I'll Love You More, Ch. 5
Title: I’ll Love You More
Chapter:#5, The Ghost on the Grave
Previous: 1, I, 2, 3, II, 4, 4.5
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: PG-13 maybe?
Spoilers: for the entire series.
Summary: After six years, the brothers are finally reunited, but will Ed be able to adjust to a world that has long since moved on without him? Non-movie AU, pairings for now are Ed/Win and Al/Win with a side of Ed/Hei
Chapter Five: The Ghost on the Grave
She flinched when she heard someone at the door, and gave a heavy sigh as she set her favorite screwdriver down on the workbench and stood, turning to see who had the nerve to be coming around her automail shop so late in the day. Her skills were much sought-after, and she saw people by appointment only, damnit! The only customer of hers she had ever allowed to break that rule was somewhere upstairs, likely teaching her daughter new ways to slack off.
The door cracked open before she got to it, and she said, “oh!” her voice sounding more breathless than she had ever intended. “Al,” she said, her voice more normal, stronger, more solid, “what are you doing down here? And I thought you weren’t coming home until tomorrow? And- what’s that?” she demanded, drawing back as he shoved a package at her, grinning.
Al shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the peg on the back of her shop door, and sat down on her work bench, kicking his feet idly. “I dunno, why don’t you open it?” he suggested, his grey eyes sparkling.
“You got me a present?” she asked, her tired face lighting up.
He nodded. “It’s just something little, but I thought you’d like it,” he told her, still kicking his feet into the legs of her bench.
Miniature screwdrivers? Wire cutters that cut clean enough that the wire doesn’t have to be sanded? Screws of rare sizes? A solid titanium wrench that will never knick or scratch? “Something for she shop?” she guessed, giving the package a shake.
Al laughed at her, leaning back until his shoulder blades were jabbed by the pegs in her wall. He jerked forward, glancing behind him at the rows of tools. “I don’t know what you could possibly need for the shop,” he teased. “Weren’t we just in Rush Valley last year?”
Something else then? She pulled the brown paper off, tossing it to the floor and saw underneath a glossy blue box with a logo on the front. “Shandy’s?” she read, puzzled. She pulled the lid off, and lifted out a flat silver object about the size of her palm. It was engraved with a scrolling leaf pattern and had her initials in the center, WR. Pressing the tiny catch with the edge of her fingernail, it popped open, revealing a mirror that lit up?
“Ooo!” she exclaimed, snapping it shut and opening it again. “Al, where did you get this? Can I take it apart? I want to see how it works!”
Al just shrugged, hopping off the bench. “Of course you can take it apart, it’s yours,” he said, looking at her with raised eyebrows. “You’re welcome,” he added, and she threw her arms around his neck, still clutching the compact in her hand.
“Oh, thank you Al, but why did you get me something? It’s not my birthday or anything…” she said, her voice trailing off.
Al shrugged again, pulling his coat off the door and heading up the stairs to the rest of the house. “I thought you’d like it,” he said over his shoulder. “Where’s Kaiya?”
“Ed’s watching her,” she called up after him, debating on whether or not to follow Al upstairs or to disassemble the compact first. Either way, no more work in the shop would be done that afternoon.
When Winry did not follow him up the stairs, Al assumed the compact had won. “Brother,” he called out, his fingers trailing along the railing on his way up to the top floor. Poking his head in the bedroom, he shook his head. No Ed, but there were clothes strewn about and the bed was unmade. He hung his regulation military coat in his closet, and began undoing his regulation military jacket. This was part of his weekly routine, had been ever since he and Winry had moved to Altenburg: Lieutenant Elric worked in Central for the alchemical research branch and was occasionally given field work by, if not the man himself, a subordinate of General Mustang. Alphonse lived in Altenburg with his girlfriend the automail mechanic. There’s nothing so strange about living two lives, he had told himself at the time. This is my second life anyway.
“Al?” came the delayed answer, from the room next to his, the study. His brother’s return hadn’t disturbed his routine too terribly; it had merely disturbed his categorization. Altenburg, Ed reminded him often, was never really their home, and Winry, no one needed to remind him, was never really his girlfriend. That fact was clear every time his brother and Winry spoke, every time they touched, even every time they looked at each other.
He heard his brother’s mismatched footsteps in the hall before he saw him in the doorway, smirking. “What?” he demanded defensively.
“What what?” Ed echoed innocently.
Al frowned. “What’s with the expression?”
Ed tapped a finger to his chin, his face thoughtful. “Oh, you mean the one of utter disgust?” he asked slowly, his tone teasing.
Al looked at him impatiently, and Ed laughed.
“You. A military uniform. I can’t get over it,” Ed said, coming into the room and reaching up to ruffle his brother’s hair.
“Hey,” Al protested. “Don’t do that, I’m not a kid!”
Ed laughed again. “Now you sound like me,” he said fondly.
“I’m nothing like you,” Al said, trying to sound offended.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “I can see that,” he said, giving the uniform sleeve a tug.
Al slipped out of the military jacket, his eyes glinting mischievously. “I can do a pretty good impression of you, I think,” he told him, reaching into the closet for Ed’s brown coat. “See, I’m Edward Elric, and I’m wearing my coat I got in this mysterious place called Germany-“
“Hey,” Ed protested, “Gimme my coat back!”
“Where I took part in such great adventures as getting thrown out of a bar for starting a fight with someone who called me short-“
Ed’s eyes widened. “Hey, that’s not exactly how it happened!” he protested.
Al puffed his chest up, tossing his hair out of his eyes and drawing the coat closed over his chest. “-getting arrested because I spent the night in the city library and someone thought I was an intruder-“
The older brother waved his hands frantically. “That was not my fault-“ he began, but Al continued between merciless bouts of laughter.
“And being banned from certain floors of the University where my father worked for insisting on arguing with busy professors about the laws of physics-“
“They were morons!” Ed raged, but his eyes were amused as ever.
“I’m also single handedly responsible for introducing my landlady to some low-life policeman who is obsessed with taking photographs-“
Ed held up his hand. “Okay, that one was me,” he admitted good naturedly, “but it was Al who really took it upon himself to convince her to let him take her out. I can’t be blamed completely.” He flopped down on the bed, leaning back and letting his head drop over the edge so the room was upside down and his ponytail touched the floor. “Geez, Al, you make me sound like such an immature brat.” His chest shook up and down with laughter.
“Hey, don’t blame someone else for your escapades,” Al said innocently, flopping down next to his brother and letting his own head flop over the edge of the bed. He turned his face to look at him, his features distorted ever so slightly from gravity pulling in the opposite-from-natural direction. “I got something for you in Central,” he said.
Ed sat up. “Oh yeah?” he asked. “Where is it?”
Al answered from his still-upside-down vantage point. “On the dresser. It’s a book.”
“An alchemy book?” Ed said warily, stepping over the clothes he had strewn over the floor from the past few days and picking up the book. “Oh, cool!” he said when he read the title. “I didn’t know there was another one!”
“There’s a few more, actually.” Al told him, sitting up and feeling the blood rush back into the rest of his body from where it had felt like it was pooling in his cheeks and forehead. “They were really popular with the kids when the first one came out, and now people stand in line outside the bookstores all night long to make sure they can get a copy every time a new one is released.”
“You think Sheizka’s read them?” he asked suddenly.
“Winry’s friend? I dunno, she probably did, why?” Al asked curiously.
Ed shrugged. “Next time she’s around I’d like to be able to talk to her about something other than aliens and pyramids.”
“Pyramids?” Al asked blankly.
“Never mind,” Ed said, eyeing his brother sitting on the bed. “Take my coat off, will ya? It’s too small for you, and it looks silly, especially over that uniform.”
Al dug his hands into the pockets. “I like it,” he protested.
Ed pounced on the bed behind him, trying to pull it off his shoulders. “I don’t, what’s with you and wearing my clothes anyway?” he countered, scrambling after his brother as he sidestepped him into the hall.
“Nothing, I was just teasing you,” Al said, voice ever the sound of innocence, edging farther and farther away from his brother, darting back into the room. “And you can’t catch me,” he added with a grin.
“I can too catch you, and besides, you’re done impersonating me, so give it back,” Ed argued, grabbing his brother around the waist but groaning when his younger brother was able to worm out of his grip.
And then Al spoke the magic words. “Make me,” he said, eyes alight.
The sound of their footsteps thundered across the upstairs hall as Ed tore after his brother, grinning madly. Al’s impersonation had been cute, sure, but his younger brother had a habit of adopting his clothing that he did not want to continue. He raced down the top flight of stairs, just inches away from catching the little tease, flying through the living room and kitchen and bursting through the door and down the outside stairs above the workshop.
Suddenly Ed felt his balance slide out from under him, and he was tumbling down the stairs. He reached once for the railing and missed it, thudding hard on a few steps before finally getting a firm grasp on the rail and halting his descent only a few feet before colliding with the concrete porch.
By this time Al was out of his sight, and he groaned, standing up again only to be returned jarringly to the ground
“Al!” Ed yelled from the ground. “Get back here!”
He heard the scrambling of his brother’s feet on the sidewalk around the side of the house as he hurried back to where he heard Ed’s voice. “Ready to give up? Cause I’m not giving you the-“ he stopped when he saw Ed on the ground. “What happened?” he said instead, surprise displayed plainly across his face.
“I fell down the steps,” Ed said. “Now help your crippled brother off his ass,” he directed sharply. Not giving up quite yet, there’s always the distraction method.
“Brother, you’re not a cripple, don’t say that,” Al protested, crossing the porch.
“Well, call me what you will,” he said darkly, “but give me a hand, will you?” His expression became almost imperceptibly devious as he reached up for Al’s hand and then yanked him down on top of him, wresting the coat from his loose hold and bundling it up safely under his own arm. “Right. It’s my coat, and I’ll have it back, thank you very much,” he said smugly from the ground.
Al sat back on his knees, arms folded. “Brother, that wasn’t fair,” he complained.
Ed waved his hand airily. “Oh well, all’s fair in love and war, you know,” he said lightly, turning to get his good leg under him and standing up to take a step, only to come crashing down again.
“Not funny,” Al warned him, sounding irritated, and stood, snatching the coat back up again. “I was going to give this back to you, you know, once I proved I could still beat you,” he huffed, starting to turn away.
Ed rolled his eyes. “Of course you can beat me, you always could. Now seriously, Al, I need some help here.”
Al looked down, eyeing him suspiciously. “Really?” When Ed nodded impatiently, he asked, “What happened?”
His brother frowned. “I told you, I fell down the steps,” he said flatly. “Help me up?” The coat was completely forgotten as he grasped his brother’s hand and stood up again, hopping a few feet and coming to sit on the stairs. Ed hiked up his pant leg to see what could have dislodged his prosthetic and cursed at the broken leather strap. “Fucking hell,” he muttered. The light-hearted mood, the teasing, the deviousness, these were gone from the air. “This is ridiculous, I fucking hate this! Winry!” he bellowed, so that she could hear him from inside her shop.
“Brother,” Al protested, “I can fix that with alchemy, you know. If you show this to Winry, she’s just going to-”
Ed looked at him witheringly, interrupting his brother. “I can fix it with alchemy too, but I bet you I’ll still end up flat on my face one way or the other. I hate being a cripple, I hate being slowed down by my own body, I hate not being in control of my own parts! I’m tired of stumbling on those stairs, I feel pathetic and I’ve had enough!”
“You’re not a-“
“Don’t be stupid,” he said darkly, sitting silent on the stairs as Al put his hands together with a soft clap and transmuted the worn leather straps back together “I guess that’ll hold for now,” he said, more to himself than to Al.
“What are you two going on about?” Winry demanded from the doorway, hands on her hips. “Who’s watching the baby?”
Al looked over at his brother. “Where is the baby?” he asked him.
“Sleeping upstairs,” Ed muttered.
Winry glared at one brother and then at the other. “Well I doubt very much she slept through all that, I could hear you all the way down in the shop. Ed, for gods sake, what do you want?”
He fixed her with a determined gaze. “Automail,” he said firmly.
They lay side by side in the bed they had shared ever since returning from Central. As far as Ed knew, Al hadn’t spent a single night in Winry’s room. Wisely, he never mentioned it.
Sharing the bed with his brother was comforting and terrifying at the same time. When they were kids, Al often slept in his bed because he said he had nightmares, and (when they were still kids) Al had spent countless nights by his brother’s bed, holding his only hand in his unfeeling leather gauntlet, the contact only one of them could feel serving to let the older boy know that he was not alone, even in his pain-induced deliriums. Later, when Ed would fall into bed at night, in some inn out in an obscure corner of Amestris or in one of the military dorms they frequented, exhausted, and curl into a ball while his brother sat in a corner, his heart would ache longing to be able to sleep side by side with him again, to feel his cold feet tickling his calves under the covers, to wrap his arms around him in comfort, to lay a head on his shoulder in place of a pillow again.
He thanked his luck, he thanked his brother’s boundless intelligence and perseverance, he thanked his own determination every night he could feel his brother’s warm, solid, human form next to him. It terrified him because that warm, solid comfort never failed to remind him of sharing his bed with Alphonse Heiderich.
It had begun out of necessity. Alphonse had only one bed, and Edward had slept on the couch when he first moved in. He had never complained, but eventually Alphonse had noticed that night after night on the couch was taking its toll on his friend’s physical form, and then there was the matter of the small apartment being very expensive to heat. The first night they had shared a bed, Edward drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking at times it was his brother next to him, and he was ten years old again, and alternately huddling on the very edge of the mattress, afraid he would forget where he was, becoming too content with his present circumstances.
When Alphonse had first flung and arm across his chest, it had been in his sleep, Ed had assumed, and he did not push him away. He lay, in his not-brother’s embrace, the guilt burning any sleep out of him that may have been waiting to take hold. When Ed, in a half dream state, curled against his friend’s side, Alphonse merely pulled him closer, taking it as a sign that Ed returned his affections. Ed had known, oh, he had known he was playing with fire. But he was drawn like a moth to a flame.
Soft fingers brushed the hair from his face. “Brother?” said the voice, and slowly, golden eyes fluttered open. “Were you sleeping?” Al was half-sitting up, all blue and grey and silver in the moonlight pouring through their window.
Ed shook his head.
“What were you thinking about? You had an odd expression, I thought you might have been having a bad dream,” Al said, a concerned frown crossing his face.
Ed sat up, pushing his pillow back against the wall and leaned into it. He looked towards the window, out across the moonlit rooftops of the town, away from his brother. “I’m not sure you want to know,” he said quietly.
“Do you miss him?” Al asked softly, revealing that he had already guessed.
His brow creased. “Why would I miss him when I have you?” Ed asked, confused.
“If you love him,” Al said, very quietly, staring at the same spot on the windowpane as Ed was, “it’s all right to miss him.”
In response, Ed lay back down in the bed, pulling the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes. After a moment, he felt his brother do the same. Cautiously, Al laid his head on his brother’s flesh shoulder, in place of a pillow, and, eyes still closed, Ed let himself smile.
“I want to go to Rizembool,” Ed said, after several minutes of silence. He could tell by his brother’s breathing that he was still awake.
“There’s nothing there,” Al said into his shoulder.
“Mom’s grave is there.”
“That’s true.”
Ed’s human fingers played idly with his brother’s hair. “I haven’t been there in ten years. I want to see it before Winry does the surgery, otherwise it could be another three years until I can get there.”
“I thought you recovered in one year?” Al asked, picking his head up and looking at his brother’s face, pale in the light from the window.
“I don’t know how long it will take to recover,” he said vaguely.
After another moment Al laid his head back down. “We can go to Rizembool,” he said eventually. “It hasn’t been the safest place, because the borders are so unstable, but we can still go. It should be all right; there hasn’t been news of any border skirmishes recently. But,” he added, “you wont even recognize it. It’s not the place we grew up in, not anymore.”
“I can handle it.”
I never could, not completely, Al countered in his mind. He sighed. “Your grave is there too, you know,” he murmured into his brother’s skin.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “My grave?”
“Yeah. You’re dead.” After some time had elapsed, Al elaborated. “That’s pretty much the only reason anyone goes up there anymore. To see your grave. The train doesn’t even go that far north, I don’t think. No one lives there.”
“Maybe you me and Winry can hire a car,” he mused.
Al frowned. “Winry wont want to go.”
Ed was silent, his breath skimming steadily across Al’s forehead.
Al pulled the blanket tighter around them, and sighed again. “Still awake?” he asked.
“Yeah,” came the quiet murmur. After a moment he added, “You could get us a military car, you know.”
“We’ll figure something out.”
There were bits of foreign metal scattered around the table Winry had set up to the side of her workbench. She had been itching for months to dissect that homemade arm of his, and she was alternating between being horrified and being astounded. Horrified because the strategies he used were like that of the earliest attempts at automail, the ones that were mostly unsuccessful and damaging; astounded because the thing worked, and better than it should have, all things considered.
She pressed her lips into a thin line, concentrating as she worked the fine tools around the wires trailing out of what was left of his mechanical arm. His eyes were squeezed shut, and she thought he might have been holding his breath, waiting for the indescribably odd sensation she was causing to stop. “Ed,” she said softly, still holding a wire between her tweezers.
“Hm,” he grunted, acknowledging her but not opening his eyes or moving in the slightest.
“This is no good,” she said, resigned. “I can’t work with any of this. I have to take it all out; start over.”
“Fine,” he let out under his breath. “Just get it over with already.”
She had already put him through the pain of removing each bolt and screw, sliding them out of his bones with a sickening scrape that made them both grit their teeth. Her strange suspicions had been confirmed: yes, his shoulder was all bone inside. That was why the screws would often work themselves loose on their own: the bone was rejecting them slowly. That was why he was in such pain after using his arm a lot, that was why he could grasp things if he placed them between the mechanical fingers but not carry anything of significant weight: it put too much strain on his bone structure. These were clear and valid problems of the early attempts at automail, something she had only read about in medical texts.
The signs were all there, but she was still shocked to confirm it. When she and Granny had given Ed his first set of automail, the bones inside his shoulder had been replaced with automail parts. It was the only way his body would be able to support the weight and function of the new limb. She could not understand why the bones were there now.
She released the final nerve, cleaning the open wound she had made and beginning to stitch him up. She had done what she could to numb the area, and knew he hadn’t been feeling pain, exactly, but he could feel her working on his nerves and he had always told her how strange that felt.
He was now breathing normally, eyes open, blank, waiting for her to finish up the stitches. When she tied off the final strand, she came to sit in front of him. “There’s something else I have to tell you,” she began hesitantly, and watched his murky gold eyes slowly focus on her own.
“What is it?”
“Those wires you were using,” she said slowly, “the ones I said were never used in the body because they can cause unpleasant reactions, and rejection. They might have damaged your nerves.”
He nodded. “You’ve said this before,” he said calmly.
She sighed. “I wish Granny were here, she knew everything, absolutely everything about automail. I’m just guessing, here, Ed. It’s possible the reason you could never get those fingers to move is because you damaged the nerves attaching those wires, or, it might have just been that they couldn’t hold enough current to travel all the way down the arm. I don’t know.”
His single hand gripped his knee tightly. “I didn’t know what else to do, Winry!” he protested. “I was all alone there, and I couldn’t do anything, and it was terrifying. I couldn’t use any alchemy, but besides that, I couldn’t even use my own body any more, not the way I wanted to.” He looked over at the detached limb lying over on her table. “It might not have worked very well, but it was damn well better than nothing, which is what I started out with.”
“It’s really incredible,” she said seriously, “That you got as far as you did with it. Everything might be fine; I might be completely overreacting, but…”
“Win,” he said gently, moving his hand from his own knee to hers. “Just tell me. What is the absolute worst thing that could happen?”
Her lips formed that fine line again. “You might not get one hundred percent movement out of the new automail. You won’t be in the pain you’re in now,” she added hurriedly, searching his face for a reaction but reading none. “You’ll be able to carry things, probably even lift things you can’t even pick up with your real arm. It’ll be strong, but you might not have the fine control that you had before.”
He leaned back on the bench, into the wall, raising his eyebrows and looking over at the arm on the table again. “Ho much movement would you say I got out of that one?”
“Twenty five percent? Thirty maybe?” she guessed.
“And the new one?” he prompted. “The worst I can expect?”
“Ninety five? Ninety eight?”
He gave a low laugh, and folded his hand behind his head. “I think I can handle that,” he said, smiling. Smiling? How can he be smiling about this?
“But I wanted it to be perfect for you!” she protested, obviously distressed. “I’ve been studying all this time, learning every new technique as soon as it’s developed, just so I could make you the most perfect automail available!”
He gave an odd one shouldered shrug, and smiled again. “Win, I’ve been without automail for so long, I guarantee you, I will not even notice a few percents less movement than the last set. I’ll just be happy to have something that works, and someone who knows how to take care of it.” He stood up, gathering up his shirt as he did and pulling the right sleeve inside out before he put it on so that it would not hang in his way. “Come on, Al is watching Kaiya and making dinner at the same time, lets help him out a bit, huh?”
She let herself laugh as she hung up her tools on the proper pegs. “That’s Ed-speak for me helping with dinner and you playing with your daughter,” she said, smiling down at her wrench.
“Our daughter,” he called from his way up the stairs. “All three of ours.”
He gripped the gravestone with his only hand, steadying himself as he sank to his knees on the frozen ground. Its me, Momma, its Edward, he began, haltingly, staring at the dirt and grass at the base of the slab. I’m sorry, I didn’t bring you anything, except- Al’s here, and he’s whole, and he’s perfect, and I’m here too, so I can take care of him now, just like you said. Except, Momma, it’s really Al that takes care of me, but, at least we’re together now.
I wish- I wish I could tell you something that would make you proud of me, and… I’ve done my best, but all I’ve managed to do is screw things up, again and again. I wish I could tell you I’m not the obnoxious know-it-all kid I was when I was ten, but- that’s not really something I can say either. But I promise you, I know I’m not God, and I’ve learned my lesson: I promise you I’ll never endanger myself or my brother’s life ever again, not for something impossible.
I wish I could say all the pain I’ve caused everyone around me hadn’t been in your name, in your memory, but I cant say that either. I’m sorry, Momma. I’m sorry, it’s been- so many years, I’m starting to forget your face. We burned the house down, to keep us from running home instead of chasing our goals, and all the pictures burned too. Auntie Pinako had a few, I think, but it’s been ten years even since I’ve seen those. What I remember mostly are your eyes. Al has your eyes, and sometimes when I look at him I see you.
Rizembool was quiet, utterly quiet, Al had been right when he said there was no one there. The only sound was the wind blowing tiny specks of snow around, not enough to stick but enough to cloud the air and to chill the tips of his nose and ears. Dad loved you, he admitted, with some difficulty. I never believed it, but I know you did. You never doubted him. He- he’s gone now too.
You- you have a granddaughter now. Her name is Kaiya. She’s perfect, she’s the most perfect baby you’ve ever laid eyes on. She’s Winry’s, and she’s beautiful. Me and Al used to fight over who would marry Winry, but in the end, I guess neither of us won. She’s Winry’s daughter, he repeated. Maybe you can be proud of us for that.
He shifted uncomfortably on the cold ground, and when he blinked he saw the salty drops fall onto the frozen dirt. He raised his hand to his face, not even having realized he was crying. I do remember you, Momma, there are things I’ll never forget; I’ll never forget how your arms felt around me, I’ll never forget how my head fit perfectly into the curve of your waist. I’ll never forget your voice and I’ll never forget the words to that song you would sing while doing the dishes. I’ll never forget the way mine and Al’s beds smelled the days you would wash the sheets, I’ll never forget the taste of the porridge you would make us for breakfast. I’ll never forget playing out in the fields and seeing your light flashing for us to come home, I’ll never forget seeing the house lit at night with a candle in each window to guide us home. I’ll never forget that yellow apron with the little flowers I used to bury my face in and cry when I would scrape my knee-
He didn’t know how long he sat, his head leaning against the stone, or where Al had been, whether he had stood and watched his brother cry or whether he had gone to sit by the river, in the spot he always used to when they had been kids. If there had been anyone at all in Rizembool besides the brothers, there would have been stories about the ghost of the Fullmetal Alchemist hovering over the graveyard, but there was only Al.
The brothers walked silently over the debris that still remained of their burned down house, keeping step with each other and not speaking until Al said, “Do you want to see yours?”
“Mine?” Edward had echoed hollowly, not quite trusting his voice yet.
Someone, they saw, had been to that grave already, and had left a wreath of flowers, and Ed shuddered, kicking at the wreath with his foot. Did people really come all the way out to Rizembool to leave flowers on his grave? Who were these people, and just what did they think he had done to deserve their attentions? He, the sinner?
“Lets get out of here, Al,” he said, shoving his hand further into his coat pocket, suddenly colder than he had been.
“I want to stop at the house.”
Ed turned to look behind them at the ruins that had been the Elric house, but Al shook his head and pointed to the building in the distance. “No, at Winry’s house. I want to see if there’s something there she might want.”
“The house is still there?” Ed asked, confused. “Then why-“
“It’s there,” Al said tersely. “The Drachman army used it as their headquarters when they occupied the town.”
Ed had elected to wait outside while Al entered the abandoned building they had once called their home, understanding, suddenly, why Winry had refused to come with them. His memories of the Rockbell house were bright and full of warmth, and he found he didn’t want them replaced with empty rooms and dusty shelves.
After some time had passed, Al emerged, carrying two boxes, trailing cobwebs that he swiped at before handing one to his older brother. “What-“ Ed began.
“They’re photos, from the basement,” Al said. “I thought they might still be there.”
The brothers were silent for the first two hours of the drive back to Altenburg, Al keeping his eyes fixed on the road and his attention carefully on what was in front of him. Ed’s eyes were closed and he leaned his head against the window, but Al knew he wasn’t sleeping.
Finally, breaking the silence, Al let out a heavy sigh as a preamble. His brother’s eyes fluttered open. “I didn’t tell you this before,” he began, his words uncertain. “But I just want you to know, because I know she didn’t tell you.”
Golden eyebrows rose, once, curiously.
“Winry isn’t my girlfriend anymore.”
“Al, I’m sorry-“
“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault. And it’s better this way. It’s fine,” Al said firmly.
“Al-“
“I said don’t be sorry!”
Ed clamped his mouth shut.
Nearly another hour had passed before they spoke again. It was dusk, and the sky was a glowing deep blue above their heads, a road sign here and there illuminated by a streetlamp. “It’s just five days until she starts the surgeries,” Ed said quietly, staring at the trees flying past them.
“Are you scared?” Al asked softly.
“A little,” Ed admitted.
“You’ll be all right, Brother,” he encouraged. “You’ve done it before, you know what to expect.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Let me be there with you,” Al said suddenly. “Don’t send me out of the room, let me be there through it all.”
Ed sighed. “I don’t want you to have to see me like that, Al, I’ll be screaming my head off in pain.”
“Winry told me you never screamed.”
“I can’t promise you that this time,” Ed said quietly. He looked out at the road, and then over at his brother, and then back out at the line of trees that blurred into a stripe of brown and black if he let his eyes relax.
When Al began to speak again, his voice had an odd quality to it, one Ed couldn’t quite place.
“You always told me that you were fine, that you weren’t hurting, but I knew you were lying to me because when Winry would come in to check on you you would whisper to her that you needed more pills.”
Ed’s eyes widened, and he jerked his gaze over to his brother, who sat gripping the steering wheel, gaze fixed on the road.
“You had these terrible nightmares, I knew you did because I watched you sleep, all those long nights, it must have been the medicine that was giving you those dreams and you would never tell me about them. You wanted to spare me from them but you didn’t know that I had them too, and I had them while I was awake, because I couldn’t sleep.”
Ed was staring at him, watching his eyes dart from side to side, the course of their vehicle no longer part of his attention.
“You would call for me, and you would call for mom, and sometimes you would even call for dad, and when you were like that there was nothing I could do. I would touch you, but I couldn’t feel it, and you didn’t even know it was me. You would look at me and you didn’t know it was me.”
“Al, the road,” Ed said harshly, and reached out and grabbed the steering wheel, sending their car swinging back to the center of the road. They had been driving half on the shoulder and half on the grass for quite some time before even Ed had noticed it. “Al!” Ed pressed, refusing to let go of the steering wheel, staring into his brother’s vacant eyes. “Al, snap out of it!”
Alphonse blinked, slamming his foot on the breaks and causing their vehicle to screech to a halt. “What happened?” he demanded, blinking rapidly. “Did I fall asleep? I didn’t think I was that tired-“
Ed was opening the car door, walking around the vehicle, opening Al’s door. “Okay, Al, get out, I’m driving the rest of the way!” he said forcefully, waiting for his brother to obey him.
“You can’t drive, you have only one hand!” Al protested, but Ed’s insistence was unwavering.
“I can do lots of things with only one hand! You almost ran us off the road, get out!”
“I’m awake now, Brother, I can drive fine-“
“Al, you weren’t sleeping- do you even remember what you were saying?” Ed demanded, the realization dawning on him.
“What are you talking about?” Al said, confused.
“You were telling me things only you would know. Things no one could have told you. Things I didn’t even know,” he said quietly, his voice grave.
“What do you mean?”
“Things from when you were in the armor.”
“That’s impossible,” Al said flatly, folding his arms across his chest and looking up at his brother.
“It should be,” Ed agreed. “But you did it. Now out, and let me drive, I want to get back to Altenburg before midnight.”
His eyes narrowed. “Brother, I’m not letting you drive,” he said stubbornly
“I’m not letting you drive,” Ed countered, equally stubborn.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“So we’re spending the night somewhere nearby.”
“Fine, that’s what we’re doing.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Al drove cautiously into the small town they were passing by, feeling his brother’s eyes on his face the entire way. Once they had found themselves a room, Ed had pressed him with questions about his memory, but Al was unable to tell him anything new. This was a bad idea, coming here, he thought to himself. Brother’s miserable, I’m miserable, and now Brother thinks I’m crazy, to top it all off. Could I really have done that, spoken to him about things I don’t even remember, and not have realized it?
He thinks my memories are his fault, that he’s hurt me in some way! He saved my life, if he hadn’t kept my soul in that armor I would be dead right now, instead of here, alive, warm and beside him, with a life and a family and nothing more I could ask for. Brother doesn’t deserve any more guilt or any more pain. I wish I could tell him nothing will ever hurt him again, but I can’t say that. He’s going to be going through the worst pain he’s ever felt, pain he thought he’d never have to go through again, just to get his automail installed. “Brother,” he said quietly, interrupting Ed’s worried rantings. “It’s all right.” It wasn’t all right. It wasn’t all right that he had lost four years of memories, but he was used to it. “Don’t do this to yourself. I’m fine.”
By the next morning every citizen in the town of Bethan was full to the brim with the gossip that the Fullmetal Alchemist and the Soul Alchemist had spent the night in their most prominent (and only) inn. If anyone else, any out-of-towners, were to inquire, however, they would say he must have been a ghost. The people of Bethan were proud to say that the People’s Alchemist had come from the North, and they would not give away his secret that easily.
“Of course I’m nervous,” Ed said, not looking at her as she stitched up the wound she had made in the end of his leg. He shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” she said sharply, looking up. “Did I hurt you?”
He shook his head, pressing his lips together. “No, it just feels fucking strange, like you’re tickling my toes or something.” In fact, she had attached tiny metal transmitters to a few select nerves in his stump. That little preparatory step, she had insisted, would help a great deal during the surgery. She had done the same the day before with his shoulder.
She blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Good. That means I’m doing this right.”
His eyes widened in a sudden panic. “You don’t know if you’re doing it right? Winry! I thought you said you knew what you were doing!”
She laughed at his horrified expression. “I’m just kidding Ed, god. Of course I know what I’m doing. This is my entire life, you know.” She tied off the last stitch, swabbing the stump one more time with disinfectant. “Done,” she added unnecessarily.
Ed leaned back against the wall, looking half-relaxed sitting there in his boxers, but his tapping fingers betrayed his discomfort. “Al is really upset that he can’t get back until tomorrow. I know he wanted to be here with me tonight.”
“I know you wanted him to be here too,” Winry said gently, cleaning off her instruments. “General Mustang is such an ass, he told Al it would be no problem for him to go on leave, and then springs this last minute stuff on him.”
“I keep telling myself that the first surgery was so long ago I couldn’t possibly remember it that well,” Ed began, not looking at her, “But I do, I swear I do. And it hurt more than losing my limbs in the first place did.”
Winry glanced up at him, surprised. She had never, that she recalled, heard Ed say anything about how much it had hurt. She knew, of course, that it did, but Ed had also been the only patient of Pinako’s that had not cried out during the painful nerve attachments. She waited, but it didn’t seem like he was going to continue, so she said, “Don’t worry, Al will be here tomorrow morning, and he’ll be here to stay with you until you’re all recovered.”
“You think I can really do it in a year, Win?” he asked, his fingers still tapping on the bench. “I mean, I’m not a kid any more, I’m not growing, so you think my body will still heal as fast?”
“I don’t know, Ed,” she said honestly. “Wait,” she said, stopping him when he reached for his prosthetic leg. “You can’t put that on, you’ll irritate the stitches, what are you thinking?” She got up, jerking open her supply closet, pulling out a crutch.
“I guess I’m not thinking,” he admitted, taking it from her, pulling himself up with it in a practiced motion and tucking it under his arm.
“You should go to bed, Ed,” she instructed him. “Get as much rest as you can tonight.”
“I don’t think I can sleep,” he said admitted, shifting his weight on the crutch. “I thought Al was going to be here tonight. I’m too on edge,” he said, his eyes darting side to side. He lowered his voice, his cheeks turning faintly pink at his next admission. “Sometimes Al can get me to sleep, he kind of pets my hair, like mom used to do, but Al’s in Central, or on his way from Central, anyway.”
It seemed like it had been ages since he had been open with her, in any way. In fact, the times when she worked with his nerves, getting ready for the surgery, were the only times they had been close to each other, the only times they had spoken about anything other than where is the baby? Can you watch the baby? Would you feed the baby? If I change the baby will you put her to bed? Here they were, in the same house, yet when Al wasn’t home they moved in circles one around the other, like magnets that pushed each other away. Winry let out a slow breath. “Well, I’m not Al, but maybe I can help you sleep,” she offered, but he shook his head.
“It’s not the same,” he told her.
He hobbled across the workroom on the crutch and stared up at the flight of stairs that led up into the house.
“Do you want some help?” She asked hesitantly.
Ed considered her offer, looking steadily from her form to the stairs and back, and shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, I’ll take some help,” he said.
It was different, trying to help him, because he was taller than her now, if only by an inch or so. He was taller, he weighed more, and there was no way to help him other than to wrap and arm around his waist and offer him balance as he hopped awkwardly up the stairs. She had helped him when they were kids, when she had been the bigger one, when she had been in charge, when she had envisioned herself his doctor, when she had taken it upon herself to put her friend back together as best as biomechanics would allow, but now she really was in charge. There was no one for her to turn to if she did not know what to do. When she was eleven she had believed she could do no wrong, that there was no automail problem she could not solve, that Edward was in the best hands available. Now she felt almost afraid to touch him.
“Aw, man, I am a mess,” Ed said, but he was laughing as she deposited him on her bed, seeming not to notice her discomfort. “Why’d you bring me in here anyway,” he demanded, noticing that he was in her room and not Al’s.
“Well,” she began, still hesitant. “I’m not your brother, but I am your friend. I thought you wouldn’t want to be alone quite yet.”
His pride made him want to protest, that he didn’t need her to watch over him, to soothe him into sleep, that she would be doing plenty of that soon enough and even that was too much to ask from her, but he swallowed it, seeing how she hesitated. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her feelings by turning her away, like he knew he had done so many times before. If she wanted to be there for him, he would let her. She was his best friend, after all. “Okay,” he agreed, quietly, not meeting her eyes.
She wanted to sit behind him, to wrap her arms around him, to press her chin into his shoulder and her cheek against his own, but was that the act of a friend, or a lover? What did she know?
What did any of them know?
She shifted on the bed, drawing her feet up under her knees and turning to sit behind him, skimming her fingers lightly down his shoulder blades and digging them into his lower back, which she knew must be perpetually sore from walking with one strong leg and one false one. “Ah,” he said, giving in, voicing his approval. “You’re good at that,” he told her.
“I try,” she said softly, moving her hands slowly up his back as she felt him beginning to relax.
“Mmm,” he said. “You smell good.”
“Eh?” she said, confused. “I do?” Winry was certain she smelled of nothing but sweat and machine oil, the way she always smelled after working in the shop. Not a particularly attractive or feminine smell, she was sure, but she had never known Ed to give a false compliment.
“Yeah. I missed your smell,” he said, and her eyes flew open, her hands stopping their massaging circles. “Hey, don’t stop!” he protested, and she made herself continue.
“Ed, you should lay down,” she instructed. “You’re supposed to by trying to sleep, and you don’t sleep sitting up.”
“Lay down with me,” he said, tugging at her hand as he shifted into a lying position.
She cooperated, her heart pounding, and pulled the blankets up around them, lying back on the pillow next to his. He was still holding her hand, she realized, and he was staring at it, rubbing his thumb over her veins.
“I love your hands, Win,” he said quietly, seemingly transfixed.
“Thanks,” she said, unsure of how to respond. After a moment she pulled her hand away, turning on her stomach and propping her chin on her hands, looking down at him. His eyes were closed and there were faint creases between his eyebrows. “Are you nervous?” she asked.
He shrugged with one shoulder, not opening his eyes. “I guess,” he admitted. “Shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you know what to expect, so yes, you should be,” she said bluntly.
He cracked one eye open, the corner of his mouth jerking up in a wry grin. “Aw, thanks, that really makes me feel better,” he said sarcastically, but he reached over for her hand again, wrapping his fingers tightly around her own.
“What?” she asked, raising one eyebrow, pulling her hand away slightly.
“Eh?”
“What do you want with my hand all of a sudden?” she asked him, and watched his cheeks turn faintly pink. I’ve slept with this man, her mind told her suddenly. And now he’s embarrassed by holding my hand?
He dropped it instantly. “Sorry,” he said quickly, but she could already feel her own face flushing crimson. It had been a year ago, about, at least a year ago that she had collided with a dead man on her way to the market to pick up a half dozen eggs. A year ago that they had yelled and she had cried and they hugged and comforted and argued and ended up here in her bed. Her heart sank into the pit of her stomach. He wished it had never happened. That’s what he told her. “Win, what’s wrong?” he asked, concerned.
Round eyes blinked at him. “Nothing,” she said miserably.
He turned his head, looking out her window at the deep blue of twilight. “It’s been a little while since I’ve been in here,” he said with a faint smile don’t even say it Ed, she thought darkly, glaring at him as he gazed at the sky, unaware. Whatever it is you might be about to say, I don’t even want to know what it is. Just don’t say anything.
But he didn’t, she realized, and he wasn’t going to. She let her head drop onto the pillow, closing her own eyes and trying hard not to think anything at all.
After a while she became aware of his fingers pulling through her hair, just like what he said Al would do for him, stroking the long strands slowly and gently. She opened her eyes to find that he was watching her, his expression carefully blank, his golden eyes blinking every few seconds, their dark gold lashes brushing together ever so briefly.
She was determined to do nothing.
She did nothing when he pressed his warm lips to her forehead, and she did nothing when he pulled back, watching her carefully. “Ed.” She let his name hang between them for a moment. “What are you doing?”
Another beat passed before he answered. “I’m not sure,” he whispered. The silence between them was becoming oppressive, and suddenly she wanted to sit up, to jump out of bed, to say something bright and cheerful and switch on the light on the night table to illuminate the darkening room. He couldn’t possibly be looking at her the way he seemed to be, his eyes burning into her just like they had that night that other time, he couldn’t possibly be wanting what he swore he didn’t and she couldn’t possibly be even considering- “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I just wanted to touch you.”
“Why?”
He looked down at his lap. “I’m sorry.”
She put one hand on either side of his face, feeling the rough texture of his cheeks on her palms, and he lifted his eyes and let her meet his lips with her own. “Edward,” she whispered, her face only inches from his, “tell me you want to do this.” Don’t answer me Ed, I don’t even want to know your answer
“We can’t-“ he began, shaking his head.
She pressed a finger to his lips. “We’ll never tell him,” she said of Al in a rush of words, things she never meant to say tumbling from her lips. “He’ll never know. He’ll never ask, and we’ll never tell.”
“Is this what you want?” he asked hesitantly.
Her deep eyes widened. She nodded I’m not going to get an answer I’m never going to get an answer why are we even doing this I swore he swore we swore this would never happen and-
Ed shook his head. “I can’t- We can’t, Winry. We shouldn’t.”
I know we shouldn’t and you know we shouldn’t and I’m never going to know if it’s something you want or not because I don’t want you to answer me not really “He said it was all right,” she insisted quietly. “He said he doesn’t want to tie me down.”
“And I said we would never do this,” he reminded her, pulling away.
“Did you promise?” she whispered.
Wordlessly, he shook his head again. “But,” he began, looking down at himself, gesturing to the stub of his leg, his missing arm. “Like this?”
“Edward, I don’t care,” she assured him, grasping for something familiar. She was used to reassuring him that things were going to be okay. She was used to offering him her comfort. “I don’t care how many parts you have or don’t have. You’re you, regardless.”
That wasn’t really what he meant, he had been referring purely to the physical maneuverability of it, but her words sent a rush of memory over him.
“Alphonse, how can you possibly-“ his words caught in his throat, and he looked down at himself in disgust. “I’m half a person!” he protested.
Alphonse had taken him by the shoulders, holding good and scarred skin alike, and ducked his head down, looking into his friend’s eyes. “No, Ed,” he said gently, nervously, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “No.” He let himself stare, unrestrained, at the un-naturalness of it all, the sheer imbalance of his form, and at the same time, the beauty in it. “Maybe half a body,” he admitted, honest as always, “but you’re a whole person.”
Edward had looked at him witheringly, searching for pity in his open face but finding none.
Alphonse reached for his single hand, pressing it between his own, twining their fingers together. “You’re a whole person,” he repeated, “and I think you’re fine the way you are.”
Edward leaned forward, pressing his face to the younger boy’s chest, not knowing whether to laugh at the absurd assurance or to cry at the truth of it but suddenly unable to look him in the eye.
“Edward?” Winry said gently, calling him back, moving back into his field of vision. He had turned away, and she had followed his eyes, not letting him escape her. “You don’t believe me?”
He shook his head, pressing his lips together. “No, I believe you,” he said quietly, with a heavy sigh, falling back onto the bed and bringing his only arm up to cover his eyes. “I can’t do this, Win. It isn’t right.” He slid his arm up a bit so he could read her expression.
She didn’t understand. He hadn’t said enough.
“It wouldn’t be you,” he told the ceiling. “It would be him.”
Slowly, she reached over him, wrapping her hand around his, pulling his arm off his face so she could see his eyes. But he’s gone, she wanted to say. You’ll never see him again. We’re both free, she wanted to tell him, but he was no freer than she was, and she had known that all along. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I won’t ask you again.” She pulled him back up to a sitting position and wrapped both her arms around him, letting him bury his face in her long hair.
“I love you,” he whispered, and for a brief moment, her heart soared.
He wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, entwined like lovers. He wasn’t thinking, not really, just watching the shadows move across the room with the shifting moonlight and listening to her quiet breathing as she lay next to him. He shivered slightly, suddenly missing the warmth of her body, and wondered when they had separated. Was she sleeping?
He reached over, sliding his arm under her, trying to pull her closer to him, and she smiled, eyes still closed, and rolled over, resting her head on his shoulder and throwing one leg across his hips. Hesitantly, he rested his hand on the small of her back, and felt the rise and fall of her breathing against his torso. He was not thinking any thoughts about love, about different kinds of love, about how many people a person can love in a lifetime. He wasn’t thinking about death, and separation, and which is harder for the heart to understand. He wasn’t thinking about existence, and what parts of himself he may have inadvertently left behind on the other side of the Gate.
When he felt rough, gentle fingers sliding over his cheek, his jaw, trailing down the side of his neck and stroking the place below his ear, he did not think anything at first. She must be asleep, came the slow realization. We’ve both been asleep. A light kiss fell on the side of his face, and he turned away, not even knowing why. God, does she think I’m Al? he wondered, knowing he should push her away but instead pretending to sleep himself, enjoying her touch as much as dreading it. Her hand slid over his throat, moving across his chest, brushing a nipple and he stiffened, unmoving. He let out a heavy breath, realizing this was a bad idea as his sleep-muddled body began to catch up to the sensations it was registering. Her lips fell on the hollow at his neck, following his collarbone, and a calloused palm pressed up his side, fingers pushing into his ribs. He jerked when she touched the shiny, strange skin that had been underneath steel for so many years at a time, grasping at where a right arm should have been, clutching at the scarred stump.
Her eyes opened, and he could feel her sharp intake of breath as she stiffened against him, lifting her head. Now she wakes, he thought, still in a half-daze himself, looking blearily into her round open eyes, dark in the shadowed room. Her lips were parted, and she pressed her teeth into the lower one, pulling away from him slightly, seeming to expect him to do something. “That feels kind of weird,” he whispered in the dark, moving his had to cover hers, drawing it away from his empty shoulder.
“Sorry,” she whispered, not breaking eye contact. “I think… I must have been asleep.”
He took a deep breath, slowly bringing her hand to his lips, pressing it into them. “You could touch me somewhere else,” he suggested finally, almost disbelieving his own words. He wanted this, or at least part of him wanted this. Al had forgiven them, and Al was not there, and would never know. And Germany was worlds away.
She pulled her hand away, moving back to the empty side of the bed and pressing her face into the pillow. He sat up then, watching her, not sure what to do next. Her shoulders were shaking, he saw. Was she crying, or was she angry? “Win…” he said softly.
“What are you trying to do to me, Edward?” she demanded into the pillow, not looking at him.
His eyes widened. “Do to you? You started this! What are you trying to do to me?”
“I was asleep!” she wailed, sitting up, facing him, and throwing the blankets into his lap in a half-formed bundle. “Make up your mind!” she said desperately. “Who do you love?”
“You,” he said simply, and that was his answer, at least right then, even if it was not a complete one. He pushed the heap of bedding off of him, letting it rest in a pile between them.
“Then you need to decide how, and just how much,” she insisted, her tone not accusing at all, more sad than anything else. “As much as I want to, I’m not going to do this with you if you’re going to wake up tomorrow telling me you regret it. I can’t do that again!”
He turned away from her, swinging his leg over the side of the bed. “I’m going back to Al’s room,” he said stiffly, eyes casting about for a moment for his prosthesis before remembering that the limb was downstairs in the workshop and there were stitches in his leg. He stood up slowly, not looking back at her and using the nightstand for balance as he hopped awkwardly across the room to retrieve the crutch he had dropped earlier in the day.
Out in the hallway, he leaned against the railing, looking down into the house that was not his house, feeling that this life was not his life; that nothing could be real anymore. Edward Elric was in pieces, and his soul was stretched thin as his heart trying to collect them all again. Yes, he was standing in the hall on one leg while the other was two floors down in the workshop, and yes, his right arm was disassembled somewhere in Winry’s closet, but these things could be remedied. His body could be whole again, if not completely flesh, and soon enough he would have four working limbs after more than a decade without them, something that was possible only in this world he had been born in.
But love and guilt, he was afraid, would never be one without the other. He imagined Alphonse, his lover, alone and abandoned in Germany, and knew a piece of himself would always be there with him, as much as he professed to hate that devastated world. He had known they could not always be together, and had always turned the conversation away when Alphonse tried to speak of the vast forever that was the rest of their lives. He had known that eventually he would leave, and he had done exactly what he had sworn not to do, and gotten involved. Even now, after all this time, he couldn’t sort out for himself exactly why he had stayed with the younger man, if it was because he loved him in his own right or because he felt useless on his own, away from his brother, and Alphonse had been a ready substitute.
It was as impossible to return to the Alphonse in Germany as it was to return to the Al in his memory, Al the child, the innocent. They had both been innocent.
Now he was afraid he would never be a whole person again.
Chapter Six: Without a Hand to Guide Us
Note: No notes on this chapter.
Chapter:#5, The Ghost on the Grave
Previous: 1, I, 2, 3, II, 4, 4.5
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: PG-13 maybe?
Spoilers: for the entire series.
Summary: After six years, the brothers are finally reunited, but will Ed be able to adjust to a world that has long since moved on without him? Non-movie AU, pairings for now are Ed/Win and Al/Win with a side of Ed/Hei
Chapter Five: The Ghost on the Grave
She flinched when she heard someone at the door, and gave a heavy sigh as she set her favorite screwdriver down on the workbench and stood, turning to see who had the nerve to be coming around her automail shop so late in the day. Her skills were much sought-after, and she saw people by appointment only, damnit! The only customer of hers she had ever allowed to break that rule was somewhere upstairs, likely teaching her daughter new ways to slack off.
The door cracked open before she got to it, and she said, “oh!” her voice sounding more breathless than she had ever intended. “Al,” she said, her voice more normal, stronger, more solid, “what are you doing down here? And I thought you weren’t coming home until tomorrow? And- what’s that?” she demanded, drawing back as he shoved a package at her, grinning.
Al shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the peg on the back of her shop door, and sat down on her work bench, kicking his feet idly. “I dunno, why don’t you open it?” he suggested, his grey eyes sparkling.
“You got me a present?” she asked, her tired face lighting up.
He nodded. “It’s just something little, but I thought you’d like it,” he told her, still kicking his feet into the legs of her bench.
Miniature screwdrivers? Wire cutters that cut clean enough that the wire doesn’t have to be sanded? Screws of rare sizes? A solid titanium wrench that will never knick or scratch? “Something for she shop?” she guessed, giving the package a shake.
Al laughed at her, leaning back until his shoulder blades were jabbed by the pegs in her wall. He jerked forward, glancing behind him at the rows of tools. “I don’t know what you could possibly need for the shop,” he teased. “Weren’t we just in Rush Valley last year?”
Something else then? She pulled the brown paper off, tossing it to the floor and saw underneath a glossy blue box with a logo on the front. “Shandy’s?” she read, puzzled. She pulled the lid off, and lifted out a flat silver object about the size of her palm. It was engraved with a scrolling leaf pattern and had her initials in the center, WR. Pressing the tiny catch with the edge of her fingernail, it popped open, revealing a mirror that lit up?
“Ooo!” she exclaimed, snapping it shut and opening it again. “Al, where did you get this? Can I take it apart? I want to see how it works!”
Al just shrugged, hopping off the bench. “Of course you can take it apart, it’s yours,” he said, looking at her with raised eyebrows. “You’re welcome,” he added, and she threw her arms around his neck, still clutching the compact in her hand.
“Oh, thank you Al, but why did you get me something? It’s not my birthday or anything…” she said, her voice trailing off.
Al shrugged again, pulling his coat off the door and heading up the stairs to the rest of the house. “I thought you’d like it,” he said over his shoulder. “Where’s Kaiya?”
“Ed’s watching her,” she called up after him, debating on whether or not to follow Al upstairs or to disassemble the compact first. Either way, no more work in the shop would be done that afternoon.
When Winry did not follow him up the stairs, Al assumed the compact had won. “Brother,” he called out, his fingers trailing along the railing on his way up to the top floor. Poking his head in the bedroom, he shook his head. No Ed, but there were clothes strewn about and the bed was unmade. He hung his regulation military coat in his closet, and began undoing his regulation military jacket. This was part of his weekly routine, had been ever since he and Winry had moved to Altenburg: Lieutenant Elric worked in Central for the alchemical research branch and was occasionally given field work by, if not the man himself, a subordinate of General Mustang. Alphonse lived in Altenburg with his girlfriend the automail mechanic. There’s nothing so strange about living two lives, he had told himself at the time. This is my second life anyway.
“Al?” came the delayed answer, from the room next to his, the study. His brother’s return hadn’t disturbed his routine too terribly; it had merely disturbed his categorization. Altenburg, Ed reminded him often, was never really their home, and Winry, no one needed to remind him, was never really his girlfriend. That fact was clear every time his brother and Winry spoke, every time they touched, even every time they looked at each other.
He heard his brother’s mismatched footsteps in the hall before he saw him in the doorway, smirking. “What?” he demanded defensively.
“What what?” Ed echoed innocently.
Al frowned. “What’s with the expression?”
Ed tapped a finger to his chin, his face thoughtful. “Oh, you mean the one of utter disgust?” he asked slowly, his tone teasing.
Al looked at him impatiently, and Ed laughed.
“You. A military uniform. I can’t get over it,” Ed said, coming into the room and reaching up to ruffle his brother’s hair.
“Hey,” Al protested. “Don’t do that, I’m not a kid!”
Ed laughed again. “Now you sound like me,” he said fondly.
“I’m nothing like you,” Al said, trying to sound offended.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “I can see that,” he said, giving the uniform sleeve a tug.
Al slipped out of the military jacket, his eyes glinting mischievously. “I can do a pretty good impression of you, I think,” he told him, reaching into the closet for Ed’s brown coat. “See, I’m Edward Elric, and I’m wearing my coat I got in this mysterious place called Germany-“
“Hey,” Ed protested, “Gimme my coat back!”
“Where I took part in such great adventures as getting thrown out of a bar for starting a fight with someone who called me short-“
Ed’s eyes widened. “Hey, that’s not exactly how it happened!” he protested.
Al puffed his chest up, tossing his hair out of his eyes and drawing the coat closed over his chest. “-getting arrested because I spent the night in the city library and someone thought I was an intruder-“
The older brother waved his hands frantically. “That was not my fault-“ he began, but Al continued between merciless bouts of laughter.
“And being banned from certain floors of the University where my father worked for insisting on arguing with busy professors about the laws of physics-“
“They were morons!” Ed raged, but his eyes were amused as ever.
“I’m also single handedly responsible for introducing my landlady to some low-life policeman who is obsessed with taking photographs-“
Ed held up his hand. “Okay, that one was me,” he admitted good naturedly, “but it was Al who really took it upon himself to convince her to let him take her out. I can’t be blamed completely.” He flopped down on the bed, leaning back and letting his head drop over the edge so the room was upside down and his ponytail touched the floor. “Geez, Al, you make me sound like such an immature brat.” His chest shook up and down with laughter.
“Hey, don’t blame someone else for your escapades,” Al said innocently, flopping down next to his brother and letting his own head flop over the edge of the bed. He turned his face to look at him, his features distorted ever so slightly from gravity pulling in the opposite-from-natural direction. “I got something for you in Central,” he said.
Ed sat up. “Oh yeah?” he asked. “Where is it?”
Al answered from his still-upside-down vantage point. “On the dresser. It’s a book.”
“An alchemy book?” Ed said warily, stepping over the clothes he had strewn over the floor from the past few days and picking up the book. “Oh, cool!” he said when he read the title. “I didn’t know there was another one!”
“There’s a few more, actually.” Al told him, sitting up and feeling the blood rush back into the rest of his body from where it had felt like it was pooling in his cheeks and forehead. “They were really popular with the kids when the first one came out, and now people stand in line outside the bookstores all night long to make sure they can get a copy every time a new one is released.”
“You think Sheizka’s read them?” he asked suddenly.
“Winry’s friend? I dunno, she probably did, why?” Al asked curiously.
Ed shrugged. “Next time she’s around I’d like to be able to talk to her about something other than aliens and pyramids.”
“Pyramids?” Al asked blankly.
“Never mind,” Ed said, eyeing his brother sitting on the bed. “Take my coat off, will ya? It’s too small for you, and it looks silly, especially over that uniform.”
Al dug his hands into the pockets. “I like it,” he protested.
Ed pounced on the bed behind him, trying to pull it off his shoulders. “I don’t, what’s with you and wearing my clothes anyway?” he countered, scrambling after his brother as he sidestepped him into the hall.
“Nothing, I was just teasing you,” Al said, voice ever the sound of innocence, edging farther and farther away from his brother, darting back into the room. “And you can’t catch me,” he added with a grin.
“I can too catch you, and besides, you’re done impersonating me, so give it back,” Ed argued, grabbing his brother around the waist but groaning when his younger brother was able to worm out of his grip.
And then Al spoke the magic words. “Make me,” he said, eyes alight.
The sound of their footsteps thundered across the upstairs hall as Ed tore after his brother, grinning madly. Al’s impersonation had been cute, sure, but his younger brother had a habit of adopting his clothing that he did not want to continue. He raced down the top flight of stairs, just inches away from catching the little tease, flying through the living room and kitchen and bursting through the door and down the outside stairs above the workshop.
Suddenly Ed felt his balance slide out from under him, and he was tumbling down the stairs. He reached once for the railing and missed it, thudding hard on a few steps before finally getting a firm grasp on the rail and halting his descent only a few feet before colliding with the concrete porch.
By this time Al was out of his sight, and he groaned, standing up again only to be returned jarringly to the ground
“Al!” Ed yelled from the ground. “Get back here!”
He heard the scrambling of his brother’s feet on the sidewalk around the side of the house as he hurried back to where he heard Ed’s voice. “Ready to give up? Cause I’m not giving you the-“ he stopped when he saw Ed on the ground. “What happened?” he said instead, surprise displayed plainly across his face.
“I fell down the steps,” Ed said. “Now help your crippled brother off his ass,” he directed sharply. Not giving up quite yet, there’s always the distraction method.
“Brother, you’re not a cripple, don’t say that,” Al protested, crossing the porch.
“Well, call me what you will,” he said darkly, “but give me a hand, will you?” His expression became almost imperceptibly devious as he reached up for Al’s hand and then yanked him down on top of him, wresting the coat from his loose hold and bundling it up safely under his own arm. “Right. It’s my coat, and I’ll have it back, thank you very much,” he said smugly from the ground.
Al sat back on his knees, arms folded. “Brother, that wasn’t fair,” he complained.
Ed waved his hand airily. “Oh well, all’s fair in love and war, you know,” he said lightly, turning to get his good leg under him and standing up to take a step, only to come crashing down again.
“Not funny,” Al warned him, sounding irritated, and stood, snatching the coat back up again. “I was going to give this back to you, you know, once I proved I could still beat you,” he huffed, starting to turn away.
Ed rolled his eyes. “Of course you can beat me, you always could. Now seriously, Al, I need some help here.”
Al looked down, eyeing him suspiciously. “Really?” When Ed nodded impatiently, he asked, “What happened?”
His brother frowned. “I told you, I fell down the steps,” he said flatly. “Help me up?” The coat was completely forgotten as he grasped his brother’s hand and stood up again, hopping a few feet and coming to sit on the stairs. Ed hiked up his pant leg to see what could have dislodged his prosthetic and cursed at the broken leather strap. “Fucking hell,” he muttered. The light-hearted mood, the teasing, the deviousness, these were gone from the air. “This is ridiculous, I fucking hate this! Winry!” he bellowed, so that she could hear him from inside her shop.
“Brother,” Al protested, “I can fix that with alchemy, you know. If you show this to Winry, she’s just going to-”
Ed looked at him witheringly, interrupting his brother. “I can fix it with alchemy too, but I bet you I’ll still end up flat on my face one way or the other. I hate being a cripple, I hate being slowed down by my own body, I hate not being in control of my own parts! I’m tired of stumbling on those stairs, I feel pathetic and I’ve had enough!”
“You’re not a-“
“Don’t be stupid,” he said darkly, sitting silent on the stairs as Al put his hands together with a soft clap and transmuted the worn leather straps back together “I guess that’ll hold for now,” he said, more to himself than to Al.
“What are you two going on about?” Winry demanded from the doorway, hands on her hips. “Who’s watching the baby?”
Al looked over at his brother. “Where is the baby?” he asked him.
“Sleeping upstairs,” Ed muttered.
Winry glared at one brother and then at the other. “Well I doubt very much she slept through all that, I could hear you all the way down in the shop. Ed, for gods sake, what do you want?”
He fixed her with a determined gaze. “Automail,” he said firmly.
They lay side by side in the bed they had shared ever since returning from Central. As far as Ed knew, Al hadn’t spent a single night in Winry’s room. Wisely, he never mentioned it.
Sharing the bed with his brother was comforting and terrifying at the same time. When they were kids, Al often slept in his bed because he said he had nightmares, and (when they were still kids) Al had spent countless nights by his brother’s bed, holding his only hand in his unfeeling leather gauntlet, the contact only one of them could feel serving to let the older boy know that he was not alone, even in his pain-induced deliriums. Later, when Ed would fall into bed at night, in some inn out in an obscure corner of Amestris or in one of the military dorms they frequented, exhausted, and curl into a ball while his brother sat in a corner, his heart would ache longing to be able to sleep side by side with him again, to feel his cold feet tickling his calves under the covers, to wrap his arms around him in comfort, to lay a head on his shoulder in place of a pillow again.
He thanked his luck, he thanked his brother’s boundless intelligence and perseverance, he thanked his own determination every night he could feel his brother’s warm, solid, human form next to him. It terrified him because that warm, solid comfort never failed to remind him of sharing his bed with Alphonse Heiderich.
It had begun out of necessity. Alphonse had only one bed, and Edward had slept on the couch when he first moved in. He had never complained, but eventually Alphonse had noticed that night after night on the couch was taking its toll on his friend’s physical form, and then there was the matter of the small apartment being very expensive to heat. The first night they had shared a bed, Edward drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking at times it was his brother next to him, and he was ten years old again, and alternately huddling on the very edge of the mattress, afraid he would forget where he was, becoming too content with his present circumstances.
When Alphonse had first flung and arm across his chest, it had been in his sleep, Ed had assumed, and he did not push him away. He lay, in his not-brother’s embrace, the guilt burning any sleep out of him that may have been waiting to take hold. When Ed, in a half dream state, curled against his friend’s side, Alphonse merely pulled him closer, taking it as a sign that Ed returned his affections. Ed had known, oh, he had known he was playing with fire. But he was drawn like a moth to a flame.
Soft fingers brushed the hair from his face. “Brother?” said the voice, and slowly, golden eyes fluttered open. “Were you sleeping?” Al was half-sitting up, all blue and grey and silver in the moonlight pouring through their window.
Ed shook his head.
“What were you thinking about? You had an odd expression, I thought you might have been having a bad dream,” Al said, a concerned frown crossing his face.
Ed sat up, pushing his pillow back against the wall and leaned into it. He looked towards the window, out across the moonlit rooftops of the town, away from his brother. “I’m not sure you want to know,” he said quietly.
“Do you miss him?” Al asked softly, revealing that he had already guessed.
His brow creased. “Why would I miss him when I have you?” Ed asked, confused.
“If you love him,” Al said, very quietly, staring at the same spot on the windowpane as Ed was, “it’s all right to miss him.”
In response, Ed lay back down in the bed, pulling the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes. After a moment, he felt his brother do the same. Cautiously, Al laid his head on his brother’s flesh shoulder, in place of a pillow, and, eyes still closed, Ed let himself smile.
“I want to go to Rizembool,” Ed said, after several minutes of silence. He could tell by his brother’s breathing that he was still awake.
“There’s nothing there,” Al said into his shoulder.
“Mom’s grave is there.”
“That’s true.”
Ed’s human fingers played idly with his brother’s hair. “I haven’t been there in ten years. I want to see it before Winry does the surgery, otherwise it could be another three years until I can get there.”
“I thought you recovered in one year?” Al asked, picking his head up and looking at his brother’s face, pale in the light from the window.
“I don’t know how long it will take to recover,” he said vaguely.
After another moment Al laid his head back down. “We can go to Rizembool,” he said eventually. “It hasn’t been the safest place, because the borders are so unstable, but we can still go. It should be all right; there hasn’t been news of any border skirmishes recently. But,” he added, “you wont even recognize it. It’s not the place we grew up in, not anymore.”
“I can handle it.”
I never could, not completely, Al countered in his mind. He sighed. “Your grave is there too, you know,” he murmured into his brother’s skin.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “My grave?”
“Yeah. You’re dead.” After some time had elapsed, Al elaborated. “That’s pretty much the only reason anyone goes up there anymore. To see your grave. The train doesn’t even go that far north, I don’t think. No one lives there.”
“Maybe you me and Winry can hire a car,” he mused.
Al frowned. “Winry wont want to go.”
Ed was silent, his breath skimming steadily across Al’s forehead.
Al pulled the blanket tighter around them, and sighed again. “Still awake?” he asked.
“Yeah,” came the quiet murmur. After a moment he added, “You could get us a military car, you know.”
“We’ll figure something out.”
There were bits of foreign metal scattered around the table Winry had set up to the side of her workbench. She had been itching for months to dissect that homemade arm of his, and she was alternating between being horrified and being astounded. Horrified because the strategies he used were like that of the earliest attempts at automail, the ones that were mostly unsuccessful and damaging; astounded because the thing worked, and better than it should have, all things considered.
She pressed her lips into a thin line, concentrating as she worked the fine tools around the wires trailing out of what was left of his mechanical arm. His eyes were squeezed shut, and she thought he might have been holding his breath, waiting for the indescribably odd sensation she was causing to stop. “Ed,” she said softly, still holding a wire between her tweezers.
“Hm,” he grunted, acknowledging her but not opening his eyes or moving in the slightest.
“This is no good,” she said, resigned. “I can’t work with any of this. I have to take it all out; start over.”
“Fine,” he let out under his breath. “Just get it over with already.”
She had already put him through the pain of removing each bolt and screw, sliding them out of his bones with a sickening scrape that made them both grit their teeth. Her strange suspicions had been confirmed: yes, his shoulder was all bone inside. That was why the screws would often work themselves loose on their own: the bone was rejecting them slowly. That was why he was in such pain after using his arm a lot, that was why he could grasp things if he placed them between the mechanical fingers but not carry anything of significant weight: it put too much strain on his bone structure. These were clear and valid problems of the early attempts at automail, something she had only read about in medical texts.
The signs were all there, but she was still shocked to confirm it. When she and Granny had given Ed his first set of automail, the bones inside his shoulder had been replaced with automail parts. It was the only way his body would be able to support the weight and function of the new limb. She could not understand why the bones were there now.
She released the final nerve, cleaning the open wound she had made and beginning to stitch him up. She had done what she could to numb the area, and knew he hadn’t been feeling pain, exactly, but he could feel her working on his nerves and he had always told her how strange that felt.
He was now breathing normally, eyes open, blank, waiting for her to finish up the stitches. When she tied off the final strand, she came to sit in front of him. “There’s something else I have to tell you,” she began hesitantly, and watched his murky gold eyes slowly focus on her own.
“What is it?”
“Those wires you were using,” she said slowly, “the ones I said were never used in the body because they can cause unpleasant reactions, and rejection. They might have damaged your nerves.”
He nodded. “You’ve said this before,” he said calmly.
She sighed. “I wish Granny were here, she knew everything, absolutely everything about automail. I’m just guessing, here, Ed. It’s possible the reason you could never get those fingers to move is because you damaged the nerves attaching those wires, or, it might have just been that they couldn’t hold enough current to travel all the way down the arm. I don’t know.”
His single hand gripped his knee tightly. “I didn’t know what else to do, Winry!” he protested. “I was all alone there, and I couldn’t do anything, and it was terrifying. I couldn’t use any alchemy, but besides that, I couldn’t even use my own body any more, not the way I wanted to.” He looked over at the detached limb lying over on her table. “It might not have worked very well, but it was damn well better than nothing, which is what I started out with.”
“It’s really incredible,” she said seriously, “That you got as far as you did with it. Everything might be fine; I might be completely overreacting, but…”
“Win,” he said gently, moving his hand from his own knee to hers. “Just tell me. What is the absolute worst thing that could happen?”
Her lips formed that fine line again. “You might not get one hundred percent movement out of the new automail. You won’t be in the pain you’re in now,” she added hurriedly, searching his face for a reaction but reading none. “You’ll be able to carry things, probably even lift things you can’t even pick up with your real arm. It’ll be strong, but you might not have the fine control that you had before.”
He leaned back on the bench, into the wall, raising his eyebrows and looking over at the arm on the table again. “Ho much movement would you say I got out of that one?”
“Twenty five percent? Thirty maybe?” she guessed.
“And the new one?” he prompted. “The worst I can expect?”
“Ninety five? Ninety eight?”
He gave a low laugh, and folded his hand behind his head. “I think I can handle that,” he said, smiling. Smiling? How can he be smiling about this?
“But I wanted it to be perfect for you!” she protested, obviously distressed. “I’ve been studying all this time, learning every new technique as soon as it’s developed, just so I could make you the most perfect automail available!”
He gave an odd one shouldered shrug, and smiled again. “Win, I’ve been without automail for so long, I guarantee you, I will not even notice a few percents less movement than the last set. I’ll just be happy to have something that works, and someone who knows how to take care of it.” He stood up, gathering up his shirt as he did and pulling the right sleeve inside out before he put it on so that it would not hang in his way. “Come on, Al is watching Kaiya and making dinner at the same time, lets help him out a bit, huh?”
She let herself laugh as she hung up her tools on the proper pegs. “That’s Ed-speak for me helping with dinner and you playing with your daughter,” she said, smiling down at her wrench.
“Our daughter,” he called from his way up the stairs. “All three of ours.”
He gripped the gravestone with his only hand, steadying himself as he sank to his knees on the frozen ground. Its me, Momma, its Edward, he began, haltingly, staring at the dirt and grass at the base of the slab. I’m sorry, I didn’t bring you anything, except- Al’s here, and he’s whole, and he’s perfect, and I’m here too, so I can take care of him now, just like you said. Except, Momma, it’s really Al that takes care of me, but, at least we’re together now.
I wish- I wish I could tell you something that would make you proud of me, and… I’ve done my best, but all I’ve managed to do is screw things up, again and again. I wish I could tell you I’m not the obnoxious know-it-all kid I was when I was ten, but- that’s not really something I can say either. But I promise you, I know I’m not God, and I’ve learned my lesson: I promise you I’ll never endanger myself or my brother’s life ever again, not for something impossible.
I wish I could say all the pain I’ve caused everyone around me hadn’t been in your name, in your memory, but I cant say that either. I’m sorry, Momma. I’m sorry, it’s been- so many years, I’m starting to forget your face. We burned the house down, to keep us from running home instead of chasing our goals, and all the pictures burned too. Auntie Pinako had a few, I think, but it’s been ten years even since I’ve seen those. What I remember mostly are your eyes. Al has your eyes, and sometimes when I look at him I see you.
Rizembool was quiet, utterly quiet, Al had been right when he said there was no one there. The only sound was the wind blowing tiny specks of snow around, not enough to stick but enough to cloud the air and to chill the tips of his nose and ears. Dad loved you, he admitted, with some difficulty. I never believed it, but I know you did. You never doubted him. He- he’s gone now too.
You- you have a granddaughter now. Her name is Kaiya. She’s perfect, she’s the most perfect baby you’ve ever laid eyes on. She’s Winry’s, and she’s beautiful. Me and Al used to fight over who would marry Winry, but in the end, I guess neither of us won. She’s Winry’s daughter, he repeated. Maybe you can be proud of us for that.
He shifted uncomfortably on the cold ground, and when he blinked he saw the salty drops fall onto the frozen dirt. He raised his hand to his face, not even having realized he was crying. I do remember you, Momma, there are things I’ll never forget; I’ll never forget how your arms felt around me, I’ll never forget how my head fit perfectly into the curve of your waist. I’ll never forget your voice and I’ll never forget the words to that song you would sing while doing the dishes. I’ll never forget the way mine and Al’s beds smelled the days you would wash the sheets, I’ll never forget the taste of the porridge you would make us for breakfast. I’ll never forget playing out in the fields and seeing your light flashing for us to come home, I’ll never forget seeing the house lit at night with a candle in each window to guide us home. I’ll never forget that yellow apron with the little flowers I used to bury my face in and cry when I would scrape my knee-
He didn’t know how long he sat, his head leaning against the stone, or where Al had been, whether he had stood and watched his brother cry or whether he had gone to sit by the river, in the spot he always used to when they had been kids. If there had been anyone at all in Rizembool besides the brothers, there would have been stories about the ghost of the Fullmetal Alchemist hovering over the graveyard, but there was only Al.
The brothers walked silently over the debris that still remained of their burned down house, keeping step with each other and not speaking until Al said, “Do you want to see yours?”
“Mine?” Edward had echoed hollowly, not quite trusting his voice yet.
Someone, they saw, had been to that grave already, and had left a wreath of flowers, and Ed shuddered, kicking at the wreath with his foot. Did people really come all the way out to Rizembool to leave flowers on his grave? Who were these people, and just what did they think he had done to deserve their attentions? He, the sinner?
“Lets get out of here, Al,” he said, shoving his hand further into his coat pocket, suddenly colder than he had been.
“I want to stop at the house.”
Ed turned to look behind them at the ruins that had been the Elric house, but Al shook his head and pointed to the building in the distance. “No, at Winry’s house. I want to see if there’s something there she might want.”
“The house is still there?” Ed asked, confused. “Then why-“
“It’s there,” Al said tersely. “The Drachman army used it as their headquarters when they occupied the town.”
Ed had elected to wait outside while Al entered the abandoned building they had once called their home, understanding, suddenly, why Winry had refused to come with them. His memories of the Rockbell house were bright and full of warmth, and he found he didn’t want them replaced with empty rooms and dusty shelves.
After some time had passed, Al emerged, carrying two boxes, trailing cobwebs that he swiped at before handing one to his older brother. “What-“ Ed began.
“They’re photos, from the basement,” Al said. “I thought they might still be there.”
The brothers were silent for the first two hours of the drive back to Altenburg, Al keeping his eyes fixed on the road and his attention carefully on what was in front of him. Ed’s eyes were closed and he leaned his head against the window, but Al knew he wasn’t sleeping.
Finally, breaking the silence, Al let out a heavy sigh as a preamble. His brother’s eyes fluttered open. “I didn’t tell you this before,” he began, his words uncertain. “But I just want you to know, because I know she didn’t tell you.”
Golden eyebrows rose, once, curiously.
“Winry isn’t my girlfriend anymore.”
“Al, I’m sorry-“
“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault. And it’s better this way. It’s fine,” Al said firmly.
“Al-“
“I said don’t be sorry!”
Ed clamped his mouth shut.
Nearly another hour had passed before they spoke again. It was dusk, and the sky was a glowing deep blue above their heads, a road sign here and there illuminated by a streetlamp. “It’s just five days until she starts the surgeries,” Ed said quietly, staring at the trees flying past them.
“Are you scared?” Al asked softly.
“A little,” Ed admitted.
“You’ll be all right, Brother,” he encouraged. “You’ve done it before, you know what to expect.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Let me be there with you,” Al said suddenly. “Don’t send me out of the room, let me be there through it all.”
Ed sighed. “I don’t want you to have to see me like that, Al, I’ll be screaming my head off in pain.”
“Winry told me you never screamed.”
“I can’t promise you that this time,” Ed said quietly. He looked out at the road, and then over at his brother, and then back out at the line of trees that blurred into a stripe of brown and black if he let his eyes relax.
When Al began to speak again, his voice had an odd quality to it, one Ed couldn’t quite place.
“You always told me that you were fine, that you weren’t hurting, but I knew you were lying to me because when Winry would come in to check on you you would whisper to her that you needed more pills.”
Ed’s eyes widened, and he jerked his gaze over to his brother, who sat gripping the steering wheel, gaze fixed on the road.
“You had these terrible nightmares, I knew you did because I watched you sleep, all those long nights, it must have been the medicine that was giving you those dreams and you would never tell me about them. You wanted to spare me from them but you didn’t know that I had them too, and I had them while I was awake, because I couldn’t sleep.”
Ed was staring at him, watching his eyes dart from side to side, the course of their vehicle no longer part of his attention.
“You would call for me, and you would call for mom, and sometimes you would even call for dad, and when you were like that there was nothing I could do. I would touch you, but I couldn’t feel it, and you didn’t even know it was me. You would look at me and you didn’t know it was me.”
“Al, the road,” Ed said harshly, and reached out and grabbed the steering wheel, sending their car swinging back to the center of the road. They had been driving half on the shoulder and half on the grass for quite some time before even Ed had noticed it. “Al!” Ed pressed, refusing to let go of the steering wheel, staring into his brother’s vacant eyes. “Al, snap out of it!”
Alphonse blinked, slamming his foot on the breaks and causing their vehicle to screech to a halt. “What happened?” he demanded, blinking rapidly. “Did I fall asleep? I didn’t think I was that tired-“
Ed was opening the car door, walking around the vehicle, opening Al’s door. “Okay, Al, get out, I’m driving the rest of the way!” he said forcefully, waiting for his brother to obey him.
“You can’t drive, you have only one hand!” Al protested, but Ed’s insistence was unwavering.
“I can do lots of things with only one hand! You almost ran us off the road, get out!”
“I’m awake now, Brother, I can drive fine-“
“Al, you weren’t sleeping- do you even remember what you were saying?” Ed demanded, the realization dawning on him.
“What are you talking about?” Al said, confused.
“You were telling me things only you would know. Things no one could have told you. Things I didn’t even know,” he said quietly, his voice grave.
“What do you mean?”
“Things from when you were in the armor.”
“That’s impossible,” Al said flatly, folding his arms across his chest and looking up at his brother.
“It should be,” Ed agreed. “But you did it. Now out, and let me drive, I want to get back to Altenburg before midnight.”
His eyes narrowed. “Brother, I’m not letting you drive,” he said stubbornly
“I’m not letting you drive,” Ed countered, equally stubborn.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“So we’re spending the night somewhere nearby.”
“Fine, that’s what we’re doing.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Al drove cautiously into the small town they were passing by, feeling his brother’s eyes on his face the entire way. Once they had found themselves a room, Ed had pressed him with questions about his memory, but Al was unable to tell him anything new. This was a bad idea, coming here, he thought to himself. Brother’s miserable, I’m miserable, and now Brother thinks I’m crazy, to top it all off. Could I really have done that, spoken to him about things I don’t even remember, and not have realized it?
He thinks my memories are his fault, that he’s hurt me in some way! He saved my life, if he hadn’t kept my soul in that armor I would be dead right now, instead of here, alive, warm and beside him, with a life and a family and nothing more I could ask for. Brother doesn’t deserve any more guilt or any more pain. I wish I could tell him nothing will ever hurt him again, but I can’t say that. He’s going to be going through the worst pain he’s ever felt, pain he thought he’d never have to go through again, just to get his automail installed. “Brother,” he said quietly, interrupting Ed’s worried rantings. “It’s all right.” It wasn’t all right. It wasn’t all right that he had lost four years of memories, but he was used to it. “Don’t do this to yourself. I’m fine.”
By the next morning every citizen in the town of Bethan was full to the brim with the gossip that the Fullmetal Alchemist and the Soul Alchemist had spent the night in their most prominent (and only) inn. If anyone else, any out-of-towners, were to inquire, however, they would say he must have been a ghost. The people of Bethan were proud to say that the People’s Alchemist had come from the North, and they would not give away his secret that easily.
“Of course I’m nervous,” Ed said, not looking at her as she stitched up the wound she had made in the end of his leg. He shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” she said sharply, looking up. “Did I hurt you?”
He shook his head, pressing his lips together. “No, it just feels fucking strange, like you’re tickling my toes or something.” In fact, she had attached tiny metal transmitters to a few select nerves in his stump. That little preparatory step, she had insisted, would help a great deal during the surgery. She had done the same the day before with his shoulder.
She blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Good. That means I’m doing this right.”
His eyes widened in a sudden panic. “You don’t know if you’re doing it right? Winry! I thought you said you knew what you were doing!”
She laughed at his horrified expression. “I’m just kidding Ed, god. Of course I know what I’m doing. This is my entire life, you know.” She tied off the last stitch, swabbing the stump one more time with disinfectant. “Done,” she added unnecessarily.
Ed leaned back against the wall, looking half-relaxed sitting there in his boxers, but his tapping fingers betrayed his discomfort. “Al is really upset that he can’t get back until tomorrow. I know he wanted to be here with me tonight.”
“I know you wanted him to be here too,” Winry said gently, cleaning off her instruments. “General Mustang is such an ass, he told Al it would be no problem for him to go on leave, and then springs this last minute stuff on him.”
“I keep telling myself that the first surgery was so long ago I couldn’t possibly remember it that well,” Ed began, not looking at her, “But I do, I swear I do. And it hurt more than losing my limbs in the first place did.”
Winry glanced up at him, surprised. She had never, that she recalled, heard Ed say anything about how much it had hurt. She knew, of course, that it did, but Ed had also been the only patient of Pinako’s that had not cried out during the painful nerve attachments. She waited, but it didn’t seem like he was going to continue, so she said, “Don’t worry, Al will be here tomorrow morning, and he’ll be here to stay with you until you’re all recovered.”
“You think I can really do it in a year, Win?” he asked, his fingers still tapping on the bench. “I mean, I’m not a kid any more, I’m not growing, so you think my body will still heal as fast?”
“I don’t know, Ed,” she said honestly. “Wait,” she said, stopping him when he reached for his prosthetic leg. “You can’t put that on, you’ll irritate the stitches, what are you thinking?” She got up, jerking open her supply closet, pulling out a crutch.
“I guess I’m not thinking,” he admitted, taking it from her, pulling himself up with it in a practiced motion and tucking it under his arm.
“You should go to bed, Ed,” she instructed him. “Get as much rest as you can tonight.”
“I don’t think I can sleep,” he said admitted, shifting his weight on the crutch. “I thought Al was going to be here tonight. I’m too on edge,” he said, his eyes darting side to side. He lowered his voice, his cheeks turning faintly pink at his next admission. “Sometimes Al can get me to sleep, he kind of pets my hair, like mom used to do, but Al’s in Central, or on his way from Central, anyway.”
It seemed like it had been ages since he had been open with her, in any way. In fact, the times when she worked with his nerves, getting ready for the surgery, were the only times they had been close to each other, the only times they had spoken about anything other than where is the baby? Can you watch the baby? Would you feed the baby? If I change the baby will you put her to bed? Here they were, in the same house, yet when Al wasn’t home they moved in circles one around the other, like magnets that pushed each other away. Winry let out a slow breath. “Well, I’m not Al, but maybe I can help you sleep,” she offered, but he shook his head.
“It’s not the same,” he told her.
He hobbled across the workroom on the crutch and stared up at the flight of stairs that led up into the house.
“Do you want some help?” She asked hesitantly.
Ed considered her offer, looking steadily from her form to the stairs and back, and shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, I’ll take some help,” he said.
It was different, trying to help him, because he was taller than her now, if only by an inch or so. He was taller, he weighed more, and there was no way to help him other than to wrap and arm around his waist and offer him balance as he hopped awkwardly up the stairs. She had helped him when they were kids, when she had been the bigger one, when she had been in charge, when she had envisioned herself his doctor, when she had taken it upon herself to put her friend back together as best as biomechanics would allow, but now she really was in charge. There was no one for her to turn to if she did not know what to do. When she was eleven she had believed she could do no wrong, that there was no automail problem she could not solve, that Edward was in the best hands available. Now she felt almost afraid to touch him.
“Aw, man, I am a mess,” Ed said, but he was laughing as she deposited him on her bed, seeming not to notice her discomfort. “Why’d you bring me in here anyway,” he demanded, noticing that he was in her room and not Al’s.
“Well,” she began, still hesitant. “I’m not your brother, but I am your friend. I thought you wouldn’t want to be alone quite yet.”
His pride made him want to protest, that he didn’t need her to watch over him, to soothe him into sleep, that she would be doing plenty of that soon enough and even that was too much to ask from her, but he swallowed it, seeing how she hesitated. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her feelings by turning her away, like he knew he had done so many times before. If she wanted to be there for him, he would let her. She was his best friend, after all. “Okay,” he agreed, quietly, not meeting her eyes.
She wanted to sit behind him, to wrap her arms around him, to press her chin into his shoulder and her cheek against his own, but was that the act of a friend, or a lover? What did she know?
What did any of them know?
She shifted on the bed, drawing her feet up under her knees and turning to sit behind him, skimming her fingers lightly down his shoulder blades and digging them into his lower back, which she knew must be perpetually sore from walking with one strong leg and one false one. “Ah,” he said, giving in, voicing his approval. “You’re good at that,” he told her.
“I try,” she said softly, moving her hands slowly up his back as she felt him beginning to relax.
“Mmm,” he said. “You smell good.”
“Eh?” she said, confused. “I do?” Winry was certain she smelled of nothing but sweat and machine oil, the way she always smelled after working in the shop. Not a particularly attractive or feminine smell, she was sure, but she had never known Ed to give a false compliment.
“Yeah. I missed your smell,” he said, and her eyes flew open, her hands stopping their massaging circles. “Hey, don’t stop!” he protested, and she made herself continue.
“Ed, you should lay down,” she instructed. “You’re supposed to by trying to sleep, and you don’t sleep sitting up.”
“Lay down with me,” he said, tugging at her hand as he shifted into a lying position.
She cooperated, her heart pounding, and pulled the blankets up around them, lying back on the pillow next to his. He was still holding her hand, she realized, and he was staring at it, rubbing his thumb over her veins.
“I love your hands, Win,” he said quietly, seemingly transfixed.
“Thanks,” she said, unsure of how to respond. After a moment she pulled her hand away, turning on her stomach and propping her chin on her hands, looking down at him. His eyes were closed and there were faint creases between his eyebrows. “Are you nervous?” she asked.
He shrugged with one shoulder, not opening his eyes. “I guess,” he admitted. “Shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you know what to expect, so yes, you should be,” she said bluntly.
He cracked one eye open, the corner of his mouth jerking up in a wry grin. “Aw, thanks, that really makes me feel better,” he said sarcastically, but he reached over for her hand again, wrapping his fingers tightly around her own.
“What?” she asked, raising one eyebrow, pulling her hand away slightly.
“Eh?”
“What do you want with my hand all of a sudden?” she asked him, and watched his cheeks turn faintly pink. I’ve slept with this man, her mind told her suddenly. And now he’s embarrassed by holding my hand?
He dropped it instantly. “Sorry,” he said quickly, but she could already feel her own face flushing crimson. It had been a year ago, about, at least a year ago that she had collided with a dead man on her way to the market to pick up a half dozen eggs. A year ago that they had yelled and she had cried and they hugged and comforted and argued and ended up here in her bed. Her heart sank into the pit of her stomach. He wished it had never happened. That’s what he told her. “Win, what’s wrong?” he asked, concerned.
Round eyes blinked at him. “Nothing,” she said miserably.
He turned his head, looking out her window at the deep blue of twilight. “It’s been a little while since I’ve been in here,” he said with a faint smile don’t even say it Ed, she thought darkly, glaring at him as he gazed at the sky, unaware. Whatever it is you might be about to say, I don’t even want to know what it is. Just don’t say anything.
But he didn’t, she realized, and he wasn’t going to. She let her head drop onto the pillow, closing her own eyes and trying hard not to think anything at all.
After a while she became aware of his fingers pulling through her hair, just like what he said Al would do for him, stroking the long strands slowly and gently. She opened her eyes to find that he was watching her, his expression carefully blank, his golden eyes blinking every few seconds, their dark gold lashes brushing together ever so briefly.
She was determined to do nothing.
She did nothing when he pressed his warm lips to her forehead, and she did nothing when he pulled back, watching her carefully. “Ed.” She let his name hang between them for a moment. “What are you doing?”
Another beat passed before he answered. “I’m not sure,” he whispered. The silence between them was becoming oppressive, and suddenly she wanted to sit up, to jump out of bed, to say something bright and cheerful and switch on the light on the night table to illuminate the darkening room. He couldn’t possibly be looking at her the way he seemed to be, his eyes burning into her just like they had that night that other time, he couldn’t possibly be wanting what he swore he didn’t and she couldn’t possibly be even considering- “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I just wanted to touch you.”
“Why?”
He looked down at his lap. “I’m sorry.”
She put one hand on either side of his face, feeling the rough texture of his cheeks on her palms, and he lifted his eyes and let her meet his lips with her own. “Edward,” she whispered, her face only inches from his, “tell me you want to do this.” Don’t answer me Ed, I don’t even want to know your answer
“We can’t-“ he began, shaking his head.
She pressed a finger to his lips. “We’ll never tell him,” she said of Al in a rush of words, things she never meant to say tumbling from her lips. “He’ll never know. He’ll never ask, and we’ll never tell.”
“Is this what you want?” he asked hesitantly.
Her deep eyes widened. She nodded I’m not going to get an answer I’m never going to get an answer why are we even doing this I swore he swore we swore this would never happen and-
Ed shook his head. “I can’t- We can’t, Winry. We shouldn’t.”
I know we shouldn’t and you know we shouldn’t and I’m never going to know if it’s something you want or not because I don’t want you to answer me not really “He said it was all right,” she insisted quietly. “He said he doesn’t want to tie me down.”
“And I said we would never do this,” he reminded her, pulling away.
“Did you promise?” she whispered.
Wordlessly, he shook his head again. “But,” he began, looking down at himself, gesturing to the stub of his leg, his missing arm. “Like this?”
“Edward, I don’t care,” she assured him, grasping for something familiar. She was used to reassuring him that things were going to be okay. She was used to offering him her comfort. “I don’t care how many parts you have or don’t have. You’re you, regardless.”
That wasn’t really what he meant, he had been referring purely to the physical maneuverability of it, but her words sent a rush of memory over him.
“Alphonse, how can you possibly-“ his words caught in his throat, and he looked down at himself in disgust. “I’m half a person!” he protested.
Alphonse had taken him by the shoulders, holding good and scarred skin alike, and ducked his head down, looking into his friend’s eyes. “No, Ed,” he said gently, nervously, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “No.” He let himself stare, unrestrained, at the un-naturalness of it all, the sheer imbalance of his form, and at the same time, the beauty in it. “Maybe half a body,” he admitted, honest as always, “but you’re a whole person.”
Edward had looked at him witheringly, searching for pity in his open face but finding none.
Alphonse reached for his single hand, pressing it between his own, twining their fingers together. “You’re a whole person,” he repeated, “and I think you’re fine the way you are.”
Edward leaned forward, pressing his face to the younger boy’s chest, not knowing whether to laugh at the absurd assurance or to cry at the truth of it but suddenly unable to look him in the eye.
“Edward?” Winry said gently, calling him back, moving back into his field of vision. He had turned away, and she had followed his eyes, not letting him escape her. “You don’t believe me?”
He shook his head, pressing his lips together. “No, I believe you,” he said quietly, with a heavy sigh, falling back onto the bed and bringing his only arm up to cover his eyes. “I can’t do this, Win. It isn’t right.” He slid his arm up a bit so he could read her expression.
She didn’t understand. He hadn’t said enough.
“It wouldn’t be you,” he told the ceiling. “It would be him.”
Slowly, she reached over him, wrapping her hand around his, pulling his arm off his face so she could see his eyes. But he’s gone, she wanted to say. You’ll never see him again. We’re both free, she wanted to tell him, but he was no freer than she was, and she had known that all along. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I won’t ask you again.” She pulled him back up to a sitting position and wrapped both her arms around him, letting him bury his face in her long hair.
“I love you,” he whispered, and for a brief moment, her heart soared.
He wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, entwined like lovers. He wasn’t thinking, not really, just watching the shadows move across the room with the shifting moonlight and listening to her quiet breathing as she lay next to him. He shivered slightly, suddenly missing the warmth of her body, and wondered when they had separated. Was she sleeping?
He reached over, sliding his arm under her, trying to pull her closer to him, and she smiled, eyes still closed, and rolled over, resting her head on his shoulder and throwing one leg across his hips. Hesitantly, he rested his hand on the small of her back, and felt the rise and fall of her breathing against his torso. He was not thinking any thoughts about love, about different kinds of love, about how many people a person can love in a lifetime. He wasn’t thinking about death, and separation, and which is harder for the heart to understand. He wasn’t thinking about existence, and what parts of himself he may have inadvertently left behind on the other side of the Gate.
When he felt rough, gentle fingers sliding over his cheek, his jaw, trailing down the side of his neck and stroking the place below his ear, he did not think anything at first. She must be asleep, came the slow realization. We’ve both been asleep. A light kiss fell on the side of his face, and he turned away, not even knowing why. God, does she think I’m Al? he wondered, knowing he should push her away but instead pretending to sleep himself, enjoying her touch as much as dreading it. Her hand slid over his throat, moving across his chest, brushing a nipple and he stiffened, unmoving. He let out a heavy breath, realizing this was a bad idea as his sleep-muddled body began to catch up to the sensations it was registering. Her lips fell on the hollow at his neck, following his collarbone, and a calloused palm pressed up his side, fingers pushing into his ribs. He jerked when she touched the shiny, strange skin that had been underneath steel for so many years at a time, grasping at where a right arm should have been, clutching at the scarred stump.
Her eyes opened, and he could feel her sharp intake of breath as she stiffened against him, lifting her head. Now she wakes, he thought, still in a half-daze himself, looking blearily into her round open eyes, dark in the shadowed room. Her lips were parted, and she pressed her teeth into the lower one, pulling away from him slightly, seeming to expect him to do something. “That feels kind of weird,” he whispered in the dark, moving his had to cover hers, drawing it away from his empty shoulder.
“Sorry,” she whispered, not breaking eye contact. “I think… I must have been asleep.”
He took a deep breath, slowly bringing her hand to his lips, pressing it into them. “You could touch me somewhere else,” he suggested finally, almost disbelieving his own words. He wanted this, or at least part of him wanted this. Al had forgiven them, and Al was not there, and would never know. And Germany was worlds away.
She pulled her hand away, moving back to the empty side of the bed and pressing her face into the pillow. He sat up then, watching her, not sure what to do next. Her shoulders were shaking, he saw. Was she crying, or was she angry? “Win…” he said softly.
“What are you trying to do to me, Edward?” she demanded into the pillow, not looking at him.
His eyes widened. “Do to you? You started this! What are you trying to do to me?”
“I was asleep!” she wailed, sitting up, facing him, and throwing the blankets into his lap in a half-formed bundle. “Make up your mind!” she said desperately. “Who do you love?”
“You,” he said simply, and that was his answer, at least right then, even if it was not a complete one. He pushed the heap of bedding off of him, letting it rest in a pile between them.
“Then you need to decide how, and just how much,” she insisted, her tone not accusing at all, more sad than anything else. “As much as I want to, I’m not going to do this with you if you’re going to wake up tomorrow telling me you regret it. I can’t do that again!”
He turned away from her, swinging his leg over the side of the bed. “I’m going back to Al’s room,” he said stiffly, eyes casting about for a moment for his prosthesis before remembering that the limb was downstairs in the workshop and there were stitches in his leg. He stood up slowly, not looking back at her and using the nightstand for balance as he hopped awkwardly across the room to retrieve the crutch he had dropped earlier in the day.
Out in the hallway, he leaned against the railing, looking down into the house that was not his house, feeling that this life was not his life; that nothing could be real anymore. Edward Elric was in pieces, and his soul was stretched thin as his heart trying to collect them all again. Yes, he was standing in the hall on one leg while the other was two floors down in the workshop, and yes, his right arm was disassembled somewhere in Winry’s closet, but these things could be remedied. His body could be whole again, if not completely flesh, and soon enough he would have four working limbs after more than a decade without them, something that was possible only in this world he had been born in.
But love and guilt, he was afraid, would never be one without the other. He imagined Alphonse, his lover, alone and abandoned in Germany, and knew a piece of himself would always be there with him, as much as he professed to hate that devastated world. He had known they could not always be together, and had always turned the conversation away when Alphonse tried to speak of the vast forever that was the rest of their lives. He had known that eventually he would leave, and he had done exactly what he had sworn not to do, and gotten involved. Even now, after all this time, he couldn’t sort out for himself exactly why he had stayed with the younger man, if it was because he loved him in his own right or because he felt useless on his own, away from his brother, and Alphonse had been a ready substitute.
It was as impossible to return to the Alphonse in Germany as it was to return to the Al in his memory, Al the child, the innocent. They had both been innocent.
Now he was afraid he would never be a whole person again.
Chapter Six: Without a Hand to Guide Us
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