A/N: Written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Meeting Azulongmon 2 task, and for the Diversity Writing Challenge, A69 – write about an inanimate object. The armour is inanimate post-Brotherhood. :) If it survived. I don't remember if it did actually, but let's assume so!
It's been way too long since I've written for FMA. You can thank Shadow for this fic. :D
Looking Back at that Armour
His armour was a rusted, fading thing.
Perhaps it wasn't even right to call it his anymore, but he could not think of it belonging to anyone else. And it wasn't even an armour anymore. It had broken; he hadn't fixed it, that final time, because there'd been no need. Alphonse had his own body by then. He needed a walking stick, leg braces…that kind of thing. And it easier to carry flat, jagged, pieces of metal.
It would have been even easier to carry neater squares – or a ball of clumped petal – but he could not bring himself to deface it further. How it crumbled in fights or with the passage of time was fine, but by his own hand he could not change it. Mend it, yes. But this was the final record of his sin. Of his mistake. Of his retribution.
The metal leg he still wore was almost always covered in his pants. That was his own cost. His own sacrifice. The scar he was willing to carry around.
That armour was a reminder from his brother. Healthy now, travelling, performing alchemy and helping everyone he could…
That armour sat in their bedroom at the Rockbells and decayed.
'Step forward.' That was the message he heard it say. 'Step forward and embrace the future.'
It was a part of the past now, and that was why it wasn't right to mend it.
But, while it was still in this world of theirs, he looked back at it, as it continued to slowly fade into the mesh of time.
