Author's Note: THIS FIC IS A SEQUEL PLEASE READ THIS NOTE FIRST!
Hello, and thank you for clicking on my fic! This work is a sequel to another great FMA fan fiction called Three Wise Monkeys by pale-blue11 on this site. You can find it under my Favorite Stories or Favorite Authors. You are welcome to stay here of course, but I doubt my fic will make much sense without reading pale-blue11's first. So please go read Three Wise Monkeys, have your heart broken, and then come back here so we can put it back together! Thanks so much :-)
Warnings for violence, gore, torture, lots of blood, and severe mental illness for Three Wise Monkeys (nothing sexual). There will be no actual torture scenes in this fic, but it will have remembered torture, violence, some gore, lots of blood, mental illness, amputation (although if that really bothers you I'm not sure what you're doing in this fandom), PTSD, some suicidal thoughts and a possible attempt. The main pairing in this fic is eventual Edward/Winry, but it is not a romance-focus fic and there will be nothing sexually graphic.
Love and hugs to all of my followers on Tumblr, but most especially to my amazing Tumblr betas heythatsdeep, floweryfandomnerd, planet-envy, and endertender
And now, without further ado...
Overheard
Chapter 1: Right Place, Right Time
Images, memories, information, the world.
They flowed past him in a never ending stream. Flowing and flowing and never ending. And he flowed right along with them. He barely even saw them anymore. He barely even was anymore.
The homunculus, or what remained of him anyway, floated endlessly through the Gate, unable to leave, unable to die. Maybe he had just become part of the Gate at some point. Nothing more than a piece of information like the others swirling around him. He didn't really think on it anymore. He didn't really think anymore.
It wasn't a horrible way to exist. He didn't feel pain. He didn't really feel anything. He just existed, existed and flowed. He didn't suffer, but at the same time, he didn't get to rest. Shouldn't he be allowed to rest?
He flowed, mostly unseeing, mostly unfeeling. For how long? He didn't know. There was no time. It went by quickly. It dragged on for eternities. For how much longer? He didn't know that either.
But it had to end some time, didn't it? He had to be allowed to rest eventually. Or did he? The homunculus in the Gate, unable to leave and unable to die, not thinking, not feeling, and barely even existing. And yet, something remained. A last wish. The last broken-hearted wish of the artificial creature as he fell into the everything and the nothing of the Gate from which there was no escape.
A broken-hearted wish to be reunited with his brother.
Images, memories, information, the world.
All the same. Ever flowing, never changing. And then…
Something. Something different. Something familiar.
The homunculus stirred for the first time in ages. There was something there. Something familiar. Something he knew. What was it?
A shape. A familiar shape. An oval? An eye? No, not an eye.
A portal. The Portal of Truth.
He reached for it, and then pulled back. He was alive and alert for the first time in…in…he didn't know how long, but the unfeeling, the unthinking, it was falling away and so suddenly things came rushing back.
Happiness. Love. Pain. A knife.
His mother. His brother. Colt. Envy.
Days running through Resembool with Alphonse and Winry. Days tied to a blood soaked table. Nights laughing with friends. Nights crying, mutilated and crippled, in a hospital bed.
Envy. Death after death after death. Pain. Blood. A dirty mattress in a corner. A leering grin. Pain.
Bodies. Bodies with throats that had been sliced open by an imitated auto-mail blade. A suit of armor he could no longer look at. Death after death after death. Pain. Blood.
"People change"
"You're not people anymore"
And so, the homunculus hesitated. Did he want that? Did he want to go back there? Couldn't he be content here? Here didn't hurt. Here didn't really anything anymore.
He wouldn't go. He couldn't take the pain. He couldn't…
He couldn't…
Alphonse.
Alphonse.
Alphonse was there. Alphonse was on the other side of that Portal.
And suddenly he was fighting. He was fighting as hard as he ever had. He was scrabbling. Scrabbling to get to the Portal. Hands grabbed at him, pulling him back. Hands grabbed at him, pulling him forward. Hands grabbed him.
The pain…he could take it. The blood…what did it matter? There was only one thing that mattered: Alphonse. Alphonse was on the other side. He had to get to Alphonse. He had to!
He fought and fought and the Portal drew closer. Closer and closer. He reached…he was almost there! It was closer, but then it was smaller. It was closing. And he fought. He fought as he had only ever fought once before. He fought with every last thing he had inside him.
"Alphonse!"
He fought. He was getting closer. He reached…he was there! A metal hand reached through the Portal, and then he was falling. Falling back through. Back to the other side.
The scene that awaited him was one that was all too familiar. Edward was on the ground on all fours, feeling…feeling feelings, all rushing back into him at once. Beneath him, he watched the Portal close. The floor was revealed. He was kneeling on a transmutation circle.
He was kneeling on a human transmutation circle.
Something was on the ground just in front of him. He looked up at it, and suddenly the world was spinning. He saw the mutilated, deformed, barely-human, barely-anything, smoldering corpse, created by the failure of a human transmutation, in front of him. And at the same time, he didn't see it at all. The room was spinning, his head was spinning, and what he really saw before him was a different corpse, another failed transmutation.
A broken voice whispered in his memories, "Mom?"
The remembered corpse breathed and reached and Edward panicked. Not again!
"Alphonse!" the memory cried, "Alphonse!"
Had it not been for the sound of something behind him, Edward might have sat there for hours in the grip of that memory. But the sound of a sob hit him like a slap to the face and suddenly the spinning stopped. Edward turned.
The sight of the man behind him was one that was all too familiar. The man lay against the wall, panting. He was sobbing, and he was bleeding.
His right arm was gone.
"Celina," he cried brokenly, "Celina!"
Edward went to him. He was losing a lot of blood. He was losing it too fast. Ed needed to stop the bleeding. The man's eyes were already hazy with blood loss and pain.
"Celina…Celina…who are you?" the man asked blearily as Edward approached and laid his hands on the man's bleeding shoulder stump. He need to put pressure on it. He had to stop the bleeding. "Where's Celina?"
"She's dead," Edward said quietly. He needed something to wrap the wound with. His hands weren't working. There was still too much blood.
"Who are you? How did you get here?" the man asked.
"I was stuck in the Portal," Edward said, not really thinking about it as he searched the room for something to stem the bleeding. "When you opened it, I was able to come through."
They appeared to be in a basement. Edward scanned it, specifically avoiding looking at the inhuman body lying in the middle of the circle. There were some boxes in the corner, and one of them had a coat sleeve hanging out. Edward crossed to it and snatched the coat out. He returned to the bleeding man.
"Who are you?" the alchemist slurred as Edward balled up the body of the coat and placed it on the man's open wound, tying the sleeves together tightly under the man's remaining arm. "Where's Celina?"
Edward sighed. This wasn't working. The man was still bleeding too much and his constant calling to a dead woman was starting to grate Ed's nerves. He needed to get this man to a hospital or he was going to bleed to death.
"What does it matter to you if he dies?" Envy asked.
Edward startled violently as panic set in. Envy! Envy!
"Hiya pipsqueak!" Envy said brightly.
Envy! Envy was here! Envy was…
No. No. Envy wasn't here…
"Fooled ya!" Envy cackled.
It wasn't the real Envy. He knew it wasn't. It was in his head.
The coat wasn't working. Edward needed real medical supplies. He turned, surveying the basement again, specifically avoiding both the disfigured corpse and the beaming apparition perched in the corner, but the basement was small and sparse.
"Just leave him," Envy said. "Who's he to you? Just let him die."
Edward closed his eyes, willing for patience. And willing for Envy to disappear.
If there were first aid supplies in the house, then they would have to be upstairs.
"Just leave him," Envy repeated. "He deserves what he got. Better yet…finish him off!"
Edward stood, turned on his heel, and marched up the stairs.
"You're really bad at being a monster, you know," said Envy conversationally.
"I am not a monster!" Edward snapped.
"Whaa?" the bleeding man behind him asked. Edward ignored him.
He entered the main floor hallway and quickly found a bedroom. The bedroom had a second door that led to a bathroom. He made straight for the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Envy followed looking bored.
"Aww, come on, pipsqueak," Envy said, and Ed had to work very hard to resist the urge to spin around and throw a punch at the empty air where Envy was standing, "you're no fun today."
It was an interesting observation. No, he supposed he wasn't very fun today, considering that what Envy found fun was torturing Ed and getting under his skin. But Edward was focused. He wasn't letting Envy distract him. There was a man downstairs who was going to die without Edward's help. He needed to save the man and he needed to find his brother, and this hideous hallucination wasn't going to stop him.
Edward's shoulders sagged with relief. A first-aid kit! He snatched it from under the sink and straightened up. Envy had gone, but any good feelings Ed might have had about that vanished as soon as he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
Dammit, he was a mess. He was drenched in blood. His clothes…well he barely had clothes anymore, just bloody strips of fabric hanging loosely from his frame. He looked exactly like he had the night he had vanished into the Portal.
He looked down at the first-aid kit. He needed to wrap the man's arm, but he also needed to get the man to a doctor, and he couldn't go outside like this!
Making his decision quickly, Edward set the kit down and grabbed the nearest towel. He ran it under the faucet, and then started scrubbing at his face. He didn't have time for a shower, but if he could at least get most of the blood off of his face and out of his hair, he could cover the rest with clothing.
Clothing, he thought, dropping the now mostly red and brown towel and making for the closet, deciding his face and hair were as clean as they were going to get. The full-grown alchemist's clothes were way too big for the small 15-year-old homunculus's body, a thought he pondered angrily as he rifled through the closet with more force than was necessary. Resigning himself to the fact that he wasn't going to find a magical hidden stash of perfectly fitting clothes, he finally just chose something.
He dropped his bloody rags to the floor and shimmied into pants that had to be cinched massively at the waist by a belt and need to be rolled up many times over to fit in his boots. The shirt hung almost to his knees and the sleeves needed significant rolling as well. The jacket he selected probably fit the man like a normal jacket, but it was an overcoat on Ed. He found a cap in the closet and quickly tucked his still-quite-bloody blond hair into it. It had a larger brow, the better to hide his face too.
It took a lot of rummaging to find gloves, which were apparently not a normal part of this man's outfit. Not yet, Ed added darkly, thinking of the one-armed man downstairs. The only gloves he could find were thick and fuzzy, clearly for winter, but they would have to do.
Ed returned to the bathroom and looked despairingly at himself in the mirror. He looked even smaller than usual, like a little boy playing dress-up in Daddy's clothes. But most of the blood was hidden, if you didn't look too closely, and also most of what would be recognizable about Edward Elric. He gave one more glare to the mirror, as though it was its fault he was such a runt, then grabbed the first-aid kit and headed back downstairs.
The alchemist hadn't moved, he hadn't done anything else to try to stop the bleeding, and he was still moaning "Celina" over and over again, which irritated Ed. He briefly wondered if Envy hadn't had a point. Who was this man to him after all? This alchemist who sat whining like a baby, letting himself bleed to death? Why did he merit help? Didn't he get what he deserved? He was much older than Edward and Alphonse had been, so shouldn't he have known better? Wasn't this whole thing his own damn fault?
Edward let these less-than-charitable thoughts float through his head but never once paused in his actions. Peeling the gloves back off, he took the antiseptic and the gauze from the kit, removed the blood soaked coat from the man's shoulder, and started to properly clean and dress the wound.
"Celina…" the man said again.
"Where are we?" Ed interrupted.
"My basement," the alchemist replied.
Idiot. "I meant where in Amestris?" Ed clarified. "We are in Amestris, yes?"
He was guessing. The man appeared Amestrian and was speaking the same language and dialect as Edward, but Ed really didn't know.
"Yes, in Archard,"
"Never heard of it," Ed said, foregoing trying to manage the tiny kit scissors with his auto-mail hand in favor of ripping the gauze with his teeth. "What's it near?"
"Near Pallerie."
Pallerie. He knew Pallerie. He was in the Southeast! It was less than half-a-day's trip to Resembool. Of all the damned dumb luck.
"What year is it?" Ed asked. It was the far more nerve-wracking question, which is why he hadn't led with it. Just how long had he been gone?
"1917."
Edward dropped the spool of bandaging he had been wrapping snugly around the man's torso. Three years? Only three years?
There was no time. It went by quickly. It dragged on for eternities.
Edward felt hope blossoming inside him, even as the alchemist's eyelids started to droop. It had only been three years! Alphonse, he would still be here. He'd only be seventeen! And not just Alphonse, but Winry too. She was probably in Resembool right now with Granny. Less than half-a-day's trip away!
And as quickly as it had bloomed, the hope was tamped down again. It had only been three years. Three years was not a very long time. Three years was not nearly enough time for people to forget about Edward Elric, the State Alchemist turned alleged serial killer. It was not nearly enough time for them to forget Edward Elric, the immortal monster.
He'd have to be careful, really careful. He was extra glad that he had grabbed the cap and the gloves. People in Archard might not recognize his face on sight, but who knows what stories had gone around about Edward Elric, the Fullmetal homunculus, these past years? Who knows what detail about him people might see and connect with his description.
It suddenly felt very unimportant that the gloves he had were fuzzy and made for winter. He would have worn them if they were bright pink with kittens on them. He could not be showing off his auto-mail.
And what about Granny and Winry, he thought, his heart sinking further. Would they even want to see him? Did they believe he was a killer? Did they believe he was still a person?
"Get up," Edward instructed the one-armed alchemist. He'd wrapped the wound the best he could, and now he needed to get the man to a doctor.
"Hm?" the alchemist asked. His eyes were barely open anymore.
"Get up," Edward repeated, sliding the gloves back on, "I can't carry you up the stairs. I can help you, but you need to stand up and walk."
"Celina…" he whispered.
Edward slapped the man across the face with his left hand. "She's dead!" he said, his temper and voice rising together, "she's dead, and she's not coming back. She can never come back! The transmutation failed! It failed because it's impossible! And you lost your arm for your failure. You know all this! You saw the Truth. And now you're going to bleed to death if you don't get the hell up!"
"My arm…" he mumbled, bringing his left hand up to touch Ed's bandaging.
"It's gone," Ed repeated, "but you've still got both legs so stand up and use them! Stand up and get the hell out of here and get the help you need. She…Celina…she wouldn't want you to die here."
That got his attention. Finally, he extended his remaining arm and let Ed help him to his feet. He was unsteady. Ed wrapped the much larger man's one arm around his shoulders, letting him lean on Ed for support. They made their way ungracefully to the stairs.
"Is that…?"
"Don't look at it," Ed said as they skirted around the mangled transmuted corpse, "it's not her. It's not anybody."
They staggered up the stairs, through the house, and out the front door.
They were on a city street, Ed noted to great relief. Whatever Archard was, it wasn't some backwoods farm town where a suit of armor would have to sprint half a mile to the nearest house carrying your bleeding, limbless ass to get you medical care. It was a city street, with traffic and…
No. No way. He couldn't possibly get that lucky.
They must have been really close to Pallerie, that's the only possible way there could be a…
"Taxi!" Ed yelled, waving the arm not half-carrying the dying alchemist.
And the taxi saw him. It saw him and it pulled over and stopped. Of all the dumb luck. Of all the goddamn dumb luck.
Edward opened the back door almost before the taxi had come to a complete stop and practically threw the one-armed man into the back seat.
"Take this man to the nearest hospital," Ed instructed the driver, "quickly!"
The driver turned from Ed to gape openly at the one-armed man bleeding on his backseat. Then he turned back to look at the kid, and his jaw unhinged even further. The kid had vanished!
Edward smirked as he walked away. He had turned invisible as soon as the driver had looked away from him. He seemed to have better control over it than the last time he had been on this side of the Portal, and it was amusing watching the taxi driver twist in his seat, looking wildly around for the vanishing boy.
Invisible Ed took off at a brisk pace down the sidewalk, looking for street signs to point him in the direction of the train station. There was nothing more he could do for the alchemist, not being a doctor. He'd bandaged him, pulled him out of the basement, and seen to it that he would get to medical care. He was now in the presumably-capable hands of the taxi driver who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Kind of like I was, he thought as he walked. Of all the dumb luck, of the places in the Gate he could have been, of all the places that Portal could have opened…
It had been there. It had been right there where he was. He was back! He was back and he was going to see Alphonse again, all because the Portal and the homunculus had happened to be in the same place at the same time.
The right place, at the right time.
"I'm coming, Alphonse."
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