103 - The Trembling Foundations

Sliding the handles of her grocery bags around her wrists, Sheska fought with her building's stiff entry door until she wedged it open far enough to slip inside. Throwing her weight against the door to shut it, she climbed the aging wooden stairs in the apartment she'd been forced to move into when her finances got too tight. Reaching the second floor of an older building that creaked with every move she made, Shezka put her key in the lock and gave the door a swift bump with her hip to pop it open.

Navigating her maze of stacked books with an armload of groceries, Sheska got to her kitchen, shoved some unwashed dishes into the sink, and put her bags down on the counter. Gathering a few things to throw into her pantry, she paused and anxiously listened to a strangled noise that leaked into her kitchen.

Sheska poked her head into the hall, "Ed?"

There was no answer.

Curiously weaving her way past towers of books that acted like walls, Sheska peeked around a pillar of novels behind her sofa and looked into her haphazardly cleared out living room. Seated on the floor, rather than her small sofa or forty year old armchair, Ed's arms were folded on the coffee table and his head was down on atop a chaotic spread of papers. As far as Shezka could tell, he'd fallen asleep like that.

That derailed her plans of asking what he might want for dinner. Was Ed even staying for dinner again? Did he want to cook again? He was shockingly good at that. Was he staying the night again? Sheska honestly had no idea what his plans were.

Ed flinched and a tangled noise that sounded like a cross between a gasp and a choke coughed out of him. Mumbling something incoherent, he fell silent again.

Freezing at the restless behaviour, Sheska stared wide eyed at her guest. Maybe she should wake him up. That might be fair, Ed did wake her up last night when he freaked out about something and she honestly thought her house was being robbed. He never did explain what happened.

Or maybe it was best to let him sleep. He didn't exactly seem to have a regular sleep schedule. Maybe he'd be less antsy about what was going on in Xenotime with some more sleep.

But… why was Al in Xenotime in the first place? What was Ed so anxious about out there? Something about Al and Xenotime seemed time sensitive and Ed was burying himself in busy work to distract himself from it. Were they doing something to help with the government overthrow? Neither of them really seem like the type.

Slipping around her towers of books, Sheska tried her best to keep the floor from creaking as she knelt down next to Ed.

There were so many questions she wasn't getting clear answers to. Like, why exactly did he look so old now? How'd he get so tall so fast? Yeah, she'd read that puberty can hit boys when they're a bit older, but she wasn't sure biology could accomplish this in under a year. If she peered in close enough, if she inched in tight enough, Sheska swore he had stubble on his face.

Something fishy was going on.

If Al was responsible for getting Ed his flesh arm and leg back, and that only happened in the last few weeks, what was Al suddenly doing in Xenotime now? Why weren't they together?

And how come nobody but her cared how Winry was!? Sure Ed was alive and in her home and the country was on the verge of civil war and she had to buy multiple weeks worth of groceries in case her store didn't open ever again, but no one had heard from Winry in months! Ed's 'I'm sure she's fine' gut feeling had zero basis in all the realities she'd concocted in her head. He could stop being so casual about it and be a little more worried about her!

Sitting back, Sheska scanned her coffee table buried in pages upon pages of alchemical formulas, diagrams, transmutation circles, and sheets of… writing? Yet another mysterious thing was looking her in the face.

Carefully sliding a page out from the pile Ed was sleeping on, Sheska adjusted her glasses and stared utterly bewildered at a page littered in words she couldn't read.

Wait, had she forgotten how to read?

Sheska snatched a book out from under her sofa and opened it. Okay, she still knew how to read.

Holding the handwritten sheet in one hand and the book in the other, Shezka compared the two written pages to make sure there was no trickery going on and confirmed: yes, Ed had indeed written out something she couldn't read. Scanning the unreadable page line by line, she quickly noticed that it clearly had sentence structure and punctuation, but its words were incomprehensible. It was written with English letters… for the most part, and some of the words looked like they could have been English, but it seemed like it was some kind of English derivative. Did that exist anywhere in the world? Sheska had seen books archived in the Central Library written in Drachmarian, Ishiballan, and Xinginese, but all those had different script types. There were no other languages with a similar script to English. Whatever Ed was writing was done in predominantly English letters, but different somehow.

Was this alchemy code!? Sheska's interest peaked again and her eyes flew wide - could this be a language code and not a Marcoh cookbook code? A whole entire secret language created for alchemy? Amazing. What a fascinating thing to try and figure out.

Scanning the table for another cluttered sheet to scour over, Sheska snagged the corner of a busy page in the pile and tried to pull it out from under his elbow.

Ed startled.

Shrieking as Ed jerked awake, Sheska scrambled back when he jumped and sent the coffee table astray. Ed kicked his legs out and skirted along the floor, knocking the sofa out of place in a panic, and causing the towers of books piled high behind the sofa to graciously sway. Both sets of eyes locked onto the leaning tower as it swayed one way, and then the other, and then back again where it toppled over with a deafening, dusty clatter to the hardwood floor.

As the collapse settled, the noise dissipated, and the unexpected chaos ended, Sheska stared wide eyed at the spooked looking Elric sitting on his backside in the middle of her floor.

Ed's pinpoint, golden eyes darted around her apartment as he got his bearings again, before his hand swept through his face, shoving his bangs out of the way, "Fuck."

Sheska warily eyed Ed as he moved the coffee table back into place.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

Sheska tightened her expression, got up, and adjusted her sofa.

Getting to his feet, Ed briskly moved around her and put himself to work clearing out the avalanche of books plugging the hall without a word to it.

"Um, thanks again for the grocery money," Sheska nervously patted her hands off her thighs, "I managed to get a bunch of things from a place up the street before they shuttered everything."

"I heard on the radio this afternoon the city's a mess. I could hear it out the window sometimes too," Ed threw a few books over the back of the sofa to get them out of the way, "you were gone all day, did you get in touch with anyone at Mustang's operation?"

"I did, actually," Sheska inched herself around and watched Ed as he tossed books, "Mr. Hakuro and Lt. Colonel Armstrong met with me and I think I can now be charged with theft and espionage and a handful of other things and I don't think anyone's going to ever have the time to figure that out."

Ed sat back on his knees, "Hakuro?"

"Yeah, Brigadier General Mustang wasn't available to see me, but Mr. Hakuro was there giving orders," Sheska wove her brow, "I thought he'd resigned and left town with his family."

Thrusting his arms into the pile of books, Ed drew them upwards and heaved an armload over the back of her sofa, "He's a man who knows when to seize an opportunity," Ed's expression suddenly wrenched around in his face as he tried to stop himself from laughing, "Mustang's going to be so pissed that guy is stealing his thunder."

Heading around to pick up a few stray books that bounced to the floor, Sheska snuck a few side-eye glances at the pages of alchemical code on her coffee table, "What have you been working on all day?"

Ed abruptly lost his amused expression, "Your brain can't translate that for some reason, can it?"

Sheska laughed, "No."

Nodding in relief, Ed crouched back down and resumed digging, "I've been finishing a puzzle."

"A puzzle," Sheska eyed her table, "what sort of puzzle?"

"The kind that I need to use my head to solve."

Frowning at the ambiguous answer, Sheska tossed another fallen book back onto her sofa, "What's the puzzle for?"

"Alchemy."

"Come on," she sagged, "I can see that. What are you getting up to in my house?"

Pushing back up to his feet, Ed adjusted his ponytail and walked back around to the table he'd cluttered, "I suppose you can call it a formula for inequivalent exchange. It's stuff everyone's better off not knowing about."

Her expression contorting, Shezka could only sigh, "How does dangerous alchemy follow you everywhere?"

Ed knelt down across the table and started gathering his papers, "Alchemy isn't dangerous, people are dangerous."

"That's true about everything," Sheska put her elbows down on the table as Ed tidied the space, "if people intend to use something like a weapon, that's what it becomes."

"Exactly," Ed nodded, straightened his papers, placed the neatly stacked pile of notes down at the centre of the table, and looked back at Sheska without another word.

Narrowing her gaze, Sheska examined the sleepless-looking man giving her a firm cold shoulder on the topic. This guy was such a frustrating anomaly; nearly everything that came out of his mouth was guarded. Every time she looked him in the eye for answers she was met with a stone wall. There were moments where she'd talk to him and he'd feel lightyears away. And then there were times like earlier where he was just straight up jumpy. How did this odd stranger end up in her living room and start filling her life with riddles?

Sheska suddenly clued back in that she was actually staring at Edward Elric and blurted, "How the heck did you go from fifteen to looking like you're twenty-five?"

"I'm not THAT old!" Ed squawked, sprouting a few grey hairs, "and I was sixteen when I left!"

"Yeah, but where did-"

"Come on," Ed stood up abruptly and marched back to the heap of fallen books blocking the hall, "let's dig out your hallway and I'll make dinner."

Hanging her head sheepishly, Sheska followed him up to her feet, "Sorry, I'm a terrible cook."

"It's fine," Ed shook her apology off, "I like cooking."

While Dante puzzled through the construction of transmutation circles with the four characters his brother had scribed, Al stared out the window. There wasn't a whole lot for a view, just the faded silhouettes of greenspaces and sky masked by sheer curtains that occasionally offered gaps that let him see the wildness clearly, all of which was fading into the setting sun.

Dante was having an immense amount of fun next to him. Al figured it had probably been centuries since she'd last found a challenge with alchemy and her challenge was going to become more bountiful whenever Aisa came back and forced Al to write out the remaining eight.

In the meantime, Al held his quiet vigil over the shrouded window and went through the information he had conceded to Dante.

His brother had made no mention of a relationship with the Gate to him or anyone. That was the truth and concealing that gave no benefit.

His teacher had described Wrath's behaviour prior to his departure identically to how Dante had. The homunculus wasn't shrewd enough to pull off any kind of large scale charade, so Al had to conclude both accounts were genuine.

And his brother had voiced concerns about clapping his hands now that he was home. It was a truth that Al iced Dante's cake with, to her absolute delight. Despite it not containing any concrete details, it was a piece of information she had no other means of accessing, which seemed to cement her convictions and let her ease up on him.

Despite all the gross satisfaction he provided Dante, Al acknowledged that giving her his account of something she already believed to be true only provided her validation - it gave her no tangible information about the Gate, nor his brother, and it didn't compromise or alter their situation.

In a way… in a very small, tiny, miniscule, microscopic way that Al was almost too annoyed with his brother to put credit towards, Dante's belief that Ed hadn't been truthful with him kept her from digging around in his head.

And in his head, amongst all the parts of questions, partial truths, and things Al knew for certain about the other world, was also a single, tangible truth to his brother's puzzle that Al had been able to keep from Dante. One piece of the scattered puzzle that the Gate itself had given him personally: the refusal to permit his brother to return home.

It was just simply a fundamental truth Al understood; even if the Gate never specified why, he knew it to be true. Yet, somehow his brother had done something to bypass that restriction. Ed had blatantly and jokingly avoided answering what he'd done to get around it, which allowed Al to open his mind to Dante's claim that he was withholding information.

Al solidified his resolve to skip the predictable rhetoric that came with asking 'why' and just go straight to beating some clear answers out of his older brother the moment he saw him. Ed tended to be more cooperative if he'd been hit a few times anyways. Then Al would punch some decent sense back into him once they were done.

The mental plan for beating up his brother was put on pause when the door opened and Aisa presented to the room who Al had bowed to Dante for: Brigitte.

Alphonse's heart sank when he saw her.

Standing inside the door, Aisa had a hand locked on her upper arm and the expression and body language she wore reflected how Al felt deep down - weary, tired, and downtrodden. Someone had gotten her re-dressed in clothes that looked like they'd been borrowed from kitchen staff: a stiff, wrinkled, button-up white dress shirt that was a bit too big, and a long, stiff, white skirt that stretched past her knees. For no reason Al could see, she'd arrived without shoes or socks. The exhausted look on Brigitte's face made Al question if she'd been sleep deprived, but the mess of her bedhead hair had him wondering if she was trying and just simply couldn't.

The only consolation Al got was how Brigitte's eyes brightened and her posture strengthened when she recognized him.

Dante returned her pencil to the pile on the table and slid aside the papers Aisa had brought in earlier. Clasping her hands together neatly, she smiled at their newly arrived guest, "See, she's perfectly fine."

Al swallowed the sarcastic laugh he nearly choked out.

"Sit her at the end of the table, Aisa," Dante swept a hand out, gesturing to the seat across from Al, "I need to check the authenticity of a few details Alphonse was given by his brother."

Forcefully sat down in the chair, Brigitte stared wide eyed across the width of the table at Al without a word. He watched her eyes dance over him, forgoing words in favour of what he figured was a futile attempt at telepathically to deliver her thoughts. He watched her as she puzzled over how he sat ajar at the table, nervously eyed how his torso was bound to the back of his chair, took note of the damp stain down the front of his shirt and bindings, and uncomfortably acknowledged that his hands and wrists were caged in a cumbersome metal box.

Brigitte swallowed, tucked her hands away in her lap, and sat in her seat perfectly straight.

Dante sifted through a few sheets of paper before pulling out one of interest. Hopping up onto her knees in the chair, she cleared her throat and immediately commanded the attention of the room. Directing her theatrics at Brigitte, she read aloud:

"Deutschland."

It was one of the few times where Al could honestly say he'd watched a person's complexion drain of all the colour. Brigitte lost her posture and sank back in her chair, elbows locked and hands burrowing deep into her lap. Watching anxiously as the witch smiled at her visible discomfort, she clenched her jaw and stared nervously at the first person she'd ever heard on her journey voluntarily and knowingly provide the name of the country she'd been born in.

"München," Dante spoke in contrast to the dread she was causing.

Like she wished she could melt off the chair, Brigitte squirmed uncomfortably and tried to bury her eyes as deeply into her lap as her hands were.

"Fascinating," Dante addressed Brigitte regardless if she could understand or not, "these are words you recognize. It's where you're from and where you'd like to return to. Like Amestris is to our world, you are from the central country beyond the Gate: Deutschland."

Brigitte quickly glanced up to catch Al's hardened look before hiding her eyes in her lap again.

Dante snapped her fingers to get Brigitte to focus on her. Collecting the foreign girl's attention, she handed the unfolded piece of paper with four Cyrillic characters written down over to her, "I'd like to see your impression of these."

Gingerly taking the paper from her, Brigitte collected it in both hands and stared at it. Al watched curiously, as did Dante and Aisa, as Brigitte's expression grew more puzzled, more confused, and more perplexed. With her brow done up in knots, the German girl curiously flipped the paper over to see if there was something on the back, then flipped it upside down. At a total loss, Brigitte took her eyes off it and looked into the tea room, watching Al deflate in quiet relief while Dante folded her arms in disappointment.

Swallowing nervously, Brigitte put the paper down on the table and offered a response as lost in translation as everything else, "Um… I don't know Russian."

Dante frowned, slowly coming off her knees in the chair, "That's not the kind of reception I was looking forward to."

Al sighed, "I was worth a try."

Before Dante could explore her options further, or Al could come up with a way to keep Brigitte with him a little longer, a clatter echoed in the hallway and caught the room's attention. The four heads at the table locked their attention on the door as a calamity in the hallway could be heard throwing open doors and shaking the floor with each heavy, desperate step taken.

"NINA!"

Dante's shoulders rolled back and her expression bled foul, "What is he doing up here?"

"I'll address him," Aisa stood up.

The moment Aisa cracked the door open, the pristine presentation of the room was thrown into chaos. Sebastien Mitchell, the man tasked to helm a nation set up to fail by the woman who'd seduced him, now whittled down to nothing more than Dante's floundering puppet, forced himself into the room. The aging, dishevelled, frazzled man in a grey suit frantically collided with the table, knocking everything astray, and sending Brigitte scrambling from her seat and into the farthest corner of the room. His hands slammed down with force, throwing Al's eyes wide and drawing the ire of Dante as he pleaded with the vile, offended face of a child now standing high on her seat across from him.

"Nina, sweetheart, I need your help! Everything's coming undone!"

"AISA," Dante pounded power into her tiny voice, "remove him before I do."

"No, dear! You don't understand," he frantically wailed as Aisa began forcing the man out the door, "the military is trying to remove me! They're trying to break down all we've accomplished!"

A cold, uncaring look no child would have known how to wear crushed down on him, "That isn't my concern. Get out."

"It is our concern," Mitchell pleaded. Struggling within Aisa's iron grip, his vision and focus was so hopelessly locked on Dante he seemed unable to realize there were others in the room, "people will get hurt if Hakuro keeps this up! We can't allow that!"

The chill Dante shrouded herself in suddenly thinned, "... Hakuro?"

Al's brow rose as he watched and listened.

"He's going to ruin everything!" Mitchell pleaded over Aisa's shoulder from the hall, "please! We need to come up with a strategy."

"Wait."

Dante issued the order she'd intended both Aisa and the man she escorted out to comply with. As everything around her ceased moving - as Mitchell sagged in Aisa's firm hold, as Brigitte pinned herself in the corner with untranslatable fear, as Alphonse's observing eyes flooded wide with interest, Dante made sure the attention of the room zeroed in on her. She stepped off her chair and onto the floor, her shoes lightly clicking with her steps, and the childish features of her face began to deform from the discontent that overtook her.

"Hakuro is helming the disruption?"

"YES!" Mitchell cried, "and he's incited the entire city! We have to find a way to stop this."

Swiftly moving out from her position at the table, Dante swept around past Al and stormed towards the door, "We will have a discussion elsewhere."

Stopping at the door, Dante looked pointedly at Brigitte cowering in the corner, snapped to Al watching the scene, looked around the room in disgust, punched her brow down low, and slammed the door shut.

Brigitte flinched and both remaining children watched in dismay as an alchemical spark swallowed the doorknob and then fused the entire exit into a solid, seamless wall.

Just like that, the disruption ended.

Seated in silence at opposite ends of the room, neither Brigitte nor Alphonse made a peep while they listened to the sound of Mitchell's chaos fade away down the hall.

Mustang snapped his fingers to light a torch and his scowl deepened when he got no satisfaction from doing it. The urge to snap his fingers and let loose the hot, volatile rage burning inside him was growing insufferable.

Literally kicking down the door to the mine that evening didn't bring any relief either. Subduing the evening guard was practically an afterthought.

"We should look for dynamite in the supply room," Hawkeye eyed the locked door and reached for her sidearm in the hip pocket of her workman's overalls.

"No need," Mustang stopped her, "I'll take care of it."

Hawkeye wrapped her fingers around the handle of her gun, "Not to get in, but to collapse the mine shafts we marked."

"I said I'll take care of it!" the infuriated, ignited superior officer bellowed his intentions and stormed deeper into the mining tunnel.

Reluctantly releasing her weapon, but knowing better than to argue with his tone, Hawkeye hustled after him.

All communications with Central had been severed. From what little information East City bragged about having over the radio, Hakuro had turned up sometime in their absence and, for some reason, attempted to change the power balance in Central City. He tossed the city into upheaval, with rumoured military factions attempting to seize control, and the government was only holding on to it's faculties by the lengths of the rifles they were pointing at its citizens.

Yes, they had run the risk of botching or retreating from their position at the government's throat, and Mustang was fully prepared to accept that, so long as their missions succeeded in the end. But… why the hell was Hakuro suddenly meddling in the middle of all this? Mustang wanted to snap his fingers and blow a crater out of the mountain in frustration. Where did he come from? Hadn't he left Central to prioritize his family? Where had he been hiding his alliances?

Why in the world would this man have handed his direct, subordinate team over to Mustang's authority just to turn up with another group?

To unsettle the beleaguered officer further, but what kept him from flying completely off the handle, was the nagging voice in the back of his head that found the entire event suspicious. Not a single news report had mentioned Hakuro had taken the opportunity to flaunt or gloat about his success, nor had he called out Mustang for his obvious absence. Surely, the man would have recognized that he wasn't in Central or Hakuro never would have acted, so why wasn't he gloating?

Pinned at the outskirts of the country and entirely unable to exert his presence, the only course of action Mustang could take was to extract Brigitte now, while the building was in an uproar and Dante was minding her puppets, and get the hell back to Central.

"Do you honestly intend to collapse the mining tunnels with ignition cloth?" Hawkeye finally asked, "an explosion like that in a confined area like this…"

"No," Mustang blurted, but quickly dialed back his tone, "I have another way."

Hawkeye lowered her brow, "A way that doesn't require dynamite?"

Mustang huffed to avoid smirking, "Yes."

Taking the cue that he had no intention of explaining what his intentions were until he needed to act, Hawkeye unrolled their map as the first intersection in the mine shaft began to pick up the light. The left turn they needed had been boarded up, but rather than pick up a discarded axe from the respite and hack it down, Mustang took out some of his frustrations on the brittle wood and used his boot to punch a few holes.

Hawkeye stood aside, tucked her arms properly away behind her back, and let her superior officer vent while he dismantled the blockade.

The corridor that opened up was in a far poorer, dilapidated condition than the one they'd come from. The wooden supports sagged from rot, the dirt ceiling bowed down from the earth's weight overhead, and roots from the aged forest above had started to burrow in. Mustang did himself a favour by lightly snapping his fingers and burning up all of the spiders and cobwebs for the next several hundred metres.

The tunnel stretched on for what seemed like ages and the silent trek he and Hawkeye embarked on felt like it took far longer than the map suggested. Marching and weaving through the dank and dreary tunnel beneath Xenotime, breathing in the settled air growing thicker with the smell of raw earth, Mustang's steps finally slowed as the next, and last, intersection available on the copied map came into view.

"We take the north tunnel from here," Hawkeye let the map curl back up in her hand, "then we have one more interchange that'll lead us to what should be connective routes into the laboratory."

Stepping into the open cave of a five-way intersection, Mustang eyed two boarded up tunnels in a southern direction, peered down the open one to the west, and finally turned his attention north, "It has to, because getting out any other way is going to be hell."

Hawkeye eyed him curiously and then looked down the eastern tunnel they'd exited, which had been the first one on the map Mustang had been marked for collapse.

Pivoting and handing the torch off to her, the brigadier general reached into the hip pocket of his overalls and gallantly produced a stick of chalk, showcasing it high in his fingers.

Hawkeye blinked twice before raising her brow.

"I did have to be fairly proficient with alchemy in general prior to specializing and gaining my title," Mustang looked pointedly at the woman eyeing him with intrigue, "I'm not a one-trick pony."

"I never thought you were," she replied.

"Dynamite is crude, noisy, and leaves room for error," on a dry piece of wood embedded into the dirt wall to stabilize the tunnel, Mustang swiftly drew out a transmutation circle and peeked over his shoulder when he felt a pair of curious eyes watching him.

Hawkeye's brow travelled a little higher, "That's the transmutation circle Lt. Colonel Armstrong had on his gauntlets."

"Close," Mustang corrected, "this is scaled down. I just want to collapse the tunnel, not bring the entire forest above down with it."

At that, his fingers swiped the transmutation circle.

Both officers took a quick breath and shielded their faces as a rush of air and dust surged back at them when the aged wood and caked dirt walls cracked and collapsed. Despite losing their visual as the dust cloud thickened and the torch blew out, they were still able to hear the dull sounds of the travelling transmutation as the reaction cascaded farther down the reaches of the tunnel they'd entered from, before the noise petered out and everything settled into a deafening quiet again.

Waving her hand in the dark to clear the air, Hawkeye coughed as the dust settled, "When was the last time you did a transmutation like that?"

"When I was a baby."

Hawkeye stifled her laugh.

Mustang lightly snapped his fingers to get a visual in the dark intersection, then snapped once more to re-ignite the torch his partner held, and he directed her attention to the northern corridor.

"Now-"

The earth shook.

Both officers snatched up their sidearms and pointed them down the dark corridor that ventured west off their map.

Sediment rained from the low dirt ceiling overhead as the tremor dissipated and pure silence swallowed the cavern again. Dropping the torch on the ground, Hawkeye stomped out the flame and let everything fall to black.

No sooner had the room darkened than a light quake shook everything once more. Again, a shower of sediment fell from the dirt ceiling overhead and the sound of dry rain echoed throughout the underground tunnels. As the quake quickly subsided and the sound of the falling dirt faded, both officers remained fixated on the depths of the western corridor that they had no visual on.

Mustang brought his voice down as low as he could, "Who the hell…"

"We need to hurry and get into the lab," Hawkeye hastily tried to wrangle his focus.

Mustang took a few cautious steps towards the western tunnel, "If someone is coming in from behind us, we-"

The faint light of a transmutation deep in the western corridor lit the eyes of the two officers debating their next move and commanded them to hastily vanish out of sight as the earth continued to tremble.

"Don't worry about it," Al spoke like Brigitte could understand him.

Frowning as though she had, Brigitte shoved the tip of a pencil into what little space there was around Al's wrist and gave another shot at prying apart the box open.

And she cracked the tip of another pencil.

Exasperated, Brigitte threw it across the room and watched it clatter on the floor.

"It's okay," Al shook his head and peered out the window into the Xenotime forests again.

The door might have been gone, but Dante may as well have taken the window too. The moment Brigitte got Al untied from the chair, and finished hugging the daylights out of him, and finished rambling off an absolutely frantic tale he couldn't understand, the first thing they both did was try to see how they could get out the window. The immediate, obvious conclusion was that they couldn't. The window panes didn't open more than the width of an arm and, if they shattered the glass, it was still a four-storey drop straight down into the dark orange hues of the late sunset.

It left them trapped in a room with four chairs, a table, the remnants of Dante's tea party, an assortment of pencils and paper, and no usable alchemist. How the heck were they going to get out? How would they let someone know where they were? How much time did they have?

Al needed to get his mental questions in better order. Walking back to the spot where the door once was, he stared at the empty wall.

How long was Hakuro going to keep Central in an uproar? Why Hakuro? Al quickly decided that didn't matter. How long before Dante began to question the brigadier general's whereabouts in all this? What exactly was going on, Al couldn't pinpoint, but it read clearly like something had been done in Central City to force Dante to turn her attention to the government and Al needed to use the distraction to become apparent and accessible.

Brigitte borrowed Al's attention again when she walked up next to him and looked at the vacant wall where a door had once been. For a day where everything had been so demoralizing, exhausting, and frustrating while he'd been forced to bend and bow throughout Dante's games, Al could at least say he had found her.

Stepping away from the empty wall, Al's eyes wandered the tiny room. The space had little to offer, but the one thing it did have was a generous grate shoved into the top corner of the wall that was responsible for bringing the circulated air into the room.

Right, this was Xenotime… he'd been here before! Alphonse knew what this place was all about: a massive laboratory for botanical alchemy research as a cover for the Red Water production going on within. Both dealt with high levels of potentially toxic and reactive airborne elements, so the air circulation throughout the building had to be bountiful and top notch.

And large as heck.

"Brigitte," Al looked to his shoulder and found her already there, "um… chair?"

"Chair?" she repeated, not sure of the word.

"Chair," Al went over to the table, tucked his foot around the leg of a chair, and tried to tug it to the corner.

"OH," Brigitte scrambled over, grabbed the back, and brought it over to the corner where Al was shaking his box.

With the chair tucked into the corner, Al hopped up and tried to look into the vent. Straining on his tiptoes, he was still too short.

Al blinked over to Brigitte when the sound of dishes began to clatter and, for the first time in what felt like days, Al smiled while he watched her move the entire contents of the table to the floor, rip off the table cloth, and start shoving the table towards the corner. Hopping down, Al's feet tugged on the chair legs until he'd moved it enough to chase it away with his backside. Brigitte settled the table in the corner and promptly collected the chair Al had moved, put it on top of the table, and both children climbed up.

The table on its own was an improvement, but the best vantage point happened when Al climbed onto the chair and he was able to stare straight through the grate into a wide, metallic air vent.

"Perfect!"

Al examined their next obstacle: the grate in their way had nothing to grab on to, but it was only attached to the wall with a single screw at each corner. Bringing his arms up, Al tried to see if he could get any leverage from the edges of the metallic box around his hands in place of a screwdriver. The large, cumbersome cage was clearly too big for the task, even when Brigitte helped give some stability and leverage, and the duo had to stop when it became apparent they were stripping the bottom screws, rather than making it budge.

When Brigitte's fingernails were just as useless, the German girl hopped off their tower, collected a few pencils from the floor, and came back. As futile as they had been trying to get the box off Al's wrists, the lead pencil tips simply crumbled, shattered, and ripped out of the wood as the stubborn screw resisted. Even the broken wood of the pencils did little good - it was all too soft.

The trapped pair withered; not only could they not get the grate off but, whenever Dante came back, she was going to see the absolute disaster their escape attempt had been and Al had nothing but disparaging thoughts on how that was going to go over.

Slouched on the chair atop the tea table, Al cast his weary gaze over the mess of things on the floor and once again looked at the window, wondering if there were any options with the window he hadn't thought of yet. He could easily shatter the glass with the box confining his hands…

Brigitte moved in the corner of his eye and Al looked down. He watched curiously as she collected one of the broken pencils from the floor and sat back down on the table. Biting into the eraser at the end of the pencil, Brigitte wrestled with it in her teeth and extracted the eraser from the case holding it. Shoving the tin end into the corner of her mouth, Brigitte chomped down on the empty eraser casing. Al sat forward as she took the pencil and its flattened casing out of her mouth, eyed it, then stuck it back in. Gnawing and wiggling the end of the pencil end through her molars, eventually she brought it out again and gave her creation a stern visual inspection. The tin casing had been flattened and folded over in her teeth, leaving a firm, narrowed nub at the end. Al's grin ran ear to ear as he looked at the chewed up 'screwdriver' Brigitte had manufactured.

She stood up and Alphonse excitedly hopped off the seat.

"Don't tell my mom I did that," Brigitte climbed onto the chair and dipped her head to keep from bumping it on the ceiling, "she's afraid I'll get lead poisoning from chewing on my pencils."

Brigitte slipped the pencil end into the head of the screw, gave her tool a firm twist, and ripped the tin casing right off the wooden pencil.

Alphonse sank down on the table top as Brigitte let the stripped pencil clatter to the floor. Getting down off the chair in a huff, she stomped her way down, snatched up another pencil, ripped the eraser out, and began grinding her teeth on the end of another one. Al flexed his hands imprisoned uselessly in his lap while he watched Brigitte slide her backside onto the table again, give a few good chomps to the pencil end to secure it, and popped it out of her mouth to inspect it.

Scaling the chair once more, the Brigitte stood up tall, pressed the top of her head into the ceiling for stability, left the infuriating bottom screws alone, shoved her pencil high into the screw in the top right corner, gripped it high around the eraser casing, and turned it.

"IT'S MOVING!" her unintelligible squeal echoed inside the air vent.

Al nearly fell off the table trying to get up to his feet, "You got it!?"

"It's coming out!" she shrieked, shoving her pencil behind her ear and freely spinning the screw with her fingers.

The accessible screw tumbled into her hands and Brigitte scrambled off the chair. Cradling the screw in her hands, like she was presenting Al with some kind of silver jewel, Brigitte's grin ran ear to ear.

A smile exploded through Al's face and his voice pitched with excitement, "You did it!"

"I got it out!" Brigitte continued to glow and bounce on her toes.

For a brief moment, two unorthodox children acted like children and foolishly stood on the table in the room they were trapped in to squeal incoherently at their accomplishment.

Footsteps approached in the darkness, wildly igniting Mustang's imagination, and the first concise detail that came to his mind's eye was that the approaching body included weight.

The steps were strong; they had weight and force behind them. Mustang quickly concluded that, unless she'd changed bodies, their alchemist company was not Dante. Aisa couldn't do alchemy and there were no other alchemists in Dante's party that he was aware of, so who the hell was left?

Accompanying the fearless strides walking through the dark was the clacking of a stick dragging along the wall. The subtle noise it made changed every time it moved over a wooden pillar and that told Mustang whoever was approaching was just as blind as they were.

It had been some time since the transmutation light ceased and the earth had stopped shaking, and in an echoing space where so little sound existed, every movement, every breath taken too drastically, and every shift of fabric was noticeable. When the encroaching presence passed into the open gap of the corridor's interchange, Mustang made the decision to make the first move.

Squaring off against the sound of a moving body, the click of his gun setting echoed the loudest in the room, "Do-"

The gun was kicked from his hand before he'd finished his breath. It was a blind swipe taken from the audible cue, and while the foot hadn't landed cleanly, it connected with enough force to disarm him and Mustang promptly changed gears. Tossing his left gloved hand out in place of his gun, he snapped his fingers, let his flames brilliantly swarm inside the underground pocket, and watched in surprise as Izumi clapped her hands amidst a flurry of papers.

As quickly as his flames fanned out beneath the low hanging ceiling, Izumi just as quickly tinkered with the density of the molecules in the air, drew up a gust of wind, and blew his fire out.

"With the amount of shit they mine down here you're lucky you haven't blown a hole in the entire countryside yet," Izumi barked as she stomped out the remnants of Mustang's flame from the papers on the ground around her, "and what the hell would you have done if I'd been Dante? She would have burnt you alive with your own flame, you idiot."

Mustang stared dumbstruck at the woman berating him in the settling darkness, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I assume that was you who caused that rumble," she looked at the collapsed eastern tunnel as it vanished to darkness, "guess I owe Vato a drink."

Tucking her weapon away, Hawkeye maneuvered through the darkened intersection and swept her feet around, searching for the dropped torch, "Izumi, what are you doing here?"

Mustang's voice suddenly snapped in the black void, "And what the hell is going on in Central!?"

Clapping her hands to offer a bit of light, Izumi stepped towards Hawkeye and pinched the top of the torch to light it as the officer picked it up. Abruptly turning to face the man in charge of the mission, Izumi's expression tensed.

"Dante has Ed and Al."

"What!?" two voices echoed in the chamber.

"How?" Mustang abruptly demanded, "Ed is supposed to be up north."

"Five more minutes and he would have been," Izumi snarled, "Vato's best guess is that Dante sent Aisa into Central City and used her to organize a loyal military group to feign allegiance to you. They had enough people involved that they were able to piece together when and where Ed and Winry were supposed to head out."

Mustang's hands charged through his face as he digested what he'd just heard. Every time information found him, the situation they faced grew monumentally worse. How were they even supposed to keep up, let alone get a head, if every time they attempted to do anything, something else happened to set them back. Even their best laid plans were being forced to kneel.

"Aisa was in Central?"

"She was," Izumi nodded.

Mustang snarled in a deep breath, "Dante's made her expendable then?"

"Yes," Izumi confirmed, "if Aisa's being used like this, the Philosopher's Stone remnants that Al says are crystallizing inside her are almost ready to come out. The moment Dante removes them, the chances that the Red Water inside her remains stable enough to maintain her drops dramatically."

"Okay," Mustang tried to get his thoughts in order - the scale of their mission had been drastically changed. He needed to reorder their approach and adjust their tactics accordingly, "How long have Ed and Al been in there?"

The bridge of Izumi's nose creased as her brow dipped lower, "Since early this morning."

Frustration pumped through his veins; that was not an answer Mustang wanted to hear. Until two minutes ago his motivation was to get Brigitte out so he could get back to Central and put his boot up Hakuro's ass. But, with Dante having free access to the Elric brothers, there was no room to entertain his selfish desires - any length of time that little terror had alone with Ed had the potential to be absolutely catastrophic for everyone.

"Is that enough time for Dante to get anything out of Ed?"

Izumi delivered her response with a heavy sigh, "Dante's not going to want to risk damaging Ed, he's too valuable, so she's going to have to go slowly and carefully with him. But, we're probably going to have to assume she knows something by now that we don't want her to know."

"Great," Mustang scowled and smoothed his hands over his hair as he tried to think. He suddenly wished he'd just hog-tied Ed and forced him up north kicking and screaming in the first place, "how the hell did she get both of them? What was everyone doing?" his dark eye began overflowing with frustration, "Where were you!?"

"Oh no," the implication of the question drew Izumi's ire, "you don't get to blame me for this. I'm not the one whose failed security procedures put them in danger."

Mustang scoffed "Right, you only take responsibility for their well being at your leisure."

"Excuse me?" Izumi dug her heels in to challenge him, "You've only been irresponsibly stringing two teenaged boys around for years because it suits your politics."

Mustang bit back at the accusation with a bitter retort, "And you just forget about them, or abandon one in Central, and only come back into their lives when it's relevant for you to do so."

Countering someone she firmly believed had no right to say anything to her on the matter, Izumi bristled, "That's rich coming from the mouth of a mongrel who coerced a grieving child to become a dog of the military, feeding him hope that it might lead to solutions for his problems."

"From what I've come to understand," needlessly dramatic, Mustang threw his hands out as he paraded his words, "you're the one responsible for empowering these two grieving children with knowledge well beyond their years, then abandoning them to it."

"I did not teach them human transmutation!" Izumi drilled her anger into the single eye of the man in front of her, "the lessons I gave them were meant to drive home you should NEVER do what they did."

"And they listened so well didn't they! Just like children," Mustang slung his words back at her like mud, "you let two precocious young boys with no parents walk in and out of your life, like they could possibly do no wrong, and never once thought to check up on them."

Izumi let the man's fire boil her; stepping forwards, she met him nose to nose, "UNLIKE YOU? Pinako told me that YOU walked into their life, into her home knowing full well who they were, who their parents were, and what they had done, and you still filled Ed's head full of ideas."

Throwing his finger to the air with pointed authority, Mustang's booming voice shook dust from the walls, "If I hadn't stepped in when I did, someone else in the military would have come along for Ed and Al. Someone with ties to Dante I don't doubt and then where would they be?"

Izumi's words crashed like thunder through the cavern, "Is THAT how you've been justifying manipulating them all these years? You think you've been some kind of saviour?"

Mustang's voice exploded in her face like he'd snapped his fingers, "You do NOT get to lecture me when you weren't a factor in their lives 'all these years'. At least I have been TRYING to protect them!"

"AND I'M TRYING TO PROTECT THEM NOW."

"SO AM I."

Hawkeye fired her gun into the dirt overhead and immediately had two angry people latch their dark, enraged eyes on her.

She cleared her throat, "It's obvious we're all trying to do our best for Ed and Al right now, but we need a little more strategy and organization in our approach," Hawkeye took a deep breath and swung the torch towards the western corridor, "Izumi, you were running transmutations prior to finding us, correct?"

Collecting herself, Izumi reached down and started collecting the paper maps that had been discarded at their feet, "I was. When we got in I helped myself to resources at Town Hall, so I knew where to bugger things up on my way in."

"Okay, that's good," Hawkeye looked back to the entirety of Mustang's collapsed tunnel, "then, you're going to be more efficient at irreparably damaging things down here than we will be."

Izumi slammed the last map into her hand and stood up.

"I know you want to go in," Hawkeye tried to ease her reaction, "but, it'll be in everyone's best interest if you keep going through the tunnels and initiate as many massive collapses as you can."

"You're going to need all the hands you can get once you're inside," Izumi pushed back.

"I know," Hawkeye didn't argue with her sentiment, "but we don't have a lot of time and a large-scale dismantling is something your skillset would be most efficient with, especially considering Aisa is also in the building and she hampers your best defence mechanisms."

Straightening the collar of his shirt, Mustang added, "The more you do and the louder you do it, the more attention you'll get from Dante's party and that can offer us a distraction and get the boys' attention as well."

Hawkeye continued his thought, "She'll have both a government to puppet and her underground tunnel structure to investigate. It'll thin her resources for spotting the two of us and let us maneuver better."

Sucking in her next breath through clenched teeth, the alchemy teacher reluctantly accepted the scenario, "Fine. I'll make it loud," Izumi turned her frustrated gaze down the dark western tunnel, "but once I've made this a sufficient mess, you better be out or I'm coming in after you and nobody's going to like what I intend to do to that place."

"We'll set off the fire alarms when we have everyone. Let's get going, we need to get this done quickly," Hawkeye put a heavy hand on Mustang's shoulder and gave him a strong, but encouraging shove towards the north tunnel as Izumi retreated down the westward passage.

Barely managing a few steps towards his destination, Mustang's single eye lit with one final glow of frustration and he swung back, "What is Hakuro doing in Central?"

Walking back into the intersection to look at him, Izumi gave Mustang an honestly puzzled look, "Who's Hakuro?"

Shaking like he was ready to explode, Mustang abruptly turned on his heels and stormed up the northern mineshaft without any further encouragement from his company.

They had two screws.

But, they only had two screws.

Brigitte had managed to successfully claim the other top screw while Al cheered her on, but it was the bottom two screws that foiled them.

The two bottom screws ruined all the other pencils too.

Refusing to surrender to a pair of stubborn fixtures, a new plan was hatched. An extra chair was put on the table so Brigitte had better balance, and she scraped away the soft paint coating the top of the grate with the broken bits of pencils.

Plucking the top edge of the grate away from the wall, she needed to create a better finger hold, so Brigitte wedged a pencil shard into the gap and began twisting and wrenching it around to widen the space. The endeavour brought more success and, with enough space created to get her fingers into, she grabbed onto the upper lip of the air vent grate and started yanking. The stiff metal barrier bent and the wall where the two stubborn screws remained quickly developed cracks, but progress was infuriatingly slow and eventually reached a standstill.

Al was shoo'd off the table when Brigitte steadied herself squarely on both chairs. Gripping the grate at both ends, she gulped down a deep breath, cemented her hold, and picked up her feet.

Brigitte hung off the infuriating grate while it bent a little bit more.

"Let me help," Al scrambled back onto the table as she put her feet down.

Claiming the spot farther away from the wall corner, Al tried to figure out how best to wedge the box into the slowly growing gap between the grate, the wall, and the ceiling. Awkwardly reaching up so his arms would dangle straight down, Al caught the edge of the metal box on the corner of the grate and slowly wedged it in tighter, digging a corner deep into the ceiling as he fought with it. Reaching over, Brigitte gave Al's cage a few good smacks to help shove it in tighter.

"Okay," Al took a deep breath, looked at Brigitte as she secured the opposite corner, and offered a single emphatic word: "three."

With a few good English words at her disposal now, Brigitte nodded, "Three."

Al looked straight ahead, "One. Two. Three."

The children picked their legs up and inexplicably hung off the front of the air vent secured to the wall by two infuriating screws. Brigitte's face twisted as she fought to hold her grip on the corner and Al clenched his eyes as his body weight pulled on his trapped wrists.

A crack ripped into their ears and together they screamed as the grate tore off the wall without warning.

Al and Brigitte landed on their knees atop the chairs, then fell further when both seats skidded wildly along the table top as unbalanced weights sent them astray. Dumped heavily on the table as the chairs crashed to the floor, with the grate landing on them and torn bits of wall crumbling down, both curled up as the dust settled around them.

"Ow…" was the tiny, little whine that squeaked out from the clatter.

Al picked his head up and watched his bloodied nose run over the aggravating metal prison that had smacked him in the face somewhere in all that.

Brigitte shook out her hair and gingerly slid off the table. Al slowly brought himself up onto his elbows and knees and turned his eyes up to admire the hole they'd just ripped in the wall. Success vanquished everything that hurt and, despite his nose coating his upper lip, the small Elric's grin still curled proudly as he got off the table.

Al blinked when Brigitte turned him around, grabbed his chin, and put their dire situation on pause.

He stood soundly on both feet while she washed a tea-soaked corner of the white table cloth over his bloodied face to clean it up. Caught in a moment that made him feel as young as he looked, Al humbly let her tidy his face. Wiping up the mess like he was a little boy who hadn't noticed his runny nose, Brigitte dried his face, wiped the metal box clean, and capped off the task by shoving a scrunched-up napkin into his leaking nostril. Somewhere between feeling very young and very humbled, Al's grin creaked sheepishly sideways as she nodded and patted him on the head.

With the sudden flash of Brigitte's pointed finger, they snapped back to the mission at hand, "It came off!"

"We did it!" Al joined the childish, squealing cheer as Brigitte flew away and quickly got a chair back onto the table.

The ascent into the ventilation system went without any further fanfare. Brigitte slid in first, then Al hopped up and tossed his torso into the vent. The box immobilizing his hands crashed against the metal sides of their escape route, sending a wicked eruption of noise exploding through the air shaft. Unable to grip anything as he tried to flounder his way in, Brigitte snagged Al by the belt loop on the back of his slacks and helped haul the poor Elric awkwardly in by the seat of his pants.

If there weren't a hundred other things stewing in his head and needing his focus, Al would have just let himself have a moment of frustration to yell at the binding of his hands. Nearly everything he tried to do was crippled by it and every which way he tried to move in the vent created noise so intense it clearly gave away that someone was crawling through the shaft. The only solution Al could think of was to lay down on his back and push himself along…

When Al rolled over to give it a try, everything began to shake.

Snapping his knees into his chest, Al kicked his legs up and planted the soles of his shoes against the top of the shaft to steady himself while the building shook around them. For a few seconds that seemed to last forever, the building rumbled and a tired, dull echo reverberated ominously low inside the metallic shaft as the tremble pulsed through the building. Then it vanished.

Laying still on his back, not sure what had happened, Al craned his head back and looked down their escape route. Amidst an eerie calm, he stared quietly at the rays of light leaking in through vents ahead of them, watching the disturbed layers of dust begin to resettle in the glow. For as long as he stared, watching the dancing dust calm in the light, not a single sound found its way into the airway.

Al slowly pulled his feet off the ceiling of the ventilation shaft, "Brigitte…?"

Unable to sit up properly in the confines of the air shaft, Al peered as best he could over at her.

"Brigitte?"

Uncoiling from the ball she'd wrapped herself up in, she peeked an eye up at him.

The earth shook again.

Al flattened himself on his back and smacked his feet on the ceiling of the vent again. His heart rate skyrocketed; what the heck was going on?

With less oomph than the prior one, the quake faded as quickly as it had arrived.

Laying on his back, Al stared at the walls of their metallic confines and took a slow, steady breath. The quake hadn't been enough to dislodge anything, or even tip something over. It just rumbled quickly and then faded. Even when it came up to interrupt their anxious silence a third time, it wasn't enough to cause damage, it was just simply enough to unsettle their nerves. To be a disruption.

To be noticed.

Al turned his head again and looked down their escape route again, his expression tensing with his thoughts.

No matter what the reason for the shaking earth, he didn't doubt for a second Dante had felt it too and someone would be on their way to monitor them both. Al reached out with a foot and lightly tapped the top of Brigitte's head to get her mobile. Despite whatever was going on around them, the first thing they had to focus on was getting as far away from the gaping hole they'd created as possible.

To Be Continued...

Author's Note:

I was very very bored in school sometimes and I chewed on a lot of pencils and made some weird things out of them. I pass down my tips and tricks to Brigitte ;)

I do believe Izumi has met Hakuro in the story, but she wasn't really interested in who he was, so she didn't take note of him. If she sees him again, she'd recognize him.

I really really really want to post the next chapter on Oct 3, but it's sitting at Maybe right now. Crossing my fingers!