Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Völuspá ❯ the Second: breath they had not, nor blood nor senses ( Chapter 2 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

"Settle down," said Roy, too quietly for anyone but Lust and the driver of the jeep to hear.

The vehicle moved at marching speed, following two more jeeps and a personnel carrier, and followed in kind by one of the armored divisions. To one side of the road, a couple squads of soldiers on foot jogged through the slushy, half-frozen mud, following their sergeants and advancing farther up the column. Although, to call this trace through the snow-covered forest a road was being charitable; perhaps it had been yesterday, but bearing several hundred thousand men, women, and vehicles had been hard on it.

Earlier in the morning, Roy had heard the sounds of fighting near the head of the column, but by the time the reports had trickled back toward him, it had all been over. The Drachmen army was not, to all appearances, the source of the light resistance they'd encountered so far, but rather groups of guerillas. It was to be expected, but the face of one of the dead guerilla fighters remained with Roy, turned up toward the sky in the snow as Roy's jeep passed by, the front of his white-patchy camouflage jacket splattered with red. He'd looked so young.

"This is so exciting," said Lust, from his perch on the rear of the jeep. "Why didn't we do this sooner? This is such fun!"

Roy had a lot of words that he could use to describe this march toward the southernmost pass through the Briggs Mountains, but "fun" was a long way down that list. "Sit down," he said through his teeth, "and settle down."

Lust, as usual, ignored him, and jumped from the back of the jeep up onto the barrel of the cannon on the tank that followed them. The soldiers manning the tank were used to Lust by now, and did nothing but give him dirty looks. There was no wind, but it was bitterly cold, and the air smelled like mud and gasoline. Somewhere up ahead, a sharp crack of breaking wood carried through the cold air, followed by the crash of falling, as the engineers out in front of the column cut another tree to reinforce the road for the tanks that followed them. When another crack rang through the air, and then a third, Roy knew there was some kind of problem with the road ahead, and when the radio phone mounted in one of the jeeps in front of him rang, he knew it was a bad one.

The first lieutenant manning the radio phone came running back toward Roy a moment later. "Sir," he said, with a brief salute as he jogged along beside Roy's vehicle. "There's a culvert up ahead. They're bridging it now." Another sharp, distant cracking of a felled tree accompanied the words. Roy had sent the engineers far enough ahead of the column to, hopefully, be able to deal with any mines in the road or minor issues with the natural features of the area without having to slow down the column's advance, but when he heard yet another tree fall, his optimism in this respect was hard to maintain.

"Pass the word to the company commanders," he said. A place in the road where the army was forced by the lay of the land to halt for any length of time would be the perfect place to launch an ambush. Roy had to assume that the Drachmen knew their own land, and knew about this culvert. "Tell Colonel Davidson send out exploratory squads with flares to the north and south. The armors are to remain manned. The remainder of the company can rest while we're held up, but they are to keep their weapons in hand at all times."

"Yes, sir," said the lieutenant, and ran back to his own jeep to call the necessary people up and down the column.

Roy's jeep lurched as Lust jumped back onto it. "When are we going to start fighting?" he asked, and Roy more than half-expected the creature to start bouncing in excitement, but thankfully Lust refrained.

"Hopefully, never," said Roy. "Now come here, sit down, and be quiet."

"Realistically," the homunculus insisted, remaining where he was. "When do you think we'll start fighting? I never get to see the fighting, you're always locked up in a building during the battles. I want to kill something, Colonel."

Reaching back, Roy grabbed for Lust's arm with the intent of physically dragging him down into the seat, but the Sin twitched back out of his reach and laughed derisively. It would have been undignified to chase him, so Roy didn't.

"What's the matter?" the thing taunted. "Arms too short? Not quick enough? Weather making you creaky in your old age?" The homunculus laughed again. Roy's driver shifted uncomfortably, but remained facing stiffly forward.

No matter how much comfort the creature could offer him sometimes - no matter how much he looked like Roy's dead lover - there were times when Roy would have happily strangled his companion. He actually had, once, but aside from making the mocking laughter stop for a little while, it hadn't had much effect.

Up ahead, the personnel carrier was slowing to a halt, and soon Roy's jeep and the tanks behind him were as well. The sound of trees being felled had stopped for a little while, but now Roy could hear them starting up again; he was closer now, and the buzz of chainsaws, far away, was just audible. Roy felt no particular need to send any messages up front; the engineers couldn't help but be aware of the potential danger the column was in while stopped dead, strung out like pearls along a road with the defensive capacity of a child's sandcastle.

Looking up into the forest around him, Lust was bouncing slightly now, balanced in a crouch, his bare toes on the frozen metal on the back of the jeep, fingers extended into eight-inch black talons. "I want to kill something," the creature whispered again.

"People in hell want icewater," Roy told him. "Stay here."

"Eh?" Lust gave him a curious look as Roy swung out of the stopped jeep. Really, he just wanted to stretch his legs a little ... he wasn't really trying to evade the homunculus, which had proven impossible in the past anyway. He just wanted to walk a bit, although the snow-churned mud sucked at his boots and would have exhausted him before he got very far.

He never got far enough to even feel tired, or to be able to pretend that he was somehow away from the homunculus for once. The shots sounded dreadfully loud in the quiet, snowbound forest on the other side of the road. Roy turned around just in time to see his driver slump down at the wheel and Lust jerk; then the tips of a pair of scissored black talons were inches from Roy's chest with a small lump of silver metal caught on the broken tip of one. An instant later, the talons were gone.

It happened almost too quickly for Roy to process. Lust took the space between the jeep and Roy in an animal bound and knocked Roy down into the mud, and after that Roy couldn't see anything at all because Lust wouldn't let him up. Gunfire was erupting all around them, shouted orders, and then the deafening reverb of the armor firing into the trees. Shots pinged off of metal, thudded into the snow and mud, cracked off into the forest. Somewhere nearby, a soldier made the low, agonized sound of a mortal injury being suppressed as best as possible.

"Let me up," said Roy, cold wet mud soaking into the back of his coat, as he tried to shove Lust off of him so he could stand. The homunculus stood over him, body shielding much of his, and a taloned hand pressed hard against his chest to keep him down. The creature was strong. Red fluid dripped from Lust's broken claw for ten or fifteen seconds, and the drops sizzled like embers in the churned snow until the talon regenerated.

When the sound of combat subsided, at least nearby, Lust finally let Roy stand up and, furious, Roy punched the creature as his first action. Unimpressed, Lust just took the hit and grinned at him, and leaped up to resume his perch on the back of the jeep, scanning the woods around him. The mud didn't seem to stick to Lust's feet at all.

"What the hell is happening?" he demanded. In the scant minutes that had passed since Lust had knocked him down, the entire column had been thrown into disarray, and one of the tanks was actually half-off the road, still firing shells into the forest. "Stop that. Stop that! Where is Colonel Houghton?"

It took more effort than it should have to find the armored division commander and get the tanks to stop wasting their ammunition on an enemy that had effectively vanished between the trees; there were alchemists with the army, of course, and for some reason that made some of the soldiers think that they had access to an unlimited number of shells.

The first lieutenant from the communications jeep brushed the mud off the back of Roy's uniform while Roy listened to reports and gave orders through the scratchy radio phone mounted in the jeep. There was still some fighting going on toward the back of the column, but it was tapering off as the Drachmen escaped into the forest.

Roy debated sending what little cavalry he had into the forest after the attackers, but in the end decided not to. The snow was deep in places, and he didn't have many horses; the last thing he needed was to have one or more of them fracture a leg chasing a phantom enemy and leave him with even fewer horses. Some of the Drachmen that had attacked were dead. The rest were effectively gone once they got beyond a certain distance. Roy gave orders for no pursuit, and had the brigade commanders get their soldiers back on the road and back in order instead. They hopefully wouldn't be here much longer, and chasing guerillas would be both a waste of manpower, and probably also something the enemy expected him to do ... stringing out his forces even further would make it that much more difficult to get moving again. Above all else, Roy needed to remain mobile, and get into the foothills of the pass as quickly as possible.

By the time Roy had things halfway sorted-out, the call was coming in that the issue with the road through the culvert had been resolved, and the column was starting to move again. There was no time to bury the Amestrian dead; Roy's driver was stripped of his dog tags, weapon, and anything else useful, and abandoned by the side of the road with the others who had already breathed their last. The wounded were carted to the middle-rear of the column, where the medical trucks were.

Roy's new driver gave Lust the kind of look that a mouse generally gives a cat, but got in and started up the jeep anyway.

"Sir," said a soldier of unknown origin and a sergeant-major rank who abruptly appeared by the side of Roy's jeep just as they started to move again. She held a flat package wrapped in canvas toward him. "Major Havok asked me to give you these."

"Thank you," said Roy, taking the offered item, which, unwrapped, proved to be a half-dozen photographs. Roy turned them around, wondering what he was looking at, before recognizing in two a top-down view of a black line half-shrouded by trees, the winding, serpentine course of a creek, and a rise of land. They were aerial snapshots of what must be the surrounding territory. Havok must have taken advantage of the brief pause to send up a spy balloon. "Excellent. Tell the major this is good work."

"Yes, sir." The soldier saluted, and jogged off again farther forward.

Lust leaned forward to look at the photographs over Roy's shoulder as if interested in them, but when he spoke it was only to say mournfully, "I didn't get to kill anyone."

Roy had managed to put the Sin's presence out of his mind. Abruptly reminded, he turned around and gave the creature a murderous glare. "You," he said, the fury that had been put aside so that he could deal with the situation surging back. He leashed it with difficulty, and only because having an argument with his companion in hearing distance of his soldiers would have caused more rumors to spread. "You are never to do anything remotely like that again, is that clear? I have put up with a lot of bullshit from you, but when you put my ability to command this army in jeopardy, I am through with you. I will take you out and have every soldier in this army put a round into you until you finally die. Do you understand me?"

The homunculus' cocky grin - so much like Edward's that his heart ached - didn't break for a second, and when Roy stopped speaking, Lust leaned forward and spit. Incensed, Roy was about to start dressing the impertinent thing down again, when Lust spit again, and this time the silver blob of metal, deformed by hot passage through flesh, landed in Roy's lap.

Lust spit out a total of six bullets. Then he resumed what he'd been doing before, just riding the back of the jeep with a secretive, knowing smile. Roy stared at the creature for a long time before he went back to the photographs.