It's clear to Ed that both JJ and Morgan are still in shock. They haven't really processed that they're in another world, and every time Ed does alchemy, their eyes kind of glaze over as if their brains just say does not compute. He gives them a couple minutes on their own by raising a column out of the sand to see if he can get an idea of where they are. He also checks to see if there are signs of anyone else being around, but there aren't. If Ed really saw Hughes, their Maes Hughes, either he didn't get pulled through with them or he didn't get dumped out where they are. Considering he was pulled through a different door, Ed's assuming the first. Which means that Hughes might be in the same world as Roy. Roy may have to deal with the resurrection of his best friend… alone.
There is nothing Ed can do about it at the moment, so he turns his attention to problems he can deal with.
He's never learned the desert well, and except for Xerxes's ruins, Ed isn't aware of any landmarks in the place. If he can't figure out where they are and which direction they need to be walking, he may be making them a temporary shelter until night falls and he can navigate by the stars. Fuck, he is sweltering in his coat and layers.
Squinting, he makes out something on the horizon. He fixes the array he wants in his mind, relieved that they still come as naturally as breathing— fuck , even after nearly a decade, he really fucking missed this— then kneels on his column to pull out a spyglass. Sand really is one of the best bases for transmutation. He stands back up and looks through the glass, relieved that he managed to calibrate the glass correctly, and sure enough, he can make out Xerxes's ruins in the distance.
Dropping to sit, throwing his legs over the side of the column, Ed takes a moment to consider. It's definitely at least twenty-five miles off, which, while doable, is going to suck in this heat. He can feel his automail port heating up, which is far from ideal, but traveling at night has its own risks.
Not many though, since he has his alchemy back.
That's something he has no idea how to feel about. It's been nearly ten years since he had his alchemy. He was used to not having it, has never regretted giving it up for Al, but he has no idea what the repercussions of him getting it back are. It's both amazing to have it back and terrifying. What if Truth took Al back as a toll for him getting his gate back? Ed never tried to recover it, even though he missed it like another limb, it was an acceptable loss. Having Al back whole and healthy enough had been enough. Just like sacrificing his arm again for Roy's sight had been worth it. He had been at peace with his decisions.
Now he has alchemy back, and all he can do is hope that Truth hasn't decided that Ed regaining it demands a further toll. They're in Amestris, so if he can get to civilization, maybe he can get in contact with Al and find out for himself.
As for Roy… well, the soul array on his wrist is active for the first time since they had fallen into that other world. It's just a barely noticeable but consistent warmth, none of the vague tugging that tells him what direction Roy is in like it used to have. He takes that to mean that Roy didn't get pulled through with him this time, and he doesn't know why it didn't work, but he'll figure it out. Amestris, as much as he loves and misses it, isn't home if Roy isn't here.
If Roy still wants him…
He shakes his head, forcing that thought out of his mind. Given the option, he knows Roy would want to come home, so Ed is going to figure out how to send JJ and Morgan back to their world and pull Roy back to theirs. Once he does that… if Roy decides… Well, he'll deal with that then. He's not giving up on Roy, giving up on them until Roy tells him it's over with his own mouth.
He claps again to send the column back to the ground, jumping off a few feet from the ground as it dissolves back into sand.
"So the Xerxes ruins are a solid twenty miles in that direction," he says, pointing east with the spyglass.
"Where did you get that?" Morgan asks.
"I transmuted it," Ed says as if the answer should be obvious. He has to remind himself that they only barely believe alchemy is a thing, much less have any real frame of reference for what it can do. "Anyway, the Xerxes ruins are about thirty miles in that direction, which probably puts us more than 150 miles from Amestris's borders. So, unless you want to trek more 150 miles through the desert, we should aim for the ruins."
"A hundred fifty miles?" JJ asks, looking stunned.
"As much as I don't want to hike 150 miles through the desert, what good does getting to these ruins do us?" Morgan points out.
Ed claps to transmute a coat stand and also a lean-to for shade. JJ and Morgan both startle, but they gratefully accept the shade while Ed pulls off his jacket and hangs it up.
Morgan blinks at him. "Was a coat rack really necessary?" he asks.
"I'd prefer not to get sand everywhere in it," Ed says with a shrug. He pulls off his sweater, hangs it next to the coat, then he unbuttons his longsleeve shirt, leaving him in his tanktop.
" Ed !" JJ gasps.
He blinks at her. "Right," he says, feeling stupid. Somehow, the moment he realized he was back in Amestris, eight years of neurotically protecting his automail has gone straight out the window. "Uh, there's a reason I didn't let you see the shoulder connection."
"Is that bolted into your chest?" she demands, aghast.
"Well, yeah. It kind of has to be. It's heavy and has to be anchored or it could get yanked out," he explains. "Though these carbon fiber composites are a lot lighter than my original steel ones." He then turns to the shirts and claps, reconstructing them, grateful that he never developed a taste for artificial textiles. Organics are mostly carbon when you boil them down, and that's a piece of cake for Ed to work with. He hands the two scarves that were his sweater to Morgan and JJ. "To cover your heads, protect your faces," he says.
"Is there anything you can't do?" Morgan asks, sounding somewhere between irritated and amazed.
"Of course there is," Ed says dismissively. "Alchemy is a science, not magic. There are limitations on it. Equivalent exchange for one. You can't make something out of nothing." He can see Morgan and JJ trading skeptical looks as they wrap the scarves around their heads, but they don't make any snarky remarks, so he ignores it. "So, do we want to start making the trek in the heat, or do we want to chill out here till the sun mostly goes down?"
JJ and Morgan trade looks. "Is it possible that we need to stay here?" Morgan asks.
Ed frowns. "To get pulled back into your world?" he asks. Morgan nods. "No way. I mean, I can put up a column or whatever so we can get back here if we need to, but no, there's no reason we should be geographically tied to a location. Not for this. If that were the case, I'd have expected us to land down south, which is where I was when I got pulled through to your world almost nine years ago. But Roy was in Central, which is Amestris's capital, which is—hold for it—right in the center of Amestris. He was over a hundred miles from where I was, but when we got pulled through, we landed in the same place."
Burying his face in his hands, Morgan hunches and kind of looks like he wants to huddle up in a corner until he wakes up and finds this has all been a terrible nightmare.
"Why did Mustang get pulled through when you did?" JJ asks. "If you were so far apart."
Right. He holds up his left wrist. "Soul alchemy. I had him bind our souls together about, I dunno, four months before we got yanked through to your world."
They're both gaping at him again, and he really wishes they'd stop doing that, but, well, he remembers how his and Roy's heads spun when they encountered all the insane tech in their world, so he figures finding out about alchemy and what it can do is probably about equivalent.
"I—You—But—" In other circumstances, watching Morgan trying to decide what to say, cutting himself off, and restarting again would be funny. Okay, even in these circumstances, Ed can't help but be a little bit amused.
"Spit it out," Ed baits, sticking his hands in his pockets.
Morgan drags his hands down his face. "I don't even know where to begin."
"Let it percolate for a while," Ed suggests, turning back to JJ. "Something to add?"
"You had Mustang bind your souls together?" she asks, eyes hard. "Why did you have him do that?"
He really should have realized that she would jump to the conclusion that Roy manipulated him into allowing it. Beyond tired of this discussion, he says, "I couldn't, at the time. Some stuff happened and I couldn't do alchemy anymore. But Roy doesn't know shit about soul alchemy. I designed the array and had to walk him through it."
"You were… seventeen? What rational thirty-one-year-old man ties his soul to a seventeen-year-old?" Morgan demands.
Rolling his eyes, Ed stares up at the ceiling of their lean-to. "Look, I know you're trying to compartmentalize and focusing on my relationship with Roy instead of focusing on the fact that you're in another world that has something that appears, from your perspective, to be magic, is a lot easier to handle. But knock it off. I'm done having this conversation. There's a lot of shit you don't know about and can't understand, and it made sense for both of us to want to be able to keep tabs on one another's well-being." He looks at them again, and they both look absolutely miserable. "No one who knew us both did more than raise eyebrows when we got together. Think about that, okay? Not my teacher, not her husband, not Roy's second-in-command, not his team, not my brother . Hell, even Olivier didn't make a stink when I had to transfer to her command 'cause of frat regs."
JJ has gone startlingly pale considering how hot it is out here. "Frat regs?" she asks.
Ed tracks back his words and promptly realizes he's a fucking moron . Where the fuck is his brain? Did getting dropped back into Amestris just fry all of his common sense? Eight years of hiding his past with these people and the moment they land in Amestris, he becomes a fucking sieve ?
Well, the moment they hit civilization, they're going to find out anyway. He's simply way too high profile for them not to. It's probably best to get them through the shock before they're surrounded. Honestly, even telling them now is probably not going to prepare them for the reality of who Ed is.
"I'm… kinda famous here," he starts, trying to figure out how to explain child soldier without sending them into absolute meltdown mode.
"How famous? Exactly?" Morgan asks, crossing his arms. "And for what?"
It's so tempting to hedge or mislead, but it's going to go to hell the minute they meet anyone who knows of him, and he's going to have to lean on people knowing of him to get anything done. "The Amestris State Military has a special program to recruit alchemists. If you pass the tests, you become a State Alchemist. It's a prestige position, basically comes with a military commission, a big-ass budget and paycheck, and, of course, status."
"And how young were you, when you got this position?" JJ asks, voice a little faint.
There is really no way to pull this punch. "Twelve. The youngest in Amestris history."
"I need to sit down," JJ says, legs folding under her and sinking to the ground in what Ed can call a controlled fall, but only barely.
"That's how you met Mustang, isn't it?" Morgan asks while JJ buries her face in her hands. "Joining the military?"
It would be so easy to lie. The fact that Roy effectively recruited him might never come up. But if it did …
His hesitation must have been obvious on his face, because Morgan shoulders tense and he says, "That's not how you met, is it?"
Ed rubs the back of his neck with his flesh hand. "No," he admits. "Roy heard about me and my brother and came to talk to us about joining the military." He sees the horror on their faces and rushes to assure them, "Rumors said we were like, thirty, or something! He was appalled when he realized we were just kids."
"But he recruited you anyway."
"Well, I'd just committed the crime of human transmutation and lived through it, so to be fair , he could have just had me arrested. Human transmutation officially carries a death sentence." He shrugs, ignoring the wide-eyed fish impressions they're giving him. "Instead, he told me to come see him when I recovered. And in his defense, the usual timeline for recovering from automail surgery is three years, and I hadn't even had the surgery yet when he found me. He didn't expect me to show up in Central for the test a year later."
" Death sentence ?" JJ says, voice faint.
"Well, technically ," Ed says. "But like, 80% of attempted human transmutations kill the alchemist in the rebound, and even the ones that survive, well, generally those of us who do survive pay enough of a price for it, the military isn't real eager to finish the job." He knocks his arm on his leg to make the point. He is not getting into the whole needing alchemists who have committed the taboo to sacrifice to a nation-wide array thing. Depending on who they run into here, that whole debacle could come up, but Ed's not going to go there if he can avoid it. They're looking dangerously shocky as it is.
It reminds Ed that their standards of fucked-up shit are still very human based. Not that he isn't enraged or furious about the shit he sees working for the BAU, but compared to the kind of shit he's seen, it's just never been… quite the same magnitude of fucked-up. It hasn't given him the same kinds of nightmares. It feels terrible to even think it, but the psychos they deal with in the BAU are, honestly, mundane in comparison. Even the really creative ones.
Considering how these veterans of human terribleness still sometimes react, Ed isn't eager to add to their nightmares.
"What is this? A military dictatorship?" Morgan asks, sounding more like himself.
Right . "Yeah," Ed says, "That's exactly what it is."
No way is he going to sit in here, playing Twenty Questions with Shocked and Horrified until sundown. Ed claps, taking a heartbeat to fix the array he wants in his mind, then puts up a column, dismantles their lean-to back down to sand, and stretches to put markers up in a straight line toward Xerxes for as far as he can sense. He's not entirely sure how far they go, but when he stands back up, he can't see where they end, and the waist-height poles are in a dead-straight line running toward the ruined city. He takes his own modified shirt and pulls the new poncho-like construction over his head, pulling up the hood to shield his face, then picks his two full water bottles back up.
"C'mon," he says, calling over his shoulder as he begins walking along his line of poles. "I can tap into the groundwater, but I can't make food out of nothing. Last time I came through Xerxes, there were refugees there at least." His boots are real leather, but they're real leather from the other world, which means they're processed to high hell, so he would prefer to go hungry for a bit than try to stew them the way he had to in Gluttony's stomach.
Ed is definitely okay with never having to eat blood-stewed leather ever again. He's pretty sure that Morgan and JJ would have to be a lot more desperate than he was to even consider stewing his boots. It's probably a sign of how soft he's gotten in the US that the prospect of stewing and eating his boots is less unappealing than the prospect of stomping through this desert without a shoe. Blood is one thing, sand is something else entirely. It could take him fucking weeks to get it out of his automail. Especially because he wouldn't have to stew the leather in blood this time. He could just use water, and not water transmuted from blood. Even if he knows he transmuted every molecule that was H or O out of it, the blood-water still had that copper tang. Not inedible, but hardly appetizing.
...Not that the leather was either.
When was the last time he ate? He's only been in the desert for, what, half an hour, and he's contemplating eating his shoes? They're fifty miles from Xerxes at the absolute worst , and he doubts it's half that. Once upon a time he wouldn't have thought anything of hiking twenty-plus miles on foot.
Fuck, he's gone soft. Al is going to laugh his ass off at him, and rightfully so.
The thought of getting to see Al again— he's alive, he still has a body, Truth couldn't have taken him again, he will be there! —perks him up a little.
.o0o.o0o.o0o.
Most of the time, Heinkel is pleased with his and Darius's decisions to leave the military and attach themselves to the other Elric brother after the Lieutenant Colonel went missing. Life isn't necessarily less eventful, it's just a different kind of eventful. Heinkel long ago accepted that the Elrics are simply magnets for weird shit. At least Alphonse's type of weird tends to be less violent.
What they maybe didn't expect was that attaching themselves to Alphonse would mean attaching themselves to a Xing princess. Not that they don't like Mei, but she is like a scary combination of both the Lieutenant Colonel and Alphonse. Upon first meeting, she seems more like Alphonse: calm, competent, polite. That dainty frame hides a martial artist he thinks would give the Colonel a run for his money at his best. She also has a temper.
Having met the women in the Elrics' lives—Mrs. Curtis, Miss Rockbell—Heinkel supposes he shouldn't be surprised.
But protecting Alphonse these days means extending that protection to his fiancee, so he's trekking through the desert on her heels in the heat of the day to track down whatever "disturbance" there was in the Dragon's Pulse. Of course she didn't want a military escort, or an escort of any sort. She grudgingly accepted Heinkel's company only because Alphonse guilted her into it. Heinkel got to come because his lion is better adapted to the desert than Darius's gorilla. Even after nearly a decade of familiarity, Heinkel still finds Alphonse's people-manipulating skills frightening at times. He much prefers the Lieutenant Colonel's directness, though he'd been getting a little more shrewd before he disappeared. Heinkel blamed General Mustang's influence.
The sun must have him in a maudlin mood. The Lieutenant Colonel's absence is still felt, but not usually quite so present. Maybe it's just the birth of Mei and Alphonse's daughter that's made his absence so noticeable recently.
Not that you'd be able to tell Mei is only six months removed from childbirth…
Blue-white static arches from the ground, making Mei and Heinkel jump back from it. Waist-high poles rise in a straight line before them, spaced evenly about every ten feet until they disappear behind them.
Heinkel and Mei exchange glances. There's no one visible on the horizon, and the only alchemists that Heinkel can think of who have that kind of range are Alphonse, Mrs. Curtis, and…
The wind shifts, bringing the scent of people on it. "There are three people up ahead," he informs Mei. "A woman and two men. One is…" he trails off, because he knows that scent. It's tickling at the back of memory, changed and not quite right anymore, but familiar. Maybe he wouldn't have recognized it so quickly if the Lieutenant Colonel hadn't been so top of mind, but he could almost swear…
Mei is a mindreader—he doesn't care how much she protests—so she asks, "Who is it?"
Heinkel shifts to his chimera form to better pick up the scent, and he's almost sure… but it couldn't be, could it?
"Heinkel," Mei says, and it is not a request. At her side, Xiao-Mei has scented the wind and is growling as well, every bit as suspicious as Heinkel is.
"Let's go," he says. "I don't want to say anything, in case I'm wrong."
Mei narrows her eyes at him, looking between Heinkel and Xiao-Mei suspiciously, before eyeing the poles in the sand.
"All right then," she says, and Heinkel already knows she's going to make him regret this. "Let's continue on, shall we?" She holds out a hand to suggest he goes first.
As if he intended to do otherwise. He shoots a look to Xiao-Mei, who dutifully brings up the rear. He lifts his head to scent the air again as another gust brings the scent of people to him.
Electricity and tinder and oil and metal and leather, the tang of sweat, and something beneath that Heinkel's human brain has never been able to name, but his creature brain calls bright .
There are only three people who have ever smelled bright . One is dead. One is back at Xerxes. The other…
He puts his head down and makes himself walk faster, his animal brain saying yes, yes, yes, the pride! The pride leader! while his human brain is afraid to hope.