Little Albert

He settled himself comfortably on the couch and bared teeth in a sadistically feral grin down at his semiconscious captive. Pride may be annoying when it came to how much of the old hag's bitch he was, but he did have his good points. Namely, how easy it was to command and drug an unsuspecting subordinate. As his new pet began to further come around, he shifted his form to the man's more immediate commander. Time to start the game.

"On your feet, Lieutenant." His voice held somewhere between annoyance and actual anger, and he smirked coldly at the confusion that flashed across blue eyes. He knew the blond wanted to ask, also knew that this particular inflection of voice would keep him from doing so. This soldier was a puppy in the guise of a lion. Vicious and efficient in battle, eager and desperate for a pat on the head in boring life. Moreover, he was the nauseating epitome of the "good guy," the sort that wouldn’t be able to comprehend or adjust to the wanton cruelty he had in store.

Most importantly of all, he would be able to kill two birds with one stone while he amused himself. He wanted to hurt the brat. Pride wanted to hurt Flame. Breaking this man would be ideal to both, destroying an adored lover and a trusted subordinate all at once.

He had to restrain himself from licking his lips, held his facade of the sternly irritated Colonel. Oh, this would be fun.
___

His little game piece was actually rather attractive curled up and shivering in pain. The steady line of burns down his spine, inflicted with his own lighter and cigarettes (Of course the Colonel wouldn’t want to sully his precious gloves by using them for such a personal punishment) was quite fetching, as was the blood slowly seeping from between his legs.

He smiled coldly to himself as he pushed himself off the couch and finished refastening his pants, then pulled a syringe from his pocket. It would be more pleasurable to have the man fully coherent and fighting, but actually keeping him here in this little false cell is more important. The blond gave a small whimper when the needle slid into the back of his neck, then was roughly pulled out, and he waited until the sedative took effect before shifting back to his usual form and walking out.

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He was slightly surprised to find out that Flame and his crew of halfwits had already discovered that they were missing someone, and after only two days too. Maybe Pride had a bit more of a reason to be interested in the man than he’d thought. At first, he’d been annoyed by the persistence of the search, until it gave him a new idea. Why merely be content with torture, when he could add a few new pieces to the game? After all, frustration was always so much fun to play with, and wouldn’t it be delicious to watch their despair as he led them off on wild goose chases while their lost companion suffered?

Smirking, he dropped down from the window ledge he’d been seated on and shifted form, taking on the shape of a woman who lived nearby to his pet’s apartment before he approached the two soldiers.

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In his stolen guise, he jabbed another needle into his captive’s neck, drawing a sharp cry of pain. By the time the human fully shook off the effects of the original drug, however, the second variation sedative had kicked in, and the blond looked up at him with an almost drunkenly hazed sort of recognition. “Ri-…Hawkeye…wha-…?”

‘She’ glared down at the man and backhanded him sharply, snapping a berating comment about his state of undress, and in a base office, no less. Purposely not waiting for the artificially impaired man to stammer out an explanation or an apology, she roughly threaded callused, yet feminine fingers into short hair and roughly dragged the taller blond of the couch and forced him to his knees.

Still holding the blond by the hair, she pushed him down face first into the carpet and held him there, pulling a ‘borrowed’ gun from the belt of her uniform. It didn’t matter what reasoning she gave for this little punishment session, since he was hardly in a state to be asking questions anyway, but she rattled off something semi-plausible, something involving their commanding officer and a less than reputable incident, without really bothering to listen to her own words. The muffled sounds of misery he was making as she roughly used the grip on his hair to scrub his bruised face across the stiff carpet were far more entertaining.

Almost as good as the agonized howl that came when she forced the unlubricated barrel of the gun into an already torn and still bloodied entrance.

“Now, now,” she hissed, her voice all cold efficiency and slight strain from holding the weakly struggling soldier down, despite inner amusement. “I don’t want to put up with something this disgusting any more than you do. But if you don’t and take your punishment like the good soldier you’re supposed to be, I might just have to put my finger on the trigger and pull. You wouldn’t want the commander, or even Elric, to come in here and find such a mess, would you?”

He made a choked whine of pain as she forced the gun deeper in, but she could see, even from this angle, that he was biting his lip to bleeding in an effort to keep quiet.

He couldn’t see the distinctly out of character grin of cruel satisfaction that crossed her lips, however.

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He chuckled under his breath, and it was just a pity that he was too close to them to laugh in full. It wasn’t as good as what he got from his pet, whose broken state was coming along especially nicely these days, but their growing despair was something he nonetheless savored. It had been especially nice to drop in on the Fullmetal brat as a mouse in the wall and listen to his quiet, miserable mumblings to his tin can brother when he found out that his darling lover had apparently vanished off the face of the earth.

He purred in amusement as the soldiers found yet another lead to be another dead end, particularly enjoyed the obvious frustration written on the face of their fire alchemist commander. A little over three months now, he’d played his game of bait and switch and torture, and it wasn’t nearly over yet. There was still so much more fun to be had.

Humming some nondescript tune, he hopped off his perch and left the humans to their unfulfilled search. He could come back to play with them later, after all, and the sight of the little electronics junkie had just given him an especially delicious idea for what to try out next on his little pet.

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The anguished shriek was music to his ears, and the way the man writhed in agony was pure beauty. He purred softly and pulled the electrified rod away, and, just for a further measure of spite, twisted the other rod deeply embedded in his captive’s cock, drawing another broken cry of pain. “Payback hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked innocently.

His captive choked and mumbled something confused and incoherent, possibly wanting to know what he was being paid back for. A slow smile, almost malicious enough to break his role, crossed his face as he watched the blond quivering in an effort not to thrash, not to move, not to even breathe in a way that would cause the thing shoved in a place it wasn’t meant to go to cause any more damage.

He turned the rod he held in his hand, as if admiring it. “You already know what you did,” he said in a hurt tone, enjoying the look of uncomprehending denial that flashed across drug glazed eyes. “Why don’t you just admit it and save me some trouble, hm?”

There was a weak, pained moan in response, and he sighed, his tone turning chiding. “You never could own up to things well, could you?”

The rod in his hand touched bare skin again, and he grinned as the soldier screamed and twisted convulsively in his bindings, sobbing half-understood apologies for an offense that he didn’t know and had no idea was a pure fabrication

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“Oh, good, you made it.” ‘She’ moved aside to let the men in white uniforms into the room. “One of other secretaries found him like this about an hour ago. Nobody wanted to get close enough to find out where the blood came from, not with him mumbling like that, the poor thing.”

One of the orderlies crouched down and shifted the curled up blond slightly, drawing a small wail of pain, and she had to cover his mouth with a hand, disguising a smirk as a gasp of horror.

“We’ll handle it from here, ma’am,” the dark-headed of the two said as he pulled a small syringe out of his bag and began to prepare a sedative shot. Two more men came in, carrying a straightjacket and a stretcher. It was amusing to watch the weak attempt at struggling that the dazed and bloody soldier made before the needle was poked into the back of his neck, moreso to watch them carry him out on the stretcher, bound and mentally incapacitated.

She waited until they were completely down the hall and around the corner before shifting to another body, then he hummed as he headed off in the other direction. Time to go play with his pet’s comrades for a couple of weeks or so while the now-former soldier got used to his new home.

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Boots and standard issue hospital uniform shoes echoed through the hallway as he followed the nurse through the asylum complex, fighting the urge to scowl. Damn, he could almost understand why the brat had such a complex about his height; following someone whose legs were almost twice as long as his was harder than it looked.

“It’s so good of you to come, Mr. Elric. It’ll probably do poor Jean some good to have a visitor for a change, especially someone so close.”

Jean, huh? He’d never bothered to learn the man’s name, since he’d only ever needed to use his rank before. Probably a good thing the nurse had mentioned it, though. The brat had been his pet’s lover, after all, and it probably wouldn’t have done his charade much good to not be able to refer to the blond on a first name basis. He forced a pleasantly grateful smile on his face and thanked the nurse as she opened a door for him.

“Now, remember, Mr. Elric. You have two hours, and if he gets out of hand, the red button beside the door will buzz for the orderlies.”

The door closed, and he glanced around, managing to be impressed by the fact that the ‘visiting’ rooms managed to be far more forbidding than the patient cells. It would be a nice touch. Then he turned his attention to the lanky figure curled in a tight ball in a corner, clutching something or other made of blue fabric. Remembering the name the nurse had given, he brought a concerned note to his voice. “Jean?”

A blond head lifted, and blue eyes hesitantly glanced his way. He put on a tentative smile and moved in closer. “I just heard the news. Are you okay?”

He almost laughed at the relieved tears that welled up in the man’s eyes, but managed to hold his expression of affectionate concern as he crouched down to wrap his arms around the ‘older’ blond. Now he could see what it was the man was clutching so tightly. A large stuffed rabbit, with black button eyes. How sickeningly cute. He stroked short hair in a mockery of comfort as the former soldier clung to him.

“I was so worried about you,” he cooed gently as he began to rub the back of his pet’s neck, seemingly ignoring the way the man began to squirm in discomfort as nails became sharper and began to scratch viciously into his neck. “No word, no sign, no nothing… I thought for sure you’d just vanished off the face of the planet… That you were avoiding me…”

He caught the other blond by the throat with the ‘automail’ hand and pushed him back against the wall, expression turned dangerously calm with a little worry. “That’s it, wasn’t it? You were avoiding me.” Fingers tightened, and he inwardly reveled in the motion of his pet struggling for air. “How could you go this far, just to forget what we meant to each other?”

He let go of the former soldier’s throat and let him gasp and cough as he picked up the rabbit that had been dropped. “You bastard…” he murmured icily with a wounded look, almost to himself as he calmly tore the rabbit to shreds in front of terrified blue eyes. “Hurting me like this… Making me worry like this…” He grabbed one wrist, then the other, before his captive could attempt to flee, and bound the man’s hands painfully behind his back. “You’ll have to pay for that, you know. Equivalent trade and all.”

He’d heard rumors that all the rooms in the asylum were soundproofed, but he couldn’t take that chance, as much as he wanted to hear his pet scream. Using another strip of the rabbit, he gagged the man, then knelt down, pressing a knee into the other blond’s groin to force him to hold still. His expression still looking like that of a kicked puppy, he ‘transmuted’ his arm into an automail blade.

One slice. Two. Ten. Never enough to seriously damage the body or destroy the clothing, but more than enough to draw blood and muffled sobbing and pleading. He kept up the litany of accusations even as he dragged the man’s patient uniform pants down and forced him onto his stomach before unfastening his own pants. “Now you’ll understand,” he hissed softly as he thrust in dry.

He began timing the injuries with the thrusts, making both deeper, harder, relishing the tears that now spilled down his pet’s face. He dragged the man’s head to an angle where he could see them better, and grinned coldly when their eyes met, enjoying the fact that he could almost hear the sound of shattering glass as what was left of the man’s hope and protest crumbled into dust.

When he finally came, he pulled out roughly and dragged the man’s pants back up before shoving him into a broken heap on the floor. He cut loose the bindings, making sure to intentionally wound his captive’s hands and face. Now for the final part of the day’s charade.

He pulled a knife he’d stolen from the asylum kitchen in another form out of his back pocket and casually smeared it in his pet’s blood before tucking it into the semiconscious man’s hand. All it took after that was to make his own hands and face look injured, and he vaulted to his feet and ran to pound on the aforementioned red button, screaming for help.

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He’d only managed to get in ‘visits’ as a few more people before the staff and doctors began to get suspicious. Not of him, of course, as they had no idea that everyone who’d come to see his pet in the past few months had actually been one person. But they’d become suspicious enough of the original articles to put in a call to Flame at the military base. It was sooner than he’d been planning, and he was annoyed that the fun of being the one to lead the man’s comrades here had been stolen from him, but it wasn’t something he couldn’t work with.

He knew the staff schedules well enough to know that the orderly whose place he was taking wouldn’t be found locked in the janitor’s closet for at least another three hours, so he plastered on a smile as he entered the former soldier’s room to begin settling him into his straightjacket for another visit, ignoring the soft whimpers of protest the blond made. The stuffed rabbit had been fixed, much to his ire, although he would admit that he rather liked the jagged and uneven new stitching, as well as the dark splotches and stains from where blood hadn’t come out of the fabric. Crooning reassuringly to his captive, he hauled the man to his feet and began leading him down the hall, the rabbit left behind.

Well, damn, he inwardly purred as he peeked into the chosen visiting room at the doctors and others in attendance. The gang’s all here. It was better than he could have hoped for. The full unit, even the brat and his useless brother. He had to fight down a grin of pure malicious glee. Showtime.

He was at an almost perfect height and angle to see the effect as he pulled his captive into the room. The looks of shock on the human’s comrades was beautiful, but nothing compared to the honest performance that the man in his grip gave at apparently seeing all of his nightmares and hallucinations congregated in one place. Eyes widened. Pupils shrank. The blond went rigid, then began to tremble violently. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the men start to get up.

And Jean Havoc began shrieking in pure, unbridled fear and hysteria, the last vestiges of sanity exploding apart.
___

Having dragged the blond back to his little cell and shed his stolen form, he basked in the sunlight on the roof of the asylum, only moving enough to lean over the edge and laugh to himself as the soldiers and the brat and his brother were escorted out. He didn’t really need to hear what was actually being said… the looks of anguished confusion and anger and despair were more than enjoyable enough.

An entertaining game, a delicious payoff, and the brat and Colonel both were emotionally crushed. Not bad results for almost a year’s worth of effort.

As the humans and the tin soldier boy walked out the gates of the asylum, he shifted form again, fluttering after them in the guise of a harmless little raven. As he flew, there was a bit of a hollow ache in his chest, but it was nothing really…

He was just disappointed that his fun was over, and he had to go back to work.