The Finding of an Elric

Roy Mustang was late. Not only was late but he had deep, black bags under his eyes. Riza's frown instantly disappeared into a look to fit a worried mother.

"Sir?" he just shook his head and barricaded himself in his office to work. She stared at the door for a good 10 minutes before finally deciding she'd had enough. She unlocked his door without permission and slammed it shut after entering. "Sir, It's the nightmares again isn't it?" Roy just looked at her warily. "Sir, what did you see? You haven't had nightmares about her in over 3 years, why now? What's happening to her in your dreams that deprive you so?"

"I think she's dying all over again. I see her in an odd uniform running with a bunch of people her age, which is for some strange reason about seventeen, then she collapses coughing, I hear her whisper my name and look up, seeming to meet my gaze, and then she's gone. I'm going to go insane! Riza, I have to find her and bring her back!!!"

"Roy, NO! She's dead! She died 10 years ago! You have to let the past lie! I know you loved her, but she would want you to be happy! Not mopping around like some old man with nothing better to do! She trusted you to take care of Ed and Al, they are all that's left of her, her siblings. They are your first priority now."

"She's NOT DEAD! I'm telling you she's out there somewhere! As for Ed and Al, I kept my promise and I am trying to protect them, but it's hard when they won't let me and they don't even know she ever existed. Equivalent exchange my ass. What was equivalent about that?" He slumped in his chair. "I feel so useless, before I knew what I was doing, what I should do. There were no questions asked. Now though… do I go and try to find her? Wait here for her? Return to the sea where we were stationed? I don't know. I just don't know anymore!!!" there was a knock on the door.

The door was opened by Riza and both of them just stared at the man standing there with an uncertain grin. "If you're looking for my daughter, you're going to need my help. I too see her in the same place you do. Her time in that world is limited. Come, we must act quickly before it is too late, Roy." They continued to stare at Hoenheim, the girl's father. "We must save Sabriel and bring her back to restore balance to the dimensions. She knows she's not supposed to be there, she knows what will happen if she stays and she's going to try to do something about it." Roy was by his sides in seconds.

"What must I do?" Hoenheim smiled slightly.

***

It was a normal day. I'm a senior at Hawking High Boarding School, and it's BORING!!! All the classes are super easy, for me at least, and neither my Professors nor my classmates could be bothered with anything I do. In other words, I got away with a lot; then again, it might have been pity. For you to understand why they might have pity when I thought they should by all means rot in hell, I'll give you a brief rundown of my life weather you want it or not.

I guess it really starts when I was nine, I was diagnosed with something that couldn't exactly be diagnosed, and that something was eating me away at an agonizing crawl. They said it was like a cancer but it wasn't in the sense that they couldn't help me. When I turned 11 me and 'mum' (not really my mum, but that's not relevant) moved and all our funding was cut. I'm not really sure where the funding came from but I was aware that my mum didn't like the people. A year later she died in a horrible train wreck, it destroyed me to say the least. I was supposed to stay with my 'grandparents' but, they didn't want to take care of me so they sent me here. I've been here for 4 ½ years and my first, best, and only friend is the young man that lives four houses down on Randle Avenue, three blocks away. That's the rundown.

Anyway, back to the beginning. A normal, boring day at school, in the required gym class I collapse in a coughing fit. That totally figures that there would be blood spewing from my mouth after just talking to one of the only decent people in the whole entire school. If I believed in a god, I would have damned them, but as it was, I did not, so there was no condemning of supernatural beings. Tonight I had planned a randavu with the young man from Randle Ave, watching movies, working on one of our various projects. All this was planned before I entered the lobby at the end of the day. We'll come back to that in a bit.

Okay I knew something strange is going to go down within the next couple of hours. I could feel it. I called it the 'tingle' after Kazuma Kuwabara from Yu Yu Hakusho, but that is beside the point. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had the 'tingle' and at night I would dream of a different world, a world that I felt like I belonged too. It felt so familiar, so much like home and every time I awoke, weather at my real home or in the dorm, I felt lost. Like part of me was still there, in that world, like someone was waiting for me there. These dreams stopped when I stopped sleeping. I lost the ability to sleep properly in a bed, or anywhere for that matter, about three years ago when I was 14. The dream had come back last night as I finally drifted off to sleep... outside in the rose garden.

It was that finale dream that made up my mind. I knew it was real, that place was my home. I wasn't supposed to be here, my friend from Randle had been trying to tell me the whole time. That was part of the reason I set up tonight to do the randavu, I wanted to come up with a plan to get me there, before this world disintegrated completely for the lack of balance between the worlds. For some reason the words 'equivalent exchange' kept running through my head at the thought.

"Hey! Will you watch where you're going!?!" oh dear me, I was so busy talking to you that I bumped into the biggest bitch in school. Great.

"Sorry, Mi'lady! Can I carry your books to your next class!?!" She hates it when I do that.

"You FREAK!!!" We now had the whole lobby's attention.

"Oh! I'm so hurt! Wounded! How can I pos-", I stopped my theatrics immediately after catching the eyes of a man. A man that did not belong to the school faculty. A man I knew, a man my 'mother' despised.

"Sabrial!" I ran for it. There was nothing else to do. I didn't get too far though, before he grabbed me around the neck and slammed me into a wall. There was dead silence. "Don't you dare run from me! I'm your father! I will be treated with respect."

"Would you like an ass kicking to go with that?" I taunted as I got to my feet. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to do considering I currently had the strength of a flea but there was no way I was going to let this bastered walk on me like he had my lab mother. That's right, lab mother.

"As testy as always, I see, Sabrial. That can be fixed." He pinned me against the wall by the neck. There was nothing I could possibly do. My vision was going blurry when something hurtled into the side of my attacker that likes to think of himself as my father. I fell to the ground and immediately there was someone there. I looked up into the midnight blue, almost black eyes, of one Roy Mustang.

Everything came back at once.

"Are you al-"

"Roy, let me up! I'm fine, but pops ain't!" Relief filled the man as I stood up, no longer in the body of a 17 year old, but two years older than my original age of 26 so now I'm 28, and my clothes changed as well back to what I use to wear. A simple band of silver around my finger, reminding me of a promise from the man I love, my husband. That stupid man from the lab I had been kept in for years was actually gaining on pops. Not cool, my old man was just that, an old man. I glanced at Roy, he was older too, looked to be in his early thirties. No time to ponder the fact that Roy was suppose to be YOUNGER than me, not the other way around.

She looked exactly the same, even after all these years. Her flaming golden hair an improvement to the dull, pale yellow it had been moments before. Her eyes had changed within seconds, going from a dusty blue to the violet he remembered and loved. When they had married, she had been two years his senior, but he didn't care. She was 26 when she 'died', that was 10 years ago now, but here she was, two years older than when she left. He was nearly 6 years her senior now, but he knew that wouldn't change anything. She was still his Sabriel.

He smiled wistfully at his wife as she proceeded to grab the man by the throat and slam him into the wall. Hoenheim sat down beside him catching his breath. They watched with amusement.

"This is why you kept me in that lab for all those years!" She sounded triumphant. Roy and the senior Elric snorted, still the same, Ed was just like her. "This is why you fed me that illness, oh I know all about that little stunt. It would have killed me on my '18th birthday because that's what you designed it to do. But tell me, who where you trying to get to? Was it my husband? Was it? Or was it Ed? Al? Armstrong maybe? No? Maes? Trisha?" Roy smiled at the murderous gleam that came into his wife's eye as he looked away.

"Ah, I remember you now, always following my lovely step-mother around in the shadows. Oh yes, I saw you, I watched you. I remember. You sniveling sack of cow dung!!!" The odd choice of profanity wasn't even laughed at, the look in her eye silenced them all. "This is for my mother!" The man squirmed and she knocked him sideways with a resounding crunch.

"As much as I hate to say this, we should probably stop her." Hoenheim said.

"I suppose we do, but I wish we didn't have too. She doesn't know yet." Roy replied nearly jogging once on his feet to stop his wife from kicking the man in the face with her steel toed boots.

"Darling lets go home. Riza and the gang will take care of him." He encircled his wife with his arms. Her rage instantly quitted. She leaned back into him, twisting her head around to look at him. They did not kiss, he knew she wanted to do it properly, latter, when they where home. She looked for her real father, and found him sitting where Roy had left him, smiling at the two of them. She broke away from Roy and offered her had. He took it and was catapulted to his feet.

"Let's go!" They nodded and walked out of the building, crossing the opening in the dimension Hoenheim had created. Back to their lives, their world, their reality. After all, there was a little boy who needed to get his body back… but she didn't know that yet.