A fic for the first prompt of Almei week 2015: Past/Future. Thanks to Arlyn on Tumblr (thesoulboundalchemist/almei) for looking over this for me!

I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist.

In Due Time

What he notices first is the lack.

It's glaring in the same way light is after sitting in the dark. It's glaring because it's the only thing Truth had been missing. No silence. No white space. Truth was the inked and colored parts of the world; it was everything else, for lack of a better word, because there's no real word that can encompass its sheer weight and volume.

And when something as empty as a person joins it, Truth's compulsion is to fill the empty spaces.

It wrote on every inch of him, painting his skin, burning into his muscles, engraving into his bones. Everything is just a space, everything is just a surface, and everything is free game. It's terrifying how much a person can hold, how much of a sponge a human is. Because he's human, definitely human. He's not layers of information. He's not overlapping images that blur time, mixing the past, present, and future. He's not sounds - not voices talking, screaming to be heard. He's not ideas that have died with a whimper. Not thoughts that are sparks to tragedy.

He's just Alphonse, and he feels a little more like Alphonse as he basks in the lack, the lack of color, the lack of depth. It's a dull unassuming white that's easy on the eyes. It's quiet here, so quiet that silence has its own sound like the waves of a thrumming guitar or the purrs of a cat. It has a soothing pulse that coaxes him to close his eyes, that lulls him to sleep. God, he can sleep, can't he? He doesn't feel more human than when he thinks of how exhausted he is.

But a cold hand ghosts across his forehead and sweeps back his bangs. "Don't sleep. You can't stay here long."

He opens his eyes to look at a woman hovering over him, her long dark hair like a curtain shielding him from the white. He's never seen anyone like her with her fair skin and dark pointed eyes and gently sloped nose - Xingese features, says several voices in his head - but she's smiling in a way that aches of familiarity. He thinks of how his mother used to pull him up for hugs, how he saw Risembool filtered through the strands of her hair, and how light would tint amber when it peeked through to brush his cheeks. Muted sunlight, warm and gentle enough that he felt he could pocket it.

That's what her smile is like.

He sits up and notices belatedly that his head had been in her lap, but the embarrassment he should feel is distant, sucked into the void that defines this space. Instead, he watches her, oddly both wary and incredibly at ease; the most at ease he's felt since… since the gate pulled him in, and that feels like lifetimes ago. He doesn't know her. The chorus of voices crowding his mind disagree, and… And they're more right than wrong. He's never met her before, but he knows her. He knows her the same way a child knows his mother's voice at birth. He knows her like they've grown old together in past lives. He knows her like a memory.

Because she is one, the voices hum together, she's our memory…

She takes his hand and traces it in her palm, a gesture that instantly comforting. She smiles, and it's a quiet smile between friends.

"How old are you right now?" she asks.

His mind is flooded with a litany of numbers, all in various baritones. 17. 28. 22. 46. 89. But one answer feels realer than the rest.

"Ten."

Her face shutters like the flash of a camera, so fast that he's barely conscious of the change in her expression before it's gone, but the afterimage lingers in the corner of his eyes. It's the picture of her face crumpling with pity. He wants to ask if something's wrong, but her smile is so tight he's afraid his question will be the strain that breaks it.

"Ten, huh?" she says wistfully. "Ten's a good number. Your first double digits. Precursor to puberty. You're going to grow pretty tall, much taller than your brother at any rate."

The void is beginning to creep into his mind. He can't quite remember who his brother is… what a brother is. But the voices all whisper, "Edward."

"Edward," he repeats as he scrawls the name in every available space in his mind because he knows the name is important. He vaguely thinks of an impossibly wide grin and corn hair that catches the sun. When he thinks of that grin, his answer comes naturally to him. "Growing taller than Brother. That's not very hard."

The woman laughs, and he finds that the muted sunlight saturates a little when she does. It's something he thinks he could learn to love.

"No, it isn't, is it? At the very least, that much should be easy." Her laughter peters into a chuckle and then a sigh, like the humor is slowly deflating out of her. She stares off into the space stretching before them as though she's seeing something he can't. He suspects that she is. "It's going to be hard, though. Not growing taller than your brother. Everything else. It's going to be lonely, unbelievably so, and probably no one can really relate with what you'll go through. But I want you to remember," she turns to him and gives his hand a squeeze. "There are so many people who love you, who adore you. They'll do anything for you. So don't bottle it up like you always do. Don't ever think that your feelings, your worries, your doubts are a burden. People want to give you the world, but they can't if you won't let them."

He doesn't understand, but all the voices do. They grow quiet without telling him anything. In their place, the tang of cold metal sits thickly on his tongue. The woman waits and watches, perhaps looking for comprehension, but he's dumb as the inside of his mouth rusts. He's not sure what he's waiting for, but the message was as much for the voices residing in his head as it was for him. So, like her, he waits.

Finally the voices prompt him. Say yes. Say thank you. Say I understand. Say thank you.

Instead he asks, "Who are you?"

They all speak. They all have answers, but no two are the same. A friend. A best friend. An acquaintance. An enemy. A lover. Family. A heartbreaker. Our most important person. But she gives the clearest answer.

"I'm… a possibility in your life."

"Not a certainty?"

The woman hums in thought. "No, not a certainty. There are no certainties, only paths."

"And you're on a path?"

She grins. "I'm on quite a few, maybe even in the majority at this point. You could say our lives are bound to cross." She looks down at their hands, playfully intertwining their fingers, his small hand in hers. "Just think of a flying kick to the stomach as a sign of affection."

Again, he doesn't understand, and some voices laugh. Maybe he can hear the clang of metal and a push at his ribs.

"And will you be one of those people?" he asks.

"I'm sorry?"

"You know," his hand twitches in hers, "one of the people who… who love me?"

She blinks at him before smiling. Then she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. It occurs to him that she might be like him. She might have her own voices. She might be the funnel through which different versions of her are speaking, versions of her that have taken different paths, versions of her that she has yet to become. Her mind might be filling up with an infinite number of voices, each with their own answer.

But even though he can't hear, he feels the ripples of their unanimous response.

A resounding yes.

Instead, she says, "You have to go."

Indeed he does. He can already feel the small hands grasp at his limbs, wrapping around his torso. They tug impatiently and begin to drag him backwards. He twists and turns and tries to rip their fingers off him. He wants to stay here. It's soothing. It's quiet. He can just be. Be without absorbing information, be without fighting. But most of all, she's here. It's because she's here that he can just be.

She squeezes his hand, their fingers still intertwined. "Don't fight it. It's time."

She lets go, and he panics. They might never see each other again. She's just a path. Even if she's in the majority of them, she's not in all of them, and he realizes that that's not enough. "Wait! What's your name? How can I find you? How do I even know it's you?"

She merely smiles and waves goodbye. It frightens him when he thinks that this is the last he'll see of her; but she's already so far and information is already starting to crowd in and he's surging from that pleasant white towards blinding light and "Wait! Wait!"

But the dam on Truth crumbles, and she's drowned out of his mind in the deluge of sounds and sights and smells and everything else. His head is stretching to accommodate all on what is, what was, and what will be, but the word "wait" is sitting on his lips and he doesn't know why. He's so bloated, so saturated with Truth that he's losing information as fast as he's gaining it, his mind just a sieve. Desperately, he holds onto the word wait, though it's slippery in his mind's fingers.

wait, wait, wait, why, why wait.

He's forgotten something. He's left something precious behind.

your body your body your body your body your body

"That's not it!," he protests. "Something else!" But the chorus swells into every corner of his mind, filling every nook and cranny, and it's so full and so loud and so there in the heaviest sense of being.

And God, he's lost his body. How will he do alchemy without hands? How will he eat without a stomach? How is he going to laugh with Ed without a mouth? How is he going to hug his mother without arms? He doesn't have a body.

He doesn't have a body.

And he's blazing towards a door, impossibly brighter than the light he's traveling through. Or maybe - a terrified thought - it's coming to engulf him. Whatever is left of him - your soul your soul your soul your soul your soul - is stretched thin, so much so that he might just rip in half. And still on his paper thin soul, Truth is being transcribed, volume upon volume upon volume. The words on his lips are no longer wait but stoppleasestop.

Someone, maybe God, listens. He bursts through the door and finally into blissful darkness.

And he forgets that smile like muted sunlight.

A/N: Yay for posting this online on time! I don't think I've had a completed story sitting on my computer for so long. Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed this little past meets future fic. It's a trope I honestly adore. Do me a favor, and tell me what you think, what you loved (if anything), or what you would like to see! Be on the lookout for more of this week's prompts!