AUTHOR'S PREFACE
This unexpected story continuation is sponsored by Covid19 Quarantine.
It's been nine years and nearly eight months since the last chapter and this was *incredibly* hard to write after so long. But, I've never forgotten this story. I've tried to come back to this more than once. I do have an ending to share. I have seen your beautiful comments over the years, they give me life, and I love them all ;A;
If it's your preference now, I've mirrored the story on AO3 (title's the same, my handle is different), but there are so many here who'll miss the updates if you don't know to look there, so I'll run both locations. Also, AO3 has endcap illustrations for most chapters :)
I have a few chapters waiting to go (up to 49) and I'll update them on Sundays!
Finally, this has not been beta'd, so hopefully I still have some clue how to do things. Here we go~
95 - The Xenotime Gambit
The sun had begun to set and Brigitte couldn't tell how long she'd been unable to find help for Maria. Every which way she'd gone, someone had collected her and returned the German girl to her room. The louder she'd screamed and shouted, the more ruckus she created, the more harshly she was dragged back. Surprisingly, none of them seemed to have the ability to lock her door. Brigitte began to think that Nina was the only one who possessed that key.
At the point she gave up on the men and women of the facility, who acted like nothing was going on around them, Brigitte did her best to gather all her nerves and march down to the main floor. She waited patiently for someone to come along and offer even the slightest distraction, and when some giggling women gave her an opening, Brigitte brazenly tried to run out the front door. She was scooped up off her feet by two military looking men before she'd even finished getting down the entry steps and was hauled back into the building kicking, screaming, and making as much of a scene as possible.
Nobody seemed to care.
The military type men deposited Brigitte in the middle of the building, like they hadn't known exactly where to put her and just simply placed her away from the exit.
Frustrated, German girl dragged herself back to the room everyone else sent her to and looked around for anything that might help her. All she had was a cold plate of food that had been left on her bed. Sighing, she walked up to it, picked up the plate, and headed out of the room, back to where she'd left Maria.
Slipping into the room Nina had forgotten to lock on her way out, Brigitte closed the door behind herself and stared at Maria curled up on her side atop the bed centering the far side of the room. She'd been cursed by the little witch's magic, Brigitte concluded. What else could a magic red stone possibly do? The quiet German girl put her plate down on the floor – she wasn't hungry, but she picked up the dinner bun.
Crawling onto the bed beneath the aggressive overhead lights, Brigitte sat down next to Maria. The fever'd look she'd once had seemed to have faded and she was far less warm to the touch. Brigitte patted her on the shoulder and Maria's eyes began to crack open.
" Oh, I woke you, " legitimately surprised by that, Brigitte tilted her head and looked down at her, posing a question regardless if it could be understood or not, " are you feeling any better? "
Maria's gaze drifted a bit, swimming in the room, but eventually settled on Brigitte and the officer forced a difficult smile to her.
" That's better than you were, I have to say ," putting the bun down on top of the uncovered bed, Brigitte collected Maria's limp hand and squeezed it, wondering – hoping – she'd get some kind of response. What came were a few twitchy fingers that tried to communicate and not much more.
Humming her thoughts, Brigitte put Maria's hand down and looked her in the eyes again. She reached out a finger and pointed it in Maria's face, " You… " her hands came up and cupped her ears, " hear… " and then the same pointed finger landed on her own chest, " me? "
An unstable, swimming nod came to Maria's body language, and Brigitte continued the nod with affirmation, " If we're clear, that's good I suppose. Though I'm not sure what good it does either of us right now. "
Picking up the bun Brigitte had brought with her, she pulled the tiny dry loaf in half and held it out near Maria's nose, " Food? "
Maria closed her eyes and rolled her head away.
Sighing, Brigitte nibbled on her end, not sure what her next course of action should be.
In the silence that followed, Brigitte perked up at an uncomfortable, distant sound that filtered into the room. She wasn't certain, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be certain, but Brigitte had thought she'd heard a crackle – the kind of crackle that accompanied much of the magic. Sitting frozen, Brigitte tried to force her eyes to look at the door, positive it had come from within the halls of the building.
Losing interest in her food, Brigitte left her torn bun atop the bed as curiosity lured her to the door. She didn't want to see the magic, but she also wanted to make sure of where it was in case she needed to run from it. Unable to hear any further sounds from the hall, Brigitte placed her hands down on the doorframe and slowly, silently turned the knob of the door until it opened and she peeked out.
The hall was empty.
She stuck her head out and looked up and down it, wondering if the noise was loud enough to be heard through multiple walls, but not curious enough to leave Maria's room and check the other doors.
And then the crackle hit – like pocket lightning – illuminating from behind Brigitte in the depths of the room. Nearly slamming the door shut on her nose as she whipped around, Brigitte knocked her knees together to keep from falling down to her backside as she watched.
With edges formed from curled wood, a gaping hole had appeared on the left side of the rounded wall.
Brigitte's eyes widened as the young boy Fletcher practically tumbled out.
"Brigitte!" he hoarsely whispered her name then hopped onto the bed, "Ms. Ro…" his tone changed at the recognition of the unresponsive lieutenant as he rolled her onto her back, "Ms. Ross?"
With a deep breath, Brigitte got her legs back in order and staggered forwards to a magician Edward had told her could be trusted, " The uh, the-the little witch clapped her hands and did something to her. "
Looking wide eyed at Brigitte's untranslatable explanation, Fletcher's mouth slowly opened, "Brother, I think I need your help."
Russell snapped his head into the hole and hissed, "I told you to keep your voice dow—woah, what the heck, Ms. Ross?" he got out of the hole in the wall much more skillfully than his younger brother.
Despite the unease the incomprehensible trickery left her with, Brigitte's recognition of the help she'd spent the afternoon seeking won out. Clenching her fists, Brigitte took a deep breath, marched up to the foot of the bed, hopped up onto her knees atop the mattress, and announced to the boys, "Nina!". Clapping her hands, Brigitte clenched her teeth and prayed absolutely nothing would happen as she put her hands down on Maria.
The only thing that happened was the two brothers' jaws falling loose.
"We need to get her out of here," Russell reached across the mattress and grabbed Maria under her arms, "right now. We got what we came for."
Brigitte and Fletcher helped usher the limp officer's body to the edge of the bed. Together they sat her up and draped her arms over Russell's shoulders, trying to get her onto his back.
Russell tossed his head to their escape hole, "Brigitte, get in there."
She sat on the bed bewildered, startling when Fletcher pushed her off the mattress and pointed at the hole.
"Go on."
The wooden hole carved of unnaturally bent wall planks was given a very wary eye, " Oh lord no… "
"Go go go," Fletcher continued to wave his hand at her.
"Ohh…," Brigitte took a reversed step away from everything, " oh no, I am not interested in finding out what's inside a dark magic hole, thank you. Are there no doors available? "
Russell scowled, "Fletcher, help her get in."
No sooner had the younger brother hopped off the bed, than the door to the room flew open.
The young occupants froze and stared wide-eyed at Aisa standing in the creaking entryway.
"Ah. That's what I felt."
No sooner had the sound escaped her lips than Aisa had flown past Brigitte and run Russell into the wall with an explosive force. Maria crumpled to the floor with the loss of Russell's aid and Brigitte screamed as everything burst into motion. Russell's legs thrashed in the air and both of his hands grappled around Aisa's iron grip on his neck as she began crushing him into the wall.
Dropping to his knees, Fletcher snapped out the stub end of a piece of chalk from his pocket and, in a few swift strokes, laid down a transmutation circle on the wooden floorboards.
His glare snapped to Aisa and he activated it.
"STOP," Aisa spun around.
The two youngest in the room watched in horror as the woman's eyes, skin tone, and teeth reddened at the activation of a transmutation circle too close to her body saturated with red water. Whatever Fletcher had tried to transmute began flying wildly beyond his control, causing the floorboards to curl, splinter, and sprout. Like he'd intended to do it from the start, the youngest brother released his hands from the transmutation and let Aisa inadvertently fuel the continued chaos.
Brigitte never stopped screaming as the floor beneath her feet roared to life. It rocked and crawled and grew until it touched her legs. She threw herself on tip toe towards the door, endless voices yelling words she didn't understand, and she ignored them all. Frantically scrambling with the knob, the door finally popped open and she ran from the madness.
Never looking back, Brigitte ran with her longest strides down the sunset halls, throwing her arms with each step, hoping it would propel her farther and farther away. She took corners and adjoining halls at random, hoping to lose anything that might be following her, until finally she found herself running down a plain hallway with nothing but a window at the end.
Jumping up, she flipped the window's latch and threw the heavy glass panes wide. Brigitte's small fingers grabbed the screen by its corner hook and yanked on it until it fell away to the bush four stories below. Gasping for air, focus dizzied, and with no conscious thought or plan, Brigitte climbed into the window.
The scream she let out when an arm reached around her midsection and hauled her back in should have been enough to alert the entire township below that something had gone terribly wrong.
Brigitte's legs weren't strong enough to free herself, her hands not strong enough to hold on to the window frame, and Aisa ripped the frantic, screaming child back into the building and shut the window.
Well, that was odd.
Mustang double checked a report. It remained odd.
Against the logic of what Mustang was expecting to be Dante's about-face return to Central to collect Ed, reports began coming in that contradicted his expectations.
Postponing a briefing with his senior officers, Mustang asked for his reports to be re-delivered and some corroborated by different sources. Yet, the feedback remained the same. Perhaps it was a ruse? It stunk of a rouse. But, there were other ways to stage a ruse. This was too blatant and obvious.
While Central City had ground to a near halt and the major cities of the four quarters had begun to feel pinched as well, why the hell was there increased traffic going IN to Xenotime?
Beyond it being the current location of Dante, the home town of Nash Tlingum and his sons, and that it had been heavily involved in the production of red water, Mustang knew very little about the town. The officer repeatedly questioned what would warrant an influx of people mid-week. Other than being in the east, what was the strategic significance of Xenotime?
The situation in Xenotime was infuriating, since Mustang was the one who'd organized getting everyone together there. There had been absolutely no motivation for Dante to go, so someone out that way must still have ties to Dante and alerted her. Or worse, someone around him. Now, he had an officer trapped there with their foreign child, the woman from Lior Dante had once fancied, and the two botanical alchemist nuisances who were actually providing their worth. The east was an area Mustang had stronger ties to, which offered a slight piece of mind, if and when Dante showed she was moving on Ed. Except, by all accounts, she didn't appear to be going anywhere. She looked to be fortifying herself in Xenotime with his people.
Mustang rubbed his good eye – why? She clearly wasn't worried that Ed could be headed out of reach, which in itself was concerning. He couldn't begin to fathom what sort of tendrils Dante had in place that would give her the kind of confidence that she could simply sit idle while they shuffled Ed through the country. Given the longevity he'd been told she had, there was the possibility that she saw the entire country as nothing more than her private property that they were all trespassing on. To top that off, Izumi had mentioned she had her tricks woven into the minds of at least several men in powerful positions. Did that mean she had moles who didn't even realize it? How spread out were her eyes? What was the potential and scale of it all? Was that how she found out about the group in Xenotime? The potential for her reach was unnerving. Roy straightened himself up at the desk.
The phone kindly rang, relieving Roy of his train of thought for a second. The voice on the other end, however, threw his thoughts with more of a curve than he'd had before.
"They what? I need you to elaborate."
An elaboration was unnecessary, the message relayed was very clear. It was the absurdity that Mustang needed clarified. A select number of government officials were en route to Xenotime, where the Prime Minister was already headed, if not there already. Prime Minister Mitchell didn't surprise Mustang, since he'd written the man off due to his proximity to Dante, but the other officials simply up and abandoning their duties while the city – the country – was in growing turmoil and lacking leadership was absurd. The informant wasn't entirely sure what prompted the senior officials to vacate the city in the middle of mounting protests, but the fact of the matter was, the issues of the capital city were less important than whatever charade was going on in Xenotime.
Mustang thanked his informant and dropped the receiver of his phone to its holder with a clatter.
A bare hand came over Mustang's mouth as he thought things over. Central City was open. It was vulnerable: abandoned by its leaders and stewing in the furor of neglect.
Mustang could march in and take the city. It was too easy.
It was too easy.
… That tiny little shit.
Their ancient parasite was locking herself down in Xenotime and she would be fully aware of what leaving Central without its higher government would mean. There had to have been a message relayed by her actions and the most obvious one Mustang could find was that she simply placed no value in who actually controlled the nation. Political control was not an objective of hers, it was only a tool used as a means to her ends. Then, what she was doing was turning Central City into bait for Mustang, and if he didn't act on it soon, someone would see it as a weakness and take advantage of the situation in his stead. But, if he took the offering of Central City now, he would be so bogged down with politics that he wouldn't have time to address the little miscreant treating the nation's people as nothing more than free-range livestock for her games.
In a way, Mustang was somewhat pleased that he finally felt like he had some sort of handle on what was going on. The devil's actions had once been buried beneath well-constructed blissful ignorance, but now that he'd started to learn where and how to see it, she was actually fairly transparent: Dante needed him, and his crew, occupied and too burdened to track her. That was the game he was playing with her.
Mustang gave a swift boot to the bottom of his desk, rattling the telephone receiver as he slapped his hands over his face.
"Bad timing?"
"What?" Mustang groaned at Havoc's entrance.
"Well," the lieutenant closed the door behind himself, "you wanted me to get the trip up north sorted sooner than later, but you've been on the phone all morning."
"What do you know about Xenotime, Havoc?" Mustang straightened himself around in the chair.
The man wrinkled his nose, "Only what I read in Ed's red water report years ago, that's it."
"Knowing what we know now and how involved Dante has been with things, can you think of anything that would give preference to Xenotime over other locations in the east or in the quarters near Ishibal and Lior?" Mustang asked.
Havoc folded his arms, looking to the ceiling, "If I'm to be perfectly honest, I don't remember a damn thing from the Xenotime reports, other than the refreshers we got on the implications of red water."
Snorting a laugh, Mustang waved his hand dismissively, "It's fine lieutenant."
"What's up?" Havoc yanked a wooden chair over to his superior's desk.
Gesturing to the papers strewn on his desk, Mustang shrugged, "Dante isn't making a move on Central."
Havoc looked from the papers to his superior officer, slowly raising his brow, "In most cases, I think that'd be a good thing?"
"In most cases," Mustang scowled, "but allowing us time to move Ed tells me she's confident that she'll gain access to him no matter where we send him. On top of that, she's bringing parts of the upper echelon into Xenotime for… something."
"What?" Havoc shot his confusion around the room, "What the hell for?"
"To be perfectly honest, I don't think it matters what for, because it's not why they're going to Xenotime, it's why they're leaving Central City," Mustang's head continued to shake, "the city is being made available for the first upstart who wants to supplant the current government for abandoning its people."
Moving as though he were ready to fly from his seat, Havoc froze when he realized Mustang did not carry any of his enthusiasm, "Wait, we're not taking it?"
"I'm being set up," Mustang ground his teeth, "imagine the amount of work I might be delegating to you and how many weeks and months it'll take you to get through it. Now put that on a national scale," the officer sighed at the bind he was finding himself in, "a society to put back into order, law to establish and maintain, multitudes of people to organize, jobs to distribute, people to calm, public confidence to be measured, domestic affairs in all four surrounding quarters – I still don't know at this point if all the quarters want to play nice with yet another change in governance. Dante will use the chaos to vanish in the first days and we won't have the resources for months to track her or keep her from reaching Ed no matter where we put him."
Havoc settled back in his seat and looked around the room they'd come to call headquarters, "All things considered, I still think sending them to be under Major General Armstrong's watch is the best option. She can have autonomy over their protection while we deal with Central."
"Agreed," Mustang nodded, looking over to his junior officer, "but, before we do that I want to make sure that devil doesn't have her hands into more than just the east. Now that we have at least a clue what to look for we'll double check our options before we gift wrap anyone into a trap. I'm not losing Ed or this nation to that tiny woman."
Mustang slammed his fist on the desk, bouncing the telephone receiver off its cradle as he stood up.
Every few minutes, Alphonse bounced.
"What're you doing?" Winry giggled.
A goofy grin wiggled through Al's face, "I haven't bounced on a bed in years."
"So you pick mine?" Winry sputtered.
"Yup," Al gave another bounce and flopped onto his back. Looking ahead to the ceiling, he dropped his arms out at either side, "I wish someone would come and tell us what's going on."
The someone originally was meant to be Lieutenant Havoc, who wanted to have a chat with the trio about a tentative plan to head north. But, Havoc didn't show at the time expected and neither did anyone else. Eventually, Ed had gotten exasperated with sitting idle and had wandered off in a huff for an explanation. So, like the well behaved ones they told themselves they were being, Winry and Alphonse waited for someone to show up and explain things.
And they waited.
And waited.
And then it turned into the afternoon.
"How cold do you suppose it is up north?" Al wondered aloud.
"It's July," Winry shrugged, "even the coldest places get summer in July."
"True… true true," Al nodded as he thought that over, he'd simply always associated the north with the cold. His eyes narrowed with a fun thought, "If we go north and we're there long enough, we're going to need winter clothes with hats and mitts and scarves and fur coats and—"
Winry started laughing and leaned back against a pillow she'd shoved up against the headboard, "You want the winter to freeze you to death? Be my guest, but count me out – I'll stay inside, thank you. I've had enough of the cold for a while."
Al bounced around on the bed to face Winry, his legs crossing in the process and he slapped his hands down in his lap eagerly, "You said it was really cold beyond the Gate, right?"
"Your brother will tell you I'm exaggerating," Winry pointed a finger at the younger Elric, "but I swear no cold like that exists here."
Al dug his hands into the bedsheets. "Was there a lot of snow? Did you have to wear parkas all the time? And big fur hats and boots?"
Winry laughed, "Not exactly, but I would have worn something a heck of a lot warmer on my feet if I could've. I think my feet were always cold."
Al thought that was an odd statement to make, "Why couldn't you wear warm boots if it was cold out?"
The look he got from Winry was palpable, "I had to obey the rules of what women could wear, and my feet suffered the most for it."
Al was starting to find that, if he wanted to learn more about the little things about life beyond the Gate, he was probably going to get it through Winry. In the first few days, his brother had felt surprisingly open about details he'd shared, but the moment things began to get serious with their situation, Ed's restraint kicked back in and, other than making it clear he hadn't enjoyed his time there, he became more factual about what he shared. Winry, on the other hand, offered tiny details, voiced her thoughts on the little things, and had a moderately subjective opinion on most everything.
Al found he had an insatiable hunger for the smaller details, like the strange idea that it mattered what men and women could wear; it gave the place more substance and made everything feel far less abstract. When Al's memories had come back and filled the space that existed between his reborn self and everyone, even though they weren't there to share it with him when it happened, it had been a very rich sensation. Suddenly everyone he looked at or thought about made more sense to him – they were fuller somehow. Since Al wasn't going to get five years of free information on his brother, or a much easier five months from Winry, he'd have to build it himself.
As his thoughts wandered around the ideas of building memories and connecting dots, there was as small detail Al already had that he wanted to know about, "Did you know Mathilde and Hermann?"
Winry's eyes flew wide, "Did Ed tell you?"
"No no," Al laughed at her surprise, "Brigitte wrote their names down when she was trying to tell us about people on her map in München and Deutschland."
"Ohh… yeah, she would have met them too," Winry looked off in momentary thought while she put together an answer, "We did know them. Mathilde was pretty lively – the first time I met her she showed up with an armload of clothes, a stack of magazines, and a massive collection of curlers, pins, clips, and things. She spent the afternoon dressing me up like I was a human sized toy doll," Winry gave a laugh at the memory, "I think she had a lot of fun doing it. She spent forever trying to teach me how to curl and style my hair. Most of the time I just gave up and let her do it. She just somehow knew how to set the curls, spin it all up, do it this way or that, and then pin it to my head properly. I either wore a hat to hide how I couldn't do my hair or I wore my hair as a hat."
Al's expression twisted as put together in his head what in the world Winry might look like, "… no, I can't imagine you in curls," he laughed.
"Right?" she sputtered at Al's very astute conclusion, "it was such an exercise, but no way was I letting her cut my hair."
"How did you guys know them?" that was what Al really wanted to know.
"Hermann was a scientist of some kind," Winry folded her arms as she racked her brain, "something to do with rockets I think? Ed never went into much detail about what he actually did, since he was also a doctor and we sometimes needed him for that."
With another mental canvas well underway, Al wanted to know more, "Did you do a lot of things with them?"
Winry gave a wobbly nod, "Not lots lots. We had dinner together a couple times. Hermann sometimes came over to pick Ed's brain on science stuff. If I needed to go shopping for clothes I couldn't borrow, Tilly would take me," her nose wrinkled, "I didn't understand at first why she was so specific about everything."
"Specific?" Winry's tone only made Al more curious, "about the clothes rules?"
"Yeah, everybody had a lot of clothes rules," Winry straightened herself and motioned to Al, "like for you, I never heard Ed mention if it was a rule exactly, but whenever we were out, all of the men wore a dress shirt, vest, pants, and a jacket of some kind – everywhere they took me and any guy I met was dressed like that too," her eyes lit with a hint of amusement, "I suppose it was like a uniform: the man uniform. Ed and your dad stayed 'in uniform' pretty much every moment we weren't at home."
It wasn't a battle that Al had considered for his brother, or one that he would have seen him conceding to either. Ed had his own style that he catered to, and certainly never made an effort to 'blend in', so to consider some of his individuality lost to societal standards and norms must have been at least a little deflating for him.
"At least he looked good in it," Winry grumbled, "all I got were these frumpy clothes and skirts everyone had to wear no matter the weather. And they could only come half way up the calf and always cover my knees," her grumble got worse, "and I had to wear stockings because I wasn't allowed to have bare legs. And I couldn't wear pants either, so if I ever wanted to wear sweats or a big sweater or something I had to steal them from your brother."
Al's thoughts were tripped up and he burst with a laugh, "You stole his clothes!?"
"They were way more comfortable!" Winry protested, "I just couldn't leave the house in them."
Al couldn't stop giggling at the mental image of that. His brother now was at least a few sizes larger than anything Winry would have fit into, "You raiding his closet. Everything must have been huge, why didn't you buy your own?"
Winry sat back and let Al in on a missing detail, "Money was pretty tight. Ed and your dad both had good jobs, but they both said the country was having too many economic problems and their jobs didn't matter too much, so they couldn't afford to decorate me in new things. Most of the clothes I got were just hand-me-downs Tilly brought me."
For Al, the concept of beyond the Gate seemed to come with the precognition that the people existed with general wealth, since their knowledge had once seemed so vast, and both his dad and his brother working at a school complimented that. Alphonse had never even considered the people beyond the Gate would be struggling to pay for something.
"But Ed never complained if I took his sweaters, as long as I washed them and put them back," Winry shrugged, "I think the only things he really paid for were my new coat and the dress Tilly helped me get for the concert."
"Concert?" there Winry went again hauling Al away from his growing list of curiosities and over to a whole new picture, "You went to a concert? What kind of concert?"
Winry replied with a mousy grin, "Yeah, someone gave Ed two tickets to a fancy orchestra concert for his birthday."
Al's grin flew wide with intrigue, "And he took you? To the orchestra? Like on a date?"
Winry wrinkled her nose and waived Al off, "Al, your brother's never asked anyone out on a date. The person who gave him the tickets told him to take me, so I could see the finer side of German culture."
Al debated how badly he wanted to contest her assessment of the outing, but decided he was more interested in hearing what else Winry had to say than risk derailing the conversation.
"Ed couldn't give the tickets back, so we had to scramble last minute to find something to wear," Winry's gaze narrowed, "he got lucky and the Haushofer family was all boys, so they had a tuxedo he could borrow, but I had to go shopping for a nice dress and this contraption called a garter belt."
Al took note to ask who the Haushofer family was later, but he still needed to know a little bit more about the topic at hand. Since his afternoon seemed to continually get more entertaining, Al bounced himself onto his stomach, folded his arms atop the sheets, and put his chin down with a grin, "What kind of dress did my brother end up paying for?"
"It was an olive green thing," Winry looked herself over, "it came down to here and here, didn't have sleeves, the back was really open, but I had a nice shawl, so that was okay. My hair was bundled up on my head again, I had to clip up my stockings into the damn belt, and I wobbled around in these pointy green shoes Tilly found to match. It was the most uncomfortable lady-like outfit I've ever worn," Winry paused as her memories drifted into the ceiling and she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear, "but, I did look kind of nice in it, and I enjoyed the evening overall, so I give it a pass."
Grinning, Al stretched his arms out through the top of the bed, "Who was the mastermind that sent you two to the fancy concert?"
"Um…" Winry's clenched her eyes and shook out her thoughts as she tried to remember, "oh, it was this guy named Rudolf He—"
There was no provocation Al could recognize, nothing in her story that would have let him see it coming, nor anything the younger Elric could have done about it. Al slowly began to bring himself up, helplessly watching a rich, fun story of an innocent adventure drain of its life in Winry's eyes and bleed the colour from her face.
"Hess."
Her eyes locked forwards, but Winry's gaze existed far from the room; Al watched as she sat up in the bed and tried to tuck her legs under herself, but her wounded leg didn't comply, and she was forced to leave it out, half bent in front of her.
"Hess?" Al leaned forwards with the question, hoping she'd look at him to give him something – every alarm was going off in his head and he had no idea why, "Winry? Who's Hess?"
Her hands came up to her face and her fingers pushed through her cheeks, hooked around her ears, and slowly pulled down her neck, while her gaze vacantly darted around the sheets, like she was piecing something together, "It was the Saturday before…"
Al reached out finally, grabbed one of her wrists, and watched her expression flash back into the room in a panic. He hesitated with his question, not certain where he should begin.
"Are you okay?"
The obvious answer was no, but Al wasn't lucky enough to get that response. Winry's snared look held her captive for a moment longer, before she took a deep, staggered inhale and tried to shake it all out on the exhale.
"Al, can you go find someone to tell us what the heck is going on? Your brother buggered off ages ago."
Glancing from the door back to Winry, Al sat back, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, yeah," she nodded.
Al looked to the wrist he still held and slowly let it go, "Alright, but are you going to be okay?"
"Yeah, yeah I'm fine," she offered a forced laugh that Al saw straight through, "it's fine, don't worry. But can you find someone to tell us why we're still sitting here, please?"
"Okay," he slipped off the bed and slowly made his way to the door, "I'll find an update quick and be right back, okay?"
"Thanks Al."
Her fake smile made the guilty weight imposing on Al more noticeable, and he certainly hoped doing as she asked and not pushing was the right thing to do. Hopefully he could find some answers quickly, so he had a valid excuse to come back sooner than later.
Past the dinner hour, and through the final reaches of daylight, Mustang strode through the halls of his operations base. Lodging and a few operations was sequestered away on the second floor, leaving the main floor open and modestly accessible to not draw too much attention, and it allowed the troupe access to the dim little restaurant the hotel had there. A shoddy café by day, and dingy pub by night, it was an occasional respite to sit and enjoy the dreary atmosphere of somewhere else beyond a repurposed second floor lunch suite.
It was where Roy found Ed, much to the officer's chagrin. He would have preferred if this Elric would stay completely out of sight, though his concerns were eased knowing that this Edward Elric did not fit the description of his teenage self any longer. Nobody beyond a handful of people knew Ed's current age or constitution; yet, tonight he was a far odder sight. Roy found him seated alone, back to the world around him, an elbow on the table with his head resting in the hand, plate of food half eaten, one drink gone, another on its way out. Roy's brow furrowed at the image. With an unassuming stride over, the officer stepped up behind Ed, put a hand down on his shoulder.
Ed threw himself from the chair at an alarming speed, nearly knocking the table over as he flew up and away from the grasp. Spinning around amidst his stumble, Roy snatched the wrist that went flying out at him.
"STOP."
Ed froze; panicked golden eyes locked to Roy. The pair stood silently paused, staring at each other, as a fork finally toppled from the table and clattered off the floor.
Ed suddenly snatched his arm back and snapped his shirt straight.
"Anything wrong?" was the question Roy opted for over 'what the hell just happened?'
"No."
The officer looked to the ajar table of spilt alcohol and cold dinner, "You're certain?"
"Nothing's wrong," Ed barked, turning to the table to straighten his mess, "Christ, you don't just sneak up on people like that."
"Okay," Roy backed off. His brow lowered and he watched as a frustrated Ed tried to re-set the disturbed table, "no one to dine with tonight?"
"Winry's taking a nap and Al's occupying himself, since we're not doing anything and all your people are giving us the runaround," storming over to the unattended servers bar, Ed snatched a rag to wipe his table down with and confronted Mustang again, "where the hell have you been all day? I was hearing you had some grand scheme up your sleeve to banish us north? Anything wrong ?"
"Yes actually," Roy ignored the cranky Elric's attempt to get a rise out of him. Exhaling, he brought his mind back to a very pressing topic, "what do you remember about your assignment in Xenotime?"
Not expecting to have his snide quip actually answered, Ed put the rag down on the table and raised an eyebrow, "With the red water?"
Roy nodded, taking his turn to approach the bar counter, "I'm looking more into what you remember of Xenotime itself."
"Oh," Ed's brow popped, his toweled hand sweeping over the table as he tried to think, "it was a mining town. They mined gold in the northern range and valley until it ran out, then the town declined pretty badly. They found more gold in a new excavation, and then fell back into decline after that ended."
Roy scanned the layout behind the bar counter and snatched up two tall glasses, "Topography?"
Straightening up, Ed strummed his fingers on the back of a chair as he thought, "It was tucked away in the lower mountains. The town sat in a valley bed. Fit maybe a few thousand people or so I'd guess." He narrowed his eyes in thought, hearing ice cubes clatter into Roy's glasses, "There was a huge lake just beyond the southern mountain range, Al and I took a train over it."
"Where was the red water treated?" Roy crouched down and opened a cooler door.
"The northern range. They had a sheared cliff that they built the lab into above the town and it was the range where they first found all the gold," Ed sat back down at his table, eyed his cold dinner, and gave up on the idea, "when the gold was gone, they used the old gold mine shafts as procurement for the red water. I'd assume someone had planned to do the same for the second deposit at some point."
Roy walked back up to the table and placed two tall, ice filled glasses down on the table for each of them.
Ed looked from the glass back to Roy as the elder of the two sat down, "Why?"
Sighing, Roy took a sip of his drink before answering, "It doesn't appear Dante is leaving Xenotime. If anything, she's fortifying and bringing people in."
Ed laced his fingers, put his elbows down on the table, and leaned into his hands with a scowl.
The discontent in Roy's voice grew, "And I'm having some trouble getting information about what is exactly going on, but there's a clear influx of people into Xenotime and almost nobody is leaving. The fact that Xenotime is in the east like Ishibal and Lior, and she has history with both the town and quarter, doesn't bode well. On top of that, she seems to have gone 'fuck it' to politics and is willingly about to let us fall into anarchy."
His head falling forwards, Ed's hands slapped down onto the table. He scowled and grabbed the glass Roy'd filled for him. With a sharp inhale he took a large gulp and suddenly found himself sputtering on it, "It's water?"
Roy put his glass down and looked pointedly at Ed, "So, how difficult would it be to use the Xenotime township as a replenishment source for the Philosopher's Stone?"
Ed froze.
Roy ran his finger over the rim of his glass, "You just described a dying town with underground mining architecture."
"Xenotime?" Ed looked around in hurried thought, "The place is too small, she wouldn't get much. It doesn't even seem worth it."
"But, if she were desperate?" Roy tapped his finger off his glass, "if she weren't even desperate and just wanted to make a point? With a town she could hide by drowning it in lake water, all executed from a secure location?"
Ed sunk back in his chair, "Shit…"
"A town with people in government converging on it to bolster her effect."
Taking a long, heavy sigh, Ed rocked back on two legs of the chair, tossing his head back as he groaned. He let the chair land on all fours again with a thud and snapped forward, popping up to his feet. Roy rose as Ed snatched up his glass of water and came around the table. Stepping into his path, Roy's hand landed firmly on Ed's chest to stop him.
Ed scowled at the intrusion, "What?"
Without a word, Roy spun him around, put a hand at what would have been the scruff of his neck, and led him out with his gifted glass of ice water.
"The hell're you doing?" Ed spat.
Shrugging, Roy ushered him towards the stairs, "You seem to need something to keep you busy and I need to figure out more about our little terror in the east. So, I'm going to put some people's heads together in a room and see what we come up with. Drink up."
It had been an exhausting evening of arguing. There were a multitude of ideas all going in their own directions and no sign of a consensus among stubborn minds. Al walked into his room, his brother storming in after him, slamming the door.
"He's got a point though," Al flicked on the table lamp to ruin the midnight.
"His nose is a damn point," Ed grumbled, "if Brigitte and everyone are with Dante in Xenotime, we need to find a way to get them out and keep her from ruining the town. You're going to need me to be there for that."
It was his brother's argument that, to prevent Dante from possibly doing something to endanger the entire population of Xenotime, Ed would travel with them knowing that Dante wouldn't act callously and risk endangering him – Ed was too valuable.
"Brother, we'd nearly be handing you to her if you go."
The counter argument from everyone else was that, in order for Ed's presence to be effective, they would have to let Dante know he was there.
"Nobody's handing me over to Dante," Ed dumped himself in the room chair, his elbow landing hard on the table, "we can bait her out and keep her occupied long enough to evacuate the town and give everyone else enough time to extract Brigitte, Lieutenant Ross, and the rest of'em."
And this was the focal point of contention between the two Elric brothers, "I don't want any part of a plan that uses you as bait ," Al watched his brother's head fall into his hands with a heavy sigh, and the younger brother rolled his head back, "we don't even know what happens if you clap your hands at this point. You said it yourself; you need months to practice the other world's alchemy practically, with tangible transmutation circles, to learn what they do before giving it a go at clapping your hands for it. That leaves you defenceless and you want to be bait? No, absolutely not."
"You'll be with me and she's probably going to have a ton of questions for you too," Ed's hands flared out, "she'll keep her heavy actions to a minimum and I'll have you to watch my back if anything starts up."
Al bristled at the plans being made for him, "No, you won't, because I'm not going. I'm staying put with you and Winry, like we're supposed to."
After Al had anxiously left Winry's room to find answers that would hopefully distract her, Al had found his brother loitering in the main floor halls, scowling, having been completely unable to get an answer out of anyone or, for that matter, find Mustang, Hawkeye, or even Havoc who was supposed to have taken them north. Al mentioned to Ed that something had upset Winry, and when he elaborated with 'someone named Hess?' his brother abruptly vanished, leaving Al to scour for answers on his own. After what felt like an hour later, Al gave up getting rhetoric and runaround from people, went back upstairs, and intercepted his brother coming out of Winry's room. He'd asked if she was okay and Ed simply said she was taking a nap, at which point Al took a good look at his brother and told him that he looked like he needed one too. Ed dismissed the idea and wandered downstairs, leaving Al by himself and to his own devices. At that point Alphonse decided he was just going to collect his family and take them wherever Mustang sent them, because something felt off.
"Al," Ed pleaded, his hands dropping over his knees, "Winry definitely needs to get out of here. I don't want her anywhere near this and she needs to be far off Dante's radar, but Dante's not going to do anything that might hurt me."
"You mean other than try to turn your brain to liquid while she tries to rip your thoughts out against your will?" the younger brother's fists landed on his sides.
The impatience and frustration in his demeanour growing clear, Ed swung back up to his feet, folding his arms. He drew a breath to speak, but Al beat him to it.
"Brother, can we just step back for a moment," Al took his fists off his hips and let them ease at his sides, "let's just focus on leaving safely and we can think of something on the way. We might get some better ideas on some sleep, travel, and new scenery. You haven't been sleeping well, I think we need a change of scenery at least."
Ed stopped pacing, though his head kept shaking, "That's really what I came home to do? Run and hide?"
Al's shoulders sagged, "Brother…"
"I need to at least try to do something, Al," Ed voiced his exasperation at the situation, "but the less you or I do, the more Dante will. She doesn't act with morals or empathy. She'll operate like Envy and work her way in where we're not looking. And then what happens? Who gets hurt?"
If anything was unmistakable about Dante, it was that the lives of Amestrians only had value to her in terms of how they could further her objectives. She rarely acted on her own accord, rather choosing to use any available assets to move on her behest, while she slipped ahead to orchestrate another playing field to her favour.
Unsure of what his answer could or should be, Al watched his older brother's brow flatten and tighten as he began to think. Ed's eyes could exist in a room, but his gaze could be seeing something ten thousand miles away if he wanted. Tapping a free finger within his folded arms, the older brother rolled his jaw while his pupils danced around in thought. Finally cancelling the silence the brothers were maintaining, Ed moved - from the bedside table, the elder brother picked up a pencil and notepad and began writing. Wrapped in the weak room light, Al watched curiously as the page was torn out and handed to him.
"What's this?" turning the sheet around in his hands, Al's brow rose curiously.
"Cyrillic," Ed answered.
Oh. Al wasn't sure if he should divert his eyes from the four items scrawled on it or not. He debated dropping it altogether, "Brother, isn't this dangerous?"
"I don't think these are."
As passive as it was, Al didn't like the response and he took his eyes off the paper, "The Gate wouldn't let me bring you all the way home," he glanced at his brother standing in the corner of his vision, "If this knowledge is dangerous, I don't think I should be looking at it."
Shaking his head, Ed stepped up to his younger brother, "It was me the Gate didn't want coming home, right? I was the danger, not the knowledge."
Al gave pause to think on his brother's words.
"If all of the knowledge was dangerous, why did the Gate allow me to return with it?"
Al had only been able to bring his brother so far as the back side of the doors, because anything beyond that had been refused. It was Ed, as an existence, as an entity, that the Gate had refused. But in the end, Ed had managed to get himself, Winry, and the knowledge in his head home. A question drifted past Al as he mulled his memory of the moment… what did he—?
"Dante has every inch of Amestrist to her memory by now," Ed pivoted on his toes, waving the notepad in his hand as he spoke, "she has five hundred years of weaving done. Even if that nasty little bitch has tricks we can't even imagine," Ed spun back to his brother with a very familiar smirk, "I guarantee she's never encountered those four characters."
Unable to dissuade himself from entertaining his brother's energy, Al peeked down at the sheet in his hand.
"The culmination of what I learnt beyond the Gate is dangerous," Ed wouldn't disagree, "but not every individual thing I discovered there was."
Alphonse relented, "Okay, what do they do?"
Ed shrugged, "When I researched them, they looked like basic alchemical formula markers."
Al looked at his brother confused, "Just regular transmutation parts?"
"Hopefully, they're a bit more than that," Ed cocked an eyebrow, his tone a bit wistful, "I had no way of testing them. They're part of an older alchemy formula set that gave way to one that's more like what we have. I never found anything coded into their texts that made it look like they were volatile but, I'd rank those as the most garden variety ones from beyond the Gate that we've never seen," Ed's hands found his pants' pockets, a growing grin worming its way through his expression, "and you can find out what they do."
It was an indelible curiosity. Al brought the sheet of four mystery alchemical factors back up to eye level. He could learn it. They could learn it. It had been a long time since Al felt that kind of excitement bubbling in him. They had been innocent children the last time they sat down and really tried to learn anything new with alchemy together.
"We can go north, south, east, or west, but it's not going to matter where we go if we have someone hunting us who doesn't play by any rules," Ed's brow rose with a quirk to his grin, "So, we'll modify the playing field."
Slowly, cautiously, yet with a child's eagerness, Al examined every stroke his brother had made on the sheet. He wouldn't deny he was insatiably curious about the concept and application of new transmutation circles.
"I'm going to have to start by drawing all these out," Al looked up from the sheet.
"Good call," Ed's energy picked up yet again and he tore out a few sheets from the notepad, "and after some practice you won't need to anymore."
There was never a moment where Ed's excitement for alchemy wasn't contagious. Al began pulling the small table in the borrowed hotel room over to the bed as his brother put down a series of blank circles on each sheet. Running into the bathroom, Al filled a glass half way with water and brought it back, placing it centre of the table.
"Let's think up a couple circles that'll give us a clue to what they might do and go from there," Ed tapped the end of his pencil on the table and spread out the sheets.
Al tapped his chin as he scanned the paperwork, debating where to start first, before his new golden eyes excitedly lit, "Oh, there's a planter at the end of the hall."
"I'll grab some dirt," Without missing a beat, Ed hopped to the door, "and get some salt from that makeshift kitchen."
The younger brother was momentarily left alone with the incredibly exciting and nerve wracking job of thinking up the first new transmutation circle in hundreds of years. What an absolutely monumental feat they were about to undertake. Yet, when he looked back at the door his brother slipped out of, Al wondered how concerned he should be that Ed seemed to be trying to divert him from the idea of leaving Central.
There was no prison to stash a wailing and raging de-limbed homunculus in, so Wrath had been relegated to the basement's cleared out equipment room. It was close enough to the boiler room that it would drown out the creature, and solid enough that he couldn't break anything, and built well enough that his ankle could be tethered with a chain to his wrist around a cement pillar. The bottom of the stairs was where Izumi would sit in the mornings if she wanted to interrogate or simply stare at the defective creature as it wiggled, wailed, and flailed. At some point the red stones fueling Wrath would have to run out, but at what point and when, she couldn't say.
Izumi didn't want to look at the reason she'd given herself the task of monitoring Wrath; looking at him and knowing why he existed was bad enough. And even locked up with nowhere to run there was nothing she could do about him. He was nothing but a tool now.
She knew this.
She understood it.
And she was still down there anyways while he screamed at her. Wrath didn't seem to need much sleep when he was hyped up on red stones, but he'd fallen silent in the last while, like a child that had simply exhausted its ability to throw a tantrum and passed out.
Through the silence, a pair of shoes were heard on the cement stairs and Ed came down to join his teacher that morning.
"He's not going to start acting like he can rip me limb from limb, is he?" he asked quietly, below the echo.
Izumi shook her head, "He's screamed himself to sleep I think. It took hours."
Ed breathed in the stale, warm air and sat down next to her, "He didn't happen to give up anything useful?"
"Just noise," she shrugged and looked at Ed, and had to look again and bring her eyes up – she still wasn't used to having to look up at him, "when did that happen?"
She got back a curious look.
Izumi offered a soft laugh, "When did your body decide it was time for you to grow up?"
"Oh," a rich, smug grin came to Ed for this answer, "I was seventeen. Not sure when it started, I wasn't really paying attention, but I stood up one day and whacked my head into the kitchen cupboard," he rubbed the top of his head at the memory, but never lost his grin, "I'd never done that before. Best hole in my skull I ever got."
Izumi did her best to stifle her laugh at the achievement marker, "Well, that's good," Ed got a pat on his knee for that as Izumi looked him over again, finally shaking her head, "Brigitte told us that you were older than we were expecting, but I don't think any of us honestly believed it. We accepted the facts as they were, but to look at you and know you've had over five years go by…"
Ed leaned back, putting his elbows down on the step behind him.
"There're a lot of people involved now who've never even known you for five years, I can't even say I have. You two were so busy running around being fools."
Ed chuckled at the sentiment.
"Your father, of all people, got the most years out of you," Izumi looked out into the darkened cement room, poorly lit with the sunrise falling in through the filthy windows near the ceiling.
Ed drew a slow breath in and looked up to the piping overhead, "They weren't exactly my best years."
Izumi followed his gaze up, but found nothing of interest, and cast her attention back to him, "How're things now that you've been back for a bit?"
Narrowing his eyes at a drip leaking through a pipe, Ed wondered how to answer that, "It's fine. It was something like a shock to the system at first," his gaze narrowed as he struggled to find words for a feeling, "we woke up here in the middle of everything… I've just been running with it."
"But?" Izumi pushed his silent hesitation.
Ed shook his head slowly, unable to find his words, "I don't know… at some point it'll start feeling normal again."
There was something in Ed's voice that Izumi kept picking up on that she couldn't say she'd ever heard from him before: a weary tone occasionally found his voice. It wasn't much, but it was noticeable when his words softened - it was a subtle undertone that she wanted to describe as sounding tired. Izumi wasn't sure 'tired' was the word she wanted, but she couldn't put her finger on another one.
"I suppose you're a few steps out of sync," she offered, "from your perspective, this point is around four years behind you."
"Something like that," Ed continued the shake of his head, but then startled Izumi when he suddenly choked down a laugh, "Actually, I feel like I have to go to work."
And with the upbeat in his tone, the inflection was gone. The teacher joined him in the muffled laughter; Al offering up his brother's occupation beyond the Gate had given everyone a lot of questions that Ed had groaned his way through answering, "You're such a good boy, getting a nice, decent, regular Monday to Friday job. Please, do everyone a favour and find something like that here later."
Ed rolled his eyes, "We'll see about that."
"All things considered," Izumi looked at him and wondered aloud, "you did live a fairly normal life there."
A disgruntled noise sputtered out from Ed, "I just buggered around with one arm and mostly two legs and tried to learn an extinct science nobody believed in any more. Speaking of…" he pointed a finger upstairs, "Mustang's gathering people for a meeting soon and wants you involved. If you're not busy with this creature…" the finger wiggled over to Wrath.
"I'm not busy," Izumi shook her head, "if he wakes up, he can yell at the ghosts for a whi—"
As if irony had timing, from the floor above a clatter of what sounded like a tower of pots and pans fell to the ground, sending a deafening echo through the concrete walls. Ed and Izumi cringed in unison and looked back to Wrath lying flopped on his side, purple eyes suddenly open wide.
"Well, at least he can't go anywhere," Ed shrugged and stood up.
"Hello there my arm and leg!" the little creature's voice gleefully ripped out like fingernails down a chalkboard.
Izumi gave the noisy creature her harshest glare as she rose to her feet, "You mind yourself down here."
A toothy grin was flashed their way, "I will if you let me take my arm and leg back."
The teacher turned and began her ascent up the stairs with an exhausted groan while Ed used this single, childish opportunity for one purpose, and one purpose only. Clicking the heels of his shoes off the floor, Ed walked up to the very edge of the flopped homunculus's reach, leaned down, looked Wrath in the eye, and offered him a mercilessly smug grin.
"They don't fit you anymore, Wrath. They're too big."
The hungry gaze and enflamed purple eyes drained away and Wrath stared blankly back.
Ed's foolish expression vanished. He leaned back warily as Wrath's blank look locked on and didn't let go. Ed glanced at the stairwell Izumi had already climbed before cautiously looking back down at Wrath.
What the?
This was unnerving.
Total bewilderment and curiosity got the better of the golden blonde and he knelt down, half expecting the creature to try and bite something off him. Nothing happened though, Wrath simply stretched forwards, as far as he could within his bindings, like an animal leading with its nose, piercing purple eyes drying out as the creature focused relentlessly on Ed.
His discomfort growing worse, Ed's brow rose high and he stood back up. He tugged his shirt straight like the adult he should have been and looked down at Wrath again.
The homunculus' eyes had somehow grown wider as his head slowly turned and neck craned while he stared, jaw creaking open the longer it went on.
"Ed!"
He startled from the echo of Izumi's call.
"Act your age, stop tormenting him, and get your ass up here."
"Yeah," Ed took a step away from Wrath, watching the homunculus' eyes continue to track him as he moved. Making his way back to the stairs, Ed kept his own eye on Wrath and listened while the creature never made another sound. Ed landed deliberately silent on each step and he looked up to Izumi waiting at the top, holding the door.
"What's he doing?"
"Hell if I know," Ed shook his head.
Turning on the top step, Ed took the door from Izumi, but stopped before closing it. His attention fell back down into the homunculus's chamber, barely able to see Wrath's face peek into the light of the open door as he pushed the limits of his binding to watch Ed go out. Ed slowly turned, his golden gaze narrowing and staring straight back at the creature while he tried to think.
"What?" Izumi asked.
Ed let the door go and it slammed shut, "Wrath's being weird."
"Stop taunting him then. Let's go."
He nodded and followed his teacher out.
To Be Continued...
Author's Notes:
Ed actually didn't mind his job at the university. For what it was, he was pretty good at it. He did take it out of necessity though (he'd been having to face a few realities and getting a job was one of them) but being in the sciences department helped keep him from being too bored.
I don't know why this story exists in my head as richly as it does. Some poor person's going to come along in 2022 and see like 600,000 words and just nope out on me LOL. Are you still reading along? Cheers to you!
Author Babble (b/c its been so long)
I had to re-read this fic to get her going again, and as a result, Chapters 1-3 were heavily revised so they're actually readable (4 & 5 will be as well at some point, but they aren't in as dire straights) and 42 & 43 were slightly modified so I could go with an idea I settled on. Unless it's colour coded (like chat or texts) I actually struggle a bit reading print on screens (says the lady writing 10k chapters) so I when I decided to use my lockdown time for this fic, I printed it out and mucked it up with a pen. It's a daaarn huge pile :'''). The AO3 version is a slightly cleaner version than FFN though - I was able to go through each chapter and touch them all up for the transfer (and the 'edit chapter' button makes a ton of difference for rogue typos ngl).
I had a ton of fun re-reading the story and getting everything set up again (I started back in February). I let myself doodle up illustrations on my lunch break during work as I went along (at home... where no one could see LOL). I couldn't draw these little endcap bits 10-15 years ago and I wish I could stick them in the FFN version, but at least they're on AO3. Special shout out to Father's Christmas, Contrast Blue, In Lieu of Armistice, Der gute Kamerad, and The Crimson Charm pt2 for having images that existed so clearly in my head they survived to 2021 when I could draw them.
For the final arc, I chose not to re-do ch 42 & 43 and just went with taking things where they sat (with slight mods) and moved forwards from those points - it makes entry into the Dante arc a bit clunky, but it'll smooth out. I hope this chapter didn't read as clumsy as it feels in my head. I gave up counting how many times I changed my ideas and my outline. Chapters 44-46 have been re-drafted over and over and over…
Interestingly, when I was dumping my thoughts and trying to mash out ch 44-46 (they were written together) I ended up writing character interactions or emotional points that were almost word-for-word something that I'd already written ages ago lmao.
My long-held intention to make this 51 chapters has been overturned in favour of taking better care of the story. The final chapter count will land around 60.
At time of posting, I'm finishing up Ch50 and at some point I'm going to catch up to myself. I wasn't going to try and finish this unless I could write out enough to convince myself that I could actually make it to the ending. I hope everyone enjoys reading me get back into the swing of this, before I force you to wait between chapters like days of yore :)
Lastly, FFN destroyed all of my outbound link information in both my profile and story notes. I'm sad to see that go, I had lots of supplementary fun things from years ago for the story on LJ and DA. But, since it's all broken now, I'll be clearing it out. Oh well.