A Heart Made Fullmetal

That pisses her off. She didn’t think she’d stoop so low to hit a kid, but here they are. The Doppelganger really doesn’t care. She IS scared. She’s confused and there’s no way in hell she’d let them take her away. THIS is her place, her world, she belongs here. The Doppelganger is breathing heavy, but she looks to still have enough energy to keep fighting. She’s not going down.

Deborah looks at Edward, eyebrows furrowed. “There’s no talking to her.” She knows herself that much. “She’s not going to listen. We’ll have to do this by force.” Deborah reaches out, placing a knuckle against the kid’s cheek just a light tap to wipe off a smudge of blood, “C’mon. She’s bound to get tired if she’s up against two of us. If you’re able to encase her in….We may have a chance in sealing her away.” She won’t use her gun. It’s placed back in its holster and she steps forward, knuckles cracking as she does so, “Alright. If you want a fight, we’ll give it to ya. I can beat the living shit out of you no problem.” 

Her words makes the Doppelganger scoff. This is more like it. And here she comes again, ready to strike and Deborah’s ready to parry. 

“Right,” Ed nods. She’d know her own doppelganger best, right? If there’s no talking to her, he can handle a fight. Hell, that’s what he’s used to! So he wastes no time jumping back into the fray.

He only has a few more uses of alchemy left, so he has to time his barriers carefully-- giving her less space to move around is a good way to capture her... but also a good way to make her feel cornered. And Ed knows how dangerous someone can be when they’re backed into a corner.

Luz pressed her lips together tightly, pointedly not meeting Ed’s gaze, knowing if she did she’d end up caving without any resistance. She dug through her locker, keeping her hands and eyes busy. “Ed, I’m not gonna do your homework for you! That’s cheating! Eda would be so mad if I did that!” That was a total lie, and Luz knew it, but it sounded like a normal excuse about a normal parent.

And then Ed brought up Amity, and Luz stood up straighter, her head whipping to finally look at him. As soon as she realized how she’d reacted, her cheeks flushed.

She stared at him, lips in a tight line again… before she sighed, shoulders slumping. “Fine. I’ll help you. I’m not doing it for you, but I’ll at least give you a hand. But you can’t be weird if she’s there!”

“You don’t have to do it for me! Just help me figure out what I’m doing, like brainstorming and stuff. I don’t get these art assignments at all.” He hangs his head. Math and science are easy-- there’s an answer the assignment is looking for, he just needs to find it. When it comes to art, there’s nothing to find.

“Thanks, Luz, I owe you big time!” He offers a hand to help carry her books as they walk. “And don’t worry, I’ll play it totally cool. When have I ever been weird?” He’s met Amity in passing, but doesn’t know her too well-- they’ve been in a few honors classes together.

“Hey, maybe you could go ask her for help finding art books or something? It would be a good way to get to talk to her for a little. It’ll be easy!”

It’s a good thing he’s quick on his feet getting back up, because that stomp would’ve been extremely painful to his face. She’s not superhuman strength, but there is an imprint in the dirt from the force she would’ve successfully delivered should he had stayed down on the ground long enough.

Shit.

She was just about to deliver a kick again while he transmuted those obstacles. Thank goodness she draws her kick back just in time to avoid smashing the back of her foot against something possibly hard. She jumps back with a grunt. 

“Like HELL you believe I’m gonna take that kind of answer?” THERE’S no way. Of course she doesn’t believe him. She won’t die. She’s moving quick, looking for any kind of openings to deliver a flurry of punches and kicks. 

And Luckily for Edward, the noises DOES help track them down. The Real Deborah’s got her pistol ready. Just in case it’s needed. Her doppelganger isn’t going to stop unless reasoned enough. Deborah knows that better than anyone. 

Just when the doppelganger is about to throw another punch Edward’s way, Deborah fires her pistol near the doppelganger’s feet. 

“FUCK you’re already here?” She scowls angrily. The doppelganger steps back when Deborah approaches Ed, “Thanks for holding her off. Let’s get outta here.” 

He’s able to fend her off for the most part-- what Edward lacks in brute strength he makes up for in speed. He never really strikes back, even after she catches him with a few well-aimed punches. The last thing he wants to do is hurt her when she’s already scared and angry.

“I can’t tell you what to believe,” he answers as he dodges. “But trying to figure something out is a hell of a lot better than doing nothing! That’s what the version of you I know told me once-- she prefers taking action to sitting around waiting for something to happen!”

The pistol shot startles him, too, but he knows enough to jump back out of the way of the punch, standing his ground by the real Deborah’s side.

“Bullshit.” of course she doesn’t believe him. Not knowing what’s on the other side gives her more reason to not just follow willy nilly. OKAY, yes, they said that she’d both die if the counterpart didn’t go, but that could be a lie, too! 

She doesn’t like this. Feeling cornered. 

“Best for everyone or best for YOU guys?” 

And here she comes. She’ll attack with a right hook, then a left one. The attacks are then followed by another punch and then a low kick. If she can get him down she won’t have to worry about anything else. It’ll take a moment for that other woman to show up. She needs to get him down QUICK.

“Best for everyone, dammit!” He parries as best he can, cursing not being able to transmute his automail yet-- luckily the repairs that Deborah did are holding up under pressure. His dodges are quick, but the low kick gets him-- most opponents don’t think to do that due to his size, so he loses his footing, cursing as he goes down.

Quickly hopping to his feet, he claps his hands together and presses them to the ground, transmuting a few large obstacles to try to slow her down, and block off a few exits. He doesn’t have much alchemy, but she doesn’t know that, right...? He can always bluff to make it seem like he can do more later.

“I’m not gonna bullshit you and pretend like I know what’s gonna happen!” Another clap, another barrier. “But you’ll both die if we don’t do something and fast! Is that what you want?” Just gotta stall until Deborah can get here-- hopefully all the noise they’re making will help her find them...

“Please Luz, I’m begging you here.” Ed leans against his locker, trying to give his friend his best pleading gaze. “I can't afford to fail this art assignment, you’re my only hope.” While his grades are pretty good across the board, his artistic abilities are notoriously bad-- his sense of style is almost nonexistent. He’ll do her math homework for the rest of the year if that’s what it takes, but he’s not about to lose his average over some open-ended creative project.

Ed was given the side-eye for his language, but nothing more for that. Instead, he turned to the other student.

“You’re done here. Go back to the front office–no, Edward, you stay.”

The kid started to sneer until he met the teacher’s gaze–something about it must have startled him back out of the room. … When he was gone, he turned back to the other, looking… a little less intimidating, and a little more exasperated.

“I suppose that depends on if Alphonse is staying late today. If he is, you’re stuck here until he comes to get you to go home together.”

While he never taught the eldest Elric brother, Alphonse was one of the sweetest students he’d had in a class. What he lacked in prodigy like his brother, he made up for in earnest hard work. But…

“And be honest with me. Unless you enjoy the extra punitive hours of community service.”

As the other kid leaves, Ed can’t help but give him a glare-- as if to say ‘yeah, you better run. If we hadn’t been interrupted you would have been finished.’ But he straightens up when Kratos looks back at him, trying to brush it off.

He shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, not meeting the teacher’s eyes. Usually he was sent straight to detention without another word, he’s not used to an authority figure questioning him on his actions.

“...Al’s probably staying,” he admits. It’s not like he’d ever let his brother walk home alone, but he’d at least love to get out of another detention. Unlike Al, who’s never had disciplinary action in his life, Ed has a long and varied permanent record.

“Of course I don’t enjoy it. But guys like that are all the same, they never shut up until you make ‘em.” Kratos had told him to be honest, and he’s not going to sugercoat things to try to get out of trouble. That’s never been his style-- saying exactly what’s on his mind is how he often ends up in trouble.

Subversion AU Info:

Local 10th grader with a problem with authority

He’s in the science club, and his grades are incredible... yet somehow he still ends up in detention a lot.

Argues with teachers, and has a record for the longest time spent derailing class.

Super protective of his little brother ever since his dad walked out on them and his mom died.

Lost an arm and a leg in an accident trying to protect Alphonse-- and due to having engineering/robotics friends, he has pretty advanced prosthetics (maybe not on automail level, but,).

Trouble finds him whether he likes it or not. Frequently gets in fights

Luz still wasn’t sure what to make of the mist, herself. And her light glyph spell seemed to be lasting a lot longer than it normally did here in Spirale, which was really weirding her out, but she tried her best not to worry about it and just let it happen.

“Oh, uh, no, it’s okay! Not everyone’s familiar with magic, so it’s cool. Here, I’ll start a new one.”

She closed her hands around the floating orb of light, extinguishing it without a trace. Then, she plucked her notepad and pencil from her pocket, quickly scribbling a new glyph on a blank page. She tapped the sketch with her finger, and the paper crumpled into itself, forming into a brand new orb of light.

“Ta-daaa!” She turned to look at the boy with a small smile. “If nothing else, it’s just a little bit of comfort for me while things are being weird again.”

She calls it ‘magic’, but with the circle and the array inside, it almost looked familiar to Ed. Like alchemy. In the brief moment after she drew it, he noted that the glyphs weren’t any type of array he recognized, but it was fascinating to see something that looked so much like what he’s used to produce something as cool as that.

“Woah, that’s awesome! You produced light outta nowhere!”

Part of him wants to grill her for all the details on how it’s done, and why the paper crumbles like that, and where the light comes from... but he reigns in his excitement for now. They are still in a dangerous part of the mist, maybe now’s not the time for a science lesson.

“Again...?” He puts his hands in his pockets, glancing at her. “You make it sound like weird stuff happens all the time.” He’s heard rumors, but this is his first big citywide upset. other than the mask thing.

Barry looks over the entity in front of him without the context to be appropriately horrified, though Edward’s reaction sets him on edge. A human life…? For all the connections he can see between alchemy and transmutation magic, this does seem like a transmutation gone very wrong.

“What happened here?” Barry asks in a low voice. “Who… is this?”

He shifts to be in front of Ed, so this poor kid doesn’t have to stand with the object of all that fear right at his feet. He kneels and very slowly extends a hand, to see if this creature is open to being pet, or if it’s a sort of mimic situation that’s going to try and bite his hand off.

“It’s okay. We can play. What’s your favorite game?”

The creature in front of him blinks, then presses her nose against Barry’s hand, gently headbutting him for attention.

‘Play... we were going to play tag outside.’ She speaks slowly, like it’s hard to find the words. ‘Daddy said...’

“Her name is Nina Tucker,” Ed says, closing his eyes. His fists are clenched in rage, but he doesn’t move. “She... what you’re seeing is a chimera,” his voice is flat, like this is a story he’s had to tell hundreds of times before. “Her father was a bioalchemist at risk of losing his state funding. When he got desperate...” When his eyes open, he stares past Nina to the door, where he remembers Tucker standing so clearly before.

“The sick bastard experimented on an innocent little girl so he wouldn’t lose his certification. His own daughter...!” That’s the part that gets Ed’s voice to crack, and he’s suddenly glad Barry isn’t looking at him enough to notice that he’s started to cry.

“Hey, how are you doing that light thing?” Ed puts his hands in his pockets as he walks up beside this girl. The light definitely makes it easier to see in the mist, but he's never seen anything quite like it. It doesn’t look like fire, at least not any that he’s ever seen-- hopefully she doesn’t mind his curiosity.

“Do you remember when I was explaining alchemy to you... I said it was forbidden to mess with human lives?” Ed’s hands tremble as he stands by Barry’s side, unable to tear his eyes away from the scene in front of him.

“This is why.”

The dog-like chimera approaches them slowly, one foot in front of the other, and Ed tenses as he tries not to back away from her. He’s never been able to forget this moment as long as he’s lived. The lab in front of them is dark, and Ed stands completely still as Nina stops in front of them.

‘Hey, Fullmetal Pipsqueak, that a friend of yours?’ Ed puts his hands in his pockets, trying very hard to ignore the incessant chattering of his reluctant traveling companion.

“No,” Ed says flatly, glancing at Vaati apologetically. “I barely know him.”

‘I just thought, y’know, given that you two are about the same height?’ Envy spins on their heel to approach Vaati and Ezlo, moving their hands to compare heights. ‘Maybe you two knew each other. He’s actually a little taller than you!’

“Shut up!” Ed groans, but shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. His alchemy has been coming and going, so he’s not about to try to fight them off.

“This place...?” Ed stumbles back against the wall, a lump in his throat as he stares at the lab in front of him. Last he remembered, he was wandering around in the mist, and now he’s here. Shou Tucker lay unconscious by the door, and it’s a good thing, too, or else Ed would have had to fight the urge to beat him to hell and back.

Worst of all, he can still hear the cries of the creature on the floor-- not human anymore by a longshot, and an image Ed has never been able to burn from his mind.