Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist/Hagane no RenkinJutsushi belongs to Arakawa-san. I just borrow her toys sometimes.
TOE-TO-TOE
Prompt: Start the first line with "he could hear everything."
He could hear everything. The gentle sigh of her breath, the whisper of her heavy wool slacks as she shifted once, and then again, trying to ease the tension digging iron fingers into her shoulders and knees. If he stilled his own lungs, he could, he fancied, even make out the rhythmic padam padam of her heart as it beat against the underside of her sternum. Faster, perhaps, then it normally was, but still strong and steady. A velvet blanket around the barbs twined within his stomach.
Beyond the stuffy, dust-laden air vent where they'd taken refuge, there was very little going on—the occasional dry rustle of paper, an even drier cough from one of the pencil pushers, the light tick tick tick of a pocket watch that kept being opened and then closed, the footfalls of the man who carried it.
The steps were light, and sure and confident. Not unlike the steps that his foster sisters so often took as they sashayed about his aunt's bar. He wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the man was carrying a gun.
He glanced over his right shoulder, down the vent to his dust-covered lieutenant, to see if she had come to a similar conclusion. But the thick motes danced in and around the thin shafts of light that broke through the vent's cover, and the golden bars and drifting silver made her face impossible to read.
He'd just had to assume then. She was a capable woman, after all.
Another cough, and then more shuffling of paper, and if he ducked his head just like so, he could watch a pair of Oxfords in dire need of a polish scared up dust from a thick Xingese rug as they paced about a handsome room. There was a pause, then the steady tick tick tick filled the room again, dropped from laden bookshelves and walls decorated with heavy red silks, collected in the air vents where he and his lieutenant hid. It snapped shut again, and the footfalls resumed their path.
He let himself inhale deeply, even though he couldn't release it as a sigh. He knees and shoulders were protesting soundly, and his neck, craned as it was to keep his face away from the light as he eavesdropped so uselessly on their non-existent conversation, was making its discomfort quite clear.
This was precisely why he avoided taking part in stake outs. How much longer did they have to wait until something came of this?
Very, very carefully, he released his exaggerated breath. His eyes darted back to his faceless lieutenant once more, although he really couldn't say what he was searching for; she'd apparently found a semi-not-quite-uncomfortable position and had settled in again. A watchful golem. A deadly tigress on the hunt.
He rolled his shoulders, breathed again, propped his head up on the heel of his palm. How she managed to do that, he'd never know, but he may as well try to—
Within the room, a rosewood door opened on well-oiled hinges, and meek footsteps minced into the room. A woman's voice, lilting and trembling around the harsh consonants of her native tongue, just barely cut above the pages and the pocket watch and the pacing. A pencil pusher grunted, a second offered a reply that dripped with acidic sarcasm.
But the Oxfords came together at the heels, and their wearer's voice snapped across the room like a bullwhip before the man himself stalked out. The woman drew the door shut again as she followed.
The most excitement they'd seen in nearly four hours, and all they could glean from it was that Intelligence was right; their targets did indeed speak Drachman.
The effort it took to keep from sighing was nothing short of herculean.
Who knew that terrorist sects could be so dull? Perhaps he should have just implied there was simply no way that Fullmetal, as young as he was, could complete the task on his own. While there may had been reports of an exploded building or ten waiting for him on his desk in the morning, surely handling the aftermath of the young man's rather theatrical method of problem-solving would have been well worth the—
Speaking of Fullmetal…
The door opened again, this time with enough force to send it swinging wildly on its hinges. It crashed loudly into a bookshelf, upsetting both a stack of tomes and the nearby pencil pushers. He could feel the shock of it reverberated through the vent, and edged a little bit closer to the cover. The brush of a hand against his shin was his lieutenant, reminding-ordering him to be careful.
A barked out command, and the pencil pushers were scrabbling to clear their work from the heavy oak table at the centre of the room. The Oxfords tramped back across the Xingese rug. Heavy boots, possibly military, kept stride. Between the two, a familiar pair of dirty leather boots scrabbled against the expensive carpeting.
A sharp note cracked off the walls as the two men threw their captive forward, maybe even drove his head into the oak table—Mustang couldn't quite tell from the angle—and the rough tenor of Fullmetal's voice, teeming with what the fuck's and fucking bastards's and kick your asses's, heated the air.
Well, if Fullmetal could still speak like that, at least it was proof that he wasn't actually injured too badly.
The Oxfords shifted, and there was the wet sound of flesh on flesh, and Fullmetal was cut off.
"You spy!" So the man could speak Amestrian after all, even if it was guttural and heavily accented. "Who you tell this to?"
"I fuckin' told you already, asshole!" Fullmetal snapped back, and even though he couldn't see the kid's face, he knew all too well the molten golden glare that was trying valiantly to burn a hole through Oxford's head. "I'm not spying for anyone!"
The Oxfords shifted on the carpet. Fullmetal's boots jerked back towards the man and an almost-feral growl bubbled up from between lips that could only be twisted in a snarl. If the man didn't let go of that golden spun braid soon, Mustang wouldn't be surprised if he found his teeth rearranged by a fist made of high-grade automail alloys. "You lie. Guards tell me they see you hide-walk—"
"Not. Fuckin'. Lying!" Fullmetal's worn boots kept shifting, and there was a certain tightness in the blond's voice that hinted at pain, and the barbs in Mustang's gut tightened at that. "I'm just—I got nothin', so I wanted t' see what you assholes had so that I could pawn it off! There! I told you, now will you just fuckin' let go of me already?"
The barbs loosened again, ever so slightly. If he had his wits about him enough to cobble together a cover—
Another resounding crack against the oak table, and there was no mistaking it this time: Oxford had slammed Fullmetal's head onto its surface, once, twice, three times, and Fullmetal's boots stopped their scrabbling for a few breaths, and the man's voice was a rough snarl. "You lie. You lie, war dog. I kill you, maybe, send head to your military. They talk to us then, hmm?"
The silence in the room was deafening. Oxford didn't move, nor did any of his co-conspirators. Fullmetal's boots were still.
"You talk now, maybe?" Oxford's voice was a whisper now, and laced with something bloody and menacing. "You talk, little boy."
Mustang glanced over his shoulder at his lieutenant. She reached down to her hip and eased a well-used Browning from its holster.
"Who the fuck," Fullmetal ground out, and his boots planted themselves firmly on the floor, "are you calling short?"
Mustang pressed his fingers against an array he'd chalked onto the vent's grate some number of hours ago. There was booming sound from within the room, Fullmetal shouted something unintelligible, and the man wearing the maybe-military boots dropped to the ground, screaming and clutching his face while blood seeped between his fingers.
Pale light flashed over the grate and the screws holding it in place melted away. It dropped from the wall. Oxford was barking out commands over the din, the pencil pushers were shouting, half-panicked. The high shrieks of the once-quiet woman resounded off the walls and the bookshelves and the Xingese rug, and holy shit, talk about pandemonium—
He touched his fingers together and pushed himself out of the vent with a single hand, and there was Fullmetal, nose bloodied and teeth bared like a feral dog, mismatched hands balled into tight fists and gleaming golden eyes sizing up a true bear of a man whose hands were probably bigger than the kid's whole head, and then the little bastard launched himself off a massive oak table still half-littered with crumpled pages, leapt high, cocked his fist back—
The smaller of the two pencil pushers, a rail-thin man with spit-shined loafers, pulled a folding knife from a pocket. He darted forward, swung the blade with quick, sharp movements that suggested military service—the calculating part of Mustang's mind filed that away for later—and Mustang jumped back to avoid getting gutted like a rabbit.
Shit. The room was so small, and there were books and pages fluttering all about, and with Fullmetal showing all the delicacy of a pissed off warhorse in an antiques store while his beast of an opponent scrambled wildly to stay away from the deadly weapons that were automail appendages, there was no way he could use his alchemy—
The cough of a pistol made his ears ring. Head and shoulders peeking out of the vent, Hawkeye watched as her target dropped to the floor, screaming as he grasped his knee and bled all over what, Mustang was sure, was once a very fine and expensive antique Xingese rug. The other pencil pusher watched his comrade for a moment, eyed Hawkeye as she pulled herself out of the vent, and laced his fingers over his head.
"Not. Fuckin'. Short. Asshole."
Mustang dared a glared over his right shoulder. Fullmetal had cornered his victim between a bookshelf and a finely detailed cabinet, and had one hand buried in the collar of the man's collar while the other punctuated each word with blows.
He was certain that Oxford hadn't been sporting twin black eyes or a dazed expression when the evening started, and willing to bet that the broken tooth was a new development, too. And really, if the hot-head brat didn't stop now, they'd have a rather difficult time interrogating the man later…
"Fullmetal," he called out. "Intelligence will want to question this group shortly, and that man will need a working jaw in able to respond to their questions."
"Fucker called me 'short'." Fullmetal drew his fist back once more, almost testing, and the man flinched away.
At least he could sigh his exasperation now. "Any more of that and I'll have to consider it abuse of a prisoner. Let him go, now."
Another moment—just long enough, Mustang knew, for the brat to prove to himself that he was choosing to follow the order, and not just obeyingit—then Fullmetal released his victim, letting him drop into the rug.
With a pathetic whimper, the woman shuffled over to her countryman, muttering words that wavered in the air as she ran trembling hands over his body, cataloguing what, Mustang knew, would be an extensive list of injuries. With a final glare at the both of them, Fullmetal made his way over, wiping his bloody nose on a sleeve as he did, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the rug.
"Now that this is finally done with, can I go already?" He asked, narrowed eyes turned on his superior officer as though this was all the older man's fault to begin with. "I told Al I'd only be a couple of hours, and that was fucking ages ago."
Mustang arched an eyebrow at the kid, and received a glare in return. "For once in your life, Fullmetal, remember that you're a member of the military—"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever, Bastard. The day I wag my tail for you—"
A deafening bang echoed about the room, loud enough that he would later swear that his ears had bled, and Fullmetal gasped, mutely, jerked back and slammed into a laden bookshelf, and pages fluttered around him as he gasped, blinked eyes wide with shock. He stared at his young subordinate, ears ringing, mind reaching out with pale fingers to grasp at some explanation. What had…? What was Fullmetal…?
And then the smell of cordite and heat curled lazily about the room, and the adrenaline, cooling in his veins after the brief battle, caught fire again.
He touched his fingers together, spun on a heel, and his mind screamed at his, called him seven kinds of idiot because he'd already noticed that Oxford had a gun, threw his hand out before him like a weapon as he sought out the man, found him still bloodied and dazed—
—and then caught sight of the woman, bright blue eyes hardened into a glare, a single, steady hand wrapped around a snub-nosed pistol. She was screaming something in her harsh native tongue, and Fullmetal, still on the ground, was gasping for air behind him and if the kid'd been shot, he didn't have much time—
Another shot rang in the room. The snub-nosed gun dropped to the ground. The woman shrieked and pressed a hand to the bloody rose that had bloomed on her shoulder.
A second's glance at his lieutenant, and she passed off her well-used Browning to him as he strode forward, kicked the dropped pistol aside. "Move," he said, and his eyes fixed themselves on hers, "and I shoot. Understood?"
She sneered at him, and responded with something that sure as hell didn't sound like agreement—not that, with his still-ringing ears perked and his skin prickling in tension, he cared all that much.
Behind him, he could just make out Hawkeye's tight voice, the rustle of fabric as she searched for the bullet wound and, finally finally finally, the rough tenor of Fullmetal's voice as the kid answered, sounding more annoyed than pained, and then the grunt as he got to his feet
—whatthehellisHawkeyethinkingtheyneedamedicanambulancethekid'sgoingtobleedout—
"Shit." And leave it to Fullmetal to get shot and immediately start muttering oaths. "Got my damned automail. I just got it—Winry's gonna kill me…"
The… the automail. The relief was strong enough that it stole the air from his lungs, and he had to remind himself to trust Hawkeye's assessment, to keep his eyes on the prisoner, to keep his voice even as he spoke. "Just get out of here, Fullmetal. Tell Havoc to move in with the support teams to clean up this mess when you see him."
"Yeah, fine, whatever." And without even a breaths' hesitation, Fullmetal's uneven tread stamped out of the ruined room.
What exactly was it about Central that attracted the killers, the terrorists, the renegades? Mustang drew a hand over his face as he watched Hawkeye load her Browning with a fresh clip, as Havoc slung a riffle over his shoulder, as Fuery hurriedly rushed them through the most vital information of their mission.
Renegade alchemists this time, hell bent on forcing the military to dismantle the State Alchemist program, explosive array around the train station, engines already destroyed and no way to get the wounded to hospitals…
The office's doors swung open violently enough to knock against the whitewash walls, and Fullmetal strode forward, golden eyes darting over Havoc's rifle, over Breda's set face, over his own gloved hands.
And then the incorrigible little bastard grinned. "So, who're we going after this time?"
FIN