Chapter Text
“Al?” Ed shoved himself into what could loosely be considered a sitting position if one were being very, very generous. His elbows were made of jelly, which was especially impressive considering one of them was made of actual metal.
Al didn’t respond and Ed reached up one hand to shove his bangs out of his face; he was surrounded by four people he didn’t recognize, all crumpled on the concrete the same way he was and all looking extremely confused about the whole thing.
Out of those four people, however, none of them were Al.
Shooting to his feet like the ground was made of electrified lava, Ed spun in a circle, “Al? Al!” He sounded hysterical; he knew that, in the distant kind of way that meant there was exactly zero chance of him giving a single fuck about it, “ Alphonse ?”
“Alys?” The similarity in pitch made Ed turn; the brunette man he didn’t know looked something very akin to terrified, “Amaryllis Pankratz you get your ass out here right this second, this is not funny!”
Ed’s knees gave up the ghost and he sunk back onto the ground, covering his face with his hands. No. No, no, no . He racked his brain for an explanation, any goddamn explanation. He’d known it was a little ambitious to start with, especially since Al was going to have to power the array himself, but in theory it was flawless. A portal inside of a portal; one to drop the airships outside of Berlin where they wouldn’t hurt anybody in their inevitable crash and a second to drop him and Al off in London.
Just because he couldn’t do alchemy didn’t mean he lost all of the knowledge Truth had given him and it should have worked .
“Yennefer, what the fuck --” Growled the white haired man.
“I don’t know,” admitted the scarily beautiful woman, one hand pressed to her forehead and face pinched in pain, “lower your voice.”
“Lower his -- My sister is missing, Yen! ” Yelped the Brunette, “Geralt’s tone is the least of our problems right now!”
The man, who was apparently Geralt, had busied himself helping the fair haired child sit up and checking her over for injuries.
“What happened?” Asked the child, “I thought we were going to Kaer Morhen?”
For a moment Ed thought he was having a stroke -- then it hit him.
“You opened a portal,” he whispered, earning eight eyes darting in his direction and zeroing in, “you opened a portal .” He hadn’t accounted for that in his calculations. He hadn’t considered the idea that, not only were there other, other worlds but that they had the ability to create portals at will.
“Yes,” said Yennefer impatiently, “I do it all of the time. Any mage worth their bloody chaos can open a portal; it’s basic magic .”
And well, Ed didn’t have time to unpack all of that; not when Al was missing and he had no way to get back to him.
“Can you make one now?” He asked and the woman scoffed, lifting a hand and furrowing her brow.
When nothing happened, her expression morphed into something much less contemptuous. Face tightening she held out her other hand along with the first.
“Fuck,” she whispered, “ fuck ! Where the fuck are we?” She demanded of Ed, “What kind of land doesn’t have magic?”
“England,” replied Ed dryly, tilting his head back to blink at the inky black sky, “So you opened a portal in your world at the same time I opened one in Amestris and they somehow converged and ended with you here with me and my brother and your sister… Alys? Unaccounted for.”
“That sounds like an excellent summation,” the brunette said, only a little snippily which Ed was going to generously allow given the circumstances, “now what do we do about it? Because if there’s no magic here, that means Yen can’t get us home. How did you make a portal?”
“I didn’t,” Ed sighed, “come on, I’ll explain my side of everything once we’re not sitting in the middle of Piccadilly fuckin’ Circus. Someone’s gonna call the police on us; especially with you dressed like that . Are those swords?”
“Geralt's a Witcher,” the child said, rising to her feet and brushing off her pants with a level of grace Ed couldn’t even dream of having, “my name is Ciri, by the way.”
“Ed. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but things are looking a little fucked right now.”
Ciri snorted out a laugh that still managed to sound like music, “Completely tits up,” she agreed.
“Cirilla!” The brunette gasped, “Where did you learn that kind of language?”
The look she gave him would have made Mustang proud, “Literally you.”
Ed swallowed hard around the lump in his throat; he shouldn’t think of Mustang. He really, really shouldn't. It wasn’t good for his heart. Or his tear ducts.
Truth, he’d been so close to getting everything he’d ever wanted. When he’d gone back to work for the military he’d requested not to be assigned to Mustang’s unit. He couldn’t do alchemy anymore and every moment spent working for his old unit was just going to pour salt in what was still an open, festering wound.
Instead, he went to Hughes, who had finally been returned to full duty and reclaimed his rightful place as head of investigations. Alchemy or no, Ed could snoop like nobody's business.
He’d conferred with Mustang first, of course he had, and had the man asked him to stay he knew he would have folded like a house of cards. But he hadn’t said anything; he’d given Ed his blessing. Arranged for the transfer himself.
But he also didn’t say anything when Ed dropped by to waste time in the office. And sometimes he looked at Ed, when he thought Ed wasn’t paying attention, and he smiled like he’d gotten handed a literal star as a present.
Those moments, Ed wondered if maybe he had a chance. He’d been telling himself that he needed to figure out how to fall out of love with the bastard, but then, just when he thought he maybe had, Roy freaking Mustang would send him that smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and showed just a flash of brilliantly white teeth, and Ed fell all over again.
And then the array -- Investigations worked closely with just about everybody, it was inevitable that sometimes Ed would work with the bastard’s unit. And, truth be told, those were his favorite assignments. Hunting down rogue alchemists would never not be fun; and then there was the added layer of righteous indignation and fury that those assholes took what Ed no longer had and used it to fuck with other people’s lives. Punching them was cathartic.
It was pure luck that Ed was at the right angle to even see the array -- the bastard had been smart, he’d used ink that blended in almost seamlessly with the wooden floor except that when the light hit it just right it was just the tiniest bit reflective.
Roy, the dumbass, stepped right into the center of the thing before Ed could do much more than open his mouth to begin to shout a warning. So he’d done the only thing he, an even bigger dumbass, could have done.
He pushed Roy out of the way and got caught up in the array himself.
He’d woken up in Berlin, in the middle of a war that spanned the entire globe with no conceivable way to get home.
And then he’d gotten home, he’d done it, but he had to stop the damn Nazis from destroying the place and the only way to do that was to once again give up everything, absolutely everything.
He’d seen Mustang for all of ten seconds, ten heartstopping seconds where he thought he was going to die if he didn’t kiss the man right that moment, and then he’d smiled sadly, so, so fucking sadly, like his heart was breaking and was gone and Ed was piloting a ship back to Berlin.
At least this time he’d had Al.
He’d thought he’d had Al.
Fuck, the little shit better have gotten spit out back in Amestris and not whatever weird universe his new ‘companions’ were from.
“I put you on the ship myself ,” Roy Mustang had a headache. No, no, that was putting it too lightly. Let’s give it another go.
Roy Mustang felt like someone had scooped his brain from his skull with half a pair of chopsticks and a playing card, stuffed it in a blender on high, shaken it (not stirred) in a martini shaker, garnished it with lemon juice and salt, and then put it back in his head secured with nothing stronger than the mild adhesive his mother’s girls used to apply their false eyelashes.
“You did,” Alphonse replied, like this burst of weirdness was nothing but a blip on his radar -- actually, given the rest of his life, it probably didn’t even register as a blip, “and then I woke up in the middle of Central.”
“At least you’re in the right universe,” the girl mumbled, slumping back in her chair and using her good arm to pinch the bridge of her nose.
She was, ultimately, the cause of Roy’s headache. Specifically the ‘right universe’ part of her statement. Her name was Alys Pankratz (“Well,” she’d admitted as Dr. Knox was patching up the arrow wound in her shoulder, “it’s actually Petunia, but I don’t use it.”) and other concerning things she’d said in the two hours Roy had known her consisted of:
In response to her bleeding shoulder, “Oh, yeah. Some Nilfgaardian asshole shot me. Well, he was aiming at the princess but I got in the way.”
When Knox was concerned about the strange, dark veining spreading outwards from the wound, “The arrow was tipped with some kind of poison. I think I cured the worst of it; I don’t feel particularly poisoned anymore.”
And of course, “Hey, has anyone seen my brother? A little taller than me, has my face, really obnoxious?” Which is what had prompted the strange sort of kinship that Alphonse had immediately struck up with her.
“Have you got any idea how we could return you to the correct universe, Miss. Pankratz?” Roy asked, resisting the urge to copy her gesture.
“Just Alys is fine,” she said absentmindedly, “if we’re using titles mine would be Lady and I have no intention in claiming that particular birthright. And no, unfortunately, I don’t. I can’t open portals, that’s Yen’s thing. I’m more of a… potion-making, plant growing kind of magic user.”
“And Yen is…?”
“My sister in law,” a pause, “I guess. They’re not actually married, I don’t think? We haven’t found a solid ritual for three people yet. Anyways, it doesn’t even matter because she’s not here . I woke up alone, ‘side for this one,” she jabbed her thumb towards Alphonse who nodded in agreement, “My guess is that all of them ended up wherever he and his brother were trying to go.”
One could only hope; “And how did you come to this conclusion?”
Alys looked at him like he was stupid (he wasn’t stupid) and Alphonse tried very, very hard to turn his laugh into a cough, “Think about it; if your lot doesn’t usually have the ability to travel by portal, let alone interdimensional portal, then you opening said portal probably sent some things out of alignment. We, on the other hand, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You think the portals crossed each other,” Alphonse mumbled thoughtfully; he looked so much like his brother with that expression plastered on his face that Roy’s heart hurt , “That’s not a bad idea. I’ve never traveled that way before, so I couldn't be sure but it felt a little… turbulent?”
Nodding, Alys took her bottom lip between her teeth and chewed on it for a moment before releasing, “I thought it felt weird,” she admitted, “but I was also fighting the poison at the time. I hate portalling, usually, it’s half the reason we walk everywhere. That and Roach, that’s Geralt’s horse, by the way. But I thought something was off from the start. Geralt was carrying me when we went in but it felt so wrong I wiggled away from him and ended up flat on my back in your world.”
“And fist fighting three of my officers,” Roy sighed.
She at least had the decency to look a little sheepish, “Sorry about that,” she said, “really, I am. The last thing I remembered at the time was being ambushed and shot -- can you really blame me for reacting badly to several dozen armed strangers in matching uniforms?”
Well, when she put it like that, “No, I suppose I can’t.” He turned to Alphonse, “I suggest you phone Miss. Rockbell. I’m sure she’ll appreciate hearing about this newest bombshell from you.”
“Disaster magnet, huh?” Alys asked, side eyeing the blonde with a sly smile.
Alphonse blushed scarlet, “Shut up!” He cried, smacking her good arm as he made for the phone, “Like you’re one to talk.”
“Never said I wasn’t,” she was still grinning as Alphonse lifted his hand in a gesture that would have had Edward clutching for his pearls if he could see his sweet, innocent baby brother.
Roy sighed and pushed up from his desk, all of his joints protesting him having the audacity to use them for their intended purpose, “We should give him some privacy,” he said, “and spare our eardrums. Miss. Rockbell has… very healthy lungs.”
Snorting as she rose from her chair, Alys shook her head, “That’s a very… diplomatic way of saying she’s loud.”
“I am a politician,” Roy pointed out, holding his office door open and ushering her through, “Why are you still here?” He asked Havoc and Hawkeye, who he distinctly remembered sending home over an hour prior.
"Aw, don't be like that, Chief," Havoc grinned around the unlit cigarette between his lips, "We couldn't leave when Al and the new girl were still looking all grimy and confused."
"New Girl has a name," Alys groused, "It's Alys."
"Jean Havoc," he held out a hand, which Alys eyed like it was made of bees before taking gingerly, "pleased to meet you."
"Likewise," she drawled, "you got another one of those?" She gestured towards the cigarette, "It's been a hell of a day."
"No smoking inside the office," Havoc said, even as he tapped another out of his pack, "Boss' orders."
Chuckling, she reached into his front pocket to take his lighter and stuck the filter into her mouth, "Good thing I don't work here, then."
As she lit the smoke, Roy watched Havoc's expression go a little dreamy and he sighed, shifting slightly to the left to bestow upon Riza his best look of exasperated fondness, to which she responded with a roll of her eyes and a pointed glance to her gun.
Sighing again, Roy took the lit cigarette and put it out against the underside of his boot, ignoring Alys' indignant "Hey!"
"I was smoking that," she hissed.
"And now you're not," he responded, handing Havoc back his lighter, "and you are going home. Both of you."
"Sir," Hawkeye agreed as Havoc let out a huff that may have been a sigh from anyone else.
"Sure, sure. You always keep the pretty ones to yourself," he complained.
Roy had known Alys Pankratz (and what a name ) for about three hours and already knew exactly what she was going to say before she even opened her mouth.
"Aw," she simpered, batting her eyelashes as she twirled a lock of umber hair around her right index finger, "you think I'm pretty?"
The drip, drip, splat of Havoc's brain melting out of his ears was almost audible.
"I… uh. Of course I do. Look at you, you're--"
"Even when I'm dirty, and bloody, and my arms in a sling, and I almost tore your teammate's throat out with my teeth?" Bat, bat went Alys' eyelashes.
Drip, drip went Havoc's amygdala, because otherwise it would be screaming at the man to run before Alys had the chance to eat him alive.
Alphonse reappeared in the doorway like a vaguely chastised but no less resplendent angel of mercy and tugged on the end of Alys’ ponytail, “Stop terrorizing the villagers,” he said.
“I’m not terrorizing ,” she dropped the façade as quickly as she’d donned it, tilting her head back to grin at the younger Elric, “Jean and I were just chatting, weren’t we?”
Sputtering something that sounded affirmative, Havoc managed a clunky nod and a sloppy salute in Roy’s direction, “Permission to go the fuck home, Sir?”
“Permission granted,” Roy graciously confirmed; honestly he could have watched Alys torment his subordinate for at least another twenty minutes before even considering saving him.
“Winry will be here on the morning train,” Alphonse said, “think any of the hotels are still standing?”
“None of the good ones,” Roy checked his pockets to make sure he had his keys, “my house, however, should be untouched. And I have more than enough space for the both of you.”
Alys turned wide, questioning eyes not to Roy, but to Alphonse, who nodded back firmly, “I trust him.”
A long moment of silence before she nodded slowly back, “Okay, Mr. Mustang. I’m in.”
Mr. Mustang was a strange sort of man, Alys decided. And she was pretty damn familiar with strange things. His house was large, but he was the only person who lived in it; he didn’t even have staff .
He gave her her own room, complete with a bathroom that housed a bath tub with magic running water that never seemed to go cold! Dr. Knox had told her not to get her bandages wet but she’d put her body through much worse for much less.
She’d just rewrap them when she was done.
The water was hot enough to boil a chicken and she sunk down to her chin almost immediately; it almost made her shout when it soaked through the bandages and danced across her stitches but fuck she didn’t care.
The very best part was once she’d scrubbed the worst of the grime from her skin and the water around her had turned murky and gross she simply emptied the tub through the drain in the bottom and refilled it!
She had to do it twice and by the time she finally pushed herself to her feet she was scrubbed raw and redder than a lobster but she was beautifully, blessedly clean. She didn’t think she’d been so perfectly squeaky since she was a child with a team of nannies charged with trying to keep her and Jas out of trouble.
There was a plush, cream colored robe waiting for her when she exited the bathroom, wrapped in the softest towel she’d ever brushed her fingers against. Her clothes; the doublet and pants she’d been wearing when she’d crash landed in Amestris, were gone.
She couldn’t even force herself to feel indignant about the whole thing; she would have, normally. They were gross, yes, but she could have washed them. It wouldn’t have been that hard to salvage them, she’d dealt with far more butchered clothing over the years when she didn’t have the coin to go out and buy more.
But the robe was very comfortable and the slippers that went along with it, while far too big, were soft and squishy; they flopped and slapped against her feet as as she padded down the hallway, robe carefully pulled down away from her left shoulder to keep the stitches from catching on the material.
The house really was too big for just one person; she felt like she needed a map. By the time she found Mr. Mustang and Alphonse in what looked like a library, she figured that the man must be either very lonely, never home, or perhaps a bit of both.
Both sets of eyes turned to her as she stopped in the doorway and Alys tamped down hard on the blush that threatened to rise to her cheeks, “Hello,” she said, shifting the robe higher up her shoulder, trying to be polite -- it was all fun and games in the incredible vastness of Central Command, but this was Mr. Mustang’s home . While he clearly knew Alphonse well he had only just met her and had still invited her to stay, seemingly with no ulterior motive.
That called for a certain level of decorum that, while she didn’t use it often, had been ingrained in her since childhood.
“Do you have any bandages?” She asked, staring intently at the row of books over Mr. Mustang’s right shoulder, “I may have forgotten,” ignored , “Dr. Knox’s order to not get them wet. They weren’t salvageable so I threw them away but I do need to rewrap them.” Probably; she’d always healed faster than most but there was still the poison to account for.
"Of course," Mustang stood, "one moment." He even offered her a smile on his way past her and out the door and she let out a breath she hadn't been aware she'd been holding.
She turned her gaze to Alphonse, still seated on the sofa as he'd been since she'd found them, "You," she said accusingly, stomping forward and dropping carefully into an overstuffed armchair, careful to keep her left side facing outward, even if she had to crane her neck to properly glare at her new friend, "did not tell me he was attractive."
It was a running joke that the sluttiness Jaskier had inherited from their father mother had skipped her but it really, really had not. She was just a little more selective and a lot more discreet than her brother.
Less people tried to kill her for buggering their spouse that way.
Alphonse laughed, cementing his comparison to Jaskier in her mind and making her glare harder, "I never noticed," he said, and that at least sounded true enough.
She liked Alphonse. It wasn't often that she met someone that she simply clicked with immediately but losing your brother through an interdimensional portal seemed to be a bonding experience like no other.
Plus, he was good . He didn't have a cruel bone in his body; which isn't to say he wasn't dangerous. She'd seen the magic he'd used when she'd been attacking the soldiers, too scared and feral to ask questions. He'd slammed his hands into the ground and a pillar of stone erupted to separate them.
He could kill someone without breaking a sweat but he wouldn't and that was the important distinction.
Which is why she'd decided to trust him; he knew this world and he wasn't likely to betray her.
Also, she did just simply, genuinely like him. It had been a while since she had a friend who wasn't irrevocably tied to her brother.
Still, "You didn't notice ," she hissed incredulously, trying very hard to keep her voice down, "How do you not notice? He's practically sex walking ." She shrugged the robe even higher up her shoulder at the thought; it still wasn’t high enough to stop the niggling voice that sounded alarmingly like her mother from shrieking in the very back of her mind, "And I don't know if you noticed but I'm not exactly fully dressed under this robe."
"He's not my type," Alphonse responded dryly, "And he's also already arranged for Riza -- Colonel Hawkeye, the blonde woman you met in command? -- to bring you shopping tomorrow," he paused, smirking, "On the military's dime, of course."
"It's called diplomacy, Alphonse," Mustang had returned and Alys straightened in her chair, wondering how much he'd heard before he announced himself, "and we have a good amount for it in the budget. Mostly because your brother wouldn't stop blowing things up," there was something in his voice that Alys recognized very clearly.
Longing.
She wondered if Alphonse knew that the general was in love with his older brother; either way, it wasn't her place to let that particular cat out of the sack.
There was a bundle of cloth in his arms -- far too large to be just bandages. He followed her gaze and smiled, “I also grabbed antiseptic to clean the wound as well as a set of pajamas that shouldn’t be too large on you.”
Alys blinked twice, slowly, before allowing herself a restrained smile, “That was very thoughtful,” she said, “thank you, Mr. Mustang.”
“Who are you and what you have don’t with Alys,” Alphonse interrupted whatever Mustang had opened his mouth to say, “ Mr. Mustang ?”
The blush from being called out was so intense that she could feel it spreading down her neck and chest like a brand, “It… when we were in the big building it was different,” she looked at her fingers, twisted together on her lap, before looking back up and meeting Mustang’s eye, “I understand that for most people their home is their sanctuary and it would be reprehensible of me to respond to you inviting me into that sanctuary by being a… well, a jackass.” She wasn’t raised in a barn.
“I,” Mustang paused, considering his next words carefully, “appreciate the sentiment,” he settled on, “but as this is also your home for the foreseeable future I’d much prefer if we were all candid with each other.”
“I don’t understand,” Alys’ eyebrows pinched together.
“He means we’re going to be cohabitating for a bit so you may as well roast him like a marshmallow,” Alphonse translated with a self satisfied smile as Mustang looked at him extremely unimpressed.
“Essentially, yes,” he said after a moment; he turned back to Alys with another smile, “you can start by calling me Roy.”
Across the room, Alys watched Alphonse pull a face and mouth the name with no small amount of derision; she raised a hand to cover her grin and shook her head slowly.
“Alright, Roy,” she said, “I do have an important question.”
“What’s that?”
“I have no idea what the fuck a marshmallow is.”