The Heist

AN: Unfortunately, if you're looking for a brand new chapter, this isn't one. I'm so sorry! But I needed to reorganize this story; I said before that I was working pretty much on a half-baked premise. However, I've decided to flesh it out into a complete story. In order for me to get to where I want to go, I edited some stuff from the previous chapters.

The main change is that I broke the chapters up into smaller ones, because I would never be able to keep up with those 20-paged chapters for the entirety of the story. And I like having uniform length chapters.

Contents of chapter 3:

• Fu is brought to the Yao house (previously in Ch2)
• new scene with Lan Fan and Fu going over their options
• new scene with Edward and Winry and the issues with Auto-Mail
• school scene (previously in Ch2)

When they arrived at his house, his mother had him settle Lan Fan and her grandfather in two of the guest chambers on the second floor. Theirs were on the third, but it was directly accessible through the hallway adjacent the stairs.

"If you need anything," Ling said, pointing to the doors visible just beyond the railing. "Mom and I are close by. You might need a bomb to wake Ma up, but she can take care of things. I mean..." He trailed off quietly, only realizing that a bomb joke may not be an appropriate one considering their past. Sometimes he wondered why he had to be cursed with verbal diarrhea.

She waved him off, nonchalant, as she closed the door to her grandfather's room. She began to head for her own, but stopped in the middle of the hallway to rummage through her bag.

"I almost forgot," she said, and from it she took out a tightly-knitted, black tuque. "I don't know if you want it back, but I did find it more useful as a hat."

Ling took it, realizing immediately what it was. Though the lower part that should have covered the face was cut out, there were still the two obvious red lines that trisected what once had been his mask.

"You kept it?"

She shrugged, but let a small smile slip through. "It was free. It's better than having to buy one."

He chuckled, and stretched it down over her head. "Keep it. I kinda grew out of its style." He gave her a pat on the head, which she swatted away. It only made him laugh harder. "Good night, Lan Fan," he said, before taking the stairs two steps at a time.

"Oh, Ling?" He turned back to see Lan Fan playing with her left sleeve. Nervous habit, it seemed. He wondered if she used to wring her hands together when she still had two.

"Look, this might be a little tough for Grandpa," she began. "He's got more than his fair share of... issues with your father, and even if we're working towards bringing him down, it's still hard for Grandpa to swallow. It's just..."

"I understand," Ling said. And he really did. He had dealt with five cases of vandalism and three of slander before he realized that people seemed to think that getting to him would mean getting to his father. There had also been two 'accidents' perpetrated by several siblings, but those hadn't been an indirect message for their dad. As a legitimate child (not all of his siblings were), he had the opportunity to inherit XYZ Ltd. should something happen to their father. He wasn't the first in line, of course, but for some reason, 'the lesser the better' seemed to be a mantra many of his siblings went with.

"He's not going to be very fond of you," she added. "That's all I'm saying."

"How much does he know?"

"Most of everything. I can't exactly keep a lot of things from my grandfather. Even when I try, he finds out eventually."

Ling chuckled. "Parents and guardians, how dare they, right? Don't worry. Not a lot of people are fond of me anyway. I'm used to it." He made a point of heaving an exaggerated sigh.

Lan Fan's smile broadened a bit.

"Let me know if you need anything," he reminded her one final time, before going up to bed.

-o-

Lan Fan felt the unfamiliarity of the mattress and bed sheets before her eyes even opened. For a moment, she panicked, wondering if yet again she had found herself unwillingly hoisted to a bed not her own. But the events of the previous day came flashing back, and she sighed in quiet relief, urging other memories to flee from her mind.

The warm blankets and the silver hue of the moonlight streaming through the curtains made her feel cheery, but she wished she had brought her ratty old blanket with her. She'd left it on the assumption that blankets would be provided by her employer and that she needn't bring unnecessary things, but now she found herself wanting a touch of something more personal. Damn, she remembered to bring Ling's old mask, but she neglected her own blanket.

She sighed, pushing herself out of bed. It had never been easy for her to adjust to sleeping to a new bed. Her feet were surprised to be greeted by a warm spread of soft carpet, rather than the cold hard touch of a wooden floor. She went to the window, pulled aside the curtains and stared at the street bordering Ling's house. The wreckage from their encounter with Izumi earlier were now gone, and there remained nothing to prove that the madwoman had ever attacked them.

What strange people she met today. She woke up wondering how she would be able to afford another month's worth of roof over her head, food, and not to mention the Red Stone. And now food and shelter were basically free. She knew that despite how she might complain about these people, she was willing to deal with worse to try and save her neck as well as her grandfather's.

She closed the curtains and padded out to the hallway, heading for her grandfather's room. She saw him slumbering peacefully, and relaxed a little. He didn't take to moving homes very well. It took a while for him to adjust to their most recent apartment. This place was far more opulent than any they had ever owned, so perhaps the high quality bed and sheets were able to pacify his symptoms well.

"I'm not sleeping," his gruff voice crossed the room to where she was standing idly by the doorway. She snickered. She should have known.

Lan Fan entered the room, closing the door behind her, and sat at the foot of the bed. For a while she was silent. She knew in her head the kinds of things her grandfather would be thinking, the kind of questions he'd want to ask her about her decision to take this job. But he was never one to speak so carelessly, not one to waste words on things he couldn't change. Right now, the most important thing to him was what she was going to do.

"I'm hoping," she began, looking over to Fu who stared back at her with reddish, glassy eyes. "To find more about the stones." Where were they from? How were they created? Was there any other way to get them? Because if Lan Fan was to be honest with herself, the last few months she had half expected to see an empty mailbox, her monthly deposit taken, but no Red Stone in return. Life was fickle, and she didn't know how she could blame anyone else but herself. She had been too greedy once.

"That boy doesn't look like he knows what he's doing. His eyes are too shifty, and I don't trust him," Fu muttered. "I think he just wants to sleep with you."

Lan Fan gasped, turning to him with shocked eyes. "Grandpa!"

"What? Don't think me a prude, Lan Fan, not at my age. I fathered six children, may I remind you. One of them was your father."

Lan Fan chuckled, not knowing else how to react to this strange redirection of their conversation. "Well, at least all of them had the same mother," she said.

Fu gave her a small, sly smile. "I was too poor to afford anything more than monogamy."

"Grandpa!" she covered her face with her hands. But she knew as much as anyone else who had known her fraternal grandmother how much Fu had loved her and their kids. He had never been an affectionate man, crimping hugs and kisses like he crimped his pennies, but his love was concrete. She wondered often if any of her aunts and uncles were alive. They had lost all connection to them when they fled to Amestris following the emancipation of Tong Hua. Her parents had died then. She doubted she'll ever see any of her relatives. Movement was hard enough, especially for one who didn't own the right papers.

Lan Fan shook her head. She was getting ahead of herself. One problem at a time.

"Maybe it wouldn't be so hard," Lan Fan said, though she sounded naïve even to her own ears. "Bringing down Henry Chu. Ling and his mother have a lot of money. Isn't that all that anyone needs?"

"The last Xingese emperor was drowning in wealth, and he still ended up with his throat slit," Fu replied.

Lan Fan sighed. Chu was a cunning little bastard, smarter than anyone she had ever dealt with before. She knew personally the brunt of his indifference. If she failed with this, she wouldn't have to worry about the Red Stone; she'd most likely lack the living breath to worry about anything. Working to undermine him would be like walking on eggshells, with only a yawning abyss to catch her if she fell.

But what would the alternative be? Throwing herself a pity party every Thursday, counting her misfortune the same way Chu must be counting his money. She didn't want to be helpless even in her helplessness. These past two years she and her grandfather had dangled on threads like puppets. If she was more willing to stay a puppet than to cut the strings in fear of what would happen, then she had already given up.

Steeling herself, she bid her grandfather goodnight, and returned to her room.

-o-

Winry Rockbell woke up to find a golden head invading her desk drawers. Groggily, she stretched out a leg to kick Ed on the hip.

"Ay!" he cried out, turning around to glare daggers at her. She stuck out her tongue.

"What's this?" she asked. "Going through other people's things is kind of rude, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered under his breath, one hand still rubbing the sore spot on his hip through his pyjama bottoms. "Just looking for this!" He raised his other hand to show he was clutching the University Map.

Ah, that's right. College. Winry let her head fall back down to her pillow. She had arranged her schedule so that she had no classes on Mondays, but Ed would be going to his today. The campus was about two hours drive from Rush Valley, and the clock on Winry's bedside table already pointed at 8:30.

"You're already late for your first class, you know."

"I know, and it doesn't matter," Ed said as he folded the map and tucked it in his pocket. "It's just a tutorial, and I already know the material anyway. Al and I have been doing differential calculus since we were babies." He tossed his hair with a harrumph, and though Winry was tempted to roll her eyes, she let him have his moment. They didn't start when they were babies, but they have been doing advanced math for some time now.

She slipped out of bed, trying to comb her hair into place with her fingers. "You didn't even go back to Izumi's last night," she reprimanded him. He was supposed to come to Rush Valley for a short visit over the weekends, but stayed a little longer. He delivered a personal request from Ling Yao himself late on Saturday, and Winry had scrambled to arrange the boy with whom she considered an underappreciated superstar in the Auto-Mail networks.

"Meh, what would I do there anyway? She'll make me clean the house."

"She gets worried too, you know that." They made their way to the kitchen, and she pulled out some eggs from the fridge.

"I'll tell her about the servers," Ed said noncommittally. "That's the third time they failed this month. I don't think Dominic is taking good care of them. Last night, about a third of those in our network couldn't access us."

"Don't blame Dominic," Winry said. "He's doing the best he can. We all are. Those servers are just ratty old things."

"Then let's buy new ones."

Winry gave him a flat look, lifting her left hand in the gesture of asking for money.

"Ask Ling!" Ed said, taking a bite out of his hastily buttered toast. "The kid's got millions."

"You know I can't keep asking Ling for money."

"Why not? You need them, he has it, and he's one of our clients." Ed shrugged. "It'll do him good to give to the needy."

Winry sighed. There might have been a time when she would be terribly insulted by that, but that time would have been at least a year ago, when the Resit Cavern was still alive. They had been their biggest financial sponsor, and now... well. She could no longer deny that it was getting harder and harder to maintain the network, not with so many people each month registering. Their work grew exponentially to the number of users they had, and Winry's job as the 'matchmaker' – as Ed liked to tease her – became more difficult with each new request.

"Speaking of Ling..."

Winry turned to face Ed who had now finished his slice of bread. He carelessly dumped his dish on the sink, earning a reproachful frown from her – Garfiel hated it when the kitchen was dirty, and she already was paying discounted price renting out a room at his house.

"Are you sure about the whole 'hitting two birds with one stone' thing?" Ed continued. Winry had been informed of Ling's suggestion to turn the government inspection of the black markets as an opportunity to resurrect Operation Greed. Her role in the prior operation had been minimal, merely as an information relay. This time, the operation was much bigger, much riskier, but had much more potential for success.

The first time Ling proposed it, she and Ed had immediately refused. Auto-Mail was a hub to some ten thousand people across the nation, and even here in her dominion in South Area, Winry was responsible for almost a thousand. And counting. Risking them would be downright impossible. And yet...

"Yes, I'm sure." She nodded resolutely. At least Mustang had agreed to work together with them to keep them as safe as possible. They would unlikely have that kind of opportunity again. Auto-Mail was on the edge of falling apart. Either, they would eventually be discovered then dissolved by the government itself, with criminal records haunting their names to boot, or they would just disintegrate after Henry Chu had eaten out all his bite-sized competitors, which Auto-Mail relied on for support. Resit Cavern was hardly bite-sized, and look what Chu had done to them.

"Alright," Ed moved out of the kitchen, slinging his bag across his back. "I'll work the knots out with Ling and call you if we need anything." She unlocked the door for him, and he stepped out of the small house. Before he walked away, he spun back, and a thick awkwardness oozed between them, punctuated by Edward moving a fringe of her hair behind her ear. He reddened and sprinted down the steps to the streets, yelling "see you tomorrow" like someone had spat in his soup.

Winry rolled her eyes, and shut the door. What a dork. Honestly. Why she even bothered... bah.

She prepared herself a small breakfast of oven-heated waffles and some scrambled eggs, and a cup of warm honeyed tea. She carried her food to her room to start her work. There were some things she wanted to finish before going to campus for the next four days.

There were piles and piles of sheets littering her table; most of them were her own notes, but some were newspaper and magazine cutouts, flyers from the neighbourhood centre, and bills for and from clients. Though Auto-Mail started out as a voluntary service, the process became so complex that they now charged a 5% cut from all successful matches they facilitate. At the center of the mess was her desktop. She fired it open, and connected herself to the Auto-Mail VPN. Dominic provided her an administrator access to all the databases hosted on his servers. She also had access to other databases, but she mostly used the ones with information in South and East Areas of Amestris.

Opening the program that logged new and pending requests, Winry scrolled through the list (432 New Tickets! 185 Drafted Responses!) If she were any other girl, Winry might have considered herself flattered by her popularity that she should wake up with so many messages in the morning. But now, she just sighed, took a sip of her tea, and began scanning through them.

…need a cheap ride to go to North City for law exam... Hmm, sounded like a job for Mr. Eves. The man sold discounted train passes under the table. Winry moved the ticket to the "Require Contact" bucket, and added a small comment that Mr. Eves must be contacted. There were other automailers who would take care of the rest of the process.

…high pay guaranteed for quiet disappearance of colleague – scrap that. Winry clicked on the delete button at the corner of the ticket. Auto-Mail strived to provide a decent source of income, no matter how small, for many people, which meant that they also constricted their service requests to decent ones, to avoid hypocrisy. Hitman hires were not too uncommon in the black markets, but Winry would rather they go to some other underground network.

Next. Desperately looking for a doctor to treat my cousin, who traveled here from the Cretan pass. Winry opened DataHunter, a database management software tool, and queried Tim Marcoh on the parser. If this person's cousin had traveled through the Cretan pass, then they were surely an illegal immigrant. Amestris had closed that pass years ago when the Cretan plague broke out, and Bradley – then president of Amestris – asserted a quarantine on all Cretan cities on the Amestris border. There were several doctors in the Auto-Mail network, but Winry new Marcoh best.

"Winry, yoo-hoo, where is Eddie-boy?" a knock came from her door, and she turned to see Garfiel's ever smiling face peer through the doorway.

"He went back to school now," Winry answered.

"Oh, that's too bad. He's such a fine visitor."

"Eh... fine wouldn't be the word I use for him," Winry said, as she clicked on several tickets in a row, and dropped it onto Garfiel's slot. Now that he's awake, she could escalate some of the more urgent-looking tickets to him. He's been doing this a lot longer than she had. "More like... exasperating."

"Alright, whatever you say! Though Exasperating Boyfriend does look very good on you," he exited her room with a wink, and traipsed down the hallway to his own workstation.

Winry shook her head to rid herself of the blush she felt coming on. Back on her computer, she waited as DataHunter retrieved all of Tim Marcoh's Auto-Mail appointments for the next few weeks. It wouldn't finish for at least five minutes. They had so much data now, that even though they had invested in larger bandwidths, there was still a lot of bottleneck on the hard drives. And their clients often complained why they took so long. Honestly, it was saying something about how old their equipments were that she could make faster matches through word-of-mouth than through machine.

She leaned back, and began to eat her breakfast. Poor person, whoever it was coming from Creta. Nobody had really discovered a cure for the virus that circulated there. It was now better contained, yes, but those who succumbed under the outbreaks had little chance of surviving.

Winry turned her attention back to DataHunter. The loading bar still wasn't even a tenth through! Or wait... did DataHunter just freeze? She tried canceling, but the button didn't register her click. Minimize? Nope. She pressed the hotkeys on her keyboard, and the Process Manager came up, indicating that DataHunter was taking up 10GB of her RAM. With an irritated huff, Winry tried to kill the process, but instead of terminating DataHunter, her entire computer decided to shut itself down.

"Argh!" She pounded on her desk, hands clenched tightly or else she'd be pulling her hair out of their roots.

She snatched up the phone on the table to her right, and dialed Dominic's number. He didn't even let her get in one word.

"Yes, I know, the server's slow, DataHunter ate up too much memory, and your computer crashed. Tell me, young lady, what else is new?" The fact that Dominic was usually gruff did not excuse Winry's growing annoyance.

"So what are we going to do?" she asked, exasperated. Why did she have to surround herself with such surly people all the time?

"I don't know what you are going to do, but as for me, I am going to continue to mimic a load balancer, so if you have any other questions, talk to my son."

She heard the clicks that transferred the call, and a moment later she heard Ridel's much more amiable voice on the other side of the line.

"Hey Winry, sorry about that!" he chuckled softly. "I promise I'm working on the new version of DataHunter. It should be able to handle queries much more efficiently."

"Thanks," Winry said. "The past month hasn't been very easy on all of us."

"Yeah, and looks like the upcoming months aren't going to be either," Ridel trailed off in an uncomfortable silence.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, you haven't heard? XYZ Ltd. just bought out Weom and Co."

Weom and Co. Winry groaned. The small family-owned company's donations were the only thing that paid for the LeCoulte's software updates and maintenance. The software the powered all of Auto-Mail.

Damn. Is Henry Chu cornering Auto-Mail –

Winry stopped herself from completing that thought. She hastily said goodbye to Ridel, before sitting down in front of her desk again with a loud sigh.

She found herself staring at a picture of her parents. Late parents. As a child, she remembered believing they were going to save the world. Nobody really thought of doctors as a dynamic duo, but she certainly did. Her parents had worked on an ambitious project – a cure-all antidote, composed of advanced engineered cells that could learn the nature of a disease and adapt themselves to fight it.

She didn't really know what happened to it. Her parents died almost six years ago. Last she heard from Ms. Hawkeye, the Rockbells had managed to finish exactly one prototype of the antidote, which the government kept for safekeeping.

Lousy job they did there. Hawkeye also told her that after Bradley was overthrown, the government lost the Red Stone.

-o-

Ling woke to the smell of burnt dumplings. His nose, as usual, was awake before the rest of him, and when he opened his eyes to find drops of rain violently pelting his window, he wondered why the smell of rain didn't wake him first. The sound of his stomach grumbling answered that question for him. Ah, well... there went some decent pork and shrimp. It was almost disappointing. His mother must have wanted to impress the guests with her cooking skills. It wasn't like she couldn't cook; Ling had known his Mom to boil egg and water, and surely those counted for something. He could only boil water, after all.

Guess they better start looking for another maid soon.

After washing up, he trotted downstairs to find no dumplings. Burnt though they were, he was never one to waste food. There was, however, Lan Fan sitting by the dining table, wiping her mouth with her hand, an empty bowl in front of her. His mother was standing behind her, mouth pursed in concentration as her fingers wound Lan Fan's hair in a braid.

"Good morning, sweetheart!" His mother chirped, eyes never wavering from the locks she was interweaving.

"Where's breakfast?" Ling asked, eyes forlornly tracing the outline of the bowl.

"Oh," Lan Fan said, following his gaze. "They were burnt... I thought you might not have wanted to eat them. Sorry! I can make you something, if you want." She started to rise from her seat, but was harshly pulled back down by his mother's grip on her hair.

"Don't worry about that," Ling said, waving her concern away. He grabbed instead a small red bean pastry on the counter, where a pile of confectioneries lay ready for his insatiable stomach. His mother had long ago stopped issuing her no-sweets-for-breakfast rule, especially when Ling tended to eat eggs and follow it with chocolate milkshake, whose sweetness was never disputed. "I didn't hire you to make me food."

"You hired me to ensure your well-being," Lan Fan agreed, not quite reaching the nod she was hoping for. The hold on her head was tight. "I don't want you to faint."

Faint. He glanced at his mother through narrowed eyes, knowing full well from where Lan Fan would have gotten that information. She ignored him, tucking a strand of hair below two others.

"For your information, I have never fainted," he clarified, sitting beside Lan Fan. "I merely experience small lapses in consciousness, in which my feet fail to uphold my weight."

She gave him an unconvinced look. Goodness, was this girl never impressed by anything?

"Never mind that!" he exclaimed. "We are going to Amestris University today!"

"To tell 'the brat' not to go home to Izumi?" Lan Fan asked, and Ling was mildly surprised she remembered the conversation that had transpired between him and the hot-tempered woman. If she was this observant, then it had been a wise choice for him to choose her for the job ahead. He'd merely hoped for a competent martial artist, but if she could pick up and remember things said in passing, she might be more valuable than he'd expected. Lucky him.

"Yes," he answered. "Among other things."

"Job-related things?"

"Lan Fan, people usually go to a school to, you know, learn stuff." Ling pointed to a knapsack hanging by the coat rack in the living room. "I'm a commerce student."

At first, Ling had been convinced, with both parents running their own businesses, that it would be wise for him to choose a different path. Literature, maybe, or even the arts. He'd always been told he had a flair for the dramatic. That was until he woke up one day, with a death threat from a brother in their mailbox, the cheesily insidious words 'I will make you pay' scrawled in chicken scratch. And it was like an epiphany. There he was, thirteen-year-old Ling, threatened to pay for something he didn't buy (turned out it was bail – the brother was arrested for indecent exposure), and he realized, life was one big, ugly business. To live was to bargain. He might as well learn the best skills to run it.

His mother finished with the braid, wrapping an elastic at the end. There was a purple plastic rose hairpin sitting on the table, and she inserted it by Lan Fan's right ear.

"Ta-da! Oh, how wonderful, isn't it? I've always wanted a daughter!" his mother exclaimed, waving excited hands towards what she surely considered a masterpiece.

"Ma, my hair is longer than Lan Fan's. How come you've never put flowers in my hair?"

His mother ignored him. "This is great! And considering you've brought absolutely no decent clothes, I'll make it a point to help you shop! Oh this is awesome. Just like when Mei comes to visit!" She pocketed the small comb she'd been using to arrange Lan Fan's hair, and started out of the room. "Now I gotta go get ready for work. But this weekend! You. Me. The mall." And with that, she rushed out of the dining room, and headed up the stairs.

"Mei?" Lan Fan turned back to him, fingering the rose tentatively. She cringed, and slowly pulled it from her hair, freeing a few locks from the tight braid to limply frame her face.

"She's my half sister."

"The one your mother caught here in the house before deciding to murder you father eight different ways?"

Ling laughed, partly out of real amusement, and partly out of delight. He was now almost fully convinced of her canny ability to pick things up. "Well, she didn't quite get away with murder. Mei is several years younger than me, so my parents weren't together anymore by the time she'd been conceived. Still, that's not to say that my father wasn't a feast for the paparazzi for the entire week. Incidents did happen."

Lan Fan whistled. "Remind me never to get in your mother's bad side."

He laughed again and finished off his bun. "So. Amestris University today, and yes, there are some job related things we have to do. I'll need to introduce you to some people, and I believe we're getting news from a few of them." He remembered setting an appointment with Mustang. The colonel himself might not appear, but one of his subordinates would surely be there. He was hoping it would be Hawkeye, so that she could meet Lan Fan again, but he doubted Mustang would let her go by herself. "Let me just get ready, and we can go. My first class starts at 11."

He returned to his room, donning on a fresh pair of jeans, and a yellow sweater. For a moment he considered putting up his hair in a braid too, to match Lan Fan, but decided to bundle it up in the usual ponytail instead, just in case the former seemed a bit too childish. When he came out, he found the door to her grandfather's room open as he reached the platform to the second floor. He heard her voice inside.

That's right, they still needed to get a live-in nurse for him.

Though the door was wide open, he knocked first to let them know he was there. He found Lan Fan kneeling by the bedside, her grandfather pale and sweat-soaked. He let out weak coughing fits, and a small trail of blood slipped from the side of his lips. Lan Fan used a towel to wipe it away, and then poured a red liquid into his mouth. He sputtered a bit, but her careful handling ensured that most of the medicine went in.

"Hey, is he going to be alright? Do you want to take him to the hospital before we leave for school?" Ling asked, entering. "It's okay if we're a little late."

She looked back at him, then shook her head. "No, it's okay. He should be fine now that he's drank his medicine."

"We should get someone really soon to help out with him."

"About that..." Lan Fan started. "I have a contact from Auto-Mail who has helped me out before. She's not a nurse, but she is careful. Would it be okay if we get her? She doesn't charge that much, so you don't need to worry about–"

"Money won't be a problem at all," Ling assured her. "Give your friend a call, and give her our address. Tell her to come tonight if she can."

"Thank you," Lan Fan said, face clearly relieved.

He looked back at the old man, and watched as the restlessness slowly ebbed, allowing him to fall back into a deep slumber. Remembering how the man had greeted him the night before, Ling had a feeling that this man had once been a hale and agile fighter. It was sad to see someone fall prey to the clutches of a disease, mostly because of the high expenses, but also because there was no one to blame. It wasn't like a physical fight, not like a business deal. Nature wasn't calculating like that.

"Well, that was some quick medicine you got there," Ling noticed, his eyes catching the bright crimson hue of the liquid. The bottle reflected a glint of light, and Ling paused. Strange that a prescription medicine should be in a clear, glass bottle. Didn't those come in plastic ones, wrapped with medical info and instructions nowadays?

"Who issued that?" Ling asked, reaching forward for the medicine in Lan Fan's hand. She noticed, and pulled back, showing him the small vial, but not allowing him to hold it.

"It's from an independent vendor." Her voice was simple and direct, like how it had been last night when he inquired about her disappearance: it didn't allow further probing.

She turned back, and tucked it into the bag that held her grandfather's things. "Well, if you're ready, then we can go."

"Would it be okay to leave your grandfather alone?" Ling asked. "Ma's going to work, and she doesn't have a regular schedule. Chances are we'd be here before her, and that would be around dinner time."

She nodded. "Yeah, it's okay. His medicine has a twelve hour effectiveness. Things only get bad when I don't get to administer the medicine in time, but so long as he takes it once in the morning and once in the evening, he'll be alright." She turned back, feeling the old man's forehead. "If we could get some food near him though, it'll save him from having to wander the house looking for food."

"Right." Ling and Lan Fan went back down to the kitchen, rummaged the fridge for some easy food they could provide for the old man. What was his name again? He didn't think Lan Fan had ever mentioned. How rude of him, not to even ask. His mother would scold him.

"Hey, uhm, what should I call your grandfather?" he asked, as he found a pack of microwaveable mashed potatoes. He tossed it in the microwave for a minute.

"Fu would be just fine," she answered. She held up a can of just-add-water miso soup, her look asking him if she could give it to her grandfather. He nodded, and grabbed a bowl of left-over wonton noodles from the buffet last night. He heated them up as well, hoping they'd still be marginally warm when the old man needed them, and brought them up to the bedroom in a tray. When that was done, he shouted out to his mother to say they were leaving.

-o-

"Are you sure I'm allowed to be here?" Lan Fan whispered to him. She kept close by his side, the crowded University campus making her jumpy.

"Why not?" Ling asked. "Everyone's welcome here."

"It's a private institution, isn't it? Don't I have to pay?"

"It's the education we're paying for," Ling explained. "The buildings themselves are open to everyone."

"Where are we going?"

"The Great Hall," he said. It was the only one that could fit all the students taking the first year introductory psychology course. He noticed, since they stepped out of his car in the parking lot, that Lan Fan had been greatly distracted. Ling almost wondered how she could not have had whiplash as she turned her head back and forth every two seconds. He knew that downtown South City could be extremely busy; a boy with a car and nowhere to park could never forget that in this metropolis. Today they had to walk half an hour from the nearest plaza with an empty space he could find to the heart of the campus. It wasn't bad, but he was starting to feel sorry for Lan Fan. Did her neck hurt?

"What's wrong?" he asked. "Are you looking for someone?"

"I'm looking for many someones," she muttered. "How am I supposed to protect you in this beehive? I don't know who I'm even looking for. It could be just about anybody."

"Hey, give me some credit!" Ling said, defensively. "I've never pissed off that many people."

"I'm sure your father did," she retorted. "And what about those brothers you said were out to get you?"

"I doubt they'd get me here with this many witnesses." Ling was almost certain of that, but like he'd learned to do since the disastrous Greed 1.0, he allowed a trickle of doubt creep into him. It was no longer safe for him to make bold assumptions, thinking his safety was assured. "You can relax a little bit."

She sighed, her shoulders easing slightly. He maneuvered them through the crowd, eyes combing the posts for street signs. School had started only a week back, and he still hadn't memorized the campus very well. It was large enough that the ten minutes between each class implied a healthy cardio for anyone trying to get from one side of the campus to the other. But it wasn't as large as Ling would expect of the Amestris University campus located in the heart of Central City.

Central... if South was a beehive, Central was a jungle.

He found the intersection leading to the Great Hall. He was leading Lan Fan through a shortcut in between two other buildings, crossing a paved walkway, when he felt her suddenly jerk against him, and he found himself trapped between Lan Fan's body and the brick wall of Boyle Centre.

"This isn't exactly my idea of–" He stopped short, when he heard grunts, and the distinct sounds of limbs hammering against each other. He looked up over Lan Fan's shoulders and realized what was going on.

Ed showed up.

And, as usual, his idea of saying hello was through a punch.

Ling wiggled his way from the wall, but Lan Fan's hand pushed him back against it. She positioned her body, so that she was blocking him from Ed's assaults.

"Hey, Lan Fan, it's okay!" he yelled, sliding once again from her grasp and asserting himself between the two. He deflected one of Lan Fan's kicks with a quick turn of leg, and he caught Ed's next punch squarely in his fists. "Ed here is my friend."

Lan Fan's eyes almost bulged out of their sockets, so wide they were with disbelief.

"Oh," she said, much louder than he'd ever heard her before. "Wh-what is this... some kind initiation to your circle of friends? Or is physical violence a prerequisite for your friendship?"

"Who is this?" Edward asked, looking Lan Fan up and down. "Your maid got lost or something?"

Lan Fan snarled at him, but turned her attention back to Ling. "So when you hired me, is that to protect you from your friends?"

"No, of course not!" Ling said. "I'm a very sociable kind of guy, you know. I don't discriminate. I find pals anywhere from the sweetest little kitten to the crazy roaring lion – ah, wait not the hair!"

"Who are you calling little, you shifty-eyed punk?" Edward had grabbed his pony-tail, pulling it back.

"Not you, Ed! Trust me. You're not exactly sweet, nor particularly kitten-like." Edward released him, and Ling pulled the hair elastic free, his hair falling down to his shoulders. He fingered the spot where the ponytail had sprouted, feeling his scalp aggrieved. He massaged it gently.

"Geez, and this is Lan Fan. You know, the girl you sent me. Have those books you've been reading addled your long-term memory or something?"

"Lan Fan?" he asked, wide-eyed with surprise. "Oh. I thought you said you were looking for a bodyguard."

"Shh, keep it down, would you? Yes, she is my bodyguard."

Ed sneered. "Eh, okay. It's just that... I was sorta expecting her to look like Armstrong or something. I don't know her. I asked Winry and Paninya to take care of the whole matchmaking thing, and if it's good enough for Win, I was sure it'd be good enough for you."

Ling nodded. "Yes, she's good, so I'd appreciate it if you don't go around beating her up."

"Like he could," he heard Lan Fan mumble beneath her breath. For one intense moment, the three of them stood in an awkwardness so solid, Ling could have almost held it in his hands. He cleared his throat.

"Class? Our prof doesn't exactly appreciate stragglers."

The rest of the walk to the Great Hall was blanketed in uneasiness, with his two friends as rigid as poles on either side of him. Where was Al when you needed him? Ling had a feeling that the introduction would have gone so much better if Al was here. He'd know how to smooth things over, make up for his brother's lack of decorum. But Al visited the University only once or twice a week. He was still a high school student after all; he only came here to converse with a pharmaceutical professor who had given him a research project. Al was, if anything, quite an over achiever. Not that his brother wasn't, but Ed... Ed didn't exactly use niceties to display his skills.

During lecture, Ling noticed the way Lan Fan pored over his notes, often pointing out things from the slides that she felt he should jot down. Even without the motivation to do so, she focused on the lecture, more so even than Ling himself, who found his attention wandering from time to time. She particularly perked up when the professor involved the entire class, about a thousand students packed in the hall, in a little activity. The right half of the class was told to close their eyes for a time as the professor revealed to the other half a series of pictures, where the left most image gradually changed shape to form the right most. Then the activity was repeated, but with the halves interchanged. When everyone was told to open their eyes, one single image was projected on the large screen.

"How many of you see an old woman?" The left side of the hall almost exclusively raised their hands. "Now how many see a man carrying a sack?" The right side, where Ling, Ed and Lan Fan were, raised theirs. The young professor then turned back to his projector and removed two slips of paper that had been covering either side of the image. It turned out that the series of images that they had been shown initially were only half of the entire collection. The actual first picture most resembled a woman's face, and the actual last a stooped traveler with a heavy load. The middle image was somehow somewhere between the two.

"You see, your mind is more ready to see something if it's been primed to it," the professor began to explain. "This is why observational bias is so dangerous to experiments. This is also what sometimes happens in self-fulfilling prophecies when..."

"This is fascinating," Lan Fan whispered beside him. He looked at her, finding an excited glint in her eyes. "You have to learn this for business?" she asked.

"No, but it's definitely helpful," he agreed. "Psychology can certainly be applied when you need to do a little persuasion." He smiled. "If you're interested, maybe after your contract with me, you can apply to a college or something. Take a couple of courses or get a degree. You'd have enough money for it."

The glint disappeared, and Lan Fan sobered. Ling was about to ask what it was he said that upset her, but the professor began another set of class interaction. He made sure to file it away in his mind, ready for grabbing when he got the chance to ask her in a more appropriate time.

When the class was dismissed, and the three of them filed out of the building, Ling spotted a certain militant lounging about in front of a cafe, smiling at random girls. Ed nudged him in the ribs, letting him know he noticed Havoc too.

"What? What's wrong now?" Lan Fan asked.

"There's our man," Ling whispered to her, nodding in Havoc's direction.

"Oh great. Do we just go up? Say some password or something?"

Ling grinned. "No, we have to be more subtle than that. A bunch of college kids walking up to a State Military man? Not exactly ordinary, is it?"

"Gah, I hate subtlety!" Ed whined.

"Then what do we do?" Lan Fan asked.

Ling's grin widened. "He's an enforcer. There's only one way to grab their attention: make trouble." Ling sidestepped to catch a bun being passed between a hotdog vendor and a skinny student. In one swift motion, he threw the hotdog to the street, where it caught between the wheels of a cyclist. The impediment threw the rider off of his seat, and sent him smashing into a parked car. The vehicle's alarm went off, startling the other students making their way to their next classes. A crowd had begun to gather around the hotdog vendor and the bicyclist, though by the way he was pushing himself off of the car, Ling could tell he wasn't gravely injured.

"Excuse me, excuse me punks, let me through," Ling heard Havoc's voice as the man made his way through the crowd. "Now, now what's going on here?"

"That boy stole my lunch and attacked that cyclist over there!" the skinny student shouted to Havoc, an accusing finger pointing straight at Ling.

"Me?" Ling feigned. "I didn't mean it! It was an accident! I was practicing my golf swing." From the corner of his eyes, he could see Lan Fan's pained expression, one that told him she was so tired and unimpressed with his excuses.

"You, young man, are coming with me," Havoc replied, his cigarette balanced tipsily between two fingers. He turned to Edward. "And you as well."

"Me?" Ed asked. "What did I do?"

"I saw you smile," Havoc explained. "Finding amusement in other people's misfortune is quite the crime."

"Since when?" Ed raged.

"Since you committed it, young man. Now both of you..." he trailed, eyes catching Lan Fan's. Ling gave the smallest nod he could to indicate that Havoc had to take her too. "And you Miss, for being a passive witness, and thereby a guilty accomplice. You must also come with us."

The crowd parted to let them through, whispers beginning to spread. Havoc led them around the street to where he parked a State Military issued car, and motioned for them to get in.

AN: Well, now that's ironed out, I think it would be much easier for me to write the next few chapters now that I know where this story goes. Thanks for being patient with me. If there's any inconsistency between the changes (or anything in general), let me know, and I'll put a quick fix.