Once again, more than three sentences. I actually scared the fuck out of myself writing this and ended up having to tone it down to stop myself from having a heart attack.

Prompt: Two characters go to a creepy bridge out in the country that trains go on. It's the middle of the night. They hear a car come up the lane that should be deserted. And go.

"They say this place is haunted." Roy motions to the lane where they're standing, just shy of the old train bridge that spanned the river.

"There's no such thing as ghosts, Mustang." Hughes laughs, and Roy shoves his shoulder lightly.

"You say that now, but I'm telling you. This lane really is haunted."

"Next you'll tell me that you believe in the Loch Ness monster too," Hughes scoffs.

"Whatever Hughes. But I still think it's haunted."

"You're crazy Mustang," Hughes replies, as they start walking again. It's getting late, and they have summer jobs in the morning.

"Loser."

Silence. (Roy thinks he hears an old car coming up behind them, but the sound vanishes a couple seconds later and he decides that he's just hearing things.)

"Hughes?" Roy turns, and frowns when he realizes Maes isn't with him anymore. "Hughes? Maes. Where the hell are you?"

There's no one there, and Roy bolts back to town alone.

xoxox

The Resembool Lane was one of those old dirt-road ones, the kind that you usually see in movies about places like Eastern Amestris in the 1960s. The kind of lane that, when you walk down it, makes you think of apple pie and small towns and where everyone knows everyone and 'personal business' is a myth because no one keeps secrets here.

It ran from the edge of town, down through the valley, alongside the old river and right across the old train tracks and into the distance. Once, it had been a busy path, horse-drawn carriages and travelers on foot coming and going all the time; now it's just an empty dirt road that no one uses anymore because there's a paved highway going in the same direction about three miles away that everyone uses instead.

These days, the only traffic it ever received were the local teenagers and tourists looking for old ghost stories.

xoxox

Roy doesn't know what he's supposed to do—his best friend has just vanished into thin air—so he does the first thing he can think of, and that's to bang on the front door of the local sheriff's house.

When the door opens, old Bradley's standing there in a robe and looking annoyed at being woken.

Within twenty minutes, the entire town's been woken and a search is started for Maes Hughes.

The search lasts for two weeks, but he's never found.

xoxox

They say that back in the 1940s, a local teenager went missing one night after he and a friend went up to the old bridge.

The friend swore up and down that he'd been there one minute and then gone the next and the only clue anyone ever had was the 'sound of a car that vanished after a few seconds'.

There was speculation that the friend had perhaps killed him, or maybe there'd been an accident and Roy Mustang had simply panicked and invented the whole story to hide what had truly happened. But there was simply no evidence either way and eventually the search was dropped, and Roy was let go after an intense questioning.

It was said that for the rest of his life, Roy Mustang visited the spot where Hughes vanished every night, searching for his missing friend.

xoxox

Roy never gives up, and every night he returns to the bridge where he calls out for Hughes and waits for a reply.

He never receives one.