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prose_alchemistTitle: Blood Ties (8/14: Flipped)
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.
Sunset.
For Edward Elric, that once-prosaic event was no longer a sight, but a sensation: the release of an indefinable pressure within him, his signal to rise from the undreaming quiescence of the day. It meant darkness, his new native element, had descended over London.
He opened his eyes to complete blackness, for he and Noa wasted no candlelight during their daytime rest. At this point, after all, there was no need for light to orient himself in their cellar refuge; scent and touch were enough. A part of him somehow thought that fact should have made him feel monstrously animalistic and degraded… but in reality, it was one of the many things he had found himself growing used to, in the three days since their escape from the Hunters.
His turning was complete, his body and senses—and his instincts—having achieved their full dhampiric strength. He was now sure of what he could expect from his changed nature, and that at least helped to dispel his fear of the unknown in himself. Even his need for blood had become something less than unbearable, if only because its very routineness was numbing him to the revulsion of it.
Indeed, this in-between existence had quickly fallen into a pattern. Nourishment was the first order of business each evening, and Noa would go alone to fetch the blood Sig left for them in a prearranged place. After she brought it back to Ed, and their needs were satisfied, they would set out together to spend the night on the hunt—searching the city for Envy. Ed had half-expected Envy to find him, but there was still no sign of the homunculus, and he wondered in frustration if the Hunters’ larger-scale search efforts had driven their quarry to ground. Already he and Noa had barely avoided crossing paths with Falman and Breda, presumably out vampire-hunting like the rest of Hughes’ disciples.
As for the daylight hours, when the two dhampirs were forced back to the cellar to take shelter from the sun, that time was of no use to them. There was nothing to do then but sleep… and when they bedded down at sunrise, Noa would lie much closer to Ed than she once had, her sword and dagger removed and set aside.
Ed was moved by this lapse of Noa’s compulsive guardedness. He knew there was a deeper reason than her sharing of his memories, because she had never even permitted herself such vulnerability with Hughes, or with any other Hunter whose blood she had taken—no matter how sure she was that they would not hurt her. He could only assume he alone was granted this privilege because of her fantastic belief in him, her assurance in her fate that surpassed all reason.
Perhaps it was only that faith of hers rubbing off on him again… but sometimes, he almost began to feel things might work out.
They would find Envy eventually, and with any luck, it would be before the Hunters did. However much it inconvenienced him to be hunted, he was unlikely to leave London until he was convinced Ed was dead; and if somehow he was driven from the city, Ed and Noa would track him down. At the very least, they would first find one of his fellow vampire-homunculi on which to test the possibilities of alchemy. They would discover how Ed had injured Envy before, and whether they could use that transmutation to destroy vampires completely… and if they could, they would set out to eradicate these monsters, with or without the help of the Hunters.
There would never be any joy in such work, and the lost hope of any reunion with Al still left a gaping hole in Ed’s heart, but at least this new purpose filled a fraction of the void. The thought of saving lives and undoing the sins of other alchemists was reason enough to go on, even as what he had become.
He could live this life… at least, so long as he wasn’t completely alone.
As Ed gave an idle waking stretch in the darkness, his left hand brushed Noa’s sleeve, and he felt her stir as she too sensed the arrival of night. There was nothing unchaste in her closeness, merely a gentle soul-presence that both offered and sought a warmth not of flesh, but of heart—a comfort that was bittersweetly familiar.
As he sat up, a match scraped, and a candle flickered to life. Noa set the light to one side and smiled thinly at him.
“Another hunt tonight, then?”
Ed shrugged and drew his knees up to his chest. “I don’t have any better ideas. Maybe this will be the night—Envy is probably trying just as hard to find me.”
Noa grimaced. “So he can try to kill you…”
“We’re out to do the same to him,” Ed muttered. “And we will be the ones who win this fight.”
“I know that,” Noa replied, in a quiet voice of simple assurance, and reached out to collect her blades. “It’s time to pick up Sig’s delivery.”
Ed watched her fasten the sheaths to her belt, and then somberly handed up her coat, which she had spread on the floor as makeshift bedding. “You think Hughes might suspect Sig of helping us, don’t you? That’s why you haven’t wanted me to come with you.”
Although Noa’s back was turned, he saw her flinch. She looked over her shoulder with a sigh, and gave a small nod as she turned to accept her coat from his hand.
“Maes hasn’t fully trusted him for a while, because he knows Sig doubted his judgment—even before all this happened. Sig is a skilled enough Hunter to avoid being tracked himself, and a dhampir can’t take memories from a human. But if Maes…” She trailed off with a shudder, and her gaze fell. “If he were to get the truth out of Sig some other way… I just don’t want you to walk into a trap, Ed.”
“I don’t like this,” Ed growled, rising to his feet. “I can take care of myself—and after going against Hughes, you must be about as high on the Hunters’ hitlist as I am. If there’s any trouble, we should both face it.”
“Don’t worry. After all, I don’t really think anyone ever could make Sig talk.” Noa gave him a warmly reassuring smile. “This will only take a few minutes, just like it has before. I’ll be fine.”
After a moment’s frustrated uncertainty, Ed sighed and nodded in resignation. He watched Noa climb the steps to the cellar door and slip out into the night; then steel fingers snuffed out the candle, and he settled down in the darkness, to lie lost in his thoughts as he waited.
And waited.
Perhaps consequent to his new sense of the sun’s rising and setting, Ed’s general awareness of time was now uncannily precise as well. On the past two nights, it had taken Noa less than twenty minutes to fetch their supply of blood and return… but this time, those minutes stretched on to thirty, and then forty, and then fifty.
By the time an hour had passed, Ed knew something was wrong.
At that point, it took very little debate with himself to choose action. He gathered his own weapons and left the cellar. Although he never went with Noa to retrieve the blood, she had told him where the dropoff point was, and he turned his steps toward it now—his anxiousness growing with each step.
If she had fallen into a trap laid by the Hunters, they would surely be waiting for him at that place too. He was certain he could avoid capture himself, so long as he was wary of their presence. He would take them by surprise instead, and beat her location out of them if he had to.
But if it was Envy who had found her…
Ed shut that horrific thought out of his mind, and quickened his pace.
In his rush, he reached the dropoff point in a little more than five minutes, and approached it with all his senses on the alert. There was no scent of any other Hunters nearby; if they had been there in the last hour, they were long gone, any lingering trace of their passage obliterated by the evening breeze.
The location was just as Noa had described to him, a well-kept block of flats with a garden in the courtyard. At the center of the garden stood a large, ornate fountain, its water cascading from four successively smaller basins. When Ed sprang up onto the broad rim, the topmost tier was still above his head. He peeled the glove from his left hand, reached up into the cold water… and his searching fingers found two smooth glass shapes that rolled and clinked together.
His heart sinking, he lifted down a pair of carefully-sealed bottles of beef blood. It was their full night’s ration, left untouched in the place where Sig had hidden it—which meant Noa had never reached it at all.
Snarling a curse, Ed impulsively hurled the bottles into the bushes across the courtyard, and heard the sharp crack of shattering glass. Some long-neglected inner voice of prudence warned that he might later regret skipping the meal, but the fear rising in him was enough to dampen even his unnatural dhampir appetite. He leaped down from the edge of the fountain and ran back to the street, to set out on a direct course for the Hunters’ headquarters.
He would lie in wait outside the walls. He would seize the first Hunter to emerge, and if they knew where Noa was, he would make them tell. If he had to, he would even take another dhampir’s blood and memories by force to find out—and if they had her, he would tear their entire fortress down to free her.
And if they didn’t…
Ed shook his head sharply, and with Noa’s memories of the local streets to guide him, he turned down a long alley that would shorten his way by a few minutes. With high building walls on either side blotting out the moonlight, it was particularly dark there, but that was no difficulty for his eyes.
Something black and flowing suddenly plummeted down from above, landing in a crouch on the bricks ahead of him.
As the figure rose up, Ed saw golden hair and scarlet hellfire eyes, and caught a scent that was far more familiar than it should have been. Noa’s knowledge catalogued it simply as vampire, but a more subtle nuance repulsed him to his core as the redolence of pain, of evil, of death itself… and he knew his deepest subconscious remembered that scent even from his worst moments in his own world.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Envy announced silkily, with a sneer of a smile on his face.
At that moment, it felt to Edward as if any remaining human warmth in his soul drained away. He was ready to kill with ice-cold gladness.
His automail hand twitched toward his sword, only to fall to his side again. Any damage the blade inflicted would be temporary at best. He was going to have just one chance at this—and it would be alchemy or nothing.
“What did you do to Noa?” he asked slowly, and Envy’s head slanted to one side as his smile twisted a little more.
“So that was her name.” The vampire chuckled viciously. “You just keep losing people, don’t you, pipsqueak? First Baby Brother, then Daddy Dearest… and now even your little Hunter whore.”
Ed’s innate temper bled into his dhampir instincts, and he felt his eyes burn crimson with half-animal rage as he threw himself forward. His knife somehow found its way into his hand. At that moment, he wasn’t thinking about alchemy, or anything else but his desire to tear Envy apart by the force of his own flesh and steel.
Their knives collided with a bone-shuddering scrape of metal. Even as a dhampir, Ed couldn’t fully match the homunculus for either strength or reflexes; Envy shoved Ed’s mechanical arm away with a quick, powerful movement, and his blade swiped downward. A sudden fiery shock bit into Ed’s right side, jarring him so that he stumbled back with a hiss of pain.
Vampire and dhampir froze just beyond one another’s reach. Ed smelled his own blood as he took a breath to center himself, but he didn’t even glance down at his ribs. The sting of the long but shallow gash above his hip was already fading, the damage regenerating to become flawless skin once more.
Then he realized it was his opponent, instead, who was staring at the half-exposed wound as it healed.
“You’re one of them,” Envy breathed, with an entirely unpleasant wonder.
The flames of fury iced over again, and ruby eyes slowly softened to amber as Ed remembered his purpose. If it was true—if he had lost Noa to this monster as well—he was once again the only sane soul left to carry the secret of alchemy. For the Hunters, and for this entire world, he had to prove it was truly the hope Noa believed in.
He smiled at Envy, and there was the cold emptiness of death in that smile.
“Not much fun, is it… trying to kill something that won’t die?”
A shudder of rage passed through Envy’s body. He knotted his fists at his sides, exposing his fangs as he drew in a rasp of a breath.
“But you can die,” he murmured, and for a brief moment, it seemed almost as if he was trying to convince himself—having already seen Edward survive death at his hands twice over.
“You can die… and this time, you will!”
Envy made a headlong rush, knife raised; a reaction Ed anticipated. The alchemist dropped his own knife and clapped his hands together… and for the first time in his life, the array he formed in his mind was calculated to break down the very molecules of a body of flesh.
His reflexes were just fast enough to let him duck under Envy’s furious swing at him. He rebounded and struck upward, his outstretched hands slamming solidly into Envy’s chest—
And nothing happened.
For a single, absurdly anticlimactic second, they stood frozen in their positions, as they both grasped the momentous reality of that failure. At last some flickering message of Ed’s nerves made its way to his automail hand, spurring metal fingers to make a grab for the sword that was his only remaining weapon.
Envy was quicker.
A cry gasped from Ed’s lungs as Envy seized his flesh arm and wrenched it, bodily spinning him around. He felt more than heard a sickening crunch between elbow and wrist, and somewhere amid the explosion of pain, he sensed his sword being dragged out of its scabbard by a hand that was not his own. Before he could regain his bearings from the dizzy, excruciating shock, his back smashed against a hard surface—and his reeling vision went red as an inconceivable new fire blazed in the center of his body.
It felt…
It felt like the first time Envy had killed him.
For a small eternity, there was only the pain. The haze his vision swam in turned white, and then faded slowly into the darkness of the alley. His eyes focused suddenly as a small, involuntary spasm shot through him.
Envy’s face was an inch from his own. The homunculus was smiling with a savage triumph.
In a second that seemed to take a very long time, Ed pieced together the meanings of the agonies in his body. His left arm was going to do him no good anytime soon; it was broken, the bones fractured too badly to heal until they were set. His steel right arm was intact, but Envy held it by the wrist, twisted back in a monstrously powerful grip that Ed was not now in any condition to fight.
As for the conflagration raging in his torso…
Lowering his eyes, he saw the cross-guard of his own sword pressed snugly against his stomach. Its entire blade had passed through his body and beyond, the point sinking deep into the stout wooden door behind his back—pinning him like an insect.
Incredibly enough, even this was not a mortal wound for a dhampir. The sword penetrated only resilient skin and soft tissue, coming just shy of a far more critical strike to his spinal cord. He could still heal.
But Envy would never give him that chance.
Ed wasn’t sure whether the sound that escaped him was a laugh or a sob. The convulsive shudder that attended it made the sword tear a little more at his insides, but that didn’t matter any longer.
Nothing mattered. End of the line. He had failed for the last time, and now, he would die for the last time.
“The alchemy didn’t work…”
He only realized he had faintly whispered those words when Envy let out a snort of disdainful laughter. “Of course it didn’t, you fool. It didn’t work for your friend Hughes, either—or at least the one that lives here.”
A gasp half-choked Edward as air and blood mingled in his lungs. “Hughes—?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t kill this one—not yet. It was more fun to hurt him. And to keep hurting him, until he needed blood so badly that…” Envy smiled languorously, as if at some pleasurable memory. “Well. Let’s just say the woman they found dead in the street this morning wasn’t my doing.”
The sword through Ed’s body caused new sparks of pain as his gut tightened with a visceral horror. He understood what Envy was saying. If the homunculus was telling the truth, Hughes had sustained so much damage and blood loss that, in the Hunters’ terms, he flipped: all rational thought was driven from him, and like a rabid animal he would attack anything in his path, to satisfy his need for healing, nourishing blood.
If Hughes, in his already unstable state, had been pushed over that line—had turned rogue and taken human life as prey—he was finished. His mind would never recover, and his body would compel him to keep killing. Even his faithful Hunters would know the only mercy was to put him down, to end that maddened suffering and spare him the bloodguilt of more lives.
By now, perhaps they already had.
“And now it’s your turn…”
There was something exceptionally chilling in Envy’s tone. With a smile of ominous indulgence, he grasped Ed’s hair and pulled at it, forcibly turning the teenager’s head to expose his soft throat.
“I’ve already ripped you open three times, and you’re not dead yet. This time, maybe we’ll see what happens when I cut your head off…” Envy paused. “But first, now that you’re one of them, I’m going to do to you what I did to Hughes. You’ve always been so proud of how precious human life is to you. I want you to feel what it’s like to need to take it, to be so starved for it you can’t stop yourself—just like a newly born homunculus. Then you’ll know the hunger you made your mother feel, the hunger I felt from the moment he brought me back. This is what you’ve done to your most beloved dead, alchemist!”
The diatribe climaxed in a ringing shriek, promising a new and unspeakable level of horror. Ed was prepared for death, even for the most grisly torture of his own person to precede it; such was the price to be expected for his ultimate defeat. But to be starved into madness, to become a ravening predator unleashed to stalk and kill the innocent for Envy’s vindictive amusement…
New embers of resistance glowed to life within Ed, and he tried to fight. His automail hand shoved back so hard against Envy’s grip that he was sure it would break, and his left leg kicked. Even his crippled flesh arm flailed out, his fist seeking Envy’s face.
Envy was unmoved. With lightning quickness, his right hand released Ed’s braid to capture that swinging fist, and his head snapped forward to connect violently with the dhampir’s chin. The blow created a double impact as the back of Ed’s skull cracked hard against the door, blinding him with pain.
In that moment of stunned helplessness, Envy’s fangs sank into his throat, and he felt the surge of life escaping his body.
With his blood, Envy also took from Ed the knowledge of everything that had happened since their last encounter. His entire brief existence as a dhampir, his time among the Hunters. Noa, Hughes, Mustang, Sig, all of them.
His last clear realization was that they, or whoever remained of them, would be Envy’s next targets. Even after Ed was dead, that unquenchable thirst for vengeance would drive Envy to obliterate every last familiar person in this world—and it would not end with the Hunters, his enemies in their own right. He would kill anyone he found whose only crime against him was to wear a face Ed had remembered with kindness.
No.
As Ed felt his life physically drain away, the aching bloodlust Envy sought to induce was swiftly creeping over him; but that fleeting sense of a threat to the Hunters aroused something more. Deep within, he understood it as a simple animal impulse to defend his pack.
Perhaps he had forgotten that the Hunters were not the old friends he had known. Perhaps it didn’t matter. For a moment, that feeling of primal devotion was indescribably beautiful and pure… and then it merged with his hunger, igniting a rage beyond anything even Envy was prepared for.
Ed’s eyes blazed to scarlet, and his automail arm lashed out, breaking free of the grip Envy had unconsciously relaxed during the mesmeric rush of feeding. The fist landed a punch to Envy’s chin that would have shattered a human jaw, and a metal knee simultaneously cannoned into the vampire’s stomach. He was pitched backward, leaving open red gashes where his fangs were torn roughly from Ed’s throat.
Steel fingers clamped down on the grip of the sword pinning Ed’s stomach. He twisted it, and the hilt snapped off—and with an inhuman roar of pain and fury, his body slid forward, lurching off of the blade that had impaled him.
It only hurt more then, but that was alright. That was good. It would spur him to fight harder.
With his broken arm tucked against his body, and his flesh hand clutching the bloody hole in his middle, he took a few unsteady steps. Suicidal as it was, he knew nothing then but a burning desire to continue his assault on Envy, and it was his nose more than his pain-clouded eyes that allowed him to track the homunculus.
Envy. Envy half-sprawled in the middle of the alley where Ed’s blows had thrown him, still dazed from the force of the unexpected resistance, as well as from the lingering dream-haze of stolen memories. Envy bleeding from a split lip that was already beginning to regenerate.
Bleeding.
Blood.
Homunculus blood, the very source of the infection that condemned dhampirs to exist as predators of the night. Its smell was bitter, unnatural, like a harsh metallic poison; but it was blood nonetheless, and Edward’s fangs emerged as he stumbled toward that promised manna.
The very intensity of the reaction caught Envy by surprise. He was by far the stronger one, especially now that Ed was weakened by injury and blood loss—but the deranged directness of the attack was enough to give even an immortal monster pause. He squirmed backwards, his eyes flicking about in search of the knives they both had dropped earlier in the battle. Without a blade to pierce through the heart or sever the head, a blood-crazed dhampir would challenge even his expertise at killing things.
Ed reeled toward his nemesis, delirious and shaking with need. Blood to survive. Blood to heal.
Envy suddenly made a quick feint to one side, like a rat attempting to scurry back into the shadows. Reacting on instinct to the seeming escape effort of his prey, Ed lunged—unaware that the move was in fact a scramble for one of their fallen knives. Once more Envy was armed, and Ed’s irresistible compulsion to sink his fangs into the homunculus could only end in his own death; but in his current state, like a wild animal looking down the barrel of a gun, he was incapable of grasping the danger.
Almost tasting the rich torrent of the blood he smelled, he reached out…
A step away from Envy, something plowed into Ed from his left side, pushing him down and away. He hit the ground with a wordless snarl at the pain that jarred his body, the fury of his thwarted kill, and turned to spring at whatever it was that dared to interfere—but he caught a scent that froze him in place. He didn’t understand what it was, but it was deeply familiar, a strange tang of decay veiled beneath a heady musk.
Then a burst of brilliant, crackling light exploded before his night-sensitive retinas. Envy let out an animal shriek, and as Ed’s automail arm rose reflexively to shield his eyes, he glimpsed only the silhouette of a tall figure bending over the vampire.
Darkness again, made even deeper by the aftershock of the light, dimming and blurring his vision. He fell back on his other senses to detect running footsteps, smells of fellow dhampirs. Ones he knew, and humans as well; but names were beyond him at the moment.
There was a shout, a wave of noxious gasoline odor, and then a far more natural spark flared somewhere in front of Ed. It traced a glowing arc through the air, to fall with a crash of glass at Envy’s feet—and flames blossomed over Envy, clinging to him like liquid, mingling the fuel smell with the stench of charred flesh.
For an instant, an odd, half-coherent thought came near to the surface of Ed’s mind.
I didn’t hear a snap…
The burning homunculus screeched and ran flailing into the night, unchallenged by the other presences in the alley. He was finished for this battle. Fire was no more deadly to him than any other weapon, but even if the pain and damage was temporary, it would drive him miserably into hiding for hours as he healed.
A moment’s tense silence fell. Still crumpled on his knees, his broken arm pressed tight against his punctured body, Ed unthinkingly processed the changes to his surroundings. The fire-smell was fading away, leaving the scents of people, both dhampir and human. The bitter musky note he had discerned before… and blood.
Human blood.
With that trigger, all other perceptions were swept away by the renewed urgency of his hunger, and he swayed to his feet. Blood. Life. Relief from his pain. He tracked the scent, and his eyes focused on the personage he had seen bending down over Envy. Crouched and panting as if exhausted, or perhaps grieving, this one was the source of that mysterious familiar fragrance—and the bloodscent.
Blood. Survival. Nothing else mattered.
Giving vent to a growl of impatient desire, Ed stalked toward this new prospect of nourishment. The sound startled his prey into turning, and he glimpsed a shimmer of long blond hair.
“No, Ed!”
It was Noa’s voice that rang out. It was Noa’s scent that met his intake of breath, and Noa’s form that was suddenly thrust between himself and his target. She tore open the collar of her blouse, tore the skin of her own throat with her fingernails to leave trails of blood.
Dhampir blood. Not quite so enticing as the other—but she was closer.
His eyes never met hers as he fell upon her, biting deep into the wound she had made in her neck. Greedily he dragged her to the ground, and she offered no resistance while he drank as if he would bleed her dry. New memories swam into his consciousness, half-recognized faces and fragments of information he was in no state to comprehend.
Sig and Havoc, waiting together to meet Noa at the fountain. Visitors from Paris, carrying important news. The tall blond-haired man…
For one incandescent moment, a spectacular shock of recognition seized Edward.
Then something crashed down on the back of his head, and a merciful darkness swallowed him up.
AMESTRIS
Winry wondered how Ed had done it all those years.
Alphonse was restless that morning, and roaming about in his armor again. When she found him stretched out on his back in the Curtises’ tiny front yard, he had invited her to join him in cloud-watching; so she gingerly settled against him, propping herself up on his metal side to gaze at the sky. Edward often used to do that, and she thought the closeness might be a comfort to Al, even if he was physically numb to it.
And even if she wasn’t his brother.
Half an hour later, her shoulders were cramping and her spine was knotted up with stiffness, and she wondered how Ed had done it. How he had always endured this discomfort with every sign of complete contentment.
The otherwise mild edge to the morning air was seeping into her skin through Al’s steel, too—and this was balmy Dublith. She remembered the cold of Resembool’s first winter after the transmutation, when Ed was still recovering. No matter how warmly Pinako had tucked him into bed, the morning almost invariably found him nestled in Al’s lap, heedless of the night’s chill.
But then, at that point, it was the only place where he slept without nightmares.
In any case, Winry was determined not to let on about her growing aches, because Al seemed glad enough for the contact. He spoke little, save for his occasional observations about the shape of this cloud or that, tracing it in the air for her with a pointing leather digit. If it wasn’t for his hard shell against her back—and the empty void beside them where Ed belonged—she could have closed her eyes and imagined they were just kids on a Resembool hillside again.
There was solace now in memories. She liked the ones of childhood best, tempered with sadness yet still innocent; but she couldn’t deny that even those awful months after were precious to her, too. As much as she complained about Ed’s stupidity and hard-headedness, and the work and grief he caused for her and Granny, a part of her had cherished the chance to take care of him for a while—when he had no choice but to let himself be taken care of. It was even more bittersweet because she knew all along how fleeting that time would be.
She knew Ed and Al would never be hers again. They had touched something great and terrible, and for all it took from them, it made them much more than they ever could have become otherwise. More than she alone could jealously, pettily lay claim to. They belonged to the world, to use their gifts for a good Ed had never anticipated when he set his own seemingly impossible goals. He would have scoffed at her if she said it, but she knew there was a destiny for the brothers.
And in the end, that destiny had blazed with such brief brilliance that it burned them up.
“Al… Have you decided when you’re going to do the transmutation?”
Winry felt a slight quiver pass through Al’s armor. He hesitated for a moment, and then moved to sit up—causing her back muscles to shriek a painful protest as she shifted in response. She suppressed her wince and turned to face him, noting the troubled darkness of his soul-light as it met her gaze.
“Soon.” His voice was a resonating whisper. “I’m not really exactly sure yet.”
The answer frightened Winry a little, for Al’s true body already seemed to be on the edge of death. Since her arrival, he had only grown weaker, until he could scarcely even eat. In the last day or two, he’d hardly even mustered the strength to transfer his being to the armor… or perhaps he was just clinging more dearly to his last fading hours in his own flesh, as he realized what he was about to lose.
She knew how gut-wrenching it had to be, working up the courage to abandon his body forever, knowing he might still die in the attempt—but time was fast running out. It was risky enough to have stretched it this far. At any moment now, she feared the life in his body might slip away completely, taking his soul with it.
“How much longer do you think your body can hold out?” Winry made a mighty effort to keep her voice from trembling, and didn’t succeed. “I know you want to hold onto every moment you can, but if you don’t do it soon—”
“I know.” There was something flat and brusque in Al’s tone. He looked away from her, his metal shoulders creaking as they shifted uneasily, and a heavy strain of emotion crept into his voice.
“It’s only, when my body is gone… I won’t be able to dream.”
Winry’s heart clenched up tight. She suddenly understood, and this time, she couldn’t keep her tears from welling up.
“Oh, Al… You’ve been hoping your dreams about Ed would come back, haven’t you?”
Al’s helmet dipped downward, to stare at his clasped gauntlets in his lap. “I don’t know why they stopped… but I know a part of me is with Ed. It still is, no matter what’s happened.” He looked up at Winry, exuding a sudden determination. “And if I could just dream about him one more time—about the place where he is—then maybe I could finally see something there that would tell me where to find him.”
It hurt to hear the fierce conviction in his voice, and Winry felt again the agonizing confusion of her own emotions. Of course Al would go to his grave, if it came to that, believing Ed was alive; and it said something extraordinary that Mustang believed too. On the other hand, she also knew the secret despair Izumi was harboring. Only the teacher still remembered the terrible power of the thing they called the Gate.
Torn between the two impulses, Winry didn’t know what to think or feel. She couldn’t decide whether to go on hoping, or finally let go of hope and properly grieve…
But even if she did choose hope, there wasn’t enough of it left to risk Al’s life on.
“You can’t push it any further, Al.” Blinking back her tears, she grasped his gauntlet and squeezed it. He wouldn’t feel the touch, but he would see it and understand. “If you wait too long, and you die… you won’t be able to look for Ed in your dreams or in the real world.”
“I know that. I just have to do this in my own way.” The leather hand she held returned a gentle grip. “Don’t be scared for me. I’m almost ready. And when it’s over… I’ll be glad. Because then I can finally leave here, and try to find those places where I’ve seen Ed.”
A sharp sadness pricked Winry, but the words were only a confirmation of what she had already known deep down. Of course Al would leave. Once he had permanently traded feeble flesh for strong steel, he would devote himself to scouring the farthest ends of the world for his brother. Free of physical needs, and perhaps free of death itself, he could search forever if he saw reason to continue beyond the span of Ed’s natural life. She might never even see him again.
He would still never be hers—but at least he would be alive.
If the transmutation succeeded at all.
It suddenly struck her more painfully than ever that in a day or two, a mere handful of hours, Al might be dead. Alchemy might finish the job it had started seven years earlier, and take the last thing that was left to be taken from the Elric brothers. Al’s life.
Perhaps, if he died… he would finally be with Edward.
Tears flooded Winry’s eyes. She sat up quickly on her knees and threw her arms around what passed for Al’s neck, hugging him so tightly that the hard edges of his armor would leave her bruised. She didn’t let herself sob, but the effort of holding it back made her body tremble.
Al seemed taken aback for only a moment. Then he put his arms around her, and one massive gauntlet cradled the back of her head.
Except for the tender hand that petted her hair, he sat patiently motionless, and said nothing. She clung to his steel embrace for so long that her muscles grew stiff and aching again—but she didn’t care anymore.
It was Al who broke it off at last. He gently took her by the shoulders and drew her away from him, and she knew by the tilt of his helmet that he was studying her face. Her cheeks were damp with tears, and he shook his head at the moisture with a wry disapproval.
“Now I’ll have to polish my armor again. I don’t need it getting rusty already, you know.”
Winry smiled. It hurt, but it was genuine.
“I can help—”
The words died on her lips as a sudden spasm gripped Al’s armor. Just once his huge frame jerked rigidly, as if electrified by a live wire; then he slumped forward, bracing his gauntlets against the ground. Strange shudders began to course through him, rattling every joint.
“Al!” Winry gasped, reaching out to him uncertainly. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s…” Still shivering violently, Al lifted one hand to his chestplate. His fingers clutched futilely at it, as if the steel itself was struggling for a breath it was incapable of taking.
“My body, Winry—stopped breathing—”
The convulsions ceased all at once, as his distressed body of flesh instinctively drew his consciousness back into itself. Suddenly bereft of its occupying soul, the lifeless armor crashed to the ground at Winry’s feet, its helmet tumbling loose onto the grass.
“Al!”
© 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.
Sunset.
For Edward Elric, that once-prosaic event was no longer a sight, but a sensation: the release of an indefinable pressure within him, his signal to rise from the undreaming quiescence of the day. It meant darkness, his new native element, had descended over London.
He opened his eyes to complete blackness, for he and Noa wasted no candlelight during their daytime rest. At this point, after all, there was no need for light to orient himself in their cellar refuge; scent and touch were enough. A part of him somehow thought that fact should have made him feel monstrously animalistic and degraded… but in reality, it was one of the many things he had found himself growing used to, in the three days since their escape from the Hunters.
His turning was complete, his body and senses—and his instincts—having achieved their full dhampiric strength. He was now sure of what he could expect from his changed nature, and that at least helped to dispel his fear of the unknown in himself. Even his need for blood had become something less than unbearable, if only because its very routineness was numbing him to the revulsion of it.
Indeed, this in-between existence had quickly fallen into a pattern. Nourishment was the first order of business each evening, and Noa would go alone to fetch the blood Sig left for them in a prearranged place. After she brought it back to Ed, and their needs were satisfied, they would set out together to spend the night on the hunt—searching the city for Envy. Ed had half-expected Envy to find him, but there was still no sign of the homunculus, and he wondered in frustration if the Hunters’ larger-scale search efforts had driven their quarry to ground. Already he and Noa had barely avoided crossing paths with Falman and Breda, presumably out vampire-hunting like the rest of Hughes’ disciples.
As for the daylight hours, when the two dhampirs were forced back to the cellar to take shelter from the sun, that time was of no use to them. There was nothing to do then but sleep… and when they bedded down at sunrise, Noa would lie much closer to Ed than she once had, her sword and dagger removed and set aside.
Ed was moved by this lapse of Noa’s compulsive guardedness. He knew there was a deeper reason than her sharing of his memories, because she had never even permitted herself such vulnerability with Hughes, or with any other Hunter whose blood she had taken—no matter how sure she was that they would not hurt her. He could only assume he alone was granted this privilege because of her fantastic belief in him, her assurance in her fate that surpassed all reason.
Perhaps it was only that faith of hers rubbing off on him again… but sometimes, he almost began to feel things might work out.
They would find Envy eventually, and with any luck, it would be before the Hunters did. However much it inconvenienced him to be hunted, he was unlikely to leave London until he was convinced Ed was dead; and if somehow he was driven from the city, Ed and Noa would track him down. At the very least, they would first find one of his fellow vampire-homunculi on which to test the possibilities of alchemy. They would discover how Ed had injured Envy before, and whether they could use that transmutation to destroy vampires completely… and if they could, they would set out to eradicate these monsters, with or without the help of the Hunters.
There would never be any joy in such work, and the lost hope of any reunion with Al still left a gaping hole in Ed’s heart, but at least this new purpose filled a fraction of the void. The thought of saving lives and undoing the sins of other alchemists was reason enough to go on, even as what he had become.
He could live this life… at least, so long as he wasn’t completely alone.
As Ed gave an idle waking stretch in the darkness, his left hand brushed Noa’s sleeve, and he felt her stir as she too sensed the arrival of night. There was nothing unchaste in her closeness, merely a gentle soul-presence that both offered and sought a warmth not of flesh, but of heart—a comfort that was bittersweetly familiar.
As he sat up, a match scraped, and a candle flickered to life. Noa set the light to one side and smiled thinly at him.
“Another hunt tonight, then?”
Ed shrugged and drew his knees up to his chest. “I don’t have any better ideas. Maybe this will be the night—Envy is probably trying just as hard to find me.”
Noa grimaced. “So he can try to kill you…”
“We’re out to do the same to him,” Ed muttered. “And we will be the ones who win this fight.”
“I know that,” Noa replied, in a quiet voice of simple assurance, and reached out to collect her blades. “It’s time to pick up Sig’s delivery.”
Ed watched her fasten the sheaths to her belt, and then somberly handed up her coat, which she had spread on the floor as makeshift bedding. “You think Hughes might suspect Sig of helping us, don’t you? That’s why you haven’t wanted me to come with you.”
Although Noa’s back was turned, he saw her flinch. She looked over her shoulder with a sigh, and gave a small nod as she turned to accept her coat from his hand.
“Maes hasn’t fully trusted him for a while, because he knows Sig doubted his judgment—even before all this happened. Sig is a skilled enough Hunter to avoid being tracked himself, and a dhampir can’t take memories from a human. But if Maes…” She trailed off with a shudder, and her gaze fell. “If he were to get the truth out of Sig some other way… I just don’t want you to walk into a trap, Ed.”
“I don’t like this,” Ed growled, rising to his feet. “I can take care of myself—and after going against Hughes, you must be about as high on the Hunters’ hitlist as I am. If there’s any trouble, we should both face it.”
“Don’t worry. After all, I don’t really think anyone ever could make Sig talk.” Noa gave him a warmly reassuring smile. “This will only take a few minutes, just like it has before. I’ll be fine.”
After a moment’s frustrated uncertainty, Ed sighed and nodded in resignation. He watched Noa climb the steps to the cellar door and slip out into the night; then steel fingers snuffed out the candle, and he settled down in the darkness, to lie lost in his thoughts as he waited.
And waited.
Perhaps consequent to his new sense of the sun’s rising and setting, Ed’s general awareness of time was now uncannily precise as well. On the past two nights, it had taken Noa less than twenty minutes to fetch their supply of blood and return… but this time, those minutes stretched on to thirty, and then forty, and then fifty.
By the time an hour had passed, Ed knew something was wrong.
At that point, it took very little debate with himself to choose action. He gathered his own weapons and left the cellar. Although he never went with Noa to retrieve the blood, she had told him where the dropoff point was, and he turned his steps toward it now—his anxiousness growing with each step.
If she had fallen into a trap laid by the Hunters, they would surely be waiting for him at that place too. He was certain he could avoid capture himself, so long as he was wary of their presence. He would take them by surprise instead, and beat her location out of them if he had to.
But if it was Envy who had found her…
Ed shut that horrific thought out of his mind, and quickened his pace.
In his rush, he reached the dropoff point in a little more than five minutes, and approached it with all his senses on the alert. There was no scent of any other Hunters nearby; if they had been there in the last hour, they were long gone, any lingering trace of their passage obliterated by the evening breeze.
The location was just as Noa had described to him, a well-kept block of flats with a garden in the courtyard. At the center of the garden stood a large, ornate fountain, its water cascading from four successively smaller basins. When Ed sprang up onto the broad rim, the topmost tier was still above his head. He peeled the glove from his left hand, reached up into the cold water… and his searching fingers found two smooth glass shapes that rolled and clinked together.
His heart sinking, he lifted down a pair of carefully-sealed bottles of beef blood. It was their full night’s ration, left untouched in the place where Sig had hidden it—which meant Noa had never reached it at all.
Snarling a curse, Ed impulsively hurled the bottles into the bushes across the courtyard, and heard the sharp crack of shattering glass. Some long-neglected inner voice of prudence warned that he might later regret skipping the meal, but the fear rising in him was enough to dampen even his unnatural dhampir appetite. He leaped down from the edge of the fountain and ran back to the street, to set out on a direct course for the Hunters’ headquarters.
He would lie in wait outside the walls. He would seize the first Hunter to emerge, and if they knew where Noa was, he would make them tell. If he had to, he would even take another dhampir’s blood and memories by force to find out—and if they had her, he would tear their entire fortress down to free her.
And if they didn’t…
Ed shook his head sharply, and with Noa’s memories of the local streets to guide him, he turned down a long alley that would shorten his way by a few minutes. With high building walls on either side blotting out the moonlight, it was particularly dark there, but that was no difficulty for his eyes.
Something black and flowing suddenly plummeted down from above, landing in a crouch on the bricks ahead of him.
As the figure rose up, Ed saw golden hair and scarlet hellfire eyes, and caught a scent that was far more familiar than it should have been. Noa’s knowledge catalogued it simply as vampire, but a more subtle nuance repulsed him to his core as the redolence of pain, of evil, of death itself… and he knew his deepest subconscious remembered that scent even from his worst moments in his own world.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Envy announced silkily, with a sneer of a smile on his face.
At that moment, it felt to Edward as if any remaining human warmth in his soul drained away. He was ready to kill with ice-cold gladness.
His automail hand twitched toward his sword, only to fall to his side again. Any damage the blade inflicted would be temporary at best. He was going to have just one chance at this—and it would be alchemy or nothing.
“What did you do to Noa?” he asked slowly, and Envy’s head slanted to one side as his smile twisted a little more.
“So that was her name.” The vampire chuckled viciously. “You just keep losing people, don’t you, pipsqueak? First Baby Brother, then Daddy Dearest… and now even your little Hunter whore.”
Ed’s innate temper bled into his dhampir instincts, and he felt his eyes burn crimson with half-animal rage as he threw himself forward. His knife somehow found its way into his hand. At that moment, he wasn’t thinking about alchemy, or anything else but his desire to tear Envy apart by the force of his own flesh and steel.
Their knives collided with a bone-shuddering scrape of metal. Even as a dhampir, Ed couldn’t fully match the homunculus for either strength or reflexes; Envy shoved Ed’s mechanical arm away with a quick, powerful movement, and his blade swiped downward. A sudden fiery shock bit into Ed’s right side, jarring him so that he stumbled back with a hiss of pain.
Vampire and dhampir froze just beyond one another’s reach. Ed smelled his own blood as he took a breath to center himself, but he didn’t even glance down at his ribs. The sting of the long but shallow gash above his hip was already fading, the damage regenerating to become flawless skin once more.
Then he realized it was his opponent, instead, who was staring at the half-exposed wound as it healed.
“You’re one of them,” Envy breathed, with an entirely unpleasant wonder.
The flames of fury iced over again, and ruby eyes slowly softened to amber as Ed remembered his purpose. If it was true—if he had lost Noa to this monster as well—he was once again the only sane soul left to carry the secret of alchemy. For the Hunters, and for this entire world, he had to prove it was truly the hope Noa believed in.
He smiled at Envy, and there was the cold emptiness of death in that smile.
“Not much fun, is it… trying to kill something that won’t die?”
A shudder of rage passed through Envy’s body. He knotted his fists at his sides, exposing his fangs as he drew in a rasp of a breath.
“But you can die,” he murmured, and for a brief moment, it seemed almost as if he was trying to convince himself—having already seen Edward survive death at his hands twice over.
“You can die… and this time, you will!”
Envy made a headlong rush, knife raised; a reaction Ed anticipated. The alchemist dropped his own knife and clapped his hands together… and for the first time in his life, the array he formed in his mind was calculated to break down the very molecules of a body of flesh.
His reflexes were just fast enough to let him duck under Envy’s furious swing at him. He rebounded and struck upward, his outstretched hands slamming solidly into Envy’s chest—
And nothing happened.
For a single, absurdly anticlimactic second, they stood frozen in their positions, as they both grasped the momentous reality of that failure. At last some flickering message of Ed’s nerves made its way to his automail hand, spurring metal fingers to make a grab for the sword that was his only remaining weapon.
Envy was quicker.
A cry gasped from Ed’s lungs as Envy seized his flesh arm and wrenched it, bodily spinning him around. He felt more than heard a sickening crunch between elbow and wrist, and somewhere amid the explosion of pain, he sensed his sword being dragged out of its scabbard by a hand that was not his own. Before he could regain his bearings from the dizzy, excruciating shock, his back smashed against a hard surface—and his reeling vision went red as an inconceivable new fire blazed in the center of his body.
It felt…
It felt like the first time Envy had killed him.
For a small eternity, there was only the pain. The haze his vision swam in turned white, and then faded slowly into the darkness of the alley. His eyes focused suddenly as a small, involuntary spasm shot through him.
Envy’s face was an inch from his own. The homunculus was smiling with a savage triumph.
In a second that seemed to take a very long time, Ed pieced together the meanings of the agonies in his body. His left arm was going to do him no good anytime soon; it was broken, the bones fractured too badly to heal until they were set. His steel right arm was intact, but Envy held it by the wrist, twisted back in a monstrously powerful grip that Ed was not now in any condition to fight.
As for the conflagration raging in his torso…
Lowering his eyes, he saw the cross-guard of his own sword pressed snugly against his stomach. Its entire blade had passed through his body and beyond, the point sinking deep into the stout wooden door behind his back—pinning him like an insect.
Incredibly enough, even this was not a mortal wound for a dhampir. The sword penetrated only resilient skin and soft tissue, coming just shy of a far more critical strike to his spinal cord. He could still heal.
But Envy would never give him that chance.
Ed wasn’t sure whether the sound that escaped him was a laugh or a sob. The convulsive shudder that attended it made the sword tear a little more at his insides, but that didn’t matter any longer.
Nothing mattered. End of the line. He had failed for the last time, and now, he would die for the last time.
“The alchemy didn’t work…”
He only realized he had faintly whispered those words when Envy let out a snort of disdainful laughter. “Of course it didn’t, you fool. It didn’t work for your friend Hughes, either—or at least the one that lives here.”
A gasp half-choked Edward as air and blood mingled in his lungs. “Hughes—?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t kill this one—not yet. It was more fun to hurt him. And to keep hurting him, until he needed blood so badly that…” Envy smiled languorously, as if at some pleasurable memory. “Well. Let’s just say the woman they found dead in the street this morning wasn’t my doing.”
The sword through Ed’s body caused new sparks of pain as his gut tightened with a visceral horror. He understood what Envy was saying. If the homunculus was telling the truth, Hughes had sustained so much damage and blood loss that, in the Hunters’ terms, he flipped: all rational thought was driven from him, and like a rabid animal he would attack anything in his path, to satisfy his need for healing, nourishing blood.
If Hughes, in his already unstable state, had been pushed over that line—had turned rogue and taken human life as prey—he was finished. His mind would never recover, and his body would compel him to keep killing. Even his faithful Hunters would know the only mercy was to put him down, to end that maddened suffering and spare him the bloodguilt of more lives.
By now, perhaps they already had.
“And now it’s your turn…”
There was something exceptionally chilling in Envy’s tone. With a smile of ominous indulgence, he grasped Ed’s hair and pulled at it, forcibly turning the teenager’s head to expose his soft throat.
“I’ve already ripped you open three times, and you’re not dead yet. This time, maybe we’ll see what happens when I cut your head off…” Envy paused. “But first, now that you’re one of them, I’m going to do to you what I did to Hughes. You’ve always been so proud of how precious human life is to you. I want you to feel what it’s like to need to take it, to be so starved for it you can’t stop yourself—just like a newly born homunculus. Then you’ll know the hunger you made your mother feel, the hunger I felt from the moment he brought me back. This is what you’ve done to your most beloved dead, alchemist!”
The diatribe climaxed in a ringing shriek, promising a new and unspeakable level of horror. Ed was prepared for death, even for the most grisly torture of his own person to precede it; such was the price to be expected for his ultimate defeat. But to be starved into madness, to become a ravening predator unleashed to stalk and kill the innocent for Envy’s vindictive amusement…
New embers of resistance glowed to life within Ed, and he tried to fight. His automail hand shoved back so hard against Envy’s grip that he was sure it would break, and his left leg kicked. Even his crippled flesh arm flailed out, his fist seeking Envy’s face.
Envy was unmoved. With lightning quickness, his right hand released Ed’s braid to capture that swinging fist, and his head snapped forward to connect violently with the dhampir’s chin. The blow created a double impact as the back of Ed’s skull cracked hard against the door, blinding him with pain.
In that moment of stunned helplessness, Envy’s fangs sank into his throat, and he felt the surge of life escaping his body.
With his blood, Envy also took from Ed the knowledge of everything that had happened since their last encounter. His entire brief existence as a dhampir, his time among the Hunters. Noa, Hughes, Mustang, Sig, all of them.
His last clear realization was that they, or whoever remained of them, would be Envy’s next targets. Even after Ed was dead, that unquenchable thirst for vengeance would drive Envy to obliterate every last familiar person in this world—and it would not end with the Hunters, his enemies in their own right. He would kill anyone he found whose only crime against him was to wear a face Ed had remembered with kindness.
No.
As Ed felt his life physically drain away, the aching bloodlust Envy sought to induce was swiftly creeping over him; but that fleeting sense of a threat to the Hunters aroused something more. Deep within, he understood it as a simple animal impulse to defend his pack.
Perhaps he had forgotten that the Hunters were not the old friends he had known. Perhaps it didn’t matter. For a moment, that feeling of primal devotion was indescribably beautiful and pure… and then it merged with his hunger, igniting a rage beyond anything even Envy was prepared for.
Ed’s eyes blazed to scarlet, and his automail arm lashed out, breaking free of the grip Envy had unconsciously relaxed during the mesmeric rush of feeding. The fist landed a punch to Envy’s chin that would have shattered a human jaw, and a metal knee simultaneously cannoned into the vampire’s stomach. He was pitched backward, leaving open red gashes where his fangs were torn roughly from Ed’s throat.
Steel fingers clamped down on the grip of the sword pinning Ed’s stomach. He twisted it, and the hilt snapped off—and with an inhuman roar of pain and fury, his body slid forward, lurching off of the blade that had impaled him.
It only hurt more then, but that was alright. That was good. It would spur him to fight harder.
With his broken arm tucked against his body, and his flesh hand clutching the bloody hole in his middle, he took a few unsteady steps. Suicidal as it was, he knew nothing then but a burning desire to continue his assault on Envy, and it was his nose more than his pain-clouded eyes that allowed him to track the homunculus.
Envy. Envy half-sprawled in the middle of the alley where Ed’s blows had thrown him, still dazed from the force of the unexpected resistance, as well as from the lingering dream-haze of stolen memories. Envy bleeding from a split lip that was already beginning to regenerate.
Bleeding.
Blood.
Homunculus blood, the very source of the infection that condemned dhampirs to exist as predators of the night. Its smell was bitter, unnatural, like a harsh metallic poison; but it was blood nonetheless, and Edward’s fangs emerged as he stumbled toward that promised manna.
The very intensity of the reaction caught Envy by surprise. He was by far the stronger one, especially now that Ed was weakened by injury and blood loss—but the deranged directness of the attack was enough to give even an immortal monster pause. He squirmed backwards, his eyes flicking about in search of the knives they both had dropped earlier in the battle. Without a blade to pierce through the heart or sever the head, a blood-crazed dhampir would challenge even his expertise at killing things.
Ed reeled toward his nemesis, delirious and shaking with need. Blood to survive. Blood to heal.
Envy suddenly made a quick feint to one side, like a rat attempting to scurry back into the shadows. Reacting on instinct to the seeming escape effort of his prey, Ed lunged—unaware that the move was in fact a scramble for one of their fallen knives. Once more Envy was armed, and Ed’s irresistible compulsion to sink his fangs into the homunculus could only end in his own death; but in his current state, like a wild animal looking down the barrel of a gun, he was incapable of grasping the danger.
Almost tasting the rich torrent of the blood he smelled, he reached out…
A step away from Envy, something plowed into Ed from his left side, pushing him down and away. He hit the ground with a wordless snarl at the pain that jarred his body, the fury of his thwarted kill, and turned to spring at whatever it was that dared to interfere—but he caught a scent that froze him in place. He didn’t understand what it was, but it was deeply familiar, a strange tang of decay veiled beneath a heady musk.
Then a burst of brilliant, crackling light exploded before his night-sensitive retinas. Envy let out an animal shriek, and as Ed’s automail arm rose reflexively to shield his eyes, he glimpsed only the silhouette of a tall figure bending over the vampire.
Darkness again, made even deeper by the aftershock of the light, dimming and blurring his vision. He fell back on his other senses to detect running footsteps, smells of fellow dhampirs. Ones he knew, and humans as well; but names were beyond him at the moment.
There was a shout, a wave of noxious gasoline odor, and then a far more natural spark flared somewhere in front of Ed. It traced a glowing arc through the air, to fall with a crash of glass at Envy’s feet—and flames blossomed over Envy, clinging to him like liquid, mingling the fuel smell with the stench of charred flesh.
For an instant, an odd, half-coherent thought came near to the surface of Ed’s mind.
I didn’t hear a snap…
The burning homunculus screeched and ran flailing into the night, unchallenged by the other presences in the alley. He was finished for this battle. Fire was no more deadly to him than any other weapon, but even if the pain and damage was temporary, it would drive him miserably into hiding for hours as he healed.
A moment’s tense silence fell. Still crumpled on his knees, his broken arm pressed tight against his punctured body, Ed unthinkingly processed the changes to his surroundings. The fire-smell was fading away, leaving the scents of people, both dhampir and human. The bitter musky note he had discerned before… and blood.
Human blood.
With that trigger, all other perceptions were swept away by the renewed urgency of his hunger, and he swayed to his feet. Blood. Life. Relief from his pain. He tracked the scent, and his eyes focused on the personage he had seen bending down over Envy. Crouched and panting as if exhausted, or perhaps grieving, this one was the source of that mysterious familiar fragrance—and the bloodscent.
Blood. Survival. Nothing else mattered.
Giving vent to a growl of impatient desire, Ed stalked toward this new prospect of nourishment. The sound startled his prey into turning, and he glimpsed a shimmer of long blond hair.
“No, Ed!”
It was Noa’s voice that rang out. It was Noa’s scent that met his intake of breath, and Noa’s form that was suddenly thrust between himself and his target. She tore open the collar of her blouse, tore the skin of her own throat with her fingernails to leave trails of blood.
Dhampir blood. Not quite so enticing as the other—but she was closer.
His eyes never met hers as he fell upon her, biting deep into the wound she had made in her neck. Greedily he dragged her to the ground, and she offered no resistance while he drank as if he would bleed her dry. New memories swam into his consciousness, half-recognized faces and fragments of information he was in no state to comprehend.
Sig and Havoc, waiting together to meet Noa at the fountain. Visitors from Paris, carrying important news. The tall blond-haired man…
For one incandescent moment, a spectacular shock of recognition seized Edward.
Then something crashed down on the back of his head, and a merciful darkness swallowed him up.
AMESTRIS
Winry wondered how Ed had done it all those years.
Alphonse was restless that morning, and roaming about in his armor again. When she found him stretched out on his back in the Curtises’ tiny front yard, he had invited her to join him in cloud-watching; so she gingerly settled against him, propping herself up on his metal side to gaze at the sky. Edward often used to do that, and she thought the closeness might be a comfort to Al, even if he was physically numb to it.
And even if she wasn’t his brother.
Half an hour later, her shoulders were cramping and her spine was knotted up with stiffness, and she wondered how Ed had done it. How he had always endured this discomfort with every sign of complete contentment.
The otherwise mild edge to the morning air was seeping into her skin through Al’s steel, too—and this was balmy Dublith. She remembered the cold of Resembool’s first winter after the transmutation, when Ed was still recovering. No matter how warmly Pinako had tucked him into bed, the morning almost invariably found him nestled in Al’s lap, heedless of the night’s chill.
But then, at that point, it was the only place where he slept without nightmares.
In any case, Winry was determined not to let on about her growing aches, because Al seemed glad enough for the contact. He spoke little, save for his occasional observations about the shape of this cloud or that, tracing it in the air for her with a pointing leather digit. If it wasn’t for his hard shell against her back—and the empty void beside them where Ed belonged—she could have closed her eyes and imagined they were just kids on a Resembool hillside again.
There was solace now in memories. She liked the ones of childhood best, tempered with sadness yet still innocent; but she couldn’t deny that even those awful months after were precious to her, too. As much as she complained about Ed’s stupidity and hard-headedness, and the work and grief he caused for her and Granny, a part of her had cherished the chance to take care of him for a while—when he had no choice but to let himself be taken care of. It was even more bittersweet because she knew all along how fleeting that time would be.
She knew Ed and Al would never be hers again. They had touched something great and terrible, and for all it took from them, it made them much more than they ever could have become otherwise. More than she alone could jealously, pettily lay claim to. They belonged to the world, to use their gifts for a good Ed had never anticipated when he set his own seemingly impossible goals. He would have scoffed at her if she said it, but she knew there was a destiny for the brothers.
And in the end, that destiny had blazed with such brief brilliance that it burned them up.
“Al… Have you decided when you’re going to do the transmutation?”
Winry felt a slight quiver pass through Al’s armor. He hesitated for a moment, and then moved to sit up—causing her back muscles to shriek a painful protest as she shifted in response. She suppressed her wince and turned to face him, noting the troubled darkness of his soul-light as it met her gaze.
“Soon.” His voice was a resonating whisper. “I’m not really exactly sure yet.”
The answer frightened Winry a little, for Al’s true body already seemed to be on the edge of death. Since her arrival, he had only grown weaker, until he could scarcely even eat. In the last day or two, he’d hardly even mustered the strength to transfer his being to the armor… or perhaps he was just clinging more dearly to his last fading hours in his own flesh, as he realized what he was about to lose.
She knew how gut-wrenching it had to be, working up the courage to abandon his body forever, knowing he might still die in the attempt—but time was fast running out. It was risky enough to have stretched it this far. At any moment now, she feared the life in his body might slip away completely, taking his soul with it.
“How much longer do you think your body can hold out?” Winry made a mighty effort to keep her voice from trembling, and didn’t succeed. “I know you want to hold onto every moment you can, but if you don’t do it soon—”
“I know.” There was something flat and brusque in Al’s tone. He looked away from her, his metal shoulders creaking as they shifted uneasily, and a heavy strain of emotion crept into his voice.
“It’s only, when my body is gone… I won’t be able to dream.”
Winry’s heart clenched up tight. She suddenly understood, and this time, she couldn’t keep her tears from welling up.
“Oh, Al… You’ve been hoping your dreams about Ed would come back, haven’t you?”
Al’s helmet dipped downward, to stare at his clasped gauntlets in his lap. “I don’t know why they stopped… but I know a part of me is with Ed. It still is, no matter what’s happened.” He looked up at Winry, exuding a sudden determination. “And if I could just dream about him one more time—about the place where he is—then maybe I could finally see something there that would tell me where to find him.”
It hurt to hear the fierce conviction in his voice, and Winry felt again the agonizing confusion of her own emotions. Of course Al would go to his grave, if it came to that, believing Ed was alive; and it said something extraordinary that Mustang believed too. On the other hand, she also knew the secret despair Izumi was harboring. Only the teacher still remembered the terrible power of the thing they called the Gate.
Torn between the two impulses, Winry didn’t know what to think or feel. She couldn’t decide whether to go on hoping, or finally let go of hope and properly grieve…
But even if she did choose hope, there wasn’t enough of it left to risk Al’s life on.
“You can’t push it any further, Al.” Blinking back her tears, she grasped his gauntlet and squeezed it. He wouldn’t feel the touch, but he would see it and understand. “If you wait too long, and you die… you won’t be able to look for Ed in your dreams or in the real world.”
“I know that. I just have to do this in my own way.” The leather hand she held returned a gentle grip. “Don’t be scared for me. I’m almost ready. And when it’s over… I’ll be glad. Because then I can finally leave here, and try to find those places where I’ve seen Ed.”
A sharp sadness pricked Winry, but the words were only a confirmation of what she had already known deep down. Of course Al would leave. Once he had permanently traded feeble flesh for strong steel, he would devote himself to scouring the farthest ends of the world for his brother. Free of physical needs, and perhaps free of death itself, he could search forever if he saw reason to continue beyond the span of Ed’s natural life. She might never even see him again.
He would still never be hers—but at least he would be alive.
If the transmutation succeeded at all.
It suddenly struck her more painfully than ever that in a day or two, a mere handful of hours, Al might be dead. Alchemy might finish the job it had started seven years earlier, and take the last thing that was left to be taken from the Elric brothers. Al’s life.
Perhaps, if he died… he would finally be with Edward.
Tears flooded Winry’s eyes. She sat up quickly on her knees and threw her arms around what passed for Al’s neck, hugging him so tightly that the hard edges of his armor would leave her bruised. She didn’t let herself sob, but the effort of holding it back made her body tremble.
Al seemed taken aback for only a moment. Then he put his arms around her, and one massive gauntlet cradled the back of her head.
Except for the tender hand that petted her hair, he sat patiently motionless, and said nothing. She clung to his steel embrace for so long that her muscles grew stiff and aching again—but she didn’t care anymore.
It was Al who broke it off at last. He gently took her by the shoulders and drew her away from him, and she knew by the tilt of his helmet that he was studying her face. Her cheeks were damp with tears, and he shook his head at the moisture with a wry disapproval.
“Now I’ll have to polish my armor again. I don’t need it getting rusty already, you know.”
Winry smiled. It hurt, but it was genuine.
“I can help—”
The words died on her lips as a sudden spasm gripped Al’s armor. Just once his huge frame jerked rigidly, as if electrified by a live wire; then he slumped forward, bracing his gauntlets against the ground. Strange shudders began to course through him, rattling every joint.
“Al!” Winry gasped, reaching out to him uncertainly. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s…” Still shivering violently, Al lifted one hand to his chestplate. His fingers clutched futilely at it, as if the steel itself was struggling for a breath it was incapable of taking.
“My body, Winry—stopped breathing—”
The convulsions ceased all at once, as his distressed body of flesh instinctively drew his consciousness back into itself. Suddenly bereft of its occupying soul, the lifeless armor crashed to the ground at Winry’s feet, its helmet tumbling loose onto the grass.
“Al!”
© 2011 Jordanna Morgan
Chapters: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12 :: 13 :: 14 :: Epilogue ::
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Date: 2011-04-22 03:27 am (UTC)OH! Please do tell me the little fireballs were Roy's work! That made me smile! <3
Al. *sniffle* As much as I hated the thought of him trapping himself in the armor again, it was even worse to watch him slowly waste away. And now his body has died or is at least trying to? *wibbles* Maybe if Al does die, he will achieve his dream - to be reunited with Ed, albeit as neither one of them imagined such a reunion would be. ;_;
*sigh* I now have this thought/image stuck in my head of the dhampiric Elric brothers [yeah, I went there; my imagination made Al one too] tracking down vampires and ridding the world of Amestris' mistakes. stupid brain. ^_^
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Date: 2011-04-22 03:48 am (UTC)Thanks for reading!