Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At the feeling of rain drops, a nameless man stops walking just outside the doorway of the ramshackle inn he’s just left and looks up at the sky. Dark clouds, silvery where they’ve crossed in front of the moon. Another drop falls down directly onto his dark glasses, making him blink, and he lets his mouth fall open slightly to taste the air.

It’s the first rain he’s seen this year and his immediate, traitorous thought is, But I didn’t hear anyone singing.

He closes his mouth immediately when he thinks it, looks down at the sidewalk, and makes himself keep walking. The air doesn’t taste right, anyway—it smells like rain, but there’s a damp, rotten undertone to it. Rationally, he knows it’s because there’s a dumpster in the alley that runs along the side of the inn, but of course it doesn’t smell like the desert rain. It’s Amestris. There’s no sand under his feet, and there’s too much cement and brick. The sun set more than an hour ago, but the temperature is still sticking in the air humidly, instead of spiraling steadily down like a hawk on the hunt. Everything he’s known, everything he’s learned growing up and in the time since his world was ripped away, tells him he is an interloper, unwelcome, and far from home.

Still. He holds out a hand, waits for three drops to fall on his palm, and whispers, "Aymarolela, Ishvalla, shuden t’alkaam’tr, ins am’trala t’desha t’oshamla thanta folef awadhi sawatan."

But the night stays dark and silent. The moonlight horribly frail through the clouds, and certainly no shouting or singing from his brothers and sisters, rushing outside to dance in the rain. Even the angry murmurs of spirits he swears he can hear like calls across the desert have quieted down. Tonight, on Am’trawwala, the First Rain, he is alone. Just like he has been for the last four years.

He curls his finger over his palm, then lets his arm drop. He’s not outside tonight for celebrating.

If it weren’t raining, he might walk slower, take his time. The sun is down and the Sewing Life Alchemist will never see him coming. But feeling the rain on his skin, the taste of it in the air, makes him expect every flash of movement in the corner of his eye to have dark skin, red eyes, and white hair glistening with rain. And every time he looks—barely moving his head, just a glance—they’re never there.

He walks quickly, and soon enough he’s turning down the street where the State Alchemist lives. A military police care is parked outside a neat house with a fence around the yard. Two men are posted by the gate, standing at attention and facing the empty street. He’s not sure why there’s a guard, since his last kill was several cities away, but he doesn’t wonder. Military is military, and guilty is guilty.

The guards don’t seem to register him as a threat until he stops walking almost directly in front of them. Sloppy. The younger of the two squints at him through the rain. “Are you here to see Mr. Tucker?” He raises a hand to above his eyes to shield them from the rain. “Unauthorized individuals aren’t allowed past this point,” he recites. “If you have any business—“

“I’m going through.”

The other policeman starts to reach for his gun. He obviously has the better-developed survival instinct; the nameless man steps toward him first, grabbing his wrist and twisting before the man can aim the gun at him. A gunshot sounds, but the bullet hits cement instead. He reaches for the policeman’s forehead with his right hand before he can try another move.

hydrogen oxygen carbon sodium potassium sulfur

He doesn’t have to finish the list or even separate a significant amount of the water inside the man’s body before blood is spurting from his eyes and mouth. The policeman crumples, dead long before he hits the ground, and his killer turns toward the other guard.

His gun is out, but he’s gaping at the body. They always expect a weapon, and never expect that weapon to be drawn onto his skin.

The second guard puts up even less fight than the first, if possible, and when he falls, the nameless man leaves the bodies lying at the gate and circles the house to check for any more guards. There aren’t any, so he tries the back door. Locked, unsurprisingly.

He rubs his fingers over the handle. It looks like brass, and feels a little tarnished.

copper zinc

The knob obligingly falls out of the door. There’s no deadbolt. He drops the brass knob and lets it roll across the floor, leaving the door gaping open. It’s not like they won’t know he was here. The laboratory seems like a reasonable hideaway for an alchemist at this time of night, so he heads down the stairs into the basement.

A twisting ambience creeps up the stairs and sets him on guard before he can even reach the door; pain, darkness, and something writhing. He clenches his jaw and pushes through the sensation to open the door. The floor is bare cement, but smooth—best for drawing chalk circles. Shelves line the room with books and manuscripts, jars of unnamable abominations on display. Cages fill in the spaces between the shelves, the creatures inside shuffling quietly or moaning slightly. A paw with oddly tapered toes and curved claws reaches between the bars of one, and he eyes it in disgust. The sense of horror is stronger now, and it’s not hard to tell where it’s coming from.

He considers putting the creatures out of their misery and then trashing the rest of lab, but the Sewing Life Alchemist isn’t here, and he’s by far the priority.

He heads up to the second floor instead. He can hear the soft sound of someone speaking in one of the rooms, and walks silently closer.

“…anyone understand? Why, Nina…”

He opens the door to find the alchemist sitting in a chair facing some sort of monster he’s created. It seems to be the only thing in this area of the house, the impression of abomination much weaker up here. The alchemist turns to the doorway, and there’s no fear in his eyes, just tired curiosity.

“Are you Shou Tucker?” He stays facing the heretic, but makes sure to watch the monster sitting placidly on the floor. It doesn’t seem built for fighting, and is making no aggressive movements, but alchemy has created stranger and more monstrous things—he isn’t going to let his guard down for a moment.

“Who are you?” Tucker says, slowly rising to his feet.

He steps into the room, not bothering to answer the question, with Tucker apparently takes as a signal to ask more.

“What do you want with me? You’re…” Tucker scrutinizes him. “You’re not with the military.” His eyes widen and he takes a step back. “How did you get in here? There should have been guards outside.”

“Alchemists who have trespassed against Ishvalla,” the man with no name growls, stalking forward and lifting his right hand, “must be punished.”

Tucker doesn’t even seem to realize he should fight. Just stands, sweating, eyes sick with fear, as the nameless man grabs his face.

hydrogen oxygen carbon sodium potassium sulfate

Tucker jerks once in the implosion and falls face-first to the floor with blood soaking his jacket, trailing down his arms and staining the legs of his pants. A little blood gets onto the chimera’s paw, and he watches it for any violent movements. But it only has eyes for Tucker, and makes a tiny, whimpering sound as it slinks towards the dead man.

Then the thing speaks.

“Dad-dy.” The voice is slow, deep, and faltering, but nearly human. The sense of horror grows thicker in the air, and he doesn’t know if it’s the change in proximity or something far deeper.

His eyes widen and he clenches his fists. This thing… it used to be human. Tucker didn’t just use animals, he used a human in his sick perversions of nature.

The monster used his child.

He watches in sick, still horror as it—she? He?—it noses at Tucker’s hand. “Daddy?” That horrible voice, another sad little whimper, and again, “Daddy. Daddy. D-dad-dy.”

It’s crying.

There’s a shout outside, and he looks up with a frown. No one should have realized something was wrong so quickly. He turns back to the abomination, but it’s still drying over its father’s corpse. Doesn’t even look up.

He shakes his head slowly. “How awful.” He can hear thudding on the stairs, now, but he has no fear of a couple more guards. He reaches forward and rests his hand on the monster’s head. It doesn’t flinch, probably unaware it’s about to die, but he’d like to think it wants to go back to Ishvalla. The poor creature shouldn’t exist like this. “Now that he’s done this to you, there’s no way to change you back to normal. At the very least—“

There’s a yell like a battlecry, before he can begin to form the elements of deconstruction in his mind, and, annoyed, he jerks his head over to the doorway—

—and down?

White flashes and something collides with his chest, much faster than he expected. Something metal. It’s probably good that it missed his ribs, but his internal organs are not happy to take a hit hard enough to throw him halfway across the room from the chimera.

“Don’t you fucking touch her,” his assailant snarls. The voice sounds oddly young.

He rolls to his feet, the better to prepare to meet this attacker. He’s having trouble catching his breath, and his abdomen emphatically does not appreciate the movement, but he’s well-practiced at ignoring pain. Then he freezes.

White hair, long and tied back. Dark skin, where it isn’t covered up by a ridiculous red cloak and black pants. The boy is mostly turned away from him, so he can’t see his eyes, and this is East City, Amestris, so he hardly dare think it, but—he looks like an Avat’ishval, like one of his people. In the last place he would have expected to find one. One gloved hand is stroking the chimera’s main of hair in what appears to be a calming gesture. The monster certainly takes it as one, nudging its head against the red cloak and whimpering. “Ed-ward,” it says, still deep and slow.

“Yeah, I’m here now, Nina,” the boy says, his voice aching. He lifts his head in the direction of Tucker’s body and his breath stutters; Edward throws a look at the nameless man, his expression too twisted between grief, horror, and relief to be easily readable.

The boy’s eyes are gold. The shaft of disappointment pierces what he’d thought was a well-armored soul.

“Who the hell are you?” Edward asks, raising his voice.

He’s no one, he’s nothing. He has no name. He is Esamekke. “That doesn’t matter,” he says instead.

Edward casts a bird-quick glance at Tucker again. “You killed him,” he says, voice low and angry, shoulder tightly wound as if ready to attack. “And the guards outside. Didn’t you.”

It isn’t a question, but he nods.

“You were going to kill Nina next,” he hisses.

The boy is far too familiar with the creature to have only known it in its current shape. Ishvalla dhoshen, he’s still giving it a name. “You knew the girl?” Guardedly, suspiciously, Edward nods, and the nameless man spares another thought to hope Tucker will spend his afterlife in flames. He’s heard from several sources that it’s the most painful way to go. “She was his daughter, correct?”

Edward’s face twists again, this time much more clear in its grief, and he holds the creature a little tighter to him as it snuffles at his neck. Jerkily, he dips his head in a nod.

Slowly, the nameless man steps forward, ignoring Edward’s narrowed (golden) eyes and says, “No one can fix what was done to her. A quick death is the only mercy I can give.”

Edward snarls at him, like a wild animal. “I’ll fix her. If it takes me a lifetime, I will find a way to fix her.”

The vehemence takes him aback, a little. “You’re an alchemist?”

“Youngest State Alchemist in history, thanks, so don’t give me that shit about how it hasn’t been done, ‘cause I’ll be the first.” Still so angry, still crouched half in front of the chimera like he’d die to defend her.

Which he will. State Alchemist. The boy is so young. But no one ever said a quest for vengeance kind to the soul, and he hardly has one anyway, so he steps forward. He will complete the task he set himself to when he gave his name back to the desert. Still, it will be hard when the boy has hair that pale, and skin that dark. He can’t cover the boy’s eyes, or he doesn’t think he’ll be able to do it. He’ll have to grab the side of his head, or maybe his neck. Messier, but dead is dead.

Even staring at the golden eyes it’s hard to step forward, and he says, almost conversationally, “If it weren’t for the color of your eyes I would have taken you for an Ishvalan.”

Already braced for a fight, Edward bristles, baring his teeth, which, while not unexpected, is still rather offensive. The blood of Ishval is a blessing, not an insult. “What, gonna go for a hat trick and pick on the half-breed, too? Go fuck yourself, I’m an Amestrian citizen.”

He stops approaching. Blinks. Runs that sentence through his head again, though he’s still not sure he’s processing it correctly. “You’re Ishvalan?” he says blankly. But the eyes. Eyes any color but red don’t happen until at least two generations out, if that. “Your eyes are gold.” His brain-to-mouth filter seems to have stopped with his feet.

Edward has a truly vicious scowl. “Yeah, I noticed. They’re weird, I know, shut up. But look, if you talk bad about my mother, I will kick your ass out of the goddamn city, because she was full Ishvalan and was a way better person than my Amestrian father.”

Wordlessly, the nameless man takes off the glasses hiding his eyes.

Edwards falters and his eyes widen almost comically. “Oh.” He blinks, and scowls ferociously. “Okay, well, I’ll still fight you,” he says petulantly.

“You’re a State Alchemist,” he repeats, because even with the facts, together they don’t make sense.

“Fullmetal Alchemist,” Edward says, a stubborn set to his jaw. “Problem with that?”

“Brother!”

He has a hundred more questions, most of them simply why why why why why, but someone in a seven-foot tall full set of armor bursts into the room. Edward shoots the armor the briefest of glances, apparently unsurprised. Brother. Another Avat’ishval? It must be his older brother.

“Wait,” the armored one says. “Are you—are you fighting someone?”

Edward rolls his eyes. “Gee, I don’t know. I kicked him once, but the bastard won’t take a swing at me and he’s cryptic as hell. All I got is that he’s Ishvalan and is apparently the guy who blew up the guards outside. And, well—“ Edward gives and abortive gesture to where Tucker’s body lies.

The Ishvalan in the armor follows the gesture and quickly looks away, shoulders hitching up as he covers the mouth of his helmet with his gauntlet. Edward grimaces.

“Yeah. That.” His odd golden eyes slide sideways. “Seriously though, are we gonna fight or not?”

The nameless man shakes his head. “I will not spill any am’tr t’Ishval. There is so little of it left.”

Edward gives him a blank look. “Spill any what now?”

He opens his mouth, but for a horrible moment nothing comes out. They don’t know. They don’t know. “Ishvalan life,” he manages. “It means Ishvalan life.”

Edward shrugs it off, like he couldn’t care less. “Whatever. Al, how soon’s the backup gonna get here?”

“Uh.” Al turns to stare at the nameless man.

“Hey, he can apparently blow people’s heads up. Alchemy or something. I bet they’re not even gonna have Colonel Bastard with them and it’s raining anyway. I’m not gonna throw a bunch of guys at him to die. It’s not like they did anything to deserve it.” He casts a dark, complicated look at Tucker’s body.

“Right,” Al says slowly, rubbing the back of his helmet with one gauntlet. For someone so tall, his body language is remarkably young. “Well, they said they’d be here fast as they can. I told them the police were dead so I think they’re getting an actual squad, so maybe ten minutes?”

Edward nods decisively. “Then once this guy leaves we’re good—what’s your name, anyway?”

He watches them carefully when he says, “I don’t have one.”

The only reactions he gets are Edward’s eyebrows crawling up his forehead as he continues to look very unimpressed, and Al tilts his head in puzzlement. it confirms what he’d feared: they have no idea what it means that he’s Esamekke.  They don’t know anything about their heritage.

“What, am I just supposed to call you X-Face or something?” Edward says, making a little slashing motion in the air over his own face to mimic the scar.

“Ed!” Al hisses. “You can’t just say something like that!”

“What!” he says defensively. “It’s not like he’s giving us anything to go off of.”

The nameless man watches their little back and forth with a growing lump in his throat. He swallows it down. They don’t know. They don’t know. Someone has to tell them. He looks away from their faces and his eye catches on the chimera, calmer now, looking away from its father’s body and no longer crying, but pressing the side of its face against Edward’s shoulder. A glimmer of an idea forms.

“Are you going to give it to the military?”

Edward sees where he’s looking at goes from good-natured banter to snarling in an instant. “She is not an it!”

He waits a moment, and says, “Are you going to give her to the military?”

The indecisive look on Edward’s face makes it clear he hadn’t quite thought that far ahead. “I guess. We’ll study up how to fix her, and they can keep her safe in the meantime—“

“Will they let us?” Al says, voice hushes. The brothers exchange a glance, communicating at a level that he can’t parse. Edward huffs out a breath and wrinkles his nose, staring down at Nina.

“We gotta fix her, Al,” Edward says.

“Of course. But we don’t know enough yet.”

“They’ll kill her,” the nameless man says.

That might be a step to far, too soon. “Maybe you’re the only one who wants to kill her, asshole!” Edward spits at him. “They wouldn’t.”

“If they don’t kill her, they’ll experiment on her.” Edward’s eyes shut, as if the boy’s in pain, but he continues ruthlessly, “She’s a forbidden experiment. They can’t make a chimera like her without public outcry. But if they have one, already conveniently made by a man they’d judged guilty—“

“Not like he’s getting a trial now,” Ed mutters.

“—then they can do whatever they want to her. A groundbreaking chimera that they could easily make disappear.”

Edward’s eyes flick toward his brother, and he takes in a shaky, angry breath. “I don’t like you,” he says, pointing. “You’re an asshole. But you’ve possibly got a point. A tiny, minuscule bit of a point.” He drops his hand, scowling again in frustration. “But it’s not like we can take her. We travel too much and she’s way too obviously a chimera. You got any bright ideas, X-Face?”

Al gives an exasperated sigh at the moniker, and the nameless man tries not to be bothered at being given an identifier by another Avat’ishval. As a matter of fact, he does have a plan, even if it’s not yet very well-planned and he’s almost certainly going to live to regret it. But these boys are here for the monster, and if he wants to find them again, it would do well at drawing them in.

“I’ll keep her safe,” he says. “They won’t find us.”

Edward gives him an incredulous look. “You were literally just ready to blow her head off.”

“Everything I have ever heard of alchemy says no one is even close to finding a way to reverse a transmutation like this,” he says. It feels odd to be talking to Avayut’ishval about alchemy; years ago he’d gotten on his brother’s case constantly for the same thing. “It’d be cruel to leave her to suffer in that shape. At least I could give her a quick death.” Edward opens his mouth, but he cuts in, “If you think you can fix her, I’ll keep her safe until you do. This sin isn’t hers to be punished for.”

Edward closes his mouth and looks down at the chimera, face blank.

“Brother,” Al says softly. “If Mr., uh, if Mr. Ishvalan here is going to leave before they get here, he has to go now.”

Golden eyes glare up at the nameless man. “If you hurt her, I will find you,” he says, deadly serious. “You might run, but I swear I will hunt you down and end you. Got it?”

He nods. “I’ll find you in a few days to tell you where we are.” Keeping track of State Alchemists isn’t easy, but he’s had a lot of practice.

Edward snorts. “Uh, no, you’re going to meet us somewhere. Tomorrow. Noon, clocktower off the main road. Got it?”

“Very well.”

“Brother,” Al says anxiously.

“Yeah, yeah. Get moving, X-Face.” Edward makes s shooing motion with his hands and he gives the boy a dry look, but approaches the chimera, holding out a hand. Left hand, since there’s no need to tempt himself.

It—she—shies away from him. He hesitates, then tries moving toward her slower, but she does it again, ducking behind Edward, obviously aware of who is more likely to protect her.

Edward gives him another dark look coupled with a flickering glance in the direction of Tucker’s corpse, then kneels down in front of Nina. “Hey, he says softly. “The scary asshole over there is gonna keep you safe for us for a while, okay? He’s not gonna hurt you and he’s sorry for scaring you.” Edward looks back to glare at him, daring him to argue, and he feels oddly chastened, even if he was fully justified in murdering that bastard. “I’ll keep you safe, Nina,” Edward says to the little monster. “And I’ll fix you. I promise. But you gotta go with scary X-Face, okay?”

Nina is still timid, but doesn’t back away when he approaches and lays his (left, clean, untainted) hand on her head. The horrible aura around the chimera feels like a herald of doom, when he’s so close.

Al looks anxiously out the window. “Okay, they’re not here yet, but you should go.”

“Come with me, Nina,” he says, more for the boys than for anything else. Still, the creature seems to understand enough to finally start forward.

“What are we going to tell them, Brother?”

“Nina ran away after her dad got blown up from the inside out,” Edward says promptly. “I mean, wouldn’t you?”

He looks back again, just before he leaves the room. "Utobezhayla aq ayzhotema’a kharra," he says, and the boys look over.

“Gesundheit,” Edward says blankly.

“Does that mean goodbye?” Al says cautiously.

One of them is curious, at least. That makes his gambit worth it. He inclines his head. “It means, 'until we meet again.'”

He hustles Nina out of the house as quickly as he can, which isn’t very, seeing as he’s guiding a nervous creature with only one hand. A collar would be helpful, but looking at the shape of her neck and head he’s not sure one would sit comfortably on her. Besides that, what little he knows of Edward suggests he would fly into a frothing rage if anyone dared to use a leash and collar on her.

They step out of the house and immediately into the rain. He’d almost forgotten it was Am’trawwala in the unexpected confusion he’d found in the house, but he decides to take such a well-timed meeting with two Avayut’ishval as a good omen.

He sees a entourage of three military cars head down the street before he’s more than two blocks away; he’s between the chimera and the street, and hopes that’s enough to keep from catching any unfriendly eyes. There’s a part of him that almost wants them to come for him, whispering military is military, and guilty is guilty, but Edward wanted them to live.

If there is no State Alchemist among them, he’s willing to grant that wish, at least just this once.

Still, traveling with a horror of alchemy is not a way to slip under the radar in any city with a Military Headquarters in it. It’s after dark, but he decides to use alleyways and streets without lights where possible, places that the silhouette of a large dog and an even larger man will encourage people to walk past quickly and not look too closely.

He’s not going to be able to go back to the ramshackle inn he’s spent his last two night in, he realizes. They wouldn’t report a suspicious man with a scar on his face, but they would surely inform the military about an alchemic experiment on the property.

That’s alright, too. He’s scoped out the area of the city and there’s at least one dilapidated, abandoned apartment building with nothing to protect it besides flaking walls and old, semi-functional locks that were left on most of the doors. Hardly even half of the tiny apartments are inhabited, even this close to the slums. The sad state of the crumbling walls, leaking pipes, and broken, boarded up windows had apparently decided plenty of people that the building wasn’t worth it, when they could themselves build something that would actually block out the wind and wasn’t as likely to collapse over their heads.

The inn had been nice for a warm meal, but he’d kept the building as a backup plan, and has no qualms about the change in scenery.

Nina appears less sure. The chimera seems to shrink in on herself when they enter the building, and the looming darkness of the rickety stairwell makes her start whimpering very softly. By the time they make it to the second floor, her side is pressing against his leg. He sets his jaw against the sense of abomination that prickles at his nerves at her touch, but at least it means she’s following him closely, so he walks on down the hallway until he comes to the door of the apartment he found a few days ago. None of the adjacent apartments are inhabited and it’s somewhere dry, though the window had been inexpertly boarded up, leaving gaps large enough for a small cat to get through, and the door didn’t quite sit in its frame.

He jams the door back closed once Nina’s inside, and wanders through the tiny rooms to make sure nothing else has taken up residence inside. Nothing. The rooms aren’t even furnished except for a table and single chair in the kitchen, and a thin, fabric mattress on a wooden frame in one of the bedrooms. He goes to drag it into the main room, which is at least marginally largely than this broom closet masquerading as a bedroom, but when he gets close he catches a whiff of it and thinks better, eyeing unidentifiable stains on the thing. He’ll be fine without a mattress, anyway. But from what he’d seen, the chimera had lived in a large house that probably had nice beds and couches, and he doesn’t want to be kept up by its—her—whining all night.

Ah, well. They’ll both just have to survive.

There’s a light scratching on the bedroom door and he opens it to find Nina, her ears back flat and tail hanging low, whimpering a little louder, now. She presses herself against his legs again, nearly hard enough to unbalance him. The behavior confuses him until he remember the thing can still speak, and had, at one point, been a young girl.

The chimera’s scared of the dark. Just his luck.

He sighs quietly and shuffles past her to walk back into the main room, and she follows behind him closely enough to bump her nose against the back of his knees, the creeping sensation of an abomination dripping down his spine with every momentary contact.

He flicks a light switch on in some vain hope when he enters the room, but unsurprisingly, there’s no power. There’s probably no water. He’ll have to work around that, but he’ll leave it for the morning.

With Nina curled up just far enough away to avoid getting in his way, he goes through his evening regimen. Push-ups, sit-ups, a prolonged handstand that somehow turns into a staring contest between him and the chimera as she watches him intently. He cuts out anything that involves jumping, or otherwise pounding the floor loud enough for anyone else to hear, mindful of avoiding discovery.

Finally, he lies down flat on the floor, his bundled up jacket providing a makeshift pillow, and the chimera takes it as an invitation to come closer. He eyes her as she lays her head tentatively on his shoulder. The residue of this evil alchemy he keeps feeling rises like a tide of dark water, lapping at the shore, slowly wearing it away. But he doesn’t make her move. It’s probably better if she stays close to him—easier to keep track of. She’s his bait, after all.

He should probably stop thinking about the t’Ishval boys in terms of hunting.

When he doesn’t push her away, the creature nuzzles in closer, neck and one paw lying across his collarbone, head settled next to his.

The day seems to catch up to him all at once, like it always does, lying on his back at night staring up at the ceiling of sky in the dark. He can hear them again, his people screaming as if from very far off, in pain and dying again and again. Covering his ears has never helped, so he doesn’t bother. Their spirits scream inside him, where nothing can give them peace for long. So many dead. So many dead and their souls not at rest, their names still not returned to Ishvalla.

Nina’s back rises and falls in the deep, regular breathing of sleep. He curls his right hand into a fist, not daring to touch her with it. The wrongness of the creature half lying on him jangles his nerves, and he wants to stop it. Place a hand on her back and unravel her heart, free her from this tortured form and send her soul to wherever they go when one’s name has never been brought before Ishvalla. Yet he stays his hand and watches the thing sleep. He’s traded her peace for a chance to draw the boys in again, to try and hold on to a vanishing chance that maybe he can teach them what they should already know, something he, Esamekke as he is, has no right to even speak of.

He’d pray to Ishvalla for forgiveness if he thought he would be heard, but he’s already returned his name to the desert. All he is is the body of a dead man, still moving in its last throes of vengeance.

Slowly, he brings his left hand up to rest on the back of the chimera’s neck. She doesn’t even twitch. He thinks of killing the alchemist, her father, of watching his bloodied, destroyed body collapse to the floor, but can’t picture her body doing the same. He hasn’t come across many chimera, before.

The memory doesn’t stop there, because of course it doesn’t. He turns his head until her mane is covering his face and tries not to let the memory of stalking toward a golden-eyed boy break him. One more sin. One more horror that would have chipped away at the bits of soul he has left.

I almost murdered an Avat’ishval today. He mouths the words against the chimera’s neck, but cannot bring himself to say them aloud.

Chapter Text

Ed doesn’t want to go back inside the house the next morning.

It’s barely nine and he doesn’t even want to be awake yet, for that matter, just wants to be curled up under his blankets and trying to ignore the sharp ache in his shoulder and leg as the rain keeps pouring down. But no, instead he’s standing on the bottom step leading up to the porch, getting drenched and not caring because if he goes inside, Tuckers body will be there. He’d almost rather stay in the rain, where the sky is crying with him even if all it does is make his insides feel muddy.

Mustang makes the choice for him. The Colonel peers at him through the open front door and says, “Get out of the rain, you’ll drip all over the crime scene.”

Grumbling, Ed complies, wringing his braid out under the safety of the porch and following Mustang inside with his usual bad temper. Still, he balks for just a moment when they’re right outside the door of the room where Tucker died.

Mustang waits with one hand on the doorknob and watches Ed out of the corner of his eye. “They covered the body with a sheet.”

Ed hates that Mustang can read him that well, and that the words actually make him feel a tiny bit better. He scowls and looks away, and after a beat Mustang opens the door and leads the way in.

His eyes still flick toward the place where he knows Tucker’s body lies. They haven’t moved it, but there is indeed a sheet draped over him, only showing a vague outline and none of the grisly details. There’s a sick part of Ed that wonders anyway if it would look worse than it did last night, or better. If seeing Tucker’s twelve-hour-old body would give him any more nightmares than seeing his fresh one.

At least Al had agreed to stay behind, just in case whatever the military wanted him to do here dragged on past noon; they needed to be able to find Nina again. And if Al never has to see a dead body again, Ed will consider himself slightly less of a shitty big brother.

One of Tucker’s hands is peeking out from under the sheet, a man who must be Lieutenant Colonel Hughes crouched down next to it. Ed’s stomach rolls and he swallows, then finally manages to tune into what the Investigations team has to say.

“Are you telling me to put this corpse on trial?” Hughes gives Mustang an annoyed, faintly disappointed look, before turning back to the body, his eyes stuttering briefly over Ed.

He folds his arms as a reflex, ready to put up a stink if he makes a big deal over—well, anything. Does he think Ed’s too young? He saw the crime scene before it got all cleaned up, and the military is who told him to come back this morning. Or maybe it’s about how Ed isn’t… as freakishly tall as the other State Alchemists? Ed will actually flip his lid if the guy says anything about it.

But Hughes’ focus is back on Tucker’s body. He looks like he’s about ten seconds from poking the bloody hand with a pencil, like a really morbid three year old. “Man, we didn’t come all this way out here from central to do an autopsy.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, you don’t need to remind us of our mistake.” Mustang looks like he’s in physical pain, which is definitely worth the price of admission, here. Ed, in a feat of maturity, smothers the smug grin that threatens to creep onto his face. Crime scene. Right. “Please just take a look.”

Hughes sighs and gives the sheet the side-eye. “If this guy really used his own family as experiments…” He shakes his head and finally reaches for the sheet. “Must have been divine justice.”

He lifts it high enough to look under, Armstrong leaning over to follow suit, and Ed is suddenly very glad he’s at the wrong angle to see. One less nightmare, or at least a couple fewer liters of blood in the ones he already has.

“Ugh. Just as I thought.” Hughes grimaces and drops the sheet. “Did the guards outside die the same way?”

Ed’s fists clench, and if he weren’t wearing both his gloves his fingernails would probably be cutting into his own flesh palm. The guards. Maybe Tucker deserved to die—hard to argue that he didn’t—but the guards were just doing their job. “Yeah, they did.”

He’s managed to cut Mustang off, which is a tiny bright spot in the situation. Hughes swivels to look at him appraisingly. “That’s right, you’re out witness, aren’t you.”

Ed nods shortly.

Hughes stands and takes a rag that one of the military policemen offers him and wipes at his hands, even though it doesn’t look like he got any blood on them. Maybe he just feels filthy—seems like occupying the same room as a body will do that. “Well, then I’ve got a couple questions. The MO here is very familiar, but it’s good practice to make sure.” His gaze cuts to Ed, green eyes sharp. “Did you see the perpetrator?”

“Sure did,” Ed says. “Big scar on his face.” He mimics its shape with a finger, an X drawn in the air over his forehead.

“Thought so,” Hughes sighs. “Any other description you can give us would be helpful, what he’s wearing, his height and weight, so on. He’s wanted for ten murders—“ He stops narrowing his eyes. “…All State Alchemists, actually. Must not have realized you were one, or we’d be short a witness.”

Ed scowls, only partly because of the dreaded s-word; it’s kind of out of context and he’ll let it slide this once. Mostly he’s trying to hide how that sends a shiver up his spine. The guy really hadn’t wanted to fight him, then—he’d just been going for a quick, horribly messy kill. “He knew I was a State Alchemist,” he says flatly. Mustang goes tense, which, sneaky bastard that he is, he’s usually better at hiding. Ed’s scowl deepens a little. “He was probably going to attack me—I barely got here in time to stop him from blowing up Nina—but then he realized I’m Ishvalan, and he’s Ishvalan too, so apparently that made a difference?”

The tension in the room ratchets up so fast that it takes a concentrated effort on Ed’s part not to flinch. He knows people aren’t usually huge fans of Ishvalans—he grew up in Risembool, for God’s sake, the war was practically in his backyard, even if it stayed out of living room—but it’s been years, and it’s not like the military can do anything about him being here. He’s a genius, he’s valuable, and he’s a hundred percent willing to deck anyone who tries to make an issue of it. With his right hand.

Hughes’ face as gone still, his head dipped just enough to make his glasses catch the light and glare. “Dark skin and white hair don’t necessarily mean Ishvalan,” he says.

Ed’s two seconds from snapping back off about the eyes before he realizes Hughes isn’t talking about him. He’s talking about X-Face—who’s a serial killer. Which he and Al probably should have guessed, honestly, after he killed three people in what was probably less than ten minutes, like he didn’t even care that they’d been living, breathing humans a moment before. He must be tough, though. Most of the State Alchemists Ed has met are made of way sterner stuff than Tucker. “He took his glasses off, and his eyes were red. Said something like he wasn’t going to kill another Ishvalan, his work here was done or whatever, and then he took off.”

He gives Mustang a quick glance out of the corner of his eye—he may not like listening to him, but he’s a pretty good gauge for when Ed has just said something that’s going to get him in a shitload of trouble, and he’s never dealt with Investigations as a witness, before. Then he actually turns to face the bastard when he registers how his folded arms aren’t hiding the way he’s white-knuckling his sleeve. Mustang’s always pale, but now his face is like chalk, and he looks like he’s about to get up close and personal with whatever he last ate, or maybe pass out.

Ed sidles away, not even bothering to try to be discreet. Discreet is for people who give a shit. “Mustang, I swear to God if you throw up on me I will not be held responsible for my actions.” Like punching you in the face, he thinks, but he’s at least ninety percent sure saying that aloud to his Commanding Officer in front of Investigations would spell out trouble for him. Mustang’s mouth twists into a tight, queasy smile, like he knows exactly what Ed’s thinking. Still, it’s an expression that instills absolutely zero confidence that he’s not about to puke. Or fall over. “I’m not about to catch you if you pass out like some damsel in distress, either, I won’t even hesitate to let you hit the floor.” He hears one of the military police try to muffle a snort at that; thank you, thank you, he’ll be here all week. “Why the hell did you come to an investigation in the rain when you’re sick, huh? Now I’m gonna catch it and Al’s gonna be a nightmare like he always is when he thinks he’s gotta look after me, and it’s going to be your fault.”

He’s rambling, he knows he’s rambling, but it freaks him out more than he’d like to admit when Mustang looks like that, like he could be knocked over by a stiff wind. He seems to rally, his face a little less pale, his hands loosening the death grip they have on his sleeve. Ed’s still gonna flip his shit if the bastard turns out to be contagious, though. He has way better things to do with his time than getting sick.

Hughes clears his throat. “Thank you for your information, Major, it’s been very helpful. Did you hear what his name was? There aren’t many Ishvalans on our records, but if he’s there, it would help us track him down.”

“He didn’t give me one. Honestly, I’ve just been calling him X-Face in my head.”

Hughes gives him a humorless little half-grin. “That’s about where we’re at, too. Investigations has been calling him Scar.”

Scar sounds better than X-Face, honestly. Not that anyone could pay Ed to admit that in front of Colonel Bastard. “Sure. You need anything else?”

“Hmm.” Hughes’ eyes flicker towards Mustang and back again, so fast Ed almost misses it. “Don’t suppose you know where Nina is?”

Ed had been hoping Mustang wouldn’t be here for this part—he always seems to pick out Ed’s lies instantly, even if he rarely reports them, and this is important. Because X-Face—Scar, or whatever you want to call him—was right. Ed knew that even before the guy had said anything. If the military gets ahold of Nina, they’ll experiment on her, and then it really would be kinder to kill her—he doesn’t even want to think about what an alchemist could do with a human chimera. Ideas keep coming into his head, each more horrible than the last, and he keeps pushing them aside.

But if Mustang didn’t turn Al over for experimentation, then Ed could probably convince him not to turn Nina in, either. He just hates owing the guy. At least Mustang doesn’t seem like he’s at the top of his game at the moment—if he’s ever going to slip something past him, now would be the time. “When I ran into the room, I left the door open, and kicked Scar in the stomach to get him away from Nina—he didn’t seem like a great character, even before I noticed the body. Nina took off running. I’m not even surprised, she was apparently in her room when her dad… exploded.” He eyes the shape of the body under the sheet. “She was gone by the time Al and I left.”

“Did you see what weapon Scar used?”

Ed shook his head. “Tucker was dead before I got here. So were the guards, that how Al and I knew something was wrong. Scar didn’t bother acting like he was innocent, but I didn’t actually see him kill anyone.” Come to think of it, Ed hadn’t seen a weapon on him at all. No gun, not even a knife. Like he didn’t need any of that.

Not a happy thought. He’s suddenly regretting Nina with a guy like that, but they hadn’t known he was a serial killer last night, and Tucker really had deserved it. Oh God, what if she’s already dead? What if Scar just doesn’t show up today like they’d planned? The idea makes him sick, but at least then he’ll know what to do: help Investigations find the bastards through any means necessary and make Scar pay.

But he doesn’t know yet, and won’t until noon. Nina could still be okay. Maybe. Ed swallows thickly.

Hughes’ eyes do another one of those split-second flickers to Mustang, and finally the lazy bastard clears his throat. Ed makes a show of turning to face him, eyebrows raised.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Fullmetal,” Mustang says. “You’re dismissed.”

Oh thank God. Al will have some idea of how much he should actually be worrying. “See you later, Colonel.” He’s careful not to leave the room too fast, but he’s glad to shake off the weird atmosphere in there. He seriously hates dead bodies.

Now it’s time to really, really hope that he and Al aren’t about to find Nina’s.

Al looks up from the book he’s reading when Ed throws the door open.

“Good news: didn’t keep me long. Bad news: Colonel Bastard is coming down with something, and if it’s contagious I’m gonna punch him in the face.” Ed practically collapses onto the tiny couch in their dorm and starts to prop his feet up on the coffee table before wincing and thinking better of it. His ports ache something awful with the weather like this, like his scar tissue has decided to try to curl up and hide from the rain. He resists the urge to massage his shoulder; Al gets gloomy when he’s given reminders of how much the automail hurts him, and when Al gets gloomy Ed has to go blow something up to feel like a halfway decent big bother again, and he’s probably only about three more collapsed buildings away from a court martial Mustang can’t get him out of, so really it’s better to just avoid that whole mess entirely.

“It’s probably the rain,” Al says wisely. “You really might catch whatever he has, we were out in the rain last night and stayed up pretty late. Are you—“

“I’m fine,” Ed interrupts, before Al can start trying to feel his forehead, get frustrated, and decide (again) to try and create an array that can calculate temperatures. Even Ed is pretty sure that’s not actually possible—besides, that’s what thermometers are for, even if he does his best to keep them out of the house so Al doesn’t worry himself sick. Metaphorically, or whatever. “And I’m not done. Worse news: apparently X-Face is known to Investigations as Scar, and he’s a serial killer that’s killed ten State Alchemists already.”

Al’s posture stiffens in his surprise. “But then—Brother, what if he attacks you?”

Ed slouches in his seat and determinedly ignores another vicious twinge in his shoulder. “First of all, we had that discussion last night. He knows I’m a State Alchemist, and he said he wasn’t going to attack an Ishvalan. Second of all, we have to go anyway. I mean… what if he just hates alchemy?”

“Nina,” Al breathes. “Oh, no. Do you think she’s still safe?”

“I have no idea.” Ed rubs a hand over his face, discomfited by how little control he actually has over the situation. He doesn’t know where Nina is, or if she’s still alive. He doesn’t even know what the hell Scar wants, and even he knows that’s a shitty place to be negotiating from in a hostage situation. “It’s possible we could have done a little more thinking last night before we let him wander off,” he admits.

“We were short on time, if we didn’t want the squad running into him. And he might still come to meet us,” Al says. “He doesn’t know that we know, after all.”

Ed nods thoughtfully. “I don’t know why he would, but honestly, I don’t know why he offered to take Nina in the first place. If she’s not—“ He shakes his head, unwilling to dwell on it. “We need a game plan.”

Al cocks his head, red eyes boring into him. “…Did you just admit we need a plan before we go rushing in waving your transmuted automail around? I think you must be sick.”

He aims a half-hearted kick at Al’s shin. “Shut up and help me decide what to do when he shows up.”

And if he didn’t show, well, then Ed would just have to keep his promise and hunt the son of a bitch down.

Nina almost manages to slip out of the apartment before the nameless man realizes she’s trying to follow him. He nudges her back into the apartment’s living room as gently as he can with his leg, but she just rests her head against it and peers up at him from under her mane of hair.

“Mis-ter?” she says, and he sighs and ducks back through the doorway before her distorted horror of a voice can draw the attention of any other residents.

He wonders, briefly, if it’s really worth it to try to reason with the chimera. Her mental faculties might be intact enough to speak, but he’s not sure how her object permanence is. Then he considers his other options—shutting her in the bedroom, tying on a rope like a leash and keeping her in the kitchen—and reluctantly crouches down in front of her. It’s worth a shot, at least.

“I am going to go get Edward and Al,” he says slowly. “You remember the boys?”

Nina sits up a little straighter and her tongue lolls out of her mouth in… what is probably supposed to be a smile. “Ed-ward. Al-phonse.”

He makes a note of the second name and nods. “But you need to stay here. I need to go, and you need to stay. Okay?”

Nina droops, which at least proves she understands him. “But I. Want—to play.”

He can’t tell if that’s the dog or the girl. Either way—“Maybe the boys will play with you,” he bargains. “But you need to stay here so I can go get them.”

Nina lowers her head. He takes the chance to rise to his feet and go to the door. When she hears him yanking the door out of its misshapen frame, she starts to pad toward him. He gives her a stern look and she lowers herself to a crouch with a quiet whimper—he tries to lighten his expression, but his face can’t seem to figure out how. The past years have done their work to turn it to stone.

Ah, well. He said he’d keep her safe, not happy.

At least she doesn’t try to follow him out the door, this time.

He sees the boys when he’s still across street, Alphonse’s armor towering over anyone outside despite the rain. Edward is beside him, presumably standing on the base of the clock tower, judging by how the pale tip of his hair is almost at level with the armor’s shoulder spikes.

Edward’s (golden) eyes catch on him as he weaves his way through the sparse crowd of the main road on such a gloomy day. The nameless man thinks he sees them narrow, but a blond Amestrian passes between them and when she passes, Edward is simply staring at him, and odd knowingness to his gaze.

He opens his mouth to greet them in his native tongue, but hesitates. He has not been granted their names, and should not use them aloud, even if it’s highly unlikely that they have been brought before Ishvalla. They have, technically, not even introduced themselves as Avayut’ishval or as insan mutaqal Ishvalla.

Perhaps Lughat’ishval isn’t the best way to greet them, this time. Even if passing over the traditional greeting causes a pang somewhere deep.

“Hello,” he says, and Edward scowls at him. The vitriol is unexpected, and he raises an eyebrow.

“Um, hello,” Alphonse says back. If anything, Edward scowls harder at this.

The short exchange is already stretching his limited reserve of smalltalk. What else is there, the weather? It’s still Am’trawwala, but they don’t know what that is either. “I’ll take you to the chimera girl now,” he says abruptly. “This way.”

The walk through the city is silent. Edward seems to wind tighter as the streets around them slowly get drearier, less bright colors and more flaking paint, the sidewalks and roads pitted.

When they reach the old building, Alphonse has to duck under every doorframe as they make their way up to the apartment. The doorknob turns easily for something so old, but the nameless man has to throw his weight against the door—carefully, as he doesn’t want to break it—to dislodge it from the frame.

This apartment is even more obviously pathetic in the daylight, confronted with the prospect of actually presenting it to Avayut’ishval. He braces himself and enters anyway, wedging the door back into its frame after the brothers go through.

He doesn’t have much food to offer them, and its quality is poor compared to what they must have access to with a military (military, Ishvalla dhoshen) paycheck. His first instinct is to start boiling some water to make them tea, but all of the best recipes for tea that he knows are made with plants not found this far from the desert. He doesn’t even know what kinds of Amestrian teas are worth drinking. The coffee here is shit, though at least it’s still identifiably coffee, but he doesn’t have any of that here either.

No matter he’s tried to get the Avayut’ishval here, he is apparently still woefully unprepared to actually host them.

Edward’s shoulders slowly releasing their tension as he steps away from where he was petting Nina’s head, but there’s something about his carefully relaxed limbs that are setting off the nameless man’s fighting instincts. Alphonse and stepped neatly between him and Nina.

Have they decided to take her by force? His usual stern expression twitches toward a frown. What, do they think he’s going to put up a fight? They can have her if they want. He only wants to talk.

“So,” Edward says. “You’re a wanted serial killer, apparently.”

Ah. Are they afraid? They have nothing to fear from him, but perhaps—like so much else—they don’t understand that, yet. “I am.”

The frank admission seems to catch Edward by surprise. He narrows his eyes, shifts his balance like he’s about to lunge forward. It takes effort not to react, to stay standing upright and relaxed, as unthreatening as he knows how to manage.

“You were going to kill me. Except for the thing about—Ishvalan blood or whatever.”

…Close enough.“You are an Avat’ishval. I would never kill you, knowing that.”

“Avat’ishval?” Edward echoes suspiciously. His pronunciation is dubious at best, but coherent.

“A child of Ishval. An Ishvalan.”

Edward rolls his eyes. He tries not to be offended. “Okay, well, what about all the other people you killed? The State Alchemists?”

His voice goes cold, desolate as the desert after the shureqyu had swept through and left only jackals and buzzards behind to care for what was left of the bodies. “They deserve no mercy after what they did.”

Edward seems taken aback by his vehemence; it’s Alphonse who puts forward the tentative question. “What did they do?”

His fingernails are digging into his palms. He swears he can hear the screaming, tortured and desperately lonely. They don’t know—don’t know the blood on that silver watch the boy carries. Don’t know why it is they’ll never see their people walking these streets.

He forgets he’s only twenty-eight, sometimes. Right now, he feels ancient, like the mountains not so distant from where his city once stood, sanded down by storms. Raw and bleeding like a mound of stone never could be.

“They massacred my people. Your people. Ishvalla’s children are nearly extinct, now.”

“The Civil War,” Alphonse says, hushed.

“I remember that. Risembool got hit too,” Edward says. His tone rankles, like he’s deliberately avoiding anything that could be misconstrued as reverence for the dead. “I didn’t know Ishval got creamed that badly. The State Alchemists were involved?”

It is all he can do to hold onto his temper with both hands, and swear—to himself, if Ishvalla will not take his oath—that he will not lash out at the boy. He will not harm an Avat’ishval, whatever the pain.

The nameless man does not trust himself to speak.

“It’s not like I was involved, anyway,” Ed says flippantly.

You would have been too young to murder a people wholesale. And if you hadn’t been, if you had carried that watch, they would have slit your throat for the blood that runs through your veins. “I know,” he manages.

“And Nina?” Edward says, voice dangerously even.

His eyes stray to the chimera, watching him from behind Alphonse’s hulking form. “What about her?”

“You won’t kill me because I’m not Ishvalan. What’s keeping you from killing Nina?”

Selfishness. Though he is nearly certain that explaining why he is actually keeping her safe is not going to satisfy Edward. “She was hurt by a State Alchemist. It’s not her fault.” This answer has the benefit of actually being true. Not that Ishvalla seems to be particularly bothered by fault and fairness on the mortal plain. “If you don’t have somewhere safe to keep her, I’ll watch over her while you find a way to reverse the transmutation.” Less true. Everything he has learned about alchemy in the six years since—well, since, has told him returning her to what she once was is impossible. But he’s already traded the peace of this little girl’s soul for a chance to speak to these Avayut’ishval. He just needs them to stay for a little while.

Edward glares at him, narrow-eyed. Whatever he sees, it must be satisfactory, because he nods shortly. “Al keeps getting on my case whenever I call you X-Face,” he says abruptly. “Apparently the military is calling you Scar, which is basically the same thing. Think I might go with that one.”

The boy’s gaze has a challenge in it that he doesn’t understand.

“Well? You gonna keep being a reticent bastard about your name? You can’t seriously be okay with getting stuck with ‘Scar’ for forever.”

The nameless man remains expressionless as he meets Edward’s gaze. “I have no name of my own and no opinion on what others may call me.”

Edward looks faintly disgusted, maybe that he isn’t rising to the bait. “Fine. Scar it is.”

‘Scar,’ calling constant attention to the wound he got the day everything he had was torn from him—a wound that was soul deep, one that his name didn’t survive. It tastes like penance on the tongue, like ash. It’s not a name, he reassures himself. It’s only a brand.

Scar inclines his head. “Very well.”

The boys migrate to one side of the room and lean their heads together, scribbling away in notebooks. At least they know Nina is safe—he hears murmured words of alchemy, now, and deliberately tunes them out

Scar would speak to them of holier things, but he doesn’t know how to begin. All he knows of them are their names, and that they are shureqyu. He’s more aware of the things they don’t know than of the things that they do.

Nina creeps over to him from where she’s been sitting near the boys, her tail wagging half-heartedly. Ed glances up when she moves, cuts a wary gaze towards Scar, but returns his attention to the books without saying anything.

“We play, Mis-ter?”

He stares at her in something approaching dismay. The boys are busy, can’t be asked to occupy her. The choices are him or nothing, and maybe she’s more dog than girl, but he wouldn’t leave a dog lonely and isolated either. Of course, his usual solution for such a situation would be to find the poor thing an owner—anyone but him. With a chimera, that option is out, for obvious reasons.

Maybe this will endear him to the boys. He doesn’t have room in his fractured soul for pity for this creature.

“If you insist.”

Nina perks up, jaw opening as she pants her excitement. She pads in a circle around him, then sits back down and tips her head to the side. Is that movement the dog or the child? So much about her he can’t separate, can’t understand. “D—dolls?” she asks hopefully.

That’s probably the girl in the thing.

“…I do not have any.”

Nina gives a little whine and wanders off into the kitchen. The food is in the cupboards far out of her reach; he doesn’t know what she expects to find in there.

She comes back with what looks like a pack of cards in her mouth. Scar’s nose wrinkles. He doesn’t want to know where she found them, but those look like the cards of gamblers. That would explain the smell—the lingering scent of cigar smoke and spirits. Nina drops the box in front of him and he reaches to open it, carefully avoiding the chimera’s slobber. He doesn’t know any games with Amestrian cards, and wouldn’t know how a chimera could play a game anyway, but humoring her will keep her from getting upset in front of the boys for as long as possible.

“Princ-ess castle!”

Scar eyes the chimera doubtfully. This is a deck of cards, and he sees no picture of a castle on any of them. If this is some sort of card game, she is going to be very disappointed when she realizes he has no idea what she’s talking about.

Nina stops bouncing when he remains still, and her ears droop. “Ca-astle? Make—tower?”

“I don’t understand.”

Nina lets out a sigh that shifts into a canine’s whine and settles down with her head resting on her paws. Her shoulders look to be at an awkward, uncomfortable angle, elbows not quite animal enough to be comfortable. Scar sets the deck of cards in front of her, free of their box, and she reaches forward to paw a few off the stack.

“Like—tent?” She manages to separate two of the cards from those she’s scattered, and looks up at him with eyes that are probably supposed to be beseeching.

He can’t bring himself to meet them for more than a moment, but he does take the two cards, careful not to touch her paw. Like a tent. He balances them carefully together, forming something that does, indeed, look something like a tent, and raises his eyebrows at Nina.

She’s back on her feet, tail wagging so hard her entire body moves. “Tower! Tents and tents a—and tents!” Her words slur, the second t in ‘tents’ disappearing, but he things he understands. She wants a card tower.

Scar builds it up, to two levels, three, four. The cards are thin enough he’s surprised they don’t just collapse. Nina watches him build, enraptured. He doesn’t know what the abominable transmutation did to her brain, but he can see the girl peeking through—and yet, she seems to have regressed. Smarter than a dog, more simple than a child. He doesn’t know how old she is, but the children he knew before—before—would never have sit so still long enough to watch him build a card tower.

He gets it to four levels before Nina raises a paw. “Princ-ess lives—here,” she insists, and gently pats the cards forming the point at the top of the tower. It’s enough to send the cards cascading downwards, and he’s left with a tower made up of maybe ten cards, the rest wreckage around them. Trying to excavate just sends the last cards to the ground. Nina droops, distraught at what’s become of her tower.

Scar clears the cards away and starts building the tower again to keep himself and the chimera occupied. It’s not like he has anything better to do. He’s trying to think of how to approach the boys, but—he can’t. He got them here, but he doesn’t know how to tell them that he has so much to teach them. Card towers are something to keep his hands occupied.

Nina decides it’s fun to pat the side of the tower every now and again, sending it tumbling down, and solemnly tell him it’s a dragon attack. He can’t think of a response to that, so he simply builds the tower again for her to knock down. Nina seems much less the terrified creature she was last night, absorbed in an imaginary battle for a princess’s tower. He wonders if the sense of horror her body gives off has lessened, but can’t make himself touch her to see.

“You’re very patient with her,” Alphonse says, after an indeterminable number of towers have been toppled.

Scar suppresses a flinch. He’s used to being able to tell when someone’s watching him, like a whisper at his shoulder or an itch on the back of his neck, but something about Alphonse throws off his senses. Like he isn’t quite there.

He knows he should respond, but he’s not sure what to say. This isn’t patience, it’s indecisiveness. “Thank you,” he says, after a pause.

It seems to be satisfactory. Alphonse gives his brother a quick glance, then stands and crosses the room to the chimera. He sits down crosslegged—that can’t be comfortable in the armor—and strokes Nina’s mane. She happily abandons the cards to turn towards Alphonse, but her wagging tail obliterates the latest tower anyway. At least he doesn’t have to rebuild this one right away.

“She seems… actually kind of happy right now,” Alphonse says quietly. “She loved to play games, with us and her dog. So she seems a little more like herself. Even with—everything.” The helmet turns towards Scar. “Thanks.”

Scar simply inclines his head in acknowledgment. He has no desires to share his opinion on the chimera, unwelcome as it would be, and Alphonse seems to have more to say, anyway.

“Um, you said something in Ishvalan back at the house, and—mom was Ishvalan.” Alphonse shifts a little, and Scar tries not to make it obvious that he’s holding his breath. He can feel Edward’s eyes on him, but doesn’t look over. “But she never taught us anything like the language, or, well, anything. I don’t know if she wanted to leave it behind, or…”

Edward picks up the end of the trailing sentence: “It wasn’t safe.”

If this isn’t a sign from Ishvalla, he doesn’t know what is. “It’s still not safe. Not in Amestris.” He takes a breath. “But if you want to know, I’ll teach you everything I can.”

Edward scoffs with his usual suspicion, but Alphonse says, “I want to know about mom’s culture.”

A scowl, and Edward turns his back to them, returning to his alchemy. “You have fun with that. I’ll be over here.”

Even if only one of them wishes to learn, this is what he wanted, and he’s prepared to take the opportunity granted. Scar settles into a meditation posture, his back straight, hands on his knees, his mind and broken soul reaching desperately for something that used to be his. “Would you like to learn now?”

Alphonse mimics his posture, leaving a hand still resting on Nina’s head. “Please.”

Scar takes a deep breath through his nose, letting it out through his mouth. Find a center, his mudalim would tell him, but he has none. He will make do with this. “Then let us begin.”

Chapter Text

When the world was new, all was dark and still—there was no wind, yet, no shifting sands, no water or life. All there was in the world was Ishvalla, sleeping with all the am’tr of the world inside of him, until finally he woke.

It was dark, and it was lonely, so Ishvalla bore into being his first children, the sun and moon. To the sun, he gave all the fire to light the world, and a little am’tr so he might flow across the sky; to the moon, he gave all the am’tr she could rain on the world, and a little fire to light her way.

He loved his children, but still found it lonely, with them so high in the sky and the earth dry and barren. So Ishvalla kindled his fire deep in the earth, fire that spewed up through the mountains and into the sky. His footsteps made chasms that he poured his am’tr into: these were the oceans. As he poured out his am’tr he shrunk, until his footsteps made lakes and valleys, and finally he had poured out nearly all of his am’tr. His last act of creation was to make his human children.

Plants grew and bloomed across the world Ishvalla had made, feeding on the sun’s fire and the moon’s rain. Animals crawled and flew and ran, while his children began to walk.

Scar remembers being very young and asking his mother why, if Ishvalla made all the life and the green things in the world, that they, his favorite children, lived in the desert. She gave him a dimpled smile and tapped him on the nose. “Where we are is not the easiest place to be, ava mine, but that is not why we are here.”

For Ishvalla had created all the children of the earth—but when he had finished, he was tired and empty, as he had given all his am’tr to his children, and there was none left for him. He lay down in the place on earth that had been last to receive his am’tr, which now had so little, and let what remained of his am’tr go slowly into the sand.

But the last of his children did not wish to see him go.

Those few began to cry for their creator, and their tears watered the barren land where they stood. A young girl among them said, “We are giving Him am’tr again, but our tears are not enough.” And she opened her veins to spill her am’tr onto the sand for her God.

Ishvalla rose again with her am’tr in his being. He gathered her spirit close, precious child that she was. “Oh, my daughter, I would never have asked this of you.”

“But Ishvalla,” she said, “I want to stay with you. And now I will never have to go.”

Ishvalla shook his head sorrowfully, and addressed his other children who still stood by him. “You may stay by me if you wish, my children. I will make plants that will bloom even in this harsh land, animals that can live, and water to find. It will not be a paradise, but you will always have enough. And when your am’tr runs dry, your spirit will return to me—but do not hurry, my children.” He held his daughter still closer. “Do not hurry. There is no need; I will always be here.”

To the daughter who had come to him so quickly, he gave the name Iesha, the one who is alive. The swift one, the hurrier, the first to die. She brings new spirits to the bodies where they will live out their lives, and guides all his children back to him when she is called.

The children of his who stayed in the desert were given eyes of red, for Iesha’s sacrifice of am’tr, and hair of white, for the am’tr the moon would pour over them, under Ishvalla’s promise that they would always have enough to live.

—§§§—

It was always his mudalim’s belief—and Scar’s after him—that it is always best to start at the beginning.

They are without a proper sandstorm to build the atmosphere around them. There is no howling of the wind of the shushing of the sand beyond their now-destroyed adobe and fabric homes.

Still, he begins with this.

—§§§—

“You don’t actually believe that some girl comes and guides your spirit when you die, right?” Edward’s voice is caustic, dismissive. “Or puts souls into babies? That’s a little out there.”

Does he believe it? That Iesha brought him to his mother in the moment of childbirth, deep in the night? That when a name is returned to the desert, the wind brings it to her, so that she may find the soul to guide them back to Ishvalla for an eternity of peace?

He believes that Iesha’s arms must have been full of his brothers’ and sisters’ spirits, when their names had been brought on the wind, and that she must still be searching for the countless wailing spirits who had died with no one left to return their names to the desert.

But he doesn’t know how to articulate this in Amestrian—translating the story of the beginning had been difficult enough, leaving him to pick his way across a language of pain, stumbling over the words he can’t find a way to express. Honesty flows better from his tongue when he speaks in Lughat’ishval. This country of modhenyu has a tongue better suited to his rage.

“Brother, don’t be so rude!” Alphonse hisses at Edward, saving Scar from having to respond. “It’s a story, anyway! I mean, it’s.” The boy tries to backpedal, glancing at Scar guiltily. So Alphonse doesn’t believe it either—Scar cannot bring himself to be offended. For an Avat’ishval raised here, he can’t even bring himself to be surprised. “I’m glad I heard it, though. I bet it’s a story mom would have told us, if.” Alphonse’s voice wobbles and he looks away from them both. He seems vulnerable even in the armor, too young to be so massive. Scar can’t decide what to make of him.

Edward, at least, appears somewhat mollified by this. He subsides and moodily returns to his notebook, scribbling away so viciously it’s a surprise he doesn’t rip the page from the book.

Alphonse recovers from his fit of melancholy quickly. “Um, instead of stories—or, before the stories anyway, could you teach me the language? Stories are probably better told in the native tongue anyway, right?”

The boy sounds very eager, and he is correct. Scar nods slowly. There’s a pain in his right palm, an array of tiny throbbing pinpricks. His hand, he recognizes, is curled into a fist he doesn’t remember making, tightly enough to cause pain.

He tries not to frown as he consciously unclenches his fingers and rubs at his palm. Stupid thing not to notice. An instinct to attack may have saved his life countless times in the past years since Amestris declared war, but to be aware of the body was to be aware of the soul.

“If that is what you want to learn, I will teach you,” Scar says to Alphonse, and deliberately doesn’t look directly toward where Edward’s mouth has twisted downward into a frown.

—§§§—

Learning a language isn’t a task to be undertaken in an afternoon. Luckily, Scar has no place better to be than this city, in the slowly breaking apartment with these young Avayut’ishval and a tortured wreck of chimera.

The days stretch like this: the boys come by when they can, but always at least once a day. Alphonse brings boundless curiosity with him, endless eagerness to learn, while Edward trails at his heels like a sullen dog on a leash. Edward keeps deliberately turned away from Scar during his lessons on Lughat’ishval. Sometimes speaking with Nina in a low voice while she responds with her slow, broken speech. Usually, he scribbles away in a alchemy notebook. But even one of the brothers wanting to learn feels like more than he deserves, so Scar does his best not to let Edward’s narrow-eyed glares bother him.

Instead, he goes through the ordeal of trying to teach his native language to another, when he had been young enough, learning Amestrian, that he doesn’t remember the beginning to the process of learning a language at all.

He starts with greetings, since that seems intuitive enough—

“Yirzhaldaw’ loykume,” Alphonse sounds out carefully, missing the catch at the end of yirzhaldaw’ but otherwise coherent.

—and moves onto numbers—

“In, nan, thela, abe, khams, sti, sab—sbeth—sbthe, thamy, tse, jush.”

—and, for lack of a better idea, starts teaching him words for things around the house and whatever Alphonse thinks to ask.

“So if I wanted to tell someone I was outside?”

“Qaman zharij. Or you could say zharij qaman, if you wanted to emphasize that you were outside, as opposed to inside.”

Edward mostly keeps his scowling to himself, during the language lessons. Still, he keeps his distance and refuses to even pretend to participate. If the lesson ventures too close to anything remotely religious, Alphonse gets shifty and Edward starts imitating a thundercloud, ominous rumbling included, so Scar learns to steer clear of it. Any wistful pangs that might think of making themselves known are firmly strangled.

Mention of their mother will wipe a frown from Edward’s face and replace it with a distant, sorrowful look, but the only thing that Scar has ever seen make Edward smile is Nina and alchemy.

Alchemy, Ishvalla dhoshen. At this rate, Scar can’t see Edward ever being willing to learn a thing about his culture. But if Scar can at least save Alphonse’s soul—or set him on the right path, Scar harbors no illusion that he has the spiritual strength to save anyone these days—then it will be worth it.

Scar is still trying to come up with some way to broach the cultural differences they don’t understand, somehow without bringing religion into it, when Alphonse solves the problem for him by asking about esamalayu.

“So—there’s two formal greetings for an Ishvalan—an Avayu—Avat’ishval that you’re meeting for the first time. And they’re not interchangeable, because with one you give your name?”

Nuance. Scar has been pushed to his limits to explain some of the nuance when limited to Amestrian, but all he can do is try. “Yes. There are other variations as well—you use sharintilib when speaking to a male Avat’ishval whose name you have not been granted, sharintil for a female one. Haqarib for a male Avatishval whose name you have been granted, haqaribl for a female one. But most of the greeting’s structure is centered around whether you are making the overture of granting your name to the one you are speaking to.”

“So names are important,” Alphonse intuits. “Why?”

“Names are treated differently in Ishval than they are in Amestris. They are considered holy.” He doesn’t linger on that thought, trying to hasten on before Alphonse regrets asking. Trying to escape the ache behind his ribs. “A name belonging to an Avat’ishval is called an esamala, whereas another’s name would be called an esam. You wouldn’t give your esamala to others casually.” Rabiq, sadiq, mutiq, says his mother’s sing-song voice in the back of his mind. The ache intensifies. “Family, friends, or—“ His mind blanks for a moment on how to translate mutiq. “Brothers-in-arms. Close allies. Diplomats will sometimes give theirs when introducing themselves to foster a connection. To ask someone for their name is extremely rude. The most you can do is offer your own, and people will often offer theirs in return. A severe, if polite, insult would be to not offer your name to someone who has offered you theirs.”

Alphonse appears to think on that, his eyes dimming as though half-shuttered. Strange eyes, apparently glowing in the confines of the armor that he never takes off. Strange eyes for a strange boy. Scar’s mind has cycled through reasons for the armor over the past days, and he cannot seem to get the image of horrific burns to leave his head. He knows the brothers were far from the war, and Alphonse moves far too easily for his skin to be a vast tapestry of angrily discolored, ropy scar tissue, but the mental picture lingers.

“Introducing yourself in Amestrian must be weird for you, then.”

“An Avayut’ishval speaking in Amestrian will still not give their names unless it is appropriate—the rules for esamyu are different. But it can be… disconcerting to be given a virtual stranger’s name,” Scar admits. Sometimes he feels abstractly guilty about knowing the brothers’ names, but forgetting them when he already knows would be a worse insult. He just does his best never to use them aloud.

The concept of Esamekke is like a storm on the horizon. They deserve to know that they’re breathing the same air as a shell of a man who hasn’t found the strength to lay down and die. Any moment now, Alphonse will ask what it means that Scar has said he has no name, no esamala, and Scar will answer that curiosity as he always does.

He suddenly, viscerally wishes to put that explanation off a while longer. For these lessons to continue to exist in an artificial peace.

So he keeps feeding Alphonse’s bottomless curiosity, in the vain hope that it will have satisfied itself before Scar has to speak of things best left sunk in bleeding sands. “Shortened names are also different.” There is a word in Amestrian for those, he thinks. “…Nicked—nicknames. In Amestris, I’m given to understand that they are common if a person prefers to be called by their nickname, but in Ishval it is usually an insult to presume to use on, even if you have been given that person’s name. Small children use them, as do immediate family and the closest of friends, but anyone more distant would not.”

Edward speaks from the other side of the room, a rare enough occurrence during a lesson that Scar’s spine snaps a little straighter at the sounds of his voice. “Well, in that case, I’m Edward and he’s Alphonse. Other people call us Ed and Al, but you don’t. Got it?”

“Edward!” Alphonse hisses, at the same time Scar says, “Of course.”

A beat of silence. “That is entirely appropriate,” Scar says, eyeing Alphonse’s reaction. Surely the boy doesn’t think Scar would be permitted to refer to them as such? He doesn’t deserve to know their names at all.

Edward seems suspicious and possibly faintly disturbed at Scar’s swift capitulation, but he doesn’t push the subject. He turns his attention back to his notebook with a huff and hunched shoulders.

Alphonse seems fed up with his brother’s supposed insensitivity and deliberately, unsubtly changes the subject. “So, about prepositions…”

Scar gears himself up to explain the word order for prepositions, and only halfway through a discussion on the variable translations of loykume is he convinced that he won’t have to tell the boys what it means to be Esamekke.

Not yet.

—§§§—

“I think you could stand to be a little more polite to them,” Al says as they walk home. The sky is dimming into sunset, but there’s still enough light that they don’t have to worry about the flickering or broken streetlights common in this area of town. Nina deserves a better place, Al thinks, but he understands why Scar stays where they are. Anywhere better could bring notice and questions.

“Polite,” Ed echoes flatly, an edge to his voice.

No brash defensiveness, which means Ed is either horrified beyond words (not likely, since that’s usually the point where he devolves into offended shrieking) or convinced Al has no valid argument to make.

Which, maybe he doesn’t. But being polite isn’t a chore—unless you’re Ed and think it’s going to eat you if you let it get too close, apparently. “He’s teaching me. That should be a reason.”

Ed’s eye twitches and he looks quickly around the empty street before hissing, “He’s a murderer, Al.” His face is twisted up in a vicious scowl, like it has been every time they talk about Scar, or to Scar, or Ed thinks about Scar.

“Your face is going to get stuck like that, one of these days,” Al sighs. Ed shoots him a disbelieving look, and Al glances away. He’s not avoiding the facts. They’re just—uncomfortable. He sighs again. “He hasn’t killed anyone lately. If he keeps looking after Nina for us, he won’t have time. State Alchemists aren’t exactly easy to catch. So even if we don’t turn him in, we’re kind of helping, right?”

At least Ed stops scowling, but the carefully blank look that steals onto his face in its place isn’t much better. Al knows it’s an almost painfully naive thing to say, even if Ed won’t call it that to his face. But—

“I guess we are helping,” Ed says, with a kind of forced determination that makes Al want to set a hand down on his shoulder and ask sincerely if Ed really thinks he has ever once fallen for that tone of voice in his life.

But Nina.

They’re not going to turn in Scar, because as long as he’s free, he can keep Nina safe.

And maybe Ed wouldn’t agree with him, but Al can’t help but believe that there must be a way to stop the murders without sending Scar before a firing squad.  He has to believe that there’s an option other than more death.

Even if it is naive.

“So do you know how to say ‘I’m going to fight you’ in Lughat’ishval yet?” Al says brightly. “I bet you’d find that useful.”

“And how would I know that?”

“I know you’ve been listening to the lessons, even if you’d rather die than admit it. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Scar, you’d probably try to bounce his head off a wall until he forgot again, and having you around means I have more concussion experience than I can handle already.”

“Hey!”

—§§§—

When the boys come in, Alphonse peeks into the kitchen Scar has slowly been turning into something livable. A teakettle, a wood-burning stove, a pot, a barrel for water, a bowl for Nina. It’s still very much a work in progress. “Tai ralwayih payukh,” Alphonse says carefully.

“Payukh awetai ralwayih,” Scar corrects automatically. Then blinks and frowns at his teakettle.

He’s been cycling through different Amestrian teas based on what smells like teas he knows from Ishval. There are a few that are startlingly similar to ones he knows, but they’re all slightly off, and the vague wrongness of it bothers him more than no tea at all. So he’s been venturing slowly into teas he’s never tasted in his life, since even what passes as tea in Amestris is better than plain water he’s never quite certain is clean.

The tea he’s steeping has a bitter smell that made Nina turn tail and skitter right back out of the kitchen when she’d come looking for a playmate. Scar has smelled and drunk worse in his time, but he shudders to think what his stay in Amestris is going to do his palate if Alphonse thinks this smells good.

“Your pronunciation is improving. Would you like some?” he asks, in Amestrian, even, since he is the host.

Alphonse’s shoulders draw upward. “Um, no thanks, I just—I just wanted to tell you it smells good?”

It’s an oddly defensive reaction. Scar considers commenting, but Edward chooses that moment to duck under his brother’s elbow into the kitchen and give Scar a glare that could peel the paint off the wall, if there were more than specks of it left. “Thank you,” Scar says instead, since Alphonse was probably just being polite. Edward’s scowl, which Scar has begun to think of as a greeting of its own, lightens slightly and he ducks back out of the kitchen to pat Nina on the head and settle into his alchemy research.

Twenty minutes later sees Nina falling asleep, curled up against the wall on a mostly stain-free patch of carpet. Scar stands alone in the kitchen with an empty mug of bitter tea, wishing for running water in this apartment building so he can rinse out his mug and kettle, just for the sake of something to do. Unfortunately, he can’t honestly say it’s a reasonable expectation, considering the building is about two empty doorways from being a glorified scrap heap. Thin walls and surprisingly effective acoustics, probably from the lack of insulation. It’s difficult to ignore the alchemy being discussed in the next room.

Maybe Alphonse will want to take a break soon and study Lughat’ishval instead. Scar rolls his eyes at himself, but sets the mug down on the table and ventures back into the sitting area anyway.

The conversation lulls briefly as he reenters the room. Scar deliberately doesn’t look over at the brothers, instead settling far enough from Nina that he won’t touch her by accident, even if she shifts in her sleep. The horror coming from being too close dimmed a little in the first few days, but it’s plateaued since and Scar doesn’t stay within reach if he can help it.

Firmly tuning out the ambient talk of alchemy, Scar leans back to rest against a wall, closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

—§§§—

His people’s spirits are screaming.

Blood turns the sand under his feet pink, makes the street sting with the scent of death and ashes. His people’s eyes are brighter red than the dark and drying pools of blood on the sand, and even lifeless and glassy they seem to watch him accusingly. A woman slumped in the doorway of her home. A boy fallen on his front, two bullet holes in his back like a second pair of red, red eyes, bleeding and staring.

He keeps walking, a dead man through an unhallowed burial ground. More bodies lay on either side of the street, strewn like discarded dolls, stiff like slowly drying clay.

A flash of movement around the corner of a building catches his eye. He follows, stepping over the staring, still body of a young woman and into the shadow of an alleyway. The movement is in golden fur, a jackal come from the desert to feast on the carrion the damned katal-nabi leave in their wake.

The jackal is turned away from him, tail brushing the dirt and moving nervously side to side. But he can see just beyond it, to the body of an Ishvalan man that the jackal is considering for dinner. His fists clench, and he moves forward to kick the jackal, to reach his left hand toward the beast and tear it to pieces—bodies are to be treated with respect, and if he can’t keep the dead from the katal-nabi, he’ll at least do what he can to keep the desert itself from destroying those it once loved.

He barks out a sharp sound as he moves, and the jackal startles hard. It stays by the body, but tucks its tail between its legs and shies away from him. It has blood on its muzzle. He sees red, red—

Red eyes.

The creature has red eyes.

“Eba,” it says.

The nameless man stops in his tracks.

Somewhere near, he can hear raised voices shouting in Amestrian. There’s a high, short scream that ends with a gunshot. The whole ordeal can’t be taking place more than a few blocks away, but even knowing that the katal-nabi is coming to clean up its slaughter grounds, he finds his feet rooted to the ground.

The jackal-child cringes and whimpers at the sound of the gunshot and slinks back towards its father. He takes a step forward, but the jackal-child shies away, and he stops. He can hardly think over the roaring in his ears. This—child—chimera—he needs to get it to safety. The katal-nabi is coming and will kill it. But he doesn’t dare touch the thing—how much more would the horror shriek at him, when it’s a child of the holy desert trapped inside a monster?

Amestrian shouting, closer. More yelling, an angry shout in Lughat’ishval. Another gunshot.

The nameless man forces his feet to move forward. It’s a child. It’s a twisted creature. It has red eyes, and they are crying. He is standing over its father’s body, suddenly, and reaching out his left hand to touch the creature’s head.

Its mane is soft and white. The hum of creeping dread is quieter than he thought it’d be. It tilts its head into his touch.

There’s the sound of heavy boots on the sand behind him, a shout from the mouth of the alleyway. He moves, body between the creature that was once a child of Ishval and any harm that might fall upon it, as he was taught by his mudalim, as kahiriblayu have been taught for centuries. He’s twisting toward the katal-shakhyu, ready to kill, when he feels metal rest cold and heavy on his shoulder.

Scar wakes like a live wire, body seizing into a defensive position with his heart thundering, synapses sparking. All that breaks through the static is the sensation of metal against his shoulder, and his reaction is less a conscious thought and more like electricity, seeking a ground—

—iron copper zinc—

—§§§—

Ed can hear the pieces of his automail raining down around the room: clink, clink, clink. He’s frozen, watching sparks—sparks, what the fuck what the fuck—and he can see the moment Scar’s brain clicks into full wakefulness and he recognizes Ed. Widening eyes, cutting a glance to the now empty automail port on his shoulder—

Ed scrambles away, awkwardly three limbed, and tries to pretend he did not just freeze like a startled rabbit. “Holy shit,” he blurts.

Scar’s face does a twitchy tightening thing, which is about as much emotion as Ed’s ever seen on his face. He’s probably the kind of guy who doesn’t like it when peole take the Lord’s name in vain, like some of the nuns Ed had the misfortune to meet down near Southern City while on a mission looking into rumors of a sorcerer—usually code for “weird as fuck alchemy” and/or “clueless backwater rubes”. Al adored the nuns and thought the whole thing was hilarious. Ed? Not so much.

“…I am sorry,” Scar says, stilted and distracted, like half of his brain is still inside whatever hellish nightmare he’d been having before Ed decided to wake him up (against his better judgement, he might add—no good deed and all that).

It’s not like Ed knows how that feels, or anything.

He forces his brain to derail that train of thought before he can come down with a debilitating disease like, say, sympathy for a murderer. “You know alchemy,” Ed says abruptly, because he knows those sparks. “We’ve been doing alchemy for weeks, and you didn’t say anything.” The serial killer probably couldn’t have helped him and Al anyway, they’re geniuses after all, but it’s the principal of the thing.

Scar’s face goes tighter. Full of expressions today, he is. “I do not perform alchemy. To do so is unholy, an affront against Ishvalla.”

And murder isn’t? Ed wants to ask, but he catches the words between his teeth before they can get out. After the shit he’s seen, he can actually see how someone could hate alchemy that much. Still, he’ll claw someone’s throat out before they take his last lifeline away from him. “That’s the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard. Also, I know alchemy. That? Was definitely alchemy. I didn’t see a circle, though.” If they’ve got someone who’s seen the Gate, here, then Ed really is going to be pissed that he hasn’t been helping put Nina back together.

Stiffly, like it causes him great pain (pain in the ass, Ed thinks) Scar shrugs his tan jacket off. Ed’s first thought is that fighting him might be pretty fun after all, because Scar is way more ripped than Ed expected. His second is that his right arm must have nearly gotten hacked off at some point, judging by the thick rope of scar tissue forming and oddly neat band around his upper arm.

And then all other thoughts fly out of his head because there is a transmutation circle tattooed on Scar’s arm, from the scar on his bicep right down to the wrist, and it’s like no alchemy Ed’s ever seen before. “Holy shit,” he says again, barely breathing it this time, and reaches for the circle like a moth reaching for a flame.

Scar jerks his arm away and Ed mentally shakes himself. Right, don’t grab the guy who—oh yeah, automail. Ed dials up the scowl.

“You fucking wrecked my automail. What happened to ‘won’t attack another Avat’ishval,’ huh?”

The door opens and Al walks in with two bags of Xingese takeout. He hasn’t even had time to close the door before he sees the mess of the room and stops. “I was gone for twenty minutes,” Al bursts out.

Ed hisses at him to be quieter and points, pointedly, at the door. Al steps fully into the sitting room and closes the door behind him. Pointedly. Ed jabs a finger at Scar. “Nightmare and alchemy arm. See the tattoos?”

“What? Alchemy arm? Tattoos—ooh.” Al sets the food down by the door and makes a beeline for Scar—well, Scar’s tattoo. In his defense, it’s fascinating.

Three stacked circles, an arrow pointing toward his hand, two symmetric arrows threading around it with some kind of design—wheat? A braid?—leading down to a thick band of a design. There’s a word written in the band, and Ed leans forward to try to read it—

Scar quickly shrugs his jacket back on, looking at Ed and Al like they’re some bizarre brand of human. Ugh, what a killjoy.

“He blew up your arm.” Al says, disbelievingly. “Deconstructed it?”

“Definitely alchemy,” Ed agrees. “Deconstructive phase of it, anyway.” He’s not sure the circle would work for anything more—he isn’t familiar with the designs on Scar’s arm, but they’re elegant and something in his head that Ed hopes isn’t a trace of the Gate whispers that the circle is excellent, if missing it’s balance. Ed shakes it off and glares at Scar. “You didn’t tell us you were an alchemist. Could have been useful.”

Scar frowns, which on the slab of stone he calls a face is really just a slight deppening of his mouth’s usual downward slash. “I am not an alchemist. To create with alchemy is to blaspheme against Ishvalla. I only perform the understanding and deconstruction stages.”

Ed shoves any and all admiration for the asshole’s sneaky rules-lawyering back to the corner of his brain where he sent the seeds of sympathy to die. “That’s skirting the rules if I’ve ever heard it. And seriously, what happened to the Avat’ishval truce?”

Scar looks even more uncomfortable now. If Ed realized that getting an actual human facial expression out of him was as easy as needling him until he found somewhere that made him twitch—well, Al would probably give him the same why-are-you-baiting-the-serial-killer look that he’s giving him right now, but two weeks ago.

“Flashback. Nightmare.” And then Scar clams right the hell up, which, fair.

“Yeah, I noticed. That’s why I tried to wake you up.” One of Scar’s eyebrows ticks upward a fraction of an inch, and Ed immediately feels self-conscious. Ed isn’t a total asshole, alright? He just pretends to be. “Besides, you were freaking Nina out.”

Scar glances to the side, where Nina is still sound asleep.

Well, fuck him too. “Obviously that was a horrible idea, god, if I’d used my flesh arm there’d be blood everywhere.” Sucks to clean up, and considering it was his, well. It would have been bad. Ed thinks of Tucker’s body, weeks ago now, and a shiver races up his spine as he realizes he finally knows how Scar did it. Alchemy to kill an alchemist. Breaking a human body is infinitely easier than building one. If you separated even a fraction of the water in the blood into oxygen and hydrogen, the pressure would—

“There would not.”

Ed stares at him, unsure what the hell Scar is trying to say. His brain is spiraling away with diagrams and theories and full-color recollections of that night and the bodies of the soldiers outside, the blood on Tucker’s fingernails and pooling under his face, the splatter pattern that implies implosion now, with all the pieces clicking together like a puzzle.

“I felt metal against my shoulder,” Scar says quietly. “I used deconstruction for iron. That would disrupt any steel. Were there a gun, I’d have enough time to… convince an attacker to move on. But if it had been a person’s hand, I wouldn’t respond with—that kind of force.” He clenches his right hand, the one attached to the tattoos hiding under his jacket.

Ignoring the part where his automail is his hand, thank you very much, he gets the point: flesh is safer than metal. Well, between he and Al, they don’t have enough flesh to make even one whole body. “Yeah, no way in hell am I or Al going anywhere near you when you’re sleeping if that’s your gut reaction. I’m just going to throw something at you next time.”

Scar nods like this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. “That would probably be safest, yes.”

Is is actually impossible to get a proper rise out of this guy?

“If we—collect the pieces, could you transmute it back together?” Scar says slowly. If he’s feeling guilty, Ed’s going to—well, milk it for all it’s worth, probably, but then he’s going to edge away slowly, because what passes for Scar’s guilty face is really uncomfortable.

Ed glares. “Do you have any idea how finicky automail is? I try to fix it, I’m gonna mess up, and then my mechanic will kill me.” Oh, god, Winry. “She’s gonna kill me anyway,” Ed says blankly. “Al, give me a nice funeral, will you?”

“I’ll do my best, Brother,” Al says solemnly.

Scar gives them a look that might, possibly, be alarmed. “Surely there are other automail mechanics?”

Winry would probably be able to sense that from across the country, somehow. Ed better not risk it. “Ha ha ha! No.” He sigs, maybe a little (only a little) dramatically. “Well, it was nice knowing you.”

This seems to be what convinces Scar that he’s joking. Shows how much he knows. “I will find a way to pay for it.”

Ed raises a supremely skeptical eyebrow at him. “Would it involve robbing anyone, killing anyone, or anything like that?”

Scar glances to the side, appears to think about it for a minute, then shrugs.

Ed tries to dial up the you’re not fooling me, I am on to you that Hawkeye uses frequently and to devastating effect. “Provided you someday get a reasonable job or something”—Ed honestly can’t see that happening, and by the doubtful look on Scar’s face he feels about the same—“then I’ll let you pay me back. For now I’ll just pull it out of my research funds.”

Ed goes to stand up, and only long instinct of having half the limbs he was born with keeps him from overbalancing when his right side reminds him that it’s missing the pounds and pounds of weight he’s gotten used to over the years. Al moves forward as if to help him up, but Ed is fine and he is on his feet and he is fine. “I can’t believe you wrecked my automail,” Ed growls at Scar, angry and embarrassed and trying not to be. He’s an amputee, he’s going to be off balance sometimes, and if someone wants to fight him, missing an arm isn’t going to stop him from kicking their ass. He turns away from Scar. He kind of wants to kick the guy in the face with his metal foot, but he prefers three limbs to two and Al would give him a kicked-puppy look anyway, so he manfully resists.

“We have to tell the Colonel if we’re going to Risembool,” Al puts in.

Ed groans and seriously considers kicking Scar anyway. It might make him feel better. “We’ll come up with some excuse,” he decides. “We can’t lead them to Nina.” Scar’s another matter entirely, but—he’s kept Nina safe so far.

God, Ed hates this. He takes a breath and goes on. “It’ll take a couple days, maybe a week. Scar, take care of Nina. DOn’t blow up any other poor unsuspecting kid,” Ed says pointedly, and Scar’s eyes slide away from his. “Al, let’s go.” Ed grabs his notebook with his one good hand and his jaw tightens as he recognizes how hard it’s going to be to put it back in his pocket, on the left side inside of his jacket. Whatever, he’ll ask Al, once they’re somewhere Scar isn’t.

Out under the sky, Al says, very tentatively, “At least it was just the arm?”

Ed tries to find the words stuck in his throat. Something like, he could have killed me or, more likely, I’m going to feed him his own intestines.

Or a description of the indescribable: the moment when Scar lashed out like a dog that’s been hit one too many times, when Ed should have thought, I’m going to die, but instead had only seen the half-conscious terror in Scar’s eyes and understood, viscerally, the scream clawing it’s way out of the man’s throat that died stillborn on his lips, the ghosts staring out from behind his eyes.

Ed doesn’t have the words to explain it to his little brother who doesn’t remember the Gate.

“Winry’s going to kill me,” he says instead, “in my sleep. And then she’s going to use my leg for spare parts.”

Al hums doubtfully. “Ed, I don’t think she’s going to wait until you’re asleep.”

Ed huffs and pats his brother on the shoulder plate. “You always comfort me, Al.”