Warnings: More icky stuff mentioned
Spoilers: None
Feedback: Constructive feedback is very welcome
Notes: Sorry for the delay...I've been very busy lately. The next chapter will be out soon, but will be very short as I'm low on time this week too. The following chapters will be longer out of necessity, so I will have to wait until I can properly write and beta them, ETA about 2-3 weeks. Thanks for your patience!
Felis Catus: Circle Sixteen
"Yippee, another wonderful day in The Life of an Underpaid, Overworked and Unappreciated Drone," Havoc remarked sarcastically as he and the rest of the team began to assemble weapons and demolitions as Hughes set up his charts.
Edward was still happily examining the walls and wondering if he could attempt the fire transmutation, while Roy sat watching him bemusedly. Hayate continued dozing lightly. He'd learned to nap whenever possible as the hectic lifestyle his owner and him led didn't really allow for much rest at normal hours.
Armstrong, unlike Hayate, was pacing the floor, mentally strategizing - or so it was assumed. His wounded arm was wrapped up carefully, and firmly bound to his chest as to avoid being jounced in a sling in the probable event that he'd be undergoing strenuous physical exertion.
"We're worker bees, Havoc, not drones - a drone gets the queen at least," Breda cackled, loading a rifle.
"Worker bees are female, Breda - got something you want to share with the rest of us?" Hawekeye asked sweetly.
Everybody laughed.
"Oh no, you've discovered my secret!" Breda screeched in a high falsetto. The laughter escalated at Breda's feminine posturing.
"We mourn your defection to the Dark Side," Hughes informed him with a serious expression on his face. "One woman on our team was enough. Not you too!"
Hawkeye aimed a handgun at Hughes. "Dark Side?" she inquired mildly. "Do tell."
"I'll pass," Hughes said impudently, saluting Hawkeye with a grin.
"Hughes, you're a smart man - so why, exactly, do you have this compulsion to act so dumb sometimes?" Edward grinned. "You should know better by now!"
Hughes sighed, and looked artfully mournful. "It's the Roy in me, man - it comes out at the worse times! He's been a bad, bad influence," he bemoaned theatrically as everyone began to snicker.
"The 'Roy' in you?" Hawkeye asked skeptically, beginning to laugh. "You blame your juvenile behavior on ROY?"
"Oh! The pain of my deteriorating sanity," Hughes said mechanically, in deadpan voice - complete with a perfectly straight face.
Most of the men doubled over laughing uproariously, while Hawkeye's shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. Edward was rolling on the floor laughing helplessly at the inanity of HUGHES claiming that ROY was the cause for his suicidal remarks.
Roy was not exactly pleased. Hughes' sanity deteriorated at an astounding rate with or without Roy's influence, which was a stabilizing factor, not the reverse, thank-you-very-much! Humph. See if his so-called best friend got a present from him this year! Other than some hot coals dumped down the back of his pants.
"Well, Colonel Mustang has been known to act with some, erm, impetuosity at times," Armstrong chuckled. "Diving head first into bar brawls when we were younger, 'for the heck of it', I believe."
You were the CAUSE of some of those too, you know, Roy accused mentally.
"Running around in the rain threatening suspects when he knows full well that water and fire don't mix?" Hawkeye suggested dryly, making a quick recovery from her momentary fit of humor. Roy winced. "You were right there in the middle of those bar brawls, by the way, Major Armstrong."
Armstrong shrugged rather philosophically. "Youth is not a crime."
"Stupidity is."
"Leaving paperwork for the last minute knowing that it's due the next day and he'll only have an hour to finish it," Fury chimed in.
So he liked to live dangerously. What? Was that a capital offense? Roy didn't think so. Besides, it got DONE, didn't it? That was what counted, after all.
Farman looked thoughtful. "Sleeping on his desk when the Fuhrer is rumored to be making the rounds."
He woke up in time. When the Fuhrer was two steps from his door, but still, in time is in time, Roy huffed.
Breda laughed. "Challenging Hawkeye to a game of darts, loser buys drinks for the office?"
All right, so that was NOT his finest hour, Roy had to admit.
"There's that," Havoc acknowledged with a grin. "Calling Fullmetal short when he knows full well he's just begging for a revenge prank."
"Very true," Edward said ominously. "Speaking of which, I owe him one for the insult he made 25 days ago."
"Of course, you wouldn't be keeping track, now would you?" Hughes murmured, amused.
"Who, me? It's not my fault the bastard Colonel can't keep his mouth shut."
Yes, you, Edward. Roy sighed. It hadn't been that bad of an insult. All he did was ask Edward if he would please get a folder from the top shelf of Roy's very high bookcase in his office. All right, so watching Edward slowly look up at the top of the bookcase with that plaintively sinking expression on his face had been rather funny...but still! It was a legitimate order!
"It's all right, Edward - we tease the ones we love the most," Hughes said loftily.
Edward looked at him warily. "What's THAT supposed to mean, Hughes?" he asked, eyes narrowed with suspicion. Everyone kept dropping innuendo like it was going out of style, and Edward was beginning to think he'd better get to the bottom of it soon before the curiosity drove him nuts.
Yes, Hughes, what WAS that supposed to mean? Roy wanted to know too - for different reasons, of course.
"What DOES life mean? What does ANYTHING mean?" Hughes cried out, striking a dramatic pose. "Where is the TRUTH in this existence we cling to? Acht! Give me liberty, or give me death!"
Edward gave him a dirty look. "You're avoiding the question."
"It looks that way, doesn't it?" Hughes agreed readily.
"Oh Hughes," Hawkeye said, shaking her head sadly. "Whenever I start to think you've grown up, you go and prove me wrong again."
"It's what I do best," Hughes said cheekily. "Prove you wrong, that is." He prudently ducked as a bullet went zinging over his rapidly lowering head.
Armstrong clapped his hands. "All right, all right now my little children, let's all settle down and get back to business."
Everyone looked at each other before simultaneously turning back to Armstrong and sticking out their tongues. Hughes crossed his eyes and thumbed his nose, while Edward blew a raspberry. Roy was very hard pressed not to hack up a hairball. Dignity, you understand.
"Don't make me spank you, now," Armstrong warned serenely. "Stern discipline is another tradition handed down through many, many generations of Armstrongs." He sparkled menacingly.
It was NOT a pretty thought. Everyone winced and straightened up.
"All right, all right, since you put it THAT way," Hughes grumbled, unrolling a large parchment that had been leaning against the wall behind him. "Intelligence managed to dig up some more dirt on the chimeras and combined with what we've learned from last night and the bodies of the chimeras killed, we're getting an even more gruesome picture."
"Both bodies started to deteriorate almost immediately," Hughes readjusted his glasses to take a closer look at his notes. "The one we got in First District and the one Gran's team got in Fourth District were barely able to be loaded into the carrier trucks before they began to liquefy from the inside out. It appears that the Animator Alchemist somehow created some sort of an array linking the brain to the body, and when the link was broken, the connection was likewise severed, so the body immediately began to revert to its original state of decomposition."
Edward looked very thoughtful. "A bit similar to how I bound Al to the armor..." he mused out loud.
"Very similar," Hughes agreed. "Only in this case we don't know if there is an array drawn ON the chimeras' bodies somewhere, or if they were completely created within an array or if the array was internal...kind of like the chicken or the egg argument."
"Wouldn't it be a simple matter to examine the bodies of the chimeras destroyed and see if they've got markings?" Fury asked.
Hughes grimaced. "If you would like to volunteer to swim through a puddle of decomposed mulch, be my guest," he informed a rapidly greening Fury.
"No thank you."
"I didn't think so," Hughes sighed. "But we did, in fact, closely examine the muck, and from what we could see, which wasn't much, there were no arrays drawn. But that doesn't mean there weren't any originally."
"So what you're saying is that maybe in order to destroy these chimeras, we don't have to beat them to a pulp; we just have to find and destroy the array on their bodies?" Edward guessed.
Hughes grinned. "Bingo! At least, that's the theory."
"That's a rather dangerous theory," Farman observed. "Instead of trying to kill the things, we have to spend time trying to stay alive to FIND the array on their bodies so we can kill it."
"Well, after seeing how hard it was to kill just one of those things, I'd really prefer to know there's an Achilles heel somewhere on those monsters," Havoc replied dryly. "Not like looking for the array is going to stop us from pounding it to a pulp in the meantime."
"Good point."
"There's another issue," Edward pointed out logically. "If the chimeras were created from a single array, that's one thing, but if they were created using multiple arrays and multiple alchemical transmutations, finding one array on one body part may or may not be the key to undoing the entire chimera. Hell, we don't even know what the arrays may be for."
Everyone winced.
"Yeah, Boss, be the voice of reason," Breda complained half-jokingly.
"Sorry."
"Ahem, moving on," Hughes coughed. "As I mentioned before in the hospital, there were three more disappearances in Second and Third Districts last night - and we have three missing chimeras still. Which in turn, stands to reason that these chimeras appear to need at least one body each to maintain their current states."
"Wait, Hughes - these chimeras have been loose for a week or so, right? Then shouldn't there be a rather huge number of missing people?" Havoc asked suspiciously.
Roy felt his stomach roll. He really wished he hadn't eaten those oddly yummy looking flowers on the windowsill now.
Hughes' shoulders sagged. "We believe so. The five or so disappearances that brought the case to general military attention instead of limiting it to Gran's super-secret military research operations were probably just due to the chimeras getting careless, so that the deaths and MO could be linked to them instead of dismissed as random incidences of crime."
Edward blanched. "So there're MORE deaths?"
"If we use the estimate of one person per chimera per 24-hour period...then we're looking at about at least, at the very least, twenty-five missing individuals."
"So WHY hasn't there been wide-spread panic yet!" Edward yelled, leaping to his feet, glowering.
Armstrong put a hand on Hughes' shoulder to forestall his reply. "Because we believed at first that the vanished persons were homeless, or criminals, wandering Central's streets at night. People that no one would notice missing or people whom no one would care were missing, hence no one reported in their disappearances. Military had assumed that without whatever it was that the Animator Alchemist was supplying to the chimeras in lieu of human material, the chimeras would die on their own. No one ever suspected that the chimeras would know that eating humans as supplements would prolong their unnatural life."
"That's hideous!" Edward sputtered. "So let me get this straight! First, the military think, 'oh, well they'll die on their own without their super vitamins of who-knows-what they were being fed originally!' then they think 'oh, well, the missing people aren't really people, they're just those on the fringe edge of society so who cares!' THEN they finally haul their asses in when, 'oh no, a fine, upstanding citizen or two or three or FIVE are missing...gee, I wonder why, maybe we'd better DO something now, don't you think?' WHAT the HELL were they THINKING! WERE they even thinking?" he exploded. "Then they call US in for damage control and risk OUR lives to cover their own incompetent asses! FUCK!"
You tell 'em Ed! Roy cheered in his mind. He added a yowl into Edward's diatribe for support and got an absent-minded pat on the head for his efforts.
"Edward, Edward, calm down," Hughes soothed. "We KNOW, okay, we KNOW. We feel exactly the same way."
Edward sat down with a fuming huff, golden eyes blazing angrily. He was still swearing sulfurously under his breath.
"Maybe we should go hunting bigger game," Havoc drawled, snapping a cartridge into a rifle. "The kind that sign our paychecks."
Hawkeye gave an almost feral smile. "Why do you think we're all on Colonel Mustang's team? All that cigarette smoke clouding up your head there?" She drew her gun with a fancy twist, spinning it about before aiming it at Havoc with a raised eyebrow.
Havoc returned her smile with a slow grin of his own, setting the rifle back against his shoulder. "Don't be getting all trigger happy on us now, Hawkeye - Mustang wouldn't thank us if he missed out on all the fun of a coup."
Darn straight! Roy wanted in on the action! It was HIS coup, after all.
She sighed. "True, true." With an almost seamless gesture, the gun was safely returned to its holster.
"My hearing seems to be failing me again," Armstrong muttered, half to himself. The two bantering team members winked at him.
Hughes smirked, then looked serious once more. "Moving right along, the chimera that Gran's team brought down was odd in one veeeery interesting way. I feel a bit gypped - our chimera didn't show anything of that sort."
"Of what sort, Hughes?" Farman asked.
"I suppose our chimera was a finished product," Hughes continued, furrowing his brow.
"Finished product? Wait a minute, why do you say that?" Havoc looked alarmed.
"Well, our chimera just died as it was. From what I saw of the gryphon chimera, it looked slightly different than the picture I showed you all yesterday. This was from a photograph taken before the liquefaction was completed, so we have a good idea of the physical appearance by the way," Hughes explained, showing up a photograph that had been blown up.
"Spit it out already, Hughes - do we have to drag the details out of you?" Hawkeye said in exasperation.
"Different, how?" Fury asked suspiciously.
"I'm not quite sure," Hughes admitted candidly, scratching his head in annoyance. "If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that it looked as if it was..."
"...Was?" Breda prompted nervously.
Roy knew he wasn't going to like the sound of this.
"...Was possibly not quite finished evolving," Hughes said glumly.
Yep. He didn't like the sound of that at all.
To be con't...