Chapter Text
War, as Ed had known it, was stories. It was cold nights out on the streets with the townsfolk as flickers of flame danced in the air and the loudest voice was the one that spoke of battle. The tales were often outlandish and rarely seeded in truth, yet Ed had found himself listening to them all the same.
In the twisted world the speaker built up, there was always a clear-cut line of right and wrong. There was always a good, there was always bad, and there was always a hero. A hero, who fought for everyone, and who always triumphed in the end. Ed remembered liking those—emulating their traits when he played with Al and Winry in the fields. Because how could a hero be anything but right?
Mustang had been a shock. Not just him, either—Ishval as a whole had been a shock. He’d grown up hearing about war from the mouths of people who could never imagine it as more than a fantasy, but he had still thought they were right. But here was a hero, like the ones he’d heard about over so many nights, and he looked nothing like any of Ed’s imagined characters. He held his head so high there was no ‘almost’ about his assumed superiority, but over time, it seemed less like he was looking down, and more like he was looking up.
Like he had his head on a chopping block, and was just waiting for the blade to fall.
Despite all this—despite Mustang, despite the military, despite how he knew war wasn’t black and white but grey and despite what he’d come to hear of Ishval—it had never been anything but stories. Over time, the words of cold, fire-lit nights were pushed aside and shelved for later. For when he’d learned enough to understand what they didn’t say, and taught himself how to recognise the lies in his own head.
Ed had lived all of fourteen years, and not once had he expected to find himself on this kind of battlefield.
There was a gun at his feet. It wasn’t his gun, nor was he the one who fired it. It was covered in dirt and dented badly enough that the last bullet had stuck in the barrel, leaving the smoke creeping out of its crevices. The trigger had been broken off, along with half the handle, and Ed couldn’t say where that had ended up. No doubt it was buried under the rest of the carnage around him.
Rubble littered the area as far as he could see, along with bullets, blood and bodies. A ways off to the right, a still-smoking hill crumbled slightly—aftershock from where a grenade had hit. Spikes of rock sprung up in increasingly larger and taller clusters fanning out from several separate locations, one still with a hastily drawn transmutation circle, displaying a symbol that Ed could tell had sent the attack slightly off course. Blood was sprinkled around like seasoning for a sick sort of stew.
Ed trudged away from the smoking hill and out into the thick of what had been a battleground of desperation just minutes before. Once they’d run out of ammunition, the Aerugonian and Cretan soldiers had started to throw their guns and fists in a final stand against Ed’s unit.
What was left of it.
Moving as quickly as he dared, Ed took long strides over to the bodies dressed in Amestrain blue, barely crouching down enough to swipe the dog tags from the chains around their necks. He resolutely did not think about the dull, lifeless eyes that seemed to follow him even as he walked away.
Pushing the last tag into his uniform pocket, Ed looked at the wreckage before him. All this to gain control of the Aerugo-Creta-Amestris border, and maybe to work their way up between the other two countries and cut off their communications. Not an easy task, as it would leave the advance team exposed to fire from either side, and there were sure to be fortifications. That was without counting the probable outcome of Drachman backup, and the inevitable consequence of running into the Donbachi border at the other end.
It was going to be a suicide mission, but it was going to be worthwhile—any number of troops Amestris lost, Creta or Aerugo were bound to lose too. Thin the ranks, so to speak, and take the fighting away from Amestrian cities.
The point was, they were incredibly lucky it had been guarded so sparsely. ‘Sparsely,’ in this case, meaning that he and his unit had been outnumbered almost a dozen to one, instead of the expected twenty or more.
Not that any of them were still alive.
To be alone at the site of a veritable bloodbath, Ed thought, was to know the true meaning of isolation.
He was the last one still standing. The last one alive. He would have compared it to how he felt after his mother died, only it was so, so much more than that. Al wasn’t here, Winry wasn’t here, Granny Pinako wasn’t here—no one was. It was just Ed, still-cooling corpses, and the rest of the uncaring world.
Ed put his right hand over his heart—exposed, dented, automail hand—and wished, as six bloodied dog tags clinked together in his pocket, that his eyes were any less dry.
-
Wrath had been through his fair share of conflicts. It was in his very name, the essence of violence was sewn deep into his skin as if it were his blood. He was the ruler of a country constantly at war, with itself or with its neighbours, and so he could never truly rest in the way that other leaders could—save, of course, for the Xingese Emperor. War was a necessity, not just for the expansion of the country but for the sake of Father’s plan. Without war, the plan would fail—there wouldn’t be enough energy to power the circle, and so it would never work.
But this war. This war was making Wrath uneasy.
“Father.”
His Father, his creator, opened his eyes. He was seated, as he usually was, with the head of his vessel rested on his fist. As an acknowledgment to Wrath, he removed the fist holding his head up, letting the hand uncurl and drape over the arm of his throne.
“Wrath,” Father said, out of courtesy. He already knew the purpose of this visit, could feel the bloodshed spreading from Briggs already. He knew the what. Wrath was just there to tell him the why.
“Drachma has declared war,” said Wrath. It hung with a damning weight over the cavern.
Father’s face didn’t change, but something sparked, sharp and deadly, in the glint of his eye. “I thought I was very clear about my plans for warmongering in the north.”
Wrath didn’t react. If he’d been human, he would have—oh, he would—but he wasn’t.
But human he may not be, even he couldn’t deny the tension in his shoulders.
“I gave no such order.” He paused, though only for a moment, before reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a copy of the report from Briggs. He unfolded it at an entirely regular pace—a stark contrast to the words on the page.
Father watched him all the while.
“The report states the cause of conflict as a faulty wire in one of Fort Briggs’ anti-tank missiles. An unprecedented fire near the generator room caused it to overload and break entirely, which should have shut down the targeting systems but instead lead to an explosion that killed nearly a hundred Drachman soldiers in the base over the border. The Drachman government has taken this as an Amestrian assault, and returned fire within the hour.” He paused. “We lost over a hundred soldiers and gained a sizeable breach in our defences, and Briggs was almost fully destroyed. It’s a miracle we didn’t lose Major General Armstrong, or else we’d have no troops left from Briggs at all.”
It would have been laughable, if it weren’t such a tragedy.
“It wasn’t Hohenheim?”
Wrath shook his head. “No.” There was no need to explain why.
Father regarded him, pensive in a way that betrayed his true nature. “Am I to believe that the humans started this all on their own?”
“Yes,” Wrath confirmed, and even through his rage at the utter incompetence of it all, he couldn’t help but be disbelievingly impressed. “That’s exactly what they did.”
-
Ed knew he was shell shocked. Hawkeye had warned him at great length about the signs and dangers of shell shock. Problem was, she hadn’t really been able to tell him anything about the kind of shell shock you got when you were the bomb.
Before Fort Briggs fell, when he’d been just shy of thirteen and even more stupid than he was a year later, he’d told himself and Al—promised, even—that he would never take another person’s life. Failing that, he’d absolutely never kill in cold blood. The thought of war was inconceivable to him, despite how violent Amestris was as a country. The reality of what he was signing up for by selling his soul to the military—and Al’s by extension—didn’t hit him until too late.
Far too late.
“Major!”
A spray of gunfire as Martie made her way with reckless abandon from one of four transmuted walls to another, trading Seb’s company for Ed’s. Ed, who was supposed to be leading, fighting, doing something but instead he was—he was—
Martie cried out as her shoulder jerked violently, twice in quick succession, but crawled the rest of the way to cover, blessedly alive.
For now.
“Major,” she repeated, breathless with what was undoubtedly the same mix of fear, pain and desperation Ed could see in Seb’s eyes. Seb had taken a stray rock to the jaw when the defence troops guarding the Aerugo-Creta-Amestris border had opened fire, starting with a well-placed grenade. Ed himself was still shaking from the noise and could barely hear Martie over the ringing in his ears. He couldn’t imagine what Seb was likely experiencing, what with all the dust and ash in his eyes.
Though maybe that was its own kind of blessing—maybe it was better that he was blind to the carnage of the crater behind him. Some kind of sick reassurance, because Seb couldn’t see Henning, barely holding himself together as Zaf did her best with what she had on hand to reduce the bleeding from what remained of his left leg, the right’s automail busted well beyond repair. He couldn’t see Annabell, on Ed’s other side, as she robotically unloaded her gun onto the Aerugonian and Cretan forces bearing down on them, paused to reload, then resumed her one-woman counterattack.
He couldn’t see his best friend, Guiying Ren, whose remains were partially smeared on the wall right next to his face. The majority of Ren’s corpse was difficult to place, what with it being buried under the rubble of the explosion that had cost Henning his legs.
This wasn’t even Ren’s country—none of them were; not Aerugo, not Creta, not even Drachma. He came all the way from fucking Xing because he had nowhere to go but west, and then he couldn’t fucking leave because the Amestrian citizenship he’d worked so hard to get had become as good as a death sentence when the war broke out. He’d died for a bullshit cause, for a country that wasn’t even his, and Ed couldn’t even bring himself to do anything about it because he was so fucking terrified.
He wanted Al.
He wanted Al to stay as far away from this as was possible.
His breath came in short, sharp gasps.
“Edward Elric.”
And all of a sudden, Ed stopped breathing altogether. He slowly lifted his gaze to meet Martie’s eyes—Martie, who’d taken two bullets to the same shoulder just to be here, with him instead of with Seb, who needed her too. But Ed was the ranking officer here, and Martie was his second. If she didn’t think he could take command, it was her responsibility to step in. ‘Major in name only,’ was what he’d been told when he’d been given command of his unit. It was only now that he understood the gravity of his responsibility.
Martie looked into his eyes like she wanted to cry for him. Somewhere, deep inside, Ed wanted to cry for him too. “We need you,” she said, even as a second grenade was thrown over their defences and Henning, despite how much pain he must have been in, threw it right back. The shouts of their enemies mingled all too seamlessly with the explosion as rubble rained down from on high.
Ed shook, his whole body—involuntarily—and then just his head. “N—no, I—I can’t—”
“You can,” she insisted, “of course you can! You’re the Fullmetal Alchemist, of course you can!”
“I can’t,” Ed protested, hysterical. “I can’t, I can’t, I—”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Martie asked, echoed by the sound of Annabell’s return fire.
“Can’t!” Ed insisted.
“We need you,” Martie repeated, and suddenly, Ed could see that she was nearly hysterical with hopelessness. It was the way her eyes darted everywhere are nowhere, and the way her hands reached for his shoulders even though they were practically caked in Ren’s blood. Ed didn’t know what it was, but it did something to his insides that made him swallow down his bile for long enough to listen.
“We—I don’t care if you can’t lead for shit. None of us need you to lead—we need you because you’re our best shot at even getting close to that base, and because you’re our Alchemist,” she said. “We need you, because you’re our human weapon, and if you thought you were anything different in the eyes of the military, you were wrong.”
Zaf, satisfied that Henning wouldn’t immediately die now that she’d treated him to the best of her abilities, had joined Annabell in returning fire. Henning was getting ready to do the same, and Seb was slowly blinking the world back into focus, drawing one of the basic earth arrays Ed had taught him in the only thing he had on hand: his own blood.
In front of him, Martie crouched, and Ed knew exactly what she was asking him to do.
Ed took a deep breath in. He held it for as long as he could, then let it out. The result made him dizzy, but not for long. After a second, he pushed himself to his feet, ignoring Martie’s alarmed demands for him to get back down. He allowed his eyes to wet but did not permit the tears to fall, glaring down at her.
He was shorter than the protective wall, and he could see that it broke her heart.
“Fuck you,” he growled. By the way his voice broke in the middle of that declaration, she could probably tell that he didn’t mean it.
Before he could see her shatter any further, Ed turned to face the transmuted wall. This flimsy party trick, something he hadn’t even had to teach to Seb, was all that stood between him, his unit, and certain death.
He clapped.
Killing had come to him more easily than he’d ever admit.
In hindsight, he could have asked Mustang. Of everyone he knew who might even have the hope of understanding how hollow, how desperately empty it felt to be surrounded by death of his own creation, it was Mustang who knew what it was like. The Hero of Ishval, the Flame Alchemist, was burdened with the knowledge of a war far more tragic than the one Ed was now fighting in.
Ultimately, it was Mustang who put him here, but it was also Mustang who had tried to save him from what he was facing now.
Ed’s hands moved on their own, reaching for his flare and loading a canister of green. He shot without hesitation, back towards Amestris where the squad tasked with holding down the fort once it had been won was waiting. That done, he dropped the gun to the ground, and his body was quick to follow. His automail leg jarred painfully, and his hands hit the bloodied ground for support. All this succeeded in dong, however, was drawing attention to the worrying groan of his arm, accompanied by a clatter of his internal mechanisms that he didn’t have the energy to be worried about.
His hands were covered in blood. So was the ground, but his hands were what mattered. They seemed so distant, and yet he could sense the coldness seeping into his skin and staining him red, red like the coat he’d been forced to ditch in favour of military blue like the Major he was.
He nearly collapsed to the side, but stopped himself for two reasons. For one, if he lay down now, he knew he’d never get back up. For another—well.
On one side was the body of Sergeant Martine Stafford, his second—shot in the head just seconds after Ed had begun to wreak havoc on their enemies. On the other was what he strongly suspected to be a part of Private Guiying Ren’s skull.
Ed had no idea how long he stayed there, floating in and out of awareness on all fours like the dog he was. The wind, biting and cold, blew through his hair, cropped short. He felt light and heavy at the same time. His lungs were coated with the dust of explosions.
Behind him, Private Annabell Hodge’s corpse had been impaled through the arm by an alchemically created spear of stone. Even in death, her gun remained in her grasp. The enemy soldier Ed had been aiming for—Cretan, judging by his uniform—hung limply with his feet off the ground where the spear had pierced his gut, one lifeless hand rested on her head. Closer to the enemy base, Private Sebastian Abel had been gunned down alongside Corporal Eiva Zarfati, transmutation circle unfinished, all entrance wounds on their backs. Private Henning Kaufer remained behind Ed’s protective wall to the very last, and now rested underneath its rubble.
There were too few of them and too many to fight. The only reason Ed was still alive was the same reason they were so thin on the ground to begin with: he was a State Alchemist.
The more he thought it, the more he understood Teacher’s distaste for the military, and the more he wished he could have joined his unit and all their broken pieces.
Distantly, the sound of engines was slowly becoming audible. From what Ed could tell, they were coming from Amestris, but in all honesty he just wasn’t sure. He was so cold. His lungs were burning, but his skin was ice.
Behind him, debris clattered as it shifted, unstable after the battle. He didn’t bother to turn and look.
Gunshots.
Abruptly reminded of the ever present dangers of war, Ed’s mind snapped sharply into focus. His body lurched without his command, and the sudden movement made the joints of his automail arm grate with a loud screeching of metal on metal. It collapsed out from under him, leaving him to stagger uncontrollably into the pool formed by a mix of Martie’s and Ren’s blood. His flesh and blood ankle twisted as he stumbled, kicking the discarded flare gun, and he just about managed to clap before he hit the floor once again. As soon as his hands touched the ground, his eyes focused on the disturbance enough so that he caught sight of three Aerugonian soldiers as they were flung harshly into the air and came crashing back down, bloody and broken just like the rest.
He ignored the fact that he’d tripped over Martie’s neck on his way down.
Turning his head towards the engine sounds, he could now see the approaching convoy—three personnel vehicles, and another for equipment. He could just about make out two figures walking behind the vehicles. The source of the gunfire, probably, now that he thought about it.
Soon enough, the personnel vehicles had reached the battlefield, and the soldiers inside them were piling out. Almost immediately, Ed locked eyes with a young looking man who took one look at him, another at Martie’s corpse, and heaved up whatever he’d managed to choke down that morning. Ed didn’t blame him, but that didn’t stop him from hating every soldier whose face went pale at the sight of what he’d done. At least there were some, now, who were checking for Aerugonian and Cretan survivors.
“Major Elric.”
Ed gladly looked away from the green soldiers and up at a man who was obviously in charge of them. He was of average height and build, but that meant nothing to someone as grounded as Ed currently was. “Captain,” Ed replied after a glance at his shoulders.
The Captain held out a hand, which Ed accepted. With some strain, he pulled Ed to his feet. “Captain Holder, Sir,” he said by way of introduction, bending only a little awkwardly to support Ed as he swayed on his feet. “I’ll take you to our medic. After that…”
Ed’s vision—and his hearing—swam for a split second, and he missed the rest of Holder’s sentence. He jarred his ankle for a second time as he tripped over his own feet, blinking white spots from his vision. When his sight returned to him in full, he blinked once more, this time at Holder, who was looking down at him as expectantly as he could out of the corner of his eye.
“…Say that again, but slower,” Ed said, the words tasting like dust in his mouth.
Holder regarded him for a moment. “I’m taking you to our medic. My men are currently sweeping the area for any more survivors like the ones who tried to attack you. After Private Furn treats you we can discuss what happened and move your unit’s remains onto our equipment transport vehicle to be brought back.” He hoisted Ed’s arm higher on his shoulders and Ed hissed in pain. He lowered his arm back down again, though he looked awkward supporting someone so much… less tall than he was. “Be glad we arrived when we did. Any later and those Aerugonians would’ve shot you down like the rest of your—”
—unit, was what Holder no doubt would have said, if not for Ed’s automail foot stomping down on his boot. This had the net effect of making both him and Holder stumble, but only Ed fell to the ground. That hardly mattered. He was too angry to care.
The dog tags he’d collected stabbed into his thigh, a vengeful sort of remembrance.
“Then where the fuck were you, Captain?” Ed half yelled, half seethed. His ankle was throbbing like a bitch, but that wasn’t important. He was on the floor, on his ass, covered in his own sins, but that wasn’t important. “Where the fuck were you when I needed more than six people to fight eighty fucking guys?”
Holder’s face was unreadable. Around them, Ed could see other soldiers stopping to look at the commotion. In any other situation, he might’ve felt embarrassed to be so undignified in front of this many lower ranking soldiers, but all he felt was the fire of rage and sadness that came roaring up from his burning lungs.
“WHERE WERE YOU!” he screamed, like the petulant child he was, his tantrum evident around them, bloody and gory for all to see. “WE NEEDED YOU! I NEEDED YOU! WHERE WERE YOU!”
Ed could feel the saliva leaking from his mouth and down his chin, no doubt mixed in with the blood and dirt. It wasn’t Holder’s fault. He had orders, Ed had orders, and they both followed them to the success of the operation. Ed could have called him in at any time, but he didn’t.
But Holder had been right there. And he’d done nothing.
Holder took a long, tired breath in, closing his eyes. He rubbed at them with his hand, pinching the bridge of his nose. When he opened them again, there was a kind of weariness in them that spoke volumes more than words ever could. He knew exactly what he’d done—what he hadn’t done—but he also knew that there was no way to go back and change it.
“Get up, Major,” Holder commanded as he held his hand out once more, even though Ed outranked him. “Private Furn won’t wait forever.”
And Ed… Ed was so tired. He felt too much, too little; too hot, too cold. His mind was sluggish with exhaustion and jumbled with terror and shock and he was so, so tired.
He closed his eyes and took Holder’s hand.
In the distance, gunfire rang like church bells. Ed had always hated church bells.
-
When Roy received news of what had happened, it was via his office telephone. He listened with a numb sort of comprehension as the situation was laid out, promised to inform his team immediately, thanked the operator, and hung up.
He stood from his desk before he fully realised what he was doing, and the sudden return of his thoughts had him grinding to a halt. His shoulders were tensed, his eyes open, staring at nothing. He had his hands flat on either side of a report he’d been looking over before picking up the phone, his head bowed. He could hear his breathing, too loud in his ears; could feel his throat close up with the realisation of what this meant.
Unbidden, his mind followed his eyes as they wandered to the drawer he knew held his gun. He hardly ever took it out anymore, but still, he kept it.
There was a knock on his office door. Roy didn’t answer it.
“Boss,” called Havoc, knocking for a second time. “There’s a letter for you.”
Roy couldn’t move.
“You know, I’ve got better things to do than deliver your mail,” Havoc said. “See if I ever do a good deed for you again.”
Roy tried to speak, but all that came out was a strained breath.
“…Boss?”
“I’m still here,” Roy said; whispered.
“Boss, you in there?”
“Sir?”
That was Riza. Fuck, what would he say to them? What could he say?
What could he tell the Elrics?
“Sir?” Roy was too breathless to reply. “I’m coming in, Sir.”
And as Riza opened the door, Roy didn’t want to imagine what she must have seen on his face. Fear, probably. The current situation was bringing back a whole host of memories he’d previously had under control. Everything he’d spent years coming to terms with, all dragged out into the open again.
The gloves on his hands felt like shackles.
“Sir,” Riza said, and wow, when had she walked over to his desk? “Sir,” she insisted. He shook his head. “Roy.”
A sudden, harsh sound somewhere between a laugh and something else escaped Roy’s lungs. In front of him, Riza reached over to rest a hand on his shoulder, helping to bring him back to reality. She was staring at him so intensely he could feel it boring into his skull.
“You alright, Colonel?”
Roy slowly turned his head towards the voice—coming from outside his open office door. Through it, he could see the various gradients of curiosity and concern spread over the faces of Fuery, Falman, Havoc and Breda, all watching him and waiting for him to collect himself.
In the back of his mind, it occurred to Roy that this was probably the most visibly distressed that they’d ever seen him.
“Roy,” Riza said again. Roy brought himself around to meet her gaze. “What’s happened?”
Roy’s face did something strange—tried to express the sheer magnitude of the situation, the depths of the horrors about to unfold, but stopped short. Not so far away, the sounds of people moving hurriedly around the building filtered through from the corridor. From the corner of his eye, he saw Fuery turn briefly to look, before coming back around to face Roy’s office again.
There was no easy way to break this to them.
Drawing in a deep breath, Roy straightened up. He lifted his hands from his desk, adjusted the report with his fingertips, and moved to face his team head on.
“Fort Briggs has fallen,” he said, crystal clear and unreal on his tongue. Saying the words felt like suffocating. “Drachma has declared war.”
Havoc’s cigarette—unlit, as per office regulations, but too much of a habit to properly break—fell to the floor. “But—but Boss, surely it’s just—I mean, this can’t be happening, right?” He looked to Falman for reassurance. “Right?”
Falman was staring at Roy, eyes wider than he’d ever seen before. “Fucking hell,” he said, and that—an expletive from a man who rarely saw the need to cuss at all—was what cemented the reality of what Roy had said.
Amestris was at war again. Only this time, they hadn’t been the ones to declare it.
This was nothing like Ishval. This was nowhere near as bad as Ishval. Ishval had been nothing but a glorified slaughtering of undeserving innocents, and this was anything but. Tensions between Amestris and its neighbours had been high for as long as just about anyone could remember. There had been a treaty a while back, in the western continent— between Aerugo, Creta, Donbachi, Drachma, Etria, Atsach and Amestris. All countries signed, but once the others had ratified, Amestris withdrew to the outrage of people all over the west, and to the government mandated ignorance of nearly all Amestrians. With all the brutality Amestris was wont to subject its own people to, no country wanted to be unprepared for when that same force eventually turned outward. So they built up their own arsenals; collected new techniques and technologies for weapons, each better and more destructive than the last; breathed life into their own forms of alchemy. These countries were ready for a war that was a long time coming. A war that, as of today, was finally breaking out. No, this wasn’t anything like Ishval.
In a certain, twisted way, this was worse.