Beggar's Banquet Chapter 15
"The memories of who and what we have been, age upon age, life upon life, sleep within us. In that moment when a living person passes through the Gateway, we close off those memories to protect our sanity but when we arrive on the other side those memories are restored to us. The dead who are reborn, however, are sealed off so tightly that only severe shock or trauma will cause them to surface. In most cases, this is a good and merciful thing—it is far wiser to be getting on with the life at hand. I know for certain that in my own case I would far prefer to be reborn tabula rasa—in the state of holy innocence—than be reminded yet again of the sins I have committed in all my many years…"
---Van Hohenheim of Light
Elric Family private archives
EARTHSIDE, AT THE RANAMURTE GATE-NOWI survived Hohenheim's neglect, and the pain of watching him withdrawing from his own sons.
I survived the war years. My sons never went hungry or unloved.
I survived the agony of my illness, never giving my children cause to grieve or worry until it was simply impossible to conceal any longer.
I survived the hazards of passing into flesh again, of being born of woman so that I could find my sons again
If I can survive all that, Tricia Elric told herself as Envy reached for her, then this is nothing…
And when he was done, she spat, once, upon the ground and stared up at him, her face unreadable. In fact, none of them had said one word. Envy couldn't fathom it. He had counted on the Pipsqueak screaming in outrage, to come up off the ground swinging, ready for the fight he'd anticipated for so long. He'd chosen his victim with great care, for the greatest effect it would have on the little bastard. He'd even considered buggering Alphonse but it might have been risky and it could have cost him his hostage. Since all the troubles began with the attempt to bring Tricia Elric back from the dead, it seemed like a delicious idea to skull-fuck their mother in front of her sons, even better to assume Edward's form and voice as he violated her.
The bitch had done as ordered—and when it was done she spit his seed in the dirt and sat back on her heels, meeting his eyes with cold contempt, He raised one foot, planted it between her breasts and shoved. She toppled over backwards at Edwin's feet. The brat caught her tightly in his arms, blotting his tears on her hair. "Ohhh, Tricia….I'm so sorry," he whimpered, just as…
…just as Hohenheim would have done. "Get over here," Envy hissed, trembling with sudden elation. "If I didn't know the bastard was dead I'd swear—"
"ENVY! You've had your fun, now," Edward shouted desperately. "Hell, I'll even give you a free shot. C'mon, this is getting old. You wanna fight? I'm the one you hate so goddamn much, now that Dad's dead—"
"Save your breath, son." Edwin Hohenheim Elric, age fourteen, rose to his feet with a weary little smile. "I'm the one he wants."
AMESTRIS—NOW"You'd better make a run for it." Taisa Roy Mustang tore his eyes away from the museum map and glanced quickly at Josh Tringham, fidgeting nervously beside him. "If I can lure him down to the restoration lab there's bound to be plenty of volatile chemicals."
"What—what are you going to do?" Josh demanded. Mustang was looking unnervingly calm. "You're not going to blow this place up, are you?"
One corner of Mustang's mouth arched slightly in amusement. "I'm open to suggestions, presuming you have any. No? Then we do it my way."
"B-but—you'll never get out of there alive."
"That's a possibility."
"I know all the back passages through the whole place, including the garden."
"And as soon as you scribble them on this map I can lure Gluttony down to the lab and finish him off." A part of him felt physically ill. The kid was right. Blowing up the lab gave him little hope of getting out of there alive. I'll never see Edward again, not in this life. I'll miss the wedding and he's going to be righteously pissed. But this monstrosity had come back to Amestris because of him, so it was his responsibility to blow Gluttony straight to hell—or to the Gateway, which ever was his final destination.
Josh straightened his shoulders stubbornly. "Nothin' doing, Colonel. And you're right—it is all my fault."
Mustang was adamant. "Now, listen to me—"
"You took Edward Elric as a State Alchemist when he was only twelve. I'm seventeen. I'm not a child. And you don't know this world anymore."
They glared at one another for several long minutes before Roy shook his head in resignation. "I suppose it's pointless to suggest what a loss this would be to your parents if you get yourself killed."
"No worse than it would be to Ed and everybody you left back on Earth."
Mustang rumpled his hair in frustration. "Fine. Now, here's my plan…"
HOPE SPRINGS RESORT, RANAMURTE"Fuck my blessed Aunt Nelly, but this is too ugly for words!" Paul Youngblood was scrubbing the spatters of rotten egg off the sleeve of his jacket and spritzing FeBreeze frantically in all directions. "Somebody get that crazy bitch out of here!" By 'that crazy bitch' he meant the lovely DEA agent who was firing off rounds over her head. "She's cuffing every faggot in sight, darling, and it's bad for business. And if I can't get the stains out of this silk I'll scratch her pretty eyes out!"
Paninya wasn't listening to anything but her radio. She was frantically stuffing wads of cash from the safe into a briefcase and deleting files off the network. "Hello, Skipjack? The tennis court is all clear. I'll be out there in two minutes."
The radio crackled back. "That's a negative, Miz P. We got Martina Navratilova hosting a backhand stroke clinic out there. You got to get them out of there, ASAP."
Paninya snapped the briefcase shut and stuffed a usb flash drive into her pocket. "Damn Martina!" she growled. "Who gives a rat's ass if you knock a few silly bitches on their asses? They're only a bunch of dykes!"
Only a bunch of…DYKES???
Paul Youngblood, formerly of American Airlines, currently serving as wedding consultant for Hope Springs Resort, mentally scratched his present job off his resume. His hand slipped into his desk drawer and into his pocket before he turned to Paninya with the most charming smile he could manage while fantasizing about feeding her to the legendary Beelzebufo. "Sweetie, ask Skipjack to give me five eensy minutes to get everybody out and he can land, 'kay? I'll make sure you can get to safety."
"Now, if only I can remember my hanky code," he muttered frantically as he checked his breast pocket. "White means 'parley' or 'surrender', right?"
'Give me a hand, mon." Skipjack's co-pilot had leaned down to grab the brief case full of cash and evidence, but Paninya was struggling to climb up into Skipjack's decommissioned Huey helicopter. She'd gestured for Paul to give her a leg up, since Skipjack hadn't actually touched ground, only lowered a rescue ladder to about four feet off the ground.
"No, precious. There's been a tee-nincey change in plans." A pair of steel handcuffs, tastefully decorated with pink leopard-print velvet, snapped on her wrists, the other side clicked shut around the rungs of chain ladder. "Agent Hawkeye?" he called gleefully, "I'll take that reward in non sequential bills, please!"
The blond grimly nodded, approaching the tennis court at a dead run. Paninya appealed to Skipjack's sense of greed. "You can have every'ting, mon. All of it. Jus' get me out of here!"
"Okay, Boss Lady. Hang on!"
"Ohhh, merde! Come back here, you back stabbing bitch!" Paul shouted as the Huey lifted off, his former boss hanging on for dear life to the bottom rungs of the wildly swinging ladder. "She's getting away!"
"The hell she is!" A bullet pinged thru one side of the ladder, causing Paninya to scrabble wildly to the broken chain. "He'll be forced to land. He's not going to let her fall to her death."
Paul grinned as the Huey headed out towards the docks and open water. "That's all you know, babycakes."
Hawkeye stared at him in amazement. "Still," she confirmed, "she's cuffed to the ladder. She'll be bruised but she won't fall."
Paul covered his face in embarrassment. "Ohhh, silly me! Here are the cuffs you handed me. I'm afraid I had my own in my pocket. They cost me a fortune at Lucy's Manhattan Love Emporium."
Hawkeye's jaw dropped several inches. "Fetish cuffs?? My god, man—those are designed to break away for safety!"
"Ooopsie. My bad." Hands in his pockets, Paul strolled off towards the paint splattered wreckage of Le Grenouille, humming an old Jimmy Buffett song:
"She got fins to the left, fins to the right—and she's the only bait in townnnn…"
AMESTRIS—NOWThere he is! Gluttony's stomach rumbled with delight as he spotted a familiar black haired man standing in the open doorway labeled "RESTORATION LAB"
A voice echoed around him through the overhead speakers. "Hey Gluttony—EAT ME!"
Tongue rippling behind him, Gluttony barreled up the hall and dove towards the man in the cargo pants, mouth open, arms outstretched..
From behind him, Taisa Roy Mustang raised his hand, concentrated on the gleaming red stone on his middle finger, and then snapped.
Ka-FOOOOOMMMMMMMMMmmmm.
The entire left wing of the complex, including the lab, the gift shop, the food court and the FueryMax 3-D Theater had been reduced to cinders.
"I…I think I just pissed on myself," whispered Josh Tringham.
Taisa mopped the sweat off his forehead and grinned. "Me too."
"Nice view of the garden, What's left of it, that is."
Far off in the distance came the frantic honking of fire trucks and squad cars, their lights flashing blue and red on the horizon. "We'd better get back to the gallery and get you home, sir."
"Not so fast. You see a body anywhere around here?"
"N-no."
Mustang frowned. "I remember it took more than one shot to kill Lust," he muttered half to himself.
There was an earsplitting roar to their left in the statuary garden. Josh's favorite snack kiosk, the one that served those tasty Not-A-Shrimp Bites with Flame Alchemist Sauce was being gulped down as fast as Josh would down a cold bottle of Louis Lime flavored Strong Ade.
"JOSH! Come back here!" Before Mustang could stop him, the boy had dashed out of hiding. Snatching a half-empty bottle of Strong-Ade out of a nearby trash bin, he chucked it at Gluttony's head, then whistled sharply.
"Hey, FATASS! Ya eat too much of that junk food it's gonna give you the most epic farts in the history of the free world!"
"Huhhh???"
The behemoth lumbered around just as Josh shot behind the solid bronze statue of the Flame Alchemist with its eternal flame dancing on the statue's gloved fingertips. "Hey! Over here, fatass! Got something crunchy for ya!"
Gluttony pounced.
Josh dove behind the seven foot bronze of Alphonse Elric. "ROY! NOW!!!"
"Owww…fuck, my head hurts…" Worse than the throb in his head was the ringing in his ears from the roar of the explosion when the Colonel had blown up his own gas-powered statue—and the propane tank that fed its perpetual flame.
The museum was crawling with firefighters who had abandoned the smoldering wreck of the left wing and were now stampeding through the garden, tying to put out a twenty foot high column of fire where Roy Mustang's statue used to be.
Mustang had hauled him clear and, after consulting the map, ducked in through the still functioning service elevator on the right side of the main building. Dodging security, they made their way through the corridors towards the Gatestone Exhibit. "Hang on a second, Roy," Josh told him, ducking down the hall towards the Elric display. There was a loud crash of glass and another alarm added it's noise to the cacophony. "Here. Take this with you." A parcel shoved in a plastic envelope was shoved into his arms. "Get this back to Earth. It's…for Edward."
Roy nodded and shoved it inside his uniform jacket. "Key's still in the stone. If my theory's right, then all I need…is this."
On Christmas Eve, 2007, Edward Elric sat down at his desk while his lover slept on the couch nearby. He was drowsy and peaceful from lovemaking, but he had forced himself to slip out of Taisa's arms long enough to add a few lines to the letter that he'd kept sealed in the family vault, the letter he was to take with him if he ever traveled near the Gatestones again.
His eyes darted away from the original missive. Hard to believe he'd written anything so raw and intimate and tender to the man he routinely addressed as Shithead and Asshole. The fine parchment had cockled slightly and the ink was blurred in a few places where the tears had dripped down his cheeks and stained the document. He had actually signed it in blood, nicking his finger with a sterile needle.
Tonight while Taisa slept he thought of the newborn down the hall, snuggled safely in Alphonse's arms. A child conceived of Elric blood by a Mustang…
"One thing more, my shujin (husband)—promise me that if you are on Earth and I'm dead that you'll watch over Izumi. I know you'd do it anyway, but the truth is, she's not just Teddy's child…she's yours and mine. She's the child we can't make between us and she was born of our love for each other. Every time I look at her, it's not the Colonel I see—it's you. I can't tell you what it means to know that a part of you will live on after time has taken us away from each other, even if we know we'll find one another again. That child means everything to me. Please keep her safe—she is the proof that even love like ours can survive in spite of Fate's best efforts to keep us apart…
His throat was tight as he refolded the envelope and stashed it inside his jacket beside the parcel Josh had given him. He held out his hand. Josh took it. "I'd get out of here if I were you. Have a good life, kid."
"Hope you get home, Sir. "
"Don't hope. Believe it." The older man snapped to salute, stepped through the wreckage where the stone had toppled flat on the floor. Without hesitating, he knelt down, took the blood-signed letter that Edward had given him and pressed it into the fissure in the stone's surface.
The building rocked. "What did I tell you?" a voice echoed in the blinding light. "I SAID, run like fuck!"
EARTHSIDE, THE RANAMURTE GATE—NOW"You?? Hohenheim?? Don't jerk me around!" Envy spat. "You're just a punk kid, and probably not half as good a fuck as your father was after I killed him. You're useless." One pale hand hoisted Izumi, dangling her by the back of her onesie. "This filthy little brat is at least good for one thing. Hey Pipsqueak—remember what our father said about everybody having a Gateway inside us? Remember Rose's brat? Dante used that child to open the Gate. Alchemy doesn't work here—so we'll try blood magic instead…"
Flicking his razor in the air, he morphed back into the familiar shape of a certain well known actor. "Swing your razor wide, Envy!—"
"—oh god, no…"
"---see it glint and shiiiine!"
"—ENVY! You bast—"
"…sink it in the blood that flows from HOHENHEIM…"
….To Be CONTINUED…