The Elrics were pensive, quiet drunks. More likely to write or read or go to sleep than laugh uproariously or enter a fistfight, although the later wasn’t entirely impossible.
They joined the old and stooped and bone-weary at the bar. Al vaguely remembered expecting some dizzying euphoria. Al vaguely remembered expecting something, and waiting for it for a good, long time. A maiden in waiting. He snorted into his third glass and tried not to giggle. His third glass. Ed was being indulgent - of his little brother, and of the drink.
Honestly, Al didn’t know why he kept drinking. It didn’t taste good. He didn’t suspect that it made him look any older - he’d like to think he was more rational than that.
Ed lit a cigarette and pulled the bar’s ashtray closer. Al was beginning to like the smell of cigarette smoke. Like? Tolerate? He took another sip. He listened to Ed rattle on with a hint of a slur. He honestly had no idea what his brother was saying. The words swung between alchemy and physics and engineering, the last of which Al knew little of the details. Sometimes they combined, and he was pretty sure Ed was confusing his facts in some places.
He felt distinctly out of sorts, but not in a terrible way. He became rather fond of the cozy atmosphere of the bar and the pilled and ragged texture of his coat. He was content to let Ed babble, and watch the smoke from his brother’s cigarette curl and sway. His mind was still. He didn’t feel like himself.
It wasn’t bad. Master Izumi spoke volumes against cigarettes, against beer, but Seig had a beer belly to match his gargantuan muscles. Colonel Mustang had a whole cabinet of liquor. In his office. In his cabin? Al didn’t feel like himself, but it wasn’t so bad. He let his eyes follow the swirls and sways and curves of smoke to his brother’s cigarette.
Ed’s hand was calloused beneath the white gloves, Al knew. Ed’s lips were chapped. Al saw it when his brother put the cigarette to his lips and sucked. His lower lip was freshly nicked, certainly from their tussle. Ed turned his face away from Al’s and exhaled. Ed’s adam’s apple bobbed. Al reached to his own neck and felt for his, but his neck was all baby-smooth lines and gentle curves.
“You look like dad.” Al blurted. But Ed didn’t. Not really.
“Thank you from the bottom of my fuckin’ heart.”
Al ignored it, because Ed had a dopey half-smile on his face. The drink accomplished what Al couldn’t.
“D’you think I’ll look like Dad when I get older?”
Ed shook his head. Exhaled. Smoke curled. Edward was eighteen. He was an adult, a terribly handsome adult.
“You look more like Mom than Dad.” He gestured vaguely to his face. “You’ve got her eyes.”
They lost half of their family on that night. Olive eyes turned purple, and turned red.
“I look like a girl?” Al demanded, suddenly self-conscious. Humorously so. He snickered at himself.
“Kinda. Bet you won’t when you get older, though. I looked like a fucking girl. Do not tell anyone I said that.”
“I look like a girl.” Al repeated. He drank more. He didn’t know what to make of it. “Are you disappointed?”
“The fuck would I be disappointed?”
“’Cause I look like a girl.”
Ed burst out laughing. It was an unfettered laugh, deep from his chest, but it floated from liquor in his blood. “You are so weird, Al.”
Al was kinda weird. He thought on it, and came to grips with it. Al always was weird. He was weird.
“I am weird.” Al said harshly, and grinned into his glass.
It was late when they stumbled from the bar, soft half-laughs on gusty breathes passed between them. Neither knew what was so funny. Maybe the way Ed sauntered like a rooster when he was drunk. Maybe the looks they got when they passed people on the sidewalk and the people openly gawked at the crowned, winged snake crucified on the cross on Al’s back. Maybe nothing. Al didn’t need the answer.
Al wouldn’t grow up to look like their Dad, or Ed. Al wouldn’t grow up heartbreakingly handsome. Al would grow up to look like someone who was dead. He’d age around the inheritance of their dead mother’s eyes. It was absurd. Al laughed, but it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t bitter. He just laughed.
In response, Ed laughed because Al laughed. Ed used to hurt because Al couldn’t hurt, but always hurt. It was better this way, laughing because of a few glasses of scotch.
Ed lit another cigarette. Ed smoked a lot when he could get away with it. He tried to light the cigarette, and uttered a stream of disproportionate curses when the cigarette just would not light.
“You’re doing it backwards, brother.” Al laughed at the second round of cursing. Al laughed at just about anything. Because he was weird.
They took a piss on the wall of one of the alleys on the way back to the hotel, once they righted their lack of direction. Stores were closed. Bathrooms were closed. Ed snickered and wrote his name on the wall, but it was winter and everything was wet and Ed’s name didn’t really show up. Al laughed uncomfortably. His brother was handsome, but Al wasn’t jealous, because he looked like a girl and he looked like mom. A peek at his brother’s flaccid penis made him blush and turn away mid-stream. His urine rattled on one of the aluminum trashcans. Al was so fucking weird.
“Did you leave me because I’m weird?” He asked suddenly in the quiet of the inn. He was slumped against the door and Ed was leaning his shoulder into him to keep him upright while he and the rusty key fought with the rusty doorknob.
The door opened. Al fell back. His arms flailed for support. But he always managed to right himself. He always did.
“I didn’t leave you.” Ed said with a viciousness that would have scared Al if Al was sober. Ed kicked off his shoes and surveyed the room from his seat on the bed. Noa’s bed was empty. Neither really noticed it. Noa traveled alone before, Noa was in love with the Eiffel Tower and the pavilions of Paris and ideals that will eventually disappoint. Neither noticed it.
Al climbed into the bed alongside his brother, pawing at the blankets to get comfortable. He kicked his shoes off. One fell onto the floor with a dull ‘thud’. One stayed on the bed. “Yes, yes you did. Back in Central when the Gate was opened.”
Ed lay back. His mouth was a line of no extremes, expressionless, and he stared at the ceiling.
“It is because I’m weird, isn’t it?” Scotch placated him. He felt guilty for being weird. For being young. For looking like a girl, for being weird and having the guts to look like mom. He snuggled up to his brother like he was five and Ed was six, even if Ed was an adult who smoke and drunk and knew how to take more scotch than Al did before making a spectacle of himself.
“I’m sorry.” Al sighed softly. Ed smelled like cigarette smoke and scotch and plain human musk. He was warm. So warm. Al’s blood was warm. “You’re warm, brother.”
Ed pulled him close. Al lacked the finessed movement of a trained fighter when he was drunk, but Ed didn’t loose his strength. Ed never lost his strength. Al felt small and vulnerable and just like he’d figure a typical girl would feel, except the women in Amestris were all strong in their own rights. Weird, then. And young.
“So’re you.” Ed’s throat hitched. Al reached out and touched it before he could reason with himself not to, but he found he forgot what reason was.
Ed squeezed him close and stared at the ceiling. Ed was haunted and eighteen and old. Ed was old when he was twelve. Al was thirteen, seventeen, and still too young. The scotch didn’t quell his need for an answer, even if it soothed his desperation. He relaxed half laying on his brother’s chest, and the lust to know was languid and sweet.
He was hard against Ed’s leg. His brother’s thigh flexed, tentatively, experimentally, and shifted to press just so. Ed’s real arm around his waist pulled and squeezed until it hurt. That’s when Al opened his eyes. He didn’t even know he had closed them, and in the light from the tiny lamp of their room, Edward’s eyes were wet and glistened.
“Don’t cry, brother.”
“Yeah. I’m not.” Al’s world did not turn upside-down; he had no world to rattle. But Ed gently turned him over onto his back, and Ed was comfortably heavy. He was hard against Al’s thigh, and Al saw through drunk-haze eyes his big brother and the man who couldn’t quite copy his big brother’s grins that were too big and too bright on a boy his size.
Al never really wondered about his first kiss. It tasted like scotch, cigarettes, and a wetter, softer flavor of skin. The salt of blood from the nick on Ed’s lower lip. Ed’s lips were chapped. His tongue was hot and Al’s mouth was full with it. It was an awkward gesture, and neither quite knew what they were doing. Al was enthralled with it.
He cooed quietly against his brother’s lips when the automail touched him, his stomach, the dip of his bellybutton and the curve of his hip.
His brother’s lips. He didn’t care.
Edward’s hair came loose when Al whimpered and clung and snapped the hair tie, something in his chest so desperately, desperately broken and warm. His brother’s blond hair fell all around him, like a curtain, a veil, hiding how young he was and how weird he was. Dad’s hair was nowhere near as blond. Edward was all scars and shameless metal glint and soft kisses and cold touches and spitfire about to sputter out. Al clung, with his lips, his hands, his knees.
Edward’s hair caught the modest lamplight of the inn room and shone all around Al’s face, and Al could have sworn he smelled the Rizenbool spring sun.
He was tall and terrifying and terrified of himself. It was wet, raining, nothing comfortable like the alleys of Paris. Edward was crying. There was blood on the wall. On his brother’s white gloves. It was the only time he’d seen his brother cry.
Al woke in stages. One moment Edward was young and round-faced, like him. The next he was older and more mature and eighteen and framed by a dark alley stained in blood. He was sobbing like the round-faced Edward in his dreams.
Then he wasn’t sobbing. He was smiling. Edward wasn’t cruel, but the smile was, hundreds of feet over Central and Al was in arms he didn’t want to be in and everything was about to crash.
Al was awake. His brother never sobbed.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.”
Ed whispered like the sinners in confessionals, shame and humiliation making his words soft. He hid his tears with a hand pressed over his eyes. Al knew they were there anyway. It was morning, the room was bright. Nothing was red, except the coat he had fallen asleep on. Al wanted to retch out the stone in his gut that had once been his courage.
He lay there, naked and cold. The blanket was tucked between his sticky thighs, pulled against his chest, clutched in his fingers because the night before he held onto them and tried so desperately not to sound like a girl. Or too young.
He remembered Ed, pressed flush against him, and how handsome he was when his brother thrust between his legs and right against him and panted against his cheek and the shock of Edward’s semen on his chest and stomach.
“I’m sorry. Sick. So sick.”
Al uncurled his fingers from the blanket. From the red coat. Timidly, he pressed his fingertips to the white streaks on his chest. He had sex. He wasn’t a virgin anymore. Did it make him an adult?
“I don’t feel different.” Al told himself, but Edward heard. Where had the stoic man gone, when Edward looked at him and froze?
His head spun. He felt sick, scotch tasted horrible after a night of kisses and Edward’s breath in his breath. He wanted to retch out the stone in his gut that was once his courage and he couldn’t say anything to his brother.
Edward’s cheeks were red and wet and his lips were dry and his hand shook when he took the corner of the closest thing at hand - the red coat - and began to scrub furiously at Al’s chest. Al let him. Edward hurt to look at the white that smeared and stuck to Al’s skin. Al’s skin was pink around the streaks of white. The scratches on the back of his neck were almost gone.
Edward bowed his head, and he dropped the coat. The corner was smeared in white. His hand rested on Al’s ribcage, as if to hide what was all over his baby brother’s stomach, thighs, chest. His face. Al had a streak of it from his cheek and along his baby-soft neck. Ed had stained him there. Bitten him there. The shape of his teeth were dark and his semen was white and none of it belonged on Al.
“I can’t ever do anything right by you, can I?” He whispered. His shoulders were slumped and there was no strength there. Ed hid behind his hair. Blond but dull like dad’s hair. A coward.
“It wasn’t a mistake, brother.”
“Don’t justify it. Don’t fucking-“
“I wanted it.” Al had wanted it. Al had wanted, wanted, wanted, ever since landing with a clatter and no grace in Munich.
Al didn’t look like a girl, or too young. To Ed, he looked perfect, tasted perfect, had a lovely voice and soft skin and none of it was for him. Al might have known, if he could remember the slurred ‘So perfect’ and ‘Love you, baby brother’ beyond the scotch in his stomach.
Ed had no grace as he forced himself to pull away. He wanted to fix it, right his sins. He did it before. He could do it again. He could. He would find a way. But he could. He could.
When Ed’s hand lifted from his stomach, Al panicked. He didn’t care about the headache, or the foul taste in his mouth, or the unease in his gut, or the way he felt stained and content and unchanged. Ed pulled away. He followed. Al didn’t remember how to kiss, he remembered little from the scotch-soaked lessons Ed gave that Ed didn’t understand himself. But he pressed his lips against Ed’s. Ed’s lips were dry. So were his. Nothing like the night before.
Ed stilled and Al almost felt something settle in his mismatched self when he felt his brother’s automail hand on his hip. It shifted immediately to his waist, but it was there. His mouth was dry, cottony, he could’ve used a few glasses of water. He licked his dry tongue over Ed’s dry lips anyway.
“No.” Edward croaked, an ugly sound. Al was gently pushed away, and Ed stood. Ed was ashamed of his nakedness, but he had no right. He left the blankets for Al. He left everything for Al. He dressed, his flesh hand was shaking. Al was watching. Al was staring at his automail arm.
Last night, Al sighed and cooed into his ear when he pressed the automail to Al’s hip. There was a bruise there, the symmetric shape of metal fingertips. Ed knew how to destroy with a steel fist. The military name he left back in Amestris. Winry’s automail locked to his nerves didn’t know the meaning of tender or gentle.
“But…I belong to you, brother.” Al said, and touched the scratches on the back of his neck.
Ed pretended he didn’t hear it. He pretended not to see Noa sitting at the café at the front door of the inn, or the wounded look she kept on his back long after he thought he lost himself in the early-morning pedestrian crowd of Paris. He wore crumpled clothes that smelled like sex, like his little brother.
“Noa! Did you see my brother?”
Al. Naïve Al. With his hair rumpled and his lips bruised and dark circles under his eyes. With skin pink from furious, hasty scrubbing, and clothes that smelled stale straight from his suitcase. With panic in his voice, and the shape of teeth on his neck.
“Yes.” She said, her voice haunted, timid and frosty because she just did not know how to consider it. She looked into her untouched coffee. Ed was beautiful. So was Al. Ed was flawed, Al was perfect. Somehow, tangled together, they still didn’t quite balance out.
“Where did-“ Al finally saw her, beyond the kisses from his brother’s lips and the apologies of a broken man. His knees buckled, and he fell onto the chair across the table from her. He pleaded without words for her to understand, but how could she when he didn’t himself?
She had her knapsack under the table. He accidentally stepped on it. Maybe to make sure it was really there, and he wasn’t half-asleep and dreaming of terrible things.
They sat in silence while Edward lost himself in the pavilions and promenades of Paris, and became sick with the romance of it. They sat in silence and Noa continued to swish the little, silver spoon in her coffee mug long after the sugar had dissolved.
Al had stopped hoping. He sighed, and there was a glisten in his eyes, but he was Edward’s brother and wouldn’t cry. Not for her, or in front of her. Al raked his fingers through his hair, and she could smell the guilt and despondency and the scent of Edward off of him.
She put the spoon down with a delicate, sharp ‘clink’. She had no appetite for anything.
“Alphonse.” She whispered and couldn’t, for the life of her, make her voice gentle. He looked at her with doe-eyes, and in Edward’s memories she saw their mother. She was a beautiful woman.
She reached across the table and held her hands open to him. Alphonse’s hands were small for a boy, with delicate nails and slender fingers and calloused palms. They were warm and gentle in hers. They were filthy hands. The hands of an alchemist.
Noa bowed her head. She closed her eyes. It all unraveled beneath her eyelids, when she saw the brilliant Shamballa and Munich and France and Paris and their little inn room through the innocent eyes of a trapped boy.
Al stared at her, and hated himself for not knowing the words to say. Noa’s jewelry was made by a well-trained hand, a blacksmith of another family she used to travel with. The blacksmith loved her, she had told Al in the unimportant doings of the Roma carnival camp, but how she felt she never said. Her jewelry was made of simple brass, but the man put such gentleness into the crafting that beneath the tarnish it was still beautiful. Her jewelry seemed to fit her. Just like with Winry and her silver earrings and steel automail and sharp, blue eyes that always were alight, Al wished he could have loved her. He really, truly did.
She let go of his hands, and he kept them outstretched but she tucked hers back onto her lap.
“Edward never offered me a home.” She whispered. The low shriek of her chair against the pavement made Al jump. Her knapsack was in her grasp. Al didn’t want to accept it, but it wasn’t hard to believe. “I guess he couldn’t share his.”
Her smile was forced and the Roma girl he’d come to know from Alfons Heiderich’s apartment in Munich to Paris was gone. Noa was a timid girl, a fortune-teller, Roma, gypsy, everyface Ishbalan, and nothing like the women in Amestris.
Like a coward, she didn’t say goodbye. It would have been ideal if he lost sight of her in the crowd, but she stood out, rich in her secondhand clothes. She walked toward the direction of the Eiffel Tower. Al knew it would be the last time he’d see her.
“Tell me.”
Those were the first words his brother had spoken to him. They were the first words Al had even wanted to consider. He pretended the heavy ‘I’m sorrys’ didn’t exist. He didn’t want them to exist. He remembered guilt, and it would rend into him, alone, because he couldn’t remember anything after his terrified brother reached for him.
The train from Paris skirted the coast. The sea was blue, it was grey, angry and at peace and seagull wishes skimmed the surface. The France countryside was quaint to the point of rickety. They left Paris behind not long ago, and that was fine. Paris was made for lovers and those in love. Anyone could fall in love there, and be lost entirely in the city of lights.
“What do you want to know?” Al hadn’t spoken in hours. Al used to speak to strangers - a friendly ‘Hi!’ in passing. He talked to birds. He talked to cats. He talked to keep himself sane. What answers could he have for his brother?
“Did Noa say anything?” Edward asked the coast of France, and the seagulls wheeling overhead.
“No.”
“You’re lying.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was proof that he belonged to his brother, when Ed didn’t even need to look at him. Al lifted eyes he inherited from their mother, and looked away from his fidgeting hands. Ed was still eighteen, adult, and handsome. Ed was unnamed brilliance against his skin, and the big brother who used to have to look up at him for them to make some false semblance of eye contact.
“She said that you never offered her a home, because you didn’t want to share it.”
Ed sighed, and was still, as if he sighed the life out of his skin. Warm skin. “She’s right.” It wasn’t an admission of adoration. It was acquiescence to an unchangeable truth, the way he used to say ‘Equivalent Exchange’ after Lior went up in dust and sand.
But Lior was rebuilt. “I’d hope so.”
Ed looked at him, and he looked tired. Handsome but tired.
Al wanted. “I wish you’d kiss me again, brother.” Al whispered, without thinking, and touched the back of his neck. Always touching the back of his neck. Last night, Edward used the tip of his tongue to trace the array over Al’s cherished scratches. It was drawn on Al’s skin, in saliva, and had no meaning outside the press of his tongue to sweetly-pink skin. Ed was drunk, and Al had squealed and laughed giddily.
His brother closed his eyes against the sweet blush. Al had surrendered to their sickness so easily. It was too easy for Ed to be disappointed in his brother, instead of himself.
“Dad told me to tell you that he loved you.”
Al’s breath stopped. Ed wondered if Al had to remember how to breathe after he got his body back.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I…” It was still, so still, as the train continued along its tracks. Closer to the coast. Light on the water. “I wasn’t sure if I believed it.”
“Isn’t that up to me, to believe it or not?”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“Then it’s up to me whether or not I want you.” He blushed. “Other than as my brother.”
Ed rubbed a hand over his eyes, and Al needed to touch him. Needed to. He rested his hand on the table between them, and it twitched under the cold weight of Ed’s automail.
“I told you because that’s how real families are supposed to be.”
“We are a real family. But we’re different.”
Ed gave a soft, sardonic laugh. His head bowed, he shook it in disbelief. “Yeah, we are, aren’t we?”
“You made me.” Al murmured softly. He was in love since he opened his eyes in the city beneath the ground. He just didn’t know it. He was convinced of it. He remembered the seal of blood that culminated his entire existence. He could feel Edward’s tongue on the back of his neck. “I belong to you.”
“Stop saying that.” Ed was harsh. “You belong to yourself.”
“We’re all we’ve got.” Al was wistful. His brother’s automail was hidden by a glove, but it was wonderfully cold. He loved it. He hated it. “It that still true?”
“Yeah.” Ed hurt. His brows knit together. An eleven year old with a gaping maw where his arm and leg used to be. “You’re stuck with me. Sorry.”
“I’m not.” Al lied, not wholly, but he lied. There was a fire behind the despondency. Crippled, torn apart, bleeding and fake, they would keep walking forward. There was no other choice.
“Tell me.”
And Al opened his heart in the stories of Amestris, of Roy Mustang’s phone calls to the Rockbell home, of Roze and her beloved children and her hoarse voice, of Winry and her automail and her gentleness and the way she loved Ed but never spoke of it and always walked with it on her shoulders. Of her automail on Paninya when he visited them passing through Rush Valley, of Sheizka’s promotion, and the letters from her that Winry shared with him. Of Auntie Pinako’s crumbling health, of Wrath’s haunted face. Of Elysia’s seventh birthday, and Gracia who was still gentle and kind and still in love with her husband.
He told his brother of the sunny days in Rizenbool with Kain in his arms and Den at his side, of the Armstrong family in Lior, of the justice to the Ishbalan people, of the skirmishes between Amestris and Drachma, of the National Assembly in Amestris. He told his brother of how he missed their mother’s grave and Izumi’s grave, and the way their Master kept him and loved him like a son and he tried so hard to let Wrath know it but Wrath was sullen in his own little world.
Of Izumi on her deathbed, and the day he was sent away. She didn’t run out of things to teach him, she just couldn’t, and Seig and Mason and the stillness of the butcher shop and the way children wouldn’t visit that house anymore because Master Izumi was gone and Seig was a widower reliving his wedding in his ever-present silence.
He told Edward Elric of the Fullmetal Alchemist in the eyes of the people, the Alchemist for the People, and how everyone but a select few thought he was dead but there were those who had faith and Al carried it all on his red-clad shoulders. He told of his theory on Equivalent Exchange, when he was on the train again to Dublith and it gave him hope.
He gave all the answers he had, and some he didn’t have.
He didn’t realize he was harboring some of that old hope he should’ve left in Amestris. Not until Ed covered his eyes with the skin-warmed palm of his automail, and sighed. Whispered - “This is our world now. Those things don’t matter anymore.”
Al had seen his brother’s tears. There was no beast of cynicism to rip and shred his heart. “Our world will always be our world.”
“We left nothing worth anything behind.”
They left a city under the ground destroyed, and a house in ashes and char in Rizenbool, and graves. So many graves.
“You shouldn’t have followed me here.”
“Then you did mean to leave me behind.” He shivered, and looked at the sea. “How much am I worth, then?”
“Every-damn-thing.”
“Then you can’t ever leave me behind. Remember? You turn into a jerk without me around.” Al laughed a marionette laugh.
“This is your world too, then.” Edward’s words were heavy, and he wouldn’t look at his baby brother, and it broke the heart Al had laid in gruesome, naïve trust between them. “I’m sorry.”
There was sand between the railroad tracks, and grass grew in struggling patches and tall waves. The air was fresh with salt, and toyed with his short hair like the cat he had always wanted. It was cold in Rouen, as a western wind carried with it the scent of the water and things untold across it. It was cold in Rouen, and Al was all alone on the small train deck. He needed to be alone.
He could see the ships docked in the bays at a distance. He saw the water that didn’t seem to end. These things filled him with despair, the balance of his thoughts caught up in the jagged waves of the France coastline.
He tightened his small hands on the rail. He used to be able to bend steel with the will of his soul and little else. He remembered brown, worn gauntlets always dusted with white chalk. He remembered the white of Ed’s semen on his cheek when he stared at it, mystified, in the communal bathroom at the inn in Paris.
It was a victory he couldn’t have begun to imagine. The cargo ships grew bigger and bigger, fat and bold and breathing black breath to the grey clouds above.
It filled him with dread. His knees felt weak. Men who do not fall, scream. He wasn’t a man, an adult. His brother was. But Al had his lungs and his voice.
“I never wanted this world!” He told the seagulls wheeling overhead, and no one heard.
Seven years from that date, this evening, Edward, my son, wound up at my doorstep.
My interest in the Thule Society is deeper than casual now. I do the rites, I discuss halfbaked theories amongst the pompous innovators. I plant the seeds to grow the truth. I use the science of this world to replace my son’s wooden prosthetics with something that suits him. He is too young and so full of fire to be walking around with a cane.
Edward rarely speaks. When he does, it is always about Alphonse. I’ve seen the way he looks when we talk of Alphonse. I do all I can to help my son, but I know I am no true father. I have no rights. None. This considered, Edward talks when he sleeps. He talks to his brother when he’s asleep. He regularly cries, or laughs, or screams for Alphonse before he wakes. I say nothing of this. I have forsaken my rights as a father. I don’t know how to love, not really, so I cannot guide Edward’s love.
We disagree on the best way to reach Amestris. Edward calls the Thule Society a bunch of ‘idiotic morons who think too highly of themselves and are stuck in middle-school fantasies’. He’s going to Transylvania to study rocketry. His hopes are far-fetched, but so are mine, and we continue to work in ease and unease until it is time for him to leave. To get back to Alphonse.
Edward doesn’t see this world. He only sees the stars.
It was the last entry in his Father’s journals, and Al felt as if he had just read an unbelievable epic. The ending left him nostalgic, and heartsick, even if the ending would keep going, most likely unwritten, as long as his brother and he lived. They were the last of the alchemists who would keep ‘Elric’ after their first names.
It was night, and the cargo ship creaked and groaned like a haunted place. They slept in hammocks. They washed alongside crates of finery from China and India and places he couldn’t even hope to paint in his mind. He kept the journals in his suitcase. He’d always keep the journals.
On the dock, it was night, and the sea blurred into the sky and reflected the stars. Cosmos. Nothing told where one began and the other ended, and if he let his mind carry him away, he could very well believe a fall over the rail would swallow him in nothingness.
Edward was smoking, sitting against one of the crates tethered to the dock. His ashtray was overflowing. The stars were in his eyes when Al sat beside him and leaned over. Took the half-burned cigarette and dragged on it, forced it, because it tasted something like Edward’s kisses and his heart was soft for his brother. It always had been.
Ed took it back. Stubbed it out amongst the others crushed. “Don’t you start.” He mumbled and the Atlantic wind almost stole the words away.
Al let the taste of the smoke linger on his tongue. He didn’t inhale, just blew it out in a thick cloud and watched as it dissipated into the air.
“Tastes like you.” He said, and that was all there was to it.
He didn’t inhale. Edward’s kiss was as much a part of him as the blood seal and the sacrifice that fashioned his young features. He had faith, always faith, and his brother was right beside him. Not the physicist, not the Fullmetal Alchemist. Just Ed. His brother.
“Hey.”
“Yeah, Al?” Ed’s hair was undone. Ed was coming undone, but Al had faith.
Al pointed to the clear sky overhead. “Isn’t that Taurus?”
Ed’s smile was nostalgic. The first real thing Al could believe in. “Modification through congelation. Yes. And there’s Cancer.”
“Union through solution. Which one is that, brother?”
“Cassiopeia.”
“I don’t remember that one.”
“Crazy myth, that.” Ed had memorized a map through the stars that he never used. “It isn’t very relevant to alchemy.”
Al closed his eyes. He wove his fingers into his brother’s, and squeezed, and reminded himself of his faith. Softly, he said -
“Then I guess it doesn’t matter that I don’t remember.”
Das Ende
(The End)
[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]