Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist/Hagane no RenkinJutsushi belongs to Arakawa-san. I just borrow the characters from time to time and hope that I don't break them… too much.

Just Once

Prompt: Start the story with "It was just for one night…"

It was just for one night. Just one. Then they could fight and claw and drag their half-frozen asses back across a river of glacier water tainted red with Drachman blood, though frosted-licked fields of stiff corpses and lost limbs and open stomachs that wild animals made meals of.

They would hide here, shivering, blood blossoms in uniforms so mired with filth and rot and gun powder that they weren't even close to blue anymore, wait until the sun cast its anemic light over the churned snow and soot-blackened trees. They would trudge—slowly, maybe, but they fucking would—back to the trenches. Make a few witty comments about how state alchemists are damned near indestructible and, really, what kind of goddamned idiot would be stupid enough to think that two of them could be taken down by a few snipers and a squad of grenadiers?

He trembled, hunched his shoulders even more, tucked his mud-lined chin to his chest—anything to protect himself from the aching, burning, screaming, howling, furious cold. Huddled deeper into the oversized wool-lined coat that wasn't nearly warm enough.

The cave that he'd dragged them into was little more than an overhang, one of way too-fucking-many in the Dranchman steppes that they were fighting over for some stupid-ass reason. It kept them away from the worst of the snow, though, and the howling blizzard that raged around them would keep those bastards from trying to look for them. Hell, they'd probably just write them off as dead and would stop hunting them like hounds chasing rabbits.

He'd somehow managed to pull out his boot knife before the storm really took hold—and fuck those snipers and their training for putting a round into his automail, or else the whole thing would have been a hell of a lot easier—and had hacked the branches off a few nearby evergreens. The barrier that he'd create looked mostly—he hoped—natural, and would keep them hidden if any of those goddamn northern assholes thought they'd play chicken with Mother Nature.

The cold gnawed at his knee and shoulder, burned his fingers, smothered his face and his lips and crept so far into his bone marrow that holy shitfuck—

No. Stop it. He stuffed his twice-gloved hand into the folds of his coat. Don't think about it. Don't think about how it was so cold that his balls'd retreated right into his body or that he fingers would probably have to be amputated if they got much colder but, hey, that's okay really because he can hardly feel them now anyway. Don't think about all the precious energy his was wasting by shivering so fucking violently that his teeth shuddered because at least he was shivering and he wasn't lying on the frozen ground with bullets in his hip and shoulder like the bastard was and—

Fuck. Fuck. How did he become a state alchemist if he was so monumentally stupid? Weeks of catnaps and half-frozen brain cells; that was the only explanation.

He'd seen it happen, more time than he cared to remember, so many times that it now almost-still-sort-of-just-a-little bothered him. Soldiers with bloody roses, made from bayonets and bullet wounds, splattered over their clothes. It was the shock and the fatigue and cold and the just make this hell go away—

But the hell wouldn't go away. At least, not for the bastard. It couldn't. He'd promised—the asshole had promised him—on the too-short-long train ride to this forsaken wasteland and again after the first battle, while Ed was trying and trying and trying trying trying to get the blood out of the creases of his automail arm. And Ed had sneered at him the first time with as much vehemence as he could muster, and had sobbed the second time in a desperate attempt to rid his body of the poison and the pain and the horror that clung to his skin.

But now, that assurance—you won't be left alone up here, no matter what, alright?—that was what he clung to, what kept him alive just as much as the thoughts of a wide-eyed Al and a teary-eyed Winry.

If that good-for-nothing, shit-for-brains bastard had lied to him…

"Hey." His voice came out as a croak. Funny word, that. But no croaking yet, not now, not here. "Hey, bastard. You awake still?"

Mustang said nothing, but Ed saw his fingers twitch. He was sure of it. Positive.

"Good. Because if you fall asleep, I'll kill you myself." He dragged himself across the frozen forest detritus that line their shelter's floor. Shrugged his greatcoat off—and holy motherfucking sons of inbred bitches is was cold—and threw it one the ground next to his commanding officer. Rolled Mustang onto it and that was a weak groan of pain because it had to be because he'd be shot twice so of course it would hurt, then dragged the other man's own greatcoat off of his shoulders with a single trembling hand. Curled up next to the warm body and covered them both.

Just one night. They'd stay alive that long. They had to.

Author's Note: I've been feeling like shit and writing hasn't been coming easily to me for a while, so I grabbed a prompt and just crossed my fingers. That being said, this hasn't been beta'ed, edited, reviewed, and was basically cobbled together in about forty-five minutes, so… nya.

Update: Yeah, I did a light edit. It was bugging me too much.