Tsubasa/FMA fic: Part 10
Jun. 30th, 2007 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopThis has actually been finished for a couple of days now, but the Internet connection from where we're staying is not the most reliable thing. Only one more chapter left to go on this now! (and with any luck, the computer will cooperate enough for me to get that up before I get home too)
Title: Catalyst
Series: Tsubasa/Fullmetal Alchemist
Part: 10/11
Summary: It's nearly always safe to assume that whatever trouble the Tsubasa crew wind up in, there's going to be a feather involved somewhere in the middle of things. And it's probably even safer to assume that where the Elric brothers are involved, it's never going to be the Philosopher's Stone.
Rating: PG
Word count: 2110
Previous parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
Al was entertaining Sakura by transmuting balloons out of paper when Fye burst energetically back in.
“We’re home!” he called, “Hello again Alphonse, thank you kindly for minding the place for us. Sakura – good to see you awake, good timing too. We have someone for you both to meet.”
Kurogane carried Ran in and set him gently on the floor. The small boy blinked owlishly at the room’s odd assortment of inhabitants.
“Everyone, this is Ran,” said Fye. “Ran, this is Alphonse Elric, and this is the Princess Sakura we told you about before.” There was the brief flurry of small nods and hellos that meant a group of polite people were being introduced without being quite sure why or what was going on.
“What happened to the chimeras?” Al asked.
“All taken care of,” Fye assured him, “and we had a stroke of luck while we were out too. Ran, why don’t you show them?”
Glancing once more at Fye for reassurance, Ran produced the feather from a pocket.
“My feather!” Sakura exclaimed.
“Can you really make it disappear?” asked Ran. He was a strange boy with a solemn maturity beyond his apparent age, but now he looked desperately hopeful.
“We can do better than that,” Fye promised. “We can send it back where it’s meant to be. Sakura?” he prompted.
Sakura held a hand out for the feather, then hesitated. “Syaoran-kun’s not back yet, is he? I only just woke up, and at this rate I’ll be asleep again when…”
“I wouldn’t worry, he’ll be just as happy to get back again and know the feather is safe,” Fye assured her, “and if a hunch of mine is right, returning the feather to our princess now might even make what he’s doing just a little bit easier.”
“He may be right,” Kurogane agreed, looking thoughtful.
Sakura looked from one of them to the other, nodded resolutely, and held out a hand.
***
Deep below the mansion, when a transmutation that had only been sustained by bending a few minor alchemical laws was suddenly subjected to the full force of what passed for physics in this universe, this is what happened.
The wire whip broke mid-swing and splintered into a thousand tiny shards, all left to the mercy of air resistance and badly directed momentum, spraying over their targets in a shower of harmless fragments. The targets themselves had thrown themselves flat on the floor and were poorly placed to catch the full effect of what was happening around them, but it was plain before either boy made it back to his feet that somehow – whatever the cause – the rules in this room had changed. By this time all that was left was a cloud of splinters, tinkling gently as it settled to the ground.
Ed muttered “What the…?” once he was just about upright again, which was probably something of an understatement. Syaoran watched in mute confusion. It didn’t take a lifetime’s experience with alchemy to tell that something about the glistening device that took up so much of the room had gone very wrong.
All around them, metal creaked as tightly strung wire, created only by impossible magics, began to feel the strain of being reshaped so many times under so much tension. Three sets of eyes watched in fascinated horror as, with what felt like exaggerated slowness, the first strand of supporting wire snapped and ricocheted towards the centre of the structure like a spring had been released. For the first time, the boy in the centre of the room looked like no more than a scared child. The end of a snapping wire whipped across his face, leaving a trail of blood. The boy barely seemed to have felt it, but raised a hand to the sensation of moisture and looked at the blood that came away on his fingers as if he had no idea what it was, nor what he was meant to do.
It was then, as wires continued to fail, that Syaoran saw with a sudden, horrible clarity what was going to happen, and went charging towards the centre of the room without a second thought, slicing through wire left and right to clear his way.
“Hey, wait!” Ed yelled after him. “The whole thing’s going to…!”
“I can make it – cover me!” Syaoran called back, hacking his way past another tangle. Once cut, the wire sprang in unpredictable directions – away for the most part (thank any god who might be listening), but already, pieces had slashed along his arms, body and legs, ripping fabric and in some places scoring deep enough to leave red marks on his skin. It stung like anything; what would happen if one hit him in the eye he didn’t want to find out – just tried to keep a hand or Hien’s hilt in front of his face as much as was practical. No part of the amplifier had ever been designed to take strain like this. The very design – all the weakest connections at the outwards most edges – guaranteed failure in the most catastrophic way. The remaining wires furthest in Syaoran didn’t dare touch – but instead squeezed past, twisting under and over to get through. He leapt over the last row of arrays to land in the centre, only barely cleaning the uppermost without catching any on his toes.
The alchemist boy had hardly moved, just watched in stunned silence as broken wire tangled around him. Given his position, he’d taken surprisingly few gashes, but wire that had whipped back here had caught and wrapped around his clothes and arms in dozens of places, so much that he would scarcely have been able escape now even had he had the sense to. It took some serious work with Hien just for Syaoran to get him free. That finally done, he looked back and around them – now everything that remained was contorting, ready to give – not good, they couldn’t have more than seconds left, not nearly time to get out again.
Syaoran grabbed the boy tightly and threw them both to the ground. The world went abruptly dark, and for a long time all was aware of was the sound of a sickening, drawn out, metallic crunch.
It probably couldn’t have been more than seconds, but it felt a lot longer, when Syaoran realised everything had gone quiet and looked up again. It was still dark when he opened his eyes, close to pitch black. Almost every part of him hurt, but at least he could still feel all his limbs, and they did seem to be working. Syaoran reached out in front of himself with one hand and encountered the curve of a vertical wall just inches away. He had only just begun to move his hand to find out how far it went when he heard a familiar clap, and the wall shrank back to the floor right in front of him. Scattered fragments of crushed but harmless metal fell to the floor with a tinkling noise as the structure that and protected Syaoran and the boy was reabsorbed.
The room revealed had fallen dark, but in front of Syaoran crouched Ed, eerily illuminated by a ball of something by his feet which glowed with a phosphorescent light. Hands freed now that the last transmutation was done, he reached for it and picked it up again.
“Lights went out when everything was collapsing,” he said by way of explanation, holding the ball up to show to Syaoran, “and my torch got broken somewhere in that fight before. This is about the best even alchemy could do in a hurry without any matches. You alright?”
“Yeah,” Syaoran told him. “More or less. You probably saved both of us with that barrier before.” The floor, what was visible of it in the gloom, was littered with broken wire. Nothing more than the sad shapes of a few half-recognisable circles had survived in any way intact.
“That was a hell of a stunt,” said Ed, looking grumpy, though whether that had more to do with other people’s recklessness or the fact he hadn’t thought of it first was up for interpretation. “You should have seen that thing fold up from where I was – you’d be a real mess right now if I hadn’t been here.”
“I wouldn’t have tried it if you hadn’t been,” said Syaoran. He took another long look around the room. “What do you think could have happened to make it all give out like that?”
Ed shrugged. “Don’t ask me. He must’ve overloaded it with that last reaction somehow. I told you these devices were more trouble than they were worth.” Ed’s gaze moved to the troublesome child Syaoran had gone to so much effort to save. “Was it worth it?”
The boy, Syaoran realised, checking him properly at last, was unconscious, but – to his great relief – still breathing. He looked a lot more peaceful now – it was hard to believe how much trouble he’d caused.
“He’ll be alright,” Syaoran concluded. “I don’t think he’ll be awake again for a while though. From what he was saying, it sounds like he’s been down here alone for a long time. I don’t think he ever meant to hurt anyone either – what he was doing just got out of hand.”
“Even kids can be dangerous if they learn too much alchemy this young,” said Ed bitterly. “Especially when they lose someone close to them like that.”
Syaoran had been feeling for a while now that there was a story here, but he’d only gotten half the pieces and suddenly it seemed like if he didn’t ask now how it was all supposed to fit together, he’d never get to. “Ed,” he said, cautious but unable to hide his curiousity any longer, “Alphonse’s body, your arm and leg – what happened to you two?”
Ed started at the unexpected question and turned his back on him; for a moment Syaoran thought he was going to just walk away, but then, “We tried to bring our mother back to life.”
“Huh? But isn’t that…?”
“Human transmutation.” Ed twisted around to give Syaoran a rueful sort of grin. “I told you it was forbidden for a reason, didn’t I?”
“Then – the reason you’re looking for the Philosopher’s Stone…”
“Nothing is going to bring our Mother back from the dead, we learned that,” said Ed, eyes dropped towards the floor. “But at the least, I’m going to get Al his body back. I owe him that much.” He turned the rest of the way back around. “Is that all you wanted to know?”
Syaoran honestly didn’t know what to say. “But it wasn’t the stone they were using here.”
“It usually isn’t.” Ed grumbled, and gave Syaoran one of his more sceptical looks. “Sounds like you might have been in more luck though. That ‘feather’, he talked about? Shouldn’t I be asking you what’s been going on here?”
Syaoran looked down, hesitating. “Whatever happened, it isn’t here anymore. And I was telling the truth when I said I don’t know how it works.”
Ed did not look satisfied at this rather poor excuse for an explanation. “C’mon, you can give me something better than that.”
After prying so far into Ed’s secrets, Syaoran was suddenly, guiltily aware he couldn’t fairly have expected anything less. “I said I couldn’t explain it well, but – the feathers are fragments of Sakura’s memories. Like fragments of her soul. Something happened, and they were scattered. It’s up to me – and Kurogane and Fye – to find them again.” He looked at Ed, nervously waiting to see how he might react.
Ed frowned, responses and questions visibly waring somewhere behind his eyes. He sighed in eventual resignation. “Well, I won’t pretend I get all of it, but I’m probably not someone who can start lecturing you about what you can and can’t do with a soul.”
And that appeared to be the end of it.
Syaoran got to his feet at last and looked around the room, what little was visible in the dim light. He tried to imagine people had lived down here, and glanced once more at the slumbering boy he’d rescued. “I wonder what really happened. He kept talking about someone called Ran – I wonder where he could be now.”
“The one who took the feather?” said Ed. “Well, what I do know is we’re not going to figure it sitting down here. Come on – lets get this guy back to that doctor in town. I sure hope there’s another way out of here, I’ve had enough tunnels for today.”
On to Part 11
Title: Catalyst
Series: Tsubasa/Fullmetal Alchemist
Part: 10/11
Summary: It's nearly always safe to assume that whatever trouble the Tsubasa crew wind up in, there's going to be a feather involved somewhere in the middle of things. And it's probably even safer to assume that where the Elric brothers are involved, it's never going to be the Philosopher's Stone.
Rating: PG
Word count: 2110
Previous parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
Al was entertaining Sakura by transmuting balloons out of paper when Fye burst energetically back in.
“We’re home!” he called, “Hello again Alphonse, thank you kindly for minding the place for us. Sakura – good to see you awake, good timing too. We have someone for you both to meet.”
Kurogane carried Ran in and set him gently on the floor. The small boy blinked owlishly at the room’s odd assortment of inhabitants.
“Everyone, this is Ran,” said Fye. “Ran, this is Alphonse Elric, and this is the Princess Sakura we told you about before.” There was the brief flurry of small nods and hellos that meant a group of polite people were being introduced without being quite sure why or what was going on.
“What happened to the chimeras?” Al asked.
“All taken care of,” Fye assured him, “and we had a stroke of luck while we were out too. Ran, why don’t you show them?”
Glancing once more at Fye for reassurance, Ran produced the feather from a pocket.
“My feather!” Sakura exclaimed.
“Can you really make it disappear?” asked Ran. He was a strange boy with a solemn maturity beyond his apparent age, but now he looked desperately hopeful.
“We can do better than that,” Fye promised. “We can send it back where it’s meant to be. Sakura?” he prompted.
Sakura held a hand out for the feather, then hesitated. “Syaoran-kun’s not back yet, is he? I only just woke up, and at this rate I’ll be asleep again when…”
“I wouldn’t worry, he’ll be just as happy to get back again and know the feather is safe,” Fye assured her, “and if a hunch of mine is right, returning the feather to our princess now might even make what he’s doing just a little bit easier.”
“He may be right,” Kurogane agreed, looking thoughtful.
Sakura looked from one of them to the other, nodded resolutely, and held out a hand.
***
Deep below the mansion, when a transmutation that had only been sustained by bending a few minor alchemical laws was suddenly subjected to the full force of what passed for physics in this universe, this is what happened.
The wire whip broke mid-swing and splintered into a thousand tiny shards, all left to the mercy of air resistance and badly directed momentum, spraying over their targets in a shower of harmless fragments. The targets themselves had thrown themselves flat on the floor and were poorly placed to catch the full effect of what was happening around them, but it was plain before either boy made it back to his feet that somehow – whatever the cause – the rules in this room had changed. By this time all that was left was a cloud of splinters, tinkling gently as it settled to the ground.
Ed muttered “What the…?” once he was just about upright again, which was probably something of an understatement. Syaoran watched in mute confusion. It didn’t take a lifetime’s experience with alchemy to tell that something about the glistening device that took up so much of the room had gone very wrong.
All around them, metal creaked as tightly strung wire, created only by impossible magics, began to feel the strain of being reshaped so many times under so much tension. Three sets of eyes watched in fascinated horror as, with what felt like exaggerated slowness, the first strand of supporting wire snapped and ricocheted towards the centre of the structure like a spring had been released. For the first time, the boy in the centre of the room looked like no more than a scared child. The end of a snapping wire whipped across his face, leaving a trail of blood. The boy barely seemed to have felt it, but raised a hand to the sensation of moisture and looked at the blood that came away on his fingers as if he had no idea what it was, nor what he was meant to do.
It was then, as wires continued to fail, that Syaoran saw with a sudden, horrible clarity what was going to happen, and went charging towards the centre of the room without a second thought, slicing through wire left and right to clear his way.
“Hey, wait!” Ed yelled after him. “The whole thing’s going to…!”
“I can make it – cover me!” Syaoran called back, hacking his way past another tangle. Once cut, the wire sprang in unpredictable directions – away for the most part (thank any god who might be listening), but already, pieces had slashed along his arms, body and legs, ripping fabric and in some places scoring deep enough to leave red marks on his skin. It stung like anything; what would happen if one hit him in the eye he didn’t want to find out – just tried to keep a hand or Hien’s hilt in front of his face as much as was practical. No part of the amplifier had ever been designed to take strain like this. The very design – all the weakest connections at the outwards most edges – guaranteed failure in the most catastrophic way. The remaining wires furthest in Syaoran didn’t dare touch – but instead squeezed past, twisting under and over to get through. He leapt over the last row of arrays to land in the centre, only barely cleaning the uppermost without catching any on his toes.
The alchemist boy had hardly moved, just watched in stunned silence as broken wire tangled around him. Given his position, he’d taken surprisingly few gashes, but wire that had whipped back here had caught and wrapped around his clothes and arms in dozens of places, so much that he would scarcely have been able escape now even had he had the sense to. It took some serious work with Hien just for Syaoran to get him free. That finally done, he looked back and around them – now everything that remained was contorting, ready to give – not good, they couldn’t have more than seconds left, not nearly time to get out again.
Syaoran grabbed the boy tightly and threw them both to the ground. The world went abruptly dark, and for a long time all was aware of was the sound of a sickening, drawn out, metallic crunch.
It probably couldn’t have been more than seconds, but it felt a lot longer, when Syaoran realised everything had gone quiet and looked up again. It was still dark when he opened his eyes, close to pitch black. Almost every part of him hurt, but at least he could still feel all his limbs, and they did seem to be working. Syaoran reached out in front of himself with one hand and encountered the curve of a vertical wall just inches away. He had only just begun to move his hand to find out how far it went when he heard a familiar clap, and the wall shrank back to the floor right in front of him. Scattered fragments of crushed but harmless metal fell to the floor with a tinkling noise as the structure that and protected Syaoran and the boy was reabsorbed.
The room revealed had fallen dark, but in front of Syaoran crouched Ed, eerily illuminated by a ball of something by his feet which glowed with a phosphorescent light. Hands freed now that the last transmutation was done, he reached for it and picked it up again.
“Lights went out when everything was collapsing,” he said by way of explanation, holding the ball up to show to Syaoran, “and my torch got broken somewhere in that fight before. This is about the best even alchemy could do in a hurry without any matches. You alright?”
“Yeah,” Syaoran told him. “More or less. You probably saved both of us with that barrier before.” The floor, what was visible of it in the gloom, was littered with broken wire. Nothing more than the sad shapes of a few half-recognisable circles had survived in any way intact.
“That was a hell of a stunt,” said Ed, looking grumpy, though whether that had more to do with other people’s recklessness or the fact he hadn’t thought of it first was up for interpretation. “You should have seen that thing fold up from where I was – you’d be a real mess right now if I hadn’t been here.”
“I wouldn’t have tried it if you hadn’t been,” said Syaoran. He took another long look around the room. “What do you think could have happened to make it all give out like that?”
Ed shrugged. “Don’t ask me. He must’ve overloaded it with that last reaction somehow. I told you these devices were more trouble than they were worth.” Ed’s gaze moved to the troublesome child Syaoran had gone to so much effort to save. “Was it worth it?”
The boy, Syaoran realised, checking him properly at last, was unconscious, but – to his great relief – still breathing. He looked a lot more peaceful now – it was hard to believe how much trouble he’d caused.
“He’ll be alright,” Syaoran concluded. “I don’t think he’ll be awake again for a while though. From what he was saying, it sounds like he’s been down here alone for a long time. I don’t think he ever meant to hurt anyone either – what he was doing just got out of hand.”
“Even kids can be dangerous if they learn too much alchemy this young,” said Ed bitterly. “Especially when they lose someone close to them like that.”
Syaoran had been feeling for a while now that there was a story here, but he’d only gotten half the pieces and suddenly it seemed like if he didn’t ask now how it was all supposed to fit together, he’d never get to. “Ed,” he said, cautious but unable to hide his curiousity any longer, “Alphonse’s body, your arm and leg – what happened to you two?”
Ed started at the unexpected question and turned his back on him; for a moment Syaoran thought he was going to just walk away, but then, “We tried to bring our mother back to life.”
“Huh? But isn’t that…?”
“Human transmutation.” Ed twisted around to give Syaoran a rueful sort of grin. “I told you it was forbidden for a reason, didn’t I?”
“Then – the reason you’re looking for the Philosopher’s Stone…”
“Nothing is going to bring our Mother back from the dead, we learned that,” said Ed, eyes dropped towards the floor. “But at the least, I’m going to get Al his body back. I owe him that much.” He turned the rest of the way back around. “Is that all you wanted to know?”
Syaoran honestly didn’t know what to say. “But it wasn’t the stone they were using here.”
“It usually isn’t.” Ed grumbled, and gave Syaoran one of his more sceptical looks. “Sounds like you might have been in more luck though. That ‘feather’, he talked about? Shouldn’t I be asking you what’s been going on here?”
Syaoran looked down, hesitating. “Whatever happened, it isn’t here anymore. And I was telling the truth when I said I don’t know how it works.”
Ed did not look satisfied at this rather poor excuse for an explanation. “C’mon, you can give me something better than that.”
After prying so far into Ed’s secrets, Syaoran was suddenly, guiltily aware he couldn’t fairly have expected anything less. “I said I couldn’t explain it well, but – the feathers are fragments of Sakura’s memories. Like fragments of her soul. Something happened, and they were scattered. It’s up to me – and Kurogane and Fye – to find them again.” He looked at Ed, nervously waiting to see how he might react.
Ed frowned, responses and questions visibly waring somewhere behind his eyes. He sighed in eventual resignation. “Well, I won’t pretend I get all of it, but I’m probably not someone who can start lecturing you about what you can and can’t do with a soul.”
And that appeared to be the end of it.
Syaoran got to his feet at last and looked around the room, what little was visible in the dim light. He tried to imagine people had lived down here, and glanced once more at the slumbering boy he’d rescued. “I wonder what really happened. He kept talking about someone called Ran – I wonder where he could be now.”
“The one who took the feather?” said Ed. “Well, what I do know is we’re not going to figure it sitting down here. Come on – lets get this guy back to that doctor in town. I sure hope there’s another way out of here, I’ve had enough tunnels for today.”
On to Part 11
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