Fic: Ed x Alfons: Immortality
Title: Immortality
Pairing: Ed x Alfons
Rating: PG for swearing and implied sex.
Genre: Spiritual? Sap? Romance? Maybe?
Timeline: Post-movie and post Kids OVA.
Warning: Jen’s extremely sappy writing style. Oh, and implied sex.
Disclaimer: FMA is not mine. Don’t sue.
Notes: Blame Richard Marx, reading too much romantic poetry and sappy fanfiction, and a burst of inspiration…and here you go. Not totally happy with this, but you guys might appreciate it. So…here it is.
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They say that through words, a man can reach immortality. Just a single step, the lines on the page burned forever into the annals of history, no matter how insignificant, allowing their name to settle into the hearts and minds of all those who read it, even if the readers themselves don’t know of it at first.
They say that paper is the only true way that a man can be seen. Photos, memories, and even accomplishments in a fit of unrestrained genius; all fade away with the wind, but the ink never seems to fade away completely, and even when the pages flutter away, someone else will find them and read them, allowing the person to be seen all over again.
Immortality.
Rememberance.
He had wanted both.
“I just want someone to remember me,” he had said that night, running his fingers through wheat-colored hair, blue eyes boring into gold. “I want to leave proof that I was alive.”
“You will,” the other man replied, sleepy at the time from post-coital interaction and his own exhaustion seeping into young muscles, “Now go to sleep. Won’t accomplish anything if you kill yourself before you get anything done.”
…Even if it was only in his own heart. In his own lips, in his own memories. They would soon fade, but for now, that was enough.
The pen started moving over the paper, but somehow no words could come out. How could one describe a tender, gentle smile? Warm lips, touching one’s collarbone under the blanket of darkness? How could one write about those hands, deft in everything they did, whether it be gliding over soft skin or working the kinks out of a miscellaneous machine, just to ease his own troubled mind?
The writer’s hand shook, clenching his eyes shut as he tried to remember. Old bones started to creak, familiar pains shooting through a weakened hand and even weaker frame. The automail had to balance him to keep him from falling over the desk in a pained heap, age catching up with him.
“If you went to my grave, and you had one thing to say to it before you left, what would you say?”
He glanced up from his spot on the bed, still sweaty and sticky from their previous activities, golden eyes dim in the moonlight.
“The hell?”
“If you went to my grave…” the other man repeated, blue eyes closed now.
“I heard what you said. Why the hell are you spouting this stuff now?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Alfons had whispered, giving his companion a featherlight kiss on the cheek before rolling over. “I guess I get sentimental after sex.”
“Obviously. Now go to sleep. You’re not leavin’ for a long time, y’know? We’ll worry about graves and death when we come to it.”
He had been a fool. Only a week later-a week, he had held his bloody body in his arms, speechless and unsure of what to say. Tears were the only words he could shed, and even at his grave, no utterance could escape his lips for the one who had asked him that night to say even one thing to him when he was gone.
Failure.
The young man who wanted so desperately to be remembered was forgotten-the only one who remembered was him, and even then his memories couldn’t be conveyed. He couldn’t say them, not even to a harmless sheet of paper-
“If you went to my grave, and you had one thing to say to it before you left, what would you say?”
…
Gold eyes closed, a pen moving in his hands of his own accord, unsure yet sure. Clumsy yet refined. The words were not of a flurry of emotion, or of a work of passion.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Thought.
Nostalgic.
Yearning for better times, for better days.
If only he could go back…
“Alfons Heiderich, I love you.”
Even with these words, these simple words that nobody but he would understand…
He knew then that Alfons would never be forgotten.