He could hear the sounds of the battle going on far above him, but all of his attention was focused on the seemingly innocent ten-year-old boy in front of him. His small hand was no longer stretched over the gaping crevasse that used to be the right side of his face, now flaking away to reveal shadowy eyes and the darkness inside of his human shell.
Pride's thoughts echoed in his mind as well with his own, he could see Father's underground lair but also nothing but swirling, shrieking souls. Just…a bit farther…
He could feel his throat being screamed raw but he didn't hear it, he could hear it but didn't feel it-
Pride's cranium exploded into shards of alchemical material and smaller flakes of alchemical residue. Ed's fist hovered in the centre of the devastation, rising and falling with the heavy breaths of its owner.
Soon, Pride dissipated into ash, forming a small pile at Ed's feet, with only a brown boy's dress shoe as evidence that the first homunculus ever existed.
When the remains of Pride had settled, Ed allowed a long, relieved breath to escape him. After a moment of letting his abused throat and muscles rest, he brought his fists up to eye level, one worn steel and the other muscled flesh, and opened them.
Empty.
Ed craned his head back to gaze at the blue sky, lighting up red at the edges of the massive hole in the ground, the sounds of alchemical attacks and gunfire cracking and crackling through the air.
As he turned and readied himself to transmute a tower to catapult him into the aboveground battle, Ed didn't notice a faint stirring in the small pile of ashes a few paces behind him.
_000_
Ed's vision blurred and smeared as he saw red. Using his newly restored flesh arm, he ripped the iron pole out of his bicep with vicious force. He flung it out of his sight as if he were disgusted with it, and barely registered the muffled clang as it hit the paved stone ground of the Central HQ courtyard.
Ed threw himself up, snarling. Lightning-quick transmutation instructions flickered through his mind, his mind already planning steps ahead.
GRANITE- SILICA ALUMINA POTASSIUM OXIDE TRANSMUTE
Stone spikes seven feet high rammed themselves into Father's body-
LIMESTONE- CALCIUM CARBONATE DOLOMITE TRANSMUTE
Stone fists pommelled Father's face and torso with unimaginable power-
CLAY- SILICA ALUMINA IRON OXIDE TRANSMUTE
He was finally close enough to unless the full extent of his fury onto Father-
A stone spear was thrown like a super-powered javelin straight through his opponent's skull.
Father stumbled several steps, completely stunned, and Ed saw his chance.
Edward Elric punched God right in the face.
_000_
Usually, he would be complaining about not having a single moment of rest, but this wasn't the time to be pissy.
His little brother was gone, something he had tried to prevent when he attached Al's soul to that damned suit of armor.
Blind panic and logic warred in his thoughts. Two people had already offered stupid ideas for the toll for Al's body and soul. Hawkeye had even thought that Ed was contemplating sacrificing himself- something he was sure he would never do. Loneliness was not something he wanted to subject Al to.
Ling wanted him to use the Philosopher's stone, that bastard wanted Ed to use him instead (Ed was only a little ashamed to admit that he cried a bit over that one). He wasn't going to take their suggestions unless they were good ones, thanks for trying though, ten points for effort, now shut up, I need to think!
It was probably a little cliché, no, extremely cliché, but his morale spiked when he realised something.
He made a promise not to give up. And Edward Elric's promises weren't meant to be broken.
A crazy, but genius idea sprang into fruition in his head, and a slight smile split his face.
One last display for the road.
He grasped an abandoned rod, and began to scratch out a very familiar design.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scriiiiitch…
Ed stepped back into the centre of the circle and surveyed his work. Satisfied, he nodded.
"I gotta go," He stated. He clapped his hands together, right between his eyes, and exclaimed, "The Fullmetal Alchemist is going to perform his last transmutation!"
He slammed his hands into the centre of the shaky circle. Blue lightning arced up into the equally blue sky.
He always did have a flair for the theatrical.
_000_
"…!"
A noise?
"A…!"
"Al…!"
His name, being shouted from far away.
"Hey!"
Brother's voice!
"Alphonse!"
For the first time in four long years, Al had eyes to open.
He could feel the hard stone pressing into his back. He could feel the weight of his too-long hair tickling his shoulders. He could smell the iron from blood and ozone from alchemy in the air, he could taste the sticky dryness in his mouth, he could see dozens of pairs of eyes (and one pair of milky grey ones pointed slightly to the right of him) focused on him.
He did it! Brother did it!
And it felt…amazing.
"Oh!" He breathed. Wow, he was breathing. That was weird- and great! He had a heartbeat, too. Even blinking felt new and amazing and Al was sure he wouldn't ever take any of this for granted ever again.
The next several minutes were filled with hugs and raucous cheering, new sensations (touch! Touch felt like electricity! Warm, amazing electricity!), tears…
This was almost too good to be true!
With all the attention focused on Alphonse, no one noticed a slowly dissolving child's figure creep up on the group, where Ed was in a wide clearing of people.
As Edward bent down to squeeze his brother in a bone-crushing hug, the child rushed forward.
In a matter of seconds, everything fell apart.
Al would never forget the sensation of all of Ed's muscles bunching up and tightening like rusted coils of wire, of all of Ed's joints bending past their breaking points, of the warmth in Ed's body flooding away but also becoming burning hot at the same time.
Ed ripped away from his brother and collapsed to the ground. Pride's heavily damaged, flaking wrist was sunk into Ed's back, the veins standing out like crimson cords under Pride's pallid skin.
Alarmed screams from everyone around Al filled the air. Ed began to convulse violently, twitching and thrashing this way and that.
And then he screamed.
He screamed animalistic sound that shouldn't ever come out of a human's throat. It shrieked and ripped through the air like a rusted knife yanked out of a victim's chest after the slaughter, but this knife screamed on for what seemed like years and years until, unexpectedly, it stopped.
Pride dissolved into the wind.
Ed lay still.
Al shouted with desperate hope, "Brother? Brother!"
Ed didn't respond.
Al attempted to creep forward on skeletal, atrophied limbs to his brother's side, but only succeeded in collapsing onto the ground.
Ed's eyes shot open wide. The gold surfaces were flat and glassy with something Al couldn't identify.
Al could dimly feel a horrible…pressure begin to emanate from Ed's body.
A horribly familiar pressure.
Even in a suit of armour, Al could feel that vile pressure deep in his soul. He knew, then, that it couldn't hurt him, but that pressure activated some ancient primal instinct, one that told man's ancestors when to run, when something was going to kill them.
Fear. Unadulterated, raw fear.
"Broth-"
Ed's flat eyes and expressionless face jerked in Al's direction. With those flat eyes focused directly on him, Al could only feel his sense of foreboding intensify tenfold.
No one was breathing. Silence settled like a blanket over the group, now completely still.
Al didn't notice the jagged shadow in the corner of his eye until it was too late. He was jerked upward by one bony arm, and suddenly, he saw the group of people scattering away from Ed's body, screaming, as everyone grew farther and farther away…
He didn't realise he had been flung until he hit something hard and flat, and several things broke in several different places.
Everything went dark.
_000_
Al woke up in the midst of chaos. He could feel himself bobbing up and down on what seemed like someone's shoulder, but he couldn't be completely sure. His face was pointed at the floor of a hallway- a hallway that was echoing with the din of a clinic after a disease outbreak.
"Agh!" He grunted. The harsh bobbing and jarring of his abused body made several, probably broken, ribs grind together in an undesirably painful way.
Al's breath began to come in short gasps. Oh, god, his ribcage. Every breath felt like a dagger was poking him in the side.
Al's hand's tightened into fists, gathering up handfuls of white linen in the process.
White linen? Al tried to even his breaths to make observations. The weave of the linen was smooth and fine, completely unlike the clothes had last worn when he could wear clothes (he doubted the dingy blanket wrapped around his skeletal body counted as clothing). The cloth more resembled his old dress clothes than what he had originally guessed: white sheets.
His eyes trailed up to a muscled waist, and a swishing, toned upper arm.
"Teacher!" He rasped. It hurt so much to breathe; just how many ribs did he break?
"Alphonse!" He heard her exclaim loudly. She delicately shifted his body into the crook of her arm, so his nose would brush her neck and she could carry him like an infant. "I apologise, I know your ribs are broken, but this hospital is a mess. Don't know how else I would've gotten you in here, those worthless desk clerks."
Al went silent. "Teacher? Where's Brother?" He whispered.
She peered down her strong nose at him. Black eyes met golden-brown for half a second, before she flagged down a haggard-looking nurse.
"I know you're busy, but this boy has at least three broken-" She never got much farther. The nurse interrupted her with a high-pitched scream loud enough to rival a car horn.
"It's a coup fighter! They're going to blow up the hospital!" She dropped her overcrowded clipboard with a clatter, ready to scream a bit more, but Teacher slapped a calloused, bloodied hand over her mouth.
"You stupid…" She closed her eyes and took in a deep, deep breath. "This boy has been starved for a very long time, flung bodily into a courtyard wall, and traumatised. He may be just a bit more important than the man in, say, room one-hundred-eighteen, who has an ingrown toenail, hmm?"
Teacher gave the nurse a look that dared her to argue. The nurse gulped, and glanced over Teacher's shoulder, as if looking for the demons of hell to come running after their angered Queen.
"Right this way, ma'am. But, I've got to warn you that the Dean won't like this-"
"Shut up and do it." Teacher snapped. The nurse blanched and stuttered out a 'yes'.
Bland, crowded hallway after bland, crowded hallway passed Al's slowly dulling eyes. He could feel the edges of unconsciousness begin to creep into his mind. He was unsure that he could stay alert. With every breath, pain caused the corners of his vision to darken, and the darkness would slowly ebb away until the next, struggling breath.
"Hold on, Alphonse." Teacher muttered.
Al finally let go of consciousness when an explosion rocked the earth outside, and sent Teacher stumbling into a wall- Al's side first.
_000_
Al wasn't allowed a single moment of peace. From the moment he woke up days after the ground –shattering explosion (which was revealed to be Mustang and the others fighting the thing), he thought about what he did wrong. The only rest he gleaned from the day's hours was the result of medication, treatment, physical therapy, new rib bindings, and so on, where he was distracted by the huge amounts of pain.
What could he have done to prevent what happened? Could he have deflected Pride's charge? Could he have warned Brother?
He tried blaming it on the others a few times. All he got from that was guilt. It wasn't their fault, and Al knew it. It wasn't his fault, either.
He had come full circle, hadn't he? Ed had placed blame on himself for losing Al's body, and now, Brother was a thing and Al was blaming himself.
Al never wanted to say that word. Saying that word meant that it was real. It wasn't real. Brother was recuperating in the room next to him, safe and sound and perfectly human, ready to be smacked around by Winry and her best friend the wrench the next time she came. He was just resting a lot. He was probably tired from his fight with Father, and would visit him soon.
Brother wasn't a thing. He had dreamt the whole ordeal. That couldn't be real.
The universe couldn't have punished them yet again. What could they have done to deserve all that?
What could they have possibly done wrong?
_000_
Al had nightmares. But they weren't just normal nightmares, no, they were nightmares that he woke up screaming from. They were nightmares that felt like the horrors within carried over to the real world even after he awoke.
But, in Al's case, this was true.
His brother was turned into a thing.
All because another thing wanted to live a little longer.
The Narcissist had humiliated himself. The Narcissist had hurt his own pride to admit that he wasn't invincible. He had stooped impressively low to steal someone from their brother right after reunion, just because Brother happened to be the most convenient vessel around.
The Narcissist turned his brother into a thing.
That thing gave him nightmares. Night terrors, Teacher called them. She used to have them after her failed human transmutation attempt, she said. Sid couldn't wake her up, but she was screaming and screaming in her sleep-
Shudder.
"Sorry, Alphonse. I don't think this is helping you." She remarked, momentarily soft. "But don't think I'm going to let up on you! Don't think I haven't noticed you slacking in physical therapy! Do you want me to help you with it?"
Alphonse stammered out a 'no ma'am' and 'I'll work as hard as I can ma'am', and let out a relieved sigh after she nodded sternly.
This was feigned normalcy. It was a pathetic attempt at filling the hole in their worlds- the hole that Brother had occupied and that thing had ripped open.
_000_
A month passed in the hospital before Al could take a single step on his own. He was extremely exhausted afterwards, but the nurses' congratulations lightened his mood, if only a shade.
Nothing, really, could remove the shadow over everything Al did- Brother was out there, somewhere, living as a thing.
Al, throughout his hospital stay, realised several things: One, Brother was a killing machine. Two, Brother could be completely lost to him. That thing could have completely absorbed his soul. Three, Winry Rockbell had no idea. Her cash cow, her childhood friend, was possibly dead and she couldn't ever know. Not yet, anyway.
Four, Brother was immortal. He could live for hundreds of years longer than any human ever could. He had amazing powers, a detachment from morals, the ability to slaughter entire cities, and thousands of souls living inside of him. He could outlive everyone he knew. His body would survive for millennia as a sixteen-year-old boy.
The closest Al ever came to smiling in that hospital was when he imagined Brother having the same 'average teenager problems' well into his eighties.
Five, Al was going to be fifteen in only a few short days. The 7th of June- it was marked in fat red marker on a paper calendar at the nurses' station: ALPHONSE'S BIRTHDAY, ROOM 203. FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. He had completely forgotten about it until one of the nurses made an offhand comment about family coming to celebrate with him.
The shell of numbness and detachment had shattered then, and for the first time since Al had regained his body, he knew what it felt like to cry.
_000_
It was the same dream he'd had every night for the past few weeks.
He was sitting in a dark room, in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair. His hands and feet were tied by thin black cords to the chair, and the ends trailed off into the darkness of the room's edges.
Then, a harsh light flickered on above him. He squinted up a bit, but inevitably looked down to the space in front of him, which had been occupied while he was distracted.
Brother sat on the floor, face expressionless and eyes closed. His hair was back in its usual braid, his outfit spotless, and his red coat without a single tear or ragged edge. The black tank top he always wore underneath it wasn't torn or bloodied in any way, not like Al had last seen it.
And that's when his eyes opened.
He would look up at Al with sharp, deeply shadowed eyes, eyes that were empty far beneath their gold surface. A twisting deep inside Al's gut told him something was definitely wrong.
That twisting turned into cold terror when Brother's pupils shrank to razor-thin slits. A too-wide grin split his familiar face, and his voice rang out, sounding like multiple voices at once (a woman screaming the words far away, a child with a hollow soul, an old man croaking out his last words before death, a chorus of ghostly androgynous voices singing the words to a poignant tune), "Oh, but you two succeeded, didn't you? Isn't that what you wanted?"
The shoulder of his coat slipped away, revealing a red tattoo surrounded by residual automail bolts and scarring, as Brother lunged for Al's throat.
Al awoke with a start. For several moments he sat completely still, pressing a sweating hand to his heart, beating out a panicked rhythm.
Mei's breathing exercises. Breathe in. Exhale. Breathe in. Exhale.
He closed his eyes once more to get his heart and lungs under control. After he was sure he wasn't going to have a heart attack, Al surveyed his surroundings.
It was still in the dead of night. Soft silver moonlight sent the planes and furniture into hazy, gentle shadows. Teacher was asleep, her head inclined at a seemingly uncomfortable angle on the couch next to his bed's nightstand. A fat hardcover book lay abandoned on the floor, her slack hand hovering just inches above it.
Mei's head was resting on Teacher's thighs, her hair still crimped into tight waves after being restrained in her characteristic braids all day. Said hair had one of Teacher's calloused, tan hands resting on top of the strands.
Teacher had both of her shoes off and tucked under the bench, while Mei had completely abandoned all over-clothes she had, and was wearing the simple pink dress she normally wore during the day. A few strands of short hair in the front of her head fluttered and fell every time she breathed in her peaceful sleep.
They looked almost blasphemously tranquil, sleeping there, the complete opposite of the turmoil in Al's mind.
He was content with watching the two rest for a while. Neither of them had let him see them resting very often, and it was rare to see them without an afflicted (or angry) look on their face.
Al slowly propped himself up on his elbows. There really wasn't any point in trying to sleep after having that dream. He hadn't ever succeeded in the past.
Al sat up and bent his legs at the knees to sit cross-legged. He clasped his bony hands in his lap, and resigned himself to stare out the window for hours on end. That is, until he heard rustling from a dark corner. Al made a small noise of alarm, and began to attempt to claw himself out of bed (which, of course, he failed at doing).
"Alphonse?" A high voice yawned. Al halted his panicked scrambling, and turned towards the source.
Mei was bracing herself against Teacher's shoulder, covering her huge yawn with a slightly pudgy hand. "Wha-what time is it?"
Al shrugged. "I don't know." He turned his head away from Mei's questioning, sleepy eyes.
"Did you have another nightmare?" The question was completely innocent, concerned even, but the reminder of his dream made every muscle in his body stiffen.
Al felt himself nod tightly.
He heard a rustling, a few light steps, and felt the side of the bed sag as Mei sat on the edge.
"You don't need to feel bad, you know." Mei whispered. "It was scary." Al's face softened at her simple word choice. He'd never been able to sum up every feeling he had in that moment. He couldn't express in words the horror and desolation he felt when the gold of his brother's eyes went flat as a coin, but somehow, this girl who was barely thirteen was able to do it using only the tone of her voice.
"And-and your brother's gone because of that thing." Mei's voice cracked somewhere in the middle of her sentence.
He was quiet for a minute. "Mei?" She made a small noise of acknowledgement through her hands, which were pressed into her face as some sort of barrier.
"I'm going to find him. And I'm going to get him back."
The last words of his sentence were said with such certainty that Mei glanced up from her hands to meet Al's eyes.
They were burning with a determination and certainty that almost scared her a little.
His furrowed eyebrows and flat set of his mouth told her two very important things.
One, Alphonse reminded her very much of his brother, albeit in a less evil-boy-who-lied-to-me kind of way.
Two, he was going to accomplish his goal.
Alphonse Elric would reclaim his brother from the homunculus Pride, come hell or high water.
_000_
That was interesting to write. I hope you enjoy the upcoming angst- have fun suffering, dear readers. Щ(･｀ω'･Щ)
(Ha, I gave Al one of my friend's birthdays. He always seemed like a summer baby to me.)