A/N: Sorry about the amount of description going into Ed's yard and home in this chapter and the next—there IS a reason for it, which careful readers should realize as they read the descriptions, especially of the house interior next chapter.

Also, when I was describing the plants in the gardens and stuff—I was actually being accurate to things really found in a garden in many countries in Europe, and yes, marigolds do exactly what I say—we use them to keep most harmful bugs and many kinds of animals out of our garden. Animals don't like the smell of the leaves when you brush your fingers over them or give them a little, light twist (it's sort of skunk-ish).

Home

They had indeed done the blood test that day, but the bath had needed to wait for the one after, because Ed was still tiring very quickly. Ten days into the blood replacement and the blood sample they had taken had already shown thinner blood than normal—traditionally, such thin blood would have been good cause for worry. Also, both doctors had watched in shock as the small wound from the needle healed near-instantly, then traded amazed looks and promptly decided it was best to empty the small sample into the toilet. Ed was relieved by the decision. The process was obviously still going to take a while to complete, so getting rid of unusual samples would mean people would be less likely to take an interest in him.

For the next several weeks, things largely went into a holding pattern, the first three of those with Ed in little better shape than he had been during the first week and a half. The pain ratio decreased (though he wasn't sure if that was due to the cause being mitigated or him re-learning his pain tolerance) and the time he spent aware began increasing gradually, until he was almost normal again. Well, as normal as a five-year-old with energy for blood could be (assuming he didn't end up in tears at how Ria or someone else from Gaia wasn't there to talk with or whatever it happened to be). He was able to write more in his journals, spend time talking with whoever visited—largely the Rockbells, his mother, and Al—and generally just get used to being in a child's body again.

During that time, Winry had been perfecting and improving her walkie-talkies, Al had been reading Sarah and Yuri's medical books, and the adults worked to keep things light and cheerful, especially as Ed got better. His mother often sat with him for part of the day, and took Al and Winry outside to play for awhile as well. All three adults had given up on keeping Al and Winry out of Ed's patient room, though that was likely also partly because Ed was doing better, despite pain and exhaustion which were prevalent for most of that time.

The doctors had been tracking Ed's blood state along with how well he was doing at managing the pain, and decided when his blood was almost entirely clear with only hints of red in it to call his mother into a meeting with them. Ed was included, so they sat in his room, his mother sitting on the bed beside the boy while he leaned against her side and Yuri and Sarah in chairs, one borrowed from another room. Granny Pinako had taken Al and Winry to play at the local 'playground' by the single-room schoolhouse.

"So, what can you tell me?" Trisha asked of her friends.

"This—process—Ed went through has had some interesting effects, and we thought we should go over some of that with you before it takes you by surprise," Yuri began, checking his doctor's notes. "There are some things which will be obvious from the start if anything happens, so better you're prepared."

"And those things are?" the woman blinked, looking down at Ed for a moment.

Yuri and Sarah traded looks before the woman sighed faintly and told Trisha, "The most obvious thing is that, if he's injured—say, a cut or scrape—not only will it heal extremely quickly, but if blood came to the surface, it will be clear, not red."

"But if his blood is so thin, he'd never stop bleeding!" Trisha stared.

"In this case, that's not true, though," Sarah replied, looking amused. "Whatever made his blood thin seems to have done the opposite—it's made it almost impossible for Ed to bleed out because the wound, or wounds, heal too fast. Believe me, when we took a blood sample and found the thinning, we tested it, exactly because it could have been very bad for him if it had behaved the way it normally would have."

That made Trisha frown in confusion, and Yuri told her, "For obvious reasons, it's not a good idea for that data to leave this room—the few notes Sarah and I have made about it are both in a hidden file and written in code so no one would know what we were talking about. For you, that means you don't want to spread it around, or put it in writing. As much as I might be willing to trust someone like Doctor Marcoh, even he's a military officer at this point, and his desire to study whatever this is could well mean he'd want to haul him off to Central. There's a good chance we'd never see him again if that was the case, because there would be too much...fascination with this."

When the woman's eyes widened in surprise, Ed added, "Yeah, I'd be an experimental subject in short order, even if they had to set up a kidnapping and coverup to get their hands on me."

"But the military couldn't possibly mean harm to children!" Trisha protested, but it wasn't actually a very strong one.

"That's why the military is killing Ishbalan children and civilians, not just combatants?" Ed asked her dryly. "That's why there are so many levels of security on things which are supposed to be developed to help us? That's why people often go missing, and 'the best the military has to offer' never find them? Everything looks great on the surface, but there are always things which don't add up when you look closer."

"And that's true," Sarah told the younger woman, reaching out to take her hand. "We want to believe in them, but there's only so much we can actively believe is true—a large part of the government system isn't honorable at all. That's also a sad truth, and without a very impressive leader, we'll never have a truly trust-worthy government. No nation will. And unfortunately, the vast majority of those who want the power to rule a nation want it for the power over others, not to take care of them. Some may start out well, but quickly fall to the same corruption their predecessors did. Without a complete overhaul of the whole thing, Ed's going to be in danger if the state of his blood, and the healing it gives him, become widely known."

"Sadly, that's the world we live in," Yuri sighed softly, then clapped his hands. "But, the good news is that, thanks to that same strange blood being a healer, Ed should be able to go home now. He'll need some time to adapt still, and you may have to change his meals a bit from now on, but otherwise, the process should finish quietly with very little effect on any of you."

"Why do I need to change his meals, and to what?" Trisha asked in surprise, gaze moving down to Ed again for a moment.

"Primarily, the clear blood seems to flush toxins out of his system, but it also seems to flush just a bit too much of the metal and mineral requirements he has for good health," Yuri replied, tone vaguely amused. "That means something like mercury could never poison him, but it also means his iron levels are dangerously low, to the point where he'd be called iron anemic. That's just one example of what's low. I don't know if that will change over time, but it means he always needs meals which have very high nutritional value to compensate."

"Won't that healing blood take care of it?" the woman asked curiously, wondering at the odd collection of traits.

"In theory, yes, at least for awhile," Sarah said. "The problem is that he still has an otherwise normal body, and he's going to suffer for it if his body never leaves a state of healing. Even if his new blood can 'heal' him from lack of vitamins, metals, and minerals, we don't know for how long, or even if his muscles, bones, and tendons—let alone his organs—can actually handle that level of healing on an on-going basis. Better not to over-strain his body due to carelessness, so it will be able to help him when it really needs to, like when he's injured or ill."

"Okay," Trisha nodded. "Would some of those new vitamin and mineral supplements people have talked about help?"

The doctors traded looks again, then Yuri offered, "I think they could in the short term, for the things Ed is especially low on, but the truth of most of those supplements is that they don't stay in the system for long, many do next to nothing because they're in the wrong format, and they normally don't have a sufficient quantity of the corresponding mineral or vitamin which would allow absorption."

"...What?" Trisha asked, and Ed stared at Yuri in surprise. Surely Lucrecia would have told him vitamins worked that way?

"Let's take, say, salt and potassium," the man started out, arms crossed as he used the fingers of his visible hand to make motions in relation to his words. "Having too much salt can cause high blood pressure, which in turn can cause many other issues, including heart attacks. People often get their full quota of salt in a day, or more, but they don't get the required amount of potassium to moderate the salt. There's a balance between the two, and it doesn't matter how much salt you eat as long as you're getting the balancing amount of potassium, up to the maximum amount the body will take of either. In this case, the body won't take more than a certain amount of salt, and the rest will be discarded.

"So, you can eat as much potassium-rich foods as you can, which means often things like potato or various citrus fruits, which are also high in vitamins like C. They also have various amounts of many other minerals, vitamins, and metals. That's why eating a natural food, like potato or fruit, works—it's got the other nutrients in it which allow the body to absorb and use the potassium properly to offset the salt. When they made the vitamin and mineral supplements, Trisha, they isolated just the item they wanted, like the potassium, and made that into a pill, which isn't combined with the very thing it needs to be absorbed properly, making it almost useless to the body.

"Because it doesn't get absorbed properly without its offsetting element, the body can't use most of it and ends up shedding it within a few hours. Why they thought it was a good idea to make pills like that, I don't know, but it means the supplements have limited use, and require you to take a lot more of them than what the recommended daily is. In turn, taking larger quantities could give you poisoning if you didn't quite need that much, as the current amount in your system still affects it in the immediate. It's not ideal, so you need to be very careful with quantities, otherwise it has very real potential to do more harm than good."

Finally, Yuri was done, so Sarah added, "But, we know metals for Ed are safe to take extra right now, and it's more a worry that Al will try to copy his brother. That's far more dangerous, as Al doesn't need so much excess, and doesn't have a system capable of removing harmful quantities."

Trisha paused for a minute, then said, "I could explain it to him as a medicine Ed needs to take, and because Al isn't sick, he doesn't need to take it. Would that do?"

Sarah looked amused as she commented, "The greater deterrent will be the fact that they taste horrible. But yes, I think Al is smart enough to grasp the idea and take it seriously. But, until we find a good balance for all of you, we'll have to keep seeing Ed for check-ups every week or two. We'll let you know when that can safely stop."

"Could they make supplements with the right amounts of things in them?" Ed suddenly asked. "I mean, is it possible?"

"I don't see why not," Yuri answered, smiling at the boy. "It's not so much that it could or couldn't be done, it's that they chose not to do so. They were going for the isolation process, not for balance and actual health—they did it the easy way. And it's no small amount of research to work out the exact quantities of what's needed to make viable supplements, so until that research gets done, we have to work with what we have. If we had the facilities here to make a better set of supplements, we would, but we currently don't."

"What about a multi-vitamin that basically has everything in it? Would that cover it better than trying to get the metals independently?" the boy asked, still thinking of the single pill Lucrecia had always given him. Also, all of those had been tailored to his needs, so he supposed her access to the Shinra Labs had been a boon, allowing her to make tailored vitamins for those who needed them. He wondered how many people she'd done that for on Shinra's money—probably on Lady Shinra's, though, not the President's.

The doctors both blinked, then traded looks, then looked at him again as Sarah said, "We can look into it and see what may have been done with it. If there is such a multi-vitamin, though, it will be more expensive than individual ones, and the only question is whether it would be cheaper than all of the ones you need individually or not. I would say, if the prices are very close but the multi-vitamin will allow most of the needed elements to be absorbed in decent quantity, then the multi-vitamin would be the more viable option. Assuming your mother can afford it, Ed. If she can't—we'll have to hope your food content will be good enough."

Trisha gave them both an amused look and said, "Yuri, Sarah, all I would need to do to have enough money to take care of Ed is to write a letter to Hohenheim asking for more funds for medicine. He's not completely cut off from us, and has done that for me before." The words surprised Ed and made him glower. That man had never cared about them, otherwise he'd have come home to take care of them. Then again...they had always found unmarked envelopes in their mailbox with money in them so the boys didn't starve and could do things like get repairs done on the house...And that was after their mother's death...

He did not like that thought, which caused his glower to darken.

"We'll let you know how it goes, then," Sarah agreed with a smile. "In the meantime, you can go grab Ed a fresh change of clothes so the two of you can head home today. Take care of yourselves, all right?"

"Thank you both for all your help, and I'll be back soon," Trisha agreed, giving her son's shoulders a squeeze before getting up to follow them out of the room.

True enough, it didn't take her long to return with a fresh change of clothes for Ed, and it also didn't take long for him to change. For the first time since he woke in his bedroom over two months prior, he was going to be seeing more than the inside of the Rockbell home and the view from the window. Stepping outside was easy, as his recollection of the town he grew up in hadn't been great by the time he'd been shipped off to Gaia, and even with the memories returned, most of the views around him were of a bemusing sort at best.

But, as they were walking up the front walk to the house where he grew up, the view became surreal, and he kept seeing the burnt house overlaid on the un-burnt one. He almost felt like he had vertigo, but he obviously didn't—he'd have fallen flat on his face if he did, as he'd had it before (for varying reasons, most of them deliberate and not pleasant). There was no way he could deny a detached feeling at the sight of the house, the one he'd once lit on fire and turned away from so he could never go back.

And yet, now he was. Right back where he'd started, before everything (almost everything, he had to amend, at the fact of his father's absence) had gone wrong.

How could that not be surreal?

He was also suddenly very thankful that Al wasn't there, because he was sure his behavior for the next few hours would look very strange for someone who had only been away from their home for a couple months, not many long years.

"Did you want to just go to your room and rest, Ed?" his mother asked him kindly as they stepped inside.

He blinked, then shook his head and answered, "I want to just—look around. I won't go doing anything stupid like trying to run, but I just feel...restless after being in bed for so long, even if I was in pain."

She gave him an understanding smile and agreed. "Go ahead, but don't over-do it. If you get tired, or want a drink or snack, come find me or grab what you need yourself."

"Okay," he agreed, then wandered away to look around as his mother headed for the kitchen.

Surreal. Every bit of it.

Normally, he'd have started in the living room, which in that era was more of a 'parlor' than it was a living room. It served roughly the same purpose, especially as it was the first thing a person stepped into from the short entrance hall. One wall led to the stairs to the upper floor, while the other opened into the room, and past the stairs up was another hall which led to the back door. Off that hall were the kitchen, their storage and laundry room, and their decently-advanced bathroom. They had no showers yet, though, and he was going to miss that. A lot.

Rather than searching around those rooms or going upstairs, he headed for the back door and slipped outside. From the front of the house, a person would never know there was a garden back there, because the front and side yards were all just open grass, other than a few small trees near the front of the house. Outside the back door, however, was a fenced-in garden which was about the width of the house and more than twice its length—most of their food came from it.

Closest to the house were a few decorative flowers, and there were marigolds throughout the garden to keep most unwanted pests out of it, but otherwise, it was all food. In with the flowers were many kinds of herbs: dill; rosemary; sage; oregano; basil; thyme; mint; anise; turmeric; savory; rue; tarragon; fennel; cloves; ginger; chamomile; coriander; lovage; bay leaf; marjoram; nutmeg; pepper; parsley; and chicory. There were also a couple he didn't know the names of, but all of the herbs his mother grew could be used for either/or seasoning and medicine.

Staples like potatoes and carrots grew to one side, and corn, peas, and beans grew to the other, the peas using the cornstalks as trellises to grow on. There was a bundle of tomatoes, though they didn't eat them much as they were more a summer treat than a standard food source, and there was a decent patch of each celery, onion, leeks, chives, and garlic. They also grew cucumbers for pickling in the part of the garden which stayed moist longest. Some years, they grew a couple plants of things like squash or pumpkin, though one of his favorites was sweet potato, especially when his mother candied it for a winter treat. They also had spinach, which he hated.

At the far back of the garden was an enclosed walk and chicken coop. Because they didn't want a bunch of new chicks every year, the coop had a large section where their several hens had their nests while a sturdy wire divider kept the rooster's nest separate from the hens. They could take the wire divider out to let the rooster roam if they wanted the new chicks to replace older hens, a couple at a time. When the rooster was being kept away from the hens' nests, he could run around on the walkway, which was also separate from the pen. Both Ed and Al had learned very quickly to keep all of the pen and walkway gates closed, and before burning down the house, they had either given the chickens to Winry and Pinako or sold them.

Their family had never had more than the chickens as a protein source, but that had never been an issue, really—eggs were a good source of all kinds of nutrition, and were filling as well. The garden provided nearly everything they needed for vegetables, and their mom had traded eggs for fruit. Past the pen, they only had an apple tree and a pear tree, and those were actually on public property, even though everyone took those trees as the Elrics' trees. All other fruits had to either be bought or traded for—things like oranges came out of the Matheson's greenhouse, as they were the only ones with the money to have built one. Doing so had, however, meant they had no funds left for any source of protein, so they didn't mind trading some fruit for eggs.

Because this was still the early (maybe up to mid?) part of the Ishbal War, Ed realized suddenly, it was still a major wool-producing community, meaning they had a lot of farmers with sheep.

Mutton.

Wool.

If he was honest with himself, he hadn't touched mutton or wool since ending up on Gaia, and to be dropped back into a community where those were mainstays...That was going to take getting used to. He had never much liked wool, though one of the tailors in town had a way of softening it so he could wear it, so cotton had always been his priority for natural clothing products, and he'd gotten used to eating beef or pork as a red meat on Gaia, where those animals were generally more plentiful. And damn, he was going to miss hamburgers...

Unless his mom would be willing to make them with ground mutton?

Why was he even thinking about hamburgers?

Sighing and giving his head a shake, he also realized part of the reason for the fences was so the flocks of sheep wouldn't get into their garden, but on the up-side, the roaming sheep flocks kept the foxes away from the chicken coop. It was a very interesting dynamic, honestly, now that he knew something about the balance of nature. Now that he knew what was and what wasn't possible. The herds made the area far too busy, at all hours, for the foxes to want to risk stealing inside, especially since the rams were vicious when they found any kind of predator—wolf, mountain lion, fox, or anything generally fitting in those categories. Only house cats and the town and sheep dogs were safe from them.

Oddly, that had led to them acquiring a few wolves as 'sheep dogs', though Ed wasn't really sure how the wild wolves had ended up protecting their herds after watching the dogs do it. He guessed those were just strange wolves, or maybe ones who had been kicked out of their packs so had sought the next nearest 'pack' which may take them—the human town. It was fun to imagine how that might have come about, especially after seeing how Alexander as a Bandersnatch had behaved with Nina.

The thought caused him a pang of very real pain. What was going to happen to her if she came back here? She wasn't even going to be born here for years yet, and he'd never want her to go through any of that suffering again!

As he reached for Minerva to ask, he realized a huge problem. Or more than one.

Most obviously, the call to her went upward a bit, then fizzled out—she was too far away for his bond with her to reach her. In a way, that was expected, as she wasn't on the planet yet.

The second was that the other tie he should have was...unresponsive.

That wasn't strictly accurate, but he didn't have better words for it just then, so he looked around for a place to sit. The thought of the fruit trees had him head out past the edge of the walkway and pen, then over to the apple tree, gaze wandering absently over the grazing forms of the fluffy, white sheep. They'd need to be sheared soon. Which was a useless and random thought just then. Sitting against the tree, Ed found himself closing his eyes and reaching for his ties to the planetary entities. He knew he should find two, and had already noted the fading out of Minerva's bond.

It was the other bond he needed to track (he still wasn't even sure which entity it would lead to, and wouldn't know without being able to talk with that one), and tracking it led to a barrier. Very quickly. It was unresponsive because...He paused to eye the barrier for several long moments, then finished the thought with the realization that someone had knowingly blocked the entity from the nearby humans, and had in turn blocked the nearby humans from communicating with it. The barrier could only have been deliberately made, and was therefore made by someone sentient.

In the usual course of events, that would have meant humans, probably alchemists. But because Ed knew about the homunculi, he felt certain it was the First Homunculus, 'Father', behind it, because none of the others had been actual alchemists able to create such a barrier. On the other hand, it could have been 'Father's' pet alchemists in Central on his orders, which he may or may not have helped to do. When he had last encountered 'Father', the barrier hadn't been one of the things they had noticed or thought on, largely because it hadn't mattered. Though, the barrier felt too old for that...

The only two ways to bypass the barrier for alchemy 'Father' had erected in Central had been through forms of alkahestry, one the Xingese version and one the adapted Ishbalan version Scar had eventually learned and used.

...Scar hadn't become Scar yet. Oh, that was going to be fun to adapt to...

Even more fun was going to be the fact that Ishbalans hated and feared alchemy from the word 'go'.

Giving his head a shake, Ed opened his eyes again and rose so he could go back inside to keep looking around. He was a lot of things, but since he'd lived for so long, he had learned to not overreach without dire need. Trying to take down the barrier wouldn't happen overnight, and he wasn't even sure one person alone would be able to do it. Trying to rush it would just mean he'd hurt himself and be unable to do anything for longer, so first, he'd wait for the process to finish replacing his blood, do some more research and tests on things, and decide what to do and how to go about it.

Either way, that barrier was going to come down, and soon. But 'soon' was a relative term, and he couldn't be careless, because he was also sure he'd really only have one chance before he'd be screwed.

And besides Al, where was he going to find more alchemists to help him take it down?