Swan Dive

Title: Swan Dive
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Kimbley x Roy
Warnings: Spoilers, smut, WTF-ness, I found it disturbing...you might, too? o.O
Disclaimer: I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist or its characters.


That sharp, familiar pain tore at him again as his hips were shifted up and forward and he rested on his knees, letting his head hang loose on his shoulders like a man in worship. Spindly fingers gripped into his hips, hot and persuasive and he was sure that they would leave trails of soot in their tracks, charred snake slither marks on his flesh.

Tonight should have been the night that he turned the other down. Tonight should have been the night that he paid his penance with one of the Ishbalan women eager to take his money and his hoarse grunts for an evening. Tonight, instead, was just another night in the bed of a eel with algae caked around its length

The lantern had been put out before they had fumbled to the bed; that was Roy’s only stipulation. This atonement was his own, these muffled masculine sounds were his own. Still, with darkness folded around their bodies, those glinting white teeth beneath him would catch the light, shine dangerously and Roy would have to close his eyes and grit his teeth.

“Keep moving, Sparky,” the thing hissed.

Roy winced and closed his eyes. He could feel the cot creak beneath them as he rose up higher on his knees and dropped down hard onto the other’s cock. His toes dug into the scratchy standard issue blanket and he fought back the urge to gag on a scream. With each lift and drop, he could see a separate pair of terrified eyes in his mind. Each rising of his hips, another rosary bead. Each time his fingers grappled at sweaty skin and long, greasy brown hair that stuck to bare shoulders like seaweed, another gasp of prayer escaped his lips.

Roy’s eyes snapped open when blunt nails pushed hard into his flesh and his partner stopped thrusting up.

“We’ll have to slow down. Don’t want you to sweat and ruin my work,” it hissed and Roy flinched as a rough fingertip traced a circle on his chest.

Roy dropped his head and stared at the ink on his flesh. A tidy array, drawn unerringly, even in the haste of undressing, spanned the width of his torso. He didn’t recognize its symbols, at least not in conjunction with each other. He raised a finger and dragged it along the edge of a thick line of ink and felt the greasiness. It slowed the path of his finger and clung to him, dragging him back into its black abyss and he was reminded of the times that his hands would inadvertently dive into Kimbley’s hair when the pain or the damned pleasure became too much.

Roy didn’t know what the array was for and he didn’t care. All that he cared about was being able to scream until his lungs ached and his throat was tired and somebody heard him, if just to prove this was real. Just to prove that he was real. Sometimes, though, he didn’t want anyone to hear at all and then maybe he could convince himself that this was the result of a drinking binge with Maes and he would wake up sore and nauseous and home, proving it wasn’t real at all

Another sharp, dry thrust jolted him and reminded him of just where he was and whose body was tensing and jerking and shifting beneath his. Kimbley gasped and dug his nails deeper into hips and spittle flew from his lips. Roy felt its coolness on his thighs and then he felt Kimbley’s fingers slide slowly up his torso.

The men met the glinting of eyes in the dark. Roy saw the light reflect off of Kimbley’s eerily white teeth as his mouth crawled into a smirk and fingertips touched briefly to the array on Roy’s chest.


He remembered the pond near the home where he had grown up. He avoided the water as a rule, but his parents had insisted on a ridiculous religious rite, an archaic relic. And so the holy man had cupped the back of Roy’s head with a righteous hand and had forced him below the surface. He had found himself underwater for what could have only been moments, but time had seemed to...stretch, somehow. He remembered hearing nothing and seeing only indistinct shapes and floating and feeling so disconnected from everything. He didn’t even mind not being able to breathe. He wondered what his parents would do if he just stayed under.

That’s what it felt like. Except there were no dark blobs of seaweed swaying in his periphery. He still couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t find that he minded too much. To the contrary, he found that he rather enjoyed the lack of sensations around him. He reached his hand out to feel the absolutely temperature-less air. It had been just a flash, but he wanted to stay here, he knew it. He wanted this floating sensation to last forever. He want to st-

“Ah!”

The cry of the other brought him back down in a whooshing sort of way. He felt heavy and hot and too cramped into this tiny cot. He looked down at Kimbley. It was hard to make out in the light of the burning town, but he could have sworn that he saw streaks of blood on the other man’s face. And that grin. That sideways, slippery grin that tasted like sulfur and charcoal was still there, like always.

Roy glanced back down at his chest. The lines of the array were thicker than the lines he’d learned to draw in the Academy. And, despite what he’d learned about the crucial nature of the thin, geometric lines and precise angles, the sweeping, curved, languid lines of the Ishbalan design captivated him and were almost enough to pull him out of this pain and the humiliation of being perched over Kimbley’s tensing body.
“Do you want me to do that again?” it hissed again, a slick tongue darting out between its lips for a moment.

Roy winced. Of course he should say no, but it hadn’t been that bad. The lack of sensation and memory had been what he’d hoped for coming into this tent night after night. He wanted distraction more than he wanted pleasure. He wanted anything that let him forget for a time the scent of charred flesh that, at the right point of combustion, reminded him all too much of family barbecues and the thought made him want to vomit. When he coupled on the cot with a man who smelled like nothing but sweat and death, he could forget the barbecues and even the massacres, really, because all he could think of was how this act, this man, his smell repulsed him. It was repulsion, but it had nothing to do with the death outside and for that he was grateful. But the release from everything, that ascent into nothingness and numbness that he had experienced when the array was activated had been better.

Instead of shaking his head and shaking free of the snake, he said nothing and guided Kimbley’s hand back to his inked chest.


The lack of breath was back and the whiteness, the nothingness, hurt his eyes, but it was better. He wasn’t sure how, but it was better. Better than what, he wondered, because he truly couldn’t remember. But that made him happy, somehow.

The was an absence of everything but a floating feeling, a lightness. Roy felt himself grasping at the white air, at the light with no source, wanting to remain there. It was hard to be frantic, he found, because there was nothing to be frantic for. And so he moved in fluid patterns, grasping out, trying to hold on. In the distance, he saw another figure turn around in a slow circle.

He recognized the dark, greasy hair hanging around his face and the soot that seemed to be a permanent part of his skin. The man turned and Roy could see that he had been right; four slashes curved down his right cheek, starting by his ear and ending near the upturned algae of a smile. Roy licked at his dry lips. The other man looked...unsettled. He’d never seen that.

Roy glanced down in time to see a thin trickle of blood crawling down Kimbley’s left arm. Before he could cry out, he felt himself thrown back down onto the cot, on top of the other soldier’s still body.

Kimbley trembled and his face was even more ashen than normal. It wasn’t until the stricken man had begun to pull away that Roy even noticed that his arm had been held as if in the grip of a drowning man and, when he looked down, a distinct hand print in blood had been left on his skin. A quivering hand reached for the array on Roy’s chest again, but it was clear that the intention was not to activate it, but to mar it, to deface it instead. And Roy found himself pulling back.
He’d never recoiled from Kimbley before, not since he had began coming into this tent each night for release, for atonement. Kimbley looked taken aback - maybe frightened, even - by Roy’s reluctance.

“Get rid of that thing,” he hissed.

Roy tottered from his lifeguard’s perch above. “No,” he muttered.

“You’re going to fucking kill us!”

Roy opened his mouth to protest, but could find no words and he looked back down at the array. “Activate it again.”

“Fuck you.”

“I don’t know how to do it, so you’re going to have to do it for me.

Kimbley’s eyes went wide. “You’re fucking crazy.”

Roy scowled and his hand lurched up from the depths of blanket and grabbed at Kimbley’s face, gripping tightly into his cheeks.

“Activate it!”

“Shit. I just got it from some guy in town! I’m not even sure what it does!”

“Well I am! It helps me forget that I spent all day roasting innocent fucking children and I want to forget more! Don’t you?”

Kimbley spat and Roy withdrew his hand. The eel grinned slow like the tide. “No. I don’t want to forget a moment.”

Something ugly washed over Roy’s face and before he realized what he was doing, a balled fist connected with Kimbley’s jaw. This time when the soldier spat, slick saliva was mixed with blood. Kimbley tucked his hands behind his back to prevent Roy from making him set off the array.

“Give this to me, just this one thing!” Roy said and lurched at the man beneath him as if for oxygen.

Kimbley slithered out from beneath the struggling man and pinned him, holding his hands above his head at the wrists. “Didn’t you see it, you asshole?”

Kimbley stared at him a long moment before speaking. “You didn’t, did you?”

Roy licked his lips and shook his head. “I saw nothing. Just light. And you.”
“Fuck... The little bastards with the teeth. Fuck.”

Roy blinked. Teeth? “I don’t know what you mean.”

“No shit,” Kimbley said and spat out another clot of blood, “I don’t think I kept the transmutation going long enough, but I kept going I think I would have gotten a better look.”

Roy could only stare.

“They fuckin’ scratched my face and I think one of them took a bite out of my arm.”

Roy let his eyes fall level with Kimbley’s forearm. Thick red gashes ran sticky with blood down the length, starting up by his elbow. Roy frowned. The bite marks weren’t that deep, certainly shallower than the guilt he wanted the creatures to chew out of him. He anchored his jaw and held Kimbley’s eyes with his own.

“Do it,” he said.

Repulsion flowed into Kimbley’s eyes, but that slimy, sadistic smirk was reforming there on his face. “I’m fucking getting something out of this then,” he said and started to stroke his cock back to hardness. A moment later, he shoved back into Roy, dry and stinging. When Roy began to reciprocate movement, Kimbley swallowed thickly and pressed his palms quickly, like he would pull off a bandage, to the array on Roy’s chest.


Roy had been expecting the silence and the void again. Instead, this time sensation overwhelmed him. The sound of the ocean rushed in his ears, sand scoured at his skin, his eyes felt like they were being assaulted by the high sun reflecting off waves, and seaweed seemed to be filling his lungs. He wanted to scream, but found he couldn’t. That’s when he saw it.

Writhing, black, indistinct shapes were swimming toward him through the glare in his periphery. They did have teeth. And large eyes. Large eyes like the child he’d had to eliminate earlier that morning. Small hands reached out toward him, like the small hands that had lunged for a discarded firearm when the soldier in blue had been spotted. One of the things sunk its teeth into his leg and the wound burned like his flames always burned his hands a bit, even through the gloves.

Roy was amazed when the pain had began to fade from his leg and he felt something else begin to...slide. It was the images from the morning being extracted, hungrily being pulled away by some vector of flow. But they weren’t being taken from him so much as he was willingly releasing them, burning them and tossing their ashes to the sea. He wanted to forget it all: the child he had burned, the woman he had watched Kimbley drag off to her death or to the violation of her body, the buildings collapsing, his title, his name, the street he’d grown up on. He wanted to forget and so he extended his arms to his sides and let the small black (black like the corpses he left in his wake) creatures drag him.

He was being pulled against nothing and light, but he felt the riptide pushing back against his body. Roy could see something loom and take form up ahead of him. Large and dark and ominous, a door - is that what it was? - summoned him. Spread open enough to let the yellow light inside seep our into the white oblivion surrounding him. He didn’t know for sure what was inside, but he knew that he wanted it. The things flanking his sides, biting at him, were pulling faster now and he held his breath as they brought him to an abrupt stop that made his organs feel like the might burst as they collided with his rib cage.

Roy couldn’t understand why his skin felt so clammy with all the light pouring down on him. The creatures were a single undulating mass around him, but they weren’t biting at him anymore. Instead, they were hovering, waiting. Inside the doors, he saw a figure moving, sliding, and suddenly it was in front of him. Or, rather, it wasn’t in front of him. It was more like a void in front of him, shaped like a small boy would be, were he there. Roy tried to block out the vision of trembling eyes.

His skin prickled, he didn’t like the feeling there anymore. It was too close to too much, too close to death, even, maybe. And the void smiled and Roy knew it was smiling at his discomfort. The emptiness where a finger should be reached out and caressed down the left side of Roy’s face, very close to the corner of his eye. The tingle moved down his cheek, his neck, his arm.

“I’m only taking your memories this time, Alchemist.”

Roy blinked and tried to recoil.

“I could let you in, let you know. But then I’d have to take more from you, you understand.”

If it meant he could stay there... “Take it.”

The thing grinned without teeth. “No. I don’t think I will. You’ll pay your toll soon enough.” And it caressed his face again and tingled over his eye.

The non-hand pressed hard against his chest and he was falling back, the things were screeching around his head, his breath was gone again and when he could finally see, Kimbley’s head was thrown back and they were coming together, the sensation in his gut, his extremities, his cock, only heightened by the waterfall crashing through his body that followed his arrival back from that empty place.

When he stumbled his way back to his own tent, the first thing he did was scour at his chest to remove the cursed lines on his flesh before he committed them to memory, lest he be tempted to swan dive into that barnacled nothingness again and stay there until the bubbles stopped rising to the surface.