Author's Note: Story written for the Secret Coconut, a fic exchange promoted by the community Saint Seiya Super Fics Journal.
For Silveropoly.
Set pretty early…while they were staying with the Hughes family, probably. You'd have to ask them to be sure.
Criiik-crik.
The metal gears in Ed's hand ground slightly together as he opened and closed his hand.
Criiik-crik.
He should oil it, he thought absently as he lay there in the dimness that passed for dark in the city's night.
Criiik-crik.
Criiik-crik.
Open, closed. Open, closed.
He couldn't have said why he did it—he could hardly have formed the question. His thoughts were low and murmured, words and logic temporarily overpowered by images and vague, unwordable ideas.
Al was nearby, sitting on the bed across from him. Not asleep—never asleep—but quiet with his own thoughts, ignoring the soft sounds of his brother's automail fingers.
Criiik-crik.
It felt strange.
It still struck him that way every so often, even after all this time.
He could feel through his automail, true—a fact that even made up for the painful connection process—but it wasn't the same.
Criiik-crik.
It was…blank, somehow, even with its presence.
There were shapes and pressures, and he always knew where his metal limbs were in relation to his body, but it was like sight without color, or like the texture of food without the taste. It just wasn't the same. There was something missing.
Criiik-crik.
Criiik-crik.
That dully aching emptiness behind his metal skin had faded to the point where he barely noticed it under ordinary circumstances, which tonight apparently wasn't.
He couldn't have said why, but the fact remained that he was lying here awake instead of sleeping his cares away.
Criiik-crik.
Ed took in a breath that was fractionally deeper than the others, and let out slowly, but the rhythm of the creaking never faltered
Criiik-crik.
If that were the only thing that were missing—limbs made of flesh and blood—that would have been easier.
But it wasn't that simple.
The unyielding metal of his leg was a constant reminder of his greatest failure, and the scarred connection of his arm was a memento of the worst mistake of his life.
His failure…their mother's absence ate away at him in a way that would have faded away years ago if he had only left well enough alone.
Criiik…
And his mistake…
He stared blankly at the dim outline of his stilled hand.
He had no right to even acknowledge the absence of the few things that were missing from his life, when his brother's whole life was missing.
Crik, whispered the metal as he curled his fist.
His fault.
His fault, his fault, all his fault.
The words tangled up inside him, begging to be freed, begging to beg for forgiveness, but he forced them down. He couldn't do that to his brother, couldn't reopen old wounds like that just to temporarily assuage his conscience.
With a breath that wasn't quite as steady as he'd hoped, Ed lowered his fist to the bedsheets, his dulled senses interpreting it as a ghostly phantom.
Closing his eyes, Ed reviewed the basic principles of alchemy in his mind. As the simple geometrical shapes and tables flashed their way across his eyelids, his hand slowly unclenched. If that hand had had fingernails, they would have left marks in his palm, metal or no.
Another breath, this one satisfactorily even.
The moment bursting with emptiness had passed, but it left him in that odd state of wakefulness that was neither tired nor alert—or perhaps it was both.
Either way, it left him lying there, unable to sleep, floating there in a sense of something that wasn't quite calm.
Somehow, the silence in this almost-serenity was more unbearable than the emptiness. Ed tried shifting slightly, but the silence was too much.
"Hey, Al?"
His own voice surprised him. The silence was hungry, and should have swallowed the words into its own heaviness.
"Yes, brother?"
He wasn't asleep, of course. He never slept. No matter how much he might want to sleep, Al was trapped in the twilight half-life his brother had condemned him to.
Ed's throat suddenly felt like sharing its moisture with the entire Xerxes desert.
"…nothing," he managed to mutter.
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?"
Al's voice—too tinny, too young—was soft, and laced with a worry that Ed didn't deserve. Not from him. Not from anyone, but definitely not from him.
"Can't sleep." He cast about for an excuse. "Too bright."
There was a slight creaking of metal as Al turned his head to glance around the room.
"It's no brighter than it's been any other night."
Ed raised an empty palm of helpless bafflement with an answering creak.
"Maybe I slept too long this afternoon."
"Brother, naps never keep you awake."
Ed chose not to respond, instead closing his eyes and enjoying the silence.
"Brother…" Al said quietly, "…are you blaming yourself again?"
Ed's eyes reopened.
"What makes you think that?" he asked, in what was supposed to be a jovial tone.
"Your hand was bothering you," said Al simply.
Ed blinked, and then waved the offending hand, trying to shake off the truth that clung to it.
"What, this? Nah, it's not—"
"Brother."
Ed stopped moving.
"…yeah?"
He heard Al take a deep breath that he didn't need.
"Brother, you've got to stop doing this to yourself. You keep doing this, over and over again, and it's not going to do anything but hurt you."
Hurt him? Of course it hurt him! It should hurt him!
The conflicting forces within Ed threw him sideways into a sitting position before he even realized he was moving.
"I did this to you!"
Ed's metal arm was outstretched toward Al, ghostly-solid fingers clenched as if to hold the emptiness he'd offered.
"No, you didn't!" Al rose halfway from the bed he'd been sitting on. "I went into that circle with you—"
"I pressured you into it!" interrupted Ed. "You never would have done it if it wasn't for me!"
"But I did do it!"
"I forced you!"
"I chose to."
Ed's contrition vanished into the cold space his brother's form occupied.
Al's voice softened, and he sat back down. "Brother…it might have been your idea, but it was my choice. I wanted to see mom's face again just as much as you did, and I would have done worse if it meant a chance for her." Al bowed his head, and let the silence honor their mother's memory for a moment. "You saved my life. If it weren't for you, I would be dead. I wouldn't have a chance to get my body back." Al creaked and held out his metal right arm. "If it weren't for your sacrifice, I wouldn't even have this body."
For a moment Ed remained utterly motionless. Then he slowly lay back down, legs dangling off the bed, and stared at the ceiling.
"Al?" he asked after a long moment.
"Yes, brother?"
There was another pause of several heartbeats—Ed's heartbeats. He closed his eyes.
"If I had given you a choice, would you still…be like this?"
Creak. Al flexed his fingers.
"Be in this body, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Rather than being dead?"
"…yeah."
There was a long pause.
All sighed. "It's not always easy, being in this body. I wish I could remember what food tasted like, or what it was like to smell things, or…or to feel anything at all…"
Ed covered his face with his hand.
"…but I would still take it over dying."
Ed opened his eyes.
"It's…well, I can still see, still hear, still move around…I still have a chance to do something with my life. And I have you to thank for that, brother."
The shadows on the wall flickered in response to a passing car.
"…you sure?"
"Yes."
Slowly, Ed lowered his hand from his face.
"All right."
"You're going to stop beating yourself up now?"
Ed actually cracked a smile. "Well, maybe for tonight."
Al sighed, but this time it held an edge of humor. "Brother, you're terrible. Now go to sleep before you have to wake up again."
Ed chuckled slightly. "I guess I'll do that."
Perhaps he'd actually be able to.
He rolled so he was all the way back on the bed, and let his limbs fall into one of the uncomfortable-looking arrangements he favored.
Al was right. It was hard to live with a part of your life missing, but it was still better than nothing. And after having lived with that emptiness every single day, Ed found that the little somethings that filled it had become incalculably more precious. If Al, of all people, could have come to hold that way of thinking, who was he to do less?
Ed closed his eyes and curled his hand with one last whispering crick of his gears. The shadows of the room finally lengthened to join the shadows behind his eyes, and he slipped quietly into that place beyond the Truth.