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The sun is warm today, and there are birds in the trees nearby. His brother is somewhere nearby, getting him food before the other part of his assessment for the State Alchemist test. The important part of his assessment, Ed thinks to himself, before hauling himself back to his feet.
The sense of deja vu never ceases, these days. He’s been here before. It’s not the first time that he’s been here and done this. It’s not the second time either. Or the third. He’s lived through this life so many times that he knows how many leaves are on the tree giving him shade and how many bricks make up the walls surrounding this little courtyard they’d found in the middle of the assessment block. He didn’t even bother to write out the answers to his exam this time - he tapped his fingers on his desk and alchemised them straight into the page. Three of the other contenders had quit on the spot, but Ed was used to that too. State Alchemists were a sorry bunch.
He’s killed just about all of them, at some point. Either just because he could, or because he wanted to try something out. To try something different. To try to make something work, to make things change.
It’s scary just how little time he truly has in every cycle. The only one which has lasted longer than a few years was the time he ran to Xing, and that only lasted until the homunculi came calling. The circle around Amestris is just the beginning - he knows that now. What comes next is worse, somehow. Every soul within it used to power an array that encircles the world. The human race sacrificed for the lonely immortality of a tortured being created by an egomaniac seeking to escape death.
Part of him wonders, as it always does when he thinks about the time he ran, how anyone managed to map a two-dimensional array onto the three-dimensional space of the world. It doesn’t make sense to him, not intuitively. Of course, he knows that really transmutation arrays are n-th dimensional polycubes of quantum goo represented in the physical dimension as lines and symbols and mental allegories - it’s no harder to encapsulate a three-dimensional space in an array than a two-dimensional space - but the part of him that is human hates the geometry.
It hates the maths too.
Somewhere around seventeen dimensions deep, the world stops making sense, even if you are blessed with the ultimate Truth of all knowledge.
He doesn’t know what it says about him that even with the sum of all knowledge of alchemy and science and everything in-between that is and was and ever will be, he still can’t defeat Dwarf in the Flask.
If only he had more time.
If only his allies had more time.
Colonel Roy Mustang’s plans to take over the country have never been realised in any life that Ed has ever dreamed. The man is ambitious, and the man is a genius, and the man is dangerous in a way that Ed thinks he might have come to enjoy in more than a strictly intellectual way, but the man is too slow and too late to stop the Dwarf in the Flask. Ishval is only one of the points on the circle, but the other points are not far off. The one time Ed managed to stop them from wiping out Liore, they rounded up every Ishvalan left in Amestris and executed them one by one in the town square until the blood soaked the ground and the transmutation circle was ready.
He’s only one man. He can’t stop a genocide by himself. And he doesn’t look old enough to inspire others to join him. He’s tried that as well. Ed has spent a thousand lifetimes trying everything, and everything was always too late. Everything was always not enough. Not enough, not enough, not enough. Just like him, he thinks sometimes.
Truth can’t send him back earlier. They can only send him back to the point at which they met, and that means that Ed spends the first two years of every life relearning how to walk. He hasn’t got any better at it - retraining your brain pathways to use a neuroprosthetic isn’t something that is transferred through whatever quasi-scientific bullshit Truth is using to pull this reincarnation off - but he at least knows what to expect from his recovery each time. He knows how fast he can push it, and how fast he can’t.
He’s been nice to Winry about his suffering for the last few hundred lifetimes. It’s not her fault it sucks, and being nice to her doesn’t cost anything. She’s going to die anyway - everyone always dies - so wh make her die wracked with guilt that she couldn’t make the automail surgery painless for him?
God he wishes that someone could come with him each time. Why couldn’t Al have remembered the gate? Why couldn’t he have faced this pointless eternity with the help of the one person that has never betrayed him, never let him down, never-
He tried doing it without Al once. He didn’t make it through the first six months of being a State Alchemist. He didn’t want to make it through the first six months either. He would trade a limb for his brother’s soul any day of the week, and Truth doesn’t even argue with him about it any more. There has to be an exchange, and it’s an exchange that Ed will make without hesitation.
Another failure on his part.
He’s never been able to get Al’s body back.
This time he’s got a new plan.
It’s been five minutes since Al left, and it’ll be another ten minutes before he’s back, and that gives Ed enough time to do what he needs to do. There aren’t many State Alchemists around Central during the examinations. There’s always the risk that they might get asked to help assess another alchemist’s work, and there’s nothing so frustrating as trying to eke secrets out of an alchemist convinced you want to steal them for your own ends.
Of course, Ed has had plenty of time to convince them to give up their secrets, and an infinite amount of attempts. There isn’t a State Alchemist he hasn’t worked with, there isn’t a State Alchemist he hasn’t apprenticed under. Once he even worked under Shou Tucker. He hated every moment of it, except for the moments when he saw Nina’s eyes on Nina’s face, and realised that helping Shou in his mission to create abominations out of prisoners had saved her and her innocence. Equivalent exchange. How many murderers would he be willing to sacrifice to save her?
These days, he turns up to Tucker’s examination and makes sure the man is dead and buried. Human transmutation. It’s taboo. It’s illegal. It’s forbidden. Ed is a card carrying member of the club, and he’s not afraid to highlight all the ways in which Tucker has fucked up. He watches the execution every time as well, just because he can. He’ll never forget the years he spent working with the man and discovering just how depraved Tucker truly was when gifted with a colleague whose brilliance he could respect. The world is a better place without Tucker in it.
This time around, Ed killed him last night.
Just in case this is the one time it all works.
Nina deserves to have a chance to live a life of love with her mother, without her psychopathic father destroying everything she holds dear.
The point is, though, that Ed knows the work of every single State Alchemist inside out. He’s worked with most of them, and he’s learnt their secrets. And today he is going to turn that against them all. They will stand aside, or they will die, and that will be the end of it.
Thankfully, of all the State Alchemists currently in Central, there is only one who is truly dangerous. The Hero of Ishval. Useless in the rain, he claims, because he can’t make a spark. A weakness so conspicuously avoidable - so ridiculously simple to solve - that Ed has no idea why anyone believes it. Colonel Mustang didn’t have the ignition gloves when he learnt the arrays, and there are plenty of other ways to make a spark. No, Roy’s uselessness in rain has nothing to do with sparks at all and everything to do with lightning burning through the air.
It was discussed once and only one, and Roy had shown Ed the scars littering his side. Lightning can ignite his alchemy as easily as any other spark, and the side effect of his transmutation is that it lowers the electrical resistance of the air itself. Lightning is guaranteed to hit.
Folding his hands together on his belly, Ed closes his eyes and lets alchemy race up toward the sky. He learnt this from the only alchemist to ever control the elements, and he thinks that he might have fallen in love with it had he not been stuck in yet another cycle of the same life. It won’t be quick, but he can feel the seeds of what he has sown begin to come together high above the city. By the time he finishes his exam, there will be a storm brewing, and the most dangerous human in the city will be reduced to only his intelligence, his wits, and his military training.
Really, Ed thinks wryly, it might still be a fair fight, even with all the knowledge he has of Roy’s peculiarities.
“Brother, you don’t have time for a nap! Eat this!”
Al’s fussing over him is always to be cherished. And, this time around, he probably won’t do it for long. Ed has kept it together for long enough that Al hasn’t realised that it isn’t the same brother that was there before The Event, but it isn’t going to last. Ed is going to destroy it all.
Equivalent exchange.
His relationship with his brother, for the world to survive.
He isn’t sure that one is so equivalent, truth be told, but it’s one of the few things he hasn’t tried yet.
“Did they have the noodles I wanted?”
Al holds up a bowl that has the marks of transmutation on it. Clearly Ed’s favourite restaurant from the future isn’t doing takeaway yet, but Al made it work for him, because Al is the best brother. Food gives him a reason not to talk too much to his brother either, and makes the betrayal he’s planning feel less like treason. He doesn’t keep many secrets from Al. Keeping this one is killing him. But Al wouldn’t get it. Al never gets it. One time Al told Pinako, and Pinako rang the doctor from one town over, and Ed watched the world end in the red sparks of alchemy with his arms bound tight in a white jacket in a padded cell.
“Are you nervous, brother?” Al asks eventually, as Ed stuffs his face full, “It’s a big exam and-”
“-I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
And that’s all that needs to be said.
Ed keeps one eye on the sky and the gathering clouds and another eye on the clock. He spent three months of his last life working out the timing for this, and he thinks it will work, but there’s always the chance that something might go wrong. It’s an Elric plan. The chance that something might go wrong is more of a certainty, if he’s being honest.
The examination room is as big and as empty as he remembers, and his footsteps echo as he crosses the room to where Wrath is hiding behind Fuhrer Bradley’s eyes.
Nominally, state Alchemy tests are open to the public, but no one has heard of Edward Elric and those that have heard of him know that he’s twelve. No one ever shows up, and Ed is grateful for that.
It means there are less innocents to kill today.
He’s tried lots of different approaches to the State Alchemy exam. He’s shown off alchemy of all types, from all corners of the world, from all specialisms. Somehow, he always end up with the same moniker. He is Fullmetal. He will always be Fullmetal. It’s the limbs, not the alchemy, and he hates Wrath for it just a little bit - like the homunculi intended, he suspects.
If he was in a better mood, a smile might play at his lips. As it is, it’s just a feeling of deja vu in his veins.
“Let the examination begin,” Wrath declares, his one eye gleaming with something covetous.
He can feel that Ed is a Human Sacrifice. One more for their plan.
“You guys might want to reconsider how you hold these examinations,” he says, letting the words fall from his lips, as he claps his hands, “because otherwise some military figures might get assassinated.”
They react to his words, but they’re too slow. His alchemy is fast, and precise, and the stones he pulls up from the floor lodge themselves in the skull of every single soldier around him in the examination room simultaneously even as he moves toward Wrath, who already has a sword in his hand. It doesn’t matter. Ed has met with Scar. Ed has learnt from Scar. Ed knows exactly what array to hold in his mind as he shoves his hand forward.
Deconstruction.
Wrath melts beneath his hand, the homunculi’s life blistering and then cracking and then fading entirely underneath his hands, in a matter of moments . It’s been barely seconds, and the people in the gallery haven’t had time to react yet.
Even Roy, who Ed knows is there and watching and waiting, has still to pull on his gloves. And, Ed thinks with grim satisfaction, there’s a rumble of thunder about to break over Central. The only State Alchemist that might be able to stop him is going to be useless . Incapable of fighting lest he blow up himself and his allies with him.
State Alchemists gained a reputation after the events of Ishval.
Today, Ed thinks, he’s going to remind everyone of why alchemists can’t set foot in half a dozen cities in the East.
Today Ed is going to rip his way through everyone between him and the homunculi, no quarter given. And then he will surrender himself to whatever punishment they deem necessary. He can’t believe that the homunculi won’t reveal themselves, but he can’t believe it won’t cost thousands of lives.
He’s done the maths though. What’s a few thousand to save fifty million?
Al will never forgive him, but he can’t find a way to explain it. He can’t find a way to explain it. Who could begin to hope to understand?
So he won’t.
He’s just going to go.
Without Al.
He blitzes through the wall behind the examination room without pausing in his stride, carving a door where no door had ever existed, ripping the rocks apart.
One down.
Six left.
Ed doesn’t know why he’s never tried assassinating the homunculi before. Killing Wrath was almost fun , and Pride isn’t that far away either.
Let’s see that egomaniacal monster try to rip apart Amestris without his underlings to help him.