Title: Chasm (3/4)
Author: Jordanna Morgan
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I'm just playing with them.

PART III

All in all, it was one of those days when Roy Mustang wanted to take the Fullmetal Alchemist over his knee.

"Well, that was pointless," Edward griped, stalking ahead of Roy with his mismatched hands buried in his pockets. "I hope you're better than this when it comes to finding your car keys—or do you just leave that to Hawkeye?"

After nearly two hours of fruitlessly searching for Scar, the Colonel had redeployed the rest of his men to assist in other sections of the search grid. He and Ed then set off alone to keep their rendezvous with Hughes and Al… and since then, Ed hadn't stopped complaining for a moment. At least it was something that he had kept his trap shut earlier, in the presence of Roy's subordinates, but by now his muttered venom was making Roy want to torch that braid off the back of his neck.

Even so, Roy tried to cut the kid a little slack. He knew Ed well enough to realize the tension in him now was not just his customary surliness. With a known murderer of alchemists in the area, he was more worried than usual about his brother—and as annoying as it was to hear him get it out of his system by grumbling, at least he hadn't resorted to more destructive ways to vent. He was not, for example, going around punching holes in walls.

Well, alright, except for that one. But Ed hadn't thought anyone was watching him, and the wood was so dry-rotted it was ready to fall apart by itself anyway.

"You just can't stand for me to be right about our being lucky for once," Roy retorted to Ed's back. "When we reach the command post, we'll hear that Scar was captured or killed by other searchers. You'll see."

The only response was a dubious grunt.

It took a considerable walk to get back to the command post from which they had started out. As it came into view—a cluster of a dozen police and military vehicles, all ringed loosely around Chief Grogan's plotting table—Roy could see that a number of men had already returned. There was a sense of urgent activity in the way they moved about. Something had obviously happened. Perhaps Roy's half-serious prediction had come true, and Scar really was taken down by another search party.

That thought must have occurred to Ed as well. With a slightly surprised but grimly satisfied expression, he quickened his steps and hurried on ahead, to disappear into the milling crowd of men. Roy caught a last glimpse of him looking around anxiously, stopping a policeman to speak to him, evidently in search of Al.

Then Roy saw a soldier being tended to in the back of a truck. The man was clutching his bloody arm, as agony writhed across his face… and a deeply sinking feeling came over the Colonel.

"What happened?" he demanded instantly of Chief Grogan, who leaned against the table with a red face and a volcanic expression.

"Our suspect got away. He broke through the perimeter, out beyond the edge of the mine. Cut through the men like a one-man war—and by the time he took off into the hills, nobody was left standing to go after him. Not all of the search parties are back yet, but so far we know two of my officers and one soldier are dead, and another dozen men have serious injuries." Grogan scowled at Roy. "I'm holding you responsible, Colonel. All we were told was that we were hunting a wounded man. Not someone who could do this."

Roy winced internally at the wrath on the police chief's face, and the genuine pain in his voice. Against that, the words he was obligated to say on the military's behalf sounded unbearably hollow.

"I'm sorry for the losses to both of our forces, Chief. As far as I knew, every possible step was taken to prepare for Scar's resistance. As for the military's communication with your department, I wasn't involved in that… so I can't give you an answer."

"Yeah. That's just what every one of 'em will say, right up the line." Grogan inhaled for a fresh barrage. "Listen here, Colonel—"

"Where's Al?"

The sudden sharp intrusion of Fullmetal's voice silenced Grogan. Both men turned to see Edward standing near the table, his golden eyes wide, his face slightly pale and just beginning to tighten with the tension of an ill-controlled fear.

"I can't find him," he said breathlessly, his gloved fingers clenching tight. "Al's not here."

Roy's heart skipped a beat, and his gaze snapped back to Grogan.

"Neither is Major Hughes. He was supposed to meet us back here with his team after two hours. The search area he'd chosen was… here." He placed his finger on the map, and looked hard at the police chief. "Where did Scar break through the cordon?"

Grogan's ruddy face had turned ashen. He grimaced, his thick brows knitting over dark eyes, and pointed to a location on the map that lay just beyond Hughes' chosen search field.

Without a word, Ed turned and started running.

The water was rising faster than Maes had expected… or at least, faster than he had hoped.

It crept steadily up the sloping floor. It lapped at the bottom edge of the debris mound in which Alphonse was pinned, and continued crawling up, to encircle the mound completely on its inexorable march toward the far wall of the pit. When Al looked straight down, he could now see the water rippling an arm's length below his chin. He could measure its progress as it overtopped stones and smaller piles of earth in front of him.

The boy had struggled, for a few moments. When he thought Maes wasn't looking, he fought with renewed urgency against the weight of the soil and rock on top of him. The effort caused a fresh cascade of dirt to sprinkle down over his helmet, but it did nothing to free him, and finally he gave in to the uselessness of it.

His stillness then frightened Maes even more.

For his part, Maes had circled the bottom of the pit three times, fervently seeking any means of climbing to the surface. He started an attempt to pile soil and debris against one side, but he quickly realized he could never build a heap big enough to reach the top before the water broached Al's blood seal. He tried digging his hands and feet into the steep walls, to scale them by strength alone, but the dry earth crumbled and gave way in his grasp.

The exertion was doing no favors to his own condition. More than once, he felt the gash in his arm tear a little more—saw the bandage freshly begin to spot through as the bleeding renewed—and his twisted leg was throbbing in agony. He was also drenched from his explorations of the lower side of the pit, where the water was now as high as his chest at its deepest. Long after he waded out, its coldness left him shivering, and even the dry side of the space was veiled in cool shadows that were only growing dimmer as the afternoon sun sank lower. He knew he faced a growing danger of hypothermia.

Even so, he continued to prowl the circumference of the pit. He ran his hands over the walls, searching for a previously unnoticed handhold, or tried laboriously to drag fallen timbers into new configurations. Something in his mind simply shut out the pain and the futility, and forced him to keep trying, even when he knew there was nothing he could humanly do to save Al on his own.

"Major."

It was the first time Al had spoken up in more than half an hour. Drawn immediately by his soft voice, Maes abandoned his latest search of the walls, and limped back over to crouch beside him.

"You should rest now, sir. You've been bleeding again, and you don't look very good."

On the surface, there was thoughtful concern in Al's tone. But underneath… Maes could sense a quiet, dispassionate note of surrender, and it forced a lump to rise in his throat.

"No." He swallowed hard. "I'm fine. I think I might be close to figuring something out, if I just keep at it."

Al's helmet had been tilted up to look at him, in what would be a highly uncomfortable angle for a human neck. However, as Maes spoke, it tipped downward, conveying a sense of somberness. The light of the boy's gaze was hidden.

"You don't need to lie to me."

The words were soft and unaccusing, but they stole the Major's breath. Al looked up again, his torn shoulder twitching in a minute shrug.

"Even if you got out of this hole yourself, there wouldn't be time now for you to reach anyone and bring them back. Not with your leg hurt the way it is. If no one is coming for us by this time, you know it's already too late."

"But they are coming!" Maes leaned a little closer, resisting the urge to take Al's metal face in his hands, as he did on rare occasions when he was forced to speak firmly to his daughter. "We're at least ten minutes overdue now. With Scar around, they won't waste any time coming out to find us—not that your brother would anyway." He forced a wan smile. "It'll only be a little longer. Hang in there."

"…Yeah." There was a dullness in Al's tone that chilled Maes' heart more deeply than the cold of his sodden clothes. "But that still means we can only wait. So there's really no reason for you to keep looking for a way out, and hurting your wounds any worse."

Slowly, reluctantly, Maes was forced to accept that truth. There was nothing more he could physically do to change this situation. All he could hope to accomplish now was to give Al reassurance and comfort.

He eased his body down painfully against the slope of the debris mound, resting his good hand on the sliver of Al's backplate that had not yet been covered by falling sprinkles of loose earth.

"You're gonna get out of here, Al," he said, giving the words the weight of a promise.

Al did not reply for more than a minute. At last he said, in a faint, demure voice: "I want to ask you something, Mr. Hughes."

The tone of the words, and the fact that Al had called him by name instead of by rank, sent up a wave of foreboding in Maes' heart. He frowned and bent his head closer. "What is it?"

"It's just… if something does happen to me… will you look after Ed?"

A fierce pang of emotion pulsed in Maes' chest, and he responded to it with an instinctive resistance that made his voice harder than he meant it to be. "Nothing is going to happen to you!"

"Yeah, but… if it does. Now or… someday." The coolness began to melt from Al's voice, replaced with a faint, childlike tremor. Maes knew it was because the boy's thoughts had turned from himself to his brother, and what Ed would feel if he lost the only family left to him—his very reason for living. "You'll take care of him, won't you?"

"…Of course we will." The lump had returned to Maes' throat. He shook his head and squeezed the rim of Al's backplate, although he knew Al couldn't see the gesture. "Gracia and I, and Roy too… we'll always look out for Ed. But that job still belongs to you—and you're going to keep on doing it."

Al let the insistence pass without comment. His tone grew distant and thoughtful.

"It wouldn't be easy. Brother is—not so good by himself." He looked away. "If he didn't have me anymore, sometimes I think he might even… hurt himself. I know you wouldn't let him do that. But on the inside, he'd be…"

The thought trailed off, left mercifully incomplete. Al was silent for a moment, and then went on in a slightly different vein.

"If he didn't have my body to get back, I know he'd stop trying to get his arm and leg back too. I feel kinda bad about that, because I want him to be whole again, but… he'd be safe then. He wouldn't be searching and fighting anymore."

Maes seized on the topic as a chance to divert Al's thoughts from the consequences of his own demise. "What do you think you two would be doing now, if you weren't on this quest of yours?"

"I never think much about the way things would be, if… if we hadn't done the transmutation. I guess we'd still just be growing up as normal boys in Resembool—or mostly normal, anyway. Ed's too smart to be completely normal." A flicker of amused and gentle warmth came into Al's voice. Maes was delighted to hear it; but at the same time, he sensed a note of regret. Perhaps the real reason Alphonse did not dwell on what might have been was that it was too painful to think of all he had missed.

"Sometimes I've wondered what it would be like if we were still this way, but we didn't look for a way to fix ourselves," Al continued pensively. "Ed is so determined to make things right, it's hard to imagine what else we might have done. All I know is that he wouldn't have gotten himself hurt so badly, so many times. But if we hadn't done all these things… there are so many people we never would have helped."

Maes looked away, because he was afraid the savage heartache he felt would be visible on his face. It was all so wrong. That innocent boy, still thinking only of others after all he had endured himself, should never have seen and known and felt so many terrible things in the first place. He deserved so much more. He deserved all the things that were the right of every child: to grow up, and fall in love, and have a family.

It couldn't end like this.

"You're still going to help more people," Maes said quietly. He pushed himself to his feet in water that was now six inches deep, with a space of some eighteen inches to go before it reached Al's chest. "And one of these days, you are going to get that body of yours back—because life still owes you too much living to let you die in that tin can."

Running his hands across the tight-packed side of the earthen heap, he found a loose stone. When he pried it out, only a little soil trickled into the crevice it left. Then he dug his fingers into the edge of that small hole, and began to enlarge it: clawing out handfuls of dirt, working down carefully but quickly toward Al's buried left shoulder.

If he could only free Al's intact arm, give the young alchemist a chance to draw a transmutation circle…

"What are you doing?" Al queried anxiously.

"Keep still. I'm gonna try to get your other arm loose—but if either of us makes a wrong move, that chunk of rock up above you could slip. Just hang on, Al."

The metal boy whimpered faintly, and became motionless… save for a trembling that was perceptible only by the sprinkle of dirt it dislodged.

© 2013 Jordanna Morgan