FMA Fanfic: Unconditional – Ten
Unconditional – Ten.
by arcanewinter. R 3650 Roy*Hughes. Fullmetal Alchemist. AT, pan-series spoilers.
After a costly strike on a military facility, Greed tries his hand at putting clues together.
These characters do not belong to me. I do not profit from this. [...]
They stood poised atop a military warehouse just outside of Central. Within leaping range rose a structure of similar proportions, but much more sophisticated security. They were waiting for the brigadier general, visible through a window below, to dismiss a reporting soldier from his makeshift office. Minimizing complications was worth the patience. They couldn’t afford for this to go wrong.
The journal had, until this point, served them well. A few of its entries didn’t get very far, but for the most part, Dante’s posthumous success rate had been pretty high, and so had theirs in plundering those successes.
But without her around to inspire the trauma that often led to the Philosopher’s Stone and its many imitations, the art was quickly dying out, and after three decades they’d exhausted the known supply.
Outside of the military, that was.
Under Pride’s tyranny, military funding and personnel had been used in a number of high-stakes operations whose focus was the Stone itself, and with his passing, those laboratories had been seized by top military brass hoping to harness such power for themselves. They’d barely waited for his actual death to mobilize forces for their own purposes, which was why Pride’s burial had been such a scant affair.
Pride had left no clear successor. The military was still in caustic turmoil over who among its generals would emerge triumphant, and there was no greater expression, no greater proof of a man’s supremacy than the Stone. Whether or not that man could wield the Stone to any favorable end was irrelevant.
They’d been researching this facility off and on for a few months, putting it off when they could. The risk was extremely high: these military operations were staffed by alchemists of true skill, and having been trained under Pride’s rule, they knew how to win against homunculi–even if Pride had probably never admitted to Envy or Greed by name.
But they’d travelled far and wide searching for the alternatives, and much as they hated to admit it, there were none. Even these facilities would someday be a thing of the past, and what then? Were they destined for the same?
Would they, in the end, have to become like her?
The brigadier general relaxed his posture, focus returning to the paperwork on his desk. The soldier had gone. Greed took on his full Shield, and with a mixed glance to Envy, he vaulted himself across the distance, his hard body gaining entrance through the window with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Envy had followed close behind him, and the brigadier general barely had time to pull his pistol before Greed drove his face into his knee.
Behind him, Envy sighed as the officer slumped to the ground behind the desk. “You’re lucky I remember what he looked like.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Greed muttered. He released his Shield, quickly pulling shaded glasses from the pocket of his human clothing and putting them on. Envy had already assumed the appearance of the fallen officer, and he now bent to lift the man’s hand, concentrating.
“Get ready,” Greed warned him, facing the door. He could hear them in the hall.
The door burst open.
“After him!” Envy shouted, on cue, but Greed had already bolted past the guards and through the door, skidding on his sharp right turn. He heard their boots in swift pursuit behind him, and tried his damndest not to smile.
He could have run faster, but the longer it took them to realize he wasn’t human, the better. Still, there was a comfortable distance between him and the thundering herd of soldiers, and as he leapt and twisted his way down the first stairwell and the next, he was having more than a little fun.
Midway down the next corridor, though, one of their bullets finally hit him, and the situation lost its amusement. But this was part of the plan, and he couldn’t use the Shield to deflect their attack. If he was hit, he needed to bleed, at least initially.
By now, the alarm had sounded. The number of soldiers in pursuit hadn’t grown by much, but they knew where he was headed, and they were trying to cut him off. The acrobatics he used to avoid them just a little longer would have been difficult for a human, but not impossible, and so far no one had shouted the word that would give them away prematurely.
The last hallway. They were on his heels now, his agility reduced by the close range of their weapons, but it didn’t matter. They let him break free only as they reached the dead end, the laboratory’s security checkpoint at his side.
He turned; they unleashed another round of firepower; and finally, he fell.
Beneath the wail of the alarm was only stillness. They were waiting for a command. Greed tried hard not to breathe, but it still hurt to do so, anyway.
“Turn off the alarm,” he heard one of them say. Greed was all but certain it was Envy.
There were footsteps, and the alarm was silenced. “Back to your positions,” Envy commanded again. “We’re done here. You two, check him.”
As far as Greed could tell, they were predictably obedient. Most of the commotion faded down the hall, and he soon felt a human hand against his throat checking for a pulse.
He opened his eyes to grin at them just as Envy pressed a blade through them each, silent but sufficient. They fell to either side of him.
“You okay?” Envy murmured. He bore a half-smile, but Greed could feel the sentiment.
“I will be,” he grumbled, sitting up slowly and scattering the bullets that had risen to the surface. His clothing was in tatters, but it wasn’t as important now.
This would have been much easier just ten years ago.
As Greed stood, Envy approached the console beside the door. He punched in the code they’d procured days earlier through Envy’s trickery, then pressed his thumb to the adjacent reader.
There were alchemic symbols stamped around the device. If this didn’t work, they’d have to haul the body down here, but to Greed’s relief the locking mechanism finally relented. The doors slid open, and Greed followed Envy in, close as his shadow.
The antechamber was empty–empty, but bright, even while shaded by Greed’s glasses, still miraculously in place. The stark sterility of the place was foreign to them.
Further on was another door with a narrow window, but they didn’t need to peer through it to know that two alchemists worked beyond. Envy stripped himself of the officer’s appearance, looking like himself again, or at least, a human version of it, blue eyes hiding the purple. Greed just had to make do with the glasses.
“Don’t forget,” Envy murmured, casting a glance his way.
“Don’t kill them, I know.” Greed smirked lightly. Longevity was key. “And keep my mouth shut.”
Envy smirked back, but stepped to the side of the door. There would be another keypad on their way out, but for now, all he had to do was turn the latch and push.
One behind the other, they sprinted in. This next room was just as bright, and just as sterile, with the exception of the chimeras in cages along the wall. The alchemists were just where they expected them to be, one near each of the desks, conveniently far from the surgical weaponry near the cages. Envy headed toward the female on the right; Greed to the male on the left. As long as they had no time to draw their infernal designs, this would be simple. This was the last barrier between them and military-grade stones.
Greed heard Envy’s fist connect with jawbone just as his own heel landed in the gut of his charge.
It sent the alchemist hurtling a little further than he’d intended.
“I said be careful!” Envy shouted.
Greed did his best to keep his teeth hidden as he growled, leaping over the desk to find him again. “How should I know how hard to hit them!?”
The alchemist was still gasping for breath when Greed lifted him by the collar. The man’s garish rings, each one stamped with a different alchemic symbol, flashed under the blinding lights as he grappled with Greed’s wrist. Ordinarily, Greed would have said something snide, but he couldn’t risk it, and he pulled back his fist, trying to calculate his force.
Calculation wasn’t his strength. Before he could stop him, the alchemist changed tactics and squirmed to make contact with the desk, sending a pillar of it into the underside of Greed’s jaw.
It was an exercise in discipline to let himself be hit with it, but it didn’t do him any good. He’d locked eyes with the man before he realized he’d lost the sunglasses, and in light as bright as this it was too late to hide himself.
Recognition consumed the man’s expression. “I know what you are,” he uttered. Greed could tell his mind was back-peddling.
At least now he could sneer. “And just what are you gonna do about it?”
But the man actually sneered back, dropping to press his hand to the ground. Greed expected more projectiles, but instead, the pristine floor beneath the alchemist slowly acquired the sprawling design they feared the most, as though it had been seared there from beneath.
“Your move,” he said.
Greed set his mouth in frustration. “Envy!”
Envy sighed as he approached. “If he wants to stay in there, let him. We don’t need to–Greed!”
Greed was nearly knocked off his feet as Envy shoved him to the side and promptly receded: another sealing array had nearly been completed where he’d stood.
“You’re a real pain in the ass,” Greed yelled, jabbing a claw in the man’s direction. “We weren’t even gonna kill you!”
Envy’s tactics were much more effectual. “Catch him!” he warned just before launching the remains of the desk into him, knocking him out of the protective circle and into Greed’s waiting clutches.
Gripping his wrists, Greed kept his meddling hands away from the floor, but even the contact between them was dangerous. Unbidden by him, Greed felt the hard carbon rise to the surface of his arm, and he realized the pattern in it just in time to fling the alchemist away from them both. As soon as he hit the ground, another array spiraled out from beneath him, and unlike the carbon on Greed’s skin, the previous array persisted. Now there were two seals, and no doubt there would be more before they were out of here.
“You know what we want,” Envy reasoned coolly, just the opposite of Greed’s temperament. “And we don’t even want very many.”
The alchemist’s face suddenly clouded. “You have no idea what we had to do for those. You’ll never take them!”
They barely had time to sigh at the man’s overreaction. He’d resumed his desperate attempts to catch them, and though Envy easily flipped out of, and Greed easily dodged, each array before it was completed, the place was quickly becoming a minefield.
“We should have just killed him!” Greed shouted angrily.
“You should have knocked him out!”
“Well, if I get ahold of him now, he’s dead!”
And yet that wasn’t likely to pass. Not only could they not stand still long enough to think, but their foe had begun to guess where they were leaping to, causing them to veer off course at the last second.
They were remarkably resilient creatures, but they couldn’t keep this up forever.
And neither could the alchemist, who was tiring, finally. He remained crouched, protected within his sealing array, panting lightly though he wasn’t the one leaping from one empty space to another.
They’d have given up now and made a run for it if there weren’t already an array at the door . . . but if Envy could distract the alchemist long enough now that they had a few seconds to think, maybe Greed could–
“Let’s just finish this, shall we?” the alchemist suggested.
Greed didn’t like that tone at all. A cautious glance to their beleaguered opponent showed nothing of his intentions, and the floor beneath Greed remained empty of design. But out of the corner of his eye he saw it: the perimeter of a sealing array as large as the room itself, forming steadily inward, consuming the other arrays as it went. By the time the circle beneath the alchemist disappeared, too, the whole room would be a trap.
They didn’t have time.
They didn’t have time.
Envy bolted for the door, but even if he made it, even if he put in the code right on the first try, the door wouldn’t open in time.
But they only needed one of them to be free. One would help the other. That was their way.
“Yeah,” Greed muttered in agreement, “let’s finish this.”
He lunged toward the alchemist, his path direct now that the incomplete design had replaced the rest. He’d plunge into the one still protecting the alchemist, but the little shit would be dead before Greed lost his strength. He’d just have to keep him from dodging, and with just a few feet between them, the arrogant bastard wasn’t budging.
“GREED, DUCK!”
The command was sure enough, sharp enough, that Greed aborted his collision course to veer heavily to the side.
He hadn’t even hit the ground when he heard the clipped parting of the air past his ear.
Beneath him, the advancing claws of the array were still, the incomplete design now harmless. In another second, the alchemist had slumped over to join it, a knife’s blade tucked neatly into the center of his forehead.
A wide grin of serendipitous relief spread over Greed’s face. “Nice shot!”
Envy chuckled breathlessly from across the room, approaching with a swagger. “Did you expect anything less?”
Though Envy had earned it, Greed smirked at his smugness, picking himself up off the floor. “From you, no.”
Envy could be an overbearing nuisance, but Greed had to admit–
Greed stopped mid-tug as he began to straighten his clothes.
That wasn’t right, was it?
He hadn’t expected anything less. But he should have.
His eyes found Envy’s, which flicked back to purple in his wide-eyed stare.
Greed quickly looked away. They still had a job to do–the crux of the whole ordeal–and there was no telling how much time they’d have to do it. They couldn’t afford to sink their attention into this, and what did it matter, anyway? Why should they focus on such an insignificant snag? It was obvious what they were. What was gone was gone. These . . . echoes were nothing more than an annoyance.
“Watch her,” Greed mumbled, gesturing toward the remaining alchemist, still unconscious on the floor. He pulled out the burlap bag he’d rolled around his waist to save it from bullets and unfolded it with unnecessary concentration.
Envy stopped his haphazard pacing and nodded. He needed something to do.
Greed watched him a moment longer before he crossed the room to a series of glass tanks spanning the wall. He readied himself.
“So we knew each other?”
There it was.
Greed sighed quietly, closing his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He pulled back and rammed his claws into one of the tanks, puncturing it, and catching the cascade with the porous sack. Its weave filtered out the stones as they came out of solution.
“Maybe we should,” Envy persisted, his voice quiet, almost lost amongst the shuffling of the caged chimeras and the slosh and clink of the gathering stones.
“Not right now. Let’s just get out of here.” The tank had run out. The sack now heavy and swollen with stones, he balled its open end in his fist and turned to face him.
Envy still looked anxious, but he nodded, and handed Greed his sunglasses from the floor, hiding his own eyes behind the blue again. “Here. She’ll probably figure it out when she sees the place, but we don’t want anyone to reinforce her suspicions.”
There would be suspicions anyway, when investigation revealed that the brigadier general was probably dead before leading the chase to the laboratory, but humans were good at manipulating probability in their favor.
Greed nodded back, putting on the shaded glasses. They were cracked, but still functional.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
They sustained far fewer bullet wounds on the way out, having got pretty far before anyone noticed them at all, but the injury still made their ascent to the rooftops less than graceful. At least Greed had been able to protect the sack. The last thing they needed was to lose any of what they’d come for.
But they’d soon reached Central proper, bringing the rooftops closer together and a greater ease to their travel. Now that the pursuit behind them had dwindled, they could have chanced a car, but rooftops safeguarded against anyone following them to their dwelling.
Midway through the city, he felt Envy’s hand grip his arm, pulling him to stop.
“What about now?–I need to talk about this now.”
Greed halted in his sprint despite his better judgment. Just a few blocks beyond, the military’s headquarters marred the skyline behind Envy as Greed turned to face him.
His tone was kinder than usual, though he knew this was a losing battle. “We should leave well enough alone.”
“Until someday it blindsides us and we can’t handle it?”
The distress was obvious in Envy’s face. Greed himself had an idea of what that might feel like. He had felt it the night he first knew, really knew the truth of their existence. They were reproductions of humans who once were. And it was an awful feeling, capable of what Envy warned against.
“So what do we talk about?”
Envy pursed his lips. Greed could tell he wanted this conversation, he just didn’t know what it should be.
Greed set down the stones between them, relieving himself of that weight, at least.
“What do you remember?”
Envy shook his head slowly. “If I start with the knives . . . not much. I used them. I threw them. But if I start from the end . . . I think I was shot.”
Something clenched in Greed’s gut. He frowned, trying to keep the emotion from interfering, but it had already stirred something to the surface.
“Revenge,” Greed murmured. “I died by my own revenge.”
“For who?”
“For Hu–” Greed’s heart thundered as he corrected himself. “For you.”
But Envy had caught the slip. “That was a name. You almost said it–what was it?”
Greed frowned again, but Envy had drawn closer, searching his face as Greed studied his.
“Maes Hughes,” he confessed, quietly.
Envy repeated it back to him, his volume no greater, and Greed felt some relief that his expression had not danced with some further recognition. It was just a detail to him, as it should have been.
“So what was yours?”
“My name?” Greed scowled with the idea of it, but nothing came to mind. “Don’t remember.”
“Well, you were a colonel, we know that much.”
He glanced over Envy’s shoulder to the floodlights on the military’s headquarters and smirked. “Yeah, the irony’s rich. But we should get home.”
Envy glanced down as Greed lifted the sack again. “Yeah, you’re right. Want me to carry it?”
“It’s fine,” Greed answered, turning to continue their journey.
And maybe it was fine. Maybe knowing these things made no difference.
“Why would his wife kill him, though?” Envy wondered to the night air behind him.
Greed just shook his head, eyes on the distant hill as they bounded toward it. “Humans. Who knows?”
* * *
They’d hid the stones in tens of places around the hill, the train station, and in the mine shaft itself. Their forethought and restraint were a marvel unto themselves: they’d kept only a handful for themselves tonight, and still drunk on the influx of power, Greed pressed Envy to the wall inside the station, a note of ownership guiding his kiss. Greed had grown accustomed to Envy’s subservience to him in this regard, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying.
“So you tried to kill my wife, then?”
Greed wasn’t sure how to take the interruption before Envy chuckled against his lips, setting him at ease again. “That seems . . . fitting.”
He laughed shortly. “No, I succeeded. Whoever it was, anyway.” He could only remember the fire, not who was in it. All he knew for certain was that it had been for Hughes.
. . . for Hughes.
Greed drew back to peer into Envy’s face–the face Greed had asked for, the face he’d demanded.
But it wasn’t Envy’s face to begin with, was it? It wasn’t Envy he’d given up his freedom for, it was Hughes.
And it wasn’t even Greed who had wanted him, it was–
“Roy,” Envy murmured, his eyes studying the features of Greed’s face as though to confirm this. “That was your name. Roy Mustang.”
Greed’s entire foundation–his very greed, the need that had defined him from the start–it wasn’t even his.
But to hell with it. He drew Envy to him so that he could feel every tiny movement of his muscles, feel the pulse that thrummed through them both. It was Envy he had won through that bargain, and it was Greed who had won him. It was Greed who felt this way for him.
“And let that be the last time you ever say it,” Greed answered.
In time he felt Envy smile, his lower lip withdrawing from between Greed’s teeth.
“Deal,” he purred, and Greed acknowledged it with a satisfied leer, lifting him and carrying him to the bed.
To hell with humans.
Greed was the victor.