Chapter Ten: Memories

Alphonse watched as Ed sat reading Tucker's notes. 'Last time I saw brother (or someone who looks like him) so determined was when we thought Mom would die. You wouldn't know it if you saw her now, but several years ago, she was really sick. My brother and I thought alchemy could save her.'

A younger Alphonse watched a young version of Edward as he sat in the same position Ed was now sitting in, and who also had the same determined look in his eyes as he read an alchemy book.

"Brother, it's getting late. Why don't you stop, and come back to it in the morning?"

"I can't, Al. Every minute counts. Every second we waste, mom gets a little sicker. There must be something in one of these books that can save her, and I'm going to find it!"

"But what if there isn't anything, Ed? Shouldn't we spend all the time with her that we can?"

Edward was about to reply, when he heard footsteps.

"Boys?" A slightly pale Trisha Elric entered the room. "Shouldn't you two be getting ready for bed?"

"Sorry, Mom," Alphonse said and began to leave the room.

But he stopped at the door when hearing his mother say, "What's so important, anyway?" Alphonse watched as she bent over to pick up a book Edward had left upside down on the floor.

"No, Mom, wait-" Edward called out, wide-eyed.

"Oh..." She said as she looked at the page. It had something to do with using alchemy to cure illnesses. Edward lowered his head.

"I... I don't want you to spend all of your time trying to make me well."

"But you're all we have in this world!" Edward said.

"Don't worry about me. For all you know, I could get better on my own."

'And that's just what she did,' Alphonse thought. 'After she got well, she never talked about the time she was sick. She pretended it never happened.'

"Hey, Alphonse. You paying attention?" Ed asked, waving a hand in front of his face.

"Huh?" Alphonse asked in surprise. "Uh, yeah. Of course," he replied.

"Yeah... Sure you were," Ed said as he rolled his eyes.

A slight blush came to Alphonse's cheeks from embarrassment.

"I was just saying that I found a receipt for red water. It looks like Tucker's been getting his main ingredient from Mugwar's spring."

"Who's Mugwar?"

"Oh, that's right. I guess you wouldn't know him. Well, he's this guy in Xenotime. Back in my dimension, he was using a spring to make Red Stones - they're basically nothing but cheap imitations in comparison to the Philosopher's stone, though," Ed said with a knowing smirk. "I had to put a stop to his project; the red water was making the townspeople sick. The Tringum brothers, masquerading as me and my Al, were working with him, but I never became a state alchemist in this dimension, so the brothers didn't have us to impersonate and ended up with Tucker. Apparently, they were better of with Mugwar, though..."

"Uh... Maybe if you wrote it down I could figure it out?" Alphonse said, still very confused.

"It's not important..." Ed told the younger boy as he shook his head. "What is, though... Is what this page says." Ed held up the page to show Alphonse, but just as Alphonse started to read it, Ed took it back.

"It says," Ed said as he began to read. It was easy for him to picture Tucker writing in that room late one night, after Nina went to bed.

"The consequences could be disastrous if anyone besides Jonston is ever able to use the dimensional vertex. Especially if two people try to enter the same portal, as Jonston and Scar plan to do. On the other hand, the formula's more stable use has a lower probability of side effects..."

"Formula's more stable use?" Alphonse asked.

Ed revealed another page. "He explains it here."

"After discovering a more stable way of activating the formula, Jonston has abandoned the previous procedure. Instead of activating the formula before absorbing it into his bloodstream, he is now activating it after absorbing it."

"Sounds like we did it the unstable way. But now I know that the formula should still work, as long as it's only me entering the portal. Maybe if I used the formula and found the other me, we could both use the formula at the same time, again, and reverse the effects."

"I thought you said it was too dangerous to experiment with the formula. Didn't you say it may not have even been completed and could have bad side effects?"

"Yeah, but with all of Tucker's notes, I think I can figure out what to watch out for."

--End chapter--

Hmm... Looks like it's been a week since I posted a chapter. Is that the longest I've gone for these stories? (I used to think posting a chapter a month was doing pretty good. Guess that changed with the start of my FMA stuff.)

Well, this morning I finished watching all the episodes of the anime. (Now I need to find the movie) After seeing the episode where Ed runs into Mustang and Hawkeye in the car, I didn't really feel like writing fanfiction anymore. The anime just seemed too complete the way it was. But then I started thinking that maybe I could still write the next story in my series, even if it would involve a lot of things that happens in the last episodes of the anime. I could make little changes in the plot and see how it effects the story, right? And maybe I could have something about Dante in Edward's dimension...

I've already determined that Ed isn't the same Ed in the show, by the way, since the story has already been changed. The show would be one of the dimensions, but one that Jonston hasn't been to... (because if he was there, the story would be different than what's on TV, right? There's only one thing about Ed's dimension that I know of so far, which is different than the dimension of the show, that wasn't caused by Jonston or Edward changing the dimension's timeline. - Oh... There's an story idea. Maybe it's a bad thing to change time...)

(ponders) Wonder how I can wrap this up. If I make it as long as the first story, it would have two chapters left and I'd have to tie things up in those two. It could have a chapter or two more, I guess, but I don't want it to have many more.