Disclaimer: I do not own FMA.
Author's Note: I just wanted to try something out. It was supposed to be shorter, but it kept on expanding. Feel free to make your own conclusions about the stuff in this story, if you desire.
There was a small village, cradled by a river and resting at the foot of a mountain, while expansive coniferous forests spread out in all directions. Few came by the isolated village, which seemed as if it sat on a line between reality and something else. It was perhaps truer than any knew.
This village was so small that it did not have a name, but to its residents it was the World. It was a place of its own, a child's special bauble kept secret and stashed away from the rest of the world. In this little World of its own, fairytales were popular, and fact and fiction were so blurred to the denizens that they would sooner believe in dragons than the possibility that anything existed beyond the forests.
Yet there was one fairytale native to the village that most agreed was undeniably fiction. The people did not know why they dismissed it as fiction, nor did they know how it had originated or how long it had been around. They regarded it with suspicion, for although it was as constant in their lives as the sun in the sky at day, it never failed to present itself as new to a listener, no matter how many times they heard it.
It was the tale of a spirit. Some said it was but the faintest outline of armor, while others claimed that it was a young boy that never found its way to its proper place. It lived on the mountain, not at the peak, or in a cave, mind you, but just in an ordinary spot.
There was another detail of the story that was always left out save for its annual telling on the summer solstice, that the spirit, always a boy in this version, lurks around an arm and leg of alien design, fashioned of cold metal. They claim that the artificial limbs lie amongst and are overgrown by tall grasses and weeds that cling to them tenaciously, while they rust from neglect. Some debate that it is not rust that mars the chillingly beautiful creations of man, a mockery of life, but blood.
No one brings up the question of why blood could be on them. The village has no answers for that, for this is one fairytale without a beginning or an end.
They say that the ghost circles around the metal constructs, attempting to shake them but failing with a lack of body, crying out with the lamentation of a loss more precious than that of his life.
Nobody has seen those limbs. Nobody wants to.
But the ghost armor/boy has been seen before, and even spoken to. It is said that he was the one to first tell the fairytale, to a young boy that did not understand the concept of death, but could see it in the flickering red light hidden behind the spirit's transparent eyes, only the faintest tinge of honey hazel coloring them.
There are people who have seen the image of the boy superimposed over that of the armor. When asked why this was, the entity claimed that those were the people that understand loss without gain, sacrifice without purpose.
The fairytale ends at this part, to the derisive snorts of the listener.
Everyone in the village has seen the spirit on the mountain, clinging to limbs that were real at one point beyond a black veil, at least once.
Those that have seen the image of the boy superimposed over that of the armor do not speak of it to others, even those few that share the true knowledge of it. Nobody would believe them, and some things should not be spoken of.
A boy hobbling along on a crutch whilst making a crude attempt at running despite a lame limb goes by the only tavern in the nameless village, and overhears the telling of the story to one of the rare travelers that came out to see what the World is to others. No one discovers the village by accident.
While laughs are shared and drinks passed around, the boy smiles, something beyond comprehension shining in those peculiar eyes of metallic gold that are his and his alone. Those that look into them deny ever seeing the shine, and do not acknowledge the feeling of their very souls being stripped away.
This boy knows the true name of the World, forgotten to those that would claim it their own. He also knows of the line over which the black veil drops, and what lies beyond. But he does not know what lies before.
But it is not time to dwell on such thoughts, for he has promised a lonely friend closer to him than family, as close as if he were himself and so much more, a picnic, where they will pay homage to a grave for one that does not sleep eternally, that does not belong in the World or any World beyond.