Widening Circle

It didn't take long for the Innkeeper's wife to return to them and ask if they would be willing to take Ed to the Doctor's office. Since they were done eating by then, the two young men agreed and Mustang again carried Ed, that time definitely wrapped in a spare coat, the distance to the Rockbell home. Yuri was waiting for them at the door, and led them to a room in the house, where he again tried to move Ed—only to find him offering resistance again.

By then, Ed had also made his decision and realized something very important. There was no way he could do it himself in his current state. Mustang knew nothing at all about the kind of alchemy needed, even if he'd have the power to cast Cleanse. Hughes, Sarah, Yuri, and his mother weren't alchemists. His father would never be able to focus to cast it, even if he had been studying the method with Marcoh—which Ed was sure he hadn't been.

While Al knew the method, Cleanse took so much energy Ed seriously had doubts about a four-year-old being able to cast it without having Mako blood. Ed was only letting him work on the healing water because that was a natural Cetra Healer's skill, so didn't take much energy once the person knew the method. Cleanse was actually the opposite—it wasn't a natural skill so took a lot of energy, though anyone could theoretically cast it if they had the Materia. Which they currently didn't.

By extension, the only one who had any chance of casting such a demanding spell was Doctor Marcoh himself.

Before a very puzzled Yuri could leave, Ed reached out to catch his cuff, making the man stop and turn back to him. "Get Marcoh here. He has to use Cleanse," Ed said, and Yuri's eyes widened in alarm.

"What does that mean?" Mustang asked as Ed's hand dropped from Yuri's sleeve and his eyes closed again.

"I'm not an alchemist, so I'm not the best one to explain it," Yuri told the two younger men, eying them thoughtfully. "He must trust you to have said something like that in front of you, though. I have a call to make, if you don't mind keeping your limpet for a while longer?"

Hughes chuckled as Mustang sighed and answered, "We don't have anything else to do. But why is he so attached to me?"

The Doctor blinked in surprise, then nodded and said, "That's a fair question. By what he said just now...You wouldn't happen to be feeling more tired than normal, would you? And are you an alchemist by any chance?"

"Um...Both?" Mustang answered in surprised puzzlement. "I'm not very tired, but since you said 'more than normal', I went with that, which I am now that I think about it. And I've been working hard to learn alchemy, with fairly good results, but I'm nowhere near trained enough to be an expert."

"How are your alchemic reserves just now?" Yuri asked curiously.

After a pause, the other man said slowly, "I don't actually think I'd want to try doing anything just now."

Yuri motioned at Ed and said, "Something has gone wrong and is pulling far more energy from Ed than he can afford to lose. To compensate for that, he's been pulling on your energy, something much easier to do when he's touching you. I don't think he's even aware of doing so, only that he wants to stay close to you because it's helping him feel better. Apparently, Cleanse will fix that, so we need someone here who can use high-level alchemy, and if he didn't ask for his father, there's something keeping him from being able to do it. That leaves Doctor Marcoh. Now, if you'll excuse me...?"

Mustang and Hughes turned to stare at one another in shock as Yuri left, and Hughes managed to get out, "Well, even if we'd been trying to find Hohenheim, I guess finding Doctor Marcoh means finding him..."

"The boy's father...Is he maybe Von Hohenheim?" Mustang mused.

Ed had to snort in amusement at that. "Why do you want to find him?" he managed to ask, just staying where he was. Apparently, Mustang didn't mind him hijacking his energy, which seemed a bit odd. Maybe it was because he was younger? It wasn't often he pulled energy from others, and it was usually from Aeris or Ifalna when he did, but that didn't exclude being able to pull from others. He'd also pulled from Genesis a few times, or from Kunzel. The requirement seemed to be that the person was a Mage—an alchemist. It also normally meant the person was a Cetra, which gave him pause.

Mustang had Cetra blood?

"I'm trying to learn more alchemy so I can be more useful to the war effort," Mustang answered. "Hawkeye wouldn't teach me further when he realized I was aiming for the military, so I have to find someone else, and when I suggested Hohenheim, he said Hohenheim and Marcoh had recently left for a small town in the middle of nowhere—Resembool."

"You should talk to Doctor Marcoh and my dad about the military before you decide to devote your life to it," Ed replied in a flat tone, keeping his eyes closed.

If he was thinking about it now, though, for him to be subconsciously pulling someone else's energy, he'd have to be in a worse state now than he had been when he'd first needed Cleanse. Which still left the question of why that was the case—what was actually wrong? It wasn't physical, since his Mako blood negated any kind of physical harm or drain unless it was something attached to him. There obviously wasn't anything like that, so it had to be energy-based.

The sudden realization of what it meant for Ishbala to be under that wall made him start mentally cursing. Of course the first hole he'd be able to expel some negativity through would be one of the ones Ed had made, and Ishbala might not even be aware of having released some of it—or maybe more than 'some'. And Ed had been putting little pin-prick holes in it for months, all of which were attached directly to him, and might not actually be closing over completely when the reaction ended. If even the smallest energy bond remained between him and Ishbala, those emotions would just absently seep across and affect him.

"As long as we can find them," Mustang agreed dryly.

"...Roy...Did a five-year-old just say 'devote your life to it'?" Hughes asked suddenly.

"Yes, why?" Mustang asked in confusion.

"...I know children are intelligent, and sometimes surprisingly so, but no five-year-old says 'devote', let alone used in that way," Hughes explained, and Ed mentally rolled his eyes. "Maybe a ten-year-old would. Maybe. But at five, I don't think that word is even a thing to them, even if they've heard it before."

"And yet, this is clearly a five-year-old sitting in my lap and leaning on my chest," Roy answered in amusement.

"Okay. Why does he apparently know his own treatment, and even the certified Doctors here are taking his word for it?" Hughes asked shrewdly, and Ed found himself impressed with the man's mind, even when he was only eighteen or nineteen. He was definitely showing Turk traits—he'd fit right in with them. Hughes' question also made Mustang pause to think before answering.

The door opened again and Yuri led Marcoh into the room, the latter of whom was carrying one of Ed's journals, the boy noticed when his eyes flicked open for a few moments. It also seemed the man was a little nervous, but he was steady enough as he flipped the journal open to one page in particular for a minute.

"So, this is apparently a kind of energy drain," Doctor Marcoh said, but then flipped the page and went on, "Or, more accurately, an inundation of negative emotion, which in turn drains a person's energy. Cleanse should remove the negative energy." He paused again, then asked, "Ed, are you really sure I can cast something at this level?"

Ed felt Mustang stiffen under him, but sighed faintly and said, "You've been practicing with it. I'm too tired. My father won't touch it. No one else has the energy or the knowledge—one or both. You're the only one who actually has a chance of doing it right now."

Another silence fell, then Marcoh drew in a breath and asked, "Will the young man you're clinging to be harmed by it if he's in the area of effect?"

"You're choosing a 'target', not an 'area of effect', so no. And Cleanse wouldn't hurt anyone in its 'area of effect', anyway, because everyone has some negative energy or emotion needing to be cleansed," Ed answered dryly, then yawned. "Could you please just try? Just focus on me and clearly visualize the arrays in your mind. As long as you hold it long enough, it'll pull the needed energy, even past the wall." That had made him sleepy to the point of pretty much dropping off right where he was. Not that he hadn't already basically been doing that...It was just stronger now.

"What wall?" Mustang asked in surprise.

"We'll get to that later," Marcoh answered, then apparently set the book down and moved closer. "Let's see how this works, then."

Shortly after, Ed felt the energy of Cleanse reach him—and felt Ishbala with it, offering more energy, a small apology for having caused accidental harm, and warmth as a thanks for putting those holes in the wall. If he felt it, probably Marcoh had, too, but he also felt the cleansing and lightening of the emotion he'd been accidentally inundated with. After a time, it had gone completely and he drifted into natural sleep.

FoWD-HC

Maes Hughes liked to think he was a practical man, even at only nineteen years of age. When he and Roy had met in secondary school, they had hit it off because he'd found Roy usually had interesting things to add to a discussion, even if his perspective was completely different from his own. That was a good thing in his books, and they'd stayed friends right into basic military training. Then, he'd found the information for Roy that he'd have to participate in the State Alchemy exams if he wanted to be a State Alchemist, and no, he wouldn't get leave from military operations to study. On the other hand, if Roy became a State Alchemist, he could fast-track Maes through basic training.

That being the case, the two men had decided to drop out of basic training before finishing it, instead focusing on getting Roy the training he'd need to become a State Alchemist. In the process, they'd met Riza Hawkeye and her father, and had also found themselves running up against a wall in regards to the flame alchemy the man knew. His daughter wasn't an alchemist, but in the long run, she'd been more helpful to them than her father had. She had admitted she knew and understood the danger in such powerful alchemy, but she also felt it could be used for good in the right hands. The only reason they'd found out about Hohenheim's location was because she had encouraged her father to tell them.

Meeting little Edward their second day in Resembool had been an interesting experience, because most five-year-olds didn't take one look at an unfamiliar man and pronounce them a 'bastard'. And he was sure the boy wasn't claiming anything about Roy's birth status, he had just been swearing at him. Sitting with Trisha and Hohenheim now, he was also sure they had never taught him words like that, not at his age. While his first thought had been some form of abuse or neglect, he now was starting to doubt that—or even if the 'child' actually qualified as one.

Since Ed was still sleeping on Roy's chest and didn't seem to mind that a stranger was the one he'd made into a cushion, he and Roy just stayed where they were. Doctor Rockbell (both of them, actually) still had a medical practice to run, and Trisha had another child to worry about, so they didn't stay long. That left the two of them, the sleeping boy, Doctor Marcoh, and Von Hohenheim. Since the parents had only stepped into the room after Doctor Marcoh was done with 'Cleanse', Maes had been able to focus on the man when he'd come in and while he'd been activating arrays unlike anything he and Roy had ever seen before.

Knowing such an accomplished alchemic doctor was asking a child for guidance was mind-boggling, and the child's replies had been nothing at all like a child's. He'd have thought the boy was a grown man, maybe even elderly, and had apparently also known what he was talking about. And in the process of directing the alchemic reaction, he'd seen how Doctor Marcoh had suddenly turned stunned, but had forcibly returned his focus to the arrays he was maintaining. Those glowing lines of many inter-linked circles around his wrist...

With just the men in the room, apparently Roy thought to ask one of the things Maes had also wanted an answer to. "So, apparently that—version of alchemy takes a long time to complete? It's not instant or short-term?"

Doctor Marcoh sighed and gave his head a shake. "It's supposed to happen at the same speed as any other reaction an alchemist uses. But, using it that way, I'd already been noticing interference with the ability to make it work, and in this case, the task was so demanding it made the interference show as what it was—a wall of energy intended to disrupt and prevent access to natural, planetary energy."

"When did you discover that kind of alchemy, and why use it if it's so taxing?" Roy blinked. Maes just observed the man, who suddenly looked sadly amused.

"It's not mine, it's entirely Ed's creation," the Doctor told the two younger men, and Maes felt his eyes widening in stunned shock. "He's been allowing me to study and learn it, but it's a steep learning curve, and with that wall in the way...I truly believe this form of alchemy would be far more useful to us, and far more wide-ranging. If that wall wasn't there."

"Why so certain?" Roy asked, gaze intense.

To all of their surprise, it was Hohenheim who said, "Because the planet's energy is a natural healer, and while it can also create destruction, the terms by which it does are shockingly precise. Xingese alkahestry already uses the same energy base for their workings, but what Ed has done has well surpassed that knowledge."

After a pause, Maes asked what should have been an obvious question, "Why is it a five-year-old apparently knows alchemy so advanced if there's no precedent for it?"

"Someone taught him, and that 'someone' obviously knows it," Hohenheim replied. "There are a very limited number of 'entities' who could know it, even fewer than there are who could teach alchemy the way we know it or alkahestry."

"To be honest, I'd had doubts that planetary sentience or awareness could be a thing, but after what happened while I was directing Cleanse, I'm sure we've all been utterly remiss and exceedingly arrogant," Marcoh said, his gaze faintly amused. "And if anyone 'taught' it to him, it was the being who helped power my attempt to heal him. A being who notably pushed extra energy into the arrays, who sent along an apology for accidental harm, and who most definitely sent along a sense of caring. It was all directed at Ed, but that didn't mean I was excluded—I was also passed a thank you for my help."

The others stared at him for a long time before Roy asked, "So why does this child seem to come across more as an adult than as a child?"

Maes was glad Roy had asked, but when he thought back to Ed's expression when he'd looked at Roy, he realized now it was an expression of recognition. The boy had already known who Roy was. The boy had already known him. Neither of them had seen him before that day, so how could Ed have possibly already known Roy?

"That's...apparently some entity aged his mind without aging his body," Hohenheim sighed. "It results in some very strange behaviors which don't quite fit with either an adult or a child, and some of those are also some sort of trauma..."

His mind hadn't aged, Maes realized. No, that was the wrong wording. To be precise, it had aged, but it hadn't been aged. This wasn't just a case of his mind aging to the state of an adult, it was that Ed had lived through something, then been put back in a younger body, those memories intact. That meant it was probably an older version of Roy Ed had met, and they likely hadn't gotten along. If that was true, changing their first meeting had the potential to change how they interacted. But then he also had to ask if even one lifetime would have been enough to develop and perfect a completely new kind of alchemy. It would also explain how there could be trauma to deal with, though.

"Why do you think that, Hohenheim?" Marcoh asked the man.

"You know I'm older than I look," Hohenheim commented. "It happens sometimes that the body ages slower than the mind, so someone who looks fairly young is doing things you'd expect from someone older. But in this case, the gap is too large to be able to put down to simple genetics, so it had to be artificially done. There's really no other way to explain how he changed in the time I've been away, since it hasn't really been that long."

"So why would he tell me, or us, to talk with the two of you before deciding to join the military?" Roy asked, and Maes shot him a mildly surprised look. He hadn't thought that was actually so important, but maybe they shouldn't pass up the opportunity...

When the two older men sat back and traded looks, Maes knew there was indeed something to tell. He never expected what Marcoh finally answered with.

"I had never seriously thought about things before, things I was being asked to do by the military or things the military was doing," the Doctor said with a faint sigh, then pulled a rough map of Amestris from his pocket which was covered in notes. That, he passed to Roy. "You can see what it is, right?"

"A map of Amestris you've added dates, locations, and names of battles on," Roy answered, his brow furrowed faintly.

"How many substances can forcibly maintain a large-scale array if they fall on solid ground, even if the base circle is destroyed?" Marcoh asked. Maes wasn't really sure what that meant, but it meant something to Roy which made him first frown as he looked back at the map, then caused his eyes to widen.

"Blood," Roy said, and his hand was shaking. "What's this array for?"

"...It will turn every living being in Amestris into a Philosopher's Stone," Doctor Marcoh answered quietly, and Roy's expression became tortured as Maes' mind came to a screeching halt.

Hohenheim went on, "It's the same thing that happened to Xerxes. My best guess is that someone either knew or re-discovered the old alchemy which ended Xerxes and is trying to re-create it here. Unfortunately, that also means the Amestrian military is on board with the idea, and that they're willing to sacrifice an entire nation for this goal. The only ways you can bypass the majority of the restrictions on alchemy the way it's used here and now is to either harvest soul energy from the living—create a Philosopher's Stone—or to learn the version of alchemy Ed has, which harnesses raw planetary energy. The latter doesn't require people to die or have their souls become trapped in the Stone."

"So wait—our nation is nothing but a trick to lead us like lambs to the slaughter?" Maes managed to get out, wondering if this was all just a hallucination.

"With its current leadership, yes," Hohenheim agreed. "Amestris isn't a bad nation. It's not a bad place to live, and most of its people are generally good people. The problem isn't the nation, it's the leaders. The people in power know something the rest of the people don't, and they're using that to herd people unknowingly into their plan. Rulers have been doing it for ages, usually for something which would grant them power, wealth, glory, or any combination of those. The war against Ishbal is another of those things we and the Ishbalans were herded into for the leaders' purposes."

"And that's why Ed told us to talk with you, because you knew about all this..." Roy began, suddenly sounding defeated.

"I actually think Ed knows all of this," Marcoh said in reply. "I think he told you to ask us because you would take it better if we were the ones who told you. And because he was just plain tired. I know he's aware of the array and the fact that it's meant to create a Stone from the people of the nation—he's the one who told me to bloody well look for something so obvious if you actually start charting it out. In that regard, it's missed because it's not even hidden, but no one draws attention to it, either. No map of various wars in Amestris ever shows enough on any one map to form the circle. We're tricked into thinking that's because of the topic of the discussions, when really, they made the topics to be sure they'd never complete the circle in visible form on any one map. In so doing, no one sees the circle for what it is."

"But how do we stop this?" Roy asked, the hand holding the map clenching into a fist, and crumpling the map in the process.

Hohenheim and Marcoh traded looks again, and Maes found that he was starting to take that as a bad sign. Hohenheim was the one who finally said, "I've been trying to work on that, figure out where to place a counter-array to stop the one Amestris is being made into. I don't think there's any other way to break the circle because of the sheer amount of blood spilled in each place, so countering it is the best we have. Though, it's also possible Ed's alchemy might be able to do something about it, and the question then is whether or not he's got advanced enough knowledge to work with arrays on this scale. Because the circle isn't quite complete yet, we still have some time, but..."

"So why aren't you studying it?" Maes found himself asking, which caused the man to look taken aback for a minute. "You're an expert and bound by no nation—why aren't you studying it? If you were, you'd have been able to do what Doctor Marcoh did for your son."

The older, blond man agreed, "You're right, and I know that. But there are things he wrote which Tim and I have discussed, and I still don't know that I could justify them. This level of alchemy is advanced. I shudder to think what people could do to the world if they could randomly call up another creature to fight for them or heal them. Summoning has never resulted in anything good."

"Summoning?" both younger men asked in shocked surprise.

"Hohenheim never bothered to ask his son or revisit the topic with me," Marcoh put in. "Humans can't 'create' a summoned being, it has to already exist, and calling one doesn't give them the ability or the right to control it—they aren't puppets. If Ed's work is to be believed, Summoning is even higher level than the Cleanse ability I used, and they only exist because their souls were asked by their planetary awareness to bond with an elemental, healing, or other kind of property which resulted in them having a primary 'ability'—Ifrit calls fire, and Kirin calls a type of gradual healing, for example.

"But, to offset all of that, you can't just randomly create a soul and demand it join with anything, you can only ask, and you can't actually force them to obey you. It's the same reason why we can't raise the dead—the soul isn't ours to command, and we can't forcibly attach it to something we want it to be in. His data on the beings was meant for people to grasp what they are so they know what kinds they might want to meet and ask for help, not so they can just call a kept servant or slave at will."

"So...it has limits," Maes asked slowly, processing the depth of data the Doctor had just dumped on them, all data which had apparently stemmed from a five-year-old.

"It does," Marcoh agreed. "Those limits make sense for a being who is benevolent and wishes us to live in peace and harmony. The way this alchemy works also prevents a huge amount of misuse as well, just by having more instructions in its arrays, and it's actually more dangerous in some ways than our traditional alchemy. Like ours, it can also target any number of things—a person or animal, or a monster made by alchemy, or it could target the ground or a crate in our way, or even someone else's alchemic 'casting'."

"That makes it sound like magic," Roy scowled. "But unless the other array created a physical object, how would you target the array?"

"This description actually sounds a lot like magic, but works exactly the way described in the hands of an alchemist," the Doctor said in amusement. "It's still following the rules, but with a source which bypasses some of the most prominent, you can conjure short-term ice out of thin air to freeze an opponent to the ground for a few minutes, or create a random gravity sink. If your skill is advanced enough, you can even create an anti-gravity zone around you, which in turn allows flight. A prominent defensive mechanism of those who learn to command gravity is to create a gravity sink in the path of something—a cast of ice, a bomb, bullets—and let the gravity sink either force it to the ground or implode it. And oddly, it works."

Once again, Maes found himself wondering if the child had only lived forward one lifetime. It was one thing to advance alchemy, but to advance it to the point of functioning combat tactics? Not only could he not find any way to disregard it as a child's fantasy, but it was becoming less and less likely the boy would even have lived just one lifetime. The men might be willing to stop looking there, but he was finding that something was still missing, and he was sure it was that the boy may even be carrying thousands of years of memories himself. Especially if the one who gave him the data was a planetary sentience who had intrinsically lived as long as the planet was old.

But that was something to talk privately with Roy about, once Ed had woken and they'd returned to their room at the Inn. Right then, he was fine with letting the discussion wear off, and instead wondered why Roy himself didn't seem to mind keeping the boy close to him. What kind of working would have done that?