Chapter 45

"Are they still coming?" Greed asked.

"Go! Go! Go!" urged Tourmaline.

Greed would take that as a yes then. Tourmaline could move impressively fast considering she'd gotten injured earlier. Pride had used alchemy to partially heal her leg, but Greed wasn't an expert on alchemy, and even he knew you'd need a stone to completely heal injuries. So she was going to be in a lot of pain when the adrenaline wore off.

They reached a door and Pride slammed it shut as soon as they were all in. Greed leaned against it, ready to force it to stay closed if he needed to. It was quiet. They were all still, breathing as silently as they could despite all the running.

"Are they gone?" Greed whispered.

A robot arm burst through the middle of the door, sending bits of it everywhere. Tourmaline screamed.

"No!" Pride answered.

But only one could possibly reach through the door at a time. Greed used his ultimate shield on his arm, and drove it into that robot. The metal arm fell into the room like a loose gecko tail, while the body fell back. Greed peeked through the opening.

"The coast it clear."

Pride clapped his hands and sealed the gap in the door. Oh he looked annoyed, and tense. Well, now that the door was sealed it was pretty dark in here. Pride always had to care about that before. Kind of strange, since he didn't now. But Greed hadn't been sure he could regenerate, and he'd still let himself get decapitated.

Wait. When had he been unsure if he could regenerate? A brief vision flashed into his head. He shook his head and tried to clear it.

"Well where are we?" Pride asked, turning towards the room.

"Another puzzle room," Tourmaline said, looking around. The room was blue, and the only source of lights were little ones floating around. They looked like fireflies. "Give me some time. I can figure it out."

"By yourself?" Pride asked skeptically. "You know I've been doing half the work solving these."

"I know!" Tourmaline snapped, surprising both of them. Despite how tired and annoyed she could sound, she hadn't yelled at them before. "I know. Just, let me focus on this. Please."

There was pain in her voice and she was favoring her good leg. It seemed her injury had caught up to her.

Pride huffed and sat down, leaning against the wall. "Fine. I don't care."

Greed sat down on the opposite side of the door, trying not to look at Pride, who was no doubt on edge. Greed could put him further on edge. He could start a fight. A physical one even. Without Pride's oh so special powers Greed had a chance at winning. A part of him certainly wanted to. This was Pride after all. Father's most unquestioning little follower. Greed had plenty of reason to hate him. Even the siblings Pride sort of seemed to like had a certain level of fear for him, if Greed remembered well enough. Even now he was putting a damper on what could be a fun space adventure.

And yet, the actions and words that could start a fight weren't happening. What was it Tourmaline had said? Their fighting should be natural and not an obligation? Yeah, right now it felt very forced.

Maybe it was just because Pride was being weird. Pride didn't give Greed phones just because he said he wanted one. He didn't help other people for basically no reason, like healing their legs. He certainly didn't accept he might've done something wrong. (There were also the physical differences. Greed kept waiting for Pride's voice to echo around the room and he'd been a lot heavier than when the human appearance was basically just a hollow shell. It figured the one time they were on the same side Pride couldn't just power through everything. But the physical changes had been surprisingly easy to adjust to, comparatively speaking.)

It was all supremely weird and it was tempting to say it was a fake Pride. After all, one of them almost certainly had to be dead. But it didn't seem right. The explanation that Ed had dropped him down to one soul made sense. (Between that and hearing Ling had become Emperor it sounded like his friends had made it out alright. Good. He hadn't seen any of them in . . . a while. He'd be . . . annoyed if anything had happened to them after everything on the Promised Day.) Besides, with how strange this day had been, if Pride wasn't real maybe none of it was. This was all in his head. Or something. He'd never had a fever dream, or any other hallucination, before. That could be interesting.

His was getting nowhere with this. He glanced at Pride, who was still tensed up and staring out at nothing. Tourmaline? Still looking at orb lights.

Greed resisted the urge to sigh. Well, it might be time to talk to his arrogant sibling.

[This chapter was not supposed to end here. This entire chapter was originally supposed to be like, 3 paragraphs. But it just kept going on and here we are.]