"Look, you bastard! You think you can get away with this by being all nice and saying "oh look how my sons have grown up into fine, talented alchemists"? I don't think so somehow!.."

In a corner of the room, Den lay curled up, willing with all his doggy might the shouting match away. The very one-sided shouting match, he might have added. How could Ed screech for so long without getting tired? Still, he understood where he got some of that frustration from, to some degree. His own amputated stump was acting up on him, and he knew with certainty the weather was not going to be good. It made him a little angry, as well. Angry enough to bite the annoying shrimp in the butt, in fact.

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING A SHRIMP YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING PIECE OF SHIT!" was Ed's reply to the dog' thought, his superhuman ability which let him know when anybody was making fun of his height in a range of thirteen point o-two feet kicking in. His aim was a bit off today though, thought the weary animal, as he had blamed it on the tall blond man standing opposite him rather on the black, white, and metal smudge under the kitchen counter.

The man himself was standing, seemingly unfazed by the constant onslaught that he had been receiving for some time now. Of course, that couldn't be right, one could only stand a certain amount of hate from a loved one before breaking down, on the inside, at least. So Den just assumed that the man must be hurting very, very much and must be very, very strong to withstand it all.

"So what, you just felt like adding insult to injury, then?" Ed added snidely, going off on a different tangent in his anger. Not so much shouting, rather piercing little comments that you thought about for far too long after they were said, that you tried to pick out of your skin and throw on the ground and forget, but that just kept digging in deeper and deeper, seeking the vitals.

"Oh, right, what else are you going to say to the boys you left happy and smiling, but that you come back to find homeless and crippled? Hum? But would you dare say that to our faces now, hey? Would you dare say that to me, to Al?" He took a step closer, grabbing the unflinching man's collar in his metal fist. "Would you dare say that we are a disappointment?" he breathed quietly, nearly tenderly.

The blond man's lips parted, and he let out in a detached tone of voice: "What would your mother say?"

Whoops, Hohenheim, thought Den from his safe spot, you must really be losing your grip if you're resorting to such a hit-or-miss comment like that.

Ed did shut up, just for a second though, to absorb the words he had just heard.

"You're dragging mother into this as well then. Fine," he took a seat at the large kitchen table, "let's talk about her."

"How can we start, I wonder?" the blond teen hummed in painful sarcasm. "I know! What about the fact that you ABANDONED HER SEVERAL TIMES AND NEVER CAME BACK TO SUPPORT HER IN ANY WAY WHEN SHE NEEDED IT THE MOST. Or, maybe that one time you WENT OFF AND FUCKED ANOTHER WOMAN AND BROUGHT BACK THE KID AFTER SHE DIED FOR MOM TO LOOK AFTER. Don't you think I can't remember, you bastard, that's one thing you can't forget, even when you were only three when it happened."

There was a silence, filled with Hohenheim's paling, Ed's fuming, and Den's sighing. But it was broken in a way so unexpected that it made everyone flinch, then feel their heart plummet at the implication of the sound.

The clanking of metal armour.

It was dark outside, and despite the torch he had brought along, the shadows didn't recede much further than a few feet in front of him. Ed had pulled his hood up against the downpour he had known was coming for hours now, but that he had planned to stay away from in his nice warm bed at Pinako's. It was not to be the case, though.

"Al!" he called yet again through the rain, his voice getting lost in the white noise that the pitter-patter of droplets was making. He listened. Nothing.

Of course, he could place the blame on Hohenheim, as he always did when he could, but he knew down to his very core that this was his fault. His doing. Like that one night, which seemed so long ago, but was really only a handful of years back. He shuddered, the shiver in his flesh only partly due to the clammy dampness that the rain brought upon the world. He mustn't think about that now. He needed to find Al, and that's all.

A good part of an hour passed as he stumbled through the dark, shouting out every now and then, cursing when the torch finally failed him and he had to repair it using the moving mud to transmute from. The result had suffered a minor rebound, nothing he couldn't just skip away from before the blue flash jumped up at him, but still, the warped metal casing was proof enough of the poor material he had to work with and his own high-strung state. It was nearly embarrassing. But, as he reminded himself severely, he had other priorities.

It was when the heavens were open to their fullest that he groaned and slapped his soggy glove over his equally soggy forehead. Why hadn't he thought of it before? he thought, even though he groaned again at the high cliché potential of both that one sentence and the idea of where his brother could be hanging out.

And he was indeed right.

It would have been hard to find the graveyard were it not for the intermittent lightning flashes painting everything black and white for the microsecond it was present, but still, he managed it. Al was sitting in the mud that had been churned by the pounding water, the plume of his helmet wet and sticking to the back of the great metal armour. For someone who didn't know the boy, it would have been a spooky sight, as he sat there looking like an envoy from the Otherworld or whatever other superstitious crap people believed in these days. On the other hand, people like Ed, a brother, a friend to the small boy stuck in a hulking metal body, this was something so sad that he could cry over it. Oh wait. Is that really rain running down my face?

As he remembered, the gate swung open with an unoiled screech when he shoved it awkwardly, trying not to let his grip in his unfeeling hand slip and let the torch drop. Al hadn't looked his way when he had walked through, his head still turned towards the headstone. Ed frowned. It couldn't be that interesting, couldn't it? Sure, he had done his own fair share of staring off into space, but he had never cut himself off completely. He needed to be there for people. That's what he lived for. And that was always what he thought Al lived for, as well.

But now, he was unsure, confronted with the same doubt he had had when he had been battling against Barry the Butcher. Ed knew this had been a big blow to that fragile trust he had established after that disaster, but that was probably nothing next to the years and years of knowing, but never saying. As he got to the gravestone, he plopped down in the mud next to his little brother, the disgusting brown wetness soaking into his clothes as soon as he did so.

Being a hypocrite (like he had always been, he had to remind himself) he shared the same staring focal point as the soul-fire dot things that allowed his brother to see. The words "Trisha Elric" were slowly being eaten away at by white fungi, the "ic" nearly disappearing under the rock-moss. One part of his orderly, obsessed-with-appearances mind demanded that the name of a person so loved be not obscured by petty, capricious nature; another, though, screamed sacrilege at the very thought. He could not touch a memory of his mother with these tainted hands of his, foolish enough to have thought it possible to bring her back. Maybe that the reason for which Al hadn't cleared the stone either was because he had exactly the same internal monologue. He was the one to have dragged him into it, after all. I was the one to make him lose his body.

Ouch.

And now, he doubted. Heavily. Of course, he had accepted the sacrifice, even though it was a failed one, because it was for someone he loved. But the question was now raised: would have he done the same thing if he had known that they were not really family? That her and him, no matter how close they seemed, had no blood relation? But Edward was more than certain that these thoughts were too selfish for his brother (your half-brother, came the instant reply through the gritted teeth of his mind), and that he would have seen Trisha as his mother no matter what. No. The problem lied elsewhere. The problem was one of brotherhood.

(Narrator's snort)

Despite having technically more relation to Ed than the woman who had brought him up, the lie he had been keeping together for so long had dug a gap, incredibly deep yet so thin, like a crack in the earth, between them. Ed hadn't even noticed it, and Al neither, but now it was staring them both in the face like a failed transmutation. That is, all too obvious, a little embarrassing to others and a sign that it is time to doubt yourself.

The short (boot flies in my direction) blond's eyes moved from the gravestone to the armour's head, and was surprised to see both of the red pupils looking at him. There was some understanding there. As if maybe, they were connected. A spiritual link would come in handy right about now, he thought. It would spare him having to remember all that reflecting-on-stuff crap and forcing it out of his throat.

Al chuckled, and his voice, a tinny, little boy's voice lost in the depths of the huge metal armour said:

"Come on, with the luck we've got I'll get struck by lightning and you'll catch the flue if we don't go home now."

And with that, he turned away and walked along, humming a merry tune as he went.

Damn Al.

Will you ever think of yourself before others one day?

By the way, I don't see Hohenheim as a bad guy. He never was. He's just human, like all of us.

Well, this is what comes of reading angsty fics. And I mean, REALLY angsty fics. This wasn't even the fandom I was reading from. But, I had this idea a few months back (when I still had an iota of inspiration), and I found it in my notes and thought: hey, let's angst! (reference to Lady Gaga there, for those who hadn't caught that bad pun)(I swear it's the only song by her that I would actually listen to). So, here you go, a bad mix of angst and angsty/sarcastic humour, as well as intelligent animals, and broken families. You're welcome!