Waiting was always the most agonizing part.

He had waited for the boy to report in, and it never came. He waited for news of him, and it never came. He waited for their handful of leads to turn up a scrap of evidence that Ed was still alive, and after three months of the boy missing, the wait was supposed to be over. Roy finally had him. He was finally safe.

But, as Roy watched the disturbed visage of the doctor coming down the hall to see him, he decided that for Ed, safe was a relative term.

Roy stood to meet the doctor, Hawkeye by his side. The rest of his team was busy coordinating the investigation into who Ed's captors were, where they had gone, and where Roy could find them so he could make them pay for the condition they had returned his subordinate in.

The last one wasn't written on the orders, but there was no doubt in anyone's mind that retribution of the fiery kind was in order.

"How is he?" Roy demanded before the doctor could get a word out. He spared a glance at the tag on the man's lapel that read 'Doctor Wayne Marsh.' He was an older man, with hair thinning into a white, wispy halo around his head, a thin frame, and small, dark eyes that vaguely reminded Roy of a weasel.

"We should talk in my office," Marsh said, gesturing for them to follow. It was a good idea, since this was case-sensitive information, but Roy couldn't help but be annoyed with the further delay.

The doctor took them back into a hallway of offices and into the third door on the left. His personal space was a disorganized mess, with papers littered all over the desk and files piled high on every surface, but Roy was far too distracted to be bothered by the man's housekeeping.

"What is his condition?" he snapped as soon as the door shut. Perhaps it was a bit rude, but Roy had waited for this information for three months.

The older man sighed. "He's in bad shape. The most obvious problems are the bite wounds. You said he was kept in a room with wild dogs? Several of those are infected, as well as several of the lacerations and deep cuts on most of his body. He has a multitude of burn marks, some appearing to be from some sort of acid. He is severely malnourished and dehydrated, so he's on fluids. We've stitched him up and given him shots for tetanus and started him on antibiotics and rabies vaccinations, though we don't have the results on the dogs' autopsies yet. Just a precaution, you see."

"What about his automail?" Roy asked. Even to his own ears he sounded terse and snappish, but the way this man was just listing these things, like items on a grocery list . . . it was infuriating.

And the thought of someone doing all this to Ed . . . Roy wanted to make someone pay.

"His leg has some damage that might cause him some problems, most notably a missing toe. His shoulder port appears to have been terribly abused. The fuses are burned out, and there is some trauma to the tissues around it, perhaps for the same reasons. We have him scheduled to meet with our automail specialist in the morning."

"And his eyes?" Roy was afraid to ask, but in the dimness of that wretched basement, when Ed had looked up at him, Roy couldn't help but notice his golden eyes, once fiery and sharp, were dull and murky, not focused on anything. He hadn't shared his suspicions with anyone, lest he make them worry for nothing, but now he had to know.

"Acid," the doctor supplied.

Roy had known it, but he still felt his insides go cold with the brutal confirmation.

Hawkeye didn't say anything, but Roy noticed the sudden tension in her jaw and throat, the tightness in her eyes. Apparently she hadn't noticed before.

"It's been too long to properly gauge what kinds were used, but it was obviously strong enough to do the trick."

Roy thought he did a valiant job of not throttling the man for such casual terminology. "The 'trick?'" he hissed.

The doctor seemed to catch the promise of violence in his inflection. He cleared his throat and shifted his stance uncomfortably. "He has no vision or light sensitivity in either eye."

Another dreaded question: "Will it come back?"

"Not likely," he said, bringing up his clipboard to check something, or maybe to keep his gaze hidden from Roy's threatening glare. "If you would like, you may see him now. He caused a lot of problems when we got him in here, so he's being lightly sedated, just enough to keep him from being a handful. I'll send in my assistant to check on him in a bit." Roy knew a dismissal when he heard one. The doctor turned and walked out of the office, leaving him and Hawkeye to stare after him.

"I should set his whole office on fire," Roy snarled, stalking into the hall and heading for the ICU.

Hawkeye kept pace with him easily. "That would not be wise, sir."

"I don't care. If it weren't connected to the whole hospital, it would be ashes," he assured her with barely restrained fury.

"He did his job, sir. Just because he didn't sugarcoat it is no reason to become violent," she said sagely, but Roy could hear the undercurrent of tension in her strong voice.

Roy didn't respond, lest he take out his wrath on her. She was right, as she always was, but that didn't make him any happier.

This whole situation was maddening. This shouldn't be happening, not to Ed. What was he thinking, sending the boy up here?! The Drachman border was a hot spot of terroristic activity, with bombings and kidnappings almost as common as not. It was no wonder something had gone so wrong.

Roy couldn't help but wonder why it was his subordinates always had to pay for his mistakes.

"Have you notified his brother?" he asked, suddenly feeling very much the wet match Ed often likened him to. Alphonse would be devastated to see his brother like this. Ed would be devastated for him to see him like this.

"We've tried to get in touch with him, but as you know, he hasn't been staying in any hotels," she said. As a suit of armor, Alphonse didn't require things like food and sleep. The day Ed went missing, Al had dropped everything and took a train to the north. He called to check in with Roy about once or twice a week, but as far as anyone knew, he was constantly on the move, tirelessly scouring the countryside for any sign of his brother. "We left a message at his last known location, but they haven't seen him in three days."

Roy chanced a sidelong look her way. To an outsider, she appeared calm and confident, fully in control of herself, but Roy had known her for years. He had known her when she was young and every emotion could be clearly read on her beautiful face, and he knew what to look for; the tightness in the corner of her eyes, her shoulders, the way her elbow bent slightly, as if subconsciously wanting to reach for her gun. Roy knew she cared about the Elric brothers a great deal. They all did.

When they arrived at the hospital room, Ed didn't seem "lightly sedated," as the doctor had promised.

Actually, he was currently in the middle of fighting off three male nurses. Well, mostly two, since the other was flat on the ground, blood streaming from his nose. The other two had just managed to strap down the boy's automail leg, but despite Ed being two limbs short and starved and weak, he was putting up a desperate fight.

"STOP, NO MORE!" Ed was screaming, voice raw and feral, face twisted in tortured anguish and wet with frightened tears as he tried to wrench his limbs from the grips of those around him, sightless eyes wide. "Get away from me! STAY BACK!"

Roy's blood boiled at the sight. Maybe it was irrational, maybe this was just standard procedure, but they were scaring him, and Roy couldn't stand it.

He and Hawkeye both rushed forward. "Fullmetal!" Roy snapped, voice sharp with authority. He hated to do it, hated to be so cold when all he wanted to do was cradle the boy against him and tell him everything would be okay, but the sharp command seemed to cut through the haze, reaching back to wherever he had locked away his rationality.

The response was instant; he froze, just like he had in the basement, as if he had forgotten why he had been struggling in the first place. The expression on his face became one of disbelief, then desperation. "Colonel?" he whispered, head angling toward his voice. "You . . . you . . ." He pulled his only arm away from the startled nurse, his hand stretching out, searching.

Roy shouldered roughly past the nurse, taking his place by the bedside and wrapping his hand around Ed's. Ed flinched violently at the contact, trying to pull his trapped hand away with a panicked whimper, but quieted when Roy said, "I'm right here, Ed."

The small hand gripped his impossibly tight, as if holding on for his life. "Don't leave," he begged, voice quiet and broken in about as many places as Roy's heart. His eyes were drooping as his small frame took a shuddering breath. "Can't stay awake . . . can't fight them, they'll come back, please don't leave . . ." He had been fighting sleep, fighting against the pull of anesthesia, but apparently a familiar voice was enough to make him relax enough to go under.

Roy swallowed thickly "I'm not going anywhere," he found himself saying, squeezing the boy's hand gently. "I'll be here when you wake up."

"Promise . . . promise . . ."

"I promise."

Roy's quiet assurance seemed to satisfy the child. He gave a weak nod and his eyes closed. Roy waited a minute until his breathing evened out and the hand went limp in his before he turned to the three nurses, venom in his eyes. "What is the meaning of this?"

The men paled considerably, blinking at him with wide eyes. He stared at them until one found the resolve to answer. "We gave him the sedative, but his last dose started to wear off before the new one kicked in," the thin red headed kid explained, voice quivering. "He started thrashing, so we were trying to get him strapped down—"

"Tell me," Roy interrupted, his own voice quivering, but with barely suppressed rage, "is this whole hospital completely incompetent?"

All three blanched even further. "No, sir, we—"

"Get out of my sight. I want the head nurse down here." They didn't move. "Now," he snarled.

All three jumped, nearly tripping over themselves to get out the door.

The room fell into the closest things hospitals got to silence: the hum of air conditioning, the rattling of carts and chatter of nurses in the halls, the steady beep of the heart monitor. Suddenly all of Roy's rage— the anger and guilt he'd been nursing since Ed went missing, that had built to an inferno upon their arrival at the hospital— all left him in a rush. He dragged one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs from the wall and sank into it, never letting go of Ed's hand as he did. For some reason, he didn't want to let go. He wasn't sure if it was more for Ed's comfort or for his own.

"Sir?"

He glanced up at his lieutenant tiredly. "What is it?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it and shook her head, grabbing the only other chair for herself and dropping into it.

They sat there for a while, lost in their own thoughts as they stared at the blonde boy in the bed.

To say he looked awful would have been the understatement of the century . . . He was so horribly thin, cheekbones jutting from his face and eyes sunken, the children's hospital gown swallowing him in its green expanse. His skin was pale and almost papery under Roy's hand, graced with scars and bruises. He looked like some kind of macabre jigsaw puzzle, stitches tracing across his body as if the threads were the only thing holding him together. The blonde locks were now clean, but dimmed somehow, their luster gone, and Roy's eyes were drawn to the swath of fabric encircling his small throat. He recalled how protective Ed had been of his neck, and wondered vaguely if some special attention had been paid to it by his captors.

"We have to get him back to Central," Roy found himself saying, almost absently, as he gently massaged the back of Ed's hand with his thumb, careful of the IV taped to it. "He can't stay here."

"It's probably not safe to move him yet, sir," Hawkeye said, but her voice said otherwise. She wanted him back home, too.

Roy shook his head. "I know doctors in Central. Doctors I trust. He needs to be someplace familiar, with familiar people. We'll have to go back to the office eventually, and I'm not letting him stay here. Not by himself."

Hawkeye nodded, the gesture seeming to neither agree nor disagree. "It will be a stressful move for him like this."

"He would be sedated the whole time. He wouldn't even know he'd moved until he woke up in Central."

She didn't respond, and Roy lost himself in his thoughts again. He tried to breathe deep, to dispel the numbness in his chest. He was probably in a bit of shock, still trying to process what had happened, as all of them were. Too much had happened to Ed, and they still didn't even know the extent of it. What horrors had he witnessed? What awful things had been done to him? Physical recovery was going to be hard enough, and there was no telling what kind of psychological damage had been wrought.

Ed was always so strong. He was energy and light, red and gold, nothing but conviction and passion. He could do anything, overcome any obstacle, but Roy wasn't so sure this time. Ed always claimed he wasn't small, that he wasn't a kid, but now Roy was torn. He wanted to believe that Ed was big enough, strong enough to take what had been dealt him and recover from it.

But Roy couldn't help but see how small he looked, how vulnerable, lying there like a broken toy, abused and discarded. How could a child recover from this? How could anyone recover from this?

"Sir?"

The gentle hesitation in her voice made him turn to look at her. She looked tired, pale, and maybe her eyes glistened a bit, but she looked so beautiful and so strong, much stronger than Roy felt. "He'll be alright," she said with a warm smile, and though her voice shook, he could hear the conviction there. She had faith in Ed, she knew he would pull through this, just like he pulled through everything else.

Roy wished he had that faith, too. "I hope so," he whispered, turning back to the frail boy on the bed, trapped in artificial sleep, and he prayed that it was too deep for dreams.


Oh my gosh, you guys, I could scream xD

I honestly didn't expect that many reviews and favs for just the first chapter! Thanks so much, guys! I'll try to respond to all the signed reviews (both for the first chapter and the last chapter of Heart), but that'll have to be tomorrow. Sometime when it's not three in the morning haha xD

One reviewer did ask something that I wanted to address, though, for everyone's sake. In the first chapter, Ed used alchemy to escape the first time, and they asked how he could do that if he didn't have his arm. Ed can use alchemy without his arm. If nothing else, he proved that in the Barry the Chopper episode when he drew a circle on his chair to get lose C: He doesn't have to have the arm; as long as he makes the circle, be it by clapping it or drawing it, he can use his alchemy. So in the first chapter, he scratched a circle in the stone floor with his automail toe, then activated it. Hope that cleared some of that up! :)

Aaaanyways, hope you enjoyed! If you have the time, drop a review, and I'll see you next chapter!

God Bless,

-RainFlame