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Somehow, sometimes, you have a cosmic knowledge of when things are coming to an end. Like that moment before you watch a child fall off the swings, you can tell, from something in your stomach, that it’s the last moment of peace you have prior to the screaming, the blood, the tantrum, the fear of the swings. It’s the last time for a while that the child truly feels safe, and you can tell that this moment is coming from the uprising of blood in your veins, and from the hair raising on the back of your arms. You know it’s the last.
This is how she felt, in those last moments with Edward. Something changed, after pressing their backs together, fighting off those eyeless humanoid fleshy zombies. She couldn’t shake the feeling from her body, the adrenaline in her fingers made her twitchy, and every noise surrounding them made her jumpy. Though human eyes had pushed through evolution to show themselves as predators, she felt like she was being hunted.
So in those last moments, before she now stood where she did, glaring angrily into darkness, she had kissed him. It wasn’t as perfect as they showed in the cinemas. Their teeth clashed, their noses were shoved tip to tip uncomfortably so, her cheeks burned, and it tasted salty from what she could guess was either their sweat or her tears. She didn’t grab his face, and he didn’t grab hers. Her hands were tightly wrapped in his red coat, and her eye was screwed shut.
And she meant what she said right after she kissed him. She locked eyes with him, tugged his lapels harder towards herself to show she meant business, and said, “You need to forget me.”
She’d done well, because Ed was shocked from what she could tell. So shocked, that all he did was stare at her slack-jawed while she created a wall between them, and before he could take it down with his own alchemy, had dashed into a separate tunnel that again, she used her alchemy to create. She could hear him screaming her name, in that worried tone, it was a godsend that Mustang was with him, and lied through his teeth that he was sure Rhys would be fine, and that they had bigger things to worry about right then. (That part, Rhys could acquiesce, was very true.)Something in her had dragged her through the maze of tunnels under the Central building. It was like a whisper, bouncing around the brick walls and through her ears, tempting her to where she stood now. She couldn’t say what it was then, but she knew now, as she continued to keep her eye steady on the form in the darkness in front of her. Cold light reflecting off his wet, toothy grin, and the glasses that he pushed up on his nose. Hatred, fear, vengefulness broiling in her veins; a disgusting potion of it all, had pushed her to this spot in the tunneling.
“Y’know kiddo,” his familiar tone made bile rise up in her throat, and anger churn in her stomach, “Those homunculi really are poor imitations, aren’t they?” A chortle, of all things, bounced off the walls wickedly. Rhys’ nostrils flared in contempt. For the fact that he was right. The fact that he was here in front of her, brazenly. The fact that he was breathing the same stale, putrid air that she was breathing. Her lone eye narrowed as he stepped into a slightly brighter light. “They really thought that you wouldn’t come here. That Envy, he was so sure that he knew exactly how you would play out. And I told him, no. Not my daughter.”
Rhys shifted to the right, keeping her eye trained on him as much as possible while also searching her peripheral. There was grey water beneath their feet, cobwebs above them. She could maybe make a weapon, but she would prefer to hurt him without the use of his experimental ‘gift’. She clicked her tongue, choosing to speak for the first time.“You called me that to his face, huh?”
“Well, with all the innocents, the pain… the death too… all of this… you’ve earned the title at this point.” Another chuckle rose through him, and it choked her like nerve gas. Her eye felt the burn too, the rage that wanted so desperately to breathe, to take form in that cellar room. Any escape, any breath, any form of relief was better for the rage than to continue to stay in the young woman’s clenched teeth, flared nostrils, and curled fists.
“You know the funniest part? He really thought that out of every creature in their faux family, that you deserved his death the most. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he was quite fond of you-” The scraping of metal on stone followed him as he followed her in the circular path she was making, continuing her search for a tool. “But I know you better I think.”
It was too fast, at least, it seemed that way with her still getting used to only having one field of vision. He had crossed the room, raising his arms to slam down a heavy metal pipe. It caught her off guard, and he clipped her foot as she slammed herself into a brick pillar to get away.
“I had suggested, really requested, that your true sin be the one to face you. He’d have gotten rid of you easily enough, but then, as the Furër King, he doesn’t really have time to handle mundaneness like us. So I said I’d handle you, I brought you into this world after all.”
Again, he swung the metal pipe with a voracity unmatched. She turned her face, reeling as the sound of thick hollowed metal slammed onto solid rock right into her ear drum. A gasp of pain escaped her, but she saw her chance here. She faced him, his cruel green eyes that matched hers in every way, and slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose.
“Fuck you.”
The force from the heaviness of her head sent a shock through Daniel, and he dropped the pipe in favor of grabbing his face and now destroyed glasses.
“Now it’s fair. You can’t see, and I can see only 50% more than you can. Remember when we used to play this game? Usually it was switched though huh?” She picked up the leaden pipe from where he’d dropped it, feeling the weight of the choices in her palm. Deciding there wasn’t really any choice except the one she’d been racing after for the last 3 years. “C’mon.” She tapped the pipe against the ground impatiently, narrowing her eye at him. “Arms up. Show me how you get away from someone who wants to kill you.”
A rage-filled exhale left her as she swung the pipe into his defending right arm, hearing a crack that made her chest bloom with satisfaction. Breaking the bones in his body the same way he’d done to hers over the years of training seemed like sufficient torture. But she also wasn’t entirely sure she could stop there. She wanted to beat each limb until it puffed with broken veins and blood pressure. Until the shatters of bones cut into his arteries and ruptured his nervous system. She wanted to watch him scream for air with broken ribs that wouldn’t cooperate, and beg her for life. She wanted to slam the pipe through his throat, and let him choke on it.
The only reason she didn’t, right then and there, was because somewhere, in the desperate parts of the human heart that can only take so much pain, so much anger, repeated Ed’s words to her from the past. Begged her to not waste her energy on taking another human life to add to her growing roster, to give herself a rest from the recurring trauma of watching the life leave someone’s eyes. The unexplainable part of souls that Alchemists’ respected more than anything, she had started taking freely since the death of her mother.
And that thought, the memory of her mother’s twisted, tortured, dismembered body lying in front of her, of Winry crying into Rhys’ face trying to wake her up, of Ed throwing up from the smell alone; it snapped her back to where she wanted to be.
Though the movements between them were slowed now, she felt the fracture in her foot from where she’d been clipped earlier, and Daniel had gotten a voracious lust for life or for taking her down with him, she didn’t really care either way, but he’d begun using alchemy. Structures of concrete and brick, rusting rebar jutting out of them like spikes, flew at her faster than she could think. He had one unbroken arm, and two working legs. Her foot screamed with pain, but she had her arms, an eye, and the ability to transmute without a circle now. That was an advantage that she was still getting used to.
Slamming her hands together, she threw up a wall between the incoming rebar and her face, and sent the affection right back towards him.
They went back and forth like this, blowing through walls with reckless abandon, slamming broken and bleeding skin into concrete walls where there used to be a head or a torso. Creating weapons out of rebar and pipes, and losing them right before they were used to gut the other, or recreate an artistic gesture of blood on the walls. Rhys’ rage-filled screams echoed through the tunnels as she shoved her full force into her extending limbs, and Daniel’s only response was grunts of annoyance and the regular release of a gentle, sadistic, chuckle. Their clothes wore tears, burned holes, and blood where there didn’t used to be.
Rhys felt bad for stealing Ed’s only piece of white clothing for a moment but discarded it when air left her as a solid kick to the solar plexus slammed her into the next wall, and finally made her throw up whatever she could digest from the previous night.
Hell-fire burned through her skin so hot that she didn’t even register the room she was in. Filled with Homunculi, the Elric brothers, Mustang, and Mei. None of it mattered, not as Daniel crossed the growing pile of broken concrete and dusted off his coat with his good hand. She reached up, wiping the chunks off her lips and gasping slightly for air.
“All this time, all those people. And you’re still as weak as you were when we parted ways in Drachma. How….” A moment of stillness, of shock, waved through the room as Daniel’s bored expression wiped over his daughter’s broken and tired body, “Disappointing.”
Rhys didn’t hear Ed’s wailing of her name, she didn’t hear Pride chastising Daniel for the destruction of his Father’s sanctuary, she barely even heard the blood pounding in her ears. The word disappointing ripped through her freshly, as if after all this time, all this hatred, it was truly the last push that she needed to empty her heart. Disappointing. As if he knew she didn’t want to kill the hired hands that tortured her mother in front of her. As if he could smell her sadness and regret like a rotten body in the heat of day. As if he’d been watching every step she’d taken the last five years without him, and knew exactly what she would do, and let her play into every moment of tragedy that came after the day he shipped her off to Central, or even later back, to the night her brother was killed.Despite herself, hot tears slipped down her cheeks. Her nose scrunched up, her fists bawled even tighter, snot now ran into her lips. Lips that had just an hour ago kissed someone for the first time, and were now stained in rubble dust and blood. Against her will, her body curled, knees slamming onto the ground with solid and thick thuds, and her eye stared into the mixture of mud and blood beneath her, at her hands that were caked and thick with new wounds, likely infection, the hands that her mother would have washed with kindness, and dotted with iodine after a full chastising about the dangers of infection. She didn’t need the acid-burned alchemical circles that were scarred into her palms anymore, she didn’t want the memories that came with them either. She just - in her core - all she wanted was her mom in that moment.
In this second of clarity, the desperate warning of her name grabbed her attention behind her. She glanced back, seeing Edward for the first time since she’d been in that room, his shining arm reaching out to grab her, her name screaming out of his mouth, and his eyes shining with tears of fear. She knew, that fear was for her. A pang of regret hit her heart again, she didn’t want Ed to have to worry about her for this part. She had specifically taken this route, the kiss, the vanishing act, to take herself out of the equation. Out of Ed’s equation. Why was he wasting time again, just for her, the Disappointment? In those seconds, she gave him the most bittersweet smile she could muster, trying to apologize. Trying to communicate that through a look alone. Trying to force that apology through Ed’s clear rejection of such a thing.
Then she felt it, the slam of a steady hand against her throat, and her attention turned back to the man in front of her. He took an informal technique, with both arms, including the injured one, gripping her throat and pressing tight. Rhys’ hands scratched at his, trying to find any form of solace, the putrid air suddenly seeming so sweet to her as oxygen was stolen. Around her singular field of vision, she watched her father above her. His gaze indifferent to his child’s suffering, but it wasn’t new. Her nails dug into his skin, breaking the unbroken pieces and trying to pry his hands off of her desperately. Her legs kicked against the rubble pile, burying her lower half deeper and pushing the weight of her head to be more dependent on his grip.
She continued to lock eyes with him, and in a moment, she felt the elation that comes when your body is losing too much oxygen.
“Do it.” She choked, “Do it.” She felt it under her skin, the will leaving her. The soul, whatever she was faced with in the space between here and there where that toothy God resided, was causing her fingers to go numb, and the idea of not being here, in pain, anymore, suddenly felt delightful. It was here that a small pink fury slammed into the man above her knocking Daniel and herself to the side, it was here that Rhys felt the pain of being human, both physical and emotional, slam back into her chest with a full gust.The pain surged through her throat, as she turned over to cough and take thankful gulps of air into where there was none. She rolled over, supporting herself with one arm while the other gently touched the skin of her throat and she winced, the skin tender, and something popping internally when she tried to speak, and when coughs of blood scabbed up through her. Her head throbbed with each inhalation, blood trickled from her nose and down from the back of her head.
“RHYS! GET UP! GET UP RHYS! MEI! HELP HER FOR FUCKS SAKE!”
The words pounded against her eardrums, she glanced up to see Edward Elric, still keeping his eyes trained on her despite dealing with the short homunculus in front of him. Fuck, why did he have to care so much, and show off so much. Her brows crunched as another wave of pain hit her, Mei rushing to her side to support her weight as much as her small form could.
Through gritted teeth, Rhys pushed off Mei to lean against the nearest wall, and took a deep breath through her nose, wincing again from the pain. “I’m fine. Go. Go help them.” Her words were understood, despite their lack of volume or clarity. The young girl gave her a concerned raise of her eyebrows, but nodded, knowing that Rhys was not only likely right in her prioritization, but sensing the bond between her aggressor and her, that this was not something Rhys desired help with, or to get someone else involved.
She was thankful when Mei nodded, a small noise of affirmative tone leaving her nose as she jumped back into the fray between the boys, their father, and the Homunculi. Though she did sense Ed’s agitation at this, she didn’t care. Watching her own father rise from the dust in anguish and pain, she suddenly saw him with more clarity than she’d had in the past. He was small, maybe only an inch or two taller than herself. And his body was large in muscle, but his joints were atrophied with age, he wasn’t the same beast that she had struggled with at age 5, or 10 or 12. He wasn’t the same person who’d tied her down and burned symbols into her skin, or who’d sold her to the Central government as an alchemical weapon.
This man, was nothing. Withered by old spirit and hatred, the only drops of joy being when someone else was in pain that he was inflicting. She felt her raw throat quickening with breath as her anger once again fueled her, rushing forward and grabbing a piece of hefty rebar, she swung with her whole might at his head.
He fell, and she chased him. Slamming the thick rusted metal into any portion of him he left open, hearing his grunts of pain, watching his eyes occasionally flash with the rage that they shared.
Rhys beat his arms until every bone was shattered beyond repair, and his head until it was caved in, his bright green eyes still glaring at her from spaces that were no longer socketed to hold the orbs of nerves and rays. She didn’t realize she was screaming until she couldn’t breathe anymore due to the pain, and that was when she passed out. Rolling onto the side, she stared into the grated ceiling and took gulps of air and saliva and blood. Her fingers curled around the bar, and her head dizzy. She closed her eye, to rest for one moment, as much as she could before she’d jump into the battle to help the boys save the world.
But when she opened her eye again, it wasn’t Ed’s golden irises that she was staring into. It was the reflective glasses of Dr. Knox, who was sweating desperation into his medical mask, and gritting through her right arm with a military bone saw.