Chapter Text
Dolcetto sat in the cold holding onto the only precious thing left in the world.
Everything was darkness and screaming and blood and death. You’d think the war would have prepared him for that. Would have conditioned him to be unflinching in the face of senseless cruelty and hurt.To turn away from the sick and the dying. To save himself.
You’d think that would be the case.
But it isn’t.
Whatever humanity wasn’t ripped from him in Ishval is still there.
So he sits with his arms wrapped around the small being who deserved none of what she was dealt. Her name offered to him in the voice of a child- a child- is Nina. She whines often in her sleep and talks a lot about her father. Dolcetto has this sick fucking feeling that he’s the bastard that did this to her and if she wasn’t so worried about his well being and if she could remember his name he just might hunt that man down and force him to repent for all that he’s done before ripping out his guts.
She keeps getting so sick that she can’t stop shaking and panting. When she has the energy she talks about her big brothers and her dog whose still with her. She nuzzles into his chest and she tells him all about her Edward. She misses him and Dolcetto just tells her that he must miss her too.
He thinks a lot about Gracia, his own sister, the pacifist, ever the angel of the family. Who loved her books and animals and the rain. Who helped anyone she could and who smiled like the sun. All the while he liked to pick fights and prove his strength. Show off his bravery to anyone who would spare him a second glance. And when he would come home, fists bloodied and knuckles torn apart at the edges she would bandage his hands. She never asked what happened or why. She didn’t need to.
He thinks about Gracia who had begged him not to go to war. Who told him that he didn’t need to go. That she needed him at home. She was only fourteen and dad was gone and mom could offer no help and they needed that military money. He tried to explain this to her as he kissed her forehead in goodbye.
He hopes she got his final check and put it to good use. He hopes that the letter that most likely told her that he was dead didn’t hurt her. But of course it did. He knows that it did. He left her and now he’s here in what feels more like hell than earth.
So he curls closer to Nina, his sweet Nina, and tries to forget the outside world. Forget the world he has no hopes of ever returning to.
He tries not to fight the guards, he really does. They just make things harder on Nina if he does that. The sick bastards use his heart against him and he fucking hates them for it. He hates it but there’s nothing he can do. There’s too many of them.
So he tries not to be a problem but he can hear what happens when she’s out of his sight. He can hear her whining when they take her. She’s so strong for her age but they love to break her. He can hear their tests and her screams and whimpers and her begging for her father who’s never coming back and he can’t take it.
When she returns to their cell she returns with a limp. Her paw looks bloodied and broken and he growls at the guards for what they did to her. “Where do you people get off? Hurting a little girl who did nothing wrong! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
They pay him no mind. He’s sure they have been given instruction to not talk to the animals. He understands that orders are orders but he hates them. He was a dog of war before he just started getting treated like a dog and orders are orders- but a little girl? She likes to find rocks and build tiny castles with them when she feels well enough to move. She’s explained to him the complications of hide-and-go-seek multiple times because when she can breathe properly she loves talking about games and by God Dolcetto is going to let her do whatever she wants to do.
Sometimes she just wants to rest and that’s okay too. He lets himself be used as a pillow and he’ll card his fingers through her black mane and he’ll sing her lullabies because by all rights she’s his little girl and he can’t sing well but for her, he can try.
She’s his little girl and they treat her like no one should ever treat another living thing.
Most days his only hope is that she isn’t treated how he is.
The newest trend for his tests is endurance. In running, in holding his breath, in heat and in cold. The waterboarding is the worst but they don’t really do it often. He figures that they’re just worried about accidentally killing him before they can fully understand his potential. The running sucks but the military helped him learn how to put one foot in front of the other when his lungs feel like they’re being filled with fire and his legs feel like they’re becoming molten lead.
The heat and the cold seem like those tests are still in their beta phases and they aren’t that bad. He hasn’t been subject to anything sub-zero yet and he takes that as an incredibly good sign for the time being. He tries not to think too much about his future.
They often return him shaking to his cell and Nina will crowd him and ask him if he’s alright. She does this everytime he returns and he always hugs her in response. He says he’s okay even if he can only just whisper it and he’ll ask her to tell him stories if she feels like it as he braids her hair. She likes her hair being braided and so did Gracia. Silently, he thanks his little sister for forcing him to learn.
On the days when they are too tired for anything other than the greeting they just sleep or sit in companionable silence.
In the quiet moments, Dolcetto likes to dream of another life. He meets Nina in another circumstance and they are both unbroken and he takes his little girl to meet Gracia. He thinks they would get along well and maybe they could go to a park and play tag. Gracia could teach her how to make cookies and how to weave a basket out of broken branches.
He could meet Nina’s big brothers. God only knows what happened to them.
He thinks that he’d get along with them, maybe. They could be a family in another life. He tries not to dwell on the impossible too much because they make his chest ache and he wants to cry but he has to be strong for his Nina. He doesn’t want her to think about all the things that can never be. That can never happen.
But he wishes that they could.
More than anything, he wishes that they could.
One day she comes back with bloodied paws. Her pads looked like they were burned off and he can do nothing but hold her and wrap her paws in the tattered remnants of his shirt. She whines a lot that night and she can’t even talk. She’s so tired she can hardly cry.
Sickness looms heavy over her and her normally heavy breathing is turned into wheezing sighs. She has to wake up a few times in the night to cough up blood and he wants so badly to know what they did, but he can’t ask because he doesn’t want her to try to articulate the torture. He wants to know what they did so he can find a way to properly take care of her. So that, when they get out of this hell hole, he can do the same ten times over to the scientists and the guards and everyone else even remotely involved.
He knows that vengeance does noting in the end. He knows that. But holding this little girl in his arms, he starts to wonder if it wasn’t the way to right things. What was that weird mumbo-jumbo alchemists always say?
Equivalent exchange.
Though, he thinks, it wouldn’t be very equivalent if those bastards were only tormented once. They deserved to rot in this cell for years, to be scared, to lose everyone they loved in one way or another.
And he knows that these thoughts aren’t going to help anyone. That he really shouldn’t do anything. That if they make it out of here, he should be the better man and leave them dumbfounded by his pacifism and benevolent nature. But that was never really his style.
Nina shuffles in his arms finally settled down into a thankfully peaceful sleep, and he questions what his style even is anymore.
Peaceful silence is interrupted by loud clamoring talk of “the mutts” as their overlords love to call them. He smells them before he can see them round the narrow corridor and their scent carries with them sulfur and fury and old blood.
Their barred door swings open with a loud bang that startles Nina out of her dream and Dolcetto just holds her tighter to his chest. He’s so fucking done with his girl coming back to him in pain. He can’t stand to hear her crying anymore. And he knows damn well that he shouldn’t fight them. That resistance is futile. That they can always put a bullet in his head if he becomes too big of a problem.
And he doesn't want to leave Nina. Not like he left Gracia. But instinct is overpowering him and he just wants to protect his pup. He wants her to get out of this hell hole. He wants to let her feel the grass on her paws and he wants to play hide-and-seek with her and he wants to teach her what it's like to run when you want to. He wants to make her food that will actually fill her up and he wants to make pillow forts with her. He wants her to laugh and play. He wants her to be a fucking kid.
He wants to get her out of here.
He needs to get her out of here.
And now he’s growling through sharp teeth. Setting Nina behind him as he threatens them with fang and with claw. Several startle and take a few steps back but many more stand their ground. Stupid fucking training to make them think that they have a chance. He tells his little girl to close her eyes and she obeys by laying down and covering her face in with her oversized paws.
He manages to catch one in the stomach and the man goes down with a scream. Bright crimson stains the cold concrete walls of the cell. Strong arms doing nothing to help his entrails repair. The scent of iron fills the room and he fells two others before a bullet tears through his shoulder and his arm left goes slack. It had to have been laced with something, he thinks as his knees stop working properly and he falls. He hits his face on the floor and there’s a sickening crack. His nose is broken, no doubt about that. He feels himself breathe in and choke on his own blood before barely remembering to turn his head to the side. The pain of his stomach being kicked barely registers and he can hear Nina rush him and ask if he’s okay but then she’s gone and everything goes black.
The small cell they put him is uncomfortable but somehow bearable. He can manage. He can survive, he knows that he can. His arm aches and he’s begun to fear that they’re going to let the wound become infected. Perhaps it will become festered off by the time they finally decide to amputate or give him any sort of antibiotic. But his arm… he doesn’t care all that much about a stupid limb at this point. Anxiety begins to eat away at his stomach when he begins to ponder the fate of his little girl. He wonders what happened to her. He wonders if she’s okay.
He tries not to wonder what they did to her because of him.
He sometimes asks the good doctors about her as they perform tests on him but they remain silent. Dolcetto caught something the other day about a guard being killed and he’s sure that it was the one hit in the abdomen but he’s not quite crazy enough to ask if his theory is correct.
Sometimes he howls into the darkness when they shut off the lights and when he can’t sleep which is often. He has too many questions about his little girl and too few answers. He hopes that someone will return his call, but no one ever does.
The tests swiftly become more rigorous and he’s finally placed in a chamber that’s below zero. When he returns to his cell riddled with frostbite and freezing lungs he does nothing to stop tears from pouring and his ceaseless howls sing of pain and loss and unabashed fear. He hits his wall but it’s no use.
Of course it’s no use.
The metal is uncaring as the bastards who run this place.
He thinks about Gracia a lot, but he thinks of Nina more. He misses her presence and he can’t sleep most nights without nightmares featuring her being harmed in some way. Whenever he wakes up from those dreams he can feel his body being weighed down with guilt. Whatever has happened to the best thing in here. The best thing in his life since he left home. Whatever happened to her is all his fault and he knows that.
He knows that he shouldn’t have done what he did. That he wasn’t thinking and that cost him. That cost her. He thinks about Nina and it’s like a major part of him is missing. He has a hard time not just trying to die. He thought about it sure, but Nina might still need him and he’s going to be here when she comes back for him.
He has to be strong for her.
And so he waits for her.
He waits.
He waits and it’s awful.
Surviving is more difficult than he can remember. He can feel his legs move, he can feel his arms soreness, he can feel oxygen filling his lungs, and yet he can’t bring himself to care. It just- it requires way too much energy. He needs that sort of fuel to eat, which is a challenge these days. And he knows that’s a bad sign but… there’s nothing he can do to change the way things are. He just eats what he can when he can and he tries not to get killed or injured too bad during his tests.
Those two things really shouldn’t be as difficult as they are
.
He comes back after tests with bruises and new scars and a lack of appetite. He shovels down his shitty food even though it makes his stomach churn. He does it but he can tell he’s been getting thinner. He tries to care. He really does.
He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he saw his girl. He honestly stopped keeping track of the days, the counting was starting to drive him up a wall. So it could have been a week later- or maybe it was a year- when he hears an explosion rip through the lab.
In the rubble, he can see broken bodies and glass and metal. He sees crimson leaking onto the floor and electricity from broken wiring crackles in the dark room. And towering above it, standing like a king above his palace, there’s a tall, dark man who could have been a demigod or a demon in a past life. Dolcetto didn’t care either which way about it because cradled in the man’s arms was his little girl.
The man must have been strong, he muses. His Nina isn’t light by any means.
The man gently set her down and barks orders to others behind him, still in the settling cloud of dust.
Nina can stand on her own and she even plods around the room, sniffing at crumbling cement here and there. She looks good, healthy even. Dolcetto can’t see any new scars marring her pale body and that fact releases a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. His heart soars and he’s so proud of his little girl for pulling through for him. “Nina!”
She twists towards the sound of his voice and then bounds towards him in that awkwardly adorable shifting gait of hers. She has to stick her face through the bars of his cell to see him properly and he lets her sniff his hands, not wanting to startle her. “D-dol?” She speaks softly, labored breath half ways catching.
He can feel himself start to cry. “Yeah, sweetheart it’s me.” He wraps his arms around her powerful neck. On her fur, he can smell rain and rubble. But he can’t pick up on any blood and he quickly thanks whatever god is out there for that fact.
“Y-you alright?”
He snuggles even closer to her, “I’m okay, kiddo, I’m okay.”
And for the first time in a long time, he feels like he actually is.