The House of Adelinethyme (Idling in Time)

Alphonse – Edward – home – Mother and Father – gen

Written: April 20-21, 2006

Summary: It was one of the memories Alphonse thought he had forgotten.

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For Jessie

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Clutching his file of gathered information like a magic talisman, Edward walks up to the house and extracts a key from his pocket. By the time Alphonse has taken one step onto the pathway, Edward is already inside. His presence is characterised by raucous banging; the Fullmetal Alchemist is none too thrilled that they've been doomed to spend the rest of the day in the "valley" of the residential blocks of Central City.

The builders had evidently not considered the possibility that an uneven surface would prove a hindrance. And they had certainly not stopped to consider that the "valley" would be unreasonably sweltering in the full swing of summer.

Alphonse, of course, is not bothered by the weather, and instead of rushing an investigation with frenzied inconsistency, he is struck by the notion that he has seen this house before. In his memory, there was no path, nor street, nor adjoining neighborhood, but there was this house, on a hill in the country near a tree and a little garden. From the slant of the roof to the trim near the ground, it is every inch the image of their house. Only… in Central. And not burned down.

He walks inside to survey the interior.

There had been a bed beneath the window. Alphonse shifts to the right of the doorway, not heeding Ed's request that he follow close behind – yes, there had been a bed right here, where a patch of wan sunlight washed the sheets in a mellow film of gold. And a little bench, where Mother had sat and told them stories before bedtime. At this, Alphonse felt a pang of guilt. Those stories had no place in the real world (the barren world), no place in the military, to which Edward and Alphonse had become inexorably bound, and above all else no place in alchemy.

Such was the same for all of his memories of Mother; if, in this life, there was no place for Mother's stories, then was there no place for Mother?

But that's stupid, Alphonse admonishes. She was their mother, and had she lived, they wouldn't be here now, and even if they were, she would still have a place. But lately, even the slightest doubt sends Alphonse into a spiral of growing uncertainty.

Edward's voice calls from the top of the stairwell, and the sound is tinged with a quality that reminds Al very much of the sunlight on the bedsheets: worn thin and weary, with hints of patience rapidly fading. Never mind – when Edward calls for him a second time, the irritation is all too apparent. Alphonse sighs, letting the tender, airy memories slip away as he gears his mind towards dealing with a particularly tetchy Edward. It's been a long day, full of dust and dead-ends and sticky heat, so Al can't really blame him.

When he is alone, through the long nights while Edward sleeps (often) when there is no interesting scenery (more often, it seems, though logically that can't be true) Alphonse has taken to stretching his memory as far back as he can, until his hands grasp at a feathery slip of a child. Then, he drinks from its essence and tries so desperately to recall what the shapes and colours meant, what the foreign sounds had tried to tell. Yet, simultaneously he realises that he will never know, because their meaning will have no place in his present world: a clever, calculating world, where every word has a meaning and every equation can be balanced if you look hard enough, try hard enough. That's equivalent exchange.

And still he tries.

"Brother, doesn't this house remind you of –"

Edward whirls around. "It reminds me, Al, that we've been travelling all across the damn city, looking for who-knows-what, because of a lead so incredibly loose, it could have more to do with what Mustang's having for dinner next Sunday than with the Philosopher's Stone!"

It hurt, to have his precious reveries summed up in a single outburst. "Just look at the building, will you? Stop thinking about your dumb 'lead' and look at the building!" Edward's agitation is like a catching ill, and it is one to which Alphonse is not immune.

But he's only feeding the fire. "You always tell me to 'get back on track', 'don't get side-tracked' but once you think you know something that's vastly more important than anything we've been trying to do since then, you say the exact opposite. Hypocritical, aren't we?" Edward scowls at the downstairs wall, at the place where the bed had been and where the window created a snag-toothed impression of light on the floor. A small compensation, as Edward is all too aware, but at least he's looking at the damn building. "There. I see the wall. Happy?"

Now he knows he's gone too far, that Alphonse's abundance of patience in him is burning away, but he can't seem to stop himself. It is all he can do to tone down the argument, slow it and make it less caustic. "Don't forget why we're here."

"No, Brother." Alphonse takes the equivalent of a deep breath. "I think you're the one who's forgetting why we've ended up trying to reconstruct our fate. But there's really no place for her now, is there?" A shroud of confusion washes over Ed's expression at the last interjection, but is quickly replaced by a different emotion. He knows from the new look on Ed's face he's about to say something, but Al ignores the unvoiced convictions of his brother and disappears downstairs. He can hear Edward storm into the upstairs bedroom (in their house, it was his favourite) and possibly kick something.

In the main hall (too grand a phrase, the main hall also served as the kitchen, the dining room, and Mother's bedroom, in their home), Alphonse clears his head enough of Edward's influence to envision Mother chopping vegetables at their kitchen table. But soon, the vegetables are on the ground, and so is mother.

Alphonse gasps and tries to close his eyes and vanish away the phantom scenery, before remembering he can't. He can only replace it with another memory; he reaches further back. A little paper bird on the table – why couldn't they have just folded it? Then Mother wouldn't have been reminded of Father's alchemy. We made her remember, we killed her, it was all our fault – no, it was Father's fault, for existing, for helping to conceive us. All his fault, all his fault, all Father's –

And then, a flickering of candlelight in the thin-spread hours of the morning, and a man nestled in the glow.

It is one of the memories Alphonse thought he had forgotten. Mother, Alphonse remembers. Her smile, her voice, her pretty hands and comforting manner. But the only things he knew about Father – things he would tell someone if they should ask what his father was like – were that he was Hohenheim of Light, he had searched for the Philosopher's Stone, and that he was currently absent without leave. That, and Brother wanted Father to drop dead and rot in hell, but that's not the kind of thing you tell the casual conversationalist.

But there it is. Alphonse traces a ghostly outline of a high, wooden table in his mind, briefly wondering why it seemed so… disproportionate. Then he sees that he was looking up at it from an infant's perspective. The table legs tilted inwards to the vanishing point, and a right angle separated Alphonse from the figure. Though there were no discernable features, as far as Alphonse (borrowing the eyes of the infantile Alphonse of the time) could see, he knows it was Father; the sturdy, infallible bulk (with no face, only hands - such wide, open hands) that told the same stories Mother did.

And he doesn't know how, but he remembers that those strong, wide hands planted the azalea bushes outside on Mother's birthday. But there are no bushes by this house; Central has no place for them.

Alphonse reaches for the doorknob; he wonders if he could create a space. He could plant them here – no, it's not their house, it's not their house… And you can't 'create' empty space with alchemy. Still, he wants to see, and imagine the shrubbery and what it would look like. To his surprise, his hands touch only air; Edward has already opened the door. How could he have not noticed that?

Edward looks up into what passes for his brother's face for a nigh-imperceptible instant, looking out at the town before Alphonse has a chance to register the movement. "I want to check on a few things at the library. I'll be back soon."

On a normal day, Alphonse would obligingly follow Brother, but he can't really bring himself to curb his desires right now. Besides, he has a feeling Brother would prefer to be alone. So instead, he imagines the bushes and he imagines Edward, who was famous for being brave enough (though now Alphonse wonders what, exactly, he and Winry had been afraid of) to crawl under the bushes and retrieve lost balls and felled kites.

--

It's long past sundown when Edward finally returns – Alphonse had almost decided to set off in search of his brother before Edward's form cast a shadow over the pathway, long and stretched in the image-warping streetlight.

"Hey," Ed says, touching on an apologetic note but not wholly succeeding. He shrugs in his long red coat uncomfortably; regardless of the time of day, the heat seems all the more prominent when there is no sun to blame. "You were right, Al."

Alphonse turns around, snaps out of his memories of Father. "About what?"

Edward looks as if he has a distinct feeling that Alphonse isn't going to let him out of this one so easy. Extracting a singular page from the folder of information he had collected from the landlord, he reads: "Property designed and constructed by Arthur Mandel; 1880." He looks to Alphonse for any signs of recognition. But as always, Little Brother has the best poker face. "Apparently, he designed the houses in blocks two and three of Central City," ("That's where we are now," is added as an afterthought.) "and the eastern half of Risenburg."

Alphonse cocks his head to one side, looking at his brother with what would have been a gratuitous smile. Edward had obviously done quite a bit more than 'check some other leads' on his time alone at the library.

Edward shifts, straightening his posture as he looks out at the big city, hazed by the temperature. Then he drops in an ungraceful heap beside his brother, and adopts a tone of voice that Al has since learned to recognize as his 'I'm-not-interested-in-continuing-this-topic-so-let's-talk-about-something-else' signal. "Even if they had our tree, the shade wouldn't do any good! It's hot, Al."

Alphonse nods, saying nothing, still caught up in a memory of the tall, spindly tree that had for so long watched the brothers sleep from the upstairs window. There had been a swing (until Winry had fallen off and Mother made them take it down), and during autumn they used to collect the leaves, using them as the monetary unit in their imaginary world.

"There were rose bushes all along this side, too. Our house was prettier than this one – and bigger, I'm sure. It must've been…"

From a child's eyes, everything seemed larger, Al supposed; over-glorified, like the table. Maybe even his memories of Father. Or Mother. But Alphonse finds he doesn't want to think about that just yet – he would much rather stay here, beside his brother, in their small world of windows and tree boughs. And shrubberies.

"They were azalea bushes, not roses, Brother."

-fin