Hey gang! Thank you a GAZILLION TIMES for all your sweet reviews! I finally learned how to reply to them directly, so if I haven't replied to yours yet know that I plan on it soon. I was absolutely blessed with nice comments to read! Feelin' the love over here.

Anyway. Here is a chapter I wrote ALMOST ENTIRELY TODAY (yesterday; it's like 1AM now, sigh). This was supposed to be the introduction to a very exciting plotline about a very fancy dinner party being hosted by a very fancy guy, but I wrote the first sentence and then immediately got sucked into a tangent, and, well, it's like 2000 words now. Featuring Ed, Izumi and the alchemy inherent in breakfast foods! How appropriate given the title of this fic, eh?

Song for this one is "Get It Wrong, Get It Right" by Feist, a soothing, gentle song about being out in the countryside and figuring things out bit by bit. That's the vibe.

Wind on the fields,
Blowing your hair
Weaving gold, weaving gold, weaving gold
Weaving gold, hand to hold
Hand to hold

Cold outside,
Warm by the fire
Get it wrong, get it wrong, get it wrong
Get it right, get it right
Get it right

It was early Saturday morning, and Ed was making pancakes.

It had been part of the weekend routine at the Curtis household when he and Al stayed there as kids, and Sig and Izumi had reprised the tradition when they'd stayed for a few weeks last year too. He didn't know what reminded him of it now, exactly, but for whatever reason he'd fallen asleep the night before craving pancakes for breakfast something fierce. He'd even dreamt about them. And so, when the neighbours' stupid defective rooster woke him up by crowing a solid two hours before the sun came up, he lay awake for twenty minutes, thinking pancake thoughts, until finally deciding to get up and get to work.

He did his best to climb quietly out of bed—not an easy task with a metal leg and a metal bunk bed ladder—so as not to wake Alphonse, who was still sound asleep in his bunk. Then he crept out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. From the top step, looking back for a second, he could see that Pinako's door was still shut, so she wasn't up yet—and there was a strip of light coming from under Winry's door, which usually meant she'd fallen asleep with the light on again.

Typical, he thought, smirking as he headed downstairs.

He was dressed in flannel pyjama pants and a black military-issued t-shirt, and took one step out the front door before stepping back in to grab a jacket. When did it get so cold?

Outside, the sky was getting lighter but it was still dotted with stars. The grass was wet with dew, and Ed tucked his pant legs into his boots so they wouldn't get soaked as he went out to feed the chickens. Luckily, the hens had also been woken up by the neighbours' rooster; they were already fussing away inside the chicken coop, scratching and pecking in the straw. They swarmed at his feet when he opened the door.

"Whoa, whoa, one at a time, ladies," he said, stepping back and throwing down a handful of grain. "There's plenty for everybody."

He could see his breath, but only a little. The chickens didn't seem to mind at all. He grinned at the sight of them eagerly scrounging in the grass around him. Something about it felt so straightforward. You're hungry, you want eggs; chickens are hungry, you feed the chickens, you get eggs. Simple.

This time last year, his life had been anything but. Where had he even been at the end of September? Central? Dublith? East City? The desert? The horrifying blood-dimension inside Gluttony? So many things had happened in such rapid succession, and he'd traveled so much that he couldn't even place himself. He'd have to check the dates on his old notes later just to figure everything out. Either way, he wished he could send a message to the Edward of last September, wherever he was, to let him know that in a year's time he'd be home in Resembool feeding the chickens while Al was asleep.

It was still quiet in the kitchen when he came back in, basket of fresh eggs in hand, and he got to work. After washing up, he lit a burner on the stove to put the kettle on, then scooped a generous amount of ground coffee into Pinako's custom-made steel-mesh drip-filter coffee cone contraption (which had a name, but Edward couldn't remember it right now).

Then he got down all the ingredients from the cupboards, one by one. Flour. Salt. Baking powder. Vanilla extract. Milk—crap, do we still have milk left? They did. Plus the eggs. And then the bowl, the whisk, the flour sifter, the measuring spoons.

Ed didn't cook much; it wasn't exactly a priority when he was on the road all the time. He mainly ate at hotel restaurants, barracks cafeterias and sidewalk food carts. But this recipe, at least, he knew by heart. He knew to crack the eggs sharply on a flat surface, not the edge of a bowl, because they broke more cleanly that way and that meant fewer little eggshell bits. He did it with one hand—his left, since he didn't trust his right hand's co-ordination quite that far yet—and didn't drop a single piece.

He beat the eggs quickly and thoroughly, then poured in the milk, then the vanilla. Then he measured the dry ingredients into the sifter and began to sift them over the egg mixture, bit by bit, whisking the two together in the bowl with his other hand.

Izumi had taught him that baking was a lot like alchemy: you had to combine everything in the right amounts, at the right speed and in the right order, or you wouldn't get what you wanted. You couldn't just eyeball things or throw things together; Izumi could, but that was because she knew how everything worked well enough that she knew exactly which variables she was manipulating and by how much. That was a lesson she liked to reiterate to him and Alphonse: just because I make this look easy doesn't mean it actually is.

At the time he didn't get it, thinking the whole thing was a pretty juvenile exercise given that he was here to learn the science of deconstructing and reconstructing matter. As such, Ed's first attempts at pancakes were lumpy disasters; his next batch had been overmixed, thin and flat. He kept trying to skip over being careful and following the instructions, and he kept being rewarded with terrible results for breakfast. Al's had been much better, except that he'd been unable to decide whether he wanted blueberries, strawberries or chocolate chips and had added all three, and the results were just weird.

Thinking about it now, Ed realized his teacher had gone to huge lengths to convince him, in so many ways, that there was no such thing as a real shortcut. If you cut corners, if you skipped a step, you always had to pay for it in the end.

And then he remembered the Sunday morning when the lesson had finally sunk in—at least on the culinary level, if not the philosophical one—and he'd made his first perfect pancake. The batter was finally the right consistency, and he'd carefully poured it into the hot cast-iron skillet, slick with butter. Sig had shown him how to time flipping it, and then finally it was on his plate, golden-brown and delicious, and he felt amazing.

After that, he'd tried to make pancakes via alchemy instead, and somehow it didn't work at all. Izumi had found him at the kitchen table, surrounded by crumpled-up transmutation circle designs and bowls full of sad piles of wet flour, and asked him what the hell he was doing.

"Trying to make pancakes," he'd replied lamely.

"Ed, you made pancakes yesterday. You know how to do it. So what's all this for?"

"If baking is just like alchemy, shouldn't I be able to transmute a pancake instead of baking one?"

His teacher laughed. "Eventually," she said, "but how's it working out so far?"

Ed paused. "Not so good," he admitted.

"Exactly. And do you know why?"

"Because I haven't found the right formula yet to—"

"No," she said, cutting him off, "because you're trying to create one single transmutation that handles a dozen different chemical processes at the same time."

"What? But there aren't even a dozen ingredients!"

"That doesn't matter! Look," she said, "I know you're used to working with rocks, metals and sand, and you think flour is another random inert substance. But it's organic matter. It's made of plant cells, and it has a complicated protein structure. It's going to take you a lot of studying before you're able to understand on a molecular level how the glutenin and gliadin combine."

"But I can figure it out! The amino acids have to—"

"I'm not finished," she said. "And then once you've produced a gluten solution, you're going to need to produce the leavening reaction, which is done with—"

"That just puts air in the batter, so why do I have to create the reaction first? Can't I just put the air bubbles in myself?"

"You could try, but then you'd lose the components from the neutralization reaction, which are what?"

"W…water, salt and carbon dioxide?"

"Exactly. So where are you going to get the extra water and salt that the batter should have?"

"I'll just use more ingredients to start with! That shouldn't be that hard."

"But how will you keep them separate from each other? And how will you get the extra aeration that the baking powder releases when it's exposed to heat?"

"I'll…wait, it does that?"

"Yup. And that's not even approaching the question of the Maillard reaction."

"The what?"

"That's the reaction between amino acids and sugars when exposed to heat, which is what makes the outside all golden-brown and tasty like they should be, instead of pale and quivering like whatever you have going on here."

"Oh." Ed paused. "Well, I can still figure that out! It's just a matter of—"

"It's a matter of making more work for yourself than you can even fathom right now to reproduce the same work you can do by hand in ten minutes, that's what it is," Izumi said firmly. "And even if you do finally figure it all out—and you're right, given enough time and energy you could do it, you'll know how to make exactly one pancake with one specific recipe, and it might taste more or less the same as a normal one. But if I take this milk and replace it with buttermilk, for example," she continued, picking up the glass bottle on the table, "or, say, Alphonse is in the mood for blueberry pancakes, or you're using whole-wheat flour instead of bleached, you're going to have to start your array completely from scratch, because you haven't actually learned the functional skills you need to use what's already in front of you."

"But—" Ed sputtered, still clinging to his idea. "But if I want to learn alchemy, isn't it better to try it, to understand how things are put together?"

His teacher sighed, fixing him with the exhausted stare of every adult who's had to argue with a child too smart for their own good. "Well, you've tried it now, haven't you?" she said. "But we've talked about conservation of mass, and about conservation of energy. When it needs to, an alchemical transmutation uses energy from the movement of tectonic plates. But it never pulls more energy from that source than is strictly necessary, meaning that if there's enough chemical, kinetic or magnetic energy already present in a given reaction, you as the alchemist are barely relying on tectonic plates at all."

"Okay…"

"To be a good alchemist, you should take no more than you need to produce the appropriate result with the materials you have. Just because a particular transmutation doesn't require the use of a lot of tectonic energy doesn't mean it isn't alchemy—it's just more efficient alchemy. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

Ed scowled, squishing his hand into the little pile of wet bread goop in front of him. He grunted.

"Sorry? I didn't quite catch that."

Ed scowled harder. "So making pancakes the normal way…is better alchemy than actually transmuting them."

"Exactly!" she said brightly, clapping him on the shoulder. His ten-year-old scowl stayed in place. "Now that's the face of a real scientist!"

Then she clapped her hands together and slammed them down on the failed pancake experiment; there was a small flash, and suddenly the shapeless glob was gone, replaced by three neat piles on the tabletop—flour, baking powder and salt—and a smooth milk-and-egg mixture in the bowl.

"Put those away when you're done experimenting," Izumi said, grinning, "and I'll teach you to make crêpes tomorrow."

Then she strode out of the room before Ed could respond.

Now, in Resembool, in the kitchen, while the coffee was brewing drip by drip and there was butter melting in the pan on the stove, sixteen-year-old Edward suddenly wanted to thank her. She probably didn't even remember that conversation—he hadn't thought about it in years himself. She couldn't possibly have known how relevant it would be to him now.

The sky was getting a lot lighter around the edges, and he figured he had just enough time to make a plateful of pancakes before Pinako—usually the earliest riser—came downstairs. The coffee would be ready just in time, too.

Al would be next, and Winry, if she managed to get up before the pancakes were gone, would be last.

Ed smiled to himself as he ladled pancake batter onto the hot cast-iron pan, wondering absently what she'd been working on when she'd fallen asleep. Had she even made it to bed, or was she up there right now asleep at her desk?

A few minutes later, he was surprised to hear Winry's voice coming down the stairs.

"Calm down, you crazy dog!"

Ah, Ed thought suddenly: the one variable I didn't consider.

Den padded eagerly into the room, tail wagging, apparently lured out of a deep sleep in Winry's bedroom by the intoxicating scent of breakfast. A bedraggled Winry followed a few steps behind, half-asleep and wearing an oversized grey t-shirt. She yawned, then blinked at the scene in front of her in the dimly-lit kitchen.

"Ed?" she said thickly. There was a blueprint mark on the side of her face. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Alchemy," he replied, laughing softly to himself as he flipped a pancake.

HOW 'BOUT THAT, EH? LIL SPRINKLING OF EDWIN IN THERE FOR YA. Sorry, I'm yelling. I'm just excited about how well this came together with zero advance planning.

Scientific pancake information was largely sourced from the article "Pancakes, served with a side of science" by Aatish Bhatia for Wired. Very grateful that this article existed for my extremely specific needs.

All the stuff about the specifics of alchemy I just made up, but I think it's all quite in line with what we know about a) what alchemy is capable of, and b) Izumi's don't-rely-on-alchemy-for-everything worldview. I also had a lot of fun writing Baby Ed, and I definitely want to write more of Izumi Curtis. Dinner party chapter hopefully coming soon too. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!

EDIT, 18-04-2020: I have gone back and added song-lyric epigraphs to every chapter, because CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP. You can totally ignore 'em but they make me happy so whatever. record companies, don't sue me I love you