Fanfic / Operation Exchange

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Operation Exchange👁 Image
is a fanfic by Wind-Waker👁 Image
on SpaceBattles.com, and is a crossover between Fullmetal Alchemist and SPY×FAMILY. It is also available on Archive of Our Own here👁 Image
.

Agent Twilight of the Creta intelligence organization WISE has been assigned to Operation STRIX, with the objective being to determine the Amestrian military's plan for Spring 1915. Unfortunately for him, getting a fake wife and daughter will be the easiest part of handling the alchemical plot he is about to unravel.

Operation Exchange contains the following tropes:

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The Shopkeeper has more personal reasons to be leading the Garden here - he's Ishvalan, and part of his desire to limit conflict is regret over what happened with his homeland and his inability to mitigate the violence, as he has accepted he couldn't have prevented the conflict, but still feels he could have limited it.
• Adaptational Badass: Anya's powers here aren't just telepathy, but a fully opened Gate of Truth, implying that she could use alchemy if she tried.
  • While he’s a brilliant student in the original story, Demetrius Desmond shows no skill in fighting. Here, he is a fully-accredited State Alchemist.
• Adaptational Context Change: While Anya's grades are still barely acceptable, unlike in canon she actually is capable of excelling in science, mathematics, and alchemy due to the experiments the Homunculi ran on her, alongside forcing her to study. Instead, she's deliberately doing bad on those subjects because she knows the Homunculi are hunting her for her fully opened Gate of Truth.
• Adaptational Intelligence: As opposed to being supremely Book Dumb in canon, Anya is a prodigy in mathematics and science due to the experiments conducted on her. Ironically, she makes a point of deliberately doing bad on them because she knows the Homunculi are looking for her.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Yor and Lust only ever showed interest men in the their respective home franchises. Here apart from here on top of her growing feelings and attraction to Loid she also shows obvious fluster and attraction towards Lust from the moment they meet who has developed a mutual interest in Yor herself.
• A Father to His Men: When confronted by Wrath and his soldiers, Greed orders Zampano, Roa, Dolcetto and Martel to take Alphonse and escape, fighting Wrath himself as they do so. And despite Greed ultimately being captured, he was able to buy enough time for them to get out, sparing the latter three from their canon deaths.
• Adaptational Jerkass: The Homunculi were dysfunctional in canon, but they weren't this dysfunctional. In canon, Lust and Envy have a genuine Villainous Friendship, and Pride at least likes Wrath enough to not tell Father that Wrath may be a bit fonder of humanity than he lets on. Here, Pride is practically chomping at the bit to throw Wrath under the bus, and Lust believes Envy would gladly try to kill her if not for Father's orders.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • Anya only tries to befriend Damian in canon because it would help Loid. Here, she's implied to become his friend because she stood up for him when Selim bullied him.
  • Yuri's obsessive affection towards Yor is significantly reduced thanks to Hughes putting in some effort to bring it down to manageable levels.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Twilight gets hit with this, through no fault of his own - while Twilight is still a very skilled agent, his opposites in Amestris are already investigating something even crazier than Operation STRIX, so they're more inclined to notice the flaws in his arguments. Additionally, having the story set in a setting near WWI/WWII with less Rule of Funny means he can't rely upon as many tricks as he has in his home series. And that's not getting into the literally superhuman foes The Conspiracy has on their side.
  • WISE as well is severely weakened compared to the original story. Between Maes Hughes rooting them out and the Homunculi killing or framing them, the spy organization has lost a lot more agents to the point that even senior handlers are forced to undertake field work.
• All for Nothing: This is part of Twilight's despair after discovering the great conspiracy. His organization was never going to be able to prevent any of the wars that Amestris was waging, because the war was the point. They were always going to be started one way or another because the secret conspiracy running the country needed those wars to occur in order to complete their ritual. For a man who has been fighting for world peace for years, and has seen countless friends and coworkers be killed in the path of duty, this is a hard pill to swallow.
• Always Second Best: Damian has a chip on his shoulder about his family being this. His father is the most powerful member of the elected government - but since Amestris is a military dictatorship, said government only has as much power as Bradley feels like letting it have. His older brother had been the youngest State Alchemist in history at fifteen (beating Mustang's record of twenty) - until Edward Elric blew his record out of the water at age twelve. Damien himself was only able to get second on the alchemy section of his enrollment exams at Eden Academy (behind Anya, though he doesn't know this).
• Artificial Limbs: Due to having lost his leg during the Ishval war, Franky has an automail leg to replace it. This is how Twilight comes to realize that the Franky that supposedly betrays him isn’t actually Franky, as Envy didn’t know about this.
• Berserk Button: Saying anything poor in regards to Basque Grand is a good way to make Franky angry as Twilight quickly finds out. Turns out Grand's intervention saved his life from the orders of a commanding officer who treated Franky's unit as cannon fodder.
• Book Dumb: Downplayed - Loid is very astute, but has no real skill in even the theory of alchemy. Ironically, this is the one bit of learning Anya already knows due to the experiments she underwent in Lab 5 giving her a fully opened Gate of Truth.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: As in canon, Hughes will constantly blather to anyone he meets about his wife and daughter. Despite this, he is also a master at counter-espionage and his personally-trained unit is a considerable challenge for WISE.
• Canon Welding:
  • Operation STRIX's goal has been changed from finding out the truth about Donovan Desmond to learning what Amestris is planning for mid-Spring 1915 - AKA the Promised Day.
  • The organization that created Anya here is the Homunculi, with Anya being the product of Lab 5.
  • It's heavily implied that this universe's version of the Westalis-Ostania war, the Creta-Amestris war, was one of the blood crests needed to turn Amestris into a country-sized transmutation circle. Wrath eventually confirms this to Twilight .
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Wrath killing Izumi earns him the ire of Father and he only survives by lying his ass off that Greed was the one at fault. Father allows him to live, but denies him alchemical healing of his injuries as punishment.
• Car Fu: When bullets aren't enough to stop Envy, Lloyd resorts to ramming him with a car. While this does knock the Homunculus to the ground briefly, his dense body causes significant damage to the vehicle.
• Children Are Innocent: An important plot point for Anya’s story:She was used in experiments that ended up opening her Gate of Truth by the Homunculi. But since Anya was too young to understand the consequences of what happened, Truth didn’t take anything from her and instead gave her mind reading powers, making Anya the only one with a open Gate of Truth that hadn’t lost anything.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Izumi is allegedly murdered by Greed using his diamond claws. Thanks to his years of experience as a butcher, Sig instantly sees this is a lie as the wound is consistent with a sword strike as opposed to claws.
• Crossover Relatives: As revealed on Anya's first day of School, Bill Watkins is an Armstrong, being the son of one of Alexander and Olivier's unnamed sisters.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Barry the Chopper dies significantly earlier than in canon, with Yor offing him well before his original body can.
  • Frankie is killed by Bradley while Lloyd rescues Hughes from Envy . 👁 This example contains a TRIVIA entry. It should be moved to the TRIVIA tab.
    Word of God confirms this to be a case of Equivalent Exchange - saving a character from their canon death requires someone else to take their place.
  • Izumi Curis dies protecting Alphonse from Wrath after they learn he is a Homunculus.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: As opposed to being wiped out by Bradley, Greed's gang (except for Dolcetto, Zampano, Roa and Martel, who escape) is killed off by Yor.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: As in canon, Izumi kicked out the Elric Brothers after they committed human transmutation because she no longer felt they were her students, but her equals. Maria Ross ends up yelling at Izumi when she finds this out, pointing out that the latter is missing an entirely different point - regardless of her intentions, she kicked out two boys who loved her like a mother after they were crippled for life. This reduces Izumi to tears, as she realizes that not only is Ross right, but that she squandered a second chance to be a mother with the Elric Boys due to her own beliefs.
• Dramatic Irony: The very nature of The Conspiracy regarding the Promised Day means that the SPY×FAMILY cast is missing boatloads of information that the readers are well aware of.
  • WISE assumes that whatever Amestris is planning for Spring 1915 relates to war with Creta. The actual plan is apocalyptic in nature, but is intended to be contained within Amestris.
  • Shopkeeper believes that the Ishvalan War was the result of building tensions boiling over and explicitly rules out the possibility it was caused by some conspiracy.
  • Lloyd is paranoid about Amestris figuring out who he is and coming after him. The Homunculi are interested in him and his fake family, but not because of him - Lust recognizes Anya as one of their failed test subjects.
  • As in canon, Lloyd wants Anya to get high marks on her schoolwork. But he's unaware that Anya is deliberately underachieving on one of the subjects she does know - Alchemy - because the Homunculi want whoever does perfect on the alchemical portion of the exams as a potential sacrifice.
  • In an example befalling the Homunculi, they all assume that Anya was a failure because she never manifested alchemical powers. Not only did she end up with Telepathy, but it turns out her Gate did open, and Truth took nothing from her because he recognizes that she is too young to understand why opening the gate in the first place is bad.
  • Pride assumes that Damian is the one who got a perfect score on the alchemy portions of the Eden admissions after seeing him reading an alchemy book. In fact, he actually writes off Anya as his target (to her immense relief) because she looks dense.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Hughes and Mustang deduce that Lloyd is really a government agent sent to spy on State Alchemists under the guise of a psychiatrist due to his suspicious timing showing up after MacDougal went rogue. They're correct about Twilight being a spy watching the military, just not which country he's spying for. When confronted over this, he doesn't correct this misperception.
• Equivalent Exchange: Present as always in Fullmetal Alchemist - the author's notes explicitly state that something can only be gained if something of equal value is lost. While Hughes is Spared by the Adaptation, Franky has to take his place; similarly, several members of Greed's gang survive their encounter with Wrath at the expense of Izumi.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Truth always demands a price if someone attempts human transmutation, even if they were forced to do so. The one exception to this is Anya, who was apparently forced to commit something along these lines before she was five years old, leaving her with a permanently opened Gate of Truth. Anya paid no price for this, implicitly because Truth recognizes that she was forced to cross the line at an age where she lacks the mental capacity to understand why the line exists in the first place.
  • Twilight has no qualms about abandoning anyone he was in some kind of relationship with after completing a mission. He makes an exception for Anya after learning that she was raised to be a Human Sacrifice, explicitly planning to take her with him to Creta once Operation STRIX is completed.
  • Despite being somewhat at odds with him due to him being from the military, Twilight does save Hughes when he sees him being attacked by Envy and was ready to offer extraction to Creta.
• Foreshadowing: When Lust returns from a mission she finds Envy and Gluttony in quite a state after one of the lab animals they were holding escaped with Gluttony saying it was as if the dog could predict what was going to happen.
• Frame-Up: The WISE agent Stirrup is implied to have been framed for a failed bombing by Envy impersonating him.
• Friend to All Children: Lloyd has a protective streak towards children due to his past and his main motivation for becoming a spy is to create a world where they won’t have to be dragged into war. Because of this, he also serves as an another adult guide for Ed and Al (even asking Ed to leave the military) and is planning to take Anya with him once Operation STRIX is completed to protect her from the Homunculi after he found out what they did to her.
• Hero Antagonist: Downplayed, as with the narrative as a whole he's still a protagonist, but Maes Hughes serves as an antagonist for Lloyd early on due to being an intelligence officer who has opposed Lloyd's organization for years and is now grilling Lloyd whenever he can.
• Heroic BSoD: Lloyd suffers this when he sees what Shou had done to Nina (having realized his true character and having rushed to stop him earlier), just staring with a haunted expression on his face and holding the gun (clearly wanting to shoot Shou) as Ed beats down Shou and Al stopping his brother.
• Holding in Laughter: After hearing Yor explain how she thought Colonel Mustang was secretly gay and going on dates with Hawkeye to hide this, Hawkeye is struggling not to laugh.
  • Lust has to hold in a snort of laughter after hearing that Pride got punched by Anya.
• I Have Your Wife: Wrath delivers Gracia and Elicia to the hospital room where Hughes is secretly recovering, clearly indicating that the Homunculus can take his family at any time unless he cooperates.
• Imposter Forgot One Detail: Happens twice with Envy.
  • First happens during the moment when they disguise themself as Maria Ross to kill Hughes, as they forget to include Maria’s mole.
  • Happens again when they are disguised as the now dead Franky, which Twilight figures out due to both legs being flesh rather than one being automail.
• In Spite of a Nail: Anya still punches the son of her father's main target on her father's spy operation on her first day of school. In this case, it is Selim who gets punched because Anya was defending Damien, who Selim was bullying. This leads Damian to acquire his crush on Anya, as per canon.
• Interrupted Intimacy: In Chapter 36, after Yor tries to help Lloyd with his stress from recent events, she begins to lean to him, almost as if to kiss him. They're interrupted by a call from Lust, who requests Yor to head to Dublith. It's only after the call ends does Yor realizes that she was close to undressing Lloyd (evident in how one of the buttons of his shirt was in her hand) meansing she was very close to doing the deed with him then and there.
  Yor: WHAT WAS I ABOUT TO DO TO HIM!?!
• It's All My Fault: Lloyd blames himself for Franky getting killed by Wrath.
• Kicked Upstairs: Maes Hughes gets this in the wake of surviving his canon death at Envy's hands, jumping from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general so the conspiracy can trap him in the capital and keep a closer eye on him. Lloyd gets a form of this too for his role in the same circumstances, from a simple local psychiatrist to Bradley's personal psychiatrist.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Pride ends up thoroughly humiliated when he bullies Damian because the words he chose reflect badly on Wrath/Bradley. He ends up being forced to write that he won't be a bully on a chalkboard one hundred times.
• Loophole Abuse: An entirely unintended example, but Lab 5 figured out a way to have an alchemist unlock the Gate of Truth without sacrificing anything to Truth - force someone to do it who isn't old enough to comprehend morality.
• Mistaken for Gay: This was Yor's thought process and response when she was asked about Roy Mustang. Though to be fair, she did state that she had never seen him with any woman on a date other than Riza Hawkeye in disguise. The idea has since gained traction in the Central rumour mill to the point even the Homunculi are convinced.
• Mundane Utility: Bradley uses his Master Swordsman skills to cut and serve a cake in the blink of an eye, which serves the double duty of showing off to the civilians in the room while also discreetly threatening everyone else.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Donovan is a fiercely loyal partisan whose main complaints about Bradley are that his war campaigns are too wasteful of Amestrian lives. His loyalty is so deep the conspiracy decides not to recruit him as he rejects the idea of replacing strong Amestrian soldiers with alchemy.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: When Darius and Heinkel go on the run, Gluttony is tasked with tracking them down via the scents left in the laboratory where they were converted into chimeras. However, the two planned for being tracked by scent and pass through a zoo which throws Gluttony off their trail
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!:
  • Lust burning down the Central Library to conceal Marcoh's research on Philosopher's Stones also destroys all the Eden Academy records stored there, after the other homunculi learn that someone got a perfect score on the alchemy exam (and thus is a potential sacrifice), but before they could look through the files to figure out who.
  • The conspiracy disassembles Hughes's personally trained unit of spy hunters in order to isolate him inside Central. With them gone, WISE is suddenly able to operate much more effectively in Central as the new counter-intelligence agents are far less skilled.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Hughes, delirious from exhaustion and blood loss, lets the following slip just before he slides into unconsciousness while riding to the hospital:
  Hughes: (to Lloyd, who is driving the car) "Thank you, Agent Twilight..."
• Oh, Crap!: Lloyd and Franky have this once they realize what Shou Tucker made his first talking Chimera from and that he would do it again with Nina, causing Lloyd to rush out towards their house to try to save her. Tragically, it was too late for him to do so.
• OOC Is Serious Business:
  • Lloyd does care for Anya and Yor, but Twilight still plans to leave them after Operation STRIX is completed. After learning that Anya was involved in the Fifth Laboratory and was intended to be used to create a Philosopher's stone, though, Twilight immediately makes plans to take Anya with him once the mission is complete.
  • Roy realizes that Hughes is in very deep trouble when his friend calls him and doesn't spend several minutes gushing about his wife and child.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Conspiracy run by the Homunculi is this to Lloyd and WISE because they are an Outside-Genre Foe - they're a fantasy Apocalypse Cult who happen to be opposed by the protagonist of a Spy Fiction story. Notably, his entire plan to avoid scrutiny by the government was ruined through no fault of his own because Lust recognized Anya as a survivor from Lab 5 and had already informed Father about this.
• Outside-Genre Foe: Anything related to Alchemy is this for the SPY×FAMILY cast - except for Anya and to a lesser degree Yor and Yuri, they're mostly realistic characters from a Spy Fiction setting, while Alchemists use what is best described as magic, and the Homunculi are flat-out superhuman. Lloyd's encounters with Scar and the Homunculi highlight this, as all he can really do is futilely shoot at them or run.
• Paranoia Gambit: Lloyd is well aware he's being watched by Envy and that the Homunculus could be any person or creature he sees. Envy delights at how stressed this makes the man, because even when the Homunculus isn't actually present the thought of Envy watching keeps his target in line.
• Precision F-Strike: After managing to learn how the Philosopher’s Stone is made, Lloyd delivers one:
  Lloyd: I fucking hate alchemy.
• Psychic Radar: Anya's telepathy allows her to instantly identify the homunculi because their Philosopher's Stones make them dozens or hundreds of minds (most of them extremely unhappy about their present circumstances) in one body. Wrath, naturally, does not have this effect, though she has identified him as a Homunculus by listening to Pride's thoughts.
• The Purge: After Hughes is Kicked Upstairs, all of his trusted subordinates and agents are quietly reassigned to posts scattered across Amestris in order to isolate him in Central. This has the knock-on effect of removing the best spy hunters from Central, giving WISE room to act they previously lacked.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ross delivers one to Izumi Curtis after learning she kicked out Ed and Al once she learned they committed human transmutation, calling her out on how she regardless of her intentions, this was an incredibly cruel thing to do to a pair of orphaned kids who had just been crippled for life, especially since they clearly loved her.
• Right Makes Might: In chapter 39, Scar fights and kills an agent of the Garden who had taken a young Ishvalan boy hostage to draw him out. He credits this as the reason he won, as the assassin's only motivation was wanting the prestige of killing the man who survived the Thorn Princess, while Scar's goal was to save the boy.
• Rule of Symbolism: As in canon, Truth exacts a price from whoever performs human transmutation based on why they performed said act, even if they were forced to. Anya lost nothing to them because she isn't at the intellectual age to understand the consequences of said action.
• Spy Speak: When Control manages to slip her tail and observe Twilight on a walk with his daughter, Anya detects her and leads her father into a conversation where he can give out the emergency code words for "I am burned", "I am being watched", and "Purge of local cell unlikely" for Sylvia to hear.
• Superweapon Surprise: Deploying State Alchemists against Ishval served as this as few people outside Amestris understood just how dangerous battlefield alchemy could be. Donovan believes revealing them for something as minor as an internal revolt was a waste as the surprise could have been used to crush an actual enemy nation instead.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The Homunculi often argue and snipe at each other but still largely collaborate. That doesn't stop them taking petty pleasure in getting one over on each other, like Wrath forcing Pride to continue attending school to the latter's shock.
• Team Member in the Adaptation: Jerso and Zampano join Greed's in this story, though they still wind up traveling with Alphonse.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Lust has taken a direct interest in Yor, both for her lethality and her potential as a lover.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 28 - The Fifth Laboratory. Twilight infiltrates the Fifth Laboratory concurrently with the Elrics, and before he is forced to retreat, finds out that Anya was a former test subject there.
  • Chapter 31 - Equivalent Exchange. Just as Envy is about to kill Hughes, Lloyd intervenes and manages to rescue his neighbor. Unfortunately for Twilight, though, Bradley finds Frankie and has him dealt with.
  • Chapter 42 - Again In an effort to protect Alphonse from Fuhrer King Bradley, Izumi Curtis gets killed.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Zigzagged: While Truth doesn’t take anything from Anya when her Gate of Truth is opened (thus sparing her from the injuries other alchemists had suffered), it makes it clear that it only did this because she was too young to understand what she did was taboo. Children who do know and commit it anyway are fair game.
• You Are Too Late: A truly tragic example of this, as Lloyd is forced to see that he was too late to save Nina from being used by her father.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Handler's reaction when Nightfall passes along Twilight's message that Hughes, who has been a colossal thorn in her side, wants to defect from Amestris