The Spider's Web (2/?)
When Al woke again, it was to the sound of an argument-one voice was a woman’s, low, almost a hiss, and the other was more hushed and quavered slightly. That second one was Marie, his mind supplied blearily as he blinked around in near-complete darkness, looking for the source of the voices, each tone sharp in his ears and making him grimace. His head was pounding. The voices were overlapping-each seemed eager to talk over the other.
“-was I supposed to know, I wasn’t given any information beyond just taking him and-”
“-be so dense, honestly, Maria, he’s an alchemist and one of the most powerful in the country to boot.He could’ve transmuted a wide-open hole in the side of the car and slipped right out onto the highway-”
“-was on an extremely high morphine dose and he’s kitten-weak, so I seriously doubt that, and at any rate, you have him and it’s done with, so just tie him up now if you want-”
“-lucky if Uncle doesn’t hear about this, honestly, how could you be such an idiot-”
“-wouldn’t do that to me, Viv, you can’t,” Marie’s voice was now just as sharp as the other, with anger, but there was a definite undercurrent to it, one of terror. “You know what he’d do…”
“Then I suggest you don’t screw up again,” said the other voice, Viv’s, coldly. She had a distinctive accent, Al thought groggily, trying to determine the direction the women’s voices were coming from through the dark. She hit her vowels hard, and her consonants not hard enough, and it was an accent he’d definitely heard before-it was one that was widely associated with the industrial urban sprawls of Southern Amestris, big ugly cities that were mazes of factories and warehouses and smog. Al hated them. And while they might be the financial hub of the country, it was common knowledge that these polluted hell holes were lorded over by mob dynasties.
And at that thought, Al suddenly felt as though he’d swallowed a chunk of ice. He’d been about to make some sort of noise, let these people know he was awake and ask where he was and what they wanted, but he thought better of it. He held his breath, and continued to listen.
“Again?” Marie sounded nearly hysterical. “What the hell do you mean, ‘again’? I’m going home first thing tomorrow. I am not you people’s errand girl. Not anymore.”
“I think you’ll find you are, Maria.” Viv sounded bored with this conversation now. “Or are you so eager to disown your family? Besides, Uncle needs you to stick around for awhile. Look after our prisoner.” Something about the way she said it made Al shiver.
A beat of silence. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“You’re the nurse in the family,” Viv continued, nonchalant. “Can’t have the little invalid fouling up the bedsheets, now can we? Come now, we have to show a bit more class than that.”
“You don’t give a damn whether the boy wastes away completely in there.”
“And neither should you,” Viv snapped. Then she added, quietly, viciously: “Or are you forgetting what this boy has done? What he’s capable of?”
A pause. “No.”
“You’d do well not to.” Al heard footsteps-a sharp, echoing tap-tap-tap-and what sounded like the flick of a switch. Suddenly, the room was flooded with light, and Al was blinking back tears as spots flooded his vision and his head gave a nasty throb. That was one thing he was still having trouble getting used to, having eyes that were actually sensitive to light intake, and were rendered completely useless in the absence of light, or, like now, by the presence of too much of it.
He drove the heels of his hands into his eyes, willing the nausea away, and started when heard his own name in Viv’s cold voice.
“Alphonse Elric.”
He drew his hands away from his face. He was lying on his side on a cot, the wool coat still tucked around him, in what appeared to be a dilapidated holding cell of some kind. Three walls were brick and smelled of damp, his bed pressed lengthwise against one, while the fourth, across from him, was made entirely of steel bars that stretched floor to ceiling. The whole scene was lit by dreary, flickering fluorescent bulbs.
Standing on the other side of the bars and staring in at him were two women-there was Nurse Marie, curls in wild disarray and face haggard with exhaustion, wearing some rumpled, ill-fitting blouse and skirt. She was staring quite fixedly at the ground, hands clenched at her sides. And next to her, the fingers of one hand curled like talons around a bar of the cell, was the woman who he presumed to be Viv.
She was attractive, Al supposed, in a severe sort of way, and looked to be around thirty. She wore a blazer and skirt of pristine black, perfectly-fitted, her dark curly hair that might’ve resembled Marie’s wound into a tight knot on the back of her head. Her eyes were hard, silvery, and currently giving him an appraising look that made Al’s skin crawl. The very white smile she flashed him reminded him of wolves and serpents.
“Vivian Valera,” she continued, still smiling, apparently satisfied by the fact that her mere appearance was enough to unnerve Al. “And of course you’re already acquainted with my younger sister, Maria Valera.” At the sound of her name, Marie’s eyes fluttered closed for a fraction of a second, but she gave no other acknowledgement that Vivian had spoken.
Valera?
Oh, this was bad…
Al made a valiant attempt to drag himself upright, but couldn’t quite manage it. Marie must’ve been right about morphine in his system; his arms trembled like sticks below him and he collapsed back onto the cot. “What do you want from me?” Flopped out on a cot behind bars and panting from exertion, he couldn’t have looked very intimidating, but he glared at them both nonetheless.
“Recompense,” Vivian said, her grin sliding off her face. “Exact recompense.”
Al blinked. “Recompense for what?” As far as he could remember, he didn’t think he’d ever met a member of the famous Valera family, and he hadn’t even known that Marie (Maria?) was a Valera. Nonetheless, as light glinted off of a key that suddenly appeared in Vivian’s hand, which she slid smoothly into the lock of his cell, something horrible coiled in the pit of Al’s stomach.
“I’ll save the pleasure of that explanation for my uncle,” Vivian said, her lip curling as she strode into the cell, brandishing the key, Marie a fretting shadow in the open doorway.
And before Al quite knew what was going on, he’d been dragged from the bed and thrown down hard onto the floor, the force of it nearly driving the breath from his lungs. He heard the snick of a gun being cocked, and his heart rose to his throat.
“Move and I’ll shoot,” Vivian said flatly, from above him. “Spread your arms out.” She gestured down at his chest with the muzzle of a handgun.
“Viv-” Marie started to protest, but Vivian threw up a hand, and she fell silent.
“I’m only doing what you should’ve all along, Maria,” Vivian said, a smirk tugging at her lips as she watched Al spread his arms out to either side of him, fingertips sweeping the gritty concrete floor.
And then, with a sharp stamp of Vivian’s foot and a sickening snap, Al felt his right arm break.
Tbc~