With the gentle "fwump" of fabric rustling, Edward landed heavily just outside the Human military complex. Double checking the cloaking illusions he was maintaining he stood, the red folds of his cloak billowing in the evening breeze. He tugged gently at a messenger bag strap that was pulling too tight about his shoulder and sighed.

"Mission Start." He whispered to a microphone just below his throat. His earpiece buzzed in response.

"Don't do anything stupid." Came Hughes' ever helpful commentary. "Keep your cloak up, and be careful."

Edward felt his eyes roll. "Of course, Father." He said, voice laden with sarcasm.

Edward smirked as he heard Hughes' patient cough at the other end of the feed. "Okay highness, don't screw up. This is your first mission and if you get killed, I'll never hear the end of it." Ed Hoisted his bag up once more, and winced when if banged into his wing.

"Got it. First tower's about five metres away. Doesn't look too heavily guarded."

"Still." Said Hughes. "Don't fly in. They have ground to air weaponry that isn't fooled by illusions."

"The bastards." Grinned Edward and he started a stealthy approach towards the guards, holding the hem of his cloak to prevent it from rustling. He focused on the humans at the base of the tower, convincing their minds and senses that he wasn't there. There was a tense moment as one of the creatures looked right at him, and he briefly panicked that he might have missed one, but the moment passed and the guard took a sip from a mug, looking away.

Edward let you a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. He darted forward, taking care to keep to the shadows. Never mind his cloaking, it was better to be safe than sorry. "Okay, Ed." Hughes' voice echoed behind his ear. "The power box should be on the right side of the tower... err, the east side, sorry." Edward let out a snort of disdain and checked his compass. Hughes was a bit scatterbrained at times.

"Are you sure it's the East side, Hughes? Because I'm on the west and I can see what looks suspiciously like a power source." A human looked over and Edward froze. Eventually the man looked away with a shrug, and muttered something to another one. The second shrugged as well, and said something back. They were too far away to make out the words.

"Well done, wise-ass, you've seen the dummy box." Edward nearly laughed at the sardonic tone. "Now quit trying to insult your superiors and actually do some work for once."

With an amused smirk, Edward switched the communicator off and approached the large, steel watchtower that served as a power outlet. It was painted a dull red to blend in with the landscape, Mars' red, rocky surface, and it was in perfect seeing distance of Mount Olympus in the background.

Edward could have laughed when he saw the outline of the mountain, the irony of the situation nearly killing him. He approached the turret silently.

It was nearly midnight and the building was poorly lit, however, badly painted sections of the steel menace could be made out by the way of the floodlights scattered about and There was little to no cloud cover (having water on the planet was a result of the human's partly successful attempts to colonise the red mass. They had yet to work out how to grow trees, and Edward doubted they cared. A stable atmosphere had been the second thing for the Humans to place on the planet, with the Atmos bugs purifying the carbon-dioxide of the planet into something breathable). Edward crossed the last few metres to the base of the tower confidently; hoping that his illusion was holding up as well as he thought it was. Circling around to the eastern side of the metal monstrosity, he began to search for two key cables that would alert him to the location of the underground generator. He rolled his tongue around his teeth briefly, shuddering at the slightly dusty taste that he had come to associate with the red planet's surface.

Bingo. He spotted the leads that ran towards the generator and checking he was out of sight, he approached them, cautiously switching his communicator on. A pressure surfaced behind his eyes, Mustang was tapping into his mind and reading his vision.

"Roy says that the wires are protected." Said Hughes.

Edward glared. "Tell Roy" he drawled, "To get out of my head, or I will castrate him the moment I get back. How do I get the protection off?"

The man was silent for a moment, as if listening to someone speaking on the other end of the connection. "The captain says, quote unquote, 'You'll have to catch me first, and then actually muster the courage to go for my dick.' And he also told me to tell you to keep your communicator on and that he was just getting a look at the situation, thank you very much." Against his will, Edward grinned fondly at the thought of the two men. "Anyway, the shock of the electromagnetic wave should be enough to strip the wires of their protection and take out the generator. If not, it will at least damage the generator and make it so that it doesn't run at optimum. So just set the bombs."

"Can do." He replied, sorely tempted to switch off the communicator again just to give Mustang the shits.

He looked at the wires for a moment, thinking of how best to tackle his problem. Placing his bag down he glanced left and right in the dark night, not noticing anything that was out of the ordinary. There was a wall behind him, the start of the human training compound that it was his mission to take out the power of. He opened his bag as quickly and as silently as he could manage, and extracted one of the Electro-magnetic wave emitters from within it. The machine was set to detonate and expel energy in all directions, focusing on any metal within the area. This, hopefully, would mean the underground generator, and hopefully it would create enough heat to melt the internal wires of the generator and create a short circuit. Carefully balancing the contraption in one hand, he leaned forward and cleared some of the red dust away from the cables the bomb was to be attached to. He levered it in, taking great care not to jostle it and set it off prematurely and fastened it to one of the tick, black wires, making a small cut in the plastic outer coating with a blade-like contraption the avians called a Shiv. "Set it for button push detonation." Hughes told him. "There's too much discrepancy in this mission for a timed release."

Edward nodded, even though the man couldn't see it. Once the bomb was set, he stood and grinned. "Which tower next?" he asked the mouthpiece.

"Roy's ego." Come Hughes' laughing reply.

Roy pulled his mind back from the Princes' with a disbelieving snort. "Some friend you are." He told Hughes with a wry smirk.

The man on the communications station laughed and switched off the microphone he'd been using to converse with Edward, gently tugging off the headphones in his ears so to better talk with the man who had been standing behind him. He leaned back in his chair (it squeaked in protest) and grinned toothily. "It's true though. Your ego needs to be cut in half and THEN some."

Roy rolled his eyes with fond exasperation. Folding his arms over his chest, and with a mock offended expression he replied, "And here I thought my self confidence inspired my men." He let the look drop. "In any case, I'm still not comfortable with the prince doing this mission. I didn't struggle looking for him so he could go kill himself."

Hughes nodded. "I don't think anyone is truly comfortable with this except Ed. Even then I'm not sure." The man sighed. "However, I think he's trying to prove himself to you. He doesn't want anyone hurt in the process."

Roy allowed himself a frown. "Alphonse would have completed this mission so much faster."

"Yes, but those two boys have developed quite the bond in such a short time. I hear that Al's even taken to calling his older brother exactly that instead of his name. Edward doesn't want to see his brother in danger." An evil glint came to Hughes' demeanour. "Speaking of that little fact..."

With a sigh, Roy lowered his eyes from those of his best friend. He couldn't count the amount of times he'd had this exact conversation with those on board the ship. Once the news had come to light that the prince was the brother of 'that loveable boy Alphonse', he had been plagued by questions and demands for his immediate relief of the captaincy for keeping something so important from the people of the ships. He looked up at Hughes' laugh. "You sly dog, keeping THAT bombshell from everyone. What happened to you being unable to keep secrets, huh?"

Roy snorted, vastly relieved. Placing a hand on his best friend's shoulder he commented, "Hughes, I think you'll find that's you."

The Avian at the control panel snorted. "As if. I bet you any money that when I die, I'll have gathered vast amounts of vital information and will have not cared to share it with anyone." He said with the air of upmost certainty. "YOU on the other hand, Ronald will find yourself in a life or death battle because you told the wrong person too much."

Roy allowed himself a true laugh, and then flinched as he realised exactly what Hughes had called him. Any reply the man would have made, however, was cut short by the loud scream that came from Hughes' headphones at just that moment. Both men paled considerably as the yell faded from their ears.

Shocked silence reigned supreme for three seconds.

Hughes cursed loudly and quite vulgarly in the avian tongue and dived for the microphone, hastily clipping it back where it was positioned just above his chin. Placing the headphones in his ear, he gave Roy a hopeless look, but the man was already gone, pressing in on Edward's thoughts, worry etched onto every one of his features.

"Highness! Highness! Ed!"

"I'm alright. I just slipped." Edward's breath was coming in hard pants, and his face was hot with embarrassment. He was suspended about forty feet from the ground, by his right ankle, after having toppled backwards from where he was working on the last of the towers, most unfortunately located in the centre of the human compound. If a human were to look up at that moment, they would have seen him in what had to be a comical sight, suspended by one foot, upside down and with his cloak around his head. He flapped his wings in an attempt to right himself, but this only hurt his ankle, caught as it was between two crossbeams.

Hughes sighed relief over the communicator as the pressure behind his eyes returned. "Be careful, I believe I told you." The man said, and a sound that was disturbingly like background laughter echoed down the connection. Edward scowled, and with great effort he swung himself up to grip another beam before freeing his foot. Muffled sounds, like suppressed snickers flowed down the line and Edward's anger and embarrassment chose to show itself in the form of a low and dangerous growl. Mustang must have told Hughes.

"Would you two comedians shut it?" He bit out past clenched teeth. He flapped his wings to give him a boost over the side of the ledge and from there proceeded to work back up to the portion of the roof on which he had been working. He carefully avoided the exposed pipe he hadn't seen before and returned to the work he was doing. This was by far the most dangerous of the towers, located within the compound towards the centre. It was perched high above the rest of the compound in an attempt to discourage sabotage.

"The captain says the cables are to your left." Said Hughes, still sounding FAR too amused.

"Right." Edward replied, reaching into his bag and extracting the last bomb. It was nothing short of a miracle that it hadn't fallen out, exploded or both when he had fallen.

"This one's going to be very difficult to place." Hughes commented thoughtfully. "And once you've got it down it's probably going to be as unstable as shit. Place it and get out of there as fast as possible." Edward didn't trust himself to reply. Concentrating on the wires he was carefully wrapping around the cables he bit his lip out of nervousness as just how dangerous this part of the mission was occurred to him. The bomb was a mix of the electromagnetic waves of the others, but it had a bit of a spin attached to it, and that spin was what Edward was fixing now.

Edward attached the plastic explosive slowly and carefully, attaching the leads that would connect it to the fuse of the electrostatic portion of the bomb. It was a weapon that had been made from a combination of stolen human technology and avian know-how and it hadn't been tested. Electrical pulses were going to trigger the spark that would set the whole contraption off.

In short, the tower was going to go boom.

"Well done, Ed." Said Hughes as Edward attached the trigger and stepped back to admire his handiwork. "The captain wants you to return to the transport ship now that your mission is complete. Once you're about a kilometre away from the tower, activate the bombs."

"Right. Rodger that. Returning now." He said, and then proceeded to make a dreadful mistake. Against Hughes' previous warning, he took flight.

He had flown about three metre when the first thing grazed his left cheek and searing, burning pain followed what seemed to be a wave of boiling heat. He banked a hard right. "What the hell was that?" he demanded into the microphone.

"That was the ground-to... hey! Roy! Give that back!"

"Princess." Roy's voice cut over the communication channel, Hughes' mutterings barely audible in the background.

"don't call me... HOLY SHIT!" Another shot grazed past his knee.

"Duck." Said Mustang, and wonder of Wonders, Edward did so as another of the blasts soared over his head. The end of his hair was clean cut off and about one inch just sizzled before his eyes, the acidic smell of burnt hair plaguing him. "And I don't think I've ever called you holy shit." There was an edge of panic to Mustang's tone that killed the would-be joke.

"What the fuck is going on?" he yelled, spinning to one side as a wave of heat barely missed his ear.

"Welcome to the world of combat; Edward. Hard right." He did so, barely avoiding being sliced in two. As it was, the beam took out three of his feathers. "These would be lasers." Mustang informed him.

"What?" Confusion flittered past Edward's face as he spiralled downwards and came to a sickening stop, dismally close to dying. He flapped twice and shot up again, barely avoiding a crossbeam. His wings were hurting from the prolonged flight acrobatics, he wasn't ready for this! "You mean those coloured beams they shoot in badly made movies? Why the HELL can't I see them?"

"Drop back." Snapped Mustang urgently. "drop your illusion, it's useless anyway. When the humans register, right! That something is going on, they'll just start firing." Edward was breathing erratically, a stitch was developing in his side, and adrenaline was pounding through his system. "You cant' see the lasers because you don't see lasers. They're made purely from DOWN! Light and you can only see that if it lands on something." Mustang's voice, while urgent, had lost that degree of fear and was cool and composed once more. Edward shot down in a spiral, weapons firing at him from all around and barely missing him. Only when he was in danger of crashing did he pull out of the nosedive and with three fierce flaps of his wings he shot off down a narrow, east facing alleyway, wings at full spread and with barely enough room to breathe. To his left a piece of brick wall exploded.

He flew faster.

His hair was unravelling, a completely inappropriate part of his brain noted. The shot that had destroyed the tip of his hair had taken out the tie and it was coming out. He spun around a corner, barely avoiding coming head first into another wall, ducked around a human that sprung up out of seemingly nowhere and dived through an open warehouse door into a room full of...

"Motorbikes?" The chrome helms shone in almost studio-like lighting, of the large room. The floor was covered in grease stains and the walls were covered in different tools and parts. The bikes themselves shone with an almost dull gleam as if they hadn't been polished in a while and most were covered with the fine red dust that was the planet's surface. He realised how utterly exposed he was, standing in the garage doorway around about then and made a hasty dart to the shadows on the far side of the room. Human voices came from the right wall and Edward froze, noticing belatedly the second doorway and that his movements had just pretty much cornered him. Mustang was being decidedly quiet and unhelpful and the voices were growing louder as if they were approaching.

"...right Ling. You've just got to tone it down a bit. Not every girl in the world actually wants to sleep with you. Pass me that wrench would you?" Said a disturbingly familiar female voice, and if Edward had of been still capable of moving, he would have seized up then and there, as it was he was pretty sure his heart had stopped beating. He took a deep shuddering breath and pressed into the wall, looking for something, anything to hide his face.

"This one?" Asked a male voice with a slight oriental accent and the female gave a dismissive snort.

"No, the one next to it, dumbass. I thought you said you were good at fixing things. Can't you even tell a sixty-six-two-b wrench from a sixty-six-two-a?" This wasn't happening, it simply wasn't happening. She couldn't be here. She just couldn't, not that person who would know that trivial difference between something so small, not the person who had been studying mechanics since she was three years old and practising it since she was 5. "Which one of these piles of junk is broken anyway?"

"number seventeen. It overheated when the..."

"Radiator ran dry. How the hell did THAT happen? These things run on hydrogen fuel, they literally create their own water." A black head darted into view, followed by a blonde one. In desperation, Edward saw a helmet just a little way away and made a hasty grab for it, pushing it on. It was slightly too large, but he didn't care.

Roy's voice came to him. "Oh you're not going to steal one of those things, are you?" Caught unawares, Edward jumped.

"Quiet. They'll hear you." Though it wasn't a bad idea. He thought as he moved towards one of the red bikes. It had a black three painted on the front. Seventeen, the broken bike was right next to it, by some unfortunate stroke of luck, and he looked over at the two approaching. The two humans headed his way were barely teenagers, neither had turned towards him, and he prayed desperately that it wasn't her. He straddled bike three and pressed the ignition switch. The engine gave a loud revving roar and both of the human's heads snapped up.

His worst nightmare was confirmed as a pair of blue eyes met his through the helmet's visor. He had never been so grateful for tinting in his life as Winry, tall, blonde, tomboyish Winry stared at his wings with a look of utmost hate on her features. She was just as he remembered from three months ago, and some part of him, the part that desperately wished she wasn't cried out in agony.

There was a pause in which the only sound was the soft rumbling of the bike's engine.

Edward sighed, and then, almost unsure why he did so, he spoke. "Get out of here, humans." His voice came out shaky and weak, not at all as he had hoped. "If you value your lives."

Without watching her, He revved the engine and roared out of the garage his hair flying behind him like some golden sheet and the cries of "Angels!" and "We're under attack!" trying to keep up with him but laying choked and dying in his dust cloud. A laser blast from a hand held weapon grazed his knee. He didn't turn around to see which one of the two had fired it, he didn't think he'd be able to handle it if it was her.

In desperation, he pressed the detonation button and an explosion racked the world behind him, locking the electric doors of the complex open. Without pausing, he roared through them, the bike vibrating almost unbearably behind him. He couldn't see for the tears streaming from his eyes.

It was only after he was several kilometres away from the compound and could still see the smoke rising in the distance, at the base of mount Olympus that Edward stopped the motorcycle. He shakily stepped off the bike, barely trusting his legs to hold him up, pulled back his hair and heaved until his stomach was empty.

And when Mustang asked him about it later, he denied everything.

.

A/n: ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

-DED- You have permission to brick me.

But please leave a review first?