#fic diverging paths

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

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[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [Eleven] [Twelve] [Thirteen] [AO3]

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Fourteen

Mustang raced down the hospital corridors towards Hawkeye’s room, anxious to bring her up to speed on everything that had happened in the last day. He’d been loath to leave her the first time, but once she was with the doctors and in far more capable hands than his, there was nothing that he could do to help her. He knew his time would be better spent going back and continuing his search for the Elric brothers rather than just sitting around waiting for news of his lieutenant; who knew what might be happening to the Elrics at the hands of the homunculi?

To that end he’d gathered the rest of the team and pretty much gone door-to-door throughout the entire warehouse district until he had found someone who had seen their motley crew entering into the warehouse that they had indeed come out of. 

As grateful as he was for the brothers’ continued safety and for the information that the brothers and Hohenheim’s homunculi had given him, the ramifications of it all were still stupefying and he was having trouble contending with the massive scope of it all. 

He needed to see Hawkeye, and as much as he told himself it was because she needed to know everything that he and the rest of his team now knew, he knew that deep down, he just wanted to see for himself that she was all right. The doctors had reported that she would be all right but would have to keep the weight off her injured leg until it healed fully, but he still wanted the reassurance of being able to speak to her.

He pulled up short as he reached her hospital room; although he wasn’t entirely surprised to find a guard standing outside, he was definitely surprised to see the rank stripes and braid of Bradley’s personal guard rather than a common soldier. Something was wrong, and Mustang felt his veins turn to ice. He knew what Bradley really was. Hawkeye knew what Bradley really was. If Bradley knew that they knew…

The door opened and the Fuhrer himself came out.

“Ah, Colonel Mustang. I wondered if I might be seeing you here soon. I’m afraid Lieutenant Hawkeye won’t be allowed any further visitors today; she needs her rest, after all. Oh, don’t worry, she’s perfectly safe, and as well as can be considering her condition.”

For a terrible moment, Mustang wondered at the implication of that statement, and it was only the glimpse of Riza propped up in bed and very much conscious before the door swung shut behind Bradley that kept him from thinking that the Fuhrer had gone as far as personally assassinating her. 

“I was hoping to speak to you, Mustang,” Bradley continued. “Come, walk with me to my office. There’s much that you and I need to discuss, especially concerning the lieutenant. As I’m sure you’re aware, her condition is rather precarious at the moment.”

The implication was more than clear this time. Hawkeye’s life was in the balance, and if Mustang wanted to ensure her safety, then he would have to toe the line to avoid a tragic medical accident. He didn’t say anything, simply falling into step beside the Fuhrer and waiting to see what would happen next.  

Nothing more was said as they made their way through the hospital corridors and out into the main command complex, but they attracted more than a few looks from the staff and other soldiers milling around and talking. Mustang already knew his reputation as an upstart rising through the ranks far too quickly for comfort, and it was one that he had always taken easily and occasionally revelled in, letting people think what they want whilst he was safe in the knowledge that one day he would be leading this country, and then they would see just what he was capable of. 

He didn’t stop to wonder what they would be thinking about when they saw him with the Fuhrer now. Right now, national reforms were the last thing on his mind. Right now, all he wanted to do was make sure that he and Hawkeye both got out of this encounter alive. 

They reached Bradley’s office and the Fuhrer indicated for him to sit. There was already a tray with tea waiting -  Mustang noted grimly that there were two extra cups. Bradley had evidently been waiting for him to play his hand and try to get in to see Hawkeye. 

He wondered who the third cup was for. He knew that Bradley was a homunculus, and he knew that the other homunculi worked for a higher master. It was likely that Bradley did too, and not for the first time, the idea that the most powerful man in the country was merely a puppet made him shiver. All the same, he was intrigued to meet this mysterious man behind the curtain face-to-face. 

“There are several things that we need to discuss,” Bradley began. “Firstly, the squad that you brought with you from Eastern, Colonel. I think that their talents have been wasted here in Central, so I have taken steps to have them reassigned to places where their expertise will be of most use. Lieutenant Hawkeye, of course, will be assigned to desk duty after her release from the hospital whilst she continues to recover from her injury. Naturally, in order to keep her out of harm’s way, a change of role was also necessary for her. She will be far safer working within Central Command as my personal attache.”

Mustang said nothing. He knew exactly what this was, and there was no use in drawing attention to the fact. They were cutting off his support, scattering his loyal subordinates to the four winds in the hope that it would scupper any resistance against the status quo that he could muster before it even began. He held Bradley’s eye levelly, refusing to show any kind of emotion at the news. They might be leaving him alone, but he’d find a way. He’d just have to be clever about it. And after all, Hughes was still out there somewhere, nice and safe and dead, ready to work behind the scenes wherever he was needed. 

“This brings me on to the second point.” Bradley leaned forward over steepled fingers, and it took every ounce of Mustang’s self-control not to smack him one in the face. “I am sure that I don’t need to remind you that the lieutenant would not have been injured if you had not been looking into things that are none of your concern, Colonel. I already warned the Elric brothers and Brigadier General Hughes not to look any further into what they had uncovered, and we all know how that turned out for Hughes. I suggest that if you want to avoid meeting the same fate, you keep your nose out of where it does not belong, and you warn the Elric brothers to do so as well.”

Mustang fumed silently for a while, gathering his thoughts, searching for anything that he could use to his advantage and finding pretty much nothing. 

“Do the rest of the generals know what you are?” he asked eventually. 

“If you’re looking for leverage or blackmail material, Mustang, you’re wasting your time.” Bradley smiled, but there was no warmth in it at all. “The upper command are all aware of my true nature, and it did not take much to convince them to join my cause. Old mortal men are greedy and predictable. All you have to do is offer what they want most in the world and they will gladly rip that world apart for you in order to achieve it.”

“But this isn’t yourcause, sir, is it?” Mustang again eyed that third teacup. “You and the other homunculi are just puppets, really, serving a higher master. So who’s the man behind the man? Who’s truly running Amestris?”

“That would be me, Colonel Mustang.”

Mustang turned at the new voice; he had not heard anyone enter the room but he certainly could not deny that there was someone else now in it. 

He was pale golden in tone, in his long hair and pale skin, like a watered-down version of Edward Elric, and he was dressed in white robes. Everything about him seemed almost to glow.

The man walked calmly towards Bradley’s desk, red alchemic lightning crackling and forming a new chair out of thin air at one end. Suddenly, it was no longer a case of the general behind the desk and the subordinate in front of it. Now the head of the country was at the head of the table, with Bradley at his right hand; the true king of Amestris on his throne. 

Mustang knew that he shouldn’t just ask ‘who are you?’ to the most powerful man in the country (if he was even a man, with alchemy so powerful that crackled like a Philosopher’s Stone, no circle, no movement, no touch), but since he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he just stared. 

“My name is unimportant,” he said, as if he’d read Mustang’s mind. “But my closest subordinates know me as Father.”

Mustang did not suppress a shudder at the implications. 

“Colonel Mustang, I think it’s time that you realised your place in this world. The events going on around you now, events that have been in motion for far longer than your very short human life span, are so large, and so all-encompassing, that you are an ant in comparison. And just as no one remembers an ant crushed underfoot, so no one will remember you when you are crushed underfoot if you stand in the road of those on the path to greatness.”

Mustang just listened. He knew what was good for him. He would not have got anywhere in his career if he didn’t know when to shut up, which was something that Hughes had always readily remarked set the two of them apart, and was the reason why Mustang would be the one to rise to the top. He would not be cowed that easily. They could take away his team, they could confine him to Central, they could go out of their way to stop him, but Mustang would not, could not, give up and let what had happened to Hughes, what had happened to Hawkeye, be in vain. He just needed a game plan. 

“You have the potential to be very valuable to our plans, Colonel Mustang, so we would quite like to keep you alive for as long as possible,” the one known as Father continued. “Just be warned, however, that we have ways of getting what we need from you.”

“I understand perfectly.”

“Good. Then there’s nothing left to say. This meeting is adjourned. Tread lightly, Colonel Mustang, and remember just how precarious your situation, and that of so many others who rely on you, is.”

Mustang was dismissed, and he waited until he was out of the building before swearing violently and setting fire to a leaf that had done nothing to deserve the treatment. Watching it crumple into ash, he sighed. There was no way that he would be able to get in and talk to Hawkeye in person, but he could send her a message. They communicated in code often enough, and it wouldn’t be anything unusual for a hospital patient to receive cards and flowers. He needed to let her know everything that was going on, and let her know that no matter what else happened, he would not be dissuaded from his course. Life would be more difficult now, but Mustang had never backed down from a challenge before, and he certainly wouldn’t back down now.

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [Eleven] [Twelve] [AO3]

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Thirteen

Tempe agreed to take them back into the catacombs to speak to Hohenheim again, and although they didn’t say exactly why they wanted to go back so soon, Ed suspected that she knew nonetheless. She didn’t question them, just guiding them through the tunnels until they reached the entrance to the homunculi’s home, still shrouded in darkness against whatever mysterious foes might lurk in the shadows. Ordinarily Ed would have probed more into that, but not today, not when there was so much more on his mind. 

Hohenheim came out of his study, looking rather perplexed to see them back again so soon, but he nonetheless directed them to the kitchen with good grace, and Tempe vanished off into one of the side rooms, inherently aware that this was a conversation that did not need third parties.

Ed and Al took a seat at the table and Hohenheim set the kettle to boil on the stove before coming over to them.

“What is it that you wanted to ask?”

Ed took a deep breath. How did he even begin? 

“We know how your homunculi were created,” he said eventually. “We know that they started as failed human transmutations, and that you pulled them into life again.”

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“We just have to know… Our mom…”

“You tried to perform human transmutation to bring her back to life.” There was no chastisement in Hohenheim’s voice, no shock or horror like they had heard before when other people had become aware of what they had done.

Ed nodded. “Could you… Did you… It was four years ago, but we were in a tiny town out in the East in the middle of nowhere…”

“Resembool,” Hohenheim said quietly. “Yes, I know it. I was there.”

Ed’s heart was beating painfully in his mouth. Chary had said that there were seven of them, and they had so far met only six. The seventh…

“You have to understand that they have no memory of their first lives,” Hohenheim continued. “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression; I don’t think that this would be the reunion that you’re hoping for.”

Ed opened his mouth to speak again, but the words died in his throat as another voice called through from the corridors, a voice that he had not heard for years but that was still achingly familiar nonetheless.

“Chary? Have you got the kettle on? I could really use some tea, it’s manic up there.”

Hohenheim looked at him and Al. “Would you like me to head her off?”

Ed couldn’t speak; he didn’t know. Did he want to meet her or not? She wouldn’t know them, and if she found out they were the ones who had brought her back and would have doomed her to living death if Hohenheim hadn’t intervened… But at the same time, all they had wanted to do was see Mom again, and now she was here, just a few steps away. 

Hohenheim took the decision, springing up and going to the door. 

“Dili, no…”

It was too late, she was already in the doorway. 

“Oh, I didn’t realise we had visitors, sorry.”

She was Mom, and yet, she wasn’t. She looked like Mom. She had the same hair colour, the same eyes, the same face and build. But she was looking at them without any kind of comprehension or recognition. Her hair was braided neatly down her back; Mom had never worn hers like that, and Mom had never worn trousers or the dark colours that this woman - Dili - was dressed in. 

It was all wrong, and yet she was Mom.

“I’ll bring you some tea, Dili,” Hohenheim said, ushering her out of the room. 

She nodded and left without another word, maybe sensing the gravity of what was going on.

“Mom,” Al whispered.

It took Ed several minutes to regain his voice. 

“Did you know?” he asked Hohenheim eventually, wishing that he didn’t sound so shellshocked. “Did you know Dili was our mom?”

“I put the pieces together,” Hohenheim said. “Because of what happened to me to turn me into what I am, I can feel when the Gate of Truth is opened and people are attempting human transmutation. That’s what lets me get to them and pull them through into life again. I felt when you two opened it, and I knew that there were two of you. I knew you had gone back to retrieve your brother’s soul. When two young alchemical prodigies with injuries consistent with a deal with Truth, from the village of Resembool, arrived in Central, it wasn’t difficult to come to the conclusion that you were the ones who had brought Diligence back, and that you were likely her children.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Hohenheim gave him a pointed look, but one that was nonetheless full of sadness.“Would it have helped? On top of everything else that was happening when we first met?”

Ed thought about it, and had to concede that Hohenheim probably had a point. On top of everything else that was happening, finding out that they had almost killed their mother a second time over and that she was now here in Central and didn’t remember them at all… 

It would not have helped.

The kettle was whistling insistently on the stove, and Hohenheim got up to make tea.

“Milk, no sugar,” Al said. “That was how Mom always took her tea.”

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes. Diligence is the same.” He smiled. “They’re still the same people underneath, the homunculi. Their personalities still bleed through, they get odd impressions of the lives that they lived before and the things that were important to them. There is a part of me that has always believed that perhaps if they met people who knew them in their first lives, it would help to jog their memories a little. It’s entirely up to you if you want to pursue that theory.” 

He brought the teapot over to the table and poured a cup for Diligence. “I’ll be back shortly, and I’ll answer any questions that you might have.”

X

Diligence was in her bedroom when Hohenheim brought her tea. The door was wide open and he knocked on the frame before entering, but he didn’t think she’d heard him. She was standing at the dresser, staring into the mirror.

“Dili?”

He put the teacup down on the dresser, and at length she turned to him.

“They’re the ones who tried to bring me back, aren’t they?” she said, her voice soft and unsure. “They’re… my children.”

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes.”

“I don’t remember them.”

“I know you don’t. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right!” Dili pressed her hands over her face as she began to cry. “They sacrificed so much to try and bring me back and I don’t know who they are!”

Hohenheim put his arms around her, not knowing the best way to comfort her. This was the first time that any of the homunculi had ever come into contact with someone who knew them in their previous life, let alone the person who had tried to bring them back. Dili leaned into his chest, letting out a shuddering sigh.

“Do you think they want to see me?” she asked eventually.

“I don’t know. I think that everything is happening very quickly, and they don’t necessarily know what they want right now. It’s one thing to perform human transmutation and have it fail, and it’s another to then meet the person you tried to transmute and thought was lost forever.” Hohenheim rubbed her back as she continued to weep. “Do you want to see them?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation. Of all the vague impressions of memory that Diligence had had since she had come into this life four years ago, the one thing that she had always been convinced of was that she had been a mother in her first life, and Hohenheim knew that the idea of having left her children alone was one that caused her no small degree of anguish. He felt sure that if they spent some time together, then Diligence’s memories would start to return and she would remember her past life more fully. 

Finally, Dili quietened and looked up at him. 

“Could you please find out what my name is, at least?”

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes, I can do that. Are you going to be all right?”

She nodded. “Yes. I think that those boys probably need a comforting presence more than I do right now. They’re just children still, and they would have been so young when they did this… I don’t want to think about the trauma they’ve been through already in their lives.”

Hohenheim didn’t know what it was that made him peck a kiss to her forehead as he left her alone with her tea. Maybe it was just because she was so grief-stricken and it was the first form of affection and reassurance that came to him, but he was never usually so tactile with anyone else. He pushed the thought away, making his way back to the kitchen. The two Elric brothers were talking quietly among themselves, falling silent when he came in.

“If you’d like a moment to yourselves…”

“No, it’s fine, thanks.” Ed took a gulp of tea, turning red when it turned out to still be too hot to drink. “It’s just strange knowing that you were there that night, whilst we were just next door at the Rockbells. You were there in Resembool rescuing Mom. What if Granny had looked out at the wrong moment and seen you?”

“I’m careful,” Hohenheim replied. “Chary and Tempe were with me to keep watch.” He paused. “I’ll leave it to you two to decide where you would like to go from here, now that you know what you wanted to know. Dili has made one request, though.”

“Yeah?”

“She would like to know what her actual name is.”

“Oh.” Ed had evidently been expecting something more difficult. “Trisha. Her name is Trisha Elric.”

“Thank you.”

It was strange, now having a name and identity to put alongside Diligence. He had known so little about her, about any of the people he had pulled out of darkness and into a second life. They had always been complete people in their own right and he would never say otherwise, but now Diligence had not only an identity, but a place in the world around them; they had found the gap that she filled.

Eventually, Ed spoke again. 

“What about the others?” he asked. “Do you know anything about their identities, too?”

Hohenheim shook his head. “No, not really. We only know what we’ve been able to piece together from the places where I found them and their own brief flashes of memory. We believe Temperance’s husband was the one to try and bring her back, and we’re fairly sure she had at least one child in her first life. Humility was the first I found; it’s so long ago now we’ll likely never find any clues. Patience’s appearance leads us to believe that they, like you two, were sired by the homunculus. Pasha was a stillborn child; since the homunculi don’t age, I had to use my Stone to age him past the point at which he died in order for him to have a fulfilling second life ”

“Brother… Do you think that Pasha could be…”

“Teacher’s child,” Ed agreed. “Did you collect Pasha in Dublith?”

Hohenheim nodded. 

“Our alchemy teacher, Izumi Curtis, had a stillborn child whom she tried to bring back with human transmutation,” Al explained. “Pasha would be her child.”

Neither of the boys spoke for a long time, and Hohenheim couldn’t blame them, not in the face of all of the revelations that they were undergoing, but the furrow in Ed’s brow betrayed a much deeper thought than simply coming to terms with the fact that Diligence was the failed human transmutation of their mother, and that they also knew who Pasha was. 

“Edward?” he ventured. “Is there anything else I can answer for you?” He didn’t ask if everything was all right. How could it be after everything that had happened? 

“I don’t know.” Ed was still deep in thought. “Something isn’t adding up and I don’t really want to think about what the implications of that might be.”

“What is it?”

“Our father… The other homunculi’s Father. Izumi holds him at least partially responsible for the chain of events that led to her performing human transmutation. He used a Philosopher’s Stone to ostensibly heal her, but then her miracle baby was stillborn. There’s a part of her that still thinks the Philosopher’s Stone was responsible for that. What I don’t understand is why he would do something like that? I mean, I can understand him causing chaos and destruction wherever he goes because that seems to be his MO, but I don’t see what purpose it would serve.” He gave a disgusted shudder. “I hate referring to him as Father. I’m just going to call him That Bearded Bastard.” He paused. “No offence to your beard.”

Hohenheim couldn’t help laughing. 

“No,” he agreed eventually. “No, I can’t see why he would do something like that either. It’s certainly a worrying development. I had always worked on the principle that our two paths and the homunculi that we brought to life were completely separate. The transmutations I had found had nothing to do with him; they were the result of complete desperation from losing a loved one. But if he’s been meddling in people’s lives like this, then it presents a very sinister picture.” He sighed. “There is another reason why I try to find the failed human transmutations when they occur. I want to try and save them, of course, but I also try to keep an eye on the people who perform human transmutation in the first place. That’s the trickier part. Those who have seen the gate of Truth possess incredible alchemic power, and they will be keys to the original homunculus’s plan.”

“Is that why the other homunculi refer to us as sacrifices?” Al asked. 

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes. Although sacrifice maybe isn’t the correct word. I think we would be more like vessels to help him accumulate the full power of Truth. He would need five in total, just as the most powerful transmutation circles have five points. You two are on his list, as am I, and from what you’ve told me, your old teacher in Dublith is also one. As of yet, I have not managed to find anyone else who has attempted to perform human transmutation and lived this long with the consequences of what Truth took from them. The people who brought back Humility and Patience will all be long dead simply from human lifespan by now, even without the potential difficulties caused by Truth. I have a feeling that Temperance and Charity’s alchemists are also deceased by now, and Chastity was pulled back using a Philosopher’s Stone, so the alchemist did not gain the knowledge of Truth in return and would therefore be useless in Homunculus’s plans. That gives me a small glimmer of hope that perhaps this terrible day can be stopped in its tracks if he does not have the requisite number of sacrifices that he needs.”

“Wait, if he needs people to perform human transmutation in order to use them as part of his plans…” Al trailed off, but the horror in his voice was clear, and as Hohenheim also realised the implications, he felt his blood chill in his veins. 

“Maybe he’s been putting people in positions where they’ll be desperate enough to perform human transmutation,” Ed whispered, putting two and two together as well. “Maybe he did make it so that Izumi’s baby would be stillborn, knowing how much she wanted a child he knew she’d be desperate enough to try human transmutation to try and bring her baby back.”

A profound silence fell in the room. Hohenheim didn’t want to believe what the boys were hypothesising, but at the same time, there was definitely evidence in their favour, and when it came to working on his grand master plan, there was nothing that Hohenheim would put past his nemesis. On the face of it, it didn’t make a lot of sense for him to be masterminding the human transmutations. He knew when the Promised Day would come, so why would he run the risk of his sacrifices dying of natural or unnatural causes before that time? Unless this was something he did regularly, just to make sure that the pool of sacrifices was always ready. There may well have been a time in the past when there had been five sacrifices simultaneously, but no longer. 

“Brother?” Al’s voice sounded so very small and young and horrified, and Hohenheim was reminded forcibly of just how young they had been when they had made that fateful decision to perform human transmutation. “Brother, he was our father. He knew us, well, he sort of knew us. He definitely knew Mom. Do you think that he did something…”

Al did not finish the sentence. Ed was shaking his head.

“No. No, he can’t have. He was gone well before she died.”

Hohenheim could tell that Ed did not believe his own words. His voice was cracking, hands trembling as he curled them into fists, pressing down hard on the kitchen table. 

“No,” he whispered to himself. “No, no he can’t have done that. He can’t have manipulated us in that way. Not when he never even met you. God, we can’t even ask Diligence, she won’t remember.”

“I’ll give you two some space to think.” Hohenheim rose from the table and stepped out of the kitchen, walking along to his study in something of a daze. Even after so many years, even after all this time of following in Homunculus’s footsteps, trying to work out his plans and plan against them… Hohenheim thought that he had his nemesis figured out, and yet even now he still found ways to surprise him with his utter cruelty and disregard for human life. 

He sank into his chair, resting his head in his hands as he stared down at the map of Amestris that now lived permanently spread out over his desk. He traced over the tracks he had taken, the places he had been to collect the human transmutations and try to pull them into a better second life; nowhere near as good and fulfilling as their first lives, but still infinitely better than what they had been doomed to before. Had the homunculus been there before him all these years, sowing the seeds of despair and destruction wherever he went?

His eyes came back to Resembool, Diligence’s birthplace and the home of the Elric brothers. Here, he felt, was where Homunculus had caused the most damage. 

When he had received his body and broken free from his flask, Homunculus had wasted no time in enjoying the freedom that his new shape could bring him. Hohenheim had always kept an eye on his movements, even as he himself kept to the shadows, keeping away from the humanity that he no longer deserved to be a part of. At first, it seemed that Homunculus was revelling in all of the pleasures of his newfound humanity, but it soon became clearer that what he was really doing was testing experiences. Everything that Hohenheim had expressed an interest in doing once he was freed from slavery, everything that had intrigued this strange being with no concept of humanity or human form, he was trying out, but as intrigued as he was, he was never satisfied, moving on from things and discarding them as soon as he had tired of them. Hohenheim was certain that Patience’s mother was someone that he had tired of, casting her aside unaware of the child he’d left in her belly. That begged the question why he had then stayed with Trisha Elric for so long; long enough to get her pregnant, see her through the pregnancy, and get her pregnant again six months later. He had spent just over two years with her, and that was the longest he had stayed anywhere outside of Central City where his master plan was taking shape. What was the reasoning behind that? Especially since, by this time, he would have created all of his own homunculi, removing his vices in the bid to become a perfect being. Lust would have been separated from him long before he met Trisha Elric, so it must have been something other than primal desire that kept him with her for so long. 

As nightmarish as the thought was, the only explanation that he could see was Ed’s hypothesis. He had sought out Trisha and sired the Elric brothers specifically to then manipulate them into becoming sacrifices via human transmutation. 

There was a soft tap on the study door, and Tempe’s voice came through the wood. “Hohenheim?”

He did not respond at first, caught up in the mire of his thoughts until Tempe knocked again. 

“Hohenheim, please come out. I can’t cope with this many mental crises going on at once.”

Hohenheim shook himself, taking a deep breath and making his way to the door. It had got to the stage where he could no longer hide himself away as he had been doing for so long. The endgame was approaching and he would have to take an active role now. The Elrics had just had their world shattered, and they needed help. Hohenheim knew that he was probably not the person best placed to help them, but he would never be able to live with himself if he didn’t do what he could.

The boys were silent when he returned to the kitchen, and he got the impression that they had been so ever since he had left, the sheer enormity of everything too much for words. Diligence was hovering in the corridor, torn between wanting to go in and offer what comfort she could, and fearing making things worse.

“Thank you,” Ed said eventually. “Thank you for being honest with us.”

“It’s the least I can do, and you deserve the truth after everything that’s happened to you throughout your lives. I’m sorry that I can’t provide the answers you want.”

“They were the answers we needed,” Al said. “Whether we wanted them or not doesn’t really matter.” He paused. “I just have one more question, but I don’t know whether you’ll be able to answer it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Is… Is Diligence mad at us?”

“No, of course not. Why would she be?”

“We brought her back - wrong - and if you hadn’t been there, then she’d have been stuck in that mangled, messed up body, buried alive forever. We should have left well alone.”

“No.” Hohenheim shook his head emphatically. “No, I can say categorically that she’s not mad at you.”

He heard Dili’s soft sob from outside the door, and he knew that the brothers had heard it too. 

“She’s not mad. She’s just so sad that she can’t remember you after everything that you suffered at the hands of Truth to try and bring her back.”

Al nodded his understanding, and the visible tension that Ed had been holding within his frame for the entire length of their visit finally started to ebb away. 

“I don’t think I’m ready to meet her properly. Not yet. It’s just too much right now. But in the future, once everything’s had time to sink in.” 

“Of course,” Hohenheim said. “Just let us know. We’re not going anywhere.”

“We will. Thanks again for everything.” Ed paused. “And please tell Diligence that her garden is beautiful. Mom loved her garden, and I can tell that she created that garden in the warehouse that we came in through.”

Hohenheim smiled as they stood and he went to let them out of the catacombs; Dili had vanished out of the corridor but Tempe popped her head out of her door to take them back to the surface. 

“I’ll be sure to let her know.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [Eleven] [AO3]

==

Twelve

“Where have you been? Who are these people?”

Ed and Al were back in their hotel room a few blocks from Central Command with the colonel; after learning of Fu and Lan Fan’s current location safe in the doctor’s house, Ling had gone to check in with them. 

Whilst it was certainly amusing watching the colonel work himself into a state of near-apoplexy as he paced up and down the room, Ed thought that he should probably give some kind of explanation so that everyone was on the same page. Considering the vastness of the conspiracy that was going on around them just a couple of streets away in Central Command - at least Mustang had not questioned why they didn’t want to go back to his office and preferred to debrief him in a more neutral setting - it made sense for them to get as many people on side as possible, and leaving Mustang in the dark wouldn’t help. 

Ed launched into the explanation, trying to get through all the salient points as fast as possible, with Al adding in helpful interjections. By the time he’d finished, Mustang had stopped pacing and had sunk down heavily onto the sofa, looking as if he was about to pass out. 

“Right.” He seemed to regain conscious thought in that moment, leaning forward and resting his chin on his fists, staring into the middle distance with a furrowed brow. For a long time, he didn’t speak, but finally he addressed them. 

“Are you sure that this Hohenheim character can be trusted? And these homunculi who apparently aren’t related to the ones that attacked Hughes?”

“I was doubtful at first,” Ed admitted. “But when I think about it and put all the pieces together of everything that’s happened up until now, it does all fit, and I don’t think that he has any reason to lie to us.”

Mustang sighed. “It makes you wonder why he hasn’t come forward before. If he really has been hiding out under Central Command for all these years, watching and waiting as this vast conspiracy was put in place, why didn’t he do something sooner?”

Ed shrugged. “Who would he have told? He’s one guy with seven homunculi that we know of, going up against the entire Amestrian military for all he knows. I think it was the attack on Hughes that kind of spurred him on, and honestly, I don’t think that he would have got as involved as he had if Gluttony hadn’t eaten me and Ling and Patience hadn’t decided to take us into the catacombs to get Hohenheim to get us out. I think that all of them would have stayed in the shadows doing what they’ve been doing for probably hundreds of years. Now, though, our paths have crossed and he knows that he has allies on the surface that can help him bring down his doppelgänger.”

Our father, he thought to himself. He hadn’t gone into that aspect of the entire thing, not wanting to poke at that still-gaping wound and especially not wanting to give Mustang any kind of leverage in that respect.

“Would you be able to arrange a meeting with him?” Mustang asked. 

Ed grimaced. “I get the impression he doesn’t really do ‘outside’ much, and I don’t think that he’d want you to go to him, if that makes sense.”

“No offence,” Al added quickly. Ed just raised an eyebrow; he’d meant it with every offence.

“We could probably arrange a meeting with the other homunculi, though,” Al suggested. “They’d be able to pass the message on. One of them’s going to come by later to drop Ed’s things off. We could ask them then.”

Mustang nodded. “Yes. Please do. We can reconvene in the cabin where we convened before.”

“Considering everything that happened the last time we were there, including, you know, me being eaten, is that really wise?”

“No, but it’s the only place we’ve got where we can be sure of being away from military surveillance,” Mustang pointed out.

Ed grudgingly conceded the point; with the extent of the corruption in the military being completely unknown, they were rather limited in their resources. 

“Ok. We’ll see what the homunculi say.”

The meeting was adjourned and Mustang left them alone in the hotel room to await the arrival of Ed’s laundry. 

It was Patience who arrived, just after dark. Ed couldn’t decide if they’d spent too much time with Ling and therefore got the idea of entering the room via the window from him, or if it was a coincidence, but the fact that both of them arrived at the same time and not through the traditional method of the door was suspicious. 

“Well, it’s certainly worth a shot,” Patience said once they’d explained the situation and Mustang’s request. “I’m not sure exactly what we can add, but we’ll speak with him and pool our knowledge. I’ll get Tempe to come too. She’s the diplomatic one.”

They bounded out of the window again, off to go and make preparations, and Ed turned to Ling. 

“How’s Lan Fan?”

“She’s about as well as can be expected. The doctor’s looking after her, he says that she should be ok to move once her fever’s gone down. There’s not much more we can do until that happens.” Ling sighed. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Lan Fan made that choice, but I still keep expecting Fu to be mad at me for letting it happen. I know that they’re my bodyguards, not the other way around, but they’re still my people, and as Emperor it would be my duty to protect them.”

Ed couldn’t really help with Ling’s crisis in that regard; he had no idea what to say that would reassure him or comfort him.

“Lan Fan made the choice,” Al said. “It’s like you said. She knew what she was doing. And it’s ok to feel horrible that she made that choice, but you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. It wasn’t your choice, so you don’t have to feel guilty about it.” He looked over to Ed. “It’s a little like when I lost my body when we performed the human transmutation. Ed felt guilty about me losing my body for a long, long time, but it was my choice to perform the human transmutation with him. There was nothing for him to feel guilty over, and I know that Lan Fan would say the same thing about your situation if she were here. I don’t blame Ed, and she wouldn’t blame you.”

Ling gave a wan smile. “Thanks, Al.” He sighed and straightened up. “Well, I guess we should be making tracks to meet up with the others at the cabin. I wonder what Mustang can tell us?”

“Who knows? But Ling…” Ed paused. “You know, I do know a really fantastic automail engineer down in Rush Valley who could make Lan Fan a new arm.”

Ling gave a sudden laugh. “You know, I had completely forgotten about Winry. Thank you, I’ll see what Fu and Lan Fan say.”

Like Patience, he hopped out of the window and off into the night, and Al sighed.

“Do you think we can get anyone to use the door like a normal person?”

X

The convention at the cabin proved useful; although it did not really tell them a lot more than they already knew, apart from confirming that Lust was indeed deceased at the colonel’s hand, and that Hawkeye was currently in the hospital recovering from that encounter, it at least made sure that everyone had the same information. Mustang had left soon after the briefing had finished, but the others had stayed a little longer so as not to attract too much attention to themselves. Al wasn’t surprised that Ed had fallen asleep. 

Al didn’t intend to eavesdrop, not really, but he couldn’t help that he could hear what Tempe and Ling were saying in the other room. People tended to forget that he didn’t sleep at all, let alone on the same schedule that Ed did, and he didn’t think that Tempe and Ling were talking about anything private. 

“I don’t claim to know a lot about homunculi, and I know I’ll be hard-pressed to get one to take back to Xing with me,” Ling was saying, “but I am still intrigued about how you all came to be. A homunculus is an artificially created human with a Philosopher’s Stone at the core. I can gather that much, but how are you created?” There was a long pause. “If that’s not an insensitive question.”

“It’s not insensitive, and I don’t mind talking about it,” Tempe said. “It happened long enough ago that there’s no kind of trauma there. It’s just that it’s a complicated answer. There are two groups of homunculi involved in this grand story. Those of us who were created by Hohenheim are created differently to those who were created by the one they call Father. Their creation is simple - he uses his own Philosopher’s Stone and alchemy to create a brand new homunculus from scratch; they are all parts of him, in a way.”

“I see. That makes a gruesome kind of sense, in a way. And you and your family?”

“Hohenheim didn’t create us, but he did give us life. We were created by other alchemists, the side effect of transmutations that went… wrong.”

“Human transmutation, you mean?”

“Yes.”

If Al had had a beating heart inside his armour, it would have stopped right there and then, and he couldn’t help the gasp that escaped him. He hoped that Tempe and Ling hadn’t heard it. They didn’t seem to. 

“Human transmutation is impossible,” Tempe continued, “in that it’s always doomed to fail. You can’t bring someone back from the dead, at least, not without a Philosopher’s Stone, and even then, you need to know how to use it properly. The equivalent exchange needed to pull a human soul out of the afterlife and put it back into a body is at least another human soul, but it’s more complicated than that. I don’t know the mechanics. I’m not an alchemist. All I know is that an alchemist tried to bring me back. They had the ingredients for a human body, they had a link to my soul, and they tried to put all the pieces together, but they failed. I had a body - not that it could really be called a human body, it was just a mish-mash of parts at that point - and my soul was inside it. But I wasn’t alive. Not really.”

“And Hohenheim gave you life?”

“Yes. He gave me the Philosopher’s Stone that gives me life from his own blood. All of us: Humility, Chary, Pasha, Dili, Chastity, Patience and me. We were failed transmutations once, and Hohenheim rescued us and took us in.”

“I see.” 

There was a long silence, but Al didn’t take any notice of how long it dragged on. 

Mom. They had tried to bring Mom back and it had failed. They’d had all of the ingredients of a human body, they had a link to her soul, they had tried to put the pieces together… He thought of the abomination on the cellar floor, a twisted mass of bones and flesh. That was Mom. Her soul was inside it. And she wasn’t alive, but she wasn’t really dead either… What if she was still there? Buried and rotting but with her soul still inside her makeshift body…

Ling was speaking again. 

“So there could be more of you out there?”

“I’m sure that there are more failed transmutations out there. But homunculi like us? I doubt it. Not unless there’s someone else like Hohenheim out there. He doesn’t always get to people in time.”

Al was frozen in place with horror. Mom.

“So what happened to the people who tried to bring you back?” Ling asked. 

“We don’t know.” Patience was the one to speak this time; Al had almost forgotten that they were there at all. They sounded sad, so quiet and far from their usual self. “We don’t remember our first lives. We know that we had them, and we know that we were loved enough in them for someone to want to bring us back, but we don’t know who those people were.”

Al didn’t know if that made it better or worse. Mom might still be out there as a homunculus, but she wouldn’t remember who they were. She wouldn’t remember that she was their mom. She wouldn’t remember anything.

In the other room, the conversation seemed to have come to a close, and the cabin fell into silence for a long time. Al did not dare to move and break it, and he didn’t think that he could have done even if he had wanted to, still paralysed by the implications of everything that he had just heard. 

It was light by the time Ed woke the next morning, and as soon as he was compos mentis again, his brow furrowed, picking up on Al’s distress even though Al himself hadn’t spoken or moved.

“Al? What’s wrong?”

It took Al several attempts to make the words come out as he explained everything that he had overheard between Patience, Tempe and Ling overnight. For a long time, Ed said nothing, just staring into the middle distance, but the expression on his face said it all, the same horror that Al was feeling. They did that to Mom. She might be trapped in that half-life, half-death, or she might, just maybe, have been rescued by Hohenheim and become a homunculus. 

Eventually, he chanced to speak.

“Ed? I think we ought to go back to Hohenheim and ask him about Mom. I mean, at least we would know either way, right?”

“I guess…” Ed didn’t seem so convinced. “But what if it turns out he didn’t get to her in time and she’s trapped in that body and suffering?”

“There might still be something that he could do,” Al pressed. “I can’t take not knowing.”

After another long silence, Ed nodded, setting his features into a grim mask of determination. 

“Ok. Let’s go and see what he says.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [AO3]

==

Eleven

“The Elrics have gone now. Sorry to have kept you in hiding whilst they were here, but with everything else that’s happening at the moment, I think that this would have been a little bit too much.”

“All right, thank you for letting me know, Tempe.”

“How is he?”

“A couple of broken ribs, but he’ll be fine.”

“Thank goodness for that. How are you holding up, May?”

“I’m ok, Miss Tempe, thank you. And thank you for dinner.”

“You’re welcome. Oh, I think he’s waking up, Tim.”

Scar wrestled himself back into consciousness. His chest ached and his head was pounding, but he was definitely alive, even if he had no idea where he was or how he got here. He touched the bandages around his chest, both arms still intact. 

“Welcome back.”

The two strangers who swam into view in the corner were Amestrian, and he was here in pain and bandages, and all of a sudden he was back in Ishval, back in the field hospital with Fahim’s arm attached to him and the Rockbell girl’s parents and…

“Mr Scar! Don’t sit up, you’ll hurt yourself.”

May popped into his field of vision, and he calmed down a little. He was not in Ishval. He was in Central, and May was here and she was safe. 

“How are you feeling?”

The man came over to him, and as he reached out to check the bandages hadn’t come undone with his sudden movement, Scar saw the telltale tattoos of a State Alchemist on his palms. He smacked the man’s arm away.

“Who are you? Where are we?”

“I’m Dr Tim Marcoh, and we’re under Central City.”

“You’re a State Alchemist.”

“I was; I’m no longer licensed.”

Their eyes met then, and Scar felt the unadulterated rage boil up in his veins, reaching out with his right hand almost on instinct until he saw May out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped short. Marcoh followed his eye-line and straightened up. 

“Tempe, Mr Scar needs to speak to me alone, could you take May outside please?”

“Of course. Come on, love.”

May and the woman, Tempe, left the room, and Marcoh kept holding Scar’s gaze, his face calm and accepting. 

“I was a State Alchemist, and I was in Ishval,” he said levelly. “I was responsible for the deaths of many of your kinsmen, and you have every right to kill me for my crimes.”

He would have done it. It would have been so easy. He could see now that the doctor wouldn’t put up a fight but would accept his fate quietly, but he could also see that he wasn’t actively seeking death. He had put the choice in Scar’s hands, but he had not actively sought out this confrontation. 

“How did I get to be here?”

“You had collapsed in the tunnels after the homunculus Envy tried to squeeze the life out of you. Miss Chang found you, then Shao May went looking for help and found me. I brought you back here. We’re currently somewhere under Central Command.”

Scar took a moment to process this, then turned back to Marcoh. “What did you do to my people in Ishval?”

“I was involved in a project seeking to create the Philosopher’s Stone. The process requires the sacrifice of human lives to provide power to the Stone, and I sacrificed Ishvalan lives.” Marcoh sighed. “The stone that I created ended up in the hands of a State Alchemist named Kimblee, the Crimson Lotus Alchemist; and once that happened, well, the massacre that followed was swift and brutal.”

Scar remembered the blast that had killed his family and given him this arm of vengeance, the sheer raw power that could not have been natural. That must have been Kimblee. He looked at Marcoh again. It would be so easy to destroy him, but, uncharacteristically, Scar hesitated. He thought of May outside, and the woman who had been tending to his wounds with Marcoh. They at least were innocent, and he did not want to have to explain his actions when they came back to find blood and death here. Especially not to May. 

The doctor’s words floated back to him. You have every right to kill me for what I did. It was the same thing that he had said to the Rockbell girl, just a day ago. She had hesitated too, then, and they were both still alive after the encounter. Something made him want to deliberate a little more before he delivered down judgement. He remembered the Ishvalan Elder who had taken care of him in Eastern City. There is no forgiveness for wanton murder, but we can still endure.

“How do you live with yourself?” he asked Marcoh instead.

“Because not living is the easy way out.” Marcoh sighed. “It would be very easy to end it all, but it would not be a fitting show of remorse. My death, especially at my own hand, would not bring back those I killed. It might bring catharsis to their families-” he nodded to Scar, “but it would not do anything constructive to make up for the lives I took. It would not help people. It would not be an atonement. So, although not living would be far easier, I choose to live, and to do what I can to try and atone for my crimes in a way that is helpful and constructive.”

“By hiding under Central Command?”

“I haven’t always been here. I was working in a village in the east until a few months ago. Circumstances conspired to bring me here. Tempe’s family has been very gracious in letting me stay as long as I have, but I like to think that I’m helping them in return for the safety they have given me. Perhaps, once you meet them, you’ll be able to help them too. There is something very wrong in Amestris, and there has been since long before the Ishvalan Genocide.”

Scar did not want to think too much into what Marcoh was implying, but he was reminded of May and her constant affirmation that something was not right in this country, that there were souls buried deep in the ground.

There was a knock at the door, and Marcoh looked to Scar. He nodded slowly. There was a stay of execution for a while, but he remained undecided on what Marcoh’s fate would be. It would be courteous to listen to what his hosts had to say, if nothing else. 

Marcoh opened the door and a tall man with golden hair and eyes stepped into the room. 

“I’m glad you’re awake,” he said to Scar. “How are you feeling?”

Scar just stared at the newcomer, trying to pinpoint him. He had only seen that colouring on two people before; Edward Elric and the stranger who had stepped in and fought with him back in Eastern City before the military had arrived to break up the fight, saving Edward’s life in the process. Although he had not really paid it any mind at the time, there was something about this man that made it clear he was not Amestrian. 

The Xerxians were supposed to have been touched by the gold of the sun before they had been wiped out, and May had kept chattering on about the Sage of the West, the Golden One who had codified Xingese alchemic practices into the alkahestry she now used. 

He pushed the thought aside, settling for more immediate questions instead. 

“Who are you people?”

“My name is Van Hohenheim, and I am an alchemist. You’re amongst friends here, there’s no reason to fear. All of us have been living in the shadows of society for a long time. I trust you are not too shaken from your encounter with Envy?”

“I’ll survive.”

“I can help with the pain in your chest, if you’d like. I think you have some broken ribs there.”

Unsure of the man’s intentions, Scar nonetheless nodded. Hohenheim reached out and gently pressed one hand against his ribcage; there was a spark of alchemy and bright white pain for a second, the same as when May used her alkahestry on him, but then the pain was gone, and he could feel that the ribs were no longer sore. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’d like to ask you about your array, if I may. I’ve been speaking to Miss Chang about her alkahestry, and from what she’s told me, I think that your array may be a mixture of elements from both Amestrian alchemy and Xingese alkahestry.”

Scar’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I think that the fate of the country might rest on it.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [AO3]

==

Ten

“Al’s right.” As much as Ed really didn’t want to have to deal with the fallout of everything that he’d just been told, he knew that they needed to pass on this information if they stood any chance of warning Mustang about what was going on above him in the military and gaining his help in going up against the mastermind behind it all. He stood up. “We should go and tell the colonel. And, you know, let him know that we’re ok after being eaten.”

“Are you sure that you wouldn’t like to stay a little while?” Temperance asked. “I mean, no offence, but you’re covered in blood. We might be underground but we do have functioning plumbing and a washing machine. You can freshen up.”

Ed looked down at himself and his blood-saturated clothing. Maybe that wouldn’t be quite such a bad idea.

“You can borrow some of Patience’s clothes,” Temperance continued. “They have an… extensive wardrobe.”

“Yes.” Patience looked him up and down critically. “Yes, I think I would be the best fit. Pasha’s fashion sense is a tad too young and Hohenheim’s pants would drown your feet.”

“Are you calling me short?!”

“No, I’m calling Hohenheim tall, now onwards, to a military-scale assault on my wardrobe and Central City’s hot water supply. That’s a definite upside to our existence down here, we don’t have to pay for utilities. Or rent.”

“I was wondering about that, actually,” Al said as they followed Patience through the corridors and found themselves in a well-appointed bathroom. “Where do you guys get money from?”

“Well, Hohenheim’s been around a long time and although he’s an airhead, once he met up with Humility and yours truly, we managed to initiate him into the ways of investment banking…”

Al and Patience left Ed alone in the bathroom, and for a while he just stood there, staring at the pipes, still not quite able to take in everything that had happened. In a way he felt like everything he’d ever known had just been turned on its head. 

Eventually he shook himself, trying to galvanise himself into movement, and he started the shower. By the time he came out, he found a neatly folded pile of clothes on the linen hamper. To say that he was sceptical of Patience’s style would be an understatement, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when their other clothes had been spirited away to be laundered. Dressed, he made his way out into the corridors again and realised he had no idea where he was going. Even though the tunnels were much more homely than any ordinary catacombs that weren’t being occupied by a bunch of homunculi, they were still a labyrinth. He wandered back in the vague direction he had come, listening to voices getting closer and closer until he could make out Al and Ling talking, and he peered around the nearest open door. He had found the kitchen, and in it, Al and Ling, the latter of whom was still stuffing his face with what looked like an entire chocolate and raspberry pie. Ed’s stomach growled. 

“Hey Ed. Come and try some of this pie, it’s amazing. Chary’s a great cook.”

“Chary?”

A figure who had previously had their head stuck in the pantry backed out and waved genially to Ed; he recognised her as the woman Al had seen in Liore and then again in Dublith, and then again at Hughes’s funeral.

“Take a seat and dig in, you must be hungry after all your escapades, if your companion’s appetite is anything to go by.”

Ed snorted. “Ling’s appetite is astronomical even when he hasn’t been trapped in a failed gate of truth for hours.” Still, he couldn’t deny that he was hungry, and he pulled up a chair at the table, taking the offered piece of pie. 

“You’re a homunculus too?” he asked Chary.

“Yes. All of us are, apart from Hohenheim, who’s… unique.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Seven, at the moment.”

Ed didn’t really know what to make of the ‘at the moment’. It made it sound like another homunculus could pop into being at a second’s notice, and he was really not ready to know how homunculi came into being in the first place. 

There was the pattering of feet in the corridor outside, and Ed was rather alarmed when a small child raced into the kitchen.

“Patience said we had guests!” The kid climbed onto a free chair at the table and gawped at Alphonse from under a curtain of dark hair. “Woah.”

“Pasha, it’s rude to stare.” Chary brought the refilled teapot over to the table and took a seat between Ed and the newest arrival. “Sorry about this. He doesn’t get out all that much.”

Still discomfited by Pasha’s appearance, Ed leaned in and murmured to Chary.

“Is he…”

“Yes. Like I said, we all are.”

“Right.” The fact that homunculi could be so… smallwas perhaps even more disconcerting than the thought of them popping into existence, and Ed still wasn’t ready to think about that, although it did raise a potentially even bigger question that wouldn’t leave him alone. When Greed had said that they were artificially created humans, Ed had automatically assumed that they were created in their current forms, but why would anyone create a child homunculus? What purpose would they serve? Although, that said, Ed wasn’t entirely sure what any purpose any of Hohenheim’s homunculi served, apart from acting as eyes and ears on the ground for a hermit who apparently shunned daylight.

He shook himself away from going off on a mental tangent about Hohenheim potentially being a vampire, and continued to stare at Pasha, who was calmly pouring himself a glass of milk from the jug on the table. 

“Chary just said it’s rude to stare,” he said. 

Ed felt the heat rise in his cheeks and glared down at his piece of pie instead.

“Perhaps I should make proper introductions.” Chary poured fresh tea for everyone. “My name is Charity and this is Compassion. Pasha, this is Edward and Alphonse Elric, and Ling Yao. Ling’s come all the way from Xing.”

Pasha’s eyes lit up, and he immediately started bombarding Ling with questions about Xing, and about the journey, and about everything really. Now that he was sufficiently fed, Ling didn’t seem too perturbed by this and was happy to answer anything and everything, although Ed wasn’t entirely sure how much was true and how much was exaggeration.

“He seems like a good kid,” Al said.

“Yeah.” Chary sighed. “It can’t be good for him to be cooped up here with us lot all the time, but being what he is, what we all are… It would be dangerous for him to be out there and to live a normal life, so we try to give him as normal a life as we can down here.”

There was definitely something different about these homunculi, as opposed to Envy and the others who had always been fighting against them. Although they happily admitted that they were homunculi and did not seem to feel any shame in that fact, they were far more human. Envy and the others were so obviously contemptuous of humanity, gleefully revelling in all the pain that they could cause to it. Chary, Patience and the others, on the other hand, were trying to live as normal human lives as possible; not denying their homuncular nature altogether, but still accepting of the fact that although their bodies might be artificially created and they might have a Philosopher’s Stone at their core, in their hearts, they were human beings like everyone else. This place they lived in was a home, and they thought of each other as a family. 

“Once you’re done eating, Patience will take you back up to the surface,” Chary continued. “One of us will deliver your clothes this evening once they’re dry, it shouldn’t be too long.”

Ed nodded, still lost in thought, only really focussing back in on the conversation when Al spoke up.

“Miss Chary, you were in Liore a couple of months ago, and then again in Dublith whilst we were there. Were you following us?”

Chary shook her head. “No. Those two times our paths happened to cross by coincidence. We all keep an eye on where Father’s homunculi go and what they do. We don’t intervene if we can help it; we like to keep to the shadows, but we need to know what they’re up to. Lust, Envy and Gluttony were in Liore at the same time as you were; Greed and Wrath were in Dublith at the same time you were; Lust and Envy were in the fifth laboratory here in Central at the same time you were. Most of your encounters with all of us thus far have been a case of you being in the right place at the right time.”

“What about the first time we met Patience, in Eastern City? Were there homunculi there then?”

“No, I’d just missed them.” Patience waved from the doorway. “But I could tell that you needed help and I couldn’t just leave you to be exploded by Scar, so intervention was required.”

“Excuse me, Patience.”

Patience bowed out of the doorframe to allow Hohenheim to peer into the room. 

“Before you leave, I think there’s one more person here that you really need to meet.” Hohenheim gestured for Ed and Al to follow him, leading them out into the corridors and into the very heart of the catacombs, knocking on a door before peering around the frame, and then stepping back and ushering them inside.

For a long time, Ed could only stare. 

“Lieutenant Colonel Hughes?”

“Hey.” Hughes waved weakly from the bed. He was alive, and well, not exactly well, but definitely not dead. Gracia was sitting in a squashy armchair at the foot of the bed, and Elysia was asleep, curled up close next to her daddy.

“I’m so sorry that we had to deceive you,” Gracia said. “But we couldn’t run the risk of whoever attacked Maes the first time coming back to finish the job. It was better for everyone involved to think that they had succeeded in their goal. We’re much safer this way.”

Ed couldn’t even bring himself to be angry about it, he was just so glad that Hughes was alive after all. Still, as welcome as his appearance was, it raised more questions than Ed knew what to do with, so he condensed them all down into a single, slightly strangled, “how?”

“Erm, that’s probably my fault.”

Ed turned to see Lieutenant Abrams hovering in the corridor behind them. He waved apologetically. 

“Lieutenant Abrams? What are you doing down here?”

“Actually, you can call me Humility.”

Ed groaned. “You’re also one of Hohenheim’s homunculus friends?”

Abrams nodded. “As you can probably tell, Hohenheim doesn’t really get out much, and in a place like Central, it pays to have eyes and ears in the military, so that’s what I do. When Mr Hughes got shot, I figured that bringing him down here into our world was probably the safest thing for him. He can recover here in peace and safety, and once he’s better enough, we’ll get him safely out of the country for a while. I hear Xing’s nice this time of year.”

Despite everything, Ed had to laugh.

“Does Colonel Mustang know that you’re here?” Al asked Hughes.

“No. He knows that I’m alive, but as far as he’s concerned, I’m recuperating on Lieutenant Abrams’ family’s farm out by the Cretan border.”

“We would really prefer it to stay that way,” Humility added. “You have to understand that so much of our existence here, and so much of the work that we do on the surface, depends on secrecy. Patience and Chastity would never have brought you down here into the catacombs if it wasn’t for the extraordinary circumstances.”

Ed nodded his understanding, and after exchanging a few more words and well-wishes with Hughes, they left him to continue his recovery and followed Humility back to the kitchen, where Ling was still entertaining Pasha with tales of distant lands. 

Chary offered Ed a second piece of pie without a word, and Ed accepted gratefully. 

“Does Hohenheim ever go out?” he asked. “Obviously I’ve seen you, Chastity, Patience and Humility around on the surface, but there seems to be a general consensus that you’re his eyes and ears.”

Chary sighed. “Hohenheim’s relationship with humanity is complicated. He does leave, but only very occasionally and for very specific reasons. He feels like there’s no place for someone like him out there, that after everything, he doesn’t deserve to be part of that world.” She shrugged sadly. “He cares so much. Perhaps too much sometimes. But getting him out and about is a battle that Patience and Humility long since lost.”

Before Ed could make any further comment or delve deeper into Hohenheim’s relationship with his homunculi family, Chastity came into the kitchen. 

“I lost Envy,” he lamented. “They’re as slippery as a buttered squirrel, I swear, and of course as soon as they got up onto the surface they just shifted and I was doomed. I did find something interesting on the way back down though. It looks like our friend the colonel had an altercation with Lust that did not end well for her.”

Chary looked up sharply. “She’s really gone?”

Chastity nodded. “If the pile of ash in the east side tunnels is any indication, I would say so.” Chastity didn’t seem to take any pleasure in reporting the demise of one of their opposite number, and his brow was furrowed. “I’m kind of alarmed by how close they got to us though. I think Hohenheim might want to seal up and redirect that section of the catacombs just in case.”

“Yes. That’s a little too close for comfort. I think they’ve always known that we were down here, but they’ve never bothered us enough to find out exactly where we are.” 

“The colonel was down here?” Al asked. 

Chastity nodded. “The flame damage would certainly suggest it. There’s no sign of him though; I checked all the tunnels in the area, so if he’s injured then he was still able to make it back to the surface under his own steam. There was blood on the floor so I was worried, but it doesn’t leave a trail.”

Ed had to stop and take stock of this. Why on earth would the colonel have come down into the tunnels? Unless he had seen Al, Patience and Chastity come down here and was mounting a rescue mission. But why would Lust be down here as well? Attempting to rescue Gluttony? It wasn’t beyond possibility.

“We should probably take you back up to the surface,” Patience said, echoing Ed’s thoughts. “If the colonel is looking for you, then we really don’t want him finding us, no offence.”

Ed nodded and finished his last mouthful of pie. “Come on Ling. We’d better go and report back. There’s certainly a lot to tell.”

“I’m sure our paths will cross again,” Chary said as she cleared the plates. “And you know where to find us if you need us, as long as you’re careful.”

They left the area of the tunnels that the homunculi called home; Ed wanted to say a final word to Hohenheim to tell him that they’d be letting the colonel know everything that he’d told them, but his study door was closed and Patience whisked them past and into the darkness of the catacombs beyond. Ed had to rethink what Chary had said about being able to find the homunculi if they needed them - the place was a complete rabbit warren and there was no way he’d be able to find his way through it in an emergency, but once they came out into the greenhouse-warehouse, he conceded that he would at least be able to find the entrance. (Although, from what Chastity had said, there seemed to be multiple routes into the place, which wasn’t exactly helpful if Hohenheim was going to be changing the layout to prevent discovery by enemy homunculi and well-intentioned but somewhat destructive military alike.)

Mustang was waiting for them at the entrance to the catacombs when they emerged, although ‘waiting’ probably wasn’t the best description. From the way the rest of the squad was assembled and the orders that Mustang was barking out, Ed got the distinct impression that if they’d come out five minutes later, Hohenheim and his housemates would have found themselves under a full-scale military assault as Mustang and his crew stormed the catacombs in search of their kidnapped State Alchemist.

“Ah, Colonel. I never thought you cared so much.”

Mustang, for his part, just stared at the group of them as if they had all grown second heads. 

“Colonel Mustang!” Patience sprang forward, grabbing the colonel’s hand and shaking it enthusiastically, almost pumping his arm off. “Delighted to make your acquaintance; I’ve heard so much about you.”

Mustang looked from Patience to Ed and back again, raising an eyebrow, and Ed just grinned.

“Now, as you can see, I’ve delivered these three mostly unharmed into your care and now I really must be going; please do keep an eye on them because I really can’t be making a habit of this. Goodbye! I’m sure our paths will cross again soon because this young man does not know what is good for him.”

With that, Patience was off back down into the catacombs, leaving Mustang and the rest of his squad staring after the homunculus with expressions that ran the full gamut from confusion to downright terror. 

Mustang was the first to regain his composure. 

“You all right, Fullmetal?”

Ed nodded. “Yeah. I think we can say for certain that these guys are friends. We’ve got a lot to catch you up on, Colonel.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [AO3]

==

Nine

When Ed came to, he became aware of three things. The first was that his head was killing him. The second was that he was no longer inside Gluttony’s stomach, so presumably the transmutation had worked. The third was that Ling and Envy were nowhere to be seen, and someone was leaning over him rather too closely. He startled and sat bolt upright, which didn’t help his head, and the person jumped back. 

“He lives! Welcome back. We thought you’d be out of it forever.”

“Patience, it’s been thirty minutes, if that.”

Ed recognised the face that had been leaning over him as the Mysterious Stranger who had been following him and Al around since the battle with Scar, although whether intentionally or not remained to be seen. 

“How are you feeling?”

Ed needed a moment to take stock before answering the question. He was sitting on a bed in what appeared to be a cosy little bedroom, although he was rather perturbed by the lack of windows anywhere in the room. Aside from Mysterious Friend Patience, there was a small blonde lady sitting on the foot of the bed with a pile of first aid equipment in her lap, and Ed realised that the wounds he had received in Gluttony’s stomach and during the fight with Envy before had been rebandaged. She looked to be in her early thirties, and she smiled warmly. 

“My name is Temperance,” she said. “This is Patience, and you’re currently in our home.”

“You’re in Humility’s room,” Patience added. “He barely uses it so Tempe figured he wouldn’t mind you getting blood everywhere.”

“How are you feeling?” Temperance asked again. 

“Like I’ve been run over by a train,” Ed muttered. He looked around the room again, once more noting the lack of windows. “Where am I? Am I a prisoner?”

“Of course not, you’re free to go whenever you please,” Tempe said. “But you may want to stick around and speak to Hohenheim before you go; you might be able to use his knowledge and information, and he could probably help with the feeling like you’ve been run over.”

“Yeah, I need to find my brother,” Ed swung his legs off the bed and got up; neither of the others made a move to stop him. “I’ll speak to his Hohenheim guy later. And I don’t suppose either of you know where Ling and Envy went?”

“Envy we’re not sure of, Chastity followed them when they ran off and has not as yet returned either in triumph or in failure, but Al and Ling are here,” Patience said. “They’re just down the corridor.”

“And Gluttony?”

“Ah, unfortunately Gluttony did not survive the ordeal of having you three explode out of his stomach.” Patience mused for a moment. “In a way I feel a little sorry for him. He wasn’t really evil, he was just hungry.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve never been inside his stomach,” Ed muttered. “Can you show me to Al and Ling, please?” He still wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t being held prisoner, even if his captors seemed to be nice enough people. 

“Of course.” Patience opened the door and gave a little bow as they waved Ed through it. “This way. Dare I ask what you were doing inside Gluttony’s stomach in the first place?”

“It’s a very long story, and I didn’t exactly end up in there on purpose.”

They walked a little way down the corridor, and Ed could tell from the lighting that they were underground, which at least explained the lack of windows but didn’t really do much to reassure him. At least the place looked homely rather than like a prison. Patience pushed open a door that was leaning ajar and indicated for Ed to go in.

Al was in there, but the relief that flooded Ed’s veins on seeing him was immediately extinguished on seeing who he was talking to. 

“Bastard!” 

He managed to get one good punch in before he felt Al’s hands come around his arms and pull him back. 

“Ed, it’s not him, he’s not our father, it’s a long story but please don’t hit him again!”

There was red lightning sparking up the side of the man’s face to heal the bruise before it could bloom, and he rubbed the back of his neck as he retrieved his glasses and put them back on. 

“I was fully prepared for that reaction and yet… ow.” He looked at Ed. “Did you have to use the metal arm? I even fixed the broken one!”

Ed felt that he could be completely forgiven for his reaction, and even though he did not trust this strange doppelgänger of his father as far as he could throw him, and he did not trust that he was a doppelgänger and not actually his father, he conceded not to hit him again. Yet. Al let go of him, and Ed dropped down onto the sofa beside him, looking at the man critically.

“Are you a homunculus?”

“No.”

“I’m a homunculus.” Patience waved from the doorway, seeming to be rather amused by the scene that was unfolding in front of them. “So’s Tempe. We’re all homunculi apart from Hohenheim, who’s, well… He’s Hohenheim. He defies description.”

Hohenheim raised an eyebrow. “Thank you, Patience.”

“Right.” Ed looked around the room, which appeared to be some kind of library or study; there were bookshelves stacked floor to ceiling on every wall. “Where’s Ling?”

“He’s in the kitchen, eating what appears to be his entire bodyweight.” Patience paused. “Seriously, where does he put it all?”

In spite of himself, Ed laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like Ling. Good to know that his adventures in Gluttony’s stomach haven’t affected his appetite.”

Now that he was somewhat more assured of Al and Ling’s safety, however, his entire concentration turned to the man called Hohenheim, who was apparently not his father despite looking like him and was apparently not a homunculus despite healing like one.

“Who are you, and where are we?”

“My name is Van Hohenheim, and we’re currently somewhere under the Central Command complex.”

This probably shouldn’t have surprised Ed as much as it did. 

“You live down here?”

Hohenheim nodded. 

“How has the military not found you?”

“They don’t know the tunnels exist. I was here before them.”

“Right.” Ed considered all this for a moment, then considered that it was too much to consider, and turned his thoughts in a different direction. “So, are you going to explain this long story?”

“Yes. I was just beginning to explain to Alphonse. You haven’t missed too much.”

Hohenheim and Al hadn’t been lying. It was definitely a long story, and almost too fantastical to believe, and that was pretty much the only reason that Ed believed it, because it was too crazy a story for someone to have made up. The original homunculus from beyond the Gate, the destruction of Xerxes in a single night to create a Philosopher’s Stone so powerful it provided Homunculus and Hohenheim with nigh-eternal life, how the two of them had parted ways, and Hohenheim had hidden away in the darkness, horrified by the thing he had become, until he had learned of what was going on in Amestris, of the other homunculi working for the one they now called Father. 

Father. That was the part that Ed was having the most trouble with. The original homunculus, the mysterious Father who was behind this conspiracy, who was working within the military to achieve his own nefarious ends, a being who had never been human in the first place… That being was his father. 

Did that mean he and Al weren’t even fully human?

“Brother? I think we need to tell the colonel all this. If this is related to what happened to Mr Hughes…”

Ed wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t quite at the stage of thinking that everything in his life thus far had been a lie, because he was fairly sure that Mom hadn’t known that their dad was the original homunculus from beyond the Gate of Truth, but it was still something huge to take in. Yes, the conspiracy going on in the military and the fact that the entire country was doomed to become a Philosopher’s Stone were very important things that they should absolutely tell someone about because they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it on their own and probably not even with Hohenheim and his homunculi’s help, but the fact that he was related to the perpetrator of it all was something Ed just couldn’t swallow.

“Edward?” Hohenheim looked concerned. 

“This is just…” 

He didn’t want to believe it. Despite everything, there was still a part of him that wanted to believe that Hohenheim was his father and that this was all a very elaborate ruse on his part to justify his abandonment of them, but deep down, he knew that he had to believe it. It all made a horrible kind of sense. 

“I understand that it’s a lot to take in and a lot to ask you to believe,” Hohenheim continued. “And I can appreciate if you don’t trust me yet. I don’t know what I can do to earn that trust, but I’ll do what I can.”

“I trust you. Maybe not entirely yet, but I trust that you’re telling the truth. I don’t want to, but I do.”

“That’s fair enough.”

Ed sighed. “I think I’m going to need a minute.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [AO3]

==

Content Warning: Canon-typical violence.

Eight

If the Elric brothers were there, Mustang would have been giving them a speech something along the lines of ‘I leave you alone for five minutes and you go and get yourselves kidnapped’, but the Elric brothers were not there, having got themselves kidnapped, so he settled for giving the speech to Hawkeye instead. 

“I leave them alone for five minutes and they go and get themselves kidnapped.”

“I know sir. You weren’t to know.”

“I should know by now not to let them out of my sight whilst they’ve taken a homunculus hostage,” he grumbled. He had not intended to leave them alone at the hideout for too long, but having worked on the mistaken principle that there were three of them and one of Gluttony, he’d thought that they’d survive whilst he got Knox, Lan Fan and Fu back to the city and warned the rest of the squad about Bradley being a homunculus. 

When he and Hawkeye had returned to find evidence of a massive altercation and no sign of the Elrics, Ling, or Gluttony, he’d metaphorically kicked himself for thinking that everything would be all right. Now they were retracing their steps back through the city and desperately asking passers-by if anyone had seen a short state alchemist, a tall Xingese prince, a suit of armour and a rotund homunculus. Although no one had seen the former two, the evidence pointed to Gluttony and Al having been headed in the direction of Central Command in the company of two other strangers before they’d vanished into a warehouse and not come out again. The manufacturing district was home to rather a lot of warehouses, and Mustang was gearing up for a search of all of them when Hawkeye caught his attention. 

“Over there, sir. She looks like one of the homunculi that Edward described meeting at the fifth laboratory.”

Mustang nodded. “It’s as good a lead as any if she’s going after Gluttony. Let’s do it.”

They crossed the street, keeping an eye on their quarry as she ducked in and out of the alleyways, evidently looking for something just as they had been looking for the warehouse where Alphonse had been taken. Finally she stopped, stooping to wrench open a rusted grating in a wall before disappearing through it. They waited a minute or so before following her, not wanting to get caught out so soon but not wanting to lose her either. The entrance would likely lead straight down into the catacombs, and although Mustang had never been down there himself, he knew enough of the legends to know that they were completely labyrinthine and, if the more hysterical conspiracy theories were to be believed, they had monstrous chimeras living down there.

The tunnels were dimly lit by the sunlight coming in through the gratings on the street above them, but Mustang knew that the point would come when they would be entering into complete darkness; the trail kept angling downwards. The walls were wet, not dripping so much as oozing, water seeping out of the very stone. He really hoped that there weren’t any rats down here. Hawkeye had drawn her gun and was holding it in readiness, staying half a step in front of him. Mustang pulled on his gloves, ready to spark but not wanting to draw any attention to them by creating light to see by.

It was too dark to make out the woman in front of them, but so far there had been no branches off the main tunnel, so hopefully it would just be a question of putting one foot in front of the other until they caught up to her, or found Alphonse and Gluttony, or both. 

Suddenly, Hawkeye stopped dead. 

“Hawkeye? What’s wrong?”

“Something brushed past me,” she hissed. “I felt something touch my shoulder, on the left.”

She was so close to the wall that she was almost touching it on her left side; there was no way that anything could have come past her in the gap, and surely rats would have come along at floor level, not vertically along the wall at shoulder height. And, of course, the fact remained that Mustang had not seen, felt or heard anything come past him. He didn’t disbelieve Hawkeye, far from it. After everything that had gone on today, he was quite prepared to believe almost anything. 

“If it wasn’t for the fact I felt it, I’d say that it was just a shadow,” Hawkeye continued. She started moving again; even though Mustang could tell that she was obviously discomfited from what had just happened, every moment that they stood still whilst the woman ahead of them continued took her further away from them and the potential of losing her and getting themselves lost in the tunnels into the bargain became higher. “I’m certain that we’re not alone down here.”

Mustang would agree with that. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end, prickling with the indescribable and undeniable feeling of being watched. 

Hawkeye paused again a minute or so later before shaking herself and pressing on, and this time, Mustang felt it too, just a whisper past his shoulder on the wall that could have been put down to a passing breeze if it wasn’t for the fact they were underground and the stench of damp and decay proved that there was little to no ventilation down here. 

“You’re right, we’re definitely not alone down here.” Something was moving about in the shadows beyond their sight, and Mustang couldn’t tell if it was friend or foe. Right now, he was angling down the foe route. 

“These tunnels go on for miles,” Hawkeye said. “We must be right under Central Command by now. If there are multiple entrances and they know where they’re going, then it could take days to find them in here.”

“We have to try.” Now that he was down here and thinking about it properly, Mustang realised that rushing off underground without backup and without telling anyone where they were going was an absolutely terrible idea, but they had come too far to turn back now; they had to press ahead whilst they still had a lead, or else they would be back to square one again. 

They were in almost complete darkness now, and Mustang chanced a flame, creating a small pinpoint spark and checking that they had not missed any exits that their quarry may have gone down. As the flame bounced off the walls it cast grotesque shadows, and whilst it might have been the uneasy situation getting to him, Mustang could have sworn that the shadows were moving of their own accord. 

That was when they heard the voice, high and sibilant like a whisper and seeming to be coming from the walls themselves.

“Lust, you have company.”

Mustang and Hawkeye froze, looking around for the person who had spoken even though Mustang already knew that they would not see anyone.

Suddenly, the sound of running footsteps careened down the tunnel from the direction that they were heading in; Hawkeye aimed her gun and fired off three shots in quick succession as the woman from before charged into their line of vision, her face twisted with rage, but the bullets didn’t even slow her down despite hitting their mark squarely in her chest, tearing holes in the Ouroboros tattoo that immediately began to flicker and heal with sparks of red alchemic lightning. If Gluttony was anything to go by then it would take something far more drastic than a pistol to stop her, and Mustang let loose the flame, a steady, concentrated burn that had her screaming and stopped her in her tracks. She dropped onto her knees, but even as her hair and flesh smoked, she was regenerating once again. Enough of her flesh had been seared away to show the bright red stone pulsing and flickering at her core where a human heart should have been; Hawkeye brought her pistol up again and aimed straight for it. The flash of alchemic light was blinding, and the scream of pain jarred in Mustang’s ears, making him feel nauseous. Everything was still and dark again. Had they done it? Had Hawkeye’s shot destroyed the stone and killed Lust?

Hawkeye unloaded her empty clip and pushed a fresh one in, not taking any chances, and Mustang snapped another fireball to dance over his palm and let them see what was going on. 

He saw the red lightning spark just a fraction of a second too late. Lust’s fingers shot out, spearing deep through Hawkeye’s leg, going in at the knee and coming out near her hip. Hawkeye cried out, dropping her gun and trying to staunch the wounds as Lust pulled her talons out and rounded on Mustang.

“Pathetic fools. It’ll take far more than that to destroy a pure, stable Philosopher’s Stone. I’ve survived for decades. Do you really think your human weaponry can destroy a homunculus?”

He snapped on instinct, self-preservation winning out over everything else, even anger at what had happened to Hawkeye. If he didn’t destroy this woman then he and Hawkeye would both die down here and no one would know what would happen to them. No one would find their bodies, and the homunculi would still be on the loose and Alphonse and Edward would still be in danger. He had to stop her and this was the only way he had, the only surefire way he knew that he could beat her. If he could kill her enough times, surely her stone would run out of regenerative power. Human weaponry might not be able to kill her, but she was a being created from pure alchemy, so alchemy had to be able to destroy her.

She was still swinging at him with her talons, even as he set fire to her again and again and the spikes charred in front of his eyes; each regeneration brought her closer and closer to him, razor-sharp fingers slashing his chest and drawing a thin line of beading blood to the surface. Mustang scrabbled back blindly through the tunnels, trying to gain light and higher ground until Lust gave a final, primal howl and finally stopped lunging for him, the stone in her gaping chest cavity beginning to turn to ash along with the rest of her.

“Interesting,” she whispered. “So much fire from someone with such cold, killer’s eyes. I must have touched a nerve.”

Mustang ignored her, and tried to ignore his legs shaking with adrenaline as he rushed back down the tunnel to where he had left Hawkeye slumped on the ground, clutching at her impaled leg. There was blood everywhere; Lust must have hit the main vein, and Hawkeye was pale and clammy, drifting in and out of consciousness even as she tried to keep pressure on the wounds. 

“Hawkeye! Hawkeye! Stay with me! Don’t you dare die on me, Lieutenant! That’s an order!”

He had to get her back to the surface and to the hospital as soon as possible, but before that, he had to stop the bleeding or she’d never make it up there. 

She stirred back into consciousness as he was ripping the fabric of her uniform pants. “Sir?”

“This is going to hurt,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but it’s the only way.”

Hawkeye screamed as he snapped against her skin, cauterising first one wound and then the other, and for an awful moment he remembered when he had burned her tattoo. She had not screamed then, but he knew that it had been just as painful.

“Lieutenant? Lieutenant, are you still with me?”

In the darkness, he saw her nod weakly as he scooped her up in his arms, pounding back in the direction they’d come, up towards the waning light of the day and the outside world, their original purpose in entering the tunnels in the first place all but forgotten in the overwhelming fear of losing her forever.

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [AO3]

==

Seven

It was safe to say that they were lost, groping along in the dim tunnels that they’d ducked into to avoid the military after everything had started to go wrong. They had been hiding out here for several hours now, and Scar was about to suggest beginning to head back in the direction that they’d come from. The hullabaloo outside must have died down by now, and it was clear that May was incredibly distressed and only becoming more so the deeper underground they went.

“It feels like people,” she whimpered. “Thousands of screaming souls all packed into the very earth.”

“May, let’s go back. The surface will be safe by now, I’m sure.”

May nodded and got to her feet, but Shao May gave a squawk of alarm and leapt off her shoulder, scampering further into the darkness and deeper into the maze of tunnels.

“Wait, no, Shao May, come back!”

“May, no…” It was too late, she was already following her pet into the tunnels. Scar heaved a sigh and started to run after them. He had no idea why he was doing it; he had nothing to do with the kid. She’d just latched onto him as a friend even despite the fact he was not the kind of role model any twelve-year-old should want. But she was alone in a strange and hostile land, and she was dead set and determined on her mission. He knew how she felt; for all their vast differences, they were kindred spirits in a way.

“May! May!”

He’d definitely lost them, and with the tunnels now beginning to branch off into several sub-branches, he had no idea where they might have gone. He stopped; with any luck May would be sensible enough to retrace her steps and she would find him again. Scar shivered. He was not particularly cold, but May was right about there being something inherently wrong about the place.

He heard running footsteps in front of him, getting closer, but the footfalls sounded far too heavy to be May’s. Perhaps it was just the acoustics in the tunnel, but Scar wasn’t convinced.

She appeared out of the gloom, running for her life as if all the demons in hell were after her, but something still wasn’t right. She still sounded far too heavy, for all she looked like her normal self.

“Help me!” She flung herself behind him, cowering, but Scar couldn’t hear anything following her, and May, for all her young age and tiny size, was not the type to cower in fear behind someone bigger than herself. Her bravery had reached levels of stupidity until now. If something was after her, then she’d have her kunai out and be blowing it up with alkahestry. Scar pulled out of her grip on his waist and turned. 

“You are not May.”

“Huh.” The voice was definitely not May’s anymore. “I’m impressed. Normally it takes longer for people to figure it out.”

“Where’s May?”

“She’s around somewhere. I’m just borrowing her shape, but I assure you I’ve not harmed a hair on her pretty little head.”

Scar reached out with his right hand, ready to destroy, and the Not-May’s smirk dropped when it saw that he meant business.

“Woah there, I’ve got nothing against you, I’m just trying to get out of here before the resident watchdog finds me.”

It jumped out of the way, transforming into what Scar assumed was its true shape. He made contact with the wall instead, sending the surface crumbling. He grimaced; this was not the place for wanton destruction in case he blocked their exit route or brought the ceiling down on top of them.

“Careful now.” The figure who had been impersonating May looked over at the collapsed wall. “You could do some real damage there.”

Before Scar could go in for another try at the imposter, their arm shot out, turning long and scaled and snake-like and wrapping around him, crushing his ribs and clamping his hands to his sides, his alchemy rendered useless. The tendril squeezed around his neck, making him see dark spots dancing in front of his eyes. He could hear another set of running footsteps, much lighter than this thing but still not May.

“Oh hell. Now look, I could have got away if it wasn’t for you.”

The snake released and the thing took off along the tunnels again, followed by a young man who appeared out of the darkness in the same direction as the imposter had come from. The newcomer was so focussed on his quarry that he didn’t even see Scar choking on the ground, running right on past him.

Scar gave into the screaming pain in his sides and the sudden oxygen euphoria, and closed his eyes.

X

To say that May was scared was putting it mildly. She had not given any thought to the dark and the unknown when she had rushed after Shao May, but after she had located her friend a few yards along the tunnel, something had burst out of the darkness in front of her and sped past, followed a couple of minutes later by something else in hot pursuit. She had been so shaken by finding that they were most definitely not alone down in the tunnels that she had been frozen to the spot for a long time, clutching Shao May close to her chest until her squeaking and frantic gesturing back in the direction that they had just come galvanised her back into action. 

They had to get back to Mr Scar. Maybe he would already have taken care of whoever those people were; or maybe they had gone somewhere else in the vast network of tunnels. May began to retrace her steps; luckily she had not made many turns, having followed Shao May’s little squeaks rather than running blindly, and she found her way back to the main tunnel with little difficulty. 

“Mr Scar? Mr Scar, where are you?”

For a moment she wondered if he’d given up and left her on her own down here. She must be something of a drag on him, but she’d thought that he was a friend. She didn’t think that he would just abandon her like that. 

“Mr Scar?”

She moved forwards into the dimly lit section of the tunnel that she had left him in when she’d run after Shao May, tiptoeing carefully down it, well aware that there were other people down here and she had no idea if they were friend or foe. They hadn’t paid her and Shao May any attention when they had run past her, but it had been so dark and they’d seemed so focussed that perhaps they hadn’t even realised she was there and had just passed over her. Mr Scar was a lot harder to miss in that sense.

“Mr Scar?”

She saw a vague shape slumped against the tunnel wall a few yards ahead and put on a burst of speed to reach it. 

“Mr Scar!”

He was still breathing, but he was unconscious, and May couldn’t see any visible injuries on him to be able to heal him with alkahestry. She slid down the wall beside him, hugging her knees whilst she waited for him to wake up, Shao May sitting quietly on her head. She couldn’t leave him down here on his own and defenceless against whatever it was that had attacked him in the first place, but if he had been knocked out like this, then May feared she wouldn’t have a chance against whatever it was if it came back for a second attempt. Still, she had to try.

“Please wake up,” she whispered. “Please.”

She was absolutely terrified, but she couldn’t run away, not now. 

Shao May slipped off her head, gesturing further into the tunnels. Telling her to go looking for help? May shook her head; she didn’t want to leave Mr Scar like this, and she had no way of telling if anyone she found would help her or make matters worse. And who would there be in the tunnels who could help at any rate? She thought back to the two figures who had raced past her in the dark and shivered. Had one of them done this to Mr Scar?

Shao May nodded enthusiastically before scampering off back into the darkness. May did not follow; this time Shao May had left with purpose rather than being spooked, and May trusted her to come back. She huddled in on herself a little tighter; it was not exactly cold down here, but the bad feeling in the earth that she’d felt ever since she’d stepped into Amestris was even stronger now that she was underground, and it was giving her the creeps. There was also the fact that she had no idea how much time had passed whilst they’d been hiding in the tunnels, and she was getting very hungry. 

Time continued to drag by, marked by unseen dripping that echoed around the tunnels. Every sound was far too loud, and when May heard footsteps reverberating along the path, she was on her feet in an instant, kunai at the ready. The footsteps were measured; whoever it was, they were walking rather than running, which was something at least. 

Shao May bounded back into sight and skidded to a stop beside her. 

“Hello there. Is this your little cat, young lady?”

“She’s a panda,” May corrected. The owner of the voice came into view, a middle-aged man with greying hair. He didn’t look all that dangerous, but appearances could be deceptive, and May did not lower her kunai. The man held up his hands in a gesture of peace. 

“It’s all right, I mean no harm. I found your panda further into the tunnels, it looked like she was wanting me to follow her, so I did. Are you all right? What are you doing down here anyway?”

The man came closer and peered around her to see Mr Scar. “Ah, I see. You and your friend have been hiding down here. Looks like he got on the wrong side of Envy. It’s ok, we’ll see what we can do for him. I’m a doctor, my name is Marcoh.”

He reached down and hauled Mr Scar up onto his feet, taking an arm around his shoulders. 

“Come with me,” he said. “I’ve been hiding down here too.”

Still not entirely convinced, May nevertheless followed Dr Marcoh through the tunnels, towards what fate she did not yet know.

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [AO3]

==

Six

Al decided that the best thing for him to do now would be to stay where he was, take several metaphorical deep breaths, and take stock of what was going on. The one saving grace was that Gluttony seemed to be just as terrified by what had happened as Al was, having accidentally eaten both a sacrifice and one of his homunculus brethren, and he was now getting very worried about what his father was going to say when he found out. 

Everything had been going fairly well. It hadn’t exactly gone according to plan, because none of them could have been prepared for the fact that Bradley was a homunculus, however much they might not have trusted him, and none of them could have been prepared for Lan Fan’s injuries. But once they’d met up with Mustang again, and once they’d got medical attention for Lan Fan, and once Mustang had rushed off to go and warn the rest of his team that the Fuhrer could in no way shape or form be trusted, things had seemed to be back on something of an even keel.

Now, though, through a series of, to put it mildly, unfortunate catastrophes, Ed, Ling and Envy were inside Gluttony’s stomach, whatever pocket dimension that might lead to, and Al was outside Gluttony’s stomach with only one hand and therefore no ability to perform alchemy. His first thought was to somehow let the colonel know what had happened, but he really didn’t think that the colonel would be able to do anything to help. He was a great alchemist, sure, but getting people out of homunculi would be beyond most people, and the colonel now had to worry about the fact that the Fuhrer was a homunculus and he he no idea who in the military could be trusted, on top of worrying about Ed and Al and Ed’s currently unknown fate. 

The thing that perturbed Al the most, although he knew that it shouldn’t, was the fact that the mysterious strangers had not made any appearance throughout these last confrontations with the homunculi. Before, they had always been there.

True, they had always turned up in response to the homunculi doing things rather than in response to him and Ed being in danger. That had always been somewhat coincidental, and Al knew that it was silly to be relying on them for assistance now. All the same, it did make him wonder why they hadn’t arrived to combat Gluttony and Envy and the Fuhrer if nothing else. Maybe it depended on what the homunculi were doing as to whether the strangers would arrive or not. Al wished he could predict their patterns. 

He pulled his thoughts away from them and back to the here and now. It was now extremely clear that the homunculi did not want to kill him and Ed. Harming them maybe, but whatever happened, the homunculi and their leader needed Ed and Al alive, and presumably, that meant that the homunculi’s father would be invested in getting Ed and the others out of Gluttony so that they could continue to be instrumental in whatever he was planning. Al really didn’t want to think about what that might be, especially since they were always referred to in terms of sacrifices.

He had an idea. It was quite likely a terrible idea that could get everyone into more trouble than they already were, but it was the only idea that he had that might work, and sitting here doing nothing and waiting for a rescue definitely wasn’t going to get Ed and Ling out of Gluttony’s stomach any quicker.

He got to his feet and went over to Gluttony, who had been pacing up and down in quick little steps, mumbling to himself about how much trouble he was going to be in when Father found out what had happened. 

“Gluttony!”

Gluttony stopped and looked Al up and down.

“Gluttony, I want you to take me to your father.”

The homunculus gave him a pained look. “But he’s going to be so angry with me.”

“I’m sure he’ll understand if you tell him it was an accident,” Al said. He had no experience with a father of his own, but Mom had always understood when they’d broken stuff by accident. “And besides, if you take me with you, then he’ll be happy that you’re bringing him a sacrifice, won’t he?”

Gluttony nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think he’ll want to meet you.”

“Ok. Then we’re going.”

Gluttony nodded, a little more enthusiastically this time, and he set off back in the direction of the city. Al was surprised by this, but reflected that he probably shouldn’t be. If Bradley was a homunculus and working for Father, whoever he might be, then it made sense that the person who was actually in charge of running the country through Bradley as a puppet ought to be somewhere in the capital so that he could keep an eye on things. 

Since he didn’t really have anything else he could do until they got to Father, Al wondered for a long while what this shadowy figure would be like.

They had reached the outskirts of the city when Gluttony stopped, sniffing the air. 

“They’re here,” he said.

“Who’s here?”

“The other ones.” Gluttony started to wring his hands again. “Oh dear. Oh dear. Where’s Lust? She should be here. Lust would be able to see them off. Oh dear.”

“What other ones?” Al asked. “Who are you talking about?”

The question was unceremoniously answered when two figures dropped down off the top of the building they had stopped beside, landing on top of Gluttony and pummelling him down to the ground. Al recognised the strangers from the fifth laboratory.

“Don’t kill him!” he yelled. “My brother’s inside his stomach!”

“Really?” The golden-eyed stranger gave Gluttony a look that was part awestruck and part disgusted. “You really are an extreme omnivore, aren’t you? Well, never mind. We’ll do it the hard way instead.”

Although Gluttony was doing a grand job of fighting back, the two newcomers had managed to tie his mouth shut as their first defence against him, and with both of them working together with their inhuman speed, he was soon outmatched. 

“Hello again.” The mysterious golden-eyed friend waved. “I think it’s got to the stage where we should really be properly introduced. My name is Patience, and the young man who is currently manhandling Gluttony is Chastity. You must be Alphonse Elric.”

“Erm, hello.”

With Gluttony now tied up, Chastity began to roll him along like an outsized toy ball. 

“Ok, Patience, I think we’re good to go. Let’s get him back home to Hohenheim and see if he can get the others out of him.”

“Yes.” Patience turned back to Al. “Please do come with us. If anyone can rescue your brother from wherever he is, I’m sure that Hohenheim can.”

Al looked from Patience to Chastity to Gluttony and back again. Although the mysterious friends had turned up in opposition to the homunculi as he had predicted they would, even if a bit late, he still wasn’t entirely sure that he could trust them. He thought of the last time he ended up going with a bunch of strangers, back in Dublith, although he hadn’t had much choice in the matter that time.

Now he nodded, following Chastity and Patience and the Gluttony-ball through Central’s alleyways, keeping well clear of the main thoroughfares where their strange retinue would most certainly be questioned. Getting Ed back had to be his priority, and if this unseen Hohenheim could do that, then so much the better. Once Ed was out of Gluttony’s stomach, then they could regroup and make a plan. Potentially a plan that involved escaping from Patience and Chastity.

“Here we are.” They had arrived in the manufacturing district, stopping outside a derelict old warehouse with missing ceiling panels. Al looked at it critically. 

“You live here?”

“Of course not. This is just the entrance. No one would ever think to look here.” 

Patience let them into the warehouse, and Al was surprised to find that inside the crumbling walls, there was a neat and well-maintained garden, with flowers and herbs. It reminded him of Mom’s garden back home in Resembool.

“This way.” Patience helped Chastity to lift up Gluttony and the two of them carried him carefully across the garden, not wanting to roll him and squash the plants. Al followed them, still mystified as they reached a door on the opposite wall. This was unlocked to show a dimly-lit staircase leading straight downwards. 

“Where are we going?”

“This leads to the catacomb tunnels under the city,” Patience said. “That’s where we live. Don’t worry, it’s quite safe. We made up all the rumours about vicious chimeras living down here to stop people stumbling in on us by accident.”

“Right.” Al wasn’t quite sure what to make of that statement, but he nonetheless kept following Patience and Chastity.

He didn’t know how long they walked through the dark tunnels, and there were so many twists and turns in the path that he was sure he’d be completely lost if he tried to make his way back to the entrance. He felt like he really ought to say something, but what was there to say? Patience and Chastity knew where they were going, and he had put himself into their hands.

He was about to ask whereabouts in Central they were under when the little convoy stopped suddenly, and Chastity jumped back from Gluttony with a shout of warning. 

“Patience! Alphonse! Take cover! I think something very nasty is about to happen!”

Al looked at Gluttony, alarmed by what he saw. The homunculus was swelling up like a balloon about to burst, his stomach hideously distended and mutated as if something was trying to claw its way out from the inside. Was Ed doing something from the inside that was causing this?

Chastity dived into the nearest niche in the tunnel, pulling Patience with him, and Al pressed himself as flat against the wall as he could as Gluttony’s huge mouth extended open, horrific teeth exploding out and hitting the walls as the swirling eye of truth could be seen in the void that was his innards. Al covered his head out of instinct.

The bang was deafening, and Al felt chunks of Gluttony’s rubbery flesh hit him before they melted away into dust. When he finally chanced to take a look at what had happened, he had to gawp at the sight that met him.

“Whatis that thing? Is that… Envy?”

The creature now taking up most of the space inside the tunnel was something out of a horror story; Al had never seen anything like it before and although he had a good imagination, he didn’t think that even he could have dreamed up something like this. 

“Yes, unfortunately, that is Envy.” Patience came out of hiding in the alcove, addressing the massive green monster that was getting to its feet.”Well, Envy, I didn’t think that it was possible for you to get any uglier, but here we are.”

Below Envy’s huge frame, Al saw Ling and Ed as well. Ling was sitting up, but Ed looked to be out cold. He rushed forwards, picking up Ed’s limp body before one of Envy’s feet could stamp on him, and Chastity darted in to help Ling onto his feet and pull him out of range of Envy’s wildly thrashing limbs. Patience was already bouncing off the walls trying to evade the monster even as they continued to taunt it. Al glanced down at Ed; he was unconscious but still breathing, and whilst his automail looked to be intact, it was obvious that his flesh and blood arm was broken.

“What happened?” he asked Ling.

“Ed used souls from Envy’s Philosopher’s Stone to open up the gate of Truth and get us out of Gluttony’s void,” Ling said. “It must have really taken it out of him.”

Al wasn’t surprised; if Ed had performed human transmutation again, and this time transmuting himself and Ling and Envy into a different place rather than transmuting someone back to life like they’d done before… The first trip through the gate had been traumatic enough that Al hadn’t remembered it for years; he couldn’t imagine that a second one would be any better.

“Chass, a little assistance if you please!” Patience was slowly losing the upper hand over Envy, and Chastity pushed Al, Ling and Ed into the alcove he had sought shelter in when Gluttony had exploded before going over to assist Patience. Envy was massive and strong, but their huge bulk and the limited space in the tunnel made them unwieldy and it was hard for them to manoeuvre. Chastity and Patience were both lighter and more agile, but they didn’t have the raw brute strength that Envy did.  If the circumstances had been different, it would have been a mesmerising fight to watch, but Al could only feel fear - it was too dark and claustrophobic in the tunnels to feel anything else. 

“Envy!”

The voice echoed down the tunnels, sounding very near and very far away at the same time, as if it was being yelled through a loudspeaker. 

“Stop it, Envy, and get back here!”

Almost immediately, Envy stopped, turning tail in the tunnel and lumbering back the way they had come, transforming and shrinking back into their usual form as they did so. Chastity cursed under his breath and ran after the homunculus, disappearing into the darkness in the distance. 

There was silence for a while; Patience was the one to break it. 

“Well, that was certainly a bit of excitement for a Tuesday morning. Shall we continue, gentlemen?” Patience looked down at the remains of Gluttony, the last large chunk comprising of his head and some of his body still breaking down into dust and showing no signs of healing like the homunculi had done before.

“His stone is expended; he won’t be coming back from this one. I think that having everyone explode out of his stomach on top of everything else was just the last straw.”

Although it was something of a comfort to know that the homunculi could be killed, Al was still disturbed by the sight. 

“Come on, let’s come away from this gruesome scene.” Patience led the way further into the tunnels. “Even though there’s now no need to get Hohenheim to get everyone out of Gluttony, you could all definitely do with medical attention, Ed especially, and we can help you at home.”

They continued to follow Patience through the catacombs; Al kept glancing down at Ed every few seconds, but there was no change in him.

“This next section of the tunnel has no lighting,” Patience warned as the lights started to dim behind them. “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other; there isn’t anything to trip over.”

Al continued to tread carefully as the visibility reduced to zero; he could hear Ling beside him and Patience in front of him, and even though he was almost completely convinced that Patience was a friend, there was a part of him that still wondered if they were being led into a trap. He tried to listen for the sounds of anyone else in the tunnel with them, but Lan Fan and Fu had already proved that they could move silently when they wanted to. 

“Can you feel anything?” he whispered to Ling.

“No. The impression of multitude is in the very ground here, I can’t differentiate anything over the top of it.”

That didn’t really do anything to reassure Al, and he looked around, desperately trying to see through the blackness.

“Ok, stop here,” Patience said. “The lights are going to come back on now, don’t get dazzled.”

There was the clunk of an electrical switch and the tunnel burst into life again, and Al looked around in wonder. They were evidently still in the tunnels, but this was no longer the gloomy catacomb they had been wandering along before. This seemed more like, well, a home, almost. There were rugs on the floor and neatly painted wooden doors leading off the main tunnel, which was illuminated with soft lamp light. 

“Wow.”

Patience smiled. “Welcome to our home. It’s not much, but it serves us well.”

Al looked down to see that he was standing on a welcome mat, and for some reason that served to reassure him. 

“I’m sorry if it’s a bit of a mess,” Patience continued. “We don’t really tend to get guests all that often. Secrecy’s the name of the game when you’re… like us.”

“Is that the reason for keeping your porch in pitch darkness?” Ling asked.

“No, that’s more of a security feature. No light means no shadows. You never know what might be lurking in those.”

Al shuddered. The little reassurance that the welcome mat had given him went completely out of the window with those words. Well, metaphorically. They were deep underground, there were no windows. He thought of the voice that had echoed through the tunnels and called off Envy, a voice that had seemed to have no owner but had come out of the darkness nonetheless. Patience probably had the right idea when it came to keeping the dark tunnels safe.

“Hohenheim?” Patience called, moving further into the tunnel. “Tempe? Where are you? I brought guests!”

A female voice responded from one of the doors to the right, slightly ajar. “We’re in the study, Patience.”

Patience bounded along in the direction that the voice had come from and waved for Ling and Al to follow them. 

“Tempe, I thought we agreed that we were going to call this the war room,” Patience said as they all entered. “I mean, look at you. All you need are a few little models of homunculi and some sticks to move them around with.” 

Two figures were looking over what looked like a map spread out over a large table in the centre of the room, and the woman glanced up as they entered, startling at the sight that met her. 

“Good grief, Patience, you could have warned us that one of the guests was unconscious!” She bustled over, peering into Ed’s face and checking him over before looking up at Al. “You must be Alphonse, come with me and let’s get Edward sorted out.”

Try as he might, and as grateful as he was for the medical attention, Al couldn’t move. He could barely hear what the woman - Tempe, he assumed - was saying to him. He was transfixed by the other person in the room. 

Al had never met the man before, but he’d seen his picture. This was the man whose picture Mom had kept all those years, and Granny had kept after, and that now lived tucked into the chest cavity of his armour. 

His hair was tied back now, and he was wearing glasses, but there was no mistaking that the man in front of him now was the man in the picture. 

His father. 

And yet, when the man looked up, his expression didn’t fit. Sure, he had the same golden eyes and hair and beard, and the angles in his face were the same, but there was something in his expression that was softer. Older. Sadder. 

He shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “And I’m not him. I know I look like him, but I’m not your father.”

“Al?” All of Patience’s exuberance seemed to have gone, as if they realised the massive gravity of what was going on. “Al, I’ll take Ed; Tempe and I will get him fixed up.”

Al didn’t resist as Patience lifted Ed out of his arms.

The man came towards them, taking in Ling’s bent posture and Al’s missing hand. 

“Here, let me help.”

He gently placed a hand on Ling’s ribcage; there was a spark of red alchemic light and then Ling straightened up. 

“Thank you. That’s much better.”

“And now for you, Alphonse.” He touched Al’s arm and the lightning sparked again, regrowing his hand out of nothing, the armour not thinning. No equivalent exchange.

“Thanks.”

For a while the three of them looked at each other, and then Ling gave an awkward cough.

“I think I ought to go too.” Ling backed out of the room, leaving Al alone with the man who was apparently not his father.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” The man indicated a squashy, moth-eaten sofa in the corner of the room. “My name is Van Hohenheim, and it’s a very long story.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [AO3]

==

Five

As soon as the Elrics had rushed out of earshot, Mustang groaned, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. 

“I had hoped that conversation would go better,” he muttered. Hawkeye closed the office door again and came over to the desk.

“Sir, I really think you need to go home and get some sleep. I know how committed you are to finding Lieutenant Colonel Hughes’ attacker, but you’re no good to him running on empty.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Mustang snapped. “Hughes is sleeping enough for both of us at the moment and I can’t rest until he wakes up.”

“Sir, it’s not your fault any more than it’s the Elrics’ fault. Neither you nor they are the ones that did this to him. I know you wanted to spare them the feeling of responsibility for what happened to Hughes, but that doesn’t mean that you have to take it upon yourself instead.”

Mustang sighed. “I know that in theory. It’s harder to put it into practice. If I could just find out what he knew…”

“I am sure he’ll be able to tell you that in time,” Hawkeye said. Her tone was gentle but firm, brooking no arguments, and Mustang knew that she was right.

To say that the last few weeks since Hughes’ attack had been frantic would be putting it mildly. The longer that he went without finding out who had stabbed and shot him, the longer that person was still running free and the more opportunity they had to come back and finish what they’d started. Lieutenant Abrams had done an admirable job of standing guard outside Hughes’ hospital room so far; in fact Mustang was beginning to think that he never went home, but he couldn’t be there all the time. And, of course, if as Armstrong had surmised, Hughes’ attacker was working within, or at least alongside, the military, then it would be as easy as anything for someone to turn up and relieve Abrams of his duty, only to slip in and finish off Hughes whilst he was so helpless and unable to defend himself. 

Truth be told, he still wasn’t entirely sure that he trusted Abrams, but the young lieutenant had volunteered himself for guard duty before the need for guard duty had been established - indeed, Mustang had arrived in Central to find out what was going on the morning after Hughes’ attack and had found Abrams standing outside the door, having received no orders to do so but taking it upon himself to be prepared anyway. 

(He said he didn’t mind the monotony. It got him out of doing paperwork.)

So far nothing had happened, and now that he and his team had moved to Central permanently, he could set up a much better protection detail, but the worry still remained. 

At length, Hawkeye left him alone, going back to her own duties, and Mustang stared down at the papers spread in front of him, not really seeing any of it when his mind was filled with military conspiracies and the like. How far up did this all go? Armstrong had said that the Fuhrer himself was the one who had warned Hughes and the Elrics away from their line of investigation. If it went all the way up to the top, if Bradley himself was involved in it… 

In the midst of all the hustle of Central Command, slap in the dead centre of Amestris’s most populous city, Mustang had never felt more alone. There were so few people that he could trust anymore, and he could already feel himself drowning in the depths of the quagmire that Hughes had unwittingly drawn him into. 

He checked his watch; he was due a lunch break and he might as well use it to go over to the hospital. The nurses were used to seeing him there by now, a regular fixture in Hughes’ room. They said that talking to coma patients helped them to recover, but they weren’t exactly good conversation partners, and what Mustang really needed were answers, answers that Hughes couldn’t give. 

Still. At least if he was unconscious then he wasn’t spilling secrets that the military did not want aired, so perhaps this state was simply buying Mustang more time to unravel all the mysteries.

Gracia and Elysia were just leaving as he arrived, and Gracia gave a tired sigh when she saw him. 

“When was the last time you slept, Roy?”

“I’m fine.”

“Burning yourself out isn’t going to help him, you know. You need to take care of yourself, Roy. The doctors are taking care of Maes, but there’s no one taking care of you.” Gracia smiled weakly. “I can appreciate all that you’re doing to try and work out who did this and why, but I don’t want you ending up in the bed next to him because you’ve collapsed from nervous exhaustion.”

“I know.”

“Maes will come back to us in his own time, Roy, and then he can tell you everything he knows, and together you’ll do what you do best, like you always do. Take care of yourself, and if you ever find yourself in need of a good meal, because I’ve heard Maes complain about the Central Command cafeteria food enough to know it’s terrible, then you know where to find us.”

“Thank you, Gracia.”

They said their goodbyes and Mustang went into Hughes’ room. He was just the same as he had been yesterday, and the day before that, and every single day since he had been attacked. Although the doctors were fairly optimistic, it was hard for Mustang to feel the same way when he saw his friend like this. 

He settled into the chair that Gracia had just vacated, resting his elbows on his knees and trying to make sense of everything again. He had no idea whom in the military he could trust anymore. Was it just Central Command’s top brass he was looking at here, or had things spread out across the entire nation? He shivered at the thought that Grumman might have been involved in anything nefarious whilst they’d still been out in the east. 

And now, on top of it all, the Elric brothers were back in town. He knew that it had been a pipe dream to try and keep this from them, not when they had got on pretty well with Hughes when they had been in Central and he had always looked out for them; they would want to know what had happened to him, and Hawkeye was right, it would have come out sooner or later and they would not thank him for treating them like children at this juncture. 

Still, they’d been through so much, it would have been nice not to have to add this to their already piled-high trauma. Not to mention the fact that now they were here and Scar was here. He really had been intending to get them a protection detail now that they were back in town, but that had been completely derailed by the news of Hughes’s condition. What with trying to keep an eye on Hughes and trying to keep an eye on Elrics, and not knowing whom he could trust outside of his own team and Armstrong’s direct subordinates, Mustang was running out of people whom he trusted to provide protection duties. All he could do was hope that Ed and Al would keep their heads down now that they knew Scar was back on the prowl. At least Scar worked alone, and if he didn’t know that the Elrics were back in town then they would be fairly safe from him. The military, though… That was harder to fathom, and far more dangerous. In the end, Scar was just one man, and he was just a man. The military could call upon hundreds of thousands of people if necessary, and with these inhuman creatures on side as well…

Mustang was vastly outnumbered. He’d been vastly outnumbered before, but this situation was very different to Ishval and he couldn’t just burn his way out of it. Not this time. This was going to require subtlety. 

He needed to know just how far this conspiracy had spread throughout the military, and he needed to know which of his superiors he could confide in.

Soon, he was going to have to try and infiltrate the generals. Not yet, though. For now, he wanted to keep an eye on the Elric brothers and make sure that they didn’t do anything that could get themselves killed.

X

“We’re going to get ourselves killed.”

Ed sighed. “It’s a risk that we’re going to have to take if we’re going to get anywhere with working out who the homunculi are and what they want.”

“The colonel specifically told us to lay low and not cause trouble!”

“Since when have we ever listened to what the colonel tells us?”

Even though Al’s expression didn’t change, Ed could tell that his brother was glaring at him. 

“Even if Scar doesn’t kill us and the homunculi don’t kill us and the colonel doesn’t kill us, you do know that Winry is definitely going to kill you when she finds out that you’re intentionally going to put yourself into a situation where your arm could potentially get blown to smithereens.”

Ed winced at the thought of his arm being smithereened for the second time in far too short a space of time. 

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said. “The homunculi will turn up before that happens, I’m sure of it.”

Al was clearly not convinced, as he continued. 

“And once she’s done killing you, she’ll then kill me for letting you do it, and once she’s done killing me, she’ll probably kill you again just to make sure.”

“Al, a little optimism here, please?” Ed pleaded. 

“No one’s going to get blown to smithereens,” Ling said. 

“You can say that, but you’ve never met Scar,” Al pointed out, before turning back to Ed. “And even if the homunculi do show up, it won’t exactly help us against Scar because these three will be distracting the homunculi!” He gestured towards Ling, Lan Fan and Fu, sitting on the windowsill where they had unceremoniously decided that they wanted to be a part of the homunculus capturing expedition.

Ed would admit that it was probably not the most thought through of plans, and it was definitely flying in the face of all the promises that they had made to various friends and family members that they would be careful in their ongoing quest. This was about as far away from careful as they could get, using one enemy to lure out another enemy, but if they wanted to learn more about the homunculi’s plans, then the only viable way to do that whilst still retaining the upper hand was to get one of them on the back foot. If they could time it right and force things into a Scar versus Homunculus free-for-all, then maybe they stood a chance, but right now, a hell of a lot had to be put down to sheer dumb luck. 

Still, fate had favoured them in the past, and who knew? Maybe the other mysterious friends would show up again and wade in, for better or worse. Maybe it would give Ed more of a clue of where everyone, the mysterious friends included, landed in this grand scheme of things, and whether or not they could be trusted to have his best interests at heart, or whether they were simply pursuing their own agenda that sometimes just so happened to align with saving his and Al’s skins.

There was a knock on the door, and Ed turned to Ling, Fu and Lan Fan, but they had already vanished out of the window, off to who knew where. They were really going to have to do something about them appearing and disappearing at will, and Ed considered locking the windows right now whilst they were still out there hanging on the outside of the building. That said, they were going to help them with capturing a homunculus for interrogation, so perhaps he should be charitable. Just this once.

Al opened the door, and Ed was surprised to see Lieutenant Hawkeye standing there. 

“Hello Lieutenant,” Al said. “What brings you here so late?”

“We’ve received some bad news, and I wanted to make sure that you heard it from me as soon as possible.” 

Ed felt his veins turn cold, and he could almost tell what Hawkeye was going to say as she said it. 

“I’m afraid that Lieutenant Colonel Hughes passed away earlier this afternoon.”

X

Considering that he was only fifteen, Ed felt that he’d been to way too many funerals in his life thus far. They were all the same. They were always cold, no matter what the weather. There was a chill in the air that seemed to emanate off the very mourners, and no one was paying any attention to what any of the people were saying in their speeches and eulogies. Ed just kept staring at the coffin as the earth was thrown over it, listening to Gracia crying, feeling Winry shaking where she’d grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. 

It wasn’t until the service was over and people were beginning to move away from the graveside that Ed noticed the group right at the edge of the cemetery, almost too far to make out facial features properly, but he recognised three of the four nonetheless. It was their Mysterious Friends from the fifth laboratory, and the pale-haired woman from Liore. The fourth he didn’t recognise and it was hard to make out her face with her hood up against the wind, but he startled as he focussed on her. 

She looked like Mom. 

“Al…” He patted Al’s arm to get his attention, but by the time he turned back, the mysterious woman had turned and was walking away from them with the other Mysterious Friends. Only the stranger from Eastern remained, looking at them with a certain degree of scrutiny before they too turned and followed the others further into the cemetery, no doubt heading towards the back gates at the other side of the site.

For a moment, Ed wanted to run after them, ask them what the hell they were doing at Hughes’ funeral in the first place, and what the hell they were doing in general in the second, and to see whether that fleeting glimpse of the woman who’d looked like Mom at first glance would be any different close up, but something stopped him. He still couldn’t decide if he wanted to meet them properly or not, even if they weren’t in a life or death situation like they had been all the other times. This was definitely a much calmer prospect, but at the same time, a cemetery really wasn’t the best place for a potential confrontation, and Ed didn’t want to think about how the conversation might go if it turned out that the Mysterious Friends weren’t quite as friendly as they seemed. As long as he never met them properly then the illusions would never be shattered, but at the same time, if they were going to be a threat then Ed wanted to know, even if they might not be the same kind of threat as the homunculi were right now. 

“Them again,” Al said. 

“Yeah.” Ed didn’t say anything about the woman who had looked like Mom, figuring that it would be best to keep that to himself. Maybe he’d been mistaken. He’d been thinking about Mom, after all, or more specifically thinking about her funeral. Maybe a wire had got crossed in his brain somewhere. He’d only seen her for a couple of seconds. 

It was getting late by the time they made it back to the hotel, Winry making her excuses and going straight into her room. Ed couldn’t blame her; it had been a bad day for all of them and he wasn’t exactly feeling sociable himself. Tactfully, Ling, Lan Fan and Fu had chosen not to break in to continue discussing their plans for drawing out the homunculi, but they had left a note telling the brothers to give them a sign when they were ready to proceed again. Ed lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a sigh. A part of him felt like it was pointless to think about these things now and it would be callous to start making plans again so soon after Hughes had died, but the rest of him couldn’t help but think about the promise that they had made to Gracia, that they wouldn’t give up and they wouldn’t let what happened to Hughes be in vain. 

If the homunculi had been involved in his attack somehow because he knew too much, then capturing one made even more sense; they could ask it what it knew about Hughes’ death and who had killed him, as well as what was going on with the Philosopher’s Stone and the fifth laboratory.

“What do you think?” Al was still looking at the note from their Xingese… Friends was pushing it. Acquaintances perhaps? “Do you think we ought to go ahead with the plan again?”

Ed gave a long sigh.

“Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes, I think we owe it to Hughes to find out exactly what happened, if nothing else. The colonel isn’t exactly making any headway by trying to find things out within the military. This might get us on the right track to learning what he’d found out, and once we know that…”

He didn’t really know what would happen after that. All he knew was that if it was important enough for someone to have killed Hughes for it, then it was something that was big enough to need to be found out and acted upon.

“Yes,” he repeated. “The plan goes ahead.”

X

“The Elrics are back in town.”

“Again? I still say they’re following us. Shall we take bets on how long it’ll take them to get into trouble again?”

“Don’t joke about things like that. You were the one who decided to keep an eye on them in the first place.”

“I know, and sometimes I regret that decision. All right. I suppose we shall just have to be on our guard.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [Three] [AO3]

==

Four

“Well, you can’t deny that we’ve certainly had an adventure over the last couple of weeks. Homunculi in Dublith, the Fuhrer turning up, Xingese ninjas in Rush Valley.” Ed paused. “Hopefully we’ve seen the last of them, though. I don’t know why Ling decided it would be a good idea to come with us.”

Al laughed.“ Yes, it’s definitely been eventful, but I’m not sure how much of that we could put in an official report to the colonel.”

“Meh.” Ed waved aside his brother’s concerns. “We don’t have to tell him anything, and he won’t be expecting us to report back for a while. We’ve got time to think up a cover story. Who knows? Lieutenant Colonel Hughes might even help us with that.”

They turned into the street that led to Central Command and stopped dead.

“What the hell happened here?” 

Ed looked down the street, taking in the damaged building facades and the tree branches everywhere. City maintenance workers were brushing broken window glass off the sidewalks, and although it wasn’t a scene of utter devastation, it was clear that something major had happened in the street last night.

“It looks as if a tornado hit,” Al said.

“It did.”

Ed startled on hearing the colonel’s voice beside him. Mustang was surveying the carnage grimly, and he held out the morning’s newspaper to Ed. 

“Colonel Mustang? What are you doing in Central?”

“My transfer was finalised a month ago.”

“Oh.” Al paused. “Congratulations. Are the rest of your team here too?”

Ed left Al and Mustang to their conversation and skimmed the paper. Scar Strikes Again: Fifth State Alchemist Murdered. Lieutenant Colonel Abigail Sherman, the Whirlwind Alchemist, was killed last night…

“So, Scar’s back, huh.”

“Yes.” Mustang nodded towards Central Command. “Now that you’re back in the city, arrangements will need to be made for your protection. Shall we go and discuss it? I assume that you were going to report in, since you were heading in that direction.”

Ed narrowed his eyes but didn’t say anything, following the colonel along the road towards the command building. He thought about the last time he and Al had had a protection detail, and what had happened then. They’d ended up opening a massive can of worms, and now it was open, they couldn’t get any of the worms back in. All they could do was just keep following the trails. That was hard enough as it was, but being under guard would make it even more difficult. He wondered if they’d assign Brosh and Ross again, and he felt kind of sorry for them at the prospect.

On the other hand, if Scar was operating here in Central where there were so many more State Alchemists to go at, most of whom had, unlike Ed, actually been involved in the Ishval war, maybe that would get him off the hook. 

They met Lieutenant Hawkeye in the entrance to Central Command.

“Hello Ed, Al. I didn’t realise that you were back in town.”

“We finished what we needed to do down south and we came back to tie up a few loose ends,” Ed said. “We were going to check in with Lieutenant Colonel Hughes.”

At the mention of Hughes’ name, Hawkeye and Mustang exchanged a look, and even though Ed would admit that he was not the most astute person in the world, he could not miss that look. He raised an eyebrow. 

“What’s going on?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Hughes is…” Hawkeye began, but Mustang cut her off.

“Lieutenant Colonel Hughes is not currently stationed at Central Command.”

Hawkeye all but glared at her superior, and Ed’s eyebrow remained raised. 

“OK… Where is he, then?”

Neither of the officers replied, both of them seeming to be having a conversation conducted entirely in ferocious facial expressions.

“Let’s talk about this elsewhere,” Mustang said eventually, looking around the open foyer of the command building and gesturing for Ed and Al to follow him. He moved on ahead apace, and Hawkeye sped up to catch up to him, the two of them talking in hushed but urgent tones. Ed couldn’t make out what they were saying, he was having to jog to keep up with them as it was, but he heard Hawkeye say something along the lines of they’ll find out the truth soon enough and they won’t thank you for lying to them. 

“Brother?” Al whispered. “Do you think something’s happened to Mr Hughes?”

“It definitely sounds that way.” Ed’s stomach turned in knots. If something had happened to Hughes as a result of everything that he and Al had found out in the fifth laboratory, the threads that they had started to pull on, and Hughes had helped them to pull on, and Bradley had warned them away from pulling on…

He felt sick at the thought, thinking of Gracia and Elysia and the warmth and hospitality that the entire Hughes family had shown them on their arrival in Central, not making anything of Al’s appearance, not expecting anything from them, just accepting them as they were. 

Hawkeye ushered them into Mustang’s office and shut the door behind them, checking the corridor for eavesdroppers before taking up a position by the door, standing guard.

Mustang settled himself behind his desk and indicated for Ed and Al to take a seat. He gave a long sigh, and Ed could tell that Hawkeye had won whatever argument they’d been having through the corridors. 

“Shortly after you departed Central last month, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes was attacked by an unknown assailant. He received multiple stab wounds and he was shot at close range.”

Ice flooded Ed’s veins at the thought. “Is he…”

“He survived the attack; a passer-by called an ambulance and performed first aid. He’s still alive, but he’s been in a coma since that night and he hasn’t regained consciousness.”

Ed took several deep breaths, trying to calm his racing heart. Hughes wasn’t dead. He wasn’t ok by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t dead. 

“Ed, Winry went straight to the Hughes’s.” Al’s voice was high and urgent, betraying exactly the same kind of frantic fear that Ed was feeling. He jumped to his feet, the scrape of the chair legs along the floor grating in his ears, and ran for the door; Al followed hot on his heels. Hawkeye sidestepped to let them out. They had to intercept Winry; they had to tell her what had happened…

“Fullmetal!”

He ignored the colonel yelling after them as they left the room and rushed off in the direction of the Hughes home. Several frantic knocks at the apartment door told them that there was no one home, and Ed took a step back, stumbling and landing hard on his ass as the adrenaline finally started to wear off. He smacked the floor in frustration. This shouldn’t have happened. This was all his fault. 

“Brother?” Al crouched down beside him. “Are you ok?”

Ed sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah. No. I don’t know. It’s all so stupid and pointless, and it’s all my fault. If we hadn’t been looking for the Philosopher’s Stone, if we hadn’t gone to the fifth laboratory, if we hadn’t met those weirdos…”

“If it’s your fault, then it’s mine too,” Al said plainly. “We’re in this together. We’re doing all this together. Don’t blame yourself. I don’t blame you.”

Ed remembered their conversation on the hospital roof, and the catharsis that had come with the air being cleared and knowing that Al did not blame him for his current state. He accepted Al’s hand to pull him back onto his feet and he brushed himself down. 

“They’ll probably be at the hospital,” he said. “We should go and see.”

Al nodded his agreement and they set off again, this time at a much more measured pace.

Winry was sitting in the corridor when they got there, hugging her knees with her heels drawn up on the chair edge. She looked up as she heard them approaching. 

“I just can’t believe it,” she murmured. “Who would do something like that? Why?”

Ed’s stomach flip-flopped again. He knew exactly why someone would do something like that. If Hughes had found out more information about the mysterious people in the fifth lab, then someone would definitely want to silence him. 

Lieutenant Abrams opened the door for them, and the sight that met them didn’t do anything for Ed’s churning stomach. 

Hughes just looked wrong, lying there hooked up to tubes and drips. He looked too small and too helpless; it didn’t look like he was just asleep and could wake up and be his normal, exuberant, irritating self at any moment. It was a stark reminder of just what they had got themselves involved in, and the fact that they were now in way over their heads, and the only thing that they could do to keep afloat was to keep moving forward.

“Ms Gracia, we’re so sorry,” Al said.

Despite everything, Gracia gave them a weak smile. There were dark shadows under her eyes and it looked like she hadn’t slept for days; Elysia was curled up in her lap but it looked like she’d only fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion. 

“Oh boys,” she said softly. “It’s not your fault.”

“But if we hadn’t…

Gracia shook her head, cutting them off. 

“No, please don’t start getting into What-Ifs. You weren’t the ones who did this to Maes. You’re not responsible. Just… Promise me that you won’t let this derail you. Promise me that you’ll keep going and keep trying to get your bodies back like you were doing before. Please don’t give up. Please don’t let this be in vain.” She gave a long sigh, turning her gaze back towards Hughes. “There’s still hope. I’m sure that he’ll wake up with time. Maybe the next time he sees you, you’ll have succeeded.”

“Thank you, Ms Gracia.” They left the room quietly, collecting Winry from outside, and the three of them made their way back to the hotel in contemplative silence. Ed had been so close to giving up, figuring that if their quest to get their bodies back was going to get people hurt in the process, and if looking into the mysterious people from the fifth lab was going to get their friends like Hughes attacked, then maybe it wasn’t worth it at all, and they should just accept their fate and the consequences of breaking the taboo. 

What Gracia had said made sense, though. Hughes had suffered this fate whilst acting on information that they had found out; he had been helping them out, and to give up now would be tantamount to throwing his help back in his face. They had to keep going, for the sake of everyone who had helped them even if not their own. 

After all, as Gracia had said: there was still hope. However bleak things might look, there was still the chance that Hughes would be ok in the end, and if they had managed to get their bodies back by that point, then so much the better.

X

“I’m concerned about Hughes. I think that something needs to be done before anyone else decides that something needs to be done.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve been working on a plan since he went into the hospital. Everything will work out. I know how we can keep him safe.”

“I think we can safely say that the days of ‘not intervening’ are over.”

“When the stakes are this high, we can’t just sit back and do nothing.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [Two] [AO3]

==

Three

“I’m beginning to think that you two just attract trouble.” Izumi sighed. “You couldn’t have decided to be ordinary, could you? No, you had to go and get yourselves involved with homunculi, of all things, and now we even have the Fuhrer sniffing around.”

Ed’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, I don’t buy that he was just in the area at random. That seems way too convenient. Especially as he’d already warned us against continuing to investigate what was going on in the fifth laboratory. Do you think he’s keeping tabs on us?”

Izumi raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t put anything past that man, and I also wouldn’t put it past you two to have ended up on some kind of government watchlist.”

Al wasn’t really listening to Ed as he tried to defend himself against accusations of strange government blacklists. He was remembering what had happened in the sewers under Dublith, when Martel had been in his armour and he couldn’t move. 

There had been someone else there. If he’d had a body, he would have said that the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end; he’d been certain that there was someone else lurking in the shadows there even before the Fuhrer had arrived and addressed the unseen presence, warning them not to get involved in military business before he vanished off into the darkness in search of Greed. He had told Ed about it as soon as everything had been sorted out and they’d had time to themselves after being reunited, but neither of them had really had time to process the meaning of it. 

He focussed back in on the conversation once he heard Ed mention the Philosopher’s Stone. Izumi had been reluctant to talk about it before, when they had first asked her what she knew about it, and it was clear that she knew a lot more than she was letting on. Now that they were no longer her pupils and they were approaching her on an equal footing, perhaps she could be persuaded to talk more about her experiences. 

She gave a long sigh. 

“I suppose my point of view might be influenced by what’s happened to me, but honestly, I don’t think that any good will come of you chasing after that thing.”

“Yeah.” Ed grimaced. “I mean, we already know how they’re created, and Dr Marcoh already warned us against looking into it too much, but I can’t rest easy until I know that I’ve covered every angle. I understand that the stone can bypass equivalent exchange because the human lives and souls inside it are offered up in exchange for whatever you want to create, and even an unstable Stone can still do that.”

“Father Cornello in Liore was doing it,” Al said. “But even then, he couldn’t use it to bring the dead back to life. Rose said that he’d tried to bring her boyfriend back and it hadn’t worked.”

“I don’t really think that we can take Rose and Cornello’s word for it, considering his excuse for it not working was ‘Rose wasn’t praying to God hard enough for it to work and if she just had more faith it would all be fine’,” Ed pointed out. “But if he really had tried with the stone and hadn’t succeeded, it’s pretty clear evidence that there are some things that really are impossible to do.”

“Yes.” Izumi was looking into the middle distance, brow furrowed. “I think that everyone ought to think twice before relying on a Philosopher’s Stone to solve their problems. In my experience, there’s still always a catch, just perhaps one that isn’t obvious in the first instance.”

“Will you tell us, please, Teacher?” Al asked. Izumi glared at him at the misnomer, but did not correct him, and she gave a soft sigh. 

“I did not tell you everything when I told you the story of my breaking the taboo,” she said eventually. “Right at the point when I was despairing of ever being able to conceive a child, an itinerant alchemist was passing through Dublith. He had a Philosopher’s Stone in his possession, and although he wasn’t exactly promoting himself as being able to perform miracles like this Father Cornello was in Liore, word soon got around that he was able to use alchemy to heal things that doctors couldn’t. Naturally, as an alchemist myself who’d been researching ways to use alchemy to cure infertility for years, I was sceptical of the claims that people made about him, but I was also desperate enough to go along and see for myself.”

Izumi sighed again, and Sig reached across the table to cover her hand with his larger one. 

“We got into a pretty heated debate about it, but in the end, the Stone that he had looked to be genuine, and I asked him to try and heal my infertility. A few weeks after that, I was pregnant with our son. The rest of the story, you already know.” Izumi shrugged. “I don’t know whether the two things are linked or whether it was just extremely bad luck and bad timing on everyone’s parts, but there’s a part of me that can never let go of the idea that it was the Stone that caused my baby to be stillborn, and that was the price that I had to pay for what the Stone had done without equivalent exchange. If the Stone works by expending the human souls trapped within it, then perhaps my child’s soul was taken to restore the balance. I don’t know. I just know that I don’t trust the Philosopher’s Stone, or those who claim to be able to perform miracles with it.”

There was silence for a long time as Ed and Al both took in the gravity of what Izumi had just told them. Suddenly, her breaking the taboo took on a much more sinister aspect with the spectre of the Stone in the background. 

“Do you remember the name of this alchemist?” Ed asked eventually. “Maybe we can track him down and ask him.”

“It was years ago now,” Izumi protested. “I can’t remember the name he used, but all things considered, I doubt that it was actually his real name. There was something not quite right about him, something untrustworthy, and it should have warned me away from the start.” She paused. “I do remember one thing, though. He had the same colour eyes as you two, and I thought that was strange from the moment I first met you back in Resembool.”

Ed and Al looked at each other, and Al, with a horrible sinking feeling, reached inside his chest cavity for the photograph that he had taken from Granny and kept. It was splashed with blood now, but still obvious for what it was. He passed the picture to Izumi, who nodded. 

“Yes, that’s him.” She gave Al a sympathetic look. “Your father, huh? The one who walked out before you were born?”

Al nodded. “Yes.”

Ed snorted. “Well, at least the impression of ‘untrustworthy at first glance’ hasn’t changed,” he muttered. “What the hell was he doing with a Philosopher’s Stone, though? Where the hell did he get it? Did he have it when he was at home with Mom?” Ed slammed his fist down on the table and another screw bounced loose out of his arm; Al chased after it. “If he had a Stone that could cure anything and everything, where the hell was he when Mom was sick?”

Al chose not to point out that, if Izumi’s cautionary tale was to be believed, the Stone would probably have made things even worse. He was asking much the same questions himself, and he had no idea where they could find the answers. All he knew was that there was no way that Ed would be going after their father in the hope of getting more information about the Philosopher’s Stone. They had already decided that there were other ways and means and that they would not use a Stone to get their bodies back if they could help it. There was no sense in seeking out old wounds.

“Sometimes bad things and bad people happen to good people,” Sig said, as sage and calm as ever. “There’s nothing that you can do about it; so don’t blame yourselves.”

Al knew that Sig had a point, but it was hard to let go of the fact that the person whom Izumi held partially responsible for what had happened to her was their own father. Even if they had never had a relationship with him, it was still easy to feel guilt by association. 

“Alphonse, it was my decision to perform human transmutation,” Izumi said, as if she could read his thoughts. “That part, and everything that happened as a result of that, was my decision, and the consequences lie with me. There’s nothing you or Ed could have done.”

Al nodded. “I guess. It’s just a shock I suppose, knowing that everything is linked like this.”

“Yeah.” Ed’s brow was furrowed again. “I really don’t like the way everything’s linking together. Our father, the Philosopher’s Stone, the homunculi, the Fuhrer… Sooner or later it all starts to connect, and it feels wrong.”

“Whatever you do, boys, please just be careful,” Sig said. It was the same warning that Granny had given them, albeit delivered somewhat differently. Whatever was going on, however it was connected to them, if it even was connected to them, it was clear that this was so much bigger than just looking for a way to get their bodies back. 

At length it was time to leave Dublith, if they wanted to stand any chance of getting to Rush Valley in good time to get Ed’s arm fixed before any more harm could come to it. Sig and Izumi saw them to the station with a few minutes to go before the train arrived, and Al promised to keep them informed of whatever they might find out, whether it made things better or worse.

Ed looked down at his arm, turning it this way and that, and he sighed.

“Ok, so how much grovelling to Winry am I going to have to do this time? Al? Al?”

Al was not paying his brother any attention, because he was focussed on someone at the other end of the platform. 

“Al? What’s got into you?”

“That lady.” Al surreptitiously indicated to the woman who had caught his attention. She was small in build with pale, platinum blonde hair, wearing a pink coat, and Al was certain that he’d seen her and her pink coat before. 

“Yeah, what about her?”

“I’ve seen her before, I’m sure of it. I’m just trying to remember where.”

“Ok.”

“I know it could be a coincidence, but with everything else that’s happened here - Greed, the homunculi, the Fuhrer and that cryptic message to someone in the dark - I’m starting to think that maybe coincidences aren’t as coincidental as they seem.”

Ed nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Although he didn’t mention it to Ed just yet, Al had the gut feeling that the unseen third party in the tunnels under Dublith, the person whom Fuhrer Bradley had warned to stay out of the military’s business, was the woman standing on the platform now. He didn’t know why he was so certain, it was just a feeling that wouldn’t go away. He tried to push it to the back of his mind, focussing instead on trawling through his memories to find where he had seen her before. 

“Liore,” he said eventually. “She was in Liore the day we were.”

“Huh.” Ed narrowed his eyes, watching the woman. She hadn’t been looking in their direction, but now she glanced to the side, and Al felt her gaze lock onto his. She was definitely looking at them.

“Do you think she’s following us?”

“Well, if she is and we haven’t seen her since Liore, then she’s either really good at tailing people, which begs the question why is she now so visible to us, or we’re really, really bad at picking up on when we’re being followed.”

“Yeah.” Al shuddered at either train of thought. “It makes me wonder though. We thought that the Mysterious Friend from Eastern might be following us when they showed up in the fifth lab in Central, but then we decided that they were probably following the other group - the homunculi, I guess - instead. Now  this lady is here, and there was a homunculus here. Do you think that maybe there was a homunculus in Liore at the same time as we were there, and that’s why she was there? And maybe there was one in Eastern at the same time as Scar?”

“Maybe Scar’s a homunculus,” Ed suggested. 

“I don’t think so. Lieutenant Hawkeye wounded him when she shot him and he was bleeding badly. The other homunculi don’t bleed.”

“I was joking. Well, I was half-joking.” Ed sighed, getting up from the bench they were sitting on as the train pulled into the station. “You might be onto something there. These mysterious people keep turning up in the same places as the homunculi. If the confrontation at the fifth lab is anything to go by, then they’re on the opposite side to the homunculi, but that doesn’t automatically mean that they’re on the same side as us. They could be working diagonally, I don’t know.”

“Yeah. And it just so happens that we end up turning up in the same places as the homunculi as well.”

“I just hope that we don’t run into any more.” Ed paused. “Of either group, to be honest, although…”

“You’re still curious about the stranger with the golden eyes, aren’t you?”

Ed nodded. “Part of me wants to know. The other part really doesn’t. I just wish I could make my mind up, and I think that might be easier if I wasn’t about to die whenever we meet them.”

Al snorted. “Yes, that does kind of hamper introductions a bit.” 

They didn’t speak again until they got onto the train, but it was clear that the conversation wasn’t over and that they were both thinking the same thing, their minds focussed on the stranger and whether the woman from Liore was with them or not. Al lost sight of her as they entered their carriage, but she was definitely on the same train as them, and he had to wonder if she or one of the others would perhaps turn up in Rush Valley. He didn’t know whether he wanted them to or not.

“Well I guess we have time to make a decision,” Ed said eventually once they were settled on the train and steaming up the line towards Rush Valley. “Something tells me that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of them.”

Al had to agree.

X

“How was Dublith?”

“Bradley took out Greed.”

“Really? Well, I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“There was one other thing. The Elrics were there.”

“Them again? They keep turning up like bad coins, don’t they? Do you think they’re following us?”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated:Teen

==

[One] [AO3]

==

Two

In hindsight, Ed realised that sneaking into an abandoned and structurally unsound building in which mysterious alchemical experiments had been conducted and secrets were still definitely being housed was not the best of ideas. 

Especially not when they had snuck out from under their guard and had not told anyone where they were going. 

And especially not when the abandoned building turned out to not be abandoned at all, and now Al was who knew where fighting who knew what and Ed was backed into a corner by What The Hell on one side and Even More What The Hell on the other, and to make matters even worse, now his arm had randomly stopped working. 

This was definitely one of the worse scrapes that Ed had found himself in during his still rather short and hopefully not yet over life.

“Lust! Envy! I might have known that you two would be here. You’re like a vulture, aren’t you, Envy? Always looking for death and misery. Mind you, I think that vultures have slightly better dress sense.”

The figure who had given a final death to Slicer’s body and now had Ed on the back foot whirled around at this insult against their taste in fashion, and Ed took advantage of the brief moment of respite to take stock of the situation and the source of his unexpected reprieve. Two new figures had entered the room. One was a young man who had immediately gone toe to toe with the one Ed assumed was Lust, and the other…

It was the stranger from the fight with Scar in Eastern City, and they gave an exasperated sigh when they turned and saw Ed in the corner of the room.

“You’ve got to stop making a habit of this, you know,” they said. “I’ve never known anyone to get into as many life or death situations as you.”

Ed felt that this was a bit uncharitable since they’d only met twice, but he would admit that both times were indeed life or death, and twice in one month was still rather a lot of life or death situations for the average person to get into. He struggled back to his feet as the other newcomer ducked a skewering from Lust and took a running jump towards Envy, bowling them over. 

“Well go on!” The golden-eyed stranger made shooing motions towards Ed. “You need to save your skin whilst you can, this place could collapse at any moment.”

“What about you?” What Ed really wanted to ask was who are you, but this wasn’t the time or place. 

“You really don’t need to worry about us, now get out of here.” The stranger hopped lightly out of Lust’s reach. “You shouldn’t even be here in the first place! Why are you even here?”

Ed didn’t need further prompting and started to make his way towards the exit, still feeling woozy from the blood loss. His vision was starting to swim at the edges, and he could feel his legs beginning to tremble under him. This really wasn’t boding too well, and to make matters worse, they’d left their main source of help behind. At least if Ross and Brosh noticed that they were missing from their hotel room then they’d probably know where to look for them. He just needed to hope that they had noticed he and Al were missing, which, considering the pains they’d taken to escape, wasn’t a certainty. 

He staggered, the noises of the fight behind him starting to swim, and he heard a commotion as he leaned against the wall, dragging himself along to try and keep going. He vaguely heard a long-suffering sigh, and vaguely felt himself being picked up like a ragdoll and draped over someone’s shoulder, and that someone moving far too fast to be truly human. Then everything was distant and dark and far away.

He could just about hear voices, and he could just about recognise Al’s voice exclaiming, and the mysterious stranger’s voice much closer to his ear.

“Please keep a better eye on him; we’re really not supposed to be doing this.”

Then everything was truly black.

X

“Something’s going on.”

Privately, Al thought that was something of an understatement, but he chose not to say anything to Hughes. They’d been holed up in Ed’s hospital room for close to an hour with Hughes and Armstrong, explaining what had been going on. A young lieutenant named Abrams had taken over door-guarding duty from Brosh and Ross, who definitely needed the break. Al felt a bit sorry for them.

“You say that this person was in Eastern when you were attacked by Scar?” Hughes pointed to the picture that Al had sketched of the mysterious stranger who’d turned up and then vanished in Eastern and had then carted an unconscious Ed out of the fifth laboratory just before it came down in ruins.

“Yes. They ran off as soon as the military arrived.” Al paused. “I get the impression they would have run off as soon as the military arrived last night, if they hadn’t had to hand Ed over.”

Ed snorted. “Way to give an injured guy a guilt trip, thanks, Al.”

“You know what I mean. They’re obviously not with the military, and it looks like they’re not with these people with the Ouroboros tattoos either.”

“Hmm.” Neither Hughes nor Armstrong spoke for a long while, Hughes continuing to peruse Al’s sketches of the Mysterious Friend, as Granny had called them, and their associate, and Ed’s pictures of the two people who had killed Slicer and attacked him inside the lab; the ones who had been referred to as Lust and Envy. 

“Do you think that they’re following you?” Hughes asked eventually. “It seems unlikely that they’re allied with Scar considering what happened in Eastern, but someone tailing a State Alchemist is a cause for concern considering his patterns of behaviour.”

Ed thought about it for a long time before shaking his head slowly. 

“No, I don’t think so. From the way they were talking in the lab, it seemed like my being there was incidental, I don’t think they were expecting to see me. I think they were more concerned with the other two than they were with me.”

“That still doesn’t explain their presence in Eastern,” Armstrong pointed out. “These other two with the Ouroboros weren’t anywhere to be seen on that day.”

“Yeah, that part doesn’t add up,” Ed agreed. “But I think last night was a coincidence.”

“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned since working in intelligence, it’s never to trust a coincidence,” Hughes said dryly. “You said these Ouroboros guys mentioned something about sacrifices?”

“Yeah, although I was kind of fighting for my life at the time so I wasn’t really paying much attention,” Ed sniped. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with either of these two groups, I just know that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught up in all of it. They’re both opposed to each other and even though these guys jumped in to save us - twice, technically, if you count the time in Eastern as well - that’s no indication that they’re on our side or they can be trusted.”

“The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend,” Hughes agreed. 

“And they’re not human,” Ed added. “None of them are. She’s got freaky fingers, that one heals instantly and these two are way too fast and strong to be human.”

“Well, that should make things easier to investigate,” Hughes quipped before gathering up all of the papers. “Well, I’ll keep looking into it. Nobody should be poking about in abandoned government labs in the middle of the night.” He gave Ed and Al a pointed look, and Al felt rather guilty at their deceit.

After Hughes and Armstrong left them alone, neither of them spoke for a long time, both still lost in their own thoughts and in the conclusions that Hughes had helped them to draw.

“You know, Al, I’ve been thinking,” Ed said eventually. “Once Winry’s fixed up my arm again, I think we’re going to have to go and see Teacher.”

Al startled at the thought. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t think of anyone else I would trust to tell us about the Philosopher’s Stone, and she’s not part of the military.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Not at all, but I can’t see another choice.”

“She’s going to kill us.”

“Well, that’s a certainty. But I think that we might be able to get some answers before we die.”

Al sighed. He didn’t think that there was going to be any talking Ed out of this one, and he didn’t have a better idea.

“All right. Let’s go and see Teacher.”

X

“Central City Crisis Line, what’s your emergency?”

“I need an ambulance. A man’s been shot at close range in the phone booth I’m calling from in Central Park. He’s losing a lot of blood.”

“Is he still breathing?”

“Yes.”

Summary: Xerxes falls and the only two survivors walk away from the dead city.

Homunculus is keen to make the most of the new human body he now wears, and he goes out into the world, still planning his ascension to godhood as he strips away his vices and turns them into homunculi.

Van Hohenheim believes he has become a monster, and he hides himself away, befriending the other abominations of the world, failed human transmutations doomed to agonising half-life without the intervention of a Philosopher’s Stone.

Years later, Homunculus meets Trisha Elric and sires two sons with her before vanishing into the night, whilst Hohenheim tries to foil his doppelgänger’s schemes.

Years after that, Edward and Alphonse Elric are caught up in the middle of it all…

A Father-Hohenheim role reversal switcheroo, following Mangahood’s main plot with elements of ‘03, based on the premise ‘what if Father was Ed and Al’s father and Hohenheim was the one hiding under Central?’

Rated: Teen

==

[AO3]

==

One

If it wasn’t for the stranger, Ed reflected, he might be dead. Staring up at the cloudless sky above Resembool, he remembered the mysterious figure who’d appeared during their altercation with Scar in Eastern City. They had only been there for a minute or so and they had disappeared as soon as the military had arrived; vanishing as quickly as they had come onto the scene as they dashed into the darkness of the alleyway they had jumped out of in the first place. Still, their presence had been enough to turn the tide, levelling the playing field and distracting Scar for long enough to allow Mustang and the others to come and take charge. 

They hadn’t been an alchemist, at least, Ed hadn’t seen them use alchemy, but they were fast, and they were strong, and as Ed had looked on in a haze of pain and panic and my arm is destroyed and I have no defence and I’m about to die, he had caught a glimpse of their face beneath their hood - a sharp, angular, youthful face, with messy blonde hair. 

The thing that struck Ed most, though, were the eyes. 

“You’re thinking about the stranger again, aren’t you?”

Ed glanced sideways at Al, then looked back at the sky with a sigh. 

“Yeah, I guess I am. I just can’t get over the eyes, you know? I’ve never seen anyone with our colour eyes before. Apart from, you know. Him.”

“Yeah.” Al gave a long sigh. “Do you think…” He trailed off, but Ed could follow the train of thought. He didn’t press the point, letting Al come round to it eventually. “Do you think they might be related to us? I mean, if our father had other children, then perhaps…”

Ed really didn’t want to think about it. It wasn’t that he was averse to the idea of having more family members, although it was a very strange concept to consider when his family had consisted of just Al and Mom for as long as he could remember. He just didn’t want to think about his father for any length of time. Especially not about where he might have gone, what he might have done, and whom he might have done it with. Ed didn’t even remember his father, he’d left that long ago. Hell, Al had never even met the man; he’d vanished into the ether whilst Mom had still been pregnant with him. 

“Granny kept that photo, you know,” Al said presently, and Ed sat bolt upright. 

“What?”

“That photo of our father, the one that Mom always kept. Granny snuck it before we burned the house.” Al paused, contemplative. “I think she wanted to keep it in case he ever showed up again so she wouldn’t forget what he looked like and she could beat him up.”

Ed snorted. “She’d have to wait in line.”

They fell back into silence for a while, both lost in their own thoughts. 

“Would you want to meet them?”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “Who, our potential half-sibling?”

“Yes. And any other potential half-siblings that might be out there.”

“I don’t want to think about us having any half-siblings at all, let alone more than one.” Ed scoffed. “Still, I suppose we could bond over weird eye colour and terrible fathers.”

“I think it would be interesting to meet them.” Al continued to muse. “Maybe they might be able to tell us more about him.”

“Maybe. I don’t want to know more about him, though. I know all I need to know. He left when I was tiny and you weren’t even born. He left Mom on her own with a toddler whilst she was pregnant. That’s all I know and all I want to know. I don’t care about anything else.”

“I know. A part of me feels the same way, but then, there’s a part of me that keeps asking why. Why did he leave?”

“Because he was an asshole.”

“Well, yeah, I guess. He never said anything to Mom, did he?”

“Nope. She woke up one morning and he’d vanished. It was like he was never there.”

“He saw, he conquered, he came, and then he buggered off.” Ed turned sharply on hearing Granny’s voice. “I thought you might be talking about him. Al told me about the mysterious friend who saved your skins.” 

She held out the small snapshot as she came towards them, and Ed took it, passing it to Al without looking at it. It was the only photo of their father that existed, and despite everything, Mom had always kept it. It wasn’t out of any sentimental value, not really. She’d kept it more as a reminder of everything he’d done, leaving her high and dry with two children and no explanation. 

She’d never liked to talk about him all that much, but sometimes she’d told them stories of the mysterious man who’d turned up out of the blue one day and swept her off her feet, a man with hair and eyes like the sun and brilliant alchemy to match. Sometimes Ed wondered if his and Al’s dabbling in alchemy had ever caused her pain to think of the memories of before they were born. She’d never shown anything but pride in their work, but it must have been a reminder every time they transmuted something. 

“Well, if this mysterious friend is related to that bastard, then it sounds like they’ve certainly inherited the disappearing act genes.” Granny sighed. “You know, I can’t decide whether you chasing this thread would be a good idea or a bad one. There are big warning signs flashing everywhere I look; the same warning signs that started flashing when he came to town and began wooing Trisha in the first place. I always feel like I should have been able to do more to protect her, but if there’s one thing that can be said of your mother, she was a determined woman. You definitely get your stubbornness from her.” 

Here Granny gave Ed a pointed look. “There’s a part of me that wants to just let the whole thing stay buried. He caused enough trouble when he was around, I don’t want him causing you two even more trouble now that he’s not around. At the same time, though, there’s another part of me that thinks maybe it would be good to find some more of his relatives.”

“We’ll be careful,” Ed said. “Whatever happens. Besides, we’ve got other threads to chase.” He thought of Dr Marcoh and his research hidden in Central Library, the key to the Philosopher’s Stone and potentially the key to getting their bodies back. That was far more important than chasing after potential half-siblings via their errant father. 

Granny raised an eyebrow. “Hmm.”

“We have got other threads to chase!” Ed protested. “We have a new lead on the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“That wasn’t what I had an issue with,” Granny said dryly. “It was the ‘we’ll be careful’ part. I’ve never known two people less careful. I know you don’t do it intentionally, but I swear one of these days, you’re going to get yourselves into something that’s going to give me a heart attack.”

Al laughed. “Nothing could phase you enough to give you a heart attack, Granny.”

“You just keep believing that.” Granny snorted. “Anyway, Winry’s just finishing up with your arm, Ed. She should be ready in a few minutes. Then you can head off on whatever madcap adventure comes next.”

She left them alone once more, going back up to the house, and Ed fell to thinking again. Finding the Philosopher’s Stone was their first priority, and nothing would change that. Still…  Even though Ed didn’t really have any desire to find any potential family members, not like Al did, he couldn’t help but be intrigued by the stranger. There was something about them that really wasn’t normal, something in their speed and agility that seemed… off. And how had they known that Ed and Al were in trouble and needed help anyway? It wasn’t like they were just passing by on the street, not when everywhere was so empty due to the rain and not when they’d appeared out of nowhere. Although Ed hadn’t been paying attention at the time, the more that he thought about it now that he had the leisure to do so, the more he came to the conclusion that the stranger had appeared and helped them purposefully. They’d known that he and Al were in trouble and needed someone to buy them just a few precious minutes. 

It was still troubling though, and just as Granny had described, Ed could see the warnings flashing too. Why had they run off when the military had arrived? Why not stick around to make sure that Scar was incapacitated and that he and Al were all right? He couldn’t deny that the stranger had certainly helped them, and probably saved their lives, but they likely had their own agenda just as much as Scar did, even if Ed and Al weren’t currently on the wrong side of it. 

He pushed the thought to the back of his mind, determined to focus on their mission in Central and the Philosopher’s Stone instead. He was sure that their meeting had not been a coincidence, and he wondered if they’d cross paths again, but that was a bridge they would cross when they came to it. They had more important things to think about right now. 

He still couldn’t get those golden eyes out of his head, though.

X

“You know we’re not supposed to intervene like that. You’ve been at this far longer than I have, you know that secrecy is everything.”

“I know, but I had to. I didn’t think that the military would turn up in time and someone had to stop the poor kid from being exploded. Besides, it’s the Elrics. I can’t just leave them to their fates.”

“I know. Well… I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

“Thank you.”