Fic: Dawn (2/4)
Title: Dawn, Part 2 of 4
Pairings/Characters: Edward, Roy
Rating: M/R
Genre: Drama, Angst
Spoilers: None - Alternate ending, TWT?
Word Count: +/- 9100
Cumulative Word Count: +/- 16800
Warnings: Language, violence, gore.
Summary: Ed and Roy are stuck in a war zone. Gratuitous hurt!Roy for the sake of hurt!Roy ensues.
Previous Parts: 1
Notes: PHEW. FINALLY. I just really need to get this bit away from me for now. Sorry for mistakes, but I need to not be thinking about this. XD Special thanks to ketita for the excessive amounts of hand-holding that I need to be at all useful. Much love.
Enjoy!
They continued their halting progress forward, Ed with his shuffling and ineffective crutch-step and Roy with steps so short and shallow he might as well have been standing still. They’d made it approximately three feet when Roy suddenly declared, “Right. This isn’t going to work.” And Ed could tell quite clearly from his face that it wasn’t. The unearthly, almost ethereal pallor, highlighted by unhealthy, pink-tinged cheeks, the garish red swell of his lips against the paleness of his face, the horrible, shallow, rasping breaths that made it sound as if he was choking on sandpaper. And if things weren’t bad enough, they’d only just inched their way to the final resting place of the fallen Drachman soldier.
“Right,” Ed agreed, and his breath made a billowing cloud before him. “This isn’t going to work.” But what was there to do now? All Ed knew was going forward - generally he trusted his old adage about two good legs and getting up to use them… But. But. But what were you meant to do when you didn’t? Roy panted somewhere to his left as Ed’s vision fuzzed black with horrified recognition, and he didn’t know what to do at all.
Ed looked up from his preoccupied state of panic just in time to see Mustang swaying dangerously next to him. “Sit down then, if we’re not going anywhere. I don’t know what we mean to do going back to camp anyway -” Ed leaned as far as he could without falling over, enough that he was able to touch Mustang’s shoulder, cold with wet and trembling. He looked up then, black soulful eyes that Ed wasn’t sure he recognized and said, “They’re all gone? You’re - they’re all dead?”
And of course he was thinking about that, eating himself up about his troops with a bullethole in his gut and lungs full of debilitating fluid. As their commanding officer, everything that happened to the men under him was immediately his fault. Nevermind he had been sick and weak and…and what? Slipping into a coma? Dying? -- when the attack had taken place. Nevermind that there really was nothing he could have rightly done in the face of the overwhelming odds in the state he was in if their own unit couldn’t have organized themselves enough to defend themselves. Mustang took things upon himself just like Ed did. They were similar in a way that Ed had never really realized until now, because they both just loved too damn much.
However, Ed thought as he tightened his hand ever-so-slightly on Mustang’s quivering-taut shoulder, Mustang’s caring had always been on a much grander scale than Ed’s. Mustang looked out for the state of his country, and thus aspired to be the Fuhrer. Mustang looked out for the good of his unit obsessively, spiraling pitifully if so much as one of them fell out of place due to something he believed to be his fault. But Ed had a narrow window of love. He loved so fucking intensely, to such insane degrees, that his pores leaked with it, that he closed his eyes and it was all he saw, that at night he dreamed and woke with nightmares of it, and in the day it pulled at his smile. But he couldn’t handle that sort of intensity on such a grand scale, he couldn’t, he would just explode with it. And it was probably his downfall. Al had blinded him for the longest time, he knew, even though his little brother’s plight had been occasionally interrupted with the short-lived burden of someone else - and now with his little brother gone and safe and blessedly human, Ed knew he was meant to be lamenting the loss of their unit with Mustang, but all he could bring himself to see was Mustang himself.
The hubris of Edward Elric, his tombstone would read, after this whole fiasco was over and they were both dead, was that he loved too fucking much. Ed really ought to work on that. But - but right now -
Ed looked over, and Mustang fell. In one glorious, gentle arc, Mustang fell. Ed’s heart stuttered in his chest, and Ed was horrible, Ed was a heartless bastard, but the memory of a decimated camp and the imagined visions of a hundred soldiers burning struck less fear into his heart than just the gentle thud Mustang made when he fell into the snow.
“For fuck’s -”
“Lil’ lightheaded s’all,” he heard faintly from the snow at his feet.
“No, Mustang. Goddamnit -” He dropped carefully next to him, hand resting gently at the base of his spine. There was still a blanket over his back, but Ed imagined he could feel the febrile heat soaking its way through, could imagine it was intense enough to melt through the snow beneath them. “Don’t go to sleep. Please. You almost - you almost didn’t wake up this morning.”
“M’not tired,” he breathed, his speech heavy and slurred and catching horribly at every audible wheeze. “Lil’ lightheaded.”
Ed briefly entertained the thought that had been a prevalent source of irony earlier in his life and that, apparently, would continue to haunt him now:
Look on the bright side, Edward. It couldn’t get much worse than this, now could it?
And as voices suddenly rose up with alarmed shouts a mere few feet away, from the direction of the camp, thick with Drachman dialect, Ed was once again reminded of the painful truth. Even after your father has left you, your mother can still die. Even after you’ve lost half your family, there is always more to lose. Even when you’re at your most desperate, you’ll always find that there’s another level of desperation lurking right behind that, waiting for that thought, that wall of weakness in the form of ignorant optimism -
It couldn’t get much worse.
Three Drachman men in heavy boots and thick woolen coats hefted guns in his face, and yes. It very much could.
Running on pure reflex and adrenaline, perhaps the knowledge of Mustang’s prone form still prostrate and feverish beneath his fingers, Ed slammed his hands together. But hefting the automail was miserable, he felt so weak, and it was as if it was heavier with the weight of the knowledge that it had killed, resistant to soak itself with blood again. And Ed didn’t imagine he was very intimidating then, his arm drooping, his eyes searching fervently for any measure of humility in the men over them.
One man stepped forward, face covered in a long and horrible beard, dyed yellow near the corners of his lips. He said something then, and Ed had spoken some Drachman before - he could vaguely recall bickering with Al on a street corner with a translating guide in one hand and a wad of unfamiliar currency in the other, but his arm was heavy and Mustang was dying and he didn’t know what to do with the hands still poised in front of him, and when the Drachman soldier spoke he just slowly, slowly, eyes unwavering, shook his head. The man had the nerve to - smile. And that horrible yellow smile creaked up at the corners. His lips cracked with the cold and his smile was full of holes, dyed yellow to match his beard. As he turned to address his comrades again, back to Ed as if dismissing him as a threat, Ed saw him lick a fleck of red from his lip.
Ed was unnecessarily and illogically outraged at being outright dismissed. The dead body just across the clearing was his doing, goddamnit, did they even know who he was? He was the fucking Fullmetal Alchemist, Major of the Amestrian army. He could perform alchemy other people could only dream of, he could pull miracles out of his ass, he could bend the elements to his will.
The yellow-bearded man jerked a thumb at him and the two other soldiers laughed. More irrational anger bubbled up inside him and he glared at the arm that had, sometime during the mental tirade, fallen limp at his side. He would show them, he would, he would.
He smacked his hands together again so hard the metal compressed upon impact and groaned with pressure in the cold under his flesh palm. He could see what he wanted to make very clearly, a giant palm; he liked hands made of Earth, they bent to his will so easily and made him feel fucking godlike. He’d read some of the shitty holy books before, with all the deities making the universe, and what was more fucking iconic than a massive hand that could create and destroy as he -He - pleased?
But his arm was still heavy with remembered blood. He could almost feel it seeping from the joint at the elbow as the soldiers eyed him bemusedly, eyes sparking with barely restrained humor, from a few paces away. They didn’t know what he was capable of when he was defending someone he loved.
A hand. He smashed his own hands together more firmly, willed a hand from the deepest recesses of his mind’s eye. That way he could just capture them, of course. It would startle them enough that those guns in their hands would fall, that they would be able to watch him and Mustang escape to safety as they cursed their unfortunate underestimation.
It took him a full five seconds to know what he was going to do, precisely, down to the last crushing little crevices in the hand’s surface - more Godlike, more realistic, more intimidating to any man who believed - but then, unbidden, another image rose to his mind.
It was the sort of thing he could always see when he sought to do alchemy that was meant to have more of an impact than a simple state or phase change. Inevitably, with the creation of something bigger, more powerful came a picture of death. Now, there was the nameless Drachman soldier’s blood, gushing out of his mouth, out of his lungs, down the front of Ed’s shirt. Now, there was another image, of one single digit on his hand tightening just beyond the degree it was meant for, and maybe breaking a spine, puncturing through one of the men just looking at him curiously now until their blood ran free and red down the earthen sides just as their comrade’s had.
He had the power to kill all three of them if he so much as placed his hands on the ground, and just the thought of it had him retreating to sanctuary of his slim little armblade. The alchemy in his mind changed abruptly, and all he could see was everyone he loved in the clutches of that hand, Al’s eyes blank and unseeing from between that massive forefinger and thumb as it threatened to squeeze so hard it burst his skull.
With a sudden whimper he forced his hands apart, shook his head fervently, hated himself for not being able to do this even in the face of everything and even over Mustang’s shuddering, dying body that should have meant more to him than this man with the yellow teeth whose head he could pop like a balloon. The men seemed further amused by his unease, and yellow-tooth cracked a smile so big Ed could see three holes where molars should be.
Alchemy was not an option, but his blade - he could almost see it glisten against the blue of Mustang’s sluggishly rising back, a beacon of defense in the hopeless blackness of disease, and Ed would always, always have that.
Wouldn’t he?
But - alchemy had made the arm that had killed that man across the clearing. He blinked, long and slow. His alchemy had already killed someone today, oh shit -
And if he used alchemy to kill someone, how could he honestly say he was any better than Tucker? Than Psiren? He bitched and moaned because every criminal he met was hellbent on telling him they were no different, how Ed would do the same in the same situation wouldn’t he…?
Tucker in this situation. What would he do?
Ed’s mind’s eye created a picture of the three Drachman soldier’s, heaped together in a steaming pile of wriggling arms and legs, still alive but moaning and in pain as Tucker loomed over them and just smiled. Ed could never imagine himself being that, but killing these soldiers was just a step on the road to hell and Edward would not be that man.
After the fact, he wouldn’t remember getting up. He just remembered the thoughts leading up to it - no alchemy, no blade, he would whale on them until they let him go. In hindsight it was rash and stupid, he would insist that the cold and wet, seeping into his body and leeching the logic from it, had been a part of it. But he imagined it was just more of the same rage that had lead him to attack so many people with just bare fists and snarling, primitive canines. Removed from his tools, lowered to his basest, he could only just remember being midstride on his way toward them, moving faster than he had thought his broken automail could carry him, when one of the soldiers cocked his gun and shot a bullet right over his shoulder.
Ed’s heart did stop beating for a moment when it whizzed past his face, close enough that his hair waved crazily when he turned his head to follow it. He didn’t have enough time to even finish the thought - it was Mustang, they’ve killed Mustang and you’re going to have to tell everyone you failed because you’re a coward - but the missed beat of his heart spoke volumes to the blood running in his veins, and it just froze in the split second before the bullet hit the ground and sent up a spray of snow next to Mustang’s head.
His breath came out in a ragged cloud to match Mustang’s catching moan on the ground, and Ed said, “You bastard,” like an afterthought when a gun jabbed between his ribs for the second time that day.
The Drachman soldier breathed words that he couldn’t understand into his ear from behind, and Ed could smell the drink in the white cloud that wafted from him. Ed just kept his eyes firmly on Mustang as the shallow mockery of sweet-nothings caressed the shell of his ear and the remnants of vodka - that was all - stung at his eyes. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand. Mustang shifted on the ground enough to turn his buried head toward the crater that the bullet had created in the ground and sigh in a way that Ed would’ve called resigned in anyone else. But Mustang didn’t resign himself to anything.
Suddenly, there were words Ed could understand from the prone form on the ground. The Drachman man was still polluting the air by his ear, but Ed found it so much harder to care with his commander’s dulcet baritones there now.
“He says he’ll shoot me if you don’t cooperate, Ed.” The gun point in his back, the one that kept him pinned in place, seemed to dig in deeper at that. “He also says he’ll shoot you.”
“How - reassuring.”
“I can’t attack them, Ed. Now would be a wonderful time to pull one of those miracles out of your ass.”
Ed breathed hard at that - Roy was expecting him to do something; Roy wanted him to do this. Of course he did, if it meant saving them both. The mutually exclusive bits of his mind, hovering on opposite corners of his consciousness, one regarding pleasing Roy and the other regarding the morals he held so tight and close to his chest, suddenly stood off against one another, snarling in opposite corners. Teeth bared, fangs gnashing, and Ed couldn’t possibly give up one for the other, could he?
He whimpered, and the fog issued forth in steady, hazy puffs.
Then, from nowhere, a light in all the darkness. “No. We’ll let them take us.”
What he had said must have been particularly insane, because Mustang actually engaged in the effort of straining his neck to look at Ed, then.
“Isn’t that,” he said, white-washed against the snow and cautiously intrepid in the face of Ed’s madness, “what we’ve been trying to avoid? You know. Since they killed all our men and…shot me?”
Ed licked his lips before he went on, as if saying that would make the words come out easier. “Yes, but we’ve been looking at it all wrong see, they must know we’re important since they haven’t killed us yet…but they must not know what we can do. Because…they haven’t killed us yet.” Mustang slanted his brow.
“Don’t you g-get it? If they take us into custody, they’ll help you get better and then once we actually can escape, it’ll be as easy as -” a clap of his hands and they were all dead “-a snap of your fingers.”
Mustang rolled a bit to look at him, dubious. The Drachman spoke something, more rapidly than before, and that was all the warning Ed got before a gun went off again. It startled him enough that he froze when the bang issued from the barrel, and he couldn’t keep still in the face of the idea that oh god Mustang was dead, he wouldn’t shoot and miss twice, he wouldn’t-
But when he whipped around to face the man, anger making him unafraid, he saw that it hadn’t been the man with the gun in his back at all. It had been one from the group behind the alpha male so hellbent on intimidating him, and he was looking down the barrel of his gun as if puzzled. The man behind him looked back with Edward, gun not wavering, and howled out a huge guffawing laugh at the sight. It wasn’t long until all the men joined him.
Ed absolutely - balked. They were all fucking drunk. Ed turned back to give Mustang the same conspiratorial look. These men must have been told to take hostages, but they really did have absolutely no idea what they were dealing with. Who in their right mind took on Fullmetal and Flame drunk off their asses anyway?
On the ground, Mustang breathed out a sighing breath of a laugh, still so tired but Ed just couldn’t say resigned. “We let them take us.”
It was a grandiose affair getting Mustang on his feet again, requiring more shoving of guns in both of their faces. He was absolutely exhausted and Mustang was mostly dead, it was probably only the bullet hole marring the ground, stark and morose splay of soil like blood, that kept them moving between the two buffering layers of drunken buffoons as fast as they did. They intended to go with them, it made it easier to accept being pushed around when it was by their own volition, but the fact still remained that those were real guns, and these were real drunken bastards, and if they didn’t walk at just the right speed, either one of them could get their brains blown.
As Edward staggered ahead, bearing as much of Mustang’s weight for him as he could without outright carrying him on his back, he couldn’t help thinking about what a tight, thin, brittle rope he had put them both on just to avoid killing a few brainless thugs. He wanted to believe that throwing himself behind enemy lines was a good plan because honestly, how far could he get with Mustang like this? But he knew it was selfish, he was always selfish, everything he ever did was to save himself from his own over-critical sense of self-loathing. Wasn’t that why he’d restored his younger brother? To quell those feelings that were something like nausea - the ones that always had a way of creeping up the back of his throat, polluting his ears and eyes with a miasma of toxins that he could only dissolve with a reversal of the whole guilty affair. He was so, so selfish to put himself and a man that he cared for more than he liked to think about in a situation where any number of things could conspire horribly against them to take them down, just so that he could save his soul from himself.
He found himself looking over at Mustang then, who probably didn’t even realize what kind of danger Edward was leading him into half-dead as he was. He trusted Ed as blindly now as Alphonse had trusted him just before he’d dragged them both to hell. As if to punctuate the fact, Mustang clenched tighter at Ed from where his arm was grasping for support, smiled warmly down with lips dyed rust with drying blood. His eyes said he was proud of Ed and a thousand beetles crept against the ever-flowing current of Ed’s blood. Behind the pride and utter, unprecedented dependence was a sort of fever-madness that Ed knew was driving this. Mustang was not in his right mind. If he were, he would have stopped Ed’s nonsense plans ages ago.
But Ed tightened his hold protectively on Mustang too, though he was sure his eyes said nothing of pride in turn. Self-loathing filled him, pushing its fingers out of his mouth and greedily stealing the air before it ever hit his throat. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do.
Mustang opened his mouth, and there was fresh blood coating his teeth. Was it coming from his lungs? Had they finally torn themselves to pieces in the midst of all of the manic coughing that Mustang did during the day with all of his spastic efforts to tear his own body apart? Was it the bullet wound? Would Mustang live through the night, or was Ed just killing someone else he loved?
“Thank you,” he said, very quiet. “For being my crutch.”
Edward laughed - how else could he respond to something so absurd, really? “S’not much else I can do, is there? How are you feeling?”
Mustang’s eyes blazed, and Edward knew that every bone in his body was screaming behind that strange, incomprehensible gaze. “I.” A sharp breath. “Have been better.”
They walked like that for an hour at least. Edward knew because he could feel each minute pulling hard at his automail leg. It stung and ripped and maybe bled with the cold. Nothing new, it had done it before. He heard Mustang’s breaths getting more and more wet, and he knew that as the time wore on he stumbled just that much more. Every time he fell, Edward expected a gunshot, he expected to look over and see Mustang’s head somewhere on the ground in front of them, the warmth that Ed was depending on now to keep himself going leaking steadily onto his shoulder. But there was just yelling, maybe some scuffling if one of the men got caught up in Mustang’s legs as he tumbled and then a minute longer than Ed had ever known any minute could last as Mustang slowly, slowly, slowly gained his feet again.
By the end of the hour, when the stumbles happened every few minutes, the tension had mounted enough that Ed could feel it buzzing around him. He drove himself half-mad with the idea that Mustang might not be able to pick himself up this time, what was Ed thinking, now they were going to shoot him where he lay like a wounded animal that had expended its worth. True to this form, Ed clung to him with animal dependence and pleaded -
“For god’s sake - get up, get up, you’re fine, just a little bit more, just a bit - I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Please, one leg, then the other, good, good, you’re fine-”
He didn’t even know what he was saying anymore. He supposed nothing really had changed. He’d never known what he was saying his entire childhood. He usually only noticed the consequences after he’d said it.
When they got to camp the pace had decreased enough that the drunks were starting to notice it. They were also starting to sober enough to complain and brandish their guns just that much more menacingly. Ed could have cried at the sight of so many enemies congregated in one place, at the piles of artillery that would have made Ed blanch in fear and move in the opposite direction under any other circumstances. But as it was, Ed could have dropped to the ground and kissed it if there hadn’t been the general, leaning like a blushing virgin leaned on her elbows to beat her eyelashes at a pretty boy, heavy with dumb love. He breathed copper into Edward’s ear frantically, he squeezed with knuckles so devoid of blood they were slightly purple. At the sight of the camp, Ed felt tremor wrack all the way through Mustang. He imagined that was something like what dying felt like.
Finally.
Finally.
Finally - what? Finally he was in the nest of the enemies that could bring him either salvation or death. What was he thinking, what was he thinking, what the fuck was he -
There was an absence of warmth at his side, and Mustang was torn from him. He frothed in his fury, he snapped like he’d been cleaved in two. It was too much, the sudden loss of the man from his side was like automail detachment. He needed that there, he needed Mustang. He provided Ed with a purpose for everything he did, much like Al had. He knew the noise that ripped from him was more animal than anything, but that was alright. At least he was being consistent.
“Sons of bitches, give him - ” cold unfeeling hands replaced the tickle of Mustang’s hair on his shoulder. Meaty, grasping fingers roved over the planes where comfort in its most unusual form had existed mere seconds ago. Mustang needed him, a crutch. He could hardly stand on his own.
“Mustang!”
Without even thinking, blinded by rage and unable to see, just for a moment, where Mustang had disappeared to just beyond his peripheral vision in the face of these new and uncomfortable touches, Edward clapped his hands.
His brain was alight with every alchemic circle he knew for a moment, categorizing the damage that each one would make. Which one should he use? How much exactly did he want it to burn?
His vision cleared enough to see a man before him, big and burly and standing straight with the air that only a high-ranking officer could possibly possess, when he heard a commanding voice that quite clearly wasn’t Roy speaking Amestrian above all the garbled guttural Drachman voices.
“Fullmetal.” It said, then more Drachman, then hands forcing his own hands apart.
In the short moment of coherence between then and oblivion, Ed had enough sense to realize that he’d just intended to kill every man here. That he’d just intended to make them all feel the pain that blazed through his own veins at the thought of having Roy ripped from him.
It was the least comforting thought in the world, and he hated himself with unabashed abandon as he was hit over the head and cast roughly into unconsciousness.
Ed woke cold and alone and afraid to the sound of screaming and guns and explosions. He didn’t open his eyes immediately and he wasn’t sure he wanted to anyway. The world behind his eyelids was dark enough that there couldn’t possibly be any sun outside, whether the trees were keeping it from filtering to them or whether it was just the dark, dank coldness of night. He took a moment to gather himself, assess where he was and what was happening to his body. His automail was remarkably still intact, he could feel the feedback from his arm and leg more than he could see it, and he took a moment to wonder at the stupidity of these Drachman soldiers. He could escape them, he could escape them any time he wanted if only his damn head would stop pounding -
He opened his eyes and knew he’d been concussed. The world was topsy-turvy, swaying and looping and upside-down. He’d been hit in the head many times, but this wasn’t like anything that had ever happened before. He’d never been hit so hard the vertigo lingered like this, never so hard blows caused the nightmare world to weasel its way out of his dreams and become real. His arms were free and he tried to work them under him. He threw his head around like a horse trying to dispel its own blinders. Every time he moved though, the ground shifted, the colors melded together. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t have his alchemy, he didn’t know where he was, and he was scared.
Pathetically enough, “General!” was the first thing out of his mouth, wounded and frantic as his eyes shifted and the pain in his head flared and overwhelmed his senses. He could see smells, and the ground rippled with footsteps outside.
“General,” he said again. There was nothing. There was no one. Wherever he was, cold, concussed and confused, he was alone. He closed his eyes again, because seeing wasn’t worth it. His thoughts were just as manic, snowballing against one another and building something enormously dangerous.
Ed knew with a cold logical certainty that they had killed Roy. Of course they had killed Roy. How could he be stupid enough to think that they wouldn’t? Such a high-ranking officer, of course they’d want him out of the way. Edward didn’t know what he’d thought, what he’d stupidly assumed outside before. Let them capture us? Let them capture us indeed, Roy had to be dead now because of him. Why would they invest time and money in curing an enemy soldier?
Ed could feel his insides squirming, and he curled into himself as best he could. His esophagus was clogged with the gnarled trunk of a tree that had taken root somewhere in his heart, and every time his went to breathe the leaves rustled in his mouth and his throat contracted madly against that unmovable force in a frantic, useless effort. The trunk groaned in the face of his heaving gulps, which explained the moans that ripped themselves from him then, pained and desperate.
He’d killed Roy. He didn’t know why he was so ashamed of death now, not when he’d thought of killing so many countless men just before he’d been concussed out of his wits and half-mad with fear. He’d killed Roy and he was the worst man there was.
Just then there was a trace of a touch on his back. Something soft on the flat plane of it, feather-light through the coat that miraculously hadn’t been ripped from him. Not alone, then.
He opened his eyes, but the world still swayed sickly, so he moaned again, and the petting became heavier. He didn’t like the disembodied touches if only because he didn’t like to imagine where they could be coming from. Who else was in this camp but Roy and a few Drachman bastards? And Roy was dead.
Roy had to be dead.
Why did Roy have to be dead?
He whimpered, the miraculous hand learned speech and shushed him, and he slipped away again.
“What’d they do to him?”
“Fuck if I know. You think he’ll be okay?”
“Can’t say. He seems - upset.”
“Goddamnit - just a kid. Just a fuckin’ kid.”
When he woke again there was light. He could see as much quite clearly through the haze of his eyelids. It was too bright against his eyes, and his head throbbed with every tangible ray. He remembered his unsuccessful attempt to regain a sitting position the last time he’d woken, and now he realized why that had been such an impossibility. His prior assessment of his bodily condition had come up short. Further inspection revealed that they’d continued beating him after he went down. He grazed fingers gently over his face, his lips. Twinges of pain flared from over-extended flesh as flakes of dried blood drifted quietly to the ground.
Damn. There wasn’t a piece of him that didn’t ache fiercely, and, opening his eyes and looking down at his body from his miserable vantage, it seemed there wasn’t a piece of him that wasn’t mottled by fresh blue and black bruises. He didn’t attempt to get up. It wasn’t that he didn’t think he could necessarily, because he’d made his body work in more adverse conditions, but there didn’t seem to be any will left in him. He didn’t want to, so he didn’t.
To make matters worse, hunger gnawed spitefully at his gut, a doleful ache that seemed to say that he wouldn’t be moving at all until it was satisfied. Those two sad, thin biscuits seemed so far away now - almost as distant as his feeling going to bed that night, desolation coming purely from the trivial little worry of a skipped dinner, hope coming solely from the promise of breakfast on the horizon. Life now was a hard ground, a veritable galaxy of scars and bruises, a cold certainty that Mustang was dead, and thoughts of Al, hundreds of miles away and longing for his older brother. Edward yearned for that night and that dark, heavy sleep.
It was only then that he bothered to look around him. He was on the cold ground, flumped on one side like all the life had fallen from him. All he could see when he looked ahead was a watery-bright strip of canvas - the wall of a tent no doubt. Casting his eyes up, down, left, right yielded only stretches of moist, hard-packed earth. He was inside a tent somewhere in Drachman camp, cold and limp and useless as the day he was born. He might have been able to do something if he’d felt bothered enough to stretch out a hand or to clap, but vague recollection of his inane plan and a deep, shameful fear of bringing anymore pain on himself than he already had stopped him dead.
He knew he ought to turn over. He was inside a tent, up against a wall, who the hell knew what was on the other side of it? He could just be making a show for Drachman soldiers if he moved. He mulled over it for a moment before he finally decided that yes, it was worth the effort, before gathering his strength to turn. Just as he finally felt prepared, foreign voices sounded from outside the tent somewhere behind him and then there was the heavy clunking of multiple sets of boots tromping into the small space. Edward could hear their guns clicking, could smell the smell he’d come to identify as distinctly Drachman in his short time in their company. They wore fur on their heavy uniforms, so they often smelled like a wet animal, heavy and putrid. A wet animal that had rolled in vodka and gunpowder.
He wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes, willing the sour foulness away from his aching head, just as he was pulled roughly from the ground. Voices came quick and rough, too slurred for Ed, a mediocre speaker of Drachman, to even begin to understand. His feet dangled off the ground, and he felt his toes skim the earth with each swaying motion of the Drachman’s meaty fist. He shied away from the hand, refused to open his eyes, and hoped against all hope that they would leave him alone for just a bit longer.
The arm shook him, the knuckles brushing across his swollen jaw and bringing a ragged hiss from the back of his throat, and Ed knew that he would have no such luck.
“Fullmetal,” someone said suddenly, and it was a word that Ed knew in that voice. It was the officer from earlier, still commanding as ever, this time close enough that his warm breath gusted across Ed’s face. “You are the Fullmetal one, yes?”
Ed nodded, just because he didn’t really know the protocol involved in captor-captive situations, and while spitting in his face seemed like a good option, it probably was not the most viable. Who knew how many guns the other people in this room had, where he was, how he could escape if he even managed to from this one set of grasping fingers -
“Open your eyes, listen. You know why you are brought here, yes?” Ed slitted his eyes in response and the light burned, explosive little pops behind his eyeballs. His fingers twitched with unexpended power, and his eyes wept it from their corners like tears.
“Can’t say I do,” he rasped.
The man smiled a crooked smile that glinted yellow in Ed’s over-taxed retinas. “You will want to get rid of that attitude.”
Ed was about to ask why the hell should I, you’ve robbed me of everything you asshole, I could kill you right here -
Through his wavering vision, Ed saw the man turn his head and nod to a group of snow-covered Drachman’s off to the side. They all nodded in return, exited, and returned almost immediately with a limp form covered in familiar Amestris blues, and Ed found hidden strength almost immediately. His legs wanted to walk again, his arms wanted to touch and hold and find a pulse.
“His wounds are bandaged, but he is not in clear,” the words were crisp, rolling off of his tongue in such a smooth and easy accented tone that Ed wondered at it. How was it possible to speak of life and death, this man’s life and death, with such cold clarity? Ed squirmed and clutched fruitlessly at the fist. “You care about him. You are clearly not practiced in war, you care too much, you show too much.” Images of his headstone flashed across his vision again - here lies Edward Elric, he cared far too much - and Ed barked the man in the kneecap with as much strength as his current leverage and concussion and shock allowed him to.
Ed didn’t expect to be on the ground, but he found himself there quite suddenly. The General lay in an unmoving heap a few feet away, and Ed didn’t even think about alchemy or the soldiers or the consequences of what he’d just done before he was scrambling unsteadily on all fours toward him. He needed to verify through touch that he was still alive; this was important, this was key.
Not considering the soldiers turned out to be a bad idea though, and he only had a split second between the moment he saw the booted foot before him and the moment it made impact with the bleeding gash on his forehead to consider that perhaps this wasn’t the best stab he could have taken at captor-captive protocol.
“Yes. You see. You make too easy,” he heard again, smug and satisfied and filtering through his daze. “He is alive, I assure you.”
He became aware of himself and the boot poised just above his kidney pressing a steady, even, threatening pressure into his tender belly just a moment later. He dared to slit his eyes again only to find the same yellow-toothed officer hovering just beyond his reach. He twitched his arm as if to punch his smug-ass mug, that asshole, that insufferable fucker - and the boot on his gut pressed down hard. He could feel each little stitch, each imprint in his starved stomach and he gasped aloud before the CO barked a Drachman order and the boot relinquished its hold on his consciousness.
With another abrupt order, the boot moved to press hard on his human hand, and Ed wondered at that a moment before the explanation came on another putrid, steamy exhale. “Can’t let you drawing circles yet.”
Ed’s head no longer pounded or ached with each beat of his heart but it just straight out hurt like a motherfucker. He hoped there was nothing wrong with his skull, with his brain - lord only knew these fuckers wouldn’t do a thing about it.
“Circles?” he managed, voice weak.
He received a kick to his ribs for that remark, pain blossoming and distracting from the swollen mess of his head as he felt something give way under the heavy sole. He tried to curl onto his side defensively, but more boots on his kidneys pinned him in place and so he just heaved hard breaths beneath them until he felt like he could properly take in air again.
The man continued, leering, “Don’t play jokes, don’t make dumb, we know you are alchemist. We know you are Fullmetal one. You play with elements and alloys like child toys for filthy Amestris government, and now you will do so here.”
Maybe it was the concussion, maybe it was the conditions, maybe it was the fact that someone had just fractured his fucking ribcage - but Ed simply wasn’t following. He licked his lips and tossed his head. He could just see Mustang out of the corner of his eye, but he did his best to keep from looking because he could also see a veritable sea of dark brown boots, all surrounding that tender stomach, that open wound. They could kick him as much as they wanted, so long as they didn’t disturb the very tenuous balance Mustang seemed to have between life and death. “I don’t understand,” he said.
There was another short exchange in Drachman, and then he was hoisted again. Two sets of hands this time, and he could feel the difference in their fists holding his arms in place behind him from the head bastard, the man in charge. Mustang was lifted before his eyes with a man on each of his limbs, swinging carelessly between them like a rag doll, and the arms on his were the only thing that kept Ed from pouncing. They were so careless, and he was such a precious thing to be swinging around like that.
The men carrying Mustang walked out the canvas flap, and before it swung shut, he saw them take a sharp turn to the right. He logged that away. If Mustang was alive, continued to be alive, he was alive in that direction.
Shortly after, they walked him slowly out of the tent and into a smoky world of snow and filth. Drachman soldiers peered at him from row upon row of shoddily constructed tents, spitting on his boots as he walked past. His hair and his eyes, grimy and clouded with rusty red as they were, must have been a beacon in this dreary hellhole. So easy to spot, it might make it harder to escape if he had to make a break for it with Mustang later. Lucky for him, Mustang fit in just -
And unexpected blow cracked brutally against the stinging wound at his temple. It was one too many hits to his already pounding head, and his vision whited out for a moment. When it returned, he found himself upright solely because of the rough hands on his arms. In front of him lay a thick and heavy glass bottle steadily leaking some sort of alcohol onto the hard-packed earth and dying the snow there a dark amber. His knees were weak and wobbly and he could feel spikes of horrible pain with each beat of his pulse, but again he was forced on.
“He says you look like woman,” the commanding officer put in airily from somewhere ahead of him. “Your hair. A woman’s hair.” Ed’s hair hung loose and lank and stringy and sticky from his head, and he wondered vaguely, brain fuzzing like radio static, why this mattered at all. Hawkeye was a woman, and she was a better soldier than any of these motherfuckers.
A hail of laughter followed every step of his unsteady, bowlegged, limping gait - with all the excitement, he’d almost forgotten how very fucked his automail was - all the way into a tent that was bigger than the rest, strips of canvas hoisted high above his head and running with the colors of Drachma’s flag. Behind the flaps of the doorway Ed found a jungle of rusty red bayonets, mud-clogged rifles, guns and scrap metals of all sorts clogging the entry way. On the far side of the tent was a small work table of rough particle board. The commanding officer came forward and spoke again in his rough Amestrian tongue. “Here. You do your work for Mother Drachma now.”
Ed’s tongue was heavy in his mouth as realization started to dawn on him. “Where’s the General?”
The Drachman raised his eyebrow pointedly, disbelief wrinkling his brow. “Xingan General is alive. He will be alive so long as you recycle our metals, fix our weapons. Fullmetal.”
And didn’t that just fucking figure.
“Is he - well cared for? Is he alright?”
“I tire, I tire of your caring. You care too much, it is too much. You fix our weapons, he lives. That is all.” He waved a hand and muttered something, and the hands on his released. Unsteady on his own, Ed stumbled forward toward a pile of scrap metal, close enough that he could see bloody stains still clinging tenaciously to some of the objects in the pile. One bayonet on top, freshly severed from its gun it seemed, shimmered with blood that hadn’t yet gone to rust, and Ed felt his stomach turn within him at the sight.
Eyes still on the pile of death in front of him Ed whispered, “If he dies?”
The answer came in a quick snap, and Ed knew he’d pushed too far. “He will not.”
But that didn’t stop him from pushing more. “He’s ill. His lungs.”
“Medicines, antibiotics, he will have them while you work.”
“Can I see him again?”
“Too much, it is too much, shut your mouth. Here.” He stepped forward, grabbed the bloody bayonet from the top of the heap in one hand and a blown-out rifle in the other. He thrust them out to Ed, tipping his head pointedly toward the particle board work station. “I see you fix.”
Ed’s hands shook at his sides. He couldn’t help but think that this was just more of the same, more of what he’d been so violently opposed to. He shouldn’t transmute this gun back together so that it could kill more of his fellow soldiers, take countless more lives, just for the sake of one man he wanted to see make it through the night. The choice should have been easy. Between the lives of these men and the lives of his men, between the life of Mustang and the life of his country - the choice should have been clear. But Ed’s moral compass was not infallible, and Ed would do anything in his power to keep the only constant adult figure he’d had in his life since the age of twelve alive. The choice should have been simple, and it was. Just not in the way it should have been.
Besides, it wasn’t as if this had to last long. Just so long as Mustang was recovering. When he was well enough to escape with Ed, it would be a very simple thing to do. And why wouldn’t it with two alchemists on their side?
Trembling fingers reached out for the two torn pieces, and Ed walked toward the table as he would have in a funeral procession. The grimy bayonet did very little to sully the already rust-dyed glove on his flesh hand, and if anything the blown gun in his right hand chipped away some of the lingering dried blood. When he reached the table, he set them gently on the splintery surface and solemnly lifted his hands to clap.
Fingers almost touching, a voice rang out, “Quit fooling, draw your circle.” Ed - stopped. Blinked. Allowed the slow-turning cogs to work the frost and blows off before…
Was it really possible that these people weren’t aware of his ability? It’s true that in Amestris most people didn’t know, that it was a novelty in every new town he visited, but he had assumed that that novelty was the only thing keeping him alive in the enemy’s clutches. After all, any alchemist could draw a circle to make weaponry, but he had the advantage of being able to do it that much faster.
He dropped his hands to his side, looked back over, smiled grimly. He said, “You caught me,” and then reached for the piece of chalk at the other end of the table. His heart pounded, the telling cracks in his ribs pulsed, and his head throbbed as he took the chalk in his hand.
If they needed him to transmute their weapons, thinking he was just a standard alchemist for Amestris, nothing special, no big deal - then it was quite possible that these people knew absolutely nothing of what alchemy was capable of. They couldn’t know, could they? What a circle looked like, what properly performed alchemy looked and felt like when it saturated the air -
He started drawing. He knew all the proper elements off the top of his head, down to the last bits of iron in the blood on the surface, and it was so easy to call the images to his fingers, manifest it with the chalk in his hands. But it was also so, so easy to - slip every once in a while. The first mistake was a slight waver on the symbol for the metal, a minute little wiggle in the arc of the curve that spoke of a weakness. It sent a secret little thrill up Ed’s spine to draw it, and he licked his lips and glanced around at the soldiers watching him, looking closely for any sign of recognition. There was none, they stood straight and tall at attention. All of them looked wary, as if they had only seen the effects of alchemy on the battlefield and were leery of any alchemist, no matter how much he seemed to lie under the thumb of the law. The tip of a gun in the small of his back reminded Ed quite effectively of the very real threat on his and Mustang’s lives if he made this little fuck-up too blatant.
The head goon just looked smug, like he knew they had Ed cornered, like he knew Ed wouldn’t take Mustang’s life into risk. And he was right in that respect - Ed wouldn’t. He would transmute their weapons, but this he could do, this he could. He grasped at whatever power he could have like a lifeline. It wasn’t much in the great scheme of things, a wonky gun or two, but this he could do.
The second mistake was in the last symbol he drew, and by then he had begun to get bolder. It was a disruption in the flow of the material, a slightly more blatant mistake than his last. To any eye highly trained in the alchemic arts it might have even been apparent, read as more of a sabotage than an error, given that it really wasn’t a mistake so much as it was a conscious decision to put a hole in the matter he should have been seeking to mend. He glanced around discreetly, sweat beading his brow, and willed his trembling fingers not to betray him when he finished the circle off with his token flourish. But the soldiers did not fire, or cock their weapons, and when no one jumped forth to stop him, no one brandished a gun or threatened Mustang’s life, Ed smiled unabashedly, deliriously happy to have some degree of control back in his life. He couldn’t imagine what it looked like from their point of view - captured, covered in filth and grinning liked a maniac - but it was obviously the most incriminating thing they had witnessed thus far, nevermind the paper thin weakness that would be in the barrel of the gun.
“Stop your smiles,” said the commanding officer. He then wiggled his hand a bit, putting the enlisted men on what Ed could only assume was a higher alert, given that they all lifted their guns and jabbed at him a bit. Ed saw a younger soldier swallow convulsively. “What is there to be smiling about?”
Ed lifted both his hands to the edge of the circle, huffed a breath, ignored the twin aches of his head and stomach, and said, “Nothing, I just - love alchemy.” Hand’s tightened on guns, soldiers breathed in like it was the last breath they expected to take, fingers twitched on triggers, just waiting for the array to go ever so slightly awry and -
And then the transmutation began. It was clearly not good alchemy, any novice would have recognized that the yellow light vomiting sluggishly from the lines wasn’t exceptionally effective or powerful. But almost all of the enlisted men shied away almost immediately, lifting hands to shield their eyes from the mediocre light. Their attention switched from suspicious to abruptly fascinated as the gun and bayonet miraculously became one in front of them, just as they’d been bade to do.
The officer just grinned, jaundiced in the sickly yellow light and looking like the cat who had just landed the alchemically enhanced canary.
It was such a pathetic transmutation to impress him, such a far cry from what he was generally capable of, but the same sense of pleased satisfaction came to him as the transmutation died out and all that was left was the circle, silence, and an innocuously clean and complete weapon stark against the particle board. It would fire, once or twice maybe, before the weakness of the metal would give to the brutal, primal power of the bullets and it would simply crumble.
“Good,” the officer said, hefting the gun. He closed one eye and pointed the muzzle in Ed’s direction. “Good. Feed him, he will start work tomorrow.” He lowered the gun and smiled wickedly.
“And - and the General,” Ed suggested with some trepidation.
“And the General. Feed him as well.”
And Ed let himself be led away from the tent, let himself be dragged and humiliated, because things would work out now - Ed would make things work out now - and they would live.
Comments are much loved and much appreciated. Expect more soon.
Pairings/Characters: Edward, Roy
Rating: M/R
Genre: Drama, Angst
Spoilers: None - Alternate ending, TWT?
Word Count: +/- 9100
Cumulative Word Count: +/- 16800
Warnings: Language, violence, gore.
Summary: Ed and Roy are stuck in a war zone. Gratuitous hurt!Roy for the sake of hurt!Roy ensues.
Previous Parts: 1
Notes: PHEW. FINALLY. I just really need to get this bit away from me for now. Sorry for mistakes, but I need to not be thinking about this. XD Special thanks to ketita for the excessive amounts of hand-holding that I need to be at all useful. Much love.
Enjoy!
They continued their halting progress forward, Ed with his shuffling and ineffective crutch-step and Roy with steps so short and shallow he might as well have been standing still. They’d made it approximately three feet when Roy suddenly declared, “Right. This isn’t going to work.” And Ed could tell quite clearly from his face that it wasn’t. The unearthly, almost ethereal pallor, highlighted by unhealthy, pink-tinged cheeks, the garish red swell of his lips against the paleness of his face, the horrible, shallow, rasping breaths that made it sound as if he was choking on sandpaper. And if things weren’t bad enough, they’d only just inched their way to the final resting place of the fallen Drachman soldier.
“Right,” Ed agreed, and his breath made a billowing cloud before him. “This isn’t going to work.” But what was there to do now? All Ed knew was going forward - generally he trusted his old adage about two good legs and getting up to use them… But. But. But what were you meant to do when you didn’t? Roy panted somewhere to his left as Ed’s vision fuzzed black with horrified recognition, and he didn’t know what to do at all.
Ed looked up from his preoccupied state of panic just in time to see Mustang swaying dangerously next to him. “Sit down then, if we’re not going anywhere. I don’t know what we mean to do going back to camp anyway -” Ed leaned as far as he could without falling over, enough that he was able to touch Mustang’s shoulder, cold with wet and trembling. He looked up then, black soulful eyes that Ed wasn’t sure he recognized and said, “They’re all gone? You’re - they’re all dead?”
And of course he was thinking about that, eating himself up about his troops with a bullethole in his gut and lungs full of debilitating fluid. As their commanding officer, everything that happened to the men under him was immediately his fault. Nevermind he had been sick and weak and…and what? Slipping into a coma? Dying? -- when the attack had taken place. Nevermind that there really was nothing he could have rightly done in the face of the overwhelming odds in the state he was in if their own unit couldn’t have organized themselves enough to defend themselves. Mustang took things upon himself just like Ed did. They were similar in a way that Ed had never really realized until now, because they both just loved too damn much.
However, Ed thought as he tightened his hand ever-so-slightly on Mustang’s quivering-taut shoulder, Mustang’s caring had always been on a much grander scale than Ed’s. Mustang looked out for the state of his country, and thus aspired to be the Fuhrer. Mustang looked out for the good of his unit obsessively, spiraling pitifully if so much as one of them fell out of place due to something he believed to be his fault. But Ed had a narrow window of love. He loved so fucking intensely, to such insane degrees, that his pores leaked with it, that he closed his eyes and it was all he saw, that at night he dreamed and woke with nightmares of it, and in the day it pulled at his smile. But he couldn’t handle that sort of intensity on such a grand scale, he couldn’t, he would just explode with it. And it was probably his downfall. Al had blinded him for the longest time, he knew, even though his little brother’s plight had been occasionally interrupted with the short-lived burden of someone else - and now with his little brother gone and safe and blessedly human, Ed knew he was meant to be lamenting the loss of their unit with Mustang, but all he could bring himself to see was Mustang himself.
The hubris of Edward Elric, his tombstone would read, after this whole fiasco was over and they were both dead, was that he loved too fucking much. Ed really ought to work on that. But - but right now -
Ed looked over, and Mustang fell. In one glorious, gentle arc, Mustang fell. Ed’s heart stuttered in his chest, and Ed was horrible, Ed was a heartless bastard, but the memory of a decimated camp and the imagined visions of a hundred soldiers burning struck less fear into his heart than just the gentle thud Mustang made when he fell into the snow.
“For fuck’s -”
“Lil’ lightheaded s’all,” he heard faintly from the snow at his feet.
“No, Mustang. Goddamnit -” He dropped carefully next to him, hand resting gently at the base of his spine. There was still a blanket over his back, but Ed imagined he could feel the febrile heat soaking its way through, could imagine it was intense enough to melt through the snow beneath them. “Don’t go to sleep. Please. You almost - you almost didn’t wake up this morning.”
“M’not tired,” he breathed, his speech heavy and slurred and catching horribly at every audible wheeze. “Lil’ lightheaded.”
Ed briefly entertained the thought that had been a prevalent source of irony earlier in his life and that, apparently, would continue to haunt him now:
Look on the bright side, Edward. It couldn’t get much worse than this, now could it?
And as voices suddenly rose up with alarmed shouts a mere few feet away, from the direction of the camp, thick with Drachman dialect, Ed was once again reminded of the painful truth. Even after your father has left you, your mother can still die. Even after you’ve lost half your family, there is always more to lose. Even when you’re at your most desperate, you’ll always find that there’s another level of desperation lurking right behind that, waiting for that thought, that wall of weakness in the form of ignorant optimism -
It couldn’t get much worse.
Three Drachman men in heavy boots and thick woolen coats hefted guns in his face, and yes. It very much could.
Running on pure reflex and adrenaline, perhaps the knowledge of Mustang’s prone form still prostrate and feverish beneath his fingers, Ed slammed his hands together. But hefting the automail was miserable, he felt so weak, and it was as if it was heavier with the weight of the knowledge that it had killed, resistant to soak itself with blood again. And Ed didn’t imagine he was very intimidating then, his arm drooping, his eyes searching fervently for any measure of humility in the men over them.
One man stepped forward, face covered in a long and horrible beard, dyed yellow near the corners of his lips. He said something then, and Ed had spoken some Drachman before - he could vaguely recall bickering with Al on a street corner with a translating guide in one hand and a wad of unfamiliar currency in the other, but his arm was heavy and Mustang was dying and he didn’t know what to do with the hands still poised in front of him, and when the Drachman soldier spoke he just slowly, slowly, eyes unwavering, shook his head. The man had the nerve to - smile. And that horrible yellow smile creaked up at the corners. His lips cracked with the cold and his smile was full of holes, dyed yellow to match his beard. As he turned to address his comrades again, back to Ed as if dismissing him as a threat, Ed saw him lick a fleck of red from his lip.
Ed was unnecessarily and illogically outraged at being outright dismissed. The dead body just across the clearing was his doing, goddamnit, did they even know who he was? He was the fucking Fullmetal Alchemist, Major of the Amestrian army. He could perform alchemy other people could only dream of, he could pull miracles out of his ass, he could bend the elements to his will.
The yellow-bearded man jerked a thumb at him and the two other soldiers laughed. More irrational anger bubbled up inside him and he glared at the arm that had, sometime during the mental tirade, fallen limp at his side. He would show them, he would, he would.
He smacked his hands together again so hard the metal compressed upon impact and groaned with pressure in the cold under his flesh palm. He could see what he wanted to make very clearly, a giant palm; he liked hands made of Earth, they bent to his will so easily and made him feel fucking godlike. He’d read some of the shitty holy books before, with all the deities making the universe, and what was more fucking iconic than a massive hand that could create and destroy as he -He - pleased?
But his arm was still heavy with remembered blood. He could almost feel it seeping from the joint at the elbow as the soldiers eyed him bemusedly, eyes sparking with barely restrained humor, from a few paces away. They didn’t know what he was capable of when he was defending someone he loved.
A hand. He smashed his own hands together more firmly, willed a hand from the deepest recesses of his mind’s eye. That way he could just capture them, of course. It would startle them enough that those guns in their hands would fall, that they would be able to watch him and Mustang escape to safety as they cursed their unfortunate underestimation.
It took him a full five seconds to know what he was going to do, precisely, down to the last crushing little crevices in the hand’s surface - more Godlike, more realistic, more intimidating to any man who believed - but then, unbidden, another image rose to his mind.
It was the sort of thing he could always see when he sought to do alchemy that was meant to have more of an impact than a simple state or phase change. Inevitably, with the creation of something bigger, more powerful came a picture of death. Now, there was the nameless Drachman soldier’s blood, gushing out of his mouth, out of his lungs, down the front of Ed’s shirt. Now, there was another image, of one single digit on his hand tightening just beyond the degree it was meant for, and maybe breaking a spine, puncturing through one of the men just looking at him curiously now until their blood ran free and red down the earthen sides just as their comrade’s had.
He had the power to kill all three of them if he so much as placed his hands on the ground, and just the thought of it had him retreating to sanctuary of his slim little armblade. The alchemy in his mind changed abruptly, and all he could see was everyone he loved in the clutches of that hand, Al’s eyes blank and unseeing from between that massive forefinger and thumb as it threatened to squeeze so hard it burst his skull.
With a sudden whimper he forced his hands apart, shook his head fervently, hated himself for not being able to do this even in the face of everything and even over Mustang’s shuddering, dying body that should have meant more to him than this man with the yellow teeth whose head he could pop like a balloon. The men seemed further amused by his unease, and yellow-tooth cracked a smile so big Ed could see three holes where molars should be.
Alchemy was not an option, but his blade - he could almost see it glisten against the blue of Mustang’s sluggishly rising back, a beacon of defense in the hopeless blackness of disease, and Ed would always, always have that.
Wouldn’t he?
But - alchemy had made the arm that had killed that man across the clearing. He blinked, long and slow. His alchemy had already killed someone today, oh shit -
And if he used alchemy to kill someone, how could he honestly say he was any better than Tucker? Than Psiren? He bitched and moaned because every criminal he met was hellbent on telling him they were no different, how Ed would do the same in the same situation wouldn’t he…?
Tucker in this situation. What would he do?
Ed’s mind’s eye created a picture of the three Drachman soldier’s, heaped together in a steaming pile of wriggling arms and legs, still alive but moaning and in pain as Tucker loomed over them and just smiled. Ed could never imagine himself being that, but killing these soldiers was just a step on the road to hell and Edward would not be that man.
After the fact, he wouldn’t remember getting up. He just remembered the thoughts leading up to it - no alchemy, no blade, he would whale on them until they let him go. In hindsight it was rash and stupid, he would insist that the cold and wet, seeping into his body and leeching the logic from it, had been a part of it. But he imagined it was just more of the same rage that had lead him to attack so many people with just bare fists and snarling, primitive canines. Removed from his tools, lowered to his basest, he could only just remember being midstride on his way toward them, moving faster than he had thought his broken automail could carry him, when one of the soldiers cocked his gun and shot a bullet right over his shoulder.
Ed’s heart did stop beating for a moment when it whizzed past his face, close enough that his hair waved crazily when he turned his head to follow it. He didn’t have enough time to even finish the thought - it was Mustang, they’ve killed Mustang and you’re going to have to tell everyone you failed because you’re a coward - but the missed beat of his heart spoke volumes to the blood running in his veins, and it just froze in the split second before the bullet hit the ground and sent up a spray of snow next to Mustang’s head.
His breath came out in a ragged cloud to match Mustang’s catching moan on the ground, and Ed said, “You bastard,” like an afterthought when a gun jabbed between his ribs for the second time that day.
The Drachman soldier breathed words that he couldn’t understand into his ear from behind, and Ed could smell the drink in the white cloud that wafted from him. Ed just kept his eyes firmly on Mustang as the shallow mockery of sweet-nothings caressed the shell of his ear and the remnants of vodka - that was all - stung at his eyes. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand. Mustang shifted on the ground enough to turn his buried head toward the crater that the bullet had created in the ground and sigh in a way that Ed would’ve called resigned in anyone else. But Mustang didn’t resign himself to anything.
Suddenly, there were words Ed could understand from the prone form on the ground. The Drachman man was still polluting the air by his ear, but Ed found it so much harder to care with his commander’s dulcet baritones there now.
“He says he’ll shoot me if you don’t cooperate, Ed.” The gun point in his back, the one that kept him pinned in place, seemed to dig in deeper at that. “He also says he’ll shoot you.”
“How - reassuring.”
“I can’t attack them, Ed. Now would be a wonderful time to pull one of those miracles out of your ass.”
Ed breathed hard at that - Roy was expecting him to do something; Roy wanted him to do this. Of course he did, if it meant saving them both. The mutually exclusive bits of his mind, hovering on opposite corners of his consciousness, one regarding pleasing Roy and the other regarding the morals he held so tight and close to his chest, suddenly stood off against one another, snarling in opposite corners. Teeth bared, fangs gnashing, and Ed couldn’t possibly give up one for the other, could he?
He whimpered, and the fog issued forth in steady, hazy puffs.
Then, from nowhere, a light in all the darkness. “No. We’ll let them take us.”
What he had said must have been particularly insane, because Mustang actually engaged in the effort of straining his neck to look at Ed, then.
“Isn’t that,” he said, white-washed against the snow and cautiously intrepid in the face of Ed’s madness, “what we’ve been trying to avoid? You know. Since they killed all our men and…shot me?”
Ed licked his lips before he went on, as if saying that would make the words come out easier. “Yes, but we’ve been looking at it all wrong see, they must know we’re important since they haven’t killed us yet…but they must not know what we can do. Because…they haven’t killed us yet.” Mustang slanted his brow.
“Don’t you g-get it? If they take us into custody, they’ll help you get better and then once we actually can escape, it’ll be as easy as -” a clap of his hands and they were all dead “-a snap of your fingers.”
Mustang rolled a bit to look at him, dubious. The Drachman spoke something, more rapidly than before, and that was all the warning Ed got before a gun went off again. It startled him enough that he froze when the bang issued from the barrel, and he couldn’t keep still in the face of the idea that oh god Mustang was dead, he wouldn’t shoot and miss twice, he wouldn’t-
But when he whipped around to face the man, anger making him unafraid, he saw that it hadn’t been the man with the gun in his back at all. It had been one from the group behind the alpha male so hellbent on intimidating him, and he was looking down the barrel of his gun as if puzzled. The man behind him looked back with Edward, gun not wavering, and howled out a huge guffawing laugh at the sight. It wasn’t long until all the men joined him.
Ed absolutely - balked. They were all fucking drunk. Ed turned back to give Mustang the same conspiratorial look. These men must have been told to take hostages, but they really did have absolutely no idea what they were dealing with. Who in their right mind took on Fullmetal and Flame drunk off their asses anyway?
On the ground, Mustang breathed out a sighing breath of a laugh, still so tired but Ed just couldn’t say resigned. “We let them take us.”
It was a grandiose affair getting Mustang on his feet again, requiring more shoving of guns in both of their faces. He was absolutely exhausted and Mustang was mostly dead, it was probably only the bullet hole marring the ground, stark and morose splay of soil like blood, that kept them moving between the two buffering layers of drunken buffoons as fast as they did. They intended to go with them, it made it easier to accept being pushed around when it was by their own volition, but the fact still remained that those were real guns, and these were real drunken bastards, and if they didn’t walk at just the right speed, either one of them could get their brains blown.
As Edward staggered ahead, bearing as much of Mustang’s weight for him as he could without outright carrying him on his back, he couldn’t help thinking about what a tight, thin, brittle rope he had put them both on just to avoid killing a few brainless thugs. He wanted to believe that throwing himself behind enemy lines was a good plan because honestly, how far could he get with Mustang like this? But he knew it was selfish, he was always selfish, everything he ever did was to save himself from his own over-critical sense of self-loathing. Wasn’t that why he’d restored his younger brother? To quell those feelings that were something like nausea - the ones that always had a way of creeping up the back of his throat, polluting his ears and eyes with a miasma of toxins that he could only dissolve with a reversal of the whole guilty affair. He was so, so selfish to put himself and a man that he cared for more than he liked to think about in a situation where any number of things could conspire horribly against them to take them down, just so that he could save his soul from himself.
He found himself looking over at Mustang then, who probably didn’t even realize what kind of danger Edward was leading him into half-dead as he was. He trusted Ed as blindly now as Alphonse had trusted him just before he’d dragged them both to hell. As if to punctuate the fact, Mustang clenched tighter at Ed from where his arm was grasping for support, smiled warmly down with lips dyed rust with drying blood. His eyes said he was proud of Ed and a thousand beetles crept against the ever-flowing current of Ed’s blood. Behind the pride and utter, unprecedented dependence was a sort of fever-madness that Ed knew was driving this. Mustang was not in his right mind. If he were, he would have stopped Ed’s nonsense plans ages ago.
But Ed tightened his hold protectively on Mustang too, though he was sure his eyes said nothing of pride in turn. Self-loathing filled him, pushing its fingers out of his mouth and greedily stealing the air before it ever hit his throat. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do.
Mustang opened his mouth, and there was fresh blood coating his teeth. Was it coming from his lungs? Had they finally torn themselves to pieces in the midst of all of the manic coughing that Mustang did during the day with all of his spastic efforts to tear his own body apart? Was it the bullet wound? Would Mustang live through the night, or was Ed just killing someone else he loved?
“Thank you,” he said, very quiet. “For being my crutch.”
Edward laughed - how else could he respond to something so absurd, really? “S’not much else I can do, is there? How are you feeling?”
Mustang’s eyes blazed, and Edward knew that every bone in his body was screaming behind that strange, incomprehensible gaze. “I.” A sharp breath. “Have been better.”
They walked like that for an hour at least. Edward knew because he could feel each minute pulling hard at his automail leg. It stung and ripped and maybe bled with the cold. Nothing new, it had done it before. He heard Mustang’s breaths getting more and more wet, and he knew that as the time wore on he stumbled just that much more. Every time he fell, Edward expected a gunshot, he expected to look over and see Mustang’s head somewhere on the ground in front of them, the warmth that Ed was depending on now to keep himself going leaking steadily onto his shoulder. But there was just yelling, maybe some scuffling if one of the men got caught up in Mustang’s legs as he tumbled and then a minute longer than Ed had ever known any minute could last as Mustang slowly, slowly, slowly gained his feet again.
By the end of the hour, when the stumbles happened every few minutes, the tension had mounted enough that Ed could feel it buzzing around him. He drove himself half-mad with the idea that Mustang might not be able to pick himself up this time, what was Ed thinking, now they were going to shoot him where he lay like a wounded animal that had expended its worth. True to this form, Ed clung to him with animal dependence and pleaded -
“For god’s sake - get up, get up, you’re fine, just a little bit more, just a bit - I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Please, one leg, then the other, good, good, you’re fine-”
He didn’t even know what he was saying anymore. He supposed nothing really had changed. He’d never known what he was saying his entire childhood. He usually only noticed the consequences after he’d said it.
When they got to camp the pace had decreased enough that the drunks were starting to notice it. They were also starting to sober enough to complain and brandish their guns just that much more menacingly. Ed could have cried at the sight of so many enemies congregated in one place, at the piles of artillery that would have made Ed blanch in fear and move in the opposite direction under any other circumstances. But as it was, Ed could have dropped to the ground and kissed it if there hadn’t been the general, leaning like a blushing virgin leaned on her elbows to beat her eyelashes at a pretty boy, heavy with dumb love. He breathed copper into Edward’s ear frantically, he squeezed with knuckles so devoid of blood they were slightly purple. At the sight of the camp, Ed felt tremor wrack all the way through Mustang. He imagined that was something like what dying felt like.
Finally.
Finally.
Finally - what? Finally he was in the nest of the enemies that could bring him either salvation or death. What was he thinking, what was he thinking, what the fuck was he -
There was an absence of warmth at his side, and Mustang was torn from him. He frothed in his fury, he snapped like he’d been cleaved in two. It was too much, the sudden loss of the man from his side was like automail detachment. He needed that there, he needed Mustang. He provided Ed with a purpose for everything he did, much like Al had. He knew the noise that ripped from him was more animal than anything, but that was alright. At least he was being consistent.
“Sons of bitches, give him - ” cold unfeeling hands replaced the tickle of Mustang’s hair on his shoulder. Meaty, grasping fingers roved over the planes where comfort in its most unusual form had existed mere seconds ago. Mustang needed him, a crutch. He could hardly stand on his own.
“Mustang!”
Without even thinking, blinded by rage and unable to see, just for a moment, where Mustang had disappeared to just beyond his peripheral vision in the face of these new and uncomfortable touches, Edward clapped his hands.
His brain was alight with every alchemic circle he knew for a moment, categorizing the damage that each one would make. Which one should he use? How much exactly did he want it to burn?
His vision cleared enough to see a man before him, big and burly and standing straight with the air that only a high-ranking officer could possibly possess, when he heard a commanding voice that quite clearly wasn’t Roy speaking Amestrian above all the garbled guttural Drachman voices.
“Fullmetal.” It said, then more Drachman, then hands forcing his own hands apart.
In the short moment of coherence between then and oblivion, Ed had enough sense to realize that he’d just intended to kill every man here. That he’d just intended to make them all feel the pain that blazed through his own veins at the thought of having Roy ripped from him.
It was the least comforting thought in the world, and he hated himself with unabashed abandon as he was hit over the head and cast roughly into unconsciousness.
Ed woke cold and alone and afraid to the sound of screaming and guns and explosions. He didn’t open his eyes immediately and he wasn’t sure he wanted to anyway. The world behind his eyelids was dark enough that there couldn’t possibly be any sun outside, whether the trees were keeping it from filtering to them or whether it was just the dark, dank coldness of night. He took a moment to gather himself, assess where he was and what was happening to his body. His automail was remarkably still intact, he could feel the feedback from his arm and leg more than he could see it, and he took a moment to wonder at the stupidity of these Drachman soldiers. He could escape them, he could escape them any time he wanted if only his damn head would stop pounding -
He opened his eyes and knew he’d been concussed. The world was topsy-turvy, swaying and looping and upside-down. He’d been hit in the head many times, but this wasn’t like anything that had ever happened before. He’d never been hit so hard the vertigo lingered like this, never so hard blows caused the nightmare world to weasel its way out of his dreams and become real. His arms were free and he tried to work them under him. He threw his head around like a horse trying to dispel its own blinders. Every time he moved though, the ground shifted, the colors melded together. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t have his alchemy, he didn’t know where he was, and he was scared.
Pathetically enough, “General!” was the first thing out of his mouth, wounded and frantic as his eyes shifted and the pain in his head flared and overwhelmed his senses. He could see smells, and the ground rippled with footsteps outside.
“General,” he said again. There was nothing. There was no one. Wherever he was, cold, concussed and confused, he was alone. He closed his eyes again, because seeing wasn’t worth it. His thoughts were just as manic, snowballing against one another and building something enormously dangerous.
Ed knew with a cold logical certainty that they had killed Roy. Of course they had killed Roy. How could he be stupid enough to think that they wouldn’t? Such a high-ranking officer, of course they’d want him out of the way. Edward didn’t know what he’d thought, what he’d stupidly assumed outside before. Let them capture us? Let them capture us indeed, Roy had to be dead now because of him. Why would they invest time and money in curing an enemy soldier?
Ed could feel his insides squirming, and he curled into himself as best he could. His esophagus was clogged with the gnarled trunk of a tree that had taken root somewhere in his heart, and every time his went to breathe the leaves rustled in his mouth and his throat contracted madly against that unmovable force in a frantic, useless effort. The trunk groaned in the face of his heaving gulps, which explained the moans that ripped themselves from him then, pained and desperate.
He’d killed Roy. He didn’t know why he was so ashamed of death now, not when he’d thought of killing so many countless men just before he’d been concussed out of his wits and half-mad with fear. He’d killed Roy and he was the worst man there was.
Just then there was a trace of a touch on his back. Something soft on the flat plane of it, feather-light through the coat that miraculously hadn’t been ripped from him. Not alone, then.
He opened his eyes, but the world still swayed sickly, so he moaned again, and the petting became heavier. He didn’t like the disembodied touches if only because he didn’t like to imagine where they could be coming from. Who else was in this camp but Roy and a few Drachman bastards? And Roy was dead.
Roy had to be dead.
Why did Roy have to be dead?
He whimpered, the miraculous hand learned speech and shushed him, and he slipped away again.
“What’d they do to him?”
“Fuck if I know. You think he’ll be okay?”
“Can’t say. He seems - upset.”
“Goddamnit - just a kid. Just a fuckin’ kid.”
When he woke again there was light. He could see as much quite clearly through the haze of his eyelids. It was too bright against his eyes, and his head throbbed with every tangible ray. He remembered his unsuccessful attempt to regain a sitting position the last time he’d woken, and now he realized why that had been such an impossibility. His prior assessment of his bodily condition had come up short. Further inspection revealed that they’d continued beating him after he went down. He grazed fingers gently over his face, his lips. Twinges of pain flared from over-extended flesh as flakes of dried blood drifted quietly to the ground.
Damn. There wasn’t a piece of him that didn’t ache fiercely, and, opening his eyes and looking down at his body from his miserable vantage, it seemed there wasn’t a piece of him that wasn’t mottled by fresh blue and black bruises. He didn’t attempt to get up. It wasn’t that he didn’t think he could necessarily, because he’d made his body work in more adverse conditions, but there didn’t seem to be any will left in him. He didn’t want to, so he didn’t.
To make matters worse, hunger gnawed spitefully at his gut, a doleful ache that seemed to say that he wouldn’t be moving at all until it was satisfied. Those two sad, thin biscuits seemed so far away now - almost as distant as his feeling going to bed that night, desolation coming purely from the trivial little worry of a skipped dinner, hope coming solely from the promise of breakfast on the horizon. Life now was a hard ground, a veritable galaxy of scars and bruises, a cold certainty that Mustang was dead, and thoughts of Al, hundreds of miles away and longing for his older brother. Edward yearned for that night and that dark, heavy sleep.
It was only then that he bothered to look around him. He was on the cold ground, flumped on one side like all the life had fallen from him. All he could see when he looked ahead was a watery-bright strip of canvas - the wall of a tent no doubt. Casting his eyes up, down, left, right yielded only stretches of moist, hard-packed earth. He was inside a tent somewhere in Drachman camp, cold and limp and useless as the day he was born. He might have been able to do something if he’d felt bothered enough to stretch out a hand or to clap, but vague recollection of his inane plan and a deep, shameful fear of bringing anymore pain on himself than he already had stopped him dead.
He knew he ought to turn over. He was inside a tent, up against a wall, who the hell knew what was on the other side of it? He could just be making a show for Drachman soldiers if he moved. He mulled over it for a moment before he finally decided that yes, it was worth the effort, before gathering his strength to turn. Just as he finally felt prepared, foreign voices sounded from outside the tent somewhere behind him and then there was the heavy clunking of multiple sets of boots tromping into the small space. Edward could hear their guns clicking, could smell the smell he’d come to identify as distinctly Drachman in his short time in their company. They wore fur on their heavy uniforms, so they often smelled like a wet animal, heavy and putrid. A wet animal that had rolled in vodka and gunpowder.
He wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes, willing the sour foulness away from his aching head, just as he was pulled roughly from the ground. Voices came quick and rough, too slurred for Ed, a mediocre speaker of Drachman, to even begin to understand. His feet dangled off the ground, and he felt his toes skim the earth with each swaying motion of the Drachman’s meaty fist. He shied away from the hand, refused to open his eyes, and hoped against all hope that they would leave him alone for just a bit longer.
The arm shook him, the knuckles brushing across his swollen jaw and bringing a ragged hiss from the back of his throat, and Ed knew that he would have no such luck.
“Fullmetal,” someone said suddenly, and it was a word that Ed knew in that voice. It was the officer from earlier, still commanding as ever, this time close enough that his warm breath gusted across Ed’s face. “You are the Fullmetal one, yes?”
Ed nodded, just because he didn’t really know the protocol involved in captor-captive situations, and while spitting in his face seemed like a good option, it probably was not the most viable. Who knew how many guns the other people in this room had, where he was, how he could escape if he even managed to from this one set of grasping fingers -
“Open your eyes, listen. You know why you are brought here, yes?” Ed slitted his eyes in response and the light burned, explosive little pops behind his eyeballs. His fingers twitched with unexpended power, and his eyes wept it from their corners like tears.
“Can’t say I do,” he rasped.
The man smiled a crooked smile that glinted yellow in Ed’s over-taxed retinas. “You will want to get rid of that attitude.”
Ed was about to ask why the hell should I, you’ve robbed me of everything you asshole, I could kill you right here -
Through his wavering vision, Ed saw the man turn his head and nod to a group of snow-covered Drachman’s off to the side. They all nodded in return, exited, and returned almost immediately with a limp form covered in familiar Amestris blues, and Ed found hidden strength almost immediately. His legs wanted to walk again, his arms wanted to touch and hold and find a pulse.
“His wounds are bandaged, but he is not in clear,” the words were crisp, rolling off of his tongue in such a smooth and easy accented tone that Ed wondered at it. How was it possible to speak of life and death, this man’s life and death, with such cold clarity? Ed squirmed and clutched fruitlessly at the fist. “You care about him. You are clearly not practiced in war, you care too much, you show too much.” Images of his headstone flashed across his vision again - here lies Edward Elric, he cared far too much - and Ed barked the man in the kneecap with as much strength as his current leverage and concussion and shock allowed him to.
Ed didn’t expect to be on the ground, but he found himself there quite suddenly. The General lay in an unmoving heap a few feet away, and Ed didn’t even think about alchemy or the soldiers or the consequences of what he’d just done before he was scrambling unsteadily on all fours toward him. He needed to verify through touch that he was still alive; this was important, this was key.
Not considering the soldiers turned out to be a bad idea though, and he only had a split second between the moment he saw the booted foot before him and the moment it made impact with the bleeding gash on his forehead to consider that perhaps this wasn’t the best stab he could have taken at captor-captive protocol.
“Yes. You see. You make too easy,” he heard again, smug and satisfied and filtering through his daze. “He is alive, I assure you.”
He became aware of himself and the boot poised just above his kidney pressing a steady, even, threatening pressure into his tender belly just a moment later. He dared to slit his eyes again only to find the same yellow-toothed officer hovering just beyond his reach. He twitched his arm as if to punch his smug-ass mug, that asshole, that insufferable fucker - and the boot on his gut pressed down hard. He could feel each little stitch, each imprint in his starved stomach and he gasped aloud before the CO barked a Drachman order and the boot relinquished its hold on his consciousness.
With another abrupt order, the boot moved to press hard on his human hand, and Ed wondered at that a moment before the explanation came on another putrid, steamy exhale. “Can’t let you drawing circles yet.”
Ed’s head no longer pounded or ached with each beat of his heart but it just straight out hurt like a motherfucker. He hoped there was nothing wrong with his skull, with his brain - lord only knew these fuckers wouldn’t do a thing about it.
“Circles?” he managed, voice weak.
He received a kick to his ribs for that remark, pain blossoming and distracting from the swollen mess of his head as he felt something give way under the heavy sole. He tried to curl onto his side defensively, but more boots on his kidneys pinned him in place and so he just heaved hard breaths beneath them until he felt like he could properly take in air again.
The man continued, leering, “Don’t play jokes, don’t make dumb, we know you are alchemist. We know you are Fullmetal one. You play with elements and alloys like child toys for filthy Amestris government, and now you will do so here.”
Maybe it was the concussion, maybe it was the conditions, maybe it was the fact that someone had just fractured his fucking ribcage - but Ed simply wasn’t following. He licked his lips and tossed his head. He could just see Mustang out of the corner of his eye, but he did his best to keep from looking because he could also see a veritable sea of dark brown boots, all surrounding that tender stomach, that open wound. They could kick him as much as they wanted, so long as they didn’t disturb the very tenuous balance Mustang seemed to have between life and death. “I don’t understand,” he said.
There was another short exchange in Drachman, and then he was hoisted again. Two sets of hands this time, and he could feel the difference in their fists holding his arms in place behind him from the head bastard, the man in charge. Mustang was lifted before his eyes with a man on each of his limbs, swinging carelessly between them like a rag doll, and the arms on his were the only thing that kept Ed from pouncing. They were so careless, and he was such a precious thing to be swinging around like that.
The men carrying Mustang walked out the canvas flap, and before it swung shut, he saw them take a sharp turn to the right. He logged that away. If Mustang was alive, continued to be alive, he was alive in that direction.
Shortly after, they walked him slowly out of the tent and into a smoky world of snow and filth. Drachman soldiers peered at him from row upon row of shoddily constructed tents, spitting on his boots as he walked past. His hair and his eyes, grimy and clouded with rusty red as they were, must have been a beacon in this dreary hellhole. So easy to spot, it might make it harder to escape if he had to make a break for it with Mustang later. Lucky for him, Mustang fit in just -
And unexpected blow cracked brutally against the stinging wound at his temple. It was one too many hits to his already pounding head, and his vision whited out for a moment. When it returned, he found himself upright solely because of the rough hands on his arms. In front of him lay a thick and heavy glass bottle steadily leaking some sort of alcohol onto the hard-packed earth and dying the snow there a dark amber. His knees were weak and wobbly and he could feel spikes of horrible pain with each beat of his pulse, but again he was forced on.
“He says you look like woman,” the commanding officer put in airily from somewhere ahead of him. “Your hair. A woman’s hair.” Ed’s hair hung loose and lank and stringy and sticky from his head, and he wondered vaguely, brain fuzzing like radio static, why this mattered at all. Hawkeye was a woman, and she was a better soldier than any of these motherfuckers.
A hail of laughter followed every step of his unsteady, bowlegged, limping gait - with all the excitement, he’d almost forgotten how very fucked his automail was - all the way into a tent that was bigger than the rest, strips of canvas hoisted high above his head and running with the colors of Drachma’s flag. Behind the flaps of the doorway Ed found a jungle of rusty red bayonets, mud-clogged rifles, guns and scrap metals of all sorts clogging the entry way. On the far side of the tent was a small work table of rough particle board. The commanding officer came forward and spoke again in his rough Amestrian tongue. “Here. You do your work for Mother Drachma now.”
Ed’s tongue was heavy in his mouth as realization started to dawn on him. “Where’s the General?”
The Drachman raised his eyebrow pointedly, disbelief wrinkling his brow. “Xingan General is alive. He will be alive so long as you recycle our metals, fix our weapons. Fullmetal.”
And didn’t that just fucking figure.
“Is he - well cared for? Is he alright?”
“I tire, I tire of your caring. You care too much, it is too much. You fix our weapons, he lives. That is all.” He waved a hand and muttered something, and the hands on his released. Unsteady on his own, Ed stumbled forward toward a pile of scrap metal, close enough that he could see bloody stains still clinging tenaciously to some of the objects in the pile. One bayonet on top, freshly severed from its gun it seemed, shimmered with blood that hadn’t yet gone to rust, and Ed felt his stomach turn within him at the sight.
Eyes still on the pile of death in front of him Ed whispered, “If he dies?”
The answer came in a quick snap, and Ed knew he’d pushed too far. “He will not.”
But that didn’t stop him from pushing more. “He’s ill. His lungs.”
“Medicines, antibiotics, he will have them while you work.”
“Can I see him again?”
“Too much, it is too much, shut your mouth. Here.” He stepped forward, grabbed the bloody bayonet from the top of the heap in one hand and a blown-out rifle in the other. He thrust them out to Ed, tipping his head pointedly toward the particle board work station. “I see you fix.”
Ed’s hands shook at his sides. He couldn’t help but think that this was just more of the same, more of what he’d been so violently opposed to. He shouldn’t transmute this gun back together so that it could kill more of his fellow soldiers, take countless more lives, just for the sake of one man he wanted to see make it through the night. The choice should have been easy. Between the lives of these men and the lives of his men, between the life of Mustang and the life of his country - the choice should have been clear. But Ed’s moral compass was not infallible, and Ed would do anything in his power to keep the only constant adult figure he’d had in his life since the age of twelve alive. The choice should have been simple, and it was. Just not in the way it should have been.
Besides, it wasn’t as if this had to last long. Just so long as Mustang was recovering. When he was well enough to escape with Ed, it would be a very simple thing to do. And why wouldn’t it with two alchemists on their side?
Trembling fingers reached out for the two torn pieces, and Ed walked toward the table as he would have in a funeral procession. The grimy bayonet did very little to sully the already rust-dyed glove on his flesh hand, and if anything the blown gun in his right hand chipped away some of the lingering dried blood. When he reached the table, he set them gently on the splintery surface and solemnly lifted his hands to clap.
Fingers almost touching, a voice rang out, “Quit fooling, draw your circle.” Ed - stopped. Blinked. Allowed the slow-turning cogs to work the frost and blows off before…
Was it really possible that these people weren’t aware of his ability? It’s true that in Amestris most people didn’t know, that it was a novelty in every new town he visited, but he had assumed that that novelty was the only thing keeping him alive in the enemy’s clutches. After all, any alchemist could draw a circle to make weaponry, but he had the advantage of being able to do it that much faster.
He dropped his hands to his side, looked back over, smiled grimly. He said, “You caught me,” and then reached for the piece of chalk at the other end of the table. His heart pounded, the telling cracks in his ribs pulsed, and his head throbbed as he took the chalk in his hand.
If they needed him to transmute their weapons, thinking he was just a standard alchemist for Amestris, nothing special, no big deal - then it was quite possible that these people knew absolutely nothing of what alchemy was capable of. They couldn’t know, could they? What a circle looked like, what properly performed alchemy looked and felt like when it saturated the air -
He started drawing. He knew all the proper elements off the top of his head, down to the last bits of iron in the blood on the surface, and it was so easy to call the images to his fingers, manifest it with the chalk in his hands. But it was also so, so easy to - slip every once in a while. The first mistake was a slight waver on the symbol for the metal, a minute little wiggle in the arc of the curve that spoke of a weakness. It sent a secret little thrill up Ed’s spine to draw it, and he licked his lips and glanced around at the soldiers watching him, looking closely for any sign of recognition. There was none, they stood straight and tall at attention. All of them looked wary, as if they had only seen the effects of alchemy on the battlefield and were leery of any alchemist, no matter how much he seemed to lie under the thumb of the law. The tip of a gun in the small of his back reminded Ed quite effectively of the very real threat on his and Mustang’s lives if he made this little fuck-up too blatant.
The head goon just looked smug, like he knew they had Ed cornered, like he knew Ed wouldn’t take Mustang’s life into risk. And he was right in that respect - Ed wouldn’t. He would transmute their weapons, but this he could do, this he could. He grasped at whatever power he could have like a lifeline. It wasn’t much in the great scheme of things, a wonky gun or two, but this he could do.
The second mistake was in the last symbol he drew, and by then he had begun to get bolder. It was a disruption in the flow of the material, a slightly more blatant mistake than his last. To any eye highly trained in the alchemic arts it might have even been apparent, read as more of a sabotage than an error, given that it really wasn’t a mistake so much as it was a conscious decision to put a hole in the matter he should have been seeking to mend. He glanced around discreetly, sweat beading his brow, and willed his trembling fingers not to betray him when he finished the circle off with his token flourish. But the soldiers did not fire, or cock their weapons, and when no one jumped forth to stop him, no one brandished a gun or threatened Mustang’s life, Ed smiled unabashedly, deliriously happy to have some degree of control back in his life. He couldn’t imagine what it looked like from their point of view - captured, covered in filth and grinning liked a maniac - but it was obviously the most incriminating thing they had witnessed thus far, nevermind the paper thin weakness that would be in the barrel of the gun.
“Stop your smiles,” said the commanding officer. He then wiggled his hand a bit, putting the enlisted men on what Ed could only assume was a higher alert, given that they all lifted their guns and jabbed at him a bit. Ed saw a younger soldier swallow convulsively. “What is there to be smiling about?”
Ed lifted both his hands to the edge of the circle, huffed a breath, ignored the twin aches of his head and stomach, and said, “Nothing, I just - love alchemy.” Hand’s tightened on guns, soldiers breathed in like it was the last breath they expected to take, fingers twitched on triggers, just waiting for the array to go ever so slightly awry and -
And then the transmutation began. It was clearly not good alchemy, any novice would have recognized that the yellow light vomiting sluggishly from the lines wasn’t exceptionally effective or powerful. But almost all of the enlisted men shied away almost immediately, lifting hands to shield their eyes from the mediocre light. Their attention switched from suspicious to abruptly fascinated as the gun and bayonet miraculously became one in front of them, just as they’d been bade to do.
The officer just grinned, jaundiced in the sickly yellow light and looking like the cat who had just landed the alchemically enhanced canary.
It was such a pathetic transmutation to impress him, such a far cry from what he was generally capable of, but the same sense of pleased satisfaction came to him as the transmutation died out and all that was left was the circle, silence, and an innocuously clean and complete weapon stark against the particle board. It would fire, once or twice maybe, before the weakness of the metal would give to the brutal, primal power of the bullets and it would simply crumble.
“Good,” the officer said, hefting the gun. He closed one eye and pointed the muzzle in Ed’s direction. “Good. Feed him, he will start work tomorrow.” He lowered the gun and smiled wickedly.
“And - and the General,” Ed suggested with some trepidation.
“And the General. Feed him as well.”
And Ed let himself be led away from the tent, let himself be dragged and humiliated, because things would work out now - Ed would make things work out now - and they would live.
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