Sorry this is super delayed. Spring Semester kicked my ass with homework. But I got back into FMA bc I watched the mediocre live action movie again last week and I listened to OotP on audiobook on my roadtrip back from school, which funnily enough, is how I came up with this fic exactly a year ago! I'm gonna try to work hard on this in summer.

Gary Paulsen and Jack London Whomst? This is the real peak wilderness survival content.

Roy jolted suddenly into consciousness. Awareness rushed into him with a rattling gasp and before his eyes had even snapped open he was processing the situation. He was lying on his back on stone - outside, judging by the moving air on his face, diffused light through his eyelids, and smell. And he wasn't alone.

His opening eyes met a leering, gleaming skull peering out of a dark mass of hood and robes. If this was the Grim Reaper come to take his soul, he was forty years short of Roy accepting his fate lying down. Roy had far too much left undone.

He saw three figures, one crouched next to his right shoulder, one by his feet, and another against a crumbling stone wall to his left. As far as he was aware, the Grim Reaper was a singular entity, which meant this was probably some death cult or equally unpleasant organization.

He slammed bodily into the figure crouching next to him, which let out a deep grunt as Roy surprised him enough to bowl him over. The other figures also started, stepping towards Roy while reaching for their hip, but Roy's instincts were faster. He normally would give a chance to unknown parties outside of a war zone, but skull masks after apparent kidnapping suggested a fairly obvious threat.

He snapped twice and orange zigged through the air to burst into twin infernos around each figure. They screamed horribly - human screams - which, absurdly, relieved him. People trying to kill him was something he could handle.

The first figure was scrambling to his feet, robes catching on his shoes, when Roy turned back around. He could imagine the horror on the man's face under the mask as he watched his comrades struggle in pain. The man had a thin stick in his hand, gripped like a conductor's baton, and was pointing it at Roy. A flash of green light flared from the tip and passed with a cold discomfort by Roy's left shoulder. The stick was some kind of weapon.

Roy snapped and the stick flared with fire and was hastily dropped by the man who let out a string of words that were wholly unintelligible to Roy, but sounded tonally like swears. He was already lunging to reclaim the now extinguished stick.

It was something to puzzle out away from danger. Roy needed distance. He snapped again, filling the entire stone enclosure with searing, towering flames and ran into the surrounding woods at random. There were distant shouts from the ruins but no one overtook him as he pelted through the trees.

Roy woke up that first morning from a sporadic and restless sleep underneath a tree with a headache and his body's unhappy realization that coffee did not grow on such trees as these and he was due for a rough ride through caffeine withdrawal.

With Roy's promotion to Colonel and acquisition of subordinates had come far more days in an office than out of it. And when he was "in the field" it was structured stints of scheduled hours that let him return to his own bed or a hotel room nearly every night. It had been a long time since he had slept wrapped in a coat on the softest ground he could find with every sense ready to wake. But at least in Ishval it had been warm and dry. Not the damp coolness of whatever place he now was.

That was another unfortunate aspect of this experience. The lack of intelligence information. He had no idea what country he was in. The second day in this strange land, he stumbled upon signposts and a farm. To his dismay he had not been able to read the letters at all, the writing system had little in common with Ishvalan, Amestrian, or Xingese and beyond that he had little expertize.

Equally frustrating had been what little conversation he could overhear from the farmhouse. He had hoped that even if the letters had given little away he could at least identify the language family from sound. It too was unfamiliar, less tonal than Xingese and far choppier than Ishvalan. He did not risk a confrontation with the people. Instead, after waiting to make sure there was not a guard dog, he waited an hour's walk away and then crept back under cover of night to exchange a few chicken's eggs for alchemically repairing the shabby hen house as best he could. He hoped the gesture would be sufficient.

The third day dawned and the eggs were cooked over a small fire on a pan transmuted from scrap metal taken from what had smelled like a large garbage bin. He made a mental note to thank Alphonse for teaching him some supplies-based metal transmutation circles. Edward, for all his genius, was difficult to learn basic circles from because of his on-the-fly clap transmutation method that involved advanced mental work. Alphonse still carried chalk and was eager to fill his time with anything "helpful". Thus Roy had made a pan and a knife.

Those times he did not come across any farms or houses, he was forced to turn to less-pleasant alternative meals. The squirrel he singed off a tree and cooked sat poorly in his gut. It reminded him too much of rats and lizards eaten on miserable missions in the war that ran longer than rations supplied for and left them scavenging for vermin in sandy ruins. Kimblee, in his typical awful manner, used to watch his prey writhe for a while before blowing off its head. Then - and now - Roy managed to keep his meal down. The calories were too precious to be wasted on queasiness from disgust.

He had no trust in his abilities to identify safe plants or mushrooms to eat out in the wild. It wasn't worth poisoning himself when he could either guiltily steal from an occasional farm or stick to meat from the forest. He managed to make a net to catch fish and his traps for rabbits and birds were occasionally successful.

The difficult part was the constant need to continue moving. With the risk of the return of those masked people, and every farm speaking an incomprehensible language, his safest bet was finding a multicultural city.

So his strategy was following a large stream. Eventually it would become a river. And cities were built with access to water. Which meant either on the river or, eventually, on the coast, he would find civilization.

And that had set the standard for his time here. Wandering in wilderness, shadowing the water and trading repairs for morsels of farm goods whenever he failed at hunting.

As far as he could tell, the Elrics had not been transported with him. Whether they were still back at the archaeology site and only he had left, or if they had appeared at some other location was uncertain. Underneath the exaggeration-heavy nature of Edward's anecdote style, Roy had gleaned that he and Alphonse had spent a month in a wilderness survival based training exercise and were far more qualified than he to live off the land.

He vainly tried to keep from worrying about the Elrics. However capable Edward was at feeding himself, there were still the people who had immediately attacked him. He hoped they were together, where Alphonse could keep watch in his sleepless nights, but still. Both of the Elrics used some terrain based alchemy, erecting walls and launching projectiles from the ground, Ed used his automail arm and leg as both shield and weapon and Alphonse threw his bulletproof body around with little regard for damage. That may work with fire and metal and fists, but Roy had never seen alchemy quite like the multicolor streaks of light before, and they did not seem so easily blocked. It reminded him almost of Kimblee, and his ability to transmute something into its own explosive, blowing up people from their own flesh. He wouldn't want the Elrics to fight him and he did not want the Elrics facing the masked figures without forewarning. But there was little he could do seperated and without means of communication.

On the sixth day of his hermitry, his attackers returned. A whip crack startled the birds from the trees and had Roy leaping from lounging against a tree to a ready position, fingers poised. The dark-clothed, masked figures had returned.

Roy was still fairly certain they were cultists of some sort - no respectable organization would have a uniform quite that intensely thematic. If Roy had been the superstitious type he likely would have lost his nerve the first time he had seen them, body aching and head spinning, staring up at a cloudy night sky. Their shadowy robes distorted their limbs and movement and the gleaming skull masks were haunting in low light.

The way they shot colored bursts of light was easier to handle. It reminded him of his own alchemy and that he could dodge and counter -although the effect was very different. Rubble had exploded from the wall because of some of the flashes that missed him, others shriveled moss in a blink, or passed as gushes of hot or cold. It was something he puzzled over during his wilderness walks.

That first group he had escaped by lighting the entire space aflame and bolting through a crumbling doorway while the figures he left behind struggled to put out their robes and handle their burns.

He did not expect things to be left at that and every moment spent trekking through hills and forest was in constant paranoia and vigilance.

The robed figures had appeared, but were merely looking around, apparently unsure of his exact location. There were five of them, they had brought reinforcements from the original three he had fought. He must be considered more of a threat now. He was not going to wait for them to notice him and began backing away, keeping to undergrowth cover and stepping as quietly and efficiently as he could. This worked for perhaps a minute before he heard a voice mutter something and a rush of tingling sparks surrounded him, he wasted half a second marveling at the way they swirled harmlessly around his limbs before a shout from the masked figures shook him from his wonder.

It was a harsh sound, paired with the aggressive pointing in his direction. Roy snapped his gloved fingers, a wall of fire flared to life between him and the group and he bolted. It wasn't a hapless sprint either. Every nerve in his body was wired, this was the adrenaline of battle. He had to balance speed and caution, avoiding tripping and damning himself to capture or death. He also had to calculate how often to turn around and send back return fire. His instincts helped him dodge their fire and he knew from experience that aiming a projectile while running was very difficult.

He knew he had run for too long in one direction when a cloaked figure sprung with a snap from a clearing ahead of him. He swerved hard, slamming into a tree while a green blast shook the far side of it, sending a snake of fire around the tree in retribution, and darting off in a new direction. His stamina wasn't at its peak anymore, too much paperwork and too little time for serious running, but it was enough.

Suddenly, tree next to him exploded with a blast of sawdust and wood chips and pain sliced into his face as a shard caught his jaw. Roy cupped his left hand to the injury and stumbled. His attackers were now closer. The pain was distracting and he forced himself to focus with a mumbled string of curses. He needed space. The cloth-covered hand he pulled away from his jaw was stained with spreading scarlet - he was down to one ignition glove.

A forest fire would risk even more unwanted attention, but this was a situation of immediate danger. The time for a drastic measure. Roy preferred using his alchemy in precision shots -the proud product of years of training and skill to accurately send pipes of oxygen snaking through the surrounding air carrying sparks to burst to light on a target. But at certain times he had been forced to burn wider swaths with far less control.

It was with guilt to the trees that he half turned and snapped his fingers, unleashing the power that was the reason he would be the last flame alchemist. He jogged away without looking as the undergrowth charred and his peripheral vision turned orange and white and blinding.

The fire raged with a roar of its own and out of that noise came screams. They were a welcome reminder that his pursuers were also human and he was not defenseless - just outnumbered and nearly outclassed.

He kept at his inelegant run until his arm ached from holding his jaw and his legs tired from their fumbling steps and he could no longer hear anything except birds and creaking trees.

They did not reappear that night and over the following days Roy tried to settle back into his previous routine.

The deprivation of food, sleep, and any relief from the stress was taking its toll on him. On the eighth day since he had woken up in this strange place he took his usual midday water break.

He transmuted a bowl from a piece of a log, and filled it with stream water. Then he scratched an array into the belly of the bowl, that would separate out only the dihydrogen oxide and form it into a chunk of ice, leaving behind any bacteria or leaves or other elements. It was a basic array commonly used to make ice for easy food storage. He made a new, clean bowl and melted the water into it, drinking his fill.

But when he went to rise from his brief rest he doubled over, pain lancing his skull. It seemed the sheer stress he was currently under was rearing its ugly head as a skull-splitting migraine. He had not had a headache this bad in months, and here there was no Hawkeye to cancel his appointments and shutter the office windows, here he had no lights to turn off and couch to lie on.

It was all he could do to find a hollow created by the massive roots of a tree and drag a few fallen branches against it to create a lean-to shelter, wrap his rather ragged jacket around his head, and lie there vulnerable and waiting for the agony to fade.

It was dusk when the pain lessened to manageable and he staggered back to the stream to drink again and hope for fish or small game.

The next day he took his rest under the swaying boughs of a willow and halfway through a doze bolted upright and turned to stare at the tree.

Two of his foster-sisters had gone through teenage fascinations with herbal remedies and traditional medicine. He had avoided most of it, having been threatened with being their practice board for acupuncture after teasing them one too many times, but he remembered a few of the more interesting factoids. And he was fairly certain that aspirin came from the willow tree. It might have been boiled from the leaves or the bark or the sap.

He took out the transmuted knife and gouged a chunk of bark from the trunk. It did not leak with sap, which ruled out the likelihood of that hypothesis. The inner pulp of the bark was a pinkish flesh. He also ripped a handful of leaves off the nearest branch. One did not become an alchemist without some penchant for experimentation.

He created two vessels with circles to boil the water and put leaves in one and the bark flesh in the other with chunks of ice made from the stream. He could remember the look and smell of the tea that held the willow aspirin, a hazy picture of his childhood kitchen and his giggling sisters passing around the glass of medicine they had made, daring each other to taste it.

The leaves brewed to a fragrant dark brown, smelling and looking a bit like black tea. The willow bark turned its water into a rosy wine color right out of his childhood memories. He dumped the leaf water, uncertain about its safety as a beverage, but choked down the reddish brew rapidly, filtering the wood splinters with his teeth. It was bitter and unpleasant but at bare minimum the hydration would help. He cut another chunk of tree bark and then crawled back into his shelter to wait for the tea to take effect.

After recovering from his migraine he resumed stumbling his way along the streambank for two more days.

It was late on the eleventh day when his intermittent solitude again ended. He was coming to expect the cracking sound, like the snap of some great dry bough.

There were five figures this time, but not in the skull masks and hoods of the previous groups. These had those same thin sticks clutched in their hands but were colorfully dressed in an assortment of styles. There were three men, two tall and strongly built, but nowhere near approaching Armstrong's physique. The third man was wiry. Both women had a stern air.

Again, from their searching gazes and outstretched sticks, Roy got the sense they were looking for something. And going off his recent luck, that he was the target they were hunting down. Frustratingly they spoke the same language as everyone else he had come across - something wholy unintelligible to him.

The exhausted, desperately optimistic part of him wanted to believe that these were the other side of the scales from the cultists, and their civilian dress gave some hope, but he knew that masks came in all forms. Independence was better than betrayal when working alone.

So when they shouted and moved in his direction, he ran.

He did not make it as far as he would have liked before he ran into a very unfortunate complication. He vaulted through a wall of undergrowth only to hear the crack and see the flash appearance of a masked man. The cultists had found him too.

There were two potential schools of philosophy to approach this situation with. Either heading towards the Skull Cultists and assuming "better the devil you know" because at least Roy could handle them enough to give himself an opening to run for it and continue his wilderness trek. Or to assume "the enemy of my enemies is my friend" and hope that the unmasked people who had appeared and immediately began shooting colorful blasts back at the cultists would recognize him as a potential ally. This could possibly lead to resources and assistance in finding the Elrics.

The two groups seemed quite content to exchange shouts and fire, the air filled with high speed streaks and flashes, colliding in firework displays and exploding bits of trees and mulch. Roy used the distraction to retreat out of the line of fire and began wending his way towards the eclectic group.

When he re-entered the skirmish he immediately sent a flashy fireball at the masked group. It was best to establish his allegiances quickly and clearly. There was a startled shout and a quick return to combat.

His selection of potential allies seemed to be paying off. After a few minutes of volleying bursts of light one of the hooded figures collapsed, struck with a chestful of red. Another grabbed hold of the limp form and both vanished with the ever present crack. The other masked persons sent a final poorly aimed flurry of green streaks and vanished with a chorus of snaps. He was now alone with the enemies of the masked figures.

He turned to face them and was met with frowns. He raised his hands up in what he hoped was a universal gesture of surrender. If he was going to negotiate aide from them it was likely going to involve a lot of hand gestures and pantomime conversation, and he would prefer calm hosts to misread body language on a battlefield. All of them were pointing those sticks at him. He opened his mouth to speak, but was greeted with a shout. Rapidly, the same flares of light that had been aimed at the masked figures were volleyed at him.

He dodged one red streak but only caught a second white flash out of the corner of his eye before it hit him. His body went rigid, arms snapping to attention and everything locking down to his toes. He fell over into the mulch with an uncomfortable thud and lay immobile, forcing down his mounting panic.

He was paralyzed, no matter how desperately he strained to wiggle even his toes he could not. And this was not the limp boneless ness of a tranquilizer drug, this was stiff and tense. Like the rigor mortis he felt in corpses forced upon a living being.

There were hands hauling him upright and locking around his biceps. He tried to right himself on his feet but still could not move and was dragged foreword, the toes of his shoes raking two lines in the mulch and dirt. The group clustered around him, voices jabbered rapidly at each other and the people moved around as if responding to orders. Someone tilted him back and he felt uncomfortably close to falling over and a stick jabbed towards him, blaring with brightness. This was repeated with multiple colors and the murmuring increased with each one.

Finally they seemed to have reached some conclusion because the grips on his arms changed and he was balanced again. There was a crack of a whip and once again the world around Roy was sucked into a vacuum and there was pressure around him that suddenly ended. He felt disoriented and if his muscles could move to do it he would have gagged.

They were in a stone room lit by candle lamps with a massive blazing fireplace taking up much of one wall. It should have been far warmer in the room than it was.

Out of the blurry corner of Roy's vision he saw one of the figure approach the fireplace and do something to it that turned it from orange to green. It had to be copper added then. A voice spoke and the fire flared brighter suddenly.

Then the arms hauled him quickly, his legs jolting as his toes caught on every crag in the floor. The took him to the fire and began pushing him in.

He would have been screaming. His mind was roaring with his own fears and with the voices of people he himself had burned. He knew exactly what it smelled and sounded and looked like when a living person was slowly cremated. If this was some torture or execution there was a bitter irony to it that he doubted they appreciated.

But there was no pain. Someone in the fireplace received him and held him flush to their chest as the green flames lapped around them. The person behind him spoke and the world spun in a sickening twirl of green.

Fun facts about this fic. I decided early in the ideas stage that it's going to be hard and fast only Roy pov which is a fun challenge. I did research wilderness survival things but don't try this at home kids. I learned so much about willow's uses. Roy's foster sisters are my favorite mechanism to spice up his background.

Shit will "get real" as they say Next Chapter (which *fingers crossed* will be in a month or less)