(no subject)
hey everyone! :D Well, I've finally gotten up the resolve to start a chaptered elricest fiction, and this is actually my first chaptered anime fanfiction, too. so yeah, I'm kinda nervous about starting one, buuuut... please lemme know what you think of this chapter, and if I get some positive responses, I'll definitely continue, kay? Just lemme know, it's ALWAYS greatly appreciated, especially since you guys here are always so wonderful to me n' my stories ^-^
anyway, on with the story.
Fanfiction: "Tell Me What It Means" [chapter 1]
Author: sakikotetsu
Pairing: elricest (duh?)
Genre: Romance/Drama
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: complete AU, taking place in the present day.
Summary: Alphonse Ehrlic and Edward Elric - two strangers - have a bond that neither of them can understand, but will it be strong enough to get them through what they have to face?
Golden eyes, bright as day. They stared at him, bore into his very being, but gently so. Something about those eyes made him feel anxious, like he was waiting for something, but he didn’t know what, or whether it was even good or bad. The shining optics spoke thousands of words to him, though all in an unknown language. But something about it all… he could tell they were trying to tell him something. Something important.
“What is it?” he spoke, asking more than one question by doing so. What is it that you’re trying to tell me, what is it that I’m waiting for, what is it that you’re making me feel? Answers never came, but still he longed to know. He tried to reach out to the topaz-colored orbs, only to find that he himself had no body. But still, this didn’t faze him compared to the mystery before him, staring, never blinking…
The dream always ended the same way. With a loud, detestable sound that was merciless. But it was because of that that it was the only thing that could make those eyes fade away.
…
5:03 am.
The green numbers glared at him through the dark. He looked at them with half-lidded eyes, his mind slowly registering the noise coming from the small electronic device. Once the beeping finally became annoying, he reached out and hit the button on top with more force than necessary. But he got the result he wanted.
Silence rang in the dark room. Most days, he would use this to his advantage and fall back to sleep for a little while longer, but…
Those eyes…
They kept coming back to his mind.
With a small groan, he reluctantly decided to get out of bed. Besides, if he got up now, he would have time to take a longer shower. So, he lifted himself from the bed, and padded across the room to the door.
As he made his way down the hallway to the bathroom, he heard a faint noise from outside. He stopped and listened. It sounded almost like… an engine? He walked a few steps further to one of the windows that were in the hallway, and looked out into the foggy gray-ness of the early morning.
The sounds were - as he had thought - coming from an engine. A truck, to be exact. It was pulling into the driveway of the house next door. He narrowed his eyes at it, wondering why it would be there. No one had lived in that house for as long as he could remember. But as he squinted harder, he soon realized that what was in the driveway wasn’t a truck.
It was a moving van.
Eyes widening a little, he leaned away from the cold glass, but still looking out. It was definitely a surprise to him, he hadn’t heard anything about getting new neighbors. Surely his parents would’ve known?
He shrugged and stepped away from the window, and continued the rest of his trek to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
An unpleasant shiver went through him as his bare feet met with the cold tile floor. He made haste in going over to the shower, and turning on the hot water, peeling off his pajamas, and hopping into the welcoming warmth behind the curtain.
He sighed contently as the water met with his cold skin. It burned a tiny bit, but he didn’t mind. He turned so that it could cover his back and the top of his head, long chestnut locks spilling over his shoulders.
In the haze of his comfort, the teen’s mind wondered back to his dream. He’d had it several times before, but the odd thing was that they had occurred all his life. And once every couple of years, he would have it. The first one came when he was four or five, and he remembered that it had scared him out of his wits. He had been too frightened to even sleep, convinced that those eyes were watching him.
But now at sixteen, the dream no longer scared him. Confused him beyond all reason, but didn’t scare him. There was nothing to be scared of anyway, they were just eyes. They didn’t look at him angrily, or anything unsettling like that. The dream wasn’t even unpleasant to him all that much. And that fact was probably one of the most confusing things about it. The eyes themselves made him feel almost comfortable. He longed to know whom they belonged to, they had to be a wonderful person. That was, if they belonged to anyone at all.
Alphonse let his eyes drift shut as he began lathering strawberry-scented shampoo into his hair. Right after one of those dreams, the memory of it was always clearest when he blocked everything else from his vision. And sometimes he thought that if he daydreamed about it enough, all the answers would come to him.
But as always, no go.
Alphonse proceeded to condition his hair, but after that, the rushing water became a dull sound in his ears. Hid mind began to go blank as he stared at the wall, steam clouding around him. The comfort of the warm water was starting to get to him.
He remembered the room steadily going black before he lost all consciousness.
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“Alphonse! Alphonse, honey!”
A female voice, followed by a loud banging met his ears. His eyes slowly drifted open, he was having a hard time focusing. He blinked a few times, but everything still seemed clouded over.
“What the-?”
Suddenly, his senses came back to him and he felt something ice cold pouring all over him. He yelped and jumped up, now realizing he had been on his knees. Then all in one quick moment, he finally realized that he had fallen asleep in the shower.
He rushed out of the shower, only reaching back into to turn the knobs back down, ceasing the flow of water.
“Alphonse?”
He grabbed a towel from the closet and wrapped it around his waist. “I’m fine, Mom,” he called. “I… fell asleep in the shower.” Oh, how stupid he felt.
“Oh,” she replied in a confused voice. “Well, uh… do you want me to make you some breakfast? It’s 6:30.”
‘Shit,’ he mentally cursed. ‘Only I could fall asleep in the shower for a whole hour and a half.’ “No thanks, Mom, no time.” He ran the towel over his hair, trying to dry it the best he could.
“Okay, then,” she answered, followed by he footsteps growing fainter as she went further down the hallway. Alphonse threw the towel he was attacking his hair with into the hamper by the door, then hurried over to the sink, grabbing the hair dryer from its spot in the cupboard underneath, and turned it on.
Once Alphonse deemed his hair dry enough to return to his room to get dressed, which - after fishing through the clean clothes pile in the corner of the room, and adding on the time it took to dry his hair and successfully tie it up into a ponytail - only took him a total of fifteen minutes. He then threw his books together, put them in his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and left the room.
Alphonse Ehrlic, though definitely wasn’t the most organized and highest achiever in the world, never liked being late. He liked to arrive at school early, get to his locker before getting caught up in the mad rush of late people, and be the first one into homeroom. To do all that, he had to leave his house by 6:50.
He was down the stairs, across the hallway, and halfway out the door before remembering to turn and call back, “Bye Mom, I’m leaving now!”
She poked her head out of the kitchen doorway and smiled at him, auburn hair loose in it’s ponytail. “Bye sweetie, have a nice day,” she said to him sweetly. He smiled and waved in response, then left, shutting the door behind him.
He checked his watch. 6:54. He was behind by a few minutes, but he’d be fine. He hopped down his porch steps, but then stopped and glanced at the house next door, now noticing a dark blue minivan parked on the street in front. He quirked an eyebrow at it.
“I guess that’s the new owner’s,” he stated to himself.
The brunette looked on for a moment more before turning back around and making his way down the street.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You okay, Alphonse? You look kind of out of it.”
Alphonse looked up from his still full lunch tray to the blonde girl sitting across from him - his best friend since first grade.
“Yeah Winry, I’m fine,” he told her with a smile. “Just tired is all.”
She nodded, taking a sip of her apple juice. “Didn’t you get enough sleep last night?”
Alphonse hung his head, prodding what was supposed to be stuffing with his fork. “I’ve just… been having weird dreams.”
She cocked her head to the side, confused. “Really?” she inquired. “Like what?”
He never did tell her about them. It wasn’t that it was some big secret deal, but he just never thought to discuss it with anyone. But he shrugged, took a breath, and told her.
“… Eyes?” she asked after he was finished.
“Gold eyes,” he corrected. Their color had always held some kind of significance to him.
“And they just stare at you?” She shivered, an unpleasant expression crossing her face. “That’s creepy. What do you think it means?”
Winry had always sort of been into things like horoscopes, dreams, and astrology. Besides her unhealthy obsession with mechanics, those were her other favorite hobbies. He shrugged again. “Probably doesn’t mean anything.”
He didn’t believe that, really. He’d been having those dreams for nearly all of his life, and just with how they made him feel… it had to mean something. But… he wanted to find out what by himself.
Winry blew out her cheeks, mock-aggravated, mumbling something about being boring. He just stuck his tongue out at her.
Then he remembered something.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, causing her to jump. “Winry, have you heard anything about a new student coming here?”
She blinked at him. “Uh… no, I haven’t. Why?”
“Well, there’s some people moving into that house next door to mine,” he explained. “I’m just curious if they have a kid or not.”
“Really, someone’s moving there?”
Alphonse nodded. She leaned back in her chair. “They must not, though. I think I would’ve heard about a new student, usually that’s a big thing.”
Alphonse made a small noise in agreement just as the lunch bell rang. Winry got up from their small table, picking up her tray.
“C’mon, Alphonse,” she said cheerily, beginning her trek across the courtyard. He reluctantly got up to follow her, not looking forward to chemistry class.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“So Alphonse how was school today?”
The brunette looked up at his father and smiled a small smile. “Fine, Dad. How was work?”
Christopher Ehrlic then went on to talk about a new employee that had he needed to train on one of the computer programs they used, Alphonse really only half-listening as he stared back down at his mashed potatoes. He really should be hungry, considering he hadn’t had breakfast, and only a few bites of his lunch. So he tentatively took a small forkful of his food.
Things went silent again once his father was finished talking.
“Hey Mom?” Alphonse then spoke. Trisha turned to her son. “Did you notice that there are people finally moving in next door?”
Both adults visibly stiffened. Alphonse looked at both of them, taken aback by their odd reaction. His mother then smiled, though a little too unsurely for his liking. “Well… yes, I did,” she answered. The boy cocked an eyebrow.
And that’s all that was said on the subject. The remainder of the dinner passed in an unresolved sort of silence.
Alphonse returned to his room a short while later, telling his parents that he had a lot of homework to do. This wasn’t really true, but he had needed an excuse to leave dinner early.
He wondered idly why his parents had reacted so strangely when he asked about the neighbors. He had never been very good at reading people, so he wouldn’t even be able to guess what it was. He wanted to just ask them, but he knew they wouldn’t give him a straight answer.
He sighed, going over to his window and opening it. Immediately, he noticed the dark clouds in the sky, the stillness in the air, the smell…
“It’s going to rain,” he stated to no one but the ominous clouds.
But then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice answer, “… Sure looks like it.”
Alphonse nearly fell over backwards from surprise, but managed to catch his balance before toppling over. The looked wildly around for a moment before his gaze landed on the neighboring house’s window that was a mere ten feet or so from his.
Or rather, the person standing in the window.
It was a boy. Not a little boy, though, more like in his late teens. Tall and lean, he was leaning against his arms, partially out of the window, long golden hair falling out over his shoulders. Blue eyes shone behind his bangs, looking at Alphonse with interest. A warm smile played out upon his features then as he let out a friendly, “Hey!”
It was then that Alphonse realized he was staring.
He felt his cheeks grow slightly warm as he did his best to smile as casually as possible, uttering a small, “Hello?”
The other boy’s smile widened. “I just moved in here today, as you might’ve noticed,” he then stated. “The name’s Edward - Ed for short. Ed Elric.” He gave a small, but friendly laugh. “You don’t know how glad I am to know there’s someone my age right next door.”
Alphonse blinked for a moment, but then found himself saying, “No one’s ever lived there. Not that I can remember, anyway.” He didn’t know why… but he didn’t feel uneasy at all about talking to this guy. And he usually had a hard time with strangers, particularly ones his age. Thus explains why he only had one friend.
“And it shows,” Edward replied, gesturing with a grimace to the room behind him. He turned back to Alphonse. “Soo… what’s it like here?”
The brunette shrugged. “It’s nothing special. Nothing really big ever happens here,” he told him. “Obviously you know we’re right next to the ocean, so there’s a beach and boardwalk for things to do, and a mall…”
Ed nodded. “What about the local high school?” he asked.
“Well it’s just two blocks from here. I walk there everyday,” Alphonse told him. “Just your average school, though. Regular teachers, regular students…” He paused for a moment, then he asked, “When do you start?”
“Tomorrow.”
Silver eyes widened. “So early? You just moved in.”
The blonde smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, but it’s something better to do then helping around the house here.”
Alphonse was surprised to hear a chuckle escape his lips.
After that, the two of them ended up talking for quite some time; a longer time than Alphonse could ever remember holding a conversation with anyone. They spoke about everything and nothing, asked about everything and nothing. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Why’d you move here?’ ‘Do you join any clubs at school?’ ‘What kind of things do you like to do?’ Even things as pointless as ‘What’s your favorite color?’
Edward said silver, while Alphonse said gold.
Alphonse didn’t know how many hours passed. He had long since pulled the wheely chair from his desk over to the window to sit on, leaning himself against the windowsill, while Ed was just kneeling on the floor. Alphonse was surprised that his parents hadn’t come up to inquire who in the world he was talking to.
Once or twice, the brunette had wondered if the conversation seemed strange at all to Ed as well, or if maybe he was always this sociable with people, and all of his conversations with strangers went like this. But then, they weren’t exactly strangers anymore. Both knew enough about the other now to write a book.
The sky had grown steadily darker throughout their conversation, from both nightfall and the thick clouds. Claps of thunder that were soft and off in the distance at first quickly came closer, louder with each one that sounded. Neither boy really took notice, though, except maybe to glance over in the direction of the storm for a moment. And even when it began to drizzle lightly, no one pulled away from their seat at the window.
No, the faint flashes of lightning, the booming thunder, nor the rain could get either of them to break from their conversation.
But when Alphonse let out a small yawn in the middle of ranting to Edward about how good oreos with peanut butter was, Ed decided to cut in.
“Hey,” he voiced loud enough to be heard over the rain, but still with some sort of… gentleness. “You tired?”
The tone reminded Alphonse of how his mother or father would speak to him right before bedtime when he was little. He felt his heart give a tiny flutter as he leaned onto the windowsill. He nodded, honey colored tresses spilling out over his shoulders. “Yeah a bit,” he said, smiling sheepishly.
“Yeah, I am too,” Ed answered, wincing a little as he pushed himself up from the floor. Alphonse stood up as well.
Then it was quiet. For the first time since they had began talking, it went quiet between them. Also for the first time, Alphonse didn’t know what to say.
“Well…” the blonde began. “It… was nice talking to you.”
Alphonse blinked for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah… you too.”
It surprised him how much he really meant it.
They said their goodnights, just as the rain began to fall just a bit harder. Alphonse closed his window, but looked on at Edward’s for a moment longer. He felt himself smile.
He fell into a dreamless sleep that night.
anyway, on with the story.
Fanfiction: "Tell Me What It Means" [chapter 1]
Author: sakikotetsu
Pairing: elricest (duh?)
Genre: Romance/Drama
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: complete AU, taking place in the present day.
Summary: Alphonse Ehrlic and Edward Elric - two strangers - have a bond that neither of them can understand, but will it be strong enough to get them through what they have to face?
Golden eyes, bright as day. They stared at him, bore into his very being, but gently so. Something about those eyes made him feel anxious, like he was waiting for something, but he didn’t know what, or whether it was even good or bad. The shining optics spoke thousands of words to him, though all in an unknown language. But something about it all… he could tell they were trying to tell him something. Something important.
“What is it?” he spoke, asking more than one question by doing so. What is it that you’re trying to tell me, what is it that I’m waiting for, what is it that you’re making me feel? Answers never came, but still he longed to know. He tried to reach out to the topaz-colored orbs, only to find that he himself had no body. But still, this didn’t faze him compared to the mystery before him, staring, never blinking…
The dream always ended the same way. With a loud, detestable sound that was merciless. But it was because of that that it was the only thing that could make those eyes fade away.
…
5:03 am.
The green numbers glared at him through the dark. He looked at them with half-lidded eyes, his mind slowly registering the noise coming from the small electronic device. Once the beeping finally became annoying, he reached out and hit the button on top with more force than necessary. But he got the result he wanted.
Silence rang in the dark room. Most days, he would use this to his advantage and fall back to sleep for a little while longer, but…
Those eyes…
They kept coming back to his mind.
With a small groan, he reluctantly decided to get out of bed. Besides, if he got up now, he would have time to take a longer shower. So, he lifted himself from the bed, and padded across the room to the door.
As he made his way down the hallway to the bathroom, he heard a faint noise from outside. He stopped and listened. It sounded almost like… an engine? He walked a few steps further to one of the windows that were in the hallway, and looked out into the foggy gray-ness of the early morning.
The sounds were - as he had thought - coming from an engine. A truck, to be exact. It was pulling into the driveway of the house next door. He narrowed his eyes at it, wondering why it would be there. No one had lived in that house for as long as he could remember. But as he squinted harder, he soon realized that what was in the driveway wasn’t a truck.
It was a moving van.
Eyes widening a little, he leaned away from the cold glass, but still looking out. It was definitely a surprise to him, he hadn’t heard anything about getting new neighbors. Surely his parents would’ve known?
He shrugged and stepped away from the window, and continued the rest of his trek to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
An unpleasant shiver went through him as his bare feet met with the cold tile floor. He made haste in going over to the shower, and turning on the hot water, peeling off his pajamas, and hopping into the welcoming warmth behind the curtain.
He sighed contently as the water met with his cold skin. It burned a tiny bit, but he didn’t mind. He turned so that it could cover his back and the top of his head, long chestnut locks spilling over his shoulders.
In the haze of his comfort, the teen’s mind wondered back to his dream. He’d had it several times before, but the odd thing was that they had occurred all his life. And once every couple of years, he would have it. The first one came when he was four or five, and he remembered that it had scared him out of his wits. He had been too frightened to even sleep, convinced that those eyes were watching him.
But now at sixteen, the dream no longer scared him. Confused him beyond all reason, but didn’t scare him. There was nothing to be scared of anyway, they were just eyes. They didn’t look at him angrily, or anything unsettling like that. The dream wasn’t even unpleasant to him all that much. And that fact was probably one of the most confusing things about it. The eyes themselves made him feel almost comfortable. He longed to know whom they belonged to, they had to be a wonderful person. That was, if they belonged to anyone at all.
Alphonse let his eyes drift shut as he began lathering strawberry-scented shampoo into his hair. Right after one of those dreams, the memory of it was always clearest when he blocked everything else from his vision. And sometimes he thought that if he daydreamed about it enough, all the answers would come to him.
But as always, no go.
Alphonse proceeded to condition his hair, but after that, the rushing water became a dull sound in his ears. Hid mind began to go blank as he stared at the wall, steam clouding around him. The comfort of the warm water was starting to get to him.
He remembered the room steadily going black before he lost all consciousness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Alphonse! Alphonse, honey!”
A female voice, followed by a loud banging met his ears. His eyes slowly drifted open, he was having a hard time focusing. He blinked a few times, but everything still seemed clouded over.
“What the-?”
Suddenly, his senses came back to him and he felt something ice cold pouring all over him. He yelped and jumped up, now realizing he had been on his knees. Then all in one quick moment, he finally realized that he had fallen asleep in the shower.
He rushed out of the shower, only reaching back into to turn the knobs back down, ceasing the flow of water.
“Alphonse?”
He grabbed a towel from the closet and wrapped it around his waist. “I’m fine, Mom,” he called. “I… fell asleep in the shower.” Oh, how stupid he felt.
“Oh,” she replied in a confused voice. “Well, uh… do you want me to make you some breakfast? It’s 6:30.”
‘Shit,’ he mentally cursed. ‘Only I could fall asleep in the shower for a whole hour and a half.’ “No thanks, Mom, no time.” He ran the towel over his hair, trying to dry it the best he could.
“Okay, then,” she answered, followed by he footsteps growing fainter as she went further down the hallway. Alphonse threw the towel he was attacking his hair with into the hamper by the door, then hurried over to the sink, grabbing the hair dryer from its spot in the cupboard underneath, and turned it on.
Once Alphonse deemed his hair dry enough to return to his room to get dressed, which - after fishing through the clean clothes pile in the corner of the room, and adding on the time it took to dry his hair and successfully tie it up into a ponytail - only took him a total of fifteen minutes. He then threw his books together, put them in his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and left the room.
Alphonse Ehrlic, though definitely wasn’t the most organized and highest achiever in the world, never liked being late. He liked to arrive at school early, get to his locker before getting caught up in the mad rush of late people, and be the first one into homeroom. To do all that, he had to leave his house by 6:50.
He was down the stairs, across the hallway, and halfway out the door before remembering to turn and call back, “Bye Mom, I’m leaving now!”
She poked her head out of the kitchen doorway and smiled at him, auburn hair loose in it’s ponytail. “Bye sweetie, have a nice day,” she said to him sweetly. He smiled and waved in response, then left, shutting the door behind him.
He checked his watch. 6:54. He was behind by a few minutes, but he’d be fine. He hopped down his porch steps, but then stopped and glanced at the house next door, now noticing a dark blue minivan parked on the street in front. He quirked an eyebrow at it.
“I guess that’s the new owner’s,” he stated to himself.
The brunette looked on for a moment more before turning back around and making his way down the street.
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“You okay, Alphonse? You look kind of out of it.”
Alphonse looked up from his still full lunch tray to the blonde girl sitting across from him - his best friend since first grade.
“Yeah Winry, I’m fine,” he told her with a smile. “Just tired is all.”
She nodded, taking a sip of her apple juice. “Didn’t you get enough sleep last night?”
Alphonse hung his head, prodding what was supposed to be stuffing with his fork. “I’ve just… been having weird dreams.”
She cocked her head to the side, confused. “Really?” she inquired. “Like what?”
He never did tell her about them. It wasn’t that it was some big secret deal, but he just never thought to discuss it with anyone. But he shrugged, took a breath, and told her.
“… Eyes?” she asked after he was finished.
“Gold eyes,” he corrected. Their color had always held some kind of significance to him.
“And they just stare at you?” She shivered, an unpleasant expression crossing her face. “That’s creepy. What do you think it means?”
Winry had always sort of been into things like horoscopes, dreams, and astrology. Besides her unhealthy obsession with mechanics, those were her other favorite hobbies. He shrugged again. “Probably doesn’t mean anything.”
He didn’t believe that, really. He’d been having those dreams for nearly all of his life, and just with how they made him feel… it had to mean something. But… he wanted to find out what by himself.
Winry blew out her cheeks, mock-aggravated, mumbling something about being boring. He just stuck his tongue out at her.
Then he remembered something.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, causing her to jump. “Winry, have you heard anything about a new student coming here?”
She blinked at him. “Uh… no, I haven’t. Why?”
“Well, there’s some people moving into that house next door to mine,” he explained. “I’m just curious if they have a kid or not.”
“Really, someone’s moving there?”
Alphonse nodded. She leaned back in her chair. “They must not, though. I think I would’ve heard about a new student, usually that’s a big thing.”
Alphonse made a small noise in agreement just as the lunch bell rang. Winry got up from their small table, picking up her tray.
“C’mon, Alphonse,” she said cheerily, beginning her trek across the courtyard. He reluctantly got up to follow her, not looking forward to chemistry class.
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“So Alphonse how was school today?”
The brunette looked up at his father and smiled a small smile. “Fine, Dad. How was work?”
Christopher Ehrlic then went on to talk about a new employee that had he needed to train on one of the computer programs they used, Alphonse really only half-listening as he stared back down at his mashed potatoes. He really should be hungry, considering he hadn’t had breakfast, and only a few bites of his lunch. So he tentatively took a small forkful of his food.
Things went silent again once his father was finished talking.
“Hey Mom?” Alphonse then spoke. Trisha turned to her son. “Did you notice that there are people finally moving in next door?”
Both adults visibly stiffened. Alphonse looked at both of them, taken aback by their odd reaction. His mother then smiled, though a little too unsurely for his liking. “Well… yes, I did,” she answered. The boy cocked an eyebrow.
And that’s all that was said on the subject. The remainder of the dinner passed in an unresolved sort of silence.
Alphonse returned to his room a short while later, telling his parents that he had a lot of homework to do. This wasn’t really true, but he had needed an excuse to leave dinner early.
He wondered idly why his parents had reacted so strangely when he asked about the neighbors. He had never been very good at reading people, so he wouldn’t even be able to guess what it was. He wanted to just ask them, but he knew they wouldn’t give him a straight answer.
He sighed, going over to his window and opening it. Immediately, he noticed the dark clouds in the sky, the stillness in the air, the smell…
“It’s going to rain,” he stated to no one but the ominous clouds.
But then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice answer, “… Sure looks like it.”
Alphonse nearly fell over backwards from surprise, but managed to catch his balance before toppling over. The looked wildly around for a moment before his gaze landed on the neighboring house’s window that was a mere ten feet or so from his.
Or rather, the person standing in the window.
It was a boy. Not a little boy, though, more like in his late teens. Tall and lean, he was leaning against his arms, partially out of the window, long golden hair falling out over his shoulders. Blue eyes shone behind his bangs, looking at Alphonse with interest. A warm smile played out upon his features then as he let out a friendly, “Hey!”
It was then that Alphonse realized he was staring.
He felt his cheeks grow slightly warm as he did his best to smile as casually as possible, uttering a small, “Hello?”
The other boy’s smile widened. “I just moved in here today, as you might’ve noticed,” he then stated. “The name’s Edward - Ed for short. Ed Elric.” He gave a small, but friendly laugh. “You don’t know how glad I am to know there’s someone my age right next door.”
Alphonse blinked for a moment, but then found himself saying, “No one’s ever lived there. Not that I can remember, anyway.” He didn’t know why… but he didn’t feel uneasy at all about talking to this guy. And he usually had a hard time with strangers, particularly ones his age. Thus explains why he only had one friend.
“And it shows,” Edward replied, gesturing with a grimace to the room behind him. He turned back to Alphonse. “Soo… what’s it like here?”
The brunette shrugged. “It’s nothing special. Nothing really big ever happens here,” he told him. “Obviously you know we’re right next to the ocean, so there’s a beach and boardwalk for things to do, and a mall…”
Ed nodded. “What about the local high school?” he asked.
“Well it’s just two blocks from here. I walk there everyday,” Alphonse told him. “Just your average school, though. Regular teachers, regular students…” He paused for a moment, then he asked, “When do you start?”
“Tomorrow.”
Silver eyes widened. “So early? You just moved in.”
The blonde smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, but it’s something better to do then helping around the house here.”
Alphonse was surprised to hear a chuckle escape his lips.
After that, the two of them ended up talking for quite some time; a longer time than Alphonse could ever remember holding a conversation with anyone. They spoke about everything and nothing, asked about everything and nothing. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Why’d you move here?’ ‘Do you join any clubs at school?’ ‘What kind of things do you like to do?’ Even things as pointless as ‘What’s your favorite color?’
Edward said silver, while Alphonse said gold.
Alphonse didn’t know how many hours passed. He had long since pulled the wheely chair from his desk over to the window to sit on, leaning himself against the windowsill, while Ed was just kneeling on the floor. Alphonse was surprised that his parents hadn’t come up to inquire who in the world he was talking to.
Once or twice, the brunette had wondered if the conversation seemed strange at all to Ed as well, or if maybe he was always this sociable with people, and all of his conversations with strangers went like this. But then, they weren’t exactly strangers anymore. Both knew enough about the other now to write a book.
The sky had grown steadily darker throughout their conversation, from both nightfall and the thick clouds. Claps of thunder that were soft and off in the distance at first quickly came closer, louder with each one that sounded. Neither boy really took notice, though, except maybe to glance over in the direction of the storm for a moment. And even when it began to drizzle lightly, no one pulled away from their seat at the window.
No, the faint flashes of lightning, the booming thunder, nor the rain could get either of them to break from their conversation.
But when Alphonse let out a small yawn in the middle of ranting to Edward about how good oreos with peanut butter was, Ed decided to cut in.
“Hey,” he voiced loud enough to be heard over the rain, but still with some sort of… gentleness. “You tired?”
The tone reminded Alphonse of how his mother or father would speak to him right before bedtime when he was little. He felt his heart give a tiny flutter as he leaned onto the windowsill. He nodded, honey colored tresses spilling out over his shoulders. “Yeah a bit,” he said, smiling sheepishly.
“Yeah, I am too,” Ed answered, wincing a little as he pushed himself up from the floor. Alphonse stood up as well.
Then it was quiet. For the first time since they had began talking, it went quiet between them. Also for the first time, Alphonse didn’t know what to say.
“Well…” the blonde began. “It… was nice talking to you.”
Alphonse blinked for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah… you too.”
It surprised him how much he really meant it.
They said their goodnights, just as the rain began to fall just a bit harder. Alphonse closed his window, but looked on at Edward’s for a moment longer. He felt himself smile.
He fell into a dreamless sleep that night.