Shot of Acid
Chapter 3: Compounds 01
Disclaimer and warnings elsewhere.
Author's Note: Enjoy, me dears! Havoc and Scar loving, you've been warned.
Chainsmoking
Words: 231
Edward inhaled. He coughed. His throat burned and lungs felt as if it housed a kerosene lamp. Then he started coughing harder. Mustang looked on with an amused smirk, as did Havoc. Hughes was a little tipsy and didn't notice much of the game they were playing, as he had declined and went to start singing offtune to songs played from a new jukebox. Maes would be surprised the next morning to find that he had no more change in his wallet.
"Ugh, no thanks" Edward hacked. The cigarette was plucked from his fingers by Havoc.
"You're a wuss, is all," the lieutenant said, replacing the smoke in his mouth.
The blond wheezed a few more times. "No, it's just that you're stupid. How can you stand that stuff?"
Jean shrugged and passed it over to Mustang, who inhaled generously. The lieutenant had decided on a little game to help pass the time in the bar, before they were all shipped off to the Drachma war. 'We'll chain smoke a pack,' he had said. 'Pass it around, cause you may never have another chance.'
"That tastes and smells disgusting. Don't you ever get tired of it?" Ed muttered, his voice muffled under his glove.
Havoc popped out a new cigarette. "Well, you're short and have a temper, I don't get tired of you."
Sounds
Words: 345
He shivered in his bed, wide awake. It wasn't the cold, although the night was cooler than her brighter counterpart. The gunfire wasn't what kept him up in his cot, wrapped in a caccoon of rough army blanket. The loud bangs and screams and clashing bayonnets and the splashes was the cause of his insomnia and shudders. He heard them all. Especially the most undetectable sound, if it, indeed, could be heard. Death. At any moment there would be a silence so long, so detached, and this was when Death was the loudest. In the quiet afterwards. And that's when they would leave, because the bodies bred sickness.
'I can't take this.'
Standing, he staggered to the flap that served as his door, not caring that he looked haggard and quite dead himself. Everyone there did, more or less. He opened it and lurched forward. He felt too late the hand pressed against his chest and he was shoved back, landing hard on his backside. "Hey there, Flame," a giddy voice said. "Where're you off to on break time?"
The lesser ranking officer mustered a cold glare at the Crimson Alchemist.
"Oh, I see," Kimbley sneered. "Want to get some fuck from the Colonel, eh? Well, I'll be your escort for the evening instead." A manic grin was on his face as he pounced and tore off Roy's uniform with enthusiasm so like the alchemist.
Mustang never spoke of that evening, although it was a known and easily found skeleton in the military's vast Grein was promoted to General and they no longer communicated. The burns were noticed and he said it was an old war wound and they'd nod sympathetically. Almost as if Kimbley had never happened.
He suffered cold detachment as he lay down at night when his mind, far away from there, to that time when the scars had been fresh burns and his mouth felt hot with blood and saliva.
'But it doesn't matter anymore.'
Manly
Words: 295
"Niisan! Niisan!" a young Ishbalan boy ran up to a much taller, older man. "Look Niisan!" He held up a bouquet of violet flowers, their radiance in the sunlight unmatched by the blankness of the desert.
The other smiled and took the flowers with long, tan fingers. "You know, you should be doing other things than picking flowers," he said, his voice forcibly gentle and slow.
"What do you mean?" he asked, large eyes observing his brother, admiring all of his redeeming qualities and ready to listen to whatever he said.
"Well," his older brother hesitated, "picking flowers is not what a man would do." The sentence hung in the air and the little boy's face trembled. It went through stages of surprise, then understanding, hurt, and finally anger. He snatched the purple blossomsand threw them on the floor, face twisted with anger as he stomped and the plants as his brother watched with a look of regret.
He had run off after trampling them and hadn't returned home until evening. The house was lit with only one light, his hated brother reading through some tome or other and he resented the older one for having such great intelligence. Trudging into his room, he stopped and looked at his bedside table. A bloom of multicolored petals were partly silver in the moonlight.
If Scar had any fonder memory than this, it was when he and his brother had made it a habit of going into the fields, taking as many of the just blooming flowers and then sitting down at home, cozy against each other as his brother told him a story about their latest grab.
And back then, it didn't matter if that's what men did, because it was good.
- Compounds 01 End -
End Notes: You may or may not know this, but I don't know what chainsmoking (or chain smoking) means, if it's a word at all. Forgive my ignorance.That's my favorite drabble I've ever written. It's so evilly witty. Havochas always been the personI think could say thingshe doesn't mean to say that are hilariously unintended.:Gasp: I put Older brother x Scar! Whatcha gonna do? Review! Tell me how much ya hate it. I'd love to know.
Shameless plug for kurama-sweethart's new fic 'Rebirth', with already three chapters! And another for our co-write fic, 'The Gatekeeper', with only a prologue, but it's getting there!
Read, review, and so forth! I know, the drabbles aren't that great this time. I was sort of pressed for good last lines.