Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Collision ❯ Triumphant Return ( Chapter 2 )

(Disclaimer: I do not own Full Metal Alchemist. All rights go to FMA’s creator. I do, however, own the plot to this story. That is all.)

Triumphant Return

The air smelled stale and old, slightly damp with a hint of desolation. That was the scent that first greeted Ed’s nose as he slowly faded back into consciousness and opened his eyes reluctantly. Concrete greeted him on all sides, and he sat up quickly with a gasp.

“Impossible,” he whispered, staring in wide-eyed horror at the underground city he had left two years ago. There was an eerie silence, save for his rapid breath, the roar of lost souls still echoing throughout the miles of wasteland. His heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest as he realized he was back in the world he was born in. Back to where alchemy existed.

But…how?

A moan from beside him distracted him from his frantic musings, and he quickly turned around to find Al pushing himself into a sitting position, rubbing his head.

“That hurt,” he remarked, patting the dust off his body as he stood up. He froze as it finally registered in his mind that he was no longer walking along a river on his way back home. “Ni-san?” he asked, his voice shaking slightly in disbelief and the beginning of panic. “Are we where I think we are?”

Ed sighed, dropping his head. “Yeah. We’re back. I wonder what hap-GAH! Al, get off me!” He started gasping for breath as Al grabbed him around the neck and hugged him as hard as he could.

“We’re back, we’re back, we’re back!” He chanted happily, not noticing that Ed’s face was starting to turn blue from the lack of oxygen. Finally he registered what was going on when Ed was frantically pounding against his arm. “Oh, sorry! I couldn’t help it!”

Ed dragged in a lungful of the blessed, though still stale, air. “Are you trying to kill me?!” He sighed and rolled his eyes as Al laughed nervously, scratching his head. “Anyway, how did we get back?”

Al looked serious for a second. “Someone opened the gate from this side with a transmutation circle. It reacted with the transmutation circle on our side and….”

He fell silent, but Ed knew they were both thinking the same thing. To open the gate, there needed to be a sacrifice. Since there was no sacrifice on their side, that meant that someone had sacrificed something on this side. Something big. Ed had a sick feeling that more human lives had been traded for someone to get what they wanted. How many had suffered this time? What child lost a mother, or mother lost a child? Whose life was irrevocably changed this time? When Ed found the bastard that did this, nothing would save him.

“God DAMN it!” he suddenly burst out, kicking the nearest pile of rubble with his metal leg in a fit of temper. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” His fists clenched to his sides as his frame trembled. “It’s always like this,” he whispered. “Equal trade.” He laughed humorlessly as Al remained silent.

Equal trade was such bullshit, one that he had centered his entire life around, only to realize that not everything in life was equal to something. Some things were priceless, things that could never be traded. Human life was one of them. And now another human life had been wasted.

Ed took a deep breath as he tried to calm down. Getting angry right now wouldn’t help the situation. “We’re underneath Central. We’ll go to headquarters and find out what’s going on.”

“We can see Colonol Mustang and the others,” Al pointed out happily as he began to head towards the place that would lead them to aboveground.

Ed’s eyebrow twitched. “Great reunion.”

Mustang was going to get a kick out of this.



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Being Fuhrer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Correction: being Fuhrer wasn’t exactly what former Colonel Mustang thought it was going to be. Yes, sure, he had the power to do basically whatever he wanted, including changing the dress code of the female officers (although he hadn’t quite gotten the gumption to do that. Being faced with Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye would force any man to reconsider, even if he was the Flame Alchemist), but he didn’t take into account all of the damn paperwork that went along with the job.

“Can’t we just hire somebody to do this?” he muttered under his breath as he signed a release for something or other. It all tended to fade into a blur after an hour or two. Icy silence greeted his question, and he dared a peek at his lieutenant. He pouted when he received only a glare. So she was still mad at him for not getting his work done earlier. So what if she had reminded him a week ago of the steadily growing pile on his desk, she still didn’t have to treat him like such a child. He was the Fuhrer, damn it!

He started to inch his way back slowly from the desk, fully intent on making a quick escape, but the loud cock of a gun was heard in the quiet of the room and he froze. After a moment of quick deliberation, he picked up his pen again and started writing. The click that signaled he was safe came soon after, and he let out another dejected sigh.

A commotion outside of his office made his head snap up, just as Havoc burst into the office.

“Fuhrer! Sir, we just got word Lior’s been destroyed!”

Full silence greeted his statement as the words slowly sunk in to those in the office.

“Would you care to repeat that, Havoc?” Mustang said slowly. Surely he didn’t just hear what he thought he’d heard. The blood drained out of his face as Havoc reiterated his words.

“All of the townspeople, sir, they’re all gone! Witnesses say they saw a light surround the entire city, like that of an alchemy circle, and then all of a sudden…” The man faded into silence as an undecipherable look crossed his face.

“All of a sudden what?” Hawkeye demanded, even though she had a feeling she didn’t want to hear what Havoc had to say.

“Then….and then….there were…there were…”

“Spit it out, Havoc!” Mustang said, banging his fist on the desk, causing the other man to jump in trepidation and screw his eyes shut.

“The screams, Sir.”

“Damn it,” Roy cursed softly, and he saw the shock on Riza’s face.

Lior had been destroyed. Again. In the blink of an eye, a whole city had disappeared. It seemed almost impossible that so many human lives had been taken so suddenly, but he had an inkling as to where and why they had gone. Roy had no doubt that they would not be able to come back, not unless a miracle happened. They had been sacrificed to the gate between two worlds. Like two brothers had been sacrificed before. He knew that alchemy was behind this, but what would be big enough to sacrifice a whole city? Had something gone wrong, or did they have a new enemy? If anything, he would pay. Pay for harming what Roy Mustang had sworn on his life to protect. But first, he needed to find the bastard.

“Sir?” Hawkeye said. “What do you need us to do?”

He paused briefly to give a mental thanks to his old Lieutenant. There was no hesitation on her part, and she knew him well enough to know that he would want vengeance.

“Gather the team,” he said, the authority he’d seemed to be born with coating his voice, making them stand at attention. “We leave tomorrow morning for Lior to investigate what happened there. Prepare for a hunt as well. Whoever did this will not escape. Dismissed!”

“Sir!” they both saluted and began to leave his office.

They had barely opened the door that had slammed shut due to Havoc’s hasty entrance than a louder commotion started.

“Good God, what now?” Roy muttered and he saw Riza’s jaw drop. Now that was really interesting. He walked to the doorway himself, and had to resist the urge to let his own mouth go slack.

“Colonol Mustang!” a young, familiar voice piped up as the owner of a voice walked down the hall with a sullen young man following.

“Alphonse?” Mustang said in disbelief. He looked behind the boy to see none other than Edward Elric, a scowl on his mature face. “Full-metal?”

“Don’t look so happy to see us,” Ed said in a sneering voice. “I don’t think my heart could take it.”

“But how…why?” Mustang was not one to stutter, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Full-metal and Alphonse were back in this world. It should have been impossible unless…

…suddenly everything clicked in his mind with such clarity, he blinked. “Gentlemen, in my office. Now.”

Even Riza blinked at the hard tone her former Colonel had used as she ushered the two boys, no, young men, into the office she had just vacated. She closed the door in Havoc’s face as he tried to follow, communicating with just a look.

Ed was looking around the office when the door closed. “Man, this is nicer than your last office. I can’t believe that you actually became the Fuh-” His sentence was cut off as with one smooth move, Mustang hand a hand around his throat and his back against the wall.

“What did you do?” he asked in a low, deadly voice that made Riza do a mental doubletake. She’d never heard that tone from him before and was unsure if she should stop him…or if she could stop him.

“Brother!” Alphonse said in a panicked voice, but Ed shook his head frantically for him to stay back. The throat around his neck was firm and tight, and completely unmovable. He knew the Flame Alchemist was a formidable man, but never before had that realization made itself clear in that moment. In the same low voice he asked, “What do you mean?”

The hand tightened minutely, and Ed was finding it hard to breath. The Fuhrer’s voice spoke again in that same monotone voice, signaling that the man himself was working hard to reign in his emotions, another reason to be worried. “Just what in the hell were you thinking? I thought that you valued human life, swore to protect it, and yet you sacrifice people just to make it back to this world? Thousands of innocent lives just so you could be happy…”

“What?! What are you talking about?” Ed choked out.

Mustang’s eyes flashed dangerously as he gave the Full-metal alchemist a sharp shake, signaling that his patience was wearing thin. “Don’t give me that bullshit! Lior’s destroyed, and on the same day, you and Alphonse reappear in this world. If you think that my intelligence in low enough to not put two and two together…” His voice trailed off as Ed slumped down.

“Lior’s been destroyed,” he said in an empty voice, staring at the floor. Mustang noticed his hands were clenched. When Riza stole a look at Alphonse, the shocked look of disbelief and anguish on his face almost took her breath away. “So that’s what happened,” Ed continued on, his voice still eerily quiet and resigned. “I was wondering what had been sacrifice when we found ourselves under Central but I never thought…never thought that that city would have been used again.” He looked up as he was set back on the ground, almost gently. He met the now inscrutable eyes of his former Colonel, not knowing that his own eyes radiated a grief so deep it was familiar to the Fuhrer. He had felt it himself in the past.

“What happened, Ed?” Roy’s anger had left him, and now he just wanted answers.
“I don’t know. Al and I were in the other world beyond the gate. Al had drawn a transmutation circle in the sand for old times sakes, and the next thing we knew, we were back here.”

“It’s my fault,” Al said quietly. “If I hadn’t drawn that stupid transmutation circle, none of this would have happened.”

“No,” Mustang broke in. “Someone from this side deliberately sacrificed Lior to open that gate. To bring you back, or just coincidence, I don’t know, but we need to find out. I assume that you want to go to Lior with us to catch whoever did this.”

Ed gave a wicked smile, and Mustang was forced to notice how much he had grown up. How much both boys had grown up. He blinked, and said in a deliberately surprised voice, “You finally got taller.”

A vein popped out in Ed’s forehead. “What happened to your eye patch?” he replied in kind. “I had finally gotten used to the idea of you having that awful thing.”

“People heal,” Mustang replied with a tight smile.

Al sweat dropped, apparently sucked out of his depression by their bickering. “Everything’s still the same.”



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After Riza had settled Ed and Alphonse in a spare room at headquarters, she headed back to the Fuhrer’s office to talk to her commander. She found him sitting in the dark of his office with just the moonlight shining through the windows, casting him in the shadows. He had his hands folded in front of his mouth, staring moodily into nothingness. It was a look she had seen far too often, one of the few who was actually allowed to see past the mask he wore on the outside. This was the true Roy Mustang.

“I hope you’re not brooding over the fact that Ed’s almost as tall as you now,” she said loudly, causing him to jump and stare at her. Good, she thought, don’t let him get too absorbed in his thoughts where I can’t follow.

“You exaggerate. If he was almost as tall as me, he wouldn’t be able to walk properly with his old automail. He hasn’t been tuned-up since the last time he was here,” Roy said finally. There was a companionable silence for a few moments before Riza spoke again.

“Why do you think this happened, Sir? Why Lior again?”

Roy looked out the window at the moon, pensive once more. “I don’t know,” he admitted. That was just another sign of how much he trusted Riza...to anyone else, he would pretend that he knew everything. “I don’t know if Lior was targeted on purpose, or if it was caught in the backlash of something bigger.”

“Something bigger?” she said with her brows furrowed. He spared her a brief smile.

“We need to keep a close eye on Ed and Alphonse on this journey.”

“Ed and Al? Why?”

“I think that someone is targeting them. Someone that purposely brought them back.”

“What makes you think that, Sir?”

“I have this…feeling. Call it a hunch. But I think someone is after Ed and Al.” His face showed a mild annoyance, as if it bothered him to not know why he thought that. But something had been tugging at the back of his mind and just didn’t feel right about Ed and Al’s appearance.

“Sir, I think that what you’re proposing is impossible,” she said carefully. “Even if someone was trying to bring back Ed and Al, they couldn’t have possibly known that Al had done a transmutation circle in the other world. To have both transmutation circles happen at the exact same point in time…the statistics of that are almost unthinkable.”

He stared at her for a long moment, making her resist the urge to squirm. Then he gave her another small smile, this one a little more…intimate, for lack of a better word.

“See that’s why I like you, Hawkeye. You’re not afraid to tell me when I’m wrong.”

“Someone has to, Sir,” she said, hoping that he wouldn’t be able to see how that small smile affected her. He was just complimenting her as a fellow officer, that was it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Another moment passed in charged silence, before he seemed to blink and shake his thoughts away. Then he leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head, stretching.

“You’re probably right,” he said breezily. “The odds of that happening to Ed is virtually impossible. Forget I said anything.”

She took that as her dismissal and stood up to walk to the door of the office. However, as she stole a glance behind her, seeing Roy’s face basked in moonlight once more, mask back in place, she couldn’t keep herself from opening her mouth.

“I’ll keep an extra eye on Ed and Al, regardless, if it’s all the same to you, Sir.”

She didn’t catch the expression of mild surprise, and then another small smile on his lips as she left.



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The night was late (or the morning was early) when Al awoke to find himself alone in their room. Groggily he looked around the sparse room, trying to find out where his brother had disappeared to. Slipping out of bed, he trudged to the door to look out into the hall, and sighed when he saw Ed sitting on the window sill, one leg dangling out.

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

Ed didn’t look away from gazing at the moon when he answered. “I’m just thinking about some things. I’m sorry if I disturbed your sleep.”

Al didn’t respond and Ed finally tore his eyes away from the scenery to meet the shrewd eyes of his brother. It was amazing how Al could know what a person was thinking, even if that person didn’t know it themselves.

“Are you worried about what you’re going to do now that you’re back in this world?”

Ed laughed humorlessly. “Return to being a dog of the military, I suppose. I don’t know how to be anything else but an alchemist.”

“It’s not just being a dog of the military. You can help people with your alchemy. I can help too, now. We’ll be dogs together.”

Ed smiled at his brother. “Thanks, Al. We’ll do our best now that we’re back, right?”

Al beamed. “Right.” He walked up to look out at the starry sky, and said almost casually, “When are we going to visit Winry?”

He could feel Ed tense up beside him. “I…don’t know. I haven’t thought that far yet.”

“Bull,” Al said. “You’re afraid of what she’ll think now. This is the second time you’ve been back, but you’ve been gone for so long, and now you wonder if she even cares anymore.” He caught Ed’s scowl and knew he had been correct. His brother had always been easy to read. “You don’t need to worry, you know. This is Winry, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Ed said. After Al had gone back to bed, his thoughts turned to the blonde mechanic once more. Of course he remembered. He couldn’t stop remembering. Her eyes, her smile, her voice…just her. He had grown up, and found himself missing her more than he thought possible. And now that he was back…

He sighed. Why did things have to be so complicated?

All that kept running through his head until he saw the beginnings of the sunrise was how Rizenbool was right on the route to Lior.



(A/N: I apologize for the lateness of this chapter. I’m not going to make any excuses, but I would also not appreciate any notes on, “jeez, what took you so long,” either. Life is hard. Thank you to all who read and review this chapter. I hope to get the next chapter out sooner. I was caught on a writers block for a LONG time, and I think I’m going to get out of this soon.

Reviews are GREATLY appreciated.

Mujitsu)