#the idea of naming the horse after his VA was just too tempting

[fe-fictions]

Fredrobin for life!!! You actually got me interested in this ship in the first place!! So thank you <3

As for a prompt, how about Frederick teaching Robin how to ride a horse for the first time? Or having him catch her giving his horse treats.

(I changed the prompt up just a little bit...but it was so fun writing about Hebert!! Reminded me of my days going to 4H classes and taking care of the pony I rode, Tater :'D )

Hebert was an excellent horse. Frederick had raised the beast since he was a foal, and had grown up to become a powerful warhorse. A warhorse who was, surprisingly, very affectionate with his master.

You had observed Frederick’s relationship with Hebert over the last few months, and now that you were together, it was important that you build a relationship with the beast, too. At least, in your opinion. It was the animal who played a huge role in Frederick’s life, especially on the battlefield. 

So it wouldn’t hurt to befriend the beast too, right? Such was the proposition you made when you approached your husband one morning, stepping into the horse stalls where he dutifully brushed Hebert’s coat.

“Good morning, Frederick.” You greeted him, quietly so as not to startle him or the other horses shuffling about. His brush paused when he heard you, and looked at you with quite the surprise on his face. "I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No, not at all. I’m surprised to see you up so early. You didn’t sleep ‘til late, and I was careful not to rouse you when I left, this morning. Was I not as careful as I hoped?”

“Nothing of the sort, dear. It’s actually…well, I wanted to assist you with taking care of Hebert.”

To your (slight) disbelief, he shared a look with the stallion. 

“...You do?”

“If you’ll have me, yes.” You leaned against the stall door, “I just feel like I haven’t gotten to know him like I should. He’s your horse, but he’s so important to you, and the bond you have is so sweet. I was hoping I could form one with him, too.”

Frederick’s face shifted, the slightest of blushes dusting his face. Hearing how motivated you were to build a bond with his dearest companion touched his heart. 

You looked up at him hopefully, procuring an apple from your pocket. “I heard he prefers apples to carrots.”

“Oh? And where did you hear such a thing?”

“From you.” 

“Then it must be true.” He confirmed with a soft smile, eliciting a giggle from his wife. He gestured for you to join him beside the horse, who had suddenly taken great interest in that shiny red fruit you were holding up.

Frederick took your hand, gently unfurling your fingers. 

“To feed a horse, it is best practice to hold your hand open, palm flat when you offer a treat. That way they won’t nip you by accident when trying to eat it.”

“I would prefer to keep my fingers.” You obeyed his instruction, the apple sitting atop your palm, ready for a handsome horse to take a bite. 

“All right…let’s see if he’ll take it from you.” 

“Is there a chance he won’t?”

“Well, Hebert tends to be rather wary of strangers; it takes a little warming up for him to become familiar with new people, which means he won’t accept food from just anyone. But considering you aren’t entirely a stranger, I doubt he’ll be reluctant to take it from you.”

“Interesting…it seems the wary apple doesn’t fall far from the wary tree.” You jested, earning a an eye roll and a shoulder nudge towards the horse.

“Just give Hebert his treat, please. It’s cruel to keep him waiting.”

You inched closer to the horse’s (quite large) face, finding a big, black nose sniffing the air around the awaiting apple. Frederick kept a steadying hand on Hebert’s neck, patting him reassuringly and just close enough to the reins should his steed decide snapping at your fingers was a better option than taking the apple.

“Wow…he’s really huge, isn’t he?” You murmured nervously; the horse was so much more intimidating a few feet away– it was different being face to face with him compared to fighting a fair distance from him.

Dark brown eyes gave you no point of reference whether he was wary of you or happy to see you. But there wasn’t anymore time to guess. 

A fuzzy, soft nose pushed against your hand, sniffing the apple with great interest. Tall ears flicked onea after the other, and you glanced over at Frederick. He looked particularly pleased. 

And then, Hebert’s lip quivered above your fingers, searching around the apple. It was such a bizarre feeling– and his fuzzy face was so warm on your skin! You shifted your hand a little lower, giving him better access to the awaiting fruit.

Hebert did his horse researching just a moment longer before he decided it was indeed a perfectly safe apple. You jumped when he crunched the fruit, taking the whole thing in a single bite.

“Oh my gods!” You pulled back, feeling a rush of excitement. “He just took the entire thing!!”

“Indeed he did,” Frederick chuckled at your reaction. 

“Is it okay for him to just take the whole thing like that? Should I have cut it in half, or something?”

“Not at all. Were he a foal, he might need a little help. But considering his head is nearly three times larger than ours, he could eat a dozen whole apples without hesitation.”

“What a magnificent beast.” You marveled, watching Hebert happily crunch away his much deserved snack. You reached out, carefully petting his nose. He didn’t pull away, content to enjoy his snack while you took your turn getting to know him. “Aren’t you just wonderful, Hebert!”

“This is quite a pleasant surprise. He’s taken to you much faster than I would have thought.” Frederick observed, moving from Hebert’s side to yours.

“Perhaps it’s because he knows who I am.” You mused, leaning into his side. His arm wrapped around your waist, humming thoughtfully as he scratched behind Hebert’s ears.

“And who might that be?”

“The Lady Frederick, of course. Someone of only the highest standing beside such a decorated knight.”

“You may be onto something.” He squeezed you close, “I recall Lord Chrom trying to offer an apple to Hebert long ago, only to walk away with one less glove and bright red fingers.”

“Oh, dear! You bit the Exalt?” You couldn’t help but laugh at the very thought, poor Chrom’s pride wounded by an opinionated steed.

“It was mortifying at the time, but we both look back at the time fondly. A humbling experience for the young prince.” 

“Well, then. Thank you for treating me with a little more grace than Lord Chrom.” Hebert chuffed softly, the apple long finished. He pressed his mouth to your palm again, searching for his second helping. “Shall I go and fetch another one for you, good boy?”

“You mustn’t spoil him. He may prefer your company to mine if he realizes you’re more willing to give him snacks than I am.”

“You’re just worried he’ll start liking me more than you.”

“How absurd.” He tousled your hair, walking away with a shake of his head. You laughed, trailing after him with a skip in your step. “He would never betray me for a few apples.”

“Then surely you won’t mind. Shall I fetch a few more?”

“Certainly, if you’re all right with an extra hour of training for each apple you sneak to him.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“I surely would.”

Hebert stomped his hoof, listening to the ridiculous back and forth of the knight and his wife, wondering why in the world the nice lady who had given him an apple was leaving so soon.

(He would receive another one a little while later, while Frederick was distracted with the royal siblings. Perhaps you would become his preferred person, after all…)

[anthropwashere]

deadfic: she sang to me a language strange 2

More deadfic for @goodintentionswipfest but this time some of y’all might recognize this one! I cut out ~2k of language strange when I posted it because it was even more of a hot mess than the rest that I just didn’t have the energy to wrangle. Now I have an excuse to still throw it in your faces with virtually no editing! 

Behold yet more bad times for Ed in the terrible werewolf AU (tw cannibalism, imprisonment, and a whole heck of mileage out of the word “fuck”). The key difference between this chunk and the previous chunk is in the pacing.

(Apologies for the bad Google Translate French. Again.)

(part 1)

=

A guard comes by with a bowl of mush, barks something at him but he doesn’t care, he refuses to care. The guard leaves. He doesn’t look at the bowl even though his stomach is a knot of nausea and hunger and he’s so fucking thirsty, he just wants a glass of water but he can’t remember the last time they gave him anything to drink.

The guard comes back with another guard, no, two more guards from the smell. They’re laughing. Oh, good, great, this’ll be fun. Can’t they just, fuck, give him a day or whatever amounts to a day down here? He’s tired, he’s so tired. He’s digesting the parts of Renée Poirier he didn’t throw up. Just stop, go away, let him rest.

One of the guards bangs on the top of his cage and they all laugh when he flinches. Another one must bend down because his rough voice is too close to the bars when he asks, “Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas, loup garou? Vous sentez-vous malade?”

He bares his teeth. Loup garou. Wolfman. They think they’re so goddamn funny.

They ask him again if he’s feeling sick, bang on his cage, ask him if he’s just feeling down, aw, poor wolfman, poor stupid Amestrian dog, is he sad? They heard him and the bitch chatting, does he miss his new friend? Well he shouldn’t have gone and killed her, eh? God, but the mess he made of her, makes a normal man sick it does! Like he enjoyed it—

“Shut up,” he snarls, or he means to say it in Amestrian but it comes out as nothing but a warning rumble deep in his chest. His teeth are too big again, too long, too sharp. How did Heinkel deal with this shit? How did any of them? They’d all always seemed so—controlled. Calm, cool, collected, whatever the fuck, the guards are banging on his cage more and it’s hard to think, harder than usual, what’s even fucking usual anymore. 

He curls up tighter, tries to calm down. Normal man, he thinks scathingly. Fuck off with that. The guards are all bargain bin chimeras too. They look human, sure, mostly, but their eyes shine wrong and their teeth are too sharp. Little tells that used to raise the hair on the back of his neck when he was still human. Now he knows better. Now he knows the guards were all changed as a precaution, otherwise one wrong move and any one of the prisoners could take a bite out of them. Even the playing field.

He can’t deny he wouldn’t be tempted to, if it were an option. He can’t deny he’s tempted to bite one of them anyway, never mind the hell they’d give him after. He has no idea if it’s something he would have thought of when he was human or if this is that fucking animal instinct Darius always loved to harp on about. He doesn’t know which is worse or which is more comforting. He just wants the guards to leave. They’re clearly not taking him anywhere, otherwise they wouldn't have started messing with his shackles, choking him, yanking on his bad leg, shit like that. They’re just here for a laugh. There’s nothing more obnoxious than guards with time to kill until their shift’s over.

One of them declares that the reason he made a mess all over the floor must be that he doesn’t know. The other two are astounded, my god, surely he must? Surely the Amestrian dog’s not so stupid as that? Wasn’t this one supposed to be smart, isn’t that why the brass wanted him so bad? How could he not notice something so obvious? Not used to good cooking, one of them suggests, and they all howl with laughter and start to rag on bland Amestrian cuisine for a minute, which, whatever, they can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they leave him out of it. 

Of course they don’t though. One of them pulls on one of his chains and he snarls, snarls louder when they pull harder. “Regarde moi,” the guard snarls back. 

They all know he understands them. His mistake. He should have realized the advantage he’d have if they thought he couldn’t string more than a where’s the bathroom together. Ah well. If wishes were horses, they'd end up as chimeras down here too. He doesn’t roll over—they’ve all driven that joke into the ground—just cranes his head over his sore right shoulder and bares his teeth up at them. He’s pretty sure that’s something he would have done as a human. It’s a mean comfort.

The nearest guard’s fangs dimple his lips when he smiles. He’s got old scars across his jaw and one cheek, like claw marks. Now there’s a fucking idea. The guard asks him if he’s stupid and barks laughter. 

“Stupid enough to get caught by you, I s’pose,” he says in Amestrian, because he doubts they can string even a where’s the bathroom together in his language. Either he’s wrong or they just don’t like his tone, because the guard yanks on his chain again. They’ve got him by the right arm and his shoulder throbs and threatens to pop out of the joint again. Fuck them, fuck the bastard who cut out his prosthetic clavicle, fuck the alchemists for not giving him a new one along with the leg they gave him, not like he wanted it but—fuck, fuck—

The guards laugh raucously above him. Fuck them. Fuck. Fuck. Ow.

“Regarde moi,” the guard says again, rattling the chain a little. Not enough to hurt, just enough to remind him who’s in charge. Ha. Like they ever give him a chance to forget. 

He glowers up at him and the guard asks if he really doesn’t know. “Sais quoi?” He grits out, exasperated. Just spit out whatever bullshit and leave him alone.

The other two guards are grinning too. The one on the left grins wolfishly, open mouthed with his too-thin tongue lolling. Must be the one not talking as much. 

The nearest guard yanks on his chain again and asks him what he thinks he’s been eating the whole time. He looks at him, baffled. What the hell did that—

Quicker than he can react the guard sticks his hand through the food slot and upends the bowl of mush in his face. He yelps, splutters, room temperature broth and soft meat clumps and cold potatoes and stringy gray vegetables spilling in his eyes and soaking his hair. He can’t see well enough to dodge the guard’s rough fingers, shoving something—meat, definitely meat—into his mouth. He bites down but the guard’s quicker; he only bites the meat, feels no satisfying—horrifying—crunch of bone. He swallows so he can snarl, but the guards all laugh and the nearest one says, “Tu as mangé du la chimère.”

He stares. They’re making even less sense than usual, and that’s saying something. He knows he fucking ate a chimera, he knows, he knows, he knows. Her name was Renée Poirier and she was a wolf like he’s a wolf, which is to say they aren’t wolves at all but they’re not human anymore either, and she’s not anything but past fucking tense because he killed her and ate her, and he killed her and ate her because the alchemists did—something—to him that made him want to kill and eat her. So what is this guard playing at?

“Je le sais,” he says, wary, flinching when the guards all laugh again.

“Non, non,” the other guard says, the one who doesn’t laugh like a dog. “Now.”

He shakes his head, not understanding—

—but he does. 

The lumps of meat on his chest, on the floor of his cage, in his stomach—they came from another chimera. Someone like him. A person. They’re feeding him people, they have been the whole time and he never knew, he never knew all this time he’s been eating—he’s been cannibalizing—

“No,” he whispers. “No. You’re lying—”

“Not a lie,” the second guard says, grinning crookedly. “All eat the same. Always.”

The guards bark laughter one last time and then finally, they leave. 

He shies away from the clumps of meat cooling in his cell, curls up tightly in as close to a corner as his chains allow. No, he thinks—begs. No. They’re lying. All this time, trapped down here in this freezing hell, weeks or months, his life sustained day after day by the other—no. No. It’s wrong. They’re lying. They have to be. Just another ugly trick. Please.

Time passes. The mush caught in his tangled hair cools and clots. Nothing fresh is brought, no one comes to bother him at all. He doesn’t eat no matter how much his stomach growls. They lied. He knows it’s a lie—but what if it’s not? What then? He gets so hungry. He’s so tired. But he can’t. He can’t eat. Someone will come for him. They have to find him. Soon. Please. S'il te plaît. They’re wrong. They lied. Please.

=

He hears the bitch before he smells her, and he smells her before he sees her standing in the open doorway of the narrow little room his cage is kept. He growls and doesn’t mind the purely animal sound that bubbles out of him. She’s the one who made him this. It’s her bite on his leg that made him this. 

The bitch sighs. “The guards say you are not eating.”

He growls louder, deeper, rolls onto his hands and knees—grinds his fangs together to keep his pained yelp unuttered when his left knee hits the cold metal too hard—and glares a challenge at her. He sets the scrap of humanity left to him aside, folds it up small and hides it away where she can’t set her teeth to it. She doesn’t deserve to see it when she’s the one who did this to him.

“You need to eat,” she says. Yeah, she would say that. Pretending like she cares about his well-being when she’s the one who tore him open to allow his humanity to bleed out. Look at him, he growls. Fucking look at this hobbled, toothsome thing he’s been reduced to. It’s all that’s left of the man he was, and it’s all. Her. Fault. Fuck her. She’s proud of what she did to him. Never said it plainly but he can smell it on her. Pride in a job well done. What a bitch.

“Fine,” she says. “Don’t eat. I don’t care. Die and be done with it.”

He cackles, high and shrill. “Yeah? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

She bares her teeth—too long, too sharp—in a humorless grin. “I would. My superiors would not, however. They have high hopes for you, Fullmetal.”

“That’s not my fucking name.”

“What horrid language. You never fail to disappoint.”

His skull grew faster than the rest of his face so he can’t really grin back, but whatever face he’s managing to make at her is a nasty thing if her own expression’s anything to go by. Then again she always has this look about her like she just stepped in dogshit. Maybe that’s just how the other alchemists put her back together, he doesn’t know. 

The bitch takes her left hand out of the pocket of her white coat. She’s got a syringe full of something clear, something slightly tinted green. He’s seen it twice before, but both times he was more animal than person, more eager to bite than to ask questions. This is the first time he’s been sane enough to wonder what the fuck it is.

“You need this,” she says. “You will die without it.”

He laughs, loud and barking, pitching higher into a howl that sets off the other wolves that aren’t wolves on this floor. He hears their manic fear mirroring his own and finds relief in it. He’s not the only one down here like this, this half-thing, this twisted up monster, this chimera full of teeth and fury hungry for the excuse to bite. He grins wolfishly, slitted eyes and bared fangs. “Fuck you,” he says, and finds gladness in the unhappy curl of her mouth.

“You’ll eat,” she says, brandishing the bowl of mush in her other hand that may or may not be chopped up people-chimera. “You’ll take this,” she says, brandishing the syringe so it catches the light spilling in from the hall. “ You’ll accept both or you’ll die.”

“Fuck you,” he says again. “Go take a flying fuck over the goddamn moon.”

Her snout—nose, she’s got a nose, she still looks human enough for a nose, she’s got better control than she does and fuck her for that too—wrinkles. She walks into the room and he snarls louder, feels hackles rise all down his spine, feels his bones creak and muscles strain. He doesn’t want to change but he fucking hates her enough to make the pain worth it. She closes the gap anyway, cold and confident and just out of reach of his paws—claws—whatever. She slides the bowl of mush over, just outside the narrow gap in the bars of his cage. She holds up the syringe, twists it between her fingers. Her fingernails—no, sharp enough to be called claws—tick and tap carefully against the glass.

“I mean it,” she says. “You need this. Every six days, the same as me. Seven days, you’ll start to go insane, almost as much as you did in the pit—” He flinches. She grins. Bitch. “Eight days, your body will start to tear itself apart. The shape you’re in? You won’t live nine days. This is not a threat. It’s fact.”

“Yeah?” Hard to talk with how long his teeth have gotten, how long his snout’s grown. He growls low and knows she’ll understand him. There’s a fine line between personhood and the monster she made him, and monsters can all understand each other just fine. “And I’m supposed to believe you?”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” she replies. “They’ll show you the truth of this, if you survive the pit.” 

He flinches. She grins. 

She pulls something out of the other pocket of her coat, a thin wooden shape with curving pale carvings. “You take your dose, or I get a guard to come in here and blow this.”

He squints at the wooden shape until it makes sense. It’s a whistle.

Le sifflet, the dark shape of the thing that used to be Renée Poirier whispers in his memory. His memory fractures, splintered by a high, thin scream of noise and pain that tore the scrap of his humanity, that last bit of him that can still call itself Edward Elric-Rockbell, out of the beast and left it to hang.

The bitch grins wider. 

He shakes his head, shrinking back until his spine is pressed painfully against the bars nearest the walls. “You’re lying.”

“Of course not,” she says. “The truth is far more useful.”

White grins in white spaces. Yeah. Isn’t it just.

“Tell me what’s in the syringe.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Fuck you. What’s in it? What’s it gonna do to me?”

She sighs impatiently. “Consider the fact that you are dying as we speak.”