[fic] Forward the Machine (AT, Action/Adventure) - Chapter 7 - Part Two
Title: Forward the Machine - Chapter 07
Genre: Action/adventure, AT (diverging from mid-CoS)
Rating: R
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
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Now:
Chapter 7 - Part I
After his conversation with Armstrong, it was hard to contemplate doing anything at all restful, let alone sleep, but Al was in Lior and in Lior, the afternoon meant sun-sleep. The time between two and four was the hottest, most dangerous part of the day, and in the desert, the people had adapted to holing up in the shade and dozing to avoid over-exertion in the heat. All businesses shuttered, even canteen sales ceased, and by the time the two ‘o clock bell rang out from the city hall bell tower, the streets were almost entirely deserted.
It begged to mind the question, who stayed awake to work the chimes, but Al had bigger mysteries to solve.
Rose and Armstrong were indisposed herding the children to bed, so Al made himself as useful as he could be while sequestered inside. The orphanage library was well stocked with primers and picture books, but its atlases were too simplistic to be of any use for his quest, though he did smile to see A is for Alchemy, one of his own early childhood favorites. He put in a call to his contacts in Central too but unfortunately to no avail - he had forgotten about the two-hour time difference, which meant that it was still noon back west, and while the state itself might disavow religion, there was no sacrament higher among the ranks than the twelve ‘o clock lunch hour. After a brief period of sweating, he finally deigned to leave a message coded with as much information as he dared. The on-call lunch secretary didn’t seem to be the sharpest point in the array, either, and probably the best he could hope for was that the man had taken his phone number right.
In absence of anything else to do, Al sought out the bathroom, took a shower beneath a showerhead that looked disturbingly like the Armstrong family rose crest. The water was plentiful and cool though, and he showed his appreciation by transmuting a better softener for it. Aquifer water was unfortunately hard, and without added salts it would reek like sulfur and leave skin feeling gritty. Al swapped the sodium in the ion exchanger for a quantity of potassium chloride, which would both result in less environmental damage and be cheaper to be replaced when necessary. Sylvite, natural potassium chloride salts, existed in surfeit in the surrounding desert.
He left the arrays required for replenishing the modified softener taped to its side in the machine closet and then sought out his quarters, having finally exhausted all other options. At least he felt clean, and although his wet hair smelled a little like bad eggs courtesy of the water, it no longer itched with sweat. Al flopped down on the little cot Rose had set up for him and stripped down to his boxers, laid back on the soft sheets, and tried to think of anything at all that wasn’t that array.
Four triangles, two circles. Arcana drawn in blood, both major and minor. All assembled together in an eight-point star. He had never seen that particular arrangement before, but the second Armstrong had said it had been his, he had known it was the truth, as true as sylvite and sulfur, as true as the blood rushing through his veins. Al reached into his battered suitcase and pulled out a piece of paper, sketched it absently, ran his fingers over the lines again and again and again.
Was Armstrong right, that he could lose pieces of himself using these arrays? He felt whole. The few times he had lost control of a soul transfer, he had just opened his eyes back in his regular body a couple seconds later, alchemically exhausted but physically all right. Though if he deactivated the array before that happened, he was always far less worn out. That detail was troubling…but correlation didn’t equate to causation. It was also highly likely that he lost control because he’d become tired, not necessarily that the tiredness was caused by a rebound reaction. The man had certainly right about one thing - he needed to test this.
Al dragged his thumb idly over the central focus of the star, considering, and that was when the bottom of the world abruptly fell away.
A flash went off in the back of his head, not in front of his eyes but behind his eyes, and all he could see was a brilliant fuzzy splotch of yellow, like he’d just closed his eyes after staring at the sun. Nothing seemed to change whether he opened his eyes or closed them. Al blinked around in panic, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, not even the bed beneath him. He tried to reach out and feel for the sheets, but his arms didn’t seem to move.
Maybe I’m inside the paper, he had the sudden, terrified thought. He’d been thinking about testing it, yes, but he hadn’t thought he’d actually activated the array - surely he had better control than that! - but if he thought about it, the ceiling over his cot was made of adobe. In the afternoon light, the off-white clay looked yellow.
Think, think, have to think, not panic. It was just a bad transfer, he’d had it happen before when he’d attempted to affix a part of himself to a ceiling. As much as he’d wanted to believe that ‘the walls have ears’, he’d discovered the human mind rebelled against being trapped in a flat plane. The point of view was too broad, all reference became skewed, and it was easy to panic. Al took a deep mental breath and tried to open the eyes in his true body.
Nothing happened.
He closed his current ‘eyes’, though the yellow haze remained exactly the same, and concentrated harder, willing himself as hard as he could to shift his view back to his proper self, but once again he looped right back to where he was. It was as if this paper-self was the only self he had. It just didn’t just feel like there were two of him.
::but there are, there are two of you::
A voice suddenly inserted itself, like an iron curtain dropping down. It was simply there in his mind, without preface or preamble, spoke with his own mental voice but the words were not his. His train of thought had not just been derailed, it felt hijacked, and Al had the hideous sensation of something crawling all over him, prickling like bug feet, like invisible centipedes crawling inside his brain.
::two of you, or three of you, many of you, many many many many many many MANY::
Each ‘many’ grew increasingly louder, more distorted, and the voice became Winry’s voice, became Armstrong’s voice, became a cat’s voice, became a crow’s. There was something right outside his field of vision, he was convinced now, something just behind him, and it was watching him…
Who are you? He screamed without words, terrified.
::we are myriad, we are nothing, we are one, we are legion::
There was a feeling of great movement just beyond his reach and a deafening yet inaudible toll, a sound like the inverse of a bell. He thought if he ever heard it again, he might go mad.
Let me go, leave me be! Al gibbered, squeezing his eyes closed, willing himself to see nothing, above all else, hear nothing. Armstrong was right, he was coming undone, his mind couldn’t exist like this, he should never have tried to transfer his soul into anything, now he was lost -
“…what in God’s name are you doing?”
The Other was hanging in the nothing-yellow in front of him, staring back with a curious expression.
It was a dream.
Numb relief washed over him so hard he felt he would be sick from it, but in his dream, apparently he was incapable of physically becoming ill. Al realized he was huddled down (if there was such a thing as ‘down’, in this place) in a ball, arms clutched around his knees in a fetal position. He had arms, and legs, and toes and fingers too. When he raised his head, he found that it moved.
“You again,” he said tiredly to the other boy. “Alfons-Haydrich?”
“Heiderich,” the Other said with a faint tinge of annoyance. “My family name is Heiderich.” He pronounced the ‘ich’ with particular flourish, with a hint of an accent Alphonse couldn’t place.
Al laughed, low and relieved. At the moment, he couldn’t care less if the man’s name were Alphonse Is-A-Doody-Face Fandango, so long as it was his voice talking and not that…other one. That voice had felt like it was reaching into his very soul and turning him inside out.
What was wrong with him that he could even imagine that?
“What are you laughing at?” ‘Alfons’ asked, looking alarmed.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry…I was having the worst dream, before this…” And now he was having the best, because here he was again, here they were - himself and the Other, the person who had claimed to be his brother’s friend. Someone Ed had lived with.
Someone who knew that city with a river running through it.
Al bolted to his feet, although the emptiness gave no resistance at all beneath his shoes. If not for his Alfons as his reference point, he wouldn’t have reason to believe he were standing up at all. Without the other boy in front of him, he could have just as easily unfolded his legs down and he never would have known the difference.
“Where’s Ed?” Al asked eagerly. “Where do the two of you live?” He hadn’t gotten an answer the last time they had met like this, and this time around he would not be denied. If he only had the address, the city, the country, something he could work with!
“I-I don’t know,” Alfons stammered, looking deeply unhappy. There was the briefest impression of a hallway behind him, a heavy door that opened and shut in the ether. “I told you, he left.”
Because there had been some kind of confrontation, Al remembered with dark fury. Because apparently you drove him out. The world twisted around them, reacting to his thoughts the way it had before, and that same tableau spread out around them, a darkened hallway, stairs. His brother, lying helpless halfway down them. It was a caricature only though, his brother’s golden eyes and hair and then a rough slash where Ed’s mouth ought to be, hardly any nose; a cartoonish parody of a person. His face couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a child’s or a man’s either, the jaw line kept wavering around the edges, like a picture show reel caught in the projector, flickering back and forth between frames.
‘Alfons’ gasped audibly and made a sign like an X in the air in front of his body - some kind of ward? It reminded Al of the Ishvarites’ sign of penitence - and as he stared, Ed’s features came in to stark relief, one second a preimage, the next a complete photograph. Al gaped himself, amazed by how real Ed was, how much he expected him to jump up and start talking. He could even see slight stains on his brother’s shirt lapels. Those details hadn’t come from him, of that he was certain.
A wave of hot jealousy spiked through his core and he found himself even more furious with the stranger. His hands clenched into fists. He did not understand the mechanic exactly, but he knew the dream seemed to react to things he pictured in his own mind. That was how he had shown ‘Alfons’ his research data, all the images he had found of Ed. Presumably also how Alfons had shown him Ed’s…’girl’, an unfamiliar woman who’d appeared Lioran. But if that was the case, and his brother only resolved when Alfons looked at him…in the language of dreams, did that mean that this stranger knew his brother better than he did now? Al had the maddening feeling it might.
He had to focus though, had to focus. If this was anything like the last dream, there might not be much time. He wanted to snarl about it but Alfons’s fight with Ed was not the issue. Ed’s whereabouts were.
“What is this place?” Al pushed instead. “Where did you last see him? You owe it to him to tell me, people are trying to find him.” This Alfons seemed (rightly so) to feel guilty for having hit his brother. Maybe he would actually answer the question this time.
“…it is our boarding house, in Munich,” Alfons whispered. He was visibly paler, clutching at the nape of his shirt like the rough fabric was choking him. Not that he had been robust to begin with. In the yellow light he looked jaundiced, and his skin seemed paper thin. It reminded Al eerily of the cadavers at the state research facilities, of illness and of death.
This is not a well man, he realized for the first time.
“Where?” Al asked again, feeling a twinge of sympathy, but he needed to know. “Where is Munich? Is there a river there?” Come to think of it, Alfons had mentioned a river the last time he’d seen him. Al had to fight a sense of mounting excitement. This person was real somewhere, he had to be, too many coincidences were starting to add up.
The floor split behind them, sunk down into a small ghostly parody of the river Al remembered…smooth as glass, just a few drifting leaves to suggest the current might be moving.
“The river Isar,” Alfons said, sounding confused. He was staring at the vision with something akin to relief though. Apparently he was glad not to look at Edward’s face any longer. “And Munich is in Germany.”
“Is that a territory name? Or a colony? I’ve never heard of it.”
“No, it is a nation! My fatherland.”
That seemed to hit a nerve. Alfons jerked his head back haughtily and his nostrils flared.
“Sorry,” Al said hurriedly, though he wasn’t sure why he was apologizing. This person had hit his brother, he reminded himself again, he’d admitted to casting Edward out.
“Where is it in relation to Amestris? Is it in Libya or Asias?”
Al concentrated hard and the river disappeared, replaced by a map hanging in between them - the two great continents of the civilized world in bas relief, northern and southern, with jagged marks roughly apportioning the countries whose boundaries he could best picture. Xing hulking to the east, Drachma looming across the north, the scattered smaller nations to the south and west, Creta, Aerugo. Amestris stood out at the center as a glowing landlocked territory.
Alfons was giving him a strange look now, deeply thoughtful. He reached up as though to touch the map, but his fingers stopped just shy of making contact.
“Amestris…?” Alfons said slowly, as though tasting each syllable on his tongue. “Edward used that name.”
“Yes,” Al said, hardly daring to breathe. “That is where we’re from. My ‘fatherland’. Ed’s too.”
“…it’s all true, isn’t it?” Alfons asked in a raspy voice. His pale eyes were wide, searching Al’s face with quiet amazement. “You’re real.”
“Yes,” Al said, meeting his gaze as best he could. Alfons had expressed doubt before too, and he hadn’t known what to say. “Aren’t you?”
“I think so,” Alfons said slowly. “Insofar as this is a dream.” He tilted his head to one side, appearing to consider, one index finger pressed just to the outside corner of his lips. The effect was so over the top ‘THINKING’ that Al had to restrain himself from laughing. The man looked like a gangly crane cocking its head over a fishpond, stymied by having a selection. Al had to work to banish the image from his mind before it finished materializing beside Alfons.
“I’m dreaming too,” Al offered. “It started out as a nightmare…then I came to be here again, with you.”
Alfons’s lips twitched down slightly and he frowned. “I was not dreaming of anything else, I do not think. Unless I dreamed the alchemy…” The map between them shifted into the shape of a broom for some reason, then winked out altogether.
“Alchemy!?” Al yelped, darting forward a few steps, hardly able to breathe. Something stopped him before he reached Alfons though. It was as though he were wading into a thick, invisible liquid - the further he went the harder the resistance became, until by the fourth step he couldn’t lift his feet at all. Al looked down at his stuck legs in surprise, reached down to try and pull at one with his arms.
Alfons moved forward as well with a curious expression on his face. He took four very deliberate steps before stopping dead himself, cocked his head to the side again.
“We seem to move easier this time,” Alfons noted. “But not very far.” His tone was clinical, detached, a scientist solidly in observation mode. Al recognized that demeanor well. Sometimes, he even played that part himself.
He was less interested in observing the dream phenomena right now though, not when Alfons had just spoken that tantalizing word.
“What were you saying about alchemy!?” Al pressed again. He let his legs be, concentrated on trying to drill through Alfons’s skull with his eyes instead.
“I work for a…society of gentlemen,” Alfons said, and was it Al’s imagination, or did he seem uncomfortable? He took a shallow little breath, coughed a little before he continued. “Today, they showed me something that I thought was impossible.”
The floor beneath them rolled back like a carpet in toward Alfons, then out again in every direction. There were dark circles marked in even intervals across the ‘room’ they were in now, each a highly ominous shade of black. Like burn marks, or the char from a bad transmutation. And that was their purpose, Al realized with sudden delight, he could see the marks of what was clearly meant to be an array in the circle that was now positioned between them.
“You work for alchemists!?”
Alfons nodded reluctantly. “Apparently this is the case. Apparently…I am one too,” he said, and he looked up with a stare so fierce Al nearly laughed again. It was like Alfons expected him to take issue with it.
“You didn’t know?” It was unusual, but not inconceivable, that someone could grow up a latent alchemist. Most children were tested by the time they left grade school, but if they were homeschooled, or missed a lot of school for some reason, it was possible to go years without exposure to the discipline. Al had a hard time picturing it himself because he and his brother had had their father’s old books; they had read about arrays since the time they were three. By the time his brother was four they’d both already experimented enough to know they had the gift. Not knowing at all was hard to imagine.
“Of course I did not know!” Alfons sputtered. There was color to his skin now, little spots of flustered red on his cheeks. “It is madness. Alchemy is a pseudo-science, no one has taken it seriously for hundreds of years. How could I have been expected to know!”
He seemed legitimately perturbed, a brilliant scowl written all the way across his face. Al blinked. The Ishvarite people disavowed alchemy for religious reasons, of course, but they were at best a ‘nation’ of nomads. Bush people, whose traditions were immune from modern technology only because of the remoteness of their encampments. Alfons did not look like he was one of the desert peoples. His skin was fair enough to belong to a society girl in Central.
The broom appeared again, spinning in slow circles, and Alfons stared at it with a despondent look on his face.
“Edward told me about alchemy,” Alfons said. “When he was drunk sometimes. I thought that he was shell-shocked. The circles never worked when he drew them...the only logical conclusion was that he was ill.”
His eyes shone with a sudden brightness and Al shifted uncomfortably. This person hurt my brother, he reminded himself again, but the rage was increasingly difficult to summon. Alfons seemed to radiate hurt when he spoke about Edward, like he was genuinely penitent. And it wasn’t as though he and his brother had never bowled each other over in a fit of pique. When he was nine he had once thrown his brother down a flight of stairs at the Master’s house because Ed had absolutely refused to accept that their sparring match was over. He remembered that afterward, he had felt horrible (and not just because the Master had spanked him).
“What do you mean, the circles didn’t work?” Al asked, trying to summon objectivity again. Whatever Alfons’s feelings were, he needed the information Alfons had even more.
“Just that, they didn’t work,” Alfons said. He still looked wretched. “Edward did not know why they didn’t either. He drew them everywhere, when he thought I wasn’t looking. Once, he even drew them on his bed sheets.”
A miniature bed appeared between them in the ether and a tiny Edward jerked out of it, looking incredibly disgruntled. As the vision opened its mouth to rail wordlessly, Al realized there was half an array printed on Ed’s cheek, traces of the array that was drawn across its pillow. The image was so powerfully, inexorably brother that Al couldn’t keep from laughing for a second.
“He does that sometimes,” Al explained, and now the Ed in the vision was six again, looking over at a little Al in the bed they shared with the mark of Mercury stamped across his lower chin. “He gets ideas in the middle of the night, can’t wake up enough to find paper to write them down.”
Alfons blinked for a second, then slowly, he also grinned, shaking his head a little in exasperation. He had a very nice smile, Al realized for the first time. It was the first time he had ever seen it.
“Well, if it weren’t for Miss Gracia - our landlady - he would look like a vagrant all the time,” Alfons said. “She says she boils and boils his shirts to get the ink out of them.”
“That sounds like him,” Al agreed. “The master used to have to bend him over the sink and scrub his face for him when he came in from outside, else people would think he was Ishvarite.”
He left out the part where she’d also had to do the same for him. Left to their own devices, the two of them had tended to ignore their appearances. Dirt might even be said to build character.
“Where is your boarding house, anyway?” Al asked again, still smiling at the other man. He focused once more on bringing up a map between them. “On a map, I mean. I’d like to come and look for Ed. We haven’t seen each other in two years…we’ve all missed him here at home. I’ve missed him.”
Hopefully, Edward was missing him too. More than once, it had occurred to him that maybe, just maybe the reason his brother had not turned up so far was that he no longer remembered where home was.
Alfons’s smile seemed to falter as he looked at the map again, and his pale eyes flicked back and forth between it and Al.
“I can show you, I think…but…”
A small part of western Asias lit up, in the region the ancients had called Europa. It was slightly north of the infamous boot-shaped peninsula of Aerugo - maybe in the contested part of Creta? Al narrowed his eyes at it, trying to commit the location to memory, when suddenly the map exploded with lines.
Unfamiliar borders raced across the western part of Asias - at least he thought they were borders, but none of them were right. If this was correct, there were at least…thirty, maybe forty territories to old Europa, some so small they were barely even visible next to their neighbors.
“What is this?” Al asked, absolutely befuddled.
“Europe,” Alfons said, and his eyes were deeply sad. “The Europe that I know, at least.”
“I don’t understand,” Al said, inhaling sharply, although a horrified part of himself was starting to get an idea.
Alfons shook his head a little, reached one finger out to hover over the ghostly map.
“Edward told me once that he was not part of my ‘world’,” he said quietly. “I always pretended it was just hyperbole.”
Al swallowed thickly, reaching out toward the map as well. There was gibbering at the edges of his hearing again and the world was starting to glow brighter.
Alfons’s eyes were glowing as he looked at him now, twin sapphires cutting through the increasing yellow haze.
“But now I think, he was not so crazy,” Alfons was saying. “His alchemy, his other world, all of it…”
His face was fading away now, obscured by the increasing light, and Al just barely heard him whisper.
“If he is crazy, then I am crazy now too.”
Al opened his mouth to speak, to scream, but the sound seemed to congeal in his lungs. Light poured down his throat, thick enough to feel gelatinous, and something - a hand maybe - invisible and strong swiped fingers along the back of his head.
::now you see, now you see::
A cock’s voice, his mother’s voice, a million dark things at once crowed in triumph, and then the hand holding him twined hard into the base of his ponytail and jerked hard.
The world exploded in light once more, and then Al saw nothing at all.
Genre: Action/adventure, AT (diverging from mid-CoS)
Rating: R
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
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Now:
Chapter 7 - Part I
After his conversation with Armstrong, it was hard to contemplate doing anything at all restful, let alone sleep, but Al was in Lior and in Lior, the afternoon meant sun-sleep. The time between two and four was the hottest, most dangerous part of the day, and in the desert, the people had adapted to holing up in the shade and dozing to avoid over-exertion in the heat. All businesses shuttered, even canteen sales ceased, and by the time the two ‘o clock bell rang out from the city hall bell tower, the streets were almost entirely deserted.
It begged to mind the question, who stayed awake to work the chimes, but Al had bigger mysteries to solve.
Rose and Armstrong were indisposed herding the children to bed, so Al made himself as useful as he could be while sequestered inside. The orphanage library was well stocked with primers and picture books, but its atlases were too simplistic to be of any use for his quest, though he did smile to see A is for Alchemy, one of his own early childhood favorites. He put in a call to his contacts in Central too but unfortunately to no avail - he had forgotten about the two-hour time difference, which meant that it was still noon back west, and while the state itself might disavow religion, there was no sacrament higher among the ranks than the twelve ‘o clock lunch hour. After a brief period of sweating, he finally deigned to leave a message coded with as much information as he dared. The on-call lunch secretary didn’t seem to be the sharpest point in the array, either, and probably the best he could hope for was that the man had taken his phone number right.
In absence of anything else to do, Al sought out the bathroom, took a shower beneath a showerhead that looked disturbingly like the Armstrong family rose crest. The water was plentiful and cool though, and he showed his appreciation by transmuting a better softener for it. Aquifer water was unfortunately hard, and without added salts it would reek like sulfur and leave skin feeling gritty. Al swapped the sodium in the ion exchanger for a quantity of potassium chloride, which would both result in less environmental damage and be cheaper to be replaced when necessary. Sylvite, natural potassium chloride salts, existed in surfeit in the surrounding desert.
He left the arrays required for replenishing the modified softener taped to its side in the machine closet and then sought out his quarters, having finally exhausted all other options. At least he felt clean, and although his wet hair smelled a little like bad eggs courtesy of the water, it no longer itched with sweat. Al flopped down on the little cot Rose had set up for him and stripped down to his boxers, laid back on the soft sheets, and tried to think of anything at all that wasn’t that array.
Four triangles, two circles. Arcana drawn in blood, both major and minor. All assembled together in an eight-point star. He had never seen that particular arrangement before, but the second Armstrong had said it had been his, he had known it was the truth, as true as sylvite and sulfur, as true as the blood rushing through his veins. Al reached into his battered suitcase and pulled out a piece of paper, sketched it absently, ran his fingers over the lines again and again and again.
Was Armstrong right, that he could lose pieces of himself using these arrays? He felt whole. The few times he had lost control of a soul transfer, he had just opened his eyes back in his regular body a couple seconds later, alchemically exhausted but physically all right. Though if he deactivated the array before that happened, he was always far less worn out. That detail was troubling…but correlation didn’t equate to causation. It was also highly likely that he lost control because he’d become tired, not necessarily that the tiredness was caused by a rebound reaction. The man had certainly right about one thing - he needed to test this.
Al dragged his thumb idly over the central focus of the star, considering, and that was when the bottom of the world abruptly fell away.
A flash went off in the back of his head, not in front of his eyes but behind his eyes, and all he could see was a brilliant fuzzy splotch of yellow, like he’d just closed his eyes after staring at the sun. Nothing seemed to change whether he opened his eyes or closed them. Al blinked around in panic, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, not even the bed beneath him. He tried to reach out and feel for the sheets, but his arms didn’t seem to move.
Maybe I’m inside the paper, he had the sudden, terrified thought. He’d been thinking about testing it, yes, but he hadn’t thought he’d actually activated the array - surely he had better control than that! - but if he thought about it, the ceiling over his cot was made of adobe. In the afternoon light, the off-white clay looked yellow.
Think, think, have to think, not panic. It was just a bad transfer, he’d had it happen before when he’d attempted to affix a part of himself to a ceiling. As much as he’d wanted to believe that ‘the walls have ears’, he’d discovered the human mind rebelled against being trapped in a flat plane. The point of view was too broad, all reference became skewed, and it was easy to panic. Al took a deep mental breath and tried to open the eyes in his true body.
Nothing happened.
He closed his current ‘eyes’, though the yellow haze remained exactly the same, and concentrated harder, willing himself as hard as he could to shift his view back to his proper self, but once again he looped right back to where he was. It was as if this paper-self was the only self he had. It just didn’t just feel like there were two of him.
::but there are, there are two of you::
A voice suddenly inserted itself, like an iron curtain dropping down. It was simply there in his mind, without preface or preamble, spoke with his own mental voice but the words were not his. His train of thought had not just been derailed, it felt hijacked, and Al had the hideous sensation of something crawling all over him, prickling like bug feet, like invisible centipedes crawling inside his brain.
::two of you, or three of you, many of you, many many many many many many MANY::
Each ‘many’ grew increasingly louder, more distorted, and the voice became Winry’s voice, became Armstrong’s voice, became a cat’s voice, became a crow’s. There was something right outside his field of vision, he was convinced now, something just behind him, and it was watching him…
Who are you? He screamed without words, terrified.
::we are myriad, we are nothing, we are one, we are legion::
There was a feeling of great movement just beyond his reach and a deafening yet inaudible toll, a sound like the inverse of a bell. He thought if he ever heard it again, he might go mad.
Let me go, leave me be! Al gibbered, squeezing his eyes closed, willing himself to see nothing, above all else, hear nothing. Armstrong was right, he was coming undone, his mind couldn’t exist like this, he should never have tried to transfer his soul into anything, now he was lost -
“…what in God’s name are you doing?”
The Other was hanging in the nothing-yellow in front of him, staring back with a curious expression.
It was a dream.
Numb relief washed over him so hard he felt he would be sick from it, but in his dream, apparently he was incapable of physically becoming ill. Al realized he was huddled down (if there was such a thing as ‘down’, in this place) in a ball, arms clutched around his knees in a fetal position. He had arms, and legs, and toes and fingers too. When he raised his head, he found that it moved.
“You again,” he said tiredly to the other boy. “Alfons-Haydrich?”
“Heiderich,” the Other said with a faint tinge of annoyance. “My family name is Heiderich.” He pronounced the ‘ich’ with particular flourish, with a hint of an accent Alphonse couldn’t place.
Al laughed, low and relieved. At the moment, he couldn’t care less if the man’s name were Alphonse Is-A-Doody-Face Fandango, so long as it was his voice talking and not that…other one. That voice had felt like it was reaching into his very soul and turning him inside out.
What was wrong with him that he could even imagine that?
“What are you laughing at?” ‘Alfons’ asked, looking alarmed.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry…I was having the worst dream, before this…” And now he was having the best, because here he was again, here they were - himself and the Other, the person who had claimed to be his brother’s friend. Someone Ed had lived with.
Someone who knew that city with a river running through it.
Al bolted to his feet, although the emptiness gave no resistance at all beneath his shoes. If not for his Alfons as his reference point, he wouldn’t have reason to believe he were standing up at all. Without the other boy in front of him, he could have just as easily unfolded his legs down and he never would have known the difference.
“Where’s Ed?” Al asked eagerly. “Where do the two of you live?” He hadn’t gotten an answer the last time they had met like this, and this time around he would not be denied. If he only had the address, the city, the country, something he could work with!
“I-I don’t know,” Alfons stammered, looking deeply unhappy. There was the briefest impression of a hallway behind him, a heavy door that opened and shut in the ether. “I told you, he left.”
Because there had been some kind of confrontation, Al remembered with dark fury. Because apparently you drove him out. The world twisted around them, reacting to his thoughts the way it had before, and that same tableau spread out around them, a darkened hallway, stairs. His brother, lying helpless halfway down them. It was a caricature only though, his brother’s golden eyes and hair and then a rough slash where Ed’s mouth ought to be, hardly any nose; a cartoonish parody of a person. His face couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a child’s or a man’s either, the jaw line kept wavering around the edges, like a picture show reel caught in the projector, flickering back and forth between frames.
‘Alfons’ gasped audibly and made a sign like an X in the air in front of his body - some kind of ward? It reminded Al of the Ishvarites’ sign of penitence - and as he stared, Ed’s features came in to stark relief, one second a preimage, the next a complete photograph. Al gaped himself, amazed by how real Ed was, how much he expected him to jump up and start talking. He could even see slight stains on his brother’s shirt lapels. Those details hadn’t come from him, of that he was certain.
A wave of hot jealousy spiked through his core and he found himself even more furious with the stranger. His hands clenched into fists. He did not understand the mechanic exactly, but he knew the dream seemed to react to things he pictured in his own mind. That was how he had shown ‘Alfons’ his research data, all the images he had found of Ed. Presumably also how Alfons had shown him Ed’s…’girl’, an unfamiliar woman who’d appeared Lioran. But if that was the case, and his brother only resolved when Alfons looked at him…in the language of dreams, did that mean that this stranger knew his brother better than he did now? Al had the maddening feeling it might.
He had to focus though, had to focus. If this was anything like the last dream, there might not be much time. He wanted to snarl about it but Alfons’s fight with Ed was not the issue. Ed’s whereabouts were.
“What is this place?” Al pushed instead. “Where did you last see him? You owe it to him to tell me, people are trying to find him.” This Alfons seemed (rightly so) to feel guilty for having hit his brother. Maybe he would actually answer the question this time.
“…it is our boarding house, in Munich,” Alfons whispered. He was visibly paler, clutching at the nape of his shirt like the rough fabric was choking him. Not that he had been robust to begin with. In the yellow light he looked jaundiced, and his skin seemed paper thin. It reminded Al eerily of the cadavers at the state research facilities, of illness and of death.
This is not a well man, he realized for the first time.
“Where?” Al asked again, feeling a twinge of sympathy, but he needed to know. “Where is Munich? Is there a river there?” Come to think of it, Alfons had mentioned a river the last time he’d seen him. Al had to fight a sense of mounting excitement. This person was real somewhere, he had to be, too many coincidences were starting to add up.
The floor split behind them, sunk down into a small ghostly parody of the river Al remembered…smooth as glass, just a few drifting leaves to suggest the current might be moving.
“The river Isar,” Alfons said, sounding confused. He was staring at the vision with something akin to relief though. Apparently he was glad not to look at Edward’s face any longer. “And Munich is in Germany.”
“Is that a territory name? Or a colony? I’ve never heard of it.”
“No, it is a nation! My fatherland.”
That seemed to hit a nerve. Alfons jerked his head back haughtily and his nostrils flared.
“Sorry,” Al said hurriedly, though he wasn’t sure why he was apologizing. This person had hit his brother, he reminded himself again, he’d admitted to casting Edward out.
“Where is it in relation to Amestris? Is it in Libya or Asias?”
Al concentrated hard and the river disappeared, replaced by a map hanging in between them - the two great continents of the civilized world in bas relief, northern and southern, with jagged marks roughly apportioning the countries whose boundaries he could best picture. Xing hulking to the east, Drachma looming across the north, the scattered smaller nations to the south and west, Creta, Aerugo. Amestris stood out at the center as a glowing landlocked territory.
Alfons was giving him a strange look now, deeply thoughtful. He reached up as though to touch the map, but his fingers stopped just shy of making contact.
“Amestris…?” Alfons said slowly, as though tasting each syllable on his tongue. “Edward used that name.”
“Yes,” Al said, hardly daring to breathe. “That is where we’re from. My ‘fatherland’. Ed’s too.”
“…it’s all true, isn’t it?” Alfons asked in a raspy voice. His pale eyes were wide, searching Al’s face with quiet amazement. “You’re real.”
“Yes,” Al said, meeting his gaze as best he could. Alfons had expressed doubt before too, and he hadn’t known what to say. “Aren’t you?”
“I think so,” Alfons said slowly. “Insofar as this is a dream.” He tilted his head to one side, appearing to consider, one index finger pressed just to the outside corner of his lips. The effect was so over the top ‘THINKING’ that Al had to restrain himself from laughing. The man looked like a gangly crane cocking its head over a fishpond, stymied by having a selection. Al had to work to banish the image from his mind before it finished materializing beside Alfons.
“I’m dreaming too,” Al offered. “It started out as a nightmare…then I came to be here again, with you.”
Alfons’s lips twitched down slightly and he frowned. “I was not dreaming of anything else, I do not think. Unless I dreamed the alchemy…” The map between them shifted into the shape of a broom for some reason, then winked out altogether.
“Alchemy!?” Al yelped, darting forward a few steps, hardly able to breathe. Something stopped him before he reached Alfons though. It was as though he were wading into a thick, invisible liquid - the further he went the harder the resistance became, until by the fourth step he couldn’t lift his feet at all. Al looked down at his stuck legs in surprise, reached down to try and pull at one with his arms.
Alfons moved forward as well with a curious expression on his face. He took four very deliberate steps before stopping dead himself, cocked his head to the side again.
“We seem to move easier this time,” Alfons noted. “But not very far.” His tone was clinical, detached, a scientist solidly in observation mode. Al recognized that demeanor well. Sometimes, he even played that part himself.
He was less interested in observing the dream phenomena right now though, not when Alfons had just spoken that tantalizing word.
“What were you saying about alchemy!?” Al pressed again. He let his legs be, concentrated on trying to drill through Alfons’s skull with his eyes instead.
“I work for a…society of gentlemen,” Alfons said, and was it Al’s imagination, or did he seem uncomfortable? He took a shallow little breath, coughed a little before he continued. “Today, they showed me something that I thought was impossible.”
The floor beneath them rolled back like a carpet in toward Alfons, then out again in every direction. There were dark circles marked in even intervals across the ‘room’ they were in now, each a highly ominous shade of black. Like burn marks, or the char from a bad transmutation. And that was their purpose, Al realized with sudden delight, he could see the marks of what was clearly meant to be an array in the circle that was now positioned between them.
“You work for alchemists!?”
Alfons nodded reluctantly. “Apparently this is the case. Apparently…I am one too,” he said, and he looked up with a stare so fierce Al nearly laughed again. It was like Alfons expected him to take issue with it.
“You didn’t know?” It was unusual, but not inconceivable, that someone could grow up a latent alchemist. Most children were tested by the time they left grade school, but if they were homeschooled, or missed a lot of school for some reason, it was possible to go years without exposure to the discipline. Al had a hard time picturing it himself because he and his brother had had their father’s old books; they had read about arrays since the time they were three. By the time his brother was four they’d both already experimented enough to know they had the gift. Not knowing at all was hard to imagine.
“Of course I did not know!” Alfons sputtered. There was color to his skin now, little spots of flustered red on his cheeks. “It is madness. Alchemy is a pseudo-science, no one has taken it seriously for hundreds of years. How could I have been expected to know!”
He seemed legitimately perturbed, a brilliant scowl written all the way across his face. Al blinked. The Ishvarite people disavowed alchemy for religious reasons, of course, but they were at best a ‘nation’ of nomads. Bush people, whose traditions were immune from modern technology only because of the remoteness of their encampments. Alfons did not look like he was one of the desert peoples. His skin was fair enough to belong to a society girl in Central.
The broom appeared again, spinning in slow circles, and Alfons stared at it with a despondent look on his face.
“Edward told me about alchemy,” Alfons said. “When he was drunk sometimes. I thought that he was shell-shocked. The circles never worked when he drew them...the only logical conclusion was that he was ill.”
His eyes shone with a sudden brightness and Al shifted uncomfortably. This person hurt my brother, he reminded himself again, but the rage was increasingly difficult to summon. Alfons seemed to radiate hurt when he spoke about Edward, like he was genuinely penitent. And it wasn’t as though he and his brother had never bowled each other over in a fit of pique. When he was nine he had once thrown his brother down a flight of stairs at the Master’s house because Ed had absolutely refused to accept that their sparring match was over. He remembered that afterward, he had felt horrible (and not just because the Master had spanked him).
“What do you mean, the circles didn’t work?” Al asked, trying to summon objectivity again. Whatever Alfons’s feelings were, he needed the information Alfons had even more.
“Just that, they didn’t work,” Alfons said. He still looked wretched. “Edward did not know why they didn’t either. He drew them everywhere, when he thought I wasn’t looking. Once, he even drew them on his bed sheets.”
A miniature bed appeared between them in the ether and a tiny Edward jerked out of it, looking incredibly disgruntled. As the vision opened its mouth to rail wordlessly, Al realized there was half an array printed on Ed’s cheek, traces of the array that was drawn across its pillow. The image was so powerfully, inexorably brother that Al couldn’t keep from laughing for a second.
“He does that sometimes,” Al explained, and now the Ed in the vision was six again, looking over at a little Al in the bed they shared with the mark of Mercury stamped across his lower chin. “He gets ideas in the middle of the night, can’t wake up enough to find paper to write them down.”
Alfons blinked for a second, then slowly, he also grinned, shaking his head a little in exasperation. He had a very nice smile, Al realized for the first time. It was the first time he had ever seen it.
“Well, if it weren’t for Miss Gracia - our landlady - he would look like a vagrant all the time,” Alfons said. “She says she boils and boils his shirts to get the ink out of them.”
“That sounds like him,” Al agreed. “The master used to have to bend him over the sink and scrub his face for him when he came in from outside, else people would think he was Ishvarite.”
He left out the part where she’d also had to do the same for him. Left to their own devices, the two of them had tended to ignore their appearances. Dirt might even be said to build character.
“Where is your boarding house, anyway?” Al asked again, still smiling at the other man. He focused once more on bringing up a map between them. “On a map, I mean. I’d like to come and look for Ed. We haven’t seen each other in two years…we’ve all missed him here at home. I’ve missed him.”
Hopefully, Edward was missing him too. More than once, it had occurred to him that maybe, just maybe the reason his brother had not turned up so far was that he no longer remembered where home was.
Alfons’s smile seemed to falter as he looked at the map again, and his pale eyes flicked back and forth between it and Al.
“I can show you, I think…but…”
A small part of western Asias lit up, in the region the ancients had called Europa. It was slightly north of the infamous boot-shaped peninsula of Aerugo - maybe in the contested part of Creta? Al narrowed his eyes at it, trying to commit the location to memory, when suddenly the map exploded with lines.
Unfamiliar borders raced across the western part of Asias - at least he thought they were borders, but none of them were right. If this was correct, there were at least…thirty, maybe forty territories to old Europa, some so small they were barely even visible next to their neighbors.
“What is this?” Al asked, absolutely befuddled.
“Europe,” Alfons said, and his eyes were deeply sad. “The Europe that I know, at least.”
“I don’t understand,” Al said, inhaling sharply, although a horrified part of himself was starting to get an idea.
Alfons shook his head a little, reached one finger out to hover over the ghostly map.
“Edward told me once that he was not part of my ‘world’,” he said quietly. “I always pretended it was just hyperbole.”
Al swallowed thickly, reaching out toward the map as well. There was gibbering at the edges of his hearing again and the world was starting to glow brighter.
Alfons’s eyes were glowing as he looked at him now, twin sapphires cutting through the increasing yellow haze.
“But now I think, he was not so crazy,” Alfons was saying. “His alchemy, his other world, all of it…”
His face was fading away now, obscured by the increasing light, and Al just barely heard him whisper.
“If he is crazy, then I am crazy now too.”
Al opened his mouth to speak, to scream, but the sound seemed to congeal in his lungs. Light poured down his throat, thick enough to feel gelatinous, and something - a hand maybe - invisible and strong swiped fingers along the back of his head.
::now you see, now you see::
A cock’s voice, his mother’s voice, a million dark things at once crowed in triumph, and then the hand holding him twined hard into the base of his ponytail and jerked hard.
The world exploded in light once more, and then Al saw nothing at all.