Body, Mind and Soul

"Did it work?"

Alphonse opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment he was confused, but then he remembered that the lights had smashed. Darkness. Of course, darkness was right.

"Brother, where are you? Did it work?"

Silence. All around him was the dense sound of nothingness. Nothing, except the dark so complete that it almost seemed to be smothering him, wriggling over and under his skin. Shadows crept upon shadows, and yet the blackness was so powerful that no movement could be seen. The darkness was eternal, and stretched out all around him. A true lack of light will take all the senses with it.

Alphonse had eyes, yet here he was blind.

He shifted his weight, moving his legs around so that he was sitting on his heels. It was only then that he registered that he was crouched upon the ground.

So the ground was still here, then. That was a good start.

The silence was appalling. Alphonse heard nothing; not even the slight rustle of his own movement, not even the soft sound of his own breathing. He felt a longing to break the unnatural silence, yet also a strange obligation to preserve it. He paused, following his second impulse, and sat quietly. For a moment everything was still. But then the calm settled and thickened and grew closer towards him, almost pouring itself into his ears.

And then he was on his feet, and was shouting for Edward.

No matter how much noise he made, it was swallowed by the silence, somehow rolled up and flattened rather than fading away into the emptiness. He felt a vague surge of terror at hearing his own words consumed and transported away to nowhere. But the real fear came when there was no answer.

Alphonse turned around and around in a sudden panic, straining his eyes uselessly against the heavy dark.

He called again, but this time for mother, teacher, father, granny, anyone who might hear. But again his words folded away from him and vanished, leaving nothing except the silence and the ringing and echoing inside his head, which even this stillness could not quash.

All at once he sat, crouched with his knees to his chest, and wrapped his arms around himself. Although there was no temperature, he felt cold. Blind and deaf, in possession of senses but robbed of their purpose, he began to frantically search his mind for explanations. Yet even his memories were useless. He remembered his trepidation, excitement, a sudden flash of inexplicable fear. Beyond that, nothing.

But what had happened? To him, to Edward, to mother, where were they all now? How had everything got so quiet? What had happened to everyone? Thinking about this made Alphonse almost cry, but he pushed the tears deep down inside himself and covered them, too terrified of the silence to make a sound. His shoulders shook noiselessly in the midst of the stillness.

He curled into a tiny ball and remained motionless for a long, long time.

A hand fell upon his shoulder.

"Brother?"

And he was standing and had turned around.

He saw nothing but blackness, dark upon dark, an enveloping darkness that defied the eyes to adjust to it. And yet, although he saw nothing except black, there was something there: a silhouette made of darkness, as if the lack of light had pooled and concentrated to produce this condensed figure made of a still denser dark. It was moving closer to him, and still had its hand on his shoulder.

Alphonse stepped back.

And there were more, darker than the unsurpassable black all around him, and they were surrounding him, and they had hands that clutched at his bare skin and hair and legs and chest and face. The feel of their hands was gruesome. It was a touch consisting entirely of shadow; it was soft and brushed against him, but had a strong, resistant grip. He fought mindlessly as they pulled and grabbed at him, tugging on his limbs and attempting to rip him away from each other. He yelled, and tried to fling them off; they merely raised their heads and looked at him.

Then he saw it: these creatures, that grew from nothing and were made of nothing, and that currently swarmed across his body, had faces. Eyes and teeth.

He was surrounded by a darkness filled with eyes and teeth.

He struggled, or at least he tried to, but movement was squashed just like sound had been. Except that this was somehow still more terrifying.

The noises and the moves that the shadow creatures made had come into being out of the stillness and the silence. Their sounds, a constant, buzzing, excitable chatter, were formed from and made of the lack of sound, so the silence did not consume them. Yet Alphonse, an invader, with foreign movements and new noises, was swallowed and choked by it. He felt himself being dragged down into the nothingness-

And then the twin doors opened, and light flooded over him.

Author's note: As Al lost his memories of the time spent journeying with Ed, this is what I imagined he would remember in between transmuting Trisha and being restored to his normal body. I think that time wouldn't function normally inside the Gate, so his experiences would only seem to last a few minutes or so. Sorry for not including the Gate babies much, but. . . they creep me out.