Author's Note: I'm an asshole. Some Christmas fic.

Warnings: Suicide

They're all fighting again.

"Someone has to do it. The kid looked close to dead by the time we got back, and it's been two hours now! The infection is spreading, Roy. We have to do this now or we'll all – "

"Let's just wait a little longer before we make any decisions."

"There are no other options! No matter how long we wait, the end result will be the same."

"Fine, Jean, let's just do it now. You go ahead, by all means. And when Edward comes back, you can be the one to tell him that you killed his little brother."

It's like they think he can't hear them, how they continue to toss his life around in their hands as if he has no say, and Alphonse is tired, so very tired. He's been in this room for what feels like days, though he knows it's been a little less than two hours. Alphonse sits in the bed he's shared with his brother for the past week or so, staring listlessly out the window as he clutches at his bandaged arm.

"If we wait until Ed comes back… Roy, he won't let us do it. He'll keep Alphonse alive no matter how much pain the kid is in. That's not fair to either of them."

"We can't separate them like this, not after everything we've been through. At the very least, Edward needs to say goodbye. He'll never be able to move on if he doesn't. Just wait for them to come back. It shouldn't be long now."

Alphonse misses simpler days when he would play with his brother in their own backyard, when life was easy and the dead didn't rule the world. It feels like so long ago now, almost like another life entirely. Even though he'd only been twelve when the virus first struck, he hardly remembers a world with privileges such as working electricity or a true, vanilla death.

His entire being is now wired for survival and not much else. Even now, he's still fighting, though there isn't much left for Alphonse to fight for, not now, not after he's been bitten.

"I can't believe this." Maria, who has been relatively silent thus far, sounds close to tears as she interrupts Roy and Jean's conversation. She hadn't left the house with them earlier, choosing instead to stay behind with Riza and Elicia, the latter of whom was beginning to fall ill with some illness that Alphonse can't even remember the name of now. She was the reason they'd left the house, and while the sacrifice was a hefty one, Alphonse is glad they were able to get the medication the little girl needed. "He's only sixteen. Weren't any of you watching him?"

"Alphonse is very capable for his age." Riza says, placating the other woman. Alphonse can imagine her placing a hand on Maria's shoulder, situating herself between the squabbling members of their group. "He's proved that to us many times over. What happened was only a fluke. Neither Jean nor Roy could have seen this coming."

Maria sighs, and Alphonse swallows thickly. He watches the movement below, only picks up on unsteady, awkward gates and glassy eyes. He doesn't know how much longer he has, if he can overcome the virus until his brother comes back, and he's not sure if he has the strength to keep trying anymore.

He almost can't believe that it happened. They'd been making a simple run to a nearby pharmacy for medicine for Elicia; Roy, Jean, Lan Fan, Edward, and Alphonse himself went, leaving Maria and Riza to watch over things. Nothing had seemed off, not a single undead in sight, and even when a small hoard did show up, Alphonse hadn't been concerned on the getting out alive front.

They'd all lost somebody, were hardened in ways that other survivors weren't even four years after the outbreak began, but all their experience didn't stop them from getting separated, or stop Alphonse from momentarily losing his footing and allowing an undead to slip in for the intended kill. Alphonse killed it soon after he was bitten, but in the end, the rotting corpse got the last laugh.

His brother will be furious. They'd both been trained better than this, don't deserve to be fallen because of some fluke, and beyond the fear of his impending doom, Alphonse is ashamed of himself; ashamed because, despite his best efforts, he couldn't preserve his own life, the first of only two things he'd managed to keep from the old world, the second being his older brother. They both mean everything to him, two things that can never be replaced, and the thought of losing either one was something Alphonse had refused to entertain until now.

Here he is on his deathbed, and Alphonse is more worried about never seeing Edward again than he is about turning into one of the monsters they've spent nearly four years running from. It's almost comical, and the boy would laugh if he weren't so terrified.

"How are we gonna do this?" Jean asks quietly, and Alphonse wants them to shut up, grits his teeth and doubles over on the bed, wishing desperately that he could rip off his own arm and he done with it. "I've never killed a kid before, let alone one I'm close to."

"There are only two options." Riza says, ever the strategist. "Either Edward insists he does it himself out of loyalty to his brother, or one of us will have to hold Edward down while someone else ends this."

Alphonse tries to picture it in his head, isn't sure how he would react if his own brother were to come at him with a gun, liquid sorrow in his eyes as he struggled to end Alphonse's life. That doesn't sound terribly appealing, but neither does listening to his older brother scream as someone else slips into Alphonse's room – it would probably be Lan Fan, the only person in the group who's had to put down a loved one in the past.

Riza doesn't know, but there's also a slim chance that Edward might sit silently and let his younger brother take care of things himself. Alphonse could be wrong about that, but considering a conversation he once had with his brother, he figures it's a possibility. There is a chance that Edward has changed his mind since then, though.

"What if we amputate the arm?" Maria asks. Alphonse can hear her pacing, sees the rapidly moving shadow underneath the crack at the bottom of the door. "The infection might not have spread through his entire body at this point, maybe we can – "

"Be logical about this." Roy says, voicing Alphonse's own thoughts on the matter. "None of us are qualified to remove someone's arm, let alone keep the wound from getting infected. Gracia was the one who… Anyway. The virus spreads with the flow of blood, Maria. Alphonse is mature for his age, but he's only a child. He's likely begun to panic, and with all that blood rushing to his heart, it won't be long now."

Alphonse would at least like to say that he kept a cool head in his final moments, but that's not true. It was easier to pretend that he was all right when he was face-to-face with the others, keeping up a smile for their benefit even as blood seeped in between his fingers and onto the ground below. Roy and Jean had stayed close to him on the journey back to their safe house, but once they arrived, they'd given him a wide berth.

It hurt, of course it had, but Alphonse understood, shutting himself up in his room to give them and himself some time to come to terms with what had happened. Alphonse doesn't like to think that he would hurt his own friends if he were to change, but he was there when Gracia got sick, and again when she died and came back to life as something else and tried to attack her own daughter. Edward was the one who'd pulled the trigger while Lan Fan hustled Elicia, kicking and screaming, into the next room.

No matter how gentle or loving a person was before, death turns them into something else, and Alphonse knows he'll be one of them before too long.

Roy is right. Alphonse is beginning to panic; his heart is beating way too fast, spreading the infection inside him at an accelerated rate. Time is running out, Edward isn't here, and Alphonse refuses to lose whatever ounce of humanity he has left while waiting for him.

It takes entirely too much energy to push himself to his feet, but he manages somehow, keeping a firm grip on his wounded bicep as he shuffles over to the desk near the closet, opening the drawer and withdrawing the extra pistol that Edward keeps there for emergencies. Roy had asked for Alphonse's own gun when they got back, probably for this reason, and Alphonse had given it to him, knowing that it wouldn't do much if he ended up making a tough decision before Edward made it back.

When they first set out on this journey, Alphonse didn't think he'd make it more than a few months. He'd never wanted to kill anybody, regardless if they were technically already dead, and Roy always used to say that he would be among the first to die if he didn't toughen up; but in the end, Alphonse is one of four sole survivors of their original group. He only made it this far because of Edward; his older brother, who gives him the strength and will to survive, and the one who never fails to tell his younger brother, every time they leave their safety zone, "If you die out there, you better hope I don't find you. I'll slap your corpse until I'm one myself, got it?"

Alphonse screws his eyes shut, refusing to look at the gun any longer.

It's with careful footsteps that he approaches the door, knowing that the others are still talking but unable or unwilling to listen to them any longer. He feels disoriented, like his entire body is made of lead. He's lost feeling in the arm that was bitten, so he carefully tucks the pistol into the crook of his elbow as he reaches for the dead bolt on the door. Alphonse tries to be as silent as possible, but with his entire body trembling both out of exhaustion and fear of what he's about to do, the sound of the lock sliding into place is louder than he'd intended it to be.

The sounds in the adjacent room stop, and Alphonse winces, reaffirming his hold on the gun and turning so his back is to the door. Alphonse forces himself to breathe in the few moments of silence following, though eventually there's a knock on the door. "Al? You okay in there?"

Jean tries to turn the knob but can't get the door open, and tears begin to slide down Alphonse's face as the older man starts to swear, calling for Roy. "Shit, he's locked himself in!"

"Al." Roy joins Jean at the door, and Alphonse tightens his grip on the gun, wishes they would just let him do this. As if it weren't hard enough. "Al, open the door."

"Is Elicia asleep?" There's silence, and Alphonse can imagine them exchanging confused and worried glances. "Tell Maria to go make sure she's asleep."

"What are you doing?"

"What you guys won't."

"Al, don't!" Riza calls, probably hovering just over Roy's shoulder. "You don't have to do this, it's not – "

"We all know how this is gonna end, guys." Alphonse says, refusing to remove his gaze from the window and the full moon seemingly just beyond the glass. He hopes Edward and Lan Fan are all right. They've been gone for a long time now. "If I don't, you'll all struggle trying to figure out who will do it later, and I might already be gone by then. I might hurt somebody."

"We can deal with that when it comes!" Jean shouts, and Maria swears, hurrying off to check on Elicia. "C'mon, man, we've been through too much to let you go like this. Remember those times we found wounded house pets lootin' through neighborhoods last winter? You couldn't kill a dog let alone yourself!"

"Alphonse Michael Elric!" Roy snaps while Maria, who is apparently finished checking on Elicia, gets on Jean for being insensitive. "Put down whatever weapon you have and open this fucking door, right now!"

Listening to the man talk, Alphonse is suddenly reminded of the Roy Mustang from before, their local high school's head security guard and the only one person who Edward had somewhat respected that wasn't apart of the Elric family. Alphonse considered himself lucky to have been smart enough to skip a few grades and attend high school at twelve. If he hadn't, Alphonse doubts he would've survived that first day when the Infected swarmed their small town. Roy and his team had saved as many students as they could, Edward and Alphonse included, though at the end of that year, they were the only two left alive.

They're all invested in him, Alphonse realizes as they continue to shout and pound away at the door. They know he can't be helped and yet they won't let him do this without first trying to talk him down. Alphonse can't make sense of it, only knows that it's getting harder to breathe, and he feels like he's been hit by a truck.

Truthfully, Alphonse is terrified, but not for the reasons his friends might think. Taking his own life certainly isn't going to be easy, but to him, it sounds preferable to dying and coming to life as some mindless corpse. After witnessing all this destruction, he's always been determined to stay human for as long as he can, and if he's going to die, Alphonse wants to go as nothing other than himself, or with whatever is left of who he used to be still intact.

Before, he was the underage prodigy in a household run by a single mother, struggling to keep up in a world ruled by commercialism that would chew a person up and spit them out without a second thought. Now, his only useful skills are his abilities to expertly wield a gun – the same gun he's been caring since the beginning, the one he used to kill his own mom – and talk down his hotheaded older brother.

Alphonse wants to live, though he knows that's a reality far beyond his reach now.

"Tell Brother that I love him and I'm sorry." Alphonse says loudly, fumbling to situate the gun with one trembling hand and another that can't feel a damn thing. "But he'll understand."

He fights past the blur in his vision and removes the safety, lifts the pistol to his temple –

"Alphonse, don't do this to your brother. Don't you at least want to say good – "

- and pulls the trigger.

"Hey, Ed?"

"Yeah?"

"What do you think happens when you die?"

Edward frowns to himself, mulling over Alphonse's inquiry for a brief moment before turning to face his brother. "You mean, after a shot to the head or before?"

Alphonse breaths out a wisp of a laugh. "Before."

"I don't think about it much. If I did, I probably wouldn't be able to pull the trigger before one of them sunk its teeth into me." Edward says. His older brother used to be a person who would ask questions first and shoot later. It worked in the beginning when people still retained their humanity and tried to help one another. Now, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and Edward has adapted like most everyone has. Alphonse can't say he doesn't miss the gentle person his brother used to be, though he does catch glimpses here and there. "Why are you asking?"

"Just curious." A light flickers in the house they're staking out, a signal that there aren't any undead in the vicinity but the building hasn't been searched completely, and the brothers shift on their respective branches, trying to get comfortable. "Ever since Gracia died… I don't know. What happens to a person when they die? Are they trapped? Do they remember anything?"

"My guess is no. That thing tried to attack Elicia. Gracia would have never done something like that."

"What if her soul was… trapped in there?" Alphonse asks worriedly, imagining a disembodied Gracia, pounding at the edges of her own mind, watching herself attack her only child but unable to do a thing about it. "What if they all are?"

"Then I guess I set her free." Edward says, and he shoots Alphonse a sidelong glance, offering him a small smile. "And all those things you killed, you saved the people inside them, too. If their souls were really in there, of course. Maybe when someone gets infected, their souls leave for good when they die, and what comes back is just a hollow shell. Makes sense considering how mindless they act."

Alphonse nods, though he doesn't feel any better. "But we don't know for sure."

"I don't think we ever will. For all we learn, we're always one step behind. We think the virus is spread through direct contact, like through a bite, though we've both seen those who weren't bit turn on a dime."

"Kinda freaky. It could easily be one of us next."

"Is that what you're worried about?" Edward asks seriously, placing the palm of his left hand against the tree trunk to steady himself when a gust of wind shakes the branches. "What'll become of you if you turn? Because I won't let that happen, Al."

"I know you wouldn't." Alphonse says, kicking his legs as he sits on his own branch. "But I still wonder. I wouldn't want to become one of them and hurt someone."

Edward is quiet for a time, and Alphonse can hear Lan Fan and Elicia talking quietly in the tree next to them. "If something were to happen," Edward says at length, "what would you want me to do?"

"Huh?"

"If you were to be bitten, what would you want me to do?"

Alphonse blinks, leaning against the trunk heavily without taking his eyes off the house. "If anything, just don't kid yourself. You won't be able to help me, so denying it wouldn't work."

"I think I can manage that. I was always the more cynical one between the two of us, anyway."

"Ha, yeah, I remember."

They're both quiet, and Alphonse thinks he sees movement at the tree line, hopes to God that he's only seeing things and there aren't any of the undead around. "I would want to do it myself."

"What's that?"

"End it." Alphonse clarifies, finally turning his head to meet his brother's gaze, trying to convey how serious he is, even in the near darkness they're surrounded by. "If something happens, I would want to end my own life. So… I guess you should let me."

Edward laughs, though it's far from a happy sound, and Lan Fan hisses for them to keep quiet. "Let my little brother kill himself. What kind of fucking world do we live in where that's even an option?"

"I think in the end, I'd be more scared of being one of them than taking my own life." Alphonse whispers, not wanting Lan Fan or Elicia – especially Elicia – to hear. "I wouldn't want my soul to be trapped, looking on while my body hurts and kills others, makes them like me. I know it's not fair to ask this of you, Brother, but I couldn't ask you to kill me either."

"I wouldn't be able to, even if I knew there was no way to save you." Edward replies. He looks so tired in that moment, hardly a boy of sixteen. "I mean, I helped raise you. You were my genius kid brother who tagged along wherever I went. I loved you then and I still love you now. There's no way in Hell I could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, even if you were trying to kill me."

Alphonse flinches, doesn't like to even think about hurting his brother in such a manner, but Edward isn't finished. "But you have to do the same if something happens to me, okay? Just let me handle it."

"I couldn't kill you either, idiot." Alphonse says, though he wonders. He had to shoot their mom on that first day. He and Edward had insisted that they go find their mom during the chaos, but she was already gone when they got home. Their dad had been a hunter, his guns still in the home, and Alphonse hadn't hesitated to shoot her when she made a lunge for Edward. He'd been twelve years old then, and while he'd been horrified afterward, too jolted to even let go of the gun until Edward pried it from his hands, he hadn't thought about it in the moment. Alphonse wonders what he would be capable of now, what with all the experience he has. "You'd be a freakishly strong and coherent zombie. I don't think all of us combined could put you down."

"Well, thanks for sparing my life out of love." Edward scoffs, and Alphonse can't help but grin, despite the subject matter. "But seriously. I know it would hurt, but we can't do that to each other, fight for something already lost. It would be different if there was a cure, but there isn't."

"I know. Death is permanent, even now. You don't have to remind me."

Edward nods, and the glare of a flashlight from within the house distracts them. The movement Alphonse had seen earlier was indeed an undead, and it's loping across the field now, drawn in by the sudden break in darkness. Alphonse steels himself to jump down from the tree and go take care of it, but Lan Fan slithers down her tree first with Elicia in tow. The little girl is only eight, though she's tough for her age, and Edward and Alphonse watch her back as she waits near the tree while Lan Fan goes to deal with the newcomer.

"I know what happened with Mom fucked you up." Edward says suddenly, and it's so off topic that Alphonse is stunned into silence. "That you think you're a bad person or some monster, but I'll never stop thanking you. I was the one she was after, and yet I still couldn't bring myself to kill her, even though she was already gone. You were braver than I was that day, and you've been amazing these past couple of years. Just… don't count yourself short, Al. You're stronger than you think."

Lan Fan is back, taking Elicia's hand and signaling for Edward and Alphonse to follow them back to their newest safe house, and the brothers climb down their tree, first Edward and then Alphonse.

Alphonse stares at the back of his brother's head as they walk, dumbfounded by him for the first time in a long while. His older brother means everything to him, though he knows that if the time comes, he'll have to let him go without a fuss; but can he? They lost their dad young because of a hunting accident, and after killing his own mother, Alphonse was too afraid to pick up a gun.

But Edward, as strong as he is, gave Alphonse the courage and incentive to wield a gun once again. His entire purpose is to protect his brother and the people they care about, but what if they were suddenly taken from him? Alphonse isn't sure what he would do, but he does know that he'll be strong for his brother, because Edward would do the same for him, every time.

And when the day comes, Alphonse won't be afraid of death, because if he has his way, he'll go completely as himself, and that is a death worth fighting for.