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prose_alchemistTitle: Blood Ties (3/14: Blood)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for fantasy violence and blood.
Characters: A whopping big ensemble across two worlds, although the strongest focus is on Ed.
Setting: First anime. Same timeframe as CoS, two years after the end of the series.
Summary: Alternative to Conqueror of Shamballa. An old enemy plunges Ed into the dark secrets of his new world, linked to the alchemy he thought lost to him—while in Amestris, Al faces a life-or-death choice. Will the nightmare Ed is drawn into provide the key to both their fates?
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I’m just playing with them.
Sleep proved to be a rather generous word for Ed’s state of being over the next few hours. In fact, he was not really asleep at all so much as… dormant, immersed in a dreamless darkness that felt quite different. More disconcertingly, there was a level of his senses that remained aware of his environment in a way unknown to natural repose. He would have felt the slightest sound or motion in that lifeless room, and even in the depths of his not-sleep, there was a primal new edge to his instincts that brimmed with readiness to react.
His return to consciousness was swift but impassive, his only movement the abrupt opening of his eyes. He did not feel the languid haziness of waking from human sleep. His mind was immediately clear and focused, and however strange his rest had been, he found it had served him well: the aches in his body were gone, the once-dizzying pain in his skull now faded to a faint twinge.
As he sat up, his first impulse was to glance at Noa. She remained at rest, and while it unsettled him to see her lying inert and unbreathing as a corpse, he resisted the urge to lean over and seek a pulse he knew was not there. Although her hand had moved from its cautionary place near her dagger, he still knew better than to startle her.
In spite of himself, Ed half-smiled crookedly. The shadow of post-traumatic fear Noa carried was unworthy of her. Judging by what he had seen when she faced off against Envy the night before, any man who thought he could have his way with her now was in for a nasty shock.
He let her alone, and rose to look for his coat where it had fallen the night before. The dark stains and the smell of blood on it made him shiver, but in its pockets he found his few personal articles. A handful of coins from three different countries, a dented pocketwatch that proclaimed the hour as not yet half-past six, a stub of a pencil and a small notebook in which mathematical fragments and titles of books were scribbled… It was almost laughable that such flotsam was the last remains of what had been his life. Perhaps he had lost nothing in his turning, after all.
Tearing one of the few blank pages from the notebook, he carried it back across the room with the pencil. He sat on the floor and began to draw, slowly and deliberately, with several pauses for thought; the passage of two years had made him a bit rusty, and the equations were always so much easier in his head than when he bothered to lay them out on paper.
“What are you doing?”
Ed raised his eyes to see that Noa was now awake and sitting up. She was studying the piece of paper beneath his pencil, and with a sad smile he pushed it forward, to give her a better view.
“It’s called a transmutation circle. Most of the alchemists in my world have to draw their equations, like this. I can transmute without a circle—or at least I could, and I did it last night—but I haven’t tried it this way since right after I came to this world. After what happened, I thought I should try again, in case something has changed.”
He filled in the last few lines, completing the array for a simple transmutation of the wooden floorboards beneath the paper. As Noa watched in apprehensive curiosity, he placed both hands on the border of the circle, reaching within himself for the reaction… and was utterly unsurprised when nothing happened.
“I’m convinced now,” he muttered, absently crumpling the paper in his automail hand. “Alchemy still can’t transmute things that belong in this world. It has to be something about Envy that made it work.”
“Envy?”
“The homunculus. The vampire from last night. If he can be transmuted, theoretically, I should be able to stop at breaking down his body—just take him apart and leave him that way.” Ed scowled reflectively. “In my world, destroying homunculi took something more than just alchemy, so I don’t know if even that would kill him permanently here… but it’s worth a try.”
It was then that a startling thought occurred to him. Homunculi carried within them the energy of all the human lives they had consumed, and there was no particular reason to believe Envy’s metamorphosis into a vampire had altered that fact. If he or any other vampire-homunculi like him could be transmuted, then perhaps…
Just perhaps that energy could even be used to open the Gate.
With a pang of gut-wrenching grief, Edward swiftly buried that idea in the deepest depths of his mind. The theory came a day too late; now that he was a dhampir, possessed by an unholy hunger for lifeblood himself, he belonged irrevocably to this realm of darkness on the other side. A single drop of the poison in his veins might be enough to destroy his own world, and he would never let that happen.
“You have to find him first,” Noa observed, forcing him to shake off his agonizing moment of thought. “That’s where the Hunters can help you. Tracking down vampires is what we do.”
“I’ve got an idea he won’t make himself hard for me to find,” Ed muttered grimly. “But tonight, I will go with you, and talk things over with your people. Envy is my own personal business—but if it’s true that all the other vampires you’ve tracked are homunculi, they have to be destroyed too. Assuming alchemy will even do the job, I know I’ll never find them all on my own.”
Noa was clearly pleased by his decision. She smiled at him, and began to rise; but before she could even stand upright, she stumbled slightly, and sank back down onto her knees. “Oh…”
“What’s wrong?” Ed asked in alarm, moving quickly to her side.
“I’m alright. Just a little unsteady.” Noa looked up at him, not quite succeeding at a nervous smile. “Earlier, you… took more than I thought.”
When she raised her head, the open collar of her blouse slipped down a little, exposing the wound on her neck. Unlike Ed’s own burns, the cut had only partly healed, and it was torn by two vicious fang-marks that were equally raw and discolored. Ed’s stomach roiled at the sight, a fresh reminder of the horror of his deed.
“Noa, I’m sorry, it… I mean, I didn’t…” A violent shudder passed through him, and he turned his face away.
“Don’t blame yourself. You needed it too badly, and you haven’t had time to learn how to control your instincts. I’ll be fine…” Noa hesitated, and at last added faintly, “I just need blood myself now.”
Flustered by his guilt, Ed stood up. “Okay. I… I can do that. Stay here.” He grimaced. “I’ll find an alleycat, or something…”
“Oh, not that!” Noa objected, looking distressed at the idea. “We have a different way. The butcher’s shop three streets west of here belongs to one of the human Hunters I told you about. He’s our… supplier. If you tell him I sent you, he’ll know what to do.”
Frowning, Ed tried to dredge a name or a face from his mind, but the information was a blank to him. He seemed to be assimilating Noa’s older memories more readily than her newer ones—which was not convenient, because her more recent life as a Hunter was the experience he needed now.
He gave up the effort, and turned to a more immediate question. “Is it safe to leave yet?”
“Yes. I felt the sun set. That’s what woke me.” Noa smiled hollowly at his bemused expression. “It’s true—we can sense day and night. Soon you’ll begin to feel it, too.”
“Okay, that’s just creepy.”
Without comment on Ed’s lack of enthusiasm, Noa cast a wry glance over his deficiencies of clothing. He was still stripped to the waist, his shirt, coat, and gloves having been irredeemably blood-soaked. Even his trousers were darkened by a few red-black splashes, but that couldn’t be helped, and for the moment he had no means of replacing them.
“You can’t exactly go out like that,” Noa observed pointedly, and picked up the black inverness that lay beside her. “Take this.”
A little reluctantly, Ed took the coat and slipped it on, examining the gash Envy’s knife had made in the left shoulder. A faint trace of Noa’s bloodscent jangled his nerves, but her wound had bled very little before it healed, and there was no alternative in any case. At least the damage did not expose any glint of metal from his automail, and he could hide his hand from sight in the coat pocket. Now of all times, he had no desire to draw attention to himself.
He looked back at Noa, and she held out her sword.
“If you meet that vampire, you have to cut his head off again. It won’t kill him, but it’s the only thing that will really give you enough time to get away.” Her eyes held his, with a trace of anxiousness in their dark depths. “Please, Edward… don’t take any chances yet. You’re still not strong enough.”
For a brief moment, Ed had to wonder if her concern was for him, or for the knowledge of alchemy he had yet to divulge to her; but either way, it amounted to a genuine desire for his safety. More than that, regardless of what she wanted from him, she trusted him enough to let him take her best weapon and leave her in this weakened state. It was a faith he didn’t quite understand, but he had no thought of betraying it. He accepted the sword, buckling its scabbard under the coat.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promised, and crossed the room to leave.
As he confronted the door he had opened so unwisely that day, Ed struggled with a moment of apprehension. The memory of being burned by the sunlight was still potent and painful—but Noa had assured him it was safe now, and he knew she would know. So he hesitantly opened the door, and found beyond it a night-darkened street, lit only by scattered streetlamps.
For the rest of his unnatural life, he would see the world only through shadows. It was a thought that made him swallow hard, blinking back the sudden sting in his eyes as he quickly shut the door behind him.
The street was as unknown to him as the rest of London, but Noa’s memories of it stirred a vague familiarity, like deja-vu. With that instinct to guide him, he started westward on a course he felt he had traveled before, although he knew he never had. The air was colder than it had been the previous night, but it no longer troubled him, and his newly nocturnal eyes pierced the darkness as easily as daylight.
On the other hand, the sounds and scents that surrounded him were an inordinate distraction. Having moved beyond his unstimulating refuge of the past day, the new depth of his senses became painfully clear. In the past he had secretly feared that Alphonse, upon regaining his body, might find the slightest sensations overwhelming—and now Ed thought he understood how that might feel. The few tentative breaths he dared to take brought him powerful odors of dampness and dust, horseflesh and automobile exhaust and heavy city smog, and the softest scurrying of rats among ash cans made him flinch.
It wasn’t only the intensity of his perceptions that strained his nerves. He couldn’t shut out a faint, predatory awareness that each living thing he sensed around him was full of warm red blood… and that terrified him.
Yet one myth of vampiric traits, at least, was soon dispelled. As he passed by a glass-paned storefront, his own unexpected reflection caught his eye, and he paused to study himself with a dimly horrified wonder.
Edward’s skin had always been fair, but now he was ghost-pale, bloodless and colorless. His amber eyes seemed unnaturally bright in a gaunt, shadowed face, and his hair was disheveled, still flecked with traces of dried blood from the beating Envy had given him. He looked as if he had freshly clawed his way out of the grave—which was not so very far from the truth, after all.
Impulsively he leaned close to the glass and drew back his lips, examining his teeth. They seemed perfectly normal now, and the scientist in him puzzled over their transformation into the fangs that had so cruelly marked Noa’s neck…
He drew a willful breath, and tore himself away from the morbid fascination of his monstrosity.
The butcher’s shop was a few buildings down from the intersection of the third street, but Ed found it with ease—a fact that owed nothing to Noa’s memories. He smelled the place from half a block away, a rancid perfume of blood and raw flesh. Were his reactions still human, he would have found it nauseating; but to his altered senses, blood now meant food, and it only aroused in him a dark, unwelcome craving.
Outwardly, there was nothing to set the establishment apart from any average butcher shop. It was small and unpicturesque, with hand-drawn advertising placards in the grimy front windows, and an upstairs apartment where Ed assumed the stout-stomached butcher lived. The lights in the shop itself were on, so he tried the door. It was unlocked, and he stepped inside rather apprehensively, triggering a bell that hung above the threshold.
The first thing to meet him was an enormous black-and-brown dog that bounded toward him with a growl.
Ed froze in an instant of panic. Had his heart beat at all, it would have stopped; but under the pressure of the moment, he felt Noa’s knowledge helpfully intercede, almost as if she was speaking to him herself.
Animals don’t like true vampires. The Hunters use dogs to track them, and to guard against attacks.
Indeed, as the dog scented him, its growl faded to a noncommittal whine. It nosed at his automail curiously—reminding him to tuck his hand out of sight in his pocket—and then it turned with sudden disinterest, to lope back to its bed of old blankets in the corner. Apparently dogs, or at least those trained by the Hunters, had no problem with dhampirs.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Ed spared a glance around the unremarkable interior of the shop. A high counter stood at the back of the room, and he approached it in search of the proprietor. There was a man behind it, bending over a cutting board, but Ed could see only a pair of mountainous shoulders and a head of dark hair.
As he came near, the butcher turned… and a gasp caught raggedly in Ed’s throat.
Sig!
It was unmistakably true. Sig Curtis, the husband of Ed and Al’s alchemy teacher Izumi—or at least Sig’s doppelganger in this world.
For a moment Ed felt himself go weak in his organic right knee, but he managed not to buckle. Even so, his expression must have added further color to his bedraggled appearance, judging by the dubious way the Sig-but-not-Sig looked at him.
“Uh…?” Ed blurted ineloquently.
In any world, Sig Curtis was a canny and observant man. One glance sized Ed up; then he strode around the counter, moving with a graceful quickness that seemed as if it should have been physically impossible for his bulk. His craggy, bearded face was dark with concern.
“You alright?” he boomed laconically, in that seismic-disturbance of a voice Ed knew so well.
It was no time now to be tripped up by the bizarre vagaries of this world. The man in front of him may have worn the face of a friend, but he was really an absolute stranger—and there was urgency in Ed’s errand. He marshaled his wits as best he could.
“I… Noa sent me here. From the Hunters.” He gulped slightly, at an utter loss for how to put the request into words. “She—she needs…”
“Yeah,” Sig cut him off with immediate comprehension, his eyes narrowing. He gave Ed another hard look, and asked, “She hurt?”
Ed flinched, remembering the ugly mark of his bite. “Not… badly.”
A thoughtful growl rolled around in Sig’s chest, and he turned, moving toward a doorway behind him that appeared to open onto a back room. “Stay put.”
Obedience to Sig’s phlegmatic yet terrifying presence was thoroughly ingrained upon Ed, and in any case, he still felt a little dazed. He stood rooted to the spot, trying to process this new development. Sig Curtis a Hunter, one of Noa’s mysterious colleagues who tracked and battled indestructible vampire homunculi… At least he wasn’t a dhampir too. Noa had said as much, and while it was hard to detect through the native stench of the shop, Ed had briefly picked up a scent from the man that his new instincts somehow labeled as human.
Even so, none of this positively meant he could trust the Hunters—or even Sig himself. Of the several doubles he had already encountered in this world, some were very much like the people he once knew, but others were quite different. It was far too early to tell whether this Sig was the innately kind and protective man his counterpart had been.
After a moment, Sig emerged from the back of the shop. He wordlessly placed a brown paper bag on the counter, and the clink of glass bottles inside left no doubt as to what it contained.
“Uh… thanks,” Ed murmured awkwardly, and with his automail hand still hidden in his pocket, he carefully gathered the bag into the crook of his left arm. His curiosity about Sig would have to be satisfied later. For now, Noa was waiting for the blood that would heal the damage he had inflicted on her.
As he was turning to leave, Sig’s voice spoke up behind him.
“There’s enough there for you, too.”
A startled shudder raced down Ed’s spine. Shamefaced, he turned back, and met Sig’s unreadable stare with difficulty. “How did you know?”
Oddly enough, the rumble that emerged from the butcher seemed to be some distant relative of a chuckle.
“When you’re around humans, remember to breathe sometimes.” His eyes darkened then, studying the young dhampir more intently. “You’re new at this. How long?”
“…Last night,” Ed admitted faintly, dropping his gaze.
“I see.” Sig slowly moved from behind the counter and came closer to Ed, looking down at him thoughtfully. “Noa?”
Ed wasn’t quite sure what Sig was asking, but he remembered that it was forbidden for a Hunter to spread the curse of dhampirism to others. As loathsome as this new existence was to him, he had no wish to see Noa punished for sparing him from the finality of death.
“She saved me from a vampire,” he said, choosing words that were cunningly truthful, yet unrevealing. “But it was too late for me.”
“Then it’s true. There’s a vampire in London again.” Sig folded his massive arms, and his expression became just a little more dangerous. “Noa hasn’t gone back to report it yet. That’s not like her. You sure she’s alright?”
“Yes!” Ed winced at the defensive yelp that crept into his voice. “She’s just… She was held up for the day, trying to help me. But she’s taking me to the other Hunters, as soon as she’s had this.” He nodded to the ominous bag he carried, and then glanced at Sig with an inquisitiveness he couldn’t quite disguise. “Will you be there too?”
“Not tonight.” Sig’s stony face softened a little, and he leaned down, meeting Ed’s eyes. “But you don’t have to be scared, kid. The Hunters’ll take care of you. Count on Noa to make sure of that.”
A part of Ed railed against Sig’s patronizingly kindly tone; but for all this Sig Curtis knew, the bewildered teenager who stumbled into his shop was just a random, ignorant victim, a chance survivor thrust for the first time into extraordinary circumstances. He could know nothing of how unusual Ed himself truly was, or how brutally his life had conditioned him to adapt to unimaginable new twists of his reality.
“How did you end up with the Hunters?” Ed asked impulsively.
The butcher’s face fell, and he straightened, looking away. There was a tangible pain in the silence before his reply.
“It was a vampire that killed my wife.”
Of all the answers Ed might have anticipated, he was unprepared for those words, and the sudden pang that tore at his heart. His breath caught, and in spite of himself, his teacher’s name slipped faintly across his lips.
“Izumi…!”
At that hint of recognition, Sig raised his head, his eyes dark and wary. “What did you say?”
“I… I said excuse me,” Ed covered swiftly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Sig’s suspicious look faded, a thoughtfulness settling over him once more. After a moment’s consideration of Ed, he offered a final piece of advice that was both unsolicited and unsettling.
“You’re alright, boy. So listen to me. It’s true that the Hunters will help you—but be careful around their leader, Maes Hughes. Noa won’t see it… but he’s not right.”
Recalling the conflicted impressions of Hughes in Noa’s memories, Ed frowned. “How so?”
“Just… not right.” Sig’s stare turned flat. “You better get that blood to Noa.”
The topic was clearly closed, and Edward had been dismissed. Inwardly reeling, he could only bow his head in thanks before he turned to leave the shop, carrying his detestable but necessary package.
Outside, the stars were bright, at least by the standards of urban London. He gazed up at those distant points of light as he walked, clutching the bag to his chest, trying to put the entire startling encounter into place. Added to Noa’s trust, his own gut told him Sig was truly reliable and well-meaning—but that cryptic warning about Hughes only heightened the off note Ed had already sensed. Noa’s feelings for the dhampir who turned her were still too confusing to be of much use, but even from her, there was something he could only classify as dark.
Unfortunately, if his meeting with Sig’s dog was any indication, experience was the best key to unlocking the puzzle-box of memories Noa had given him. Perhaps seeing Hughes in person was the only way to grasp his secondhand knowledge of the man… but by then, he might already have learned the hard way what that veil of darkness meant.
Beyond the immediacy of those concerns, Ed hurt for Sig, and for the other Izumi. He couldn’t imagine his formidable teacher falling prey to a monster, but perhaps the Izumi of this world was not as strong. In a painful way, he was glad she had been spared his fate. He could never have wished upon anyone the horror he was experiencing now, condemned to a shadow existence in an undead body that hungered for blood.
His steps quickly returned him to the refuge where Noa waited. Seen from the exterior, it could be identified as the ruin of an old townhouse, its upper floor destroyed long ago by a fire—or perhaps by a bombing during the War. Inside, he found Noa sitting where he had left her, waiting with trusting patience for his return.
He thought his walk had given him time to dispel his shell-shocked expression, but he was proven wrong when she peered at him with curious concern. “Are you alright?”
Everyone seemed to be asking him that tonight. It was a rather ridiculous question.
“…Yeah.” He gave her the bag with its ghastly contents, and sat down an arm’s length away, hugging his knees to his chest. “I just have a lot to think about.”
Noa said nothing further, and Ed couldn’t blame her for having a more pressing concern than conversation; it was his own fault, after all. She reached into the bag with a faint sense of urgency, withdrawing a glass milk bottle full of thick red liquid. Impatient fingers fumbled it open, and she raised it eagerly to her lips.
Ed looked away then, grimacing at the smell of the beef blood. He had no heart to watch Noa drink, to see such a tender and beautiful creature succumb to that animal need… or to imagine what he had looked like in an even worse state, when bloodlust forced him to take his nourishment from its source. The indelible fact of that deed made him feel wretchedly inhuman and unclean.
He wished he could at least think of it as only Noa’s blood that had changed him, but he couldn’t forget that his infection was ultimately traced to a monster like Envy—to the same monster, in fact, who had slain the family of the dhampir Hughes. What sort of alchemist on the other side had created that homunculus, whether for love or ambition or pure scientific curiosity, never knowing how far the consequences would extend beyond even the loss of their own flesh?
Having discerned what vampires really were, it was far worse for Ed than if he had been an innocent native of this world, aware of himself only as the victim of an inexplicable horror. Instead he knew he was part of the cause, and that shame was even more terrible.
“Edward?”
With a morose sluggishness, Ed raised his head. The empty, red-tinged bottle in front of Noa attested that she had sated her need—but there was now a second one beside it, still full, and this she gently pushed forward. “You need it, too.”
A shiver passed through him. He swallowed hard, and let his chin sink down onto his knees. “I don’t want it.”
“Do you think any of us do?” Noa leaned forward intently. “You’ve got to stay strong, Edward. If you don’t take what you need this way, you might—”
She faltered into silence, but Ed didn’t need the help of her memories to understand what she was trying to say. His own experience was more than adequate to tell him that.
“I might lose control of myself again?” he finished for her bitterly, and squeezed his eyes shut.
After a few hesitant seconds, he heard Noa move, shifting closer to him. He wasn’t surprised when he felt the touch of her fingers on his left hand. The contact was not particularly welcome, but he had no will to brush her off.
“I know it’s hard to believe now, but it will get better,” she said softly. “What happened today made it worse for you, but you’re still adjusting, growing stronger. Every dhampir goes through this at first. So did I… and if I could bear it, I know you can, too.”
For a long moment, there was absolute stillness.
Then, very slowly, an automail hand reached out, steel fingers ticking against glass as they closed around the neck of the bottle.
Edward turned his back to Noa then, trembling with shame, and let his body have what it craved. In his mind, the taste of the animal blood was foul; but every corrupted fiber of his being yearned for it all the same, compelling him to drink until the bottle was dry.
Such, it seemed, was the supper of the damned.
© 2011 Jordanna Morgan
Chapters: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12 :: 13 :: 14 :: Epilogue ::
Author:
jordannamorganArchive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for fantasy violence and blood.
Characters: A whopping big ensemble across two worlds, although the strongest focus is on Ed.
Setting: First anime. Same timeframe as CoS, two years after the end of the series.
Summary: Alternative to Conqueror of Shamballa. An old enemy plunges Ed into the dark secrets of his new world, linked to the alchemy he thought lost to him—while in Amestris, Al faces a life-or-death choice. Will the nightmare Ed is drawn into provide the key to both their fates?
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I’m just playing with them.
Sleep proved to be a rather generous word for Ed’s state of being over the next few hours. In fact, he was not really asleep at all so much as… dormant, immersed in a dreamless darkness that felt quite different. More disconcertingly, there was a level of his senses that remained aware of his environment in a way unknown to natural repose. He would have felt the slightest sound or motion in that lifeless room, and even in the depths of his not-sleep, there was a primal new edge to his instincts that brimmed with readiness to react.
His return to consciousness was swift but impassive, his only movement the abrupt opening of his eyes. He did not feel the languid haziness of waking from human sleep. His mind was immediately clear and focused, and however strange his rest had been, he found it had served him well: the aches in his body were gone, the once-dizzying pain in his skull now faded to a faint twinge.
As he sat up, his first impulse was to glance at Noa. She remained at rest, and while it unsettled him to see her lying inert and unbreathing as a corpse, he resisted the urge to lean over and seek a pulse he knew was not there. Although her hand had moved from its cautionary place near her dagger, he still knew better than to startle her.
In spite of himself, Ed half-smiled crookedly. The shadow of post-traumatic fear Noa carried was unworthy of her. Judging by what he had seen when she faced off against Envy the night before, any man who thought he could have his way with her now was in for a nasty shock.
He let her alone, and rose to look for his coat where it had fallen the night before. The dark stains and the smell of blood on it made him shiver, but in its pockets he found his few personal articles. A handful of coins from three different countries, a dented pocketwatch that proclaimed the hour as not yet half-past six, a stub of a pencil and a small notebook in which mathematical fragments and titles of books were scribbled… It was almost laughable that such flotsam was the last remains of what had been his life. Perhaps he had lost nothing in his turning, after all.
Tearing one of the few blank pages from the notebook, he carried it back across the room with the pencil. He sat on the floor and began to draw, slowly and deliberately, with several pauses for thought; the passage of two years had made him a bit rusty, and the equations were always so much easier in his head than when he bothered to lay them out on paper.
“What are you doing?”
Ed raised his eyes to see that Noa was now awake and sitting up. She was studying the piece of paper beneath his pencil, and with a sad smile he pushed it forward, to give her a better view.
“It’s called a transmutation circle. Most of the alchemists in my world have to draw their equations, like this. I can transmute without a circle—or at least I could, and I did it last night—but I haven’t tried it this way since right after I came to this world. After what happened, I thought I should try again, in case something has changed.”
He filled in the last few lines, completing the array for a simple transmutation of the wooden floorboards beneath the paper. As Noa watched in apprehensive curiosity, he placed both hands on the border of the circle, reaching within himself for the reaction… and was utterly unsurprised when nothing happened.
“I’m convinced now,” he muttered, absently crumpling the paper in his automail hand. “Alchemy still can’t transmute things that belong in this world. It has to be something about Envy that made it work.”
“Envy?”
“The homunculus. The vampire from last night. If he can be transmuted, theoretically, I should be able to stop at breaking down his body—just take him apart and leave him that way.” Ed scowled reflectively. “In my world, destroying homunculi took something more than just alchemy, so I don’t know if even that would kill him permanently here… but it’s worth a try.”
It was then that a startling thought occurred to him. Homunculi carried within them the energy of all the human lives they had consumed, and there was no particular reason to believe Envy’s metamorphosis into a vampire had altered that fact. If he or any other vampire-homunculi like him could be transmuted, then perhaps…
Just perhaps that energy could even be used to open the Gate.
With a pang of gut-wrenching grief, Edward swiftly buried that idea in the deepest depths of his mind. The theory came a day too late; now that he was a dhampir, possessed by an unholy hunger for lifeblood himself, he belonged irrevocably to this realm of darkness on the other side. A single drop of the poison in his veins might be enough to destroy his own world, and he would never let that happen.
“You have to find him first,” Noa observed, forcing him to shake off his agonizing moment of thought. “That’s where the Hunters can help you. Tracking down vampires is what we do.”
“I’ve got an idea he won’t make himself hard for me to find,” Ed muttered grimly. “But tonight, I will go with you, and talk things over with your people. Envy is my own personal business—but if it’s true that all the other vampires you’ve tracked are homunculi, they have to be destroyed too. Assuming alchemy will even do the job, I know I’ll never find them all on my own.”
Noa was clearly pleased by his decision. She smiled at him, and began to rise; but before she could even stand upright, she stumbled slightly, and sank back down onto her knees. “Oh…”
“What’s wrong?” Ed asked in alarm, moving quickly to her side.
“I’m alright. Just a little unsteady.” Noa looked up at him, not quite succeeding at a nervous smile. “Earlier, you… took more than I thought.”
When she raised her head, the open collar of her blouse slipped down a little, exposing the wound on her neck. Unlike Ed’s own burns, the cut had only partly healed, and it was torn by two vicious fang-marks that were equally raw and discolored. Ed’s stomach roiled at the sight, a fresh reminder of the horror of his deed.
“Noa, I’m sorry, it… I mean, I didn’t…” A violent shudder passed through him, and he turned his face away.
“Don’t blame yourself. You needed it too badly, and you haven’t had time to learn how to control your instincts. I’ll be fine…” Noa hesitated, and at last added faintly, “I just need blood myself now.”
Flustered by his guilt, Ed stood up. “Okay. I… I can do that. Stay here.” He grimaced. “I’ll find an alleycat, or something…”
“Oh, not that!” Noa objected, looking distressed at the idea. “We have a different way. The butcher’s shop three streets west of here belongs to one of the human Hunters I told you about. He’s our… supplier. If you tell him I sent you, he’ll know what to do.”
Frowning, Ed tried to dredge a name or a face from his mind, but the information was a blank to him. He seemed to be assimilating Noa’s older memories more readily than her newer ones—which was not convenient, because her more recent life as a Hunter was the experience he needed now.
He gave up the effort, and turned to a more immediate question. “Is it safe to leave yet?”
“Yes. I felt the sun set. That’s what woke me.” Noa smiled hollowly at his bemused expression. “It’s true—we can sense day and night. Soon you’ll begin to feel it, too.”
“Okay, that’s just creepy.”
Without comment on Ed’s lack of enthusiasm, Noa cast a wry glance over his deficiencies of clothing. He was still stripped to the waist, his shirt, coat, and gloves having been irredeemably blood-soaked. Even his trousers were darkened by a few red-black splashes, but that couldn’t be helped, and for the moment he had no means of replacing them.
“You can’t exactly go out like that,” Noa observed pointedly, and picked up the black inverness that lay beside her. “Take this.”
A little reluctantly, Ed took the coat and slipped it on, examining the gash Envy’s knife had made in the left shoulder. A faint trace of Noa’s bloodscent jangled his nerves, but her wound had bled very little before it healed, and there was no alternative in any case. At least the damage did not expose any glint of metal from his automail, and he could hide his hand from sight in the coat pocket. Now of all times, he had no desire to draw attention to himself.
He looked back at Noa, and she held out her sword.
“If you meet that vampire, you have to cut his head off again. It won’t kill him, but it’s the only thing that will really give you enough time to get away.” Her eyes held his, with a trace of anxiousness in their dark depths. “Please, Edward… don’t take any chances yet. You’re still not strong enough.”
For a brief moment, Ed had to wonder if her concern was for him, or for the knowledge of alchemy he had yet to divulge to her; but either way, it amounted to a genuine desire for his safety. More than that, regardless of what she wanted from him, she trusted him enough to let him take her best weapon and leave her in this weakened state. It was a faith he didn’t quite understand, but he had no thought of betraying it. He accepted the sword, buckling its scabbard under the coat.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promised, and crossed the room to leave.
As he confronted the door he had opened so unwisely that day, Ed struggled with a moment of apprehension. The memory of being burned by the sunlight was still potent and painful—but Noa had assured him it was safe now, and he knew she would know. So he hesitantly opened the door, and found beyond it a night-darkened street, lit only by scattered streetlamps.
For the rest of his unnatural life, he would see the world only through shadows. It was a thought that made him swallow hard, blinking back the sudden sting in his eyes as he quickly shut the door behind him.
The street was as unknown to him as the rest of London, but Noa’s memories of it stirred a vague familiarity, like deja-vu. With that instinct to guide him, he started westward on a course he felt he had traveled before, although he knew he never had. The air was colder than it had been the previous night, but it no longer troubled him, and his newly nocturnal eyes pierced the darkness as easily as daylight.
On the other hand, the sounds and scents that surrounded him were an inordinate distraction. Having moved beyond his unstimulating refuge of the past day, the new depth of his senses became painfully clear. In the past he had secretly feared that Alphonse, upon regaining his body, might find the slightest sensations overwhelming—and now Ed thought he understood how that might feel. The few tentative breaths he dared to take brought him powerful odors of dampness and dust, horseflesh and automobile exhaust and heavy city smog, and the softest scurrying of rats among ash cans made him flinch.
It wasn’t only the intensity of his perceptions that strained his nerves. He couldn’t shut out a faint, predatory awareness that each living thing he sensed around him was full of warm red blood… and that terrified him.
Yet one myth of vampiric traits, at least, was soon dispelled. As he passed by a glass-paned storefront, his own unexpected reflection caught his eye, and he paused to study himself with a dimly horrified wonder.
Edward’s skin had always been fair, but now he was ghost-pale, bloodless and colorless. His amber eyes seemed unnaturally bright in a gaunt, shadowed face, and his hair was disheveled, still flecked with traces of dried blood from the beating Envy had given him. He looked as if he had freshly clawed his way out of the grave—which was not so very far from the truth, after all.
Impulsively he leaned close to the glass and drew back his lips, examining his teeth. They seemed perfectly normal now, and the scientist in him puzzled over their transformation into the fangs that had so cruelly marked Noa’s neck…
He drew a willful breath, and tore himself away from the morbid fascination of his monstrosity.
The butcher’s shop was a few buildings down from the intersection of the third street, but Ed found it with ease—a fact that owed nothing to Noa’s memories. He smelled the place from half a block away, a rancid perfume of blood and raw flesh. Were his reactions still human, he would have found it nauseating; but to his altered senses, blood now meant food, and it only aroused in him a dark, unwelcome craving.
Outwardly, there was nothing to set the establishment apart from any average butcher shop. It was small and unpicturesque, with hand-drawn advertising placards in the grimy front windows, and an upstairs apartment where Ed assumed the stout-stomached butcher lived. The lights in the shop itself were on, so he tried the door. It was unlocked, and he stepped inside rather apprehensively, triggering a bell that hung above the threshold.
The first thing to meet him was an enormous black-and-brown dog that bounded toward him with a growl.
Ed froze in an instant of panic. Had his heart beat at all, it would have stopped; but under the pressure of the moment, he felt Noa’s knowledge helpfully intercede, almost as if she was speaking to him herself.
Animals don’t like true vampires. The Hunters use dogs to track them, and to guard against attacks.
Indeed, as the dog scented him, its growl faded to a noncommittal whine. It nosed at his automail curiously—reminding him to tuck his hand out of sight in his pocket—and then it turned with sudden disinterest, to lope back to its bed of old blankets in the corner. Apparently dogs, or at least those trained by the Hunters, had no problem with dhampirs.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Ed spared a glance around the unremarkable interior of the shop. A high counter stood at the back of the room, and he approached it in search of the proprietor. There was a man behind it, bending over a cutting board, but Ed could see only a pair of mountainous shoulders and a head of dark hair.
As he came near, the butcher turned… and a gasp caught raggedly in Ed’s throat.
Sig!
It was unmistakably true. Sig Curtis, the husband of Ed and Al’s alchemy teacher Izumi—or at least Sig’s doppelganger in this world.
For a moment Ed felt himself go weak in his organic right knee, but he managed not to buckle. Even so, his expression must have added further color to his bedraggled appearance, judging by the dubious way the Sig-but-not-Sig looked at him.
“Uh…?” Ed blurted ineloquently.
In any world, Sig Curtis was a canny and observant man. One glance sized Ed up; then he strode around the counter, moving with a graceful quickness that seemed as if it should have been physically impossible for his bulk. His craggy, bearded face was dark with concern.
“You alright?” he boomed laconically, in that seismic-disturbance of a voice Ed knew so well.
It was no time now to be tripped up by the bizarre vagaries of this world. The man in front of him may have worn the face of a friend, but he was really an absolute stranger—and there was urgency in Ed’s errand. He marshaled his wits as best he could.
“I… Noa sent me here. From the Hunters.” He gulped slightly, at an utter loss for how to put the request into words. “She—she needs…”
“Yeah,” Sig cut him off with immediate comprehension, his eyes narrowing. He gave Ed another hard look, and asked, “She hurt?”
Ed flinched, remembering the ugly mark of his bite. “Not… badly.”
A thoughtful growl rolled around in Sig’s chest, and he turned, moving toward a doorway behind him that appeared to open onto a back room. “Stay put.”
Obedience to Sig’s phlegmatic yet terrifying presence was thoroughly ingrained upon Ed, and in any case, he still felt a little dazed. He stood rooted to the spot, trying to process this new development. Sig Curtis a Hunter, one of Noa’s mysterious colleagues who tracked and battled indestructible vampire homunculi… At least he wasn’t a dhampir too. Noa had said as much, and while it was hard to detect through the native stench of the shop, Ed had briefly picked up a scent from the man that his new instincts somehow labeled as human.
Even so, none of this positively meant he could trust the Hunters—or even Sig himself. Of the several doubles he had already encountered in this world, some were very much like the people he once knew, but others were quite different. It was far too early to tell whether this Sig was the innately kind and protective man his counterpart had been.
After a moment, Sig emerged from the back of the shop. He wordlessly placed a brown paper bag on the counter, and the clink of glass bottles inside left no doubt as to what it contained.
“Uh… thanks,” Ed murmured awkwardly, and with his automail hand still hidden in his pocket, he carefully gathered the bag into the crook of his left arm. His curiosity about Sig would have to be satisfied later. For now, Noa was waiting for the blood that would heal the damage he had inflicted on her.
As he was turning to leave, Sig’s voice spoke up behind him.
“There’s enough there for you, too.”
A startled shudder raced down Ed’s spine. Shamefaced, he turned back, and met Sig’s unreadable stare with difficulty. “How did you know?”
Oddly enough, the rumble that emerged from the butcher seemed to be some distant relative of a chuckle.
“When you’re around humans, remember to breathe sometimes.” His eyes darkened then, studying the young dhampir more intently. “You’re new at this. How long?”
“…Last night,” Ed admitted faintly, dropping his gaze.
“I see.” Sig slowly moved from behind the counter and came closer to Ed, looking down at him thoughtfully. “Noa?”
Ed wasn’t quite sure what Sig was asking, but he remembered that it was forbidden for a Hunter to spread the curse of dhampirism to others. As loathsome as this new existence was to him, he had no wish to see Noa punished for sparing him from the finality of death.
“She saved me from a vampire,” he said, choosing words that were cunningly truthful, yet unrevealing. “But it was too late for me.”
“Then it’s true. There’s a vampire in London again.” Sig folded his massive arms, and his expression became just a little more dangerous. “Noa hasn’t gone back to report it yet. That’s not like her. You sure she’s alright?”
“Yes!” Ed winced at the defensive yelp that crept into his voice. “She’s just… She was held up for the day, trying to help me. But she’s taking me to the other Hunters, as soon as she’s had this.” He nodded to the ominous bag he carried, and then glanced at Sig with an inquisitiveness he couldn’t quite disguise. “Will you be there too?”
“Not tonight.” Sig’s stony face softened a little, and he leaned down, meeting Ed’s eyes. “But you don’t have to be scared, kid. The Hunters’ll take care of you. Count on Noa to make sure of that.”
A part of Ed railed against Sig’s patronizingly kindly tone; but for all this Sig Curtis knew, the bewildered teenager who stumbled into his shop was just a random, ignorant victim, a chance survivor thrust for the first time into extraordinary circumstances. He could know nothing of how unusual Ed himself truly was, or how brutally his life had conditioned him to adapt to unimaginable new twists of his reality.
“How did you end up with the Hunters?” Ed asked impulsively.
The butcher’s face fell, and he straightened, looking away. There was a tangible pain in the silence before his reply.
“It was a vampire that killed my wife.”
Of all the answers Ed might have anticipated, he was unprepared for those words, and the sudden pang that tore at his heart. His breath caught, and in spite of himself, his teacher’s name slipped faintly across his lips.
“Izumi…!”
At that hint of recognition, Sig raised his head, his eyes dark and wary. “What did you say?”
“I… I said excuse me,” Ed covered swiftly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Sig’s suspicious look faded, a thoughtfulness settling over him once more. After a moment’s consideration of Ed, he offered a final piece of advice that was both unsolicited and unsettling.
“You’re alright, boy. So listen to me. It’s true that the Hunters will help you—but be careful around their leader, Maes Hughes. Noa won’t see it… but he’s not right.”
Recalling the conflicted impressions of Hughes in Noa’s memories, Ed frowned. “How so?”
“Just… not right.” Sig’s stare turned flat. “You better get that blood to Noa.”
The topic was clearly closed, and Edward had been dismissed. Inwardly reeling, he could only bow his head in thanks before he turned to leave the shop, carrying his detestable but necessary package.
Outside, the stars were bright, at least by the standards of urban London. He gazed up at those distant points of light as he walked, clutching the bag to his chest, trying to put the entire startling encounter into place. Added to Noa’s trust, his own gut told him Sig was truly reliable and well-meaning—but that cryptic warning about Hughes only heightened the off note Ed had already sensed. Noa’s feelings for the dhampir who turned her were still too confusing to be of much use, but even from her, there was something he could only classify as dark.
Unfortunately, if his meeting with Sig’s dog was any indication, experience was the best key to unlocking the puzzle-box of memories Noa had given him. Perhaps seeing Hughes in person was the only way to grasp his secondhand knowledge of the man… but by then, he might already have learned the hard way what that veil of darkness meant.
Beyond the immediacy of those concerns, Ed hurt for Sig, and for the other Izumi. He couldn’t imagine his formidable teacher falling prey to a monster, but perhaps the Izumi of this world was not as strong. In a painful way, he was glad she had been spared his fate. He could never have wished upon anyone the horror he was experiencing now, condemned to a shadow existence in an undead body that hungered for blood.
His steps quickly returned him to the refuge where Noa waited. Seen from the exterior, it could be identified as the ruin of an old townhouse, its upper floor destroyed long ago by a fire—or perhaps by a bombing during the War. Inside, he found Noa sitting where he had left her, waiting with trusting patience for his return.
He thought his walk had given him time to dispel his shell-shocked expression, but he was proven wrong when she peered at him with curious concern. “Are you alright?”
Everyone seemed to be asking him that tonight. It was a rather ridiculous question.
“…Yeah.” He gave her the bag with its ghastly contents, and sat down an arm’s length away, hugging his knees to his chest. “I just have a lot to think about.”
Noa said nothing further, and Ed couldn’t blame her for having a more pressing concern than conversation; it was his own fault, after all. She reached into the bag with a faint sense of urgency, withdrawing a glass milk bottle full of thick red liquid. Impatient fingers fumbled it open, and she raised it eagerly to her lips.
Ed looked away then, grimacing at the smell of the beef blood. He had no heart to watch Noa drink, to see such a tender and beautiful creature succumb to that animal need… or to imagine what he had looked like in an even worse state, when bloodlust forced him to take his nourishment from its source. The indelible fact of that deed made him feel wretchedly inhuman and unclean.
He wished he could at least think of it as only Noa’s blood that had changed him, but he couldn’t forget that his infection was ultimately traced to a monster like Envy—to the same monster, in fact, who had slain the family of the dhampir Hughes. What sort of alchemist on the other side had created that homunculus, whether for love or ambition or pure scientific curiosity, never knowing how far the consequences would extend beyond even the loss of their own flesh?
Having discerned what vampires really were, it was far worse for Ed than if he had been an innocent native of this world, aware of himself only as the victim of an inexplicable horror. Instead he knew he was part of the cause, and that shame was even more terrible.
“Edward?”
With a morose sluggishness, Ed raised his head. The empty, red-tinged bottle in front of Noa attested that she had sated her need—but there was now a second one beside it, still full, and this she gently pushed forward. “You need it, too.”
A shiver passed through him. He swallowed hard, and let his chin sink down onto his knees. “I don’t want it.”
“Do you think any of us do?” Noa leaned forward intently. “You’ve got to stay strong, Edward. If you don’t take what you need this way, you might—”
She faltered into silence, but Ed didn’t need the help of her memories to understand what she was trying to say. His own experience was more than adequate to tell him that.
“I might lose control of myself again?” he finished for her bitterly, and squeezed his eyes shut.
After a few hesitant seconds, he heard Noa move, shifting closer to him. He wasn’t surprised when he felt the touch of her fingers on his left hand. The contact was not particularly welcome, but he had no will to brush her off.
“I know it’s hard to believe now, but it will get better,” she said softly. “What happened today made it worse for you, but you’re still adjusting, growing stronger. Every dhampir goes through this at first. So did I… and if I could bear it, I know you can, too.”
For a long moment, there was absolute stillness.
Then, very slowly, an automail hand reached out, steel fingers ticking against glass as they closed around the neck of the bottle.
Edward turned his back to Noa then, trembling with shame, and let his body have what it craved. In his mind, the taste of the animal blood was foul; but every corrupted fiber of his being yearned for it all the same, compelling him to drink until the bottle was dry.
Such, it seemed, was the supper of the damned.
© 2011 Jordanna Morgan
Chapters: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12 :: 13 :: 14 :: Epilogue ::
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Date: 2011-04-06 03:51 pm (UTC)I can promise that this story won't be left hanging. I only have a bit more than one scene left to write now, so it's mere days from being finished (all 90k+ words of it!), and more chapters will be posted regularly. Things only get more interesting for poor Ed from here. ;)