Salvation (REWRITE)

CHAPTER ONE

Sort of an AU. Ed isn't in the military, since he's a little kid.

Thank you Kaori022 for giving me the motivation to write this again, Ovskyaya for being a good anime-watching, long-distance buddy, and ApatheticFallacy because he reads all my fanfiction + he leaves good comments even though he has no clue what's going on.

He often spent his days gazing at the green-colored rubber hose attached to the farthest concrete wall; given the position of the dusty ceiling lamp, there wasn't much else to see- nothing to admire beyond the way the water slid from the metal end, before collecting on a dirty, forgotten puddle on the floor. Bathed in the fragmented shadows of iron bars, Edward was alone, now; drenched in the dwindling remains of yellow light that fell on him in streaks, rather than in waves.

Beneath him sat a floor made of beige concrete, which was decorated with maroon-colored splotches that were smeared across the length of the craters that had been created by the feminine hand that held him without even being physically present. He could smell her, when she was gone; and he could hear her, though her voice had been absent for an unknown amount of time.

Dressed in a ragged pair of shredded shorts and nothing more, his ribs were stark and scarily visible against the faded pink smears that covered the front of his chest. Anyone who saw him would think he was a corpse; but that faint flickering of life that haunted his sunflower-colored irises gave way to much more than death- it fueled the breath that whistled past his cracked, scarred lips in an agonized, pleading pattern; it allowed him to twitch his calloused fingertips enough to smudge the dust back and forth, where his hands had fallen.

It allowed him to remember her; to remember Paula as she had been, during the moments when he had screamed his throat raw, pleading for her to leave him alone- to kill him, if that was her plan, because he'd rather die than continue to gaze into her lifeless, light-forgotten irises.

Now, after she had gone and left him behind, he was getting his wish; but it wasn't how he had been picturing his death. This was agonizing and sorrowfully slow, while his body wasted away on the concrete floor of the cell she had selected for him. Other people had been with him, at one point, but she had taken them with her, claiming, "the world has already forgotten your name, Edward; and so will all of us," before vanishing through a door far-beyond his sight.

Edward lacked the strength to move; there was no way to make that happen with deteriorating muscles and a caving, snarling stomach. Even his eyes didn't stray from that one particular spot, since he was too tired, and too weak, really, to do so much as shift his gaze towards where the lock to a wooden door was being fiddled with by someone on the other side. His ears barely even picked up sound; he was so used to hearing nothing that it was like his mind had just forgotten how to register that there were voices drifting toward him.

Beyond that wooden door was a group of people dressed in deep-blue military uniforms, and with every ragged breath that Edward struggled to take, it seemed like they got ever-closer to their goal of picking the lock open. Forcing their way in didn't seem smart; they couldn't be certain who was waiting on the other side- Roy Mustang already knew plenty about the cruelty of the woman they were going to encounter. "Be on your guard," he warned quietly, his eyes narrowed in concentration as he loomed over the shoulder of one of his companions.

They had gotten a tip about this place, which was nothing more than the basement of an old, abandoned house that had been forgotten in the middle of nowhere, literally, because it sat in an old, dreary forest clearing with no path to take them to their destination. After a trek through dead, leafless, snow-covered trees and many hours of battling the blizzard that was brewing in the closing distance, they were more than ready to find their suspect and get the day over with.