Title: Notes on Alchemy
Genre: Angst, General
Characters: Alphonse and Edward Elric
Pairings: None
Warnings: Character death
Word Count: 1,413
Summary: Equivalent Exchange does not exist. Alphonse Elric learns what Edward Elric refused to see. AU Animeverse.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist or its related characters (or much of anything). No profit is being derived from this work by the author, other than her own enjoyment.
Author's Notes: First FMA fic. I haven't finished watching the anime, so let me know if there are some grievous errors in terms of the characters. AU from some point in the middle of the series, although it references things that are revealed in later chapters. Enjoy.
And now our feature presentation:
Equivalent Exchange does not exist.
Equivalent Exchange is therefore not the founding principle of alchemy.
Any fool should be able to realize that the world does not run on the principle of Equivalent Exchange. Monsters are blessed while the holy are damned. There is no larger purpose to life, no plan, no guiding light. In short, there is no justice. Some men are born in the lap of luxury and squander their wealth on night after night of bacchanalia, while others break their backs and earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow and die without so much as a tombstone to mark their grave.
The Elric Brothers however, were children, and they still believed in fairy tales. They had believed that if they worked hard enough they would be able to get what they wanted. One failed experiment had not taught them that they were wrong, and so they had set out to regain what they had lost, believing wholeheartedly that they could get what they wanted. After all, they didn't want much. How much were an arm and a leg and a child's body compared to a mother?
The question of alchemy is more complicated. In the beginning, when men like Nicholas Flammel were pioneering the science it was observed that thirty grams of water could not be transformed into twenty grams of ice any more easily than lead could be turned to gold. It was discovered that the mass and elemental composition of the original materials could not differ drastically from that of the final product. The observation was simple enough, and the scientists gave it a simple name: Equivalent Exchange.
What these scientists (and almost all who followed them) failed to take into account was that in order to achieve a transformation, massive amounts of energy are required. Alchemists never really got around to thinking about things like energy. The man who could have changed this had felt hungry one brisk spring day and had picked an apple out of the tree. The apple therefore never fell on his head, and the man remained an anonymous professor, a mediocre alchemist whose silly dabblings were (rightfully) lost to the injuries of time.
Alchemy developed at the expense of physics. Equivalent Exchange? Hardly. Besides, the world would never know the difference.
But, Equivalent Exchange is what is written in all the textbooks, so Equivalent Exchange it is. Besides, it seems that Equivalent Exchange works.
Had Edward Elric been older or wiser, he would have realized the truth sooner. A leg and his brother in exchange for a monster? An arm to damn his brother to a suit of armor? And then, what about all the other alchemists? Shou Tucker had traded a beautiful little girl and a delightful dog for an abomination. What in the world could possibly be equivalent to the life of little Nina Tucker?
The Gods of the Gate of Alchemy are cruel and unforgiving gods. Not jealous gods, like the God of Ishval, but cruel and unforgiving nonetheless.
Edward Elric was a child, and even if he didn't believe in gods, he still believed in fairy tales. And Alphonse believed in his big brother, so whatever Ed believed, was the gospel truth to Al.
Still, Edward Elric was a genius. Sometimes he had doubts. Small, unhappy doubts, late at night when he was supposed to be asleep. He always brushed them aside, into the back of his mind. He didn't have a god, he didn't have a father; he needed something to believe in. And so he did. It made his life easier. It allowed him to sell his soul to the military, because that was the way life worked. Equivalent Exchange: sacrifices had to be made, and if he needed to give up his freedom in order to attain the knowledge to restore his brother, well then, fair was fair.
But dog of the military or not, Edward Elric was still a child. He had no mother, and no father worth speaking of. Pinako was very far away, Mustang very busy, and Hughes very dead. So there was no one really to tell him when to eat, or when to go to sleep, or when to quit. Alphonse was different. Alphonse had a god, and his name was Edward Elric. So when Edward Elric told Alphonse that he wasn't hungry, Al believed him. And when Ed said he wasn't sleepy, Al believed him so long as he didn't yawn. And when Ed said he wasn't cold, Al believed him. Being made of iron, Alphonse really couldn't feel the cold.
Hohenheim wasn't there to tell Edward Elric to come in from the snow.
Trisha wasn't there to bring Edward Elric a warm blanket.
Pinako wasn't there to drag the boy in front of the fireplace.
Mustang didn't care quite enough to feed him chicken soup.
So Edward played in the snow. He played and played and played, because he was a child, and even a child with limbs of steel needs to play once in a while, and Edward hadn't played in so long. And Alphonse just watched and smiled, or would have smiled, if he'd really had a mouth that could do that, because he knew better than anyone that Edward, god or not, was still just a child, and he knew that children had to play, and he couldn't feel the cold.
But now, Alphonse Elric knows what his brother always refused to admit, because no amount of playing in the snow could possibly have been worth the twilight of his idol. No amount of fun could have been worth the pain that he endured as his brother who was still mostly of flesh and blood caught his death of cold. Beautiful, brilliant, charming Edward Elric had died not on his quest for the Philosopher's Stone, not at the hands of a homunculus, not even in the line of duty as a State Alchemist. He had died as a child because he had stayed out in the snow too long because his worthless tin brother couldn't feel the cold. What should have been just a simple cold, obnoxious but nothing more had escalated because his tin can of a brother had believed him when he had said that he wasn't hungry and when he said that he wasn't tired, and so he had been both hungry and tired when he'd been out in the snow. And the disease hadn't been checked until the pulmonary infection had become full-fledged pneumonia because the boy had been too proud to tell Mustang that he was sick and his worthless brother who never got sick and couldn't remember how it felt had believed him when he had said that he felt fine. A stupid suit of armor who couldn't feel cold when it was snowing and couldn't feel heat when little Edward Elric was burning up.
When Edward Elric died, Alphonse Elric lost his brother, and his mother, and his father, and his best friend, and his hope, and his teacher, and his god and his faith. And none of it was worth it. Alphonse Elric learned that day what the founding principle of alchemy really was.
Equivalent Exchange does not exist. There is no justice in the world, only the strong and the meek. The meek will not inherit the earth.
His eyes were opened, and he realized that since Equivalent Exchange did not exist, he was not bound to it. Nothing could be worth his brother's life anyway, so what did it matter what it cost to bring him back?
Alphonse Elric died when Edward Elric died and rose again a monster, like all the others who had returned from the dead before him. He died like Hohenheim and Dante had done all those centuries ago, and it wasn't fair and it wasn't worth it and it never would be, because Equivalent Exchange does not exist. It never has and it never will.
Edward Elric, when he had lived, had been a brilliant alchemist. In the end it hadn't been blindness that had kept him from the truth about Equivalent Exchange. He was brilliant. He knew the cost of giving up his last fairy tale and so he'd clung to it like a security blanket even as he died. Edward Elric had known the cost, and he hadn't been willing to pay it, and that had been his Equivalent Exchange.
Except of course, for the fact that Equivalent Exchange does not exist.
FIN.
Author's Notes: Or does it? That of course is for the reader to decide. Anyway, I'm very new to the FMA fandom—I just started watching FMA about a month ago… In any case, I'm not completely delighted with this little one shot, but I figured I'd post it and see what you guys thought. Reviews would be highly appreciated.
As to what the text in italics is… they're notes on Alchemy. Whose? Hohenheim's? Dante's? Al's? You tell me.
Also, maybe I should note that I absolutely adore Ed and Al… Normally I torture the characters I love most.