Disclaimer: I do not own FMA in any way at all.
A/N: SO! Here's the deal with this one. My class got in trouble in Earth Science for talking constantly, and we got assigned a five page report on the sun. (It was double spaced and one sided though, thank the lord.) And this is what came out of me. I'm not entirely sure if this counts as an Earth Science report, but I honestly don't give a crap. It was easier than working hard on it, and being all... nonfiction and shit... And it's got facts in it! Lots of them! Should be okay. Psh, school.
Anyway! It's pretty abstract, very unclear, but it's basically about Edward being overwhelmed by his search for Alphonse's body. Mhmm! So... Earth Science away!
Maybe You'll Touch the Sun
There once was a time when everything I saw was dark.
You might not believe me when I say it, but that was a happier time. A time when I was not blinded by the brightness of the world – when the glaring effulgence of (core, radiative, convective, subsurface, photosphere, chromosphere, corona) of the sun did not set ablaze my retinas. When you're burning like fire, when you see avaricious coils of trembling heat and nothing else, you wish for the dark to return. You wish your eyelids hadn't burned away long ago, so that you could rest your eyes. If only for a moment.
There is a way to describe this sensation to you, this burning, but it will never be enough. It is always easy enough to explain a thing away, but to understand, that is completely different. That is unreachable, and only the ignorant believe they have found understanding, in the face of such conundrums. But still I'd try, still I'd tell you of this sun I see that steals my vision and makes me blind. With hue-less acid poured atop my skin, all I see is white.
Deep within, temperatures squeal and rise and peak. There are 15,000,000 degrees of temperature, Celsius, of course, that rush through the veins of this great monster, that are birthed inside it's womb and spread out through its layered body like varicose veins. Deep within, there is power great enough to create nuclear reactions, then there are 5 million tons of pure energy. Deep within, there is pressure, 340 billion times Earth's air pressure at sea level; (unimaginable pressure, pressure so intense, so extreme, you would not exist, you could not exist, you don't exist there, you just don't) the highest recorded being 1085.7 millibars. (So much, so much.) Times that by 340 billion then, I dare you.
Let's pretend. You've gotten out a calculator, and you've decided that finding out the answer to the question is in your best interests. Your fingers run across the buttons, you make no mistakes, and your gaze finally rests upon the answer you'd inquired. 369,138,000,000 millibars, that is. Imagine you've been crushed flat by millions of tiny five pound weights. Are you imagining that? Well, this is nothing like that, of course.
Okay, you can stop pretending. Remember, this story isn't about you, it's about something else entirely.
Scintillating was a word that would come to mind, perhaps, if the overall experience had been at all pleasant. But to be drenched in the ignited passion of novel pain with each new blink was not anything of the sort, albeit a bit stimulating, in every wretched manner of the word. (Burning, infernal, conflagrant, it burns, it blinds, there is nothing to see past this everything.) Reaching has become my only solace. To extend my hand and hope for some substance to exist on the other side of this emptiness, this incompletely sense of fulfillment in disaster – for sometimes I think, this is all there is, this is all there ever will be, and there is nothing more. Dark days these thoughts pass through me, days when it has become so bright and blazing that I can hardly contain my madness. I want to scream. (Dark days, yes, dark days. Oh, the irony. Want, nostalgia, melancholy – these things are not for me. Yet still I reach.) I reach forward until my fingertips are scalded, but I cannot see the blisters, I can only feel the water within me, boiling and blossoming red and scarlet beneath my skin. I hope idly that it does not break, that I do not bleed, but I am not sure that I have skin to break or blood to bleed any longer. Perhaps it has burned away long ago.
When I was a child the other children and I used to have competitions. The point was to stare into the sun for as long as you could, I always won. It amazed me, to look at, even as my eyes screamed in protest and my brain rattled – too bright, too bright – that this circle in the sky was so enormous in actuality. That I was so small.
The sun is the largest object in our entire solar system. What am I? A speck on Earth? Even smaller? (Lost somewhere, reaching, and it's too bright.) The sun contains 98% of all the mass in the solar system, so if I belong somewhere in the remaining two, there's not much space I can take up.
Let's take another second to pretend. You're insignificant. You're just a tiny little human – made up of elements so cheap a child could get a hold of them. (Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, Phosphorous, Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Magnesium, Copper, Zinc, Selenium, Molybdenum, Fluorine, Chlorine, Iodine, Manganese, Cobalt, Iron, Lithium, Strontium, Aluminum, Silicon, Lead, Vanadium, Arsenic, Bromine) You are part of a big world, and an even bigger universe; in the center of yours: the sun.
Always, the sun is growing lighter. Always – brighter, bigger, hotter. Four and a half billion years old and it is raging on, growing older each day, and one day it will consume all of us. (Like this world, so bright, so blindingly brilliant that it hurts. All I see is white, I want to see gray, I want color and shades and tints. Help me.)
The sun will consume us one day. Become huge, a red giant, encompassing everything that surrounds it. Then, it will expend its energy, it will dull, fade, dim, and become a White Dwarf. Everything ends, and we're just tiny humans. When we die, the sun won't stop growing, when the sun dies, the universe won't stop moving.
I am so inconsequential to the things around me, and yet I affect everything simultaneously. In this lost world of blinding light I find myself consumed by the power of coursing chain reactions, in which I reach and touch and the air around me shudders from the weight of it. My presence carries outward and sings when it touches the oxygen in the air and I hope to God someone finds me, saves me from the light, and brings me back into the dark.
Perhaps the sun is consuming me now. Maybe the explanation for the fiery agony all around me has been evident all along. (I am disintegrating, falling apart, burning up.)
My line of sight is a realm filled with prominences, despairing and alone in the Corona of the sun and all around me are enormous clouds of pulsating, phosphorescent clouds of gas that have exploded outward from the sun. Stretching into space I am the wall of permeable existence that separates man from this burning mass of hydrogen. I am a barrier. I am locked here, unable to move. I am trapped – for I can never end my vigil, I do not know what I am watching, but it is bright and undying like the sun, and maybe I will stay here forever.
There was a story I read once, it was an old Greek myth, about a boy named Icarus and his father Daedalus. They escaped from a life of servitude by embarking upon wings made of branches and held together by wax. Icarus was warned that if he flew too close to the sun, his wings of wax would melt and he would plummet back to the ground. Yet Icarus was young and his naivete was born of gentle ignorance, he was astounded by the beauty of the sun and rose high in the sky to salute it, before diving back toward the sea once more. He was reckless, and he rose again and again, and before long, the wax of his wings began to melt. He fell into the sea and drowned. The Icarian Sea.
He would have never been able to touch it anyway; it was a fruitless dream, in the end. The sun is a just a burning mass of Hydrogen (92.1 %) and you'd melt away yourself long before you reached it. Ashes, dust, a puff of steam, perhaps that's all that would be left. (So powerful, the sun, so full of energy – Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Neon, Iron, Silicon, Magnesium, Sulfur – so bright.)
The sun is 330,000 times the weight of the Earth. Wherever I am, maybe if I weighed that much, I would fall away. I could escape my prison, if only I were heavier than the Earth. Heavier than even the sun. I could get away.
Let's pretend. You're spinning, rotating, moving around in a circle where you stand (float, dangle, are). It's only a matter of time before you pull a full circle, and you're right back where you started from – not 25... 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 days, like the sun. So long. As a matter of fact, it'll only be one day, twenty four hours, and you'll have found yourself once time around the Earth. You are an explorer, pulled forward by a perpetual motion you cannot control, always moving, always continuing. Even after death – we've talked about this haven't we?
Yet you're encased in a hell so tight and exhausting, so brilliant and blinding that it shocks you every moment you remain living – am I alive? You spin around on your axis but you never see any of it, the sun rises and sets because you're rotating and revolving and there are seasons and weather, and there is time and heat and beauty but you miss all of it. You see nothing because everything is too incandescent to decipher. The world is a mystery.
You can stop pretending now, because it's time to start reaching again.
Maybe, when people look at me, they see me like the moon. Maybe I can be seen brilliant and shining in the dark of the night but I cannot see past the light shining, reflecting, off of me. I do not have my own light, but maybe this horrible burning, this terrible anguish, maybe that is borrowed pain (beautiful, radiant, glowing). Am I alive? Am I the moon? Where am I?
Perhaps I eclipse the sun.
That is a wonderful thought.
Let's pretend again, I swear this will be the last time.
Reaching, one day, isn't going to be enough anymore. You're going to tire of the hurt, the sorrow, the – alone, I'm all alone – solitary world that spins around you in threads of vivid, resplendent coruscation. You'll want something more. Maybe, though, maybe that thought – perhaps I eclipse the sun – is beautiful too, and maybe, when you think about all the light you'll cover up, all the dark you'll make for the colors to seep through, crawl into the world to be illuminated once more... Well... Maybe this thought is just what you need to keep yourself reaching a little bit longer. Maybe – because it's possible, that you're somewhere, that you're someone – you'll reach out and touch something someday, and you'll know exactly what you've been missing.
Maybe you'll touch the sun.
A/N: The sun is Alphonse? Ouch! :) Hey Mr. Salim! Did you catch the FMA references in my crappy-story-report? Yes? No? What's FMA you say? Well, not Earth Science... But...