[fic] "Forward the Machine" - Chapter 04
Title: Forward the Machine - Chapter 04
Genre: Action/adventure, AT (diverging from mid-CoS)
Rating: R
Coauthor/beta credit: My lovely livewife mikkeneko and partner in crime sky_dark
Summary: (AT diverging from mid-movie): What if the Thule Society hadn’t opened the Gate on that fateful November 8th? What if Alfons Heiderich had yet to fire his rocket? What if Alphonse Elric was still out there searching? And what if Edward Elric...disappeared...
A/N: Thanks to everyone who reminded me: sometimes you just have to write past the block XD
Previously:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
For the first ten minutes after the dream broke it was all he could do to remember how to breathe. The nightmare sent him careening out of bed, nightclothes and all, and he wandered around for a while in a fog, unsure of what to do with himself, unable to settle. He had no idea at all what time it was. A quick peek out the hall window on his way to the restroom revealed the gibbous moon still fat in the lower half of the pane, a couple embarrassed stars skulking about with it on the horizon. It looked poisonous through the distorted old glass; its bloated yellow face winked at him unevenly, and that was when Alfons realized he wasn’t going to be going back to sleep after all.
That same shade of yellow still lingered behind his eyes whenever he closed them.
He stumbled down the stairs like the living dead and wandered into the kitchen, seeking heat, seeking light. He didn’t like to impose on Miss Gracia’s stove, but mornings in November were rough on the ill and the ill at heart, and right now he was both. Alfons put a small kettle on the boil and hung his head over it, craving steam with an intensity that literally bordered on the physical. There was a twinge in his lungs that refused to be ignored, a sensation like miniature claws were pricking at him from the inside and trying to get out, and there was only one way to scratch that itch.
He wound up hovering over the kettle for a good fifteen minutes huffing hot vapors until the maddening prickliness lifted. Only then did he reluctantly wean himself off. He made sure to clean up carefully and polished the stovetop until it gleamed to assuage his guilt. Hot steam was a luxury because fuel was a luxury - although his ‘rent’ payments fed the house, they did not cover the cost of gas, nor did anyone else benefit from this particular bit of selfishness. He slipped out of the kitchen and padded back through the hall toward the stair, anticipating at least an easier climb because of his transgression. The common room was alight in a wash of predawn grey, casting long shadows up against the wall, and Alfons once again had the eerie sensation of following a distorted image of himself up the stair.
Doppelganger, he thought again, and shivered.
Even though he had not rested well, the morning’s steam had made him feel a little better, so he got dressed and risked a walk down to his old university’s library in search of any literature that might inspire him to work on his latest task for Kessler. Technically he was not currently a student, but the girls who worked there who liked him; or else they had yet to realize that he was no longer enrolled. He told most people he was on ‘sabbatical’, but in reality as an undergraduate, he was not afforded that luxury. It was merely that he did not have the money, nor the time any longer, to stay in a school where the programs denied him time to work on his all-consuming passion. When the aerospace program had been cut, he’d taken the semester off to try and continue privately, first on his own mark, then on the Thule Society’s. But as long as no one noticed that he still flitted about the library’s stacks, he was content to glean what information he could from the university’s stores.
“Good morning, Miss Kiel,” he said to the brunette librarian standing watch at the reference desk, pleased to see that again today she took no exception to his presence. She was a serious, stodgy woman, like his grandmother must have been as a young lady, but Miss Kiel afforded him a sunny smile that he never would have seen from Gran. Miss Kiel’s thick wall of a face lifted and transformed into something remotely human as she watched him pass and Alfons smiled inwardly.
He’d found that it paid to learn the names of librarians, barkeeps, and stewards - they looked on you much more favorably later.
He was also taking a page from Edward’s book, namely, the attitude one needed to profess. Edward had his own special brand of charisma, but first and foremost he was audacious. He walked into any new place like he owned it, like he belonged there as much as the light fixtures. Alfons was still learning, but it did seem to help when he held his head up, looked straight ahead, moved with purpose toward what it was that he needed.
“Act like you know what you’re doing,” Edward had once told him, “nine times out of ten people
will assume that you do.” According to Edward, he’d made his career out of sneaking into strange libraries. According to Edward, he’d also made his career as an alchemist, a Jesus-figure, and occasionally as an occult mad scientist.
You’re the real fetch, Alfons thought back to the echo of Edward in his head. He kept wishing he’d catch sight of the man between the stacks, gliding like a bird of prey circling around a mouse. Edward was a predator when it came to books; Alfons realized that he missed hunting with him.
I keep trying to get rid of you, and yet your ghost just keeps coming back.
That thought brought a darker recollection, courtesy of the nightmare once again. It was starting to bother him just how often that memory was intruding - how real it still felt, despite its clear insanity. It was so vivid that if he hadn’t woken up in his bed, alone in the night, he was actually concerned he might not have realized the dream was just fantasy. The experience was burned into his mind like Fact, the soft details of Edward’s brother’s face as real as thrust equations. Mass flow rate was mass flowing through a plane over time, and last night he’d gone to some indescribable place to speak with Edward’s dead younger brother, who had then conjured a doppelganger of Alfons himself. Right. Of course. It was perfectly logical.
He supposed it was also perfectly logical to make good on his vow to find a rational explanation for what the hell was wrong with him.
Alfons circled into the northeast section of the stacks, although he felt more ridiculous every step he took. The mind ‘sciences’ were not his favorite part of the library and he rarely had cause to set foot there. Experimental philosophy, psychology, whatever they called it - that was all well and good, but a part of him still resented the fact that experiments into ‘the study of consciousness’ were continuing when his own program had been cut. Astronautics, that was real science, provable…he could set up a tincture of two compounds and test how well the resulting fuel ignited, or he could use mathematics to predict how many far away a prototype would fly. The mind had too many variables, too few ways to test it.
He fingered a leathery spine indignantly but stopped when he realized which it was: Principles of Physiological Psychology. Alfons felt guilty. Wundt’s stuff had been all right…all about the mind having root in the physical, reasonable theories which sounded more like actual science. He’d had a few statistics lectures with a guy who’d liked this book, and Ernst had been perfectly nice, dedicated to his discipline like any scientist should be. They’d had a few rousing debates written on note pages during that boring course, since Alfons had nothing better to do than read Ernst’s crazy psychology texts. He’d been rather sorry when Ernst had nearly failed the math course because of it.
Out of belated penance, he thumbed through the intro pages of a few more texts to the right and left like a fisherman casting about, but none of the waters he tested bore a trophy. He knew he should probably give up, he was dawdling - the 500 stacks in the library loomed off to his right, the chemistry and physics research calling his name. But why bother? A snide part of him wondered. He’d read everything those shelves had to offer from front to back already. He’d been hoping his mood would lift once he set foot in the library, formerly his sanctuary, but weirdly he found it was depressing him more. It was just a reminder that he wasn’t that memorable, that no matter how far he’d come no one had noticed he was a drop-out. The Thule were asking for this new design and they hadn’t even tested the one he’d poured his heart into. At least philosophy was something different.
Maybe I can figure what a grade-A nutter I am, then I’ll be glad no one will remember me after I die, he thought sourly. The Interpretation of Dreams stuck out like a sore thumb, as well as Psychology of the Unconscious; indeed, the whole section was obsessed with man’s dreams. Some of the names he recognized from his ex-classmate’s babbling. Alfons flipped through a few volumes by authors he thought he remembered Ernst liking, but the more he looked, the more he realized maybe this field wasn’t the panacea he’d secretly been hoping for.
Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance… yeah, that was exactly what he needed to hear. Alfons closed his eyes and tried to shut it out again, but that yellow was increasing in his mind- and with its rise, growing fear. He didn’t want the doppelganger to be a symbol that Meant something, because deep down, he already knew how he must interpret it.
When he had been five years old, his grandmother had regaled him with stories of the Doppelganger, evil, ghostly doubles of the living, who could slip away and steal your life whole. He was old enough to know better now, but he had lived in terror for a time - not just of catching his ghost sneaking off in the corner of his eye, but of seeing it directly. Because, according Gran, to look your double-walker in the eye was to look at the portent of your own impending death.
And what did he have to show for it? A few botched experiments, a shaky relationship with his ex-professors. Even Alfons himself had understood that maybe his rocketcraft would never bear him as a rider. Too many things remained untested, and now his time was running out. Alfons leaned his forehead against the edge of the shelf, took a deep breath in until it hurt. He’d fantasized about leaving his designs for the team to finish, but without Edward’s brains, would the rest of them ever come close? Edward had been the closest thing Alfons had ever had to a true, honest-to-god peer. They worked the same way, they thought the same way, but the selfish bastard was so obsessed with his own delusions that here he’d gone off with his little Gypsy mystic, chasing after some wild dream-
The memory of ‘Alphonse Elric’s’ similar enthusiasm, so honest, so desperate, cut into him like a knife. Alfons thought about his fury again, and he knew shame.
Because Edward’s ‘wild dream’ had only been to find his family again, as horribly, hopelessly misguided as that might be. Because a horrified part of himself realized that maybe part of the reason he was upset at Edward trying was that it kept Edward from helping with Alfons’s own obsession.
And at least Edward had never tried to hold Alfons back. That was the part that sickened him, now that he was finally awake to think about it. He’d relived that night through the nightmare actions of his doppelganger, and for the first time he had seen what it must have truly looked like…Alfons lashing out in momentary frustration at the last man who deserved it. It wasn’t Edward’s dream to set foot in space. Edward’s dream was likely unrealizable, but misguided or not, Edward had always been the type to see what he wanted and go for it.
That was when Alfons realized the truth.
Maybe the soft sciences were right, and there was a reason his doppelganger had appeared to him in his sleep. Maybe there was a reason he he’d seen his ‘evil’ twin knock Edward down.
Maybe it was time Alfons stopped wallowing in self-pity and snitched another page from Edward Elric.
**
A few hours later, out of the city and in a car headed to the Thule Society’s villa, Alfons found he was already feeling better. Nervous as well …but overall, better about his decisions, his convictions, and the direction things were going to take. Kessler and the rest of the Society had been depending on him these past several weeks to deliver miracles of engineering, no matter how impossible some of their specifications had been on short notice, and Alfons and his team had delivered to the letter. Now the Society was starting a fresh round of demands, but this time, Alfons was ready with some of his own. If they expected him to spend the rest of his natural life working on an entirely new rocketcraft, then he at least wanted to see how the first one performed. No if’s, and’s, or but’s.
He directed the driver to take him right up to the villa’s front entrance, ready to rush in and take no prisoners just the way Edward would do. Unfortunately, the stairs threw a bit of a kink in his plans. His valiant charge was more of a slow, mildly wheezy climb with periodic glances stolen at the door guards. If he started coughing blood here, there would be lots of questions that he would rather not answer.
The two guards closest to the villa’s front doors stepped casually in front and formed a wall with their bodies. They were huge, easily as tall as Alfons was, and their chests were built like beer barrels. More ex-military, Alfons thought with alarm. One even bore a waxy scar in the place where his left cheek should have been, like a candle that had come too close a fire. Both of them were armed.
“State your business?” the non-melting one demanded. The very slight rise at the end of the phrase was the only thing that made it a question. The slight raise of his gun made it a question that Alfons couldn’t refuse.
Alfons drew up to his full height, well aware this was a challenge. Normally he entered through the service doors to the adjoined factory; the upper levels of the villa were private for the owners and the upper echelon of the Society, like Kessler.
“I am the Chief Aerospace Engineer for the Society,” he said, hoping perhaps long titles would impress them. “I am here to see Dr. Kessler on a related matter.” He neglected to mention that he didn’t have an appointment.
The puddle-faced man grunted and quirked up the non-mutilated side of his lip.
“You got proof?”
Again, those musket tips were trained ever-so-casually at Alfons’s kneecaps…security had gone up, his driver had said yesterday; the man had not been kidding around. Alfons reached slightly shaky fingers into his pants pocket to withdraw the contract Dr. Kessler had given him to prove he was commissioned into service for the Thule Society.
Keep it with you, m’boy! Always have to be careful of quality control, the fat little man had said. Alfons wondered if quality control involved removing intruders’ legs.
He offered his documentation to the guard and tried not to stare too obviously at the man’s face. Melting Cheek unfolded the well-worn piece of paper and grunted again, squinted hard at the lines of legal rubbish. Either he couldn’t see well, or he couldn’t read.
“The seal’s at the bottom,” Alfons offered. The guards themselves were wearing it too, he realized with faint shock. A bright, if inexpertly painted version of the wax seal that his contract bore was visible on each man’s front pocket, a shining sun with a sword beneath it, garnished with leaves. The crest of the Thule Society, and something he’d previously only seen used as a gentleman’s signature stamp. Furthermore, there was something nastily regular about their mode of dress. Their dark pants and brown coats weren’t exactly uniform but it looked as though they were attempting to be. The non-scarred one’s pants looked almost like they’d been dyed to fit; the color was uneven in places. Again, quiet discomfort echoed at the back of Alfons’s mind.
Who are these people, that they have their own uniform?!
Melting Cheek made a dangerous rumbling noise and Alfons jerked back to attention. The man was consulting a little black journal book and frowning at his compatriot.
“I don’t have you on the list,” he said.
Alfons was already of the mind that perhaps this had been a mistake. Sure, Edward might be the sort to waltz right on in here and tell the ‘gentlemen’ that of course he was on there, they must simply be looking at the wrong list. Edward also had the devil’s own luck and acted like he wasn’t afraid of anything that heaven or hell could throw at him. Alfons had witnessed personally the time his friend had taken on two drunken self-described ‘troublemakers’ at a beer hall, and each of their fists had been roughly the size of a small boulder. The most insane part of all had been that Edward had won.
“I can go round to the factory then, never mind,” Alfons said. He reached for his papers but the guard pulled them farther away, apparently not done glaring and grunting at them.
“Corporal,” Melting Cheek addressed his companion, who jumped to attention, “take this to the Doctor, let him know that - hey, what’s your name, boy?” He turned to Alfons and skewered him with a glare. Suddenly, Alfons understood the problem.
“My name is Alfons Heiderich,” he said, as slowly and calmly as he could manage. “I came into the Society straight from University.”
Which hopefully explained why he looked so young to them, so they could stop looking at him like dogs scenting out poisoned meat. Sometimes he cursed his round baby face…his height helped some, but at the end of the day he still often had the same problem as Edward. Colleagues didn’t take them seriously because they looked like babes from the breast.
“Now, is there a problem with my papers?” Alfons asked.
“Not as such,” the guard said, but he did not relinquish them. Instead, he passed the contract over to ‘Corporal’ and gave Alfons an appraising look.
“Corporal, run these up to Dr. Kessler.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m going to escort his guest inside.”
I’d really rather you not, Alfons thought desperately. This was already getting way out of hand. ‘Security’ was one thing, but it was starting to scare him the way they were reacting.
“Look, I called for a motorcar to drive me from the station,” he said, trying not to let the concern in his voice show. “One of your men dropped me off here.”
Melting Cheek pushed the door open and urged Alfons through it with a curt wave of his gun barrel. Alfons was now thinking the man suffered from the same form of selective deafness that so often plagued Kessler.
“Your motor pool should be able to verify my identity, I come and go from the factory a lot.”
“But not from here,” the guard said. Alfons tried not to be intimidated by the fact that the man was capable of literally stonewalling him. The sloughing skin on his cheek lent the impression of an impenetrable mask, and that was the side that was currently turned to Alfons.
He ushered Alfons through a cavernous tiled foyer and into a corner close by an ornate staircase.
“If Dr. Kessler wishes to see you, he will be down shortly,” the man said.
“And if he does not come down?”
The guard didn’t answer.
Okay, what would Edward do now? Since thinking like Edward got m into this mess, Alfons thought to himself, trying not to panic. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen armed men before. Surely the guns were for show, they wouldn’t actually use them. He’d shown them his papers, the contract was legit. Edward would tell him they needed to stay calm, he decided, just like the time they had run into some shady characters on the way home. Alfons had been prepared to cut loose and run for it, the way he usually survived such things, but Edward had convinced him they could defuse the situation just by keeping level-headed and ultra alert. Alfons took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and tried to take in his surroundings, look for anything useful or unusual that might help him.
The most immediately salient detail was the EXIT of course; back down the hallway and out through the foyer. That didn’t take much detecting though, since he’d just walked through it. Alfons turned his attention to the staircase. It was one of the fancy ones that split into two at either edge of a landing, each associated with a separate door. Both were closed. Really, the villa was very, very opulent. It looked like the stair’s rails were gilded with some kind of gold-leaf paint, or at least a very effective fake. There were also two doors on the same level he was on, which he noticed belatedly with an inward wince. It was a good thing he wasn’t actually running for his life right now, else he’d probably be dead already. Alfons was still optimistic that this bizarre encounter was going to end perfectly peacefully, and the more he looked around, the calmer he was starting to feel.
He was also feeling like a fish out of water, especially as he took in more details. Melting Cheek wasn’t offering any information, but the fineries of the wainscoting, the staircase’s gilded handrail, even the fancy round reflection mirror on the opposite wall spoke for themselves. Compared to Ms. Gracia’s stripped down, bare-bones home, this place still retained many of the luxuries that other people could no longer afford. It was true that a countryside home this large spoke of Old Money, but those pockets must run deep indeed if no one had thought to sell off the art objects.
There was a noise at the top of the stair and both Alfons and Melting Cheek looked up at the same time. The door on the east side of the landing swung open, but it wasn’t Kessler’s familiar bulk that came striding out. Another tan-and-grey uniformed soldier (he was starting to think of them that way, soldiers) appeared and he was carrying a long wooden pole in both hands.
He turned stiffly and held the door open, gestured to someone inside. Alfons wondered if perhaps he was crippled and that was why he needed the quarterstaff.
All bets were off though, once he saw what was coming behind the soldier. Another uniformed man, this one even burlier, also carrying a pole - and a smaller, dark-complexioned form, literally half the burly soldiers’ sizes, swathed in drab skirts…a woman.
A familiar woman.
NOA! The name formed on his lips before he could stop it, and only the sudden shift of Melting Cheek beside him kept Alfons from giving the word breath and crying it out. He disguised the slip with a calculated cough. Luckily it wasn’t hard to make it sound convincing.
Melting Cheek wasn’t looking at him, though. He was focused on the tableau above with a peculiarly intent look on his face - had his features not been frozen by deformity, he might almost have seemed concerned. Alfons followed the man’s gaze and immediately noticed the same oddity. Despite the gypsy’s slight frame, the soldiers with her gave her space as though she were two times as large. They flanked her like men walking with a rabid wolf, each holding their quarterstaffs in the hand closest to her - caging her with the poles, Alfons realized as the little trio started to descend the stair. Her skirts shifted too far to one side, and the soldier on that flank edged his pole in more toward her. Warding her off.
Alfons surreptitiously pinched himself, just in case, but the pain told him he was very much awake.
Noa’s eyes were downcast at the stairs in front of her and she moved with slow, calculated steps. She looked thinner than the last time he had seen her, there was a certain hollow look to her cheeks that reminded Alfons of what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror, and he wondered in horror if perhaps he was the reason they were directing her with sticks. The tickle in his chest seemed to grow into a flame, a literal guilty ache.
She lived with us for a time…did I give it to her, too?
He knew immediately that he couldn’t acknowledge her. It was a horrible, awful thing to think; but if they were quarantining her like this because she was a consumptive, what hope had he if the truth came out? Alfons tried to turn his face as far away as possible without drawing attention to himself. The Thule did not look kindly on the weak…now he was seeing proof of that for certain.
“Ah!”
He must not have moved fast enough though, or else her vantage point from the staircase gave her a good look at his face anyway, because the gypsy suddenly let out a startled sound. Alfons’s attention immediately snapped back to her, along with everyone else’s in the room, and oh god in heaven, she was staring right at him - Alfons was absolutely sure that she knew him. She stopped dead, like a deer in a car’s lamplight, and the soldiers to either side of her sprang at least another foot away, right up against the grand stair’s railing. Their poles came in to squeeze against her elbows, and the gypsy started - then started to run, hurtling down the stair toward Alfons in a blur of skirts and dark hair. Alfons braced himself as the harpy descended, talons outstretched, waiting to claim his sorry hide as prey.
The men with her reacted instantly, though not quickly enough to grab her before she got a few feet in lead. Alfons watched in shock as they smashed in on her sides as hard as possible with their poles, trying to pinch her between the staves and impede her progress; to his left, Melting Cheek hefted up his gun.
“Don’t!” one of the soldiers called out, but it wasn’t clear whether he was speaking to the gypsy or to Alfons’s guard. Noa continued to struggle between the poles and the two men pinched her harder, to the point where her sides pressed in. Neither of them made a move to grab her.
Is this how they would treat me? Alfons wondered, faintly horrified. Like a rabid animal, like the consumption would spread if they so much as laid a finger to her clothes. Noa made it a few more steps, still focused on him before finally she gave up, panting. The poles on her sides were pressing so hard, apparently they restricted her breath.
Her dark eyes were huge, anguished voids in her face, and Alfons wished he could say he was sorry.
Melting Cheek looked as though he were ready to say something but one glance from Noa’s attendants silenced him.
“Come on then,” the soldier spat at the gypsy and gave her yet another vicious thwack. Noa began moving, once again slowly, but she did not shift her gaze from Alfons. She remained fixated on him as they alighted at the end of the stair, and her attendants began urging her off to one of the side passage. Alfons and Melting Cheek watched the bizarre procession in silence. Melting Cheek looked about as shocked as Alfons felt.
They reached a side door and one of the soldiers unlocked it with a key, threw it open with little fanfare and gestured for her to enter. Noa ducked her head obediently and followed the man’s lead.
Just before she disappeared, she looked back at Alfons over her shoulder and mouthed a single word. Alfons felt his blood run cold.
Melting Cheek turned to look at him and Alfons was acutely aware that he was under the microscope once more. Whatever happened, he couldn’t let on that he’d understood any of that.
“What on earth was that mess?” he huffed, trying for his best Entitled Young Genius impression.
“I thought the Society was for ridding us of gypsies, not coddling their women.”
“Mm.”
The guard did not seem convinced, but at least there were no questions. He looked uneasy but shifted back into his holding position, once again watching the stair, though Alfons noticed this time he held his rifle higher. It was clear there was not to be any more discussion.
Alfons didn’t mind. It gave him time to think. He was no lip reader, so he wasn’t at all sure he’d gotten the message right, but Noa’s last, desperate attempt to communicate had jogged his shocked mind back on course. The last time he had seen the gypsy - outside of his feverish, spiteful nightmares - Noa had been at home with his roommate. Watching the two of them fight silently from the top of Gracia’s stair. Now here she was, being corralled by the Thule Society, possibly stricken with an illness Alfons had given her. Of all the questions whirling around in his mind, one leapt to the forefront, first and foremost. He had no clue what the answer might be, and Alfons was determined to find out.
If Noa was here, where was Edward?
**
The train whistle blew in the distance and he knew he didn’t have much time left. It was still very early in the evening, but Gramma Pinako had ears like a hawk, and he knew once he started the reaction, there wasn’t going to be any going back. He had his suitcase all packed, his brother’s jacket pressed. Kissed Edward’s old bottle of automail lubricant for good luck. Gramma Pinako and Winry were going to be absolutely furious, but if they insisted on believing he was crazy, he might as well oblige them by acting the part.
Alphonse transmuted his locked window open and jumped out into a summer breeze, hit the ground running, and didn’t look back.
Like it or not - next stop, Lior.
Genre: Action/adventure, AT (diverging from mid-CoS)
Rating: R
Coauthor/beta credit: My lovely livewife mikkeneko and partner in crime sky_dark
Summary: (AT diverging from mid-movie): What if the Thule Society hadn’t opened the Gate on that fateful November 8th? What if Alfons Heiderich had yet to fire his rocket? What if Alphonse Elric was still out there searching? And what if Edward Elric...disappeared...
A/N: Thanks to everyone who reminded me: sometimes you just have to write past the block XD
Previously:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
For the first ten minutes after the dream broke it was all he could do to remember how to breathe. The nightmare sent him careening out of bed, nightclothes and all, and he wandered around for a while in a fog, unsure of what to do with himself, unable to settle. He had no idea at all what time it was. A quick peek out the hall window on his way to the restroom revealed the gibbous moon still fat in the lower half of the pane, a couple embarrassed stars skulking about with it on the horizon. It looked poisonous through the distorted old glass; its bloated yellow face winked at him unevenly, and that was when Alfons realized he wasn’t going to be going back to sleep after all.
That same shade of yellow still lingered behind his eyes whenever he closed them.
He stumbled down the stairs like the living dead and wandered into the kitchen, seeking heat, seeking light. He didn’t like to impose on Miss Gracia’s stove, but mornings in November were rough on the ill and the ill at heart, and right now he was both. Alfons put a small kettle on the boil and hung his head over it, craving steam with an intensity that literally bordered on the physical. There was a twinge in his lungs that refused to be ignored, a sensation like miniature claws were pricking at him from the inside and trying to get out, and there was only one way to scratch that itch.
He wound up hovering over the kettle for a good fifteen minutes huffing hot vapors until the maddening prickliness lifted. Only then did he reluctantly wean himself off. He made sure to clean up carefully and polished the stovetop until it gleamed to assuage his guilt. Hot steam was a luxury because fuel was a luxury - although his ‘rent’ payments fed the house, they did not cover the cost of gas, nor did anyone else benefit from this particular bit of selfishness. He slipped out of the kitchen and padded back through the hall toward the stair, anticipating at least an easier climb because of his transgression. The common room was alight in a wash of predawn grey, casting long shadows up against the wall, and Alfons once again had the eerie sensation of following a distorted image of himself up the stair.
Doppelganger, he thought again, and shivered.
Even though he had not rested well, the morning’s steam had made him feel a little better, so he got dressed and risked a walk down to his old university’s library in search of any literature that might inspire him to work on his latest task for Kessler. Technically he was not currently a student, but the girls who worked there who liked him; or else they had yet to realize that he was no longer enrolled. He told most people he was on ‘sabbatical’, but in reality as an undergraduate, he was not afforded that luxury. It was merely that he did not have the money, nor the time any longer, to stay in a school where the programs denied him time to work on his all-consuming passion. When the aerospace program had been cut, he’d taken the semester off to try and continue privately, first on his own mark, then on the Thule Society’s. But as long as no one noticed that he still flitted about the library’s stacks, he was content to glean what information he could from the university’s stores.
“Good morning, Miss Kiel,” he said to the brunette librarian standing watch at the reference desk, pleased to see that again today she took no exception to his presence. She was a serious, stodgy woman, like his grandmother must have been as a young lady, but Miss Kiel afforded him a sunny smile that he never would have seen from Gran. Miss Kiel’s thick wall of a face lifted and transformed into something remotely human as she watched him pass and Alfons smiled inwardly.
He’d found that it paid to learn the names of librarians, barkeeps, and stewards - they looked on you much more favorably later.
He was also taking a page from Edward’s book, namely, the attitude one needed to profess. Edward had his own special brand of charisma, but first and foremost he was audacious. He walked into any new place like he owned it, like he belonged there as much as the light fixtures. Alfons was still learning, but it did seem to help when he held his head up, looked straight ahead, moved with purpose toward what it was that he needed.
“Act like you know what you’re doing,” Edward had once told him, “nine times out of ten people
will assume that you do.” According to Edward, he’d made his career out of sneaking into strange libraries. According to Edward, he’d also made his career as an alchemist, a Jesus-figure, and occasionally as an occult mad scientist.
You’re the real fetch, Alfons thought back to the echo of Edward in his head. He kept wishing he’d catch sight of the man between the stacks, gliding like a bird of prey circling around a mouse. Edward was a predator when it came to books; Alfons realized that he missed hunting with him.
I keep trying to get rid of you, and yet your ghost just keeps coming back.
That thought brought a darker recollection, courtesy of the nightmare once again. It was starting to bother him just how often that memory was intruding - how real it still felt, despite its clear insanity. It was so vivid that if he hadn’t woken up in his bed, alone in the night, he was actually concerned he might not have realized the dream was just fantasy. The experience was burned into his mind like Fact, the soft details of Edward’s brother’s face as real as thrust equations. Mass flow rate was mass flowing through a plane over time, and last night he’d gone to some indescribable place to speak with Edward’s dead younger brother, who had then conjured a doppelganger of Alfons himself. Right. Of course. It was perfectly logical.
He supposed it was also perfectly logical to make good on his vow to find a rational explanation for what the hell was wrong with him.
Alfons circled into the northeast section of the stacks, although he felt more ridiculous every step he took. The mind ‘sciences’ were not his favorite part of the library and he rarely had cause to set foot there. Experimental philosophy, psychology, whatever they called it - that was all well and good, but a part of him still resented the fact that experiments into ‘the study of consciousness’ were continuing when his own program had been cut. Astronautics, that was real science, provable…he could set up a tincture of two compounds and test how well the resulting fuel ignited, or he could use mathematics to predict how many far away a prototype would fly. The mind had too many variables, too few ways to test it.
He fingered a leathery spine indignantly but stopped when he realized which it was: Principles of Physiological Psychology. Alfons felt guilty. Wundt’s stuff had been all right…all about the mind having root in the physical, reasonable theories which sounded more like actual science. He’d had a few statistics lectures with a guy who’d liked this book, and Ernst had been perfectly nice, dedicated to his discipline like any scientist should be. They’d had a few rousing debates written on note pages during that boring course, since Alfons had nothing better to do than read Ernst’s crazy psychology texts. He’d been rather sorry when Ernst had nearly failed the math course because of it.
Out of belated penance, he thumbed through the intro pages of a few more texts to the right and left like a fisherman casting about, but none of the waters he tested bore a trophy. He knew he should probably give up, he was dawdling - the 500 stacks in the library loomed off to his right, the chemistry and physics research calling his name. But why bother? A snide part of him wondered. He’d read everything those shelves had to offer from front to back already. He’d been hoping his mood would lift once he set foot in the library, formerly his sanctuary, but weirdly he found it was depressing him more. It was just a reminder that he wasn’t that memorable, that no matter how far he’d come no one had noticed he was a drop-out. The Thule were asking for this new design and they hadn’t even tested the one he’d poured his heart into. At least philosophy was something different.
Maybe I can figure what a grade-A nutter I am, then I’ll be glad no one will remember me after I die, he thought sourly. The Interpretation of Dreams stuck out like a sore thumb, as well as Psychology of the Unconscious; indeed, the whole section was obsessed with man’s dreams. Some of the names he recognized from his ex-classmate’s babbling. Alfons flipped through a few volumes by authors he thought he remembered Ernst liking, but the more he looked, the more he realized maybe this field wasn’t the panacea he’d secretly been hoping for.
Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance… yeah, that was exactly what he needed to hear. Alfons closed his eyes and tried to shut it out again, but that yellow was increasing in his mind- and with its rise, growing fear. He didn’t want the doppelganger to be a symbol that Meant something, because deep down, he already knew how he must interpret it.
When he had been five years old, his grandmother had regaled him with stories of the Doppelganger, evil, ghostly doubles of the living, who could slip away and steal your life whole. He was old enough to know better now, but he had lived in terror for a time - not just of catching his ghost sneaking off in the corner of his eye, but of seeing it directly. Because, according Gran, to look your double-walker in the eye was to look at the portent of your own impending death.
And what did he have to show for it? A few botched experiments, a shaky relationship with his ex-professors. Even Alfons himself had understood that maybe his rocketcraft would never bear him as a rider. Too many things remained untested, and now his time was running out. Alfons leaned his forehead against the edge of the shelf, took a deep breath in until it hurt. He’d fantasized about leaving his designs for the team to finish, but without Edward’s brains, would the rest of them ever come close? Edward had been the closest thing Alfons had ever had to a true, honest-to-god peer. They worked the same way, they thought the same way, but the selfish bastard was so obsessed with his own delusions that here he’d gone off with his little Gypsy mystic, chasing after some wild dream-
The memory of ‘Alphonse Elric’s’ similar enthusiasm, so honest, so desperate, cut into him like a knife. Alfons thought about his fury again, and he knew shame.
Because Edward’s ‘wild dream’ had only been to find his family again, as horribly, hopelessly misguided as that might be. Because a horrified part of himself realized that maybe part of the reason he was upset at Edward trying was that it kept Edward from helping with Alfons’s own obsession.
And at least Edward had never tried to hold Alfons back. That was the part that sickened him, now that he was finally awake to think about it. He’d relived that night through the nightmare actions of his doppelganger, and for the first time he had seen what it must have truly looked like…Alfons lashing out in momentary frustration at the last man who deserved it. It wasn’t Edward’s dream to set foot in space. Edward’s dream was likely unrealizable, but misguided or not, Edward had always been the type to see what he wanted and go for it.
That was when Alfons realized the truth.
Maybe the soft sciences were right, and there was a reason his doppelganger had appeared to him in his sleep. Maybe there was a reason he he’d seen his ‘evil’ twin knock Edward down.
Maybe it was time Alfons stopped wallowing in self-pity and snitched another page from Edward Elric.
**
A few hours later, out of the city and in a car headed to the Thule Society’s villa, Alfons found he was already feeling better. Nervous as well …but overall, better about his decisions, his convictions, and the direction things were going to take. Kessler and the rest of the Society had been depending on him these past several weeks to deliver miracles of engineering, no matter how impossible some of their specifications had been on short notice, and Alfons and his team had delivered to the letter. Now the Society was starting a fresh round of demands, but this time, Alfons was ready with some of his own. If they expected him to spend the rest of his natural life working on an entirely new rocketcraft, then he at least wanted to see how the first one performed. No if’s, and’s, or but’s.
He directed the driver to take him right up to the villa’s front entrance, ready to rush in and take no prisoners just the way Edward would do. Unfortunately, the stairs threw a bit of a kink in his plans. His valiant charge was more of a slow, mildly wheezy climb with periodic glances stolen at the door guards. If he started coughing blood here, there would be lots of questions that he would rather not answer.
The two guards closest to the villa’s front doors stepped casually in front and formed a wall with their bodies. They were huge, easily as tall as Alfons was, and their chests were built like beer barrels. More ex-military, Alfons thought with alarm. One even bore a waxy scar in the place where his left cheek should have been, like a candle that had come too close a fire. Both of them were armed.
“State your business?” the non-melting one demanded. The very slight rise at the end of the phrase was the only thing that made it a question. The slight raise of his gun made it a question that Alfons couldn’t refuse.
Alfons drew up to his full height, well aware this was a challenge. Normally he entered through the service doors to the adjoined factory; the upper levels of the villa were private for the owners and the upper echelon of the Society, like Kessler.
“I am the Chief Aerospace Engineer for the Society,” he said, hoping perhaps long titles would impress them. “I am here to see Dr. Kessler on a related matter.” He neglected to mention that he didn’t have an appointment.
The puddle-faced man grunted and quirked up the non-mutilated side of his lip.
“You got proof?”
Again, those musket tips were trained ever-so-casually at Alfons’s kneecaps…security had gone up, his driver had said yesterday; the man had not been kidding around. Alfons reached slightly shaky fingers into his pants pocket to withdraw the contract Dr. Kessler had given him to prove he was commissioned into service for the Thule Society.
Keep it with you, m’boy! Always have to be careful of quality control, the fat little man had said. Alfons wondered if quality control involved removing intruders’ legs.
He offered his documentation to the guard and tried not to stare too obviously at the man’s face. Melting Cheek unfolded the well-worn piece of paper and grunted again, squinted hard at the lines of legal rubbish. Either he couldn’t see well, or he couldn’t read.
“The seal’s at the bottom,” Alfons offered. The guards themselves were wearing it too, he realized with faint shock. A bright, if inexpertly painted version of the wax seal that his contract bore was visible on each man’s front pocket, a shining sun with a sword beneath it, garnished with leaves. The crest of the Thule Society, and something he’d previously only seen used as a gentleman’s signature stamp. Furthermore, there was something nastily regular about their mode of dress. Their dark pants and brown coats weren’t exactly uniform but it looked as though they were attempting to be. The non-scarred one’s pants looked almost like they’d been dyed to fit; the color was uneven in places. Again, quiet discomfort echoed at the back of Alfons’s mind.
Who are these people, that they have their own uniform?!
Melting Cheek made a dangerous rumbling noise and Alfons jerked back to attention. The man was consulting a little black journal book and frowning at his compatriot.
“I don’t have you on the list,” he said.
Alfons was already of the mind that perhaps this had been a mistake. Sure, Edward might be the sort to waltz right on in here and tell the ‘gentlemen’ that of course he was on there, they must simply be looking at the wrong list. Edward also had the devil’s own luck and acted like he wasn’t afraid of anything that heaven or hell could throw at him. Alfons had witnessed personally the time his friend had taken on two drunken self-described ‘troublemakers’ at a beer hall, and each of their fists had been roughly the size of a small boulder. The most insane part of all had been that Edward had won.
“I can go round to the factory then, never mind,” Alfons said. He reached for his papers but the guard pulled them farther away, apparently not done glaring and grunting at them.
“Corporal,” Melting Cheek addressed his companion, who jumped to attention, “take this to the Doctor, let him know that - hey, what’s your name, boy?” He turned to Alfons and skewered him with a glare. Suddenly, Alfons understood the problem.
“My name is Alfons Heiderich,” he said, as slowly and calmly as he could manage. “I came into the Society straight from University.”
Which hopefully explained why he looked so young to them, so they could stop looking at him like dogs scenting out poisoned meat. Sometimes he cursed his round baby face…his height helped some, but at the end of the day he still often had the same problem as Edward. Colleagues didn’t take them seriously because they looked like babes from the breast.
“Now, is there a problem with my papers?” Alfons asked.
“Not as such,” the guard said, but he did not relinquish them. Instead, he passed the contract over to ‘Corporal’ and gave Alfons an appraising look.
“Corporal, run these up to Dr. Kessler.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m going to escort his guest inside.”
I’d really rather you not, Alfons thought desperately. This was already getting way out of hand. ‘Security’ was one thing, but it was starting to scare him the way they were reacting.
“Look, I called for a motorcar to drive me from the station,” he said, trying not to let the concern in his voice show. “One of your men dropped me off here.”
Melting Cheek pushed the door open and urged Alfons through it with a curt wave of his gun barrel. Alfons was now thinking the man suffered from the same form of selective deafness that so often plagued Kessler.
“Your motor pool should be able to verify my identity, I come and go from the factory a lot.”
“But not from here,” the guard said. Alfons tried not to be intimidated by the fact that the man was capable of literally stonewalling him. The sloughing skin on his cheek lent the impression of an impenetrable mask, and that was the side that was currently turned to Alfons.
He ushered Alfons through a cavernous tiled foyer and into a corner close by an ornate staircase.
“If Dr. Kessler wishes to see you, he will be down shortly,” the man said.
“And if he does not come down?”
The guard didn’t answer.
Okay, what would Edward do now? Since thinking like Edward got m into this mess, Alfons thought to himself, trying not to panic. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen armed men before. Surely the guns were for show, they wouldn’t actually use them. He’d shown them his papers, the contract was legit. Edward would tell him they needed to stay calm, he decided, just like the time they had run into some shady characters on the way home. Alfons had been prepared to cut loose and run for it, the way he usually survived such things, but Edward had convinced him they could defuse the situation just by keeping level-headed and ultra alert. Alfons took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and tried to take in his surroundings, look for anything useful or unusual that might help him.
The most immediately salient detail was the EXIT of course; back down the hallway and out through the foyer. That didn’t take much detecting though, since he’d just walked through it. Alfons turned his attention to the staircase. It was one of the fancy ones that split into two at either edge of a landing, each associated with a separate door. Both were closed. Really, the villa was very, very opulent. It looked like the stair’s rails were gilded with some kind of gold-leaf paint, or at least a very effective fake. There were also two doors on the same level he was on, which he noticed belatedly with an inward wince. It was a good thing he wasn’t actually running for his life right now, else he’d probably be dead already. Alfons was still optimistic that this bizarre encounter was going to end perfectly peacefully, and the more he looked around, the calmer he was starting to feel.
He was also feeling like a fish out of water, especially as he took in more details. Melting Cheek wasn’t offering any information, but the fineries of the wainscoting, the staircase’s gilded handrail, even the fancy round reflection mirror on the opposite wall spoke for themselves. Compared to Ms. Gracia’s stripped down, bare-bones home, this place still retained many of the luxuries that other people could no longer afford. It was true that a countryside home this large spoke of Old Money, but those pockets must run deep indeed if no one had thought to sell off the art objects.
There was a noise at the top of the stair and both Alfons and Melting Cheek looked up at the same time. The door on the east side of the landing swung open, but it wasn’t Kessler’s familiar bulk that came striding out. Another tan-and-grey uniformed soldier (he was starting to think of them that way, soldiers) appeared and he was carrying a long wooden pole in both hands.
He turned stiffly and held the door open, gestured to someone inside. Alfons wondered if perhaps he was crippled and that was why he needed the quarterstaff.
All bets were off though, once he saw what was coming behind the soldier. Another uniformed man, this one even burlier, also carrying a pole - and a smaller, dark-complexioned form, literally half the burly soldiers’ sizes, swathed in drab skirts…a woman.
A familiar woman.
NOA! The name formed on his lips before he could stop it, and only the sudden shift of Melting Cheek beside him kept Alfons from giving the word breath and crying it out. He disguised the slip with a calculated cough. Luckily it wasn’t hard to make it sound convincing.
Melting Cheek wasn’t looking at him, though. He was focused on the tableau above with a peculiarly intent look on his face - had his features not been frozen by deformity, he might almost have seemed concerned. Alfons followed the man’s gaze and immediately noticed the same oddity. Despite the gypsy’s slight frame, the soldiers with her gave her space as though she were two times as large. They flanked her like men walking with a rabid wolf, each holding their quarterstaffs in the hand closest to her - caging her with the poles, Alfons realized as the little trio started to descend the stair. Her skirts shifted too far to one side, and the soldier on that flank edged his pole in more toward her. Warding her off.
Alfons surreptitiously pinched himself, just in case, but the pain told him he was very much awake.
Noa’s eyes were downcast at the stairs in front of her and she moved with slow, calculated steps. She looked thinner than the last time he had seen her, there was a certain hollow look to her cheeks that reminded Alfons of what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror, and he wondered in horror if perhaps he was the reason they were directing her with sticks. The tickle in his chest seemed to grow into a flame, a literal guilty ache.
She lived with us for a time…did I give it to her, too?
He knew immediately that he couldn’t acknowledge her. It was a horrible, awful thing to think; but if they were quarantining her like this because she was a consumptive, what hope had he if the truth came out? Alfons tried to turn his face as far away as possible without drawing attention to himself. The Thule did not look kindly on the weak…now he was seeing proof of that for certain.
“Ah!”
He must not have moved fast enough though, or else her vantage point from the staircase gave her a good look at his face anyway, because the gypsy suddenly let out a startled sound. Alfons’s attention immediately snapped back to her, along with everyone else’s in the room, and oh god in heaven, she was staring right at him - Alfons was absolutely sure that she knew him. She stopped dead, like a deer in a car’s lamplight, and the soldiers to either side of her sprang at least another foot away, right up against the grand stair’s railing. Their poles came in to squeeze against her elbows, and the gypsy started - then started to run, hurtling down the stair toward Alfons in a blur of skirts and dark hair. Alfons braced himself as the harpy descended, talons outstretched, waiting to claim his sorry hide as prey.
The men with her reacted instantly, though not quickly enough to grab her before she got a few feet in lead. Alfons watched in shock as they smashed in on her sides as hard as possible with their poles, trying to pinch her between the staves and impede her progress; to his left, Melting Cheek hefted up his gun.
“Don’t!” one of the soldiers called out, but it wasn’t clear whether he was speaking to the gypsy or to Alfons’s guard. Noa continued to struggle between the poles and the two men pinched her harder, to the point where her sides pressed in. Neither of them made a move to grab her.
Is this how they would treat me? Alfons wondered, faintly horrified. Like a rabid animal, like the consumption would spread if they so much as laid a finger to her clothes. Noa made it a few more steps, still focused on him before finally she gave up, panting. The poles on her sides were pressing so hard, apparently they restricted her breath.
Her dark eyes were huge, anguished voids in her face, and Alfons wished he could say he was sorry.
Melting Cheek looked as though he were ready to say something but one glance from Noa’s attendants silenced him.
“Come on then,” the soldier spat at the gypsy and gave her yet another vicious thwack. Noa began moving, once again slowly, but she did not shift her gaze from Alfons. She remained fixated on him as they alighted at the end of the stair, and her attendants began urging her off to one of the side passage. Alfons and Melting Cheek watched the bizarre procession in silence. Melting Cheek looked about as shocked as Alfons felt.
They reached a side door and one of the soldiers unlocked it with a key, threw it open with little fanfare and gestured for her to enter. Noa ducked her head obediently and followed the man’s lead.
Just before she disappeared, she looked back at Alfons over her shoulder and mouthed a single word. Alfons felt his blood run cold.
Melting Cheek turned to look at him and Alfons was acutely aware that he was under the microscope once more. Whatever happened, he couldn’t let on that he’d understood any of that.
“What on earth was that mess?” he huffed, trying for his best Entitled Young Genius impression.
“I thought the Society was for ridding us of gypsies, not coddling their women.”
“Mm.”
The guard did not seem convinced, but at least there were no questions. He looked uneasy but shifted back into his holding position, once again watching the stair, though Alfons noticed this time he held his rifle higher. It was clear there was not to be any more discussion.
Alfons didn’t mind. It gave him time to think. He was no lip reader, so he wasn’t at all sure he’d gotten the message right, but Noa’s last, desperate attempt to communicate had jogged his shocked mind back on course. The last time he had seen the gypsy - outside of his feverish, spiteful nightmares - Noa had been at home with his roommate. Watching the two of them fight silently from the top of Gracia’s stair. Now here she was, being corralled by the Thule Society, possibly stricken with an illness Alfons had given her. Of all the questions whirling around in his mind, one leapt to the forefront, first and foremost. He had no clue what the answer might be, and Alfons was determined to find out.
If Noa was here, where was Edward?
**
The train whistle blew in the distance and he knew he didn’t have much time left. It was still very early in the evening, but Gramma Pinako had ears like a hawk, and he knew once he started the reaction, there wasn’t going to be any going back. He had his suitcase all packed, his brother’s jacket pressed. Kissed Edward’s old bottle of automail lubricant for good luck. Gramma Pinako and Winry were going to be absolutely furious, but if they insisted on believing he was crazy, he might as well oblige them by acting the part.
Alphonse transmuted his locked window open and jumped out into a summer breeze, hit the ground running, and didn’t look back.
Like it or not - next stop, Lior.