March 22nd, 1976
Charisa nearly tripped over the cat as she walked into the kitchen. "Drat it, Rap! Stay out of the walkway." She grumbled as she looked down to find him already past her feet, nosing into the refrigerator, which was open.
Her father was standing in front of the door, holding a jar of mayonnaise.
"What are you doing, Dad?" she asked suspiciously.
"Making tuna salad," Breda replied, giving her a look that almost dared her to scold. "Everyone likes it, so I thought I'd make dinner tonight. But we don't have the right ingredients."
"What's wrong with the mayonnaise?" Charisa asked. She hadn't bought it all that long ago.
"It's low fat."
"So?"
Breda set it down on the counter and closed the refrigerator door. The cat barely got out of the way in time as he darted sideways, then went to lurk beneath the counter, on which sat open cans of tuna fish. "I wanted to use your mom's recipe," he admitted.
Charisa smiled and shook her head. "Mom used low fat mayo, Dad."
Breda gave her a skeptical look. "No."
"Yeah," she nodded. "That's the exact same mayonnaise that Mom always got. It tastes right when we eat it, right?"
"Well, yes…"
"And that's what I've been cooking with," she assured him. "Not my fault you didn't realize we eat low fat mayonnaise." She leaned in and kissed his cheek. "So you can go ahead and finish making dinner without a problem. Thank you, by the way."
"No problem." Her father still looked mildly disgruntled but after a moment he smiled back. "Might want to lock him up until I'm done," he motioned down at Rapscallion, who was still pacing the floor with a predatory air. "He hasn't left me alone since I opened the tuna."
"And you might want to make a double batch," Charisa suggested as she picked up the cat, who wriggled in protest. "Don't forget Edward and Winry are coming over for dinner."
Breda grinned. "For Ed, I might want to make a triple," he chuckled.
It was a rare evening –ever really- for Tore to get an evening with Ed and Winry that didn't also involve a pile of other family members. It hadn't been small or quiet since he'd lived with them as a kid. So a dinner that was "just" him, Charisa, Breda, and the kids with Ed and Winry was a rare treat. One that amused Tore at how much he, now, could appreciate it, where his younger self would have rolled his eyes.
There were very few people in the room related by blood, and yet Tore would never have said that his family was anything but perfect the way it was. So what if his foster parents weren't his real parents? So what if Charisa was adopted? That Dare was his alone, and Brandon was the only child that came from them both? They were a family brought together by chances, turned into choices, and taken in by the love of strangers.
Tore had to admit that he was damned lucky!
Dinner was over, and the adults were lounging in the living room. Dare and Brandon had run off upstairs to play, and Camelia was dozing off on Charisa's shoulder, where his wife sat in the recliner, rocking slowly back and forth.
Ed was teasing Breda about dinner. "Seriously, I didn't think you could cook!" He and Winry sat on the couch, while Breda was in his favorite chair. Tore had taken one half of the love seat.
Breda snorted. "How do you think I survived before I got married?"
"Take out, all-you-can-eat buffets, and the donut box in the office," Ed quipped, grinning.
Breda opened his mouth once to object… twice… but nothing came out. Tore had to assume there was some truth to the accusation.
"Daddy's always been a good cook," Charisa came to his defense.
Breda chuckled. "Thank you! At least someone appreciates my talents."
"Was any of it healthy?" Ed asked with a challenging note to the question.
Charisa looked thoughtful. "Well…"
Breda shook his head. "You're one to talk," he turned the tables back on Ed.
Or tried. Ed shrugged casually. "What? I cook all the time, and it hasn't killed anyone."
"You two," Winry sighed.
Tore turned his attention to Winry. "Have they really always been like this?"
"Oh it used to be worse," Winry assured him with a smile. "They used to try and out eat each other."
That was not a competition Tore would have bet on lightly.
"That is terrifying," Charisa agreed with a slight shudder.
But Tore found the idea at least mildly fascinating. "Who won?"
"Tore!"
He grinned at his wife. "What? I'm just curious!" It was history! Besides, by the time Tore had met Ed –while trying unsuccessfully to pick his pockets- the General (then-president) had already been a bit more health conscious.
Ed grinned. Breda just looked a little disgruntled.
"It wasn't ever really a fair fight," Winry answered for them. "Ed's inhuman."
"Hey!"
"Umm… excuse me."
Tore looked away from the bickering shenanigans. Krista was standing in the living room entry, holding some kind of old book. "Do you need help with something, Krista?" he asked.
Krista glanced at him, but then her nervous gaze locked on Edward. "Actually, I was hoping you or, really, Mr. Elric could help me with… some research."
That had Ed's full attention, and the teasing dropped. "What kind of research?" he asked curiously.
Krista crossed the room, still clutching the book. "Alchemy research, sir," she said, taking a steadying breath as she held it up. "My father was an alchemist. When he died I, I took all his notes in the house with me when I left and came here. But my grandmother wasn't keen on alchemy and didn't know anything about it. She thought these were gibberish…" she held the book tentatively towards Ed. "But I know they're my father's work. I'm sure they're in code, but I don't even understand the language I think he might have made it up, just to make it more difficult to decipher."
Ed took the book, looking over the outside curiously. "And he never told you anything about his work?" he asked.
Krista shook her head. "Not a lot. I mean, he taught me the basics of alchemy, but he never talked about his work. He said it was secret. And then… then he was killed."
"Killed?" Tore looked at her sharply. "We were told your father had died." He noticed Charisa was not-quite-staring at Krista now.
Krista swallowed. "The circumstances of the accident were… suspicious, but I wasn't ever allowed to really investigate. But the way Dad acted sometimes, I think someone didn't want something he knew to get out, whether it was about them, or something they found out that he had learned. I'm not sure. But I think the clues are in his notes. He kept lots of them. I've got several volumes. I couldn't bring his entire workshop, but I brought everything I knew he wrote himself."
Tore's eyes went back to the worn book; an alchemist's journal. His curiosity made his fingers itch to take a look at it himself. There were a lot of alchemy secrets people would kill for. But what could be in there? Certainly not another way to a fake philosopher's stone, or make homunculi, or living dolls, or any of the other taboo alchemy that the State had been hunting down and dealing with for decades.
He watched as Ed opened the cover of the book, looked down, and went dead still.
Silence fell.
"Ed?" Breda broke the silence first. "What is it?"
For a moment, Tore thought Ed's hands might be trembling. But the Fullmetal Alchemist didn't speak as he stood up and crossed the room, snatching the phone off its table and starting to dial.
"Ed!" Winry spoke up more abruptly, looking slightly afraid. "What's going on?"
"I've got to get Al over here, now," Ed replied, though it wasn't much of an explanation.
"Why?" Tore asked.
Ed looked back at them all as he finished dialing and the phone began to ring. "Those notes… they're not gibberish. They're in German."
Even by the time Al actually arrived, Ed could hardly believe what he was looking at. The book was in code all right, but the language was painfully, horribly familiar. Even Winry recognized it when he showed it to her, though she had admitted she didn't remember much of it.
But Ed did. And while he couldn't decipher what the code meant, the words were far from disjointed. In fact, it wasn't unlike his and Al's old notes… in travelogue or, in this case, reading like a history.
What troubled him was some of the tidbits in that history. Hints at events that had happened that he knew had not happened in Creta, or Amestris, or anywhere on the continent. Nor would he find evidence to the contrary, because even the place names were consistent with what Ed knew of Germany, France, Italy… the other side of the gate.
And a life time ago. Yet here it was, in the hands of a man who had died only three years ago, and while the dates were a little odd, they were consistent with the time difference Ed recalled being between the two worlds. But that meant Ed was looking at hints of events from decades after he and Al had come back through the Gate, leaving the other world to its fate, and they weren't all happy events. Not that Ed could make a whole lot of sense of it without the older volumes.
Krista was more than willing to bring the rest that she had with her downstairs.
Ed was laying them out on the coffee table when Al arrived, immediately reaching for the nearest journal and staring at it with the same stunned expression Ed still felt.
"How is this possible?" Al asked as he sat down next to Ed, pouring over the journal in his hands.
"That's what I want to find out," Ed replied as he looked for the earliest volume. Each one seemed to cover about two years of time, and finally he found the first one, dating back eighteen years before. "Here we go," he turned to the first page, and began to read.
"Edward."
He looked up several lines later. "What?"
Winry was looking at him. "You're reading it in German."
"Oh." Ed felt abashed for a moment. He looked around, and realized that he was still getting odd looks from people, especially, he noticed, Charisa and Krista who were both staring at him and Al as if they had gone mildly insane. "Something wrong?"
Charisa nodded. "Yes. Could you explain, please, just what the heck language German is? I've never even heard of it."
That was when it struck Ed that there were two people in the room who had absolutely no idea why this was so fascinating or problematic… and that wasn't fair because one of them was the daughter of the man who had written the journals in the first place.
Ed sighed. "That could be a really long story, but I'm going to give you the short version. You know your Amestrian History, right? There's a whole chapter on Al and I last I checked."
"Two now," Krista commented with all seriousness.
"Great," Ed shared a look with Al, who smiled. "Well, then you know Al and I disappeared for about seven years. Well, about five for Al, after the strange airship invasion that lasted only a few hours."
Charisa was nodding. "Half the history books don't even want to acknowledge that as anything more than a mass misunderstanding of rare weather phenomenon," she commented. "But yes, I remember that. Then you just show back up after having been gone for years doing research, and you took up positions in the military again with big promotions. They never say where you went. Is this German place somewhere on another continent?"
"Sort of," Ed replied. "It's in a parallel world."
Charisa snorted. "Oh, come on Mr. Elric! Don't you think I'm a little old for fairy stories?"
But Al was looking at her, and Winry, and Tore, and even Breda… and Charisa's face turned slightly pale.
"You're not kidding."
"No, he's not," Al cut in, and in short order, there had been a brief lesson on the nature of the Gate, how that was related to alchemy, and the world on the other side of it. Or at least, somewhere on the other side of it. Ed had long ago decided that it was very possible that the world wasn't the only thing beyond the gate, it was just the only other physical place they could get to alive… probably. But those theories were not ones he had the urge to really explore.
When it was done, both Charisa and Krista looked stunned. Even Tore and Breda looked like their minds had been run through a blender.
"So you can see why this is a big deal," Ed finally took the story back up. "Other than Al, Winry, and myself, there shouldn't be anyone else here who even knows about Germany, let alone has the ability to write fluently in the language. These places he mentions… they're real, though the bits I'm finding are far different from the Germany I remember. But they would be, given how long it's been."
"You mean these contain information about what happened after we left." Winry was now looking at the books with keen interest.
"I think they do," Ed nodded. "But Al and I will need to fully decode them first to see what else there is to them." He wanted to dive right into it right now, but he knew that wasn't going to happen. At least, not in the next few minutes, no matter how much his fingers and mind itched to be at it. "That may take a while. Though first thing we have to do is actually crack the code so we can write them out in plain Amestrian and see what we've got."
Tore stood, with a grin on his face. "I'll put on coffee."
"I didn't mean right…"
"Oh don't even try to pretend, Ed," Breda chuckled. "We can see it in your eyes. You're dying to get into this material."
Ed glanced at Winry, who was smiling knowingly at him. He sighed as Al chuckled. "Yeah, okay. But we could be at this all night. Maybe Al and I should take this back to one of our houses so we don't intrude on your night."
"You think Tore doesn't want to watch you at work?"
"Or help," Tore pointed out. "Besides, I think it's only fair to Krista that you work on it here. They're her father's journals after all."
A very good point. Ed looked at Krista, who was sitting quietly, looking shocked at how fast this was all coming on. "You make a good point. All right. We'll stay here."
"You can use the dining table," Charisa offered as she stood up, Camelia now asleep on her shoulder. "Winry, would you mind helping me get the kids in bed?"
"I'd be happy to help," Winry assured her, standing and following Charisa out of the room.
Al, Tore, and Breda all headed for the dining room to finish clearing off the table.
Ed was set to follow when he glanced down. Krista was sitting in the chair she had taken at the beginning of the story, silently, still looking stunned.
Ed sat down next to her. "Are you all right?" He couldn't blame her. It had to be a lot to take in.
Krista jumped. "Oh.. yes I… I guess I just can't believe my father was from another world! It seems so far-fetched and… what does that make me?" She asked the last softly.
Ed smiled gently. "Yourself. It doesn't change who you are, or what," he added with emphasis. "You're human, like everyone else. That's what everyone on the other side of the gate is; people just like us. Same flesh, blood, and souls."
Krista seemed relieved by this fact, though her reactions were far from blatant. She clearly kept her deeper feelings close to her chest in most cases. Not that Ed could blame her, given her situation. "So they're just the same?"
"Yeah, pretty much." Ed nodded. "World's a little different. New languages, other countries and politics, but it all works the same. People live, grow up, socialize, fall in love, have jobs, and die of old age. The major difference when Al and I were there was their level of technological advancement, that and alchemy is very weak in their world."
"But my father was an alchemist."
"There were people who studied it," Ed clarified. "But very few of them, and it was a lot less scientific. As a culture they gave up on it sooner and focused on engineering and other hard sciences." He considered how much he really ought to be telling her. She had a right to know, but he didn't want to put the wrong ideas into her head either. "Their knowledge of advanced chemistry, physics, and other sciences that don't require an alchemical energy source was impressive. I wouldn't be at all surprise if your father was a scientist who picked up alchemy very easily."
"But, how did he get here?" Krista had still more questions. "And why did he stay?"
"That's what I want to find out."
Realization and curiosity dawned on Krista's face. "How?"
"By doing a little investigating." Ed tapped one of the journals with his finger. "You said this wasn't everything he had written, just his journals; his research notes."
Krista nodded. "I couldn't bring everything. These were the ones he always told me were the most important to him. I don't know what he left in his workshop."
"Well then we can see if we can find the truth of what happened to him. And if anything else of his is still around."
"How will you manage that?" Krista asked, looking skeptical, though Ed could tell she really wanted to believe him. This was, after all, why she had brought him the journals in the first place.
He grinned. "Oh, I know a few people."
