Uh-oh, sorry for the double-same-chapter-update. I had a mishap while doing some editing 0.o Sorry!
This chapter is bit odd, but things are finally beginning to come out. I would like to say right now that the three main characters in this chapter (Roy, Riza, and Hughes) are all out of character. Hughes is especially out of character, but do keep in mind all the things he knows about Al and the situation as a whole. Roy has a reason to be OOC, and Riza has pretty much just had enough, and I don't blame her or Hughes for getting out of sorts with all that's been going on. Oh! I would also like to say that I fell in love with the last chapter haha and thus removed my oh-so negative author's note.
Uh, somehow this chapter got a bit one liner-y and spaced out, which I'm not entirely sure is a good thing. Ah, hell.
Anyway, enjoy.
Death hung in the air like cigarette smoke to curtains. The evidence of man's latest sin lay hidden deep in the soil, tucked away in satin-lined caskets. The smashed frames of jumpers and mutilated faces of trigger-happy citizens were at last out of sight. Not out of mind. Their presence was still there, giving every hallway the eerie feeling of being watched by watchless eyes.
Roy was a simple man. He didn't believe in the supernatural. Ghosts and the unquiet dead were nothing more than stories of the deranged to him, God and Lucifer included. Such things did not exsist, and this he knew.
But that suffocating presence of the dead, that uneasy feeling of being watched, shrouded his resolve, made his heart race in his chest at every turn into a new hallway. His beliefs on the supernatural were beginning to change with every step he took, every second he spent where death had scourged the ground black.
The hallway was devoid of life. No nurses or doctors cluttered the space. If there were patients behind the closed doors he passed, he didn't know it. Where was everyone?
The thought that he was the only living person in the hospital whispered in his mind.
That couldn't be right. Not at all.
It screamed at him.
But what if it was right? What if every fucking soul had vanished?
Black burns on the soil.
"Edward?" he called out, his shaking hand wrapping around a door knob and throwing it open.
Emptiness.
Another door tried.
"Riza? Where are you? Please, come out. Please!"
Another hope crushed.
Just him. Alone. Just him. No one. Solitude.
He panicked as he realized that he really was the only one left. The only fucking person left in the world. But he knew that they would be coming for him soon. They would take him away like everyone else.
They?
The ghosts.
God.
The Reaper.
Fuck, every fucking thing he didn't believe in!
Tears burned him, burned his dignity. He was afraid to die. Terrified. His heart ran from him as he clung to the wall for support, the floor quaking in a threat of collapse.
Sinner! Sinner!
Voices. No, a voice. One voice.
You've caused this, Roy Mustang. Despicable.
It spoke with low hisses, laughed with wild menace.
All of this turmoil is your fault. You did this. You're the reason why this world suffers.
"Sh-shut up," he pleaded, voice riddled with cracks.
Come with me, sinner. Take my hand, and throw your pains away.
A weight built upon him, and he snapped his gaze upward. He saw it. Saw Him.
"It c-can't be."
The Fallen Angel. It had to be.
Take my hand, Roy Mustang, and serve me.
He swallowed hard as he made to grab the outstretched hand.
What the fuck was he doing?
That's right, sinner. For eternity. Be mine.
Lucifer's hand squeezed around his, seared his flesh and his mind. Raped his soul.
He screamed.
"Roy! No!"
The voice cut through the darkness, threw away his mistake as a tightness circled his wrist. His mind jolted back to reality, the scalpel sliding out of his grip and ringing against the floor. A small droplet of blood dripped down from his free wrist and splattered in all directions as it hit the white floor. Only one part of the masterpiece that could have been. Should have been.
"What the hell were you thinking?" Riza asked in an unusual voice of rage, teeth clenched tightly together as she threw her superior's hand out of hers.
Roy couldn't answer, disbelief and confusion grasping his mind and tossing away his voice. The only thing he found he could do was look at where the fallen scalpel lay, a spot of red next to it, shining under the light. Had he really tried to take his own life?
"Answer me, dammit!"
Then he remembered the ominous figure towering over him and reaching out to take him away. He remembered his life ending in agony the moment he touched the crawling flesh.
"R-Riza, I saw Him. I touched Him."
"Him?"
"The Devil, Riza. He told me to t-take his hand, and I did. I didn't want to, but I did. He's real."
Something wet and hot rolled down his cheeks as he bit down hard on his bottom lip to hide the choking sobs that begged life. He grabbed Riza's hands, held them tightly in his.
He wasn't alone. He wasn't the only one left. And touching her gave him the strength he needed to believe there was still hope for himself and mankind.
The anger in her faded as she realized the situation was deeper than she'd first thought. She'd heard someone call Edward's name, followed by her own; the voice was broken and pathetic, but when she saw Roy Mustang running down the hall in a fit of blindness, she rushed forward, knowing that something was wrong. He threw open a door and bolted inside, a small closet where surgical tools were kept, and she followed him in the room. Her blood curdled at the scream.
"What happened?" she asked, voice softening.
How could he answer that? He didn't even know for sure what he saw was the truth. And for a fleeting moment he knew he'd had the first glimpse of what living in insanity was like. He was crawling in that direction, he knew. He was going insane. Or was he?
"I don't know," he said, giving her hands a tight squeeze as his tears fell on her knuckles. He was terrified to die, but now he was terrified of himself.
Minutes went by in silence, the only sound being Roy's sniffling. It was so strange to hear the man make those sounds and see him cry. She couldn't recall the last time she'd seen her superior shed tears; he was too prideful for that. But he was only human, and every human threw away dignity when emotions grew too intense to handle.
"Roy," she whispered, taking her hands out of his to gentle lift his face, "I want you to go home, okay? I want you to go home and get in your bed."
"But what about E-"
"Don't worry, I'll look after Fullmetal. As soon as you wake up and feel better, you can come back. All right?"
Roy was just tired, that was all. The extreme lack of proper sleep had caused him to hallucinate, pressed him to do something his pride couldn't fight against. She knew he just needed a good night's sleep in his bed. That was the solution to the situation, because she couldn't accept the truth. She couldn't accept that she'd just watched her friend try to kill himself.
What if she hadn't been there to see? What if she'd arrived just a moment too late?
She shuddered at the thought, exhaling sharply as she took his hand to look at the red smear on his wrist. "But first, let's take care of this," she said, extending her free hand past Roy to take a roll of gauze from a shelf.
"I'm sorry, Riza."
"No, it's okay," she said with a small smile, wrapping the long strip of cloth around his wrist. "Everything's going to be okay."
"Be a good boy and stay still."
"W-wh-"
"And quiet," the Ishbalan said as he grabbed the boy's thin arm and punctured his flesh with the tip of the needle, pushing down on the plunger with his thumb. A grin met him as he watched his captive tense and yelp, the yellow liquid joining his bloodstream.
A minute passed and the boy went limp in the chair he was bound to. He wasn't dead or unconscious. Perfectly aware of his surroundings.
"Now, listen to me, Al," he said, crouching down to look up at the boy's fallen gaze, "we're going to try to hurt you, and you need to let us know when we succeed. Just scream when you start to feel pain, okay? Just scream your little lungs out, all right?"
The boy replied with only a deep throaty sound, but that was satisfying enough. Smiling, he cupped an angled cheek, the bone defined and pronounced from starvation. Tilting back his captive's head, he leaned forward, brushing his tongue across broken lips. Still delicious. He stared hard in the steel eyes as he trailed his hand down to fondle the boy's flaccid length; he stroked the organ, pet it with a childlike interest.
"You can't feel this, can you?" he murmured, then smiled wickedly as he brought his lips down on the head. Gently, almost passionately, he licked and sucked on the boy, nibbled his way farther down the shaft. The boy's length stayed limp in his mouth, not even giving a twitch of life. The little bastard really couldn't feel a damn thing!
He detached himself from his captive just as the door was creaking open and his assistants, two Ishbalan men and one Xing woman, entered. They would make sure that the experiment carried on until the desired results were reached.
"All right, I guess we can begin," he said, smiling. "Get the wa-"
"Excuse me, sir, but you have a call."
"Tell them to call back later," Hughes growled, exhaustion making him irritable, not to mention what he was reading. He often had to stop with shaking hands and start on someone else's horrors, someone whose face he didn't know and whose name was nonexistent.
"Sir, it's Lieutenant Hawkeye, and she says it's urgent," Shiezka said uneasily.
The moment he heard the words, he snatched the phone off the receiver, switching it to the line where Riza was on hold. If Riza said something was urgent, then it was.
"Riza? . . . No, I- . . . What? . . . Where's Roy? . . . I'm leaving now."
"Sir?"
"Shiezka, go home," he said quickly, rushing past her and leaving his office.
He ran all the way to the hospital.
When he got there, Riza was waiting for him, her eyes wide and glistening. Wet clay.
"They won't tell me anything," she said, her voice like cracked porcelain. "And they-"
"Hang on," he muttered, taking in a deep breath. He hadn't ran that far and that fast in years, and his heart was beating with vengeance against his chest. A minute passed before he straightened himself and placed his gaze on the blonde, asking for what had happened.
"When I went to see Ed, he wasn't there," she replied, shifting uneasily on one foot. How unusual of her. "All they told me was that he had to be taken to surgery."
"You told me on the phone that Roy was at home, right?"
"Yes."
"Good, he can't know about this yet."
"Why?"
"Think about it," he said as he began walking down the hall. "If Roy found out that something was wrong with Ed, he'd come here and raise seven kinds of hell. The place would be torn apart until he saw him. And after that, Roy would never want to leave Ed's side ever again. So for now, we'll just let the Colonel have his peaceful sleep. He deserves it, I think."
With Riza following behind him, Maes walked down the hall with every intention of stopping a doctor or nurse to question the situation surrounding Edward Elric. However, something better went wheeling by. Edward himself.
Hughes stopped at the end of the hallway as a gurney slowly crossed in front of him. Unconscious on the gurney was Ed, a white sheet covering his body and two tubes running to his arm, one tube holding what looked like blood and the other holding what couldn't be seen. And on that arm was a black line, an unnatural blur that looked so damn familiar.
He watched the gurney disappear in a room.
Nodding, he turned around and made his way to a bench against the wall. He sat down and motioned for Riza to sit next to him.
"What are we doing?" Riza whispered, confused.
"We're waiting. They probably won't even tell me anything, so we're going to wait and find out on our own."
"Oh, God," she gasped, her trembling hand clasping over her mouth as hot tears fled her eyes. The screams were still ringing in the air, invading her ears with a tremendous cruelty.
She should have done as she'd been told. She should have left. Should have gone home.
But damn, all of those files. New and begging to be read. Out in the open for all eyes to see.
She couldn't possibly turn away from them.
More screams.
She'd read an entire stack of files, but when she went to start on a new one, she found something nestled between the papers.
More taunts.
It was a small black box. An audio tape.
More cruel laughs.
Her curiosity had gotten the better of her.
More sobs.
The sounds intensified, vibrated against the speakers. Overwhelmed, she quickly turned the volume knob at the top of the cassette player. The agonized voice of the boy faded away and so did the man's low and torturous words.
Schiezka left the office with Alphonse Elric's screams playing in her mind.
"Come on," Hughes said a few minutes after the nurses had left Ed's room.
There was no one in sight, but that didn't mean no one was nearby by or wouldn't turn around the corner at any moment. Quickly, they ducked into the room before the chance of that risk was too high.
It was dark, the only light coming from the screen of the heart monitor next to the bed. Green light. The machine gave a small beep with Ed's every heart beat—the sound of life.
"What happened?" Riza whispered, disbelief and shock clouding her mind as she looked down at the boy.
Hughes grabbed the clipboard that hung from the foot of the bed. A vague pain built inside him as he read the paper, and his eyes squeezed shut as he passed it to Riza.
"Why would he do something like this?" she ask, her hand covering her eyes. She was breaking, crumbling under the weight of reality. Years she'd spent hiding her fears and sorrows behind a mask of calm. The mask, beautiful and serene, fragile and timeless, was cracking.
"Shame."
"What?"
"Shame. He did it out of shame," Hughes said with a heavy sigh as he lowered himself in the bulky chair next to the bed. He set his gaze on the boy, mind flitting with the truth. It was obvious. A swan among geese.
So beautiful, yet so, so vicious.
"He was ra-"
"Don't you dare say it."
"Why not? To not say it would be denial," he said lowly, face twisted. What had made him so cold? Maybe he was breaking too. Maybe the world would just crack one day with him and he would fall, plummet through the dark abyss below. "He was raped. He enjoyed it. Shame leads mutilation, which brings us here. It adds up, doesn't it?"
"Maes, how can you say that?" Riza asked through clenched teeth, her fists tightening at her sides. This wasn't Maes Hughes before her; the man she knew would never speak in such uncaring tones.
"To not say it would be denial," he repeated.
As the silence grew, she realized that Maes Hughes was wearing a mask just as she was. He was hiding his soft emotions behind it, like she had been trying to do. His mask was in place and secured.
Tie it tight.
Not tightly enough.
"Damn," she muttered, dropping her gaze. Her own mask came undone, fell from her and slipped out of grasp. She lost the battle of calm, of hidden emotion. She lost. "Why didn't we see this coming, Maes? Why couldn't we stop this? Why did th-"
"If you'd known any of this were to happen, what would you have done, Riza Hawkeye? What could you have done? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Life's a vicious, vicious thing. Hiding corruption and despair under gilded beauty. But the funny thing is, we're the ones who made it that way." He sighed as his words met him. He was being entirely too harsh. "I'm sorry. This whole thing is just starting to take me down with it."
"Do you think things will get better, Hughes?" she asked after a few seconds spent in awkward silence.
"Well I certainly can't see how things can get any worse," he replied, laughing lightly. Oh, how very wrong he was. "Come on, I think we should leave."
"Yeah."
As Riza left, Hughes walked over to the other side of the bed. He gently raised the sleeve of Ed's gown and nodded. Before turning away, he brushed his palm against the blond's cheek with a great sigh and wondered if there really was something that could have been done to prevent such damage. What was the small detail that had gone by unnoticed, the small thing that had tried to scream at them with warnings of the future? Hell, it didn't really matter.
He stepped out into the hall, gently closing the door behind him. After parting with Riza, he decided he had to get back to his office, and so he silently begged forgiveness from Gracia as he walked in the cool night.
The sky was beautiful. So, so beautiful. A million diamonds strewn across a sheet of dark satin, a silver brooch holding everything in place. The stars winked at him, giving a peculiar sense of life to the late heavens. They twinkled, moved across the soft background that was no less beautiful. Eyes to the sky, he smiled as he began to hum an old nusery rhyme, one he couldn't wait to sing to Elysia again.
Running his fingers through his hair, he sat down at his desk, taking a stack of files in his hands. He'd found it odd that the lights had been left on, which was unlike Schiezka, but he figured that it had simply slipped her mind. He shrugged the thought off, deciding that it was another thing that didn't really matter.
"10-03-10," he muttered as he flipped through the papers. "10-0310...10-0310...Where are you?...Ah!"
He took a deep breath and shut his eyes before reading a single word of the report. When he opened his eyes, he wondered if Ed's file would tell a more gruesome tale. There was only one way to find out. He began to read.
Minutes ticked by with the words he passed. A quiet relief cloaked him as he continued, for what had happened to Ed didn't read as horrendously as what had happened to Al. It was still terrible and he couldn't even begin to imagine the pain Ed had felt while undergoing the experiments, but the tale didn't make his body ice over. It didn't make him want to hate. It didn't make him want to fight against the world.
The paper floated out of his grasp as he reached for the continuing page, but a sudden sound from behind made him jump in his chair, heart racing. He swiveled around and saw that it was only the cassette player rewinding the tape inside it. He chided himself for his childish fear.
But what tape was inside the box? And why had the cassette player been left on in the first place?
He watched the black film turn back inside the small cassette until it was finished, giving a loud click before unwinding itself once again. He waited to hear something, but no sound came through the speakers. It was then that he realized the volume had been turned down all the way. How strange.
He turned it up.
And regretted it.