Disclaimer: I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist or DGray-Man.

Authoress Note: I'm so so so sorry for how long it took for me to get this out! My computer kept crashing and wouldn't let me get onto the computer for more than like a minute, and it's very hard to write a story like that. And it didn't help matters that I was trying to write other stories as well. But I found a way to write the chapters even though my computer is sadly, still messed up.

Oh and before I forget, landscape wise, all the FMA countries like Xing, Drachma, and Ametris and so forth are all one big continent somewhere down by Australia. Just because it makes things a whole lot easier.

Please enjoy.

Obvious Grief

By: animeroxsmyworld

Chapter 2: Losing the Warmth

The murders in Risembool were decreasing drastically as the months passed, and with the dwindling murders went Trisha's wavering faith in the town. She couldn't just up and move after all. She had friends here whom she loved dearly, and this was where she had promised Hoenheim that she would wait for him after all.

What if he decided to come home and discovered she was gone? No, she wouldn't do that.

Not to mention that Ed and Al would be absolutely devastated. That she knew for certain. They would probably be outraged for years if she decided to leave Risembool, even if it was for their own safety.

She couldn't just uproot her family and take them away from everything they knew and loved.

They had told her that Winry was starting to talk in complete sentences to them again. It may not seem like much to them, but it was an improvement. Trisha couldn't wait to see that little blond girl smiling once again like she had so many times before. It would be such a light in this bleak moment of Trisha's life.

She was glad to see that Ed and Al still hung out with her even though she had changed so much…emotionally.

Oh what she wouldn't give to have everything go back to normal. If only that were possible.

"Oh come on Winry! You haven't been over in ages!" Ed complained as he followed the girl down the path that led from the school and all the way into town, a wood fence accompanying them on one side and separating them from the green pasture's that belonged to the various farmer's in town.

"No Edward." She cut back icily, glaring back at the boy who started for a second at her sharp tone before rising up as much as he could and returned her glare.

"Why not? It's not like you have homework or anything? I was in class you know, I know we didn't get assigned any." He huffed.

"Brother, if Winry doesn't want to come over, just let her go home." Al interjected kindly, though rather sadly. He had been kind of hoping that Winry would come over and play as well, though he wasn't as…outspoken with it as his brother seemed to be. When Winry finally started talking again, they had both assumed she had returned back to normal.

So why wasn't she up to playing with them like old times?

Winry closed her eyes and frowned in irritation as Edward began to argue with Al behind her, their voices grating on her mind. The two boys were so annoying, it was a miracle she had been able to prevent herself from killing them when she was a mere level one.

Granted she was using them for cover then, drawing the suspicion of a homicidal murderer away from her tiny girl body.

She would've never forgiven herself if she was killed before she was able to offer any assistance to the Millenium Earl.

But now the situation had changed.

She was smarter. She didn't need to have people around for cover anymore, not since she had gained the restraint to not go on killing sprees and to actually deploy simple, easy deaths to her victims. If she needed to, she supposed she could kill the two boys.

But until then, it never hurt to have the extra protection that they provided her human cover.

"Honestly, what can she be doing?" Ed's voice interrupted her train of thought, and she almost grounded her teeth. She needed to get him off her case if she was going to sneak out and kill someone today.

She had been good and restrained herself for three months. Hopefully that was enough time to remain inconspicuous enough to not gain the attention of the exorcists, but she couldn't be certain. They had ears everywhere. But she was not going to let Edward ruin the one day she had actually planned to kill someone. She had been practicing to make the deaths look less suspicious, less like murders and more like suicides.

She was not going to stray from her plans because of some obnoxious boy.

Thinking quickly, she said the first plausible excuse she could think of that would get him to leave her the hell alone and wouldn't sound far fetched if he would so choose to investigate the matter further.

And seeing how it was Edward, he probably would.

"I'm training to be a mechanic!" She snapped, whirling around to shove an angry finger in his face. "Now leave me alone!"

Hoenheim preferred to drink alone, the bar was never really his scene. It was too crowded and sometimes, depending on the place, the smell was horrid. But the weather outside was absolutely terrible and he really needed a drink.

Anything to stop the voices that spoke senseless babble in his head.

"Another please." He called to the bartender as he showed the man behind the counter his empty glass. How many had he downed already? He didn't know. A lot he was sure. Nothing was helping his head. It never really did anymore.

All it ever did was make it lessen, the voices turning into whispers that he could pretend to ignore, if he tried hard enough.

Which he didn't.

"Comin' at'cha." The bartender responded before filling Hoenheim's glass with expert ease. Golden eyes starred down at the drink behind rectangular glasses before he took a small sip, trying to savor it this time.

God knows he didn't for any of the others.

"Celebrating something there? You've had quite a bit don't you think?"

Hoenheim paused before bringing his gaze to the speaker beside him, ignoring the comment. Drinks didn't affect him anymore, his body was growing to strong of a resistance, he could probably drink all night and not feel any different.

The stranger had long crimson hair that spilled over the his shoulders, something white like a clown mask covering half of his face, and a huge golden ball with wings sitting perched like a bird on top of his head.

Strange looking creature that was.

But after a second he noticed the various bottles in front of the man and couldn't help commenting as well.

"It seems you shouldn't be one to talk." He replied as he downed his drink quickly. The man blinked before looking at the glass he himself currently held in his hand and barked out a laugh.

"This? I'm starting to grow a resistance to the stuff from drinking it too much." He admitted before he took a generous swig, amusement evident in his face. Hoenheim could only nod in understanding.

"Cross."

The two men turned around at the rather sharp voice right behind them. Since Hoenheim's name wasn't Cross, he figured it had to be the man next to him.

A giant of a man stood before them, smelling like fish and salt water, his clothes well worn and his hair and beard so grown out it was hard to distinguish where his face ended and his hair started.

"Ah…yes Curt?" Cross asked, a small waver in his voice as he kept his eye trained on the man's face. Or what one would assume was his face. The fisherman really needed to think about his hygiene.

"Your kid passed out in the middle of working for me." Curt said, thrusting his arms forward. It was then that they noticed a white haired child fully passed out in the man's arms, clothes tattered and limbs sprawled out into the air as if he was lifeless.

Cross blinked before looking at the child offered to him. Then he sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Sorry about that. I'll—"

"Let him take a break and I'll get him tomorrow. He'll finish his shift tomorrow at noon." Curt said gruffly, still holding the boy out towards the redhead, waiting for him to take him. Cross looked reluctant before sighing once more and taking the child from the man's huge arms. Curt's tone had held no room for argument.

"Alright." He agreed. Curt gave a single nod before turning around and leaving the bar. "I never should've rode on his boat." Cross muttered under his breath as he turned back around, child still in his arms.

Hoenheim knew he shouldn't be staring at strangers, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the boy. He looked no older than Ed or Al. No older than eight perhaps. It shot something through his heart and made it impossible to look away no matter how rude it may have been.

But if Cross was unnerved by his staring he didn't say anything. In fact, he looked more uncomfortable holding the child if anything else. He looked like he didn't know whether to drop the poor thing or to continue to hold onto it in his awkward way.

Hoenheim was starting to suspect the redhead had never held a child before. The boy's head had no support whatsoever, his neck lolling back so far it looked like it was snap in two.

He couldn't help interjecting. "You're holding him wrong."

There was a single pause before Cross responded.

"…you good with kids?"

He had to pause for a second at the question. He wouldn't really call himself good with kids. Sure he had two but he had left them, and their mother. That really wasn't something the world's greatest dad would do.

"Uh…"

Apparently Cross didn't require a response because the next second, Hoenheim found his arms filled with white hair, juggling a tiny body and a glass at the same time. "Hey!"

Cross only groaned as he sprawled out onto the counter before him, sipping lazily out of the bottle he held in his hand. "That darn brat. I can't believe he passed out on the job like that." He muttered into his bottle, his words gurgled and hard to understand at first. "If he continues like that he'll never pay off all my tabs." Cross muttered so lowly that it seemed his words were only for his own ears.

Hoenheim didn't even try to eavesdrop on the redhead anymore. He was transfixed with the angry dark red scar that slashed down the left side of the child's face, the bumpy scar trailing from a pentagon etched into the left of his forehead and seeping down over his eye and stopping at the corner of his lip.

It wasn't some normal scar, Hoenheim could tell that much from the pentagon. Something that precise had to be carved into one's own head, he couldn't have received this scar by accident.

What must've happened to him?

"Cross?"

"Mm?" Cross hummed as he set his bottle down with a clink.

"What's his name?" Hoenheim asked, looking over at the older man. Cross actually blinked several times in confusion, the weird metal bird on his head shifting ever so slightly before realization seemed to dawn on him.

"What, the brat? What's it to you?" He scoffed as he waved his hand lazily to shoo off the topic. Hoenheim only watched him with a stern stare that he had perfected in his many years of life. Cross stared at him for a second before looking away. "Allen Walker."

Hoenehim hummed as his gaze returned to the limbs in his arms. He freed a hand, shifting the boy and gently prodded the scar with a gentleness that he hadn't used since he had been around his own children.

"Where'd he get this sc—"

Eyes shot open, the little body jackknifing so badly it caused the golden haired blond to do the same, the stool rocking underneath them.

There was a buzz in the air as Hoenheim found himself staring into one blue eye and one red and black eye, the noise coming from the transparent cog that was churning consistently over the boy's left eye.

There was a second of startled confusion between Cross, Hoenheim, and Allen before Allen opened his mouth and screamed.

The tingling feeling Allen got when his eye sensed Akuma, made Allen wake with a start, his eye whirring as it activated instantly. His muscles flexed, senses screaming on alert as he prepared for battle. He knew his master would leave him if Akuma ever attacked! Damn that bastard!

Startled gold eyes looked down at him from rectangular glasses and Allen froze in confusion as a face of a man he didn't recognize filled his vision, blocking any sight he might have that would aid him.

At first all he could see was the gold moustache followed by the matching hair scraped back into a low ponytail. But once he was able to move past the sharp face and hair, he felt his blood turn to ice, his heart thud so painfully in his chest he thought his ribs were going to crack.

He had seen souls before. Fighting Akuma with Cross guaranteed that he would learn to harness the powers the cursed eye Mana had cursed him with. They were always skeletons, dressed in what they wore when they died, or bandaged up like mummies depending on how long ago they had died.

He had thought he had learned to deal with it.

But this…!

He wanted to vomit.

There were so many souls that he couldn't even begin to count them. There had to be hundreds! And they were bound so tightly together it was hard to distinguish one from the other, making a creature that would frighten Allen for the rest of his life he was sure. With its gaunt face, hallowed, sunken in eyes and skin so paper thin it hung off its bones like parchment. They were moving, falling over each other and tugging at each other's chains as they gagged and made hair raising noises, wailing and crying out to him, all kinds of liquid pouring from their eyes and mouths.

He screamed.

All thoughts of training to be an exorcist wiped clean from his head and the urge to flee rode through him.

Oh God! He had to get away!

He pushed and flailed until he wiggled free from the monster, uncaring that he crashed to the floor and smoked his head on a bar stool, or that he had kicked the man in the face in his struggle for freedom. He didn't care one bit. Winding himself as he hit the ground, he groggily rolled over, his scream cutting off abruptly as he wheezed.

All eyes in the bar turned to the scene but Cross seemed quick to take action.

He was off his bar stool before Allen could finish getting his breath back, his movements purposeful and deliberate.

He didn't know what was going on, but whatever it was, he needed to end it quickly before everything got out of hand. He was before Allen in half a second, big black jacket obstructing Allen from curious gazes. Hoenheim was the only one in a position to see what was going on, but his vision was spotted with pain as he held his swelling face.

The kid had a powerful kick he would give him that.

"Get yourself under control." Cross hissed as he grabbed Allen by the arm and all but yanked him back up to his feet. "He's alright. Just startled himself awake!" Cross called out cheerily into their unwelcome audience. Whether the people were actually interested or not didn't seem to matter as one by one they started to turn their gazes in the other direction, all muttering something or other under their breath as they did so.

"But he's...he's a...a..." Allen was stuttering terribly, eyes huge as he stared at Hoenheim, a look of terror on his features. Hoenheim felt himself tense as the whispered words reached his ears and Cross sent a quick, but very steady and calculating glance his way. What did they know about him? Did this small boy recognize him from somewhere? There was no way he would know just who he was.

No one alive would know him.

Quick, ferverent whispers were exchanged between the two, too low that Hoenheim couldn't pick them up this time, but Allen seemed to be calming, his red and black eye changing to match the other.

'It seems I've caused quite the scene.' Hoenheim thought as he looked back around the bar before letting his eye return back to the two strangers beside him. He decided to pay his tab and slip out without a sound before he brought anymore unwanted attention. And he didn't need to deal with anything more at the moment. He already had voices in his head he couldn't drown out.

He should've never come to a bar.

He never liked them anyways. They were never his scene.

Winry walked casually through the rain that was falling in sheets from the sky, crashing onto her tiny shoulders. She was walking along the dirt road that connected the nearest town to Risembool, the cart tracks engraved deep into the ground.

She had gotten bored with Risembool. A few years had passed since she had become an akuma and she was still working on keeping her kills under the radar. If an exorcist took her out, how could she continue to help her Earl? But she couldn't just keep killing in the same town or else, eventually, the whole town would disappear. And that would definitley cause a few eyebrows to raise.

So she had started to travel by foot to different towns, missing at days at a time in order to perform her tasks. Sure she still looked like a 7-year-old, her body no longer aging, so she got many people asking her if she was lost when she traveled, but she just killed them if the moment was beneficial. Each time she returned to her current residence at Risembool, she would find the old midget of a woman pacing herself into a worried fit while Ed, Al, and Trisha, with the help of a few other villagers had attempted to scour the village to look for her. The adults in town had started to get concerned about her. She wasn't aging, and was disappearing for days at a time without so much as a word to anyone.

Whenever they found her, they cooed and coddled her like some kind of infant.

This happened each time she left.

She was starting to get annoyed. Stupid humans.

"Oh Winry! There you are! Goodness, you have to stop disappearing like that!"

Winry felt her eyes narrow as Trisha neared her, tall frame safe from the harshness of the rain as a wide umbrella protected her from above. She looked tired, ragged breaths escaping from her as she gripped her umbralla tightly. She must've been looking for quite soom time.

Fool.

Winry had felt something akin to hate towards Trisha over the course of a few years. She was always nosing herself into her business, always showing up and always trying to talk and coddle her. It made Winry's anger spike. Winry would've killed her years ago if they were ever alone together. Usually if they were together in the same place, Ed and Al were with her, or maybe even Pinako, and those three people were key in keeping the facade of sweet little Winry in place.

Trisha's eyes were twin pools of worry and Winry felt her lips pull back into a tiny snarl. How dare she feel worried about her?

She was an akuma! Humans should not be worried about her!

"You not only get Pinako worried when you leave like that, but you get me an-"

Winry didn't know what prompted her to do it. Maybe it was the fact that they were alone, in rain that could drown out any sound, or maybe it was the fact that Winry wasn't in a particularly happy mood. It could've even been the fact that Winry hadn't killed enough in the next town over, but whatever the reason, maybe simply because she was an akuma and she was getting annoyed with bidding her time in the same place, Winry shot a sickle of an arm through Trisha's torso as the older woman babbled away to her, each word she spewed making Winry more agitated.

There was wet gurgle and Winry ripped her arm straight back out from Trisha's stomach, blood splattering high into the air and onto her jacket as she did so, staining her sin plainly for the world to see. Or it would if the rain wasn't pouring down so hard that it would wash it away in seconds.

Like a weight, Trisha lurched forward, Winry side-stepping and watching as the older woman clutched the openly flowing wound before she crashed to the ground with garbled sounds, dark pink blood frothing up at her lips and spilling over her chin.

She felt oddly better.

If Winry could only have known that that single action would spell out her own death.

Tears flowed like rivers down Al's face as he sat like a statue in front of his mother's grave, Ed standing beside him and staring at it with eyes like chips of ice. Everyone around them were like shadows, fading into the scenery. Their sympathetic words and cries of remorse were lost to their ears, even Pinako's as she went up to say a few words about Trisha and the wonderful life she had once led. It was all a waste.

Even Winry was a senseless blur to them from where she stood among the sea of black, a blank look on her face and her hands carefully folded in front of her.

What would they do without her? Without their mother?

She was everything, the world couldn't possibly exist without her. Without her smile, her laugh, her scolding. It couldn't go on.

Al felt a scratchy sob tear itself from his throat, his chest shaking from the effort to repress the many others that wanted to follow after it and make it transform into a wailing child among all these people. Ed's hand tightened on his shoulder and through Al's blurry vision, he could've sworn he saw his brother gulp in fresh air, forcing down his own secret tears that were falling from the hole on the inside.

The Trisha shaped hole.

They had found her after Winry had gotten back to the Rockbell house from one of her many disappearances. Pinako had been downright furious, yet relieved all at the same time and had demanded where she had been. Like always, Winry said nothing. Her eyes would only gleam with untold secrets as she removed her jacket and headed into the house to let Pinako to continue to yell at her.

It wasn't until later that night, when the search party for Winry was called off, that it came to everyone's attention that Trisha wasn't back yet. A murmur had passed through the town and Alphonse couldn't help the tightness that had gripped his stomach. The search party had regrouped, which didn't take very long, and searched the town once more while Ed and Al waited with Pinako.

Ed had been tense, Al had been sick to the point of vomiting.

They had found her on the road just outside of town, a hole through her stomach. Al had cried and thrown up, and cried some more. He never saw what Ed did, his heart was pounding too fast for him to hear anything but his own heartbeat in his ears, the stench of his own vomit filling his nostrils and the sight of his mother's body in the villager's arms filling his vision and haunting his nightmares for years to come.

The Risembool murderer had killed their mother.

Al couldn't find the will to stop crying even though that had been 3 days ago. He didn't think he would ever stop crying.

A jolt like lightening passed through both him and his brother as they started to lower their mother's casket into the ground, and Al all but jumped to his feet, Ed taking a couple steps forward.

It was actually happening. They were burying her into the ground. Forever. She was dead. Dead.

Dead.

A garbled sound came from Ed and this time Al reached over and gripped his brother's arm, though his own hand was weak and trembling.

The ceremony ended but Ed and Al stayed rooted in front of their mother's grave, sitting on the wet grass. Even Winry and Pinako had left them to their own devices.

"What are we going to do?" Al asked, his voice feeling raw and scratchy. He hadn't used it all day, these were the first words he had spoken.

"I don't know." Ed admitted quietly, his voiced laced with despair.

"But what'll we do without mom?" He cried out in desperation, letting the tears swim in his vision once more as memories of his mother flashed in front of him.

"I don't know."

"But w-"

"Why hello."

The two jacknifed and their gazes ripped to a figure sitting on the headstone next to their mother's. He looked like a fat clown with purple skin and a large top hat on his head with pointed ears poking out from under it, his outfit looking like something a clown who was trying to dress formal would wear. He had one leg crossed with a pink umbrella lying across his lap.

His eyes looked at the two boys and his permanent grin seemed to broaden, eyes gleaming.