Chapter 4
Live Wire
When the door opened and Pride entered again, Winry tottered to her feet as swiftly as she could, her whole body wound tight with tension.
"I'm busting you out of here," the homunculus said, without any preliminaries.
The mechanic blinked, certain she'd misheard. "What?"
"Are you hard of hearing? I said I'm getting you out of here!" Pride snapped.
"Why?"
"Never mind why, just come on!"
"And I'm just supposed to trust you, is that it?" Winry asked, laying on as much scepticism as possible.
Pride folded his arms and gave her an exasperated look so much like Ed's that she blinked. "Will you be any worse off?"
He had a point, Winry conceded. Trusting him could hardly make her situation worse. "Okay, fine, just give me a minute to get Pretty..."
"You want to bring that thing with you?"
"Why not?" Winry snapped. She knew she was probably being unreasonable, but she couldn't bring herself to leave the poor chimera here.
Pride looked like he could come up with several thousand reasons as to why not, but apparently decided to would be swifter not to argue with her. While Winry had only hobbled halfway across the room to the tethered chimera, the shadows had leapt from the floor and severed the chain about three feet from Pretty's collar.
Even though he claimed to be helping her, Winry couldn't hold in a little shiver at the evidence that he could also make the shadows ridiculously sharp and capable of severing metal.
"Come on, girl, we're getting out of here...I think," she muttered to Pretty, wrapping the chain-turned-leash around her hand.
Pretty's long, forked tongue lapped at Winry's wrist for a moment, but the creature began to growl threateningly when Pride approached, their last encounter obviously fresh in her mind.
"It's okay," the mechanic whispered, patting the fine, bristling hairs along the Pretty's back. "He's not going to do anything creepy this time...I think."
"Stop coddling the stupid thing and let's get going!" Pride barked, looking edgy.
"We're coming, we're coming," Winry hissed, limping in the direction of the door. "Take it easy!"
Pride regarded her mobility – which Winry placed as somewhere between a snail and a crippled tortoise – with a look of murderous frustration. The next thing the mechanic knew, she was being swept up in Pride's arm and onto his back like a child. On instinct, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her fingers still tightly clenched around Pretty's chain, and she yelped as her ankle knocked against his leg.
"Don't yell in my ear!"
"Don't touch my sprained ankle!"
Pride swore, already beginning to regret this, and began to run.
Winry clung to his back, biting her lip against the throbbing pain in her ankle as she was jolted up and down. The chain she was holding snapped back and forth as Pretty galloped beside them, claws clattering on the hard floor. She tried to keep track of the twists and turns Pride was following, but soon gave up – there was no way she'd be able to hold all this in her mind, and why was she even trying to remember it anyway? Hopefully, she wouldn't be back here, so she concentrated on not letting go of either Pride's shoulders or Pretty's chain.
-xxx-
As soon as Pride had clambered up the pipes to the surface and set her down on her own feet, Winry glanced around at the towering buildings, the cobbled streets...
"Are we in Central?"
"Bingo," Pride nodded, glancing down the street.
"What time is it?" Winry asked.
It was clearly very late – the moon was high in the sky, and the streetlamps revealed that the roads were deserted.
"About one in the morning," Pride replied absently.
Winry winced – one in the morning! She knew being locked up without any windows or way of telling the time would screw up her internal clock!
Pretty whined, and she reached down to pat the chimera reassuringly. "What are you looking for, by the way?"
"Some way to get us out of this city," the homunculus muttered. "We can't hang around here."
"You didn't really think this escape-thing through did you?" Winry grumbled, limping forward into the empty street.
"I can always put you back in the cell..."
"You'd have to catch me first!"
"Yeah, like that would be difficult..."
Winry opened her mouth to reply, but suddenly Pride had yanked her into a doorway, one hand clapped over her mouth to stifle her yelp as her injured ankle dragged.
"There's two soldiers just down the block," he hissed. "Keep quiet!"
Winry pushed his hand away, trying to disguise how uncomfortable she was – she couldn't help but remember the last time their faces had ended up in such close proximity and what had happened then – and glanced down the street. Sure enough, she could see two military personnel standing beside a car, their brass buttons reflecting the light from the streetlamp. They spoke in low voices for a few moments, then began to make their way down the street – fortunately in the opposite direction from where Winry, Pride and Pretty were hiding.
"Probably got called out here for some reason," Winry whispered. "Help me get to the car."
"They'll see us!" he protested.
"Use your freaky pet shadows or something – that car could be our ticket out of here."
Winry knew she should probably be feeling more guilt about essentially stealing a car, but they needed to get out of the city quickly (in a more inconspicuous fashion than her on Pride's back with Pretty running alongside) and recent events had left her with some animosity towards the military.
Pride grumbled, but did as she'd instructed, using his shadows to shield them from view. It wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny, of course, but it would at least keep the soldiers from noticing something strange in their peripheral vision.
Winry opened the back door of the car as quietly as she could and urged Pretty up onto the back seat.
"They didn't leave the keys," Pride hissed. "How were you planning on starting this thing?"
"I'm going to hotwire it," Winry said honestly.
"...you know how to do that?"
"Yeah – my grandmother taught me," the mechanic explained as she cautiously popped the hood and began to fiddle. "We had this really, really crappy car, you see – Granny never told me where she got it but I always suspected she'd found it in a ravine or something – but the ignition port was damaged and there were no keys, so you had to hotwire the thing to get it to start. It finally died when I was about thirteen-"
"Your grandmother was teaching you to hotwire cars before you were thirteen! If I had known you were a criminal mastermind when Father told me to grab you, I'd have left you well alone."
"Keep it down! And get ready to jump in the passenger seat, because as soon as the engine turns over, those soldiers are going to come running."
Pride cast a speculative glance up the street. "It would be a lot easier if I just knocked them out or something..."
"Only as a last resort."
The engine suddenly roared into life and Pride jumped. Winry slammed the hood closed and practically leapt into the driver's seat, leaving the homunculus to scramble after her as shouts and the sound of running feet began to resound down the road.
Of course, he couldn't help but ask, "Do you actually know how to dri-"
Then inertia slammed him against his seat as Winry floored the accelerator and the car charged forward. The startled yelp from the backseat told him Pretty had just suffered a similar fate.
"This is much more responsive than Granny's old car," the mechanic commented as she spun the wheel to turn onto the main road.
She grimaced as she was forced to use her injured foot to work the clutch again and shift into a lower gear.
Pride was on the verge of breathing a sigh of relief when their pace began to slow, until he realised the car hadn't slowed nearly enough.
"Don't you think we should slow down a bit – you know, now that we're out of their sight?"
Winry didn't even turn to look at him – though considering the speed she was driving at, Pride considered that a good thing. "They'll probably be alerting headquarters, which means we need to get out of the city as fast as possible."
While some part of Pride saw the wisdom in that, most of him was busy pointing out that if another car happened to shoot out in front of them, they'd probably be smashed to a pulp. He knew he could survive any crash, but this pace made even him nervous!
He glanced back to see if he could use the chimera's distress as an argument for stopping, but unfortunately found that Pretty was being true to canine instincts by hanging her head out of the window, her long tail wriggling back and forth enthusiastically.
-xxx-
Pride had expected Winry to keep driving until they ran out of fuel, not pull over on a deserted forest road as soon as she could to check their supplies.
"How do you know they even have supplies?" he asked the blonde.
"This is a military vehicle," she pointed out, opening the back door to let Pretty out. "Trust me, there'll be some stuff in the trunk. Can you use your shadows or something to get it open?"
Pride sighed, severing the metal of the lock by manipulating the shadows cast by the car's headlights. Winry peered into the dark depths, but the only source of light was useless at this angle, so she put her hand inside and tried to guide herself by touch.
"Let's see, we seem to have...a couple of blankets – good! Hey, there's some camouflage gear and two helmets as well. And...I think this is either water or fuel – can't tell in this light. Probably water, though, because if it's fuel there's a hell of a lot of it. Okay, that was definitely water; I think the fuel is in this tin-thing. There's what feels like some rope and a tent or something...also these two briefcase shaped things that I'd like a closer look at..."
Winry heaved them out and deposited them on the ground. Pretty, having attended to her business behind a nearby tree, snuffled curiously at them, but the mechanic gently but firmly pushed her nose away. "No, girl – not for you."
In the moonlight, she could vaguely make out a dark cross on a light-coloured background on the smaller case, indicating it was probably a first-aid kit. Making a mental note to check that for some sturdier wraps for her ankle, Winry opened the other one.
Pride rolled his eyes and glanced back at the road they'd come from, on the lookout for anyone driving down it – their car had probably already been reported stolen by now.
"Score!" Winry's enthusiastic voice came to him. "This is the emergency supply kit! Maps, canned food, matches, kindling – even some cash! And I think this is a pocket knife-" there was a sudden snapping sound. "Yeah, it's a pocket knife. And there's a gun and some bullets-"
"What?" Pride barked, spinning around.
"But they're not going to do us any good," Winry continued. "Do you even have any idea how to load a gun? Because I certainly don't."
"No," Pride grudgingly admitted. "But maybe we can use it to bluff – you know, to scare people away."
"I'm pretty sure your creepy shadow-thing will do that."
The homunculus rolled his eyes again. "What do you care what we have anyway? I mean, there's a plan here, right? You're actually going somewhere?"
"Says the guy who broke me out and thus was supposed to have the escape plan."
"Hey, I got you out, didn't I?" Pride defended. "That was my plan!"
"You mean your plan was to bust me out and basically hope I had somewhere to go?"
"Well..." Pride glanced away at the dark trees surrounding them.
Winry snorted as she placed their small stash back into the trunk. "Not that I don't appreciate it...but just admit it – your plan was to hope that I had a plan." But her amusement vanished as she contemplated – for the hundredth time since they'd driven out of Central – their rather grim position. "And sorry to disappoint you on that front, but I don't. At least nothing beyond 'get out of Central and hide somewhere'."
"Great...just great," Pride muttered darkly, folding his arms and looking suspiciously like he was sulking.
"Well, at least we've got supplies and some money," Winry said optimistically, taking Pretty's dangling chain and leading the chimera back to the car. "Come on – might as well try to cover as much distance as we can while it's still dark."
Pride grimaced as he climbed into the car once more, wondering what Father's reaction to that particular piece of news would be.
After all, it was on Father's orders that he was here.
-xxx-
AN: Thanks to justcallmefaye for beta-ing this!