Beta: TaintedLetter
Warning: Standard FMA warnings apply.
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Elizabeth smiled in satisfaction as she watched her test subject quiver from the end of her experiment.
'A success,' Elizabeth cheerfully concluded. 'With this... yes. I'm ready.'
Stepping down from her stool, Elizabeth moved away from her autopsy table. She carefully pulled off her blood-soaked apron, hanging it on the hook as she peeled off her gloves and mask. She let her hair free from the tight bun she had to wear during the experiment and opened her laboratory door.
To her delightful surprise she found Selim on the other side, about to knock. She beamed. "Selim! Guess what?"
"What?" he asked her, amused by her bubbly enthusiasm.
"I'm ready to reverse Nina," Elizabeth declared, gesturing toward the snake lady she had split apart, put back together, and pulled apart again, and again, and again, and again, and again—
"Congratulations, Ellie," Selim praised her, his dark eyes flickering over to the human strapped to the table. "Where's the snake?"
Elizabeth nodded toward the back where she had set up a terrarium for the snake. "She's enjoying retirement."
"Will the human get to retire?" Selim asked her.
Elizabeth tapped her cheek. She didn't want to be so merciful with that vile woman who forced herself inside of Alphonse. What that snake did to her poor friend was violating. Even if Alphonse insisted he was fine, Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to forgive the act.
So she suggested, "Would you like her?"
Selim narrowed his gaze as he reassessed the woman. "She doesn't look like she'd last very long in a hunt."
Elizabeth made an agreeing noise to such. "I don't have any experiments I can use her in, though. The only new creation I have that requires a live subject is the project I'm working on for Papa."
"How far along in that are you, by the way?" Selim inquired.
"I'm ready for first phase testing," Elizabeth admitted, a slight frown on her face. "Papa said I would have to test it out at Fort Briggs, though. I wish you could come with me."
Selim sighed at that. "I do, too. Playing the role of a student is dreadfully dull."
Elizabeth ran her fingers through her hair, her brow furrowing in a brief spike of anxiety. She was reluctant to admit to Papa she was ready for testing since Mustang could make his move at any point. She knew Papa and Selim didn't view Mustang as a threat—and warned Elizabeth not to take him out so soon—but Elizabeth couldn't help but worry. She didn't want to leave their side until she was certain Mustang was eliminated.
Elizabeth recalled something, though, and turned back around into her lab to grab a small black box. She held it out to Selim. "Here, odorless paralysis gas."
"Thank you," Selim accepted the box. "For Mustang's men, I take it?"
"It'll only target the cardiovascular system, so you'll be immune," Elizabeth explained. "Please keep at least one with you."
"You worry too much," Selim insisted, but nonetheless he took out one of the bombs and pocketed it. "Besides, today is a good day, isn't it? I'll get Mother and Nina. I'm sure you'll want to tell the Elrics about this accomplishment."
Elizabeth nodded, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Yes... but I still need to decide on what to do with that awful lady."
"Turn her into a meat pie," Selim suggested dismissively with a shrug.
'A pie, huh?'
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Finding Edward and Alphonse took a touch longer than Elizabeth had originally anticipated. They weren't at their hotel rooms, and they didn't leave any notes or messages behind to say where they were going. Elizabeth checked Central Command afterward to see if they stopped by, but no. Her next guess was the hospital—maybe they were visiting Maes, or Mustang and Havoc?—and it panned out in her favor.
She checked by Maes' room first, finding it oddly empty for the first time in a while. A quick glance at his charts showed promise, though. She was certain he would awaken any day now.
Next came Mustang's room—he was sharing it with Havoc—and lo and behold she found Edward and Alphonse inside.
(And of course Hawkeye was there. Mustang's right hand woman was never far behind him.)
Elizabeth opened the door to the hospital room, poking her head inside and smiling when she found her friends. "Edward, Alphonse!"
"Lizzie?" Edward questioned in surprise. "Why are you visiting the colonel?"
"I'm not. I was looking for you two. I'm going to fix Nina today," Elizabeth proudly declared, stepping fully into the room.
There was a moment of stunned silence from everyone in the room and then—
"REALLY?!" came Edward's elated shout, rushing forward and picking her up to hug her. "Lizzie, that's amazing!"
"You're really going to fix her today? Really, really?" Alphonse excitedly asked, his armor clanking together as he practically hopped in place with glee. "You've only been on this project for a few months!"
"Tucker's notes were very well detailed, and I already have a good background in human anatomy and biology," Elizabeth dismissively explained. "Both you and Edward could easily do this if you had the same notes."
That much she was certain of. While she wasn't going to dismiss the fact that she was a genius, so were Edward and Alphonse. She was—and always would be—the firm believer that if they had spent all their knowledge and time in creating a new human body for Alphonse instead of chasing the philosopher stone they would be done by this point.
After all, the boys literally read and comprehended Elizabeth's notes on the nervous system, and cardiovascular system within months.
It took average doctors years to do that much. Yet these two boys devoured every knowledge Elizabeth had and surprised her with new ideas or suggestions. They connected dots Elizabeth had even noticed before.
She was smart, most certainly, but these two felt like being on a whole other level.
What a waste they chased after a myth instead of putting in the research hours.
If they had done research with Elizabeth, she bet they would have been able to fix Nina within a week.
"You overestimate us," Edward insisted, giving Elizabeth his sunny grin. "How are you going to do it?"
"It's a matter of rearranging what's there," Elizabeth plainly stated. "The only tricky part is the nervous system. Having to, ah, in layman's terms, reattach nerves and create pathways was difficult. I practiced on cadavers often enough that I feel comfortable doing so."
'And a live specimen, too, of course.'
Not that Elizabeth would admit that to the Elric brothers.
"That's truly remarkable," Hawkeye praised.
"No kidding. Your father must be proud," Mustang observed. Oddly, he stumbled over the word father, as if he didn't want to say it.
Elizabeth's fingers reflexively twitched, her instincts telling her that Mustang knew.
'How, though?'
He had no reason to suspect Papa was involved with the homunculi. Edward and Alphonse certainly didn't have evidence, or clues, to point toward that. In fact, Papa left them with the impression that Papa knew about the homunculi but was working against the homunculi. Mustang should not have any information to contradict that belief.
'No, no. It makes no sense. He shouldn't know. He could have simply stuttered due to fatigue.'
That was logical. Certainly more believable than Mustang magically figuring it out overnight.
Speaking of overnight—
"While I'm here, would you two mind if I looked at your charts?" Elizabeth politely inquired. "I do consider you my patients, after all."
'Exactly how long will you be vulnerable and out of commission?'
Mustang gestured toward the clipboard kept at the end of his bed. "Have at it."
Elizabeth approached Mustang's charts first, unsurprised to find he was doing considerably well. The skin would be weak for a couple weeks, and he would undoubtedly be sore for months, but he should make a decent recovery within a month.
Certainly enough to still pose a viable threat.
'Damn,' Elizabeth thought.
Elizabeth commented, "You're doing well. You should have a full recovery in a couple months. As long as you give the skin time to heal, you shouldn't have to worry about much."
"Thanks, doctor," Mustang said.
Elizabeth moved on to Havoc's charts next. She finished the first cursory exam but then Havoc spoke up.
"I can't feel my legs... the doctors say the nerves have been severed," Havoc admitted.
Technically no.
'That'll make it easier to remove you as a threat,' Elizabeth thought, pleased with Lust's work.
"Oh—Lizzie, didn't you say that you could reattach nerves?" Edward asked, turning toward her with wide eyes.
'Shit.'
"Yes," Elizabeth admitted, regretting her boastful statement earlier. She slowly flipped through Havoc's clipboard to reread what the doctors had already tested.
'Hm.'
It seems that the damage was a bit more than a cut nerve or two. Such things could be fixed in surgery, after all. There were some severing, to be certain, but according to the EMG and MRI there was some traumatic damage to the surrounding synapses.
Synapses could not presently be repaired in surgery.
How ironically fortunate for this man that Elizabeth knew how to rebuild such.
'Ugh. It would make no sense if I could literally rebuild Nina's entire nervous system but not fix this man,' Elizabeth thought with disdain, trying to think of a way to get out of fixing a potential enemy.
But, no. There wasn't an easy way out.
'I can always poison his food,' Elizabeth reasoned out. 'And it wouldn't hurt to get a touch more practice in before I move on to Nina.'
Elizabeth finished reading through the medical charts, taking note of his basic information. Her gaze narrowed when she read that he was a smoker.
"If you want me to do this, you have to quit smoking," Elizbath blatantly cut in. "I'm reconnecting a lot of sensitive areas, and should any blood flow be constricted due to your habit it'll—the parts below your waist will—um—you'll, um—it'll, um..."
Elizabeth struggled to find the appropriate way to say: your penis might literally rot off in front of a room of guests.
She settled on wiggling her index finger, a blush over her face as she said, "You might lose this."
Havoc blinked slowly at that. "My fingers?"
"Oh, sorry," she apologized, and switched to wiggling her pinkie.
Mustang got it first and he turned his head to cough. Havoc got it a second after his colonel's reaction, his face red, "No!"
"Yes," she muttered, red in the face from how Edward and Mustang started laughing. "I'm not reattaching that if it does, so you better quit cold turkey."
"Oh no," Havoc moaned, burying his face in his hands. "Oh noooo. Okay. Okay. I'll quit. I promise!"
"Lucky for you I brought chalk. I'll fix you up quick then I'm off to save Nina," Elizabeth said, starting to draw on the hospital room floor. "Oh, this'll probably hurt a lot, so brace yourself."
Once she was done drawing the alchemic circle—and Edward and Alphonse excitedly questioned her about it—she triple examined the results from the EMG and MRI to make sure she knew which nerves had to be reconnected.
The human body has 31 pairs of spinal nerves. Nerves carry signals from one junction (synapses) to another through neurons across the gap of chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Now, neurotransmitters weren't things that could be easily severed or destroyed—it'd be like trying to slice through acid. But disrupting synapses would result in the signal being interrupted during transmission.
Essentially, Lust had damaged several synapses that were used to convey signals to the lower half of the body.
The present human body could not regrow or heal these synapses on their own.
With the use of alchemy, though?
Elizabeth could turn the damaged synapses into neurotransmitters, and neurotransmitters into healthy synapses.
The neurotransmitters had such a variety of compound variation, after all. Amino acids were made up of glutamate, aspartate, D-serine, y-aminobutyric acid, and glycine. Gasotransmitters were made up of nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide. Monoamines were made up of dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, histamine, and serotonin...
Plenty of material to work with.
Elizabeth felt a keen thrill of excitement at what she got to do next. Enemy or not, Elizabeth was a scientist above all else and being able to try something new and exciting was... well, invigorating.
Her love of biology and chemistry was hard to ignore and her experiments and research done into undoing what happened to Nina lead her to such thrilling science.
Elizabeth honestly wanted to try her hand at creating a plant-human hybrid.
'Ooo, I'm getting goosebumps!'
But one thing at a time! She still had a lot of projects she had to finish before she could tackle that tantalizing prospect.
"Lay Havoc down on the circle," Elizabeth instructed Alphonse and Edward. Thanks to Alphonse's size he was easily able to pick Havoc up and do exactly that. "Good. Havoc, do you need something to bite down on?"
"Exactly how badly will this hurt?"
"I'm literally tearing apart your nerves and reassembling them," Elizabeth plainly warned him. "The pain will be excruciating."
"Here," Hawkeye said, handing Havoc a towel that was at his bedside. Havoc bit down into it, and looked determinedly at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth clapped her hands down onto the hospital floor. The trademark alchemic blue sparks circled around Havoc before the soldier cried out in pain and convulsed. Lucky for him Lust had only severed half a dozen nerve clusters, so it barely took Elizabeth a minute to fix up.
Once done, she wiped her hands of the chalk and stood up. "There. Follow the standard physical rehabilitation program for a back injury and you'll be fine."
Havoc stared at her in disbelief for a moment before he raised his legs. He gaped. "You—you really did it! I can move—I can feel them!"
Elizabeth brushed off the chalk that had clung onto her. "Of course I did. Come along now, Edward, Alphonse. We have a little girl to save."
Elizabeth let out a startled shout of surprise when Alphonse picked her up and placed her on his shoulders. "Yep! Let's go."
"Wait—" Havoc tried to say, but the three children were already gone.
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Mumma had already set up a lovely spot in the garden for Elizabeth to work on Nina. Given the magnitude of this particular transmutation, a rebound would have explosive effects. To be safe, the transmutation would have to occur outside.
While Mumma chatted politely with Edward and Alphonse, Elizabeth set about making her massive transmutation circle. It took her nearly half an hour of focused drawing—nothing could be out of place—before she was ready to move Nina in the middle.
Then it began.
One hour.
It took all of one hour of intense concentration on Elizabeth's part, and unimaginable pain on Nina and her dog's part, but...
At the end of that hour, in a quivering puddle of whimpers, laid a small little girl and her big fluffy white dog.
Elizabeth shakily pulled back her arms, the muscles aching from being leaned on for so long, and having to maintain a stiff posture. Elizabeth sat back in a huff, pulling out a handkerchief to dab at the sweat over her brow.
There were gasps of amazement from her onlookers. Elizabeth hadn't noticed she had gathered a rather impressive crowd of military and scientists. It wasn't terribly surprising, given how unique the situation was. How many could say they witnessed the reversal of a chimaera transformation?
Before anything else could be done, Elizabeth pulled herself up and hobbled—her legs had fallen asleep, so she had to walk in pins and needles—over to Nina and her dog. Nina herself was shakily sitting up, her big brown eyes looking around in absent minded confusion.
While Elizabeth had been able to reconstruct Nina's human brain, she wasn't confident she would be able to retain any of Nina's memories. She didn't know how Nina's brain looked before, how her dendrites were formed, but she knew how the average child's brain looked. She put the pieces together, but she wasn't confident she put them in the correct order.
The result would be a significant loss of memory for her and the dog. Not just familiar memories, but memories of how to speak, or even walk.
But that seemed like such a small price to pay for being human again, so Elizabeth accepted the loss on Nina's behalf and pushed forward.
She and the dog were young and could easily be retrained. She doubted the girl would want to keep any memories of her awful father anyhow.
"Nina," Elizabeth said gently, carefully touching Nina's shoulder and drawing the girl's attention to her.
When she touched her, she realized the girl must have been freezing. Elizabeth didn't transmute clothes alongside her, after all.
Elizabeth glanced up to find Edward and Alphonse staring at her in amazement—she assumed the expression on Alphonse's part—and asked them, "Would you two mind carrying Nina inside and getting her some clothes?"
"I'll help," Mumma said quickly, surprising Elizabeth with her appearance. She didn't think Mumma would have the stomach to watch such a thing for so long. She Elizabeth also noticed that Papa and Selim had joined the crowd to observe.
"Yeah," Edward agreed, hurrying forward to delicately pick up the startled Nina. She didn't struggle, only staring up at Edward with a vapid expression.
No memories of fear, no reason to be afraid, then? Elizabeth surmised.
Elizabeth shakily stepped away for Alphonse to pick up the groggy dog. Before she could lose her balance, Papa had crossed the distance between the two of them and picked her up.
"Well done," Papa praised her. "A truly remarkable feat in alchemy."
"Thank you, Papa," Elizabeth gracefully (as much as she could manage at least) accepted.
"I think it would be best if Ellie got some rest now," Selim softly pointed out.
Elizabeth made an agreeing noise at that. "If you don't mind, Papa. I'll submit my notes to you later."
"Very well," Papa agreed.
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Elizabeth ended up taking a nap for a few hours, and during that time Mumma bathed, clothed, and fed Nina and her dog. As it would turn out, both Nina and her dog were exponentially exhausted from the transmutation and passed out shortly after being fed. Both were tucked into the guest room.
Elizabeth assumed they would sleep for at least a day. Their bodies had been put through some significant trauma and would need time to heal. Not even counting the lingering effects of psychological trauma that Elizabeth couldn't even begin to guess.
Selim woke her up an hour before dinner, knowing she would need to eat.
"What are your plans for the two of them now?" Selim casually asked her as she rubbed the gunk from her eyes.
"Hm? Oh, um... well, I'll need to study both of them for at least one year. If all falls within the expected margin, I think I could start my own version of a chimaera," Elizabeth yawned.
"A year?" Selim inquired.
"Of course. I have to see if she or the dog reject their bodies," Elizabeth said firmly. "The snake, too."
"Hmm." Selim tapped his chin. "That might be an issue... Elizabeth, would you object if Nina and her dog were sent elsewhere for a month or so?"
"Depends," Elizabeth said slowly, frowning at the question.
"Things are going to get hectic here," Selim explained. "If you want your subjects to survive, they'll have to be moved elsewhere."
"Elsewhere? But I need to—I need someone competent to study them," Elizabeth relcutantly argued. She didn't like arguing with Selim, but this was science.
"Would you trust Lust to do so?" Selim asked her, his lips twitching in amusement when he noticed her reluctance.
Elizabeth hesitated.
Lust was Selim's sister, and Grandpapa's daughter. She was an esteemed scientist, and a capable woman. Elizabeth had no reason to distrust Lust's competence, and if Selim truly believed things would get too busy here—
"Yes," Elizabeth admitted. "I'll write up a report for Lust. You don't think she'll mind?"
At that, a sour look flickered over Selim's face. "I doubt it. She's fond of you."
Heat rushed up to Elizabeth's face. She was pleasantly surprised by that revelation, and being liked by Selim's family was... sincerely wonderful. She couldn't stop the smile that bloomed over her face. "Your sister likes me?"
"Don't look so happy," Selim muttered.
"Sorry," Elizabeth reflexively apologized. "But... I mean being liked by your family is... you know."
"And who do you like the most?"
"You, of course," Elizbaeth admitted easily.
Selim stared intently at her for a few seconds before he reached over and flicked her nose. "Go clean up your lab rat before she starts to stink."
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Bonus:
"Ahh, what a lovely smell," Mumma praised, sniffing the fragrant kitchen. "So sweet! What are you making now, Elizabeth?"
Elizabeth smiled lovingly at her adopted mother. "Meat pies."
"Plenty to share?" Mumma asked kindly.
"Actually, I was going to hand them out at Central Command," Elizabeth answered with a hum, pulling out here latest batch of pies.
"My! How kind of you."
Elizabeth giggled at that.
(óヮò)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
There's more to the nervous system than what I blurbed here, but no one wants to read a textbook so I keep it short. :)
Answer: I am an evil botanist! I shall create plants that will help me rule the world, muahaha! My loyal henchman shall be Lilly!
Question: What's your phone background and screensaver? To those without a phone, what would you want it to be?
Reviews are love!