One fight, two of her people down. Emily stares at Mustang, who still sleeps quietly after his surgery. She's already been in to check on Rossi, who came out surprisingly quickly and also woke up much sooner before falling back to sleep. They're going to keep him at least a few days to make sure that nothing really dangerous was punctured. Abdominal wounds can turn septic so terrifyingly fast…

Mustang was ushered into surgery immediately as well, hoping to save his eye even though he was unconscious. The doctor says they saved the eye itself, but he's doubtful Mustang will have much, if any, sight in it.

When did Mustang become one of hers, she wonders ? She doesn't like him, doesn't really trust him, and yet… he put himself at risk for them. He saved them. He could have run, abandoned them to deal with Kimblee, and they probably would have all died. Not just them, but Kimblee would have unquestionably killed so many more people, people who had no understanding of what he could do, people who'd never even be able to guess at his abilities. She owes Mustang the lives of all of her team, and she knows it.

Elric trusts and loves him. She keeps thinking about how young Elric is, but Reid joined the BAU at the same age, and she's never felt that Elric is a kid while she's worked with him. In fact, frustrating as she finds him sometimes, she trusts his judgment. He's like Reid in more than just his brilliance, he sees things differently, has genuine compassion mixed with ruthless pragmatism.

Maybe someone like Mustang, who is charming and a politician, cagey, holding all his cards close to his vest, is exactly what someone like Elric needs. Maybe someone like Elric is exactly what Mustang needs.

A soft murmur and rustle of sheets alerts her to Mustang waking. She gets up, getting him the ice chips he'll undoubtedly be wanting.

"Ed?" he asks, voice croaking.

"Emily, I'm afraid," she says, making sure to stand in his line of sight as his one good eye focuses. One of his hands comes up to touch the side that is currently bandaged, but he stops just shy of actually touching it. His good eye closes for a moment, his chest rising and falling with the kind of perfect slow rhythm people have when they're counting their breaths.

When he opens his eye again, he seems in control. "Maes?"

"Not going to ask about your eye first?" she asks, though she's pretty sure she already knows the answer.

He shrugs and says, "Ed would tell me I've still got two good legs." He tries to sit up, and she pushes him back down, grabbing the ice chips and letting him suck on a few. He barely lets it enter his mouth before shoving them to the side and repeating, "Maes?"

"He's fine," she assures, bemused in spite of herself. Of course this man would be more worried about his friend than himself. "I made him go get some sleep about an hour ago. He was making me crazy with his pacing."

A small smile twists Mustang's lips. "Sounds like him," he says. "Was anyone else hurt? I think I remember… Rossi?"

"Surgery, like you," Emily informs. "Shrapnel in the stomach isn't ever good, but so far, so good it seems." She glances around, then knocks on the wooden side table. "Knock on everything, if you're superstitious." He gives another rueful grin, then coughs a little. "More water?" she asks.

"Please?"

This time she helps tip a little of the water itself into his mouth, though she doesn't let him drink much.

When she pulls the cup away, he asks, "How bad is it?"

Sitting back down, she touches her fingertips to each other. "They won't know for a while yet. They saved your eye, but they're not sure if you'll have any vision left in it."

He nods like it's what he expected. "How long have I been out? Your hearing seems much better?"

She nods. "It's much better. Yours too, apparently. But yeah, broken eardrum, which means no flying for a while, try to avoid loud noises too. And in answer to your question, almost two days."

Settling back a little bit, Mustang yawns. "It felt like it was a long time," he admits. He turns to put her more fully in his line of sight and then asks, "If I may inquire… why you?"

For an instant, she considers playing dumb, but she knows what he's asking, and after everything he's done, playing dumb would be doing him a disservice. "Because someone should be here when you woke up, and it was my turn."

His brow furrows like he doesn't quite believe it, but it's close enough to the truth that she doesn't feel bad. "So it has nothing to do with not wanting me to disappear on you?"

It's her turn to smile ruefully. "You're not going anywhere, eye or not. Running off isn't your style."

"Sure about that, are you?"

Emily sits back. "You'll blow off something you consider inconsequential or unimportant, but Hughes isn't unimportant to you, so you'd never just disappear on him. I also honestly believe that you want to help get Morgan and JJ back if you can."

"Oh?" he asks, trying to raise his eyebrows, though one must tug on the bandage because he winces and then nearly touches his eye again. "What made you change your mind about that?"

"You could have run off and abandoned us at any point if you really wanted to. You don't need us for anything you want to accomplish. If you were going to leave, you'd have done it already."

"I'm honestly not sure whether to be flattered at your improved opinion or insulted that you really thought that poorly of me," he admits after a beat.

She shrugs. "Is that better or worse than what I thought of you for getting involved with your underage subordinate?"

He raises a hand to point a finger at her like a trigger. "Point," he concedes, swallowing. Emily gets up again to give him a little more water before sitting back down. "So, how are you actually feeling?"

Mustang shifts on the bed a little bit, apparently assessing his condition seriously before he says, "Like I've been hit by a bus, mostly. But I'll live. The eye is… not ideal, but all things considered, it seems a relatively small price to pay." He twists his wrist up, seeing it wrapped. "Did anyone—"

"If anyone noticed your wrist glowing like it was possessed, no one said anything. We wrapped it before sticking you in an ambulance and implied you may have hurt your wrist. They did an x-ray, but obviously, it's fine, so they didn't bother unwrapping it in case it was sprained or something," she explains.

He nods, then yawns. "Thank you," he says.

"You don't owe us any thanks," she tells him. "You're the one who saved us. And keeping someone from seeing your amazing glow-in-the-dark tattoo seems like a small price to pay to thank you for what you did."

Blinking, seeming like he might be fading soon, he says, "I talked to Ed." He reaches up and rubs at his good eye, as if trying to wake up more.

"The glow-in-the-dark tattoo seemed to imply that," Emily says. "He say anything interesting?"

"Yes," Mustang replies, a little more urgently, like there's something he has to do. He tries to sit up again, and she gets up to push him back down. "No, I need—" he cuts himself off, looking around. "I need something to draw with. Paper and pencil. It doesn't really matter what kind of paper, lined, unlined, scrap. I just… need to write down these arrays while they're still fresh."

Arrays? He wants to write down arrays? Why does that fact make the hair stand up on the back of Emily's neck?

"Why do you need to write down arrays?" she asks, and her voice sounds a little distant to her this time, and not just because she's got an eardrum blown out.

He meets her eyes with his one own and says, "Ed thinks he knows how to get everyone home, where they belong."

Now it's not just the hair on the back of her neck standing up, but it feels like every hair on her body is vibrating. She doesn't know if she's excited or terrified, and she thinks that she may be equal parts both. Emily looks around the room, but hospitals aren't really known for having a lot of spare paper lying around in them. The only paper is his charts, and she doesn't want to either explain to a nurse or doctor why Mustang was drawing arcane symbols all over the backs of his charts or have to try to get copies of them later.

While looking around, Mustang has found the button to elevate the top part of the bed and is doing so, even as he looks around. He must swing his head a little too rapidly because he actually pauses and puts a hand to it.

"Let me go ask the nurse if we can get some spare paper," she suggests.

"Please," he says, almost absently, the look in his eye going distant in the way that Reid's often does when he's looking at things in his mind that no one else can track. She doesn't like the comparison, so she quickly makes her way out.

Mustang isn't roomed that far from a nurse's station, so she's able to quickly ask for some spare paper and a pen, and she even thinks to request a clipboard, promising to return it under the suspicious glare of the on-duty nurse. When she slips back into Mustang's room, she's not terribly surprised to see him sitting up with his eye closed, mouth moving as if he's repeating something he worked to memorize over and over. She does send a text to the group that Mustang is awake, but she puts her phone away without waiting for an answer.

The sound of the door closing seems to bring him back to himself, and he looks at her, eye going from her face to her hands, locking in on the paper and clipboard. He holds out both his hands. "Quickly," he says.

Part of her doesn't want to give him the paper and pens. Part of her is deathly afraid of what he might do with them, now that she's seen what alchemy can do. But really, is any array he can put to paper really more destructive than his fire? Than Kimblee's explosives?

Emily really hopes she doesn't ever have to learn the answer to that question; she's afraid the answer is yes. Yes, because the explosions and the fire were—even to her untrained eyes— simple arrays. The way that Mustang practically rips the items out of her hands when she tentatively holds them out to him makes her even more wary. He sets about drawing a near-perfect circle, almost big enough to touch both sides of the paper, and then he repeats the feat on three other pages.

Next come structures and signs and symbols, the first lines always placed meticulously, then more added with obvious care to other places around the circle. There's obvious meaning about what is placed where, and while some of the larger structures appear the same, Mustang soon starts making deviations in them.

Entranced, Emily watches each array develop under his hand, watches the way he flips between them, comparing them to one another, the way he makes changes in one over another. She'd been given a pen, not a pencil, so he has no ability to erase, but he doesn't really seem to need it.

Distantly, it occurs to her that she should probably call the doctor in to check on Mustang now that he's awake. How long he was unconscious made everyone worry about a concussion and that he wasn't merely unconscious but might be in a coma. It had been a legitimate concern, but they hadn't dared wait on his eye either.

She doesn't call, though. She just watches the arrays take shape beneath steady, sure hands. She notices the scar on the back of Mustang's hand, not for the first time. She'd traced the lines of it with her eyes while he'd been unconscious, even had one of the nurses ask her if she knew how he got it. She didn't.

"How'd you get the scar on the back of your hand?" she asks. She didn't mean to, and she hopes she's not interrupting him, but he'd been flipping the pages back and forth for several minutes, only pausing to make tiny adjustments on one page or another.

Mustang blinks as if coming out of a daze, then looks down at the back of his hand before turning to look at her. "I… uh…" he trails. Emily is reasonably sure that between the hyperfocus of whatever he was just doing and his own exhaustion from both the injury, surgery, and sharing the dream with Ed, she's just managed to catch him unusually off guard. "I didn't used to be able to do alchemy without a circle," he says, changing tack as he visibly gathers his thoughts. "The clapping, that is. I couldn't do that before…" He trails for only a moment before continuing. "Anyway, I couldn't do it at the time, and… an enemy had destroyed my gloves to disarm me."

Emily has gotten a pretty good look at the pattern on the backs of those gloves, and she hasn't missed the resemblance between the lines on his hands and those on the gloves. "You carved it into yourself," she says softly, wondering what kind of situation would have been that dire, make him that desperate. Having seen him deal with Kimblee with all the coolheadedness of a longtime veteran, she doesn't think he panicked.

Mustang's lips press into a tight line, not quite frowning, before he says, "It was necessary," in a tight voice that does not invite further questions. He looks back down at the arrays.

After everything they've been through in the last few days, Emily honestly doesn't want to know, but she has to ask, "Is it something we need to worry about here?"

That makes him set the arrays down softly, and when he looks back up at her, it's almost sympathetic. "No," he says in the kind of voice that they usually use on victims to keep them calm. She hates that she doesn't know if it's unnecessary or undeserved. "No, nothing as terrible as that seems to have made its way here." He jaw tightens, and he adds, "Though I'll feel better when we can see Kimblee's remains."

Emily knows she should ask what that means, but she kind of doesn't have to, and she really, really does not want to think about what that might actually mean right now, so she changes the subject. "What are those for?" she asks.

It makes him look back down at them again. "They're soul-binding arrays," he says softly, almost regretfully.

"What, like you and Elric have?" Emily asks, needing to understand, to be sure she didn't mishear.

He nods. "Dr. Reid and Agent Morgan. Detective LaMontange and Agent Jareau. Maes and his wife, Gracia."

Mustang and Elric. He doesn't have to say it; Emily isn't stupid. "Elric thinks that you can use the soul bonds to pull everyone back to the right place?"

Nodding again, Mustang says, "Ed is sure that it can work, that the link can pull everyone to the right place, to where they belong."

He falls silent, his eye fixed on the arrays as if in thought. Emily gives him a moment to decide to continue before she prompts, "But you don't think it will work?"

"It's not that I don't think it will work," Mustang begins, choosing his words with obvious care. "This is Ed's area of expertise. Soul alchemy, the Gate… this is what he knows best, and if he says it will work, I believe him."

"So why do I still hear a 'but'?" Emily asks.

He meets her gaze again, and there are emotions in his eye that she can't read. Something that's hope and fear and mourning and more things she's not sure she has names for, but things that make her chest tight and some animal part of her brain say run. "But this alchemy has a price," he says, using that same gentle, calming voice he used before, and it does not make this any better. "Asking anyone to commit to a soulbond is enormous. It isn't a decision someone should be backed into making, or making under duress." He looks down again, moving two arrays side by side and looking them over. "And there's still the matter of the cost."

More chills run through Emily, and she wishes she could go back to just hating and being suspicious of this man. Where alchemy is concerned, she doesn't have any other sources or anyone else they can get a second opinion from; they have to trust Mustang. When it's clear that he's not happy about this particular plan, she's allowed to retain reservations.

"What kind of cost?" Emily asks. While there are questions she can put off right now, this isn't one of them, and they both know it.

"On our side, we have the red stone," Mustang says, and even just saying the words red stone, something about his tone gets rough and disdainful. "Ed thinks that should be a toll enough on this side."

"Does he have a stone on his side?" Emily asks. Mustang just shakes his head. "Then what might the cost be?"

Mustang's grip on the papers tightens, knuckles going white but managing not to crumple them somehow. "Too high," he says as if he has to force the words from his throat.

Emily considers what she knows, although it isn't much. Mustang said the red stone was made from souls, but whatever she believes of Elric, she doesn't believe for a moment that Elric would ever, ever sacrifice a person for any reason. Not even to get his partner back. He would just never—

It clicks, and Emily feels sick. Elric would never sacrifice anyone else, but he would most certainly sacrifice himself. That's what started them down this road, after all, Elric being willing to walk into a fire he should not have been in, putting himself in danger far above and beyond the call of duty.

But while he might sacrifice himself, he wouldn't sacrifice Mustang.

"What happens to you if he dies?" she asks in her own soft, careful voice.

"I die too," he says.

"Elric would never let that happen," Emily says, absolutely certain.

Mustang looks back up at her, surprised, then seems to understand Emily's train of thought. "No," he says. "He wouldn't. Al—Ed's brother—once said that the best thing about us soulbonding is that it kept us both from being 'suicidally heroic' since we'd be willing to put ourselves in the line of fire, but not each other." He shakes his head. "No, it's not his life he thinks he needs to sacrifice. It's his alchemy."

She doesn't understand why, but something about the way Mustang says it sends another chill through her.