C - Coward
Blek. The first of the fics to come from my ABC prompt list
Title: Coward
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (anime)
Summary: Shou Tucker is a slave to his own fear.
Rated: Ew for revulsion.
Characters: Shou Tucker, Nina Tucker.
Spoilers: All of FMA as regards the Tuckers
Word count: 734
Author's Note: Eh, I could have been happier with this. I think I kept trying to add to much extra stuff and I had to stop myself. Unbetaed.
Coward
Shou Tucker had always been a coward, even before. Before he had become something else, he had never been truly a man. His every move had been dictated by a consuming fear of personal suffering.
All those years ago when he had started down the track that had lead him to where he was today, he had let cowardice guide his hand. Living day after day in alleys and abandoned buildings, trying to feed his wife and tiny daughter on the pennies tossed to him by the factory foremen, something in him had snapped. His hands shook and his eyes, hiding behind the thick lenses of his glasses, flashed and darted like those of a terrified animal. Cold fear settled in around his heart and ate away all that had ever been good in him, all that had ever been human.
He had the knowledge, all that was left was to obtain the subjects. The first half was easy. He laid a trap with a bit of food in the alley near where his family was living and waited for one of the local stray dogs to wander in looking for a meal. For the second half he had waited, hands shaking uncontrollably, for his wife to fall asleep, the baby in her arms as she lay on the dirty pallet on the floor of the abandoned warehouse. He had used just enough chloroform to keep her unconscious long enough for him to begin his experiment. And in the middle of the night, common sense and human emotion driven out of his mind by an abject terror of spending one more day in such absolute poverty, he combined them.
The result was an ungainly creature, covered in matted grey fur and long brown hair. It stumbled forward and cried out in pain, a sound so horrible that Shou Tucker felt his stomach wrench with nausea. It stared up at him with eyes not altogether his wife’s, full of pain and sorrow and anger and fear. It gasped in agony and whispered, “Shou, why?”
The second time it had not taken traps and chloroform to get his “subjects” into the lab. They trusted him. So, with rising fear of failure and a return to a life of sleeping on flea-ridden mats and eating whatever could be found, he had lead his daughter and his dog down the basement stairs into pain and oblivion.
The moments before, hugging Nina in his arms in those few seconds before the decision was made, had been his last chance at being a man. Now, with his transmuted hulk of a body, huge and hairy with his own shoulders and head combined upside-down and backwards, he had no prayer. It was the price he paid for his cowardice. He had become cowardice. He skulked in shadows, hiding his horrible form in darkness and oversized trench coats. His voice, now only a whisper sickeningly like the one he had heard so long ago, passed through his bent throat as he solftly ministered to the silent bundle in his arms, his little Nina. He held her cradled in one monstrous arm as he showed her the arrays he had scratched into the walls, explaining to her what he would do next to make her better. But she never spoke, never asked questions, never asked him why he had done what he did or how many creatures he had deconstructed and recombined to make her. Her big blue eyes remained expressionless and unblinking as he added and subtracted and whispered formulae and ingredients. It might have driven him mad if there had been anything left of the man called Shou Tucker inside the beast that wore his upside down face. But there was nothing there that had not been twisted and perverted by the choices he had made and the things he had sacrificed to his fear.
He continued to hold her, to talk to her and show her things though she never reciprocated with a sign of life. She was the sin born of the cowardice he had become and though her lifeless face bore little resemblance to the bright animated one of the first Nina, he clung to her as if she really was a part of him and shrouded her in the cowardice that had borne her in those deep dark labs full of whispers and false red light.
Title: Coward
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (anime)
Summary: Shou Tucker is a slave to his own fear.
Rated: Ew for revulsion.
Characters: Shou Tucker, Nina Tucker.
Spoilers: All of FMA as regards the Tuckers
Word count: 734
Author's Note: Eh, I could have been happier with this. I think I kept trying to add to much extra stuff and I had to stop myself. Unbetaed.
Coward
Shou Tucker had always been a coward, even before. Before he had become something else, he had never been truly a man. His every move had been dictated by a consuming fear of personal suffering.
All those years ago when he had started down the track that had lead him to where he was today, he had let cowardice guide his hand. Living day after day in alleys and abandoned buildings, trying to feed his wife and tiny daughter on the pennies tossed to him by the factory foremen, something in him had snapped. His hands shook and his eyes, hiding behind the thick lenses of his glasses, flashed and darted like those of a terrified animal. Cold fear settled in around his heart and ate away all that had ever been good in him, all that had ever been human.
He had the knowledge, all that was left was to obtain the subjects. The first half was easy. He laid a trap with a bit of food in the alley near where his family was living and waited for one of the local stray dogs to wander in looking for a meal. For the second half he had waited, hands shaking uncontrollably, for his wife to fall asleep, the baby in her arms as she lay on the dirty pallet on the floor of the abandoned warehouse. He had used just enough chloroform to keep her unconscious long enough for him to begin his experiment. And in the middle of the night, common sense and human emotion driven out of his mind by an abject terror of spending one more day in such absolute poverty, he combined them.
The result was an ungainly creature, covered in matted grey fur and long brown hair. It stumbled forward and cried out in pain, a sound so horrible that Shou Tucker felt his stomach wrench with nausea. It stared up at him with eyes not altogether his wife’s, full of pain and sorrow and anger and fear. It gasped in agony and whispered, “Shou, why?”
The second time it had not taken traps and chloroform to get his “subjects” into the lab. They trusted him. So, with rising fear of failure and a return to a life of sleeping on flea-ridden mats and eating whatever could be found, he had lead his daughter and his dog down the basement stairs into pain and oblivion.
The moments before, hugging Nina in his arms in those few seconds before the decision was made, had been his last chance at being a man. Now, with his transmuted hulk of a body, huge and hairy with his own shoulders and head combined upside-down and backwards, he had no prayer. It was the price he paid for his cowardice. He had become cowardice. He skulked in shadows, hiding his horrible form in darkness and oversized trench coats. His voice, now only a whisper sickeningly like the one he had heard so long ago, passed through his bent throat as he solftly ministered to the silent bundle in his arms, his little Nina. He held her cradled in one monstrous arm as he showed her the arrays he had scratched into the walls, explaining to her what he would do next to make her better. But she never spoke, never asked questions, never asked him why he had done what he did or how many creatures he had deconstructed and recombined to make her. Her big blue eyes remained expressionless and unblinking as he added and subtracted and whispered formulae and ingredients. It might have driven him mad if there had been anything left of the man called Shou Tucker inside the beast that wore his upside down face. But there was nothing there that had not been twisted and perverted by the choices he had made and the things he had sacrificed to his fear.
He continued to hold her, to talk to her and show her things though she never reciprocated with a sign of life. She was the sin born of the cowardice he had become and though her lifeless face bore little resemblance to the bright animated one of the first Nina, he clung to her as if she really was a part of him and shrouded her in the cowardice that had borne her in those deep dark labs full of whispers and false red light.