Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Fullmetal Alchemist.

A/N: I promised you guys action, yeah. But are you getting any, no. Not really. So, whenever I say anything there's like a eighty-five percent chance that it could possibly be a lie (whether purposely told, or accidentally) and thus, there is no action in this chapter. Next chapter! For reals!

Rue

Chapter 10

Cabal

Ron knew instantly that a dark alleyway was a bad idea. No matter how cliché the assumption was in general, it still held fast. Good things just don't happen in places like that.

"Come on Ron," Harry sounded exasperated, "I'm sure no spiders are going to get you."

The strange boy eyed the alley carefully, tilting his head to the side and narrowing his eyes suspiciously. Ron found it odd that he didn't even spare him a single teasing glance, not even a rolling of his eyes, and a look of superiority that would sing, "Spiders? Are you serious?". No. That was a bad sign too. If something was up with him, then it must mean something to them as well. If he was, in fact, an assassin of some sort sent by You-Know-Who then it was a dumb idea on Harry's part.

That boy was, however, already on his way through said alley.

"This is absolute rubbish," Ron murmured under his breath, as Hermione and the blonde boy, with what looked very much like a shrug, stepped quickly after Harry.

"Harry!" Hermione pestered, "Let's just go back the normal way!"

Harry shook his head, Ron could barely see his dark visage in the gloom. "We're already here aren't we? It would take even more time to go back."

In retrospect, they shouldn't have let Harry get so frustrated in the first place, it only lead to bad things.

Lord Voldemort was waiting patiently for the moment Harry Potter would step into the open air of London. He couldn't stay carefully hidden away much longer.

The dementors he had sent to Little Whinging had failed, but at the very least that had managed to stir up quite a fair amount of trouble for the boy-who-lived.

However, the boy had taken care of the dementors on his own. Voldemort had been underestimating him, clearly.

His window of opportunity was quickly closing. As long as harry was not in Hogwarts he could be dealt with. The only problem was that dreadful, tiresome organization, The Order of the Phoenix, and that blasted man Dumbledore. He had not been able to locate their Headquarters as of yet, and it was becoming increasingly annoying.

So when one of his Pettigrew showed up before him, sniveling and unworthy, and muttered, "They've found him. They know where the boy is." He'd felt a kind of sadistic excitement he had been denied for quite a while.

"...or we have the general idea. That girl Hermione got spotted by one of the lookouts you had placed around the city going into a Muggle shop on that side of town. They've seen her out a few times, once with an Auror even..." and the assumption was that the 'golden trio' had been reunited, and that the boy could not be far. Avery stood before him and relayed the information, twitched away each time he so much as moved a finger. He had misinformed him in the past, once even about the matter at hand, the plan if this slight effort did not follow through. Falsified facts about the Department of Mysteries... He had been punished accordingly.

So he decided to give it more time.

"Watch the are carefully, tell me what you find."

Meanwhile, he had a new strategy to work out. His fingers itched for death. It would be so much simpler if he could just get rid of the boy now.

"A squib?" Luscius Malfoy frowned, disbelieving. Why would the Dark Lord want him to find a squib? One who would be assigned a job no less! Surely any assignment he had for this filthy shortcoming could rest easily upon his own shoulders. Or any other death eater for that matter. If not, still, a squib?

Not that it would be hard to find one willing to obey his master. Any squib would jump at the chance to assist He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, for this meant that he would not kill them. Being spared their lives, surely, would be convincing enough.

Fear was practical. Fear was efficient.

Narcissa pondered the thought of a squib quite seriously, screwing up her pale features into a twist of concentration when he consulted her about it that night at their dining table, "Do I know any squibs? Hmm..."

"Doesn't a squib own that odd pawn shop in Knockturn Alley?" Draco muttered around a piece of lobster that was placed delicately on his tongue.

"Not when your mouth is full, dear," Narcissa lectured, looking very serious.

Draco merely hummed in response, tossing his bangs back from his face and stabbing into another white piece of meat. He swallowed roughly and continued, "His name is Theodorsius or something hideous like that, he's an odd man, angry scum."

Luscius nodded, "I think I know who you mean," he affirmed, making plans to visit the shop later, "horrible kind of people."

"Horrible..." Narcissa conceded, head bobbing elegantly in her agreement.

Theodorsius Revelier was a man from France who had come to London for God-only-knows what reason and opened a pawn shop in one of the most dark and desolate places in magical London. He dealt strictly with things that were not... particularly... legal.

Stolen was a better word, or dangerous, perhaps, either one.

All sorts of rare and common item alike, of all kinds and values, statues and books and body parts and creatures. At the start of things. Whatever he could get his slimy hands around and chain to a shelf in a dusty old corner of the world, where spiders crawled and demons lurked.

He longed for Magic, and he loathed it. He could have anything magical that he wanted, but he would never have magic. He would never cast a jinx, a curse, a hex, a charm, and he was angry. At the world. At magic. At Muggles...

(Perfect really. So full of hate, that they couldn't have found a better subject for their proposition if they had actually looked.)

...If he had to, he'd hate Harry Potter.

"The-Boy-Who-Lived", this boy had more magic at birth than he had in his pink toe, and for that, he could hate the boy.

So why shouldn't he die? It would be so easy, after all. He'd dealt with wizards in this manner before. The hardest part was getting the wand away.

After that, it was like baking a cake.

(He couldn't do that either, so maybe he could be mad about that too.)

It was either the brat or him anyway, he was sure. The Dark Lord wouldn't ask that something be done without expecting a 'yes, master' in return and a quick execution of that deed directly afterward.

Of all the wizards he despised, the Dark Lord was his favorite. He was loyal to cruelty, to injustice, to death, and he was loyal to Voldemort. If this boy could be taken care of, and if he could do it, then the world would end up a better place in the end anyway.

Luscius had cringed at the sight of his bony figure, as he hunched and hobbled and grinned, "A job, you say?"

"A very important one..."

He'd pulled the knife from its sheath and watched it lovingly as it caught the dull light of a flickering flame. This would be fun.

Say goodbye, Boy-Who-Lived.

"For whatever reason, we still can't find where they are exactly," the man sighed, looking fearfully in his master's direction. "There's some sort of very heavy concealment charm surrounding the entire area. They're most likely exposing themselves far from their meeting place."

The Dark Lord sneered, it was a common expression, "He can't stay there forever. If you see him leave, if you see him anywhere outside of the concealment, you tell me immediately." His lips curled back in distaste, and he waved his hand flippantly through the air, "Now get out of my sight."

"Yes, my lord."
So when, only two weeks after contacting Theodorsius – and making a very irrefutable agreement with the man – Voldemort was delighted to hear of the boy's presence.

"A library, he went to a library."

"...send the squib." he smiled, "Tell him to kill as many as it takes, but bring the boy back... Alive enough."

He could smell him, oh the agony of it. He wanted him dead, he wanted him gone, because he couldn't and that damn boy could.

And he was making this so easy for him.

A shortcut? Shortcut to hell maybe. Theodorsius wanted to laugh, this was getting simpler by the second. What were the odds?

The name, "Harry Potter" was scratching at his lips.

It was dark, but he could see the boy. The boy and three others (good) that moved anxiously through the night. Toward home, he thought (correctly). What a pity.

The one in the front, that was him. The boy who managed to survive Voldemort, the Chosen One, Harry Potter, the fucking brat he was goin to murder – not murder, he reminded himself, he was supposed to keep him alive – stick his knife in and tear the magic out, because it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair.

The Dark Lord would fix it, he'd promised. All he had to do was kill Harry Potter.

That's right. He would kill him. Take the effort out of it. In the end, the Dark Lord would thank him, be gracious, happy really, that he had done it himself, and spared him from wasting his time.

And I'll be a wizard, he thought with childish glee and his hand tightened around the handle of his blade, I'll be just as good as any other too.

He'd be Voldemort's best servant, mystical and cruel. He'd kill and curse and jinx and all he had to do was kill Harry Potter.

The one in the front, that was him. The leader, he'd been told.

Naïve. Young.

One was a girl (even better, though some distant part of his mind) and the other two were male. Friends of Harry's. They'd die with him.

Would they still be his friends if they knew that?

He'd have all sorts of friends, but he wouldn't need them, and that would be wonderful, perfect, good. He'd be a dark wizard and he'd do only what he pleased, and he'd be magic.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, he'd promised, the Dark Lord, Voldemort.

All he had to do was kill Harry Potter.

Ed knew that their silly little magical sticks had been stolen. He wasn't blind – although it seemed very much as if they may have been – anyone should be able to notice a pick pocket the moment they walk into a room. Sure the man was bent and crooked, old and innocent, a typical library type, by assumption, one might think. Ed had known that the thief was going to steal something quite possibly before the man even decided what it was he was going to steal. They all had the same look in their eyes, the same shift in their feet, the same lithe, jerky movement and guilty eyebrows. He thought briefly of Paninya and thought of how she would have done a much better job. Her stealth rivaled this man's by millions.

He would have snapped the man's hand off when his own pockets had been checked, but he had already seen the other's be stolen from, and as it appeared wands were the main focus... Well, he was curious to say the least. This was, after all, a "non-magical" library, so why would a "Muggle" steal wands? He wouldn't. Why would a pick pocket bring his criminal ways into a library in the first place without reason? He wouldn't.

That was the reason for two things actually.

One being why he didn't break that god damn pick pocket's arm in two when he touched him, and another being why he didn't stop Harry Potter from going down that alleyway.

Even though he knew that man was in the alleyway. He had saw him when the had first set off to return to 12 Grimwauld Place. That was why he had immediately taken charge of their direction, planning on leading them on a route that would avoid that particular area all together.

If that bratty, fucking Harry kid didn't feel like having his ass watched out for him, then so bet it. He could go stomping stubbornly off into danger if he wanted. Ed didn't give a shit.

It would give him a chance to see how they could fare on their own anyway.

He wasn't sure, but there was a chance that the man had been holding some sort of blade.

Metal was his specialty, and he would have noticed the slight metallic glimmer from miles away.

So he hung back, not too much, but just enough, as they entered the so called "short cut". He considered warning at least one out of the three that there was bound to be trouble, but that would ruin the fun. Besides, he would never go down a thin city passageway at dusk without expecting something life-threatening to occur. It happened enough, so he had learned at a very young age to always be on guard. Surely they knew what to look out for?

Harry was so determined – for something, no one had bothered to clue Ed in one the details – that he was now beginning to pull away from all three of his companions. His dark hair blending deeply into the night and his form almost receding completely into the growing shadows cast by the walls. Edward watched all of this with a certain amount of amusement. Hermione was clearly terrified, that was obvious from her quivering hands and wide eyes, and Ron didn't look much less worse for wear. In fact, he may have looked more frightened than his friend did.

Ed noticed relatively quickly that he was the only one who didn't look frightened when a man stepped out from the dark exit of a building with a knife in his hand and seven little words on his lips. But, honestly, he had already figured this all out already.

"I'm going to kill you Harry Potter."

Well, at least he wasn't wasting any time.

A/N: Yes, yes, much of this was... Not the best, I'll admit. I feel very much as if I'm squeezing this out of nowhere, like it wasn't there before. Anyway, Theo is a bit cuckoo, so he'd going to mindlessly go for more blood than he's supposed to. But little does he know that Edward Elric's standing in that alleyway with him, and because of that, he should be terrified.

Cabal – plot (one of my favorite words!)