Prologue: Debt
"Sin will not be forgiven. That is its definition."
--Edward Elric, Only Human
Beneath the city of Central, Amestris -- 8. Nov. 1917
Roy
The cavern air was cool and dank and subtly wrong. The smell of absence, I supposed. I wouldn't have had to see the massive array laid on the buried city or deduced its sinister purpose to understand what had happened. Millions of lives had been sheared away in this place, inside of a single moment. It left me with a sickeningly familiar feeling to walk through the empty avenue to the city square. There was no difference between this empty place and the killing fields of Ishbal. The place reverberated like an echo of a scream long past, or the carbon-stain of immolated men, the last testament to a void in the world that has nothing to do with physical space.
I suppose I should know the smell of murder.
I am a murderer, after all; a government-sponsored, war-stained state alchemist, and therefore well-schooled in the science of that most abrupt of departures. Acid-etched into my mind are the formulae to calculate how quickly a certain mass burns given the correct proportions of fuel, which parts will incinerate at what temperature, or how much oxygen is required to reduce bone to char. I can kill swiftly and I can kill slowly. I know that the glowing tallow that was men's flesh an instant previous can take their unwitting vengeance by catching woolen uniforms alight. I know how a soldier can find himself—briefly—in a hell of his own making before being sent on to the real thing…
The wisdom I gained at Ishbal wasn't worth the price of the lesson.
The proof of my skill may be that I have only ever fired a gun once after basic training, and even then it was a conscious choice. A bullet is a faster death than burning, no matter how practiced I am at my specialization. Powerful as I am with my gloves on my hands, effective as I can be on the battlefield, the weapon I wield simply does not kill swiftly enough on a small scale to allow most of the people I have murdered a merciful death.
I loaded three bullets, one to kill and one to finish, one unloaded harmlessly with shaking fingers when Marco stopped me. Three victims after firing only twice. Somehow I cannot think that my arms instructor at the academy would be proud.
My last victim stood beside me in the city beneath Central.
Winry Rockbell was waiting for the pistol's report, it seemed. Waiting for the shot that would shatter the world. Waiting with the same utter calm I remembered seeing in her parents the moment they died, the moment I pulled the trigger. The peace in their eyes still keeps me awake some nights, and the nights I can sleep are spent apologizing to ghosts. Winry Rockbell had her father's eyes, and inspired the same question I asked him every night I killed him in my nightmares. Would you forgive me, even if you could?
Is someone supposed to forgive an act for which you cannot even forgive yourself?
She stood waiting as I hesitated, my remaining eye on the cavern roof. I had been idiotically attempting to craft my thoughts into snares, able to dart through the roiling chaos above us to the other side, to summon back another ghost that had left such a void in us all. I bent my will to the task, commanding my former subordinate to reappear, right now, or this former colonel would snap him into charcoal--
But Winry Rockbell only waited as Elric brothers failed to reappear, her thoughts known only to herself. She waited as I closed my eyes and admitted silently that I was being a fool. I knew the decision Edward had made. I had watched him make it.
They were not coming back.
Miss Rockbell watched at the very edge of the reaction when I blew Alphonse's array apart with a snap of my fingers. We both watched as the burning hole in the cavern's ceiling flickered gold—purple—gold again for an instant before it shrank, collapsed, and disappeared entirely, save for the harsh afterimage that burned behind my seeing eye. My ruined eye saw only when I dreamed, and then only my disgrace.
She watched me take her family away again, pale and dry-eyed, not blinking, not pulling her gaze away. She stood only an arm's length from me the entire time. We watched together as charred rock fell back to ground around us, beneath the stone sky and its ugly secret.
That strange impulse that drives you to speak at funerals, and attempt to patch great wrongs with insufficient words, tempted me then. I wanted to say that Fullmetal had asked for Al to close the Gate here so that he could do the same at the other end. I wanted to think, I wanted to say that he had abandoned the world through his own choice. To say she could be proud of what he had done, as we all were. As I was.
It was too close to a lie to rest well even in my mind. For the Fullmetal Alchemist, the alchemist for the people, choosing between his own happiness and the welfare of others was no choice at all.
There hadn't been any choice for Edward Elric, having grown to the man he should never have had to be. Nor for Alphonse, as he loved his elder brother as selflessly as Edward loved him. No choice, and no path but forward.
I met Alphonse for the second time in 1916, when Edward's military file stated the boy was sixteen but his features spoke to his being twelve or barely thirteen. Of course I had known about him, from Miss Rockbell through the now-Mayor of Lior Alexander Armstrong. I was as grateful to know that some part of Edward's life remained among us as I was saddened by the fact that Edward could take no joy in what he had wrought.
Fearing to repeat the past and bring about the loss of the younger Elric as well as the elder, I resolved not to reach out to him.
But it seems that my resolve to protect either brother will always mean little in the face of that brother's resolve to seek trouble.
He entered my office on the same day my transfer to the Northern border came through. In the late afternoon the shadows cast by precarious stacks of paper and supplies stretched and obscured the slight figure in the doorway. Preoccupied with the signing of tedious forms and transferring tedious forms and disposing of tedious forms, I failed to notice the figure until he moved into the light.
I can recall Havoc, a lieutenant then but still willing to tarnish his new commission and tempt official reprimand helping a corporal pack up official files for storage. His perpetual cigarette made a dive for the floor as his jaw went slack. There was a clatter as Breda dropped the box he was carrying to empty its contents all over the floor. Even Riza, stoic Riza, gasped at the sight of him.
It was like seeing a ghost. The failing light even lent him the gold I had thought unique to Edward alone.
He had shifted uncertainly under the weight of our eyes, and we realized in that instant who he truly was. Who he had to be. His voice replaced the golden specter he resembled with another, the soul that we had only known when it was bound to steel.
That quiet, differential voice sent Riza's hand to her mouth, and a cold weight sinking inside my chest. "I—someone said I could find Colonel Mustang here. I'm looking for my brother."
He looked straight into my face.
I could only look at him, standing amid the remains of my life for the past five years, and see the bitterest reminder of all my many failures. All I knew, in that moment, was that I had to keep this one piece of Ed's life from becoming part of the wreckage of my own and the misery that stalked those tied to me.
I told him, "Colonel Mustang isn't here." Part of me was startled by how coldly I had spoken. The other part was grimly satisfied. Shy Alphonse surely wouldn't linger for such a hostile reception.
I should have known better. Our watchers turned deathly still, but Alphonse Elric's jaw only squared in a manner that was hauntingly familiar. "Then maybe you can help me."
The silence drew out with the tension a pistol would command in a crowded room.
"I'm sorry," I said, stepping past him and out the door. I abandoned him to the silent room, not certain if I was apologizing for failing him or failing his brother.
His expression as I passed that moment a year previous—despairing, determined, driven beyond what anyone could expect of a man, let alone a boy—had been no different when we stood together on the airship and Edward turned away, to forge his fate alone.
Alphonse turned his eyes only once from his brother's vanishing back, to look at me for an instant—
And I never had to reply. My answer was to make a stirrup of my hands and brace to take the weight of a near-fourteen year old boy, the eloquence of action being all that time left to us.
He was surprisingly light. Perhaps it was the training he'd received at the hands of the infamous Mrs. Curtis, but the red-swathed form leapt up and away from me like a falcon released from its jesses. The young alchemist flew across an instant that seemed separated from the rest of the world, holding him hostage in time as sunlight shafted through the pre-winter clouds and turned him to living gold, all fire and light and burning life—
—and in the space of that moment I was certain that no deed I had done could ever be as right.
The moment snapped in two as the sun was shrouded and shadow and the empty cold of the thin air divided us. I watched as the blur of dun and red was swallowed within the dull gray hulk. I drifted downward alone and the alien vehicle dove back toward the vast pit in the ground and the distant glare of the portal beyond it.
Alphonse had cleared the final distance separating him from his brother as though the wind itself had lent him wings. He never looked back.
I never looked away. Not until my feet were planted once again on solid ground.
It was a comfort that with my refusal to involve the boy in my affairs, he would never suspect what he had asked of me. He had always been a kind child, and a kind young man. When Edward was lost and his brother's memory of those years were likewise lost with him, the "new" Alphonse could never have known me through more than the occasional ancient news clipping.
I believed, and I hoped, that Alphonse would never suspect what he had truly asked. In releasing him I watched the final remnant of the family that manipulation and fortune had bought me, the men I'd united in East City and the two who completed it, dissolve like wax held relentlessly to flame.
It might have been justice. I had taken someone else's family. In the war I must have killed several and scattered still more. Now I had lost everyone who made up my own.
But there is nothing just about war. There is nothing just about loss. If there was, Winry Rockbell would have her parents, all of the Elrics would be living happily in Riesembul, and I would have been either dead or in prison.
I said simply: "Miss Rockbell," and waited for her to turn, still calm, to look at me.
"I'm sorry." I'm sorry that every time I fail those whom I owe my protection, I've managed to take someone you love away from you.
I knew it was worthless to say even as I did so, as worthless as when I'd said the same to Alphonse the year before, as worthless as every time I whispered it over Maes's grave. Yet there was nothing else, and nothing I could possibly mean more. It was an unkind fate that had bound her to my inadequacies. I regretted that. Some feeble part of me wanted her to know.
Penance is an irony made of small worthless gestures, worthless because it is only worth doing in the cause of something that is beyond redemption.
We alchemists are called weapons and dogs and monsters. We are called angels and demons. We are seen as stronger than human, or better than human, or outside of human limitations. Some of us, in our arrogance, view ourselves in this manner.
But if there is a truth, it is this: I aspire to no greater strength than that the daughter of Dr. Uley Rockbell possesses. For she turned, and looked me in the eye, and said "I know." And there was no hate in her eyes, no disgust in her face.
If you're religious, the battlefield either cures you or convinces you once and for all.
Above all the things that I am, have been, and may become, I am a scientist. If there is an almighty deity I've failed to notice any sign, though the concept of Hell has suggested itself more than once. But I've known a higher power in the people who see us as fallible, oft-moronic mortals and nothing more. Higher still are those who can forgive us for it. Those people are the real heroes.
She said, after a moment: "Edward would thank you. For doing this for him. But he's not here—" her voice wavered only the tiniest bit "—anymore. So thank you, Colonel Mustang." She held out her hand. I took it gently, and couldn't help but feel a certain mad, bitter amusement at the irony of it. Once again, I had been the one to lock the door on the fate of her family, and Miss Rockbell took my hand rather than grabbing my firearm and blowing my head off. I did not realize until she had done so that some part of me had been waiting for, had wanted her to draw my pistol and destroy me before I could destroy the array. Then I would have an excuse to leave it open, and leave the brothers their chance to return. The gods of irony would be satisfied.
Strange the things you don't know you're thinking.
Then I realized that Miss Rockbell had reminded me of the one task that I could accomplish for the brothers, left to me because Alphonse could no longer carry it out.
"No," I replied. "Edward did say thank you. But it was for you, Miss Rockbell."
This time, she managed to look me in the eye again for a bare instant before she had to look away.
"That idiot." I heard her whisper. Only then did she start to weep.
--
It was only later, long after she departed for the surface but before anyone could be spared from the chaos to investigate the invaders' origin, that I finally noticed an odd glitter from the center of what had been the center of the vast array. I approached it with a vague curiosity that changed swiftly to rising dread. I had last seen that unique luster in a gem that had encircled my own finger, in what felt like a lifetime ago. I had looked in horror on another city as it burned alive by my hand, the terrible thing glistening like a killer's smile in the flames.
As I cleared away the dust and fragments of rock I found myself praying it was some trick of the light recreating the eerie glow.
Freed from the surrounding debris, I grasped the shining object, forgetting until that moment I had removed my gloves.
The red stuff of my nightmares, a mere chunk the size of the last digit of my thumb, flared in my hand—and suddenly I was three feet from where I started. The force of its energy had knocked me back but left my skin eerily untouched.
It was the Red Stone. The Philosopher's Stone. And it was lying in pieces all around me. I saw its telltale bloody shine a dozen or so times, from far larger pieces, scattered across the floor.
Later I would allow myself to wonder how the stone had come to be there, but then I wasted little time. Aware my superiors would eventually arrive, I did the only thing I could.
I gathered up every piece I could find in a length ripped from an ancient tapestry. When I finished I had a sack roughly the size of a full kit bag, and my hands were cold and slick with sweat. I extracted the smallest one from my pocket with my gloved hand, no larger than the nail of my smallest finger, and climbed to the stairway overlooking the city, the highest ground available. I drew an array at my feet and used it to fashion a crude ring from the stone, employed a thread from my sleeve to tie the chip to it, then placed it on my finger and snapped.
So long as I live, I swear there will never be another Lior, nor any genocide made possible through that red abomination.
In the blink of an eye, a vast section of the hidden city was rubble or shrouded in flames. The crater where the array had been was buried under at least ten feet of rock and dust, hopefully along with any pieces of red stone that I had missed. I slipped the ring from my finger, placed it carefully with the others, and climbed the rest of the stairway into the ruins of an old church.
Then, expecting military police in every shadow and doorway, I boarded a train north. There was no way of knowing then that military was not so great a threat as the shadow that detached itself from the dim cathedral walls and followed.
--
"I think the world we entered would be easier to describe if it had been more different. It was a shadow of this one, reflecting our own as through bent glass, with places and people that were distorted, but still very similar. Sometimes disturbingly so…"
—Alphonse Elric, The Gate and the World Beyond
25. Nov. 1923—Berlin, Germany
Edward
I finally staggered, triumphant, out of the bar at half past two in the morning. That triumph had cost several million marks in alcohol, which I didn't much care about, and my coordination, which was beginning to concern me. I was nearly sure it wasn't right for the pavement to drop away from me at every step. There was no scientific explanation for the ground to be jumping up and down all on its own, except an earthquake, and earthquakes didn't happen in Berlin. So I theorized that it had to be upset with me for walking all over it all my life, and had decided at long last to take its revenge. Grimacing at it failed to motivate it to behave properly, but taking small, ginger steps minimized the distressing undulation. Believing this to be proof that the ground wouldn't notice me if I walked very, very carefully, I grabbed a nearby lamp post to see if I could wrestle it into standing still.
There was a familiar sigh from somewhere off to my right, within a large black blotch that smelled like an alley. I smiled ingratiatingly in its general direction. "Al?" I asked hopefully. It didn't deign to reply.
"Al?" I said again, a bit more anxiously. If Al had left already I'd be in trouble. Trying to walk home by myself seemed like a bad idea. I had no idea where home was.
There was another sigh. "You're a mess," Alphonse informed me.
He was probably right. Anyway, everything seemed just a little too cheerful to try to argue with him. I opted to change the subject.
"Herr Schmidt," I effused loudly, "is a lovely, generous man. Especially for a verdammter gehirnlosen sheisskopf that could give the Colonel lessons in being a superior Eselsarmmfff—" My discourse on Brenner Schmidt's finer qualities was obstructed by a hand clamping down over my mouth. It was difficult, but I managed to indicate my displeasure to the hand's owner. "MmmRRMmmFnm, ll." I frowned against his hand and furrowed my brow at him.
Alphonse deciphers mumbling fairly well. "No I won't take my hand off your mouth. I want myself and my idiot brother home in one piece, which won't happen with you yelling insults at the top of your lungs."
I would have denied it, but my stomach chose that moment to bring more a more urgent problem to my attention. "MmmRRRMmmFNM, LL." I repeated, more urgently.
"No."
"MMGnnmTHMMUNMM!"
"What? Oh!" Al took his hand away and managed to leap back just in time for me to stagger to the curb and present my dinner to the gutter rather than in his lap. He even leaned in and held my hair back. I hadn't realized it had escaped from the cap I'd been using to hide it. I would have thanked him if my stomach hadn't had other plans for my mouth just then.
I took a few shaky breaths on my hands and knees to be sure my innards had returned to their usual places, then tried to stand. Despite my caution, my attempt to climb to my feet again was less than graceful.
"Ow! Brother, that was my foot—no, wait—!"
I never even saw the lamp post until I hit it.
"Ouch," I commented, fingering my nose. It didn't hurt much with all the alcohol in me, but the tingling sensation promised to be painful later.
There was another sigh, then a hand clamped down on my sweaty wrist and hauled, bracing a shoulder under my arm. "I really hope this was worth how bad you're going to feel in the morning." He peered speculatively into my face. "I think your eye's swelling up."
"Worth it," I croaked. Al protested as I leaned dangerously to the side, fishing for a cigarette to burn the awful taste out of my mouth. "It's an equipment dump."
My left leg below the knee abruptly decided to take a nap, so it was understandable that Al could be distracted from the topic of conversation. "What is?" he grunted, catching my elbow. I'm heavier than I look, but then Al's a hell of a lot stronger than most people would think. "Back up a minute, Brother, and pretend I wasn't actually present for any of what you found out."
"The warehouse on the Spree River. It's an equipment dump. Weapons. Stuff 'n things. According to Herr Brenner."
Al's shoulder tensed under my arm. "You think Nuskisson's weapon might really be there?" He murmured. I could feel warm breath across my ear.
I really didn't. But rather than voice my doubts I said, "Got the guard rotation. For the warehouse."
"Oh. Good." Al wobbled a bit sideways as I mis-stepped again. "Maybe you won't get shot at this time. Though you probably wouldn't have last time, if a certain pigheaded brother would let me watch his back and weren't intent on treating me like I was made of glass—" Al began frustratedly.
"Not a good time," I interrupted, my stomach lurching again. I must've looked pretty green because Al subsided, though the stubborn jut of his jaw promised the argument wasn't over, or forgotten.
Three weeks from what the German newspapers were calling the Beerhall Putsch, after the discovery of three separate storehouses and being disappointed three separate times, we were no closer to the uranium bomb I had seen in Fritz Lang's photograph, the deadly weapon I had thought lost in the Gate with the mad physicist Nuskisson.
But then, things taken by the Gate had come back to haunt us with annoying regularity.
My night spent nodding along to Schmidt's spewed invective about gypsies and foreigners would be our fourth attempt to discover where the Thule Society had squirreled the weapon in an unknown number of caches and rat holes. After blowing up Haushofer's villa, Thule was still looking for me. I, on the other hand, was more than a little reluctant to be found and worked over by Hess and his fanatics, hence my disguise as a barely employed machinist, complete with grease, coverall and a baggy cap I'd found abandoned along the river. Hess was the reason I was wasting my time drinking with fifth-rate peons rather than charge in and knock heads until I got what I wanted. I knew which method I preferred, but it was literally a different world than the one where the Colonel had wielded me like a bird dog, confident I could flush out the game he wanted while I searched obsessively for the Philosopher's stone. Back there and then, with alchemy, I had been a lot harder to kill.
With Eckart dead and their glorious Fuhrer imprisoned, rumor had it that Hess had taken the reins of their political faction. The first time I'd met Hess he'd punched me in the face, then tried to shoot me. He and the Letoist founder I'd put down in Lior would have got along well; they both had a fondness for guns and hated my guts. Not a healthy combination. For me, anyway. So, charming as I found Hess and his happy band of murderers, I didn't want to risk a confrontation before I had more than a vague idea of the game at hand. Especially not with Al around, himself no longer steel and both of us all too handicapped by ignorance and our lack of firepower.
I was getting impatient, though. Haushofer's office on the Munich campus was the next place to hit if this didn't work. Hess and his bullyboys might think twice about shooting in a university full of students.
The smile that thought inspired faded when I felt Al eying me warily. "Why are you grinning like that?"
"Just happy," I prevaricated weakly. I had tried like hell to get Al to stay behind on this escapade to one of, if not the, seediest, most wretched district of Berlin. Trolling for National Socialists or Thule members invited other kinds of trouble than the sort we were looking for. Germany was economically and socially depressed, desperate for foreign money to supplement its own worthless currency. Hence Berlin was the place where foreign spenders were provided anything they might want to buy. And I do mean anything.
You could smell the desperation and misery in the Mitte district, and hear it in the prostitutes' hollow-eyed proprositions. It was one of the few times I found myself grateful Al's grasp of German was still rudimentary. "We gonna be home soon?"
Al muttered something under his breath. "Soon," he finished loud enough for me to hear. His blurry silhouette looked over at me again and bit its lip. "Do you think you can make it?"
I was about to reply when my leg chose once again to declare its independence in favor of jerking around like it was palsied. A second later my right arm joined the mutiny, and between the two I was a bit preoccupied to remind him that I was still the Fullmetal Alchemist, regardless of the lack of alchemy in the world we now found ourselves in, and as such could make it to anywhere I cared to go.
Unfortunately, all the jouncing was giving my stomach ideas. "Think I'm going to be sick again," I informed my brother queasily.
"How can you have anything left to be sick with?" he muttered, stopping. "What on earth were you drinking? And how much did you drink?" His eyes narrowed suspiciously. "You were in there a long time."
"Don't know," I hiccupped cheerfully, which didn't seem to reassure him. "Started with beer, but it got blurry after the bottle of vodka. Herr Schmidt makes a hefty packet as a john in the Mitte district. And he only stopped paying attention to what he was saying halfway through the second bottle." I stated all this more glibly than I intended.
Al's reaction was predictable. He sucked in a breath and frowned ferociously. "Two bottles of—Brother, were you trying to poison yourself?"
"Not intentionally," I informed him, hands on my knees and hoping my next view of my insides would be over quickly.
Al preemptively grabbed my hair. "Maybe we should cut your hair short if you're going to make a habit of this," he scolded me, fingering it.
"It's not like I wanted to spend the night throwing up things I ate a year ago," I pointed out, sounding more petulant than I would've liked. I added --"Besides, it worked, didn't it?"—before having to shut my mouth again. Figuratively speaking. My mouth actually stayed open, but attempting to carry on the conversation would have ended badly.
"If you call this working," Al muttered. I could feel his hand tighten as he averted his eyes. "Yuck," he commented. He helped me as far upright as I could manage. "Are you going to be alright?"
"Ah, sure," I waved my hand carelessly at him, only vaguely troubled by the way my whole body seemed to wave with it. "S'not like I've never been drunk before."
I couldn't actually see with my face crammed into Al's shoulder, but I could imagine the look being turned on me. "You actually make a habit of this?" The disapproval was palpable.
Alfons hadn't much liked my drinking habits either, but they had lent me the tolerance I needed for misadventures like this one. Drinking was something I'd gotten used to before I'd met Alfons Heiderich, back when I was still traipsing back and forth from Oberth's to my father's flat every couple of weeks. The visits stepped up in winter after I discovered it was impossible to study in a dank hall with my arm and leg made so excruciating by the cold I couldn't sleep, let alone focus. I wasn't about to complain; Hohenheim had tried his best to recreate my old arm out of spit, hope and a lot of things that were never meant to be attached to a living being. I was grateful to have even a semi-functional set of limbs again. But the old man wasn't exactly Granny Pinako. Not by a long shot.
I never told Alfons about it. I didn't want his pity. But there were a few times I had climbed up to my tiny garret room at Oberth's and found the blankets warmed from the radiator pipes downstairs and the tiny fireplace already lit. I knew it was him for certain when he forgot his satchel and theory books in my room. A debt isn't something I carry particularly gracefully. I stuffed the last of my good Indian tea in it with my spare mug and left it at the foot of the staircase, along with a note inside the cover of one of his texts that climbing around in the cold would make his cough worse and if he kept it up I'd better see him drinking the damn tea, or I'd start locking the door on him.
He left a cheeky note on my door in turn, informing me that if I insisted on hobbling around like I had gout and locked the door on him, he'd just learn to pick locks.
I never told the old man about the new prosthetics either, but I saw his eyes following me as I made my way off the train my first winter here, shuffling like a creaky old geezer and cringing so badly my face was screwed up in a permanent grimace.
That night there was glass of sherry on the table beside my random stacks of notes and empty ink bottles. Desperate enough to try anything by that point, I downed it.
The relief was tremendous and nearly immediate. From then on I made my own trips to the sherry bottle. When I realized the dreams also stopped when I drank, or at least I stopped remembering them, I went out and bought a crate of poor quality stuff with my petty earnings as Oberth's assistant. By now I had a pretty decent tolerance, especially for a guy missing two limbs, with the blood and tissue that would dilute the effects of alcohol.
When I had talked and dreamed and conspired to return to Amestris it was a goal. There was distance to surmount between this place and time called Deutschland, or Germany, 1923, and my home. Telling Alfons stories about mine and Al's adventures reminded me why I was working so hard to pound obscure theory into my head until dawn, why I was an alien wandering an alien land, and distracted me from the growing fear that I had been relegated to some private hell or self-delusion for daring to attempt what belonged to gods and the Gate, not once but twice. I was chalking it all in my mind with Alfons as my slate, determined not to lose the life I remembered living, whether it was real or not, holding it before me like my dreams of the Stone.
Why Alfons put up with me I'll never understand.
Al tensed abruptly and stopped, bringing me out of my head to face whatever was happening. Suddenly I was aware of some very bad German being gabbled at me. English accent, it sounded like. I squinted at what appeared to be two men who were looking straight back at us appraisingly, which turned into a limp-haired, balding fat man and a kid, or nearly a kid, thin and gangly and taller than me. Everyone's bloody taller than me, I thought bitterly. Al in his thirteen-year-old body stood only a little shorter than I did now, and I was nearly nineteen. It was damned unfair. The kid's hair was thinning too, though, young as he was. That made me feel a little better.
"The hell do you want?" I snarled at them in German, straightening up. I kept my left hand on Al's shoulder as I leaned away from him. My other hand was clumsier, but I felt it catch on the weight inside my coat pocket. I closed my fingers on it and gave the pair a smile. There was no way I could take them now, drunk as I was. But I wasn't about to let them know that.
They got the tone, though I doubt they understood. They babbled more unintelligible words. They pointed at Al, then pointed to themselves, held up several banknotes, then pointed at me.
Thankfully, I didn't fall over when I whipped the knife out and pointed it right back at them. I was confident that this would indicate "no" in any language, but I made sure they got the message. "Bugger off."
"English," the gawky kid noted my accent. I didn't correct him, but the other man pointed at my dockworker's clothes. "Naw, 'ee's nothin', he's as broke as Horseface Dick." The man gave me a limp smile. His teeth were yellow. "You sell us the boy, little man, Johnny Poole'll treat him allright. I've got a whole fifteen pounds here for him."
Little? I'll show you little, you fat bastard. Fifteen pounds was a damn fortune in that miserable alley, or near enough. Fifteen pounds in a filthy fist gave me a great idea. I turned slowly to Al, who had been watching the men steadily, waiting for them to make a move, and said, "Sure, why not?" When Al rounded on me in shock, I blinked at him innocently. "We need the money," I said reasonably. Then I winked, and smiled with the half of my face that the pair couldn't see. I saw him get it. He looked like he wanted to argue … but then his shoulders slumped. "All right," he said softly, adding for the duo's benefit. "We do need the money." Resignedly, he shuffled over to them, me trailing behind him…
The struggle was largely a blur, but I remember putting my knife through the toe of a boot, then squealing, and the smell of someone pissing themselves. Al did the brunt of the work; his strikes were soundless, but the meaty thumps the two made when they hit the pavement was music to my ears. I sat on the senseless fat man while I went through his pockets.
"And you say I don't let you do anything," I reproached my little brother. Al wrinkled his nose, lifted an eyebrow…but he smiled all the same.
I smiled back. Nothing could defeat the two of us. We would be all right.