Disclaimer: don't own them, just this (admittedly unlikely) possibility.
I know, I know, I said I wasn't going to do any more of these. But then I found this sitting on my hard drive almost finished, and well, how could I resist?
This was supposed to be a drabble or at least a double drabble like the others, but it refused to stay that size.
As per usual, anonymous reviews get answered in my profile.
After a long, careful silence, Alphonse said, "I don't think that's quite what we were hoping for."
The small yellow cat sitting wide-eyed in the middle of the alchemical circle where the Fullmetal Alchemist had been standing moments before gave him an amber-eyed glare that clearly said, "No, you think?" That, along with the tiny braid, reassured Alphonse that his brother had merely been...reshaped, rather than replaced. Alright, the absolute worst case scenario had not occurred, so he should not panic. He should be logical. Logic was good.
He should probably ask about the next most important thing.
"So...Can you still do alchemy?"
The cat glared at him, then looked thoughtful, moving out of the circle. It took a few tries for it to successfully stand up on its back legs while holding its forepaws together, all the while giving him a look that practically dripped, "Don't you dare laugh." Alphonse, for once grateful that the suit of armor didn't convey expression very well, suspected that the Colonel, lacking that advantage, would be soon be experiencing feline retribution. He mentally underlined that thought as the cat's joined paws crackled with static and its fur fluffed out in a way that looked highly uncomfortable. Then the cat leaned forward to hit the ground with a paw, and the cement nearby rippled and flowed into raised letters: "Yeah looks like."
Alphonse nodded in satisfaction. "Good. That will make life easier when we submit the report."
His brother hissed, tail bristling.
"What, you want to pretend nothing happened and just not tell anyone?"
The cat nodded vigorously.
"That's not going to work."
The cat tilted its head in a definite "Why not?"
"Without their support, we'll have to travel on our own. Oh, we could do it, especially since you probably don't need as much food now, but it wouldn't be comfortable. You'd be listed as missing, and if they sent out searchers to find us - they would eventually, you know, they probably wouldn't worry for a month or two but after that Mustang would take matters into his own hands - I'm pretty obvious in a crowd. Plus it'll be easier to research what happened with the State resources behind us, and Mustang can help us hide that we were experimenting with human transmutation. Um, again."
The cat laid down, head on its paws, sulking.
"Don't be like that, brother. We probably only have to tell the Colonel and Lieutenant Hawkeye, and you know they keep our secrets. They'll probably keep us out on missions even more of the time because you can do all sorts of undercover stuff now that no one else can do, so you won't have to worry about the others at the base finding out."
The cat's tail lashed, once, twice. Then it pushed itself back up off the floor, this time less awkwardly, and touched its front paws together for a moment before landing on the ground again. The cement shifted, the previous message dissolving and reforming into: "Not yet try to fix it first."
Alphonse nodded. If they could reverse it they wouldn't need to tell anyone at all. The chances of reversing alchemical accidents were best as close to the time and place of the original incident as possible, while notes and memories were still in order and the setup and residue of the transmutation were still in place.
But after a few hours, ears and tail drooping, his brother finally admitted defeat with another terse sentence raised from the floor. Unable even to find any flaw in the array that might have caused the reaction to have such an unexpected effect, they couldn't even begin to try to fix it. While it was true that there was no sign of the automail and Ed now had all four limbs, this was not what they had been trying for.
Understandably, Edward took the failure harder than Alphonse, though neither was pleased with the situation.
Still, Alphonse would always treasure the memory of the look on Colonel Mustang's face when a kitten walked into his office, jumped up on his desk, and, positively smirking, transmuted his inbox into a watering can.
Plotbunnies say that they were trying to use Ed's hair as a sort of template to regenerate his lost limbs. Given that Al was helping with the setup, draw your own conclusions.
Comments are great. Criticism is even better.