A/N: Written for the Green Room 2015 (Rlt), challenge #10 – the big bang challenge, and for the Mega Prompts Challenge, writing prompt #12 - write a oneshot over 1500 words.

Space and Conservation

There was a law of conservation that claimed nothing could be created, nothing destroyed. And in between those two absolutes, there was a flux of transformation: a continuum that stretched between breakdown and rebuilding, between what humans called destruction and creation in their own egotistical words and egotistical understanding.

And maybe it was because of those ways that they could squander resources until they were spent, and lose the way to renew them. Because the laws of conservation were absolute. Resources couldn't just disappear from the cycle of life. They simply changed. Became something else.

With alchemy, he might have been able to clap his hands and bring it all back. But alchemy brought with it its own problems, and in 1923 there'd been a war to prove that. Most of the world was kept ignorant. Most of the world didn't even realise it had happened. Heck, most of Germany didn't understand what had occurred, and Edward Elric was more than happy to keep things that way. So was his brother, but Alphonse had settled down some years ago, getting married and having kids and grandkids and the whole neighbourhood, so to speak. He threw himself into the world once the duty they'd promised to their old one had been done, and he lived it.

Edward, on the other hand, observed.

He still worked with space. It wasn't a necessity so much as the path he'd put his feet on and it was just as good as any other. Better, for a time, when it wasn't about finding resources or fighting or claiming territory or any of the stuff like that.

But then the world developed. Resources were swallowed into more and more complicated designs. Land was swallowed into more and more conflicts, borders changing and reforming and the world always seemed to be caught in the sway of some war or other. Edward didn't know why he bothered keeping track of it all. Maybe it was the soldier in him. The part of him who'd signed up for the military at twelve, fully prepared to enter a war with a collar around his neck – and he had, several of them, if not in the way he'd imagined. Maybe because he'd, once upon a time, been involved. Now he just watched, and continued his research on space and just wondered when mankind's reach would stretch into it as well –

And then one day it did. And, some years later when the seeds of war and greed in space began to bloom, a man called Aeolia Schenberg came to him. By then fossil fuels were running low, a feat impossible in the realms of alchemy and the world's conversation law but nonetheless true. The fuel had been sucked out, used elsewhere and there was no alchemy in the world that made a quick clap of the hands or a complicated circle restore it to the land. And if it had, in some thousand years they'd simply face the same crisis again, and people didn't live that long.

Or, rather, most people didn't live that long. The Elric brothers were an exception to that. They were an exception to many things, really. They'd traversed dimensions as well. They'd performed transmutation – and its only successful ones as well. Edward's arm – though he'd had to trade that back for his own transmutation. And Alphonse's body – and they came together to this side of the world, the proof of that impossible task.

Their longevity and eternal youth was another matter. A hundred and seventy-eight years old and he looked as though he was still seventy five, and Alphonse looked more like his twin than a year younger and another three lost in stasis to the Gate.

And so Aeolia Schenberg came. He was a clever man. A rare breed of cleverness that had traced a cleverly placed trail and almost come out at the truth. He didn't find the name Edward Elric of course until he introduced himself as such. Nor had he found the name Edward Hohenheim, or Edward Heiderich which were sucessions number two or three, but he'd traced the aliases back to single digits. And if Edward had been as young as he'd been back then, he might have felt bested. But it was a pleasant chance now, when humanity seemed to insist on making the same mistakes and space which had been spared some thousands of years was no longer immune.

The law of conservations said nothing could be created or destroyed, and space had been an untapped reservoir of resources. More resources for the greed of humans who hadn't been able to manage with what the earth had already decreed for them. And he was one of those greedy humans exploring space for nearly two hundred years, and Aeolia Schenberg was one of those as well to find a solution to the earth's power problems by using photovoltaic energy and technology the world was, at the moment, incapable of.

But Edward knew what advances were possible. Things like automail that still didn't exist and their version of prosthetics were still drastically inferior. He was just lucky Winry's automail was still holding up, and her estimations had been a teensy bit off. But that had worked out well in the end, because by the time he'd stopped growing at twenty-five, the arm and leg she'd made for him fit perfectly. And he'd broken his own record many times over since, with the automail surviving a hundred and fifty five years and looking almost as pristine as the day Winry had dragged them to Central for him.

And Aeolia Schenberg decided he was going to change the world, and Edward Elric decided he'd like to see that: that changed world. So he jumped on board the project that became later known as Celestial Being, and Alphonse, for very different reasons, came as well.

.

Two hundred years, Celestial Being's Gundam meisters made their first armed intervention, and Celestial Being declared its intention to eradicate war to the world. It was laughed at, at first, until the technology and prowess they possessed was showcased again and again. Then they became known as terrorists, and the world drew together in order to fight them.

But the world was undergoing a drastic change, and that was what Celestial Being had spent the last two hundred years working towards. The original members were mostly dead, because longevity was still a thing of myth except for the two people who'd accomplished it. But, of course, it had been no work of Edward's or Alphonse's that lead to that, simply genetics. After all, their father had the Philosopher's stone running through his veins and clinging to his cell's DNA material. And some thousands of souls went into the making of that stone. And that was what gave them immortality, and the ability to witness the largest war known to mankind.

And it was against them, against the organisation known as Celestial Being. Edward was no stranger of having the world against him. They'd been on the run from the Military with the Philosopher's Stone after all. And they'd had friends then. They had friends now, and Alphonse's family had grown quite a lot in the nearly four hundred years they'd been on this side of the Gate. But back then they hadn't truly understood conservation. They'd thought about materialistic things, the exact combination of raw materials would yield the correct results. They'd tried to recreate their mother that way: the components of an average human body that could be found at the local drug store. But the law of conservation was about far more than materials. It was about energy. It was about life. It was about everything. Everything that was gained meant something else that was lost. Everything that was lost meant something else was gained, and some things like time and lives were always lost, and always gained.

And when the death toll drastically climbed like in wars, that was simply the price that had to be paid for drastic change.

And they'd grown callous, or tired, to think like that when once upon a time, on the other side of the Gate, they couldn't bear to kill even the worst of humans with their own hand. But that was their youth, their naïve understanding of the laws they'd devoted their entire lives to. People died, so others could be born, so others could grow. It was part of the way of the world, one of his earliest lessons but something that had taken them so long to fully grasp. And when he did it was like a weariness had seized him.

Watching the world change, he wondered if Aeolia Schenberg had felt similarly, in less time. And what would be at the end of the changed world? Nature would not change. Alchemy hadn't changed that and neither had technology, because humans were just a small part of the world and they liked to think themselves as having bigger roles. They liked to think the world was theirs to splurge on, and now space as well. To eradicate war would mean knocking humankind down a few pegs and keeping them there, but he doubted it was possible. He wasn't with Celestial Being to eradicate war because he wasn't an idealist like that and he didn't have a big enough heart to care for the entire world. Alphonse did though. He was both of those things and he had other bits of family too, some several times great kids and their kids and grandkids and it was only natural he'd want a world free from war for them, even if some of them were involved in different bits of the war. And it wasn't that Edward didn't care, but he'd made his decision long ago to never marry anyone but Winry – his Winry – and they'd never met again. So he'd never settled down, and even in the past Edward had been the pragmatic one…except when it came to Alphonse.

But none of that was so important once the world began to change. Aeolia Schenberg's ideals were fought for by people who didn't even know him, and the machines they, the Elric brothers, had designed killed many hundreds of people and indirectly lead to the deaths of thousands more. But the law of conservation was buried in that: the more people died, the more things would change and that was the grand prize, the scheme they all worked towards. They all had different reasons for joining Celestial Beings – the meisters, the crew of the Ptolomy, the ground forces and the ones at Lagrange 4 Space Colony… They all had different reasons for wanting to change the world and they all fought because they all had the hope it could change, beyond whatever despair or exhaustion or hate they felt.