I didn't so much die as (kind of) start existing somewhere else.

Confused? Yeah, me too.

The last memory I had was my whole entire life – there wasn't even a definite end anywhere. It wasn't something convenient like, for example, I was shopping at the grocery store and inspecting the grapes before suddenly a black portal sucked me through Shoujo anime style, where a hot guy waited for me on the other side with dashing sword super-powers being like 'YOU'RE THE CHOSEN ONE'. In addition to that, there might even be a neat prophecy detailing exactly what you have to do to, to boot. Kind of like, 'yeah, this is your place in the world, you're needed.'

That'd be so nice, but… nope, none of that. Life wasn't so kind to point out helpfully and say, 'ah, so that's where my memories end, and so this is where I should start now'.

When I thought back, I couldn't remember anything but little bits and pieces of myself, in general. Like the fact I liked the colour green. I had two older brothers (twins, and they were horrible and family all at once), and a dad, and an uncle, and an aunt, and… well, family. We lived in a house that, for the majority of the year, had snow on it. I hated celery. Loved cheese and broccoli, but not mixed together. My brothers were in their twenties, if I thought hard about the memory where they looked the oldest, and thus I should be younger than that.

These memories, of course, weren't very useful to explaining where I was now.

Because, when I looked around this place, this wasn't Earth anymore.

All around me, everything stretched into infinite white. There was a kind of fuzzy outline of a might-be-horizon that looked grey and slightly pixelated. The only thing here that was remotely coloured was me, and all I wore was a white shirt and shorts combo. There was nothing to indicate I was any sort of 'needed' - I felt more like an outsider, with me being skin-coloured and all.

I examined the endlessness of the white again, for lack of anything else to do.

...Yeah, this wasn't normal Earth landscape, for sure.

And instead of a really super handsome shoujo hero that would be really helpful at this point, (I'd take any sort of human being to talk with right now), I had this vaguely creepy blank white person-thing with huge, smiley teeth staring at me when I turned around.

"…Hi?" I ventured, because relationships had to start somewhere, even with creepy, alien things. It pays to be polite!

"Not your time yet, Marlon," he (she? they?) said with a voice that sounded more like a really monotone choir of voices – thousands and thousands of people talking in one, with maybe whale-noises in the background. And you wouldn't suspect it, but he spoke with this oppressive aura that screamed to me run, run, run, this isn't where you're supposed to be you shouldn't be talking with this thing. It looked like a cute white blob thing, but when it smiled…

Dear lord, those teeth.

I didn't get to run though, because in the second it took for me to lock up my muscles and even think about sprinting in the opposite direction, he had disappeared.

After a few seconds, I scratched my head.

"What just happened?"

The only answer was my own breathing, because people didn't really appreciate how loud and raspy airflow is when it cycles through your lungs when there weren't other noises to distract you. It didn't help, of course, when you felt like you haven't drank anything in forever.

Ugh. Water. Will I die here without it?


An Interminably Long Time Later

I wasn't dead yet, and the weird white alien-boy thing checked up on me, from time to time. I stopped trying to run away by the fifteenth time he popped up, and since the number of visits must have gone up to the hundreds or so, I felt like I've been waiting here for a long time? Whenever I asked why I was here though, the boy-thing (the bastard), would just smile.

"Ah, ah, ah, it's not time yet, Marlon."

They would even waggle a finger at me, grinning this grin that would show like, at least fifty teeth, and the blank space where eyes were supposed to be would wrinkle – not in the way that paper or skin wrinkled, but like, how jelly wrinkles if it's not broken. Squashed wrinkles.

Yeah. Boy thing was so creepy, you had no idea. I wished he would just stop showing his teeth. That white was unnatural, in a place lacking in dental care facilities.

I stopped being bothered to be angry at him around the fiftieth visit. This boy-thing was like, omnipotent or something, because I swear it could read my thoughts before I even spoke them.

I guess it's nice he had the basic manners to let me speak out loud before continuing the conversation.

Maybe it's just him being polite though, or maybe he's like me, summoned here only to become so mad from solitary confinement that he found a tub of whatever they dipped the landscape with and turned himself into a white blob!

Nah. Can't be. He's waaay too inhuman for that. Maybe he's God. Maybe I'm dead.

I missed my dog. He was called Happy, and he loved rubbing against everything as if he was faking to be a cat, but without all the sinuous back-bendy-ness of a real cat but more like 'let's shed as much fur as possible on everything so the vacuum cleaner will clog every two seconds'. Hugging him was like hugging a living furnace.

But my dog wasn't there, so I lied down instead and started staring into the eternity (that is literally the ceiling of this place and nothing poetic). I was so bored I started rolling sideways, like you would if you were lying on a blanket and tried to wrap yourself into a burrito. Only this blanket was as long as this place (that is, of course, as long as eternity), and so I rolled and rolled and rolled to the right. Usually I get really dizzy really easily, so after rolling once or twice, I would stop.

Only… I didn't get dizzy.

If God was the white thing, did that mean I really was actually dead?

I stopped rolling and stayed flopped on my stomach, running a confused inventory over my memories again, as much as I could – Danny and Leo arguing whose turn it was to wash the dishes, and me just smirking at my brothers while I ran up the stairs, Da and my uncle going over their compositions next to the piano…

Gosh, I even remembered what type of milk everyone drank (soy for Da, lactose free for Danny, full-cream for Leo, organic for Auntie Kamini and Uncle, and me who didn't care much as long as I could add chocolate powder into it), and if I had died somehow, I surely didn't remember it. For one, I don't exactly… feel dead. Not that I had to eat or anything, but yeah, dead things can't think, right?

But I looked at my elbow, where I'd fallen over when I was nine or so and broke my arm so bad that it had left this huge scar that was amazingly shiny in the right lighting. However, it wasn't there. My shins were also unscabbyfied. I didn't get dizzy.

Hmm.

If I was alive, this was… probably not my body.

If I was dead, the afterlife is ridiculously empty and I want to quit.

(both ways, it was pretty horrifying)


An Interminably Long Time Later x2

"So, Marlon," Truth drawled, because the stupid humanoid finally told me what it was five visits ago (i.e. at least 200 visits too late), "don't you realise something is missing from your memories?"

"You mean," I drawled back, my eyes staring back him as intently as he'd always stared at me because he was something to look at dammit, and this just meant he was eyecandy. If only he'd get some skin. And eyes. And a nose. Then he'd be better graded eyecandy. "You mean that moment when I was kidnapped and dragged here? Sure, man, I'll happily hear what you have to say. I want to know why I'm here desperately, as you might have noticed."

"Ah, ah, ah, it's not time yet for that," Truth just said with the annoying finger wiggle, unperturbed and smiling. "No, something else. Don't you think something is missing?"

I frowned at him, but gave up on the 'no time for that' stuff because I had tried to crack him about that for at least twenty visits straight and Truth was stubborn the way nothing could argue against. How did you argue against pure, stubborn, 'No'?

"Something?" I mused, scanning over my memories again, an act that had become so intrinsically familiar by now. What else was there to do, when you were placed in solitary confinement with the embodiment of Truth? "No, not really."

"Someone, then?" Truth asked, ever pleasant.

I scanned my memories again, getting a little paranoid now, because did he mess with my memories or something? Danny, Leo, Da, and Uncle and Auntie were the few things keeping me sane here. If he'd messed with them, even if he was some type of God (I remembered his ridiculous spiel of Truth and God and you and me stuff, and it flew over my head really), I would maul him. I could do some decent eyehooks with my fingers, even though… Truth didn't have eyes.

I readied my hands into mouth hooks instead. My fingers were very strong and mauly when I wanted them to be. I'd tear those teeth out of his head.

"Who did you mess with," I asked, scowling at him.

Truth was as smiley as ever. Stupid teeth.

"Who else?" And Truth leaned in, his face ridiculously close all of a sudden, only a few inches from my face. "Of course I meant your mother."

Then he vanished, and I was left clawing the air.

Because it was true. It was very, very true.

Before Truth mentioned it, I didn't even notice. Now, it was this huge, gaping hole in most of my memories of home. Ma.

Ma.

I had a mother? No, of course I had one.

Ma.

I searched, I turned each of them over, I rehashed all the times where it seemed like I was talking to myself in the kitchen, but had been given more weight now (because there was someone there, wasn't there?)

Ma.

I searched, but there was nothing there. I punched the ground, and instantly regretted my moment of fake macho-ness. Floor. Wimpy, flesh knuckles. Note to self: they don't mix.

So I did the logical thing and curled up around it. Bawled my head off. It wasn't as if there was anyone to watch anyway, and if Truth was watching, well maybe this would guilt-trip him.

Stupid pain. Stupid floor.

Stupid Truth.


Truth would say nothing about my mother, nothing about the 'right time', but he stayed around more after that. He, as unwillingly as I let him, became my closest confidante, my closest friend in this white, bright place. I slowly understood his quirks (though still waay in the dark as to why he had such quirks), and the surprising bursts of knowledge that would enter my head every time he touched my arm.

Yeah. I was so desperate that I let creepy Truth touch my arm.

The lows I have fallen!

To distract myself from Truth's creepy-factor, I puzzled through the information that he sent to me. Though, to be honest, the knowledge he gave me didn't make much sense though.

When I asked him about it, he wasn't even sketchy, he just said something vague about 'it's a price to restore balance' and the second time saying 'this has been paid for you,' but the more I understood about the weird physics (alchemy) knowledge he was putting in my brain, the more I was apprehensive.

I understood things – stuff like, you know, apparently there's a universe out there that has earth energy, and people with intense IQ can tap into it and change stuff. Transmute. Magic? Anyway, I understood that. The thing I was worried about was Equivalent Exchange.

"Who is paying for this for me?" I asked. "Because I distinctly remember that my world doesn't have this magic stuff. Our science is electrical machinery, not mystical 'tapping into the natural energy of the world' and all that energy tectonic plate ley line stuff."

"Who is paying for you?" Truth parroted, tapping his chin mockingly. He was a bastard like that. "If you want to be technical, the universe," Truth said, as monotone chorus-like as usual. His smile was still mega-watt blinding. "It's trying to compensate for pulling another person from another universe. Specifically, it's the person who summoned you – they paid a price to direct how the universe would pay the 'cost'. So instead of taking your spinal cord and two legs, I took something else in exchange."

"…What did you take from me?"

Truth's smile never dimmed, but when he raised his hand, there was some white stringy stuff in his palm.

"Why, didn't I already tell you? These are the neurons that made up the semantic networks that once linked to your concept of 'mother'."

It took me half a second to process that, but even less for me to lunge at him this time.

I wanted to grab the stuff in his palm for myself back, to stuff them back in my head somehow, but he vanished.

Dammit. I frowned at my toes.

Because as much as he was my greatest friend here, he was also my worst enemy, and I never, never, forgot that.


"The 'them' you referred to, that paid my price. They were my mother, right?" That was the first thing I asked when Truth reappeared. My eyes tracked him again, because I was angry, and I wanted him to know. "There's no reason why you would only take my memories of my mother. She paid a price, and that price was for me to forget her."

"Yes," Truth merely replied, playful smile on his face. "She loves you very much. It was appropriate."

I bit my lip to stop from screaming. After I had calmed, I continued my deductions.

"She went to that place you're giving me information on, somehow. That place with all the strange magic alchemy stuff. Since I'm here," I waved around this stupid, disgusting, white place, "summoning people from another universe is possible. It happened to her."

Truth smiled like me figuring stuff out was somehow delightful. I groused in my head, because It just felt patronising, frankly. I wish Truth was nicer (but that was folly – Truth is a bludgeon at worst, and revelationary at best. It was never quite gentle), and that he would be less shady and just tell me stuff.

"Since it seems to need a really big cost, that person summoning Ma must have been desperate."

Truth nodded, "Kind of, some details are off, but continue."

"If they were desperate, they must have thought my mother had something they didn't." I paused, but Truth didn't answer, so I continued. "But after something or another, my… my mother summoned me."

"Not really," Truth objected, because he was that type of person who couldn't ever let something 'not-truthful' uncorrected. It was what I had been bargaining on – his smart aleck last-word ways. "She didn't mean to summon you; she was horrified when she realised she got you."

I tilted my head, urging Truth to continue. Please. Don't shut that mouth and say something cryptic again. Dumbledore died for a reason. Communication was key.

"The first person who summoned your mother was… is, something unnatural. They created a situation where they used your mother's status as someone outside the boundaries of the world I've given you information on. In an act of desperation, your mother used all her knowledge and summoned someone else, and it latched onto the person closest to her."

I remembered the bunch of strings in Truth's palm, but stayed silent, because I hadn't got anything to exchange it for. Besides, he was talking. I needed to listen.

"That unnatural thing… I need to hunt them down, but I have no true influence in the corporeal plane. I hijacked the process of your summoning, because you're uniquely suitable for my purposes – and thus I also have to pay part of the price, along with your mother. As I am Truth, you get the truth, knowledge." Truth's eyes jelly-wrinkled around the edges, looking unnatural and smooth and stiff, teeth still gleaming. "I am bound by the rules of the universe just as much as any other, as much as I am omniscient."

He leaned forward again, and his hand touched mine – and I suddenly knew a heck lot about hydrogen, mercury, and the workings of UV. I blinked it away, wondering, wait a second. So mum summoned me (to do something?) and paid the price for disturbing the universe or something. Then Truth hijacked that purpose and (did what?) so he has to… pay a price too?

"You paid a price with my mother?" I repeated blankly, because one, he was one creepy bastard, and I hadn't expected him to play by rules. I blame the lack of eyes. Makes anyone look suspicious.

…But maybe not really? The person in charge of laying the rules had to follow them too.

"Thus, you have quite a few things to do, when I send you down there. I've paid a price after all, so you have to do it. If you don't… there will be ramifications."

He touched my hand again, and the relationship between the four elements was jammed into my brain.

"When is that?"

"When I've paid enough for the exchange, Marlon. Soon enough."

"…Was that the whole truth of the situation?"

Truth smiled, creepy-ass thing.

"No, not really."


The next time Truth appeared, a door appeared beside him also. It was an ornate, engraved door filled with Latin and tree branches and alchemy stuff that I could actually appreciate. The door had a basic explanation for life – flow, God, and Lion King style Circle of Life sermons.

"We have a guest coming," Truth merely said, beckoning a finger towards the door. Inside, all these long black things writhed, before a few hands pushed a glowing, rice-milk coloured thing towards us. It was a bright blob of something cute and small, and when I cupped it in my hands, it felt warm.

Well, since I came into this horrendous, nightmare place, I hadn't felt much heat, or cold, or anything at all. I felt so moved I felt like I could cry.

Wait no, I was crying. Bluh, I hated being a crybaby. Tears spurted out my eyeballs without permission all the time. It was hard to exist without tissues. That tissue-angst was real.

"Hello," I whispered to it. "Hello. Hello, hello, hello."

The warm blob had a small awareness, something tired and painful and young all at once. When I cradled it in my palms, it nuzzled into it with a small greeting of its own.

Something that was sentient that wasn't Truth! I hugged it even closer – it was small, and cute, and cuddly – the complete opposite of seeing an eternity of Truth's rack of creep teeth.

"That," Truth said, butting into my moment like the tactless sledgehammer he was, "is the soul of little Marlon Crawford. She's nearly three years old, and died of lung infection half a minute ago. She is a convenient piece for our purposes," he continued, "because part of your mother's price for you was Identity."

I felt slightly horrified, hugging this baby-soul to my chest; all sleepy and warm and relieved that the pain was over.

"She was born so I could go possess her?"

"No," Truth immediately refuted. "She was fated to die two months before her third birthday. Born premature, she had weak lungs. Getting sick, then getting infection, was something that was supposed to be."

"But human transmutation is wrong," I pointed out to Truth, using my knowledge, because death was part of the natural flow of life. Alchemy used flow – it didn't subvert it. Life lead to death, which flowed to something else. Wasn't I dead?

Truth looked bemused, as much as Truth could look.

"Yes. But there is a difference. One, you are not dead, thus it isn't refuting the law of Death," and I blinked in shock at that information, "and two, because you are not a part of the fabric of this world. Putting a live soul into the vessel of a body is not impossible, though granted, the body is not usually a corpse."

I heard all that, and in my hands, baby-soul heard it too.

"Is that alright, dear one?" I said to it softly. "Can I use your body?"

Baby-soul, Marlon Crawford who shared my first name like a cosmic joke, jumped out of my hands and became a faint shimmering shadow of a thin toddler, black haired and green eyed, whose smile detracted from how skeletal and sick she looked.

"I don't mind!" She chirped, surprisingly articulate. "I'll be happy actually, because that means Daddy won't be alone now. I'm all he has left, see?" She said, babbling happily. Truth's smile was somehow different when he looked at her, and when he touched her, she started filling up like the happy, healthy child she was supposed to be. "I'll even watch over you, if you take care of Daddy for me!"

I knelt down, staring at the colour of her eyes. Leaf green, spinach green. Lime green was closer. Or maybe fresh moss. "Of course. I'll be the best daughter ever. Since I'm occupying your body, can I say you're my sister? I've always wanted a little sister."

She giggled, a small, childish, happy thing.

"Sure!" She tried to throw her arms around me, but they went straight through. "Oh." Her face fell, and I started making silly faces to get her smiling again. I was up to the one where I stuck fingers up my nose when she interrupted.

"You promise you'll take care of Daddy?"

"I promise," I said solemnly. She smiled again, and I was starting a grin when Truth interjected (did he sound slightly amused?). "It is time now. I will give you your task. Fate flows as she wills, and she will automatically correct her course if you deal with the mess your mother made. I am Truth, I am retrospective, and I cannot see the future, only infer, but if you do this task, the future should be whole again."

Truth's hand touched mine, and a searing amount of knowledge was pushed into my brain, so much that my eyes started watering as my brain tried to catch up. It was something about an ancient civilisation. A woman, my mother, arriving there. Something, something?

"Go, now." And with a surprisingly gentle push, I fell backwards through the door into the grasp of those thousands and thousands of creepy black hands.

The next thing I felt was searing, searing pain in the chest. It was also excessively hard to breathe, a problem I'd never had barring intense physical exercise. When I tried to breathe out, phlegmy wet filmy stuff rattled, feeling disgustingly squishy in my throat.

No wonder baby-Marlon felt looked so happy escaping this.

"Stabilising…miraculous recovery…will need further supervision for…"

Words babbled around my head, and with tremendous effort, I lifted my eyelids that felt as heavy as huge lead wrecking balls and focused on the room around me. The first thing I saw was blue. An intense shade of blue, in a marginally handsome, worn face. And according to the small amount of memories Marlon Junior had (entirely too much of staring at hospital walls), this was my new father, who started sporting a huge, wobbly, relieved grin when he saw me open my eyes.

Blue. The first real colour I've seen since Truth.

Well. Screw green. Blue was my new favourite colour.


I feel like I saw this every time I start a new story, but this is my first FMA story, so please be nice? XD I'll try my best to get to the main chara's soon, and hopefully everything made some sort of sense. If you enjoyed, please review! Thank you very much. ^^