Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I wake up in a hospital. 

At least, it feels like a hospital. The telltale blue glow from a healer’s water is replaced by a gross fluorescent wash of white, and the comforting tones of yellow, green, and brown from my home kingdom are replaced by faded wood and dusty white plaster. But I’m lying on my back against an uncomfortable mattress that feels like more springs than cotton, and the smell of bleach and antiseptic is flooding my now wrinkled nose. I’m wearing a flimsy cotton dress tied together in a barely modest excuse for clothing, and though they’ve left me in my underwear, the clothes I’d been wearing earlier are nowhere to be found. Definitely a hospital.

I groan and try to sit up, but a hand on my shoulder stops me. 

“Hey, take it easy,” a smooth, authoritarian voice sounds from my left, and I turn to see a man gazing at me with a carefully neutral expression. He’s pale, with spiky black hair and slanted eyes that indicate possible Fire Nation descent, but his uniform is completely unknown to me. Gloves of a strange, almost silvery-white material cover his hands, and his arms and torso are covered by a dark blue coat with several colorful badges and buttons, probably indicating some sort of ranking system of this kingdom. I narrow my eyes at the various accessories, trying to gain some sort of idea as to where I’ve ended up, but nothing comes to mind. How far did the Spirit world take me?

“You’ve been injured, it’ll hurt less if you stay lying down,” the man says, and I scowl at his guarded tone. He, like me, is well-versed in the arts of manipulation, I can tell that much just by the way he hides his syllables. He’s trying to keep me here, but it’s not because he’s concerned for my safety. So why then?

“Where am I?” I ask, because it’s a perfectly logical question. I’ve never seen anything like this place, and when I last spoke to the Spirits… well, they’re never too keen on specifics. 

“You’re at the hospital at Central Command,” the man says. “My name is Brigadier-General Roy Mustang, I’d like to ask you a few questions while we wait for the nurse to arrive.”

Ah, so he’s taking advantage of my disoriented state to interrogate me before I sober up from whatever drug must be running through my system. I know there’s a drug, because the horrible sluggish feeling that comes from most anesthetics is numbing most of my senses. I need to get out of here, fast. I hate hospitals. 

“Go for it,” I say as neutrally as I can, shifting slightly in my seat. Something twinges at my hip, but it’s dulled by the effects of the painkillers. I manage to hide my grimace. 

“First off, how are you feeling? You were caught in a pretty big blast,” Mustang asks, and my response slips out before I can decipher what he’s fishing for.

“I was?” 

“Yes,” Mustang purses his lips. “Are you suffering from any memory loss? What was the last thing you remember?”

“I—” My response is cut short by the door on the opposite side of the room swinging open. A man in a long white coat strides in, carrying a clipboard and wearing a strange device around his neck. It looks like some sort of amulet, with three ends connected by thick black cords. 

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” the man with the amulet says. “I’m gonna check on your bandages and give you a quick screening to make sure nothing was damaged internally.”

“Wait, you’re the healer?” I ask. He looks nothing like the healers back home, in his crisp white uniform with his strange amulet and gloves that are blue and thin as skin. Where are his Water Tribe medallions? Why would he be wearing such clean white if he spends his days working with blood and guts? And why is he covering his hands with gloves? Won’t that affect his connection with the water? 

“I’m your doctor, Doctor Angelou,” he says with a warm smile. By my side, Mustang stands up and walks around my bed to the healer—no, doctor. They call them doctors here, wherever here is. 

“I think she may be suffering from some memory loss,” he reports. “I’d make sure there’s no additional head trauma that we might’ve missed on the first sweep.”

“Brigadier-General, all due respect, but I’d appreciate it if you and your men could wait a few minutes before interrogating my patient,” the doctor says in a pinched tone, ignoring Mustang’s comment. I don’t smother my smirk in time, and when Mustang sees it I catch a glint of frustration in his eye. “You can wait in the hall until I’ve deemed her fit for questioning.”

“Right, of course, apologies for any inconvenience I may have caused by being here,” Mustang says, and I don’t miss the coolness in his tone. “Miss,” he says to me, with a slight inclination of his head. 

I glare at him in response. 

He holds my gaze for a few seconds, then ducks out the door. 

“Now, let’s check your heart rate, shall we?” the doctor suggests, and he pulls the amulet out from around his neck to settle two of the ends in his ears, holding the amulet end in one hand. “Take a deep breath in,” he instructs, and I do as he says, watching curiously as he presses the cold metal of the amulet against my sternum. He seems to be listening to something—my heart beat, I assume—though I can’t guess how he’d be doing it through this strange device. His ear is nowhere near my chest.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing to the amulet. His eyebrows shoot up in blatant surprise, and he points to it as well as if asking for clarification. 

“This? It’s my stethoscope,” he explains, as if it were obvious. “I use it to listen to your heartbeat.”

“How?” I ask. I’m not afraid to speak plainly when I know I’m not being scrutinized like I had been with that slimy Brigadier-General. 

The doctor smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling as evidence of a lifetime of laughter and warmth. “Would you like to try it?”

I nod, and he goes to sanitize the ends that had gone in his ears and the cool surface of the amulet. Then he hands it to me and watches as I do as he’d done, placing the cold nubs into my ears and bringing the amulet up to my chest. 

Instantly, a swell of sound floods up to my ears, in perfect sync with the steady thump of my heart. 

“What the hell?” I exclaim, pulling the stethoscope away from me and shoving it into his hands. “How did it do that?!”

“This round part, it’s called the diaphragm. When it feels the vibrations from your heart, it shoots the acoustic energy from those vibrations up through these hollow tubes and into my ears.”

That’s strange. Healers had always just been able to hover healing water over peoples’ chests and feel if their heart was healthy. There was never any need to listen. 

The healer continues the rest of his examination, using all sorts of other strange tools that I don’t recognize, but none are as foreign as the stethoscope. I don’t ask any more questions, but I do pay attention to everything he does, just in case it’s important later. I’m also mentally cataloguing all the places he checks extra carefully, namely a heavily bandaged section of my abdomen on my right side, and another on my left shoulder blade. He also adjusts some sort of splint on my ankle, and it twinges as if sprained but definitely not broken. The painkillers are numbing most of the pain, so I can’t exactly feel how bad any of my injuries are, but there’s a general feeling of unease and discomfort around my head, from the drugs or from some sort of injury is unclear. 

Spirits, I hate hospitals. 

“Well, everything looks to be in working order. You did get a scratch over your right eyebrow, and it’s gonna leave a scar, but I don’t see any signs of brain damage. I’m sure Brigadier-General Mustang will be thrilled.” The last part is said sarcastically, and I bite my lip to keep from giggling. I wonder how long Mustang has been haggling them to unlock my secrets. 

I wonder how long I’ve been out in general. Hours? Days? I don’t like not being aware of time distortions. Sometimes I’ll get back from spending months in the Spirit World only to find that just a few days have passed in the real world, and it’s always terribly disorienting.

Doesn’t keep me from going back, though. 

“We’ll have a nurse come in to redress your bandages, then I’m afraid I’ll need to let the Brigadier-General in to question you. You’re quite the mystery,” the doctor apologizes. “I hope the military is able to help you understand what’s happened.”

I notice how the doctor never asked for my name. I’m grateful for that, he’s clearly trying to do the opposite of what Mustang is after—he’s respecting my privacy, never asking more of me than he strictly requires for his practice. Maybe this military man needs some answers from me for his own job, but the way he’d spoken to me made me feel like there was more at hand. He’s searching for something in every word I speak, but two can play at that game. 

A woman bustles in—the nurse, I assume—and gingerly peels back the bandage over my right eyebrow, then cleans it with alcohol and places another bandage firmly in place. Next she moves on to my back, and I wince as she cleans that one. I can’t see it, but it must be bad for me to feel it as much as I do through the haze of the drugs. 

Though, I think they must be fading, since a steady throb from my head and abdomen is starting to swell up through my consciousness. 

She moves on to the wound at my abdomen, and I feel myself go a little pale when she cuts away the old bandages. It’s a gaping red slash, about the length of my hand from the tip of my middle finger to the base of my palm, and about a hundred thick black strings hold the wound shut in neat little stitched rows. It looks like I was swept through by a dull meat cleaver, and doesn’t feel any better, either. When the nurse cleans the wound, I can’t stifle my little grunt of pain. She looks up at me apologetically. 

“Sorry, the painkillers must be wearing off. I’ll prepare some more once I’m done here.”

“No,” I say, a bit louder than I’d intended. “I—it’s okay. I don’t react very well to heavy stuff.” It’s true, I’ve always hated the helpless feeling I get from intense painkillers, dulling my senses and slowing my reaction time, making me sluggish and sleepy. I’d rather have the sharpness of reality, even if it’s accompanied by the sharpness of pain. 

“Are you sure? Your wounds are in pretty painful places, you’ll benefit from a few more doses.”

“Yes, I’m okay. I appreciate your concern,” I go a little heavy on the breeziness in my voice, but she doesn’t seem to catch on, instead shaking her head in exasperation before wrapping the wound on my abdomen back up and checking on the bandages of my foot. She doesn’t redress them, which proves my previous theory of it being a sprain rather than a cut or a break. A few minutes under healer’s hands could fix that right up, but for some reason they haven’t done it yet. Could be because official healers are in short supply here, but that doesn’t seem likely, seeing as it’s a big hospital. The window across the room from me gazes out onto a small courtyard, about three stories up, and the hospital is apparently in a place called ‘Central Command.’ It seems very official, which makes the lack of good healers even stranger. 

The nurse gets up to leave, and I know that once she’s done the general will be allowed to come in, which I think I know I don’t want just yet.

“Wait,” I say, and the nurse turns away, a few strides from the door. She lifts a questioning brow at me, and it doesn’t look accusatory, but for some reason I don’t want to ask about the healers just yet. My instincts are telling me to keep my cards close to my chest, and if the doctor’s reaction to me not knowing about stethoscopes is anything to go by, there are a lot more unknowns about this situation than I previously thought. 

“Uh, could I just get some water?” I can heal myself once I’m alone, I was trained under one of Avatar Korra’s very own pupils, so I know what I’m doing. Though, water has always been the hardest element for me to maintain, and everyone knows that self-healing is always more tedious than healing other people. 

Whatever. I’ll figure it out. 

“Of course,” the nurse smiles and steps over to a door on the other side of the room, reaching in and pulling out a bottle of clear water. “This is the bathroom, and there’s more water in here if you get thirsty and a nurse isn’t nearby. Once Brigadier-General Mustang is done with his questioning we can set you up with some crutches for that sprained ankle and start talking about physical therapy for you.” A sparkle of something giddy dances across the nurse’s cherub face at the mention of Mustang, and if the slight blush of her cheeks is anything to go by, I’d guess she admires him for something more than just his military status. 

The nurse exits, and I reach for the water and take a quick sip to soothe my scratchy throat, making sure to leave enough for me to heal my foot properly. I hope it won’t be too much of a shock for them when I saunter out of bed with both feet good-as-new later today, but something tells me that’s just wishful thinking. 

Mustang has enough class to wait a few minutes before barging back in, which gives me enough time to arrange myself into a carefully neutral sitting position, hiding my legs beneath the bedsheets and rolling my shoulders back, occupying my hands with the water bottle in front of me. My body language will be delicately unreadable like this, apart from my facial expressions, but I’ve always been good at fabricating those. 

“Hello, Mustang.” I strike first, keeping my face warm and open in hopes of disarming any suspicious lances he might’ve prepared with the words behind his teeth. “The staff here speaks highly of you, I look forward to finding out what all the fuss is about.”

Mustang’s face flickers, the space between his brows crinkling for a split second as he absorbs the information—verbal and nonverbal—that I’ve given him. I’ve caught him off guard, but not by much. He smiles at me without any teeth, and moves to sit fluidly in a chair by my bedside. 

“I appreciate that, though the real heroes are the doctors and nurses who tire away day and night to support those who need it most.” He smiles at me again, this time it’s half a quirk of his lips, and I have to fight to keep my laugh from bubbling up. Ouch, he’s both inserted himself as a modest worker for the people and made a jab at my current weakness in one incognito statement. This guy is good. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to really stretch my manipulating muscles like this, I’d be lying if I said I’m not excited. 

“How humble of you,” I say with just enough drawl to be considered sarcastic by a close listener. Mustang definitely fits that bill. “What do you say we skip the pleasantries and dive straight into the interrogation? Believe me when I say I’m more lost than you.” The last statement needs no extra flair, I speak with complete honesty. While I don’t trust Mustang, I am eager to figure out just where the hell I am, and why I’ve woken up with wounds I don’t remember receiving. 

“I’ll try to make this quick. My last intention is to make you feel more uncomfortable than you already are.” His words are honest, too, responding in kind to the slight vulnerability I’ve shown him. Perhaps he’s not as shady as I originally thought? Of course, that could be his goal—to lower my defenses. But he sounded genuine, and I’ve fine-tuned my lie detection skills to trust when I think I’m hearing the truth. 

“I appreciate that, thank you.”

His eyes—greyish-blue so dark they could be mistaken for black—soften for a few moments, and I get a glimpse into the person behind the many masks he’s been wearing since I met him. He seems tired and confused and frustrated, and I’m able to empathize with that. I still don’t trust him, but I’m starting to understand him. But then his mask falls back into place and he straightens, slipping back into business mode. 

“First off, could you tell me your name and where you’re from? I’m sure your family would like to know what’s happened to you.”

I try not to let my face harden at that, but I know I’ve failed once I see a faint twinge of surprise lift Mustang’s brow. My relationship with my family has always been a bit of an open wound. 

“My name is Y/N Paeonia, from Hua Cheung,” I report. “But you won’t be needing to contact anyone for me, I take care of myself.”

“Hua Cheung? I can’t say I’ve heard of a city by that name, is it Xingese?” Mustang asks, thankfully skipping over the part about my lack of next of kin. 

“No, Earth Kingdom. It’s behind the mountains north of Ba Sing Se, so it’s a little out of the way. I don’t doubt that you haven’t heard of it before.” My city is the most beautiful place on Earth, literally named the City of Flowers. I don’t try to hide the pride in my voice when I speak of it. 

“That definitely sounds Xing. I’m afraid I don’t know much about the geography beyond Amestris.” 

He should know something about Ba Sing Se, everyone knows about Ba Sing Se! I’d known that something was off about this place from the moment I’d woken up, but now I’m starting to think that the Spirits have sent me much farther than I originally thought. This is very, very wrong. 

“Miss Paeonia, I’m just gonna cut to the chase. Last night, you were found in the very center of our headquarters, deep underground in a network of tunnels that are not available to the public. None of our sentries saw you, and there were no signs of forced entry anywhere around where you were found. The first we heard of you was the explosion that caused your injuries. Nobody else was hurt, but rumors of ambush and treason are running rampant as we try to understand exactly how you got in and what caused that explosion, and there are several officers who are eager to toss you into a cell and call it a day, but my men and I would prefer to understand exactly what happened so we can prevent it from happening again. Believe it or not, I’m one of the few people in this building who’s on your side. If you could explain to me everything you know as clearly as you can, we can help each other.” As Mustang speaks, he leans forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands. His face remains still, but the glimpse of humanity I’d caught earlier is still fresh in my mind. 

I take a deep breath. I know I should probably be keeping my secrets close, but I really, truly need to know what’s going on just as much as he does. The Spirits had been terribly vague, as they always are, which means I’m left with nothing but the assistance of other people. If what Mustang says about the other officers is true, I’ll need to put away my claws and start admitting to my vulnerability. 

“Okay. I’ll help you, but on one condition,” I say, pointing an accusing finger at Mustang, who inclines his head to show he’s listening. “No more of this verbal back-and-forth. It’s fun, but not what we need right now. If I’m gonna open up to you, I want the same thing in return.”

Mustang’s face melts into a slow, easy smile, real and warm, and I can’t help but return it. “Sure. You can probably see through all of my tricks, anyways. I don’t think I’ve spoken to someone so well-versed in the arts of manipulation as you in years.”

“Thanks,” I say, grinning openly. “Same to you. If I’m not taken out of here in chains, I’d love to challenge you in a game of cards.”

“I can think of no better way to celebrate solving your case,” Mustang chuckles.

“Perfect.” My smile softens, and I take a moment to enjoy this temporary peace we’ve made before we begin treading the dangerous waters that make up this mystery. Then I huff a breath and look around, shifting a little in my seat. “I guess I should start at the beginning, huh?” 

“That would make the most sense, I think.”

“Okay. So, I’m not just Y/N Paeonia from Hua Cheung.” I sigh. “I’m also the Avatar.”

I hold my breath, waiting for his reaction. I’ve just barely finished my training, so I haven’t had the opportunity to tell the world about my existence. As far as most people know, the Avatar is some unknown entity born to some Earth Kingdom family who is still working on their training. I suppose now is as good a time as any for that ‘big reveal.’

“Avatar?” His eyebrows scrunch together in genuine confusion, and I huff out a mirthful laugh. 

“I know, I’m supposed to look more Earth Kingdom, but my family is really weird.” Truthfully, I was born in probably the worst place for an Avatar to be born in the history of Avatars. To most parents, birthing an Avatar is one of the greatest honors imaginable. To mine… well, it wasn’t exactly a celebration when they found out. 

“I’m sorry if I sound ignorant when I say this, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Uh, what? A nervous giggle rips from my lips, and I raise my eyebrows at his perfectly honest, confused face. 

“Do you need proof or something? I can do some bending, but I’d prefer if you’d just take my word for it, buddy. I’m Avatar Y/N, and the Spirits are the reason I ended up in the middle of your fancy military compound.”

A flicker of understanding passes over his face, but it’s not the right kind of understanding. He looks like he’s just realized that he’s talking to a child. “Ah, yes, okay. I see. The spirits brought you here. And you’re… an avatar.”

“Not an Avatar, the Avatar. Pretty sure there can only be one at a time. Do you seriously not know what I’m talking about?”

“I’m sure you know what you’re talking about, but I’m afraid you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else around here who can understand. What does the Avatar do?” He speaks as if he’s trying to communicate with one of those crazy junkies from the streets of Republic City, and my frustration is quickly spiking into panic. How far removed from my home am I that the Avatar is completely unheard of? I swallow the sharp nausea in my stomach and look away from Mustang’s condescending face. 

“I… I can bend all four elements. Like this,” I hold my hand out over the opening of the water bottle on my lap and draw some water out, coaxing it around my head in a lazy swirl before letting it slip back into the bottle. “Waterbending, you know waterbending, right?” I ask, then curl my fingers into a fist and make a weak punching motion to summon a small burst of flame. It heats the air for a few seconds, a lance of gentle red fire about three feet long dies out before it hits the wall. “There’s firebending. I could do air and earth but I think you get the point.”

I look back up at Mustang, and his expression of placation has been replaced by abject astonishment. His face is pale, and he watches me with wide eyes.

“How did you do that?” He breathes. 

“I told you, I’m the Avatar. It’s in the job description.” Finally, he’s starting to get it. 

“But… but that’s impossible.” I try not to roll my eyes. I just showed him that it is possible, didn’t I? “You didn’t need to start a spark for that flame, and you just… moved the water, ignoring every law of gravity, physics, everything.”

“Well, duh. That’s kinda how waterbending works. And what do you mean, spark? I can make sparks, too, if you want?” I demonstrate, opening my palm and letting some colorful beads of light dance around at my fingertips in a little trick I’d learned from a firebending child back during my training. 

Mustang stands up abruptly, and it almost looks like a retreat. His eyes are comically wide, and when he opens the door to speak to someone on the other side his voice is hushed and tight. 

“Hey, where are you going?” I ask, but he ignores me.

“Hawkeye, find Fullmetal and Al and bring them here immediately.” Another voice on the other side of the door responds, but I can’t quite make it out from my bed. Mustang’s shoulders slump, and he shakes his head. “I don’t know. At first glance, yes, it looks like she might’ve, but some things just don’t add up. Even Ed couldn’t do the things she’s just shown me.”

“Mustang! What’s going on? What did I do?” He closes the door and walks back up to my bedside, face hard. Gone is the friendly banter we’d had earlier, now his face is clouded by suspicion and doubt. 

“I’m not sure, but your… abilities… have only one possible explanation, and it’s not a good one.” He purses his lips, then seems to decide something as he turns back to the chair and sits down, back straight and arms folded. “Did you commit the taboo? Did you try to transmute a human?”

“ What?! Look, buddy. I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. I’ve already explained how my abilities work, and why. I’m. The. Avatar. I didn’t do any fancy taboos or—or transform a person or any of that junk. I know I don’t exactly look like the Spirit’s chosen one, but nobody does! It just happens, alright?” Desperation is edging my voice, but I can’t stop it. This whole situation feels too familiar, me defending myself and pleading with the others to understand that I never chose this, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, begging for help and getting nothing but coldness in return. 

Mustang heaves a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose with his strangely gloved hands. “I’m… inclined to believe you, but just know that what you’ve just shown me is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. You may not think your abilities are all that spectacular, but science and logic argue otherwise.”

“Science and—?!” My exclamation is cut short when the door slams open to reveal a young man in a red coat, face wild and eyes bright. 

“Mustang, I’m here. What’s going on?” His gaze swivels to land on me, and his golden eyes narrow. His skin is tan, but his hair is long and molten gold to match his glittering eyes. He’s short, in a plain grey vest and tight black leather pants that bunch up slightly at the ankles of his boots. Though, the most striking part of his appearance is definitely his right arm. It’s made of metal, a silver prosthetic attached to a scarred port at his shoulder. Behind him, another young man comes running in, chest heaving as if he’d sprinted after the first from across the base. They’re definitely brothers, or maybe very close cousins, due to the similarities in their features. The second is taller, and his hair is cut short while the first has his tied into a long, silken ponytail. The coloring of his eyes leans more towards green than yellow, and his skin is paler. 

“Brother, what’s the big hurry—oh, are you the one they found underground?” The second asks, stepping into the room behind the first, shorter man. His face is more open, more kind, while the one with the red coat is regarding me like he’s waiting for a bomb to detonate. I cross my arms and narrow my eyes right back at him, raising a daring brow. 

“Y/N, could you show them what you just showed me?” Mustang asks, pointing to the water bottle still on my lap. 

“What, my bending?” I scoff. “Not if they’re gonna go berzerk, running around accusing me of taboos and rambling about science and reason like you did.”

Mustang’s face tightens and he sighs frustratedly through his nose. “Y/N, please. These two will understand your abilities better than I can.”

I roll my eyes. “Fine, but seriously, if you think this is crazy, you should see me in the arena. You’d shit your pants.” The one in the red coat snorts. 

I bend some water out of the bottle, and feel the room go still. Deciding to add a little flair this time around, I splash it up towards the ceiling and freeze it mid-splat, so it forms a frozen lattice over my head, before unfreezing it and coaxing it back through the neck of the bottle. I drop my bending hand and look back at the three men beside me, raising my eyebrows. 

Mustang tilts his head, and I take that to mean that I should firebend a bit, to show that I’m really the Avatar and not just a strangely colored waterbender, so I open my palm and play around with the sparks for a little bit, then close my fist and send out a burst of true flame, a little more orange this time because I’m frustrated and don’t feel like holding back enough to make a colder flame. 

“Boom. Avatar. What more do you want?” I huff. “I guess while I’m at it I might as well heal my foot, since you people clearly don’t have any half decent waterbenders around.” I pull the water from the bottle again and set to pushing my healing energy into it, turning it a glowing opaque blue and soothing my throbbing ankle. It’s a good distraction, keeps me from needing to look up at the faces of the three men who are probably looking at me like I shouldn’t exist. 

This sucks. I don’t think Avatar Korra or Avatar Aang ever had to deal with this kind of stuff. I’d much rather be forced to fight for my life using brute strength than through convincing everyone around them that they’re not a monster. First my family, now apparently an entire city, maybe even a whole country? How is this fair?

“She—she made that fire, but I don’t see any gloves like yours, Mustang. She didn’t need a spark,” the boy with the shorter hair says. “That’s impossible.”

I roll my eyes. 

“And the water, how—how did you do that?!” The other boy asks. I growl, deciding my foot is healed enough for me to walk on, and bend the now transparent water back into the bottle, ripping at the bandages and freeing my foot. I swing it over the edge of the bed and stand up, ignoring the way the wound on my side pulls and stings. It’ll require more focused healing if I want to do it correctly, so it’ll have to wait until I’m alone. 

“I already told you, so many times, I’m the Avatar, I can waterbend, I can earthbend, I can firebend, I can airbend. Could all of you stop treating me like I’m about to blow up or something?! I’m not hurting anybody, so just leave me alone!” Alone. I’m always better alone. How many times have I been thrown out because I’m too different, too volatile? Even the Spirits didn’t want me, chucking me out of my home and into this stupid place that doesn’t want me either. I’ve learned my lesson! I get it, universe! Nobody is ever going to want me, I’ll keep to myself. Consider me a lone wolf from this point on!

That is, if I can get out of here. 

“But—but—that doesn’t make any sense! There was no equivalent exchange with what she did there, she just did it!” The boy in the red coat fumes. 

“I know, which is why I called you and Al here. She says she didn’t do human transmutation, but I could think of no other way that those kinds of abilities could exist,” Mustang explains, ignoring me. At least now I know which one is Al and which one is Fullmetal. What the hell kind of name is Fullmetal?

“Okay, look. I think I know what’s going on here,” I hold my hands out in a placating gesture, and watch as three pairs of eyes swivel over to me. “I think—I think I might’ve… teleported here? I don’t know how, but basically, where I’m from, I’m the only person who can do what I do too. But it’s not because I did… whatever human transmutation you’re talking about. It’s because the Spirits chose me to have these abilities. I’ve been the Avatar since I was born. And yesterday, I was chilling in the Spirit world, and I was told that my talents were needed elsewhere, and I woke up in this hospital. I think that the Spirits must’ve known that my world wasn’t in any immediate danger, so they sent me to a world that needed me. The Avatar exists to serve and protect the people, so that’s what I’ll do, for as long as I’m here. I don’t want to hurt anybody, I don’t want to blow up anything, I just want to help. Can I please just do that?”

The room is silent. I wait, forcing myself not to shift under their scrutiny. Fullmetal still looks angry, like I’m a puzzle refusing to be solved, and Mustang looks tired and distrustful. Al’s face is just open and curious, and I can tell he’s going to be my saving grace in this place. 

“Brother, I know it sounds insane, but I think she’s telling the truth. We might not be able to explain it, but we can try to take advantage of it, right? I mean, stranger things have happened.” Al and Fullmetal share a look that speaks of deep understanding between the two of them. In an instant, they seem to have an entire conversation, and I bite down on the miserable jealousy bubbling up my throat. I’ve never had anyone who understood me like that, not even in the days before my family decided to cast me out. 

“I don’t like it. There’s too much we don’t know.” Fullmetal crosses his arms, silver over flesh, and eyes me up and down. I look down at my flimsy hospital dress and blush, but don’t adjust my stance. His red jacket hangs from his flesh shoulder, and his arms aren’t looped through the sleeves, as if he’d grabbed it in a hurry just in case he needed it later. 

An idea comes to mind, and I smirk as I sweep one foot out and flick my wrists up, then wind my arms back, airbending a blast of wind that shoots out around Fullmetal’s body, lifting the coat from his shoulder and into my outstretched hand. I smirk at their gobsmacked faces as I slip into the coat and wrap it around my body, testing out the fitting. 

“Perfect! You can have this back when someone gets me some real clothes.” 

“I’m guessing that was… airbending?” Al asks. I nod and smile.

“Yep! You’re catching on!” 

“Wh—Hey! That’s mine!” Fullmetal snarls. 

“Too bad! I’m not gonna sit here half naked while you people argue about things I’ve already explained!” I grab the water bottle from the bed just in case I need to slash anything (you never know, and I haven’t been allowed to use the water whip since I first learned it in training) and stalk over to the door, determined to find some proper clothes and maybe a bite to eat? Jesus, it’s like these people have never heard of hospitality. 

“Uh, where do you think you’re going?” Mustang asks sharply, sticking his hand out to stop me. 

“I want clothes, and I’m hungry, and I don’t like hospitals, and I’ve told you everything I know, so I’m taking off. Pleasure meeting you boys, Fullmetal, I’ll return your coat within the next—”

“You can’t leave,” Mustang orders. “You’re a key part of an ongoing investigation, we need to keep you here, at Central.” 

“Uh, no way am I staying here, I’m not an invalid. You people can still keep tabs on me if I go to a shitty hotel somewhere close.” I look back at the hospital bed and shiver, remembering the fog of the drugs clouding my systems. Yeah, no hospitals. 

“If the doctors say you’re stable enough to leave, you can stay at one of the dorms here at headquarters, but you're not being released from our care until we’ve deemed you not a threat.” Mustang’s eyes are unwavering as they bore into mine, and it takes all my self restraint not to just chuck him out the window with a spike of earth.

“Fine,” I growl. “But could I at least get some fucking clothes? Where did my old ones go?” 

“They were destroyed in the blast,” a no-nonsense voice comes from the open door. I turn and see a tall woman with pale yellow hair tied into a folded bun behind her head, and cool, appraising brown eyes. Draped in her arms is what looks to be a set of thin blue cotton pants and a matching button-up shirt, and she carries a tray with some bread, meat, and vegetables on a plate. “The doctors have been alerted of your improved condition and are working on the paperwork to discharge you from the hospital. A room is being prepared for you in the military dorms, it will be ready by the time you’re free to go.”

“Thank you, Hawkeye,” Mustang lets out a relieved sigh, and the woman sets the tray onto my bedside table before shooting him a salute. She lays the bundle of clothes beside the tray, and I pick up the shirt, eyeing it warily. “We can set up more permanent accommodations for you once we get a better grip on what happened.”

“Okay,” I sigh. “I—okay. Alright.” I bite my lip. This is crazy—this is crazy! I’m in another world, where apparently my bending is impossible, and it’s not just because I’m the Avatar. What would Avatar Korra do in this situation? Or Aang or Ozai or any of the others? This has got to be a first in Avatar history. I can practically feel my past lives looking at me like, I don’t know, you handle this one! 

Stupid Spirits, stupid military, stupid Y/N, stupid stupid stupid. 

It’s fine. One step at a time, that’s all I can do. That’s how I’ve made it through life so far, just one step at a time. And right now, that means living in one of these weird dorms and hoping these people don’t decide I’m some sort of scientific miracle to be tested in a lab. 

I shrug out of Fullmetal’s coat and, because I’m petty and bending always makes me feel better, I airbend it back to him, slamming him in the face with the bright red fabric. He sputters and yanks it off his head, glaring at me through static-charged strands of hair that have come out of his ponytail. Mustang’s lips quirk up into a smile that’s mostly amused but bordering on affectionate, but he smothers it before anyone else notices. Note to self: re-examine the relationship dynamic between these four. I’ll need to know as much as I can about them if I’m going to survive. 

“We’ll give you your privacy,” Hawkeye says sternly, shooting a sharp look over at the three men. Al blushes and nods, walking out behind Hawkeye without another word, but Fullmetal and Mustang linger a little longer, Fullmetal eyeing me distrustfully and Mustang keeping his face carefully blank. I roll my eyes. 

“Don’t worry, idiots. I won’t try to escape. Just go, you can wait outside if it’ll make you feel better, but if I catch you peeking through the window I’ll earthbend you to a pulp.” I smirk as Fullmetal’s face goes beet red and he snarls, stumbling back.

“Like I’d fucking peek at a mutant like you! Gravity-defying dumbass fucking glowing water shit…” he continues to growl profanities as he stomps out the door, and Mustang gives me a curt nod before following, closing the door behind him.

I let out a breath and force my shoulders to drop, easing out the tense knots already starting to form. One step at a time, that’s all you can do. 

I untie the ribbons holding the hospital gown together and let it slip from my shoulders, wincing at the bandages coating my body. My back is definitely mottled with some sort of bruising, that’s got to be the reason why it aches so much rather than stings. A few minutes under healing hands will fix it right up, once I’m settled in the dorms I’ll make sure to tend to my injuries before anything else.

The clothes are simple, a pair of cotton trousers and a button-up shirt that’s entirely too big, especially around the sleeves. The ends dangle far past my fingertips, and the hem brushes my mid-thigh, almost to my knee. Almost comically large, for all intents and purposes it could be a dress! If I just had a belt to tie around the middle, maybe roll up the sleeves a few times…

I grin as a plan starts to form in my mind, reaching out for a drop or two of the water from the bottle to help me cut the fabric. With a quick flick of my hand, the water slices cleanly over the fabric of the trousers, and I use my hands to rip them the rest of the way until most of the length of the legs are removed to form makeshift shorts. I slip into them and tie the band to make sure it's secure, then move on to the legs, tearing off two long strips of fabric and using a small, precise blue flame to seal the ends together, forming a ribbon long enough for me to tie around my waist.

After trying to roll them up in a handful of different ways, I decide the sleeves are a lost cause and rip them off at the shoulder seam, creating a cute yet functional sleeveless button-up dress. I’m burning the scraps of ripped up fabric into ash when Fullmetal comes barging in, metal hand clamped over his eyes and mouth curled into a snarl.

“Alright lady, what’s the holdup? If you’re trying something I’ll—”

“Oh, stop it. You can look,” I roll my eyes and toss the ashes out the window, clapping my hands together a few times to get rid of the dust. It floats gently down the three stories, sprinkling over the fresh green leaves of a tree outside. Then I plop back down onto the bed and start tucking in to the prison food I’ve been given, watching carefully as Hawkeye, Al, Mustang, and a new man I don’t recognize come back in, standing in a line in front of me. 

It’s hard not to feel like I’m being completely isolated like this, in a Me VS Them type situation. The band of heroes facing off against the elusive enemy.

“Y/N, this is Lieutenant Jean Havoc. He’ll be your escort for the foreseeable future, while we work on your case and get you settled.” Mustang motions to the unfamiliar man, who steps forward and offers a friendly smile. He’s tall, taller than the rest of the men in the room, with sandy blond hair cropped close to his scalp around the back and sides, with longer strands piled in an artfully messy tumble atop his head. His eyes are soft baby blue, and his jaw is sharp and well-structured. More than well-structured, he’s drop-dead gorgeous. He extends a large hand my way, and when I shake it his fingers wrap all the way around my hand in a firm grasp. 

I very pointedly do not blush. 

“Hi,” I say as coolly as I can. “Y/N Paeonia. Though, I’m sure these jackasses have already given you a full profile.”

“I’m aware of the circumstances, yes,” Havoc says with a rakish smile, and damn that should not be legal. As if I needed another complication to this situation, the Spirits have gone and given me this ?! “Though from what I hear, you’re a tough egg to crack.”

I shove down the temptation to make a lewd joke, instead shrugging my shoulders and going back to my now nearly empty plate. 

Just then, the door opens and another nurse comes in, carrying a clipboard and a small kit with what definitely looks like needles and sedatives tucked neatly inside. 

“Oh, good. You’ve eaten,” the nurse smiles and takes the plate, placing it on a table across the room before returning to my side, laying the needles out and beginning to fill them with various liquids.

“Wait, are those drugs for me? I told the other nurse no drugs,” I put a hand on her arm to still her, and she looks up, surprise and concern flitting over her features. 

“Oh, but these aren’t too terribly strong, they’ll just help the pain, nothing else. You won’t be unconscious, just a little fuzzy.”

“No,” I shift in my seat, looking down at the needles. My stomach does a little flip, and I swallow a wave of queasiness. “It’s okay, I have a pretty high pain tolerance. This is nothing.”

The nurse purses her lips. “Miss, I’d really prefer if we gave you something, your injuries aren’t anything to laugh about. You almost didn’t make it out of that explosion.”

Well this is an interesting development.

“Whatever,” I smooth out the shake before it touches my voice, but not in time to keep my hand from trembling a little in its place on my lap. “I’m here now, and I feel fine. Look, my ankle’s all better, too!”

To emphasize my point, I stand up, bouncing a few times on the balls of my feet, ignoring the nurse’s appalled gasp. 

“Miss, please, sit back down! You’ll open your stitches, or worsen your sprain!” She grabs my wrists and sets me back down onto the bed, and I roll my eyes.

“I told you, I’ve got a high pain tolerance! Don’t worry about it!” I force a toothy smile onto my face. “In fact, I think I’m about ready to get out of here! Are those discharge papers?” I snatch the clipboard out of the nurse’s hands and roll to the other side of the bed, leaping off and darting over to the opposite wall before she can react. I scan the contents of the paper pinned to the board, pleased to see that not only does this region write in the same language that I read, but they also use a similar system for releasing patients. “Great! Where do I sign? Oh, here. Can I borrow that? Thanks!” I close the distance between me and the sputtering nurse, plucking a pen from her breast pocket before retreating back to my wall and scribbling my signature on the lines indicated. 

I press the clipboard back into the nurse’s chest, ignoring her cries of “wait!” and “the doctor still hasn’t cleared you!” I reach around her and grab the water bottle, tucking it under one arm and grabbing Havoc’s with the other. Even through the thick blue military uniform I can feel the swell of impressive muscles, and I roll my eyes while sending a silent curse to whatever Spirit constructed this beautiful nightmare.

“Well escort, looks like I’ve been discharged! Now you can escort me to my dorm and I can get started plotting my escape.” I hum pleasantly, moving to march out the door, but Havoc doesn’t budge, looking nervously over at Mustang.

“Uh, Boss?” He asks. Mustang shrugs, and I let out a longsuffering groan. 

“Can I please just get out of here?” I whine, because I’m whining at this point, since nothing else has been working. 

“She sounds like you, brother,” Al laughs, and Fullmetal lets out an indignant squawk. 

“Hawkeye?” Mustang asks. Hawkeye thinks for a moment, then shrugs.

“The dorm will probably be ready by now, there’s not much to do with the lower-level bunks,” she explains. Mustang looks up and meets Havoc’s eyes, nodding minutely. 

“Lieutenant, you may escort her to her dorm. You remember where it is?” Mustang asks with a sigh. Beside me, Havoc chuckles.

“How could I forget?” he quips. I narrow my eyes.

“We’re just letting her go?” Fullmetal hisses. “You saw what she did, she could be dangerous!” 

“Only if you piss me off, pipsqueak,” I snap. Fullmetal’s face goes red with rage and he turns on me, mouth open wide to retort, but Al slides in front of him at the same time that Havoc finally steps out the door with me, and it closes before Fullmetal can unleash his full rage on me. 

I take a deep breath, shoulders deflating with my exhale, and step away from Havoc’s side, reluctantly releasing his gigantic, beautiful arm. Finally out of that stupid room, I take a minute to survey my surroundings. The hospital appears to be a wing of a much bigger building, my room looking out into a courtyard surrounded by other wings of the building. I mentally catalogue each turn we take, every door we pass through, making note of possible exits just in case things get messy. We exit into a larger open foyer, with large staircases leading up to the balcony of the floor we’re walking, down to large wooden doors that I assume to be the building’s entrance. We go down a set of stairs to the second floor, crossing a balcony to the other side of the foyer before cutting down a hallway lined with big, important-looking doors. 

“I have half a mind to blindfold you so you can’t see where we’re going, but Boss seems to think you’re not going to be a threat to us,” Havoc says suddenly, startling me out of my scrutinization. 

“Kinky,” I mutter without thinking, then blush and shake my head, cursing my stupid idiot brain. Get it under control, Paeonia! “I mean—uh, I’m not. A threat, I mean. Despite being treated like a fucking hostage here I’m inclined to think you’re the good guys. I only fight bad guys.”

By my side, Havoc lets out a humorless laugh that’s more of a tired sigh. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The military is a big place, it’s easy for bad guys to creep in here and hide in plain sight.”

I narrow my eyes. “Is this your way of like, giving me a ten second warning before you turn around and attack me or something?”

Havoc laughs again, a real, full-bellied laugh, and it’s a nice sound. Rich, friendly, and warm. “No, no. I’m under orders to keep you safe unless you become dangerous. I’m just saying… I guess, don’t hand out your trust to anyone in a blue uniform. The Brigadier-General is working on fixing the system, but until that happens, keep your eyes open, yeah?”

I shrug and kick at the carpet at my feet. It’s so short it’s practically stone, and blood red. “I guess,” I mutter. So the military is corrupt, huh? Who woulda thought that an institution built on controlling people through brute force and violence would have some rotten spots? That’s perfect, just another problem for me to deal with. 

I guess that’s why I was sent here, to deal with this world’s problems. I shouldn’t be so reluctant about it. If the Spirits think that this is where the Avatar is needed most, then I’ll do my best to be the Avatar they need. 

“Ah, we’re here. Number 217,” Havoc stops in front of a plain-looking brown door, and I curse as I realize that while I’d been lost in my thoughts I’d completely lost track of where I am. The corridor we stand in now looks perfectly ordinary, with rows and rows of brown doors just like the one we’re standing at lined on each side of the hallway. Havoc opens the unlocked door, and inside I see the room is already lit by a few lamps and an open window letting in the white gold of the afternoon sunshine. 

It’s cramped, with one tiny twin bed shoved up into a corner and beside it a dark wood nightstand with a small reading lamp looks like the joints holding the wood together are about to fall apart. Off to one side is a small kitchen area, with a handful of wooden cupboards and a tiny stove with a rusty kettle stationed atop one of the burners. There’s also a sink, and a few dishes set on a drying rack on the counter beside it. A rickety table with two chairs sits in front of an open door that leads into a small white-tiled bathroom with a shower, sink, and mirror, and a few towels stacked on the lid of the toilet. There’s also a dresser and a cloudy full-body mirror pressed into the corner opposite the bed, and I notice a few stacks of various plain articles of clothing arranged atop the dresser. 

Overall, the whole space is probably as big as the one-automobile garage I’d rented from a family back in Hua Cheung, which means I’m not exactly accustomed to luxury, but still, it could definitely use some color. This sparsely decorated room isn’t going to know what hit it by the time I’m done with it. 

“Well, here it is. Home sweet home. My dorm is just across the hall, so I can keep an easy eye on you. You’re free to do as you please while you're here, but if you get hungry or you want to explore the base, you’ll need to bring me with you. The doors are arrayed to alert me if you try to leave, so don’t do that. I’ll wake you up at dawn every morning for breakfast, and tonight I’m under orders to keep you in your room until dawn tomorrow.”

“What?!” I squawk, interrupting his speech. “So I’m on house arrest?”

“We’re still working on accommodations for you, and with this and… other outside situations coming into play… we need to keep you in one place while Mustang comes to a decision.” Havoc crosses his arms, giving me a look that tells me that this point is completely nonnegotiable. I growl and put my hands at my hips to keep myself from pouting like a child. 

“Fine. But tomorrow I’ll be allowed to go do shit? I’m of no use to anybody cooped up in here.”

“I’m sure Mustang will arrange something,” Havoc says behind a gentle amused smile, and I quirk my brow. He notices my look and shakes his head, as if clearing a thought. “Sorry, you just… you really remind me of Boss sometimes. Ed, not Mustang.”

“Ed?” I ask. Havoc chuckles and scratches at the back of his head bashfully. 

“The uh… the one you called ‘pipsqueak’ back there,” he grins. “You’re treading thin ice with those height jokes, especially since you’re half a foot shorter than he is.” I shrug. 

“So Fullmetal isn’t his actual name? Shoulda known it was too weird,” I mutter, mostly to myself. 

“Nah, that’s his title. Edward Elric, better known as the Fullmetal Alchemist,” Havoc rummages through his pockets for something, then procures a thin black cord with a golden key dangling from the end. “Oh, and here’s your key. Don’t lose it, it’s a pain in the ass to make copies.”

I take the key and loop the cord around my neck, tucking it under my shirt for safety. The metal presses cooly against my skin, and I suppress a shiver. “Alchemist? What’s that?”

“You don’t know what alchemy is?” he exclaims, blue eyes bugging wide. I shake my head.

“No, is that what you meant when you said the doors were ‘arrayed?’ Is that alchemy?” I hadn’t seen any trip wires or hidden latches that might indicate an alarm system when we’d walked in, but now, looking back, I notice a few carved circles by the doorknob. They’re complicated little drawings, with symbols I don’t recognize. They could be purely decorative, but who decorates the wood over a doorknob? 

“Uh, yeah. It’s basically a science focused around transmutation. You take one thing and turn it into another using these drawings called transmutation circles. I’m the wrong person to ask about it, I’m more of a guns n’ combat type of guy. But Ed and Al, they’re the best alchemists around. I’m sure they could give you a crash course,” Havoc explains, still looking at me like I’m from a different dimension. 

Oh wait, I probably am.

“Honestly, when I was briefed about you, they weren’t too specific. Just said you had some strange abilities and they wanted to keep an eye on you. I’d just assumed you were a unique alchemist like Ed and Al, but I guess that’s not the case.” He looks me up and down, as if trying to prise my secrets from my body just by looking. Maybe he’s searching for some of those transmutation circles, or metal limbs like that Edward guy. 

“Did the Elrics try to do human transmutation? Is that why Ed has that prosthetic arm?” I ask, and judging by Havoc’s poorly suppressed flinch, I’d guess I’m right on. “Why is that so bad? If alchemy is just changing one thing to another, what’s the problem with doing it to a human?”

“It’s—that’s private information,” Havoc says in a rush, eyes darting to the still open door. He walks over to it, turning his head side to side to make sure the corridor is empty, before closing the door behind him and moving briskly back up to my side, voice hushed. “Look, human transmutation is risky business. Like I said, I don’t know any specifics, but it’s a big taboo in the world of alchemy. You just… you don’t mess with that kind of stuff. It’s too volatile, too powerful. If word got out that those two tried it, even if it was a long time ago, they’d be put against a wall and killed for it. I don’t know how you figured it out, but you need to keep quiet about it, okay?”

I blink, taking in Havoc’s intense expression. “Okay, I won’t say anything. ‘S not like I’ve got anybody to talk to about it besides people who already know.”

Havoc lets out a breath and nods. “Right. Okay. I guess I’ll… be across the hall. Let me know if you need anything.” He turns, making to walk out the door, but I reach out and catch his hand, stopping him. 

“Wait,” I blurt out. What am I doing? I don’t know. It just hadn’t felt right for him to leave just yet, and I’d let my instincts do the talking rather than my logic. He raises a brow, and I flounder, racking my brain for something to say. Why had I stopped him? Something had told me I should, so I did. 

“Um, I guess… thank you?” That’s a start. “Thanks for telling me. I can tell that wasn’t something you usually go around sharing willy-nilly.”

Something nags at the back of my mind, and by now I know what my conscience is trying to tell me, but I don’t like it. 

“You’re welcome,” Havoc says with an easy smile. “Though it was mostly just to protect my Boss.”

“Right, but… still.” Spirits, this is hard. “I guess… I guess since I’ve already shown Al and Ed and Mustang, I can show you. Sorta like… I don’t know, and eye for an eye? I’ll tell you some sensitive information in return for yours.”

“Equivalent exchange,” Havoc nods. I tilt my head in confusion. “Oh, it’s sorta the base principle of alchemy. Every action has its equal and opposite reaction. You can’t have one thing without sacrificing something of equal value,” he explains, holding his hands out in the gesture of a scale. “Equivalent exchange.”

“Okay, yeah. Equivalent exchange.” I step back, breathing deeply as I search for something to do. I still have the water bottle tucked under my arm, and that had been enough to get Ed all feral and snarly, so I unscrew the lid, distantly aware of Havoc’s eyes trained diligently on me. 

I’d mastered waterbending last, so it’s still fresh in my mind, but it had definitely been the most difficult for me to get the hang of. Earth came as naturally to me as breathing, as my home element. Fire had been a bit harder to learn simply because I was obsessed with making a lot of it, rather than focusing my energy into smaller, more controlled blasts. Air was like sprinting through a field after a long day of being stuck inside, exhilarating and bubbly. But water was always so… uncooperative. It’s heavy and sluggish, it flows where it wants, when it wants, unless you have a perfect grip on it at all times. Fire and air will eventually petter out if you’re finished using it, which means the hardest part is maintaining it. But water always just stays , and it slips around without warning, unlike the solid surety of earth. 

Even now, after fully mastering the element and graduating from my training, I need to actually focus on what I’m doing, while with the other three elements I’m able to bend almost without thinking. 

I drop the bottle, but keep my hand hovering over the water, watching as the now empty container falls to the floor with a quiet thunk, but the water remains swirling just under my palm. I bend it around my head, twirling and looping it in a lazy dance, sometimes splashing it up in an arc over my head that I freeze mid air, allowing tiny puffs of sparkling diamonds clatter over my head before unfreezing them and incorporating them back with the main body of the water. 

I use the same finale as earlier, tossing it into the air to freeze in a snowflake shape on the ceiling and watching as the ice sparkles in the sun for a few moments before guiding it in a line back into the bottle, which I screw the lid back onto and leave on the ground. 

When I finally decide to peek at Havoc’s face, he looks like he’s seen a ghost. 

“I know, that should be impossible! What about the laws of physics?! Blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it all before, so save your breath.” I know I’ve just stolen his easiest reaction by saying that, but I’m getting tired of hearing that something I’ve just done right in front of somebody is ‘impossible.’ Like, did you not see me? If it can be done, that means it’s not impossible.

“That… wasn’t alchemy, was it?” Havoc says at last, still staring at me wide-eyed and pale-faced. I shake my head. 

“No, waterbending. I can do the same thing with earth, fire, and air. But where I’m from, everyone else can only do one. It’s not a science like your bending, it’s an art. And like any other art form, you’re either born good at it or you can’t do it at all.” I scuff at the carpet with my (still bare) feet in order to avoid looking at what I know is probably a distrustful glare. Everything had gone to shit once I did my bending. Mustang stopped treating me like a person and started treating me like a mutant, Ed and Al had rushed in like they’d received a bomb threat, and Havoc had been assigned to me as a 24/7 babysitter. Whatever tentative trust we’d built over the past few minutes has no doubt snapped like a gossamer strand of spider silk in the middle of a thunderstorm. 

“Fascinating,” Havoc breathes, and my head snaps up. He’s not glaring at me, or backing away to go call Mustang. Instead, he’s gazing at me with open admiration, enough to make me flush red and look away. “So the water just floats where you tell it to? And you can freeze and unfreeze it just because you were born with that power? Not because of some hidden array?”

“Pretty much,” I giggle, because when you think about it, bending is pretty strange. Why should I be able to move water, earth, fire, and air, but nothing else? From a scientific standpoint, it really truly does seem impossible. But that’s only if your science never accounted for humanity’s connection to the Spirit world. 

“Now I see why Mustang wants you on a short leash,” Havoc murmurs. “If the military got their hands on you, they’d stop at nothing to try and pull whatever part of you that makes that happen out and into their clutches.”

I snort. “Well I hope they know how to extract and contain my Spirit, because there’s nothing physical about my abilities. Bending is sewn into my soul.”

Havoc levels me with a grave stare. My heart stutters a beat, then picks up twice as fast to make up for lost time.

“Wait, hang on. The military can take a person’s Spirit? How?!” I cry.

“Alchemy,” Havoc replies lowly, shrugging a defeated shrug. I can see the horrors of some old memories behind the blue of his eyes, some war that was fought and barely won. I stagger back, slumping onto the bed as it creaks under my weight.

Numbly, I recognize a flair of understanding pass through my head. Maybe this is why I’ve been sent to help this world?

“Hey, don’t worry. You’ve got me to protect you, and Mustang and the Elrics and the rest of our unit. We wanna keep your bending a secret just as much as you do.” Havoc appears in front of me, and I have to crane my neck up to see his face. “We’ll keep an eye out for each other, okay? Equivalent exchange.”

“Equivalent exchange,” I murmur, taking the hand he extends in my direction and allowing him to pull me to my feet. 

“Alright, over there’s the bathroom, and the kitchen, but you won’t find a lot of normal kitchen things in there. That’s what the cafeteria is for, you’ll see that tomorrow morning at breakfast. And here’s some extra clothes, I know most of it isn’t going to fit, but I’m sure we can work something out once we…”

“Figure out what to do with me, yeah, I got it,” I finish his sentence with a humorless chuckle, inspecting the clothes and already making mental notes for what alterations need to be made. 

“Well then, I think that’s everything. Once again, I’ll be just across the hall if you need anything,” Havoc smiles, and I manage to return it through a halfhearted quirk of my lips, then return to the pile of clothes, separating it into tops, bottoms, and eventual scrap fabric. After a moment, I realize I haven’t heard the door open and close yet, so I look up, brows drawn together in confusion. 

Havoc is standing by the door, hand on the doorknob, completely still. I feel my heart lurch into my throat as I instinctively bend into a defensive position, straining my ears for any sign of attack, but the dorm is silent. Finally Havoc sighs, and I straighten, watching closely as he turns to face me. 

“Look, Miss Paeonia—”

“Y/N,” I correct him. “Just Y/N is fine.”

“Okay, Y/N, I just really want to reiterate that… that we’re on your side. I know this is an unfamiliar situation for you and everything, but just know that you can put your faith in my unit. I’ll be doing everything I can to keep you safe until we know for a fact that you don’t need it anymore, even if that takes weeks or months or even years, and my friends will be doing the same. I won’t let the military touch you.” His eyes are glittering with determination, his voice rich and firm, and under any other circumstances I’m sure I’d be going weak at the knees at the sight of a tall, broad, muscular man proclaiming his protectiveness over me. 

But instead I just feel numb. And maybe a little sick. 

Still, the words are comforting to hear, so I nod, and he takes that as and adequate response. Turning the handle of the doorknob, he slips into the corridor, and is gone.

Chapter Text

I’m in the avatar state. I’ve only done it a few times, but I already know that something is wrong. 

A man’s face flashes across my vision, manic and angry. Hands grab at me from all sides, but all I can see is the man’s face. I try to jerk away, but the grabbing arms pull me deeper and deeper down into their depths.

The man laughs a terrible, cackling laugh, and I lash out, trying to burn the hands away. Things are getting fuzzy, I can’t tell which way is up. 

“Yes, that’s right, show us your power!” The man’s voice is a snarl by my ear, and I pull back, sending a blast of flame at him. I can’t feel the earth, so there’s nothing to be done there. He laughs again, and I scrunch my eyes shut, thrashing in the thousands of hands’ grips. My hold on reality is getting weaker, I can feel my power slipping away from me, flickering and fading. 

“Almost there, c’mon, don’t stop fighting now! You’re making it too easy!” His snarling voice echoes around me, I cry out, reaching for my bending, but the hands are tugging it away from me. 

Then all at once, silence. The hands retreat, I’m left floating in a blank numbness. 

The man’s laugh swells up, louder than before, and something pierces through my chest. I try to scream but I can’t make a sound, blood is filling my lungs. 

With a strangled cry, I jolt up out of bed, heart hammering against my still aching chest. I gulp down heavy, gasping breaths, forcing my body to shake away the phantom feelings of drowning in a pool of my own blood. Someone is standing by my bed, and I flinch, summoning a gust of air beneath my legs and back to propel me out of bed, flying across the room and landing squarely in a defensive position by the door. My breath still rips past my lips in desperate gasps, and I know I probably look like a crazy person, but it doesn’t matter. 

I’d died. In that dream, that crazy, horrifying man had not only drained my energy but killed me dead and I’d been helpless to stop him. It could have just been a nightmare, a stress dream triggered by the events of yesterday, but my gut is nagging at me, reminding me that it had been too vivid, too real to be just that. I’ve just had my first Avatar vision. 

“Woah! Y/N, uh—are you alright?” Havoc’s voice breaks through my panic, and I look up, wide-eyed, at the man standing across the room beside my bed. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s me, that was just a dream.” 

I ease out of my defensive crouch, just marginally, my fists still raised just in case. I blink at my surroundings, noting the dusky pink of the clouds outside my window. It’s dawn, and Havoc is here to escort me to breakfast. I’m in my dorm in Central Headquarters, in a strange new land. For the most part, I’m safe. 

I’m safe.

“S—sorry,” I stammer, finally letting my fists drop from my stance and instead pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes. I take a deep breath, urging my heart to slow its erratic thumping in my chest and reminding my lungs to take it easy. 

The man’s face flickers in front of my vision, and I flinch. 

“Fuck,” I whisper. That was a vision, not just a dream. My past lives are trying to warn me about something, probably that man. But what were all those hands? Why had it felt like I was being drained? It didn’t feel real, like something that could actually happen. But still, it did. It will, if I don’t do something to stop it, but I have no idea where I might start. 

“Y/N?” Havoc’s voice is closer now, but still a good distance away, like he’s approaching a spooked eel hound. I look up, blinking away the spots in my vision from pushing too hard. “You’re alright, it was just a dream,” he repeats. I sigh and shake my head. 

“No, it wasn’t. But you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I pull open the drawer in my nightstand, withdrawing a pen and pad of paper I’d seen earlier, and start scribbling as much as I can remember from the vision. I sketch out a rough picture of the man’s face, making sure to be as detailed as I can so I don’t forget. Once finished, I close the notepad and toss it back into the drawer, slamming it shut with airbending because I can. 

Havoc is still standing in the middle of the room, looking like he wants to say something but can’t find the words. I take pity on him and gesture for the door, saying, “Sorry. I’ll get ready, be out in ten?”

Havoc seems to struggle with something for a moment, glancing at me with a worried frown, but eventually he straightens and nods, exiting the dorm without another word. 

I go through the motions of showering, brushing my teeth, and getting dressed without really thinking, spending a few extra minutes under the stream of water to finish healing the wounds on my side and back. I was right, my back was just a couple large scrapes and bruises, nothing too deep, but painful nonetheless. They’d been easy enough to heal with all my free time yesterday, alone in the dorm. My abdomen was more difficult, especially around the stitches. I didn’t want to heal it all the way, or else I’d end up trying to pull thick black threads out of a seamless line of flesh. I’ll need to go back to the hospital to get them removed, which means I’ll need to deal with more fretting nurses wondering how I’m already mostly healed. 

Once dried off, I sigh, tossing an overly large button-up over my head and tying the bottom into a knot above my hips because I don’t have time to alter it. I throw on a pair of baggy sweatpants, tying the waistband as tight as it’ll go because they’re ridiculously big, and slipping into a pair of cheap sandals that were left for me by the door. 

When I step outside, Havoc is waiting with his arms crossed, leaning against the door across from mine. His door. I can’t believe they’ve put me across the hall from my watchdog, do they really not trust me that much?

“Ready?” He asks, glancing at my oversized clothes with a slight quirk of his brow. I nod wordlessly, and he straightens, leading me down the hall to the exit. I pay attention to every turn we make this time, adding the dorms to my mental catalogue of the base, and soon enough we’re standing in a spacious room filled wall-to-wall with tables, many of them already occupied by blue-clad military workers eating their breakfast. Havoc herds me over towards a line at one wall, where we each grab a tray and a set of silverware and start piling on food through the buffet line. 

The very thought of eating right now with the horrors of my vision still fresh in my mind makes me queasy, but I have a feeling that I’ll need my strength if I’m gonna make it through the day. I focus on getting as much protein on my plate as I can, then follow Havoc to a table where Mustang and Ed are already eating, Ed’s face buried in a book with about a dozen others stacked around him. 

“Good morning,” Mustang greets pleasantly, and Havoc salutes before sitting down beside him and tucking in, instantly starting up a conversation with the Brigadier-General. I end up sitting across from Ed, giving me a perfect view of the titles he’s reading. 

They’re all about alchemy, as far as I can tell, but most of them are more focused around elemental alchemy and physics. A sly smile curls across my lips, and I reach forward, shooting a puff of air at Ed’s face. He looks up and scowls murderously at me.

“You won’t find anything about me in those books,” I explain, picking at the mystery meat on my plate. “I don’t do alchemy, I do bending.”

“What’s the difference? Both are manipulating the elements around you to do what you want,” Ed growls, and I sigh. He clearly can’t get it past his thick skull that I can do something he doesn’t understand, and it’s pissing him off. 

“Bending doesn’t transmute anything. I can’t turn rock into steel or fire into ice. I can just… bend it. Move the elements around. In a way, your precious alchemy is worse than my bending, it’s got more potential for disaster. I just throw stuff around with my mind, and I’m limited to the four elements.” I hold Ed’s glare, unflinching, and he does the same for a few seconds, the chatter of the cafeteria fading away behind us. 

Then Ed grunts and slams his book shut, shoving it aside to make room for his heaping plate. “Doesn’t make it any less dangerous,” he mutters, then begins eating with an intense vigor. I roll my eyes but do the same, nodding to acknowledge Al and Hawkeye when they approach with their own trays of food. 

“Any luck?” Al asks his brother, sitting down beside him and picking at the stacks of books, pulling one out from the middle and leafing through it. 

“Nope,” I say for Ed, who sneers at me. “If you gave me a proper training ground, I could show you my moves. I’ll even spar with you, if you think you could handle my impossible abilities,” I say, drawing out the word ‘impossible’ with a smirk. Ed doesn’t seem to notice the jab, though, instead he sits up, eyes bright with determination. 

“Oh yeah? You wanna try to take the Fullmetal Alchemist in a sparring match?” His self-assured grin is enough to make my blood boil with competition, and I nod, cramming more of the food on my plate into my mouth before responding. 

“After breakfast? Unless you got somewhere to be,” I say mid-chew. Ed, also beginning to take his plate of food more seriously, nods and extends his metal arm across the table. 

“You’re on,” he says with a smirk. I take his hand and shake it firmly, listening to the way the metal joints click together when he moves. 

“Wait, stop, what are you two plotting?” Mustang asks, and we both swivel to look at his frustrated face. I shrug and drop Ed’s hand, digging back in to my almost empty plate. 

“Ed thinks he’s gonna win in a duel against the motherfucking Avatar,” I say nonchalantly as Mustang chokes on a sip of coffee. 

“No, no duels, no fighting. We’re spending all day today in the office, researching. We agreed on this, Fullmetal,” Mustang says firmly. I look between the two of them, eyebrows raised as they seem to engage in a silent battle across the table. 

After a moment, Ed slumps back with a shrug. “You heard the man, sounds like I’ll have to raincheck kicking your ass,” he sighs, then collects his empty tray and stands up, carrying it to the trash and dishes receptacle around the other side of the buffet. 

“What? Lame,” I groan. I’d really been looking forward to stretching my bending a bit, it’s hard to do earthbending in a casual way like I do with the other three elements, not unless I want to wreck the floors. I glance longingly over at Ed’s retreating form, thinking about how he might try to defend himself with his alchemy against my bending. 

Then, all of a sudden, he stops, turning slowly to look back at me. Mustang has already gone back to discussing the day’s agenda with Havoc and Hawkeye, so he doesn’t notice the meaningful look Ed sends my way, jerking his head towards the door. 

A slow, creeping smirk spreads across my face, and I nod minutely to inform him that I got the message. Under the table, I hold out five fingers, out of view from Havoc and Mustang but within perfect eyesight of Ed. He glances at my hand, smiles, and gives me a thumbs-up before turning away.

I go back to my food, slumping down as if I’m still disappointed, and start counting in my head. The minutes creep by slowly, but I manage to keep my leg from bouncing anxiously or fingers tapping against the wood of the table. 

Finally, after four minutes, I stand up, stretch, and sigh, stepping over the bench.

“Wait, where are you going?” Havoc asks, grabbing my hand before I can turn away. I make a show of rolling my eyes and laughing good-naturedly before gently pulling my hand out of his grip. 

“I just need to take a piss, relax. Did you want to escort me to the lady's room, too?” I ask teasingly, and the faintest dusting of pink splashes over his sculpted cheeks. He shakes his head, and I smile. “Great! It’s just over there, right?” I ask, intentionally pointing at a door across from the one Ed had indicated. I already know which way the bathroom is, I’d been paying attention to the layout of the building as best I can. If I play dumb and pretend I was going to head in a different direction, they’ll be less likely to suspect me of meeting up with Ed. It’ll give me an extra few minutes after they realize we’ve both been gone for an awfully long time. 

“No, out that way,” Havoc points at the door Ed had exited, and I feign an embarrassed laugh. 

“Oh, thanks!” I say, and turn around, walking at a leisurely pace, weaving through the tables like I’ve got all the time in the world just in case Havoc is still watching. 

When I open the door, Ed is waiting, a wicked grin on his face. He’s holding a silver pocket watch in one hand, and he tilts his chin up with an impressed glance.

“Right on time, way to go. What’d you tell Havoc?”

“I’m in the lady’s room, powdering my nose and re-applying my lipstick, just generally being a perfectly well-behaved hostage.” I snort. “We probably have ten, maybe fifteen minutes before they realize we’re gone.”

“And twenty before they find us,” Ed giggles— giggles! “C’mon, the faster we get there the sooner we spar!”

I laugh and follow him down a corridor at a brisk jog—fast enough that we look like we’ve got somewhere important to be but not so fast that people think something is amiss. I’m extra careful to catalogue where we go this time, knowing that wherever Ed has in mind could be a good place for when I want to stretch out my bending again. We wind around the base, eventually coming out the back to an open patch of land shrouded from the main building by a gentle cover of trees. It looks like a retired training ground for new recruits, with packed dirt that has since grown tufts of grass and cracked under the weight of the elements. It’s obviously been a while since anyone’s touched this place, and the trees surrounding the clearing are overgrown and bushy, creating a perfect cover in case anyone were to look out a window and see what we were doing. 

It’s perfect.

“Okay, standard sparring rules: if one of us gets the other on their back with potential to strike and incapacitate, that’s a point. First one to three wins,” Ed explains. “Since this is also a way for me to observe your bending, I’ll say anything goes. Let’s not be afraid to fight dirty.”

I grin and kick my sandals off, instantly feeling more at home with my bare feet pressed against the earth. “Sounds like a plan,” I singsong. “Begin on three?”

“One,” Ed says, clapping his hands together and creating a flash of blue lightning.

“Two,” I crouch down and spread my legs, flattening my feet against the earth and feeling for places where the dirt is denser and therefore better to knock down my opponent. Ed places his flesh hand against his prosthetic, and in an instant the blue light transforms the metal over his forearm into a wicked looking blade. So that’s what alchemy looks like. Basically just metalbending, it seems, but with extra flashy lightning. Oh well, I can bend both. 

“THREE!” we shout at the same time, and I yank up a pillar of rock under my feet in the same instant that he lunges for me, swinging that alchemically formed blade. It slashes through the rock I’d left behind, and as I fly through the air I shoot a puff of fire at him while his back is turned. 

He dodges it in time, leaping almost as though airbending out of the path of my flame. So he’s fleet footed, good to know. I land and spin, kicking a gust of air into his chest, sending him flying back just as he leaps forward at me again. I slam my foot into the ground and summon four chunks of dense earth around me, throwing them at him one at a time with wide, arcing punch motions. 

He dodges all but one, which he catches head on with his metal arm, and the rock crumbles around it, one shard cutting his cheek but not doing much of anything else. The metal must be extremely strong, probably reinforced with something extra to make it impervious to hard attacks. Attempting to disable his arm with metalbending or brute force probably won’t lead anywhere. 

Noticing that I’m temporarily distracted by his arm, he claps his hands together and presses them to the ground, and the earth beneath me lurches as if caught in a tidal wave. I stagger, and while I’m catching my balance he lunges, kicking his left foot out and sweeping mine out from under me. Normally my center is more grounded than that, but I notice with a flash of realization that his leg is also made of metal. It’s heavy, and packs a punch, so my back hits the ground before I’m able to react. I wince as the tender bruises on my shoulder blade shoot dull pain up my arm, but I’m more preoccupied by the metal blade hovering an inch above my throat. 

“One me, zero Avatar,” Ed smirks, but it’s more of a breathless grin, and I let him pull me to my feet. 

“You caught me off guard with that metal leg,” I admit with a laugh. “Got any more fake limbs I should know about?”

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Ed teases. 

“And here I thought you were an alchemist,” I roll my eyes, but smile anyways, ducking back down into position. 

The second time around, he tries for a more elusive approach, leaping around in my blind spots whenever I try to punch up some rock and blast him with them. He gets in a few good swipes, at one point his blade barely grazes my arm, but it’s enough to draw blood. I growl frustratedly, and slam my foot into the ground, focusing on the vibrations of the earth and closing my eyes in the Beifong method. 

There, I curl my arms up, throwing them out and then in towards my chest to summon a wall of earth right behind him. Still keeping my eyes closed, I feel for the way he darts away, and right in that moment I tilt my body sideways to send part of the wall crashing down around him. He staggers back, and in that instant I whirl around, kicking him with a gust of air squarely in the chest. He’s sent flying into the portion of wall I’ve left standing, and I lunge forward, shooting two pillars of fire to blast at either side of his head. 

“Boom. Tied.” I let my eyes flutter open again, holding my hand out for him to take. He does, grinning wildly.

“You did that all with your eyes closed?” he asks.

“Yep, I was using the vibrations of the earth to feel where you were rather than try to find you with my eyes,” I roll my shoulders back, stretching out the tense coils of energy still pent up in my muscles. “Ready for round three? Or do you need a break?”

“No rest for the wicked,” Ed blows a puff of singed hair out of his face and resumes his fighting stance, and I do the same. We count off to three, and begin our dance again. This time, I go more on the offensive, blasting walls of air and fire at him between volleys of clumpy rock, switching up my attacks as frequently and as randomly as I can to keep him from guessing my rhythm. When I’d felt the vibrations of the ground below earlier and focused on seeing without my eyes, I’d been able to sense a system of pipes not far beneath the ground, with a hose nozzle attached to the side of the building. If I could just focus closely enough to manipulate some of the water up and out of the pipes, I could throw in another element to my attacks. 

I send one last big blast of fire at his face, buying me enough distraction time to lurch forward and summon a sharp triangular earth trap around his metal foot, keeping him stationary. He tries to dive out of the way, but my trap trips him, and he barely catches himself in time before he faceplants into the dirt. 

That’s all the time I’m gonna get, maybe a few seconds while he does his little alchemy thing and crumbles the trap. I close my eyes and focus on the water rushing under my feet, guiding it up through the pipes and into the nozzle. 

Behind me, I hear a triumphant fwish as the spigot opens, dumping water out onto the ground beneath it. 

I don’t have any time to celebrate, though, as suddenly a blunt punch from Ed’s flesh hand is slamming into my injured side, tugging at my stitches. It’s healed enough that it won’t get re-opened by the blow, but it still hurts like a bitch, and I clench my teeth to keep from crying out. In my moment of weakness, he grabs my arm and spins me around, throwing me to the ground with my arm trapped behind me, his knee digging into the small of my back. 

“Gee, that’s two for me, and just one for the mighty Avatar! I thought you’d put up more of a fight,” he snarks, and I bark out a laugh as he helps me to my feet. 

“Put your money where your mouth is, goldilocks,” I rasp, my voice coming out rougher than I’d intended. That hit to my abdomen hurt. “Until you caught me distracted I was beating your ass.”

“Whatever,” Ed shrugs nonchalantly. “Is your side okay? I forgot you’re still recovering from that nasty gash.” There’s no sarcasm in his voice, so I smile and wave my hand dismissively. 

“It’s fine, I healed it up almost all the way yesterday. Just had to leave it a little open so the doc doesn’t have any trouble taking out the stitches later.”

“Gross,” Ed wrinkles his nose, and I laugh. 

“You’re tellin’ me. I fucking hate getting stitches. And hospitals in general,” I groan. 

“Same here,” Ed chuckles, “but at this point the feeling’s mutual. I'm a notoriously bad patient.” He smiles at me, open and genuine, and as we both descend into laughter I can’t believe there’d ever been a time where we’d been resentful of each other. 

“Y’know, yesterday Havoc was telling me that I reminded him of you, and I think I’m starting to see what he meant,” I say, curling my fists and listening to the rush of the water behind me. He still hasn’t noticed, so I’m banking on the element of surprise with our next fight. 

“Al said the same thing, actually,” Ed laughs. “You might be a freak of nature, but hey, so am I.” He holds up his metal arm for emphasis, and I can’t help the softness that slips into my smile. 

“Mutant bros?” I ask, holding up my fist. He bumps it with his flesh hand.

“Mutant bros,” he replies. We stand there, truced for a few moments, before his smile turns wicked, and he bends back down into a defensive crouch. “One more win and the spar’s mine,” he crows.

“Guess I’m gonna have to start actually trying, then,” I sigh, stretching my arms over my head in a leisurely curl. “One…”

“Two…”

“THREE!” 

We dart forward at the same time, his metal blade raised to slash at my legs, so I throw my arms back and summon a sharp wind that lifts me up over his head in a cartwheeling arc. He’s not trying to mortally wound me with that blade, it’s more of a deterrent to keep me dodging. If I want to keep from getting sliced, even if its small, I need to stay out of his way. 

While mid air, I reach out for the water rushing from the spout and yank it toward me, smirking as I watch Ed’s spine stiffen at the sudden wall of water roaring toward him. When I land, I focus on curving the water around his body, freezing his arms to his sides, but his metal blade takes only a few seconds to hack free from the ice. He drives the sharp end of the blade into the body of the ice and twists it, forming the thick white line of a crack with a low crunching noise. He breaks free of the trap just in time to roll out of the way of a fire attack, clapping his hands together and pressing them against the earth again. 

I anticipate the lurch of his pseudo-earthbending, sweeping my feet up over an air scooter and letting it carry me away from the destabilizing roll of the earth. Ed, however, slips down onto one of the waves, using its momentum to give him a boost in his jump as he leaps in my direction. I duck under the swing of his fist, but he lands a kick with his metal leg at my shin. 

“Fuck!” I growl, hopping away as he cackles devilishly, my shin throbbing. It’s not injured, but it hurts like hell. I’ve landed in the icy mud of my water attack, and I look down at the buzzing of my shin and the bite of the dirt mixed with water on my bare feet. 

That gives me an idea. 

This time, when Ed lunges for me, he doesn’t use his metal arm, and I notice how he keeps it by his side, as he has for most of our sparring. He doesn’t want to seriously hurt me, so he uses it as a sort of sheepdog, herding my moves around to meet his own. That means he’s been using his flesh arm for most of his bigger attacks, and flesh can feel it when you zap it. 

His fist flies by my head, and I lean out of the way, reaching my hands out in front of me, two fingers pressed together to conduct my lightning. Then, in an instant, I draw one hand in its path down my arm, to my stomach, and back up to intercept the punch flying past my ear. I clamp my hand around his arm and watch with glee as he sucks in a gasp, knees buckling. 

It wasn’t a hard shock, not enough to do any lasting damage, but definitely powerful enough to make him lurch back and curse, falling into the muddy ground. 

Combining my earth and waterbending, I jab my arms into an X shape, shooting thick slabs of mud over his body and freezing them in place, compressing the mud back into rock as I do so in order to create a layered material that’s as strong as rock and ice combined. 

He wriggles under the casing I’ve trapped him in, but can’t get free, so I put one foot on top of his chest and draw another tangle of thick white lightning to my fingers, letting it crackle threateningly in front of his face. 

“Tied again!” I singsong over the humming snap and fizz of the lightning in my hand, then angle my hand away from his head and up to the sky where I release all of the energy in a hundred foot long bolt of electricity so bright it leaves thick purple marks behind in my vision. 

Once all the electricity is out of my body, I sigh contentedly and melt the ice again, softening the rock back into mud that splats all over Ed’s body. “That could have been your face,” I say with a smirk, pointing two fingers at the sky with one hand, holding the other one out to help Ed to his feet. 

Ed opens his mouth to undoubtedly throw me a witty retort, but he’s cut off by another man’s voice coming from the building at our side. 

“FULLMETAL!” Mustang roars, and we both whirl to see him, Havoc, Al, and Hawkeye standing furious at the door leading out to our training ground. Mustang’s face is pinched with barely restrained rage, and Havoc’s baby blue eyes glare daggers at me and my torn, muddy clothes. I look down at myself, then over at Ed, noting our equally disheveled appearances. The gash from our first match still bleeds sluggishly from Ed’s cheek, and he’s clenching and unclenching the fist on the arm that I’d zapped. He’s also coated head to toe in mud, and some of the shorter locks of hair framing his face are curled and darkened from when I’d blasted fire at his face. 

I’m not much better, with the gash on my arm soaking into the long sleeve of my white button-up shirt, the baggy sweatpants torn and holey from when Ed had slashed at me and from several skids across the rough dirt to dodge him. My hair is also sticking up in staticky puffs from the charge that had jolted through my body, and I have no doubt that both of us are minorly battered and bruised pretty much everywhere else on our bodies. 

“C’mon, Mustang, couldn’t you have waited like, five more minutes? This next match is gonna be the tiebreaker where I kick her ass for good,” Ed whines. 

“Did you not just see the dope ass bolt of lightning I made?! And you still think you’re gonna win?” I squawk. 

“Oh, please. You think I’m scared of a little fireworks? If you didn’t—”

“Fullmetal!” Mustang barks again, cutting Ed’s response short. “Now is not the time for jokes. Do you realize the amount of danger you’ve just put yourself in?”

Ed blinks at the Brigadier-General, then at the ruined wasteland of our training ground, then back at Mustang. “Is that supposed to be a trick question?”

“No, it’s not—you know what, I’ve had enough of this. Havoc, cuff Paeonia and take her down to the cells—”

“ What?! ” Ed and I cry at the same time.

“—Fullmetal, you’re coming with me. I’m sending you and Alphonse on a mission somewhere far away while we finish this case.”

Havoc walks up to me, face grim as he grips my arms and spins me around, clamping a tight pair of handcuffs around my wrists behind my back. 

“ Seriously?! We were just sparring! It was all consensual, I promise,” I scoff. Havoc’s hands wrap around my arms, roughly guiding me back inside.

“Yeah, bastard, this was no worse than what me and Al do. ‘Sides, I’ve gathered essential intel into Y/N's powers. Conclusion: they’re rad as hell.”

“Yes, I’ve gathered the same about Ed’s alchemy,” I pipe over my shoulder, craning my neck to wink back at Ed, who gives me a thumbs-up. 

“You willingly engaged in a combat scenario with a dangerous individual, essentially giving her your full permission to harm, maim, or even kill you, and you did it without any supervision or notifying one of us of your whereabouts. You could have been lying here, dead in the mud, for hours while she was busy escaping,” Mustang seethes. 

“To be fair, we did tell you where we were going. You just told us not to,” I add, and Mustang turns and gives me a murderous glare. Havoc’s hands tighten around my arms, and I scowl as the gash on my bicep stings under his grip. 

“Yeah, and she didn’t maim or kill me, even though she had every opportunity to do so. You shoulda seen some of her attacks, Mustang, they were insane! If anything, this proves that she’s safe and can be trusted! We played a little dirty, but in the end we always helped each other back up,” Ed explains. I shoot him a grateful smile before Havoc ushers me inside with a none too gentle shove. 

“Havoc, keep her cuffed, even when she’s behind bars. She shouldn’t be able to do much without her arms,” Mustang orders, and Havoc lets out a gruff ‘sir,’ as an affirmative when we pass by.

“Break me out of Baby Jail, Mutant bro! Avenge me!” I cry over my shoulder, and behind me I hear Al cover his mouth to hide his giggle. The arguing conversation between Ed and Mustang fades out behind us as Havoc manhandles me down the corridor and into a room that’s just solid stone stairs leading down to a dark underground basement or bunker of some kind. 

Havoc guides me down the dank passageway, still holding my arms at an awkward angle, and I realize that it’s because my gravity is tilted forward, meaning that if he were to let go (or I were to try to get away) I’d just eat shit falling down the endless concrete stairs. 

I groan. This is so not inspiring a protective Avatar attitude from me towards this world. If all they’re gonna do is make me sit inside twiddling my thumbs, what’s the use?

I could escape at any moment, I’m not exaggerating when I say my earthbending is among the best in the world. Because it was my home element and I’d been born with super jacked-out bending abilities due to me being the Avatar and everything, I’d always excelled in my training. And since my family came from a massive line of earthbending specialists, I’d received some of the most intensive training known to the element. I wouldn’t need my arms to turn this concrete to sand around Havoc, eating him up before hardening it again around his body and trapping him, but it also wouldn’t help establishing trust. As much as I want to just ditch this ungrateful city and find someplace that actually wants the Avatar’s help, I know that the Spirits sent me here for a reason. 

Also, I really don’t want to know how it would feel to tumble down who knows how many flights of thick concrete stairs. 

We finally get to the bottom, where there are rows and rows of cells lit by gross fluorescent light. The ceiling is high, and through thin vents I can see the morning sunlight peeking down into the cells in slotted lines of light, interrupted by the occasional blade of green grass indicating that those little windows about ten feet above my head are at ground level. 

So maybe there weren’t as many stairs as I thought, so what? It still felt like a long ass time, especially being precariously balanced at the hands of a man who, moments ago, was glaring at me like he wished he’d never had the displeasure of meeting me. 

Though, he wouldn’t have dropped me. Havoc doesn’t have any malice for me, he’s a good, honorable guy. Maybe that’s why he’d been so angry with me. Good, honorable people don’t disobey direct orders and rip up the ground hurling rocks at other good people. 

He shoves me into an empty cell, closing and locking the door behind me before turning to a few guards by the block and giving them instructions, explaining that I’m a highly dangerous individual, and that they shouldn’t listen to my requests no matter what, and blah, blah, blah. I plop down on the floor right in front of the bars with my back to the wall, staring resolutely up at the back of Havoc’s blond head. 

Once he’s done briefing my babysitters, he turns back to me, holding my gaze with a disappointed droop in those heartbreakingly blue eyes. He doesn’t say anything, so I do.

“You know I shouldn’t be here, Havoc,” I insist. He sighs and drops my gaze, turning to walk back out the way we’d come. I lean forward and rest my forehead on the bars, watching him go, wondering if I’ve just made an irrevocable mistake. 

His footsteps retreat up the stairs, heavy and firm, and when the door slams shut behind him, it carries a note of finality that oozes painful and thick in my stomach. 

I sigh and tilt my gaze up at the guards, who are peering at me curiously. I’m probably quite the sight, an unassuming young woman in scratched-up clothes, bleeding from the arm and, judging by the way my cheek is throbbing, bruised in all sorts of pathetic ways. And yet they’ve just been told that I’m incredibly dangerous, and that it’s imperative that they remain on high alert while guarding me.

“Well,” I sigh, and my voice echoes sweetly throughout the cell. “Which one of you boys wants a blowjob in exchange for those keys on your belt?”

The guard on the left chokes around the lip of the flask he’d been drinking from. 

The hours slip by slowly and uneventfully, the guards aren’t too keen on chatting beyond than the occasional ‘shut up’ or ‘no talking.’ I count the minutes by the movement of the sun through the slants of the vents, and when I’m pretty sure it’s close to 5pm, the time that most people would be getting out of work, and Ed still hasn’t come to break me out (I wasn’t really expecting him to, but still, it might’ve been nice), I begin phase one of my plan. 

“Look, boys. It’s really been a pleasure, and I mean that!” I crow.

One of the guards grunts and raises an eyebrow in question, and I laugh arily, shrugging one shoulder.

“Oh, you know. I just mean that, after I escape, I really think I’m gonna remember you two. The conversations we’ve had, the secrets we’ve shared,” I sigh a dreamy sigh. “We’re like, bonded now.”

“You’re not escaping, kid,” one guard snorts. I bite my lip and gaze leisurely around my cell, as if soaking in the sweet sight one last time.  

“Oh, but I think I am!” I hum, then roll back onto my hands, using my airbending to help me lurch to my feet. If the guards feel threatened by a little puff of wind, they don’t show it, only looking curiously down at me while, behind my back, I crumple my hand into a fist, snapping the chain that holds my cuffs together and whistling to cover up the faint sound. “I’ve stuck around here long enough to keep you people all content and happy for a little while, but I’m getting awful tired of pretending just to protect your fragile egos. So, this is my polite but firm goodbye. ” 

On goodbye, I slam my foot down and tilt my body to the side, keeping my hands bound behind my back because if these guys see that I can metalbend without my arms they’ll probably wet themselves. I’m immature enough to admit it, I think that would be funny as hell. 

Following the motion of my shoulder, the metal bars bend and snap out of place, clattering to the floor. Now the guards are taking me seriously, and one reaches down to their hip for something, probably some sort of weapon, so I jerk my shoulders forward, and a few of the metal bars fly forward, twisting around the guards’ bodies. 

“Phew,” I whistle, pulling my hands out from behind my back and showing off my snapped cuffs. “Was that cool or what, guys?!” I squeal, turning back to my now ruined cell. One of them opens their mouth to shout, but I reach forward and snatch their dumb folded handkerchiefs out of their pockets and cram them into their mouths, metalbending another rod around their heads to keep the gags in place. 

“Hey now, no talking, right? I think that was the rule. Man, I sure am gonna miss that cell. It was really cozy, yknow? Here, maybe you guys should give it a try.” I curl my hands into fists, levelling one foot on the ground in front of the other, and lean from one leg to the other in a classic earth shift. A section of the wall behind the guards sweeps forward, shoving them into the cell and closing the gap I’d made with my metalbending. 

“See, isn’t that nice? Tell you what, you guys sit here and chill, maybe have some more bonding moments, y’know, paint each others’ nails and such. I’ve got some stuff I need to upstairs, so I’m gonna go do that, but don’t let me get in the way of your fun! Just pretend I’m still here, chatting your ear off and just generally being a nuisance,” I trill, bending down to pick up the remaining severed cell bars and hefting them over my shoulder. I make to exit, but then stop mid-stride, struck with a terrible, wonderful idea. 

“Hey, wait! You don’t need to pretend, I can just make an extra me! Like this,” I giggle, slamming my foot onto the ground and lifting my arm up, pushing a slab of rock up from the ground beside the guards. Then I close my eyes, focusing on the form of the rock, and throw my hand back down, and when I open my eyes again, a perfect statue of me sits cross-legged, smirking at the guards with her tongue stuck out and her middle fingers raised, complete with broken handcuff links on each wrist. 

“Oh, isn’t she beautiful,” I sigh, then cackle, skipping the rest of the way up the stairs. “Betcha wish you went for the blowjob offer now!” I singsong down the echoey stairwell, grinning at the sweet sight of the wooden door above me.  

Phase one complete. 

Phase two will be a bit more challenging, since I’m banking on the fact that most of the military personnel are clock punchers who want to get home early, while Mustang and his men are more diligent workers, finishing the work that needs to get done until it’s all the way done, even if that makes them a little late to get back home. 

The corridor leading out from the Baby Jail is empty, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the base is. I keep my guard up high, moving as swiftly and as stealthily as I can while carrying seven metal rods longer than I am tall. If worst comes to worst, I can easily metalbend the cuffs into bracelets and the rods into a chair or something and pretend I’m working construction somewhere, but for my plan to work best I’ll want to keep the raw materials in their original state. It’ll have more impact like that. 

I creep towards a hallway where a few ambling military people are chattering, likely just finished with work and socializing for a bit before heading back home. After a few moments, I decide they won’t be leaving anytime soon, and tuck the cuffs under my sleeves, hefting the rods higher onto my shoulder and tilting my chin up with a confident, level glare. 

I walk purposefully out into the corridor, and a few eyes turn my way, but I nod curtly at them as if to say nothing to see here, just a construction worker workin’ her construction. As you were, and fortunately most of my blue-suited spectators look away after that. A few keep their eyes on me even as I round the corner, but they aren’t stopping me or asking for identification, so I’ll take what I can get. 

Around the next corner are less military people, but military nonetheless, so I maintain the act until I finally slip into the door I think I remember Havoc introducing as his unit’s office when he’d first brought me to the dorms from the hospital. 

Phase two complete.

I close the door behind me as quietly as I can, but there’s no need. The people inside have already seen me. 

“Y/N?!” Havoc squawks, and I wince, turning slowly on my heel. He and another man I haven’t seen before with black hair and glasses gawk at me, Havoc slack-jawed in disbelief and the bespectacled man curiously, taking in the broken cuffs on my wrists and the bars on my shoulder.

“Hey! Havoc, just the man I wanted to see. Is Mustang in? I need to talk to him,” I say as lightly as I can, pattering across the room to Mustang’s office. 

“Y-you’re supposed to be—”

“In Baby Jail,” I wince. “I know, but something came up so I had to raincheck that whole imprisonment thing,” I drawl with sarcastic regret honeying my voice. “Yo, Mustang! You got a minute?” I kick the doors open, ignoring Havoc’s heavy footsteps as he chases behind me. 

Mustang looks up from his desk, eyes wide, and by his side Hawkeye stands poised, aiming something black and metallic at my head. Lounging on a couch by the fireplace is Ed, who, upon seeing me, dissolves into a fit of giggles. 

“Miss Paeonia—!” Mustang gasps, but I interrupt him, throwing the bars onto the floor with a loud clang. 

“Just Y/N is fine,” I snap. “I came here to show you that I escaped, and I did it without breaking a sweat, and I’ll do it a thousand times over if that’s the way you want this to go. I’ll keep breaking out, I’ll keep showing up at your office, I’ll keep doing this, ” I reach my hand out and clench my fist, and one of the metal bars crumples into a perfect sphere of steel. I turn my fist over and spread my fingers out again, splitting the sphere into three, and guide them over to my hands, where I begin to juggle the heavy metal, all while maintaining eye contact with Mustang in his chair. 

“And I’ll keep proving to you that I’m on your side, even if you keep ignoring me.” I clap my fists together, and the metal spheres rejoin into one big ball before elongating back into the bent shape of the broken prison bar it was before. Or, as best as I can remember it looking. It falls back into the pile, clamoring against the others. 

“I’m trying to help you people, because I think that’s the right thing to do, and I'll continue to help you even if you don’t want me to. But I really think that it would be easiest for all of us if you’d just stop treating me like a fucking child and start recognizing that I’m an incredibly valuable asset to you and your team. Like, I’m not even asking for anything in return, here! It’s my duty as the Avatar to use my powers to help other people, so that’s why I’m doing it! How often do you get a guy in here promising their loyalty to you for no reason other than that they genuinely want to help? I mean, come on! ” I step back, because I’m getting dangerously close to crying out of frustration, and I’m not trying to get anyone’s pity. I want their trust. 

“Please,” I breathe, because I’m not too proud to beg. “Just let me help you.”

There’s a tense silence as Mustang glares at me thoughtfully, and Hawkeye lowers the thing she’d been pointing at my head through my whole speech. Even Ed has gone still, watching with bated breath as I meet Mustang’s gaze, head held high. 

Finally, Mustang sighs and pulls a piece of paper off from a stack beside his pen, scanning the document while he speaks. 

“You can start by fixing those,” he points to the pile of metal rods at the foot of his desk. “Havoc will escort you back to your dorm once you’re done. We’ll discuss the details of your position in our unit tomorrow morning. Until then, all previous escort rules apply.”

I let out the sharp breath I’d been holding, and my face cracks into a relieved smile. 

“Sir, yes sir!” I bark through a giggle, bending down to scoop up the metal rods and hefting them back up over my shoulder. “Thank you! I won’t let you down!” I squeal, skipping out the door and very nearly decking Havoc in the chest with the bars when I swing around. 

“See? I told you,” Ed says smugly, and the last thing I hear before Havoc closes the door behind us is Mustang’s exasperated groan. 

Phase three complete!

We march down the halls in silence, Havoc a steady presence by my side. I can tell there’s something he wants to say, but until he decides to say it himself, I'm not gonna ask. We pass the groups of soldiers from earlier, and I toss a friendly nod their way, which several return, though not without any confusion. 

When we get back to the door leading down the concrete stairs, I stomp my foot and slide my weight forward, flattening half the stairs into a slide, because I can’t help myself. Giggling, I crouch on the slope and punch the air behind me with the hand that’s not holding the cell bars. I shoot forward, skiing barefoot down the endless stairs and skipping to a halt at the bottom. 

“Oh boooys!” I say in a giddy drawl. “I’m baaack! Didja miss me?”

Havoc, opting to take the safer yet slower route of the stairs, stomps down after me, catching up just as I make it to my cell. He looks in at the mess of rock and bent cell bars, a faint gasp darting from his lips before descending into a slow, easy chuckle. I assume he’s seen the statue. Good, I had to work really fuckin’ hard on that technique before I’d mastered it, and there’s never any good reason to use it. 

“Sorry about earlier, but like I said, places to be,” I explain, grunting a little as I force the slabs of rock back into place at the wall. There are a few scratches on the concrete, and one look at the matching scuffs on the bars holding the guards captive tells me they must’ve tried to break through my wall for a good long while before realizing it was futile and giving up. Good men, at least they didn’t just roll over and die. 

I set down my bundle of cell bars on the ground beside the gap and step inside, unbending the guards’ restraints and setting them down in my pile. I hold my hands out to help them up, but they ignore me, shooting me with a deadly glare as they spit out their handkerchiefs and tuck them back into their breast pockets. 

“Uh, is it any consolation if I say it was nothing personal?” I ask awkwardly. They ignore me, and one turns to Havoc with a disbelieving glare.

“Sorry, guys. It was all a misunderstanding. My unit and I accept full responsibility for this incident,” Havoc apologizes smoothly, ducking his head as the two guards shoulder past him, adjusting their uniforms and grumbling amongst each other. 

I’ll have time to be guilty about that later, for now I’ve got some prison bars to repair. I go one at a time, jamming each bar into the place I think they fit best based on the jagged breakage around the edges. Once I ascertain where each bar should probably go, I focus on mending the metal as smoothly as I can manage, feeling with the Beifong method to make sure there’s no weak points that could be exploited by a real bad guy. 

While I’m metalbending, Havoc shifts uncomfortably behind me. I get through repairing two whole bars before he finally spits it out. 

“Y/N, I’m—I’m sorry,” he murmurs. I stop, turning to look up at his face. He’s glaring determinedly at me, like he’s forcing himself not to look away, but his mouth is twisted into an uncomfortable frown, his spine is rigid. “I understand now that you’ve just been trying to help, even though we’ve done nothing to deserve that. These past few days, you’ve been whisked away into unfamiliar territory, stuck in an explosion, thrown into jail, and it’s all been because of our reluctance to trust you. It was… inconsiderate of me to forget how hard this must’ve been for you. I’m sorry.”

“Aw, don’t worry about it,” I smile warmly, shrugging and going back to my work. “I mean, if it were me, I’d probably have done the same thing. I’m just glad it’s over now, and we can start focusing on taking down actual bad guys.”

“Yes, but it was still my failure of empathy that—”

“No, shh. It’s okay, I’m over it. No hard feelings,” I interject, pointing my finger at him and pressing my lips into a firm line. “And, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for scaring you by sparring with Ed before you were ready to trust me. That was irresponsible, even if it was the most fun I’ve had in… Spirits, in years!” I huff out a little self-deprecating laugh. “I wonder if he’d want to do it again.”

“I’m sure he would jump at the opportunity,” Havoc chuckles. Then, after a moment, huffs, “and I wasn’t scared. Just… worried.”

I laugh, and it interrupts my metalbending, causing a slight crumple in the steel right by my head. “Alright, sure. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“Thanks,” he grunts. I finish mending the bars, and by the time I’m done, my arms are starting to feel the strain of all the bending I’d done that day, from sparring with Ed to escaping Baby Jail to lugging those fucking bars across the base twice. The ghoulish overkill had totally had its desired effect, but still. Did I need to take seven? One or two would’ve done the trick just fine, I think. 

“All set?” Havoc asks, peering curiously at the now seamlessly mended jail cell.

“Mmmh,” I hum, scrubbing at my eyes. It can’t be any later than 6pm, but I’m still exhausted. Breakfast had been the last time I’d eaten, so I’ve been pretty much running on empty since the early afternoon. I scan the floor around me, making sure there aren't any stray chips of concrete or steel, and just as I’m turning around to shuffle back to the staircase, Havoc reaches out and takes my wrist in his hand. 

“Wait, sorry, let me take those cuffs off,” he digs around in his pocket for the key, but I step back, shaking my head.

“No, I think I’ll keep them. They make a good fashion statement.” I lift my arms in front of my face and curl my hands into fists, pumping them up and down in the air once to smooth the broken handcuffs out into shiny silver bracers melted perfectly around my skin. 

Havoc gives me a curious look, but doesn’t say anything else, watching as I try not to stumble on my way back to the stairs, stomping on the ground beside my slide to turn it back. Little puffs of airbending help me up the steps, but I really can’t do much more than the barest hints of extra bending or else I’ll probably collapse and tumble to my rocky death. 

We walk side-by-side back to the dorms, now that there’s no need for Havoc to show me where to go, and by the time we finally roll up to our rooms my body feels like it’s made of lead. I fumble for the key under my shirt and stick it in the lock, the small motion of turning it and opening the door seeming to zap up all of my remaining strength. 

“Well, goodnight Havoc, I guess I’ll see you at dawn,” I yawn.

“Yeah, goodnight,” Havoc replies, his voice a little wary. “Are you okay?” he asks before I can close the door behind me. 

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Just tired,” I send him a weak smile, but the pinch in his brow doesn’t lessen. I don’t really have the energy to try any harder to make him feel better, so I just give him a thumbs-up as I close the door.

I stumble back to my bed and flop down, knowing I should probably change out of my muddy clothes and dress the cut on my arm, but exhaustion pulls at my muscles, and before I know it I’m sinking deeper and deeper into sleep. 

What feels like mere moments later, I’m jolting awake, panting and gasping to fill the choking sensation in my chest and lungs. I’d had the same vision again, with the man’s leering face and all those grabby hands yanking me back. And then the sharp, stabbing pain in my chest, blood pooling in my lungs and throat, leaving me dying on the cold floor. 

The dorm is dark, the window by my bed showing a rich blue sky just barely beginning to light from the blackness of night. I’ve probably got an hour or two until sunrise, I should probably go back to sleep, but my heart is thrumming too fast, my legs shaking with nervous energy. Sleep won’t be coming back to me until tonight. 

I rub my eyes, reaching blindly for the switch on the reading lamp on my nightstand, and breathe a little sigh of relief when my cool blue room is lit up with the lamp’s friendly yellow warmth. I reach into the drawer and pull out the pad of paper, peering warily at the man’s snarling face. I add a few more lines, sharpening his jaw and squashing his nose some more now that I’ve had a second look. He’s not an attractive dude, with tiny, beady eyes and thin lips curled into a terrible sneer. His hair is wispy and grey, receding back from his forehead leaving a scraggly bald top with frizzy sides framing large, lumpy ears. He doesn’t look old or frail, despite the unfortunate state of his hair, maybe in his mid-fifties. He doesn’t look like anyone I recognize, and I can’t really tell if that’s a good thing. 

I sigh and stand up, ignoring the way my bruised body whines for me to lay back down and rest. I could definitely use a shower, so I strip off my tattered clothes from yesterday and duck under the water, which I’ve turned as hot as I can stand. 

The hot stream loosens the tightness in my muscles, and I sigh as I run idle healing hands over the scrapes and bruises that stand out the most. I take a glance down at the stitched up line across my abdomen and huff a frustrated breath. I’d meant to go to the hospital yesterday to get the stitches removed, but instead I’d been thrown in the military’s Baby Jail all day. 

I’m getting tired of the constant throb of pain from that gash, so I decide with a wince that I’ll just need to take care of it myself. 

Once I’m clean, I shut off the water and search through the dorm for tweezers or little surgical scissors. Of course, I don’t find anything remotely that convenient, but inside the nightstand drawer I stumble across a few paperclips that I metalbend into a suitably tweezer-shaped instrument. I toss on a pair of comfy sweats that drag across the floor and sag low on my hips until I tie the waistband tight, and squeeze into one of the sports bras left for me in a pile of other undergarments. The bra is more of a tight-fitting cropped tank top, but it does the job alright, and leaves my midriff exposed so I can see what I’m doing. 

I sigh, shaking the anxious shakes out of my hands as I gather a bowl of water, a washcloth, and my makeshift tweezers, angling the reading lamp to shine right on the gruesome black line of sutures on my side. 

Deep breath in, deep breath out. 

I pick at one of the knots, pulling the thread out a bit so the sharp end of my tweezers can slice through the thread, then, with a sharp intake of air, I pull the first stitch out from under my skin. 

It stings, a faint pulling sensation more than anything, but still makes me a little queasy. Probably doesn’t help that I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.

I swallow back my nausea, dropping the severed piece of thread onto the washcloth, then move on to the next one. 

It takes a lot longer than I was hoping for, each knot needs to be cut in just the right way to keep it from tangling as it slips through my skin. After the first few stitches, I manage to disassociate myself from the experience, going into autopilot as I tug, snip, and pull over and over and over again. 

I’m just getting down to the last third of the stitches when a loud knock sounds at the door. 

“Y/N? It’s Havoc, time to get up,” his voice is muffled behind the door. I curse, setting my tweezers aside and standing up slowly, making sure not to disturb the wound too much just in case it’s not ready to be moved around yet. 

I open the door just a peek, angling my body away from the light flooding in from the hallway. 

“Hey, Havoc. I’ll be out in a minute?” I ask, and I don’t manage to stifle a wince as my hand brushes against the still raw gash.

“Um… yeah, is everything alright in there? You look a little pale,” Havoc tilts his head, peering into my room, and I nod, opening the door a little more, still hiding my gash out of sight. 

“Yeah, it’s cool! Don’t worry about—”

“Wait, what’s that?” He points over my head, and I grimace, following the line of his hand over to the bloody washcloth on my nightstand, severed black threads scattered around the surface. 

“Oh, y'know… just… taking out my stitches,” I shrug as nonchalantly as I can manage, opening the door the rest of the way to let Havoc in. No use trying to hide it anymore, he’s already seen the worst of it. 

“You were supposed to wait for the doctor to do it! Properly, with the proper tools!” Havoc wrinkles his nose at my paperclip tweezers, then looks back at me with an incredulous glare. 

“No, I can heal this thing pretty much all the way up by myself. I just needed to take the stitches out so I didn’t mend my skin over them. This was the fastest way,” I protest, plopping gently down in front of my station and grabbing the tweezers from his hands. “I’ll be done in like, two minutes.”

I go back to where I left off, slipping one end of the tweezers under the knot, and Havoc breathes a sharp wince above me. 

“No, no, stop. You’re doing it wrong, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” He takes the tweezers out of my hands and before I can react, he’s kneeling on the ground in front of my bed, gently and methodically pulling at each stitch with the confidence of someone who has done this a hundred times before. 

His right hand picks at each knot with the tweezers, his left splayed across the bare skin of my waist, thumb sometimes skimming forward to push around the wound a bit, checking for infection or inflammation. It makes me shiver, not just because I’m freaked out by the wound. 

Eventually he gets to the last knot, and when he’s finished he inspects the little punctures in my skin one last time before pulling away, nodding with satisfaction at a job well done. 

“There. You can do your healing thing now, it’s not infected,” he instructs, and all I can manage to do is nod, reaching out for the water and placing it over my side, pushing my healing energy to make it glow. 

“Thanks,” I smile up at him, and he grins back, shrugging to tell me it was no problem.

“I’ll clean this stuff up,” he reaches for the washcloth dotted with blood, and I shake my head.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to! It’s okay, I can take care of it once I’m done here, it just needs a few more passes with my healing water.” He ignores me, gathering the materials and walking them to the bin and rinsing the blood from the washcloth at the kitchen sink. 

“Don’t worry about it, I’m in the military. I’m used to this stuff,” Havoc says easily, inspecting my tweezers while he lets the water run over the washcloth. “Where’d you get this contraption?”

“Hm? Oh, that. I made it out of two paperclips I found. You can just throw it away,” I shrug. 

“Christ,” Havoc mutters, and I see an incredulous smile quirking his lips. I let the tug of a matching grin draw my lips into a soft curve, looking idly around my room while my healing water tingles over my side. After a few moments, I check and see the wound has closed, now just a tender pink scar curving across my abdomen.

I breathe a sigh of relief, dropping the water back into the bowl and carrying it over to the sink beside Havoc. I dump out the water and watch it swirl down the drain, a faint bloody pink. By my side, Havoc turns, taking in the sight of my newly healed gash. He whistles lowly, and I look up, quirking a brow in confusion. 

“That’s crazy, the whole healing thing,” he wrings out the now clean washcloth, draping it over the faucet to dry. I reach out and waterbend the water out of it instead, dropping it into the sink and folding the washcloth on the counter, and he chuckles. 

“Yeah, really comes in handy,” I reply. “You got any scrapes you need healing? I can do a demo.”

“You can do it on other people, too?” Havoc sputters. I patter over to a pair of sandals by my bed, slipping into them and tightening the straps as best I can. I’d left the ones that fit best in the training clearing yesterday, I’ll need to go pick them up sometime if Mustang gives me a minute of free time. 

“Uh, yeah, ” I roll my eyes. “It's actually easier to heal other people. When I’m healing myself, I’m using my own healing energy, but that energy is also being taken away from naturally mending the injury. It takes longer and can be more exhausting to self-heal.”

“I… think I’m following,” Havoc says thoughtfully. Then his shoulders slump and he brings a hand to his head, rubbing his temples. “But that’s just another reason the military might try to weaponize you, be careful with who you tell about that.”

A realization strikes me, sitting cold and heavy like a stone in my stomach. I reach for the pad of paper, tearing out the page with all my scribbles from my visions, including the face of the creepy old man. 

“Hey, Havoc? Does this guy look familiar at all?” I hold the paper up, and Havoc peers at it for a second, eyes narrowing in thought. 

“No, I don’t recognize him,” he shakes his head apologetically. “Sorry, why?”

I bite my lip. “Remember when I woke up yesterday morning spooked as hell and said you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what happened?”

“I do,” Havoc nods. I puff out a heavy breath, looking down at the paper and wondering how the best way to explain a vision would be.

“Well, basically, since I’m the Avatar, I sometimes get these… visions. They’re warnings from my past lives, usually about like, world-threatening danger coming in the future. It’s so I’ll know what to expect, and maybe be able to stop it before anything even happens.” I point to the man’s face, watching Havoc’s for any signs of skepticism, but he looks pretty open to what I’m saying. It’s a miracle, considering everything else I’ve had to do to convince these people I’m not a mirage.

“I think this dude might be some sort of military guy who’s after my Spirit. Or, he will be, in the future.” I drop the paper, shivering at the remembered sensations of dying in that strange, empty plane of existence filled with all those hands. 

“Not gonna lie, that does sound kinda far-fetched,” Havoc admits, and I slump. “But, so has everything else you’ve done. I think we’d be willing to suspend our disbelief if you’re really serious about it.”

“I am,” I nod grimly, pocketing my drawing as Havoc goes to open the door and steps outside. 

“Mustang has lots of connections throughout the military, he’d be more likely to know who that is if you show him,” Havoc suggests.

“Okay,” I reply, following him down the quiet halls. 

By the time we sit down at the same table as yesterday, most of the gang is already there, including the tall man with glasses that was in the office yesterday after my prison break. 

“Y/N, Havoc, you’re here,” Mustang nods at us, and I nod back, plopping across from Ed again and kicking his flesh leg under the table before tucking greedily into my heaping plate. 

“Yeah, sorry for the delay,” I apologize through a smirk at Ed’s attempt to kick me back, which he misses. 

“Y/N thought it would be a good idea to take out her own stitches, sir,” Havoc sighs, sitting down next to me. I gasp and scowl at him, whispering ‘traitor,’ as Mustang groans. Ed reaches over the table and gives me a fist-bump.

“Looks like she’s already a part of the team,” the man with the glasses says with a fond smile. He sticks his hand out to me, and I shake it while he introduces himself. “Maes Hughes. I work in Intelligence, so I’m not an official part of the Mustang unit, but this old man would be dead without me so he lets me stick around.”

Mustang sighs deeply, and Ed snickers, landing a kick on my shin with his metal foot. I yelp, then scowl at him, waterbending some of the coffee in his mug to splash in his face. 

“Did she just…?” Hughes looks between Ed’s cursing coffee-stained face and my hand, poised in a flicking motion.

“Yeah, that’s what I was telling you about,” Mustang nods.

“Amazing,” Hughes breathes. “She gonna be taking the exam?”

“I’m still deliberating,” Mustang replies. I interrupt him, reaching around Havoc’s back to poke at his shoulder. 

“Hey, Mustang, I got a question for you,” I fish the folded up paper from my pocket and pass it to him, and he takes it, setting his coffee mug down to unfold it and peer curiously at the contents. “Do you recognize that face? Maybe an officer or one of your alchemists?”

Mustang’s brow crumples with thought, examining the rough strokes of my drawing. I hold my breath. “He’s familiar, I definitely know him from somewhere, but I can’t place it,” he replies, tapping his chin. Hughes reaches across the table to snatch the paper out of his hands, scanning the page. 

“Let me see… yeah, he’s not an officer, I haven’t seen his face anywhere important, but I think I recognize him,” Hughes says. I purse my lips. So it was a vision, which means that if I want to keep from bleeding out in a strange plane of existence, I’ll need to figure out who he is and stop him before he gets me. Not a very comforting thought.

“Gimme that,” Ed takes the paper from Hughes, scowling at the drawing. “Yeah, I know this guy, he was in the news a couple years ago, I think. He’s an alchemist, but I can’t remember why he got front page,” Ed explains. I feel my face go pale, and I take the drawing from him, hastily folding it back up and cramming it into my pocket. “What happened, how do you know him?” 

“I… it’s hard to explain,” I sigh, picking at a piece of bread on my plate. 

“She says she saw him in a vision, something to do with her Avatar powers,” Havoc supplies, and I sink lower in my seat, avoiding everyones’ gazes. Havoc might’ve been willing to listen, but that doesn’t mean the others will. 

“What do you mean, ‘vision?’ What did you see?” Ed asks, disbelief already coloring his voice. I sigh, rubbing my temples.

“Alright, I know you probably won’t believe me, but basically, whenever there's a big danger coming that I don’t see yet, I’ll get these visions. Sometimes they happen when I’m awake, just little flashes of memories from my past lives or pictures of the future. Sometimes, they come to me in dreams but like, super vivid. Last night, and the night before, I had a vision like that, and this guy was the star of the show,” I explain, scanning the faces of the people sitting around me. To my surprise, they mostly just look like they’re curious to hear more, rather than distrustful of the crazy things I’m saying.

“So, what, you saw that guy in a dream and you think it means he’s trying to destroy the world or something?” Ed asks. I shake my head. 

“No, it wasn’t just him. I was kind of… floating? I don’t know, it was in some weird different dimension, I couldn’t feel any earth around me. It was just blank white space, then all of a sudden I saw that man, laughing at me and telling me to… show him my power? And there were these things, thousands of hands reaching out and yanking me deeper into someplace, every time I tried to bend and get away, it just felt like they were sucking it up, until I was totally empty. Then I heard the man laugh again, and this terrible pain ripped through my chest, like I was being eaten alive from the inside out, and I woke up.” I rub a hand against my chest, soothing the phantom pains from my memory. As I continued to speak, Ed and Al’s faces had grown more and more horrified, until they were both pale as a sheet. 

“Brother, that sounds like—”

“The Gate,” Ed cuts his brother off, face tight. 

“The what?” I repeat, tilting my head at the two shellshocked siblings. 

“The Gate, it’s basically an all-powerful structure set on a separate plane of existence. It’s what makes alchemy possible, and it controls equivalent exchange, at any cost,” Al explains. “It’s not a comfortable place for mortals to visit.”

“Wait, so you have a different dimension, connected to your own, that makes sure to maintain and restore balance to the world, even if that means hurting innocent people?” I clarify, and when they nod, I scoff, folding my arms and leaning back. “Sounds just like the Spirit world to me.”

“Whatever you wanna call it, if that dude knows how to access the Gate, I don’t doubt that he’s up to some world-ending shit,” Ed says grimly. “Al and I will start looking through old news records to try and identify him, Y/N, let us know if you have any more of those freaky Avatar visions.”

“Okay, but what will we do when we find him? It’s not like anything’s happened yet, we can’t lock him up for a crime he might commit in the future,” I protest. 

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Ed says easily, gathering his empty tray and pulling his brother along behind him.

“Fullmetal, wait—! And, he’s gone,” Mustang sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. Hawkeye pats his hand in consolation a few times before returning to her mug of coffee and scanning over a file of paperwork.

“Hey, what was that exam you guys were talking about earlier?” I ask, shoveling the last of my breakfast into my mouth and mourning my now empty plate. 

“The State Alchemist exam, I think you should take it,” Hughes replies. 

“But… I’m not an alchemist.”

“No, but it’d be easy enough to fake it. You just gotta draw a random transmutation circle and make some water float, tell the brass you’re working on an anti-gravity array, and you’d be a shoo-in.” Hughes shoots me a grin, waggling his fingers to emphasize his point. 

“But if they ask for a closer look at her research, they’ll know right away that she’d been lying, which would cause them to look deeper into her background, and before we knew it they’d have her locked up in a lab somewhere,” Mustang protests. “It’s not that simple.”

“I could always tell them I have a photographic memory, which means I don’t need to write things down.” I shrug, and Mustang blinks a few times, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Though I don’t see the reason for it, why do you guys want me to pretend to be an alchemist?”

“State alchemists get certain privileges in the military—funding, exclusive access to research materials, even a rank. If you were to pass the exam and be put in Mustang’s office, it’d be an excuse to keep you close and away from the rest of the brass. And it would be a perfect coverup for your bending, you’d be able to use it out and about whenever you wanted without worrying about exposing yourself as the Avatar. People would just assume you were a wicked good alchemist,” Hughes explains. 

“Dope, where do I sign up?” I ask, gathering my tray to head back to the buffet line for seconds now that the number of soldiers in the queue have dwindled down to a handful. 

“I’m still concerned that there are too many ways for this to go wrong,” Mustang murmurs, turning to talk only to Hughes about the specifics of believable alchemy and transmutation circles and other stuff I don’t understand. Rather than break my brain trying, I instead go pick up some more bread and a slab of mystery meat from the buffet line, along with a tall glass of water. When I sit back down, Havoc raises an eyebrow at my plate. I ignore him, immediately scarfing down one piece of bread in its entirety, then reaching for another. 

“Stocking up for the winter?” Hughes laughs. I roll my eyes and take a sip of water to clear my throat.

“Apparently breakfast is the only time you people eat, and if I’m gonna be doing more bending like yesterday I’m gonna need to have more than half a serving in the ol’ fuel tank,” I explain, patting my stomach. Havoc whirls on me, fist tightening around his fork, and for a split second I irrationally think he’s gonna stab me with it, but then I notice the worried pinch of his brow.

“Did the guards not feed you yesterday?” he asks. I shake my head, shoveling another piece of meat into my mouth behind a bite of bread. 

“It’s cool though, I’m great at adjusting to this typa stuff. Actually, when I was back home, I used to—” my anecdote is cut short by a distant rumble shaking through the hall, and all movement in the cafeteria comes to a halt. I narrow my eyes, scanning the windows, but I don’t see any signs of smoke or explosions. Could‘ve been an earthquake, but I dismiss the thought almost immediately. I know the earth like I know my own brain, and that booming noise wasn’t due to anything remotely earth related. It was too shallow, too surface-level. Earthquakes come from deep down in the ground. 

Another boom, and this time I notice out the eastern window a curl of black smoke gradually building into a rolling cloud a few blocks away. 

“There,” I point at the smoke, then grab a bottle of water and shove it into my over-large sweatpants pocket (just in case), already out of my seat and running for the door. 

“Y/N, wait—!” Havoc’s voice fades into the clamour of military personnel getting up and running out the doors behind me, but when I glance around I notice nobody is headed straight for the explosion. What are they doing? They’re the protectors of the city, are they not? And judging by the way everyone had gone still when the first explosion sounded, it’s not some sort of drill or anything they could’ve been expecting. 

Well, if these guys aren’t gonna help, I will. Finally, some real action the Avatar can fix!

I shoulder open a back door leading outside and glance around, fixing my gaze in the direction of the smoke. I don’t know about any of the city’s layout beyond the Central Command, so I just throw my arms back and catch a massive gale of air behind my back, propelling me up to the nearest rooftop. I scrabble across the tiles, leaping from one ledge to the next with another puff of airbending, and as I get closer and closer to the site of the blast I hear harsh popping sounds like fireworks accompanied by the various screams of men, women, and children alike. My blood turns icy, and the next time I leap off a roof I propel myself forward with a pillar of fire, pushing concentrated blue flame from my hands and feet to stabilize myself. 

The trip is taking longer than I’d like, the blast is further away than I’d originally thought. Even at full-blast, my bending can only go so fast, and it takes about ten minutes for me to finally get close enough to really hear more of what’s going on beyond general chaos. Somewhere along the way I lose my right shoe, but that’s fine, they’ll just get in the way of my earthbending anyways. When I jump over to the last rooftop before the massive cloud of black smoke I kick off the other sandal, not bothering to see where in the alley beneath me it lands. 

The building is huge, made from white marble with thick pillars framing the entrance that is now spewing fire and smoke. People in ordinary citizen clothes stagger from the open door, coughing and bleeding, covered in ash and burns. From inside, I hear another volley of those strange popping noises, cracking through the air like the snap of a whip. I jump down from the rooftop and land in a crouch, my fire blasters slowing my fall. 

I land right at the bottom of the marble steps just as a woman comes staggering out, clutching the burning skin of her hand to her chest. Her whole arm is enveloped in horrible, mottling red skin, blisters sizzling under the melting remains of her pink cardigan. 

“Help!” she sobs, grabbing at my shirt. 

“Ma’am, what happened?” I ask, eyes darting back to the burning building. I can’t see any signage, but it looks to be some sort of bank or similar agency, judging by the size and architecture. Maybe a robbery?

“Th-there are some men in—in masks, they’re armed and trying to get to the vaults, p-people are trapped in the f-fires,” she takes a shuddering gasp, “S-so many people, they’re h-hurt—!”

“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’m here to help,” I say, pushing as much soothing confidence into my voice as I can. “Go find somewhere safe to wait until the ambulances come, do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, I-I think so,” she shivers. “Please hurry, the people still t-t-trapped are in worse sh-shape than I am.” She’s definitely going into shock, but I don’t have time to address it. I watch as she staggers down the steps and limps down the street for half a second before turning back to the flames licking through the building’s interior. 

“Why don’t I start with that,” I mutter to myself, then, taking a deep breath of clean air, I run into the thicket of orange and black destruction. Instantly I’m struck by the heat, bright and all-consuming. I’ve gotta get rid of this fire. 

It’s harder to do, extinguishing fires rather than creating them, but I might be able to redirect it. I close my eyes and focus on every pocket of heat I can sense, holding one hand palm facing down into the building, the other curled into a fist, my elbow bent at a square angle to point at the sky outside. 

I center myself, bending my knees and wincing in preparation for what I’m about to do. It’s gonna hurt like a bitch, and probably take a lot out of my bending, but at least I got a proper meal before, right?

Deep breath in, deep breath out. 

All at once, I feel the fury of the flames in front of me stutter, then halt in its tracks. There’s a moment of stillness, then I turn my palm up, and feel the moment the fire starts to surge all its power at me. Like a tornado sweeping up the air around it, I force the fire to sweep up into my palm—all of it. The flames from two massive explosions, all focusing their frenzied rage into one point hovering above my hand in an angry red ball the size of my fist. 

My brow beading with perspiration from the strain of containing it, I cautiously step back, away from the lip of the building’s roof, until I’ve got a good ten foot radius of open air above and around me. Finally, with a shaky exhale, I toss the crumple of flame into the air with one hand, punching upward with the other to release the energy into the flawless blue sky. 

A plume of fire roars hundreds of feet into the air from my fist, the energy singeing the air around me as a vacuum of oxygen is formed in the wake of the fire’s hungry power. 

Finally, it dies off, and I groan a sigh of relief, shaking the strain out of my arms. The building beside me no longer crackles at the mercy of the explosions, and the smoke that had once choked every window and door is gradually dwindling away in wisps of grey. 

Behind me, a swell of cheers erupt. 

I turn and see people, more than I’d noticed before, standing around the bank and watching me with awe on their faces. Some peek out windows of the surrounding buildings, others choke up the alleys and streets between. 

I give them an awkward wave, but that’s all I can afford right now, the bad guys are still inside. I turn away from the crowd and run back into the building, wrinkling my nose at the stinging smell of smoke and burning flesh as a wave of nausea rolls in my stomach. 

The main area of the building is shattered to bits, charred wood and cracked marble scattered across the floor and pressing into my bare feet. I’d managed to draw most of the heat out along with the fire, but as I get deeper into the room the stone gets warmer and warmer. 

Those loud popping noises come again, this time accompanied by a man’s shout and the sound of metal striking against stone. I venture further down the halls, following the sounds of combat and feeling around for vibrations in the marble. Somebody shouts an order of some kind, and then I feel the vibrations of footsteps—maybe ten or twelve men—retreating across the stone. 

I’m about to burst through the door when a large hand closes around my wrist, yanking me backwards into a man’s tight grip. I thrash away, pulling a fire-loaded punch around my body to slam into the man’s head, when Havoc’s sharp voice floods my ears.

“ Y/N! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hisses, pulling me aside to duck behind a corner, blocking me from the entrance to the vaults where I’m sure the masked men are robbing and hurting people like the woman in the pink cardigan. 

“I’m taking down the bad guys, what does it look like?” I whisper back, trying to get past him and scowling when he blocks me with his body. 

“You can’t just run in there throwing rocks around, they’re armed, with hostages! ” He presses something cool and heavy into my hand, and when I look at it closely, I notice it’s one of the same types of weapons Hawkeye had pointed at my head when I broke into Mustang’s office. “Take this, only use it if absolutely necessary, and no bending! You’ll cause too much of a scene and before you know it you’ll have twenty guns aimed at your heart.”

“What is it?” I ask, turning it around in my hands. It’s L-shaped like a boomerang and made of metal, most likely steel or iron, which means I’d have no problems trying to metalbend it like I would with more refined metals. I peer down the tube on the long end, pushing my face up close to try and see what’s inside. All of a sudden, Havoc is snatching it out of my hands and looking at me like I’m insane. 

“How do you not know what a gun is?!” he asks, voice bordering on hysterical. “You won’t survive if you go in there, I guarantee it.”

“Will they try to hit me with those things?” I scowl. I can dodge a boomerang . How pathetic does he think I am?

“This is a gun. It shoots bullets, little pieces of metal, very very fast. There’s no time to dodge bullets. If you get hit by one, it could go straight through your body depending on how close you are. There won’t be any time to blast fire or put up a rock shield, you’d just be dead,” Havoc explains like he’s talking to a child. Is that what the weird popping noises were? Bullets?

“What are the bullets made of?” I ask.

“Why the hell do you want to know?” Havoc hisses, peering around the corner at the still intact door. I assume the rest of Mustang’s men aren’t far, because Havoc holds his hand out and makes some sort of signal. 

“Just tell me!” I whisper. Havoc curses and looks down at the gun, rubbing his forehead as he thinks.

“Uh, lead, I think? With a copper casing.” Perfect. 

“Alright, I’m going in,” I murmur, diving between Havoc’s legs and rolling out into the open hall before he can try to stop me. 

“Wh—hey! Y/N, get back here, it’s not safe!”

I stomp on the ground, and the marble floor crackles and rolls, knocking the char-stained door from its hinges. It clatters to the floor in front of me with a loud boom, emphasized by the echoey marble hall.

Inside, ten men in all black gear with brown gas masks clasped over their faces turn to me, and in each of their gloved hands they hold guns similar to the one Havoc gave me then promptly took away. Tied to a pillar and bleeding in one corner is a group of teary-eyed hostages, and my blood boils when I notice a handful of children in there with them, all in various states of pain as burns curl around their bodies. 

“Surprise bitches,” I bark, both hands raised and ready to metalbend. The men raise their guns, and a loud cracking noise rips through the hall. 

A child lets out a terrified whimper, but it’s drowned out by the sound of a man’s sharp, surprised gasp. 

Hovering an inch above my right palm is the metal projectile that I’ve caught using my metalbending. My hands act as magnets like they did with the fire from the explosion earlier, and as more popping noises echo from their guns my hands fill with little metal cylinders. 

Bullets.

Once my hands are full and the deafening cracks fade into empty-barreled clicks, I smirk, striding forward into the room. 

I drop the bullets on the ground, each one hitting the marble with a soft little plink!

“You done?” I ask, tilting my head up with a defiant grin. Then I throw my arms forward, crossing over my body and cutting my elbows sharply to my side, and the guns rip out of their hands and go flying behind me, striking the walls around the door. 

The men stagger back, but I stomp forward, imprisoning them in triangular rock traps made from the cool white marble. One manages to sidestep my bending, and he reaches for something on his belt, but I lift my foot and kick in a high circle above my head, and a knife of fire knocks him down. Then I plant my foot on the ground again and lurch my body sideways, erecting a diagonal cut of marble that spikes up from the earth, slamming into his head and knocking him out cold. I punch my fist up to cut another earth trap around his body, and the job is done. 

Easy fucking peasy.

“Okay, military! You can take them to Baby Jail now!” I call over my shoulder, and watch with my hands on my hips as Havoc emerges in front of Mustang, Hawkeye, Hughes, and about two dozen others in military blue. “Be careful not to slip on the bullets,” I point to the little metal beads on the floor around my feet, of which there are about a hundred, and make my way to the hostages to start untying their bonds. 

“Why did she call it ‘baby jail?’” I hear someone murmur, and Havoc sighs. 

“What’d I miss?” Ed’s voice shouts down the hall, loud and breathless, and I grin as I hear his uneven footsteps stomp into the room. He whisks in, hair flying around his face and slipping out of his ponytail, the back of his coat fluttering and twirling in the air behind his body. He takes in the incapacitated robbers and piles of fallen rock, and his shoulders slump. “Aw, man! I can’t believe I was in the library while all this was going down!”

“It’s okay, Ed. It wasn’t much of a fight,” Mustang confesses, and I beam a little.

“Hey lady,” a little voice pipes up from the circle of hostages. I glance over from where I’m working through the knot on the ropes, and see a little boy with sandy blond hair and watery blue eyes gazing up at me as if I’m made of stars. “Are you an angel?” 

My heart melts. 

“No,” I smile and pull a little water from the bottle in my pocket from breakfast and get to work healing his knee, upon which a bubbling, blistering burn weeps sluggishly down his leg. I gaze around at the carnage surrounding me, all the blood and burns and tears, and my stomach rolls. I’ve never had to do anything this serious before, not as the Avatar. The whole reason I was sent away from my home world was because mine never needed me. This one does, and I’ll be damned if I don’t try my absolute best even if it does break my heart. 

“I’m just…” I hesitate before continuing my reply to the little boy, Havoc’s warning of the military coming for my Spirit and my abilities still fresh in my mind. “I’m just your friendly neighborhood alchemist.”

That’s right. Soon enough, I’ll take that alchemy test, and I’ll be officially recognized as a State Alchemist. Then I can finally start using my bending without fear of what onlookers might notice and report to the military. 

“Is this alchemy, too?” The boy is gazing wide-eyed at the glowing water curled around my hands as I work it up and down his leg. I smile and nod, pulling back to check on the damage. It’s still wounded, as it probably will be for a week or two, but the sick red color has faded and the pain should be much less. 

“Uh, yeah. It’s a… an array! Yes, an array, for—for heat… misdirection. It moves heat… out…” my face flushes red with embarrassment. I should really do more research on alchemy if I’m gonna pretend to be practicing it. I’m usually an expert on bullshitting, but this concept is completely new to me. 

“Cool,” the boy marvels, and watches carefully as I move on to the other victims. Around me, the military personnel dart back and forth, capturing and unmasking the perps, rescuing victims from under the charred remains of fallen structures. I notice, heart in my throat, as one team of men carries a handful of empty black body bags over to a section of crumbled wall and begins gingerly pulling debris away from a large pool of blood. 

I pull away from healing a woman’s face for a moment and pound my fists into the marble, erecting a thin wall of solid rock around us to block the hostages—specifically the kids—from seeing any of it. They’ve already been traumatized enough today. 

I’m finishing healing the last of the seven hostages as best I can when Havoc emerges from the other side of my marble barricade. I drop the water back into my bottle and stand, striding over to meet him and a handful of paramedics who followed him over. The medical professionals brush past me, barely sparing me a glance, and I mentally thank them for focussing on those who need it most. I don’t know how I’d react if some doctor tried to tell me to sit down or take this medicine, it’ll make all the scary things go away! Bullshit. 

“Sorry,” I mumble, gesturing at the marble barricade. “I didn’t want—I mean, I know it’s not much, considering, but—”

“It’s okay, I know,” he says softly, and one look at his eyes tells me that he understands. “What about you, everything alright? I know you smoked those guys and made it look like you barely had to lift a pinky, but that can’t have been easy, even for you.”

I roll his question around in my head, considering it. He’s right, I’d gotten a little bit of a crash course about bullets and guns right before marching in here, but still, those metal pellets had moved a lot quicker than I was ready for. It took a lot out of my bending, in fact, I’m pretty sure that if I wasn’t an Earth-born Avatar I might not have been able to do it at all. If those bullets had been made of a purer metal I would’ve been toast. 

“I think I’m okay. Sure, it was hard, but mostly I’m just tired. I’m more worried about these guys,” I turn my attention back to the hostages, eyes softening as they land on the three children of the group—the little boy from before, a young girl maybe ten or twelve years old, and another girl, barely old enough to go to school. 

And damn it, I know I’m gonna have to go have a good cry about all this when I get back to the dorms. 

“You sure?” Havoc asks. I tilt my chin up to meet his gaze, and damn how could I forget how tall this guy is? His eyes are gentle, tired, and more than a little startled. I realize with no small amount of guilt that I must’ve given him the scare of his life, darting out in front of the open fire of all those men and their deadly weapons after I’d almost shot myself in the eye with one mere moments before. Oh, how embarrassing. I really took the gun from him and my first thought had been, what’s down the barrel here? Let me take a look up close. 

“Yeah. I’m good,” I reply. Havoc’s face hardens into something more businesslike, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve done something wrong, but then he nods and gestures for me to follow him out from behind the barricade.

“Alright, then you’re gonna need to go with them,” he says when we emerge, and I see a crowd of four unfamiliar military officers standing and looking sternly at me. “They have some questions about what happened, exactly. ”

The way he says the word ‘exactly’ tells me I probably shouldn’t listen to that suggestion. 

“Oh, right.” I step forward numbly, glancing back at Havoc, and he tilts his head in an encouraging gesture, though his eyes bore seriously into mine. I press my lips into a tight line. Time to start coming up with the excuse of a lifetime. The meaning behind Havoc’s glare had been clear: whatever you do, do not tell them the truth. These men are probably the same kinds of men that would eagerly toss me into a lab and fill me up with needles if they knew the extent of my abilities.

I know I’ve just stood at the business ends of a dozen man-killers, but the questioning I’m about to undergo scares me more than anything else has today. 

“Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Paeonia. We’re just trying to understand every detail we can,” one of the men says. He’s taller than me, but not by much, and as broad as one of the marble pillars we pass on the way to the exit, where Mustang chats strainedly with Hawkeye. Judging by how the others fall behind the man who spoke to me, surrounding me on all sides, I guess that he’s the leader. 

“Of course,” I reply smoothly. “Information is of utmost importance in these kinds of cases, to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

“You’re a smart one, Miss Paeonia. Brigadier-General Mustang has done a fair job training you.”

So he knows that I’m Mustang’s responsibility, but he doesn’t know that I was found in the explosion three days ago. Interesting. 

“I appreciate that. If I hope to pass the exam, I’ll certainly need my wits about me.” It’s a risk mentioning the exam, I don’t know what Mustang has told this man about me yet. For all I know, I’m contradicting a carefully planned backstory already put in place for me.

“Yes, the Brigadier-General mentioned that. Judging from what I’ve seen from you here so far, I’d say you have a fair shot,” the man laughs, and I join with him, giving Mustang a little wave as I flicker into his peripheral vision. His eyes widen, then narrow, flicking between me and the man leading me. I give him a nod to hopefully indicate that I have a plan and turn back to the man in front of me, who guides us to an empty room branching off from the corridor I’d burst in through. One of the other men—a burly redhead with sideburns the size of a continent—closes the door behind us with a strangely foreboding thud. 

“Now, Miss Paeonia, why don’t you start by telling us when you got to the scene?” The man asks. So we’re just diving right in, huh? Alright, that’s fine. I can build my plan as I go.

“Right. Well, I was eating in the cafeteria when I heard the first explosion. I’m sure you remember, it brought everything at Central to a standstill,” I explain. The man nods, motioning his hand for me to continue. “By the time the second one went off, I could see smoke coming from the east. Since I’m not officially military’s problem just yet, I was able to dart out without waiting for further instructions.” I purse my lips. How truthful do I want this account to be? “If I’m being honest, I didn’t really think before I reacted. I just knew that people might be hurt, and I would be able to help.”

“Yes, well, it’s good that you were able to depart headquarters so quickly. Many of our witnesses have reported that you were among, if not the very first, to arrive.”

“That would be correct, sir. I don’t remember seeing anyone else military by the time I got here.”

“So then, is it safe for me to assume that you saw what caused the… ah, extinguishing of the explosions?”

“You mean the giant fireball?” I laugh. “Yeah, that was actually me.”

The man exchanges a glance with one of the others, and I notice one of them scribbling rapidly on a pad of paper. “We thought that might be the case, though that’s not to say it’s easy to believe. Would you mind elaborating on how exactly you were able to achieve that?”

Okay, now is the tricky part. Alchemy speak. I need to tread lightly with my words, air on the side of vagueness in everything I say. I still don’t understand enough about it to convincingly play the part of a master capable of doing the things I did today, so I’ll need to pull a more secretive researcher approach. 

“Alchemy,” I say simply. “I specialize in elemental Alchemy, and one subset I’ve studied happens to be fire, or, more specifically, heat. I used a heat misdirection array to pull out the hottest parts, then, in order to get rid of the energy I’d collected, I drew another one to direct it into the sky.” I press my fingertips together and smirk at him with a light shrug. “Equivalent exchange.”

“I see,” the man nods. “Though I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything like it, I understand your research is meant to be groundbreaking enough to pass the State Alchemy exam. A bit of suspension of belief is in order for such things.”

“Thank you,” I say honestly. “I’ve spent the better part of my life perfecting my art, it feels good to know that it wasn’t all things people have already done.”

“Indeed,” the man says simply. The questioning continues on like that, with me touching vaguely on the mechanics of my alchemy and excusing my lack of detail with a requirement for secrecy if I’m to pass the exam. Sometimes the man glances at his subordinates, and they scribble on their little notepads, but other than that it goes by relatively smoothly.

That is, until he gets to the part about me catching bullets with my bare hands. 

“We have some witnesses who claim that you stood before the perpetrators with your arms raised and simply… caught them. We could chalk it up to trauma-induced hallucination if it was just one, but several have reported seeing the same thing, which causes some raised eyebrows here in our department,” the man explains, and I notice that suddenly the energy in the room has gone electric. Each of the men seems to be leaning into me, eyes searching mine for the miraculous excuse.

Fortunately, I’ve prepared for this.

I flex my hands by my sides and the silvery bracers from my handcuffs melt away from my wrists, instead moving to coat the palms and fingers of my hands like the front side of a glove. 

“Once again, it was my alchemy,” I hold my hands up, showing off my metal-plated hands, and the men all stare, pens hovering over their notepads in anticipation. “You see, on the undersides of these plates is an array that can, essentially, alter the makeup of this metal to attract others magnetically, at an incredibly potent level. I’ve tested it on needles, toys, phone poles, and yes—bullets. If I know what kind of metal I’m meant to attract, I’m able to pull them towards my hands alchemically. Of course, there are limits, but I knew when I walked in there that I’d be able to protect myself. Even if they’d shot at the ceiling the bullet still would’ve ended up in my palm.”

The men write furiously in their notepads. I try to keep myself from giggling. 

“Incredible,” the man questioning me breathes, staring owlishly at my metal-plated palms. “Would you mind showing us how? Not on a bullet, but perhaps this pen?” He plucks a spare pen from his breast pocket, and I nod.

“Do you know what it’s made of? If not, I’ll just assume it’s steel,” I explain. Earthbenders of my caliber are required to memorize the makeup of most metal objects in order to gauge bendability, it’s incredible how many things are conveniently made of steel or iron, some of the easiest metals for earthbenders to bend. 

“Yes, stainless steel I believe,” the man says. Easy-peasy. 

I hold my hand out and flex my fingers back, focussing on the pen, and metalbend it into my palm. I catch it, twirl it between my fingers, then toss it back at him, and it slides to a halt just in front of his fingertips. 

“Amazing,” he breathes. By his side, the other men give me strange looks, crossed between disbelief, awe, and something else that I can’t place. I don’t like the way it makes me feel, like they’re observing me for future use. It’s probably just paranoia, but you can never be too careful. 

“I think that concludes the most of our questioning, you’ve solved our remaining loose ends. The investigation thanks you for your cooperation, and I sincerely look forward to seeing you someday join our ranks as a State Alchemist, Miss Paeonia. Best of luck.” The man stacks his papers under his arm, tucking his pens back into his jacket and extending a pudgy hand for me to shake. I do, not bothering to retract my bracers back to my wrists. His eyes flash when his hand comes in contact with the warm metal, and I smile. 

They bought it. They fucking bought it. 

We walk back out to the main room, the men breaking off from my side almost immediately to go finish conducting their questioning with other witnesses. I let the metal from the cuffs retract back onto my wrists, scanning the room for Havoc and the others.

When Mustang catches my eye, his shoulders visibly relax, and he motions for me to join him in the far corner of the vault room. 

“Y/N, welcome back,” Mustang congratulates. “It’s good to see you.” I notice the hidden worry that I wouldn’t come back from that questioning a free woman behind his voice, and smile, bending my knees in a tiny curtsy. 

“Good to be back,” I reply.

“What’d you tell the brass?” Ed asks quietly, eyes darting around to check and make sure no unwelcome ears are listening in on our conversation. Havoc shifts a little to stand closer to my side, and I notice he’s blocking me from the immediate view of the rest of the room, offering us even more privacy. He’s a good bodyguard, I should be sure to tell him once we get back to the dorms.

“Oh man, Ed, you’re supposed to be a baby genius, right?”

“Hey!” Ed whines at the ‘baby’ part. I continue without acknowledging him.

“Bro, you gotta teach me more about alchemy. I think the only reason they bought all my bullshit was because I was pretending it was top-secret research that I couldn’t say too much about. You shoulda heard the pathetic excuses I was making, it was fucking terrifying!” I sag against my heels a bit, rubbing my eyes. “I made something up about a heat misdirection array for the fire show, and pretended that these—” I shoot the bracers back over my hands and hold them up— “were inscribed with magnetic arrays on the backside that were able to catch the bullets. Emphasis on arrays on the backside. If they’d asked to see any of it I definitely would’ve been toast.”

“I guess it’s a good thing you kept your cuffs,” Ed laughs. “Don’t worry, Al and I can totally teach you how to pretend to do alchemy. You’re gonna need it if you’re gonna get through the exam.”

“Speaking of the exam,” Mustang interjects, “I’ve decided it would be best if you took it, Y/N. I know it’s a risk, but it’s probably the best shot we have if we’re going to keep you out of those questionings from now on. You’re right, we got lucky this time, but that won’t always be the case.” He sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose with one gloved hand, shaking his head in dismay. “I don’t suppose I can tell you to lay low for the next few weeks and stay away from these kinds of incidents until you’re a state-recognized alchemist, can I?”

“Nope,” Ed and I say at the same time, then fist-bump.

Mustang sighs. 

“Sir, the surviving victims have all been safely transported to the hospital, General Marquez has instructed all personnel not assigned to cleanup to return to Central and continue business as usual,” Hawkeye’s voice emerges from outside our little huddle, and Mustang steps aside to allow her to slip into the conversation. 

“Surviving?” I ask weakly. “How many casualties were there in total?” Hawkeye hesitates before responding, probably deciding whether or not I’m in the right state emotionally to receive whatever news she’s about to give me. I’m not, but I’ll find out anyways. I need to know. 

“So far, there are thirteen dead, more in too critical a condition to likely recover. We won’t know the official total until after the investigation is completed, hopefully within the next few days.”

Thirteen dead. Thirteen people that I wasn’t here early enough to save. Thirteen families about to receive the worst news of their lives. I should’ve gotten here the moment I heard that first explosion. I could have used the Beifong method to scope out where it came from long before I saw the smoke, then I might’ve been able to save some of those people. 

I don’t realize I’m swaying on my feet until Havoc’s hands shoot out to close around my shoulders, steadying me. 

“Woah, Y/N, you okay?” Ed asks.

“Y/N?” Havoc prompts at the same time. I rub at my eyes, trying to shake away some of the bone-deep weariness and emotional ache nagging at my consciousness. 

“Sorry—sorry, just… fuck. ” I don’t bother to elaborate, and nobody seems to need an explanation. 

“Hey, it wasn’t your fault, okay? It was none of ours. Just some stupid, selfish mafia men trying to get their hands on some extra cash,” Ed spits. “They’ll be locked up soon enough, I’m sure the death penalty is waiting for at least some of them. We did the best we could, and from what I hear you kicked ass out there, Luce.” 

“Yeah, I know like, technically I wasn’t the cause of all this, but… I don’t know. It’s the Avatar’s job to protect , and I wasn’t fast enough to protect thirteen people, probably more.” My mind wanders back to the little boy who had asked if I was an angel, and I feel my heart go icy with pain. My eyes prick with tears, but I shove them back down, deep into my throat. There’ll be time to let all that out when I’m back home, alone. No need to break down in front of all my friends here in the middle of a charred bank vault.

Havoc’s hands tighten around my shoulders, and I can’t keep myself from leaning into his grasp. He’s firm, steady, a lighthouse amidst the roaring darkness of my emotions. I let out a shuddering breath, giving myself a five seconds to feel nothing but the overwhelming frustration, sadness, and grief churning in my gut. I count in my head, letting it wrap me up until I’m practically sick with it. 

Then, when I reach five, I take another deep breath and straighten my back, tilting my chin up with a confidence I know I don’t have. 

“Okay. I’m okay. Sorry about all that,” I reluctantly step away from Havoc’s comforting hold, striding for the door. “C’mon, I think Hawkeye said we’re under orders to go chillax.”

“Chillax?” Ed repeats, falling in stride beside me.

“Yeah, it’s a contraction of ‘chill’ and ‘relax.’ Chillax ,” I explain, heart swelling with gratitude at his willingness to move on from the conversation. When we get back out to the front of the building, it’s swarming with military vehicles and curious civilians, along with a couple big vans I don’t recognize. Beside them, people stand with cameras, scanning the building and snapping the occasional picture.

Reporters.

When we come within eyesight of them, there’s a swarm of noise and light as cameras click and flash, reporters shouting for our attention as we descend the steps. 

“There she is! There’s the alchemist from before!” One voice shouts, and all of a sudden the full force of the press is centered on me, people scramble around the barricades and red tape set up by the military to snap a good picture of me. I try to appear strong but uninterested as we pass, and Havoc ushers me to his side, blocking me from the worst of it with his body as we get closer to the crowds of people and flashing cameras.

“Lady Bulletproof, Lady Bulletproof! Tell us how you managed to take on each of the robbers all at once!” 

“Are you planning on taking the State Alchemist exam in a few months?”

“Is it true that you were able to direct the force of the explosions away in that giant blast earlier? Some say the power of that alchemy even rivaled that of the Flame Alchemist!”

“Lady Bulletproof! How do you feel about your new nickname?”

“What do you have to say to the victims of this tragedy?”

My stomach turns at the volley of questions, and I’m having a hard time ignoring them without the urge to curl up in a ball at the foot of the steps and plug my ears, crying. At one point, Havoc pulls me up against his chest and drags his coat around my body, and I see the flash of a camera go off mere inches from the fabric near my face. He puts a hand on top of my head and pushes down, and I get the hint to duck into the doorway of a car waiting for us. 

Once the door closes behind Havoc, who gets in after me, Hawkeye guns the engine and peels away from the gaggle of press and curious civilians, racing down the streets to headquarters. 

“Jesus,” Ed grumbles by my side. I'm wedged between him and Havoc, with Mustang in the front seat and Hawkeye driving. Behind us a car of similar make and model follows, and I notice Hughes at the wheel beside another of Mustang’s unit, a grey-haired man whose name I think is Falman. Or maybe he’s Feury. I can’t really get those two names straight in my head yet. 

“Yeah, that was almost as bad as when you became a State Alchemist, Ed,” Havoc says over my head. “We almost had to pull guns on those reporters, heartless bastards. They’re so hungry for the next biggest stories they don’t bother to think of their subjects as human.”

“Yeah,” I swallow, watching my hands as they’re occasionally taken by a tremor or shake. Is that what it’ll be like every time? I know that the Avatar is usually inundated by press once they first reveal themselves to the public, I’d been ready for that kind of release. Easy questions about my training, what I think of the area, etc. I’d never been prepared for whatever that was. I groan and tilt my head back against the headrest, bringing my hands up to my hair and squeezing a fistful of it, focusing on the gentle pain and allowing it to ground me after all that. 

“I hope they don’t print anything too nasty because we didn’t answer their questions,” Mustang says grimly, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I guess we’ll know tomorrow morning when we see the papers.” 

“Aw, fuck ‘em. I stopped reading that shit ages ago, too gossipy,” Ed snorts. “They should publish real stories, like the new botanical alchemy Al’s been working on at University.”

“Nobody wants to read something they can’t understand,” I laugh, but it comes out hollow. 

“Well you’ll understand it plenty once I get you up to speed,” Ed pouts. “When we get back to base, we’ll get started right away on your alchemy tutoring,” he says the last bit with a yawn, and when he stretches he knocks me in the head with his flesh arm. I elbow him back, and he yelps. “Actually, I think I’ll take a nap first. Then we’ll get started on your tutoring.”

I smile and settle back, gazing out at the road. Yeah, I could use a nap. 

That’s the last coherent thought I have before I drift asleep, head leaning against Havoc’s firm shoulder.

Chapter Text

The air is humid and hot like the belly of a beast. My body fights against the sluggish influence of some sort of mind-numbing drug that keeps me from getting a proper grasp on my bending. I feel like I’ve been chi-blocked straight to the Spirit, I know the earth is humming and pliant around me but I’m not able to connect with it enough to bend. 

My arms are shackled by thick platinum bands connected to the opposite corners of the room, leaving me hanging by my wrists at the mercy of my own body weight. I ache all over, it appears whatever drug I’ve been administered is able to dull my senses and bending but leaves the sensation of pain fresh and unhindered. Warm blood dribbles down my arm from thick cuts at my wrists, the platinum digging deeper and deeper into my flesh, but I wouldn’t be able to bend it off even if I could still feel my powers. Platinum is too pure, too removed from the Earth’s original form. 

I try to open my eyes, but they’re heavy and blurry. Before me I see only shapes, dark and concrete grey. Though one splash of color stands out amongst the rest, a person dressed all in military blue. 

“Help,” I try to croak, but my tongue is thick in my mouth. The figure turns to look at me, and as they step closer I notice more of their defining features. It’s a man, with ordinary brown hair and tan skin, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen him before. He shakes his head and steps away, making for the dark outline of what I assume is a heavy platinum door set into the concrete. Why make the door platinum but leave the rest bendable for me?

I whine and cry out for the man to stop, but my voice gets caught in my croaking throat. I try to thrash out of my shackles, but I just end up hurting myself more. Scarlet globs of fresh blood appear in my vision as they drip onto the floor, and I watch almost entranced in a dissociated state as the puddles grow wider and wider beneath my dangling feet. The red of my blood mingles with more streaks of scarlet, and I blink wearily at the strange way the colors swirl beneath me. I’m dangling over a circle of red paint, about five feet in diameter with intricate symbols I don’t understand. It must be the transmutation circle he’s using to access the Gate! I drink in as much of the design as I can through the haze of the drug clouding my vision and my thoughts, wrenching my head around a little to take in the rest of the circle behind me.

“Ah, ah, ah,” a voice cuts through my dulled senses sharp as a razor, and my body instinctively flinches back, head snapping up. This version of me recognizes that voice, and she hates it. “Can’t have you bleeding out and dying, not yet.” The man moves to my shackled wrists, he’s still too far away for me to focus closely on his face through the haze of the drug, but I have a sinking feeling I already know who he is. 

He slips a piece of cloth between my wrist and the shackle, rubbing roughly at my raw flesh. I whimper, and the man laughs. I know that laugh. It’s the man from my other dreams. 

“I’ll leave these here until your skin heals up enough to keep you from bleeding too much, then we’ll take them off and start it all over again. Won’t that be fun?” 

I try to growl, but it comes out more of a whine. 

“That drug still bogging you down, sweetheart?” he tuts. “You already know how to stop it, why don’t you just give in?”

I don’t, what’s he talking about? Why is future me not doing everything she can to get out of here? Is he threatening me with the safety of my friends or something?

Oh. 

He probably is. 

My heart sinks into my stomach.

He’s probably got Havoc or Ed or someone locked up a room over, threatening to kill them if I don’t go along with whatever this is. 

In a way, that makes it easier. Now I’ve got someone to fight for. 

“Well, with all that taken care of, why don’t we get started?”

My legs twitch out in an attempt at a kick in his direction, but heavy shackles keep them down. My heart thumps rapidly against my chest, my body in the future knows something bad is coming but my mind is still in the past. 

The man disappears behind my peripheral vision for a moment, but when he emerges he’s carrying a horrifying looking knife, glowing orange and yellow with heat. If he were to stab someone with that, it would cauterize the wound all on its own, preventing death and leaving only pain.

Which means…

“Close your eyes, sweetheart!”

He rears back, knife in hand, and plunges it through my shoulder.

I wake up screaming in someone’s arms.

I arch away from their grasp, thrashing out for my bending, but it’s still sluggish from sleep, so I only succeed in kicking and elbowing whoever carries me in the side of the head.

“Ow!” Havoc winces, but his hold around my body doesn’t loosen. “Y/N, it’s okay! It’s just me!” 

“I—” I stammer, my heartbeat a jackhammer against my sternum. My left shoulder, pressed against Havoc’s chest as he holds me bridal style, still throbs with the phantom sensation of the man’s searing knife digging into my flesh. My throat is tight and raw with the screams I hadn't been able to release while still asleep, and when I see a flash of silver in the corner of my eye encircling my wrists, my heart skips a startled beat. 

I gasp and throw my hands down, and the metal from my bracers shoot from my wrists and into the red carpeted flooring of Central Command in two sharp spikes of steel. Lifting my shaking hand up, I inspect smooth, unblemished wrists, rubbing at the places I still remember scraping painfully against the platinum restraints. I swallow the rising nausea in my throat and shakily reach out to pull the metal back around my wrists, but I leave them as loose little bangles rather than their previously seamless-as-skin bracer forms. I reach out and smooth a hand in the air above the cracks in the floor, using earthbending to seal the concrete up, then drop my hand, gazing emptily at the two thin holes left behind in the carpet. 

“Y/N?” Havoc asks tentatively, and I start, realizing that I’m still sitting limp in his arms like a baby. 

“Sorry,” I mumble, disentangling myself from his firm grasp and dropping onto the hard floor. The chill of the air away from Havoc’s body heat strikes me instantly, and I shiver, clutching at the shoulder that still throbs with the occasional phantom pain. I blink around the room, taking in the group of familiar desks of the Mustang unit office. 

“Was that another vision?” Ed pipes up. I whirl around and see him, Al, and Mustang standing warily a few feet behind me and Havoc, with the others still standing in the doorway. 

“Y-yeah,” I nod and look away, shivering and tightening the hand curled around my aching shoulder. Behind me, I hear Havoc rustling with something, then moments later the heavy fabric from his coat is being draped over my shoulders. It’s still warm from his lingering heat, and under any other circumstances I’d put up a fight and argue that I didn’t need it, but now all I can do is sigh and sink into the fabric, letting the warmth and comforting scent of spice and detergent drown me. I turn and shoot him a thankful smile.

“Good news?” Al asks hopefully. I snort and shake my head. 

“No, not good news,” I mutter. I don’t want to get into it just yet, not while the feeling of those platinum bands digging into my flesh and the horrid heaviness of that drug are still fresh in my mind. I turn back to Havoc, face twisting apologetically as I notice him rubbing at a spot on his temple. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “Are you alright?”

“Aw, it’s just a bump, don’t worry about it. We tried to wake you up in the car but you were too deep in the vision, we assumed it would probably be best to just bring you inside safely,” Havoc explains. 

“Oh, right. Yeah, it’s kinda hard to pull me out if I’m already in the middle of it.” I pull his coat tighter around my body, it’s so big. “I’m really sorry if I caused any extra trouble.”

“Can’t be any trouble if you found out more about our guy,” Ed shrugs. “What happened? Did you see the Gate again?”

I shake my head. 

“No, it’s…” I grimace and glance at my wrists. The bangles clank musically against each other. Okay Paeonia, time to grow a pair. You’re not in that cell, not yet. There’s still time to stop that future from happening. Just chill out and explain what happened, Ed will know what to do, he’s a baby genius!

“I was somewhere different that time, in some sort of cell, shackled at my wrists by platinum chains,” I explain, leaning against a desk behind me for support. As I speak, I smooth the bangles out into bracers against my wrists again, forcing myself to face my irrational anxiety head-on until I’m able to stop thinking about the feeling of the metal pressed against my skin as suffocating.

“Platinum?” Al asks, raising his blond eyebrows. “How do you know? It’s not an easy metal to come by, especially in large amounts.”

“It was too pure for me to bend,” I explain. “I can metalbend most types of ore no matter what shape or size, but my abilities usually falter around gold, platinum, and extremely purified variations of copper or silver. Where copper and silver and even gold can sometimes still be influenced by my bending under extreme effort, platinum is absolutely impossible.”

“Which means whoever is after you knows enough about your bending to take measures against it,” Ed murmurs.

“Or he’s just got a lot of platinum laying around,” Havoc suggests. I give him a weak smile, and he returns it with a softness that fills my emotionally exhausted heart up like a zeppelin. 

“Whatever it is, I was stuck. I’d also been knocked up with some sort of drug that dulled my senses… and my bending. There was concrete all around me but I couldn’t feel any connection to it.”

“Damn,” Ed curses. “That just confirms what we already said about him knowing your powers, then.”

“Yeah,” I swallow.

“But how would he know? I mean, we’re posing her as an alchemist to anyone who asks, and I don’t think anyone outside this room knows otherwise,” Mustang asks, and by the confident tone in his voice I can guess that he’s overruling the possibility of a traitor in our midst immediately. Each of his men have been carefully selected, hand-picked and loyal to Mustang above all else. It’s comforting to hear. 

“I’m not so sure,” I say, grip tightening around Havoc’s coat around my shoulders. “When I finally managed to get my eyes open through that stupid drug, I noticed someone standing right in front of me wearing military blues.”

Ed swears under his breath, and Al sucks in a sharp gasp. 

“He was too out of focus for me to get a proper look at his face, and I didn’t see any discerning features like a birthmark or unique rank, but he did seem familiar. I couldn’t place how, but I feel like I might’ve run into him at some point. Maybe in the cafeteria or something, I don’t know.”

“You’re sure he was military? Not just some wearing a similarly blue coat?” Mustang asks.

“I’m sure. He had all the weird buttons and flaps and silver trim that yours do, butt-cape and all.”

Ed snickers.

“This is concerning news,” Mustang murmurs. “Whatever this alchemist is planning to do with the Gate, I’m sure he’s enticed some branches of the military with the promise of power once he achieves his goal.”

“Was there anything else? Did you see the guy again?” Ed probes. I feel myself pale a little. I don’t want to tell them about the torture, I really don’t want to. What if they demand that I stay cooped up in my dorms? What if they panic and throw me to the streets instead? What if they just look at me like they feel sorry for me and treat me like I’ll shatter at any moment?

“I did, but it’s not important,” I look away, sinking lower into the welcoming heat of Havoc’s coat. “He was just… saying nonsense. Taunting me.”

“Luce, if there’s anything else, it would probably be better if we knew about it. It could give us clues to what he’s doing alchemically, and that will help us stop him,” Ed says gently. I look up at his bright golden eyes, they’re Fire nation eyes. Descendants of the great Firelord Zuko and Avatar Ozai shared the same amber coloring, I’d had the pleasure of being trained by one of their distant ancestors. I imagine how those eyes would look, lifeless on a concrete floor, because I was too fucking frightened to talk about a stupid nightmare. 

“Okay,” I take a deep breath. “So I mentioned the platinum shackles, right? I was kind of uh… dangling from them. Like from two points on opposite walls. So they were cutting into my wrists pretty deeply, and it would only get worse when I tried to move. After the military man left, the man from my other dream showed up and shoved cloth between the metal and my skin because he ‘didn’t want me bleeding out yet.’ And he kept talking about how much fun it would be to keep hurting me, and by the way he spoke it made me feel like I’d already been there for a little while. He kept saying things like ‘ready to start again?’ and shit.” I don’t look at anyone’s face, but I also don’t shy away from their gazes, holding my chin up as high as I can manage while still bundled tightly in Havoc’s coat. “But then, when I tried to kick at him, he said, ‘That drug still bogging you down, sweetheart? You already know how to stop it, why don’t you just give in?’”

“Wait, so he gave you an antidote or something?” Al asks. I shake my head. 

“No, I don’t know. When I go into these visions I’m just sorta watching through my own body in the future, I can’t really influence anything that I do beyond what I’d probably be doing anyways at that time, and I don’t have any additional knowledge other than what I already know. I think he must’ve set up some sort of ultimatum for me, either endure what he’s doing to me or… something. Whatever the alternative was, it was bad enough for me to stay there under the influence of that drug while he tortured me.” I grimace around the nausea coiling in acidic swirls in my stomach. “I woke up right when he drove a red hot knife into my shoulder.”

Almost everyone in the room sucks in a collective wince. 

“Yeah, shit sucks,” I say as plainly as I can. 

“Are you okay?” Al asks. I want to laugh, or cry, or both at the same time. But instead I just shake my head and sigh.

“ I’m fine, but future me isn’t exactly having a tea party,” I explain. Hawkeye makes a sympathetic noise, but I don’t want anybody’s pity. This is what I wanted when the Spirits sent me here, I wanted to be able to help the world in the way Avatars do. In order to help others you gotta go through some tough shit, I know this! I’d been ready for whatever the world could throw my way when I found out I was the Avatar. Hell, I’d even gone through a bit of pain already when my family found out! So why am I so much more frightened now that I’m older and stronger?

Maybe it’s because I know that I’m strong, but it still isn’t going to be strong enough. That man is going to get me, and he’s going to hurt me, and maybe even destroy the whole world. And I’m not strong enough to stop him. 

“We won’t let that fucker get you,” Ed snarls. I look up, blinking back a couple stupid helpless tears before they’re able to slip down my cheeks. “Ya hear me Y/N? You got some of the most powerful alchemists in the world here to help you out, okay?” 

“And the rest of us might not be alchemists but our unit is one of the finest in the military,” Havoc interjects with a confident grin. “If we took down Dwarf in the Flask and the Homunculi we can take down another creepy old dude trying to play god.”

I’ll have to remember to ask who they are once this is all over.

“That’s right,” Al says. “We’re not gonna let that guy get his hands on you. It won’t happen.”

Spirits I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to cry. 

“Thanks guys,” I swallow back the lump in my throat, ducking my head. “I’ll do my best to look out for you, too.”

My shoulder has finally stopped throbbing, and my heartbeat has finally settled down to a reasonable rate, so I’m almost able to take a breath without feeling like I’m going to break. My eyes trace down the line of my arm, one tucked under Havoc’s jacket and the other curled around the edge to keep it wrapped securely around my body. The silver of my bracer catches in the afternoon light slanting through the windows, and I gaze at the simple, colorless band, remembering how gruesome the red and maroon streaks of warm blood had looked on my arms, on the floor. 

Wait, the floor! 

“Fuck!” I lurch forward off the desk I’d been leaning on, scrambling for a pen and paper on the desk across from me. “I forgot something!”

“What is it?” Ed’s by my side in an instant, peering down as I scribble the array that had been drawn on the floor beneath me as precisely as I can. 

“Underneath me, I was dangling over one of those alchemy whatchamacallits, it was kinda hazy so I don’t remember it exactly, but…”

“A transmutation circle?! Al, get over here!” Ed calls over his shoulder, and I hear more than one pair of footsteps jog over towards me as the rest of the unit comes to crowd around the piece of paper. I close my eyes, straining to remember the odd symbols and where I’d seen them, adding possible variations to the symbols in the margins in case my memory is faulty, and by the time I’m finished Ed and Al have gone very, very still. 

“There were more, smaller symbols on the edges, but they were too far away for me to make out through the drug,” I explain, jabbing my finger into the page. “But I think this makes up the gist of it.” 

Ed takes the paper from me and holds it up in front of Al, their heads tilted together as they inspect my shitty drawings in silence. I bite my lip. There’s a possibility that my memory is absolute bullshit and the drawing is useless, but judging by the grave expressions on both the brothers’ faces, I’m inclined to believe otherwise. 

“Well?” I ask, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. Ed blinks up at me, then back down at the paper, brows crinkling. 

“It looks like human transmutation, for sure. It’s hard to make out since you didn’t get a good look, but these symbols and the skeleton of the array are unmistakably taboo,” Ed points to a few spots on the drawing and I nod as if I understand, and Al takes the drawing from Ed, shaking his head. 

“Here’s what I don’t understand, though,” he points to a symbol near the bottom, it’s one of the ones that had been behind me, but I recognized it almost immediately upon seeing it, as one of the few symbols I could read. “It’s right where we’d usually find something about human, soul, or center, but instead all I see is… scribbles.”

“Hey, my handwriting might not be perfect but it’s clearly the traditional writing for Spirit,” I huff. “See? This means infinite, and these are the symbols for the four elements, but they’re overlapping for some reason.” I frown back at my drawing, tilting my head to get a better look. Most of the array had been absolute nonsense to me, so I’d just drawn it as best I could based on memory, but writing the familiar texts for Spirit, infinite, unity, and the four elements had been easy as breathing. I’d been seeing them all throughout my Avatar training as I learned more about my destiny and my powers. 

“Wait, you can read these?” Ed asks. “I thought you didn’t know anything about alchemy!”

“I don’t! I can’t understand any of these other symbols, but these,” I point to the four points on the array that are written in my language, “are traditional characters. Everyone can read them.”

“So then what do they say?” Al sputters. I roll my eyes. My handwriting can’t be that bad.

“Like I said, this means Spirit. That one means infinite or vast, and this means unity. I’ve never seen the four element symbols written like this before, but if I were to separate them…” I pick up the pen again and write along the margins the four symbols for the elements, curling the lines around each other with practiced ease. “Boom. Earth, Water, Fire, and Air.”

“Let me see that,” Ed takes the paper from me again, then goes over to a bookcase by the door, scanning the titles until he finds one with a thick black binding, worn with use. He brings it back to the desk, flipping through the pages until he finds the one he’s looking for, dropping it onto the wood alongside the drawing with a curious frown. 

“Okay, so it looks like the guy from Y/N’s dream is using some sort of combination of Amestrian alchemy and Y/N’s Spirit world bending to complete some variation of human transmutation. See these symbols here?” He points at the book, which is opened to a page full of alchemical symbols along with a short description of their abilities. “If we were to transcribe the array into completely Amestrian symbolism, it would be easier for me and Al to decipher since we’re familiar with it. But since the guy is using Y/N’s so-called traditional characters, I think it’s safe to assume that these specific parts of the array relate specifically to her abilities.”

“In other words, the array probably won’t work if anyone other than Y/N is standing inside it,” Al surmises. 

“Exactly. So if we can figure out what the rest of the array is trying to achieve, then we can start fitting the unfamiliar characters into the rest of it, like a puzzle. It’s obviously trying to do something with her bending, and through that, her soul, or Spirit, as she says.” Ed frowns. “Though I can’t guess why he’d use a character for infinite. Alchemy is tricky enough without unquantifiable variables, adding this in would only destabilize the array unless he had the energy directed towards a specific, fortified concept. Does that symbol have any double meanings, as far as you know?”

“Nope,” I shake my head firmly. “It’s only translations are infinite, vast, immeasurable, very very very much, you get the idea.”

“Hmm,” Al taps his chin with one finger, the other hand reaching out to trace my crudely drawn lines. “Brother and I will get back to the library and work on gleaning as much information from this as we can, along with searching for the name of the alchemist. Y/N, if you remember anything else from that array, write it down. We’ll use whatever we can get.”

“Yeah, and if anything else blows up, call me right away. I’m dyin’ to see Luce in an actual battle,” Ed says with a mischievous grin. 

“Don’t sound so eager,” Havoc sighs. “Nearly gave me a heart attack earlier today when she put her face right up against the barrel of a gun, finger on the trigger, because she didn’t know what it was.”

“You did what?! ” Ed laughs. I feel my face go scarlet, and I roll my eyes.

“Whatever, in my world we don’t need to shoot stupid little lead nuggets at people. Our guns are built-in,” I flex my arms and send a couple plumes of fire up at the ceiling, weak enough that they don’t catch on anything but still hot enough to raise the temperature around us a few degrees. 

“Showoff,” Ed snorts.

“Pipsqueak,” I snarl.

“You’re like two feet shorter than me!” Ed cries, and I flick a harsh puff of air at his face, pulling a few strands from his already disheveled ponytail. 

“Come on, Brother,” Al sighs, grabbing Ed by the arm and dragging him towards the door as he snarls profanities. 

“And you, ” Mustang says, jabbing a finger in my direction, “are going to get started on studying for the exam. It’s in two and a half weeks, which means we can’t afford to waste even a second of spare time.”

“Aw, man!” I grumble. “I thought I was just gonna cheat and do a little bending then be done with it!”

“That will be during the demonstrative portion, there’s also a written test and a personality screening that you’ll need to go through first before you’re permitted to have audience with the Fuhrer, and if I remember anything from my time taking the exam, two weeks will be barely enough time to cover everything in the knowledge portion. There are men and women who have taken the test multiple times, and know exactly what questions to study for, and still don’t pass. You’ve got a lot of studying ahead of you.”

“Wait, you’re an alchemist, too?” I ask. 

“I am,” Mustang nods. He holds up his hands, upon which the white gloves made of the strangely metallic material I’d noticed when I first woke up in the hospital sit, shining and fitted perfectly. “My official State title is the Flame Alchemist.”

“Dope,” I breathe. “Will I get a dorky nickname, too?”

“If you pass the test, yes. You’ll be awarded an alchemist name along with your rank as Major,” Mustang replies tightly, ignoring my comment about the names being dorky. They are, I mean, Fullmetal? Flame? How uncreative. 

“So if you’re the Flame Alchemist… I can assume you make fire with your alchemy? And since you’re the only one I’ve noticed wearing those steely gloves, I’ll guess you activate it using them?” I ask.

“That would be correct, yes.”

“Wanna spar?” I grin, leaning over the table. If Ed had been the closest I’ll probably get to sparring an Earthbender in this world, then Mustang can be my Firebending opponent. 

“Didn’t I just say we can’t afford to waste any time not studying for the exam?” Mustang asks exasperatedly. 

“Aw, come on, please? Just one match, first to three wins. Besides, if I’m gonna know what to pretend to do during the exam, I’ll need some real-life examples,” I whine.

“She has a point, sir,” Hawkeye pipes up by Mustang’s side. “As important as studying alchemy will be, it’ll all be null if she does something the Fuhrer deems impossible and tosses her into a lab, and the paperwork from today is being taken care of by the investigative team.”

Mustang purses his lips. 

I hold my breath.

“Fine,” Mustang barks after a painstakingly long few seconds, and he says the word like it physically pains him.

“Yay!” I cry over his voice as he continues talking, throwing my hands into the air and pumping a tiny plume of orange flame over my head. 

“This is only to practice honing your fire abilities to match those of regular Amestrian alchemy, do you understand? So no extra bending, and no pushing yourself too hard. Don’t forget you’ve just passed out on the car ride here from a taxing encounter, you’re not at top shape.” He rubs a gloved hand over his eyes, shaking his head, and I dart past him, making a beeline for the door. Behind me, I hear Mustang mutter under his breath, “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

“Ed!” I call out into the hallway. “Ed come back!” I run in the direction leading to the main entrance of Central, calling for my Mutant Bro as I discreetly tug a few brisk shots of air beneath each step, lengthening my stride. I wonder if Havoc is making chase after me, still acting like he needs to be my bodyguard 24/7, and if he’ll be able to keep up.

I find Ed and Al just as they’re descending the steps outside Central. 

“ED!” I shout. He whirls around, hair curling like a whip from the movement and smacking him in the eye. I snort and dash down the stairs, meeting him in the middle. Behind me, I distantly hear Havoc shout my name. So he did chase after me. 

“Ed, you’re not gonna fucking believe this,” I say in a rush. “Mustang’s letting me spar him with my firebending.”

“No. Fucking. Way,” Ed gasps. “You’re lying, there’s no way that old bastard agreed to do something so reckless!” 

“That’s what I was thinking! But then Hawkeye pointed out that it would be a good way for me to see how Amestrian firebending works so I could properly mimic it in the exam and he said yes!”

“Y/N!” Havoc roars from the top of the steps. I turn around to see him marching sternly in our direction, and the dark, disciplinary expression on his face is enough to make me pale a little. 

It’s also kinda hot, okay, but that’s not what’s important right now.

“Please don’t run off alone like that anymore,” he says in a lower voice once he catches up to us, but his tone doesn’t lose any of its authoritative power. I feel a chill run up my spine, from intimidation or arousal, who knows? Probably both! “It’s not safe for you to try and navigate Central without a guide.”

“Aww, but I was just getting Ed,” I point out. “He told us to let him know if anything else was gonna blow up!”

“I don’t think this sparring session is going to be as interesting as you’re imagining it,” Havoc sighs. “You’re mostly just going to be focussing on learning  the Boss’s technique and replicating it to the best of your ability.”

“Doesn’t mean it won’t be dope as hell,” I huff, folding my arms and turning away from Havoc in a tiny act of defiance that turns out to be the wrong idea, as suddenly I’m being hoisted up by the waist and tossed over his shoulder like a bag of flour. I let out a surprised squeak and twist instinctively to throw myself back down to the ground, but his thick arm curls around my waist, his large hand gripping tightly at my hip. 

“Wh—let me go!” I yelp. We’re out in the open, so I can’t exactly airbend myself out of this, so I settle for beating my fists halfheartedly against his back, glaring up at Ed, who follows behind us, laughing wildly. 

“It seems you’ll never learn not to run off unaccompanied, so I’ll just have to keep you slung over my shoulder whenever you wish to go somewhere,” Havoc explains plainly, as if that makes any sense! What use is a bodyguard if he’s exhausted from hauling my ass around when a real fight starts up?

Though, he doesn’t seem to be showing that many signs that holding me like this is tiring him out. In fact, he’s barely faltered at all, simply adjusting his stride to make up for the change in balance on one side. His shoulder doesn’t shake from exertion, his breathing is level and even. It’s like I’m lighter than air in his hold, and suddenly my traitorous face is blushing. No, it’s just the blood rushing to my face from dangling upside down behind his back, that’s it. This isn’t attractive, it’s humiliating. I mean, how dare he?

“Shut up,” I snarl at Ed, who is still giggling like a drunken chipmunk. I notice that Al isn’t with him, he probably went to the library to actually get something done, Brother! 

“Who’s tiny now?” Ed smirks. I growl and try to swat at him with my bare fist, since my bending would raise too many alarms out in the open, but he’s just out of my reach from my perch on Havoc’s shoulder. 

“Haaavvoooc,” I whine, not caring that I sound like a petulant child. “I have legs, I can walk, I won’t run off again, just put me down!” I kick out halfheartedly to emphasize my point, and feel Havoc’s other hand reach up and clamp down on the flailing limbs, tucking them neatly against his chest. 

“Not even if another explosion goes off somewhere?” Havoc asks. 

“That’s different,” I reply matter-of-factly, because it is! I’m not gonna sit around and wait for orders when there are people in trouble. 

“Nope,” Havoc shakes his head, and I feel the movement against my side. 

“Uuuuggghhh,” I groan, long and excessive. A few soldiers turn as we walk by, covering their mouths to hide their laughs at the sight of us. I blush and duck my head. Spirits, this is so embarrassing. “Y’know, I’ve been carried more times today than I have in my entire life, and it’s all been from you,” I give Havoc a weak thump on the back at the last word. 

“Okay, now you’re just being dramatic on purpose,” Ed snorts. I am, but I don’t think he’s referring to my longsuffering groan from before. “You got tossed around twice. It’s not the end of the world.”

“I’m serious!” I snap. “Where I grew up it was considered sacrilege to cut contact from the Earth unless absolutely necessary. Even as a baby I wasn’t lifted up, only cuddled on the ground.”

“What the hell?” Ed snorts incredulously. “Did everyone do that? Or are you fucking with me?”

“No, it’s true,” I reply. “But it wasn’t everyone, just the earthbender community I grew up in. As Earth commandeth, so shall be the manner of all things; they that fly, they that walk, they that live, they that perish, all shall return and become one with the Earth .” I recite one of the lines still burned into my brain from my childhood with ease, jerking my shoulders in a shrug that comes off awkwardly due to my current position horizontal on Havoc’s arm. 

“Did it actually help with your bending or anything? Or was it just some lame superstition?” Ed asks, genuinely curious, and I decide to humor him. Sure, I don’t like talking about my past, or the family that bitterly rejected me, but I think I can talk about how fucking crazy those people were without breaking through into sensitive territory. 

“Hard to say, but I’d assume no. More likely, it was our training that made any difference. They were seriously fanatic about earthbending, which means training was always intense and high-level. I’ve been slinging rock since I first could stand—same with everyone else in the community—and as a result we all got really good at it.” I smile, remembering the good times spent in the training caves as a child, the nostalgic smell of rich earth and hard metals. Those were the days before I realized I was the Avatar, when I was simply everyone’s star pupil. Even among the ridiculously skilled elders of the community, I stood out, gaining masterful control over metal and dirt long before my peers. I was set to become one of the greats before… well, before. 

“Hardcore,” Ed nods thoughtfully. “Say, what about—?”

“We’re back, Boss,” Havoc cuts Ed’s question short as he opens the door to the office and pushes inside, finally crouching down and dropping me gently on my feet. I’d kinda been hoping that he’d dump me unceremoniously onto a desk or something, so I could glare and bend a good blast of air at his stupid handsome face, but now I’d just look extra immature in doing that. 

“Thank you Havoc,” Mustang says with a nod. “Y/N, what have we told you about peeling off without permission or escort?”

“I was just getting Ed!” I groan. “He said he wanted to see if there were any more explosions, and besides, he’s an alchemist, too. He can help me bullshit my technique or whatever.”

“But as someone who reportedly stuck her nose down the barrel of a gun out of sheer ignorance, it’s incredibly risky for you to be wandering around without a trusted Amestrian to show you the ropes. What might’ve happened if, say, you stumbled into a section of Central closed off from the public and gotten yourself seriously injured by the protective arrays? I bet you wouldn’t even know what to look for!” Mustang scolds. I duck my head, cheeks heating up as I fold my arms and try not to look like a kicked puppy. 

“Whatever,” I grumble. “We sparring or what?” 

Mustang lets a sigh out from his nose.

“Yes. Hawkeye, ready a car with food and water for the rest of the day,” Mustang instructs to the Lieutenant, who stands stiffly at attention. “We’re going to Pine Point.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Havoc makes a thoughtful noise behind me, and I lift an eyebrow at him. He doesn’t see, and I’m not curious enough to ask and risk him thinking I’ve forgiven him. 

(I have, but he doesn’t need to know that.)

“Y/N, is that attire suitable for combat?” Mustang asks, eyes darting up and down my frame, clad in the same baggy sweatpants and sports bra from this morning, my pink abdominal scar still proudly showing at my midriff. And I’m still not wearing any shoes.

“It’s about as good as it gets,” I sigh. Back home, the Fire Nation people produced flame-resistant clothes that I wore during my firebending training, and those would’ve been perfect. Here, though, I doubt they have that kind of technology. These people would have no need to protect themselves from the everyday dangers of rogue or inexperienced firebenders. “Most of my other clothes are too big anyways, they’d just get in the way.”

Mustang frowns. 

“Very well then. Ed, since it seems you’re tagging along—”

“Damn straight,” Ed grins.

“—Then I’d like you to grab a couple texts on basic flame alchemy, maybe Zerandt’s first two volumes, and The Phoenix ?” 

“Duh,” Ed rolls his eyes. “I’ll also get some of my own notes about circleless transmutation, I think I can start working up a strategy to fake her alchemy using some of that lightning power she used yesterday.”

”Good idea,” Mustang says curtly as Ed turns on his heel with a mocking salute, jogging out the opposite door towards the dorms. Does everyone military live on Central’s grounds? Even Mustang? It’s hard to imagine the polished Brigadier-General living in one of the same dirty little bunks I’ve had the pleasure to call home these past few days. “Lieutenant, keep an eye on Y/N until I get back, I’m gonna grab a few of the fire alchemy texts from my office and change into more combat-suited clothes,” Mustang instructs. 

“Sir,” Havoc says as affirmative, and Mustang nods, turning back to his office and ducking inside. 

A few minutes later, we’re all piled into a military-issue black car, Again with Hawkeye driving, Mustang in the passenger seat, and me squeezed between Ed and Havoc. Ed’s got a stack of books and papers sprawled across his lap, and he flicks through one with laser focus as we peel down the cobbled road, away from Central. 

I squint out the window through the afternoon sun, craning my neck to see around Havoc’s ridiculously large body mass. This is the first I’m seeing of Amestris beyond my brief trip along the rooftops on the way to the burning bank that now feels like years ago. 

The city is plain, but charming, with no specific architecture to set it apart from anything else, just ordinary buildings with ordinary rooftops and ordinary brick holding up ordinary walls. Maybe it’s just the area I’m in, but still, it’s a little shocking to see. Back home, every region had a specific aesthetic declaring the region’s traits. Ba Sing Se was strong and opulent, with emerald green rooftops and gold-plated scrolls of metal traversing smooth white marble. The city shouted proudly, we are the strongest, we are the wealthiest, we are the greatest. 

Meanwhile, the little town in the mountains that I’d most recently settled down in was a burst of lively color. Brick structures were built like flowing water, tumbling over each other, some top floors of certain buildings stretching out over the roofs of other, smaller ones and held up by flower and ivy laden pillars. Each building was painted a vibrant color to match the flowers growing around it, the loft I’d lived in was a little run-down farmhouse made of pale pinkish violet painted wood planks that complimented the lavender weeping willows whose soft fragrant vines tumbled over my roof and partially obscured the view from my window. 

Everything from my land was out in the open for anyone to see, it’s made abundantly clear if you’re in Fire Nation territory or Water Tribe oceans. This place is more secretive, discreet. One needs to actually read the signs to tell if one building is a bakery or another a clothing shop, sure the big display windows out front do plenty to show the trained eye, but to someone just passing through it would appear just another regular building until you got up close. 

“Hey, what’s Pine Point?” I ask, leaning back into my seat. By my side, Havoc’s hand twitches, and I realize I must’ve startled him. The car had been comfortably quiet before I spoke, and yet Havoc’s only reaction to me shattering that had been a little tremor in his hand. His composure is impeccable. 

“It used to be a mining town, up in the mountains. There was a vein of coal that kept the town up and running for a few years, but eventually the mine ran dry and the town was deserted. The military tried to turn it into a training camp a few years back, but it proved to be too inefficient a location, so they also cleared out. Now it’s just a ghost town with a few old buildings and a lot of free space from when the military renovated it,” Havoc explains. 

“Pine Point is far enough away from the rest of Central that there won’t be any alarms raised at our flame-based sparring, but it’s close enough that the trip won’t take too long,” Mustang explains. 

“Oh, perfect,” I hum. “Then I hope you won’t hold back.”

“Same to you,” Mustang says distractedly, turning his eyes back to the map on his lap. 

“Y/N?” Ed pipes up by my side.

“What’s up?”

“When you made the lightning during our sparring match, you pointed two fingers out, like this,” Ed demonstrates as best he can with the limited space in the car, and I nod. “And then you drew a line with the other hand down your arm and out at the sky again, and that was the hand that the lightning came out of, right?”

“Yeah, that’s the technique,” I nod. “One hand conducts the energy, then you guide it through your body and out the other end, where you release it.”

Ed makes a thoughtful noise and looks back at his book, pulling a pen from his jacket pocket and scribbling something completely illegible in the margins. 

“Okay, is that the only way for you to conduct and control electricity, or is it possible for you to use some other body posture?” 

“Uh,” I look down at my hands. “Honestly, I’ve never really given it much thought. That’s like… like asking if there’s another way to drink from a cup. I suppose you could tilt your head upside down and sip it from the topside, but why would you do that when there’s a perfectly good method already invented and implemented worldwide? If that makes sense.” 

“So… it could be possible to do it another way, we’d just need to do some workshopping?” Ed asks. I shrug.

“I guess, yeah.” It would be hard, but I’m sure I can come up with something. Focus on the basics, keep the electricity out of my heart, easy. No harm in trying, after all, we wouldn’t have metalbending if not for Toph Beifong’s stretching the normal limits of earthbending. 

The rest of the trip is spent lapsed in comfortable silence, broken only by the occasional question from Ed about my bending and the gentle rasp of turning pages in his books. 

When we finally make it to Pine Point, I understand why Mustang chose this location. 

The town—if you could even call it that—is hardly a handful of dilapidated buildings. Shrouded from the rest of the world by a thick cover of pine trees, one could easily overlook this place for their entire life, the long forgotten whispers of humanity lost to time’s eternal march. The roads are made only of packed dirt, quickly becoming overrun by the gentle sprigs of eager summer grass, and the tires of the car jostle unevenly over the lumpy rock. Hawkeye maneuvers us down unkempt winding paths, passing buildings whose roofs sag and walls crumble as if born down upon by some invisible weight, until we get to a wide open clearing of grass and packed dirt not unlike the one Ed had taken me to yesterday. This one, however, is wide and spacious, easily as big as four pro bending arenas side-by-side. The sky above the circle of trees protecting the area is thick and cloudless blue, the sun hanging brightly in the middle of the sky, washing the clearing in steady white light. 

“Ready to get your ass beat?” I crow over my shoulder at Mustang as he climbs out of the passenger seat. 

“Once again, this exercise is for observational purposes first, if you spend the whole time focused on winning rather than learning then the whole expedition will be a loss,” Mustang explains, shrugging out of his coat to reveal a tight black tee shirt covering his muscular torso (though not as muscular as Havoc, I definitely do not notice). “Though I will admit, I am looking forward to stretching my alchemy a bit.”

“That’s the spirit!” Ed claps a metal hand against Mustang’s back. “C’mon, let’s get started!” He darts out into the middle of the clearing, hands on his hips, surveying the area with a satisfied nod. 

“You heard the shrimp,” I cackle and surge upwards with a burst of fire, twirling through the air over Ed and landing in front of him in a smooth twirl. 

“Standard sparring rules, fight to incapacitate, first to three wins. Hawkeye will shoot one of you if things get too rowdy, and Y/N, fire attacks only. ” Ed explains as Mustang and the others catch up to us.

“Where’re you guys gonna camp out while this is happening?” I ask. If we’re gonna firebend without holding back then the others will need to be a safe distance away, I don’t want to accidentally melt one of their faces off in the crossfire. 

“Leave that to me,” Ed smirks. “Y/N, pay attention to the way Mustang’s fire behaves and how he controls it, if you have the opportunity to copy something he’s done, by all means try it. You’re at a slight disadvantage here since you’re gonna be doing two things at once, but I’m sure you can hold your own just fine.”

“Easy-peasy,” I scoff. These alchemists think I’ve never had to adapt my fighting style based on my opponent? What kind of firebending master would I be if I could only belch fire one way?

“Awesome,” Ed claps his hands then, and the blue lightning of his alchemy swirls around his hands before surging into the dirt that he presses his flat palms against. I follow the path of the energy with my eyes as it crackles over to the edge of the clearing, finally coming to fruition in the form of a thick rock barricade. Ed trots over to it, jumping over the side and landing safely behind the wall, gesturing for Havoc and Hawkeye to follow him. 

“On my mark!” Ed shouts from the safety of the barricade. “One!” I crouch, and see Mustang straighten in place, extending his gloved hand with his fingers poised as if he’s going to start snapping. What good will that do? “Two,” Ed shouts. Mustang doesn’t move. Is he going to remain stationary for the entire fight? He’s not even in a good stance! “Three!”

At three, Mustang snaps his fingers, and I’m suddenly throwing my hands up to block the blast of flame surging my way. It’s slow, and cool, he’s giving me a warning shot so I’ll know what to expect. Still, the cloud of light and heat is intimidating, and apparently he’d produced it simply by snapping his fingers .

In that instant, I realize that this is going to be the absolute coolest fight I’ll ever have. 

My outstretched hand cuts through the fire like a blade, and I bend it around my body so I’m standing in a protective bubble amidst the roar of the fire. Then I leap forward, pushing the fire out of my eyes until I’ve got a clear view of Mustang while mid air. He has half a second to react, eyes darting up from where I’d been to where I am now, before I’m arching back and spin-kicking three harsh blasts at his face in quick succession. 

He dodges all but one, which he blocks with one arm, batting it aside. I don’t give him time to recover, kicking another big blast at him when I land. Unfortunately, the light of the fire blocks my view, so I don’t see him tucking and rolling around to my side until I hear his snap. I barely have time to shoot a hand up to catch the flame in one hand as another impossibly large cloud of flame erupts from his fingers. 

I try to do what I’d done back at the bank, gathering the fire into one point at my palm, but something about this flame resists my bending. It must still be obeying Mustang’s alchemy, but he’s not trying too hard to keep it under control. It appears that once the fire is out of his hands then he, too, is at its mercy. At least, for now. Once he realizes I can direct his own fire in my favor I’m sure he’ll start trying harder to maintain his own hold over it. 

I manage to grapple most of the blast under my control until I’ve got a volatile tangle of white hot flame flickering and lurching in my palm. Mustang’s eyes widen, and I rear back, throwing it down into the ground at his feet. It explodes in a wall of fire easily thirty feet high, and I put my hands up and push forward to keep it all directed away from me. 

I keep my eyes narrowed at my surroundings, checking to see if he’d gotten out in time for another sneak attack, but when the fire dies I see him kneeling, arms raised in front of his face to block the brunt of the attack. Sensing an opportunity, I dart forward, fist raised, and shoot two puffs of fire on either side of Mustang’s face, same way I’d done with Ed. 

“Is that a point for me?” I call over at the barricade.

“Fuck yeah it is!” Ed crows. 

I whoop and jump into the air, pumping my fist, before sticking my hand out to help Mustang up. 

“Hey, you good?” I ask. 

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Mustang says with a little chuckle. I tilt my head in question, and he shakes his head. 

“I’ve never been on the receiving end of one of my attacks before,” he admits. “It was a little surreal.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of opportunities to get used to it,” I say with a smirk. “Ready to go again?”

Mustang nods. 

The winner of the spar is clear, and it’s not me. Not even close. 

Apparently, the first match was just a fluke, because Mustang’s powers are absolutely mind-boggling. The second and third rounds crawl by, with me barely hanging on to my bending. 

The problem is that he can conduct fire without even moving a muscle, he just snaps his fingers and boom, the world around us is engulfed in fire faster than you can say ‘cabbages.’ Meanwhile I need to draw on my own strength—physical, spiritual, emotional, all of it—in order to wield my weapon. I know that alchemy takes some energy from the user, but Mustang appears completely unruffled by each scorching snap. 

It’s so frustrating, if only I were allowed to use earthbending. I’ve never—and I mean never —been evenly-matched in a fight using my home element. In fact, by the time I was sent to train with a master earthbender for my Avatar training, I had far surpassed the skills required to pass the element. I only spent three days in Ba Sing Se, the first was a rest day given to help me recuperate from my journey, the second day I took the final earthbending test, and the third was spent loading up the boat to head to the Southern Water Tribe. 

The fourth and final round goes by slower than all the ones before it, with both of us exhausted but still giving our all. Mustang’s power is terrifying, at one point creating a wall of roaring fire so tall and wide I can’t even see the late afternoon sky through the burning barricade. 

I inhale sharply, squaring my stance and curling all my focus onto my hands, which are held out on either side of my body. I close my eyes—not wise in a fight, I know, but the neverending view of blinding red fire is intimidating enough to break my focus, which would be even more disastrous given the maneuver I’m about to attempt. Then, letting out the shaky breath I’d taken earlier, I focus on pulling the force of the fire around me. 

I feel the heat creep closer and closer, and keep my eyes stubbornly shut so I don’t need to stare the horrible roar in the face as I bring it flush with my body. Once I feel I can’t take the heat any closer, I focus on directing it around my body, first around my legs, then up my torso, around my arms, and finally covering my head. Slowly, my feet lift from the ground, and I’m brought into the core of my creation—a massive fire spirit. 

Of course, I’d need to be in the Avatar state to actually summon the Spirit of Fire, a temperamental lizard phoenix who I’d met only once in the Spirit World and who singed my eyebrows off with an irritated huff. However, If there’s enough fire for me to work with, I can channel it into the Spirit’s shape around my body, the same way Avatar Aang had done to protect the Northern Water Tribe in his day, just without the added help of the actual Spirit. With his most recent attack, Mustang has finally given me enough ammo to actually do some damage.

Now, high above the treetops, I guide the fiery lizard’s head back and open its mouth with a roar that’s entirely my own. Then I clap my hands together and kick both legs out, shooting a breath of fire from its mouth straight at Mustang. He dodges, but I’d been anticipating that, bracketing the phoenix wings on either side of him and flicking the Spirit form’s long tail out to wrap around Mustang and toss him back.

He lands with a grunt, fingers poised to snap, and I pull back in another dragon-like roar, opening my monster’s mouth to shoot another plume of fire out at him. He stands his ground, which I had not been anticipating, and I’m about to pull back to keep from actually turning him to char, when my control over the beast flickers, then halts. 

I frown and pull my elbow back to swat my wing at him, but it does nothing. It’s almost as if the flame has completely frozen (ha) in place. 

An ear-splitting snap resounds from where Mustang is standing, and all at once the fire Spirit’s form, along with me in its white hot center, is fluttering away harmlessly into the sky in a shower of sparks. I grapple for control over the fire again, but it won’t listen, and I remember too late that it had been Mustang’s fire originally, which meant it would behave better according to his desires. 

I have no choice but to relinquish what little hold I’d had over the element and allow myself to drop through the inferno and onto the ground far beneath me. I jet some fire from my hands and legs to cushion my fall, but I’m so worn out that I stagger onto my knees, right in front of Mustang’s outstretched hand, curled in the position to snap. 

“Three for me, I win,” he says with what might’ve been a cocky smirk if he wasn’t drenched in sweat and heaving breaths like he’d just run a marathon. 

“No shit, Mustang,” I chuckle, and allow him to pull me to my feet. I sway a little, but don’t fall again, thank the Spirits. “That was fucking. Awesome. ”

“Same to you,” Mustang says with a smile as I hear the uneven footsteps of Ed and the others come running out from behind the barricade.

“No, like, seriously, how the hell have you been hiding all that in these little gloves? That was insane! You could probably level a city with that kind of power!” I gush. Almost as soon as the words leave my mouth, though, something tells me I shouldn’t have said that. All four of the others stiffen, and Mustang’s smile has tightened into a grim line. He doesn’t meet my gaze. 

“Yeah, I could,” he says quietly. I’ve never been great at reading qi, but the atmosphere is just drenched in tension and regret. 

“Oh,” I mutter weakly. Has… Has Mustang levelled a city before?

“Uh, what creature did you make at the end there, Luce?” Ed interjects, clearing his throat uncomfortably. 

I blink. “Oh! It was a giant lizard phoenix, the shape of the Fire Spirit. I’ve only been able to do that a handful of times, You need a lot of fire to create it and I’m only able to produce so much from my bending.” I’m blabbering, I know, but my muscles are twitching from exhaustion and I can still feel the outright grief bleeding from Mustang’s qi like an open wound. 

“Well it was super cool. If Mustang hadn’t taken control of the thing it would’ve been your win for sure.”

“Thanks Ed,” I say with a smile.

And then my knees buckle. 

After about a thousand assurances that I’m fine, just a little fatigued, we spend about an hour going over the fight, pointing out attacks I could and couldn’t use in the exam, adjusting techniques, and generally roasting the hell out of my firebending. Like, I’m sorry I was trained in martial arts? Where I come from, all those backflips were absolutely necessary, Hawkeye, no I wasn’t ‘just showing off.’

Mustang barely says a word throughout the briefing, and while I can't really read his emotions anymore, his face is still pulled tight in a regretful grimace by the time we’re finished. Hawkeye goes to collect the extra food she’d gathered, along with more water since both me and Mustang have already drained the bottles we’d brought to the field, and I decide I’ve had enough. 

“Okay,” I huff. “Storytime.”

Ed shoots a questioning brow up, and Hawkeye’s brown eyes flick between me and Mustang uncertainly. 

“This might take a while, so…” I grimace and stomp on the earth, erecting five blocky brick chairs around us, and a cylindrical fire pit in the middle, which I fill with a couple branches airbended from the outskirts of the clearing, and light with a quick firebending punch. 

“Y/N, what’re you—” Ed starts, but I flick my fingers and shoot a little wedge of earth beneath his toes, unbalancing him so he topples perfectly onto the chair I’d built behind him. 

“Hush now, child, now is the time to gather ‘round the fire and tell stories about the days of old,” I croon in my best wacky old lady voice. “Or, in other words, backstory time. I obviously said something that upset Mustang earlier, and I’ve been kinda dyin’ to know the whole story behind your supposed coup d'etat and Gnome in the Bucket or whatever you called it.” I huff out a strained breath, grimacing against the words I’m going to say next. “Also, I’m sure at least Ed’s curious about my Avatar upbringing, so I’m hoping we’ll all spill over a meal and then call it a day. A sort of ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ situation.”

“I don’t know if—” Havoc starts to say, but I kick another minor earthquake under everyone’s feet and send them tumbling into their own seats, and Hawkeye sighs, unpacking the sandwiches she’d grabbed from the mess hall and distributing them amongst us.

“Great! I guess I’ll start. And uh, this is a bit of a long story, so please bear with me,” I cross one leg under the other, leaning my chin onto my hand so I’m not tempted to fidget. I blow out a long breath, gazing into the fire so I don’t need to look up at the others. Spirits, where to begin?

“I guess… I guess I’ll just start at the very beginning. So in my world, dimension, whatever you wanna call it, people are born with the ability to bend elements, and it’s very reliant on genetics. Depending on how ‘watered down’ your bloodline is, you could be born with either very strong or very weak bending abilities. For most people, there’s a certain threshold that you can’t pass, no matter how often you train or how deeply you meditated. And a lot of the time, you’re not born with any bending abilities at all. You just… don’t get the gene. And it’s not a big deal, for most people, it’s like being born with blue eyes versus brown. You just have it or you don’t, and even those from long lines of strong benders have about a 50/50 chance of producing a nonbender. 

“This wouldn’t be relevant information in most cases, but unfortunately I’m not most cases. Ed and Havoc will remember that I was born to a clan of extraordinarily strong earthbenders, with all sorts of crazy rules and superstitions. I wasn’t allowed to be carried, even as a baby, because that would’ve been ‘severing my connection with the Earth,’ which was supposedly one of the ways your earthbending could become weaker. I was taught to crush stones to sand before I was taught to crawl, and stamp footprints into the ground when I took my first steps. Earthbending was… it was deity. I could recite a thousand scriptures for you right now about how much more superior our element was compared to the others, and how blasphemous otherbenders were, to sully an art given by our great element and use it to bend other materials. In essence, water, fire, and airbenders were the lowest of the low. And even though nonbenders weren’t blessed by the Earth, at least they hadn’t defiled the art of bending by trying it on anything else. 

“The other thing about bending is that it’s largely reliant on race and region. Until about a hundred years ago, all water, earth, fire, and air benders looked a certain way, distinct from the others, and lived on opposite edges of the globe. Rarely did they cross, and rarely did genetics make it that two elements could be born to the same family. Now, of course, it’s kind of impossible to keep travellers from making families with people of different elements, and in a lot of coastal regions it’s near impossible to distinguish which element belongs to which race. But… my clan wasn’t close to the coast. We were deep in the heart of Earth kingdom, most of the people in my community, myself included, had never seen an otherbender before in their lives. 

“That all changed when I was eleven years old, and a group of travelling refugees from the mountains far East of my village came through, fleeing a civil war that had broken out on the opposite coast of the Earth kingdom. Since they were coastal, and therefore had a lot of different element people cross through their community, there was a mix of benders, and, like I said, it was impossible to tell who bended what based on appearance.”

I stop to take a painful bite out my sandwich, forcing the lump in my throat down. I’ve never told this story to anyone, in fact, I haven’t even allowed myself to dwell on it unless I’m trapped in a nightmare. 

“Since they stepped foot on our land, our Earth, the holiest of holiness, my Elders considered it a direct attack on our way of life. They’d done nothing more than walk where we walked, but those assholes decided it was the same as if they’d spat in our faces,” I blink away the angry tears springing to my eyes, feeling my mouth curl into a snarl. Good. Better I be angry than heartbroken. 

“The greatest earthbenders in our community were gathered, and even though I was just eleven, more than a decade younger than the second youngest in the group of elites, I was brought along. Not only was I trained to hell since I was a baby, but I was also the Avatar, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was insanely overpowered, and just… so excited that my Elders thought I was so good. Good enough to join the whole council!

“So, I sat at the table in my nicest earthen greens, I can still remember how my heart was racing, I had to hold onto my knees to keep from kicking back and forth with glee. The High Elder, a man my father’s age who had been my master since I’d turned six, stood up, and declared that every person seated at that table had been specially selected to purge the evil from our holy lands. It sounded very poetic when he said it, he even turned to me and fucking smiled , made our mission sound like a divine rite of passage, when really we’d just been tasked with the genocide of a group of harmless refugees.”

Havoc and Ed suck in a sharp breath, but Hawkeye and Mustang simply share a grim glance before turning back to me. 

“Since I was still just a kid, even though I coulda earthbended half those bozos to shame, they decided I would be better suited going after the easier targets. The ones that wouldn’t have refined their bending as well as their elders, and who I would have evenly matched in a physical fight.”

“You don’t mean…” Havoc’s voice is a strained whisper at my left. I squeeze my eyes shut. 

“ Lazuli, they said, the Earth has commanded that you exterminate all sinners under the age of eighteen. Their blood spilled will nourish our great element and fortify your bending. Do you accept this calling? And, since I was terrified, and eleven years old, I said, ‘I accept,’ and was sent away to don my battle gear, which had been tailored down from an adult’s size to fit my tiny body. I was shaking with fear, but my Elders thought it was excitement, and I guess I didn’t do anything to dissuade that idea. I’d always been the perfect disciple. I memorized every scripture, I performed every ritual, and I bended like I bled rock and ore. And as I was preparing to set out with the rest of the battalion, the High Elder found me and put his hand against my shoulder, and whispered, ‘ Precious Lazuli, you don’t need to look so determined, I have faith in your abilities, as does the great element beneath your bare feet. Defend your home with a smile, and I will reward you. ’ Then he kissed my cheek and reared up beside me at the front line, and had the pleasure of watching my face stretch out into the coldest, most terror-stricken smile you’d ever see on a child. 

“I knew I couldn’t do it. I think I knew even before I got my specific calling, that what we were doing was wrong, and I wouldn’t be able to match up to my High Elder’s expectations. Still, I went along with the rest of them, surfing on the earth with a face that said I fully intended to spill infant blood, and with no plan in mind that might help me do otherwise. We crested the last hill before the camp of refugees, they hadn’t gotten far because they were mostly women, children, and elderly—the people who couldn’t help fight in their civil war at the coast. 

“The High Elder raised his hand, the signal to fire, and I just… fell into autopilot. I surged forward with the rest of my battalion, the smile still glued to my face, because the High Elder was still watching and I don’t think I had the mental capacity to tell it to do anything different. I remember shooting up into the air, and—it sounds stupid, but all I could think was, this looks like stew. I was high enough over the site that the muted colors from the tents and torches and people kinda blurred with the darkness of the night and it really just looked like my mom’s beef and carrot stew. Pretty sure it was just my brain disassociating from the situation, but still. I jumped down into the stew, and I landed right in front of this little girl who had just woken up from the noise of my people slaughtering hers. She looked up at me and asked ‘where’s mama?’ And in her eyes I just… I saw my siblings. I had four little siblings, I was the oldest—honestly how did those fuckers ever think that it would work?!” 

I growl and stomp on the ground, cracks forming under my feet. 

“I should’ve been the last one chosen to… to kill kids, and yet! There I was! Face-to-face with my first charge! But of course, I couldn’t fucking do it, so I turned around and leapt for another tent, hoping to just… I don’t know, hide until it was all over, maybe ‘accidentally’ get caught in a crossfire and end up dead, my blood feeding the Earth that I still worshipped at that point to make up for the children I wouldn’t be able to murder myself. I decided I’d take eternal damnation from my religion over massacre, and just really was being super pathetic and sorry for myself. So I stumbled away, headed for the nearest hiding place, and I tripped. Right on my face. My nose is still a little crooked here because I fucking broke it in that fall.” I tap my nose on the side where it juts out just a bit more than the other side, not enough to be noticeable unless you’re touching it, but still, crooked.

“I turned around to see what I’d tripped on, and it was an arm. Someone’s severed arm was lying beside an explosion of blood, and at the center was a massive boulder bearing our community’s crest. And the reason I’m not breaking down in horrified sobs describing this is because the next moment I was swept away into the Avatar state.”

I take another bite. 

“See, when an Avatar is under extreme emotional or physical stress, they’ll go into what’s called the Avatar state, where their consciousness basically takes the backseat, and their bending takes over. Their eyes glow white, and their powers become… immeasurable, honestly. All of a sudden, the Spirits of every Avatar who has ever lived surges into you, including their bending prowess, and they’re able to do impossible things. I went into that state, and when I woke up, I was floating above a mountain range made of pure steel. On one side, my people were trapped in prisons made of ice. On the other, the refugee camp lay in ruins, the people and their dead about a hundred miles west in a massive wave of water I’d created to get them away from us.

“The Avatar state is extremely taxing, so I only had a few moments of consciousness before I fell out of the sky, but it was enough to see the absolute hatred on each of my peoples’ faces. They had to wait until the ice melted to move again, and by then, the refugees had plenty of time to flee, far out of what would have been worth it to pursue. So the next time I awoke, I was back home, in platinum chains, stripped down to my underwear and beaten within an inch of my life while the council decided my fate. As the Avatar, I’d taken the blessing the Earth gave me and destroyed it worse than any other living soul could comprehend, I’d not only become an otherbender, but an allbender. It was like, every sin you could imagine, focused into one being. I’d ‘deceived’ my Elders, my family, everyone, and I was going to pay the price. 

“I almost died that day. But, since I’d already forsaken my family, I decided it couldn’t really get much worse and decided to disgrace the Earth once more by first causing an earthquake to loosen my chains at their posts, then setting the hall on fire and getting the hell out of there. Then I rode an earth surf out to the steel mountain range I’d made, knowing that I was not only the fastest in my whole community, but also the strongest, which meant it would take them weeks to get through my mountains. I did it in a day.

“I was nearing the end of my rope, I was practically naked and starving, with a whole bunch of broken bones from when the Council had punished me before I awoke, when I caught up with the refugees. And even though I’d been a part of the group that had killed almost half their numbers, they welcomed me with open arms. I found out they were from a city called Paeonia, and were headed towards Ba Sing Se, where I’d be able to tell a master that I was the Avatar and get started on my training. Those refugees became my new family, which is more than I’ll ever deserve, giving me a new last name and helping me change my first from Lazuli—a type of rock and the pride of my old community—to Y/N. My name now stands as a reminder to never hurt another innocent person, and to continue forward no matter how hard I think things will get. I’ll be sweet and strong like the people of Paeonia, and I’ll become the greatest Avatar I can be in order to protect every living soul in this world or the next. That is my new calling, and I’ll be damned if I don’t fulfill it.”

I bend down and snag onto another bite of my neglected sandwich, cheeks burning with… well, a lot of different emotions. Shame, pride, grief, embarrassment, bitter hope, all of them swirl around my heart enough to make me sick, so I just close my eyes and focus on eating something before I decide I want to vomit. 

They probably think I’m a monster now. I mean, serves me right. I deserve no less for the things I did, even if I was a child. I was still a definitive part of the Paeonia refugees’ deaths, and I will never stop repenting for my crimes, no matter how many times the surviving refugees tried to tell me it wasn’t my fault. I was the Avatar, and I failed them. 

The circle is silent, save the crackling of the fire in front of us. 

I cough. “ANYWAYS,” I say between hasty bites of my sandwich. “Who wants to go next?”

“Don’t think you’re getting off the hook so easily,” Havoc warns. My stomach sinks like a lead ball, my heart shrinking down to the size of a pin. I curl into myself, avoiding the piercing blue gaze that I know is filled with disgust and hate. He’d trusted me, and I’d thrown it in his face, hiding the truth about my past and my terrible deeds, he probably thinks I’m pathetic, monstrous, a waste of space, cruel, wicked, treacherous—

Before the tears gathering in my eyes have the chance to fall, I’m being wrapped up in an embrace so tight it takes my breath away. Havoc lifts me off my seat, and I turn, eyes wide, to look at his face, but it’s pressed against my shoulder. Could it be? Does he really still want to be close to me? Even after explaining everything I’ve done? 

“Uh oh Y/N, now nothing can save you. Havoc can be an even bigger hugger than Armstrong when he wants to be,” Ed snorts. I turn blurry eyes over to the other three seated around the fire, and I must look ridiculous, with my arms trapped between Havoc’s and my torso, my feet dangling off the ground and my head just barely peeking over Havoc’s shoulder, but the only emotion I see in their eyes is pure understanding. It appears that not a single one of them has the good sense to hate me. 

With that revelation, the tears in my eyes finally do spill over, and I let out a hitched sob, burying my face into the fabric of Havoc’s shoulder. There’s a rustle of movement, and I feel Havoc take a few steps back and land back on his seat, with me still curled in his arms. He helps me adjust my legs so I’m seated bridal-style on his lap, and I don’t even have the brainspace to be embarrassed, my brain too flooded with relief. 

The tears don’t stop, and I don’t try to hide them, instead allowing myself to just be held for a moment. It’s so rare that I get to be held. If today is any confirmation, however, it seems that Havoc is more than willing to supply a lifetime’s worth of hugs to make up for lost time. And I know I don’t deserve it, not while I’ve abandoned my home world and failed to save so many people, the ones in the bank fire, the fallen Paeonians, and so many more. But here, swaddled by his warmth and protective strength, Havoc makes me feel like maybe someday I could be forgiven, which is more hope than I’ve had in a long time. 

The rest of the evening, which is steadily creeping into night, is spent rehashing old wounds. I learn of Ishval, a country of people that Mustang and Hawkeye had been ordered to exterminate by a corrupt leader in the name of creating immortal beings. I find out who Dwarf in the Flask was, along with the tragic story of Ed and Al’s family. I listen with tears in my eyes to the countless tales of loss and pain, how Havoc had at one point needed a wheelchair, and Mustang had gone blind. I also discover that the faint, unnameable scent I’d caught on Havoc’s clothes the few times I’d been close was actually cigarettes, and that until about a year ago when he’d managed to quit for good he’d never been seen without one caught between his teeth.

I realize that these people have been through so much more than I could ever imagine, enough to fill hours of time with grim stories, but that they’re also the strongest, most hopeful people I’ve ever met. Through thick and thin, they remained determined, eyes set on a goal that others would’ve called impossible. 

Now all that’s left is getting Mustang to the seat of Fuhrer, and they can start healing every last scourge on their country left behind by the corrupt military. It’s so fucking admirable, what they’re all trying to achieve, I can’t believe I’m being offered a place in their circle of trust. It’s one of the highest honors I’ve ever been given, second only to my last name. Not even being the Avatar tops that, not when all I’d needed to earn it was be born at the right time. 

It’s not until the fire has died down to warm glowing embers and the sky has been engulfed by a blanket of stars that Hawkeye calls an end to our little storytime, announcing that Mustang has quite a bit of paperwork waiting for him in the morning and that he best be getting to bed at a reasonable hour if he doesn’t want to get shot for sleeping on the job. 

Havoc still hasn’t relinquished his hold on me, and as reluctant as I am to leave his warm embrace, I move to stand and follow the others back to the car. When I try, his arms just tighten around me, and he stands up, holding me the same way he had earlier this morning after the bank heist. It feels like it was years ago, even though I know it was only this morning. 

“I told you, you’re not getting off the hook that easily,” he scolds when I shoot him a questioning look, and I have to turn away to keep him from seeing my blush. 

I reach an absent hand out over our impromptu campsite to bury the rocks back into the earth, and smother the embers with another slab of rock so they don’t blow into the trees and start a forest fire. Then I pull back and let Havoc carry me as far as the car, demanding that he at least let me sit in a seat by myself—honestly, I’m not a baby. 

(Please keep holding me anyways.)

Havoc compromises by slinging a protective arm around my shoulder once we get back into the car, and I let my eyelids droop shut, the smooth vibrations of the car rolling speedily across rocky pathways lulling me to sleep without a fight. 

Somehow, I know I’m not going to have any nightmares.