Fic: Vagabonds (2/?)

[yixsh]

Title: Vagabonds - Chapter Two
Author: yixsh
Original Concept/Illustrations: sicarius66
Rating: T/PG-13 for this chapter
Genre: Drama, Adventure, Angst
Spoilers:  Eventual spoilers for the whole series, the movie, and early bits of the manga.
Word Count for Chapter One:  +/- 4227
Total Fic Word Count:  +/- 10387
Warnings:  Mild language and violence.
Summary:  After Ed and Al are unceremoniously thrown back into Amestris, they find that they are wanted for horrible crimes that they didn't commit.
Past Chapters: Prologue, 1



Ed hung back and waited, shuffling his feet, while Granny exchanged a tender hug with Alphonse. He could she her tiny, veined hand running through his shaggy hair, could hear her saying something about him having grown. Granny just made him look bigger, hunched nearly in two to wrap his arms around her, and Ed was hit by just how surreal the situation was all over again. Again. He could see himself being eternally surprised to see these people again, just like he had always been startled to see a familiar face in the crowd in Germany or Britain or America. Here was his surrogate grandmother, a woman who had very nearly raised him, and it really was her this time.

When Al raised from his hunch and discreetly wiped at his eyes, Granny turned to him with her mouth set determinedly downward. Ed - didn’t exactly know what to say. He hadn’t seen her for six years. He hadn’t seen her since she had faded away on a train platform in Risembool when he’d been sixteen and young and reckless and convinced that he was going to Central City to die. His bottom lip quivered of its own volition. Would things be the same; could he talk to her the same way he always had?

“You’ve grown a bit, pipsqueak,” she said, sly, and her lip curled up to one side. Ed smiled. How silly to think that things could change so easily.

“Heh. Too bad I can’t say the same for you, hag.”

“You’re hair’s almost longer than you are though, kid. Have you even cut it since I saw you last?” She approached him like he might bolt out the door at any moment and took hold of his long braid where it swung under his arm. She turned it in her weathered hands thoughtfully, spinning it like gold thread and watching it catch the light.

Once. Just once he had cut it. His father had trimmed it when the weight of it had just been too much. But it grew back, and Al had said once that he couldn’t stand the idea of Ed cutting it. Never again. So he hadn’t, and his head had been lighter despite it all, and he would never cut it again, now.

“Have you taken yours out of that ridiculous bun since we’ve been gone? I think I can see spiders layin’ eggs in there.” And then she wrapped her arms around him - not the sort of comment that merited a hug from anyone else, but Granny was different and Granny was the same, and Ed leaned down to plant his face in her shoulder. She smelled the same, too. He wondered if she would ever stop smoking that godforsaken pipe or if she would just perpetually smell earthy and woody and spicy like smoke, forever. Then he wondered why he even bothered to wonder anymore.



“You boys are insane, do you know that?” She untangled herself from Ed and dropped his braid. It swung freely over his arm then, and he straightened himself and righted his hat. Granny just turned abruptly and sniffled hugely, and Ed smiled softly at her back. She was just walking toward the door again to retrieve what looked like a bag of groceries that she had dropped there when the door flew open again and Ed’s hand rose unbidden to cover his suddenly pounding heart.

“Gramma, I beat Mom all the way over here!” There was another silhouette in the doorway, shoulders rising and falling rapidly with respiration. Ed could see the ends of wispy tousled hair against the backdrop of sun, and when he stepped further into the house, head cocked slightly to the side, Ed could see dark skin and purple eyes peeking out from beneath the mop of brown.

“Gramma, who - ?”

“That’s good, Kain. Now shut the door, you’re letting in the heat.” She was brusque with him, and Ed could recall that same shortness in the way she had spoken to him and Al as children. The boy looked puzzled but closed the door nonetheless, and Ed stood for a moment, trying to place the face, the eyes, the name with something in his memory. He still stood, stock still, as Granny ushered the boy into the kitchen (Ed remembered the kitchen well, swinging double doors and wonderful smells). He was about to turn to Al to inquire - surely Al would remember, wouldn’t he? - when the door swung open and a silhouette appeared for the third time in the golden afternoon sunlight.

“Pinako, did Kain already get here?” she said, gently, before stepping into the house, and Edward could never forget that voice. It was one of the last he had heard before he died, one of the last he had heard before he crossed over for good the first time. He had gone over that last fateful day in the grand ballroom time and time again in his mind, alone and crippled and miserable and sick with all the illnesses his body had never encountered before.

He could still hear it, if he listened closely enough - a haunting call of my baby in the midst of all the chaos around him. Gentle and quiet with disuse, but nurturing and calm and soft.

She saw Al first, closer to the door and more in the light than Ed was, and she gasped, and that was familiar too. She had been carrying some sort of shopping bag as well, but she didn’t take the care that Pinako had to set it upright on the ground. She dropped it and rushed to his little brother with open arms.

“Al! We thought you were - ” she said into his collarbone, but before she had finished the thought she opened her eyes and, peeking over his shoulder, saw Ed standing nonchalantly against the bulletin board lined already with his face. Her eyes were so wide and so shocked over his little brother’s shoulder that it was almost comical, and Ed couldn’t resist the little smirk and wave he gave her then. She all but screamed, “Kain!” before flinging herself away from Al and bustling toward Ed, lifting her long skirt until it fluttered around her ankles. The little boy appeared from the doorway to the kitchen again, the same puzzled tilt to his eyebrows and a bag of flour perched in the crook of his elbow.

She threw her arms around Ed and he felt several wet kisses on his bristly jaw before she suddenly released him and waved the little boy toward them both. “Kain, this is Edward Elric,” she announced grandly, chest inflated with pride and eyes glowing. By the way the boy’s eyes widened, Ed could tell he had been spoken of before. He gave a little wave again, smile warm and crooked and barely containing a laugh bubbling at the back of his throat, and Kain’s mouth fell open.

“You saved my mom.” It was only then that Ed made the connection, glancing back and forth between Rose and the boy hurriedly. This boy was the baby he’d pulled from a stone snake’s mouth, that had saved him from being impaled on the end of Wrath’s spear.

“...I guess I did, kid.”

“You saved me.”

“You had a knack for getting into trouble at a very young age,” Ed answered with a shade of discomfort coloring his voice.

“You’re - the stories. You’re real, I knew you were from the pictures but - ”

The boy rambled on even as Ed rubbed the ridge of his nose with one automail finger and rolled his eyes toward Al in a ‘save me?’ gesture. Al just smiled back at him in a very familiar ‘you-had-this-coming-you-attention-hoarder’ way, and when Ed looked back down, the boy, who, given the fact that Ed knew who he was now, couldn’t be older than six or seven, had his right hand plastered to is forehead in some semblance of a rigid military salute. Obviously, nobody had been very thorough in telling The Story of Ed, because he clearly didn’t know that Ed wasn’t the best little soldier boy in the great Amestris military.

But Ed wasn’t so cold-hearted that he was going to stare down a six-year-old with some sort of hero worship for him, so he went straight-backed, stood on the very tips of his toes and put his all into rigidly saluting him right back. The boy looked so utterly overtaken with joy, eyelids fluttering and eyes flashing toward his beaming mother, that Ed really did laugh then and Al too, though he turned away in an attempt to hide it. Kain didn’t seem to notice it anyway as he swept into the kitchen shouting, “Gramma!”- no doubt regaling his latest epic encounter.

Ed’s laughter faded quickly enough after the boy had left despite the fact that he could feel Rose practically sparking with excitement beside him, because he couldn’t stop his eyes flickering toward the door, expecting it to open again with wispy trails of blonde this time. The door stayed stubbornly closed, the doorknob ruthlessly refused to twist. Rose took his arm while he glared at it and led him urgently away from the bulletin board. She was saying something that Ed couldn’t hear and Al was agreeing with similar enthusiasm, but still, Ed just willed the door open with everything he had.

It didn’t budge.

He hadn’t left Winry on the best of terms. Granny and Rose hadn’t seen him in six years, but Winry had seen how he’d changed - had predicted it, even - and had been one of the only people he’d encountered with visible hope for his return. That she had been carrying his arm and leg at the time when he crash-landed into the city spoke of blatant devotion that Ed hadn’t been able to see immediately, blinded as he was by his little brother and the rather pressing tasks at hand. But - but the more time he spent considering what exactly she had done for him the more he realized that his horribly distracted excuse for gratitude was entirely inadequate.

He had wanted to thank her for three years.

“Winry’s in Rush Valley.” Granny cut in above his concentration, abruptly patching the twin holes he was boring through the front door. Ed blinked.

“We should call her,” he said quickly, voice cracking halfway through. Al looked smug across the room, and when Ed caught him he stuck his tongue out. Honestly.

“Not just yet, Ed. I feel the need to catch you up on some things.”

“Then - we should eat,” he suggested with some trepidation.

“Edward. Go sit down.”

His stomach grumbled its dismay aloud. Fuck. He was hungry. Almost a full day without eating already -

Rose led him to a sofa that he remembered and practically bent his legs at the knees to get him to sit. She never let go of her stranglehold on his arm, even as Ed ran a thoughtful hand over threadbare folds that had seen him struggling against the pain of automail reattachment more times than he cared to count.



Granny stopped his careful contemplation when she thrust a stained white mug of coffee under his nose.

“We should call her sometime soon,” Ed conceded carefully, looking into Granny’s eyes, then Rose’s.

“We will,” Granny said. Rose squeezed his flesh elbow. The coffee was hot when he took the first sip and then set the mug distractedly on the end table next to him.

“First though - did you boys meet anyone along the way? Anyone at all?”

Ed started to shake his head in the midst of a careful observation of the cuckoo clock, until a brittle, once-decidedly inconsequential moment surfaced again.

You’re the man from the posters!

“A little girl,” Al provided helpfully for him. “Seven or eight.”

Pinako gave a tight-lipped nod. “I should have expected as much. You boys can’t do anything without causing a commotion. The rumors will be starting everywhere now.”

“It was hardly our fault,” Ed said defensively.

“Brother, we were sleeping in an open field.”

“How were we to know we’re - we’re... What are we exactly, Granny?” Rose’s face fell at that, but Granny just looked pissed.

“I should have thought that was obvious from the clippings. You’re wanted across Amestris, branded as malicious mass murderers.”

While Ed couldn’t say that the accusations surprised him, it sounded so harsh coming from her mouth like that. Al’s expression fell to match Rose’s. Ed’s eyebrows rose to match Pinako’s.

“Bullshit,” he muttered.

“The papers don’t think so,” Rose said, almost sadly. Like her faith had been questioned. Ed remembered that about her, too.

As Rose took a moment to speak her piece about the newspapers, Kain trotted back into the room from the kitchen and sat next to his mother. He eyed her arm around his like a kid eyeing cake on his birthday and kept glancing discreetly around the curve of Rose’s body to get another glance in. Ed could recognize the hope in his eyes because he had seen the same darkly gleaming desperation in his little brother’s as a child - whenever he spoke of Hohenheim.

Father, it said.

Oh.

Shit.

Ed scootched his butt away from Rose as inconspicuously as possible - she reflexively tightened her hold to death-grip level again, midsentence - and Kain just kept looking at him with those thrice-damned eyes. His mouth was dry by the time he was meant to speak again, his head swimming at the thought of being assaulted by something like this mere hours after his arrival home.

It’s not my fault your real Dad’s an asshole kid, just please stop looking at me, I’m not your dad, I just saved your mom a few times by accident of location.

Damn. What had Rose been feeding into that kid’s head?

When Rose ended her tirade and looked at him with nearly the same earnest, hungry intensity in her eyes, Ed just thought blankly, Oh. That’s what.

Shit.

Rose - couldn’t be in love with him.

...Could she? No. Nonono. Because Ed wasn’t love material, he wasn’t - he wasn’t compatible with the female species and he never had been. All that time away from him must have deluded her into some false image of him. Yeah. That was it.

When he’d been sixteen and stupid enough to charge a bull head on if he felt that it had challenged him to, some people had chosen to (mis)interpret that arrogant enthusiasm as bravery or selflessness or some senile shit like that. Rose, Ed knew, might be prone to do that above many others because if he chose to acknowledge it, she had a horrible tendency to fall head over heels for anything on two legs that offered her some sense of security.

Fuck, could he really deal with this and being branded as a mass murderer? There was only so much a man could take on his first day back in a new world, and this little boy was going to be the straw that broke his fucking proverbial back.

“So, we’ll have to stop the rumors,” Al chimed in just as Ed pried his eyes away from the intense, wide-eyed little boy. “We’ll go to Central and we’ll speak to - someone. The Prime Minister.”

He sounded so determined that Ed could almost, almost think for a moment that something like that would work, if only because Alphonse wanted it to be so. But things weren’t fair like that, and they wouldn’t let two mass murderers have a friendly little audience with the Prime Minister, the arm in his wasn’t a happy-to-see you arm, and a little boy wanted a father, and Ed had never been anything if not perpetually fucked.

Granny interjected with words that were a shade kinder, but no less realistic. “Alphonse, somehow I don’t think reasoning with them is going to help. Somehow I think that putting yourself into the public eye is going to land you in jail without a trial or - ”

Or with nothing left of them but their heads on a platter in the Prime Minister’s chamber and their names on the memo line of someone’s big, fat paycheck. Rose gasped at the implication. Kain just eyed him like he was bulletproof and solidgold. Ed pitched sideways and slid snake-like out of Rose’s deathgrip, found that for the first time in a long time he’d unearthed a problem that he didn’t particularly want to charge head on.

Once he was free, he stretched like that was what he’d been intending to do with his freedom all along, and he rose to his feet to avoid being caught by her again. He took up his coffee cup for another distracted sip, and it roiled uncomfortably in his empty belly.

Alphonse rose to greet him, agitated, like he couldn’t stand to be sitting any longer. He paced between the two worn sofas like a caged animal. Ed stood uselessly with a coffee cup, and didn’t know what to do now.

“So - what, w-what. What did I - we - do - exactly?” Al said after a moment of aimless wandering. Yes. Good question.

Granny pursed her lips. “You, Al, brought on that invasion, three years ago, apparently. It was easy to be wary of you because you made your ability to transfer your soul into things so well known in Liore. I think it was grossly misconstrued as...as you having the ability to bring inanimate things of all sorts to life. Several Lioran’s testified about the abilities. Some residents of Central City reported seeing you on-site at the time of the incident.” She took a breath. “I think Ed knows what he’s accused of.” Ed nodded gravely. “Liore and the mass slaughter of the troops there. They scraped together some meager testimonies against him from a few people who really didn’t remember their own names after seeing all those men killed, much less the events of the day.” She sighed. “From there, it’s easy enough for the government to make two and two equal four hundred and blow things out of the water.”

“That’s all the evidence they had?” Al asked incredulously. “They must have been looking for a scapegoat.”

“Well.” She thought for a moment, hand tapping gently at her chin, and then, “There was one more thing.”

“What, Granny?”

“A circle,” Ed cut a glance across to Al at the startled sound he made and saw his eyes widen.

“A - where? What?” he asked quickly.

“In the underground, underneath the city. Where all that mess came from. They seemed to think it started the whole invasion. I’m a little bit hazy on the details but...” She laughed, “They claimed - you drew it!”

Al laughed mirthlessly with her for a moment before he nodded tightly and held himself painfully erect, just breathing. His lips trembled. He seemed profoundly affected by the idea that he had been pinned as a menace during his attempts to help the innocent, and Ed could sympathize, he really could, but why...he shouldn’t be this upset, should he? Not like this. Maybe righteously angry, but not on the verge of tears.

He crossed the room in a few quick strides and took him by the shoulders.

“Al?”

“Brother,” Al whispered, sounding devastated. “Maybe I should be caught.” He struggled slightly against Ed’s hold, and Ed held tighter.

“Fuck no, don’t say that. What are you talking about? Don’t let ‘em get to you,” Ed whispered back in German, attempting to maintain a level of privacy in the conversation before three pairs of prying eyes. They wouldn’t know the language, how could they? There was no Germany in Amestris. No Germany, no German.

Catching on, Al whispered back, “I’d - forgotten until now. I really did - I really did make the circle. The reports are true. I killed them,” in the same guttural language.

Oh. That chaotic day and his little brother’s breakdown flashed back to Ed from somewhere in his memory. This again. Damn Al and his damn guilt complex almost as big as Ed’s own.

“Alphonse, I thought we went over this - ”

“We did, but, but back then I thought about it every day, all the time. I got over it. I thought I had. It was easy to dismiss it then when I could do something to stop it or when I was a world away or when I didn’t know the body count but Ed - I read, the article - do you know how many people died?”

No. He didn’t want to.

He gingerly wrapped his arms around his brother, as if anything more might break him.



“Nearly five hundred! Under rubble ‘n in fires ‘n stray bullets - ” Al sniffed hard somewhere near his left ear, and when Ed looked up from his smushed position at Al’s neck, his face was wet and miserable. Ed let his own face harden, grabbed his brother by the biceps again, and held him firmly at arms length.

“And do you know how many people I ‘killed’? Fucking seven thousand, Alphonse. I know Scar did it, and I c’n whine about what I could have done to stop it until the sun goes down. But - there’s you here, ‘cause of that, and damn if I can hate myself for it.”

“Stupid,” Al sobbed on a wretched breath. “Liore wasn’t your fault.”

“And Central wasn’t yours. And now we’re together ‘cause of that. And I tell you Al, I couldn’t, I couldn’t have made it another year ‘n that hellhole they call Germany alone.”

Ed had become so good at convincing himself that convincing Alphonse came as second nature. But if he was honest with himself, the image of all those troops marching to their deaths even as Ed screamed and screamed for Archer to stop the advance still haunted him. The number seven thousand alone still woke him some nights in a cold sweat. Even now, in broad daylight, his empty stomach squeezed acid at him at the thought of it.

Ed smushed them back together when Alphonse’s face melded itself into an anguished sort of acceptance, and they lingered in the embrace a little while. Ed even dared to whisper, “I love you, and you didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done. I love you.” into his little brother’s shoulder despite how utterly un-manly that would be in any German speaking country. But this wasn’t a German speaking country. This was their Grandmother’s living room, and they were two grown men with dark pasts and lives that had been uprooted a few too many times. They were justified.

They ended the embrace with some manly coughing and hard pats on the back, just to be sure, though.

They both caught Granny’s eye at the same moment after their exchange, and her eyebrow was cocked in a way that said clearly I’m-just-not-gonna-ask. Ed avoided looking back at Rose’s face, for fear of the expression that would so clearly state her dawning remembrance of her true love’s questionable mental state now that she’d seen him babble through an embrace with his little brother.

“Eh - we. Have some things to explain about that day.”

“In Amestrian, I hope?”

“Hah - yeah.”

“When you’re ready,” Granny said and nodded sagely.

The living room was quiet for a moment but for the low wind outside against the windowpanes and the ticking of the cuckoo clock on the opposite wall until Al broke the silence with an observation that Ed couldn’t bring himself to approach just yet - not on top of everything else.

“Well...what do we do now?” Ed’s stomach chose that moment to voice its displeasure to the room at large, letting out a low, deep, audible growl.

Granny gained her feet, smoothed her skirt, and pointed at the kitchen. “We eat,” she said simply.

And crisis or no, Ed beat Al in a race to the dining room.

“General.”

Mustang looked up slowly from the latest expense reports, eyes making a lazy trail from the growing deficit to Hawkeye’s impassive face.

“Has something surfaced on the other candidates, Colonel?”

“No, sir. There’s - ” she paused, searching for words. “There’s about a ton of rubble on the outskirts of East City. The - the local geologists are puzzled by some of the elements they’ve found in the few tests they’ve run already. It hasn’t been there for more than a day. It.”

“Hmm?”

“From the way the rubble is situated, sir, it looks as if it fell - from the sky, sir.”

Mustang raised an eyebrow and steepled his fingers elegantly in front of him, “Well. That is interesting.”

“Ah and General - there’s one more thing.”

“I’m listening, Colonel.”

“A mother - a mother called Eastern in hysterics because,” she paused, and her lips twitched up in an almost-smile. “Because her daughter claims to have seen the - the Elric brothers, sir.”

He stood so abruptly that his rolling chair hit the window behind him. He met her eye across the desk, and there was no doubt they were thinking the same thing.

“The papers?”

“Too late. They’re at press, sir. The evening edition is already out for delivery.” He swore under his breath.

“Book me a train for East City.”

“Done, sir.”

“Care to execute a little damage control with me, Hawkeye?”

“I’ll book a second presently, General.”

“Excellent.”



Note:  Please excuse the relative slowness of the updates!  The author is entirely to blame, I'm afraid, as I've been attempting to stay one chapter ahead of my posting and chapter 3 was giving me fits for some reason (it's still not entirely done, so who knows how long that staying ahead of myself thing will last ;D).  Also, the pace of the story itself is moving a little slow right now, too -- also the author's fault.  I promise it will pick up soon. <3  Thanks so much for reading -- feedback is very much appreciated.