Inextricable
Chapter Ten: Vigils
Sorry for the two-week wait for this chapter. My "real" life has been something of a train wreck, lately, and I've spent the past many days digging out from under the debris. Happily, I'm now back in Amestris, and the story continues.
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For the first time, Edward really wished he knew how to drive, because then he would have had at least that much control over his impossible situation.
Fuery drove responsibly, following all the rules of the road when all Ed wanted him to do was plow through every obstacle and get him to the hospital immediately!
Calm down, he thought to himself. Crazed overreaction wasn't going to help Winry. Just calm down. As if hearing his thoughts, Hawkeye's hand touched his arm, just for a moment, in a wordless gesture of comfort.
Gracia-san had chosen to go back home, in case Winry called or sent word, and Hawkeye dispatched Falman to stay with her and to offer any assistance or bring back any news.
Denny met them outside the hospital and ushered the officers into the room Maria had commandeered for their use. She'd been organizing possible witnesses and taking initial statements, working with the police to try to find some clue as to what had happened to Winry.
A depressing amount of time passed as Ed conducted interviews, turning up nothing but that someone, maybe, heard something somewhere.
When Fuery came up to Ed, while he was in the middle of yet another aggravating interview, and plucked tentatively at his arm, Ed nearly snarled.
"What," he bit out. Not Fuery's fault... wish it were... wish I could hit someone...
"Sir, there's someone here to see you," the man whispered.
Ed frowned at him, confused. Of course someone was here to see him. He was talking to someone right now!
"Someone you need to see," Fuery added, his eyebrows raising and a little head-nod communicating very clearly to Ed that the man was trying to be stealthy about something.
"Where?" Ed asked, hoping Fuery wasn't simply trying to give him a way out of the truly useless interview he'd been conducting.
"Follow me, sir," Fuery said.
Okay, Ed thought. But he'd better have something worthwhile after this act.
"Thank you for your time," Ed said to the nurse he'd been interviewing. He stood up. "We'll contact you if we have any further questions."
The young woman shot to her feet, her face flushed, and she nodded. A stammered, "Th-thank you, sir," was followed by a quick, somewhat clumsy bow, and she dashed from the room.
Ed frowned again and wondered if Fuery's skittishness was contagious. He followed the man out through a different door and down a long corridor. They reached a door leading outside, and Ed found himself emerging into a very dark alley. If it hadn't been Fuery, he would have been certain of some set-up. Instead, when a tiny ember flared in the darkness just beyond the circle of light haloing out from the open door behind him, he made the connection.
"Hi, Martel," he said, stepping further out into darkness. "Thanks for coming to see me." He waved Fuery away and the man nodded and retreated back into the hospital, leaving Ed alone to interview his unconventional contact.
"I came as soon as I got Al's letter," the chimera said, walking into the light. She held a cigarette loosely in one hand while smoke trickled from her mouth as she spoke. "All the pieces he mentioned don't make a nice picture when they're put together."
"Our friend Winry's been kidnapped, or at least she's vanished," Ed said. "I think it's connected somehow."
Martel dropped the cigarette and scuffed it into dust with her heel. "I'm sorry, Ed," she said. "If I'd known they weren't dead, I'd have told you all about this ages ago. Warned you and Alphonse. But I thought everyone but me—"
Ed shrugged. "No reason to think otherwise, until now. Do you know what's going on?"
Martel nodded. "I think so. Part of it, at least. Alphonse said you found Marissa Landis's body."
"She'd tried to unmake herself. She was a chimera, too. Half hyena."
Martel paled and shook her head. "Finally got her, then. Damn. She was always the good one, if any of them could be called that."
"Please," Ed whispered. "I've been trying to figure this out for weeks. What's going on, Martel?"
"The Landis family was so strong. They had two children who became State Alchemists this last generation — unheard of, really."
"The Green Alchemist is dead, but Vera—" Ed began, but Martel interrupted.
"That's where your entire theory's gone wrong, Ed. Rafe Landis isn't dead."
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Winry looked into Vera's eyes and gave a firm nod. The woman nodded in return, set her jaw and turned away to stare up at the ceiling. The man she'd called Rafe stood on her other side, holding her other arm tightly. They'd tied down her ankles to try and keep the thrashing to a minimum.
"Now," Winry ordered, and Vera opened her mouth while Rafe stuffed the thick wad of cloth between her teeth. As soon as his hands were both holding the woman's arm again, Winry picked up the saw.
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"You have to understand," Martel continued. "We didn't really know what was going on. We picked up pieces and some of us knew names and faces from before. Dorochet had served in the same command as the Green Alchemist. I'd been in the same command as the True Blood Alchemist."
"So they were the ones who made you all into chimeras?" Ed said, trying to clarify what Martel was telling him.
She nodded. "It was a much larger group. Gran would come and go, but he was clearly in charge. Vera Landis ran the day-to-day operations, though. We never did figure out what they really wanted. Shou Tucker had his own agenda, though he served Gran."
"Yes. He wanted to bring Nina back," Ed rasped.
"For someone whose specialty was chimeras, he wasn't anywhere near as talented as the three Landis alchemists," Martel said, shaking her head. "At least from my perspective. We were works of art... weren't we?" She turned, then, to look Ed right in the eyes. Something about her expression made him realize she was asking him a much deeper question than the words implied.
He grasped for something to say. Some equivalent exchange to make up for the information she was giving him. "Martel, you're still here, and you have your whole life. You're the most perfect chimera I've ever seen. There's no reason not to just live your life. Is there?"
"I don't know how to 'just live,' Ed. Everybody's dead. I'm all alone."
"You aren't," Ed scoffed, grinning to remove the sting. "Anyone who can call my brother a friend will never be alone."
After a long moment, Martel grinned back at him. "Stupid," she muttered. "It brings back too many memories, all of this. But you have a friend in trouble. Enough about me.
"Vera was in charge. Rafe couldn't do anything without her, and that always rankled Marissa."
"She and Rafe were married," Ed said, hoping she could verify his research. "But he's supposed to have died before the massacre at Ishbal — do you know what happened? Why wasn't he dead? And if he wasn't dead, why did everyone think he was, and why did he let them go on thinking it?"
Martel shook her head. "Too many questions, Ed. Wish I knew, but I don't have all your answers. All I know is that he wasn't dead. There were several other alchemists in their group. Helpers. Some were State and some weren't."
"Did you hear the names Geoffrey Maier or Marcel Watson?"
"We only knew the ones we'd served with," she said, shaking her head again. "We figured Marissa Landis's connection to the other two out from some arguments she and her husband had."
Ed blew out a breath. Time was ticking in his brain, and he was no closer to finding Winry, but at least he had a new puzzle piece. "Any idea what happened to Marissa? How did she become a chimera and why did she try to undo it all by herself?"
"The True Blood Alchemist had always been odd, but Rafe Landis was even more strange at the lab. Dorochet said he wasn't anything like he'd been before. Marissa seemed pretty normal. The group's focus was chimeras. I can only guess that Vera and Rafe maybe were chimeras, too, like Shou Tucker. I think they finally turned Marissa into one of them."
"Why would they do that, though?" Ed exclaimed, shaking his head at the insanity of such an act. "What could they hope to gain?"
Martel looked away into the darkness for a long moment, then turned back to face Ed. Her expression was disturbing. Grim. "You gain a lot, becoming a chimera," she said. "Maybe more than you lose. If all you want is power."
- - - - - - - - - -
Winry had seen more blood than she liked to think about in her brief lifetime, and she thought Ed's surgery might have been worse than this, but Granny Pinako had been there. She hadn't been forced to face that alone.
The rest of Vera's ruined arm had been removed, the wound bound, the blood staunched, and the screams finally silenced. Vera was strong. She'd survived the nightmare amputation — though how she'd done it, Winry couldn't imagine — but her screams still rang in the girl's ears.
Rafe had dashed off into the darkness as soon as Vera passed out from the agony, and Winry hadn't seen him since. She supposed she might have been able to escape, but she couldn't leave Vera until she was sure the woman would survive the procedure. He's probably watching from somewhere nearby, anyway.
She still couldn't figure out what exactly was off about Vera, but something was. It was more obvious, with Rafe. He'd had something done to him at some point. He wasn't exactly human anymore. She wondered if he was some kind of chimera, like Al's friend Martel.
As she wheeled Vera's gurney away from the gruesome, leftover mess of the surgery, she realized she felt more tired than she could remember having ever been before. Not good. Need to stay awake and keep an eye on her... can't fall asleep...
Vera still slept, but her breathing, though shallow, was even. Winry hoped she'd be okay. She didn't know if she could trust Rafe not to go crazy and kill her if anything happened to Vera — no matter what the woman had told him.
She rolled another gurney over next to Vera's and took one of the blankets Rafe had found. Wrapping herself up in it against the chill of the enormous room, she climbed onto the gurney and began her vigil.
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Ed didn't think he could face another fruitless interview in that sterile hospital room. Martel had drifted back into darkness some time ago, but he continued to stand in the alley, thinking.
This whole situation felt personal, but he couldn't understand why it would be personal. He had no connection with the Landises aside from Lab Five, and even then, he'd never met them. Never even heard of them before this mess.
Lab Five had been suits of armor and Tucker and the homunculi and the prisoners and Scar... He'd thought everyone else had been gone from the building by that time, anyway. Where were these Landis alchemists in all that chaos? Why hadn't they made themselves known then or in the meantime, during all the disasters that followed Lab Five?
"Haunted," Ed muttered, rubbing his shoulder where automail met skin. Exhaustion buzzed in the back of his head and behind his eyes, and aches complained from his back and from his missing arm and leg. Unfair that they show up when I'm this tired.
"Fullmetal Alchemist," a voice whispered, sounding almost like a thought in his head.
Ed whirled toward the voice, but he moved too late. The memory of Mustang's warning was the last thing he remembered as the blow knocked him into blackness. "Not good, Fullmetal..."