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nebroadweTitle: An Inconvenient Season, Part 3
Fandom: FMA (manga version)
Character(s): Ed, Winry and a special guest villain
Pairing(s): Ed/Winry
Word Count: ~3200 (for this part; ~8900 overall thus far)
Rating: PG-13 (for language and violence)
Warnings: None, as long as you've kept up with Viz's English translation. Takes place in an imagined future seven years after the end of the series.
A/N: Part three of a four-part novella I drafted as an entry in the 2008 Ed/Winry Fire and Ice Challenge, but was unable to complete in time. (Part 1 may be found here and part 2 here.) Previously on An Inconvenient Season, a thuggish individual broke into the West City automail clinic where Winry was working alone; Ed, noticing something amiss as he came to pick her up, has just charged to her rescue. Concrit welcomed with pitons and nylon rope to haul everyone up off that cliff where they've been dangling. Crossposted from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hagaren_manga, fm_alchemist, fma_het, ed_winry, fma_writers and fma_fiction).
Dedication(s): For my father, who advised me that villains never fight fair.
Winry stood in the center of the sparsely furnished waiting room, straining in the grip of a muscle-bound, one-eyed thug with a knife at her throat. One arm was twisted up behind her back, the other pinioned between her body and his. Evidence of the struggle Ed had seen from outside was all around them in the crooked drapes and the rucked-up carpet and the gouge out of the plaster where no doubt a thrown wrench had struck. Winry was breathing in little gasps; her hair had come unpinned on one side to half-shroud her face.
"Get away from my wife!" Ed snarled.
The knife glinted as the man's fingers tightened on the haft. "Shut that door," he countered in a slow, gravelly voice. "Were you raised in a barn?"
"Yeah, and every time I hear a jackass, I get homesick!" Ed retorted.
The man didn't answer, but pushed the top fold of Winry's scarf down with the flat of his blade to expose a little more of her neck. Her breath caught, and Ed, glowering, kicked the door to behind him. Dammit! Why does this neighborhood have to roll up its sidewalks so early? "What do you want?" he demanded aloud. "Who are you?"
The big man's jaw worked, as if he were chewing on something distasteful. "You don't remember?" he asked, and when Ed made no reply, he continued with a humorless smile, "I guess that's the way it goes. Ask for the Fullmetal Alchemist, and they try to sell you a pack of fairy-tales and nonsense. Ask for Edward-fucking-Elric, they send you to a sawbones's office. Ask for Blue Squad -- " He shrugged, and Winry's eyes widened as the knife-edge scraped her skin.
"Let. Her. Go," Ed grated out.
The man shook his head. "I don't think so."
Ed's hands squeezed the pickle carton until it bent. He couldn't just charge in and kick the smirking bastard in the head. He had to think -- damn it all, he had to get Winry out of here so he could break every single one of the goon's filthy phalanges, proximal to distal --
Patience, Fullmetal, Roy Mustang lectured him out of the distant past, superior and maddeningly correct. A hostage situation is inherently unstable. Wait for the moment when the balance tips in your favor; then strike.
Ed mentally flipped his erstwhile commanding officer the bird. As if you ever did anything but wait for me and Al to strike and then swan in afterward to take all the cred- -- oh, shit! "You're that guy from the train!" he blurted out, as memory sketched a mustache and beard on the man's clean-shaven rectangular jaw and pointed chin. "The terrorist!"
His opponent nodded. "You do remember. Good."
"Why the hell aren't you still in prison?"
Ed's indignation amused the other man; his smile widened and he actually chuckled. "The amnesty."
"You? How the -- how -- ?" Ed sputtered, almost choking with rage at the terrorist's pious grin. Grumman had sold the the amnesty for political prisoners to the Amestrian public as a gesture to heal the wounds of civil strife still fresh in the memory of our nation, but it was supposed to cover people jailed for printing subversive pamphlets or failing to bribe corrupt officials, not anyone who'd committed a real crime, like hijacking and murder. Is this some kind of bureaucratic screw-up, Ed wondered, unease abruptly tempering his anger, or is somebody holding this guy's leash? "What do you want?" he asked again.
The man's mocking geniality sharpened into bloodthirsty anticipation. "You," he said. "Dead."
"Fine!" Ed shot back. "Let Winry go."
"No!" she screamed.
Her captor twisted her arm savagely in reply. "Shut up!" he growled when she blanched and squealed. "And you, back off!" he added, as Ed took an involuntary step forward. "You don't want her throat slit before yours, you keep real still, Mr. Fullmetal Alchemist."
I'm not him anymore! And he hadn't regretted it this deeply for a good five years, though even his cocksure adolescent self would have balked at a threat to Winry. She'd always been his weakness. But no one who drew her into a scheme against him ever triumphed by it -- he'd always seen to that. This fucker's going down hard, he promised his wife silently, trying to will her confidence from his own depleted store. All he needed was a little time to come up with a plan. Gotta keep him jawing. "Why do you want to kill me?" he asked, partly at random, partly in search of a handle on his unaccountable opponent. "I thought you guys -- Blue Squad -- were supposed to be freedom fighters. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not running the country!"
"I need the practice," the terrorist replied. "Seven years inside, and you can get a little rusty."
"Practice for what?" Ed countered. Maybe he could get the man to uncork his entire plot, cinema-villain-style. "You don't overthrow governments one slit throat at a time!"
"Government?" The thug hawked and spat, missing Winry's right foot by centimeters. "Who gives a shit about the government? I want you dead -- you and that fat judge and your lah-dee-dah boss."
My boss? For a moment Ed could only gape at the idea of the arrogant consultant to whose condescending lectures he'd been subjected for the past month as a terrorist target. Who the hell -- ? "Mustang?" he exclaimed. "He'd char you before you got within ten feet!"
"Like I said, I need the practice," snarled the other. "I figured I'd start -- " his derisive glance measured Ed from sole to crown -- "small."
Ed bristled, baring his teeth in an answering snarl. "Yeah? And what's the point?"
"'The point?'" repeated the terrorist sarcastically. "'The point?' What d'you think?"
"I think you're an ass!" Ed snapped, as exasperation shredded his grip on his ire. "The East is rebuilding, whatever's left of your movement is rotting in jail, and you decide to come after me and Mustang and -- and some other guy?" He threw up his arms and the pickles sloshed about noisily. "What are you getting out of this? Company in hell? Is that it?" He pointed a finger straight at the man's face. "Well, you can save yourself the trouble -- I guarantee it's already full of pricks like you -- "
"Shut up!" The man's eye seemed bulge in his head as he shouted; Winry flinched and he pressed the knife with distracted menace to her windpipe. "You don't know anything about it!"
Ed bit his tongue. Softly, softly, Mustang's remembered voice advised him. You want to bore him to death, not slay him with your rapier wit --
The terrorist drew a hissing breath through his long nose. "Maybe I don't care about the East anymore," he went on, "or about those jugheads back in the clink. Maybe I never did. Maybe all I'll get after killing you is a good night's sleep. Maybe all I want -- " he threw the word back at Ed with venomous emphasis -- "is to see you in hell!"
Ed's eyes met Winry's, and he could see what it was costing her not to tremble or scream again. He was all but shaking himself from the adrenalin rush, his body demanding that he do something, anything, while his brain considered and discarded option after option. He settled for shifting as unobtrusively as he could into a ready stance, but the terrorist's eye, attending to his movements with homicidal intensity, tracked the change in his posture and narrowed suspiciously.
His single eye.
The bullseye.
The pickle container trembled against his damp palm. No, don't give it away -- wait for it -- Frowning, the thug rubbed the flat of his blade across Winry's neck; her gaze flicked from Ed's face to his and back again. Ed froze and said, as plaintively as he could, "You don't need to do this."
The man made a show of considering that, his features pulled into an expression of mock thoughtfulness that didn't suit them. "You know what?" he answered. "I think I do. Get down on the ground!"
It was almost a relief to hear him say it, to know that the moment to strike was now or never. Almost. Ed exchanged a long look with the hulking terrorist -- then slowly, as if unwillingly, he dropped to one knee, grasping the pickles in both hands like an ambassador of far-off days ready to present a humble gift. The unwillingness wasn't tough to fake, conscious as he was of gambling with two -- no, three lives. Ed let the other man stare him down and caught a glimpse of his opponent's premature triumph as he bowed his head, thumbs slipping under the flaps that folded across the top of the waxed-cardboard cube.
Three, two, one --
"Ed, no!" Winry cried out. She began to struggle again, kicking back against her captor's shins, heedless of the blade at her throat -- or perhaps calculating, as Ed had, that the threat which held him in check ended with her life. The man damned her with inarticulate grunts and yanked her arm so that she shrieked, spine arching. Ed's head snapped up in time to see the knife score a wet, red line across the skin above Winry's collarbone.
He felt the shock of the cut in his own body, like a lash of cold water thrown up by the wheels of a passing omnibus. The pickle container popped open to release a tart, bracing smell. The thug hauled Winry back against him, shifting his grip, and yelled at Ed, "Down! Face down, now!"
Ed bent his neck again -- one last deceptive gesture -- and sprang, flinging the pickles into his adversary's face.
The terrorist howled and recoiled as the vinegar doused his uncovered eye. Ed grabbed the man's right wrist and yanked the knife away from Winry, pulling left as she spun right. His fingers dug for the nerve in the flesh and found it; the man bellowed again as his hand spasmed opened and let the knife clunk to the floor. Ed kicked it away and blocked his opponent's first wild swing. The goon wiped his reddened, squinting eyeball clear; he shook off Winry, now attempting clumsily to encumber him from behind, and threw a left hook at Ed's head. Ducking, Ed countered, landing a body blow, but it was like punching a sack of wet sand. Has this guy got an Armstrong up his family tree?
He leaped back and the two men began to circle each other, feinting. Ed repressed the useless impulse to seize a lamp or curtain rod and transmute it into a spear. Work with what you've got, dammit! His opponent had the advantage of him in weight and wingspan; Ed needed to draw him out, sucker the thug into overreaching and turn all that mass against him -- or, failing that, at least clear a path to the door so that Winry could escape. Where is she? He risked a swift survey of the room and glimpsed his wife on her hands and knees in front of the receptionist's counter in an attitude that made his blood run cold. Her neck? Is she sick? Oh, shit, not the baby --
His attention strayed from his adversary for a moment too long, and in that distracted instant the big man charged, breaking straight through Ed's belated defense and slamming him bodily into the wall beside the front door. Ed felt the plaster give behind his skull and shoulders, heard the laths crack; his opponent's hands closed around his throat and his vision tunneled as he clawed at the hold. "Now you're dead!" the terrorist grunted, his voice barely audible over the thunder dinning in Ed's ears, but that couldn't be true --
-- they all say that and it's never true --
-- never, never, never, never --
-- and then the other's grip slackened as the hate-filled eye boring into his lost focus. Twisting, Ed broke free of the chokehold and threw all his strength into a uppercut to the big man's jaw. The terrorist's head rebounded on his neck and he dropped to the ground in a lopsided heap, just shy of a pair of black leather pumps that skipped back to avoid being crushed.
Ed blinked to clear his sparkling vision and recognized the shoes as Winry's. She jigged from foot to foot before him, wrench raised to strike -- no, to strike again, he realized, correlating her high color and rapid breathing with his own hairbreadth escape. Never count out a Rockbell of Riesenbuhl, he thought giddily. Advertise that, you morons!
Winry prodded the inert body on the carpet with her left toe, none too gently; when it failed to respond, she tried in vain to kick it aside. Ed chuckled between gulps of air and his wife, pocketing her weapon, stepped over their fallen foe and into his arms.
They sagged together against the wall. Ed flinched as a broken lath dug into his side and Winry's caresses immediately turned clinical, investigating his head and neck for damage. "Are you all right?" they asked each other.
With a not quite hysterical giggle Winry nodded and drew away, her hands dropping to his ribs while he tugged the blood-stained scarf away from the wound in her throat. "It's only a scratch," she said, forestalling his concern. "Does this hurt?"
"Not really," Ed answered automatically. His torso was one massive, undifferentiated ache at the moment, sure to blossom into some spectacular bruises over the next week, but as he took careful deep breaths at her direction, he felt none of the stabbing pains that would have indicated a broken rib. Small favors. He wanted to ask her about the baby in return, but the question seemed to imply disaster and she looked merely strained, not ill. So he cupped her cheek with his right hand, trying to smooth away the corvid tracks of anxiety in her skin, and she closed her eyes and leaned gratefully into his palm. "Ow!" he yelped as a new smart lanced up his forearm. "I think I sprained my wrist! -- No, leave it," he added, eluding her gentle fingers. "We've got to hogtie this bastard first and then call the cops."
He should have expected that a length of the bandage roll Winry fetched to secure their prisoner would wind up around his arm anyway; his wife was nothing if not persistent. The suggestion that he might be too badly injured to help, however, was simply insulting. "It's a sprain, Winry -- and I can tie one-handed knots, you know," he complained as she pinned the dressing. "I'm training for a surgeon. And what about your neck?"
"This isn't an operating theater, Ed," she retorted, unreeling another several feet of material. "Fine. You get his legs; I'll do his arms."
"Once you've taken care of your neck," Ed insisted as he took the length of gauze from her.
She sighed, dug a sticking plaster out of her toolbag, and slapped it across the deepest part of the wound. "There. That's good enough for now." Avoiding his dissatisfied gaze, she took her scissors and proceeded to cut the terrorist's left sleeve open to reveal the automail underneath.
"You're not giving him a free tune-up, are you?" Ed couldn't help but ask.
She ignored this weak sally, instead rooting another wrench from the bag. Ed gave up for the moment and busied himself with hobbling the terrorist's thick ankles while Winry unbolted and removed his prosthetic's shoulder plating. With a tight, smug smile she disconnected the control junction at the ball joint. "That'll hold you," she muttered.
"Make sure there aren't any fancy surprises," Ed warned her. "Last time he had a knife hidden in there."
"I don't think so," Winry answered, but she pried off the forearm grille to check. "This is a standard-issue prosthetic, not custom-made. It's a lot like the models the government has been supplying to veterans since the war." She began rebolting the plates she had removed. "It doesn't look like it's been modified -- it hasn't even been that well maintained," she added with a disdainful sniff.
"Just a lone nut, then," Ed concluded, snagging the unused bandage roll and tethering the terrorist's flesh arm to his automail with a double gunner's knot. Unless -- no. "Anybody with connections as well as a grudge would have come better equipped." He leaned over to poke their unconscious-seeming adversary in the kidneys and was rewarded with a faint groan. "Saphead."
He half-expected Winry to call him either on the poke or on his analysis -- the saphead had nearly taken him out unassisted, after all -- but she packed up her kit and rose, frowning. "I'll call the police," she said. "You keep an eye on him. Yell if he stops breathing or has a seizure."
Ed opened his mouth to harass her into taking care of her own wound first, but the slight wobble in her gait as she made her way across the rumpled carpet to the hall door dissuaded him from continuing. The cut was long but thankfully shallow -- time enough to dress it properly after she had phoned the authorities, when there was nothing to do but wait and think. She'd welcome the distraction then. With luck he could keep her arguing about the need for stitches until the cops arrived; their questions would give her plenty to occupy her mind.
He picked idly at the constricting gauze around the base of his thumb and considered the terrorist again. His presence here was a puzzle, or maybe a warning. The more Ed thought about it, the less able he was to sustain his glib dismissal of the man: he couldn't have been that stupid, not if he'd tracked the Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward-fucking-Elric, all the way here. Ed's low public profile since the Promised Day was ably abetted by those members of the government sensible enough to judge the uncannier aspects of that unsettled period best forgotten. They also kept him under oh-so-casual surveillance in case he hatched belatedly into a monster. Falman, now a colonel in internal security, sent the Elrics a polite card each winter at New Year's; until today, Ed hadn't given up hope of boring him to death.
"Thanks a lot, jerk," he muttered to the terrorist.
A lamp clicked on in the receptionist's office. Looking up, Ed saw Winry lift the black handset to her ear and begin dialing. She'd straightened her coat and blouse and tied her hair back, and he was suddenly, fiercely glad to have the high wooden counter dividing her from him and the thug at his feet. He didn't begrudge the professional success that made her, for the moment, the better-known Elric, but he'd never imagined it putting her on the front lines in his place. Hell, he thought they'd quit the field years ago. As for their adversary, he'd walked out of prison with the customary pocketful of cens and get-a-job suit, his record cleared and his arm refurbished into the bargain. You could've gone anywhere, done anything, Ed thought with uneasy contempt. So why'd you have to come here?
He made certain that Winry was intent on her conversation, then kicked his captive where it was least likely to leave a mark.
To be continued ...
[Acknowledgments: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix); two anime of the same title were produced by Studio Bones. Copyright for these properties is held, inter alia, by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix, and Studio Bones.]
Fandom: FMA (manga version)
Character(s): Ed, Winry and a special guest villain
Pairing(s): Ed/Winry
Word Count: ~3200 (for this part; ~8900 overall thus far)
Rating: PG-13 (for language and violence)
Warnings: None, as long as you've kept up with Viz's English translation. Takes place in an imagined future seven years after the end of the series.
A/N: Part three of a four-part novella I drafted as an entry in the 2008 Ed/Winry Fire and Ice Challenge, but was unable to complete in time. (Part 1 may be found here and part 2 here.) Previously on An Inconvenient Season, a thuggish individual broke into the West City automail clinic where Winry was working alone; Ed, noticing something amiss as he came to pick her up, has just charged to her rescue. Concrit welcomed with pitons and nylon rope to haul everyone up off that cliff where they've been dangling. Crossposted from
nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. hagaren_manga, fm_alchemist, fma_het, ed_winry, fma_writers and fma_fiction).Dedication(s): For my father, who advised me that villains never fight fair.
Winry stood in the center of the sparsely furnished waiting room, straining in the grip of a muscle-bound, one-eyed thug with a knife at her throat. One arm was twisted up behind her back, the other pinioned between her body and his. Evidence of the struggle Ed had seen from outside was all around them in the crooked drapes and the rucked-up carpet and the gouge out of the plaster where no doubt a thrown wrench had struck. Winry was breathing in little gasps; her hair had come unpinned on one side to half-shroud her face.
"Get away from my wife!" Ed snarled.
The knife glinted as the man's fingers tightened on the haft. "Shut that door," he countered in a slow, gravelly voice. "Were you raised in a barn?"
"Yeah, and every time I hear a jackass, I get homesick!" Ed retorted.
The man didn't answer, but pushed the top fold of Winry's scarf down with the flat of his blade to expose a little more of her neck. Her breath caught, and Ed, glowering, kicked the door to behind him. Dammit! Why does this neighborhood have to roll up its sidewalks so early? "What do you want?" he demanded aloud. "Who are you?"
The big man's jaw worked, as if he were chewing on something distasteful. "You don't remember?" he asked, and when Ed made no reply, he continued with a humorless smile, "I guess that's the way it goes. Ask for the Fullmetal Alchemist, and they try to sell you a pack of fairy-tales and nonsense. Ask for Edward-fucking-Elric, they send you to a sawbones's office. Ask for Blue Squad -- " He shrugged, and Winry's eyes widened as the knife-edge scraped her skin.
"Let. Her. Go," Ed grated out.
The man shook his head. "I don't think so."
Ed's hands squeezed the pickle carton until it bent. He couldn't just charge in and kick the smirking bastard in the head. He had to think -- damn it all, he had to get Winry out of here so he could break every single one of the goon's filthy phalanges, proximal to distal --
Patience, Fullmetal, Roy Mustang lectured him out of the distant past, superior and maddeningly correct. A hostage situation is inherently unstable. Wait for the moment when the balance tips in your favor; then strike.
Ed mentally flipped his erstwhile commanding officer the bird. As if you ever did anything but wait for me and Al to strike and then swan in afterward to take all the cred- -- oh, shit! "You're that guy from the train!" he blurted out, as memory sketched a mustache and beard on the man's clean-shaven rectangular jaw and pointed chin. "The terrorist!"
His opponent nodded. "You do remember. Good."
"Why the hell aren't you still in prison?"
Ed's indignation amused the other man; his smile widened and he actually chuckled. "The amnesty."
"You? How the -- how -- ?" Ed sputtered, almost choking with rage at the terrorist's pious grin. Grumman had sold the the amnesty for political prisoners to the Amestrian public as a gesture to heal the wounds of civil strife still fresh in the memory of our nation, but it was supposed to cover people jailed for printing subversive pamphlets or failing to bribe corrupt officials, not anyone who'd committed a real crime, like hijacking and murder. Is this some kind of bureaucratic screw-up, Ed wondered, unease abruptly tempering his anger, or is somebody holding this guy's leash? "What do you want?" he asked again.
The man's mocking geniality sharpened into bloodthirsty anticipation. "You," he said. "Dead."
"Fine!" Ed shot back. "Let Winry go."
"No!" she screamed.
Her captor twisted her arm savagely in reply. "Shut up!" he growled when she blanched and squealed. "And you, back off!" he added, as Ed took an involuntary step forward. "You don't want her throat slit before yours, you keep real still, Mr. Fullmetal Alchemist."
I'm not him anymore! And he hadn't regretted it this deeply for a good five years, though even his cocksure adolescent self would have balked at a threat to Winry. She'd always been his weakness. But no one who drew her into a scheme against him ever triumphed by it -- he'd always seen to that. This fucker's going down hard, he promised his wife silently, trying to will her confidence from his own depleted store. All he needed was a little time to come up with a plan. Gotta keep him jawing. "Why do you want to kill me?" he asked, partly at random, partly in search of a handle on his unaccountable opponent. "I thought you guys -- Blue Squad -- were supposed to be freedom fighters. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not running the country!"
"I need the practice," the terrorist replied. "Seven years inside, and you can get a little rusty."
"Practice for what?" Ed countered. Maybe he could get the man to uncork his entire plot, cinema-villain-style. "You don't overthrow governments one slit throat at a time!"
"Government?" The thug hawked and spat, missing Winry's right foot by centimeters. "Who gives a shit about the government? I want you dead -- you and that fat judge and your lah-dee-dah boss."
My boss? For a moment Ed could only gape at the idea of the arrogant consultant to whose condescending lectures he'd been subjected for the past month as a terrorist target. Who the hell -- ? "Mustang?" he exclaimed. "He'd char you before you got within ten feet!"
"Like I said, I need the practice," snarled the other. "I figured I'd start -- " his derisive glance measured Ed from sole to crown -- "small."
Ed bristled, baring his teeth in an answering snarl. "Yeah? And what's the point?"
"'The point?'" repeated the terrorist sarcastically. "'The point?' What d'you think?"
"I think you're an ass!" Ed snapped, as exasperation shredded his grip on his ire. "The East is rebuilding, whatever's left of your movement is rotting in jail, and you decide to come after me and Mustang and -- and some other guy?" He threw up his arms and the pickles sloshed about noisily. "What are you getting out of this? Company in hell? Is that it?" He pointed a finger straight at the man's face. "Well, you can save yourself the trouble -- I guarantee it's already full of pricks like you -- "
"Shut up!" The man's eye seemed bulge in his head as he shouted; Winry flinched and he pressed the knife with distracted menace to her windpipe. "You don't know anything about it!"
Ed bit his tongue. Softly, softly, Mustang's remembered voice advised him. You want to bore him to death, not slay him with your rapier wit --
The terrorist drew a hissing breath through his long nose. "Maybe I don't care about the East anymore," he went on, "or about those jugheads back in the clink. Maybe I never did. Maybe all I'll get after killing you is a good night's sleep. Maybe all I want -- " he threw the word back at Ed with venomous emphasis -- "is to see you in hell!"
Ed's eyes met Winry's, and he could see what it was costing her not to tremble or scream again. He was all but shaking himself from the adrenalin rush, his body demanding that he do something, anything, while his brain considered and discarded option after option. He settled for shifting as unobtrusively as he could into a ready stance, but the terrorist's eye, attending to his movements with homicidal intensity, tracked the change in his posture and narrowed suspiciously.
His single eye.
The bullseye.
The pickle container trembled against his damp palm. No, don't give it away -- wait for it -- Frowning, the thug rubbed the flat of his blade across Winry's neck; her gaze flicked from Ed's face to his and back again. Ed froze and said, as plaintively as he could, "You don't need to do this."
The man made a show of considering that, his features pulled into an expression of mock thoughtfulness that didn't suit them. "You know what?" he answered. "I think I do. Get down on the ground!"
It was almost a relief to hear him say it, to know that the moment to strike was now or never. Almost. Ed exchanged a long look with the hulking terrorist -- then slowly, as if unwillingly, he dropped to one knee, grasping the pickles in both hands like an ambassador of far-off days ready to present a humble gift. The unwillingness wasn't tough to fake, conscious as he was of gambling with two -- no, three lives. Ed let the other man stare him down and caught a glimpse of his opponent's premature triumph as he bowed his head, thumbs slipping under the flaps that folded across the top of the waxed-cardboard cube.
Three, two, one --
"Ed, no!" Winry cried out. She began to struggle again, kicking back against her captor's shins, heedless of the blade at her throat -- or perhaps calculating, as Ed had, that the threat which held him in check ended with her life. The man damned her with inarticulate grunts and yanked her arm so that she shrieked, spine arching. Ed's head snapped up in time to see the knife score a wet, red line across the skin above Winry's collarbone.
He felt the shock of the cut in his own body, like a lash of cold water thrown up by the wheels of a passing omnibus. The pickle container popped open to release a tart, bracing smell. The thug hauled Winry back against him, shifting his grip, and yelled at Ed, "Down! Face down, now!"
Ed bent his neck again -- one last deceptive gesture -- and sprang, flinging the pickles into his adversary's face.
The terrorist howled and recoiled as the vinegar doused his uncovered eye. Ed grabbed the man's right wrist and yanked the knife away from Winry, pulling left as she spun right. His fingers dug for the nerve in the flesh and found it; the man bellowed again as his hand spasmed opened and let the knife clunk to the floor. Ed kicked it away and blocked his opponent's first wild swing. The goon wiped his reddened, squinting eyeball clear; he shook off Winry, now attempting clumsily to encumber him from behind, and threw a left hook at Ed's head. Ducking, Ed countered, landing a body blow, but it was like punching a sack of wet sand. Has this guy got an Armstrong up his family tree?
He leaped back and the two men began to circle each other, feinting. Ed repressed the useless impulse to seize a lamp or curtain rod and transmute it into a spear. Work with what you've got, dammit! His opponent had the advantage of him in weight and wingspan; Ed needed to draw him out, sucker the thug into overreaching and turn all that mass against him -- or, failing that, at least clear a path to the door so that Winry could escape. Where is she? He risked a swift survey of the room and glimpsed his wife on her hands and knees in front of the receptionist's counter in an attitude that made his blood run cold. Her neck? Is she sick? Oh, shit, not the baby --
His attention strayed from his adversary for a moment too long, and in that distracted instant the big man charged, breaking straight through Ed's belated defense and slamming him bodily into the wall beside the front door. Ed felt the plaster give behind his skull and shoulders, heard the laths crack; his opponent's hands closed around his throat and his vision tunneled as he clawed at the hold. "Now you're dead!" the terrorist grunted, his voice barely audible over the thunder dinning in Ed's ears, but that couldn't be true --
-- they all say that and it's never true --
-- never, never, never, never --
-- and then the other's grip slackened as the hate-filled eye boring into his lost focus. Twisting, Ed broke free of the chokehold and threw all his strength into a uppercut to the big man's jaw. The terrorist's head rebounded on his neck and he dropped to the ground in a lopsided heap, just shy of a pair of black leather pumps that skipped back to avoid being crushed.
Ed blinked to clear his sparkling vision and recognized the shoes as Winry's. She jigged from foot to foot before him, wrench raised to strike -- no, to strike again, he realized, correlating her high color and rapid breathing with his own hairbreadth escape. Never count out a Rockbell of Riesenbuhl, he thought giddily. Advertise that, you morons!
Winry prodded the inert body on the carpet with her left toe, none too gently; when it failed to respond, she tried in vain to kick it aside. Ed chuckled between gulps of air and his wife, pocketing her weapon, stepped over their fallen foe and into his arms.
They sagged together against the wall. Ed flinched as a broken lath dug into his side and Winry's caresses immediately turned clinical, investigating his head and neck for damage. "Are you all right?" they asked each other.
With a not quite hysterical giggle Winry nodded and drew away, her hands dropping to his ribs while he tugged the blood-stained scarf away from the wound in her throat. "It's only a scratch," she said, forestalling his concern. "Does this hurt?"
"Not really," Ed answered automatically. His torso was one massive, undifferentiated ache at the moment, sure to blossom into some spectacular bruises over the next week, but as he took careful deep breaths at her direction, he felt none of the stabbing pains that would have indicated a broken rib. Small favors. He wanted to ask her about the baby in return, but the question seemed to imply disaster and she looked merely strained, not ill. So he cupped her cheek with his right hand, trying to smooth away the corvid tracks of anxiety in her skin, and she closed her eyes and leaned gratefully into his palm. "Ow!" he yelped as a new smart lanced up his forearm. "I think I sprained my wrist! -- No, leave it," he added, eluding her gentle fingers. "We've got to hogtie this bastard first and then call the cops."
He should have expected that a length of the bandage roll Winry fetched to secure their prisoner would wind up around his arm anyway; his wife was nothing if not persistent. The suggestion that he might be too badly injured to help, however, was simply insulting. "It's a sprain, Winry -- and I can tie one-handed knots, you know," he complained as she pinned the dressing. "I'm training for a surgeon. And what about your neck?"
"This isn't an operating theater, Ed," she retorted, unreeling another several feet of material. "Fine. You get his legs; I'll do his arms."
"Once you've taken care of your neck," Ed insisted as he took the length of gauze from her.
She sighed, dug a sticking plaster out of her toolbag, and slapped it across the deepest part of the wound. "There. That's good enough for now." Avoiding his dissatisfied gaze, she took her scissors and proceeded to cut the terrorist's left sleeve open to reveal the automail underneath.
"You're not giving him a free tune-up, are you?" Ed couldn't help but ask.
She ignored this weak sally, instead rooting another wrench from the bag. Ed gave up for the moment and busied himself with hobbling the terrorist's thick ankles while Winry unbolted and removed his prosthetic's shoulder plating. With a tight, smug smile she disconnected the control junction at the ball joint. "That'll hold you," she muttered.
"Make sure there aren't any fancy surprises," Ed warned her. "Last time he had a knife hidden in there."
"I don't think so," Winry answered, but she pried off the forearm grille to check. "This is a standard-issue prosthetic, not custom-made. It's a lot like the models the government has been supplying to veterans since the war." She began rebolting the plates she had removed. "It doesn't look like it's been modified -- it hasn't even been that well maintained," she added with a disdainful sniff.
"Just a lone nut, then," Ed concluded, snagging the unused bandage roll and tethering the terrorist's flesh arm to his automail with a double gunner's knot. Unless -- no. "Anybody with connections as well as a grudge would have come better equipped." He leaned over to poke their unconscious-seeming adversary in the kidneys and was rewarded with a faint groan. "Saphead."
He half-expected Winry to call him either on the poke or on his analysis -- the saphead had nearly taken him out unassisted, after all -- but she packed up her kit and rose, frowning. "I'll call the police," she said. "You keep an eye on him. Yell if he stops breathing or has a seizure."
Ed opened his mouth to harass her into taking care of her own wound first, but the slight wobble in her gait as she made her way across the rumpled carpet to the hall door dissuaded him from continuing. The cut was long but thankfully shallow -- time enough to dress it properly after she had phoned the authorities, when there was nothing to do but wait and think. She'd welcome the distraction then. With luck he could keep her arguing about the need for stitches until the cops arrived; their questions would give her plenty to occupy her mind.
He picked idly at the constricting gauze around the base of his thumb and considered the terrorist again. His presence here was a puzzle, or maybe a warning. The more Ed thought about it, the less able he was to sustain his glib dismissal of the man: he couldn't have been that stupid, not if he'd tracked the Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward-fucking-Elric, all the way here. Ed's low public profile since the Promised Day was ably abetted by those members of the government sensible enough to judge the uncannier aspects of that unsettled period best forgotten. They also kept him under oh-so-casual surveillance in case he hatched belatedly into a monster. Falman, now a colonel in internal security, sent the Elrics a polite card each winter at New Year's; until today, Ed hadn't given up hope of boring him to death.
"Thanks a lot, jerk," he muttered to the terrorist.
A lamp clicked on in the receptionist's office. Looking up, Ed saw Winry lift the black handset to her ear and begin dialing. She'd straightened her coat and blouse and tied her hair back, and he was suddenly, fiercely glad to have the high wooden counter dividing her from him and the thug at his feet. He didn't begrudge the professional success that made her, for the moment, the better-known Elric, but he'd never imagined it putting her on the front lines in his place. Hell, he thought they'd quit the field years ago. As for their adversary, he'd walked out of prison with the customary pocketful of cens and get-a-job suit, his record cleared and his arm refurbished into the bargain. You could've gone anywhere, done anything, Ed thought with uneasy contempt. So why'd you have to come here?
He made certain that Winry was intent on her conversation, then kicked his captive where it was least likely to leave a mark.
[Acknowledgments: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix); two anime of the same title were produced by Studio Bones. Copyright for these properties is held, inter alia, by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix, and Studio Bones.]