on that new axis.

Germany: Abstract. I was thinking "Fire Death Team."

Japan: No. It better to confuse with obtuse metaphor.

Quarantine, A Fullmetal Alchemist Fic MASTERPOST

crazybeagle — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:08:21 GMT

Title: Quarantine

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Edward, Alphonse
Rating: T
Teaser: "Do you think that they're right, brother? To keep me away from everyone?" Alone and recovering, Al remembers some things he wishes he couldn't.
Notes: Set directly post-manga/Brotherhood. Vaguely based on this very old but very lovely chapter 53 fanart by Glyf on DeviantArt: "I Can't Come With You" . Two chapters.
Disclaimer: ALL YOUR FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST ARE BELONG TO ME. Well, not really.

Chapter 1: "Mr. Elric, when I say 'no visitors'..."

Chapter 2: The only word that seemed to come to his mind, looking at this frighteningly feeble version of his brother, was mortality.

Quarantine, a Fullmetal Alchemist Fic (2/2)

crazybeagle — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:00:21 GMT

Title: Quarantine (2/2)

Author: crazybeagle
Characters: Edward, Alphonse
Rating: T
Teaser: "Do you think that they're right, brother? To keep me away from everyone?" Alone and recovering, Al remembers some things he wishes he couldn't.
Notes: Set directly post-manga/Brotherhood. Vaguely based on this very old but very lovely chapter 53 fanart by Glyf on DeviantArt: "I Can't Come With You"
Disclaimer: ALL YOUR FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST ARE BELONG TO ME. Well, not really.
And a HUGE thank-you to dzioo for doing an incredible fanart, to be found here.

It just about killed him waiting the additional hour for the nurse to bring the mask by, but wait he did, because just because he was anxious to see Al didn't mean he wasn't incredibly paranoid now that he had been so abruptly reminded of the concept of mortality as it now applied to his brother. She'd walked in, wordlessly tossed the mask onto the foot of his bed, turned on her heel, and left as swiftly as she'd come. Moments later, he slipped out of the room after her.

The south wing wasn't that far, but what was difficult was evading people, keeping his eyes trained on the ground in case he got recognized, sidetracked, or sent back to his room. Fortunately, he made it to the room without incident. He loitered on a bench just outside for a minute or so, making sure there weren't any doctors going in or coming out of the room, before looping the elastic straps of the mask over his ears, noiselessly opening the door, and slipping inside. It wasn't locked, which struck him as odd—either the nurse had left it open for him herself, or somebody hadn't gotten the memo about Al yet.

The room was dark, the lights out, the air stuffy and uncomfortably warm. His heart skipped a beat when he looked at the bed, against the right wall, and saw that it was empty, the sheets and covers in a tangled heap. But then he looked at the window, opposite the door. There, perched on the wide window ledge with his knees drawn to his chest and his forehead pressed against the glass, was Al. His hair was no longer long or unruly, but had been cut, visibly choppy and sticking up in odd in places but just as short as it had been when they were younger. And, though he was in the same scrub pants that Ed himself was wearing, he wore no shirt, and Ed had to bite back a little surge of nausea at the sight of all-too-visible bones jutting out under sallow skin that seemed stretched too tightly over a spindly, breakable frame. Ed could've counted his ribs. One skinny arm was taped and tethered to an IV line, the pouch of which was hanging from a metal stand that had been pushed up by the window—he was willing to bet solid food wasn't quite on the menu yet. And yet again, the only word that seemed to come to his mind, looking at this frighteningly feeble version of his brother, was mortality.

He cleared his throat, plastered a smile on his face behind his mask. "Y'know," he drawled, his voice muffled by the mask, "if they wanted to keep visitors out, they should've locked the door."

He heard Al's breath catch, and his head wheeled around to face him. "Brother!" His voice was raspy as though from disuse, and he looked just as terrible as Ed remembered, all sunken cheeks, dark circles, and grayish white pallor. But at the sight of Ed, his eyes, though faded from gold to a dull, tired hazel, lit up with what could only be called joy.

"Hey, Al." Grinning for real this time, he walked over towards the window.

"You're limping," Al noted, looking pointedly at Ed's leg.

"Eh, hardly," Ed said, tapping his foot on the floor a few times and listening its hollow, metallic tap. "Nothing Winry can't fix."

Al's smile widened at the mention of Winry, and Ed knew what they were both thinking, his own heart swelling a little at the prospect of home..and of Winry herself, though he wasn't about to admit as much. But a moment later Al's eyes narrowed as they gave Edward a critical sweep. He thought Al's eyes lingered a little longer on the obscured lower half of his face than they did anywhere else on him, but all he said was, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well they told me…they said you were unconscious for two d—whoa—" As he'd spoken, Al had been trying to pivot himself around to face Ed, but he'd lost his balance and began pitching forward off the sill. Ed bounded forward to catch him.

"Whoa, hey there, no breaking any bones on my watch, okay?" he said, taking Al by the bony shoulders and pushing him back up onto the ledge, leaning him against the sill once more.

But Al didn't answer. When Ed had touched him, he'd gone stiff as a board, drawing in a sharp hiss of breath.

Ed let go immediately, frowning in confusion and alarm at Al, whose eyes were shuttered, jaw now tightly clenched, his shoulders shuddering a bit. "What's the matter?" he asked, urgently. "Are you hurt?"

He opened his eyes. "No," he said, tightly, before letting out a breathy chuckle and letting his shoulders relax. "It's just…it's weird, is all." He attempted a grin, but it came out as more of an uncomfortable grimace.

"Oh…right," Ed said, realizing what he was talking about. Al had mentioned it within an hour or two after he'd come back, when he'd kept wincing as Ed had half-supported, half-carried him to the nearest hastily-erected tent.

"Yeah," Al said, drawing his legs up a little so Ed could sit opposite him on the other side of the ledge. "It's nice after a moment, but at first it still feels kind of like, I don't know, a bunch of little static shocks."

"Sorry."

Al shrugged. "Don't be. I'd take that over broken bones any day."

Ed glanced at both Al's newly-cut hair, as well as what he now realized was a discarded scrub shirt hanging on the armrest of an empty wheelchair standing by the IV. He pointed at it. "Is that why—"

"Oh, uh," he chuckled again, uneasily. "Yeah. Couldn't stand the feeling."

"But you left your pants on," Ed pointed out, knowing that Al would know he was being smirked at even if he couldn't see it behind the mask.

"Of course I left my pants on," Al said, tone defensive, and jerked his head toward the wall of glass by his head. Below them was a little courtyard, walled in on all sides by wings of the building, with a few trees, benches, and a koi pond with a fountain. A uniformed soldier and another patient in scrubs were over by near of the benches, deep in conversation, while a nurse taking a smoke break stood by the edge of the pond. "I wasn't about to sit in a window sill overlooking a public place without my pants!"

Ed laughed. "Good call."

"It's why my hair's gone, too, in case you were wondering," Al said. "A nurse cut it for me."

"Dang it," Ed said, in a tone of mock disappointment, reaching back to grab a strand of his own hair from its ponytail. "And here I thought you were taking after me." He noticed, now that he was close enough to get a good look, that Al's hair color was slightly different than he remembered before he'd lost his body—if memory served, it'd been around the same color as his own, though maybe very slightly darker blond. It was paler now, color leeched and faded from years spent before the Gate.

"Nope, sorry." Al shook his head. "It felt…weird. On my back and all. Don't know how you do it, brother." His shoulders tensed a bit, as though the mere memory of it made his skin crawl.

"Suit yourself," Ed said. "But we gotta get it cut better than that before we go home, Al. You know Winry's gonna tell you it looks scruffy."

"Better this than no hair at all," Al said wryly. "But, uh, I haven't really seen it yet. Does it look that bad?" he asked, looking uncertain, reaching up with one hand that had been braced against the sill towards his hair, his other arm wobbling a bit as he tried to keep his balance.

"Geez, Al, I told you not to fall!" Ed exclaimed, lurching forward, hands hovering over his brother as Al slammed his hand back down on the sill and regained his balance.

"Sorry," he said, breathlessly.

"And I was kidding, by the way. Your hair's fine. No need to break your neck over it." He glanced from Al to the bed and back. "How did you manage to get yourself all the way over here, anyway?" he asked.

Al jerked his head at the wheelchair. "A nurse helped me."

"Yeah, well," Ed muttered, not liking that one bit, "If they're gonna leave you like this, they should at least make have somebody here to make sure you don't fall."

Something in Al's face darkened for a moment, but then he looked up at Ed and shrugged, expression impassive. "I'm sure they just didn't think of it, brother. It's wide, and it's not very high. And besides, you're here now, right?"

"Right," Ed agreed, though he hadn't missed that look on Al's face. "Not going anywhere. At least not 'till somebody throws me out."

"Should you….shouldn't you go get some rest, though?" Al said, eyes too big for his thin face now wide and anxious. "You're hurt. You were out for two days, right?"

"Don't worry." Ed shook his head. "I was just asleep, Al, not comatose."

Now it was Al who was smirking. "With you there's hardly a difference."

"Shut up," he groused, though it sounded more affectionate than annoyed. "I'm fine, though, really. Been up for a few hours. Hospitals are boring."

There was a beat of silence.

"You're right about that," Al said finally, eyes suddenly distant. His gaze drifted back out the window. "Have you seen anybody yet?" he asked.

"No, not yet," he said, a disconcerted by Al's sudden change in demeanor, and closed-off expression. "I heard Colonel Mustang tried to visit, though."

"…Oh?" Al said, without much enthusiasm. "Cool."

This was…weird. It was like somebody had flipped a switch in Al's entire demeanor. Thirty seconds ago, he'd been totally fine. Something was definitely amiss here.

He'd been about to tell Al what he'd heard about Mustang's restored vision, but he reconsidered. That was important, but finding out what was up with Al, preferably before anybody came in and made him leave, was more important. His best guess was that it was the result of loneliness, 48 hours' isolation, but he needed to make sure. "So they haven't let anyone visit you yet, huh?" Ed asked.

"No," Al said quietly. "I haven't seen anyone." He turned from the window toward Ed, and the suspected loneliness, as well as hurt, couldn't have been more evident in his eyes. "You're wearing that mask, so I take it you know why."

"Yeah," he admitted softly, after a moment. "They told me. But you know they're only doing it to help you, right?" he added. "Give you a chance to get stronger before you have to face half the population of Central and their germs."

Al didn't respond.

"Al?"

Then, "You had to sneak in here, didn't you?"

There was no point in lying about it. "Yeah."

Al took a stuttering breath and let it out before answering. "I see." His fingers scratched at the tiled sill. "And do you think that they're right, brother?" he asked. "To keep me away from everybody?"

"Al…"

"Do you?" His voice was harsh. A fierce desperation burned in his eyes; it cut Ed to the quick.

Didn't mean he was wrong. "What I think, Al, is that I'm not gonna let you catch some stupid disease and die when I just got you back."

"I'm not sick!" Ironically, the words came out in a near-croak. That fear in his eyes seemed to solidify, harden into anger, and his too-sharp jaw clenched. There were high spots of color on his cheeks, and his breathing, harder and more ragged than it should be, had sped up.

"And we're trying to keep it that way," Ed snapped back, "so don't be a brat about it, okay?" He regretted his words when Al's shoulder's slumped, and his lips quivered. He looked down, in the vague direction of Ed's feet.

"Brother?" The word was barely audible.

"What?"

"Take the mask off."

"Al, I'm not gonna—"

"Please." His voice was strained, quiet.

Scared.

"Alright, what's up with you, Al?" Ed asked, frowning. Whatever was upsetting Al this badly was leaving a sour taste in his mouth; he was determined to get to the bottom of it. "This isn't like you."

Al's gaze was trained on the people below in the garden once more. "Just take it off," he whispered.

Ed reached up to unhook one of the elastic bands from around his ear. As much as this made him nervous, he really did think—or was 99% certain, at least— that if Al really was going to catch any random deadly diseases from him, it'd be too late by this point anyway; he'd been exposed. "Alright, but if I do, will you tell me what's wrong?"

Al's throat bobbed, but he nodded. He wouldn't meet Ed's eyes.

Ed took the mask off and threw it aside. It landed on the floor, near the base of the IV stand. Al glanced down at it, and his eyes fluttered closed for a moment before he finally looked up at Ed. Relief and gratitude were palpable on his face, but he still looked pretty damn miserable. "Thanks," he rasped.

"Sure." He glanced at the mask too, before fixing Al with a steady look. "Now talk to me, okay? The nurse I talked to said you weren't sleeping. Why?"

"Uh…well…" His mouth pinched, as though he was trying and failing to think of a way to articulate himself.

"I know sleeping's gotta be weird for you," Ed offered, "After, uh, you know, not being able to for awhile, though if your body really needs the rest that badly, it shouldn't be this much of a problem." He paused, thinking. "But earlier your nurse told me they're trying to give you sleep aids, and you won't take them. Which means…" he gave Al a long look. "You're keeping yourself awake, aren't you?"

Al said nothing; that was all the confirmation Ed needed.

"Al, you moron," he growled, anger flaring hot before reason was able to catch up—there was a good reason for it, there must've been, but right now worry, no, fear for this frightfully weak body sitting before him made it little hard to be reasonable—and Al looked away again. "Are you trying to sabotage yourself here?"

"No." He was staring fixedly at the tops of his knees, but his voice was sincere.

"Then why?" He asked, failing to keep exasperation at bay.

Al was silent for a long, tense moment. Then, all in a rush, he blurted, "Because every time I shut my eyes I—" he broke off and shook his head. He was blinking rapidly.

"You what?" Ed asked, though he was suddenly filled with foreboding.

"I'm at the Gate," Al finished, voice barely more than a shaky whisper.

Then it clicked in Edward's mind.

Oh.

The reason why he didn't want to be alone.

But that meant….

"What do you remember about that, Al?" He asked slowly. He felt like a total idiot for not having even considered this as a possibility, and he dreaded the answer.

Al let out a long breath before he answered, and Ed nearly winced at the shallow, wheezy sound of it. "I guess…I guess it wasn't me, or, uh…. not completely, because my soul was here with you and all, b-but…." He was definitely blinking back tears now, his words halting. "But I was…alone, a-and cold, and empty, and everything was all white, and the Gates wouldn't let me through."

"Al…" Ed felt sick. He hadn't considered that the mind and body, apart from the soul, could take in memories of their own, or realized that once all the parts were back together again, those memories would be intact and fresh, and that Al would finally, retrospectively feel the full traumatic force of them.

"And I knew I had to wait, for it to come back," he went on, his voice low and awful. "My soul. The other one…Truth, I guess…told me I had to wait for it…but it didn't come... And I waited for so long…" The last words came out as a half-sob.

Five years…

With a horrible jolt Ed remembered having heard mention of the pair of Briggs soldiers, found after only mere days in Father's tunnel: useless, reduced to nervous wrecks, on the brink of insanity.

And Al, even if it was just a part of him, had spent a third of his life that way.

Oh no…

Al's forehead was pressed to the window again. Without much conscious thought, Ed reached forward and nearly set his hand on Al's knee. He almost withdrew it when he remembered the way Al had flinched before, but reconsidered, and set his hand down firmly. Al jumped a little, startled, and looked back at him. His eyes were desolate, tear-filled.

"Were you planning on telling me about this?" Ed asked, gently, though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that. Guilt writhed like some terrible living thing in his chest, constricted his heart like a vise.

Al shook his head slightly, the movement knocking a few tears free. "No point," he said in that same low, barely restrained voice. "I knew…I knew that you'd be stupid and blame yourself for it when I know a-and you should too that there was nothing either of us could've done."

"Al, I—"

"You came back," he said, with a small, watery smile. "You promised you would, when I said I couldn't come with you, and you did. I remember that too."

"…Yeah," Ed managed, now fighting against his own slightly swimming vision. "Of course."

Al nodded. "So it's okay now, but…"

"But you don't want to be alone anymore," Ed finished, glancing at the wadded up, discarded mask lying on the floor. He understood now.

"I need to see people, brother." Al's voice was broken, his own eyes following Ed's to the mask. "I need to, or else I-I'm alone and it's just like I'm…back there again, and I can't—" His voice trailed off into a harsh, strangled cry, half-stuck in his throat, and his face crumpled. "I can't…"

Ed moved forward on the ledge, and as gently as he could manage helped swing Al's legs around so they dangled off the sill, his toes sweeping the floor, and scooted himself closer so that he was sitting next to him. A second later, the dam had finally broken, and he found himself with his arms full of emaciated, helplessly sobbing, choking, and gasping little brother, his bony frame wracked with tremors. Ed said nothing, not trusting himself to speak, but put one hand on the back of Al's head and one on his back, pretending he couldn't feel every rib and vertebra under his palm so distinctly. Al went stiff as a board at his touch at first, but eventually relaxed into it. Ed's left arm and chest throbbed painfully at the contact, but he ignored it.

As his shirt steadily went damp at the shoulder, anger began to simmer somewhere deep in Ed's gut-- surely this was negligence, for these idiotic doctors and nurses to have let Al go for so long until he was reduced to--to this, sent reeling into blind panic at the mere thought of being left alone. But at the same time, who could really be faulted here? They were taking every measure they could to ensure that Al was cared for physically, and now that he actually had his arms around him Ed was acutely aware of just how much his brother needed all the protection from the outside world he could get right now. As to the rest of it, they couldn't have known, because it wasn't like Al had told them. And the only other people, aside from Ed himself, who might've guessed that seclusion would be so detrimental to him--Mustang in particular came to mind-- were now deeply embroiled in the chaos of a fallen state, and were inevitably being pulled in a million different directions at once. And as for Mustang himself, who by all rights should still be in the hospital himself come to think of it, even if he did know about the quarantine--which he likely now did after having tried to visit--he would more than likely consider Al's physical well-being to outweigh temporary separation anxiety. And Ed couldn't exactly fault him for that.

But still.

He was willing to bet that, while Al was obviously being seen and taken care of by doctors and nurses at least some of the time, they were so caught up in trying to deal with the battle's aftermath that they didn't have much time to spare on any one person. Just the fact he'd been left on this ledge when he could easily fall off and hurt himself spoke volumes about how strained things were- he wouldn't be surprised if the "nurse" who'd left him there had been an amateur but well-meaning civilian volunteer, recruited by the hospital to run errands and take orders from medical personnel. If that was the case, and they really were that understaffed, he was willing to bet that Al was being left completely alone in here for hours at a time. It was no wonder he couldn't stand it anymore-- Ed wasn't sure he himself would've been able to take more than a few minutes if it were him.

"I won't go anywhere if you don't want me to, Al," Ed said, eventually, when those heart-wrenching sobs finally subsided, turning into shuddering breaths. He'd exhausted himself completely, his whole weight resting against Ed.

"Until y-you get caught and t-they kick you out," Al muttered into his shirt.

"I'll see what I can do," Ed replied, glancing out the window. The soldier and the patient out in the courtyard were sitting on the bench together, laughing. "The word of a state alchemist's gotta be good for something, right?"

The words hung heavy in the air as he realized what he'd just said. State alchemist.

Former state alchemist, that was. He'd nearly forgotten.

Al stiffened again. "Brother…"

Ed shrugged. "Hey, it was just a means to an end, right? It always has been. We got what we wanted."

"Except your leg."

"Are you kidding? Winry'll be thrilled with this arrangement. She's still got a chance to make big money off me."

A weak laugh. Then, "But still, you—"

"Save it, okay? I'm not sorry. Who wants to be a dog of the military, anyway?"

Silence. Then—

"Thank you."

"Anytime. And thank you for my arm, you dumbass."

That elicited a real laugh. "Anytime."

"Not anytime, Al. Never again. You got that?"

"Yup." Which was bullshit, they both knew. Now it was up to Ed to make sure Al was never in a position where he'd be tempted to take any figurative—or literal, for that matter—bullets for him. Because given half the chance, the idiot was likely to play big damn hero all over again.

"Anyway," Ed continued, refusing to dwell on it any longer, "you've already been exposed to whatever deadly diseases that might be hiding up my sleeve, so maybe they can just shut me up here with you."

Al's breath caught, and his fist clenched. "Don't wanna be shut up at all," he mumbled.

"The goal is to keep you away from that Gate, Al," Ed said, eyeing the IV bag and the wheelchair with immense distaste. "Preferably for the next eighty or so years, at least. And to do that, we gotta get you healthy again. You know that." And if it took him breathing down the necks of the hospital staff and being generally paranoid and obnoxious on Al's behalf to make sure that that happened, so be it. He almost pitied them.

A few seconds passed, then Al nodded against his shoulder.

"And at any rate," he went on, "I got a theory about that anyway. About you, and the Gate. And me, for that matter." He hadn't really vocalized this, even to himself—it had been little more than a vague notion before now— but even as he spoke the idea began to solidify itself in his mind.

Al shifted a little, leaned back, and looked up at Ed. His eyes were bloodshot. "What is it?"

Ed steadied him, helped him sit up. He leaned against the sill again, head slumped back, one hand clutching the sill's edge for dear life. He looked totally spent, but he was watching Ed intently.

Thinking on his feet, Ed kept talking. "Well, I mean, whether or not I've lost my alchemy, if our souls are bonded together to the point where I was eating, sleeping, and growing for you while you were still at the Gate, what do you think's gonna happen when one of us dies?"

Al blinked. He looked a bit stunned. "What?"

"Think about it, Al. Especially if it's you who goes first. I don't have a Gate anymore, and we both came through yours to get back, so I'm willing to bet I gotta go through yours again when the time comes."

His eyes widened. "You think?"

"Like I said, just a theory, but yeah, maybe," he said. He figured that it was probably more likely to be true for him if Al were to die first, but he left out mentioning that he wasn't as sure whether or not the opposite was true, that if he himself died, he wouldn't just pass through the Gate while Al kept on living until his time came. Ed would've infinitely preferred it that way, especially because, after healing himself in the aftermath of the Baschool explosion, he had no clue by how much his own life span was going to be cut short in recompense. But he didn't think it was quite what Al needed to hear right now.

"Or, maybe," Al said, expression turning grim, "It's not my Gate anymore, but both of ours. Maybe it'll be just there for either of us no matter who dies when."

"Yeah, there's that," Ed said, a little put out by this potential flaw, though he wouldn't say as much. He knew neither of them would be willing to admit how comforting the prospect of not having to worry about living on alone really was, for fear of inciting each other's anger, so they let it drop. On a sudden inspiration, he added, "You are forgetting that you can still do alchemy, and I can't, so maybe it's still completely yours, after all, and I've just gotta use it…" He shrugged and gave Al a pointed look. "It's not a theory I wanna put to the test, though, so get better, okay?" He leaned back against the sill himself, mirroring Al's posture. "Personally I wanna take a little more time to revel in our victory before I die, how 'bout you?"

And with that, he knew he had him. Al knew it too. It was low, using his own life as motivation for Al to comply with doctors' orders, but nonetheless effective. "Fine," he murmured. "I'll do the quarantine." Al wasn't the type to pout over things, but he definitely looked pouty right now. Ed would've teased him for it if the reason behind his reluctance wasn't so terrible. "But…" he started, looking uncertainly at Ed. "Do you really want to be stuck here with me? I mean…I understand if you don't…you're right that they probably wouldn't let you see anybody either, and I know you hate hospitals…"

Really, now?

After all that, he's seriously trying to feed me reasons why I should ditch him? Ed thought.

Unbelievable.

"Are you nuts? Of course I want to stay," Ed laughed. "For the first time in a long time, I've got nothing to do. Besides," he added, mischievously, "If we lay low for awhile, it'll only build up the anticipation. The whole of Central will be thrilled to finally meet Alphonse Elric in the flesh, I'm telling you."

Al looked a little daunted at the thought of that, but he smiled. Ed could tell it wasn't a totally unpleasant notion.

"Look, it'll be better anyway if you deal with all that when you can actually shake someone's hand without it feeling like a tazer, won't it?" Ed asked.

Grudgingly, Al nodded.

"Plus, there's Armstrong," Ed pointed out, quirking an eyebrow.

"Oh." Al visibly shuddered, obviously envisioning being on the receiving end of a bone-shattering hug. "…Right. But…" his mouth twisted, fear of abandonment warring with (completely idiotic) guilt on his face. "It's not fair to keep you away from people, too."

"Oh, come on, Al, after something like this?" Ed scoffed. "The military's in chaos. Hell, the government just got overthrown. You think I wanna get in the middle of that? At the very least, that'd mean miles and miles of red tape. No thank you."

"You'll be bored to tears within twenty-four hours, I know you will," Al said dryly. He gestured out the window. "You'll want to be helping out, with rebuilding, or relief, or whatever else needs doing out there."

"Eh, we can leave it to everybody else for awhile. I'm sure there'll still be plenty to do when we get out," he said dismissively. "And, uh…I hate to admit it, but I think I'd be pretty useless to them right now." He held up his arms—one thin and weak, and one tightly bandaged. "I've gotta wait for these to start working right again, and I think Winry'd better take a look at my leg too." Not to mention he wasn't going to be a massive help anyway without alchemy. At any rate, he still was making up excuses, they both knew that, but that didn't keep Al's face from splitting into an ear-to-ear grin.

"So you want to stay?"

He returned the grin. "Couldn't get rid of me if you wanted to, little brother."

"I don't know how long it's gonna be…they won't tell me…" The grin diminished somewhat, and Ed knew he was dreading being stuck here for an indefinite amount of time.

"Doesn't matter," Ed said, waving a lazy hand. "We got all the time in the world now."

"You sure you don't mind?"

"Yeah, I'm sure, so quit asking," he said, rolling his eyes. "Besides," he added, "I owe you for sticking by me for a year's worth of automail recovery."

"No, you don't." It was Al's turn to roll his eyes.

"Still." He tapped his left knee. "That big old tin can body of yours was a hell of a lot better than any icepack, let me tell ya."

That had been especially true that winter and early spring. His memory from that time was a haze of fever, delirium, drugs, the agony of nerves being fused to wire and screws being drilled into bone.

And the long days and nights between and after the surgeries spent curled up against cold steel.

Of course, all the fleeting relief that that had provided had always been followed fast with the raw, gnawing fear that Al hated him for what he'd done.

He wished he'd realized then that the contrary was true.

He could tell from the way Al was watching him now, brow furrowed, mouth taut, that he was traveling down the very same memory lane that Ed was.

Time to change the subject.

"Hey, speaking of ice packs, aren't you burning up right now? It's like a sauna in here. We should crack the window or something."

It was true; his own shirt was beginning to stick to the back of his neck, and he didn't like how flushed Al's face now looked.

"Is it?" Al looked around curiously. "Huh."

"What, you didn't notice?"

"Still kind of hard for me to tell that sort of thing, I guess," he said. "We can open the window if you want. I should get down though…" He looked at the ground, then the wheelchair, then the bed. "Um," he began, a little sheepishly.

Ed chuckled, and hopped off the sill, and pushed the wheelchair up against it. "Need some help?"

"Mhmm."

Al reached up and looped his arms around Ed's neck, letting Ed lift him up off the ledge and down into the chair. Ed's stomach churned at just how light Al was, and he found himself regretting the fact that, despite his rather formidable appetite, he obviously hadn't eaten enough for the both of them.

It took much awkward maneuvering, and negotiating Al, the IV, and the wheelchair and somehow moving all three from the window back to the bed all with arms that were almost pitifully weak, and then having to reach a window latch that was only very slightly too high for him while Al, the little smartass ingrate, made a few snide comments about how as soon as he could actually stand on his own, he was pretty sure he'd be able to reach that latch without having to hop for it. Ten minutes later found them both wiped out and sweating, but dissolved into peals of helpless laughter at a volume that Ed was sure had to be against hospital protocol. Really, he expected somebody to finally stick their head into the room and bust him for being here at all any minute now.

Whatever.

Though a part of him suspected that the nurse from earlier probably had something to do with the fact that they had not yet been interrupted.

Eventually, Al let his head flop back against the pillow, and closed his eyes, a tired smile on his lips. "We're kind of a pathetic team, aren't we, brother?"

"Who are you calling pathetic?" Ed snapped back. He'd parked the wheelchair by the side of the bed and had sat in it, but was supremely irritated to find that his chin barely cleared the top of the mattress. Al had found this hilarious, and had pointed out a stool standing in one corner, which Ed had grudgingly gone to retrieve, pumping the pedal under the seat to make it taller while Al looked on, trying and failing to keep a straight face. Now, Ed was slumped forward on the foot of the bed, his chin resting on his recently restored arm, which sat on the bed, while his wounded arm sat on his lap.

"Just saying," Al said with a yawn, and Ed was reminded of a day more than a year ago, where almost the exact same words had been spoken—a day that had found them both leaning against some brick wall in a random alleyway having just faced down a serial killer and lost badly, his arm blasted into a thousand steel pieces and half of Al's body totally missing, having hit rock bottom in every possible sense, but laughing and laughing, because that was all they could do.

But this? This wasn't rock bottom by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't perfect, but they'd fixed things. They'd won. He was okay with this.

And whether they were stuck here for two weeks or for two months, it was fine by him.

He snorted softly. "No. Not completely pathetic."

After a moment, Al half-opened his eyes and peered over at him, blearily. "Don't go anywhere, okay?"

"You got it."

*End*

Chapter 1

LOOK, GUYS! ART!

"But you don't want to be alone anymore." "I need to see people, brother."

And an additional art by me:

His memory from that time was a haze of fever, delirium, drugs, the agony of nerves being fused to wire and screws being drilled into bone. And the long days and nights between and after the surgeries spent curled up against cold steel...