Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist is not mine. I'm just three chapters from the end!
A/N: Due to a slight mix up - most likely the carnivorous nature of MSN - Dailenna's betaed version of this went astray. Updates are in progress!
Chapter 32: Breaking the Circle
Helen wrapped her arms around Edward and hugged him tight. It was pure reflex, an impulse to somehow do the impossible and protect him from things she could not understand and could scarcely imagine. He shivered once and moaned.
Mr Chambers had parted the emptiness in the middle of the room as easily as one might part a pair of curtains. His hands were clasped behind his back and his suit was as pristine as it had always been.
"Mr Elric," he said, voice empty of inflection, "Are you attempting to attract my attention?"
Without waiting for a reply, he looked from one bomb to the next, glasses shining in the light.
Each one evaporated, bottle and all just bubbling away.
"Mother of God," Cain whispered.
His gun dropped from his fingers, clattering on the bare stone. No one paid him any attention. Ed looked ill. He managed not to sound it though.
"Great. Now try that on yourself."
"Your belligerence means nothing. You are insignificant now, a component that no longer has a function."
With a painful-sounding smack, Ed's hands met. His auto-mail melted and reformed, the whole forearm transmuted into a single blade. Defiantly, he went into a fighting stance, feet planted apart, arms held ready, eyes narrowed. Chambers did not visibly react.
"As you are well aware, any physical assault against me will fail."
"That so?" The young man's lips peeled back. "Wanna bet that's gonna stop me?"
"It will not. You are foolish enough to believe that stubbornness is a virtue. I am going to stop you."
With that, Chambers flexed the fingers of his left hand.
Ed screamed, his spine curving backwards, his arms straining in their sockets. In agony, he was pulled from the floor and left to hang suspended, spread-eagle, in thin air. He screamed again. Chambers' head tilted slightly to one side.
"Mr Elric, please understand that the only reason you remain alive is that I do not wish to risk the disruption of an incorrectly polarised 'soul' entering this side of the Gate before I have completed the task of rebuilding it. It is far safer for me to exert a fraction of my present power on the reactions keeping you in your present state."
The tortured boy choked an obscenity, clenching his jaw against the pain.
Edward abruptly twisted out of Helen's grip. He dashed out to put himself between his counterpart and his former master. Glaring, he clapped once. Lightning sprang from his feet, playing out over broken stone slabs. The ruined floor heaved itself up into a tidal wave, rushing towards Chambers in a great, molten arc.
He did not so much as blink. The wave crumbled, becoming inanimate rock once more. Ed plummeted with it, luckily stunned with pain so that his bones did not snap when he hit the ground. Edward screeched as he was scooped up in his place and almost casually crushed against the wall above the door.
Helen started forward, driven by an impulse that overrode any desire to survive. Her toe caught on something. She looked down to find Cain's discarded gun at her feet.
The world seemed to stop.
When she had first met Edward March, he had been a fifteen year old, full of an exuberant intelligence that bordered on energetic mania. He was kind, brilliant and away from home for the first time. She had been ten years older, an unmarried nurse working at one of the London hospitals. Edward and his sponsor, Professor Van Hohenheim had come to stay at Mrs McKinley's boarding house, in the rooms below hers. They had first started talking over the evening meal and from then on, she had seen Edward almost every day. She had wondered if the Professor had not been related to him. They looked a great deal like one another. But, no, he was from somewhere on the continent – which explained his accent – whilst Edward was from Wiltshire. They were both part of the Donovan Organisation, a teacher and pupil in the art of chemistry.
Despite amused comments from her colleagues about 'her young man', there was nothing untoward in her relationship with the handsome, vibrant student. He was an only child, suffering from home-sickness and intimidated by the dense city streets. She was the second oldest and only girl in a set of five children and still felt pangs from not having her family around her. Despite their differing temperaments, they very much enjoyed each other's company and together staved off loneliness. They had played chess (which she rarely won) and card games (which she usually did). They had walked around the parks when the weather had been fine. They had visited the museums when it was not. Mostly though, they had simply sat and talked.
The conversation had inevitably and often been about the war but Edward had always been ready to enthuse about his work, dazzling her with rapid-fire scientific terminology before slowing down and explaining what he was actually talking about. She always laughed when he got halfway through a description and the penny dropped that he had left her behind five minutes ago. He would go bright red and sheepishly ask where he had lost her.
He was not perfect. No one was. Not being able to understand something would make him irritable and short tempered. Sometimes, he was snappish with people without really meaning to and he would gobble his food down as though he did not have the time to waste on such necessities. And he could bury himself in books so deeply that he missed what was going on around him. But he was no worse in those regards than any other boy trying to work out how to grow up and she had come to care for him a great deal.
The air raid had cut their friendship cruelly short. The Professor had been the one who told her, breaking the news with extraordinary gentleness. There had been tears in his eyes. She had not seen him again after that. She wished she had, so that she could have told him of the miracle, the misstep of fate that had returned Edward to her.
For so long she had tended him as the impossible happened and he got better. Each day, she would swear to herself that they would walk along the Thames again, even if it took half a lifetime. Graves' ghoulish ambitions to be heralded as some sort of genius healer could not have meant less to her. All that mattered, all that had ever mattered, was seeing him standing and smiling, proudly showing off his latest achievement.
And, of course, now she had seen that. Not as she had imagined and she supposed they would never walk by the river after all, but that was not the point. The point was that he was alive and whole.
And she discovered that she was willing to do anything to stop that being taken away from him.
She knelt and picked the gun up. It was heavy and ugly. She raised it, taking aim, drawing on memories of her older brother's light-hearted attempts to teach her how to shoot. Chambers had his back to her, his attention on Edward. She did not hesitate. Alan would have thought it terribly bad form to attack a man when his back was turned. She did not care.
The gun kicked. Once. Twice. Three, four times. Edward fell from the wall and sprawled next to Ed. Helen felt her arms drop to her sides.
Chambers turned around. He plucked the bullets from where they had stopped, a hand's breadth from his skin. He looked at her.
She saw herself reflected in his spectacles. She was smiling.
Ed's eyes did not want to open but he made them. Every cell in his body was shouting in outrage. He shoved their complaints aside and fought for focus.
Edward lay to his right, a jumble of thin limbs and bandages. Chambers had turned away, releasing them both. He was holding something. Cain was flat against the wall. Helen stood in front of him, smiling, a gun held limply in her hand.
Ed tried to call out to her, to tell her to run. Chambers made a dismissive flicking motion.
The bullets caught her in her stomach and threw her into Cain's arms. They both went down.
Pure, undiluted hatred took the place of Ed's blood. It hit him with a shock of adrenaline that rushed down into his legs and made them move. He was mid-jump before it registered with his brain that Edward up as well, going for Chambers, howling like a wounded animal, striking the man at chest height, clawing at his face. With passionless ease, the attack was turned aside, the ragged homunculus man knocked senseless by a rush of force. Furiously, Ed swung the auto-mail blade, throwing all his strength behind it.
It connected with the golden halo.
The explosion shook the room.
When his vision cleared, Ed was back on the floor and his arm was gone. The socket had been cracked open and all that was left of the rest was a few blacked chunks of shoulder. If that weren't bad enough, someone was shoving a blunt stick into the back of his eyes while an army marched up and down inside his chest and someone else attacked his face with a blowtorch. Worse still, the halo was completely unaffected.
"You knew that that would not work," Chambers told him calmly, "If you cannot appreciate the impotency of your position, I fear I shall have to incapacitate you via far cruder means."
He pointed.
Ed's leg – the pioneering example of Rockbell auto-mail that had survived battle, dismantlement, monsters and Elrics without failing, the testament to Winry's skill and the technology of another world – went to pieces. The plates and tubes, the joints and motors, the nuts and bolts, they all came apart in a clinking cascade, leaving him surrounded by a sea of components. His balance shifted, he lurched and had to put his remaining arm out to brace himself.
Chambers folded his hands behind his back.
"I have work to complete. That the Hunger was able to enter this room was distraction enough. I cannot afford to allow you to hold my attention away from the Gate any longer."
He made to close the nothingness around him. Ed wanted to shout. He wanted to do something, anything to not just sit there and dumbly watch Chambers get away.
He couldn't make a noise and he couldn't tear his eyes away.
Damnit, this wasn't fair!
Benedict Chambers prepared to return to the task of remaking creation. He could not describe the experience of reconstructing the Gate, of taking one Truth and replacing it with another. It was not that he was unimaginative, for he was not, but that there were no words in any language in either world to describe this form of alchemy. It was on a level so truly fundamental that any attempt to encapsulate it in the feeble grunting of a select group of higher primates was doomed to absolute failure. Suffice to say that if he had been a man who believed in God, he would have been of the opinion that the act was worthy of the Almighty.
Mr Chambers did not believe in God. He believed in reality and that everything that one could find within its bounds could be manipulated. He believed that alchemy had for too long been squandered by people who were complacent and ignorant and who had no real notion of how powerful a resource they had at their disposal. He believed that he would be able to change all things about until they were set in a way that would be beneficial to his world. He believed that to attempt this feat was the logical and correct response to the circumstances. Above all, he believed he was right.
He began to take the step back to the place in between, to resume the transmutation briefly interrupted by the presence of alien bodies in the reaction system. The Hunger was a nuisance, an unavoidable contaminant that had to be flushed out. Venting the stronger parts into the surrounding universes had been a successful tactic but one that risked them interfering with the main array. Fortunately, he had been able to counter that interference without –
Something tickled the edge of his heightened senses. Something distinctly familiar and immensely unwelcome.
He turned back to the chamber, the faintest of frowns playing over his brow. The source of the troubling sensation was immediately identifiable. One of the gated tunnels, behind the fallen Edward Elric, was slowly flooding with pure white light. As he observed it grow, it encompassed the bars. They melted clean away.
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Mr Chambers drew his power a little closer, knitting it into new shapes, ready to let a little of it loose, to rework the matter and forces around him as he saw fit. Ready to defend himself and his efforts from those who would see them undone.
Two shapes walked out of the light. They drew it with them and it settled around their shoulders like a cloak. One held a staff. One held nothing. They looked at him and he looked at them.
He recognised who they appeared to be, recognised Alphonse Elric and the gypsy clairvoyant who had no name but Noah.
However, he also recognised who they had become, who now looked out through their eyes.
The Gatekeepers had come to do battle with him.
A/N: Sooooo........anyone see that coming? Or care to guess what happens next.......?