To Find Shamballa: Chapter 3
Title: To Find Shamballa
Pairing: Edward Elric x Alfons Heiderich
Side Pairings: Alphonse Elric x Winry Rockbell, Roy Mustang x Sheska, onesided Roy Mustang x Riza Hawkeye
Rating: G-NC-17
Summary: Alfons Heiderich had gone to Transylvania to pursue his passion, and maybe find a way to help save his tattered country. Little did he know that he would find Edward Elric.
Thanks: To my beta
ssjkawaiitenshi, who read over this for me, even when she was really busy~ Thanks so much!!
Note: This is the remake of the entire Movie arc. This is heavy DIVERGENCE. This is EXTREME DIVERGENCE. DIVERGENCE WITH A CAPITAL DIVERGENCE xD This will also be posted on Fanfiction.net, but that is the cut version of this story. The complete unedited version is LJ only.
Note 2: This one is a bit short too...actually, this is shorter than Chapter Two, I think...Originally this was going to be much longer, but instead I decided to separate the whole chapter into two seperate ones, in order to keep the chapters from getting too long. I hope you guys don't mind! ^^;;
Note 3: For those of you wondering what happened between Noa and Ed, all of that is in Chapter 4~
Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two
----
Resembool, 1924
-----
Name: Alphonse Elric
Age: Appears 10, but is really 14.
Nationality: Amestrian
Occupation: None
-----
Every morning, the view outside his window looked the same.
Blue skies, rolling clouds…there were some nice green grasses and some hills out there too, with some flowers dotting the landscape. It wasn’t the view from his old window…but it was a familiar view just the same…the view from the Rockbells’ guest room that he had slept in so many times when he was younger.
It was peaceful…beautiful.
In a way…it was like that other place that he would see in his dreams.
His dreams, huh?
He was him…maybe.
He thought he was…though he was older, and he was much much taller. Tall as an adult, but thin and skinny…with washed-out blond hair and blue eyes. If Winry was a boy, and older…would she have looked like him? Well, with his own face, maybe.
There was no such thing as Alchemy in his dreams. Machinery, and lots of it-Winry would have had a ball there. ‘He’ would always be drawing these strange blueprints, making designs and plans to build flying machines that flew into space.
“Hey Alfons, what’re you looking at?”
The taller man was familiar…short blond hair, tufted out in the front but neatly cut in the back…he was chewing on something…something that looked like a cigarette, though it wasn’t even lit. He must have been at least five years older than ‘him’, though…
“Oh! Well, ah…nothing much, really…Just review…This is an equation detailing the conservation of momentum in a moving object.”
“The what?”
‘He’ had blushed a bit. He had always, always blushed. It was often said that his face would work itself into a permanent one if he kept being so embarrassed all the time. “The Conservation of Momentum. See, look…”
He scribbled some words on the paper in front of him-the equation looked similar to something he would have done while performing Alchemy:
“See? “p” stands for the fluid density, and D/DT is the substantive derivative…also called the material derivative…”
The taller man’s eyes almost widened a bit, but he waved him off, shaking his head.
“Sorry, this is just way too much for me, Alfons. I’ll just stick to what I know and let you revolutionize the world of science, all right? Besides, dinner’s ready. You scientist types are always skipping meals-it’ll put a guy like me out of work, even if I am just the hired help.”
“Though you don’t have much work to do anyway, do you Mr. Havoc?” ‘He’ blinked, almost laughing past his blush. “You help Frau Oberth cook, but…”
“I’m more of a butler than a cook, actually. I was a cook too back in the military, so I’m used to this sort of work.”
“You don’t mind? Coming all the way down here for work, even though work is scarce?”
All he got was a grin. “Hey, I’m just happy I got the job. For a foriegner like me, I’m lucky if I’d even get to clean the sticky mess left over in brothels. And let me tell you, Alfons…”
“H-hey!”
“Whoops, sorry kid. Forgot that you’re not into that sort of thing.”
“A-ah…”
The insides were made of books, libraries and strange blueprints that lined the tables. And engines that several men worked on as a team, competing.
He and his brother used to do that too…though they competed in other ways, to be sure.
Al’s heart felt a bit of a twinge.
‘He’ had lost his brother too…he had talked about it once, though it was to himself…and not out loud really.
He wondered if his brother looked anything like his brother?
They had similarities, but they also had differences too. Winry had said that he would get his memories back of that time eventually…in dreams or otherwise.
But these didn’t seem like memories.
These weren’t his memories at all. Amestris ran on Alchemy, and Physics took a heavy backseat. Sure, there was the basic physics…Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Energy…any Alchemist worth his salt knew these things and more-but then it went to the simple level and beyond…much further than what was commonly studied in Amestris.
Fluid mechanics…burst engines…the whirring of bearings, and the scent of machine oil. He wasn’t even there, but he could smell it-he could feel the grease on his hands, though they weren’t his hands; he could smell dinner, even though he wasn’t the one smelling it; he could hear the engines scream in the testing room, though his ears weren’t the ones straining against the sound.
These weren’t memories. They couldn’t have been.
These sorts of things didn’t even exist where he was from.
But…
“You called me, sir?”
There was a young man standing in front of the desk…his back was turned to him, long golden hair spilling down over his shoulders in a high ponytail.
He was short-well, shorter than him, anyway…his brown coat was nice and thick and long…it must have been made from a soft material too, though he wasn’t sure if he himself would have had the courage to go and touch it, and there were white gloves on his hands…
Al felt a sort of jump in ‘his’ chest. Almost a bit of a nostalgic twang…an anxiety.
“Yes. Alfons…let me introduce you…”
The young man at the desk had only started to turn around…gold eyes only starting to show, and that achingly familiar face coming into view-
Al had woken up crying. His cheeks were wet, and he knew that his pillow had to have been stained from some of it.
What an imagination he had.
He not only thought up a world that didn’t exist, with that older him and those amazing machines…
But now his own brother appeared in them, too.
* * *
Getting out of bed used to be such a chore for Al-when he had first come to.
One moment he was in his basement with his brother, and the next he was in another place entirely-an amphitheater, maybe. It was cold, and for some reason he wasn’t wearing anything. Just lying there naked and alone on a tile floor, until a pretty young woman named Rose found him, wrapping him in some shoddy old rags she got from God-knows-where before taking him home.
Carrying, more like. He couldn’t walk, could hardly speak. Nothing but squeaks and strange mumbles, anyway…his arms were barely moving though his fingers and toes would wiggle when he wanted them to.
He wished she didn’t have to carry him all the way to Central Station, and then from Resembool station to the Rockbells’.
It was embarrassing.
And having Winry (older, taller, and prettier Winry) see him like that was even worse.
But there was nothing he could do.
…It had been four months since then.
Four months, Alphonse Elric thought, trying to pull himself up off the bedroom floor, and I still trip and fall off the bed every morning.
At least he could get up afterwards-that was the important thing. Falling down was embarrassing in itself, but if he had to rely on someone else to keep lifting him up and carrying him again, he wasn’t quite sure what he would do.
Though he did trip enough as it was.
Stupid legs.
If he walked out of the room and tripped on that same crack, and Winry saw hi-
Wait.
Winry wasn’t there today. She had said yesterday that she and Granny had to leave early…something about a shipment-or-other, and that they would be back by noon at the very least.
That left him alone again.
Well. Not alone…
Den was probably sleeping downstairs.
But that still meant that the house would be silent.
Al made it to his feet, wobbling a bit on clumsy legs as he walked towards the door, swinging it open.
With the way the sun was shining, it had to have been eight in the morning at the very most.
…It was far too quiet.
No talking, no walking…no sounds of stepping feet.
Al purposely made his steps louder, nearly stomping towards the stairs-
As funny as that looked with him weaving around like he did.
Like he was drunk…but he was too young to drink.
“C’mon Al! We’re just going to sneak a little!”
“Brother, you know that we can’t! We’re too young to drink alcohol!”
“Teacher’s not even going to notice-you know how she gets when you give her booze-come on!”
…That day, Ed had snuck two drinks and gotten horribly drunk…Al had managed to get his brother out of the attack radius before Izumi found out, but…
…Brother.
Why had he disappeared? Where was he?
It didn’t make any sense.
Winry hadn’t told him much…though with the rueful glances towards the old pictures…the pieces were starting to piece together, if not a little.
She had said that he had lost his memories of a time of great hardship…when he and his brother were on a journey to find something that no human could reach. Rose had said that they went on a “Pilgrimage” to pay penance and somehow right whatever wrong that they had done.
Attempting their mother’s resurrection, he was sure.
And whenever he had asked about the huge suit of armor(it was in the study back home, he was sure of it-he didn’t remember much, but the few fuzzy memories he had showed that thing at least) in some of the pictures, nobody had really said anything. Ed was in the pictures-but he was nowhere to be found. Just that armor.
And they had said that he was supposed to be fourteen years old now.
Then why did he look exactly the same as he did…
It didn’t make any sense.
He remembered being grabbed by those things that night, and then being pulled into the darkness.
And then…the story speaks for itself.
Lost years, lost memories, the armor that seemed to stand in for himself, his brother’s sudden disappearance.
The dreams.
Four months and nothing to show for it, too.
His brother was still gone…
He wasn’t getting any closer to finding out the truth behind any of this…
And the dreams certainly weren’t helping, either.
And then, with last night…
He wasn’t sure if he was going to get any rest, awake or asleep.
* * *
Transylvania, 1921
-----
“…Alfons!”
“Mmnnh…ja?”
The workroom…wait. A desk?
He was asleep?
How long had I been out? I didn’t even notice falling asleep…
One moment, he had been in the workroom, talking to Dorrecht about some design flaw or another, Edward off doing God-knows-what after blowing up at Law (In his poor German, of course) about how the engine design wasn’t going to work with the energy output-though admittedly, Edward’s arguments were plausible, and denying Alfons’s frantic offer to translate with a loud English “Butt the hell out”, he made a situation go from bad to worse in a span of ten seconds.
Law had nearly exploded, and Edward did explode, storming off out of the workroom and slamming the door behind him.
Alfons didn’t know whether or not to go after the man, or to stay behind…
Even though he hadn’t known Edward long, he was already proving to be a handful.
Scheisse.
Bleary blue eyes blinked open, fuzzy vision becoming clear again into an empty room, chairs pulled in and materials strewn around. The engines were off, the lights were low…
Nighttime?
Oh God, how long was he sleeping?
“Alfons? Are you okay? You were sleeping for a reeeally long time.”
Brown eyes were there, blinking at him.
Noa?
Alfons sat up fully, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Noa…sweetie, what did I tell you about coming into the workroom?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay…I just don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all…”
“I won’t get hurt-nobody’s here! And I’m not going to touch the engins or anything.”
“You mean ‘engines’?” Alfons asked with a chuckle.
“That’s what I said!” Noa puffed out her cheeks, pouting. “And besides, it’s not nice to tell Mr. Edward that you’re going to do one thing and not do it!”
Mr. Edward?
Alfons blinked-and not just once, either.
Edward asked her to come get him?
“Mr. Edward asked you?” Alfons asked.
Noa nodded. “Uh-huh. He said he can’t find his room without you, and since you live together he doesn’t want to go to the wrong area, you know? This house is really big.”
So that was it. Without him, Edward was lost-it was understandable, really. After his earlier display, it was a wonder that Edward wanted to get along with anyone at all…let alone room with anybody. But when one had no choice, they had no choice, perhaps. Pride would get pushed to the curb and then slight humility would follow.
Just like him.
…Someone who didn’t exist, dammit.
But in those dreams, Al dreamed…
Dreams were only the mind’s way of releasing what it was that it had dealt with, seen, and experienced in a single day. The sooner he would realize that, the sooner he would be done with these silly…
“Just be nice to Mr. Edward, okay?” Noa shifted a bit where she stood, her purple skirt swaying around her ankles. “He’s lonely away from home.”
Lonely away from home.
No, no, no, no…he’s just away from his home country. He had said he was from America…right?
Alfons couldn’t help but smile a little.
“Of course, Noa. I’ll do my best.”
Pairing: Edward Elric x Alfons Heiderich
Side Pairings: Alphonse Elric x Winry Rockbell, Roy Mustang x Sheska, onesided Roy Mustang x Riza Hawkeye
Rating: G-NC-17
Summary: Alfons Heiderich had gone to Transylvania to pursue his passion, and maybe find a way to help save his tattered country. Little did he know that he would find Edward Elric.
Thanks: To my beta
ssjkawaiitenshi, who read over this for me, even when she was really busy~ Thanks so much!!
Note: This is the remake of the entire Movie arc. This is heavy DIVERGENCE. This is EXTREME DIVERGENCE. DIVERGENCE WITH A CAPITAL DIVERGENCE xD This will also be posted on Fanfiction.net, but that is the cut version of this story. The complete unedited version is LJ only.
Note 2: This one is a bit short too...actually, this is shorter than Chapter Two, I think...Originally this was going to be much longer, but instead I decided to separate the whole chapter into two seperate ones, in order to keep the chapters from getting too long. I hope you guys don't mind! ^^;;
Note 3: For those of you wondering what happened between Noa and Ed, all of that is in Chapter 4~
Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two
----
Resembool, 1924
-----
Name: Alphonse Elric
Age: Appears 10, but is really 14.
Nationality: Amestrian
Occupation: None
-----
Every morning, the view outside his window looked the same.
Blue skies, rolling clouds…there were some nice green grasses and some hills out there too, with some flowers dotting the landscape. It wasn’t the view from his old window…but it was a familiar view just the same…the view from the Rockbells’ guest room that he had slept in so many times when he was younger.
It was peaceful…beautiful.
In a way…it was like that other place that he would see in his dreams.
His dreams, huh?
He was him…maybe.
He thought he was…though he was older, and he was much much taller. Tall as an adult, but thin and skinny…with washed-out blond hair and blue eyes. If Winry was a boy, and older…would she have looked like him? Well, with his own face, maybe.
There was no such thing as Alchemy in his dreams. Machinery, and lots of it-Winry would have had a ball there. ‘He’ would always be drawing these strange blueprints, making designs and plans to build flying machines that flew into space.
“Hey Alfons, what’re you looking at?”
The taller man was familiar…short blond hair, tufted out in the front but neatly cut in the back…he was chewing on something…something that looked like a cigarette, though it wasn’t even lit. He must have been at least five years older than ‘him’, though…
“Oh! Well, ah…nothing much, really…Just review…This is an equation detailing the conservation of momentum in a moving object.”
“The what?”
‘He’ had blushed a bit. He had always, always blushed. It was often said that his face would work itself into a permanent one if he kept being so embarrassed all the time. “The Conservation of Momentum. See, look…”
He scribbled some words on the paper in front of him-the equation looked similar to something he would have done while performing Alchemy:
“See? “p” stands for the fluid density, and D/DT is the substantive derivative…also called the material derivative…”
The taller man’s eyes almost widened a bit, but he waved him off, shaking his head.
“Sorry, this is just way too much for me, Alfons. I’ll just stick to what I know and let you revolutionize the world of science, all right? Besides, dinner’s ready. You scientist types are always skipping meals-it’ll put a guy like me out of work, even if I am just the hired help.”
“Though you don’t have much work to do anyway, do you Mr. Havoc?” ‘He’ blinked, almost laughing past his blush. “You help Frau Oberth cook, but…”
“I’m more of a butler than a cook, actually. I was a cook too back in the military, so I’m used to this sort of work.”
“You don’t mind? Coming all the way down here for work, even though work is scarce?”
All he got was a grin. “Hey, I’m just happy I got the job. For a foriegner like me, I’m lucky if I’d even get to clean the sticky mess left over in brothels. And let me tell you, Alfons…”
“H-hey!”
“Whoops, sorry kid. Forgot that you’re not into that sort of thing.”
“A-ah…”
The insides were made of books, libraries and strange blueprints that lined the tables. And engines that several men worked on as a team, competing.
He and his brother used to do that too…though they competed in other ways, to be sure.
Al’s heart felt a bit of a twinge.
‘He’ had lost his brother too…he had talked about it once, though it was to himself…and not out loud really.
He wondered if his brother looked anything like his brother?
They had similarities, but they also had differences too. Winry had said that he would get his memories back of that time eventually…in dreams or otherwise.
But these didn’t seem like memories.
These weren’t his memories at all. Amestris ran on Alchemy, and Physics took a heavy backseat. Sure, there was the basic physics…Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Energy…any Alchemist worth his salt knew these things and more-but then it went to the simple level and beyond…much further than what was commonly studied in Amestris.
Fluid mechanics…burst engines…the whirring of bearings, and the scent of machine oil. He wasn’t even there, but he could smell it-he could feel the grease on his hands, though they weren’t his hands; he could smell dinner, even though he wasn’t the one smelling it; he could hear the engines scream in the testing room, though his ears weren’t the ones straining against the sound.
These weren’t memories. They couldn’t have been.
These sorts of things didn’t even exist where he was from.
But…
“You called me, sir?”
There was a young man standing in front of the desk…his back was turned to him, long golden hair spilling down over his shoulders in a high ponytail.
He was short-well, shorter than him, anyway…his brown coat was nice and thick and long…it must have been made from a soft material too, though he wasn’t sure if he himself would have had the courage to go and touch it, and there were white gloves on his hands…
Al felt a sort of jump in ‘his’ chest. Almost a bit of a nostalgic twang…an anxiety.
“Yes. Alfons…let me introduce you…”
The young man at the desk had only started to turn around…gold eyes only starting to show, and that achingly familiar face coming into view-
Al had woken up crying. His cheeks were wet, and he knew that his pillow had to have been stained from some of it.
What an imagination he had.
He not only thought up a world that didn’t exist, with that older him and those amazing machines…
But now his own brother appeared in them, too.
* * *
Getting out of bed used to be such a chore for Al-when he had first come to.
One moment he was in his basement with his brother, and the next he was in another place entirely-an amphitheater, maybe. It was cold, and for some reason he wasn’t wearing anything. Just lying there naked and alone on a tile floor, until a pretty young woman named Rose found him, wrapping him in some shoddy old rags she got from God-knows-where before taking him home.
Carrying, more like. He couldn’t walk, could hardly speak. Nothing but squeaks and strange mumbles, anyway…his arms were barely moving though his fingers and toes would wiggle when he wanted them to.
He wished she didn’t have to carry him all the way to Central Station, and then from Resembool station to the Rockbells’.
It was embarrassing.
And having Winry (older, taller, and prettier Winry) see him like that was even worse.
But there was nothing he could do.
…It had been four months since then.
Four months, Alphonse Elric thought, trying to pull himself up off the bedroom floor, and I still trip and fall off the bed every morning.
At least he could get up afterwards-that was the important thing. Falling down was embarrassing in itself, but if he had to rely on someone else to keep lifting him up and carrying him again, he wasn’t quite sure what he would do.
Though he did trip enough as it was.
Stupid legs.
If he walked out of the room and tripped on that same crack, and Winry saw hi-
Wait.
Winry wasn’t there today. She had said yesterday that she and Granny had to leave early…something about a shipment-or-other, and that they would be back by noon at the very least.
That left him alone again.
Well. Not alone…
Den was probably sleeping downstairs.
But that still meant that the house would be silent.
Al made it to his feet, wobbling a bit on clumsy legs as he walked towards the door, swinging it open.
With the way the sun was shining, it had to have been eight in the morning at the very most.
…It was far too quiet.
No talking, no walking…no sounds of stepping feet.
Al purposely made his steps louder, nearly stomping towards the stairs-
As funny as that looked with him weaving around like he did.
Like he was drunk…but he was too young to drink.
“C’mon Al! We’re just going to sneak a little!”
“Brother, you know that we can’t! We’re too young to drink alcohol!”
“Teacher’s not even going to notice-you know how she gets when you give her booze-come on!”
…That day, Ed had snuck two drinks and gotten horribly drunk…Al had managed to get his brother out of the attack radius before Izumi found out, but…
…Brother.
Why had he disappeared? Where was he?
It didn’t make any sense.
Winry hadn’t told him much…though with the rueful glances towards the old pictures…the pieces were starting to piece together, if not a little.
She had said that he had lost his memories of a time of great hardship…when he and his brother were on a journey to find something that no human could reach. Rose had said that they went on a “Pilgrimage” to pay penance and somehow right whatever wrong that they had done.
Attempting their mother’s resurrection, he was sure.
And whenever he had asked about the huge suit of armor(it was in the study back home, he was sure of it-he didn’t remember much, but the few fuzzy memories he had showed that thing at least) in some of the pictures, nobody had really said anything. Ed was in the pictures-but he was nowhere to be found. Just that armor.
And they had said that he was supposed to be fourteen years old now.
Then why did he look exactly the same as he did…
It didn’t make any sense.
He remembered being grabbed by those things that night, and then being pulled into the darkness.
And then…the story speaks for itself.
Lost years, lost memories, the armor that seemed to stand in for himself, his brother’s sudden disappearance.
The dreams.
Four months and nothing to show for it, too.
His brother was still gone…
He wasn’t getting any closer to finding out the truth behind any of this…
And the dreams certainly weren’t helping, either.
And then, with last night…
He wasn’t sure if he was going to get any rest, awake or asleep.
* * *
Transylvania, 1921
-----
“…Alfons!”
“Mmnnh…ja?”
The workroom…wait. A desk?
He was asleep?
How long had I been out? I didn’t even notice falling asleep…
One moment, he had been in the workroom, talking to Dorrecht about some design flaw or another, Edward off doing God-knows-what after blowing up at Law (In his poor German, of course) about how the engine design wasn’t going to work with the energy output-though admittedly, Edward’s arguments were plausible, and denying Alfons’s frantic offer to translate with a loud English “Butt the hell out”, he made a situation go from bad to worse in a span of ten seconds.
Law had nearly exploded, and Edward did explode, storming off out of the workroom and slamming the door behind him.
Alfons didn’t know whether or not to go after the man, or to stay behind…
Even though he hadn’t known Edward long, he was already proving to be a handful.
Scheisse.
Bleary blue eyes blinked open, fuzzy vision becoming clear again into an empty room, chairs pulled in and materials strewn around. The engines were off, the lights were low…
Nighttime?
Oh God, how long was he sleeping?
“Alfons? Are you okay? You were sleeping for a reeeally long time.”
Brown eyes were there, blinking at him.
Noa?
Alfons sat up fully, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Noa…sweetie, what did I tell you about coming into the workroom?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay…I just don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all…”
“I won’t get hurt-nobody’s here! And I’m not going to touch the engins or anything.”
“You mean ‘engines’?” Alfons asked with a chuckle.
“That’s what I said!” Noa puffed out her cheeks, pouting. “And besides, it’s not nice to tell Mr. Edward that you’re going to do one thing and not do it!”
Mr. Edward?
Alfons blinked-and not just once, either.
Edward asked her to come get him?
“Mr. Edward asked you?” Alfons asked.
Noa nodded. “Uh-huh. He said he can’t find his room without you, and since you live together he doesn’t want to go to the wrong area, you know? This house is really big.”
So that was it. Without him, Edward was lost-it was understandable, really. After his earlier display, it was a wonder that Edward wanted to get along with anyone at all…let alone room with anybody. But when one had no choice, they had no choice, perhaps. Pride would get pushed to the curb and then slight humility would follow.
Just like him.
…Someone who didn’t exist, dammit.
But in those dreams, Al dreamed…
Dreams were only the mind’s way of releasing what it was that it had dealt with, seen, and experienced in a single day. The sooner he would realize that, the sooner he would be done with these silly…
“Just be nice to Mr. Edward, okay?” Noa shifted a bit where she stood, her purple skirt swaying around her ankles. “He’s lonely away from home.”
Lonely away from home.
No, no, no, no…he’s just away from his home country. He had said he was from America…right?
Alfons couldn’t help but smile a little.
“Of course, Noa. I’ll do my best.”