Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist is not mine. I'm just trying to finish this damn story!

Chapter 31: The Saints Go Marching

Somehow, that nothing stood in their way made it worse.

Ed had expected to run into the Hunger. He had been certain of it. That was the way his luck went, wasn't it? If anything could go wrong, it would go wrong, in a way that was infinitely worse than he had imagined. Fate, God or whatever had had it in for him for years and never, ever let an opportunity to make his life miserable slide by. That was just a fact.

The tension was, therefore, killing him. Every so often, his auto-mail would creak and he would realise he had been squeezing his fist tight enough to strain the plates. A few minutes later he would be doing it again. And a few minutes after that. If something didn't happen soon, there would be little bits of metal ricocheting off the walls.

It was the silence, mainly. They were deep enough into the building that they could no longer hear the rain or the thunder. Now the only noise came from their footsteps, the shuffling, stuttering sound of a group of people trying to move about as quietly as possible. There was nothing else. Not a whisper. The floor wasn't moving any more, either. The drumbeat had stopped. There was only a dead, stifling calm.

The others were just as bad. Cain was sweating and kept adjusting his grip on the makeshift bomb he was carrying. The other Templar – the one whose name Ed still didn't know – was no better, constantly trying to see in all directions at once, making him resemble a red-haired owl. Daniel was slightly more collected but he twitched every time the auto-mail made a sound and glared daggers at the culprit. With a jolt, Ed remembered they'd left Luke sedated in the infirmary. He found he felt more guilty about that than he thought he should. Still, the man's hysteria would have been a liability. Lazarus was quiet and evidently terrified.

He had not expected Helen to cope with the situation as well as she was. This had nothing to do with her being a woman, of course. No one could live around Winry, Hawkeye, Ross and the rest of a surprisingly long list without coming to the conclusion that chauvinists were about as wrong as it was possible to be. She had just seemed too brittle, too easily spooked to have stayed so stoically calm. But she had. This was, Ed thought, mostly due to Edward, who had stuck to her side like glue. He, of course, hadn't stopped smiling since they'd started out. His pride at his achievement with the sealed walls radiated from his battered, bandaged frame, making him look taller.

Which would have annoyed the hell out of Ed if he had bothered to notice it, given that Edward already had a height advantage of a couple of inches.

They rounded another corner. The stairs down to the basement gaped before them. Ed stopped and frowned.
"Where've the bodies gone?"
"What d'yah mean?" Daniel demanded, "What bodies?"
"There were bodies. Between here and the infirmary, when we ran there earlier. I haven't seen them."
"Maybe he vanished them," Cain suggested, nervously indicating Edward, "Like the doors..."
"Nah." Ed pointed at the wall. "The reaction didn't get this far."
"Perhaps those shadows...came back for them," said Helen.
"Maybe..." Ed's frown became contemplative. "But why didn't they eat all of 'em to begin with? If they were going to, they'd have...unless..."
"Unless what?" snapped Daniel.
"Unless it's something to do with how they're getting through in the first place. There has to be some kinda...gap they're coming through. Maybe it's the array – the big one beneath us. Maybe they're...coming out of the lines. And maybe they can only get so far from them...to begin with, anyway."
"So...what?"
"So what you do if there was something holding you back? Like a...a rope tied round your middle. And every time you ran away, it tugged you back a bit."
Helen bit her lip.
"You would...try and pull it out of the wall...or whatever the other end was tied to."
"Yeah. And the only way to do that is to go back and try again. And again. Until it breaks..."

The alchemist grunted. He took a step towards the stairs.
"S'only an idea. But if it's right, we need to keep moving."
"And if yah're wrong," Daniel pointed out, "There could be thousands a' those things waiting for us. Or comin' up behind us."
Cain went white and threw a panicked look over his shoulder.
"Or that," Ed agreed and started downwards.

Faced with the choice of following the one member of their party who seemed to have a clue what to do or staying where they were to wait in the silence for the shadows to wake up again, they voted with their feet. Soon the half-lit tunnel was full of crunching footsteps and the sounds of people manoeuvring their dangerous burdens around the wreckage.

The big wooden door had been shut again. Ed walked up and down a couple of feet in front, examining every inch of it and the wall around it. The anteroom seemed impossibly tense, the stale air practically quivering. Like before a thunderstorm, only a hundred times more oppressive. It smelt of dust and ozone and dank earth. And still, nothing else moved or made a noise. At the very least, the shattered joists should have been shifting, the debris should have been settling. But they weren't. The sounds of seven people breathing filled the suddenly cramped space. The atmosphere was swiftly suffocating.

"What are we waiting for?" the unnamed Templar asked.
"Him ta be sure we ain't gonna die tha moment he opens that," Daniel retorted, "At least, that had better be tha reason..."
"It is," Ed growled.
He took a deep breath and placed his auto-mail hand against the door. Nothing happened. He moved the hand along and pushed. It swung easily inwards.

Golden light washed out through the gap, throwing their shadows sharply behind them.

Daniel hissed. Ed put his flesh hand over his eyes, squinting. The ring was still there, floating above the centre of the chamber. Everything below it was still not there. The gated openings were dark and empty. There was no sign of anything else, human or otherwise. He watched for a while, until he was satisfied that this was not going to change.

"Keep to the edges. Don't go near the reaction. Put the bombs around the walls. The ones that need mixing go closest to the doors. The ones that need fuses go as far in as the fuses 'll stretch. Ones we need to shoot go where you can shoot 'em." He plucked a couple of bottles from Cain's shaking hands. "Then we set it off and run. If this works, Benedict will get dragged back when his reaction stops and then he'll be in the middle of a collapsing room."
No one asked what would happen if it didn't.

They edged inside, single-file, splitting up to keep close to the walls. Ed went anti-clockwise, half an eye on the blazing halo. Its light remained constant, a steady and brilliant reminder of just how much power was flowing through Chambers' reaction. Without warning, his mind went back to a pair of lonely children in an empty house, plotting and scheming, convinced that alchemy could do anything, even turn back time. For so long, he had looked back on his younger self with anger and humiliation. How could he ever have been so naïve? But here he was, standing in front of proof that alchemy really could do anything – even turn the universe inside out. "We're the closest things to gods." That's what he'd boasted to Rose, all those years ago. He'd meant it too – believed it, just as strongly as he had come to believe that he had been utterly wrong. And yet now, he was faced with an alchemist – an insane, amateur alchemist – who was making himself into something that might as well have been a god.

Was something following him around, Ed wondered, waiting for him to start believing something so that it could prove him wrong? That would explain a lot...

He snorted softly. He couldn't remember what he was supposed to do with the bottles he was carrying, so he just put them next to one of the openings. They would go up with everything else. If everything went to plan. Which was obviously going to be the complicated part. Straightening, he looked around. Helen and Cain were checking over the fuses to their chemicals, each making sure the other's was fixed properly. Lazarus and the other Templar were doing the same on the opposite side of the room. Edward was watching them curiously. He caught Ed looking and smiled. Ed ignored him and walked around to see where Daniel had got to.

The Havoc imitation was still standing by the door. No. Not standing. He was backing slowly through it. When he saw Ed coming, he stopped and smiled a sickly smile. Ed opened his mouth to ask what the bastard thought he was doing. Too late, he figured out that was the wrong move.

Daniel drew his pistol as fast as Hawkeye and fired three times, straight at the bottles he had put near Helen's. The bottles that Ed knew for certain were ones he had told them to shoot to set off.

There was no time to act. Even if he had been closer, he probably couldn't have done anything to deflect the bullets. He threw his arm across his face, automatically bracing himself against impending pain as he swore hard enough to turn the air blue.

Nothing happened. He lowered his arm. Daniel was looking at his gun in disbelief.
"Laws in flux!" Edward shouted victoriously.
"Frickin' double-crossin' bastard!" Ed howled.
They both ran at the Templar, Edward following Ed's lead. Wide-eyed, Daniel aimed his useless weapon at them, hands obviously unsteady. They slammed to a stop, scarcely a foot away. His confidence returned for the few brief moments before it dawned on him that Ed was staring past him.
"What the hell?"
He whirled.

The fat English doctor stood immediately behind him, grinning grotesquely.

Daniel's yell cut off almost at once. He collapsed backwards, his chest a gaping mess. Graves stepped over him. The grin did not falter. Now that he was fully in the alchemic glare, the lines of black gunk criss-crossing his body were clear for all to see. They had completely covered his clothes in some places, wrapping around his limbs and his torso before climbing up to disappear into his hair. Several weaved together at his neck, merging into a crude, ugly half-face, one whose mouth was gaping in hysterical mirth.

Ed swallowed, forcing bile back down. He knew what he was seeing, although he still couldn't quite believe that it was possible. It had to be like a homunculus, he reasoned, only with the Gate Child on the outside of the body, not infused into it. That was how Eckhart had still been able to think, in her twisted, violent way, after going through the Gate. She had travelled through so quickly that the Hunger that had managed to latch onto her had been dragged out into the other world. Perhaps plastering itself over her had been the only way it had been able to survive.

Then he looked closer and realised what he was seeing clashed with what he remembered. The bile threatened to come back up. Whatever had happened to Graves, it was not identical to what had happened to Eckhart, not by a long way. Her eyes had not been rolled back in her head. Her face had not been immobile. Her steps had not been halting and mechanical.

She had survived having her body infested.

Helen gave a strangled cry. The thing animating Graves' corpse turned it towards her. Fire suddenly bloomed against its shoulder, stopping it in its tracks. The nameless Templar fumbled with a lighter, reaching for another bottle to throw. Lazarus cowered behind him, ashen and terrified. The Gate Child's mock-face shifted, its mouth turning downwards. Graves' arms jerked up. Ed yelled a warning. The Templar hesitated. Black spears erupted from Graves' hands.

Ed and Edward clapped simultaneously. Energy tore up the floor and catapulted Graves out of the reaction chamber. His form disintegrated mid-flight, ripped to shreds by the violence of the alchemy. Ed spared a glance for the two men who had been transfixed by the spears. There was no help he could give them. Cain yelled a warning.

Oily blackness burst from Graves' remains, the oh-so familiar coiling mass of hands and eyes. It reared up, filling the doorway, overflowing, impossibly fast, coming straight for them. Edward was directly in its path. All he could see was boiling shadow flecked with violet. His eyes bulged and his mouth hung limply open as images came crashing across his mind, elusive and familiar at the same time.

The Hunger halted. And recoiled, its mad, jumbled gaze fixed upon the homunculus man, utterly confused.

That confusion saved Edward's life.

Ed heaved him away, practically throwing him towards where Helen was screaming his name. The Hunger's confusion abated and it rushed at the alchemist eagerly. He flung himself out of its path, clapping again. The electric-blue fire sliced through the bodiless creature, but for all the difference it made, he might as well have done nothing. It poured over and around, indifferent to being cut in two, intent on seizing its prey and dragging him into empty oblivion.

And if not for the burst of gold that consumed it and eradicated it from any kind of existence, it would have done precisely that.

The after-image of the blast faded. The room went utterly still for exactly as long as it took Ed to get his ragged breathing under control. He knew without a doubt what he would see when he got up but did so anyway. After all, he figured it was probably the only thing left that he could do. He turned round.

Benedict Chambers regarded him impassively from beneath the golden halo.

A/N: ................................what? You were expecting me to give up on the cliffhangers now? Never!