Alchemy and Magic
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Author's Notes:
This is a Full Metal Alchemy/Gargoyles crossover. It is set in early 2007 (about when the story itself will be finished). Gargoyles started airing in 1994, so that puts it thirteen years after the start of the series. In FMA, it goes AU at the end of the series -- Ed lands in NYC in 2007 rather than in Europe in the 1920's
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He wasn't dead.
That was the first thought in Edward Elric's head, shortly followed by, Crap, the automail again. Winry's going to kill me.
He knew even before he opened his eyes that his arm was a dead weight, because he'd tried to put his hand to his furiously pounding head and his it hadn't moved. It was busted -- how badly, he wasn't sure yet.
He opened his eyes and wished he hadn't.
Pain lanced through his skull. The world spun. He rolled over -- the world spun more -- and retched weakly onto the ground, only lifting his head a few inches. He tasted blood amid the bile and collapsed weakly back.
Pavement. He was lying on pavement. Wet, cold -- very cold -- cement under his cheek and hip. The sockets for his automail were starting to burn with pain akin to an ice cream headache, only on a grand scale, as the metal transmitted the icy cold directly to bone and nerve.
After a long moment, the earth stopped rolling underneath him and he pushed himself half upright with his left hand. His leg was also out of commission.
"Where the hell ..." He blinked around him. He was lying in an alley in what was indisputably a foreign city.
Alphonse. Oh, God, Alphonse. Did it work? Are you even alive? Why am I still alive?
Memories returned in a rush, overpowering the headache. He had to find Al. Find his brother.
Nausea threatened to return when he flipped over, but he forced it back. He tucked his good leg underneath him, pushed with his good arm, and managed to make it up onto his feet -- foot. The automail leg trailed behind him, far more hindrance than help, as he hopped to the support of the closest wall.
Blew the circuits out, he guessed. The structure seemed okay, and Winry had designed it to take a hell of a power surge given his usual methods for alchemy, but he'd been dealing with -- well, hell squared.
Why am I even still alive? He wondered again as he hopped to the end of the alley. It wasn't far, really, but it felt like miles. His hip was cramping by the time he made it, and he leaned with exhaustion against the wall.
It wasn't home.
That much was obvious. The street beyond was jammed with cars -- sleek, fancy cars, in a myriad of colors. There were thousands -- tens of thousands -- of people filling the sidewalk.
Okay, so we can answer the question, 'Why am I still alive' later -- first question is, where am I? This isn't London.
He'd never seen a city like this before. He looked up -- nearly passed out -- closed his eyes, swallowed back an urge to vomit, and then stared in awe at the skyscrapers looming about him. They had to be hundreds of stories tall, and they glowed with electricity. Above all the others, and not too far away, one particularly tall skyscraper appeared to have a castle on top of it.
"Hey. Kid. You okay?"
He blinked, looked down, cursed himself for being unwary, and realized the owner of the voice was wearing a uniform. He had dark skin, greying white hair, and frown. And very definitely a military uniform. Shit. Soldier.
In his experience, a strange army in a strange place was pretty much bad news. He spun to run, forgetting for an instant that he was crippled. His leg collapsed underneath him and he went splat in a large, rather noxious, and icy puddle.
"Easy, kid," the soldier said, "I'm not going to ..."
Whatever the soldier was going to not do he didn't get a chance to say, because Edward clapped his good hand against the palm of the dead automail palm, summoned alchemic power, and yanked a wall up between him and the man.
He heard cursing, and the soldier yelling for backup.
Ed scrambled up to a standing position and started hopping away as fast as he could go. Unfortunately, that wasn't very fast at all, and he found himself cornered with more guys in uniforms appearing at the other end of the alley. These men had gun out, and they were pointing them at him.
"It's just a kid," one of the men said, uncertainly.
"Let me go!" Ed said, holding his hands menacingly a few inches apart. The damaged arm hung limply from his shoulder, useless for anything but this.
"Easy, kiddo," the man said. "We won't hurt you. Easy there."
He sounds like he's talking to a frightened animal, Ed thought, Wonder what I look like to him? "I'm fine. Leave me alone."
"Gotcha!" Arms wrapped around him, pinning his arms to his side.
Ed struggled frantically, "Damnit, let me go!"
"Settle down, kid," the voice said, gently. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name's Bluestone."
He stopped struggling, for the moment. Waited. The man set him down -- Ed clapped his hands again and flung the man into a wall with a wave of stone. He also lost his balance, tumbled to the ground, and scrambled away as best he could with one working leg and arm.
He saw a basement window at eye level -- a fumbled clap, and he vaporized the glass, lunged forward, wormed through the narrow space, and fell several feet to the ground. His automail leg took most of the impact, but it was a bad landing and the force of it jammed his hip hard; he saw stars and darkness for a moment.
Hope I didn't break something there, he thought, with alarm, when pain faded and coherent thought returned. Steel could be fixed -- bone took longer to heal.
How in the hell am I going to get away? He wondered dumbly. He was practically immobilized, there were strange soldiers after him, and he hadn't a foggy clue how to get ahold of anyone he knew.
Not for the first time he wished he could fix his own automail with alchemy. However, after one disastrous attempt years before that had resulted in awe inspiring pain, a loss of concentration, and a mess so bad that Winry had to build him a whole new leg ... he hadn't tried since. It was one thing to transmute his arm into a sword. It was quite another to mess with the interface between the more delicate mechanisms of the mail's powerplant and his own nerves.
Silence, from above.
He waited, sure they would try to extract him. He contemplated transmuting the windows shut, but they were across the room and he'd rolled and tumbled quite a distance when he fell. And anyway, since the soldiers weren't going to go away, he figured sooner or later he'd need to talk to them and come to an agreement with them. Preferably one that didn't involve attempts to grab him.
Damnit, he thought, savagely, weighing his options. Lack of information was really hindering his decisions. He didn't know where he was, what the situation was, who his friends or enemies were.
More silence.
He waited. They would be back.
The pain in his hip faded. He could move it. Nothing broken, apparently.
More waiting. He judged an hour passed before anyone approached him, though he could see flashing lights now -- red and blue, over and over again.
"Hey." A voice said, from the window.
Female.
"What's your name?"
He considered several possible responses to that, and decided that Full Metal was possibly dangerous if he'd landed somewhere that didn't like alchemists. Elric, likewise. He settled on, "Ed." Ed was common enough.
"Ed, my name's Elisa." The voice said, wryly. "That's some magic you were throwing around. You scared people pretty good."
"Not magic. Alchemy."
She was quiet for a brief moment, then, "Are you a Child?"
"Who are you calling little ...!" He found he didn't have the energy for a good rant, and wound down dispiritedly.
"Not what I meant. Child of Oberon. Which I take it you're not. Okay." The voice said, sounding remarkably calm. Child of what? "How come you ran?"
"I've got reasons to avoid soldiers."
"Soldiers ...?" A question there. Then the woman explained, "Not soldiers, Ed. I'm a police detective. Those were cops. Where are you from?"
"Risembool. In Amestris."
"Never heard of it, which might actually explain a bit." Elisa said, confirming his guess that he'd wasn't in the same world anymore. "So how long are you planning on staying in that basement?"
Damnit, he thought savagely, she was mocking him.
"I mean," she said sensibly, "we just want to help you. You got friends or family you'd like us to call?"
Call. Yes. Mustang. Bastard that he is, he's probably my best chance for finding out what happened in any detail, assuming he's still alive. Winry won't be home yet so I can't call the Rockbells.
"Can you call Central HQ -- Colonel Roy Mustang?
"What's the number?" He saw a flash of light -- the woman had a small, glowing object in her hand.
"Number?" He blinked. Thought. Provided the four digit number from memory.
"Rest of it?" She asked.
"There is no rest of it."
Silence. After a moment, the woman said, somewhat to his mystification, "Kid, I really don't think you're in Kansas anymore."
I don't know where Kansas is, but I for sure am not in my own world anymore.
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Elisa regarded the kid thoughtfully, over a sheaf of paperwork. Deal with it, Maza, Chavez had said. This one's up your alley. CPS wouldn't know what to do with him. We both know that.
He'd thrown a remarkable amount of magic around, and these days, the cops pretty much had a protocol for dealing with magic. That procedure was best summed up as, "Call Elisa and Bluestone, shut up, and pretend you didn't see anything."
Given that this approach resulted in far less paperwork for all parties concerned, and arguably less damage to people and property, there hadn't been many complaints about the routine.
Unfortunately, she didn't have a foggy clue what to do now. She could, and had, dealt with everything from rampaging fey to space aliens. Teenage boys a long way from home, on the wrong side of a magical gate -- so not up her alley. He had confirmed he'd passed through a gate, much to her complete lack of surprise.
I figured Child of Oberon when Bluestone called me yelling about magic, but I'll cheerfully accept teenager with super powers from another world as a plausible explanation.
She regarded him thoughtfully, earning a glare back for daring to look at him. He was short. Tiny, really. He claimed to be sixteen; that might be possible, but she thought thirteen or so was more likely. And he was crippled -- his arm and leg hung limply, apparently paralyzed. He'd insisted on hopping to her car, however, refusing to let anyone touch him. He'd been angered by the offer of a wheel chair at the station, and had only reluctantly -- very reluctantly -- leaned on her arm to get up the steps.
He was blond -- very blond, in a spun-gold fairy tale sense. His hair was long, caught back in a braid, with loose bits escaping and falling around his face. In truth, he was a very good looking boy -- and he had the sort of features that would mature heartbreakingly handsome. He'll be stunning when he's twenty.
Tawny amber eyes regarded her with suspicion, wariness, and a little anger. She'd seen eyes like that before, in children who'd seen things no child ought to. Behind the anger was doubtless a sizable lump of fear -- terror, even.
Though mostly, right now, he just looked pissed off. He wouldn't acknowledge the fear unless forced to.
"So you've never even heard of my country," he repeated, for the umpteenth time in the last hour.
"I'm afraid not." Not that she doubted him, exactly, though she supposed that the kid could be making it all up. The mess he'd made of the alley argued for the truth of his story -- at least, what little stor they'd managed to get out of him. He'd explained he'd been casting an alchemic spell -- he made a clear distinction between alchemy and magic that Elisa didn't begin to grasp -- and had ended up here in the aftermath.
She had a call in to Owen, who might have a better idea than she did on where the kid was from. If Owen talked, and if the price wasn't too high for the information.
"So how did your arm and leg get hurt?" she asked.
"Made a mistake." Three words. A sullen look.
Yeah, Elisa figured, kid's terrified.
"Did somebody hurt you?"
"Did it to myself." Four more sullen words.
Her this-might-be-a-case-of-abuse instincts went off. She didn't deal with domestic violence much, these days, but every cop saw some. "How do you hurt your leg and arm that badly by yourself? You can't even move them."
Silently, he pushed the sleeve of his coat up, exposing a gleaming metal wrist.
Elisa froze in place for half a heartbeat, too many memories of various homicidal robots surfacing to allow for any reaction but panic.
He's human, she told herself, then added mentally, because she knew better than to make assumptions about anyone based on appearances, or close enough. He's not a robot.
He'd been shivering when she'd finally talked him out of the basement. Robots didn't shiver.
"That's ... an artificial limb?" She guessed.
"Broken." One word.
She sighed, ran a hand over her face, and said, "Look -- Ed -- I know you're not really happy to be here. I suspect by your reactions that you've been through hell ..."
"... you have no idea ..." he murmured.
"But sitting there sulking isn't helping matters. Are you going to talk to me so we can figure out how to get you home to your parents or are you going to sit in my office forever?"
"I'm not sulking and I don't have any parents. My mom died when I was ten."
That was the longest string of words she'd managed to get out of him. He met her eyes with a level golden glare.
"I'm sorry," she said, meaning it. "Who looks after you?"
Blank look. "No one."
"That must be pretty lonely." Elisa offered. Orphan. But I think there's more here, much more, that he's not saying.
"I've got my little brother. I look after him." That was said with the first emotions she'd seen out of him that weren't varying degrees of hostile. He sounded ... worried and fond all at once. "He's fourteen. I ... I want to get back to him."
"I've got a baby sister," Elisa volunteered. "And an older brother. It would tear me apart if anything happened to them."
He continued, in a slightly thoughtful tone of voice, "I've got friends in Risembool. Winry and her grandmother. They fix my automail when it breaks. They're home, I guess."
"Automail -- your arm and leg?" Elisa guessed. "How did it break?"
A one-shouldered shrug was her only response, and a defiant look. He wasn't going to give her any information easily.
Elisa sighed. "Well, until we figure out how to get your home, I may have a friend who can fix it for you."
That got his interest. "It's some pretty complicated machinery," he said, warily. But his eyes showed sudden hope. The kid had a remarkably expressive face; she wondered idly what he would look like if he actually smiled for once.
"Yeah, well, Lexington's one of the best engineers I know. If he can't fix you up, nobody can."
What the hell, she thought, with a mental shrug. The clan wasn't even a secret these days, and her relationship to them was widely known. Introducing the kid to the guys couldn't hurt, and maybe they'd have some idea on how to send him home.
"What's the exchange?"
"Huh?" Exchange -- does he expect to have to pay? Elisa thought, a little incredulously.
"What do I need to exchange for his help?" The boy had a rather condescending tone in his voice.
Elisa blinked at him. "Nothing." She glanced at the window, saw that the sky was rapidly growing light, and sighed. "But it will have to wait until tonight."
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