Archive of Our Own

"Seriously? I thought that was some bogus rumor.

"I thought that was a rumor made up by him."

"I fought with him in my sector too, and it's true."

"I heard he's the son of the Fullmetal Alchemist."

The twenty-year-old had every sentence tugging on his ear. Sometimes, soldiers just couldn't keep to themselves. He seethed. As he walked through the scattered, uniformed men, he had to bite his lip to keep from biting them with a select collection of words.

Then, as he approached a familiar face at the end of the crowd, leaning against a counter and sipping what he presumed was shitty coffee, he heard a whole new enslaught of sentences uttered about this raven-haired, auburn-eyed eighteen-year-old man

"That guy's a prick. So cocky."

"He thinks he can join the airforce because his daddy's somebody."

"I heard he went through bootcamp like it was a piece of cake."

"He could probably up and leave and not get arrested for dessertion because his father is the Fuhrer." 

The twenty-year-old let his crossed arms weigh down on the counter, shoulders stiff. 

Next to him, the eighteen-year-old inquired, "What's pissing you, Elric?"

He ran his fingers through his short mane of toasted gold, his parted, arched, equally short bangs temporarily merging with the rest of his hair as he pushed them back. He had to say, he missed the longer hair that would have kept him warm in the frigid temps of northern Amestris. Pensive, his eyes were tense, melting the molten of his irises.

"Here," the eighteen-year-old piped up when he wasn't answered. 

The blond looked to him, a pair of gleaming, wide, curved yet pointed auburn eyes staring back at him; in a standard military fashion, his black sheet of hair shared the same length, except it was kept tight by gel and pointed up above his forehead. He held out another mug topping with steam.

Elric took it from his hands. 

"Thanks," he muttered. 

He squinted down, but the steam was too overbearing, watering his eyes. Even if the coffee had that cheap woody aftertaste, he might as well if that meant he could keep warm.

The young man braced himself, blew on the liquid surface, and took a sip.

"Blegh!" 

He ripped away from the mug, and not because of the coffee's taste. It was because, while he expected a certain flavor to meet his tongue, an entirely different, watery, herbal-y taste met him instead. 

"What is this, Mustang?" he blabbered with his tongue hanging out.

He answered, simply, "Tea. Haven't you ever drank tea before?" 

Elric gave him a funny look, shrinking his tongue back into his mouth. 

Mustang then remarked, "There's no way in hell I'm going to grin and bear that nasty shit they call coffee. This is much better."

The older boy suppressed an urge to roll his eyes, looking out to the uniforms. The airforce uniform was much different from a standard soldier. It was dark, varied shades of gray, black, and beige, and had the Amestrian emblem strapped to the upper arm. It was a typical pilot's get-up, basically, with bomber hats strapped to their heads and goggles waiting to sit over their spectacles.

"So," Mustang spoke, looking out as well. "You been thinking about your answer to taking the State Alchemist Exam?"

Elric showed no reaction, in his face nor his body language. His eyes stayed on the crowd, soaring a million miles off the map, like he wished he could have right then.

"I don't know," he rasped, finally.

"What's keeping you from doing it? You'd outrank me to a major."

His elbows rocked back against the counter. "While I would love to outrank you, I'm just not sure about the whole thing."

Again, Elric's gaze left planet Earth. He added, "Besides, my pops wasn't too thrilled about me getting into the military to begin with."

Mustang's lips tilted into an odd frown. "Wasn't he a state alchemist, the alchemist of the people? I would think he'd be urging you to do it."

He didn't reply. His brain was stuck rewinding memories, rewinding stories of his father not even told by him. Over half of his dad's ventures he discovered were not discovered until he joined the military.  Sometimes he wondered if his siblings knew of them.

"Er..st...Jackson."

He blinked to a voice speaking over the intercom. They were beginning to call names. He heard Mustang set his mug down.

"...Mortimer Smith..."

The two men waited. Several names later, the intercom said, "Maeson Mustang."

He stepped forward, but was stopped by the voice of the man behind him.

"Hey," Elric blurted. He turned to face him. "See you out on the battlefield."

Mustang returned his crooked grin. "See you out on the battlefield."

Soon, his back disappeared into the crowd of backs. The blond couldn't spot him anymore. 

Alone, he stood patiently until he heard, "Theo Van Elric."

Theo loved alchemy. Ever since he was small boy, he was fascinated by his father's work. He even learned the elements along with his first words, and was rewarded with a golden stickers each time he presented a new one. Happiness could not describe what he felt when his father was proud of him.

With his uncle, however, he could transmute. Transmuting was a whole different ball game from reading alchemy in a book -- it required physical percision. You must calculate all of the materials in your mind, how much is provided for you, how much you will move, and then mold the material with only using your hands to clap against eachother and communicate to the circle. It took mental strength to keep it from falling apart, and most importantly, equivalent exchange.

When Theo was sixteen, he begged Izumi Curtis to teach him like she taught his father. She had to look at him first for approval, and it took a bit of convincing, but finally, she accepted Theo as her new student. In the time that he spent at Dublith, his ass had been kicked, the concepts he had known were crushed, and his training with Mrs. Curtis was just as scary as his dad and uncle proclaimed it would be. 

But it was also a time of self-discovery, because he uncovered two things about himself.

When he was lying out in the yard, bruises freshly beaten over his face and body, he concentrated on the overcast clouds that threatened to cry above him for about an hour. He thought about the elements that gathered the condensation of those clouds and the materials that fuel lightening. 

It was then that, with his fingers grazing an alchemic circle in an open alchemy book, experimentally clapping his hands together, he discovered that he could control lightening. He was quite reckless about it, hitting the fence with a bolt or two, but this was the birthing of alchemy he has never heard of. Izumi had been observing him from the window. She knew he was his father's son.

The second discovery made happened when a customer came into the butcher shop -- a short, middle-aged, blind-as-a-bat man wearing greased up coveralls and a red cap, who was obviously foreign, perhaps from Aerugo, when he spoke. 

"I'm building Amestris's first model plane. My daughter is testing it into flight this afternoon, you should come see," he had told Mrs. Curtis.

Though she made no promise to attend, Theo, with nothing better to do, let employee Mason drag him along later that day. 

What he witnessed was the red-headed daughter of the aviation engineer, who apprenticed and helped build the plane, and his newfound love for aeronautics.

Hence his double-affair with alchemy and airplanes.

The airforce was a perfect oppurtunity for Theo. It was the closest he would get to piloting a plane, he thought. Even though his mother was uncomfortable with the idea and his father was flat-out angry, when he came of age, eighteen-year-old Theo gave his hair a good trim and joined the military.

Pure white, for as far as the eye could see. This was not the ideal setting for a pilot. 

Theo looked to his side. Slipping out of the fog, a fellow Amestrian plane glided next to his. He could barely recognize the pilot's face, but as soon as the pilot started punching in light signals, Theo knew who he was.

He grabbed hold of his own signal lamp and responded.

The flickers of light said, "Where's the rest of these bastards?! I thought they had 'better built' engines than ours."

Maeson Mustang smirked cheekily and replied in morse code, "They're hanging back so we can do their dirty work. Or they're just afraid they'll have to make a pit stop and piss themselves."

Theo's chuckle was silented by the whistling wind. If it wasn't for the windshield, he would have had waves of numbing wind crashing into his face.

Suddenly, another plane became visible on the other side of him. They signaled, "Enemy ahead."

Theo and Maeson looked out ahead of them. Then, one pilot looked to the other, nodded, and the two navigated their planes to a lower elevation. There, they could find the shadows of enemy planes and attack from beneath with an advantage in speed. 

As the fog thinned out from where they were, they successfully identified the black bodies surging through the cloud cover. The pilots calculated their trajectory in order to meet up with their target planes. As they climbed in elevation, they climbed in speed. In the very second that the first Drachman plane became visible, their nimble fingers set off their weapons. Bullets went flying with the speed of light. 

They had an upper advantage with that single plane, but as soon as its friends came over, their advantage was long lost. With Amestrian planes facing Drachman planes, the stratigized attack quickly turned into a dogfight. Bullets were pelting steel, the engines of aircrafts were screeching as pilots jerked left and right, and a bigger storm was brewing in the clouds. The skies around them went from ghostly to dark gray.  

From the corner of his eye, Theo was watching plane after plane sink around him. He has never been so stiff in his life. Even his fingers performed robotic movements to control the plane. From behind his goggles, his eyes squeezed the gold out of them. He could not back out now. He had to be a man, face this head on, without a hair of fear on his body.

Suddenly, a fighter craft was diving nose-first toward him. The craft was fast; he questioned if he could get his plane out of the way in time. Bracing himself, he clenched his eyes and fists shut.

Inside his fists, however, something was happening. Beneath his traditional aviation gloves, two alchemic circles where traced on his palms with marker. He used it as a "just-in-case-emergency" strategy. 

For a second, every pilot, Drachman and Amestrian, stopped what they were doing to gawk at the show on the far right. There, a single fighter plane had an wall of lightening encasing it, pulled from the clouds. The incoming plane ricocheted off its electric barrier, nose-diving to Earth instead.

As Elric's plane circled around, the lightening followed. It seemed to illuminate his aircraft alone. These piloting soldiers were witnessing what the FullMetal Alchemist's son was known for.

Two, three, four bolts of lightening whipped their respective planes out of the sky. It was then that every plane did everything they could to stay out of the alchemist's way.

For Theo, this was merely a defense mechanism. He wanted to bat every enemy plane out of the park so he could be done with it. He would rather shut his eyes and kill than wait to be killed.

Something went wrong this time, though. All of a sudden, he felt a poweful shudder. His plane quaked to the side. He finally opened his eyes to look out the window, and when he did, he was certain he was going to die.

He had been reckless. Roaring thunder, a cloud released its revenge and hissed out with its lightening tongue, grazing the far end of his plane. Now his wing was on fire. He couldn't control his alchemy, he couldn't steer, and this gave the enemy planes a chance to shoot him down. 

The Amestrians attacked back with full force. The Drachmans were only able to send two bullets into Theo's hunk of steel. Even so, as Maeson peered down to his fellow pilot, he watched in horror as the man's plane sunk under the cloud cover. With a smoking, flaming wing, he had no chance of staying in flight. 

Maeson had no choice but to keep defending himself from the enslaught of bullets.

"Fuck."

Theo woke up with a hell of a headache, and the aches didn't stop there. His stomach, his arm, his back, his neck, and /hell/, his leg. Luckily, the ice cold embrace of air numbed some of it. But mainly, it was uncomfortable. 

His eyelids were heavy. It felt as though he was using every ounce of strength he had just to open them. The remaining strength was used to lift his neck, looking to the condition of his mangled body, then to the white abyss around him. 

His goggles and hat had been torn off, as well as various parts of his clothing, to reveal a gash in his stomach, on his knee, over his shoulder and across his forehead. He kept having to blink the blood from his eyes. In his mouth, he could taste it. He smacked his lips in disgust, then looked to the splayed out pieces of the aircraft he once flew, sitting some yards away. Fantastic.

Theo was happy to still be suited with gloves, because grabbing handfuls of snow while trying to flip himself around was not too soothing against bare hands. 

While moving his body, he found his leg in an excruciating amount of pain. Either it was sprained or broken. His abdomen wasn't feeling too hot being pressed against the ground, either (no pun intended), indicating that he might have broken some ribs. Theo was far from grinning, but he beared it, worming toward the plane wreckage. He figured there was no danger since the flames had long since been out, and he needed to get near shelter so he could make sense of his situation without a white breeze constantly chilling him.

When he huddled inside the carcass of the plane and flipped himself back over, leaning himself into a sitting position, he could finally breathe. For minutes upon minutes, that's what he did. He breathed. 

How he survived the fall, he hadn't the slightest clue. As he looked around, though, he realized that his survival was no blessing. It only meant he would die slower, alone, in the frigid poles of south Drachma.

But he couldn't just wait around to die. Theo took in his surroundings again. Pierced by a piece of shrapnel, his bomber hat was hanging in reach. He would have to keep warm, he knew, so he tugged on it until it gave in and spilled into his hands. The fur lining the inside relieved his rosy ears and his vulnerable scalp. He then peeked around for other things — cloth, something edible, or maybe some stick-shaped objects.

He did spot a strip of cloth hanging on another piece of shrapnel, as well as the handles to the plane, but nothing edible. Theo looked down to his feet. His dad did eat a leather boot with the emperor of Xing one time. Maybe he could do the same-- but where would he find a pot? Never could he imagine eating a boot... raw.

Water is more important, anyway. Kicking off one of his boots, he scooped it full of snow and rubbed his fingers together. He was so used to producing lightening that he hardly had to think about its components anymore, letting a weak bolt streak over the top of the snow.

He did this until the snow was sloshy enough to drink. Theo didn't realize how thirsty he was until he slurped the water down, not minding the ice that stung his esophagus. It was good for washing blood down and getting that awful iron taste out of his mouth.

When he was done, the man gathered whatever cloth he could and used it to clean his wounds, dipping it into the remaining water of his boot and sweeping it over his face. Even with the temperatures clinging to the water dotting his skin, he felt wonderful. Lastly, he took a dry bit of cloth and wrapped it around his leg. While he had many external injuries, none of them bled out much (excluding the gash in his forehead), which was a silver lining.

Theo found another silver lining. Deeper in the rubble, he saw a backpack looking object. It was the emergency supplies they stash in the airplane. With difficulty, he crawled to it and dragged it back to his original spot. He dug inside.

There was a thick jacket hogging up most of its space, to which he happily tugged it on, hugging it to himself. There was also a pocket knife, cigarettes and canned food (hooray, he wouldn't have to eat boot for dinner!). 

It was helpful, but this survival pack moreso said "good luck, you're going to need it" than "here you are, this should get you through until somebody finds you".

Theo picked out a cigarette from its white box. He sucked it between his lips as he rubbed his fingers again, lighting the end of it with sparks. If anything, it should keep him warm for the time being.