Arcs in Fullmetal Alchemist: Standalone | After | Canon Amelioration | Circumstances | Seishin | Success | Summer | Tamashii
Roy and Gracia discuss some difficult plans.
Gracia Hughes had been blessed with an innocent face. It had served her well, as the wife of an investigator. She had also been blessed with a sharp mind, which had served her even better, as the wife of Maas Hughes, in particular.
Lust comes looking for Greed before things heat up. They get to know each other a little.
He was tall and built more powerfully than most of them. And he held himself differently. He draped himself against the air, with none of the tension she was used to seeing in her own kind. Insouciance wrapped around him, from the pointed toes of his boots to the furred collar of his vest. He could really have been human.
The thought lasted until he turned, and she caught his eyes.
Scar’s experience at Lior, and after.
The world was red. Red with blood. Red with pain clawing through his body. Red with the light rising around him. He watched it brighten, growing as each breath slowed, until one last breath felt like it wasn’t air any more.
Scar’s experience at Lior, and after.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by now,” she said, clinically. “You’re the most willful human I’ve ever met.”
Roy wakes up in the hospital.
Roy woke far more slowly than usual, which would have been his first clue that something was wrong, had he needed a clue.
Roy recovers and Lisa keeps watch.
Hawkeye crossed one slippered foot over her knee and rubbed her toes. “I should have kept you at my apartment longer,” she said with some asperity. “At least I could walk across my guest room without tripping over anything.”
Lisa gives her old job the boot, much to the puzzlement of those around her.
When General Hakuro popped out of an office right in their path Lisa knew he’d been waiting for them, and tensed. There were a lot of unpleasant ways this meeting could go, and she could tell by the number of teeth in Hakuro’s smile that he had at least one of them in mind.
What does a career soldier do when he loses his career? And what do his friends do about him?
Roy’s past slid through his fingers into a box: a folded “portrait” of him, product of Elysia’s first finger paints; a box with his captain’s insignia—so that’s where it had gone; two letter openers, one of them an old knife of Hughes’.
Lisa gets some good advice from Gracia.
Lisa set down the teacups with a bit more force than necessary. “I’m not heartbroken over anything.”
The husband and wife conspiracy team.
Maas folded his arms around her, beaming. “I’m so lucky,” he sighed. “Not only is my wife beautiful, smart, sweet and amazing, she’s also the best secret agent I’ve ever seen.”
Some reflections, while Hawkeye cleans her guns.
She liked her guns. Killing made her reluctant to eat for a day or two, but the guns themselves were clean and precise and definite at all times.
Havoc watches and worries a bit about his friends, as he moves them in.
Anyone with eyes knew Hawkeye’d had a thing for their superior officer since day one. Well, anyone with eyes who wasn’t Roy Mustang, but Jean had never been sure that wasn’t deliberate ignorance.
Lisa chooses a new direction to move in.
Roy would be in motion again, soon. He probably didn’t know it, yet, but she was sure of it.
Roy comes to some realizations and starts to move again.
Lisa had been a sweet, cheerful girl, when he’d met her. But she’d been seventeen at the time. He hadn’t been surprised that she’d become more solemn, when she showed up as his new Second Lieutenant two and a half years later. People changed as they grew up.
Lisa goes back to her roots.
A corner of her mouth twitched as she wondered what Roy would think if he knew that she’d learned half her officer skills from her family’s bank manager.
Roy stirs things up and gets a new job.
Clearly, Roy was heading for another superior who could spot him coming and going. This could be good or bad.
Team Mustang dives into politics.
Hawkeye sniffed. “It was bad enough, dealing with bureaucratic idiots as an officer,” she noted. “I’m not going to deal with them as a secretary.”
Lisa unveils her own new job.
She really couldn’t help a satisfied smile at the stunned realization spreading over Roy’s face. To be perfectly honest, she didn’t try all that hard.
Lisa and Roy reach an understanding.
“I’ve never met another woman who’s so beautiful when she isn’t trying.”
Hakuro reflects grimly on Mustang’s influence.
It was a messy idea, a jury-rigged, special-dispensation way to disorder records and assignments. It proposed to bend regulations into pretzels without ever quite breaking their letter.
It was Mustang all over.
Ross fields some odd questions from her new boss.
“Ross-kun,” he murmured, not seeming to notice. “What do women really want?”
Lisa gets tired of waiting and coaxes Roy into bed.
“Lisa.” The whisper drew her attention from his hands to his face, and her lips parted. Roy was looking at her—at nothing but her—with a focus she’d only ever seen when he faced mortal danger. Except that, where his eyes were cold, then, they were warm now.
Havoc teases a happy Lisa.
Faint color painted her cheekbones and she gave him a mild glare. “Don’t you start too. Gracia is bad enough, giving me those doting looks every time I turn around.”
Their world has changed.
The first assassination attempt should probably not have come as a surprise. And, in a way, it didn’t.
Al wakes up, restored. Not all the news is good, though.
He and Nii-san were going to have to come up with whole new equations to talk about what had happened to him and probably some new technical vocabulary too. The thought steadied him, and he smiled.
Back with his teacher again, Al takes up his studies; this time, though, he already knows some things won’t work.
He dreamed of the color, sometimes, nights when he woke up sweating and threw open the window just to look up at the sky and know the whole world wasn’t red.
Roy really likes Ed’s metal hand.
Roy shifted against the bed as Ed’s metal fingers pressed deep into him.
Al stumbles over the clue to finding his brother that he was looking for, in a way he didn’t expect. (Continued after a seven year hiatus, I recommend re-reading the first two stories in the arc.)
Al picked an easy path, down by the lakeshore under the trees where the light rain wouldn’t get him too wet. Sensei was probably right. His brain felt so full it might spill if he moved too fast, and his thoughts jostled against each other. He was pretty good at modern alchemical codes, but he’d been reading much older texts, and if you went back far enough it was as much philosophy as science and every statement seemed to mean at least three different things at once. Probably more, actually, but he had threes on the brain; it was Trismegistus’ fault. And Salmon’s. Mercury meant spirit meant animal, and where did that get him?
Al visits home and tells everyone about how his studies are coming,
and Rose talks sense to him.
Al ignored the rattle of the train wheels to scowl over his notebook, certain at the bottom of his heart that his notes weren’t going to do him any good. Plenty of people wrote about the Stone, but as far as he could tell no alchemist, in four hundred years and more, had written down anything about the Gate. Given his own experiences, he supposed he couldn’t blame them, but still…! And Sensei must agree that his books were a dead end, or she wouldn’t have loaded him on the train for a visit home without a single book to his name except one volume of poetry he’d bought a year ago and hadn’t opened since.
Al goes to Ishvar, searching for answers.
Al sighed. Getting to New Ishvar had been simple. Finding the temple had been even easier; it was the tallest building in the city and by far the most finished-looking one. The next step was proving a little harder.
Gil does his best to make restitution and finds himself being drawn out by Al.
Gil had not been surprised when Alphonse mentioned nightmares. The boy had died, been hauled back by his heels and bound to a suit of armor, tramped all over the country running after the false hope of the Stone, been transmuted into the Stone, and finally sacrificed those years of love and effort to be returned to true life. Nightmares were surely to be expected. He hadn’t quite expected his new houseguest to start up in the middle of the night, screaming, though.
He certainly hadn’t expected it to happen every night.
Al settles into closer company with Gil and, as the year draws on, finds the key he needs—if he can use it.
He frowned down at the sheaf of papers in front of him, the delicately colored and carefully labeled concentric circles and the dissertation below on their interrelations. "All these accounts and explanations… they all talk about joy," he murmured.
"Of course." Alec-san blew on a carefully copied page to dry it and pulled up a fresh sheet of paper, turning to the next page. "They speak of the pathways to completion, to perfection, if you will."
Al frowned some more, tapping his pencil against his chin. If that was so, then why was it only fear that he remembered?
Gil assists Al and has a bit of an epiphany, and finds some peace with his past.
Alphonse looked stubborn. "I need to not be afraid. If I’m afraid of the Gate, I’ll just keep running away from it and forgetting and I’ll never be able to find Nii-san through it." The stubbornness shifted into the earnest entreaty Gil was far more wary of. He had fewer defenses against it. "Please, Gil-san. I do think it should be you."
Gil stifled a sigh. He wasn’t at all sure he was ready for the burden of that trust, but if it was laid on him already he couldn’t bring himself to break it. "Very well."
Al finds his brother. In a way. LAST CHAPTER, INCOMPLETE
Even asleep, Al could tell this dream was different.
