Edward Elric never thought of himself as being particularly lucky.

So he supposed that Truth dumping him out in the middle of nowhere after being shot to death three months ago was to be expected.

Ed decided that his first order of business would be to figure out where, exactly, Truth had left him.

After that part, he had no idea what he was going to do.

He trudged through the field and into the forest, heading for the faint glow against the dark sky. That kind of light meant there was either the last remnants of sunlight, or a decent-sized village. Maybe he would be able to find help there. Or at the very least, figure out where he was.

Despite the dark, Ed noticed that he didn't have too much trouble seeing. With the clouds and only occasional flashes of lightening, it should have been a lot darker than it was. He stepped over a fallen tree and lifted a hand to his face. It looked real enough, the metal and wire visible in the dimness, though he could make out the faint outline of trees behind it.

So, what, he was a ghost? Some sort of spirit? Ed had never believed in such things, but maybe that explained why he was able to see clearly despite the dark. It wasn't like a spirit really had corneas and cones and lenses to interpret light with, right?

But how did that even work? Truth said he could get along fine without his actual body, but Ed had been screwed over by Truth before. What kind of limitations would his current state set on him?

Of course, that was all conjecture, because ghosts didn't exist.

But if he were an actual ghost, he was going to kill Mustang.

"Stupid Truth and his stupid games," Ed muttered, shoving his hands inside his pockets.

He finally came through the trees to a precipice. Below him, nestled in the valley, sat a small town, lights burning defiantly against the oncoming storm.

It was as good of a place as any to find help.

Ed eyed the steep drop underneath him, wondering what would happen if he jumped. Would he die again somehow? Despite the improbability, Ed wasn't about to test his lack of luck further to save himself half an hour walking around it. With an irritated sigh, he picked his way down the rugged path.

As he did, the rain started to pour down.

"Great," he growled. "This is real helpful, Truth!" he shouted at the sky, picturing that smug immortal being with it's annoying smile sitting up there laughing.

After a few more steps, he realized that the rain wasn't soaking into his coat, or dampening his hair. Actually, he couldn't even feel it against his face. All he felt was a strange sort of chill as it passed right through him to wet the stone under his feet.

He shivered, and not from cold. It was just creepy.

The path before him leveled off, and up on the knoll above him, he saw a house.

Ed didn't know why it caught his attention. There wasn't anything especially remarkable about it, aside from how decrepit it was. It looked like something a tornado had picked up, spun around and deposited from a hundred meters in the air, then someone came in behind it and sandblasted it for good measure. Light glowed from a small window, casting faint shadows on the grass that the lightning above obliterated with each flash.

Since Ed wasn't in the habit of questioning his instincts, he took the hill at a lope, coming to a stop only when he reached the porch. The floorboards didn't so much as whisper under his weight, which Ed found terribly odd, given how shoddy they looked. The wood was scaled, the way that quick or poor transmutations usually were.

He paused outside the door, listening. From inside, he heard a voice, and he knew without a doubt it belonged to Mustang.

Hot irritation swelled inside of him. Though Ed didn't remember what, exactly, had happened, he just knew that the idiot was responsible for him being dead somehow. So now he was hiding out in this dump? Probably got kicked out of the military for getting the youngest State Alchemist in history killed. Good.

When Ed got in there, he was going to give that lowlife a piece of his mind.

Speaking of, he wondered if Mustang would notice the way the light passed right through him, or his complete lack of shadow. It was unsettling, to say the least, and if Ed found it odd, Mustang would find it doubly so.

Steeling himself, Ed reached out to pull the door open, wrapping his fingers around the wooden handle and . . .

They closed together in an empty fist.

Ed blinked.

He stared at his hand. It looked like it was closed around the handle, but he couldn't feel the handle. Only a chill, like the way the rain felt as it passed right through him.

Unfortunately, it made sense that if he couldn't touch rain, he couldn't touch anything else either.

Unfortunately, people were bound to notice him just walking through a wall.

That was Ghosting One-Oh-One, right? Ghosts walked through things.

Ed groaned, running a hand down his face. The fact that he was even addressing this situation as if there was logic to be had was insane. That, and there were no such things as ghosts. He might not have a body per se, but he was as real as anything else. He was able to have limited interaction with his environment, like the ability to stand on the front porch. Why the door of the house was different was completely beyond him at the moment.

He was still holding out for this all to be some stupid dream.

Ed tentatively put his hand up to the door and pressed his fingertips against it. Instead of halting against the alchemized wood, they pushed on through. It felt like digging his fingers into ice, the frigid sensation both numbing and burning at the same time.

Well, this proved his walking-through-walls theory.

With one more long sigh, Ed pulled his hand back and took a steadying breath. Then, he inhaled and stepped through the wall. That strange and uncomfortable sensation happened again, but on a much larger scale, burning and numbing his body all at the same time until he pushed through on the other side. With a yelp of pain, Ed shook away the sensation and looked around the room.

Now again, Ed had never thought of himself as being particularly lucky. He had managed to keep himself and Alphonse alive—up until three months ago, anyway—but since he had joined to military, he seemed to just have a knack for walking in on trouble.

So when he found himself in the front room of some poorly alchemized dump with both Mustang and Hawkeye sitting at the table and a gun trained between them, he didn't regard it as an especially fortuitous situation.

Call him a pessimist, but it stood to reason that this whole situation was somehow Mustang's fault. He was Ed's only lead, so if Mustang died, then he'd be up a creek without a paddle.

Besides, Ed wanted to shoot him himself.

And even though he had just passed through a wall, no one even bothered to look at him.

Actually, one even looked up.

Their conversation didn't even falter.

The only reaction he even sort of got was the way Mustang glanced at Hawkeye, then back at the man with the gun.

Was that even a reaction? Or did the gunman just say something particularly insulting?

Ed had the nagging feeling in his gut that maybe they just couldn't see him at all, but he couldn't actually be a ghost, could he? Sure, he could walk through walls, but maybe that was just a perk of being dead with his body "unavaliable," as Truth had put it. Actual ghosts, like the kind Ed had heard stories of as a child and the kind that Feury claimed haunted Warehouse thirteen didn't actually exist. They were myths, concocted to ensure that teenagers didn't stay out too late where they didn't belong and small children stayed safely tucked in bed. There was no such thing as ghosts.

But what was a ghost, except a soul without a body?

Ed felt a little sick, but he didn't know if he even really had a stomach to be sick with. Maybe that was another perk of being dead. Was this the kind of existence that awaited Alphonse if Ed didn't get his body back?

Thunder cracked and Ed jumped before focusing back on the task at hand; save Mustang and Hawkeye first, succumb to spiraling depression later.

Ed took a moment to study the man with the gun. He had his back to him, so Ed couldn't make out much, but he certainly didn't recognize him from behind. He was a slight man, with long limbs and auburn hair stuffed under a cap. He looked like a scarecrow from the back. Well, then, Ed was going to just have to take full advantage of their obliviousness.

Something simple and elegant. Like pulling the floorboards up to restrain him.

With a self-satisfied smirk, Ed brought his hands together in a clap, then leaned down and slammed them against the floor.

Nothing.

There was no hum or spark of alchemic electricity. There was no brilliant blue light that heralded a transmutation. The floorboards didn't even groan under the force of his hands.

Ed tried again, and again nothing happened.

He turned his eyes to the ceiling. "Is this some kind of joke, Truth?!" he demanded.

No one so much as winced. No one shifted or turned their head as if they had heard him. He was invisible and inaudible and there was nothing he could do about it.

In a last-ditch effort to try to throw the odds in his friends' favor, Ed sucked in a breath and leapt, landing right in the gunman's face. "Boo!" he shouted, waving his hands over his head in the most ghostly way he could manage.

But embracing his ghostly state accomplished no more than denying it. All he succeeded in doing was getting a good look at the creep's face and an unsettling feeling as the man's coffee-brown eyes stared right through him.

He looked like a scarecrow from the front, too.

"I haven't got all evening, Colonel Mustang," he was saying, the gun waving impatiently by Ed's left ear. "If you would just be so kind as to tell me who you were working with, I can be on my way."

Ed turned around to see Mustang and Hawkeye and he saw them in a way he hadn't until now. They looked tired. Hawkeye looked like she had been through the ringer, her eyes bloodshot and hair too untidy for the Hawkeye Ed had always known. She had rings under her eyes, dark shadows that stood out on her paler-than-normal face and gave away just how little she had been sleeping lately. Still, though, she sat in her chair, ramrod straight and defiant in her own, quiet, tired way.

And if Hawkeye looked bad, Mustang looked positively awful. He had always been pale due to how much time he spent bossing people around from behind a desk, but now he looked almost translucent. He leaned heavily the cane propped in front of him, like it was the only thing keeping him from falling out of his seat. His hair was disheveled, very much unlike the proud man Ed knew, with dark stubble prickling his jaw. He looked just a little bit too thin and too fragile and too unlike Mustang. His eyes, though, were the worst of it. Even with his eyes trained on the gunman with a foggy sort of interest, they still looked lost and broken, like a man back from war. Haunted.

And these two were matching wits with some crazy armed scarecrow?

"Mustang grimaced. Ed didn't know if it was in distaste or pain. "I still don't know what you're talking about. Could you be more specific?"

Scarecrow narrowed his eyes. "Alright, I'll play along. Over three months ago, you received a letter. Inside was a map. I want to know who sent it to you."

"A map?" Mustang asked flatly. "You're telling me that you're going to put me in my grave for a map?"

"I believe you're aware of just how sensitive the information on it is."

"You can believe that the world is flat for all I care," Mustang said irritably. He was behaving more like the gunman had interrupted his nap rather than threatening to interrupt his life. The man had lost it. He was going to get both himself and Hawkeye shot.

Scarecrow raised his eyebrows just a fraction. "I don't think you're taking this seriously."

Crap.

Mustang didn't pick up on it quite as fast as Ed did. "You're right," he replied. "You're about to shoot me over a map. I think you're taking it a bit too seriously."

Scarecrow smiled. "Oh? Am I?"

Then he turned the gun on Hawkeye and shot her.

Cliffhangers. Oops. Scarecrow/Michael is a jerk.

So, there's plot, too? Not just angst for the sake of angst? Who would have guessed? xD

Okay, can we all agree that Hawkeye is the most amazing person ever? Every time I write her, I have a brand new respect for her. She's just so hardcore. I like how I say this after getting her shot. Am I awful or what? :'D

Anyways, hope you enjoyed! I started the next chappy, if that's even sort of a good indication of when I'll update (prooooobably not lol).

Hope you enjoyed! If you have the time, please drop a review, and I'll see you next chapter!

God Bless,

-RainFlame