Warnings: Increasingly dark (no character death). The one note I have here is that, in case it isn't glaringly obvious already – Ed is a very biased observer here ;) Keep that in mind, it may help.

It was not without a certain amount of trepidation that Ed returned to Special Projects Building Twenty-one the next morning, his heart in his throat and his stomach in his shoes. He'd had a night to think on it, and as the ache in his bruising knuckles had spread, so had the awareness that he'd done something unforgivable. Not that he cared what Alfons Heiderich thought of him - the man was a child and a petty, arrogant sot - but he himself should have known better than to take the fight that hard, that far. If Alfons did choose to complain (and that chance, although slight, was still greater than zero), Ed would likely also lose face. Oberth, the junior adviser whom their group looked to, frowned upon 'barbarism', his loose word for fighting, gambling, and any other activities that took focus away from work that had to be accomplished. And he had known that going into the fight, Ed despaired later, and it had been by his will that the fight had existed in the first place. Alfons had been the one to ask for it, yes -- and boy, had he ever been asking for it -- but he had been the one to manipulate the man, snipe at his ego; draw his proverbial quarry straight into the trap and then suddenly and decisively bring the jaws shut tight around its neck. It had been by his hand, ultimately, that the incident had ended the way it did, and upon reflection, Ed had realized the awful truth.

For those seconds of fleeting pleasure in punishing the bastard, Ed had lost sight of his overall goal - and that was absolutely unacceptable.

He slunk in through the side door and picked his way through the honeycomb of saw-horse barriers that sectioned the space, past strange machines and projects that other students were already hard at work on, despite how early in the morning it was. He was still wearing his brown wool outer coat, and he tugged it a little tighter across his chest as he approached their lab space, as if that would somehow make him less visible. It didn't, of course. Sometimes Ed felt like he were the only bright spot in this world of dull browns and grays, and in a way it was true. His bright hair and eyes stood out like a beacon, no matter what camouflage he tried to bury himself in.

A few of the others raised their heads as he stepped carefully into their protective ring of boards and machinery. Not everyone had gathered yet, he noted in an instant, just the few other early birds who were always here right at opening. The engine prototype - the most important thing, the most secret of all the experiments they were working on - was sectioned off from the outside world by a mishmash of tarps, a little insurance against any prying eyes; it had yet to be uncovered for the day. To the left of that was a high table they had co-opted from the university to lay out their schematics. Alfons Heiderich was sitting on his usual stool there, hunched over the table sketching something furiously.

He did not look up.

"Morning, Edward," the Frenchman called out, waving to Ed from the other side of the table. He was chewing on the end of an unlit cigarette like usual, his panacea until mid-morning smoke break: a familiar sight that was by equal parts comforting and disturbing. He could have been Havoc's twin.

"Morning," Ed called back to Jean, still keeping his eyes fixed solidly on Alfons. It seemed the man was solidly ignoring him. He stiffened a little when Havoc mentioned Ed's name, but otherwise he did not so much as twitch. There was a nasty swelling up one side of his jaw and a dark knuckle-shaped bruise at the center where Ed's fist had landed, only just beginning to yellow.

That's got to hurt, Ed considered, examining his handiwork from a careful distance. It was obscurely good to know that the ache in his knuckles had not been for nothing. Still, a part of him was concerned. Teaching the bastard a lesson had been momentary fun, but the long term effect on their working relationship was as of yet unknown. Would Alfons behave the way he expected? Ed liked to pride himself on knowing how to handle people, but there was always that chance, that non-zero chance, that something would not go as he forecast.

That chance that he never should have taken, but he couldn't go back now. There was only moving forward.

"Good morning," he tried saying to Alfons, testing the waters like a bather paranoid of sharks. If there was going to be fall out from what had happened yesterday, best he ascertain that now before the work day started. He didn't want to have to apologize, but just in case he had prepared an acceptable boiler-plate speech. He'd had enough experience lying (mostly to the Colonel, occasionally to angry mobs) that he figured he could fake 'contrite.'

"And how are you today, Alfons?"

Alfons's pencil jagged sharply to the right over the blueprint he was working on, but other than that, there was no response. Ed watched as Alfons sucked in deep, long breaths through his nose, once, twice, three times. Then he slowly and silently set down his pencil and reached for an eraser, started rubbing out the thick line he had made across the page.

That was all.

Fine, Ed thought, briefly cross at not being able to elicit a real reaction. The silent treatment. Okay, fine, he could handle that. In some ways, it was actually for the best. If Alfons was refusing to speak to him, then perhaps he would also go a day without criticizing him for once, and maybe Ed could concentrate on getting real work done.

Also, it meant Alfons had likely not told anyone. If Ed were in some kind of trouble with Oberth or a dean, he could be sure to count on Alfons to rub his nose in it. The fact that the man hadn't… Ed's smile widened.

Thus satisfied, he went to take his own seat, a slightly taller stool that sat at the corner diametrically opposed to Alfons. He shucked off his coat and tossed it down on the floor beside the table, and grabbed a pen and paper to sketch out more of the distillation task he had been given to work on. The Frenchman ambled up to take the seat beside him, and they all began doodling in earnest, the same as they did every morning.

Periodically Ed could feel Alfons's eyes on him, but as Alfons continued to say nothing, he didn't let it bother him.

He had taken a chance, and apparently won.

Eventually the full project team made it in to the lab, and that was when the joshing began. When it had just been him and the Frenchman at the design table, no one had dared to comment on Alfons's ugly swollen cheek, not with Alfons's sky-pale eyes so stormy, his expression like the promise of thunder. Once Dorchett and Lars in particular joined them, however, there were no end of jokes at Alfons's expense.

"What happened, you cop a feel off someone's old lady?"

"Did her man take after you? Or did she just get ya with her purse?"

The two of them together reminded Ed a bit of a pair of hyenas. Lars was large and thick all over, a great big ox of a man; Dorchett was the opposite, small and wiry with narrow, pointed eyebrows, but both of them had a vicious sense of humor. They were quick to attack any time they sensed weakness.

"C'mon, you can't expect us to believe you ran into a door."

Ed watched as Alfons's ears turned progressively darker, the man visibly growing more and more agitated as his colleagues speculated on whom or what had laid Alfons out. Apparently Alfons's weakness was a known thing among the group - or perhaps his lack of a story had tipped them off. They all assumed that Alfons was the one who had come off worst in his mysterious battle, and everyone wanted to know what he had done to 'get his ass handed to him'.

"We have work to do," was all Alfons would reply, though his expression grew more and more murderous.

Ed listened to the snickering and bit down on the end of his pencil, worrying his teeth into the soft wood.

He deserved what he got, he told himself again firmly. He'd spent the night thinking about it, and damn it, it was fact. Alfons had been a grade-A asshole. Ed couldn't stand putting up with his behavior. He could regret his loss of control – shouldn't have hit him so hard, should have found another way to deal with it – but he couldn't regret standing up for himself. He couldn't.

And bruises faded, after all. Hopefully, Alfons would just learn his damn lesson, and they could put this whole ugly incident behind them.

He realized the Frenchman was trying to look over at his paper, and Ed started to realize he hadn't done anything in the past ten minutes. Ed flushed a little, chagrined, and went back to the vexing task of balancing equations related to refining fuel. The science of 'chemistry', he sometimes considered, wasted even more paper than even traditional array-based alchemy. So much that had to be done first in theory. It was so frustrating, sometimes, to think that what would be so easy with alchemy was so impossible the way these people did it. Combustion reaction, if they wanted combustion reactions all he'd had to do was set fire to the air. Separate out the oxygen into one stream, hydrogen from ambient humidity into another; those two together could make this baby soar. To say nothing of the more exotic fuel possibilities. He was fairly certain that lithium, lithium would give them thrust these poor fools could only dream of, but here it would be impossible to work with in liquid form – it was highly corrosive and would take tremendous heat.

Did you know I used to be able to do miracles? he nearly said to the Frenchman, as Jean looked over the piddling advances he'd made. Once, he could have clapped his hands, and they would have had all the low-octane petrol they liked. Hell, they wouldn't need it.

"What, lithium again?" Jean asked, pointing to the structure Ed had unwittingly just sketched in the margins of his page. Ed colored a bit, embarrassed to be caught doodling.

"Yeah," he said blithely, as if he had meant to do that. Sometimes his pencil just moved with his thoughts, and then he had to deal with explaining them. "Or fluorine. Maybe both at once. Stuff of your wet dreams, those two together," he said, eying Alfons obliquely. The nerd would get off on stuff like that, he considered snidely, and crude expressions always pissed him off. Perfect combination.

He probably shouldn't bait the man, but just being – written off like that - it bugged him. He'd thought he wanted Alfons's silence, but at the same time…

It was the waiting that was getting to him, he decided. Silence meant that Alfons was still stewing, the situation was still bubbling, and until he was sure how it was going to turn out, he wouldn't be able to really relax.

"Or compounds with hydrazine, that could be good, just throw in another hydrogen or two - "

"If we're going to talk fantasy, how about one in which you can keep your mouth shut?" Alfons growled suddenly. "Unlike some people, I am trying to work here! Chit-chat somewhere else."

Ed might have been annoyed at that, except that well, he'd invited it. He was pleased to note though, that Alfons stopped there. He did not rail any further about Ed's "completely impractical theoretics" and went right back to whatever it was he was doing with that straight-edge. Experiment succeeded, Ed considered, and felt immeasurably heartened.

Normally, a comment like that would have gotten them into a half-hour argument about the many ways in which Ed's suggestion was completely impossible, just in case anyone didn't realize Alfons was smart enough to disprove him. Lingering guilt about punching the man or no, all signs certainly pointed to Alfons's behavior shaping up for the better now.

The rest of the project team didn't seem to think so, however.

"Wow...damn, what do you think's eating him?" the Frenchman asked him later, out front by the loading zone on mid-morning smoke break. They had gone out together to kill two birds with one stone – check for any deliveries and share a cigarette.

"Who knows," Ed lied. A part of him would deeply love to join the man in 'speculating' – particularly if it involved discussing Alfons's up-tight character, and how many continents his ego encompassed - but that would be taking another risk he couldn't afford himself. If it got back to Alfons that Ed was putting him down, it might upset the delicate truce they seemed to have right now. The man was so touchy about being criticized, honestly, he needed to just learn when he was wrong and be done with it.

He wouldn't have had to knock sense into him, Ed told himself, if Alfons had just been born with some like regular people.

"Not really worth discussing, I think. I mean, c'mon. Could be anything, knowing him," Ed said sagely, and Jean reluctantly nodded. His eyes were very sharp all of a sudden, it seemed, and Ed felt more than a little uncomfortable under his gaze.

"I suppose," the Frenchman said at length. He sighed and pulled out his match tin and cigarette box, tucked the cig he was currently chewing on back behind his ear, and pulled out a fresh one. It was one of Jean's habits, Ed had learned, that the cig he smoked was never the same as the one he used as a pacifier – more expensive, but in some ways less wasteful in the long run. By the time he got done with a particularly stressful set of ballistics equations, his cig-sucker would be half-chewed and wet. If he did that to every cig in the box, he'd only ever get to smoke the ends. Best to keep just one to gnaw on, he'd said, and keep the "mouth piece" around until it was literally chewed to ribbons. Ed thought that was a bit disgusting, but hey. He had once had a loose wire in his automail that he twirled on trains when he was bored, and Al had always chided him for getting his hands so oily.

Thinking of Al in this situation only made his heart twist worse when Jean proceeded with a ritual that was all-too familiar. The Frenchman struck a cigarette on the side of the building and then lit the cig with a little flourish of his hand that Ed had seen a thousand times before – the way the real Jean Havoc worked his smokes, when the Colonel wasn't around to give him a snap-light.

Ed eyed him warily as Jean slipped the thing casually into the corner of his mouth, again the mirror image of his real world counterpart. As if his face weren't bad enough...his vices, his mannerisms, why did all of it have to be the same?

I hate this place so much, he thought desperately.

Sometimes, he wondered if this might not be his punishment…the price he had to pay for simply being alive.

"...you want one or something?" the Frenchman asked, a slight frown at the corner of his lips. Ed started. He supposed he must be staring.

"No," Ed said. He swallowed thickly. "Don't have any sandwiches to trade today, sorry." Usually, he brought his lunch (or his father tried to make one for him, a horror he hoped would never happen again), but this morning he had been so worn down and anxious about the upcoming day that he had clean forgotten. It did not help his mood.

"'s okay, I don't mind sharing the one I've got going," Jean said. His eyes were still unusually bright, Ed thought. It was unsettling. Jean pulled the cig away from his mouth and Ed reached out to grab it, eager suddenly for a calming drag. The bastard Colonel had never let Havoc give him smokes back home in Amestris, and in retrospect Ed wished he hadn't respected the man's wishes and obeyed. Smoking was expensive, but it sure did wonders for the nerves.

The Frenchman grabbed his hand.

Ed's eyes widened as he stared down at the exact same thing Jean was looking at, then looked up helplessly into piercing blue eyes. Stupid, he berated himself, stupid stupid stupid.

He had reached out with his flesh hand out of habit, the one with bruised knuckles, and it was clear now that Jean had put two and two together.

"I thought as much," the Frenchman said. He sounded…disgusted, which was unexpected and more than a little upsetting.

"I saw you two leave yesterday. Neither of you came back after that argument, so I figured something had to be up. But this…"

He released Ed's hand as though it were covered in worse than just spots of engine grease.

That's what I did, Ed realized belatedly. He must have stripped off his glove when they went to take the tarps off the rocket engine, old fussy habit about getting white cloth dirty. Paranoia took him for a moment and he looked quickly down at his other – the glove covering his obviously mismatched prosthetic hand – but luckily it seemed he hadn't made the same mistake on that side. Old automail habit, he identified dryly, never taking the right glove off. At least that routine had served him well.

Jean took another long drag on his cigarette, and Ed looked down at the ground, not sure what to say.

"Look," the Frenchman said finally, through a thick puff of smoke, "I don't know what your problem is, okay? But there's some of us who wish you'd just be done with it already."

Ed had expected Jean not to be very sympathetic, but his problem? His problem? It was at least half as much Alfons's problem, if not more; Ed had been perfectly fine until Alfons had started making life difficult.

"H-he said we should take it outside," Ed said lamely, and then immediately wanted to take the words back. Stupid, again. He must sound like a petulant five-year-old, crying to Mommy - he hit me first! He hit me first!

He was letting the fact that this guy looked like Havoc get to him, he decided. Something about that friendly, easy-going face, suddenly stern and very disapproving…

You used to call me 'boss', he wanted to wail all of a sudden, and the fact that he even had that urge made him want to recoil in horror.

Maybe he was tired too, he considered rather desperately. Maybe that would explain why he had taken leave of what he had once thought to be good senses.

"I know I'm not on the same level as you two boy wonders," the Frenchman said, taking another hard suck on his smoke-stick. Ed opened his mouth and Jean held up a hand, staying him. "And that's all right. But as long as I have to work with you, I'd appreciate it if you would at least try and keep the peace. All right? The way you two go at each other is like my old man and lady, and if I wanted to hear my parents fight I'd go back home for Christmas Mass."

He raised one bushy eyebrow and Ed, helpless, just stood there and stared.

"Alfons is a good guy, okay? You don't have to be so damn prickly with him."

"But he—I—" His brain had lost all ability to form words suddenly, and Ed's tongue twisted helplessly as he struggled to find some way to express the sheer, utter unfairness of it all. He knew it wasn't his imagination that Alfons picked on his ideas more often than any of the others. Alfons never got into debates defending Einstein's honor with any of the rest of the project members.

But it was true that given that evidence, it could also be inferred that just as Alfons had some bizarre problem with Ed, Ed's reactions implied he had an ax to grind against Alfons too. Which of course, he did – with good reason! The difference was, the rest couldn't see it, he realized with numb horror. Alfons had all these people on his side from the start. They likely never noticed all the animosity Alfons had sent to start this, because he was their friend. And if there was one thing Ed knew about friendship, it was that it quite often caused smart people to blind themselves to the most obvious things.

"Okay, fine," he ground out to the Frenchman. "I'll see if we can't get along better. Thanks for the smoke."

He left Jean there and slipped back into the warehouse, angry and hurt and feeling wound up somehow, his body full of nameless tension that had no name or foreseeable outlet. Jean's face and eyes, his voice…all disapproving…maybe it would be better if he stopped taking so many cigarette breaks with the man, Ed considered sourly. In fact, it was probably better he not associate too much with the Frenchman, anyway. Not just for his own sanity, but also because, cruel or not, Ed could see the writing on the wall. The 'Frenchman' was 'French' by heritage only; he'd had the poor luck to have a French merchant for a father, and even that seemed to be sin with Dorchett and Lars, some of the others who were big into politics. And Ed was not oblivious to group dynamics. It was obvious Jean was a low man on the proverbial totem pole, often left out of impromptu discussions. Some of the men looked at Jean's face askance sometimes, and seemed ill at ease with Ed's accent too. When these people had their own little smoke break conversations, often speaking of national pride and harmony, it was always clear that the two of them were not invited.

Ironically the only person who never seemed to give a damn - other than Oberth, who rarely had time to stop by and kibitz anyway - was Alfons the Hard-Ass. He would come out and urge them to get back to work, and generally be a bitch about it, but at least he was a bitch to everyone equally.

He really didn't want to think about that right now.

I must be losing my fucking mind, he thought, scrubbing a hand back through his hair. He couldn't have just misinterpreted all this, could he? Fuck, he'd spent the first few weeks thinking it was just his imagination. But the trend had become more than evident by the time he'd started making a histogram, taking the data down had only served to prove it--

Of course, it occurred to him, the fact that he'd resorted to taking a histogram of all the times Alfons had slighted him, interrupted him, or challenged him versus anyone else, probably said he did have just an eensie little ax to grind.

He stormed back into the main research space in an ill humor and plopped down on his stool, muttering dark things under his breath. Alfons was still just where he'd left him, Ed noted, perched resolutely on his rickety stool, sketching things out in fine, even lines good enough to rival any master alchemist.

Doesn't he ever take a smoke-break? Ed found himself wondering. At all? The bastard was just too fucking perfect sometimes, even when he knew Alfons wasn't – how many flaws had he spotted in Alfons's combustion chamber designs? Physics for firing things into the air was one thing, but the idiot needed to brush up on his thermodynamics if he was going to allow for the kind of forces they were dealing with from these reactions. And—

He was doing it again, Ed realized, now vaguely paranoid of even his own thought processes. What if this was somehow all just his own attitude problem? Ed bit down on his pencil hard enough to cut grooves in the side of the wood. More histograms, he decided. He could take more data – not just on Alfons's interactions with others, but his own – and see if there was a main effect of him starting arguments versus Alfons starting arguments. Maybe his previous study had been biased. Until then, he was just going to have to chill, as much as that irked him.

Alfons lifted his head and looked toward him, the very picture of cool confidence.

"Dorchett wanted your help with the condenser," Alfons said nonchalantly, then turned back to his work.

Ed's bowel's turned to ice.

Sure enough, when he turned around, there was Dorchett, fiddling with the distillation setup that was spread across a side table. They had been experimenting with a variety of different commercial-grade kerosenes for their liquid propellant, but so far none had proved quite as low octane as they would have liked. The lower the octane, the more readily the fuel would be to detonate, which was ideal for providing thrust to a rocket. Alfons and Ed had both agreed that if they could refine the stuff they had, it would be much better for the project.

That was not going to happen, though, if certain people didn't stop messing with the samples Ed was experimenting on!

"Hey hey hey whoa whoa whoa!" Ed said, rushing over in a panic. "What the hell are you doing?"

Dorchett jerked his head up, startled, and Ed groaned out loud to see that yes, it was exactly as he'd feared. As expected from the man, the little pin-head was busy screwing everything up. It wasn't enough that he'd obviously been fiddling with the condenser (the Liebig that at one time, he had naively hoped might help him to distill oxygen in this stupid world where arrays couldn't just take care of everything); the Bunsen burner that was heating the sample was now turned down too low.

"FUCK! You've got it all wrong," he snapped, absolutely furious, and shoved the interloper aside. "Let me do that. Fuck."

"The output beaker was full! I was trying to replace it. I was just trying to help --"

"Well, don't," Ed said, fury thick in his voice. "I've told you before, I've got this set exactly how I want it."

Dorchett shifted back and forth scratching his pointy little head, looking desperately unhappy, and Ed resisted the urge to snarl at him. Dammit, he was trying to be patient. It had been hard enough to figure out how to purify the pitiful ingredients this university provided without having to worry about people touching his equipment, people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing.

He looked at the beaker still in the receiving position and did snarl at that. It was filled to the brim and distillate was still dripping into it – distillate that had been affected by Dorchett's changes, and now he couldn't say the sample had been adequately controlled the whole time, the parameters of the experiment had changed for an unknown part of the output.

"Do you realize what you just did?" he snapped. "I have to throw it out now, the whole sample is ruined! If you don't know what the fuck to do, learn to leave well enough alone!"

Damn, he missed working with Al. Al understood how to leave well enough alone, or if he did meddle with an experiment that Ed had left running, he knew how to be careful and not create more work. He bent down and began readjusting his equipment, cursing softly to himself at just how quickly Dorchett had managed to knock his setup out of whack.

A shadow fell across his shoulder, and Ed blinked up to see Alfons looming suddenly above him, his eyes hard and flinty, a great Disapproving Presence. Coming to Dorchett's rescue, no doubt; ready to complain Ed was being too hard on him. Ed resisted the urge to jump up and sock the man.

You would be twice as hard on me if I pulled a stunt like that!

"And just how is he supposed to know what he is and isn't to do? You were out on a smoke-break" – said as if 'break' were a dirty word, holier-than-thou bastard – "and he was just trying to help. Your sample would have been equally as ruined if it overflowed."

And as usual, the worst part about it was that Alfons was right. Ed gritted his teeth.

"He could have come and got me."

"Perhaps it would help if you could deign to explain your process to the rest of us poor, unwashed masses, instead," Alfons drolled. "We could avoid interrupting your experiments if only we knew what it was we were interrupting. I mean, for all we know you were pretending to distill hydrogen again."

Again, the insult hit true. Alfons's words rankled and Ed wanted nothing more than to give him a matching bruise on the other side of his face. Digging up ancient history again, mistakes Ed never would have made if he weren't just so damn new in this world…

I liked you better when you weren't speaking to me! Ed thought desperately, eyes darting from side to side. He was starting to feel hemmed in. He was aware of a gathering around him, of people slowly starting to circle around the table where the two of them stood, and their eyes all around made his heart yammer fast and furious in his throat.

What were they expecting him to do? Circles like these he had seen before, oh yes, but in grimy tavern bars or seedy parts of the city, where man fighting man was a common past-time. Surely they were not expecting a rematch! He wasn't concerned about laying Alfons out – he'd already proved he could do that with one hand – but this many other guys, who for all he knew might be liable to jump him the second that Alfons was down…he might be able to take them, but not without collateral damage. Ed looked nervously over at his precious distillation setup, remembering how hard it was to get the university to loan all this equipment in the first place. If Oberth, their advisor, found out he had wrecked it in a brawl…

He could kiss his hopes of working with this team -- any team – under Oberth goodbye. He would have to scratch everything and go back to square one.

He would be that much further from getting home to Al.

"I-I'm SORRY!" he squeaked, spreading his hands out quickly in a 'surrender' pose. "Here, I'll show you, whatever you want to know, I'll do it right now, just please—"

Alfons's smile was like a viper's, quietly deadly.

"Then show me," he said. "I want to know everything."

Alfons turned toward the burner and began asking questions about specific temperature, flask weight specifications, all the ins-and-outs in a perfectly calm voice. Ed nodded, still residually shaky, and turned to join him. Somehow, thankfully, it seemed the immediate crisis was averted. And Alfons might like to challenge him about Einstein and ballistics and the price of pasta in Rome, but he would be damned if Alfons could find a hole in his setup here. Ed lost himself quickly in the intricate details of his distillation experiments, explaining how this part and that part was used for a very specific part of the process, and what each and every last operating parameter was.

Something seemed…off, however, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it – something about the sound of Alfons's voice as he continued asking random questions. Ed had in truth almost entirely tuned him out at this point, immersed as he was in the details of his experiment. Something about his own voice…something wasn't right…

"And then you take this Dublith condenser—"

Dublith. Not Liebeg.

He had reverted to Amestrisian.

Ed froze, his fingers wrapped tightly around the cylindrical condenser tube.

"Well? Go on?" Alfons said, a wicked bent to his voice, and it was only then that Ed paid enough attention to realize that Alfons was speaking perfect Amestrisian – excuse him,English - and fuck, everyone around was staring at them – at him – as if he had just grown a second head. It was worse than the time he had rolled his pants-leg up, it was like…like the stares poor Jean got when he joined the wrong people for lunch, only magnified times a thousand. Jean, Dorchett, Lars…Ed looked frantically back and forth between the people he knew, and they were all staring back at him with the most queerly blank expression on their faces, as if they weren't sure what to think.

"You absolute bastard," Ed snarled at Alfons. The man met him with a wintry glare, his eyes the very embodiment of icy chill.

"On the contrary," Alfons said, and this time Ed was aware of the shift into Drachman—German. He must have missed the change earlier because he was engrossed in shoptalk. "You come into our lab, make demands of our time and equipment – no gratitude, no cares for our budget – say you want to be a team player, but you bully my colleagues and cause nothing but trouble."

He touched his bruised face, not without meaning. Ed felt his stomach sink into his shoes.

Alfons switched back into Amestrisian, a little sneer about his lip, as if the foreign words were distasteful.

"And all this, and you won't even be honest about who you are, or where you came from, and your father – as it is well known – was not here in this country during the Great War. There are those who claim he was in London, betraying the Fatherland. To be frank, there were those who didn't want you within a thousand meters of our great experiment. This project is for Germany, and our nation's greatness. They claimed you were a spy."

"I'm not a—"

"I don't care what you claim you are!" Alfons wheeled and his eyes were blazing, his cheeks flushed and angry. "I stuck up for you, I protected you, I agreed to take you on when all the other teams rejected you, and this is how you repay me?!" He pawed at his swollen cheek again, as though it were a blight he could physically pull off and fling back at Ed. "I know what you are now. You are a bully and a brute, and I am through with you. Get out."

"But I—"

"Get. Out." Alfons's shoulders were quivering, whether in fear or rage Ed could not tell. He took a step forward and saw Lars immediately step in on the side in his peripheral vision - and Jean behind him, and Dorchett behind him. He felt his own hands begin trembling in rage. Did he realize—this could honestly ruin him—he might never see his brother again--

All the eyes were on him, Alfons's eyes were on him – those lying, stormy blue eyes; set in a face that resembled his brother's but he was now sure was nothing alike.

"Fine," Ed said, swallowing hard. "I understand. I see what I have to do."

He decked Alfons hard, directly over the line of the previous bruise with his unyielding prosthetic hand, and then he turned and fled.

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