Fic: Dawn (3/4)
Title: Dawn, Part 3 of 4
Pairings/Characters: Edward, Roy
Rating: M/R
Genre: Drama, Angst
Spoilers: None - Alternate ending, TWT?
Word Count: +/- 6300
Cumulative Word Count: +/- 23100
Warnings: Language, violence, gore, torture, implied rape.
Summary: Ed and Roy are stuck in a war zone. Gratuitous hurt!Roy for the sake of hurt!Roy ensues.
Previous Parts: 1 2
Notes: In keeping with my ambitious once-yearly update schedule, here is part 3. This was originally supposed to be the final part, but I've decided to split the last chapter. It should be out sometime next year, after I've finished my fmabigbang fic. Sorry for the delay. Thanks for sticking with me -- know that I will finish this fic if it kills me, damnit. Also, thanks again to ketita for hand-holding. Much love.
Enjoy!
That night, Ed couldn't find any way to lie on the ground that didn't aggravate every ache and pain he had accumulated that day. The outlines of the guards were stark against the canvas of the tent, glowing and flickering with lanterns outside. His leg was a sullen dead weight pulling at his thigh, and everything, everything, everything was far too cold. The only concession they had made to his comfort was a thin thatch mat that separated him from the chill of the earth but did very little to insulate him from the horrible, strength-sapping cold of the night air.
One of the strangest things was the sound of the voices outside. He'd never really contemplated how very familiar Amestrian was or how accustomed he was to falling asleep and waking to Mustang's soothing speech, nor had he ever contemplated quite how ugly Drachman was, or quite how strange it would be to be surrounded by a language he couldn't understand. It gave him and overwhelming sense of paranoia, because they could be talking about the weather or they could be talking about how Mustang was being strangled a few tents down and Ed wouldn't ever know the difference.
Mustang.
Ed thought of Mustang, and it made him cold and alone and afraid and shameful, and he wanted so badly to curl in on himself, bring his knees to his chest and cry there, but his leg was a dead weight, his ribs didn't want to bend that way, and his head hurt so badly that he didn't think he could find the tears. He rolled onto his back, and the ceiling of the tent roiled like the sea and swelled like nausea. Maybe it was better that he couldn't sleep, because he really had one hell of a concussion. He tried to think back on all the times he'd been hit in the head that day, and decided it must be a relatively high figure because he couldn't seem to remember all of them.
On top of everything, his stomach was upset. They'd fed him some sort of thick, greasy porridge that burned all the way down and coated his throat in ash. It sat in his stomach like a rock, seemed like a solid block despite the fact that he was almost sure it had gone down in separate syrupy spoonfuls. He wasn't entirely sure, because he had wolfed it down almost too quickly to taste how utterly horrible it was. Honestly, he was very lucky that his gag reflex had stopped working ages ago.
He sighed, rolled over, felt uncomfortable, worrisome twinges from all over, and didn't sleep that night.
Ed vomited on his first transmutation circle. His head was not getting better. The walk to the tent where the weapons were held had been grueling; the light reflecting off of the snow had been too much for his over-sensitive eyes. He couldn't focus, his head hurt, his stomach churned, and eventually, it had all been too much. He fucking hated looking so pathetic in front of these bastards, but focusing on the thin lines of the transmutation circle had finally done him in.
The guards brandished their guns like it would make him magically stop hurting - neither of them knew Amestrian. It was clear they'd been given strict, specific instructions that didn't account for their dangerous charge getting sick all over their pet project. Ed leaned on one arm and tried to recover his wits, but there was nothing but white spots in his vision, and hell, for all he knew he could be bleeding from his brain.
He turned to the guards, and as slowly and loudly as his aching head would allow he said, "Doctor."
His efforts got him shoved with the butt of a gun. He wasn't sure if they expected him to go back to drawing in the puddle of his own sick, or if they were testing to see if he would just fall over when touched. If they'd been going for the latter, they got exactly what they wanted. His balance was gone, his equilibrium totally thrown, and his automail knee was still fucked anyway. It gave out, and he tipped to the left.
That, at least, seemed to get their attention. One of them mumbled something to the other and then meandered off in the direction of the tent flap. While Ed contemplated getting back on his feet using the rough, unsteady particle board table, wondering absently if it would tip and leave him covered in his own mess, the butt of a rifle appeared in his vision. Instinctively, he flinched away, covering his tender skull with an automail arm before he realized - the guard was helping him up.
Huh. It was such an out of character act of - not kindness, not necessarily. Conscientiousness, really. The picture that the rifle butt presented contrasted so strangely to the drunken, gun-wielding assholes from the day before that his aching head didn't quite know how to deal with it all. But that thought was cut off as the Amestrian-speaking General he'd become so familiar with strolled into the tent with an expression that said he just couldn't be fucked with Ed's nausea. The gun pulled out of his vision as the soldier saluted, and instead, the General pulled him roughly from the ground himself, tugging at Ed's many aches with strong, calloused hands.
He said, "You are more trouble than good."
And Ed repeated, "Doctor," as the sudden change in position sent the room spinning and his stomach churning again.
The General shouted something at the two soldiers, doubtless outraged by the fact that his captives did little more than absorb their resources. He seemed to debate with himself on the merits of taking Ed to the infirmary, keeping a firm hold on Ed's arm.
"I take you, they give you medicine, and then you work."
"Yes," he said quietly. "Then."
And with a powerful tug at his arm, they were off again. The two guards seemed to mull over following before they finally decided that one of them would suffice. Ed tried to pay attention to where they were and where they were going. It was important to situate himself in the camp if he ever wanted to escape from it. But everything spun and swayed sickly, and they moved so fast that Ed was having a difficult time not concentrating on his footwork. By the time they got there Ed could only figure that they had gone mostly left. His tent, the tent where he spent his nights on a cold thatch mat, was mostly to the right.
He was just attempting to retrace his steps, trying to figure where he had entered when -
There was Mustang. On a cot in the corner of the tent. It was blessedly warm. He had a blanket, and there was a whole pitcher of water at his bedside. It was more than Ed ever could have asked for. He was alive, and he was warm, and he was -
"-dog will not tell me what is wrong, I will let him- " the General shook him, Mustang wavered and faded out of his vision, and Ed's knees justgave again. But this time, the General was there. He held him steady, and Ed could almost swear he also held back the bile pushing up his throat with some sheer force of will. He seemed determined to ensure that he wasn't made a fool of, which probably meant that the decision to keep two Amestrian alchemists within the camp was not a popular opinion, and was an opinion he was probably responsible for. Interesting.
He kept his eyes on the doctor now, but he couldn't stop them flickering back to Mustang. He shifted in his sleep and coughed a little, and Ed wanted so badly for him to wake up. And see him, say something, tell him to stay strong or keep forward or tell him he was doing the right thing transmuting these weapons. Oh god, Ed didn't know how he was doing this alone.
He finally answered, "My head," with a vague gesture at the tear in the skin there.
The doctor grabbed him roughly by the chin, muttered something in Drachman, and there was no warning before there was a light shining into his pupils. He hissed, felt tender and abused and tired. There was a conspicuously empty bed next to his General and he could - he wanted - if he could just have a moment back there in that tent. Comforted and protected and secure.
After a bit more prodding, the General relayed the doctor's message to him. "You are concussed."
Ed took a moment to marvel at the medical ingenuity. The doctor gave him a pill from a stash that had clearly been stolen from the med tent at their own camp, which was more of a shock to Ed's system than he ever could have imagined. Maybe that fire hadn't been all-encompassing, maybe it had spared something, maybe there was someone looking for them.
They gave him the rest of the day off. The General escorted him back to his tent, and Ed paid very close attention to the route indeed.
Ed counted seven days after that, over a week he had been in this hellhole. Day one had been wrought with more confusion and sensitive eyes - perhaps too little fudging on the part of the weapons he'd "repaired." It was a sad measure of his competency as an alchemist that he was better able to successfully fix a weapon than to unsuccessfully fix one. Day two saw more coherency. They seemed to remember he needed water at some point, and he got it when they saw fit. But even that little bit was more than enough to sustain him, power whatever mechanism in his brain spat out arrays. Days three through five saw the beginnings of normalcy creeping into this most abnormal situation. Ed felt well enough that his weapons were nearly perfectly imperfect. He found the most effective method of fudging guns, he developed alloys that looked strong but crumpled under pressure. And his effective ineffectiveness was rewarded in days six and seven, which saw the guards growing more and more secure in their positions and the General more and more smug.
They began to get complacent. The General was obviously being rewarded for the risk he'd taken, and he saw fit to treat Ed well because of that. Well. "Well" was a relative term here - his ribs hadn't suffered any more violent attacks, his head was healing over nicely, and on the seventh day, at dinner, he got bread to eat.
As Ed tried not to look too desperate inhaling it, the General said, "He recovers," like he was doing Ed some great favor. Ed hated to look pathetic, but in all honesty - he was. Ed clung to any information about Roy with greedy abandon. Usually, he had to listen closely for words he recognized in Drachman conversation as he transmuted weapon after weapon after weapon. He could hardly believe that such a succulent tidbit was being offered so freely.
"Oh. Thanks," Ed said.
"It is nothing. Tomorrow, you start more."
Ed didn't have time to think up a response before the General was gone.
Later, alone in the tent, the bread soaking up some of the hunger that had been gnawing at him since he'd toted Mustang away from the flaming ruins of their camp, he thought he felt good enough to find Roy. It was why he'd memorized the route when he'd been concussed, but he'd been too consumed by hunger and pain and exhaustion to even think about making the ten minute trek over there, avoiding guards and soldiers and doctors and dealing with his broken automail. Performing transmutations all day with very little sleep meant that he was often too tired to even consider moving, to even consider sacrificing any of the precious few hours he got to sleep.
But tonight he felt lucky. Well-rested and lucky.
It was easy enough to slip under the heavy canvas of the back of the tent. A hostage meant that they didn't really bind him, and the barricade at the border of the camp meant that they didn't feel the need to post guards all around the tent. Even if he escaped out the back and tried to flee the camp, there was really nowhere to go. But he wasn't trying to flee the camp, now.
His arms were bound together with a simple, rough rope. He didn't know what they hoped to prevent besides a good night's sleep, because he could have drawn a circle easily if he felt the need, and he probably could have slipped the knot even without alchemical augmentation. But tonight, he needed both his hands, and he needed the rope intact to prevent any suspicion, so it was a simple enough matter to clap, stretch the fibers on the rope a bit, and pull his hands free. His automail knee was going to be a problem no matter what, so he just concentrated on trying to find the right pattern of step.
And it was working until he hit the first guard, just around the front of his tent. He lost his momentum and stumbled, and his knee clattered, and the guard looked around stupidly from his post at the door. Ed had a few panicked moments of silently pleading the guard not to look inside the tent for him too soon - they usually only poked their heads in once every two hours, when the sentries shifted. Ed figured he had about an hour and forty-five minutes left if everything went according to plan. The sentry casually scratched his neck and didn't look into the empty tent, and Ed very consciously didn't sigh in relief before moving on.
He fell back into the shadow of his tent and looked over to the right, taking shelter behind a tent there. From what he'd seen, he was housed in a group of larger tents on the outskirts of the camp. Things would become easier once he moved into the confusion of the soldiers' housing. That was a sea unruly commotion, drunkenness and revelry. Everyone, including the general and his guarding soldiers at the weaponry tent, seemed in such good humor it was safe to say that the Drachmans had likely executed some sort of victory against the Amestrians in the last few days. And that was bad news for his country, but in its own way, his only very selfish way, it was fantastic news for Ed.
He skipped easily behind three more overly large tents, covered with snow and crackling with ice. His knee groaned with this cold, and he silently willed to stop as he approached a big, muddy road that he recognized. It led to the center of the camp first, and later, to the other edge of it. To the medical tent. He couldn't take it directly, but he skimmed along behind tents that ran along it easily enough.
The guard was lax, the soldiers were relaxed. Before the snow had even seeped into his boots, he had passed the tent housing all his transmutation circles and fudged weapons. It loomed large and glorious amongst the tiny troops' tents, and Ed caught himself looking at it too long before -
The tent he was hiding behind shook, and a Drachman man stumbled out. He dragged a woman out behind him, his hand tight around her upper arm, and she was like a splash of color in this dark world of furs and ice and mud Ed found himself trapped in. She had to be Amestrian. Her coloring was Amestrian, her features were delicate like an Amestrian. Her face was flushed red, her lips were wet and rimmed in dark smudges like bruises, and her blonde hair was loose in slick, sweaty rivers down the sides of her face. She was beautiful, and Ed saw his own horror mirrored in her light blue eyes.
Ed was, before anything, reminded of Winry. He was little more than a stranger to war, and he'd heard stories about men going crazy from having seen the faces of their loved ones on the battlefield. But Ed hadn't seen a battlefield, not really. He'd seen one desperate kill in an alcove with only his dying superior officer to serve witness, and there hadn't been time to mix faces, but here he was confronted with Winry - panting, bruised, battered Winry, and he lost sight of Mustang for a moment, reaching out a hand to her over the canvas tent before he even really had a chance to take her all in.
Everything then happened very quickly.
The woman, showing fire that made Edward really believe he'd made the right choice associating her with Winry, spit in the Drachman soldier's face and jerked her arm away, rushing toward Edward. There was dawning realization in her eyes, and Ed knew that he was a hero she'd seen in newspapers. Oh, hell if he needed this now.
But as she got closer, Ed noticed certain things that he hadn't taken in before, when she was hidden around the front end of the tent. Her skirt was in absolute tatters, splattered grimly with drops of blood, and hiked down on one side to reveal flashes of bare skin and bruises on the sides of her hips. She walked with a limp, and her feet had to be cold bare as they were in the sloppy, icy muck covering the ground. Every step closer to him made a morosely comical sucking noise as she struggled away from the Drachman man. He waited, face flushed in a different way, and he smelled of the same wet animal drunkenness that everyone here did.
She reached Ed and touched him reverently before throwing her arms about him like he was some kind of savior. Which was funny too in its own grim way, because she was taller than him, and her greater weight was over-balancing his fucked knee. But she whispered easy, unaccented Amestrian words in his ear, and it was a moment of unfathomable beauty before -
He felt her ripped from him and thrown to the ground. His arms were still extended to hold her, he could still feel her hair whispering against his cheek, and Ed, a country boy who had been raised bowing to women and respecting women and holding his mother upon a pedestal of greatness, couldn't really fathom how she'd ended up on the ground. How could any man abuse his strength like that against a creature like her? Ed knew a lot of kick ass ladies, but that healthy fear and knowledge that there were many women who could absolutely lay him flat, always came with the knowledge that women, especially women in distress, deserved to be treated a certain way, and this most certainly was not it.
He punched with his automail fist before the drunk fucker even knew what hit him. The Winry that wasn't Winry rose shakily even as he dropped like a stone, covered in mud now and terrified. It was strange how that anger hadn't really given him time to think, how that harsh knife blade of feeling had cut clean through his better judgment unlike a hell of a lot of other feelings had. But then, that hadn't been alchemy, it had been shattering a man's jaw. He would live, but he'd have a fucking hard time eating solid foods for a while. Bastard.
Ed turned to the woman and tried to look better than he felt, hand lightly squeezing the abused flesh on her upper arm.
"What's your name?" he said softly.
"Louisa," she said. "You're the Fullmetal Alchemist. Did you come for me?"
It was such an innocent question that it made Ed sick. Because it made him think back to the one hundred individuals Ed hadn't really given a damn about. Even now he couldn't stop his mind flashing to Mustang, what this meant for getting to Mustang, and what it would mean for Mustang if she was caught. Ed didn't come for her, no one from the Amestrian military would come for her. She was a pretty young woman with a promising future, and she was one hundred percent expendable.
So Ed said, "No." Her face fell. Ed's bleeding heard throbbed uncomfortably, caught between his usual value for human life and the callousness that war had put there. "But here, let's see if we can't help you or get you somewhere safe or something." Ed had no idea what the fuck he had just promised.
Heads were starting to pop out of tents. They hadn't yet focused on two of the most obtrusive heads in the camp, blonde in the midst of black, peeking from between tents halfway to the med bay. But it wouldn't be long before they did. Ed didn't know what to do, so Ed took off running. Louisa knew enough to follow and stay close, and she hissed in pain when her feet struck ice or rocks. Eventually, she caught up enough to take Ed's hand, and that's why Ed felt it when she dropped.
He was puzzled when her dead weight pulled him down - he'd been clamped to her just as much as she had to him. It had been such an odd moment of danger and companionship, camaraderie borne of fear behind enemy lines that he'd never really had a chance to make with his fellow soldiers. His knee gave, and he looked back to see -
Winry's face. Sightless, staring eyes and a tiny pin-prick of a hole leaking blood from her forehead. He gasped out a strangled shout, struggled to disentangle her hand from his still clamped so hard in death, and was only then able to see Winry's little nose dissolve into a slightly less shapely one, to see the blood running over freckles that Winry had never had. He was too startled, too alarmed for discretion now. That had been a practiced shot and it could have taken him out but instead it just made it clear that they wouldn't kill him. They'd catch him now, he'd made too much of a ruckus, but he needed something before they exiled him back to his tent. Fuck it all he could see the med tent and he needed to see Mustang.
Willing himself up and away from this new blemish on Ed's overtaxed conscience, tears welling up in burning bands under his eyes, Ed staggered to the toward the med tent. He wouldn't escape, he wasn't sure he'd ever intended to escape or even where he'd intended to go in the first place. But now there was just a single-minded determinedness to get to Mustang, nothing mattered if he got to fucking Mustang -
Three soldiers hit him before he ever made it there, and a hail of blows accompanied the sinking despair of knowing that he'd never be able to see him, now.
To Ed's surprise, though, they just led him around the front of the med tent, into the warm enclosure that smelled like infection and medicine.
Mustang was asleep at the back of the tent, just as Ed knew he would be. The soldiers slackened their grip for an instant at the mouth of the tent, and Ed jerked free of them. He loped across the tent unevenly, panting roughly, and just at the edge of the cot his breathing stuttered and his automail knee gave and his flesh knee wobbled and he fell, half on his bed, arms clutching like Louisa's had in desperation.
He couldn't get the pictures out his head. Ed was naïve but he wasn't so naïve that he didn't know what a big, burly Drachman soldier was doing with a very pretty, very young, and very kidnapped Amestrian woman in his tent. He thought of what her final hours must have been like, he thought of how she probably would have lived and been raped and raped and raped but alive without Ed's piss poor timing, and he grasped blindly at Mustang's clean white shirt. Mud and blood rubbed off in his throes of misery, desperation - wake up wake up wake up.
And - Mustang woke with a startled release of air that sent him into a coughing fit. He curled in close to Edward with the force of his coughing, and Edward let out a whining, needy gasp at the closeness.
"Mustang, oh fuck, oh fuck Mustang -"
"E-E-E," Mustang got out his name slowly as the cough quieted, staccato bursts and the most beautiful thing Ed had ever heard. "Edward," he said finally, hands finding him, patting him, touching him. Blessed, blessed warmth that made every life Ed had to give worth it -
"You're bleeding Ed, what are you -? What's going on?"
The guards were on him before the first clear, welling tear had joined the mud and blood. Really, it took them longer than he would have guessed. They jerked him back and bound his hands, still raining spontaneous blows and - the warmth lingered on his hand, tingled at his joints.
It had been worth it.
By the time they decided they were done, the ragged cut had reopened on his head. He kneeled in the center of the med tent panting, one eye swollen shut, blood running freely done his face, hands tied behind his back. Ed awaited his fate with grace, warring tempests within him calmed for just a moment by the warmth and presence and life he was facing. Said life did not display the same grace. Mustang didn't like not knowing what was going on and maybe it was the illness, but he wasn't hiding his panic well. He tossed harried, clumsy Drachman requests at the guards mulling around. He kept looking at Ed like he wanted to touch him again. But they both knew the guards wouldn't take kindly to them conversing, and so they both stewed in their separate solitudes from half a tent away from one another.
Ed's head hurt like a sonuvabitch.
And then there was the General. He strode into the med tent billowing furs behind him, and Ed could see that another blizzard hard started sometime since he'd come in himself. There was none of the good humor Ed had seen on his face earlier -
he looked fucking pissed. There were some strange politics going on in this camp, and Ed just knew he had gotten in the way of some of them.
He was horrified when a soldier came in behind him, dragging Louisa's pale, mud-covered body behind him. Her face in his vision warped to Winry, half an hour dead with blue around her lips and a grubby hand buried in her hair. The tips were frozen with the sweat she'd made struggling in her final moments of life.
Ed let out a low, involuntary moan and lowered his head so his bangs skimmed the ground.
But the General would have none of it. Ed heard his boots smacking on the hard earth beneath the flimsy covering of the floor in the med tent, and then there was a hand in his own scraggly hair, roughly foisting his head back until he was struggling to breath and his Adam's apple strained hard in the open air.
His eyes were fierce, his breath was hot, and Ed glared defiantly back with his one open eye. There was a moment of that heavy, hateful tension before the hand released him and he sagged forward without the counterpoint of pressure keeping him up. And then suddenly the General was next to Mustang, and Ed wasn't so confident anymore.
"You tried to escape," he said.
Ed shook his head, slowly.
"Why did you do it then, hm? Leave?"
I was coming to see him. I needed to see him.
Ed shook his head again. A kick landed on his tender side, and he fell sideways.
"You did leave him?"
Ed shakily hoisted himself up, looked between Mustang's face and this General's, and he knew how this could be misconstrued. Ed's escape was a like a total abandonment of his superior officer, and he was playing into their devotion to each other to tear them apart.
It wouldn't work. He looked at Mustang, and clenched his fists, and it wouldn't work. He shook his head again.
"You have leave him for a woman, and she is dead. And you will come back to him now? The moment she is dead?"
He said, "No." Quiet and venomous.
Mustang said, "Ed, it's okay."
Ed didn't really know what that was supposed to mean. Eyes on Mustang again, he quirked an eyebrow in disbelief, bared his teeth in an incredulous grimace. That could really only mean that Mustang believed the tripe this asshole was feeding him, believed that Ed would actually leave a man that he had sacrificed a whole camp to save, believed that Ed was even capable of physically separating himself from Mustang's comforting presence for some girl that didn't even know ten minutes ago.
But hell, that sounded bad too.
"Fuck, Mustang, what are you saying? You want me to leave?"
"No, of course not. But of course I'd understand if you decided to, of course I wouldn't blame you - "
Unspoken between them was the fundamental truth: with his alchemy, Ed could get away any time he damn well pleased. Mustang was tethering him here, but fuck if Ed thought the tether was half as fragile as Mustang did. Ed's tie was diamond hard and unbreakable, and he wouldn't fold to this bastard's flimsy little -
"Fuck off Mustang, I wouldn't leave you, I'd never leave you, who the hell do you think you're talking to?"
Mustang looked a little alarmed at the outburst, like he'd seen something in Ed's face that surprised him. That he didn't like. That he didn't want to see. Ed wasn't so sure he couldn't feel it there himself, a twitch of hysteria that gave away just a little bit too much of how very serious Ed was. Eyes trained on Mustang, he didn't look back at Louisa's body.
"Kid, I'm only -"
There was a little bedside table by Mustang, on his left side, the side farthest from Ed. The General took their conversation as an opportunity to move it to the side of the bed closest to Ed and stand there silently until Mustang stuttered to a gravelly, rasping halt.
The General said, "You tried to escape."
Ed said, "No."
Two guards were on Mustang before Ed could blink. Big, bulky guards that Ed hadn't even really comprehended the existence of before.
The General said, "You tried to escape."
With slightly more trepidation, Ed said, "No-o." A breathy stutter drew it out long.
Then there was one guard at Mustang's back and one guard extending Mustang's arm toward the hard, cold metal table that the General had placed there. Mustang extended his fingers reflexively, splaying them on the metal in an effort to keep himself balanced against the weight on his back. A third guard manifested behind Ed in the form of a hand in his hair, keeping his eyes trained on the action. It was a testament to Ed's naivety that he didn't even realize what was happening until the General drew a slim-handled hammer from the inside of his fur coat.
Ed screamed, "What the fuck are you doing?" He jerked at the restraints holding his hands together behind his back. He thought briefly of squirming his hands into a position where he could clap, knew what alchemy could do here, but he couldn't. He couldn't, he couldn't. They wouldn't make it far now, clapping would only give away his secret, and Ed didn't really think he had it in him to use alchemy at the moment anyway. But still, a thousand arrays flew through his mind. Painful, skin-flaying, blood-boiling arrays that he'd never even thought before, never even known before. It was almost as frightening as the tableau in front of him -
Mustang's eyes did something strange, going wider than he'd ever seen them, and he curled his fingers back under the fleshy protection of his palm. A final guard appeared, and he splayed Roy's fingers back onto the table until they were going pale and bloodless under the force of the guard's heavy hand. The General stroked the hammer tenderly, Mustang lost any silent dignity he may have had and jerked mightily at the hand holding him down, and Ed took up a breathless, continuous mantra of 'no' under his breath.
"You tried," the General said, running a single, gloved finger delicately up the underside of the hammer, "to escape. And you left him here."
Ed screamed, "NO!" And he had his eyes closed, he must have had his eyes closed or blinked or something, because he missed the lightning fast movement that left Mustang - stoic, brilliant hero-of-Ishbal Mustang - screaming hoarsely. All that Ed saw was red, inflamed, distortedness - a knuckle on Mustang's index finger that looked utterly wrong, before another damning statement issued from the General's mouth.
"You left your General for a girl," he said.
Ed bit his lip, and he knew what this answer would do, now. 'No' seemed to be the wrong answer. Denial, an upholding of Ed's very strict moral code, meant pain. 'Yes,' a fundamentally abhorrent thing now, in this situation, given that it meant an abandonment of an attachment he held more dear than his own life, meant that this could maybe end before things got too extreme.
Ed's epitaph carved itself out before his eyes - here lies Ed, he loved too much - and Ed said, "Mustang, you gotta understand -"
That was the wrong answer, and there was an earth-shattering crack as the hammer hit Mustang's middle finger straight on the center knuckle. Roy was coughing too hard by that point to scream, but something obscene roared its way out from the base of his throat in a guttural, primal way on the next wave of stuttering coughs. There was blood flecking his lips when the General repeated his calm, eerie mantra.
"You tried to escape, and you failed. And now you face your General." Ed stayed silent and breathed hard through his nose. "He needs you. Face your abandonment. You are fickle."
Louisa was a cold, hard, unfamiliar lump behind him. She was not Winry. She was no one, and this was her fault.
She was also dead, and that was Ed's. She deserved more respect than this, but he couldn't stop himself denying her.
"She's nothing, I did it for you, I came for -"
Wrong answer. The next crack - his ring finger, his right hand - must have broken something in Mustang, and he screamed, "I don't fucking care, Edward, I don't care! Say yes, fucking say yes! You left, it's fine, you left, you left -"
"-But…"
"Just say it!"
His hand jerked spasmodically against the guards, looking red and tender and swollen and - wrong. There were tears, on Ed's face and Roy's, and the begging was too much. He said, "Yes, I'm sorry, yes." And the admission and what it might mean to Mustang physically tore something within him. Mustang had been buying into their lies, Mustang had believed them - Mustang's belief in Ed was key, Mustang's confidence was absolutely key. If this man, his hope didn't have any confidence in him, how could Ed ever hope to find strength in himself? How could Ed ever really believe that he hadn't truly abandoned Mustang himself?
"You left him."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"To defend for himself. Against preventable, painful things." He waggled the hammer in front of his face. "Like this." Then he broke Mustang's thumb.
Ed jolted forward and Mustang jolted back. He clearly hadn't been expecting it after Ed's positive responses, and he'd let himself relax. His thumb jutted at an awkward ninety degrees from its base on his hand.
"For fuck's sake, stop, please!"
"Answer!"
"YES!"
"You won't leave him to us again."
"No, no."
"You will stay."
"Yes. Yes. Forever, if you like." Mustang was sweating and wheezing and hurting and he thought Ed had left him alone to this. Never, never - he'd be his crutch forever, he wanted nothing more -
They splayed Mustang's left hand to the open air and cracked two more fingers along their sides. He was hiccupping back frantic sobs of pain and nursing two broken hands against his chest by the time they led Edward out of the med tent. He didn't look at Ed as he walked out the door, and it was more final and ultimate and damning than anything.
Under the watchful eye of six burly guards, he spent the evening burying Louisa on the outskirts of camp. The earth was frozen and his hands ungloved, and it took him hours and hours to make a hole even close to deep enough. The guards were drunk by the time they rolled her into the ground, and she fell facedown in an awkward slump at the bottom of the frozen pit.
Shuffling back to his tent between his escorts, Ed nursed blisters from the rough hewn handle of the shovel.
And then, bile rising at the back of his throat, he thought of Mustang - of his broken, swollen, blackened fingers - and he didn't care so much about the blisters anymore.
Thanks for reading! Feedback is very much appreciated.
Pairings/Characters: Edward, Roy
Rating: M/R
Genre: Drama, Angst
Spoilers: None - Alternate ending, TWT?
Word Count: +/- 6300
Cumulative Word Count: +/- 23100
Warnings: Language, violence, gore, torture, implied rape.
Summary: Ed and Roy are stuck in a war zone. Gratuitous hurt!Roy for the sake of hurt!Roy ensues.
Previous Parts: 1 2
Notes: In keeping with my ambitious once-yearly update schedule, here is part 3. This was originally supposed to be the final part, but I've decided to split the last chapter. It should be out sometime next year, after I've finished my fmabigbang fic. Sorry for the delay. Thanks for sticking with me -- know that I will finish this fic if it kills me, damnit. Also, thanks again to ketita for hand-holding. Much love.
Enjoy!
That night, Ed couldn't find any way to lie on the ground that didn't aggravate every ache and pain he had accumulated that day. The outlines of the guards were stark against the canvas of the tent, glowing and flickering with lanterns outside. His leg was a sullen dead weight pulling at his thigh, and everything, everything, everything was far too cold. The only concession they had made to his comfort was a thin thatch mat that separated him from the chill of the earth but did very little to insulate him from the horrible, strength-sapping cold of the night air.
One of the strangest things was the sound of the voices outside. He'd never really contemplated how very familiar Amestrian was or how accustomed he was to falling asleep and waking to Mustang's soothing speech, nor had he ever contemplated quite how ugly Drachman was, or quite how strange it would be to be surrounded by a language he couldn't understand. It gave him and overwhelming sense of paranoia, because they could be talking about the weather or they could be talking about how Mustang was being strangled a few tents down and Ed wouldn't ever know the difference.
Mustang.
Ed thought of Mustang, and it made him cold and alone and afraid and shameful, and he wanted so badly to curl in on himself, bring his knees to his chest and cry there, but his leg was a dead weight, his ribs didn't want to bend that way, and his head hurt so badly that he didn't think he could find the tears. He rolled onto his back, and the ceiling of the tent roiled like the sea and swelled like nausea. Maybe it was better that he couldn't sleep, because he really had one hell of a concussion. He tried to think back on all the times he'd been hit in the head that day, and decided it must be a relatively high figure because he couldn't seem to remember all of them.
On top of everything, his stomach was upset. They'd fed him some sort of thick, greasy porridge that burned all the way down and coated his throat in ash. It sat in his stomach like a rock, seemed like a solid block despite the fact that he was almost sure it had gone down in separate syrupy spoonfuls. He wasn't entirely sure, because he had wolfed it down almost too quickly to taste how utterly horrible it was. Honestly, he was very lucky that his gag reflex had stopped working ages ago.
He sighed, rolled over, felt uncomfortable, worrisome twinges from all over, and didn't sleep that night.
Ed vomited on his first transmutation circle. His head was not getting better. The walk to the tent where the weapons were held had been grueling; the light reflecting off of the snow had been too much for his over-sensitive eyes. He couldn't focus, his head hurt, his stomach churned, and eventually, it had all been too much. He fucking hated looking so pathetic in front of these bastards, but focusing on the thin lines of the transmutation circle had finally done him in.
The guards brandished their guns like it would make him magically stop hurting - neither of them knew Amestrian. It was clear they'd been given strict, specific instructions that didn't account for their dangerous charge getting sick all over their pet project. Ed leaned on one arm and tried to recover his wits, but there was nothing but white spots in his vision, and hell, for all he knew he could be bleeding from his brain.
He turned to the guards, and as slowly and loudly as his aching head would allow he said, "Doctor."
His efforts got him shoved with the butt of a gun. He wasn't sure if they expected him to go back to drawing in the puddle of his own sick, or if they were testing to see if he would just fall over when touched. If they'd been going for the latter, they got exactly what they wanted. His balance was gone, his equilibrium totally thrown, and his automail knee was still fucked anyway. It gave out, and he tipped to the left.
That, at least, seemed to get their attention. One of them mumbled something to the other and then meandered off in the direction of the tent flap. While Ed contemplated getting back on his feet using the rough, unsteady particle board table, wondering absently if it would tip and leave him covered in his own mess, the butt of a rifle appeared in his vision. Instinctively, he flinched away, covering his tender skull with an automail arm before he realized - the guard was helping him up.
Huh. It was such an out of character act of - not kindness, not necessarily. Conscientiousness, really. The picture that the rifle butt presented contrasted so strangely to the drunken, gun-wielding assholes from the day before that his aching head didn't quite know how to deal with it all. But that thought was cut off as the Amestrian-speaking General he'd become so familiar with strolled into the tent with an expression that said he just couldn't be fucked with Ed's nausea. The gun pulled out of his vision as the soldier saluted, and instead, the General pulled him roughly from the ground himself, tugging at Ed's many aches with strong, calloused hands.
He said, "You are more trouble than good."
And Ed repeated, "Doctor," as the sudden change in position sent the room spinning and his stomach churning again.
The General shouted something at the two soldiers, doubtless outraged by the fact that his captives did little more than absorb their resources. He seemed to debate with himself on the merits of taking Ed to the infirmary, keeping a firm hold on Ed's arm.
"I take you, they give you medicine, and then you work."
"Yes," he said quietly. "Then."
And with a powerful tug at his arm, they were off again. The two guards seemed to mull over following before they finally decided that one of them would suffice. Ed tried to pay attention to where they were and where they were going. It was important to situate himself in the camp if he ever wanted to escape from it. But everything spun and swayed sickly, and they moved so fast that Ed was having a difficult time not concentrating on his footwork. By the time they got there Ed could only figure that they had gone mostly left. His tent, the tent where he spent his nights on a cold thatch mat, was mostly to the right.
He was just attempting to retrace his steps, trying to figure where he had entered when -
There was Mustang. On a cot in the corner of the tent. It was blessedly warm. He had a blanket, and there was a whole pitcher of water at his bedside. It was more than Ed ever could have asked for. He was alive, and he was warm, and he was -
"-dog will not tell me what is wrong, I will let him- " the General shook him, Mustang wavered and faded out of his vision, and Ed's knees justgave again. But this time, the General was there. He held him steady, and Ed could almost swear he also held back the bile pushing up his throat with some sheer force of will. He seemed determined to ensure that he wasn't made a fool of, which probably meant that the decision to keep two Amestrian alchemists within the camp was not a popular opinion, and was an opinion he was probably responsible for. Interesting.
He kept his eyes on the doctor now, but he couldn't stop them flickering back to Mustang. He shifted in his sleep and coughed a little, and Ed wanted so badly for him to wake up. And see him, say something, tell him to stay strong or keep forward or tell him he was doing the right thing transmuting these weapons. Oh god, Ed didn't know how he was doing this alone.
He finally answered, "My head," with a vague gesture at the tear in the skin there.
The doctor grabbed him roughly by the chin, muttered something in Drachman, and there was no warning before there was a light shining into his pupils. He hissed, felt tender and abused and tired. There was a conspicuously empty bed next to his General and he could - he wanted - if he could just have a moment back there in that tent. Comforted and protected and secure.
After a bit more prodding, the General relayed the doctor's message to him. "You are concussed."
Ed took a moment to marvel at the medical ingenuity. The doctor gave him a pill from a stash that had clearly been stolen from the med tent at their own camp, which was more of a shock to Ed's system than he ever could have imagined. Maybe that fire hadn't been all-encompassing, maybe it had spared something, maybe there was someone looking for them.
They gave him the rest of the day off. The General escorted him back to his tent, and Ed paid very close attention to the route indeed.
Ed counted seven days after that, over a week he had been in this hellhole. Day one had been wrought with more confusion and sensitive eyes - perhaps too little fudging on the part of the weapons he'd "repaired." It was a sad measure of his competency as an alchemist that he was better able to successfully fix a weapon than to unsuccessfully fix one. Day two saw more coherency. They seemed to remember he needed water at some point, and he got it when they saw fit. But even that little bit was more than enough to sustain him, power whatever mechanism in his brain spat out arrays. Days three through five saw the beginnings of normalcy creeping into this most abnormal situation. Ed felt well enough that his weapons were nearly perfectly imperfect. He found the most effective method of fudging guns, he developed alloys that looked strong but crumpled under pressure. And his effective ineffectiveness was rewarded in days six and seven, which saw the guards growing more and more secure in their positions and the General more and more smug.
They began to get complacent. The General was obviously being rewarded for the risk he'd taken, and he saw fit to treat Ed well because of that. Well. "Well" was a relative term here - his ribs hadn't suffered any more violent attacks, his head was healing over nicely, and on the seventh day, at dinner, he got bread to eat.
As Ed tried not to look too desperate inhaling it, the General said, "He recovers," like he was doing Ed some great favor. Ed hated to look pathetic, but in all honesty - he was. Ed clung to any information about Roy with greedy abandon. Usually, he had to listen closely for words he recognized in Drachman conversation as he transmuted weapon after weapon after weapon. He could hardly believe that such a succulent tidbit was being offered so freely.
"Oh. Thanks," Ed said.
"It is nothing. Tomorrow, you start more."
Ed didn't have time to think up a response before the General was gone.
Later, alone in the tent, the bread soaking up some of the hunger that had been gnawing at him since he'd toted Mustang away from the flaming ruins of their camp, he thought he felt good enough to find Roy. It was why he'd memorized the route when he'd been concussed, but he'd been too consumed by hunger and pain and exhaustion to even think about making the ten minute trek over there, avoiding guards and soldiers and doctors and dealing with his broken automail. Performing transmutations all day with very little sleep meant that he was often too tired to even consider moving, to even consider sacrificing any of the precious few hours he got to sleep.
But tonight he felt lucky. Well-rested and lucky.
It was easy enough to slip under the heavy canvas of the back of the tent. A hostage meant that they didn't really bind him, and the barricade at the border of the camp meant that they didn't feel the need to post guards all around the tent. Even if he escaped out the back and tried to flee the camp, there was really nowhere to go. But he wasn't trying to flee the camp, now.
His arms were bound together with a simple, rough rope. He didn't know what they hoped to prevent besides a good night's sleep, because he could have drawn a circle easily if he felt the need, and he probably could have slipped the knot even without alchemical augmentation. But tonight, he needed both his hands, and he needed the rope intact to prevent any suspicion, so it was a simple enough matter to clap, stretch the fibers on the rope a bit, and pull his hands free. His automail knee was going to be a problem no matter what, so he just concentrated on trying to find the right pattern of step.
And it was working until he hit the first guard, just around the front of his tent. He lost his momentum and stumbled, and his knee clattered, and the guard looked around stupidly from his post at the door. Ed had a few panicked moments of silently pleading the guard not to look inside the tent for him too soon - they usually only poked their heads in once every two hours, when the sentries shifted. Ed figured he had about an hour and forty-five minutes left if everything went according to plan. The sentry casually scratched his neck and didn't look into the empty tent, and Ed very consciously didn't sigh in relief before moving on.
He fell back into the shadow of his tent and looked over to the right, taking shelter behind a tent there. From what he'd seen, he was housed in a group of larger tents on the outskirts of the camp. Things would become easier once he moved into the confusion of the soldiers' housing. That was a sea unruly commotion, drunkenness and revelry. Everyone, including the general and his guarding soldiers at the weaponry tent, seemed in such good humor it was safe to say that the Drachmans had likely executed some sort of victory against the Amestrians in the last few days. And that was bad news for his country, but in its own way, his only very selfish way, it was fantastic news for Ed.
He skipped easily behind three more overly large tents, covered with snow and crackling with ice. His knee groaned with this cold, and he silently willed to stop as he approached a big, muddy road that he recognized. It led to the center of the camp first, and later, to the other edge of it. To the medical tent. He couldn't take it directly, but he skimmed along behind tents that ran along it easily enough.
The guard was lax, the soldiers were relaxed. Before the snow had even seeped into his boots, he had passed the tent housing all his transmutation circles and fudged weapons. It loomed large and glorious amongst the tiny troops' tents, and Ed caught himself looking at it too long before -
The tent he was hiding behind shook, and a Drachman man stumbled out. He dragged a woman out behind him, his hand tight around her upper arm, and she was like a splash of color in this dark world of furs and ice and mud Ed found himself trapped in. She had to be Amestrian. Her coloring was Amestrian, her features were delicate like an Amestrian. Her face was flushed red, her lips were wet and rimmed in dark smudges like bruises, and her blonde hair was loose in slick, sweaty rivers down the sides of her face. She was beautiful, and Ed saw his own horror mirrored in her light blue eyes.
Ed was, before anything, reminded of Winry. He was little more than a stranger to war, and he'd heard stories about men going crazy from having seen the faces of their loved ones on the battlefield. But Ed hadn't seen a battlefield, not really. He'd seen one desperate kill in an alcove with only his dying superior officer to serve witness, and there hadn't been time to mix faces, but here he was confronted with Winry - panting, bruised, battered Winry, and he lost sight of Mustang for a moment, reaching out a hand to her over the canvas tent before he even really had a chance to take her all in.
Everything then happened very quickly.
The woman, showing fire that made Edward really believe he'd made the right choice associating her with Winry, spit in the Drachman soldier's face and jerked her arm away, rushing toward Edward. There was dawning realization in her eyes, and Ed knew that he was a hero she'd seen in newspapers. Oh, hell if he needed this now.
But as she got closer, Ed noticed certain things that he hadn't taken in before, when she was hidden around the front end of the tent. Her skirt was in absolute tatters, splattered grimly with drops of blood, and hiked down on one side to reveal flashes of bare skin and bruises on the sides of her hips. She walked with a limp, and her feet had to be cold bare as they were in the sloppy, icy muck covering the ground. Every step closer to him made a morosely comical sucking noise as she struggled away from the Drachman man. He waited, face flushed in a different way, and he smelled of the same wet animal drunkenness that everyone here did.
She reached Ed and touched him reverently before throwing her arms about him like he was some kind of savior. Which was funny too in its own grim way, because she was taller than him, and her greater weight was over-balancing his fucked knee. But she whispered easy, unaccented Amestrian words in his ear, and it was a moment of unfathomable beauty before -
He felt her ripped from him and thrown to the ground. His arms were still extended to hold her, he could still feel her hair whispering against his cheek, and Ed, a country boy who had been raised bowing to women and respecting women and holding his mother upon a pedestal of greatness, couldn't really fathom how she'd ended up on the ground. How could any man abuse his strength like that against a creature like her? Ed knew a lot of kick ass ladies, but that healthy fear and knowledge that there were many women who could absolutely lay him flat, always came with the knowledge that women, especially women in distress, deserved to be treated a certain way, and this most certainly was not it.
He punched with his automail fist before the drunk fucker even knew what hit him. The Winry that wasn't Winry rose shakily even as he dropped like a stone, covered in mud now and terrified. It was strange how that anger hadn't really given him time to think, how that harsh knife blade of feeling had cut clean through his better judgment unlike a hell of a lot of other feelings had. But then, that hadn't been alchemy, it had been shattering a man's jaw. He would live, but he'd have a fucking hard time eating solid foods for a while. Bastard.
Ed turned to the woman and tried to look better than he felt, hand lightly squeezing the abused flesh on her upper arm.
"What's your name?" he said softly.
"Louisa," she said. "You're the Fullmetal Alchemist. Did you come for me?"
It was such an innocent question that it made Ed sick. Because it made him think back to the one hundred individuals Ed hadn't really given a damn about. Even now he couldn't stop his mind flashing to Mustang, what this meant for getting to Mustang, and what it would mean for Mustang if she was caught. Ed didn't come for her, no one from the Amestrian military would come for her. She was a pretty young woman with a promising future, and she was one hundred percent expendable.
So Ed said, "No." Her face fell. Ed's bleeding heard throbbed uncomfortably, caught between his usual value for human life and the callousness that war had put there. "But here, let's see if we can't help you or get you somewhere safe or something." Ed had no idea what the fuck he had just promised.
Heads were starting to pop out of tents. They hadn't yet focused on two of the most obtrusive heads in the camp, blonde in the midst of black, peeking from between tents halfway to the med bay. But it wouldn't be long before they did. Ed didn't know what to do, so Ed took off running. Louisa knew enough to follow and stay close, and she hissed in pain when her feet struck ice or rocks. Eventually, she caught up enough to take Ed's hand, and that's why Ed felt it when she dropped.
He was puzzled when her dead weight pulled him down - he'd been clamped to her just as much as she had to him. It had been such an odd moment of danger and companionship, camaraderie borne of fear behind enemy lines that he'd never really had a chance to make with his fellow soldiers. His knee gave, and he looked back to see -
Winry's face. Sightless, staring eyes and a tiny pin-prick of a hole leaking blood from her forehead. He gasped out a strangled shout, struggled to disentangle her hand from his still clamped so hard in death, and was only then able to see Winry's little nose dissolve into a slightly less shapely one, to see the blood running over freckles that Winry had never had. He was too startled, too alarmed for discretion now. That had been a practiced shot and it could have taken him out but instead it just made it clear that they wouldn't kill him. They'd catch him now, he'd made too much of a ruckus, but he needed something before they exiled him back to his tent. Fuck it all he could see the med tent and he needed to see Mustang.
Willing himself up and away from this new blemish on Ed's overtaxed conscience, tears welling up in burning bands under his eyes, Ed staggered to the toward the med tent. He wouldn't escape, he wasn't sure he'd ever intended to escape or even where he'd intended to go in the first place. But now there was just a single-minded determinedness to get to Mustang, nothing mattered if he got to fucking Mustang -
Three soldiers hit him before he ever made it there, and a hail of blows accompanied the sinking despair of knowing that he'd never be able to see him, now.
To Ed's surprise, though, they just led him around the front of the med tent, into the warm enclosure that smelled like infection and medicine.
Mustang was asleep at the back of the tent, just as Ed knew he would be. The soldiers slackened their grip for an instant at the mouth of the tent, and Ed jerked free of them. He loped across the tent unevenly, panting roughly, and just at the edge of the cot his breathing stuttered and his automail knee gave and his flesh knee wobbled and he fell, half on his bed, arms clutching like Louisa's had in desperation.
He couldn't get the pictures out his head. Ed was naïve but he wasn't so naïve that he didn't know what a big, burly Drachman soldier was doing with a very pretty, very young, and very kidnapped Amestrian woman in his tent. He thought of what her final hours must have been like, he thought of how she probably would have lived and been raped and raped and raped but alive without Ed's piss poor timing, and he grasped blindly at Mustang's clean white shirt. Mud and blood rubbed off in his throes of misery, desperation - wake up wake up wake up.
And - Mustang woke with a startled release of air that sent him into a coughing fit. He curled in close to Edward with the force of his coughing, and Edward let out a whining, needy gasp at the closeness.
"Mustang, oh fuck, oh fuck Mustang -"
"E-E-E," Mustang got out his name slowly as the cough quieted, staccato bursts and the most beautiful thing Ed had ever heard. "Edward," he said finally, hands finding him, patting him, touching him. Blessed, blessed warmth that made every life Ed had to give worth it -
"You're bleeding Ed, what are you -? What's going on?"
The guards were on him before the first clear, welling tear had joined the mud and blood. Really, it took them longer than he would have guessed. They jerked him back and bound his hands, still raining spontaneous blows and - the warmth lingered on his hand, tingled at his joints.
It had been worth it.
By the time they decided they were done, the ragged cut had reopened on his head. He kneeled in the center of the med tent panting, one eye swollen shut, blood running freely done his face, hands tied behind his back. Ed awaited his fate with grace, warring tempests within him calmed for just a moment by the warmth and presence and life he was facing. Said life did not display the same grace. Mustang didn't like not knowing what was going on and maybe it was the illness, but he wasn't hiding his panic well. He tossed harried, clumsy Drachman requests at the guards mulling around. He kept looking at Ed like he wanted to touch him again. But they both knew the guards wouldn't take kindly to them conversing, and so they both stewed in their separate solitudes from half a tent away from one another.
Ed's head hurt like a sonuvabitch.
And then there was the General. He strode into the med tent billowing furs behind him, and Ed could see that another blizzard hard started sometime since he'd come in himself. There was none of the good humor Ed had seen on his face earlier -
he looked fucking pissed. There were some strange politics going on in this camp, and Ed just knew he had gotten in the way of some of them.
He was horrified when a soldier came in behind him, dragging Louisa's pale, mud-covered body behind him. Her face in his vision warped to Winry, half an hour dead with blue around her lips and a grubby hand buried in her hair. The tips were frozen with the sweat she'd made struggling in her final moments of life.
Ed let out a low, involuntary moan and lowered his head so his bangs skimmed the ground.
But the General would have none of it. Ed heard his boots smacking on the hard earth beneath the flimsy covering of the floor in the med tent, and then there was a hand in his own scraggly hair, roughly foisting his head back until he was struggling to breath and his Adam's apple strained hard in the open air.
His eyes were fierce, his breath was hot, and Ed glared defiantly back with his one open eye. There was a moment of that heavy, hateful tension before the hand released him and he sagged forward without the counterpoint of pressure keeping him up. And then suddenly the General was next to Mustang, and Ed wasn't so confident anymore.
"You tried to escape," he said.
Ed shook his head, slowly.
"Why did you do it then, hm? Leave?"
I was coming to see him. I needed to see him.
Ed shook his head again. A kick landed on his tender side, and he fell sideways.
"You did leave him?"
Ed shakily hoisted himself up, looked between Mustang's face and this General's, and he knew how this could be misconstrued. Ed's escape was a like a total abandonment of his superior officer, and he was playing into their devotion to each other to tear them apart.
It wouldn't work. He looked at Mustang, and clenched his fists, and it wouldn't work. He shook his head again.
"You have leave him for a woman, and she is dead. And you will come back to him now? The moment she is dead?"
He said, "No." Quiet and venomous.
Mustang said, "Ed, it's okay."
Ed didn't really know what that was supposed to mean. Eyes on Mustang again, he quirked an eyebrow in disbelief, bared his teeth in an incredulous grimace. That could really only mean that Mustang believed the tripe this asshole was feeding him, believed that Ed would actually leave a man that he had sacrificed a whole camp to save, believed that Ed was even capable of physically separating himself from Mustang's comforting presence for some girl that didn't even know ten minutes ago.
But hell, that sounded bad too.
"Fuck, Mustang, what are you saying? You want me to leave?"
"No, of course not. But of course I'd understand if you decided to, of course I wouldn't blame you - "
Unspoken between them was the fundamental truth: with his alchemy, Ed could get away any time he damn well pleased. Mustang was tethering him here, but fuck if Ed thought the tether was half as fragile as Mustang did. Ed's tie was diamond hard and unbreakable, and he wouldn't fold to this bastard's flimsy little -
"Fuck off Mustang, I wouldn't leave you, I'd never leave you, who the hell do you think you're talking to?"
Mustang looked a little alarmed at the outburst, like he'd seen something in Ed's face that surprised him. That he didn't like. That he didn't want to see. Ed wasn't so sure he couldn't feel it there himself, a twitch of hysteria that gave away just a little bit too much of how very serious Ed was. Eyes trained on Mustang, he didn't look back at Louisa's body.
"Kid, I'm only -"
There was a little bedside table by Mustang, on his left side, the side farthest from Ed. The General took their conversation as an opportunity to move it to the side of the bed closest to Ed and stand there silently until Mustang stuttered to a gravelly, rasping halt.
The General said, "You tried to escape."
Ed said, "No."
Two guards were on Mustang before Ed could blink. Big, bulky guards that Ed hadn't even really comprehended the existence of before.
The General said, "You tried to escape."
With slightly more trepidation, Ed said, "No-o." A breathy stutter drew it out long.
Then there was one guard at Mustang's back and one guard extending Mustang's arm toward the hard, cold metal table that the General had placed there. Mustang extended his fingers reflexively, splaying them on the metal in an effort to keep himself balanced against the weight on his back. A third guard manifested behind Ed in the form of a hand in his hair, keeping his eyes trained on the action. It was a testament to Ed's naivety that he didn't even realize what was happening until the General drew a slim-handled hammer from the inside of his fur coat.
Ed screamed, "What the fuck are you doing?" He jerked at the restraints holding his hands together behind his back. He thought briefly of squirming his hands into a position where he could clap, knew what alchemy could do here, but he couldn't. He couldn't, he couldn't. They wouldn't make it far now, clapping would only give away his secret, and Ed didn't really think he had it in him to use alchemy at the moment anyway. But still, a thousand arrays flew through his mind. Painful, skin-flaying, blood-boiling arrays that he'd never even thought before, never even known before. It was almost as frightening as the tableau in front of him -
Mustang's eyes did something strange, going wider than he'd ever seen them, and he curled his fingers back under the fleshy protection of his palm. A final guard appeared, and he splayed Roy's fingers back onto the table until they were going pale and bloodless under the force of the guard's heavy hand. The General stroked the hammer tenderly, Mustang lost any silent dignity he may have had and jerked mightily at the hand holding him down, and Ed took up a breathless, continuous mantra of 'no' under his breath.
"You tried," the General said, running a single, gloved finger delicately up the underside of the hammer, "to escape. And you left him here."
Ed screamed, "NO!" And he had his eyes closed, he must have had his eyes closed or blinked or something, because he missed the lightning fast movement that left Mustang - stoic, brilliant hero-of-Ishbal Mustang - screaming hoarsely. All that Ed saw was red, inflamed, distortedness - a knuckle on Mustang's index finger that looked utterly wrong, before another damning statement issued from the General's mouth.
"You left your General for a girl," he said.
Ed bit his lip, and he knew what this answer would do, now. 'No' seemed to be the wrong answer. Denial, an upholding of Ed's very strict moral code, meant pain. 'Yes,' a fundamentally abhorrent thing now, in this situation, given that it meant an abandonment of an attachment he held more dear than his own life, meant that this could maybe end before things got too extreme.
Ed's epitaph carved itself out before his eyes - here lies Ed, he loved too much - and Ed said, "Mustang, you gotta understand -"
That was the wrong answer, and there was an earth-shattering crack as the hammer hit Mustang's middle finger straight on the center knuckle. Roy was coughing too hard by that point to scream, but something obscene roared its way out from the base of his throat in a guttural, primal way on the next wave of stuttering coughs. There was blood flecking his lips when the General repeated his calm, eerie mantra.
"You tried to escape, and you failed. And now you face your General." Ed stayed silent and breathed hard through his nose. "He needs you. Face your abandonment. You are fickle."
Louisa was a cold, hard, unfamiliar lump behind him. She was not Winry. She was no one, and this was her fault.
She was also dead, and that was Ed's. She deserved more respect than this, but he couldn't stop himself denying her.
"She's nothing, I did it for you, I came for -"
Wrong answer. The next crack - his ring finger, his right hand - must have broken something in Mustang, and he screamed, "I don't fucking care, Edward, I don't care! Say yes, fucking say yes! You left, it's fine, you left, you left -"
"-But…"
"Just say it!"
His hand jerked spasmodically against the guards, looking red and tender and swollen and - wrong. There were tears, on Ed's face and Roy's, and the begging was too much. He said, "Yes, I'm sorry, yes." And the admission and what it might mean to Mustang physically tore something within him. Mustang had been buying into their lies, Mustang had believed them - Mustang's belief in Ed was key, Mustang's confidence was absolutely key. If this man, his hope didn't have any confidence in him, how could Ed ever hope to find strength in himself? How could Ed ever really believe that he hadn't truly abandoned Mustang himself?
"You left him."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"To defend for himself. Against preventable, painful things." He waggled the hammer in front of his face. "Like this." Then he broke Mustang's thumb.
Ed jolted forward and Mustang jolted back. He clearly hadn't been expecting it after Ed's positive responses, and he'd let himself relax. His thumb jutted at an awkward ninety degrees from its base on his hand.
"For fuck's sake, stop, please!"
"Answer!"
"YES!"
"You won't leave him to us again."
"No, no."
"You will stay."
"Yes. Yes. Forever, if you like." Mustang was sweating and wheezing and hurting and he thought Ed had left him alone to this. Never, never - he'd be his crutch forever, he wanted nothing more -
They splayed Mustang's left hand to the open air and cracked two more fingers along their sides. He was hiccupping back frantic sobs of pain and nursing two broken hands against his chest by the time they led Edward out of the med tent. He didn't look at Ed as he walked out the door, and it was more final and ultimate and damning than anything.
Under the watchful eye of six burly guards, he spent the evening burying Louisa on the outskirts of camp. The earth was frozen and his hands ungloved, and it took him hours and hours to make a hole even close to deep enough. The guards were drunk by the time they rolled her into the ground, and she fell facedown in an awkward slump at the bottom of the frozen pit.
Shuffling back to his tent between his escorts, Ed nursed blisters from the rough hewn handle of the shovel.
And then, bile rising at the back of his throat, he thought of Mustang - of his broken, swollen, blackened fingers - and he didn't care so much about the blisters anymore.
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