Fearless

Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure this is, like, the seventy-something-th disclaimer I've had to come up with, and you know what? IT DOESN'T GET ANY EASIER. :P

A/N: Back again, back again...! (Even if the chapter is shorter. Hey, it was necessary.) And guess what! ? I have a Fullmetal Alchemist plot bunny! :D If you're a fan then check out that poll that will be up on my page within the next hour or so if you would be so kind :)

And so our heroes are hobbling down the street, partially conscious and in pain! ... Er...great? Don't worry! :) It's gonna be okayyy...once Zack calms down o_O I swear my little Zacky muse just took over the keyboard and went with it! I haven't got too much to say WAIT SCRATCH THAT. I GOT A DEVIANTART.

So find me at http:/ infamous run4life .deviantart .com ! Minus the spaces, of course! :P I haven't gotten any of my fanart for this story up yet...but that's somewhere in the near future! :D

And now I shall briefly reply to people (I am so inconsistent with these, it's terrible -.-').

YoungReckless: Oh yes it can be quite the bitch. I shall bitch it back O_O Why thank you! I know, don't you just hafta love the poor guy? 8'( Oh I know you were going to hunt me down o_o' it was quite the threat-spiel you gave there xD

Sarah: MUAHAHAHAAAAA yeeees he did *cackle* creepy sonofa...yeah. Haha, thanks, here ya go! ^^

Shatter: Very nice summation. Thanks :) we're trying. Hahaha, yeah, it was kind of insane, wasn't it? xD aw thanks, it was awesome writing it all out. Ahaaa, you gots it ^^ that was indeed Four, dead. Well, technically he's not the last, 'cause they didn't absolutely kill all the other guys back there. A few were just unconscious but they were all indeed severely wounded so they'll be out of commission for a little bit...again, assuming they're found by their boss's people and everything. (Speaking of, any guesses as to the identity of the head honcho?) Technically there are more of them back at the lab, but they're still growing and everything so they aren't in any condition to be used as weapons yet. (Sickos...gah, I hate the evil people 0_O) Thanks, and here be the chapter! :)

Chostani-san: Mmmmmmm-hm, exactamente. Not good at all 8( we'll just have to see how it works out... Why thanks ^^ and ta-dah!

Chapter 52: A Veritable Emergency

1629 hours, Office of SOLDIER First Class Angeal Hewley, Shinra Headquarters

Angeal raised an eyebrow at his PHS. Eleven missed calls from Zack, all appearing at once, like the piece of technology had been backed up and was trying to compensate. The SOLDIER sighed.

He wandered into a dead spot again, didn't he? He reached for the call button as a twelfth call came in, finally being received properly. "Yes, this is Angeal." I swear, if this is his idea of a prank—

"Damn it! Voicemail agai—wait—FINALLY YOU PICK UP! ? WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A GODDAMN EMERGENCY HERE! NO SIGNAL IN THE ENTIRE AREA AND WE'VE GOT TWO PEOPLE HALF DEAD AND ANOTHER SERIOUSLY PISSED OFF—!"

Angeal gritted his teeth and held the cursed phone at arm's length. "Zachary, pardon my Wutaian but would you calm the hell down? !"

"YOU WANT ME TO—huh?" Suddenly Zack's voice moved away and Angeal wasn't sure whether to take that as a cease-fire or to not risk it.

He was tempted to go with the latter option until he heard the voice of a female—a very cross female—barking at Zack from the other end of the line. Diana? Goddess above, what have these two gotten themselves into now?

He didn't have to wait long for his answer.

"Okay. Okay. Point taken. Angeal?" Zack came back on.

"Yes, Zack," the older man replied patiently.

"We need emergency transport right now. We're in the Sector Six slums—me and Diana—with an ally that's critically injured, and we aren't doing too great ourselves," he summarized curtly.

Wait…two people half dead…that means… It was Angeal's turn to yell. "WHAT? !" But...wait a second. Once he got over the initial decibel level shock, he realized that Zack's voice was wavering, even while he was being snippity. Zack being short with anyone was rare, not to mention that he sounded uncharacteristically shaky. Like he was seriously overtired...or injured. Really injured. And he understood exactly what that meant. Maybe not the circumstances, but the concept at the very least. "Okay. Alright. Get to the nearest main street, I'll track your PHS signal and I'll get you a vehicle—" Then he thought about it and asked the question that would confirm his suspicions. "Zack? Do you need a medical vehicle?"

There was a short pause. "...Yeah. That'd be good." And he hung up.

Angeal stared at his PHS for about a second and a half as he realized just how serious things were. Then he grabbed his desk phone and scared the shit out of first the operator, then the secretary at the medical wing, then the secretary at emergency transport, and then an ambulance driver. "I'm sending it through right now!" He typed away furiously at his computer. "I want that signal traced on the double, and when we get there ask no questions! Is that clear?"

"Sir! Excuse me sir, but you said we?"

"Well of course I'm coming! Give me less than a minute! Go!" He executed the final command on the keyboard, punched the enter code, and tore out of his apartment, taking the hall and stairs at a dead sprint.


"Zack—Zack! Zack, I think he's starting to fibrillate."

"Shit." Zack crouched down, wincing, next to his two companions at the side of one of the main streets in the slum.

The passerby hardly spared the trio a second glance. It went to show how things worked around here. Survival of the fittest, and don't ask questions. Once or twice an especially concerned pedestrian would study the group a little more closely than usual—but then they would see just how much blood there was on the young man and woman whose eyes glowed; never mind the condition that their companion was in. And then they would hurriedly walk in the opposite direction. No emergency phone calls made. No offers for help.

Five's eyes were fluttering and they could only see the whites. Diana was trying valiantly to talk him into staying conscious. She looked up at Zack. Her eyes were deep, dark green streaked with golden yellow and brown. "How long did Angeal say?"

"He didn't." Thank Gaia she keeps her head in a crisis. Zack reached tentatively for Diana's hand; the one hanging limp that wasn't feeling Five's pulse and wiping sweat and blood from his brow. He didn't expect her to gasp in pain and recoil, still only putting her weight on one leg. So he attempted to stare her down. "You didn't mention your arm."

"I'm pretty sure it's just a dislocation. I am not half dead and don't you lecture me; I know for a fact your wrist is broken and you're limping," she fired back. "Gods, what if we can't get to an AED? If we can't defibrillate the heartbeat and it doesn't stabilize he could flatline, and you're still bleeding like—like—a regular human!" she spluttered, unable to come up with anything better.

"No, I'm pretty sure ambulances come equipped with those," Zack affirmed grimly. Right on cue, they heard a siren. Rising and supporting their consciousness-fighting friend between their horrendously abused bodies, they tracked the sound for longer than a normal person could. It made waiting all the worse, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off, which meant the pain was coming in increasing waves.


When Angeal saw the trio on the curb, he was sure his own heart had a little hiccup.

"Even from here I can tell…" he said to the driver, who was at least an EMT and possibly a paramedic. "I've never in the four years since he made SOLDIER seen Zachary this badly beaten up. And never mind that it takes a lot to do that to Diana Loveless as well."

The SOLDIER was thankful that one probably had to have recklessness to the point of insanity for the sake of other people listed as a medical condition in order to become an EMT. They had arrived on the scene in a matter of mere minutes, and in seconds two men had flung open the rear doors and jumped out the back of the truck before it even screeched to a full stop.

"If you'll give me a moment, I have to help. We'll be out of here in seconds, sir," promised the driver.

"Good man. Permission to stay in the back of the vehicle with the injured?" Angeal inquired.

"Sir?" The man was clearly confused. It wasn't every day a First Class SOLDIER asked one for clearance to do something.

Angeal looked dead at his—in principle—subordinate. "These people are in your hands and they could very well owe you their lives by the time this is all over. This is your show right now and I am not going to compromise it by not being conducive to the operation."

The man swallowed hard but didn't lose focus, setting the vehicle in park and jumping out as Angeal did. "Permission granted, sir. I feel it's appropriate." He also felt obliged to salute Fair briefly and nod to the young woman with him before taking in the situation that confronted him at the back of the van.

"I'm no expert," the woman was saying, "but he's in the worst shape out of us—Angeal!"

"What, you didn't think I'd show?" the big SOLDIER scoffed, helping a disgruntled Zack into the ambulance. The two paramedics had already gotten Zack and Diana's unknown comrade onto the table in the back of the ambulance, and his breathing was hard and shallow.

"See, this is what I like about the military," Diana coughed. She absently realized that her limbs and extremities were actually shaking uncontrollably with stress and exhaustion as she climbed into the ambulance with a paramedic. "Efficient, and no superfluous questions asked til later. The operative word being 'later,' but minor details."

Seven is not an optimal number of people to have crammed into the back of a rapid transport emergency vehicle when it is hurtling through the streets of the slums of a city and has to eventually climb up to an entire second level of said city and make it all the way into the medical wing of a headquarters complex.

"Watch out for these wires and do not touch anything that's touching him, just to be safe," the paramedic instructed the single woman in the group. "We might have to use the paddles and we'll mostly likely be using some materia. This is critical."

"Good deal. What do you think? Is he gonna be okay?" she asked him anxiously, looking up from her seat in a chair. She had been instructed to remove extra clothing items, so her belt and a package that seemed to be full of dangerous-looking, pointy things were on a seat next to her. Currently, she was attempting to extract herself from the shreds of an outer shirt, deliberately not using several body parts.

She was obviously tough, though, and by the looks of things, battle-hardened to boot. The man wondered just who she was, but his priority was taking care of her injuries. "I think he'll be just fine when all's said and done, but he's in pretty serious condition. I have to focus on you, though, and since you're conscious can you tell me what hurts? I want everything, even the stuff that doesn't seem so important."

At this the woman appeared to zone out a little, like she was focusing acutely on something. "It can be hard to tell sometimes… Okay: left shoulder; left foot; ribs, especially the right side; head; spine at the neck; left shin; right hip; back and side. And it feels like a Behemoth's sitting on my nose—Zack!" she suddenly yelped, automatically jerking to try to get up and run to him. He had just slumped over, unconscious, and one of the other paramedics was getting an IV started in his arm and cutting his shirt off.

Diana stared openly at the three deep scores in Zack's stomach that were trying desperately to heal themselves via Zack's regenerative systems, but the bleeding was too profuse and he was moving too much for it to be effective. There was blood absolutely everywhere, soaking his shirt and even dripping onto the floor, and Diana couldn't believe she hadn't noticed so earlier. But she had been barely lucid herself and had just been trying to get them all to safety alive.

"You stubborn idiot," she whispered, shaking her head at how Zack had managed to pull off what he had while so severely injured. You were half dead too, and all you could focus on was that we were in danger and that you were ticked off about it? Damn fool…

The paramedic was well-trained—the best—efficient, and professional, but he couldn't help but blurt out, "What did the three of you get into? A monster nest or something?"

The woman gave a bark of a laugh and winced. "Yeah, right. Metaphorically, sure; but literally, well, quite frankly that would've been welcome compared to this."

He shook himself. "All right, well, miss, if you could just stand up for me for a moment, don't use that left leg and I want to make sure nothing looks out of alignment except for that shoulder; that's definitely a dislocation." Taking one of her hands to steady her, he placed a precautionary hand on her back. "I'll be wrapping that foot up real tight for you, same with your ribs because they're probably broken…"

It took him a second to realize how warm, wet, and sticky his hand had suddenly become. "Gods!" he exclaimed, leaning around the other side of her to get a proper look at the area somewhere between her right side and her back. There were two slash marks and what looked like a trail of flesh carved out…and a lot of blood.

The paramedic had assumed up to this point that she was just cut and bruised; a broken nose, some broken ribs, a sprain or two…but she shouldn't even be conscious by this point with this much blood pumping out of her. It was no wonder Fair had passed out seconds ago, and apparently she should have too. He assumed the two patients were closely connected, and while he wasn't quite sure about the man who seemed to be the most severely wounded, he bet that the man was a comrade, if not a friend. There was something nagging at part of his brain, though: the observation that his patient's knuckles, of all things, were all skinned, bruised, and bloodied. That, put together with the bag of pointy objects, triggered a connection that should have been obvious to him from the start. Holy Goddess, she's the fighter that hangs out with the SOLDIERs all the time. Loveless; of course! Her twin is a Third and friends with Fair… And then there's that bag full of public safety violations just waiting to happen… He suddenly realized what he had been missing the whole time. Dear Gaia, were they in a large-scale fight that got them all in this condition?

"I didn't miss that, did I?" Diana Loveless was asking apologetically, swaying slightly; but that might have been because of the erratic movements of the vehicle. "I did say back and side? Yeah, one of them shot me, I think…"

His anxious reply was, "You're lucky you're still conscious, unlike these two. I'm starting an IV for you right away. You can't go through that much blood loss and not have—"

"Oh, but I for…forgot to say—it's kinda important." The woman cut him off and looked at him as steadily as she could. "It's alright, 'cause I - I regenerate like a SOLDIER…"

And with that, she proceeded to get tunnel vision and was just unable to fight it, or want to, anymore.

1652 hours, Medical Wing, Shinra HQ

In one of the offices, a doctor was listening to the daily police reports on the radio just before the five o'clock hour started up. Besides a man calling the emergency line on the basis that his cat had disappeared (the poor feline was later found sleeping under a bed) and yet another report on the ongoing Wutai War, there was a case about a man not having disappeared, but rather appeared.

He was found dead on the doorstep of an apartment building (and that was a loose term) on the Sector Six slums. A woman living with her husband in the first-story space had heard a knock at the door and gone a moment later to answer it, only to find a man seemingly unconscious and unresponsive. No one was in sight, even when her husband went calling up and down the street.

The man had no identification on him; no wallet, no personal belongings except for an unusually extensive array of concealed weaponry. Except, however, for a pair of dog tags that hung on a chain around his neck. One had a series of numbers and letters on it that looked like a code, but it was unintelligible.

The other had the numeral IV inscribed on it:

The number four.

The other witnesses in the neighborhood had, incidentally, been too afraid to mention the strange people and events they had seen in the past hour or two. First a dozen men clad in black and sporting weapons most people had never even seen in person; then the two seemingly innocent young people that had been attacked and kidnapped; and never mind the loud noises and minor explosions that preceded those same two people making their way back the way they came, bearing an unconscious man with them.

What did they care? It wasn't like they'd be arrested for perjury or something. Odds were, the police wouldn't care about an incident in the slums very much. And it wasn't like those people could have been important or anything. What was a gang mix-up to them? No, the stranger it looked, the quieter the slum-dwellers remained.

No one else believed the little girl that claimed that the man and woman had glowing eyes like SOLDIERs, anyway. Really, what were the odds of that?

A/N:
run4life: Well! Now that we're all safely unconscious and in the care of Angeal and a medical team, I'll just wander off and -
Five: *revives momentarily* Leave this hanging for more than a week and a half and I'll personally - *passes out*
run: *sighs* Well, alright, I suppose I can actually get back to regularly updating. Though I do have the need to make obscene amounts of peppermint bark this weekend, not to mention to Christmas tree hunting.
Yuffie: *runs by shrieking* I WANT SOME! And I demand more screen time!
run: Alright, alright, but only if you beat my scanner into cooperation so I can scan some art! *waves* Well, 'bye all, I'm off to have a rant session with my wonderful friend xD Review please, and I shall see you all again soon, never fear! :)