Al didn't notice that anything was wrong- at first. He knocked on the door several times, each set gradually increasing in volume until Al was sure he was going to knock down the door from its hinges. Even then, with no response, Al wasn't the least bit worried. They must be in the workshop, with the welding machines, which make a lot of noise. Yes, that's it. He was sure they wouldn't mind if he let himself in, so Al grasped the tarnished doorknob, and turned. When the knob gave way without any resistance, Al smiled. It was just like Auntie and Winry to leave the front door unlocked, and there was little need to lock it in a tiny village like Resembool.

Al stepped into the much cooler indoors, quiet as a library and nearly as empty as one in the foyer.

Silence. Absolute silence.

Al could hear himself breathe. The grinding and hissing of welding wasn't reaching Al's ears like he had expected it to. Instead, silence met where other noises weren't. If the house was this quiet, why couldn't they hear him banging on the door?

He stepped inside, leaving the door ajar, and peered around the corner into the sitting room, searching for a sleeping Auntie Pinako or Winry, but found nothing. What he did notice was a fine layer of dust on every surface in the sitting room, accompanied by a cold, unlived-in air. It was as if no one had set foot into the house for several weeks, if not months. A few glances into the kitchen and workshop solidified Al's theory, though he was intrigued by how a fork had lodged itself into the wall near the breakfast table. One abandoned plate, piled high with mouldy bacon, eggs, and toast sat in front of what was Ed's chair, which had been tipped over onto its back. Someone had jumped from their seat and left the house in a hurry, right before breakfast, and Al could only wonder why.

A few dishes that looked like the aftermath of pancake fixings sat gathering dust and mold in the sink. He couldn't imagine why Auntie or Winry would leave the kitchen in such a state.

"Oh, of course!" Al muttered to himself, pressing a palm to his forehead. It'd be just his luck if Winry had left for Rush Valley for the Autumn just before he came to visit. Auntie Pinako could have left for Central for one of her automail patients, and now Al was alone in their house. And he'd come all this way to visit them!

He also needed to tell her what had become of her best friend.

Discordant chiming startled Al out of his reverie. Al raised his eyes up to the top of the stairs, where the clock lay on its side, glass face shattered but otherwise unharmed. Al clomped up the dusty stairs to take a closer look.

Glittering shards of glass littered the floor like sharp, glistening snow. Much smaller, smashed pieces clung to the wood and runner in a powdery grit.

Now Al was concerned. Just what had happened here while he was away?

He struggled to lift the heavy clock away from the mess of shattered glass, making note that the clock had a long, thin slash across the wooden backside. He traced the gash with his fingers, remembering to ask Winry or Auntie Pinako the next time he saw them.

This thought brought him back to speculating just what had taken place in the Rockbell house while he was away. Maybe Auntie and Winry had left quickly for an emergency, and someone robbed their house while they were out taking care of a patient.

Al searched through his memories of the Rockbell house for anything of value someone might have stolen. Auntie and Winry's tools definitely had some value, but nothing in the workshop was missing, not even the completed automail models.

Winry's jewelry box on the endtable just inside her room was sitting in its rightful place, piles of tangled chains and rows of earrings still intact. Not even the delicate gold chain Auntie Pinako had given her for her fourteenth birthday was missing. A thief that neglected Winry's extensive collection of necklaces wasn't very good at their profession.

Al squinted down at the dusty floor, gears turning. Winry's jewelry, the tools, the rainy-day fund was still under Ed's bed in their guest room, and Auntie Pinako's- Auntie Pinako! Al had to suppress the urge to slap his palm to his forehead. He had missed the most obvious. Auntie Pinako was entering her seventies, so of course she would have nearly twice as many material valuables as Winry in the way of jewelry.

As Al crossed the hallway, to Auntie Pinako's room, he began to notice a strange smell in the air. He brushed it off as the fumes from the mouldy food downstairs finally wafting into the upper part of the house, but when he reached the door, the odour only intensified.

When he pulled the door open, an abhorrent stench hit his nose. Al groaned and pulled his shirt collar up to cover it and provide some meagre protection from the stink, but its nauseating reek permeated the thin cotton. Al hadn't smelled this in a while, but its fetor was unmistakable. It was the stink of death and decay.

Mister Schmidt's piglet had somehow wandered into the river and washed up downstream. From there, it decomposed to a mass of bloated flesh and maggots until Al had discovered it one day. He was five, so he went running home to his mother bawling about a stinky alien laying by the river. His mother had taken care of it, and with even a decade and the obstacle of not having a nose to smell with, the intensity of that stench had stayed with him.

Al stepped further into the room, and the smell grew so Al's stomach was roiling. His gut rolled and flipped until Al thought he couldn't stand it any longer.

He turned around the bed and caught a glimpse of something bone-white and wriggling, and a sickly purple-green-grey mass of something.

Al's stomach wrenched out of his abdominal retched right onto the floor, whatever little was in his stomach emptying onto the hardwood.

Al staggered into the wall and down the stairs, shoes crunching unevenly on the powdered grit of the clock face still dusted over the top steps. Al's foot missed a stair, and his body wobbled uneasily before toppling down onto the landing. He braced himself on the railing, wave after wave of nausea ripping through his throat and gut. The stench followed him.

It seemed as though his nausea had sharpened his eyes as he stumbled down the stairs and into the now obvious details shook and wobbled from his / There was a skid mark of a shoe from someone running to the door from something or someone. And over there, long thin slash marks across the stairwell wall he hadn't noticed.

Right before the front door, deep scores had been clawed into the floor and in the surrounding wall. Someone's fingernails had torn into the wooden floor hard enough to dislodge long gauges.

In the centre of the door, right at someone's eye level, two identical cuts had been sliced straight through the wood, spaced at exactly one human head's-width. In front of the scratches, a single dried drop of blood pooled between Al's feet.

Al pushed the scarred door open wider with trembling hands.

He continued in this lurching, wobbling manner until he came across Miss Schmidt riding to town on her horse-cart. She greeted him, and when he didn't reply, and continued staring at the ground with glassy eyes, she hopped off of the mare's back and took his face in her hands.

"Alphonse? Alphonse, look up at me! Alphonse Thomas Elric, you will tell me what's wrong this moment-" Miss Schmidt's crow's-feet-lined eyes widened. Her face paled considerably. "Alphonse, you're as white as a sheet and sweating like a glass of water on a hot day! And what's this on the side of your mouth?" Miss Schmidt raised her hand to wipe at it with the back of her hand. "Is this...bile?"

Miss Schmidt shook his shoulders a little. "What happened to you?" Al didn't reply.

Before long, Al was holed up in the closest thing Resembool had to a town meeting place- the Kraus family's barn. A mug of hot tea cooling in his hands and a quilt around his hunched shoulders, Al endured questioning by all of the town's residents that he didn't even try to acknowledge. The first time he spoke after leaving the Rockbell house was long after the sun had dipped behind Resembool's foothills. All heads turned his way and hushed whispers died down as began to speak.

"How long has it been since any of you have heard from Winry or Auntie Pinako?" Al whispered. A few mutters went around the room as people cross-checked their facts with others, and then relayed them to the neighbours around them. It was Nelly who piped up out of the crowd.

Her eyebrows were raised high up into her high forehead, and knitted together in concern. Her long brown hair was in long wet strands, having obviously just gotten out of the bath.

"Al, we all assumed Winry had gone to Rush Valley for the autumn. We haven't seen her since July." Nelly said, her voice becoming quieter with each word. "W-why? What happened?"

"And no one went to check on Auntie Pinako?" Al's hands were beginning to tremble once again.

"We all thought she went off to take care of an out-of-town automail patient. Last time anyone saw her was…" A short murmur coursed through the crowd. "...yeah. July."

Miss Schmidt stepped forwards this time. She crouched in front of Al, hesitated, and asked, "What does this have to do with what happened to you?"

Al's mug fell out of his hands and shattered on the floor. The now cold tea leaked out in a dark puddle all around the broken, yellowed remains.

"Something happened to them." Al spewed out, grabbing short handfuls of his hair. The memories he had tried so hard to shut out were streaming back. "You have to go, you have to find them, something's wrong-"

"Al, I don't understand what you're saying-"

"Auntie Pinako was murdered!"

The buzz that had begun to ripple through the people went dead silent.

"No, not Pinako Rockbell."

"Certainly not. Al, are you sure about this?"

"I don't believe a word of it. Boy's probably gone a bit nutty. You hear what happened to his brother? Done popped off, and only sixteen too!"

"William, don't say things like that!"

"Is it true, daddy? Is Auntie Pinako dead?"

"I say we go up there and check it out!"

"Everyone, quiet!" Miss Schmidt's shout silenced the crowd's growing volume. Al, who had begun to cry, hiccoughed at her sudden yell. "You know Al wouldn't lie about something like that."

"You there." Two grown men jumped to attention at Miss Schmidt's austere glare."Go to the Rockbell's. Nelly, use the train station's phone to call the Elgach City police force. And… and the county coroner."

The people Miss Schmidt had recruited snapped their hands up to their brows in respectful salutes, and set off to do as they were told. The rest of the town was left to speculate in hushed voices, and send worried glances Al's way.

Al sat in a corner with Miss Schmidt, her hand rubbing his back in a comforting gesture that he remembered his mother doing when he was sick. In the short span of a few hours, Al had regressed nearly ten years. He was lost. He was alone. In a the short span of a few hours, the entire Rockbell line was exterminated. Just like when his brother had become a thing, Al was numb. The only thing he could feel was hopelessness creeping up into his soul as an icy shadow. Whoever had done this had left him completely alone.

Al didn't fall asleep that night. He didn't dream. All he had was the sounds of the crickets and occasional hoots of night animals to keep him company until the sun rose. Through the guest bedroom window in Mister and Miss Schmidt's house, the sunrise was a deep red.

_000_

Sunday afternoon, right after everyone had lunch, the population of Resembool gathered once again in the Kraus's barn. Even the brand-new, squalling babies were present, gathered in their mother's arms in linen blankets.

The two men Miss Schmidt had ordered to the Rockbell's house commanded everyone's attention by banging on a cow bell with a wooden spoon. A few mothers of infants voiced their dissent to this method (with the men's own wooden spoons to their heads), and after the men had nursed their wounds for an adequate amount of time, they cleared their throats and announced that all children needed to leave the barn and find something to do. Everyone knew that they would all listen at the doorway to the barn, but shooing them away would keep them in arm's reach if things got a bit too graphic.

Lawrence said, just a tad too loudly. "The house was a complete wreck."

Theodore, who was just a few years Lawrence's junior, added to this. "Huge scratch marks on the floor, gashes in the wall, and the clock was completely destroyed. Everything was covered in dust."

"So this must've happened a while ago, and we all didn't know. We didn't notice Auntie Pinako hadn't come and gotten her bread or eggs for an entire month."

"Based on the amount of dust gathering on all the surfaces," a man who had chaperoned the two younger men to the Rockbell house observed, "I'd hazard a guess that no one has been in that house for at least a month."

"Lenny, get to the point. Is Pinako dead or not?"

The older man's wrinkles became much more defined. His frown lessened, and the look on his face was the only answer the town needed. The air seemed to whoosh out of the room.

"We found her. It. Too short to be her own bedroom, too."

A loud sniffle came from a curly-haired woman somewhere in the middle of the crowd.

"Well, who did it? Surely no one here could do such a thing!"

"The police and the coroner came last night. I've got a copy of the versions of the reports they plan to release to the public here, if you want me to read them."

A murmur of assent. A few people who didn't have the stomach for such things left quietly, shaking their heads in disbelief all the way.

"Police Report: Elgach City PD. Date: August twenty-fourth, 1915. Time: Nine-oh-six-"

"Get on with it!"

Lenny sent a glare at the general direction of the outburst, and continued on.

"Victim is Pinako Rockbell,female, age seventy-nine, identified by the engagement ring on her finger and unusually short stature. Time of death is estimated to be a month prior to discovery of corpse, based on stage of decomposition. Cause of death is a single hole to the back of the head, going clean through to the forehead. Death was most likely instantaneous."

The pages rustled as Lenny flipped over to the second page. "Only pieces of evidence are the scratches all over the floor, the smashed clock, and gashes present on several walls. Holes identical to the one in the victim's head are present in the front door and the victim's bedroom door. There are no eyewitnesses, and no suspects. The discoverer of the corpse has an alibi. All of the interrogated townspeople have alibis. Most likely a cold case."

Lenny squinted down at a short, handwritten note squeezed in at the very bottom of the page in blotchy ink.

"ADDENDUM: The body of Winry Rockbell, the victim's granddaughter (age sixteen), is nowhere to be found. She was confirmed to be living with her grandmother at the time of the murder, but her disappearance makes it impossible to investigate her possibility as a suspect. Captain Haus-Hermann, Eglach City Police."

The silence following Lenny's reading was absolute. Everyone was stunned.

"So that's it, then." Someone whispered.

Lenny nodded. He placed the thin stack of paper back into its brown envelope, and finished with, "Alphonse has it hard. His brother died in the coup, his surrogate grandmother is dead, and his best friend is missing. How about we all make this easier for him, and make sure he's happy while he copes with his loss."

Solemn assent came from all sides. Soon, people began to slowly empty out of the barn, and trail back to their houses, shaking their heads at the cruelty of the world.

Miss Schmidt waved goodbye to the last exiting person, and after she was sure they were out of earshot, she turned to face what seemed to be empty darkness.

"Al, I know you're in here."

Silence.

"You were supposed to stay at the house."

A few moments passed, but soon Al's golden hair and eyes loomed out of the shadows, his eyes cast downwards.

"So that's it, then." He said, no trace of emotion in his voice. "That's it." This time, his voice cracked in the middle of his sentence, and the floodgates opened.

"Auntie Pinako is dead. My brother is gone. I have no idea where the last person who could be any semblance of family to me is, and I'm alone! Alone!" He sobbed, hiding his face in his hands. "I'm tired of it! I just want to live a happy life with the people I love, and somehow, the universe doesn't think I deserve even that little! I-"

Al's voice cut off. Miss Schmidt had strode forward with the authority of a General, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and pulled him to her chest in a warm, maternal embrace.

"Alphonse, listen to me." She said softly. "You're angry. You're sad. You feel more alone than you ever have in all of your life. But, I need you to listen to me. You are never completely alone. Don't you ever dare to say you are completely alone."

"You have people here who have known and loved you like their own sons since your birth. Even when your mother died, you were brought in with your brother by the entire town. We take care of our own."

"You have friends who care for you. I know you do. Winry told us all about the people you've met in the last few years that you've told her about. Friends are family you choose."

Miss Schmidt squeezed him a bit tighter. The tears had almost completely stopped now. "And even though it hurts now, it will get better. You'll heal. Pinako would want you to. We'll all get over this grief together. Don't you worry, Alphonse. Our wounds will heal together."

Miss Schmidt finally let go, and held him at arm's length, her eyes more tender and more feeling than Al had ever seen them. She smiled gently, the slightest tinge of sadness in her grey eyes.

"And who knows? Winry is missing, not gone. We can all hope and heal. Grief makes you stronger as you grow from it. This, I know."

Miss Schmidt let go and opened the barn door, shoving it open with her shoulder and motioning for Al to go. "Now, what do you say about a little baking?"

_000_

Al sat in bed a few nights later, belly full of peach pie and roast chicken, staring at the sky. Miss Schmidt's words had stuck with him, and he made sure he wouldn't forget a single word. He hadn't cried since she had spoken to him.

The only other thing he made sure he would remember was the contents of the police/coroner report. There was something very strange about the whole affair. Resembool was over three hours out of the way of any city in any direction, and the only people to visit were supply men, and they didn't even leave the station. Even the occasional visit from the military didn't stray from the train station. The only people to leave from the train station, who weren't really townspeople, were Ed and Al.

Winry definitely couldn't have done this. There was no way she could have. Al was in the hospital in July. And Brother, well, there was an obvious reason he couldn't have done it. Even Brother's resident thing didn't have a motive for doing anything to Pinako Rockbell.

Al shook his head and rolled over onto his side, running a finger over the seams on his pillow. He couldn't place just what felt wrong about the whole situation. There were no clues, and it was a cold case. He understood that they couldn't apprehend anyone without evidence or suspects. For all intents and purposes, this was already a closed case.

Al couldn't help but want to solve it on his own. Maybe he wanted to do it for Auntie Pinako, or maybe he wanted to solve what made him feel like something was off about the case. He couldn't, though. He had no resources and no investigative training, and he'd have to be happy with the best the police could do.

A masculine voice said something, far away in a memory.

"Yeah, we ran a prostitution bust last Thursday. The military seems to be taking more and more cases from the police. We have more jurisdiction, but if you ask me, the police need to handle police matters. All of these cases keep me away from my darling Elicia more and more!... Say, Al, if you wanna help, you can. I'm sure you caught onto some investigative tricks while hanging around your brother and the Colonel. You've got the brains and the brawn. What do you say?"

Oh, that's right! Al did catch onto investigative procedures, and being in a suit of armour with no other senses did sharpen his visual observation skills.

Al sat up and stared at his open suitcase, sitting on the vanity on the other side of the room.

He'd start tomorrow. He could do this. He'd solve this- for Auntie Pinako. He couldn't be sure he'd do a better job than the police, who were trained for this, but it'd make him feel like he was doing something, not just waiting around for the answers to come.

He'd better get to work.

_000_

Agh! I was going to put this up earlier, but my computer went completely kaput on me, and now I'm typing this on a borrowed laptop. (binge-watching SCRUBS might have had a part in this, but shhhh. I didn't tell you that.)

We finally got to Resembool. From here, I think we've got about ~30 chapters until this whole thing ends. Wow, the time flies by. Chapter eight already! Soon, this'll all be over and I'll have to fix all the plotholes and rewrite. I am not looking forward to that.

Ohohoho? Winry's body is nowhere to be found? Didn't she die, though? *curious prodding*

So, sound off in the reviews/comments, whatever form of feedback on the website you're reading this on. What am I doing right? What do I need to polish up on a bit? Any plotholes? What do you think is going to happen next? Feedback is author food, people. (No seriously. I need to feed my fifteen starving help us.) I'm thankful for all of the people that have reviewed so far. Thanks for your opinions!