Maes didn’t bother knocking. He knew the door wouldn’t be locked, mostly because he had ordered Ed not to bolt it anymore. In case there was another emergency, the last thing Maes wanted to have to do was break another door down. His shoulder still hurt from doing it last time.
And so Maes hefted the bag of food under his arm—he had made the happy mistake of mentioning to his wife that Ed was looking a little underfed lately and she had promptly whipped up a pie and a chicken casserole to take over to him—and pushed open the door.
The door opened to reveal Ed, sitting on one of the two beds in the small room. His head was bowed and he was holding a glinting metal something by the handle, the point of it digging into his chest.
The bag of food dropped from Maes’ grasp and he bolted forward, crying out his name. He grabbed Ed’s hand and yanked it away from his chest.
Ed looked up at him, his face both pained and startled. There were tears in his eyes, and desperation so intense that it Maes felt it hit him like a solid blow.
With mind still racing, Maes looked down at what Edward was holding. The metal flashed again in the dim light of the room, and Maes let out a tiny, relieved laugh.
He had thought it was a knife. For those first few blinding seconds upon opening the door, he had thought that he was witnessing Ed’s suicide. And how could he not think that, after everything that had happened? After seeing Ed so completely overwhelmed with fear and grief that morning?
But, no. It wasn’t a knife.
What Ed was holding in his hand was a screwdriver.
“W-what the hell are you doing?” he stammered to the kid, “I thought that you were—”
“Al’s gone,” the boy rasped, talking over him and silencing him with those two words. He gritted his teeth and the tears in his eyes spilled over. “I don’t know where he is. He left. I think he gave in to the Call and left...!”
Maes’ insides did a backflip and his eyes darted to the corner where Al had been sitting, ceaselessly, for nearly two weeks. Ed was right; the corner was empty save for the tight writing that filled every inch of the wall, the only ghostly reminder that Al had been there at all.
“It’s alright, kiddo,” Maes made himself say, sitting on the bed next to him, scooting in as close as he could get and putting an arm around his quaking shoulders. Edward was trembling and his skin was cool to the touch. That was really no surprise, since his shirt was off and his hair was still damp from his shower... but somehow Maes thought that his shivering wasn’t due entirely to his body temperature, if at all. Maes could also tell that he was a little unfocused, at least more so than he’d been that morning, but it seemed as if the terror-fueled adrenaline pumping through him was helping to stave off the Call somewhat. “We’ll find him,” he added lamely.
“No...” Ed bowed his head, clutching the screwdriver in both of his hands as if it were some kind of religious object, like a string of holy beads to channel his prayers. “No, he’s gone. We’re all disappearing. All of us. I’m already starting to fade.” A loud, heartbroken laugh barreled out of his throat. “I don’t even feel like myself. Maybe I’m already gone. I think Mustang’s been gone for a while.”
He was shaking hard, clearly battling against some crippling kind of half-mad terror that Maes couldn’t even begin to understand. Maes didn’t even know what to say in response to his soft, frightened words, and so instead he reached forward and gently took the screwdriver from Ed’s hands. He wasn’t certain now whether or not Ed was intending to hurt himself with it, but with the way that he was talking he really didn’t want to risk it. “You’d better let me have this...”
“Wait...” Ed stopped him, visibly trying to calm himself and stop crying. He wiped his eyes. “I need that...”
“For what?” Maes asked, cautiously letting him take it back.
“I’m l-losing focus again,” he sniffled. As Maes watched, he set the head of the screwdriver against one of the screws bolting his automail to his collarbone. He tried to turn the screw, but his shaking hands were too unsteady to make much headway. Finally, he offered the screwdriver to Maes. “Could you...?”
“What?” Maes blinked, not quite getting what Ed wanted him to do. But then his heart squeezed with sympathy as he realized. “Oh, sure...”
“Just tighten it a little,” he rasped. “The pain is enough... better than the band, at least...”
“It won’t damage your automail?” Maes asked uncomfortably. Now that he was looking at it, he could see that the area around Ed’s collarbone was red and swollen. There was dried blood in the joints of the metal. Well, Maes had asked him to find an alternative to cutting himself... but was this really better?
“It’s fine. I’ve been doing it for days.”
Not wanting to, but feeling that he didn’t really have a choice, Maes tightened the screw. Ed stiffened and winced in pain—and it had to have been significant pain... for fuck’s sake, he was drilling into his bones—but he did not cry out.
“L-little more,” was all he said, and Maes grudgingly complied by giving the screw another slight turn. This time, a soft cry did find its way out of Ed’s throat, but he silenced it quickly by turning his head and biting into the back of his flesh hand.
The phone on the nightstand beside the bed rang. Ed made no move to answer it, just let himself collapse sideways onto the bed and curled around himself, giving his body a moment to adjust to his intensified pain. Is this how Ed had been living for the past few days? Maes suddenly hated himself for not keeping a closer watch on him. With the ongoing investigation, and the missing alchemists, and the climbing body count, and Roy’s issues, and all of the meetings he’d been expected to attend, Maes had failed to keep an eye on the one person who really had no one else to depend on. In his moment of terror and crisis, not even his own brother had stayed by his side...
Mentally swearing to be more attentive to him from now on, he reached over and picked up the phone.
“Hullo?” he answered numbly, completely forgetting his military decorum.
“Oh, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes,” Hawkeye said, “I was hoping you’d be there already...” Her voice was very clipped and low, as if she were terrified and trying very hard not to sound like it.
“What’s wrong?” Maes asked her immediately, “Is Mustang okay?”
“No. No, I don’t think he is. He just purposefully broke his hand with a paperweight. He’s losing it, Hughes. He said he wants me to tie him down so that he can’t go anywhere. He’s afraid that he’s going to give in to the Call and I don’t know how to help him. He’s sick and not making sense. It’s like he’s a completely different person. I can’t get him to stop shaking.”
Maes’ guts went cold. “Do you think he accidentally overdosed...?”
“No, I don’t think he’s had any cocaine at all. If anything, I think he’s fighting through withdrawals. I think he just can’t take any more of this, Hughes. Everyone around him is breaking down and expecting him to stay strong and...” Her voice broke, a harsh and helpless sound that physically drove the breath from Maes’ lungs. He had never seen her anywhere near close to tears before. She was a very strong, sometimes volatile person—so much like her commander—and for her to display any sort of weakness, no matter how deserving the display was, was downright terrifying. “He just can’t do it anymore,” she finished in a despairing whisper.
The façade that all of them—the soldiers, the alchemists, and, hell, even the Brass—had been clinging to since the beginning of this nightmare was wearing too thin to be of any use anymore. There would be no more delusions of optimism, or the increasingly desperate refrain of “Everything’s fine”. Because nothing was fine, and none of them could continue pretending. People were dead, more were going to die, and there was very little that anyone could do about it. The mental admission to himself that he and everyone around him were equally powerless to stop—or even understand—what was happening crushed down on Maes’ shoulders with an impossible weight.
Suddenly, all Maes wanted to do was curl up with Ed on the cheap dormitory bed and go to sleep so that he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. If he slept, the world would go away... and when he woke up, all of this would just be a bad dream.
“...I’ll be right over,” he told her, running a hand through his hair. “Just stay with him until I get there.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They both hung up and Maes allowed himself a moment to just sit in silence, his head cradled in one hand. Finally he took a breath and straightened. He turned and put a gentle hand on Edward’s side.
“Ed, I have to go see the Colonel for a few minutes, but I’ll be back. Hawkeye says he isn’t doing very well and I want to make sure he’s okay.”
Ed’s automail hand shot out and grabbed his wrist in a crushing grip.
“No,” he said, his golden eyes frighteningly wide and bright in the dim room. “Don’t leave me here alone...”
Suddenly, it was all Maes could do to keep from following Ed’s lead and weeping. His eyes welled and he swallowed hard in an attempt to lessen the grieved ache in his throat.
Never in his life had he ever felt so helpless, watching as his friends suffered. During the war, Maes had seen comrades die on a fairly regular basis. He had seen Mustang forced into actions he found morally damning each day, and watched him devolve into a mere shadow of himself, an emotionally-blocked husk. But even then, there had been a purpose. Maes had had orders, and he knew how to follow them. Now, there were no orders. There was no plan or purpose. Everything was in chaos, and even the great war leader, Fuhrer Bradley, had no fucking clue what was going on.
“Okay,” he choked, but then he cleared his throat and made himself sound normal, as if nothing at all was wrong. “Get dressed, then. You’re coming with me.”
Within a few minutes, Ed was dressed and ready. Maes picked up the pie and casserole that lay dropped and forgotten in the hallway—neither was too badly damaged—and set them on the shelf in the dorm. Perhaps he could convince Ed to eat them later, but for now they both had more pressing matters on their minds.
They were quiet for the first part of the drive. Ed stared out the window at the darkened sky. He was still shivering, and now Maes was positive it wasn’t because he was cold. The evening was pleasant and still... almost unnaturally so; there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze in the trees.
Somehow unnerved by the contrast of the eerily calm weather and the silence inside the car with his own hectic thoughts, Maes finally broke the quiet.
“Ed... can I ask you something?”
The boy turned his tired, bloodshot eyes over to him. His brow was furrowed with pain and in the light of the streetlamps he looked positively unreal, as if he were an excruciatingly detailed wax model that had been just ever so slightly warped somehow. It was as if the consciousness looking back at Maes through those watery eyes was not completely Edward Elric.
“What?”
“Roy... Colonel Mustang mentioned to me the last time we spoke that he felt like the thing that’s going on... this ‘Call’ is focusing on him. I told him that everyone was probably feeling that way, but he was adamant. I don’t know if he’s just being paranoid or... I don’t know.” Maes stopped and cleared his throat. “The way he was talking about it just worried me... I just wanted to know if you feel that way, too, or if it’s just him.”
Edward didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Yes...” he said at length.
“You feel like it’s focused on you, too?”
“No... I feel like it’s focused on him.” He said it as though he had just realized it, with a hushed kind of wonder. “I mean, we’re all under the wide umbrella of the Call... but... I think he is the center of it. I can feel it all around him. It made me uncomfortable, kind of on edge when I was near him, but I didn’t realize what it was... More and more, I can feel him. I can feel everyone...”
“Okay...” Maes said, his expanse of worry somehow finding a whole new dimension to explore. “Okay, but what does that mean?”
“I just... I don’t know.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “We can just sense each other, I think. Kind of. Mustang stands out, though. I feel him the most strongly... and I don’t know what Hawkeye was saying to you on the phone... but now that I’m paying attention to it, I can tell you that saying that Mustang ‘isn’t doing very well’ is the understatement of the year. I can feel how close he is to... doing something.”
“Is... is he really that bad...?”
Ed looked up at him again. “He’s been bad for a long time, but today... even in just the past couple of hours it’s been worse. For all of us... I can feel it building. It’s getting harder and harder every minute... If it weren’t for the drugs, I don’t think Mustang’d be sane at all by this point.” He licked his lips, and when he spoke again his voice was a dull whisper, on the verge of tears again. “Hate to admit it, but I’m terrified for the bastard, Hughes. I’m terrified for us. I think we’re nearing the end of this... however it ends.”
Maes absorbed that. “Thank you for answering my question,” he said, managing to sound much steadier than he felt.
The barracks where all of the out-of town military officials were staying were really not that far from Ed’s dorm. They probably could have walked there, if Ed weren’t in so much pain and if Maes had honestly thought that they could afford the extra time it would take. Maes hadn’t come to visit Roy in his room before now, as both of them had been very busy and they’d been having angry spats at each other rather frequently since his arrival, but he knew which room was his. Third floor, room 303.
There was a kind of pressure hanging overhead as he pushed open the door, a dark and overbearing sensation that Maes had been feeling off-and-on for the past few days. It was all around him now, hovering so thickly that air stuck in his throat as he tried to breathe it in. It gave him a headache and turned his stomach and made him, with some kind of primal warning, not want to enter the room.
Hawkeye looked up as the two of them entered. Maes met her frightened gaze for only a moment before his eyes fixed on Roy.
He looked bad. He looked really, really bad.
He was sitting in his desk chair, his arms wrapped around himself. His head was down and he was doubled over. His whole body shook with each breath and he was, very quietly, mumbling to himself. His deranged whispers filled the otherwise-silent room. It made Maes’ skin crawl.
Roy’s hair was in disarray, his clothes—one of the simple white button-ups he was prone to wearing and his military slacks—were rumpled and he was barefoot. The sleeves of his shirt were unbuttoned and rolled to the elbow, and Maes could see traces of what looked like blood smeared across it in several places. It looked like his left hand was bleeding and, from the odd way his fingers were bent, Maes felt safe to assume that it was the broken hand Hawkeye had mentioned on the phone.
Hawkeye stood from her seat on the corner of the bed, close to Roy, and came over to Maes. Her face betrayed a deep-set fear, and a certain tenseness at her temples and jaw-line made him wonder if she, too, were fighting a headache.
“He barely even speaks to me now,” she whispered urgently. “It takes him forever just to form a coherent sentence... We have to take him to the hospital. I think it’s gotten to that point. I know there isn’t much they can do, but...” she trailed off, then swallowed hard. “At the very least, they can make him comfortable. They can sedate him so he doesn’t have to suffer this anymore...”
As much as he didn’t like the thought, Maes found himself agreeing with her. Roy’s hand was broken... he was bleeding... and, if Ed was to believed—and Maes did believe him completely—Mustang was probably even worse off than he looked. He had likely broken his hand to help himself focus, but if his appearance was any indicator, it didn’t appear to be working very well. If the Call had grown so strong within him that even shattered bones did little to snap him out of it, then things had become dire for him indeed.
Ed, who had silently entered the room after Maes, slowly made his way over to Mustang. He stood over him for a moment, just looking down at his bent head with an utterly blank expression. Perhaps Ed’s pain wasn’t completely staving off the Call anymore, either...
But then the boy knelt down on one knee and looked up at Roy. After a moment, Roy raised his head a little to return his stare. Slowly, Ed’s expression changed as they regarded one another. His face went from its distant blankness to a look of deep, horrified sadness. His bright amber eyes widened and the muscles in his jaw went tight.
“Mustang...” he said, very, very quietly. “I think we have to let it take us.”
Roy shook his head slowly. “No...” he breathed, so quietly that Maes wasn’t completely sure that he’d spoken.
“We have to,” Ed grated out, and then the sob that he’d been holding back since the car ride finally expelled itself. “It took Al...”
“I know,” Roy said. “I’m sorry...”
“Al’s gone?” Hawkeye asked, turning her despairing eyes on Maes. He nodded. He could see her wondering how Roy had known.
“We have to go after him... please. It’ll destroy us if we don’t... We have to stop fighting it, Mustang. We have to let go.”
Roy just stared at him. His eyes were dull and hazy, the red-rimmed eyes of a very old man. He lifted his broken left hand and, though it shook as he did so, rested it on Ed’s shoulder with an air of his old authority, as if he had just made a heavy decision.
As Maes watched, Roy’s face softened and became that blank slate of expressionlessness that he had seen worn so often lately by the alchemists in his life. All sense of pain, terror, sadness, or anything at all lifted from him, and all that remained was a vessel that Maes almost didn’t want to recognize as his friend. It was almost as if Roy wasn’t even there anymore, as if it was just an animated body with no thought or feeling.
Maes didn’t at first realize the significance of what had just happened before his eyes. He’d thought that Roy had been overwhelmed by the Call again and had just lost his focus, his mind wandering to whatever hellish place the poor alchemists’ thoughts were pulled to when they lost control of themselves.
But then that feeling of pressure... that unsettling sensation of building tension that he’d been feeling and that—unbeknownst to him—Hawkeye and every other being within Amestris had been feeling to some extent as well... began to increase. The air felt heavy and it weighed in Maes’ lungs as if they were full of water. He felt suddenly suffocated, and his headache exploded into new and impossibly intense peals of pain. Beside him, he noticed Hawkeye wince and put a hand to her brow.
Roy stood from his seat and Ed stood with him. He was no longer shaking. He was no longer tired or in torment. He was nothing at all. His eyes were empty, the eyes of a corpse.
It was then that Maes realized that Roy had taken Ed’s words to heart. He had let go, and the Call had consumed him.
“Roy?” Maes called to him, his own horror increasing as his friend’s dissipated.
But Roy did not respond.
“Oh, Ed...” Hawkeye rasped, “What did you do...?”
“What needs to be done,” he replied softly, tears streaming down his cheeks freely now. Roy took a step toward the door, but Ed took his arm and held him back a little. “Wait...”
The boy clapped his hands together and touched his flesh hand to his automail wrist, and in doing so joined Mustangs broken hand to his automail with a makeshift chain, effectively cuffing them together.
“Whatever happens, I won’t leave his side...” Ed swore, and Maes could see by how the brightness of his eyes was fading that even he wasn’t all there anymore. He wouldn’t be able to fight the Call much longer, either.
“You can’t leave,” Maes told them.
“Neither of you are going anywhere except a hospital,” Hawkeye joined in, taking a step toward them.
“There’s no choice in the matter, now. You have to let us go.”
“Not on your fucking life!” Maes shouted, blocking the door.
Roy raised his head, and in his face something far more unsettling than blankness was stirring. He parted his lips and, in a voice that sounded somehow like a thousand people speaking at once and echoed into itself in an infinite wave of sound and was—it froze Maes’ insides to realize it—resolutely not Roy’s, he said:
“Do not interfere.”
“Like hell!” Hawkeye managed, looking just as bewildered as Maes, but just as unwilling to back down. Even Ed looked startled by the sound of Roy’s words.
The Roy-thing-that-was-not-Roy raised hand toward them and gestured with it. That building pressure became crushing, and it was all Maes could do to keep from screaming as the pain in his skull reached levels he’d never thought possible. His knees hit the carpet hard and he bent double, clutching the sides of his head. He felt Hawkeye collapse beside him, and he swore that he could hear screaming from the streets outside, as if the entire city were crying out in sudden pain.
Maes raised his streaming eyes to his friend and saw a wide, horrific grin spread across his face.
It was the last thing he would see for several hours.
And then everything went dark.
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