It was quick. It didn't seem possible that in just a second, he was gone.
Scar's hand, despite Al's desperate protests, settled against his brother's head.
There was a flash.
And Ed was gone.
How? How could Edward Elric, Fullmetal Alchemist, die, just like that? How could he be laying there in a pool of slowly spreading crimson?
Al wondered how long he could scream. He'd been going since Scar darted away amidst the spray of Hawkeye's bullets. He had no throat to worry about getting sore, nor a voicebox for that matter. He could probably scream forever.
He wished he could cry. He felt like his armor should be crying despite the laws of science, because how could he feel so much and not be crying? But he couldn't, and his brother's face was clearly visable without a shroud of tears to blur it.
Ed stared at him, having opened his eyes at the last second before his death to drink in a last image of his brother. His expression was plain. He didn't go painlessly, but he felt fine going for his brother. Ed would do anything for him.
Al thought his soul was splitting. It would make sense. Ed was part of him. He was taking half of his brother's soul with him.
He scraped into motion, clawing desperately at the ground, pulling his decimated shell of a body towards that of his brother's. He broke his screaming when Mustang appeared in his line of vision, not noticed beforehand. In Al's red orbs of eyes the world exsisted only for Ed now, even though he was not of the world anymore. Even though he was an unmoving spot of red and gold in the grey.
The colonel knelt to set his head against Ed's chest.
"DON'T TOUCH HIM," Al howled. He didn't want anyone to touch him. Scar had killed him with a touch. In an instant. Al wanted to make those painful gasping noises that someone with lungs could make. He wanted to hurt somewhere besides his soul. If his pain were to increase he felt he would die. Maybe that would be fine.
Mustang only flicked his eyes to him for a moment before continuing the motion. He pressed his ear against Ed's chest. Al had a breif fanstasy of his brother sitting up and dealing the colonel a swift uppercut to retaliate for touching him. Anyone else's voice would have broke at the octave Al hit at that thought. He wondered if his brother was still warm.
It didn't take long for Mustang to set back and obscure his eyes with his bangs as Hawkeye approached. Hers was a face of disbelieving horror. Eyes wide, face white and slack. Al wished for expressions.
He didn't feel Armstrong picking him up. Armor doesn't feel. But he struggled when he realized the ground was falling away from him. After he had pushed down the surge of hope that he had died and was floating up to join Ed, he thrashed. The large man ignored it, and carried Al to his brother's corpse.
As soon as he was there, right next to Ed, Al wished he was further away.
Here there was no denying it now. He could see with terrible detail the limp curl of the metal and flesh fingers on the ground, already paling, and the disheveled and dirty splay of the golden braid. The black and gold attire a wet coat of paint dashed over Ed's body.
His brother, the only thing he had left, his only hope at ever returning to his body, was a corpse on the cold, wet cobblestones.
"NII-SAN!" Alphonse's grief was palpable, spreading through the soldiers that pointed their forgetten guns at the ground as the armor's crys carried sadness into the souls of the onlookers. In the rain it couldn't be told who wept.
They stayed like that for a long time, gathered around Ed. Roy's head was bowed, Riza's gun dangled limply from her fingers, and Armstrong was a sobbing, shaking mess. Al continued to shriek, his hands circled around Ed's upturned, left, arm, wishing he could feel the cooling flesh on his own fingers.
As the rain stuttered and turned to sprinkles, so did Al's wails, and Mustang rose to his feet.
"Gather up Alphonse's armor. We need to leave." Armstrong wiped snot from his nose but went to his task, scraping together the scattered bits of Al's body.
Mustang shrugged off his jacket and scooped up Ed, cradling the boy in the blue of his uniform. His shirt beneath was quickly soaked, goosebumps prickling the bits of exposed skin. He didn't seem to care.
"No, no-" Nobody knew if he was protesting Roy or death taking his brother away.
Mustang sat himself in the backseat of the car, one arm tucked beneath the mismatched knees and the other gently laced around Ed's shoulders. Armstong set Al in the seat next to him. As the car lurched into motion Ed's golden haired head lolled back, his golden eyes coming to view Al again.
The younger boy's crys were unearthly.
Riza's shoulders shuddered as she piloted them back to Central, and Roy's face and hair dripped onto Ed, clicking softly if they hit the exposed automail arm. Al lapsed into little crys and moans. The city moved past them in dashes of grey. The whole of the world's color seemed condensed in Ed. Red, blue, black, gold. Were there any other colors to speak of?
They were taken to a hospital room, despite the fact that no medicine could help them. Maybe the staff didn't really know where to put half an animate armor and a dead adolecent, plus their military entourage.
Mustang set Ed down on the hospital bed, his wet and stained coat remaining draped over the boy's shoulders. His golden eyes still wept blood. His introduction to the bed made snakes of moisture creep out through the sheets, smattered with blood here and there.
Armstrong pulled a chair up to the bedside and set Al there, where he immediately latched onto his brother, although neither of them could feel the other. Al heard Hawkeye break then, making lurching gasps as she cried.
"Nii-san," Al murmured. "How are you dead?"
If a person had the hearing of a god, they would have heard the plink of Mustang's tears falling onto the tile, or the little squelches his hands, running with Edward's blood, made as they tightened into fists.
Alphonse tried to wipe away the rivlets of blood from his brother's face, but all his hands did was push the mess around. He desperately reached for the box of tissues on the nightstand, but he couldn't reach. His armor gave off terrible, broken creaks as he strained for it. Hawkeye's sobs intensifyed.
The two broken boys were undone, severed of their beautiful union, shattered past repair.
Riza Hawkeye, the most steely woman, no, person, that could be imagined, was torn by this atrocity that life had dealt the brothers.
Mustang quickly passed the box to Al, who jerked out a tissue and proceeded to delicately sop up crimson from his brother's face, running the flimsy paper over the bags under his eyes, the bridge of his nose, the trough of his lips. Ed kept looking at him, the golden stare becoming one that would haunt the dreams of those present. Al preferred that to having his eyes closed. Closed meant death. He wished he had dreams for them to haunt.
The door slammed into the wall, but not a soul in the room started from the savage noise. Alphonse did not pause in the cleaning of his brother.
"Is he really-!?" Hughes panted, quelling his sentence halfway through, taking in the scene. There was no need to ask. There would be no other reason for them all to stand so still, for their shoulders to shake like that. He took a shuddering step into the room and was fixed by Ed's eyes. They didn't look dead, really. The gold was vibrant as ever, but they didn't move. They weren't darting around, watching everything, they weren't a gateway into the boy's busy mind anymore.
Hughes hadn't belived it when he had overheard the sopping wet soldiers tramping back through the halls of Central-"The Fullmetal Alchemist-" "Scar got 'im," "Dead-" "Goner-" "Dead."Edward was hardy. The Fullmetal Alchemist wouldn't go down easy. The Fullmetal Alchemist couldn't go down.
The door slammed again, even louder, as he fled.
The rest were slow in leaving. Roy was first, turning suddenly on his heel and pacing out of the room. Riza left soon after. Armstrong settled his hand on Al's metal shoulder for an instant before following, leaving a large rainwater handprint. Al couldn't feel it.
It didn't take long for it to get dark after they left. The clouds hadn't cleared even by the birth of night, and the hospital room was almost pitch black, lit only by the sliver of light seeping in under the door. It glinted and danced off of the exposed automail and gold braid, which Al had redone, having wrung out and gently combed the dirt from it. A pile of tissues had collected at the foot of the chair, soaking in their puddle of water and blood.
"Nii-san," Al spoke into the quiet. He didn't like the quiet. He'd always been with his brother, who every second, took a step, or a breath. Even in the night there was never total silence. Soft snores and rustles as he adjusted in his sleep. Al didn't make those noises. The silence was scaring him. He didn't want to think about living the rest of his life in silence.
"How are you here one second, and gone the next?"
He wanted to cry his own tears. He felt like he would burst. His bloodseal would just explode, shattering metal and his soul over his brother's body. He would be a firework of grief set off in a silver explosion.
"How can you leave me behind?"
He'd promised. Not verbally, but when Ed sacrificed his arm for Al's soul, that's what it had meant. That they would never leave the other. Not for anything. No barrier could seperate them.
"How can you, Nii-san, who is so alive, be laying here now, just staring? You never could keep still Nii-san, and yet you just lay here. How? Why don't you live?" Al's voice crescendoed. If feelings were color, the dark world of the hospital room would have been pulsing bright with the color of pain.
"You have to come back Nii-san! I can't bring you back! I don't have anything to give! They wouldn't want my armor, Nii-san..."
Ed didn't offer up the answer. Corpses didn't talk.
Ed was invincible. He could never die. He had proved so countless times. The priest at Resembool had been unable to kill him, their month on the island hadn't killed him, he'd survived their human transmutation.
"Get up!" Al gripped the bedrail tight enough to make his armor shriek. Maybe his fingers would fall off. "Sit up! Tell me to get it together!"
Edward Elric was invincible.
Al put his head down on his brother's stomach, mindful of the armor's horn.
But yet one moment had left him dead.
The younger boy wailed, his sorrow echoing throughout his hollow armor.
Had left Al by his body in the hospital.
"I know you would have me leave you,"
Had broken all the promises he had ever made.
"But I can't move on without you, Nii-san."
Edward Elric was not invincible.
A/N: I hope you are all bawling. Cause this friggin hurt to write, man!
I'm so glad the main characters never die. Really, if you think about it logically, they should in some situations, but after this, I'm so glad they don't.
This was born of me thinking too hard about logic. Damn that stuff.
I hope you enjoyed this, in a sick, twisted way.