Sorry if this gets confusing but I'm just dumping my documents form AO3 on here in a conglomeration for these chapters when i get a chance from not on.

Edward was silently grateful that the automobiles in this world weren't so different from the ones on Amestris, despite being bigger, louder, somehow less smelly but in seeming uniform need of maintenance. Since society had collapsed here, he guessed a lot of routine maintenance work had become impossible, if the same need for specialized mechanics was the same here as it was back home.

Negan sped around a pothole, shaking Ed out of his thoughts; the convoy of vehicles, mostly made up of big trucks with open cargo bays in the back and a few smaller cars, except for the matte black, seemingly unnecessarily overpowered and fast car Negan seemed to have a personal conveyance, where Ed was currently riding.

He could have foregone the honor.

For one, the big man seemed to take childish joy in speeding, dodging obstacles, and running the vehicle into the occasional reanimated that had wondered across the mostly cleared open road the convoy was headlong down.

For another, he was riding in the back, as for some reason Negan had placed his barbed wire wrapped club in the front seat and secured it with some kind of cross strap safety harness. That left Ed in the back, holding unto a heavy grab bar on the inside of the door with one hand and vainly trying to flip through the Amestrian (apparently it was called German on this world) to English the bandits had found for him.

Negan had kept up a nonstop narration throughout the whole trip, pointing to random objects and calling out their English names; he pointed to the dashboard and said "car", which Ed repeated back to him after a moment's hesitation, not quite taking his meaning, and then to the heavy, camouflage painted vehicle in front of their car and saying "truck", which Ed repeated, more quickly this time.

As the convoy got going, the bandit kept the game up, pointing to random objects; sometimes similar or the same as one he ad already pointed out, seemingly testing Ed's comprehension a she watched the displaced alchemist with narrowed eyes in the rear-view mirror,

"Road"

"Highway"

"Corpse"

"Sign"

And after passing one brightly painted, windowless building n the high way, he'd pointed and said "Strip club". While watching Ed in the rearview mirror; Ed had repeated the name to himself, whilst looking at the unlit neon signs around the place, just barely still visible in the fading light; silhouettes of women, odd words and some odd melon like designs that reminded Ed of…Ed flushed bright red and Negan broke out laughing.

"I'd buy you a beer and some local flavor, kid but it looks like they're closed." Negan said, grinning back at Ed in the rearview mirror.

Ed muttered an insult under his breath, which only made Negan laugh harder, before he went right back to testing Ed.

The convoy passed a fortified checkpoint that was partially built into the tree tops next to the high was and walled with wrecked cars, concrete barriers, and on a particularly gruesome note, a rough barbed- and razor-wire fence scattered with impaled reanimated.

Ed watched Negan relax visibly once the convoy passed through the fort and made a quick turn unto a an even wider, raised roadway on the other side that Negan called a "highway".

As night overtook the world, Negan's game trailed off due to visibility dropping off to just the pools of light from the convoy's headlights.

Ed folded his dictionary into his now torn and filthy jacket as he failed to stifle a yawn.

"Listen old timer, this had been fun but I'd love to grab some shut-eye; promise not to take that club to me in my sleep?" he asked, jovially, rolling his eyes a bit, knowing that Negan wouldn't understand a word.

The shrewd bandit eyes him with narrowed eyes and said something in quickly spoken English, something about "needing a booster seat"; Ed had no idea what that meant but it made the pissed-off section of his brain start throbbing.

"They say the elderly have trouble driving, maybe you should watch the road?" Ed asked as he stretched out in his seat. Negan chuckled in the front and then asked, "Sleep?"

Ed had picked that word up from the dictionary and nodded. Negan looked knowingly back at him and flashed a thumbs up; Ed was surprised the gesture existed on this world as well, but he was getting to tired to care. Unravelling that mystery would wait, just like abut a million others, until after he got some rest.

Sometime later, Negan pulled into the flood-light lit vehicle bay of the old factory that was the stronghold of the Saviors, the band of survivors led by Negan. They called it the Sanctuary. A gray haired man with a handle bar mustache regarded the arriving convoy with dark, calculating eyes as he stood amongst the crew of workers that waited to unload the vehicles and perform any maintenance work on them they could with the dwindling amount of scavenged supplies at the Sanctuary.

"Boss Man!" he called as Negan stepped out of his black Dodge Charger, Lucille already in hand.

"Simon! How'd the run to The Kingdom go?"

"No trouble. They were a bit short on produce but, fall's closing in so their harvests are dropping off. They swore they were gonna make up for it in a couple days, apparently, they have a line on a fuel depot."

"Well, they had fuckin' better. We found us some new hardware we gotta test out. Hate to have to take Good King Ezekial under siege with it."

Simon looked over to where workers were unloading a stream of guns from a box truck, including stubby, tube barreled grenade launchers and a few massively heavy, long barreled machine guns.

"Fifty cals? What'd you guys run into?"

"Found the kid Arat's scout spotted," Negan said, pointing to the backseat of his charger, where Ed still slumbered, "He was holed up in a school some sort of military special forces unit had set up in."

"Special forces, huh. Wonder what they were doing way the hell out in the sticks."

Negan shrugged,

"Eerie Country." He said, shrugging; it was what the Saviors said as an excuse for any and all of the strange goings on in the equally strange section of the country, "We may have to force the bitch to give up her secrets at some fuckin' point of time."

"Sure, Boss. That why the kid got to ride with you? Lucky scav-run mascot?"

"Nah. Nah, he is his own special kind of can of what-the-fuck"

Simon shrugged.

"Anything else?"

"Yeah. Fire up the smelter."

Negan looked over at Simon and then over at Ash, the young Savior who stood nearby Arat.

"The kid?"

"She broke orders on the run, let loose a herd of stenches. And rules are fucking rules. Fire it up."

Edward woke up to find himself alone in the backseat of the car, with no way of telling how long he'd been asleep. Looking at the dim world outside made even darker by the tinted windows, he was unable to see much as he cautiously opened the door. He stepped out into the cool night air and found himself in a heavily fenced in a lot surrounded by the vehicles that had been in the convoy. A few people moved amongst the vehicles and shone flash lights into cabs and under hoods, making repairs and checking engines; unlike the armed and equipped bandits Ed had seen before, they wore normal clothing and carried no guns, but they were universally armed with knives or other hand weapons.

Ed's explorations were cut short when a tall, gaunt man loomed out of the dark; he carried a crossbow slung across his back and Ed gasped when he saw the side of his face was a mass of shiny scar tissue. The stranger's grim demeanor seemed to soften when he saw Ed's reaction shift from shock to concern as the teenager asked;

"Hey, you alright?"

The man with the scar shrugged; he obviously hadn't understood.

"Dwight." He said, pointing a thumb at his chest.

"Edward."

"Negan said to bring you when you woke up."

Ed understood "Negan" and "Bring", and silently nodded, cautiously following as Dwight moved off toward a towering building nearby, with dirty windows that shone with light, here and there.

They made their way through a side door and up unto a cat walk just in time to see Negan, in a crowd of his armed bandits, pull a long knife from a blazing furnace and turn to face Ash, the young girl who spoke some Amestrian.

She stood rooted in place a Negan approached, brandishing the long, glowing blade.

"What? What the hell is he doing?" Edward shouted as he took a step forward, only to be stopped by Dwight. The Amestrian could only look on in horror as Negan leaned in and pressed the flat of the red-hot blade to the side of Ash's face, and his outraged roar of anger was drowned out by the girl's shrill scream of pain.

Even as Arat stepped forward to take ahold of Ash and another of the assembled bandits had pressed a cloth to the seared wound on the side of the girl's face, Negan had looked up at Edward's shouted protest. The bandit leader snarled something in that language of the is world that Ed couldn't understand, pointing up at his apparent guard, Dwight, and angrily shouting something as he dropped the red hot knife he'd just pressed to the side of Ash's face unto the dirty concrete floor.

Dwight desperately grabbed ahold of Ed's shoulder with a tight grip, gathering the dirty material of the kids jacket and trying to hold him in place, but the lanky man was expecting a normal teenage boy, easily held in place; but Edward Elric was a lifelong martial artist who had been fighting bigger, stronger opponents for years and the crossbow armed man was in no way prepared when the youth brought his auto-mail arm back in a vicious elbow strike to the gut, doubling the Savior over as Ed twisted out of his grip and threw him to the metal catwalk beneath them.

Edward didn't need to look down to know that the other bandits were on the way, could here angry shouts in that foreign tongue, head heavy footfalls approaching, could here the roar of Negan's voice and the young alchemist didn't think he ran, quickly. His earlier calculations that the gang members and bandits under the big man's sway would be a preferably alternative to living in solitude in the dead, reanimated filled world outside seemed to be quite wrong at this moment.

As he darted up a nearby flight of metal stairs and across another empty catwalk high above the floor below, his mind was racing, planning in the heat of the moment; he would escape for now to make sure he stayed out of Negans hands, get back out into the wilds and hopefully, somehow, come back for Ash; the young bandit girl was still alive, the monster hadn't killed her. He needed to get her out of here as well; he may have just met the girl, but he wouldn't leave anyone to be held and tortured, ever.

After that…well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it, just like he had this cat walk; he'd come to the end of the metal walkaways, in front of a heavy blue painted wood door which was thankfully unlocked and, as he twisted the handle and through himself inside, he looked for a way to change that now that he was on yeh other side.

Unfortunately, there was no latch or bolt, and nothing in the long, empty corridor to block it with. He reached into his pocket; remembering with a curse that he'd already lost the chalk back at the school, and the gore on his clothes was far to dry to draw another circle with. Gritting his teeth, he turned and darted back down the corridor, into what seemed like a warren of closed doors and long hallways, with windows to high off the ground to be in easy reach.

It was still quiet and he dared to sop for a moment to try and regain his bearings; trying to guess form the lay off the walls sand windows where he might be in the sprawling factory complex he'd seen from outside.

Edward shook his head in frustration and muttered another curse. He had no clue where he was. The brief glimpse at the darkened buildings from outside were no basis to orientate himself in the maze-like structure now that he was inside it.

From somewhere behind him, he heard a door crash open.

Ed froze; he had gotten so turned around, he wasn't sure where he'd come from. Hopefully most of Negan's gang were down on the floor, otherwise there might already be…who knew how many up here with him already.

Suddenly, someone whistled, loud and shrill and with a simple two-tone melody, from somewhere nearby.

Ed started walking quickly, preparing for a fight.

Another whistle sounded; from a direction he knew he hadn't gone yet.

He moved a little faster determined to find a fire escape, a stairway, any possible way to escape.

The whistles sounded simultaneously, form both ends of the hallway.

Ed looked around, seeing a side hallway and stepping towards it, just whine the power cut and the hallway was plunged in darkness, the narrow windows to smudged with grim to let in much light.

The whistles came again, closer, whoever was whistling was in the hallway s with him.

Ed threw caution to the wind and ran blindly down the corridor he'd found just prior to the lights going off, bouncing off the walls but keeping his footing with a cat-like grace, but he fell to his knees in surprise when the whistling picked up again form what seemed like directly in front of him, by the sound of it there were almost a dozen people out there in the dark.

The alchemist fought his way back to his feet, groped blindly, found another corridor and scrambled down it, followed by the that same, two-tone whistling call.

Edward's flight through the dark suddenly came to a halt.

He'd run chest-first into something that barred his path, something long and cylindrical that seemed to stretch across a doorway of some kind he discovered, as he desperately fled in the dark.

The whistle sounded again, louder then ever and coming from somewhere right next to him.

Ed froze again, but this time he stayed that way as he was momentarily blinded as the lights in the hallways snapped back on with a distant mechanical *clack* that echoed through the silence.

With wide, golden eyes he looked over at Negan as the big bandit blocked Eds progress with his heavy wooden club, blocking Ed from going into the room he's annoyingly been dating for.

It was small, cramped and dirty. Ed guessed it was a janitors closet at one point. The heavy metal door had bene reinforced with extra locks.

On the outside.

Ed swallowed nervously, but his eyes hardened as he gaze up at Negan; this was a cell, and if these bandits expected it to hold him…

Negan grinned and said something to Ed.

"He say…he admire…soul? No, spirit? Bravery? Bravery! Your bravery he admire."

If Ed's had been surprised to find Negan, he was shocked to hear that broken, halting Amestrian in that voice he already knew; Ash.

The girl was standing behind Ed, her face roughly but cleanly bandaged, and pointing the stubby black rifle of hers.

But she was pointing it at Ed.

Negan laughed again, and said something.

Ash lowered the rifle as the alchemist looked on in confusion.

Ed didn't know what to do…how could she stand here with Negan, after he'd…

Negan snapped his fingers and Ed turned to glare at him.

He motioned at Ed to follow him, which he reluctantly did as the narrow hallways began to fill with armed members of his gang. Negan led Ed to another open doorway; this room was sparsely furnished, with a single bed with a rough frame made of lumber, and table made from a cable spool flipped on one side and a couple uncomfortable looking folding chairs.

Negan motioned Ed inside, and the young man made his way inside in awkward silence.

Without a word, the bandit leader spun on heel to leave, but quickly turned back around, grinning like a stage magician as he reached into his leather jacket and took out a pair of pens and a notebook strangely bound with a metal spiral.

He said something, and Ash translated.

"He say…for to help with translation. He say, we talk again two days." Ed couldn't even bring himself to look at Ash as she stood there and translated.

Negan held the items out to Edward and grinned.

"Well? How about a danke schon my darling?" Negan demanded.

Ed snatched the notebook and pens out of his hands and growled a long sentence in that not quite German language of his.

"He said…uh…he said thank you." Ash translated, and Negan looked dubiously over at his bandaged warrior.

"Really? He used that many words to say 'thank you'?"

"Well…"

Negan laughed.

"C'mon kid. Let's get you to the fucking Doc and leave the drama queen to stew for a few days. After that you two can teach other to swear, and I can figure out just what good having wizard around will actually do."

They had left Edward alone after that. The bandit leader, Negan, hadn't bothered to shut the door behind himself when he left and it hadn't taken him long to poke his head out into the hallway to see if there were any guard posted, and had been shocked to find the hallway empty except for a few unarmed bandits cleaning the floor and checking the light fixtures. Shaking his head, the young alchemist went to the metal framed bed against one of the room after shutting the door and flopped down on the lumpy mattress.

This return to a seemingly uncaring approach to his not-quite-captivity was as confusing as it had bene when he had been not-quite-captured back the abandoned school.

But, thinking about things from the bandits' point of view, Ed realized that things weren't so muddled; he was a prisoner, alright, but judging from the looks of shock on the faces of both Arat and Ash whenever he had used alchemy (as well as the hungrily eager look on Negans face) he would guess that the people on this world had never seen alchemy before- they probably thought of it as some kind of magic!

Ed smirked, but his amusement at the perceived primitivity of this world faded quickly. From everything he had seen, the technology here had, at one point, been leaps and bounds beyond that of Amestris. And they had gotten there without the aid of alchemical science.

Shutting out that frankly frightening idea, Edward went back to his original train of thought; these people had no real idea what he was capable of, he guessed, so the chains they hung on him weren't literal, but psychological. Ed seemed to be safe here, and was surrounded by a hundred or more other humans, barbaric as they were and if he decided to make a break for it…

He had spent the last few days slowly starving and sleeping on the floor of an abandoned school classroom, unable to even read the local language and wondering if a herd of reanimated corpses were going to start battering their way through the piled up furniture he'd used to barricade the door.

Ed shivered with a sudden realization; the reanimated seemed to hunt partially by sound and if that mob of them in the school basement had heard him and broken out, they'd have flooded the school and trapped him and even with alchemy to help him escape, there was no guarantee the something wouldn't have gone wrong.

The teenage alchemist sighed again.

He'd always made noises about being a loner (except for Alfonse, of course) but knew, although he'd never say it, that he never would have managed to defeat Dante and get as far as he had without the help of Winry or Hawkeye, or…Mustang. Right now, Ed would have swapped one of his remaining limbs for more auto-mail just to have that smug jerk here with him. Mustang was a veteran state alchemist, the last remaining wielder of flame alchemy and was a hell of a lot better with people than Ed and…the young alchemist realized that if Mustang were here with him, he'd likely be just as lost as Ed was, surrounded by walking corpses and savages that mutilated their own.

Ed wouldn't wish this on his worst enemy.

Ok, maybe Kimblee.

And Envy, absolutely.

And definitely Dante…

Ed frowned as he rolled over to look at the beige-painted ceiling, remembering the shouts from the gate creatures as he was dragged into this world; Dante may very well be here already. The thought that these bandits were in league with the immortal villainess crossed his mind, but he dismissed it just as quickly; if they were he'd either be beaten to a pulp or dead. Which brought him to thinking about just why Dante would have brought him here in the first place…

Ed yawned, deeply and gave up on pondering the unknown as he drifted off to sleep, suddenly glad to have a wall and an army of bandits between him and whatever this world held.

Negan whistled happily to himself as he walked into the Sanctuaries makeshift clinic; it had been the old factories first aid room, but the Saviors had knocked a wall down and expanded it into another room with a makeshift medical ward complete with curtains and hospital beds taken from an abandoned hospital. Well, someone had taken them from an abandoned hospital. And then the Saviors had taken it from them, along with all the other medical equipment the group had salvaged before running into Negans boys and girls.

The bandit leader shrugged to himself; clearly, the little community had been ballsy enough to fight their way into a hospital on a scavenging run once, they could do it again.

"Morning, Sunshine!" he called as he tore back one of the curtains, revealing the young savior Ash scrambling awake inside. Without a word, he leaned in close and grinned at the girl, looking at the fresh burn dressing on her face, Ash smiled faintly back.

"Mmmhmm. Took that shit like a boss, young lady." Negan stood and offered the girl a hand up, which she took and stood up, automatically reaching for her boots next to the bed, "Doc said he wanted you for one night, it's been a night, you ready to get back to earnin' your fucking keep?"

Ash nodded as she pulled on her boots,

"Fucking ready, boss." She said, gritting her teeth against the pain from the burn.

"Fuckin'-a right you fucking are." Negan reached into his jacket as Ash finished getting her boots on; she still wore her clothes, while her ammo vest and rifle were locked up in the armory. No guns in the clinic. Negan tapped the side of his face as he pulled the girls long bladed knife out from under his jacket; Ash flinched but took the knife from Negan when he handed it handle-first to her.

Negan turned his back as Ash stood; there may have bene a moment of hesitation, as Ash stood with that knife in her hand and the tall mans back was to her, but she slipped the weapon into the empty sheath at her belt and stood up.

"Let's go check on our young wizard, yeah?" Negan ordered as he walked out into the Sanctuary with Ash in tow.

The pair walked in silence, with Saviors and workers steeping aside and going to one knee or bowing as Negan strode by, Lucille tucked under his arm as he strode past.

"Um…Negan?" Ash asked, interrupting the silence between them,

"What's on your mind, kid?"

"Why…why didn't you use the iron…for…" Ash tapped the burn on her face, even though the big man was facing away from her. But not for long, as he suddenly turned and loomed over her,

"Ash, you know why we use that fucking hot ass iron?"

"To…show people what happens when they break the rules…"

"No, it's to teach people a fucking lesson. Both the motherfuckers looking on and the sorry dumb-fuck getting burned. In this case, that sorry dumb-fuck was you. And you," he jabbed Ash's shoulder with two fingers of his free hand, pushing her back, "Are a fuck of a lot smaller than the other dumb fucks I've needed to iron out." Negan smirked at his joke, "And a burn from that big ass iron would have been the end of you. You can't learn a valuable lesson and go back to being one of my guys if you're fucking dead from fucking shock, can you?"

"No, boss."

"You good to put this shit behind us and go back to fucking work?"

"Yeah, boss."

Negan stood up tall and grinned widely; he looked rather proud, even.

"'Yeah boss, no boss'," he mimicked, but with no conceit or cruelty, "You're not a whiny bitch about this, unlike some fucking people I know." Ash realized that Negan wasn't quite speaking to her, but to the small crowd that had gathered, doing their best to not look like they were listening.

"Back to fucking work!" Negan shouted, scattering that crowd and he and Ash passed the rest of the short walk up to the room they had left Edward in the night before in silence.

They found him at a desk, sitting in a sturdy looking but unvarnished wooden chair- which was fascinating, as neither one of those items had been in the room the night before.

Ash gaped and Negan smiled.

"Hope you're no to troubled, but rearranged I did." Edward said, leaning back in his chair when he noticed the two Saviors; Negan's smile slipped.

Ed had spoken in English.

"How fucking long have you been studying?" Negan demanded. He was starting to suspect the kid had been duping him about not knowing English after all…

"I woke up in the middle night," Ed frowned, "No, middle of the night. And have been studying since- our languages aren't two different and we use the same alphabet, after all."

Negan frowned,

"Why, is that surprising to you?"

"A bit, actually. The other world shared an alphabet, of course, and for some reason I could speak the language in London, but I couldn't here. Bit of a relief that we share as much as we do, really.

Ash was still staring at Edward like he had grown another head, but Negan looked thoughtfully down at the teenaged alchemist, before walking over and setting down at the desk with Ed in another chair the alchemist had apparently created, before dropping Lucille down on the desk top between them and growling,

"What in the actual fucking fuck do you mean by "other-fucking-world"?"