All the usual disclaimers.
Enjoy!
Ritual.
Last night she had a dream.
In her dream, she was standing in their old apartment in Central, the one they lived in when she was born. Outside the windows, the sky was inky black, yet a bright, brilliant light that came from an unknown source lit up the whole room like a summer's day.
The apartment was hushed and reverent. The walls seemed to bow towards her, the high-beamed ceiling leaning down conspiratorially, the windows craning to hear her thoughts. Fey shadows stretched from the corners and tickled her ankles. She wiggled her toes against the warm, solid oak boards of their old living room. Dust motes filled the air, swirling in eddies and pooling in the creases of her elbows, the little gullies and fissures between her toes, sliding off the tip of her nose and clinging to her eyelashes. A flicker of her eye sent a wave of light swirling and crashing through the space around her. The room was empty, devoid of furniture, the fireplace simply a place, dark, no fire in it, the only part of the room that the light did not reach.
She was herself, both as she is now and as she was then, five and fifteen years old all at once. She felt small, but her limbs felt cramped and crunched, as if she had suddenly outgrown the room in places she couldn't see.
Tranquillity filled her head like cotton wool, making her feel fluffy and insubstantial, as if she lacked solidity within the confines of this space. As if to prove to herself that she was real, she jumped up and down on the spot, the soft thud of her feet on each landing seeming to come from much further away than the other end of her legs. Everything sounded muted and round, like standing with her hands over her ears.
The uniformity of the darkness outside her window made her skin prickle.
She wakes early. Her bedroom is full of dawn sunlight, pinkish and gleaming and wet with dew. Her bedroom window is open, the curtains drawn back. She likes to be woken this way in the summer, by the approaching day. She likes to wake up with the rest of the world, to hear the birds yawning their morning songs and shaking the branches as they set out on their day's journeys.
Her bed sheets are wrapped around her waist, her left leg poking out at the bottom, toes bare and warm. She breathes deeply.
Through the open window, she can smell the garden. It has rained in the night, releasing the thick moisture from the air that has hung over Central for most of the week. Now, the morning air is fresh and clean. She can smell the crisp wetness of the garden below, the peonies and camellias, pink and frilly for a little girl, delphiniums and tulips standing tall and firm, the huge orange lilies that drip lust onto the flat, green lawn, their pungency almost sickening close-up, but up here, far away, sensual and beckoning.
She stretches, yawns, sighs, relaxes. Two arms raise themselves above her. Two hands on the end of these arms, long, slender fingers that flex and wiggle. Tendons moving under flesh, ligaments limbering up. A warm-up routine.
Where is the rest of her body?
Here it is, below her. Shoulder blades, collar bone, ribs. Tanned from long hours spent in the sun, her stomach appears abruptly from beneath her tee-shirt, a thin trail of blonde hairs leading down, down, down towards the waistband of her striped cotton shorts. Further down, places she can't see now, underneath the covers, strong thighs, two bumps for knees, shins, calves, ankle bones. Two feet, ten toes.
All present and accounted for. Nothing has been lost while she wasn't looking.
Here I am.
She closes her eyes again and lets her arms drop back onto the mattress with a thump.
Some time passes.
She opens her eyes again. She has been dozing, but now she needs to pee, and her body slowly surfacing from sleep is itching to be active, to get up and go about its business of moving and doing.
She rolls onto her side and a tangle of dark blonde hair slides into her eyes, cuts her off from the room. She sweeps it back off her face, tucks a few strands behind her ear, tucks her arm underneath her head and tries to focus her eyes on the clock by her bed.
Six-oh-five.
No rush.
She closes her eyes again.
She gets up and goes to the bathroom. She pees, runs her fingers through her hair a few times in compensation to actually brushing it, twists it back off her face and secures it with a couple of pins, washes her hands and face and goes back to her room. She steps into her slippers, shrugs on the old jersey that used to smell of her father but now just smells like cotton and soap flakes and goes downstairs.
The sunlight pouring through the stained glass of their front door makes diamond-bright puddles on the floor. She pauses for a moment in one of these pools of colour, her feet drenched field green. It reminds her of Resembol, of rolling hills and clear, crystalline skies and standing in the Rockbell's garden in her bare feet.
There is a bottle of milk on the front porch and a carton of eggs.
Eggs come on a Monday.
She takes both and wanders through to the kitchen. It is warm in here already. She opens the back door and the window, puts the milk and eggs away.
She makes tea, takes an orange from the fruit bowl and goes outside.
Her favourite place is the back step. It gets the sun first thing in the morning and is warm under her butt. She peels the orange, takes the whole skin of in one long piece. She holds the globe of it in her hand, plump and heavy, then begins to dissect it. Sticky juice runs down her wrists. She runs her tongue up her arm to catch it.
It's late August. In three months, she will turn sixteen. When she was little, sixteen seemed like a very old age to be. Sixteen was grown up, adult, mature.
Somehow, she still feels like a child.
Out in the neighbourhood somewhere she hears the sound of a car engine. People are getting up, making breakfast, going to work. The world is ticking along.
She thinks about the dream she had. Already the details are becoming sketchy; she has forgotten exactly how the room looked and how she felt. She doesn't remember what it was that seemed so significant. Much like life, the greatest events are eventually consigned to memory; a good dream becomes breakfast small talk.
I dreamt the strangest thing last night.
Really?
Above her, the house looms. The raised eyebrows of the eaves cast their sardonic, penetrating gaze, and she has no good answer for their questions.
What does it mean?
I don't know.
But it's your dream. They're your thoughts. What do you mean 'you don't know'?
"I don't know," she sighs.
"Who are you talking to?"
She jolts out of her reverie, sloshes hot tea out of the cup and yelps as it splashes onto her bare thighs. Her mother stands in the doorway, one hand on the wood frame, the other holding her dressing gown across her chest.
"Ma, you scared me," she grumbles, rubbing at her reddening thighs with the hem of her jumper.
"Sorry, sweetheart," her mother smiles gently. "Did you sleep well?"
"Mmm."
Her mother goes back into the kitchen. She clatters around, boiling the kettle and getting out coffee grounds, sugar, milk.
"Do you want breakfast?"
"Nah."
Her mother comes to the doorway again and she can feel her eyes on her back. She swivels her torso around and squints up into her mother's face. She sees her as if for the first time, young and pretty and already resigned to a life of solitude.
She feels bad for leaving her alone so much, but she has a life to live, too.
"You okay, Ma?" She asks gently. Her mother nods, closes her eyes and smiles sadly.
"It's just..."
She knows what her mother is going to say, has heard it a thousand times before. Still, she waits patiently for her mother to finish the thought, watching the words form in her throat and push their way up along her tongue and past her teeth.
"He would have been so proud of you, Elysia."
Elysia looks away, down at her hands in her lap, sticky with orange juice, callused and scarred from cuts and burns and a hundred and one other small, silly accidents.
"I know, Ma," she whispers.
It's a yearly ritual.
She doesn't come here any other time except his birthday. Her mother comes more often to clean the grave and lay fresh flowers. This is the one day a year that Elysia accompanies her. It's almost a special occasion; she does her hair nicely and puts on a dress, mostly because she knows it makes her mother happy. She's pretty sure her father wouldn't care if she came wearing a bin liner, but all the same she likes to feel like she's making an effort for him.
They go out early, before it gets too hot.
There are a lot more graves in the cemetery than there used to be. Even if everyone else is suffering, a war is good business for the earthworms, at least.
She feels bad for thinking such grim thoughts.
The summer that Edward came back from the dead, she was eight years old. It was also the first summer that she went to stay in Resembol.
She remembers feeling very grown up as her mother waved her off at the station, allowed to take the train by herself, her only chaperone the cheerful stewardess who came to check on her every now and again. She had books and homework to keep her occupied, but ignored all of it; she spent the whole journey with her nose pressed to the rattling window pane of the swaying, creaking train, watching the countryside unfold in front of her.
She had never seen cows or sheep in real life before, only in the picture books of farmyards that she'd read as a small child. The prairie land that stretched out for a hundred miles east of Central spread before her like a sea of gently undulating grass and unfamiliar crops.
Winry, Edward and Alphonse met her at the train station. Edward gave her ten cenz to call her mother on the ancient payphone that clung reticently to the clapboard walls of the old building.
"Remember to be on your best behaviour, sweetheart. Use your nice manners and be polite."
"Yes, Mama."
Seeing the Rockbell house for the first time felt like stepping into a story book. Painted sunshine yellow, sitting atop a low hill, it glowed golden in the grapefruit light of late afternoon. The old woman who greeted them at the door smelled of tobacco smoke, and despite being not much taller than Elysia herself, seemed imposing and frightening. Not normally shy, Elysia found herself overcome with embarrassment; she twiddled her thumbs, lowered her eyes and recited- as her mother had told her- her nicest, most polite greeting.
"Pleased to meet you, Mrs Rockbell. Thank you for having me."
"You're very welcome, dear. And none of that 'Mrs Rockbell' nonsense. You can call me 'Granny'."
She has a lot of very happy memories of that summer, but none that she recalls as clearly as the day she went fishing with Edward and Alphonse. Winry and Granny had been busy that day, locked away in their workshop with the sound of drilling and the smell of solder and polish, so the three of them had packed up tackle and bait, a picnic of apples and sandwiches, and gone down to the river.
Alphonse was not the Alphonse she remembered from when she was little. Back then he had been a big guy in a suit of armour, who came for dinner but never ate and whose eyes glowed like two small red stars from within his helmet. She had a hard time reconciling him with this Alphonse, flesh and bone, wheat blonde hair and sage eyes. Plus, he was far too small for that big metal suit.
Edward, though, was unchanged. He was her big brother, and he was back. That was all she needed from him.
They fished for rainbow trout and river cobbler. Alphonse transmuted a small rod for her, spooled the line for her and sat on the river bank beside her, putting a steadying hand out whenever she leaned too far forward in her eagerness. It was Alphonse who carried her home on his shoulders too, whilst Edward walked a little bit ahead of them, laden with their basket of fish.
It wasn't until much later on, when they had eaten grilled fish and apple pie and listened to the cicadas singing in the garden, when Elysia had been tucked in by Winry and wished goodnight, not until the bedroom light went off and she relaxed into sleep that the fish came out to haunt her. They wriggled and thrashed in her arms, muscular bodies wet and glistening, every bright scale reflecting her face back at her. Their big, black, unblinking eyes shed huge, shining tears, as brightly coloured as sugar diamonds, that dripped off their strange, smooth faces and dribbled down her arms.
She woke sobbing, inconsolably guilty for the deaths of her fish, and it was Edward who came to comfort her, who pulled her awkwardly onto his lap and stroked her hair whilst she soaked his shirt with her sadness. And when she'd cried herself out and sat hiccupping miserably and stifling yawns, he tucked her back into bed and leaned close, so close that his hair fell like a golden curtain around her head.
"All is one and one is all," he whispered to her, his eyes earnest and kind. "Just you remember that."
It would be a long time before she understood the meaning of those words, and even longer before she was able to apply them to any situation other than that of the dead fish. Yet somehow, even with no distinguishable meaning attached to them, Edward's words comforted her and eased her guilt.
She slept soundly after that.
After tidying the grave, they stand together for a while, side by side, a trio minus one. They stay like that for a long time, Elysia's hand grasped tightly in her mother's just like it always has been, ever since she was small. Then her mother leaves and Elysia sits down, leans her back against the head stone and lifts her face towards the sky.
All is one and one is all.
She was never destined to be an alchemist. The magic that runs in Edward and Alphonse's veins is, to her, just that; something unattainable, unreal, incredible. Still, that principle of oneness, of circularity and pattern, that is something she can understand and relate to.
Sitting here with her father, what was once her father, what is now just a stone with his name written on it and a place for them to come and say, Look, here he is, he really did exist, she feels, if not happy, then at least peaceful.
She takes copper coin out of her pocket, cleaned in vinegar and bicarbonate of soda until gleaming, and works a small clump of earth out of the ground with her finger. She tucks the penny into the small cavity and then pats the earth back down over the top of it.
For luck. For love.
For the sake of it.
Another ritual, one she has forgotten the origins of but continues to observe.