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Nightmares	By : Khait_Khepri Category: Fullmetal Alchemist > Het - Male/Female Views: 2624 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist nor am I making money from the creation of this story. This is merely for entertainment purposes.

Chapter List
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Summary: Edward contemplates the past and is confronted by something more terrifying than his ‘nightmares’.
Note: This chapter has no real relationship development save for the parent-child relationship of Izumi and Ed. Also, I equate a sen to a single American cent.
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It was strange, Edward thought, that he had become so entranced with the one person that had essentially turned his life upside down since the moment he’d met her. He remembered how he’d been wheelchair-bound, limbless, and broken by the horrors he’d caused just a few days before. He remembered how she’d come into Granny’s house, anger in her eyes, shaking him and demanding answers. He remembered how she’d reminded him so much of Teacher with her Xingese features though Teacher was a little shorter and had a sharper face. He also remembered the shame he felt as she berated him, feeling as though Izumi Curtis had appeared from Dublith to personally ram her fist into his gut for his stupidity and failure to protect Alphonse who had stood above and behind him like a silent sentinel. A silent sentinel that was nothing more than an empty suit of armor save for that blood painted sigil keeping him tied to this plane of existence.
He hadn’t seen how she’d stared in horror at Alphonse when the large armor had said to forgive Edward and that they were sorry, but the suddenly slack fingers on his shirt had, in retrospect, shown the shock she’d felt. And that, he reflected, had been the moment she’d wanted him to join the military and help make her look good for finding such a young and extremely talented alchemist. Then again, her words, though harsh and somewhat heavy in places, had given him the kick in the pants he’d needed to get back up and get strong again. Not to mention she had spent so much time angling things so that he and Alphonse had been protected. From what he’d seen of the military since joining, there were few higher-ranked people that put the welfare of their subordinates first as they typically adhered to rules blindly and wished to advance in the ranks. Power hungry, one could call it. The truly good ones typically were lower ranked than Majors. The Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel when she’d discovered him at eleven, was power hungry as the rest, but was also interested in protecting those that supported her as well. It was probably the reason she’d not been reported by those same subordinates for treasonous mutterings, breaking laws, and general manipulations.
He’d succeeded in recovering from a surgery in a third of the time it would have normally taken. And he’d gone to her in East City in order to become the thing she’d offered and that Teacher had told him to not ever submit to becoming… a State Alchemist.
And then there were all the subsequent interactions, teases, and outright mockery they’d traded. He still remembered how he’d fought her in the Alchemist Battle Royale. How many of the men behind her had catcalled, wanting a date, and how there had even been a few women demanding for her to give back their boyfriends. He’d gotten some shout-outs, too. They had been mostly about how he had been short, general underdog support, and a few women even encouraging him to put Rowan in her place. That debacle had ended with him thoroughly toasted and her with only one little bruise from a lucky strike on his part. The fact he had been beaten by a woman had not really galled him seeing as his Teacher was a woman, but the fact it had been Rowan Mustang, rank Colonel, had pissed him off thoroughly. He came out lucky in the end, though. He hadn’t been the one to fix the field back though he could have done it almost instantly. In a way he had won the fight for Rowan and the on looking crowd had been the ones to fix the field.
Actually, now that he thought about it… that had been when he’d started dreaming about her near exclusively. Somehow the woman had, in all her cool and steady methods while he’d tried to get to her and hit her, made herself undeniably sexy and incredible to the (at the time) fourteen-year-old. It really was ironic how some things turned out. Edward seemed to have a thing for finding strong willed women.
As things currently stood…
Edward wasn’t entirely sure how he’d done it, but he’d hidden his attraction to the woman twice his age from Winry and Pinako when he’d gone to Resembool for repairs on his arm, Alphonse and Major Armstrong in tow. It probably helped his cause when he had more or less distracted the Rockbells via his broken arm and the fact they were resigned to him keeping information from them. Alphonse, like the good brother he was, had also kept his mouth shut about the entire affair. At least Alphonse was harder to read in some ways, but Alphonse had also fallen into the habit of forming his expressions through verbal and posture cues which could telegraph even louder than facial expressions his real thoughts. Without the expression a face provided, Alphonse had, ultimately, forgotten how to be canny in such things. He’d not realized yet that this was the method Ed primarily used to determine what was going through Al’s head. Or perhaps he had as he sometimes stifled his motions (despite the fact doing this only communicated he was trying to hide something) but he couldn’t lie worth a damn ultimately. Especially not to Edward, who knew him inside and out…
Edward’s nightmare visited almost every single night, delightfully incorporating the details of both times he’d had sex with her. And every time he woke up panting, wired from dreams of red-tipped hands and sweet mouths and sweat-slicked skin and hot pussy, he’d immediately find his way to his tented boxers and seek delicious release though knowing nothing would be better than her pressed to him. Well, perhaps another female, but he knew what she was like and that was enough to keep his interest. The sheer regularity of the dreams made such an occurrence commonplace and while he did occasionally go to the bathroom (if one was available) to take care of things, Alphonse would usually just ignore it if Edward whacked off in bed. It was still callous in many ways to have to deal with all the messy, smelly, and so very human things in front of Al, but he tried to keep himself contained… and quiet.
He knew he still murmured Rowan’s name despite everything he tried to stifle his mutters from his dreams. At least he could keep his mouth shut when he was awake and nigh hallucinating of sex during the daylight hours. Didn’t help out with the physical side of things, but at least he could half disguise a boner by closing his coat.
Alphonse, of course, had to ask what it felt like. He had, when he was still a regular human, gotten ‘boners’ like any other little boy did and had also figured out that touching one’s self there felt good. The sheer amount of time that he’d been locked in that armor had made him forget most of the things he had simply taken for granted so little things, like how sunlight felt and how bread tasted, were often asked about. Alphonse asking about those things was hard enough. Asking about what it felt like to have sex was a whole new level of awkward painfulness that had Edward stuttering like a fool and turning beet red. He didn’t really want to talk about it. He didn’t want to make Alphonse feel even more cut off. It was bad enough when Al asked ‘what does sunlight feel like?’ That was enough to have him guiltier than he ever thought possible. He had been proven wrong when Al asked ‘what does it feel like to touch a girl?’ The seemingly simple statement that, Edward knew, would have had him boasting and teasing Al under normal circumstances left Ed feeling hollowly guilty and painfully angry at himself for having done what he had to Alphonse. And Ed hated how he went ahead and described a bit of it, trying to sketch it out for his little brother in terms Al might be able to understand and he had taken it all happily, living through his brother for a little while as he tried to imagine what Ed told him. Fortunately, such questions were asked well away from nosey Rockbell women and an equally nosey Major Armstrong.
When he got done in Resembool, he and Al went to Central to follow up the lead he’d gotten from Marcoh. It was their first solid lead in a long time and it was far more solid than any lead they’d ever had. The frustration of finding the library burnt upon their arrival and their steps being dogged by Second Lieutenant Ross and Sergeant Brosh made for a tension that was not the ‘nice’ kind he’d gotten used to feeling almost every time he woke up. Ross was pretty good looking… and so had that Sheska chick they’d discovered to have an incredible memory and had read the very documents they’d thought irreparably lost. Neither female could compare to the incredible Rowan Mustang in his opinion. Ross gave off a strict, almost motherly vibe. Sheska was… meek and self-effacing at best. Edward knew he flourished best under pressure and Sheska would probably wilt under a strong personality, though how she wilted and seemed willing to verbally put herself down all the time (not that Ed had rights to chastise when it came to self-accusation) was a bit worrisome. The lady was nice, but not nice enough to feature into his wet dreams. And Ross seemed so unassailable. Not to mention that Brosh guy seemed to really like her and behaved like he did around Rowan.
Despite his thoughts towards ‘frivolous’ matters, he stayed focused upon working to translate the coded notes of Dr. Marcoh. Piles of paperwork surrounded him and Alphonse as they worked until the library closed each day. Ten days of excruciating work to break the damn code drove thoughts of sex out of his mind save for those in-between moments of consciousness and blessed sleep. She didn’t come to him but one or two times during that period, though he didn’t get much chance to notice. Apparently, stress had a tendency to smother the libido and he was feeling stress far beyond what he normally dealt with and had become accustomed to. And when they broke the coded notes that had frustrated them so much… part of him wished that they hadn’t. The truth was awful. The very thing that they felt could fix them… the thing they thought they could use to restore their bodies… used human lives. Human lives.
He really meant it when he demanded of the papers before him what the hell Marcoh was thinking like they would answer him. How anyone could do such sick experiments was beyond him. And the fact that the military seemed to go along with it made him even more ill. He wondered if Rowan had known…
When he and the others, Alphonse, Ross, Brosh, and Armstrong, had begun to look over the citywide map to figure out where such experiments were likely taking place after having more-or-less ruled out Laboratory Three due to the fact Ed hadn’t noticed anything going on that seemed particularly suspicious when he’d last visited (though he admitted to himself older and wiser minds might be good enough to hide evidence well enough), Ed had pointed out a likely spot for human experimentation. Laboratory Five…
That had turned out to be a right fool adventure and one he was certain that could have had disastrous consequences had he and his brother not been extraordinarily lucky. It was a bit shocking when Ross and Brosh had chewed him out for his reckless behavior and part of him wondered if Rowan would have had similar words to throw at him. His general distraction of malfunctioning automail, various injuries from Slicer and Envy as well as the ‘friendly-fire’ wounds from Armstrong he later received, and worry over Winry killing him for said automail malfunction made for a very convenient smokescreen his brother had hid behind. Ed noticed Al’s odd behavior, but unfortunately couldn’t discern what it meant. It wasn’t until he’d made a faux pas about the damn milk he hated (had he not been so overly distracted by other things, he wouldn’t have done that) that the tension within Alphonse had come to a head and when he had exploded at Ed, demanding if he was even real, the elder brother had been shaken to his core as he had remembered the one question he’d feared to ask Al. ‘Do you blame me for putting you in that body?’ It seemed that Al did blame him to some degree, but not in a way that Edward had expected. ‘What would you do?’ An image of Rowan flashed through his mind when he wondered that.
The thought of Alphonse, his entire drive for going forward and working to fix everything he’d done wrong to him and the only blood family he had left that he was willing to acknowledge, rejecting him had felt like a sledgehammer blow right in the solar plexus. It had hurt so much he needed to get air. So a few words later, he made his way from his private room all the way to the roof to look out on the city of Central. His brain had rattled with disgustingly circular and unhelpful thoughts until he’d heard that door open behind him. His brother’s footfalls were unmistakable. That was the usual for him and Al. No matter who began the fight… no matter who disagreed first… no matter… If one of them ran, the other one would chase after. A small testament that even if Alphonse blamed him, he still cared enough to follow Ed. That made Ed a bit happier. In a fit of contrariness, Ed picked a fight despite his wounds and his (rather failing) common sense saying perhaps he shouldn’t.
He’d been the one to win that bout for once in a long while. Crafty, sly, and undeniably an asshole to many people, there was one person Edward had never been able to deny ever since he was very small. And that was Alphonse. Now he had someone else he was slowly becoming incapable of denying and that was Rowan.
They’d resolved their differences and headed out towards Dublith to talk to their Teacher… with a side trip to Rush Valley for Winry. They’d left their childhood friend there after a helter-skelter trip through the town and out into the boonies where that automail engineer Dominic lived. And it really was helter-skelter. After going out into the middle of nowhere, there was the entire fiasco of him begging for lighter automail (he really wanted to get taller, dammit!), Satella going into labor, and the torrential downpour that had confined them to the house. Thankfully everything had turned out alright and he and his brother had enjoyed the fact they’d seen a new life come into this world.
Once they got to Dublith, they wound up confessing everything to their Teacher about their transgressions. Edward was truly grateful when they were taken into her arms and held close helped soothe some of the hurt and pain they’d carried without even truly being aware of it anymore. It had cemented them closer than before even as she turned them loose of their teacher-student relationship.
In the intervening days at Teacher’s house, she invariably picked up on Edward’s nighttime activities. The first moment she got, she had cornered him about whom exactly he was dreaming about considering there was that usual name lingering on his lips every time he dreamed of her. That had led to yet another awkward conversation. Thankfully Izumi allowed for him to be sequestered rather than having this aired out before everyone.
“You mean to tell me you have been dreaming about someone twice your age?” Izumi demanded, glaring at her former student as he looked everywhere but at her with his fingers knotted in his lap and looking quite nervous where he was seated on the bed. She loomed over him like an implacable storm cloud ready to let loose a torrent of lightning. Izumi Curtis somehow wound up appearing more like a force of nature rather than a ‘simple housewife’.
“Yes, ma’am,” he admitted, knowing that the immediate truth was safer than a found-out lie and subsequent beat down for the actual truth.
“Rowan Mustang, Colonel in the military and your superior officer?” The incredulity in her tone made him fidget. Her hard, truth demanding eyes made him fidget more. He felt like he was a child all over again and had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Yes, ma’am…”
“Considering the regularity of your dreams, is there something else you’d like to tell me about this woman?” Izumi pressed with a dark, suspicious edge in her voice. There wasn’t much of a choice despite how she phrased it. Rhetorical questions were always that way.
“Erhm… not really.” Might as well try to get out of the interrogation even if it would be a hopeless pursuit, especially with how feeble his answers were sounding in his own ears. “Can I go train or something?”
“No, you may not, Edward Elric,” she growled at him as she folded her arms under her ample breasts while glaring at him. “Now spill.”
He sighed, ducked his head, and began to tell her as he kept his eyes latched on his hands. “It… started with wet dreams, okay?” Totally embarrassing to admit to his teacher. Probably more mortifying than being cornered by Rowan that first time. Really, Izumi Curtis had been a sort-of mother figure to him and his brother. She wasn’t as old as Granny was and despite her rough treatment, he and his brother always felt secure about her like they had with their mother. She had looked out for them, cared for them, and tended to them as a mother would have, after all. “For a while… it was just… dreams… But it seemed more like nightmares really. I mean, I didn’t get what was going on and I did some research…” The fact he had turned to books versus actually asking an adult was so typically Edward that Izumi had to fight to keep from smirking at the hilarity of it. As it was, there was a brief glitter of amusement in her eyes before she rapidly returned to her concern… a concern that was growing with each word he spoke. “And figured out, you know… the whole puberty thing. But knowing what my brain and body was doing didn’t really… fix anything. Sometimes other girls would show up, but it always wound up being her I’d return to. Al… realized that something was wrong and asked me about it. I’d brush it off as nightmares. And because I didn’t really like her, it was easy enough to say they were nightmares. But he got worried and asked… Colonel Mustang to talk to me.” He grunted a bit, remembering that he’d not been able to look at that couch in her office the same way again. “The Colonel called me into her office and talked to me… at first… and…” His voice faltered, knowing that his Teacher would know…
“And she molested you,” Izumi said with all the bluntness of one of Winry’s wrenches to his skull. Red colored his face and he couldn’t look up to look into her eyes, afraid to face the ire he felt radiating off of her. “That bitch… You’re a minor!”
“I was as freaked out as you were!”
“Then why didn’t you report it?!”
“Because she’d not hurt me and I would have hurt a lot more people than just her if I had!”
“Edward, for such a smart guy, you’re as stupid as shit!” She seized his shoulders and shook him. He stared back at her with pain in his eyes. “Don’t you think they deserved being destroyed for sanctioning this?”
“You don’t get it, Teacher,” he pled. “I know that. I know what she did was wrong. But it didn’t feel bad at all. And Ro… Colonel Mustang… She was the one that got me going again when I was eleven and worked to protect Alphonse from discovery this entire time! She’s aggravating as hell, but she’s been… she’s been really nice. And everyone else… If they’d thought she was going to hurt me, they’d have stopped her. I know it… especially her aide, First Lieutenant Hawkeye.” He looked down, shamed. “I’m sorry.”
He was engulfed in Izumi’s arms and pulled close to her. “You’re so stupid…” she muttered, having caught his slips of the tongue. Obviously he was crushing on her if not beginning to think he was in love. “That woman shouldn’t have touched you in the first place.” She ran a hand over his soft hair as he hugged her back. “And you think you have a place in the military with people like that…”
“When… when Nina…” He had to get her to understand, if only to keep her from searching out Rowan to kill her on pure principle. “When this little girl named Nina got turned into a chimera by her father, I didn’t know what to do. I should have been able to protect her, Teacher… She… she was just this little girl that we’d played with just the day before. And when her dad did that to her… We told the authorities. Al and I did. I’d been so upset that initially Colonel Mustang had told us to go get rest… but then… she told me to go to her house so she could talk to me. She had talked to Alphonse, too, but Tucker had said things to me… targeted at me… aimed to hurt me more than Al. And she realized that.”
“You had sex again with her, didn’t you?” Izumi said without much need for the question.
“Not at first. I wound up crying all over her like an idiot.” It was safe here in Teacher’s arms. Warm and safe… He could tell her anything, even if she beat him into the ground for it. Regardless of her treatment of him, she’d protect him like a mother would. Her arms tightened about him, evidence of her anger as well as her protective instincts. “It was weird… she’d understood why I was so upset and angry. She said she’d been incapable of protecting people, too, during Ishval. I could have walked away… but I didn’t. She understood… and I needed her.”
He heard her sigh against his head and he closed his eyes, hoping that whatever she decided to do wouldn’t result in lots of pain. “I feel that you should report this. And outright leave the military as well,” admitted Izumi as she thought about the situation her stupid student was in.
“I can’t do that… not until I get Al’s body back…”
“You are a stupid boy,” growled the woman who had taught him and his brother alchemy.
“I guess so…”
Teacher didn’t bring it up again, and for that he was grateful. He knew it was because she had already said everything she would on the matter. When he realized a few days later he’d forgotten about his yearly assessment, she had delightfully taken the opportunity to call up the military and tell them he wasn’t coming in for his evaluation but somehow had gotten a ramen restaurant instead. He had managed to run to Southern Headquarters and get recertified (and wasn’t that a debacle all its own considering the Fuhrer had rather irresponsibly signed off his paperwork without any of the need for the usual evaluation?) before returning to find Alphonse had been kidnapped. It was almost laughable if it hadn’t inspired an incredible surge of rage through him at the mere thought of someone taking what mattered most in his world. Alphonse. Kidnapped. Big suit of armor empty on the inside with fighting skills that pounded Ed into the ground on a regular basis. Kidnapped. It was certainly one of those ‘the fuck?’ moments.
Then there was the whole fiasco in the Devil’s Nest with Greed, his merry band of chimeras, and the military barging in and wiping out the lot of them. After a none-too-subtle threat on his life via the very Fuhrer that had followed him back to Dublith.
Again, he had ruined his automail (thanks, Greed) and had to go to Rush Valley to get the arm fixed. It had horrified Winry to no end and had gotten him beat up with her wrench. And then he further destroyed his arm when Ling Yao and his pair of freak-job tag-alongs managed to assault him and his brother. He’d had to beat up a girl, whom he later learned was named Lan Fan, and cut his arm off to do it because she’d severed the wires required to manipulate the steel.
That had gotten him downright pummeled by Winry when she discovered what had happened. And he still needed to kill that fucking Yao for eating ten thousand and something sens worth of food!
During all the mess that occurred, his nightmare didn’t really come back to him except for once and a while. Considering all the hell he was going through, he wasn’t really surprised.
Then it was time to go back to Central to continue their research, Winry tagging along to visit the Hughes family. Edward was truthfully interested in seeing him and his family as well. Hughes had been incredibly nice to him and his brother and he liked Gracia, whom they had met on the train platform when they had headed south.
The train they were on trundled north, carrying him, his brother, Winry, and that damn Ling bastard towards the center of Amestris. He looked forward to seeing them all again, unknowing that Lieutenant Colonel Hughes had died a month ago and been elevated post-mortem to Brigadier General, that Rowan and her subordinates had been moved to Central just a little while ago, and that he was headed towards yet another helter-skelter adventure.
All he knew right now was that for the first time in a while, Rowan visited him within the confines of his mind and he was very happy that he was awake to receive her image for at least this way he could keep from murmuring her name.
Oh, and he now knew that he was shorter than Ling Yao who was also fifteen fucking years old. That was something else to make him want to beat the fuckhead leech up over. And he still hadn’t gotten his money back.
But he tried to keep himself marginally ‘calm’ by focusing on the woman he missed despite all Teacher’s anger. Yeah, he knew what they were doing was considered wrong… but then again, since when had that stopped him?
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Nightmares