Disclaimer: I own nothing. NO FLAMES PLEASE! As with my last fanfic, this is RoyXEd, so if you don't like that sort of thing, just leave. To understand this one, it would be a good idea to read my When September Ends. This is a continuation... I've decided to only put the disclaimer in the first chapter, that way it's less annoying! But still look for my "Blah Blah Blahs" at the end or beginning of most (if not every) chapter! I know you've been waiting for an ending, and to see what happens to everyone, and now, you are one step closer. Yeah, I realized after posting the "final" chapter of When September Ends, I had actually put up the wrong chapter! So I had to go in and fix it. Not it has 30 chapters. Make sure you've read it! And sorry about that! And how come only one of you decided to tell me that Roy was promoted to General at the end of the series?! Now I can't fix my mistake! Thanks Kaleigh Elric for pointing this out!

PS- Some lines from in this chapter are taken exactly from the manga series and/or the anime series. Y'know, just incase you're reading and start getting a sense of Deja Vu. Some of the stuff is pretty accurate, other stuff I added so my story would flow better. If you've either read the series, or watched it, you can probably figure out what I as an authoress added, but I tried to keep it within their characters. Once you're done reading, don't forget to review! Sorry this one his so long! Oh, and the Title of this fanfic is yet another song, but this time, by Black Sabbath! (Which I don't own either!)

Chapter One: Beloved

I'm a year younger than Ed. When he was born, my mother and father were still living together. By the time was able to make memories, my dad was gone. Therefore, I felt no hatred towards my father. Edward on the other hand remembers our dad, and still hates him for leaving our mother. And that...that hatred...is what left fuel for Edo to grow...

My brother looked just the same as now, just with long hair, regular limbs instead of two metal ones, and he's taller due to age. Other than that, his looks have remained the same. He still had that golden colored hair, and those eyes that resembled that of a lion's.

He loved to run around and play either in our front yard, or out in the fields that surrounded us. We grew up out in the eastern country land in a medium sized house. We only had each other, and our mother. We had no pets, nor never wanted one (although I did take care of stray cats until my mom found out). As far as friends, we only really had Winry. Due to our location, we were rather isolated as far as people were concerned. There wasn't really even a school in our small farming town. You were taught how to read, write, speak, and do arithmetic by your parents down to the basics, and if you wanted to learn more, you had to go down to the pitiful library, and hope to find something. Lucky for us, our father came from a far away city with lots of people, and he had an extensive collection of books. I read a good bit, but my brother...he was a complete book worm. That's why he's so smart. He studied, and studied, and if I remember right, I can recount a couple times where my mother would find him fast asleep in the chair come bed time. He would sit up in bed after my mother left our room and read by candle or lantern light.

That's how our obsession with alchemy started.

Ed stumbled across a book one rainy afternoon that had once belonged to our father, who left behind nearly all of his possessions when he left. In the book, it had easy to follow instructions on how to construct a doll using alchemy. My brother was amazed. He had read books based in fantasy worlds where magic was everything, and yet we lived in a world dominated by money, science, and provable facts. Needless to say, he was quite curious to see if it would actually work, and was very eager to get started. We gathered the necessary materials in secret, thinking mother may yell at us for using this technique that the book called "alchemy". Once we compiled all the needed ingredients, my brother drew what was known as a transmutation circle in the dirt beside our house, and with me as his witness, using no other object than his two flesh hands, he created a doll that was just a little bigger than my own hands. That was our first transmutation. My brother was thrilled.

After that, my brother even read how to revert the doll back into the individual ingredients again, using the same book. It was amazing to the two of us. It was like the magic right out of the stories come to life. So, for Winry's birthday, we created a similar doll right before her eyes. Unlike my brother and I who thought that it was nearly one of the best things in the world, Winry started to cry! She thought that we had done something wrong since normally people can't create dolls with their bare hands. We felt ashamed. Granny Pinako called our mother over, and at our house, hidden inside our room that we shared, we awaited her verdict. We expected to be punished severely for using this alchemy, and for frightening Winry so much. What we didn't expect was for our mother to be happy about it!

"It's stunning," she told us with a smile.

After that day, it seemed like we were always making things for our mom. Especially Ed. He went out of his way to create things right before her eyes. She loved it when Ed transmuted her flowers. She could tell that Ed in particular wanted to learn more about this mixture of science and magic, so she opened up for us a door which had been forbidden before. It was our father's study. There were volumes upon volumes of texts, including quite ancient ones, all about the study of alchemy, and even handwritten notes that I realize now were my father's. The texts were difficult to understand, and it took away a lot of time in order to perfect certain things, after all, they were written for adults.

But we started studying alchemy, and we found the more we did it, the more she'd smile. We became absorbed in the science that made your feel like you were magic. But even as we studied this magic-science hybrid, Ed and I still played like we were kids. We would go running around, chase animals, go to Winry's and play with her and Den, and Ed even liked a game of soccer once in a while. But, although Ed was a loving brother, he often had a different way of thinking. Sometimes there were times when we wouldn't agree, and we would start throwing punches and kicking each other. Since he was my older brother, my mom always yelled at him, although sometimes it was really my fault. She would try to get him to apologize, but he never would on command. He would stomp away, muttering mean kindergarten words under his breath, and I would get even angrier and go and sulk by the river where I would let out steam. I was usually there for over an hour, and just as I was calming down, Ed would appear and take me home. He may have never apologized, but that was just how we was. Even today, he usually doesn't come right out and say he's sorry, but rather he shows you with actions. The fact that he would come and take me home was evidence enough that he was done with the fight. Most of the fights were about silly child like things, including who was going to marry Winry! I won most of those fights just because Ed would get so flustered. But, even through our fighting, we would still make peace, especially for our mother. Our lives up until then were normal enough, except for the fact that my brother was probably just as smart as a kid nearly twice his age. But, when Ed turned ten, and I turned nine, everything changed.

It was a sunny afternoon when it happened, and we were just coming back from picking some vegetables from the garden. Our mom was going to make a soup, so she sent us out while she got the water boiling and such. Ed and I at one point broke into a run. We were grinning like idiot children. We had no idea of what would await us in our house that we looked forward to returning to and seeing our mother making things in the kitchen, always with that smile on her face. What we found...

After not hearing a response to our "We're back mom!", we rushed into the kitchen, still playing a bit, only to see our mother on the floor as if she had collapsed. Her face was flushed with fever, and she was sweating. When Ed touched her skin as he cried out for her to wake up, he mentioned something about her feeling hot. He yelled at me to go get Granny Pinako, and for a moment I hesitated, but after another scream from him, I took off as if the devil were at my heels. Edward stayed loyally by her side, holding her head in his small lap until I arrived with Pinako, a doctor, and nurse that had been hurried up from town. He never once cried, he never once whimpered as they took her up to her bed, and laid her down.

She was sick. Terribly sick. For years she had been ill, both of body...and heart. What we didn't know when we first approached alchemy, was that although she didn't practice it herself, our father, Hohenheim, did. And behind that beautiful smile that inflated our egos and hearts, was the sadness in the familiarity of the science. Our father used to make stuff for her all the time. Jewelry, furniture, clothes...all sorts of things. We reminded her of he who had left her. You couldn't possibly imagine the guilt and heartache it brought us to know that we were causing our mom so much pain. This realization made Edward incredibly sad. I had hardly ever seen him seriously cry, but one night, after visiting with our mother, and seeing the state she was in, I saw him break down in the middle of our bedroom. I had always viewed Ed as unbreakable, but when I saw him moaning and crying because he felt he was the cause of our mother's pain, I saw him as what he was. A human boy. He was no super hero. He was no unbreakable titian. He was Edward Elric. My brother.

Within the same year of her collapse, our mother was suddenly on her deathbed. Granny Pinako guided us into the room, where the doctors stood around her bed, giving us sad eyes filled with sympathy that Edward clearly loathed. I was scared beyond reasoning. Even as a kid, you can sense people's emotions either through body language or tone. You may not always know what some words they say mean, but you can always tell when people are clearly sad. It was upsetting to know that our mother, Trisha, was able to hide it for so long. We walked up to her bed, only to see her laying there, the window open, letting the lovely afternoon air enter the room and ruffle her hair gently. She had a cloth over her forehead, trying to alleviate the slight fever she had. She talked for a long time about our futures, things we should and shouldn't do, and her hopes for us...But then, Edward seem to tense. It was as if since he was her first born, he had some special connection to her that I lacked, and it was probably true. He seemed to tense up, and he looked like he was going to fall apart at any second.

"Edward," came our mother's beautiful voice from that weak shell of a body. "would you be a sweetheart and transmute something for your mother?"

"Like...what?" my brother asked quietly.

"Yes, I know...a ring of flowers would be nice," she replied. "You see, your father always used to make them for me."

Without a second thought, my brother pulled together some materials to make her the biggest ring of flowers he had ever made. She was happy, you could see it genuinely in her eyes. My brother and I held onto her hand, almost with the childish thought of holding her back from the clutches of the Reaper. She smiled, and her hand tightened on ours. She gave us a couple more loving pieces of advice before we felt her hand loosen around ours, and her hands slowly fell to her side. And just like that, we were all alone in the world. In that moment, the building blocks for the personality known as Edo were set into place.

The funeral was horrible. We witnessed the person we loved most in the world get lowered into the earth, leaving us on separated by a dirt mound. We would never see her smile again. I was crying hysterically the whole time, whereas my brother merely stood there, crying to be sure, but silently as a true man should. People gave us support in words, then disappeared. Pinako told us that we should come live with her, and to come back to the house when we were ready. Our mom was buried in the late morning, and we stayed at her grave until the sun was painting the sky all sorts of oranges and yellows.

"What are we going to do?" I asked my brother. My tears had long since run dry for the day, and I had to settle with staring numbly at her grave marker. "We're all alone-!"

"We're not, Al..." he replied. He too was staring at the etching of her name on the stone before us. There was a slight edge to the gleam in his eyes that I had never seen before. "We're going to bring her back."

And that was our dearest wish. We would do anything to see her again. So, after meeting a woman by the name Izumi Curtis who was saving a town from a flood, we were able to convince the strong alchemically inclined woman to teach us alchemy. For training at the age of ten and nine, she stranded my brother and I on an island for thirty days where we were forbidden to use alchemy. I depended on my brother for a lot of things like catching food, and defending me from what we thought was a monster, and it made me realize how much I really needed him, and how much I really cared for him. During our "exile" to this island, we realized that there was a relationship between the laws of nature, the world, and alchemy. We survived some hard times during the month we were deserted and left for dead, but after seeing our determination, Izumi agreed to teach us alchemy. But it wasn't so much just alchemy techniques, but in having a strong body as well. My brother and I learned how to use material arts in order to fight, and used each other as sparring partners, and in good humor, we would also launch surprise attacks on Izumi. Unfortunately for us, she could beat us...while reading a book! We were never able to win against her, not even when we worked together.

After learning a lot from her, Ed and I returned to our empty home in order to study more of the texts our father left behind. During that time, I noticed a change in Ed. While I would become lethargic from long nights of studying, Ed on the other hands would still be still feverishly reading, his eyes skimming over the small print, collecting all the information. He hardly ate anything, and only put down the books in order to go to the bathroom. He was a man possessed. Unlike my brother, I could not sit and read for long periods of time without my legs getting stiff, so I would go for walks around the neighborhood.

One night after a long session of reading, I told my brother I was leaving for a walk. He didn't reply, but of course I was foolish to expect such a thing seeing as how my brother blocks out everything while he reads. I shrugged it off and went for my usual walk. Upon returning, I opened the front door of our house only to hear angry yells from upstairs, followed by a loud shattering noise. I quietly went to the stairs, and carefully ascended them. Like a moth drawn to a light, I crept towards the half opened door from which the light from a lantern shone from inside. Edward was standing up, his chair tipped backwards as if he had stood up quickly, and pages of notes were thrown everywhere. There was also a large hole in a window next to the desk where he must have thrown something out it. His eyes were wide and filled with rage. That's when I first saw the green orbs replacing the golden ones. His facial features looked agitated, and with another scream of anger he grabbed another book that he had been engrossed in when I left him, and flung it against the wall, letting it fall with a thud to the ground.

"Why?!" he screeched as he gripped his blonde locks with his hands. "Why can't I find it?!"

I silently stepped away from the door. My brother had been losing his mind over trying to find a way to get our mom back. Then I heard him gasp.

"What happened to all the papers?" he wondered aloud. I opened the door a little, wondering about his sudden shift in tone. "Stupid wind."

I fully stepped into the room, worried about Ed. "Uh, brother...?"

"Oh, hey Al," he said, a look of confusion on his face. "When did you leave?"

"Only a little while ago. I told you I was leaving," I said with a small chuckle.

"Sorry, I must not have heard you. Hey, where's my...Al, have you seen my book I was just reading?" he asked.

I walked over to the window and leaned my head out of it. Sure enough, on the ground below, a book laid in the grass.. "You threw it, brother."

He stared at me blankly. "Why would I do that? I wasn't done reading."

"I don't...wait, you don't remember throwing it...?"

That was the first time he had switched personalities to my knowledge. He had no recollection of throwing the books, nor did he realize what kind of an outburst he had. Those green eyes appeared on other occasions, mainly while I was out of the room and he was frustrated with his readings, but also once when we were fighting to keep in shape. He had had a rough time figuring out the last couple pieces of our puzzle of how to resurrect our mother, and so we decided to spar. It was a bad decision on my part however, because Ed began to use his frustration for fuel to fight. At one point in our fight, he had me cornered with a wall behind me, and I saw his eyes flash green. With that sinister smile he wore, I thought he was really going to kill me. If I hadn't managed to knock him out...

I still have nightmares about those eyes. But every time those eyes appear, my brother goes to sleep, and remembers nothing when he wakes. He was totally unaware of this other side, as far as I could tell.

The day finally came a year after our mother's death. I was sitting on top of a library ladder in our father's extensive study, when I heard Ed running toward me from down the hallway where he had sunk into our bedroom with some papers and books.

"Al! Al!" he called out. He flung open the door with enthusiasm and his golden eyes glimmered with delight. "Hey Alphonse!"

I turned to face him, still holding the book in my hands. "What is it, big brother?"

I hopped down off of the ladder, leaving my book in it's place, and walked over to where my brother was placing down a big sheet of paper down on the desk. Drawn on it in what looked like charcoal was a transmutation circle, along with some notes that I didn't bother to read at the time.

"Look!" my brother said with glee. "We can't got wrong using this theory!"

I stared at the paper in disbelief, then at Ed. "No way. Is this...?"

"It is!" my brother exclaimed. For the first time since our mother's death, I saw a genuine smile grace my brother's lips. "This says how to do it! We can bring mom back from the dead!"

We never had any doubts about doing it. Our mother was so kind...the kindest person in the world...All we wanted was just to see our mother's smile again. Even if it meant breaking the laws of alchemy. That was the only reason we were studying alchemy, after all...

So, one stormy night, down in the depths of our basement, I helped my brother draw a giant transmutation circle, identical to the one that Ed had discovered during his studies. He was confident that our mother would be alive by morning. We dug up her bones which were still fairly well intact, and placed them in the center of the circle. Both Ed and I had to leave to throw up a couple of times due to the fact that we were touching our mother's bones. It was disgusting and heart-wrenching, but if all went according to plan, we wouldn't have to worry about her dying for a very long time.

After we perfected the circle in which we drew on the concrete, both of us stepped back to admire the work that we had put into drawing the fairly elaborate circle. It had taken a couple hours to get it just right, but using all the tools at our disposal, and without alerting anyone to what we were going to attempt, we had completed the first part of our plan. The next step was to clap our hands together and welcome our mother into the world, just like she had been there to welcome us at our births. I glanced over at my brother, who looked back over at me and exhaled shakily.

"This is it," he said nervously. "This will be the product of our hard work."

"It will be worth it," I assured him with a smile. "We may have lost a year studying alchemy, but it was definitely worth it."

"I can't wait to see her again, Al."

"Me either, Ed."

My brother went and retrieved a knife, and me made the first move to make a slice across his finger and let the blood drip onto mother's remains. I soon followed suit. We exchanged another glance at each other before my brother nodded at me. In sync, we both clapped our hands together, and slammed them down onto the drawn in transmutation circle. There was a humming noise, that was caused by the transmutation, followed by the transmutation circle glowing a beautiful blue. My hope increased at this beautiful color, but was quickly shattered as the circle suddenly glowed red, and the humming became more of a screech. We both removed our hands, and looked at each other, wondering if this was supposed to happen. Then I saw something the will forever be engraved in my memory. Edward's left leg looked like it was breaking apart, and disappearing in a strong windy like vortex that the alchemic reaction had created.

"Brother!" I cried out.

When I went to step towards him however, I felt myself slowly getting drug backwards. And soon, I was begin pulled completely into the vortex. I heard my brother cry out, and reach forward to grab me, but hundreds of tiny black tar-like hands had already wrapped themselves around my legs and torso, and were pulling me into the purple abyss that had opened up in our very basement. The last thing I saw was my brother looking around. Then I lost consciousness.

The next thing I saw when I regained consciousness, was an armor body, and a sea of blood. My brother was sitting, back up against the wall, his head bend forward, and his right arm, and left leg missing. He looked like he had found something to bind his leg with, but his shoulder was still bleeding badly. I wasted no time in scrambling over to my brother in the metal body I was in, in order to see if he was okay. When I arrived by his side, I realized that his eyes were briefly green before they shifted quickly back to gold.

"Heh heh...sorry. All I could get for one arm was your soul..." he muttered, moving his hand up to clench his right shoulder tightly in hopes of slowing the bleeding.

"Brother..." I whined. "Why?"

I had a million questions running through my head at that moment, and they all wanted to spill out of my nonexistent mouth at the same time. But one thing topped my list.

"Did we...?" I began to turn my head to look for that smiling face that I missed so dearly.

"No...Al, don't look-"

But it was too late. I saw it. The product of all of our hard work...

"To obtain something, something of equal value must be lost". It's the Law of Equivalent Exchange that every alchemist lives by, or at least is aware of. People call my brother a genius, but the reason he's so good at it is he paid the price...and he worked so hard. And because we worked so hard, and because we wanted to see our mother so much, we failed to think of the consequences of breaking the laws of alchemy so carelessly. We thought that because we gave up so much, then there would be no reason for our mother not to breathe once again. But we were wrong. So sadly mistaken we were.

The thing we brought back wasn't even human.

Ribs and other bones jutted out as strange angles with flesh peeled away at certain points, falling off on others, and completely missing in certain areas. You could see a heart pounding from within the protective hug of the rib cage, and the creature gave a cry every few beats as if it were in pain. It's eyes were wide, and it's teeth were not hidden by lips, but rather coming out of the skull with only a bit of gum to hold them in. It had a head of long black hair, which, years later, we realized wasn't the color of our mother's, so it raised many questions, but at the time, we were in such a state of panic and horror, we looked over this detail. Blood was splattered beneath the body, and it's one arm was outstretched as if it had been reaching out of the circle to Ed. As I had been staring at the thing that we had risen from the dead, my new body began to shaky with the sadness that shook me to my very core.

"No! How did this happen?" I cried, although I could cry no tears. "Big brother, your theory was flawless!"

"Yeah," he replied as he looked at his blood covered hand with wide golden eyes. "There weren't any mistakes in the theory...The theorems weren't the problem, Al. It wasn't the math. It was us."

After that was a bit rushed. I took Ed out of the house and into the rain, where I rushed him over to the Rockbell house in order for him to get medical treatment. He was bandaged up, and we were questioned mercilessly by Pinako. While Ed was still resting, we were visited by a man known as Colonel Roy Mustang of East City. He had been traveling through the area and had seen me taking Ed from our house and followed. Ed had expressed a determination in getting our original bodies back, so Colonel Mustang suggested that Ed join the military, that way he could not only practice alchemy, but he could also search for a way to regain our bodies without much hindrance. Ed took the advice, and got the auto-mail surgery, just so he would be able to join the military, who would when hired give him the funding for research.

On October 3rd, after receiving auto-mail prosthetic limbs for Pinako, Ed and I set fire to our home, and left our village, vowing not to return until we had our bodies. We did this so we had nothing to run back to, meaning we had to stick this out to the end. We burned the house to the ground, including all of our father's books, and all our possessions and our mother's. We realized too late that there was no way to bring back the dead, but my brother was still set on getting back out original bodies.

But there was still something that worried me. He said he was fine, but I was still concerned about those green eyes, and the fact that he had seen a lot of bad things during the beginning of our travels, and during the failed human transmutation. So, when we had some off time at East, I pushed him to go to a therapist every couple days to vent his frustration, even if he couldn't supply the woman details. In the mean time, I tried not to blow our cover, and study the whereabouts of a stone said to allow the user to surpass those accursed laws of alchemy. After a couple sessions, I was approached privately by the therapist Edward had been seeing, and she gave me startling news that supported my worst fear.

Due to many factors- hatred for Hohenheim, frustration from not getting desired results in alchemy tests, losing his limbs, seeing horrible things and losing our mother- Ed had developed a separate personality. Whenever he got mad, frustrated, or felt that he was cornered or in fear of being physically hurt, Ed would be replaced by this other personality, who would reek havoc until he felt he was safe, or as I had found, when I entered the room, and then the personality would relinquish control back to Ed, who wouldn't remember a thing. I figured this condition would cause difficulties if the military was aware of it, so I kept it a secret from everyone, including my semi-oblivious brother (he suspected something was up, but wasn't too sure if anything was really wrong). This was an advantage in many different situations, but currently, when Archer was able to exploit this weakness and use it to his advantage, it has put everyone in danger, including my brother.