Agent Prentiss grabs Agent Rossi's shoulder and Dr. Reid's arm, says, "Excuse us for a minute," and yanks them aside, out of Roy and Maes's earshot.
Maes's eyes watch them, but under his breath, he murmurs, "Since when do can you do Edward's trick with no circles?"
Roy sighs. "A lot has happened," he replies, keeping his voice low. It's a laughable understatement. How can he tell Maes about the homunculi, about the source of the philosopher's stone, about the nation-wide array…
The nation-wide array. The thing Maes had been killed for seeing. "We found it," Roy tells him quietly. "We found the array."
A tiny bit of stress eases from Maes's shoulders. "Are… Gracia and Elicia…"
"They were fine, last we saw them," Roy tells him honestly. "But we've been here for eight years, so my information really isn't up-to-date."
It's not enough, but Maes seems to realize it's all Roy can tell him. "Eight years ?" he asks, leaning back and crossing his arms. "Why haven't you…?"
"Up until I got up in these mountains, we haven't been able to make alchemy work in this world. That horse," he nods to where Maes had set it on the desk, "is the first bit of alchemy I've been able to do since we got here."
"Why here?" Maes asks. "Why now?"
Roy shrugs. "Ed called me, left a message on my phone. He said this case was 'our stuff.' Someone in this world has figured out how to make alchemy work," he explains, keeping an eye on the agents, who are likewise glancing over at them.
Maes lifts a skeptical eyebrow. "Someone could figure out something you and Edward couldn't?"
"They must have sacrificed human lives to do it."
Frowning, Maes taps his finger on his arm. "Making a philosopher's stone?"
Roy blinks, surprised, then remembers that Ed had told Maes about the ingredients of the stones long before he told Roy. Maes's discovery of the nation-wide array had required immediately removing Maes from the board, but even knowing the source of philosopher's stones had probably put a target on him. "It's possible," he says. Humans have always and likely will always seek immortality, but it doesn't feel right. "I'm missing something."
Agent Prentiss moves back their way. "Something you want to share with the class, Mr. Mustang?" she asks.
He somehow manages to refrain from commenting on the less-than-inspired snark. Compared to Ed, she's an amateur anyway. "There was an array, correct? A circle?" he asks. "Ed left me a message saying this was 'our stuff.' I assume alchemy. Which means there's a circle. Are you going to show it to me or not?"
She folds her arms. "We have a lot more questions."
"And we're done answering them," Roy tells her, firm, but not unkind. "They aren't relevant to the current problem. The array is."
"Your boyfriend is missing," Prentiss snaps. "And you're just done ?"
Roy leans forward and props his elbows on his knees. "I know that Ed is alive. I have seen him do things that are nothing short of miraculous. I have faith that wherever he is, he will find his way back to me, or a way to pull me to him. That said, I'd prefer to be working the problem from this side as well. Since none of you are alchemists, the array will be meaningless to you. You cannot use alchemy. Whatever has happened to your teammates, there is nothing you can do to help them. You need to rely on Ed or me." He looks purposefully from one agent to the next before continuing. "If you would prefer to simply sit and wait for Ed to figure it out, then, well, you have no need of me."
The glares he gets for that statement are harsh, but he knows it's their own impotence driving them.
"Assuming we believe you, if you're so confident that Ed can figure it out, then why haven't you found a way back to your world?" Reid asks.
Sitting back, Roy says, "Because before now, we couldn't get alchemy to work. Ed hypothesized that we could power it with human souls, but fortunately for you, neither of us are morally bankrupt or desperate enough to be willing to commit murder to test it."
"Wait, alchemy wasn't working at all ?" Dr. Reid asks. "You couldn't use it at all ?"
"There's obviously some form of alchemy here. Ed's automail—his prosthetics—works so we knew it had to exist, but that," he nods toward the horse, "hasn't been possible for either of us. Till now. Till this place." He meets Agent Prentiss's eyes and continues, "You could have just called like the last time Ed went missing. You knew this time was different. You brought me here because you knew on some level I would be able to help. So stop stalling and let me help or get the hell out of my way."
.o0o.o0o.o0o.
" Motherfucker !"
It takes a moment, but the continuing, fluent cursing soon jars JJ's memory. Ed , she thinks. "Ed?" she calls.
The cursing cuts off abruptly, but before Ed can get to her, she hears Derek call, "JJ?"
"Thank fuck ," Ed says, his form a wavy outline in the heat. The sun is blistering, and when she lifts her arm to shield her eyes, sand clings to her skin. Fine, yellow sand, like the kind she might see in any desert special on TV.
Ed pulls her to her feet with a metal hand under her arm like she weighs nothing. She's not sure what surprises her more—his touch or his strength. Then she remembers his arm holding that beam, and hauling her to her feet seems less impressive.
"Morgan!" Ed yells.
He pops up over a dune, shading his own eyes. "Ed? JJ?"
"Hughes!" Ed yells, his voice echoing back to him as Derek closes the distance. There's no response. His brows furrow, but he looks at them. "Are you both okay?" he demands. "Nothing hurts, limbs attached?" He's looking over her with worried eyes, like a parent whose child just did something stupid and dangerous but managed to come out unscathed.
"I'm… fine," she says. "Confused, but okay. What the hell happened? How did we get here?"
Ed ignores her and looks over Derek. "And you?"
"All limbs accounted for, as far as I can tell," Derek replies. "I'm with JJ though. Where the hell are we?"
"Yeah, and how did we get here? I thought we were in Pennsylvania mining country…"
Ed's eyes scan the horizon, watchful, wary. JJ tries to remember if she's seen him like this before, but she doesn't think she has. "What's the last thing either of you remember?" he asks, turning in a slow circle.
JJ follows his gaze but there's literally nothing in any direction that she can see but desert.
"The circle. The sparks?" JJ says, the memory more scattered flashes than a connected movie, she frowns. "How did you get out of the car?"
He raised his hand, the metal fist glinting in the bright light. "I broke the window," he says dryly, annoyed but not angry. She winces anyway as he says, "Morgan?"
"The victims," Derek says. "Tucker Maes... grinning."
Sighing, Ed turns back to face them. "Nothing about a white space? No giant doors?" he asks.
"You don't mean the barn door, do you?" JJ asks. She thinks back, but she remembers running to help one of the victims, and… nothing else.
"No," he says flatly. "That's probably for the best."
"You know where we are, don't you?" Derek asks, watching him.
"I think so," Ed admits. "I think we're in the Xerxian Desert, between Amestris and Xing."
Derek stares. "The what between what and where?"
JJ's not sure she would have phrased it quite like that, but she empathizes with the sentiment.
Ed appears to slump a little. "Amestris is the country Roy and I are from," he explains.
Trading a confused look with Derek, JJ says, "International geography isn't my best subject, but I don't remember a country called Amestris."
"It doesn't exist in your world," Ed says, softly, almost regretfully.
"I must have misheard," Derek says after a beat. "Did you just imply you're from another world?" He's looking at Ed incredulously.
"You wanted to know why I couldn't tell you about the circle?" Ed says, motioning around. "Forgive me if I thought 'I'm from another world' wouldn't go over well."
JJ shields her eyes. "I'll worry more about the other world when I know we're not going to dehydrate in this desert," she says before they dissolve into bickering. She knows they like and respect each other, but they remind her of her brothers—they just can't resist picking at each other. She'll deal with the impossibility of what Ed's saying when she's not worried about dying.
"Don't worry about that," Ed says, waving her off.
"Is this desert small or something?" JJ asks. From where she stands, how much she can feel she's sweating and how quickly it's evaporating, she thinks her concern is warranted.
"No, but I can get water for us, so it's not that big of a deal."
JJ stares. " How ?" she asks when it becomes obvious he's not going to volunteer.
He frowns, lifting his left arm, he pulls back his sleeve, revealing a circle tattooed there. JJ thinks she's seen that tattoo before—on Mustang maybe? He frowns at it and bites his lip, then sighs, dropping his hand. He squares his shoulders, closes his eyes, then claps his hands together in front of him, almost like he's praying, except his elbows are out to the side. Then he drops to the ground and puts his hands in the sand.
Blue-white lightning sparks from the ground, the same as they saw in the barn. JJ and Derek both step back, but what looks like a fountain raises up from the sand, including a gargoyle-shaped spout. The base is also some ghastly, gothic-looking thing of sharp edges and skulls.
Ed stays crouched for a few minutes before he dusts off his hands and stands, then steps over to the fountain, steps on the tail of the gargoyle like a pedal, and water pours from it, just like it was a normal plumbed water fountain. Pulling off his left glove, Ed sticks his hand in the stream for a moment, rubbing the water between his fingers, smelling it, then he shrugs and leans forward to take a drink.
"It's fresh," he says, straightening. "And cold. You should drink some."
While they gape at him dumbly, Ed claps his hands together again, then kneels back to the sand. The blue-white lightning sparks again, and a half dozen vessels rise up out of the sand, complete with chain straps. They're also ornately decorated, jars that could be works of art in other circumstances, even if the subject matter was a little tacky.
"How are you doing that?" JJ finally manages to ask.
Ed picks up the first jar? Jug? Then he pulls off a lid and steps to the fountain to fill it up.
" Ed ," she says, using her best mom voice.
Sighing, he says, "It's alchemy. It's not magic. And it tells me we're back in my world."
"You made a fountain ," Derek points out. "In the middle of the desert . By clapping ."
Ed rolls his eyes, releasing the tail and handing the jug to JJ. "Drink up," he says. "Alchemy is the science of deconstructing and reconstructing matter. Sand is one of the best basic substances to transmute. And we might be in a desert , but there's still groundwater, if you go down deep enough. I just transmuted the sand into pipes to tap into it and made the cistern so it's easy to use. I'll put it back before we get moving."
Rather than staring like an idiot, JJ takes a deep drink of the water, which is so cold it gives her a chill despite the heat outside. She can feel its cool chase all the way down to her stomach, and it makes her realize how thirsty she is, so she takes another deep drink, the clean-tasting water refreshing in a way she can barely describe.
Ed tosses the second bottle at Derek, who manages to catch it.
"Can anyone here do that?" Derek asks, running his hands over the jug as if he can't quite believe it's real, even in his hands. "Can Mustang?"
"No," Ed says, snorting as he grabs another jug. "Well, maybe Roy could do this?" He hesitates as he thinks about it. "Maybe… earths aren't really his area of expertise. In theory anyone can learn alchemy, but not a lot do, and those who do are usually super specialized."
"What's your specialization?" JJ asks, putting the lid on the water jug, not wanting it to evaporate.
"I'm best with earths and metals, but I'm a generalist," he says, watching the jug fill. When it's done, he takes the chain and loops it over his shoulder, then bends to pick up the next one.
"Do you know how we got here?" Derek asks, finally moving back closer to them.
"Kinda."
"Ed, you have got to give us more than that," JJ admonishes.
"I don't even fully understand how Roy and I got to your world to begin with. I don't know why we got pulled through back to Amestris instead of…" he trails off and looks back down at the jug.
"Instead of?" JJ prompts.
It takes a moment, but the words come, soft and full of regret. "Instead of being fuel for the transmutation, like those old people were."
"They're dead?" Derek asks, pained. "All of them? Are you sure?"
Ed caps the jug in his hand and stares at it blindly for a long moment. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, they're gone."
"Do you know how to get us home?" JJ asks.
She almost doesn't catch the jug Ed tosses in her direction before he bends to pick up another one. Ed silently fills the next while she trades uncomfortable looks with Derek, until that one is full and tossed back to Derek. Ed picks up the last and begins to fill it.
"Ed?" she asks. "Can you get us home?"
"Not yet," he says, watching the water fill the last jug. "But I will . I didn't have alchemy in your world. At least, apparently, not unless it's powered by human souls anyway. But we're not in your world anymore." He dusts off his hand on his jacket, tilts his head back and pours the water over his eyes. He reaches up and pulls something out of one eye, then the other, then rinses his eyes again. When he looks back at JJ, she can't resist a gasp as she stares into eyes that are a pure golden yellow unlike anything she's ever seen before. "I will get you home, and I will get Roy back. I promise."