Fullmetal Alchemist characters, settings, and ideas do not belong to me but to Arakawa Hiromu.

The Dogs of War

By Taliya

Part II

Spring of 1920

"Gave them a small warning," he said in lightly accented Drachman, dusting the snow from his gloves as he gazed at the burning forest before him.

"Good, good," replied his companion with distinct satisfaction coiling about his voice and a sly glance at the young man before him. "Let the Amestrians know we intend to crush them." The man turned his eyes to the west, to where for decades the towering, impenetrable barrier of Fort Briggs had impeded their ability to expand to the south before returning to the slight young man before him. "Come, we return home, Eduard." He held out a sizable backpack, which the younger man shouldered with ease. "How is your leg?"

The youth briefly glanced down at his covered left leg and grunted. "Fine, Alexei. It's squeaking and is a little stiffer than normal, so it needs maintenance soon before something breaks. Idiot Demchenko has no idea how to work with automail. And he calls himself a mechanic," he scoffed as they began the long, hazardous hike back over the Briggs Mountains to Drachma.

Autumn of 1917

He alighted from the train and paused to take a slow, deep breath, for the moment ignoring the prickling sensation of pins and needles that nipped angrily at his right leg and backside. The air here was different from that in Amestris: cleaner, purer, not yet tainted with the pollution brought by gas exhaust from automobiles and coal burned for electricity and generalized industrialization he had unfortunately become accustomed to in Central and East Cities. There was also a faint bite to the air that hinted of the coming of winter. This would probably be the last trip he would make out west for the year. He had no desire to use his leave traveling about half frozen. The small Cretan town of Minolos, just south of the Cretan-Drachman border, somewhat reminded him of Resembool, all small houses and dirt roads and fresh winds and nearly untouched nature. But instead of rolling green hills, Minolos was surrounded by a thick, mixed coniferous and deciduous forest. The changing season had brought with it a resplendent, riotous exhibition of color that left him breathless.

I wish Al could see this, he thought wistfully, taking in the explosion of brilliant golds, reds, oranges, and browns juxtaposed rich greens, before interlocking his fingers and stretching out the kinks in his shoulders and back. It had been just over two and a half years since the Promised Day, and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Elric was no longer enlisted in the Amestrian military as a State Alchemist. That ability had been willingly exchanged for his younger brother Alphonse's body, which for four years had sat patiently before the Gate of Truth waiting for the younger Elric's soul to join him. He flexed and wiggled the fingers on both hands, undeniably pleased by the return of his right arm and his ability to truly sense textures and temperatures with his right hand. His left leg of automail remained, and he was both saddened and contented that he still possessed it. He had wanted something tangible—aside from Alphonse's returned body—to serve as a reminder of his greatest, most grievous sin. His right shoulder still contained remnants of automail parts embedded in it, but as it did not bother him in the least, he therefore had no desire to go through the pain of surgically removing the metal bits.

He wandered around the small station for the twenty minutes that the train was docked, waiting for the conductor to signal when he was to board the passenger car once more as he worked out the numbness in his lower half, grateful for the lack of stiffness civilian clothing provided. The Amestrian military uniform was sewn of thick, durable cloth that needed to be starched every so often, and it was uncomfortable enough that he did nearly everything he could to get out of having to wear the blue uniform. His crimson coat, one of the trademarks of the Fullmetal Alchemist, had been discarded when he had sacrificed his Alchemy abilities.

The station had few travelers since Minolos was such a small town. Therefore it came as quite a shock when he was suddenly grabbed from behind as he turned the far corner of the platform, a large, calloused hand clamping over the lower half of his face and a thick, muscled arm pinioning his arms to his sides. While Edward was pleased that he had grown to a respectable 168.625 cm without any added height from elevated shoe soles, he was still quite thoroughly incensed when he was easily picked up off the ground and carried swiftly away from the station like a rag doll. The hand on his face kept his mandible immobile, and so he was unable make any attempts at biting the man despite how much he wished to.

The years Edward had spent in the Academy had served to increase his already ruthless physical prowess and honed his ability to judge a situation more rapidly and objectively. His commanding officer, the Flame Alchemist Major General Roy Mustang, had from the beginning bemoaned Edward's hotheadedness and inability to mask his feelings. But as Edward had matured, his ability to mentally dissociate himself from his impulsiveness and emotions had grown to the point that now he possessed a poker face that rivaled the Major General's if he felt so inclined. It was a hard-earned lesson from his days in the Academy, when he had lost many a spar because his opponents taunted him about his height—or lack thereof. This relatively new development left Edward giddy with an unholy amount of glee at the mayhem he could and indeed had already brought down upon Central Headquarters, and in particular Mustang's office, much to his superior's irritated dismay and his fellow officers' delighted amusement. In addition, it allowed him to cautiously navigate and sometimes even participate in the vicious and backstabbing world of office politics. As he was no longer able to use Alchemy as a means of offense and defense and was already extremely skilled in close-quarters open-handed and bladed melee, Edward had taken to stowing knives in various places on his person, in much the same manner the late Brigadier General Maes Hughes had.

Thus Edward clenched his forcibly closed jaw and allowed himself to be toted off, far enough away from the station that any action on his part would not cause the locals undue stress as he pondered the myriad conceivable reasons he had been singled out for a kidnapping. The man carrying him had headed straight for the forest, and Edward estimated they were traveling north by the time and position of the sun. They were joined in short order by two more, judging by the two additional sets of footfalls that kept up with his captor. His abductor spoke in what Edward identified as Drachman, feeling the man's voice via the low rumble in the burly chest he was unwillingly pressed up against. His associates answered curtly, and there was an undercurrent of malicious satisfaction in their tones.

When Edward deemed them far enough away, he pulled his knees towards his chest and tugged a small knife out of each boot, flipping them easily in his fingers before bracing his feet and ramming them into his captor's thighs. The man went down with a scream and Edward launched himself off the man's injured legs before he could pin him to the leaf-strewn forest floor with his massive bulk; however, the man toppled backward from the sheer force Edward used to propel himself forward. He landed nimbly in a crouch as he skidded across the leafy ground, the bloody knives grasped in his hands and ready for combat. The two other Drachmans, one equally as large as their fallen companion and the other comparatively scrawny, snarled what he assumed to be a lengthy litany of curses at him as they pulled handguns from their holsters. Edward fervently thanked whatever deity who was listening—even though he was no longer an Alchemist, he was still atheist—that his mechanic and fiancé, the soon to be Winry Elric née Rockbell, had the foresight to equip him with his lighter winter automail two weeks prior when he had returned to Resembool for a maintenance check. The lightness of the interwoven carbon fiber allowed him greater agility without the weight of his more usual steel but weakened the strength of any of his kicks as a direct result of the decrease in weight.

He scowled darkly at them before his face smoothed over. "Oi," he growled, "who the hell are you idiots?" The scrawny man barked a reply in Drachman before unloading a few rounds in Edward's direction. The former Alchemist dodged the bullets easily, coming up into the man's personal space and delivering a swift punch to the jaw. Before the unconscious man had even hit the ground, Edward was already on top of the other man. "Too slow!" he snarled, knocking him out with a blow to the head using a booted, automail foot. He flipped and landed on the ground as the second man collapsed, straightening and coldly regarding his captor with the stabbed legs, who by this point had a gun aimed at him with shaking hands and grim determination writ across his face. He wiped the blood off both of his knives on the coat of one of the comatose men, stowing them in his boots. He crossed to the man's side before the Drachman could react, knocking the man out with a foot to the head. "I'm really not in the habit of repeating myself, but it's a little pointless to ask when we don't understand each other, isn't it?" he asked rhetorically as he stood over the man.

He checked the time on his pocket watch—not the physical symbol of a State Alchemist, but a simple silver one he had received from Winry on his birthday last year. He still had six minutes until the train left, which he estimated he could catch it if he sprinted. He eyed the three fallen would be snatchers. They would wake up all with pounding headaches and one with limited mobility, but they would live through this little debacle of theirs. He had purposely grabbed the smaller of the two knives he kept in each boot, both of which were the size of a penknife, so that the man would not bleed out even without immediate bandaging of his wounds. Yeah, they'll live… well, provided they don't get eaten by something, he amended before shrugging. Eh, it's not my problem.

He turned in the direction they had come from and had taken a couple of steps before there was a crack and a blinding pain erupted in his right shoulder that sent him spinning to the ground. It was accompanied by the scent of scorched flesh and the sulfurous odor of gunpowder. Edward hissed fiercely as he grasped his shoulder, having somehow managed to instinctively roll into the relative protection of a tree trunk stationed between him and the sniper. He brought his hand away and was not surprised to find it slick with blood. Further inspection quickly revealed the bullet wound had gone through cleanly and narrowly missed his clavicle but had partially shattered his scapula, thus rendering his right arm completely useless. His brain raced at the implications and he snarled silently as he eased his coat off and did his best to jury rig a bandage and sling.

A useless right arm, he thought with black humor, it's like losing my automail arm all over again, except the damn thing is still attached to my shoulder instead of just gone and can still get damaged. The snap and rustle of leaves and twigs alerted him to the presence of more people, and by the sound of it he was surrounded. More Drachmans appeared, all bearing firearms pointed at him and disregarding their three fallen comrades. Resolutely ignoring the throbbing but cradling his wounded shoulder, Edward stood up and glared at the fifteen men that ringed him. They must really have wanted him badly to have sent this many men just to retrieve him. Their lack of sympathy for the men he had felled, their sheer single-mindedness, was absolutely mindboggling.

One man stepped forwards from the rest, just off to his left. "Hagane no Renkinjutsushi?" he asked in thickly accented Amestrian.

Edward's eyes narrowed. "Nope, wrong person," he blithely answered through pain-clenched teeth, mentally baring a toothy grin at the truth—or at least, half-truth, that he spoke. Technically, the Fullmetal Alchemist no longer existed. Once upon a time he had answered to the name and occasionally, even now, he still started upon hearing his former title in passing though he had freely given up any claim to call himself as such. Now, he was simply a Lieutenant Colonel in the Amestrian military who carried a slew of blades and a standard-issue firearm on his person.

"Yellow hair, yellow eyes," the Drachman spokesman grunted, his rudimentary grasp of the Amestrian language barely coherent. He pointed at Edward accusingly. "You Hagane no Renkinjutsushi."

At times like this he damned his unique ancestry courtesy of his late Xerxian father, Von Hohenheim. At least it wasn't Al being mistaken for me, he thought, which unfortunately happened with a higher frequency than he was happy with. Although Al would have already knocked their lights out with Alchemy. He fleetingly ached for the ability he had given up, but it was swiftly and remorselessly smothered beneath the steadfast elation and relief of his younger brother having his body back. It had taken a while for him to quit his habit of clapping and attempting to fix something with Alchemy. He still slipped every now and then, but sparring in the Academy had quickly cured him of that particular habit during a fight after getting swiftly punched or kicked as he waited for some result from his nonexistent Alchemy skills. He was never as thankful for that training as he was now, for he no longer defaulted to Alchemy to aid him in his battles.

Edward decided to keep his words short and simple due to the language barrier as he calculated his odds of escaping. He pointed to himself, shaking his head. "Not Hagane no Renkinjutsushi," he enunciated clearly. Fifteen to one, sixteen if the sniper counted. They were terrible odds, even more so considering he was injured. He adamantly refused to consider the word "crippled," though he knew that was exactly what he was. Without a working right arm, there was only so much he could do battle-wise. Well, there was always his fallback option, which was to derive as much malicious entertainment out of his opponents by aggravating them as much as possible until they could not see straight. It would be a little more difficult, however, if they could not understand the slew of insults he could potentially spit at them. Verbal barbs he dealt as easily as physical wounds—when he had two working arms. But even if they could understand his witticisms, there was no easy means for him to defend himself from their likely physical retaliation. His decision was depressingly simple, when it came down to it. There was no feasible way he could extricate himself from the situation without badly injuring himself, and so it was the easier—albeit greatly demoralizing and completely infuriating—route to surrender.

"You Hagane no Renkinjutsushi," the Drachman repeated with narrowed eyes. "You come with." The snapped a command in his native tongue, and the men closed in tighter around him like a pack of wolves, ready for any attack. Edward remained perfectly still, eyes boring into the spokesman's as two of them approached close enough to grab him. They roughly twisted both of his arms behind his back, forcing him to his knees as another pressed the muzzle of his gun against his temple. His vision blacked for a moment and he choked back a shriek as agony lanced through his shoulder. He glared at the spokesman with unrestrained loathing as his arms were bound behind him. A swift blow to the head, and Edward knew no more.

They often kept him sedated and so time passed in hazy patches for him after he had been captured, recovering from both his gunshot wounds, broken shoulder, and concussion. A single poignant and terrifying experience blazed brightly in his recollection of those first few muddled weeks of captivity. It was the memory of the time they forced him to perform human transmutation with the aid of a Philosopher's Stone: the aim, to reclaim his lost Alchemy abilities. Edward had no idea how they had managed to procure the Stone. It was not the Stone Dr. Tim Marcoh had created using the people of Ishval, and Edward breathed slightly easier for it. The stone was larger than any he had yet come across, nearly the size of an egg, and he morbidly wondered how many people had died to create it.

They had brought in a middle-aged man, a battered and starved Amestrian too weak to protest his rough treatment. The circle for human transmutation had been drawn in the center of the room they had prepared, and the man had been thrown carelessly onto the center of it. He merely laid there, breath light and shallow, a skeleton wrapped in skin and clearly on the edge of death. They slid the Stone onto Edward's neck, fashioning it into a crude choker-style necklace with the amplifier pressed heavily and uncomfortably against his Adam's apple. Edward had then been forced onto his knees, his hands shackled to the ground. Two men jerked at the chains attached to his hands, and he caught himself with his hands. It was a split second later that he realized his hands brushed the Alchemy circle as the array lit up in that sinister indigo he was horrifyingly familiar with, powered by the Philosopher's Stone that remained in contact with his skin and used him as a conduit.

"NO!" he shrieked, rearing back but unable to, the shackles keeping his palms on the ground. He wondered fearfully what was going to be taken from him this time—would it be Alphonse again, the one person in the world he would do anything for? Or Winry, his beloved childhood friend and future wife, the one he planned to spend the rest of his life with? His right arm, the physical manifestation of his independence and freedom from the guilt-ridden burden he had carried for so long? A breeze from the Alchemical concentration began to build and whip about the room. The Amestrian man moaned and weakly curled in on himself. Edward tried desperately to lift his hands away from the array but could only watch in horror as the energy in the room reached a fever pitch and there was wind and light and screaming, then suddenly it was gone and he stood in an endless sea of white before the Gate. The two stone slabs depicted a relief etched on the surface depicting the seventeenth-century Parcacelsian scholar Robert Fludd's Sephirothic Tree of Life, identical to his own forfeited Gate.

"So, Edward Elric, you have returned," conversationally remarked that multilayered, ageless voice that both was and was not his own. Edward spun away from the Gate to face Truth, Edward's left leg attached to its otherwise featureless white body as it sat comfortably on the floor with a wide, toothy grin. It suddenly frowned, and despite the lack of eyes, Edward had the uncanny feeling he was under intense scrutiny. "You gave up your Gate," it announced, "yet you have made it back, and performed human transmutation in the process."

Eyes wide with barely-contained terror Edward took a step backward, his entire body trembling. "I—I never wanted to come back here…" he stammered between hitched breaths.

"Nonetheless here you stand," Truth said gravely, "having attempted once again to play God."

His hands clenched into fists as he shouted desperately, "I NEVER MEANT TO! I DIDN'T WANT TO! I WAS FORCED!" His thoughts flashed to the Promised Day and Roy Mustang, rendered blind in exchange for knowledge from his forced human transmutation in order to become one of the Homunculi's human sacrifices.

"A toll must be extracted in accordance with the Law of Equivalent Exchange," the being continued inexorably, "regardless of the circumstances which brought you here."

Cold beads of sweat slid down his face at the realization he was going to lose something infinitely precious to him. He collapsed to the ground, hands supporting him as he hunched over. "Please…" he begged, squeezing his eyes shut as the smiling faces of Alphonse and Winry floated before his mind's eye, "please don't take them away…"

Truth stood and padded over to the defeated form on the nonexistent floor. "I will not," it said, and Edward's head snapped up at the pronouncement, eyes wide and confused and wary and optimistic. He felt something disappear from around his neck and quickly clasped a hand to his throat. Looking back at Truth, he saw the crude choker containing the Drachman's Philosopher's Stone dangling from its fingers. "For a toll as exorbitant as this," the being said, "containing the souls of three-hundred fifty-six-thousand five-hundred seventy-two humans—" Edward felt his stomach lurch violently at the number, "—the Equivalent Exchange for such a toll would be your Gate and your leg."

His breath caught in his chest as his mind struggled to fully comprehend Truth's decision. "I don't want my leg back," he said immediately, his voice quivering. "I need the reminder, but… my Gate…" he murmured, eyes staring sightlessly somewhere between his propped hands. "My ability to perform Alchemy…"

"Would be returned," Truth stated solemnly, finishing Edward's thought.

Edward's fingers curled tightly against the imaginary ground. "I can't…" he said heavily. "Not with the lives so many sacrificed…"

The necklace vaporized into nothing and Truth pointed behind itself. "The toll has already been accepted, Edward Elric, and so your Gate has been returned to you," said Truth. Edward peered upwards to find that another Gate had appeared and his eyes widened at seeing his personal Gate once again. "However…" his blood ran cold at the qualifier, "even so, the Law of Equivalent Exchange has not yet been satisfied. Therefore…" The Gate behind him—not his Gate, but Truth's Gate—opened with a rumble, and dark, ethereal hands latched onto him before he had a chance to react, dragging him into the opening. He screamed and struggled, but the hands would not release him. "You will receive knowledge to fulfill the Law of Equivalent Exchange." He was thrown into the time stream, disintegrating and becoming a part of the flow as knowledge incorporated itself into his conscious. He felt as though he was going to explode, the sheer amount of information overwhelming his ability to assimilate.

Just when he felt he could not withstand anymore, he came to on the cold, hard ground, breathing harshly as his mind raced and his heartbeat pounded in his ears. He ached all over and his wrists in particular throbbed. He groaned, blinking dazedly as he turned his head to see what his forced human transmutation had wrought. He froze, eyes wide with horror, before he released a hair-raising keen of despair and rage.

The Amestrian man was simply a pool of blood and gore, his internal organs a steaming, liquefied mess as his ribs and twisted, broken limbs jutted and clawed grotesquely into the air. The Drachmans were muttering uncomfortably amongst themselves at the result, though they flinched violently when Edward lost it. He heaved himself off the ground, catching unawares the two holding his chains, forcing his hard-earned mental discipline into corralling his rampant and raging emotions. Furious that he had been coerced into performing the forbidden ritual, he instinctively clapped his hands and slammed them on the ground, instantly and savagely gratified when the floor erupted in a forest of spikes that impaled the men's feet and lower legs. The energy of the Alchemy sung in his veins, and he reveled in his not-newfound ability as he watched the Drachmans writhe in agony. Where they fell, he retracted the stone spires lest he killed them, and so they all squirmed and wailed on the now barren ground, clutching their bleeding and undoubtedly broken feet.

As he smirked at the men, a small bubble of hope filled him at the thought that he could escape, that he could return to Al and Winry. He let out a small, heartfelt sob in anticipation of his freedom before he felt a bruising sting slam into his side, followed swiftly by another in his leg. Agilely hopping away, he found another contingent of men crowding the doorway, their arrival masked by the cries of their compatriots. His fingers quickly located the projectiles that had hit him and he yanked them out. Two small darts rolled between his fingertips, and he cursed nastily in his head as the world went black again.

Time had no meaning again. His world, where before consisted of bouts of bleary wakefulness, now took on a more nightmarish quality, full of half-lucid lapses of consciousness where the only outlet to the pain he endured was to scream until his throat went raw against a backdrop of murmured Drachman. His head constantly throbbed whenever the sedatives wore off, the mere act of thinking sending fresh shards of glass into his cranium. Little by little his conscious, his soul, the fundamental substance that made him Edward Elric, brother of Alphonse and reborn Fullmetal Alchemist, slid away into the dark recesses of his mind. And each time he awoke, it became harder and harder to recall himself and remember who he was.

Until one day Edward, firstborn child of Amestrian Trisha Elric, never returned and Eduard, adopted youth of Drachman Brigadier General Alexei Vasiliev, remained.

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi – Fullmetal Alchemist, although technically "Hagane" translates to "Steel"

Author's Note: All right, so I made this into a twoshot to give a bit (a lot!) of background information on what happened to Edward. Not pretty, not pretty at all. I do feel rather badly for torturing poor Ed like that. I hope you enjoyed it.

Completed: 23.11.2013