Disclaimer: I do not own young Ed and young Al, nor living Trisha. I do not own my reference to the lost city of Xerxes, and I do not own fifth graders.
A/N: Woah! No, it isn't a oneshot, it almost was, but then I decided it wasn't. So it isn't. It will be a collection of one shots, but they will tie together. In a way. So, tell me what you think, I suppose. :)
Blood Brothers
That's what we are. Because my blood is tied to your soul. And your blood is all over my hands.
I.
Edward ran down the country hillside with a skip in his step. His messy blonde hair whipped against the back of his neck and tangled in the breeze. Surely his mom was going to be angry when she brought the brush through the rat's nest it was bound to become before he donned his pajamas and got ready for bed tonight. But he'd be glad for the argument, however. He was eight now. He could brush his own hair. He would tell her so, firmly, and then he would insist upon doing so. And she would smile and be so proud of what a responsible young man he was becoming.
Al would probably jump at the chance for attention. Grab the hairbrush from his hands and insist she brush his hair for him.
Ed would laugh because Al was such a little kid sometimes, and Al would be mad. He would clench his little fists and declare Ed to be "Mean!" and run out of the house. Run down to the river.
Ed would always come and find him later, but he would never apologize.
The river finally came into view and Edward slowed down to a walk. Putting his excitement on hold when it threatened to bubble up inside of him. He could see the singular head of light brunette hair that faced toward the currents. He watched as the small boy poked his finger into the water, watching the liquid swirl around his digit that obstructed its gentle path.
"Hey," Ed said when he reached his younger brother. He didn't sit beside him and stare into the clear mess of fluid and rocks and foliage that was this river that Alphonse always found comfort in. He never did. He stayed on his feet, one hand outstretched, as his brother turned and looked up at him. He reached out and grabbed a hold of Edward's hand, hoisting himself up and off of the ground and standing beside him.
"Hey," Alphonse mumbled in response, sounding less than enthused.
Edward thought back to what had led to this, his brother's retreat to the river and ultimately, the presence of the knife now resting in his front left pocket.
Edward had been with a few of the older boys from school. He had promised Al that he would go home today right away and that they would practice a new transmutation that they had just read about, but the two boys had approached him immediately upon dismissal and he had felt very... very proud... cool, even, upon their request that he come with them that afternoon. These boys were fifth graders! The fact that they even knew of him filled his little heart with a strange sense of vanity and satisfaction. He realized later that it was wrong of him to ditch his own brother for a chance to be more popular. But if he was hanging out with fifth graders, he doubted that the children in third grade would have the guts to call him a nerd anymore.
They called him a nerd for a reason, where as the other kids in his grade would have happily gone along with anything that these two boys would have asked of them – it didn't take Edward long to figure out they were using him.
Being a scapegoat was not something that Ed found he greatly appreciated. He had had his fair share of undeserved blame offered up on to him, but he also knew that they were not trying to blame him, they were trying to make him deserve the blame. He had a good sense of what was morally correct and was was morally wrong. His father had left him at a young age, that was wrong. His mother had stayed, that was right. Winry's parents had been killed, that was wrong. Alphonse had stolen a pencil once, that was wrong, and the teacher had told him so. He had cried. Breaking into a house and stealing a man's gun was wrong, very wrong, and he immediately knew this.
"We just want to see it Ed, it'll be cool, we'll let you see it," Edward wasn't very comfortable with the casual tone that the boys used with him. There was some underlying presence in it, that told him they were talking to him like a child. As if he could not possibly understand.
"All you have to do is go in through that window and go into the cabinet. It should be right in there,"
And if you get caught, we'll be Scot-free! That was the part they were forgetting to mention. Edward heard it all the same. He wasn't dumb. He was, in fact, quite smart.
"Come on Ed, we're only asking this little bitty thing of you. Or are you chicken? Because we could find someone cooler to hang out with."
The sky was beginning to grow dark, and Edward thought that he probably should had just gone home to Alphonse right away. He was probably worried about him, when all he had really done was abandon him for some no-good kids who didn't really want to be his friends in the first place. But all the same, the word "chicken" rang in his ears like some sort of alarm that he couldn't get to shut off. It infuriated him and made his jaw clench with determination. He almost considered doing what it was that they wanted him to do, but it hit him that that was exactly what they were driving at. He quickly redirected his anger in their direction.
"You're only trying to find someone to do this for you so you don't get in trouble. You two are obviously the only cowards here,"
The two boys had looked down at him from their considerably larger heights with an expression of genuine surprise across both of their faces. Clearly they had not thought that he would ever not go through with what they wanted. And they had also not expected and insult to boot, their own words pitted against them instead of the small child they had pressured into this heist.
The slap came unexpected as well, and Edward felt his jaw scream in protest as the older boy's hand made contact with the side of his face. The force of it made him stumble back and trip over his own feet, landing hard on his buttocks at the edge of Mr. Simone's carefully tended yard. The laughter that accompanied the violence made ashamed tears prick at the corners of his eyes, the sharp sting of pain that shot up through his face did not help, and he felt very weak suddenly. Anger flew through him again, how dare they make fun of him like this. They were cruel, and irrational. Solving their problems in the very first way that crossed their mind, regardless of what it was they had to hit, or who it was.
Edward had no problem with this manner of dealing with problems, and he would show them that they weren't the only ones who could land a good hit to the face.
He wasn't slapping though. The sissies.
His small fist connected with the oldest boy's nose and blood immediately spurted from the boy's nostrils upon impact. Ed felt a satisfying rush of adrenaline and he turned to the other boy, propelling himself forward and pushing every ounce of his body weight into the other boys abdomen. They fell to the ground in a harsh tumble when he collided with the fifth grader that had slapped him earlier, the slightly younger boy who would do anything to make the oldest one give him an appreciative glance. It didn't take much to make Edward twice as mad at the boy then he was when he began attacking him. He thought of how easy it would have been for this boy to decide to slap Alphonse if he looked at him wrong, or wouldn't sneak into a house and steal a gun. And both of those things, the slapping, and the pressure that the boy wouldn't think twice about placing on his younger brother, made Edward's anger spike to new levels.
Before he knew it his fists were plowing their way into the boy's face again and again, and the older boy was yelling at him to stop. His hand was clawing at his face that was now covered blood that he had accidentally smeared across his own cheeks when he fell. But Edward's temper would not be cooled, especially not by the boy who had called him a chicken, a coward, when really that's what these two were.
Two arms wrapped around his shoulders and threw him off the boy he had been straddling moments before, and Edward watched as Mr. Simone fussed over the fifth graders that had so merciless attempted to set him up. They deserved what they had gotten, but as the middle-aged man looked back in his direction, his eyes cold, Edward knew that he was the one who was in trouble.
When Mr. Simone had gotten both of the fifth graders attended to – it seemed Edward had managed to fracture the youngest boy's jaw, while the other simply had a bloodied nose – Edward had been driven silently back to his own house. The look on his mother's face when she saw his bruised face and the blood on his knuckles was horrible, and the horror on Al's was worse. Trisha was, at the very least, disappointed, Edward seemed to get into fights more and more as of late, and this had certainly been the worst. It was beyond her how her sweet little eight year old had managed to fracture a ten year old's jaw, and she was terribly mad at him in the first place. For he had not only been trespassing on Mr. Simone's property, but why had he been out so late with those two boys in the first place? When his brother had been waiting patiently with him all evening, he had missed dinner, and surely he should have known that she would have been worried sick.
The next day Alphonse was positively furious with him. A long argument had followed his arrival home between the two of him. In which Edward prepared to defend his honor and his the seven year old would simply not hear a word of it. He was convinced that Ed had done something unspeakable, and had been about to do something even worse. The older brother he looked up to had ditched him to do awful things and he couldn't stand him anymore, he had said. There had been mentions of brotherhood and how sad he had made him, and about how Edward must not have loved him at all. And all the while Edward had tried to explain that those two boys, had it coming. Alphonse, however, did not find this to be an appropriate explanation, and had claimed he was a bad brother.
"Fine," Edward had finally sighed loudly, exasperated, "maybe I don't want to be your brother anyway!"
And that had done it. Alphonse had screwed up his face in a look of pain and sadness and he had ran out the door as fast as his little legs could carry him, a shout of "I hate you!" following him out the threshold and down the front porch steps.
Edward had stood in his wake and watched his mother shake her head disapprovingly.
"Go after him," she said, as if he should already have been out the door.
The disappointed look she gave him in that moment broke Edward's heart, and he had ran out of the door with a frustrated yell that did not form any words, despite having no intentions of finding Alphonse.
So, he had gone to the one place that always calmed him down. The library.
In those books he had found something that made him ripe with excitement, and, forgetting the pain that was shooting through his own jaw, he had scrambled home. In his father's old study he had found a pocket knife with a thick wooden casing that was stained a dark red color and filled with intricate carvings that seemed old in style. When he looked closely they seemed to depict some sort of city, and the people that lived in it, but he paid it no more than a second of appreciation before dropping it in his left pocket and running back out of the door. On his way to the river where he knew he would find Alphonse, who, stubbornly, would wait there all day if he had to.
"Guess what I read about in the library today?" Edward asked Al, pulling the pocket knife out of his pocket and holding it up as he turned to face his younger brother.
"Is that dad's knife?" Al asked, "Why do you have dad's knife?"
"You know how chemical bonds can only be broken down by alchemy, Al? Like the water in that river. It's just one molecule of oxygen bonded to two molecule of hydrogen. They're very different things, and bonded together they create one singular substance. H2O. Water. Alchemy can break it down but it always gets put back together again," Edward looked at the river as he spoke, pulling the blade out form where it lay inside of the wood and watching as it glinted in the sunlight, "I read a story today about two brothers. They went through a lot of stuff and they fought a lot but in the end they ended up alright. In the beginning they cut open their palms and they shook hands and they said that they were blood brothers, and that it would hold them together through anything. And in the end it turned out that it did." He dragged the tip of the blade across the soft part of his hand lightly, so that it hardly hurt at all, but it still drew a bit of blood.
Alphonse eyed the blade nervously, "But-"
"I promise it didn't even hurt," Ed said, "you can do it yourself."
Al bit his bottom lip and grimaced, taking the knife from Ed's hands. With quite a bit of hesitation, he pulled the side of the knife across his palm and winced, tears coming into his eyes as he watched the red liquid bubble up to the edges of the cut. Edward patted him on the back with his other hand, trying to reassure him that it would be fine. It was only a little cut after all, practically like a paper cut.
He held out his hand and Al clasped his own small fist around Ed's, their grasp was firm and filled with promises.
"So you know what this means right?" Ed asked, "We're gonna go through a lot of stuff and we're gonna fight a lot but in the end things are gonna end up alright."
"Does that mean this is our beginning?"
"Of course, and all we have to do to get to our end is remember that we'll be brothers forever. Nothing can change that."
"Like what you said about the water right?"
"Yeah, Al, alchemy can break it apart, but it always gets put back together again. We might break apart but we'll end up together again, because we've got this bond between us. We might look a little different in the end, but we'll still be brothers."
"Okay," Al said, "I'm sorry for saying I hated you."
"I'm sorry for saying I didn't want to be your brother." Ed said, and he thought for a moment, pulling his lips into a crooked smile and squeezing Al's hand again, "Blood brothers?" he asked.
"Blood brothers." Al affirmed, with a smile of his own.
