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BADILLAC
Edward Elric was stubborn. An unmovable object. An unrelenting force.
Edward Elric was human. Weak and unimportant. Pathetic and dirty.
Edward Elric was a pawn. The smallest on the chess board, both in size and value. Its only purpose is to serve something else.
Edward Elric was tired.
i pick you up and we ride ('till the end of the earth)
He was able to keep it off his mind, somehow.
It was somewhat easy. All he had to do was focus on something else.
His brother's recovery. Their rapidly changing government. The horrible smell of the hospital. The dead bodies that could've been his brother. Or Mustang. Or Teacher. Or Winry-
It wasn't easy, actually. But he managed.
He wasn't whole, but it was close enough.
His brother contained his entire body, even if it was drastically underweight. Mustang contained two seeing eyes. Teacher was no longer coughing up blood every few minutes. Ed didn't have to worry above the ticking clock for any of them.
Only his own.
The nightmares take their toll on his body, even as the battle wounds fade into battle scars. At first, his newly human arm is skinny. His newly human arm is frail, and his new human arm has a hole in it. Eventually, the hole in his newly human arm is stitched up, and later, he's given the go-ahead to start training with it.
But even as his arm grows to fit his body, he feels as if he grows weaker.
The bags under his eyes become permanent. Winry asks him if he's getting enough sleep even more than usual. Winry had always been fussy, even as a child. It was simply in her nature. But when she sees him, her eyes go soft and concerned, and her voice sounds sad. She begs him to tell her what's wrong, covers him in blankets and complains about how he sleeps with his stomach uncovered.
Ed gives her fake smiles, but she sees through him.
He sometimes wonders if it was really worth it.
But then he glances at Teacher and Al, taking a leisurely walk around the garden outside the hospital. He watches and Teacher taps Al on the shoulder, reminding him that he has a face he can control. He watches as Al grins brightly, talking miles about scents and textures and tastes. He watched as Winry tracks them down holding a freshly baked apple pie.
Ed doesn't second guess his decision again after that.
He forces himself to feel relaxed, and joins them all outside for a picnic.
He gets up and grabs a spare fork instead of transmuting one himself, like that'll somehow make his debt against Truth lighter.
But Edward Elric was stupid to think he could ever really get away from Truth.
Even lying wouldn't keep it at bay for too long.
we can give it a try (but it will never work)
"You're silly, Little Alchemist."
"So, so, silly."
oh, no, i lied (oh, no, you cried)
The deal had been relatively simple.
Instead of giving up his own alchemy in exchange for Al's body, the deal would be spread wider.
Al's body, Roy's eyes, Teacher's life, all in exchange for something that seemed oh so simple.
Ed's loyalty.
It could've meant anything.
Do an occasional favor to Truth. Track down anyone who goes against its laws. Plant a garden in its favor. Restore Xerxes. Write a book dedicated to it. Spread alchemy throughout every country and culture in the world.
Or maybe, it could mean nothing at all.
You'd live in a constant state of fear and anxiety, simply waiting for something that would never come. Be on guard, and rewrite goodbye letters every month just in case it grabs you away in the middle of the night. Keep one eye on the road and one eye over your shoulder because you never know when it'll just reach out-
And take you.
oh, you lied (oh, no, i tried)
Truth visits him for the first time about three months after Promised Day.
He's was dreaming, at the time, though now, he can't remember of what. A dark thought, mostly likely. It wasn't a nightmare, because nightmares are just unpleasant dreams. "A dark thought," Ed says, because the things that flash in his mind while he dreams could most certainly become real.
They're more like worst case scenarios, really.
Ed wakes up in a room of white, not for the first time.
It is, however, the first time in a while that he hadn't been making it up.
"Hello, Little Alchemist," Truth greets with the same wicked grin on its face. It's wearing Ed's leg, and the Gate behind it keeps shaking slightly. Like something is trying to escape from behind it.
Ed doesn't know where to look.
He decides on the place where Truth's eyes would be, if it had any. Its smile doesn't falter, even as Ed stays silent. If anything, it seems to get wider. Ed does his best to ignore it.
"It's time for your first mission," Truth announces.
Ed doesn't believe in God, or anything that might resemble it. Ed believes in science, and he believes in facts, and he believes in things that can be proven, time and time again. Ed doesn't believe in a higher power.
Ed doesn't believe in Truth, but it exists all the same, hiding behind facts and reason and science with a sinister grin on its face.
(Ed wonders if he's going insane, with these little visits to Truth. Ed wonders if they're all insane, him and Al and teacher and Roy, if they're stuck in a mass hallucination. Then he remembers that a carbon copy of his dad that called himself 'Father' tried to eat the eclipse.
And when he doubts that, he reminds himself that at least in he's hallucinating, it's with every other person in the Amestrian Military.)
badillac!
The first mission is the worst one, in his opinion.
He had no experience with it, and no knowledge of where he is.
"Kill the Outliers," Truth had told him.
It had taken him a week alone to find out what that had meant.
He wanders the forest he was dropped in during that time. He passes by a shack, placed oddly in the middle of the woods. He approaches it, hands prepared to clap and knife in the sleeve of his shirt.
Inside the shack he finds a body torn to pieces, broken apart and died red from the blood spilling out of it.
There is chalk on the floor.
(Truth's order means to kill those that are breaking the rules.)
He had found the person responsible a few hours later. He had trailed them for almost two days before he could actually follow through with the command.
He makes the ground under them dig into itself, leaving the Outlier in a cage of rock and dirt. Then he makes the walls slam together, and he keeps Nina Tucker's smiling face in mind as he hears the bones crack.
When he hasn't appeared back in Amestris by the next morning, he remembers the Truth had said 'Outliers'.
He find the next one before the victim is killed, and he stabs them with the knife they had almost used.
The victim had thanked him desperately, getting on their knees and saying it must have been an act of God that he was there in time.
Ed chuckles humorlessly at the irony of it all.
He washes the blood off his boots in a river and thinks of his brother's smiling face.
The next morning, after his job is done, he wakes up in the same room he had gone to sleep in before Truth had summoned him. He doesn't have the little nick the second Outlier had given him in their struggle.
(His eye-bags are deeper than they were before, and he can't seem to look up from the ground.)
ba-dill-ac
On his second job, he is made to kill an animal.
He feels fearful for his third job, because he knows that Truth has no mercy.
Truth is tactful and thoughtful in everything that is presented to it. That includes Ed, himself.
His third mission will mostly likely be much worst than the first two.
(On his third mission, he is forced to kill someone the same age as himself.
A girl with blue eyes and blonde hair and a horrid smile on her face.
When he wakes up, he can't meet Winry's eyes.
He can't meet Al's, either.)
well i hate myself (and i hate the earth)
He'll never escape, not really. He'll grip onto his illusion of freedom, and he'll tug and tug on it until Truth eventually claims it again. He'll be swept away from his family, and be planted somewhere else.
And he'll go along with it, because there's nothing else he can do.
we could give it a try (but it will never work)
The missions get harder in regards to getting the motivation. It's overall easier to find the Outliers, even with the fact that the way new Worlds are structured is confusing. He usually doesn't know the language, and has to rely solely on the device he had taken from an Outlier in the previous World, along with his own alchemy.
It's a compass, and it tracks down the energy levels associated with alchemy.
It makes his job a little easier faster.
However, it's his eleventh mission that makes him falter.
A child. He has to kill a child.
He does it.
Ed wonders if there was a Hunter before him. He wonders if he would've been killed as a child if there had been one when he had first attempted Human Transmutation.
Ed wonders if this was what Truth had planned since the first day he make a decent toy at five years old. If Truth had seen him carving the wooden floorboards into a little horse and had chosen him to carry the burden of being a Hitman for Sinners.
Even the young ones.
(Ed ignores the fact that he's taken to only calling them Outliers, and not humans.
He also ignores how he had taken to calling it his job only three missions in.)
oh, no, i lied (oh, no, you cried)
Ed thinks he had stopped living when he was seventeen years old. When he had become desensitized to all the people Outliers he had killed, how he had done it without hesitation.
His family grows worried for him, but he brushes them off with fake smiles and sarcastic remarks.
He continues writing letters.
oh, you lied (oh, no, i died)
Edward Elric was twenty years old when he died.
He was killed in another World, ambushed by thirty-some alchemy users that ended up sacrificing him to Truth.
The loop stops.
Alphonse Elric and Winry Rockbell wake up with a feeling of dread deep in their guts, and immediately race to Ed's room.
They don't find him.
What they do find, however, is several dozen notes, spanning from when Ed was sixteen years old, about a month after Promised Day, to just the week before.
It leaves them both sick to their stomachs.
badillac!
badillac!
badillac!
ba-dill-ac