It's only been a day, but Derek's heart jumps in his chest at Ed's announcement. "We might have a way back?" he asks.

"You are not going back through the Gate," Al says as if it is in no way up for debate.

"It's not like I'm going to fucking experiment with it or anything," Ed replies, waving his hand dismissively.

"Of course not," Al says. "Because that's certainly not something you would do. My brother would never blunder into a situation blindly and just assume he can find a way to make everything work."

Ed has the grace to wince, and in virtually any other circumstance, Derek would be amused to watch someone be able to knock Ed down a few pegs, but under this isn't other circumstances. These are the ones in which Derek and JJ are in a world that isn't theirs and have people they love and miss at home and—

Looking at Al standing in front of Ed, seeing the two of them arguing in the familiar way that family do, without missing a beat, without the slightest hesitation, Derek realizes, Ed has lived with this feeling for over eight years. The only thing from his world he had to cling to was Mustang. He didn't even have someone he trusted to explain how the world worked, they just had to figure it out all on their own and hope that they could find a way to make a living.

"Well, you're sure not doing anything tonight!" Winry chimes in, plopping herself down on Ed's lap.

"Winry!" Ed yelps, scandalized, but she's not paying much attention as she expertly divests him of his shirt.

"Ah, so much easier to get to it this way," she says, reaching for his automail arm.

Ed tries to move away, but unless he's willing to dump her on the floor, there's really not much of anywhere he can go. "You just reattached it!"

"And now I'm unattaching it again because you need an upgrade," she tells him. There's the soft hiss of compression, and the arm comes off. She hands it blindly to Al, who takes it with a look of longsuffering.

"Al, give it back!"

"You won't do anything too reckless if you don't have your arm," Al informs almost cheerfully.

"I'm not going to do anything stupid!"

Winry snorts at that, and Derek doesn't blame her because he doesn't believe Ed either.

"Are you taking your pants off or am I?"

"Fuck's sake, Win—"

"Okay, that's a me—" She gets off his lap and reaches for waist of his pants, only to have her batted away.

"Fucking!" Ed cuts himself off. "If you had just fucking asked and done this in motherfucking order , this would have been a lot easier," he grouses but handles the button and zipper on his pants with ease. He does let Winry help him shimmy the pants off, leaving him in just boxer shorts printed with a bunch of chemistry symbols. She kneels to take off Ed's leg with the same ease and comfort as she had his arm.

"All right then," Winry says.

"Can't you get me a fucking temp?" Ed complains.

"Why? So you can run around and do more irresponsible things?"

"I am not irresponsible!"

"Since when, exactly?"

"Children!" Mrs. Curtis's voice snaps across the room, and they both look at least a little bit cowed by the slight woman.

" Ed ," JJ says next to him, part pity, part horror as Winry moves out of the way and is no longer blocking Ed. Derek would be more amused at the banter and at seeing someone browbeat Ed, but he isn't exactly trying to look, but it's hard not to.

Turning to look at them, Ed blinks and seems to realize that he's nearly naked, and he reaches up to scratch at the back of his neck. "Sorry," he says. "I know it's pretty hideous—"

" What happened to you?" JJ asks, nearly a cry.

Derek understands why she's so upset. He's used to thinking of Ed as the near-invulnerable ball of pure stubborn will and borderline arrogance. Seeing the automail joinings, the honestly shocking mounds of scar tissue around both his shoulder and thigh—it's different than seeing them partially obscured by his tanktop— seeing more scars, so many more , Derek is suddenly aware of exactly how fragile Ed actually is. Despite the defined muscle in his shoulder and his chest, muscle gained in part from hauling around what were clearly heavy prosthetics, he looks small on the bed. His collar abruptly ends where there should be a shoulder, and it makes him look unbalanced and incomplete. It is wrong to see Ed like this. Wrong to see him this vulnerable.

"You haven't seen the automail?" Winry asks, sounding surprised but not at all upset. Of course she's not. She's Ed's automail mechanic. She's used to seeing him like this.

"It's not just…" JJ trails, taking a shaky breath. "It's not just the automail," she says, reaching out a hand that is steady despite her obvious upset. She stops shy of touching Ed, but the scar on his side is… it's a terrible thing. His whole torso, his remaining arm, even his legs are littered with small lines, permanent marks of what were once wounds. Against his complexion, the scars are pale and pink and impossible not to notice. Next to the automail scars, the one on his abdomen is the worst.

How on earth had he ever hidden this from them?

Ed takes JJ's hand, bringing it to the large scar. "It's healed," he tells her, gentle, soft, the way he is with victims when they need someone soft, someone who understands.

Derek wishes he never wondered how Ed could understand.

"It's old, and it's healed, and I'm okay," he says, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand.

" How?" she asks, not a demand as much as it is a plea.

Derek sees Al open his mouth but Ed shakes his head.

"These are old, Jayge," he tells her. "They're all from a long time ago."

"That doesn't answer my question!" she tells him, somewhere between hurt and angry.

"It's not important."

"It is—"

"JJ," Derek breaks in, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. She turns and looks at him, and he's seen JJ like this before, and it is not a good thing. It's not quite the same look as when he physically dragged her out of that warehouse not so long ago, but it's close. It's wild and desperate, a mother in desperate protection mode.

But Ed is not a child. He does not need her to defend him. He did, once, the proof of that is literally carved into his skin. Someone should have protected him, and no one did, and despite what Ed has tried to do, despite how he's tried to keep them all at arm's length while he's been with the team, he is theirs . He has been hurt, he has been failed, and Derek has to stomp down the outrage in his own chest.

Another child they failed. Another child they couldn't save.

"Jayge," Ed says, drawing her attention back to him. "You have never failed me, okay? Never."

"But—"

" Never ," he reiterates, every bit as fierce as Derek has ever heard him. He glances up to meet Derek's eyes and says, "Neither of you have ever failed me. None of this, not a single scar , is from my time with the BAU. Do you understand that?"

Derek has to run a hand over his face, heart heavy. "Ed," he starts, sounding as tired and old as he feels in the moment. "That you feel you're safer chasing down serial criminals for a living than whatever you were doing here before is not a comfort."

"It's not that it's safer ," Ed protests, looking frustrated. "It's not about being safer. It's about being smarter . It's about caring about what happens to me. It's about making sure I don't do stupid shit and that I would always, always be able to come home to Roy. It's not about the job being safe. It's about me being safe."

"You had this," Derek points out, motioning to Mrs. Curtis, Al, and Winry, who all look like they don't really know what to do. They don't know JJ and Derek, not really. The Ed they know isn't quite the Ed that he and JJ know. They know the child soldier he was; he and JJ know the man that Ed is now. "You had all these people who obviously loved and cared about you—"

"I had a mission," Ed interrupts. "I had to save my brother. And if I had to die doing that, it would have been equivalent exchange." He meets Derek's eyes squarely, unflinching, as stubborn and bullheaded as ever. "These"—He runs his hand over the automail join at his shoulder, down to the scar in his side, then down the scars around his thigh.—"are all the proof of my sins."

"You were a child ," JJ says, voice cracking.

"I was arrogant," he corrects her, and there is no arguing with it. "I may have been naive, but I knew damn well that the greatest taboo in alchemy was that you can't bring back the dead . I knew that , and I just fucking thought I knew better than hundreds of years of alchemists who came before."

"Because you were a child," JJ insists.

He's not convinced. Derek can see it in the lines in his face, in the shadows in his eyes. "No one touches Truth and comes out unscathed," he says. "Most alchemists don't survive the attempt at all. I don't deserve your sympathy, JJ." He reaches out and tucks some of her hair behind her ear, and it's still almost wrong to see Ed willingly touching people. "I remember standing there, before Truth. I remember it cracking my head open and pouring knowledge… so much knowledge…"

Derek doesn't think he's imagining the almost longing note in Ed's voice. He's seen Ed devour knowledge about anything and everything that interests him, at rates that would be difficult to believe if he didn't know Spencer. He's seen that thirst, that desire to understand, and he can well believe that Ed could fall prey to sheer desire to know more.

"It wasn't your fault," Al says softly.

Ed scoffs at that, but Al doesn't argue, not because he doesn't disagree but because he clearly knows that it's an argument he won't win.

"Anyway, my goal was restoring Al. I needed to survive to do that, but if the only way to restore him was to sacrifice myself… I'd have done it."

"Brother!"

Derek happens to glance up and catch the look on Mrs. Curtis's face. It's pained, not just from hearing how little Ed had valued his own life, but for something else. Something more like empathy than suffering.

Al steps over to Ed and pokes him in the chest hard. " We were always going to restore ourselves together! I would never have let you sacrifice your life for mine! I'd have refused to come back first!"

A soft chuff from Mrs. Curtis has them both settling down. "If you have ever wondered why these two do the impossible, I think that tells you all you need to know." The grief and pain that had lined her face moments before is gone, and she grins, stepping over to them and ruffling both of their hair roughly, making both splutter. "Even Truth itself couldn't bend an Elric's will." There is unmistakable pride in her voice as she says it.

Winry's less than complimentary huff follows it and says, "You're giving these idiots too much credit. They're too stupid to know when to give up, that's all." The words seem harsh as she takes Ed's limbs from Al, but she can't hide the affection in them.

"Hey!" they protest in unison.

"Al may be slightly less stupid."

"Obviously," Mrs. Curtis chimes in.

"Traitors, all of you," Ed informs in mock disgust. "Get out of here. I'm tired. If you're not going to give me a temp, Win, the least you can do is stop picking on me."

Winry grins at him. "Such a good boy—"

" Fuck off ."

"What, doesn't General Mustang—"

Before she can finish the leering tease, Al slaps a hand over her mouth. "Let's go, Winry. I'm sure Mei is going to come looking for me soon, and you wanted to get some work done on Ed's automail tonight, right?"

He hesitates before removing his hand, looking ready to reapply it if she insists on continuing in the same vein. She shoots Al a look that clearly says that she'll let it go for now, but she is doing so under protest. "I do need to get these upgraded. These are way too heavy," she says, hefting the limbs as if they're weights.

"Get her out of here before I have to beat her to death with one of her precious pieces of art," Ed says, flopping back on the bed.

"At least you acknowledge they are art," she says haughtily, then smiles for JJ and Derek. "Good night, both of you."

Ed sits back up at that, levering himself up a little awkwardly onto one elbow. "Don't you have your own rooms?" he asks.

"We were staying with you," Derek says, motioning to the bunk bed setup that Al had transmuted for them out of the wall.

"We thought it was best they stay close to you with the array active," Al explains. "Anyway, good night, Brother, Mr. Morgan. Ms. Jareau."

"In the morning, brat," Mrs. Curtis says like it's a threat.

Ed drops again, putting his hand over his eyes. "See you in the morning," he says, less than enthusiastic.

When the door closes behind them, Derek says, "What was that about?"

"She wants to spar," Ed says.

"While you're missing an arm and a leg?"

"Winry'll probably have something in the morning. She is one of the best automail mechanics in the country. Maybe the best, by now," he says.

JJ moves to sit next to him, looking more like her normal self. "Are you okay?" she asks as Derek pulls out one of the chairs at the little table in the corner of the room to sit.

Snorting, Ed moves his hand off his eyes. "Shouldn't I be asking you that? I haven't had two arms and two legs since I was eleven. I don't particularly like having the automail detached, but that shouldn't be a surprise."

"You feel vulnerable," Derek says.

He can see Ed roll his eyes from where he's sitting. "I am vulnerable," he says pointedly. "But the bigger thing is that the phantom pains are a bitch when they're detached. The automail stimulates the nerve ends well enough that it mitigates a lot of them, but once my nerves figure out they're not going to be getting any stimulation in a few hours, it's gonna fucking suck ."

JJ sighs. "Is there anything we can do to help?"

"I keep telling you that alchemy isn't magic. We don't have anything here that helps with the phantom pains more than it does in your world."

An odd sense of resignation hangs in the air before JJ breaks the silence and says, "You were just a child, Ed."

"Not this again—"

"No," she says, in that mom voice that she's developed since Henry was born. "You need to listen. You need to hear it. You were a child. " She reaches over, hesitates, then when Ed doesn't flinch, she straightens his bangs, soothing them down. "Someone should have been there. Someone should have seen."

"She's right," Derek feels compelled to support her.

With a sigh so deep that Derek can see his chest rise and fall, Ed concedes, "Maybe." He stares at the ceiling for a long moment, and they wait, knowing more is coming. "Maybe someone should have known. But… I don't know how they could have. Human transmutation… alchemists have spent their entire careers trying to get close to it. No one expected a ten- and eleven-year-old boy to actually crack it. It should have been impossible. No one teaches that shit. Sources about it are destroyed on sight. Anyone who wants to dabble in it has to pull it together from scratch."

Derek frowns. "How long did it take you?"

"About a year," Ed admits. "We weren't the kind of kids that people knew how to handle. Winry helped with my automail surgery when she was eleven. Al's probably written books about shit that everyone thought was impossible by now. I taught myself how to do alchemy from my old man's books, and then I taught Al because Winry doesn't have the aptitude or interest. No one is supposed to learn it that way, but there weren't any other alchemists in our hometown. Mom just thought we took after fucking Hoenheim." He sighs again. "Maybe I was just an arrogant kid, but no one could have known. I knew better. I knew what I was doing. I just thought the rules didn't apply to me."

Neither JJ nor Derek can stop the small huffs of laughter at that.

Folding his arm behind his head, Ed says, "Yeah, I know. Not a lot has changed. Where alchemy is concerned, especially, the rules don't apply to me. You can't learn alchemy from a book. You can't intuit what things are made of, can't do calculations in your head in real time, can't do alchemy without an array, can't hold a complex array in your head…" He trails, frowning. "And you can't bring back the dead."

Something about his voice changes on the last item, and Derek says, "I thought you didn't succeed."

"Not with my mom, no," he says. "But… I thought… in the Gate… I thought I saw…" He pulls his hand out from behind his head and rubs his eyes. "I don't know. I'm probably wrong."

Before the quiet can grow too heavy, JJ says, "Why don't you sit up and let me brush your hair before we all call it a night?" When Ed turns to look at her, she adds, "It's kind of a rat's nest at the moment."

Ed levers himself up again, more fluidly this time, then turns to the side and puts his back toward them. "Sure," he says. "Better than having Winry try and pull it out."

He may grump, but the affection is clear. JJ pulls the holder from the end of his mussed braid. Before she begins unraveling it, her hand drops to a spot on Ed's back. There are fewer scars on it, but a large one that, if Derek isn't wrong, matches the one on his abdomen. She doesn't quite touch it, as if she can't bear to, instead moving to card her fingers through Ed's hair and unwind the braid.

"I was so sad when Henry decided to cut his hair," JJ says rather than commenting on the scar, nostalgia and longing both in her voice.

Ed must hear it too because he shifts to look over his shoulder. "I'll get you home," he promises again.

She meets his eyes. "I know you will," she says.

She does. So does Derek. But he's not sure that he believes that Ed will be coming home with them when he does.