Chapter 2 – Remnants of a Life Lived
Roy could sense Al's growing reluctance with every step they took down the dormitory hallway. The narrow, shadowed corridor tended to be rather warm and stuffy in the summer season, but despite that fact, the boy had begun to shiver as the four of them progressed nearer and nearer to the door of his and Ed's room. And when they arrived at the door itself – number C3-6 – his knees suddenly gave out beneath him, and he would have collapsed if Roy hadn't held him up with a firm arm around his waist.
"We don't have to do this, Alphonse," breathed the man, pulling Al's trembling form tightly against him. "I can have the room sealed for a little longer, or I can even have my people box everything up themselves. If we put the boxes in my basement, you can go through them later, when you're ready."
The boy clung to him for a moment, convulsive hands clutching at Roy 's uniform as he shuddered in the encircling arms. Over his head, Roy exchanged a worried glance with Winry, who watched anxiously, biting her lip. Pinako, meanwhile, observed the exchange in expressionless silence.
"No." Al shook his head, breathing deeply, trying to calm himself. "I have to do this. I'm just – I'm scared, Roy ." There was the faintest hint of a break in his voice.
"I know," Roy murmured. "Everything in the room is going to look and feel different now."
Al hadn't been back even once since he and his brother had left, on the morning of the day Ed had died. First he'd been in the hospital for four days, then he'd stayed at the hotel with the Rockbell women while the State funeral had been arranged and conducted, and after that he'd fallen in with the plans for him to move in with Roy and then take Ed's body home to Risembool. He'd never had clothes to retrieve, since he hadn't owned any while in his armoured form. In fact, every piece of clothing he now owned had been purchased initially by Havoc and Hawkeye while he was in the hospital, and then more recently by Winry and Pinako. He hadn't even had a toothbrush until Havoc bought him a new one that first night.
So everything in the room on the other side of that door was Ed's, and every item was going to induce painful memories. No wonder he was scared to go in.
The boy pulled back and lifted his head, even though his hands remained tightly fisted in the uniform jacket. He raised wide eyes, full of trepidation, to the man's face. "Is that how it felt with Maes Hughes?" he asked.
Roy sucked in his breath. He should have expected that one. He faced the boy's gaze as openly as he could. "Y-yes," he faltered. "It wasn't easy, helping Gracia go through his things."
Al lowered his eyes. "Sorry to make you go through this again."
The man put a gentle hand on his hair. "Stop it," he murmured. "This is what friends do. And I'm here as much for me as I am for you. So don't take on that burden too."
Al finally let go of the jacket, straightening his thin shoulders and turning to face the door. He set his jaw with such fierce determination that Roy would have laughed if the circumstances had been different. At that moment, the kid was all Elric, drawing on some inner source of strength, pushing down his fear, and getting ready to plunge right in. He pulled the key out of his pocket, his hand now surprisingly steady as he inserted it, turned the knob, and finally pushed the door open.
And again Roy wanted, incongruously, to laugh. Even with the curtains drawn and no lamps lit, he could see that the mess was prodigious. Clothes had been strewn everywhere – tossed on the end of one of the beds, draped haphazardly over both chairs, lolling from half-closed drawers, and even kicked in a ball under the desk. Which, he noted, was itself a mess, charts and papers spread in piles all over it, some having spilled off one end to fan out halfway across the floor.
The place didn't smell, exactly, but the air sat heavily, and the room was very warm. It had clearly been shut up for several days.
Winry stomped in past the others and turned around in the middle of the room, hands on hips. "Oh, Ed!" she cried. "What a complete slob!" She dropped her knapsack on the floor beside a chair, pulled a red bandana out of the pocket of her overalls (maybe she'd been expecting exactly this sort of major cleanup job), and tied back her long blond hair to keep it out of her face.
For some reason, Al was now more embarrassed than upset. "Sorry, Winry," he muttered, cheeks flushing visibly even in the dim light. "We were in such a hurry that morning, I didn't have a chance to tidy up before we left." He glumly eyed the disastrous room. "It could be a full-time job sometimes."
"He was always just so busy, thinking about something else. But you let him get away with it, Al, you know you did. You should have put your foot down more often."
"I did try. But if I put my foot down too hard, I might have made a hole in the floor. Or broken Ed's foot."
The two young people looked at each other for an instant, and then burst into near-hysterical giggles, Winry bending over, hands on knees, while Alphonse leaned on the back of a chair as he shook with mirth. The spasm of hilarity left them both gasping, though it only lasted a few seconds. Finally, though, it faded away as quickly as it had arisen, and they were left staring at each other again, the same stark sadness creeping into both grey eyes and blue.
Pinako took charge. The diminutive woman stepped past Roy and into the room, going to the window between the beds and briskly yanking the curtains open. The tumbled mess was even more impressive with daylight flooding in, now that it wasn't blending into the shadows.
"Well," she said, "we're here to clean up after Ed now, so we'd better get started. Someone open this window and let some air in first. Winry, you and I will collect and fold all the clothes, so Al can decide what he wants to keep. Mustang, you and Al had better see to that desk. I imagine there are some papers there that the military may want to have."
Roy nodded. "You're right, thank you." As Al moved obediently toward the desk, the man stooped and murmured in Pinako's ear, "I'm so glad you're here." She merely responded with a curt nod before joining her granddaughter beside the bed.
Roy opened the window, and immediately a soft breeze crept in, ruffling the curtains and beginning to disperse the warm heaviness in the air. Outside, in a central square created by this dormitory and two others on either side of it, he could see the training field and running track, with several people already taking advantage before they began their day's duties. The muffled sound of the runners' footsteps rebounded off the adjacent dormitory walls, accompanied by the occasional shout of encouragement.
He left the window and took his place with Alphonse at the desk. In the better light, he could now see a plain white plate from the downstairs cafeteria, sprinkled with hard, shrivelled crumbs, sitting on a corner of one of the charts, whether intended to act as a paperweight or merely having held Ed's last hasty breakfast, he wasn't sure. But casting his eyes about the room, he spotted the toaster – illegal, of course, in the dormitory – resting beside an equally illegal hot plate and half of a very stale loaf of bread, on top of an otherwise almost empty bookcase.
The morning's tasks moved along more smoothly than he had expected, after Al's shaky start in the hallway. Despite how the lavish mess made things appear, Ed didn't have that many clothes, and it didn't take long for the women to collect them all from their various nests, and start folding them on the bed. Meanwhile, Roy and Al began to go through the piles of papers on the desk.
Some were clearly military documents, most having to do with the last big operation, in which Ed, Roy , and so many other alchemists had been involved. He recognized the blueprints of the warehouse where the rogue alchemists had kept their headquarters and laboratory, as well as maps of the adjacent streets. Ed, and probably Al too, had pretty thoroughly marked up both the blueprints and the maps, as they'd plotted avenues of attack and escape.
At least…avenues that were supposed to be escape routes. He knew that if he looked for it, he'd actually be able to locate the intersection where Ed had died, and for a moment he found his eyes automatically moving along one of the maps, following the streets and alleys toward it. But he hastily folded up the maps with the blueprints and dropped them into the garbage can. Glancing casually over his shoulder, he found Pinako watching him from the other side of Ed's bed, and wondered if she guessed what he'd been doing.
"Look at this shirt," Winry remarked, drawing her grandmother's attention away. "He was splitting a couple of seams."
"He was still growing," the woman replied. "I wonder if he realized it?"
"Oh, he realized it all right," Al smiled over his shoulder. "One little millimetre, and he'd know it."
Roy created a place for the small stack of military documents on the end of Al's bed. But the pile didn't get augmented much after the two of them sorted through the top layer of papers, because the majority of the papers – scattered notes, hand-written passages taken from research articles, lists of various sorts, rough drawings of alchemic arrays – all involved Ed's own alchemy studies. And as Roy spread out and examined three of the circle drawings, each very different, each one taking a new and unique perspective, he realized that almost all of this research had to do with one preoccupation, indeed, one powerful obsession.
"He never gave up trying to figure out how to get my body back," Al whispered at his side. The boy gently touched the drawings, running his fingertips along the lines of the circles as though caressing them. "He kept running into a block that he couldn't understand. He was always sure there was a way, so he found all these different approaches and kept coming so close – but every time, there was that block again."
In fact, Roy could see it, in every circle: an unusual symbol or oddly placed line that would divert the energy of the transmutation, preventing it from going where Ed had hoped it would. One of the symbols seemed to suggest eternity, another merely a simple lifeline, and still another hinted at nothingness, at an endless void. They were different concepts, and yet as Roy compared them, a feeling nagged at the back of his mind, as though he was missing something, some commonality uniting them...
He saw his companion's lower lip beginning to tremble, and wondered helplessly if he should try to take the drawings away. But Al went on, glassy eyes fixed on the charts as he traced the circles, over and over, with his fingers. "Sometimes I told him I was just glad to be alive, and maybe he should stop looking, but he'd get mad at me and tell me he'd never stop as long as he lived. So he kept reading, and making the drawings and finding out that every new method he thought of kept running into that same wall. He used to get so frustrated…"
"Let me guess," Roy murmured. "He'd throw all of this on the floor, and then have to pick it up again. Which would put him into an even better mood."
Al's lips curved upward slightly. "You did know him, didn't you?" His brows drew together in a faint frown. "What I don't understand – what I just don't understand – is how it finally happened. All that work, all that research, and he couldn't find a way, and then – then it just happened, as though he never had to work at it, at all. It just happened. How could it suddenly happen like that, when he didn't even do anything? Like it didn't need him at all, like he didn't even matter. But he did matter. He did! I don't understand it – "
"Alphonse." Roy put a hand on the boy's shoulder, trying to calm Al's rising distress. "You know Ed. He always tried to finesse everything, get every tiny detail perfectly correct. Maybe it was sheer brute force he needed, and that's what he kept missing. He used it when he was on the fly and had no choice, but for something as important as your life, he'd never have risked it. But all those different kinds of alchemic reactions all around us during that last battle when we defeated them – maybe it was just a matter of battering at the block with every kind of alchemy anyone could think of, until the block collapsed, and there you were, back in your body."
"Do you really think that was it?" Al asked softly, gaze lowered. "Was it really that simple?" His eyes flickered, briefly, as Winry passed them on her way to the other side of the room. Outside the window, a whistle shrilled as some training group began going through their paces.
Roy didn't blame the kid for sounding so doubtful. He wasn't even sure he believed it himself. "Maybe that's not it," he had to admit. "I just don't know what other explanation there could be."
"Well, here it is." Winry's voice intruded into their conversation. She had opened the door of the small closet beside the door, and as they turned, she pulled a garment out, leaving a hanger jangling inside. "I wondered where this thing was," she said.
Al drew a sharp breath. In a bright flash of red, Ed's long hooded coat seemed to ripple in Winry's grasp as she held up it in front of her. Without warning, Al rushed toward her, face twisting in pain, and literally grabbed the coat out of her hands, clutching it in a bundle to his chest. He gasped as though he'd been stabbed, crying, "Ed! Ed!" Bursting into tears, he buried his face in the soft red folds, the fabric muffling the sobs that began to shake his shoulders.
Roy made as though to go to him, but Pinako put up her hand, shaking her head. Instead, Winry guided the young man toward Ed's bed and sat down with him, putting her arms around him and pulling his head onto her shoulder.
Roy sank onto the other bed, setting an elbow on one knee and leaning his forehead onto his hand. He remembered. Ed had been wearing all black that day. There'd been some chance he'd need to sneak into the warehouse, and hopefully remain unnoticed in the shadows, until he could slip out and let the others know which entrances or walls were weakest and most vulnerable to attack from outside. As though he could ever really be unobtrusive with that bright hair…
'Hold on, Ed! Help is coming! Hang on just a little longer!'
The ghastly spreading bloodstain hardly visible in the fabric of the black jacket…
He felt the mattress depress as someone sat beside him, and Pinako murmured, "Don't worry about Alphonse. He'll need to do this a few more times, I think."
Roy nodded. "We both will, actually."
"Winry and I have had our own moments like this, the past few days." Pinako fell silent again. He idly noted that even though she sat on the very edge of the mattress, her toes just touched the floor. He closed his eyes, listening to Al's muffled sobs and Winry's quiet sniffles, until he heard the woman add quietly, "I always knew you loved that boy."
Wondering at first which boy she meant, he decided it didn't matter. She was right in either case.
Presently he stood up again and returned to the desk. He could at least keep sorting the papers into categories, so Al could decide which ones he wanted to keep and which he should discard. Whatever he could do to make this task simpler for his young friend, he'd do it.
A few minutes later, after Al and Winry had gradually stopped weeping, Roy heard the girl murmur quietly, "So, Al. I bet you're keeping the coat, huh?"
Roy glanced back in time to see the boy give her a light punch on the shoulder. "You idiot," Al answered with a slight laugh. He wiped the back of a hand across his eyes, and held the coat out. "This smells like him, doesn't it?"
Winry bent and took a deep breath in the folds of the coat, then lifted her head with a wistful smile. "Yes it does. I can smell his soap. And his automail."
"I thought so." Al himself followed suit, closing his eyes and slowly breathing in the lingering scent of his brother. His fingers moved in the folds, rubbing gently as he absorbed the texture of the material, gazing raptly at the red fabric. It reminded Roy , suddenly, of yesterday in the garden, as Al had discovered the scent and texture of the rose petals.
When he was finished, reluctantly dragging his attention back to the task he was here for, Al stood and shook out the coat, then put it on without another word, coming to stand beside Roy at the desk. Absently straightening the collar of his shirt with one hand, he flipped through some note papers with the other.
It was shorter on him, the man thought with a pang, realizing again that Alphonse was taller than his brother. The coat came only just below Al's knees. Ed would have been so irritated.
The work continued, the two women speaking quietly to each other from time to time, while Roy and Al consulted occasionally on whether to keep or discard some random paper. They sorted for a few minutes more before Roy asked, "Didn't you do any alchemy research of your own, Al? All of this seems to be Ed's work. Did you do everything jointly?"
"No, I had my own notes, but I kept them a little tidier," the boy smiled. "I have some file folders," he waved a vague hand, "stuck in with all of Ed's books."
Roy looked over to the bookcase. "What books?" he asked.
"The ones in the – " Al frowned, following the man's gaze. "What…? Where did all the books go?" Apart from bread, toaster, and hot plate, the bookcase was empty except for a couple of folders full of paper, lying flat on the second shelf. Al stared at them as though he'd never seen them before. "That's really weird," he muttered.
Roy knew exactly what he meant. "I sort of expected to have to bring Ed's books home in a big cart," he agreed. "Did he take them somewhere else to work with, maybe?"
"No, they were here just a few days ago." Al frowned again. "He was pulling them out and working on something pretty late one night, about three days before…" The boy turned and looked around the room in bewilderment, as though hoping to find the missing tomes stashed in piles under a bed.
Pinako, from the other side of Ed's bed, wondered, "Were they his own books, Alphonse?"
"No, they were all library books. I wonder – would the library have come and gotten them, once they heard he was…," Al averted his face, "…dead?"
Library books. The Central Library. Roy stared at the boy, unable to speak around the sudden cold constriction in his chest.
'Oh, sorry, Ed, let me help you pick these up. This is quite a pile of books – are you taking them out or bringing them back?'
'Bringing back. It's my third trip, actually.' This with a laugh. 'I've had some of them out for years, and they're starting to threaten me with eviction from the dormitory if I don't settle the fines.'
'Look at this one – I don't believe you're reading something this outdated. Alchemists have done a lot more recent work than this.'
No longer laughing, eyes downcast, gathering the fallen books into a pile. Murmuring, 'You'd be surprised, the sort of things you can discover in the oldest books.'
Two days before. Two days.
Why was that important? It wasn't…was it?
And Central Library might take the fines out of a person's salary, but they never threatened eviction because of them.
"What do you think?" Al asked again, watching him curiously. A floorboard creaked under his foot as he shifted.
"Yes," Roy lied, forcing himself to speak normally despite the heavy pulse thudding in his throat. "Yes, I'm sure that's it. The library sent someone to retrieve the books."
"Then we're almost done," Winry said, picking up her knapsack from the floor and pulling out a couple of folded-up canvas bags. "I don't know if I brought enough bags for everything you'll want to keep, Alphonse."
"Actually," Roy put in, eagerly grabbing at the change of subject, "I've arranged for the staff downstairs to deliver Al's things to my place this evening. We just need to label the piles, and they'll take care of everything. Anything you want donated elsewhere, Al, we'll put in a separate pile and they'll take that too. And they'll clear out the garbage as well." Which reminded him. He walked to the bookcase and scooped the dry, crusty loaf of bread into the trash can, before straightening and picking up the military documents. Those were classified, and his responsibility.
In silence, Al surveyed the discrete piles of materials, now neatly arranged along the edge of Ed's bed: Ed's research, crammed into the file folders with his own, some stationery supplies, a few toiletries, three neat piles of clothes, and a single white plate. His shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly.
Roy followed his forlorn gaze and understood exactly what his young friend was thinking. "There should be more than this," the man murmured, fresh pain gripping his heart. "He did so much…there should be more than this, to show that he existed, and did such great things."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Winry bury her face in her hands.
Al looked up at Roy for a moment. When he returned to his contemplation of Ed's possessions, that Elric determination shone again from his large grey eyes. "There is more," he said, pressing a hand flat on the red fabric over his heart. "There are stories about him in every little town and village we ever visited, in every country. It's going to be a long time before anyone forgets Edward Elric, the People's Alchemist. And – there's me. The fact that I exist at all is a miracle, and Ed was the one who did that. As long as I'm alive, nobody is ever going to forget him and what he did. I won't let them."
Roy put an arm around his shoulders. "Thank you," he said softly. "You're right. That's how he's going to be remembered. Edward was vastly more than," he indicated the beds, "just these things."
"Yes. So…give it all away. All except his research and mine."
"Al," Winry protested, wiping her eyes, "are you sure? You don't want anything else to remember him by? You could wear some of these clothes, you know. Maybe not the pants, because your legs are longer than his, but you could wear some of the shirts."
Al's fingers again caressed the fabric of the coat. "I have this," he said. "I don't need anything more. But why don't you take some of the shirts? I think he'd like it if you wore them."
So they did as he asked, and labelled everything for donation (except the research which Al was keeping, and some shirts, and the toaster and hot plate, which Winry happily stashed into her bags). By the time they were finished in the room, it was past lunchtime, so Roy offered to take them all out to eat somewhere.
"Unless you'd like to go back home and nap, Al," he added. "You look tired. How are you doing?"
"I'm tired, but I think I'll feel better if I eat, so let's go out. But first…" Al walked over to Ed's bed and set down his papers, picking up the pillow instead. He pressed his face into it and breathed, long and deeply. Then he set it back in its place, carefully smoothing it out and, once again picking up his files, he walked out the door, not looking back.
Roy stood aside as the women followed the boy into the hall. He paused one final time in the doorway, slowly surveying for the last time the place where Ed had slept, done his research, shared private times with his brother. The man's eyes came at last to rest on the empty bookcase, and again a cold, inexplicable unease took hold of him. He stepped back into the hall and pulled the door closed.
As though they had passed through an ordeal and now celebrated the release of tension, the four of them spent a cheerful couple of hours together as they enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch at an outdoor bistro Roy favoured. Pinako allowed Winry a glass of wine, which lifted her spirits considerably. Alphonse, on the other hand, took one taste from Roy 's glass and made a face, deciding to stick with juice. It was the first time in his life he'd ever tasted wine.
Almost inevitably, the talk revolved around Ed, and Al shared stories about things his brother had done on their journeys together. Most of the tales were funny – this was Edward, after all, who tended to leap into situations before really thinking – so the two young people laughed a great deal, even if they occasionally laughed around their tears. Roy and Pinako shared slightly more subdued reminiscences.
Between the laughter, the good soup (with lots of chunks in it), and the fresh air, Roy decided that the flush on Alphonse's cheeks was a sign of health rather than fever. And this was the first time he'd seen the boy's eyes so bright, in the two weeks that he'd had eyes again.
Still, by the time they'd walked Pinako and Winry back to their hotel, and then taken a cab home, Roy could tell that Al's reserves had pretty much been used up once more. So he helped him upstairs and into bed for a late afternoon nap.
And once he'd seen to it that the boy was asleep, he returned downstairs and stood for a long time in the kitchen, staring at the phone on the wall, listening to the stately back and forth sweep of the pendulum of the grandfather clock in the living room. It should have calmed him, should have eased the agitation that had started back in the boys' dormitory room. But nothing, it seemed, could do that.
Finally, forcing himself to a decision, knowing he'd never rest easy till he did this – whatever "this" was – Roy picked up the receiver and dialled the main switchboard at Central military headquarters. A moment later, the operator had put him through.
"Hello, Scieszka," he said. "This is Roy Mustang, and I have a confidential request. I'd like you to make me a list of every book Edward Elric returned to Central library in the week before he died."