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The scratch of chalk against concrete, like a match against strike strip. Even from the outside of the cavernous room, Roy could hear the powdered claw scrape across the stone, its raw edge scrawling indecipherable circles onto any surface it could reach. The walls, the floors, the columns, the steps, the risers, the underside of the bed, the scuffed toes of the boy’s worn boots. With hunger came desperation, with desperation came ingenuity. Under the right circumstances, anything could be a canvas.
You should rest.
The kid had taken to dragging his lower half across the floor as though he were roadkill in the making. Within the last two weeks, the exhaustion had begun to set in. A spectre had taken up residence in the solemn hunting cabin, a parasitic starvation that chewed through the body until only raw material remained.
I don’t have to. Thanks to you.
Flesh to leather, fat to tallow. Humans gave new names to their makings to avoid the reality that beneath the skin, they were meat too. They were all meat. With hunger came desperation, with desperation came ingenuity. Under the right circumstances, anything could be a five-course steak dinner.
“Edward.”
Beyond the barrier of the cellar door, the scratching stopped. In his mind, Roy could envision the way a dog lifts its head toward its master’s call, or the way a disobedient child listens for the sound of their father’s key in the lock. Those who carry rods, and those who receive them.
Roy did not consider himself a punishing presence in their dubauched facsimile of a household. Wether or not Edward would ever agree, he wanted to think of his visitations as rewarding. He was not an unforgiving patriarch with lash in hand. He always remembered to sweeten the proceedings with a little treat.
“I brought you something,” Roy offered placatingly, staring down at the handle as though expecting it to turn, as though expecting the child to crawl up the rickety cellar steps to collect his prize. He’d honestly be impressed if the kid could actually make it up to the door without passing out by this point. His survival was really becoming a matter of time. “Are you going to behave yourself?”
No response was their new normal. After weeks of screaming, and thrashing, and clawing, Edward had become content to lie beneath the heavy shock-blanket of silence. There was an assumption that the boy was attempting to wait him out somehow. Roy didn’t know how a starving child could have so much patience.
The knob was cold against his palm, dented into a perfect notch where his thumb could rest. Like the gouges in the cutting boards and the cracks in the bathroom countertops, newfound strength left marks on everything. The cry of the cellar door’s neglected hinges trumpeted his arrival to the resident of the dim basement, and the grunt he released as he reshouldered his burden announced his intentions.
Each step creaked painfully beneath the shared weight as he carefully descended. His captive’s shallow breaths ghosted down the shoulder of his shirt, wet and hot like steam against his own cold skin.
“Are you hungry yet?” Roy opened conversationally, knowing already that the boy wasn’t going to take to the joke. From his limply seated position on the cold stone, Edward finally acknowledged what he had deemed the lord and master of his misery.
“I’m fucking starving,” the boy shot back, golden eyes sunken and freckled cheeks hollow. Roy could tell by the way his raised hackles shuddered through ragged breaths that Edward’s body was fighting to contain its own spirit. It was as though his body itself was rendered condemned with a soul still trapped inside.
Roy gave his best attempt at a warm smile. He really did want the best from their conversations.
“Well, I’ve got great news for y–”
“Not for that.”
The silence that followed was a heavy blanket of fog over the entire basement, the hum of the water heater seemed deafening in comparison. The boy held his tired gaze like it was a rifle, staring down the sights at the lone Colonel who had so kindly gone hunting in his place. Roy was used to dates who were grateful for his offers to provide for them. From where he stood, the children of the new century seemed chronically ungrateful.
“...You know you’re dying, don’t you?” Roy began softly, kneeling to offload his unconscious load. The man’s soundless breaths passed between undisturbed lips, the signs of life few and far inbetween, but the decadent scent of unspilt blood filling the still air between them.
The boy was trying to act as though this information did not affect him. He really, really tried.
“I’m already dead.”
He spat it as though the words were bitter, as though they were poisoned, as though they were filthy. As though what they were was filthy. As though wolves were filthy for chasing down rabbits, as though famine were holier than any feast.
Christ, he’s touchy tonight.
“You don’t have the time to fight me,” Roy reminded in a sigh, settling into his daily role. He didn’t need sleep the way he used to, but that didn’t make the night shifts wasted on trying to feed his fledging any less exhausting. “You need to drink something”
“I’ll drink something that doesn’t hurt anyone,” He explained hoarsely, for the hundredth time in the weeks they’d spent talking circles around the issue. The scratches on the floor had begun to overlap, their endless circular patterns becoming increasingly erratic with each passing day. Edward was obsessed, growing ever more desperate for some way to turn cheap cuts of beef into something he could keep down. Transmute something animal into something human, transmute himself a way out. He always believed alchemy would have the answer to every tragedy. “Maybe I wouldn’t be so thirsty if you actually tried to help me.”
The circles were everywhere the boy could reach, with matrixes so complex they had taken on the appearance of clumsy spiderwebs. The lines criss-crossed each other seemingly at random; arrays constructed on a foundation of hunger instead of logic. Animal blood was the new myth Edward had decided to chase. He begged for as much of it as Roy could find, arching his spine over rusted buckets of the stinking stuff and begging his ever-silent God to turn it into something he could drink. With weeks of searching under his belt, with his round-the-clock attempts resulting in unstomachable red bile, all he had earned himself was chapped lips and a dry throat.
Roy knew better than anyone else that this couldn’t be fixed, couldn’t be wished away. Theirs was a ceaseless hunger, theirs was a lasting curse, theirs was an undeath no living thing could ever hope to understand. No amount of circles, no crackling of light, no wishes with eyes squeezed shut could ever take away the way the craving carved its way through them. They were blessed with fangs and doomed to the fate of unquechable thirst.
“What if I told you you were actually helping people? There are ways to do this that don’t hurt people,” Roy offer placatingly. This was not the first time they’d had this conversation, but perhaps starvation would harden the heart of his little recruit. “Well, people who matter.”
“...Everybody matters.”
The naivety was almost cute.
“You think so?” Roy pressed further, circling the drain of his point. “Even people who hurt people?”
The wet heat of the captive load over his shoulder heaved a shaky breath, dripped red onto the dusty cement. From the way Ed’s ridged spine straightened, Roy could tell the boy could smell in feast. The way he could keep his back turned to the meal, even now, was impressive.
“If you hurt someone who hurts people, you’re no better than they are.”
Edward’s voice was faint, cracking over the syllables. He could barely raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. His tongue was a pale, dried slug in his mouth, the ridges of unused taste buds like the cracks in sun-bleached desert stones. Roy didn’t think the sun could ever feel more oppressive than it had in Ishval, but now even the ever-cloudy East City felt like a beaming cavern of scorching light. It felt as though his eyes could adjust for hours and never truly get used to the white hot burn of the daylight. The Lieutenant was always concerned about his migraines. She thinks they might even be getting worse.
“Do you know what soldiers are, FullMetal? Do you know what we do for people?” he asked, introducing the concept slowly, like introducing a child to water. Inch by inch, until you can force their head under, until they learn to hold their breath and allow themselves to be submerged. “We hurt people before they can hurt anyone else. That’s what you swore into. You know that right?”
Ed responds in a dusty grunt that sounds more like the cough of one choking on sand.
Good to see his insubordination was unaffected by the circumstances.
“How is this any different?” Roy prodded, adjusting the load on his shoulder as it began to stiffly writhe in his grasp. Their dinner was regaining consciousness faster than he had anticipated, the deep red that pooled in the burlap sack over the man’s face was seeping through the seams.
“...Nobody deserves to get eaten.”
His values broke over the rocky syllables, cracked like the stern of a ship upon harsh seas. His soul was taking on water.
Roy purred at the opportunity, dropping his words to a place of soft, easy understanding. He was gentle. He was placating. He was providing.
“You don’t think so?”
“Stop saying that.”
In memory, a knuckle cracks babyfat, a ring cuts clear skin. In reality, the three of them were perfectly still. He doesn’t lay hands on Edward anymore. Not the way he used to. Roy thinks he may have done enough damage already. There was no greater consequence he could have imposed upon the fragile, doll-like body on the concrete before him. Hunched in the darkness, heaving dying breaths with every gasp, and trembling under the weight of his own starvation: Edward had been punished plenty.
“What if I told you that there are very, very bad people in this world.”
The response was a quick snap, a spark from a flint and steel.
“I wouldn’t eat them–”
“That’s the best way to do it. You can lay here until you’re not strong enough to drag those limbs around anymore, you can rot in your own dry shit until you’re dead, or you can find a way to make this work,” Roy pressured with a firm, uncompromising tone. Edward had been a mistake, but that did not mean it was not Roy’s responsibility to make sure the boy did not go hungry– or, at least didn’t starve himself to death. “Between starving in a dark hole, or hurting someone far worse than myself, I choose to hurt bad people.”
“What’s worse than this?”
A twitch at the corner of his lip. The flesh is indented by the point of his fang. “What we are doesn’t even scratch the surface of cruelty, Edward.”
Silence blanketed the room like snow, the unearthly death of winter settling into the basement. Nothing moved, barely anything breathed. Even the scratch of chalk was absent from the din of hunting cabin’s tiresome day-to-day. It was the sort of placid stillness that made one feel as though, if they concentrated just a bit more, they could feel the Earth turning beneath the soles of their dirt-caked boots.
“...What did he do?”
Finally, Edward was ready to ask the right questions.
“Is my word not good enough?”
“What– ” Edward barked the way a small dog does. Quickly. Anxiously. “–Did he do?”
In the half-darkness, Edward could not see the way Roy’s lips curled. It was good to see the boy finally listening to reason, even if it did little to curb his nasty attitude. With a quiet groan, Roy knelt to the cold stone, and offloaded his shouldered burden. The man’s body writhed in its unconsciousness, a wet gasp from somewhere within the bloodstained burlap was like the cheerful ring of the dinner bell to their sharp ears. Even from across the dark, dingy basement, Roy could hear the way Ed drew hungry breaths through his fanged teeth, how his dried-slug tongue reached out to taste the crimson air. The stench of copper pipes and iron blood alike, the cloying metallic taste of the devil’s ambrosia.
“You sure you want to know?”
“You want me to eat him. I should at least get to know why.”
Edward can’t see the way Roy smirked, but his finely-tuned predator ears could probably hear it.
“...Three women,” Roy offered simply. There was the shuffling of shaking metal limbs and fabric against the cold floors, the scratch of steel fingertips against concrete. Edward was dragging his corpselike form from the darkness for a closer look at the feast Roy had brought home for the two of them. “Well, two women. One girl. I don’t think she was nearly old enough to call a woman.”
The boy’s throat bobbed pointlessly. There’s nothing in his system left to swallow. Even the bile had gone dry.
“...Killed them?”
A shrug. The tip of a boot jabbed into the unmoving side of the man on the ground before him. No reaction.
“Among other things.”
“...I don’t know,” Edward muttered. A trembling hand combed through matted, unwashed tresses and came away with long blonde hairs tangled between the boney digits, golden threads falling out at the root at the lightest touch. The body was preparing to die. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t think murder is enough?”
“If you kill a murderer–”
For an atheist, the kid sure could preach.
“There are worse things than murder.”
“–Nothing is worse than murder.” Ed shook his head in weak defiance. “Taking a life away… It’s the worst thing you can do to someone!”
“Respectfully, Major FullMetal, I disagree.”
A heavy footfall, the stiff rubber sole against the dusty cement was like a fall of a drawbridge; the cavalry set loose. Edward’s hands move like a spider’s many legs, scrambling for purchase on the unforgiving terrain as the man crossed the threshold of scraggled arrays and reached for the boy.
In Roy’s grip, it felt as though the boy only weighed as much as his automail attachments. The flesh was practically paper, the blood halfway to dust. Everything else was only the weight of bone and teeth.
He pulled the boy up from the floor by his collar, the ragdoll in all it’s battered glory. His knees were white with gathered dust and chalk. His one flesh wrist was skeletal beneath the red coat. He wasn’t going to last much longer. This was life or death.
“Tortured them, Edward. Raped them. Cut them open like animals– You think that’s worse than us?” The burn of anger boiled it’s way up his throat like bile, his growling words growing into barks of wrath. Edward cowered away from the boom of Roy’s voice, turned his face away, trembled. “You think he’s got more of a right to live than you do? You think I should just let that thing walk? Let him go find another poor girl to fuck–”
The boy squirmed weakly in Roy’s grasp, too debilitated by his own righteous fast to fight the older man off.
“–Stop–”
The order was a feeble squeak, a desperate cry. Every syllable was probably a cannon blast in the boy’s skull, every consonant a harsh lash, the squealing of nails on a blackboard.
“Took two fingers. Two fingers off the little one– We haven’t even found them yet. The bastard probably fucking ate them, the sick freak–” Roy spat quickly, shaking the focus back into the boy. Even if Edward wanted to turn away from the sound of his voice, Roy wouldn’t let him ignore the reality of it all. The stretch, the burn, the ripping, the tearing. Hands at your waist, hands at your hips, hands gripping your thighs. Baying like dogs, squawking like wounded birds. “–We don’t even know everything he did. You should’ve seen what they brought in with him– All those tools– They don’t even think three was all there was, they’ve been trying to find the rest, it’s only a matter of time–”
“–Stop–”
Another plea. Roy gave him another shake. That time, he thought he heard the boy hiss.
“She was thirteen , Edward, she was younger than you are–”
Golden eyes screwed shut. Fangs on display.
“–I get it–”
There was something animal in Edward now. An instinctual drive that had been awakened in a subhuman body.
“–I don’t think you do–”
Made to be lesser, made to be broken, made to be compliant, made a stranger in your skin. The virus, the infection, the infestation– the whatever-it-was– if Ed could understand what Roy had done to him, certainly he could understand this too.
“–Please–”
Edward had to know. He couldn’t be so ignorant, he couldn’t be so spoiled, so blissful. He had to know too, it couldn’t just be Roy.
“–Thirteen!” Another shake– and this time when Edward hissed, the boy made sure he was heard. If he’d had anything left to spit, he’d be spitting for sure– fangs slicked with threat and pupils contracted. Instead, the dry hissing felt less like an intimidation tactic and more like a desperate bluff.
The last time he’d held the boy like this, he’d been so small, so light, it was like lifting a toy. Two bandaged stumps and hand-me-down clothes, dead button eyes staring back at him. That was the FullMetal he’d found, the FullMetal he’d shaken back to life in one, irresponsible hand. Sweet little FullMetal, with doll-like limbs, with glass-like eyes, with rosy cheeks and a sharp tongue. Sweet little FullMetal, you never should’ve come to East City. You should’ve stayed in your grandmother’s house where you were safe.
“Do you know what that must’ve been like for her? Do you know how scared she was?” The stretch, the burn, the ripping, the tearing. Cloying sheets, kisses with teeth. Little drops of red against white linen, a scream caught in one palm. Cold sweat, dark rooms, the feeling of being torn apart, the feeling of being drained. Bleeding out in someone’s hand, becoming something different, becoming whatever they wanted you to be. The last time it had happened to him, he’d been so small, so light, it must’ve been like fucking a toy. “Do you need me to show you what it’s like for you to understand that that thing over there has completely given up any right he has to call himself human–”
He felt his grip become more forceful. He needed Ed to understand. He needed Ed to drink.
“–Let go–”
He pounced, forcing the boy back against the stony walls, a hand at his hip, fingers digging in like rending claws. He could do it, he could show him, he could make Edward understand. A spring lamb with golden fleece, still too sweet to imagine there could be anything worse than an eternity of undying thirst. At least when Roy had kissed him, at least when Roy had touched him, at least when Roy had loved him, he’d really loved him. Even when he drained him, even at the depths of his hunger and weakness, at least Roy had loved him. That was a mercy not every piece of meat could be offered.
“–How’s this, huh? Is this better? Is this better than starving to death in the dark here? Is this better?”
If Edward left himself to starve and rot, if Edward died, Roy would be left with all this hunger and no one to share it with.
“–Get off of me!!”
On the concrete behind them, their feast gasped to consciousness. He writhed awake, pulled at the restraints Roy had fasteed against the man’s wrists and ankles. Tied like a freshly-shot deer, bleeding against burlap, gasping in blackness.
“Wh– Where am I?” A wet croak, They can both hear the blood in his mouth, they can both picture the way it must be running between his teeth. “Who’s there? Who are you people?”
No one moved. No one spoke. Through the wet burlap, the man released a pained cry.
“Hey– I hear you– Whoever you are, you’ve got to let me go–” He moved like a disturbed inchworm, contorted in the thick ties in a weak attempt to orient himself. The headache must be killer , Roy thought simply. “–I swear, they’ve got the wrong man– You’ve gotta believe me– I’ve got a daughter–”
Roy softened his grip on the boy in his hand, easing him back to the cold earth. Edward shook so violently, the mechanizations of his steel limbs rattled like old cans. Golden eyes dropped to the toes of his scuffed boots, wild with fear. He did not dare to move or speak. Luckily,Roy felt he could still easily manage both.
“How old?” Roy asked conversationally.
The man paused, unmoving. When he spoke again, his voice was even weaker.
“...You’ve gotta believe me…” Begging. Begging for his life. Roy wondered if he would’ve offered mercy to them, had the roles been reversed. “...You’ve got to.”
Sobs. Wet and weak. Edward’s throat bobbed pointlessly. There was nothing in his system left to swallow. Even the bile had gone dry.
“...You had the chance to do this quietly,” Roy dropped his voice to a hiss of disdain.
“I– I don’t–” Edward couldn’t cry anymore, but it was clear his body wanted to. “I don’t think I–”
Edward wouldn’t look at him. Edward wouldn’t look at the man either. It was as though he hoped the ground beneath him would open up and drop him into a kinder Hell than the one he’d already found himself in.
“Just remember. He didn’t do what he did for survival. We do.” It was the only advice Roy could offer. It was the only binding law by which their universe could operate any longer. “...I’ll give you until dawn to make your decision. It’s him or you.”
. . .
Roy stood solemnly before the doorway to his captive’s cell. The faintest light of cloudy daybreak outlined the harsh edges of the old kitchen with white ink and gave him just enough pale blue to differentiate shape from shadow. He had paced overhead like an anxious God for the remaining hours of the night, waited to hear a scuffle, waited to hear a scream, but it never came. Nothing ever came. Despite his stern, unspoken orders, the basement had remained resolutely silent.
The knob was cold against his palm, dented into a perfect notch where his thumb could rest. Like the gouges in the cutting boards and the cracks in the bathroom countertops, newfound strength left marks on everything. The cry of the cellar door’s neglected hinges trumpeted his arrival to the resident of the dim basement, and the soft click of the lantern light coming alve in his hand announced his intentions.
Each step creaked painfully beneath his weight as he carefully descended. Somewhere in the darkness, he could hear something wet, something squishy, something gnashing and desperate.
Gently, he held the lantern aloft to illuminate the space. Cobwebs, dust, old boxes full of God knows what, and red. Smeared, streaked, lapped up greedily by something less than human. The grey concrete was painted with the stuff, in handprints and shoe treads, in droplets and in puddles, and in the middle of it all was Edward.
Sweet little Edward, with doll-like limbs, with glass-like eyes, with rosy cheeks and a sharp tongue. A spring lamb with golden fleece, now dyed red from the rise of his trembling lower lip to the mess that gathered in his crimson lap. He was hunched over the red form, hands like talons gripping a fish ripped from the water, his face buried in the crook of what remained of the man’s neck. He was chewing. He was so hungry, he’d started to chew at him like a dog with a bone, tendons caught between his teeth.
He’s a messy eater.
Edward’s attention rises from the depths of the man’s jugular to Roy. He pupils dilate, contract, attempt to recognize his old commanding officer through the haze of feeding frenzy. The boy looks confused, disoriented, lost somehow. It was as though something else had done all the hard work for him, and now, it was Edward’s turn to decipher what his hands and teeth had done.
“D-did I hurt him?”
A childlike question, hiccuped through scarlet syrup. A broken sob. Edward never wanted to hurt anyone.
“You didn’t hurt anyone who mattered.”
The Fuhrer King’s Investigations Department would be turning over every stone in the city in search of their top suspect. The Flame Colonel would be harshly reprimanded for the failings of his men to secure the suspect, for allowing such a madman to escape. There would be no trace of a struggle, of an escape plan, of a collaborator that may have sprung the killer’s trap and let him loose on the streets again. A locked room case, a vile man spirited away in the dead of the night while under Roy’s watch. The man would die an unmourned mystery. The fate of any piece of meat.
Ed didn’t have an answer, his bloodsoaked lip trembling, his throat bobbing in quenched gasps. He stared up at Roy the way one stared up at the heavens from a gravesite, pleading silently for an answer that whatever loomed overhead could not give them.
“Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.” Roy offered softly, meeting his ward’s wet gaze. The glasslike look of his golden eyes had returned, alongside the barest hint of color in his cheeks. Equivalently, as always, he was going to live. “You can come hunting with me tonight.”