Title: Chasm (2/4)
Author: Jordanna Morgan
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I'm just playing with them.

PART II

"…Major Hughes, please wake up!"

The high, frightened voice was the first thing to register in Maes' awareness. The second thing was the pain.

This was not good. He felt as if his entire body had been wadded into a ball, shaken violently, and thrown down again in some careless giant's game of dice. His right arm was throbbing in agony; he vaguely recognized a sticky warmth of blood below the shoulder. His right leg was bent torturously somewhere underneath him. His head ached so savagely that he could barely see even after he opened his eyes.

"Al?" he mumbled, and tasted dirt. It was in his mouth, up his nose, under his eyelids, and he belatedly realized the heaviness on the left side of his body was a layer of dirt and small rocks too. He squirmed free of it awkwardly as he tried to blink his irritated vision into focus, absent his eyeglasses.

What he finally deciphered from the landscape around him made him wish he hadn't looked at all.

He was sitting in the bottom of a massive crater, perhaps thirty feet across, with steep earthen walls rising twenty feet or more on all sides. The sunlight that filtered down from high above was dim, but he could see enormous mounds of earth and rock heaped around him… and from the side of one such heap, he noticed a glint of steel.

"Al!" he gasped, stumbling to his feet—only to realize that a stumble was the best he would be able to manage for a while. Although his leg was not broken, it was twisted badly. Placing any weight on it caused tremendous pain. It was all he could do to stagger over to the steel-glint and drop himself in front of it, and what he found there on closer inspection only alarmed him more.

Alphonse Elric was trapped. His armor body was almost completely buried beneath the largest heap of earthen debris, and further pinned by a particularly heavy rocky slab that had wedged above him. He lay at a slight angle on what passed for his stomach, with only his shoulders and part of his right side exposed. His right arm was entirely missing, torn away at its joints just below his now-bent shoulder spikes. His helmet had also detached, and sat almost comically upright and undamaged below the protruding edge of his chestplate, as trickles of loose earth spilled down into the void of his neck-opening.

For a brief moment, Maes' gut lurched with instinctive horror… and then he forced himself to remember that Al could feel no pain.

"Are you—okay?" he asked awkwardly, laying his good hand on the upper rim of Al's backplate. It was a rather pointless gesture, but he was fairly sure Al could at least see that his hand was up there somewhere.

"Yeah," Al's small, bodiless voice responded from within the empty steel. "I'm just stuck—I can't move."

"What happened to Dyson?"

"…I don't know." Al's tone was heavy. "I tried calling his name too, but he didn't answer. What about you? Are you hurt bad, sir?"

Maes smiled weakly, if only to give Al reassurance. "I'll be alright, but I don't think I'll be much help digging you out of there right now. My leg's twisted, and my arm's not too useful." Painfully he flexed his right arm. The sleeve of his uniform jacket was torn and bloody. He removed his left hand from Al's back and carefully eased the garment off, first to glance at his wristwatch—which he found had stopped—and then to care for the deep gash that ran almost from his elbow to his shoulder. "How long was I out?"

"About ten minutes, I think." A sudden shower of soil sprinkled down between Al's headless shoulders. Maes realized he was trying futilely to move, as if to get a better look at the bleak view around them. "It happened so fast. Scar split open the ground under us so he could get away, but the transmutation he used wouldn't have made a hole this deep. There are pieces of wood from support beams mixed in with all this dirt, and I can see tool marks on the wall over there. I think we fell into a mine shaft."

"Yeah, that's what it looks like." As Maes tore strips of fabric from his jacket and wrapped them around his arm, he studied the debris of the cave-in. His wits were still fuzzy, but they could confirm Al's observations. In several places, the sides of the pit were straight and smooth, with unmistakable patterns of grooves from earth-moving machinery. This chamber had once been excavated by man; but if it had ever possessed an exit tunnel, it was now buried by the tons of fallen soil and rock.

Near the spot where he had landed, Maes noticed the especially jagged end of a broken joist protruding from the dirt. It seemed the likely cause of his injured arm. He was only lucky it hadn't caught him in the neck or the stomach instead.

Now he feared the missing member of their party had not met with similar luck.

"I'm going to see if I can find Dyson," he informed Al, as he awkwardly tied off the bandages with his left hand. "You're… sure you'll be alright like that for a while?"

"I'm fine. I'm just worried about Dyson, and you… and anyone else up above who runs into Scar." More loose earth slid down into the hollow of Al's torso. It was caused by a shudder through his steel, and Maes felt a swift, sharp pang of regret—and rage—that the boy had witnessed Voss' murder.

"They'll get him," Maes said grimly. "And they'll be along to find us any time. Just sit tight… uh, not that you can really do anything else right now. If you need me, give me a yell. I can't go far either."

He gingerly pushed himself to his feet. It was agony to place weight on his injured leg, but he clenched his jaw and hobbled away to search the bottom of the pit, leaning his hand on any wall or heap of rubble he could reach for support.

It took him almost no time to find Dyson. Ten feet away, off to one side and beyond Al's limited range of view, he saw a tuft of blond hair and a limp hand protruding from beneath a heavy fallen beam. His heart turned over as he lunged forward, briefly forgetting his pain… and then it sank as his fingers closed around the wrist, to find no trace of a pulse.

He closed his eyes, shook his head, and struggled back to the spot where Al was pinned.

"Dyson didn't make it," he announced quietly.

"Oh… oh, no." Al's voice quivered, soft and mournful. "I'm sorry. For him, and for Lieutenant Voss…"

"They died doing the jobs they cared about. I think it was quick for them both." The words sounded trite and comfortless to Maes' ears, but he said them anyway, in case they might be any consolation to Al. The boy's own predicament had to be unnerving enough for him. Even if he felt no pain or discomfort, he was surely not used to finding his inhumanly strong body in such a helpless state.

Maes crouched awkwardly, studying the earth, stones, and fragments of wooden beams that had fallen on top of Al. He appeared to have taken the brunt of the collapse. Had his body been flesh, he certainly would not have survived; as it was, he was going nowhere any time soon. The debris towered several feet deep, and its sheer weight had packed it down firmly around him. Maes considered the chances of trying to dig him free by hand, but with his own right arm severely hampered by his injury, it was a daunting prospect—and he did not at all like the precarious angle of the rocky protrusion wedged in a foot above Al. If much soil was removed from around it, he feared it would slip still further, and only worsen Al's entrapment.

Al was plainly aware of the direction of Maes' thoughts. He chuckled from pure nervousness, his mangled shoulder-spikes giving a little shrug above the open hole where his rerebrace belonged. "If I hadn't lost my arm in the cave-in, I could have drawn a transmutation circle and moved the dirt myself… Sorry."

"There's nothing for you to be sorry for." Maes looked at the torn edges of metal where Al's arm had sheared off, and was unable to suppress a grimace. "Where'd it go, anyway?"

"I dunno. I… kinda have a weird feeling when a piece of me isn't where it's supposed to be—but that doesn't tell me where it is." A low, self-conscious note crept into Al's tone. "It's hard to explain. Anyway, even if you found it now, you couldn't just screw it back on or something. It would take alchemy to make it part of me again."

The thought of what Al was experiencing was a little more than Maes could get his head around… or truthfully wanted to. He frowned and laid his hand on the helmet that still rested on the ground beneath the boy. "What about this?"

"That's… a little different. I guess because it wasn't exactly connected to the rest of the suit when Ed first put me in the armor. It's still a part of me, even though it's never really attached." Al squirmed a little. "Uh, sir, since we're talking about it, would you mind…?"

"Huh?—Oh." Blushing for no reason he could quite define, Maes gently grasped the helmet and lifted it into place between Al's shoulders. He was sure he felt it seized by something like a ghostly magnetic pull; then it moved between his fingers, the chin raising slightly, as a familiar soft glow of life stirred behind the eye slits.

"Thank you." Al turned his head that was now back where it belonged, giving the pit around them a fresh appraisal. Maes wondered how the helmet's presence may have altered the boy's perspective—and tried not to feel a guilty relief that his hollowness was concealed again. He had known for some time that there was nothing tangible inside the armor, but actually seeing its emptiness was always a little disconcerting.

"Do you think you could climb out of here?" Al queried after a moment.

The thought of trying to scale one of the walls made Maes' arm throb, and he winced. "I'm not so sure about that. The sides are pretty steep, and from what I can see, none of the debris is piled close enough to climb up on." He forced a smile. "Besides, I don't want to leave you alone like this. Roy—Colonel Mustang—he knows exactly the search area we were headed for. He'll probably bring a whole platoon right to us the minute we don't check in on time."

"But you need a doctor—and Brother will worry if he doesn't know I'm okay." Al's voice somehow managed, at the same time, to contain notes of both childlike pleading and earnest reason. "I'll be fine waiting here by myself. You should go if you can."

Maes was left conflicted by the urging. He really did hate the thought of leaving Al trapped and alone. Having lost his gun, he was concerned about running into Scar again if he went off on his own… and he was tired and hurting. It was perfectly true that Roy would move to find them quickly once they missed the two-hour rendezvous. Struggling back to the command post on his injured leg would probably take almost as long as simply waiting for help, so the effort of crawling out of that hole seemed pointless.

On the other hand, Alphonse was only thinking of others' good. Without pain or physical needs, he could await his own rescue with an almost inhuman level of patience; but he didn't want Maes to hurt, or Edward to feel anxiety, for any longer than they could avoid. He was upset by their suffering. When Maes considered it, easing the boy's mind by humoring him would be worth a little more ache and strain.

"…Okay." Slowly Maes dragged himself to his feet—averting his face to hide his grimace of pain. "I don't know if I can find a way up, but I'll look."

Arduously Maes crossed to the nearest wall. He began to investigate the topography, but the results were as discouraging as he had surmised. None of the debris mounds were high enough or close enough to the walls to be helpful. It was impossible to gain any secure handhold in the loose earth lining the sides of the pit. Nearly all of the collapsed support beams strewn about them were broken, and even those still intact were too short to reach the top of the hole above.

The floor created by the tons of fallen earth was slightly sloped. Maes had circled a bit less than halfway around the perimeter, and reached its lowest point, when he discovered a new complication: a rippling pool of water had collected along the bottom edge of the crater.

Maes got down stiffly on his good knee, and thrust his hand into the cloudy puddle. It was deeper than it looked. As his fingers probed along the bottom, he felt a strong upwelling current. There was nothing less than a gushing spring under the surface, sending water bubbling up from a corner of the wall.

A sudden nip of coldness touched Maes' trouser leg. He flinched back, withdrawing his hand from the water, and looked down to see that the edge of the puddle was now lapping at his knee.

An icy feeling closed in around his heart. He pushed himself away from the expanding pool, and stumbled back over to Al.

"We've got a problem," he said, in a taut, quiet voice. "There's water coming up from the bottom of this hole. The cave-in must have broken a pipe that fed the mine's hydraulic equipment."

Even through the unchanging, barely-human face of Al's helmet, Maes knew there was something different in the way the boy looked up at him then.

"Is it coming fast?" he asked, and his tone matched the unseen-but-sensed expression. It was a rasp, high and tremulous, brimming with a deep and sudden fear.

"I haven't got a good gauge of it yet… but it's not exactly a kitchen faucet." Maes looked back toward the lower end of the floor. From where he leaned down beside Al, he could now see the water, trickling over the top of a half-buried beam.

"Major… if that water keeps coming up, and reaches my blood seal before they find us…"

Al didn't complete the sentence. He didn't have to, because Maes already knew what would happen. The Elrics had long since trusted him with the secret of that simple, terrible weakness.

If the water washed over the fragile alchemic seal that bound his soul to the armor, Alphonse would almost certainly die.

For a moment, something broke inside Maes. His own pain was the farthest thing from his mind as he flung himself toward the pool, splashing into water that was now knee-deep at its deepest. He plunged his arms in up to the shoulders, digging his hands into the silt and gravel at the bottom, trying manically but uselessly to push it over the hidden source of the current and stop up the water's flow.

"Major."

Al's tone was very quiet, but it was somehow incredibly penetrating, even through Maes' frantic splashes. It froze him in place, recalling him to his wits, and he realized that acting on this initial impulse of panic wouldn't help. It would probably just make Al more frightened.

"Now you have to find a way out," Al insisted behind him, his voice faint but steady. "You can't stop the water, and you can't dig me out by yourself. You have to go get help. I know you could bring Ed back in plenty of time—and he can get me out of here easy."

Inhaling a deep breath, Maes straightened. He waded out of the water, moving back into Al's view, and made some quick mental calculations as he stood dripping.

By his figuring, if Al was correct about how long he had been unconscious, just under an hour had passed since they left the command post. That meant a little more than an hour remained before they would be missed. Add to that another twenty minutes or so, at the least, for rescuers to reach that distant corner of the search grid… He glanced to the far side of the chamber, trying to judge its dimensions. The water was rising at a fairly swift rate, but there was still a lot of space for it to fill before it reached Al near the center of the pit. Furthermore, Al rested another two feet above the level of the floor, his metal body wedged at an angle that left his upper torso pointed slightly upward.

There would be time. There had to be time.

"Alright," Maes agreed, limping over to pat the exposed portion of the boy's backplate. It was the only helpless gesture of comfort he could offer. "I'll keep looking. I'll find a way. Just hang on."

He turned to continue scouring the walls and floor, searching with new urgency for a way out of the pit… because now, his escape would not be merely for his own sake.

© 2013 Jordanna Morgan