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When they found him facedown on the side of the trail, he and the road scarcely visible in the spring maelstrom, May dropped to the mud, ground the heels of her palms into her eyes, and pretended to weep. “Al,” she murmured. But she didn’t move so much as a centimetre towards the pale corpse; surviving this long had taught her well. Crouching by her side, Lan Fan pressed a quick kiss to her left temple.
“I’ll check.”
She and Ling closed the distance in three long strides. He lay in a still pool with his once glistening hair damped and matted around his neck. Under the orange umbrella, his skin glowed with a dark tan, unlike the bloated reddish of the damned. “He might be alive,” Ling offered. He wiped the raindrops from his forehead, strained the slickness of his bangs between his fingers. “C’mon. We’ve only got one umbrella, and May’s out there shivering.”
Lan Fan nodded. With her automail hand, her flesh fingers supporting her wrist in case the weight of the body proved too heavy for her steadily slipping automail alone, she grabbed his shoulder. Jerked him up, roughly. Observed his head roll limply on his neck, his tongue loll out of his cracked lips. Water trickled from the corners of his mouth. Faintly she could feel something like breathing on the back of her right hand. Or perhaps she sensed the pattering of raindrops from his hair.
Either way she keyed into the chi. She read the Pulse in silver ribbons of light, extended from soul to soul in pulsating rhythms of emotion and intent. Yet since the Apocalypse, her technique of reading the chi—born of the southern mountains, unlike the styles of those raised in the northern ways—had fallen into disuse and ill luck. Most of her ribbons had torn; the vast majority of Ling’s, save for those to her and to May and, barely readable, a handful of others, had tied off at the edges of his soul, and the same with May.
At this near distance Lan Fan could distinguish the chi of the damned—which carried the slightest undertone of decay, as if the ribbon connecting its soul to itself were withering away piece by piece—and the chi of the living. She read his Pulse; the strand that connected him and May, and him and Xiao Mei, startled her in its intensity. Squinting against the glow, she peered deeper. Disentangled the brightest ribbons. Wrapped her fingers around the thread of his soul and sensed its pertinent shine.
“He’s alive.” She listened to the words over again in her head while Ling, nearly losing his grip on the umbrella, grabbed his body and hauled him upwards. “You’re alive.”
“Alphonse.” Ling’s voice shattered her thoughts. Shifting the umbrella to her palm, the former emperor gathered the golden boy’s form in his arms and smashed his palm into Alphonse’s back. The Amestrisian gurgled in his throat. “Al.” Then he was kissing the boy. Pumping his chest, inhaling, kissing him again to push breath into his lungs and suck water free from his throat. Lan Fan watched Ling struggle in reviving him.
Raising her head, raindrops pouring down the curved awning of the umbrella, she called May. The woman who had lost her title and her Clan but kept her person and her loved ones lunged. The royal half-siblings knelt together in the mud that squelched between their legs and sullied the fabric of their trousers, attending to him while Lan Fan held the umbrella, the aegis against the rain.
Thunder crackled overhead. The wetness sank into the bottom of Lan Fan’s boots. At least her automail, made of carbon nanofibre instead of the traditional steel, would scarcely rust, but even so her port ached. Terrifying her on more levels than one: the thought of the automail arm tearing from her nerves, of the infection spreading to the rest of her body, of the damned locating them here in the drenching storm that kept her field of vision locked to several metres on every side and not a step beyond.
Ling exhaled; Alphonse’s chi stirred, barely, the oscillations of his ribbons to May and her panda increasing, and now she could sense ribbons to Ling. To herself, which surprised her over again. Herself. “Thank God.”
“We could get him somewhere warm,” May announced. “We should. Get him out of his clothes.” Carrying him in her arms, she unfolded herself to her full height. Ling reached over to brush the caked silt from her knees. “Come on.”
They walked onwards. When May, body weakened from the months of grueling rations, stumbled forward and Xiao Mei squealed as her master passed out, Ling took Alphonse into his arms and Lan Fan took May into hers. They walked on. Hours. Every once in a while Lan Fan would lean down to kiss May’s forehead, less to comfort the princess and more to comfort herself. Her limbs burned; her muscles ached; her spine threatened to snap entirely.
And still the rain hadn’t let up. And still no shelter existed on the barren road, though occasionally they would pass bloated pallid things by their feet, wagons and caravans sunken into the dirt, decaying hints of civilisation that had passed. Twice Ling defended their passed-out loved ones with his sword between his teeth as she decapitated and de-limbed the damned with her kunai. Retrieved them and washed them in the rain prior to tucking them back into the secret compartments in her automail.
They walked on. And on. And on and on and on.
A splash behind her and she found that Ling, too, had fainted with that illness of his, the same sickness that the previous emperor had had, that half of the deceased imperial family had suffered from before the world had ended. She stood there for a moment. The rain. The darkness. The scent of death around her, overpowering, and she wondered if this was how they would die. After the chance meeting of a lifetime. After all of this time.
No.
From May’s collar she removed Xiao Mei, who cowered in the warmth between Lan Fan’s throat and lower jaw. With the panda’s heartbeat against her neck, she removed her jacket. Gave herself thirty seconds to shiver, keeping time on the pulse at her wrist. Then she discarded their bags of supplies. She tied May, and Ling, and Alphonse into the wide expanse of the jacket. Looping the sleeves around her waist, she stooped slightly, angled the umbrella, and toiled onwards, dragging them as a dog would.
They’d always called her the Emperor’s dog. For her loved ones, she would be.
At length she spotted something foreboding by a bend in the path. Racing forward she noted the outline of a wagon, adequately large to house a family of six or seven, and she hid her unconscious friends and lovers in the shadows of the wagon’s underbelly, safe from the rain, as she scoured the innards. The damned had left, or died; she noted one body, fallen apart entirely. No, not fallen apart. Fresh, by the lack of total decay in its chi, but smashed apart by a bloodied club she found left on the floorboards. The thing had attacked the owners of the wagon—had possibly sprung of the owners of the wagon—and the wagons had killed it, then left.
She could admire their tenacity.
In any case she cleared the wagon of the bodies, the dried blood, the blackened bits of eyes and fingers and other discarded bits, as best she could. Checked and rechecked the remainder of the wagon thrice over. Returned outside to drag the three inside and examine them one by one for marks of cuts, bites, discolourations. Anything that could signify an infection. A damnation.
Nothing.
Stroking Xiao Mei as lightly and carefully as she could, Lan Fan stripped the trio of their wet clothing, removed her shirts—due to her many layers her skin and innermost tops were dry—to clothe them whilst she carefully stoked a fire in the safety of the brazier. Once she’d taken care of that she rechecked the wagon, boarding up windows and doors, and returned to find May stirring.
“Lan Fan,” she murmured. Arms lifted, palms opened. Lan Fan returned the embrace. “I don’t know what you did, but thank you.”
They kissed, as they always did, with the whisper in the backs of their minds that this may well be their last, fueling a desperation to every I love you and a weight to every touch. “Check Alphonse.”
“Al,” whispered May with a wonder awe to her timbre.
Lan Fan found it in her to smile; she returned Xiao Mei, who chirped cheerfully, and started rummaging for dinner. “And Ling.”
“Of course.” From the corner of her eye, her hands in the one remaining pack of food and emergency supplies, Lan Fan watched her tend to Alphonse first, briefly, before moving on to Ling, briefly, again. Ling awoke first; both turned to Lan Fan immediately. “Are you all right?” they asked in near enough unison that she nearly laughed.
“I’m fine.”
May grinned at her as Ling half-skipped and half-bounded across the cramped room to grab her wrists, press her palms to his cheeks. “You doin’ okay there, Lan Fan?”
“I just said so. I’m fine.”
Ling cocked his head to one side, not unlike a bird. He gazed at her from behind a curtain of long, dark lashes shadowing the dark grey of his eyes, the deep darkness of the coming storm. “Your hair’s getting pretty long. Might wanna cut it soon.”
“Ssh!” May glanced up from Alphonse’s side. “Her hair is gorgeous short.”
He cocked an eyebrow in her direction. “Well, it might look good long.”
“What, so one of the damned can grab it and drag her to her death?” she put in sharply. Lan Fan sighed. Raised her hands, if not defensively, then out of a need for quiet, for peace.
“I think I’ll be allowed to decide that myself.” Ling and May bowed their heads almost at the same time and the same angle. Half-siblings at the very least. “Is Alphonse doing all right?”
May’s voice dropped half an octave and Lan Fan felt the shiver of fear through her belly. “He’s alive, but not awake. Not yet.”
“He’s alive, though,” Ling echoed cheerfully, “and he doesn’t have an infection, so he should be fine!”
May bobbed her head. “Mm. I’ve got find out how he ended up so far out. I wonder if he knew about it, somehow.” Her eyes widened. “What if he knows where Winry and Ed are, too?”
Ling’s grin could not contain itself to his mouth alone, and he kissed Lan Fan quickly on either cheek, blinked at her, noticed her nod, and pressed his lips to hers for a sweet instant prior to slipping back to sit by Alphonse’s other side. “I hope he hopes up soon.” He smiled sheepishly. “Ah, I mean, I hope he wakes up soon. Guess I’m still tired.”
“C’mon. I’m sure he’ll be up by morning.” May hmmed. “Maybe I could try to read his chi, use the Pulse to heal him?”
“You could!” Ling clapped, pushed the conversation onwards. They traded ideas back and forth between massaging Alphonse’s body to try to stir some life into his form.
Half-listening, seizing upon dried fruits and strips of meat, Lan Fan leaned back to rest her weight on the backs of her legs. “Unless there’s a new channel of infection,” she said, quietly, inaudibly. For now her lovers rejoiced over the first gain to their meagre group rather than another loss. Perhaps, just perhaps, they would survive after all.