Revised:
--oo--
Freezing hotly so hard he shivers. The deep aches in his port cry out, and he squeezes his eyes shut tight against the onslaught of infinite knowledge spilling through his mind. Gripping grasping black hands of the gate hold him, wrap around him uncomfortably tight, and he struggles and squirms. The noise of all languages roars his ears full, but he understands none of it. It scours away who he is and he's afraid.
Alone. So alone.
Stray hands, no fists, struck the side of his face hard, and he landed on something so solid he's breathless.
Wait. This isn't right...this isn't..
This isn't that place.
He breathes in. Breathes out. Cracks open his eyes. He is in the world, he can see that. But something's not right. A fuzzy white haze creeps into his vision.
There was a boot near his face, and he followed it upwards to the face of the bald man speaking the nonsense. Why was he speaking nonsense? There was another beside the man, one with longer hair, and he decided he didn't much like the look of that leering smile.
He pushed himself up off the ground onto his hands, and swungs out wildly with his feet. He heard rather than felt his left heel strike something, and he remembers why. Automail. His left leg was sacrificed long ago to a mistake. He hears the clinking rattle of metal on metal as he tries to curl in on himself, but something prevents him.
He flipped back to his feet, and completed the move his body seemed to remember more that he did: he doesn't know why it was so natural to slap his palms together, and follow that with a lunge to the ground. A piece of himself rises to the muddy soup of his mind, and he briefly sees the beauty of the shining blue pattern that appeared before devastation came to the world at his command.
The earth rose in great towering spikes, and dust billowed. He couldn't see his two attackers as he darted within his creation, but he felt the single pinprick at his right shoulder before darkness took the world away. Soupy mottled gray wisps of garbed language blend with shifting lyrics and luted voices.
He dragged his feet as he was pushed along from his left shoulder, his arms prickly numb and bound apart behind his back. He heard the pounding of a gavel on solid wood echoing around him, and the voices hushed. The remaining port in his left leg ached deep as bone, and his welling pride, another piece of his lost self, told him to cover up the limp. He stumbled on an upward step he couldn't see, and he teetered forward. An unkind strike was his reward, and he can't remember ever hitting the ground.
How much time has.. has he lost? For some reason, time seems terribly important, and his breath catches in his throat. He shifts his pounding head against the soft pillow.
Light stabs pounding pain into his closed eyes, and he swings mad vengeance at the world. Pounding slaps of sandles on tile, bells and alarms defen his ears. Soon after, unwelcome grasping hands pin him to the board of the mattress, and he snarls.
"Hey!! Stop..! Stop..! Let me go!!"
Swirling vertigo jumbles colors together much like the garbled language, and solidifies into a pattern of red bloody scars. The expressionless face of a boy wavers into his sight. He doesn't remember learning to read exactly, but he knows the crude tattoo on the forehead says "love".
Another piece of himself rises in his exhaustion. He can't move much beyond shivering, but he knows now that he has a name. It is Edward Elric.
Ed trades fairly with the "love" carved "Gahraah" before he drifts off uneasily into muddled slumber.
Days pass, marked by the rising and setting of a golden sun he can see through the tiny squares high up on the thick wall. Little disturbs him here. It is peaceful and warm.
He hears and understands a few words. "Slave" seems familiar as the cotton wool of his mind knits itself into a semblance of order, and Ed mulls through what he has experienced upon returning to the world as he stares listlessly at the unkind intrusion of tubes and needles in his bound arms.
He breathes in the aneseptic smell that identifies this place as a sort of hospital, but beyond that..? Hazy recollections of the bare wood of the stage he stumbled upon, and the striking sound of the gavel give rise to a nagging horror.
That was a market. A slave market. He must have been sold as a slave. The more he thinks of it, the more it rings true. He feels the deep rage rise from his belly at the sheer indignity of not being sovern over his own self.
The undeniable impulse to leave is difficult to hide, and he clenches his hands.
He watches the pattern flow around him to pass the time. The metal of the headband seems to be the only identifying real feature of any kind uniform here, and people have it on in the oddest of places while fluttering in and out of his room. Sometimes it's tied about their heads as the things was clearly intended, sometimes draped upon a belt, or wrapped about a wrist.
A girl enters the room, carrying a tray of broth. His stomach recoils from the beefy smell. He eyes her loose sleeve, and notices how oddly rigid the cotton looks. It reminds him of something, a memory of someone that is frustratingly just out of reach. He pathetically presses himself back into the furthest corner of the bed as she sets the tray on the nearby table with a falsely kind smile streching her lips.
Like with the red scar, he doesn't know how he knows. Visions of a sharp knife, or or more likely many knives, rise from the murky depths of his unconsciousness as he eyes that sleeve. That such sharp deadly things are kept handy, and well hidden upon her body while she works at hospital of all places disturbs his sensiblities. Over the hours of quietly watching, he finds that she is not the only one with such devices.
He duly notes the threat for what it is, and coolly calculates that he is too weak to try for a go. The fever has him shivering again, and he impatiently clenches his teeth to wait until the time is right.
He will not be anyone's slave. At least not for long.
--oo--
Sent via Blackhole
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