|| "... Mars is associated with confidence and self-assertion, strength, and impulsiveness…" ||

Jean Havoc

October 28th, 1912

"HEY! STOP!"

There were times in Jean Havoc's life when he couldn't help but wonder if he'd made a poor choice in careers.

Case in point: the perp he'd been tailing through the quay staith along the East River was fast. Really fast. Falman, the sod, hadn't mentioned speed being a factor when he'd compiled the mission dossiers –– not that Jean had actually read the mission dossier. He'd had Heymans summarize it for him in ten words or less, and while those ten words had been "Read your own damn paperwork for once, you feckless cad," Jean was fairly sure he'd gotten the meat of it.

"THIS IS THE MILITARY!" he bellowed, his lungs distending like two boiled leather bags. Damn cigarettes. "STOP RIGHT THERE!"

He may as well have been shouting in ancient Xerxian for all the good it did him. The man Jean was pursuing didn't check his pace –– the perp was tall and lanky, his strides long, his turnover quick, and his well of adrenaline clearly in no immediate danger of running dry.

"Damnation." It came out as more of a puff than a mutter.

Jean's booted feet pounded out an insane, frantic rhythm as he raced into an abandoned warehouse at a dead sprint. He skidded around the corner and managed to catch himself on one of the wooden pylons, fairly positive he'd given himself a sizable splinter in the process.

He figured the others were not far behind him –– the Colonel had insisted on taking Hawkeye's car, which in turn forced Ri to play chauffeur when Jean knew she'd much rather be hitting the bricks along with the rest of them. Roy could be a right prat sometimes. Regardless, Jean'd heard their military-issue sedan burning rubber a few blocks back.

Falman and Fuery were holed-up somewhere coordinating the canvasing efforts with the head of the military police, while Heymans ought to be close at Havoc's heels, catching up... eventually.

Jean glanced up briefly as he careened through the open bay doors. The roof of the warehouse was domed some seventy-five feet above his head, like a cathedral... if cathedrals were made of corrugated tin and radiated the burnt-hair smell of brazed joints. The perp ignored the grain silos and shipping containers and made for a basement door, slamming it open so it hit the opposite wall with a bang before bolting down the staircase.

It was as though an elastic band had snapped in Jean's muscles, a tug at the base of his spine pulling him into free fall. He could almost taste the fretting in the air, breaths that smacked of volatile solvents, ready to explode.

He dashed down flights of stairs that appeared to increase decimally until there seemed no end to them, no bottom. The whole stairwell hitched crazily from side to side with the speed of his descent. Going around and around, his hand slapping at the worn guardrail to keep from bulleting into the wall at each turn, Jean had a small pocket of time to reflect on the circumstances that had landed him in such a disagreeable situation.

It had started... with six words. Six damning words that had spelled two weeks of the worst undercover work of Jean Havoc's tenure as a member of the Amestrian armed forces.

Two Weeks Earlier

"I could pose as a professor," said Vato Falman demurely.

Colonel Roy Mustang –– a man whose perpetually cocked left eyebrow, rakish smile, and mussed head of hair made Jean look about as enticing as the underside of Breda's boot by comparison –– gave Falman an indulgent nod, signaling the Warrant Officer to continue.

Falman sighed slightly, as though he already regretted making the suggestion in the first place. He explained: "If the suspect is a member of the Eastern Polytechnic faculty, would it not make sense for a subordinate to go undercover at the institution?"

First Lieutenant Hawkeye, who had up until that point been quiet, dutifully combing through the evidence obtained by Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes, paused in her perusal. "A covert op may be our best course of action, Colonel. A vast majority of the materials documented in the bills of sale," she jerked her head towards the teetering pile of water-stained and curling paper on the corner of her desk, "lack serials or were obtained through third parties."

"Which allowed the original buyer to legally bypass any background checks or registration regulations," added Heymans through a mouthful of mustard and pastrami.

Kain's beetle-black eyes blinked myopically behind his glasses. "Is there a department specializing in alchemy at the University, sir? That might narrow our search."

The room's collective gaze pivoted to Roy, who shook his head emphatically. "Eastern Polytechnic is fully-funded by the Amestrian military, with a vast majority of the students electing to join the reserve officer training corps as a means of offsetting the cost of tuition. With the University falling under the purview of the Department of Defense, state licensure would be a prerequisite to practicing or teaching alchemy."

"And according to the University directory," said Falman, drawing on his impressive memory, "there are no state alchemists currently on staff."

"And, therefore, no alchemists at all," finished Roy with a scowl, waving a hand as if batting off a nuisance fly. "At least, not in any official capacity. Whomever is responsible for buying these materials is operating outside the control of the military. Their backroom operation, coupled with the nature of the acquisitions themselves, doubly condemn them."

"Break the law once, shame on you," munched Breda, "break the law twice..."

Kain set aside the spare power plug with which he'd been fiddling. "Pardon me, Colonel, I don't mean to sound ignorant, sir, but what's so strange about purchasing..." the Sergeant glanced over at one of Riza's forms, reading aloud: "fertilizer, soda-silica glass, and moissanite rock?"

"You mean aside from the fact that a carat of moissanite costs more than what I make in a month?" grumbled Jean, his mood black. His date had made some bullshit excuse involving cat claws and lockjaw, so Havoc had committed himself to being grumpy and miserable for the rest of the day.

Hawkeye glared daggers at him, harboring about as much sympathy and regard for Jean's plight as Heymans reserved for his doomed pastrami on rye.

Roy sounded vaguely irritated as he explained: "Moissanite is a naturally occurring carbide compound, a carbon-based semiconductor. Soda-silica glass, which is the main ingredient in most bottles and containers, is lime and silicon dioxide. And fertilizer contains ammonia, of course."

"Of course," muttered Jean.

"In short, the person purchasing these items in bulk is stockpiling not insignificant amounts of carbon, silicon, lime, and ammonia."

Heymans choked on the crust of his sandwich. After giving his chest a few effusive smacks and pointedly ignoring the startled frowns and Riza's raised eyebrow, he spluttered: "This guy is gatherin' the ingredients for human transmutation, ain't he?"

Even in Jean's home backcountry, people whispered about the possibility of human transmutation, but like most folks, Havoc had dismissed the whisperers as alarmist crackpots.

But next to the Colonel stood Falman and Fuery slack-jawed and wide-eyed –– or, at least, as wide as the former's eyes could manage. Further along sat Riza, with a frozen stare so alarming that Jean thought perhaps she had stopped breathing altogether.

"Woah woah, back up a bit, Colonel." Jean had very nearly said hold your horses but had caught himself at the last minute. "Back home, we used to sell soda-silica mason jars and fertilizer to growers all the damn time, especially herbalists. And if they were doin' any indoor planting, the thermal conductivity of moissanite makes for good heat lamps."

"Lieutenant Havoc has a point," murmured Hawkeye, gaze distant, deep in thought.

"All the more reason to check this place out ourselves," argued Heymans. "On the one hand, we gotta guy running an apothecary out of his basement. On the other, some lunatic playing God and bringing dead people back to life. We can't afford to be wrong about this, sirs."

"And what makes you think Falman is the one for the job?"

The Warrant Officer fixed Jean with a pinch-eyed glare, huffing testily, "I am more than capable of infiltrating a university, Lieutenant."

Jean snorted. "The last time we ran a covert op, you took your mask off in the middle of a raid because it 'smelled like feet'."

"Major Armstrong's feet, sir!"

"Look, Vato, nobody here would argue about your sterling idealism in looking to defend us all against the threat from evil alchemical masterminds," said Jean, more than a little sarcastically, trying to mimic Falman's fancy turn of phrases as best he could, "but I'm not champing at the bit to sit with my thumb up my ass for months on end just on the off chance that some egghead with a god complex might turn up."

"Enough," snapped Mustang, looking between Falman and Havoc, his irritation and annoyance liable to turn to anger in short order. "Going undercover is far from watertight, but it guarantees a small operation and keeps word of an attempt at human transmutation from leaking to the public, which is ultimately in the military's best interests. I will make the necessary preparations with General Grumman. In the meantime, Warrant Officer, cross-reference what we know about the case with Lieutenants Hawkeye and Breda and draw up a preliminary dossier."

Falman clicked his heels. "Yes, sir."

Jean dipped his chin toward his chest and pressed his lips together. Watching Falman play pretend for who-knew-how-long didn't exactly flip his fin, but he had to admit that, for all the Warrant Officer's crippling inexperience in undercover work, and despite the fact that Jean'd never admit it aloud, Vato's idea had merit. Jean doubted a student had the capital –– or the cojones –– to pull off a stunt like human transmutation. That left the faculty. So long as Falman found himself some suitably-tatty tweed and a jaunty bowtie and stuck to surveillance –– using his incredible memory to gather information rather than his painfully awkward mouth to blow his cover –– Roy's entire team wouldn't run the risk of inciting anyone to commit crimes of a type and scale calculated to procure specific sentences. Moreover, they'd catch the perp before he blew up half the campus or something.

"So Bishop heads in, smokes the suspect out, gets on the horn to the military police, and they nab the guy before he does anything stupid," summarized Jean succinctly. While their normal working relations were pervaded by an atmosphere of intrigue and subterfuge, Jean still felt a sense of excitement at the prospect of a recce.

"Well, we may as well give the old man a firearms review," grunted Breda –– Falman looked crestfallen at the suggestion. "Just in case things head south."

"That will not be necessary, Second Lieutenant," said Riza, interjecting smoothly.

"No need to give Falman the schooling, Breda," agreed Roy, his lips twitching. His own choice of words seemed to give the Colonel some grim amusement, until he coughed into relative seriousness again. "Since the rest of you will be going to Eastern Polytechnic with the Warrant Officer."

Jean Havoc blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, then finally said, with all the intelligence he could muster in that moment, "Huh?"

"You're enrolling. Well..." Roy considered for a moment, smirking inwardly at his thoughts, "you might be a bit old to pass for a student, Lieutenant, but I'm sure there are always positions open on the custodial staff."

He was serious. Damn it all, Mustang was being serious.

"Oh no. No no no no no. Like hell you're making me go back to school!"

"I'm not making you do anything. I'm giving you an order. If the Lieutenant says she's needs a name, then it falls to us to provide one."

Us, he'd said. Not him. "And what are you gonna do, Colonel?"

"The Colonel's face is too recognizable," said Hawkeye simply. She spoke in her usual matter-of-fact tone, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her words. "We will monitor your progress from Eastern Command."

Heymans frowned. No doubt he'd found the whole scheme highly amusing when it'd just involved Falman's hapless ass, but Breda's own ass was a different matter entirely. "I gotta go with Jean on this one, Boss... I can't say I relish the idea myself."

"Since Warrant Officer Falman's experience in the field is minimal, he'll need backup."

"Oh, come on." Jean scooted back on his chair, trying to put some distance between himself and the paperwork on his desk. He protested, "This was his idea in the first place!"

"And it was a good idea," finished Riza, her steady uptick in impatience simmering like banked embers in her eyes.

The utter dismay must have showed itself in Jean's eyes, for Roy's wry expression faltered and Riza's pen ceased its incessant scratching across the paper. Havoc felt a sharp twinge in his chest, his entire being recoiling at the very idea of returning to school, undercover or no.

Much of Jean's own time at the Eastern Military Academy had passed under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He had been dismayed by the other officer cadets' relentless snobbery –– the limpid eyes and frozen-lipped smirks –– not to mention the unremitting struggles Havoc faced with his studies. If it hadn't been for Heymans, Jean wouldn't have finished at all. It had been Breda who made the entire ordeal bearable, Breda who, in the silence of their dorm or in some empty classroom, studying well into the wee hours of the morning, had mumbled encouragement and prodding and prompting and a hundred other things, nameable and not.

As though reading his fellow officer's mind, Heymans sidled up to Havoc, lunch forgotten, resting an elbow on the corner of Jean's desk. Heymans had never been one for sappy or saccharine sentiment –– said it gave him toothache –– but the years had impressed on Havoc the value of even his best friend's smallest, subtlest gestures of reassurance.

"When do we get started?" grunted Breda.

"General Grumman has several contacts within the University proper," said Mustang. "It shouldn't take more than a week to secure positions for the lot of you. Falman, what would you like to teach?"

"How to Piss Off Your Friends in Six Words or Less 101."

"Amestrian History, sir."

Havoc glared sidelong at the Warrant Officer and muttered: "I swear to god, Falman, if this doesn't work, I'm going to stab you in the throat with a pipette."

Hawkeye sighed. "Please refrain from threatening your subordinates, Lieutenant Havoc."

"Havo," said Heymans quietly, close by Jean's ear, "not that I don't empathize with the sentiment n'all, but unless you plan to drown the guy in saline solution one drop at a time, might I suggest a scalpel?"

"Those are the sharp ones, right?"

"There you go."

He knew Heymans was only trying to make him feel better, but Jean's heart wasn't into it. Perhaps he was going a little stir-crazy being cooped up in Eastern Command all the time, but a undercover mission at a school was not the respite Jean had in mind. Besides the fact, Jean tended to favor the age-old philosophy that what can go wrong, will go wrong, and the prospect of a recce going tits-up in a University setting filled Jean with bone-numbing dread.

All the while, Kain –– the poor kid would probably have to pass as an actual student –– didn't react the way Jean'd expected him to react. He'd expected some more sympathy, and maybe even some meek and mild words of protest. What Jean didn't expect was for him to smile. But smile he did. And it was his sideways smile, which told Jean that Fuery knew something Havoc didn't.

"What?" he demanded adamantly.

Kain grinned. "Nothing... it's just..." he coughed, his cheeks growing red from the effort of suppressing his giggles. "Falman... as a professor..."

The mental image was almost enough to cheer Jean up.

Almost.

Later

Two weeks. Two whole goddamn weeks at a fucking university. As close to hell as Jean was likely to manage without his Ma weeping over a headstone. Two weeks, during which time Falman taught a history seminar, Kain took classes, Breda served chips, and Jean scrubbed graffiti off the toilet basins.

If –– and it was looking to be a very big if –– Jean got through this ordeal without skidding down the stairs and breaking a leg, or getting brained by some nutcase when he hit the basement, he was going to have a very long chat with General Grumman about a certain prat Flame Alchemist.

There –– the perp's shoe skidded on a puddle of water or oil, just along enough to put a hiccough in his gait. He started to turn, but before he could step away, Jean bounded the few steps between them and made a grab for the perp's collar.

At first, the man seemed quite ordinary looking. Tall-ish, dark complexion, dark hair, dark clothing, a shadow of stubble like cigarette ash clinging to his jaw, but when Jean forced himself to look into his eyes, he was unsettled by their brightness. Glittering, bottomless and opaque. A keyhole through which the world poured in and something rank and rotten leaked out. They were almost yellow in color, as though the man had a liver problem.

"I ordered you to stop!" snarled Jean, jamming the barrel of his pistol into the back of the man's head. The perp continued to struggle, and as he threw a hard, angry glare over one shoulder, his fractured yellow gaze fastened on Jean and held. Havoc suppressed the urge to squirm nervously.

"Let me go..." the man seethed, "I have to find it, before they take it."

"You ain't goin' nowhere, pal. Now stop," Jean gave him a good, hard shake, "your fidgeting!"

"A double negative... that was a double negative, you know. You ought to let me free, now, you see... because if I'm not going nowhere then I have to go somewhere."

Jean decided there was nothing worse than watching a crazy person saying something completely ridiculous and then to have them look at him as though he was the one a shovel shy of a tool shed. "Shut up!"

"You're encoding my truths and memories, just like they are... imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that exist and don't exist, all at the same time."

"You're outta your mind."

The perp made a deep noise. "No... no no. It's just... decohesive. I'm entangled! I am so afraid of hearing voices. I think I've come to the edge... and I want to jump off..." The man inhaled and slowly let the air out. His stance softened and so did his voice: "The book..." he murmured. "It does not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within it."

He slipped and teetered precariously at the edge of the step. Jean's arm slipped around the man's torso as the Lieutenant began to pull him back up the stairs.

"I have to find it!" the perp protested, near-giddy and beginning to struggle. They staggered together in an insane, grotesque dance. "An entomological keepsake of the horizons of existence!"

Jean tried to adjust his grip. Instead of stumbling back, the man tipped forward, pulling the Lieutenant along with him. Together they tumbled down the remaining stairs. The edges dug sharply into Jean's sides as the two of them fell, and all he could see for a few seconds were flashes of gritty concrete interspersed with darkness. There was a searing pain in his head, and sparks exploded across his eyes, vanishing into a red haze. Momentarily stunned, Jean's grip faltered, and the perp wiggled free. The man vanished through the door at the foot of the stairwell.

"A direct gathering, Jean Havoc!" called the man from a distance. "Moths to the flame!"

With no small amount of effort or swearing, Jean lurched unsteadily to his feet. Even in a tilting, dizzying daze, Havoc felt a jolt in his fingertips, very nearly depressing the trigger of his sidearm and putting a bullet in the concrete wall. "How the hell do you know my name?" he demanded, breathless, not really expecting an answer but incapable of keeping the question from slipping out...

Then, out of the dark passages beyond the stairwell, rose a scream. A nightmarish wail of misery that cut at Jean's very being. A single, thin, blood-curdled shriek. In the silence that followed, it was as if the world itself was shocked; Havoc stared slack-jawed at the open doorway, horrified. He heard a slow creak from above –– Breda, in pursuit. Jean wondered, off-handedly, if he had heard the scream as well…

Jean raised the pistol to his shoulder and plowed into the basement.

Immediately, something about the huge, open space made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. For one thing, the flat iron door at Jean's back, hanging open on its hinges, had a mean rectangle of glass at eye-level, the sort of thing one would see in an isolation ward or solitary cell in Central Prison. The room was still and quiet, crypt-like. The windows –– dozens of thin, horizontal slats near the ceiling –– were filmed in desiccated insects, which seemed to age the daylight coming through from outside. Unlike the warehouse floor above, the space was largely empty, save for the very middle of the room, where what looked to Jean like a makeshift laboratory had sprung up on the cold, bare concrete floor. The air smelled odd, rich with a disconcerting background aroma of chemicals which Jean found unnerving.

Benches formed a rough cordon around the instruments. Jean recognized microscopes and arc welders on the worktables, piles of sackcloth and sandy-brown tarpaulin, but the strings of tabular lightbulbs illuminated unfamiliar equipment, as well. Orbs humming with electricity. Cannibalized batteries strung into strange shapes. A device like a thick, metallic doughnut sitting on a plank go wood braced between two metal drums.

Jean noticed, warily, that, along with the folded tarpaulins, personal effects like coats and shoes and even trousers had been left lying around, as though everyone had evacuated in a hurry and somehow not thought to take their stuff with them. It was eerie.

It took a faint, fearful moan to draw Jean's attention to the cramped space between the empty oil drums, under the thick metal ring, where his perp sat huddled, head lowered, his knees pressed to his chest.

Jean couldn't stop watching the man's eyes. The yellow was surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in rats. They were the eyes of someone ancient, even if the rest of him didn't appear much older than Jean.

Havoc felt an emotion, then, that operated on a register above sheer terror. Some dog-whistle frequency, submerged until stumbled upon by accident. Like Fuery on his shortwave radios, scanning channels in his downtime and tuning them to some strange new wavelength –– the heavy whispers barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that people not gripped by fear could never speak.

The perp prattled wordlessly in his sing-song treble as he played with a pile of gleaming white objects arranged about him in a circle. One such object, a knobby, irregular thing like a hunk of white marble, he grasped in his right hand, and banged down noisily among the rest. The sound was less the heavy, grainy texture of stone on stone and more a light, dry scrape. Not marble, then. The man played through half closed, flame-yellow eyes. Jean stood there dumbfounded for a few long moments, staring at the spectacle, before his dazed senses finally registered the scene's full hideousness. A strangled gasp escaped him.

The stone in the man's hand was a human skull.

Jean clapped the crook of his elbow over his nose and mouth, fought the urge to be violently ill. The perp was surrounded by broken bone fragments, and the lumpen, misshapen piles Jean and his concussion had mistaken for tarpaulin or sackcloth... dry, desiccated bodies, in various states of decay and mummification. The flesh rigid along the bones, the ligaments shriveled and drawn like boiled leather.

And the belongings strewn about the floor... the gray, pockmarked shirts, the black peacoats, the belt buckles...

They were the same clothes the perp was wearing. Dozens of iterations of the same outfit, scattered amongst the bones.

"What..." Havoc swallowed, his throat suddenly as dry and dusty as the human remains on the floor. "What the hell..."

Even after his short sufferance in Ishval, where his primary responsibility had been to collect the bodies of the Amestrian dead and wounded, Jean found it difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing humans. It was dense and cloying, sweet... but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat. Like someone had burned incense in an abattoir.

The perp, meanwhile, had gone deathly still. Curled in catatonic silence. He slumped against the oil drum, his strings cut, his fingers uncurling. The skull rolled out of his hand, across the floor, towards Jean's booted feet...

"Havo... is he...?"

Heymans. Jean felt the Lieutenant's presence at his elbow, the latter's hand brushing the former's sleeve, a ghost of a touch. Havoc was immensely grateful for the company.

The man, their suspect, wore a look on his face that Jean had seen before... in the stares of the Ishval vets, in the shadows that tended to stray even upon Mustang and Hawkeye's staunch, strong faces: a look of vacant, hollow-eyed shock occasioned by horror way beyond a normal person's capacity to process. Harsh light from the slatted windows and the steely shine of the instruments illuminated the man's face as even his expression of terror crumpled to one of lifeless listlessness. His manic yellow gaze grew distant and opaque. Jean felt enveloped in the stare, which was not a stare, not really, but simply an act of the eyes remaining open, a reflex, reflecting everything but seeing nothing.

Jean thought furiously: their suspect. The bodies. The human remains. The same clothes, the same outfit...

Like moths that'd lost rudder control, realized Jean in an instant, thinking back to the warm summer evenings he'd spend with his Ma under the porch light. Watching the insects smack into the walls and rails, pinwheeling around the light in tighter revolutions, like suds over an open drain. If they drew too close, the moths ignited like balls of hair, curling into an oily puff of smoke.

Moths to the flame.

The perp had come to the warehouse to die.

Along with all the others... all wearing the same clothes, all pilgrimaging to the same place.

"What the hell is going on here, Jean."

Havoc turned to consider his friend. Under his –– unbuttoned –– uniform jacket, Heymans's shirt was drenched with sweat and his skin had gone gray and clammy. Jean couldn't remember the last time Breda had ever looked so frightened.

Jean opened his mouth to reassure the other soldier when he heard something that chilled him to the bone:

"There are no arrays."

As Jean and Heymans glanced back over their shoulder to see who had arrived, the sight of the officer's solid, dark form struck sparks inside Havoc's chest. The irony likely would have made an impression on him under vastly different circumstances. Colonel Mustang's eyes were still bold and black, but any of the usual cool recklessness in his face and cynical humor in his mouth was long gone.

A furrow appeared between Jean's brows. The limits to his understanding of what the fuck was going on had apparently been reached and surpassed. "Colonel––"

Mustang gestured to the metal floor, bare save for the corpses and the clothes. "Whatever this is... it's not human transmutation."

Heymans's burnished green eyes darted from the ground, to Roy's face, then back to the ground again. "What makes you so sure, sir?"

"I know what to look for," he murmured enigmatically.

Jean waited for perhaps a tiny bit more, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Roy's silhouette as he stalked towards the perp's body erased the kindness of him, leaving the barest sketch –– almost predatory. As the Flame Alchemist circled, Jean couldn't help but feel like some apprentice lion tamer in the ring with a disgruntled, frustrated animal, one who didn't know whether to do its tricks and receive a treat, or to simply break the rules and pounce.

Breda grunted noncommittally, a nervous habit only Havoc knew to recognize. "I guess all you alchemists must know enough about it to tell the difference, with it being the ultimate taboo n'all."

Roy crouched and rested two fingers against the underside of the perp's throat, waited for a moment, then frowned deeply. "Something like that," he muttered. Black eyes met cornflower blue and the Colonel shook his head.

Wordlessly, Havoc engaged the safety on his firearm, and reholstered it at his hip.

Breda crossed his arms over his chest. "You're the expert on the alchemy stuff, Boss. If not human transmutation, then what went on here? And why the hell are all the dead people wearing the same clothes... do we got a serial killer on our hands or something?"

Jean swallowed, feeling the nervous, hummingbird flutter of his own pulse in his throat.

"You know that old saying," said Havoc, his expression unreadable, "that you're gonna catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar. Way I figure it, you get even more flies with corpses. Flies aren't too picky."

Roy pulled his black great coat further over his shoulders, sensitive to the chill of the basement. "Are you suggesting these people were... lured here, Lieutenant?"

"I'm not sure. He was talkin' a lotta nonsense. I reckon he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, if you catch my meaning, sir."

"Mental deterioration would certainly match his physical state," said Roy, letting out a deep sigh. "There's barely anything left of him. Skin and bones in the quite literal sense." The Colonel rose from his knees and leveled on Havoc sternly. "Did he say anything to you?"

"Right before he cracked, the perp kept muttering about tryna find something. A book."

"A book," parroted Heymans.

"It does not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within it. That's what he said."

"Great. A right nutter, and probably a serial killer, to boot."

Moths to the flame.

There was something Jean was missing, something all of them were missing. Dozens of bodies... none of them exactly the same. Some stripped clean, to mere skeletons, more bloated and necrotic, and others still fully flesh and blood... like the perp from the chase. But all of them wore the same clothes, curled up in the same basement laboratory...

It was like looking in a mirror and seeing the shades of other faces looking back through the years, seeing the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, the mysterious man had made his own ghosts.

Jean could half-imagine the suspect had been haunting himself.

Not human transmutation, perhaps, but Jean couldn't shake the suspicion that a certain science was at play, a corrupt alchemy that defied all attempts to rationalize. More a bizarre, abstract poetry than any logical or coherent mathematics.

But Jean had learned enough from Heymans to know that there are hidden meanings in mathematics, just as there are in poetry. When Jean Havoc looked at an equation in physics, blind as he was to the life underlying the symbols, the lines looked dead to him. It was only when someone truly brilliant, an alchemist like Roy, began to learn and supply the hidden text that the meaning slipped, slid, then finally leapt to life.

Many moths drawn to the same flame... or perhaps the same moth. Over and over. Again and again.

An equation plotting a circle instead of a straight line.

"Could alchemy duplicate a person, sir?" wondered Jean aloud.

Roy answered absently: "With the right materials... one could fabricate a crude human simulacrum from pork, for example."

"No, sir... I mean." Jean started, then stopped, swallowed, and started again: "Could an alchemist duplicate himself?"

Roy shook his head and looked sidelong at Havoc, his expression caught somewhere between thoughtful and frowning. "Alchemy is a linear process, Lieutenant. To create, something of equal value must be destroyed. Alchemy's first and foremost law hinges on a mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of difference in the structure of matter. Two sides of the same coin. Creation and destruction. Heads and tails."

"Sir..." began Jean, wracking his brain for a way to render thoughts too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. "We did things the old fashioned way, back home. If a tie needed breakin' or a decision needed makin', we flipped a cenz coin. Thing is, one time, Ma tossed the thing in the air... and it landed on its edge. Neighbors all thought we were talkin' out our asses when we insisted it'd happened."

"What're you gettin' at, Havo?" asked Heymans.

Roy frowned slightly. "Are you suggesting a transmutational process might… fall on its edge?"

Jean was well aware of the fact he probably sounded like he had more than a few screws loose –– even as he watched, Heymans's face flushed with agitation, impatience and a sudden pity that made Jean want to grind his teeth to dust. "Deconstruction and reconstruction, right sir?" he pressed on stubbornly –– Ma had always said he was boneheaded. "What would happen if you put 'em on top of each other, if they didn't happen in order but at the same time––"

"If you superimposed them, you mean," offered Breda, skeptically, with an odd note of sternness in his voice.

"Yeah… both heads and tails existin' at the same time. Only this coin… this ain't a two-sided coin. What if a six-sided die could sit on every edge at once? Or a twelve-sided one? Or an object with an infinite number of sides… what would happen if the entire mess of possibilities played out at the same time?"

"The transmutation would become a cascade," said Roy, staring at Jean with an expression with which the Lieutenant was wholly unfamiliar. "The elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Each of these "possibilities", or the products of the transmutations, would become entangled. The entire process would splinter reality into coupled states."

"If you're sayin' what I think you're sayin'…" His face tight with worry, Heymans pinched the bridge of his nose, "then this man, all these men… are the same person?"

"It would explain the clothes, and the fact that there are all these bodies here without the military catchin' wind of any mass killings in the area."

"What the hell sort of alchemy can split one person into dozens! You can't create matter from nothing, right?"

"But it's not from nothing!" realized Jean, suddenly. "These other people were always here. Just…"

Just... decohesive.

Heymans sighed with impatience, a certain intimation of annoyance in the sound. Jean figured his own tenuous grasp of concepts far outside his scope of his understanding had begun to irritate Breda, and having nothing to lose, the Second Lieutenant let his skepticism surface. "I'll buy Alex Armstrong turning boulders into giant busts of himself. I'll buy that nutjob Kimblee leveling whole towns out in the desert. Hell, I'll even give the Boss the benefit of the doubt when he says he recruited a goddamn twelve year old to the state alchemy program. But… pulling versions of yourself from diverging realities… Jean, that ain't alchemy. That's nonsense."

At that moment, Jean reeled as he caught sight of Mustang. The Flame Alchemist's expression held such agony and such fierce horror that it was almost enough to freeze the blood in Havoc's veins. Some of the blood had drained from Roy's face, making the dark circles under his lids more pronounced, like empty sockets where eyes ought to be.

"A book," breathed Mustang. "You said he was looking for a book, Jean."

Some unspoken disclosure seemed to be taking place inside Roy's head. It reminded Jean of the way Mustang and Hawkeye tended to communicate, without words, conveying entire conversations in a few eye twitches or some slow rolls of the head.

"Alchemists frequently write in mono-alphabetic substitution ciphers," murmured Roy. "Their notes are coded."

Jean waited for him to say something more. The silence held a hidden truth that lingered between them, written in a script he did not know how to decipher.

"If we find this book," said Heymans, "you reckon you can decode the notes, Boss?"

Jean rolled out his neck. He would murder for a cigarette. "Where do ya wanna start, Breda? The guy gave me no title, no genre… hell, not even the goddamn color of the cover."

"And this is a University," said the Colonel as a means of reluctant agreement.

"Hiding a tree in the forest and all that." Heymans shrugged. "'Sides, if this guy was looking for his book before he handed in his dinner pail, then it stands to reason it's not laying around here somewhere. We got nothin' to go on."

"His secrets died with him."

Mustang let silence punctuate his statement, clearly upset at coming to his own conclusion.

Jean glanced around the basement, the bodies, not knowing how to respond to anything, not knowing what to say.

"In any case, we can't do any more down here without a crime scene investigation division of the military police," said Roy. "We have to do this by the book. After the paperwork mistake concerning those two alchemists from Resembool, Hakuro is itching to come down on us, and tampering with evidence is just the excuse he needs."

Heymans nodded. "We'd better not give him the opportunity then, sir."

Mustang's team had hit a snag. As much as he wanted to continue to dig through the remnants of the laboratory, to search the bodies, the impulse to scurry back to Eastern Headquarters with his tail between his legs was a palpable ache in Havoc's chest. The gap between the two desires filled Jean with anger and frustration.

The Lieutenant remembered the perp's bright yellow eyes, wide and unblinking… how terrified they had been. All the fear in the world, and the paranoia that came from the fear, and the hatred of the world born from the paranoia, and the loneliness that came from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, gathering around the man's life –– or lives –– like clouds in the air, growing dark and cold and heavy until it fell like gray snow. Jean reckoned the man's world had been muffled and numb, one in which no person could hear each other or feel each other.

Even when each person was the same man.

How sad and lonely it must have been...