Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is quiet. It is still. 

For the span of one breath—for two, for three—it feels as if Hohenheim is truly alone again for the first time in centuries. The feeling passes, however. The voices of all his dead friends return to him; a flood of hushed horror, whispering to one another and to him.

We failed, Tahia says, echoed by a thousand others. We couldn’t stop him.

Not again, Amouzgar moans. I couldn’t bear it once. God, don’t make me suffer this again!

Touraj hushes them all sternly, and so many others do the same. Their words wash over Hohenheim like waves upon a rocky shore. There’s still the counter array, Touraj reminds them all. There’s still hope.

Yes, Hohenheim thinks. There’s at least that much left.

The others are stirring now, jarring awake with sharp gasps. Ed and Mrs. Curtis both palm their stomachs, grimacing as if they can still feel the alien presence of God’s Eye staring out of them. The military man curls up like a startled pillbug, shielding his head with bloody hands.

Al doesn’t move.

Ed asks, “What happened?” His voice is hoarse, hushed; like river stones rubbing together.

They’ve died, Nima wails, stirring up hundreds of others to take up the same defeated cry. Amestris has fallen! Amestris has fallen! Amestris has fallen!

Hush, you old fool, Touraj scolds. Just a few minutes more, and all shall be well.

“I must thank you, my sacrifices,” a low, familiar voice intones.

Ed and Mrs. Curtis react on a hair trigger, whirling about and bringing their fists up in identical defensive stances. Hohenheim is slower to tense, dread freezing him to the bone. He can scarcely force himself to turn at all, to face that bloated monster when it sounds so terribly, terrifyingly pleased—

Oh God, ten thousand souls lament inside him, a hundred thousand, an overwhelming choir that clamors fit to deafen him. Grief coils serpentine around his heart, squeezes the breath from his lungs. Oh God.

The haze clears, revealing a figure sat upon the concrete throne. Lean and muscular, a curtain of gold hair, Hohenheim’s own eyes piercing him like a blade. It takes all of his willpower not to turn tail and flee, to instead meet the creature’s gaze unflinching. The Homunculus remains horribly familiar despite the body it's sculpted for itself, neither a perfect recreation of his own nor Ed’s nor what Al’s must look like but still—familiar. Even now, the creature is of his blood. Even now, he finds a thorn of grief buried in his heart for the thing he had once called his friend.

“You have served me well,” it says, and smiles.

No, Golzar begs. Thousands echo her, and thousands more shriek the same. It can’t. It cannot mean….

“You actually did it?” It takes him three attempts to force the question out. Pointless; a wasted effort. He already knows the answer.

“Yes,” it answers. “I have acquired God.”

Ed scoffs and snarls, “That’s not possible!”

Ah, Fereshteh sighs. To be so young. To be so foolish.

Raumesh laughs; a dry, creaking noise. What would I give to be so foolish still?

Anoush weeps; as she’s done for as long as Hohenheim has known her name, as she’s done for longer still. Anoush weeps for the devils that make ruins of holy places, for the dead that can never be honored. Anoush weeps, and Hohenheim has never found fault with her grief.

“Unfortunately it is,” Hohenheim says, “given a great enough amount of energy.”

Understanding leeches Ed's face of color. He hides his horror behind a furious mask. “The Philosopher’s Stone‽"

Hohenheim, Hashem says urgently. Something’s wrong. Hohenheim—

Ladan is a cackling distraction, teetering toward the razor-edged madness every soul within him had once cut themselves bloody upon. Oh God! Oh Hohenheim! How could we not have realized? None of us! Not a single damned one of us! How could we not consider that he might do it again! Oh God! We were such fools, Hohenheim!

Across the room a low groan spills out of the colonel, as if pulled from his throat by a hook on a string. Mrs. Curtis kneels at his side, worry at war with anger on her pale face. “What,” the man groans. “What is this? What’s. Oh, what is this?”

We’ve failed, Tahia repeats, brittle and despairing.

The Xingese girl—Mei, Aghil reminds him, They called her Mei—limps out of the shadows. She gestures widely, encompassing their haphazard circle. Her small hand shakes. “How many lives were sacrificed for this?”

The Homunculus smiles at Hohenheim, sly and victorious, a self-made god patronizing those it would demand worship from. “How many souls was it, old friend? Five hundred thirty-six thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine?”

This pressure in his chest. This sorrow that is and isn’t his. He knows this. He knows, too, the screaming he’d assumed to be his friends. Many of them are crying out, yes, furious that the Homunculus has succeeded. But the others, the vast majority, the tide threatening to engulf him? 

—WHAT'S HAPPENING WHAT IS THAT HELP GET OUT OF THE WAY WATCH OUT WHAT IS THAT DAY IS IT TODAY YOU KNOW I’D FORGOTTEN HOW FUNNY IS THAT MIND ME DEAR JUST A BIT WINDED PASS IN A MOMENT I CAN’T BREATHE I CAN’T I CAN’T MOVE COMING OUT OF THE GROUND GOING DARK GOING BLACK AS PITCH I CAN’T SEE A THING OH GOD WHAT’S GOING ON HELP ME FOR GOD’S SAKE GET UP LOOK OUT WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING MANIAC DAMN NEAR RAN ME OFF THE ROAD WHAT’S WRONG SWEETIE TELL ME WHAT’S WRONG JUST TELL ME TALK TO ME I CAN’T I CAN’T SEE WHAT YOU SEE SEE THE SKY DON’T LOOK AT THE SUN SUGAR IT’S NOT SAFE IT’S NOT RIGHT SOMETHING’S WRONG I CAN’T BREATHE IT HURTS IT HURTS MOMMY WHAT IS IT BLOOD ALL OVER THE ROAD SOMEBODY SHUT THAT DOG UP HELP ME—

They’re crying out in Amestrian.

So few of the souls inside him have bothered to learn this language, though he’s lived in this country over 80 years. What was the point? What Amestrian could hear them? If they wanted to know what something or someone said, they could simply ask Hohenheim or the few that did insist on understanding this clumsy Western tongue. Xingese and Xerxesian and neighboring dialects of each are the languages that give voice to his Stone. Amestrian should be all but absent within him. It should be an absence.

—SKY SHOULDN’T LOOK ECLIPSE IT’S DANGEROUS IT’S DANGEROUS IT’S WRONG THIS IS WRONG I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING OH GOD OH GOD OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE THAT DID YOU MISTER HEY MISTER ARE YOU OKAY HEY I DON’T THINK TOUCH THAT LOOK LOOK AT THE SKY DADDY IT’S DARK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY LOOK AT THE SKY WHAT IS THAT FUCK WHAT IS THAT I CAN’T I CAN’T OF THE DARK HELP ME HELP ME I’M SCARED OF THE CAN’T BREATHE HARD TO WATCH OUT RADIO SAID THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON IN CENTRAL NEVER A MOMENT’S PEACE AND I’M FEELING SO FUNNY TODAY ECLIPSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL IT’S TERRIBLE IT’S WRONG ALL WRONG OH GOD HELP ME—

And yet, he’s nearly overwhelmed by it now.

Words are dust that would choke him. He speaks anyway. “What have you done?"

“I have repaid you, of course, for the gift you've given me.” The Homunculus has the gall, the audacity, to hold out its hand to him. “Surely after all this time, Van Hohenheim, you’ve come to understand what a gift it is I’ve given you?”

Rustah spits curses. Foul devil! How dare he? How dare he‽

His chest aches, as if his heart is still settling into its new shape. Tens of thousands of voices scream the same sentiment, their outrage dwarfed by the agony of so many new souls freshly torn from their bodies. In him is chaos. In him is a grief he had never thought he would be made to feel twice. He swallows broken glass to say, “You haven’t learned anything at all if you think I would ever thank you for what you’ve done.”

His stolen eyes harden, and then the Homunculus is gone. 

There’s no searing flash of alchemy, no inhuman blur of speed. It didn’t disappear in the blink of an eye because there wasn’t the chance to blink before it went. It was there, and now it isn’t. Dust swirls into the empty space where it sat, its throne abandoned.

“Where’d he go?” Ed shouts, scowling about.

Shadmehr’s voice is shrill enough to set Hohenheim’s teeth on edge even with everyone else raising hell. The circle, Hohenheim! It won’t work if the beast isn’t in the center!

What can we do? Samira asks, just as panicked. The question is raised by hundreds more, and hundreds more answer, Nothing, nothing. There is not one single thing to be done.

“Get back here!” Ed demands. “We’re not done with you! You don’t get to sacrifice anybody!”

“He’s gone,” Mei says. “I can no longer sense his presence, but….” She shivers, wide eyes darting from Ed to Hohenheim, to Mrs. Curtis and the colonel, lingering last and longest on Al.

The circle, Hohenheim thinks desperately. It might still work—

You know better than that, Javad chastises. His twin sister tries in vain to quiet him. All those years away from your family, Hohenheim. All those years scheming. You were so careful, so methodical, so sure. And what good was any of it if that monster can flit away from your best efforts with a thought?

Brother, Zohreh sighs. Hush. Please. There is still a chance. There must be.

He needs to see. He needs to know. Please, help him—

A thin arm of crimson energy springs from his outstretched fingertips to chew through the ceiling above, and the ceiling above that, and again and again until he’s torn a wide hole clear through to the open air. Once the transmutation fades a sullen gray light spills down and he can glimpse the blotted out sun hung in a twilight sky. There’s still time. Surely there’s still time. The Homunculus might have successfully swallowed God but surely it hasn’t gone too far, surely it’s still within the center of his counter array—

Ed’s yelling at Pride in the corner now, demanding an explanation the little homunculus can’t provide. Greed has raised his voice too, and Mei has gone to Al to shake his armor and beg him to wake up, and Mrs. Curtis is trying to calm the colonel’s piteous groans, and within him there are 536,329 new souls screaming out their pain and fear and loss. It is all so loud.

Please, he begs, calling out into the cavernous space where his thoughts brush up against his friends. Please, help him. Shield him. Just a little while longer, please.

His friends sweep between him and the Amestrians, insulating him as best they can. It’s like trying to smother a hurricane, but it’s enough. He can keep his feet beneath him, keep his eyes on the sun.

The seconds tick by. From somewhere above there comes a rumbling, the buzz and pressure of unseen alchemy, crashing stone and metal. A fight? Perhaps it’s Scar, miraculously alive and still struggling to activate his own counter array to aid in the battle against the Homunculus. A battle scarcely began before it was abandoned. They’ve all been discarded now that they’ve served their purpose and proven themselves ungrateful. 

“We have to go after him!” Ed staggers on unsteady legs towards the nearest gap among the tangles of cables and pipes wreathing the throne room.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

Ed freezes mid-stride, staring over his shoulder with comical shock. Hohenheim pays his astonishment no mind. He has eyes only for the eclipse.

It should have activated by now, Hayley whispers.

A white crescent of sunlight appears; scintillating, blinding enough to make even his eyes burn. The moon continues its lonely trek across the sky, indifferent to the tragedy that's befallen in its shadow. The sounds above end with muffled shouting, a final crackle of alchemy. Silence falls.

With nothing to focus on, his counter array can’t direct the energy of his divided Philosopher's Stones—his friends, willing to die true deaths—from its far-flung edges to the center of Central. At most, the points have activated all across the country, burning up like matchsticks. Wasted.

Masoud’s voice is featherlight, unbearably gentle. Look to your son, Hohenheim. He needs you.

He blinks back tears. Yes. Yes, of course. He lowers his gaze to find Ed startlingly close and scowling up at him. There are smears of blood on his face. Whatever cuts he had are gone now. “—do now‽”

“...What?”

Ed’s lip curls. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. Away. Beyond our reach.” He takes a breath, ignores how it shakes, in and out. “Are you alright?” 

“What? Yeah.” Ed looks away, watches Mei fail to wake Al. He doesn’t join her in trying.

Greed and Pride are at a snarling standstill by the throne, the former’s carbon-shielded arm wrapped tightly in one of the latter’s ink-dark tendrils. “Let go of me, you little shit!”

Beyond the susurrus of his friends he can still hear the fresh screaming, a storm of misery he can only put off for so long. He can’t run from it, of course. The endless stretch of days after Xerxes taught him better than to try. He just needs time. He steels himself, shutting away everything that would break him for later. “That’s enough!”

Both homunculi gawk at him. Greed looks unharmed, which is no surprise. Pride has one hand pressed to his face, however, and as Hohenheim approaches them the sorry state of his container becomes readily apparent. He’s falling apart where he stands. 

Eliasi asks, Are they worth the effort, old friend?

Asgharzadeh answers for him. Enough death. Monsters or no, there has been enough death this day.

“You must stop this.”

Pride sneers. “Why should I? You’ve lost. Father—”

“Your father has abandoned you. You’ve been used, the same as us, and now that he’s gotten what he wanted he’s left you behind.”

“He’ll come back. I am the first. I have always been loyal to him! How dare you compare yourself to me‽”

Cheeky little thing, Shahrazad remarks. Ought to remind him who his elders are, Hohenheim.

He’s nearly as old as Hohenheim, like as not, Neghban points out. 

Well, his betters then. Do something to wipe that haughty look off his face, at least.

Abdul laughs. That little monster would tear Hohenheim to pieces if he could!

“Your container is failing,” Hohenheim says. “How long can you survive without it?”

Greed yelps as Pride’s tendril tightens, dragging him down to one knee. “Are you deaf? There’s no point, Pride, so knock it off!”

“I don’t care!” Pride shouts, tearing his hand away from his face. Shadows bulge at strange angles in a flaking hole, red-eyed and razor-edged. “We’ve won! Give me your Stone, Greed!”

“Like hell!”

“What do you gain from fighting us now?” Hohenheim asks with a smile, because he knows it stings Pride to be condescended to. “There’s nothing left for you here. Will you do your utmost to kill us all? After what your father’s given us today, do you really think you have any chance of succeeding?”

“What?” Ed asks.

Pride hesitates. His container’s eye and his true eyes dart around the room, bouncing from person to person. His predator’s fangs grind like misaligned gears.

Khorasani asks, If he takes too much after his namesake to bow out quietly, who do you think he’ll attack first?

Behrouz—and many others besides—laughs. Hohenheim for sure. You’ve set the hound loose, old friend, and you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

“Chase after your father,” Hohenheim presses, “For all the good it will do you. I expect you’ll have better luck begging for scraps from him.”

Pride snarls; a warped, skittering, wholly alien sound. “Greed and Wrath have both proven that it’s possible to house ourselves within human bodies. All I need to do is—ah!” He falters. Shock steals his rage, slackens the tendril around Greed’s arm. Greed doesn’t hesitate. He lunges at his older sibling with claws outstretched. There’s no time to intervene before the rest of Pride’s face tears apart like tissue paper. There’s more screaming, after that, and little point in interfering. Not if Pride is as vulnerable as that.

And if Greed destroys Pride’s container then perhaps our lost countrymen will be freed, Nekar says.

Perhaps they’ll meet their good deaths, Jazani says.

God willing, Hamedi mutters without much conviction.

Raumesh asks, What good is God to us now? What good has God ever been?

Anoush weeps.

When Hohenheim next opens his eyes the scene has changed. Greed and Pride are gone, though he can distantly hear them clashing. Mrs. Curtis and the colonel are in a splayed heap halfway across the room where she’s dragged him out of harm’s way. There’s a line of stone spikes tall as cypress trees, still limned with damning crimson light. There’s his eldest son, staring at his hands like he’s never seen them before.

“What?” Ed asks, soft as the fluttering of moth wings. “What did he do to our alchemy?”

Hohenheim briefly closes his eyes against a new sting of grief. It’s a terrible effort to force out, “It isn’t your alchemy that’s been changed.”

Ed stares. He’s nearly grown, if a handful of years shy of his full height and width. His chin hasn’t yet sharpened to match his jawline. His cheeks still carry a touch of softness to them. His nose—perhaps it’s something he inherited from Trisha? It’s been so, so long since Hohenheim was sixteen, but he thinks his own nose had been larger at this age. 

Nearly grown, and this is as grown as Ed will ever be.

Ah, Hamedi tuts, and every parent inside him echoes her. Ah, child. You poor thing.

Hohenheim’s heart will break in this, in telling his son the truth of what’s been done to them. But the sooner they know the sooner they can come to terms with it. Ed’s stronger than he is. He’ll recover. He’ll adapt. He must.

“Can you hear them? All those souls within you, crying out?”

“What? ”

Mrs. Curtis stands, abandoning the colonel to hide his face in the concrete. “What are you suggesting?”

Mei approaches too, leaving Al to join their haphazard circle. Fear and pain have made her small face wax-white. Her queer little panda shivers on her shoulder. She shivers too.

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you. You’ve all been made into Philosopher’s Stones.”

There is a moment of perfect, stunned silence.

“Like hell,” Ed stammers. “No way. He was gonna kill us, not—!”

“Listen, ” Hohenheim says. “The Dwarf in the Flask is gone, but there’s no telling when he might reappear. You need to reconcile with what’s happened. The sooner the better. You must listen. They need you to hear them.”

“No,” Ed protests. “You’re wrong. You gotta be. All those people, the country—”

“They’ve died. We’ve failed.” He has failed.

It isn’t only your burden, Hohenheim, Negin says. There are so, so many of us here with you, and none of us thought that beast would do this to you twice.

We thought he needed every soul he could sink his claws into, Shahla reminds him. We were so certain he’d be clinging to God’s power by his fingertips, even with all those Amestrians added to his strength.

We miscalculated, Zinat says. We were all wrong. We have all failed.

“Oh,” Mrs. Curtis says.

“Teacher?” Ed asks, hovering. 

She doesn’t answer him, one hand crawling across her jaw to smother her mouth, the other a white fist pressed to her chest. A sound is caged in her throat; a wretched retching of understanding. She shakes her head, steps back, trips over a stray cable. Ed rushes to catch her.

“Teacher? Teacher! What’s wrong? Teacher!”

Hohenheim bows his head. She hears them now. She’ll always hear them now.

Ed shakes her, mindful of the blade on his automail. He calls her again and again, as Mei had called for Al. She’s fallen slack, her eyes wide, her mouth shaping words of denial she’s unable to voice.

“She’ll be alright,” Hohenheim says. She must be.

“Bastard,” Ed snarls. 

Does he mean you or the Homunculus? Haddad asks. He’s hushed by at least a score of others. What? It’s an honest question, isn’t it?

“Bastard,” Ed says again. He hugs Mrs. Curtis tightly, his eyes squeezed shut and teeth bared. “Teacher, c’mon, you have to get up. Colonel, you too, quit lazing around. We’ve gotta find that fucking—” His breath catches. “—Al, hey, Alphonse. Get up. You gotta get up. We can’t—We can’t have lost—we can’t be—”

Go to him, Hohenheim, Behzad urges. He needs you. He needs his father.

“There was a cut on your cheek,” Hohenheim says.

Ed brings a shaking hand to his face. The left one. He digs his fingernails in as if he’ll tear his skin open just to spite Hohenheim on principle. Then he stops. Shuts his eyes. Lets Mrs. Curtis slide from his lap. “I,” he croaks. “You’re wrong. You have to be.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He has said this so often now, to so many people over so many years, that the words have lost all meaning. He tongues at the space where regret should be and finds only an empty hole. “Do you hear them?”

Ed flinches in slow-motion; an exercise in arranging the muscles of his face into a tense knot to display his anger, his fear, his grief. Little words for emotions greater than any person should have to bear. He presses his hands over his ears and tilts rigidly to the floor.

He’ll be fine. He must be.

Chapter Text

“Edward!”

The girl. He’d nearly forgotten. She limps across the room, sinks to her knees to pull on Ed’s elbow, shake Mrs. Curtis’ shoulder. A few yards farther off the colonel has fallen quiet. Behind Hohenheim, Al’s armor remains still.

Your son, Boroumand whispers. Do you think…?

Yes, he does. But he can worry about Al later. There are three others right here that need his attention. Al will be fine. He’s strong, far stronger than his old man.

Footsteps, unhurried, ring out of the dark. Mei tenses, alkahestry knives appearing in her small fist. Greed walks into the rough circle of sunlight pouring in through the broken ceiling. His stolen face is shaped in a solemn, distracted expression. “Well I took care of Pride’s container," he drawls, "but the little creep slithered away before I could finish him off. Still, I’m not too worried. I doubt he’ll last long. Ol’ Pops designed him funny an’ all.” He waggles his claws, the iridescent black melting away. His eyes fall to the others spilled across the floor. “What’s with them?”

I know he’s a far more capable fighter than you, Hohenheim, Mojtahed grits out, and he has that shield besides, but could you please strangle him? Or hit him. Something, anything, to shut him up.

Takes after his father, Aqsarai adds unkindly. 

If you hit him hard enough, do you think the boy would come out instead? Laleh asks. He sounds more tolerable.

He’s also human, Suzani adds. He’d be capable of some damn propriety. 

A little less chatter, Hohenheim asks of them, strained. It’s hard enough to think with the Amestrians swarming inside of him. He feels like an abandoned house in a summer storm; full of dust and mold and crawling things, broken windows rattling in their frames, something desiccated in the fireplace. He feels too overwhelmed to feel anything.

Mei scowls, as fiercely dismissive of Greed as she’d been of the Homunculus. “How dare you! There isn’t anything to make light of here!”

Hohenheim admires her bravery; he envies it too. Even knowing Greed has broken away twice doesn’t do a thing for his nerves.

“Sorry, geez.” He slides his hands into his pockets. “Seriously though, they gonna be okay?”

Hohenheim clears his throat to catch their attention. “Could you give me a hand with them, Greed?”

“Huh?”

“They’ll be fine—” They must be. “—but I’d like to move them somewhere more comfortable.”

“Uh. Sure thing.”

Greed scolds Mei into staying out of the way since she’s injured, then it’s quick work dragging the suit of armor, the colonel, Mrs. Curtis, and Ed into the circle of sunlight. Ed’s the only one that gives them trouble, lashing out with a wordless cry. His automail bounces with a harmless spark off of Greed’s shielded stomach, though the homunculus’ shirt doesn’t escape unscathed. 

“Damn brat,” Greed grumbles. “Think you can do somethin’ about that? He won’t hurt me any, but anybody else won’t be so lucky.”

Anybody else, Forough shrieks. Anybody else!

Hush, a hundred voices hiss.

Hohenheim looks at the blade. It’s a little thing, in the grand scheme of it all. A flash of light, and the plate melts back to its original shape.

Greed nods thanks, settling a quieted Ed beside the armor. “Now what?”

“Stay close. And keep them from moving too much, if you can.”

This isn’t as small a thing he’s going to do now. Is everyone sure? Is everyone alright with this?

Help them, Ahangarani orders. Parysatis and Beheshti murmur the same. 

Thank you, he thinks. Thank you all so much.

His friends pull a great pillar out of the earth, sturdy and wide enough to carry them all to the surface. He keeps a steady pace, unhurried, spinning stone from nothing but light. It’s tempting to lessen the burden placed on them by repurposing the Homunculus’ throne room, tear it apart down to the last square inch, but petty vengeance isn’t worth the risk of collapsing the upper levels. 

A mere two floors up his head nearly bursts with chatter, his friends clamoring, shouting and sighing relief that here, here there are survivors. He stops the pillar’s ascent jerkily, ignores Greed’s startled curse and Mei’s small whimper. He can’t help but smile.

“Whoa!” Zampano shouts, jumping to his feet. All three chimeras are transformed, fierce and huge, but Jerso’s a bloody wreck on the floor and Darius is cradling an unfamiliar woman. She’s as bad off as Jerso, a hand pressed to her throat and her white jacket soaked red.

Help them, Haik urges. Use me. No more death this day, Hohenheim. I won’t see it done.

He leaps the gap without a second thought, hands out, doing his best to appear as meek and helpful as he hopes to be. “You’re injured! Please, let me take a look.”

“Her first,” Jerso wheezes.

“You dumbass," Zampano snarls. "You’re still bleeding!”

“Allow me,” Mei says, but then the colonel groans loudly and the woman nearly tumbles out of Darius’ arms in her haste to see him.

“Colonel!” She croaks. “What happened? Is he hurt?”

“He’ll be fine,” Hohenheim assures her. He looks at the alkahestrest, as filthy and wounded as the rest and even younger than his sons. “It’s Mei, isn’t it?”

“Mei Chang,” she clarifies.

Clan Chang is still around? Khalilullah asks, astonished. I was sure they would have been conquered decades ago.

“Why don’t you let me treat them? You’re not much better off.”

“I’m alright!”

As if she isn’t struggling to keep her own feet under her, Ezatollah tuts. 

He feels his smile soften, become the same helplessly fond expression it always took at home with Trisha. Especially whenever the boys did something so beautifully, wonderfully human that his heart melted with relief. Ah, he’d always thought back then, he hadn’t ruined them. He hadn’t made them monsters too.

Well, things are different now. True, he wasn’t the one to make his sons monsters, but he’s just as much at fault for not anticipating the depths of the Homunculus’ own monstrousness. They will blame him for this. It’s only sensible to.

“Please,” he says gently. “Allow me this.”

Mei Chang bows her head, though not quick enough to hide her frustrated scowl.

He kneels down between Jerso and Darius. “Lie still,” he orders, tracking the deep slashes in the chimera’s thick green hide, the blood soaking the woman’s throat. “What happened?”

“Her throat was slit by one of them,” Darius answers, nodding toward a number of bodies Hohenheim hadn’t noticed. Old men, gray-haired with lined faces, their muscles dried to sinew and hard angles. If any of them are still alive they’re doing an excellent job of playing possum. “Pride messed Jerso up.”

“Little brat,” Jerso grits out.

“Lie still.” 

Do it, Hohenheim, Haik says again. I want this.

He presses a hand to the widest gash on Jerso’s side, feels out the damage with a frown. Skin and muscle, fat and connective tissues, arteries and veins. He’ll need to heal near-lethal wounds cleanly but not wastefully. The crimson light and unnatural heat of his Stone licks them all closed in moments, leaving ropy scar tissue and dried blood behind. He doesn’t wait for it to finish before turning to the woman, trusting Haik to be thorough. He’d been a physician himself, once upon a time. 

She’s staring, wide-eyed and wary. He plucks her hand from her neck and presses his own to the new scar. Mei Chang is skilled; the skin is tender and raw, the muscles knitted thinly, but the carotid artery has been healed almost perfectly. She saved this woman's life. It’s a simple matter to shore up the work already done. 

Greed whistles. “Not bad, old man.” 

He doesn’t acknowledge the compliment. Coming from him it’s a sour thing, bitter and poisonous. Greed is just like his father. He smiles blandly at Mei Chang instead. “Might I heal you as well?”

She fidgets, wobbly and wane, then finally nods with her face scrunched tight. He’s positive Ed looked just like this as a boy. Wincing over scraped knees, perhaps. Children are so prone to those. Haik’s light spills from his hand, and in moments she breathes easier, stands straighter, the glassy gleam fading from her dark eyes. “Thank you,” she whispers.

The other two stand with help from Darius and Zampano, slow and wincing, tracing over their new scars. Jerso murmurs gratitude as well but the woman only demands again, “What happened?”

Hohenheim gets to his feet, brushing grime from his knees. The weight of their eyes is so many thrown stones. He can’t help but flinch. “...We lost.”

As below, this is met with stunned silence. Zampano is the first to collect himself, growling out, “Lost? You mean… everybody is… everybody’s dead?”

“I’m sorry.” Empty words. A hollow where their meaning wore away long ago. It’s all he can muster.

“No,” Darius breathes. “That’s—that’s not possible. It can’t be.”

“Wouldn’t we all be dead too?” Jerso asks, plaintively grasping at straws.

“I suspect your proximity to the center of the transmutation circle is what spared you. We’re all that’s left.”

There’s the Ishvalan, Taraneh reminds him. As well as whoever he was fighting up there, if either of them are still alive.

“Where’s Father?” The woman asks. “If we lost, where did he—?”

“Lieutenant,” the colonel groans. 

“Colonel!”

Hohenheim catches the woman—an officer too, apparently—by the elbow before she can jump the gap. She shouldn’t be running around so soon after nearly bleeding out, even after being healed by a Philosopher’s Stone. “He’s alright. They all are.”

She shrugs him off and demands again, “What happened?”

“My old man bailed,” Greed says, jerking a thumb at Hohenheim. “He thinks we’re safe enough for now, but I don’t much like the idea of being a sitting duck down here, yeah?”

The lieutenant stares at him, baffled. Rather than doing the intelligent thing and explaining himself, Greed simply waves his ouroboros tattoo at her with a lazy flash of predator’s teeth. She’s clearly well-informed; her hands reflexively jump to the empty holsters at the small of her back. Darius hastily steps between them. “It’s alright. Greed’s on our side.”

“Hey. How many times I gotta say it? I’m the one running this—”

“Elric trusts him. Hell if I know why, but he had plenty of chances to kill us if he wanted to and he hasn’t.”

“Course not,” Greed scoffs. “Waste of good manpower.”

The lieutenant looks back at Greed, turning this information over. “You—You’re Ling Yao.”

Yao? Of Clan Yao? Ruhollah asks eagerly. Do you think he knows Shi?

Of course he wouldn’t, Rasoul scoffs. Hohenheim passed through the Yao province a century ago. Ling is just a boy, no older than Ed.

We don’t know how long he’s had the homunculus inside him.

I doubt it’s been more than a few years. Not if his retainer is as young as she sounds.

And she’s certainly human, with that arm of hers, Ahmadi points out.

Ruhollah sighs. It was only a thought.

“—not really the time to talk backstories, yeah?” Greed is saying, nodding at the three prone bodies and suit of armor. Hohenheim clenches his jaw, forcing his focus back on the living.

The lieutenant exhales sharply. Emotions flit in quick, complicated succession across her face. “So—that’s it? We lost, your Father’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do?”

“We can look after each other,” Hohenheim says. “We can rest, heal, decide what to do after."

"What about Father?"

"I doubt he'll come back."

“Why?”

“He got what he wanted. The dead serve no further purpose to him.”

Zampano curses bitterly, and is echoed by the weary choir within Hohenheim.

“Hell,” Darius sighs, shrinking back to his more human shape with a grimace. “What about them? What’d he do to them?”

Tell them, Hohenheim, Darya urges. Now’s as good a time as any. 

But Fannizadeh asks, What about Scar? It’s gotten quiet up there. He could be injured, perhaps dying.

“Nothing life-threatening,” Hohenheim says, holding up a hand to halt their protests and no small amount of incredulous laughter inside him. “Please. There might be others on the upper levels in need of help.” He turns away without waiting to see if they’ll listen. Ahangarani, Parysatis, and Beheshti all lend themselves to widening the pillar to allow room for the others. 

At his feet Ed twitches, half-formed sentences breaking upon the rocky wall of his clenched teeth. “Stop, I can’t—I was trying to—we didn’t—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—would you stop—this wasn’t what—no, I—it wasn’t—please—"

He has a good heart, Dariai says. He’ll endure this.

But he shouldn’t have to. None of them should be made to suffer this.

There’s nothing else for it now. At least they have you to guide them.

The pillar ascends, spun from damnable light and lifted up by simple will. No one in their right mind speaks while those who aren’t beg the dead for a peace impossible to give. Ed keeps apologizing. Small, senseless syllables escape Mrs. Curtis. The colonel keeps asking what’s happened. And Hohenheim—

We’ve got you, Zhubin says. We’ll talk to any who might listen. You just take care of the living for now.

He’s grateful for every single one of his friends who knows even a scrap of Amestrian. It’s cold, perhaps, to delegate reassurances. Today it’s necessary.

A few levels up he stops again, relieved to find not one but two more survivors. There’s Scar, miraculously sitting upright despite a terrible display of wounds. Blood soaks him from the neck down; he holds his hands to his belly like an afterthought. Standing stiffly beside him is the young bodyguard—Lan Fan—with a dagger in her right hand and the thin blade of her automail unsheathed.

“Lan Fan!”

“Young lord!”

They don’t embrace, but her weapons vanish in time to allow Ling Yao to take her hands in his. “I feared the worst,” he says. His voice is softer in his native Xingese compared to Greed’s brash Amestrian. 

“I disobeyed your orders,” she tells him in a rush. “I wanted to see Bradley die. I wanted to avenge my grandfather—”

“I’m glad that you did." 

Hohenheim leaves them to their reunion, crossing the gap to kneel besides Scar. The man’s eyes are glazed, unfocused. It’s impressive he’s even conscious. “Did it work? The transmuta—” He breaks off coughing, blood wetting his chin.

Help him, Seyyed urges. I’ll give whatever it takes.

“Your part is the only one that succeeded,” Hohenheim says.

Scar's eyes widen. “Then… we’ve failed?”

“Yes.”

“But….” Whatever Scar’s protest, he doesn’t have the strength to voice it. He sinks into himself like a pile of old rags.

Carefully, he offers, “I know how your people regard alchemy. But please, allow me to heal you. Too many have died today.”

Scar says nothing. Perhaps he didn’t even hear. But he would know better than any of the other survivors, what awaits them out there. The quiet devastation of bodies splayed on every street, the merciless silence that bites down like teeth on a vulnerable throat. Scar had chosen to work with the same people that had exterminated his own in the vain hope of saving innocents who like as not would have scorned and feared him for his appearance alone, and look what’s happened.

Hohenheim, Seyyed says. Do it. Hurry. He doesn’t have much time.

No. He won’t force this. He won’t take this man’s silence as tacit agreement. Everyone and everything he’d ever cared about has already been stolen from him. Hohenheim won’t take this last choice from him. If Scar would rather die here than be forced to see his remaining kinsmen dead in Amestrian streets, so be it.

“I know the burial rites of your people,” Hohenheim whispers. “If it wouldn’t offend you to have someone who is neither of your family nor your faith do it, I would see you honored.”

“What?” Mei Chang appears beside them in an instant, her small hands bristling with alkahestry knives. “Mister Scar, no, just hold on a little longer. I’ll take care of you!”

Scar says nothing, makes no move of protest as she draws her circle and places her knives. It takes long minutes but she’s able to stop the worst of his bleeding, pouring most of her efforts into the wound in his stomach. There’s a vanishingly small chance his vital organs were spared. Mei Chang’s limited experience in the healing arts is unlikely to do more than prolong his suffering.

Still, Touraj whispers. She tries. She hopes. Even in the wake of all this death, she tries. Isn’t that what makes humans so lovely?

Chapter Text

Scar’s breathing is easier once Mei Chang’s done all she’s able, but he’s still in no shape to stand on his own. Jerso and Zampano help him up, moving step by careful step to the pillar. Ahangarani, Parysatis, and Beheshti spend a little more of themselves to make room.

“Where—hhgkh—are you taking me?” Scar gasps.

It’s the lieutenant who offers, “There’s a medical bay in the east wing. But Central Command was overrun with monsters before the eclipse. They might have survived.” 

Hohenheim frowns. “Monsters?”

“An army of fake people,” Mei Chang clarifies. “They were in the sewers as well.”

Fake people. Is there no end to the atrocities the Homunculus is willing to commit for an ounce more power?

He just murdered God knows how many millions for his own benefit, Forouzanfar says tiredly. You know the answer to that.

“They’re probably dead too,” he says. “It's unlikely they’ll give us any trouble.”

The last few floors they pass are empty, and then they’re out. It’s a beautiful day now that the eclipse has passed. The early afternoon sun shines warmly high above as clouds wisp across a pale blue sky. A clean breeze tugs playfully at their hair and clothes, refreshingly cool after so long underground. The parade field is manicured within an inch of its life into a vast quilt of spring green grass and dove gray stone. It almost looks as if nothing's happened, as if the Homunculus’ plan hadn’t succeeded and the world still spun on unchanged. 

Almost. 

There are a few soldiers collapsed here and there; on the stairs, near the entry gate, slung over the ramparts. Their blue uniforms make them impossible to miss. Hohenheim is abruptly grateful for the curtain walls surrounding Central Command. They’re at the highest point of the city, but he need not see the fallout of his failure yet.

“Gonna have to make two trips,” Greed remarks.

“We can take Al apart,” Jerso suggests. “We’ve done it before. He doesn’t like it—waking up in pieces, I mean. But I don’t want to leave him alone either.”

“I’ll stay,” Zampano growls out. “Wait for him to come to. Find me a clean shirt if you can, will ya?”

“Sure.” Jerso’s bestial features don’t lend themselves well to expressions, but he makes up for it by gesturing. He rolls his sloped shoulders, holds his hands out to catch the empty sky in his claws. “Break it to him gently, yeah? Poor kid’s been through enough.”

Zampano nods, his mouth remaining a grim slash even as it shrinks from a boar’s to a man’s.

Their trek across the parade field is wordless aside from the continued mutterings of Ed, Mrs. Curtis, and the colonel. They’re semi-conscious, reacting belatedly when touched, recognition a dim thing in Ed’s eyes when he glowers. He and Mrs. Curtis can keep their feet under them with help but the colonel is dead weight sloughing off Darius’ back.

This is Hohenheim's first time inside Central Command. It’s a grand enough place, he supposes, with its endless bronze statuettes and oil paintings of stern warmongers, but it’s too—ascetic. Too barren. It’s no palace, though it echoes one in shape and scale. It can’t hold a candle to the Celestial City with its opulent gardens and labyrinthine halls, every inch of that ancient place all but sung into perfection by centuries of artisans. It’s incomparable to the wonder that had been Xerxes' last great citadel; a crowning architectural achievement of one hundred vaulted rooms overflowing with sunlight and a thousand hand-tiled mosaics, beckoning travelers from half a world away to catch the meanest glimpse of its blue domes and white minarets. 

This place is a pale mimicry of human grandeur, and doesn’t that say it all.

The bodies gather more thickly in the east wing. Blue-coated soldiers clutching at their throats or at ragged wounds, terror etched plain on their faces. Gray-green emaciated creatures with wide, lipless mouths and one eye bulging from their foreheads. He crouches to inspect one more closely, touching the red lines branded into its soft skin.

Disgusting, Khorram hisses.

Tragic, Kaboli murmurs.

“Careful,” Darius warns.

“It’s dead,” Mei Chang whispers, hand hiding her mouth. “They all are.”

Blood stains the creature’s large teeth; bullet holes mar its chest, wet with pale green fluid. Apart from these slight imperfections it’s identical in every way to the others sprawled nearby. False humans, mannequins without individuality or intelligence, only a gnawing hunger sated by blood. Does the Homunculus truly think so little of humans?

Later, Farouzanfar chides.

Yes, of course. He has other duties to attend to than picking apart the psyche of the Homunculus. There are survivors who need help, who want answers. He stands and takes Mrs. Curtis’ rough hand again. Her dark eyes slide over him without seeing him; her wedding band bites his fingers when she tightens her grip.

“Don’t—“ she spits out. “Be quiet—stop—stop. Darling, ah, are you there?”

His heart aches.

The hallway the lieutenant directs them to is blocked by a haphazard barricade made from office furniture. A half dozen mannequins lay dead on the outside of it; a half dozen soldiers lay dead on the inside. The gruesome symmetry of their splayed limbs gives them all pause, but Scar’s breathing is growing more ragged. They press on.

The medical bay, in its present condition, is a poor location to regroup. There must be nearly thirty bodies piled here; a handful in scrubs and white coats and the rest in bloody blue uniforms with grisly wounds anyplace the mannequins’ horse-like teeth had found purchase. It’s difficult to tell if any of them might have bled out before the nationwide transmutation had taken them. Perhaps one or two were so lucky. Still, Scar is flagging and Lan Fan is cradling her automail with an expression like she’s swallowed roofing nails. The others all have minor injuries that need tending to as well. It would be wise to stay nearby for supplies, at least.

Mei Chang finds a large office with several couches and desks, one wall taken up by bookshelves, two others by looming oil portraits and gaudy plaques, floor-to-ceiling windows dominating the last, and a truly hideous green and yellow rug on the floor. But the curtains are drawn and no one had died inside. It’s better than nothing. They settle Scar onto one three-cushioned couch; Ed, Mrs. Curtis, and the colonel led to a second. The rest find their own spaces elsewhere around the room to prod at bruises and rub sore muscles, their eyes firmly averted from the windows. Hohenheim remains by the open door. In his peripheral he can just make out one black boot out in the hall. 

Don’t, Aziz pleads. Look elsewhere, please. Look at the living. Look, some survived. It’s better than Xerxes, isn’t it?

Kayhan’s laughter is a rusty thing, ill-used and contemptuous. Oh, yes! This has turned out so much better than Xerxes! Now Hohenheim and that goddamn creature aren’t the only monsters walking around with half a million ghosts trapped inside them! How much better it is to have company in Hell!

Hohenheim winces. He looks at them, the three of them, at Ed and Mrs. Curtis and the colonel. Ed’s gone loose-limbed as a ragdoll, fingers tapping out a rhythmless pattern on one thigh. Mrs. Curtis is bent almost double, shaking and wild-eyed. The colonel sits rigidly, his expression one of mildly scrunched confusion. He doesn’t even know the man’s name. He doubts the man’s in any shape to tell him if he asked.

The lieutenant stands equally rigid at the colonel’s side. Her exhausted eyes bore into Hohenheim. “What. Happened.”

Tell them, Hohenheim, Darya says again. Start from the beginning, as before.

So he does. He starts with Xerxes, with the blood of an ignorant slave and the dwarf grinning in its little flask. He ends with the self-actualization of a god and the terrible gift apportioned to its prized human sacrifices. Human once. Human no more. By the end, he can’t bear to meet their eyes.

“I should have known better,” he says hoarsely. “I should have anticipated—something. My counter-array hinged on him acting as I knew him then. To preen, to gloat, to show off his new power as he’d done after—” He swallows the words he can’t bear to say, shards of broken pottery and burning sand all the way down. “I thought he’d stay. I thought there would be time for my array to reverse what his has done. I never thought he’d do anything worse than kill us once he’d gotten what he wanted. But no, of course he’d want to feign gratitude, as if he didn’t hold us down and force us to be complicit—!”

Hush, so very many of his friends sigh. Hush, Hohenheim. It was not your fault.

But it is. It is. He should have known better.

Darius is the first to speak. “So… they’re like you now? They’re… immortal?”

“That’s right.”

The lieutenant flounders. “But—they can’t be. That’s ridiculous. Why would he do that?”

Why indeed? The Homunculus always loved an audience, glad for every opportunity to pontificate, to be seen for its mind rather than as an accomplishment of the alchemist that had bound it. Is that why it did this? Not out of some ugly mockery of gratitude, not out of some twisted sense of petty comeuppance, but to ensure it would have witnesses left when it remakes the world as it sees fit?

Oh Hohenheim, Atashi whispers. Don’t think such a terrible thing. Don’t, I beg you. Forget that creature. I don’t want to imagine what horrors it might have in store. I can’t.

The whole of him shudders, a feeling not of skin and muscle and nerves but of the souls of lost Xerxes crying out against the terrible possibilities the future might hold. He can’t say any of this aloud, not a word of it. It would be too cruel. He’s too afraid.

“I don’t know,” he says instead.

“Can’t it be—undone? Somehow?”

Surely every last one of his friends reacts to her question, crying out in rage and despair and no small amount of half-mad laughter. The fragile membrane they’d constructed of themselves against the howling storm of Amestrians buckles. He flinches, but they rally before he can break. “N-no. And believe me, I’ve tried. I’m sorry, miss…?”

Her eyes narrow. “First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye. You’re the Elrics’ father, aren’t you?”

He had skipped over Resembool—and Trisha—in the telling. “I am.”

Lieutenant Hawkeye huffs, glancing at Ed. “He takes after you.”

Kayhan laughs. In more ways than one now, eh Hohenheim?

Stop it, Touraj scolds. Leave him be.

Lieutenant Hawkeye’s jaw works, words failing her. She touches the colonel’s shoulder and all at once he surges to his feet with a snarl and a violent swing of his arm. “Who’s there?! What’s going on?!”

“Colonel—!”

He holds out one hand, poised to snap his fingers. Curiously, most of the others all jump to their feet too, fear naked on their faces. Beneath the dried blood an array flickers on his torn glove. A soldier’s uniform, and a strange display of alchemy. The colonel is a state alchemist. If he were only a man the array would be useless, but as he is now? Well. Perhaps they have cause to fear after all. 

“If you want to keep your hands I suggest you keep them off me. Now, tell me what’s happened. Where have you taken me?”

“Colonel, it’s over. Please calm down—”

“That wasn’t a request. I—ah.” The ice in his voice fractures, beaten to slush by the roiling waves beneath his skin. “F-Fullmetal? Are you there? What happened? It’s so loud. God, I can barely….” He sways in place, drawn face twitching. He shakes his head as if there’s water in his ears, as if he’s trying to shake out the screaming.

Lieutenant Hawkeye approaches him. “Colonel Mustang?” When he fails to react she gingerly removes his gloves, inspecting his bloody hands with a frown. Further attempts to get his attention are equally unsuccessful. She settles for glaring at Hohenheim. “Führer Bradley and Selim forced him to perform human transmutation against his will.”

“He was the fifth,” he replies.

“His hands. Did you heal them too?”

Ah, Darya sighs, echoed by hundreds. He is weighed down by their weariness. Tell her, Hohenheim. She refuses the truth standing before her. Tell her plain.

“It wasn’t me. He’s a Philosopher’s Stone now. Technically, he healed himself.”

Her eyes slide away from him to land on Greed, distaste curling her mouth. “He regenerated? Like a homunculus?”

Greed’s triangular teeth flash in a humorless grin. “If he’s got the kinda juice my Pops had, he’ll be in a whole other league from me.”

The colonel—Mustang—latches onto Lieutenant Hawkeye’s wrists with a groan. “Who’s there? Answer me, please. Can you hear me?”

“I’m—sir, I can hear you fine. I’m right here.”

“Hello? Please, whoever you are, just tell me what’s happening.”

She glares again at Hohenheim. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m sorry.” Meaningless words. “You’re just one more voice shouting at him among all the rest. It’s going to take him time to adjust.”

“But—I’m here. I’m right here. He should at least be able to see me, shouldn’t he?”

“Blind,” Ed rasps. 

The whole room jumps. 

“Blind,” Ed repeats. His head lolls against his metal shoulder, his bangs stick to his sweat-shined face, his hands scrabble in his lap. Hohenheim can hear the internal mechanisms of his automail protesting clear across the room. Pity makes putty of his heart. “The Gate. Took his sight.” Ed gasps, eyes rolling back, and as quickly as he’d surfaced he’s gone again.

A strong boy, Abolfazl whispers.

Lieutenant Hawkeye’s expression is a fragile thing, tearing itself open upon the sharp edges of a truth she wants no part of. He has seen this grief a thousand times; the last mote of hope snuffed out. It doesn’t get any easier. “Blind,” she says, as if it’s a word she’s never heard before. “How can he be blind?”

Colonel Mustang doesn’t react to her question. He squints into the darkness he will live with for the rest of his immortal life. “Please,” he begs. The authoritative tone he’d taken before has shrunk into something small and desperate. “Where are we? What is this? Are we trapped? All that—screaming—please, those people are in danger. I—we have to help them. It’s so dark. We can’t stay here. It’s not safe. If you can hear me say something.”

“He’ll be alright,” Hohenheim says. “He just needs time.”

That’s something he has in abundance, Ziaeddin says. They all do, now.

Anoush weeps.

Chapter Text

They’re fortunate. There aren’t any additional bodies in the offices nearest the medical bay, no grim surprises, just plenty of quiet spaces to rest and all the time in the world to come to terms with the enormity—the finality—of today’s events. Scar, Ed, Mrs. Curtis, and Colonel Mustang remain in the first room under Mei Chang’s watchful eye. Darius and Jerso go to help Zampano bring the suit of armor inside. Lieutenant Hawkeye and Greed brave the medical bay, Lan Fan their shadow with a thousand-yard stare. As for Hohenheim, well—he needs time too. He can admit it to himself and his friends even if he can’t admit it out loud. So in a moment when everyone else’s attention is elsewhere, he picks a door at random and slips inside.

It's another office, of course, no different than the half-dozen he’s already seen. He's vaguely aware of another ugly carpet, bookshelves, two paintings and something brass hung up on the wall. None of it matters. He makes it to the nearest chair just as his knees give out.

Oh, but he’s old. All his years are an impossible, inescapable weight. His spine bows. His joints creak. To stand any longer would be a Herculean effort he doesn’t see the point of. He folds his glasses into a vest pocket to better bury his face in his hands. He feels fundamentally broken, full of sharp edges and echoes. How silly. How can he feel broken when he can’t be hurt? It’s the same melodramatic nonsense as the imagined weight of centuries. He’s old, and yet he isn’t. He’d been in his forties when the Homunculus made him immortal. He’s in his forties still. His body is the same as it ever was.

Shahin whispers, Is it?

What?

Can you be sure? What Greed said before—he put his father in ‘a whole other league’ from himself, and that monster fashioned itself in your likeness. You are both living Philosopher’s Stones, and it has made you an even more powerful one at that. You are second only to a god now, Hohenheim.

Don't—don't say that. What are you getting at?

If power is delineated by the number of souls within a Stone, then what does it mean for you now that the number within you has doubled?

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know.

But it matters, Hohenheim. The beast wore your face, but it was only ever a clever skin made to house its true self. It was never human. Your humanity was taken away when it first did this to you in Xerxes. Now it’s done it again. What’s the equivalency here? What was taken from you this time?

He stills. The vast majority of his friends fall nearly silent too, and he’s immediately pummeled on all sides by Amestrian screams. For a terrible moment he’s convinced that if he were to look at his hands now he’d see the truth of Shahin’s fear, revealed like a magic trick. He’s different from normal humans. He isn’t human. This has been an irrefutable fact for centuries. But he still wears the shape of the human he used to be. He still benefits from mortal necessities, like food and sleep, because his body is still an organic thing. Is that still the case? Or has he too become a leather bag? A clever skin to house the monster? If he were to cut himself open would he see flesh and bone before the wound closed, or a shadow full of grinning teeth and unblinking eyes?

He doesn’t know. He doesn't want to know. The fear overwhelms him anyway.

It feels as if he’s only sat there, hunched and reeling, for a few minutes before someone knocks. But when he looks up the office is bathed in the burnt orange light of late afternoon. He's losing time again. Dangerous. “...Come in.”

The door’s hinges squeak, making Darius wince as he pokes his head in. “We’re, uh. We’re going to the mess hall. You hungry?”

He doesn’t think there’s any room left in him for something so human as hunger. He nods anyway.

Mei Chang insists on staying behind. Scar lays prone, breathing shallowly, staining his bandages with fresh blood, and says nothing when Zampano offers to bring something back for them. The three chimera have reassembled the suit of armor here, sat it in a corner, arranged its limbs like a doll on display. Ed, Mrs. Curtis, and Colonel Mustang have moved from their couch, or perhaps were moved by others. Ed huddles at the largest desk, face hidden in the cocoon of his arms. Mrs. Curtis has folded into a tight collection of angles by the bookshelves, muttering feverishly. Colonel Mustang sways by a window, sunlight slashed across his face, his hands moving in mute conversation. Hohenheim watches them. They take no notice, three islands caught in the fury of the same hurricane. Their beaches erode. 

Ling Yao speaks. “Lan Fan.”

“My Lord?”

“Stay here, please. Someone needs to look after them, in case they try to go wandering again.”

Mei Chang bristles from her place knelt at Scar’s side, her little panda snarling on her shoulder. “If this is some kind of underhanded ploy,” she begins hotly, but Ling Yao holds up a hand in protest.

“I would not,” he says softly. “Not today. Lan Fan?”

"My Lord," she answers, bowing confirmation.

It’s only after they’ve picked their way through the dead in the hall that Greed hums. “Ah, so that’s your game.”

“What’s that?” Darius asks.

“Huh? Oh. Ling’s hoping those two’ll play nice long enough that Lan Fan’ll let the little princess heal her arm. Idiot damn near tore her port out earlier saving our ass, so here’s hoping.”

Strange, that he should show concern for the well-being of a human, Dehnavi remarks.

Perhaps it’s Ling Yao’s concern he borrows, Benazir suggests.

Back and forth, and back and forth again. Many of his friends have been quietly discussing the baffling improbability that is the sum of Ling Yao and Greed. A homunculus housed within a human host rather than wearing the shape of one. A parasite? But no, a parasite kills its host, and so long as Greed’s Stone is within Ling Yao the boy will live. Deathless, so long as there’s one Xerxesian soul left to heal whatever time or injury might try otherwise.

Parasites both, Kamal hisses. 

A human forced to do what he must to survive with a monster in his heart, Lashkari corrects. How can you expect the boy to understand what it took Hohenheim decades to unravel?

No. No, Hohenheim knew from the start. He sensed us, suffered with us, tried to speak to us from the very first day. This boy and the monster are two sides of the same blemished coin. I don’t trust either of them.

You don’t trust anyone.

And back and forth again. The pair have been baffling his friends since he met Greed…. God, was it only yesterday?

That’s the way the world turns, Mahsa sighs, low and smoky. The voice of a singer and storyteller, rich with the last swallow of spiced wine. Long, lonesome stretches of the same day repeated a thousand times, then all at once you’re swept up in calamity and wonder all over again.

The world insists on its surprises, Nazar sighs.

Surprise. What a clever word. One can be surprised by an unexpected gift or by the sudden death of a loved one. Yes, the world loves to overwhelm with its surprises.

It’s a guilty relief to find no bodies in the mess hall. There are trays abandoned on the long tables, half-eaten meals left to grow cold, utensils scattered on the floor. Everyone must have fled when the fighting first broke out. Small mercies.

A decision is made to eat there and bring rations and water back to the others. 

“Lucky a fire hasn’t broken out in the kitchen,” Zampano remarks.

“Aw, don’t say somethin’ like that,” Jerso complains. “That’s all I’m gonna be able to think about now.”

The rest all shift uneasily, eyes darting and mouths twisting. They’re right to, in this age of industry. Who knows what pipes are hissing behind the walls, pressure building, waiting for maintenance workers that will never come? How many families had just sat down to lunch before the eclipse? How many stoves had been left burning? How many people had been driving when the transmutation activated? How many had been—

Don’t think on it, Marjane interrupts. You’ll only drive yourself mad, wondering such things.

The city won’t be safe for long, Bafghi warns. You and the other three can survive the worst of what might happen, but the others won’t. A few days, maybe a week if the fires don’t get so bad, but they’ll need to flee soon if they want to live.

Behbahani moans. Oh, Hohenheim. Don’t linger so long as that. The days have turned so warm. The bodies—

Yes. He knows. He remembers.

“Mister Hohenheim?”

He blinks. Lieutenant Hawkeye is standing in front of him, frowning. Everyone else has gone ahead and he hadn’t noticed. Dangerous. He offers her an apologetic smile until she looks away, and they rejoin the others in the kitchen. It’s good someone suggested food now rather than later, as it’s something of a mess in here. A sink overflowed, spilling water across half the tiled floor. The soles of their shoes slap with every step. The chimeras hastily check the stoves, ovens, and various appliances, turning off anything that’s been left on. Lieutenant Hawkeye immediately goes to help Greed open windows to help clear the smokey air, though they’re all still left coughing and rheumy-eyed. Hohenheim can only stand there blinking as they rush about, startled by such normal displays of panic. How absurd, to fret over burnt food in the wake of catastrophe. How human of them.

In the end no one’s all that hungry. Still, food is a necessary fuel, so they eat what little they can stomach. What little is salvageable from the last meal the cooks here ever made tastes spoiled to Hohenheim’s tongue, though surely it’s only his imagination.

The walk back to the east wing is done in silence. Well, comparatively. Hohenheim, as ever, brims over with small conversations. His friends comfort each other, calm the soft weeping of the old and the frightened bawling of babies, curse the Homunculus and all the fools who trusted it. Many curse Hohenheim too; for failing today, for befriending the Homunculus so long ago, for a thousand grievances great and small. That’s fine. He understands just fine. Beneath all of them, of course, is screaming. It batters and claws at him from all sides, demanding and urgent. Soon. He’ll listen soon.

He excuses himself before anyone can ask him more questions, retreating to the same little office as before. No one stops him, no one follows him. Small mercies. 

He makes it to the two-cushioned couch beneath the window this time, sinking into it with a low groan. A few rooms away his firstborn son and two others are breaking under this same weight. Elsewhere, in that quiet white place he’s only ever glimpsed, his second son is trapped. 

Tomorrow, Poya whispers. Al will be fine one night. Tomorrow you can look for a way to save him.

He’s in no danger of dying there, Bakhtiari adds. It’s a cold comfort.

For now, there’s only one thing he can do. He takes a steadying breath, braces his brow in his hands, and asks his friends to let go—

—HELP ME WHAT’S HAPPENING MOMMY THE SKY HELP BREATHE LOOK OUT SAID NOT TO GO OUTSIDE THE RADIO SAID I CAN’T I CAN’T NO DON’T LOOK REMEMBER WHAT YOUR TEACHER SAID HELP ME WHAT IS HURTS IT HURTS I CAN’T BREATHE NEVER HAPPENS WE’RE SO LUCKY TO SEE IT NEVER HAPPENS LAURA WHAT’S CAR JUST RAN OFF THE ROAD IT’S THE MOON SILLY HELP OH GOD THERE’S SOMETHING COMING OUT OF THE GROUND AND I WHERE ARE YOU THEY SAID WE COULDN’T GO WE HAVE TO STAY IT’S A GAS LEAK I’M SURE DON’T MAKE SUCH A SOUND AS THAT SWEETIE DON’T BE SCARED I’VE GOT HELP HELP CAN YOU HEAR ME OUT THERE HELP DROWNING I CAN’T FIND HIM GUNSHOTS I HEARD DIDN’T YOU HEAR THEY SAID ON THE RADIO TROUBLE IN CENTRAL ISN’T THAT ALWAYS THE CASE DON’T LOOK AT THE SUN YOU’LL HURT YOUR DAVID WENT TO GET MILK HE FORGOT WHAT TODAY WAS ISN’T THAT FUNNY I CAN’T BREATHE MISSUS SMITH FELL DOWN GO GET HELP HELP IT’S SO DARK IT HURTS ANDREW I SAID GO IS IT AN EARTHQUAKE NEVER KNEW IT COULD GET SO DARK AS TOM OH GOD YOUR HAND PUT THAT HELP SAID ISN’T THAT FUNNY WHAT’S GOING ON THEY SAID THEY SAID DON’T LISTEN TO THAT DRIVEL ANOTHER EQUINOX CAN YOU SPELL ERICA WHAT’S WRONG SCARED I’M ALONE CAN’T YOU HEAR CHOKING I CAN’T SWEETHEART DON’T BE SCARED IT’S JUST HELP OH GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING FALLING DOWN IN THE STREETS NOT THUNDER IS IT NO SURPRISE THERE’S RIOTS IN THE STREETS WHAT WITH JUST BREATHE THERE’S A GOOD GIRL LIKE THE HICCUPS RAIN TRAIN STRAIN DRAIN WHAT OTHER WORDS RHYME WITH FUCK TOM WHAT THE FUCK CAN’T BREATHE I DON’T FEEL GOOD DADDY WHAT TREE THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN DAY YOU DROPPED HELP OH GOD DON’T YOU SEE I CAN’T I CAN’T GONE WHERE DID THAT HEAR WHAT DIDN’T HEAR THERE’S A WHAT FALLING SUN WENT OUT LIKE A CANDLE YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO RUN WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT TREES IN THE STREET NO NOT TREES NO NO BIRDS FALLING OUT OF THE SKY GAS LEAK COUP IN CENTRAL I CAN’T BREATHE HEARD FROM STEELE DANGEROUS TO GO OUT LIKE A CANDLE DON’T LOOK SWEETIE WHY WON’T YOU WAKE UP WHAT’S WRONG OH MERCIFUL GOD ABOVE THEY’RE DYING EVERYONE’S DYING AND I AND I AND YOU AND CAN’T GET OUT THERE’S NO TIME ACCIDENT BLOOD NEVER SEEN SO MUCH WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE—

“Hello. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. My name is Van Hohenheim. I can help you, but you need to calm down. Please. My name is Van Hohenheim. You’re going to be alright. It’s over now. I’m sorry. My name is Van Hohenheim….”

Half a million voices echo his name out into the flooded chambers of his heart, a meaningless collection of syllables given to him by the same monster that slaughtered two countries for its own selfish gain. It’s all he has left. It’s all he’s ever had to give. Half a million voices shriek on and on, deaf and blind to anything beyond their own suffocating pain. That’s alright. He’s in no hurry. He has all the time in the world.

“You’re safe now. It’s over. All you need to do is listen to me. My name is Van Hohenheim….”

Hohenheim… Hohenheim… Hohenheim….

Chapter Text

Time persists. The night ends. Sunlight soon presses against Hohenheim’s eyelids like warm fingers. He breathes in so deeply it feels as if his ribs might crack under the strain of his lungs. Ah, but if he were so fragile as that he would heal before the pain could steal his breath away. 

You should eat, Parvaneh says.

You should rest, Tafazoli says.

He isn’t hungry. He isn’t tired either. Does that matter? Does he still need to pay lip service to the necessities of mortal men? If Shahin is right—

You still should, Abrosima says. They’re good habits to keep, if nothing else.

And if you quit drinking, I’ll start screaming too, Ghaznavi teases. It’s a poor joke, completely inappropriate, but his mouth twitches anyway.

“I might not be able to get drunk anymore.”

Eh! God would not be so cruel as that!

Only one way to find out, Jahanbani says cheerfully. And these soldiers were clearly all halfway to alcoholics themselves. There’s been a liquor cabinet in almost every office you’ve been in.

Abrosima makes a despairing noise. Terrible influences, all of you!

He hides a smile in the palm of his hand, ashamed of even so brief an amusement. His stomach knots—or perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps coils of shadow tangle in the hollow cavities where organs once nestled. 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps now isn’t the time to worry about that. There are other, more pressing things he should focus on, the survivors most of all. If everyone could please settle down?

The Amestrian wailing fades again, overshadowed by a susurrus of comforting platitudes, his whispered name a beacon to which the newly dead might be drawn. He dries his face on his sleeve and stands, as ready to face the first day after unspeakable devastation as he’ll ever be.

He’s stopped short at the door, Jerso standing on the other side poised to knock. The chimera chuckles a little and drops his hand. “Nice timing. Mornin’, Mister Ho.”

“Morning. Has something happened?”

“No. Well, Missus Curtis damn near knocked a wall down about twenty minutes ago. Surprised you didn’t hear it.”

“Mm.”

“I don’t think she even realized what she did. Uh, I mean, she’s just been kind’ve…. Well. All three of ‘em are still pretty out of it.”

Hohenheim can’t help but think of that first flight east, so long ago now. Burning days and freezing nights bleeding together as he forced one foot in front of the other; lurching on despite hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and the unpleasant prickling he’d not yet understood as his body healing itself from the brink of death. Endless dunes, endless skies, no thought of a destination other than away. How long did he wander? How long did he beg the screaming inside him for a moment’s peace? How long until those Xingese traders dug his deathless body out of the sand?

Too long, Afshar whispers. Best not to dwell on such memories.

“Yes,” he says. “I was the same way, the first time.”

The first time, because a second has happened despite all his efforts, and now he isn’t the only one forced to be—this. Ash in his throat, rot on his tongue, to admit such a truth out loud. He supposes he’ll have to get used to the taste.

“...Right. Um. We went looking for clean clothes for everybody; figured we’d all want to clean up after—” Jerso fumbles, grasping for and failing to find a word to neatly categorize yesterday’s events. He clears his throat instead. “Darius found some things about your size. Most of us’ve already showered, so you should have it to yourself. I can show you where they’re at, if you want.”

He accepts the offered bundle, electing not to ask where the clothes came from. It's not as if whoever they'd belonged to can complain. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you. Just point me in the right direction and I’m sure I’ll find it.”

“If you’re sure.” Jerso steps back, pointing down the hall. “Take a left at the end. There’s a sign a little ways down you can’t miss.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure. Uh—Mister Ho?” 

“Hm?”

He watches the play of the other man’s discomfort; in the way he rubs a thumb along a new scar on his arm, in his reluctance to make eye contact, in the way his teeth worry his bottom lip. “They’re... gonna be okay, right? I mean, you don’t seem so bad off so I guess they will be, but….”

“They’ll endure this. They have to.”

Jerso winces in that way people do when he’s said the wrong thing. “Al—still hasn’t woken up. Far as I know, he’s never been out this long. Can he even—come to, now that he’s… like you?”

Tell him, Derakh says. Tell all of them. They’ll realize soon enough.

Tell Ed if no one else, Parviz says. He can bring Al back faster than it’d take you to piece together the how of it.

But Ed’s in no condition to attempt such a feat. It’s too dangerous. He can’t ask that of him now.

They survived breaching the Gate when they were children, and human besides, Ardabili reminds him. 

Aghaeipour scoffs. They only attempted such a desperate act because Hohenheim wasn’t there to stop them! He may as well have painted the targets on their backs himself!

Arguing breaks out among a dozen of his friends, and like a pebble dropped in a pond the dissonance sends out ripples, agitating thousands more. They’ve been gnawing this bone since he’d returned to Resembool ten years too late, since Pinako told him what had happened to his family while he’d been absent. He listens without comment. He knows exactly where the fault lies.

“Mister Ho?”

“Mm. Alphonse isn’t in any danger, that much I do know. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“...Right.” 

He’s said the wrong thing again. Nothing for it. “Thank you again, for the clothes.”

“Y-yeah. No problem.”

As he reaches the end of the corridor he hears a low scraping sound, followed by Greed's indistinct grumbling. Curious, he turns right rather than left and follows the sounds to their source. Down yet another identical corridor of polished wood and solemn portraits in gilt frames he finds Greed stood over Ed’s huddled shape. There’s an arc of paint scraped off the wall where his bare automail must have dragged when he fell.

“—get anywhere at this rate,” Greed is saying when Hohenheim arrives in earshot. Whether he’s complaining to himself or his host is unclear. He sighs. “Kid, you reek.”

If Ed can hear him he doesn’t show it. His face is tightly scrunched, left hand pressed to his ear, right hand twitching in his lap. He knocks his head against the wall, a whine escaping his clenched teeth.

There, Hohenheim thinks sadly. Can’t they see? There’s no sense in asking anything of Ed now. Al will just have to hold on a little longer.

Marzieh asks, But how long can he stand to be trapped in that place?

For as long as he has to, and not one second more.

Greed looks up as Hohenheim approaches. “Oh, hey there. You get turned around on your way to the john?”

“No. Do you need any help?”

“Nah. The last time I got grabby he flipped out and broke a chair. He can hear me, pretty sure, so we’ll get there eventually.” Yet the lazy curl to his mouth fades. “Dunno what else to do, if I’m honest. You seem to be handling dear old dad’s ‘gift’ easily enough. What’s your secret?”

His friends recoil, as much a physical sensation as it is spiritual. Hohenheim is left reeling in the wake of their indignation.

Has he no shame? Motalebi demands. Has he no understanding of what his maker has done?

Of course he does, Assar seethes. But he’s his father’s son. His only claim to humanity is the human he rides around in.

Wretched beast, Atousa spits. Is he truly so deaf to the dead inside him?

Anoush weeps.

Hohenheim musters the control to keep his voice unaffected by the fury boiling under his skin. “...Experience.”

Greed’s eyes widen fractionally, regret a quicksilver thing there and gone again. “Ah. Yeah. S’pose you would be used to it, huh?”

At their feet Ed makes a low, wounded noise. “Stop, stop, shut up, I can’t think, it’s too much, I can’t—stand you—stop—“

Ah, child, Hamedi sighs. 

Hohenheim closes the distance to crouch before his son. This close, he can see the floor and wall distorting under faint streaks of red alchemical discharge. “Edward—”

Ed flinches as if struck, snarling unintelligibly. There’s a grating shriek of metal against metal as the blade he’d transmuted yesterday reappears in a bright red flash, slicing through his trousers across his left knee.

Greed cackles. “Well! Seems he doesn’t wanna talk to you.”

“I suppose not.” He leans back, in case Ed finds the coherency to take a swing at him with blade or with fist. There’s no need to worry, however. Ed’s eyes find his briefly, burning with anger, before he’s swept out to sea again.

“Maybe you oughta just leave him to me.”

Surely there’s something he can do—something Ed would permit him to do—to ease his suffering?

One step at a time, old friend, Golbahar says. Leave the boy for now. He wants nothing from you yet.

True enough.

He stands. The blade remains. It’s likely Ed didn’t even mean to make it. 

“Hey,” Greed says. “Think you could take a look at Lan Fan later?”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She and Mei fought like cats yesterday, so her arm’s still wrecked. You did a hell of a job helping the others, so....”

“I’m not an automail mechanic—”

“I’m not askin’ you to fix her arm, just the part of her it’s connected to.”

Dehnavi asks, Still think he’s borrowing the Yao boy’s concern?

Benazir huffs.

“Ah. Well. I’ll see what I can do.”

He leaves Greed to his coaxing, Ed to his muttering, and goes in search of the showers.

Chapter Text

Lan Fan is naturally hesitant when Hohenheim asks to take a look at her shoulder, but admits the injury is beyond her ken to treat.

He picks through the medical bay for the supplies he suspects they’ll need—including the lucky find of a well-stocked engineer’s kit—then meets her in another office two doors down. He offers her a towel for modesty and privacy to undress, mentally running over what he and his friends recall of Pinako’s lessons until she gives him the all clear to enter.

There aren’t any gurneys in here, of course, but there’s a large table that suggests this had been a meeting room, before, and that’s what she's stiffly laid on. He offers her a bland smile. “I do know a thing or two about automail,” he reassures her, trying not to picture poor Pinako decomposing in her home on the hill. “I’ll need to remove the pauldron to get a better look at your shoulder. May I?”

She nods wordlessly.

He follows her example, remaining quiet as he works. The design of her arm is beautiful in its own harsh-angled way, rather unlike the simpler, heavier limbs Pinako had him assist with when she was young and he was as he ever is. Still. Screws, screwdrivers; an easy puzzle to solve. The pauldron comes off in one large piece, the bracing beneath it in smaller parts, and it isn’t long before the extent of the damage is laid bare.

“Is it that bad?” 

He startles, finds her dark eyes watching him intently. He offers her another bland smile. “Not so bad that you should look so worried. Port aside, has the arm been operating differently?”

“A little slower, yes.”

Pinako would insist on a thorough cleaning, Behnoud says. The limb won’t do her any good if it’s too gummed up to operate.

Hanif asks, You remember how to remove automail, yes?

More or less, but if anyone feels inclined to offer a reminder or two he’d be much obliged.

Gentle laughter hums through him, and no small amount of teasing too. Out loud he says, “It would be wise to clean the interior mechanisms to prevent any further damage. I’ll have to remove it.”

Her jaw tightens. “If that’s what must be done.”

Removing the arm itself proves trickier but he manages it in the end, and without hurting her in the process. The exposed port is crusted over with dried blood, enough that scores of his friends tut in sympathy. Pain is something they’re all miserably intimate with. Being calmed, called, and known by him only does so much to ease being part of his Philosopher’s Stone. He washes the port and wires clean, relieved to see there’s no further damage, then turns his attention to the flesh beneath it. Even a cursory examination is dismaying. Whatever fighting she’d survived yesterday had nearly torn the attachment clear off her stump, and the support struts grafted to her ribs had fared little better. Ling Yao—and perhaps Greed too—was right to be worried for her. If Amestris’ people still lived she’d be facing emergency surgery and a lengthy recovery after. As things stand, she’ll just have to make do with his meager skills.

Use me, Seyyed whispers again, so that’s who he draws upon. 

“Oh! That—that feels much better already. Thank you.”

“It’s no trouble. Go ahead and relax. I’m afraid I won’t be as quick with your arm.” 

He takes the limb to an adjacent desk where the late-morning light is best and sets to taking it apart. It doesn’t look as if much blood leaked past the elbow joint. Good. He doesn't want to mess about with the concealed blade if he doesn’t need to.

Combat automail, Daroudi says. Not much need for something like that in sleepy little Resembool.

True enough. Now, this part opens… this way, yes, which allows access to here, and now… yes, that’s the right of it. It’s really not so different from Pinako’s work.

Wonder which of you her soul ended up in, Rahi says. 

Hohenheim pauses. Breathes. Picks up the wet cloth and starts scrubbing.

But Rahi persists. Her granddaughter too. And everyone else from Resembool. And everyone you ever met on your travels this past decade, and millions more besides.

His teeth ache for how tightly he grits them. Grief grips his ankles, threatens to pull him deep into the Amestrian howling. How many familiar voices will he hear among them? He failed. He failed. How many died because of his failure?

Don’t, Sistani begs. It’s done with. It’s over. Hohenheim, you sit at the heart of a vast charnel house. Don’t burden yourself with the weight of their bones.

Their souls are heavy enough, Rahi sneers. 

He flinches, knocking his knuckles against something sharp inside the arm. A small cut opens and heals before he can feel it, known only for a curl of damnable crimson light. He shuts his eyes against the sight. The Amestrians batter and bruise him. He is too full; he’s a breath away from overspilling entirely. The madness of long ago taps its bony fingers against his skull, offering him an easy out. All he’d have to do is let go and the years would slip away, like water over his head; days and months and seasons passing him by. Years. Decades. The span of a mortal lifetime, or longer still. These few survivors would be gone, fled or dead; either way, no longer his concern. There would be only the four of them left here, four immortals drowning in their private wells of madness as this city falls to ruins around them—

Five, Khiabani chides, gently. There should be five. Don’t forget your younger son simply because he’s absent now. Al needs you, Hohenheim.

No, that’s wrong. He can’t do anything for Al. He can’t do a single thing right for Al. It’s Ed who could pull him out of the Gate. Ed, who should be able to do it easily, gladly, but Ed’s in far worse shape than he is. Ed, Mrs. Curtis, and Colonel Mustang are all in worse shape than he is. Of course they are. So how must Al be faring in that white void?

He needs you, Khiabani repeats. If you can’t help him, help Ed.

How? Ed won’t let him—

He’ll listen to us, Taghi says.

“...What?”

“Is something wrong?"

He’s overwhelmed, Taghi explains. They all are. They need help—no, they need a lodestone. Something to hang onto.

Ah, that’s what you’ve all been gossiping about, Birjandi laughs. I’d wondered, but I’ve been wading through all these newcomers. Noisy, aren’t they? God, but I’d forgotten how bad the early days were.

Hohenheim only reached you two hundred years ago, Taybadi points out.

Two hundred and nineteen years, if memory serves, and memory’s all I’ve got left so it damn well better. I like this idea, Hohenheim, though I don’t think one or two of us would be enough to help that ill-tempered brat of yours.

Taybadi scoffs. Be kind, you scoundrel. The boy’s got enough troubles as it is. The last thing he needs is your sass.

Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. I think Ed and I will get along just fine after a few years. Don’t you, Hohenheim?

“I—” He swallows, belatedly remembering that he isn’t alone in this room and that people find people who talk to themselves concerning. And Lan Fan would surely appreciate getting her arm back sometime today. He ducks his head, busying his hands again. What is being suggested here, exactly? That he—give some of them to Ed?

And the rest, if we prove to be more help than hindrance, Taghi says. 

Just a few of us to start, Taybadi suggests. More if that isn’t enough.

Be it five or five hundred that gets Ed sorted enough to bring Al home, Birjandi declares. 

Shirazinia tuts. Oh, start with five, won’t you? He’ll be frightened enough by that few as it is.

Taghi scoffs. Frightened? Are we talking about the same boy? Ed’s not been frightened one day of his life.

Shirazinia scoffs in turn. And how would you know? It’s not like Hohenheim was there to see.

There’s nothing wrong with being afraid now and then, Shamsi says. The life of a military dog would be fraught with danger, and it’s just been the two of them for years.

Five, Taybadi decides. Five is a good number. We’ll be able to rely on each other as we try to soothe his madness.

And our own too, Shirazinia warns. You lot weren’t aware in the early decades, when Hohenheim knew a scant hundred of us. It will be hard on whoever goes, far harder than this past day has been.

Oh, not I, Shariar gasps. God, I would break beneath such a pain as that again. I’m sorry, Hohenheim, but I can’t—

Hush. Hush. He won’t force anyone to do this. But those offering—they must be sure. He doubts Ed will be able to return them anytime soon if they change their minds.

I’m sure, Birjandi says. I could stand a change of scenery. I’m right tired of seeing your ugly mug in the mirror.

You learned Amestrian a little too well, Emami notes sourly.

Taking that as a compliment, doll.

Hmph.

Hohenheim bites his lip to keep from laughing. Fine, fine. It’s a sound plan, and more than he’s come up with besides. Who will go? 

Taghi, Birjandi, Taybadi, Shirazinia, and Shamsi volunteer. They’re all fluent in Amestrian, all of them reassuring motes of warmth and memory. They’ll do all they can to help their fellow dead inside Ed, if not Ed directly. Their influence will be small, but if even one soul is soothed because of them then it will be worth it.

Let’s try to be a little more helpful than that, Birjandi says. Be a wasted effort otherwise.

Finish up here quickly, Taghi says. The sooner we help Ed, the sooner he’ll save Al.

Don’t rush this, Shamsi chastises. Who knows if there’s a single automail mechanic left alive? You might be the best hope of one she’s like to find.

You’ll want to pillage every last clinic and bookshop on your way East then, Azraqi grumbles. God knows you’ll need all that and more to keep Lan Fan and Ed sorted.

“One step at a time,” he murmurs.

“You talk to them?”

...Ah. 

“Mm. Please, excuse me. I try not to do it around others.”

“But you do talk to them.”

“...Yes.”

“With the Xerxesians. Your people.”

“...Yes.” It’s not as if he’s had any luck reaching the Amestrians yet, after all.

“...We passed through the ruins of Xerxes, last year.”

His fingers are suddenly numb. He grips the screwdriver tighter and watches his knuckles burn white, feeling nothing. “I haven’t…. I’ve never gone back.”

“...Why not?”

“...I couldn’t bear to.”

Silence again. It takes more minding from his friends to clean her arm properly. It should be easy work, no more difficult than anything Pinako once tasked him with, if bloodier. But his mind’s eye is fixated on memories of bodies baking in the desert heat. He could never have imagined such a silence, nor a howling, as in the days after the fall of Xerxes.

The table creaks as Lan Fan stands, coming to stand at his shoulder. She’s close enough that her towel brushes his rolled shirt sleeve, tickling his forearm. He fumbles a screw, just catching it before it rolls off the table.

“It’s beautiful still,” she offers quietly.

Still, Kamshad chokes out. Still! As if we haven’t seen with your own eyes the ravages of time! How mere decades can reduce a kingdom to dust, nevermind goddamn centuries! How can she possibly compare whatever little remains to what Xerxes was?

He knows. God, but he knows.

Our home, Hohenheim, Sadiqeh cries out. Thousands, thousands, thousands cry out with him. Our bodies left to sully the earth. There’s no beauty left in that cursed place.

“Beautiful? Mm. I doubt that. Not like it was.”

The little office fills with the smell of polishing oil. It reminds him of evenings spent at Pinako’s; a bottle or two of her favorite whiskey emptied over hours of conversation, a haze of pipe smoke lingering in the air. He’d always enjoyed her company. He’s going to miss her terribly.

The arm comes together slowly, but it comes together. He’s even sure he’s done it correctly. But Azraqi is correct; it would be wise to collect as many resources on the subject of automail as he can before he leaves this dead country for good. Has automail found a foothold in Xing despite its tense relations with Amestris? He hopes so. He doesn’t know the first thing about building a limb from scratch, nevermind the initial surgeries.

There’s sure to be a few mechanics caught up in the five of you, Gharibian says. What you don’t know they can teach, eventually.

Shariatmadari scoffs bitterly. Oh yes, you’re sure to find plenty of mechanics in here with us once they’ve finished screaming their heads off. With two and a half million souls lucky enough to not end up in that monster, it's only a matter of time.

He drops the screwdriver. “Two—?”

“Mister Hohenheim?”

Two million, six hundred eighty-one thousand, six hundred and forty-five Amestrians, Yarshater whispers. There are over a million souls within you alone now, Hohenheim.

The smell of polishing oil is—abruptly—overwhelming. He presses a hand to his mouth. If he breathes too deeply he’s sure to be sick. That can’t be right. That can’t be right. But it is. God. God.

“Mister Hohenheim? Are you alright?”

He laughs into his hand, high and stuttering, unhinged even to his own ears. Is he alright? What kind of question is that?

An earnest one, Foroutan says. Be kind. She’s trying to understand.

“I—“ He clears his throat, drops his hand. “I’m sorry. I… I’m a little distracted.”

He elects to continue reassembling her arm rather than dare look at her. The backs of his hands burn under her watchful gaze. 

Sepideh asks, She’s a retainer to the Yao boy, yes? Talk to her, Hohenheim. Ask after her clan, her home. 

He wets his lips, finishes turning a bolt before speaking. “You’re of the Yao clan, is that right?”

“I am.” 

“I passed through that province when I left Xing. Díhuà was a beautiful city then. I’m sure it’s only prospered since.”

“When was that?” 

“Oh, over a century ago.” He chuckles when she can’t quite stifle a disbelieving sound. “I know. Absurd, isn’t it?”

“I don’t—I did not mean to—“

“It’s alright. It’s all very absurd, if you look at it one way.” Terrible, if you look at it another. Perspective is something he’s learned to appreciate. “What brought the Yao prince and his retinue to Amestris?”

“...We came in search of immortality,” she admits, like an apology. “The Emperor is gravely ill, and has tasked his children to find a way to prolong his life.”

“Hmm. At the cost of peace among the clans, I’m sure.” He sighs. This is hardly the first time such a situation arose in Xing. The only novelty is that the prize this time around isn’t presumed control over him.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just thinking ahead. We can’t stay here. I’m not familiar with the neighboring countries, and Xing treated me well in the past.” He’s already dreading the trip east. Amestris is so, so much larger than Xerxes was.

“I… I am certain the young lord will make every effort to aid and protect whoever chooses to return with us.”

“I’m sure that will go all the easier, once he succeeds his father.”

She hums. “Greed has all but guaranteed he shall.”

God, Yara cackles, Could she sound any more sour!

Can you blame her? Amin asks. It’s a miracle that lesser homunculus hasn’t already devoured his soul!

“Mm. This will hardly be the first time an Emperor has demanded immortality without considering its consequences. Xiàojìng hounded me the last twenty years of her life to share my secret.”

“Wh—Empress Xiàojìng Xiàn?”

“Oh, yes. I lived at the Palace long before she was born, and long after besides. Does that surprise you so much?”

“...No, I suppose not. It’s only—I would think there would have been—records—of any… notable Xerxesians matching your description. Especially if you lived in the Palace so long.”

Hear how she dances around insults, Hohenheim, Mashayekhi teases. She doesn’t even know to whom she speaks!

Tens of thousands of his friends laugh. He has to pause, fighting his own amusement. “Ah, well. Historical records preferred to, ah, name me more formally, as it were. You’ve likely heard of the Western Sage?”

“What ?”

His Xingese is clumsy from disuse, but from her shock alone he knows she understood him just fine. He laughs. How strange a thing, to laugh and mean it. He’s fallen out of the habit. He finishes putting her arm together with a smile. “There. That seems to be everything in order. Shall we?”

“Ah—! Y-yes.”

Starstruck, she is, Assefi teases. I bet she’ll be gossiping with the others the minute her arm’s reattached.

Jaber asks, There was a fourth Xingese native here, wasn’t there? The old man with the white mask.

Dead, probably, Rad sighs. Dead like everyone else.

He is, Ghotebzadeh answers. Don’t you remember? She said she wanted to avenge her grandfather. 

Killed before that monster could sink its claws into his soul, Amanati says. Lucky bastard.

Hohenheim’s never reconnected an automail limb before and warns Lan Fan as such. She nods, otherwise remaining quiet. She looks at him differently, now that he’s told her who he used to be. There’s less caution in her gaze; far more reverence. He regrets dismissing the anonymity he’d held.

There’s nothing for it, Nizami says. If Xing’s where you’re headed again, better this lot of them know who you are now. The prince could be your way back into the Emperor’s good graces long before he takes the throne.

If he has it his way he’ll be Emperor sooner than later, Siah points out. Him and that monster inside him.

Nazeri cackles. So much for avoiding another civil war. Just imagine!

Hohenheim hides another smile in his sleeve as he slots Lan Fan’s arm into its port. He reaches for the hex key he needs to reconnect the nerves, wishing he could reduce her pain through this part of the procedure. To distract himself from the inevitable groaning and twitching he wonders after Xing’s future, what the the next century will bring. They’ll just have to wait and see how well Ling Yao and Greed share the throne, won’t they?

Oh God, Nur groans. Anything but that.

Chapter Text

Finished playing at mechanic, Hohenheim retreats again to the office he’d claimed as his own in order to pull the first five volunteers out of his flesh. Then, once their souls are safely cradled in his cupped hands, he goes in search of his son. Ed, Ling, and Greed aren’t in the showers, though several jagged cracks in the tiles suggest they had been earlier. When he pokes his head into their makeshift infirmary he only sees Scar and Mei Chang's little panda shivering on his bandaged chest. He apologizes for disturbing the other man's rest and leaves. The nearby offices are likewise empty; the main hallway too. Someone’s taken the time to clear away the bodies and the barricades, even going so far as to mop up the bloodstains. Out of sight, out of mind. He finds all twelve of them in another office, neatly laid out in two rows of human and artificial. 

They might have dog tags on them, Jilani says. 

“Mm.”

But that’s something to consider later. His hands are too full to rummage around in dead men’s pockets. He shuts the door and moves on.

Eventually he finds Ed alone with Darius in what looks to be a break area in the kitchens. “Come on kid,” Darius is saying, meeting Hohenheim’s eyes briefly when he joins them. “You gotta eat something.”

Ed is braced for impact against the rickety table. He doesn’t answer; he likely didn’t even hear. His damp hair falls in waves, hiding all expression but one wide, staring eye. He shakes.

“Edward.”

The blade on his arm has left a number of shallow gashes across the tabletop. At the sound of Hohenheim’s voice his automail rattles against itself, scratching another.

“I want to give you something that might help. Is that alright?”

Darius asks, “You can help him?”

“I hope so. Edward?”

No response.

“It’s going to be a bit of a shock, but it won’t hurt you.”

No response.

Darius asks, “What’re you gonna do?”

Just do it, old friend, Shirazinia says. 

He’d probably just tell you to fuck off if he could, Birjandi says, the Amestrian curse popping against Hohenheim’s palm. 

Yes, he thinks, they’ll get along just fine. “Go well. Be kind.”

“What?”

Taghi, Birjandi, Taybadi, Shirazinia, and Shamsi spring from his hands the moment he opens them; five crimson arcs that skewer Ed’s chest with almost perfect accuracy. One pings off the bolt in Ed’s collarbone before course correcting. Probably Taybadi. He’d been terribly nearsighted when he'd been alive. Ed goes reeling out of his chair, sprawling with a perforated wheeze. Darius jumps up shouting shock; at Hohenheim, at Ed, at the holes in Ed’s shirt. He hovers his hands over the places wounds should be with astonished eyes. A moment passes. Then Ed coughs, blinking at Darius. “Uh.”

“Elric! You okay?”

“Y-yeah. I think?” He sits up, wincing when his automail scrapes loudly. He stares at the blade, around the room, at Hohenheim. “What?”

“Your dad, he—I dunno.” Darius also looks at Hohenheim, his expression far warier. “What the hell did you do? ”

Ed might hear you now, Hohenheim, Taies suggests. Tell him again?

“They’re going to help you, Edward.”

“Who’s helping him?”

Ed’s eyes widen. He pushes Darius off, grabs at the table to heft himself upright. “What? Who’s there? I thought—nngh. I thought it was just us left. You made it out too?”

Darius stands up as well, his wariness only worsening. “Kid?”

Ed ignores him, frowning at his transmuted automail as he rubs his chest left-handed. “No? What do you mean? Where—huh?” He turns around in a slow circle, baffled. “I don’t understand. Where are you?”

“Mister Hohenheim.” Darius, low and controlled and quite suddenly looming with gritted fangs, “What did you do to him?”

“I gave him five souls to—”

“What? ‘Cause he needed more?”

“Five Xerxesian souls,” he elaborates patiently. “They’re going to help him focus.”

“Wait, what?” Ed swivels to glare at him. “You gave me what?”

Darius relaxes, if only fractionally. “Huh. How about that.”

“I don’t need any of your damn—” Ed winces, looking over his shoulder. “Huh? No, don’t side with him. Who even asked him to help? What even—? H-hey!”

Oh, that was certainly Birjandi, Delara laughs.

Taghi was right, Hengameh marvels. They’re helping him, just the five of them! Five against all of that pain!

Ed keeps talking, Darius clearly growing torn between relief and renewed alarm with every stuttered question and answer he gives to people that only still exist through terrible technicality. Darius asks him a question too, and is amazed when Ed manages to answer it. Distracted, disoriented, miles and years away from anything approaching functional, but Ed is present again. There’s no telling how long this period of lucidity will last, but if those five can manage it once they’ll help Ed manage it again. 

I wonder how long they’ll be able to withstand it, Sadiqi hums. I wasn’t aware in the early days. I've only heard what the others.... And now, to listen to the Amestrians? Even with all of us working together it feels as if I could be torn apart at any moment. How can they stand it, just the five of them?

It will break them, Shahriar moans. They will beg for death and Ed won’t know how to free them. I know it. To join that greater madness would be a relief and hell both. Hohenheim, how could you let them do such a thing? My friends, my family, what fools they are—

Hush, Touraj says. Hush. They did it to help Hohenheim’s son. They’ll persist as long as they can, and bow when they can bear it no longer. They will not break. They have one another, and Ed too. He’s a good boy. He’ll take care of them, as they will him.

Abruptly furious, Ed slams his automail blade against the table. Instead of simply breaking it by mere physical strength there’s a bright crimson flash and it explodes into a dizzying whorl of sawdust, splinters, and inexplicably leafy green branches. Ed reels back with a gasp, only caught from falling down again by Darius' quick reflexes.

“Edward,” Hohenheim rebukes softly.

It was an accident, Heshmat says.

That doesn’t matter, Pahlavi says. Accidental alchemy of the caliber he’s capable of now could’ve easily destroyed the kitchens. Hell, half the building.

It’s a miracle he didn’t kill the chimera, Ervand tuts. Hohenheim, patch him up before you leave, eh?

“The hell,” Darius mutters, dumbfounded. His face and hands are already beginning to bleed. Hohenheim isn’t sure if he’s been hit too; the pain of injuries always leaves before he can properly register anything beyond a vague sting, a modicum of discomfort. He’ll need to check in a mirror for any lingering splinters, after this.

“I—I don’t want you in my head,” Ed rallies feebly. “I don’t want any of you! I didn’t want—this to happen. N-not any of it, not—no! It’s not too late! It can’t be! There has to be something I—what? I don’t give a shit what he’s tried, I’ll figure something out. Huh? I don’t—understand? What do you mean?” He reels to glare again at Hohenheim. “They can read my mind‽”

Laughter resounds through him; it’s all he can do to keep a wholly inappropriate smile off his face. “I’m afraid privacy is something you no longer have the privilege of.”

“What does that mean?”

“Give them a chance, Edward.”

“Like hell!” Ed winces, rubbing his face. “Ugh. Stop—stop laughing. This is too weird. You should’ve said you were gonna do this so I coulda told you to fuck off.”

More laughter. He bites his cheek, clearing his throat. “I did try to warn you.”

Ed blinks. “You. You did?”

“Yeah,” Darius says. “You, uh, haven’t really been hearing us since yesterday.”

“Yesterday‽”

Well, I’d call this a resounding success, Jooya says. Any volunteers for the other two? I call not it.

Oh me, me first, Shohreh pipes up laughingly. I’d love to get a chance to ride around in that officer fellow. He’s a gorgeous specimen, isn’t he? 

And with that attitude I vote you not be allowed to go, Zarah says primly. 

Aw, come now, I was only joking.

Some joke! Namdar cackles. As if you could even appreciate that face if you were a part of his Stone! He’s blind, you numpty.

Relief is a warm bubble filling his chest. It worked. It worked. Ed’s already so much better than he’d been. This reprieve for his firstborn son could fail five minutes from now, even less than that, but it wouldn’t be a failure overall. Not really. They—Hohenheim—is on the right track. He’s failed a thousand, thousand, thousand times over, but in this one tiny, flailing, desperate regard he has succeeded.

Congratulations, Mahdi says. Thousands of his friends echo the sentiment. Thousands more even mean it. How wonderful. How terrible, that this effort is necessary, but how wonderful, that this experiment worked. If he’s helped Ed find a fingernail’s worth of stability as early as today with as few as five willing souls, he’ll be able to help the others too. Their lives ruined and endless now because of him, but eased a little because of him too.

Hohenheim catches the chimera’s attention with a gesture to his own face. “I can heal that, if you’d like.”

“Heal wh—” Ed only then registers the damage his anger had done; he freezes, mortified. “Oh, fuck. I—I didn’t—it was an accident—I don't know how I even—”

“I’m fine, kid,” Darius says gruffly. “Thanks, but don’t worry about it. You should go try that trick of yours with the others.”

He nods and leaves, almost eager now to try again. One success is a fluke, two is coincidence, but three? Well, that’ll mean he really is on the right track.

And you’ll be an old hand at it by the time Al’s free of that damn Gate, Faramarz adds. Thousands of his friends chatter on, as excited as he is for the day he can finally see Al’s face again. Soon. Soon. He’ll figure it out as soon as he’s helped the others.

He finds Mrs. Curtis in a hallway up on the third floor, Mei Chang perched nearby and trying vainly to calm her down. He has to pick his way through a veritable minefield of twisted, razor-sharp edges. Wood and carpet, bronze and marble, steel and plaster; there’s hardly a trace left untouched by her grief. How strange, these alchemical outbursts are that she and Ed exhibit. How terribly dangerous.

Mei Chang looks rattled and exhausted, but otherwise she seems unhurt. Still, it’s only polite to ask, “Are you alright?”

She nods stiffly. “She’s done this three times now, but this is the largest transmutation by far. I don’t think she means to. I’m not sure she’s even aware she’s doing it.”

On the floor, face buried in her hands, Mrs. Curtis shakes. Over the voices of his own Stone he can barely hear her rapid muttering; to herself, to the dead inside her, to a god that apparently could not stop a monster from tearing it down from the firmament. In his clasped hands five more souls squirm. Qajar, Tadj, Kiarash, Shapour, and Tabrizi have volunteered and are impatiently waiting for his word to make the jump.

“Missus Curtis?”

No response.

“Missus Curtis, can you hear me?”

A slow shudder rolls through her. Otherwise, no response.

Mei Chang hops down from a ragged wooden spike to stand, fidgeting beside him. “She won’t…. She will get better, won’t she?”

Come on, old friend, Tadj urges. Can’t you see how she’s hurting? 

Please, Hohenheim, Shapour says.

“Mm. As you wish. Go well. Be kind.”

He opens his hands. Five crimson arcs skewer Mrs. Curtis’ chest with almost perfect accuracy. She sprawls, wild-eyed, with a perforated wheeze. Mei Chang cries out and rushes past him, hovers her little hands over the places where wounds should be. “What—! What have you done to her! Oh! Missus Curtis? Can you hear me?”

“I’ve given her five Xerxesian souls,” he explains. “They’ll help stabilize her, as much as they can.”

“You did what? As if she isn’t suffering enough already‽”

“It helped Edward.”

“Wh—really? Are you sure? How—”

Mrs. Curtis sits up, wincing. “Ugh. What was that? Mister Hohenheim? Is that you? ...Where the hell am I?”

“Oh,” Mei Chang whispers.

Explaining what he’s done for her goes almost beat for beat the way it did with Ed. In the end Mrs. Curtis only sneers and turns her attention inward. Mei Chang watches her speak with people no one else can hear with wide, uncertain eyes.

“Be careful,” he tells the girl even as he's turning to leave, “I don’t know when her control might lapse again, and I’d hate to see you hurt.”

It takes him far longer to track down Colonel Mustang. It doesn’t occur to him to look outside until he’s exhausted everywhere else. His friends tease him for not bothering to look out any windows, because of course he finds the man halfway down the wide white steps leading to the parade field. Lieutenant Hawkeye is with him; she's likely the only reason he’s standing at all.

“—going to be alright, sir,” she's saying as he approaches. “Can you hear me?”

But the man only shakes his head, one hand pressed over his eyes. His voice is a ruin. “I didn’t want this, I didn’t—I never wanted to use alchemy for this. They’re burning. They’re burning and it’s my fault. I did this.”

“You didn’t—that was years ago. This isn’t Ishval. Don’t you remember? We’re in Central. Colonel?”

“Look at what I’ve done. I’ve killed them. I’m killing them, they're screaming—”

Beyond the high gray walls the sky is a lurid smear of orange sunlight and black smoke. Beyond the high gray walls Central City burns.

Colonel Mustang’s right hand is held outstretched, poised to snap just as he’d threatened previously. Red sparks dance across his fingers, and apart from a harried glance at Hohenheim the lieutenant’s eyes remain fixated on those sparks. A state alchemist turned into a living Philosopher’s Stone, and here she is trying to convince him they’re anywhere but Ishval.

Well, Hohenheim, Abtahi sighs. Now we know how this soldier earned his stars and stripes, don’t we?

It doesn’t matter, Rita insists. He’s here now, alive—

Alive! Feridoun barks mean laughter, and hundreds more join him. Is that what we’re calling this hellish eternity? Alive! Gods and devils above and below us, Hohenheim. You can’t seriously mean to inflict a man such as him on any of us.

Five more souls squirm in his cupped hands. Shahroudi, Maroofi, Rita, Sennen, and Fazeli all volunteered. He’s inflicting nothing on no one. He’s never demanded anything of any of them. He asks for help, and hopes his friends will help him. Those who refuse? Well, he leaves them alone as much as he can, and grants them oblivion when they ask for it. It’s the only kindness he’s ever been able to grant any of them.

We know that, Shahroudi says. We do, Hohenheim. And I still volunteer to join with this butcher even knowing that he might never let me go. Helping him is the only kindness left to me to grant anyone.

“Colonel Mustang?”

No response, though Lieutenant Hawkeye stares enough for both of them.

“I’d like to help you, Colonel. Can you hear me?”

No response from him, but she asks, “You can help him?”

He nods. “I’ve helped Edward and Missus Curtis already. I don’t know how much help it will be, or for how long a stretch. But they were both able to find greater stability than they’d had without it.”

“Stability?”

“They could both hear me, as well as the others who happened to be with them at the time. They could answer questions, ask their own, and hear what we told them. It….” He breathes carefully, shying away from memories of long, long ago. “It isn’t any kind of cure. I can’t fix any of them. I can’t make them human again. But a little help goes a long way, for this. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.”

Aren’t you just, Mahmud mutters.

“Do it,” she says. No hesitation, not a flinch to her voice or visage. All her focus is on Hohenheim now. It’s startling, how heavy a weight it is. “Whatever it takes. Help him, please.”

He nods, openings his hands. “Go well. Be kind.”

Five crimson arcs. Five more souls severed from his Stone, likely for forever. Colonel Mustang’s panicked mutterings cut off with a perforated wheeze; he collapses in a heap, five holes in his shirt with no wounds behind them. The muttering is replaced by a disquieting, lingering silence. He doesn’t react to Lieutenant’s Hawkeye’s hands or her questions. He sits on the stairs, fingertips pressed to his face and chest, and despite the passage of a full half-hour he refuses to speak at all.

He might need a few more of us, Kour suggests eventually. 

Perhaps, perhaps not, Qadir says. Perhaps he’s finally realized he’s blind. Give him time, Hohenheim. See how he’s faring tomorrow.

He relays as such to Lieutenant Hawkeye, earning yet more wholly justified glaring, and retreats inside again where the wide palm of the sky can’t crush him.

—OUT OF CONTROL WE’LL CRASH OH MY GOD THE SKY LOOK AT THE WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE DOG I TOLD YOU NOT TO TRACY SWEETIE WHAT’S THE MATTER ECLIPSE NEVER SAW ANYTHING HELP ME HURTS FUCK WORSE THAN WHEN I CHOKING HE’S HAVING A FIT NO NO WATCH OUT ON YOUR FEET WE’RE NOT DONE YET HELP ME HAVE YOU SEEN DADDY FELL DOWN FUNNY DADDY CAN’T BREATHE WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME WHAT ARE THESE THINGS JUST DIE DAMN YOU HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE HURTS IT HURTS WHY CAN’T I SAID WATCH WHERE YOU’RE ROAD’S A MESS THE RADIO SAID IT ISN’T SAFE DOUGLAS SHUT THE WINDOW BLACK THE SKY’S GONE BLACK WHAT IS THIS BREATHE JUST CALM DOWN SIR YOU CAN’T GO THIS WAY HELP DON’T JUST STAND THERE HELP US FELL RIGHT OFF THE ROOF CALL AN AMBULANCE LEO DARLING ARE YOU FEELING WELL HELP ME I CAN’T FEELING A LITTLE DID YOU SEE THAT DO YOU SEE THAT WHAT THE HELL IS CAN’T SEE HELP ME I CAN’T BREATHE WHAT’S GOING ON WRONG THIS IS PANIC DID YOU HEAR ME WHO’S THERE WHO SAID THAT WHAT’S GOING ON HURTS IT HURTS I CAN’T BREATHE DARLING WHAT’S THE MATTER THE SKY WHAT’S COMING OUT OF THE GROUND HELP ME—

“My name is Van Hohenheim…. Please, let me help you…. Yes, hello, can you hear me? It’s alright. I know. I know it hurts now but please, trust me. Let me help you. My name is Van Hohenheim….”

Hohenheim... Hohenheim... Hohenheim....

Chapter Text

Ling Yao falls in step beside Hohenheim on his way to the mess hall. They walk together in silence for a time, passing by towering windows that spill ruddied light across bodies left to ferment in the spring heat. The air is stifling, musty, bittersweet.

The Yao prince is the first to break the silence. “Thank you. For healing Lan Fan.”

Ah, Dadehbala says good-naturedly, here it comes. 

“It was no trouble.”

“Even so, I’m grateful.” There’s a pointed pause while Ling Yao openly stares. His eyes share the same ruddy color as when Greed is in control. “She told me who you are.”

“What I was called,” he corrects. 

“You don’t deny it.”

“No. But that was a long time ago.”

“But the truth of it remains.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“Then Xing owes much to you—“

“The people of Xing owe me nothing.” He finds a small amusement in how the boy startles to hear his native tongue spoken by another, by a non-native. “I was taken in after losing everything, accepted despite being what I am. Anything else was a gift I never deserved.”

There’s silence for a time as they pick their way through a tangle of limbs. Hohenheim, feeling disinclined to speak with anyone outside himself until strictly necessary, had chosen a different route to the mess hall. The dead lay thicker here, and the homunculus had found him anyway. “We’ll be returning to Xing,” Ling Yao says in his native tongue. “It would be celebrated across every province if the Western Sage were to return with us.”

Miresmaili laughs, unimpressed. Wily little jackal, isn’t he? 

“Are you so eager to better your standing with the Emperor?”

Ling Yao at least has the grace to flash an apologetic smile when caught in his own snare, sharp of tooth though it is. “I won’t deny that I would benefit, but I already have the edge I need to be named Crown Prince.” He holds up his tattooed hand. The ouroboros looks almost black in the sickly morning light.

“And what will your people think of a boy-king who can neither age nor die, nor sire children of his own?”

“They can think whatever they want. I accepted Greed not just for the betterment of my clan, but for all of Xing’s.”

Noble, Manuchehr says. 

Naïve, Zangeneh sneers.

“Self-interest isn’t the only reason I suggest you come with us," the boy continues. "You can’t stay here. None of you can.”

“We could,” he replies, soft. Not out of any desire to linger in this dead country. Anything but that. He shies away from every slack face, every reaching hand, every glassy eye he accidentally meets. But whatever might happen—the uninterrupted decay of millions, the Homunculus returning triumphant from wherever it’s gone, something somehow worse than even that—whatever might come for them here, they would survive it.

Ling Yao stops abruptly to face him. “ But you shouldn't. There’s nothing left here. Not for any of you. We failed to stop Father from taking God’s power for his own. He could be anywhere. He could be planning—anything.”

Hohenheim stops as well, frowning down at the boy. Does he know? Was he told of future plans? Or is it something more instinctual, built into the foundations of the creature his master had pulled out of the Gate, passed from Father to Son? “...Anything?”

Frustration peels Ling Yao's mouth open, all his monster’s fangs on chilling display. “I don’t—Greed only remained loyal to Father a few months before switching sides again. His previous incarnation might have known more, but what few memories he’s regained of that lifetime have been of no help.”

Well doesn’t that raise about a hundred questions, Mortazavi remarks drily. And indeed, no few hundred scholars within him have begun clamoring amongst themselves, demanding Hohenheim sit the boy down and grill him for answers. They’d all been just as fascinated by the first sight of Pride, those months ago in Liore. What fascinating creatures they were, these lesser homunculi. It's almost a pity all but Greed are dead now.

He blinks, shaking aside the brief distraction. Later. Academic curiosity can wait. “He swallowed God. The only logical conclusion one can draw is that he intends to replace God entirely one day.”

“Replace—‽” For the first time Ling Yao sounds nothing like a prince or a monster. He looks only his few years. He looks almost human; small, helpless, frightened.

Hohenheim sighs and keeps walking. “I intend to return to Xing,” he says over his shoulder, switching to Amestrian. “But not until the others are ready to make the journey as well—if they choose to do so.”

Footsteps behind him. It’s Greed who replies, “‘Choose to?’ Where the hell else are they gonna go?”

“Wherever they want. It’s a big world.”

If his sons choose to walk away from here without him, so be it. It would only be equivalent to what he did to them when they were children.

They’re still children, Ajabel chides. They’re going to need their father.

They’ll always be children, Asadi says. The devil made sure of that.

Fifteen and sixteen. Almost grown, but never quite. There are so many ways his little friend in the flask has learned to be cruel.

“Lotta places to hide,” Greed concedes, “but not many places better to fortify than Xing, from what I hear. And whatever else Pops might be planning, this ain’t the last we’ve seen of him. It’d be good to have the five of you on our side once the fireworks go off, y’know?”

God damn him, Meshkini marvels. Does this creature have the meanest understanding of subtlety?

Not him, Bayat says. The boy, maybe. A prince of Xing. To survive as long as he has would take more than martial skill.

The monster is a monster, Mirab says. That much we all knew him to be. But the boy? Well. He might be a monster of a different caliber altogether. He knows who you are. I'm sure he knows intimately the reverence his people still hold for you. And still he lets the homunculus speak so brazenly!

Pretty words and petty insults. Silk manacles and gilded cages. He’d left Xing to escape this song and dance before Ling Yao’s father’s father had been born, and his failure to save Amestris is already pushing him back into the thick of it all. He hasn’t slept in days and all at once feels exhausted down to the bones he might not even have anymore. He just wants this conversation to be over with. “Do you intend to fight your father?”

“Ha. I don’t think it’s so much about intention as it is just plain inevitable. Me and him never did get on well, y’know?”

No wonder he and Ed do, Bahonar teases.

Hohenheim doesn’t reply. They’ve arrived at the mess hall, and they aren’t the first to arrive. Tension is a physical thing here. Cloying. Heavy. The three chimeras are cloistered at one table, not looking up at their arrival. They pick at their plates, hunched of shoulder and shuttered of expression. They shy away from the fourth person in the hall with them, sat alone at a table nearer the windows.

Ah, dear, Mohajerani sighs. Ah, poor thing.

There is an apple half-peeled and forgotten in front of Mrs. Curtis. She holds a knife in her right hand, and draws the blade across her left with a total absence of reaction. Dim red light pools in her palm. She does it again. And then a third time. There’s no telling how many times she’s done so before now. There’s no savagery in the motion. No swiftness. There’s neither grief nor pain etched into the lines of her face. She cuts herself for something to do. She cuts herself because it’s the closest she can come to feeling something without breaking entirely.

It’s only been two days. Hohenheim suspects he will find mirrors reflecting his own ugliness in all four of them for many years to come.

“Ha!” Greed trots past him to lean, too close, over her shoulder. His grin is a thing of plastic; false and leering. “That’s a hell of a trick. No blood at all!”

“Greed,” Darius growls.

“I’m serious. Here, look—” He plucks the knife out of her hand, flips it deftly, presses it deep into his own palm. Once the light of regeneration has faded he presents the beading streak of blood on his skin to the rest of the room with a flourish. “See? It’s like I said. You guys really are something else!”

Monster, Veeda seethes, and tens of thousands echo her hatred. Callous little beast!

Mrs. Curtis’ face is carved from marble; pale and cold and unmoving. Her dark eyes struggle to focus, flickering from spot to spot, hardening once she at last finds purchase on Greed’s stolen face. “How... How can you laugh?”

Greed falters, tries to play his actions off as an attempt to lighten the mood. No one is fooled. No one is impressed. It isn’t long before he leaves the mess hall in a transparent search for Lan Fan. 

At least he takes the knife with him.

Chapter Text

—HELP OH GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING HELP ME GET UP COME ON NOT FUNNY LIZZY I SAID STOP IT RUN ON YOUR FEET DON’T LET THEM GET WHAT A MESS YOU’VE MADE I CAN’T BREATHE HELP I DON’T FEEL SO DON’T LOOK AT IT DIRECTLY DON’T YOU REMEMBER WHAT THEY SAID ON THE RADIO THE RADIO FIREFIGHTS IN THE STREETS OF CENTRAL WHAT’S THE WORLD COMING TO I SAID GET UP CORPORAL ON YOUR FEET DON’T LET IT BITE YOU HELP OH GOD OH GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING DIE DAMN YOU JUST DIE ON YOUR FEET CORPORAL OUT GET OUT—

“Sergeant Jeremy Mahoney?”

—SIR DON’T WATCH OUT SOMEBODY GET HELP MY HUSBAND’S SICK THE SKY THE SKY LOOK AT THE SKY NEVER MIND THAT WHAT THE FUCK IS EVERYONE’S FALLING DOWN AN ATTACK IT’S AN ATTACK BORDER’S BEEN A MESS FOR MONTHS BROKE THROUGH I CAN’T BREATHE ERICA OH GOD ERICA BLOOD EVERYWHERE CORPORAL I SAID RUN DON’T LOOK BACK WE HAVE TO GET BACK TO THE I CAN’T BREATHE DYING STUPID SHE’S BEEN DYING FOR THE SKY THE SUN WHAT IS THAT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT CORPORAL DON’T JUST STAND THERE—

“Jeremy Mahoney. Does anyone know that name? Can you hear me?”

—GET EATEN IF YOU JUST STAND THERE HARD TO BREATHE LIKE THE AIR’S GONE SUN’S GONE SKY’S BLACK WAR IN OUR OWN STREETS THIS CITY’S GONE TO THE DOGS I SAID RUN CORPORAL WHAT WHO’S THERE I SAID WHO’S THERE THOUGHT IT WAS JUST US LEFT BIRDS DYING—

“My name is Van Hohenheim. Jeremy, is that you?”

—WHAT WHAT WHO SAID THAT I said who said that Corporal don’t just stand there we have to get back to the others, don’t just stand there, Corporal, there’s nothing we can do for them, they’re dead they’re dead they’re dead and we’ll be next if we don’t fall back now, Corporal—

“—you doing?”

Hohenheim blinks, refocusing beyond the dizzying maelstrom of his Stone. He's in yet another office, dark and humid and uncomfortably warm, oversweet with the smell of a dozen decomposing bodies. He’s knelt beside one of them. Jeremy Mahoney, the man newly identified by the badge in his hand and the hoarse sobbing in his mind. There's light spilling across Jeremy’s legs. The door’s open. Hadn’t he shut it behind him?

“What are you doing?”

Ah.

He twists slightly to meet Lieutenant Hawkeye’s distrustful glare. “Did you know him?”

“What?”

He gestures at the body. “Sergeant Jeremy Mahoney.”

It’s a long moment before she answers. “...No. I spoke with him once or twice, but we never worked together.”

Jeremy Mahoney babbles on. Who is that? Where am I? God, God, tell her to run, it’s not safe, what’s going on, I can’t breathe, tell her to run, run, is this a gas leak, it’s gotta to be, who is that—

“First Lieutenant Hawkeye.”

“What?”

—I can’t see, it’s gone dark, I didn’t think the eclipse would get so dark, I can’t breathe, run, Corporal get out I said get out, who said that, what’s happening, who is that—

“Jeremy, can you hear me? That’s First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye.” Her mouth forms a small, stricken O of understanding. “She knows you, Jeremy. Do you remember her?”

—run, we have to run, it isn’t safe, I have to get out, did you say Hawkeye, Corporal don’t just stand there, oh God, what are these things, what’s happening, who are you, so much, it’s too much, I can’t run, I told her to run—

He sighs, easing to his feet. Jeremy’s badge is yet one more addition to his collection. A handful of days and his pockets are already bulging with the varied identifications of Amestris’ dead. “It’s no use yet. He’s too addled. Still, this is a good start. Thank you.”

She’s too controlled to fidget or flinch. She simply stares, white-knuckling the doorframe. “I didn’t do anything.”

“He recognized you.”

“...His soul. It's inside you?”

“I’m afraid so.”

—where am I, it hurts, run, we have to get out, the whole city’s being swallowed up, what’s happening, oh god—

More than half a million others shriek and weep similar things. Terror that doesn’t belong to Hohenheim sinks its claws into his throat. He’d forgotten, how easy it was, to be swept away by this borrowed madness.

Focus, Farjami says. You’ll be alright. We’re with you. 

Right, yes. Thank you, all of you.

“Did you need something?”

“I….” She clears her throat. “I wanted to ask you something.”

There’s a weight to this simple sentence that presses, hard, like a thumb on the knot of tension between his shoulder blades. People never say such things to him and walk away satisfied. He sighs and gestures toward the door. It'll be better to speak where the air isn’t so stifling.

She leads him to an exterior hall in the west wing. There aren’t any bodies here, though it’s impossible to tell if that’s lucky happenstance or the chimeras’ hard work. Once there she sets her shoulders and her jaw; bracing herself for disappointment before she’s even asked her question. “Can you heal the Colonel's eyes?”

Dear, sweet fool, Goli sighs. Thousands tut and mourn alongside her. Hohenheim hesitates, looking out the nearest window. He frowns at a sky so darkened by black smoke and bruised storm clouds he can scarcely tell it's daytime.

A bleak sky for bleak times, Baladhuri says.

“No.”

“Why not? You’ve healed the rest of us. Why not him?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She cares for him, Zarei marvels, a heartbeat before he reaches the same conclusion. I thought they were only—oh, but she cares, Hohenheim. Be kind. Be true, but be kind to her. They both deserve better for that alone.

He shuts his eyes against the sting. He can almost feel Trisha’s hand on his arm, hear her warm amusement as she chastises him for being so melancholy again. Doesn’t he know better than anyone? All the years they could have had together, all the years he lost on his fool’s errand. He looks at this woman with a renewed focus. She might be about the same age Trisha was, at the end. It’s a monumental effort to keep his voice even. “If I could heal him, don’t you think I would have already?”

She shakes her head, refusing to hear.

It’s kindness that made her ask this of him, yet he can only offer cruelty as answer. “If he were still human I could, but he isn’t. I can’t heal him any more than I could hurt him. He’s a Philosopher’s Stone. How he is now is how he’ll be for the rest of his life.”

“But—! There has to be something, some way to—”

“There isn't. If I knew of a way to help him—to help any of them, I would without hesitation. No matter what it might cost me or my own Stone. They don’t deserve what’s been done to them, but there is truly nothing I can do. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes search his face. For what, he doesn’t know. He allows her to, and feels a strange shame settle in the pit of his stomach when disappointment thins her mouth. “Xerxes was destroyed centuries ago.”

Thousands of his friends mutter disparaging things while thousands more keen grief at the mere mispronounced name of their lost country.

Moravid tuts. She doesn’t pull her punches, does she?

“Yes. It was.”

“And you were there. You were born there.” Her eyes harden. “Are they going to live as long as you have?”

Be kind, Zarei repeats. Please, Hohenheim. Do at least this much for her.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, and isn't surprised to hear his voice break. “They’ll live far longer than that.”

She takes a shuddering breath, stepping away from him and crossing her arms, shielding herself from inescapable fact. The new scar across her throat stands out starkly. Distant thunder grumbles outside, felt more than heard, followed by the first hesitant pattering of rain against the window panes. After a while, she sighs. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For being honest."

Kind of her, Shahrbanu says. Kinder than you deserve.

Later, after she's excused herself, he stands in the open doorway of the entrance hall. He breathes in the clean air that’s rolled in with the spring storm. The smoke’s being battered away, torn to ribbons by the rising wind. If this keeps up they might not have to worry about fires spreading across the city after all. How lucky.

Lucky? Kermani scoffs. There’s no luck at play here, old friend. This is the devil hard at work. That monster went and made himself a god. I’d bet good money this storm is his doing. Showing off again. Showing off for you.

The wind shifts. Rain hits his face, as warm as spit. Beneath the sweet petrichor there’s still an acrid tang, chemical and organic. Burned buildings, roasted meat. How funny it is, that he can still imagine his little friend’s laughter.

Chapter Text

Five of his friends can only do so much against a half million Amestrians. To save their own minds they must bend as river reeds to a raging flood. Ed and Mrs. Curtis have moments of clarity, brief opportunities where they can hear and answer the people physically beside them. For the most part, however, they remain overwhelmed. With time and patience the five he gave them will help quiet more souls and in turn give them a touch more breathing room. It would go faster if more of his friends could assist, but both have made it clear they’re not keen on adding to their Stones. He’ll ask again, a month from now, or a year, or a decade. They’ll change their minds or they won’t. It’s up to them how they tread water.

Colonel Mustang, however, seems to have taken a turn for the worse. 

Lieutenant Hawkeye seeks Hohenheim out again, the Colonel in tow. She tells him he still hasn't spoken a word, and responds to no outer stimuli. He simply wavers in place, hunching deeper into himself, until guided gently elsewhere. 

Try a few more of us, Fakhredini suggests. I’ll go.

Others volunteer, no one clamoring to lose one of the two senses left to them but willing to help all the same. Perhaps they’re right to. Who knows how long the man might stay like this without further aid, and they can’t wait around in the husk of Central Command forever.

“First Lieutenant—“

“Riza,” she interrupts, forcing her face into an expression too strained to be a smile. Still, it's kind of her to make the effort.

“...Riza. I’m going to do the same thing I did before. You might want to step back.”

“But—that’s what made him like this.” She gestures at Colonel Mustang, then winces, as if she expects him to take offense. But he only stands where she’s led him, hands curled loosely at his sides.

“You’ve seen how it’s helped Edward and Missus Curtis. Surely even this is an improvement to his previous behavior.” When he and his peculiar flickers of alchemy had left the other survivors white-faced and poised to run.

Her mouth thins, but she doesn’t dispute it. “You forced those Philosopher’s Stones into him.”

Younessi sniffs. I suppose we don’t qualify as people in her eyes.

Most people have bodies of their own to ride around in, Morteza points out.

Al didn’t, not really. Not for years.

Different tragedies, Faridoon says. He could still speak on his own behalf. He could still interact with the world and its peoples. We’re just so much energy.

More than that, Hohenheim thinks fiercely. His friends are so much more than a resource to be spent.

A good man, Bukhari says, fond. You’re still a good man even after all this time.

No. Not at all. He’s the worst thing left alive in this dead country. 

“I didn’t force those souls to do anything they didn’t want to,” he corrects, pausing to watch her eyes widen as his meaning sinks in. “They volunteered to separate from me to help him.”

“That’s—that’s not what I meant.”

“I know it isn’t. Still, it's not as if he were in any position to share his feelings about it either way.”

She scowls, hand tightening on Colonel Mustang’s unresponsive elbow. “Silence should hardly be taken as tacit agreement!”

He winces from his own hypocrisy. Is that not the same argument he'd presented to Seyyed regarding Scar? 

Seyyed huffs. It’s not the same. Scar is still human. He’ll either succumb to his wounds despite Mei Chang’s best efforts, or he’ll pull through and die a few years from now. Decades, if he’s lucky.

Heidar barks laughter. Ha! Now that’s a good joke! Who’s ever heard of a lucky Ishvalan?

It’s sound logic, Pirouz admits, But try explaining that perspective to a normal person. She’ll be lucky to have another fifty years if she has a day. Immortality is an abstraction she will never have to grasp.

“Please try to understand, Riza. I’ve been in his position. I understand exactly how overwhelmed and frightened he is. All I want to do is alleviate his suffering as best I can. His, and that of the souls trapped within him as well.”

She looks away, her expression pinched. A moment breathes, warm and oversweet. But before she can come to any decision the Colonel abruptly raises one hand, stilling and startling them both. It seems the man isn't as catatonic as they'd feared.

Small favors, Fakhredini mutters. 

“Colonel?”

His head swivels toward her voice, magnetized. “Lieutenant?”

Riza sags with relief, with misery, with complicated emotions far greater than the sum of the names given them. “Yes sir, it’s me. Are y—”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, don’t worry about me. Are you alright?”

He drops his hand to press it to his furrowed brow. “I don’t…. Yes, I think so. It’s a little quieter. What happened?”

She glances at Hohenheim. “You’ve been—disoriented. Have you heard anything we’ve said?”

“I…. Van Hohenheim?”

“I’m here.”

The Colonel blinks, then grimaces. “Oh. They said—what did they say? Oh. Oh. You’re the Elrics’ father, aren’t you?”

How strange, to be called that first before anything else.

It wouldn’t be if you’d stayed, Noushafarin sneers. All your hard work for naught, Hohenheim. You could have been there after Trisha passed and they never would have ended up in the same damned shape as you.

There’s no need to be so cruel, Leila admonishes.

Isn’t there? Look around, all of you, and tell me if Hohenheim’s time wouldn’t have been better spent looking after his family.

His jaw tightens. He’s made it clear with whom he shares judgment. “I am. Who told you that?”

“Fullmetal. Edward did. And just now someone else…?” He stumbles over a name unfamiliar to his Amestrian upbringing. “Sh-Shahroudi?”

Riza asks, “Who?”

“One of the souls I gave him,” Hohenheim clarifies, then to the Colonel asks, “Do you remember that?”

He grimaces again. “Hazily, yes. I think so. Are you—they?—why the screaming is quieter?”

“Yes. Do you understand what that screaming is?”

“I….” His eyes shutter as he slumps, as if the weight of this new clarity will snuff out what little peace is left inside himself. “So. He’s won then.”

Anoush weeps. Her sentiment is shared and echoed and cried out by thousands, and thousands more.

“Yes. Yes, he has.”

“Amestris has fallen.”

Not a question. Simply a statement, grief roughening the edge of the Colonel's voice. Inside Hohenheim that same manic cry—Amestris has fallen! Amestris has fallen! Amestris has fallen!—still shrieks, shrill and jarring and accusatory. He can’t bear to ask them to stop. It’s strange too, to hear their grief echoed outside of himself. Mirrors. Mirrors again.

“It has.”

“He did this to me, didn’t he.” He gestures at his face, likely not meaning his eyes. “Whatever this is. I’m not imagining it, am I?”

“No, you aren’t.” And though it sticks in his throat he adds, “He did it to the five of us.”

How young is this soldier, to wear his care so openly on his face? Or is it his new blindness that has made him momentarily forget that others can see his honesty, his grief? “...Oh.”

Hohenheim looks to Riza. She nods, so he takes his leave. Better she be the one to tell the man all the ugly details of what has come to pass.

Chapter Text

—GET UP GET UP I SAID ON YOUR FEET CAN’T STOP HERE RUN RUN THAT THING IS GONNA KILL US LOOK OUT DON’T HELP ME FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T JUST STAND THERE I CAN’T BREATHE CAN YOU HEAR ME OPEN THE DOOR I CAN’T GET OUT MOMMY WAKE UP I DON’T FEEL GOOD HELP ME I CAN’T WHY IS IT SO DARK IT HURTS OH GOD IS THIS IT IS THIS ALL I GET I DON’T WANT TO DIE NOT LIKE THIS WHY WHAT’S HAPPENED WHAT IS IT AN ATTACK WE’RE UNDER ATTACK BY HELP ME HEAVY BROKE JUST DROPPED OVER LIKE A SACK OF HELP ME I CAN’T HOLD THIS ON MY OWN RHYS GET UP WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU CALL A DOCTOR RUN WHAT IS THAT SUN’S STILL THERE IT’S JUST AN ECLIPSE THE BABY SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE BABY FASTER DAMN YOU GET OUT OF THE WAY HELP CHOKING I’M CHOKING I’M EVERYONE’S FALLING IN THE STREETS GAS LEAK NO I DON’T I’M SCARED I’M GONNA JUST NEED A MINUTE HEY MISTER DON'T YOU—

“—heim?”

He’s standing by yet another window. The barren, polished halls of Central Command have all blurred together. He has no idea if he’s walked through here before. There are bodies nearby; four mannequins collapsed among what’s left of two soldiers, perhaps three. Their remains have been so torn apart and trampled through he can’t be sure. Whoever they’d been, they certainly died before the nationwide transmutation circle had been activated. Small mercies.

“Mister Hohenheim?”

Oh, Darius has found him. His face is healing well. That’s good.

“Yes?”

“Ed’s wandered off again. Missus Curtis too. You seen either of ‘em up here?”

Seen them? He’s not even sure how he ended up here. Missing time again. Dangerous.

It hasn’t been long, Abolfazi reassures him. The sun's still up.

If it’s even the same day, Afzalipour says. God, but I didn’t miss this.

If it wasn’t the same day Darius would be just as concerned for Hohenheim, wouldn’t he?

“Are you okay?”

Damn it all.

“I’m fine. How long have they been missing?”

Darius eyes him doubtfully, but lets the matter drop. “I'm not sure. I haven’t seen Missus Curtis since I left the mess hall this morning. Elric—Ed, I mean—and Greed were laying into each other for a while, almost like nothing’d—y’know. Happened. But that was almost three hours ago. No one saw where he went.”

“Neither have I.”

Junayd asks, Can’t the Xingese track them down? I thought all three of them could sense qi.

It’s a fair question, one which he relays to Darius, who shrugs. “I don’t really get how that qi stuff works, but Mei said something about interference?” 

Interference, Alami echoes bleakly. He means us.

He means Hohenheim, Kimia corrects. And Mustang too, don’t forget.

“I see.” 

He considers the view outside the window. Anemic sunlight leeches the parade field of shadows. Whatever floor he’s wandered to isn’t high enough to see over those distant walls, thankfully. He knows the size of Amestris, the shape of its borders, the heights of its mountains, the depths of its valleys. He’s traveled across so much of it, spent time in a hundred towns and gotten to know thousands of its citizens. Smiling faces and kind words to an odd stranger just passing through, spare beds and warm meals offered in exchange for a little money or a completed chore. Amestris—its people, anyway—had been a good country. 

Had been. 

“They’re not in any danger, you realize.”

“Sure, but they’re not really doing alright, are they? They’re sick—”

“They’re not sick. They can no longer get sick.”

 Darius stares, flabbergasted. "Mister Hohenheim, that’s not the point.”

He’s worried, Meskoob says. He cares for Ed, you saw that. Missus Curtis too. You should at least try to extend the same courtesy.

Don’t, Enami pleads. Don’t. Hohenheim’s doing all he can.

Laughter rattles through him, harsh and mocking. Larijani holds the same low opinion of Hohenheim as so many others do. Give it a century and the four of them will be just as cold-hearted as him.

God, but he hopes not.

“Mm. Have you searched the upper floors yet?"

He finds Ed in a fifth floor stairwell, huddled on the top step. On the landing below are a pair of soldiers and a mannequin, piled together like forgotten toys. There’s a spray of bullet holes up the wall. One soldier has a crusted wound where an ear should be. Painful, but unlikely to have been what killed him. Ed doesn’t react to the door. He stares at the dead without blinking, his left hand pressed to the seam of steel and skin under his unbuttoned collar. Hohenheim considers the dead for a few moments too. The warm air is musty with the smell of them. Enough time has already passed to turn their skin all the same mottled gray.

“Did you know them?”

No answer. 

Then, eventually, Ed shakes his head.

Hohenheim walks to the railing and looks down, glimpsing a large bloodstain and a single emaciated leg on the bottom floor. These mannequins had been alive, in some twisted misuse of the word. Created to sow mayhem, sacrificed as readily as the rest of the population. If the array is what killed them, then that suggests they had been human enough to house souls within their hideous forms.

Or Philosopher’s Stones, Bozorgmehr says. Mass-produced homunculi made on the cheap.

Truly this is an age of industry, Rezaei says. Hundreds of his friends laugh bitterly. 

Ed surprises him by speaking. 

“My stumps don’t hurt.” His voice is flat, dried out. Like a pressed flower in a book he should never have been more than a footnote in. “As much fighting as I did—they should be sore as hell.”

“Pain is also something you no longer have the privilege of.”

“You sayin’ it didn’t hurt when I punched you?”

He smiles a little, because Ed’s not looking at him to misinterpret it. “You did break my jaw, if that's any consolation.” 

Ed scoffs.

He risks asking, “Why did you come all the way up here?”

“To—” Ed makes a vague gesture at himself, revulsion there and gone on his face. “—talk.”

“...I see.”

Ed’s hand falls back to his shoulder, the flat of his palm striking the metal. “You can’t still hear them. Can you? The ones you…?”

“No. They’re a part of your Stone now.”

He nearly misses the next question, spoken so softly he has to strain to hear over the rush and roar inside himself. “...And if I didn’t want them?”

He’s afraid, Gerashi marvels. 

Told you, Momayez sighs.

“Then I could show you how to give them back.”

Another scoff. “It’s that easy, huh?”

“There’s a trick to it.” He looks back at the three bodies. Two of them had names and families, hobbies and vices, hopes and dreams and silly fears. They had been people who had put on their uniforms for the last time and likely never realized the mockery it stood for. The third could have been anyone once, or no one at all. There’s no knowing. “What little relief they're providing you will leave with them, however.”

Ed sinks deeper into himself, saying nothing. Perhaps the five Xerxesians inside him are confirming what he’s said. Perhaps they whisper the meek platitudes that linger so bitterly on his own tongue. Perhaps Ed’s turned his attention to the screaming beyond them, dreading the familiar voices he’s sure to hear eventually. Hohenheim says nothing. Ed will tell him to leave, or he’ll have something more to say. He won’t press him for anything more. 

Eventually Ed asks, “Where’s Al?”

At last, Djalili cries out. At last! His relief echoes throughout Hohenheim, thousands of his friends sharing the eager hope to free Al from that empty white purgatory. 

Hohenheim keeps his own face smooth, untroubled by the elation beneath his skin. He’s slow to reply, certain the sting of honesty will cut Ed anew. But then, he’s never been any good at breaking ugly things gently. “He’s trapped. Within the Gate.”

Ed doesn’t speak. 

Then, as if trying to move through thick mud, he twists to look up at Hohenheim. His teeth are gritted. His eyes shine too brightly.

Help him, Kooshanejad snarls. For God’s sake! Do more than just stare at the boy!

“You shouldn’t wander off without telling someone,” he says, turning back to the door. “Darius was worried.”

His message has been given. Ed will know what to do next, as soon as he’s able to act. It’s enough. It has to be enough.

Chapter Text

There’s no sign of Mrs. Curtis anywhere in the building. Eventually they all reconvene in their makeshift infirmary. Hohenheim stands apart, half-listening as the others consider the likelihood that she may have left Central Command. No one wants to venture into the city yet. No one wants to see the quiet carnage beyond the high walls. It’s bad enough here where the soldiers all died fighting. Out there will be nothing but hapless victims, millions of innocents who died ignorant and terrified.

Lan Fan and Mei Chang bicker and bare their teeth, the old clan rivalries fierce despite the warm press of decomposition clogging the air. Greed rolls his eyes but it’s Ling Yao who orders, “Enough.”

His retainer bows her head in mute apology. His sister whirls about to snap, “I’m telling you, she’s still here! I’m sure of it!”

“And I’m telling you there’s nothing to be sure of. I can’t sense anything beyond the three of them."

Anvari curses. Hohenheim, she’s gone to find her husband. I’m sure of it.

Oh, no. 

“Mister Curtis,” he says aloud. “Where was Mister Curtis when the array was activated?”

Zampano startles. “Her husband? He was here too?”

Someone must know where he died, Banan says. They would have stayed together to the end, if they could’ve.

What’s the hurry? Masouman grumbles. It's not as if she’s in any danger.

This isn’t something she should face alone, Anvari says. 

Yes. Yes of course. Mr. Curtis was a good man. It was clear they loved each other dearly. 

Salehi asks, What was his first name? Sig, wasn’t it?

Yes, that’s right. A mountain of a man, a gentle giant who spoke in a low rumble and hit shockingly hard when he’d found Hohenheim treating Mrs. Curtis… which, yes, in hindsight he could have handled that better. It had just been so obvious how much pain she was in. He couldn’t help but want to help her as much as he could.

Wasted effort, Badiyi mutters. I’m sure she’s feeling much better now.

Ed returned here at some point during the search, sequestering himself in the corner opposite from Scar. His hands and knees are dusted with chalk; an array breathtaking for its complexity as much as the horror of what it's meant for has begun to take shape on the exposed floorboards. This must be the same array his sons designed when they were children, the same array they designed to bring Trisha back because he wasn’t there to tell them the futility of trying. When Hohenheim asks if he has any idea where Mr. Curtis might have died, Ed stops drawing. Alchemical distortions twist the hardwood floor, destroying his work in an instant. “Sig,” he croaks. 

No help there, Hohenheim thinks, then winces when hundreds of his friends chastise him for his callousness. 

There’s such a thing as being too practical, Yasamin sniffs.

He opens his mouth to—what? Apologize? To lie and tell Ed the dead died painlessly when their agony is writ plain on every twisted face? He remains silent, paralyzed by guilt. 

—GOD HELP ME WHAT’S HAPPENING CAN’T BREATHE I CAN’T SEE YOU WHERE ARE YOU THE FUCK IS GOING ON CAME OUT OF IT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE GUNSHOTS OH GOD THEY SAID THE FIGHTING WOULDN’T COME NEAR HEAR THE NEWS OUT OF CENTRAL THEY’RE SAYING IT’S A COUP THE FUCKING BASTARD DIDN’T WORK IT DIDN’T OH NO ARE YOU OKAY HEY GET A DOCTOR SOMEBODY GET A DOCTOR CAR CRASH WHAT THE HELL WAS THE DRIVER I CAN’T BREATHE IT HURTS MOMMA IT HURTS IT HURTS I CAN’T BREATHE WHAT’S GOING ON SOMEBODY CALL FOR HELP SHE NEEDS FELL DOWN THE STAIRS THE SHIT IS THAT ZAVALA RUN DON’T TOUCH IT WHAT IS THAT WHAT THE FUCK IS SOMEBODY TRIED TO KILL BRADLEY DID YOU HEAR I CAN’T BREATHE HELP ME BARKER YOU IDIOT GET UP HURTS I KNOW IT’S OKAY SOMEONE’S GETTING HELP ME HELP OH GOD WON’T SOMEONE HELP ME—

Abruptly the room is too small, too crowded. Abruptly he struggles to hear the discussions of the living over the howling litanies of the dead. He retreats out of the room, down the hall, and farther still. He catches his breath in an empty alcove, focusing on the inhuman thrum of what had once been a human heart.

Mei Chang finds him here. She is small, young, fragile. Twelve years old? Thirteen? Only a little younger than his boys, and all alone in this vast wasteland. “Are you alright?”

He forces a placid smile, hiding his shaking hands in his pockets. “I’m fine, thank you.”

She eyes him, fidgeting. Thoughts weigh down her shoulders.

You make her nervous, Hohenheim, Shahzad realizes, delighted.

Rostami laughs. Scare her out of her wits, I shouldn't wonder. The other two have been gossiping.

And she’s the only alkahestrist of the lot, Samad adds gleefully. You remember how those dusty scholars prettied up your life into all those absurd tales. She must be so disappointed to meet the great Western Sage himself only to have him turn out to be you.

“So. You know who I am.”

She startles. “I—! Oh, yes. I mean, I know you’re Alphonse and Edward's father, but….” She meets his eyes briefly, flinches from whatever she finds there. “...It’s true?”

“It’s true.”

She considers this a moment, then asks, “How old are you?”

Impertinent! Masih exclaims.

Oh hush, it’s a natural enough question, Gharibpour says.

He delays answering by plucking his glasses off to clean them on the hem of a dead man’s shirt. “You know, I try not to keep track?”

“Oh! That was rude of me. I’m sorry—“

“I’m not offended. I’m just not certain off the top of my head.”

1915, isn’t it? Baghi hums. And the new year just passed.

Many happy returns, Borzuya mutters dourly.

So that would make him roughly… ah. “Four hundred and fifty.”

She blinks. Blinks again. “... Oh.”

It’s harder to feign a smile now. He can feel tension settle in his jaw, his temples. The nearest he ever gets to headaches. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised by her renewed fear. Even Trisha had reacted the same when he’d told her his true age. “Why do you think Missus Curtis is still here in Central Command?”

“I…” She shivers. “I don’t know if she is or not. It just feels like we’ve missed something.”

Neda swears loudly. Oh, we really are all a pack of idiots. She’s right. What about below? Has anyone searched the underground tunnels?

Greed and Riza both confirm the existence of a hidden stairwell in the Führer’s office, so to go down they must first go up. It’s an arduous slog to get there, nearly an hour spent picking their way through a rising sea of dried gore and heaped dead. The air is still, bitter with the smell of spent gunpowder, and beneath that the insidious creep of spoiling meat. Greed and Mei Chang insist on going below with him. Everyone else opts to remain behind, continuing the work; by now they’ve all picked up his habit of collecting identification wherever they find any. Along the way up he had left each body as he’d found them, but the others took the time to detangle limbs and smooth uniforms. Riza’s face has grown to resemble a porcelain mask with every name she recognizes.

The temperature drops noticeably once they begin the descent. No soldiers had managed to breach this far, so it’s only the grotesque mannequins piled along the stairwell where gravity had settled their skeletal frames. Harsh artificial lights bleach their mottled skin white, paint black shadows in the hollows between their bones.

They're only children, Armik whispers. They shouldn't be here.

So are Hohenheim’s boys, Pezeshkzad replies. And they don’t have the option of shying away.

It’s not the same thing. It’s not the same thing at all.

Saberi laughs, low and bleak. No. This is quieter.

It’s a long way down.

“Doesn’t seem like she’s been through here,” Greed says after a while. 

“We may as well be thorough,” Hohenheim replies. 

“Mm. Guess there’s no harm in that.”

Mei Chang remains quiet, running her little hands over her braids again, again, again. Her panda must still be upstairs, looking after Scar.

“Her and the kid’ve been doing weird alchemy crap ever since—y’know. What’s up with that?”

“I’m not sure."

The taboo, Akram whispers. It’s been years since they both committed it. You saw how comfortable your boys were, transmuting without circles. They’re accustomed to alchemy being a quicksilver thing, a matter of thought and execution with none of the dusty rigamarole. 

Ghalam asks, Who’s to say Alphonse’s alchemy won’t be just as reactionary?

Hmm. There’s a certain logic to that. He relays it to the other two. Or rather, the other three. There are three of them here with him. Ling Yao may not speak half as often as Greed does, but it’s clear he's always listening.

“I never asked Edward or Alphonse how they learned to transmute without an array,” Mei Chang whispers. “I assumed it was simply a specialization of Amestrian alchemy.”

“You’re not wrong,” Hohenheim replies. “You have to be a brilliant alchemist to open the Gate in the first place, let alone to survive the toll it demands.”

The Gate doesn’t kill outright, insofar as Hohenheim has ever seen. But alchemists by their very nature are a secretive bunch, and those desperate enough to attempt human transmutation even more so. In his many, many years he has come to know the haunted hearts of those crippled by their hubris well. He’s known too, a number of those same alchemists kill themselves rather than go the rest of their lives burdened by both the failure and consequences of their transgression. 

No one could ever call the truth kind.

They find Mrs. Curtis at last, deep beneath Central Command, the only breathing thing in a concrete mausoleum. She lays quietly beside the body of her husband, her hands clasping his, her forehead pressed to his cheek. Nearby are more dead soldiers; some in blue uniforms, some in white. One of the bodies wearing blue is bound in ropes. Hohenheim wonders, briefly, what had occurred down here among these few so far from all the rest; what they were trying to do, what they thought they could accomplish, what the one in ropes had done to earn his fellows’ ire.

Don’t leave them down here, Foroughi begs. Hohenheim, please. Sig and these others deserve better than to be left to rot down here.

He considers the difficulty in carrying them up the many flights of stairs. At least there are landings to take breaks on, and only the largest soldier should be especially difficult to carry. Well, him and Sig both. They’re about the same—

One thing at a time, Hohenheim, Bakhtieri sighs. Set your practicality aside and look after her, won’t you?

He looks over his shoulder to ask, “Could one of you please go get the others? We’re going to need help getting these bodies upstairs.”

“I’ll go,” Greed says quickly, and flees.

“Missus Curtis?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t react when he kneels beside her, nor when he touches her shoulder. It's only when he pulls her gently upright that she stirs, sluggishly, as if caught in the throes of some terrible fever dream. Which, well. “Darling,” she groans. “Oh. Oh, god. Sig. It’s so loud. Are you there? Can you hear me?”

His heart aches. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. It’s the cruelest thing to say. It’s the only thing to say. “Missus Curtis, please. There’s no need to torment yourself like this. Come upstairs. We’ll bring them all up and….” 

Here, he falters. And what? Give them a proper burial? If they were to bury one body, or a hundred—when could they stop? How could they ever stop? There’s only fourteen left alive in all of Amestris, and two of them share a body and Al isn’t even here. Twelve people can’t bury a country, not before exhaustion and grief would grind their spirits to dust, not in the finite time the mortals will live nor in the long, long span of years the rest of them must endure. 

Don’t stay, Fatemi begs. Oh Hohenheim, don’t. You couldn’t bear to stay in Xerxes. Don’t you dare try differently here.

He won’t. He can’t. But what will the others do?

“It was supposed to be me,” Mrs. Curtis says. She speaks with her head bowed, her unbound braids spilling down her back, eyes roving behind thin eyelids. Her face is dirty with shed tears. Her fingernails bite half-moon marks into his hand and wrist, barely felt but still sparking red when she shifts her grip. He doesn't stop her. “I was supposed to die first. Because of what I did, do you understand? Because of the sin I committed. Because of what I put our baby through twice—ah. No. No, that isn’t….. Ed called, once. He said he’d proven otherwise. It wasn’t my baby. I didn’t kill him twice. But still. Still. Do you understand? My sin. My toll. It was always going to kill me first. But now he’s gone, and I’m still here.”

“Missus Curtis—”

Her laughter is as soft as old velvet. “But I suppose you’d know all about that.”

Hohenheim flinches. Memories of Trisha overwhelm—her mischievous smile. Her small, work-rough hands. The smell of her lavender soap. The way her shoulders shook when she laughed. The squeeze of her thighs around his waist. Her favorite teacup, her favorite beer. The lullaby she hummed to the boys to help them sleep. How she always sneezed in threes. And most impossible and wondrous of all: the love that had somehow filled her eyes every time she looked at him, even after she learned the very worst of him. Ten years. He hadn’t meant to stay away so long. He hadn’t. But years don’t mean what they used to. He had gotten distracted, time had gotten away from him, and Trisha—Trisha was gone. So few years. They’d had so few years together. If he’d stayed, even just a few more months, he would have been there when she’d fallen ill. He could have saved her. He should have saved her, and spared their boys ten years of desperate grief.

Hush, Zadeh whispers. Hush, old friend. I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. We all are, but now is not the time. You must set your own grief aside for a little while longer. Izumi Curtis needs you. Your sons need you. Colonel Mustang needs you. They need your guidance. You’ve walked the path that stretches before them now. You remember how hard it was. You know how hard it will be for them. Don’t fall apart now.

Mrs. Curtis groans again. “There’s so many of them. How will I ever find him?”

“With time. His soul could be within any of us. We’ll find him in time, I promise you.”

Don’t promise something you can’t guarantee, Khujandi warns. It’s far more likely he ended up in that devil instead.

False hope is better than none at all, Motamed says. White lies to get her on her feet again are better than this despair that would swallow her.

For now, maybe. What might she do when the lies are laid bare? Truth will out. It always does.

Enough. That’s enough. 

His friends fall back to whispering amongst themselves, cajoling the Amestrian dead, calling out names in the hope of a reply. He’s dizzy with the noise of them, but it’s a noise he’s learned to tolerate. He helps Mrs. Curtis to her feet, lets her lean against him. She makes a soft, keening protest but doesn’t resist as he guides her to the stairs. “We’ll bring him up,” he says. “We won’t leave him down here. I’m sorry. That’s all we can do for now.”

Mei Chang steps aside to let them pass, her eyes dark hollows in a white face. So young. She is so young. He shouldn’t have let her come down here. There is so much he shouldn’t have done, so much more he should have done differently.

“It’s going to be alright,” he lies.

—HELP ME FOR GOD’S SAKE WHAT’S HAPPENING GET UP GET UP SALLY WE HAVE TO GET LOOK OUT WHAT IS THAT GET AWAY I’M SCARED HAVEN’T YOU HEARD CENTRAL’S UP IN ARMS WAR ON ALL SIDES WHAT’S THIS COUNTRY COME TO HELP ME HELP ME I CAN’T LET GO DON’T AWAY SICK THE AIR I CAN’T BREATHE WHY IN MY DAY WE NEVER THAT IS WHAT IS THIS ISN’T THE WAY WE’RE LOST WAKE UP GET A WAY OUT OF HERE GET A DOCTOR YOUR SISTER ISN’T COMING WITHIN TEN FEET SET A PERIMETER KEEP THEM OUT OF HELP ME HELP ME HELP I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM HURTS IT HURTS LISTEN DID YOU HEAR THAT—

—hello, hush now, it’s alright, it’s over, you’re safe now, just listen to us, we’re here to help you, the danger’s passed, there’s nothing to worry about now, listen now we’re going to help all of you but first you must listen—

—THE SKY THE SKY THEY SKY’S GONE BLACK I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE DIFFERENT I THOUGHT I HEARD DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING GOING ON IN CENTRAL AND WOULD YOU STOP PLAYING RUSS IT’S NOT FUNNY CAN’T BREATHE HELP ME I CAN’T I CAN’T WHAT’S HAPPENED IT HURTS SO MUCH I DIDN’T THINK IT’D BE LIKE THIS OH GOD I’M DYING WE WE WE HIGHER THAN EVER DID YOU HEAR WHAT THEY SAID ON THE HELP ME OH GOD NOT LIKE THIS I WANTED TO SEE HELP ME PLEASE SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH ME I CAN’T HELP ME I CAN’T THIS CAN’T BE IT WHAT IS IT SO DARK I CAN’T CAN’T HELP ME PLEASE FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T LEAVE ME HERE—

—we won’t leave you, we promise, hush now, hush, poor things, you’re alright now, it’s all over, just tell us your names, can you do that, hear us, tell us, talk to us, we’re here for you, it’s done now, nothing left but the aftermath and that’s got nothing to do with you, you’re all going to be just fine, hush now, hush, shh, we know it hurts, we know, but it’s alright, you’re fine now, just tell us your names and all shall be well—

—WHERE AM I WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WHAT’S HAPPENING IT HURTS HELP ME DO YOU HEAR ME HELLO HELP WHAT IS THAT IT’S HUGE COMING OUT OF THE HARRY GET UP WE HAVE TO MAGGIE LISTEN DO YOU HEAR THAT IT SOUNDS LIKE ANDRE THAT’S GUNSHOTS DON’T GO OUTSIDE ARE YOU CRAZY HARD TO BREATHE JUST NEED A MINUTE HELP ME HELP HELP SKY’S GONE BLACK DIDN’T THINK IT’D BE LIKE THIS AMELIA CAN YOU HEAR ME MY NAME’S AMELIA I CAN’T BREATHE WHAT’S HAPPENED OH GOD OH GOD AM I DYING IT HURTS SO MUCH HELP ME—

—hello Sally hello Russ hello Harry hello Maggie hello Andre hello Amelia, we’re here, we hear you, we love you, it’s all going to be fine, the danger’s passed, just listen to us, we hear you, you’re safe, we promise, tell us who you are—

—WHERE AM I WHERE AM I IT HURTS THE SKY THE CITY MY HOUSE MY FAMILY GONE GONE EVERYTHING’S GONE EVERYTHING HURTS THEY SAID THEY SAID IT WAS AN ECLIPSE AN ATTACK A COUP WAR BREAKING OUT IN OUR OWN STREETS THEY’RE IZUMI KILLING US THEY SAID THEY SAID WHERE AM I PLEASE DON’T GO DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE I’M SCARED I CAN’T BREATHE MOMMA MOMMA HUSH THEY SAID ON THE RADIO DON’T GO OUTSIDE IT ISN’T SAFE OF COURSE IT’S SAFE IT’S JUST AN ECLIPSE EVERYTHING’S FINE I SAID WHERE AM I—

—you’re safe and that’s what matters, just listen to us, we wouldn’t lie, you’re safe, we promise, we swear that it’s all over, nothing and no one will hurt you now, you’re safe, there’s just us here, all of us here with all of you, and there is a man here who can help, hush now, hush, his name is Van Hohenheim, he can help, we promise, hush now, hush, all shall be well, we love you, you’re safe, it’s over, it’s all over for you, hush now, easy now, we hear you, tell us everything, we’ll listen, hush now—

“That’s right. Hello everyone. My name is Van Hohenheim. I’d like to help you, if you’ll give me a chance….”

Chapter Text

In the morning Mei Chang finds Hohenheim to tell him this: Scar is dying, and she doesn’t know what to do.

He follows her to their makeshift infirmary. Everyone else is already there, shying away from the last Ishvalan left in all Amestris. He watches Scar struggle for each wet breath, feels the heat radiating from his fevered skin. His bandages look new, yet are already stained. Scar lays like driftwood washed up on a foreign shore.

“You can heal him, can’t you?” Mei Chang asks plaintively. Her hands and voice flutter; she hasn’t been still anytime Hohenheim has looked at her. 

Scar’s eyes are like two blood blisters, dark and swollen with quiet horrors. He says nothing, so Hohenheim admits, “I could.”

Seyyed makes a noise of disgust. For God’s sake! Now of all times you choose to be stubborn!

Aghdashloo laughs. Where have you been? Hohenheim’s the most stubborn man that’s ever lived.

Practice, he thinks dryly, to the amusement of many of his friends. It’s a poor joke. It’s a poor time for jokes. “I could,” he repeats, “with his permission.”

Scar’s teeth are stained pink when he shows them off in a rictus grin. He has a face ill-suited for such a wide display of humor. “Why?” His low voice is roughened by pain; he gasps between almost every word. “I am the last of my people. I’m all that’s left. Let it be finished. It should be finished with me.”

And doesn’t he know the weight of that terrible grief better than anyone? Though he carries half of Xerxes within him, though that should make him an appalling hypocrite—still, he understands. When Ed was born it was the first time he had seen another person with yellow eyes in centuries. He had wept then with an overwhelming joy, and wept again when Al proved to inherit his coloring too. Familiarity on a foreign shore. The desert wrought such fierce colors in its peoples. Fire and sunlight had once been sacred to Ishval and Xerxes both for good reason.

“No,” Ed says. 

Ed’s still knelt in the corner, still dusty with chalk, still unsuccessful in his attempts to draw the transmutation circle that will bring Al home. The floor is a mess of finely splintered and weirdly twisted wood where his attention had lapsed. His face is scrunched, his hands splayed. Hohenheim wonders how the five he gave Ed are faring; if Ed could be convinced to accept more Xerxesian souls. He’d be in less pain, for one thing. He’d probably have better luck finishing the array to save Al too.

Be patient, Minoo orders sternly. Pay attention.

“No,” Ed says again. “You’re not the last Ishvalan. I met others. Last year. In Xerxes.”

Hohenheim reels. Thousands of his friends clamor and batter at his senses, demanding, He’s been, he’s been? He’s gone there, he’s seen it? Thousands more blanch from the very idea, recoil from the effort of imagining what four hundred years have done to their country, their homes, their bodies left to rot where they fell. It's all he can do to breathe, to keep his feet under him. He clings to the nearest wall and fights for something adjacent to normalcy. He doubts he does so well.

“If you’re lying, boy—”

“M’not. They’re the ones who told me. About the Rockbells.”

Hohenheim has to swallow before he can speak. He must speak here. “The Rockbells?”

Ed finds the strength to hurl a glare across the room. “Winry’s parents. Auntie Sara and Uncle Yuriy. He killed them.”

Nader whispers. You remember, don’t you? Pinako said they died in the war, years ago, while you were traveling.

Hohenheim remembers.

Precocious little Yuriy, pulling Pinako’s medical journals off the shelves and pouring over them for hours. The hard set of Sara’s jaw as she towered, triumphant, over schoolyard bullies. He remembers that Yuriy held the same glad determination in his heart as Pinako did when she was young, that drive to reach out and help others, to leave things better than how he’d found them. He remembers Sara sharing that same determination, as if they were two sides of the same coin, as if she’d always been meant to be a Rockbell too. Their wedding had been lovely in its small-town simplicity, in the way everyone had come bearing gifts whether they’d been invited by name or not. He remembers the summer rain that had chased everyone indoors. Sara and Yuriy had laughed, soaked to the skin as they cut the cake together, the very picture of young love.

Sara could laugh just as bawdily as Pinako, if you told the right kind of joke. Hohenheim never could, and gave up trying right around the time Trisha had told him she thought she might be pregnant. His ability to focus on anything else fell by the wayside until little Ed had arrived squalling into the world, whole and human and yellow-eyed and—

Easy now, Hohenheim, Daqiqi says. 

Ed calls them Auntie and Uncle. Even now, years after their deaths, he calls them family.

Breathe, old friend.

He breathes. He breathes. He tunes back into the conversation to hear Scar rumble the tail end of a question. Ed, however, has fallen out of his brief spot of clarity again. He hisses nonsense between clenched teeth, his crabbed hands kneading the hardwood like bread dough. Red light reflects off his automail, dyes his yellow eyes the same muddy scarlet as Greed’s.

Scar’s blood blister eyes have gained new focus, bright with something too hungry to be hope. He stares intently. Waiting. Expectant. Assuming Hohenheim will have changed his mind now that he’s heard the truth Ed spat out. As if a handful of old murders matter in the wake of what’s happened.

You forgive too easily, Lahouti grumbles. Sara and Yuriy deserved longer lives and better deaths than bleeding out in a warzone.

He’s a serial killer, Sardar reminds him. He’s been in the papers. Murdering state alchemists. He tried to kill your sons too. He might still, for all that he can't hurt them anymore. He’s dangerous.

No more death, Seyyed insists. It doesn’t matter who he was. He’s survived this long. He tried to stop this apocalypse as much as the rest of them; as much as you tried, old friend. Use me. I want to help him.

Hohenheim wets his lips and says, “It’s your decision.”

Scar nods. 

Seyyed is less than a whisper, a curl of spent smoke, after Hohenheim heals the myriad traumas carved into the other man’s skin. Still aware, still caught in a man-shaped cage, but too weak to speak, too weak to be more than a dreg of power that might one day be used to heal some small injury. Burned to the last mote to maintain the very cage that kept him. The only consolation is that Hohenheim and his friends are nearly convinced that Seyyed is now too weak to feel pain anymore. It’s a bitter comfort. It's better than nothing.

He holds out his hand once he’s finished. Scar’s gone a little wild-eyed, tense in a new way that has nothing to do with a gut wound. If he were less formidable, less stone and iron and more the man he might have been before Ishval was dashed to pieces beneath Amestris’ heel, Hohenheim might dare to call him skittish. He is tired of unnerving people. He doesn’t know how to stop.

Mei Chang all but shoves Hohenheim aside, and the moment passes by. “Thank you,” she says breathlessly, bowing deeply, “Oh thank you so much, Western Sage. You truly are as great as the stories say! Mister Scar, how do you feel? Do you think you could eat something? Allow me to remove those bandages—“ And so on. A bristling little whirlwind, busying her small hands with small tasks so she doesn’t have to face the brunt of what she—of what none of them, of what Hohenheim—could not stop.

So many dead, so very many dead, but at least Scar has chosen not to join that towering number just yet.

After that comes the realization that they can no longer put off the discussion of what comes next. Of where they’ll go now that they’ve nearly run out of excuses to remain numb and adrift, hiding within the quiet halls of the dead heart of a dead country.

“We’ll be returning to Xing,” Ling Yao announces, and Greed continues with a broad grin, “From the sound of things there’s gonna be a vacancy at the tippy top here soon with this brat’s name on it.”

“As will I,” Hohenheim says when no one else speaks. “Xing was good to me before; I have no reason to think it would be different now.”

“What about—“ Jerso falters. His gaze skitters across the room. “Some of us had families.”

Zampano breathes a curse into his hand. “I never—my son—shit. I never got a chance to patch things up before….”

“Friends too,” Darius adds, haggard. “Wouldn’t be right, leaving Heinkel out in the woods like that.”

Riza almost speaks, then looks at Colonel Mustang and chooses not to. 

Peiman’s voice is warm and whispered, hard to hear over the endless lapping of Hohenheim’s name. There’s time to grieve. They ought to, Hohenheim. Tell them that. They’ll regret not saying goodbye.

Anoush weeps.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ed declares. He’s flattened the floorboards out again, though he can’t seem to get them to settle on being made out of wood or glass or candle wax. The musky sweet smell drifting in through the open door is nearly overpowered by lavender. “Not. Not without Al.”

“He’ll wake up sooner or later,” Jerso says. “He’s done this a lot, at least as long as we’ve been traveling with him.”

“He won’t.” Ed draws out the symbols for earth, for iron, for the body, all with an ease suggesting innumerable hours of practice. He was right-handed, once. Hohenheim remembers that much. He remembers too, how Pinako had raged against the limitations of automail. How many hours has Ed been forced to spend relearning how to write? “He can’t. The binding array. On the armor. It’s only meant for one soul.”

And Al is so much more than that, now.

“What are you trying to do?” Mei Chang asks. “I’ve never seen a transmutation circle like that.”

It takes a moment for her question to reach Ed, another for him to flinch, a third to answer. Of the three of them he’s able to answer most often, but each word is hard-won. His hands are limned with crimson light he can’t banish, paled by chalk dust. “H-human transmutation. Sort of. I just need to…. I can pull him out of the Gate.”

At the cost of someone else’s soul. But it would be cruel to state that so bluntly when there’s no other option left. Ed understands this. Al would too, if he were here. Of course they do. They’re brilliant alchemists, and Al had told him in Liore of their vow to never use a Stone for their own benefit. Given the choice he knows they would both be selfless, but that choice has been taken away from them. Ed wouldn’t be trying to draw out such a terrible array if there were any other way to bring Al home.

They whitter for a while; a few rounds of maybe-we-coulds and what-if-we-dids that go nowhere. They all agree that with a pair of royal teenagers vouching for them Xing probably is the best option. At this the three Xingese teenagers stare pointedly at Hohenheim, but he doesn’t see any point in bringing up ancient history yet, and they defer to his silence. The Amestrians make half-hearted plans to forage for supplies for the trip, what route East they’ll take, and even broach the topic of braving the city for things they won’t find in Central Command; of collecting personal items, of saying goodbye. No one looks happy at the thought that soon they’ll be seeing, really seeing, the extent of what’s happened.

Ultimately, Mei Chang distracts the group with talk of getting Scar something to eat. They all latch onto a ready excuse to avoid the outside world another few hours with undisguised relief.

Chapter Text

Lunch is a quiet affair, as every meal has been. It’s notable only in that this is the first time they've all eaten together. Twelve bodies sustaining themselves on stale dinner rolls, old fruit, and whatever canned goods Darius and Greed are heating up in the kitchens. Their first time all sat at a table together, yes, though not all of them are coherent enough to eat. Darius was only able to coax Ed away from his transmutation circle—broken again—because he’d sunk so deeply into madness that he could be guided meekly along by the wrist. He still hasn’t surfaced yet, and Mrs. Curtis followed suit not long after arriving at the mess hall. Colonel Mustang, at least, is able to thank Riza when she brings him a plate, though he does little more than pick at it.

It’s here that Salehi speaks. Hohenheim. Hohenheim, I found him.

Found who?

Someone else groans, ragged with pain. Familiar, startlingly familiar, but their name somehow eludes him. Wh—nngh. What happened? Where am I? What is this?

I told you, Salehi says. Don’t you remember?

I…. Where’s Izumi? I was looking for her, but I don’t…. It took her. Izumi? Where is she?

It’s all Hohenheim can do not to weep right there in the mess hall. He breathes. He breathes. He breathes.

Salehi asks, You remember Van Hohenheim, don’t you, Sig?

The…. He’s the boys’ father. The Elrics, Ed and Al.

That’s right. And do you remember what I told you? About what happened, about where you are?

I… I couldn’t breathe. Everything went black and it…. There were hands around my throat—no, reaching out of the ground and p-pulling—pulled me—out? We were going to get out, before that. We trusted the boys to be safe. Izumi said they’d be alright. She trusted Major General—ah—Izumi? Izumi! Where are you‽ I have to find her, my wife, it took her apart, the blackness, an eye—

Hush, Sig. Breathe. You’re alright. Izumi’s alright. Tell Hohenheim what happened. 

I… I…. Oh, god. I died.

That’s right, Sig.

I’m dead. This is—I thought I heard—for a moment…. There was someone else here.

There are a lot of us here, Salehi says wryly. His friends laugh amongst themselves, a comforting sound, a balm to soothe his mind. Waves upon a rocky shore. They’re here with him for this, as they are in all things. 

...Mister Hohenheim?

Here, he thinks, knuckles pressed hard to his mouth. Right here.

Izumi. Have you seen Izumi? It took her. An eye and all these hands took her apart right in front of me. She was screaming and there wasn’t anything I could do—

It’s alright, Hohenheim interrupts, and Salehi and hundreds more echo him. She’s alive. 

Look to her, Vida urges, so he does. Mrs. Curtis has wandered away from their table to look out at the gray rain sheeting across the parade field. Her palms are pressed to the window; bubbles of color swell and whorl within the glass. The slack expression on her face suggests she isn’t doing it intentionally, but at least it’s a harmless bit of accidental alchemy. As he watches one bubble bursts, dribbling bright yellow paint.

Sig sobs relief. She’s alright. She’s alright. I was so afraid. She’s always said, ever since that night, she’s always said she’d go first. And the doctors, every doctor we went to, they said the same. But I never wanted…. I always prayed she’d live. I hoped.

Sometimes hope is all we have, Salehi whispers. Even if it’s only a pretty lie we tell ourselves, sometimes it’s all that’s left.

But it’s not. She’s alive. She’s still alive.

You’re dead, Hohenheim thinks. Do you understand that? We failed to stop him. You and all the rest of Amestris have died, and your soul is within me. Do you understand?

Sig's chuckling, strained though it is, is a good sign. He’s himself enough for humor. He’ll be alright. He’s going to fit in just fine. Not even a little. I’m no alchemist. Never could make heads or tails out of Izumi’s books. But I remember, what you said, after you healed her.

I didn’t heal her—

She was so much better after that. We went dancing. I remember that. Before we left for Briggs. General Armstrong, she said there was a plan, her men would handle things, keep an eye out for the Elrics, Ed and Al, the boys your sons there was an eye—

Breathe, Sig.

I… y-yeah. Dancing. We hadn’t gone dancing since before the baby passed. You healed her. Whatever you did, it healed her. 

What did Hohenheim say, Sig? After he healed your wife?

He… Mister Hohenheim?

Still here, he thinks, swallowing the tears threatening to spill out of him. It wouldn’t do to make a scene.

You said you were a Philosopher's Stone. The boys told us what a Stone’s made of, that the homunculi’s power stemmed from death. I… I don’t understand how, I don’t think I want to understand, but I’m a part of your Stone, aren’t I?

Yes, he thinks. Your soul is. I’m sorry. I had no part in this—

Only in failing to stop that devil, Abdollah mutters, and Hohenheim can’t dispute that.

Salehi cuts in. The both of you, listen to me. It doesn’t have to end this way. Sig need not remain here within you, Hohenheim. You have his soul, you have his body. Join the two. Bring him back.

…What?

“Mister Hohenheim?”

He blinks, slack-jawed and stupid, at Lan Fan sitting across the table from him. She looks worried. What did he—? 

Oh. His fork. He dropped his fork. When did he do that?

Lan Fan holds it out to him, pinched between steel fingers. He stares, listening to the ebb and flow of thousands of voices demanding Salehi explain herself while thousands more latch onto the idea of performing human transmutation with growing excitement. It would work, they say. It would be so easy. One less death. The Curtises reunited, wouldn’t that be good? Do it, try it, for her, for him, for what you can’t have because Trisha is gone, gone, gone and you can never see her again, all you have is a photograph but they could still have decades, isn’t that good?

It is good, he thinks as he takes his fork back with a trembling hand. But that’s the troubling thing. It might actually be as easy as that. 

He’s never performed human transmutation, not in a way that would risk opening the Gate. That isn’t to say he never came close. If he were human perhaps there might have been a greater cost to the early days of his experimental alkahestry, but it’s as he once told Al; immortality comes in handy. This—this would be human transmutation, no question. He might have Sig's body and soul, but it wouldn’t only be a matter of rejoining them. It’s not even how much his body has decomposed; that would be a delicate and fiendishly complicated thing to restore, yes, but he could do it. He’s done such things before. Alkahestry was built on the bones of the dead, of thousands of people studying the deceased inside and out over the course of centuries, and who better to assist in the upkeep of good cadavers than he? But life is more than its biological mechanisms, and it’s more than the spark of consciousness in his Stone. It’s a union of both, an intermingling, something no one has ever managed to repair once a person has died. It’s miraculous. It’s—it’s something divine.

Human transmutation, as his sons attempted, is impossible because the soul has moved on. But he has Sig’s soul. This… he could do it. He could.

Then do it, Hohenheim! Salehi shouts, and thousands echo her. 

It would open the Gate.

So be it! And may you spit in God’s face while you’re there!

A toll would be demanded. Probably a high one. A life for a life. He would have to use one of his friends to save Sig Curtis.

I offer myself! I offer my soul gladly! His wife needs him, as he needs her! Hohenheim, I beg of you, use me!

H-hold on. Now just—hold on. I don’t even know who you are—or where? Which? You’re all moving so fast, where did you go? 

It doesn’t matter, Sig, Bahmanyar says. We all look the same in here.

But—I can’t let her do that. Sacrifice herself for me? That’s—no. There has to be something else.

There isn’t, Ebrahimi says. Hohenheim is right. It is a life for a life, no matter what. Blood for blood is the only way to reach God’s domain. This is the way the world turns.

It still might not work, he thinks desperately. It could go wrong. There are so many ways it could go wrong. 

Mister Hohenheim, don’t do this. I don’t want it. I saw what it cost Izumi—Izumi? Where are you? I—ah, ah. Nngh. Don’t. Don’t do it. Please.

It wouldn’t cost me what it cost her, he thinks.

Salehi snarls frustration. Don’t argue with him! Look at her. She’s falling apart. Your sons will have each other and Mustang has Riza, but who does she have?

She’s not alone—

That isn’t what I mean and you damn well know it. You will guide her through these black days, your sons will remind her to care, and the rest might be enough to hold her back if she proves reckless, but all of that cannot equal the love she has for him.

Izumi….

If it were Trisha, would you hesitate?

He cringes. Stop. That isn’t fair—

None of this is. This whole ugly, miserable world is unfair. But you could do this for her. You should. You must.

He must. It could go so terribly wrong. But more frightening to consider: it could go perfectly right. Who is he, to play with another man’s life like this? How would that make him any different than his grinning little friend? A god doling out charitable acts to the ants because their gratitude amuses him?

Intent, Salehi says. That’s the difference. You would do this to help him, not to curry his awe.

You know what they say about good intentions, Hatamakia warns. Take care, Hohenheim.

He can justify playing God for the sake of love, can’t he?

That’s what your boys did for Trisha, Amir whispers. What Izumi did for her baby. Be careful, old friend.

Don’t do this, Sig pleads. Just tell her I’m here. Tell her I love her. She wouldn’t want this, I swear, not after what our baby cost her. Please don’t—

She needs you, Salehi tells him. And I want to do this for you. I’m ready, Hohenheim. This is my good death.

“Mister Hohenheim?”

He’s on his feet, nearly at the mess hall doors. He doesn’t recall standing up. 

He looks back at the little group of survivors. Ed’s still drifting, slumped between Darius and Jerso. Mrs. Curtis sways by the window, stains of light and color coiling beneath her palms. Colonel Mustang squints around in vain, a bubble of silence pinned by noise inside and out. Three of them like him, four with absent Al, six if he counts Greed and Ling among their inhuman number. Full of the dead, surrounded by the dead, unchanging and wrong, and in a handful of years, a scattered few decades, it will only be the seven of them left.

Oh, Izumi. What’s… what’s wrong with her?

His friends are silent, in their own ways. Still whispering and weeping, still calling his name out to the Amestrians, still doing all they can to calm their screams. But in this they are silent. The burden falls to him. She’s like me, he thinks. She’s been made into a Philosopher's Stone. There’s nothing I can do to reverse it. I’m sorry.

Sig says nothing for a moment. Then, Okay. 

“I’m fine,” he says, because it seems the safest thing to say. “Excuse me.”

Hohenheim leaves the mess hall behind, heading straight for the office the chimeras took Sig's body. There are others placed there too, people that Riza and Ed and Colonel Mustang knew in life. Two of the soldiers found with Mr. Curtis, siblings. A gaunt and gray-haired man, and Lan Fan’s grandfather, and a man whose automail arm looks as if it had been torn off at the shoulder. Others besides, but Hohenheim pays them no mind. He’s here for—

Oh god. Is that me?

It’s been a few days since you died, Salehi tells him. I’m sorry. Hohenheim’s going to heal it before he puts you back in it. Aren’t you, old friend?

He’s half-tempted to roll his eyes at her lofty tone. As if he’d be so cruel to do otherwise, honestly.

With meticulous, exacting care he restores Sig's body, regenerating dead cells and excising what can’t be renewed into scattered atoms. A touch is all it takes to jumpstart the heart, to pump new blood through a corpse that now looks only moments dead rather than days. The lungs too; breath to oxygenate that blood to heat the flesh. On and on, a thousand minute details, course correcting as his friends prod him now and then. No mistakes. No room for error. He triple checks every square inch, then cleans the other man's clothes and the floor as an afterthought.

He leans back on his heels as the red light dies away. Exhausted already, and he hasn’t even done the hard part yet. “Are you ready?”

I…. Do I need to do anything?

“Don’t struggle. Let me guide you. Salehi, are you ready?”

Yes.

W-wait. Wait, please. Salehi, was it? I…. If there was another way, I…. God, I don’t understand any of this, but if I could—

Hush, Sig. Salehi’s voice is gentle, warm, unbearably kind. She had died cradling her daughters to her breast, comforting them even as she choked her last. Her daughters, lost within the Homunculus or one of the monsters he mockingly called his children. I’m weary of this bleak existence. I’ve been ready to let go a long time. Take care of your wife. She’s going to outlive you now by many lifetimes. Give her all your love for as many years as God gives you. Give her a thousand memories to treasure long after your passing. Let her be glad to have loved you and to have been loved by you in turn. Give her happiness. Give her comfort. Give her shelter. Do you understand me, Sig? Do you hear me plain?

Yes. Of course. I… I just wish there was another way.

There isn’t. 

I…. Thank you. Thank you.

Hohenheim, I’m ready.

He breathes. He breathes. He breathes. Thank you.

I’m not doing this for you. Now go on, old friend. No more stalling.

One hand to his chest, the other to Sig's. How easy a thing, how simple an act, when you have the necessary soul nested in the place where a heart once beat. Red light casts weird shadows across the nearby corpses, a mockery of movement, bringing false life to room-temperature meat. Never mind that. Focus, focus. This is a matter not of arrays, not of sigils and symbols, but of a monster begging mercy from one-half its maker. The Homunculus had stolen God’s power, yes, but God hadn’t put up much of a fight. It makes him wonder—no. Focus, focus. Any moment now, it will be as before, when the Homunculus struck Amestris down, as when it struck Xerxes down too. An eye, and hands, a door held aloft in whiteness, a laughing god. Any moment now.

There is a sense of—something. A chasm, vast and echoing, heard and felt but unseen. A misstep now would be enough to send him tumbling. But the eye doesn’t open. No hands reach up from the ground. He isn’t deconstructed. No stone door opens wide to admit him into God’s domain. God keeps him at arm’s length as if He too, is disgusted by the monster begging alms at His door.

Sig’s body twitches. Twitches again. It gasps and chokes. It rolls onto its side and retches. Sig's body is made animate, bulging of eye and grasping of hand. Its cold fingers bruise. There’s intelligence in his eyes, roving the room to land like lead weights upon him. There’s a soul housed within the body again; the lights are all coming back on

“Breathe,” Hohenheim says numbly. “You’re alright, I’ve got you, that’s it, breathe. Your name, now. Tell me your name.”

“Suh. Suh. Sig. S-Sig Curtis.”

“Good. Yes, that’s good. And where are you from? Where do you live?” 

“Duh-Dublith. We live in Dublith. Own a, uh. A little sh-shop. A—butcher—shop.”

A few more questions, a few more answers. Enough to prove that this is indeed Sig Curtis’ soul in Sig Curtis’ body. He did it. He actually did it. He grips Sig's hand in both of his, grinning helplessly. “Welcome back. How do you feel?”

“Cold, m-mostly.”

“That’ll pass, that’ll pass. Any numbness? Weakness—no, that’s a silly question, of course you’ll feel that. Never mind, it’ll pass as well. Do you think you can stand? Here, come on, let’s try it, that’s right, easy….”

Sig is a large man by any definition, but Hohenheim doesn’t stumble as he helps him to his feet. He's withstood failure and death and the cacophonous hell within Hohenheim; he deserves every ounce of respect that can be mustered, the biggest blanket they can find, a steaming mug of tea, and the reassurance that nothing terrible will befall him or anyone he cares for ever again. Hohenheim can manage three of those things. It’ll have to be enough.

“‘Zumi,” Sig slurs as he accepts the blanket Hohenheim found in the room next door. “Where’s’she. Where’s Izumi?”

“She’s in the mess hall. Do you remember that? You spoke to me there.”

“I—I think so. I’m not sure. It was—it was so loud. I heard that woman. Salehi. And you. So many others. It was so loud….”

“It’s alright, it’s over now. One step at a time, alright? Let’s get you to the mess hall. Your wife is waiting there.”

One step at a time indeed. Tottering, faltering, Sig struggling to keep his feet under him as he blathers on about wind and wailing, about shrinking and shrieking, about nothing, the absence of self, of life, of the very world itself. He stammers, syllables catching on his tongue and tripping over his teeth. He grows clammy. He shakes. He is a man overwhelmed. Hohenheim lets him, murmuring senseless platitudes he likely doesn’t even hear. Just past Central Command’s entryway he stops, staring at Hohenheim’s hands. “I looked out,” he says. “I looked down, and your hands were—my hands.”

“No,” Hohenheim says. “My body has only ever been my own. You were only a passenger.”

“That was real. It was all real. The screaming, and the pain—” His breath hitches. “God. I didn’t know it was possible to—hurt. So much.”

“You’re alright now. You’ll never feel that again, I promise. Come on now, we’re almost there.”

But he doesn’t move. “That woman. Salehi. I didn’t imagine her either. Did I?”

Salehi, gone. Never to be reunited with her daughters. Nor with her husband, dead three years before Xerxes fell. Nothing but memories of her left, borrowed and shared between his friends. “No, she was real.”

Mr. Curtis’ hands tighten, white-knuckled, as if he intends to break Hohenheim’s fingers. He can, if he likes. It wouldn’t stick, of course, but if it might make him feel better he’s welcome to it. “She’s dead—“

“She was dead already. She died centuries ago.”

“But she’s gone now. Isn’t she?”

Not even a wisp of her left, Mokhberi and others confirm softly. A life for a life.

“Yes, she's gone. But helping you is what she wanted. Now come along, Mister Curtis, we’re nearly there.”

The mess hall doors are ajar when they approach. Zampano walks out, a weary downturn to his mouth as he rubs the back of his neck. He looks up at the sound of their approach, slows to a stop, stares. 

“Excuse us,” Hohenheim says. 

Zampano doesn’t move. He seems to have forgotten how to blink. “...He’s dead.”

“He was, yes.” 

“No. No, he’s dead. We carried him up, must’ve been a dozen floors—” He slaps a hand over his mouth. A muffled syllable drips past his fingers anyway.

“He was dead,” Hohenheim repeats patiently. “I’ve taken care of that. Excuse us, please.”

Zampano drops his hand as if it’s burned him. He takes tottering steps backward, not looking away, twitching badly when his shoulder hits the doorway. “Hey,” he shouts into the mess hall. “Hey!”

Well aren’t you in the thick of it now, Lahiji teases. Think they’ll try and burn you as a witch? 

Hush, Khodadad scolds. This is a joyous occasion. They just need a little time to realize that.

“Come on,” he urges. Sig Curtis, alive. He did it. He did it. “Nearly there. You can rest inside, and see your wife too.”

“Y-yeah. Thank you. S’just. M'little dizzy is all, sorry.”

“It’s no trouble.”

Everyone’s looking at Zampano when they lurch through the doors, but one by one all eyes fall on them. No one speaks. Mrs. Curtis is still by the window. Rain-drenched sunlight has been painted artificially cheerful shades of orange, yellows, and reds from her hands. A bright square of color in an otherwise dreary room. She doesn’t move. No one but Colonel Mustang moves; the blind man’s head turns this way and that with a frustrated expression, kept from asking questions by a touch from Riza. Sig lets go of Hohenheim to take plodding, careful steps, shaky as a newborn foal. He crosses the mess hall to stand before his wife. Ed makes to stand and speak, but Jerso pulls him down again. Everyone watches. Everyone waits. 

Sig takes his wife’s pale face in his large hands. “Hello, dear.”

“...You’re freezing.” She pulls away. “This is a dream. Or insanity.”

“No, it’s not.” He speaks softly. He doesn’t reach for her again, careful not to startle her. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

“You died. Stupid man, you’re dead.”

“I know.”

“I’m the one who found you.”

“Maybe so. I don’t remember that. But I’m here now. Izumi—“

“Don’t.” Her voice is a whip crack, a shattered plate, the cry of a broken woman who has no choice but to limp on without relief. “I can’t. Anything else—drag me back down, keep me unthinking, so long as you don’t parade this lie in front of me—”

“Izumi." He says her name and means so much more than that. 

She breathes, high and ragged, color flushing her waxen face. “Darling?”

She dares to reach out. She dares to meet the impossible halfway.

Chapter Text

Hohenheim, Soheil calls out. Hohenheim, leave them. You’ve done enough for now. You’re needed elsewhere.

Where?

—have to get out, can’t breathe, Corporal don’t argue just run, what are these things, we’re going to die oh god, oh god, I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m gonna make it home, stop talking and run, shoot them down, why won’t they die, I can’t breathe, the sun’s gone out and I can’t breathe—

Sergeant Jeremy Mahoney. You can save him too. I offer myself. A life for a life, and may he have better luck than I ever did.

The Curtises have embraced now. It’s impossible to tell which of them is weeping harder. Joy and relief and terror wrung dry of its sting drag them down to the tile. United again at the end, after the end, and Hohenheim is glad—not to have been the one who smoothed away the lines in Mrs. Curtis’ face, not to have warmed away the stutter in Mr. Curtis’ voice, but to have given them the opportunity to do these things for each other. He is glad.

“Keep an eye on him,” he tells Zampano, still gawking nearby. “If his condition worsens—I don’t expect it to, but just in case—come find me.”

“Wh—” Zampano swallows, tries again. “Where’re you going?”

“There’s at least one other I can save today.”

Abol asks, How many do you think you can save?

He doesn’t know. He strides with newfound purpose out of the mess hall, ignoring the faint call of someone behind him. He doesn’t know. But he’ll save as many as he can. 

Jahangard sighs, forever exasperated because he was fifteen when he died and therefore cleverer than any adult. He and Ed would get on dangerously well. Old man, don’t be stupid. I know what you're thinking. You couldn’t beat the devil, so what makes you think you can beat time? You can’t save them all.

Farjam makes a pitying sound. Ah, how true, how true. You healed Sig Curtis, you’ll heal Jeremy Mahoney, but they’ve only been dead a few days. 

What are they getting at?

What about a few weeks from now? A few months? How much rot can you peel away before there’s not enough left of their original bodies to bind their souls to?

Hohenheim, remember what your younger boy said, Farjam whispers. The armor had begun to reject his soul. He flickered in and out, for moments or hours. Steel is unyielding. It may rust or buckle, but it can’t fester and break as a body of flesh. You must take care, Hohenheim. Save who you can, but know that you can’t save them all.

You’ll be lucky to save a hundred, Jahangard says.

Less, Zartosht says. It won’t be safe for the mortals for as long as that would take. The air will become poison, the earth a cesspool. You can’t stay.

Don’t stay, Vossoughi begs. Save a few, save them yes, but you can’t stay. Please. Oh God, but you can’t.

“Wait.”

Hohenheim looks back the way he came. Ed’s alone, braced against a wall, wide-eyed but more focused than he’s looked since the eclipse. “How’d you do it,” he bites out. “It’s impossible. Human transmutation. It—it’s  impossible, but that’s—that’s Sig. Tell me what you did.”

He doesn’t have time for this, not if what his friends warn against is true.

Make time, Ruzbehan barks. You owe him that much.

“His soul was in my Stone. I was made aware of that—"

"How?"

“...One of my friends told me he was there. She suggested I try to resurrect him.”

“‘Try?’ You didn’t even know it was gonna work?”

“I never made much study of human transmutation, not like you boys did.”

He winces when his friends clamor at him, upset and exasperated and furious and tired of his thoughtlessness. Be kind! Abdi shouts over the others. He’s trying to make sense of this. He’s trying to talk to you!

Ed bares his teeth, pushing off the wall to stagger towards him. “Maybe we wouldn’t have tried to bring Mom back if you hadn't left! Maybe she wouldn’t have died!”

How many times has he thought the same since he returned to Resembool? A burned-down ruin, a grave, and two sons broken by grief; that’s all that’s left of the life he and Trisha built together. Two sons broken, and now twisted into something so much worse because he wasn’t there. “I had to leave. I was trying to stop him—“

“Oh yeah? And a fat lot of good you were! He won! He beat us fair and fucking square, and what did you do to stop him?”

“I had a contingency plan that was set to activate regardless—oof. ”

Ed is fast, despite his automail, and strong because of it. It seems to take him no effort at all to grab Hohenheim by the collar and throw him against the wall. “You said that before,” he snarls. “Whatever it was, it sure didn’t amount to much. I’m starting to think you didn’t put up a fight for a reason. Is that it? Were you and him working together after all? Is this what you wanted? Well‽”

His friends are hushed within him, awed and stunned and furious and dismayed, made mute by Ed’s flashing eyes and screamed accusations. He stands stiffly. He stands speechless. Surely… surely Ed can’t mean that? 

Behnaz asks, What reason does he have to trust you?

Dehnamaki asks, How can one neat summary of Xerxes be proof of your innocence when you were the one who did the telling?

Roya asks, If you were in his shoes, would you think any differently?

He swallows. They’re right. Ed is right to accuse him so. He raises his hands to placate, to supplicate, to give Ed whatever he wants. Too little too late. Still, he must try. “I—” 

There’s a crackle of red light followed by a dull pain across his throat and through his right hand. It’s Ed who flinches. “Shit! I—I wasn’t trying to—I didn’t mean to—!”

Not that he didn’t want to, Shahrnush points out unhelpfully.

Hohenheim considers the sharp length of steel that’s torn Ed’s sleeve and his own hand open. Red light dances across his knuckles, broken and twisted out of shape. As always, there’s just enough discomfort for him to notice the injury, just enough sting to recognize that he’s going to have to do something if he’d like his hand back in its proper shape. His skin healed as best it could already, of course; there’s no telling if there’s flesh and bone beneath, or something else. “It’s alright, Edward. Hush. I’m alright.” He tugs his hand free, flexing it a few times as it heals. “There, see? No harm done.”

Ed makes several increasingly queasy expressions, backing away only to stumble over a sharp ridge of fractured wood and frayed carpet. The floor has torn open behind him, alchemical distortions rippling to splash up the opposite wall. A nearby door creaks open on bent hinges with a high, lingering wail. 

“Edward?”

No reply. Ed stares at the damage his anger has wrought. Hohenheim relaxes in increments, steps with care to stand in his son’s peripheral. He waits for Ed to find his mooring again. It takes a long time, long enough that it chafes, long enough that he’s tempted to leave his oldest here and go on to the office Jeremy’s body is quietly rotting—

You will wait, Lajevardi seethes, and a thousand thousand of his friends hiss and demand the same. As long as it takes. You will make time for your son.

Eventually, Ed recovers enough to croak, “Why. Why does this keep happening?”

“I believe it’s because you’re used to performing alchemy without a transmutation circle. Missus Curtis is having the same trouble.”

“I. Yeah. I noticed.”

“Alphonse will too, I suspect.”

His brother’s name seems to relax and aggravate him both. Ed’s breathing slows a little, at least. 

Hohenheim, Soheil whispers, insistent.

You said you said what did you say? I said run Corporal, that’s an order—no, no, wait. S-she’s not here. She’s not…. I’m not…. I am…. Where am I?

Hush, Jeremy. Just a little longer and all shall be well.

“Edward. I’ll show you what I did for Mister Curtis. Come with me.”

Ed, miraculously, follows.

He leads his eldest to the office lined with two rows of corpses. He's vaguely aware of Ed freezing in the doorway behind him, clapping a hand over his mouth with an unhappy sound, but otherwise ignores his discomfort. He knows he shouldn’t, but knows too that time works against them. He can save Jeremy. He can show Ed that others can be saved too. A life for a life. It’s all he can do. But as he kneels down beside the body Soheil says, Wait.

Oh fuck, fuck, no, Jeremy Mahoney yelps. That’s. Oh, god. Oh my god. Is that me? Am I dead?

I didn’t miss this at all, Pedrad sighs.

Soheil insists. Hohenheim, I want to talk to the boy.

He looks back at Ed. “Why?”

“Huh?”

I’m dead. I’m dead? I can’t be, this is impossible, this is insane, where am I—I—I—I said go, Corporal, shut up and run!

Can’t a dead man have a last request, old friend? I want to talk to him. Privately.

“You know that’s not an option, even that way.”

“The hell are you talkin' about?"

Then plug your ears and hum a little tune. Better yet, do something about Jeremy’s body. Go on now, send me over. 

“Edward. Hold out your hand.”

Ed doesn’t move, looking panicked, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else than in this overcrowded, overwarm room. “No. What? You’re—what? He’s gonna what? Hell no! There’s too many of you alrea—what? No. I can’t. No way. Don’t you fucking dare—"

“Edward.”

Ed’s teeth click. His breath is racing again, his eyes wild. God, but he’s so young.

“One of my friends is going to help me revive this man. He’d like to talk to you beforehand. I don’t know what he wants to say, but it won’t hurt you. He’s not going to become a part of your Stone either. All you need to do is hold out your hand and listen.”

Silence stretches, thick and syrup-sticky. A line of sweat draws down his spine; he shivers despite the heat. He watches Ed’s bright eyes chase after disembodied voices, echoes in the chasms of his heart. It’s strange, to be on the other end of this behavior. Trisha used to tease him for it, smiling as she said that it was no wonder he had no use for smalltown gossip when he had half a country forever nattering away inside him. Still, she’d add, brushing his hair out of his face to kiss him, it’s good to try anyway, isn’t it? He wonders what they’re telling Ed; the five he traded away for a modicum of peace. He wonders what he could say in their place to convince Ed he only means to help. Nothing he thinks of seems enough.

Ed drifts back after a few minutes with a scoff. His glare is habitual, and almost comforting for that. “It’s that easy, huh?”

Hohenheim offers him a thin smile. “There’s a trick to it.”

“Okay,” Ed says. “Okay. Just. Shit. Get it over with.”

Be kind, he thinks, and pulls Soheil out of himself. Soheil’s laughter bubbles across his curled fingers as Ed coaxes his legs to carry him across the room. The little crimson shape of his friend jumps from his right hand to Ed’s left, and Hohenheim’s relieved to spare them all the awkwardness of specifying. He doesn’t think this trick would work with automail.

Ed breathes in sharply, staggering back a few steps with his teeth bared in a snarl that’s all fright. “Shit. Okay. You—hi? Do I have to, uh, do anything? Like—? Oh. Okay. Okay. Shit, this is weird.”

Quite a way with words he has, Elaheh teases.

A proper poet, Jozi laughs.

Be quiet, he thinks sternly. Of course it’s weird. What better word is there for this? For any of this? For everything that’s happened? For everything Ed will have to endure? Weird is as good a word as any. It sums things up just fine. Now if they could behave themselves for five minutes while he works?

Suitably chided, his friends go back to whispering amongst themselves and the poor Amestrian newcomers. He dedicates himself to restoring Jeremy's body. He ignores Soheil’s muted whispering and Ed’s stammered replies as best he can; he can’t give them privacy, not when half the conversation would still bleed into his mind even if he left Central City altogether, but he can commit himself to distraction. The young sergeant babbles on, scrabbling for coherency, falling back into the blind panic of his last moments. He makes a note to ask the man who the corporal he keeps speaking of is once he’s alive again, as well as any other people he might have known. He’s gotten lucky twice, hasn’t he?

Soheil was right; healing Jeremy’s body soothes Jeremy’s soul. He babbles less, at least. The man must have been in his late twenties when he died, with the strong jaw and blond hair common among Amestrians. Green eyes though, when Hohenheim lifts one eyelid up with his thumb. Not quite as green as Trisha’s, but a pleasant color all the same.

This is crazy, Jeremy says, halfway to hysterical. This is impossible. This can’t be happening.

It is though, Taha tells him. This is real, and you must meet it head on.

Who are you? God, no, what are you, that’s the better question. Monsters, just like what we were fighting, those things that wouldn’t stay dead no matter what we did to ‘em.

No, Nahapet sighs. No, we aren’t like those poor creatures. We’re even less than that.

What are you then? Tell me, please, whoever you are. I don’t understand.

Oh, it doesn’t matter. You won’t be staying in here with us. 

Where is this? What is this? I can’t really be dead… can I?

Chamran asks, Why not?

Gah—! God, don’t. Don’t do that. I can’t keep up with all of you. You all look the same. Uh, I mean—

It’s alright. We do, and we know it. But you look like us too.

What? No I don’t. I’m right over there, unconscious or something. This is all some terrible, crazy dream. I’m going to wake up any minute now, you’ll see.

Hundreds of his friends laugh. Hohenheim hides his own smile in his palm. It’s true enough.

Ed says, “Um.” 

Hohenheim looks over. Ed’s got Soheil cupped in both hands. At some point between the mess he’d made of the hallway and now he’d returned his automail to normal. It should bother Hohenheim, that he doesn’t remember Ed doing that. Losing time? Simply too distracted for his own good? Dangerous either way.

“Um,” Ed says again, unevenly balanced between harried and hushed, “He says he’s—ready.”

There’s a small, stupid part of Hohenheim that wants to ask if they had a nice chat. He’d mean it kindly, but he knows Ed well enough now—the hard glare of his eyes, the defensive hunch of his shoulders, the clenched fists that stay so rarely at his sides—to know it wouldn’t be taken as such. He says nothing. Ed grits his teeth and kneels on the other side of Jeremy’s body.

“This is gonna kill him,” Ed says, specifying Soheil with a shrug. “You’re not using your Stone—yourself, or whatever. You picked this one person, specifically.”

He calls us people, Qazi murmurs, astonished, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more whisper the same. 

Pride warms Hohenheim’s heart, but now isn’t the time for that. He doubts Ed would be pleased to hear it from him anyway. “I didn’t pick him. He offered himself. If he hadn’t, someone else would have stepped up to offer the same.”

“And you just—agreed to it? You’re gonna kill him to help some guy you’ve never even met?”

Hohenheim says “I’m not killing him,” at the same time Soheil says, I’m dead already. Ed flinches, flinches again when Soheil drips out of his cupped palms onto Hohenheim’s outstretched fingers. Soheil coils and curls like a garden snake, glimmering with his own inner light. “Soheil died centuries ago. I’m going to do far worse than kill him now.”

“What d’you mean?” 

“Using the souls within my Stone doesn’t free them. It destroys them completely.” 

Ed leans back on his heels, jaw clenched, hands falling to fists against his knees. He is made up of hard angles, drawn taut and gathered up too tightly. It’s been—what, six months since they met in Resembool? Eight? He’d been softer then, smaller too. The clothes someone else found for him since the eclipse are meant for a grown man, but his shoulders are broad enough to fill his borrowed shirt. This year has been difficult for him.

Every year you’ve been absent has been difficult for him, Esfahani retorts. Every year since Trisha died and he had to look after a brother scarcely a year younger than him. He wanted his mother back so badly he risked life and limb to resurrect her, and all he earned was a mangled youth and a short leash. Life has been cruel to him, and you were crueler still for leaving. 

He knows. He knows, and he regrets it, but what good does it do to say that now? 

Your son might appreciate an apology, Farah says, acerbic as ever.

And what exactly should he expect forgiveness for first? For leaving, for being gone so long, for letting Trisha die, for letting Amestris die?

Jahangard sighs. Old man, who said he had to forgive you?

I’d like to wake up now if that’s all the same to you, Jeremy whispers. 

Hohenheim bows his head and presses Soheil into the dead man’s skin.

Chapter Text

It’s evening now, and Sig and Jeremy have been provided a room near their makeshift infirmary. They’re both recovered from their resurrections, at least enough that they no longer stumble or slur, but they’re still clearly exhausted by the effort of living anew. Hohenheim can only imagine what it must be like for them, reconciling how cavernous a body is with only one soul rattling around inside it. How well did he tie their souls to their flesh, their minds to their brains? Do their own thoughts echo out in those empty spaces he didn’t heal right?

Only time will tell.

He and Mei Chang looked after them until they fell into peaceful sleep. It’s been strange, amusing even, to watch a girl so young caring after adults with such seriousness. But she's as much a prodigy as his sons are, so he listens to her as he would any grown alkahestrist. He agrees with her diagnosis that rest is the best thing for them, easing them back into living again with small sips of water and thin broth. She still insists on staying with them, just in case, so he helps move her bedding over and promises to keep an ear out for trouble too. 

“I think you’ll have enough of that already, Master,” she says gravely, and thanks him again for his help with a deep bow.

She’s not wrong, Zabihollah says. Smart, she is. Smarter than you.

Her face reddens when he thanks her in turn; his reputation getting the better of him again. God knows what pedestal Xing’s put him on since he left. Fables had a nasty habit of cropping up whenever he wasn't around to quell them. Ah, but that’s a concern for later. Weeks, maybe months, depending on how long it takes them to travel all the way to Dàdū. Either way: later.

They gather in their makeshift infirmary. Mrs. Curtis, despite her struggle for clarity, is the one to demand an explanation. The others—excluding Ed, who was there to see him raise Jeremy—have all asked questions too. He’s not sure he’ll be able to satisfy their curiosity or confusion. He would be the first to admit he rarely has any idea what he’s doing, but he can at least try to explain what he did. They deserve that much. Hohenheim chooses to sit. Mrs. Curtis paces, almost manic, red light dogging her footsteps. The scraps of Ed’s most recent attempt at human transmutation fall apart beneath her sandals but he voices no protest.

He has his priorities, Alizadeh says. 

Or he fears his teacher more than he worries for his brother, Ferdosipour teases. Smart boy, if so. She’s nigh spitting fire!

Hohenheim hides his own amusement behind his hand, swallowing laughter and pride in a job well done. He did it, though. He did it. Sig and Jeremy are alive again, because of him and because of Salehi and Soheil’s sacrifices.

“How,” she demands. “How did you bring him back? Them. Either of them. How did you bring them both back?”

“Their souls were within me,” he answers. “By chance, both ended up as a part of my Stone. I heard them within me, and so I was able to revive them.”

“But how," she presses, low and urgent, her hands sweeping out. Red light chases after, the floor splashing like disturbed water. Scar and Jerso have to spring back to avoid being caught up in it. He doubts she even notices. “How did you hear them? I can’t—it’s all just—noise. Suffering. All I can hear is screaming."

“I have help,” he tells her. He can’t remember if she knows the whole truth of him or not, if she'd been in any shape to hear him after the eclipse or if he'd told her before that. He’s shared his history more often in these few chaotic months than he has in…. God, he can’t recall. Trisha was the last he had told, and before that? Decades, surely. Anyone else who knew the truth of him must be dead. “I carry half of Xerxes within me. They’re helping me reach out to the Amestrians bound within my Stone.”

Mrs. Curtis shakes her head like a sodden dog. She presses her hands to her temples, expression anguished, as if she could squeeze the dead out of her by force. “No. This—I can’t think like this, let alone manage what you’ve done. You—human transmutation. You did it. Successfully. Twice. You brought my husband back, and that soldier too. I don’t understand how."

“I had their souls within me,” he repeats patiently. “Their bodies were nearby, and had not decomposed much yet. I have worked extensively in the healing arts for a long time; I have a lot of practice treating what most would say is beyond help. I would be able to do the same for any souls you discerned within yourself. The same goes for Edward and Colonel Mustang. The difficulty came not from the act of human transmutation itself, but in locating the souls within.”

Mrs. Curtis narrows her eyes, her hands tangled in her braided hair. “What do you mean?” 

Like a needle in a haystack, Behrangi suggests. It’s an apt enough comparison, so Hohenheim relays it and adds, “It's not as if you can use your hands and eyes to search, however. You can only call out into your Stone and hope that someone, eventually, will hear you.”

And by then it will be far too late to save them, Karimloo says bitterly. One voice amid that cacophony? Even with the five you gave her—Qajar, Tadj, Kiarash, Shapour, Tabrizi—it will take a miracle for anyone to hear her within the year.

Yes,  he agrees. Yes, it would take a miracle. But perhaps—perhaps they could be that lucky.

Lan Fan steps forward, the first she’s been inclined to speak with him since he healed her shoulder. “There are stories about the Western Sage that tell of similar miracles. You have done this before."

Nasrollah scoffs. Telling tales again. 

"I've never done human transmutation before today," he replies tiredly. "You shouldn't take those stories at face value. They always exaggerate what really happened."

Ed balks. “Wait, what?” 

Greed—or perhaps Ling Yao—silences him with an elbow to the ribs, murmuring something too low for Hohenheim to make out over a fresh wave of screaming within him. A child calling out for a stuffed bear they’d named Molly. A man shouting for a nurse. An Ishvalan praying in his native tongue for succor. A woman doing the same in Aerugan. Others, so many others, press in and squeeze. Later. Later. Now he must speak. He has to make them understand, the ones his little friend have corrupted as it did him, so many years ago. He is not alone in this hell. He must make them understand. There is time to save some of the damned, but every second shrinks. They have time, but they’re running out of it. “There's a chance you could reach a few of them while we're still in the country. That's the best chance I'll have of reviving any more people. Likely... it's likely the only chance we'll ever have to save anyone."

Tell them, Farjam insists. 

Be kind, Zarai begs.

So he does. So he is.

They understand, after that. They understand the urgency that sweeps him up and sets him even further apart. This spring promises to be warm; every breeze that sweeps through the polished corridors brings a musty sweetness that settles like mud in the back of the throat. Time passes. He is running out of time.

He tells them—Mrs. Curtis and Ed and Mustang, to rely on the souls he gave them even more than they’ve already done so begrudgingly. If they want to save anyone they knew before, it’s the only chance they have. He offers them more souls—his friends insist that he at least try to convince them of the sense of it, of greater numbers having better chances—but they all refuse him. When he reminds them of the benefit even five of his friends have been to them, Ed curses and Mrs. Curtis and Mustang sneer.

“I never asked you to do that,” Mustang says coldly.

“You were in no position to ask,” Hohenheim replies. It comes out more condescending than he meant it to, and the conversation sours after that. 

In the end he leaves them be. If the three of them—and Al, his absent son, trapped in that white purgatory Hohenheim couldn’t pry open even when he succeeded at the very thing that stole Al’s body in the first place—won’t listen to reason, then let them muddle through on their own. He’s proven he’s right. They’ll change their minds or keep digging their heels in. He doesn’t have the time to argue with them either way. He knows they’ll try. Ed, for all that he hides his bleeding heart behind a show of contempt and indifference, cares as fiercely as Trisha did about the world and its people. Mrs. Curtis is an open book in the same regard; stern and white-knuckled, loving as fiercely as she can to make recompense for the wounds the world inflicts. He doesn’t know Mustang, but there is both deference and respect in the way Riza and Ed listen when he speaks. Hohenheim trusts their judgment, and trusts too what God chose to take from the man. His sight, rather than his eyes. His sight, rather than any other bloodied pound of flesh. He wonders what the man once set his sights on, what greater good once kept him up at night. For all that Mustang might be a vaunted hero of the Civil War, even God saw enough good in him to not take more than strictly necessary when he was forced through the Gate against his will. He must assume the man to be better than his own preconceptions of state alchemists. His eldest, after all, was one as well.

When the three of them inevitably lose their footing, when the dead within them overwhelm, the friends he gave them can keep the home fires burning. He's comforted by this even as he lingers in hallways piled thick with dead soldiers, asking the howling inside him to pay attention. Even one more soul found in time would be miraculous—but it has been a long, long time since he believed in miracles. 

He hopes anyway.

The others make preparations to leave in earnest. Riza vanished for some time not long after he’d resurrected Sig and Jeremy, returning eventually with a grimmer expression than when she’d left. "Amestris has been invaded," she declares without preamble.

He pauses in the hallway where she's gathered most of the others to eavesdrop, his hands and pockets full of dog tags and other means of identification. She says she’d gone to the communications office with the goal of contacting as many military bases as she could reach, hoping that someone, somewhere, had survived. The Homunculus’ transmutation circle covered Amestris, yes, but people and the towns they make so rarely choose to live within the confines of neatly drawn borders. She knew the rough circumference of the circle and hoped that survivors would make for the security of any military installations built outside it. So far, she has been disappointed.

There were no answers in the North. Aerugo has already taken Fotset, Milos, and Warringstown in the South. The West had the most major cities survive partially or entirely untouched, but Creta and Drachma have made moves there too. Heronstown and Westgate were the only two places she was able to reach yet to be occupied, and that was only a matter of time. Only one outpost in the East answered, Youswell, and they were the only ones she spoke candidly with. She told the officer in charge there to expect survivors from Central in the coming weeks, a further explanation upon their arrival, to look for and aid any survivors in nearby villages. Everywhere else, to foreign soldiers or captured Amestrians all, she said the same:

Amestris has fallen. Do as you will.

Hohenheim sees no reason to be concerned with what distant armies might or might not do near borders he doesn't intend to cross. Then again, he's never had a head for politics. Borders and leaders and opinions move too quickly for him to keep pace with, and he has his own people to care for in the small and guilty ways he can muster. He recalls troubles worsening in the southeast not long before he left Resembool; how their neighbors worried, how prices crept up, how the hollow-eyed Ishvalans he and Trisha had hidden in the basement now and then had wept and prayed for those who had not escaped with them. He and Trisha had stayed up often, talking about Ishval. The places he'd lived there, the people he'd known, if they should do more than they already were, if he should even follow Sara and Yuriy out on their next trip east. But not long after he realized the true meaning behind it all, the greater scheme of what was to come, and the certain deaths of the many outweighed the likely deaths of the few. He turned his back on Ishval, shut himself up in his study, and began drafting the first designs to his counter-array.

For all the good that did, Narges murmurs.

Riza estimates it will be another week, two if they’re lucky, before foreign armies reach Central. Hohenheim is content to defer to her on this and the itinerary she begins putting together with Ling Yao and Scar. There are hard discussions he remains apart from; grim arguments about families and friends that will remain unburied in distant cities. The danger is too great, Riza argues, and their numbers too few. There's nothing to be done for the dead but to mourn them. 

He stays apart from all of this. He sits in the mess hall before a display of identification tags and cards, photographs and handwritten lists of names. He ignores nearly all of what takes place outside of himself in the hopes of further miracles. Please, he thinks, find them. Find them. His friends stop calling out his name as a beacon and commit to the names he’s collected instead. He blinks and hours pass, the sun rising and setting in the span of moments, shadows shrinking and stretching as if by magic. People come and go from the mess hall, eating out of necessity but never interrupting him. At one point he sees a gleam of automail in his periphery, but he can't determine whether it's Lan Fan or Ed who hovers nearby. Eventually whoever it is leaves without having spoken, and so he considers that whatever whoever wanted from him didn’t really matter.

There’s no rhyme or reason to how the Homunculus poured Amestris' dead into the five of them. He and his friends call out the names of soldiers who died in Central Command and find answering inquiries from people who died in Novenstad, Fisk, Derrybren, Xenotime, Bellac, and a dozen other far-off places besides. Siblings and spouses, coworkers from before these soldiers joined the military, coworkers from previous installations they'd been stationed at, other souls who only happen to have the same first or last names as those he’s trying to track down. He learns the names of these people, dead hundreds of kilometers away. He tells them what happened, and that he's sorry, and that there's nothing he can do to save them.

He ignores the arguments Riza and the others get into because frankly, his own head is left spinning from the arguments that break out within himself.

He finds the souls of three other soldiers right here in Central Command, and staggers to his feet to lose himself in corridor after identical corridor until he finds their bodies. Three more times he performs human transmutation. Three more times the Gate remains tightly shut. Three more times he succeeds anyway. Ellis Gillespie, Joan Callahan, and Rory Stokes all revive in the same shaking and befuddled manner as Sig and Jeremy did. Three more saved. Three more of his friends burned up to save them. It isn't murder. If it’s anything, it's mercy. The friends who gave themselves up to save these Amestrians—Salehi and Soheil, and then Shahyar, Shakur, and Arezoo—did so willingly. They were killed 400 years ago and every single second since has been hell for them. They found their good deaths in these last acts of kindness. It's not as if he's any closer to freeing the rest of his friends anyway. Oblivion is the only sure escape he can give them.

It's in the gray, pre-dawn light some hours after Arezoo whispered Goodbye, old friend, and Rory Stokes came back to life with a scream he choked on that Hohenheim is finally interrupted. Black clothes, a steel fist. Is it Lan Fan or Ed that stands there? He thinks they're speaking, but he's down in the deep well of his heart; it would be so easy to drown down here, to remain lost in the weeping of more than a million dead. It would be so, so easy to let go—

The steel hand claps down on his shoulder hard. He jolts, scattering dog tags from their tidy rows. Beaded chains slither and hiss like living things, cheap aluminum clattering against the tiles. Ed’s face is suddenly inches from his own, his bright glare frenzied. "I found someone," he says urgently. "Tell me how you did it. How you brought the others back."

"Who?" 

"Tell me."

"Tell me who you found."

The steel hand clamps tighter, thumb pressing brutally against his clavicle, fingertips digging into the join of his shoulder and scapula. Then it lets go, swinging loosely to fall at Ed's side. "Her—her name's Sciezka. Al and I met her last year. Tell me how."

"How did you two meet her?"

Ed's lip curls. "What's it matter?"

"She's more than a name. She was a person with a life of her own. It helps," he adds, when Ed's stance shifts like he's strongly tempted to break Hohenheim's jaw again. "It helps to focus on more than her voice. The details will help you keep her soul close until I can resurrect her."

Ed's steel fingers rasp against each other; fist tightening, then falling slack. "We met a doctor who'd gone AWOL at the end of the Eastern Conflict. He made Philosopher's Stones for the military. He couldn't stomach it anymore, so he ran. Took some of his research with him. Hid the rest away in the First Branch Library, but—that—it burned down. Sciezka used to work there, but got fired. For—doesn’t matter. She helped us.” Ed swallows, his face twisted miserably. "She says—Mustang told her to take some leave. Get out of Central while she could. She didn't. She was visiting her mom when—when it happened."

Don't push him, Ghazi whispers. That's more than enough.

He telegraphs his intention to stand so that Ed, distracted as he is, can still notice and move away. He picks up the fallen dog tags, returns them to their tidy rows on the table.  “Where did she die?”

Ed's face spasms. At least a hundred of his friends sigh and scold him, but before he can rephrase the question Ed spits out, “Silvershore Hospital.”

“Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah. South of here. Can you drive?”

“Ah, no. I never learned—”

“Figures. Useless.” Ed shoulders past Hohenheim, making for the mess hall doors. “C'mon. Gotta find—somebody. To get us there.”

He follows after, ignoring his own body's stiffness, the click of his dry throat. He doesn't remember the last time he ate. He has no idea how many days have passed since the eclipse. “It would be easier to walk.”

“What? No. M'not gonna make her walk back here. She's gonna be a mess—yeah you are, don't argue. Fuck.” He runs a shaky hand through his tangled hair. “Where the hell is everyone?”

“Asleep, I expect. There's no need to disturb them. We can go on our own.”

Ed throws an appalled face over his shoulder, loses his balance, tips into yet another bronze bust. The head of some decorated soldier from decades past goes crashing to the floor. “Fuck! I—what? Fine, it's—I'm—yeah. Course I’m fine. Shut up.” He sags against the wall, glowering. “I'm not making her walk.”

Tell him, Pakzad urges. Warn him.

It's been so, so long, but even now the crushing horror of the long days it took him to flee Xerxes squeeze his throat until he can scarcely breathe. Bodies in the streets, slumped and splayed and piled up like discarded toys. Dead people, dead livestock, dead wildlife. Death everywhere he looked. All their ghosts howling inside him. 

Amestris is so, so much larger than Xerxes was.

“The roads won't be in any condition to drive on,” he forces out as delicately as scores of his friends demand him to be. 

“Why the hell not?” Ed twitches, eyes flickering up with a gasp, then shuttering closed. Some of the anger drawing up his shoulders bleeds away.

Five thousand cenz it was Shamsi who told him plain, Padideh says.

Amestrian currency is now worth less than the paper it was printed on, Niusha points out. 

You are no fun.

Hohenheim wants to help Ed to his feet, wants to brace his arm and help him walk, wants to be there for his son. But Ed would hate it. Ed would be furious to admit he might need help at all, nevermind from him. So he stays where he is and says as neutrally as he can, “A stretcher would be our best option.”

Ed swallows. Breathes. Hauls himself upright. Staggers on without reply.

Chapter Text

The rain has let up since last Hohenheim went outside, but it's still persistent enough to warrant tracking down coats for themselves and Sciezka. Ed grumbles all the way to the main entrance, where one of the towering doors is cracked open. Muted conversation and cigarette smoke filter through on a cool breeze as they walk outside. The sky has lightened further; the stars fading, the moon low, a flush of color in the east. Zampano and one of the resurrected—the sole woman, so far—are sitting in chairs they must have dragged from inside, an oil lamp pooling yellow light at their feet. The woman is bundled up in a gray wool blanket. Her eyes fixate on Hohenheim the moment he steps through the door.

Sergeant Joan Callahan, Arani reminds him. 

“Good morning,” he says evenly.

Zampano looks at Ed. “Everything okay?”

"Edward's located a soul within himself. We're going to Silvershore Hospital.”

“That's on the other side of town. You gonna find a car to get there?”

“No. The roads won't be suitable to drive."

The same delayed realization of his meaning leaves them both stricken. 

Zampano exhales one last cloud of smoke before stubbing his cigarette out. "Suppose you'll need a hand getting them back, huh?" He looks at Joan. "You mind telling the others where we've gone?”

Joan nods like it hurts her to move, lighting a fresh cigarette with shaking hands.

Poor thing, Baraz tuts.

The three of them are halfway down the stairs when she calls out to them; her voice tremulous, cracking. “W-wait. You—you're Fullmetal. Aren't you? Edward Elric?”

Ed has control enough to regard her coolly. “That's me.”

“You're wanted for treason.”

“Yeah? You gonna arrest me? The highest ranking guy left led the coup.” 

She laughs, a hollow sound. “Nah. S’funny. That’s all."

They're quiet as they cross the parade field. The grass was green and lush the last time he was out here. It's only been a few days, with a deluge of rain besides, but it's already begun to shrivel and brown. 

Life for life, Porochista mourns.

The battle waged fiercely at Central Command's main gate. Blood stains the cracked and pitted concrete, and the acrid smell of spent gunpowder still lingers in the steeply angled tunnel leading down to the street entrance. They have to descend with care; it’s a dark obstacle course of crumbling stairs, spent casings, and soft bodies. Zampano guides Ed, helps him keep his footing when he slips, murmuring quietly when Ed seethes.

The street entrance is an impassable ruin. Here, the twisted remnants of some enormous armored vehicle lay split open as if exploded from within. Its internal mechanisms and three burned bodies spill out of the wreckage. Only a few thin beams of dusty light eke through the rubble, casting the scene in a pale gray stillness.

“Damn,” Zampano mutters. 

“I got it,” Ed says, and claps his hands. 

Hohenheim hauls Zampano back just as hungry tongues of red light lash out from Ed's feet, deconstructing without bias, reconstructing with shocking speed. The different materials smear and tangle with one another to create a clear path, abstract and abrupt, scaly with transmutation marks sharp enough to cut. Concrete and steel melt, waxlike, into each other. Blue wool is pinned in place by rivets of yellow bone. Pink muscle ribbons through grotesque sheets of soft meat and polished boot leather. Pale fluids streak down the walls as the transmutation light dies out, a few last flickers clinging to bits of bronze and gold uniform apparel stuck into the mess almost as an afterthought. 

The sudden sunlight is almost blinding after long minutes in near-darkness.

“Damn,” Zampano repeats, far more shaken.

Ah, child, Hamedi sighs. 

You should have stopped him, Mansouri grumbles.

There wasn't time, Ershadi retorts. At least he kept the chimera from joining the mosaic.

Ed is frozen in place; his eyes wide, his hands still pressed together. He scarcely twitches when Hohenheim hunches face-to-face with him to better gain his attention. “You need to be more careful, Edward."

It's nearly four kilometers to the hospital. Every step breaks them. 

He knew what waited beyond Central Command's high gray walls. The stillness. The silence. The smell. The censure in every clouded eye. The accusation in every limp limb. He knew this was coming. He threw everything he had into stopping it, and still he stands here—an accomplice to a self-actualized god's apocalypse. He shies away from looking too closely. He sees too much anyway.

He was right about the roads.

Ed tries to hang on, every inch as stubborn as Trisha was, but he’s young. Nothing he’s had to endure in his few years is comparable. Ed fights to keep himself but he has half a million ghosts howling at him as their corpses darken and bloat on every street. Zampano catches him when he fails, slings him onto his back without comment. Ed doesn’t even seem to notice.

The hospital had been a flurry of activity when the transmutation circle activated. Nurses and doctors, visitors and patients are all collapsed in clean white hallways. They follow the directory to the long-term patient care wing but then have to wait until Ed's recovered enough to tell them which room they need. Zampano sets him down on a bench in an alcove empty of bodies. Ed lolls, staring yet unseeing, soft pleas escaping him. The chimera leans against the wall, rubbing his neck where the sharp edges of Ed's automail had pinched. “...How long is he gonna be like this?”

Hohenheim hesitates.

Be honest, Bahram says.

How can he? After Xerxes he was a man alone, the lone survivor of his people, a mortal man made otherwise by his cunningly cruel friend. Only the mercy of those Xingese traders who dug him out of the sand had spared him who knows what isolated suffering he might have experienced otherwise. 

He remembers… fragments of those early days. Campfires. Starlight. Voices that didn't scream. The blazing desert heat giving way to more humid climes. Sand dunes becoming tangled forests. Xingese villagers, dark of hair and eye and fair of skin, shying away from him as if his madness were catching. He spent months in that stupor, cared for by strangers. Truth be told, it was decades before he found real stability. It was during those ugly, aching years before that time that he realized the extent of his immortality; how the years no longer touched him, how a poisoned wine had no effect, how a blade through his belly couldn't even draw blood. By the time he'd carved out a space for sanity to take hold again he had been the Emperor's private curiosity for years. 

His sons, their teacher, and the colonel will suffer the worst of it together. Regardless of if they accept his guidance or shun him to forge their own paths—at least they'll have each other. The other survivors too, human and not as much, will help them when they stumble. They'll do better than he did. He has to believe that.

"Mister Hohenheim?"

Ed stirs before he can muster an answer. He curls inward, buries his head in his hands. He breathes wetly. He curses, gasps, pleads. Zampano crouches next to him to rub his back. "Easy, kid. Take it easy. Just focus on breathing. Slow and steady. There's no rush."

“Stop,” Ed chokes out, tearing at his bangs. Red light tangles in the joints of his automail. “Stop."

Zampano catches his hands, rubs his thumbs over Ed’s knuckles as he looks at Hohenheim. His eyes are wide behind dirty glasses. Haunted. Hunted. “We should go back. He can’t handle this.”

“He doesn’t have a choice. Not if he wants to save this woman.”

“Can’t you just—” He winces, shakes his hand free of Ed’s steel fingers and starts rubbing Ed’s back again. “I dunno. Take the soul of whoever it is he found out of him?”

“No.” 

To teach Ed to do what took him decades to learn? When Ed's knee jerk reaction to his mere voice is to transmute a blade? No, this is the easier way, and far faster too.

Zampano’s expression hardens. He turns back to Ed, keeps up the litany of hushed, soothing words that fail to match the hunch of his broad shoulders. He’s angry.

He thinks you should be doing more, Mona says waspishly. And he’s right. Ed’s your son, for God’s sake.

Ed would be furious if he tried to comfort him.

Better fury than grief!

He kneels down on Ed’s other side. "Edward," he says. This time, Ed doesn't snarl. This time, Ed’s automail doesn't transmute into a blade. This time, Ed is choking on tears he's desperate not to shed. “It’s going to be alright. I promise. You’re safe. I know it’s overwhelming—” God, he knows, “—but they can’t hurt you. It’s alright, Edward. Listen to Zampano and me. Listen to my friends. You’re going to be alright.”

“That’s right,” Zampano murmurs. “Nice and slow, kid. Easy now.”

Eventually, Ed calms. Eventually, Zampano helps him to his feet. Eventually, Ed leads them to room 316. The door is ajar, the window is open to let in a warm breeze. A wilting bouquet of flowers sheds its petals on the nightstand. In the bed is the body of a woman, her salt-and-pepper hair incongruously clean. On the floor is the body of another woman, younger and slimmer. She died face down, a pair of thick glasses near her outstretched hand.

Ed pulls away from Zampano, wobbles across the room to sink down beside the woman on the floor. “Yeah,” he croaks. “That’s—I’m sorry. We tried to—but it didn’t…. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“I’m gonna go find a stretcher,” Zampano says from the doorway. 

She’ll be cold, Eshgi says.

“Clean blankets too.”

“Got it.”

Ed gives small, helpless apologies to the woman's soul. Faint red light etches scales across the linoleum, creeping up the gurney and walls, but there doesn't seem to be any major transmutation imminent. Small mercies. Still, Hohenheim keeps an eye on the reach of it, ready to halt any outburst before Ed can accidentally damage the room or the bodies.

I’ll do it, Rabi’a offers. Please, old friend. I’m tired. Let it be me.

He kneels down too, ignoring the choked sound Ed makes when he rolls the body over. Half her face is pale, the other mottled in shades of blue and purple. Dark fluid dribbles from her mouth; the stench in the room immediately worsens.

Be quick, Rabi’a says. 

Thank you. Thank you.

The body is restored, its clothes cleaned, all the damage wiped away by the bright light of his friend’s soul. A pulse flickers in the throat, the bellows of the lungs work with minimal prompting, color creeps back into the face as the blood in the body's veins begins to warm. Nearly finished. One last step. One he can’t do alone.

“What—” Ed swallows. “What do I need to do?”

“Trust me.”

Entirely too many of his friends laugh at the face Ed makes. He sighs and tries again.

“Hold her soul fast in your mind. Her voice, her words, your memories of her. Don’t lose her in the whirling of all the others, never mind how loudly they shout. The night you bound Alphonse to the armor—” Ed winces. He winces too, in apology. “—How did you learn how to do that?”

“The Gate. It showed me how.”

Mahla laughs. One up on you then, ey old friend?

Hush, Rabi’a says sternly. Don’t distract him.

"Do you remember? How it felt when you pulled his soul out of that place?”

Another wince. Steel fingers rasp. “Yeah.”

“That’s what you need to do again. I can’t reach her otherwise. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. C’mon, I get it. Just—do it already. She’s freaking out.”

Footsteps in the hall. Zampano sweeps into the room to unfold a pale green sheet over the body on the bed. He gives Ed an encouraging grimace, then retreats to the doorway again to watch. 

Do it, Hohenheim, Rabi’a urges. Trust Ed as much as you’re asking him to trust you. He’s done it once already. After this he might trust you enough to let you help him bring Al home.

Thank you.

You said that already. Take care of them, Hohenheim. Take care of all of them.

He gently pries Ed’s left hand off of his automail, holding it palm up. Ed shivers, but neither pulls away nor tries to attack him. He lays his other hand on Sciezka’s body. He presses his thumb to the center of Ed's palm, and begins. 

Light. Heat. Pressure. A chasm, vast and echoing. Heard and felt, but remaining unseen. Ed breathes sharply, gasping as if in pain. He presses harder, feels Ed’s flesh part like warm wax. Red fluid bubbles out, too bright and viscous to be blood. Of course not. Ed can’t bleed anymore because he failed—focus. Focus. The soul slides under his own skin and into his Stone, a blip too small to feel more than a query, half-heard, before it slips out again, into the body it belongs to. Red light casts weird shadows across Ed’s face. It makes him look younger than he is. It makes him look older than he'll ever be. 

Sciezka’s eyes open. All the lights come back on.

Chapter Text

—OVER IT'S ALL OVER WE'RE DONE FOR WE'RE IN OVER OUR HEADS DO YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKER WHAT DID YOU WHAT'S GOING ON ASHLYN DON'T RUN IN THE STREET IT ISN'T SAFE SKY'S GONE DARK ECLIPSE ECLIPSE SUCH A TREAT TO SEE ONE IN OUR LIFETIME RUN FOR GOD'S SAKE GET AWAY FROM TERRY COME BACK HELP HELP IT'S DARK I CAN'T BREATHE JUST BREATHE DAMN YOU BREATHS SHALLOW BREATHS JUST LIKE THAT ATTA GIRL GET OUT GET OUT IT'S GOING TO BURN CAR ACCIDENT STOP STOP WHAT'S GOING ON—

Joan Callahan is dead. 

—ATTACK ON CENTRAL COMMAND WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO TO TO TURN THAT OFF SOMETHING'S HAPPENED OUTSIDE GET OUTSIDE IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE THE WHOLE BLOCK'LL GO AT THIS RATE WE HAVE TO GET AWAY FROM ME LET GO I JUST NEED A MINUTE TO CATCH MY BREATH I JUST NEED A MINUTE TO CATCH MY BREATH I JUST NEED A MINUTE TO CATCH MY BREATH I JUST NEED FIVE HUNDRED CENZ FOR SOMETHING TO EAT MISS PLEASE SPARE ME SOME COIN OH GOD SPARE ME I DON'T WANT TO DIE—

She killed herself while they were at the hospital. She found a pistol on one of her dead comrades and put a bullet through her temple. When they’d left there had been a living, breathing, miraculous human life. Now, there's just one more mess for the chimeras to clean up.

That’s unkind, Freydoon says.

He doesn't deny that.

—GOING DARK I CAN'T SEE FLOODING NO IT CAN'T BE IT ISN'T WHAT'S HAPPENING WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING WHOLE WORLD'S COMING TO AN END FEELS LIKE LIGHT THAT LIGHT WHAT'S THAT LIGHT DID YOU SEE PETROVICH JUST TAKE IT EASY MAN GIVE YOURSELF A TICK TO CATCH YOUR BREATH HELP ME SOMEBODY THIS GUY JUST COLLAPSED IN FRONT OF ME WAKE UP WAKE UP SHE WON'T WAKE UP SEE THAT CAR JUST CAREENED INTO THAT DRUNK NO OUT COLD ON A DAY AS NICE AS THIS DIDN'T YOU HEAR MESS GOING ON IN CENTRAL NOTHING TO DO WITH US NOTHING TO DO THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO—

She didn't even let the others know where they'd gone before she did it. When they’d come back with Sciezka, pale and shaking on a stretcher, it had been to a madhouse, everyone scurrying about like a disturbed anthill. There'd been a lot of shouting, then, but Hohenheim hadn't paid it much mind. He'd seen the spray of glistening gore on the wall, the body hidden under a stained sheet, and wondered at the pointless ruin of her.

—COMING UP OUT OF THE GROUND WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON RUN DEIRDRE I SAID FUCKING GO I SAID I SAID I SAY DID YOU HEAR THAT OUTSIDE SOME KIND OF COMMOTION ALL THAT TROUBLE IN THE EAST WILL THEY EVER GET IT SORTED WHAT’S THE MILITARY EVEN DOING OUT THERE OUT OUT GET OUT OF THE WAY GET GOING GET GET GET HELP SOMETHING’S WRONG I CAN’T WAKE THE BABY SOMETHING’S WRONG IT’S ALL WRONG IT IT IT OH GOD IN HEAVEN SAVE US FROM SAVE US IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS I THOUGHT I'D HAVE MORE TIME—

He feels empty-handed, wrong-footed, at odds with himself. He feels sick with guilt that he didn’t keep a closer eye on her. He should have known better. Aren't his friends still suffering, still crying out with the pain of their deaths these centuries later? 

You couldn’t have known, Bardia insists.

No. He should have known.

He's soured too, by a petty anger at the waste of Shakur’s soul, given freely just so some stranger could kill herself only days later. Four hundred years of agony come to nothing but another corpse. Are the others going to do the same? Are his efforts to save what few he can so unreasonable? What’s the point of trying if they’re just going to throw their lives away? Where’s the equivalency? Are they all so cowardly? So ungrateful?

Be kind, Ganjavi chastises. Hohenheim, old friend, I love you dearly, but you can’t understand. Though you do so much for us all you can only observe from the outside. You don’t feel what we feel.

He knows. He knows, and he hates himself for this anger he can’t help, this pettiness that gnaws at his heart. He’s sorry.

Don’t apologize for what you cannot help.

Still.

Still, more than anything, he's tired. Too much death. He’s seen too much death. Why do humans have to be so—fragile?

Don’t fault them for what they cannot help either.

It’s their fragility that makes them human, Shadi says. It makes them beautiful and terrible both. To be weak and finite, to hunger and thirst and ache and bleed, to suffer and soar. Humanity is playing an endless game of chance none of them can hope to win. Their hope despite it, their futile defiance in the face of inevitable failure—that is what makes the game worth it.

The goal is to be human again yourself one day, Zarinkoob reminds him. Or have you changed your mind? 

Human enough to die. That’s all he’s ever wanted.

Not so, Zolfonoun says. You wanted to live as a human again. You wanted to grow old in that dull little village with Trisha and your sons. You wanted one more lifetime, all your own.

...Yes. Fine. He’s changed his mind. He wants to see Trisha again. He wants to be human enough to die. No more, no less. He wants to rest.

What about your sons? What about what they want? You were a man when that devil stripped your humanity away, Hohenheim. They're little more than boys.

So were so many who died. In Xerxes, and now in Amestris too.

—IT HURTS IT HURTS MOMMA I CAN'T BREATHE WHERE ARE YOU IT'S DARK I'M SCARED WHAT'S HAPPENING DAD GET UP DAD CAN YOU HEAR ME DEREK CALL AN AMBULANCE DEREK WHOLE CITY'S IN A BLACKOUT IS IT AN ATTACK THOSE GODDAMN CRETANS WASN'T IT WHAT GOOD IS IT WHAT'S THE USE HELP ME GET HER OUT OF THE ROAD POOR THING JUST FELL HELL HELL HELL HELP ME I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING MOMMY WAKE UP DADDY WAKE UP I'M SCARED—

Hani’eh asks, So you've given up, then?

Isn't it obvious?

If you're truly so ready to die, what do you mean to do about it?

He hesitates, uncertain enough to drift out of the murky screaming of the Amestrian dead. He stares at his hands, resting on the pen-pitted surface of a large desk. A stack of paper is pushed to one corner, a lit lamp and an inkwell in another. He’s unsure of his surroundings. How he got here, how long he's been here. Losing time. Dangerous. He's in their makeshift infirmary. The blankets and bandages have all been put away. The air is vigorously clean, smelling of antiseptic and soap. Ed’s the only other person in the room, knelt on a stretch of floor his accidental transmutations haven't destroyed yet. He's muttering under his breath, doggedly chalking out the array to try and bring Al home once again.

You promised Trisha you'd find a way to grow old with her, Sadaf presses. You promised her you'd stop that devil and save Amestris. You promised us you'd find a way to free us to our good deaths. And here you are, two of three failures under your belt—

He tried—

You've been so proactive this last decade. Working to stop him. Working to save them. You tabled your family and your promise to all of us. All for nothing.

He tried—

Hush.

He breathes. 

Hani’eh says, So you want to die? Then do something about it. Burn us out of your body. Ravage yourself until all of us—all one million, seventy-two thousand of us—have been used to dust and less than dust in the healing of you. Then you can die at last. 

Aghapour says, But you'd be leaving four others in the same hell you'll have escaped.

Zarghami asks, Would your sons be able to destroy the souls trapped inside them? You heard Ed. He called us people. Al will surely think the same. Would you make your children murderers too? Or worse, leave them to suffer the long years as you have suffered?

No. No, of course not. And he wouldn't destroy his friends like that. He never would. He couldn't.

So Joan Callahan is dead, Kiarostami says. So what? So are God knows how many millions more. She got her good death. You brought her back and hoped for more than that, but what’s come to pass is already more than you've ever been able to give the rest of us.

He has tried—

Hush, old friend. That wasn't meant as insult. It's only fact. She died by her own hand, and in this way she's been freed. She got her good death. So will the others you've resurrected, whether they choose it now or meet it later. 

Better to avoid that, Dehkhoda says. Now you know better. Now you know to pay them more mind. So do the others. They’ll all be more mindful. They’ll all take greater care of one another. Perhaps no more will break as she did.

Joan Callahan is gone, Ashkan says. But you knew her. She was more than a voice in your mind. You knew her face. The color of her hair and eyes and skin. You knew her height and the shape of her hands, her thin legs and broad shoulders. You knew she smoked, and how she laughed when your firstborn dared her to do her duty when there was no longer any point. She died more human than any of us ever will, because of you.

It's a comfort too bitter to swallow. It's more than he deserves.

So you won’t abandon your sons? Emad asks.

Any more than you already have, Baraheni adds cuttingly.

No. No, of course not.

Then do the right thing, Hashemi says. Help Ed. Help him bring Al home.

Ed won’t let him—

You’re assuming again, Rafsanjani tuts. 

There’s no harm in offering, Mir says.  

He might even appreciate a token effort of parenting tossed his way, Alavi teases.

He winces, but doesn't deny that. Alright. 

He draws out of himself. He shakes his head a bit to help focus on the here and now; to focus on Ed. Ed’s automail catches the buttery light of the single lamp in their makeshift infirmary as he doggedly writes on, bright as a fistful of fireflies. He's grown so much. He still had so much more to grow.

Help him, Najafabadi insists.

He opens his mouth to call out when the room explodes.

One far corner ignites in a blinding spray of red light; an alchemical discharge that rattles the windows and fills the room with heat and pressure and crackling noise. He barely hears Ed's surprised cry over the violent alchemy and uptick of shouting inside himself. For a moment he thinks Ed's attention had wandered again, that some cruel spike of screams had frightened him into tearing down an outer wall of Central Command. But none of the red energy is spilling from Ed. It's contained all in one corner, far from his eldest.

Exactly where the suit of armor has sat, inert, since the chimeras brought it inside.

His friends babble excitedly, and fearfully, and with delight and trepidation too. Is it him, they demand, Is it your son, is it Al, dear Al, the one who listened to you and believed you and sought you out despite your failings, is he here, is he safe, it's him isn't it, isn't it, Hohenheim—

The transmutation finishes with one last sullen crackle. Papers that had been sent scattering flutter to the floor. Ed's on his knees still, twisted to look over his shoulder with comical alarm. Hohenheim's own expression probably isn't far off.

"Oh," says the armor.

"A-Al!" Ed chokes out. He scrambles to his feet, nearly falling, practically crawling over to where the armor is sat with its long legs stretched out before it. Hohenheim stands more carefully, staying back though every instinct and at least half of his friends beg him to rush forward too.

"I—oh. It. Well—ah," the armor stammers. Al's voice is thin and papery, deeper than it was before.

"Alphonse! Hey. Hey, are you okay?"

"I—don't? Huh? I can't. Yeah."

There aren't any lights burning inside the helmet. The armor hasn't moved. It doesn't reach for Ed when he wedges himself between its legs. 

Something's wrong, Zamani murmurs.

"I did it though," Al says. "It—it worked. Yeah. I—ah. Hah. Hah. I dunno." A bang resonates out of the armor. “Ha! Ouch.”

Ed's shock and delight fade, his brow furrowing. "Al...?"

"Metal. Yeah. N—ah. I don't think…." 

Ed knocks his knuckles against the breastplate and earns more gasping from inside, shaky and rapid.

"He might not be able to hear you," Hohenheim offers. 

Ed twitches badly, but otherwise ignores him. "C'mon, Al. I'm right here. Focus on me."

Nothing.

Then, "H-hello?"

"Yeah, hey, that's great, can you—"

"Is—ah. Is anyone there? Please, I… I don't know where I am. I can't see."

Ed's breathing is beginning to match Al's. He knocks on the breastplate again. "C'mon, Al. It’s me. I'm right here."

His friends chatter eagerly. They’re united in the here and now, forgetting all the new names they've collected, all the Amestrian dead howling among them, all their own petty grievances and bickering. All of them are hopeful here in this small, breathless moment.

"Am I—? Um." Al coughs, then makes a soft, surprised sound. Another bang echoes from the armor. "Oh. Oh. Well. That. I guess that makes sense. Can, uh, anyone? Hear me? Can you. Let me out?"

Oh, thank God, his friends weep. Thank God for this, at least.

Their makeshift infirmary's door bangs open behind Hohenheim as he rushes around the desk. He ignores the newcomers and their exclamatory questions as Ed scrambles to unfasten the thick leather straps of the breastplate, hauling it off to fall on the carpet with a muted clang, revealing—

Alphonse. Whole again. Body, mind, and souls all. 

Hohenheim gropes for the bookshelf at his left, not trusting his legs to hold him alone as he stares hungrily at his youngest. He stares at Alphonse, sees him true for the first time in over a decade. Al is small. Terribly small. Dwarfed by the armor he's huddled inside. And thin. Gaunt. Starved. His hair, brittle and dull, falls past his shoulders to tickle his jutting hips. His skin is fishbelly pale, gray where shadows gnaw at the hollows between his bones. He looks like something discarded, forgotten, left to wither where he fell. 

But he hasn't been forgotten, Adib says. He is your son, whole and home again.

Yes. Yes, he is. Two eyes. Two ears. A nose. A mouth full of teeth, and a tongue, and breath in his lungs. Hands and feet. Blood and bone. Skin that shivers with goosebumps. Nerves to feel the world around him again. Three arms, three legs.

Ed falls back, a terrible noise strangled out of him. 

"Brother," Al  says hoarsely. It wasn't just a trick of echoes; his voice is deeper now that it's coming from a teenaged throat. He smiles like it hurts, then seems to realize Ed's speechless for a reason. "Oh. Yeah. They—they were just—laying there."

The other people in the room have fallen silent. Ed makes another terrible noise, soft and bewildered, and that's enough to urge Hohenheim forward. He can't let his boys be burdened with this a moment longer. It's not fair. It's not right. "Here," he whispers, sinking to his knees beside the armor and reaching out. "Alphonse. Allow me—"

Al twitches, stares at him like he's never seen anything stranger, then recognition makes him relax his death grip. Hohenheim takes the odd number of limbs from him—cold, bruised, soft, wet—and puts them out of sight beside him. It'll do for now. He wipes his hands dry and smiles at Al, who returns it, and every single one of his friends melts with gladness.

Told you, Najafi crows. I damn well told you he'd do it!

Oh, poor thing, Dana tuts. He's so thin! What was God thinking, to take so much of him?

He's back, look at him, he's here, Attar all but rambles, her words tripping over one another. Look at him, Hohenheim, do you see? He looks just like Trisha, doesn't he? I'm not imagining it, am I?

No, you're right, Ghasem says. He's the spitting image of her. Your coloring, old friend—

As Xerxesian as any of us were, Hadi laughs.

Yes, Ghiyas agrees, But he has her eyes, her smile. All that hair falling in his face too! Just as hers did.

He swallows the lump in his throat, blinks the sting from his eyes. "Welcome back," he manages.

Al blinks like he has to think about it. "What?"

Ed recovers admirably, though his metal fingers don't grip the armor so much as rattle against its edges when he leans forward. "Hey," he rasps. "You're amazing. You know that?"

Al stares. "What?"

Ah. That might be an issue, Ghazvini says. Hard to hear anything over all this damned screaming.

Sort him out, Baboli orders. Like your oldest and the other two. You can dote on him once he's got a scrap of sanity to call his own.

Ed touches Al's wrist with his left hand; cautious, then grasping tight. Al squeezes back, looking down as he shivers. "You're warm," he marvels.

He must be freezing, Abu’l says. Hohenheim—

The urge to help outweighs his fear of how his sons might react to his intrusion. "Come on. Let’s get you out of there."

"What?"

Ed glowers, but doesn't push him away or bark at him to back off. He lets Hohenheim pick Al up out of the armor—it's astonishing how little he weighs, how frail he is, how whole he is—and stand him between the armor's long legs. A hand appears in his periphery as if by magic, trailing a dark blue overcoat. He takes it and drapes it over Al's narrow shoulders. The coat is meant for a grown man, not a starving boy; it blankets him absurdly. 

"Oh," Al startles, tugging it closer with a nervous, unpracticed grin. "Oh! That's—wow!"

Ed laughs, a staccato burst of half-hysterical relief. It's the first time Hohenheim has heard him laugh in over a decade. His heart aches to hear it now. 

Al shivers again, the grin dropping as if slapped from his mouth. Pain twists his features, curls his spine, tears his breathing to ragged gasping. "Oh," he says miserably. "Ah. Ah. Please, stop, every—stop—ah."

Hohenheim's heart aches. 

"Edward," he says, waiting for Ed to tear his worried gaze away from Al. "Why don't you help him get cleaned up? I can help him after, as I helped you."

Ed's eyes narrow, unfocus, refocus. He sets his jaw with a reluctant nod. "Yeah. Just. Don't fucking attack him too, alright?"

So protective, Shima teases.

Hohenheim stands aside, out of the way so Ed can help Al to his feet. Greed—or perhaps it’s Ling Yao—leaps forward to help as well, talking too quietly for Hohenheim to discern who's in control. The three of them weave past Riza, the chimeras, and Mei Chang. 

"Your limbs," Al chokes out in the doorway, almost lunging out of Ed's arms. "Brother, I—I had them, I swear. Your arm and leg. They were just—laying there—I couldn't stop the bleeding. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I don't know where they went—"

"Al—! H-hey. It's okay. They—you brought 'em back. It's fine." 

"They were just laying there. I thought—I tried to come back before—sooner—but everything went—wrong. I—I think—I don't know how but I think I'm like Dad—"

"Alphonse—"

"It's so loud. I can't hear you, I’m sorry. There are so many people screaming—" Al shudders, and it's only Ed's grip that keeps him on his bony feet. "Dad, can you—I brought Ed's limbs back, but they're—they’ve rotted. Can you—ah." Al's swallowed up and this time stays gone. Ed grimly hoists him out of the room, Greed or Ling Yao following, Mei Chang darting after. Her high voice chirps from the hall that she'd be happy to transmute some clothes to fit Al. A new project to busy herself with.

You're being unkind again, Salour chastises. Leave her be. She's his friend. She's been worried.

They all have been, Razmi says.

  Idiots, Haleh snorts. Did Hohenheim not make it clear Al wasn't in any danger?

Worry makes idiots out of us all, Markazi retorts.

Still. Al, his youngest, has come home. So much death, so much pointless futility, but Al is whole again. Let today be marked a success for that alone, if nothing else.

Chapter Text

It’s evening by the time Al is well enough to broach the topic of Ed’s limbs. He’s quieted since his unexpected return. He no longer flinches. There are no more tears. He’s no longer deaf to the living as they help him walk on unsteady legs. He remains overwhelmed, of course, and prone to staring at his hands as he touches new textures with a trembling grin. But that's to be expected. Everything must seem both brand new and bizarrely familiar to him, and likely will for some time. Still, he's improved, and his improvement is thanks to the souls Hohenheim carefully poured into him under Ed's mistrustful glower. Biruni, Taqizadeh, Maziar, Moniru, Afsaneh. Five more whispering, raw-edged voices he will likely never hear again. But they'd chosen to go, and Al is calmer for them.

Calmer, however, doesn't mean he's stopped demanding Hohenheim to do the impossible.

They're alone, the three of them, cloistered in the room Hohenheim had claimed as his own. There's a narrow fireplace in here, and at his friends' suggestion he'd lit a fire and gathered three chairs, the mechanic's kit he'd used to help Lan Fan, and an end table near the hearth. On the desk farthest from them is a knotted sheet, lumpy and already stained. Ed had shied away from it with a pained grimace, but it's all Al wants to talk about.

"You could do it, couldn't you?"

Ed, with a gentleness that reminds Hohenheim so strongly of Trisha it takes his breath away, pushes Al back into the bundle of blankets he's nestled in. "It's not worth it, Al. Leave it alone."

But Al insists, "It is too. If we have to be—if we have to be like Dad, then we should at least both be whole for it! It's possible. I'm sure of it. With what we've seen of the homumculi's regenerative capabilities I doubt it would even be that difficult. There's just the matter of—of the state your limbs are in. I came back from the Gate as soon as I could, but I wasn't fast enough.”

“How did you—” Ed starts to ask, but Al shakes his head.

“After,” he says. “You first.”

They raised each other well, Rouhani says.

They had to, Hohenheim thinks sadly. Familiar voices wash over him; agreeing and scathing, pitying and spitting. Thousands of mothers and fathers weeping for their lost sons and daughters and the endless Amestrian wails an undertow that threatens to drown him entirely. He steels himself, forces his focus to remain in the here and now. His boys deserve his full attention.

"H-hold on a second," Ed stammers. "We—this isn't—there’s no way it’s gonna work."

"We don't know that. And I told you, I think it will. It's worth letting Dad try, don't you think?"

"Hell no!"

It’s good to know his high opinion of you hasn't changed, Farhad teases.

"If anyone can do it, it's him. At least, that's what they're telling me." Al points at his temple, his mouth quirked in a rusty smile. Ed grimaces, then flinches, then in a matter of seconds falls apart entirely. Overwhelmed again by the dead inside him. Al makes a dismayed noise, low in his throat, and tries to catch Ed when he slumps. Hohenheim rushes to catch them both from falling out of their chairs. He finds himself bizarrely exasperated yet desperately, fiercely fond.

Welcome to being a father, Aghajari laughs. 

"Careful. You're not as strong as you were before." When he was nothing but a child's voice echoing out of an antique suit of armor, and still more human than he is now.

"R-right. Thanks." Al’s eyes—as yellow as Ed's, as yellow as his own—trace the come-and-go misery across Ed's face. His pale thumb traces a sun-kissed scar on one of Ed's knuckles. He moves constantly, and his every movement is how Trisha once moved. "Can you help him? Like you helped me?"

"I already have. As much as he'll let me, anyway."

"Oh." 

"I'm afraid you can expect this to happen to you as well." He swallows another sting of shame, guilt, loathing. It's his fault they're like this. "Being like this isn't something you get used to overnight."

Al nods, somber. So young. He's so young, and this is as old as he'll ever be.

Easy, old friend, Majidi says. Save your anger for later. Your sons need you.

He breathes. It could be minutes or hours before Ed comes back enough to continue his argument. In the meantime, Hohenheim allows his curiosity to get the better of him. "How did you escape the Gate?"

"Hm? Oh. I didn't. I just walked through."

"What do you mean?"

Al watches Ed, guilt an ill fit for his gaunt face. He'd just insisted he'd wait to share his escape, but he must realize that Ed won't be in any fit state for some time. Hohenheim can likely thank one of his friends for that. "I…. When I woke up there, in my body again, I didn't realize what had happened right away. I thought—” Al lets go of Ed's hand to better stare at his own unfamiliar palms. As thin as he is his fingers look overlong and brittle, as if they could break with only a minimal application of force. He moves as if he thinks so too. “I could remember everything my body had been through without me. Everything it saw, or heard, or said—"

Al shivers, drawing the blanket more tightly around him. 

Poor thing, Gol tuts.

Who knows the things God speaks of alone on His throne, Puladeen wonders. 

Pirouzfar seethes. Who would want to? 

Al clears his throat, then laughs at himself for startling. "S-sorry—"

He can't help but smile. "Don't be. It must all feel so strange to you."

Al hums, pressing his fingertips to his throat to marvel at the feel of that too. "Yeah. I thought I remembered what all of—this—would be like. Just goes to show, doesn't it?"

"Mm."

Al sobers, watching Ed hiss through his teeth, his fingers claw at the armrests, the wood warping under a fine haze of red light. “I know Truth had been—keeping—Ed’s limbs safe. Wearing them, I suppose. They were growing and age just like my body was. But when I—my soul, I mean—got there.... Truth was gone. Ed's arm and leg were laying there, bleeding out.”

Hohenheim leans back in his chair, suddenly weary. 

Ed's limbs were taken by God, and so God would have kept them as safe as He did Al's body. God wears the toll of whoever knocks on His door, maintaining a tenuous connection between the organic material taken and the alchemist they belonged to. This is something he’s learned from meeting alkahestrists and alchemists who practically stank with a guilt and grief unique to those who met with God Himself and were found wanting. He has no memory of his own Gate, his own Truth. He might never have stood before either, for that matter. He only remembers an impossible white void and his little friend’s victorious laughter. To this day he doesn’t know if anything was taken from him when Xerxes was destroyed, if his own insides were torn to viscera, if he only survives untouched by pain or bloody sputum because of the dead forced into him. 

He has no memory, but he knows… things. Things no mortal man would know otherwise, bleak secrets that hide hungrily in the shadows of his mind, waiting to spring when he least expects it. Even if Pinako had never told him what his sons had done, one look at Ed would have been enough. He always recognizes a fellow sinner.

Pay attention, Niki hisses. Your boy just told you something important!

He blinks, thinks over Al’s words again, and feels his breath turn to ice in his chest. “Truth… wasn’t there?”

Al shakes his head, his eyes hollowed and exhausted. “Our Gates were both open too. Just a little. It took me…. I dunno how long. A while, I suppose. But I managed to eventually open mine enough to squeeze through, and nothing—happened—when I took Ed's limbs with me. Inside...."

"Inside?"

"Inside the Gate. It was just... dark in there. No hands or—or anything else that should have been there. It was so dark. I don’t know how long I was in there. I don’t know—”

Ed surges forward, batting worried hands away with a hiss squeezed between clenched teeth. He falls in on himself, elbows to knees, burying his face in his hands, fingers tangled in his hair, panting heavily. "I hate this," he chokes out. "I hate this."

"Brother," Al says softly. His own burdens set aside with such grace and poise that not even Hohenheim, knowing the fear that had squeezed his voice to a whisper a scarce moment ago, can see its fingerprints on him. The spitting image of Trisha. "Let Dad try to help you. Please."

Ed—

—sighs.

"Fine," he relents, dropping his hands to his lap. The better to level a glower impressive even by his record at Hohenheim. Or maybe it just seems to top the chart when sat next to Al's self-satisfied grin. "Do you even know the first thing about automail?"

"Pinako and I were friends for many years—"

"That’s not even close to an answer."

Did he give Trisha this much lip, Golnar laughs, and far too many parents laugh with her.

"She taught me a great deal about automail."

"Huh?" Ed twitches, eyes chasing ghosts. "Oh. Nngh. Okay. Guess that'll have to do."

Al rolls his eyes. "Well don't just sit there, dummy. Get undressed."

Ed makes a face, but whatever he snipes back is drowned out by a fresh wave of wailing within Hohenheim, and trailing after that questions from far too many doubters and pragmatists. He hasn't slept in a week, maybe longer, and he's been ignoring his friends over much. He's caught off-guard enough to be, if only briefly, swept away. So many ask, Where has God gone? Has He abandoned us? Did that devil truly swallow Him whole? What does this mean? What does it mean? On and on and on, and others keep calling out to the Amestrian dead in a futile attempt to calm them. Beneath it all he can scarcely hear Abedini’s trepidatious voice, focused on the present as he always is. Will this work, old friend? Is there even any point to try?

He doesn't know. 

But you suspect it won't.

He has to try.

Is it worth disappointing them again?

He has to be sure.

"Dad?"

Hohenheim blinks. 

Both of his sons are looking at him. He doesn't know what to make of their expressions. He clears his throat, ashamed. "I—that is. We can try whichever limb you'd prefer first. The leg would be a bit simpler, but if it's any comfort I did clean and reassemble Lan Fan's arm without issue."

"Hmph." Clearly it will take more than that to impress his oldest. "We’ll try the leg. If you break it I can get around fine on a spare until Winr—"

Ed freezes. Grief drains the color from his face. He jumps to his feet and stomps across the room without saying anything else. That same grief makes Al's mouth twists miserably before he can hide it behind one thin hand.

Winry, Qamar reminds him. Pinako's granddaughter. She was Ed's mechanic.

He last saw Winry in Liore, but it's still hard not to think of her as the toddling little girl pulling engineering textbooks off the shelves to look at the diagrams with startling focus. She’d been so much like her father. She'd been Ed's age, just as brilliant as both his sons, and now she's gone.

Hardly the only pretty young thing to be snuffed out by that devil, Deghan sniffs. But if she's got an ounce of Pinako's luck her soul will have ended up in one of you five, eh?

We'll keep an eye out for her too, Melika says. Fetch your tools, Hohenheim, and keep your mouth shut. Your boy won't take your pity laying down.

Keen to keep things civil he doesn't speak once Ed's sat down again, only nudging the end table closer so Ed can rest his foot on it. The brace on his son’s scarred thigh is simpler than Lan Fan's arm, but simple hardly equals poorer quality. The metal is lighter, both in color and weight. The design of the leg itself is sleek and powerful; an almost perfect match in shape to Ed’s well-muscled right. It’s roughened by dozens of small scratches and scuffs; testament to the hard life Ed has lived since his limbs were ripped away. The connection of the automail to its port is almost seamless, and the primary and secondary locks don't make so much as whisper when he releases them. Winry had been an exemplary mechanic. He's careful when he sets the leg down but the clunk and scrape of it against the wood still seems incongruously loud. He pushes the end table aside enough to bring his chair a little closer, then turns his attention fully to the port. To the steel affixed to the stump where his son's leg ought to be. His friends hiss in sympathy as he looks. He's seen many automail users over the years, at a distance and this close. It's different, seeing the thick scars and unyielding metal attached to someone he cares so deeply for.

He's your son, Rahman mourns. And he's suffered so much so young.

How might the stump heal once he’s removed the port? How will Ed’s body—the Stone, not the flesh—react to its absence? Will it attempt to grow new limbs? Unlikely, but not impossible. Would Ed's body accept his lost limbs, human as they still are? Will they adapt to his Stone and become as unchanging as the rest of him, or will they continue to grow and age? Can the ports even be removed, or will the flesh heal too quickly around them? 

He doesn't know. He still has to try. 

"Well?" Ed growls impatiently. "You just gonna keep staring or what?"

He breathes. 

He knows what he has to do. He just doesn't want to. Even knowing he can't hurt Ed, he doesn't want to. "There’s something I'd like to test first, if that's alright."

Oh, old friend, Mojtaba laughs. You're going to break his leg, aren't you?

Better than going straight for the hacksaw, Azadeh jokes. 

Hohenheim leans over Ed's stump to hide his grimace, brushing his fingers across the port. Ed shivers as if he can feel it, as if he's already dreading the worst.

Comfort him, Deghati prods. You owe him that.

"It's alright," he says automatically. Memories of chaotic days in Rush Valley come back to him; Pinako's mad laughter, the strong reek of her pipe smoke as she walked him through complex biomechanical diagrams that left his head spinning, awed by how much human ingenuity had progressed when he hadn’t been paying attention. "Try to relax."

"Easy for you to say!"

He thinks he knows how Pinako would have designed an above-the-knee attachment. He remembers her rants about the ridiculousness of the human knee; how hard on the spine and hips adjusting to missing legs was, how much automail wears a body down the more of it there is. Above-the-knee ports have titanium inserts that travel nearly the full length of the remaining femur. He'll start with that. "This will probably feel strange," he warns.

"What’re you—guh."

Ed's femur breaks near his hip, at the seam where bone and metal mingle. It's clean. It’s painless. It is. Ed's body is the same as his now, and he knows how painlessly his own bones break. But of course it’s still strange to feel oneself splinter under an unseen force. He swallows a pointless urge to apologize.

For a moment, a second, for a single beat of his thundering heart, Hohenheim dares to hope that they'll be so lucky, that Ed might be so lucky, that this will work despite all his doubts—

Damning red light bursts from Ed's stump, driving Hohenheim's hands away. In a matter of seconds an entire leg springs from the port, a leg made of gleaming metal and hard angles, brace and all. The knee bends without so much as a squeak of resistance, the foot thumping solidly against the carpet. The light fades with one last eye-watering crackle, the new leg gleaming crimson in its passing. All three of them had instinctively leaned away from the transmutation. Hohenheim's sure he looks just as gobsmacked as either of his sons. He glances at the original leg on the table. To his untrained eye they appear identical.

Al, saucer-eyed, is the first to speak. "Are you okay?"

Ed hisses out a shaky breath through his teeth, hovers his left hand over the seam of skin and steel. "I—" He looks, wild-eyed, at Hohenheim. "Did you do that?"

He shakes his head. "Can you move it?"

"I—" Ed swallows, looking at the new leg as if it were a venomous snake. He grips the armrests tightly, leaning forward enough to see his toes. After a tense moment, they wiggle. Then the sole raises and lowers. Then the ankle. Ed's incredulous laughter is anything but joyous. "Haaaa ha. Ha. Ah. Jeez. Okay. That. That happened."

"It—it regenerated," Al falters. "How did—that shouldn't be possible. Right?"

"I—" Ed prods at the knee with both hands. His fingernails and metal fingertips click down the shin plate. He doesn't look up when he asks, voice low, "Did you know this was gonna happen?"

Pity murmurs through him, hundreds of his friends flinching from his son's bleak tone. Ed's already put two and two together, even as he still tries to deny what's attached to him. "No." True as it is, admitting such leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. "I thought the port might prove tricky, but not like this."

"Tricky," Ed bleats. "Yeah. Okay. Okay. I guess.... So. That's that, then."

"I'm sorry," he replies, hating that it's all he can muster.

"What?” Al leans forward, alarmed. “You're not giving up already. Dad, try something else—"

"Al," Ed says.

"Don't 'Al' me! You can't expect me to let it go so easily! I got my body back, it's only fair you do too!"

How is any of this fair? Rohani asks. How can he believe in such a thing as fairness after everything ?

He's young, Sinai sighs.

No, Kadkani murmurs. No, he’s wise beyond his years, to still find the strength to hope amidst all this.

“There’s nothing for it,” Ed snaps, shrugging Al’s thin hand off to stand, retreating back to his trousers. His mismatched shoulders hunch as he shoves his feet through each leg; the left with a greater range of motion, the right with a clunk that can’t be argued with. “Let’s just focus on getting you healthy, alright?”

Oh, Tamaddon says. Oh, Hohenheim. Hope is one thing, but don’t be cruel.

Tell them, Esmail orders. Tell them plain.

“Boys,” he says. Ed flinches as if struck. Al blinks at him owlishly. “I don’t think that will be possible.”

Ed stomps back over without buckling his belt, snarl flashing in the warm firelight. “What’s that mean?”

“I’ve been unable to so much as cut my hair since I became this. I suspect the same will be for the four of you.”

“Fuck off,” Ed says.

“Brother!”

Ed steamrolls over Al's protest. “I don’t care what you can and can’t do, old man. Just because you haven’t been able to do shit all with your body doesn’t mean he has to be the same!”

“The Dwarf in the Flask made you in my image, down to the number of souls he comprised your Stones of. How I look now is how I looked the day he destroyed Xerxes. There’s no fighting that.”

Ed sneers, but all it takes is the slightest touch from Al on his arm for him to fall silent. “You’re sure?”

"I'm sure. I'm sorry."

Al nods too, leaning back into his blankets. “Okay then.”

Ed tugs free of Al’s light touch. His face becomes unlovely with grief, with despair. “No. No. That’s not—you’re wrong. He can barely walk like this!”

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. I wish it were otherwise.”

“It’s alright, brother,” Al says, preternaturally calm. Spine straight, hands folded neatly in his lap, face carved from marble. The last king of Xerxes and every Emperor of Xing Hohenheim had ever known would be shamed to stand in the shadow of this starving boy. “If there’s nothing for it, then that's the way it is. We'll both just have to make the best of things, won't we?”

Hohenheim bows his head, saying nothing. There’s nothing more to say.

Chapter Text

The Curtises find him in the morning.

Mr. Curtis is a towering crutch for Mrs. Curtis to lean against while the dead overwhelm her anew. Hohenheim meets his eyes and finds a focus incomprehensible in a way that makes him feel shrunken, like some fruit left to rot where it fell. He fails to flinch. When Mrs. Curtis shakes free of her stupor she approaches the table. Her dark eyes gleam with a feverish, half-mad light. Ed’s original automail leg is on the table beside the stained bundle, both abandoned last night with poorly feigned indifference. It’s the same leg, Ed had forced out when Hohenheim had offered to switch the regenerated automail out for the one crafted by Winry Rockbell. What’s it matter?  He had let the lie stand unchallenged. He doubts Al did the same.

“It’s true then,” Mrs Curtis says.

He nods. It’s all he can do. It’s all that’s necessary.

Emotions wage a complicated war upon her pale face. Casualties pile in the furious scrunch of her eyes. “Well,” she says, plucking the stained bundle off the table. It swings on a pendulum, full with joints folded in on each other. There’s an oily sheen left on the table where it had rested. "It would be cruel to leave this for Ed to clean up."

Her voice is iron, daring him to suggest otherwise. He nods again. Who is he to refute her?

He follows the Curtises out of the room, out of the wing, out of Central Command entirely. The parade field is almost wholly brown now, grass crunching underfoot as they walk to a gardener's shed hidden behind a monument to another dead warmonger. Mrs. Curtis carefully hands the bundle over to her husband before fetching two shovels from the shed. She keeps one for herself, pushing the other into Hohenheim's hands. In short order she finds a stretch of undedicated grass and begins to dig with single-mind purpose. 

Ah, Navvab hums, satisfied. So it's like that.

So it is.

Together they work in silence, digging a hole fit for a full-sized coffin rather than a mere two teenaged limbs. The sun climbs, devouring the last of the morning's chill. Sweat tickles his hairline, his throat, his spine. No one comes looking for them. The only words spoken are when Mrs. Curtis is overwhelmed by the dead inside her. She hisses senselessly between clenched teeth until the tide retreats, then picks up her shovel and begins to dig again as if nothing happened. Otherwise there's only the steady thud and scrape of their shovels, their labored breathing, their intermittent pauses to shake out their hands and keep going.

This feels like a test, Shams remarks after a while.

Obviously, Heidari snorts. Though I wonder what the cost will be if Hohenheim fails. 

Paniz laughs. God, but she'd tear him apart given the excuse, wouldn't she?

My kind of woman, Athari leers.

She's married, you pig, Bagherpour says.

So? Never stopped me when I was alive.

And round and round they go; joking and cajoling, jeering and crying. A thousand thousand conversations at any given moment, and beneath it all—

—IS THAT WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS HAPPENING HOW MUCH DID YOU HAVE ALREADY CAR CRASH DID YOU HEAR THAT I THINK THAT WAS A PINCH MORE SALT NORA THAT'S A GOOD GIRL NOW KEEP STIRRING GONE DARK IT'S SO DARK I CAN'T SEE I DIDN'T THINK SOLAR ECLIPSES GOT SO DARK AS THIS WHAT IS THIS WHAT THE HELL IS THAT GROUND'S OPENING UP RUN YOU IDIOT RUN HELP ME PLEASE COME BACK I CAN'T GET THIS OFF OF SKY'S GONE DARK WHAT THE FUCK MOMMY I WANNA SEE DARK LOOK PRICE OF BREAD THESE DAYS IS ABSURD I SAY DEAR DID YOU HEAR THE RADIO JUST NOW THERE'S A REAL UPROAR GOING ON IN CENTRAL RUN LOOK UP LOOK OUT PIECES OF MEAT HE JUST WENT TO MEAT UNDER THE WHEELS EARTHQUAKE IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE BRINLEY YOU MORON THE HELL ARE YOU DOING SLEEPING AT A TIME LIKE THIS HELP ME OH GOD HELP ME SHE'S DEAD WHAT'S GOING ON PLEASE—

It says something about him, surely, that he can find comfort in the sound of so much screaming. 

People can get used to anything, Nousha murmurs. Even the greedy jaws of Hell.

Anoush weeps.

Eventually something unspoken passes between husband and wife. Mr. Curtis leans down into the grave to hand Mrs. Curtis the stained bundle. She cradles it like an infant in her arms. Her eyes are as empty and dull as those of a doll's. "Cruel," she says.

Hohenheim hefts his shovel over the dirt lip of the grave, not trusting his voice to speak.

"They were children," she says.

Mr. Curtis makes no move to help as Hohenheim hoists himself out of the grave. The man glowers at nothing, at everything, at the great roof of the cloudless sky. He could be carved from stone and it wouldn't make a difference.

"I understand the toll I paid," she says. "I wanted my baby. That thing made it so I could never bear another. Simple."

He watches her set the stained bundle down, arrange it tidily, tuck it neatly into its bed of cold earth. He can't see her face from up here.

"Your sons wanted their mother," she says. "How was their failure not enough? How was watching the body they made slough to pieces not enough? What was the sense in crippling Ed? In taking so much from Al? Why?"

A beat of silence strikes him. He realizes the question wasn't rhetorical only when her white face looks up to better scorch him. "I don't know."

"And if Ed hadn't given up his arm? If he hadn't bound Al to the armor? What then?"

What's the use in conjecture? Namazi asks. What's the point to any of this?

She's testing him, Shams repeats impatiently. Be quiet. Pay attention.

Watch yourself, Hohenheim, Ghilani warns. She's not the type to be satisfied by a broken jaw.

"Then there would be one less limb buried today," he replies.

Red light seethes at her feet; a bed of furious serpents, and far more dangerous. Mr. Curtis is the wiser of the two of them for taking several steps back from the edge of the grave. Hohenheim has always been a fool, however, and a hardy one at that. He stays put. He doesn't flinch. "That's assuming Edward would have even survived losing his leg in the first place, without Alphonse to carry him."

Al had shared Ed's hypothesis with him during their time in Liore. It made as much sense as anything else could, considering how all the accepted laws and expectations of mortals fell apart at God's doorstep. If it were true then Al's body would have died in a matter of days without Ed inadvertently providing for it. As for what that would have meant for Al's unfettered soul, well....

Don't dwell on what might have been, Jamalzadeh reminds him wearily. Is reality not bleak enough?

Magham barks harsh laughter, and is joined by dozens and dozens more in cruel harmony. Bleak? You think this is bleak? Better those boys dead with their mother in Heaven than trapped here with their fellow monster!

Mrs. Curtis' glare deepens. "Is this better?"

For a strangling, disorienting moment Hohenheim thinks she somehow heard his friends. Then, thankfully, he recalls the bitter truths he's thrown in her face. "You're the one who demanded anything from God. Why don't you tell me?"

Too far, Ahmad warns.

She rears back to hurl her shovel at him like a javelin. It comes so close to his ear he hears the whistle of wind as it passes. It clatters off somewhere behind him; the sound of metal striking concrete is a shriek discordant to the screaming inside him. He doesn't flinch. He only meets her glare steadfast. There's dirt on her face, her clothes, in her braided hair. Her lips are pressed in a thin white line. Her shoulders are held back and her spine is steel. It's astonishing, her resilience. To have lived so long so brutalized by her toll. To stand steady, so focused, only days after her humanity was brutalized too. No wonder his boys respect her so much. She's a far better influence on them than he could ever be.

Hohenheim is the first to look away.

"I'm sorry. I don't have an answer for you. God—or Truth, if you prefer—has never answered my prayers. If I could undo what's happened I would, no matter the cost. But I can't. I don't know how. I don't know where the Homunculus has gone, or what he's planning next. I don't know how to make you human again. My sons—" He swallows the waver that wants to creep into his voice, the sting that wants to linger in the corners of his eyes. There's a breeze spilling over the high gray walls, refreshing after so much time spent in deepening a hole. Over the smell of freshly turned earth there is a faint strain of something unpleasantly sweet. "I... I can't help them."

"Lan Fan burned her grandfather's body," Mrs. Curtis says.

Hohenheim blinks. To his relief a great many of his friends waffle too, equally bemused. "What?"

Mr. Curtis approaches the grave's edge again, reaching down to help his wife out. Once on ground level she brushes herself off, nodding thanks. "Yesterday," she clarifies. "I suppose it was pragmatic of her. An urn is easier to carry across the desert than a coffin, after all. "

His friends bubble and froth beneath his skin; suspiciously thrown off-kilter by her in a way that reminds him—almost fondly—of Pinako, for all that their temperaments are nothing alike. Mrs. Curtis is cold where Pinako had been brash; brutal in place of boisterous. Still. There's something to the burn of her coal-dark eyes that leaves him willing to indulge whatever twists and turns this conversation takes.

"I suppose so," he hazards.

"Did you know?"

"Know—what, exactly?"

Her shoulders roll. Her jaw tightens. She visibly holds back from shouting, or perhaps from punching him outright. For all that she reminds him of Pinako, it's equally clear from whom Ed earned his best habits. "Did you know."

Ah, Salimi realizes, first of all of them. She's asking the same thing of you Ed did. 

Were you in cahoots with the devil, Mehdi clarifies.

Shabestari laughs, reedy and inappropriate. Cahoots!

He sighs, pulling his glasses off to clean the dirt that's smudged the lenses to a distracting brown haze. "I keep getting asked that. Am I really so untrustworthy?"

That actually earns him a huff of amusement; from both of them, no less. "You have an untrustworthy way of doing things," Mr. Curtis says.

He means when he found you wrist-deep in his wife, Farid reminds gleefully. Hohenheim chooses to ignore that, and all the coarse jokes others pipe up with too.

"I knew his plan for Amestris. I didn’t know his aspirations for godhood. I never thought he'd do to you what he did to me."

Mrs. Curtis is, of course, in no way satisfied by this. Her glare only deepens. It's a miracle her haphazard alchemy doesn't attempt to tear him apart where he stands. "Why not? What makes you so special to him?"

Hohenheim smiles habitually, replacing his glasses. "I was his friend."

Mrs. Curtis shuts her eyes, one hand crawling to grip her temple. For a moment it seems she's been overwhelmed again, not reacting to her husband's hand on her shoulder. The moment lingers; long enough he almost concedes to Sig's staring. But a scarce second before he wanted to open his mouth to offer a middling concession Mrs. Curtis grits her teeth and says, "I've found someone.”

Chapter Text

It's the last day they can afford to stay in Central City. 

At least, that's what Riza insists. Hohenheim will defer to her expertise and her haste both; he knows little of warmongering and even less of hastiness. If she believes Amestris' neighbors will come with guns drawn against any survivors they happen upon, then that’s what will happen. 

Their last day. The last day Hohenheim can resurrect anyone in Central City. He has to make the most of it.

He's been fortunate, or perhaps simple statistics are at play here. Central City's population was over a million alone, after all. It's only to be expected they reach a few civilians, though the soul Mrs. Curtis—"I think we can dispense with the formalities, don't you? Call me Izumi." — has heard is a sergeant that had been off-duty on the Promised Day. Alphonse too, he's delighted to learn, managed to track down a soul within himself while he'd still been in the Gate. A friend of his and Ed's, and a former subordinate of the colonel besides.

"You're sure," Colonel Mustang demands, leaning forward eagerly when he hears the good news.

Al nods, pausing to marvel at the feeling of vertebrae and muscle at work, remembering belatedly that the man can't see. "Oh—yes. Second Lieutenant Breda, I'm sure of—ah—he's talking right now, hang on." A flutter of his hollowed eyes everyone here for this conversation capable of view appreciates. Everyone in the room is someone who knew Alphonse as a suit of armor, the rest all scattered to whatever duties Riza has set them to. "Seriously? I'm not going to say that. Okay, okay. Jeez. Sorry for this, Colonel. He said, 'I don't care that you're blind, I'm going to kick your ass the second I have hands again for getting me killed.'"

Colonel Mustang grins, the first Hohenheim's seen since meeting the man. It transmutes his whole face, giving him an air of wicked humor. It's a glimpse of who he might have been before the apocalypse brought him low. "That's no way to talk to your superior, Breda."

Al grimaces. The brief flash of teeth seems too large for his gaunt face. It isn't the first time his friends have uncharitably compared him to the mannequin creatures, nor will it be the last. Hohenheim is disappointed by his own inability to see past the similarity either. Al can't help his emaciated form anymore than those creatures could, but he was human once. Human still in his thinking, and kinder for it.

Give it time, Eftekhar remarks sourly.

"—hear sometimes," Al is saying when he tunes back to the conversation.

He has no real context for what his youngest is talking about, but it seems to satisfy Colonel Mustang for the time being. The conversation turns to planning out the next trek out of Central Command. Riza takes pen to paper with surgical precision, drawing out the most efficient route for them to collect people, supplies, and what few small keepsakes they can’t bear to leave behind. There's a brief debate on whether or not it would be easier to bring the bodies back to Central Command first and resurrect them here. It would certainly be less traumatic for them. Sciezka's hardly spoken a word since the hospital. Still, Hohenheim is hesitant at the risk of causing needless damage to the dead, or potentially even leaving pieces behind. He's been lucky so far—

Already forgetting Joan are we? Ebrahimi sneers.

—but that isn't something he wants to push.

Colonel Mustang is glad again when Hohenheim tells him he's found the soul of a man called Charlie Vonnegut, who turns out to have been a former comrade that had served under him in Ishval.

Ah, so he's the type of State Alchemist that's proud of the blood on his hands, Vadim hisses, and thousands more spit similar insults. 

He's not, Charlie insists in a moment of gasped clarity. He's a good man, I swear—ah—no, what is this? What's happening? Ah—!

Hohenheim misses whatever else Colonel Mustang says and doesn't bother asking the man to repeat himself. "Ah. There's another soldier as well, just outside the main gate. Lieutenant Colonel Storch?"

"I know him," Riza says after a beat of uncertain silence. She doesn't look up from her maps, hair pulled back high off her neck. "He was Führer Bradley's personal secretary before I was assigned to the position."

"Held hostage, more like," Colonel Mustang grumbles. He's picked up a bad habit of rubbing his eyes, as if he might rub away his blindness. "Can he be trusted?"

"It doesn't matter," Hohenheim says before Riza can reply, adding when they frown in tandem, "He either believed the Homunculus' lies or he had no knowledge of what was coming. He's as much a victim as the rest. I've found him, so I'll revive him."

You tell ‘em, Nouri cheers.

The chimeras and Greed offer themselves up as runners, carrying a pair of stretchers and bags loaded with blankets, rations, and canteens. Riza and Scar have been colluding through clenched teeth, making plans for the trip out of Amestris and across the desert, to where an unknown number of Ishvalans survive in whatever’s left of Xerxes. Scar is adamant about laying out exactly how the inevitable meeting of these two groups will go, pitiful their numbers may well both be.

“No more,” the nameless man rumbles.

“No more,” Riza agrees.

The two of them, Colonel Mustang, and Mei Chang are all that remain behind. Everyone else dares to breach the city; some of them to help in the resurrections of what few Hohenheim can save, the rest to their homes to gather various belongings. Izumi and Al come with Hohenheim and the runners, of course, and where Izumi goes Sig goes, and where Al goes Ed insists on being the one to push his wheelchair whenever he can muster the stability. It would be slow going regardless, but with them in tow the whole day is sacrificed on a flinching whim. Hohenheim can't bear to refuse his sons a thing, however, not after everything that's happened.

Lieutenant Colonel Anton Storch is revealed to be a thin, hawkish sort of man once Hohenheim has healed his body. It feels theatrical, to perform what is by definition a miracle with so many witnesses. Their eyes are heavy stones. His shoulders stoop beneath their weight. He dreads the day this all becomes yet another story of him; yet more proof of the awesome power of the Western Sage. That demigod isn’t him. It’s just a fable that wears the shape of him, in the same way the Homunculus did until so recently. He’s never wanted reverence. There is nothing miraculous in what he does now. This is the closest to an apology he can muster.

Anything to assuage your guilt, Behnoosh sneers. 

He doesn’t deny that.

Lieutenant Colonel Storch’s icy grip on his wrist is confirmation enough of another success. He walks away even as the man twitches and gasps himself into consciousness. He lingers long enough to tell the chimeras the address of where the next body is and no longer. There’s no time left for kind words and gentle hands. Onto the next one.

Darius and Greed stay behind while the rest of them press on. It’s slow-going, with three of their number overwhelmed by the screaming dead more often than not. Their progress is slowed too, by the sheer number of physical dead in the streets. The smells are unbearable; the sights, unspeakable. Still, they press on.

Jerry O'Connor, 23, had been waiting tables at a restaurant less than a block from Central Command’s main entrance on the Promised Day. After the initial gasps of renewed life he buries his head in his hands and shakes.  

Wayne Mora, 54, owned a tailoring shop only a few doors down. He’d been in the middle of measuring out another man’s suit when they’d both died. He stares at his dead customer, unmoved by the plaintive reassurances the chimeras offer him.

Jessie Flynn, 53, had gone for a walk despite the city-wide order to stay indoors. She hadn’t known about the coup d'état, as she was almost entirely deaf. She didn’t own a radio and her neighborhood had been spared from the fighting that had swept through other parts of the city. She’d had no warning at all before darkness and terror had snuffed her out. 

Heather Hutchinson, 42, had been teaching in a classroom at an elementary school. There’s an unfinished multiplication table on the chalkboard and 20 dead children in the room they carry her restored body from. Reviving her in the hall is the only kindness Hohenheim can give her.

Elwyn Ruiz, 26, had been on her way home from Central University. She's already won over many of Hohenheim’s friends with her wry sense of humor in the wake of unimaginable atrocity. They’re sorry to see her go from him, but happy that she will be able to live a full life. Her eyes immediately well over with tears when she breathes again, but she pulls Hohenheim into a ferocious hug and whispers, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” into his ear.

Leoni Blythe, 80, weeps the way all old men do—soft, befuddled, tired—when Hohenheim and his friends clarify the truth of what’s befallen his soul. He asks if there’s any possibility left of Heaven for him, or if this Hell is all that he deserves. It takes time to convince him that he isn’t in the Hell his faith warned him of.

Oh, he begs. Please. Please don’t leave me like this. I’ve done the best I could in my life—at least, I think I have. Haven’t I? Please, sir, if there’s an escape from this—suffering—I want it, I’ll do anything, anything you like, please, sir—

Don’t, Hohenheim implores. Just a few minutes, and you’ll live again.

Thank you. Oh, thank you.

Steven Lang, 70, doesn’t weep, for which Hohenheim is selfishly grateful for. Once he understands what has happened he's calm, accepting, understanding. He isn’t a religious man and therefore finds a strange peace in the idea of oblivion. He asks for his soul to be used in the saving of someone younger, someone more deserving, and in exchange only asks that Hohenheim go to his home, find the urn where his wife’s ashes have sat for seven years, and scatter them. 

Of course, Hohenheim promises. Anything. Anything at all.

That’s all, Steven whispers. That's all I ask. Thank you.

The hardest is Aiden Benson, 10. Hohenheim tries to keep his eyes averted from the other slumped shapes, bloated and glistening in the late morning sunlight pouring in through the kitchen window, but the damage is done. The boy sobs before he’s even opened his eyes. Jerso is the one to scoop him up, murmuring the soft sympathies only someone competent with children can muster. Zampano hides his own paternal grief behind one hand as he waves them out the door.

The last three on the list—Charlie Vonnegut, Denny Brosch, and Heymans Breda—were all soldiers, and happened to have died in the same place. Central Radio is, per the well-marked map Riza had pushed into his hands, only six blocks away if they follow 3rd street. Unfortunately damage from the earthquakes that rocked the city on the Promised Day tore a corner deli down to a heap of rubble and the rest of the street is blocked by a three-car pile up. They have to backtrack some distance to detour down a sun-splashed alleyway. Once the stifling silence of their surroundings has been deadened by high brick walls Ed angles Al’s wheelchair close enough to ask, “That’s what, seven souls you’ve destroyed so far? You goin’ for a baker’s dozen today?”

“Brother," Al hisses, mortified.

What a little bastard, Sephiri marvels to the delight of entirely too many.

Hohenheim sighs. “That’s seven I’ve saved as well."

"Yeah, yeah, 'life for life,' I've heard the spiel from—" He waves his hand vaguely toward his temple, metal fingers flashing, "—all of 'em, I think. Maybe. Point is, I'm trying to figure out how you—how you're swallowing your own sales pitch so easily—"

Al reaches up to swat Ed. "Stop it."

"I'm just saying—"

"Shut up, Ed," Izumi snaps.

The boys both flinch and fall silent.

When he looks back he sees Izumi's face is covered almost entirely by her hands, fingernails dragging prickly crimson lines down her forehead. Overwhelmed again. Sig meets his eyes, one broad arm wrapped around her. Time for another stop. Ed watches Izumi slump bonelessly in Sig's arms, a miserable downturn to his mouth. Al twists to look as well for a moment, then shuts his eyes and faces forward again. His thin hands strangle each other in his blanketed lap.

Give them something, Hohenheim, Rudaki says. They want to trust their father, but you're still such an unknown to them. You can't keep them at arm's length anymore.

They were never made of glass, Galamian now. And now they're as durable as you are.

Be kind, Ganji reminds him.

"Sadegh," Hohenheim says, waiting until they look up at him with matched confusion. They both wrinkle their noses the same way Trisha did. "Nazanin. Golshan. Bibi. Mari. Hassani. And Qolam. That's who I've used so far today. They were tired of this existence, despaired of ever defeating the Homunculus, and wanted to do something good with their final deaths. They offered themselves up to save those people, so I used them."

Ed drops his gaze, grimacing. It's Al who asks, "Who were they?"

A good boy, Fardin murmurs.

The both of them are, Mojgan corrects. Trisha and Pinako raised them well.

Hohenheim hesitates, and in the absence of answering his friends whisper eagerly. They remind him of the little details; the bleak confessions, the idle gossip, the fragile sincerities all shared over the centuries. Favorite foods and colors, skylines and songs, sleepy mornings and late nights rife with laughter. Each and every one of them were human once, and infinitely complicated. There’s no easy way to summarize a person without reducing them to a handful of words; meaningless, cold, easily forgotten.

A handful of words is better than nothing, Namjoo tells him. Better than only a name, spoken of in past tense.

True enough. 

"Sadegh was a physician. I knew Nazanin when she was alive. She was a musician in the Royal Court. Golshan owned a textile shop, handling the business while her husband rotted himself with drink. Bibi was only six years old. She wanted to travel the world when she grew up. Mari wasn’t of Xerxes; it was her first time out of Ishval. Hassani was a priest. Qolam was one of the brigands that helped carve out the nationwide transmutation circle.” 

Al and Ed share a complicated, inscrutable look. Ed's metal hand creaks on the handle of the wheelchair. “Who… who are you going to use for Lieutenant Breda and Sergeant Brosch?”

Voices clamor, thousands crying out for any number of reasons; outrage, desperation, and grief most of all. Hohenheim shuts his eyes. “I don’t know. So many of them have given up now. It’s... difficult to pick one without feeling guilty for….” For picking wrong. For picking one over another. For picking at all. For feeling joy in the success, pride in a job well done. The audacity of his happiness sickens him.

He looks to Izumi, a shuddering ragdoll with red light melting the cobblestones to slag beneath her feet. He looks to Sig, years older than her and growing older with every passing second while she remains fixed in place. They’ll have years together, decades if they’re lucky. And then?

Well, that will be one more thing she will be unfortunate enough to have in common with him.