spin - part 2

[metisket]

Mustang and crew are huddled away in a house downtown that belongs to some absent friend of Hughes’s. Ed wonders if this friend knows they’re using his house. Well, whatever, it’s not Ed’s problem. He’s got a bigger problem, namely surviving this chat with Hawkeye.

“You broke what?” she demands. Her hand’s going for her holster, and, haha, Ed would feel a lot better if he thought she knew that.

“It was practically the only thing unpacked! The fuck is wrong with you anyway, what was with the boxes? Were you planning to go on the run?”

“I was really fond of that mirror, Edward,” she says.

“What th—it was just a mirror! It didn’t even have a frame! The hell?”

Oh, shit, now her trigger finger’s twitching. “You’ll buy me a new mirror. And it will be exactly the same as the old one, Edward.”

Hughes has the biggest, looniest grin Ed’s ever seen on his face. It’s not right that he’s dodging this bullet completely. He stood there and let Ed break the apparently precious fucking mirror, didn’t he?

“Fine. Same damn mirror. Or, hey, I’m an alchemist. Maybe I’ll fix the old one, how ‘bout that?”

“Exactly the same,” Hawkeye says again. She’s crossed her arms tight together now, like she’s trying not to shoot him. Sweet of her. Ed crosses his arms, too, and scowls, so they’re mirror images of each other. She is so weird. He told her he dumped out all her boxes and kicked her stuff all over the apartment, and did she care about that? No. The mirror that came with the place, though, that shit’s sacred.

He was so careful with her gun cleaning stuff, too. He moved it around, yeah, but he made sure not to so much as scratch anything. And is she grateful? Does she even fucking ask? No. Hell no. But the mirror, now.

“You’re a freak,” he informs her. She’s unimpressed.

“Wait, did you trash my place, too?” The Lieutenant Havoc guy, bordering on tearful.

“Yeah, obviously. We did all your places.”

The skinny guy, Falman, sinks down onto a chair, puts his head in his hands, and moans. Ed’s not surprised. Guy’s place was so neat it was creepy. It was a relief to trash it.

Ed killed a guy once who kept like hundreds of locks of hair in plastic baggies, all labeled with a name, date, and number from one to ten, whatever the fuck that meant. He had dozens of baggies of fingernails, too—not clippings, the whole fucking nail. And then he had some test tubes full of blood. All with the labels. Thing is, Ed might never have even found out about him, except he started going for eyeballs, and that, people got upset about.

And yet the fingernails, the blood, nobody found them worth mentioning? Fucking what?

Anyway, yeah, that guy. His house was freakishly neat, even smelled of hospital. It was really fucking stupid of Ed to chase him to his house. For one thing, it’s not smart to chase anything into its den, and for another, weird nightmares forever. Ed ended up killing the guy just to make the skin-crawly feeling go away.

Falman’s place brought all those happy memories back. Ed’s enthusiasm for trashing it was maybe a little over the top.

“I rescued your mother’s china, Havoc,” Hughes puts in after shooting Falman a pitying glance. Havoc slumps. Ed can’t tell if it’s a happy slump or a well, damn slump.

“You told him to break my clock, didn’t you?” Mustang accuses Hughes.

Hughes grins. “I didn’t tell him to…but apparently I’m not the only one who hated that clock.”

Mustang sighs. What, it was a precious fucking clock, too?

“Is there a point to me being here?” Ed snaps. “Or can I go do something with my time?” He’s got no interest in standing around listening to them bitch about their furniture all damn day. He could be talking to the Xing girl. He could be chasing a homunculus. He could be—

“Since we’re past the point of subtlety,” Mustang says, “we may as well try your plan, Elric.”

Havoc just about swallows his cigarette, and Ed gives him a sour look. Jackass doesn’t know enough about Ed’s planning skills to be panicking. What’s his problem?

“So what is Elric’s plan?” the fat guy—what’s his name? Breda?—asks, tossing a chess piece in the air and catching it over and over ‘til Ed wants to break his fingers. “Is it to charge out and kill everything that doesn’t look human?”

“How did you know?” Hughes murmurs. Raising himself in Ed’s estimation all the time. Asshole.

Breda catches the chess piece and stares at Hughes for a while. Then he turns to Ed, and finally to the ceiling.

“Huh.” He shrugs and starts tossing the chess piece again. “Guess I haven’t got any better ideas.”

Breda, unlike everybody else in the room, is not on Ed’s shit list. For one thing, his place was by far and away the easiest one to trash, on account of Breda’d trashed it long before Ed got there. Plus, he rolls with stuff, even when it gets weird. It’s nice.

“The sooner the better,” Mustang says like he even knows the meaning of hurrying. “Elric, do you know where any of the homunculi…live?”

“Gluttony’s been hanging around the train station, Ling says. Why?”

“Ling?” Hughes asks, stupidly surprised.

“Yeah,” Ed tells him. “Ling. I think you met the guy. What’s with the face?”

“I thought something terrible had happened to Ling Yao.”

“It did. He’s still alive, though, lucky him. We’ll see how long it lasts.”

Hughes is giving him that look, he fucking hates that look. It’s so stupid, they’re all gonna die in a minute, it’s too damn late for Hughes to be worrying about Ed’s lifestyle.

“Elric,” Mustang cuts in before Ed can say anything hateful. “I’d like you to take Havoc and Breda to the train station.”

“Holy shit,” Ed says, mouth pulling into a half-grin before he can stop it. “I get my own little team and everything? That’s so what the fuck. I could just go by myself, y’know. I mean, look at that guy, he’s gonna have a heart attack.”

Havoc. Seriously, he’s way too delicate for the military.

Mustang thinks so too, apparently, cuz he gives Havoc this disapproving glare. “Don’t worry about Lieutenant Havoc,” he tells Ed. “He’ll behave professionally.”

“Uh huh.” Poor bastard. “And what’re you gonna be doing while all this’s goin’ on? Sitting here bossing people around?”

“Depending on how this goes, I’ll take a team to Lab 3. Possibly as early as tomorrow.”

“You can’t take down that father guy without me,” Ed says. Not an argument, just a statement of fact.

“We’ll only be scouting, this first time,” Mustang tells him. “It’s wise to understand the lay of the land.”

Ed doesn’t actually agree with that so much. “I’ll go kill this guy, then we’ll talk.”

Mustang rolls his eyes.

* * *

Ed will say one thing for Ling: getting taken over by a homunculus was the best information-gathering move he ever made, even if it was fucking stupid by any other standard. Ask Ling for homunculi and ye shall receive.

“That’s him, huh?” Breda asks.

“That’s him.” Ed claps, transmutes his arm into a blade. Changes his mind, transmutes it back. Havoc’s giving him all panicky looks.

“Is that what I’m going to look like if I keep eating corned beef?” Breda mumbles to himself, horrified.

“Nah,” Ed tells him. “You’re gonna be more flabby.”

“Kid, I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to be a murderer and a brat at the same time. That’s gotta be too much of a good thing.”

“What’s your plan?” Havoc cuts in. “Do you really have a plan? Can you actually kill those things?”

“Can you stop asking me questions for ten goddamn seconds so I can get a word in edgewise?” Havoc stops talking. Miracle. “You go stand at the intersection on the north side. It’s empty cuz of all the construction; the slackers take like three hour lunch breaks. Me and Breda’ll drive him toward you, you distract him and trip him into that hole.”

“What’s the hole for?” Havoc asks. What is this, random spirit of inquiry?

“I dunno,” Ed says, kind of interested himself, now they’re talking about it. “Foundation? Quarry? Sewage tank? Anyway, once you get him in there, I’ll take care of him. Got it?”

“You make it sound easy,” Havoc said.

“Yeah? Good. Try not to fuck up and die, Mustang’ll get all pissed off.”

“Better move quick, Havoc,” Breda says. He whipped out a gun sometime when Ed wasn’t looking, which is creepy. Ed thought Hawkeye was the only one who could pull shit like that on him. “Because our boy here is about to do something…very…stupid.”

Havoc bolts off the roof faster than Ed thought he could move just as Breda shoots at the crane cable holding up a huge, metal I-beam. It takes a few shots, but he does manage to drop the beam right onto Gluttony’s head.

So it turns out that, like a lot of Mustang’s guys, Breda’s secretly kickass. Huh.

“You gonna move, brat, or you gonna sit there staring at me all day?”

Ed moves. And not a moment too soon, because Gluttony hoists himself up and heaves the I-beam at the roof just as Ed hits the ground.

There’s a lot of crashing. Breda yells. Ed hopes he didn’t figure out Breda was kickass just in time for him to die, because that’d be a waste.

Whatever. Worry about it later.

Havoc’s not half bad, either. He’s managed to distract Gluttony from going after Breda by getting himself chased instead. He turns to shoot Gluttony in the head every now and again with this look on his face like he just can’t believe that no matter how many times he shoots, it’s never gonna do any fucking good.

He gets Gluttony to chase him past the hole right around the time Ed gets there. Ed decides he’s a huge fan of Mustang’s team. He decides this right as Havoc trips like a spaz and falls on his face. Here I am, homunculus. Eat me.

Well, shit. At least the guy has lucky timing.

Ed claps and hits Gluttony from the side about a second before Gluttony grabs Havoc, knocking him down into the hole and landing on top of him. He tries to remember everything he’s worked out about breaking down Philosopher’s Stones.

It’s a little scary, this trick. The principle is basically to use your body as a ground, though it’s hopefully less fatal than doing it for electricity would be. But Ed’s never done this before, so while he’s got a pretty good handle on what ought to happen, he’s not so clear on what’s going to happen. So, yeah, scary.

That said, it looks really fucking cool.

Blue lightning. Red flashes. Gluttony dissolving like sand, all the way down to a skeleton, and then to nothing at all. The people that made up his stone go screaming through Ed, and Ed screams right back at them because fuck off, he’s doing them a favor here.

And then all of a sudden it’s over. No more screaming, no more power, no more homunculus. Ed falls down in the Gluttony-dust, feeling giddy and like he’s kind of still sparking inside, and he laughs, because, hell yes, it worked. That’s three homunculi down, plus Greed who doesn’t count. So far so good, yeah? Three to go. Watch out, assholes, I’m a fucking genius.

“Oh my God,” Havoc says. Gibbers. “You’re crazy. You are crazy.”

“Yeah,” Ed agrees, with a deranged giggle to prove the point. This should really not be news to anybody, but Havoc does give the impression of being kinda slow. Except when it counts.

“Holy shit, holy shit, what did you just…?”

“I think you’ll find I just saved your ass,” Ed mutters, heaving himself out of the hole. Why is he even answering these bullshit not-questions? Maybe it’s all the exposure to Hughes that’s making him soft. “The response you’re lookin’ for is, ‘Gee thanks, Mr. Demon Alchemist.’”

Havoc’s mouth is hanging open, and that is not a good look for anybody.

“You saved my life?”

“Seems that way.”

Havoc makes fish faces. “Uh.” More fish faces. “Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, really.” He’s pulling it together now, frowning and looking halfway intelligent. “Thank you. You didn’t have to—I mean, I’m nobody to you. So. Really, thanks.”

Ed hates it when people get all sincere and shit. How’re you meant to respond to that? It’s not like he’s such a dick that he’d stand there and let a homunculus eat somebody. “Whatever.”

Havoc fidgets, looks at his hands, looks back up. He’s working himself up to say something really idiotic, Ed can tell. Guy’s about as opaque as glass, and to think he works for Mustang. That just ain’t right.

“You’re still crazy, though,” is what he comes out with in the end, even though his face says he thinks Ed might kill him for it. “Crazy.”

“Everybody’s gotta have a talent,” Ed says. “We can’t all be Captain Obvious.”

Havoc nods. “You got that right,” he says, happy about it for some reason. “I’m serious about defending my title.”

Second Lieutenant Jean Havoc, huh? He’s a spaz, but it’s good he’s not dead.

“Come on, let’s get back to the Colonel before he freaks the fuck out.”

Havoc lights a cigarette and starts back the way they came. “Whatever you say, Crazy.”

Ed narrows his eyes at Havoc’s back and wonders if he thinks this cute little nickname will earn him any of Ed’s goodwill. He doesn’t look that stupid.

“Funny Breda hasn’t come to meet us,” Havoc says after a few steps.

“Oh, him. He might be dead,” Ed remembers.

Havoc freezes. “What?”

“Gluttony threw that I-beam right at him,” Ed says, picking up the pace as he thinks about it, leaving Havoc standing back there dithering. “Hurry the fuck up!”

Turns out Breda’s not dead, but he’s not great, either. The beam hit the roof and knocked a big hole in it, then brought down a ton of shingles and snapped the roof off at the eaves. And you’d think Breda would’ve landed on top of all that, but it looks like it all managed to land on top of him instead.

Ed checks enough to get a general impression of a fuck ton of blood and a whole bunch of tourniquets. No bones poking out anywhere, at least. At that point, he figures he can’t do anything useful, so he stops looking. Breda’s still conscious, so hey, it can’t be as bad as it seems.

Havoc, though, has to get down on his knees and start tugging at tourniquets like that’ll do any damn good. People are weird.

“I told you not to fuck up and die,” Ed reminds Breda.

Breda squints up at him. “I did it,” he gasps, “to piss you off.”

“Yeah? Well, it worked, jackass.” Ed starts backing away toward the nearest phone. “So you know who I’m gonna go call? Hawkeye.”

“You wouldn’t,” Breda wheezes.

“Oh yeah. Tell her you can’t even duck right.”

“Brat.”

* * *

Bringing Breda back has basically the same effect as kicking an ant’s nest. Everybody panics and runs in circles. In the end, they all flee to a new hidey hole (how many of these places does Hughes have?) and call in Knox. Knox mutters and swears and bitches at Ed and Breda both, but eventually announces that Breda’s fine.

Which is to say, he’s fine considering a building fell on him. Not the same as being honestly fine. He’s not gonna die, which is good, sure. But it’ll take him months to get over this.

He’s out of the game. And that’d be bad enough in itself, seeing as they weren’t playing with many pieces, but Breda’s also way more than just a piece to Mustang. Mustang is, yeah, freaking the fuck out. Storming around the place snarling out orders and brooding and looking like he might set shit on fire for the hell of it. There’s no talking to the guy.

Given the dead-inside face Mustang’s making over Breda, Ed has to wonder how he looked when they found Ed after the whole Wrath debacle. Did Ed rate the dead-inside face?

He hopes not.

Once the Breda crisis winds down, Hughes catches Ed up on everything. He says Sloth showed up at HQ around the same time Breda was failing to duck. Apparently the general Armstrong and her people and some Ishbalans and two random Xingians in black took him down. Hughes says a bunch of people died in the process, which means Ed wins the fewest maimed minions contest. Pat yourself on the back, Elric.

Hughes gets this accusing look when he mentions the Ishbalans and the Xingians, like he thinks Ed knows something. Suspicious fucker. It’s somehow more irritating that he’s not wrong: Ed does know something. In fact, Ed wrote Kael a letter laying out the apocalyptic facts. He’s spent way too much time with Mustang, see, and he’s starting to think stuff like…maybe it’d be nice if the good citizens of Central saw Ishbalans kicking monster ass on their behalf.

Then, for insurance, he mentioned to Lan Fan that the faster they kill off the homunculi, the faster she can drag her idiot prince home.

But there’s no way for Hughes to know all that, so he’s got no right to be giving Ed that look.

Hughes eventually finishes with the accusing looks and gets around to mentioning that the whole team’s going to the lab tomorrow. He says, “We’re running out of time.”

Yeah. Running out of time and people. In view of which, throwing a whole herd of people at the same old problem doesn’t seem very bright to Ed. But there’s no talking to Mustang right now.

“You’re staying here,” Ed tells Hughes.

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Why? What why? Isn’t this the guy who, just a few months ago, refused point blank to get involved in anything that smacked of alchemy? What happened to that? “Because I fucking said so. What if we all get killed, huh?”

“Then Fuery will take over.”

They both look at Fuery, who’s huddled in the corner like somebody’s pet mouse, connected to a hundred different wires, doing mysterious wire-related things. Everybody’s got their gifts, yeah? But Fuery’s is for sure not orchestrating the overthrow of an evil inhuman nutjob.

“You’re staying here,” Ed says again.

Hughes sighs. “Roy said the same thing,” he admits. Which might’ve been nice to know before Ed got all worked up about it. Bastard.

* * *

In the end, they leave Hughes, Fuery, and Falman behind. Fuery and Falman because they’re better at collecting data than they are at killing people. Hughes because Ed and Mustang threatened to tie him to a chair.

Mustang and Havoc sneak into the lab first. They say it’s to get the lay of the land. Ed thinks it’s cuz they’re tired of him looking like the cool one all the time. They’re meant to check in with Ed and Hawkeye every five minutes, and they do. Twice.

“I’ll follow them,” Hawkeye says after they’ve missed the third check, calm like always, making sure all her weapons are loaded and functional. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, please call Lieutenant Colonel Hughes.”

“And then I’ll come in after you.”

“Of course.”

Hawkeye kind of rocks. Right after they first met, she cornered him for a talk. Weird from the start, cuz people don’t normally want to get Ed alone. And the first words out of her mouth were: “If you harm him in any way, I will kill you.”

Straightforward, no fucking around. Why can’t everybody be like that?

Ed said he wouldn’t hurt Mustang as long as the guy didn’t do anything unforgivable. She said, all fierce and demented, that it was her job to kill Mustang if he did something unforgivable, not Ed’s. She stared him down ‘til he agreed, it was kinda terrifying. Then they had a surreal chat about killing people, which, again, is not a thing people generally want to talk to Ed about.

She said, I like to kill them from far away so I can forget about it later. He said, I like to kill them with my hands so I can never forget about it. And she smiled at him.

She is one strange lady. Awesome, though. Anyway, they’ve been cool ever since.

“Gotcha,” he says. “Twenty.”

She looks at him like she doubts he’s capable of tying his shoes, let alone keeping track of time. He’s not bothered, though—she looks at everybody like that. “Try not to kill or otherwise damage yourself,” she says, and takes off.

Maybe sometimes, maybe just a little, Hawkeye reminds him of Al. Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he hates it, sometimes it scares the shit out of him. It definitely makes him want to hang around with her, which is obviously gonna end badly.

Well, it’ll end badly unless they all die this month, in which case it won’t get a chance.

So yeah, Hawkeye. She may be awesome in many ways, but Ed’s pretty sure her internal clock isn’t perfect. That’s why he calls Hughes five minutes early. Who’s seriously gonna notice the difference between fifteen minutes and twenty? Nobody.

“Wait until I get there,” Hughes says.

“Sure,” Ed tells him. Haha, yeah right, like there’s any fuckin’ way. Hughes must be tired or something, though, cuz he lets it slide.

It doesn’t take Ed long to catch up to the circus. He thought it was gonna be tough, right, cuz those labs are like mazes. But it turns out all he has to do is follow the charred meat smell and the screaming, and bam, there they are. Convenient.

Mustang’s standing over the pile of dirt and ash that probably used to be a homunculus, and Ed has to hand it to him, he looks pretty fuckin’ scary. The Flame Alchemist, huh? So this is him in action.

Ed knew he was right to like the guy.

“Yo, Mustang,” he calls out. “Maybe if you’d gotten your ass away from your desk and started helping me kill these fuckers a few months ago, we wouldn’t be in the shit like this. The hell are you so slow?”

Mustang gives him a dirty look, and hey, maybe things aren’t gonna turn out as bad as Ed thought.

Then Mustang’s eyes roll back in his head and he passes out on the floor, and that’s when Ed sees Hawkeye crumpled on the ground behind him. And notices that Havoc’s nowhere in sight.

Maybe things are gonna turn out exactly the way Ed thought. Optimism: it was good while it lasted.

* * *

Ed’s first encounter with Mustang wasn’t quite as smooth as the one with Hawkeye. In fact, you could say the whole getting-to-know-Mustang process was a fucking disaster. Mustang has no idea.

The truth about how Ed met Colonel Roy Mustang is, he heard about him from the Ishbalans.

The truth is, he’d been planning on killing him.

It’s not like he just kills people on somebody else’s say-so—fuck what other people think, he only believes what he sees himself—but he’d heard the bad news on Mustang from a lot of people. Mustang and Kimbley, those were the names that got tossed around. The guy who burned people to death by the hundreds, and the guy who blew up little kids and laughed.

He would’ve gone for Kimbley first, but the fucker was in jail; it was too much trouble for too little gain. That left Mustang.

Even with people insisting Mustang was evil in a uniform, the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with the military, Ed still wanted to check him out. Maybe he wouldn’t give him as much leeway as he would other people, but he wasn’t gonna whack the guy on sight, either.

Then he did see him, and everything he’d thought got thrown out, because this was the guy who’d come to pick Ed and Al up back when. Ed had only seen him through the window, but he had a memorable face. This was the guy who’d let Granny Pinako cold-shoulder him without a whimper, who’d let Winry punch him and yell at him and cry on him.

Here’s a thing that’s true: guys who are pure evil don’t let little girls cry on them. They just don’t.

He might still be kind of evil, though.

Ed decided he should watch for a while before he did anything he couldn’t take back.

He was thirteen then, just about, and looking back on it now, the way he stalked Mustang all over East for three months with mild intent to kill was…yeah, pretty freaking creepy. He didn’t think so at the time, obviously. At the time, he’d just thought he was doing great research.

So he was a weird kid. Shit. He still is a weird kid.

He doesn’t regret it, though, because this is how he met Madame Christmas, and she is an awesome lady to know.

Mustang tended to go out every night with one of a handful of women, and thirteen-year-old Ed thought that was disgusting, but hell, it wasn’t a killing offense. Other than that, Mustang’s life was so monotonously predictable, the wonder of it was that the guy hadn’t offed himself.

One night, maybe it was around month two, a woman dropped Roy off at home, which wasn’t the normal pattern. She was a semi-regular; Ed had seen her a few times. She was probably the prettiest, but also the dumbest-looking.

Which was why it was such a shock when she turned right to Ed, dropped the vapid look like she’d never worn it, and snapped, “What do you want with him?” And damn, she sounded just like Winry.

“I don’t want shit from any of you,” Ed told her, and bolted. But the woman was persistent. Really persistent, a little scary, and definitely a bully. Her name was Vanessa.

She reminded him of Winry a lot.

Vanessa grilled him on his motives and made him call Madame Christmas. Chris told him to get off his ass and go talk to some of the guys who’d served with Mustang in Ishbal. “Don’t you want both sides of the story?” she asked. “Or have you adopted the military’s policy of considering only the evidence you like?”

Burn, right?

Turned out, all the guys who served with Mustang thought he was mercy in uniform, the best damn thing that ever happened to the military.

It was like one of those pictures where you look at it one way, it’s a vase, you look at it the other way, it’s people’s faces. Those pictures drive Ed batshit, actually, because what the hell are they? No, seriously. What?

So what Ed knew about Mustang was nothing, and he really needed to look at this guy his own way. He had to see for himself, up close and personal, enough with the tailing.

He killed a rapist and hung around to see who cleaned up. He knew it’d be Mustang—guy must’ve pissed off some fat general or something, cuz he always seemed to pull the crap jobs. And what with the Winry crying thing, his hanging around with Vanessa, and just the fact that he knew Chris (Ed didn’t know Chris’s last name back then), Ed figured Mustang wasn’t likely to have any sympathy for rapists. Turned out Ed was right.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to jump down on the guy from a height, but, you know. He’d wanted to make a good first impression. Or at least a big first impression.

What Ed hadn’t known then, and what he knows now, is that if Hawkeye’d been there that night, Ed wouldn’t have lived to see fourteen. Small favors?

Mustang turned out to be surprisingly fun to scare the shit out of. Besides that, whatever he’d done in Ishbal, Ed could see he wasn’t a bad guy. He was trying to make up for it, even though he knew full fucking well that making up for it was impossible. Ed felt that.

And then too, when Mustang figured out who Ed was…just for a second, he looked sick.

It was the closest anyone had come to caring about Ed since he left Rizembool, and even though that was all his own fault, even though he totally didn’t deserve to have people caring about him…hell, he was weak. He wanted someone around who gave a shit whether he lived or died.

So he stayed.

* * *

“I hate being at the mercy of doctors,” Mustang gripes like a little kid. They’ve relocated again (holy fucking shit, Hughes), this time to some shack on the outskirts of Central. And they’ve dragged Knox along with them, although he bolts home whenever they let him.

“I hate visiting sick people,” Ed points out, “but you don’t see me bitching about it until everybody wants to smother me with a pillow.”

“No one is forcing you to be here.”

“Actually, someone is, in that way where Hughes blinded me with glasses glare and talked at me until I ran here just to get away.”

This is so much bullshit. Hughes has been calling people, checking facts, and prying into classified files by proxy at a dead run ever since it all went down. He hasn’t had time to hassle Ed. Mustang’s been asleep for a while, though, so he can’t know that, and Hawkeye and Havoc won’t tattle: it’s not their way. Besides, they’re smirking, so they must think the idea’s funny. Ed figured they would.

Havoc’s a mess. Ed doesn’t really get it, but apparently Lust (who turns out to be the homunculus Mustang nailed) punctured him with her stabby fingers, so Mustang thought it would be a good idea to set all three of them on fire.

Yeah. Who the fuck knows? Military freaks.

Havoc can’t be too down about it, though, cuz Hughes says he’s been fighting with Mustang nonstop ever since they got stuck in a room together. Ed didn’t know the guy had it in him; he’s proud. But when Ed’s around, Havoc sits back and lets the pro handle it, which is only right.

There’s a weird undercurrent in the room, something going on with these guys that Ed doesn’t know about. It’s not like he wants to know, it’s just…weird. To be here and not know when everybody else obviously does. Whatever. They’re not being weird at Ed, so it should be fine.

“Duty done, then,” Mustang’s muttering resentfully. “You can go away now and leave me in peace.”

“I’ve only been here five minutes,” Ed points out. “I trucked all the way out here. You better make it worth my while.”

“How? I’m hardly up for a performance, Ed.”

Ed’s breath stops even as he tells himself he’s being an idiot. This isn’t important. He knows it isn’t important; names are never as big a deal to anybody else as they are to him, he knows that.

Breathe, you idiot.

But to him, when you say someone’s name…you’re claiming them. You’re saying, I know you, I take responsibility for you, you’re one of mine. At least, that’s what Ed means when he says people’s names. Which is why he doesn’t, generally.

He’s pretty sure he picked up this particular gem of crazy from the Ishbalans. Clearly he hadn’t gotten enough screwball customs from his own culture, so he’d had to go looking farther afield.

He knows nobody but the Ishbalans are with him on this, and so whatever anybody else calls him, it doesn’t mean much of anything, not to them, not to him. Or it shouldn’t. But this is Mustang, this is Mustang calling him Ed, and his face says he knows what that means, and it’s bullshit. He can’t be doing this now.

“Speaking of health, though,” Mustang says, watching Ed close like a predator, “I did mean to ask you how you go about recuperating from injuries.”

He is not doing this.

“I’d like to be back on my feet as soon as possible, and your recovery time is always…uncanny.” Ed can see Hawkeye turn suddenly out of the corner of his eye, but he hasn’t got enough spare brain power to wonder what that means. “What’s your secret?” Mustang asks.

He knows, he knows, he knows. How the fuck does he know? And now it’s a big stupid game of I know that you know that I know, and Ed’s going to lose for sure. Hell, he’s lost already.

If Mustang knows about the name thing—and he’s sure acting like he does—and if he knows what Ed’s up to—he obviously does—then what he just said was you’re one of mine. And what he said after that was, you wouldn’t do to me what you’re doing to yourself.

The only thing that ever made this healing trick okay was that no one who cared about Ed knew he was doing it. He knows how much you can hurt people who like you by hurting yourself. He’s a goddamn expert on it. And Mustang’s such a moron that he does like Ed.

Part of him wants to fly off the handle at Mustang for messing with him like this, but hell, part of him always wants to fly off the handle. He doesn’t have any right. This is fair. He doesn’t have any right, and he can’t, he can’t clap.

“What do you want me to say?” he rasps out.

“Nothing,” Mustang says. “I want you to stop.”

Goddamn Mustang, who asked him to care about Ed, anyway? Nobody asked him, and it doesn’t make sense. Ed should be none of his business, Ed should be on his own, nobody asked him…

You asked him, brother.

I know that, Al, shut up.

Ed was the one who lurked around East forever making a spectacle of himself, might as well’ve been shouting look at me—shit, he practically did ask him, how pathetic. And it doesn’t have to make sense, that’s not how this works. Mustang is sitting there pale and wild-eyed with third fucking degree burns while the country combusts, and he’s telling Ed to take care of himself. No, there’s no logic here.

Ed turns to Hawkeye without much thinking about it, a help me out reflex thing. She’s staring at him, probably trying to tell him something, but he can’t figure what. She’s never been as easy to read as Mustang. Still, Ed may not know what she’s trying to say, but something about her…yeah, Ed’s pretty sure Mustang already had this same basic talk with her. Don’t go off and kill yourself, minion. For some reason, that makes the whole thing less…what? Weird, irritating, embarrassing?

“I’ll stop,” he says. Mustang nods at him, Hawkeye smiles a little.

Ed’s suddenly pretty sure he just got played.

“I have no idea what you two are talking about,” Havoc observes, idly interested. “But the part where it looked like Crazy was gonna rip your throat out was exciting.”

“If I’d known saving your life was going to make you insubordinate,” Mustang snipes back, “I would have let you bleed out.”

Ed did promise, though. He can’t take it back now even if Hawkeye is laughing at him.

“You call this saving my life? Ruining my life is more like it. I’m never gonna get a date like this. It would’ve served you right if Crazy bit you.”

“He wasn’t going to bite me. And more importantly, you’re raising ingratitude to an art form!”

Besides, they’d played him for his own good. He has no clue how you’re supposed to act about that. Everybody who did things for him before—they were pretty direct about it. Teacher, Winry, Al, Mom. If they were doing things for his benefit, they told him so, and then generally followed it up with a punch or a wrench or a knife.

But mind games are Mustang’s weapon of choice. Is this basically the same as Winry throwing a wrench at him?

“Ah, and here you all are!” Hughes says happily from the doorway like it’s a surprise. “I brought presents!” He whips out a stack of reports.

Military. Freaks.

“Edward,” Hawkeye calls softly, as Hughes makes fun of Mustang and Havoc bitches about how Knox won’t let him smoke. Ed heads over to her. “How were you healing yourself?”

Huh. Weird that Hawkeye’s asking this when he already said he’d stop. “What do you care?”

“I only have a theoretical understanding of alchemy,” she says, which is Hawkeye-speak for stop asking me stupid fucking questions. Ed respects that.

“There’s….” He stops and checks behind him. Sure, Mustang’s pretty much guessed what he was up to, but there’s a difference between being pretty sure and knowing, and Ed doesn’t feel like seeing his face if he knows. But he’s still arguing with Hughes about something and they look like they could go on all day, so it’s probably safe. He turns back to Hawkeye, who’s raised an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, okay, sorry for doubting your sneakiness,” he mutters, and she smiles. “Same idea as the Philosopher’s Stone. Difference is, I was using my life, not somebody else’s.”

She blinks, and he can see her working through the implications of that. She scowls at him.

“Shut up,” he whispers. “Like you can talk.”

“Would it work on me?”

Ed’s mind totally blanks out for a second, but of course it doesn’t do him a favor and stay that way. Hawkeye wants him to transmute her better, but he knows how Hawkeye feels about alchemy. She hates it. So if she wants him to transmute her better, then…

Then she’s fucking dying.

“Whoa, what? You look fine!” he hisses. This is no time for Mustang to be overhearing them; he’d flip his shit for sure.

“For now,” she says calmly, quietly. “But not for long. Medicine never seems to progress as quickly as weaponry in Amestris. I seem to have an infection. Dr. Knox doesn’t think I’m going to survive.”

“Fuck!”

“Quiet!” she snaps, checking behind him. Luckily, Hughes is crazy loud. “Will it work or won’t it?”

“On an infection? I don’t fucking know, Hawkeye, cuz I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Usually I just patch up holes, okay? It’s not like I’m a goddamn doctor, I kill people for a living.”

“Will you try?”

Will he try? Shit, he doesn’t even know where he’d start. When he maims himself, it’s pretty straightforward—if there’s a hole where there shouldn’t be, he fills it in. Veins connect to veins, arteries to arteries. Wrath did him the favor of not actually cutting through his intestines that time, thanks for that. Organs are a bitch, but as long as they don’t get his heart, he figures he should be fine. (If they ever do get his heart, he’s fucked, because that shit gets serious way too fast). But infection? He’d have to know what’s supposed to be there and what isn’t, he’d have to figure out how to clear bad stuff out without taking the good stuff—and there is good bacteria, he remembers that much. Shit, shit. He knows a hundred ways to kill a person organized into ten distinct degrees of painful, but only the most basic first aid. And if that doesn’t say it all. If he had Winry here—no, hell, if he had Knox—

Hang on. He does have Knox.

“How long do they think you got?”

“Not as long as I’d like.”

And he thought he was good at slithering around questions. “I gotta talk to somebody. I’ll know tomorrow.”

Hawkeye nods, still calm. “If I die,” she says like it’s nothing, “someone will need to look after the Colonel.”

“Yeah, and you’re telling me this why?”

She shoots him an eloquent look.

“No, Hawkeye. No. No fucking way, you can’t be serious, this is—”

“Breathe.”

“Shut up, you’re crazy, you’re insane—”

“‘Like you can talk,’” she quotes back at him, which is totally cheating. Hawkeye cheats. “Promise me you’ll look after the Colonel.”

“I’m not promising you shit—”

“If I die, you’ll feel like you owe me, won’t you? Do this, and we’ll be even. Promise me.”

Ed closes his eyes and thinks about how Hawkeye really is the evilest jerk he’s ever met, and damn, she reminds him of Al. “Fine. Fuck you. I promise.”

“What are you two talking about?” Mustang asks suspiciously. Ed gives him a look, then turns back to Hawkeye in time to see that she’s giving him pretty much the same look.

“Uh oh. Looks like they have joined forces, Roy,” Hughes says, cheerful and nuts as always. “Hobble for your life.”

* * *

“Oh, wonderful. It’s you.”

Knox drags him inside, leans out to cast a paranoid glance up and down the street, then slams the door shut.

“When I said, ‘Never darken my doorstep again,’” he hisses, “what did you think I meant by that?”

Ed shrugs and grins.

“Stop with that face or I swear to God I’ll throw you out into the street.”

Ed freaking loves his scar. When he got it, he sat in front of a piece of mirror for like an hour, testing out how it made even totally sweet expressions look psychotic. The scar is awesome.

“I got a question,” he says. “Kind of urgent. You’re totally tainted by association anyway, who’re you kidding?”

“Elric,” Knox sighs, pulling him further into the house and turning him to face left. “This is my son.”

Holy shit, Knox has a kid.

Well, kid, hell. He’s probably got ten years on Ed. But he’s so fucking normal. And you look at Knox—he’s obviously done a lot of bad shit and seen even worse. Burned out and burned down, just like Mustang and Hawkeye and Hughes. And Ed. But this guy, the son, he’s got a face like he’s never seen a bad thing.

Knox protected him. How the hell did he manage that?

“Pleased to meet you…Elric?” The son holds out his hand.

Ed turns to Knox. “I wouldn’t have come.” It’s for some reason really important that Knox understand this. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have.”

The son’s hand drops awkwardly. Let him be awkward—he doesn’t know what he’s asking for.

“You wouldn’t have come?” Knox asks, arms folded, stubborn chin jutting. He’s such a belligerent bastard. “Why not?”

Ed seriously considers saying because I have maggots for blood to see what Knox would do. He restrains himself, though. Hey, check it out, he does have some self-control. Up yours, Mustang. “Because you’ve got family here, asshole. Look, just answer my question and I’ll get out, stop darkening your doorstep, whatever.”

Knox sighs and rubs at his forehead. “I see what Hughes meant,” he says. Being cryptic on purpose. Fucker.

“You gonna answer my question or not?”

“Should I leave?” asks the son.

“No, dipshit, this is your dad’s goddamn house,” Ed cuts in before Knox can say anything stupid. “If you want me out, I’ll go, but you shouldn’t be going anywhere—this is so fucked up. What’re you supposed to do for infection?”

“You have an infection?” Knox asks, alarmed. Once a patient, always a patient?

Ed says, “No,” and leaves it at that, because it shouldn’t freaking matter whose infection it is. Why is everybody so goddamn nosy?

“Is it a kid?” Knox goes on. “Did you pick up another stray?”

“I don’t pick up fucking strays, what the—look, are you gonna answer or am I gonna leave?”

“Then it’s Havoc? No, he would’ve told me. Mustang? No. It’s Hawkeye, isn’t it? What are you two up to? If you kill my patient—”

“If you’d fuckin’ talk to me, I wouldn’t kill your damn patient!”

“It was my understanding that Amestrian alchemy was mostly good for blowing things up. Was I mistaken? Is our alchemy actually a healing thing of beauty? Do tell.”

“Fuck you, this wasn’t—” Ed closes his eyes and rubs them for a second before he realizes that probably makes him look upset and shit. He drops his hands and glares. “Look, just, back to theory. How do you take care of a basic infection? Like, what do you kill? How do antibiotics know what to kill?”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this, kid,” Knox says.

“Antibiotics don’t, um, ‘know what to kill,’” the son pipes up. Halleluiah, another country heard from. “They inhibit processes the bacteria need to survive.”

“Yeah?” Ed says, mildly interested. “And that’s not working why?”

“Hypothetically?” Knox asks like the bad-tempered shit he is.

“In one more minute, asshole, I am gonna tell your son about that time you tied me to your bed.”

“What!?”

“It was medical!”

“What?”

Brother!

Ed thinks hanging around with Chris has probably killed the few social skills he once had. It’s not his fault she’s got an infectious sense of humor.

Speaking of infection. “Antibiotics aren’t working why?” he repeats impatiently.

“Sometimes antibiotics just can’t do enough, young doctor-assassin,” Knox tells him. “Since we’re clearly talking about Hawkeye, I’ll tell you that I’m not sure what her problem is. But if she’s really, really unlucky, she’s got peritonitis.”

“What happens when you get that?”

“Secondary peritonitis, presenting this late? Generally speaking, you die.”

“What do you do about it, jackass? I’m guessing you don’t stand around and weep.”

“It sounds like it would take surgery at this point,” the son says. Clearly Ed should have walked in, abducted the son, and interrogated him in private. Fucking Knox. “But if the patient—”

“Don’t encourage him, son,” Knox snaps. “What you need to understand, kid, is that if you try any idiotic theories out on my patient, I will hamstring you.”

“So I’ll just sit back and watch you let her die,” Ed says.

It was not, he reflects later from his position on his ass on the sidewalk, the most diplomatic comment he could’ve come out with.

You gotta respect the guy’s balls, though. Last person who violently threw Ed out a door was Izumi Curtis.

Ed stands up and brushes himself off. He passes under the open window (‘Dad, was he a patient? Did you help him before?’ ‘That kid is beyond help’) and out into the street, and he thinks, Well. The good news is we all die someday anyway.

Hawkeye’s ahead of her game, is all.

* * *

It takes Ed a few days to get back to the safe house. He figures since Hawkeye’s pretty much fucked and there’s nothing he can do about it, he might as well take the time to check in with Greed. Greed, maybe not surprisingly, freaks out about Ed going off and almost getting murdered—and with Mustang’s crew, what a traitor.

Takes Ed ten minutes flat to convince Greed he’s just buttering Mustang up to eventually be Greed’s minion. Ed can’t believe that actually worked. For a guy who wants to rule the world, Greed’s surprisingly dumb. (Or maybe you have to be dumb to want to rule the world. Mustang.)

Whatever, Ling is so gonna win the fight for that body, it’s not even funny.

When Ed does get back to the safe house, he finds it all quiet and Havocless. Hawkeye says Havoc’s way more broken than they thought, like as in he can’t fucking walk. So he’s out of the game, too. She says Havoc’s mom came and dragged him home, which must’ve been some show. Mustang, meanwhile, has Knox’s permission to stagger around outside a little; that’s where he is. So for now it’s just Ed and Hawkeye.

“I’ve been reading a ton of stuff on peritonitis,” Ed tells her, arms folded, scowling. “And expert medical opinion is that you should really try not to get stabbed in the gut, because that way, right, you probably won’t get it. You fail, Hawkeye. Come on, let’s see the damage.”

“I’m not sure that would be proper,” Hawkeye says, and Ed honestly can’t tell if she’s messing with him or not.

“Yeah, you know me,” says Ed. “I get all hot and bothered by older women who’re rotting on the inside.” Broken bottles. “Show me.”

“Hm,” she says, and pulls her shirt up over her stomach. Mostly there’s not much to see but bandages, but it gives him a feel for where the jab through the gut is, and the slice along the ribs. Once he’s taken that in, she tugs the shirt down a little and he can see she got nailed through her right shoulder, too. Those spear fingers had a hell of a range.

“You right-handed?”

She nods, and demonstrates, now he’s paying attention, that she can’t even make a fist.

“Gonna be a real bitch to learn to shoot with your off hand,” Ed mutters. He has no idea why that makes her smile. Well, maybe because she thinks gut rot is the pressing problem and everything else is just funny.

“It’ll take some time,” she allows. “You’ll look after the Colonel in the meantime.”

“I will, huh?”

“I was tired of waiting for you to find a purpose.”

She was tired of waiting, so she just assigned him purpose. That is so totally her. Bossy.

And the sad fact is that if she’d just do everybody a favor and not die, Ed would trail around after Mustang like a dog forever if she asked. Not that he’s gonna come out and admit that, but. Yeah. He would.

Equivalent exchange, right? Ha ha, fuck.

“You better relearn to shoot fast, because if it goes on too long, I’ll kill him myself.”

“You promised,” she says, which is a pretty shitty thing to point out.

“Lift your shirt again,” he orders, ignoring her.

“…All right.” She looks amused like the wacko she is.

Sometimes it seems like everybody Ed knows is crazy. Maybe like attracts like. Then again, maybe it’s just that everybody’s crazy, you know, in the world. That would explain a lot.

Hawkeye hoists her shirt up again, and he touches the edge of the bandages. She better not be hot to the touch, because if she is, then she’s a dead woman, as far as Ed can tell. He doesn’t know what he thinks his research is gonna accomplish. It’s not like Knox is wrong. All Ed’s good for is killing people.

She seems normal temperature. But hell, does an infection of the innards even make it to the skin? Ed has no fucking clue. He stares at the stumps of his fingers against her bandages. They are both unbelievable morons. “Look, if you’re leaning on me for this, you’re fucked for sure. You know that, right? Because asking a murderer to heal you is the stupidest thing I ever heard and I have heard some stupid things.”

“Calm down, Edward.”

“Easy for you to say! If this goes to shit, you’ll be dead, so what’ll you care?”

“Well, I won’t care. I’ll be relieved of all cares. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Ha fucking ha. Asshole.”

Mustang chooses this moment to hobble in, because he’s that kind of guy. Ed realizes he’s blatantly standing there with a hand up Hawkeye’s shirt, and despite the fact that they were in the middle of a totally depressing conversation, he has to grin.

“Wow,” he says. “Awkward.” He pulls the hand back and refuses to let himself laugh hysterically. Or to look at Hawkeye, whose expression will definitely make him laugh hysterically. “Same time tomorrow?” he asks, glancing sideways at her so he can’t really see her face.

“Always a pleasure, Edward,” she answers, voice dry.

Ed bites savagely down on his lip and saunters past Mustang with a little wave. They’re a good team, him and Hawkeye. Not just anybody can stun Mustang into silence.

This is why Hawkeye can’t die. She can’t. That’s all there is to it. They’ll figure something out.

He wishes he knew where the Xing girl went off to.

* * *

The problem with looking for the Xing girl is, he’s got no idea where to even start. When you’re looking for serial killers, you start with places that cater to their, whatever, weird obsessions. When you’re looking for a little girl who doesn’t seem to have an obsession (or at least, not one people can make money off of), then fuck, Ed has no idea what you do. Put up a missing poster?

The longer he looks, the more this seems like a fucking waste of time. Ed knows what death looks like, and Hawkeye looks like death. He should be cutting her loose and getting used to the idea of not having her around. Spare himself some pain later.

Except he never has known when to quit.

“Ed! Where are you headed on this fine, sunny day?”

You have to hand it to Hughes, his timing’s so bad it’s almost superhuman. “Fuck off.”

“Now, now, don’t be like that. I saw you going for a stroll and I thought to myself, what a nice day for a stroll!”

Ed sighs and tries to control a twitch (no dice). He keeps walking and Hughes trots along beside him, talking nineteen to the dozen about random shit Ed doesn’t bother tuning in to. He always talks about the same crap anyway: his kid, his wife, overthrowing the government. Whatever.

No little Xing girl here, there, or anywhere, but as they get to the downtown, the streets are all blocked on account of Civil Unrest. The good people of Central may not have the staying power for a proper riot, but goddamn, they will hang around in the street and bitch ‘til hell won’t have it.

Ed looks up. It’ll probably be easier to go by roof than to go around. That’ll get him to the slums on the west side, which may or may not be where the Xing girl is. Who the fuck knows? Worth a shot. He starts to climb.

“Rooftops, Ed?” Hughes whines. “Do we have to?”

“You don’t have to do shit. I’m going by rooftop.”

Hughes grumbles to himself but climbs up anyway. Ed does not get Hughes at all. Like, not at all. The fuck’s he thinking, following Ed around? It’s not like it hasn’t burned him before, the idiot.

Except he’s not an idiot, not really. That’s the puzzling thing.

“I’m happy you and Lieutenant Hawkeye are friends,” Hughes announces out of nowhere once they’re on the roof and he’s gotten his breath back. This could mean a lot of things, depending on whether or not he’s talked to Mustang lately. He could be serious. He could be fucking with Ed. Impossible to say.

“Shut up.” Always a safe response with Hughes, and there’s the vague possibility it’ll work. It does every once in a while.

Ed doesn’t want to talk about Hawkeye when she’s dying and he’s not doing a thing to stop it. On top of the shitty timing, Hughes has a real sixth sense for Topics Ed Doesn’t Want to Touch.

“I can almost understand the appeal,” Hughes is saying, thoughtful. “You’re both so talkative, you must talk constantly when you’re together. No one else could put up with the din.”

He thinks he’s funny. Great. “You got it. How’d you know?”

He answers, but Ed’s not listening. There’s somebody down on the sidewalk, a guy, not the Xing girl. Ed isn’t especially on the lookout for any men right now, but something about this one, something…

Blond guy. Very familiar blond. And even from above, those shoulders, that walk…

The man squints up at the sun for a second, giving Ed a good look at his face. Ed claps before his conscious mind has a chance to register what he’s seeing.

“That man looks enough like you to be related,” Hughes whispers. “Closely related. God, Ed, please tell me you didn’t just take one look at your father and transmute your arm into a weapon.”

Ed doesn’t get why Hughes is so into denying obvious reality.

“My father is a dick,” he says. “And he’s up to something. What the hell’s he doing in Central now? Fucker burned through any benefit of the doubt I might’ve given him years ago.”

“Ed, for the sake of my sanity, please talk to him before you attack him. Please. Do it for me as a member of the League of Fathers.”

Ed considers ignoring that, but despite what his crazy mouth is saying, Hughes has on his serious face. A serious Hughes is no one to screw around with. Ed claps his arm back to normal, for now. “Whatever, I guess it won’t hurt anything. But you stay here. Stay the fuck out of it. I mean it, Hughes. Stay out of it.”

Hughes nods reluctantly. Ed’s got no doubt he’d love to be down there between them making happy fucking families, but this isn’t gonna be like that.

Ed runs along the rooftop until he’s level with his worthless dad, then drops down right in front of him. Bastard doesn’t even have the decency to look surprised.

“Long time no see, Van Hohenheim,” Ed says with a smile that isn’t very friendly, probably wouldn’t have been friendly even pre-scar—but hey, Hughes can’t say he didn’t try.

Hohenheim blinks at him. “Edward?” he asks.

Congratulations, buddy. You know your own goddamn kid. “That’s right, I’m Edward. You’re quick on the uptake. Then again, I come down off the roof in front of you, and you don’t so much as jump. The hell’s wrong with you? Apart from the obvious.”

The dickhead says, “I’m a monster,” and Ed laughs in his face.

“Well,” he says, “you sure as shit bred one.”

“So I hear,” Hohenheim murmurs, like he’s got a right to comment on anything Ed’s ever done. “Edward. You’ve grown up very wild, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve known I couldn’t be trusted on my own,” Ed snarls. “What the fuck were you thinking? No, you know what? I don’t give a shit anymore. What the fuck’re you doing here?”

“I had some business in Central,” Hohenheim answers, totally unruffled. “You burned down my house,” he adds as an afterthought.

“What, you want an apology?” Son of a bitch is unbelievable.

“I’d like to know why.”

“I’d like Mom and Al to be alive. We all got problems, asshole.”

He stands there quiet, and Ed’s getting more pissed off with every breath. This is the guy who left them, he left them, and he comes back now. Now that Mom is dead and Ed was stupid and Al died and Ed should have fucking died and there’s nothing left. And it’s like he doesn’t even care. Ed wants to destroy him so much he can already taste the blood.

But Al-voice doesn’t want him dead. He is our father, it says. Like that ever counted for shit with Hohenheim. But Al’s right, Al’s almost always right, even when he’s just a hole in Ed’s psyche. Hohenheim’s their father, doesn’t matter if he sucks at it. Ed grits his teeth and forces himself not to clap.

Don’t clap don’t clap don’t clap.

“Trisha promised to wait for me,” Hohenheim says, and Ed’s so busy picturing a gaping, bleeding hole in his chest that he almost misses the fact that the bastard sounds disappointed. But not quite.

“You’re blaming her for dying?” Ed demands. “She only died because you ditched her and she had to raise us alone. You practically killed her yourself, asshole!”

Hohenheim gives him this look, a father look. And, annoying as fuck, there’s some tiny part of Ed that feels it, that’s still the kid who wouldn’t share candy with Al or whatever. He’d thought that part of him was totally dead, and the proof that it isn’t throws him off as bad as Barry the Chopper. “What?” he all but screams.

“You say I killed your mother by leaving her,” the bastard says, “but you left Pinako and her granddaughter and never looked back.”

It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t, they didn’t need him, couldn’t want him after everything he’d—

But Winry’d come to see him and she said—

But that’s because Winry doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about, she should’ve stayed away. He was doing them a favor, he’s human goddamn poison, it’s not the same. He’s not like fucking Hohenheim!

Brother, stop!

“I, at least, always planned to come back,” Hohenheim says, cool and untouchable like he always fucking was. He was always perfect. Always big and tall and strong and far away, and Ed had actually thought that was what a dad was supposed to be, he’d thought Hohenheim was the goddamn be-all and end-all, but he left them, and—

And Ed feels the break, that cold, calm snap in his mind.

It’s about time.

“You’re too late,” he says, and smiles, and Hohenheim would never see this coming. “Maybe it runs in the family. You’re worthless and I’m worthless and there’s nothing left. And hey, I knew that already, but thanks for coming back and pointing it out.”

Al’s voice never bothers him when he goes cold. Not even when he’s about to kill their father.

It’s a good feeling, smooth, quiet, and everything’s sharp and clear and black around the edges. He can barely hear the clap of his hands or the crackle of the transmutation. He can barely hear Hughes’s shout, and shit, how had he managed to forget Hughes was even there?

Oh well. Doesn’t matter now. Hughes won’t make it in time.

He runs for Hohenheim, and Hohenheim must not realize he’s serious, because he never lifts a hand to save himself. Ed slams an automail blade right into his chest.

It’s like slamming it into fucking granite, and it hurts like a bitch all the way up through his shoulder. They both fall over, Hohenheim onto the ground and Ed onto Hohenheim, and some crazy part of Ed’s brain thinks, Well at least gravity works on him.

The dust settles.

“You would have killed your own father?” Hohenheim asks sadly. Apparently this is disappointing, but not a huge deal.

“You were never a father to us!” Ed shouts like it even matters now. “And what the fuck are you?”

Hohenheim blinks up at him. “I’m a monster.”

Ed pushes himself up and claps to transmute the blade back into an arm, then punches Hohenheim in the chest for all the good it’ll do. “Don’t give me a bullshit answer! Not even a homunculus could sit there and fucking blink at me after I tried to put my arm through him. What are you? And what am I, cuz you’re my dad, aren’t you?”

Shit, I’m babbling. Ed shuts up and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and tries to get a grip. He doesn’t know what the hell’s going on anymore. The world is ending, his worthless dad isn’t human, and Ed actually tried to kill him, which is just not—you don’t kill your own dad, what the fuck?

And now that he thinks about it, he’s kneeling on the guy’s chest having hysterics, which can’t be comfortable even if he isn’t human. Ed slides his hands away from his eyes back to his temples. Hohenheim’s still staring at him like an idiot. Ed moves off to the side and tries to figure out what you say to your estranged inhuman dad when you just sort-of-accidentally almost impaled him.

He’s pretty sure this isn’t covered in normal etiquette. Fuck.

You could always apologize, brother.

Al-voice thinks it’s more helpful than it actually is.

“No, for—I didn’t mean to kill my own dad,” he announces, even though that question was way back there. “You don’t kill your dad, that’s evil. Insane.” Which says I’m evil and insane loud and clear, doesn’t it? “Sorry.” Sorry for freaking everything. No joke.

No response for a while. Hell, Ed wouldn’t know what to say to all this either. But then Hohenheim’s hand comes up, slow, unsure, and he acts like he’s gonna touch Ed’s head, but he doesn’t. His hand just hovers there, and Ed wishes—shit, he wishes he hadn’t tried, he wishes he’d never seen Hohenheim again in his life.

“Can’t touch me, huh?” Ed laughs, because in a way, it is pretty damn funny. Guy let Ed try to stab him and punch him and sit on him and whatever, and now he can’t even bring himself to touch him. Where’s the logic? “Guess I can’t hold it against you.” And he can’t. There’s the other thing that’s funny: Ed’s brain. Funnier than a barrel of monkeys.

But Hohenheim gets a determined look Ed recognizes from the mirror, and he runs his hand over Ed’s hair like he has to, like he wants to, like he’s afraid to. And the little kid part of Ed wants to cry, and if he cries, then he’ll die of embarrassment and it’ll all be over, freaking finally.

“You’re crazy,” he mutters, but doesn’t move away. “I just tried to fuckin’ kill you.”

Silence for a long time. Not a chatty guy, Hohenheim. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there,” he says after like an hour, and Ed has to slam his hands back over his eyes before he disgraces himself. More than he already has.

Sorry I couldn’t be there. What good does that do after all this time? None. And something stupid like that should definitely not be making Ed feel this way.

It’s too much, that’s all. This year’s been way too fucking much. End of the goddamn world, for one thing. And then Mustang and Hughes and Hawkeye, all pushing at him and pushing at him, refusing to leave him alone. Teacher, who talked to him even though he is what he is. Winry, who found him and treated him like he was normal and it was too weird. Now this. This. And he may hate the bastard, but God, he’s the only family Ed has left. And Ed tried to kill him.

“Ed?” Hughes. Ed had forgotten he was there again. This is such a shit day. “Ed, are you okay?”

“No, Hughes, I am not freaking okay,” Ed snaps, and drops his hands, because it looks like he’s not gonna cry after all. Maybe he’s forgotten how. “I’m pretty sure I’ve lost it. What does it look like?” Before Hughes can answer, Ed pokes at Hohenheim’s chest with an automail finger and says, “Lose the shirt. Let’s see it.”

Hohenheim unbuttons the shirt without a whimper. Ed’s amazed by all this cooperation. He sure as hell wouldn’t be this cooperative if he were in Hohenheim’s place.

Not a mark on the guy. Seriously, what the fuck?

“So what are you? And if you say monster, I am gonna do my best to beat the shit out of you.” Should relieve his feelings, if nothing else.

Hohenheim’s giving him a measuring-up look. Ed doesn’t know what’s left to measure. Seems to him he’s already failed by every conceivable standard.

“I’m a Philosopher’s Stone,” says Hohenheim.

A Philosopher’s Stone. Hang on, what? Can people even be Philosopher’s Stones?

Can people get hit in the chest with an automail knife and walk away without a scratch? Hell no. Okay. So working from the impossible, then.

Philosopher’s Stone. A pure substance, can’t be destroyed, or so the books say. Philosopher’s Stone: essence of dead people.

His dad is essence of dead people. What does that make him and Al? Half-living? Is this better or worse than maggot blood? Al seemed so normal, though.

It’s a goddamn joke. What do you get when you cross a Philosopher’s Stone and a human? Him and Al. What kind of lame punchline is that?

“Keep talking,” Ed says, and Hughes settles next to him, wide-eyed and grim.


Part 3