Chapter Text
“Full house.”
Al groaned as Ed set down the suit of cards, leaning back in the cushion-y train seat beneath him. The words were spoken with much care at all, droned out boredly as if Edward hadn’t been partaking in a fairly one-sided game of cards with his brother just moments prior.
The younger alchemist’s hand of cards were tossed against the table, his now-free hands rushing to comb through his hair in pure irritation. Ed snorted from the other side, the bastard, both of them ignoring the heads that turned towards their little game that they’d been playing for the past few hours with increasing aggrevation.
“I don’t understand how you keep winning,” Al whined, because dammit his brother wasn't fair! “What are you, a card shark? If you’re getting bored, you can at least try to let me win.”
Ed looked up from his fingers to his brother; popping the worn-down toothpick out of his mouth. He flicked it away onto the floor without much care or caution for the likes of the soldiers and normal train-goers surrounding him, sighing dramatically and kicking back in his chair.
The train they were on was exquisite. It, naturally, was meant for normal militants to go on and off of, but was-- oddly enough-- open to normal Amestrian citizens. Table City, despite being a so-told city, was fairly empty and not really considered a place as to where many people went for important business.
Given the lack of business there, there was a good amount of people that had to go back and forth out of town. So the two brothers assumed. The necessities were there, yes, shops and things of the sort, but when people didn’t want items shipped to the plain bit of nowhere.. you had to leave and get them yourself.
But the car that the two were in was decorated nicely as well, with glossy oaken walls and floors. It had green accents on the roof and handlebars and cushions of the seating, accompanied with tall tables in the middle of two seats likely meant for desk-work if need be.
Al didn’t know how long they’d been in it; he hadn’t bothered counting the rise of the sun and moon, but it felt like give-or-take a few days given how many times he’d had to alchemize their sets of clothes clean. Ed hated when they had to do that, since the buzz felt funky.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ed sighed, “just fork over the mints. If you don’t want me to be bored, at least give me something to chew on while I read.”
Al huffed and used the side of his arm to slide over two mints, two mints that rightfully belonged to him. He was sure that Ed was cheating, although he wasn’t quite sure how, given he didn’t have alchemy nor would he be able to hide the transmutation now-a-days. Maybe he was hiding them up his sleeve? No. That was impossible, they were rolled up in the heat of southern Amestris.
Ed quickly grabbed a mint and unwrinkled the wrapper, tossing it into his mouth with an avant-garde lack of care. His eyebrows arched as he took his book from beside his chair-- one that Al knew he’d been reading over and over for the past few days with how long they had been going from train-to-train.
And... Ugh.
Edward had practically taken all Alphonse had to occupy himself with in the past few days. He’d taken his mints, he’d taken his entire pack of toothpicks without anything to share, and he’d taken Al’s extra novel he brought to occupy himself with! It felt selfish, especially with how his brother had packed the books from Xing along with him; only intermittently reading a few of them if he was “in the mood”. If anything else, he read the same one over and over all the damned time!
He was thinking too hard, it felt like.
Alphonse was good at reading his brother. He really was. He could tell when Edward was stuck in thought, when he was thinking or feeling down, or when he was considering something crude. He could tell that he was thinking about Ling, and all that had transpired over the past few weeks. It was hard not to think about it.
The scars on his right arm still remained as a reminder that it’d even happened in the first place, and Al knew he wished they weren’t there, too. There was also a bit of a nick still left on his cheek from cutting it on the glass in Dante's manor. There were faint reminders engraved on all of them, even; Al had his own nicks and cuts still faintly stinging his skin, the deeper ones having left little ghost marks that were just barely visible against his skin.
Lost in thought just as his brother was, Alphonse sighed heavily. His gaze and attention turned to the rest of the train, whereas no one in their car was looking at them anymore. Most of the people on the train were old men and women; or older citizens presumably in their middle-years. They were scattered and sparse around the seats, occasional soldiers in blue uniforms chattering about whatever when Al cared to notice them enough.
Not to say there weren't interesting looking people. There was a man in a white jacket, black wavy hair tucked into a ponytail, with scars littering his neck. He was reading a book in his lap, icy blue eyes focused on the words before him. There was another old man who seemed to be chit-chatting with his wife, and another old man reading the newspaper like the first. There were soldiers talking about their wives, some being more vulgar than others.
Al sighed, and his gaze flitted to the window on his side of the train car.
“Ed? Don't lie to me,” Al asked, mostly absently, trying to strike up conversation as he stared out the window. The landscape was dotted with copper browns and oranges, with whites and peaches overpowering most of the land. "Are you thinking about everyone back in Xing again?"
As the name for ‘Creta’ suggested, there were a fair amount of canyons (craters? Perhaps that was better) about. Alphonse wondered what Aerugo had been like for Edward, farther east.
“How’d you know?”
“You think too loud,” Alphonse sighed heavily, gaze unmoving from the window. He could see Ed looking out his side in his periphery, before his eyes widened entirely.
Edward’s head slipped out of the window, hair rippling in the wind as it did. He seemed to take in the beauty and utter scale of it all, the land, quietly breathing the fresh air as his fingers propped him up against the windowsill. Al’s eyes flickered to him, blinking at the sight of a taunting round mass of buildings and... pipes(?) before them.
It was accompanied smack in the middle by a large military command center, just about three-stories tall and hysterically similar to a three-tier cake. Alphonse lost himself in the raw sight of everything before him, ignoring the way that Ed slumped back into his chair while a military soldier walked through the car door.
Suddenly the Amestrian soldiers that had been chatting before went quiet, before standing up and saluting.
“--Hey,” Ed whispered, snapping his brother out of his daze, tapping against the table to regain his attention. “Tickets.”
Al had kind of forgot that taking out tickets while on a train was a thing now-a-days. While Ed was a state alchemist, he could practically go anywhere and get clearance for it. He’d simply hop on a train without a ticket, and they’d sit and wait for somebody to check the validity of their passage.
It was a poor excuse to spend less money, but Al thought the thrill was half the point in doing it for him. He’d only pay the Resembool conductors as opposed to the military-hired ones anyway.
“Tickets,” was repeated close to his face, and Al had to rummage into the pockets of his trench-coat to pull out his and his brother’s tickets. The word felt numb and repetitive in his mind, holding them out to be punched (clipped was a word Al liked to use more) until the soldier checked them and moved on.
(Tickets. What’re you here for today? Click. Step. Move.)
“Like I was saying before,” Ed mumbled, “I dunno, I feel like somethin’ bad’ll happen while I’m away. Is it stupid to be worried about them?”
(Man in the white jacket. Ticket, please. What are you here for? To see my little sister. Click. Step. Move.)
“No. I’m kind of worried about Mei and Lan Fan having to put up with Ling all the time.”
(Old man. Ticket, please. What’re you here for? My granddaughter is having a baby this month.)
The noises stopped.
Al’s ears were entirely to attention, perhaps too much so, gaze flitting against his brother’s face; looking rather odd in the wake of their previous conversation in the sudden silence. Ed seemed to notice this, before arching a brow.
“Congratulations,” was the final word of peace spoken, before the handle of the shotgun the soldier carried came down onto the old man’s skull.
--Or so Al thought it would, jolting into sitting upright as the butt of the gun was grabbed with almost inhuman strength, ricocheting against the soldier as a shot went off. Edward jumped with a loud, strangled noise, and Al gasped as the soldier crumbled backwards with a gushing bullet-hole through his cheek.
The regular passengers on the train went into a frenzy, while the soldiers sitting in the nearby seats sat up and readied their shotguns. The man in the chair stood up, and there was suddenly the loud purr of tearing fabric resonated through the air.
Beyond the gasps and wails of the normal civilians on the train, the soldiers were quickly disarmed and put down in what seemed like the split of a moment. Al's eyes shot wide as the old man’s muscles grew larger, tearing. They bulged out of his body, popping and tearing as fur spread across his being in waves; the bones in his face contorting and stretching into a snout while drool and slobber gushed from its maws.
“..A chimera,” Alphonse whispered under his breath, the large chimera’s hulking head turning to the pair as they sat.
(now that al was fully able to process it, he was more able to realize that the soldiers had been clawed at rather than suddenly falling like ragdolls onto the floor. the bloody gashes torn through their clothing was more than enough for proof of that, wasn’t it???)
“Everyone, hands up,” the man remarked, voice gruff and deep. It was entirely different from his frail, aged voice from before, Alphonse being vaguely cognizant of the fact he and his brother both raised his arms above their heads with slight hesitancy.
There was a sort of familiarity to his movements when he had. Al recalled the time he and Edward fought a terrorist organization on a train on their way to Central at age twelve, ready to take the State Alchemy Exam and get their bodies back. He never thought he’d have to deal with something like that again, but maybe something like this was why the General had called them here after all.
Chimeras’ existence as a whole seemed to plummet off the face of the planet after the Promised Day. Why the hell would they be around here and causing trouble, anyway? Sure, there'd be some still left as there wasn't a true way of getting rid of them (and there wasn't a need to), but the military was being rooted out of all its corrupt leaders, and the stone wasn’t a concern anymore. Beyond the whole Dante thing.
In the corner of his eye, he saw the tall man in the white coat from before exiting the car. He couldn’t have been any older than his mid-to-late twenties, looking just about the same as his older brother. The chimera didn’t seem to notice, though, and perhaps that was a good thing. He himself would’ve tried to leave had he not been in eye-shot, but the man didn’t seem too bothered about the whole situation. He moved slowly, and with purpose.
He looked around, head snapping back and forth as wolf-like amber eyes narrowed at each and every passenger, as if memorizing their faces or looking for something. Someone, maybe. It then seemed to apparently not find what it was looking for, scampering inhumanly onto the wall and out of the door with brute force.
“Stay,” he snarled, before the loud scutter of claws and heavy pitter-patter of metallic footsteps was heard from above.
--And Al let out a long, heavy sigh. Mostly out of relief. Entirely out of relief, even. And if voicing his thoughts, Ed spoke back up for him.
“...Well, fuck,” Ed cursed. “What the hell is a chimera doin' here? I thought we wouldn’t have to deal with these damn things anymore.”
“Does it matter?” Shrugging his trench-coat off of his shoulders, Al let it crumble back onto his seat as he hiked his sleeves up. Better to stop them before anything else happened to the people on-board, he supposed. “I’ll check the head of the train, you check the roof.”
“Ooh, giving orders now, are we?” Ed sneered in that snarky, confident sort of way that made Al hate him a little; already reaching onto the tips of his toes for his suitcase. The clicks of the locks unloaded before Ed began rummaging around; and inevitably, he pulled out a gleaming, metallic katar. How he'd been able to keep those on the train was beyond him. “Alright then. I kinda miss train-walking anyways.”
--
“Hey, Mister Chimera!” Ed shouted from afar, his two katars firmly held in his hands. “Kinda rude of you to hijack a train, don’t’cha think?”
The man turned around, large and broad. Intimidatingly, in comparison to him (as if that mattered). Ed took the sight in front of him in, wondering what in the hell the best course of action for this would even be, the wind relentlessly pattering his face as the train sped up. It took quite a bit of force to keep himself balanced, especially with the train coming head-on with the increasingly closer train station ahead.
Not the first time this happened. Edward doubted it would be the last. Goddamn if he wasn't rusty, though.
“Ah. You’re the Fullmetal Alchemist, aren’t you?” The chimera suddenly spoke up, making Ed shudder a little at the recognition, mostly out of pre-fight jitters. “I thought that was you! Just my luck, meeting you here. And I thought this would come and go easily.”
“Actually, the Fullmetal Alchemist is retired.” Ed rolled his shoulders with a laugh, steadying his stance against the metal ground beneath him. “Sure is hard being famous!”
The chimera snarled at him, more drool dribbling down from its jaws. Ed winced. Gross. He swore that every time he met a chimera, he started to fight with it. The only relatively okay chimeras he’d met were Darius and Heinkel-- and maybe the Devil’s Nest chimeras, but those were only in hindsight, and they’d still all tried to kill him!
“You’re just another obstruction!” The chimera charged, and Edward’s shoulders raised, ready to fight.
--
“Brake, whistle.. shoot, I don’t know what any of these are.” Al muttered to himself, reaching a hand up to tussle his hair.
His mind reeled as he tried to come up with a solution to any of this-- he had no idea what the anatomy of a train was, and Winry would have a better bet at that than he would. Mechanics and engineering were never his strong-suit. He had to stop the train somehow, though, preferably without crashing it. He knew that you probably just couldn’t pull the brake to stop the train, especially immediately, and..
“Let’s try this,” he muttered under his breath, clapping his hands and pressing it to the break.
--
The train screeched, and something above Ed’s head did, too.
“...Who the hell?” Ed muttered by the time a black blanket (no, a windglider?) covered and darkened the sky, casting shadows on the top of the train car the alchemist stood on. Shots, quickly, were fired, although Edward’s eyes couldn’t move fast enough as to tell where was going what and who was shooting who. Or where the shooting even came from.
He could tell that the harsh yelling and shooting closer to his ears were probably Amestrian soldiers, but the loud yelp of the wolf chimera in front of him definitely hadn’t been caused by one. Ed’s mouth slotted wide as the man he'd been fighting moments prior suddenly stumbled off the side and fell onto the speeding track, yelling out its last alarmed sound in the process as blood splashed the side of the car.
(what the fuck?)
Ed’s gaze darted back up towards the train station in front of him as he saw the telltale yellow shots of gunfire being discharged from the boarding platform, panicking as he realized how close they were getting. They still felt like moving dots to him, but they were moving. And fast.
The train quickly began to screech, protest, and turn, the tracks wobbling and stretching with the ache and protest of the brakes. The alchemist stumbled on his feet, the ringing sounds of someone climbing a ladder barely able to be processed as he stuttered and fell to his knees with a devastating metallic clunk. If his automail ended up broken by the end of--
“So, you’re the one that General Mustang called here for,” the man ascending the stairs said, voice smooth and low.
(...wasn't that the man in the white coat on the train?)
“And who the hell are you supposed to be?” Ed snorted, awkwardly shifting to get back on his two feet. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Ashleigh Crichton,” he responded, a glittering white powder forming around his palm. “Tapping into military lines is especially easy when they’re made for courtesy calls.”
There was a circle engraved on his palm; it didn’t look normal, and but didn’t look tattooed. It reminded him of Kimblee, which made him shudder just thinking about it, but it wasn’t quite the same. He was an alchemist, for sure. An alchemist smart enough to have a circle on them, but who in the hell was he?
Of course. He never got a break.
--
Alphonse sighed as he wiped the bit of sweat that'd built up on his forehead with the back of his hand, whistling softly as he did. The train had been stopped, property damage aside, so... now what?
He still wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done to stop the train, not really, and it was still going, but it was slowing down. It was a bit tilted, and it was certainly teetering off the tracks. Al wondered where exactly the conductors had gone. Had they been tossed off the train by the chimera?
That was a morbid thought.
--He was snapped out of that train of thought (haha) as he heard footsteps behind him, and the familiar sound of a pistol turning its safety off.
“Hands up in the air!”
--
“That’s not regular alchemy,” Ed muttered under his breath, the particles fluttering around Ashleigh’s hands growing stronger and more clustered in density by the second. “There’s no equivalency to it. What the hell is up with you?”
“You’ll find out.”
The train had slowly begun to skid to its stop, slowing down almost entirely to a crawl. The gunfire picked up, both from above and the ground, the alchemist’s gaze flickering up to the sky as he was once again aware of the people gliding.
They almost looked like.. bats?
“Hands up in the air!” A voice from below shouted, Ed’s hands darting above his head. An Amestrian soldier was yelling from below, backed by a few others; pistols aimed straight at them.
Ashleigh didn’t budge.
In fact, he clapped both of his hands together, the circles imprinted on them smearing and glowing as he was sent rocketing into the sky.
He was held up by what looked to be... snow, taken from a now-gaping hole in the roof of the train beside him. Edward was hit with a gush of low temperature, shouting in protest as fire began above him, but slowly fading out as Ashleigh landed onto one of the city’s overarching pipe paths, running and sprinting out of sight and out of mind.
--
Al wasn’t surprised to find his brother in custody with him. Today was off to a very strong start, clearly.
He was sat down roughly in a gray room beside him by some rando-officers, somewhere in Table City. They’d been walked in by a few of the soldiers themselves, their suitcases tossed carelessly behind them. They’d been given slushy, foul coffee that they couldn’t even really reach for and drink with cuffed hands, hair tousled and matted with sweat and debris from all the fighting on the train just prior.
When Edward had been shoved in, Al simply smiled at him. It did nothing to soothe Ed’s already frayed nerves, he was sure.
Al didn’t know how long they’d been staying there, sitting and waiting for someone, anyone to interrogate them or get them out. They didn’t have anything to look at. It’s not like it was one of those white sensory deprivation rooms, it was just an interrogation room. It felt like hours, but Alphonse knew it was probably only about forty minutes. And that was a generously long time.
By the fifty-second tap of his older brother's index finger that had been driving Al insane, the door opened, and he watched as Edward perked. The coffee had long since lost its scent and gone cold, the light from the door peering in from the outside; shadowed by a tall, broad figure before it.
“General Mustang!”
“Took you long enough, Colonel,” Ed sneered, and Al sighed out of sheer exhaustion in response. He wasn't quite sure if it was out of relief, or him being too tired to deal with anything more today. Probably a bit of both, but more so the latter.
“I’ve heard you caused quite the ruckus, Fullmetal,” Mustang remarked, eyes flickering towards Al. Yeah. Still blind, although he wasn't quite sure how in the hell he was able to tell it was him. “Alphonse.”
Al nodded guiltily.
“Okay, well first off, we didn’t do shit.” Ed groaned, fingers splaying wide in front of him. “And can you let us out of these? They’re getting uncomfortable.”
Mustang rummaged in his pocket, pulling out a round keychain hooked around his finger. Edward relaxed.
..Now that he actually had time to think about it while the man approached to undo their cuffs, not a lot about Mustang had changed. There were subtle things he noticed. There were more wrinkles and bags under his eyes, surely. Was he stressed?
While their cuffs came undone, Al felt himself calming a little. This morning wasn’t going well, whatnot with all the things happening on the train. Getting arrested felt like icing on top of the cake, but he knew that if he told them that he shouldn’t be arrested because he was the Fullmetal Alchemist's brother, he’d get looked at weird.
“...So, General,” Al piped up awkwardly, hesitantly as Roy took their cuffs into his pockets. “Can-- can I ask, why are we here, again?”
“If you forgot, we’re retired,” Ed added, and he gestured at the both of them with his thumb.
Mustang’s eyes narrowed. Al still wondered how he did it.
--
“So.. we’re here because of a fugitive?” Al remarked, the loud noise of people gliding above dull and almost background static to his ears. “What makes him so dangerous?”
Another gliding person gilded in black landed nearby, another diving straight into the valley as they all approached the edge. Surprisingly, Roy made no attempt to stop them, Al’s lips pursing every time the loud whistle of their gliders zipped past them and cut through the air.
Kind of strange that they didn’t try to harm them at all. But they certainly weren’t affiliated with the military. Or were they? He wasn't quite sure. Maybe they were undercover spies of some sort...? It was hard to tell, these days. Ed would know better than him.
“He’s an alchemist, first and foremost.” Mustang droned, voice practiced and devoid of any emotion as he spoke. “He tapped into the military line and I knew that, hence why I couldn’t tell you why you were to come here over the phone.”
“That’s the guy I met on the train, though.” Ed suddenly chimed in, voice skeptical. “You guys didn’t seem too keen on running after him.”
“No, we weren’t. I can’t say much because I wasn’t there, but the soldiers thought that you were affiliated with Crichton in some way. When they mentioned him and another man, I knew it was either you or your brother.”
Ed hummed, the metal platform peering into the valley below rattling beneath them as they stepped on it. A rusty metal fencing lined the outside of the walls, the sunlight beating down into the crater beneath them.
Al could barely see the bottom of the valley, cast shadowed and dark. It all looked shades of mucky browns and grays, which made the alchemist frown a little deeper.
“So, how was Xing?” Mustang questioned, voice suddenly a little more light and jovial. It was a rare thing, but it made Al look back up from the valley below, and Ed seemed to perk up beside him. “You two seemed to like it a lot. Are you going back there after this?”
“It was... ah, something.” Roy quirked a brow as Ed began. “We’re going back to Resembool after this, though. Automail port feels pretty damn numb from sitting on a train for the ass end of a week anyways. Or the fuckery on the train, can't tell.”
Al snickered, and the General quirked a brow, blissfully ignorant of the way Ed shuddered.
“Oh. Right.” Roy started, suddenly. “I forgot to ask.”
Wind whizzed from behind.
The platform shook.
“What happened with Dante? Is she still alive?"
Al’s eyes flitted from behind the General’s frame, a bit hard to see with his height. Edward seemed to be thinking the same thing as their eyes landed on a tall woman, eyes widening before they began to move.
“You asked about her, didn’t you?”
In a moment, things went quiet, Al shoving the General out of the way as a gunshot rang through the air. The tension in the air had suddenly grown thick, Ed shuffling to the side awkwardly as Al fumbled against him, being pushed away from the lady before them. The brothers knocked together, back to chest, sending Ed’s heel and balance fumbling against the short railing to the outsides of the underlying crater.
He tipped.
In a few moments, Al noticed a few things.
As he began to fall backwards, he realized that the woman before them had short black hair. She had black eyes to match, wearing wine-coloured lipstick and eyeliner. She was donning a black and pink outfit, practically the same as the ones all the other bat-esque people wore. Who were they? What were they doing? Who were they with? Who the hell was Ashleigh Crichton?
With the two’s weight, the tiny rusty fence snapped and broke off, leaving the two to fall off the edge.
Ed, falling first, let his instincts guide him, grabbing onto the metal ledge of the platform. He could hear Roy yelling from afar beyond the ringing in his ears, the sound of Al falling before Edward caught him with his spare hand; the one being used to hold both of them up straining with the weight, cutting deep into the sharp edge of the steel.
If Al looked down beyond staring up above at his impending doom, he’d notice that he could see the town below just a bit better now. He could see rooftops.
(come to think of it, ed wanted to come here to study alchemy after all, didn’t he?)
A step. A creak.
Step. Crack. Ed hissed as a sharp heel hit the tops of his fingers, coming down on them hard. It probably split the skin open, from what Alphonse could tell. The black-clad woman opened her mouth, Edward straining to keep his eyes on her out of raw pain.
“Goodbye, military dogs.”
She lifted her heel.
--And they were falling,
and they were falling,
and they were falling.