Ed's head throbs. He knows it's a stress headache, but he hasn't had one in a long time, and if he's going to miss anything from the other world, their over-the-counter medications for pain are probably going to be it. Sure, they did fuck-all when his automail was acting up or when the weather sucked, but for the headaches? They were brilliant.

He and Roy had looked up the chemical compositions for the most common—and effective—ones, but they were never 100% on the exact ratios and proportions, and there were a few ingredients in it that Ed wasn't familiar with, so he's not quite certain enough of the ratios to try to recreate them himself.

Maybe I should tell Roy to bring a fucking medicine cabinet with him when I bring him back, he thinks, and his heart flutters with hope.

There's a bang in the doorway, then Elicia comes in. She's carrying a tray with a whole tea service on it and moves with confidence into the room, setting it on the table in front of Ed.

"Hey," he says, his heart softening and aching in equal measures at seeing her again. Gone is the little girl he once knew, and she's now well on her way to being a woman. Her hair is pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail today, but nearly to her waist, her bangs styled like her mother's. She's almost Gracia's striking mirror image except for her eyes. Her eyes are all her father's.

"Hey," she echoes, setting out the service. "Where'd Al go?" she asks.

Ed rubs at his temples for a moment. "He went to go help out with Eden and give Mei a break," he says. "I'm sorry," he adds.

She startles and pauses in whatever she was doing with the tea. He catches wafts of chamomile, ginger, maybe even some clove, and Ed doesn't know how those things all belong together, but she seems very confident in her handling of them.

"Why are you sorry?" she asks.

"That… we weren't here? That Roy wasn't here." He can't help but rub at the tattoo on his wrist. "If it weren't for me—"

"Do you really think he would rather be stuck here, without you?" Elicia asks, blunt enough that he winces.

Ed knows that he wouldn't want to be stuck separated from Roy in another world, but maybe, maybe if they had been separated, he would have looked harder for a way back? Maybe he would have found a way sooner? It's only been a couple days, and already he's so much closer to breaching the barrier between worlds than he and Roy got in the better part of a decade in the other world.

A sharp clatter startles him out of his thoughts, and he looks back up at Elicia.

"You have nothing to apologize for," she tells him firmly, making it hard to reconcile her with the girl who had stubbornly stuck to his side when he first got back here. "I know you, and I know Uncle Roy. You did everything you could to get back to us. You're here now, and you're going to get Uncle Roy back. That's what's important."

Does she get that pragmatism from Hughes or from Gracia, Ed wonders. He didn't know either of them as well as he should have, he suspects. To them, he's pretty sure he'd still be, on some level, a child, even though Hughes knew of his role in the military. In their home was the one place he had, just a little bit, let himself be his age.

"What are you making?" he asks, then blinks when she pulls papers with pentagram-based arrays on them out.

"I've been studying alkahestry with Al and Mei since we arrived," she explains, taking the care to place the papers in a pentagon, then setting the teapot and the bowls with what looked like leaves and herb in them inside the pentagon as well. She pulls out a piece of chalk and, with the care of someone still unused to drawing circles, she makes a circle around the outside of the pentagon.

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, probably fixing the steps needed in her mind, then places her hands outside the array. She breathes out slowly, and the familiar crackle of alchemical lightning dances around the pot and bowls for a minute before fading. There's less tea leaf in the bowls, and the pot is now steaming as well. Ed can see the equation for combining both the leaf and heating the water.

When Elicia opens her eyes, a pleased smile spreads across her lips, but not a surprised one. She takes a teacup off the tray and turns it upright, then pours a cup for him, setting the pot down once she has to hand it to him.

"Very fancy," he can't resist teasing her, before pointing to some of the markings on the pentagrams making up the larger array. "So what's the value of making tea with alchemy instead of just letting it steep?" he asks curiously, wrapping his flesh hand around the bowl of the cup to feel the heat seeping through it. Cautiously, he sips at the tea, finding it the perfect edge of almost too-hot. "Really good job with the temperature."

Elicia's smile stays, but he sees the pleased blush dust her cheeks at the compliment. "This method allows us to intensify the medicinal qualities of the leaf," she explains, sounding altogether too grown up. Then again, she's probably thirteen now. Ed had already been in the military at her age.

The very thought makes his head throb even more.

"Drink your tea," Elicia says it like it's a suggestion, but it's a very Gracia-like suggestion, which means it's really more of a command than a suggestion, but who in their right mind would refuse Gracia anything?

Ed drinks the tea while Elicia prepares her own. He can taste clove and ginger notes beneath the chamomile. He doesn't think the combination should work, but it's oddly soothing, and even just the scent seems to be helping his headache.

"So alkahestry, huh?" Ed asks, part of his mind idly puzzling its way through some of the more unfamiliar marking on the pentagrams. He'd learned over the years that sometimes not focusing all of his attention on a problem allowed his brain to access some of the information Truth had given him better than focusing intently on it.

Sitting across from him, Elicia finally takes her own mug and says, "Yup."

"Alchemy too?"

She takes a sip of her tea and shakes her head. "Only a little, and only supplementary," she says. "I want to be able to use it to heal people, like Mei can. Alkahestry's more suited for healing than traditional alchemy is."

Ed couldn't argue that. "So no State Alchemist path for you?"

"No," she says with an almost disdainful snort that he very much approves of. Then her eyes light up. "I'd like to go back to Xing with Al and Mei when they go back—well," she interrupts herself, "if they go back. I don't know how long they're planning to stay here, but Mei says there's actually a school in the capital that I could study at."

"That'd be amazing," Ed tells her honestly. Studying alchemy in the west has always been a teacher-apprentice relationship. Alchemists tend to guard their secrets jealously, and they don't freely share information. "How's your mom feel about it?"

The excitement in her eyes banks slightly, and Ed is sad to see it dim. "I think…" She hesitates, shifting her cup between her hands with care so it doesn't spill. "I think she'd let me go," she says finally. "But I think she'd be really sad if I went."

"I can see that," Ed admits. He can't imagine precisely how Gracia must feel at the prospect of her one and only child going halfway across the known world to study, but he's seen enough bereaved parents to know how badly she'd be destroyed if anything ever happened to Elicia. "At least you should have a few more years before you have to make a decision?"

Elicia sighs. "I know," she says, but her posture is still slightly slumped. "Al and Mei both tell me I have a talent for it, and I can certainly study with them as long as we're all here—however long that'll be—but I just…" She huffs, then looks up and meets Ed's eyes. "I want to see more. I want to experience more."

Ed could certainly relate with that desire. That desire for adventure, that need to be doing something is almost certainly all Maes Hughes. "I get that," he says, and he really means it. "I've never been that great at being stuck in one spot."

"What did you do in the other world?" Elicia asks, curious.

"A lot of the same things as here, actually," he admits. "Mostly chased bad guys."

"What'd Uncle Roy do?"

Ed grins. "He's a teacher," he says, taking a serene sip of his tea while enjoying watching Elicia almost spit her own out.

"That." She pounds on her chest and clears a cough from her chest. "That doesn't seem very much like Uncle Roy," she admits.

Having had a lot of time to think about it over the years, Ed says, "He's actually really good at it. Put that obnoxious charisma to good use and make stupid kids listen to what he's trying to teach them."

"That never worked on you though," she says, and it's Ed's turn to nearly choke on his tea. He gives her a side-eye, honestly not sure if that zinger was intentional or innocent. There's a spark of amusement in her eye that makes him think it was more intentional than not, but he lets it slide anyway.

"Yeah, well, I wasn't ever a particularly good student, and it's really hard to make someone who knows your science better than you do to listen," he says. "I never really saw Roy as my teacher in any meaningful capacity. He was my boss, sure, but my teacher?" He shook his head. "At least where alchemy is concerned, I've probably forgotten more than Roy's ever known."

Well, maybe that was true before Roy had gone through the Gate, but the Gate hadn't seemed to have poured nearly as much raw information into Roy as it had into Ed. He wasn't sure if his still-developing brain had simply been capable of accepting the knowledge better at the time, or if it was just Truth being its fucking capricious self yet again.

"I didn't know you could use Uncle Roy's alchemy," Elicia says, frowning.

"I can," he says with a shrug. "Though nowhere near as well as he can. His control with it is something else, but if I need to blow shit up or just set a basic fire, I can do those."

"Can Al?" she asks.

Ed doesn't particularly like the direction this discussion is going, and he says, "I don't know." Which is actually true. "You'd have to ask him." He suspects that Al's good enough to have figured out the basics from seeing Roy's arrays on his gloves, just like Ed had, but he doesn't know if Al's ever gone to the trouble of actually figuring out how to use it. In truth, flame alchemy doesn't have a whole lot of use outside combat, or rather, almost no one would bother learning it for any reason except combat. You could use it to forge, probably, but it'd probably be more work than just working a traditional forge, and with a significantly finer margin for error. "Why do you want to know?" he asks.

"I just…" She trails off, biting her lip as if considering. "I just… I want to be as strong as you and Uncle Roy, that's all."

"You'll be able to do that by learning under Al and Mei," he tells her. "They were instrumental during the Promised Day, you know, Mei especially." Al's sacrifice had been instrumental, but it had been Mei's alkahestry that had been invaluable. It had probably saved them all to give them the chance they needed.

"I know," she says.

"Hey," Ed says, drawing her attention up to him again. "Wanting to be a hero's not the worst goal out there, but you don't need to be the next Flame Alchemist to help change the world. You're going to help so many more people with what Mei can teach you than you ever could from learning Roy's alchemy."

Her shoulders slump. "I know," she says. "I don't even really want to be able to do it, I don't think. I just… miss him, you know?"

"Roy wouldn't want you to learn his alchemy to feel closer to him," Ed says firmly, trying to breathe around the emotional punch to his solar plexus at her words. "He also loved alchemy before he started studying flame alchemy. Any alchemy should make you feel closer to him."

"It made me feel closer to you," she admits with a sad little laugh. "I really, really missed you." Tears start to well in her eyes, and she tries to blink them away furiously.

Ed doesn't decide to move, there is simply no world in which he won't go to a crying Elicia. He takes her into his arms and lets her bury her face in his shoulder. He rubs her back, murmuring, "I'm here. Just let it out. I'm here."

"Please bring him back," she says. "Please bring Uncle Roy back too!"

"I will," he promises. Over her shoulder, he's still looking at the paper pentagrams laid out on the table, and something seems to be coming together.

Infusion. Strengthening. Amplifying. Concentrating. The array concentrates and strengthens the potency of the leaves for the tea.

More pieces lock together in his head. He doesn't have the whole picture, not yet, but he's almost there—he can almost see the image the pieces are making.

"I'm going to bring him home," he says it with all the gravity of an oath. And not just Roy, he promises himself. I'm going to do everything in my power to bring your dad home too. The next time you cry, it's going to be from joy. I swear.

I swear.