Title: Winter's Eve

Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (1st Series)

Setting: Just pre-movie

Spoilers: End of Series, movie.

Rating: Mature/R

Warnings: Swearing, grittiness (hurray), drinking. Religious themes I tried to get right. Later on: a smidge of bloodshed (yay!)

Oh yeah, and, it's me and FMA, so...trippy. Got a lot of circular workings of a depressed mind in parts. Slight warning for already-depressed people. Though, the action balances it out, I feel. Yay explosions.

Also: You'll need your visual thinking-caps for today's read! And yes, that description of ice really happened, I'm not just crazy. It was how the fic was born. :]

Summary: What if there was a night they had met again in the middle of the journey? What if there were events they couldn't remember yet inextricably catapulted them into their path?

Note: Like all my fics, I like trying to make them as realistic as possible. I've worked on this for about three years now(Memorial took four), and I think it's time to share it. Please tell me what you think of this first part. The characters are a bit ... different, and I want to know what you find noteworthy or not. :) Please review, that's the only way that I know you want to see more. Plus, I don't bite. It's not like I'm getting paid (as FMA does not belong to me)---your comments are all I got. :P

Full Metal Alchemist: Winter's Eve

The journey of Alphonse Elric dragged on. The search was young compared to what he and his brother had supposedly gone through Before, but the promise of a solution was much easier to follow when you had a map to all the pieces.

He walked this night, as he did many nights, just to see where it would take him. Silently, with his hands hidden deep in his sweeping red winter coat's pockets, he took in the snowy night of East City. The steps of his black boots were muffled, an unnatural quiet in a red-light district. An unnaturally clean white covering that glimmered in the city's darkness and only drove deeper the dirt and crime.

Should he just believe what everyone said, that his brothers was already dead. . . .

The black-bricked, tightly-packed apartment buildings slicked with grime cleared along the narrow cobble road and the river, calm and collected, came into view. The many footprints wandering over the sidewalk converged into one single set along the bridge, vaguely-human trenches several inches deep.

Not one to disturb the path of many, he set his feet in them as well, slowly making his way out onto the bridge. Halfway out into the eerie hush, he stopped, considering the path in the snow. The shadows from the yellow lamps somewhere above his head radiated into the holes, while the snow was cast in a glowing haze. Like the maw of a fire, waiting to swallow him up in its endless, repeating continuance.

After a while of staring at the lights against the dark sky, Alphonse looked out onto the water. Snow fled from his worn black shoes and the footprints became an empty mass pushed out from beneath the sideguard. He brushed off the top-most metal railing, round, worn, and cold, and then set his arms atop it, pulling his body up so that he stood on the bottom-most railing of the many.

His breath came out in grey plumes as he watched over the dark river, mimicking the smoke dependably churning out of the factories that flanked the slender banks. He put his chin on his folded forearms and let the silent black expanse take his mind away.

It was not so much that he had lost hope, he considered while he surveyed the gentle curve of the flat, broad river, his eyes not quite able to make out the differences in the shades of black and blue. It was more that, on nights like to these, he had no one. There was no one he could share his thoughts with; no one would be there when he finished his day. His discoveries went only to his own self, and at the end of the elation, there was still a room void of anyone but him and chill, warped floorboards to be his keeper. What few beautiful things he found in life, there was no one to tell. But what he missed the most acutely was the person who would stand beside him and gently listen, and then take his hand and show him the world in return.

As the flakes drifted down from the soundless night sky, Al wondered, really wondered, if his brother was up there instead.

Dear Brother. January 4th, 1917. Me again, of course. I went down to the river in East City the other night—did you ever come here?—and even though it was bitterly cold, and the bad part of town(cheap hotel), it was quiet. The river was freezing over, gently, in a way I'd never seen before: Vaguely round shapes of ice floated under my feet, freezing with concentric rings dark grey in the center and consistently whiter near the ever-growing edges. Like sections of tree cuttings, floating down at their own pace. Something about never knowing when or where the next one would be, how big or small, what message it would try to convey, islands against the river's obsidian pool, took too long to turn away from. And all was silent, except for the hungry lack of reverberation that told you it was some pool you were standing over. It was a black that took you away, a black that was so much different . . . than the skies in Resembool.

In the dark, and the snow, the streetlights just off the bank reflecting in the water. . . . It looked like clouds, the sheets of ice floating lazily across the depthless expanse of dark, a pure liquid obsidian not bothered by reflections nor its limits. It was the sky at night as if there were absolutely no stars, a physical mass that merged with its horizon and yet offered itself up for you to explore as it drew you ever closer.

I'm not sure how long I stood there, watching ice and letting cold seep its way in(I know it sounds silly), but . . .

I wish I could have shown it to you.

When I find you, we'll have to come back here, and you'll tell me see what you too see.

Al lifted his ink pen, an old relic of their father's Pinako had had in her house, apparently from before he and his brother were born. He used it now, despite it being a well pen, because it was something from his old life to hold onto, something to ground him to the thought that maybe there was some serendipity in the world. And that maybe it could smile upon him.

He smiled, thinking of the green Resembool hills in the sunshine, for a moment pushing out the chilling cold of the barely-furnished hotel room, and the fact that he didn't have his brother here to tell him these little happinesses he found.

He dipped the quill in the bottle once again, and started scratching out scrawling words on the already worn and yellowing journal page.

But there was something else that happened that day that I thought you might want to know about. I'm not sure how I got out of it, and I wasn't sure I would have. You see, I ran into an old "friend" of yours . . .

Dear brother, Alphonse thought as he gazed over the night and its river, Have you ever seen ice freezing on a river? Did you ever see it in those years together I can't remember? It's really beautiful. . . . Yes, we could see the river from our house, and even though it froze in the biting winters, we never saw it happen. We'd always wake up the next morning to see crystal rapids frozen in the valley, and the land, strangely quieter. For a while, there were no tracks, no signs of life at all but for our family and the trees we looked upon.

It wasn't nearly flat enough to be so unassuming as this. . . . Were we driven like that busy river, to head out somewhere west we couldn't see, for reasons we may not have even known? Why did we run so fast, in that slow, peaceful place, when in this busy, dirty city, the river just takes it time?

I suppose most things stop, when they have no hope left. . . . He turned his head to the un-wandered side of the river, imagining what lives were being lived-out there. What hardships, what broken dreams ran rampant. . . . Which would never bounce back? Which would transfigure the world into something they wanted?

Al tipped his head and brushed some snow off the railing by his foot, trying to wait a few seconds before he went back to staring at nothing in the black-hole surface of the river, but was unsuccessful. It still held his mind, the unassuming attraction of what the next shape of floating ice would be, when it would be as he stared at ink. He blew out a breath, realizing he just wanted to go to home, and didn't have the heart to get there; so there he waited, watching the vapor be pulled apart in the biting night air.

But even the river continues on, and by the time it hits its delta, the open sea even, it's a raging torrent again, and it's found what it was searching for. . . . And all in all, the entire journey to look back on was a triumph, a river made from all kinds of tears.

Al sighed and his hands under his arms. "Dear brother," he whispered cynically to the water, "Did you know I can see you in my dreams? That it's the only way I know you're still alive?" He closed his eyes, as unbidden flashes of the Gate—which he only vaguely understood because of Izumi—popped into his mind, quick, bright, and useless. He shuddered, and stared at the railing, voice colorless. "...That it's the only reason I know you still exist, somewhere?"

His eyes slid shut, bringing the latest images of Ed: working furiously on massive machines in the middle of the night, muttering about parts and fuels, placing cogs; leaning his entire body to turn wrenches half his size and as wide as his forearms. In other views he was working by candlelight of all things in that same laboratory; orange spheres of light washed onto black formulas pages long. He recognized his brother's scarred hand anywhere, the way it held a pencil, the way it hunched over paper, and the way its created letters deformed from writing with non-dominant muscles. . . . But when Al had awoken, he couldn't remember in the slightest what the formula might have been; the lead to tell him who might work on something like that—who might be holding his brother captive—was gone. He remembered thinking that there had been too many letters for it to be anything he knew of in Amestris, but that caused more problems than it solved.

He hung his head, moaning. I'm sure that some think I was merely robbed of my sanity and I see these things as an inability to deal with reality. But.

Going down this road never made him happy, but tonight he couldn't stop. He didn't even want to. Heaven help him if someday he lost touch enough to stop believing his eyes and his heart and start listening to the things people said. But they don't see what I see, he thought, wishing he could skirt his fingers across the water as his arms hung down. They don't see their souls detach, proving that the transcendental exists. They don't see your feelings, feel your heartbeat, hear your voice. They don't . . . see our father through your eyes, not aged a day from that photograph we no longer have. . . .

The young man groaned, and rolled his head on his arm.

No, he prayed. It would explain why he never came back. He went off to do some forbidden work and the Gate took him, too. Took him to where ever it takes them, where Ed now is, too. It would explain the books in his library. The fact that we were so good at alchemy, everything. . . .

But what can I give in equivalent exchange to bring back both my brother and my father? There is nothing, nothing in this world, that is more valuable to me than them.

Al shook his head and reached into his coat. Leaning against the railing, he pulled out the flask warming by his hip and unscrewed the cap in one flicked spin. He threw back a deep drink, until he had slid down into the snow. His arms between his knees, he looked to the sky and the falling snow, chasing after the every-increasing glimmering specks of light as if one would bring him comfort. Around him, there were no cars and even less people; the factories continued to put out smoke in a way that could only be seen and never heard; the lights flickered in their lamps and not until morning would someone be by to put them out. In the quiet solemn he was left with, he tried not to imagine what his mother would say.

After a while, he stared at the warm steel in his hand, loosely moving it end over end. Just once, I would like to forget. To forget that some days I wake only so that I can run down into dreaming again; to forget that one day, I'll probably want to give up and move on, and I'll have to accept the fact that I was the one that killed you; to forget, that as I see the graves I'll have to accept that I'm the only survivor in my family.

And that we had it all, and lost it, for good.

The wind burned his lips, and quickly, he licked over the salt pooling there. "Just once, Ed, look at a goddamned map while I see through your eyes, so that I can find out where the hell you are, and bring you back. . . ."

Al's shoulders shook; he ran his hand over his face, wiping tracts of water and dirt away from his eyes. He took another quick drink, just for the hell of it. It warmed his stomach immediately, and though he couldn't say it tasted the best, it did make him feel lighter, where it pushed out reality. He clunked his head back against the railing, and stared up at the snow drifting down in clumps from the heavens.

"Happy New Year," he said, and threw back the rest.

Dear brother.

If I were to fall into endless sleep, would I dream constantly of you?


Ed stared through the back of dark buildings to a little slice of the river he could see beyond them, just one street lamp standing sentinel on the part of the bridge visible, a gentle orange halo and a dark emptiness characterizing the wide, slow-moving slip of river lying under the bridge. Ed rubbed his arms as a he leaned against the laboratory's back alley wall, breathing out a plume of icy air. His head against the bricks, he listened to the sounds of the night. It reminded him of wandering Central on his many return trips there, all alone, trying to escape the realities that he had ever following him. In those alleys, there were no expectations, there were no troubles, there were people that never looked you in the eye. There was but despair, and a hope in continuing to move.

Central smelled like this place—cold, damp, bricks and dirt. Not sand and clear are like the desert, not living things and earth like the East. It was comforting, though, ,in a way—it felt like home. Like he could go back to HQ any moment and Mustang would be there. Hawkeye, Havoc, Breda and Falman would be working hard on the case keeping them up; Fuery would be in a corner trying not to fall asleep over endless communiques he had to cipher out. Hughes might even be there, in his memories, bitching about not being able to go home, but working all the harder because of it.

And Black Hiyate might be hanging out with Al, going for on the grounds. Ed would watch him from the windows, and the frost on the glass would him inspiration for a transmutation array. . . .

He would not have thought about his father. Who then, like now, was still gone.

Ed shifted and reached for his watch. It was not the military that had been so familiar in his hand. The watch that had become the symbol of everything hidden from him.

It was not a watch his father would be giving him for some milestone in his life.

It was merely one he had picked up out of the trash and fixed up himself.

Well, after he spent almost a year dying and Hohenheim had found him.

He had thought it was a blessing back then, and he had clung to it. How things had changed.

Ed flipped open the watch lid and stared at the face. Or really: how they hadn't changed.

The clock was ticking. It was hard to read; his mind saw the circle, saw the arms and gears and started thinking in geometric inlays for arrays. It was impossible to tell what time it was, and in the end, it didn't matter. He had to get back to work.

He sighed, and shifted on his feet. On New Year's past, there would be a celebration. A party, even meager. He looked down for a second, switching the weight on his legs before stuffing his hands in his armpits and leaning back against the wall, his hair sticking uncomfortably to the sharp catches in the bricks. But he stayed there, horizontally splayed, watching the grooves, the slick grime, the grimy river beyond. Memories of so many times doing this in some strange city with his red coat came back, too innumerable to catch any specific one.

The stars, too, were there, then. Some were even the same as the ones here, it seemed. Indeed, some tenacious ones peaking through grey clouds above him currently. The way they passed made him wonder if it was midnight, yet.

It was New Year's still, wasn't it? They used to celebrate it in Risembool by most of the town gathering at someone's house, drinking, taking a run through the countryside, and then drinking some more, before determining that they needed to crash at the nearest house. In his case, being a kid, he would start out with the other kids and by the end of the night he and Al, and sometimes Winry, would end up near the caves overlooking the town and countryside that was their careful homeland, considering the stars with wonder. They would talk about the year. They would not talk at all, sometimes.

Al and Winry would wonder if their parents were up there, somewhere.

There was a little ache in his chest, a niggling need. No matter how much too small Risembool was for his ambitions, he always wanted to go back on nights like this.

And here I am, wondering which one of us is alive up there.

He closed his eyes and let his flesh arm fall against the bricks. He held it there, rocking back and forth, just to feel the cold, the finite, the sensation.

"What are you doing right now, Al? You are alive, aren't you? You still exist, outside the Gate? You still exist, at all? You're not still in the Gate; you haven't . . . ."

. . . Joined mom in nothingness?

. . . And maybe Dad?

There was another jolt in his chest, more painful. Insistant, even, though with effort he chased it away. It left him a little light-headed; as he sagged against the bricks, he cursed his near-empty stomach. His automail, less intensive but also less efficient than before, wasn't having this lack of food thing.

Even so, the little feeling persisted. It felt like a shadow over his head.

I almost feel you, sometimes, you know? Like you're standing right here with me.

He chuckled, nervously, but glad of the release. He didn't know if that meant Alphonse was a spirit without a body, following after him without recourse, or that he, Ed, was just going nuts—that he was so desperate for love and caring, an end to his crippling loneliness, that he was seeing things over his shoulder, wishing it into existence.

He sighed, groaning and rubbing his forehead against the bricks. A few memories of the two of them flittered by, even though he would think that the cold would make it harder. Actually, he was rather warm, because of how his metabolism was making him shake.

Slightly, he felt that little twitching feeling over the edge of his shoulder again. It bit into the back of his brain, but didn't tell him anything. Just a . . . feeling, that made him think Al was calling out "brother" to him.

The sound changed, sometimes. Usually it was "Edward, Ed," or "brother," though occasionally it would be a sentiment, as well. It usually only happened, though, when it was a feeling on the same wavelength of his own current thoughts. It could amplify or change his own emotion to some degree, with the whispers that came along with the feelings.

He had no idea what it was.

He crouched down and shivered, one thumb smoothing over the his watch's case, over and over.

He could see that it was the illusions of a desperate mind. He'd been crazy enough for a long while; anything was possible.

His breath plumed, and even something as little as that reminded him of what an odd place he was living in. Was it real? Was he here? he wondered, mind calculating hundreds of possibilities against the view of close walls disappearing into black shadows farther down the leading line. Or was this a place that dead souls went before they were deconstructed in conservation of matter, a place where they happened to pick up any discarded scientific theory that took their fancy that had ever been thought of, and tried to prove it as something to do, before they realized they were dead?

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, smiling at the ridiculousness of it, at how he could neither prove nor disprove it. All there was that could be certain was "I think, therefore I am."

Though the Gate could be deceiving him into thinking he wasn't inside of it. Unlikely, but true.

Either way, there had be a way out.

The fact that their worlds were so different in evolution and principle was confusing, but the shock of the different people running around that mirrored his own was disorienting. It had taken him a long time to realize that the fact that they were different was the difference between some dream he'd make in the Gate and a scientific reality: If it was of his making, everyone would look exactly the same: Al, Havoc, Dorchette, have similar backgrounds. They didn't.

Ed sucked in a breath of hard, twenty-degree air, and pressed his head into the bricks, hoping he could get his head around things again. The Pinako here had been the head matron in the government hospital ward he'd spent so many months in, trying not to die of disease. She had never had children; there was no Winry that belonged to her. Oddly enough, she and Hoenheim were still friends.

The same could not be said for himself and some of the others.

He had to face it: he was in another world. He had never thought of it, even as a child, and so it weirded him out. He didn't understand how conservation of matter could work, having transported him here. But he was here. Things were real.

Ed frowned; he ran his hand down the bricks, forcing his brain to realize what he knew to be the truth: reality. Reality. God damn it, if he didn't get his head back above water, he just might drown here, and never make it home.

Why couldn't. He make. It home?! Why couldn't. The circles. Work?! There was no damn reason, no damn reason!, that it would work there and not here. Yes it could be a binary universe where every important rule was just backwards, the switch on and switch off, but the fact that the Gate could open and let him here, the fact that he had traversed back and forth already, made him know there was something he should be able to do. There was something. He would not accept that there was no way. His father had accepted it, but that was because he thought that there was nothing for him to go back to, screw Ed and Al and the entire world waiting for him back home.

"Edward." Behind him, the door swung open, and Alfons Heiderich, the pale, tall, light-haired counterpart of his brother leaned out from the light that spilled into his space. The youth opened his mouth and then shut it, tipping his head in thought as he saw the deep, concentrating frown on Ed's face, and the fact that he still had half his body against the bricks, stomach first.

Without a word, Alfons stepped around the door and, shutting it behind him, leaned his back against it.

Ed didn't mourn the loss of the intrusive light—he liked the quiet dark sometimes—but he did miss the light it would have brought to Alfons's face. He frowned even harder as his coworker turned to him.

"Edward, what are you thinking about so hard out here?" He played a quick smile across his face, and hoped Ed wouldn't see through it. He hoped Edward would say something that didn't make him drop it.

Alfons was a person who worked differently in many different situations: sometimes he was the leader, sometimes he was the young guy looked after by the others. But with Edward, he seemed to be everything at once.

It was discomforting. He liked Edward, yes, he was a good colleague, and a bit easy on the eyes, but he crashed hard into fits of depression, and absolutely unstable views of reality.

Alfons knew damn well Edward never smoked on his smoke breaks, and he was doing more than just trying to clear his head for formulas. With the stories Ed brought up in his free time, Alfons guessed his friend was shell-shocked to some degree, and when his father had left him—or whatever had actually happened—it had thrown Edward off the deep end.

That was obvious at least: Alfons had been the one that found him when he didn't come in to work for so long, balled up in the soon-to-not-be-his-father's apartment, rocking slightly against the walls. Ed had told him some strange things in his desperate panic that night, and the fact that Ed wouldn't let him go was the only reason he hadn't made it to call the looney bin. Yes, Edward was his friend, a very good friend, but Jesus, he didn't know how to help him and he had no obligation to someone that was crazy, especially not when Al was running out of time as he was. There was also to be considered that Edward's friendship apparently came only because he thought that Alfons was some suspiciously-missing brother of his.

Truth be told, he was more than a little bit afraid that someday Ed might snap and hurt them.

Alfons shook his head when Edward just shrugged and muttered something; he took his friend by the shoulder as he turned away, and forced him to sit on his heels with him on the stoop. Ed eyed his hand like it was something dangerous.

"Ah, sorry. Forgot." Al put his hands in the air, trying his best to be amicable. Edward did not like to be touched. It wasn't like it was the norm here in Germany either, to be touchie-feelie like a woman, but it was a worrisome quirk of his, the way he thought he might die if someone touched him, at all.

"Edward, are you all right? Remember what you promised me?"

The blond frowned, annoyed, and gripped Alfons's wrist tightly. "I am fine, Al. Really. If only you could see into my head; your doubt causes more trouble than it helps. In fact. . . ." He took Alfons by one shoulder, and while Al readied his hands defensively, he didn't protest yet. "I never should have made you that promise—I can't keep it. I can't let you take away from me the only thing that lets me know I'm alive." Let you take away my memories.

Ed reached out his hand to the side of Al's face, and for a long time, just watched him, looking over his smooth, pale, familiar features. Al wondered if Ed used it as a stabilizing tool, right before he thought that he couldn't take much more of Edward and should ship him off to the Bin as soon as possible.

Ed's face suddenly turned fierce again, demanding. "We all have things we have to deal with in this life, Alfons; don't pretend like I don't realize what that cough is."

Al's eyes popped open. "Are you . . . threatening me, Edward?"

"No, Al. I'm trying to tell you something. None of us know when our last day is, and I'm just trying to get home before that happens."

Al sucked in a short breath and sighed, brow tight with worry. "I don't trust you, Edward. I don't think you're safe. You need to know that." He sounded bitter, angry.

"Are you telling me to move out?" He said it, but barely.

Al was about to say something, but then a light seemed to dawn on him, and his face suddenly brightened.

"Would you?" he asked, hopefully.

Ed gaped, and physically drooped backward. He put his face in his hand, and shook his head back and forth.

"Where would I go, Al? Where would I go? You know what, no. I won't. And you know what, if you sell me out, I'll do the same to you. Betrayers deserve as much. You know for a fact that's it's almost impossible to prove a negative. I can't prove to you I'm not a danger, that I'm not crazy, if you refuse to ever believe me. I'll tell you the truth, and if you don't believe me I don't know how you can expect me to trust you, too."

While Alfons said nothing, not sure how to proceed, Ed stood up, aggravated, and went back in the door. "Thanks for letting my know my break's up," he said, slamming the door.

"Wait, Edward, wait!" Al said suddenly, jumping after him. He managed to grab Ed's left wrist, and pulled him to a halt with it.

Ed looked down at his hand, but quickly spat as he pulled it away, "What, Al. What do you want?" He looked ready to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"The guys are all gonna go out. It's New Year's. Don't work yourself . . . to death tonight, okay? Take a break, do something nice for yourself. . . ."

"Go do something that gets me permanently out of your hair?" he sneered. "Look, just—"

"No!" Al cried, annoyed. "Look. The guys invited you out drinking with them tonight and I don't want to be accused of not telling you."

A range of emotions flirted across Ed's face, from surprise, to petulance, to anger, and everything in between. He straightened up, and ran his hand over the back of his hair. "Well, tell them thanks, but you know I can't."

"You want me to tell them yet that you're sickly?"

Ed glared. "I'm not sickly, it's called having a weak immune system." To this world, anyway—he was exceedingly healthy before. In a flash, he wondered if his father had caught something virulent that had done him in before he could come home, and he had died in the street somewhere. The Spanish Flu was still going around.

Ed gulped, and tried to put it out of his mind. He wasn't sure he could, and shaken a bit, he continued with very little control,"There is a difference. I am hardly weak and feeble. . . ."

"Fine. Whatever." Alfons threw up his hands. "I will tell them that."

"Tell them, what?"

Al shook his head. "That you cannot come, because you have work to do."

Ed mirrored Alfons's gesture and turned on his heel at the same time, going for his work belongings. "Fine. You do that. I'm going back."

"Fine," Al nearly shouted back, taking in the sight of Ed, thin and ragged, before spinning on his heel in a huff and going for his own coat. "I'll be out late tonight."

Take your time, Ed swore back.

"Happy goddamned New Year," Alfons cursed as he threw the cover over the nearest engine block.

Al hid his head between his knees and rubbed one hand over the back of his hair. In the other, the flask, empty, jiggled against the inside of his knee. The cold seeped into his legs where he sat in the snow, and even though he could not see his breath with his eyes closed, he could feel it against his nose as the moisture drifted from his mouth.

Brushing back his hood, Alphonse let his head fall back until it clunked against the railing. It roll to the side, cradled better that way, and he found himself staring again at the blackness of the river, the chunks of ice deeper, darker, and slower than an hour ago. They were starting to have the outlines of continents and countries.

He shook his head. It was cold and unwelcoming, until he looked around and found the city lights warmly reflecting on the banks. Something about it . . . ah, right. That was the warm glow of humanity, over there.

Al laughed against the cold, short and bitter. Aren't we just the most pathetic things, humans. Thrown out into the world to destroy the life God gave us.

"Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't do it."

There was a crunch of boots, and suddenly, Al realized there had been feet coming toward him, black military surplus boots kicking through the snow, and now, equally black pants tucked haphazardly into them in front of him.

Al tipped his head back farther to leer at the face accompanying the unshined shoes; against the light there stood a black-haired man in his thirties or forties. Almost completely unremarkable, save for a dark beard.

"And what is it that I wouldn't be doing?" Al asked, slurring only a little, his legs swaying back and forth.

"Whatever it was." The man shrugged.

Al frowned: He felt there should be something he could easily retort to that, but for some reason he was merely more confused. Moving his legs again to keep them warm, he started wondering what he could do to make this man go away: he wasn't who he wanted, so there wasn't much of a reason to speak to him.

Al's eyes drifted back to the dark expanse of river, blank and inviting. "And what if it was something good?"

"Then you should come with me and do something better," the man offered. "Do you remember me?"

Al looked up at him, eyes narrowing in the low light. The streetlight was an orange halo on his face, which was square and a bit unkept; broad shoulders and a loose jacket. . . . Al wondered if maybe he should remember him, but came up with nothing.

"No, I don't," he said, taking the man's offered hand. "I'm sorry, have we met before?"

The man pulled him up and patted him on the back as Al tested how steady he was and dusted off the front of his pants. Even after he felt perfectly stable, the man's heavy hand did not leave.

"You seem too young for this, kid. C'mon, let me buy you a drink and you tell me some stories. I bet you've got a few."

"Yeah, a few," Al shrugged, considering the haze around the edges of his vision. Everything, including his insides, felt soft and fuzzy, and while he knew he wasn't thinking totally straight, he quickly went through his cycle of lies to check if they were still spot-on. He couldn't let his cover be blown by a bout of drinking.

Al looked back at the river just as he found himself moving. "Where are we going, again?" he asked quickly, to the man a head taller than he.

"Just the neighborhood hangout. I wouldn't be a good person if just let my fellow men suffer alone, tonight of all nights." He chuckled at this.

Al's mouth tipped down again, but then he shrugged. He wasn't sure he wanted to go anywhere, and yet, as he walked farther into the bad part of town, he was sure that he wanted to be anywhere but back in his hotel room, back into the content and lifeless room that would chain him back to the suffocating life he had made for himself and could not get out of.

He would take a chance, just this once, because that was what his brother would have done.

Al touched the hand encompassing his shoulder, amazed at the warmth there. "Who are you, again?"

"Capt. Wilson. You sure you don't remember?"

Al shook his head. "There was this accident, actually, so . . ."

As he launched into his well-practiced story, the hand gripped only tighter.

A/Ns: So! That's the first part. I got depressed about not being able to get anywhere in life, so I dug out the story about people depressed about not getting anywhere in life. I suppose I should laugh.

Informative tidbits!: This story started out under two premises: Like in the summary, "What if there was a night where they met again, but couldn't remember?" And "What would it be like if Al were a drunk?" Odd combo, I know. I had no idea this would occur. I was thinking something much more Tolstoy, just one scene and a bit of a pick-me-up via the human spirit via a philosophy essay in the form of two people positing at each other. Instead, we got this. (Both are evil, evil genius-bunnies.)

+Also, this explores several queries as to what it was like for Ed/Al in their new circumstances--Al's experiences impersonating Ed and why, Al having a more realistic range of emotion, including hard negatives like his brother; Ed dealing with the crippling effects of disease, economic depression, emotional depression, and loss of self in the other world; Alfons being someone he has to win over (life isn't so rosy).

+Lol, Ed and Alfons are super dysfunctional. Things are at their breaking point and they aren't friends. Do you think Alfons's portrayal is believable? He is much more gritty in this than most that make him as pleasant as Al in the series (and, granted, as pleasant as he is at times in the movie). I will deal with that transition eventually. However, for this, I see Alfons as someone that just can't quite bring himself to deal with Ed, nor know how, all his previous attempts failing, so he treats him a bit like a child, though he's nice enough that he feels obligated to keep him around. Like the rest of this fic, nothing is for certain....

+Please review, I really, really want to hear your responses. It will also give me desire to finish. :)

+If you like Memorial, I'm thinking you'll like this. I think it's thicker to read as far as content, but more consistent. ^___^

NEXT CHAPTER: Al encounters friendly ladies of the night with his new friend. (Not to miss!)