FIC: Focus (chapter list)

This fic was written for the FMA Big Bang Challenge of 2011 and I made this blog today expressly to post it on so that I won't flood the inboxes of my poor followers on Fanfiction.net. This fic will also be posted there, but at the more reasonable rate of a chapter per week.

Title: Focus
Author: sevlow
Genre: Paranormal/Mystery/Horror
Rating: R

Word Count: ~36,000
Characters: Mustang, Edward, Hughes, Hawkeye, Other Alchemists and Military. No Pairings.
Warnings: Drug use, Death, Madness, General Angst, Some Gore
Summary: Mustang, Edward, and all the other alchemists of fair Amestris are starting to lose their grip on their own minds and bodies. The reason for their sudden loss of control is unknown. The Amestrian military is in chaos as dozens of its higher-ranking officers start losing their minds, until even Bradley is invested in putting a stop to their torment and calming is country.
Links:
--Chapter 1
--Chapter 2
--Chapter 3
--Chapter 4
--Chapter 5
--Chapter 6
--Chapter 7
--Chapter 8

Enjoy.

FIC: Focus, CH 8

The night was tepid and stagnant.  The air was still, the temperature of cooling blood.  No birds chirped in the stock-still trees.  No animals moved in the underbrush.  Nothing at all stirred, except for the alchemists.

There were hundreds of them, all of them silently moving forward though the darkness.  They needed no lights to see their way in the black, nor did they need to call to one another to find where they were.  They were all completely silent, and they moved as one.  They had no identity separate from one another and they moved forward, ever forward, as single-mindedly as a swarm of insects.

They were gathering here, in a place that they had all seen in their minds this night.  They were coming together from all corners of Amestris, all of them driven by the insatiable impulse that no one could explain.  The alchemists from all over the country who had gone missing were found here, some of them having walked dozens of miles after their cars ran out of gas.

Many alchemists were here already, and many more were coming.  As they neared the site of their otherworldly meeting, it became crowded and bodies were packed against each other, all of them trying to get to the same place. Some of the older and weaker members of the swarm collapsed as they journeyed, but the alchemists who came after them did not alter their paths to go around them, and many were trampled to death by their peers.  There was no such thing as pity here, or morals.  There was only the Call, and the weak—whether of body or mind—were disposable.

From the sky, the silent owls gliding overhead could see them down below, and only they witnessed the intricate shapes that the converging humans created.  The gentle owls, though, could not comprehend what they were looking at, nor did they care.

It was a transmutation circle, and it became more intricate as each alchemist arrived.  Each alchemist—each piece of the hive-like whole—knew his or her place.  Arms and legs entwined, creating a mindless human chain, each alchemist’s position drilled into the core of them, and held without cease.  Newcomers to the circle crawled over one another to find their place, and some of those below them were suffocated or crushed in the tangle of bodies, yet still they held their piece of the circle even as their corpses began to cool.

The concentration of alchemists thinned toward the center of the array.  Here, most of them were Alchemists of the State, more powerful than their civilian bretheren, and so destined to find their place in the middle of it all where their talents would be more focused. 

And then at the very Center, there were only two.  A man and a boy, one raven-haired and one blond, the two of them chained together.

The man alone stood.  His colleagues all knelt around him, intertwining with one another.  Even the boy who was chained to him was on his knees, half-heartedly yanking on the chain that bound them together.  He was not supposed to be here.  He was supposed to be further off, entangled with the other State Alchemists, but with the limited brain function that he was allowed at the moment, he did not have enough presence of mind to transmute the chain back into his automail and release himself.

The man did not notice his pulling.  He simply stared upward at the sky, motionless as he waited to begin.  For hours he stood like this as his comrades amassed around him.  Not moving, scarcely breathing.  For hours and hours.  Waiting.

And then, at precisely the right moment, just as the morning sun began to hue the sky with shades of red and gold, he spread his arms as if to welcome the coming day.  The blond boy began to pull with renewed vigor as if he knew something was about to happen, but the man did not budge.  Even as the pulling became violent, making the metal cuff slice into his wrist, even when the force of the boy’s strength wrenched at the tendons in his shoulder and pulled the bone from the socket with a soft grinding sound that neither of them were sane enough to hear... even then, he stood as solidly as a statue and closed his eyes.

Light unlike any other flashed into the pre-morning darkness, driving it back to retreat in the shadows behind trees and buildings in the distant city.  The sky was white for a moment, so vibrant that any inhabitant of Central who happened to be looking at it had to cry out and shield their eyes.  But none of them were looking.  None of them were awake to see it.

            The earth shook violently.  Rocks crumbled and trees were uprooted.  Streets cracked and the white of the blinded morning sky became a cold grey with the dust that was kicked up in the wake of the trembling ground. 

But then, slowly, that pressure that everyone had felt pressing upon their souls began to dissipate. A soft, cool breeze gathered the courage to blow as the shaking ceased, billowing the grey dust it up into the sky as the ungodly light faded.

The raven-haired man’s arms dropped back down to his sides.  He swayed, stumbled, and put a hand to his brow.

Then he fell.

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He opened his eyes. 

For a moment he just stared, blinking at the morning light shining down upon him, not knowing where... or who... he was.  He tasted blood and his automail was hot from being in the direct sunlight for so long.

Around him there were moans.  Screams.  Weeping.  Somewhere to his right an old man cried out for his mother.

Slowly, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, but a sudden surge of vertigo knocked him over a little and he sat back dazedly.  His lower back rested against something behind him and he turned his heavy, pounding head to look.

And then, some very distant, very tired part of him remembered.

He struggled to his feet and the world rocked around him.  He staggered forward, toward the distant city, joining the throng of people heading that direction, many of them clinging to one another and weeping as they walked.

The body attached to his automail wrist dragged behind him without protest, silent and still.

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The amount of wounded that they found was unbelievable.

Alchemists were lurching from every direction, some of them walking, others crawling.  Others still were completely motionless, and often it was impossible to tell from a distance whether or not they were even alive.  It had been two hours since a search had been called to find the missing alchemists—for they were all missing now, every last one of them that hadn’t been hospitalized or forcibly kept at home by their families—and already seventeen bodies and fifty-seven wounded had been found.  It was like the scene of a natural disaster, or of some kind of gruesome war act, as if some kind of deadly bomb had been dropped.  The field medics were overwhelmed.

Private Williams was looking for his commander, Major Armstrong.  As of yet, though, his massive frame had not been spotted by anyone in his search party.  But Williams would not stop.  He would search tirelessly until he and every other unaccounted-for alchemist was safe. 

Williams looked up to see someone coming toward him and his team, topping a hill in the distance.  The figure was small, but his shoulders were broad and strong-looking.  He was silhouetted into obscurity, though the gold of his hair and the silver of his automail caught the light behind him enough to let all who looked upon him know who he was.

He stumbled forward another pace and fell in his exhaustion, tumbling down the hill, dragging with him another person who Williams had not been able to see before.  The private cried out to his peers and superiors and they all sprinted forward, the trained medic in their team pulling his kit from his rucksack as he ran.

Williams reached them first, and he hit his knees beside the boy before he even registered who the man was that he was dragging behind him.  Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist—a boy who Williams knew only by reputation and had never seen face-to-face aside from a few distant glimpses in the office—raised his eyes to meet his.  Tear tracks cut through the dirt on his face, the griminess making his eyes so intense that he almost didn’t look human.

“...Have you seen Alphonse?” he asked, his young voice made old and hoarse by fatigue.

“Move aside, Private!”

The medic pushed past Williams hurriedly, not to get at the kid who seemed mostly uninjured, but to the body beside him.

Colonel Roy Mustang lay on his back, his eyes eerily open and rolled back into his head.  His body was stiff, his back slightly arched off of the filthy ground, and his hands—one of which was clearly badly broken—were clenched and twitching.  His whole body was shaking in a tight, yet uncontrollable way, every muscle spasming. Trails of dried blood were smeared under his nose and down from the corner of his mouth.  The medic was on him in an instant, rolling him over onto his side and holding him down against what Williams only sluggishly realized was a violent seizure.  It passed within a few moments and Mustang fell still and limp back against the ground, his exhausted, wrought body dragging in a series of deep, desperate breaths.

The medic put two fingers to the side of Mustang’s neck, checking his pulse.

“This isn’t good,” the medic stated unnecessarily. He’d just had a seizure; how could it possibly be anything but bad?  “His heart is racing...  And it looks as if his shoulder has been dislocated.  His hand might be broken as well...  Sir?  Colonel Mustang, can you hear me?”

Mustang didn’t say anything, or even move for a very long time.  But then his red, sunken eyes opened and moved sluggishly over to meet the medic’s.  While Williams was sure this was a good sign, he could tell by the slowness of the man’s movements and the obvious bleariness of his mind that it wasn’t a great sign.  Like most of the others who had been found alive, Mustang was in a dangerous state of shock and the fact that he was also experiencing epileptic fits only made matters worse.

“Get the stretcher,” the medic ordered one of the other men in the company, “And try to get his men on the radio; I think they’re searching just north of here.”

“Sir!”  And the soldier left.

The medic turned his attentions to Fullmetal.  The boy looked back at him as he reached over and checked his pulse as well.

“...Have you seen my brother?” he asked.

The medic’s—Captain Randall was his name—stoic professionalism seemed to waver a little, but he fought it pack into place.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t.”

Fullmetal nodded, but then his own stoicism crumbled and he gritted his teeth, his silent tears streaming anew.

That seemed to shake Randall even further.  He cleared his throat and his voice softened, as if he were speaking to a child much younger than Fullmetal.  “Are you hurt anywhere?”

The boy shook his head.

“Good.”  He turned his head and looked back at Mustang.  The Colonel was still watching him with his hazy, confused-looking eyes.  He didn’t say anything, or really even do anything.  He just stared.  Williams’ skin crawled as their eyes met and he had to look away.  Eye-contact broken, Mustang’s frail hold on consciousness seemed to waver a little.  His eyelids fluttered and he gave a small, wet cough.

 Beside him, Randall stiffened and Williams let out a strangled curse.

Vivid droplets of red stood out starkly against the colorlessness of Mustang’s lips.  Oh god, he was bleeding, and as they watched a thick stream of blood began to spill from the corner of his mouth and down across his cheek.

Randall quickly took Mustang’s jaw in his hand, trying to pry it open.

“Don’t fight me, sir!” he pleaded when the wounded man resisted.  More blood poured from his mouth, dyeing his lips and staining the collar of his dirty white shirt.  He choked on it, and still more blood came forth.

Randall finally got his mouth open and turned his patient’s head to the side, allowing the blood to dribble out of his mouth and into the dirt.  “Damn it, he’s bitten through his tongue...”

He lifted the short length of chain connecting the boy and man between his two fingers.  “Can you take this off?” he asked Fullmetal, trying to sound gentle in the face of his urgency.  “Mustang is hurt.  We need to take care of him, okay?  Can you do that?”

“We... we have to stay together...  I promised Hughes.  And H-hawkeye.”  He swayed a little where he sat, clearly not in his right mind.  But after what he’d been through—some kind of terrifying event that no one yet understood—who wouldn’t be a little cracked?  Williams had only been on the outskirt of it, and the terror in his breast was barely containable.  He didn’t even want to imagine what it must be like for the alchemists.

“Okay, but we need to take him to the medic tent.  He’s going to bleed to death if we don’t get him sedated and stitched up.  We’ll take good care of him, but it’ll be hard for us to help him if you’re in the way.  Please, Fullmetal.”

He shook his head again, his bangs falling in front of his eyes.  “No...  I promised...”

Captain Randall tried again and again to gain Fullmetal’s cooperation, but he still would not release his hold on the Colonel.  By the time the stretcher came to transport the semi-comatose man to the medic tent, Randall was losing patience.  He ordered that one of the men run back and get a bone saw from the tents and, in spite of Fullmetal’s increasingly hysterical protests, he sawed through the chain.

The kid just about lost it when they took Mustang from him.  He fought and screamed, suddenly filled with a frantic, adrenaline-fueled kind of energy, but it didn’t last long.  Williams held onto him until he could fight no more.  Like the rest of the alchemists, he was exhausted to the point of collapse and he soon fell prey to his body’s need for rest.  He fell limp in Williams’ arms, half-swooning, and did not rise to fight again.

He was taken to one of the other medical tents to be checked out, and Williams went back out into the field, still searching for his commander.

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The impromptu base camp was flooded with the wounded.  Bandaged or bleeding alchemists milled around aimlessly, like the walking undead, each of them either still suffering from shock or simply trying to absorb what had happened.

But no one really knew what happened.  As of yet, no one had been able to find a clear answer.  The last thing Maes remembered was Roy and the horrifying presence that pulsed in him.  Then there had been pain, such vivid, indescribable pain followed by a period of blackness in which he felt nothing at all. 

The next thing he remembered was waking up on the floor of the barrack room with Hawkeye shaking him and calling his name, and then that moment of terror when he realized that it was morning—hours and hours had gone by without his notice—and Ed and Roy were both gone.

“They said he was over here somewhere...” Hawkeye said to Maes tightly, her sharp-shooter eyes desperately darting around in search of her commander.  “There!”

Maes turned to where she was pointing and felt his legs try to give out from under him with relief.  The two of them ran toward a medical tent where several patients had been made to sit outside on crates.  The number of wounded had skyrocketed, and there was not enough bed space for those who were not severely injured.

Maes supposed he should feel Roy lucky to be sitting outside, then.

Roy’s eyes were closed and deeply shadowed.  His cheeks looked sunken and the dip at his temples seemed deeper somehow, as if his skin was clinging to his bones.  His arm was in a sling, supporting the shoulder that the doctors had needed to pop back into its socket—Maes hadn’t been told how it was wrenched from the socket to begin with, nor did he think to ask—and his broken hand was safely within a cast.  The medics had mentioned over the radio that he’d been having seizures and had nearly bitten his tongue off, but after being medicated and given fluids he was improving.  Still, the sight of him was enough to make Maes sick to his stomach.

Roy did not open his eyes as they approached him, but considering that he had been recently sedated, that wasn’t entirely surprising.  He was reclining on a wooden box, leaning back against a stack of empty medical crates.  He was asleep, and looked as if he could sleep forever.  His lips were parted, stained with the traces of dried blood.  But he was alive.  Unlike so many of his comrades, he had been found alive, and just about anything beyond that joyful fact was currently moot in Maes’ eyes.

“Roy?  Buddy?”  Maes knelt down beside him, almost feeling bad about waking him, but just needing to know what he was okay.  At the sound of his name, Roy looked up, but it seemed as if it took him a moment to register where he was.  He tried to speak, but the pain must have reminded him of his injuries and he stopped.  He put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes tightly, wincing.

“Don’t try to talk, sir...” Hawkeye told him, kneeling beside Maes.

Roy looked at her groggily, then he raised his uninjured arm and mimed holding something between his thumb and first two fingers.  He moved his hand slowly through the air, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra.

“Oh, of course,” she said quickly, understanding what he wanted before Maes did.  She quickly flagged down a passing soldier and managed to beg a pen and a small pad of paper off of him.

She handed them to Roy and he put the pen to the first sheet of paper on the pad.  But then he stopped, as if he had no idea how to word what he wanted to say.  He sat for a moment, utterly still and silent, staring at the blank page, a dark chaos stirring beyond his soulful eyes as he searched for the words he could not say aloud.

Finally the pen moved and he turned the pad over so that Hawkeye and Maes could both see it.

It read, very succinctly:

?

It was just a question mark and yet, somehow, Maes understood everything that Roy was making it stand for.  What happened?  Where are we?  Are you okay?  Is Ed okay?  Am I okay?  What the hell is going on?  Tell me everything.

And, to the best of their abilities, they did. 

But they didn’t know what had happened. 

No one knew what was going on, other than to say that every alchemist in Amestris had suddenly gone mad, compelled into self-injury by some kind of psychic force.  There had been some manner of grand-scale transmutation, but no one could tell what effect it had had.  Nothing seemed to have changed, though that hanging pressure in the air was gone, and in its absence Maes felt positively buoyant.  Other than that, though, the purpose of the transmutation was a mystery.

“And then you and Ed were found... do you even remember that?”

Ponderously, he shook his head.

Maes and Hawkeye looked at each other, neither of them sure of how much detail they should go into about the state the two alchemists had been found in.

“Well, neither of you were exactly yourselves...” Maes started, rubbing the back of his neck. 

Roy listened to them describe his frightening behavior back at his barrack, but they could tell by the furrow in his brow that he did not remember any of it.  He jotted something down on the pad again, looking a little more awake, but then he stopped. His dark eyes sharpened and he pointed urgently over Maes’ shoulder.  Both he and Hawkeye turned to look.

In the distance, they could see Ed wandering through the throng of rushing doctors and shell-shocked alchemists.  He was holding himself, looking around as if just desperate to find a familiar face in the crowd.  Maes jumped up and went over to him, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder.  Ed jumped in surprise and looked up at him, and the expression of heart-wrenching relief that came to his face when he recognized Maes was enough to make the man grab him hard and wrap his arms around him.  Ed embraced him in return, holding onto him so hard that the indentions of his automail fingers would probably leave bruises on Maes’ back.

“C-can’t find Al...” he whispered against him, sounding too heartbroken to even weep.  “I can’t find him anywhere...”

“He’ll turn up, Ed,” Maes assured him, trying to sound like he meant it.  He cupped the back of the kid’s head, swearing silently that once this was all settled, he was going to force Edward—and Al... if and when they found him—to spend a few days with him and Gracia, in a warm, safe home where they would be loved and protected.  After all that they had already been through in their young lives, they didn’t need this.  It was too much.  And Maes really had tried so hard to keep him safe, to dull the terror of what was happening to him and all of the other alchemists... but none of it had been worth anything.

Maes closed his eyes tightly, forcing back the sting of tired, heartsick tears that had been threatening to loose themselves over the past few days.  Now was not the time to physically give in to his grief.  There was never time.

Almost grudgingly, he let go of Ed and led him back to Hawkeye and Roy.  Roy sat up woozily and motioned for his young subordinate to sit next to him and Ed complied, shakily collapsing back onto the wooden box.

            Roy flipped over to a clean sheet on the pad and scrawled a few words.  Maes caught a glimpse of the words Are you okay? as he showed the pad to Fullmetal.

            Ed read it.  “No.  Are you?”

            Roy smirked at him sadly and shook his head.  No, of course they weren’t okay.  None of them were, nor could they be expected to be any time soon.

            More alchemists were found as the day progressed, both dead and alive.  Armstrong was found toward late afternoon, wandering aimlessly with the body of another alchemist—a young man—cradled in his arms.  He was crying and had been inconsolable for hours, but he was mostly unhurt.  The same could not be said for Major Gates.  She was also found later in the afternoon, broken and bleeding as if she had been trampled.  She was alive, but barely.

It was nearly evening when they found Al, just when Roy’s sedation had worn off enough for him to travel.  Maes was eager to get him back into the city.  He wasn’t so badly injured that he needed a hospital, but a warm bed in a quiet room would probably do him loads of good... him and Ed both.

            But as they were getting ready to go, Ed suddenly gave a sharp, joyous cry. 

            “Brother!”

Alphonse screamed for his sibling from across the camp and Edward’s tired, devastated face lit up like a light.

            They ran toward each other, Ed stumbling in his exhaustion and nearly collapsing, but Al caught him up in his big arms and enfolded him into a terribly sweet and painfully sad embrace.

            Roy was already loaded into the car and was nearly asleep again, his head resting in Hawkeye’s lap in the back seat, but he opened his eyes to the brothers’ tearful reunion and watched them hold one another, weeping, each teasingly scolding the other for making them worry.

            In the wake of the darkness enshrouding the past couple of weeks, Maes’ heart was lightened to see the boys together again, and he felt a quiet smile play on his lips.  When he looked back at Roy, though, he saw no such buoyancy on his face.  His expression was tensed with profound gravity. 

It isn’t over, that face said.

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            It had been one hundred and fifty-three years, four months, one week, three days, and eight hours since the last Release.  The World was overdue for another.  And so I initiated one.

            Mustang—My Center piece, my Host—had been right about that: it had happened before.  And it will happen again. 

            Again, and again, and again.

            That’s what they’re here for, My alchemists, though they’ll never really know it.  They are made to live by the rules of Equivalent Exchange, and must therefore equalize the World around them when it needs them to. 

            Energy is never lost.  It is just reverted, spread out, repurposed...  sometimes it gathers and it builds and builds upon itself until it is a cosmic pressure that only earthquakes and torrential storms can help dissipate.

            But sometimes, every couple of centuries, the energy has been allowed to build too much and the only way to Release it is to expel it so violently that everything around it—the land, the wildlife, even those endlessly fascinating creatures who rule over it all—is completely pulverized.  Now, I can’t have that, can I?

            And so, as I have done before and shall do again, I used My alchemists to disperse what had been collected, to act as a living conduit to divert the energy back outward and ease the cosmic pressure.

             Alchemists are indispensable to the fate of their entire World.  This is why they can never truly know of the part they play.  Soon, as the days pass around them, they will forget.  One day, as one of the injured alchemists lays in her hospital bed, she will suddenly ask, “Why am I here?  How did I get injured?” and no one will answer her, because no one will know.  Two alchemists meeting on the street will faintly remember each other, will smile vaguely and wave, but they will not remember how they had held each other and wept in the wake of the transmutation, or recall that they had supported each other, both of them limping and injured, toward the medical tents.  Even Mustang, My perceptive and intuitive soldier, will look at the books newspaper articles he had borrowed from the Central Library and wonder why he had even checked out such pointless drivel.

            Memory is an interesting thing.  It is easily manipulated and completely unreliable, by My design, of course.  Only I will forever know the Truth, for that is what I am.  And I will keep My secret to Myself, at least until I need to make use of My toys again...

            ...And again, and again, and again...

FIC: Focus, CH 7

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.