Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Völuspá ❯ the Fourth: well, would you know more? ( Chapter 4 )

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

The prisoners were brought out in groups of five so that Roy could review them. Forced to kneel, wrists bound, inadequately dressed for the cold since their coats had been taken from them, and superbly dirty, they all pretty much looked alike. Some of them were masked in dried blood, the ones who had fought and had to be subdued. Some of them were obviously disliked by their guards, given an extra kick to make them go down on their knees for the commander of the army that had captured them. Some were still in pain from their interrogation, favoring an arm or shoulder which had been broken in the process.

Lust shadowed Roy like a faithful dog, claws extended, sometimes whispering to Roy for permission to kill one of the prisoners. Requests that were always denied. The prisoners rarely looked upon Lust with anything but disgust; everyone in the camp knew about the General's pet abomination, even those who walked behind the army in chains.

After looking over each batch in the cold, windy afternoon outside the makeshift brig, Roy waved the guards to take their charges back inside. Once they'd all been presented to him, he turned to Havok and asked quietly, "Which one, do you think?"

Taking a drag off his cigarette, Havok said, "There could be more than one, you know."

"I know. But there has to be at least one, and I don't see any that look to be worth the effort of an exchange. We'll need to look at the details of the way each was captured."

"Mmm." The look Havok gave him over the cigarette was skeptical. "This late in the game? We can try to see if anyone remembers which was which. I mean, nobody bothered to check for their names and ranks until they were processed back in base camp. You're thinking one of them might have switched jackets and tags with a dead companion to make himself look less important?"

"Something like that." Roy started to walk away from the brig, and Havok walked beside him. Lust trailed behind. "I know it's unlikely, but it's not impossible."

"No. Not impossible." The cigarette was tossed to the ground and stubbed out under Havok's boot; the fact that he did not immediately light another was telling. The supply trucks were almost a week late, held up by snow, and Havok's stash of cigarettes was the mine shaft canary of the camp's supplies.

"Someone might remember," said Roy. "At least we can ask."

"We should also check out the people they're offering to exchange," said Havok. "It might give us some kind of idea of how badly they want this whoever back."

Roy scoffed, and turned to skirt the medical tent. "Probably a bunch of farmers from the border, maybe some soldiers. I can't imagine they have anyone valuable enough to give us an accurate idea."

Havok just shrugged. "Can't hurt. It isn't as if anyone can attack you if you go yourself."

"Mmmm." It would look good for the soldiers, as well, give them the impression that they could potentially be reacquired if they were captured by the enemy. Under no circumstances could Roy actually give the Drachmen what they wanted, but making both the Drachmen and his own soldiers think that he was considering it could be beneficial. "Make arrangements."

"Yes, sir." Havok offered him a lazy salute and turned around, making his way back toward intelligence territory.

"I never get to kill anyone," pouted Lust, once Havok was gone.

"It's just so tough to be you, I know," said Roy. He had a meeting with the engineers soon, but after checking his watch, he decided he had enough time for a cup of coffee and a bite of lunch. I wasn't as if the meeting would start without him if he was a tiny bit late.

"Let's go back to the house," purred Lust, and Roy turned around and swatted at him. "What?"

"Be quiet." This camp was laid out a lot better than the army's last one, as the farm that Roy had commandeered was pretty big, and a large percentage of it was flat already. Some ditches and palisades had been constructed on the outskirts of the camp, but there had been no earth-moving alchemy required to even out the land. To the north and west the Briggs Mountains rose, gray and white, their peaks shrouded in the cloud that overcast the sky; nearby to the east was the narrow dent of land that betrayed the beginning of the pass that Roy wanted to control. All around him, the Amestrian soldiers seemed quiet, almost intimidated. They greeted him cheerfully enough as he walked between the tents, and passed them where they huddled around campfires bundled up in blankets, but behind him the silence resumed.

A light snow began to fall.



Roy brought the photographic montage of the pass into his bedroom for the evening, along with a huge map that one of the women from Intelligence had drawn. Lust settled immediately on the bed, belly-down, as soon as the door was closed and began to slide out of the scraps that he claimed were clothing. Ignoring him, Roy spread out the map on the hardwood floor.

"You work too much," said Lust, rolling over onto his back once he was bare except for the gloves, which did not seem to come off at all, and the skintight black bits that did nothing to actually cover his feet. Fingers trailed enticingly over his belly and ouroborus. "Come to bed, let me fuck you."

"This is for you, too," said Roy, spreading the photographs next to the appropriate spots on the map. The pass through the mountain range was over sixty miles in length, twisted and uneven, running north-south on both ends but turning around so much that it was almost east-west for part of the middle portions. The Amestrian army was camped within sight of the southern end of the pass, but there was a town at the northern end, and it was a safe bet that part of the Drachmen army was occupying it.

They may also have sabotaged parts of the pass itself. Roy had sent a couple of the engineers, well-escorted, to scout out that possibility.

Lust moved around behind Roy and leaned against him, arms around Roy's neck. "How is it for me, Colonel? It's a map."

"Here. Or here." Roy pointed to places where the pass widened slightly, as it turned west, and then back north again around the bases of mountains. "We could draw the array in either of these spots." He could feel Lust's erection as the homunculus rubbed it against his back through his uniform. Passing a photograph of one of the points back to his companion, he said, "I think I know which one of the alchemists we can use, too."

Delicate black fingers dropped the photo back onto the map. "That one's no good." Although the hardness of the thing's cock was still stroking slowly up Roy's back, the note of lazy seduction had dropped out of Lust's voice. It ached when the homunculus sounded like that: thoughtful, intelligent. "The shape is all wrong. We'd have to draw the array far too small to get it to fit in. Do you have a picture of this other one?" Lust pointed, and the pointing finger extended to tap sharply on the other turn.

"Not yet. We should have one tomorrow when I go take a look at the prisoners the Drachmen want to exchange for ours. I agree with you about the shape, though, and the other one doesn't seem to have that kind of outcropping in it."

The needle-sharp tip of Lust's finger moved from the turn in the pass to the area just east of it, toward the Amestrian end. "We should look at this area, too. The best way to get them to bunch up on the array would be to cause a rockfall here."

"No. Not a rockfall. We'll need to use the pass ourselves, not destroy it." Like it or not, the feel of Lust's slender body pressed against his, and the promise of the creature's erection against his back, was beginning to affect Roy. Given even the slightest hint of permission, Lust would turn him over the edge of the bed and fuck him for an hour, or take him right here on the floor, amid the photographs. Just the fact that Lust desired him so much was tempting, even without the implicit promise of the hardness against his skin.

"An avalanche then," said Lust, tapping his extended finger against the map. "Easier to clean up with just a little alchemy to heat the snow. You said you knew which alchemist, too?"

Taking Lust's wrist, Roy twisted around and drew the creature to straddle his lap. Golden hair spilled over his hand as he stroked his companion's head, but the eyes were wrong ... wrong, dark, the pure gold adulterated with the color of sin. "Yes," he said, voice lowering somewhat, and he let his hands run down the homunculus' body. "You remember that red-haired fellow from lunch?" Lust was bad with names, rarely remembering them and only occasionally granting names of his own for people to use, so Roy didn't bother trying to name the man.

"Yes." Hands on Roy's shoulders, Lust tilted back, displaying himself for view and touch. Roy took the hands off his shoulders and pushed Lust back even more, until the creature was laying on the floor and accessible for Roy's tongue.

"He's ambitious," Roy murmured, around his lover's nipple. The homunculus' skin tasted just like Edward's had. "He thinks he's very skilled. You've seen how he looks at you."

"Yes."

"I'll have to tell him what he's really doing, but he will if he thinks it will give him a chance to create his own homunculus."

Lust laughed, and it was the deep, sensual laugh that he used when he expected sex in his immediate future. The purring tone was back in his voice now, which was a relief; Roy sometimes couldn't bear it when the thing resembled Edward too closely. "I want to fuck you," Lust whispered, arms around Roy's neck and fingers twining in his hair. "My alchemist."

"What if I want to fuck you?" asked Roy, moving from Lust's nipple to his throat. The creature under him was soft and yielding, willing and irresistible, and writhed in just the right way to invite Roy to use that body for his own pleasure. But the laugh he got in response was scorning.

"As if you'd enjoy that."

"I might." However, when Lust began to take the initiative, rolling Roy onto his back and starting to take off the uniform that separated him from his prey, Roy didn't fight the Sin. And he knew he'd go on his hands and knees, right there next to the map, his hands amid the aerial photos, when asked.

When Lust moved to extinguish the oil lamp, Roy didn't object to that either.



Getting Lust into a uniform had been pretty difficult; anything that concealed the ouroborus ran hard up against whatever mental block the homunculus had about covering it.

Getting Lust to sit down in the back of the jeep for the drive through the pass was all but impossible. In the end, Roy had the creature tied down.

"I hate this! I hate this!" Lust couldn't really fight the bindings effectively, because his wrists had been tied crossing each other, and held up so that he couldn't reach any of the ropes with his talons. "Let me go! What if someone shoots at you? What am I going to do?"

"Sit there and watch me get shot, just like everyone else," said Roy mildly. He wished he could have left the homunculus in camp, but no amount of tying-down would have stopped Lust from following him; he'd tried it once before, and the thing became frightfully strong when he got frantic. Short of burying him in the rock, there was just no good way to hold him. At least sitting beside Roy, Lust was reasonably calm and wasn't struggling as hard as he could have been.

"That's unacceptable! Unacceptable!" When the jeep's driver failed to refrain from laughing quietly, Lust snarled, "Shut up! I'll carve your heart out if you don't shut up!"

Roy laid a hand on the homunculus' crossed wrists to settle him a little, and then flipped out a pair of sunglasses to cover the Sin's eyes.

"What's this?" Lust shook his head, and then leaned down to get the glasses near his fingertips so he could take them off.

"Stop that. Leave them on."

"Why? I can't see!"

"You'll get used to it." Roy stroked the creature's bound hands comfortingly, avoiding the deadly tips of his extended talons with care as the jeep swung around one of the foothills to enter the pass. "You need to keep those on if you don't want everyone who looks at you to know there's something wrong about you."

"I don't care what everyone knows! I need to be able to see!" The look Lust gave to Roy was imploring, and Roy offered his companion a reassuring smile.

"You'll get used to it. I promise."

The pass through the mountains was relatively snow-free, having been protected so far by the looming peaks themselves, but Roy felt that it would probably become impassable with the first heavy storms. It was fifteen miles in to the neutral territory where the Drachmen were bringing their prisoners: the first turn of the pass that Roy and Lust had judged to be too small and irregular for their purposes. It was a relatively silent trip, aside from Lust's fretting ... the weight of the mountains was intimidating, and nobody seemed much inclined to conversation. Hawkeye was in the jeep ahead of Roy's, with two of her lieutenants, and there were four guards in the jeep that followed. Even all of them put together could not protect Roy as well as Lust, but Lust's normal behavior and attire could not be tolerated.

The trip was very ... vertical. Roy hadn't realized from the photos and maps that the pass was so rugged. Some effort had been made the smooth the way, and Roy was pretty sure that alchemy had been involved, but there was only so much one could do without jeopardizing the stability of the rock walls that soared up on either side. The jeeps had no problem taking the slopes, but it was a bouncy ride, and stones clattered off behind them, skittering down toward more level ground.

The Drachmen were being very accommodating with this agreement, bringing their prisoners here to be reviewed. Roy stared off toward the passing scenery, the stark, almost dead beauty of rock and snow, and wondered why. Someone that Roy had in custody, someone they wanted back very, very much. Who could the important one be? None of the soldiers who had captured the men (and Drachmen soldiers were always men, for reasons unclear to Roy) remembered taking their captives in the company of, for instance, a dead general, but the lack of memory signified nothing.

It was a puzzle, of the kind that Roy liked least. Perhaps they thought to capture Roy, not realizing how well he was guarded, but with Lust beside him, Roy was as safe as if he were at home in his own bed.

"I hate this," said Lust eventually.

"If I thought that you'd remain sitting down, I'd let you go," said Roy quietly. "But I'm pretty sure that if I do that, you'll jump up onto the back of the jeep instead."

"I can't protect you like this!" Lust pulled at the ropes, which lashed him in a complex web between his seat and the seat in front of him. "I need to be able to move!"

"Sometimes there's a greater need to look like a human being, Lust. Human beings don't ride on the backs of jeeps, and they don't wear next to nothing in this kind of weather, and they don't have eyes like yours. You have to look like a normal human, just another of my guards. That means you keep your uniform on, your hands in gloves, you wear the glasses, and you stay seated in the jeep."

"But I can't ..."

"Lust." Roy turned around to face his companion. They were almost there. "Pretend to be a human being. How can you seriously tell me that you want to be human if you can't behave like one for one day?"

"But ..."

"No buts. In about ten minutes, I'm going to let you loose. You're going to stay seated, do you hear me? This is very important, and you can't run around acting like an animal here. You can go back to doing whatever you want when we get back to camp, but just for now, pretend to be a human being."

Lust glared at him, but didn't argue. He said only, "I hate this," once more, and when Roy untied him as promised, Lust remained seated.

The slender road through the pass widened a bit, and then began to bear toward the west, opening up into the first mountain meadow. It really wasn't anywhere near big enough for the array, only half a mile or so wide, and a lot of that was bitten into by an abrupt spur of the mountain to the north, slamming down out of the mountain and into the earth like a grey granite fist. The Drachmen had set up their own vehicles in the shadow of this spur, armed guards standing around a personnel truck. Lust hissed upon seeing them, and flexed his hands.

When Roy eyed him, Lust said, "What?"

"Gloves," said Roy. And when Lust opened his mouth to object, Roy said only, "Lust. Human."

Lust slid his hands into the white regulation gloves without further argument.

Roy's driver stopped a long way back from the Drachmen contingent, while Hawkeye's jeep continued forward to check the conditions of the situation before Roy approached. She got out of her jeep and spoke to the Drachmen; there was a lot of gesturing, since the Drachman language was not identical to Amestrian, only similar. It alarmed Roy slightly to have her out there by herself with just her lieutenants, with the enemy, but she had insisted and, in the end, Roy had to agree that her way was the best way.

Check the situation before Roy was brought within the range of danger. Check the prisoners, make sure they were really Amestrian. Make sure the Drachmen were, as far as could be ascertained, on the up-and-up. Dangerous for her, but wise.

A few minutes later, after a brief survey of the inside of the personnel truck, Hawkeye gestured toward Roy, giving him the okay to come forward himself.

Figures that Roy could only presume were the prisoners being offered for trade were unloaded from the truck as he got out of his jeep and walked toward the enemy representatives. The guards from the other jeep hurried to flank him, and Lust ...

... had stopped dead about four paces from the jeep, letting Roy continue on alone.

When Roy realized that his companion had stopped, he turned around incredulously and gave Lust a come-here gesture, but Lust only fidgeted and actually took a step backward. There was no time to question the homunculus' behavior; Roy could not allow the Drachmen to think that there was anything out of the ordinary about Lust. So he left the Sin where he was, next to the jeep as if guarding the vehicle, and walked forward to meet the Drachmen. Armed human guards, and his gloves ... he had them both.

For seven years, Lust had never been more than a few yards away, following him everywhere, watching him do everything, refusing to be either persuaded to leave or driven off. That the homunculus would abandon him now was disquieting.

Hawkeye made the introductions, and had to be corrected on her pronunciation of one of the Drachman names. The men were small and bearded, like most Drachmen, and smiled cheerfully as they bowed to "great commander Mustang," as one said in broken Amestrian. Roy bowed back, in the Drachman custom, and nodded and smiled as Hawkeye attempted to communicate further, but Roy's smile concealed his growing apprehension. The Drachmen wanted something out of this ... perhaps it wasn't the return of an important figure that Roy had unknowingly captured. Perhaps, simply by coming to this meadow, Roy had walked into some kind of a trap. He found himself glancing around, taking in the meadow casually, as he looked for any telltale signs that a Drachman alchemist had tampered with the area.

He wished frantically that he knew what was affecting Lust.

"This way, sir," said Hawkeye, lightly touching his elbow, and Roy snapped his attention back to the Drachmen, who were bowing to him once more. Roy returned the bow, and then followed Hawkeye to the lines of Amestrian prisoners.

He had to at least go through the motions, and give no sign of his alarm.

As expected, most of the prisoners that the Drachmen wanted to exchange were soldiers, still dressed in tattered blue. There were no farmers as far as Roy could see, but there were a couple who were clearly Amestrian and yet not in uniform; it wasn't immediately apparent just where they had come from. Perhaps second-generation expatriates, born from parents who had relocated to Drachma when relations between the nations had been more peaceful? One of them seemed to be a child, which annoyed the hell out of Roy. Trying to guilt him into making a trade that he couldn't possibly agree to make by holding an Amestrian child prisoner?

He went down the line, saying reassuring things to his captured soldiers, and then walked toward the child. Teenager, really, no taller than Roy's shoulder and obviously of at least Amestrian descent; no Drachman would have hair that pale. He opened his mouth to say something, and then froze.

It was Lust scowling up at him.

Except that Lust was ...

... and the eyes were ...

"It figures," said Edward, angrily. "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. So when are you going to take me home, you bastard?"