Chapter 6

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"Who are you?" The young man quizzed the pile of dazed and environment suit clad humans at his feet. "Did you know you broke our ceiling?" He squatted down to see them better. "What strange clothing you have."

"What?" Winry slowly stood and rubbed her sore back side. "You…you look like Al!"

"Al?"

"That's…that's me!" Alphonse stood and eyed the golden haired young man. Indeed, they were identical. "Brother?" He helped Edward up.

"Who are you?" The young alchemist didn't waste time and lunged forward at the Alphonse-clone. The youth responded with no reaction, yet maintained his curious stare. "Why do you look like my brother?"

"Are you Father's other children?" He slowly circled Edward, looking him from shoe to top of his helmet. "You have his eyes…" The young man turned his gaze toward Winry. "You…you cannot be his child…" He dismissed her and looked at Alphonse, still battered and half of his face covered with synthetic skin. "You are a machine…"

"Father said to bring any living humans to him, so that's what I'll do." He waved his hand and a small rumbling emanated from the surrounding tunnel walls.

"Are you going to answer me?" Ed's left eye twitched with anger, he hated being ignored. Suddenly, five dark figures materialized from the earthen walls and encircled the trio.

"This one and this one…" The young man pointed to Edward and Winry. "Take to Father. This one." He pointed to Al, "You can destroy." The boy stepped back so that the golems could follow his directions.

"You're not laying a hand on him!" Ed lunged at a clay figure, kicking it in it's blurred face. His foot sunk into the mud and made a gash as it exited, however, the hole closed up and reformed.

"Stop it!' Winry yelled as she was grabbed around her waist and hoisted up, she punched and scraped at the mud man as he slung her over his shoulder, but each time, her hand came back with dirt and cold, wet, earth and any damage she inflicted was repaired.

"This may help!" Alphonse slapped his own uneven hands together and then on the ground, an alchemic reaction started, turning any water into ice, it traveled along the wet ground and to the golems freezing them in place.

"Oh, you know alchemy?" The young man finally showed emotion, and his face glowed with pure glee at finding someone other than his father who could transmute and without a circle!

"We sure do!" Ed clapped his own hands and touched his right metal arm with his left, running that hand down the length of the forearm and a metal blade formed. He ran toward the youth.

"So do I." The golden-haired man smiled as his own alchemic reaction started at the ground and a wall of rock grew toward the ceiling, stopping Ed's blade from striking his face.

"Brother!" Alphonse readied for his own transmutation, but was hit with a wall of stone from both sides, trapping his metal body and encasing it in rock.

"Al! Alphonse!" Edward screeched and turned to where his brother once stood. He ran past Winry, still up in the air, held by frozen golem arms as she struggled to free herself. The young alchemist moved his arms to transmute, but felt a strong hand on his shoulder spin him around. He was faced to face with the Alphonse-clone.

"Good night." He smiled and flicked Edward with his middle finger, hitting him square in the middle of the mask over his face. When he did, small blue sparks flew from the spot of contact and Ed fell to the ground.

"Edward!" Winry yelled and squirmed in the mud-man's arms. "What did you do?"

"He's so hostile…he'll feel a lot better when he wakes up. You will too." The youth walked past her, touching her own helmeted head as he went, causing the girl to fall limp. The ice started to melt and slowly all the mud-men came to life, one picking up Ed's body and slinging him over his shoulder.

"Let's go!"


"This is highly against protocol…and impractical, Sir." Lt. Hawkeye continued to question her superior's decision to lead the team on the planet. "You are too important to be here and risk injury."

She knew he'd not put up with any other of his subordinates questioning his orders. She'd saved his hide many times by asking him questions like this.

"Correct, but if I'm to answer to General Grumman and Sol Command, I need to take care of this personally…" His eyes scrutinized the harsh sandy terrain, sand beating against the clear mask of his helmet. "Besides, when we are successful and bring back the whelp and rescue the girl…I'll be famous!" He really wanted to get to Ed first, to understand what the kid was doing and formulate some sort of spin or damage control before he didn't have any influence at all.

"The beacons in their suits are coming from this direction." Havoc pointed into the swirling sand and dust. The rest of the party followed.

"Are you picking up our signal?" Havoc spoke into the communicator in his helmet. The voice of Kain Fuery responded.

"Loud and clear. Breda and I will hold down the fort and transmit to Falmon on Resembool Station. Can do a fly by and pick you up if any trouble."

"Thanks, bud." He answered.

"Are we any closer?" Mustang couldn't understand how far the three could have gotten away from their disabled shuttle.

"They are right here…right below us." Havoc, smacked the homing device he carried to make sure it worked, double checked the coordinates and spoke again. "Yup, it says we are standing right on them."

"They have to be buried, then." Riza didn't like that thought, although with the suits still on, they should still have enough oxygen. "We'll have to find a way to…" Her words were cut off by a loud rumbling and movement beneath her feet.

"Lieutenant!" Mustang lunged toward her as her body slipped into the sand. He landed on his side and the sand began to suck him in as well.

"Boss!" Havoc moved to grab Mustang's feet, but his hand just grazed the Colonel as the sand swallowed him. "Boss!" He sat back as the ground settled, he was too afraid to move. The soldier pressed a button on his collar and spoke into the hidden microphone within his helmet. "Fuery! Breda! Get your asses here!"


She found herself again in that familiar place, yet it was a place she'd never seen before. An old fashioned bedroom of some sort, with wooden floors and a door you had to open with a handle. Machine parts cluttered all the free space, yet there seemed to be some order in their placement. Her eyes fell upon his broad back as he grabbed his shirt with a metal hand. Golden hair flipped as he moved and stern and equally golden eyes glared at her.

"You make it sound so easy!" His voice was angry.

"Just say it, just say you'll save the country and get your original bodies back!" She heard her own voice raised, felt worry in her gut as she uttered the words. When he responded with some flippant answer, her eyes filled with water, but she willed not a single tear to fall.

"Are you going to wake up?"

"Huh?" Winry opened her eyes and discovered her peripheral vision was no longer obscured by the helmet, in fact, she no longer wore the environment suit at all. "Where are we?" She discovered that she was in a dark room, the floor and walls were stone. Her hands were bound behind her back. Across from her, another figure sat, she could only make out the faint golden glow of his hair.

"I'm not sure." He answered, the voice belonging to Edward. "Fuckers took my new arm." Indeed, his right arm was gone, his left hand lashed behind his back, the rope wrapped securely several times around his torso. Ed wobbled and tried to stand, not having proper balance with the missing limb, but finally making his way over to Winry and plopping down beside her. "You ok?"

"OK?" She felt her anger swell. "Let me see. You punched me in the face a few days ago. Injected me with a sedative – IN MY NECK! And, you kidnapped me. Not to mention, you crashed the getaway ship and let me get RE-KIDNAPPED…" The young woman growled. "No, I'm not OK…I'm the furthest from Ok a person could possibly be!"

"Yeah…" Ed leaned up against the wall. "About punching you…THAT I'm really sorry about. But, I know the hypodermic thingy doesn't hurt, so I'm not sorry about that."

"You probably ruined my career, you know." She huffed. "I'd just put in for a transfer to Saturn. I was going places."

"Saturn's no fun, you'd hate it." He countered.

"Ed?" Her voice quieted down. "Do you think Al's ok?" She remembered seeing him get squished.

"Well, he's probably walking funny, but yeah, as long as his seal is intact, he'll be coming for us."

"Seal?"

"I put it in his programming, sort of a computerized bit of alchemy that holds the real Al's soul to the robot Al's body." Edward seemed very sure of his craft and his brother's ability to survive. "I'll be worried if we don't see him soon, though." He tried to think of other things. "Hey, you were mumbling in your sleep…something about saving the country."

"Nothing, just a stupid dream."

"Do you have those sort of dreams often?" He wondered out loud because he had those dreams a lot.

"Sometimes."

"Winry?"

"Yeah?"

He took a deep breath, hoping that she'd not think that along with being a criminal kidnapper, he was also an insane kidnapper. "I have them too."

She took this bit of information and rolled it around in her head. It suddenly occurred to her that she'd seen the face of the man she talked to over and over in that bedroom in her dream. He wore his golden hair up in a high ponytail and when he turned to her, his eyes were glowing gold. Edward Elric spoke to her in all those dreams. Suddenly, she needed to know what he saw within his own.

"Can you tell me?" She steeled herself for his answer and listened intently as he told her stories she's already seen in her own mind over and over since she was old enough to dream at all. When he was done, she leaned back and took a deep breath.

"I think we were supposed to meet like this…I was supposed to find this place."

"It's too close, too similar not to be something…" She racked her brain for any sort of medical information on shared dreams, but found nothing.

"Hey!" The Alphonse-clone flew open the door, letting in enough light to show that they were in some sort of large broom closet. "Father sent me to bring you back, please don't fuss, you're going to be happy, he says!" He knelt down and offered help to Winry to get her to standing, then did the same with Edward, who glared at him all the way.

"I'm too tired to fight with you, seeing that it appears I'm supposed to be here for some reason." Ed scowled. He just wanted to see who this "Father" was and get to the bottom of why he was pulled to this dead planet.

"Alright!"

The boy led them outside and into a broad corridor of smooth, painted walls. Several golems followed. They only went a short distance when the entrance to a grand room appeared. As they strode into the room, they could see a solitary figure standing in the center.

"Wait!" Winry scrunched her eyes, she knew the face, she recognized the man before her. "I know you!"

"The Rockbell's child…so good for you to come." He smiled and pat her head. "Let me unbind you." With a flick of his wrist, the ropes around her hands unraveled and she brought them to the front of her body.

"Dr. Hohenheim?"

"What are you two going on about?" Ed demanded.

"That's right, that's one of the names I've gone by recently."

"Winry, what are you talking about?"

"When I attended medical school, Dr. Hohenheim, he ran the Eugenics Department." She clearly recalled the odd coloring of golden hair and eyes. "He retired a while back and I lost track of him." She hated the idea of eugenics and that the Sol-System even practiced and implemented such arcane programs.

"Eugenics?" Ed questioned, somehow the fact escaped him that his military and government planned the reproduction and birth of every citizen in its colonies.

"Planned human reproduction." The older man spoke as he were delivering a class lecture, He moved toward Edward and freed the boy's sole hand. "With such small amount of humanity, particular traits had to be isolated so everyone could be born as close to possible the way they were…or the souls would not bind without further intervention."

"What the HELL are you talking about?" Ed demanded.

"So many millions of people lost two thousand years ago…it took that long for me to study and replicate each one – well, each one I hadn't already used up." He gazed at Edward, and let out an audible sigh. "The five sacrifices, you were the hardest to bring back because your souls didn't become part of me."

"Speak English, you fucker!"

"Your souls, that is, the souls of the Elric brothers, Izumi Curtis, Roy Mustang…Van Hohenheim…those souls went to the Otzer when their bodies died. I had to sacrifice many other souls to pull them out until I was ready to have them reborn." He didn't move from the spot in the center of the room.

"The hard part was figuring out how to create human life without its own inherent soul. After all, two souls cannot be bound to one body…not that I've been able to create anyway."

"You…you mean, you engineered ALL the people living in the colonies?" Winry tried to wrap her mind around this. Her mom and dad were married and she was delivered naturally.

"Yes. I knew of all the pregnancies. As soon as a woman suspected she was with child, she reported to a doctor, as is the current law. Those doctors reported to me. Her natural fetus was replaced with one specifically created to be born, a child created without a soul until I gave it one of mine."

"That's, that's barbaric!" Winry couldn't stop thinking about all the millions of babies not allowed to live, the natural children of all the mothers who received, instead, genetically manufactured children with "souls" from this monster. Then she realized, her own soul came from him too.

Father turned to Winry. "You're not going to be helpful in this, but you can observe…over there." He pointed to a far corner and before she could yelp, a mud-man scooped her up and planted her where Father directed. The golden-haired older man turned to Edward, who still scowled. "You, you are my child!" He wrapped his arms around the alchemist, bringing the shorter youth into a loving embrace. "I knew you'd come!"

"What you said…what you said about replacing babies…is that, is that what happened with me and my brother?" Ed nearly spat, the idea of someone messing with his mother like that made his blood boil.

"Edward…" The name rolled off of Father's lips like he'd said it a thousand times. "You don't remember me, do you? I don't suppose you would, you were two and Alphonse just born when I left."

"What?" Ed's heart flipped, he couldn't believe what this man implied. "What are you saying?"

"I love your mother. Well, let me rephrase that. Van Hohenheim loves your mother. I learned to feel that love by letting him. But to answer your question, yes…your mother's children were replaced with you and your brother." He seemed to tear up upon mentioning Alphonse.

"I don't believe you!"

"Edward." Father nearly chastised him. "I'm so sorry about the accident." This time, the man moved and came slowly toward Ed. He placed his hands on his shoulders. "It's the same as before, I had to leave to finish my work, to create the array…"

"You lying sack of shit! What do you mean like before?'"

"…But, because I did leave…" Father gazed past the young man, ignoring his question. "…you boys had to work hard to help Trisha, just like before. Although I let you both learn alchemy, I never anticipated one of you dying before we began again." He pat his beard with his right index finger. "I just thought that Izumi would have come too, but no matter…I'll be the Fifth."

"Stand away from him!" The booming baritone voice echoed through the circular chamber. Mustang had heard the horrible story and hoped it just that, a story. Following him into the room and carrying her sidearm at ready, Lieutenant Hawkeye scanned the room for anything that could cause her superior harm. Alphonse Elric, more battered and bent entered last.

"Alphonse!" Ed dismissed the tall man before him and launched himself toward his brother, setting his jaw in the crook of the robot's neck in the best hug the one-armed man could muster.

"Edward, you have some explaining to do, you're probably going to end up in stockades when we return…" Riza spoke without taking her eyes or weapon off of Father.

"Alphonse?" Father peered around Edward's head to get a look at the robot. His golden eyes widened and he burst into laughter. "That's right!" He wiped a happy tear from his eye. "That's right, you did it again, Edward, you saved him didn't you."

"Sir, you better start explaining yourself or…"

Boom!

Mustang fell to the ground in a heap, the shotgun blast hitting him square in the chest.

"Colonel!" Riza dropped her guard as well as her body to the floor hoping he still lived. A gaping wound lay upon his chest, blood seeping slowly and darkening his blue uniform. Yet, he breathed.

"Good job, child." Father patted the shoulder of the Alphonse-clone, who held the now antique weapon. "If you'd make the the human transmutation array like you've practiced, we can get started." The boy smiled, set down the weapon and began drawing his favorite alchemic array on the stone floor.

"I had trouble with your souls." He walked to Riza passing Alphonse and Edward, who stood there completely stunned by what they heard and that this man actually shot Roy Mustang. "…you'll want to cart the Colonel over to the array before he dies. I don't want to lose him, he's a good man, well, sort of."

"You bastard!" Riza screamed and raised her weapon, firing it at Father. The bullets struck his chest, making holes in his shirt, then they popped right back out and fell to the ground. Her sidearm emptied, she reached for her second and third weapon, emptying each into the man. She felt defeat each time a bullet fell to the floor.

"You better activate the array, or, he'll die soon." Father sighed. "And this was my favorite shirt."

"What are you talking about?" The Lieutenant muttered, tears blinding her. "I don't know how to activate anything." By this time, golems congregated around Ed, Al, Winry and the fallen Mustang and Riza. The Alphonse-clone gently took one of Mustang's hands and drug his limp form over the circle he'd just drawn.

"Like I said, your two souls gave me some problems. You didn't want to separate. I got so flustered that I made a mistake." The golden child helped Riza to standing and pulled her numb body over to Mustang. "Got you two mixed up. But I was able to stabilize the soul-mind links despite you being in the wrong bodies." He chuckled. "You know what to do…I know you've studied it because you could."

"How…how did you know?" Riza turned to Father, tears falling freely down her beautiful face.

"Dear, I let you, that's why. Now activate it before he dies and you lose him again."

"I, I won't let that happen…I won't let her die, not again." Riza brought her hands down on the array, a blue light grew brighter and brighter and engulfed Mustang. When it died down, Riza was gone.

"What?" Roy Mustang sat up, rubbed his bare chest through the hole in the front of his uniform then slowly stood.

"Good." Father spoke. "You need to stand out of the way." One of the golems took Mustang's wrist and led the dazed man over to Winry and stood guard. Before the elder man could speak again, another brilliant flash of blue light beamed from the transmutation circle and when it died, Riza Hawkeye stood, her eyes cast down to the floor. "What did the Truth extract from you?" Father scrutinized her form, looking for what was missing. She raised her head.

"I, I, I can't see." Her brown eyes opened wide and in the good light of the room, even Edward could see that they no longer sparkled, but stared into nothing with bleak dullness. She was blind.

"Everyone! To your places!" Father outstretched his arms as the golems lumbered into a large circle around everyone. The elder man took his own spot completing the circle which consisted of Alphonse, the Alphonse-clone, Edward, Riza and finally Father.

The ground shook and rumbled. Parts of the ceiling fell and stones rolled from their resting places. Suddenly, bright light rained down upon the seven human forms as an enormous hole opened up above them and the bright sun shone down upon their startled faces. Father's alchemy kept the atmosphere inside the room so that the sacrifices could breath and live through this new ordeal. Seven human forms watched as the moon, in her gray splendor, moved in front of the sun and they were plunged into enormous hole opened up above them and the bright sun shone down upon their startled faces. Father's alchemy kept the atmosphere inside the room so that the sacrifices could breath and live through this new ordeal. Seven human forms watched as the moon, in her gray splendor, moved in front of the sun and they were plunged into darkness./p