Title: Breaking Through the World - Chapter 1
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Rating: PG for now. Might go up in later chapters.
Pairing: eventual Roy/Ed, but more focus is on the plot
Warnings: GRATUITOUS MOVIE SPOILERS. DO NOT ENTER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED. also, implications of m/m, and swearing in later chapters
Summary: Two years after seeing Edward Elric again, Roy Mustang finds himself becoming more and more obsessed with bringing the Fullmetal Alchemist and his brother back, even daring to attempt human transmutation. Unfortunately for him, the Gate has other plans for him…

Notes: a) this is a post-movie fic. Thus, it will contain all manners of spoilers for Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conquerer of Shamballa. Be forewarned!

b) I put an extensive amount of research into the time period into this fic, but much of what I couldn't actually find clear information about, I guessed at from my knowledge of the political climate at the time. This isn't so important for chapter 1 but in later chapters comes into play.

c) this is primarily a plot-driven fic with a smaller emphasis on the pairing. While, yes, I did want to attempt post-movie Roy/Ed because I've only seen it done once before, I also wanted to write a well plotted, history-driven fic that told a story. So, I did both. If you're not looking for plot, do not enter!

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Square Enix and Arakawa-sensei, not me. No copyright infringement is intended and I'm making no profit from this fiction.

Breaking Through the World - Chapter 1

He'd been searching for months on end, gathering materials, digging through alchemy text after alchemy text for just one clue, one secret, one way to get through the damned gate that had swallowed Alphonse and Edward two years before. He bought ancient books with the words almost rubbed off the pages, handwritten generations before he'd even been born, and slowly pieced together a formula that would allow him to breach universes.

But he was going to bring the brothers back, both of them, safe and sound.

Before he'd closed the gate on the Amestris side, he'd studied it briefly, as long as he'd dared. The mechanics of it were interesting; it had required being activated on both ends by something, some tie that would connect both worlds. Al had explained lowly to him as he'd asked him to close the gate that the homunculi Wrath and Gluttony had been the key. There were no homunculi left in the world, and he wasn't about to create another one just to get to another world, but it had given him a place to start.

It was always about balance and equivalent trade. There was no other way. It was the most dangerous form of alchemy, and eventually Roy had concluded something he'd been trying to avoid – that to open the gate from only one side, one needed to perform human transmutation.

Roy had nothing to transmute except himself.

Eventually he'd concluded that the Elric brothers, no matter how much he'd cared for them, would be happy on either side of the gate so long as they were together, and that his self-sacrifice wouldn't be required. So one bright winter morning, he shoved all his research into a closet in the spare room and vowed he would forget.

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"You look pale." Riza, always by his side, even after their failed farce of a relationship, was the first to notice.

"I'm fine," he grumbled, shoving aside the plate she'd set in front of him. Promoted to major after his "heroics" at the battle with the forces from the other world, it still brought a smirk to his face that Colonel Hawkeye had been assigned as his commanding officer. Parliament had been too wary of his ambition to promote him higher than major, and he would probably never receive a promotion after this, but at least he had a decent pension again and could afford the modest apartment that had housed most of his research.

"You're obsessing," she said flatly.

"I stopped researching the gate three months ago," he pulled out his familiar smirk, but it no longer fooled Riza Hawkeye, who just snorted.

"Roy…" She seldom used his first name at work, but her eyes were dark and serious, and she was obviously concerned. "The Elrics meant very much to you. The rest of us wish they could return as well, but you…"

"He grew up," Roy said quietly. She blinked in surprise at him; he very rarely spoke of his brief encounter with Edward. "He was dressed strangely, and his hair was longer, and he was a man. A boy no longer." He sighed noisily, glanced around the crowded cafeteria to ensure that no one was listening to him, then continued. "That one glance was cruel. I should have been there to see him grow up."

Hawkeye's breath caught in her throat. She'd never delved too deeply into why her relationship with Roy hadn't worked out; the rumors around the office when Edward had been fifteen had been inappropriate and malicious, and even though his loyal band of followers had defended their leader, there had always been a niggling of doubt in all of their minds. Mustang wouldn't take advantage of a fifteen year old…

Take advantage of, no.

Get ridiculously, hopelessly attached to? That was a possibility she hadn't wanted to consider, especially when her dream relationship had started falling in pieces around her ears. Roy Mustang couldn't love her because he was in love with a fifteen year old boy? What sick deity had she annoyed to deserve such a fate?

Three years later, the idea stung less, but the glazed look in Roy's good eye made her throat seem a little bit smaller than normal. Even after they'd broken it off, she'd entertained hope…until Edward had magically reappeared. Then Roy's obsessive tendencies had taken over.

"You should go home and rest," she said kindly, resisting the habit of tacking on a 'sir'. She still did it, occasionally, and Havoc never let her hear the end of it.

"I can never sleep anymore," Roy said so quietly she had to strain to hear, before shoving back his chair and standing up. "But if you insist I should go home…" The essential personality of the man hadn't changed a bit – he was still the worst procrastinator she'd ever met, and she knew he wasn't going to get around to researching the three folders she'd given him until he'd managed to do everything else he could possibly think of.

So she let him go home, and hoped some rest and sleep would get Edward Elric out of his mind. Because really, what else was there to do?

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When he returned to his apartment, he felt the pull as he always did, from the closet in the spare room. He tried to ignore it, tried to shove aside the images of eighteen year old Edward Elric in a suit (no more ridiculous red coat and black leather, that was all Al now) and get some sleep.

But he always dreamed of gold, and when he woke up, it was like his head was buzzing with desperation. The closet was bright in his mind; he was like an addict trying to avoid his favorite drug when he knew exactly where he could procure some. It was like this every day and every night, and soon he was going to snap and do something stupid, like finally using the human transmutation circle he'd secretly drawn the day he pulled up the carpet in the spare room. The carpet was back down, now, but the thick black paint he'd used would hardly have rubbed away, and it was still there, still ready for the moment when he weakened.

He was not going to weaken. He still had only the vaguest ideas on how to get through the gate when there was only one side activated. He figured he'd do a lot of playing by ear, once he got there. He had a vague thought of negotiating with this gate, hoping it would spit Edward and Alfonse back out if he sacrificed something vital.

But he didn't want to sacrifice himself to get Ed back. That would completely ruin the purpose of this whole experiment in the first place – he didn't want Ed back in Amestris for any other reason than he wanted to see him again. If he died during the process…there was really no point. Edward was most likely happy in this other world, as long as his brother was there…

Roy Mustang had become completely selfish, and it twisted his stomach into knots.

Tonight was not going to be the night that he pulled up the carpet, pulled out his old books, and transmuted himself into a pretzel just to access the gate. Instead, he poured himself a glass of whiskey, grabbed a book off the shelf, and tried to forget.

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A week later, he snapped his fingers and burned the carpet in the guest room to shreds. His precision was back – he'd barely singed the floor, revealing the elegant transmutation circle buried underneath. He'd disassembled all the furniture before this endeavor and pulled it into the living room. He hoped it wouldn't be Hawkeye who found him if it failed; the woman had gone through enough without having to deal with more of his obsession with the Elric brothers. The books he'd shoved into the dusty box in the closet were spread across the floor now, theories penciled in the margins in an uneasy script, but most of what he'd discovered wasn't relevant. Nobody had truly done what he was about to do before and lived to write about it.

On a whim, he reconstructed the spare bed in his living room, just in case he succeeded and suddenly had two extra people to house in his apartment.

He was going to get Edward and Alfonse back, and nothing else mattered.

A thought hit him as he was setting up, pulling the books away, and he grabbed a pen and drew an array on each part of his body. Binding arrays, to keep him together in a non-corporeal existence, should it come down to it. Inside each binding array he drew another, more fine, which would lend its power to the initial transmutation array that lay beneath his feet. He had to do his forehead in the mirror, and the concentration that drawing ten complicated arrays on such an unstable material as skin had required had been nothing short of astounding, but after he'd inked them he hadn't dared sleep for fear they'd rub off.

He drank a cup of coffee ("perhaps my last," he'd laughed to himself nervously) then proceeded into the guest room. There was really nothing more. He stripped down to his pants and stood in the center of the circle, ironically wondering if he would create a homunculus of himself if he failed. There was no time for that now; he had a gate to open, and two lost boys to bring home.

Just before he pulled the power to the array on the floor, he had a strange, echoed image of a fifteen year old Edward Elric, standing in the middle of the same array, painted with similar arrays on his own body. He started; if he'd seen true, perhaps he was indeed on the right path. No one knew what the alchemy that Edward had performed to restore Al had required. No one had been there to see it.

He took a deep breath. "I'm not afraid to die," he said to the empty, cold air, as if it suddenly made everything okay. "I know that the gate is symbolic of knowledge; if I die, I'll receive the ultimate knowledge. That's nothing to fear." But he was scared nonetheless.

Was Edward worth all of this?

What did he have to lose? A lifetime of never achieving his dreams while always having nightmares, a stagnant career in the military, a lonely, empty apartment, and the memory of a pair of golden eyes. It was certainly worth the risk.

He took another deep breath, then kneeled and touched his hands to the circle.

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At first he wasn't aware of anything, just blackness, as if he'd fallen into the night sky but all the stars had been extinguished. He'd expected pain, a flash of light, something to indicate that he'd just done something totally insane. Not this…stillness.

Was this death?

Then, far in front of him, he could see the outline of a huge pair of doors. The alchemic signature of the doors echoed across the blackness, pulled him in like a magnet, and although his head was swimming much like one of his worst drunken nights, in a moment of clarity he knew that it had to be the gate.

Did the gate have a keeper? This had been one of his questions, and it was about to be answered. Would the gatekeeper answer his demands, pull Edward and Alfonse out of their lives in the other world just because a despairing, selfish man asked? How much would he have to sacrifice?

The doors were getting bigger, but the drunken sensation in his head stayed the same. Of all the times to not be able to think clearly… On a whim, he looked down at his body and started in surprise to see that he didn't have a true body at all in this place. It was indeed a non-corporeal realm, just as he'd suspected. His alchemist's mind, stumbling over the slowness, still tried to rationalize the balance of power needed to reach such a state.

It was indeed very possible that he was dead.

Suddenly the gate loomed in front of him, foreboding and angry. It was half open and hundreds of hungry eyes stared out at him, wanting every part of him for themselves. The souls of the dead? Or something else? He could feel, on a primal level, that if he went through the gate in his present state, those eyes would rip him apart, steal every part of him until just his soul remained, forever to be one of them.

'No!' he thought angrily towards the gate. 'Not until I find Edward!'

The gate smirked, which annoyed him, because somewhere in his rational mind some part of him was telling him that gates did not smirk. This one didn't even have a mouth, but somehow it looked smug. For the first time in his life, Roy Mustang vaguely understood how frustrated Edward Elric had been with his smug smirking all those years before.

Something was niggling in the back of his disoriented mind, something important. Something to help him get through the mass of hungry things that waited in that blackness. But what was it?

'Oh,' he thought, and activated the binding array on his 'forehead' with a touch.

Energy shot through his 'body' like a torch, as though the energy from his real body left in Amestris was powering this spirit state, protecting it. With the arrays activated, he felt each limb, each part of his body once more, even though looking down he still saw nothing. For now, he was whole! He rejoiced in the thought, and then he was out of time because the gate was there and damn, but the thing was still smirking.

He realized abruptly that he wasn't going to stop at the doors; he was hurtling through them, and there was no more time…

"I don't want to cross!" he shouted desperately, hearing his voice echo. "I want to make a trade! I want Edward and Alphonse Elric returned to their rightful side of the gate!"

If the gate heard, it didn't say anything, because suddenly he was rushing through slime, black slime that grabbed at him and tried to eat at his soul. It was like an acid, he thought sluggishly, but the binding arrays seemed to be keeping it at bay, and the eyes in the darkness had a distinct look of frustration in their depths.

He hadn't meant to cross the gate. He'd never had any thoughts of ending up in the other universe; it was either Ed and Al in Amestris or his death that he'd planned for. But this. This was not a contingency he'd planned for…

That was his last thought before blackness overtook him.

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He woke to a language that sounded vaguely like his own, but with enough differences to make the person speaking very hard to understand.

"I don't…," and he missed a few words, "…fell onto the street from the sky…"

It all came flooding back to him in a flash and he shot up quickly, only to be shoved back down.

"Project…few years back…" the voice continued in the background, but a strangely familiar sharp, female voice drowned it out.

"Lie back down!" the woman snapped in the strange, broken language. He opened his good eye to see Riza Hawkeye staring down at him sternly. His head hurt, like a hangover, and he moaned angrily.

"I failed!" he told her. She gave him a strange look before turning to the other person in the room. She spoke too quickly for him to catch anything other than the word 'Hohenheim', but it was enough for him to sit up excitedly again. "What about Hohenheim?"

"Lie down!" she snapped again, shoving him firmly but gently back to the pillow. "I will not have…" and he missed a few words here, "damaged by impatience!" He blinked and shook his head to clear it. Why was Riza talking in such a strange way? Had the gate rearranged his brain so that ordinary language was different?

"Riza. Did I fail? Are Edward and Alphonse back?" He had to know. If they were sleeping in the guest bed in his apartment, having his brain rearranged by a mammoth pair of doors would be completely worth it. But when Hawkeye gave him only a confused look before shrugging his talking off as delirium, it suddenly hit him.

Why was she in a nurse's uniform?

No, it couldn't be.

"You need to rest," she said, speaking slowly. "I don't really understand what you're saying. Your dialect is most unusual." How he caught the word dialect, he really didn't know, but it was the proper word for the differences in language.

"You're not Riza," he stated. She smiled indulgently, still thinking he was delirious.

"My name is Liza Fischer. Do you remember anything…," and now he lost the language again. Damn, concentrating was hard. "…fell in the street. From the sky."

"I'm a friend of Hohenheim," he told her, since she'd said the name before. She smiled sadly at him and looked over at her companion, the deep-voiced man standing by the door. For a moment Roy expected to see Havoc standing there with her – but no, the man was someone he'd never seen before, a tall blond.

"Franz here studied with the Professor for a bit," she told him, "and that's why I called him. But I regret to inform you that Professor Hohenheim…died. Two years ago." She looked upset to tell him, and the man by the door – Franz? – moved inside.

"The Professor talked a little of his home to his favorite students," Franz said, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. "When they said you'd fallen out of the sky, Liza called me because she remembered my stories. Is it true, then? Are you from…" and he struggled to find the name in his memory. "Armistice?

"Amestris," Roy corrected him absently, then winced. He wasn't normally sloppy and he hadn't intended to tell either of them anything, but his brain still felt like it'd been pulled inside out by the stupid gate and he was stuck in a world he knew nothing about. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. "Hohenheim had a son."

"Edward," Liza said sharply, almost protectively.

"He worked with me at the university sometimes," Franz added. "But after Hohenheim's death…nobody knows where he went." Of course. It figured. If Roy knew Edward (and he liked to think he did), the first thing the boy would have done after getting his brother back would have been to explore the world.

Fuck, Edward Elric could be anywhere.

It occurred to him, dully in the pit of his stomach, that he probably would never see Amestris again in his lifetime. If a world renowned alchemist like Edward Elric couldn't figure out how to return from this world, it was unlikely the help of Roy Mustang would be able to assist him in any way. It also occurred to Roy that if he did return, he'd never have to wear his gloves again. He'd be able to transmute with a clap, just like Edward, and Alphonse after him. The knowledge from the gate was still chasing itself around his brain, and he swore he could feel every time it challenged a preset notion of his and ran rampant over it.

Was he even the same person anymore?

And then it hit him, hard. He could see Liza out of both eyes. His hand flew to his familiar eye patch, but it was gone, and so was the scarring that made the eye completely useless. It felt good as new. But why…?

"He kind of looks like Müller," Franz was saying to Liza, pulling Roy back to the present. She frowned and studied his face.

"Kind of? Spitting image," she replied. "Maybe he's not a visitor from another world. Maybe he fell drunkenly out a window and landed in the street, and now he can't even remember his own name." She blinked suddenly. "What's your name?" she asked him slowly.

Well, at least he could answer this. "Roy Mustang."

"Not Müller."

"Unless Müller really bashed his head in," Liza murmured, suddenly placing her (familiar and yet not) hand on his forehead. "No fever. He seems in decent shape. It was smart of them to bring him to me…" and she said more, but faster now, and he had no hope of keeping up.

"Sounds almost English, his name," Franz mused. "Not a proper German name at all."

"You don't really believe all that nonsense," she said in such a Hawkeye way that Roy suddenly wanted to hug her. Alone in this strange world, it was nice to see a familiar face. "We can discuss this business later," she added. "My patient needs rest."

Well, if he was going to find Edward Elric, he'd best start trying now. "Wait." She had been about to leave with Franz, but both turned and looked at him. "Please. Get a message to Edward Elric. He'll know what to do." They exchanged skeptical glances, then Liza put on her bullshit face, the one he only knew because he'd dated her counterpart so long ago, and so far away.

"We will. You sleep."

And then he slept, and for the first time, he didn't dream of golden eyes at all, but of thousands of tiny black hands reaching up and stealing parts of his soul, scattering it across the universe like a thousand tiny stars.

to be continued…