Archive of Our Own

The Principle of Mentalism

–The Principle of Mentalism employs the belief that all things originate within the mind. For anything to exist, there must have first been a thought, and then a manifestation of that thought. Everything that happens to an individual is a result of the mental state that preceded it.

 “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”
—Goethe

Rush Valley has to be the oddest little town has Hohenheim ever had the pleasure of coming across.

Not that oddness is a bad thing. Oh, no, quite the contrary. When you live for so long and you see so much, finding rare little things that still surprise you is as pleasant as it is elusive, and my, was it growing elusive. After a while, patterns began to emerge within human behavior, and suddenly it all becomes dreadfully predictable—things that should change don’t, and no one ever really learns, which makes it all the more tragic. After a while, it grows into a rather tiresome endeavor, not just living so long but also the fact that these patterns jump out at you immediately, to the point where the endings become so painfully predictable. Yet, there are still some things that throw him off a little, and that pleases him to no end.

Like automail.

It’s a fantastic invention in his opinion. One that would have been sorely coveted back in Xerxes had it still existed at the time of the technology’s inception. The ability to graft metal limbs onto a human body, metal limbs that are fully functioning and of little inconvenience to the user (aside from maintenance and care, which is apparently tedious, but the point is they actually function like normal limbs) is truly remarkable. And surprisingly advanced. Perhaps he gave too little credit to the fledgling nation of Amestris. For a bundle of independent states that only pulled itself together into an amalgamated nation only three hundred and fifty years ago, it’s surprisingly advanced, surprisingly powerful.

Hah. Only three hundred years. What a thought.

But it is night now, meaning that the streets are deserted and the mechanics that are the town’s lifeblood have closed up shop for the day. In response, the liveliness that littered the streets has instead poured itself into various establishments, like the tavern he’s currently residing. It’s dimly lit, with tables that were neither new nor old and floors that are a little too sticky, and is really a place people only come because the booze is good and there’s no place with better furnishings. Hohenheim finds himself at a front row seat of tonight’s drunken exploits—people growing sloppy, eyes growing bleary and words beginning to slur, bawdy laughter filling the space and the banter growing gradually more boisterous. Humans, Hohenheim muses, are odd creatures, and they have the oddest ways of amusing themselves.

He sits in a shadowed, relatively private corner, nursing a tankard of ale. It’s not the best he’s ever had, nor is it the worst, but it could be a bit better. Rather strong. If he’s honest with himself, he isn’t completely sure what he’s doing here, in Rush Valley. In Amestris for that matter. He likes to avoid the still-young country, on account of some unnamed, instinctual aversion that keeps him from lingering too long within its borders. Perhaps it’s because the country is only as old as him, and he simply doesn’t like a reminder of how much time had passed since the fall of his home—Xerxes, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Dwarf (out there, somewhere, still out there), everything.

But then again, there remains this feeling—this needling, unsettling whisper that lingers in the pit of his gut. It tells him that something's off about the land here, something isn’t quite right. Or maybe it’s just one of the hundreds of thousands of souls he harbors, their thoughts bleeding into his own as they did from time to time.

He’s actually bound for the nation of Aerugo, Amestris’s southernmost neighbor. The mythos of Creta, Drachma, and Xing all turned up dry—there’s nothing in the ancient texts that indicated any solution to Hohenheim’s affliction—but perhaps there’s something for him in Aerugo. He’s long since learned not to get his hopes up, but still, it never hurts to check all possibilities.

(despite that, he still likes to avoid Amestris)

As he was on the train, however, he’d heard talk from the other passengers, all of them tourists and eager to visit the fabled automail capital. The train was stopping there, anyway, for a quick maintenance, and he thought, oh, what the hell. It wasn’t as though Aerugo was going anywhere.

And he isn’t disappointed. It’s a vibrant town, brimming with life and vigor. The automail mechanics are almost fanatical about their works, and the users seem almost arrogant as they show off their makes and models. Hohenheim personally thinks of it as a vanity show of some sort, but it isn’t a particularly bad vanity show. It was quite amusing to see some of the mechanics actually faint at one point.

The doors burst open, suddenly, and everyone in the room goes still. Hohenheim looked up from his book (a gift from a Cretan intellectual whom he had gotten along with quite well) just as a young woman barges, a strange sort of urgency to her gait. He watches her, incredulous of the way she seems to command the attention of the room despite her blatant lack of remarkableness—wavy brown hair pulled back in a bun-topped ponytail, battered-looking combat boots, a loose-fitting jump suit half-zipped over a grease-smudged shirt. Fevered murmurs overtake the souls within him as she marches up to the counter, drops into a stool with all the weight of an anvil, and Hohenheim just doesn’t understand—

She bangs her fist against the counter—hard. Hohenheim actually starts in his seat. Perhaps that’s why everyone’s so tense.

“Vincent!” the woman exclaims and oh, her voice is loud, but it’s warm with good humor. “Bring me the finest lager you’ve got! I’m celebrating tonight!”

With that, the tension in the air immediately fizzles out.

Hohenheim gets the distinct impression he’s missing something.

The barkeep only rolls his eyes in a manner that suggests good humor. “Well, geez, Pinako, you didn’t need to be so dramatic about it.”

The woman, who is apparently named Pinako, laughs boisterously and slaps the counter hard enough for it to be audible, even far in the back corner. “Dramatic is the only flavor I come in, sweetie.”

“I’m just glad she’s not pissed off this time,” murmurs someone close to Hohenheim a little too loudly. “Last time she came in, she was all in a frenzy about LeCoulte beating her out of some customers.”

“True,” agrees someone else. “Dominic’s the only one dumb enough to piss off the Pantheress of Resembool.”

“Right?” a third person scoffs. “Doesn’t he realize that she comes in here all the time when she’s a foul mood and rants loud enough to make the rafters shake? It’d be a different story if they kept their spats to themselves, but he’s the exact same way...”

Hohenheim arches a brow. She must be a mechanic then, if she were to have some sort of notoriety in an automail-dominated town like Rush Valley. And from the sound of it, she’s also got quite a temper to her, one that’s bad enough to make everyone wary of her fouler mood. Best to stay out of her way, he decides, and goes back to his book.

There’s a loud clink. When Hohenheim looks up, he finds himself pinned by a pair of intense brown eyes and a wicked smirk. That’s an expression that clearly spells out doom if there ever was one. The souls inside him murmur apprehensively.

“Well hello stranger,” says the woman named Pinako rather jovially as she collapses into the seat across from him. A frosty tankard of lager was slammed down before his book, and some of the foam has splashed onto the table, luckily missing the delicate paper pages. “Mind if I join you?”

Hohenheim blinks at her, bewildered. What is this. What is happening right now. “I... suppose I can’t stop you.”

“Great!” She grabs her tankard and takes an enormous swig. He watches in amazement as she drains half the mug before slamming it down with an exaggerated noise of satisfaction. Foam clings to her upper lip, thick and white.

That... can’t be human. It simply can’t be.

“Ahhh, that hits the spot.” She runs her tongue over her upper lip, licking away the foam. “Perfect for the day I’ve been having!”

“I see,” he says, if only to be polite. His gaze is already absently drifting back down to the Cretan text and the subject of metaphysics has begun to once again occupy his thoughts. Fascinating subject, metaphysics...

He hears the chair legs scratch against the uneven floorboards and a shadow is cast over the text. He glances up again, and she is peering down at him with a pensive expression on her pretty young face, brows furrows and mouth scrunched up on one side. Her gaze flits over the text, but from the way her brows knit and her pout tightens, he supposes that she can’t read Cretan, which is unsurprising because firstly, most people don’t dedicate themselves to studying languages like Hohenheim has, and secondly, Cretan is a notoriously tricky language. Not as tricky as Xingese, mind you, but tricky nonetheless.

“What the hell is that?” she mutters, glancing up with a dubious squint. She’s not quite leering, but she is definitely suspicious. “Some kind of dead language? Oh! Are you a professor or something?”

He arches a brow. “Are you interested in languages?”

“Not really,” Pinako answers dismissively, immediately easing back into her seat. Her hands find the handle of her tankard and she waves it around vaguely in the space between them, pale liquid sloshing around with each exaggerated jerk of her arm. “Only thing I’m interested in right now is the bottom of my glass!”

“Ah,” he responds, if only to be polite.

She flashes an easy smile, popping her elbow up on the table and cupping her jaw with her free hand. Her fingers cover half of her pearly teeth. “That, and the mysterious stranger that’s holed up in the back of the bar like a pariah.”

She’s odd, sniffs the soul of a florist by the name of Desdoa.

“[Agreed],” he murmurs in his native Xerxian tongue. Talking to the souls aloud helps to distinguish their thoughts from his own.

At the sound of his voice, Pinako perks up. “What was that?”

He turns back to the scritch-scratch symbols of the Cretan alphabet. “Nothing.”

There is a snort from the other end of the table, but nothing beyond that. Rather, he hears the sound of someone gulping something down too fast—which, wow, says a lot about this woman and her alcohol tolerance—before the tankard hits the table again. When he flicks his gaze over to it, briefly, he notices that it’s empty. Good gods.

“I’m Pinako, by the way. Pinako Rockbell. And you are?”

At this, he looks up again. Pinako Rockbell is leaning back in her chair, elbows perched on the back of the chair and one leg folded high above the other, knee jutting out sharply. Her smile is insouciant, eyes dancing with mischief, and her head is tilted to the left in an inquiring manner. Something tells him (perhaps it’s Colin, who has always been rather suspicious, that convinces him) that she is not going to leave anytime soon, so he tucks the book’s tassel in to mark his place and the closes it carefully, setting it aside with a resigned sigh.

“Van Hohenheim.”

Pinako’s brows rise incredulously, but she retains her smile. “Well. That’s a weird-ass name.”

Hohenheim takes a sip of his ale. Its warmth is pleasant in his mouth and helps to wash back the memory of a single, laughing eye, a vicious smile that was white against a mass of swirling black smoke. He doesn’t want to think about the Dwarf right now. Or ever, if he can help it. But forgetting is hard when your body is host to five-hundred-thousand souls. At most, all he can do is avoid, avoid and run. “Nonetheless, it is my name.”

She lets out a “hmph” that might be indignant, but her eyes dance with a feline sort of curiosity. Then she turns to peer over her shoulder, cupping her mouth with a gloved hand and calling out, “Yo Vincent—gimme another round for me and my new friend Hohenheim over here!”

The barkeep scurries to fulfill her request. Hohenheim eyes her carefully. “We’re friends now, are we?”

“Drinking friends,” she says as she leans forward, resting both elbows on the table and tucking her interlocked fingers beneath her chin. Loose strands of wavy hair fall from her ponytail and into her face. “So what brings you to Rush Valley, oh Strange McWeirdname?”

Murmurs tickle at Hohenheim’s thoughts, about how blunt she is and how that is not a good thing. How he is meant to be hiding and jealously safeguarding the secret of his own inert existence, considering how a Philosopher’s Stone alone would be coveted by just about any self-respecting alchemist. And imagine the devastation that might arise should anyone learn that such an elusive, powerful object could take the shape of a walking, talking, immortal human being.

He tries to ignore it, shove aside the noise in order to focus on his own, singular thoughts. His voice takes on a stiff sort of politeness as he answers, “Passing through, mostly. I’m actually bound for Aerugo.”

At this, her brows raise, evidently surprised. “Well, that’s too bad. Rush Valley is real nice this time of year—shame you won’t be staying much longer.”

A waitress arrives and plunks two frosty tankards of sudsy amber down onto the table, then flits off to tend to the other patrons. Pinako immediately seizes one, downing far more than she should in one swig. Seriously. It is amazing that this woman is alive.

“You should slow down,” he starts.

“Oh hush.” Her face is beginning to pinken with the first flushes of drunkenness, but her smile is still mischievous. “Better men than you have tried to tear this mug from my lips, and all have failed.”

“Alright.” He decides to finish the pint he has before starting on a new one. The amber liquid warms the back of his throat.

“So...” She sets her glass down and idly traces the rim with her pointer finger, eyes half-lidded and glinting with playfulness. “What’s a well-dressed scholarly-looking fellow like yourself looking for in Aerugo?”

“Research,” he answers cryptically. The less anyone knows, the better.

She waits for him to elaborate. When it becomes evident that he isn’t going to, she lets out a pensive hum and leans back in her seat again. “Must be important research, if you’re planning to head all the way into a foreign country. Especially one that’s none too friendly with us at the moment. And even if you do get into Aerugo—not saying you will, by the way—you’ll certainly suffer some backlash for being Amestrian, won’t you?”

He neither confirms nor denies the matter of citizenship. Even if he does correct her, how is he supposed to explain that he’s a member of a long-dead race from the East, his homeland the decrepit runes currently accumulating dust and sand out in the desert badlands? Or that he is old, older than any man should be, that his life is locked into stagnation by lives wrongfully plucked from their bodies and crammed into his pitiful mortal shell?

For the sake anonymity, it is better that he allows her and everyone else to come to their own conclusions. If those conclusions place him as an Amestrian citizen, then fine. It makes sense. Most Amestrians have fair hair and he can enunciate the language without any trace of an accent (decades of practice, it took him a long time to shake his Xerxian inflection), so it’s a reasonable conclusion at that. At the very least it means no one will ask for any identification papers and he won’t be charged with illegal immigration.

“All I’m saying,” she goes on, “is that it’s an odd place for a fellow like you to go.”

“There’s a lot of odd places out there,” Hohenheim replies at a length. “Odd places tend to catch my fancy, though.”

A wide smile blooms across her face. “Anything here in Rush Valley catch your fancy?”

He almost chokes on his ale.

Pinako’s brows raise. “You okay there?”

“Fine,” he croaks as he sets the tankard down a bit too abruptly, the clink of glass against wood too loud. There is a darkened spot on the left breast of his overcoat where he must have spilled on himself, so he pulls out his handkerchief and dabs at it. He feels her eyes on him and the tips of his ears warm. This has never happened before. He has never expected this to happen before. Honestly, what woman would find him desirable? “Goodness, that was rather undignified, wasn’t it?”

She remains nonplussed by his awkwardness, simply shrugging.

Hohenheim clears his throat and pushes his spectacles higher up on the bridge of his nose, trying to ignore the thousands of other voices in his head. They always seem to get louder when his stress levels rise. “I, er, listen Miss Rockbell, you seem nice and all, but, erm, I’m a bit old and...”

Her face goes completely blank, and for a moment he fears she’s going to make a scene—

She bursts out laughing.

Actually, to call it “laughing” would be the same as equating a hill to a mountain. Her entire body shakes and trembles, tears springing from her eyes, and before he can fully process her reaction, she’s fallen out of her seat and landed on the floor with a loud thunk. And she still doesn’t stop—she convulses, writhes, clutches her sides and roars with laughter until her face is red and she’s crying, half-sobbing in her hysteria. Everyone in the bar is now staring at her with a mixture of concern and horror.

He leans over to check if she’s alright, thoroughly flummoxed and a little disconcerted. He’s pretty sure he would notice if he told a joke. And even then, he’s not that funny. “M-Miss Rockbell?”

Her laughing starts to die and she grabs at the chair, using it as a means of hoisting herself up. There is still a tremor in her frame as she fights back a silent attack of giggles, one hand clutching her mouth as though she might vomit her laughter all over the floor. Between her flushed, tear-streaked face and the heavy breaths she is pumping into her lungs, he might mistake her for someone in the throes of grief.

“Are you alright?” he asks. Something like guilt thrums in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps he was a little too forward with her.

“O-Oh I’m f-fine.” More snickers escape her. She leans heavily on her chair for support. “You—You actually thought I was—” Another round of laughter takes her, pulls her back onto the floor.

If possible, he is even more flummoxed than before.

It is another minute and half before Pinako manages to recollect herself. She hoists herself onto the chair and sets her chin atop the interlocking fold of her fingers, eyes sparkling with laughing tears and grin so wide it might split her face open. “Listen here fancy-pants, I wasn’t hitting on you. And I’m a little offended you think you’re my type.”

Hohenheim sits there for a minute, blinking. Ah. So the one at fault was still him, just for a different reason. Clearly he’d misread the situation. The souls agree. “Ah... My apologies.”

“No worries,” she says easily, even though this was clearly a big misunderstanding and there is plenty of reason to worry. She takes a long swig of ale like nothing happened.

Her eyes are on him, and he flushes with shame. Explain. At the very least, explain so she doesn’t get the wrong idea. “You see—it’s just that—you were being very friendly—”

“I’m friendly to everyone.” There’s a note of scolding in her tone, but most of it is amusement.

“I know that now,” he offers lamely. He hears snickers in the back of his mind and, yes, alright, he’s an idiot, it’s not funny.

“Relax. I get it. Pretty girl comes over here to talk to the mysterious brooding stranger. That does tend to end rather predictably.” She takes another sip of ale, though the action is significantly more controlled and almost thoughtful in nature. “Hm. I suppose I was sending mixed signals... Sorry about that.”

Hohenheim cannot believe his own idiocy. He puts his face in his hands and can’t bear to look at her. “Can we pretend that never happened?”

“Sure, sure.” He hears her drink more lager. Willard, worrywart that he is, thinks cutting her off is a good idea just about now. “But my question was actually quite serious. Is there anything here in Rush Valley you find interesting?”

That is a much safer topic, and when he peers at her through his fingers, the expression on her face is of genuine curiosity. With a sigh he forces himself to straighten, though he can only bring himself to look beyond her left shoulder rather than meet her eyes. “I... find it odd how much meaning people tend to put into automail down here.”

Pinako snorts a laugh. “Well that’s easy. Automail saved these people, gave them their lives back. Without it, they wouldn’t be able to work or make a living.”

This is not news to him in the slightest. He recalls having his own life changed, when learning the written word revolutionized his understanding of the world and how his status proceeded to rise as a result. Knowledge saved him—and he would be lying if he were to say that he didn’t value it above all else, even now. “I was actually speaking in terms of the mechanics. I saw one or two faint earlier when one man was revealing new arm or something.”

Her eyes immediately light up and, oh right, he’d almost forgotten that she was likely a mechanic herself. “You mean Wally’s new Remblanch Mark IV? Oh, I saw that. Real beautiful piece of work right there!”

Yes, there it is. That same fanatic adoration he had seen in the eyes of every other mechanic in this town. He sips more ale and is surprised to find his glass almost empty. “Perhaps. I’m not very well-versed on the workings of machinery.”

“That’s a crime here in Rush Valley you know.” Her tone is idle, but her eyes are oddly serious. “You should count your lucky stars I’m a delinquent and don’t have a good relationship with the cops.”

He blinks at her, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“Of course not.” Her eyes lighten again and she finishes off her drink. He finds himself both slightly annoyed and rather intrigued as to where this sort of playfulness comes from, how she never seems to tire of it. She places her tankard down a bit too loudly. “I was serious about the delinquent part, though. I’ve been arrested for vandalism once or twice.”

“I... Beg your pardon?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she goes on, her tone growing fiercely defensive. “You see, there’s this bastard in town named Dominic LeCoulte. I dented his stall once, big whoop. He presses charges. It was his fault—I’m telling you, he’s the one who wrote ‘bitch’ on my stall!” She pauses for a moment, brows furrowing into an oddly pensive expression. “I mean, I’m pretty sure he was. Cops didn’t believe it. But another time, another time I sort of borrowed one of his wrenches and accidentally threw it in a river. But only because he gave some of my customers a tune-up when I was visiting my folks, the swine! It’s mechanic code, you know. You don’t give tune-ups to other people’s customers! It’s the equivalent of murder!”

“I see.” He doesn’t, but people like it when you agree with them. Particularly stubborn people, and particularly about grudges or rivalries. Which is what this thing between Pinako and this Dominic LeCoulte fellow sounds like. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She frowns at him for a moment, almost dubiously, but then she shrugs. “Yeah, basically we have this whole thing. It’s the talk of the town.” A pause, brown eyes flicking towards the left. “Hey, you gonna drink that?”

Hohenheim glances at the untouched tankard that had been brought some time ago. Some of the suds have fizzled out, but the amber liquid is still rich and inviting. And from the way Pinako is staring at it with an almost covetous glint in her eyes, he guesses that she is a fan of free booze.

He takes the glass and sips from it rather pointedly.

To his surprise, she grins. “Ha! You do have some balls on ya.”

He doesn’t know what that means (modern slang and all, it's so confusing, he wishes language wasn’t so fluid, so prone to change and altering), and he has a feeling he’d rather not. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” she agrees, which means that was the right thing to say. She interrupts their conversation to flag down an approaching waitress and loudly call out for another pint of ale. As the waitress scampers off to fulfill the order, Pinako turns back to him with her arms folded over her chest, face sliced by a smirk. “So where are you from, Hohenheim?”

The ale burns. He tries not to guzzle it, but the memory of Xerxes is too intense just then—the crimson light of the transmutation circle, the phantasmal movements of spectral black arms reaching out to tear souls from bodies, the Dwarf cackling from within his flask with a cold, amoral glee. The name of his hometown and capital of Xerxes, Rebis, has long since been lost to time and remains alive only in the recesses of his memory. “You likely haven’t heard of it.”

Her brows rise to her hairline, but the waitress drops off her pint and whatever question she was going to ask is lost in favor of the frothing glass of alcohol. She gulps down at least a quarter (good god, her liver must be revolting inside of her), then remerges with a foam mustache.

“Y’know,” she starts—her words a tad slurred, “you can just say you don’t wanna talk ‘bout it. Ain’t gonna fault ya for it.”

Hohenheim does not respond.

“[Twenty-Three.]”

Twenty-Three pauses his task of swiping a mop over the stone floor. He does not look up, but the newly-cleaned tiles shine with wetness and in them he can make out the blurry form of the estate’s overseer. Everyone calls him Overseer instead of the overseer, because no one knows the man’s name (if he has one; favored slaves have names and there has always been some speculation) and his entire identity to the slave population seems to be based on his role as something like the Master’s majordomo. As such is his place among the slaves, he does occasionally check up on you if he’s convinced it’s necessary.

Except, Overseer never pays attention to the unwayward—those who are obedient, resigned to their roles of servitude and sport a bone-deep weariness that you can see in the dullness of their eyes. It’s usually the wayward that upper management keeps an eye on, the ones who are troublesome or don’t follow orders or are particularly lazy enough to warrant action. Twenty-Three keeps his eyes tactfully lowered and tries to ignore Overseer’s presence, reminding himself that this is nothing, this means nothing, everything is fine.

Twenty-Three is vigorous and hardworking and he keeps his head down, one of the unwayward (though there was that one incident with the library but it was an accident and, luckily, Master never did find out who was responsible). It doesn’t make sense for Overseer to be here. Unless he’s gotten himself in trouble with Master...

Except Twenty-Three doesn’t remember doing anything that might earn him Master’s ire. Not recently, anyway.

When it finally becomes clear he can no longer ignore Overseer, Twenty-Three looks up. Overseer’s presence seems to fill the doorway, grim and foreboding and definitely spelling of disaster. The pit of his stomach flutters.

Yep, somebody pissed him off. Oh boy. Twenty-Three swallows. Overseer only gets that expression when something is horribly wrong. He can just see the whip now, hear it crack against the back of some reckless insurgent. Punishments are often public displays. “[Yes, sir?]”

“[Master wants to see you],” Overseer says stiffly. Twenty-Three waits for him to elaborate, and frowns when he doesn’t.

Swear to the gods I was working faster than normal. “[Did I do something wrong?]”

Overseer looks a little miffed at the question, features dipping into a scowl. It’s understandable—slaves are meant to be submissive, but Twenty-Three has never been submissive. It’s the reason Overseer doesn’t like Twenty-Three very much. “[No. You did not.]”

Huh. Odd. Master doesn’t call for slaves unless something is wrong. “[I’m... not in trouble, then?]”

“[No],” Overseer intones sourly.

...this is weird. Master prefers his slaves neither seen nor heard. He does not usually hold private conference with them. Female slaves or concubines, maybe. But Master lacks a preference for men, and he wouldn’t summon a slave unless someone is in trouble. “[Surely it can wait?]”

Overseer’s expression twitches with impatience. “[Twenty-Three—]”

“[I was ordered to clean the floors],” Twenty-Three interrupts, which in itself is actually quite stupid of him, but being alone with Master unnerves him. He turns away (even stupider) and gestures to the large spot that is still dry and sand-coated. Sand has a tricky way of getting in everywhere, all sorts of nooks and crannies. Twenty-Three is one of the few slaves who is actually good at getting sand out with a mop. Others just spread it around everywhere. “[That order comes first, right? I should really finish—]”

He hears the sound of footsteps before he even finishes talking, and before he can fully process them, there is a painful tugging at his ponytail. He hisses, stumbling and dropping his mop as Overseer’s rough grip drags him towards the doorway by the hair. Twenty-Three tries to dig his heels in, but that does nothing, because Overseer is strong and used to manhandling lowly, disobedient slaves who actually think negotiating is an option.

Overseer tosses Twenty-Three onto the floor as though tossing aside garbage. The stone floor jars against the side of Twenty-Three’s jaw.

“[Master ordered you to come to the lab now],” Overseer hisses, voice stern. Twenty-Three peers up at the man, massaging the sore spot on his jaw and stifling his temper, because Twenty-Three, for all his ignorance, is not stupid. Overseer towers over him with narrowed eyes and a grim face, a few loose strands of golden hair tangled in his fist that glint in the light. “[Pick up the mop and let’s go.]”

Twenty-Three swallows thickly. The lab. Master wants him in the lab.

Here’s the thing—the lab is strictly off-limits. You are not supposed to go into the lab unless you have Master’s permission, and even then, you are not allowed to touch anything unless you want to be publicly flogged for twenty-four hours straight. Twenty-Three has heard all sorts of rumors about what lurks down there, behind the locked doors on the lowest level... stories about experiments Master conducts in his spare time. Alchemy, it’s called, but the tales Twenty-Three has heard about it always enlist some element of horror.

I’m going to end up in a jar on a wall somewhere, he thinks, feeling a scream rise in his throat.

But he bites it back and slowly rises to his feet, because he has no doubt that Overseer has probably been given instruction to use force should he resist. And he’d like to keep what little dignity he has before his death, thank you. Silent and attempting to look as dignified as a slave can be, he shuffles over to the discarded mop and sets it against the wall. As he turns back Overseer, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the dirty water of the pail—unwashed, uncut strands of hair fall over a dirt-smudged face that probably should be young, but the eyes possess an artificial sort of oldness, beaten down by a lifetime of submission.

In the future, this will be viewed as a shameful moment, but at the present, shame cannot exist where there is no pride. After all, who can take pride in being someone else’s property?

“[Let’s go],” Overseer says stiffly, and Twenty-Three does not protest.

Hohenheim prides himself on being an intelligent man.

When he was younger (young, very young, back when the years of his existence were stuck in the double digits and he was sure he’d likely never live past fifty), he’d hated being made a fool of, being called ignorant or stupid, even if it was glaringly obvious back then. It embarrasses him now, that temper his surly younger self harbored, but in truth it was all borne of a gripping insecurity. When you are a slave born into ignorance and illiteracy and branded as property, and it is made clear to you that the chances of your rising above that status are slim to none, then the knowledge of your own lacking can frustrate you beyond words. Therefore, it is rather understandable that once he got a taste of education and of higher learning, he grasped it wholeheartedly. Even to this day, there still exists a hunger in his mind, a voracious curiosity which he seeks to sate with anything he can find—obscure, mundane, the subject material didn’t matter, because the thrill of learning never left. As such, he considered himself, in his current state, to be a fairly accomplished scholar, and that was him being modest.

Yet, for all his intellect, he cannot begin to fathom how he got into this situation.

Pinako stumbles into his side again and he tries to steady her. He knows he’s not entirely sober, but he’s far soberer than her and somehow, some way, he’s ended up being responsible for seeing her back home. She mumbles to herself in a drunken slur that makes no sense to anybody, as it cannot properly qualify as language anymore, so Hohenheim chooses to ignore it as he guides her through the empty streets.

The stalls are oddly skeletal, now that they are devoid of patrons and vendors. Buildings tower up from behind, colorful and blocky, but the light from the streetlamps makes them look sickly. Between the emptiness of the streets and the washed-out lighting against the darkness, there’s an almost eerie feel to the streets now. He tries not to let it remind him of the time he wandered the streets of Rebis after the Fall, how dead the marketplace had looked and limp bodies scattered in the streets and—

No.

That is gone now. That is all gone. Lost to the ravages of time and decay. All those souls inside him are now refugees, evicted from their homes and left with nowhere else to go. And besides, he reminds himself, this is the present. There was nothing he could do then, but at the very least now he can see to it that Pinako gets home safely.

“Which one is yours?” His words are a little slurred themselves. He’s had a bit too much to drink tonight and his head is a tad fuzzy. Someone else should really be helping her. Someone who hasn’t already failed at looking after people—hundreds of thousands of people. He can hear them in the back of his head, the murmurs, the whispers, the thousands of voices offering advice. One of the louder ones, Zuul, insists that he just leave her to stumble through the streets on her own, and who cares about some grease-monkey chick anyway?

Pinako blinks owlishly. Her brown eyes are fogged with drunkenness, her face flushed a deep scarlet, and she squints dubiously at the rows of stalls. “‘S, um... th’ one wi’ th’...” She hiccups so hard she nearly falls over, prompting Hohenheim to catch her. But she hardly seems to notice, and instead makes some obscure gesticulations with her hands that must mean something to her, but mean nothing to him. “...th’ thing, y’know?”

“No. I don’t. That’s why I need you to tell me.”

“Well, ‘s kinda like...” She bares her hands out, fingers curling to resemble claws and she tears at the air, looking something like an animal. The resemblance is only heightened by the way she has her face scrunched up in a scowl, teeth bared, while a growl rumbles in her throat. He gets the feeling she is trying to explain something to him, but it only serves to confuse him more.

He briefly consults his reservoir of refugee souls, but they have no idea what she’s talking about either. Some, like Tony, propose that she is plainly mad. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what that means.”

She laughs bawdily and then flops her arm towards the right somewhere. “‘S a kitty...”

“A kitty,” he repeats. Clearly alcohol is playing fast and loose with her intellect.

“Yeah! Li’ mah title...”

Kaya lets out a thoughtful hum. Perhaps she’s referring to what the patrons were talking about earlier.

He pauses. “[Oh? What do you mean?]”

Right! Colin chimes in. They called her the “Pantheress of Resembool” or something.

“[Thank you, Colin, Kaya. That’s very helpful, actually.]” So that means he should be keeping his eyes out for the symbol of a panther or a wildcat, or something else of that nature. Hopefully it will be noticeable enough.

“What’re ya talkin’ ‘bout?” Pinako inquires groggily.

He ignores her to continue scanning the area in search of a panther. The stalls are lined up with a neatness that belies the creative vigor that permeates this place in the daytime. Sure, there are some errant patterns made by hooligan spray painters that linger in the deep shadows of alleyways, but for the most part, the streets are spick and span. There’s no sign of anything that might indicate its owner is—

Wait. There. Two stalls down, there’s a stall with a brown, feline form inscribed upon the awning. Behind it, a squat brick building sits, hunkered beneath the vast canvas of the black night sky and the dazzling, diamond-dust splatter of stars. This, Hohenheim decides, must Pinako’s abode.

She’s begun to slump against him, bleary and drooling. With a sigh, he hoists her upright. Almost there. “C’mon. I need you to stay awake now.”

“‘M ‘wake,” she mumbles, sounding quite the contrary.

He guides her to stall. It’s vacant, of course, as expected, but behind it is a workshop littered with machinery that he assumes to be Pinako’s tools. There’s an entire rack from which wrenches of various sizes hang like ornaments on the left wall. The right, by contrast, hosts an array of power tools, such as drills and buffers and—great gods, is that a blowtorch? The counters are cluttered with discarded screws and screwdrivers and a tangle of wires in numerous colors. Gears of alternating sizes are stacked along the edges, and they had clearly been disrupted recently because several of them litter the ground at his feet.

Other tools are on the ground as well, prompting Hohenheim to step around them carefully. But Pinako’s drunken shuffle isn’t made with caution in mind, and she stubs her toe on an errant shape he can’t make out in the dark.

“Sonova—” She stumbles, hopping on one foot. He catches her just before she falls over—he feels like he’s spent a lot of time catching her and keeping her steady tonight. “‘anks. Now where’dah put mah keys?”

Just drop her off and get the hell out of there, Hohenheim, Mayo grumbles sulkily, while Pinako sloppily searches her jumpsuit for her keys. You owe her nothing. She’s loud and annoying and, frankly, I don’t like her very much.

“[Don’t be like that],” Hohenheim retorts under his breath as Pinako unearths her keys. “[It’s not as though she’s particularly unpleasant or anything.]”

Pinako pauses before the door to what he assumes is her house, keys poised in her hand, and turns to blink at him in a rather owlish fashion. “Wassat?”

“Nothing,” he answers glibly.

She gives a disbelieving snort as she unlocks the door. As she stomps through the doorway, he suddenly wonders if maybe he should help her—it may be her own home, but if her workspace is any indication, she’s clearly quite comfortable living in chaos and the chances of there being something on the ground for her to trip on are quite high. Plus, being as heavily intoxicated as she is has a way of impairing basic motor skills and reflexes.

A muted thump comes from inside the house. Hohenheim sighs and ambles inside.

The interior of her home is quaint and, being only one story, lacks stairs. It’s hard to judge what is what because the lights are off, and that makes it difficult to discern much, but he presumes based on the dark masses he makes out from the shadows that the furnishing is rather sparse. He assumes the shelves and the counters mark a kitchen, while the dark lumps with bright patches he takes to be couches. There’s a large, dark swath on the ground that is likely a rug, meanwhile a probably-coffee-table sits between the two probably-couches. He glimpses Pinako tottering towards a hallway to the right, besides which is a small probably-bookshelf sporting a vase of pale-colored posies (there are a couple books on the floor, that must be the source of that thump earlier), but she ends up just slumping against a wall with a grunt.

“Pinako?”

She turns, but doesn’t acknowledge his presence beyond some groggy blinking and a grunt to let him know that, yes, she heard him.

“You should lay down on the couch,” he suggests gently.

Pinako snorts, shooting him a blearily affronted look. “‘M no’ tired.”

There’s an implied message of “please go away”, which is fairly understandable because, well, what woman wants a strange man in their house? And he’s done his job, gotten her home safely, so there’s no reason for him to linger.

He turns to go, a sensation of great weariness crashing over him. The alcoholic buzz is likely wearing off now, leaving only a bone-deep tiredness that promises a deep night’s sleep and a light throbbing in his skull once morning comes. At the very least, it means he will be able to actually fall asleep for once, because he finds that the sheets used in southern inns tend to be scratchy and rather irritating. Oh, and the arduous process of getting five-hundred-thousand voices to settle down for a while. Can’t forget that.

But as he reaches the cusp of the garage and peers out into the street, he finds a massive gap where his bearings should be.

“Huh.” He blinks hopelessly at the empty street. Being a tourist, he does not know the layout of the town, which streets feed into what and where the tavern is in relation to his current location. “Well. Damn.”

Tell me you’re not lost, Zuul growls around a chorus of disappointed groans. Please tell me, for the love of the gods, that you are not actually lost, you fucking moron.

Hohenheim ignores him and journeys back over to the house. After a moment of hesitation, he dares to stick his head through the doorjamb. “Pinako, would you be so kind as to tell me which way the tavern is?”

No response. The darkness is heavy, almost oppressive.

“...Pinako?”

Snoring. He catches her limp form, collapsed face-first on the nearest couch. The ale must have finally caught up with her.

He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. Here he is, tipsy and definitely in no condition to be wandering the streets late at night, with no idea how to get back to the tavern and no guide to direct him, and nowhere to go in the meantime. There are several “I told you so”s going off simultaneously, but he chooses, for the most part, to ignore them.

My, he thinks while exhaling through his nose, what a conundrum.

The lab is underground and windowless, therefor the only source of light is the various torches affixed to the walls. Because of that, the light is golden but inconsistent, flickering, casting shadows that move and whisper as though dancing or playing some sort of game. But where the light is fitful, the air is still, heavy and inert, and somehow that adds an ominous taint to the atmosphere, something that makes it feel cold, lifeless, despite the heat. Many shelves occupy the space, all of them pressed unceremoniously against the walls and cluttered with materials for the arcane arts—books, flasks, liquids in various colors, pickled human organs, things that make Twenty-Three’s stomach churn.

The door, heavy and stone and unlikely to let any light through, closes shut without warning. He flinches, suddenly getting the impression that he is trapped, cornered.

“[Twenty-Three.]” Master’s voice echoes through the vast, empty space. Twenty-Three whirls around, and pauses to take in the massive white chalk circle drawn across the dank stone floor, crisscrossed by highly-precise lines and elaborate patterns. Master is knelt down in one corner, lighting a candle with a match. The other three corners are marked by a silver chalice filled with water, a clay bowl of what appears to be reddish sand, and a gold-hilted dagger thrust into the ground respectively. “[Good. You’re here. Come.]”

An instinctual sense of unease grips Twenty-Three as he plods over, and it stills his feet as he reaches the edge of the chalk circle. He’s had the luxury of seeing Master draw alchemy circles when he’s showing off his skills for guests, but none of them have ever looked like this. The patterns have never been so elaborate, nor have there ever been those odd symbols before.

“[Smudge those chalk lines and I’ll have your feet cut off],” Master says darkly as he extinguishes the match and casts it aside, rising to his full height. Master is not an overtly cruel man, you see—he doesn’t torture slaves for amusement, nor does he order punishments that are undeserved. But at the same time, if you do something wrong, he makes sure to pay you back in full for that mistake. He’s rather unforgiving in that way.

Twenty-Three swallows as he navigates the maze of crisscross lines and arcane symbols, none of which make any sense to him. Pentagrams and star-shapes and—is that a snake eating itself? The whole thing is looped by a giant snake eating its own tail. And there’s a crescent that must represent the moon, and an orb bathed in fire that must be the sun. Too odd, he thinks, as he comes to an abrupt stop at the center.

Up close, he can see the wet sheet of sweat on Master’s bald head, probably because the candles give off so much heat that has nowhere to go. Being in the center of it all somehow instills a deeper sense of disquiet in Twenty-Three, which he tells himself is because there’s an open flame nearby and an athame stabbed in the ground, but it goes deeper than that, more visceral.

The polished surface of a ceremonial dagger glints in Master’s hand. “[Hold out your arm].”

Twenty-Three hesitates. The blade is sharp, silvery, flashing coldly in the candlelight, while the hilt is blackened and carved with various esoteric symbols. Something about it unnerves him on a primal level. “[Why—]”

“[Hold out your arm],” Master repeats, a little sharper this time.

Twenty-Three licks his lips. This is an order. Slaves are to obey orders, lest they be whipped and beaten and mutilated. He swallows his unease as he holds his arm out.

Master seizes Twenty-Three’s wrist and raises the dagger—

“[What—]”

—and plunges it deep into Twenty-Three’s arm.

Twenty-Three shrieks, flooded by panic, as Master drags the blade through his skin and muscle and flesh. Blood fountains from the gaping, jagged wound—gushing, pouring, crimson stark against grey stone and white chalk. His vision blurs, brightens, goes red and black and white around the edges and red-hot agony races through his nerves like a bolt of lightning. He tries to rip his arm away, but Master’s hold is firm and no matter how hard Twenty-Three writhes, he simply can’t get free. The room shrinks until it’s nothing but him, his bleeding arm, and the blade that’s carving through his flesh.

Master wrenches the blade out from Twenty-Three’s arm, and Twenty-Three has only the barest moment of relief before Master once again stabs it into Twenty-Three’s arm. The ground under Twenty-Three’s feet grows warm and slick as the puddle grows ever larger. His vision turns dark, growing blurrier by the minute, as a cold shiver grips him. Fear threads through the cloud of overwhelming pain in his skull.

Then, with a wet squelch, Master rips the blade out and throws Twenty-Three aside. Twenty-Three hits the floor with a gasp, clutching at his arm in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding, but it just gushes hotly between his fingers, spilling out everywhere.

This is how I’m going to die, he thinks with absolute certainty.

“[You may leave],” Master says, impassive.

Twenty-Three doesn’t need to be told twice. He scrabbles to his feet, nearly slipping over his own blood, and then bolts towards the doors. His head spins. His arm screams. The doors open on their own.

He only catches the blue-lightning crackle of transmutation before the doors close again and his knees buckle. Oblivion has already claimed him by the time his head hits the floor.

“Why the fuck’re you in my house.”

Hohenheim lifts his arm, squinting as his vision comes into focus. Pinako looms over him with rumpled clothing, tangled hair, and hands planted firmly on her hips. She looks rather exasperated, eyes narrowed into a particularly scathing glare, but he has a feeling it is caused less by the discovery of a strange man in her house and more by the copious amounts of alcohol she consumed. He himself has a dull thudding in the back of his skull, and he’d only had a pint and a half. She, by contrast, had put away at least three by his count. Her skull must be shrieking.

“I didn’t know the way back to the tavern,” he offers sheepishly from where he lies prone on her second sofa. Even as he says it aloud, a couple hundred souls scoff at the weak excuse.

Pinako’s brows raise dubiously. The exasperation in her expression is laced by a general sense of disgruntlement. “So you thought you’d just crash here?”

Oh dear, now that just sounds bad, even without Desdoa’s chiding about how he is certainly not acting like a proper gentleman (she’s rather fussy that way). He offers a rather weak, apologetic smile that in no way makes up for anything. “In my defense, I had nowhere else to go.”

She squints at him skeptically. “You could’ve just asked, y’know.”

With a grunt, he strains to sit up. Pinako’s irritation is much less appealing up close, but he’s not going to spend the entire conversation on his back. “You had already passed out.”

She quirks a brow. “Oh?”

“You snore quite loudly,” he adds brightly.

An affronted scowl finds its way onto her face. “I do not snore.”

He chuckles softly. “Ah. Forgive me. There must be someone else here, then, who sounds like a foghorn crossed with a wolverine.”

Her mouth opens to fire off a response, but a moment later she closes it again, a rather contemplative expression blooming across her features. She spends a minute or so scanning his face, then turns away with a thoughtful hum and something that is almost a smirk playing on her lips, making her way for the kitchen in the corner. In the full light of day, Hohenheim can properly make out the datedness of the counter and cabinets—tragically, he can name the exact year that particular style originated. “I’m making coffee for my hangover. You want some?”

He swipes his spectacles from off the coffee table and cleans the lenses with his shirt. Back in Xerxes, terms like “myopia” did not exist. There was simply vision trouble, and no clear way of correcting it without performing alchemy on humans. Which, of course, was forbidden, so there existed no cure. But spectacles were a marvelous invention that came with the advancement of mankind and medicine. “...I don’t want to be an inconvenience.”

Pinako laughs from the kitchen as she pulls out a pan and fills it with water. “Should’ve thought about that ‘fore you crashed on my couch, good sir.”

Again, he offers an apologetic smile, scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck. Ah, his ponytail has come slightly loose. “Didn’t you tell me we were friends now? Is this not what friends do?”

“We’re drinking friends,” she retorts, good-naturedly. He peers over at her as the stove turns on, as flames emerge and lick at the underside of the pan. She’s already drifted over to the coffee grinder and begun churning. It’s a hard, grating noise, the sound the coffee grinder makes. “Although, I suppose that means getting through hangovers together, so I guess it’s alright.”

“...I was just teasing,” Hohenheim says, immediately regretting the tone he acquired earlier. He missed it last night, somehow, but he can now see the subtle bulge of muscle in her forearms. “I didn’t actually mean—”

She cuts him off with a dismissive wave and a chuckle, of all things. “I know what you meant.”

He stares at her back for a moment, noting the rigid strength in her shoulders and arms and in her whole body. This is a woman who works with steel for a living, cutting and sawing and blowtorching and reshaping it into something that can conform better to the human body. It stands to reason that such a profession would build a sturdiness within a body. He looks down at his hands, worn by centuries-old callouses, and says, “I think it’s about time for me to get out of your hair.”

At this, she pauses, peering over her shoulder at him. Her brows are furrowed with a silent question, but her tone remains casual. “Sure you don’t want to take some coffee for the road?”

He is already rising to his feet and grabbing his overcoat, which he had thrown over the back of the couch. “I can always buy some coffee mix and make some myself.”

She turns around fully, crossing her arms and tilting her head to the side. “I thought you said you didn’t know the way back to the inn.”

“I can ask around,” he answers as he pulls his coat over his back. He turns towards the door, his back to her face. “I believe I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“Oh I don’t mind,” Pinako says nonchalantly. He can hear her footsteps approaching, but he doesn’t turn around as he adjusts the collar. “Believe it or not, I actually don’t mind a little early-morning conversation. Usually it’s just me and the dishes. And you can’t talk to dishes without being called crazy.”

He doesn’t respond. On reflex, he bends down to reach for his briefcase, only to stop when he realizes he is grasping at empty air. He’d left his briefcase back in his room at the tavern, dolt that he was. “Oh.”

“What?”

“I.” He stops, suddenly remembering the book he was reading last night. Alarmed, he straightens. “Oh dear.”

“What?” Pinako’s voice is more insistent now, tinged by genuine concern.

A groan escapes him, and he runs a hand roughly over his face. “I am such an idiot.”

“What?” Her face hovers in his peripheral vision, wrought with worry. “What is it?”

“I forgot my book!”

The emotion falls off Pinako’s face in a matter of moments, leaving only a blank, wide-eyed stare. She looks ready to fall over out of sheer incredulity. “Are you,” she starts, blinking several times in rapid succession, “Are you serious?”

“I can’t believe I forgot it,” Hohenheim laments. “I must have left it at the inn. Oh dear. Oh, oh dear.”

Her expression begins to harden, brows furrowing until a wrinkle appears above the slope of her nose and eyes narrowing and mouth tightening into a rather stormy frown. She crosses her arms, and he notices that her sleeves are rolled up, as though she’s purposefully trying to intimidate him with her muscles. “You made it sound like you’d left the stove on and your house was going to burn down, or you’d left your pet to starve.”

He turns to her, blinking. Those are bad scenarios, yes, but what does that have to do with his book?

“But, geez,” she grumbles, shaking her head. “It’s just a book. No big deal.”

“It was a gift,” he protests sullenly.

“It’s a book,” Pinako scoffs unsympathetically. “There are literally thousands in any library.”

“It was from a good friend of mine.”

She frowns, arching a brow. “So call him up. Ask for another copy.”

“I can’t,” he says sulkily. In his mind’s eye, he can see the Cretan skyline, the large but quaint villages, and the university he visited, which hosted one of the largest libraries in the nation. “He’s dead now.”

Her expression goes blank again, and she blinks twice. “...oh.”

There is a tense moment of silence in which neither of them speaks. Pinako’s face undergoes a series of transformations, going from surprised to sympathetic to guilty. Hohenheim only sighs, remembering his book and the enterprising young professor with red hair and a face-full of freckles who had presented it to him. Oh dear. Oh, oh dear.

Told you helping her would bite you in the ass, Zuul snickers.

“[Oh be quiet, you],” he mumbles under his breath.

She clears her throat, suddenly, and the tension breaks. When he turns and blinks at her, she shifts her weight, eyes diverting to the nearby wall. She looks uncharacteristically uncertain. “Tell you what,” she begins awkwardly, voice slightly too loud, “how about I make some coffee, and then we both go to the tavern and look for it? Sound fair?”

“Don’t you have work?” he asks, slightly taken aback. Yes, some strangers do offer help without provocation, but Pinako owes him nothing. In fact, he probably owes her, so no, it doesn’t sound “fair” at all. Equivalent Exchange and all. Plus, from what he’s seen, mechanics do not really have any free time in Rush Valley.

“My doors open at nine,” she answers glibly, mouth curving into a tepid smile. “And it’s, what, six now? Seven? That means I’ve got a few hours to kill. What do you say?”

He takes a moment to consider it and, well, it couldn’t hurt. But he’ll need to make it up to her somehow. “I suppose. Two heads and all.”

On the stove, the pot of water begins to boil.

Visions of a giant door illustrated with a tree and a whited-out figure with a too-wide grin flicker through Twenty-Three’s skull as he regains consciousness.

He’s lying face-up on a stiff white cot, a bare ceiling hovering over him. A faint breeze feathers over his face and through his bangs—fresh air, so that means a window. The slave quarters don’t have windows... but when he turns his head, there, clear as day (or, night, apparently) is a square-shaped hole in the clay wall. The sky is darker than the soot and blackened logs in the fireplace of Master’s living room, and that darkness is then freckled by a glittering arrangement of stars. Shadows pool in the corners of what appears to be a small, cramped room, of which he is the only occupant.

...it’s night. He blinks uncomprehendingly at the window, then looks around as if to further confirm that yes, he is alone. When did it become night?

His hair has come out of its ponytail, he notices vaguely, just before he’s hit by how cold it is.

He rises (not too fast because his head feels all fuzzy, and wow, his mouth is dry and his lips are chapped), clenching his teeth against the pulse of a migraine that’s decided to nestle behind his eyes. Night leeches all the heat from the day and replaces it with a pervasive chill that bites through flesh, into bones, aches through blood. He can feel it carving through his lungs, burning his throat, with each breath. It throbs especially badly in his left arm, for some reason, and there are no sheets or anything to ward off the chill beyond the clothes on his back.

Cursing nights in the desert, he rubs his arms in attempt to inspire some warmth in his goosebump-ridden skin. But then he feels something beneath his fingertips and freezes. He blinks, then looks down at his left forearm, and to his bewilderment finds neat white linen wrappings extending from wrist to elbow.

A scowl hardens his features. Where did these come from? He tugs at the bindings around his wrist, curious.

“[I wouldn’t do that if I were you],” comes a singsong voice from the doorway.

Twenty-Three peers up to see Andar leaning casually against the doorjamb, one elbow propped up over his head and one leg crossed over the other. Unlike Twenty-Three, Andar’s hair is short, and his clothing is the slightest bit less frayed, likely not being as old as Twenty-Three’s own. He wears a laughing sort of smirk across his tanned face, cradling a bowl of something steaming in his other arm.

Twenty-Three scowls harder. He swears his migraine actually worsens.

“[Morning Twenty-Three],” Andar says brightly as he saunters over to Twenty-Three’s bedside. The aroma of the steaming-thing wafts over and makes Twenty-Three’s stomach clench with hunger pangs. Gods, he can’t remember the last time he ate something. “[Or, should I say night?]”

“[Why are you here?]” Twenty-Three asks. His head is all fuzzy and aching—what happened to him? Did he get beaten and just didn’t remember? Then why did only his head and arm hurt? Actually, thinking about his arm made it hurt more. “[And... where is here?]”

“[The infirmary],” Andar responds breezily. To Twenty-Three’s annoyance, he eases himself until he is sitting on the foot of the cot, right next to Twenty-Three’s feet. Andar is all amicability and cordial smiles as he casually folds one leg over the other. “[Forty-One brought you. She claims to have found you collapsed in the basement.]”

Forty-One is a squat, muscular woman that usually works in the kitchen and delivers meals to Master when he’s engrossed in his work. It’s embarrassing to think Twenty-Three had to be carried around by a woman, but if it had to be any woman, it would be Forty-One. “[Oh.]”

Andar studies him for a moment, the laughter slowly ebbing from his expression and seriousness blooming in its place. The glint in his amber eyes is suddenly not one of mischief or teasing, but of concern. “[You were unconscious and bleeding badly. Tarek... he says if she’d found you any later...]”

Twenty-Three opens his mouth, but then the memory unfurls in his mind—the strange pattern drawn in chalk, Master’s dagger, blinding agony shooting through his arm, the wetness of blood on his feet... Oh. Oh. The jagged gashes on his arm cry out from beneath the layer of white gauze. “[I suppose I should thank Forty-One next time I see her, then.]”

Then a realization hits him and he freezes.

“[Wait—have I been asleep all day?]” Twenty-Three’s head pulses. Overseer’s going to kill him.

This response seems to surprise Andar, because he continues to stare for another moment. Twenty-Three is about to ask what the hell he’s staring at when Andar’s lip twitches into a smirk, and his usual blitheness quickly reclaims him. “[After Tarek fixed you up, he somehow managed to persuade Master into letting you rest. Fortunately, you’ll be up and working first thing in the morning. And don’t think you’ll get a free pass because you lost a little blood!]”

Twenty-Three almost groans in relief, tension in his shoulders melting. Thank the gods. “[I’m not in trouble, then?]”

“[No],” Andar sniffs in a manner that is infuriatingly prissy and not at all fitting with the mannerisms of a slave. “[But next time you want to get out of working, Twenty-Three, try something a little less life-threatening, okay?]”

“[I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.]” Twenty-Three brushes golden hair out of his face, scowling. Where is his hair-tie? If he doesn’t keep his hair back, it just gets in his eyes and he can’t see anything.

“[But if you do die],” Andar goes on brightly, “[I’ll be sure to attend your funeral. And on the headstone I’ll write ‘Here lies Twenty-Three. He was so stupid he bled to death trying to escape work’.]”

“[Who are you calling so stupid he’d mistake a rock for food, jackass?!]”

Then his head pulses and, ow. Dammit. Red King’s Crown. Why. Just what, exactly, did he do to deserve pain like this?

“[Hey now, don’t push yourself],” Andar chides, placing a hand on his shoulder and easing Twenty-Three back until he’s leaning against the wall. But it’s not like the asshole actually cares. He's only concerned about having someone to lord his supposed superiority over.

“[I’m not stupid],” Twenty-Three growls, because that’s what’s important here, while his head feels like it’s going to murder him and his arm clearly despises his existence. Fuck the pain.

Andar clucks his tongue. “[What number comes after five?]”

Twenty-Three seethes. Damned Andar. Thinks he’s so much better because he can count and has a name...

“[As I thought!]” Andar laughs as he holds out the steaming bowl. Twenty-Three can make out amber-colored broth with chunks of what appear to be either meat or boiled vegetables floating around, and again, his stomach cramps with hunger. “[A gift from Forty-One. She claims she wants you to reclaim your strength, but I think she just wants to keep you in her debt. It’s what I’d do, if I were in her position, anyway.]”

With a resentful grunt, Twenty-Three snatches the bowl out of Andar’s hands. The heat seeped through the clay and warms his hands, drives out the nocturnal chill of the desert. He only takes it out of gratitude towards Forty-One, not any obligation or appreciation towards Andar.

“[Well, now that I’ve given that to you, I’ll be taking my leave. Good night, and may the White Queen watch you.]” Andar leaps deftly to his feet and saunters back over to the door. Twenty-Three is for a moment relieved when he thinks Andar is gone now, and will have the room to himself—but then Andar pauses, and peers back at Twenty-Three with a glint of concern. “[...and get some rest, alright?]”

Twenty-Three blinks, surprised.

Then, before Twenty-Three’s opinion of Andar can change too drastically, the other slave smirks. “[I only ask because Forty-One has threatened to chuck a ladle at me if you die. And I’d be stupid not to fear her, see.]”

Well, that confirms it. Andar is a jackass, through and through. Rather than respond, Twenty-Three aims a glare that he hopes is particularly venomous over the lip of the clay bowl.

To this, Andar chuckles, then departs.

Twenty-Three grumbles under his breath. The stew is warm and he won’t deny that is smells delicious. It tastes good, too—warms him as it slides down his throat and settles in his belly. Also eases the ache in his head some. He should definitely thank Forty-One later.

The wound on his arm doesn’t stop throbbing.

They do not find the book at the tavern. As it turns out, some patron saw it, likely assumed by the leather binding and the arcane symbols on the spine that it was valuable, and stole it away for themselves. At least, that’s how the on-duty bartender from last night, Vincent, describes the events. Unfortunately, the tavern was very crowded last night and Vincent can only recall that the perpetrator was man, but nothing else, which is absolutely unhelpful.

“I’m really sorry,” Pinako apologizes as they make their way to local pawn shop in hopes of having better luck. The bastard may have tried to sell it already, and it couldn’t hurt. “Maybe if I’d held myself back a little, you wouldn’t have had to escort me home and left it unattended.”

Hohenheim winces. The book is a compilation of his friend’s research notes—the ones he neglected to publish for fear of being mocked, but was brave enough to share with Hohenheim due to their shared interest in the more obscure subjects. Knowing that something so personal is out there, in the hands of some stranger who can’t even begin to comprehend its true value, is a rather demoralizing and humiliating thought. But at the same time, he doesn’t want Pinako to feel bad, even if her logic is sound and maybe she does earn a bit of blame—it was still his responsibility, in the first place, to look after his possessions.

“If you knew me, you’d know I’m the forgetful sort, and that this probably would’ve happened regardless.” He tries to keep his tone light and humorous, though it doesn’t quite have the desired effect.

She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her oil-stained cargo pants, not looking very placated. Nonetheless, she doesn’t argue, and instead keeps her eyes forward in search of the pawn shop. “What was it about, if I might ask?”

“Sorry?”

“The book, I mean,” she clarifies, almost sheepishly. “What was it about? Was it a novel, a biography, research, what?”

He pauses, suitcase swaying in his arms. He was able to retrieve it from the inn, where it had thankfully remained untouched and no one had attempted to steal the books hidden inside. At least the rest of his research on the destruction of immortality is safe. “I don’t think I’d be able to explain it.”

At this, she glances over her shoulder at him, both curious and vaguely affronted. “You calling me stupid, Hohenheim?”

“It’s a matter of alchemy,” he elaborates, because that is as far from the truth as could be. Everyone has their own set of skills, after all. His is alchemy, hers is automail. He would be pleasantly surprised if she admitted some knowledge of the art, but she doesn’t look like the type. And even then, he’s not the type to call someone stupid to their face. He likes to think he’s more mature than that.

Predictably, her eyes go blank, and she only blinks at him uncomprehendingly. “Ah. Well. I dunno shit about that.”

“I figured as much,” he says. When her brows furrow, he rushes to explain. “It wasn’t an insult! You don’t exactly strike me as an alchemist, you see. And I’ve been around long enough to pick alchemists out from the crowd.”

That seems to placate her, if only just. “So you’re an alchemist, then?”

“I dabble,” Hohenheim lies.

Before long, they come across a squat, wooden building partially carved into the cliffside. Billy’s Pawn Shop is proclaimed by a large sign placed onto the roof which, if you ask Hohenheim, is a little on the nose, but so long as his book is here, he’s not going to complain. Pinako squints at the sign like she can’t believe someone couldn’t think of anything more creative, but gives a shrug and saunters in as though the whole town were hers. He trails her a little more hesitantly.

To anyone else, the interior would be rather unimpressive. A few knickknacks here, a few vintage items here. Curios that would appeal to the interests and tastes of various collectors. But for Hohenheim, he can see his entire lifetime splayed out—to his eyes, everything is immediately dated, grouped by exact increments of time and origin (a Drachman talisman from 1783, a Xingese paper fan that was at the height of fashion in 1456, one of the earliest models of radio from only twenty years ago, etc., etc.). He recognizes everything on the various shelves and tucked behind glass cases and, good gods, it all feels like yesterday. When he catches sight of the newer curios, those under a century old, he blinks and has to remind himself that many decades have passed, and that is was not actually yesterday that such things were considered innovative and spectacular. Now, they are relics.

He is a relic. A remnant of a world that ceased to exist, and he should have along with it.

The souls in his head reach a frenzied crescendo—excitement, awe, bewilderment. So many voices, so many different emotions, so many reactions. Some are amazed by the passage of time or how well-preserved the items are, or how easily they can recognize, say, the antique butter churn in the corner there or the early prototype of the spinning jenny. Others are repulsed, disgusted and affronted at being confronted with undeniable proof that, yes, his life is far too long and they are stuck along indefinitely for the ride. Others still are struck with a sudden, inexorable terror, a chilling realization that this will be their fate, to be trapped for all eternity in the body of a man who should have died a long time ago but never will.

Hohenheim brings a hand to his forehead. He feels a migraine coming.

Over the roar of his countrymen, he hears Pinako mutter curses under her breath, and scarcely has time to process the words before she’s storming towards the counter. He glances over at the counter and immediately understands her ire—leaning over the wooden surface is an oily-looking man who appears to be schmoozing the manager, who is a burly-looking man that appears rather unimpressed with the oily man’s efforts. But there, lying between them, unmistakable, is Hohenheim’s book.

“Excuse me,” Pinako growls loudly, thrusting herself between the owner and the oily schmoozer. Her arms are crossed firmly, like a set of great iron bars. “I believe that book doesn’t belong to you.”

The schmoozer stares at her impassively. Where Pinako is short and compact, brimming with strength, this man is tall and lanky and fragile-looking. Hohenheim seriously doubts he’s ever worked a day of manual labor in his life. The schmoozer’s mouth curls into a vulgar smile that makes Hohenheim’s stomach twist, despite not being on the receiving end. “I dunno what you’re talkin’ about, toots, but how about you let the men handle things here, kay?” The schmoozer makes the mistake of laying a hand on Pinako’s shoulder. Hohenheim can see a vein on her forehead bulge. “And then later on we can—”

He’s cut off when Pinako not only smacks his hand off her shoulder with an audible thwap, but grabs him roughly by the collar and pins him against the desk. The manager looks alarmed, but she hardly pays him mind as she thrusts her face into the schmoozer’s and hisses, “Don’t call me ‘toots’.”

“Pinako,” Hohenheim says warningly. He manages to recollect himself long enough to approach her, only to be swept up in another wave of disorientation when he spies the antique telescope on a shelf behind the counter and good gods, it was only fifty years ago that was something novel. It feels like minutes ago...

The manager says something that Hohenheim does not hear, cannot hear over the cacophony within him. He only knows that whatever was said, it was spoken in a gruff manner, and that the manager has his arms crossed, revealing the bulge of muscle. This man gives off the same vibe as Pinako—a man who works hard to make his living, and who wouldn’t bat an eye at a little blood on the floor. That thought alone makes the souls buzz louder with new tension, and Hohenheim can’t hear.

She hardly looks happy, but whatever it was that was said to her, it persuades Pinako to release her prey. But she still gives a snort of disgust and aims a stink eye at the schmoozer as he straightens his collar while shooting her an indignant look. The souls start to calm, enough for Hohenheim to faintly hear her voice, hear the tightness of anger in her tone as she says something that clearly offends the conman.

“How dare you!” the schmoozer exclaims, sounding genuine offended. His voice fades in slowly, quiet at first, like when your ears are ringing and sound has to struggle in order to reach you again. “Of course it’s mine! It’s been in my family for a very long time!”

Hohenheim manages to regain himself again, pull himself into the present so he can frown at the conman. Quiet down, he pleads to the souls, and they do so, albeit reluctantly. “So your family is Cretan, then?”

The schmoozer turns to him in disbelief. “What? No. Why would you say that?”

“Because that book is Cretan.” Hohenhem points to the symbols on the cover, which are definitely the scratch-scratch written word of Creta, and the man looks lost for a moment. “And it also happens to be mine, thank you. I recognize the cover.”

The schmoozer regains his character and sneers. “So what? Recognizing a cover means nothing. Go find your own copy, if you want one so bad.”

“There is only one copy of this book,” Hohenheim says with forced patience.

To Hohenheim’s disbelief, this fact does not cause the man to cut his losses and admit his falsehood, as would be expected of a decent human being. Instead, his eyes alight with eagerly and he turns back the manager, resuming his earlier façade of a smooth businessman. “See? I told you it was valuable. Only copy in the whole world!”

“Unbelievable,” Pinako grumbles. Hohenheim concurs.

“So I want that price doubled,” the schmoozer goes on, oblivious to the hole he’s digging himself. “No less that fifty-thousand bills—take it or leave it!”

“It’s not yours to sell!” Pinako shoots a glare at the manager, who has said nothing and only spend the entire time scrutinizing them as though they were stains on his favorite shirt, the kind that are easily washed out but still inconvenience him on laundry day. “You’re not actually buying this rubbish, are you?”

The manager appraises them all with a silent consideration, then turns to the book. With a thoughtful hum, he turns the book so that it is upright by his vantage point, mouth curling into a stiff frown beneath his mustache. “Well,” he starts, at a length, “it’s not like either of you can actually prove that you own this book. No documentation or anything, I assume. So I can’t really confirm the real owner.”

“Malarkey,” she growls, then jerks a thumb in Hohenheim’s direction. “The book is his. This other guy just found it in a bar last night.”

“Lies!” hisses the schmoozer dramatically. “Lies and slander!”

Hohenheim resists the ever-growing urge to roll his eyes. “Do you even know what the book is about?”

The schmoozer sniffs haughtily. “I don’t need to. Not all books are made to be read, after all.”

Hohenheim is suddenly struck by the urge to clock this man in the face. Judging by the expression on Pinako’s face, she is containing a similar outrage within her, though it is likely borne of the man’s lying and snake oil claims than the insult he laid against the very nature of academics.

While they were squabbling, Hohenheim also noticed the manager contemplating the book, stroking his chin with his thumb and forefinger. Finally, the manager glances up, snapping his fingers loud enough to be heard throughout the entire store. The three of them turn to him, at once both bewildered and expectant.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” he announces. “I can read a little Cretan. Not much, mind you, but enough to read the title here.” He jabs the leather cover with a meaty pointer finger, making Hohenheim wince because, really, no one should ever treat a book so roughly. “So—let’s have a test. Whichever one of you can tell me the title of this here book can keep it and do with it whatever the hell they please. Sound fair?”

“Hardly!” the man protests indignantly, planting his hands on his bony hips. “How am I supposed to know a title written in a different language?”

“Easily enough,” Hohenheim responds with a smooth frostiness. “After all, this book has been in your family for generations, hasn’t it?”

The man whirls around to pin Hohenheim with a glare. Pinako peers at him with an expression that is proud, bewildered, and the slightest bit scared of him all at once.

“So what I’m hearing, Mr. McCarthy,” the manager says, deliberately slow, “is that you can’t give me the title of this book?”

At this, nervousness flashes across the face of the man named Mr. McCarthy. “W-Well, I didn’t say that. Let me—let me see that cover again?”

The manager turns the book so that it is upright to Mr. McCarthy, then pushes it forward slightly. Hohenheim watches Mr. McCarthy’s adam’s apple bob as he leans over, eyes darting wild and desperate to examine the scritch-scratch Cretan marks. Even someone who hasn’t learned basic human behavior from centuries of observing can see that this man is terrible at bluffing.

“It says,” Mr. McCarthy starts, then stops, swallowing again. He straightens, giving his collar a little tug. In a card game, this would definitely be considered a tell. “It says... um...”

Pinako rolls her eyes. “At this point, you’re only making a fool of yourself. It’s obvious you’ve no idea what it says.”

“I know what it says!” Mr. McCarthy protests in a rather whining fashion. Hohenheim shakes his head. Truly pathetic.

The manager ignores him, instead turning to Pinako with a rather bored look on his face. It seems this is a man who likes his sales drama-free. “What about you, little lady?”

She chuckles, as though amused by the very suggestion, and shakes her head. “Nope. No clue. Unlike some people, I can admit my own ignorance.”

Mr. McCarthy scoffs. Hohenheim chuckles.

The manager heaves a sigh as turns to Hohenheim. “And you, sir?”

Hohenheim doesn’t even have to look at the title before he responds, “It says ‘Theory of the Trinity’, written by Amos DaCosta.”

“I read it as ‘ideas of the three’, but your translation actually makes a hell of a lot more sense for a book title,” says the manager. Then he stops, turning the book upside-down and peering down at the leather surface, and then gives Hohenheim a look that is not quite accusatory. “...I don’t see an author listed anywhere.”

“Check the inner cover,” Hohenheim suggests brightly.

The manager quirks a brow, but he does as Hohenheim suggests and peels the cover open. There are thin, delicate marks of Cretan letters stroked across the top corner of the first milky page. He watches the manager’s brows as he mentally translates the letters to Amestrian, then gives a chuckle as he looks back up at Hohenheim. “And there it is! Guess that confirms it’s yours.”

Pinako whoops triumphantly. Mr. McCarthy spits out something that sounds particularly spiteful as the manager slides the book over to Hohenheim, then storms out with a vague threat that Hohenheim doesn’t care to acknowledge, much less bother to remember. The man’s departure is punctuated by the loud slamming of a door.

“That could fetch a pretty penny, you know,” the manager remarks after Mr. McCarthy has stormed out. His face is neutral, but there’s a keen glint of intrigue in his eye. “You wouldn’t be willing to sell, would you?”

“Thank you,” Hohenheim says at a length, watching Pinako stick her tongue out in the direction Mr. McCarthy left, and considers the traditional archetype of good overcoming evil, “but I’m not planning to part with it anytime soon.”

The manager shrugs. “Your choice.”

The next morning, Twenty-Three is assigned to mop Master’s study, because excessive blood loss is not a valid reason for a slave to get off work. He’s very used to this sort of treatment by now, so all he does is bow his head in a manner that is considered respectful and make his way over to the room with the same stubborn resilience that has seen him through all his life.

Nightly winds carry in sand—sand that gets into every nook and cranny. Any half-brained idiot can sweep it up, and someone has, already, so the job is half-done by the time Twenty-Three arrives carrying a mop and a bucket. “[It shouldn’t take too long],” Overseer assured him with an odd gentleness (apparently almost dying can earn you a fair amount of sympathy), “[and you can rest for an hour or two once you’re done.]”

“[There is one catch, though],” Overseer added, something dangerous in his eyes. “[A very important catch.]

“[You’re going to hear a voice.]” The words ring ominously as Twenty-Three dunks the mop-head into the pail. Water sloshes all over the floor, but he’s too tired to care. He’s yet to fully recover from the dizziness and migraine that blood loss granted him, and waking up early certainly didn’t help. “[A whisper of some kind, like the rustle of silk mixed with smoke and shadow. Whatever it says, no matter what tricks it employs—you mustn’t answer it. Master’s orders.]”

Master’s probably lost his mind, Twenty-Three thinks with a snort. The memory of the tree-inscribed door and the grinning white figure flashes through his mind, for some reason, but he decides not to think about it. Crazy old git...

But as he runs the mop across the dusty, dirt-smudged floor (the floor is going to end up cleaner than him, ha), he swears to the gods he hears a murmur from the corner. He pauses briefly—but, no, he’s probably just hallucinating. That happens when you lose a lot of blood, right? You hallucinate? Hear and see things that aren’t there? Yeah, he’s probably just hallucinating.

The voice gets louder, though, more insistent.

“[Kid],” it croons (it’s exactly how Overseer described it, silk and smoke and shadow), and that’s how Twenty-Three definitely knows it’s in his head. He hasn’t been considered a “kid” in years. Technically speaking, his childhood never really existed, and whatever shoddy excuse of one he had ended when he was sold for the first time. Slave auctions are a fucking nightmare. “[Hey, kid.]”

Twenty-Three snorts and dunks the mop-head again. More water on the floor. The voice gets louder. Too tired to care. Follow orders. Ignore. Shut up, go away, leave me alone.

“[Helloooooo~?]” The voice is really damn insistent. He exhales harshly through his nostrils and mops harder. “[Anyone home?]”

In the span of ten seconds, Twenty-Three makes three fatal mistakes.

The first is stopping—just stopping what he’s doing. Frustration and annoyance make his muscles stiffen, make him pause his task. Even worse is the fact that, as a growl forms in his throat, he looks up from the floor. And just like that, his concentration is broken, and the ability to tune that incessant voice out is lost.

The second is letting it the beckon him over to the table. Now he has not only acknowledged its existence, but perceived its source—an innocuous glass flask, one shaped like an orb with a long flute and hooked up to various other liquid-filled flasks. The larger, rounded flask houses a small bundle of smoke that is somehow able to speak, okay, probably one of Master’s experiments or something. He’s probably going to see weirder things later on, so he should probably just get used to it.

The third and final mistake comes when he completely forgets about Master’s orders. Do not respond, do not acknowledge. Do not talk back. Do not engage in conversation. But when the shadow-thing keeps going, keeps talks, that voice grates against his lingering migraine and he’s just so tired, he wants it just shut up and let him work, dammit. Tired and in pain and completely forgoing that niggling feeling in the pit of his stomach that says, no, bad, stay away from the thing that doesn’t feel right, Twenty-Three turns away from the flask and—

(“[I’m busy right now],” he grumbles—thoughtlessly. “[Can we do this later?]”)

—everything slowly begins to fall apart after that.

Hohenheim ends up staying in Rush Valley for another week or so. He tells himself it’s because he’d like to take the time to read DaCosta’s work and that Aerugo isn’t going anywhere. He tells himself it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s been roped into drinks with Pinako each night. His private audience of souls doesn’t buy it one bit.

She’s an odd one, Pinako. Very lively, very spontaneous. She’s very open about herself, about her day and her customers, rants her frustrations at the drop of a hat. One day it’s a hypochondriac who is convinced the ache in his ports is the precursor of a deadly infection, the next it’s a fellow mechanic (usually Dominic LeCoulte) she’s ended up butting heads with yet again. It’s a little tedious, trying to remember all the names and details, but it is nice to hear about people’s lives and their passions, so he endures her chatter in blithe silence, offering a few scant details about himself in return (nothing too personal). From their nightly rendezvous alone, he learns a great deal about her—trivial things that he wouldn’t have even thought to be significant.

Like the reasoning behind her epithet. They call her “pantheress” because she’s famously territorial with her customers and will actively go after any mechanic who thinks they can poach her clientele. But also because she’s a solitary being who’s yet to find a real friend in her field, or at all for that matter.

“It’s rather fitting, if you think about it. Panthers are solitary and territorial,” she explains casually, shrugging as though the ache of loneliness doesn’t bother her, though her eyes betray her, “but they’re also adaptable. I looked it up in a book, once, actually. They can live in a lot of different types of places. So, I take it as a compliment.”

Ferocity like hers would not be a social inhibitor if she were from Rush Valley, in a town where she grew up and all the townsfolk were already attuned to her moods, her behaviors and habits. But, she is from a small town in the East State. Resembool. She doesn’t say why she left, only that it angers her and she doesn’t wish to discuss it. Regardless, as a stranger here, people are more inclined to shy away from her, as humans do. Unknown variables frighten them. Even the eligible young bachelors, so inclined to chase the skirts of other beautiful twenty-five-year-old women, falter around her, unsure how to approach this beast of a woman.

So Pinako Rockbell is left, a solitary creature in an unfamiliar environment, marking her territory and clinging to it so desperately it’s off-putting.

Hohenheim can sympathize with her unspoken homesickness. So much so that it’s hilarious. He doesn’t tell her much about himself and never plans to, but he does confide that he is from someplace far away he won’t be returning to anytime soon, that he travels so constantly that the possibility of putting down roots is slim to none, and can understand how it feels to be a stranger. To be somewhere people think you are strange, and aren’t sure what to make of you.

Pinako’s eyes sparkled with intoxication as she lifted a pint of ale, emboldened by his admission. “To homesickness.”

They clinked glasses, and never spoke of it again. Yet the tacit gratitude of having someone to talk to every night who wouldn’t find you odd or be inclined to stare remains thick in the air between them. They do not see each other before the sun’s set or outside the walls of a bar, but regardless, it binds them—this thing, this agreement, that is not quite camaraderie but extends beyond simple empathy.

Exactly ten days after their meeting, after ten days of nightly meetings and basking in the warm embers of newfound companionship, something in their tentative relationship shifts. Exactly ten days after their meeting, Hohenheim is informed that Pinako has arrived in the lobby, bright and early, and is asking for him.

He doesn’t know why she’s here, what’s changed. But as he descends the staircase, he catches a glimpse of her and knows immediately that something’s wrong.

Her arms are folded tight like a vice, a rigidity has claimed her shoulders, and even more startling is that there’s a man in her company that Hohenheim doesn’t recognize. He is dark-skinned and dark-haired, stubble lining the angle of his sharp jaw and a white bandanna tied around his head. The grease-smudging on his overalls and the many filled pockets of his tool belt indicate that he is definitely a mechanic of some kind, which makes a little more sense. Pinako expressed some semblance of kinship with her fellow mechanics, though it was dim and defined mostly by their fear of her. This man, too, seems to shy away from her, but he also radiates a deep displeasure, one that manifests in hostile scowls, incoherent grumbling of the irritable variety, and dirty looks that she throws right back. Their relationship, Hohenheim deduces, is clearly not amicable, but it is not one-sided either. Their distaste for each other is mutual.

“Pinako,” Hohenheim calls out as he makes his way over to her. The warm greeting cuts the tension between the two mechanics, but he is more than surprised by the urgency in which they turn to him, the intensity that grips them. It sends a ripple of agitation through Xerxes’s souls, because that is not behavior that manifests unless something’s wrong. “Er... what brings you by?”

Pinako opens her mouth to say something, but the man shoves her out of the way (brazenly fearless, Hohenheim notes) and charges over to Hohenheim until he’s right in Hohenheim’s face. Close enough for Hohenheim to smell the machine oil on his clothes and the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath. “You’re an alchemist, right?”

“I am.” The intensity in the man’s dark eyes sends a flutter of unease through Hohenheim’s stomach. Souls whisper feverishly in his ears, murmur paranoid sentiments about how he’s caught, he’s been here too long, Pinako’s realized and told this stranger—no. Shut up. Hear him out first. “And—you are?”

“This is Dominic LeCoulte,” Pinako introduces, as she comes up from behind and tugs the man away by the overalls. Dominic, presumably, shoots her a scowl as he regains his balance, but Hohenheim can’t decide if it’s from the unceremonious manhandling or the note of derision as she enunciates his name. “He’s... let’s call him a colleague, yeah?”

The name Dominic LeCoulte is vaguely familiar, and it should be—he’s heard Pinako rant about it often enough. It’s the name of the one man in town who treats Pinako as an equal instead of an outsider. Hohenheim looks awkwardly at Pinako, not quite sure what to think now that the infamous man is in front of him. “...isn’t this the man who wrote ‘bitch’ on your stall?”

Something ignites in Dominic, and he rounds on Pinako with a snarl. “Dammit, woman! How many times do I have to tell you that I didn’t touch you stall—"

“We’ve worked out a truce,” Pinako interrupts, voice forcefully sweet.

“Temporary truce,” Dominic growls. With that apparently settled, he tears his attention away from Pinako and returns it to Hohenheim, taking on a much more serious persona. “Look, normally I wouldn’t be within fifty feet of this termagant, but she tells me you’re an alchemist, and, well...”

“We need an alchemist’s opinion on something,” Pinako finishes. Dominic lets out a heavy sigh, as though admitting the need for help is physically painful. “Okay, Dom. Show ‘im.”

Dominic looks between Pinako and Hohenheim for a moment, a clear glint of distrust in his eyes, like he’s not quite sure where this will lead. But then his shoulders slump with something not quite resignation, more like acceptance, really. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thick shard of wood, which he then offers to Hohenheim. “Okay, alchemy-man, tell me what you make of this.”

Murmurs of bewilderment sound off, matching Hohenheim’s own thoughts as he stares uncomprehendingly at the piece of wood. He’s not sure what’s so special about it. It looks like an ordinary piece of hardwood. He can’t even tell what type it is, or how old.

“Well,” he starts carefully, “correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like fifty percent carbon, forty-two percent oxygen, six percent hydrogen, one percent nitrogen, and one percent of other elements.”

The answer seems be bewilder Dominic far more than the wood did Hohenheim. Even Pinako blinks, going a bit cross-eyed as she tries to process the remark.

Finally, Dominic scowls. “The hell was that now?”

“In layman’s terms, it looks like a piece of wood.”

Dominic opens his mouth, then closes it again, blinking and dumbstruck. But Pinako—Pinako starts to snicker. Then she bursts out laughing, clapping one hand over her mouth to keep the giggles back.

“You need to—you need to turn it over, Dom.” She snorts, then looses control, laughing so hard her entire body shakes. That’s the thing about Pinako. When she laughs, she doesn’t bother to contain it, like she’s trying to drag the whole world into her merriment.

Her fellow mechanic shoots her a dirty look, then flips the shard over. To Hohenheim’s surprise, the bottom of the shard is scrawled with fine markings of white chalk. It’s clearly meant to be a pattern of some kind, but the shard is incomplete, one piece of a puzzle, and you can’t really discern a picture with just one puzzle piece. Hohenheim can, however, make out the edge of a curving line that might be the outline of a circle. And if that’s a circle, then those angular lines might be—yes, yes, it might be. It just might be!

It’s part of an array.

Disembodied voices fill Hohenheim’s ears, all of them expressing a shockwave of astonishment and bemusement, as he looks back at the mechanics. Mechanics who, it is to his understanding, lack much knowledge of alchemy themselves. Pinako had once attempted to get him to talk about it, and when he’d tried to describe anything, she’d looked absolutely lost, unable to comprehend how drawing a pattern in chalk could translate into something the uneducated mistook for magic. When he had then challenger her to explain automail mechanisms to him and she was unable to do so, they came to an agreement that discussing their respective fields to one another, as it would only result in dizzying miscommunication.

In the present, Pinako has managed to reign control of herself back from laughter, but she still chuckles under her breath about sass. Dominic, however, is significantly less amused, and crosses his arms impatiently, shard still in hand. The pattern is still showing, white against the dark finish.

“Where did you get that?” Hohenheim asks.

Something urgent flashes across Pinako’s face, sobers her. She sends Dominic a meaningful look, but Dominic ignores in favor of leaning closer, expectancy glinting in his dark eyes. “First—is it alchemy-ish?”

“That’s not a word,” Hohenheim says patiently. Multiple scoffs resound in his skull and he has to concentrate hard to ignore them. “But yes, it does look like part of a transmutation circle.”

Dominic’s brow gives a twitch of irritation. “In plain Amestrian, please.”

Hohenheim has to gather his patience and remind himself that not everyone has read Alchemy For Beginners. Though if they had, it would make life so much easier. Really. “In order to perform alchemy, one must define the parameters of the matter they are going to transmute. That is where transmutation circles come in. The circle represents the flow of energy, and the pattern in the center—the array—that corresponds to the matter which is being transmuted. Without these transmutation circles, alchemists cannot perform their craft.”

“Why do you gotta make it all sound so crazy,” Dominic snaps irritably. “Is it alchemy or not?”

An uproar bubbles up at his rudeness, but Hohenheim manages to tamp it down. Layman’s terms, he reminds himself. “Yes. In fact, it is one of the things necessary for an alchemist to transmute.”

Pinako snatches the wood from Dominic’s hands and holds it up to the light, squinting at it through one eye. Dominic splutters, startled and irritated by her boldness, but she ignores him rather pointedly. “And this is one of those transmu-whatsit circles or whatever?”

“It’s definitely a strong possibility,” Hohenheim allows, watching carefully for her reaction.

A hardness overtakes Pinako’s features. She doesn’t react when Dominic snatches the shard back, grumbling something about rudeness. Her gaze is far off, wandered somewhere else. “Could someone use this circle to mess with wood or something?”

Hohenheim arches a brow. It’s hard to tell with only a partial inscription, but the possibility is there. Why she immediately guessed wood, though... “Why are you asking me this, Pinako?”

Dominic casts Pinako a sidelong glance, to which she shrugs and makes a halfhearted gesture towards Hohenheim. Whatever this action represents, it clearly annoys Dominic into exhaling through his nostrils. “There’s this mechanic,” Dominic explains with a note of resignation, “named Harry Bulloch. A week or so ago, he upgraded one of his customers, Wally Allard, with a new arm. Beautiful piece. Absolutely gorgeous.”

“Wally’s arm is the one that made all those mechanics faint,” Pinako chimes in helpfully. “It’s the day you came to town, Hohenheim.”

Flash back, ten days ago. Crowded streets and shops displaying new automail models. A muscular man in town square flexing a brass-colored arm in public, one that made several people swoon for whatever reason. The man’s features are blotted, because it was more the mechanics swooning that stuck out to Hohenheim than anything else. “I vaguely recall that.”

“Anyway,” Dominic continues, pausing long enough to shoot Pinako a reproachful look, which she pointedly ignores. “After that, Harry’s been traipsing up and down the whole town, bragging to anyone that’ll listen about how he’s the best mechanic in all of Rush Valley.”

“Which is total bullshit,” Pinako interrupts, her tone dropping into a growl. Hohenheim is suddenly aware that she has a wrench in her hand. A very heavy-looking wrench. Where did that come from?

Dominic nods calmly, though a similar annoyance flashes in his dark eyes. “To prove it, he’s set up this arm-wrestling competition and he’s been calling out the rest of us mechanics to test our mettle.”

Pinako crosses her arms sharply, a storm overtaking her expression. “I was one of the first he called out. Normally, I’m up for a little friendly competition an’ all but—the table shattered, Hohenheim. I’m not a carpenter or anything, but that’s weird, right? Tables don’t just break like that.”

Hohenheim looks between her and the piece of wood in Dominic’s hand. A picture is beginning to form in his mind, whispers chorusing their own opinions.

She continues somberly, frustration building in her tone. “Every time, the table breaks. Always. Harry claims it’s just ‘cause of how strong Wally’s arm is, but he keeps a whole stack of ‘em, like he’s anticipating it.”

“I see.” Hohenheim holds his hand out. “Might I take a closer look at that?”

Dominic seems glad to hand it off to Hohenheim, as though holding it too long might tempt him to do something vile. As Hohenheim turns it over in his hands, Dominic crosses his arms behind his head, the lackadaisical demeanor belied by the silent fury in his eyes. “Bets started flying around town, too. The two of them are making a killing off of our misery.”

Hohenheim nods absently. “I’m guessing you yourself were similarly beaten.”

“Yeah,” Dominic admits grudgingly. “Just yesterday. My client and I ended up roped into it. We lost and Wally took his arm off.”

At this, Hohenheim looks up from his task. “Took his arm off?”

“It happens when the table breaks,” Pinako leaps in. The underlying fury in her voice gives Hohenheim pause. In fact, it actually makes him want to step back. He is once again hyper-aware of the wrench in her hand. “Wally’s still gripping the hand, and, when the table breaks, the momentum and the force and everything—it tears the arm right off. I had to completely rebuild my client’s arm from scratch. It was brand new, too. I’d just performed maintenance on it!”

The rise in her pitch attracts attention from other patrons, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her shoulder tremble, eyes blazing and face flushed and teeth bared into a snarl. Hohenheim watches her knuckles whiten around the wrench in her hand.

“He threatened to drop me as a client,” she says, voice acquiring a new hoarseness. “Said that if my automail was so fragile that something like that could break it, maybe he should just switch over to Harry. I rebuilt the arm for free, promised to make it more durable, just as long as he stayed on. But, the next day—he drops me anyway. Just, drops me! Just like that! Like— Like—”

She doesn’t finish. A snarl erupts from her throat, something that sounds broken and stunningly furious. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but there is no pain quite like it either.

“Pinako,” Hohenheim says gently, apologetically. Though he doesn’t understand the mechanics of automail and how hydraulic braces fit into... whatever they fit into, he does know how passionate she is about her work. He’s seen the sparkle in her eye when she rambles about gears and wires and how automail gives people their lives back. To have the work that makes up her livelihood—her very heart and soul—criticized in this manner, to have a client drop her over something so petty...

He wonders why she didn’t mention this earlier, if this happened a few days ago. Perhaps there are some things that are simply too personal for her to share after all.

They’ve only known each other for ten days. Therefore, that fact does not sting. No. It doesn’t. He has hundreds of thousands of souls to worry about first.

Dominic, however, only sees fury in her smoldering gaze, not the embers of hurt that fuel the fire. He takes a large step away from Pinako, eyes flicking cautiously to the wrench in her hand, then he clears his throat. “Anyway, last night, I replayed the event in my head and I realized something—just before the table broke, I saw this light.”

“Light?” Hohenheim repeats.

“Yeah. Light.” Dominic rubs the underside of his nose. “One of my clients dabbles in alchemy, see. And I remember him telling me about how it works. Sorta. Most of it went right over my head, but I remembered the circle and the light. And I thought to myself, ‘hey, that light looks familiar’. So I went back to watch again. This time, when the table shattered, I found this piece of wood.”

“He also heard that I was associated with you, and that you dabble in alchemy,” Pinako adds, regaining her composure. To Hohenheim’s bewildered look, she shrugs and flashes a strained ghost of her usual grin. “Don’t look so surprised. People gossip. News travels. You get used to it.”

“And here you are,” Hohenheim surmises. He tactfully avoids the part about gossip. Something to approach at a later date.

“Yep,” Dominic affirms, something dark and vengeful dancing in his gaze. “Now, all we need is confirmation and we can prove this guy is conning us.”

Hohenheim looks at Pinako, then at Dominic, then at the wooden shard. “...I can’t be sure, in all honesty. This could be what you think it is, but it could also be something else entirely.”

The answer clearly displeases Dominic, who gives an angry snort. “Figures.”

“Science is about exact truth,” Hohenheim explains patiently. “Based on your claims and this fragment, we can form a hypothesis, but we can’t prove it by sitting around here and speculating.”

Pinako, to her credit, catches on immediately. “So what do we do then? How do we prove this, uh, ‘hypo-thesis’?”

He allows the corner of his mouth to twitch in a wry manner. “Well, we gather data. Empirical data, in this case. If I were able to observe one of Wally’s matches, we can properly test our theory.”

A grin blooms across Pinako’s face. This one is real, genuine, unlike the ghost she forced before. “Well what are we waiting for, then? Let’s go catch ourselves a dirty cheat!”

“[Your alpha is sloppy],” the Dwarf chides, offhandedly, as though commenting about the weather rather than tutoring an illiterate slave about how to write.

Van Hohenheim’s grip on the chalk in his hand tightens. The letters on the wall—the first symbol of the Xerxian alphabet—are unsteady and blunt and clumsy, the mark of an unpracticed hand. He’s spent the last two days practicing on the walls, then brushing the evidence away because the Dwarf claims Master would not be very receptive to a slave educating themselves rather than working. That’s something the two can agree on, at the very least. But learning is starting to feel like a chore, the way Dwarf lists off letters as though they were tasks to perform. Sometimes he wonders if it’s really worth it.

Then he recalls the better life the Dwarf talked about. Learn, grow, make something of your pitiful life. Rise above your status. Become something, someone, necessary to the world. And, well, there was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered, but that time has passed and now... now he wants that, more than words can express. Because now, it is actually possible, and maybe, maybe...

Maybe he deserves more than sleeping on a dirty floor every night and dining on discarded table scraps and pouring himself into menial work. Perhaps, just perhaps, he deserves more. And perhaps he, should he follow the Dwarf’s advice and stockpile enough knowledge to make him significant, will have it.

Still a lot work, though.

“[Maybe you just described it wrong],” Van Hohenheim accuses, because a student is only as good as his teacher. And his teacher is severely lacking in compassion.

The Dwarf tuts. “[Yes. My apologies. Let me just grab a book and show you the symbol—oh wait.]” A pause, during which Van Hohenheim assumes he is supposed to take in his new teacher’s limbless, immaterial form. “[No arms! Now, unless you’re going to miraculously learn to recognize which letters I’m talking about when looking at a book, just do what I say.]”

Van Hohenheim snorts. Jackass.

“[Again],” the Dwarf commands, pompous asshole that he is. If disembodied clouds of smoke can be considered a “he”. “[Straighter this time. And make sure the central line is closer to the center and further from the bottom. Otherwise it looks like a capital delta.]”

“[Yeah, I’ll just do that.]” Rolling his eyes, Van Hohenheim etches a second upside-down V on the wall, right beneath the first one.

The Dwarf makes a noise of discontent halfway through.

He stops, a groan forming in his throat. “[What’s wrong with it now?]”

“[How to put this delicately...]” the Dwarf muses aloud. Van Hohenheim watches him-slash-it hover inside the flask, subtly bobbing. “[You do know what a triangle is, yes?]”

“[Yes.]”

“[Really?]” The Dwarf sounds genuinely surprised. “[Because that shape, even incomplete, suggests otherwise.]”

Van Hohenheim briefly fantasizes about chucking his chalk at the flask.

Footsteps echo from the hallway and Van Hohenheim stiffens instinctually. He drops the chalk on the table, then darts over to collect his discarded mop and resume the façade of a manual slave-laborer. From the corner of his eye, he notices the Dwarf’s eye snap shut and its smoke body go eerily still. Best to let Master think he is oblivious to the Dwarf’s presence, much less its true nature.

However, the one that pokes his head into the doorway isn’t Master, but Andar, golden eyes glinting with mirth. “[Ah, good! Twenty-Three! I thought I might find you here.]”

Van Hohenheim does not look up from his task. It makes it more convincing, that way. “[And why would you say that?]”

Andar rolls his eyes. “[Because you’ve volunteered to clean Master’s study three times this week alone. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you liked mopping up sand.]”

At this, Van Hohenheim pauses, and peers up at the teasing expression on Andar’s face. He feels his face starting to heat, but manages to keep his composure as he retorts, “[I happen to be good at it. I see no reason not to play to my strengths.]”

“[Fair],” Andar responds casually as he glides over, carefully navigating the spots where Van Hohenheim has already mopped. Playing to your strengths is a fairly common practice among slaves. Forty-One works in the kitchen, Tarek works alongside the estate doctor, and Andar occasionally helps with carpentry. Some happen to excel in certain areas, and they are sure to exploit that. “[It can just strike some as odd, seeing how you keep coming back to this room.]”

Van Hohenheim tries to drown the niggling sensation of worry by dunking the mop in water. “[Anything particularly wrong with this room?]”

“[Nothing at all! Personally, I think you’re focusing on it so heavily because this way no one will know how much sand there is between your ears.]” Before Van Hohenheim can fire off a retort, Andar is in front of him, his gaze oddly intense in a way that belies his friendly smile. “[Though, Overseer claims the devil makes his home in here, so there’s also that.]”

He keeps himself from glancing over at the Dwarf, resting in its flask without really resting. The Dwarf can’t sleep, apparently, and is likely listening to every aspect of their conversation. “[Who cares? Let the superstitious bastard think whatever he likes. It doesn’t affect me one way or another.]”

Andar’s brows raise and he blinks, thrown by the statement. Van Hohenheim winces—that is out of character for him, and he knows it. Slaves aren’t meant to speak against their masters with such vehemence, especially not slaves like Van Hohenheim who have resigned themselves to their lowly lives. Andar will suspect something now, surely—

“[Speaking of Overseer],” Andar says, acting as though that never happened, much to Van Hohenheim’s bewilderment and relief, “[I overheard Master and him discussing a barrel of wine that’s gone bad. Apparently, they plan to throw it out tomorrow. But perhaps, before then, we could smuggle it into the barracks and have a little taste.]” When Van Hohenheim’s jaw falls slack, Andar has the audacity to flash a cheeky smile, of all things. “[What do you think?]”

Van Hohenheim cannot bring himself to so much as blink. All of his mental capacity is occupied, trying to comprehend the implications of what Andar is saying.  “[You—You want to steal from Master?]”

“[Not so loud],” Andre says, glancing discreetly at the door. “[And not steal, borrow.]”

“[Have you lost your mind?]”

“[Come now. It’s being thrown out anyway.]” Andar places a finger to his smirking lips, topaz eyes glinting with a sharp, conspiratorial light. Though his gaze is not particularly imploring in nature, he does lean forward, eager and entreating. “[It’s not as though he can be too angry if it’s something he isn’t even going to use, or want, and would be glad to be rid of.]”

He’s actually serious about this. Van Hohenheim’s head spins, and his voice drops an octave, because the Dwarf is already listening and who knows who else is? “[You don’t know that. That might have been the attitude of our last Master, Andar, but this one might have your head on a pike if he catches you stealing. You shouldn’t test him.]”

“[That’s only if I get caught.]”

“[When you get caught],” Van Hohenheim corrects him tartly.

Andar rolls his eyes. “[We’re not going to get caught.]”

To this, Van Hohenheim can’t muster up anything beyond a stare that is simultaneously incredulous and weary. “[When did ‘you’ become ‘we’?]”

“[Think about it],” Andar presses, that stubborn gleam in his eye that suggests he is not going to let this go. “[It’s the eleventh month, right? The streets will be dark. No one will be out. We’ll be fine.]”

“[Is there any particular reason you’ve come to me?]” Van Hohenheim asks as his exasperation levels continue to rise, higher and higher, until he’s sure the Red King can see them. He is slightly tempted to whack Andar upside the head with his mop, see if that knocks the sense into his skull.

Andar flashes a smug, self-satisfied smirk. “[Because you like me?]”

Van Hohenheim takes a good, long look at his fellow slave—taking in the stubborn gleam in his eyes, the infuriatingly self-assured curl of his mouth, the blitheness that makes his posture so loose. The two share between them exactly three previous masters, to which they have always been sold to in tandem as though everyone could guess how inseparable they were. He has known Andar all his life, all the way back to when Andar was named Eleven, and he knows Andar. Andar always needed someone to tease and taunt in an endearing manner just to entertain himself, and Van Hohenheim always reacted and suffered through it (without completely suffering, if that makes sense). But without Van Hohenheim, Andar would never be grounded, never have anyone to reign him in, and Andar seems to realize that. He wouldn’t have sought Van Hohenheim out if he didn’t.

A sigh leaves him, and his head drops, giving him a fine view of his own feet. It was only well and proper for a slave to be well-acquainted with resignation. “[I am not going to win this, am I?]”

Andar’s smirk widens into a grin. “[Well look at that. You’ve actually got more than sand between your ears!]”

“[I will bludgeon you to death with this mop, you jackass.]”

Andar lets out a wild laugh, like he actually enjoys having his life threatened on a daily basis. Personally, Van Hohenheim’s always thought that Andar was a little odd in the head. Perhaps he’d been dropped when he was laid at his father’s feet and then rejected. With a jaunty wave that is obviously mocking in nature, Andar breezes out of the room with an unmistakable bounce in his step, the absolute asshole.

Van Hohenheim sighs and finds himself leaning against his mop. Migraines. Andar has a gift for inciting migraines.

“[What a bizarre fellow.]” Van Hohenheim shoots a peripheral glance at the Dwarf to see that it has cracked its single eye open. That maroon pupil glitters with a dark sort of amusement, something chatoyant, playful. Almost mocking. “[You make some awfully odd friends, Van Hohenheim.]”

Van Hohenheim wrinkles his nose because that is not an accurate way to describe their relationship. “[He’s not my friend.]”

“[Good],” the Dwarf says smoothly, like water, like silk. “[You should stay away from him.]”

“[Ah?]”

The Dwarf’s eye goes half-lidded, almost judgmental. “[His capacity for common sense is severely lacking. Plus, he’s far too content with his role, and that is not a good influence to have while you’re learning to rise above your vassalage.]”

Van Hohenheim squints at him. “[...vas-what?]”

The sigh the Dwarf heaves is colossal, as though he’s struggling against a herculean weight. “[Right... We’ll work on expanding your vocabulary once you’ve learned how to read, write, and count. Now get back to alpha—and try drawing straight, will you?]”

The thing about Rush Valley is that it is never short on crowds, never short on packed streets and eager tourists. Recently, Hohenheim had noticed the crowds getting thicker near town square, people strained against one another for a peek of whatever it was that captured their attention so, but he hadn’t thought anything of it. With Pinako and Dominic’s story ringing fresh in his ears, though, the crowded town square suddenly holds new significance. And the impenetrability of said crowd holds new annoyance.

“My goodness,” Hohenheim murmurs, a little stunned but not really. Violence has an odd way of captivating humanity, appeals to some primal fascination. A display in which people tear each other’s arms off is bound to generate some sort of excitement, but. Really. The crowd is so thick that Pinako is having trouble shoving her way through, much less someone tall and broad-shouldered like himself.

“Move it, you cretins!” Pinako hollers, brandishing her oversized wrench to anyone who dares to block her way. People stiffen at the sound of her voice and flinch back at the sight of her tool, as though actually convinced she might bludgeon to death anyone who so much as looks at her funny. Which, given her personal investment in their current endeavor, might actually be a possibility.

A chorus of souls groan at the social faux pas. Several of them (mostly old women who were, in life, wives to wealthy men) are scolding in nature, and chatter amongst themselves reproachfully about how a woman can be so strange, so bold and oblivious to other people’s opinions. Hohenheim rolls his eyes as he tunes them out, because he’s long since learned that the opinions of these particular souls are shallow and superficial and don’t hold much weight.

He trails after Pinako reluctantly, murmuring profuse apologies to the clearly frightened patrons as he wades through them. With every step, he is jostled by people who are left frazzled and wary after Pinako’s proud charge, which leaves him struggling desperately to keep pace with her, only the result is that he’s constantly several feet away from her. On several occasions, she disappears completely from view, and he suspects the only reason he hasn’t gotten separated from her entirely is through Dominic’s involvement.

The other mechanic remains consistently between Hohenheim’s floundering and Pinako’s siege, stubbornly silent. He didn’t say anything after they departed from the inn, but Hohenheim could see the dark cloud of contemplative thoughts swirling around his head. His dark eyes remained locked on Pinako’s wrench, never leaving it, and only ever touching her lightly on the shoulder when trying to slow her down. After hearing so much about Dominic in Pinako’s drunken rantings, it’s rather disconcerting to see him in the flesh, watch him move and interact with her. Hohenheim only has a hazy understanding of their relationship, aware only that it is built on mutual distaste and something that resembled a rivalry. Beyond that, the man who walks in front of him is an enigma.

On a whim, Hohenheim quickens his pace and ends up falling in step with Dominic. “Can I ask you something?”

Dominic’s expression changes from a detached but general awareness of his surroundings to a suddenly focusing all his attention on Hohenheim, blinking in shock. He shifts his shoulders, seeming uncertain, but dips his head once, hastily. “Er. Sure. Shoot.”

“You and Pinako—how did you first meet?”

To this, Dominic purses. His gaze flicks from Pinako’s back to Hohenheim’s face, and Hohenheim has to wonder what it is he’s checking for, what thoughts the mechanic is turning over in his mind.

“She,” Dominic starts, voice low. “She didn’t, like, put you up to this, did she? She’s not gonna yell at me for whatever I say to you?”

A furrow skitters across Hohenheim’s brow. Pinako doesn’t seem like the type to pull something like that, but then again, Hohenheim has only known her for ten days, and Dominic has known her much longer. “No. It’s merely a matter of personal curiosity.”

The expression on Dominic’s face is considering, pensive. He shifts his shoulders while taking a quick glance at Pinako, who is currently threatening a tall, broad-shouldered man that is far too fearful of her for a man that is twice her size.

A sigh falls from him, and he turns to Hohenheim with a look of exhaustion. “When I first met the Pantheress,” and he says “pantheress” with a note of reproach, as those the title itself is a subtle insult, “it was three years ago. She’d just come over to Rush Valley. We have this yearly convention sort of thing, where all the mechanics show off their latest designs and everything.”

Dominic pauses as a plump woman suddenly appears in front of them, muttering various insults that must be directed at Pinako (words like “shrew” and “scofflaw” fly from her overly-rouged lips, and her flinty eyes are narrowed on Pinako’s back, so it’s a fairly safe bet). The two men exchange a glance, then part around her with mumbled, courteous apologies before rejoining each other. “Anyway, because it’s a celebration, we often have booze and everything—if you know Pinako Rockbell, I’m sure you can imagine where that went.”

In his mind’s eye, he imagines Pinako chugging an entire pint of beer like a glass of cold milk. Hohenheim can immediately see where this is going. “I’m guessing some sort of drunken shenanigans ensued?”

“You guess correctly,” Dominic grunts, with a note of something bitter. He casts her a wary glance, though Hohenheim catches something rueful in his gaze. “She and some other guys had a bit too much, and then they started making jokes. I’m not sure how, but they started making some sexist remarks...”

Hohenheim closes his eyes and heaves a sigh as dozens of judgmental whispers claw at his inner thoughts. He can guess how that ended. “That didn’t go over well, did it?”

Dominic massages his left temple, keeping a careful eye on Pinako’s back as she strides proudly through the crowd (which are now parting from her, apparently having learned their lesson). “The next thing I know, she’s throwing wrenches at these guys, and those wrenches are hitting the windows, and glass is shattering everywhere. It was getting pretty hectic, so I called the police. Because that’s the sort of thing you do when windows break, right?”

A beat passes between them, and Hohenheim isn’t quite sure if Dominic is expecting him to respond or not. The grumbling of discontented patrons, roused by Pinako’s brusqueness, brushes against the tense silence. Even Xerxes’s countrymen are unsure what to say, falling into an uncharacteristic lapse of silence.

Finally, Dominic looks forward again, shoulders squared and jaw set in a stubborn manner. “Anyway, the cops showed up to cart her and the other drunks off to the station. After that, she’s gotten this reputation for being sorta, well...”

“Violent?” Hohenheim offers, only half-joking. He notices Pinako getting into an argument with a woman who seems to just radiate condescension. Oh dear, he finds himself thinking, just picturing the ensuing carnage. “Volatile?”

“Sure, let’s go with that.” Dominic snorts as Pinako brandishes her wrench and chases the condescending woman off. “Anyway, the next day she comes into my shop and yells at me for getting her in trouble. I was sorta hungover myself, so I yelled back at her. It was a whole thing.”

“I can imagine,” Hohenheim says with a single nod.

A shrug rolls through Dominic’s shoulders. One that isn’t particularly relaxed, but not quite tense either. Casual, almost. “From there, it escalated into these, er, I guess you could call them ‘pranks’, but that’s not quite the right word, you know? We’ve basically been going at it since.”

Hohenheim regards Dominic for a moment, thinking about the noncommittal way he described the scene and the way Pinako cursed him out through clenched teeth and a mouthful of ale. He contrasts that with the way she whines and groans and bemoans about other mechanics, who are too fearful of her to look her in the eye and at the same time dismiss her behind her back. “It sounds to me,” he starts carefully, “like you might've earned her respect.”

Dominic glances back at him, looking none too thrilled with Hohenheim’s assessment of their relationship. Hohenheim takes that to mean that he’s at least partially right. “Maybe. All I know is that she won’t leave me alone, now.”

“[I’m regretting this already.]”

“[Quit your worrying!]” Andar is terrifying on many levels, but the first and foremost most terrifying of these levels, Van Hohenheim decides, is the ability to pick locks. He’s currently using a sharpened stone to work away at the padlock protecting Master’s wine cellar from raiders (which they definitely are), beneath the great black veil of the cloudy nighttime sky. It’s hard to see the hand in front of your face, much less pick locks, but somehow, Andar manages, and the bastard doesn’t even seem phased by the pervasive chill that’s set upon them. Maybe because he’s closest to the lantern he’s lit. “[It’s the eleventh month! No one’s even out here to catch us.]”

Van Hohenheim peers helplessly at the darkened streets. The light from the lantern is a dead giveaway—the streetlights are always out on the eleventh month, something about it being sacred to the White Queen (a moon goddess, but Van Hohenheim knows nothing about religion, service at temple is reserved for those with actual freedom). The point is, the orange glow of a fire lamp is going to look suspicious and immediately tip someone off, and they’re going to get in trouble and it’s all Andar’s fault.

Okay, it’s a little bit his fault for agreeing to this, but. It’s Andar. Andar is good at manipulation.

“[May the gods have mercy on you and your wicked tongue],” Van Hohenheim grumbles sulkily.

Andar chuckles.

The lock clicks and comes loose. Andar tosses it aside as though this isn’t going to get them into so much trouble, good gods.

Andar grins as he throws the wine cellar doors open. The wood thumps against the stone, loud enough for Van Hohenheim to wince. “[And we’re in!]”

Before Van Hohenheim can remark on how inappropriately excited Andar is about breaking and entering, Andar is already slipping inside, taking the lantern with him. Van Hohenheim does a double-take as darkness reclaims its territory, unsure for a moment if he is meant to follow or to stay outside. It might be better for him if he stayed outside. Makes him look less complicit.

“[Are you coming or not, Twenty-Three?]” Andar calls out.

And it’s Andar, so Van Hohenheim knows he’s going to get sucked in eventually. He sighs and inwardly curses the fact that Andar came to him and not someone else for this crazy scheme, then follows after his fellow slave.

The night chill was already bringing goosebumps out on his arms, but when Van Hohenheim enters the cellar, the temperature drops several degrees further. Andar’s lantern casts a warm glow over wooden shelving units and cobwebs that cling to the ceiling, but it’s only an illusionary warmth. It’s still freezing. Slaves are given very thin clothing. Van Hohenheim is going to kill him.

He spies Andar crouching before one of the racks, eyes squinted in deep concentration. The lantern has been set down on the ground, and Van Hohenheim steps around it carefully as he approaches.

“[What are you looking at?]” he asks, dropping down.

Andar hums absently, brows furrowed with deep thought. “[I think this is the one I heard Master talk about throwing out. Yes—labelled twelve-forty-five! This is it!]”

Van Hohenheim peers at the black ink markings engraved into the wood and only sees gibberish. How he envies Andar’s ability to recognize numbers, to count. He definitely needs to ask the Dwarf how soon until they move onto numbers and arithmetic.

“[Alright then],” Andar says decisively, and grabs at the nozzle jutting from the barrel’s lid, “[help me open it.]”

A bolt of horror ripples through Van Hohenheim. He turns to his friend, feeling the muscles around his jaw going slack. “[Open it? Why are you opening it?]”

The look Andar gives him is so matter-of-fact that it borders patronizing. “[So we can sample some wine, of course.]”

“[What the hell do you mean ‘sample some wine’?]” Van Hohenheim protests, openly gawking. “[We can’t drink Master’s expired wine!]”

Andar stares at him as though Van Hohenheim spontaneously began speaking a different language. “[What did you think we were going to do with it? Bathe in it?]”

Well, it wouldn’t be an outing with Andar if Van Hohenheim didn’t develop a migraine. He can actually feel it coming. “[You said we were going to smuggle it into the slaves’ barracks—not drink it in the cellar!]”

“[If I taste it now],” Andar explains in a calm, almost condescending manner, “[I can determine how much I’m going to be hated later when I serve it.]”

“[Andar, don’t be stupid.]” Van Hohenheim glances nervously at the door and—did he hear footsteps? He’s sure he heard footsteps. No, wait... never mind, false alarm, but still. “[We’ll be caught if we linger too long. Let’s just take the barrel and—]”

When he turns back, he finds that Andar’s already pouring some into his cupped palm.

“[Andar.]”

Reddish liquid drips through Andar’s fingers as he lifts his hand to his lips and takes a cautious sip. Van Hohenheim is expecting him to sputter, spit it out, or something like that, because the wine is expired, after all. But all that Andar does is twist his mouth to one side, and even then, the action is more thoughtful than repulsed.

Van Hohenheim blinks dumbly. “[I—you—can’t believe—]“

“[Huh],” is all Andar says.

“[How... How is it?]” Van Hohenheim finds himself asking.

Andar gestures with his free hand to the nozzle. “[Try some and see for yourself.]”

Oh what the hell, they’re already screwed. Van Hohenheim lets out a small half-groan to voice his discontent, then cups both hands beneath the nozzle.

Andar pours. Dark, cold red liquid dribbles into Van Hohenheim’s hands, leaks through the cracks between his fingers. As he brings it close to his face, he thinks to himself that it almost reminds him of blood, or of the time when he was bleeding so profusely he couldn’t think straight (was it only two days ago?). Seems like an awfully accurate comparison, considering the fact that he isn’t quite thinking straight now.

When Andar drank it, he didn’t seem repulsed, so that to Van Hohenheim means it’s safe. He drinks the whole puddle—

And immediately regrets it, because eugh. It’s disgusting. It burns his mouth and it tastes sour, and he gags on it, actually certain for a moment he’s going to choke. Andar, meanwhile, bursts out into a fit of laughter so strong it actually sends him on his back.

“[You lying snake!]” Van Hohenheim roars accusingly. He tries to scrub the taste off his tongue with his fingers, but his fingers taste like wine and dirt and eugh. That’s it! Andar is a dead man walking.

Andar only laughs harder as Van Hohenheim gags. “[I—I can’t believe—t-that you actually—]”

“[Asshole!]” Van Hohenheim snaps. “[That tasted horrid!]”

The laughter begins to ebb, and Andar musters enough control over his body to sit up. His face is flushed red, split down the middle by a mirthful grin, and his eyes glitter with tears. “[You know, it actually sort of reminded me of vinegar.]”

The word is foreign. Van Hohenheim frowns. “[Vinegar?]”

“[It’s an icky-tasting fluid that Master puts on his salad],” explains Andar, adopting that I-know-more-than-you tone. “[I snuck a taste while helping Forty-One in the kitchen one day, and it tastes exactly like this.]”

Van Hohenheim aims a distasteful scowl at the keg, slightly offended that it would produce something that tastes so foul. “[You’d think Master would repurpose it for his salads, then. He’s not the type to let things go to waste.]”

“[I’ll have to ask Forty-One],” Andar says, a little thoughtful, as he crosses one leg over another. The golden lantern light illuminates his tanned face, his mirthful eyes.

Van Hohenheim looks back at the keg, frown deepening, and ultimately decides that alcohol is awful. Why would anyone drink something that burns your mouth? Madness. “[When I become rich],” he says, before he even realizes what he’s saying, “[I’ll spend money on anything but alcohol. In fact, I will ban alcohol from my estate!]”

Andar snorts laughter. “[You’ll be rich enough to afford an estate, will you?]”

He shouldn’t have said that—Van Hohenheim knows he shouldn’t have said that. It’s stupid, to say something like that, when nothing is guaranteed. The Dwarf hasn’t taught him numbers or how to read. Just a couple letters, thus far. But something about saying it aloud makes some sort of determination harden in his gut. It sounds like a dream, a too-good-to-be-true dream, but the Dwarf promised him a life beyond slavery and, hell, would it hurt to aim so high?

“[Oh definitely],” Van Hohenheim says, bringing his knees to his chest. He feels a little dazzled, just considering the possibility. But it is a possibility, now that he’s learning to read, to write, to perform arithmetic. “[It’ll be a huge estate, too. Overflowing with gold, and jewels, and a massive library full of so many books that I’ll never be bored. And I’ll rest my head on the softest bed in all of Xerxes every night.]”

Andar arches a brow. “[What are you going to do with that many books? You can’t even read!]”

“[I’ll have learned by then],” Van Hohenheim retorts snappishly. He shouldn’t be saying this. The Dwarf stressed secrecy but—there’s something about Andar that makes you want to open up and spill your secrets. It’s something about his face that’s so agreeable, so open and friendly. Maybe it’s because their noses are so similar, or perhaps because they’ve known each other their whole lives and never once questioned their blood.

Andar hums thoughtfully, tapping his fingers on his knees. He’s trying to keep up the playful charade, but Van Hohenheim has known Andar for as long as he can remember, so he can pick out the quiet pensiveness glinting in his eyes. “[Well, should you ever get rich, would you be willing to take me with you?]”

Van Hohenheim pauses, and examines his fellow slave’s expression a little more closely. He can’t tell if they’re still joking, or if they’ve moved into heavier ground. But with Andar, it is safe to keep up the pretense of humor. “[Oh? Why in the gods’ names would I do that?]”

The smile on Andar’s face twitches with mischief. “[Because you like me?]”

 Van Hohenheim pins him with the most incredulous stare he can muster. Andar laughs.

“[Never mind.]” A nonchalant shrug rolls through his shoulders, the lantern shining on his smile. “[It’s not like we haven’t known each other since either of us can remember, and it’s not like I don’t consider you a brother sometimes. You’re right—you owe me nothing.]”

At once, Van Hohenheim is simultaneously flattered and irritated. The hell does Andar get off, saying sappy things like that? “[That’s actually fairly accurate. Only a brother could possibly drive me as mad as you do.]”

Andar pulls an expression of mock hurt, placing a hand over his heart. “[My, my, Twenty-Three. So vicious.]”

“[‘Vicious’ is not the exact word I’d use],” intones a voice from behind.

The slaves both tense up, frozen, caught in the act. A prickling sensation, something that might be dread, settles in the space between Van Hohenheim’s shoulder blades. Swallowing, mouth suddenly dry, he turns slowly and peers over his shoulder.

The shadows pool on Overseer’s face, distort his features into some nightmarish exaggeration. A long switch is enclosed in one hand, and patted against the palm of the other. The ends glint metallically—to be on the business end of that would be painful indeed, Van Hohenheim thinks.

“[Overseer.]” Andar’s voice is flat but higher-pitched than normal. Van Hohenheim’s eyes are still trained on Overseer and the switch in his hands, but he catches a peripheral glance of Andar rising to his feet, hands held out in a placating gesture. “[This isn’t what it looks like. We—We were just—]”

“[Stealing from the Master?]” Overseer interrupts. His eyes are dark amber and cold, glittering. “[Yes, I can see that, clear as day.]”

“[It’s the barrel Master was planning to throw away.]” The excuse sounds lousy on Van Hohenheim’s tongue.

Overseer’s gaze snaps onto him and Van Hohenheim flinches. “[And so if we were to throw you out, that would make it okay to steal you?]”

“[That’s—]” Van Hohenheim starts, then catches himself.

That’s different, he was going to say. But it isn’t, really. He’s technically just as much Master’s property as the barrel of expired wine.

“[That’s what?]” Overseer demands. Then he steps forward, and several things happen at once.

Van Hohenheim is watching Overseer, so he didn’t see Andar bend down slowly to pick up the lantern. He didn’t see Andar also do something to the shelf, something that makes it quiver, as though ready to give out. And because Van Hohenheim is watching Overseer take that menacing step forward, he only hears something moving, something rolling, before he manages to tear his gaze away and realize what’s happening.

He will learn later that Master devised a sort of mechanism in the shelf, one that causes it to release a wine barrel from its hold upon command. The barrel is meant to slide out smoothly, and then fall atop a cushion so that it doesn’t shatter and wine doesn’t spill out everywhere. However, the shelf has been acting up, suddenly spitting barrels out with more force than necessary. Master, preoccupied with his experiments, had tasked some of his handier slaves (namely Fourteen, Thirty-Nine, and Andar) to repair it, but the device had baffled them, and so it remained unfixed as of now.

Therefore, when a wine barrel is suddenly ejected from the top shelf, Van Hohenheim is bewildered and shocked and the only think he can think to do is scrabble out of the way. This ends up being a smart decision, because the barrel crashes into the spot where he once was, the wood breaking and splintering and crimson wine splashing everywhere. The crash startles Overseer, sends him stumbling back in alarm. Van Hohenheim ends up drenched from head to toe in reeking red liquid.

In the chaos and confusion, Van Hohenheim catches a blur of light and hears Andar shout “run!”, just as the ochre light of the lantern vanishes. With darkness closing in, panic grips him, and he scrabbles to his feet. But the ground is slick, and there are cuts on his feet that burn when they make contact with the alcohol. Because of this, he slips, barely manages to catch himself, and then takes off running again.

The delay costs him. Pain lashes his shoulder and he’s sent stumbling, crashing into a nearby shelf. He’s dazed, can’t see without light. His shoulder cries out and now he’s sore all over. What happened? Where is he?

There is a harsh snap against the wine-soaked stone floor. Van Hohenheim gets the distinct impression that someone is standing over him.

“[You first],” he hears Overseer say, and then he doesn’t hear anymore, because he’s too busy screaming.

Blood mixes with wine on the cellar floor.

They shoulder their way to the center, and Hohenheim is bemused to find a wooden table set up with two men who are currently locked in combat. Not traditional combat, mind you. Both wield mechanical arms—strong, sturdy-looking devices, one glinting a harsh slate color and the other glowing dull brass, plated heavily as though they might be armor—and are currently attempting to overpower one another through sheer brute force. On either side, men wearing oversized toolbelts lined with far too many utilities are urging them on, spitting insults and encouragement alike, and seem far more invested than the combatants themselves.

Pinako lets out a snarling noise, and he follows her burning gaze to one of the presumed mechanics. It’s a wiry man with a scraggly dark beard that earns the venom in her eyes. On Hohenheim’s other side, Dominic’s expression darkens similarly, so it’s a safe bet to assume that the man on the other end of their mutual glaring is Harry. He doesn’t look like much of alchemist, in Hohenheim’s opinion—and you can tell, because there’s something about the expression in a true alchemist’s eyes, the way they smolder with passion for the craft—but that doesn’t mean the man is completely ignorant on the subject. Perhaps he’s an amateur, a third-rate who skimmed a book on the basics of drawing arrays and now thinks himself an expert. There were people like that out in the world, unfortunately.

“There.” Dominic points, and Hohenheim follows the direction of his finger to the numerous wooden tables stacked up behind Harry. Yes, that is definitely suspicious. Keeping extra tables on hand as though expecting them to break.

“What’s more,” Dominic goes on, as Hohenheim’s eyes narrow, “Wally’s a carpenter. Fishy, yeah?”

Fishy indeed. Very suspicious. Hohenheim shifts his gaze back onto the wrestlers, and it is a good thing, too, because almost misses it.

The moment is subtle and innocuous, but he catches it, because his arm the eyes of a trained alchemist. Harry leans forward under the guise of fervently egging on his wrestler, and in the same moment, slips his hand on the underside of the table.

Several things happen at once.

There is a flash, so brief that an untrained eye might miss it. It’s a blue flash, the same color that comes with discharged energy from an alchemic reaction. Just as Dominic described earlier.

Hohenheim notices the table tilt ever-so-slightly. It rises on Harry’s wrestler’s side, allows the wrestler to gain leverage that puts his opponent at a disadvantage.

Harry’s wrestler slams his opponent’s arm against the table. Then the wood splinters, but only on that side. The opponent lets out a sharp yelp as his arm comes clean off in a messy flurry of sparks and exposed wires.

The crowd roars.

Pinako seems to notice something in his expression change, because she peers up at him, urgent and bemused. “What? Did you see something?”

Hohenheim doesn’t quite hear her over the outrage budding in the back of his skull, both his and his countrymen’s. The swindling mechanic laughs boisterously as his opponent kneels down to tend to his maimed customer. Even if he were to disregard the account Pinako gave him, it is obvious this man, this Harry, used alchemy to rig this contest. There’s no question about it.

First a thief and liar, now a conman. Reinhilt’s disdain thrums in Hohenheim’s head, stokes the fire, as Harry claps his wrestler, Wally, on the shoulder with a nasty laugh. This town is full of amoral men, Hohenheim.

Harry, all pomp and circumstance, swaggers over to the other mechanic, who is on his ground and consoling his customer over the damages. Hohenheim’s eyes narrow as Harry sticks his hand out, smirking, as though expecting the other mechanic to drop something in his palm.

Dominic takes a wary step back, half-ducking behind Pinako. “Oi, Pinako. Your friend’s getting’ a scary look on his face.”

Pinako watches him, eyes wide and wary. “Hohenheim?”

He doesn’t hear her. One minute he’s standing next to her, the next he’s shouldering his way over to the men, mind blank.

“The hell I’m paying you!” the defeated mechanic wails in protest, still holding on to his shaken customer. “If anything, you owe me for the damages—”

The mechanic breaks off when Wally comes up from behind, shadow seeming to swallow the two crouching forms. Swallowing, the mechanic peers up at Wally, eyes widening. Wally is a massive man, one with broad shoulders and rippling musculature, and his metal arm only adds to the intimidation factor, even if you hadn’t witnessed him just rip someone’s arm off.

Harry’s smile is sharp and patronizing. “C’mon, now, Jake, don’t be like that. We both bet, and I won fair and square, so now all I’m asking for is what’s rightfully mine, see.”

“He owes you nothing,” Hohenheim says sharply.

They all turn to him, startled. Harry’s face immediately slips into a scowl, Wally’s expression mirroring his mechanic’s. The beaten customer is just plain bewildered, and the mechanic’s face is lit by a wary uncertainty, as though trying to decide whether Hohenheim is friend or foe.

“And you are?” Wally asks in a bored tone.

Hohenheim ignores him and makes his way over to the broken wooden table. With one hand, he flips it over, and is completely unsurprised to find half of an array drawn on the underside in chalk. “You cheated,” he announces. To the crowd or to just them, he isn’t sure, only that he said it aloud and people are listening.

“You—” Harry starts indignantly, but Hohenheim isn’t finished.

“This is an array for transmuting wood.” His voice rings out as the crowd falls into a hushed silence, broken only by a few stray whispers as people react between his words. “You used it to tilt the table, and then weaken the wood so it would shatter. This is reason for your victory.”

“Listen pal,” Harry spits, voice thick with venom. Hohenheim’s gaze flicks between him and Wally, the latter of which is beginning to approach with the slow, assured gait of someone trying to inspire fear. Pitiful, really. “You can’t prove anything. I didn’t put that there!”

It says something particularly negative about the human race when they cling stubbornly to falsehood, refusing to admit their faults even when they are caught red-handed. A sigh leaves Hohenheim, one laced by growing exasperation. Ignoring the advancing threat Wally poses, he instead makes his way over to the stack of tables nearby, all-to-aware of the crowd erupting into eager, apprehensive murmurs.

He takes the topmost table from the stack and flips over deftly. A chorus of gasp burst out from behind him. People cluster desperately to peer over his shoulders, anxious eyes drinking in the white chalk markings of a complete transmutation circle. The white is stark and damning against the dark brown of wooden finish.

“I’m sure,” Hohenheim says with a note of something cold but proud, “that if I turned over every last one of these, I would find the same thing.”

Harry’s face has twisted into an ugly scowl, eyes burning like hellfire. Satisfaction unfurls in Hohenheim’s as outraged murmurs erupt from the audience, outcries that shake and rattle with loosed tempers. People coming to their senses, realizations of being duped and deceived.

Then, suddenly, the crowd rounds on Harry, a sea of angry faces hissing threats and insults. The mechanic seems to realize the turn of favor, because panic flares across his expression, and he looks around frantically, adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.

Kaya giggles her amusement. Not so blustery now, is he?

Hohenheim is inclined to agree, and is about to do so—then a shadow falls over him. From his peripheral, he sees the crowd shrink back in horror, fear flashing across faces that were previously irate. A nervous tickling settles in his gut, and he turns slowly.

Wally towers over him, a sneer beneath his thick mustache and fury dancing in his dark eyes. The noonday sun shines down harshly on his metal arm as the automail user makes an exaggerated show of cracking his knuckles. Hohenheim envisions the fist to the face that is clearly in his immediate future, the impact that will accompany it, and braces himself. There is no doubt in his mind that it will be the metal fist that slams into his jaw and sends him flying, so the real question is how hard will it land.

It’s times like this that the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” becomes particularly ironic. Nothing can kill him, and he never gets stronger for it. All it does is hurt.

With deliberate slowness, Hohenheim assumes a position of surrender, holding his hands up, palms out, while taking a few large strides back. But unfortunately, Wally matches each backwards step with a forward one, and Hohenheim feels perspiration prick his forehead, heartbeat speeding up. The upbeat tempo rouses the souls of his countrymen into a frenzy of anxiety and panic, individual voices lost in an overall roaring cacophony that all but drowns out reality.

Hohenheim sees Wally’s mouth moving, but the words are lost. He swallows thickly, gaze nervously flicking this way and that, silently begging for help from the crowd. But humans are cowardly, fearful things who are not inclined to help strangers unless they get something out of it. Wherever his gaze lands, people scatter, running from responsibility.

“Now, now,” Hohenheim begins with a panicky chuckle, and he’s not sure how loud he’s talking over the roar of voices and souls and his own pulse, “let’s be reasonable—”

The only indication the punch is coming is the vein that bulges in his forehead. Hohenheim squeezes his eyes shut, drowning in a chorus of shouldn’t have gotten involved, shouldn’t have gotten involved, shouldn’t have gotten involved, shouldn’t have—

Crack!

There is no pain.

Tentatively, Hohenheim cracks one eye open. Then blinks both eyes in amazement, because of all the things he expected to see, Wally on the ground is not one of them.

The man lets out a groan reminiscent of a dying animal. Fresh contusions bloom over the side of his face and on his forehead, all of them dark, recent, and clearly the result of blunt-force trauma. There’s a cut on his temple that weeps red liquid that trickles down his cheek. A tooth sits, bloody and discarded, a few feet away.

Pinako stands over the fallen man, tapping the end of her oversized wrench against her palm in slow, punctuated rhythm. She wears an expression of severe irritation, one brow caught in a fit of erratic twitching, mouth twisted in a teeth-baring sneer, eyes squeezed shut against the pop of a vein on her left temple. Fresh blood dapples the end of her tool-turned-weapon, and anyone can clearly make an educated guess as to what happened.

Hohenheim looks at Wally (who is still breathing, definitely still breathing, he makes a conscious effort to assure the Xerxian souls of this), then at Pinako. Wally, Pinako. Blinks one, twice. Stares dumbly.

“Honestly,” the Pantheress of Resembool scoffs, “you’d think that men of a respectable trade like this might have some decency.”

Huh.

“Great spirits woman!” And then Dominic is there, pushing through the crowd to stare at Pinako with newfound horror, eyes as wide as saucers. He opens his mouth to say something, then groans, running his hands over his face. “Fantastic. Just—oh, that’s just wonderful.”

Harry gives a startled shriek that is the very definition of unmanly, then darts into the crowd. Bewildered people part around him and make no attempt to stop him. If Hohenheim were still cognizant, he might have cried out for someone to do something, to stop him and make the coward answer for his misdoings. But as it is, he’s too busy appraising Pinako with newfound awe and fear.

“You,” he starts, fumbling. Words failing. Shock makes his tongue particularly useless and limp. The ripple of panicked voices doesn’t much help him collect his thoughts, either. “Did you just...”

Pinako lets out a grunt as she clips her wrench to her toolbelt, shooting the fallen automail user a particularly contemptuous look. “He’ll be fine. At worse, he’ll have a nasty concussion, but nothing that can’t be cured with a little bedrest.” Her shoulders roll with a noncommittal shrug, but Hohenheim notices that she has her back to him sharply, and has yet to turn around to face him. “‘Sides, it’s his own fault. You can’t expect to go around beating up people and not expect some retribution, yeah?”

“You’re insane,” Dominic tells her, point blank.

Tension enters Pinako’s shoulders, and she pats her wrench, but says nothing. It’s almost as though she’s bracing herself for something.

Hohenheim blinks over the noise in his head. “Thank you.”

Both mechanics whirl around to openly gawk at Hohenheim. Dominic’s face pales with a muted horror, sharp dark eyes actively scanning Hohenheim’s face for signs of insanity or sociopathy, or anything else that might suggest impaired mental capacity. By contrast, Pinako’s expression plays with surprise in all its shades and forms, but something flickers in her eyes, some ghost of something that might be a tentative hope, or perhaps relief.

His countrymen are stymied. They scream objections, voice their dismay and bafflement, crying out how they can’t believe he just said that, what is wrong with him, is he out of his mind, has he finally gone mad after all these decades—

“What,” Dominic chokes out, appalled.

Hohenheim’s gaze flits from Wally’s fallen form to Pinako’s wrench. “You just saved me from what I assume was going to be a very painful experience.”

For a moment, Pinako only seems to have the sense to look bewildered. Then, understanding blooms across her face, and with that, a glint of something pride-like. She flashes a delighted grin, and pats her wrench while puffing out her chest. “Well of course I did! God knows we can't have an old codger like you taking a blow to the head. He might’ve just broken you in two by accident!”

“I’m more durable than I look,” Hohenheim says, only half-joking. “But still, you’ve my gratitude.”

“Good!” She grabs his wrist with one of her strong, calloused hands and starts leading him through the crowd, to his surprise. “Because I’ve got a hankering for some beer and no money on me. C’mon! You’re paying!”

As they retreat, Hohenheim casts a bewildered glance behind him. He catches Dominic staring at Pinako’s retreating back with a fine blend of incredulity and horror, then peering down morosely at Wally’s unconscious form. The other mechanic seems to have realized that she has no plans to properly attend to her mess, and Hohenheim can see his shoulders visibly sag with resignation before he bends down to pick Wally up.

Hohenheim turns back to her, arching a brow. “Shouldn’t we help him?”

“Who, Dominic?” Pinako neither looks back, nor waits for his response. She waves dismissively with her free hand, hardly aware that people are literally bolting out of her path, faces alighting with abject terror. “Ah, he’ll be fine. I’ll send him a gift basket later.”

There’s a collective agreement from the Xerxian souls that it’d better be one hell of a gift basket. To this, Hohenheim can’t help but chuckle.

Tarek is trying to be as gentle as possible, but the disinfectant hurts like a bitch and Van Hohenheim can’t stifle his cursing each time the cloth grazes one of his fresh wounds. If the slave-medic is bothered by Van Hohenheim’s lack of decorum, he doesn’t comment on it.

“[You and Andar],” Tarek sighs, in a chiding but lighthearted manner. He’s close enough that Van Hohenheim can feel Tarek’s breath on his neck if his hair weren’t so long. “[Always getting into trouble. It’s a surprise, really, that neither of you have been stoned yet.]”

(darkly, Van Hohenheim muses to himself that it wouldn’t actually be so bad, if Andar were stoned)

A hissed breath leaves Van Hohenheim as Tarek brushes over a particularly deep lash, sending sparks of sharp burning through his back. “[It was his idea.]”

Tarek says nothing, but Van Hohenheim catches him nodding in that slow, patient manner of his. In Xerxes, there is a stigma that slaves are brutish, uncouth, and ill-tempered—which is, unfortunately, not as untrue as it ought to be. But Tarek is a rare exception, having escaped the poisonous environment of too much labor for too little gratitude and hard, cruel words from apathetic masters. At a young age, he made himself indispensable as a medical assistant to the estate’s on-site physician, and since then has become one of the few doctors willing, or even allowed, to treat slaves. Van Hohenheim is only slightly jealous of the position, because god, it must be annoying to constantly tend to so many invalids.

After what feels like the thousandth stab of cold pain through Van Hohenheim’s back, Tarek draws back and sets the bowl of disinfectant aside, placing the cloth inside of it. The white fabric is stained in a kaleidoscope of pinks and reds. “[There. All clean.]”

Van Hohenheim chances a look over his shoulder and winces. Even with the luxury of obscured sight, he can still see the raw tears into his flesh, red and oozing and messy. Countless lash-marks form a complex lattice that stretches all across his back. Even if it heals, it will certainly scar, and the reminder of such a vicious whipping with never fade.

“[Oh don’t be like that.]” Tarek tries to muster an optimistic look, but with his bushy brows and beard, it looks odd. As though his face were made for a longsuffering frown, and nothing else. “[Think of it like a battle wound, or something else of that manner.]”

Like anyone’s going to believe that a slave was on a battlefield. Van Hohenheim snorts at the thought, fidgeting with his legs. They’ve grown a tad numb from sitting on the edge of the cot, letting Tarek disinfect his wounds, while dawn begins to crest the horizon. He glances out the window and sees light reaching out with dewy fingers that dab milky yellow across the lightening sky. The clouds from last night as beginning to clear, giving access to a gorgeous desert sunrise. Normally, the magnificent sight would inspire some sort of awe, but after the night he’s had, it all just looks painfully wan and lackluster, rousing only a dulled sensation of exhaustion in his gut.

He can feel Tarek’s eyes on him, soft and concerned. Or maybe that’s the air nipping at the tender flesh of his riven back. He can’t tell. But if Tarek has something to say, he doesn’t say it, which is just fine with Van Hohenheim. He’s not particularly in the mood to be mollified right now. He wants to sit and stew, let his black mood fester until it lines the inside of his skin and rots inside his veins.

From the corner of his eye, he watches Tarek take the bandages from the side of the bed. It’s the second time this week he’s had to have had his wounds dressed.

And for the first time in his short, adolescent life, Van Hohenheim is struck by a sudden helplessness, a gripping sense of deep frustration and bitterness that cuts so deep his bones can feel it. He deserved neither of the wounds he suffered, did not deserve to have his arm sliced into like a common piece of meat. The healing cuts on his forearm were made by a man who called himself Van Hohenheim’s owner, as though a person had the right to claim ownership over one of his fellow man as he might an object or an animal. And its cause had not been cruelty, either, but a simple apathy towards Van Hohenheim’s life, which, to him, was nothing but an expendable resource. After all, there were millions of slaves in Xerxes and nearly a hundred in Master’s charge. It hardly mattered that, physically, they were exactly as human as the other, because one couldn’t read or write, and that somehow made that one lesser, made them subject to this level of abuse and apathy. What was the life of one, pathetic individual who couldn’t read or right, who sported a number for a name and bore the will of another man’s vassalage on his back?

But these others wounds—the lattice of whippings all over his back? This was punishment. Punishment for defiance, for disobedience, for one little slip up in an entire life of resigned compliance. After having spent a lifetime with his head bowed, he raised his head once and was promptly beaten back into submission. All because Andar wanted to have a little fun, wanted to toe the line and he dragged Van Hohenheim into it, so they were undeserved, too. It wasn’t Van Hohenheim’s idea, yet he was punished for it, taking the brunt of the beating while Andar ran to save his own skin. But that was a slave’s life, wasn’t it? If you weren’t holding your head down and obeying as you ought to, you were letting others take the fall for you. Van Hohenheim had seen it plenty of times, like when Twenty-Six accused Five of stealing rations from the kitchen when he was the one caught hawking them to the other slaves, or when Nine claimed Fifty of raping her, which resulted in Fifty becoming a eunuch. That latter incident was several years ago, but the story was still fresh on everyone’s tongues and—

...dammit all, it was never going to change, was it?

No matter what, no matter how old they got, Van Hohenheim would be a slave and they could mark him up however they like. He could be cut to ribbons and no one would bat an eye. His arm might be cut off and he’d only be sold off as “damaged goods”. He had been bought and paid for three times, exchanged for coin as though that were an equivalent for someone’s life and it wasn’t fair.

“[It's not fair],” he murmurs aloud. He startles himself with the anger that clenches his syllables, the bitterness that grits his teeth.

Tarek pauses.

A tense silence follows. For a moment, Van Hohenheim thinks the slave-physician is going to chide him, or worse, threaten to tell Master. His heart leaps to his throat and lodges there, beating incessantly.

Something soft and cloth-like grazes the tender part of Van Hohenheim’s back. “[Hold your arms out.]”

A wave of relief floods Van Hohenheim and he releases the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Silently, because he doesn’t trust himself not to say anything else that might be incriminating, he holds his arms out as asked. Also silently, Tarek steadily winds the bandages around his torso, binding them snugly but not painfully so.

There’s a slow, tentative knock against the doorway. Van Hohenheim looks up, but immediately regrets it because that lash of anger and bitterness returns.

Andar. Leaning awkwardly against the doorway, face pallid and wide eyes sporting dark circles. His hair is a mess and his clothes are dirty (probably from hiding in a gutter or something), and he gawks openly at Van Hohenheim’s back.

Pointedly, Van Hohenheim looks away.

“[Ah, Andar.]” Tarek’s voice is a level of pleasant that can barely qualify as forced polite, taking on an uncharacteristic frosty edge that Van Hohenheim definitely approves of. “[Good morning. What brings you by?]”

There’s a moment of hesitation, a tense, uneasy silence. Van Hohenheim feels the weight of it settle uncomfortably between his shoulder blades. His back itches, but if he scratches at it, he knows his fingers will come away bloody.

“[I],” Andar starts, uncertain in a way that he usually isn’t. “[I... I wanted to, um...]”

Van Hohenheim closes his eyes and breathes in deep, but he can feel the vein in his temple bulging. His hands clench at fistfuls of linen sheets.

With the tact of a man who is an expert in human behavior, Tarek reads the atmosphere and gives a subtly-fake cough. “[Oh dear me, it seems I need to get more dressings. Excuse me.]”

Before Van Hohenheim can point out that the wounds are already dressed, Tarek has already shuffled out the door. Then there is silence again, heavy and oppressive.

Two steps forward. “[Twenty-Three—]”

That’s it. That does it. It isn’t enough that Andar is here, unharmed and unpunished when it is all his fault, but then he has the gall to refer to Van Hohenheim by his slave name—and something in him snaps.

He whirls around so sharply he’s sure his back is going to start bleeding again. “[Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it!]”

Andar flinches back, shock and hurt playing across his face. “[I just—]”

But Van Hohenheim doesn’t want to hear. All of a sudden he is on his feet and marching over to Andar, and then he’s in Andar’s face and he’s never noticed it before, but he’s actually a few inches taller than his fellow slave. “[Shut up. This was your fault, you know that? You and your goddamn schemes. I told you we’d get caught. I told you. But what did you say?]” Andar opens his mouth, probably to defend himself, but Van Hohenheim is having none of that. “[‘Oh, no, don’t be ridiculous, it’s the eleventh month, we’ll be fine’. Fine indeed!]”

“[I—]”

“[Do you even realize what this means for me? I’m damaged goods now, Andar. Damaged goods.]” The words are sour in Van Hohenheim’s mouth, because humans and goods should not synonymous, but it is, and that’s the truth. That’s the horrible truth he was unaware was so horrible until the Dwarf asked him in that soft, silky voice why he didn’t desire freedom. “[I’ve been forever branded as wayward. Overseer will never leave me alone now. Whenever I do my work, someone will be watching me, making sure I don’t do anything, because I can no longer be trusted. I am going to spend the rest of my life with eyes on my back!]”

“[Well],” Andar begins, cracking a choked, nervous smile, while his gaze darts to look anywhere but at Van Hohenheim’s face, “[no one can say a little extra supervision ever hurt! I-I mean, you are pretty dumb, Twenty-Three. It might help if you had someone to tell you how not to screw up.]”

A fresh surge of icy hot fury descends upon Van Hohenheim. Was Andar seriously making jokes about this?! “[Ohoh! Very funny! And what about you, Andar? Where’s your supervision? Oh, that’s right! I forgot! You’ve no lash-marks on your back! How did that happen, hmm?]”

Shame bleeds into Andar’s face and he looks down at his bare, dirty feet. Feet with which he used to scamper off into the night, into safety, while Van Hohenheim took what was meant for him.

“[You ran.]” Van Hohenheim is trembling now. He has a sudden urge to hit Andar but he won’t because that might reopen his wounds and then Tarek will scold him, and he’s had enough of people lecturing him for things that aren’t his fault. “[You just ran. After all that talk about brotherhood, you didn’t even bother to look back. You fucking coward.]”

Andar winces, but says nothing.

“[I may not be able to count, Andar],” he snarls, voice venomously cold, “[but I know what’s deserved and what isn’t. And this wasn’t.]”

Quietly, Andar says, “[I know.]”

Disgust curdles in Van Hohenheim’s gut. He can’t stand to be in the same room as Andre, much less look at him. Clenching his teeth, he turns and storms back over to the cot.

“[Look, Twenty-Three.]” There’s an imploring note in Andar’s tone that makes Van Hohenheim’s gut clench. “[I came here to apologize. I wanted to—]”

“[Get out],” Van Hohenheim snarls.

A brief, tense silence.

He hears Andar approach him. “[Twenty-Three...]”

“[Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it!]”

“[But—]”

Van Hohenheim whirls around with a snarl. “[I said go, dammit!]”

Hurt and anger flash across Andar’s face. “[So what? You can speak your piece, but I can’t speak mine? Can’t I even offer—]”

“[No],” Van Hohenheim interrupts frostily. “[Get out.]”

Andar opens his mouth to say something, but at that moment, Tarek appears from behind and clears his throat. While Andar proceeds to jump out of his skin and then whirl around with wide eyes, Tarek folds his thick arms over his chest.

“[Andar],” Tarek says, not unkindly, “[can you please leave me to tend to my patient?]”

A pained expression flashes across Andar’s face, and he shrinks in on himself, raising his shoulders while lowering his head. “[I...]”

Tense silence descends upon them. Andar casts an imploring, uncertain look between Tarek and Van Hohenheim, whatever resolve he mustered how faltering in the face of such steadfast rebuff. Finally, he looks at Van Hohenheim, who meets the desperation in his gaze with an unforgiving glare, and resignation settles over his frame, makes him visibly sag. He sighs, bowing his head, then turns away.

“[Don’t come back],” Van Hohenheim murmurs as Andar departs. His fellow slave stiffens, then disappears into the hall.

All around them, the sun rises, and the room fills with the golden dawn of a new day.

“You’re going to bankrupt me at this rate.”

Over the lip of the stein, Pinako levels him with a single arched brow—the epitome of incredulity. “Just so you know, that’s never been enough to dissuade me from drinking my weight in alcohol before, and it’s not going to now.”

Hohenheim takes a slow sip of porter. The porter is crisply cool but underlaid with the pleasant warmth of alcohol. Word on the street is that the porter is much better than anything else, which he finds to have a component of truth to it. Now he understands why it is the most expensive drink on the menu. “Fair enough.”

All around them, the tavern bustles and buzzes with news of the day’s events. The words “Pantheress of Resembool” seem to be on the lips of every patron, anxious eyes darting to take in Hohenheim and Pinako, the pair sitting at an innocuous table in the back corner (the same one they first met at, only it wasn’t quite so crowded then, and there hadn’t been so much attention, so many eyes on them, so many voices whispering all around them like a plague of mosquitoes has been set loose in the area). It would be a lie to say that Hohenheim were not used to whispers by now, but those usually came from inside him, his passengers always murmuring their opinions, and he’s learned how to zero in and tune out respectively. But these are of an outside source, real live people who he’s usually managed to blend in with, remain unremarkable to and never inadvertently draw attention to himself unless he was trying. Okay, no, that was a lie. There were a few times, but that was a long time ago and it still made him uncomfortable to have eyes on him. His own anxiety stirs up the souls and makes their murmurs louder, which of course only makes him more anxious.

It’s a good thing they’re in a bar, then, with drinks that are made for lowering inhibitions. The beer does calm him down, but it doesn’t chase away the needle-like self-consciousness of someone looking at him oddly or furtive whispers clearly directed at him. But still, he’s doing his best to ignore it all (the whispers, the souls, everything) in favor of Pinako—Pinako, who seems strangely unbothered and almost oblivious, except she’s probably not and just pretending for his benefit.

Or maybe she’s putting on a show for all her observers. Saying, proud and clear, “you don’t bother me, point and whisper all you want, I’m drunk and I’ve stopped caring”. It’s the only reason he can think of why she’s putting on such an exaggerated display of how much alcohol she can chug down. Already she’s knocked back four glasses of beer and quickly claiming her fifth. Either she’s putting on a show, or she’s just genuinely in too good a mood to care.

Her mug clinks loudly against the table as she sets it down, heaving an exaggerated sigh and sporting a bushy mustache of white foam. She wipes it off messily with the back of her hand, then turns eagerly to the bartender. “Oi! Need a refill!”

He eyes the empty glass, then eyes the other four, then sighs, not quite sure if he’s amused or exasperated. Maybe both. “Just so you know, we’re not having a repeat of the circumstances from that first night. If you need an escort home, you’ll have to ask someone else, because I’ve no plans to sleep on your couch tonight.”

“Oh?” She flashes a playful grin. “What’s wrong with my couch?”

“It gave me a crick in my neck.”

As expected, she bursts out into rowdy laughter. “Oh dear! Can’t have you bothering your poor neck, can we?”

He finds himself almost chuckling along with her when a waitress comes over to them and plunks down another beer. The woman pauses to take in the five empty steins, then the one in Hohenheim’s hand. He watches the gears turn in her head, watches her connect the dots, and her eyes widen before she pins Pinako with an incredulous stare. Noticing it, Pinako flashes a sloppy grin and thumps her chest with something like pride.

The waitress takes in Pinako’s red face and mussed hair, the unsteady way intoxication has loosened her motor skills, and snorts. “Boozehound,” she mutters under her breath as she departs.

“Bitch,” Pinako sneers back, but in tone that is more laughing than bitter. Too intoxicated to care.

“She forgot to collect the other steins,” Hohenheim notes wearily, eyeing the quintet of forlorn receptacles. They look lonely, perched on the edge of the table. Or maybe he’s had a little too much to drink himself.

“You’re right. Let’s not tip ‘er.” She starts working on number six.

A sigh leaves him, and he takes another sip of porter—only to find that it’s empty. Ah, he must have been more anxious than he’d thought... Ahem. He sets it down, adding to the glum little cluster of empty beer steins. Without anything to hold, he folds his hands awkwardly on the table, feeling a little silly.

There’s a pensive look on Pinako’s face as she takes him in. Then it softens, and she sliders her glass over to him. “Here. On the house.”

His brows rise and he accepts it, a bit uncertain, but tries to keep his tone warm. “You’re sharing now, are you?”

“Aw shaddup. S’only ‘cause you look all lost and stupid without one.” She leans back, crossing her arms behind her head, looking very proud of herself for her “charitable” action. Then, noticing the rude waitress darting by, a wicked gleam appears in her eye. “Hey honey! Need a refill!”

The waitress stops, glancing over her shoulder. A frown knits her brow and she turns, folding her arms. “Miss, I just served you.”

“I gave it t’ him,” Pinako says casually, and gestures vaguely towards Hohenheim.

To this, the waitress turns to pin him with a hard stare. He stiffens under it, not quite sure what to do, why Pinako would sell him out, what the waitress is expecting him to say. Helplessly, he takes a sip and tries to ignore her.

The waitress huffs, then struts off.

Pinako sticks her tongue out. “She really is a bitch, isn’t she?”

He eyes the six steins (which the waitress once again forgot to collect, maybe she’s doing it on purpose now), then looks tiredly at Pinako. “Exactly how much are you planning to drink tonight?”

“Well, usually I have eight pints before I end up needing someone to escort me,” Pinako replies casually, like that’s not superhuman, like he hasn’t had three hundred years for his liver to build a tolerance and he still can’t handle more than three glasses of anything too strong. “But tonight, I was thinking of having ten.”

Hohenheim actually feels his jaw fall open. Living for hundreds of years allowed you to learn so much that very little could surprise you anymore, yet here he was thoroughly shocked and flummoxed beyond words. “Pinako, you are going to kill yourself like that.”

“If that were true, I’d be dead already.” Mischief dances across her face, pools in her smile and sparkles in her eyes. “One time I drank twelve in one sitting.”

“That’s physically impossible.”

“Strong livers run in the family.”

“I don’t care. It’s physically impossible for a human being to consume that much alcohol and not suffer alcohol poisoning.”

“Maybe I’m superhuman, then.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

Her laughter resonates through the rafters.

The waitress returns to plunk down a full beer stein and glare disapprovingly at Pinako, then departs again. Pinako snickers into her drink.

There’s a pleasant warmth buzzing through Hohenheim, one that sends the whispers and odd looks running, even quiets down the droning of souls. He wonders if it’s the booze or if it’s Pinako. “I’m going to miss this,” he hears himself saying.

Pinako’s too busy sipping porter to answer immediately. She holds up a finger while she finishes taking a gulp of alcohol, then sets the stein down while she swallows heavily. Her brown eyes appraise him, innocently inquiring. “Oh? You goin’ somewhere?”

“Yes. Aerugo.”

She stops. Blinks. Stares. Like he’s speaking a different language all of a sudden and she’s trying to decipher the meaning, only she’s got no base to go off of so all she can do is sit there, staring, like an idiot. Leans back slowly in her seat. Still staring, still trying to process what he’s just said.

“You,” she starts slowly. Stops, starts again. “You’re still—still leavin’?”

The word “leaving” puts a bitter tang in his throat. It implies that there’s something in Rush Valley that he was once apart of, and he is now turning his back on. Implies that something will ache and hurt, that someone or something will be lost once he departs from it. It’s not that he doesn’t like Rush Valley—he does, really does. It’s nice and lively and the townsfolk are very friendly. Plus there’s Pinako, with whom he’s found a rare, fragile sort of kinship, and he will probably miss her most out of everything.

But he can’t stay here. Can’t stay anywhere. Staying in one place won’t change the nature of his immortality, won’t change his ageless vessel and the myriad of souls who murmur in his ears when the silences grow too long. He has promised himself and his unwilling companions that he would find a way to relieve them of this burden. Already, he’s lingered too long here, had to endure the frustrated and impatient murmurs of disgruntled souls who were anxious for the fulfilling of his promise. After a few days of debating, he decided that enough was enough, and tomorrow, he would set out. He’d actually planned to tell her tonight, but hadn’t been expecting the fiasco from earlier today.

Still, the thought of leaving little Rush Valley, with its fanatic love of automail, and Pinako, with her warm candor and sparkling wit, fills him with an aching sadness. Because it is nice here, and he will miss it.

“I’m afraid so,” he says, apologetic.

A pensive look claims Pinako’s expression, belying the red flush of intoxication. Slowly, she grabs her stein and takes an uncharacteristically measured sip. “I see.”

Guilt suddenly tightens his gut. He didn’t intend to upset her—he’d assumed she was already aware of the temporary nature of their agreement. Perhaps not. “I’m sorry. It’s not that Rush Valley isn’t nice or anything—”

But she interrupts his fumbled apology with a dismissive, albeit exaggerated, wave of her hand. “No, no, s’fine. I get it. It’s, just... hell, I dunno. I’m gonna miss this, I guess.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I mean...” She eyes her glass reflectively, gaze unfocused and very far away, like she might find something in the fuzzing amber liquid. “I liked having someone t’ talk to, y’know? Someone who doesn’t judge. Like—if it had been anyone else I’d raised my wrench to save, they would have freaked on me. They would have, like, called me a crazy bitch or something. But you... you thanked me. I dunno. I just, I appreciate it is all, someone who doesn’t lecture me about how I’m not proper or whatever.”

The sentiment is warm, heartfelt. Voices wash over him, remind him that he’s not mortal, that it’s a pointless sentiment because he will outlive her, but it still stuns him and it’s deeply touching, leaves him humbled and delighted.

He feels his lip twitch and grabs his glass. “Well, if you ask me, ‘proper’ is overrated.”

Her mouth puckers musingly as she eyes his raised glass, then the corner of her mouth pulls back into a smirk. “You’d say that—you an’ your weirdass name.”

They clink beer steins, and for a while, neither says anything. The silence fills with the voices of patrons who are too intrigued for their own good.

Pinako takes a swallow of beer. “Y’know,” she says, something oddly contemplative in her tone, “I’m actually headin’ to th’ border myself.”

He blinks, stunned. “You are?”

“Yep.” She throws her head back and drains the glass. Rivulets drips down her chin, foam clinging to her upper lip. “The day we met, I was actually contacted by some Colonel or somethin’. They wan’ me to come down an’ outfit some a’ their injured soldiers with automail. The battlefield kind. I’ve been spendin’ the week debatin’ and then I accepted, and then I needed to pack, but.” A shrug rolls through her shoulders, and she grins. “If you’re leavin’ t’morrow, well, so’m I. We might be sharin’ a train.”

A ripple of protest goes through his countrymen, and thousands of voices collectively cry out against the idea, voicing their discontent with the idea. They’ve wasted enough time with her, indulging themselves in a life of leisure and normalcy that they will never fully fit into. Forming bonds is dangerous, because the closer they allowed someone to get the more likely their secret will be discovered. Plus, it’s useless endeavor, forming such friendships, such tenuous, temporary connections. These bonds are subject to death and decay and entropy, as all things are, as all humans are, while they and Hohenheim will continue to exist in their condemned perpetuality.

But at the same time, several warm voices bubble up in opposition. They point out that people are the only thing that have meaning in this continuous exercise they call existence, that companionship is the only thing keeping Hohenheim sane. Some derisively wonder if he is still sane, after all this, but those warm voices nag and badger and persist, like a trickle of water carving a canyon.

The two sides war in his head, rage against the warm buzz of alcohol. It’s giving him something of a migraine. But then he looks at Pinako, who is sitting there with a glass of beer in hand, eyes warm and sparkling—and for some strange reason, he finds himself almost smiling.

“That sounds lovely.”

The Dwarf’s eye snaps open in surprise when, not hours after he is released from the medical wing, Van Hohenheim storms into Master’s vacant study. Its maroon pupil scans Van Hohenheim’s face, takes in the slow, steady simmer of outrage glowing in his eyes and the stubborn way his jaw is set, and hums in a thoughtful manner. “[My, my. From what I’d heard, I was almost afraid that you’d gone and died on me, Van Hohenheim.]”

He strides into the room with long steps made fluid by bottled fury. Hair is falling over his face, obscuring his vision, because he hasn’t tied it back properly but who cares. No one cares. Andar doesn’t care, only cares about saving his own hide (he was almost grateful when the weasel was caught raiding the kitchen for food and then carted off to Master for a personal and gruesome punishment). Tarek only cares because he’s risen to a place where he can afford to. But Van Hohenheim’s the only one who will give a total shit about himself, goddammit. But no more. He’s done with being the only one who cares. “[Teach me everything.]”

Bewilderment flashes across the Dwarf’s, er... face? Can that cloud even qualify as a face? “[I’m sorry?]”

“[Teach me],” Van Hohenheim repeats sharply. He goes up to the flask and slams his hands down on the table—so hard that the flask bounces and the Dwarf looks vaguely startled. “[Reading, writing, arithmetic, alchemy. Anything. Everything. Whatever it takes to get me out of here.]”

“[Get you out of here],” the Dwarf repeats contemplatively.

Van Hohenheim levels with the Dwarf with as an intense a glare as he can manage, partially aware that he probably looks like a lunatic, but Red King help him, he’s not backing down. “[I’m tired of my life being at the mercy of a man who claims to be my superior. I’m tired of not being treated like a human being. So teach me, Dwarf in the Flask. Help me claw my way to out of this hellhole.]”

The barest sliver of a smile appears from the black void of the Dwarf’s body-face. “[How badly are you going to complain about my teaching technique if I say yes?]”

He thinks of Andar, who ran to save his own skin. He thinks of Overseer, who seems to almost delight in carrying out punishment to the wayward. He thinks of Master, who could barely spare him and his life a second thought. No. No, he’s done being an afterthought in everyone’s mind, done being something so insignificant that he can be easily overlooked.

The Dwarf offered him power, prestige. Wealth and fame and luxury. And goddamn, he’s going to seize it.

“[I’ll keep all my complaints to myself from now on],” Van Hohenheim promises.

Another hum radiates through the Dwarf’s gaseous body. “[You realize that, after this little incident, we won’t have any privacy anymore. You’ll likely be sneaking around quite a bit.]”

He’s already been labelled a wayward, and if all ends well, he won’t even be a slave anymore, so what the hell. “[So be it. I’ll do whatever it takes, Dwarf in the Flask. I want my life to be my own.]”

Something like approval glitters in the Dwarf’s single, haunting eye. “[Very well then. Let’s get started.]”

The train station is crowded with tourists and travelers and out-of-town automail users flocking to the town for quality maintenance. Also present but not as prevalent are young automail mechanics who have come seeking masters to apprentice them in the craft of forming metal limbs from wires and screws.

Hohenheim watches them over the lip of the book he’s reading. Young couples with children, old loners who dress like they’ve got something to prove, world-weary laborer with smudged collared shirts, adults fresh from adolescence whose eyes are bright and hopeful. They all mingle with one another, blend into some fantastical medley of lives and personalities and souls, each one so different from the other that you might never believe they could have ever made contact with one another. There, in one corner, he spots a dour young woman clothed in dark, depressing colors who looks begrudged to talk with the animated little boy who wears new overalls and allows his eyes to shine bright with innocence. And there, on the bench across from him, is an old man with a cane who is saying something particularly belligerent-sounding to a sunny woman whose entire ensemble is decorated in flowers. At the ticket booth, a trio of young women wait in line, giggling to themselves—one is the same blonde-blue-eyed staple of Amestris, while another is dark-haired and pale and possibly of northern descent, and the third is dark-skinned but white-haired, likely from Ishval, of all places.

It’s amazing, really, that some many people from so many places that meet here at a singular point and blend together into a great crowd of faces. Perhaps he underestimated Amestris. Despite its vast and tumultuously bloody history (or perhaps because of it, and the constant expansion), Amestris is one of the most racially diverse countries on the continent. And besides, it wasn’t as though the people here were bloodthirsty warmongers like the rumors and stereotypes portrayed them as. Then again, such things were usually spread by people who knew nothing on the subject, assuming things based on their own experiences or things they once heard.

A phantom chuckle interrupts his musings. You seem awfully chipper.

At the sound of that voice, Hohenheim freezes, breath catching in his lungs. He swallows, licks his lips, looks back down at the pages. The rest of the souls immediately fall silent, almost as though giving the two space for a private conversation. Or as private a conversation as they can manage. “[This morning looks like it has the makings of a good day.]”

Ha! I can’t believe a statement like that came out of your mouth, of all places!

A frown tugs said mouth. “[What’s that supposed to mean?]”

That you’re a morose old man whose more likely to sit on a bench, reading a book than engage in a meaningful conversation. Another laugh, this one nice and loud and warm with amusement. Which is exactly what you’re doing!

“[I’m not morose],” Hohenheim sniffs, affronted.

Would you prefer “crazy”, then? You’re sitting here having a conversation with yourself.

Hohenheim hums. “[Technically, I’m having a conversation with someone nobody else can see.]”

In a language no one else can understand, points out the soul, and he can practically feel the mischievous smile that accompanies it.

He looks up at the crowd again. No one is paying him much mind, instead too wrapped up in their crazy, wonderful, chaotic lives to mind the man sitting at the end of the bench nearest to the ticket booth, his nose in a book and murmuring words under his breath that no one can understand.

“[Eccentric.]”

Sorry?

“[That’s the word I prefer],” Hohenheim says chipperly. “[‘Eccentric’. A good word to describe myself, I think.]”

Oh, indeed, the soul agrees cheekily. Very eccentric. The most eccentric in all the world, if I daresay.

A smirk flits across his mouth. “[Well, they say the most brilliant minds are also the most eccentric, so I take that as a compliment.]”

More laughter, more loudness and warmth. You consider yourself a genius, Twenty-Three?

And to this, Hohenheim chuckles to himself, and slowly folds his book closed. “[I’m not entirely sure myself. Some might consider me as such. Some might not. I suppose it depends on your perspective.]”

“Oi! Strange McWeirdname! Over here!”

He peers up just as Pinako Rockbell appears through the crowd, shoving her way through a cluster of people, waving one hand emphatically to draw his attention. A giant duffle bag of what he presumes to be her equipment is slung haphazardly over one shoulder, and she’s dressed herself in surprisingly feminine attire—a clean white blouse with frills around the collar and a pair of dark slacks without a trace of grease. However, it wouldn’t be Pinako if she weren’t wearing her oversized utility belt stocked with tools. A smudge of machine oil darkens a spot on her left cheek near her ear, and there’s a brilliant smile spread across her face.

Spotting her, he gives a subdued wave to convey that yes, he sees her, there’s no need to cause a scene over it. Her grin widens as she bounds over in a manner that isn’t suggestive of the pounds of heavy equipment she’s sporting.

“Well hello there,” she chirps once she’s in front of him. “Mind if I join you?”

He gestures to the empty spot next to where he’s set his suitcase down on the bench. “Please. Be my guest.”

Chuckling, Pinako plops down next to him, sliding off the strap of her duffle bag. She keeps one hand slung over it haphazardly, like she’s afraid someone’s going to snatch it away the moment she lets it go. Despite this, she slouches against the bench, still grinning. “So what’re you doing, sitting here all alone?”

“Waiting for a friend,” he answers tactfully. He opens his suitcase and slides his books into it, because he doesn’t want to run the risk of losing it a second time.

She lets out an approving hum, eyeing the suitcase with feigned disinterest. “What’s in there, anyway? I don’t think you ever showed me.”

“And I’ve no plan to.” He snaps the case closed while giving her a meaningful look. Contained in this case is his entire life’s work, all the failed leads and dead ends, reminders of how far he’s come, how long it’s been, how he’s spent centuries searching for release. As nice as Pinako is, he has never shown the contents of his briefcase to anyone, and is not going to start now. Tactfully, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the train tickets her purchased earlier today. “One of these is yours.”

The change in subject causes her to sober a little. Lips pursing, she snatches one of the tickets out of his hand and peers down at it, brows furrowing as she quickly scans the black-and-white print. For a moment, she seems troubled, but quickly pushes it aside in favor a mischievous smirk that doesn’t look as natural as it should. “That’s awfully mean of you. I’d let you see inside my duffle bag if you asked.”

“Would you now?”

“Yep!”

Hohenheim tilts his head to the side in an inquisitive manner but doesn’t press. She eventually loses interest in the mysteries he harbors in his suitcase, gaze dropping down to her hands in favor of the little white slip of paper clutched between her fingers. Storm clouds of trepidation and vacillation gather on her face, blocking out her natural light and darkening it into something more tumultuous, more uncertain.

Concern stirs in him. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes. No. Sort of.” She heaves a sigh, sinking back into her seat with a sudden onset weariness. For a moment, she looks uncharacteristically forlorn. “It’s just—this is going to sound really strange, but... Hell, I’ve lived in Rush Valley for, god, five years now? In that time, it never really felt like home, but. Now that I’m leaving it’s... I dunno! Just, kinda. Relieving. And exciting. And nerve-wracking. If that makes sense.”

It doesn’t make sense at all. Not to him. But then again, it doesn’t have to. “You could always come back, if you want to.”

That statement makes her expression harden, marks her mouth pull into a frown and her brows furrow. “No... I don’t think that’s likely to happen. See, this place has been good to me and all, taught me a lot about what it means to be a mechanic. And hell, maybe I’ll miss it, but I, just... don’t think coming back is a notion I’m likely to entertain.”

“Alright,” he says, if only because he’s not sure what else to say to that.

She looks at him oddly. “Am I making sense to you?”

“Not at all,” he admits honestly. “But you don’t really have to. Your feelings are yours, not mine.”

For a moment, she just eyes him, not quite sure what to make of that statement. Then she rolls her eyes, mouth playing into a smirk. “You’re a strange man, Hohenheim. A right strange man indeed.”

He prefers “eccentric”! Andar crows.

Their conversation comes to a pause as the train pulls in, and the scream of the engine and the gears and the wheels and everything else is enough to drown out all noise. It’s a crying shriek, a desolate sort of wail punctuated by the bellowing of a whistle. You might go deaf, hearing something like that over and over every single day, and yet there are people in the station who don’t cover their ears or even flinch at the sound of it. They’re too used it. It’s amazing, really, the sort of things a person can grow used to.

The doors slide open and vomits people. People who all look tired and excited and relieved. Overhead, a nasally voice announces that the ten-thirty to South City is now ready for boarding, single file please and thank you.

“That’s us,” Pinako murmurs, voice tremoring with an excited trepidation. She slings her duffle bag over her shoulder, shooting him a watery smile as she rises. “You know, I’m kind of glad you’re accompanying me. If I’m worrying about you, I won’t be able to think about anything else as much.”

He grabs his suitcase and rises as well, falling into step with her and arching a brow. “What do you mean ‘worrying about me’?”

She shoots him the most incredulous look on the planet. “Oh please. You’re a nice, reasonably-minded man—of course you need my protection.”

“Well!”

“Oh hush,” she scolds, only half-meaning it. “You saw what almost happened with Wally, didn’t you?”

Memory of yesterday’s catastrophe makes Hohenheim wince. He’s heard that Wally is fine, recovering surprisingly well, and has vowed undying vengeance on Pinako Rockbell for public emasculation—according to the maître d of the inn he was staying at. Gossip spread fast in the small town, and it’s probably for the best that the mechanic is skipping town, despite how clear it is that she can handle herself and then some.

However, the recollection also stirs up the image of a resigned Dominic gathering Wally in his arms, as well as a surge of guilt. “Speaking of that—I hope you made amends with Dominic for dragging him into all that before you left.”

“Oh, yeah, I sent him a real nice gift basket.” Though she waves in a dismissive manner, the curve of her lip suggests something that is opposite of innocent. “And then some.”

Oh dear. “What does that mean?”

Laughter bubbles up, but there’s a note of something ominous beneath. “Well, I had to leave him a parting gift, now didn't I?”

Weariness, or something resembling, finds its way into him as they board the train, filing on with thousands of other people who are all eager to reach their destination. The inside of the train is meticulously clean, all the booths hardly occupied. “And what was that, dare I ask?”

“A panther cub,” she says, gliding over to the nearest booth.

Hohenheim stops in the middle of the aisle. Stares. Lets the statement sink in.

“You what?!”