A/N: Well, I was just thinking that I needed to write a Christmas special, and then the first paragraph popped into my head! The title means Christmas in German. There are some spoilers, but it DOES have Heiderich in it, so if you know about him, you probably know all of them. And they're pretty cryptic too. Anyway, enjoy!
There was no Christmas in Amestris. Not in a world where life revolved around alchemy and alchemy revolved around life — neither quite touching, like the Sun and the Earth, but if they brush — a spark lit and life is the one to suffer. The basic science of free-fall.
But, like so much else, it is different here. Without the alchemy, he cannot figure how life is — without the Sun of his world.
The science is still there, just dead. (That boy frowns when he says that. He never apologizes though). And sometimes his palms burn and tingle — even the one not there — nerves confused. Waiting to nudge himself a little closer to alchemy, just a little closer. Come closer, he urges the boy who looks like his brother. Come closer, he whispers, and see these hands that once held power pulsing through them. A small, small comfort that when that flesh hand dies, it will become that power once again. It will return home, and he will fuel his world's Sun.
Here, they have Christmas. And it is all the difference. Flickering candles on evergreens — brought in and decorated. Bursting with life he doesn't understand and doesn't want to and hardly (maybe he does, maybe he doesn't) believes.
The boy who is not — but is — his baby brother shakes his head with a small smile and a small frown. Blue eyes which should be gray but cannot be gray; should never be gray are sad, a little. But it is his Christmas, so in the soft, golden candlelight they sparkle.
He finds himself trying to see in that boy the little shattered bits of his brother. Then he wildly backpedals and tries to say they aren't there because it they were that would make this all real.
This odd world of life without that delicately balanced orbit around that power drawn from the pain of this world.
But, standing under a street lamp decked in scarlet ribbon that reminds him of blood, snow falling in the circle of yellow light, he knows that there could never be Christmas in Amestris, and there could never be power in his sin-stained hands again, in this world of sleepy, dreaming reality.
Then the boy who is (not) his brother takes his hand and says something that smells delicately of a few soft sips of beer, pulling him from his mind under the yellow-lit street lamp, fingers warm and haunting and a mix of correct and unsalvageably wrong.
He lets them draw him down a lively, decorated street that shouldn't exist.
A/N: I've really wanted to write Germany for a while now. So now I can, yay! I've been there over the Christmas season, too. And I know what it would be like for Ed, since it seems like a dream to him over there, and it did to me too, because anyone with a fever that high would feel like they're dreaming. I was very, very sick, but I didn't want to miss anything, so I just got myself sicker... anyway, I might be able to write a sequel if enough people want one. I have an idea involving Christmas trees... review please!