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prose_alchemistTitle: Blood Ties (13/14: Reunion)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for fantasy violence and blood.
Characters: A whopping big ensemble across two worlds, although the strongest focus is on Ed.
Setting: First anime. Same timeframe as CoS, two years after the end of the series.
Summary: Alternative to Conqueror of Shamballa. An old enemy plunges Ed into the dark secrets of his new world, linked to the alchemy he thought lost to him—while in Amestris, Al faces a life-or-death choice. Will the nightmare Ed is drawn into provide the key to both their fates?
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I’m just playing with them.
“Brother!”
The piercing scream awakened Winry from an illicit sleep at Al’s bedside—for in spite of her promise to monitor his breathing, she had begun to doze unknowingly after the exhausting fear and grief of the day. As her eyes blearily opened, she felt a slight, insistent weight press against her, almost falling into her lap.
She blinked her vision into focus. Al was standing beside her chair, gasping, frantic, clutching her shoulders.
Al was standing.
A sharp gasp fluttered from Winry’s lungs, and she instinctively reached out to put supportive arms around the boy. His rail-thin body was quivering with more than a surge of emotion, and he leaned into her heavily as she held him; yet he was out of his bed and standing on his feet, when a mere few hours earlier, he had hardly possessed strength enough to breathe.
General Mustang was sitting on the other side of the room, and Winry noticed the way his hand was frozen halfway to the pocket that held his gloves. There was still confused astonishment on his face, but he had registered that there was apparently no danger. His glance shifted to the doorway as Izumi and Sig, and then Mason, and finally Major Hawkeye crowded into the bedroom, each halting in wonder as they too saw the sudden change in Al’s condition.
“What—?” Winry stammered, her gaze traveling up and down Al’s no-longer-bedridden figure in baffled wonderment.
“Ed! He’s come back!” Al shrilled wildly at her. “Brother is back!”
He was brimming with an excitement that almost bordered on panic. His eyes were fever-bright, and Winry could feel his heart hammering as he leaned against her.
Maybe he was confused, not fully awake. Maybe he had dreamed of Ed again…
Yet a mere dream would not have given him the renewed physical strength to sail out of bed and pounce on her, to cling to her so fiercely.
Then Winry began shaking—because she knew.
Izumi provided the clear head the moment required. She strode forward firmly and turned Al to face her, gripping his shoulders as she looked into his eyes.
“You know?” she asked simply.
“Yes.” Al caught his breath, his eyes suddenly brimming, a hundred emotions chasing themselves across his expression. “The missing part of me is inside me again. I can feel it. I’m not dying anymore. My soul is healed, and I… I remember. I remember everything.”
It was true. All of it was there to be read in Al’s face. His body was still a child’s, but he was not the lost and bewildered boy they had known since Ed’s disappearance. Behind his intent, shining eyes was the Al who had been strengthened by his years within steel, the Al who knew himself fully—and knew the full meaning of his brother’s love and sacrifice.
For a moment, there was a breathless silence in the room.
Then, downstairs, the telephone began to ring.
Edward awakened slowly, drifting up from a peaceful darkness, and the first thing he felt was soft warmth.
His senses gradually checked in. There was a quiet stillness around him, and familiar smells, although he couldn’t quite identify them. All they meant to his reluctantly roused subconscious was someplace safe, and for the moment, that was enough to know. He felt no hurry to part with this untroubled rest.
It took some time for the memories to connect with his brain—but when they did, they slammed down hard and fast.
His father, and Envy, and Noa… and the Gate.
As his heart gave a sudden lurch, his eyes shot open. He remembered hungry obsidian creatures swarming over him, his automail arm being torn from its socket—
Three inches below his chin, a steel hand was resting on his bare chest. It shone with polished newness, as did the arm it was attached to… and that arm was very much attached to him.
In a haze of wonderment, he exerted the effort of moving the hand, and its fingers clenched in response to his will. It was a little bit stiff, not yet broken in—but the feel of its gifted workmanship was as familiar as his own flesh.
He suddenly felt himself begin to tremble, inside and out.
Winry…
Now he knew the aromas in the air. There was only one place he had ever known to possess that curious mélange of spiced apples, machine oil, and old books.
This was Resembool, and the home of the Rockbells, and the very bedroom where he had spent a large part of his childhood.
Even as his half-awake mind reeled with that discovery, he felt a double shock in the realization that he was not alone. His bandaged flesh hand was clasped tightly in the hand of another; but the fingers entwined with his own were not made of rough leather. They were soft, and warm, and oddly small.
Ed swallowed hard and turned his head, to find himself looking into the soft brown eyes of his brother.
Alphonse.
He was years younger than he should have been, and he looked thin and pale, as if he had been ill—but these things could not even begin to disguise him from the brother who loved him, who had cherished his face in memory for seven years. It was Al, warm and alive in his own flesh and blood, and he smiled crookedly as his eyes brimmed with tears.
Shaking, Ed struggled to sit up, with a choked sound that managed to vaguely resemble his brother’s name. “Al…”
And that was where his words began and ended, because Al flung himself at Ed, clinging to his neck and all but crawling into his lap.
“Brother!”
Overwhelmed, Ed wrapped arms of flesh and steel around Al’s small but blessedly living body, and the emotions became too much to contain. He laid his head on Al’s shoulder, clutching him desperately, feeling his warmth and listening to his heartbeat… and he wept.
For ecstatic gladness, and for bitter grief. For the sheer joy of homecoming, and of finding Al at his side, no longer imprisoned in steel. For five years of mutual pain and struggle, and the two years they had not shared, and the sins that were the cause of it all. For the horror and guilt of the things he had experienced as a dhampir. For the other world that suffered for alchemists’ crimes against nature, and the terrible truth he was sent back to bring to light. For their father, and for Noa.
Al cried just as freely, his wet tears on Ed’s shoulder as precious as jewels. He petted Ed’s hair and murmured soft words of comfort.
“You’re home, Brother. It’s okay. It’s over. I won’t ever let you go again. You’re home.”
Ed thought if he could just hold Al and hear those words for days, he might finally start to believe it was true.
Eventually, Ed pulled Al back from him and shamelessly indulged his need to touch, to ground himself in the reality of his brother’s physical presence. As a blind man would, he traced Al’s face, fingertips gently exploring his nose and lips and eyelids. He ruffled Al’s hair—a shade or two darker now than he remembered. He felt Al’s hands, squeezing his fingers, rubbing the lines of his palms.
Al responded in kind; and when he touched the new automail arm and the old scars around its port, finally able to feel with his own hands the heavy burden of Ed’s sacrifice for him, he cried again. Then it was Ed who whispered soothingly, and the act of giving comfort quieted his own emotions far more than receiving it ever could have.
He was hesitantly beginning to accept what his heart and senses were telling him. This was no dream or illusion. He was home, and he was with Al again… and although the price of this gift was more than he could ever repay, he already knew where he should at least begin to try.
At long last, when that first flood of tears was spent, the brothers sat talking through the night. They told each other everything of the last two years of their lives, leaving nothing out. In the process, each had occasion to weep a little more: Ed when he heard of the unnatural illness that had almost cost Al his body or even his life, and Al when he learned of Ed’s dark suffering and their father’s self-sacrifice.
But all of those things were past now, and could never truly hurt them again.
Al was also able to fill in the gaps in Ed’s understanding of exactly what happened after his return. Evidently the Gate had disgorged him there in Resembool, on the nearby hillside where their childhood home once stood—a telling fact that made Ed squirm with a sort of embarrassment, although Al just smiled knowingly and made no comment on it. In any case, Ed was found there with his automail arm missing, still covered in the dust and dried blood of his last battle in the other world, although the only wounds seen on him were the punctures he had made in his own hand. He was taken to the Rockbell home, where he lay unconscious for another two days in deep physical and mental shock. Al didn’t say it in so many words, but Ed rather guiltily gathered there had been some fears about whether he would wake up at all.
Winry, of course, had held her fear at bay by working. Still tucked away in the workshop were an automail arm and leg she had designed for Ed, and she spent anxious hours fussing over them, adjusting and calibrating them until they were perfect. These were the new limbs that were now attached to his body.
Ed couldn’t resist a smile as Al described the familiar way Winry covered her emotions, with a furious rant about his turning up on the doorstep without his arm again… but when he thought of the way his old arm was lost, it wasn’t funny at all.
“I still don’t understand,” Al said pensively from his perch on the edge of the bedside chair, as Ed was finally concluding his long and painful story with the horrific account of his passage through the Gate. “How did you get away from those monsters there?”
Sitting in the middle of the bed, dressed only in his shorts and with his long gold hair unbraided, Ed drew his knees up to his chest. A shadow passed through his eyes, and he found himself not quite able to meet Al’s gaze.
“I still don’t really know, except—I wasn’t alone. Something fought them back.” He closed his eyes. “I think… it was Dad.”
“What?” Al breathed.
“I felt him, Al. It was kind of like the way I felt your soul there, when I traded my arm to put you in the armor.” Ed glanced up from beneath his bangs with a dark expression. “I think a part of Dad is still inside the Gate.”
Sudden tears filled Al’s eyes. “Oh, no…”
“Don’t, Al,” Ed replied firmly. “I don’t understand it, but somehow, he made me know he wanted it this way. Who knows… Maybe he’s found the immortality he always wanted there. Maybe from the inside out, he’ll be able to learn about the Gate in ways we could never imagine—even find some way to use it.” He smiled wanly. “I wouldn’t even be completely surprised if… if we see him again one day.”
If the words had been anything less than absolutely sincere, Ed knew his revelation would have haunted Al forever; but he truly meant what he said, and Al sensed that. The younger brother still looked troubled, but he relaxed just a little, dropping his gaze.
“Why have so many people been hurt for us?” he pondered sadly.
The question did not seek a reply from Ed, but he gave one anyway, shrugging wearily. “I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know—but I do know this. We’ll never atone for what we’ve done if we just go on trying to make things the way we want them. We’ve grown up now, and it’s time to start thinking about something more than ourselves.”
“But what about your arm and leg?” Al queried in dismay. “I promised I’d get them back for you.”
“Al, you did keep that promise. I had them back for a little while, after you used the Philosopher’s Stone to save me.” Ed gave Al a feeble grin. “I was the idiot who lost them again.”
“But that happened when you brought me back,” Al protested. “That means this time your leg is my fault, too…”
“Stop it.” Ed reached over to grasp Al’s hand with flesh fingers. “We’re not gonna do this—never again. If we keep trying to make everything perfect, we’ll always be stuck in this vicious cycle of sacrifices, and more people than just ourselves will keep getting hurt. In the end, someone has to pay the price for what we did… and this is a price I can live with.” He smiled sadly, gazing down at his automail hand. “Besides, if I want to teach other alchemists the price of human transmutation… it’s just as well that I can show them what I lost.”
A look of faint distress passed over Al’s face. “Then you’re really going through with it?”
“Of course I am. I owe that to Noa.” Ed closed his eyes and sighed, his steel fingers clenching. “So if you really want to do something for me, Al… help me do this. Help me stop the creation of more homunculi, so her world won’t suffer any more because of alchemy.”
There was a brief silence, and then Ed opened his eyes as he felt Al squeeze his hand more firmly.
“Okay,” Al said quietly. “I don’t think I’ll ever completely give up looking for a way to get back what you’ve lost, Brother. But if this is what’s really important to you… then it’s what I care about, too.”
A fresh surge of gratitude and love filled Ed’s heart. He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Al, to hug his brother tightly.
With a contented little sigh, Al rested his chin on Ed’s shoulder and returned the embrace. Then he stirred after a moment, looking toward the window of the bedroom.
“The sun is coming up.”
Ed flinched back, his heart skipping a beat in a fleeting second of alarm… and then he smiled painfully, realizing how damaged a part of him still was. He had not seen sunlight in days, forced to hide his dhampir flesh from its fire, and that harsh instinct still lingered. Intellectually he knew the sun would not harm him now that he was human again, but he needed to overcome that twitching mote of primal fear.
He took a deep breath, slid himself off the edge of the bed, and moved gingerly to the window on his new automail leg. Al followed him to stand beside him, and Ed was calmed simply by his quiet nearness.
The hills of Resembool lay outside the window in the predawn grayness, unchanged from the picture Ed had carried in his mind for the last two years. Pinako’s chicken coop still stood in the corner of the yard, its roosters waiting to greet the morning. Past the fence lay the neighboring fields and orchards, and beyond a distant stand of trees, the edge of the pond where the brothers had often sparred was just visible. Farther on, forested hillsides bordered the horizon, dark and silent beneath a rosy, cloudless sky.
Together they watched that sky brighten. Ed found himself holding his breath as the sun rose above the far-away trees… and its light washed over him in a wave of gentle warmth. He closed his eyes to the brilliance and stood very still, just feeling it.
“I wanted Noa to see the sun,” he whispered after a long moment. “I wanted to tell her…”
He never had the chance to complete his somber thought. At that moment he was interrupted by the explosive sound of someone kicking in the bedroom door behind him, throwing it open with such violence that it crashed against the wall and rebounded.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was awake?”
Both Elrics nearly jumped out of their skins, turning as one to face Winry with a combination of sheepishness and terror. She stood framed in the doorway, still clad in robe and slippers, her hands planted on her hips—at least absent a wrench or other blunt instrument, Ed noticed with relief.
“Winry,” he breathed, with a feeble smile.
He didn’t bother to say any more, because Winry’s blue eyes started brimming, and he could tell what was coming. As he expected, she rushed across the room to throw her arms around him.
“Welcome home, Ed.”
His face flushed a little, and he gave her shoulders a light squeeze. “Thanks, Winry. For… for everything.” He looked down at his new automail hand, flexing it meaningfully.
Winry leaned back from him, and gave her latest handiwork a misty-eyed smile. “Yeah… well. The welcome-home hug wouldn’t have worked so well if you only had one arm—but don’t think you’re not getting the bill.” She sobered, looking him up and down. “Are you alright? When they brought you here, Granny said you looked like you’d been through hell, but… if you don’t want to talk about it… I won’t ask.”
This tactfulness was a change that caused Ed to raise his eyebrows. In the old days, Winry would have pestered him forever at any attempt to keep his experiences to himself, no matter how painful it was for him to rehash them; but now, she seemed willing to accept no more or less than he wanted to share.
She had grown up, too.
In any event, Ed had already decided he would tell the story to those he knew were in the house then. Winry and Pinako, and the Curtises, and General Mustang and Major Hawkeye, would all hear his tale of the other world—at least to a point. Both he and Al were agreed that he should not even try to explain the existence of doppelgangers beyond the Gate. The facts about vampire-homunculi and dhampirs and blood-fueled alchemy would be hard enough to believe. There was no need to further confuse them with the idea that he had met doubles of people he knew, including some of them… or to arouse heartache by revealing the tragedy that was the other Maes Hughes.
“Yeah, I’m… I’m okay now.” Ed smiled wanly at Winry. “I’m just hungry.”
The mechanic snorted fondly at him. “Still the same Ed. But I guess you would be hungry—you haven’t eaten in two days.”
His smile turned a little paler, as he realized how hard it would be to explain what his sole nourishment had been in the week before that.
Al was perceptive enough to intercede on behalf of his brother’s awkwardness. He latched onto Ed’s left arm just a little protectively, inserting himself into the conversation with a bright smile at Winry. “Is anybody else up yet?”
“Granny’s downstairs making breakfast… and General Mustang is awake, too.” Winry smiled somberly. “I’m not sure he’s even slept at all since we got here.”
Ed returned a wry, bittersweet grin. “In that case, maybe I should tell him a story to put him to sleep.”
“There’s no way I’m missing that.” Winry gave Ed’s metal shoulder an affectionate shove. “All the old clothes you left here are in the drawer. They still oughta fit you, after all…” She smirked and backed away from his simmering glare. “I have to get dressed too. Don’t start talking without me!”
Gleefully Winry ducked out of the bedroom, and Ed grumbled his way over to the bureau, where he found and jerked on a light shirt and pants he used to wear for sparring. Contrary to Winry’s insinuations, they were a few inches too short and tight on him now. Without even thinking about it, he calculated an array to alter the fabric, and clapped his hands together—only to wince at the sudden bite of pain from the bandaged punctures on his palm.
He muttered a curse and wrung his hand, glancing up at Al’s grin with irritated embarrassment. “What?”
“I’m just happy to see things coming back to you so easily, Brother,” Al replied, and when his words left Ed frowning in puzzlement, he nodded at Ed’s hands. “You’re right back to using alchemy, without blood—just like you never left.”
Perhaps Al hadn’t intended it, but the observation sobered Ed a little. He looked down at his hands thoughtfully.
“I guess so,” he murmured, and a humorless chuckle escaped him. “Now that I think about it, somehow it feels like my first transmutation in this world again oughta be big and important… not something so trivial.”
Nevertheless, he touched his clothes and completed the process, redistributing the fabric’s mass to better fit him. The flow of energy felt rich and limitless, so different from the few brief, dark flashes of alchemic power he had drawn from blood in the other world. It was a reassuring and even comforting sensation—as long as he didn’t think too much about the fact that both energies ultimately came from the same source.
Just one more reason to use that gift to give something back.
Hurriedly he ran a comb through his hair and braided it, and then he left the room—with one faintly anxious glance over his shoulder to assure himself that Al was following. Now that he had his brother back, there was a nervous, aching need in him to keep Al close, to never lose sight of him. It was a childish urge he knew he would have to break himself of… but not just yet.
The brothers made their way downstairs, and Edward stopped abruptly at the threshold of the living room. The comfortable space was almost completely unchanged from the way he remembered it, but that was not what gave him pause.
Major Riza Hawkeye sat on the sofa. Although she was dressed attractively in civilian clothes, she still possessed the erect poise of a soldier on duty. Her eyes were focused on the book in her hands; but at the moment, it seemed her main preoccupation was the task of utterly ignoring her superior officer.
Roy Mustang—General Mustang, commander of the Amestrian State Alchemy Corps—was in the middle of the floor. He was pacing back and forth across the rug, his hands passing over one another restlessly, for all the world like…
Like an expectant father.
Suddenly perceiving the brothers’ entry, he looked up. His eyes met Ed’s, and the expression on his face was one Ed would never forget.
Inside the teenager, something cracked open just a little, and for this one moment in his life, he let it break. He strode forward quickly and flung his arms around Mustang’s ribs, seizing the Flame Alchemist in a fierce hug.
Above the top of his head, he heard Mustang utter a rather bewildered and uncertain sound. “Ed…?”
“Shut up.” There was a half-laughing quiver in Ed’s voice, but the sound ended with the suspicion of a sniff as he pressed his cheek a little closer against Mustang’s shoulder. “It was either this or a fist in the jaw, and Pinako doesn’t like fighting in the house.”
He felt a small tremor pass through Mustang, but he couldn’t tell whether it was a suppressed laugh or something else. Either way, the General slowly relaxed. His hands came to rest on Ed’s shoulders and gripped tightly, accepting that rare moment of fragility for all it was worth.
“It’s good to have you back,” he said quietly, with a slight roughness in his voice.
Then Mustang abruptly flinched back a little, letting go. Ed glanced up at his face, saw his awkward expression, and followed his gaze to see that Winry had come into the room. She was standing beside Al, her lips quirking with a wry thoughtfulness.
With an unpleasant jolt, Ed remembered the history between his mechanic and his superior, each of whom held such a vital place in his life.
“Well.” Mustang straightened his spine, folded his hands behind his back, and took a deep breath. “So Ed is home safely, Miss Rockbell… and I had nothing to do with it at all.”
Somehow Ed felt there was a question of some sort in that plain statement, and he didn’t understand it in the least; but Winry clearly did. For a barely-perceptible moment, her eyes glistened, and then a pale shadow of a smile crossed her face. She started forward, sauntering past them a little too casually on her way to the kitchen.
“And this time you’d better take care of him!”
To Ed it was another stray puzzle piece without context, but the words had a profound impact on Mustang. He suddenly looked as if someone had let all the air out of him… or perhaps taken a great weight off his shoulders.
“Oh, and one other thing, General,” Winry added, pausing in the kitchen doorway with her back to them, and Mustang tensed again.
“Don’t keep Major Hawkeye waiting anymore. She doesn’t put up with you just to get promoted, you know.”
The mechanic went on into the kitchen, without looking back at any of them.
Mustang turned white, and then red; and from the sofa, there came the soft sound of a book thudding to the rug.
A sudden wicked grin lit Ed’s face, but before he could think up a properly scathing remark, Al took it upon himself once more to defend other people’s dignity. He seized Ed’s arm and tugged at it, hauling him off toward the kitchen in Winry’s wake. “Come on, Brother, you haven’t seen Aunt Pinako yet…”
The truth was, Ed really didn’t mind being dragged away, leaving Mustang and Hawkeye to sort the matter out for themselves. He knew it was long overdue. Although he still wasn’t sure how much was already between them in this world, their counterparts had shown him something he sensed truly was meant to be, no matter what world they lived in. Whatever the next step was for them, he would be glad to see them take it. He only hoped the future for them here would be brighter… and somehow, he felt it would be.
In the kitchen, he was first greeted by a wave of delicious aromas. He suddenly realized how starved he felt—and for a moment he paused to enjoy that sensation, basking in the way the scents of bacon and eggs and pancakes enticed his appetite. Even a week of feeding on blood, abhorring its foul bitterness and yet craving it uncontrollably, was enough to make him almost forget what hunger for real food was like. He had always hated to feel hungry, but now even that was a vivid pleasure.
Ed felt a little sorry that Al had missed out on a similar sense of rediscovery. After five long years of anticipating every first taste and smell and touch when he regained his body, his amnesia had robbed him of the awareness that he ever missed anything at all. He admitted that regaining his memory had in itself given him an intense new appreciation of his flesh, but—for the worse in some ways, and undoubtedly for the better in others—it couldn’t be the same as the exquisite joy or the unbearable shock they had both imagined and feared he would experience.
So many things had happened in ways Ed never could have expected… but some things were still exactly what he expected.
Pinako stood by the stove, changeless as the Resembool hills, imperturbably puffing on her pipe as she turned the bacon in the skillet. At the sound of Ed’s mismatched steps, the old woman faced him. She calmly took the pipe from her mouth, and her eyes crinkled with a smile.
“It’s about time you wandered back.”
With a sweetly sentimental grin, Ed ducked his head. “I always do…”
Then his stomach abruptly offered up a prodigious rumble, and he reddened.
“And ready to eat me out of house and home, as usual,” Pinako chuckled. “Sit down, boys. Breakfast will be ready in a few minutes.”
Nodding a little sheepishly, Ed turned and moved off into the adjoining dining room—where he and Al found the Curtis family at the table.
Sig and Mason kept their places, but Izumi rose slowly. When she stepped toward the Elrics, her expression was sternly inscrutable, as it so often was; but this time it was Ed who found himself engulfed in a sudden strong hug. Izumi held him tightly, and after only a brief hesitation, he gave her ribs a gentle squeeze in turn.
“Hello, Teacher,” he whispered.
Izumi said nothing. She merely reached out and seized Al’s shoulder, pulling him into her arms as well; as if she needed to hold them both just once, to physically grasp the reality of the fact that they were together and safe. When Ed remembered that Izumi had cared for Alphonse in the past two years, watching him slowly sink deeper into illness, he could understand.
Over Izumi’s shoulder, for the first time in his memory, Ed saw that Sig was smiling.
After a long moment, Izumi let go of the brothers and took a step back. Ed caught a brief glimpse of a trembling smile on her lips… and then she planted her hands on her waist, narrowing her dark eyes at him.
“And just where have you been, Edward?”
It was her patented Teacher roar, and Ed couldn’t resist his ingrained reaction of flinching back in youthful terror.
“I’m sorry, Teacher!” he blurted out. “It’s—it’s a long story—and I’m going to tell it. I have to tell it.” He gulped slightly. “I’d just… like to eat something first.”
His newly rediscovered hunger was not the only reason food was his first priority. It was a practical matter as well. He needed to get some nourishment into his empty stomach before he explained his journey, because he knew the talk of blood and vampires and impaling would kill his appetite.
As always, Izumi knew when to soften. Her hands dropped from her hips, and she gave him a small, rueful smile.
“Sit down, then.”
Mustang and Hawkeye must have been called in for the meal as well, because they soon came to the table. A few minutes after that, Winry and Pinako emerged from the kitchen, carrying a breakfast spread fit for royalty.
For a little while, Edward devoted himself completely to the meal. He demolished three huge helpings of everything that was put in front of him, and he was certain he had never tasted anything so good. Stuffing himself with real, normal food again was a blissful pleasure… but it was also bittersweet. Like the sunrise, he had wanted Noa to feel this, too.
He couldn’t change the choice she had made. He could only honor her last request to him, by bringing the truth about human transmutation to his world—and that task would start with those closest to him.
Al ate just as heartily as Ed, and it was clear that he needed the nourishment just as much. Although his soul was healed, it would still take time for his body to rebuild itself after his long illness. At present he was still thin and fairly weak, and he tired easily, but in a mere two days he had already regained a remarkable amount of strength and vitality. He had even begun to talk about sparring with Ed to restore his fit condition of old. That prospect made Ed a little nervous; it had been seven years since he sparred with Al’s flesh body, and now he was larger and stronger than Al, to say nothing of having automail. He wanted to take things slowly, and if nothing else, assure himself of how much roughhousing his brother could take.
Once again, Al’s mental resilience was his real strength. At seventeen, he was trying to reconcile his recent existence as a twelve-year-old with often-painful regained memories that only caught him up to the age of fifteen. It was understandable that he admitted to being a little confused. Even so, he was handling his predicament with splendid grace, and Ed still suspected he was in many ways the more mature one. Clearly he was embarrassed that his body was too small and too young for his true age—but Ed wasn’t terribly sorry for that. He was glad to think that for the five years Al suffered within empty steel, the Gate had at least given him the recompense of adding back those years to his life. Al would grow quickly enough, and soon this anomaly of his extended youth would no longer matter… and in the meantime, Ed would have the chance to see him become a man, the way it should have been from the beginning.
Ed’s only reservation was Al’s ability to transfer his consciousness into the armor. He had not yet seen it demonstrated, but Al had explained it to him fully, and he already had a feeling it would be hard for him to come to terms with. After everything he went through to put Al back in the flesh, he was terrified that using this gift might one day leave his brother’s soul trapped in the armor again, no matter how much Al assured him that wouldn’t happen.
But Ed felt he had no right to object. After all, it was really his own fault that the armor had become a part of Al’s being in the first place. In his wish to go on making use of it, Al was by no means expressing ingratitude for having his true body back. To the contrary, he valued the unique ability Ed had inadvertently caused him to have, and he wanted it to serve a good purpose.
So Ed resolved to bear in silence the fear he knew he would always feel deep down, every time Al entered the armor.
All of these were things to be worked out in the days and weeks to come. For the moment, Ed needed to focus on the task at hand: convincing the people around him that the story he was about to tell was true.
It was Mustang who prompted him to begin, after everyone had eaten their fill, and cups of tea and coffee had been poured.
“Well, Ed? Are you finally going to tell us where you’ve been for the last two years?”
A sigh escaped Ed as he glanced up over the rim of a steaming mug of tea. “Yes.” He looked around the table, studying each of the curious and expectant faces that surrounded him. “I can tell you now, it’s going to be hard for you to believe—but I need you to believe. I need all of you to understand what I have to do, because… I need your help to do it.”
With that, Edward began.
He started with his last battle against Dante’s homunculi, and his father’s revelations about alchemy in that first unfortunate excursion of his soul beyond the Gate. Those things were important to understand before the rest of the story could be told. Then he uncomfortably skimmed over the fact of his first would-be death at Envy’s hands. At that point, Al spoke up for the only time during the tale, acknowledging his effort to save Ed with the Philosopher’s Stone.
The elder brother resumed, describing his awakening, his restored limbs, and his attempt in turn to bring Al back. He recalled finding himself in the other world again, with steel in place of flesh once more, and only Hohenheim to help him.
Of the two years of futile, uneventful study that followed, there was nothing relevant to say. He summed them up in a few sentences.
Finally Ed came to his last week on the other side… and he told everything, in all its horror and grim wonder. His mortal wounding by Envy as he searched for Hohenheim. Noa’s intervention, and the things he learned from her about vampires and dhampirs. His own transformation, with all the monstrousness it instilled in him. The Hunters, their leader’s fall to madness, his escape from them with Noa. The reappearance of Envy and Hohenheim. The last pieces of the puzzle his father had put in place. The desperate, costly battle that ended with Envy’s destruction.
Noa’s sacrifice to send Ed home, and her final wish on behalf of her world.
There was only one thing Ed left out. As he and Al had decided, he did not reveal that the Hunters were doppelgangers of people he knew. He gave them fictitious names, altering the details of his experiences just enough to hide any hint of their real identities.
And his audience listened: by turns horrified, bewildered, incredulous. There were few interruptions for questions. Each of them was caught up in the long nightmare he described so vividly.
Al looked pained by the retelling, even though he had already heard every word of it and more. Izumi knew enough about the power of the Gate to believe the tale was true; she gripped Sig’s hand in both of hers until her knuckles turned white, her eyes dark and troubled. Winry accepted it all as fact in her implicit trust of Ed, and sat shivering, tears running down her cheeks at several points. Pinako chewed the stem of her pipe so hard she almost broke it. Sig and Mason and Hawkeye maintained a grave silence. Mustang was quiet as well—but a deep frown of disturbed uncertainty took up residence on his face.
“…And the next thing I remember is waking up here last night, and seeing Al.”
Having come to the end of the story at last, Ed felt physically drained. Telling it this time, to a larger audience and in its slightly edited form, had been much harder than his first account to Al alone. He sagged wearily in his chair, cradling in his hands a cup of tea that was still half-full, but had long since grown cold.
“Oh, Ed,” Winry breathed, wiping her eyes. “I never imagined you went through so much…”
“At least something good can come of it,” Izumi said quietly, her eyes hardening with resolve. “You’re right, Ed—it’s long past time for the truth to be told. Even those of us who know the price of human transmutation on this side have always been too afraid and ashamed to speak out. But if I had only told you the real consequences when you and Al first came to me as students… you never would have been hurt.” She winced and dropped her gaze. “This suffering has to be stopped for the sake of our world, much less the one beyond the Gate.”
“Thank you, Teacher,” Ed answered demurely. Then he turned to Mustang, the one alchemist at the table whose reaction he was most anxious for. “What about you, General? You believe the things I’ve said, don’t you?”
Mustang frowned and pushed his coffee cup from one hand to the other, his eyes shifting to the far side of the room.
“I’m… not completely sure yet, Ed.”
“What?” Ed leaned forward, his eyes widening indignantly. “Mustang, I need you to believe me more than anyone else! You’re the top State Alchemist now. I can’t do this without your support!”
“I know that. But that’s why I have to be the one to play devil’s advocate here. Before I do anything to act on your claims, I need to know this information is fact. You’re really sure it’s not possible that…” Mustang hesitated. “That all these experiences you had weren’t just some kind of dream? A vision your mind created to help you hold onto your sanity while you were trapped inside the Gate?”
“No!” Ed snapped, jerking to his feet. “I swear to you, Mustang: it was real. Every word of it happened, exactly the way I told it.”
“Okay—alright.” Mustang made a calming gesture. “I know you truly believe it did, Ed. And I want to take your word. If you could only prove a single part of the entire story…”
Ed sank back into his chair, glancing at Pinako. “Grans, what was I carrying when I was found?”
“Oh… I’m sorry, Ed. The only things on you that we could salvage were a sword and a knife, and a few coins in your pocket. Your clothes had so much blood on them that I… I burned them.” Pinako grimaced. “I hope that wasn’t a mistake.”
“No,” Ed answered quickly. “Most of that blood… it came from me, while I was still a dhampir. That means it might have been an infection risk, so you were right to destroy the clothes—but I’m glad you saved the other things. Will you show me the coins?”
With a short nod, Pinako stepped out of the room.
A thoughtful frown crossed Izumi’s face. “Ed, I’m not sure what you expect those to prove. Even the most novice alchemist could transmute a lump of metal into coins that don’t look like any currency known here.”
“That’s just it. I’m betting they can’t be transmuted.” Ed smiled grimly. “Materials from the other side were impervious to transmutation. If I’m right, those coins and weapons I brought across with me are the only things in this world that alchemy can’t touch.”
Pinako returned with several coins, which she placed on the table in front of Ed. He gazed down for a long moment at the handful of shillings and sixpence. He had carried those bits of pocket change as an afterthought, but they were now among his last surviving mementos of his long sojourn—and potentially his only proof that it had ever really happened.
He selected a shilling at random, and pushed it across the table toward Mustang.
“You’re the one who needs convincing here. You should be the one to try using alchemy on it.”
The General raised an eyebrow interestedly. He unfolded his napkin, and after receiving a nod of permission from Pinako, he drew a simple array on the cloth. Then he placed the shilling in its center, and pressed his fingers to the edge of the circle… and nothing happened at all.
He tried a second, slightly different transmutation, and then a third, but the results remained the same. The otherworldly substance of the coin did not respond to alchemy.
Finally, looking just a little pale, Mustang pushed himself to his feet.
“I’d like to use your telephone, Mrs. Rockbell. I… think I need to speak with Füehrer Armstrong.”
© 2011 Jordanna Morgan
Chapters: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12 :: 13 :: 14 :: Epilogue ::
Author:
jordannamorganArchive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for fantasy violence and blood.
Characters: A whopping big ensemble across two worlds, although the strongest focus is on Ed.
Setting: First anime. Same timeframe as CoS, two years after the end of the series.
Summary: Alternative to Conqueror of Shamballa. An old enemy plunges Ed into the dark secrets of his new world, linked to the alchemy he thought lost to him—while in Amestris, Al faces a life-or-death choice. Will the nightmare Ed is drawn into provide the key to both their fates?
Disclaimer: They belong to Hiromu Arakawa. I’m just playing with them.
“Brother!”
The piercing scream awakened Winry from an illicit sleep at Al’s bedside—for in spite of her promise to monitor his breathing, she had begun to doze unknowingly after the exhausting fear and grief of the day. As her eyes blearily opened, she felt a slight, insistent weight press against her, almost falling into her lap.
She blinked her vision into focus. Al was standing beside her chair, gasping, frantic, clutching her shoulders.
Al was standing.
A sharp gasp fluttered from Winry’s lungs, and she instinctively reached out to put supportive arms around the boy. His rail-thin body was quivering with more than a surge of emotion, and he leaned into her heavily as she held him; yet he was out of his bed and standing on his feet, when a mere few hours earlier, he had hardly possessed strength enough to breathe.
General Mustang was sitting on the other side of the room, and Winry noticed the way his hand was frozen halfway to the pocket that held his gloves. There was still confused astonishment on his face, but he had registered that there was apparently no danger. His glance shifted to the doorway as Izumi and Sig, and then Mason, and finally Major Hawkeye crowded into the bedroom, each halting in wonder as they too saw the sudden change in Al’s condition.
“What—?” Winry stammered, her gaze traveling up and down Al’s no-longer-bedridden figure in baffled wonderment.
“Ed! He’s come back!” Al shrilled wildly at her. “Brother is back!”
He was brimming with an excitement that almost bordered on panic. His eyes were fever-bright, and Winry could feel his heart hammering as he leaned against her.
Maybe he was confused, not fully awake. Maybe he had dreamed of Ed again…
Yet a mere dream would not have given him the renewed physical strength to sail out of bed and pounce on her, to cling to her so fiercely.
Then Winry began shaking—because she knew.
Izumi provided the clear head the moment required. She strode forward firmly and turned Al to face her, gripping his shoulders as she looked into his eyes.
“You know?” she asked simply.
“Yes.” Al caught his breath, his eyes suddenly brimming, a hundred emotions chasing themselves across his expression. “The missing part of me is inside me again. I can feel it. I’m not dying anymore. My soul is healed, and I… I remember. I remember everything.”
It was true. All of it was there to be read in Al’s face. His body was still a child’s, but he was not the lost and bewildered boy they had known since Ed’s disappearance. Behind his intent, shining eyes was the Al who had been strengthened by his years within steel, the Al who knew himself fully—and knew the full meaning of his brother’s love and sacrifice.
For a moment, there was a breathless silence in the room.
Then, downstairs, the telephone began to ring.
Edward awakened slowly, drifting up from a peaceful darkness, and the first thing he felt was soft warmth.
His senses gradually checked in. There was a quiet stillness around him, and familiar smells, although he couldn’t quite identify them. All they meant to his reluctantly roused subconscious was someplace safe, and for the moment, that was enough to know. He felt no hurry to part with this untroubled rest.
It took some time for the memories to connect with his brain—but when they did, they slammed down hard and fast.
His father, and Envy, and Noa… and the Gate.
As his heart gave a sudden lurch, his eyes shot open. He remembered hungry obsidian creatures swarming over him, his automail arm being torn from its socket—
Three inches below his chin, a steel hand was resting on his bare chest. It shone with polished newness, as did the arm it was attached to… and that arm was very much attached to him.
In a haze of wonderment, he exerted the effort of moving the hand, and its fingers clenched in response to his will. It was a little bit stiff, not yet broken in—but the feel of its gifted workmanship was as familiar as his own flesh.
He suddenly felt himself begin to tremble, inside and out.
Winry…
Now he knew the aromas in the air. There was only one place he had ever known to possess that curious mélange of spiced apples, machine oil, and old books.
This was Resembool, and the home of the Rockbells, and the very bedroom where he had spent a large part of his childhood.
Even as his half-awake mind reeled with that discovery, he felt a double shock in the realization that he was not alone. His bandaged flesh hand was clasped tightly in the hand of another; but the fingers entwined with his own were not made of rough leather. They were soft, and warm, and oddly small.
Ed swallowed hard and turned his head, to find himself looking into the soft brown eyes of his brother.
Alphonse.
He was years younger than he should have been, and he looked thin and pale, as if he had been ill—but these things could not even begin to disguise him from the brother who loved him, who had cherished his face in memory for seven years. It was Al, warm and alive in his own flesh and blood, and he smiled crookedly as his eyes brimmed with tears.
Shaking, Ed struggled to sit up, with a choked sound that managed to vaguely resemble his brother’s name. “Al…”
And that was where his words began and ended, because Al flung himself at Ed, clinging to his neck and all but crawling into his lap.
“Brother!”
Overwhelmed, Ed wrapped arms of flesh and steel around Al’s small but blessedly living body, and the emotions became too much to contain. He laid his head on Al’s shoulder, clutching him desperately, feeling his warmth and listening to his heartbeat… and he wept.
For ecstatic gladness, and for bitter grief. For the sheer joy of homecoming, and of finding Al at his side, no longer imprisoned in steel. For five years of mutual pain and struggle, and the two years they had not shared, and the sins that were the cause of it all. For the horror and guilt of the things he had experienced as a dhampir. For the other world that suffered for alchemists’ crimes against nature, and the terrible truth he was sent back to bring to light. For their father, and for Noa.
Al cried just as freely, his wet tears on Ed’s shoulder as precious as jewels. He petted Ed’s hair and murmured soft words of comfort.
“You’re home, Brother. It’s okay. It’s over. I won’t ever let you go again. You’re home.”
Ed thought if he could just hold Al and hear those words for days, he might finally start to believe it was true.
Eventually, Ed pulled Al back from him and shamelessly indulged his need to touch, to ground himself in the reality of his brother’s physical presence. As a blind man would, he traced Al’s face, fingertips gently exploring his nose and lips and eyelids. He ruffled Al’s hair—a shade or two darker now than he remembered. He felt Al’s hands, squeezing his fingers, rubbing the lines of his palms.
Al responded in kind; and when he touched the new automail arm and the old scars around its port, finally able to feel with his own hands the heavy burden of Ed’s sacrifice for him, he cried again. Then it was Ed who whispered soothingly, and the act of giving comfort quieted his own emotions far more than receiving it ever could have.
He was hesitantly beginning to accept what his heart and senses were telling him. This was no dream or illusion. He was home, and he was with Al again… and although the price of this gift was more than he could ever repay, he already knew where he should at least begin to try.
At long last, when that first flood of tears was spent, the brothers sat talking through the night. They told each other everything of the last two years of their lives, leaving nothing out. In the process, each had occasion to weep a little more: Ed when he heard of the unnatural illness that had almost cost Al his body or even his life, and Al when he learned of Ed’s dark suffering and their father’s self-sacrifice.
But all of those things were past now, and could never truly hurt them again.
Al was also able to fill in the gaps in Ed’s understanding of exactly what happened after his return. Evidently the Gate had disgorged him there in Resembool, on the nearby hillside where their childhood home once stood—a telling fact that made Ed squirm with a sort of embarrassment, although Al just smiled knowingly and made no comment on it. In any case, Ed was found there with his automail arm missing, still covered in the dust and dried blood of his last battle in the other world, although the only wounds seen on him were the punctures he had made in his own hand. He was taken to the Rockbell home, where he lay unconscious for another two days in deep physical and mental shock. Al didn’t say it in so many words, but Ed rather guiltily gathered there had been some fears about whether he would wake up at all.
Winry, of course, had held her fear at bay by working. Still tucked away in the workshop were an automail arm and leg she had designed for Ed, and she spent anxious hours fussing over them, adjusting and calibrating them until they were perfect. These were the new limbs that were now attached to his body.
Ed couldn’t resist a smile as Al described the familiar way Winry covered her emotions, with a furious rant about his turning up on the doorstep without his arm again… but when he thought of the way his old arm was lost, it wasn’t funny at all.
“I still don’t understand,” Al said pensively from his perch on the edge of the bedside chair, as Ed was finally concluding his long and painful story with the horrific account of his passage through the Gate. “How did you get away from those monsters there?”
Sitting in the middle of the bed, dressed only in his shorts and with his long gold hair unbraided, Ed drew his knees up to his chest. A shadow passed through his eyes, and he found himself not quite able to meet Al’s gaze.
“I still don’t really know, except—I wasn’t alone. Something fought them back.” He closed his eyes. “I think… it was Dad.”
“What?” Al breathed.
“I felt him, Al. It was kind of like the way I felt your soul there, when I traded my arm to put you in the armor.” Ed glanced up from beneath his bangs with a dark expression. “I think a part of Dad is still inside the Gate.”
Sudden tears filled Al’s eyes. “Oh, no…”
“Don’t, Al,” Ed replied firmly. “I don’t understand it, but somehow, he made me know he wanted it this way. Who knows… Maybe he’s found the immortality he always wanted there. Maybe from the inside out, he’ll be able to learn about the Gate in ways we could never imagine—even find some way to use it.” He smiled wanly. “I wouldn’t even be completely surprised if… if we see him again one day.”
If the words had been anything less than absolutely sincere, Ed knew his revelation would have haunted Al forever; but he truly meant what he said, and Al sensed that. The younger brother still looked troubled, but he relaxed just a little, dropping his gaze.
“Why have so many people been hurt for us?” he pondered sadly.
The question did not seek a reply from Ed, but he gave one anyway, shrugging wearily. “I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know—but I do know this. We’ll never atone for what we’ve done if we just go on trying to make things the way we want them. We’ve grown up now, and it’s time to start thinking about something more than ourselves.”
“But what about your arm and leg?” Al queried in dismay. “I promised I’d get them back for you.”
“Al, you did keep that promise. I had them back for a little while, after you used the Philosopher’s Stone to save me.” Ed gave Al a feeble grin. “I was the idiot who lost them again.”
“But that happened when you brought me back,” Al protested. “That means this time your leg is my fault, too…”
“Stop it.” Ed reached over to grasp Al’s hand with flesh fingers. “We’re not gonna do this—never again. If we keep trying to make everything perfect, we’ll always be stuck in this vicious cycle of sacrifices, and more people than just ourselves will keep getting hurt. In the end, someone has to pay the price for what we did… and this is a price I can live with.” He smiled sadly, gazing down at his automail hand. “Besides, if I want to teach other alchemists the price of human transmutation… it’s just as well that I can show them what I lost.”
A look of faint distress passed over Al’s face. “Then you’re really going through with it?”
“Of course I am. I owe that to Noa.” Ed closed his eyes and sighed, his steel fingers clenching. “So if you really want to do something for me, Al… help me do this. Help me stop the creation of more homunculi, so her world won’t suffer any more because of alchemy.”
There was a brief silence, and then Ed opened his eyes as he felt Al squeeze his hand more firmly.
“Okay,” Al said quietly. “I don’t think I’ll ever completely give up looking for a way to get back what you’ve lost, Brother. But if this is what’s really important to you… then it’s what I care about, too.”
A fresh surge of gratitude and love filled Ed’s heart. He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Al, to hug his brother tightly.
With a contented little sigh, Al rested his chin on Ed’s shoulder and returned the embrace. Then he stirred after a moment, looking toward the window of the bedroom.
“The sun is coming up.”
Ed flinched back, his heart skipping a beat in a fleeting second of alarm… and then he smiled painfully, realizing how damaged a part of him still was. He had not seen sunlight in days, forced to hide his dhampir flesh from its fire, and that harsh instinct still lingered. Intellectually he knew the sun would not harm him now that he was human again, but he needed to overcome that twitching mote of primal fear.
He took a deep breath, slid himself off the edge of the bed, and moved gingerly to the window on his new automail leg. Al followed him to stand beside him, and Ed was calmed simply by his quiet nearness.
The hills of Resembool lay outside the window in the predawn grayness, unchanged from the picture Ed had carried in his mind for the last two years. Pinako’s chicken coop still stood in the corner of the yard, its roosters waiting to greet the morning. Past the fence lay the neighboring fields and orchards, and beyond a distant stand of trees, the edge of the pond where the brothers had often sparred was just visible. Farther on, forested hillsides bordered the horizon, dark and silent beneath a rosy, cloudless sky.
Together they watched that sky brighten. Ed found himself holding his breath as the sun rose above the far-away trees… and its light washed over him in a wave of gentle warmth. He closed his eyes to the brilliance and stood very still, just feeling it.
“I wanted Noa to see the sun,” he whispered after a long moment. “I wanted to tell her…”
He never had the chance to complete his somber thought. At that moment he was interrupted by the explosive sound of someone kicking in the bedroom door behind him, throwing it open with such violence that it crashed against the wall and rebounded.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was awake?”
Both Elrics nearly jumped out of their skins, turning as one to face Winry with a combination of sheepishness and terror. She stood framed in the doorway, still clad in robe and slippers, her hands planted on her hips—at least absent a wrench or other blunt instrument, Ed noticed with relief.
“Winry,” he breathed, with a feeble smile.
He didn’t bother to say any more, because Winry’s blue eyes started brimming, and he could tell what was coming. As he expected, she rushed across the room to throw her arms around him.
“Welcome home, Ed.”
His face flushed a little, and he gave her shoulders a light squeeze. “Thanks, Winry. For… for everything.” He looked down at his new automail hand, flexing it meaningfully.
Winry leaned back from him, and gave her latest handiwork a misty-eyed smile. “Yeah… well. The welcome-home hug wouldn’t have worked so well if you only had one arm—but don’t think you’re not getting the bill.” She sobered, looking him up and down. “Are you alright? When they brought you here, Granny said you looked like you’d been through hell, but… if you don’t want to talk about it… I won’t ask.”
This tactfulness was a change that caused Ed to raise his eyebrows. In the old days, Winry would have pestered him forever at any attempt to keep his experiences to himself, no matter how painful it was for him to rehash them; but now, she seemed willing to accept no more or less than he wanted to share.
She had grown up, too.
In any event, Ed had already decided he would tell the story to those he knew were in the house then. Winry and Pinako, and the Curtises, and General Mustang and Major Hawkeye, would all hear his tale of the other world—at least to a point. Both he and Al were agreed that he should not even try to explain the existence of doppelgangers beyond the Gate. The facts about vampire-homunculi and dhampirs and blood-fueled alchemy would be hard enough to believe. There was no need to further confuse them with the idea that he had met doubles of people he knew, including some of them… or to arouse heartache by revealing the tragedy that was the other Maes Hughes.
“Yeah, I’m… I’m okay now.” Ed smiled wanly at Winry. “I’m just hungry.”
The mechanic snorted fondly at him. “Still the same Ed. But I guess you would be hungry—you haven’t eaten in two days.”
His smile turned a little paler, as he realized how hard it would be to explain what his sole nourishment had been in the week before that.
Al was perceptive enough to intercede on behalf of his brother’s awkwardness. He latched onto Ed’s left arm just a little protectively, inserting himself into the conversation with a bright smile at Winry. “Is anybody else up yet?”
“Granny’s downstairs making breakfast… and General Mustang is awake, too.” Winry smiled somberly. “I’m not sure he’s even slept at all since we got here.”
Ed returned a wry, bittersweet grin. “In that case, maybe I should tell him a story to put him to sleep.”
“There’s no way I’m missing that.” Winry gave Ed’s metal shoulder an affectionate shove. “All the old clothes you left here are in the drawer. They still oughta fit you, after all…” She smirked and backed away from his simmering glare. “I have to get dressed too. Don’t start talking without me!”
Gleefully Winry ducked out of the bedroom, and Ed grumbled his way over to the bureau, where he found and jerked on a light shirt and pants he used to wear for sparring. Contrary to Winry’s insinuations, they were a few inches too short and tight on him now. Without even thinking about it, he calculated an array to alter the fabric, and clapped his hands together—only to wince at the sudden bite of pain from the bandaged punctures on his palm.
He muttered a curse and wrung his hand, glancing up at Al’s grin with irritated embarrassment. “What?”
“I’m just happy to see things coming back to you so easily, Brother,” Al replied, and when his words left Ed frowning in puzzlement, he nodded at Ed’s hands. “You’re right back to using alchemy, without blood—just like you never left.”
Perhaps Al hadn’t intended it, but the observation sobered Ed a little. He looked down at his hands thoughtfully.
“I guess so,” he murmured, and a humorless chuckle escaped him. “Now that I think about it, somehow it feels like my first transmutation in this world again oughta be big and important… not something so trivial.”
Nevertheless, he touched his clothes and completed the process, redistributing the fabric’s mass to better fit him. The flow of energy felt rich and limitless, so different from the few brief, dark flashes of alchemic power he had drawn from blood in the other world. It was a reassuring and even comforting sensation—as long as he didn’t think too much about the fact that both energies ultimately came from the same source.
Just one more reason to use that gift to give something back.
Hurriedly he ran a comb through his hair and braided it, and then he left the room—with one faintly anxious glance over his shoulder to assure himself that Al was following. Now that he had his brother back, there was a nervous, aching need in him to keep Al close, to never lose sight of him. It was a childish urge he knew he would have to break himself of… but not just yet.
The brothers made their way downstairs, and Edward stopped abruptly at the threshold of the living room. The comfortable space was almost completely unchanged from the way he remembered it, but that was not what gave him pause.
Major Riza Hawkeye sat on the sofa. Although she was dressed attractively in civilian clothes, she still possessed the erect poise of a soldier on duty. Her eyes were focused on the book in her hands; but at the moment, it seemed her main preoccupation was the task of utterly ignoring her superior officer.
Roy Mustang—General Mustang, commander of the Amestrian State Alchemy Corps—was in the middle of the floor. He was pacing back and forth across the rug, his hands passing over one another restlessly, for all the world like…
Like an expectant father.
Suddenly perceiving the brothers’ entry, he looked up. His eyes met Ed’s, and the expression on his face was one Ed would never forget.
Inside the teenager, something cracked open just a little, and for this one moment in his life, he let it break. He strode forward quickly and flung his arms around Mustang’s ribs, seizing the Flame Alchemist in a fierce hug.
Above the top of his head, he heard Mustang utter a rather bewildered and uncertain sound. “Ed…?”
“Shut up.” There was a half-laughing quiver in Ed’s voice, but the sound ended with the suspicion of a sniff as he pressed his cheek a little closer against Mustang’s shoulder. “It was either this or a fist in the jaw, and Pinako doesn’t like fighting in the house.”
He felt a small tremor pass through Mustang, but he couldn’t tell whether it was a suppressed laugh or something else. Either way, the General slowly relaxed. His hands came to rest on Ed’s shoulders and gripped tightly, accepting that rare moment of fragility for all it was worth.
“It’s good to have you back,” he said quietly, with a slight roughness in his voice.
Then Mustang abruptly flinched back a little, letting go. Ed glanced up at his face, saw his awkward expression, and followed his gaze to see that Winry had come into the room. She was standing beside Al, her lips quirking with a wry thoughtfulness.
With an unpleasant jolt, Ed remembered the history between his mechanic and his superior, each of whom held such a vital place in his life.
“Well.” Mustang straightened his spine, folded his hands behind his back, and took a deep breath. “So Ed is home safely, Miss Rockbell… and I had nothing to do with it at all.”
Somehow Ed felt there was a question of some sort in that plain statement, and he didn’t understand it in the least; but Winry clearly did. For a barely-perceptible moment, her eyes glistened, and then a pale shadow of a smile crossed her face. She started forward, sauntering past them a little too casually on her way to the kitchen.
“And this time you’d better take care of him!”
To Ed it was another stray puzzle piece without context, but the words had a profound impact on Mustang. He suddenly looked as if someone had let all the air out of him… or perhaps taken a great weight off his shoulders.
“Oh, and one other thing, General,” Winry added, pausing in the kitchen doorway with her back to them, and Mustang tensed again.
“Don’t keep Major Hawkeye waiting anymore. She doesn’t put up with you just to get promoted, you know.”
The mechanic went on into the kitchen, without looking back at any of them.
Mustang turned white, and then red; and from the sofa, there came the soft sound of a book thudding to the rug.
A sudden wicked grin lit Ed’s face, but before he could think up a properly scathing remark, Al took it upon himself once more to defend other people’s dignity. He seized Ed’s arm and tugged at it, hauling him off toward the kitchen in Winry’s wake. “Come on, Brother, you haven’t seen Aunt Pinako yet…”
The truth was, Ed really didn’t mind being dragged away, leaving Mustang and Hawkeye to sort the matter out for themselves. He knew it was long overdue. Although he still wasn’t sure how much was already between them in this world, their counterparts had shown him something he sensed truly was meant to be, no matter what world they lived in. Whatever the next step was for them, he would be glad to see them take it. He only hoped the future for them here would be brighter… and somehow, he felt it would be.
In the kitchen, he was first greeted by a wave of delicious aromas. He suddenly realized how starved he felt—and for a moment he paused to enjoy that sensation, basking in the way the scents of bacon and eggs and pancakes enticed his appetite. Even a week of feeding on blood, abhorring its foul bitterness and yet craving it uncontrollably, was enough to make him almost forget what hunger for real food was like. He had always hated to feel hungry, but now even that was a vivid pleasure.
Ed felt a little sorry that Al had missed out on a similar sense of rediscovery. After five long years of anticipating every first taste and smell and touch when he regained his body, his amnesia had robbed him of the awareness that he ever missed anything at all. He admitted that regaining his memory had in itself given him an intense new appreciation of his flesh, but—for the worse in some ways, and undoubtedly for the better in others—it couldn’t be the same as the exquisite joy or the unbearable shock they had both imagined and feared he would experience.
So many things had happened in ways Ed never could have expected… but some things were still exactly what he expected.
Pinako stood by the stove, changeless as the Resembool hills, imperturbably puffing on her pipe as she turned the bacon in the skillet. At the sound of Ed’s mismatched steps, the old woman faced him. She calmly took the pipe from her mouth, and her eyes crinkled with a smile.
“It’s about time you wandered back.”
With a sweetly sentimental grin, Ed ducked his head. “I always do…”
Then his stomach abruptly offered up a prodigious rumble, and he reddened.
“And ready to eat me out of house and home, as usual,” Pinako chuckled. “Sit down, boys. Breakfast will be ready in a few minutes.”
Nodding a little sheepishly, Ed turned and moved off into the adjoining dining room—where he and Al found the Curtis family at the table.
Sig and Mason kept their places, but Izumi rose slowly. When she stepped toward the Elrics, her expression was sternly inscrutable, as it so often was; but this time it was Ed who found himself engulfed in a sudden strong hug. Izumi held him tightly, and after only a brief hesitation, he gave her ribs a gentle squeeze in turn.
“Hello, Teacher,” he whispered.
Izumi said nothing. She merely reached out and seized Al’s shoulder, pulling him into her arms as well; as if she needed to hold them both just once, to physically grasp the reality of the fact that they were together and safe. When Ed remembered that Izumi had cared for Alphonse in the past two years, watching him slowly sink deeper into illness, he could understand.
Over Izumi’s shoulder, for the first time in his memory, Ed saw that Sig was smiling.
After a long moment, Izumi let go of the brothers and took a step back. Ed caught a brief glimpse of a trembling smile on her lips… and then she planted her hands on her waist, narrowing her dark eyes at him.
“And just where have you been, Edward?”
It was her patented Teacher roar, and Ed couldn’t resist his ingrained reaction of flinching back in youthful terror.
“I’m sorry, Teacher!” he blurted out. “It’s—it’s a long story—and I’m going to tell it. I have to tell it.” He gulped slightly. “I’d just… like to eat something first.”
His newly rediscovered hunger was not the only reason food was his first priority. It was a practical matter as well. He needed to get some nourishment into his empty stomach before he explained his journey, because he knew the talk of blood and vampires and impaling would kill his appetite.
As always, Izumi knew when to soften. Her hands dropped from her hips, and she gave him a small, rueful smile.
“Sit down, then.”
Mustang and Hawkeye must have been called in for the meal as well, because they soon came to the table. A few minutes after that, Winry and Pinako emerged from the kitchen, carrying a breakfast spread fit for royalty.
For a little while, Edward devoted himself completely to the meal. He demolished three huge helpings of everything that was put in front of him, and he was certain he had never tasted anything so good. Stuffing himself with real, normal food again was a blissful pleasure… but it was also bittersweet. Like the sunrise, he had wanted Noa to feel this, too.
He couldn’t change the choice she had made. He could only honor her last request to him, by bringing the truth about human transmutation to his world—and that task would start with those closest to him.
Al ate just as heartily as Ed, and it was clear that he needed the nourishment just as much. Although his soul was healed, it would still take time for his body to rebuild itself after his long illness. At present he was still thin and fairly weak, and he tired easily, but in a mere two days he had already regained a remarkable amount of strength and vitality. He had even begun to talk about sparring with Ed to restore his fit condition of old. That prospect made Ed a little nervous; it had been seven years since he sparred with Al’s flesh body, and now he was larger and stronger than Al, to say nothing of having automail. He wanted to take things slowly, and if nothing else, assure himself of how much roughhousing his brother could take.
Once again, Al’s mental resilience was his real strength. At seventeen, he was trying to reconcile his recent existence as a twelve-year-old with often-painful regained memories that only caught him up to the age of fifteen. It was understandable that he admitted to being a little confused. Even so, he was handling his predicament with splendid grace, and Ed still suspected he was in many ways the more mature one. Clearly he was embarrassed that his body was too small and too young for his true age—but Ed wasn’t terribly sorry for that. He was glad to think that for the five years Al suffered within empty steel, the Gate had at least given him the recompense of adding back those years to his life. Al would grow quickly enough, and soon this anomaly of his extended youth would no longer matter… and in the meantime, Ed would have the chance to see him become a man, the way it should have been from the beginning.
Ed’s only reservation was Al’s ability to transfer his consciousness into the armor. He had not yet seen it demonstrated, but Al had explained it to him fully, and he already had a feeling it would be hard for him to come to terms with. After everything he went through to put Al back in the flesh, he was terrified that using this gift might one day leave his brother’s soul trapped in the armor again, no matter how much Al assured him that wouldn’t happen.
But Ed felt he had no right to object. After all, it was really his own fault that the armor had become a part of Al’s being in the first place. In his wish to go on making use of it, Al was by no means expressing ingratitude for having his true body back. To the contrary, he valued the unique ability Ed had inadvertently caused him to have, and he wanted it to serve a good purpose.
So Ed resolved to bear in silence the fear he knew he would always feel deep down, every time Al entered the armor.
All of these were things to be worked out in the days and weeks to come. For the moment, Ed needed to focus on the task at hand: convincing the people around him that the story he was about to tell was true.
It was Mustang who prompted him to begin, after everyone had eaten their fill, and cups of tea and coffee had been poured.
“Well, Ed? Are you finally going to tell us where you’ve been for the last two years?”
A sigh escaped Ed as he glanced up over the rim of a steaming mug of tea. “Yes.” He looked around the table, studying each of the curious and expectant faces that surrounded him. “I can tell you now, it’s going to be hard for you to believe—but I need you to believe. I need all of you to understand what I have to do, because… I need your help to do it.”
With that, Edward began.
He started with his last battle against Dante’s homunculi, and his father’s revelations about alchemy in that first unfortunate excursion of his soul beyond the Gate. Those things were important to understand before the rest of the story could be told. Then he uncomfortably skimmed over the fact of his first would-be death at Envy’s hands. At that point, Al spoke up for the only time during the tale, acknowledging his effort to save Ed with the Philosopher’s Stone.
The elder brother resumed, describing his awakening, his restored limbs, and his attempt in turn to bring Al back. He recalled finding himself in the other world again, with steel in place of flesh once more, and only Hohenheim to help him.
Of the two years of futile, uneventful study that followed, there was nothing relevant to say. He summed them up in a few sentences.
Finally Ed came to his last week on the other side… and he told everything, in all its horror and grim wonder. His mortal wounding by Envy as he searched for Hohenheim. Noa’s intervention, and the things he learned from her about vampires and dhampirs. His own transformation, with all the monstrousness it instilled in him. The Hunters, their leader’s fall to madness, his escape from them with Noa. The reappearance of Envy and Hohenheim. The last pieces of the puzzle his father had put in place. The desperate, costly battle that ended with Envy’s destruction.
Noa’s sacrifice to send Ed home, and her final wish on behalf of her world.
There was only one thing Ed left out. As he and Al had decided, he did not reveal that the Hunters were doppelgangers of people he knew. He gave them fictitious names, altering the details of his experiences just enough to hide any hint of their real identities.
And his audience listened: by turns horrified, bewildered, incredulous. There were few interruptions for questions. Each of them was caught up in the long nightmare he described so vividly.
Al looked pained by the retelling, even though he had already heard every word of it and more. Izumi knew enough about the power of the Gate to believe the tale was true; she gripped Sig’s hand in both of hers until her knuckles turned white, her eyes dark and troubled. Winry accepted it all as fact in her implicit trust of Ed, and sat shivering, tears running down her cheeks at several points. Pinako chewed the stem of her pipe so hard she almost broke it. Sig and Mason and Hawkeye maintained a grave silence. Mustang was quiet as well—but a deep frown of disturbed uncertainty took up residence on his face.
“…And the next thing I remember is waking up here last night, and seeing Al.”
Having come to the end of the story at last, Ed felt physically drained. Telling it this time, to a larger audience and in its slightly edited form, had been much harder than his first account to Al alone. He sagged wearily in his chair, cradling in his hands a cup of tea that was still half-full, but had long since grown cold.
“Oh, Ed,” Winry breathed, wiping her eyes. “I never imagined you went through so much…”
“At least something good can come of it,” Izumi said quietly, her eyes hardening with resolve. “You’re right, Ed—it’s long past time for the truth to be told. Even those of us who know the price of human transmutation on this side have always been too afraid and ashamed to speak out. But if I had only told you the real consequences when you and Al first came to me as students… you never would have been hurt.” She winced and dropped her gaze. “This suffering has to be stopped for the sake of our world, much less the one beyond the Gate.”
“Thank you, Teacher,” Ed answered demurely. Then he turned to Mustang, the one alchemist at the table whose reaction he was most anxious for. “What about you, General? You believe the things I’ve said, don’t you?”
Mustang frowned and pushed his coffee cup from one hand to the other, his eyes shifting to the far side of the room.
“I’m… not completely sure yet, Ed.”
“What?” Ed leaned forward, his eyes widening indignantly. “Mustang, I need you to believe me more than anyone else! You’re the top State Alchemist now. I can’t do this without your support!”
“I know that. But that’s why I have to be the one to play devil’s advocate here. Before I do anything to act on your claims, I need to know this information is fact. You’re really sure it’s not possible that…” Mustang hesitated. “That all these experiences you had weren’t just some kind of dream? A vision your mind created to help you hold onto your sanity while you were trapped inside the Gate?”
“No!” Ed snapped, jerking to his feet. “I swear to you, Mustang: it was real. Every word of it happened, exactly the way I told it.”
“Okay—alright.” Mustang made a calming gesture. “I know you truly believe it did, Ed. And I want to take your word. If you could only prove a single part of the entire story…”
Ed sank back into his chair, glancing at Pinako. “Grans, what was I carrying when I was found?”
“Oh… I’m sorry, Ed. The only things on you that we could salvage were a sword and a knife, and a few coins in your pocket. Your clothes had so much blood on them that I… I burned them.” Pinako grimaced. “I hope that wasn’t a mistake.”
“No,” Ed answered quickly. “Most of that blood… it came from me, while I was still a dhampir. That means it might have been an infection risk, so you were right to destroy the clothes—but I’m glad you saved the other things. Will you show me the coins?”
With a short nod, Pinako stepped out of the room.
A thoughtful frown crossed Izumi’s face. “Ed, I’m not sure what you expect those to prove. Even the most novice alchemist could transmute a lump of metal into coins that don’t look like any currency known here.”
“That’s just it. I’m betting they can’t be transmuted.” Ed smiled grimly. “Materials from the other side were impervious to transmutation. If I’m right, those coins and weapons I brought across with me are the only things in this world that alchemy can’t touch.”
Pinako returned with several coins, which she placed on the table in front of Ed. He gazed down for a long moment at the handful of shillings and sixpence. He had carried those bits of pocket change as an afterthought, but they were now among his last surviving mementos of his long sojourn—and potentially his only proof that it had ever really happened.
He selected a shilling at random, and pushed it across the table toward Mustang.
“You’re the one who needs convincing here. You should be the one to try using alchemy on it.”
The General raised an eyebrow interestedly. He unfolded his napkin, and after receiving a nod of permission from Pinako, he drew a simple array on the cloth. Then he placed the shilling in its center, and pressed his fingers to the edge of the circle… and nothing happened at all.
He tried a second, slightly different transmutation, and then a third, but the results remained the same. The otherworldly substance of the coin did not respond to alchemy.
Finally, looking just a little pale, Mustang pushed himself to his feet.
“I’d like to use your telephone, Mrs. Rockbell. I… think I need to speak with Füehrer Armstrong.”
© 2011 Jordanna Morgan
Chapters: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12 :: 13 :: 14 :: Epilogue ::
no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 12:43 am (UTC)happyface.
also love Hug The Mustang, and Winry basicaly telling Mustang to grow a pair and get together with Hawkeye. And Mustang's reaction at the end.
not sure I'm going to get used Fuehrer Armstrong though... XD
now if you'll excuse me, i'll be at the pub for lunch, then finish reading this after... my next comment may be a little incomprahencable.... ;p
no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 01:41 am (UTC)