FMA: The Haunted Alleyway
Aug. 5th, 2010 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: The Haunted Alleyway (or: Ghost-hunting Take Two)
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Summary: "They say it’s the ghost of a woman who lost her lover in a carting accident there years ago," says Breda. "Five men have seen it so far."
The winters in the East are long, and cold, and dark. This probably explains the unusual pervasion of ghost stories in the Eastern Capital but, as commanders across the city would be quick to point out, it doesn’t excuse it.
It’s January, and it’s a Thursday, and the New Year’s parties have finally washed out of the city’s system, try desperately as it did to hold on to them (entertainment, like everything else, is hard to come by in the East). There’s not a lot of work to be done, since the winter tends to freeze out the local problems, and no one requests back-up from the East between November and March unless they want it to arrive in June. Consequently, the men have too much free time on their hands. And, consequently of that, they end up with:
“Hoffman saw it last week on his way home. Same alley, creepy light, shuffling around in the snow, no footprints. And on Tuesday Poulk and Bietre saw it, together. Same thing,” says Breda, savouring the details with the heartless enthusiasm of a man whose way home lies in the opposite direction.
“Come on, Sergeant, have some mercy,” moans Fury, shoulders hunching. “You know that’s on the way to the dorms.”
“They say it’s the ghost of a woman who lost her lover in a carting accident there years ago, trying to find him. Digging out the blood from the cobbles to piece him back together again,” continues Breda, merciless. “Five men have seen it so far. Well, and Ms. Schlatter the lunch lady, but she doesn’t really count.”
Everyone in the room nods vaguely at this. Ms. Schlatter, although capable of making an excellent ham sandwich, is not quite right in the head; something to do with one of the border skirmishes years ago. No one asks.
“They say she’s not picky, either. If you get in her way, she’ll take you instead of her lover. Well, temporarily.” Breda makes a slashing gesture at neck-height, accompanied by the throat-slashing sound.
“Sergeant!” wails Fury.
Mustang, who has been listening from behind his newspaper with half an ear, puts it down with a loud rustle and glares at his subordinates. “Honestly, I cannot believe you are soldiers, never mind my soldiers. Remember last time?”
There’s a pause as a collective recollection of Haunted Warehouse 13 blossoms like a particularly ugly flower in the minds of the men, and chagrin flashes across their faces.
“Right,” says Mustang, picking up his paper again and flipping to the advertisements. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Stop this ridiculous rumour-mongering.”
The men shrug, not entirely relieved, and go back to what they were doing before their rumour-mongering: calculating the odds of Hawkeye reducing the gate-house duty officer to tears before the end of the week. Mustang listens to this with more than half an ear: there’s good money to be made in office betting pools. At least until Hawkeye finds out about them.
----------------------------------------
Fury walks home alone on Thursday evening, Farman having some errands to run. Apart from the cold and the ice underfoot, the streets of the Eastern Capital are dark by four, and the maintenance department out here is not the proud and efficient department of Central. He would happily have skirted the haunted alleyway good and wide, but that would have meant poorly-planned construction work adding an extra half-hour onto his walking time through the -20 weather, and he decides to chance hurrying past the alley.
This turns out to be a mistake.
He’s shuffling along as fast as he can through ankle-deep snow over a layer of packed ice when he spots the strange, blue glow ahead. Almost the blue of a hot flame, but tinged at the edges with dawn’s light pink blush rather than licks of bright orange. It’s an unsteady halo of eldritch light, dying down to darkness in jolting flickers, and then jumping back to full-glow again. It paints the snow outside the alley robin’s egg blue, and over that casts a crooked shadow. Fury yelps and jumps backwards.
It’s his second mistake; he loses his footing entirely on the treacherous snow and falls backwards while pin-wheeling frantically, eyes wide and horrified. Right up until the point that the back of his head smacks the snow-covered cobbles.
The last thing he remembers before passing out is a white form in the distance, coming closer.
----------------------------------------
Mustang gets the call from Hawkeye, who gets it from Havoc; Eastern HQ still isn’t used to the idea of anyone higher than sergeant caring about the trouble the lower ranks get themselves into out in the drifts. He wraps up and troops back to HQ’s infirmary at four in the morning to see Fury, lying in a corner bed in a ward with two bad cases of frostbite and one poor bastard who believed everything the woman in the bar told him. The other men don’t wake at Mustang’s intrusion, although the night-nurse glares at him all the same. Fury’s got a bandage big enough to swaddle a toddler in wrapped around his forehead, glasses sitting on the nightstand beside him, eyes slightly unfocused. He’s also lying tense as a cadet under a General’s eye, although he relaxes when he makes out Mustang’s figure in the dimness of the ward.
“Colonel! It was true! It was all true! There really is a woman haunting the alleyway!”
Mustang puts this down to the concussion. “Sergeant-Major Fury, you have –”
“I saw it, Colonel! The blue light, and then the woman in white! She was probably coming to chop me up into little pieces!” he makes the appropriate chopping gestures.
Mustang stares blandly. “Then how do you explain the fact that you are currently unmangled?”
Fury blinks. “I… someone must have come along and saved me!”
“Lieutenant Yarrow, of munitions, found you unconscious in the snow and called for assistance. He, incidentally, reported no footprints headed directly towards or away from you.”
“She doesn’t leave any footprints,” points out Fury eagerly, as if this is collaborative rather than disproving evidence.
Although unable to shout at a concussed subordinate at 4:30am in the infirmary, the glare Mustang gives Fury convinces the younger man that continuing down this route won’t end well.
“Lieutenant Hawkeye will check on you tomorrow; the nurse informs me you will probably be able to be released then as the concussion is extremely minor.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
Mustang nods and stalks out. There will be trouble.
----------------------------------------
Trouble starts at 0900, early in the Mustang unit. This is because the Colonel was unable to return to sleep after his trip, and so is at the office bright and early, determined to exact an equivalent amount of suffering from his subordinates. Hawkeye looks on mildly, reading through forms on a clipboard.
“Sergeant-Major Fury has fallen victim to your rumour-mongering,” is how he puts it, when they are seated and looking on apprehensively. All but Havoc who saw this coming when he got the original call sometime around 3:00am and, having gotten little more sleep than Mustang, is sucking on the end of a cigarette in the hopes of extracting some of the nicotine to keep him awake. “Fortunately, it is only a minor concussion. Unfortunately, it was a concussion, which means that I was informed of it. So: tonight, the three of you will be laying this ghost to rest.”
Breda and Farman look at each other; Havoc stares dully at his desk. His elbows have kept the shine up well, and he can make out the blurry shape of his haggard face in the wood.
“But, sir, it chops men up,” protests Breda, making the same chopping motions as Fury had in the hospital.
“Right down into mincemeat,” adds Farman, who usually walks home along that route and has all the stories memorized. “With a giant cleaver.”
“Why would a cartman’s wife have a cleaver?” Mustang presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose.
Both Breda and Farman pause, thinking hard. “Maybe she was a butcher,” muses Havoc, slurring around his cigarette. Mustang sighs.
“Are you even listening to yourselves? Now you’re trying to give the damn thing a profession! Just admit it – there are no such things as ghosts. And to keep other credulous idiots from cracking their heads open in the middle of the night, you can go and find out who is hanging around in the alley and tell them to knock it off.”
“But Colonel,” moan Breda and Farman in tandem. Havoc tries to keep from shining his desk with his forehead.
“And I’m not coming with you this time,” adds Mustang. “You can damn well do your own ghost hunting.”
His subordinates cower immediately, shifting seamlessly from whining to pleading.
“Please, Colonel, have mercy!”
“If you don’t come it’ll get us!”
“With its big cleaver, chop, chop, chop!”
“They’ll need a hose to get the blood out of the cobblestones!”
“Well, they won’t get one until April,” cuts in Mustang, heartlessly. “No wet work in winter.”
“But,” begins Farman automatically, before his brain catches up with the conversation and kicks in. “Pardon – what, sir?”
“No wet work in winter,” repeats Mustang, scowling. “Even the pipes freeze, never mind the hoses.”
Farman frowns. “But they’re doing construction all around that alley. They started last week, and it’s either cut through it or go all the way around on Broad street. That’s why there have been so many problems recently; no one wants to walk a half-hour out of their way to avoid it.”
There’s a slight pause as everyone mentally reloads in the face of this new front.
“The construction department is shut down, sir,” says Hawkeye, glancing up from her clipboard to catch the colonel’s eye. The colonel sighs.
“You too, Lieutenant?”
“You have been spending most of your time indoors recently, sir.” Her tone paints the word LAZINESS in letters a foot high.
“I’ve been buried in paperwork!” He indicates the pile of documents on his desk with a gesture of irritation. They are, in fact, unsigned.
Hawkeye says nothing, but her dry look speaks volumes.
“And besides, it’s no good pampering them. They’ll just become useless. I need real men serving under me.”
Farman and Breda glance at each other, but don’t point out that they’re still in the room. Hawkeye purses her lips. The paper wrapping of Havoc’s cigarette finally disintegrates, spilling wet tobacco into his mouth. He gags slightly, and coughs it out.
“Please, sir, we’ll follow you wherever you go,” announces Breda, changing tactics, over Havoc’s hacking.
Farman, taking the hint, leaps up to second him, “Just think of all the men who will be able to walk home without fear, sir!”
Mustang’s lip curls.
“Just think of poor Fury in the hospital, sir, terrified she’ll track him down!” says Breda, reinforcing the shores to keep the river Doubt safe in its bed and away from them.
Mustang stares at him flatly.
“Just think of Suzanne, who walks home that way,” says Havoc dully, reflecting on the desk clerk from downstairs who turned him down after the first date.
“Suzanne?” asks Mustang, sharply.
“Yes, sir,” Breda sees the way the wind is blowing and gets his oar in fast. “You know, the blonde who works reception, with the nice smile and the legs up to there.”
“I heard her saying just the other day that she wished there were more good-looking officers stationed out here, sir,” says Farman.
Mustang stands up. “Alright! We form up at the intersection of 5th and Juttland at 7pm!”
Hawkeye, with her back to the men, does not quite roll her eyes.
----------------------------------------
By 7pm the sky is black, and the Eastern Capital with its poorly maintained lighting is not much brighter. Havoc, Breda and Farman are waiting at the corner as instructed, each huddling in his heavy coat against the cold. There’s no snow falling tonight, and the stuff underfoot is now stiff and frozen. It crunches brittly when they stomp their feet and packs down into slick layers of ice.
There’s a slow crunching from behind them and all three turn, Breda slipping in his tracks and tumbling back into Farman. The colonel appears out of the shadows, looking deeply unimpressed. “Are you really soldiers?”
They draw back, half-guilty, half-rebellious. Mustang huffs, breath clouding.
“Alright, fine, where’s this haunted alleyway? Let’s just get it over with, it’s freezing out here.”
“It’s over there.” Farman points, indicating the black square mouth yawning between two dark grey buildings. “It’s about a hundred yards long; it lets out on 6th.”
“Right. Who brought a lantern?”
Havoc produces one and lights it, then his cigarette. Mustang takes charge of the lamp and leads the way; he knows how this is going to go. With him pulling and his subordinates stalling all the way. He strides forward into the alley, towing the cowering enlisted men along behind him, like a tugboat with an especially pathetic load.
The alley is long and black; even with the lamp they can’t see the far side. Nevertheless, Mustang keeps up a steady pace and they all crunch through the pristine white snow, four men and a lantern.
They reach the far end without incident.
“See?” he says, pointing back at the now-empty alley. “There was nothing –” he pauses, and then looks back more closely. Holds his lantern up, and walks over to the edge.
“Warrant Officer Farman, you said the men had been taking this alley as a shortcut?”
“Yes, sir, although after the rumours got out about Fury I think they’ve mostly stopped…”
“And it didn’t snow today or yesterday, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” answers Farman, perplexed.
“Then how is it that the snow in the alley was fresh before we walked through it?”
In the lantern’s warm glow, four sets of footprints trail down the centre of the alley. The rest of it is covered in ankle-deep snow, white and unmarked.
At the other end of the alley, there’s a quiet, rustling sound.
Behind Mustang, the men slowly begin to creep away.
As the colonel peers into the darkness, raising his lantern, a sharp line of blue fire rises from the ground at the far end of the alley and cuts out a perfect circle. It flickers and flares, and paints the alley walls in all the colours of a summer sunset for a brief moment before beginning to fade towards dusk. Mustang starts running, lantern held out in front of him. Ahead of him, the snow is once again unmarked.
Behind him on 6th street, his men realise that they’ve been left without the protection of either their superior or the lantern. They take off after him.
Mustang storms out of the end of the alleyway with the lantern in his left hand and his right gloved and upraised. And slams right into someone dressed all in white. They go flying, Mustang slipping on the icy ground and falling bottom-most. The lantern smashes on the snow-covered cobbles, and goes out.
The men arrive in a huddle, edging out of the alley mouth with guns drawn and peering into the darkness. “Colonel? Colonel Mustang? Are you alright?”
“What if –” hisses Breda to the others.
“It couldn’t be,” replies Farman, far from convinced.
Havoc strides forward, blinking in the gloom. “Colonel? Where are you?”
There’s a groan from his left, and then quiet cursing and the crunching of snow being crushed.
“Colonel?” Havoc steps over, gun still held in ready hands.
“Who else would it be?” mutters Mustang wrathfully, pulling himself up to his feet and brushing off the snow. “Goddamn ice.” And then, reaching down again, “And who are you?”
He pulls up a figure from the cobbles; in the darkness the white of his coat is barely visible. Havoc flicks his lighter open, and by the flickering flame they see that the man Mustang is holding by the back of his coat collar is wearing a long white coat over his winter clothes, with pencils tucked into the breast pocket.
“A scientist?” says Breda, disbelievingly.
“An alchemist,” says Havoc, glancing at the snow covering the array they had seen.
“An alchemist working in winter nights in a dark alley,” drawls Mustang. The implications make it a question, even if his flat tone doesn’t.
“I-it’s a secret project,” gabbles the alchemist, still hanging from Mustang’s hand. “For my qualification exam! I couldn’t have anyone know about it! I haven’t done anything illegal,” he adds, with more control.
“Falsifying construction work and closing important pedestrian thoroughfares is a crime,” says Mustang, adding when the man begins to protest: “No construction work is undertaken in the winter months, at least none that would require closing walkways. But since the construction department shuts down for the winter, it would be very easy to set up a false construction site – no one would be able to check.”
“It’s very secret work,” mutters the man rebelliously.
“And yet, interestingly, even in snow erasing footprints is actually quite simple alchemy,” says Mustang, in a deceptively easy-going voice. “The kind of thing any second-year student would be able to perform. And the kind of thing a criminal could get a lot of use out of, once he’d perfected it.”
There’s one split-instant of stillness, and then several things happen at once. The man in Mustang’s grip twists loose and lashes out. Havoc’s lighter goes flying, clicking shut and leaving them in darkness. There’s a squealing of boots on ice as the man turns to run. Mustang snaps his fingers.
Nothing happens.
“Goddamn snow,” he curses again.
Behind him, Farman pulls a matchbook out of his pocket, tears off a match and strikes it.
Five yards away flame blossoms in mid air, a particularly vibrant flower. There’s a brief smell of smoke, and then a damp thud. The match goes out. For a minute, the four of them stand still in the darkness. And then,
“I told you,” says Mustang peevishly. “There is no such thing as ghosts.”
Off to the side, Havoc steps off to search through the snow for his lighter. “You’ve gotta say though, sir, in a lot of ways it’d have been a simpler explanation.”
Mustang snorts, and pulls off his wet glove. “Next time, you’re doing this on your own.”
Behind him, Farman looks despairingly at Breda. "Next time?"
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Summary: "They say it’s the ghost of a woman who lost her lover in a carting accident there years ago," says Breda. "Five men have seen it so far."
The winters in the East are long, and cold, and dark. This probably explains the unusual pervasion of ghost stories in the Eastern Capital but, as commanders across the city would be quick to point out, it doesn’t excuse it.
It’s January, and it’s a Thursday, and the New Year’s parties have finally washed out of the city’s system, try desperately as it did to hold on to them (entertainment, like everything else, is hard to come by in the East). There’s not a lot of work to be done, since the winter tends to freeze out the local problems, and no one requests back-up from the East between November and March unless they want it to arrive in June. Consequently, the men have too much free time on their hands. And, consequently of that, they end up with:
“Hoffman saw it last week on his way home. Same alley, creepy light, shuffling around in the snow, no footprints. And on Tuesday Poulk and Bietre saw it, together. Same thing,” says Breda, savouring the details with the heartless enthusiasm of a man whose way home lies in the opposite direction.
“Come on, Sergeant, have some mercy,” moans Fury, shoulders hunching. “You know that’s on the way to the dorms.”
“They say it’s the ghost of a woman who lost her lover in a carting accident there years ago, trying to find him. Digging out the blood from the cobbles to piece him back together again,” continues Breda, merciless. “Five men have seen it so far. Well, and Ms. Schlatter the lunch lady, but she doesn’t really count.”
Everyone in the room nods vaguely at this. Ms. Schlatter, although capable of making an excellent ham sandwich, is not quite right in the head; something to do with one of the border skirmishes years ago. No one asks.
“They say she’s not picky, either. If you get in her way, she’ll take you instead of her lover. Well, temporarily.” Breda makes a slashing gesture at neck-height, accompanied by the throat-slashing sound.
“Sergeant!” wails Fury.
Mustang, who has been listening from behind his newspaper with half an ear, puts it down with a loud rustle and glares at his subordinates. “Honestly, I cannot believe you are soldiers, never mind my soldiers. Remember last time?”
There’s a pause as a collective recollection of Haunted Warehouse 13 blossoms like a particularly ugly flower in the minds of the men, and chagrin flashes across their faces.
“Right,” says Mustang, picking up his paper again and flipping to the advertisements. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Stop this ridiculous rumour-mongering.”
The men shrug, not entirely relieved, and go back to what they were doing before their rumour-mongering: calculating the odds of Hawkeye reducing the gate-house duty officer to tears before the end of the week. Mustang listens to this with more than half an ear: there’s good money to be made in office betting pools. At least until Hawkeye finds out about them.
----------------------------------------
Fury walks home alone on Thursday evening, Farman having some errands to run. Apart from the cold and the ice underfoot, the streets of the Eastern Capital are dark by four, and the maintenance department out here is not the proud and efficient department of Central. He would happily have skirted the haunted alleyway good and wide, but that would have meant poorly-planned construction work adding an extra half-hour onto his walking time through the -20 weather, and he decides to chance hurrying past the alley.
This turns out to be a mistake.
He’s shuffling along as fast as he can through ankle-deep snow over a layer of packed ice when he spots the strange, blue glow ahead. Almost the blue of a hot flame, but tinged at the edges with dawn’s light pink blush rather than licks of bright orange. It’s an unsteady halo of eldritch light, dying down to darkness in jolting flickers, and then jumping back to full-glow again. It paints the snow outside the alley robin’s egg blue, and over that casts a crooked shadow. Fury yelps and jumps backwards.
It’s his second mistake; he loses his footing entirely on the treacherous snow and falls backwards while pin-wheeling frantically, eyes wide and horrified. Right up until the point that the back of his head smacks the snow-covered cobbles.
The last thing he remembers before passing out is a white form in the distance, coming closer.
----------------------------------------
Mustang gets the call from Hawkeye, who gets it from Havoc; Eastern HQ still isn’t used to the idea of anyone higher than sergeant caring about the trouble the lower ranks get themselves into out in the drifts. He wraps up and troops back to HQ’s infirmary at four in the morning to see Fury, lying in a corner bed in a ward with two bad cases of frostbite and one poor bastard who believed everything the woman in the bar told him. The other men don’t wake at Mustang’s intrusion, although the night-nurse glares at him all the same. Fury’s got a bandage big enough to swaddle a toddler in wrapped around his forehead, glasses sitting on the nightstand beside him, eyes slightly unfocused. He’s also lying tense as a cadet under a General’s eye, although he relaxes when he makes out Mustang’s figure in the dimness of the ward.
“Colonel! It was true! It was all true! There really is a woman haunting the alleyway!”
Mustang puts this down to the concussion. “Sergeant-Major Fury, you have –”
“I saw it, Colonel! The blue light, and then the woman in white! She was probably coming to chop me up into little pieces!” he makes the appropriate chopping gestures.
Mustang stares blandly. “Then how do you explain the fact that you are currently unmangled?”
Fury blinks. “I… someone must have come along and saved me!”
“Lieutenant Yarrow, of munitions, found you unconscious in the snow and called for assistance. He, incidentally, reported no footprints headed directly towards or away from you.”
“She doesn’t leave any footprints,” points out Fury eagerly, as if this is collaborative rather than disproving evidence.
Although unable to shout at a concussed subordinate at 4:30am in the infirmary, the glare Mustang gives Fury convinces the younger man that continuing down this route won’t end well.
“Lieutenant Hawkeye will check on you tomorrow; the nurse informs me you will probably be able to be released then as the concussion is extremely minor.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
Mustang nods and stalks out. There will be trouble.
----------------------------------------
Trouble starts at 0900, early in the Mustang unit. This is because the Colonel was unable to return to sleep after his trip, and so is at the office bright and early, determined to exact an equivalent amount of suffering from his subordinates. Hawkeye looks on mildly, reading through forms on a clipboard.
“Sergeant-Major Fury has fallen victim to your rumour-mongering,” is how he puts it, when they are seated and looking on apprehensively. All but Havoc who saw this coming when he got the original call sometime around 3:00am and, having gotten little more sleep than Mustang, is sucking on the end of a cigarette in the hopes of extracting some of the nicotine to keep him awake. “Fortunately, it is only a minor concussion. Unfortunately, it was a concussion, which means that I was informed of it. So: tonight, the three of you will be laying this ghost to rest.”
Breda and Farman look at each other; Havoc stares dully at his desk. His elbows have kept the shine up well, and he can make out the blurry shape of his haggard face in the wood.
“But, sir, it chops men up,” protests Breda, making the same chopping motions as Fury had in the hospital.
“Right down into mincemeat,” adds Farman, who usually walks home along that route and has all the stories memorized. “With a giant cleaver.”
“Why would a cartman’s wife have a cleaver?” Mustang presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose.
Both Breda and Farman pause, thinking hard. “Maybe she was a butcher,” muses Havoc, slurring around his cigarette. Mustang sighs.
“Are you even listening to yourselves? Now you’re trying to give the damn thing a profession! Just admit it – there are no such things as ghosts. And to keep other credulous idiots from cracking their heads open in the middle of the night, you can go and find out who is hanging around in the alley and tell them to knock it off.”
“But Colonel,” moan Breda and Farman in tandem. Havoc tries to keep from shining his desk with his forehead.
“And I’m not coming with you this time,” adds Mustang. “You can damn well do your own ghost hunting.”
His subordinates cower immediately, shifting seamlessly from whining to pleading.
“Please, Colonel, have mercy!”
“If you don’t come it’ll get us!”
“With its big cleaver, chop, chop, chop!”
“They’ll need a hose to get the blood out of the cobblestones!”
“Well, they won’t get one until April,” cuts in Mustang, heartlessly. “No wet work in winter.”
“But,” begins Farman automatically, before his brain catches up with the conversation and kicks in. “Pardon – what, sir?”
“No wet work in winter,” repeats Mustang, scowling. “Even the pipes freeze, never mind the hoses.”
Farman frowns. “But they’re doing construction all around that alley. They started last week, and it’s either cut through it or go all the way around on Broad street. That’s why there have been so many problems recently; no one wants to walk a half-hour out of their way to avoid it.”
There’s a slight pause as everyone mentally reloads in the face of this new front.
“The construction department is shut down, sir,” says Hawkeye, glancing up from her clipboard to catch the colonel’s eye. The colonel sighs.
“You too, Lieutenant?”
“You have been spending most of your time indoors recently, sir.” Her tone paints the word LAZINESS in letters a foot high.
“I’ve been buried in paperwork!” He indicates the pile of documents on his desk with a gesture of irritation. They are, in fact, unsigned.
Hawkeye says nothing, but her dry look speaks volumes.
“And besides, it’s no good pampering them. They’ll just become useless. I need real men serving under me.”
Farman and Breda glance at each other, but don’t point out that they’re still in the room. Hawkeye purses her lips. The paper wrapping of Havoc’s cigarette finally disintegrates, spilling wet tobacco into his mouth. He gags slightly, and coughs it out.
“Please, sir, we’ll follow you wherever you go,” announces Breda, changing tactics, over Havoc’s hacking.
Farman, taking the hint, leaps up to second him, “Just think of all the men who will be able to walk home without fear, sir!”
Mustang’s lip curls.
“Just think of poor Fury in the hospital, sir, terrified she’ll track him down!” says Breda, reinforcing the shores to keep the river Doubt safe in its bed and away from them.
Mustang stares at him flatly.
“Just think of Suzanne, who walks home that way,” says Havoc dully, reflecting on the desk clerk from downstairs who turned him down after the first date.
“Suzanne?” asks Mustang, sharply.
“Yes, sir,” Breda sees the way the wind is blowing and gets his oar in fast. “You know, the blonde who works reception, with the nice smile and the legs up to there.”
“I heard her saying just the other day that she wished there were more good-looking officers stationed out here, sir,” says Farman.
Mustang stands up. “Alright! We form up at the intersection of 5th and Juttland at 7pm!”
Hawkeye, with her back to the men, does not quite roll her eyes.
----------------------------------------
By 7pm the sky is black, and the Eastern Capital with its poorly maintained lighting is not much brighter. Havoc, Breda and Farman are waiting at the corner as instructed, each huddling in his heavy coat against the cold. There’s no snow falling tonight, and the stuff underfoot is now stiff and frozen. It crunches brittly when they stomp their feet and packs down into slick layers of ice.
There’s a slow crunching from behind them and all three turn, Breda slipping in his tracks and tumbling back into Farman. The colonel appears out of the shadows, looking deeply unimpressed. “Are you really soldiers?”
They draw back, half-guilty, half-rebellious. Mustang huffs, breath clouding.
“Alright, fine, where’s this haunted alleyway? Let’s just get it over with, it’s freezing out here.”
“It’s over there.” Farman points, indicating the black square mouth yawning between two dark grey buildings. “It’s about a hundred yards long; it lets out on 6th.”
“Right. Who brought a lantern?”
Havoc produces one and lights it, then his cigarette. Mustang takes charge of the lamp and leads the way; he knows how this is going to go. With him pulling and his subordinates stalling all the way. He strides forward into the alley, towing the cowering enlisted men along behind him, like a tugboat with an especially pathetic load.
The alley is long and black; even with the lamp they can’t see the far side. Nevertheless, Mustang keeps up a steady pace and they all crunch through the pristine white snow, four men and a lantern.
They reach the far end without incident.
“See?” he says, pointing back at the now-empty alley. “There was nothing –” he pauses, and then looks back more closely. Holds his lantern up, and walks over to the edge.
“Warrant Officer Farman, you said the men had been taking this alley as a shortcut?”
“Yes, sir, although after the rumours got out about Fury I think they’ve mostly stopped…”
“And it didn’t snow today or yesterday, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” answers Farman, perplexed.
“Then how is it that the snow in the alley was fresh before we walked through it?”
In the lantern’s warm glow, four sets of footprints trail down the centre of the alley. The rest of it is covered in ankle-deep snow, white and unmarked.
At the other end of the alley, there’s a quiet, rustling sound.
Behind Mustang, the men slowly begin to creep away.
As the colonel peers into the darkness, raising his lantern, a sharp line of blue fire rises from the ground at the far end of the alley and cuts out a perfect circle. It flickers and flares, and paints the alley walls in all the colours of a summer sunset for a brief moment before beginning to fade towards dusk. Mustang starts running, lantern held out in front of him. Ahead of him, the snow is once again unmarked.
Behind him on 6th street, his men realise that they’ve been left without the protection of either their superior or the lantern. They take off after him.
Mustang storms out of the end of the alleyway with the lantern in his left hand and his right gloved and upraised. And slams right into someone dressed all in white. They go flying, Mustang slipping on the icy ground and falling bottom-most. The lantern smashes on the snow-covered cobbles, and goes out.
The men arrive in a huddle, edging out of the alley mouth with guns drawn and peering into the darkness. “Colonel? Colonel Mustang? Are you alright?”
“What if –” hisses Breda to the others.
“It couldn’t be,” replies Farman, far from convinced.
Havoc strides forward, blinking in the gloom. “Colonel? Where are you?”
There’s a groan from his left, and then quiet cursing and the crunching of snow being crushed.
“Colonel?” Havoc steps over, gun still held in ready hands.
“Who else would it be?” mutters Mustang wrathfully, pulling himself up to his feet and brushing off the snow. “Goddamn ice.” And then, reaching down again, “And who are you?”
He pulls up a figure from the cobbles; in the darkness the white of his coat is barely visible. Havoc flicks his lighter open, and by the flickering flame they see that the man Mustang is holding by the back of his coat collar is wearing a long white coat over his winter clothes, with pencils tucked into the breast pocket.
“A scientist?” says Breda, disbelievingly.
“An alchemist,” says Havoc, glancing at the snow covering the array they had seen.
“An alchemist working in winter nights in a dark alley,” drawls Mustang. The implications make it a question, even if his flat tone doesn’t.
“I-it’s a secret project,” gabbles the alchemist, still hanging from Mustang’s hand. “For my qualification exam! I couldn’t have anyone know about it! I haven’t done anything illegal,” he adds, with more control.
“Falsifying construction work and closing important pedestrian thoroughfares is a crime,” says Mustang, adding when the man begins to protest: “No construction work is undertaken in the winter months, at least none that would require closing walkways. But since the construction department shuts down for the winter, it would be very easy to set up a false construction site – no one would be able to check.”
“It’s very secret work,” mutters the man rebelliously.
“And yet, interestingly, even in snow erasing footprints is actually quite simple alchemy,” says Mustang, in a deceptively easy-going voice. “The kind of thing any second-year student would be able to perform. And the kind of thing a criminal could get a lot of use out of, once he’d perfected it.”
There’s one split-instant of stillness, and then several things happen at once. The man in Mustang’s grip twists loose and lashes out. Havoc’s lighter goes flying, clicking shut and leaving them in darkness. There’s a squealing of boots on ice as the man turns to run. Mustang snaps his fingers.
Nothing happens.
“Goddamn snow,” he curses again.
Behind him, Farman pulls a matchbook out of his pocket, tears off a match and strikes it.
Five yards away flame blossoms in mid air, a particularly vibrant flower. There’s a brief smell of smoke, and then a damp thud. The match goes out. For a minute, the four of them stand still in the darkness. And then,
“I told you,” says Mustang peevishly. “There is no such thing as ghosts.”
Off to the side, Havoc steps off to search through the snow for his lighter. “You’ve gotta say though, sir, in a lot of ways it’d have been a simpler explanation.”
Mustang snorts, and pulls off his wet glove. “Next time, you’re doing this on your own.”
Behind him, Farman looks despairingly at Breda. "Next time?"
