Edward Elric did not consider himself a traumatized person, and he did not think of his childhood as particularly traumatic. Despite this determination, the trauma of his youth was both objectively true and patently obvious to anyone with a brain. Edward's brain no longer noticed. The tumultuous Amestris of yesteryear was, for better or for worse, the world that had raised him. That fact was as comfortable around his memories as an old, worn coat, a coat that needed a wash and a patch and was two sizes too small, but was too familiar to go about replacing. In short, he was usedto it.

Maybe that was why, when he arrived at work one blustery afternoon to find his place of business swarming with a fully armed battalion, Edward Elric only yawned.

"Aw, hell," he said to no one in particular. Final grades were due in seventy-two hours and he hadn't even gotten started yet. Ahead of him, the Alchemy Building of Central University loomed large against a snow-heavy sky. All around the front steps, a throng of people gathered, held at bay by a line of blue-uniformed soldiers. Was a it a fire? A flood? Both meant water, and water meant smudged ink and desecrated paper, and that meant his final grades wouldn't be in on time.

But why the military? Slowly, like a rising wail, bomb sirens filled the air.

"Damnit." His icy sigh hung in the air and whirled apart was he stepped through it to march into the crowd.

"This is outrageous! The whole building?" Edward couldn't see the man's face, but judging from the prodigious height of his white quaffed hair, he was willing to bet it was the Dean.

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to step back, we need to keep everyone at a safe distance," replied an anxious-looking warrant officer.

"On what grounds? What is this all about?"

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to-"

"I will have you know that I run this college, young man, I demand to know why you've commandeered my-"

"Excuse me, Professor Elric?" Ed turned to see a half dozen of his students huddled in coats and mittens, craning their necks like geese to get a better view of the front steps. One called Mary was asking him. "Do you know what's going on?"

Ed glanced back at the Warrant Officer and the Dean. Their tiff seemed to have drawn attention from a nearby lieutenant, who was making her way over to intervene.

"No, but whatever it is I hope it wraps up quick, I have work to do."

"I'll say," one of the students, Josef, laughed and blew into his mittens for warmth. "Do you think Dr. Wolfgar will fail me if I miss my final because of a military occupation?"

"Military occupation?" Teased the slightly older Henrietta, "What, do you think this is some kind of coup d'etat?"

"Oh please," Edward found himself saying. "Last time we had a coup, Central Command was nearly erased from the map; this is just a university building. If they're trying to do anything big, they should blow something up first." He thought he'd been being funny, but amid the sirens, his students had fallen uncomfortably quiet. Edward sighed, annoyed by the reminder that even for college students, his humor was dark. "Whatever," He said. "I don't have time for this." He elbowed his way through the crowd.

"Dr. Elric? What are you going to do?" Josef asked. He glanced at his classmates, and then followed after their professor. The others fell into step behind him, so that unbeknownst to him, Edward had a trail of six college students following him like a mother duck.

"Lieutenant," he spoke above the chatter of the crowd. "Excuse me, lieutenant," he waved. The lieutenant looked wearily in his direction and marched over with practiced indifference.

"Yes sir?"

"I'm going inside," he stepped to the front of the crowd. She reached out a hand to stop him.

"Sir, for your safety, I cannot allow you to go any further, we need to-"

"I said I'm going inside," Edward repeated, digging around in his pocket until he could find his silver watch. He held it out. Scratched and worn, the dragon sparkled in the overcast sunlight.

"-ssor Elric is a state alchemist?!" he heard Mary say.

After a brief hesitation, the lieutenant's demeanor transformed. She stood to attention and saluted.

"Sir!"

"Now tell me what's going on." He stepped further up the stairs without her stopping him.

"Sir," she turned toward him, away from the civilians, and spoke quietly: "Central Command intercepted multiple threats against this campus early in the AM. Three separate witnesses reported seeing at least one suspicious person enter the building through a window. We're not sure who they are, what weapons they have with them, or what their intent is. Our General has advised severe caution."

"And who is your general? Is it Mustang?" Edward asked, purely out of curiosity.

"Major General Mustang, yes sir."

"Oh is that what they're calling him these days," Ed grumbled over his shoulder. "Alright, well, anything happens, we'll just blame him." The lieutenant seemed unsure how to take this. "Thanks. And sorry about the Dean - he can be a bit of a dick, though you didn't hear that from me." He began up the steps.

"You're the Fullmetal Alchemist, aren't you, sir?" She asked.

"What about it?"

After a moment of thought, the lieutenant unholstered one of her two pistols. "Sir," she offered it or him. "Just in case."

Edward looked at it, and at her, and shrugged. "Fine," he took it.

"Hey, we're with him," Josef was arguing with the warrant officer, trying to following Edward up the steps.

"No they're not," Edward turned and fixed them with the same look he used on his children. He pointed with the hand that wasn't holding a gun. "You stay right there, all of you. Do what the lieutenant says." All of the students' eyes followed his hand as he shoved the gun into his coat pocket. "If Wulfgar gives you an F, I'll deal with the registrar myself."

Edward Elric jogged up the steps, digging around his pockets for his keys. Behind him, his students watched in confusion and awe.

"Did she say Fullmetal Alchemist?" said Henrietta.

"Yeah," said Josef. "Why?"

Henrietta's face moved in stages from confusion to realization to open incredulity. "Holy shit."

Once inside, Edward brushed snow off his coat, rubbed some heat back into his hands, and flipped through his ring of keys. The jinging drew unexpected attention.

"Edward?"

He looked up to see the frowning, serious face of Riza Hawkeye marching down the hall.

"Oh, hey, Captain! Good to see you," Ed grinned as if they'd just bumped into each other at a cafe. He fiddled with the lock on his door. "Didn't know it was your men they'd sent over this way. How are you?"

Riza was unmoved. "Edward, what are you doing in here?"

"I work here," he unlocked his office door, jimmied the handle, and slammed his shoulder against the door. It came unstuck and squeaked open. He switched on the lights.

"Oh good," the disorganized heaps of paper were exactly how he'd left them, untouched by water or fire. "Diane would have killed me." He opened his briefcase and began shovelling papers into it with one arm. Riza stood by the door, holding a pistol ready at her side, casting looks over both shoulders.

"We have a secure perimeter, how did you get in here?"

Ed held up his watch and dangled it until she looked. "The lieutenant let me in."

"Edward, you can't just…" but she knew that, technically, he could. Technically, he still outranked her. "We're in a bit of a situation, you can't just sit here and grade papers."

"I know, I know," Ed leaned on top of his briefcase to force it closed. It squeaked, so he put more weight onto it until it snapped shut, leather bulging. "Don't worry about me, I'm prepared," he reached into his pocket and brandished his borrowed pistol. Riza started.

"Where did you get that?"

"The lieutenant. She seemed worried when she heard who I was. Kinda rude, if you ask me. What have you been telling them about me?" He shoved it back into his pocket and held a small remaining stack of papers in his teeth while he put his gloves back on.

"Do you have your things?" Riza asked, ignoring the question. "I'll escort you out."

"Hhh-ine," Ed grumbled around the homework. He rolled them up and put them in a pocket. "If anything else gets destroyed, I'll direct the Dean to you."

Riza called up two sargeants to cover her post while she escorted Edward to a side entrance of the building.

"Make sure Lieutenant Fletcher gets her pistol back, she shouldn't have given it to you in the first place. She'll be in a lot of trouble if it goes missing."

"It's not missing, it's with me," Edward retorted.

"Well in any event, I'm going to have to reprimand her anyway. She can't just hand out her firearms just because you can't do alchemy. Ed?" Pistol still at the ready, Riza paused and turned. Edward had frozen in the middle of the hallway. All traces of his carefree fatigue had evaporated, replaced by the kind of instinctual alarm that had helped him live to adulthood.

"Edward?" Riza called.

Ed was looking down an abandoned hall of classrooms, eyes fixated on room 103. Its door, like several of the other classrooms, was cracked just ajar. Unlike the other classrooms, there was a light on the other side of the door.

"Did you search these rooms?" He asked suddenly, not turning to look at the captain.

"Yes, when we arrived an hour ago."

"Did you search them again?"

"What?"

Ed ignored her, and walked carefully down the hall. Riza hesitated to follow him. She heard his pistol's safety click off.

"Edward?" She edged toward the hallway, and peaked around the corner. Ed stood in the doorway of classroom 103, silhouette framed by an ethereal blue light. Lightning seemed to crackle from within the room. Alchemy.

"Shit!" Edward practically fell backward, slamming the door shut. "Out! Out! Everybody out!" he shouted. Riza was holding up her gun, ready to shoot whoever was in pursuit, but there was no one. Edward passed her toward the door. He did a double take when he realized she wasn't following him. "Lieutenant, move!" He grabbed her by the back of her collar and yanked her out of the hall right as the explosion went off.

Seconds or minutes later, Edward looked up from the ground to see Riza shouting orders at her men. She was bleeding from her temple but looked no worse for wear, a gun in her hand and angry as hell. He could not hear what she was saying, and became increasingly aware that one or both of his eardrums must've burst, leaving his head ringing. His hands ground against drywall and plaster dust as he pushed himself upright. A figure ran in front of him. They were not in military blue. They were not in university dress. They did, however, have chalk in one hand and a transmutation circle tattooed on the other.

"Lieutenant," Edward tried to say, but coughed. "That's the… it's the same circle, he's," he coughed again, and realized no one was going to hear him. "Damnit," he slurred, unable to hear himself except the part of the voice that echoed in his bones. With difficulty, he rose to his feet, using his briefcase to shield himself from falling rubble as he jogged toward the front door.

There were military personnel everywhere, running and shouting with guns drawn. Most of the crowd had the sense to run, too, but some lingered, unsure of what to do or where to go. Amid the crowd, Edward spotted a man running away sans coat, sans scarf, covered in plaster dust with a circular tattoo on the back of his hand.

"There!" he pointed. "That's him, there, there!" He jogged down the steps and almost slipped. No one seemed to be listening. He's going to get away, damnit. "Lieutenant!" But neither Hawkeye or Fletcher were there to hear him. His ears rang, his eyes stung with cold, there was blood tickling his face, he felt like he was going to be sick. The terrorist looked back at him, saw him, and ran faster. Edward's hands twitched, itching to clap together and bring this bastard down by force. He felt a weight in his pocket. He grabbed it.

"Josef!" He yelled, spotting his student in the way. He levelled his gun. "Get down, now!"

Josef fell to the ground. The trigger offered more resistance than he'd expected. Kickback. An unexpected burst of red, and the terrorist fell to the ground. After a moment, the figure stirred and clutched at his injured knee, which leaving a bloody red pool on the ground. Military swarmed, and Edward fell back into a seat on the stairs so he could hold his head and wait for the world to stop spinning.

After his hearing began to come back somewhat, he found Lieutenant Fletcher. "You did not give this to me," Edward told her, holding up her pistol with a single finger.

"Sir?"

"I abused my authority and took this from you, understand? It's my fault, not yours. I'm going to surrender this to your Captain, she and I will handle it from there."

"Y-yes sir," the lieutenant said, and then glanced at either side of his face. "Sir, you need medical attention."

Edward looked down at himself, and realized he'd ruined his best winter coat by bleeding all over it. "Oh," he said. His ears had even bled onto the essays stuffed into his pocket. "Great."

They had the university open two days later, but they'd siphoned off the alchemy classes to the math and geography buildings while they cleaned up the carnage. Edward's left ear would be healing from a perforated eardrum for the next several weeks, but with his right, he could hear the chatter in the halls:

"I heard he used to be a student here,"

"Ex military?"

"Angry about the reinstatement of Ishval,"

"Targeted against General Mustang, I think,"

"My mom says she's been worried about something like this happening…"

"Something about the Fullmetal Alchemist?"

"Change, of course people will be angry. But this?"

"Seems a bit drastic."

"Fullmetal who?"

"That's what they called him - he was joking about a coup d'etat!"

Edward pushed open his classroom door, and the chatter stopped. He dumped out his briefcase onto his desk and shuffled through its contents. He scratched at his forehead beneath the large bandage that ran over his ear. Most of the essays were already in alphabetical order, but there were four unfortunate outliers.

"Uh, Tasha," he climbed up to where Tasha Miller sat in her usual seat on the third row. He tried to ignore how everyone else watched him. "I'm very sorry, I wasn't able to grade your entire essay, I uh…" he was speaking quietly, as he always did with students about assignments, but the hall was unnaturally silent today. "Part of it got, uh, part of it got blood on it, but," he quickly reassured her, misunderstanding her horror for disgust, "I was able to retype it, hopefully my comments are helpful, you seem to have a good understanding of the topic." He scratched at his bandage again. "Good work." He shuffled through the three other re-typed essays in his arms. "Martin Kovacheck? Oh, there you are. You guys need to stop swapping seats on me." He laughed. He was the only one who laughed.

He moved around the room in an apologetic round before they moved onto the lesson. As he gathered up the regular essays to distribute to the class, his right ear caught wind of a frantic whisper:

"No, not about Tuesday, I meant the coup d'etat. With Mustang. He was there."

Edward had a feeling he wasn't going to hear the end of this.

"Well, sir," said Josef quietly, when Edward went to return his graded essay, "They blew something up, all right."

Ed felt his ear throbbing. "Yeah, I guess they did."

Josef smiled as if it were a joke, and Edward realized that it was his humor that the boy was absorbing. His heart weighed him down.

"You're not too bad a shot for someone who doesn't like guns." Roy Mustang signed his name, flipped the page, and signed again. Flip. Sign. Flip. "If I issue you your own firearm, this won't be so much of a headache next time."

Edward Elric scowled at him. "There won't be a next time."

"Really?" Roy didn't look up. Sign. Flip. "Winry called me earlier and asked me if I thought you needed a gun, after what happened. She also told me that dry cleaning isn't going to save your coat."

"What are you doing calling my wife on a Friday afternoon? You know, sometime you could try minding your own damn busine-"

"She called me, Fullmetal."

Edward scowled harder. His ear was healing but ached terribly. He sulked, and signed the forms that Roy shoved to his side of the desk. "No guns," he said. "The last thing I need is another reason for my students to ask me about Back Then."

Roy paused in his signing. Resumed. "Oh?"

"They want me to guest lecture in the history department. The History Department. We're history now, apparently."

Roy chuckled. "You should be flattered."

"I'm pissed off."

"And why's that?" Roy passed him another round of paperwork. Edward was staring at nothing. It took him a moment to take the paper.

"Because it's not history. It was my life." He scribbled out his signature.

Roy smiled to himself. "I know how you feel."

It wasn't the sort of conversation Edward was wont to have with the General, and he didn't want that to change. "Do you." Sign. Flip. Sign.

"You're not the first person to live through a war. You're not the first alchemist to do horrible things and regret it."

Edward looked up at him, and they made eye contact for a few fleeting seconds. They turned back to their paperwork. Sign. Flip. Sign.

"I was just a kid," Ed said quietly, irritably.

Roy was quiet for several beats. "Yeah." Flip. Flip. Flip. Sign. Flip. He glanced up at Edward. "So are you going to sit in that chair and mope about it? Or are you going to move forward?"

For the briefest of moments, he was eleven years old again, but this time he was much bigger and far, far more tired.

"You don't have to tell them anything you don't want to, you know," said Roy. "You've already pissed off half of the Central U faculty, from what I hear. What's one more department?" Flip, flip, sign.

"Yeah, I guess," Edward said, taking the papers and signing them without reading them. Flip. Flip.

"If they don't let you off the hook, direct them to me. I can guest lecture, if they want the real story. Heaven only knows what lies you'd tell them."

Edward thought he was joking, and laughed. "Thanks."

"I'm not joking," Roy told him, and waited until Edward looked up to add, "If they push the issue, just give me a call."

Edward was not used to tone of compassion in the General Bastard's voice. It wasn't comfortable like the taboos of alchemy and the sounds of gunfire. He did his best to ignore it.

"Thanks."

"Of course." Sign. Flip. Flip. Sign. Date. Flip.

"God, this is a lot of paper," Ed complained.

"Then get your own gun, Fullmetal."

"Would you get off my back."