To say the ride to East City was uneventful after the excitement of their getaway was an understatement.
It was nearly mind-numbing to just sit and watch the dark, shapeless scenery fly by past the dirty windows. In the wake of the adrenaline rush of their escape, Roy had crashed hard. He was surprised by how very tired he was, the months of grief and running—not to mention his physical injuries—taking a very obvious toll on his endurance. He fought to stay awake, though, because Riza had to be awake. It was only fair.
Roy was content to let the numbing silence continue, and almost got lost in it, if not for Hallucination-Ed.
"Are we there yet?" Ed asked for the millionth time. Roy wondered if the hallucination expected some sort of response.
All the same, Roy felt his eye start to twitch because it was the seventh time in the past hour. Despite being only a hallucination—and Roy would repeat that until he absolutely believed it was a stress-induced hallucination and not a complete mental break, thank you very much—Ed was doing a fantastic job of being just as annoying as he used to be when still alive.
His headache certainly wasn't doing him any favors, either.
"How much farther?" Roy asked after a moment, if only to get the hallucination in the back seat to shut up.
"A couple more hours," Riza answered, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pressed to her stomach. Her arm was probably causing her no small amount of discomfort at this point, and she'd had nothing more than over-the-counter painkillers to help keep the pain at bay.
Hallucination-Ed made an exasperated noise, then threw himself across the backseat. "I only have five and a half days left, and I'm still stuck in this car," he groused.
Roy had no idea what that was supposed to mean, nor why his subconscious was feeding him such information, but that was honestly the least of his worries. The fact that he was having this complex and highly believable hallucination at all was much closer to the top.
"Doesn't this thing go any faster?" Ed asked, and Roy wondered why he kept talking when Roy was doing such a good job of ignoring him. If he was a proper hallucination, why was he so obnoxiously interactive?
"When we get there, what's the plan, sir?" Riza asked, distracting Roy from his unsettling thoughts.
"Yeah," Ed added. "We're all dyingto know what kind of genius plan you're coming up with."
Roy couldn't help but grimace at the comment. It wasn't even remotely funny. His subconscious was certainly sick. "This was your idea, remember?" he said to Riza. "What do you suggest?"
She thought for a moment, Roy able to make out the frown on her face in the darkness. He also saw the lines of pain around her eyes and tried to smother his own guilt. "We have to stay out of sight. You are far too recognizable, and we don't exactly look like we've been part of respectable society." She was right about that. Between them, they had enough bandages to wrap up a hospital ward. "Our first order of business should be finding a place to stay. We need privacy to reach out to our team."
"Do you think that's necessary?" Roy asked. He would just as soon leave them out of this. They had been chased by the military, or at the very least, men dressed in Amestrian military uniforms. They had no idea how far up the chain of command this went, and the last thing Roy wanted was to bring this down on the heads of his friends.
"Doing this alone would be foolish, at best," Riza reminded him. "We need back up."
Roy's lip quirked in a cynical sort of smile. "You may be right. So where are you thinking?" Roy asked. "We get to East City and find some cheap motel?"
"Ordinarily, yes. But motels do not usually have a phone. Phones are risky, but if we assume we're still being followed, we unfortunately do not have the time to be subtle." They would have to settle for cautious, then. "We would have to find a payphone, and moving about puts us at even greater risk in a city with such a large military presence."
Roy fought the urge to make an impressed noise. They'd been on the run so long that Roy had almost forgotten how to think tactically, and here she was with a detailed plan, or at least the beginnings of one. "Go on."
"We'll break into Lieutenant General Grumman's house."
"Anotherbreak-in?!" Ed groaned.
Roy groaned, too. "We can't just go breaking into General Grumman's house!"
"Of course not. We'll tell him first."
"Well, of course."
Riza didn't seem deterred by his sarcasm. "You know as well as I do that he would be willing to do anything to help as long as it didn't fall back on him in any way." Was it Roy's imagination, or was there a hint of irritation in her voice that had nothing to do with Roy's comment?
Riza's relationship with her grandfather had always been . . . rocky, at best. Roy knew her when she was barely a teenager, and from what he had gathered in passing conversation in his time in the Hawkeye household, there had been some bad blood between Grumman and her father. Roy didn't know specifics, but Riza seemed to be harboring, if not a grudge, then a subtle disapproval of the man and his methods.
In his time at Eastern Command, he had gotten to know Grumman fairly well. The old man was as eccentric as he was clever. He was almost as ambitious as Roy, and like Roy, had attracted a fair amount of criticism over it. Now, he liked to play things close to the vest, doing all in his power to usurp the Fuhrer without doing anything that would call attention to himself in the process.
Actually, as begrudging as Roy was to admit it, harboring fugitives against the State seemed like Grumman's kind of scheme.
"Do you think he knows we're alive?" he wondered aloud.
Riza's eyes narrowed marginally, but Roy wasn't sure what the expression meant. "Doubtful."
Roy sighed. "I guess it's as good of a plan as we're going to get, at this point."
"Why can't we just find Al?" Hallucination-Ed demanded from the backseat again, bringing Roy once again back to his other, possibly less-pressing, problem. Roy ignored Ed, because he sure wasn't going to acknowledge him now, after last night.
After he was pretty sure he and the dog had seen the same thing.
Interspecies mass hallucination? Unlikely, at best.
Roy had seen a lot of ghosts since his time in Ishval, but none of them had ever been so . . . well, real.
What was he supposed to make of it? If he were to tell Riza, she'd look at him like he'd finally gone off the deep end. He had, admittedly, not been in the most stable frame of mind as of late. The recent bout of action had helped him regain some sense of composure, but he knew he was dangerously close to some sort of mental break, like after Ishval. The guilt he felt over Edward's death was a black cloud that he could not seem to shake. That, combined with a lack of purpose, was slowly eating away at him.
Well. He'd just have to focus on the task at hand and completely ignore Hallucination-Ed until he could think of a more plausible reason that he was seeing the boy, aside from being either crazy or haunted, because he was comfortable with neither.
And as he came to that decision, something exploded.
The truck skidded, Riza cursed, and the vehicle was airborne.
XxXxX
Ed may not have been able to feel pain, per se, but summersaulting down a shallow ditch inside the body of a truck made him uncomfortably aware of what it felt like to be a tossed salad.
Ed braced one hand on the ceiling, one on the seat, wondering how that much was possible, and wondering if it was possible to be sick with an immaterial stomach.
Ed's conditionlet him take in details he was sure Hawkeye and Mustang were missing. He watched the dark, starless sky become the ground, the world outside turning through the windshield as both Mustang and Hawkeye whipped around like rag dolls in a dog's teeth. Hawkeye's head cracked against the window on the first roll, the truck turning one more time before smashing into a tree with an ear-splitting shriek of ripping metal and shattering glass.
The sudden silence was deafening.
It took him long seconds to summon the courage to move, frozen in place with shock. A fine drizzle of mist rolled in from the broken windows, making the air shimmer and drifting through his incorporeal body.
Finally, Ed shivered, breaking the spell. He twisted onto his shoulder, his legs following him down in the upside-down cab, shaken more emotionally than physically. He landed in an uncomfortable heap on the glass-strewn roof and leaned forward, panting for no other reason than that he was scared.
Scared for Mustang and Hawkeye.
Neither were moving, suspended from above by their seatbelts. "Mustang?" he tried out of reflex, before reminding himself that the action was completely futile. Still, a thrill of panic ran up his spine when no one responded. He couldn't see anything but the backs of their heads.
With a curse, Ed rolled right through the back door, noting that it was so distorted that even if he could, it probably wouldn't have opened for him.
Though he had been able to brace himself against the ceiling . . . but this wasn't the time to ponder that.
Shaking off the extreme pins-and-needles sensation from passing through solid objects, and the disorientation of being upside-down, Ed glanced around. The darkness was not a problem for his eyes, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary; just trees and shrubs and the dirt road they'd fallen from just a few meters up the slope, broken bits of glass and metal strewn along the truck's path like macabre confetti.
But they hadn't crashed for no reason. Hawkeye was nothing if not perfect at nearly everything she did, and driving was no exception. Besides, his sixth sense for trouble was practically shrieking in the back of his head like a siren.
Someone was out there.
When nothing out of the ordinary manifested itself, Ed circled the truck, coming around to the front. He got down on all fours and looked inside, staring past the jagged edges of glass that looked like broken teeth to the unsettling picture framed before him.
Hawkeye was the worst off, as far as he could tell. Her side door rested against the tree, conformed around it and effectively trapping her between it and the center console. A rivulet of blood streamed down her forehead and disappearing into her hairline from a cut in her temple, but she was breathing, features slack in unconsciousness.
Mustang looked better, but not by much. Ed couldn't make out anything aside from a few gashes across his pale face, blood languidly dripping on the glass below. Mustang was already rousing though, a low groan slipping from his throat and a slow frown gradually contorting his features.
"That's right," Ed encouraged uselessly. "Get your lazy self together, Mustang."
Getting to his feet, he sprinted up the slope to the road, cresting it just in time to see a figure dressed in black moving out of the tree line, a shadow congealing into solid shape.
With him, Ed could make out the unmistakable silhouette of a rifle in its hands.
Swallowing the urge to duck out of sight, Ed glanced back down at the truck, finally understanding.
One of the back wheels was completely destroyed, its rubber strewn across the road before him in chunks and slivers.
This dirtbag had shot out their tire.
"Great,"Ed muttered. Even from here, he could make out the short ponytail. It was his friend from last night. Ed glanced back down to the truck below, Mustang and Hawkeye vulnerable inside.
He didn't have much time.
With another curse and an ill-formed plan, Ed dove back down the hill and back to the front of the truck. Mustang hadn't made much progress, his eyes still screwed tightly shut. "Mustang, I know you suck at listening to me like you suck at everything else, but I'm going to possess you for a minute, and I really need you to cooperate."
As predicted, Mustang ignored him.
So, Ed got back on his feet and launched himself at his commanding officer.
And wow, did it hurt.
Aside from the discomfort Ed remembered from the other night, and the strange sense of othernessEd got from suddenly being inside a body that was not his, the sudden onslaught of pain and misery had him choking back the desire to vomit. His head screamed at him from the building pressure of being upside-down, and his shoulder felt like it might have been dislocated. Every breath brought a wave of fresh pain, bruised or broken ribs straining against the seatbelt. Actually, there wasn't anything that did not feel like it had been hit by a train, and Ed almost wanted to pass out then and there.
But he reminded himself that Mustang and Hawkeye were about to be executed if he didn't get it in gear, so he opened Mustang's bleary eyes and reached with Mustang's clumsy, too-big hand toward Hawkeye.
"S-sorry 'bout this," Ed said with Mustang's voice, his lips feeling slack and the words coming out a slur. He was sure Hawkeye would shoot Mustang if she had been awake for touching her, period. He reached inside her coat pocket and grabbed the gun she'd kept holstered there, all the while painfully aware of the time crunch he was on.
Ed absently wondered if this was what it was like to be drunk, large hand painfully working at the piece in her pocket until, finally, pulling it free of the fabric.
In the back of his mind, Mustang stirred, a warm, fluttering sensation that pushed forward before receding back. Clearly, he was just too lazy to wake up all the way. Completely useless.
Ed tried to squash down the voice that was really, really worried about that.
He placed the weapon on the roof of the car over his head in a bed of shattered glass, then clapped his hands and turned the seatbelt holding him hostage into a pile of fabric scraps. He barely caught himself in time to save Mustang's head from an uncomfortable encounter with the hard metal as he fell from the chair.
"Ow," Ed groaned, too distracted to be disturbed by how weird the word sounded in Mustang's voice. Everything hurt. He twisted, the motion much more difficult now that he was in Mustang's larger frame, bringing his feet down from under—above?— the console and ignoring the accent of pain he felt in the older man's right shoulder and side. He simply didn't have time to coddle Mustang's battered body.
He scrabbled out of the missing windshield, earning Mustang a few more cuts in the process, and got to his feet as quickly as he could.
The man's left leg gave out and sent him back to the wet ground.
Mustang's mouth cursed in a way the colonel's mother might have disapproved of. Ed looked back into the cab of the truck but did not see the cane. He clapped his hands, drawing a familiar circle in his head and pulling a crutch made of metals up from the earth below him. Ed was more comfortable with a crutch, anyway.
He got to his feet just in time to see the shadowed man appear over the top of the hill.
Both of them froze.
Then, without a word, the man brought the rifle up to his shoulder.
Ed had never liked guns. To him, they were all but unpredictable, the bullet out of his control as soon as it left the chamber. Alchemy was much more reliable, but Hawkeye had insisted he learned how to use one, taking him and Al out to the range every Saturday they were in East City to practice.
Now he was pretty grateful, because Ed wasn't sure Mustang's body could have gotten to the ground that quickly for a transmutation and gotten back up again.
Ed raised Hawkeye's handgun, flicked the safety, and squeezed off three shots.
The sound in the quiet night was enough to make Ed's ears ring, each bark a staccato to his already-splitting headache, but the man immediately retreated from the ridge and out of sight, taking cover from Ed's barrage.
Ed backed up toward Hawkeye's side of the truck, squeezing off two more shots before placing the weapon on top of the undercarriage and clapping his hands. He placed them on the truck, the metal peeling away like sharp petals of a flower.
A bullet struck the truck maybe six inches in front of him, golden sparks burning his eyes.
"Do you mind?!" Ed shouted, his irritation purely panic-induced now. He ducked behind the cab, Mustang's hip protesting.
"Come on, Hawkeye," he said, another transmutation taking care of her seatbelt as another bullet ricocheted off the truck. Mustang's shoulder screamed at him, but he pulled her as gently as he could afford to from the battered cab.
Something flared in his head, a wave of hot panic that wasn't his own.
Then Mustang promptly threw him out.
Am I happy with this chapter?
No.
Am I happy that I managed to write something?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
I re-wrote it three times, though, and edited it four, so I'm going to leave it alone now lol.
So, if you're not following Starlight, Star Bright, I'm going to try to be back now. Of course, now that I'm back, I haven't touched my art tablet in days haha. I wasn't built for more than two hobbies at once. Grad school starts again for the summer next week, then I'm leaving on a two week trip out of country, so though I am excited, I'm wondering what that will do to my update schedule. All I can promise is that I'm going to finish this one and SSB lol.
And if you haven't noticed, I did not reply to previous reviews, but I will start doing so on the next chapter :) Thank you guys for your patience, and sorry for the sudden hiatus.
If you have the time, please leave a review, and I will see you next chapter :)
God Bless,
-RainFlame