.Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist does not belong to me!
A/N: This was gonna be a one-shot but I was typing it and decided that it wasn't one. It's a two-shot, just because it is! Anyway, this idea has been in my Ipod Notepad for like a year and a half, so I figured I should make good on it. :)
Embodiment
One Year Later
.
It's funny the way no one can stand to even really look at him.
It's funny how he's one of those people.
The mirror in the bathroom is still broken from before, but he doesn't bother getting a new one, he hasn't, still, after all this time – he doesn't even bother cleaning it up. He wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and tip toes around the shards of glass, watching the flashes of gold that accompany him appear in all those little reflective pieces on the floor, like a mosaic. He half wants to trip one of these times. To fumble around in the darkness and just die in the next instant. Just like that.
He would be searching for the light switch, his hand rubbing furtively along the smooth panel of the wall, but he wouldn't be able to find it. Maybe he was too tired. Maybe he'd been drinking. (He never drank.) So he would think, screw it, and go into the room anyway, foregoing the light all together. Then his foot would catch on something, perhaps he had accidentally knocked a roll of toilet paper over in his questing, and he would fall to the ground. It wouldn't be a big event from there – oh yes, he had it all planned out – no need to draw out the experience. One of those forgotten, insignificant little pieces of glass would catch in his throat and...
Slice
...No more Alphonse Elric.
He could never take his own life though. He had no right. It no longer belonged to him, not really, and he couldn't... Couldn't kill... Couldn't...
Not like this.
Alphonse let out a deep breath. He would never clean up that mirror, never be able to mend his broken life here. Here. Here! Here he was like a bad omen, it unnerved them. He didn't blame them though, out of all the people who were made uneasy, it effected him most of all.
A familiar sense of overwhelming sensation enveloped him and acid burned at the back of his throat. (He'd thought that it would stop by now, it had certainly been long enough.) It wouldn't do to be sick now though, he didn't want to go back into that room of a million mirrors only to see what he had become thrown back at him from every angle. Never again. He bit back the bile that rose up in his throat, savoring the horrid, burning sensation and idly casting his eyes out his low window.
The moon was still high in the sky, but he willed it to go faster. For morning to come.
It was still the middle of the night, and his reprieve seemed so far away that it made him sick all over again. In the morning, he would leave Amestris. He would go West, where no one knew his face. Past Aruego and past Creta, he would go twice the distance west that Drachma stretched North, he would go thrice that far; he would go where no one would ever recognize him for who he really wasn't.
And he would never look again.
One Month Later
.
Two golden eyes stare back at him from the face in the steady reflection before his gaze. They're his eyes but they don't feel like they are. They feel wrong.
At least like this.
(All Alphonse Elric ever wants is for his brother to come back, from this all the moments before this, through this moment, and into the rest of his life.)
He snarls, and the action appears all too familiar. He's seen it on his brother's face a thousand times. The unrivaled grimace, his infamous scowl, or the unbridled growling, grinding, gnashing of his teeth. The determination. The tenocity. The anger.
But it's not his it's Edward's anger and he doesn't act this way Ed does, and all he wants is or Ed to come back and be angry! God damn it!
He hates this so much. Every last bit of it. But he would never say it aloud (he doesn't say much anymore, he doesn't even like to hear the sound of his own voice) because he's too afraid his ears might catch it. And he doesn't want to be ungrateful, doesn't want to waste the gift Ed has given him. The ultimate sacrifice, really, a testament of his love...
(He didn't ask for this.)
...Oh God, he must have been so desperate.
He wonders how horrifying it must have been for his brother, to be at the end of his rope, to tug and tug and tug only to realize all the slack had gone taught, and the rope was beginning to fray, and he had to think of something right then or everything he'd worked for so long would be gone. How could you even decide that?
The worst part, Alphonse knows, was that it must have come completely natural to him. It must have seemed like the easiest decision in the world. It was white or black, yes or no, right or left, and Ed, of course, would already know which one he would pick. Anyone would have known which direction Edward would go.
Though he sees now that he may have been the only one to see how completely his brother was possessed by this ultimatum. He'd always been so afraid that Edward would do something radical, something stupid, when faced with the possibility of defeat. Yet, even though he'd feared it, he'd never really believe that it would actually happen.
Not like this. Especially not like this.
His fist was embedded in the mirror before he could even comprehend the action, pieces of the damned thing raining down to the floor with a twinkling clash of petite little clatters all around him. His stomach flew to the roof of his mouth at the sight of the red blood across his knuckles, of the pierced flesh, at the intensity of feeling that rippled through his nervouse system. He'd just gotten over the worst of his sensory-overload and now there's this? Blinding, stabbing, pain, and senseless, directionless rage. Sorrow. Regret. Iwanthimback. It was too much.
There are a too many reminders of his shattered life surrounding him, glaring up at him from all the little shards of himself as he falls onto his back, eyes shut tight against the world.
He doesn't want to see with his eyes. Not when he can't.