A/N: I'm glad people seem to like this story. I'll try to keep updating it regularly.
Disclaimer: -points to FMA- Not mine.
Chapter Three -- Over the Hills
The sun's dying rays had vanished when the military train came to a stop. The hiss of steam, made more dramatic by the temperature, soon vanished into the moonlight, and they disembarked. Some of the men took supplies out of the luggage compartments while Kansan and Mustang led the rest of the troops across the tracks, down the long, concrete slab of a platform, and up a half-flight of stairs into the station.
They marched in order, or some semblance of it, and the sound of boots echoed in the small main room. Behind the glass to their right, the ticket man regarded them with a suspicious eye. The building was brick outside and brick inside, giving it a rough feeling. In front of them was a row of small stores that had not been open for business in months.
As the train pulled off again, headed into the wild cold of Drachma, Kansan lengthened his stride to match Roy's.
"Something on your mind?" Roy muttered.
"This place is not to my liking." Kansan gave the station a critical eye, letting himself linger in the shadowed corners and looking up into the vaulted ceiling, as if expecting rebel forces to come parachuting down on them all.
"They won't be here, and you know that. What kind of kidnappers would bring people to the largest town in a hundred miles, knowing that we'd probably start here?"
"Then perhaps we shouldn't have come to Calavis, Mustang."
Roy shrugged the words off, refusing to let the other man under his skin. "We can afford to be predicable. They can't. This is the best place to get information on who might have done this, and the best opportunity to contact them. But you knew that too, right, General?" He said all this while looking straight ahead, knowing that his smirk was not as easily visible from the side.
"Of course. I was merely checking to ensure that your accident hadn't affected your brain, Mustang." He gave a sharp glance towards Roy's eyepatch. "What a shame that would be."
Walking a few paces behind, Riza found that, at the moment, nothing would please her more than emptying both of her handguns between Ralph Kansan's shoulder blades.
While both Mustang and Kansan walked up front, Langston hung near the back, just in front of Havoc and Fuery, who seemed to be having a heated debate. He let his strides lag a little more, and he caught the last few words of something that roused his curiosity.
"… don't think Mustang would appreciate that, at this point," Havoc was saying.
"But what if something happened to her, and he didn't -- "
"Don't you think he's doing everything he can anyway?" Havoc talked over the younger man's protests. "Don't you think he has enough on his plate as it is?"
"But -- "
"It wouldn't change anything, right?" His voice was low, intent on driving this point home.
A sigh, and a pause. "No."
"Alright then, Fuery."
They were almost to the station steps now. It was now, or much later. Langston chose now. He fell back further, to Havoc's left. Both men gave him a questioning glance.
"Do either of you know," he began in an undertone, "who Frank Archer is?"
Fuery nearly tripped, and Havoc snapped, "Who told you about Archer?"
"General Mustang."
Jean Havoc shook his head. "Then I guess we can tell you, right?" He looked to Fuery, who nodded his assent. "Frank Archer was in the military when… there was an offensive move on a city called Lior. He led hundreds of men in, and they all died. Archer himself got some pretty nasty injuries, and what they put him through afterwards, to fix his body, took whatever small amount of sanity he was born with. He… died soon afterwards."
Fuery gave a nervous cough. After that, they were in the station, and silence fell over the soldiers. Langston was more intrigued than ever.
It was Tuesday night, and one of Winry's legs still hurt when she moved it the wrong way. She couldn't sleep, no matter what she tried. Counting backwards had never worked for her, not even as a small child back in Risembool. Closing her eyes just made her other senses more acute; she could hear Elizabeth's soft snores and smell the slight musty odor of the house, as if, before they had come, it had been abandoned for many years.
She turned towards the hooded man, presumably the same one who had been guarding them on the train. The others had been on the next car up, she had learned later. Insurance in case something went awry. Winry shuddered, and he turned to look at her. Boldness born from lost hope struck her.
"Why are you doing this?" She whispered, for even though she was the one sitting closest by him, Elizabeth and Leonard might be light sleepers. She didn't care about the unsavory character or his strange friend.
He lifted his face, and she saw thin lips, a straight nose. Not his eyes, not yet.
"Why am I here?"
"You were in the wrong place at the wrong time." His voice was flat, and deep. No joy existed there, and Winry couldn't imagine that there ever had been.
"It could have been anyone?"
"Yes…" He looked at her, and then the Ferns. "… and no." He inclined his head towards the two men asleep, sitting by a window.
"What do you want from us?" It was a question she had asked, with increasing volume and shrill tone, over the past days, each time without a response. She kept her voice lowered now.
"Only what was ours." He took the hood off, letting a mane of fiery red hair fall to his shoulders. His eyes appeared light in the darkness. He resembled some fierce chimera-like creature, she decided. He stared back at her, now, with no sign of shame.
Winry decided it was a mark of how tired she was that she actually believed him. The truth was still eluding her, she was sure, but sleep no longer did. By the time the man put his hood back on and leaned back into the hard oak frame of the chair to watch them, she was asleep.
It was a full hour after the blonde girl closed her eyes when someone came in to relieve Alexander of his guard duties. He got up with a grunt, passed his replacement a small bottle of liquor, and went out into the hall, pacing up and down until all the feeling came back into his limbs.
The hallway he stepped into was narrow and long, with several doorways leading into room in front of him. Wallpaper showing lacy blue patterns was peeling from the walls, revealing various shades of white and yellow drywall. Bare lightbulbs lit the way, and the equally naked, unpolished floor creaked with every careless step he took; whichever way one looked, the house spoke of disrepair.
At the end of the hall, past the stairs and the closet and the bathroom, a light was on in the largest bedroom, which the previous occupant had been using as an office. That was the reason they had chosen this place, he recalled now. For all its unattractiveness, it had a telephone, and locks on all the rooms. Very few modifications needed to be made to turn a bed and breakfast into a hostage situation.
He entered the room, and the four men slouching on various pieces of furniture immediately stood up, or tried to. The youngest, his own nephew, toppled the chair he'd been leaning back in. Alexander spared him only a moment's withering glance. Despite their casual manner, he knew that these men were among the most devoted and loyal of his forty or so followers.
He went to sit on one of the chaises, taking pleasure in that fact that this chair had a cushion. He sighed deeply, and allowed the events of the past few days to wash over him like a tidal wave.
He, Alexander Gorsky, had done it. The first part of it, at least. They'd come into Amestris through illegal means, and laid low in Cohigis until Kurt Fielding had gone to the bank. The crooked politician had just been a welcome bonus, and the civilians? They were bargaining chips if something happened to go wrong. His conscience grumbled at the kidnapping of women and children, but he let it be. If all went right, no blood would be shed, and what was rightfully theirs would be returned. The if was what made his heart skip beats on occasion.
If this didn't go exactly as planned, his father and sister would never speak to him again. They had shunned him during the past month, but it was nothing that a job well done wouldn't heal. The blood that ran between them would only be cut off if he caused the slaughter of innocents, and failed to bring them what they were too afraid to obtain by themselves.
The ringing of a telephone brought him out of his reverie.
"Hello?" Roman, his childhood best friend and current cohort, answered it. "The code, if you would." His eyes were on Alexander, who felt his heart race as Roman nodded. It was their contact. "Alright, then… Oh?"
All the men in the office sat up at the change in the stoic Drachman's voice.
Roman allowed the barest of smiles to touch his face. "Well, then, that is good news. Thank you."
The phone had just touched the receiver when Alexander whispered, "Well?"
"They've arrived at Calavis. And your sister's had a sudden change of heart."
He nodded, adrenaline that he hadn't known since the bank pumping through his veins. They were in Calavis, and his sister had changed her mind. Alexander mentally congratulated himself for anticipating the military. Paying off every ticket-man on the night shift hadn't been a waste of money at all.
Of all the things Roy expected to see upon exiting the station, a tall, solidly build woman whose red hair was silhouetted against the streetlights was not one of them. But there she stood -- no she was walking towards them now -- as real as the stone and wood buildings around them.
Behind him, he could hear several feet scuffling against the pavement, and the click of a pistol's safety, followed by several others. Riza, no doubt. He pushed a couple different emotions down without bothering to identify them.
The red-haired woman stopped a dozen or so paces from them. She spoke, just as Kansan opened his mouth. "My name is Anya Gorsky, and I know why you're here."
"You do?" Kansan said, working an incredible amount of contempt into two syllables.
"Yes, I think I just said that." Under the glare of a streetlamp, the woman's sneer was almost inhuman. "I know you're here for the hostages, and I know how you can get them."
"What are their names?" This was Roy, taking a single step forward.
Without batting an eyelash, Anya replied, "Elliot Wicker, Kurt Fieldling, Elizabeth Ferns, Leonard Ferns…" -- somewhere in the ranks, Kain Fuery winced -- "… and Winry Rockbell."
"Why don't we just take you, right now, for leverage?" This was Kansan, as Roy found himself unable to speak, and also trying not to be sick. As if he could be more involved in this than he already was…
"Because I'll sacrifice myself long before you let anyone die." Anya held her prominent chin high, giving Roy the impression that she either had a first-class poker face, or she was not bluffing. He'd bet money on the second option.
"What do you want, Ms. Gorsky?" Roy had recovered some shreds of composure by now.
"It's not what I want, but I suppose that's besides the point. What the kidnappers want? They want this land back." She gestured widely, letting one long arm swing across the city and back where there were no buildings at all.
"Who owns the land?" Kansan's voice really was starting to bother Roy. It was the grating tone of a warden talking to prisoners, except when he wanted something.
"Kurt Fieldling." Anya's eyes flashed with rage. "He bought it all, and Wicker's father wrapped it up in so much red tape that we can never get it back. They legally swindled us, and then Fieldling mined for silver on the land that used to be ours."
"So you kidnap civilians?" Roy ground the words out.
"That's not the end of it! This city, this place… we used to be spread out between here and the big city of Porra, in the valley, but twenty years ago, there was an epidemic there. All but a few of the survivors came here. There was grief and pain like nothing else in this world. We tried to prosper, even though the profits from the valley's businesses were gone. We were desperate. And then Fieldling buys everything for nothing -- we had no choice but to sell to him -- and we send our men to work for him for practically nothing." Tears stained her face as she looked up at them, and Roy remembered that nothing was ever as uncomplicated as it seemed. "And then we struck oil.
"All the money he had, and he still wanted more, the greedy bastard. We tried to drill for it ourselves, but he had drained from under our land, the little bits and pieces of it that were still in our hands. We who have lived here for generations have nothing, and a man who lives in a mansion in another country entirely gets everything. Does that sound right to you?"
"It sounds like kidnapping," said Kansan coldly.
"What are their plans, Ms. Gorsky?" Roy saw his breath clearly as he spoke.
"They don't want money, if that's what you're guessing. They will make Fieldling give us the deeds back."
"I don't think this is the kind of man who would part with his money easily," Roy said. "Or at all."
"And I don't think you know the lengths these people will go to," she countered. "Do you think we're that simple?"
They slept in the train station that night, though many did not rest at all. By the light of candles, Mustang, Hawkeye, Corsair, and Kansan discussed the situation well past midnight. On one hand, the situation was very straightforward. On the other hand, Langston thought, it was very complicated.
The hostages were not in Calavis; both Generals and Hawkeye had agreed on that. There were too many people; it would have been far too difficult to bring five foreigners in without drawing attention. If they were to believe Anya, few people outside of the rebel group itself knew about the kidnapping.
Roy took a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket, and spread it before the four of them. It clearly showed that Calavis was on a very large hill, and that in a valley to the north the doomed city of Porra rested in peace. Langston's intuition tingled, but Riza spoke before he could. If an abandoned city wasn't a good place to conceal five hostages, what was?
Simple enough, until Langston saw reason. Going in there now might get the one or more of the Amestrians killed, but waiting and seeing if the demands of the rebels could be met by Fieldling seemed riskier. Both sides of the conflict were desperate for a solution to different problems.
Some time before dawn, a sufficient plan had been laid out, and the finer points of it were drilled into Corsair's memory by sheer repetition.
Langston looked on while the shadows playing across Mustang's face grew deeper. Was there something else bothering the General, besides the turn of events? His eyes flickered to Major Hawkeye, who watched her superior officer closely even when she was talking. There were shadows on her face too, and they seemed to mirror his.
Between Frank Archer, Havoc and Fuery's conversation, and the strangeness he was witnessing now, Langston thought he had had his fill of secrecy for a lifetime.
Artyom the ticket-man had dozed off watching the four higher-ups discussing strategy, figuring that if he couldn't hear what they were saying, there was no point in losing his valuable rest. It was now five in the morning; he had checked the watch given to him by Alexander Gorsky. The blue-and-gold clad soldiers were all listening to two men, one with black hair, one with close-cut brown. They were going to move west, then? Check out all the small towns there? Excellent.
He remembered at the last moment to appear drowsy as they marched out. The tall, thin young man walking near the front might have given him a furtive glance, but Arty was tired, and given to seeing things in his old age. He grinned upon hearing the door close, and fumbled with arthritic fingers for the phone. Alexander would be safe for now, in Porra, and giving him the information now might get Arty a nice necklace for the wife.