FMA/Menagerie Fic - “The North Wind”
Title: The North Wind
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist/Menagerie
Prompt: Here XD
Wordcount: 3415
Genre: Mystery/Horror
Rating/Warnings: T, blood XD
Summary: When the citizens of a small town are terrorized by a monster that only seems to come out in the snow, Toni’s sister and commanding officer sends him to investigate - but what he finds may be more than he can handle alone.
Author’s Notes: For hiza_chan, who wanted Toni and Will from my novel in the universe of FMA. I’ve never crossed original fiction over with fandom before; it was weird but kind of fun. XD I tried to make it very FMA-y while also doing some different and original stuff, and… I hope it worked out. I’m oddly nervous about this one. :P Anyway, Merry Christmas to its lovely recipient and I hope you have fun guessing which Menagerie characters I cast as which FMA characters. :D (Hint: they don’t correspond 1 to 1, since I distributed some of the traits/backstories/etc.)
-
“Good morning,” says Martin warmly when Toni walks into the office. “Thanks for coming in. As I said on the phone, we have an assignment for you.”
“Good morning, Martin,” Toni says. “Good morning, Colonel.” Bianca smiles and inclines her head in greeting, and Toni takes a moment to wonder why they can’t be a normal family, the kind where he could call her Sis and she would grin and ruffle his hair. Then again, that sounds terrifyingly unlike Bianca, and he wouldn’t want a version of her that wasn’t herself. “So, what’s this mission?”
Gloved hands fly through a message, the left moving more deftly and naturally than the right, and Martin is silent, no interpreter needed for a member of Bianca’s family. Strange reports from up north - nothing concrete, but eerie signs and messages that are frightening the inhabitants of the village where they’ve appeared. I’m sending you and another alchemist up to investigate, and if you find anything at all, call in a report and I’ll come up with soldiers. We’ve had our eye on that village for a while, and I want to get to the bottom of this.
“All right,” says Toni. “Who’s the other alchemist?”
“Hel-lo,” James Hawke sings, sticking his head into the office. “I’m bored; what is everyone up to on this beautiful morning?”
Oh, god, Toni signs to Bianca, please tell me it’s not him. His fingers are slightly clumsy at shaping the patterns, because Bianca’s hearing is perfectly fine, so the only time he ever has cause to use the signs himself is when he wants to talk behind someone else’s back.
“Hey,” says James, obviously going for annoyed but sounding no less obnoxiously cheerful. “I saw that, Antonio dear. I’ve been getting better at reading those signs you guys do.”
It’s not him, Bianca signs. You’ll meet your partner at the train station this afternoon. Also, tell Hawke to get away from that mirror if he values his life.
“Get the hell away from the mirror,” Toni tells James. “Don’t you have some bimbo to be flirting with instead of doing your job?”
“But I want to see the pretty guy who appears in it,” James whines. “Flirting with him is way more fun than flirting with bimbos.”
Lieutenant Wolfe, Bianca signs to Martin, I apologize, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill your cousin.
Toni’s meeting with the other alchemist, a serious, polite young man named William, does not go as well as it might have.
That is to say, right in the middle of shaking hands and introducing himself, Toni has an attack and vomits blood all over the partner he has known for thirty seconds and will be spending at least the next week with.
“Are you all right?” William asks for the thousandth time as they sit on the train they just barely managed to catch, wearing a fresh shirt and a worried expression. Toni grits his teeth.
“I promise, I’m fine. It’s just something that happens.” This is just great; it’s bad enough trying to get respect as a teenage State Alchemist without having to work with someone who’s convinced that he’s sickly and delicate.
“Pardon me for my concern,” says William, sounding slightly annoyed, “but in my experience, blood spouting out of your mouth is not something that ‘just happens’.”
“I have a condition,” Toni says. “It’s under control.”
William just rolls his eyes, which somehow offends Toni more than anything he could have said. The younger boy scowls and plants his chin in his hand, watching the scenery outside the window go by, and resigns himself to a very long week.
When the reach the village, there’s a warning bell ringing in the tower, and Toni knows this isn’t going to be good.
“We’re military,” he tells the chief of police firmly, flashing his watch, once they manage to track him down. “What happened?”
“When we talked to the officer in Central the other day, it was just disconnected events,” the man says, sounding distressed. “Three families had reported hearing tapping on their windows on separate nights, and gone out the next morning to find strange, seemingly meaningless patterns scratched into the frost and half-snowed-in footprints going around their houses and underneath the windows - even up on the front steps. Nothing more, though. Then, this morning, we found an entire family dead inside their house, with the same footprints and scratches and the door hanging open. The corpses are frozen solid. They didn’t even try to call the police like the others had.”
“Get on the phone with Central again, right now,” Toni says. “Ask for Colonel Serpentyne, and tell her what you just told me. My partner and I will go investigate the house.”
“He’s your partner?” the chief of police asks, looking confused. “Not your boss? You seem really young to be in the military.”
Toni closes his eyes and counts to ten, refusing to look at William’s face just in case he’s smirking.
“I’d appreciate it if you could have someone show us the house now,” he finally manages flatly. “Time is of the essence, officer.”
“Also, my partner isn’t very patient,” William says calmly, and Toni almost punches him.
He expected the odd scratches in the frost on the windowpane to be transmutation circles, but they’re not. He can see by the slight frown on William’s face that the older boy was similarly wrong, and allows himself a moment of satisfaction at that.
“Everyone’s really scared,” says the police officer who led them to the house, reddish-brown hair trapped in the scarf she’s wearing over her uniform. “We’re assuming it’s the same thing that left the signs at the other houses, but we don’t know what this family did differently to make it kill them. Everyone thinks it could be them next.”
“Well, we’ll do our best to track it down,” William promises. “And our commanding officer should be here with armed men in a couple days to help protect the town. Whatever this thing is, we’ll stop it.”
And for just a moment, sounding so certain that it’s less like determination and more like a statement of fact - they will stop it and protect the town - he reminds Toni of his older sister.
Toni is six years old, and he has never felt this kind of pain.
“H-help,” he pleads, tears dripping down his cheeks, as he coughs up more blood. The sight of it - of his insides coming out his mouth - is as terrifying as the physical sensation, the feeling that something has been ripped out of him, deep inside his belly. “B-Bianca, it hurts-” He raises wet eyes to see his sister, who is barely a teenager, splattered with blood and holding a hand to her dripping throat. The grimace on her face must mean she’s in pain, but she extends her other arm to him, trying to say something. No sound comes out.
“W-where’s Paolo?” Toni gasps, cringing as another stabbing pain goes through his abdomen and letting himself slump onto her shoulder. “Where is he?”
Bianca shakes her head, long colorless hair brushing against his face, and holds him close, looking frantically around the room. When she spots her twin’s empty clothes lying on the ground, Toni feels her stiffen and start shaking.
“What do we do?” he whimpers, and she pulls away from him, staggering to her feet and scanning the room with a desperate kind of determination in her eyes. She stumbles over and pries the old mirror off its hook on the wall, turning it face-down and starting to draw something on the back, dipping her finger into the blood at her throat to use as ink.
“What are you doing?” Toni asks, but she turns to him and points violently across the room, eyes blazing. Toni doesn’t have to hear her voice to know what she’s saying - Get away.
“What?” he demands again, terrified but hanging back, unwilling to defy her. “Bianca, what are you going to do?”
But Bianca only finishes the symbol, turns her back to him, and activates the reaction. The light fills the room, and for a moment Toni can’t see, and then he sees more blood, and Bianca is trembling and trying to turn the mirror over with her left arm, because oh no what happened to the other one, but she’s not strong enough, and she’s losing consciousness and sinking to the ground.
Shaking all over, Toni crawls forward and helps her turn it over.
His reflection stares back at him, chalk-white and terrified, and behind it, confused and scared, he sees his brother’s face.
“Are you all right?” William demands, and Toni opens his eyes to find himself in the guest house with the older boy looking down at him worriedly, a hand on his shoulder to shake him awake. “It sounded like you were having a nightmare.”
“It’s nothing,” Toni says, feeling too sick to be annoyed. William raises an eyebrow.
“I won’t pry if you don’t want me to, all right? I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I am,” Toni says, taking a deep breath. He glances around the dark room. “What time is it?”
“Late,” says William. “But there’s a reason I woke you up.”
Toni takes one look at the expression on his face and says, “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No,” says William, “you’re not. I came to wake you up because I heard tapping on the window.”
When they get downstairs, the window William heard the noise from is silent, and it’s snowing fiercely outside, the wind howling around the house. Bravely, or perhaps stupidly, Toni throws open the door, knife tucked against his arm and hands poised to clap - but nothing leaps in at them, as he’d half-imagined.
Outside the house, there are footsteps circling around and around, but they seem to have no owner, and the snow is already filling them in and making it impossible to distinguish exactly what shape they were. Frustrated, Toni finally admits that whatever left them is gone, and they retreat inside the house with the lantern.
Something is waiting for them in the kitchen.
“Oh, god,” Toni breathes, because nothing has ever looked as wrong as this thing does, not even what he saw across the room that night when he was six, when he finally dared to look. That thing was horrifying, and wrong, and unnatural, but this thing is just - Toni finds himself thinking words he’s never even believed in. A perversion. An abomination. A sin against nature.
It’s only William dragging him out of the way that saves him from the thing, and he stumbles and wakes up enough to clap, using the ability that earned him his certification and his title.
A wave ripples out from his hands and through the kitchen, and outside, the sound of the wind is deeper, and the flakes of snow are swirling in the blizzard as if through molasses. Toni whips his dagger into his hand, and it arcs lazily through the air; he blinks, and the moment of darkness lasts long enough for him to fear what he’ll see when his eyes open.
The thing comes at him again, in slow motion this time, and he tries to process all the things that are wrong with it as he watches his body dodge it in slow motion. It’s like a human being created by someone who has never seen one, or a cartoonish, poorly-done drawing brought to life exactly as it is: the proportions are all wrong, the arms and neck far too long for the body, and the hair looks like strips of fabric growing out of the scalp. Its open mouth is enormous, jaw unhinged like a snake’s, and though its nose is shaped normally, it has no nostrils. The most horrifying thing, though, is the eyes - they’re enormous, too, cartoonish and lidless and far too big for its face, and they’re not actual eyes, just pigmentation in the vague shape of eyes. Toni can’t stand to look at it.
“Look out!” William shouts, voice deep and resonating slowly, and Toni manages to dodge again, trying to force himself to fight. He’s not a coward, and he’s not weak, but slowing his perception of time like this counteracts the kick of adrenaline and the rush of combat, and he’s never fought anything like this. Just looking at it horrifies him so deeply that he feels sick and weak, and his muscles don’t want to obey him.
In slow motion, he watches William’s eyes light with an idea, and he drags in a shaky breath that takes agonizing seconds to get into his chest. The older boy has some kind of plan, and if Toni can just distract the thing for a little longer, maybe-
The distant thought of some kind of end goal is enough to force his legs into motion, leading the monster around the table and away from William, who’s darting to the stove and turning all four jets of gas on. Not wanting to get close enough to the thing chasing him to use his dagger, Toni flicks it back into his sleeve and claps his hands together again, catching up a heavy steel pan and transmuting it into a long sword. The moment the reaction activates, time jolts forward into its normal pace again, and he has a moment of disorientation before he brings the weapon up just in time to defend himself.
“Quick, get out!” William shouts, looping the long handle of the still-lit lantern over the monster’s head and dragging Toni away from it and out into the entryway, slamming the door behind them. There’s the sound of furious clawing on the other side of the door and what sounds like the wood being shredded, but before it can get through, William pulls out a piece of chalk, draws a transmutation circle on their side, and presses his hands to it.
The explosion of fire from inside the kitchen is so violent that it breaks through the door and knocks them both against the opposite wall.
When Toni looks up, dazed and still panicked, there’s nothing left of the monster.
I know what it was, Bianca signs, lip curling in disgust, as they give her their report the next evening. The guesthouse they were staying in burned down, but nobody was hurt and the thing they fought seems to have been killed, so there’s no question in Toni’s mind that it was worth it.
“What?” Toni asks, still trying not to think about it. He’s studied human alchemy, though not as much as she has, but he doesn’t think he’s ever heard of anything like that. “A homunculus?”
Bianca shakes her head. No, homunculi are much more human-looking, and they’re intelligent. I think the thing you fought was a golem - a cheap, poorly-done imitation of a human being. Golem are puppets with no conscious will of their own, which means that it wasn’t acting alone.
“We think we know where it might have come from,” William says, holding up the map they’ve been charting things on while waiting for her train. “We noticed that all the houses it visited form a pattern - a giant circle. And if you add in the designs that were scratched on the windows and connect the similar shapes, you start to see the beginnings of a transmutation circle, the center of which is at this abandoned building. We think this - golem was mapping out a series of points on a circle that could be activated from inside it.”
Well, Bianca replies, looking grimly, let’s go pay whoever’s hiding there a visit.
When they reach the abandoned building, it’s started to rain, and there’s bright blue light coming out the windows and starting to spill out into the city in five long lines.
“I thought we stopped it before it could finish setting up the points!” William cries, distressed, as they run towards it. “It only murdered once; how can someone create a transmutation circle with only one point?”
“What if it wasn’t the murder?” Toni asks grimly, stepping aside to let a group of soldiers begin knocking down the door. “It visited five houses, and the first three were terrified enough to call in the military. The chief of police said the murdered family was the only one that didn’t call for help. What if they weren’t scared at first? What if what it needed was the fear?”
“A transmutation circle activated by footprints on the ground, writing on the window, and fear?” William asks, wide-eyed. “So it doesn’t matter that we killed the golem last night, because it finished the circle anyway.”
“That’s right,” Toni says grimly, as the door gives way with a loud crash.
He and William hurry into the building after Bianca and her half-dozen soldiers, only to find it deserted, a bright blue transmutation circle glowing on the floor and a shape starting to come into physical being above it, humanoid but four times as tall as a grown man.
It’s a summoning circle, Bianca signs swiftly, holding her arms out, and Martin shouts the warning to the other soldiers. Everyone, stay back! Whatever’s coming through probably isn’t even from this plane of existence, so don’t get anywhere near it.
“We have to erase the circle before it finishes coming through!” William shouts, and Bianca nods decisively, looking up at the skylights.
Lieutenant Wolfe, the windows.
“Sir,” says Martin, raising his rifle to his shoulder and shooting out each of the six large panes of glass in the roof. Freezing rain comes pouring down with the glass, and Bianca claps her hands together and extends her palms, eyes lit and lips curled into a cold smile as she turns the water into needles of ice and sends them flying around the circle, digging into the lines of chalk and smearing them. Ice is climbing up the figure in the center, too, encasing it in thick, cold walls, and by the time it stops, the last of the light has faded.
Bianca claps her hands again, and the giant block of ice shatters, leaving nothing behind.
“Wow,” William says under his breath. “It’s true what they say about her.”
Toni can guess. A favorite joke of Bianca’s subordinates is that she isn’t called the Winter Alchemist for her personality alone.
“Behind you!” William shouts, and Bianca spins just in time to throw her right arm up above her head as a man brings an axe viciously down at her head. There’s the crunch of metal on metal, and Toni sees his sister cringe with the weight of the blow as sparks fly from her arm and pieces of it rain down on her face. Her attacker pauses for a moment, obviously surprised to have found metal instead of flesh, then growls and raises the axe again.
Before Toni can even lift his hands to clap, the man drops with a bullet in his head.
Thank you, Lieutenant, Bianca signs left-handedly and only a little bit shakily, and Martin smiles grimly and lowers his gun.
“Any time, Colonel.” Bianca frowns at her right arm and continues signing with her left, and he raises his voice and interprets for the other soldiers, “All right, men. Spread out and check the rest of the building in groups of at least two. Report back when you’re sure we’ve dealt with everything.”
“Are you all right?” Toni asks worriedly, approaching once the others have dispersed to carry out their orders. Bianca frowns ruefully and gestures to her arm.
Yes, though this thing isn’t. I’ll have to get it fixed when we get back to Central.
“Here,” says Toni, taking off his scarf and tying it into a sling for her. William helps, and Toni spares him a grudging smile. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” says William, then smiles and raises an eyebrow. “Glad you’ll finally be getting out of my company now that this is over?”
Oh, I don’t think so, Bianca signs with a faint smirk. This isn’t the only mission I had for you two.
“It isn’t?” Toni sighs. “Fine, William. I guess I’ll just have to put up with you for a little longer.”
William’s grin suggests that there’s a possibility he sees through it.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist/Menagerie
Prompt: Here XD
Wordcount: 3415
Genre: Mystery/Horror
Rating/Warnings: T, blood XD
Summary: When the citizens of a small town are terrorized by a monster that only seems to come out in the snow, Toni’s sister and commanding officer sends him to investigate - but what he finds may be more than he can handle alone.
Author’s Notes: For hiza_chan, who wanted Toni and Will from my novel in the universe of FMA. I’ve never crossed original fiction over with fandom before; it was weird but kind of fun. XD I tried to make it very FMA-y while also doing some different and original stuff, and… I hope it worked out. I’m oddly nervous about this one. :P Anyway, Merry Christmas to its lovely recipient and I hope you have fun guessing which Menagerie characters I cast as which FMA characters. :D (Hint: they don’t correspond 1 to 1, since I distributed some of the traits/backstories/etc.)
-
“Good morning,” says Martin warmly when Toni walks into the office. “Thanks for coming in. As I said on the phone, we have an assignment for you.”
“Good morning, Martin,” Toni says. “Good morning, Colonel.” Bianca smiles and inclines her head in greeting, and Toni takes a moment to wonder why they can’t be a normal family, the kind where he could call her Sis and she would grin and ruffle his hair. Then again, that sounds terrifyingly unlike Bianca, and he wouldn’t want a version of her that wasn’t herself. “So, what’s this mission?”
Gloved hands fly through a message, the left moving more deftly and naturally than the right, and Martin is silent, no interpreter needed for a member of Bianca’s family. Strange reports from up north - nothing concrete, but eerie signs and messages that are frightening the inhabitants of the village where they’ve appeared. I’m sending you and another alchemist up to investigate, and if you find anything at all, call in a report and I’ll come up with soldiers. We’ve had our eye on that village for a while, and I want to get to the bottom of this.
“All right,” says Toni. “Who’s the other alchemist?”
“Hel-lo,” James Hawke sings, sticking his head into the office. “I’m bored; what is everyone up to on this beautiful morning?”
Oh, god, Toni signs to Bianca, please tell me it’s not him. His fingers are slightly clumsy at shaping the patterns, because Bianca’s hearing is perfectly fine, so the only time he ever has cause to use the signs himself is when he wants to talk behind someone else’s back.
“Hey,” says James, obviously going for annoyed but sounding no less obnoxiously cheerful. “I saw that, Antonio dear. I’ve been getting better at reading those signs you guys do.”
It’s not him, Bianca signs. You’ll meet your partner at the train station this afternoon. Also, tell Hawke to get away from that mirror if he values his life.
“Get the hell away from the mirror,” Toni tells James. “Don’t you have some bimbo to be flirting with instead of doing your job?”
“But I want to see the pretty guy who appears in it,” James whines. “Flirting with him is way more fun than flirting with bimbos.”
Lieutenant Wolfe, Bianca signs to Martin, I apologize, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill your cousin.
Toni’s meeting with the other alchemist, a serious, polite young man named William, does not go as well as it might have.
That is to say, right in the middle of shaking hands and introducing himself, Toni has an attack and vomits blood all over the partner he has known for thirty seconds and will be spending at least the next week with.
“Are you all right?” William asks for the thousandth time as they sit on the train they just barely managed to catch, wearing a fresh shirt and a worried expression. Toni grits his teeth.
“I promise, I’m fine. It’s just something that happens.” This is just great; it’s bad enough trying to get respect as a teenage State Alchemist without having to work with someone who’s convinced that he’s sickly and delicate.
“Pardon me for my concern,” says William, sounding slightly annoyed, “but in my experience, blood spouting out of your mouth is not something that ‘just happens’.”
“I have a condition,” Toni says. “It’s under control.”
William just rolls his eyes, which somehow offends Toni more than anything he could have said. The younger boy scowls and plants his chin in his hand, watching the scenery outside the window go by, and resigns himself to a very long week.
When the reach the village, there’s a warning bell ringing in the tower, and Toni knows this isn’t going to be good.
“We’re military,” he tells the chief of police firmly, flashing his watch, once they manage to track him down. “What happened?”
“When we talked to the officer in Central the other day, it was just disconnected events,” the man says, sounding distressed. “Three families had reported hearing tapping on their windows on separate nights, and gone out the next morning to find strange, seemingly meaningless patterns scratched into the frost and half-snowed-in footprints going around their houses and underneath the windows - even up on the front steps. Nothing more, though. Then, this morning, we found an entire family dead inside their house, with the same footprints and scratches and the door hanging open. The corpses are frozen solid. They didn’t even try to call the police like the others had.”
“Get on the phone with Central again, right now,” Toni says. “Ask for Colonel Serpentyne, and tell her what you just told me. My partner and I will go investigate the house.”
“He’s your partner?” the chief of police asks, looking confused. “Not your boss? You seem really young to be in the military.”
Toni closes his eyes and counts to ten, refusing to look at William’s face just in case he’s smirking.
“I’d appreciate it if you could have someone show us the house now,” he finally manages flatly. “Time is of the essence, officer.”
“Also, my partner isn’t very patient,” William says calmly, and Toni almost punches him.
He expected the odd scratches in the frost on the windowpane to be transmutation circles, but they’re not. He can see by the slight frown on William’s face that the older boy was similarly wrong, and allows himself a moment of satisfaction at that.
“Everyone’s really scared,” says the police officer who led them to the house, reddish-brown hair trapped in the scarf she’s wearing over her uniform. “We’re assuming it’s the same thing that left the signs at the other houses, but we don’t know what this family did differently to make it kill them. Everyone thinks it could be them next.”
“Well, we’ll do our best to track it down,” William promises. “And our commanding officer should be here with armed men in a couple days to help protect the town. Whatever this thing is, we’ll stop it.”
And for just a moment, sounding so certain that it’s less like determination and more like a statement of fact - they will stop it and protect the town - he reminds Toni of his older sister.
Toni is six years old, and he has never felt this kind of pain.
“H-help,” he pleads, tears dripping down his cheeks, as he coughs up more blood. The sight of it - of his insides coming out his mouth - is as terrifying as the physical sensation, the feeling that something has been ripped out of him, deep inside his belly. “B-Bianca, it hurts-” He raises wet eyes to see his sister, who is barely a teenager, splattered with blood and holding a hand to her dripping throat. The grimace on her face must mean she’s in pain, but she extends her other arm to him, trying to say something. No sound comes out.
“W-where’s Paolo?” Toni gasps, cringing as another stabbing pain goes through his abdomen and letting himself slump onto her shoulder. “Where is he?”
Bianca shakes her head, long colorless hair brushing against his face, and holds him close, looking frantically around the room. When she spots her twin’s empty clothes lying on the ground, Toni feels her stiffen and start shaking.
“What do we do?” he whimpers, and she pulls away from him, staggering to her feet and scanning the room with a desperate kind of determination in her eyes. She stumbles over and pries the old mirror off its hook on the wall, turning it face-down and starting to draw something on the back, dipping her finger into the blood at her throat to use as ink.
“What are you doing?” Toni asks, but she turns to him and points violently across the room, eyes blazing. Toni doesn’t have to hear her voice to know what she’s saying - Get away.
“What?” he demands again, terrified but hanging back, unwilling to defy her. “Bianca, what are you going to do?”
But Bianca only finishes the symbol, turns her back to him, and activates the reaction. The light fills the room, and for a moment Toni can’t see, and then he sees more blood, and Bianca is trembling and trying to turn the mirror over with her left arm, because oh no what happened to the other one, but she’s not strong enough, and she’s losing consciousness and sinking to the ground.
Shaking all over, Toni crawls forward and helps her turn it over.
His reflection stares back at him, chalk-white and terrified, and behind it, confused and scared, he sees his brother’s face.
“Are you all right?” William demands, and Toni opens his eyes to find himself in the guest house with the older boy looking down at him worriedly, a hand on his shoulder to shake him awake. “It sounded like you were having a nightmare.”
“It’s nothing,” Toni says, feeling too sick to be annoyed. William raises an eyebrow.
“I won’t pry if you don’t want me to, all right? I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I am,” Toni says, taking a deep breath. He glances around the dark room. “What time is it?”
“Late,” says William. “But there’s a reason I woke you up.”
Toni takes one look at the expression on his face and says, “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No,” says William, “you’re not. I came to wake you up because I heard tapping on the window.”
When they get downstairs, the window William heard the noise from is silent, and it’s snowing fiercely outside, the wind howling around the house. Bravely, or perhaps stupidly, Toni throws open the door, knife tucked against his arm and hands poised to clap - but nothing leaps in at them, as he’d half-imagined.
Outside the house, there are footsteps circling around and around, but they seem to have no owner, and the snow is already filling them in and making it impossible to distinguish exactly what shape they were. Frustrated, Toni finally admits that whatever left them is gone, and they retreat inside the house with the lantern.
Something is waiting for them in the kitchen.
“Oh, god,” Toni breathes, because nothing has ever looked as wrong as this thing does, not even what he saw across the room that night when he was six, when he finally dared to look. That thing was horrifying, and wrong, and unnatural, but this thing is just - Toni finds himself thinking words he’s never even believed in. A perversion. An abomination. A sin against nature.
It’s only William dragging him out of the way that saves him from the thing, and he stumbles and wakes up enough to clap, using the ability that earned him his certification and his title.
A wave ripples out from his hands and through the kitchen, and outside, the sound of the wind is deeper, and the flakes of snow are swirling in the blizzard as if through molasses. Toni whips his dagger into his hand, and it arcs lazily through the air; he blinks, and the moment of darkness lasts long enough for him to fear what he’ll see when his eyes open.
The thing comes at him again, in slow motion this time, and he tries to process all the things that are wrong with it as he watches his body dodge it in slow motion. It’s like a human being created by someone who has never seen one, or a cartoonish, poorly-done drawing brought to life exactly as it is: the proportions are all wrong, the arms and neck far too long for the body, and the hair looks like strips of fabric growing out of the scalp. Its open mouth is enormous, jaw unhinged like a snake’s, and though its nose is shaped normally, it has no nostrils. The most horrifying thing, though, is the eyes - they’re enormous, too, cartoonish and lidless and far too big for its face, and they’re not actual eyes, just pigmentation in the vague shape of eyes. Toni can’t stand to look at it.
“Look out!” William shouts, voice deep and resonating slowly, and Toni manages to dodge again, trying to force himself to fight. He’s not a coward, and he’s not weak, but slowing his perception of time like this counteracts the kick of adrenaline and the rush of combat, and he’s never fought anything like this. Just looking at it horrifies him so deeply that he feels sick and weak, and his muscles don’t want to obey him.
In slow motion, he watches William’s eyes light with an idea, and he drags in a shaky breath that takes agonizing seconds to get into his chest. The older boy has some kind of plan, and if Toni can just distract the thing for a little longer, maybe-
The distant thought of some kind of end goal is enough to force his legs into motion, leading the monster around the table and away from William, who’s darting to the stove and turning all four jets of gas on. Not wanting to get close enough to the thing chasing him to use his dagger, Toni flicks it back into his sleeve and claps his hands together again, catching up a heavy steel pan and transmuting it into a long sword. The moment the reaction activates, time jolts forward into its normal pace again, and he has a moment of disorientation before he brings the weapon up just in time to defend himself.
“Quick, get out!” William shouts, looping the long handle of the still-lit lantern over the monster’s head and dragging Toni away from it and out into the entryway, slamming the door behind them. There’s the sound of furious clawing on the other side of the door and what sounds like the wood being shredded, but before it can get through, William pulls out a piece of chalk, draws a transmutation circle on their side, and presses his hands to it.
The explosion of fire from inside the kitchen is so violent that it breaks through the door and knocks them both against the opposite wall.
When Toni looks up, dazed and still panicked, there’s nothing left of the monster.
I know what it was, Bianca signs, lip curling in disgust, as they give her their report the next evening. The guesthouse they were staying in burned down, but nobody was hurt and the thing they fought seems to have been killed, so there’s no question in Toni’s mind that it was worth it.
“What?” Toni asks, still trying not to think about it. He’s studied human alchemy, though not as much as she has, but he doesn’t think he’s ever heard of anything like that. “A homunculus?”
Bianca shakes her head. No, homunculi are much more human-looking, and they’re intelligent. I think the thing you fought was a golem - a cheap, poorly-done imitation of a human being. Golem are puppets with no conscious will of their own, which means that it wasn’t acting alone.
“We think we know where it might have come from,” William says, holding up the map they’ve been charting things on while waiting for her train. “We noticed that all the houses it visited form a pattern - a giant circle. And if you add in the designs that were scratched on the windows and connect the similar shapes, you start to see the beginnings of a transmutation circle, the center of which is at this abandoned building. We think this - golem was mapping out a series of points on a circle that could be activated from inside it.”
Well, Bianca replies, looking grimly, let’s go pay whoever’s hiding there a visit.
When they reach the abandoned building, it’s started to rain, and there’s bright blue light coming out the windows and starting to spill out into the city in five long lines.
“I thought we stopped it before it could finish setting up the points!” William cries, distressed, as they run towards it. “It only murdered once; how can someone create a transmutation circle with only one point?”
“What if it wasn’t the murder?” Toni asks grimly, stepping aside to let a group of soldiers begin knocking down the door. “It visited five houses, and the first three were terrified enough to call in the military. The chief of police said the murdered family was the only one that didn’t call for help. What if they weren’t scared at first? What if what it needed was the fear?”
“A transmutation circle activated by footprints on the ground, writing on the window, and fear?” William asks, wide-eyed. “So it doesn’t matter that we killed the golem last night, because it finished the circle anyway.”
“That’s right,” Toni says grimly, as the door gives way with a loud crash.
He and William hurry into the building after Bianca and her half-dozen soldiers, only to find it deserted, a bright blue transmutation circle glowing on the floor and a shape starting to come into physical being above it, humanoid but four times as tall as a grown man.
It’s a summoning circle, Bianca signs swiftly, holding her arms out, and Martin shouts the warning to the other soldiers. Everyone, stay back! Whatever’s coming through probably isn’t even from this plane of existence, so don’t get anywhere near it.
“We have to erase the circle before it finishes coming through!” William shouts, and Bianca nods decisively, looking up at the skylights.
Lieutenant Wolfe, the windows.
“Sir,” says Martin, raising his rifle to his shoulder and shooting out each of the six large panes of glass in the roof. Freezing rain comes pouring down with the glass, and Bianca claps her hands together and extends her palms, eyes lit and lips curled into a cold smile as she turns the water into needles of ice and sends them flying around the circle, digging into the lines of chalk and smearing them. Ice is climbing up the figure in the center, too, encasing it in thick, cold walls, and by the time it stops, the last of the light has faded.
Bianca claps her hands again, and the giant block of ice shatters, leaving nothing behind.
“Wow,” William says under his breath. “It’s true what they say about her.”
Toni can guess. A favorite joke of Bianca’s subordinates is that she isn’t called the Winter Alchemist for her personality alone.
“Behind you!” William shouts, and Bianca spins just in time to throw her right arm up above her head as a man brings an axe viciously down at her head. There’s the crunch of metal on metal, and Toni sees his sister cringe with the weight of the blow as sparks fly from her arm and pieces of it rain down on her face. Her attacker pauses for a moment, obviously surprised to have found metal instead of flesh, then growls and raises the axe again.
Before Toni can even lift his hands to clap, the man drops with a bullet in his head.
Thank you, Lieutenant, Bianca signs left-handedly and only a little bit shakily, and Martin smiles grimly and lowers his gun.
“Any time, Colonel.” Bianca frowns at her right arm and continues signing with her left, and he raises his voice and interprets for the other soldiers, “All right, men. Spread out and check the rest of the building in groups of at least two. Report back when you’re sure we’ve dealt with everything.”
“Are you all right?” Toni asks worriedly, approaching once the others have dispersed to carry out their orders. Bianca frowns ruefully and gestures to her arm.
Yes, though this thing isn’t. I’ll have to get it fixed when we get back to Central.
“Here,” says Toni, taking off his scarf and tying it into a sling for her. William helps, and Toni spares him a grudging smile. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” says William, then smiles and raises an eyebrow. “Glad you’ll finally be getting out of my company now that this is over?”
Oh, I don’t think so, Bianca signs with a faint smirk. This isn’t the only mission I had for you two.
“It isn’t?” Toni sighs. “Fine, William. I guess I’ll just have to put up with you for a little longer.”
William’s grin suggests that there’s a possibility he sees through it.