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Al took off the radiation goggles after what must have been hours, the seal breaking and his skin rejoicing in its release. The New Mexico desert whipped up a crosswind, Sand particles lashing at his cheeks as he looked at the tower being constructed for Trinity, and beyond into the surrounding mountains, to where Oppenheimer would surely be grim, looking at the rigidity of the bunker in preparation for the test.

Al pitied him. He seemed to carry the weight of the whole Manhattan project on his shoulders. He himself had seen what terrible power would be unleashed here when he had been consumed by the truth so many years before, but having seen the terror of Kristallnacht... he couldn't let this weapon be used to propogate such evil. Ed had agreed on the quayside in Danzig, when Al had left his adoptive homeland and brother: Germany must not develop the weapon.

The sand swirled up once more, and the sun was hidden. Alphonse wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked down at the rigging that was still left to prepare. He hoped Ed was still alive in the hellish fury of Berlin.

**

Hughes threw himself flat as the Russians continued pounding the building at short range with artillery. It was a sturdy building, that was for sure.

Crawling forward until he reached some sort of side-entrance, he pushed the door open with the muzzle of the rifle, peering inside as he did so, and finding himself face to face with a few confused soldiers. Their uniforms... they weren't Russian or German... who the hell were they?! Both the new-comers and he stared at one another for a few seconds, before a shell broke their stares. Hoping they understood his beckoning gesture, he tried to lead them out, back to the trenches.

**

Breda stared back at Falman. It WAS Hughes! But how did he...? Concrete tumbled from the ceiling as more shells collided with the front of the building. Hughes or not, he knew a way out, and Breda didn't need to hear Winry's urgent shouts as she sprinted after them, dragging along a half-dazed and glass-less Schiezka, to know what to do. He grimaced as pain tore along his arm again, grabbing a rifle from the rack to the right and trying to keep up with a memory.

**

His eye was burning again.

The sensation gnawed at his nerves, his brain screaming at him as he clamped his hand over the patch, before a light slap made him desist.

"Stop touching it, sir, it'll only get worse."

Mustang shook himself awake, trying to surface through the layers of unconsciousness, before finding himself in his office, the amber-eyed Captain hunching to his left.

"What the hell is going on?!"

"How am I supposed to know?!" She snapped. "There's artillery pounding away at the building, and the entrance is blocked with rubble!"

He shook his head, trying to wake from the nightmare, before picking up on that slightest note of panic he had heard in her retort. If she was scared...

He looked around the office, the desk, chairs and cabinets thrown over one another like discarded toys.

"We have to get out of here."

"The entrance is blocked sir, and I'm not too willing to let that artillery open up a..." A shell sailed into the room below, the world shaking itself violently from existence before slowly fading back into view. As the ringing in his ears died down, he peered down into the office below through the new sizeable hole in the floor, before beckoning to her, noticing that blood was slowly dripping from a cut on her forhead.

They wordlessly dropped down into the office, their fall broken by a collapsed desk, as they made their way through the building, trying to put as many rooms as possible between them and the relentless fire.

They quickly found their way to a gaping crack in the side of the building, just one floor off a cratered series of trenches, jumping down once more into a recently abandoned fox-hole, it's previous residents in grey uniforms lying motionless around a machine-gun of some sorts. Mustang gave out a heavy breath as a final salvo of howitzer shells smashed through the remainders of the central command complex, breaking the building apart with a thunderous crumbling sound and sending shards of concrete in every direction. Roy threw both of them flat on the ground as the building groaned it's last and was still.

There was another note of disquiet in her voice as she pushed him off her lightly.

"Sir... this isn't Amestris..."

He looked up and saw the wave of infantry already surging forward.

"No, Captain, it definitely isn't."

**

"Tovarish Kommandir! Tovarish Kommandir!" Ed looked up as another haggard Guards soldier sprinted to the Polkovnik, or rather Mustang, bringing more urgent news. It seemed that in the furnace of Berlin, events had spiralled even further out of anyone's control. The Polkovnik grimaced and stared at Ed, carefully weighing up his words.

"Looks like the world decided to screw itself up the moment you showed yourself."

Ed stared back pointedly. "It has a tendency to do that."

"At any rate... Orders are orders, and no matter how much I hate to follow pointless ones, you need to come with me."

Ed's heart dropped, realising that his fate had been thrown out of his hands.

"Marshall Zhukov wants to speak with you."