Foolish For You
Chapter Twenty One
Fate Groveling Mercature
- mirage -
Alphonse ran from Cindy's side, and Roy called to her. He didn't want her following or fleeing into the building in fear, he wanted her at his command because she was all he had.
"Cindy!" Roy called, "Get over here!"
Cindy ran to Roy. A short skirt bounced about her skinny legs, and a male jacket twice her size buried her upper half. She was light on her feet, and crossed much of the parking lot quickly, before slowing, and nervously creeping the last five foot distance to Roy's sprawled body. In the dark it was hard to see her face, but somehow her fear was still visible.
"Sir?" she whispered. Her tone held a sense of disbelief. She brought her hands to her face, knuckles curled and dancing about her chin. "What happened?" She had never seen war, and she never would. She was administration, and this frightened her.
"Cindy, call the base at once," Roy ordered. He pressed himself up with his good arm while the rest of him lay limp where he had fallen. "Relay my orders, they are to phone Lieutenant Hawkeye, and send men here immediately."
Cindy dropped to her knees at Roy's side. His familiar and capable voice made him more recognizable to her, and she grasped at his shoulders, and cried out, "Are you injured sir!" She broke into rapid conversation asking questions and making quick statements in a tone that suggested she would burst into tears, but Roy couldn't hear any of it. He shoved at her to leave him, he wanted her to call the base, he wanted reinforcements, and he wanted them now! He should have ordered her to move, raising his voice, forcing her to respond, but every crucial part of his focus was still locked on Ed, and all he could see was Alphonse, running full force, flip-flops going off like firecrackers as he tore across the parking lot, drawing back his fist.
Alphonse plowed into Melander, and crushed the man, and Ed, into the ground.
Roy grabbed Cindy's bicep and shoulder in a fierce grip, and cried, "Get me up!" His eyes were fixed on Alphonse's shadowed body, and her arm was a spindle in his fist. She tried to obey, struggling under his weight as he positioned her like a crutch. "Hurry!" Roy demanded, trying his best to participate. "Hurry!" His head was spinning, and Cindy rose to her feet, legs wobbling under the burden, and looped his dry arm over her shoulder.
Up ahead Alphonse was on top of Melander beating the shit out of him. Raining downward blows, Alphonse looked trapped within a fury Roy had never seen.
"Ed!" Roy yelled, limping forward with Cindy helping. He was afraid to get close while so damaged, and while leading Cindy into danger, but he couldn't keep himself away.
Ed had dropped like a heavy sack when Melander crashed to the ground. He lay a foot from Alphonse, sprawled on his side gulping like a fish out of water, and incoherent with pain. All of Ed's energy was devoted to enduring his pain, and he lay motionless, no part of him trying to escape.
Melander was flailing under Alphonse's hammering fist, before knocking Alphonse off with a brutal backhand. "Get off me boy!" Melander cried. His strength was overwhelming, and Alphonse was tossed to the side like a grown man had tackled the side of his jaw.
Cindy screamed, "Alphonse!"
Roy pulled off Cindy, staggering forward, hugging his bleeding arm. "Get his car!" Roy ordered Cindy, pointing to where he knew Alphonse's keys were abandoned on the ground. Cindy looked shook to pieces. In a comatose state of terrified fright, she stared at Roy. "Go!" Roy yelled, tipping his face down, and glaring at her with fury. "Do as I say! Get the keys, get the car!"
In a maladroit backward crawl, Melander scrambled from Alphonse and reclaimed Ed. He grabbed at Ed the way a starving man pulls food into his arms, and screamed, "Back away!" Melander pushed to his feet, hauling Ed upward with him. "You don't know what you're doing!" Melander looked crazed. "Careless fools, you'll injure Edward!"
The insanity.
"How far do you think you'll get Melander?" Roy asked, struggling to keep his voice free of pain. His blood was dripping off his fingers in the steady patter of rainfall, but he had to believe it was the excess on his arm and in his clothes. He had to believe he had closed the hole.
Melander's face looked like a kicked-in melon. His nose was bleeding a river down his face, and his left eye was already swelling. Alphonse swung a mean right hook. "This is what he wants," Melander said, hobbling back a step, and lifting Ed to his chest as if hefting up a large bag of sand. "He wants to be beautiful, he wants these metal limbs gone!"
Roy glanced from Melander's disgusting face to Ed's, but Ed looked aware of little. His physical strain was a massacre of his operating self, making his pigment red with strain, and wet with sweat. Ed was fighting through it with a vengeance.
"He told me so," Melander said, sounding giddy. Behind Melander, Alphonse was slowly rising in the cautious stance of a predator preparing to pounce. "Oh yes, he told me all about it." Melander continued. "And so we continue."
Stunned into a moment of disbelief, Roy asked, "You can take the automail away?"
"I can take the automail away in a second." Melander scoffed with insult. "Think impotent fire is the zenith of alchemy's majesty, great colonel Mustang?" A fleering look took Melander's face. "I can grow his limbs back in the likeness of whatever Lord the pathetic worm of your mind feels just to prey to." Impossible! "We made a pact to finish my experiments, and in reward, I take the automail." Melander held Ed against his chest, and fully raised, Ed was almost standing himself. "Now I will finish, and do so. I can't go back on my word," Melander said, growing a wide grin of blood and teeth. "Can I colonel?"
Roy didn't know where annihilating Ed's male body factored in to all of this, and he was speechless. The idea of actually removing Ed's automail and returning Ed entirely to a flesh vessel stunned him. Not in talent, but simply in concept. As long as he had known Edward, the boy had always had a metal arm and metal leg, and because he thought Ed was fine the way he was, suggested restoration felt more like destroying something, than saving it.
"Take some pills Ed," Roy said firmly, keeping his gaze locked with Melander. He'd had enough of this freak show. There was going to be a show down, and they were going to need Ed's help as an active participant.
Ed's right eye opened just a tiny sliver, and it looked swollen and stung with insect bites under Ed's stress and pain. "Take a few of them," Roy ordered. Ed gave a slow blink, and it was an affirming nod.
"You won't follow me colonel," Melander said softly. The man took a single step back, and Alphonse gave his lips a nervous lick. He was going to attack at any second.
"I don't need to follow you," Roy said, with flawless confidence. "You've decided to flee into our capital, nest of the largest militia in the country, and with the most disruptive State Alchemist I know." Alphonse was sneaking forward. "Even if well-intentioned, Ed would probably completely disrupt your agenda." Melander's eyes squinted with weary skepticism. "He'll take care of this for me, accidentally." Roy cocked a wry smile. "And if not accidentally," he chuckled painfully, "then simply by behaving like a badass," his heart was grateful he believed this to be true, "and resisting you."
Melander took these statements to heart, the obviousness of this was satisfying. The man's face went a bit rigid, as if realization Ed was not a casual and easy item to be possessed suddenly bloomed, and Melander was considering what a protesting captive Edward Elric would truly make.
A formidable one, Roy thought happily, Ed was a fucking formidable one.
Melander addressed this in one, quick, game-changing movement. From his cloak he pulled a large impressive hunting knife, and brought the blade tip to the left of Ed's stomach in the seppuku position of suicide. The message was clear: you'll disembowel him Mustang. Come closer, and threaten me anymore, and you'll disembowel him.
Ed looked to be half dead, but he responded to the knife immediately. His right eye had been open only a crack, but on sight of the new shinning blade, both eyes opened in fear, and Ed wiggled. "Jacob, ease up!" Ed yelled, voice tight with pain. "Get it off me!"
"You won't follow me colonel," Melander repeated.
Roy was scared of the knife and its placement. You didn't need to be strong to disembowel someone. The work was done for you with the blade, and even a child could do the job, because there was nothing about your stomach and organs made to resist incision.
Roy's good arm sprang up toward Alphonse in an open-palm gesture to stop the attack. The serrated edge of Melander's knife was just hovering over Ed's skin, and Melander looked ready to pull his arm back and slice Ed open the way a cellist strokes a bow.
"Alphonse, stay where you are," Roy said quickly. He was scared Alphonse would set Melander off.
Melander whipped his head toward Alphonse in shock, but Ed was not as graceful.
"Alphonse, stay back!" Ed yelled, shrieking a tiny strangled nose when Melander jerked the knife lower to rest against the bulge of bandages in Ed's pants. It was growing wet with blood and no longer had a well constructed shape. It was sagging like wet tissue paper, and Roy imagined it growing too heavy and simply dropping to the ground in a wet plop.
"Jacob, for fuck's sake!" Ed cried. "Ease up! Ease up!" Ed was horrified. He'd lost most of his color suffering, and his eyes were turning into dark circles, but this didn't hide the immense panic twisting Ed's features in overwrought misery. "Both of you stay back! I can't take one more wound! I am fucking serious!"
Melander was closer to his car than Roy understood, and was backing for it quickly.
"But nii-san!" Alphonse cried, flinching as if his desire to attack was almost uncontrollable.
"I am serious!" Ed cried, tipping his head back. "Come find me later!" Ed's skin glimmered in the pale light of the nearest lamppost, and Roy knew Ed was either sweating like a beast, or still crying.
"No Edward," Melander said firmly. "Do not invite them, they're not invited." In what appeared a single movement he drew back, flush to the back passenger side of his car, and tossed Ed in with one swing of his arm. Melander was not moving normally, and once Ed was out of his grasp was in the car so fast neither Roy nor Alphonse had time to move.
It was unusual and inhuman, and Roy feared Melander, and what he might have done to his own body. Traditional alchemy could remove anatomy, but not replace it, and the thought that Melander, this immoral reprobate, could, gave him the cagey feeling of looking at a real life Victor Frankenstein. Could Melander have been someone decent or sane when the journey started for him? Where did the tragedy, this disastrous harsh reality, come in like the plague, and spread outward like sickness.
"Son of a bitch!" Roy cried, feeling the flighty vibration of self-imposed restraint consume his legs. The stress and tension in the air was thick. It felt like a blanket shrouding over them, locking out the world for a plain of only Melander's sick games.
They were submitting. They were going to stand and watch Melander steal Ed. Listen to the engine turn over, smell the exhaust in the air, stare in through the windows, and WAIT. Wave clowns. Wave goodbye you fucks.
They knew things were growing worse, but still they did nothing.
Powerlessness was a crippling meal, and theirs came with the hatred of stomach-twisting compliance. Roy felt his right hand shaking; it was curled into a fist tight enough his own fingernails dove into his flesh. He felt he could smell the stench of failure, and the repugnance of it, as he stood useless, despite all his abilities, and did nothing while Ed was in danger.
"Alphonse!" Roy snapped, head ringing. "Where is your damn car!"
Alphonse was holding his head in panic, with wide eyes like fat light bulbs screwed into his face. He was mute, and twitching like Roy, but when Melander brought the small sedan he was using to life, floored the engine, and peeled out, Alphonse began dancing in absolute silent hysteria.
"Alphonse!" Roy turned to the boy. He was breathing like a bull, and each exhale was a bullet. "Alphonse! Get your head toget..." Roy silenced when headlights popped like a spotlight behind them. Everything outside of their white piercing beams was suffocated in blackness, and Roy and Alphonse both turned.
They looked into the light even though it blinded them, and the theater of it made them appear taller, wider, and stronger than they were. Alphonse brought a hand to shield his eyes with every bit of him visible. The blood on Roy's arm was twinkling, and where Ed had smeared it all about Roy's knees and lower thighs, it looked as if someone had slashed at him with a knife.
Cindy had started Alphonse's car, and she drove forward with a frightening lack of skill.
"Careful!" Alphonse raised his hands and held them out with his fingers sprayed and palms vertical, as if to stop a moving truck. "Be careful Cindy!"
Roy backed up when he realized the girl didn't know how to drive. She sped forward intermittently, switching between the gas and break with too much force, so the car looked to be hopping in unstable launches of speed.
"Brake, use the brake!" Alphonse cried. "Easy on the gas!" Roy had no chance of fleeing the collision zone, and hoped to god Cindy wouldn't run them down now. How painfully ironic that would be. Instead, with the tires crying out, and the old car shaking, she came to a screeching halt far too close to be safe. The car grille stopped five feet in front of Roy's thighs, and he shuddered with relief it wasn't six feet closer.
Alphonse had laid a palm on the car hood when he thought Cindy was stopping seven feet ago, and managed to hop to the side so it didn't clip him during the final thrust. Like a gentleman, he stopped himself after the word "Mother" jumped from his mouth, and panting, stared at the car coming down from the surge of adrenaline.
Cindy left the idling car, and staggered out crying.
"Alphonse," she said through her tears, "I am sorry I am not a better driver!" She ran to Alphonse's side and latched onto the arm he still had planted on the hood. "What's going on!" She pointed in the direction of Melander's fading tail lights. "Did that man just steal your brother!"
Alphonse wasn't hearing her, he came from his trance slow at first, and then full of motivation. Now that he was certain the car wouldn't run him over, and Cindy was out of the driver's seat, he went for it.
Roy stopped this with a loud and nonnegotiable, "I am driving!" In a bad hobble, he went shuffling quickly toward the driver's side with Alphonse hesitating indecisively. "Don't even think about it," Roy said darkly, wincing as he made it to the open door, and began easing down. "Get in!"
Alphonse backed quickly from the driver's side with Roy's command, and cried out, "Colonel, what are we going to do!"
Cindy was hanging onto Alphonse's arm with silent tears raining down her face, and she moved with Alphonse seamlessly, frightened to let go.
Alphonse ran to the passenger side peeling Cindy off, and managing her with quick distracted statements. His focus was entirely on Ed, and he climbed into the front passenger's side and slammed the door while Cindy scurried into the back.
"Colonel!" Alphonse cried, voice a bit horse with panic. "Do you know where Melander's taking him! What are we going to do!"
Roy hit the gas so hard both kids fell back into their seats. The answer was easy. "Catch them." He put the pedal to the floor and sped out of the barracks at a terrific speed. He rammed the curb turning onto the main road, and Cindy screamed.
"I can't believe this!" Alphonse said. He grabbed the dashboard, struggling to keep himself stable under the swing of Roy's driving. "I can't believe—how—how did this happen!" Cindy grabbed the back of Alphonse's headrest when Roy took a right, and she elbowed Roy in the head.
"Cindy! Sit back!" Roy yelled.
"He was! I thought he was dead!" Alphonse continued.
"Apparently not," Roy said, absolutely furious.
Roy flew through two red lights. The second hung above an intersection on a slight decline, and the car lifted up as they darted through it. They landed roughly, and Cindy screamed. The bumper hit the ground long and hard enough it scraped an elaborate firework display before detaching and flying off.
Cindy watched this happen through the back window with a frozen expression of immense shock, before calling, "Alphonse!" She pulled into the space between the two front seats, and said, "Alphonse, the colonel is bleeding!" She pointed at Roy's half-dressed blood-coated body, and Alphonse looked with skepticism, before gawking with horror. He hadn't noticed. With all that was going on with Ed, Roy assumed he could have been missing his arm and Alphonse wouldn't have noticed. Sounding frantic, Cindy added, "I don't think the colonel should be driving!"
"Alphonse does not out rank me Cindy!" Roy said loudly, turning the wheel with his single hand so the car fish tailed around a right hand bend. Cindy went sliding across the back seat and hit the back driver's side door with a small cry. Alphonse followed, and railed into Roy's right side. The effect was a sledge-hammer to Roy's lightly cauterized bullet wound, and his grip on the steering wheel went weak.
Alphonse grabbed at the wheel to steady it. Sandwiched to Roy's side, he helped turn it to keep the drive smooth, but Roy panicked, and cried out, "You're not touching the wheel if you drive anything like her!"
"I have a bit more practice!" Alphonse said, shrinking back to the passenger side to buckle up. "Cindy, please buckle up!" Alphonse called, turning around and reaching to her. "We need to catch up to my brother, so we may need to drive recklessly for a while!"
Roy approached a four-way intersection with his eyes darting about for a change in traffic to suggest Melander was not taking the route he believed the man would take. Central's streets were long black carpets spreading into the buildings like a root system. At their speed they were covering ground, but they held no true control, and Roy imagined them a white marble dropping down the black paths of a child's maze game. They were going to get to the bottom, but they couldn't truly manage their route under the momentum.
"Alphonse, buckle me," Roy ordered, lifting up on the gas just enough to glimpse all three roads before speeding straight down the intersection's heart.
Alphonse braced himself with a hand on the ceiling, and a hand on the dashboard. He was preparing himself for a crash the best he could, because the risk was very real.
"How do we know where we are going!" Cindy asked, returning to lean between the two front seats sniffling excessively. Alphonse reached past her and pulled Roy's seat belt about him.
"He was trying to break in," Roy said. Blind with hate his bare foot stamped the gas pedal down as if he wanted to kill it. In his mind he could see the Elric apartment with Ed sleeping peacefully on the couch. It was a safe, locked, and controlled environment that he had jeopardized. He had gone to the door, he had left Ed alone while medicated and defenseless, and behind him, he left the apartment unlocked and open, and somehow, and he didn't know how, he had let Melander in.
HE LET MELANDER IN!
He had been duped like a fool, and it was his fault! He had been lured out on purpose, he had taken the bait like an idiot, he had let the enemy inside, and the enemy was hungry. Roy felt the word sacrifice lift in his mind the way it had when Ed climbed to the roof of the car as if rising to the top of a great ocean, but it didn't fit. He wasn't ready to sacrifice himself, the martyr didn't agree with him, and he didn't think it agreed with Ed. Instead he imagined the world engulfed in a great fire, so flames would shoot down the streets, eat up the building fronts, burst out the windows with heat and smoke, and unharmed he would stand in the middle of it, arms outstretched, fingers posed to snap, and wait. Wait to see what survived, wait to see what he had to kill with his own two hands. He wanted the blackened rubble, the crumbling charred debris so Melander had nowhere to hide, and when the man came crawling from the ash, grinning, and laughing, and staring with those horrible dull eyes, and that toothy smile, he would see the neck he needed to wrap his hands around, and he would do it. The word wasn't sacrifice, it was savage. He felt a SAVAGE, and with blood lust, and gleeful excitement, he was going to murder Melander, and he wasn't ever going to look back.
Up ahead, speeding down the main artery linking the military zone to Central's downtown, Melander's car came into view, and Roy felt a surge of relief. Alphonse leaned toward the windshield with awe, and with absolute excitement, he cried out, "We caught up to them!"
"Brace yourself," Roy said, shifting gears and flooring the engine. The car was a bullet, speeding forward unstoppably in one perfect deadly line. Roy was flooding the engine with fuel, and they soared toward Melander's car closing the distance quickly: Fifty feet, twenty feet, ten feet, and then they hit.
Cindy screamed, and Alphonse hit the dashboard in a prepared block. The force of their car smashed Melander's left tail light, and sent the rear into an unstable wobble with the tires screeching. It waved wildly back and forth across the road, and the shadow of Melander was visible twisting the steering wheel to control it. With each pass it came to stabilize, and when the car was near corrected, Ed sat up in the backseat and looked at them from the rear window.
"Holy crap!" Alphonse cried. "Nii-san!" Alphonse had both hands on the dashboard to hold himself steady. "What do we do!"
"Wait and see what Ed does," Roy said, before speeding forward and ramming Melander's car again.
It went swerving, but this time Ed reached up and punched his automail arm out the rear window. The metal appendage stabbed through, splitting the glass into a sea of cracks until it shattered and flew back in harmless pebble sized chunks. It had the effect of an awful hail storm on Roy's windshield, but it cleared quickly, and then Ed was visible climbing to the rear window, and smacking the remaining glass away with his metal palm.
Melander was a dark shadow in the front seat, and with Ed's movement, the man turned around yelling.
"He can't drive and fight," Roy said, realizing the genius of Ed's sudden movement. "Alphonse, take the wheel."
"What!" Cindy cried. "But Alphonse isn't a very good driver sir!"
Roy managed the car's speed and pressed the nose of their car to Melander's bumper. Then he turned to Alphonse, and his expression was more powerful than anything he could put into words. His rigid jaw and commanding eyes conveyed as much personal faith and support as it did authoritative demand. TAKE. THE. WHEEL.
Alphonse looked hysterical and nerve wracked with the idea of driving a car soaring over ninety with Ed so close to the open road and their unforgiving tires.
"Take it Alphonse," Roy ordered. "You will do this." When Edward was twelve, Roy said this commonly, and often with unfriendly relentlessness. Edward was not raised hearing, you can, he was raised hearing, you will.
Alphonse reached out and took the wheel in a tight confident grasp. Quickly he slid to Roy's side and fed his foot to the gas pedal. Roy relinquished it slowly, unbuckled, and rolled down the window.
Alphonse glanced at this, learning quickly how to manage the car's momentum. The fear in his expression was loud and untamed, but like Ed's eyes, Alphonse's golden irises were burning into strong candle flames, and they looked incapable of being snuffed out.
"Roy," Alphonse said, voice uneasy but unyielding. They were in a high-speed chase; unqualified and unpracticed, with the only adult half-dressed and shot. Every movement threatened the stability of the car. Outside the street lamps went by in yellow smears, and with the window down Melander's engine sounded like a roaring beast. "I am trusting you," Alphonse said, breathing quick as if with anger. In their favor the night hours had cleared the roads, but the world wasn't empty. Their luck wasn't limitless, and Alphonse met Roy's eyes in a fierce gaze, and said, "Don't drop him."
Roy opened the window, reached up to the top of the car, and pulled himself out to sit on the window ledge. The wind was brutal, and Ed's bangs were whipping in all directions as he pulled himself out the rear window of Melander's car. Under the strain of it Ed's body was visibly shaking, and the automail was next to useless without the tactile sensation and function of Ed's flesh palm.
"Keep the car steady!" Roy called, slowly climbing onto the hood. He pitched his thigh over the corner, and stepped onto the windshield wiper. He was quick, tossing his weight into the motion to help carry him, and using the spectacular wind to his advantage. It pressed him toward the windshield like a blanket, and Alphonse held the cars bumper to bumper the best he could.
Ed was draped over Melander's back seat to the trunk, braid flowing over his shoulder, and bangs nearly straight forward as if going head first into a vacuum. "Roy!" Ed yelled, voice muffled under the wind and hum of the motors. "I am going to fall!" Ed was hanging onto the car for dear life.
"Fall to me!" Roy yelled. He took hold of the hood's lip where the windshield wipers were cradled. With a stable right grip he inched his bare feet down the hood until he was at arm's length. Then, in a kneel, he extended his left to Ed. The pain in his right arm was intense, but he refused to offer Ed the injured arm. "Fall to me!"
Ed shook his head widely. "Fall to the road!" Ed cried.
Melander twisted around in his seat to see what they were doing, and the car swerved to the right. Ed slid in that direction, and cried out into his jaw. The flesh hand wasn't enough, and Roy could see Ed's automail palm doing its best to control its grip. Too tight, and Ed would start shredding the trunk in jagged can opener slices, too soft, and the hand was pointless.
Ed managed a tolerable lean on the right of his body so he could clap for alchemy. He slapped his palms to the trunk, but the reaction was pitiful, curling some of the metal from the tail lights, so Roy understood Ed was trying to build a bridge to Alphonse's hood, but it was ultimately a failure.
"Ed, forget the alchemy!" Roy yelled. Melander's driving was growing sloppy, and symbolized what little time they had. "You have to hurry!"
Ed obeyed, and began dragging himself further out the window. The movement was delicate and slow, but freed Ed's hips from the frame of the car, and Ed was blubbering and whining high-pitched cries. His weight fell entirely into his upper half, controlled by his arms, and Roy saw a look of panic seize Ed's expression when Ed realized how little control he had of his lower half. He had lost the anchor of his body weight, and Roy's loose pajama pants were only helping to lubricate his legs. He slid easily under the jostling motion of the car, and Ed screamed, "I can't!" while frantically trying to secure capable purchase. "I can't steady myself!"
Roy tried to stretch further, but his right arm was on fire. In all his life, he had never moved a bulleted limb so greatly. "Ed!"
"I'll fall! I'll fall!"
Alphonse stuck his head out the car window. "Roy! Nii-san!" Alphonse pointed up ahead. "Corner!"
Roy lifted his gaze, and coming quickly was a sharp right hand turn. They were officially downtown, but the economically declined and less traveled portion was to the right of the downtown area. The turn was almost a perfect right angle, and there was no way either one of them would last outside the car. Even Ed understood this. He lifted his head enough to see the corner, and then curled his grip like cat.
"Ed! It's now or never!" Roy yelled, seeing their opportunity close. "Grab me! Fall to me! I'll catch you!"
"I can't direct myself!" Ed let go with his flesh hand, and reached out, even while protesting. Their hands were only a foot apart. Roy could see Ed's slender fingers bending outward and looking to dance in the wind. It was poetic, but it was unmanageable, and stretching for all their worth it was obvious they could not close the gap.
Melander caught sight of this and began yelling. In the wind the baritone of the man's throat sounded like a beating drum. The car swerved sporadically, and stabilized with only one palm, Ed almost flew off. He lost his balance, and slid down the trunk. As the car swung, so did Ed, and the metal hand activated so each steel finger was a cat's claw in a curtain. They dug into the car's frame, turning Ed's metal knuckles into hooking barbs that hinged him in place, and stopped him from being entirely tossed off.
Alphonse was screaming.
Roy believed Ed was going to fall, and his body responded. His legs braced against the hood preparing to jump, and he let go with his right hand. He believed that Ed might fall when he prepared to leap from their moving vehicle to Melander's, and realized Ed had managed to catch himself when he did. It was now painfully obvious: Ed was not in the condition to move himself from the car. He was losing blood, high on medication, without the orchestration of his lower limbs, and therefore, Roy was going to have to go to the boy. He was going to have to be strong while Ed was weak, and he was determined to be.
Roy slid down the hood of Alphonse's car, before leaping forward, and diving at the rim of Melander's busted rear window. His body hit the trunk with such intensity his rib cage vibrated inside him. His breath sputtered and his vision blurred, but his left hand sailed through the open window, and hit the empty leather of the back seats. The right was a weak throbbing noodle, and Roy clawed frantically at the seatback, grabbing what he could as the weight of his body began to take him toward the road. He felt nothing but pain from his right arm, and the wind was singing in his ears. The downtown street lamps gave a strobe effect at their speed, and in nothing but a tee shirt and boxers, his skin broke out in goosebumps, but grabbed naturally at the metal. A fierce burning sensation came to the tops of Roy's thighs as they squealed down the trunk, slowing his decent, until he stopped, hanging by his arms, and getting a sense of himself
"Are you crazy!" Ed screamed, grabbing Roy's arm to help secure him. "It's not like I am going to die right now!" Ed was hysterical. "You'll kill yourself! You could have killed yourself!" The automail was trying to help pull Roy upward, but it stopped, and smacked with angry discipline. "What the fuck Roy! What the fuck! What the fuck!"
This wasn't about any of that, and with Roy's lungs struggling to regroup, he cried out, "The turn! The turn!" This had nothing to do with acts of bravado and recklessness, and everything to do with being thrown from moving vehicles.
Roy dragged himself to the rear window with a strength Ed didn't have. "Ed!" He was terrified Ed wouldn't make it through a right angle, and would flop off the trunk, and go flittering into the darkness to be found later, in a bloody mutilated lump.
In the distance Roy could hear Alphonse screaming to them, but with the wind and tires against the road, the boy's words were nothing but sound. Driving at such a speed it seemed impossible the turn hadn't arrived, and Roy was certain they had no time. He pushed himself half inside the car, looped his bloody right arm about Ed, and hugged. Most of Ed was easily conquered, and slid along under the frictionless cotton, but the automail gave resistance. Embedded by each finger, it yanked, and Ed howled a painful, "Ow!" the wind buried. "Oh god, don't pull!" Ed cried.
Roy buckled down with every limb. He clamped himself to the car and held Ed fiercely as if preparing for a tornado to pass overhead.
Moments later the car was turning. Melander's first priority was still focused on reaching his destination, and he slammed the breaks with the corner breeching the headlights, and then slammed the gas as he turned the wheel.
It felt like the world flipping sideways. Ed lifted straight up, held down only by Roy and his metal arm. The sensation reminded Roy of a carnival ride providing a brief moment of weightlessness. In pajama bottoms, Ed's slender mass was nothing in the face of this force. The metal arm was acting as a kite string, and Ed's sailing body curled together, screaming under the agonizing pressure on his frame. His flesh hand clawed at Roy's blood wet tee shirt, and into Roy's skin with white knuckles. It was the sensation of falling. It was the sensation of falling without knowing if you truly had a grip on the edge. Roy had the weight of Ed's make pressing against him, so his strong arm felt it was being pulled to the fullest extend capable, and his bullet arm felt like it was tearing out. He couldn't manage a single word, and under the screeching tires it wouldn't have mattered. Ed's mouth was open in a yell, but Roy couldn't hear a sound beyond them.
The rear of the car swung violently toward the left, nearly turning them horizontal with the frame lifting up on the right side. For a rough and terrifying second Roy imagined it flipping over and squishing them under its several ton weight. If it flipped, they would die, and Roy held Ed for all his worth, feeling as if his body were being sucked into a roaring hurricane. Alphonse had backed off, unable to take the corner at their speed and the headlights were flashing in quick emergency bursts.
After the corner, their bodies dropped to the trunk in punctuating dead weight. The road was again straight for the next few blocks, and Ed was crying and panting with his metal palm nearly all inside the trunk. For the moment, Ed wouldn't have the luxury of falling off the car with the automail serving as a grappling hook, and Roy scrambled inside it.
Melander broke into argument, with the temper and ferocity contorting his voice into madcap beast like snarls. As if the car were an extension of his body it began a skittering rock, floundering as the man's hands lost focus on the wheel and turned to face the mass of Roy Mustang tearing over the back seats, and raising to his knees.
Alphonse again backed away from their bumper with Melander's car swerving, and the headlights shot through the open back window. In contrast to Melander's dark cloaked body, Roy's rising frame looked like the bright unfolding body of an angel.
Roy looped his arm about Melander's neck, severing the man's air, and demanded, "Pull over!" He tightened his hold, choking the man viciously. "Now!" he added, "Pull over, now!"
Melander pushed the gas pedal to the floor, and they were speeding up. Ninety-five, One Hundred, One Ten. The buildings were nothing but blurs of color, and the tires felt light and wobbly on the road. Alphonse's headlights remained a blinding high beam, trailing ten feet behind them.
"Roy!" Ed yelled, arriving at the rear window, and dragging himself inside. "Stop the car! Roy, stop the car!"
Alphonse returned to their bumper, struggling to match acceleration, and he over calculated, lightly ramming the trunk. The impact helped knock Ed inside the rear window to the seats. Or, was the impact on purpose, Roy thought, squinting through the headlight beams to Alphonse, who was hunched over the steering wheel gripping at ten-and-two like a mad man with Cindy in the passenger side, screaming and crying.
"Alphonse stop!" Ed yelled, looking over his shoulder at the trailing car. "Stop!" Ed screamed, thrusting his spread palm back out the rear window so Alphonse would see it. "Stop driving! Stop driving recklessly!" Ed ordered, before turning an angry accusing look to Roy and screaming, "Why would you let him drive!" Ed was flabbergasted with concern for Alphonse, before adding, "With that stupid girl in the car!"
Roy tightened his head-lock on Melander. His threat didn't seem to be enough, so he squeezed in such a way any soldier understood they would lose consciousness if they didn't submit. If they had to be in a runaway car, Roy preferred Melander not join them for the ride, and he would take a corpse in the driver's seat over this man.
Melander immediately responded to this new threat, jerking the wheel in protest, and tossing Ed's body from side to side. Ed toppled over on the back seat, and screamed with fury. Like a rabid injured animal, he reached forward and began dragging himself toward the front with large intimidating launches of his arms, and his hands curled into animalistic paws, while screaming, motherfucker.
Roy felt Ed grab his shoulder for leverage before Ed's automail fist flew past him, and into Melander's face. Melander's head was thrown to the left, and the steering wheel followed, driving them onto the sidewalk.
The tires bounced over the curb, and they drove into a mail stand. It hit the front in a deafening crash throwing newspaper in all directions. Like wild flapping wings, papers blew up the windshield twisting and turning while others slapped flat in blinding sheets of newsprint blocking out the road. The wooden body of the stand was being pushed along, grinding loudly and sending splinters up the windshield in bouncing wooden pebbles before tossing off to the side.
"Shit!" Ed yelled, hanging tight to Roy's arm with Melander choking. "Stop the fucking car! Stop it!" Ed punched Melander again, and the man's hands dropped off the wheel.
"Ed! Pull us over!" Roy yelled. Melander's hand reached to Roy's left arm in defense, but Roy held tight.
Ed made to grab the wheel, but his hand missed in a flopping wave of inaccurate depth perception.
"Grab the damn wheel!" Roy screamed.
"I can't see well!" Ed pushed himself forward, waving several inches to the right of the wheel where he believed it to be, before grabbing it without the slightest bit of know how. "Roy! I am high as shit!" To keep his body moving Ed had opened the small automail maintenance duct in his bicep where several small white pills were stashed and swallowed all of them. He hadn't counted, and he hadn't cared. All he wanted was the sensation of disembowelment to stop.
"Just pull us over!"
"Over where!"
"Back onto the road!"
"Is this a bad time to admit I can't drive!" Ed gave the wheel a nervous pull to the right. At a normal speed the car would have steered in that direction, but at nearly a hundred and twenty it was a vicious sway, and Ed quickly righted the wheel in fear. "What do I do! I can't see!" Papers were blanketing the entire windshield, and they were blind.
"Pull us back onto the road!" Roy screamed. With his left arm locked around Melander's neck, his right arm holding it in place, he couldn't momentarily use his numb and burning right to hit the windshield wipers. "Pull to the right! Just steer towards the road!" They were going to hit something. They were going to hit something!
"How much!"
"Now Ed!" Roy screamed. "To the right!"
Melander abandoned Roy's left arm, and reached back in an attack on Roy's head. Melander's fingers dug into Roy's scalp and face like spikes. Ed dropped the wheel, and grabbed at Melander's hand. Melander went for sensitive outlets, and Roy squeezed his eyes closed when the man's fingers dug at them, and jabbed an index up his nose.
"No Ed!" Roy yelled. "Stop the car!" They wouldn't last on the sidewalks. They'd hit something greater than a newsstand.
"Let him go!" Ed screamed, prying Melander's hand off Roy's face. Melander grabbed the unrestrained wheel with his other hand, driving them steady.
"Ed!" Roy yelled, regaining his vision. "Hit the windshield wipers! Hit the controls down!" Roy tried to make a pass at the gears alongside the steering wheel, but as soon as he released Melander's head the man tried to bite them. He latched on again, choking off the man's air, but Ed understood and reached forward. He pawed the controls down in violent swipes of his automail hand, and one snapped in half. The windshield wipers flew to life, ineffectively sliding over the smooth papers held flush under the wind before catching the corner of a few, and clearing a small porthole in the very center.
In this tiny space Roy saw the end of their sidewalk rapidly approaching, the clear street before the next block, and the parked car and phone booth stationed at the upcoming curb, coming straight for them.
At their speed there was no time to stop the car, and Roy dropped Melander. He pulled back from the front seat and attacked Ed in a vicious hug that wrapped his arms fully about Ed's frame, cradled Ed's head beneath his own, and as much as physically possible, turned Roy's body into a blanketing shield, before, they hit.
The sound the car made colliding with another vehicle and metal phone booth, Roy didn't process. The car flipped up, and smashed into the vertical booth on the left side, knocking it to the right, so it fell upside down onto the parked car, before sliding off and onto the road.
The sound of the blow into the phone booth was that of a cannon. Roy's body flew upward into the roof of the car as if it swung down and smacked him. The cannon fired again, and somewhere in the blackness, and ear-bleeding noise, there was tumbling. So absolute, there existed no equilibrium. It was impossible to understand the current action of the car, the impact on your body, and any coordination to respond. All senses were so overwhelmed with the displacement of the resonance and motion of the crash, they lost basic reception and report, so your body disappeared into black nothingness absent of comprehension, before there was a sense of falling off a four story building.
A long, but short, period of weightlessness, of immense panic, that this fall was the last fall, and when the pavement arrived your bones would shatter into toothpick shards, and the meat of your body would lop off your frame in wet chunks. You would open like a watermelon being dropped, with dispersed parts recognizable. Your jaw, perhaps still intact, your intestines visible like a red snaking garden hose, but the rest would be a pulp that had stuffed the bag of your skin the way feathers stuff a pillow, and you would not remember the moment of your death. You would remember the fall, and then there would be nothing, because the watermelon of your mind could not record the sense of it bursting into a million pieces, scattering its nerves and blood vessels out onto the cool damp asphalt, and you would die, without ever truly knowing, how you died.
Roy landed back on the roof of the car, and the world was black, but sound continued on.
There was a high-pitched ringing in his ears when he cracked his eyes, and tried to regain his vision. It was hard to remember where he was, and what was going on. Light came from odd angles, the air smelled like rubber, leather, and variables he only associated with fire. His body was shaking with vertigo and fear. Not a piece of him felt healthy, and panting, he began to recognize his lungs as they filled. His chest was working, and he recognized his heart, before his mouth awoke. His breath was rushing in and out, and dirt had mixed in against his teeth and tongue.
Carefully Roy curled his left hand into a fist to verify he could move. He regained the sense of his arms and legs enough to understand he wasn't entirely on the ground. He was on top of something, and his limbs were sprawling off that something. Unaware he was drooling he lifted his rocking head, and grabbed at it. It felt hot and it stung, as if someone had slapped him around, but everything was working.
He was still in the backseat area of the car, and he looked out the back passenger side window at the blacktop of the road and manhole. He could smell the car's tires, and he now remembered they'd crashed. The ground about him was littered with chucks of fragmented safety glass. He was lying inside the flipped car, on the interior roof, and on top of Ed.
Roy looked down at Ed in shock, remembering the details one step at a time, starting with himself first. Car, Crash, Ed, Melander.
Ed appeared unconscious. His expression was blank, and Roy was drooling onto the side of Ed's open mouth and right cheek.
Roy slurped up what was in his mouth before spitting when he tasted the dirt. He wiped at his face, and wiped his spit off Ed, before patting Ed's cheek. "Ed?" he whispered. "Ed?"
Ed's brow tightened as if the boy had a head ache. "Oh," Ed gasped, voice nothing but an exhale. Ed clenched his teeth in a deep cringe. "Oh, ow, ow, ow-ow-ow my dick," Ed whined, opening his mouth in a painful yawn. "Ow-ow-ow granny."
Roy grabbed Ed's chin, and kissed Ed's right cheek in frantic fast kisses. Despite the circumstances, this was a moment of joy for him. He had never felt relief in his life like he did for all things Edward.
"I need medicine!" Ed cried, still largely incoherent and unaware of his surroundings. "Please! Oh fuck-dammit, Granny, I need medicine!"
A car sped up alongside of them, and someone in flip-flops climbed out. "Nii-san!" Alphonse screamed, running for the car. Alphonse skidded to a stop alongside the window, and dropped to his knees to look in. "Nii-san! Nii-san! Are you okay! Nii-san!" Alphonse was hysterical, and reached into the glass and dirt, to clumsily grope at the top of Ed's face. "I am going to get you out!" Alphonse pulled his hand back, and looked to Roy with terror written across his expression. Roy was just a sprawled body with his eyes barely open, and Alphonse sputtered a fast, "Roy!" Shock took his face in the gaping of his jaw. "I am going to get you out!" Alphonse stood and took war on the crushed car door. It had been pressed in an accordion fashion, and Alphonse's adrenaline yanks to open it began rocking the car frame.
Cindy climbed out of Alphonse's idling car and Roy realized, slowly, that he must not have lost consciousness at all. Events were still following a normal pattern, and that meant after the crash the car had landed like this, and nothing more had happened. He was in the backseat with Ed, and Melander was driving.
Roy looked to the front seat, and there, hanging upside down, with his arms limp and slumped onto the roof, was Melander, with his head cracked open.
Ed spoke, slurring his words terribly. "Please take me out of this place." Ed's eyes opened for a brief minute, and his pupils were large ink blots. He seemed entirely disoriented from the crash, blood loss, and medication, and lifted shaking hands while babbling nonsense. "I can't—thinking this is just—and a good reason I need it." Ed wasn't making any sense, and Roy felt Ed's hands grope to his chest and then instinctively clutch the fabric of his shirt seeking comfort and safety. Ed squeaked out a soft, "Can I have a bath?" before whining, "I am in a lot of pain granny." Ed's chest gave a fast hitch as if to break into tears. "I'll…" and then Ed's voice became vicious, "that…fucking…"
"Ed." Roy pet his hand down Ed's face. "Ed, wake up." Alphonse was going crazy on the side of the car, and using his shoulder, began ramming at the door to get it to unhinge. "Ed?" Ed cracked an eye. "Ed, wake up."
"Roy?" Ed was beginning to wiggle with his pain. "What's…going on?" Ed asked, opening his eyes with returning thought. "What's?" Ed glanced about them, looking at the broken glass and sloping coffin they were in. "Is—oh we…is Melander okay?"
Roy was not truly glad Melander was dead, and hoped he would never feel happiness from death, but he was pleasantly relieved. He was satisfied Melander's threat was permanently silenced, and softly he said, "He can't hurt you now." His was petting Ed's bangs backward in a soft stroking gesture. "We're going to be okay."
Ed's expression was twisted into a wincing snarl of suffering, and he tossed his head briefly in a slow deranged response, before rasping, "What?" Ed blinked a few times, and his eyelids were not in synch. "What?" Ed's confused tone was changing in pitch closer to that of an accusation, before he said, "He what?" Ed was beginning to look scared with Roy's meaning, and tipped his head back trying to look toward the front seat.
Melander's skull had opened in a tiny spot, like a chicken's eggs punctured with a knife. The man's head was dangling from his neck, and the white of his brain had begun draining out while the yoke was stuck in place. This had the smell of a gutted animal leaking its stomach into the front, and Roy did not want Ed to see it. Brains were a unique thing, and there was nothing else inside the human body that looked like what came out of your head.
Slowly, in a respectful manner, Roy lifted his hand and shielded Ed's eyes in a way that made it difficult, but not impossible, for Ed to see Melander. He didn't want Ed to look, but also could not forbid Ed the choice.
One glance at Melander was all Ed needed. He had seen a corpse before, and there was something specifically still about them. Melander's open head simply confirm things, and Ed's eyes were wide with overwhelming shock, and growing panic.
"It's okay," Roy said softly, believing it to be the sight upsetting Ed. "Don't look at it." Ed did not look scared of Melander, nor sickened and upset by the death, he looked grief-stricken, and devastated with sadness. Roy didn't understand. "Ed?" Roy whispered, laying his filthy hand on Ed's cheek. "What's the matter?" Melander's death calmed him, and he thought it should have the same effect on Ed.
Ed closed his eyes with his expression curling up to tears before crying. Ed began an open unashamed weeping that was rather loud, and Roy jerked back in fright. "Are you injured?" He asked. With immediate alarm, he tried to climb off Ed, but the car had crunched downward, and he could not do so. Suddenly, Roy was assaulted with the ignorance of his assumption Ed had survived the crash safely, just because he had. The rude stupidity of this shot through him like a bullet, and he looked at the dangerous shards Ed lay in with new concern. "Ed, what's happening?" he asked, voice full of panic. He began sweeping Ed's body with his left hand searching for a wound. Was something stabbing the boy!
Roy rubbed his palm down Ed's chest, over his navel, and the tops of his thighs, but he couldn't find anything piercing. Ed appeared scratched and bruised, with dust and debris from the collision coating him, but nothing new seemed hurt.
Ed broke out sobbing a garbled beginning of a sentence, but it was incoherent, and consisted of a handful of opening words. "Ah, why did, oh I can't, this is." Ed didn't seem capable of getting out what he wanted until he yelled, "I can't fucking believe this!" in a single sob. "How could, oh fuck." Ed tipped his head up and grew louder. The sound of Ed's crying frightened Roy, and he grabbed Ed' shoulders with deep concern.
Alphonse stopped his assault on the car door, and dropped back to his knees with an expression of fear. "Why is—is he injured!" Alphonse yelled, looking to Roy for answers. Alphonse appeared scared Ed was hurt, but something about Alphonse's tone was missing the certainty this was true. "Nii-san," Alphonse said, lowering his voice to apprehensive patience. "We're going to get you out of the car, don't worry." Alphonse's approach told Roy something was happening, but injury wasn't it.
Ed pulled his flesh arm over his eyes, and continued to cry. Somewhere outside Cindy's sandals were approaching from afar, and Roy could hear her calling to Alphonse in a reporting tone. She worked with soldiers after all.
"Fuck!" Ed yelled angrily. He continued crying, sobbing miserably, before adding, "I went through all that for nothing!"
Roy was silent. He thought Ed was beautiful when he cried. He thought the Fullmetal Alchemist was beautiful when crying. The honesty of it humbled him, and he was embarrassed, but also in a strange way, comforted with the grief.
Ed looked physically possessed with the sadness of this event. His bare chest dropped in size with each sob, before trembling back upward to meet Roy's as Ed inhaled. Ed's arm hid his eyes, but his knitted brow, and open mouth were left naked, and Ed's expression of pain was very pure. "I don't want automail," Ed cried to himself. "I don't want it."
Ed looked consumed in his private sorrow, and Roy was stunned when Ed reached up and wrapped both arms about the back of his neck. Pulling them together in a hug, Ed whispered, "I am sorry. I—I—I, you don't have to look at it," Ed said sniveling. "I am sorry."
Roy was silent. Ed was crying over Melander, a cruel selfish man who had tried repeatedly to hurt him; all because Melander had offered Ed something he'd never been offered.
"Ed, you're so strong," Roy whispered. Ed had endured it all, and now wept over his lost efforts. "You amaze me." Ed's tears were calming with exhaustion. Rare instances of open weeping consumed massive amounts of pride and energy. "One day you will see how beautiful you are." Carefully Roy gathered Ed's upper half to return the hug. Ed did not respond, and went limp with depression.
"I am such a fool," Ed moaned.
Cindy knelt to the windows and looked in at them. "The ambulance is on its way Ed!" she said, before looking up when Alphonse shewed her back for privacy. Her face was wet with tears, and she looked desperate to help. With Alphonse's directive she stood quickly, stumbling into Alphonse's side, and became his partner as they tried to open the car door.
"I am beyond redemption," Ed whined, voice barely a whisper. "To be…so stupid."
Roy lifted Ed's head so he could kiss Ed's dirt streaked forehead, and whispered, "You are no worse off than the man attracted to such stupidity." He smiled weakly, and Ed felt Roy's cheek move in gesture. "Really, I've forgiven you for everything else you've done that…could have been avoided or amended with better judgment." Roy moved his mouth back to Ed's forehead and kissed slowly, before speaking into Ed's hair-line. "The lies, the debacle with your virginity, your determination to fall victim to this psycho path, your neglect to myself and my own feelings, but…really…" Roy trailed off. Ed's tears had left Ed's breath shaky. Flush together Roy could feel Ed's diaphragm spasm as Ed hiccupped. "Somehow that's all irrelevant when I consider that I can't truly leave you, despite all of it." Roy choked a soft breath of laughter. The irony, the insanity. "Even when you forced me to abandon you, in a desperate and sad attempt to save myself, I now realize, I didn't actually need saving. I just needed to be stronger for us." Roy lowered his gaze to Ed's eyes. They were large, shining with tears, and pink from strain, but Ed was listening intently. With a drooping expression of pain and surrender, Ed appeared teetering on the brink of further misery, as if he expected Roy's words to be hurtful. "It was so foolish," Roy said. "So it's not hard to forgive you for your own naivety, and the deluded notion you have about yourself, when I have to recognize the immense handicap you've given a prize decision make like myself." Roy teased. "You've turned me into a blind simpleton." He stared into Ed's eyes, mustering a soft drained and half dead smile. "We've been foolish together," he said, "and I understand you were trying your hardest Ed. I understand that."
Ed's brow twitched with skepticism. "Have can you?" he asked, sounding sick with hopeless disgust. How could you understand such repetitive thoughtlessness.
"Because I choose to."
Ed's expression caved with despair, something about kindness was painful, and he managed a fragile, "Don't insult me."
"Really, all things considered, I think I've earned a luxurious right to insult."
Alphonse stepped back from the car and began kicking at the part of the door he had peeled up.
Ed gave his head a small disbelieving shake, before quickly covering his eyes when his expression lost composure for a single soft whimper. They were lying in a smashed car, bleeding, and severely injured. Voice faint with disbelieve, Ed whined, "You're really forgiving me for all of this?" It was too good to be true. "And we can…go back to how it was before?" The more masculine way to say, we can date again.
"I won't make it easy," Roy said flatly. "I have a few specific pieces in mind I think you can suck for amends."
Ed lifted his head, and pressed their lips together in a passionate chaste kiss. Roy wasn't expecting it, and their faces and mouths were dirty. Between their lips bits of filth felt like crumbs. Ed's hands followed, and grabbed Roy's shoulders, careful of the bullet wound, but hungry for affection. Ed's kissing was fast, hard, lacking experience and grace. Roy obliged Ed's prodding mouth, which demanded entrance and moved awkwardly. Somehow Ed's vulnerable and delicate tongue had vicious strength. Ed slid his hand up into Roy's hair, and clenched the blackened roots just as Alphonse knelt down panting.
Alphonse looked in the window, ready to speak, and silenced with a fast physical recoil. He pulled back, as if to stand, but stopped himself because that wasn't an option. There was no time for that. Uncomfortably, he licked his lips, preparing to interrupt. This was the first time he'd seen Ed kiss another man, and the first time he'd witnessed Ed and Roy express physical intimacy. Respectfully he was trying to allow Ed his moment, but Ed wasn't letting up, and was growing more aggressive, pulling Roy into him, and squeezing about Roy's body with great hunger.
"Um, Roy?" Alphonse whispered, politely averting his eyes. "Nii-san?" Alphonse's stubborn presence told them Alphonse did not think kissing was the best course of action right now. How right that was. Alphonse's first priority was to free them from the car.
Ed was completely ignoring Alphonse. Roy felt Ed's breathing speed up with arousal, and Ed was licking at the top of his mouth while he tongued the boy's bottom lip before Ed jerked his head away.
In a fast, and unexpected motion, Ed turned his face to the side and cried out. "Ow!" Ed's body turned to stone when the birth of arousal fed blood to such an injured place on his body.
Alphonse reached into the car the moment Ed detached from Roy's face, and grabbed Ed's shoulders. He had pulled the car door up enough the window had grown from a narrow basement slit, to a rather sizeable hole, and Alphonse wanted Ed out.
Ed jerked with surprise when Alphonse latched on, and his body was pulled several inches toward the window.
"Careful!" Roy cried, trying to help. "Pull easy Alphonse." Alphonse managed to free only half of Ed's head when the paramedics arrived. They took over, and three of them helped coax Ed's body from the car and onto a stretcher.
Roy crawled out himself and was given a blanket, oxygen, and a rag to clean his face with. Wearing his blood and dirt stained tee shirt and underwear he was moved to the back of the second ambulance. The bullet was not in deep, and the paramedic cleaning the wound reopened the gently cauterized skin and could see it. It was taken out with medical tongs and Roy held the small lead ball between his fingers as they bandaged him.
Ed was moved to the first ambulance with the paramedics on scene horrified with his injury. They were strapping him to a stretching and cupping oxygen to his face when Ed began giving a statement. With strength Roy couldn't possibly understand, Ed began organizing the arriving military, and it put Roy to shame.
Roy was tired, he had lost blood, and he wanted to sit down and relax. He had collapsed to his ass and decided not to give a shit. Not to give a shit about Melander, not to give a shit about Marsisisms, not to give a shit about anything more than the bullet in his arm, and Ed's health.
Melander was dead, and his immediate threat was gone, but Ed seemed reanimated.
Ed wanted Melander's body preserved, as if desperate for the only shred left of the man. Struggling to prop himself up on his stretcher, Ed was pointing adamantly about the scene and giving orders like a General. The arriving grounds men were shocked and confused. They didn't recognize Ed while he was half injured and so underdressed. They came stumbling from their cars looking annoyed with the mess about the street, before snapping nervous uncertain solutes as Ed began yelling at them. His words were a bit slurred, and several of his sentences were in the wrong order, but the intensity of Ed's commands was lost on no one.
The soldiers responded with great enthusiasm when Ed identified Melander, and Alphonse was growing angry and yelling at the paramedics for allowing Ed such freedom while he was so injured. Ed was in the heat of giving his State Alchemist orders, when Alphonse began with a stern, "Nii-san, it's time to rest now. Nii-san, someone else is going to do this. Nii-san, I am not kidding."
Ed's strength died almost as fast as it arrived, and against Ed's will he was collapsing back into his stretcher. Ed ordered the scene be sectioned off with military tape, that the soldier's get a forensic team on site, and that Melander's body be taken into military custody and brought to Doctor Knox.
With the soldiers running yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter, and setting out orange cones to redirect traffic, Cindy approached Roy and sat down at his side. She looked exhausted, and stared out at the chaotic scene with unblinking glassy eyes swollen twice their size. She was shaking gently, and Roy understood as a civilian she had experienced a traumatic event, and now that things were safe, she was experiencing the aftermath.
Cindy turned to Roy, face expressionless, and in a tone built with nothing but kindness said, "I can ride in your ambulance with you," she paused, "if you'd like, sir." Roy took his gaze from Ed's stretcher where he was watching his lover aggressively flick the bottom of his intravenous line in an attempt to get the medicine in faster, and turned to Cindy. Nervously she added, "So you're…not alone."
Roy was sitting in the back of his open ambulance, slumped pathetically into the side. His exhaustion kept him from caring about how undignified he looked, slouched in his underwear, shirt still wet with blood, and a basic victim's blanket tossed about his shoulders. He was holding an oxygen mask to his face and he was sucking hungrily, when he realized he was seeing Cindy for the first time. She became more than a voice answering the other end of the phone, or the arm linked to Alphonse. She was a young girl, and while her boyfriend was in a fit of panic, and her boyfriend's brother was half dead, she was wandering a classified crash site trying to help, and had stopped at his side. The colonel was not dying, so no one was giving him the time of day. They had a classified body, a classified escape car, a classified crime scene, and one very adamant and confused State Alchemist making outrageous demands of their manpower and skill.
With something that felt to be a comforting warmth inside, Roy asked, "Cindy, who hired you?" He wanted to know who made it possible they should meet. Someone had allowed her to enter their building, someone had allowed her to take her post in his hall, and there were only so many colonels in his wing.
Cindy looked confused, and she hesitated before answering, "Y—you did sir."
Roy laughed gently into his oxygen mask . Of course. Of course he did. "Yes," he said, smiling weakly. "I should have known a good decision like that would have been my own." Roy looked back out toward Ed's stretcher, and Ed was now holding his own oxygen mask with both hands, and taking large calming breaths, while Alphonse spoke to the paramedics. Alphonse did not agree with Ed demanding they all stay on the site until it was well manned. Roy lifted his hand and pointed to Ed's ambulance. It was set behind Ed's stretcher, doors open as if ready to gather the boy inside. "I am riding with him," he said, pushing himself up slowly. His body felt stiff and hot, a combination that warned all of his senses he was in bad condition.
Roy approached Ed's stretcher slowly, and Ed began the tiny wiggle of one wanting to speak while too weak to do so. Roy waved at the paramedics. "Pack him up, we're leaving to the hospital." His voice still worked with strong authority, and they obeyed. Alphonse looked utterly relieved.
"Ro…" Ed croaked, pointing weakly toward the smashed car where the soldiers were taking photos.
"Quiet Ed," Roy said, before turning to the paramedics. "He's too heavily medicated to make medical decisions for himself, get the hospital on the line, and follow the protocol in his chart." He felt proud of himself for this order. He was learning the intimate details of Ed's life, and Ed's needs, and he was doing an okay job at it. In the future, he'd do a better job at it, and with time, and compromise, he felt promise.
The paramedics loaded Ed into the ambulance, and Alphonse followed, taking the seat at Ed's side. Ed lifted his hand slightly, reaching toward Roy, but Cindy went forward, climbed in next to Alphonse, and took Ed's hand in a tight reassuring squeeze that made Ed groan. She told him she thought he looked much better, and was going to be okay, but Ed closed his eyes fussing. He doubted very much he would be looking better when the hospital examined what he'd done to his healing wound.
Roy climbed up the back of the ambulance and took the last seat next to Cindy. Ed's second paramedic became startled with this, and glanced about the crowded ambulance before saying, "I am sorry, but there can't be so many people." He waved for them to exit, but no one moved. "Not all of you are going to be able to ride in this one," the paramedic said, becoming annoyed. "Some of you can ride in the second ambulance, we will arrive in the same place."
"Can't you make an exception?" Cindy asked, squeezing Ed's hand with alarm.
The paramedic shook his head, and Ed lifted a single metal finger and pointed at Roy, before rasping out a soft, "Do you…know who he is?" Ed asked, managing a tone of mocking condensation even now. "That's…the freaking…."
"This is State Certified Flame Alchemist Colonel Roy Mustang," Alphonse said, pointing to Roy's pathetic sweat-dried and blood-smeared self. "He said we all could ride like this. We have special permission, and top clearance."
The paramedic turned to Roy skeptically. Roy looked like a battered Central resident, an unidentifiable man, half-dressed, and in need of medical care. It would take more than a leap and a bound to make this sad sight a Colonel, and the paramedic seemed more than doubtful the patient greedily sucking oxygen in the back of this ambulance was one of the heroes of the Ishvalan War. Still, contradicting the real Flame Alchemist would be unwise, and when the paramedic hesitated Roy realized closing the deal would be up to him.
In a tone of flawless confidence Roy said, "I said they could ride." Then to humor himself, he added, "Top clearance," not sure what that was even supposed to be.
The paramedic was shocked, and the young man stood speechless. A moment of silence passed, and Roy waited, curious if the issue would be pressed or if anyone would seek verification, but after a short moment of staring in mental debate, the paramedic simply climbed up and awkwardly squeezed in at the foot of Ed's stretcher.
End. Curtain falls dear readers.
Will you…leave this chapter a review? Leave this story a review? I could go on and on about how much I would like to hear what you think. On and on, over all the specifics I'd like to focus on, but it's up to you, to find it in yourself to put something in the box below. To feel confident and empowered, that your opinion is worth writing, that in a way that is perhaps ridiculous, it matters very much to me to have you leave it, and be able to read it. Sort of, makes this all worth it, and that's insane when you consider the word count released, and that left in return.
So leave a review. This is not quite the end, but it is more or less the end.
The Epilogue will be up next Friday 11/29/13, I hope to see you there.
Miscellaneous Marketing:
(If you're starting to read this, STOP, go leave a review….then come back, lol). You should review while everything is fresh in your mind!
Book Jacket:
Just an FYI, I will continue to calendar forecast my upcoming activity, and will release what I will call a 'Book Jacket' onto "Foolish For You" Friday 12/06/13. It will do a number of small things, the biggest being to flesh out an outline of the next story, "The Big Bang Theory" which will officially go up January 2014, and give some details about the sneak peek I will release 12/20/13.
Looking For A Cover?
To all of you looking for things to read between this story and the next, or even this story and the epilogue (you gluttons!), allow me to be so pigheaded as to recommend my other stories hahaha (just not the 2008 ones, oh dear, they need help). If you have not read my story "The Silent Heart" I strongly encourage you to – and I know that sounds conceded as hell – but I can't tell you how many people messaged me to confess the story changed their entire perspective on several big FMA things. At least give it a two chapter go will you?
Misc. Rant:
What the hell are with all these new ffnet changes screwing things up!? Have you seen how the chapter toolbar totally cocks a story's beginning font to the side? At first I thought, oh dear, they'll notice that and fix it rather quickly. Yet here I am, still irritated and wondering why no one in control of the site has realized that just looks like amateur crap. If anyone knows that a fix is coming, please PM me and put me out of my misery with this. I can't take this formatting disaster.