Author's Note: Oh, friends... we are nearly at the end of our journey together. We have one more chapter after this one. Thank you so much for sticking with it, and I hope the payoff is well worth the investment.

This has been an incredibly difficult few months, and even little things like a thoughtful word after a new chapter have meant so much. Getting a notification in my email and reading your wonderful comments were the highlights of my day. Thank you for your kindness.


Alphonse's stomach plummeted.

He dared to glance at the Colonel.

But the Colonel was fixated on his subordinate… the relief of seeing her again quickly replaced with disbelief and horror.

"Lieutenant Hawkeye?"

Riza Hawkeye's stared somewhere past the Colonel's shoulder, into the darkness at the edge of the city, somewhere Al couldn't follow. For one eternal, agonizing moment, Alphonse wondered if Hawkeye was dead, if Gray had killed her before reanimating her corpse using her alchemy.

And if the Lieutenant was dead… Alphonse suppressed a shudder.

Then there wasn't a force in Amestris strong enough to staunch the tide of the Colonel's fury and grief.

But Alphonse –– and the Colonel, too –– noticed the Lieutenant's pallor. Her face wasn't as pale and bloodless as Gray's other golems. She didn't move as quickly as the reanimated corpses, either, meaning her autonomic nervous system –– which operated independently of Gray's influence –– was still working.

Gray had taken control of a living person. Like Will, the Lieutenant was being forced to do the Kaolin Alchemist's bidding.

Hawkeye raised her pistol, leveling the barrel at Mustang's forehead.

The Colonel's mouth pursed shut. He slowly raised his hands above his head, the deadly sigils on his ignition gloves forgotten, his eyes widening slightly in fear.

But not for Hawkeye, Alphonse realized, his steel body suddenly feeling very cold.

For himself.

"Lieutenant," said the Colonel calmly but firmly; despite the fear evident in his eyes, his voice didn't waver, "you don't want to do this."

"She can't answer, sir," said Alphonse mutely, the small words echoing inside his helmet.

The Kaolin Alchemist shambled towards the sound of the battle, where blazing white bolts of transmutation energy flared against the darkness, and the sound of exploding masonry thundered in the streets. Where Edward fought to contain Will before he killed any innocent people. Gray couldn't be allowed to reach her charge...

Al stepped in the alchemist's path, bending his knees and raising his hands in a fighting stance.

Lieutenant Hawkeye also stepped forward, flicking her safety off. Colonel Mustang took a sharp intake of breath.

Everyone froze.

"Lieutenant Hawkeye," said Gray, still focused on Alphonse, not looking towards the Colonel or his subordinate, "I said kill him."

Mustang hesitated for a moment, his body stiffening in anticipation of a bullet. Then, suddenly, his face cleared. He smiled a scary smile, one where the rest of his face wasn't smiling at all.

"Your alchemy has an instantaneous effect on its victims, correct?" The Colonel's charcoal eyes flashed. "If the Lieutenant was going to shoot me, Gray, she would have done it already."

Alphonse gasped. It was true; the golems were completely enthralled to the Kaolin Alchemist's will. Her alchemy exercised complete control over their somatic nervous systems. There wasn't even a capacity for independent thought or movement. And yet…

Lieutenant Hawkeye, the fastest, surest shot in the Amestrian military, still hadn't fired her gun.

Something volatile and dangerous flickered in Gray's marbled eyes. "Riza," she barked, her words like ice, "shoot Colonel Mustang in the head. Now, please."

Alphonse could see the transmutation energy taking its tole. Equivalent exchange. As Gray concentrated on controlling Lieutenant Hawkeye, something seemed to sap the moisture from her body. Her skin grew as puckered and dry as curling tree bark. The Kaolin Alchemist winced, biting down hard before turning her head and spitting a couple of her teeth into the gutter. She wiped the blood away with the back of her hand.

But Hawkeye still didn't fire.

"Put the gun down, Lieutenant," said Roy gently. There was something uncommonly tender in his words, something near to pure, honest compassion that Alphonse had never heard before. Something that, for some reason, made him desperately sad…

"This isn't you. I've seen you stare down Ishvalan insurgents and rogue alchemists and Maes Hughes with pictures of his daughter. You fought them, and you can fight this. So snap out of it." Some of the Colonel's familiar assertiveness returned, the same imperiousness that had commanded his men in front of Eastern Headquarters. "And that is an order."

Lieutenant Hawkeye's expression stayed fixed. Behind the runes graffitiing her face, she stared slack-jawed, her face soft, her eyes unfocused.

But, Al noticed, his heart clenching, the Lieutenant's hand was shaking. The tremble was so slight, anyone else would have mistaken it for a shiver from the chill night air. But Al knew better. As did Colonel Mustang.

"Lieutenant…" said the Colonel. "Lower your weapon."

"Kill. Him," intoned Gray, her expression twisting into something ugly, so sickly and marred it hardly looked human anymore.

The misty film over the Lieutenant's eyes didn't wane. She didn't give any indication she had heard any of them.

But, as Al watched, a single tear rolled down her cheek, glinting across the neural arrays.

She's fighting, thought Alphonse wretchedly. She won't hurt him. She can't...

Gray's fists clenched, her knuckles pressed again the thin, purpling skin. Lieutenant Hawkeye's tremor worsened.

"Do it!"

Roy Mustang began to lower his hands. He took a cautious step towards his adjutant. "Lieutenant Hawkeye, I'm giving you a direct order as your commanding officer. Drop your gun."

"Kill him!"

"I know you're still in there, Lieutenant." He held his hand out for her gun. "I know you won't hurt me. You made a promise."

"KILL HIM!" screamed Gray, her voice cracking.

The sound of the shot split the night.

"Colonel!"

Alphonse turned away from Gray, clanking across the street to where Mustang lay sprawled in the gutter. Blood pooled on the ground around him, running in rivulets between the cracks in the street. Alphonse stifled a thrill of panic; the Colonel wasn't moving. He'd hit his head sharply on the cobblestones. His legs were twisted underneath him. The bloodstain was slowly spreading underneath his greatcoat, turning his white shirt a vivid crimson. Riza stood above him, looking down vacantly. Her gun had dropped to her side. She wouldn't try to harm him again, Alphonse realized; she had followed Gray's directive, and the voice slithering inside the Lieutenant's head had gone quiet.

Gray.

Alphonse Elric screamed. The sound was primeval and gruesome and terrifying, reverberating within the hollow cavern of his armor. He sounded like a monster. He didn't care.

He didn't bother with alchemy. He didn't bother trying to remember his training with Teacher, or his fights with Brother. Alphonse didn't try to labor under the illusion that he was still a little boy. For a moment too brief and fleeting for memory to sustain it, he couldn't even recall what it had been like to have a real flesh and blood body. All he knew was the suit of armor, an extension of his soul, a force of destruction of brute strength. An engine of war. All he saw was the Colonel's blood pooling in the stagnant rainwater and the glazed, horrifyingly empty look in the Lieutenant's eyes...

And a sandy haired boy in a wheelchair, staring at nothing, a light gone out that could never be rekindled.

Alphonse Elric charged the Kaolin Alchemist.

She didn't have time to dodge, and even if she did, her body was too small and frail to leap out of the way. Al caught Gray in the back, hitting her spin with his forearm. It was like running into a scarecrow; there was nothing to act as a counterbalance. She let out a small noise of surprise before stumbling, but she didn't make a sound when she hit the ground, like she weighed nothing at all.

"Get up!" cried Alphonse, his voice breaking with blind, howling anger. "Get up, Gray! You're going to fix this… you're going to set them free!

"Get up!"

She didn't move. Alphonse saw red. He balled his fists. The coward… the coward, coward, coward, coward…

He wasn't finished with her yet. He went to grab her collar...

Then he stopped.

Under the corrugated trembling of his armored body, Alphonse felt a long, low silence descend upon East City. It blanketed every surface like a mantle of ash, muffling the small sounds of the world like the press of footsteps in the dust.

Al broke his gaze away from Gray Rosin. A hush had filled the empty streets. Time moved sluggishly, thick and soupy like molasses. The city seemed half-realized, splintered in the fog like something unstitched from a dream. The starless sky was beginning to purple in the east. The people, the buildings, even the still body of the Kaolin Alchemist felt like little more than imaginings, stirrings in the blackness, silhouettes circumscribed by shadow. Alphonse suddenly understood the notion of Lieutenant Hawkeye's sharp interruptions, silver footnotes in the tenebrous margins of the city. Like the world had been folded in on itself, and he was living in the creases.

Something had changed. The sounds of distant battle had died away.

Everything was so still.

Alphonse was surprised when a profound sense of calm suffused through him.

He knelt beside the body of the old woman and slowly turned her over, until she was lying on her back. She was paper-light in Alphonse's hands, almost diaphanous, like smoke. The alchemist gave him a strange look, and Alphonse jolted away from her, dropping her back onto the ground. He looked away, unable to bear the piercing vacantness in the Golem Formator's lifeless eyes.

Eyes like those of her creations.

Gray Rosin was dead.

Alphonse didn't know what did it, in the end. Maybe his push had broken her back. Maybe the prospect of the coming battle had weakened her old heart. Maybe she decided to die before she could be held accountable for all the people she had destroyed.

He didn't know. He didn't write the incantations. He merely took the paper out, and watched the golem return to the muddy clay of the riverbed.

Alphonse looked down at his hands, gauntlets and steel and fine chain mesh. The calm threatened to drown him; it was so tempting, to give into the numbing, obliterating forgetfulness. The memory of the floating, wraithlike weightlessness of Gray body seemed to stain his hands, sending deep tremors through his armor, making Al shake uncontrollably. He watched the muted shadows of the gaslamps and the coming dawn play across his palms; the flickering light seemed to breathe in tandem with the shifting silhouettes of the sleeping city. Everything suddenly felt too rapaciously organic for the boy without a body, with his victim lying dead at his feet.

"Alphonse…"

Al knew that voice…

"L-" He slowly resurfaced, emerging out from under the shadow. He controlled the tremor with a tight fist. "Lieutenant?"

Lieutenant Hawkeye blinked. Grace Rosin was dead, Alphonse reasoned, still struggling to rationalize reality, so the Kaolin Alchemist's hold over the golems was broken.

Hawkeye glanced at the gun in her hand, and looked surprised to see that the safety was off. She muttered something about poor firearm discipline and clicked the cylinder out of place, looking down to re-holster the gun at her belt…

And seeing the Colonel laying motionless in the street, sprawled in a pool of his own blood.

"Colonel!"

Lieutenant Hawkeye's face went ash-white. She went to kneel down beside her commanding officer, then she realized she was still holding her gun. She looked at the weapon, then down to the Flame Alchemist, before slowly turning to face Alphonse and the still form of Grace Rosin. Agonizing realization inched across Riza's face. A creeping, crippling paralysis.

The grief surged with every breath. Alphonse could almost measure the swell between each peak. It never seemed sufficiently soothed by her long intakes of the damp night air.

"Alphonse," she began. She couldn't finish. Al saw her hand tighten on her handgun, trigger discipline suddenly forgotten. She began to raise her arm...

The younger Elric tried to control a surge of panic. Dread pulsed like a headache behind his eyes. He saw the unobtrusive, silent tears begin to fall from the Lieutenant amber eyes and tried to concentrate on nothing else. "Lieutenant," he said gently, slowly, "put the gun down."

"What…" Her gaze moved from cobblestone to cobblestone. Alphonse read in her eyes the sure knowledge that her life could not go on without him, without Roy Mustang. That time had stopped for her. The pretenses of discipline, the control of quiet anger and suffocating grief, threatened to crack. Lieutenant Hawkeye sank to the damp road, not caring about the water and the blood that quickly soaked through her uniform trousers. "What have I done…"

Alphonse knelt beside the Colonel. He placed his hands –– those same killing hands –– over Roy's slightly-parted mouth, and saw the steel of his gauntlets fog from a small exhalation of breath.

"He's alive!" said Al, hardly believing it himself. He delicately moved aside the Colonel's greatcoat. "Lieutenant, you shot him in the shoulder!"

"But," she closed her eyes, "Alphonse, I was going to shoot him in the head… I was going to kill him."

"That doesn't matter right now," he insisted. "You were being controlled by Miss Rosin!"

Hawkeye's hackles stood on end. "Where is she?"

"I…" Alphonse swallowed. "I killed her." It was an accident, he almost added, but didn't. He had never been one predisposed to lying.

"Oh." Her voice was small. "I see."

"Look," Al deftly changed the subject; there would be a time for absolution; one day, for both of them, "the Colonel needs help. I can get Lieutenant Havoc, but you need to stay with him, okay?"

"Yes." Hawkeye schooled her expression. She tore the sleeve from her uniform jacket and went about fashioning a tourniquet to staunch the Colonel's bleeding. Alphonse was, again, astounded by her bravery and poise. She didn't care how she felt; the Colonel was the only person who mattered. "Please, get an ambulance."

"Alright." Alphonse hesitated, then asked tentatively. "Can I… can I have your gun, Lieutenant?"

"No."

"But––"

"I need it. To protect him."

To protect him. Of course.

Alphonse nodded. Then he turned towards Eastern Headquarters, running away from the two beaten, broken soldiers.

And the dead alchemist. The Golem Formator, killed by a golem herself. Equivalent Exchange, indeed.

Alphonse followed the trail of destruction –– Brother's hastily cobbled transmutations, walls and barricades and spiked portcullises, transmuted in an attempt to slow William in his inexorable march through the city. Broken windows and caved-in walls marked where the armored boy and the Fullmetal Alchemist had done battle. Glass crunched under Alphonse's feet as he tucked his head close to his chest and ran faster.

He hadn't intended to find Brother. But he couldn't say he was surprised when he rounded a corner, emerging in the market district, and spotted the diminutive form of Edward Elric, standing in the middle of a crater where a small corner café used to be, sticking out like a red eyesore in the predawn darkness.

"Alphonse!"

Ed looked terrible. His cloak was in tatters. Purple bruises peppered his arm. He kept blinking blood out of his eye. His automail had been transmuted into so many different weapons over such a short period of time the gears were almost fused together. Winry would have wept. Sweat poured down his face. He was still breathing heavily, resting his elbows on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

Across the street, framed by an empty archway, William Osterhagen loomed ominously. The suit of armor didn't move.

"Al," gasped Edward, "the Kaolin Alchemist…"

"She's gone."

Ed grit his teeth. He spat, "What the hell do you mean she's gone––?"

"Brother," said Al quietly, "if you know the secret name of God, you can build worlds, and you can destroy them."

"Al, what––"

"It's done. It's finished."

"Alphonse!"

Al didn't wait for Ed's surprise, or his outrage. He stepped up to the giant suit of armor.

He remembered the words. He repeated them like a mantra.

If you know the secret name of God, you can build worlds, and you can destroy them. You can move mountains. You can also make a human being –– a living person –– out of clay. A golem.

The law of destruction is the reversal of the law of creation.

You were created by the sages; now, o creature, return to your dust.

Al peered through the visor. He saw the blood seal on the inside of the helm.

And he heard a voice, so quiet it was almost inaudible...

"Alphonse."

Al gave a tiny wave. He imagined himself smiling.

"Hi, Will. It's nice to meet you."

"I'm sorry…"

"It's okay." Alphonse sensed the presence of Brother close behind him, ready to protect him if something went wrong. Gratitude swelled in Al's chest. He repeated Edward's words, and this time, he believed them: "It wasn't your fault."

"I'm tired, Alphonse. I'm very tired."

"I know."

"And… I miss them. I miss them so much."

Al thought of Mom. He thought of her smile. "I miss them, too."

"I want to go see them now."

"I understand."

"Will you set me free, Alphonse?" Will seemed to breath a deep, shuddering sigh. It could have been the wind. "I want to go home."

"Yeah. Hold on…"

Alphonse lifted the visor. There was the blood seal; a unicursal star, encasing a small, bright flame. Anchoring Will's tired, broken soul to the world.

Such a small thing. A miracle, and a curse. A single piece of paper with a single word, able to create life and destroy it.

"Can you forgive me, Will?"

"Oh, Alphonse Elric," somewhere, a sandy-haired boy smiled a crooked smile, cradling Borax crystals and reams of chemistry notes, "you are forgiven.

"Always and eternally forgiven."

Al nodded. With precise motions, he scratched the rust-colored seal from the steel plate, until he could see his reflection in the armor. He brushed the dried blood from his fingertips.

"Goodbye, my friend."

Alphonse must have imagined it. The seal was gone. Will was dead.

But he didn't think it mattered.

"Goodbye, Will."

Al stepped back as the armor stiffened. Then, with nothing left to hold it upright, the suit came apart, the steel plates uncoupling in the street, clanging like the sound of a church bell chorusing the dawn. Like something dying and resurrecting.

Like alchemy.

Alphonse Elric faced his older brother.

"Come on," he told Edward, "we need to get a doctor for the Colonel."

Edward didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He lay his hand on his brother's armor, and for the first time, Alphonse was sure he felt the weight of its touch.

Then the two brothers took off at a brisk run, making for Eastern Headquarters as morning broke over the city...