---ooo--
"If I'm right. His chakra is sealed beyond use. He shouldn't be breathing, much less..." Shikamaru says, pausing as he sees the target makes a face, squeeze his golden eyes closed, and mutter in a language that Shikamaru has never heard.
"Yeah. Got it." Three lunges forward, pressing the advantage. Shikamaru let his eyes drift to the swirl of sand blowing about, spinning lazily around the stumbling figure of the target.
A heartbeat passes beyond three's single step forward. The golden eyes snap open and focus with great intensity, but Shikamaru gasps as the two kunai launch from Three's outstretched hands.
We're supposed to take him in alive!!
If it were himself, Shika is sure he would be ducking low and tightly hugging himself. Couldn't the target see the kunai in the woman hands? Did he WANT to be impaled and bloody?
One kunai flies achingly close to the boy's skull, blade kissing the sweaty mop of golden hair before it thunks solidly to the hilt into the wagon yards beyond the boy. The target darts his right, striking the other kunai wide and away from his chest with the dark gauntlet. Where it flies, Shika isn't sure, for his eyes follow the blur that is Three as she closes in. She spins: heels high in an unavoidable strike for the target's spine. Shika startles as the target, a breath away from a broken neck, suddenly moves about, arms a smooth blur of a sweeping arc. Somehow, legs and arms meet, for the boy tosses the masked woman with maddening ease high over his head.
A great cloud of dust obscures her landing, but Shika hears the loud bang! as Three crashes into the very wagon where her lost kunai struck.
Shikamaru hurries his hands through the necessary hand signs, and slides his eyes back to the target. He frowns at the boy standing as still and steady as piece of steel.
Molten gold irises lock him in a stare that felt as though they would burn a hole straight through him. K-killing intent..? Without chakra, would a look like that be "killing intent"? Shika thinks as he shivers, and swallows his bile.
---oo--
A massive armor shell looms in the dust where he just tossed the green masked woman, and Ed widens his eyes. Metal plates grate against themselves then fall away to clang into the rubble. The last piece, the breast plate, drops with a bang, revealing the glow of a broken, precious, barely elegant design scrawled one desperate night with blood.
He remembers.
Ed remembers why he has a right arm of living flesh, and he shivers as the corners of his eyes leak down his cheeks.
"Al..!"
Al sacrificed himself to give me a fighting chance against Father, but I'm not worth...!
The dust clears and he sees the five kunai arranged about the remaining torso, and the form of the tiny girl he hazily remembers. She tossed the knives but hunches over close, crying into her petite hands for the loss of the empty hunk of steel.
"Al.phonse" Ed breathes brokenly. Think. Keep thinking. There has to be a way. He gasps a breath past the choking lump in his throat.
As he watches, more figures gather about the broken heap, and, one by one, turn their empty gazes his way. He vaguely remembers their faces, too, but their names are beyond his immediate grasp.
He rushes to the metal heap and reaches out a shaking hand, narrowing his eyes as he touches formerly living steel. He notices something off right away, but wrinkles his nose at the niggly cold impulse, the cool logic of the inner scientist always demanding answers. The battle is pathetically brief. He tells himself that he has to know, has to be absolutely certain that Al's soul is awaiting for payment at the Gate before he does anything.
Fingers twitching, he reluctantly looks deeper within the familiar structure which housed the faint fragment of his only family for so long.
Easing himself into the welcoming thrum of Alchemy, he hears all the world sing in his mind; a roar of elemental compositions awaiting his touch. He focuses, listening for the flow of life beneath the cacophony of atoms and spinning electrons. Once found he orients himself as it wraps about, flowing strangely sluggish through his body and tumbling onward beneath his mismatched feet.
Nearby figures, which do not in any way mesh up with what he sees with his eyes, wander about in clumps and groups. The bottom of his stomach drops as he realizes that instead of human beings, he is perceiving naked equations and pure data.
He squeezes his eyes shut then reopens them to the awful truth, and pieces of gate knowledge leach into his conscious mind as he feels his mouth move. His brows meet. There is no mass of iron here, much less the unique soul bonded steel of missing his brother.
--ooo--
Shikamaru hears Three giggle over the radio in his ear, and one corner of his mouth lifts. The dust is clearing, but he sees a vague shape of a log where the masked woman should have been.
Sent via a stray supercharged nano particle of unobtainium....
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