Red, meek purple, gleaming gold; life with the gypsies consists of scarf-laden days and violin-lilting nights, revolving through the weeks to the cadence of tambourines and spare change dropped into hats. The creaking of the wagon increases weekly, daily, grows exponentially with the grumbling of the truck's engine; if there is a mechanic in the next town Alphonse will suggest to Scar – to Lust – to the drivers that they get it checked out, because Ed has stopped speaking up on the matter, and if it had mattered to his brother once Al imagines that it must be important.
Lavender, teal, bronze glinting in the seams of threadbare skirts; years have passed since the days of the rockets and now Ed has a dark-haired, dark-skinned daughter. Al's brother gathers the girl in his lap, a tiny, mewling thing, and tells her things he will not tell Al, not anymore. He can only stand by the back end of the truck, stifling and pale beneath a November sky, and catch what words he can. It is a love Al does not understand, but a love he does not question.
Tea cups are round, Al knows, but theirs are chipped – sepia and grey gather in the corners of maimed porcelain, colour and flavour steeping unto a darkness Al feels mirrored and all-consuming in his heart. When it is forty years from now, Ed's delicate and tanned grandchildren will be none the wiser to all that plagues him now, the subsumable will of flesh that cries out and must be near to itself, the skin that misses the soft brush of its brother's lips against it, the beauty evident in the love between brothers. Roy had understood that, wordless and with a smile harsh and drawn, but Ed has forgotten, he has forgotten, and Al with his too-warm fingertips and scratchy eyelids can think of no way to make him remember.