Author's Note: I'd forgotten that Tonks is basically a guilt ridden potato at the beginning of book six so I had to go in a rewrite all of her dialogue and description. But I didn't want to use another order member. My justification is thus: Lupin and Tonks are being given kind of easy tasks to give them time to heal from the loss of Sirius, but they are still being given tasks so they do not fall out of practice.

I hope you enjoy the chapter and give me due criticism in reviews!

Disclaimer: WolfishMoon does not own J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter nor Hiromu Arikawa's Fullmetal Alchemist. She never claims the contrary and makes no money from the online publication of this free-to-read fanwork.

The Scientist's Lament

Chapter Four

An Introduction of the Social Sort

Due to the acidity of...

It was Sunday night and Hermione was writing out a lab conclusion when Ginny hurdled up the stairs to their shared room. "The Death Eaters finally made good on their threat about the muggle killing."

Hermione's eyes flew wide. "What?" She pressed her quill too firmly against the notebook paper and the mark swelled to an ugly blotch. The point tore through the paper.

Next time she'd use parchment for her lab report too and damn the consequences.

"The Brockdale Bridge collapsed." Ginny said. Hermione relaxed. Her parents lived and worked on the opposite side of London.

"Ron's downstairs with Fleur trying to get more info out of Dad."

Hermione ignored the squelching of jealousy that welled in her throat. "Right."

Hermione unfolded her legs and got up from the floor. "Let's go down to the kitchen. I'll finish my homework there."

The tension in the kitchen was thick and heavy when they walked in. Even Fleur had an uncharacteristically serious look on her face. Hermione grimaced. "How many dead?"

Arthur looked at her, and though the room had all the hallmarks of an argument, he didn't try to avoid answering. "Two hundred and fifty dead," he said, pushing his thin rectangular glasses up his nose.

Hermione nodded, felt in her pocket for her wand. She would call her parents from a payphone by the school - just to be sure. "I'm going to finish my Chemistry homework in here, if you don't mind."

Arthur lit up. "You don't mind if I look over your shoulder, do you?"

And that was precisely why she'd wanted to do it in the privacy of Ginny's room. She sighed and took a seat at the scrubbed table. "Go ahead. Once I'm done with it, I can try to explain some to you, too."

Arthur nodded and pulled a chair up next to hers at the table, eagerly bending to look at her papers. By the time she was done explaining pH, she was tired enough to fall into a dark and almost dreamless sleep.

The next morning Hermione was escorted to the muggle school by Mr. Weasley. "It's quite alright, Hermione," he said. "You have to be at that school just before I need to be at the office, so it just makes sense. I'll have another order member - probably Remus - pick you up in the afternoon."

It took a little wheedling to get him to leave fifteen minuets early so that she could use a phone. But it was worth it when her father's voice came through the payphone.

"I heard about the Brockdale Bridge," Hermione said to her father almost before they could exchange pleasantries.

"Terrible business," he said.

"You weren't anywhere near there, where you?" Hermione asked.

"What?" Dr. Granger said, "Of course not. Office isn't anywhere near there."

But there was a high pitch to his voice that Hermione found instantly suspect. "You were!"

"Well," John sounded sheepish. "There's that jewelry shop on that street, and your mum's birthday's coming up. But I had just left the area when the bridge went down - was headed back to the office."

Hermione felt the sudden urge to vomit as she realized that her parents might not be spared in a wizard war.

"Oh," she said. "I'm sure Mum'll like whatever it is you bought."

"Thanks, Mione," John said. "It's her favorite color and everything."

The conversation did not last much beyond that, but at least Hermione knew they were alive.

Alphonse was out interviewing for jobs bright and early on Monday morning and Ed felt oddly exposed without him. Without his brother's restraint, Ed's nosy curiosity had even more free reign than it normally did and Hermione, Ed noticed, was especially on edge that morning.

Her right hand kept going to her pocket. Her shoulders were hunched, eyes shadowed and darting. This couldn't have just been him. She made her way from the door to his desk.

"Professor," she said, hand going once again to her skirt pocket. "I couldn't type up the lab report."

He looked up from the book he was reading. "Nein? Do you haff it written?"

"Yes," she said. "I just couldn't get to the library."

"You don't haff computer?" Most of his students didn't, of course, but Hermione, he'd noticed, always brought in her assignments typed.

"No. I'm a little short on any technology, at the moment," she said. She would not let her right hand far from her hip, so she left-handedly pulled her lab out of her book bag and handed it to him. She looked even more ready to draw a weapon than she'd had the previous Friday.

The report wasn't even stapled. She'd poked a hole in the corner and tied it with ribbon. It was on normal paper, but the scratchy, pointed writing was clear.

"You wrote vith a - oh vhat's zee vord? - a dip pen?" he said, looking up to meet her eyes. She nodded, slinging her bag back over her shoulder.

"Does it matter?" she asked. "Anyway, it's almost time for class to start."

She was right, damn her. He slid off his perch on the desk, placing the lab in the inbox. It was already half full with the papers put in by the entering students.

The bell rang. "Alright," he said. "Today, vee vill be continuing our discussion on Avogadro's number and zee reason vee use it."

Ed watched her closely, but Granger hardly participated, opting instead to ward off an apparent headache - she pinched the bridge of her nose, her fingers gently moving to rub at her eye sockets. Something had happened. Not so catastrophic to her psyche as the loss of Nina or Hughes, but something had happened.

He walked to her desk when the students began to file out. "Granger," he said. She turned her head away from the backpack she was zipping, bushy hair falling to one side of her back.

"What?"

"Come talk to me after school," he said.

"Why?" she asked, eyes bright and defiant. "I have things to do later that rather outrank this in importance."

"Vell. I could try to get zee voman who picked you up on Friday arrested for neglectful parenting, but I don't zink you much vant zat."

"Good luck with that," she said with a sharp, cold laugh.

"So you're off ze grid?"

She looked down at him sharply. "That is quite enough, Mr. Elric." Her voice was hard enough to cut steel. "Besides, if I was completely off the grid, how on Earth would I be enrolled in school?"

"Fake dokumentation is not so diffikult to obtain," he said.

She recoiled, lips thinning to a hard line, and it hit him that he may have given away something he didn't quite want to. Her hand was in her pocket again. "And how would you know that?"

"Vell, vee both have somesink to hold over each ozzer."

"Right," she said slowly, eyes narrowing. "Don't push me professor."

Paying attention in English and French was a lost cause and Geometry was little better. Hermione walked though school in a daze. Getting Harry out of Number Four was annoyingly difficult to orchestrate, or at least the Order refused to do anything too risky. It would be days before they could move, but Hermione was desperate. And now Elric was getting out of hand.

She leaped from her seat when the bell rang, hastily stuffing her geometry notebook into her backpack. Professor Lupin would likely bring Tonks with him, to try and cheer her up, she knew.

They stood just outside of the main entrance, Professor Lupin nervous and taught, Tonks pale and drawn. Lupin noticed something was wrong immediately, and promptly questioned her on it.

"I've a professor looking into me," Hermione said. "He's too damn curious for his own good."

"Are you sure he's a muggle?" Lupin asked, rubbing at watery yellow eyes.

"Definitely," Hermione said. "Have you ever heard of a wizard who taught muggle Chemistry?"

He shook his head. "Tell me about him."

"Well," Hermione began, "He's from Germany, I think - "

Professor Lupin cut her off, said, "That might do it. We don't know how segregated the magical and non-magical communities are over on the continent."

"The Statute of Secrecy is international," Hermione said.

"Yes," Lupin said, "But the continent seems to have a looser definition. At the very least, there's more mixing between muggles and wizards. You'll find a potions shop hidden in the basement of a pharmacy, over there. So a Continental wizard might not be so ignorant of muggle things."

Professor Lupin was clearly born to be a teacher, Hermione realized. The simple act of explaining something that Hermione might not know brought a light to his eyes and an animation to his body that Hermione had not expected to see so soon after the death of his best remaining friend.

She only wished that the sudden, simple, joy would rub off on Tonks.

Hermione smiled slightly, said, "You raise a good point. But there are other things that make me fairly certain he isn't."

"Like what?" This was from Tonks, the first words she'd said. Maybe it was rubbing off on her.

"For one, he treats the Conservation Laws like a religious doctrine. Magic contradicts them at every turn. Even the most scientifically literate wizards wouldn't take Conservation all that seriously."

Both Lupin and Tonks had affected a sort of glaze over their eyes. Hermione sighed. "Basically, he practically worships muggle science. And the idea that matter and energy cannot be created from nothing. Which most spellwork completely contradicts."

"Oh," Lupin said. "Thank you for translating, Hermione."

She pursed her lips together. "Of course, Professor."

Tonks swapped her weight from foot to foot, considering. "Should we meet him?"

"Statute of Secrecy," Hermione said.

"Right." Tonks's short brown hair grew longer as she seemed to wilt in on herself - long hair did not suit the shape of her face making her look wan and sickly.

Ed, meanwhile, was hiding in the bushes. Two people picked up the Granger girl today, and neither was the woman from Friday. He couldn't hear them, but the fast glances back at the school made it clear they were speaking about him. After a moment, the haze of pretended understanding crossed their faces. Hermione, ever the erudite, was confusing them somehow.

The woman's shoulders slumped and her hair slumped too. Ed leaped out of the bushes.

"Envy!" he said, transmuting the ground to swallow the 'woman' up, leaving head and shoulders out. "How the hell are you here?" He'd slipped into Amestrian.

Hermione and the shabby man had pulled out the weapons in their pockets. They were not the guns or knives that Edward had been expecting. Instead their hands clutched ornately carved sticks leveled at his head like a gun. As tense as Granger was, her hand did not waver. Sticks?

He turned away from them. Envy feigned fear and confusion better than Ed would have expected. "Oh give it up, Envy."

Envy's expression faded from fear to confusion to slight realization and awe.

"Let her go, professor," Hermione said. "I will not hesitate."

The shabby man sent Granger a quelling look and turned to Ed, said, "You've attacked an auror, and while Hermione is underage I am not."

"Stop." Envy said, biting his lip, looking at the rock encasing him. "This is really an impressive bit of magic, kid. How did you do it? What spell'd you use?"

"Tonks!" Hermione and Shabby said together. Ed studied the shape shifter. The eyes were big, sad and exhausted. Wrong. All wrong.

He slapped his palms together, and brought them to the stone. The blue light he loved so much carried the rock back to its proper place. Shabby and Granger's sticks began to lower. Their arms were stiffly pointed at the ground to Edward's right, clearly ready to spring back up at any moment. Ed registered this all with a fragment of his brain. Mostly he saw the woman who seemed to share Envy's power.

"You are not him," Ed said, switching back to English with difficulty, the language leaden on his tongue.

"You've met a metamorphmagus before," she said, touching her hair. She screwed up her face and the length came up an inch or two. It clearly took effort on the shape shifter's part.

"A vat? I've met somevone who changed his appearance at vill, zat's true."

"Maybe the word doesn't translate? I dunno how to say it in German. Anyway, I'm Tonks. You must be the professor."

"Edward Elric," Ed said, wondering how the woman was so calm.

"Wotcher," she said.

"Vat?"

Hermione was looking between them, and she deigned not to let Tonks respond. "Why didn't you tell me you were a wizard?"

"Vhaz?" he said again, wanting desperately to switch into Amestrian. "Vhat do you mean, vizard?"

"A wizard, you know, person who performs magic. Like Professor Lupin - " she gestured to Shabby " - like Tonks and I!"

Now that statement just simply refused to compute. "Magik doezn't exizt. Here I sought you vere of scientist stock."

"But you just did some." Granger said, her eyes were turning hard again, her arm was starting to raise. This Shabby Lupin character eyed her carefully.

"It vaz applied science," he said. "Nozink more zan science."

Shabby tilted his head. "I don't know as much about muggles as Hermione, but I have to admit that looked like magic to me."

Ed was incredulous. "I am physicist. And chemist. Perhaps it vould be described more on ze quantum scale. But zee science of decomposing zee molecules and atoms in an object and reforming zem into zee shape or item you want is not magik. No hocus pocus involvt."

Shapeshifter's eyes widened, hair growing longer again as she slumped in on herself. "Bugger," she said. "This is all my fault. Again."

Word Count: 2332

So you see why I was in something of a lurch, because Ed would not have acted against them without having something of a PTSD attack upon seeing someone with the same power as Envy. Obviously, Ed logically knows that Envy is effectively dead as per Brotherhood cannon, but stress combined with flashbacks and probably a fair few nightmares do terrible things to people.

Anyway, tell me what you thought in your reviews!