A/N: "Those who exchange freedom for security gain neither." -Benjamin Franklyn...If you agree, copy to your profile (you can copy-and-paste from the very top of my profile page)! Because we're here right now. 'Censoring' and laws allowing people to be erased from the Net have gotten completely out of hand, and it will take people to change them. This isn't even about 'fake' news anymore, this is about a complete crushing of free speech, like by saying you don't agree with what someone in power is doing/going to do.

Unwanted Digging

In his room, Ed lay sprawled on the bed as he stared up at the ceiling.

His father had come home because of what was in his journals. Not even 'his journals', just part of what had been in his first one, which was only an introduction and very incomplete. Marcoh, a member of Amestris' military, had come with him.

Marcoh had never been a cruel man, but relaying information to him could lead to it being relayed to the military, and that was dangerous. He was sure the man had come with the goal of reading more of his journals, and he was torn over letting him or refusing. While the knowledge could do a lot of good, it could also lead to a lot of harm, and he was sure the homunculi's leader finding out what he knew would lead to a full-scale military operation to either seize him or eliminate him. His bets were on the latter, because his knowledge was well beyond what even 'Father' knew, and that same knowledge made him dangerous.

The worst part was that Marcoh legitimately would have no idea what he'd be dooming Ed to—he'd just think this was a huge breakthrough in their alchemic understanding, and would vastly increase their control of those same forces. He wasn't wrong, but he also didn't know yet what his military was really like or who was really controlling it.

But the problem was more what the military would do to him if they tried to kill him—only to find he wasn't going to die so easily. He could suffer a lot of wounds which would kill anyone else and just heal from them, and 'death' only resulted from very specific actions. Even if they came 'to kill him', it wouldn't take long for them to notice his natural regeneration ability, and in turn for him to become a captive they would experiment on endlessly to 'see how much he could handle', or to reproduce his blood. It would be those three hundred years of torture all over again...

When flashbacks to past torture flashed in front of his eyes, he drew in a sharp breath, threw himself to his feet, and began running. At first, he wasn't sure where he was going or what he was doing, but as more and more images, memories, forced their way to the front of his mind, he remembered.

Sarah and Yuri were the only ones who would realize he'd hit a trigger. They were the only ones who would know he was having a panic attack and what to do about it. The fact that he could even assess that at the start of a panic attack was incredible progress, but it couldn't go for too long or he'd lose any sense of thought. These images and memories were some of the worst, and he already knew Amestris' military could do as bad or worse if they wanted. It was an easy association to make—

And he needed it to stop.

Knowing he had to get to the Rockbell home, and get there fast, he felt a momentary gratitude that they were neighbors. The gratitude was quickly drowned out by the horror of old memories of torture. The onset of panic was too close.

His mind began to blur as he burst into the Rockbell house, his breathing far too harsh. As his shoulder hit the wall, creating a burst of pain, he was taken deeper into the memories, and suddenly, he felt himself curling into a ball. His mind blurred again—

A pin-prick of pain on his arm caused another burst of fear—and then, darkness fell slowly around him, and the fear drifted out of his reach...

FoWD-HC

Waking with a start, Ed blinked up at the—familiar—ceiling above him. A bit of fading fear reminded him of the panic, and also that he was back in the recovery room at the Rockbell house. Deliberately not thinking on the reason for the fear, he turned to look out the window instead, staying laying down. He remembered all too well how drained he was after a panic attack.

"So you're awake," Sarah's voice said gently from the door to the room. He didn't reply, so she added, "What was the trigger?"

"...Doctor Marcoh works for the military. Our military isn't nice," Ed answered tiredly, knowing he had to give her that much. Even Lucrecia had insisted on knowing the cause.

"And your memories blurred with what they might decide to do to you if they knew the truth. The same reason you didn't want your blood's state known," she finished gently, and he nodded. It occurred to him to wonder why Sarah and Yuri weren't out on the front lines of the Ishbal War yet, but then wondered if they'd been planning to go—until he'd fallen 'ill'. "I'm glad you made it here. We may need to give your mother something to take home with her in case this happens again and you aren't able to reach us on your own. As it was, it was a close thing. Your only saving grace is that you made enough noise that the adults followed you and would have seen you collapse outside. That's still too big of a risk to take, though."

"...When it's those memories, even small bursts of pain make it worse," the younger blond told her quietly. "I hate it. Comparatively, they only lasted around three hundred years out of nine thousand-ish, and they were almost all towards the beginning of that time. I should be past this...these...flashbacks by now."

The woman sighed faintly as she closed the door and moved over to sit beside him on the bed. "Ed, our minds and emotions don't work that way," she told him gently, and he turned to look at her. She gently ran her hand over his hair as she went on, "You suffered trauma, and even if you say that was the lesser amount of time you lived through, it takes only minutes for a person to experience a life-long trigger. Working through the mental damage can make it better, lessen the effects, reduce the likelihood of an extreme reaction, and so on, but something always stays behind."

"...Does it?" he asked, thinking back on others who he knew had experienced trauma. Shelke and Tseng were immediate thoughts, and he had never known them to be completely normal unless Shelke had never reached Deepground, the Turks, or SOLDIER.

"To use the example of, say, a woman being raped once. That's a trauma. There are some women who never recover, whether they have support or counseling or not. For those who do, they may stop having flashbacks, but nothing will stop them from approaching men with caution and suspicion. They can no longer just trust a man to be close to them because of a lingering fear of being hurt. Every time that woman is raped again, the traumatic effect gets worse. That can mean she never stops having flashbacks, even with a man she trusts, or maybe she's so turned off from men she won't have one as a partner. Maybe she'll just never have a partner at all, for that matter," Sarah explained. It sounded like something similar to what Lucrecia had said once, but she hadn't used such an example.

"...You're saying the number of times I suffered torture is part of the reason I can't completely get rid of the flashbacks, even after this long," he said. "It has nothing to do with the time, it's the repetition."

"Yes," she agreed, still running her hand gently over his hair. "To be honest, the amount of recovery you've shown by what little you've said is nothing short of a miracle. You're truly stronger than I think anyone realizes, Ed. But you're still human, and some things are nearly impossible to root out of a person's mind once they've been ingrained. To even be able to trust us, or to trust the people you say are coming—that's no small part of recovery. Having occasional flashbacks may be how your psyche has chosen to compensate for the fact that those lingering emotions and memories still need to come out, but obviously won't in the form of general suspicion."

Living a mostly normal life was actually possible for him when the people around him already knew his triggers, and coming down out of panic was easier with people who knew how to handle an attack. They could literally just call him back—well, other than on the rare occasions when he had a strong attack, like the one he'd just had, which still needed medicine to force into a less-than-panicked state. Back on Gaia, most of the dimensions once he'd reached the first one with Lady Shinra had given him the chance to live largely without panic attacks once the worst problems had been dealt with.

No one on Earth knew what the Gaians did about him, and the closest to that were Sarah and Yuri.

"So until I learn what's going to cause attacks, it won't be possible to avoid them," he sighed faintly, and she gave a small, agreeing hum. "But, can I have something that doesn't need a needle to take? Needles are actually part of the cause of the trauma now, since those..."

"It's possible to take the same medicine from a spoon, but not only is the taste horrible, it will be very hard for you to actually swallow it if you're having an attack," the woman informed him.

"Better that than trying to have my mother give me a needle when she's no expert on how," Ed answered flatly. "And hopefully, I'll be able to keep enough of my senses about me long enough to get it down, at least."

"True," Aunt Sarah agreed. She then paused and asked, "By the way...Why is Doctor Marcoh here?"

"I guess Mom sent some of my journal pages to my dad, and Marcoh was with him at the time..." the boy sighed.

"Well, he recognized what happened to you, and we can't just not tell him why," Sarah said quietly. "To the best of your mother's knowledge, you've never suffered the kind of trauma which would have led to an attack like that. We've been able to deflect him by having a legitimately busy office today, but office hours are over now, and he's going to need an answer which will make sense."

"I don't have one to give him," Ed answered quietly. "Can't you use patient confidentiality?"

"We can, but if he really decides he wants an answer, he can use his military rank to force the issue," she warned.

With a heavy sigh, the blond boy reached up to scrub one hand through his hair, dislodging hers in the process. "If he pulls that..."

After a silence, she rose and asked, "Are you ready to get up and head home now, or would you rather stay here and talk about what happened?"

Sighing, he slowly pushed himself up and answered, "It doesn't make a difference anymore, not that anyone can tell. Being able to get past the attack is good enough."

"All right," she agreed in a tone which clearly said she wasn't so sure. "Then I'm pretty sure your father is prepared to carry you home, and the way you look right now, you may really need to be."

"...Maybe. It's been awhile since I had such a strong one," he agreed quietly.

It didn't take him long to slip out of the bed, but he found fairly quickly that he needed to hold onto his honorary Aunt's arm just to walk from the room and down the stairs. His parents and Marcoh were sitting in the living room with Yuri, and Marcoh had his eyes on Ed before they were even half-way down the stairs. Ed was glad Sarah was between him and the other man. Even before getting into the room, Ed was ready to fall over, so he was pretty sure the drug they had given him to stop the panic was still lingering—he wouldn't have been quite so bad otherwise. They had used a stronger version of the drug than they would have on anyone else.

"Odd," Marcoh mused. "I had thought you'd given a child a raw drug, but he should be in a coma right now if you had, not awake and aware..."

Sarah actually gave the man an annoyed look. "We aren't so careless in our practice, Doctor Marcoh. We don't give anyone something their body can't handle."

The man sat back a bit at the words, then said in a decidedly agreeable tone, "You still haven't given me a reason for an extreme attack like that."

"It's none of your business!" Ed glared at him, curling his lip in something like disgust. He didn't realize how tightly his hands clenched on Aunt Sarah's, but she just gave his hands a bit of a squeeze in reply. Marcoh looked a bit taken aback by the words as well. "You're a stranger—it's not your right to know. And I'm not about to risk another one just for you to satisfy your curiosity."

As Marcoh opened his mouth, Hohenheim surprised everyone by saying, "To be fair, Tim, Edward is right in that. Trying to force it now is not really the way to do things—I don't even think he would share with me until he's had time to re-acquaint himself with me. If you really want to know, the best option is to stay around and earn his trust."

The black haired man turned to look at his blond friend for a long moment, then sighed and admitted, "For someone so young, the day has probably been more than trying enough without adding that to it. My real issue here is more that no one actually knows what's caused this."

"We do know, though," Yuri answered. "He saw fit to share it with us, and we're still working on that learning curve. It's no instant fix, but it's better than no one knowing at all, so we're working with it. If you're worried about his home life, you don't have to be—that's definitely not the cause. If you're staying with them for awhile, you'll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor."

Again, Marcoh was silent for a few long moments, but then he agreed, "Very well, I'll leave it be for now. Though, I don't think young Edward will be fit to walk home any time soon."

"I'll take him," Hohenheim agreed without prompting, rising to move over and lift Ed into his arms. It was such an incredibly strange sensation that Ed tensed for a moment before letting himself relax against his father's chest.

Damn, he'd been so small as a child...

"Thank you so much for your help again, Sarah, Yuri," Trisha said as she also rose.

"Before you go, we thought we should probably give you a small sample of the drug we gave him to take with you," Yuri said as he rose and headed towards his office. "It would be enough for one such attack, but that's only in an emergency—if you can talk him down out of it, you should definitely go that route first. I hope Doctor Marcoh will be able to help you familiarize yourself with that kind of process before you need to use it, or you can always visit us any time if you want our help with that. Wait a moment so I can give you the sample."

"I don't know how to use a needle," Trisha commented. "And Doctor Marcoh is a temporary guest, so he may not even be here the next time it happens."

"I asked Ed about that," Sarah agreed, and Yuri paused to look back at her. "If he's not so far gone he's pretty much catatonic, he should be able to swallow the portion needed with some water to wash it down. Also, because the needle itself is another trigger, that's another emergency resort—by the time he got here, he needed it, but in other circumstances, a needle would make him worse. As such, you're only going to get a small sample bottle with only one dose in it, and how you get it into him is up to you. If you can't, call us."

"Okay, I should be able to do that," Trisha agreed in mild surprise. "Thank you."

Yuri left the room as Marcoh also rose, and quickly returned with a small bottle, which he handed directly to Trisha. "Do us a favor and call Winry back when you call for Al, please?" he asked her with a small grin.

"Sure," she agreed, and they left the house, Trisha in the lead with Hohenheim and Ed following, while Marcoh brought up the rear.

As she'd said, Trisha called both Al and Winry, sending the girl into her own home while Al walked with his hand in hers back to their house. The last thing Ed remembered before falling back into sleep was his father tucking him in, and wondered if he was hallucinating. And there was a lingering feeling from having been in such close proximity to his father, something didn't quite feel right, like a seething energy...

FoWD-HC

In the morning, he woke shortly after dawn, so went to use the toilet before stumbling down to the kitchen, hoping his mother had left some leftovers from last night's supper. However, when he stepped into the kitchen and saw Doctor Marcoh sitting at the table, staring at the bottle of medicine, he froze.

"It's full strength, just like I thought," the man said quietly. Somehow, the boy knew Marcoh was talking to him. "This much at full strength would be enough to send a grown man into a coma for a good twenty-four hours. And yet, here they are, well-trained doctors, giving it to a small child. Don't you think that's odd?"

Dozens of options ran through his mind at once, from running, to going back to bed, to attacking the man, or even to just plain ignoring him. However, none of them would work. If Marcoh was determined to do something, he normally found a way to do so, and putting him off was more likely to make him more determined rather than less.

Finally, he moved over to the table and said, "That's the dose that works on me."

Marcoh's eyes lifted to his in surprise, but he said, "That shouldn't be possible. I've never known anyone to have that level of resistance to it, even if they had used it to unhealthy levels and been addicted. This would still have a strong effect at full strength."

Deciding to switch tactics, Ed decided to throw him a curve ball. "Are you trying to find a way to create the Philosopher's Stone?" he asked. The man's brow furrowed, but he inclined his head. Ed wasn't entirely sure he was aware he'd done so. "You should stop."

"Why's that?" the Doctor asked in vague amusement.

"The energy has to come from somewhere," Ed answered flatly. "I told you already, this nation is an array built on death. If you want to create miracles, you need one of two things—large amounts of the same energy I gave the plant earlier, or you need lives. To make a Philosopher's Stone—the primary 'ingredient' by default has to be human beings. Living humans, whose whole energy and essence is shoved into a 'stone'. In comparison, harmful drugs—even ones with viable uses—working on me only at high dosages isn't very important."

Marcoh stiffened, and Ed headed for the cooler box—it wasn't quite a fridge yet, but he thought they were close—to see if there was anything he could eat.

"Why do you know these things?" Marcoh asked quietly, and Ed glanced over to see his eyes looking shadowed. "You're five years old. How, why, are you somehow able to know things men on their deathbeds don't know?"

"For the same reason I have panic attacks and know a variant of alchemy even my father doesn't," Ed answered as he found a covered plate and happily created arrays to heat it for him so he could eat. "But you're a stranger. Why should I tell someone I don't know more than that?"

There was no response as Ed returned to the table with his plate, sitting across from Marcoh to eat. It was only after he'd mostly finished that the man asked quietly, "Does that mean you also know a way to cheat death?"

Ed actually choked on the food in his mouth at the moment the Doctor asked that, spitting the mouthful out and coughing up the rest. Something eased his airways, and Ed looked up in surprise to see Marcoh generating an array to clear them. "Sorry about that," the man allowed, looking faintly amused and somehow sad at the same time. "I should have been a little more thoughtful about when I asked something like that."

He couldn't help it, Ed just waved him off. "Thanks for helping clear that." Both fell silent for a few long minutes while the boy finished eating, but then he said slowly, "It depends on what you mean when you say 'cheat death'."

"To bring the dead back to life," Marcoh clarified, and Ed groaned as he dropped his head onto the table.

"Not this again..." he sighed, remembering his discussion with Al. "There's no way to bring the dead back to life, only ways to re-start bodily processes in a largely intact body within eleven minutes of death, before brain activity fully stops and the early stages of necrosis set in. It's the same thing science and medicine already knows, but the alchemic way of doing it is more guaranteed than things like shock therapy, that's all. It's not the kind of 'bringing back to life' I'm sure you mean."

For a long moment, the Doctor was quiet, but then he asked, "Do you know why that is?"

"Because there are arrays holding our souls to our bodies, and those arrays take eleven minutes to break down after death," Ed replied flatly, not lifting his head. "Once the array has completely broken down, the soul's energy is gone, and has rejoined a larger whole—it's no longer a singular thing you can pull back. The 'whole' is the same planetary energy I needed to help the plant in the garden. You could say it's a 'type' of 'soul energy', but it's not the same thing as literally someone's soul the way a Philosopher's Stone uses it."

After a surprisingly long silence, the man asked, "Edward, why do you know these things?"

Lifting his head, the boy shot him a glare. "You haven't even been here for twenty-four hours and you're already asking me to divulge all my secrets? Are you mental? I've already shared more than enough with you."

The man looked taken aback for a moment before offering, "I could always pull military rank on you."

"I'm a civilian," the boy replied in annoyance. "And no 'emergency' requires it. Also, you have no way to force me if I just refuse."

"I can take you back to Central with me on the premise of the doctors here violating their oaths—all I need is this sample as justification," Marcoh answered, making a small motion at the bottle on the table in front of him.

That made Ed rear back and bristle, curling his lips in a silent snarl as he realized this Marcoh was still too blinded by what good he thought the military could do. "You really don't get it, do you?" he asked the man with barely suppressed fury. Given how he'd have reacted without his mental healing during his time on Gaia, the fact that he wasn't right back in a panic state from the threat was a relief. "Your own military is trying to turn this nation into an array in order to turn all of its civilians into a fucking Philosopher's Stone—to slaughter us all—and you want me to just give myself up to all of those assholes in Central who want to murder us? You really are out of your mind. Or maybe you're just still wearing a child's rose-colored glasses. Either way, I suggest you remove them before you try to threaten me again."

He then got up and headed back to his room, leaving an utterly stunned and horrified Marcoh sitting at the table. A couple steps from the bottom of the stairs, Hohenheim stood, but Ed was too upset to care, so almost stomped past him—until he felt the man's hand brush gently through his hair as he went. Stopping in surprise, he turned to face his father, who gave him a small smile and nod.

Approval.

Tears suddenly filled his eyes as he gave his father a quick hug around the waist—the highest he could reach at his height on the stairs—then bolted for his room, feeling suddenly embarrassed.