[fic] Forward the Machine (AT, Action/Adventure) - Chapter 5
Title: Forward the Machine - Chapter 05
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...
Previously:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
By the time Al woke on the morning of the second day, the train was already far east enough the grass had turned desert. Sand made for slow going, it seemed, or perhaps it was only that there was so much of it. The world outside his window looped over and over for hours, nothing to see but endless hills of sand.
Lior happened suddenly, like a heart attack.
He had last approached the city by motorcar, so he was unprepared for the city’s best side - that it even had a best side, out of its cacophony of ruins and high rises. Approached head-on by rail, it almost came together. The city was sheltered by a wall of adobe, forged first by nomads to keep their oasis clear; modern alchemy had re-envisioned it to be twenty feet thick and two stories tall. There was a gate set into it Alphonse was sure he’d never seen - it was clearly meant to allow rail access into the city itself, and the train line from Central had only recently been completed - and it cut an impressive figure into the side of Lior’s boundary wall.
Literally so. The ‘Atlas’ figures holding up the archway to either side were a familiar nuisance, grotesquely muscled likenesses of the similarly grotesque Citizen Armstrong himself.
The train swept through Armstrong’s overly gaudy archway and into the city itself, to Al’s fascination. He liked Lior, on the whole. It was intriguing to see how the people had taken advantage of its destruction. Two years ago, more than half of its structures had been deemed uninhabitable - damaged to the point of instability by the insurrection, and ultimately, the Event. Where others had called for relocation, or costly rebuilding, the Liorans had responded by razing their city, cauterizing its wounds and starting over fresh…primarily with alchemy, donated by the Amestrian government and privately funded charities like the Armstrong L.I.V.E.!!! Foundation. Al had read about it in the paper first, and he had been impressed by their resilience even then. For a populace that had experienced the most catastrophic act of alchemical terrorism in Amestrian history to turn around and embrace the science as a solution…it was downright inspiring.
It was also advantageous. Because so much of the city had been completely deconstructed, the Liorans had been able to plan the rebuilding effort from the ground up and cut much of the cruft from the city’s infrastructure. The new train lines were part of that. According to the Lior Railways Information Guide plastered as an advertisement on the back of Al’s seat, Lior was the “most accessible city” in all of the Eastern Territory. Tracks ran in to the main depot at the center of the city, and then out again like spokes on a wheel, to connect to a huge loop running right along the inside of the city wall. A series of trams running up and down along the spokes, and also around the circumference of the city, meant that “citizens enjoy economic and expedient transport, for much less than the cost of a private motorcoach”.
The guide also offered a timetable for the tram lines, as well as a station map. Al peeled it off the seatback and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t think it likely anyone would be looking for him, but the fewer people he had to ask for directions, the better.
The train began to slow as it neared the station at the heart of the city - Central Hub, his rail map helpfully identified - and then came to a halt entirely, a good several hundred feet shy of any platform that Al could discern. He pressed his face against the window, along with every other passenger in the car, trying to figure out exactly what was going on.
The switchhouse is reporting some technical difficulties, ladies and gentlemen, the engineer cut in via radiophone. We apologize for the delay. It will just be a few minutes while they get the track operational again…
A ‘few’ minutes turned into ten, into fifteen… Al played with his ponytail and tried to be patient as the noise level increased.
It figured.
A baby screamed. Someone farted. People wandered aimlessly up and down the aisle. Curious passengers in the other seats were rapidly turning furious, and by the thirty-two minute mark, Al had had enough. He looked down at his gloves, wondered
More importantly, what would the Fullmetal Alchemist do?
Al reached in his pocket for a piece of chalk, sketched a quick array on the side of the train car, and made his own exit.
Predictably, the transmutation drew attention. He had just enough time to jump out with his suitcase and seal up the hole he’d made before three alarmed-looking men came barreling toward him from the front of the train.
“Hey! YOU!”
A pale man who looked to be the train’s alchemist was hollering at him, and Al turned to face him, palms out and facing downward in a gesture of supplication. He got YOU’d a lot by people. He’d learned that it paid to look nonthreatening.
“Ye--ah?”
Yeah, not yessir. He always had to catch himself. His brother had by all accounts never been known for his command of formal military address. People who had genuinely met his brother invariably saw through his ruse right away - which was good, because then he knew it was safe to grill them for information. One of the first things he’d learned about Easterners was that to hear them tell it, everyone and their mother had been bosom buddies with the great and powerful Fullmetal Alchemist. And generally, the more someone professed to have known his brother inside out, the less likely they were to have ever set foot in the same room with him.
People who hadn’t met his brother, on the other hand, were often just familiar enough with the details to be taken in by Al’s ruse. A small, criminally young boy, out on his own, clad head to toe in black and a red jacket -and also a highly skilled alchemist? It wasn’t as though there were a lot of them out there. Al tossed his ponytail back and grinned at the men approaching him, waiting to see which they were.
The rail company alchemist pulled up short and eyed him, showing no sign he recognized the significance of a small, unassuming boy alchemist in a red coat. There were two Lioran men following after him though, and their eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
Al leveled his gaze at them and went for broke.
“I’m the Fullmetal Alchemist,” Al said. “What seems to be the problem?”
****
In the end it was laughably mundane. The switching mechanism for the passenger rail had stuck just shy of the platform and refused to move back to the correct direction, pointing the train obsessively at the switchyard, and each side blamed the other for the malfunction. The train’s alchemist blamed the switchyard for not keeping the tracks clean and oiled. The switchhouse workers countered that the rail lines inside the city limits were maintenanced daily, and that the alchemist had been too eager in bending the track.
Al had ignored the lot of them, and in five minutes he had worked out the true cause of the problem. Modern alchemical sandcatchers were the only way trains could make it into the eastern desert expanses, but like a lot of commercial devices, they weren’t designed with finesse in mind. The array in it was keyed simply to draw up the steel of the track and then separate it from whatever compound was polluting it, rust or sand or, in this case, the oil the trainyard workers used to grease their switches. Once he’d determined that, he was able to transmute the switch mechanism open so they could lubricate the mechanism. He cautioned the railway alchemist not to activate the sand catcher near switchyard limits, and told the switchhouse workers it was now their responsibility to keep that section clear.
On the whole, both parties seemed pleased. One of the Lioran workers offered him an all-day rail pass, which he gladly accepted. The Fullmetal Alchemist was not a mercenary, but he would not frown upon a reasonable reward for services rendered.
His real prize was information, anyway. The other Lioran worker knew which tram stop was closest to Plaza d’Oasise, confirmed that was where the other ‘government investigators’ were stationed.
He took a brief detour to the restroom to freshen up as best he could, then consulted his stolen rail map, only one destination in mind. The map advised that the famous ‘plaza of the oasis’ was not actually located at the exact center of the city, as most people thought, because the city’s borders had changed since Lior’s founding. It was instead billed as ‘the spiritual and mercantile ‘heart’ of the city, a place where travelers gather to drink in each other’s culture’.
It was also a single tram stop to the north on the Red Line. Al caught the very next trolley headed out from the station. It was empty save for himself and a sour-faced driver.
The trolley platform was a rickety little island in the middle of what looked like should be a busy, dangerous street. Al saw all of two motorcars before he was able to cross.
A sign at the plaza’s west entrance explained why:
FORMAL INVESTIGATION ONGOING!
TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.
The message was repeated in six languages and stamped at the bottom with the seal of Amestris, a stylized green lion atop two sheaves of wheat. Accentuating the point were two armed soldiers standing beneath it, lions themselves. And no hope they hadn’t seen him. They were watching him with a predator’s interest, laid-back but exceedingly attentive.
Al’s heart started pounding high in his throat; a hummingbird’s rhythm, almost painfully fast. He slid his hands into his pockets and tried to pretend that he wasn’t thirteen and horribly conspicuous, wearing bright red and all black in the heat. Al was also uncomfortably aware again of how very pale his skin was. At home, he was freakishly tan for November. Back here, in the arid east, he was what the Ishvar called a ‘desert rose’ - a delicate flower that reddens, and withers.
Al hung a right and turned away to the south, zagged into a side alley and waited for a second to see if he was being followed. His intuition proved unfortunately accurate. The larger of the two soldiers - a Lioran man with thighs about as big around as a tree trunk - was poking his head around just a few yards away.
Al gritted his teeth and retreated quickly to the opposite connecting street. If these goons were police, he wouldn’t bother with them, but these men were actual military. Actual military, he didn’t cross without a plan. Unlike the schlubs at the trainyard, the actual military had ways of verifying his identity. In a pinch, he could put in a call to Miss Sheska and her mysterious boss, ‘Major Fuery’, in Central, but he didn’t want to trouble her anymore than absolutely necessary. He was never sure just how far that line of favors ran.
Why bother, anyway? He thought, fingering the bit of chalk still stuck in the corner of his right jacket pocket. If there was one thing that being the Fullmetal Alchemist had taught him so far, it was that if there was will - and more importantly, skill - there was always a way. Still fancying he could hear footsteps imminently behind him, Al dropped down to his knees and chalked an array low on the nearest brick building, praying it was minor enough not to attract attention.
Energy hissed and crackled beneath his fingers and he drew a ley line up right through the mortar holding the building together, urging it to loosen up. As always, it felt like painting with power lines. The array set off sparks in tangential directions, gave off light and heat as though he had drawn it in neon. Al tried to lean one shoulder against the building to shield what he was doing, then promptly gave up in favor of finishing quickly.
Just enough for a foothold…no need to get fancy.
By compressing liquefied mortar around them in just the right way, he wiggled a few key bricks partway out of the building’s façade. He continued until he had several good handholds and then let the reaction complete, reforming the mortar into its solid state and leaving the wall newly uneven. Al whipped his head back and forth once, to make sure the man following him hadn’t detected the reaction, saw nothing. He took his chance and put a shoe up on one of the toeholds, grabbed for another with his hands. Al scrambled up his makeshift ‘ladder’ as fast as humanly possible and pulled himself onto the roof, very grateful he was wearing gloves.
Even though the roof was fashioned from a light-colored tile, meant to reflect the sunlight, it was still exceedingly warm. Al could feel heat radiating right through the palms of his gloves, and he hated to think what it would be like if his hands were bare. He was also acutely aware of the river of sweat running down the middle of his back, and the uncomfortable sound of his own blood roaring through his ears. He had spent some time in Ishvar, relatively recently, but that had been in more sensible clothes. Al shucked his red coat off and tied it around his waist, then pressed himself flat against the roof and started creeping toward its apex. With any luck, no one in the plaza would think to look up.
The so-called ‘Plaza of the Oasis’ had been built over an aquifer, and so named for the lush desert oasis that once stood there. The water that came up through that spot now was piped through an elaborate alchemically designed fountain system, though, and largely just for show. The biggest reserves of water were found elsewhere in the city, courtesy of a modern system of artesian wells. Even still, the Oasis Fountain was an iconic image. Al didn’t need his tourist map to tell him what it looked like. A towering, intricate spire, carved by hand from a single solid piece of desert marble, it had once flown red with wine, back in 1915 when the sun cults were active. It had been respected enough to be preserved by the warring forces even during the Lioran Insurrection. It was a balm to its people, and an inspiration to all who saw it; a joy to desert travelers seeking refuge beneath the spray that cascaded all around it.
The great fountain was all but obliterated now. Its ruins were visible in piles all around the plaza, lying on blue tarps tagged with neon paint, though he couldn’t read said labels at this distance. The marble spire lay in pieces side by side nearest the great solar dias - what was now a gaping hole, a circular wound shot through the true heart of the city. All around it, the earth was mounded up like an ant hill.
The entire site was cordoned off with military barricades and police tape, and there were a fair amount of human ‘ants’ moving all around the hill - some visibly Lioran, others Amestrian, most clad in the blues and grays of the military. There were a few olive-green Lioran Civil-Defense Force uniforms as well, mostly on truck drivers. Al could see a fair amount of mechanical earthmovers stationed all around the hole. A couple were actively being used to dig.
Al watched the action for a few minutes, trying to piece it all together.
Machines digging, not alchemists…and barricades on every side, not just at the plaza entrances, but around the site itself too. Even the flow of earthmovers going to and fro from ground zero was heavily regulated. A truck would drive in toward the broken earth, and then, incredibly, workers would start shoveling debris in manually. No transmutations at all. Which didn’t fit with Lior’s new image as an scientifically progressive city, unless…
They must be worried about activating a hostile array, Al realized. Whatever unknown method the terrorists had used to bring in those armored monstrosities must not have been discovered and disarmed yet.
That would explain why they were going through the rubble so thoroughly, too. Now that he knew what to look for, he could trace ant-lines leading back from the hill to the piles of fountain parts, to other squares of standard-issue plastic tarp holding odds and ends. The excavators were separating out anything that wasn’t just plain dirt. They were looking for the source.
Which meant, he still had time to find it for himself.
He had a solid lead for the first time in ages, and unlike the ones in his dreams, this desert excavation looked like it might hold pay dirt. He needed a phone. He needed a phone yesterday.
Al yanked the dog-eared rail map out and spread it out in front of him. He had no idea where the nearest public phone booth was, and according to the tourist information, the hotel district was back toward the west. The L.I.V.E. foundation was just a few blocks away, though - and that was where Miss Rose had her orphanage.
Bingo.
He monkeyed his way back down the side of the building and took off running in generally the right direction. The rail map didn’t have a lot of detail on the street level, but the sun was just far enough from the zenith that he could tell east from west. By trial and error, he managed to pick a route past the plaza to the Palace of the Sun. It was the former site of one of the city’s largest churches, now home to the Armstrong Foundation’s charity headquarters, and Al had to laugh when he saw what had become of the structure’s main spire.
Yet another Atlas-Armstrong, this one flexing heavenward, thrusting a cheerful fist into the eastern sky. A billboard sculpted beneath it proclaimed in florid text: Let’s Invigorate with Vivacious Energy! L.I.V.E. Proud!
The orphanage was built on a corner of the old church complex, with a pretty iron gate ringing its front yard and entry. Children were playing in cacophonous harmony, at least fifteen of them that Alphonse could see. They ranged in age from two to perhaps eleven, toddlers in a sand box and older boys playing catch. And there was Miss Rose, right there in the center of the chaos, trying to watch over the action. She was wearing a loose, white shift that hugged along her curves. Toddlers hugged her knees.
“Miss Rose!”
Al waved at her frantically through the front gate, grinning hard. It had been a while since he’d actually gotten to see her, not counting their brief, frantic encounter the week before.
“Alphonse?!”
“Yeah,” he called back, clutching at the bars. “I’m back in town!”
“Wait a moment, I’ll come get you.”
Rose still looked a tad startled, which wasn’t surprising. She bent down to peel toddlers off her and waded over toward Alphonse, reached up to unfasten the gate.
“I hadn’t expected to see you so soon. How are you feeling?”
“Fine!”
Al gave her his absolutely sunniest smile, trying to exude Health and Sanity through every pore. Rose ushered him through the gate and patted him shoulder to elbow.
“Last I saw you, they were shipping you home on a stretcher…”
“…alchemical exhaustion. I just needed to rest, I’d over-exerted myself.”
He felt a little guilty for lying to her, but what else could he do? Not even Winry believed him when he told the truth about where a part of his conscious had gone…the other world that he was increasingly sure did exist. Was the key to finding his brother again. And as much as he hated having to be dishonest, he also needed Rose’s help too much to risk her judging him crazy.
“Listen, ah, I was hoping you might have a phone I could borrow. I need to make a call to someone in Central. It’s kind of sensitive.”
Rose’s eyes lowered a little. In suspicion? In concern? Al couldn’t tell which.
“You do have a phone, don’t you?”
“Yes, inside…you should come in, we have mesquite tea on,” she said after a moment. Her voice was brisk and expression seemed a little brighter, which was reassuring. Al released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“I can ask Alex to watch over the children…yes? What is it, Eddie?”
One of the toddlers that had previously been clinging to her leg was pushing his way between them, latched on to her hand. He was a round-faced, dark-haired thing, with skin far too pale to be comfortable in the vicious Lioran sun. He was her biological son, but aside from the hair color, it was hard to see a resemblance.
Eddie peered up at Al suspiciously from beneath the brim of a wide sun hat, sucked hard on a chubby little thumb.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you remember Uncle Al? Look, it’s Uncle Al!?”
“Hey there,” Al said. He tried to stoop a little lower and look as non-dangerous as possible, but the toddler was having none of it. Eddie squirmed and hid his fat face against Rose’s leg.
“He’s been very shy lately, I’m afraid. I wish I knew why.”
Rose bent down and scooped her child up into her arms, balanced him against one hip. She pressed a tender kiss to the side of one chubby cheek.
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t expect him to remember me anyway. We last met when you were really little, isn’t that right, Eddie?” said Al.
Al caught the quickest flash of brown eyes before Eddie planted his face in his mother’s breasts, and that was it - the child simply couldn’t be convinced that Al’s intentions were good, or at least, that he was worth tolerating. Rose kissed the crest of her son’s dark head and rocked him, and Al was struck by the strangest mix of happiness and longing.
Families were things that could hurt him sometimes, in ways that he hoped they would never know.
“Watch the children for a minute, would you please? I need to get Alex.”
Rose disappeared into a side door Al hadn’t known the orphanage had, taking her fearful son along with her. Leaving him alone with her charges. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to be watching, but it seemed like the children were more or less all right playing on without help. None of them were crying or bleeding out the head, that was good enough for government work.
Several of the older boys were looking at him from across the yard with curious expressions. A couple of them waved.
“Hey!” One of them yelled. He was a taller kid with stereotypical Lioran looks, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, with skin the color of a fat dark olive.
“Heads up!”
Something small and spherical came whizzing toward his head, so fast that Al didn’t have time to think, only react. He flung an arm up to defend himself and caught the weapon by reflex. It resolved into a rag-tag baseball, cheerfully missing stitches and stained the same yellow color as the playyard dirt. Al stared at it for a few long seconds, momentarily not comprehending.
“Nice catch!”
The other boy was very near him now, wearing a grin from ear to ear. Al took a step back in spite of himself.
“I’m Tomas, who’re you? You wanna ball with us?”
“Er-“
“You got a good eye, you could be catcher. Hari kind of stinks at it, you can have his glove.”
They think I’m one of them, Al realized. They think I’m just another kid.
Well, this was awkward.
The other boys were watching now too, visibly sizing him up from across the way. Al rubbed at the back of his head, trying to think. He didn’t want to offend the orphans, and well, a part of him was thrilled at being asked. When he and his brother had been little, they’d mostly just been able to play catch between the two of them. Winry had only been interested so far as she got to experiment with pitching machines. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even been asked to hit a ball around.
But he needed Miss Rose’s phone, he needed to talk to Miss Sheska and Major Fuery. He couldn’t well tear off and play sandlot games. He offered the other boy a pained grin and held his hands up.
“I’m sorry, I can’t…I’m waiting on Miss Rose…”
“For a bunk?” Tomas glanced down at Al’s suitcase. “Well the only open one’s in my room, I can take ya up there if you care. Oldest gets to pick top or bottom, ‘cept you’ll have to share with Mile and he’s big, way bigger than you, he gets bottom.”
And now it was even more awkward. Hell. There were times Alphonse wished he could just be a normal kid again. If his brother were here…Ed could show off his infamous-and-undefeatable screwball pitch, and Al could hit it high over the fence, and then Ed would probably get mad and yell a lot, but he swore to whatever deity that was out there, he really wouldn’t care.
He was saved any further frustration because the side entrance swung open and suddenly the house was giving birth to pure muscle. Al watched as a man roughly the size of a house pushed his way into the sunlight, shirtless as usual, and somehow, glistening.
“Good day to you, young men and ladies!!!”
Citizen Armstrong greeted the world with both arms outstretched, as though he were ready to hug the sky itself. It reminded him of the ridiculous statue on the church spire, and Alphonse couldn’t help it, he snickered in spite of himself.
The children seemed genuinely happy to see Mr. Armstrong though. A few of the small ones came over to hug his great knees, and the man’s boisterous demeanor turned kind. He bent down and scooped up two at a time, let them climb on his shoulders, his back, his knees. In seconds the towering figure was covered with little ones, beaming, perfectly content to play human tree.
“And how are we doing this fine afternoon?! Are all you children enjoying yourselves?”
He had a thick blonde moustache that moved hypnotically when he spoke. A child reached up to pull on it, but he let on as though her savage yanking was no bother at all.
“Yes Shari, this is the traditional Armstrong Family styling - ah-ah-ah yes, it is quite thick and glorious, and indeed somewhat sensitive, how kind of you to notice.”
Al couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t know the man well himself - only through Miss Rose’s many letters - but looking at him gave Al a warm feeling all throughout his chest.
Miss Rose appeared in the doorway behind Armstrong, sans Eddie. She slid up to him and placed a careful hand on the man’s elbow, gently guiding him to look in Alphonse’s direction.
The man’s smile, if it was possible, only intensified.
“And Alphonse Elric…I hadn’t expected to meet you again so soon!”
Tomas and the other boys eyed him, clearly curious. Rose’s eyes warned him to choose his words carefully.
“I…had some unfinished business out this way,” said Al. He bowed low, hands clasped formally against his sides. “Thank you both for helping me last week.”
“But of course!!! Anything for the glorious and noble house of Elric!”
And the man’s voice was really so kind. He might be odd, but Al was having a hard time disliking him. He was starting to get the feeling that he must have known him. He had a sense of fond exasperation that surely wouldn’t happen with a total stranger, would it?
“Won’t you come in, Al? We can have that tea now.”
Rose beckoned to him from the shaded doorway, and Al picked his suitcase up without a moment’s delay. The Fullmetal Alchemist’s coat was long and cloying, and a cool, dark building looked very much like sanctuary.
Armstrong’s eyes roamed down the back of his brother’s coat as he passed. He saw the man’s expression tighten a little, out of the corner of his eye.
“I would like a word with you later, Alphonse,” the man murmured. “Once the children are otherwise occupied.”
“…sure,” Al said, a bit reluctant.
“We both would,” Rose said.
Rose’s fingers reached out and wrapped around his wrist. For all that she was quiet and polite, Al couldn’t help but notice her grip was like velvet-padded steel.
The gentle giant remained outside, a sparkling monolith beneath the Lioran sun.
****
Once the door was shut, Rose wasted no time getting down to business.
“Winry wired that you’d run away from home,” she said. Her voice, like her hand on his wrist, was gentle but shot through with assertive strength.
Al winced.
“I didn’t run away,” he said, feeling a bit lame. “I was staying with her until I got better…then I went back out.”
Rose tugged him down a long, narrow corridor into what appeared to be a sitting room, urged him toward a chair. Al sat with his hands in his lap, feeling lost, feeling very much like a child.
“She was worried sick about you,” said Rose. “The least you could have done was leave a note.”
“I was going to wire her as soon as I got settled,” Al said. He wished his voice didn’t sound so sulky. What was it with ladies trying to be his mother? Pinako at least, she was old enough (old enough to be his grandmother, more properly). Rose and Winry…they were both the age he should be, they should be his friends.
“Al…”
And there it was, that wounded look…her chocolate eyes widened, held a vulnerable light. Like a small forest deer facing down a hunter. Al shifted in his chair, distinctly uncomfortable. When she’d been living with them, she’d gone over like that a lot, to the point he could say that he honestly hated it. When Winry was upset with him, at least she came out and screamed. They would have a row, and then one or the other could apologize. Rose just looked…injured, and that only made him fear for her.
“Rose, I saw him,” Al said, gripping at the cuffs of his sleeves. Drawing on his own strength, his own core of steel.
“On the other side of that opening, when those things were going back through? Ed was there. He is alive.”
He leaned forward into her personal space, every fiber of his being on edge - eyes locked on her dark brown ones, willing her to understand. Willing her to see he wasn’t crazy. Winry, Gramma, they may no longer have the faith - a truth that hurt, but one that he had to accept - but they had also seen less, experienced less than he and Rose. She had been with him at the beginning of his new life, when he had been born again into this strange dream, this world that had no brother, in a city with no skyline.
Rose, of all of them, had to believe.
The corners of her lips twitched wildly upward, then down again, torn between emotions. Her fingers fluttered in nervous motion, as though her hands no longer knew where to alight.
“You came back on a stretcher,” she said. “You were comatose for days.”
No, no, no, there it was again, that mothering response. Al gritted his teeth together and tried to sit up as tall as he could.
“It doesn’t change the fact that I saw him,” Al ground out. “Rose, when I fought those armored things, you remember how I put a piece of myself inside them? How I was controlling them? A piece of me was still inside one when it disappeared. That’s why I was asleep so long, I think. I was asleep here because my mind was there - in a whole other world. And my brother was there. I spoke to him. I saw him.”
He reached forward and grabbed at her dress sleeve, forced her to meet his gaze.
“I know it sounds crazy but it’s real, Rose, I swear to you. I can prove it. I need to investigate the site, I need a phone…I have people in Central, and as soon as they give me clearance, I’ll be able to look at where that array was. When I find it, I can reproduce the effect, I can show you-“
“NO!”
Rose’s cry was like a glass breaking. Al jerked back in spite of himself. The sudden vehemence was unlike her, it was unnerving.
“Al, you can’t!”
“Why not?!”
The vulnerability was gone too, replaced with a look he was certain he’d never seen before. Rose’s dark eyes seemed to swallow the light.
“Al, it’s too dangerous,” she said, and there was fire in her voice now. “You don’t remember, I know you don’t…but I do. That array…”
Her hands alighted on the ends of her chair’s arm rests and throttled them.
“It was the same as when the city was razed, Al. It’s the Rapture all over again.”
A shiver ran down the back of his spine as something about that reached inside him, struck a chord somewhere deep. In a place where strange runes crawled over his skin, behind his eyes. Black ink, dark energy, written all over his metal skin, and he was looking down at himself and he was the array…
But no, that couldn’t be true. Al had studied the records extensively. Of the few pictures of himself as a disembodied soul that existed, none of them had shown his armor to have any kind of markings, let alone arrays. And officially, what the Liorans called the False Rapture - what the rest of the world called the Alchemical Event of 1915 - had been caused by a suicidal Ishvarite terrorist. He and his brother couldn’t have been anywhere near ground zero, and neither had Rose. By all reports, the city had been completely evacuated. The only casualties had been military peace-keepers.
The Fullmetal Alchemist was on record as a hero, for erecting a barrier around the main part of the force.
“I know it might seem like the Rapture,” Al said. He tried to choose his words carefully. He didn’t want to seem patronizing.
“Arrays on that large a scale can be hard to read, even for the pros. I didn’t even get a good look at it. That’s why I’d like to borrow your phone…” Al said.
Rose’s eyes lowered for a moment as though she were considering it. Then slowly but surely, she shook her head no.
“I’m not wrong. I saw it too many times not to know. Al…how much do you know about the Event?”
“What the military knows,” he said, truthfully.
Rose shook her head again, more forcefully this time, and balled her hands into fists. The vulnerable look was fading, as impossible as that was - replaced by a quiet determination.
“Then you think it was an act of terrorism,” she said. “It wasn’t.”
“…what?”
Rose drew in a deep breath.
“Things were going very badly for us, that summer,” she began. Her hands no longer fluttered. Instead they came right to her sides, obediently, like a soldier’s. “The fighting was tearing the city apart.”
“The Insurrection?”
“The War for Independence,” Rose corrected him with a sharp look, and a fierceness Al was sure he’d never seen. “I was one of the Freedom Fighters.”
Al blinked. It was hard to conceive of Rose as a rebel. But there she was, drawing herself up in front of him, holding her chin up high, as though daring him to challenge her.
“The military had started using heavy artillery in the third week of July. By the beginning of August, it looked like we were done for. The regime was so relentless…it’s hard to explain, Al. It was like it wasn’t enough for us for us to lose. They wanted us to lose absolutely.”
“‘Crushing victory’ rhetoric?” Al ventured. The old regime had been known for its all-or-nothing ideology, especially in the east. If a strategically significant city refused to submit to the Fuhrer’s authority, the old Amestris had not been above making an example of it.
“Something like that,” Rose said. “I once saw a guerilla trying to surrender with a bedsheet on a rooftop. The snipers in the clocktower...”
She shivered hard, gooseflesh visible even from where he was sitting.
“The sheet went up white, seconds later, it was red. That is what I’m trying to tell you…it wasn’t conquest. It was slaughter, Al. Pure and simple. I don’t think they cared if there was a city left or not. They took what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was it.”
She pressed her legs together so tightly that that her thighs trembled visibly through the cotton of her dress, her mouth set in a hard, if quavering, line.
“Then a man came out of the east, an Ishvarite. Scarred, right here across his face.”
She made a gesture like an X in the space between her forehead and eyes.
“That was what we called him, the Scarred One. ‘Scar’. I never knew his name.”
Another bevy of chills raced down Al’s spine, too powerful to ignore this time. What they’d said as a kid was a goose walking over his grave. So many images were a jumble in his head, scarred Ishvarite heretics and a short woman with arresting eyes, lines, lines drawn in the street, and himself, lying at the middle of them, at the heart of them…
“You…wore a cowl?” Al said slowly, tasting each part of the thought as he spoke it. It felt right, even though the memory made no sense to him. Rose, as a nun? She had a child with her.
Rose’s nostrils flared, as though she were surprised to picture such a thing herself. Her smile was bitter.
“You are remembering things lately, aren’t you?” she said quietly.
“Some. Maybe more, with help?”
He was trying not to push her, but it was hard. Lior was it, he could feel it…the beginning, and hopefully end, to all his great mysteries. And she had kept it a secret…why?
“I thought you must,” Rose sighed. “Yes, Al…I wore the cowl, for a time. It was both my blessing, and my burden.”
She picked at the hem of her dress, pressed her thighs together once more, so tight that this time Al could hear the muscles creak.
“The Scarred One was traveling with a woman…an Amestrian woman, we were suspicious of that. She said she knew how we could end it. That we could hurt them enough they could never come near us again. We believed her. The east, at dawn, is a powerful symbol for my people, and as I said, we were weak. We regarded them as prophets.”
Al just nodded, feeling slightly ill. He was starting to get the nasty feeling he knew where this went. That he remembered where it went.
“I’m not saying it was right. But it was what we had. In the face of annihilation...” Rose continued. The fire was starting to ebb from her voice, her posture was starting to take on the same kicked-puppy hunch as before.
“The people needed something to believe in. They were vulnerable, frightened…the false prophets took advantage of that. Eddie was born that same week they came to town, and they used that. They said it had been an immaculate birth, that he was a child of Leto. That I was a Holy One. They couldn’t have been more off the mark, but by that time…it was like I just didn’t care. Anymore, about anything. Not even the baby.”
Rose’s voice was so inescapably sad then that Al physically ached for her and Eddie. Eddie, that strange, pale-faced child who burnt the way Amestrians did in the desert sun. Eddie, whose name was so like his brother’s.
“I don’t think anyone else cared if it was true or not either,” Rose went on. “It was just a convenient banner to rally around. The woman was an alchemist, she helped us build the underground tunnels. She had me lead our people out of the city, just as the Amestrians advanced…”
And the rest was history, Al thought numbly. The nameless Ishvarite terrorist had provoked the Amestrian military contingent into advancing into the city despite the danger. He had drawn an unknown array around the entire city, an array of such magnitude that no one in their wildest dreams had believed he was capable of powering.
An array whose very image had been blotted out of all known records, because in the end, it had been all too powerful. The Lioran “Rapture” had vaporized hundreds, if not thousands, of men, turned huge swaths of the city into rubble. No one knew the mechanic that had allowed the Ishvarite to sustain it.
Rose laughed, a low and bitter sound, and not for the first time, Al wondered what price she had paid to grow so old, so young.
“We’ve had a lot of false prophets, over the years.”
They sat there in silence for a long while, as Al tried to absorb what had just been laid out.
“…why didn’t you tell me?” was all he could think to ask. He felt stunned. She had lived with them for months, back in Risenburg, and she’d never breathed a word.
“It doesn’t make me proud that I was a part of it. If I could, I would gladly forget it.”
All the fight had gone out of her, and she just slumped. She looked as though she was waiting for him to scream at her.
It took all his self-control not to. Al yanked hard at his ponytail instead.
“I can understand that, but…Rose, the Event was monumental! That was when my brother first went AWOL. You know that. You-“
Underground tunnels.
Rose, leading her people through them.
An array, on a level the world had never seen.
His brother, vanishing, and with him, the memories of Al’s old life.
Rose, leading him up through the earth, at the beginning of his new one.
The final piece slid sideways into place and Al looked at her in horror.
“It was here. Wasn’t it? That place where I first woke up. We were in Lior.”
He was aware that his voice was precariously close to breaking. He didn’t care. To hell with it. Al felt like he was reeling, like the room was spinning right out from under him. All this time…everyone…
They had all sworn up and down they had no idea what had caused Ed’s disappearance, anything about it, that they would help him any way they could.
“Is that why those armored things came up out of the ground? Because there’s a whole other city buried under us, right now?”
Rose was speaking but her voice carried no meaning. Everything was a buzz. Rose had been sitting on this. The whole time.
“You lied to me.”
Now awakened, the demon of his anger could not be reasoned with. It gibbered within his chest, sunk in invisible claws. It felt like he was splitting in two.
“No, Al-“
“If you knew where the city was, why didn’t you tell me?! I asked you so many times. Everyone else said I had dreamt it. I could have shown them-maybe then they would believe me--“
“Al, it isn’t here!”
Anger bared its teeth, aimed for the jugular. It was like he was seeing the world through slow-motion, everything was red.
“Then where? You do know, don’t you? Tell me!”
“ALPHONSE ELRIC!”
Al’s teeth clicked together painfully as he missed the start of his next word. The light in the room seemed to fade, and he looked up to see a living wall of muscle between himself and Rose.
“Deplorable,” Citizen Armstrong rumbled.
He was a different person without the smile. The man did not walk, he loomed forward into the room. Hands the size of ham-shanks squeezed into fists. Al was so used to the caricature, he had never appreciated just how powerful Armstrong was.
“Simply deplorable,” the man rumbled. “I chanced inside because I thought I heard shouting…but to think I should find you, Alphonse, bullying a lady!”
Armstrong turned toward Rose, and his expression softened ever so slightly.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” Rose said. She didn’t look all right though, Al realized. She looked…frankly, terrified, and the shock was like cold water pouring down his back. Her nails were buried deep into the fabric of her armchair, and she was biting down on her lower lip so hard he could see groove marks in it. She hadn’t run though. She had sat right there and taken it, the brunt of his anger.
She had stood her ground, and Alphonse knew shame.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, bowing low over his knees, as low as he could manage. His red hood flopped down over his face and he shoved it back up roughly. Right now, he didn’t feel he deserved to wear his brother’s coat.
What kind of a hero throws tantrums at people?
“It’s all right,” Rose said, though her voice was slightly faint. “Don’t bow. You shouldn’t have to apologize. You have a right to be angry.”
Al straightened up but if anything, he felt worse.
“I didn’t have the right to scream at you, though,” he said. “Miss Rose…”
Rose shook her head firmly, and a bit of her strength seemed to return. The vulnerable light was there in her eyes but her expression was determined, and in that moment he loved her for it.
“It happened at Central,” she said. “When your brother disappeared. What they now call Old Central…it isn’t really the old part of the city at all. There is another layer to it, in a cavern underneath.”
--stairs leading on forever, down, down, and down, and a city like a wave, houses sliding down the sides of the world and smashing together in the center, to a music hall no one has seen for centuries, except for the things that live there, pale things, like fish’s bellies turned up to rot--
Rose was staring at him intently, like she could see through into his head, what he was seeing.
“That was where she took me, when the work at Lior was done,” Rose whispered. “To her place below the city.”
“Who did?” Al asked.
“The woman I told you about. The one who was a false prophet,” Rose said. “I never knew her name. I was only to call her, ‘master’.”
Her legs were clamped together again and her body was trembling like a kite caught in a strong breeze. Armstrong placed one of his thick hands on her shoulder, kneaded it a little, as though bracing her. His palm entirely covered her deltoid.
“The children were hunting after their afternoon snacks,” Armstrong suggested. “I left Bria in charge, but you do know how she goes on.”
“I do,” Rose murmured, and she reached up to squeeze his fingers very briefly. Something grown-up, something complicated passed between them for a moment, and then Rose peeled Armstrong’s fingers away.
“They can go on a while longer,” she said. “Al deserves to know.”
She straightened up higher in her chair, pull her dress out from between her legs. Her eyes rose up to meet Al’s again, and she looked older, older than he had ever seen her before.
“Your brother came for me. He saved me…and you, too. You were also a prisoner, I think. I don’t…I don’t exactly recall. It’s…hard to remember.”
Al nodded, though he got the feeling she meant that in a very different sense.
“A lot of things happened that I didn’t understand, a lot of alchemy. What I did understand was…Edward died. He was attacked, he had a hole right through his chest, he was on the floor and dead. But you used alchemy somehow, to bring him back.”
Al couldn’t hardly breathe. He could picture it - he thought he could picture it - but was that truly memory, or morbid fascination? He could see his brother’s eyes…those beautiful, unusual, golden eyes…could see them dimming. The very idea made him sick.
“But I brought him back,” he parroted right back, trying to keep his lunch from coming back up.
“Yes, you did,” Rose affirmed again. She seemed to understand. “And he was whole, Al. He had human arms and legs, everything…”
“And?”
He was on the edge of his seat and he couldn’t even recall moving. It all came down to this. The part of the story they had never told him, the part that he’d always felt lingering around the edges of his life. All his dreams, and nightmares.
“It was because you were gone,” she said quietly. “He came, and you went. He asked me to take Wrath and go for help…and the rest, you know.”
“I came back…and he went,” Al whispered.
“Yes,” Rose said. Her eyes flicked downward to the hem of her shift. “Now you know. Your master thought it meant that he just isn’t anywhere, anymore. Because he gave himself for you.”
Armstrong rumbled something soft, and this time she accepted his hand when he proffered it.
“But I brought him back once,” Al said, mustering the will to speak. The will to do anything. Right now, he felt frozen.
To be the subject of that much love was almost unendurable. How could he be expected to bear it? The brother he remembered was just plain old Ed. Not the Fullmetal Alchemist, not the Hero of the People. Selfish at snack times. A blanket hog at night. Even wearing his brother’s old coat, even out here retracing his footsteps… His brother’s shadow just cast so far, it felt like he would never make it back to its source.
But he had to try. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that he had to try. He owed his brother too much to let him go, and loved him too dearly to want to.
“If I brought him back once, I could do it again,” he said slowly. “Because I’ve seen him.”
“At the cost of your own life,” Citizen Armstrong said sharply.
If that’s what it takes, a part of him thought, but did not say. The impulse was deeply disturbing.
Rose was looking at him again as though his thoughts were no secret. Her face held nothing but the deepest kind of sorrow.
“You have a right to be mad,” she said. “But now you know, why we tried to keep it from you.”
“Yes,” Al said, swallowing tightly. “Now I know.”
Love, in all forms, was hard to endure.
***
(See, I told you believe in the internet again :)))
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...
Previously:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
By the time Al woke on the morning of the second day, the train was already far east enough the grass had turned desert. Sand made for slow going, it seemed, or perhaps it was only that there was so much of it. The world outside his window looped over and over for hours, nothing to see but endless hills of sand.
Lior happened suddenly, like a heart attack.
He had last approached the city by motorcar, so he was unprepared for the city’s best side - that it even had a best side, out of its cacophony of ruins and high rises. Approached head-on by rail, it almost came together. The city was sheltered by a wall of adobe, forged first by nomads to keep their oasis clear; modern alchemy had re-envisioned it to be twenty feet thick and two stories tall. There was a gate set into it Alphonse was sure he’d never seen - it was clearly meant to allow rail access into the city itself, and the train line from Central had only recently been completed - and it cut an impressive figure into the side of Lior’s boundary wall.
Literally so. The ‘Atlas’ figures holding up the archway to either side were a familiar nuisance, grotesquely muscled likenesses of the similarly grotesque Citizen Armstrong himself.
The train swept through Armstrong’s overly gaudy archway and into the city itself, to Al’s fascination. He liked Lior, on the whole. It was intriguing to see how the people had taken advantage of its destruction. Two years ago, more than half of its structures had been deemed uninhabitable - damaged to the point of instability by the insurrection, and ultimately, the Event. Where others had called for relocation, or costly rebuilding, the Liorans had responded by razing their city, cauterizing its wounds and starting over fresh…primarily with alchemy, donated by the Amestrian government and privately funded charities like the Armstrong L.I.V.E.!!! Foundation. Al had read about it in the paper first, and he had been impressed by their resilience even then. For a populace that had experienced the most catastrophic act of alchemical terrorism in Amestrian history to turn around and embrace the science as a solution…it was downright inspiring.
It was also advantageous. Because so much of the city had been completely deconstructed, the Liorans had been able to plan the rebuilding effort from the ground up and cut much of the cruft from the city’s infrastructure. The new train lines were part of that. According to the Lior Railways Information Guide plastered as an advertisement on the back of Al’s seat, Lior was the “most accessible city” in all of the Eastern Territory. Tracks ran in to the main depot at the center of the city, and then out again like spokes on a wheel, to connect to a huge loop running right along the inside of the city wall. A series of trams running up and down along the spokes, and also around the circumference of the city, meant that “citizens enjoy economic and expedient transport, for much less than the cost of a private motorcoach”.
The guide also offered a timetable for the tram lines, as well as a station map. Al peeled it off the seatback and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t think it likely anyone would be looking for him, but the fewer people he had to ask for directions, the better.
The train began to slow as it neared the station at the heart of the city - Central Hub, his rail map helpfully identified - and then came to a halt entirely, a good several hundred feet shy of any platform that Al could discern. He pressed his face against the window, along with every other passenger in the car, trying to figure out exactly what was going on.
The switchhouse is reporting some technical difficulties, ladies and gentlemen, the engineer cut in via radiophone. We apologize for the delay. It will just be a few minutes while they get the track operational again…
A ‘few’ minutes turned into ten, into fifteen… Al played with his ponytail and tried to be patient as the noise level increased.
It figured.
A baby screamed. Someone farted. People wandered aimlessly up and down the aisle. Curious passengers in the other seats were rapidly turning furious, and by the thirty-two minute mark, Al had had enough. He looked down at his gloves, wondered
More importantly, what would the Fullmetal Alchemist do?
Al reached in his pocket for a piece of chalk, sketched a quick array on the side of the train car, and made his own exit.
Predictably, the transmutation drew attention. He had just enough time to jump out with his suitcase and seal up the hole he’d made before three alarmed-looking men came barreling toward him from the front of the train.
“Hey! YOU!”
A pale man who looked to be the train’s alchemist was hollering at him, and Al turned to face him, palms out and facing downward in a gesture of supplication. He got YOU’d a lot by people. He’d learned that it paid to look nonthreatening.
“Ye--ah?”
Yeah, not yessir. He always had to catch himself. His brother had by all accounts never been known for his command of formal military address. People who had genuinely met his brother invariably saw through his ruse right away - which was good, because then he knew it was safe to grill them for information. One of the first things he’d learned about Easterners was that to hear them tell it, everyone and their mother had been bosom buddies with the great and powerful Fullmetal Alchemist. And generally, the more someone professed to have known his brother inside out, the less likely they were to have ever set foot in the same room with him.
People who hadn’t met his brother, on the other hand, were often just familiar enough with the details to be taken in by Al’s ruse. A small, criminally young boy, out on his own, clad head to toe in black and a red jacket -and also a highly skilled alchemist? It wasn’t as though there were a lot of them out there. Al tossed his ponytail back and grinned at the men approaching him, waiting to see which they were.
The rail company alchemist pulled up short and eyed him, showing no sign he recognized the significance of a small, unassuming boy alchemist in a red coat. There were two Lioran men following after him though, and their eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
Al leveled his gaze at them and went for broke.
“I’m the Fullmetal Alchemist,” Al said. “What seems to be the problem?”
****
In the end it was laughably mundane. The switching mechanism for the passenger rail had stuck just shy of the platform and refused to move back to the correct direction, pointing the train obsessively at the switchyard, and each side blamed the other for the malfunction. The train’s alchemist blamed the switchyard for not keeping the tracks clean and oiled. The switchhouse workers countered that the rail lines inside the city limits were maintenanced daily, and that the alchemist had been too eager in bending the track.
Al had ignored the lot of them, and in five minutes he had worked out the true cause of the problem. Modern alchemical sandcatchers were the only way trains could make it into the eastern desert expanses, but like a lot of commercial devices, they weren’t designed with finesse in mind. The array in it was keyed simply to draw up the steel of the track and then separate it from whatever compound was polluting it, rust or sand or, in this case, the oil the trainyard workers used to grease their switches. Once he’d determined that, he was able to transmute the switch mechanism open so they could lubricate the mechanism. He cautioned the railway alchemist not to activate the sand catcher near switchyard limits, and told the switchhouse workers it was now their responsibility to keep that section clear.
On the whole, both parties seemed pleased. One of the Lioran workers offered him an all-day rail pass, which he gladly accepted. The Fullmetal Alchemist was not a mercenary, but he would not frown upon a reasonable reward for services rendered.
His real prize was information, anyway. The other Lioran worker knew which tram stop was closest to Plaza d’Oasise, confirmed that was where the other ‘government investigators’ were stationed.
He took a brief detour to the restroom to freshen up as best he could, then consulted his stolen rail map, only one destination in mind. The map advised that the famous ‘plaza of the oasis’ was not actually located at the exact center of the city, as most people thought, because the city’s borders had changed since Lior’s founding. It was instead billed as ‘the spiritual and mercantile ‘heart’ of the city, a place where travelers gather to drink in each other’s culture’.
It was also a single tram stop to the north on the Red Line. Al caught the very next trolley headed out from the station. It was empty save for himself and a sour-faced driver.
The trolley platform was a rickety little island in the middle of what looked like should be a busy, dangerous street. Al saw all of two motorcars before he was able to cross.
A sign at the plaza’s west entrance explained why:
FORMAL INVESTIGATION ONGOING!
TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.
The message was repeated in six languages and stamped at the bottom with the seal of Amestris, a stylized green lion atop two sheaves of wheat. Accentuating the point were two armed soldiers standing beneath it, lions themselves. And no hope they hadn’t seen him. They were watching him with a predator’s interest, laid-back but exceedingly attentive.
Al’s heart started pounding high in his throat; a hummingbird’s rhythm, almost painfully fast. He slid his hands into his pockets and tried to pretend that he wasn’t thirteen and horribly conspicuous, wearing bright red and all black in the heat. Al was also uncomfortably aware again of how very pale his skin was. At home, he was freakishly tan for November. Back here, in the arid east, he was what the Ishvar called a ‘desert rose’ - a delicate flower that reddens, and withers.
Al hung a right and turned away to the south, zagged into a side alley and waited for a second to see if he was being followed. His intuition proved unfortunately accurate. The larger of the two soldiers - a Lioran man with thighs about as big around as a tree trunk - was poking his head around just a few yards away.
Al gritted his teeth and retreated quickly to the opposite connecting street. If these goons were police, he wouldn’t bother with them, but these men were actual military. Actual military, he didn’t cross without a plan. Unlike the schlubs at the trainyard, the actual military had ways of verifying his identity. In a pinch, he could put in a call to Miss Sheska and her mysterious boss, ‘Major Fuery’, in Central, but he didn’t want to trouble her anymore than absolutely necessary. He was never sure just how far that line of favors ran.
Why bother, anyway? He thought, fingering the bit of chalk still stuck in the corner of his right jacket pocket. If there was one thing that being the Fullmetal Alchemist had taught him so far, it was that if there was will - and more importantly, skill - there was always a way. Still fancying he could hear footsteps imminently behind him, Al dropped down to his knees and chalked an array low on the nearest brick building, praying it was minor enough not to attract attention.
Energy hissed and crackled beneath his fingers and he drew a ley line up right through the mortar holding the building together, urging it to loosen up. As always, it felt like painting with power lines. The array set off sparks in tangential directions, gave off light and heat as though he had drawn it in neon. Al tried to lean one shoulder against the building to shield what he was doing, then promptly gave up in favor of finishing quickly.
Just enough for a foothold…no need to get fancy.
By compressing liquefied mortar around them in just the right way, he wiggled a few key bricks partway out of the building’s façade. He continued until he had several good handholds and then let the reaction complete, reforming the mortar into its solid state and leaving the wall newly uneven. Al whipped his head back and forth once, to make sure the man following him hadn’t detected the reaction, saw nothing. He took his chance and put a shoe up on one of the toeholds, grabbed for another with his hands. Al scrambled up his makeshift ‘ladder’ as fast as humanly possible and pulled himself onto the roof, very grateful he was wearing gloves.
Even though the roof was fashioned from a light-colored tile, meant to reflect the sunlight, it was still exceedingly warm. Al could feel heat radiating right through the palms of his gloves, and he hated to think what it would be like if his hands were bare. He was also acutely aware of the river of sweat running down the middle of his back, and the uncomfortable sound of his own blood roaring through his ears. He had spent some time in Ishvar, relatively recently, but that had been in more sensible clothes. Al shucked his red coat off and tied it around his waist, then pressed himself flat against the roof and started creeping toward its apex. With any luck, no one in the plaza would think to look up.
The so-called ‘Plaza of the Oasis’ had been built over an aquifer, and so named for the lush desert oasis that once stood there. The water that came up through that spot now was piped through an elaborate alchemically designed fountain system, though, and largely just for show. The biggest reserves of water were found elsewhere in the city, courtesy of a modern system of artesian wells. Even still, the Oasis Fountain was an iconic image. Al didn’t need his tourist map to tell him what it looked like. A towering, intricate spire, carved by hand from a single solid piece of desert marble, it had once flown red with wine, back in 1915 when the sun cults were active. It had been respected enough to be preserved by the warring forces even during the Lioran Insurrection. It was a balm to its people, and an inspiration to all who saw it; a joy to desert travelers seeking refuge beneath the spray that cascaded all around it.
The great fountain was all but obliterated now. Its ruins were visible in piles all around the plaza, lying on blue tarps tagged with neon paint, though he couldn’t read said labels at this distance. The marble spire lay in pieces side by side nearest the great solar dias - what was now a gaping hole, a circular wound shot through the true heart of the city. All around it, the earth was mounded up like an ant hill.
The entire site was cordoned off with military barricades and police tape, and there were a fair amount of human ‘ants’ moving all around the hill - some visibly Lioran, others Amestrian, most clad in the blues and grays of the military. There were a few olive-green Lioran Civil-Defense Force uniforms as well, mostly on truck drivers. Al could see a fair amount of mechanical earthmovers stationed all around the hole. A couple were actively being used to dig.
Al watched the action for a few minutes, trying to piece it all together.
Machines digging, not alchemists…and barricades on every side, not just at the plaza entrances, but around the site itself too. Even the flow of earthmovers going to and fro from ground zero was heavily regulated. A truck would drive in toward the broken earth, and then, incredibly, workers would start shoveling debris in manually. No transmutations at all. Which didn’t fit with Lior’s new image as an scientifically progressive city, unless…
They must be worried about activating a hostile array, Al realized. Whatever unknown method the terrorists had used to bring in those armored monstrosities must not have been discovered and disarmed yet.
That would explain why they were going through the rubble so thoroughly, too. Now that he knew what to look for, he could trace ant-lines leading back from the hill to the piles of fountain parts, to other squares of standard-issue plastic tarp holding odds and ends. The excavators were separating out anything that wasn’t just plain dirt. They were looking for the source.
Which meant, he still had time to find it for himself.
He had a solid lead for the first time in ages, and unlike the ones in his dreams, this desert excavation looked like it might hold pay dirt. He needed a phone. He needed a phone yesterday.
Al yanked the dog-eared rail map out and spread it out in front of him. He had no idea where the nearest public phone booth was, and according to the tourist information, the hotel district was back toward the west. The L.I.V.E. foundation was just a few blocks away, though - and that was where Miss Rose had her orphanage.
Bingo.
He monkeyed his way back down the side of the building and took off running in generally the right direction. The rail map didn’t have a lot of detail on the street level, but the sun was just far enough from the zenith that he could tell east from west. By trial and error, he managed to pick a route past the plaza to the Palace of the Sun. It was the former site of one of the city’s largest churches, now home to the Armstrong Foundation’s charity headquarters, and Al had to laugh when he saw what had become of the structure’s main spire.
Yet another Atlas-Armstrong, this one flexing heavenward, thrusting a cheerful fist into the eastern sky. A billboard sculpted beneath it proclaimed in florid text: Let’s Invigorate with Vivacious Energy! L.I.V.E. Proud!
The orphanage was built on a corner of the old church complex, with a pretty iron gate ringing its front yard and entry. Children were playing in cacophonous harmony, at least fifteen of them that Alphonse could see. They ranged in age from two to perhaps eleven, toddlers in a sand box and older boys playing catch. And there was Miss Rose, right there in the center of the chaos, trying to watch over the action. She was wearing a loose, white shift that hugged along her curves. Toddlers hugged her knees.
“Miss Rose!”
Al waved at her frantically through the front gate, grinning hard. It had been a while since he’d actually gotten to see her, not counting their brief, frantic encounter the week before.
“Alphonse?!”
“Yeah,” he called back, clutching at the bars. “I’m back in town!”
“Wait a moment, I’ll come get you.”
Rose still looked a tad startled, which wasn’t surprising. She bent down to peel toddlers off her and waded over toward Alphonse, reached up to unfasten the gate.
“I hadn’t expected to see you so soon. How are you feeling?”
“Fine!”
Al gave her his absolutely sunniest smile, trying to exude Health and Sanity through every pore. Rose ushered him through the gate and patted him shoulder to elbow.
“Last I saw you, they were shipping you home on a stretcher…”
“…alchemical exhaustion. I just needed to rest, I’d over-exerted myself.”
He felt a little guilty for lying to her, but what else could he do? Not even Winry believed him when he told the truth about where a part of his conscious had gone…the other world that he was increasingly sure did exist. Was the key to finding his brother again. And as much as he hated having to be dishonest, he also needed Rose’s help too much to risk her judging him crazy.
“Listen, ah, I was hoping you might have a phone I could borrow. I need to make a call to someone in Central. It’s kind of sensitive.”
Rose’s eyes lowered a little. In suspicion? In concern? Al couldn’t tell which.
“You do have a phone, don’t you?”
“Yes, inside…you should come in, we have mesquite tea on,” she said after a moment. Her voice was brisk and expression seemed a little brighter, which was reassuring. Al released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“I can ask Alex to watch over the children…yes? What is it, Eddie?”
One of the toddlers that had previously been clinging to her leg was pushing his way between them, latched on to her hand. He was a round-faced, dark-haired thing, with skin far too pale to be comfortable in the vicious Lioran sun. He was her biological son, but aside from the hair color, it was hard to see a resemblance.
Eddie peered up at Al suspiciously from beneath the brim of a wide sun hat, sucked hard on a chubby little thumb.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you remember Uncle Al? Look, it’s Uncle Al!?”
“Hey there,” Al said. He tried to stoop a little lower and look as non-dangerous as possible, but the toddler was having none of it. Eddie squirmed and hid his fat face against Rose’s leg.
“He’s been very shy lately, I’m afraid. I wish I knew why.”
Rose bent down and scooped her child up into her arms, balanced him against one hip. She pressed a tender kiss to the side of one chubby cheek.
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t expect him to remember me anyway. We last met when you were really little, isn’t that right, Eddie?” said Al.
Al caught the quickest flash of brown eyes before Eddie planted his face in his mother’s breasts, and that was it - the child simply couldn’t be convinced that Al’s intentions were good, or at least, that he was worth tolerating. Rose kissed the crest of her son’s dark head and rocked him, and Al was struck by the strangest mix of happiness and longing.
Families were things that could hurt him sometimes, in ways that he hoped they would never know.
“Watch the children for a minute, would you please? I need to get Alex.”
Rose disappeared into a side door Al hadn’t known the orphanage had, taking her fearful son along with her. Leaving him alone with her charges. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to be watching, but it seemed like the children were more or less all right playing on without help. None of them were crying or bleeding out the head, that was good enough for government work.
Several of the older boys were looking at him from across the yard with curious expressions. A couple of them waved.
“Hey!” One of them yelled. He was a taller kid with stereotypical Lioran looks, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, with skin the color of a fat dark olive.
“Heads up!”
Something small and spherical came whizzing toward his head, so fast that Al didn’t have time to think, only react. He flung an arm up to defend himself and caught the weapon by reflex. It resolved into a rag-tag baseball, cheerfully missing stitches and stained the same yellow color as the playyard dirt. Al stared at it for a few long seconds, momentarily not comprehending.
“Nice catch!”
The other boy was very near him now, wearing a grin from ear to ear. Al took a step back in spite of himself.
“I’m Tomas, who’re you? You wanna ball with us?”
“Er-“
“You got a good eye, you could be catcher. Hari kind of stinks at it, you can have his glove.”
They think I’m one of them, Al realized. They think I’m just another kid.
Well, this was awkward.
The other boys were watching now too, visibly sizing him up from across the way. Al rubbed at the back of his head, trying to think. He didn’t want to offend the orphans, and well, a part of him was thrilled at being asked. When he and his brother had been little, they’d mostly just been able to play catch between the two of them. Winry had only been interested so far as she got to experiment with pitching machines. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even been asked to hit a ball around.
But he needed Miss Rose’s phone, he needed to talk to Miss Sheska and Major Fuery. He couldn’t well tear off and play sandlot games. He offered the other boy a pained grin and held his hands up.
“I’m sorry, I can’t…I’m waiting on Miss Rose…”
“For a bunk?” Tomas glanced down at Al’s suitcase. “Well the only open one’s in my room, I can take ya up there if you care. Oldest gets to pick top or bottom, ‘cept you’ll have to share with Mile and he’s big, way bigger than you, he gets bottom.”
And now it was even more awkward. Hell. There were times Alphonse wished he could just be a normal kid again. If his brother were here…Ed could show off his infamous-and-undefeatable screwball pitch, and Al could hit it high over the fence, and then Ed would probably get mad and yell a lot, but he swore to whatever deity that was out there, he really wouldn’t care.
He was saved any further frustration because the side entrance swung open and suddenly the house was giving birth to pure muscle. Al watched as a man roughly the size of a house pushed his way into the sunlight, shirtless as usual, and somehow, glistening.
“Good day to you, young men and ladies!!!”
Citizen Armstrong greeted the world with both arms outstretched, as though he were ready to hug the sky itself. It reminded him of the ridiculous statue on the church spire, and Alphonse couldn’t help it, he snickered in spite of himself.
The children seemed genuinely happy to see Mr. Armstrong though. A few of the small ones came over to hug his great knees, and the man’s boisterous demeanor turned kind. He bent down and scooped up two at a time, let them climb on his shoulders, his back, his knees. In seconds the towering figure was covered with little ones, beaming, perfectly content to play human tree.
“And how are we doing this fine afternoon?! Are all you children enjoying yourselves?”
He had a thick blonde moustache that moved hypnotically when he spoke. A child reached up to pull on it, but he let on as though her savage yanking was no bother at all.
“Yes Shari, this is the traditional Armstrong Family styling - ah-ah-ah yes, it is quite thick and glorious, and indeed somewhat sensitive, how kind of you to notice.”
Al couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t know the man well himself - only through Miss Rose’s many letters - but looking at him gave Al a warm feeling all throughout his chest.
Miss Rose appeared in the doorway behind Armstrong, sans Eddie. She slid up to him and placed a careful hand on the man’s elbow, gently guiding him to look in Alphonse’s direction.
The man’s smile, if it was possible, only intensified.
“And Alphonse Elric…I hadn’t expected to meet you again so soon!”
Tomas and the other boys eyed him, clearly curious. Rose’s eyes warned him to choose his words carefully.
“I…had some unfinished business out this way,” said Al. He bowed low, hands clasped formally against his sides. “Thank you both for helping me last week.”
“But of course!!! Anything for the glorious and noble house of Elric!”
And the man’s voice was really so kind. He might be odd, but Al was having a hard time disliking him. He was starting to get the feeling that he must have known him. He had a sense of fond exasperation that surely wouldn’t happen with a total stranger, would it?
“Won’t you come in, Al? We can have that tea now.”
Rose beckoned to him from the shaded doorway, and Al picked his suitcase up without a moment’s delay. The Fullmetal Alchemist’s coat was long and cloying, and a cool, dark building looked very much like sanctuary.
Armstrong’s eyes roamed down the back of his brother’s coat as he passed. He saw the man’s expression tighten a little, out of the corner of his eye.
“I would like a word with you later, Alphonse,” the man murmured. “Once the children are otherwise occupied.”
“…sure,” Al said, a bit reluctant.
“We both would,” Rose said.
Rose’s fingers reached out and wrapped around his wrist. For all that she was quiet and polite, Al couldn’t help but notice her grip was like velvet-padded steel.
The gentle giant remained outside, a sparkling monolith beneath the Lioran sun.
****
Once the door was shut, Rose wasted no time getting down to business.
“Winry wired that you’d run away from home,” she said. Her voice, like her hand on his wrist, was gentle but shot through with assertive strength.
Al winced.
“I didn’t run away,” he said, feeling a bit lame. “I was staying with her until I got better…then I went back out.”
Rose tugged him down a long, narrow corridor into what appeared to be a sitting room, urged him toward a chair. Al sat with his hands in his lap, feeling lost, feeling very much like a child.
“She was worried sick about you,” said Rose. “The least you could have done was leave a note.”
“I was going to wire her as soon as I got settled,” Al said. He wished his voice didn’t sound so sulky. What was it with ladies trying to be his mother? Pinako at least, she was old enough (old enough to be his grandmother, more properly). Rose and Winry…they were both the age he should be, they should be his friends.
“Al…”
And there it was, that wounded look…her chocolate eyes widened, held a vulnerable light. Like a small forest deer facing down a hunter. Al shifted in his chair, distinctly uncomfortable. When she’d been living with them, she’d gone over like that a lot, to the point he could say that he honestly hated it. When Winry was upset with him, at least she came out and screamed. They would have a row, and then one or the other could apologize. Rose just looked…injured, and that only made him fear for her.
“Rose, I saw him,” Al said, gripping at the cuffs of his sleeves. Drawing on his own strength, his own core of steel.
“On the other side of that opening, when those things were going back through? Ed was there. He is alive.”
He leaned forward into her personal space, every fiber of his being on edge - eyes locked on her dark brown ones, willing her to understand. Willing her to see he wasn’t crazy. Winry, Gramma, they may no longer have the faith - a truth that hurt, but one that he had to accept - but they had also seen less, experienced less than he and Rose. She had been with him at the beginning of his new life, when he had been born again into this strange dream, this world that had no brother, in a city with no skyline.
Rose, of all of them, had to believe.
The corners of her lips twitched wildly upward, then down again, torn between emotions. Her fingers fluttered in nervous motion, as though her hands no longer knew where to alight.
“You came back on a stretcher,” she said. “You were comatose for days.”
No, no, no, there it was again, that mothering response. Al gritted his teeth together and tried to sit up as tall as he could.
“It doesn’t change the fact that I saw him,” Al ground out. “Rose, when I fought those armored things, you remember how I put a piece of myself inside them? How I was controlling them? A piece of me was still inside one when it disappeared. That’s why I was asleep so long, I think. I was asleep here because my mind was there - in a whole other world. And my brother was there. I spoke to him. I saw him.”
He reached forward and grabbed at her dress sleeve, forced her to meet his gaze.
“I know it sounds crazy but it’s real, Rose, I swear to you. I can prove it. I need to investigate the site, I need a phone…I have people in Central, and as soon as they give me clearance, I’ll be able to look at where that array was. When I find it, I can reproduce the effect, I can show you-“
“NO!”
Rose’s cry was like a glass breaking. Al jerked back in spite of himself. The sudden vehemence was unlike her, it was unnerving.
“Al, you can’t!”
“Why not?!”
The vulnerability was gone too, replaced with a look he was certain he’d never seen before. Rose’s dark eyes seemed to swallow the light.
“Al, it’s too dangerous,” she said, and there was fire in her voice now. “You don’t remember, I know you don’t…but I do. That array…”
Her hands alighted on the ends of her chair’s arm rests and throttled them.
“It was the same as when the city was razed, Al. It’s the Rapture all over again.”
A shiver ran down the back of his spine as something about that reached inside him, struck a chord somewhere deep. In a place where strange runes crawled over his skin, behind his eyes. Black ink, dark energy, written all over his metal skin, and he was looking down at himself and he was the array…
But no, that couldn’t be true. Al had studied the records extensively. Of the few pictures of himself as a disembodied soul that existed, none of them had shown his armor to have any kind of markings, let alone arrays. And officially, what the Liorans called the False Rapture - what the rest of the world called the Alchemical Event of 1915 - had been caused by a suicidal Ishvarite terrorist. He and his brother couldn’t have been anywhere near ground zero, and neither had Rose. By all reports, the city had been completely evacuated. The only casualties had been military peace-keepers.
The Fullmetal Alchemist was on record as a hero, for erecting a barrier around the main part of the force.
“I know it might seem like the Rapture,” Al said. He tried to choose his words carefully. He didn’t want to seem patronizing.
“Arrays on that large a scale can be hard to read, even for the pros. I didn’t even get a good look at it. That’s why I’d like to borrow your phone…” Al said.
Rose’s eyes lowered for a moment as though she were considering it. Then slowly but surely, she shook her head no.
“I’m not wrong. I saw it too many times not to know. Al…how much do you know about the Event?”
“What the military knows,” he said, truthfully.
Rose shook her head again, more forcefully this time, and balled her hands into fists. The vulnerable look was fading, as impossible as that was - replaced by a quiet determination.
“Then you think it was an act of terrorism,” she said. “It wasn’t.”
“…what?”
Rose drew in a deep breath.
“Things were going very badly for us, that summer,” she began. Her hands no longer fluttered. Instead they came right to her sides, obediently, like a soldier’s. “The fighting was tearing the city apart.”
“The Insurrection?”
“The War for Independence,” Rose corrected him with a sharp look, and a fierceness Al was sure he’d never seen. “I was one of the Freedom Fighters.”
Al blinked. It was hard to conceive of Rose as a rebel. But there she was, drawing herself up in front of him, holding her chin up high, as though daring him to challenge her.
“The military had started using heavy artillery in the third week of July. By the beginning of August, it looked like we were done for. The regime was so relentless…it’s hard to explain, Al. It was like it wasn’t enough for us for us to lose. They wanted us to lose absolutely.”
“‘Crushing victory’ rhetoric?” Al ventured. The old regime had been known for its all-or-nothing ideology, especially in the east. If a strategically significant city refused to submit to the Fuhrer’s authority, the old Amestris had not been above making an example of it.
“Something like that,” Rose said. “I once saw a guerilla trying to surrender with a bedsheet on a rooftop. The snipers in the clocktower...”
She shivered hard, gooseflesh visible even from where he was sitting.
“The sheet went up white, seconds later, it was red. That is what I’m trying to tell you…it wasn’t conquest. It was slaughter, Al. Pure and simple. I don’t think they cared if there was a city left or not. They took what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was it.”
She pressed her legs together so tightly that that her thighs trembled visibly through the cotton of her dress, her mouth set in a hard, if quavering, line.
“Then a man came out of the east, an Ishvarite. Scarred, right here across his face.”
She made a gesture like an X in the space between her forehead and eyes.
“That was what we called him, the Scarred One. ‘Scar’. I never knew his name.”
Another bevy of chills raced down Al’s spine, too powerful to ignore this time. What they’d said as a kid was a goose walking over his grave. So many images were a jumble in his head, scarred Ishvarite heretics and a short woman with arresting eyes, lines, lines drawn in the street, and himself, lying at the middle of them, at the heart of them…
“You…wore a cowl?” Al said slowly, tasting each part of the thought as he spoke it. It felt right, even though the memory made no sense to him. Rose, as a nun? She had a child with her.
Rose’s nostrils flared, as though she were surprised to picture such a thing herself. Her smile was bitter.
“You are remembering things lately, aren’t you?” she said quietly.
“Some. Maybe more, with help?”
He was trying not to push her, but it was hard. Lior was it, he could feel it…the beginning, and hopefully end, to all his great mysteries. And she had kept it a secret…why?
“I thought you must,” Rose sighed. “Yes, Al…I wore the cowl, for a time. It was both my blessing, and my burden.”
She picked at the hem of her dress, pressed her thighs together once more, so tight that this time Al could hear the muscles creak.
“The Scarred One was traveling with a woman…an Amestrian woman, we were suspicious of that. She said she knew how we could end it. That we could hurt them enough they could never come near us again. We believed her. The east, at dawn, is a powerful symbol for my people, and as I said, we were weak. We regarded them as prophets.”
Al just nodded, feeling slightly ill. He was starting to get the nasty feeling he knew where this went. That he remembered where it went.
“I’m not saying it was right. But it was what we had. In the face of annihilation...” Rose continued. The fire was starting to ebb from her voice, her posture was starting to take on the same kicked-puppy hunch as before.
“The people needed something to believe in. They were vulnerable, frightened…the false prophets took advantage of that. Eddie was born that same week they came to town, and they used that. They said it had been an immaculate birth, that he was a child of Leto. That I was a Holy One. They couldn’t have been more off the mark, but by that time…it was like I just didn’t care. Anymore, about anything. Not even the baby.”
Rose’s voice was so inescapably sad then that Al physically ached for her and Eddie. Eddie, that strange, pale-faced child who burnt the way Amestrians did in the desert sun. Eddie, whose name was so like his brother’s.
“I don’t think anyone else cared if it was true or not either,” Rose went on. “It was just a convenient banner to rally around. The woman was an alchemist, she helped us build the underground tunnels. She had me lead our people out of the city, just as the Amestrians advanced…”
And the rest was history, Al thought numbly. The nameless Ishvarite terrorist had provoked the Amestrian military contingent into advancing into the city despite the danger. He had drawn an unknown array around the entire city, an array of such magnitude that no one in their wildest dreams had believed he was capable of powering.
An array whose very image had been blotted out of all known records, because in the end, it had been all too powerful. The Lioran “Rapture” had vaporized hundreds, if not thousands, of men, turned huge swaths of the city into rubble. No one knew the mechanic that had allowed the Ishvarite to sustain it.
Rose laughed, a low and bitter sound, and not for the first time, Al wondered what price she had paid to grow so old, so young.
“We’ve had a lot of false prophets, over the years.”
They sat there in silence for a long while, as Al tried to absorb what had just been laid out.
“…why didn’t you tell me?” was all he could think to ask. He felt stunned. She had lived with them for months, back in Risenburg, and she’d never breathed a word.
“It doesn’t make me proud that I was a part of it. If I could, I would gladly forget it.”
All the fight had gone out of her, and she just slumped. She looked as though she was waiting for him to scream at her.
It took all his self-control not to. Al yanked hard at his ponytail instead.
“I can understand that, but…Rose, the Event was monumental! That was when my brother first went AWOL. You know that. You-“
Underground tunnels.
Rose, leading her people through them.
An array, on a level the world had never seen.
His brother, vanishing, and with him, the memories of Al’s old life.
Rose, leading him up through the earth, at the beginning of his new one.
The final piece slid sideways into place and Al looked at her in horror.
“It was here. Wasn’t it? That place where I first woke up. We were in Lior.”
He was aware that his voice was precariously close to breaking. He didn’t care. To hell with it. Al felt like he was reeling, like the room was spinning right out from under him. All this time…everyone…
They had all sworn up and down they had no idea what had caused Ed’s disappearance, anything about it, that they would help him any way they could.
“Is that why those armored things came up out of the ground? Because there’s a whole other city buried under us, right now?”
Rose was speaking but her voice carried no meaning. Everything was a buzz. Rose had been sitting on this. The whole time.
“You lied to me.”
Now awakened, the demon of his anger could not be reasoned with. It gibbered within his chest, sunk in invisible claws. It felt like he was splitting in two.
“No, Al-“
“If you knew where the city was, why didn’t you tell me?! I asked you so many times. Everyone else said I had dreamt it. I could have shown them-maybe then they would believe me--“
“Al, it isn’t here!”
Anger bared its teeth, aimed for the jugular. It was like he was seeing the world through slow-motion, everything was red.
“Then where? You do know, don’t you? Tell me!”
“ALPHONSE ELRIC!”
Al’s teeth clicked together painfully as he missed the start of his next word. The light in the room seemed to fade, and he looked up to see a living wall of muscle between himself and Rose.
“Deplorable,” Citizen Armstrong rumbled.
He was a different person without the smile. The man did not walk, he loomed forward into the room. Hands the size of ham-shanks squeezed into fists. Al was so used to the caricature, he had never appreciated just how powerful Armstrong was.
“Simply deplorable,” the man rumbled. “I chanced inside because I thought I heard shouting…but to think I should find you, Alphonse, bullying a lady!”
Armstrong turned toward Rose, and his expression softened ever so slightly.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” Rose said. She didn’t look all right though, Al realized. She looked…frankly, terrified, and the shock was like cold water pouring down his back. Her nails were buried deep into the fabric of her armchair, and she was biting down on her lower lip so hard he could see groove marks in it. She hadn’t run though. She had sat right there and taken it, the brunt of his anger.
She had stood her ground, and Alphonse knew shame.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, bowing low over his knees, as low as he could manage. His red hood flopped down over his face and he shoved it back up roughly. Right now, he didn’t feel he deserved to wear his brother’s coat.
What kind of a hero throws tantrums at people?
“It’s all right,” Rose said, though her voice was slightly faint. “Don’t bow. You shouldn’t have to apologize. You have a right to be angry.”
Al straightened up but if anything, he felt worse.
“I didn’t have the right to scream at you, though,” he said. “Miss Rose…”
Rose shook her head firmly, and a bit of her strength seemed to return. The vulnerable light was there in her eyes but her expression was determined, and in that moment he loved her for it.
“It happened at Central,” she said. “When your brother disappeared. What they now call Old Central…it isn’t really the old part of the city at all. There is another layer to it, in a cavern underneath.”
--stairs leading on forever, down, down, and down, and a city like a wave, houses sliding down the sides of the world and smashing together in the center, to a music hall no one has seen for centuries, except for the things that live there, pale things, like fish’s bellies turned up to rot--
Rose was staring at him intently, like she could see through into his head, what he was seeing.
“That was where she took me, when the work at Lior was done,” Rose whispered. “To her place below the city.”
“Who did?” Al asked.
“The woman I told you about. The one who was a false prophet,” Rose said. “I never knew her name. I was only to call her, ‘master’.”
Her legs were clamped together again and her body was trembling like a kite caught in a strong breeze. Armstrong placed one of his thick hands on her shoulder, kneaded it a little, as though bracing her. His palm entirely covered her deltoid.
“The children were hunting after their afternoon snacks,” Armstrong suggested. “I left Bria in charge, but you do know how she goes on.”
“I do,” Rose murmured, and she reached up to squeeze his fingers very briefly. Something grown-up, something complicated passed between them for a moment, and then Rose peeled Armstrong’s fingers away.
“They can go on a while longer,” she said. “Al deserves to know.”
She straightened up higher in her chair, pull her dress out from between her legs. Her eyes rose up to meet Al’s again, and she looked older, older than he had ever seen her before.
“Your brother came for me. He saved me…and you, too. You were also a prisoner, I think. I don’t…I don’t exactly recall. It’s…hard to remember.”
Al nodded, though he got the feeling she meant that in a very different sense.
“A lot of things happened that I didn’t understand, a lot of alchemy. What I did understand was…Edward died. He was attacked, he had a hole right through his chest, he was on the floor and dead. But you used alchemy somehow, to bring him back.”
Al couldn’t hardly breathe. He could picture it - he thought he could picture it - but was that truly memory, or morbid fascination? He could see his brother’s eyes…those beautiful, unusual, golden eyes…could see them dimming. The very idea made him sick.
“But I brought him back,” he parroted right back, trying to keep his lunch from coming back up.
“Yes, you did,” Rose affirmed again. She seemed to understand. “And he was whole, Al. He had human arms and legs, everything…”
“And?”
He was on the edge of his seat and he couldn’t even recall moving. It all came down to this. The part of the story they had never told him, the part that he’d always felt lingering around the edges of his life. All his dreams, and nightmares.
“It was because you were gone,” she said quietly. “He came, and you went. He asked me to take Wrath and go for help…and the rest, you know.”
“I came back…and he went,” Al whispered.
“Yes,” Rose said. Her eyes flicked downward to the hem of her shift. “Now you know. Your master thought it meant that he just isn’t anywhere, anymore. Because he gave himself for you.”
Armstrong rumbled something soft, and this time she accepted his hand when he proffered it.
“But I brought him back once,” Al said, mustering the will to speak. The will to do anything. Right now, he felt frozen.
To be the subject of that much love was almost unendurable. How could he be expected to bear it? The brother he remembered was just plain old Ed. Not the Fullmetal Alchemist, not the Hero of the People. Selfish at snack times. A blanket hog at night. Even wearing his brother’s old coat, even out here retracing his footsteps… His brother’s shadow just cast so far, it felt like he would never make it back to its source.
But he had to try. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that he had to try. He owed his brother too much to let him go, and loved him too dearly to want to.
“If I brought him back once, I could do it again,” he said slowly. “Because I’ve seen him.”
“At the cost of your own life,” Citizen Armstrong said sharply.
If that’s what it takes, a part of him thought, but did not say. The impulse was deeply disturbing.
Rose was looking at him again as though his thoughts were no secret. Her face held nothing but the deepest kind of sorrow.
“You have a right to be mad,” she said. “But now you know, why we tried to keep it from you.”
“Yes,” Al said, swallowing tightly. “Now I know.”
Love, in all forms, was hard to endure.
***
(See, I told you believe in the internet again :)))