Another chapter! And here, we finally drag ourselves away from sideplot shenanigans and back towards the real story! It's a miracle. And now, without further ado,

ON WITH THE STORY!

Susan half-stumbled, half-ran through the painfully, inconveniently bright hallways in the bowels of the Russian Ministry of Magic. Even with the aid of featherweight charms, a human being was cumbersome to carry, and she didn't dare waste time on a slower levitation spell. She stopped at what she hoped was the right doorway—she'd been in a bit of a hurry on the way down—and carefully peered around the corner.

An empty hallway stretched out ahead of her.

Sighing in relief, Susan rounded the turn, pulling Fleming's limp body behind her. In the distance, and growing closer, she heard muffled explosions, crashes, and shouts as her one-man army of a partner worked his way down to meet her. Hopefully all the wizards were headed towards the more destructive intruder and not, say, the vulnerable one with a downed ally to defend. At least, that was the plan.

Halfway down the latest in a series of unbearably long hallways, Susan froze as she heard stomping feet approaching from one of the numerous side doors. She dove to the wall, pulling Fleming with her, and in the same move Disillusioned them both.

Then, as they rounded the corner and stepped into the corridor, she did something questionably legal. This of course weighed quite heavily on her conscience, because legality was obviously what she was most concerned about at this point in time.

"Imperio," she murmured, barely audible at all above the sound of shouting and the distant rumbles of Elric's handiwork. But even when only half-vocalized, the curse did its work. The first man to have rounded the corner immediately sprinted off down the hallway, away from Susan, giving no explanation whatsoever to his fellows, who, shouting questions and demanding answers, followed.

As the door swung shut and her pursuers were drawn further away, she sighed in relief, and prepared to begin moving again. Her partner's explosions had stopped, and she really hoped it was just because he'd found a quieter, more enjoyable way of wreaking havoc.

The alternatives didn't bear thinking about.

Edward was starting to get the slightest bit panicked. Sure, massive free-for-all melees were his specialty, and the practically nonexistent limit on collateral meant he could have a field day with all the glorious methods of breaking a person, but the entire situation was quickly spiraling out of hand. His ignition gloves that he'd so badly wanted to use for such a long time proved to be practically worthless against a pre-prepared shield, and the wizards currently charging after him had the good sense to hold a front line. Transmuted spikes, traps, and bombs were similarly rendered useless as those following quickly adapted to his hit-and-run tactics. Getting in close wasn't even an option any more, and more and more Ed found himself having to transmute paths through the floor and walls to avoid being caught by the ever-tightening trap being drawn around him. He really hoped that he could get out soon, because he was positive that his tunneling was playing hell with the structural integrity of the entire complex.

He threw himself through a doorway, hastily transmuted the path behind him shut, and turned to keep running only to come face to face with another red-hooded figure. Who seemed to be casting a spell.

"Reducto!"

The surprised alchemist did a sharp half-spin as most of his chest impacted inwards under the force of an underpowered Reductor Curse. Catching himself before he even hit the ground, Edward executed a neat roll and came up directly in front of his aggressor, red lightning knitting his bones together while also marking the formation of his signature armblade.

"Elric?"

Ed froze, metal arm poised to plunge messily into the general kidney area of his opponent as he registered several things all at once—the fact that this particular Russian knew his name, and now that he looked closer, she bore a remarkable resemblance to his partner. Not only that, but there was a second person in British Unspeakable robes lying on the floor behind her.

Lowering his weapon, Ed watched wryly as Susan did the same.

"You know, normally I'd compliment reflexes like that, but could you please check to see who you're shooting at first next time?"

"You did have a red coat," Susan half-heartedly defended. "It was an easy mistake to make."

"Yeah, yeah," Ed grumbled. "Blame the coat, sure, why not? You're lucky I've still got power to spare for things like regrowing lungs."

He glanced down at the still form of the Unspeakable.

"So, is that Fleming?"

"Yep."

"So, all we have to do is leave, now, right?"

Susan grinned.

"You make it sound so easy. 'Oh, all we have to do is fight our way past the entire Russian Ministry, somehow make it to the edge of the anti-Apparition wards, then Side-Along an unconscious operative while under heavy fire. Piece of cake.'"

With a few gestures of her wand, Fleming's body began levitating. She and Ed set a brisk pace down the hallway, keeping up their banter.

"I don't sound like that at all. And it can't be that hard, all you need is for me to drain the wards, right?"

"One, yes you do sound exactly like that, and two, you'll never be able to siphon the wards at a reasonable rate unless we get you to the anchor, and that would involve even more fighting, running, and getting lost than we've already done so far."

"Contrary to what you might believe, I know exactly which way we need to go. Left here."

Susan stopped running.

"You mean right. There's no door to the left, stupid—"

Ed blew a hole in the wall on the left, revealing a stairwell on the other side.

"Wonderful thing about this kind of compact architecture, everything's so easy to get to. Ladies first."

Susan picked her way through the rubble, tactfully avoiding the pair of boots poking out from under a larger pile.

"Smartass."

"You wound me, you really do. Keep up the pace, now, and don't stop for the welcoming committee."

Susan looked up in alarm to see a line of red-clad wizards standing ready at the top of the stairs, wands pointed directly at the duo. She ducked her head and kept running, charging forwards in what she hoped wasn't a suicide dash. There was the sound of a clap behind her, and lightning raced under her feet, stopping on the floor directly behind their adversaries. There was a breath as a few of the less disciplined mages turned to the new threat. All hell broke loose as the ground behind the group pitched upwards and then forwards, as if the stone had suddenly become bored of its stationary lot in life and decided to try being a wave for a bit. Those that didn't turn were caught by the mass of moving rock and were sent tumbling headlong down the stairs. Those that did turn had time to brace themselves, but no time to react to the blast of flames that roared up the staircase from directly next to Susan, immolating everything in its path.

The end result was a mostly clear staircase, with a few groaning, broken bodies at the bottom and a few more smoldering, sizzling bodies at the top. Susan stopped for a moment to contemplate what just happened, and Ed stepped up to the top of the stairs with her, sniffing the air, which was now permeated with the odor of charred people. Regarding the scene, she glanced, somewhat warily, at the alchemist next to her, reassessing his potential. How much risk did somebody this powerful pose? How could they trust him to stay under control?

"Bacon! That's it! Ha, no wonder Mustang never liked it. I wouldn't either, if that's what it always smells like!"

Ed grinned at his partner, proud of his deductive skills. Another mystery solved.

Susan sighed, realizing the answers to her question. Right. Elric was also an idiot.

"Anyway, we should be getting a move on, so—" Ed glanced at Fleming and did a double take.

"This might sound like a strange question, but is there any reason why you changed his hair color?"

Glancing back, Susan realized that, indeed, Fleming's hair had become a rather startling electric blue color.

"That's normal. I can explain later, if you'd kindly shut up now, while we run for our lives."

Having said so, Susan started climbing stairs again.

Ed did not seem to want to let the issue rest there.

"But how is spontaneous hair color changes normal? That's the kind of thing you might expect, but I'm fairly new to this whole thing and I—"

Susan growled in frustration.

"Listen," she bit out in between breaths. "While you don't seem to have to do little things like inhale to keep functioning, I do. And I have to carry somebody while I run. So if you would kindly shut up with the questions until we aren't running for our lives through an enemy base, that would be ideal."

Edward shut up.

They continued on their merry path of destruction, caving in walls and ceilings behind them and taking as many shortcuts as Ed's memory of the complex's layout could provide them. As they did so, their pursuers became increasingly frustrated, forced time and time again to reroute around a cave-in or back up from a booby-trapped hallway. Now that Susan was with Ed, he didn't need to keep anything except the way out intact, and he was gleefully taking that as permission to break everything, even more so than previously.

Pride, though still confined to their mind by the bright-burning lights filling every room, was enjoying the entire escape immensely.

"That looks expensive—smash it. Ooh, and that door says 'Volatile Potions'! Do the thing with the carbon and the nitrogen again!"

Ed grinned viciously, his sprint carrying him sideways towards the door Pride had pointed out. A quick transmutation and the carbon of the door was bonded with nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen in the air. The resulting mass of nitroglycerin fell to the floor with a soft splat and then combusted with a much louder BOOOM. Diving ahead of the expanding fireball, the alchemist caught himself in a roll and came up still sprinting. Susan sped up as best she could, and avoided the explosion by virtue of a shield charm and being across the hallway from the blast. Both Unspeakables barely slowed down. Behind them, a roiling cloud of undoubtedly toxic smoke covered their tracks as carefully stacked reagents fell into the conflagration.

Pulling even with him, Susan gave her partner a sideways glance.

"You're…" she puffed, "A regular… pyromaniac… aren't you?"

Edward just cackled. Reaching into an obviously enchanted pocket, he held up a trio of innocent-looking glass vials.

"You haven't even seen the really good stuff yet. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, because I'm fairly certain you don't have as high of a tolerance for death as I do."

He then put the suddenly much more threatening looking containers back into his coat, and then, in keeping with the manners of any good gentleman, disintegrated the door open for the lady waiting behind him. And Winry had always said that he never showed anybody any respect!

Three flights of stairs, five more hastily performed explosions, and twenty additional enemy casualties, the duo found themselves at one end of a very familiar hallway, with the exit at the other end. A good thing too, as Susan was quite sure this was the furthest she'd had to run in a very long time.

"Well," Edward commented as they dashed for the final door, "That wasn't too hard. Only middling-level grunts the whole way up, and now it's just a building full of bureaucrats between us and success."

All the doors in the room swung shut, an oily shine across their surfaces signifying the activation of wards. One of the doors off to the side swung open, letting out a pair of individuals who, judging by their much more ornate robes, were not middling-level grunts. Next to him, Susan groaned, shifting Fleming behind her, out of direct fire, before letting him drop.

"You just had to say it. Go on, tempt fate again why don't you, it's not like things could possibly get worse now."

She might have continued to complain, but was interrupted when the wizard on the left swiped his wand through a complex series of gestures, finishing with a bolt of gray light. As she watched, a wall rose from the floor, lightning flashing around it, to intercept the spell. The spell hit the wall, and for a fraction of a second, appeared to have no effect.

Then a massive portion of the stone vanished with an anticlimactic pop of displaced air.

The two sides regarded each other for a moment, contemplating the now-useless barrier in the middle of the room. The calm was broken by an echoing snap, and a column of flame roared across the room, and the battle began in earnest.

Lucius Malfoy considered the letter in front of him. He had read through it three times, checking for any of the usual fallacies that the author of this particular letter was prone to. But, despite his hopeful, wishful thinking, the message was painfully clear.

Something was wrong with his plan.

Well, not his plan, per se. He was really just the instigator, the finger that pushed the first domino. And if the result of this plan dovetailed nicely with his own goals, well, that was simply expected from a plot executed by a Slytherin. Layers upon layers.

But the expected outcomes were simply refusing to materialize. He had acquired, in no uncertain terms, a detailed, step-by-step description of the Horcrux's plans for Hogwarts. He had been promised a few planned inefficiencies, yes, but that was to build the tension. To draw out the rising horror as Dumbledore realized that he could do nothing, to ensure that everybody saw the threat clearly rising, before the climactic conclusion.

But that conclusion, the vital punctuation to an otherwise flawlessly executed plan, failed to appear. Petrifications by the handful, to be sure. Muggleborns freezing up left and right. But where was the murder? You couldn't have a proper purge of the unworthy if nobody got murdered. And, more importantly, the destruction of the Weasley name wouldn't be complete without a death or five. Either he had vastly underestimated the blasted Diary's scale of planning, or it was simply incompetent. It wouldn't be long, after all, before some Ravenclaw got the idea to focus less on the Chamber and the Heir and more on the Monster. And if the exact identity of Slytherin's Monster was discovered, then there was practically no chance of salvaging the plan at all.

He had to do something. But what? Secretly give aid to the Diary?

No, if he was in the least bit connected with this debacle, he stood to lose valuable anonymity. No arrests, of course. But the reminder that the Malfoy family was still working in the background would be counterproductive.

But he could remove a few obstacles. All in the name of academic safety of course.

Deciding on a course of action, the Head of House Malfoy pulled out a clean sheet of parchment and a dictation quill. It was time to write a few letters. Call a meeting. Pass out a few bribes.

It was time to set events back into motion.

Flamel strode down the halls of the Department of Mysteries, a folder full of notes under his arm. Between the tests he was running on the changes his Philosopher's Stone had undergone while in Edward Elric's bloodstream and the discussions he had with Fermier about the same alchemist, he was spending more and more time on what was supposed to be a consulting job. He supposed he couldn't really complain, though. It was all very interesting work, and the head of the Research division made for good conversation.

Speaking of which, as he passed by the lab that had, by unspoken consensus been designated as Fermier's, he heard a sound that he wasn't at all familiar with hearing in this section of the Ministry. Stepping through the door, Flamel dropped the notes on an open table and walked up to his companion, who was listening intently to a Wizarding Wireless set.

"I didn't know that you listened to music, Fermier."

The scientist looked up.

"For your information, Nicolas, it's the news. There's a broadcast on that I'm rather enjoying."

Well. For Fermier to take enough interest to pull himself away from his research to interact with the real world, it had to be something worth hearing. Flamel's instincts didn't prove him wrong. Just as he had pulled up a chair and made himself comfortable, the commercial break ended and the program cut back to the news.

"We bring you back, listeners, to the eighth hour of the Russian Ministry's lockdown. While nobody but MKGB officials are being allowed inside the building and we have yet to receive concrete reports, estimates from Portkey signatures place casualties as high as sixty-two witches and wizards. No clear reports have been made on what's going on down there, but we are assured that it is only a matter of time before this entire episode is drawn to a conclusion."

It had been nearly fifteen minutes since Ed had been trapped in a hall with two psychotic Russians, and he still couldn't see an end to the battle.

The problem was that, between the two of them, Ed and Susan were pretty much an even match for their opposing duo. Between his ability to block any and all incoming spellfire and Susan's fast counters to the spells that slipped by his barriers, they hadn't sustained any serious injuries yet. But on the other hand, Fleming's unconscious body needed protecting, limiting their ability to strike back, which meant that their adversaries weren't wasting any time defending.

Glancing around the room for the hundredth time, Ed tried to find some sort of advantage that he could use to bring this entire debacle to a close. They couldn't afford to stick around—even the amount of time they'd spent down here was far too long, and if any reinforcements got let into the room they'd be done for. He needed to end this, and quickly. Once again, his thoughts strayed to the very tempting pair of expanded-space vials in his coat pockets, and once again he had to remind himself of the presence of his partner. If only there was some way to—

Hm. That was a moronic plan. So moronic, in fact, that it might just work.

"Get behind me!" he shouted to Susan as she ducked behind a transmuted pillar.

"What's the new plan?"

He grinned. "Something very stupid. Now get back. Preferably as far back as you can get."

Further elaboration was cut off as their cover was yet again reduced to rubble by the duo on the other side of the room. Despite herself, Susan followed her partner's suggestion and fell back to a different transmuted wall, as close to the back wall as she could get.

Vaulting over the remains of his makeshift bunker, Ed charged directly at the two Russians, the two wizards who had managed to stall him for nearly twenty minutes. In each hand, he held a vial. As he ran, the air swirled and cooled behind him as his ignition gloves worked the air components of their circles. Zigzagging out of the way of spells, he drew closer and closer until he could see the individual curves of the runes stitched into their robes.

Then he threw the glass.

As predicted, they took a moment to stop trying to hit their elusive target to try to stop the bottles. The one on the left disappeared two meters ahead of its target, the target of a Vanishing Charm. But the one on the right was missed. A bluish-green spell flew ineffectually past the tube as it smashed into the ground at the feet of the duo, its expanded contents expelled in an instant.

For a moment, nothing happened. In that breath, Ed closed the last few meters, his cold front rushing in behind him. Susan's ears popped as the air grew heavier. In that moment, the only sound was the tinkling of shattered glass bouncing along the warped, pitted floor.

Dioxygen difluoride (FOOF) is a highly reactive compound. So reactive it could make even ice burn. So reactive, in fact, that Edward had to get special cooling charms on the vials so that the insides never rose above negative 180 degrees Celsius. And even at those temperatures, it was still more than capable of doing what it did best.

It exploded.

Everything exploded. Blue-white flames engulfed Ed's vision, along with the entire side of the room he was on. His coat, followed by the rest of his clothes and then his body, were reduced to ashes and his automail was rendered into molten scrap. As the fireball expanded, it met up with the wall of compressed air that Edward had been gathering behind himself during his suicide sprint. High pressure met low pressure, and a miniature windstorm spun briefly underground, flaring the flames even brighter before snuffing them as the last of the deadly reaction ended. From her relatively untouched side of the room, Susan rubbed the afterimages of the blast out of her eyes and regarded the burnt-out wreckage that had been an entry hall. She walked slowly over to the spot where, if the cherry-red lumps shaped vaguely like an arm and a leg were any indication, Edward Elric had burned.

Burning, Ed decided, was the absolute worst way to die. Dying, of course, also sucked, but the part where he lit himself on fire was particularly painful, and he found himself feeling ever so slightly sympathetic towards the enemies he'd barbecued earlier. He also found another reason to hate Mustang, who used fire to fight as his main weapon. But as he got over the mind-searing agony of death by combustion, he realized that he was not, in fact, still in the bowels of the Russian Ministry of Magic.

He was in an unfortunately familiar void, standing in front of a door he'd rather not recognize.

"Well. This isn't good."

'Amazing powers of deduction, Pride. Really. Your skills at stating facts are second only to—'

"Hello, al-che-mist."

"Shit."

Here it is! Three whole months of dead silence, and then I come back and hit you with this cliffhanger!

But seriously folks, I'm very, truly sorry about how long it took to write this. Writer's block, combined with those annoyances we call 'real life' and 'responsibilities' have been hitting hard ever since senior year got going. But I'm here now, you're here now, and the plot has reached a major point.

By the way, expect the next update to take about as long. Bye now~!

-Ambiguity