A/N- Because after Tim Marcoh in "The Ant's Bite," I'm convinced that somebody's going to pull off a Crowning Moment of Awesome next chapter. There're at least three very kickass alchemists outside the homunculi's control, Sig, half the Mustang gang, and need we mention da Bears... (Not entirely convinced Wrath couldn't surprise us yet, either... Then there's Pride...) In short, yes, Hiromu Arakawa owns. I merely flap my hands and write tinhat continuations to keep from obsessing about what happens next.

There was no time.

Even if he wanted to try human transmutation – and he had to admit, they'd given him a damned good reason – he wouldn't know how to stop that crimson gush. Even if he'd known how, he didn't have the time and materials necessary to set up the right transmutation circle – he'd seen the remains of the Elrics'; even as splattered and smudged as it had been, Mustang knew that it had not been so simple a thing as its youthful creators' ages might have suggested, and that had been but a flawed experiment.

"Lieutenant!" he shouted, praying to a god he'd never truly believed in for some miracle, some way that this could be accomplished as quickly as a snap of his fingers or clap of his hands.

And then God's agent spoke two simple words, claiming a third life-debt from the Flame Alchemist he'd once been so ready to destroy. "Let me." Two sabers withdrew from the front of the Ishvalan's neck at the gold-toothed madman's guarded nod, and Scar stepped forward, placing his hand - his left hand - firmly against Riza's gushing wound. "Help me, brother," he murmured, so softly that at first Roy thought he was hearing an echo of Alphonse. Then the right arm of destruction flashed towards Hawkeye's captor - Roy could not yet call that soulless swordsman her murderer - there was the brilliant light and ozone-and-burning-flesh scent of an alchemic reaction, and then, Scar was gone, swallowed in the blink of an eye by a doorway that had not been there before and was not there when Mustang looked again.

Riza slumped to the floor, blood still staining her dark shirt and pale, pale skin. Not caring that he'd nearly dislocated his shoulder in the process, Mustang wrestled himself out of the would-be fuhrer's grasp and rushed to her, pulling her upright to rest against his chest as he knelt and held her in his arms, almost afraid to examine Scar's handiwork. At least the state alchemist killer would have been able to grant her a quick death…

But no, Hawkeye's chest still rose and fell, however erratically, against his own, and when Mustang dared wipe away some of the blood from her throat, the skin beneath was whole and as unmarred as he'd ever seen it.

"You realize your friend has merely postponed your transition," the strange man informed them with another gold-toothed gleam. "You will still be used as Father sees best, though I must contact him now to know what that is. Hold them here," he told the fuhrer puppets, turning to leave Roy and Riza - and most likely go wherever the Elric brothers had disappeared to.

"Hawkeye?" Mustang asked softly, once the man was out of hearing range. "Can you move?" He tightened his grip on her back and slid a couple of fingers beneath her collar.

In turn, she slowly opened woozy eyelids, reaching for his waistband and letting her hand slide until she grasped what she needed. "As long as I'm with you, sir."

Roy smiled, snapping the torn but still flint-lined glove as his other hand rested upon the original circle. He had destroyed enough of it that no one else would be able to glean the secrets of using it, but the cold, calculating bastard within him - one he often wished he could live without, even if expressing that wish had always made Hughes laugh and call Mustang a wide-eyed greenhorn - had flinched away from effacing the circle itself. This was using her, no better than the father who had tattooed it upon her at such an early age, and the only cold comfort Roy could take as she flipped his pistol up in her hands and fired behind them to hit any that had escaped his inferno, was that he'd never had to use it before. Maybe, just maybe, he'd never have to use it again to save their lives. Roy could only hope the next time he touched her back, it wouldn't have to be as colonel and lieutenant, though a part of him doubted very much that that would ever come to pass.

Even if today was the Promised Day.

*

"Well, what do we have here?" Scar stared at the white-on-white silhouette impassively. His hand was still gripping the arm of the fuhrer candidate, who dragged as mindlessly behind him as a rag doll. Having one's mind and soul removed tended to do that to a person, especially in absence of any puppet master. "Very wise of you, to bring payment for the piper," the white shadow smiled, and the black tendrils not unlike Pride's engulfed the body at Scar's side. "For this, I will only take your arm." The shadow was no longer perfectly white. A well-muscled, dark-skinned, untattooed right arm materialized where there had once only been featureless white, and if Scar looked too closely, he began to see the figure take on other features as well, features that might be the hapless fuhrer candidate, or his own, or…

"Who are you?" Scar asked.

"Tell me your name, and I will tell you mine. Quite a challenge, isn't it, when the old name dies and you must rely on others to grant you a new one to go with the new personality. Especially once that person begins to change again. 'Scar' is a start, yes, but I do not think that that man lives any more than the one you were born as. Scar was a master of desconstruction, but never did he attempt to reconstitute anything. Never did he attempt to heal. He built up a great amount of backlog, on this side. It will be quite interesting to see what you earn in his stead through equivalent exchange. What shall you rebuild next? A nation? A religion? A new form of alchemy? Or something rather ironic, considering your background and the reason most of the last few have come here to me? Shall you rebuild a family, man of Ishval?"

The red-eyed man blinked, taking a step back across the featureless white expanse as the ever-grinning face continued. It never appeared to move, but he could never increase the distance between himself and the glowing, eyeless, smiling thing with his arm. The arm he'd felt Kimbley explode. "What are you?"

"Slightly easier, though there are still many answers to that, yes? Some call me the Truth. Some call me the World. Some call me God or Death or the Devil. I believe you called me Ishvala, once. I am all those things and more, and less, and not, just as you are many things to many people, aren't you?" The creature never stopped smiling. "You have paid your price. And now, your reward."

Black tendrils swallowed him up once more, and rushed him through another gate, going faster and faster as his life began to flash before his eyes. More and more flew by him, combining in ways he'd never seen, never understood before, but there was at least one rail-thin blond dropped by the Truth's grasping black shadows in his path that Scar never remembered seeing before. He was moving too fast, absorbing too much to get a good, long look at this golden child, but the voice seemed to ring in the Ishvalan's head even as he was drawn inexorably away. "Motherf- Brother! Sensei! BROTHER!"

I didn't know that Alphonse Elric ever swore like that, Scar thought bemusedly.

*