Map of Stars - Part Three
After more journal entries that left him less and less pleased with Germany, after more equations that Al was delighted he could now grasp, if not fully understand, his father had been raging, ridiculously, almost humorously drunk. Al had to do a double-take at the huge, sloppy handwriting. It left him perturbed, because in his young mind, parents don’t get drunk. Brothers do, and brothers paved the way for little brothers, and outshone them.
He tucked the well-worn scrap of paper between the drunk-scrawled pages and spent the afternoon with the chart of Taurus. The child in him adored the myths. Unlike Edward, who had sharpened his appetite on science and only science, Al was softer of heart and appreciated a good story. Their mother always used to say that, when they’d fight over if the bedtime reading would be ‘The Finer Balance of Equivalent Exchange’ (written by their own father, although their mother never let Ed see the author’s name), or something with grand prose and adventure. Al was never at a loss for suggestions. Neither was Ed.
Taurus was Jupiter as a lie. A lovely lie, but a lie. Jupiter-as-Taurus swept his love away across a sea. It was romantic. The actual constellation, the side notes of the sparse myths said, did not reflect a placid, love struck bull but rather one about to goad a man to death. Either way, no one could quite pinpoint Taurus, and a lie was an adequate description in Al’s eyes.
February 1919 - If I could change everything. His father wrote at a tipsy slant. Al found it amusing, maybe because he needed to find something amusing about the old words filled with regret. I don’t know if I could claim the liberties of changing anything. I shouldn’t be alive. I’ve lived my time, four or five times over, and who would I have saved if I didn’t relive my time? I wouldn’t have met Trisha.
Al gasped and shut his eyes tightly. Trisha. Mom. He didn’t realize he was clutching the journal to his chest until he finally mustered the gumption to continue reading. Noa asked if he was okay, but he didn’t hear her.
Edward wouldn’t exist. Alphonse wouldn’t exist. Genetics are a very strange thing. Al’s eyes lingered on his own name. So simple, so pivotal.
But I had to leave. The rot…it sounds so superficial now. But they would have watched their father rot away. Trisha would have had to care for me, eventually. I didn’t want her to fall out of love with me. I wish I was a stronger soul.
My children are beautiful. Perfect. Al was just a baby.
Incoherence. It all driveled off into incoherence, spattered with ‘400s’ and ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ and the very last words were ‘no more.’
Al wasn’t sure why he reached over to lay a shaking hand on his brother’s. Noa and Edward both stopped discussing whatever it was they were chatting about so amiably, and Edward took the journal silently passed to him with a delicate touch. Wary.
Wary wasn’t fucking enough.
Al watched his fidgeting hands, watched his calloused fingers turn the flap of his father’s coat back and forth, back and forth. Edward read quickly and finally gave a burdened sigh. He raked his fingers through his hair, and his eyes were bright, but Al didn’t see them with his own vision set on his ever-moving hands.
“I know.” Was all Edward told him. Al took the journal back carefully, desperately suppressing the urge to yank it out of Edward’s hands, and the eggshell world of lies went back up again.
Trisha died. My wife is dead. My house is gone. My sons-
The rest of the pages of that journal were blank. Not a penmark on twenty pages. Al picked up the next, and the last, with trepidation.
October 1921- I’m not sure if I did the right thing, back in London. The closer I work with the Thule Society, the closer alchemy becomes in my day to day life, the more I cannot forget.
Just when I thought I had constructed something of a tolerable life, the Germans bombed London. When the sirens sound, the only option is to run. I would be a fool to say Edward Heiderich-
Heiderich? Well, Al reasoned. It made sense, as much as anything ever made sense in this world.
-wasn’t a source of sentimentality. Favoritism isn’t a good quality in a teacher. I had many students who lived along the streets we fled from. But I chose him.
I met my son. I thought I’d never meet him again. I’d like to think the short time I spent in Rizenbool was worthy of something. I was a fool to hope my words would reach Dante. It didn’t change the fact that Edward, my son Edward, spoke through the mouth of Edward Heiderich.
While we watched London go up in flames, I made a grievous error. I try not to think about what had happened between then and Munich, if only to retain whatever dubious insanity this old man has left.
I told him the truth while we watched people’s lives become shrapnel. He couldn’t believe it. Neither could I. I ruined his faith in the science, the art he lived for.
No. I am wrong. He lives for Alphonse. Someone had to live for Alphonse, and I couldn’t. Five years spent thinking I ruined my son’s faith. I am a truly arrogant man.
Still, I thought I ruined his faith. And I walked away. Edward Heiderich died that night, killed by a zeppelin went awry. That was five years ago.
“What is the truth, dad?” Al asked the haphazard words, the haphazard story. Ed didn’t look away from the sunset of France’s border, and the pockmarked evidence of the war just finished. Noa studied Al, with the dark eyes of a fortune-teller. Al saw none of it.
Five years from that date, this evening, Edward, my son, wound up at my doorstep.
They left the train on cramped legs, right when the sun had set and the street lights flickered on. Paris lived up to every cliché expectation. It was a romantic city. It was a city of lights. At night, beautiful women were on the arms of handsome men and strolled the pavilions and streets in their finery. Quaint restaurants boasted food that was so well-crafted it would have been a shame to eat it. The general attitude to their rag-tag group of Germans and Roma was one of scornful superiority. They had won the war. Edward, Alphonse and Noa were no threat. Or perhaps it was the immediate-past history clogging their perceptions.
And that was just the train station, where Noa and Al stood to the side and pretended not to know Ed. Ed, who was currently butchering the French language with the help of a phrase book and thoroughly annoying the queue behind him and the ticketmaster behind the warmly lit glass booth.
Al noticed none of it. How many days hadn’t he slept? How many days had he lusted after answers to only be teased with more questions? ‘What’s the truth, Dad?’ ran jackal circles around his thoughts.
“They don’t have a train heading to Rouen until the eighteenth. Two days from now. I bought the tickets, anyway.”
Noa worried. “I don’t know anyone here, Edward. I can’t promise-“
“Relax.” Ed grinned, carefree. He left all his cares in the train, back in Munich, with a casual saunter and nary a glance back. Al was convinced of it. “My old man was smart enough to make some money outside of Germany. We’ve got enough to cover us for a while, if we can find a place with a decent price.”
They walked. The women who passed by them were beautiful. The men, handsome. The food too beautiful to eat, the weather cold like Munich but with a less harsh bite. ‘What’s the truth, Dad?’
The Eiffel Tower glittered, alight with hundreds and hundreds of diamond lights. Paris’ crown. Noa cried out and clapped her hands together, enthralled. She looked younger that way, and Ed humored her with a skin-deep half-smile. Al was stunned by the sight. Central never had anything so frivolous. It was magnificent in the clear air where the lights drowned out all the stars. ‘What’s the truth, dad?’
Promenades and pavilions eventually gave way to the plainer buildings, with the plainer, unique people. The sort who wore wool pant suites and linen dress shirts like any other workday out while they drank moderately-priced beer and smoked cigars and cigarettes out on café porches.
They found a modest hotel. It was plain white with a wooden door and a wooden sign, and flower boxes on the small windows with struggling blooms peeking over the rims. Ed lit a cigarette and they waited for it to burn out before they checked in. The Eiffel Tower still sparkled.
Al woke from a troubled half-sleep where he chased and ran from monsters born inside-out and missing pieces. He fell asleep wondering what the truth in his father’s journals was. He woke wondering it. He lay absolutely still.
He had to share a bed with Edward, and all were too tired to argue the two-bed arrangement.
He woke to Ed’s flesh arm wrapped around his middle, holding him close. He woke to Ed’s breath on the back of his neck, and a well-muscled, firm chest pressed up against his back. Ed smelled of motor oil, and, closer still, musk. Regular human musk. He woke to his brother’s hand having crept up beneath his shirt sometime during the night, and was now rubbing lazy circles over his stomach. His brother’s fingertips tickled the incredibly sensitive dip of his bellybutton, the slope of his hip. He woke wondering what the fucking truth was, with half a mind to plant his elbow in his brother’s face.
The situation had no right to feel so soothingly good. He had become too used to being cold. Always cold. In armor, in Drachma, in his father’s coat that never quite managed to keep the heat in. If the truth wasn’t still circling his thoughts like a jackal…if it wasn’t. Then what? He’d roll over and give his big brother a nice, big, good-morning hug? He wasn’t five anymore. Edward wasn’t six. Edward rubbed his chin into the crook of Al’s neck, and Al felt the slightest hint of morning stubble. Ed was eighteen, and while Al wasn’t five, Al didn’t quite know what the truth was.
“B’by brothr.” Edward slurred into his ear, and it froze his blood. Ed called him ‘baby brother’ when he was five and Edward was six and the novelty of being a big brother was Eiffel Tower-bright in his mind.
Al was awake. He was pretending to not be awake. He was confused, always confused, Paris provided no answers, and he was lusting after answers again with the completely un-timely hardness between his legs. Ed’s hand sliding, dry and just rough enough to feel very, very nice, across his stomach and onto his hip was not helping.
“Fuck.” Edward muttered with more coherency than his previous words. He immediately rolled back to his side of the bed, and the touches, the stubble against Al’s neck, the gentle pattern of breathing and the smell of oil was gone. These things left Al in peace to chase around the truth and try desperately to ignore the ache between his legs.
Mere minutes later, Noa announced that they were all going to visit the Eiffel Tower. Edward cursed and threw a pillow in her general direction, then stole Al’s. Al hunched over himself and rolled the musty-smelling blanket around his body, and insisted on being the very last person to head to the bathroom. He regarded his body with disgusted incredulousness, but he couldn’t stop his lust for the not-wholly-tangible.
Breakfast was a simple affair, bought off a woman peddling some ‘decent bread-things’ from a cart, as Edward put it. Al had forgotten what hunger was when he refused to do anything but read on the train. Noa took pity on him and gave him the last few bites of her breakfast.
“Tallest building in the world.” Edward translated.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Noa breathed, reverently.
To Al, it was just a huge antenna. It was magnificent at night, when the lights hid the criss-crossing unforgiving steel beams. It was just an antenna, and the tallest building in that world. Al copied Noa, leaning back to try to see the very top. He tried to be amazed, but the tower had no answers for him.
Noa was happy, and his brother was smiling. Al tried again, and again, but he couldn’t understand it and with ‘What’s the truth, Dad?’ running circles in his brain, he couldn’t channel their smiles to his lips.
In the end, the old man who worked the admission booth carried over a detest of the Roma. Al was beginning to get sick of it, and Edward tried (and failed) to argue with the man using a phrasebook.
“It was prettier lit up anyway, like last night.” Al said softly to her. He still spoke German. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the pronunciation of French.
Amestrian. He spoke Amestrian.
Noa was good at hiding her disappointment. Edward cursed in fluent German, with the garbled accent and the horrendous words. Noa put her hand to her mouth, torn between horror and amusement. When she and Al shared a glance, though, they both burst out laughing.
Paris was one big gathering of many pieces of art, Noa concluded. Ed scoffed. Al thought it was a very astute observation.
“Fuck the Eiffel Tower, then.” Edward said brashly. “Who needs a fucking antenna when we’ve got…bridges…and shit.”
That got a small chuckle from Noa. Al could admit it was funny, in that quirky sense of humor his brother had.
To Al, Paris was beautiful. Beautiful like Ed’s star-charts. Like the scrapes that had almost faded on the back of his neck. Paris made him feel like an outsider, like a tourist, like a foreigner. The French spoke French, and not some knock-off of what Al had grown up speaking. The French ate weird things and made them delicious. Like the Xingians. A damn meal didn’t remind him of dinners at Master Izumi’s or Winry’s cooking.
Al thought he could forget the truth. For a little while, because Noa was smiling and in France, it didn’t make him miss Winry so damn much. Quite often, Al was wrong, bibaxt, bad luck. Was he becoming superstitious? He tried to see Taurus in the sky, but all they could see were the Eiffel Tower lights.
Noa was glowing. Edward might as well have been one of those handsome men with a lovely lady on his arm in the pavilions that night. Al knew he should have been happy because they were happy, but he was content that Paris made him feel like an outsider. All travelers eventually get homesick, and write home. Al had letters his Father never meant anyone to read.
“Christ, I’m beat.” Edward flopped back onto their unmade bed, still fully clothed. The communal bathroom down the hall wasn’t worth the walk to change into sleeping clothes.
“It really is amazing here.” Al was annoyed with Noa, and how many times she said that throughout the day. They had spent a good half-hour staring at the Eiffel Tower from the pavilions, saying nothing. Noa and Edward saw the tallest building in the world alight with fake stars. Al wasn’t sure what he saw. He wasn’t sure about anything.
“Yeah. Hell, I thought Paris would just be a stop-through. Kinda like Xenotime, huh, Al? Completely different, though. London was impressive and Germany got kinda boring after a while.”
Al continued to comb his fingers through his hair, stoic as he faced the small mirror mounted on the wall beside the door. He could watch the conversation from there. He really didn’t want to, but he could, and he did. Masochist. His brother had given him his face, but took away his ponytail. Al’s fingers brushed the somewhat tender scrapes on the back of his neck, and he irrationally wanted-wanted-wanted his ponytail back.
“I haven’t been anywhere outside of Germany.” Noa said. So meek. Roze went to Rizenbool. Ran an orphanage in Lior. Roze went places and saw things on her own two legs. Al immediately felt rotten for comparing them. “Didn’t you travel to Transylvania too?” Al watched them talk across the room in the mirror. Ed took one shoe off, and destroyed the imagery of a man in the Paris pavilions, handsome and unremarkable.
“We met Fletcher and Russel in Xenotime.” Al’s voice was soft and even. He was scared of his own voice, and it set a chill he honestly didn’t mean to set in the room. Noa withdrew. Ed scoffed, and it boiled Al so he raised his voice just a little. “And Germany reminds me of Amestris.”
“Anyway.” Ed continued to babble stupidly to Noa. But Noa wasn’t listening. Noa was worried about Al, and saw the morose slump of those young shoulders. Noa had seen Amestris through Edward’s memories, and the colors that put everything she knew to shame. It didn’t stop Ed. “I wonder if Rouen’s something, too. Right on the coast. If Paris is anything to go by-“
“Aquaroya was beautiful.” The way he said ‘beautiful’, it might as well have been hideous. “Of course, it’s completely underwater by now.” But you wouldn’t know that, would you?
A pause. A beat. A few degrees colder in the room. Noa had nothing to clean. She made her bed, even if she was going to sleep in it in a few minutes.
“You’re just saying that ‘cause of Psiren.” Ed snickered. Al raked his hands through his hair.
“I was, what, twelve? It was a dumb puppy crush. Get over it.”
Ed did. “Dad said there’s a place like Aquaroya in Italy. He showed me some pictures, you wouldn’t believe how similar-“ Oh, Al was pretty sure he would. “-Venice and Aquaroya are.” He smiled. It was only muscle-skin-lip deep. “Maybe we’ll pass through there soon. At least that isn’t underwater.”
“I heard the Venice canals are terribly filthy.” Noa whispered. Neither paid attention to it.
“I don’t think it really matters now anyway, brother.” Al raked his hands through his hair. Fast. Hard. Strands came loose. He wasn’t used to his hair being so short, tawny strands so short around his fingers. Noa stopped fussing with the edge of her comforter and froze like a deer in the headlights. At least Roze had found her voice. Winry might have been quick with her wrench, but she never froze. Lieutenant Hawkeye didn’t know the meaning of the word. Sheska. Hell. Sheska burrowed under the military itself with her pen and her papers, her books and her glasses. Martel. Lust. Ross. Gracia. Mom, mom, mom, Oh, god.
Master Izumi.
Al hated the women of Europe. They were all cowards.
“I’m surprised you remembered her name.” Al said before he could stop himself. He wanted to clamp a hand over his mouth. Pride kept him from doing so. He wanted to never talk again. Roze.
“Who, Psiren? After all that bitch put me through, of course I’d remember her name. Out of principle, if anything.”
Noa looked uncomfortable with the word ‘bitch’. There were plenty of bitchy women in Amestris. They weren’t cowards.
“Winry Rockbell ring a bell, then?” Al sneered into the mirror. His face was horrible like that. He couldn’t stop. “Or what about Roze? Roze, you know. Kain’s mother? Kain’s gotten big. She adopted two more kids.”
Someone needed to stop him. Al couldn’t stop. “Speaking of mothers, Gracia’s doing great. So’s Alicia. Lieutenant Hawkeye? Good with a gun? Probably misses Colonel Mustang like hell. I mean, Officer Mustang. He got dismissed from the Military right after he recovered. Sits on the Amestris/Drachma border all day now.” Ed looked stricken. Good. At least he looked something.
Al hated himself. He couldn’t stop. It didn’t make sense, because the bitterness in the mirror had long faded from his mind and his heart but not his face or his voice. “No? Certainly you remember Izumi Curtis. ‘Crazy witch’ that left us alone on an island for a month? Wrath’s mom?” Ed flinched. Al bristled. “Wrath isn’t the psycho he used to be, you know. He calmed down a whole lot after Master died. But I’m sure Italy and Aquaroya are exactly the same.”
Ed seemed to stop breathing. He seemed to just have stopped, and all that strength, the masculinity, the age fell all around his feet in invisible bits of rubble. He was eleven years old again and bleeding all over their basement.
“Al…” Noa called for him. But Al didn’t want to hear it. He dug through his open luggage. The red coat was wrinkled. It felt right wearing it. It felt wrong wearing it. It kept him warm outside of the hotel, but none of it gave him any damn answers.
It was only a matter of time before they found him at the bridge. Paris, the section of Paris they were at, had no rivers. None he knew of. But it did have a bridge, one of the patches of the patchwork of a collection of art. Al was in a foul mood, and he hated the bridge. He hated the brown water that flowed under it. He missed the river in Rizenbool, which was so clear he could easily make out the flashing fish tails and fish scales and let it mesmerize him. Distract him. Light flickered in the water in Paris, but didn’t really move much at all.
“So what is the truth, Ed?” He asked the lights not moving in the water when he heard footsteps approach. Men laughed in the bar and café patios on either side of the bridge, but stores had closed.
Everything that made Ed a mystery was left behind in their little half-made hotel room. Al wasn’t sure if he could face his brother as he was. Not again.
“The truth?” Ed’s voice was hoarse and quiet, the dessert winds blowing through the remnants of Ishbal.
“Dad said he thought he ‘ruined your faith’ when he told you the truth. About alchemy. Let’s start with that.”
“Al, it doesn’t matter-“
“It matters to me. I need answers.” He raked his hands through his hair again. It was greasy from the abuse. He needed a new habit. Would smoking make him older, now that Ed was eleven again?
“I…”
“The souls of the departed humans here transform the shape of things in your world.” Noa spoke quietly, and watched him with the dark eyes of a fortune-teller. “I’m sorry, Edward.”
Edward sighed. His throat hitched. Al knew he was nauseous, because he was too. The red stones implanted into pregnant women so they can be birthed like bullets were birthed in Germany’s factories. Al supposed this is what he should have felt like; when Marcoh’s trivial code was broken and went a-flutter around the study with their notes.
He was the Philosopher’s Stone all over again, surrounded by a glowing cage, the lives of hundreds of soldiers nothing more than markings and a fifth element in his armor, and Roze had forgotten herself and Kain was left in the arms of a madwoman.
“I didn’t want to believe it.” Edward spoke like a puppet. Something else was pulling the strings. Obligations and guilt Al thought Ed left behind in his mimicry-of-the-dead sleep. He regretted. “Not at first. But Al, it makes sense, if you consider the Philosopher’s stone.” Izumi moved mountains. The Fullmetal Alchemist did too. A single soul cannot be used to save the life of another, or a few hundred.
Equivalent fucking exchange.
Noa whispered something to Ed. She was scared of Al. She was a coward. She was a vagabond, a gypsy, she was enthralled with Paris and lived through a war and centuries of persecution. She was an everyface Ishbalan. Al loved her and resented her.
Noa left. Didn’t make them a spectacle. Bullshit. She already knew what a spectacle they were.
‘Do you hate me?’ spoken in the intimacy of a battlefield behind a wall. Someone died to put that wall up, to stop the bullets, to transform Ed’s automail into a blade to protect Al.
His head whirled. The lights reflected in the water didn’t move. Al knew he should have still felt sick.
“Why do I have to hear it from Dad, from Noa?” Al gripped the edges of the limestone railing. His palms were bare. Gloves with arrays meant nothing. “Noa isn’t even an alchemist, and Dad’s dead.”
Ed came to rest beside him. Away from him, out of arm’s reach, but beside him nonetheless. In the following silence, Al was resigned to more of it. Hope made him tired, and he didn’t feel young right then. He needed sleep.
“Spar with me.”
Al gave him a look. Edward didn’t look young and stricken. He looked old and worn. He looked like the Fullmetal Alchemist in his trademark red coat, his hair in a braid, his eyes haunted and tenaciously flashing.
“I mean it. Spar with me.” Edward smiled. Or Al imagined it. Either way, there was something shallower than skin, muscle and lips. “We haven’t done that in a while, have we?” His voice trailed off. It wasn’t strong to begin with. “Years.”
Al moved without thinking. He was doing a lot of things without thinking, and it scared him. He placed his foot on the banister, then launched himself in the air. A miscalculation would set him in the canal. His knee bent, aimed straight for Edward’s automail shoulder. He never miscalculated. It would hurt, ‘like a bitch’, as Edward would say.
Fuck it.
His knee hit metal. Not the shoulder, though. Edward had lifted his arms to guard. Al distributed the shock throughout his body and used the force to flip back and away. Alchemy training. Physics.
Then Edward grinned. It was an expression that held no humor. It was the Fullmetal Alchemist before he turned his arm into a blade. It was his brother lying to him about their mother’s grave. He charged. Al dodged. Opposite legs kicked high and met, flesh on flesh. Tissue bruised. Adrenalin rushed. It was basic. A simple circle drawn on Winry’s livingroom floor. Her ninth birthday present. Their first transmutation.
Ed got that little smirk he always got when he thought he found an opening in his brother’s defenses. It was old and rusty and it scraped across his face, but it was there. Al knew the signs. So when a flesh fist came low to deliver an undercut to his ribcage, Al twisted to the side. Grabbed Edward’s arm. Pinned him against the banister.
It left them both panting. Stunned. Ed shook his damp hair out of his eyes. Cold air burned their lungs. Their lungs. The gesture made Ed’s nose rub, sweat-slicked, over the bridge of Al’s. Ed’s breath was warm on his face.
“Still can kick my ass.” Edward tried to sound disappointed, and couldn’t, for the life of him. “Still my baby brother.”
Baby brother. The words scared Al. Elated him. Snapped him out of the euphoria of adrenalin and aggression release. He was close to his brother, but not close enough.
“You’re cold and you smell like cigarettes.”
Ed laughed. It had a slightly hysterical edge to it. A deeper echo of Al’s mockery in the mirror.
“That’d be my automail, dumbass. Get off me. We’ll ditch Noa for an hour or two.”
The pavilions and promenades of Paris were made with lovers and the lovestuck in mind. The gentle lights and tender music spoke to couples and single men and women. The buildings and streets were untouched by the war, or rebuilt almost immediately. They were for superficial sin dressed in luxury. Sin that needed no repentance. Anyone could see the Eiffel Tower from there; anyone could fall in love, there.
Al walked alongside his brother, their backs to the pavilions. They steered clear of potholes in the road, they saw the bullets stuck in walls of the middle-class pubs and stores. Paris lost its magic when they saw the back alleys and homeless under the bridges, but they were scientists. Magic was for children, for fools, for gypsies and the eccentrics in Munich who had chanted incantations around an array that wouldn’t glow no matter how long they spoke.
It was cold and Edward walked with a slight limp, with mismatched steps. The last time Al had seen his brother’s automail, it was hundreds of feet above Central turned to rubble. Mustang held him back. He was hysterical, and only remembered Edward’s little skin-deep smile and the flash of a metal fist, then the way Ed’s ponytail fluttered when he turned his back.
“Where are we going?” He asked when he could see the moon high and full behind the smog, the clouds.
“Not a damn clue.”
“Sightseeing?” The snide beast in Al was dying quickly, but putting every last struggle, tooth and claw it had to staying alive.
“Yeah.” Ed sent a loose chunk of brick skittering down the pavement ahead of them with an idle kick. “We never got much of a chance to before.” He tried to sound nonchalant.
“No. We didn’t.”
“But now we can.” Ed looked at the bullet-riddled walls, the crumbling buildings alongside those with mismatched plaster, as new was patched over old and decrepit and the common man tried to forget. “Train doesn’t come ‘till late afternoon. We’ll just sleep on the way to Rouen.”
“I can’t sleep.” Al was balancing precariously between anger and weariness. It left him numb. “You know that.”
As the saying went - the calm before the storm. Dark clouds were gathering in his demeanor. Ed didn’t trust it, Al knew. Hell, Al didn’t trust it.
“You know what’s really good for sleep?”
Al didn’t know what he’d see if he slept. Dreams were peculiar creatures.
“What?”
“Scotch. Vodka. Beer.”
“You’re kidding me. No one would let-“
“Never know until we try!” It’s not the same here. Ed yelled. Yelled. Drowned out the storm clouds. Held him by his wrist and marched with typical Elric determination to the closest bar.
Al dug his heels in, tried to reason with his headstrong brother. Ed simply found a stronger grasp in his red coat. Who’s red coat? Al’s? Ed’s?
Al took the opportunity to turn around and plod determinedly away from Ed’s ridiculous idea. Al had the finesse in fighting, but Ed had the strength.
Al wound up wrapped uncomfortably in the coat. They were jostling each other right in the middle of the sidewalk. People stopped to watch, to stare at the sacrilegious symbol on Al’s back, and between Al’s incredulousness and Al’s determination, it had become a game. Narrow shoulders belonging to a thirteen-year-old boy. Steel. They were sparring in their own way, every damn excuse to touch, and leave angry little bruises on their arms and backs and chests.
They were sparring in their own way, putting every single thing Master Izumi had taught them to shame. It wasn’t a time for mourning, but they still had much to regret. Big brothers got drunk and shoved liquor down their little brother’s throats and goaded them into swallowing it. Big brothers knew better. Ed drank, Ed smoked, Ed had been there and done that and knew every damn thing
Al shoved hard against Ed, and sent both of them stumbling. They were smiling. They used to laugh uproariously during their tussles. Ed used to wear the heavy flamel on his back.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t tried once.” Ed demanded. The headlock he had Al in was harsh in the desperate need to never stop their play.
“I haven’t!” Al kicked behind Ed’s flesh knee. Ed toppled, taking Al down with him. The pavement was wet. They didn’t care.
“So your first grown-up drink’s gonna be with your big brother? Late bloomer, aren’t you?”
Ed’s first drink was in Youswell, in as grand creation as any alchemist could ask. A home, people laughing. ‘Don’t give alcohol to minors!’ Ed cried, and was surprised when Al humored him just this once. Ed had a single glass of scotch, come to think of it. He fell asleep on the floor with his shirt scrunched up and his stomach full and his mind full of victory.
“Oh, geeze, brother. You wanna ask someone to take our picture while you’re at it?”
“Hey, it’s like a tradition.” Ed stopped trying to twist Al’s arm behind his back. “I think.”
Tradition was the older setting a beer in front of the younger, and the younger trying to be nonchalant as he took his first sip. Tradition was the older looking smug while the younger tried to swallow the foul taste. Tradition was nursing hangovers and teenage experimentation. Finding a way to sleep without dreams wasn’t tradition.
Al would take what he could get. He could believe it was tradition. He could believe ‘a few’ glasses of scotch were the answer to his refusal to sleep.
“Get off me then, brother. The sidewalk’s wet.”
The bar was small and quaintly aged. Old men nursed their drinks there. Young men did the same, and the sheer weariness of the previous generation went unnoticed as the young talked over newspaper articles and the day’s events.
It was nothing like Al was expecting, and it made him complacent.
“Que sera-t-il, messieurs?”
Al scrambled onto the stools that were just a little too high to be comfortable for his height. Edward hmmed and hawed, flipping through his now rather worn phrase book. The bartender was a man of no extremes, middle-aged, middle-height, middle-temperament. Patient.
“Uh…deux ecossaise…um…” Ed scratched his head. His hair was damp with the condensation from the pavement. “si’l vous plait?”
“Oui. Deux ecossaise.”
“Merci.”
Al said it too, just to be polite. They both butchered the pronunciation, and even though they were so clearly from Germany, the man gave them a tolerant, maybe even kind, smile. Because they looked young. Did they even look young anymore?
There was no forgiving time between their awkward order and the time said order arrived. The amber liquid was bright in the short, fat, clear glass. It was pretty to look at in the dim light of the bar. Al timidly picked the glass up by the rim and studied the drink. He had the guts and the brazenness, right until it all came down to it.
“Any tips?” Al asked. He faked his brazenness. Ed saw his baby brother’s eyes glitter and flash, and Al was small, small but brave, his baby brother about to get drunk for the first time and they tried not to think about where all the years between then and now went.
Instead, he smirked. Al’s brazenness was met with a clash of a challenge.
“Just drink it.”
Al didn’t waste time on a deep breath. He put the glass to his lips, tilted his head back, and got a strongly bittersweet mouthful of tradition half-fashioned.
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On To [Part Four]