FMA -- Loud and Clear: The Path to the Precipice, Chapter 1 (2/2)
Title: Loud and Clear: The Path to the Precipice
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed (with Al/Win)
Rating: R
Word Count: 56,700 (12,700 in this chapter)
Warnings: notes from the last fic still apply :(
Summary: This isn't the first time Ed's seen the far side of a parabola, and it won't be the last.
Author's Note: Someday LJ will abolish post limits, but I will probably be all DW, all the time by then. :'(
LOUD AND CLEAR
PART 5: THE PATH TO THE PRECIPICE
CHAPTER 1, PART II
One by one he pried his fingers loose, and then he clenched both hands around the steering wheel-ten and two-and gently eased his foot onto the brake as he approached another of the sixteen billion stop signs in this horrible little cottage-crammed maze.
White light flared in his rearview-
And the whole world collapsed into a deafening metal crash-scream; the force of the impact flung him forward, and his forehead slammed into the top of his steering wheel.
Gold and black and white-edged stars smeared and flitted and flickered across his vision, and something hot draggled downward into his eyebrow and started to sting in his eye, and some part of him knew he should drag in a deep breath before the shock set i-
A wall of off-white exploded out of the center of the steering column and hurled him back against the seat-it felt like he’d been fucking slapped everywhere at once, like belly-flopping from fifty-feet up; burnt-numb all over-
The airbag deflated like a fucking parachute when the wind died and fell to hanging there tragically from the steering wheel.
He couldn’t-
breathecouldn’tbreathe-
He swallowed hard, then harder, and glanced into his rearview; the driver of the other car was silhouetted relatively clearly in their seat, and it looked like they were moving-so they must’ve been okay-
What the fuck were you supposed to do? Pull out of the fucking way, right? Other people were going to need to use this street whether or not he was fucking reeling from life’s latest one-two punch, more literally even than fucking usual.
He gritted his teeth and sucked air in through them, trying to force it down his throat; his head kept fucking teetering-like being drunk, only less fun in every possible fucking way, obviously, so really not like being drunk at all, and…
For a long second, the contours of the street ahead of him swam before his eyes, tracing hazy half-circle trajectories around the places that they should have been. He coaxed another breath into his chest, blinked hard, and looked intently at the road.
Gingerly, he pushed his foot at the gas and drew his poor shuddering Civic off to the side of the street, where he nudged it up against the curb and stopped. He pulled the parking brake and killed the engine, and…
Fucking… license and registration and insurance and… but first he had to make sure the other fucking asshole was okay-
The driver’s side door opened fine, so apparently his car hadn’t taken enough of a beating for the metal to bend this far up. He wasn’t sure if that qualified as a good thing or not in this particular case, and he was too preoccupied with planting both feet on the pavement as carefully as he could to make that call-he wasn’t sure they were going to take his weight; his vision kept tilting, and the wet heat sliding down his cheek was definitely blood running from his fucking forehead.
Too many fucking things happening at once; too much to process; too much to do-
He tugged his left sleeve down and lifted his hand up and pressed the cloth against the part of his forehead that was starting to throb and sting and make various other indications that it was almost certainly the source of the blood dribbling into his eye. Needed to put pressure on it or some shit. Once he made sure the other person wasn’t any worse off, he could think about more specific avenues of wound-management, like trying to close the fucking thing; had he thrown scotch tape into his laptop bag in the lab, or was that a vivid hallucination compounded by the head trauma and the bewilderment and…?
He braced his right arm against the frame of his Civic, walking himself along like it was a banister on a steep staircase or some shit. The fucking Lexus had done a cute sort of accordion number right towards the front, and one of the headlights had gotten smashed right the fuck out, but there wasn’t any obvious noxious black smoke pouring up from either vehicle’s engine, and the driver’s side door was opening, so hopefully the dumbass who’d hit him couldn’t have gotten hurt too badly, and…
“Hey,” he called, sounding half-hopeful and half-strangled to his own ears, as one long leg unfolded itself out of the car, followed by another. No visible injuries yet-that was good. “You okay?”
Fluidly, the driver ducked out of the car and stood.
It was-
Kimblee.
It was fucking Kimblee; fucking Kimblee had fucking rear-ended him at a stop sign out of fucking nowhere two blocks from Al’s new place-
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. This was a fucking-dream. Nightmare. The light was tricking him; it was some other graceful fucking sleazebag with long black hair swept back except the two sections framing his angular face; it was some other fucking monster of a man with eyes so fucking blue they still looked pale even in the dark-
“Well,” the voice he’d been trying for years now to scrub out from his fucking psyche said, and the slow curl of amusement in the words twisted up the corner of that smart fucking mouth. “Good evening, Edward. It’s been a while.”
Ed listened to the dry rasp of the breath sliding in and out of him as he stood there fucking rooted to the spot. He felt like a statue, like a robot, like a shell, like a-
Corpse.
Like a dead man on his fucking feet, heart stopped, muscles frozen, blood vessels severed up and down.
“You hit me,” he said, stupidly, and it came out thick and slow and tremulous.
“You’re bleeding,” Kimblee said, gesturing smoothly. “That’s going to need stitches.”
“It’s fine,” Ed managed through his numb fucking lips.
“It’s not,” Kimblee said. “Let me s-”
He stepped forward, and Ed flinched away from him hard and fast, and-
His shoulder had been pulsing with a series of fucking warning shots that he’d filed away as secondary to the head wound, but recoiling against his Civic set it on fire.
“Come on,” Kimblee said, briskly now, like he was talking to a fucking kid; and he was getting closer and closer, but Ed couldn’t-there wasn’t anywhere to run-
The cold was so fucking deep-so fucking deep in his blood and his guts and his bones that everything had frosted over; his veins were ice, and his stomach was a fucking snowbank; he couldn’t fight it-
“You need to go to the E.R.,” Kimblee said, and his hand settled on Ed’s shoulder, and the fucking horror of it sliced through him even colder than the fucking rest-
Shit, fuck-his heart was starting to jitter around like a fucking pinball, ricocheting through his ribcage, rippling underneath his skin-
“D-don’t-” he choked out.
“Don’t be childish,” Kimblee said, and for a long second the flare of rage choked Ed worse than the thundering of his heart.
He hadn’t come this fucking far to be talked to like-
Fuck it, and fuck the quickening rasp of his own breath; he forced his knees to raise him and pushed past Kimblee to get to the driver’s side of his car-dropped in, regretted that when the black swirled in close and only barely let him go, and took his keys out of the ignition. He pulled himself upright again using the door for leverage, then slammed it and locked it and shoved the keys into his pocket again. If Kimblee was going to drag him off somewhere and murder him, he didn’t want his laptop and his NIH grant app ending up at the bottom of whatever fucking ditch his body landed in.
Swiping the latest swell of blood out of his eye was apparently too abrupt a movement for his tormented fucking brain, since he wavered again-hard this time, suffused by that dangerous floaty lightness that could tip over into unconsciousness before you had a chance to blink.
“You’re probably concussed,” Kimblee said, and the long, pale fingers reaching out to him from the fucking dark made Ed’s stomach tighten, and that-
Made all of it that much fucking worse-made his heart pound harder, swifter, up in the back of his throat one second and the pit of his guts the next; made the shaking run backwards up from his fingertips to his forearms to his shoulders to his fucking jaw-
He flattened his right palm against the closest car window and held the other over his eyes-even the dim fucking orange streetlamps were too fucking much; Kimblee’s unholy fucking too-bright goddamn headlights were still on-well, the one that hadn’t smashed was-well-
This was not a coincidence.
He didn’t know how long it had been coming-didn’t know when Kimblee had fucking turned him up again, but it wouldn’t have been hard to find him. It had never been hard, and now he had half a dozen more public fucking profiles on the university website; he had a homepage for his lab with a stupid staged photo of him trying to look smart and professional and together and shit-
He pressed the side of his head in against the cold glass of the window and tried to focus-tried to breathe; tried to make his body slow down and behave and cooperate and work fucking with him for once.
What the fuck was he going to do? He couldn’t run like this-he wouldn’t make it five fucking steps before he went down hard and maybe didn’t ever get up. And even if he’d had the balance, or the strength, he couldn’t beat the shit out of Kimblee and be done with it; it was still assault and fucking battery when they deserved it, if they hadn’t unequivocally threatened you or whatever it was-like retaliating against a schoolyard bully and landing your own ass in suspension. Kimblee knew his way around the fucking law, in and out of the corners, through the loopholes. Ed couldn’t make any fucking move that might be construed as antagonistic.
Fancy fucking that-his fucking hands were tied.
Breathe. He had to breathe. Everything else would fucking come later; he had to-
Kimblee couldn’t know where Al lived-could he? Not yet. Not unless he’d been tailing Ed close for a long time, and Ed was paranoid enough to have noticed that, right?
Jesus fucking Christ, he couldn’t, could he-?
Well-if he didn’t-bless this fucking cesspit of a suburb and its billion identical cookie-cutter houses; bless the stupid unmarked mailboxes and the endless cul-de-sacs. The fucker could try a hundred houses at random and never get anywhere near Al and Win and their stupid kitten.
Right?
Kimblee’s fingers curled into Ed’s sleeve-just tight enough that he could yank himself loose if he really worked at it; just tight enough that he’d have to go overboard and look fucking dramatic if he wanted to shake off the unwelcome touch.
“Come on, Edward,” Kimblee said. “My car’s still running. I’ll take you to the emergency room.”
Ed couldn’t believe the admittedly pretty paltry contents of his stomach were still hanging out in his GI tract instead of hurling themselves down onto the pavement. “N-no, it’s fine, I’ll-”
“Ambulances are expensive,” Kimblee said, and his voice kept getting softer but-colder. “Just get in the car. It’ll be fine.”
Ed was going to die.
This fucker was going to fucking murder him while he was staggering around holding his hand up to his bleeding forehead, and nobody was ever going to find his decimated remains.
Pulling on his sleeve to lead him, Kimblee drew him over around the hood of the stupid fucking Lexus, opened the passenger door, and released his arm-like there was any fucking choice when Ed could barely stand; like there was anywhere to go with Kimblee standing there, blocking his egress, raising an eyebrow like Ed’s hesitation was some kind of histrionic little game.
He got into the car.
This was it. Wasn’t it? Fucker was going to cut him up into a thousand pieces and sprinkle them across a field of Venus flytraps, and Al would cry and cry and-
Kimblee settled in the driver’s seat, slammed his door, and had the grace not to put on the fucking child locks for good measure. Maybe if they started heading for the city dump, Ed could just jump out on the highway and hit the shoulder of the road at a good James Bond roll and crawl off before Kimblee could turn around; maybe he’d find a farmhouse with some charitable old guy who’d drive him back to safety in a tractor, and-
“I can text you pictures of my insurance information later,” Kimblee said.
The real shitty thing was that every time Ed’s heart started banging harder, his head spun faster; and then knowing that he was getting progressively unsteadier made the panic worse, and… Vicious fucking cycle shit.
Kimblee was trying to fucking trap him into responding positively on instinct-which would require him to admit that he’d blocked the shitbag’s number in the first place, or to commit to unblocking it in a damn hurry, or to give up his fucking email address as a compromise.
Fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck Kimblee for thinking he was still too stupid to see it.
“My phone’s been having problems with texts lately,” Ed said, and it was funny how lies didn’t even stick in your teeth when you spat them out the right way. He trained his eyes on the dashboard as the roads changed; the flashes of ambient lights slipping by his window made the vertigo way worse. “I could just-t-take a picture right now. ’S’it in the glove?”
He managed to keep his voice flat and casual except for the little tremor, but his blood was roiling, and the beat of it in his brain felt like the pull of a tide-every wave dragged his whole body back and forth, and if he didn’t fucking drown in the dark edges, it’d be a fucking miracle-
“It might be at home,” Kimblee said.
“I’ll call,” Ed said. “What’s the company?”
He was not a fucking kid.
He was not a fucking kid anymore, and he could handle himself, and he could handle this slimy fucking bastard, and he didn’t have to freak the fuck out. He could do this. He could take it.
He pressed his eyes shut tight and held his closed fist to his forehead and focused intently on breathing slow.
“Oddly enough,” Kimblee said, and there was the singsong voice Ed heard sometimes in the echoes of his fucking nightmares, “I honestly can’t recall. I’ll let you know.”
Funny, too, how much an offer could sound like a fucking threat.
“Great,” Ed said in the most acidically sardonic tone he could muster while he was bleeding out and losing little pieces of his mind. His thoughts just kept-fracturing, splintering; and ideas slipped loose like fragments of an iceberg and drifted off and melted clean away.
One stuck around, bobbing in the frigid current near enough to grasp:
Where the fuck were they going?
He winched one eye open and tried to make it focus on the world outside the windshield-they were getting onto the fucking highway, which wasn’t… which…
He dragged his brain back out into the agonizing real world that was currently trying to stab it from every fucking side.
“Take Meridian,” he said. “Sacred Heart has an urgent care clinic.”
Kimblee glanced over at him, and Ed could feel it-the hostility, radiating out for one long damn second; the resentment that Ed had trampled on whatever diabolical fucking plan he’d been unfurling. Probably he’d been plotting to drive Ed to an E.R. in Canada or some shit. Well, I didn’t specify which emergency room-
It was only that one fucking second, though, and then Kimblee had himself under control again, and even the slightest damn trace of readable emotion disappeared.
“Ah, yes,” Kimblee said, in a calm voice, like it wasn’t the most meaningless fucking response in the English language.
Ed leaned back against the seat-fine fucking leather, as always-and concentrated on trying to stem the slow trickle of blood from his stupid face. He had no idea now how much he’d lost; obviously it didn’t seem like a whole pint, and you could hand that out for free and be fine, but estimating volume was hard enough when it wasn’t flowing very slowly from your own damn injuries.
He wished he’d brought his fucking laptop after all, even at the risk of bleeding on it-it would’ve given him something to cling to instead of sitting here with his left hand hand pressed over the gash on his head, elbow angled awkwardly as fuck to avoid grazing Kimblee’s arm, and his right curled in as tight to his body as he could get it. And who knew how fucking long it’d take them to find someone to stitch him up? Maybe he could’ve gotten some grant work done. Maybe he could’ve played Tetris. Maybe he could’ve IMed Al for fucking help while Kimblee wasn’t looking; oh, God, he was in the middle of the fucking spider-web, splayed out and fucking helpless, just fucking waiting for the fangs-
Kimblee took the exit for Meridian.
Ed almost fucking collapsed from the sheer relief, because the bastard hadn’t flicked his fucking blinker, so there wasn’t any warning, which was utterly his fucking style-
But he couldn’t show any of his cards. Not to Kimblee. He had to be careful; he had to be so careful; maybe if he was-maybe if he played the game; maybe if he played it fucking well enough-
Just sharing air with this fucking-creature-made him so nervous it felt like there were tiny knives and needles dancing everywhere beneath his skin.
“How have you been?” Kimblee asked.
And what the fuck was Ed supposed to say to that? “Great, for a while; and then good; and then struggling but okay; and then last night I threw it all the fuck away because I’m a fucking idiot, but I guess you knew that”?
You were supposed to get revenge on your shitty exes by having a better life than them, weren’t you?
Ed could’ve sworn Winry had once said something like that.
Then again, Winry had once said a hell of a lot of things, many of which you wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company, let alone follow as advice.
“Fine,” Ed said, as tonelessly as he could when his voice wanted to tremble so badly that he had to swallow twice to steady it. That was good, though-“fine” was good; “fine” the most pointedly noncommittal answer humanly possible, which was better than fucking Kimblee deserved.
Were the streets in this part of town always this damn dark, or did city lighting just spontaneously flicker out when Kimblee’s black hole presence moved into the vicinity?
The way Ed’s stupid heart kept racing made him feel like a prey animal-and he was, wasn’t he? Quick, shallow breath and darting eyes and everything so tense he’d long since started shaking. None of this was fucking helping with the ongoing trickle of blood from his fucking head. How much had it been by now? They were probably going to ask him; what if he guesstimated wrong, and they underestimated the seriousness of it, and he passed out on the fucking germ-laden linoleum, then-
He had to fucking breathe.
The other question-maybe the worse one-
How long was Kimblee going to stick around?
Was he just going to toss Ed out in the fucking parking lot, or was he going to hover and linger and look over Ed’s shoulder and watch with that terrible fucking gleam in his fucking eyes while some doctor stuck a needle through Ed’s skin-?
What if he was faking Ed out anyway, and they weren’t going to urgent care at all? What if they were going directly to some shadowy fucking abandoned warehouse where nobody would hear him s-
“I suppose it’s difficult to believe,” Kimblee said, in that same soft, delicate, pseudo-surprised voice he’d always whipped out in the beginning, “but I’ve missed you.”
He was full of shit, and they both knew it.
Maybe he’d missed the game. Maybe he’d missed Ed’s particular brand of panic-the special way his eyes widened when the desperation to please metamorphosed into something more like fear. Maybe he missed having an easy target. Maybe he missed how earnestly his little puppet had played along.
No way-no way-had he missed Ed as a human being.
Kimblee didn’t register that other people were human beings. Other people were a catalogue of possibilities for pain and weaknesses, no more, no less.
“You’re right,” Ed said, and maybe the words fucking wavered on the way out, but he said them. “I don’t believe you.”
Silence for a second, and Ed’s heart slammed once, twice, three times; and he fixed his gaze on the street sign dangling by the stoplight that had just turned red. Kimblee stopped the car and tapped one fingertip against the steering wheel.
“Ah,” Kimblee said, so lightly that the sound barely made it across the center console to Ed’s ringing ears. “That’s a shame.”
How did he do that? How did he drop those icy fucking boulders of pure guilt directly into the pit of Ed’s stomach even after all this fucking time-after so much hard-won healing?
Ed had been so damn sure he’d gotten past it. He’d been so damn sure it was over, and now-
All of the same fucking torment-tiny little tendrils of ivy growing everywhere in fast-motion, threading through his ribcage, cinching in around his lungs, climbing up his throat-
And the unrelenting urgency of his fucking heartbeat trying to drive him over the precipice into panic.
The red disc overheard winked out, and the green one lit.
“Things change,” Kimblee said, drawing forward, and then they were off again, gliding through the unsettlingly empty fucking streets.
Things did. Sometimes people did, too.
But not the kind of things that made a person torture someone else and like it.
Not the kind of things that blackened you on the inside like that; not the kind of things that made your enjoyment of other people’s hurt and confusion-your enjoyment of deliberately creating their hurt and confusion-more important to you than any other aspect of their life.
People like that were lost forever. They didn’t turn over a new leaf and wind up with one that was clean and compassionate; they didn’t wake up one morning and understand the error of their fucking ways. They didn’t just up and erase the years and years of practiced destruction.
That didn’t happen.
And people like that didn’t deserve so much as the benefit of the fucking doubt.
Right?
“Yeah,” Ed said. If he sounded aloof-disinterested, unaffected, anything but terrified and quaking-maybe Kimblee would lose the goddamn scent. “I guess so.”
How much fucking further could it be to Sacred Heart, anyway? A reckless part of Ed wanted to turn on the radio-drown out the prickly, calculated conversation with some shitty pop music; distract Kimblee’s formidable attention from every goddamn detail of his posture and his movements and his expressions and his speech. Because he knew-he knew Kimblee was damn smart in too many ways, but that was the scariest one. Kimblee knew people; he read people-clinically, like a surgeon, so that he could pick them apart. Not to help. Not to understand. To put the knife in deeper. To get the blood running hot all over his hands.
That was the thrill for him, wasn’t it? The chase, and his teeth sinking into the throat of something helpless. The instant that his subject recognized that its life, its universe, its safety was in his grasp, and at his mercy.
A goal that simple should’ve made him predictable, but it didn’t, because there were a thousand routes towards it. There were a thousand ways to make somebody bleed.
And Ed was thin right now-paper-thin and fragile with it; worn almost fucking through. Raw. Shaken.
Vulnerable.
Kimblee would smell it, and know Ed knew he did. And Ed had always fucking sucked at chess.
“You do have insurance, don’t you?” Kimblee asked.
“Yeah,” Ed said. His heart wasn’t even fucking beating anymore: just vibrating, shuddering around inside his stupid chest, hurling itself at the walls, faster and faster by the fucking second; and it was a creeping thing sometimes-the panic was. Sometimes it crawled instead of leaping, but you couldn’t stop it even if you watched the spread of shadows from the very fucking start. “Allstate.”
“Not for the car,” Kimblee said, and the hint of the condescending smile in his voice felt like fucking chastisement, and that shouldn’t have stung, but- “Health insurance. Are you still insured by the school?”
There was fucking magic in it-in the way he talked. One of the highest-rated universities in the world was Ed’s school; with just the words he picked, he could minimize Ed’s fucking experiences and emotions in the time it took to ask what sounded like an ordinary question. That was incredible, wasn’t it?
Fucking incredible, too, how Ed hadn’t been able to see any of it from the inside, but now the silhouette was just so fucking crisp against the wall.
“Yeah,” he said. “They hired me on.” He waited, gazing out the windshield; staring at the side of the fucker’s face to monitor reactions would’ve made it too obvious that he was hoping for one. “As a professor.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have volunteered it, but it wasn’t like a single Google search wouldn’t have sold him out anyway.
“Did they,” Kimblee said, sounding-what? Vaguely surprised? Distantly fucking pleased? “How nice. Congratulations.”
Ed’s heart pounded, and his head pounded, and it occurred to him that he would have given up a couple of fingers not to be here right now. “Thanks.”
And there-
Blessed fucking neon, pun entirely subsidiary to the import of the words Sacred Heart blaring-in crappy, 80s-worthy colors-out of the muddled night ahead. There was even a helpful arrow labeled Urgent Care so that Kimblee couldn’t pull any shit… unless, of course, he’d been planning all along to drive around the back of the building, cut Ed’s throat, mutilate his corpse, and toss it into a biohazard bin, in which case Ed was fucked either way, so it didn’t really matter, did it?
Maybe Ed could spare a hand from stopping the blood from his forehead long enough to reach for his seatbelt release buckle if it came to that.
The thought was like an ice pick somebody kept stabbing into his skull; he couldn’t stop his breath from hitching, stuttering, going jagged at the edges as it warped his fucking brain-
He’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to drive into a dark part of the parking lot and get out a knife and cut me open, and I’m going to get to watch my guts pour out all over this nice fucking leather, fifty feet from the fucking hospital, and he’s going to wait as long as he can before he puts me out of my fucking misery. He’s going to kill me; he’s going to kill me; he’s-
“You can just drop me off,” he forced out around the bubble of fucking terror swelling in his throat.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kimblee said.
He pulled neatly into an empty parking spot twenty steps from the backlit glass doors.
“Don’t move,” he said.
He killed the engine, got out, and strode swiftly around the jacked-up hood of the car-but of course Ed wasn’t fucking listening; he fought his way out of the seatbelt and had his door halfway open by the time Kimblee grabbed the edge of it. That same sour-annoyed expression that Ed remembered from the time before flitted across his face, but he wiped it away as he drew the door further open and held out a hand.
“I’m fine,” Ed said, which-
Was kind of hilarious, actually, in a stupid sort of way.
But the point was that Kimblee could go to hell-which, incidentally, was where he was from-because Ed would pass out and break his face on the asphalt before he took that fucker’s hand.
He stuck one foot out of the car, followed it with the other, slid forward until they both touched the pavement, clung onto the doorframe with his free hand, and levered himself upright. The world wheeled around a little bit, but then it stayed still. So-fine. Yeah. Just like he’d said.
Other than the fact that the anxiety was rising like a frigid fucking tide, and the brush of his shirt collar against his neck felt like fingers closing around his throat, and the patter of his heartbeat was so erratic it made his breathing erratic-on top of strangled-and-
His ankles went super-weird and fucked-up and uncoordinated all at once, and they tangled with each other as he tried to take a step, and his whole balance flung sideways-
And for once-for the first and probably last time in his fucking life-it was nice that Kimblee had cobra reflexes, and his striking instincts always speared the target.
The target in this case was Ed’s elbow, and the end result was that the whole experience probably worsened the whiplash, but it avoided the addition of roadrash on his face, because Kimblee caught him right before he fell.
The annoyed face was back-snide; that was the word. The rotten fucking bastard lovechild of anger and sheer condescension.
Kimblee righted Ed-and brushed at his sleeve, which made his fucking skin crawl more than ever. “Would it kill you to accept assistance once in a while?”
Ed set his jaw and closed his eyes while the lamps over the parking spaces wavered. Kimblee’s fucking fingers clenching around his arm felt like a branding iron-like a bear trap. “I dunno. Why take the chance?”
Kimblee’s grip on him didn’t loosen, and his heart didn’t slow, but the sloshing feeling in his stomach like he was on the deck of a freaking ship sort of went away, and he risked cracking his eyes open again.
It was an uncharacteristically not-assholish move: Kimblee had actually parked relatively close to the doors to the clinic.
But they still looked like they were a million fucking miles away.
“I don’t think this is the time to try to be funny,” Kimblee said, and that one crossed from snide right over into snippy.
“I don’t think that this is the time,” Ed said, “to fucking argue with the guy who’s bleeding.”
Kimblee stared at him.
It occurred to Ed-suddenly, and maybe more than a little bit belated-that Kimblee had never really gotten a taste of what a little shit Ed could be. Ed had been so fucking scared back then-so fucking terrified that he’d die unloved and unwanted and utterly alone if he let anybody see the snarky, crabby, weird-ass nerd kid he really was. He’d been more or less honest with Greg, and that had fucked him over; with Kimblee, he’d dwindled into a meek little fucking shadow of himself in his heedless desperation to please.
Good fucking riddance.
Kimblee shut up, but he didn’t let go. Shittily enough, Ed wasn’t sure he could make it to the lobby without the support-frankly, he didn’t especially like his odds for the next five steps without that fucker’s arm to lean on.
Jesus fucking Christ; he still couldn’t believe this was happening, and he wanted nothing in the world more than for it to be over.
“Slow down,” Kimblee said as Ed tried to speed up this part of the program by lengthening his stride. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Well, golly fucking gee,” Ed said. “We can’t have that, can we?”
“As an act of charity,” Kimblee said, in a voice like a hacked-off wire-jagged, twisting, spitting sparks; “I’m going to chalk the foul mood and your incredible rudeness up to the head injury.”
Ed’s guts-
-collapsed in on themselves, like a burning house; like the whole fucking structure was giving way.
All of the trepidation and the frantic bids for attention that had used to consume his interactions with this man had festered over time into a searing spear of anger, but if there was one thing that could pry the weapon right out of his hand-
The first and truest and most important goal of his entire existence had been to cut the selfishness out of himself once and for all.
He was acting like a spoiled fucking kid.
Yeah, it was Kimblee’s fault. Yeah, Kimblee was a piece of shit. But if he was genuinely trying to help here-whether or not he’d changed profoundly in the intervening years; whether or not he’d somehow turned over enough new leaves to shed the worst of what he was before-if he was offering a hand in kindness, and Ed was snapping at it like an untrained fucking animal-
He was better than that. Wasn’t he? Mom had raised him better. He had to be.
He drew in a slow deep breath and let it out as gently as he could with his ribcage still rattling like this.
“Sorry,” he said.
He could feel Kimblee watching him, but he didn’t want to look. Besides, if he took his eyes off that distant pair of automatic doors, they might just disappear.
“I suppose it’s understandable,” Kimblee said.
Ed took another, deeper breath. Was it the oxygen deprivation that was making him so fucking dizzy, or the sudden influx of it now that he was breathing better? Probably it was just the regular old blood loss; probably it was the blunt force trauma and the likely concussion; probably…
Probably they were going to get there someday if they just kept walking, right?
Fuck.
His feet felt like anvils hung from the ankles; he couldn’t believe he hadn’t tripped again by now. One step, one fucking weight swung at a time-eventually they’d hit the curb and then the mat and then the doors and then the tile; that was just physics-
He kept getting confused trying to figure out whether the vertigo eased off or increased when he kept his head up; was looking at the ancient-gum-spattered pavement worse? He couldn’t really clock the speed of the pounding of his pulse because the noise of it was distractingly loud.
“I mean it,” he said, and his whole battered body thrummed with it-emotional muscle memory; how the fuck about that? He needed Kimblee to listen, to take him seriously, to believe him-he needed it. The urgency in the clench of his chest surprised him, and then it sickened him, because he’d thought… He’d tried so hard to get past it; worked so hard to change; resolved so firmly not to grovel for approval ever again-
“Hm,” Kimblee said.
He knew it was stupid. That was the worst part; he knew-
And it still struck him like a backhand across the cheekbone.
Maybe it was the dismissal of it-maybe that was the critical part of how Kimblee had always strung Ed along like a fucking pull toy. Maybe it was just the fact that Ed had been ignored and underestimated and shut down and pushed away so many fucking times in his life that an offer of attention that faded to disinterest had cut him to the bone faster than any outright cruelty ever could.
People who just talked shit were simple. But the people who fed you sweet-tasting poison real slow-
Those were the ones that merited your fear.
His heavy fucking feet carried him over the chipped red paint on the curb-just barely-and the automatic doors shuddered open in front of them like the parting of the Red fucking Sea. Kimblee was still performing a deft maneuver that somehow combined holding Ed up by one arm and basically dragging him by his sleeve.
Finally stumbling up to the front desk was like reaching the finish line in some ungodly sort of three-legged race. Well-four-legged, and one-souled, so that sort of made up for it, right?
“Good evening,” the woman at the desk said, which was sort of hilarious. She didn’t even blink at the fact that Ed probably looked like something out of a second-rate zombie movie-staggering around with his hand covered in blood, likely paler than death itself under the lousy fluorescent lights. “Stitches, I take it.” She pulled out a form and started checking boxes. “Anything else?”
Ed kind of wanted to say You guys have a litmus test for heartbreak?, but Kimblee was still fucking holding onto his arm, and it was taking most of his willpower to balance staying conscious and not just shuddering until his bones dropped out of his skin.
“Not really,” he said.
She half-nodded. “Do you have an ID and your insurance card?”
“Yeah,” he said automatically, and then he experienced a glorious moment of frozen panic as he wondered whether he did. Did he have his wallet? What about his fucking phone? He’d been too paranoid to take it out in front of Kimblee in case-something; in case some kind of information was visible; in case it sold him out for a liar; in case there was a text from Roy, and he just finally fucking shattered, or the bastard saw it and turned it into a weapon right off the bat-
He swallowed, swallowed again, took a shaky breath, and shoved his non-bloody hand into the pocket of his slacks. Wrangling his wallet out was way more of a fucking project than it should’ve been, but eventually he managed to fish it free and smack it down on the countertop. By the time he started fumbling in the stack of cards he’d shoved into the little plastic pocket in the middle, Kimblee was-
Moving-
Around him-
And then reaching for it, and Ed’s adrenaline spiked like a motherfucking rocket, and he snatched it back.
“Edward,” Kimblee said, and then warm fingertips caught his chin, and that same old talented fucking hand was cradle-grasping his jaw, and-
And the worst part was, there was a second where he-
Liked it. Where the thrill felt good.
His stomach twisted up so violently that he choked on his next breath, and the one after that brought an edge of bile up to the back of his throat, and all of it made it impossible to fucking speak-
“You must be concussed after all,” Kimblee was saying, looking into one of his eyes and then the other. “Relax. Let me.”
And Ed didn’t fucking want to ‘let him’; Ed didn’t fucking want to let him do anything; because one look at Ed’s driver’s license would give him Roy’s address.
Oh, God, he had to change-
All of his fucking mail was still heading for Roy’s doorstep; he’d agonized for a week about whether to do it at the start, but Al had been giving up the lease on the old place, and a P.O. box had been way out of his budget, and the university mail service lost shit all the time-
Kimblee caught up his fucking wallet and started rifling through the cards.
Ed’s heart stuck; his breath stuck; both of them were jammed in his throat and fighting for the space; he couldn’t move, and his head kept spinning like a carousel, and the lights made him dizzy, and the music was too loud-
“Here we are,” Kimblee said, setting Ed’s driver’s license crisply down on the counter; he followed it with the shittily-laminated insurance card that Ed had finally punched out of the little frame just last week-he’d waved it around, Hey, guess I’m official now, clearly they spare no fucking expense, so do you think they’ll cover burning off my eyebrows?, and Roy had laughed and almost spilled his tea and begged Ed to protect his eyebrows, because they were “positively exquisite,” whatever the fuck that meant in eyebrow terms, and-
“Thank you,” the lady said, and she picked them both up and fanned them out and then started typing things into her computer, and Ed dragged a little bit of air in through the tiny portion of his esophagus that had remained accessible. He couldn’t tell if Kimblee had done more than just glance at the front of either of them, but a glance would be enough for that fucking asshole; a glance would tell him everything, and he’d remember.
Ed watched the woman’s eyes flick back and forth between the cards and the computer screen, and then he watched her arm shift-
And reached out as she extended the cards again, before Kimblee could fucking move his hand.
“Thanks,” Ed said, grabbing his wallet up off of the counter, stuffing them back into the slot, and shoving it into his pocket. She might have acknowledged it, but his head was just-buzzing, and it was like there was an earthquake in the core of him, and the bedrock of his bones was splitting with the strain.
He could feel Kimblee’s fucking presence like the heat of a flame getting closer and closer and closer to his bare skin.
The lady was scribbling on his form. “Go ahead and take a seat,” she said without looking up. “We’ll call you when someone’s available.”
Funny how the Urgent in Urgent Care actually meant Not urgent at all, but Ed figured beggars couldn’t fucking quibble with the semantics of their handouts.
“Thanks,” he said again, since that was the societally acceptable thing to do, and apparently even a head wound couldn’t knock it out of him.
The next societally acceptable maneuver was not hissing aloud and whirling on Kimblee and putting a set of knuckles through his fucking teeth when he spread one long-fingered hand on Ed’s far shoulder, arm draping lightly against Ed’s back.
That one was a lot fucking harder.
There was clearly a full-on French Revolution, down-with-the-king, guillotine-everyone revolt going on amongst Ed’s internal organs, because they were all over the place. Maybe they’d finally gotten sick of their mediocre care and started shuffling themselves around to see if he’d treat them better if his lungs shriveled up and pressed themselves against the front of his ribcage; and his stomach climbed up and wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed, and the pair of them started banging around like a pair of fucking hooligans; and presumably there was a raucous house party going on in the general area of his liver and his kidneys and his pancreas and shit, because everything just felt wrong.
“Stop touching me,” he said, in the calmest, quietest fucking voice he could choke out.
He could hear the slow-snaking curve of the smile. “No.”
A breath shuddered into him, and then back out. His nerves weren’t exactly trustworthy right now, sparking and shimmering at fucking random like they were, but he was pretty sure the gash on his head had stopped actively bleeding. He lowered his hand and curled it into a fist. They were getting close to the line of pale plastic chairs, so that he could wait in extra agony for this place to fix the agonies he’d brought in.
There was nobody here to hear him. No fucking witnesses but the receptionist; nobody to take his fucking side.
He swallowed. “Please stop t-”
“How’s this?” Kimblee asked, arm slithering against the back of his neck; both hands settled on his shoulders, and then one drew down to his elbow, and together they guided him down into one of the chairs-pushing, but not too hard.
Ed was so fucking tense it jarred his spine enough to make his eyes water all the fucking same.
“I should be going,” Kimblee said, gazing down at him with unfuckingmistakable satisfaction.
And Ed-
Didn’t know how to fight it anymore; didn’t know what ground was stable enough to make a stand on; and, if the fucker was finally leaving of his own volition, couldn’t find the strength to care.
“Your car gonna be okay?” he asked.
Kimblee shrugged.
“My car’s in the shop,” he said, gesturing out towards the parking lot. “That’s a rental.”
Ed’s brain whirred. The processing circuits of it churned. Did that mean-could that mean-?
Had Kimblee fucking planned this down to the intimate details from the very start?
“Oh,” Ed’s voice said stupidly to fill the silence. “Okay.”
“Take care of yourself,” Kimblee said.
That would not fucking compute, but scrunching up his forehead to try to decipher it made Ed’s head ache worse.
Kimblee leaned down, reached forward, and dragged the pad of his thumb through the damp smear of blood on Ed’s cheek. He stood, smirked, and licked off the smudge.
“Waste not, want not,” he said.
Ed’s mind went blank-went void; went empty, searing, roaring white.
“What?” he croaked.
Kimblee grinned like a fucking jackal.
Then he turned on his heel and sauntered out the doors, waving over one shoulder.
Ed sunk into the chair and stared at the ceiling and tried very, very fucking hard to remember how to breathe.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed (with Al/Win)
Rating: R
Word Count: 56,700 (12,700 in this chapter)
Warnings: notes from the last fic still apply :(
Summary: This isn't the first time Ed's seen the far side of a parabola, and it won't be the last.
Author's Note: Someday LJ will abolish post limits, but I will probably be all DW, all the time by then. :'(
LOUD AND CLEAR
PART 5: THE PATH TO THE PRECIPICE
CHAPTER 1, PART II
One by one he pried his fingers loose, and then he clenched both hands around the steering wheel-ten and two-and gently eased his foot onto the brake as he approached another of the sixteen billion stop signs in this horrible little cottage-crammed maze.
White light flared in his rearview-
And the whole world collapsed into a deafening metal crash-scream; the force of the impact flung him forward, and his forehead slammed into the top of his steering wheel.
Gold and black and white-edged stars smeared and flitted and flickered across his vision, and something hot draggled downward into his eyebrow and started to sting in his eye, and some part of him knew he should drag in a deep breath before the shock set i-
A wall of off-white exploded out of the center of the steering column and hurled him back against the seat-it felt like he’d been fucking slapped everywhere at once, like belly-flopping from fifty-feet up; burnt-numb all over-
The airbag deflated like a fucking parachute when the wind died and fell to hanging there tragically from the steering wheel.
He couldn’t-
breathecouldn’tbreathe-
He swallowed hard, then harder, and glanced into his rearview; the driver of the other car was silhouetted relatively clearly in their seat, and it looked like they were moving-so they must’ve been okay-
What the fuck were you supposed to do? Pull out of the fucking way, right? Other people were going to need to use this street whether or not he was fucking reeling from life’s latest one-two punch, more literally even than fucking usual.
He gritted his teeth and sucked air in through them, trying to force it down his throat; his head kept fucking teetering-like being drunk, only less fun in every possible fucking way, obviously, so really not like being drunk at all, and…
For a long second, the contours of the street ahead of him swam before his eyes, tracing hazy half-circle trajectories around the places that they should have been. He coaxed another breath into his chest, blinked hard, and looked intently at the road.
Gingerly, he pushed his foot at the gas and drew his poor shuddering Civic off to the side of the street, where he nudged it up against the curb and stopped. He pulled the parking brake and killed the engine, and…
Fucking… license and registration and insurance and… but first he had to make sure the other fucking asshole was okay-
The driver’s side door opened fine, so apparently his car hadn’t taken enough of a beating for the metal to bend this far up. He wasn’t sure if that qualified as a good thing or not in this particular case, and he was too preoccupied with planting both feet on the pavement as carefully as he could to make that call-he wasn’t sure they were going to take his weight; his vision kept tilting, and the wet heat sliding down his cheek was definitely blood running from his fucking forehead.
Too many fucking things happening at once; too much to process; too much to do-
He tugged his left sleeve down and lifted his hand up and pressed the cloth against the part of his forehead that was starting to throb and sting and make various other indications that it was almost certainly the source of the blood dribbling into his eye. Needed to put pressure on it or some shit. Once he made sure the other person wasn’t any worse off, he could think about more specific avenues of wound-management, like trying to close the fucking thing; had he thrown scotch tape into his laptop bag in the lab, or was that a vivid hallucination compounded by the head trauma and the bewilderment and…?
He braced his right arm against the frame of his Civic, walking himself along like it was a banister on a steep staircase or some shit. The fucking Lexus had done a cute sort of accordion number right towards the front, and one of the headlights had gotten smashed right the fuck out, but there wasn’t any obvious noxious black smoke pouring up from either vehicle’s engine, and the driver’s side door was opening, so hopefully the dumbass who’d hit him couldn’t have gotten hurt too badly, and…
“Hey,” he called, sounding half-hopeful and half-strangled to his own ears, as one long leg unfolded itself out of the car, followed by another. No visible injuries yet-that was good. “You okay?”
Fluidly, the driver ducked out of the car and stood.
It was-
Kimblee.
It was fucking Kimblee; fucking Kimblee had fucking rear-ended him at a stop sign out of fucking nowhere two blocks from Al’s new place-
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. This was a fucking-dream. Nightmare. The light was tricking him; it was some other graceful fucking sleazebag with long black hair swept back except the two sections framing his angular face; it was some other fucking monster of a man with eyes so fucking blue they still looked pale even in the dark-
“Well,” the voice he’d been trying for years now to scrub out from his fucking psyche said, and the slow curl of amusement in the words twisted up the corner of that smart fucking mouth. “Good evening, Edward. It’s been a while.”
Ed listened to the dry rasp of the breath sliding in and out of him as he stood there fucking rooted to the spot. He felt like a statue, like a robot, like a shell, like a-
Corpse.
Like a dead man on his fucking feet, heart stopped, muscles frozen, blood vessels severed up and down.
“You hit me,” he said, stupidly, and it came out thick and slow and tremulous.
“You’re bleeding,” Kimblee said, gesturing smoothly. “That’s going to need stitches.”
“It’s fine,” Ed managed through his numb fucking lips.
“It’s not,” Kimblee said. “Let me s-”
He stepped forward, and Ed flinched away from him hard and fast, and-
His shoulder had been pulsing with a series of fucking warning shots that he’d filed away as secondary to the head wound, but recoiling against his Civic set it on fire.
“Come on,” Kimblee said, briskly now, like he was talking to a fucking kid; and he was getting closer and closer, but Ed couldn’t-there wasn’t anywhere to run-
The cold was so fucking deep-so fucking deep in his blood and his guts and his bones that everything had frosted over; his veins were ice, and his stomach was a fucking snowbank; he couldn’t fight it-
“You need to go to the E.R.,” Kimblee said, and his hand settled on Ed’s shoulder, and the fucking horror of it sliced through him even colder than the fucking rest-
Shit, fuck-his heart was starting to jitter around like a fucking pinball, ricocheting through his ribcage, rippling underneath his skin-
“D-don’t-” he choked out.
“Don’t be childish,” Kimblee said, and for a long second the flare of rage choked Ed worse than the thundering of his heart.
He hadn’t come this fucking far to be talked to like-
Fuck it, and fuck the quickening rasp of his own breath; he forced his knees to raise him and pushed past Kimblee to get to the driver’s side of his car-dropped in, regretted that when the black swirled in close and only barely let him go, and took his keys out of the ignition. He pulled himself upright again using the door for leverage, then slammed it and locked it and shoved the keys into his pocket again. If Kimblee was going to drag him off somewhere and murder him, he didn’t want his laptop and his NIH grant app ending up at the bottom of whatever fucking ditch his body landed in.
Swiping the latest swell of blood out of his eye was apparently too abrupt a movement for his tormented fucking brain, since he wavered again-hard this time, suffused by that dangerous floaty lightness that could tip over into unconsciousness before you had a chance to blink.
“You’re probably concussed,” Kimblee said, and the long, pale fingers reaching out to him from the fucking dark made Ed’s stomach tighten, and that-
Made all of it that much fucking worse-made his heart pound harder, swifter, up in the back of his throat one second and the pit of his guts the next; made the shaking run backwards up from his fingertips to his forearms to his shoulders to his fucking jaw-
He flattened his right palm against the closest car window and held the other over his eyes-even the dim fucking orange streetlamps were too fucking much; Kimblee’s unholy fucking too-bright goddamn headlights were still on-well, the one that hadn’t smashed was-well-
This was not a coincidence.
He didn’t know how long it had been coming-didn’t know when Kimblee had fucking turned him up again, but it wouldn’t have been hard to find him. It had never been hard, and now he had half a dozen more public fucking profiles on the university website; he had a homepage for his lab with a stupid staged photo of him trying to look smart and professional and together and shit-
He pressed the side of his head in against the cold glass of the window and tried to focus-tried to breathe; tried to make his body slow down and behave and cooperate and work fucking with him for once.
What the fuck was he going to do? He couldn’t run like this-he wouldn’t make it five fucking steps before he went down hard and maybe didn’t ever get up. And even if he’d had the balance, or the strength, he couldn’t beat the shit out of Kimblee and be done with it; it was still assault and fucking battery when they deserved it, if they hadn’t unequivocally threatened you or whatever it was-like retaliating against a schoolyard bully and landing your own ass in suspension. Kimblee knew his way around the fucking law, in and out of the corners, through the loopholes. Ed couldn’t make any fucking move that might be construed as antagonistic.
Fancy fucking that-his fucking hands were tied.
Breathe. He had to breathe. Everything else would fucking come later; he had to-
Kimblee couldn’t know where Al lived-could he? Not yet. Not unless he’d been tailing Ed close for a long time, and Ed was paranoid enough to have noticed that, right?
Jesus fucking Christ, he couldn’t, could he-?
Well-if he didn’t-bless this fucking cesspit of a suburb and its billion identical cookie-cutter houses; bless the stupid unmarked mailboxes and the endless cul-de-sacs. The fucker could try a hundred houses at random and never get anywhere near Al and Win and their stupid kitten.
Right?
Kimblee’s fingers curled into Ed’s sleeve-just tight enough that he could yank himself loose if he really worked at it; just tight enough that he’d have to go overboard and look fucking dramatic if he wanted to shake off the unwelcome touch.
“Come on, Edward,” Kimblee said. “My car’s still running. I’ll take you to the emergency room.”
Ed couldn’t believe the admittedly pretty paltry contents of his stomach were still hanging out in his GI tract instead of hurling themselves down onto the pavement. “N-no, it’s fine, I’ll-”
“Ambulances are expensive,” Kimblee said, and his voice kept getting softer but-colder. “Just get in the car. It’ll be fine.”
Ed was going to die.
This fucker was going to fucking murder him while he was staggering around holding his hand up to his bleeding forehead, and nobody was ever going to find his decimated remains.
Pulling on his sleeve to lead him, Kimblee drew him over around the hood of the stupid fucking Lexus, opened the passenger door, and released his arm-like there was any fucking choice when Ed could barely stand; like there was anywhere to go with Kimblee standing there, blocking his egress, raising an eyebrow like Ed’s hesitation was some kind of histrionic little game.
He got into the car.
This was it. Wasn’t it? Fucker was going to cut him up into a thousand pieces and sprinkle them across a field of Venus flytraps, and Al would cry and cry and-
Kimblee settled in the driver’s seat, slammed his door, and had the grace not to put on the fucking child locks for good measure. Maybe if they started heading for the city dump, Ed could just jump out on the highway and hit the shoulder of the road at a good James Bond roll and crawl off before Kimblee could turn around; maybe he’d find a farmhouse with some charitable old guy who’d drive him back to safety in a tractor, and-
“I can text you pictures of my insurance information later,” Kimblee said.
The real shitty thing was that every time Ed’s heart started banging harder, his head spun faster; and then knowing that he was getting progressively unsteadier made the panic worse, and… Vicious fucking cycle shit.
Kimblee was trying to fucking trap him into responding positively on instinct-which would require him to admit that he’d blocked the shitbag’s number in the first place, or to commit to unblocking it in a damn hurry, or to give up his fucking email address as a compromise.
Fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck Kimblee for thinking he was still too stupid to see it.
“My phone’s been having problems with texts lately,” Ed said, and it was funny how lies didn’t even stick in your teeth when you spat them out the right way. He trained his eyes on the dashboard as the roads changed; the flashes of ambient lights slipping by his window made the vertigo way worse. “I could just-t-take a picture right now. ’S’it in the glove?”
He managed to keep his voice flat and casual except for the little tremor, but his blood was roiling, and the beat of it in his brain felt like the pull of a tide-every wave dragged his whole body back and forth, and if he didn’t fucking drown in the dark edges, it’d be a fucking miracle-
“It might be at home,” Kimblee said.
“I’ll call,” Ed said. “What’s the company?”
He was not a fucking kid.
He was not a fucking kid anymore, and he could handle himself, and he could handle this slimy fucking bastard, and he didn’t have to freak the fuck out. He could do this. He could take it.
He pressed his eyes shut tight and held his closed fist to his forehead and focused intently on breathing slow.
“Oddly enough,” Kimblee said, and there was the singsong voice Ed heard sometimes in the echoes of his fucking nightmares, “I honestly can’t recall. I’ll let you know.”
Funny, too, how much an offer could sound like a fucking threat.
“Great,” Ed said in the most acidically sardonic tone he could muster while he was bleeding out and losing little pieces of his mind. His thoughts just kept-fracturing, splintering; and ideas slipped loose like fragments of an iceberg and drifted off and melted clean away.
One stuck around, bobbing in the frigid current near enough to grasp:
Where the fuck were they going?
He winched one eye open and tried to make it focus on the world outside the windshield-they were getting onto the fucking highway, which wasn’t… which…
He dragged his brain back out into the agonizing real world that was currently trying to stab it from every fucking side.
“Take Meridian,” he said. “Sacred Heart has an urgent care clinic.”
Kimblee glanced over at him, and Ed could feel it-the hostility, radiating out for one long damn second; the resentment that Ed had trampled on whatever diabolical fucking plan he’d been unfurling. Probably he’d been plotting to drive Ed to an E.R. in Canada or some shit. Well, I didn’t specify which emergency room-
It was only that one fucking second, though, and then Kimblee had himself under control again, and even the slightest damn trace of readable emotion disappeared.
“Ah, yes,” Kimblee said, in a calm voice, like it wasn’t the most meaningless fucking response in the English language.
Ed leaned back against the seat-fine fucking leather, as always-and concentrated on trying to stem the slow trickle of blood from his stupid face. He had no idea now how much he’d lost; obviously it didn’t seem like a whole pint, and you could hand that out for free and be fine, but estimating volume was hard enough when it wasn’t flowing very slowly from your own damn injuries.
He wished he’d brought his fucking laptop after all, even at the risk of bleeding on it-it would’ve given him something to cling to instead of sitting here with his left hand hand pressed over the gash on his head, elbow angled awkwardly as fuck to avoid grazing Kimblee’s arm, and his right curled in as tight to his body as he could get it. And who knew how fucking long it’d take them to find someone to stitch him up? Maybe he could’ve gotten some grant work done. Maybe he could’ve played Tetris. Maybe he could’ve IMed Al for fucking help while Kimblee wasn’t looking; oh, God, he was in the middle of the fucking spider-web, splayed out and fucking helpless, just fucking waiting for the fangs-
Kimblee took the exit for Meridian.
Ed almost fucking collapsed from the sheer relief, because the bastard hadn’t flicked his fucking blinker, so there wasn’t any warning, which was utterly his fucking style-
But he couldn’t show any of his cards. Not to Kimblee. He had to be careful; he had to be so careful; maybe if he was-maybe if he played the game; maybe if he played it fucking well enough-
Just sharing air with this fucking-creature-made him so nervous it felt like there were tiny knives and needles dancing everywhere beneath his skin.
“How have you been?” Kimblee asked.
And what the fuck was Ed supposed to say to that? “Great, for a while; and then good; and then struggling but okay; and then last night I threw it all the fuck away because I’m a fucking idiot, but I guess you knew that”?
You were supposed to get revenge on your shitty exes by having a better life than them, weren’t you?
Ed could’ve sworn Winry had once said something like that.
Then again, Winry had once said a hell of a lot of things, many of which you wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company, let alone follow as advice.
“Fine,” Ed said, as tonelessly as he could when his voice wanted to tremble so badly that he had to swallow twice to steady it. That was good, though-“fine” was good; “fine” the most pointedly noncommittal answer humanly possible, which was better than fucking Kimblee deserved.
Were the streets in this part of town always this damn dark, or did city lighting just spontaneously flicker out when Kimblee’s black hole presence moved into the vicinity?
The way Ed’s stupid heart kept racing made him feel like a prey animal-and he was, wasn’t he? Quick, shallow breath and darting eyes and everything so tense he’d long since started shaking. None of this was fucking helping with the ongoing trickle of blood from his fucking head. How much had it been by now? They were probably going to ask him; what if he guesstimated wrong, and they underestimated the seriousness of it, and he passed out on the fucking germ-laden linoleum, then-
He had to fucking breathe.
The other question-maybe the worse one-
How long was Kimblee going to stick around?
Was he just going to toss Ed out in the fucking parking lot, or was he going to hover and linger and look over Ed’s shoulder and watch with that terrible fucking gleam in his fucking eyes while some doctor stuck a needle through Ed’s skin-?
What if he was faking Ed out anyway, and they weren’t going to urgent care at all? What if they were going directly to some shadowy fucking abandoned warehouse where nobody would hear him s-
“I suppose it’s difficult to believe,” Kimblee said, in that same soft, delicate, pseudo-surprised voice he’d always whipped out in the beginning, “but I’ve missed you.”
He was full of shit, and they both knew it.
Maybe he’d missed the game. Maybe he’d missed Ed’s particular brand of panic-the special way his eyes widened when the desperation to please metamorphosed into something more like fear. Maybe he missed having an easy target. Maybe he missed how earnestly his little puppet had played along.
No way-no way-had he missed Ed as a human being.
Kimblee didn’t register that other people were human beings. Other people were a catalogue of possibilities for pain and weaknesses, no more, no less.
“You’re right,” Ed said, and maybe the words fucking wavered on the way out, but he said them. “I don’t believe you.”
Silence for a second, and Ed’s heart slammed once, twice, three times; and he fixed his gaze on the street sign dangling by the stoplight that had just turned red. Kimblee stopped the car and tapped one fingertip against the steering wheel.
“Ah,” Kimblee said, so lightly that the sound barely made it across the center console to Ed’s ringing ears. “That’s a shame.”
How did he do that? How did he drop those icy fucking boulders of pure guilt directly into the pit of Ed’s stomach even after all this fucking time-after so much hard-won healing?
Ed had been so damn sure he’d gotten past it. He’d been so damn sure it was over, and now-
All of the same fucking torment-tiny little tendrils of ivy growing everywhere in fast-motion, threading through his ribcage, cinching in around his lungs, climbing up his throat-
And the unrelenting urgency of his fucking heartbeat trying to drive him over the precipice into panic.
The red disc overheard winked out, and the green one lit.
“Things change,” Kimblee said, drawing forward, and then they were off again, gliding through the unsettlingly empty fucking streets.
Things did. Sometimes people did, too.
But not the kind of things that made a person torture someone else and like it.
Not the kind of things that blackened you on the inside like that; not the kind of things that made your enjoyment of other people’s hurt and confusion-your enjoyment of deliberately creating their hurt and confusion-more important to you than any other aspect of their life.
People like that were lost forever. They didn’t turn over a new leaf and wind up with one that was clean and compassionate; they didn’t wake up one morning and understand the error of their fucking ways. They didn’t just up and erase the years and years of practiced destruction.
That didn’t happen.
And people like that didn’t deserve so much as the benefit of the fucking doubt.
Right?
“Yeah,” Ed said. If he sounded aloof-disinterested, unaffected, anything but terrified and quaking-maybe Kimblee would lose the goddamn scent. “I guess so.”
How much fucking further could it be to Sacred Heart, anyway? A reckless part of Ed wanted to turn on the radio-drown out the prickly, calculated conversation with some shitty pop music; distract Kimblee’s formidable attention from every goddamn detail of his posture and his movements and his expressions and his speech. Because he knew-he knew Kimblee was damn smart in too many ways, but that was the scariest one. Kimblee knew people; he read people-clinically, like a surgeon, so that he could pick them apart. Not to help. Not to understand. To put the knife in deeper. To get the blood running hot all over his hands.
That was the thrill for him, wasn’t it? The chase, and his teeth sinking into the throat of something helpless. The instant that his subject recognized that its life, its universe, its safety was in his grasp, and at his mercy.
A goal that simple should’ve made him predictable, but it didn’t, because there were a thousand routes towards it. There were a thousand ways to make somebody bleed.
And Ed was thin right now-paper-thin and fragile with it; worn almost fucking through. Raw. Shaken.
Vulnerable.
Kimblee would smell it, and know Ed knew he did. And Ed had always fucking sucked at chess.
“You do have insurance, don’t you?” Kimblee asked.
“Yeah,” Ed said. His heart wasn’t even fucking beating anymore: just vibrating, shuddering around inside his stupid chest, hurling itself at the walls, faster and faster by the fucking second; and it was a creeping thing sometimes-the panic was. Sometimes it crawled instead of leaping, but you couldn’t stop it even if you watched the spread of shadows from the very fucking start. “Allstate.”
“Not for the car,” Kimblee said, and the hint of the condescending smile in his voice felt like fucking chastisement, and that shouldn’t have stung, but- “Health insurance. Are you still insured by the school?”
There was fucking magic in it-in the way he talked. One of the highest-rated universities in the world was Ed’s school; with just the words he picked, he could minimize Ed’s fucking experiences and emotions in the time it took to ask what sounded like an ordinary question. That was incredible, wasn’t it?
Fucking incredible, too, how Ed hadn’t been able to see any of it from the inside, but now the silhouette was just so fucking crisp against the wall.
“Yeah,” he said. “They hired me on.” He waited, gazing out the windshield; staring at the side of the fucker’s face to monitor reactions would’ve made it too obvious that he was hoping for one. “As a professor.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have volunteered it, but it wasn’t like a single Google search wouldn’t have sold him out anyway.
“Did they,” Kimblee said, sounding-what? Vaguely surprised? Distantly fucking pleased? “How nice. Congratulations.”
Ed’s heart pounded, and his head pounded, and it occurred to him that he would have given up a couple of fingers not to be here right now. “Thanks.”
And there-
Blessed fucking neon, pun entirely subsidiary to the import of the words Sacred Heart blaring-in crappy, 80s-worthy colors-out of the muddled night ahead. There was even a helpful arrow labeled Urgent Care so that Kimblee couldn’t pull any shit… unless, of course, he’d been planning all along to drive around the back of the building, cut Ed’s throat, mutilate his corpse, and toss it into a biohazard bin, in which case Ed was fucked either way, so it didn’t really matter, did it?
Maybe Ed could spare a hand from stopping the blood from his forehead long enough to reach for his seatbelt release buckle if it came to that.
The thought was like an ice pick somebody kept stabbing into his skull; he couldn’t stop his breath from hitching, stuttering, going jagged at the edges as it warped his fucking brain-
He’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to drive into a dark part of the parking lot and get out a knife and cut me open, and I’m going to get to watch my guts pour out all over this nice fucking leather, fifty feet from the fucking hospital, and he’s going to wait as long as he can before he puts me out of my fucking misery. He’s going to kill me; he’s going to kill me; he’s-
“You can just drop me off,” he forced out around the bubble of fucking terror swelling in his throat.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kimblee said.
He pulled neatly into an empty parking spot twenty steps from the backlit glass doors.
“Don’t move,” he said.
He killed the engine, got out, and strode swiftly around the jacked-up hood of the car-but of course Ed wasn’t fucking listening; he fought his way out of the seatbelt and had his door halfway open by the time Kimblee grabbed the edge of it. That same sour-annoyed expression that Ed remembered from the time before flitted across his face, but he wiped it away as he drew the door further open and held out a hand.
“I’m fine,” Ed said, which-
Was kind of hilarious, actually, in a stupid sort of way.
But the point was that Kimblee could go to hell-which, incidentally, was where he was from-because Ed would pass out and break his face on the asphalt before he took that fucker’s hand.
He stuck one foot out of the car, followed it with the other, slid forward until they both touched the pavement, clung onto the doorframe with his free hand, and levered himself upright. The world wheeled around a little bit, but then it stayed still. So-fine. Yeah. Just like he’d said.
Other than the fact that the anxiety was rising like a frigid fucking tide, and the brush of his shirt collar against his neck felt like fingers closing around his throat, and the patter of his heartbeat was so erratic it made his breathing erratic-on top of strangled-and-
His ankles went super-weird and fucked-up and uncoordinated all at once, and they tangled with each other as he tried to take a step, and his whole balance flung sideways-
And for once-for the first and probably last time in his fucking life-it was nice that Kimblee had cobra reflexes, and his striking instincts always speared the target.
The target in this case was Ed’s elbow, and the end result was that the whole experience probably worsened the whiplash, but it avoided the addition of roadrash on his face, because Kimblee caught him right before he fell.
The annoyed face was back-snide; that was the word. The rotten fucking bastard lovechild of anger and sheer condescension.
Kimblee righted Ed-and brushed at his sleeve, which made his fucking skin crawl more than ever. “Would it kill you to accept assistance once in a while?”
Ed set his jaw and closed his eyes while the lamps over the parking spaces wavered. Kimblee’s fucking fingers clenching around his arm felt like a branding iron-like a bear trap. “I dunno. Why take the chance?”
Kimblee’s grip on him didn’t loosen, and his heart didn’t slow, but the sloshing feeling in his stomach like he was on the deck of a freaking ship sort of went away, and he risked cracking his eyes open again.
It was an uncharacteristically not-assholish move: Kimblee had actually parked relatively close to the doors to the clinic.
But they still looked like they were a million fucking miles away.
“I don’t think this is the time to try to be funny,” Kimblee said, and that one crossed from snide right over into snippy.
“I don’t think that this is the time,” Ed said, “to fucking argue with the guy who’s bleeding.”
Kimblee stared at him.
It occurred to Ed-suddenly, and maybe more than a little bit belated-that Kimblee had never really gotten a taste of what a little shit Ed could be. Ed had been so fucking scared back then-so fucking terrified that he’d die unloved and unwanted and utterly alone if he let anybody see the snarky, crabby, weird-ass nerd kid he really was. He’d been more or less honest with Greg, and that had fucked him over; with Kimblee, he’d dwindled into a meek little fucking shadow of himself in his heedless desperation to please.
Good fucking riddance.
Kimblee shut up, but he didn’t let go. Shittily enough, Ed wasn’t sure he could make it to the lobby without the support-frankly, he didn’t especially like his odds for the next five steps without that fucker’s arm to lean on.
Jesus fucking Christ; he still couldn’t believe this was happening, and he wanted nothing in the world more than for it to be over.
“Slow down,” Kimblee said as Ed tried to speed up this part of the program by lengthening his stride. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Well, golly fucking gee,” Ed said. “We can’t have that, can we?”
“As an act of charity,” Kimblee said, in a voice like a hacked-off wire-jagged, twisting, spitting sparks; “I’m going to chalk the foul mood and your incredible rudeness up to the head injury.”
Ed’s guts-
-collapsed in on themselves, like a burning house; like the whole fucking structure was giving way.
All of the trepidation and the frantic bids for attention that had used to consume his interactions with this man had festered over time into a searing spear of anger, but if there was one thing that could pry the weapon right out of his hand-
The first and truest and most important goal of his entire existence had been to cut the selfishness out of himself once and for all.
He was acting like a spoiled fucking kid.
Yeah, it was Kimblee’s fault. Yeah, Kimblee was a piece of shit. But if he was genuinely trying to help here-whether or not he’d changed profoundly in the intervening years; whether or not he’d somehow turned over enough new leaves to shed the worst of what he was before-if he was offering a hand in kindness, and Ed was snapping at it like an untrained fucking animal-
He was better than that. Wasn’t he? Mom had raised him better. He had to be.
He drew in a slow deep breath and let it out as gently as he could with his ribcage still rattling like this.
“Sorry,” he said.
He could feel Kimblee watching him, but he didn’t want to look. Besides, if he took his eyes off that distant pair of automatic doors, they might just disappear.
“I suppose it’s understandable,” Kimblee said.
Ed took another, deeper breath. Was it the oxygen deprivation that was making him so fucking dizzy, or the sudden influx of it now that he was breathing better? Probably it was just the regular old blood loss; probably it was the blunt force trauma and the likely concussion; probably…
Probably they were going to get there someday if they just kept walking, right?
Fuck.
His feet felt like anvils hung from the ankles; he couldn’t believe he hadn’t tripped again by now. One step, one fucking weight swung at a time-eventually they’d hit the curb and then the mat and then the doors and then the tile; that was just physics-
He kept getting confused trying to figure out whether the vertigo eased off or increased when he kept his head up; was looking at the ancient-gum-spattered pavement worse? He couldn’t really clock the speed of the pounding of his pulse because the noise of it was distractingly loud.
“I mean it,” he said, and his whole battered body thrummed with it-emotional muscle memory; how the fuck about that? He needed Kimblee to listen, to take him seriously, to believe him-he needed it. The urgency in the clench of his chest surprised him, and then it sickened him, because he’d thought… He’d tried so hard to get past it; worked so hard to change; resolved so firmly not to grovel for approval ever again-
“Hm,” Kimblee said.
He knew it was stupid. That was the worst part; he knew-
And it still struck him like a backhand across the cheekbone.
Maybe it was the dismissal of it-maybe that was the critical part of how Kimblee had always strung Ed along like a fucking pull toy. Maybe it was just the fact that Ed had been ignored and underestimated and shut down and pushed away so many fucking times in his life that an offer of attention that faded to disinterest had cut him to the bone faster than any outright cruelty ever could.
People who just talked shit were simple. But the people who fed you sweet-tasting poison real slow-
Those were the ones that merited your fear.
His heavy fucking feet carried him over the chipped red paint on the curb-just barely-and the automatic doors shuddered open in front of them like the parting of the Red fucking Sea. Kimblee was still performing a deft maneuver that somehow combined holding Ed up by one arm and basically dragging him by his sleeve.
Finally stumbling up to the front desk was like reaching the finish line in some ungodly sort of three-legged race. Well-four-legged, and one-souled, so that sort of made up for it, right?
“Good evening,” the woman at the desk said, which was sort of hilarious. She didn’t even blink at the fact that Ed probably looked like something out of a second-rate zombie movie-staggering around with his hand covered in blood, likely paler than death itself under the lousy fluorescent lights. “Stitches, I take it.” She pulled out a form and started checking boxes. “Anything else?”
Ed kind of wanted to say You guys have a litmus test for heartbreak?, but Kimblee was still fucking holding onto his arm, and it was taking most of his willpower to balance staying conscious and not just shuddering until his bones dropped out of his skin.
“Not really,” he said.
She half-nodded. “Do you have an ID and your insurance card?”
“Yeah,” he said automatically, and then he experienced a glorious moment of frozen panic as he wondered whether he did. Did he have his wallet? What about his fucking phone? He’d been too paranoid to take it out in front of Kimblee in case-something; in case some kind of information was visible; in case it sold him out for a liar; in case there was a text from Roy, and he just finally fucking shattered, or the bastard saw it and turned it into a weapon right off the bat-
He swallowed, swallowed again, took a shaky breath, and shoved his non-bloody hand into the pocket of his slacks. Wrangling his wallet out was way more of a fucking project than it should’ve been, but eventually he managed to fish it free and smack it down on the countertop. By the time he started fumbling in the stack of cards he’d shoved into the little plastic pocket in the middle, Kimblee was-
Moving-
Around him-
And then reaching for it, and Ed’s adrenaline spiked like a motherfucking rocket, and he snatched it back.
“Edward,” Kimblee said, and then warm fingertips caught his chin, and that same old talented fucking hand was cradle-grasping his jaw, and-
And the worst part was, there was a second where he-
Liked it. Where the thrill felt good.
His stomach twisted up so violently that he choked on his next breath, and the one after that brought an edge of bile up to the back of his throat, and all of it made it impossible to fucking speak-
“You must be concussed after all,” Kimblee was saying, looking into one of his eyes and then the other. “Relax. Let me.”
And Ed didn’t fucking want to ‘let him’; Ed didn’t fucking want to let him do anything; because one look at Ed’s driver’s license would give him Roy’s address.
Oh, God, he had to change-
All of his fucking mail was still heading for Roy’s doorstep; he’d agonized for a week about whether to do it at the start, but Al had been giving up the lease on the old place, and a P.O. box had been way out of his budget, and the university mail service lost shit all the time-
Kimblee caught up his fucking wallet and started rifling through the cards.
Ed’s heart stuck; his breath stuck; both of them were jammed in his throat and fighting for the space; he couldn’t move, and his head kept spinning like a carousel, and the lights made him dizzy, and the music was too loud-
“Here we are,” Kimblee said, setting Ed’s driver’s license crisply down on the counter; he followed it with the shittily-laminated insurance card that Ed had finally punched out of the little frame just last week-he’d waved it around, Hey, guess I’m official now, clearly they spare no fucking expense, so do you think they’ll cover burning off my eyebrows?, and Roy had laughed and almost spilled his tea and begged Ed to protect his eyebrows, because they were “positively exquisite,” whatever the fuck that meant in eyebrow terms, and-
“Thank you,” the lady said, and she picked them both up and fanned them out and then started typing things into her computer, and Ed dragged a little bit of air in through the tiny portion of his esophagus that had remained accessible. He couldn’t tell if Kimblee had done more than just glance at the front of either of them, but a glance would be enough for that fucking asshole; a glance would tell him everything, and he’d remember.
Ed watched the woman’s eyes flick back and forth between the cards and the computer screen, and then he watched her arm shift-
And reached out as she extended the cards again, before Kimblee could fucking move his hand.
“Thanks,” Ed said, grabbing his wallet up off of the counter, stuffing them back into the slot, and shoving it into his pocket. She might have acknowledged it, but his head was just-buzzing, and it was like there was an earthquake in the core of him, and the bedrock of his bones was splitting with the strain.
He could feel Kimblee’s fucking presence like the heat of a flame getting closer and closer and closer to his bare skin.
The lady was scribbling on his form. “Go ahead and take a seat,” she said without looking up. “We’ll call you when someone’s available.”
Funny how the Urgent in Urgent Care actually meant Not urgent at all, but Ed figured beggars couldn’t fucking quibble with the semantics of their handouts.
“Thanks,” he said again, since that was the societally acceptable thing to do, and apparently even a head wound couldn’t knock it out of him.
The next societally acceptable maneuver was not hissing aloud and whirling on Kimblee and putting a set of knuckles through his fucking teeth when he spread one long-fingered hand on Ed’s far shoulder, arm draping lightly against Ed’s back.
That one was a lot fucking harder.
There was clearly a full-on French Revolution, down-with-the-king, guillotine-everyone revolt going on amongst Ed’s internal organs, because they were all over the place. Maybe they’d finally gotten sick of their mediocre care and started shuffling themselves around to see if he’d treat them better if his lungs shriveled up and pressed themselves against the front of his ribcage; and his stomach climbed up and wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed, and the pair of them started banging around like a pair of fucking hooligans; and presumably there was a raucous house party going on in the general area of his liver and his kidneys and his pancreas and shit, because everything just felt wrong.
“Stop touching me,” he said, in the calmest, quietest fucking voice he could choke out.
He could hear the slow-snaking curve of the smile. “No.”
A breath shuddered into him, and then back out. His nerves weren’t exactly trustworthy right now, sparking and shimmering at fucking random like they were, but he was pretty sure the gash on his head had stopped actively bleeding. He lowered his hand and curled it into a fist. They were getting close to the line of pale plastic chairs, so that he could wait in extra agony for this place to fix the agonies he’d brought in.
There was nobody here to hear him. No fucking witnesses but the receptionist; nobody to take his fucking side.
He swallowed. “Please stop t-”
“How’s this?” Kimblee asked, arm slithering against the back of his neck; both hands settled on his shoulders, and then one drew down to his elbow, and together they guided him down into one of the chairs-pushing, but not too hard.
Ed was so fucking tense it jarred his spine enough to make his eyes water all the fucking same.
“I should be going,” Kimblee said, gazing down at him with unfuckingmistakable satisfaction.
And Ed-
Didn’t know how to fight it anymore; didn’t know what ground was stable enough to make a stand on; and, if the fucker was finally leaving of his own volition, couldn’t find the strength to care.
“Your car gonna be okay?” he asked.
Kimblee shrugged.
“My car’s in the shop,” he said, gesturing out towards the parking lot. “That’s a rental.”
Ed’s brain whirred. The processing circuits of it churned. Did that mean-could that mean-?
Had Kimblee fucking planned this down to the intimate details from the very start?
“Oh,” Ed’s voice said stupidly to fill the silence. “Okay.”
“Take care of yourself,” Kimblee said.
That would not fucking compute, but scrunching up his forehead to try to decipher it made Ed’s head ache worse.
Kimblee leaned down, reached forward, and dragged the pad of his thumb through the damp smear of blood on Ed’s cheek. He stood, smirked, and licked off the smudge.
“Waste not, want not,” he said.
Ed’s mind went blank-went void; went empty, searing, roaring white.
“What?” he croaked.
Kimblee grinned like a fucking jackal.
Then he turned on his heel and sauntered out the doors, waving over one shoulder.
Ed sunk into the chair and stared at the ceiling and tried very, very fucking hard to remember how to breathe.