Disclaimer: I don't own anything!
Author's Note: I've been reading Cornelia Funke's Inkdeath and this idea wouldn't leave me alone.
-/-/-/-
"Now, you're looking for the secret. But you won't find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled."
-Cutter (The Prestige)
-/-/-/-
When Fullmetal walks down the street, heads turn. That isn't something to really be surprised about. He was a stunning young man. But Roy has seen some of the soldiers' faces when they look at his subordinate, has seen the way they stare and the way their eyes asked if this young man before them was made of the same flesh as them.
He had been, once. Now, some of that flesh has been replaced with gleaming steel. His determination and skill in alchemy seemed almost unreal, but Roy has seen the way he looks at Alphonse and it was human love there. And Roy had seen him after the Tucker incident, huddled in the rain, and that had been the guilt and helplessness of a mortal man.
Roy has nightmares after he sees the Gate, (How had an eleven year old child stayed sane after seeing something like that?) after his sight was taken from him. He's been accustomed to nightmares since Ishval, but these nightmares are terrible things painted in shades of stark white. There is a not-person there, one who smiles and makes shivers run down his spine. But the not-person is something that can only be really seen out of the corner of your eye, like it would disappear if you turned to fully look at it.
At first, the being stays restricted to his nightmares, but soon, it's there during his waking hours as well and sometimes, he'll enter a room and he thinks he sees it, crouching in a corner and laughing silently at him, but when he turns to look, the corner is empty. Is this what it was like for Fullmetal? Is this what haunted his steps during his travels?
"Sir?"
Roy looks at Riza, who was standing in front of his desk and for a brief, horrible moment, the white, smiling face is superimposed over hers. "Yes?"
"Alphonse is insisting that we go to Resembool. Apparently, there's some news that he says can't just be told over the phone."
"He insisted?" Alphonse was still the same soul that they'd known, still polite and kind. For him to insist and not ask, it must be important.
"He did."
"Did he say when?"
"This weekend."
Roy eyed the stacks of paperwork at his desk. "Then I guess it would be better if this was all done before then."
"Yes sir."
He sighs, but is quietly grateful for the distraction. He's found that keeping his mind occupied is the best remedy for not seeing the wide, wide smile. (Is that why Fullmetal was constantly on the move, never sitting, never resting?)
-/-/-/-
Roy almost doesn't recognize Alphonse. He looks healthy, incredibly so, with his bronze hair cut short and he was filling out, though there was still a little hollow in his cheeks. It's strange to have to drop his gaze down almost two feet when he looks to Alphonse, to not hear the echo of metal.
Edward greets them, though he's staying rather close to the door. Roy had asked why and he said that it was a just-in-case measure. Winry had apparently decided that Ed wasn't allowed near the kitchen while she was cooking, though she gave no indication as to why. But Ed still seemed determined to steal small pieces of food whenever Winry left the kitchen.
It's as they're sitting down to eat that Alphonse makes his announcement, with Winry by his side and it seems almost surreal how very comfortable with each other those two are. Had they not, just eight months earlier, been fighting for their country and their lives?
While everyone congratulates the two of them on their engagement, Roy turns to Edward, who was smiling and had clapped along with everyone else, but there was no surprise on his face. That wasn't strange. Sometimes, it seemed like Edward-and-Alphonse could never keep anything from each other.
This probably isn't the best time for this question, but it's the first time Roy has seen Ed in eight months. "Do you see it too?"
"See what?" Edward asks, not looking away from the happy seen in front of him as if committing it to memory. But there's a slight, mocking edge to his smile now and Roy knows that he has. That he's seen it outside of nightmares and memories.
"Why do you think it's following us? To remind us that we'll never be free of it?"
Ed shrugged, as if the answer wasn't important and the question wasn't the right one. "I see it every time I close my eyes. It talks to me sometimes. It'll ask me if I want to come back, if I still want those answers, if I regret giving up my alchemy. Most of the time…I tell it no."
Which meant that, in some small part of him, Ed wished that he could be back in that white, endless place with no ceiling or floor. That that part of him still sought that limitless knowledge about everything. Still sought the arrays, the lines merging and intersecting with one another to form a grand design.
"Does it say anything to you?" Ed asked, glancing at him.
"...Sometimes."
"Let me guess, it makes you promises, makes you want to go back so badly that you'd do anything."
Roy has never felt particularly uncomfortable around Edward, but when those tawny eyes look at him like that, with too much knowledge and he's reminded again that this boy (He's a young man now, but he remembers those eyes looking at him out of a boy's face and it had been just as disconcerting then as now) saw the Gate at eleven years old and was tied to it somehow. Or perhaps the Gate had left a piece of itself with them or vice-versa? But Roy doesn't feel anything missing from himself. He simply feels tired, like life-tired.
"…Yeah. Something like that." (The only way you'll ever be truly strong enough is through me, it whispers and the voice changes. Sometimes, it's a child, sometimes it's a woman, sometimes it's sibilant and other times it's echoing. And it keeps whispering, always on the edges of his mind)
"What's it promise you?"
"…Strength." He's never told anyone this. It would only frighten them.
But Ed knows the Gate, knows how it can be at once very alluring and yet terrifying. And he doesn't ask what the strength is for. He doesn't have to. "Strength." He repeats. "It does like to say that. It's probably right too, but do you really need that kind of strength to defend what's in front of you?"
Isn't what you have now enough, is the unspoken question. And Roy knows the answer. Sometimes, it wasn't, but most of the time, it was.
He thinks that Alphonse would ask Edward what it looked like, but he remembers the next instant that Alphonse's body had been trapped with it in that white place for almost five years. Maes would have asked, he thinks. He would have asked Roy to describe it for him.
And Roy would have told him and no one else because it was Maes. He would have answered, "It looked like a place with no happy endings."