Author's Note: Kind of a weird one this time. When I first looked at the prompt, I thought to myself, "Oh great. Another one I'm going to have to make all light-hearted and humorous." So I desperately sought for a way to make it angsty instead, to make it easier for me and also less predictable in general. As always happens when I put myself in situations like this...it became rather unexpected by the end. Half-asleep brainstorming, looked at again the next morning, solidified into this. It's another chapter that's probably a bit too melodramatic, but I'd just ask that you think of how you would feel if a very close friend went through an experience like this.

Timeline: Midseries

Theme 54: Quick mouth

Roy glared at his captors through the swollen slit of a black eye. The clothes they wore were nondescript, but their thick accents plainly identified them as Drachmans. "Ve-ar is de Furar's sekret bayse?" the man with the bushy black beard asked again, shaking Roy with each malformed Amestrian word.

But Roy just spat a mouthful of blood in his face. These Drachmans certainly underestimated a colonel of the Amestrian army if they thought he would break this easily. Should have realized he wasn't going to crack after a mere day of interrogation when he had held his ground for a good hour after the rest of his platoon fell.

The bearded man threw Roy to the ground in disgust, wiping the blood off his face with the back of his hand and yelling in Drachman at his henchmen. Roy collapsed with a jangling of chains and closed his eyes, grateful for this momentary reprieve. He hadn't reached his breaking point – wasn't even close – but the constant interrogation was exhausting nevertheless. And he couldn't even pretend that he had no idea where the secret base was, because then he would be dead in five seconds flat. So he just had to endure until someone came to rescue him. He wouldn't let himself wonder what would happen if no one did.

But oh, it would be hard to suppress his anger once he reported back to the Fuhrer. Surely they had spies enough to learn that Creta's unexpected military prowess was due to a secret alliance with Drachma. Surely they could have briefed him on the situation before he got everyone killed simply because they weren't expecting Drachman repeating rifles and cannons.

"May bee now you talk." The bearded man yanked him upright again, keeping a painful grip on Roy's hair.

Roy's eyes were still squeezed shut with pain and defiance when he heard a voice that turned all his insides to ice. "I'M NOT A TINY FLEA-BITTEN GRAIN OF SAND, YOU GIANT ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN! IF I HAD MY AUTOMAIL, YOU WOULDN'T BE LAUGHING SO HARD, YOU BARBARIANS! AND WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN CRETA ANYW- Mustang?"

Roy slowly opened his left eye, though his right eye was now refusing to obey him. Two of the Drachmans dragged in a familiar form, one burly man holding his legs and the other gripping his one arm. Where the automail had gone was anybody's guess, but it was obvious from the blood staining Edward's clothes and the injuries the Drachmans had sustained that he hadn't gone down easily.

"What are you doing here, Full Metal?" he asked blankly. The boy was supposed to be protecting the Fuhrer with Hawkeye and the others. He was the only one who should be in danger!

"Coming to save you, of course," Edward snapped from across the room. His captors took advantage of his relative calm to force him into chains just like Roy's.

"By yourself?" Roy demanded incredulously. "You should've stayed back where it was safe – I can handle this!"

"Geez, you're welcome." Edward didn't seem to realize what a dangerous position he was in. The boy had never been tortured. True, he'd been in plenty of fights and had his share of serious injuries...but he'd never been seriously tortured. He wouldn't be able to withstand it. Roy wasn't sure he'd last himself.

"How very amuse," the bearded man said with a sinister smile. "But now to bizness."

Roy strained against the grip the man still had on his hair. "No – let him go! The boy doesn't know anything!"

"I tink we see for ourself." He clicked his fingers, and one of the men who had dragged Edward in began to beat him up and interrogate him in broken Amestrian, just as they had done to Roy. With every pained sound that escaped the boy's mouth, Roy flinched a little – which only made the sadistic man with the beard smile wider than ever.

But Edward didn't budge. He began to look like Roy's mirror image, but he didn't give anything away, didn't tell them anything at all. He was made of pretty stern stuff for a fifteen-year-old...but if Roy's hunch was correct, this was only the beginning.

It was.

"May bee my kuveshon not getting troo?" the bearded leader finally said as Edward groaned and tried to curl in on himself. "May bee you not understanding my vords? May bee I ree-mind you vat I vant."

He administered the torture himself. He called it refined, claimed he didn't like the way his subordinates treated prisoners. Starting with the index finger on Roy's right hand, the leader took a switchblade and began wedging it under the fingernail. Roy couldn't help it. He screamed, tears oozing from between the eyes he kept firmly shut. Somehow, he thought that if he actually saw what was happening, he would break. But not a word passed his lips.

Finally the bearded man gave up. Roy sat limply against the wall, breathing hard and trying to ignore how his right hand throbbed. The man had worked at each finger, but even though he screamed and tried to pull away, he hadn't let anything of importance slip. Still, he refused to look at his hand now. He was already whimpering enough as it was. All through this torture, between his own screams and the Drachman's insistent questions, Roy had been dimly aware of Edward yelling obscenities at them all, calling them cowards for resorting to such barbaric means of finding information.

"I teenk little boy vants to talk, yes?" The leader calmly wiped his switchblade clean and turned to Edward, whose expression of fury settled into one of apprehension.

Fear shot through Roy's heart again. "No – don't – please!"

The leader turned back with a genial smile. "Sekret bayse?"

Roy clenched his teeth and glared into those tiny, dark, calculating eyes and shook his head. The leader shrugged his shoulders and slowly advanced on the boy. Edward pressed up hard against the wall, closing his one remaining hand into a tight fist. His eyes slid down from the approaching Drachman and connected with Roy's across the room. They were silently begging him, as if to say, What do I do?

His breath caught in his chest as the Drachman towered over the tiny, vulnerable boy. Pain and fear throbbed all around him, till he could hardly think at all. "Don't tell them anything!" he called desperately. "Don't you dare say a word, do you hear me? They'll kill-"

A boot to the jaw shut him up, and for a few moments he could only concentrate on this new source of pain. The Drachman leader was yelling orders at his men, one of whom left momentarily and returned with a large basin filled to the brim with water. He set it down in front of the leader, who put away his knife and knelt down next to Edward.

"Now you talking, or you end like him." He jabbed his thumb at Roy, then without warning, grabbed Edward by the braid and shoved his head into the basin.

Roy struggled against the chains holding him down, as Edward struggled against the firm hold the Drachman had on his head. Finally Edward emerged again, gasping and choking, but before he had time to catch his breath, down he went again.

Again and again, Edward's head splashed into the basin and he struggled to break free of the Drachman's grip. Roy watched in horror – this might not be as painful as what they had done to him, but it was just as dangerous. Despite everything he knew, he almost wished Edward would just let loose the information the Drachmans wanted, just so it would all stop. But no matter how many times the leader shouted questions at Edward, no matter how many times he dunked the boy's head under the water, Edward said nothing.

Nothing at all.


The doctors had explained it all to him, talked about post-traumatic stress disorder and assured him there was no physical damage sustained, speaking optimistically of how these things just take time and it's no wonder, considering what he went through. But somehow, even though he knew for a fact it was true, he just couldn't believe it until he saw for himself. But once he'd been sitting in Edward's hospital room for a while, there was no escaping it any longer.

Edward couldn't talk anymore.

Roy was so used to the boy's quick mouth, he wasn't sure how to act around him anymore. Normally, if they'd gotten into a situation like this together, Edward would tease him about how useless he was with thickly bandaged hands, and Roy would poke fun at his height, and as they bickered back and forth with increasingly raised voices, they would skirt around the hard subjects and somehow reassure each other that now everything would be all right.

But now Edward just sat there, not saying a word. It made all too much sense to Roy, after everything the Drachmans had put the boy through, but he still didn't know what to do with it. He tried making small talk, even made a half-hearted attempt at teasing the boy's height. Edward shot him an eloquent glare that could have curdled the milk he'd left untouched on his dinner tray, but that was the only response he got.

He left shortly after, unsettled.

As the weeks passed, Roy's body healed steadily. His cuts and bruises faded away, and even his wounded fingers began to heal. He had to take it a bit slow with the paperwork (not that he was about to complain), but other than that he could resume his normal life. But lingering in the back of his mind, every day without fail, was his concern over Edward.

What if he never spoke another word for the rest of his life? Alphonse, after living with him every day for his entire life, seemed to have a sort of sixth sense about what Edward wanted to say, and Edward would nod and grimace and snort to show that he agreed with his little brother's interpretation. But it just wasn't the same, somehow. It was so...quiet.

Long before Roy's hands were completely healed, Edward became restless and eager to continue his quest again. Roy could tell by the earnest look in his eyes that he was more than ready to get going, and Roy had no real reason to refuse him. So he sent the boys off again, hoping that Alphonse could continue to be Edward's mouthpiece, and hoping that at least Edward wouldn't decimate quite so many small villages if he couldn't yell at and offend people anymore.

But something bothered him. He wasn't sure what. Maybe it was just a lingering sense that something had been left unresolved, as though once again Edward was getting the raw end of the deal, after everything he'd endured already. Was this really how it was going to be for the rest of their lives?

He tried to make the best of it and not think about Edward's muteness, tried to treat him no differently than ever. After all, it was the least he could do to help. Maybe Edward didn't want to talk, and all their attempts to get him to say something was only causing him more stress.

But then there came the day when Roy decided to walk home since he'd gotten his work done early and it was a pleasant evening. He turned a corner and saw the Elric brothers standing a short distance in front of him. Something about their posture made him duck back into the shadow of the building, waiting to make sure he wasn't intruding on something important.

Alphonse knelt in front of his brother, so he could look up into his face from the height his real body must be. They were looking earnestly into each other's eyes as though the rest of the world didn't exist. "Please, Brother...talk to me. Say something. I'm so...tired of this. I feel so...so alone and afraid. I miss you..."

Edward placed his hand on top of Alphonse's head and rubbed back and forth, almost like he was ruffling his little brother's hair. Some silent message passed between them as they gazed into each other's eyes, something inscrutable that only a brother could know. Edward rested his forehead against Alphonse's, and they remained like that for a long time.

Something slipped, shifted, and shattered.

And Roy found himself stepping forward, barely conscious of what he was doing until the brothers slowly broke apart, as if too weary to be embarrassed at being caught in such an intimate moment. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "This is all my fault."

Edward looked up, his confused expression more articulate than any words.

"You came to rescue me," Roy replied, turning in shame to the blazing sun that sank below the clustered buildings in the west. "You were only trying to help, and because of that you're in this position now..." If only he had been more careful. If only he had realized sooner that the Cretan army was being backed up by a greater power. All because of his own weakness and carelessness, he was holding Edward back when he should be pushing the boy forward, lifting him up and helping him stand taller, reach higher, look to the heavens and his own bright future...

At first he thought the metal hand on his arm was Alphonse silently commiserating in the pain they both felt. But when he turned to look, it was Edward who let his hand slowly drop. He opened his mouth...Roy held his breath, hardly daring to hope...

A tiny squeak came out, the only result of the intense effort Roy could see in his eyes. There were no words, no more sound, but Roy saw what Edward meant to say, what he was dying to express but just couldn't.

For Roy, it was more than enough.