Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist/Hagane no RenkinJutsushi belongs to Arakawa-san. I just borrow the characters from time to time and hope that I don't break them… too much.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—If Knowledge is Power…

(…make sure you don't you don't get electrocuted.)

Shout out to grungekitty, with who I'm in the middle of a very intense conversation about how Edward uses hair elastics in the 1910's. Because, you know, they hadn't been invented then.

Also, to BlueIsTheColourOfOurPlanet (again!) who left the single most detailed review I've ever seen in my life and who, as a result, helped shape this chapter so I could get it out more quickly.

Finally, Stuka's an asshole. Like, holy crap, he's an asshole. This was unintentional, and I'm sorry.

hey al,

I know i haven't written in a while, and this it gonna be a little bit rushed, but i finally found some time to sit down and write you a letter, so it's better than nothing. Normally, they say, this is how things happens—it's slow for weeks and months, and then bam! Everything starts happening at the same time. and, yeah, it's been Extremely busy.

we're down further south now, checking out some stuff with one of the outposts. weird shit. can't say much more than that. During my first furlough, i'll tell you all about it. Although, they might muzzle all of us—you know, military secrets and everything. ha. Like that's ever stopped me. Let them talk to mustang about it if they're so uptight.

Now that summer's here, it gets way too warm here during the day. Only i have cold-weather automail in our command, and i'm positive that the other soldiers with prosthetics are jealous as fuck, even if no one's said anything about it. muench, that one doctor i told you about, said that there've been a few cases with minor burns. The command's automail mechanic—well, one of them—told me that he's gotten more than one request about high-carbon options, but he keeps having to tell them that the military doesn't supply it. Eh, not my problem.

So, how're things about in resembool? Are black hayate and den still getting along okay? in her last letter, winry said she's thinking about getting a new puppy. Say that i think his name should be Alexander. it's a good name for a dog, don't you think? Proper and all that shit. just don't let her name it "hut" or something else stupid because she thinks it'll go well with "den."

that's all for now, little brother. love you lots. don't fuck anything up while i'm not there to fix you.

ed

—Major E. Elric to civilian A. Elric. June 26, 1915.

If Brigadier General Roy Mustang was granted three wishes, he knew exactly what they would be: a shower, a full night's sleep, and a really stiff drink. Not necessarily in that order. However, as real life would dictate, a lukewarm cup of watered down barely-coffee rested by his right hand, his bed hadn't been touched in nearly thirty hours, and he hadn't been able to do more than dump buckets of water over his head and shoulders since first taking command of this cobbled-together hellhole.

More reports were coming in now, of missing squads and electrical glitches. They had long since escaped the rock he used as a paperweight, and had begun sneaking into files containing personnel reports, supply counts, investigation summaries, about three dozen other things that all needed his attention by five o'clock yesterday. Just why Lieutenant Colonel Lockheed had had to get himself shot in the stomach before the fighting had even started—and then to be sent away from the front lines to recover—was completely beyond him.

It took some time, but his fingers found the report he was looking for; a short, three-paged thing written in Hawkeye's precise hand, summarizing the information they'd managed to gather from one of the Aerugonians captured after the attack on the Passage Command. Most of it was horse shit, he knew, but had nonetheless sent the document to his own meagre intelligence team to tease out whatever truth they could.

And now… He resisted the urge to mutter out an exhausted curse or run fingers through hair that, he'd been mortified to realize just three nights ago, was most definitely starting to go silver at the temples.

If Breda knew just how exhausted his commanding officer felt, he made no indication of it. Instead, the man rattled off a score of numbers and names while Mustang reminded himself of what, exactly, Breda had been investigating to begin with. "—contacted the Foothills Outpost directly after that to confirm our own figures—I have to say, sir, that General Hakuro won't be pleased that your men are going around him and contacting the outposts in his command directly—"

"I'm already aware of that, Lieutenant Breda, please continue."

"Right. Well, they said that they didn't have a damned clue if our numbers were accurate or not; they've been finding evidence that a huge number of troops have been moving through the hills in their region. Some of their own estimates are as high as twenty thousand men, maybe more. The problem, General, is that not a single one of their sentries or scout teams have actually found the bastards sneaking around the area."

Mustang raised an eyebrow. That was a problem, indeed. "Foothills has had some of their squads go missing, haven't they? That's what Fullmetal's reports have indicated."

"They have, but those disappearances haven't happened in the same—"

The office's plain wooden door, shut tightly for the meeting, crashed open to reveal a splotchy-cheeked Fuery. The sergeant master gripped at the archway with white-knuckled fingers, gasping for air even as he tried to speak. "S-sorry to interrupt, sir, but Ed's on the radio. He's saying that it's urgent, and that he'd like to speak to you immediately."

Mustang had leapt to his feet at the sudden intrusion (and damn this war for making him so jumpy). Now, he released a breath and resisted the urge to bury his face in a hand. At the back of his skull, a little voice wondered just what the mercurial young alchemist had actually said to Fuery to make him move so quickly. "Fullmetal wants everyone to work on his timeline, Fuery. I'm in the middle of something important. Tell him I'll get back to him in an hour."

"Uh…" Fuery pulled the hand away from the door frame to clean his glasses with jerky fingers. "I, uh, I really think you might want to take this, General. He seemed really riled up about something."

"Is there ever a time when he's not riled up about something?" Mustang asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. But that same little voice was reminding him that Fullmetal would rather go head-to-head with an angry wolverine than talk to his commanding officer. So with a nod to Breda, he stepped around his paper-laden desk. Fuery led him down the narrow stairway and into the communications room.

Three other comms officers were there, taking quick hand notes with oversized headphones jammed over their ears or typing out reports from the previous shift, but other than that the room was empty and blessedly calm. With a gesture, Fuery guided him to an unmanned radio, mumbling an apology as he cleared up a chewed-on pen and a few scraps of paper before making himself scarce.

Mustang sighed and pulled a set of headphones over an ear. "This had better be important, Full—"

"Oh, shut up and listen, bastard." Fullmetal's voice was low and terse as it crackled over the radio. Again, Mustang couldn't help but wonder what, exactly, he'd told Fuery, and hoped that it wasn't too violent. "I—shit!—I think I've figured it out. It's insane. Fucking crazy. How those bastards even thought of it—how they managed to find anyone willing to actually help them go through with it…"

A creatively offensive insult spilt from the headphones loudly enough that Mustang glanced around to make sure the other officers hadn't taken notice. "As delighted as I am to know about how Aerugonians treat dogs and pigs, Fullmetal, I'm more interested with your reason for contacting me."

"Oh, go—"

"Fullmetal."

"Okay, okay! Fine. Look—we already know that there are alchemists involved, right? Back in April, when the surveillance team from the Plains Outpost went missing, I saw evidence of a stone cage or whatever that was clearly transmuted, and Dr Muench went over the bodies with me. They'd been superheated, but the place where I'd found them? There's no way there was enough fuel in it to create a fire that would burn long enough to do something like that. Havoc actually saw the wall being transmuted around the Plains Outpost and was able to tell us what the transmutation looked like. Blacklung sketched out that circle and made sure that I got it.

"Between that and everything else I was able to prove afterwards—the fact that I could superheat something enough to melt aluminum by stopping a transmutation at the first state and by figuring out that the leftover energy from that could disrupt our radios… Logically, the conclusion is that they have powerful alchemists on their side."

"That's the conclusion we landed upon, yes," Mustang replied, voice even though he wanted to bark at the blond to hurry up and get to the point. Fullmetal must have had a reason for reiterating all of this.

"Well, what's been really pissing me off is how little that explains this whole situation. They have alchemists—so what? That doesn't explain how they've been managing to sneak around behind Amestrian borders, or move so quickly. The reports of missing surveillance teams from the other outposts that I've been getting for months now, from here to the eastern desert, still make no fucking sense. Same with all those reports of possible enemy movements or suspected enemy sightings that seem to just disappear when Amestrian surveillance teams move in to investigate.

"And, well, Amestris still has the State Alchemist program, which is the reason that Aerugo's never dared to declare war on us before. They know how Ishval ended up; they've got to. They must've heard how the government and Bradley treated Amestris' own citizens when they rose up. If the Amestrian government is willing to set its alchemists against its own people, then they'd have to question just how it would react against a different country."

"None of this is new, Fullmetal." Mustang finally told him mildly, fingers in a white-knuckled grip around the headsets rubber lined-cords. "Unless you have something new to report—"

"Will you fucking listen! I'm not done yet!" The younger alchemist's voice was loud enough that static erupted through the earpiece.

The general winced and nearly pulled the thing off of his head. "Keep your voice down! If the men hear you, you're going to have a hell of a time keeping things under control. You have my attention right now, but I don't have the time to—"

"Then find it, asshole!" The tension was palpable through the connection. Mustang heard a deep breath, then another. When Fullmetal spoke again, he almost seemed in control. "You're busy. You don't have a lieutenant colonel, and Hawkeye's here with me. I get that. But you've got to hear this, okay? Just trust me."

When had the young man last asked something like that of him? Mustang's jaw tensed. His stomach tightened. He couldn't think of a single instance. "I'm listening."

"These impossibly powerful alchemists and every advantage that they've got over us… it's all appeared out of nowhere. Nobody's heard anything about it or else you, at least, would know by now from Intelligence. And that got me thinking. You know what kind of powerful alchemists are easy to hide? Research alchemists who walk to work like every other person and skulk in their labs all day. Even if they never set foot on the battlefield, they could still find ways to make sure that Aerugo had the upper hand."

"And you think you've figured out what their hypothetical research has entailed?" His hand still fidgeted with the cords. Trust me. Trust me.

"They have chimaeras. It… Chimaeras just feel wrong, and it's a feeling that sticks around. They make your adrenaline kick in and make hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Animals notice it, too, no matter if it's a bird or a fucking bumble bee. They all stay away."

And no wonder the younger alchemist sounded so sick. It'd hardly been more than a year since that incident with the girl and her dog.

"Back when I was looking for the Plains' surveillance team, I had that feeling of wrongness, of just needing to get away from there, but I'd chalked it up to what I found. Caddock and Renault, when they were telling me about their investigation of the Rivers Outpost, told me that they had that same feeling.

"And then there were the horses. At the Plains investigation, it looked like a bunch of the team's horses had been fidgeting. One or two, maybe, and the horses were bored or not trained very well, but half of them? They sensed something, I bet, and were nervous. And again at Rivers, my horse nearly dumped me, and Hawkeye's horse kept fidgeting, too, and we had a hell of a time getting them to move so that we could search the area where the Aerugonians had set up."

"There are other things, too. The morning before the Passage Command was attacked, I thought I heard a coyote howling—but coyotes don't howl. I saw animal tracks around Rivers and figured that there were wolves, but the tracks weren't quite right. Plus, there aren't any wolves this far south."

"And the advantage of chimaeras would be huge. Moving around behind enemy borders would be a joke—no one's going to think twice about seeing a pack of wild dogs roaming the countryside, considering how many houses and farms have been abandoned because of this fucking war. If there are chimaeras, then they'd be able to sneak around and do reconnaissance without any problems at all—and they'd be able to move far more quickly than we'd expect."

Mustang, as much as he wanted Fullmetal to be wrong, had to admit that the young man had a point. But enemy movements went far beyond elusive enemy soldiers and reconnaissance… "Fullmetal, what you're suggesting…"

A hollow laugh cut across the airwaves. "If I'm right and they actually do have chimaeras, then why not? They'd be the perfect dogs of war. And it's possible, you know. At least, it is in theory. And it would explain the sigils for human transmutation in the circle that Blacklung sketched out."

His stomach turned to lead. His fidgeting hand paused. "Fullmetal, if their chimaeras are the alchemists we've been after, then it will be impossible to track them."

"It'll be damn near impossible to stop them, too."

Edward sighed, leaned back in the wobbly wooden chair that crouched in their olive-drab communications tent. The swipe of his automail hand against the radio to cut the transmission was torpid, and his hand clunked down in his lap, a dead weight. He wasn't sure if his legs would support him, his ribs were pressing against his lungs and hammering heart, his mind felt so full that he could barely think. Could he still breathe properly? It felt like he was drowning. He took one breath, almost experimental, then another.

His lungs still worked. That was something at least.

With clumsy fingers, he pulled his watch from his breast pocket. It took a few tries to open the thing up, and the tick, tick, tick seemed far too loud, but it was a steady tempo that he found himself focusing on. Too-bright light, courtesy of the gaslight hanging above his head, glanced off its dented metal surface. It was nearly midnight now, and he didn't know when he'd next be able to sleep.

Thirty seconds, he told himself. Thirty seconds, then he'd graft a confident grin on his face, ask about the prisoners, and tell Hawkeye and Caddock about their new orders.

He hadn't known what he expected when he stumbled, half-drunk with shock and horror, into the tent—hadn't been thinking at all, really, just reacting on instinct and some need that he still couldn't quite identify—but a three hour long conversation with Mustang about alchemy and theories and hypotheses and strategy and known enemy movements and suspected enemy movements had been the result. And the man had listened, and questioned and never once said anything about his tumbling explanations or haphazard reasons or half-finished thoughts or…

Sixteen... Seventeen… Eighteen…

He groaned and dragged his free hand over his face, buried fingers into his bangs. The metal was cold and his hair caught in the joints, snapping and tearing out at the roots. The pain pulled his mind back to the grubby little tent, back to the now of chimaeras who were probably alchemists and of blue-clad soldiers who were still guffawing about the dwindling bonfire at the middle of their camp.

The maelstrom of thoughts, angry and tumultuous, black and wet with oil, smeared the underside of his skull, and he half-heartedly tried to catch them all and shove them into little boxes to be dissected later. Fuck. Fuck.

Twenty-eight… Twenty-nine…

He could do this. He had to. He snapped the watch shut and stuffed it back where it belonged, all but threw himself from the chair and strode out of the tent with his shoulders pulled back.

Hawkeye was there, hands clasped behind her back and looking for all the world like a model soldier, though her eyes were tight as she met his eyes. "I hope that your conversation with the General proved useful," she said.

The grin he wore was so brittle that it hurt, but he flashed it at her anyway. "That bastard wouldn't know 'useful' if it bit him in the ass. Can you find Stuka and Caddock and bring them here, please? We've got more work to do."

"Of course." She touched her hand to her forward in a salute, turned on her heel. Hesitated. Turned to face him again, and her spine was too straight. If she were any other person, he would think that she looked worried. Hawkeye didn't get worried, though; she got annoyed, perhaps, and exasperated and resigned, but not worried.

He redoubled the force of his painful grin and probably showed a little too much tooth. "Yeah, Lieutenant?"

"…Nothing. I'll collect the second lieutenants." She marched away, head high and hands balled into loose fists. He watched her for a moment, wondering. Four months ago, he would have been sniggering about the way the foot soldiers scrambled to get out of her path. Now…

He scrubbed at the back of his head. Bit back a tired groan. Pulled his worn-down notebook from worn-down trouser pockets. Notes from his conversation with Mustang were scrawled across a few of the rearmost pages, barely legible even to his own eyes his hand had been trembling so badly. Was there anything in particular that the lieutenants would need to know? More importantly, anything that they wouldn't need to know?

He didn't know how to stop this new threat. Had no fucking idea. They wouldn't need to know that.

Three flickering shadows separated themselves from the sea of soldiers and red-yellow glow of the bonfire. Caddock looked old, and the too-bright gaslight threw the fine lines on his face into a stark relief, but he offered a tired smile and a sloppy salute when he came to a stop. "Lieutenant Hawkeye tells me that you had a good conversation with our dear old general?"

Edward snorted, but after catching the look on Hawkeye's face, decided against making a comment at the use of the word "old" to describe Mustang. "Something like that. Another company is going to be sent out tomorrow at dawn to relieve us, and we're supposed to check on the other outposts to reinforce Blacklung's work."

"Because it worked so well the first time." Stuka muttered.

Edward didn't know if he'd meant for the comment to be heard or not, what with the noise behind them, but dammit, he didn't have the energy for this. "Then tell Mustang you think it's a shit idea. I don't care. Between the two of us, though, I have a better idea of what's going on, and I'm the one who suggested it."

"And what exactly is going on, Major?" The man asked, threw out the rank as though it were an insult, and smirked when Edward met his eyes.

He wanted to punch that smirk right off his damn face… Instead, Edward snapped his notebook closed and stuffed in back into his pocket. "They've got alchemists, which you already know, and chimaeras—human-animal hybrids—which you didn't. And, I'm pretty sure the chimaeras have been sneaking around our borders to get information about us." He paused for a moment, wondering, but this bullshit had to stop. "I could bore you about the all the alchemical theory behind it and how I came up with the conclusion, or you can do your fucking job before I send you back to the Passage Command with your hands tied behind your back. Is that clear?"

"Absolutely, sir." But the black haired soldier didn't seem fazed at all.

"Then choose a squad of your horsemen and let them know that they're moving out at first light. They're transporting the prisoners to the Passage Command, and I have reports and shit that Mustang needs to get his hands on."

Stuka offered him a perfect salute. "Permission to leave?"

"Oh fuck off, Stuka."

The man turned on his heel. Edward resisted the urge to make a rude gesture at his retreating back, and instead contented himself with muttering a few insults that made Hawkeye frown and Caddock bark out a surprised laugh. Then he sighed, sorted through his new problem before pushing it away from some other time, and turned his gaze to his two lieutenants. "The chimaeras and the alchemists are the same people."

This time, it was Caddock who swore. "So… they could be wandering around us and we wouldn't know? That explains a lot, I guess."

At the centre of the camp, Stuka was barking out commands to his men. Someone laughed. The bonfire crackled.

"This chimaerism," Hawkeye asked. "How does it affect their alchemy?"

"I have no idea." Dammit, he sounded old, even to his own ears. "Not yet. But I bet it'll end up being a huge pain in the pass for us."

Random tid-bits of information:

Uh… Nope. Nothing. Just take a look at Edward's letter again.