A note from the Hime no Argh herself—

Thanks again to Fireblazie, Lazerducky and Princess Kurumi for reviewing. This one and the next are my two favorites out of the flash pieces I've written so far. To answer Lazerducky's question, to my knowledge drabbles are 100 words or less, while a flash fiction is 300-1000 words. Much more space to develop a scene.

Title: Hell

Summary: Alphonse, Edward, and a blood-splattered cellar.

Disclaimer: I don't own FMA.


Hell

Alphonse Elric died at the age of eleven. He didn't know what else could explain the inscrutable force that had yanked him away from his brother as he screamed in terror and agony, because in the next moment he found himself floating in a dark fog, unable to tell where he was or how he could get out of this place. He thought he saw things, meaningless pictures and images that he couldn't make out. Then a voice was screaming, desperately calling out his name.

The next moment, Alphonse Elric was in hell.

The forbidden cellar room was filled with smoke, and Al was lying on the floor atop the remnants of a chalked transmutation circle. Memory flooded him, and he pushed himself up on his elbows—why did he hear metal creaking?—and tried to see through the smoke, to tell if their effort to bring their mother back had worked.

"Don't look at that thing! Don't you dare look at it!"

Alphonse jerked around; never once in his life had he heard his brother sound like that. Later he would remember wondering what was wrong with his brother's body—why he looked so oddly deformed, like a doll contorted into an alien shape. His mind, briefly, refused to accept what his eyes were seeing—that his brother was missing an arm and a leg, that the blood splattering his body and pooling beneath him was his own.

"Brother! Why are you—your arm—your leg—what happened!" Al crawled to Ed's side. Why did he hear metal creaking again? Why was Ed so small? He looked at his hands—they weren't his, they were made of leather and metal, as though he had donned a pair of gauntlets. "What happened, brother!"

"It went wrong." Ed's eyes were glassy; his breathing was shallow and labored. He was pressing a hand over the stump of his arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood. The air was thick with the red stink of it. "We—I miscalculated. We didn't give enough—" He rolled onto his side and curled into himself, gritting his teeth. "I'm going to die, Al, I'm going to die—"

"Don't talk like that!" Desperately Al looked around for something he could used to staunch the bleeding. There was nothing. Ed needed a doctor, fast.

The closest person to a doctor for twenty miles around was Aunt Pinako. Al scooped his brother up into his arms, terrified at how small Ed was and how easily Al could lift him, and darted upstairs. The sheets off his mother's bed would do for a bandage. Grimly and easily he tore them apart and wrapped them around Ed's wounds, trying to ignore his brother's ragged, agonized breathing, or the fact that his skin was whiter than the sheets.

When at last he stumbled into the foyer of the Rockbells' house, holding his dying brother in his arms as he begged for help, seeing his own horror and terror reflected in Pinako and Winry's eyes, Alphonse Elric, at the age of eleven, knew what hell was.

It was the thing that was supposed to be their mother left to die on the cellar floor. It was his brother bleeding half to death from his missing limbs. It was the clacking artificial metal that Pinako and Winry gave Ed to allow him to walk and write again. It was his own empty metal body, stained with his brother's blood.

Alphonse knew what hell was. What he didn't know, what he would come to learn, was that hell was never easily escaped.


Next link: Some Day

After taking her parents away, there's something Mustang wants.