Pride didn't have to wait long for the girl's eyes to shoot open, wide and glassy and a familiar shade of orchid. She didn't move. The only movements Pride's enhanced eyesight could see were the rising and falling of her laboured breathing.
She then twitched so violently that Pride's eyebrows shot up into his hairline. He knelt down beside her, being careful not to kneel on her long, sweat-slicked blond hair, and began to make observations. He rose each of her arms, letting them fall limply back to the floor when he let go. Her pulse was rapid and wild, and up close, Pride could see her eyes were twitching and almost vibrating. He sighed. He was afraid this would happen. At least she had taken hold- she would need some work, but it could be done, even after she had been revived. He couldn't imagine what would've happened if both he and Father were put out of action- there would go all hopes of a plan B.
Her eyes pulsed a vibrant blue for maybe half a second. He needed to get her stabilised, and soon.
He patted his pockets. Did he have enough for two train tickets?
"I'll be right back, Lust."
_000_
In a hotel room overlooking the streets of Elgach City, Pride lazed on the windowsill, finger marking his place in some esoteric text. He stared out the window down at the humans milling about underneath it, small like ants from this fourth-floor view. His eyes held some sort of cold superiority, like one looks at a bug crossing over one's shoe.
He heard his companion bustling around at the mirror on the far end of the room, opening drawers and testing their suitabilities for something, creaking the mirror into the right position, rustling around on the seat. She hummed something monotone and would cause a normal person some unease with the slightly off sound of her voice. Her voice was that of a young woman's, though with a strange note of something almost chilling. A kind of frigidity, or detachment, maybe.
"Edward?" She crooned. Pride's ever-present scowl deepened.
"I told you not to call me that."
"Do I care?"
Pride frowned. He hadn't expected this Lust to have the previous Lust's whip-smart attitude and sharp intelligence, and Pride was still getting used to their uncanny similarities.
"Do you ever get used to their voices?" Lust asked, messing with the Xingese book on the table in front of her. Her expression was at odds with her question: complete nonchalance.
"It takes a bit," Pride answered. "But-"
The change was so subtle, anyone but a homunculus wouldn't have been able to detect it from the air alone. In the time between Pride reopening his book and Lust throwing her long blond hair over her shoulder, the person sitting at the mirror was no longer his sister. The girl's hands froze in the middle of combing through her tresses and began to shake uncontrollably. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her turn around very, very slowly to get a good look at him.
"That's no good, Lust. You have to keep her under control." Pride said, flipping a page in his book. He met the girl's widened, glassy blue eyes. She started violently when scarlet met blue.
She gulped and asked, with herculean effort, "Can...I talk to hi-m?" She finished in a shaking whisper.
How fun.
"Are you afraid of me?" He whispered. A wolfish grin spread across his face, sending apprehensive shivers down her spine. He could see all the blond hairs on her arms and neck raising up on end as he continued to stare at her. "You have good reason to."
She swallowed loudly.
"Why not?" He let go.
A trembling jerked down from his head to his chest, then to his fingers and feet, just as his pupils dilated to almost catlike proportions. The irises faded from crimson to gold.
He took in a deep, heavy breath.
_000_
The world came into focus around Ed. He seemed to be sitting on a window sill of some sort, looking over a familiar skyline that tickled something in his memory that he couldn't place. In his slack hands was a book in Cretan, of all things, the cover a deep burgundy. Leather.
He looked over into the room to see the exact person he was hoping for, staring at him with widened and clearly afraid blue eyes. He sprung to his feet.
"Winry-"
Before she could answer, the world went dark again.
_000_
The same change went over him, his eyes going from gold to scarlet, his expression from anguish to cold disdain.
"There you go. He's still alive."
He heard the beginnings of a sob from her side of the room, then an unexpected cutoff. Tuneless humming resumed.
Pride went back to his book.
_000_
Lust opened the last drawer on the bottom of the vanity, where three very important things sat in a velvet-lined case. She flipped the clasps and carefully opened the mahogany lid.
A vial of shining red stones, an 1874 map of Amestris, some sites circled in black calligraphy ink, and a long Xingese dagger wrapped in black silk gleamed dully up at her.
If possible, Lust's closed-lipped smile widened even farther. She shut the box.
Click.
_000_
In Miss Schmidt's bedroom, the moment Al collapsed far, far down the road, Miss Schmidt suddenly sat up. Her heart was pounding, and she was nauseous almost to the point of vomiting.
Miss Schmidt placed her novel down on her bedside table. She hunched over and pinched the bridge of her nose and took in a deep breath. Once the nausea had faded to a manageable rolling in the pit of her stomach, Miss Schmidt threw the quilt off of her legs and wobbled to her feet. She slipped on her house shoes, pulled her cotton dressing-gown around herself tighter, and tottered out of her room.
The electric light in the bathroom was on. A thin wedge of light shined into Al's ajar doorway. She didn't hear him snoring softly, like she usually did, and this struck her as odd.
"Al?" She called softly, pushing the door open wider. "Al, are you awake?"
She was greeted by an empty room, the curtains yanked back wide to show a deep blue sky dotted with stars. His sheets were rumpled, his pillow facing the wall, and an open suitcase sat on her grandmother's old rocking chair.
He'll come back in a bit, she told herself. I'd better go back to bed now.
She began to exit his room when his open suitcase once again caught her eye. She shouldn't pry, but…
No, Schmidt! She shook herself. Respect his privacy. Nosing around will only bring you trouble, and it'll make it harder for Alphonse to trust you!
The suitcase sat innocently on the rocking chair.
Miss Schmidt peeked out into the hallway at the bathroom door.
She peeked at the suitcase.
She peeked again at the bathroom door.
And before she knew it, she was crossing the room and settling the suitcase in her lap, and feeling guilt already rising up in her chest.
These are his personal things!
How much trouble can a fifteen-year-old boy get into, anyway?
How would you like it if he rooted through your dresser drawers?
This gave her pause.
Well, he doesn't have a secret stash of-
Maybe he has a stash of something he doesn't want you to see. You wouldn't know.
Which is exactly why you don't know what kind of things could be hidden in this suitcase!
A board creaked in the hallway, and Miss Schmidt froze. Once she had judged that it was just an old-house noise, she restarted her inner monologue.
What's the value of privacy these days?
Don't you want to know what he's got in here?
Miss Schmidt was an endlessly nosy woman. Of course she wanted to know. This single thought stopped the two warring opinions to go silent.
Miss Schmidt was also a mother. With Alphonse's far-fetched stories about homunculi, and all those horrible ideas about a 'philosopher's' stone being made from human lives, she was too worried to let anything slip past her surrogate mother's net of security.
She peeled back the first layer of clothes, pants, socks, and train ticket stubs to get to the bottom of the suitcase, which brought her to much more interesting objects.
She pulled out two leather-bound notebooks, the contents of which she couldn't decipher, a frame stuffed with photographs, pens, a cloth napkin covered in feverish writing, loose change, another notebook, this time bound in parchment and tightly tied twine, and a white cloth pouch with a single scuffed screw, matches, and chalk inside.
Her fingers came back a powdery white after digging around in the white pouch. She set that aside and wiped her fingers on her nightdress. She couldn't read the writing on the napkin, and the change and pens were of no use to her, so Miss Schmidt decided to look through all of the photographs in the frame.
Miss Schmidt smiled wistfully at the first picture: one of Edward and Alphonse, probably four and five, with Trisha, her face blurred but still clearly joyous. She knew exactly why Alphonse carried this one around.
The next was of three children playing, all with blond hair and all plastered with filth and rain.
The third was of a boy she, at first, didn't recognise. Once she did, Miss Schmidt gasped a little and covered her mouth. This boy, with the dead eyes and missing limbs, was Edward. She could see Winry's little white hand and a strange man's massive leather gauntlet reaching forward in hesitant concern. At least this part of Alphonse's story had checked out. Pinako had told the town that an accident at the rail station had taken Edward's limbs, and that was the last Miss Schmidt had seen of the two boys until Edward was thirteen and Alphonse was twelve.
The next was a formal portrait of Ed in a tacky red coat and leather pants, his chin tipped high and his arms folded. A huge suit of armour, covered in spikes, stood timidly to the side. It was so tall it was out of frame. She was about to flip to the next one, when she saw a silver chain gleaming from Edward's belt loops.
"Huh," She said, squinting. Ed had a bit of an affinity for gaudy fashion.
Miss Schmidt flipped to the next one, and couldn't hold in a mournful sigh. It was Winry and Pinako, formal dresses and wide smiles and all. She affectionately noted that Pinako's damned pipe was still at her side.
The last photograph was puzzling. At first, all Miss Schmidt thought it was a throwaway, some sort of mistake in the darkroom, but when she looked closer, she could see angular elbows and long hair. The arms were too skinny to be Winry or Edward, and Alphonse certainly couldn't have been that thin after lugging that massive suit of armour around for- what, two years?
Miss Schmidt heard the toilet flush and the sink turn on. She started, and shoved everything back into Alphonse's suitcase with fervour. The socks were going with the notebooks, the photographs with the pants, and the pens were shoved deep in the recesses behind some trousers.
The bathroom door opened and shut before Miss Schmidt could fully hide herself or escape. With her fifty-plus years of experience lying, bending the truth, or otherwise being deceptive to cover up her nosey activities, it took her no less than five seconds to put herself in an innocent position and create a passable excuse.
The footsteps outside came closer- and then went past Alphonse's room. They thunked down the stairs, and Miss Schmidt heard a door open and shut.
Miss Schmidt stood in the middle of the room and relished in the relief of not being caught, but then this relief melted into confusion. She started to take a step forward, stopped herself, and stepped back into the centre of the room.
Something was wrong. She frowned and turned a full circle, her brown eyes wandering over every part of his room. She had heard the footsteps go down to Adam's room, so either he and Alphonse were having a moonlight tryst, or-
His boots were missing.
Miss Schmidt swore and tore out of his room to find her dressing-gown and mud boots.
_000_
Richard slid his eyes open, and in the first few seconds of disorientation before he fully woke up, he thought he saw his wife pulling on his mud-boots at- what, nine o'clock in the evening?
He blinked a few times. Checked the clock.
Huh. His wife really was pulling his mud-boots on at nine o'clock in the evening.
"What're you doing, dear?"
She affixed him with a wide-eyed stare. "Alphonse didn't come home, and it's been hours."
He blinked a few times. "But, we heard him come in after dinnertime-"
"It was that mutt you've been feeding. I found it sleeping on the kitchen with Al's leftover dinner scraps on the floor." His wife applied a rather forceful tug to his leather mud-boots, and the boots finally pulled up around her ankle. "I told you to stop feeding it."
"You're going out in your dressing-gown?" He blinked a few times. "It's nine o'clock in the evening."
"We've established that, Richard. That's why I'm worried." She tightened her iron-grey chignon and gave him a sharp-eyed once-over. "Go back to bed, you're clearly not in thinking condition."
He blinked a few times. "Dear-"
"I'll see you in a bit. Oh, before you go back to bed, do tell Adam to put on a pot of lemon tea. Alphonse might need it."
He blinked a few more times, and his wife strode out of their room in only her nightdress and dressing-gown. He definitely married a scary lady, but she could get things done if she put her mind to it.
He fell back asleep before he could tell Adam to put a pot of lemon tea on.
_000_
Miss Schmidt was not a tall woman. Miss Schmidt did not have long legs. She'd be damned if she hadn't run like she did towards the Rockbell house, in only her dressing-gown and her husband's too-big mud-boots.
The lights were off, and this was not a good sign.
She clattered up the steps and pounded her fists onto the door.
"Alphonse!" She punctuated this with three more pounds on the door. "Alphonse!" Her voice was uncharacteristically shrill.
She fumbled at the doorknob and rattled it to find it was locked. She fell to her knees and ran her hands under the Rockbell's welcome mat for their not-so-secret secret house key. Her hands shoved the key and the lock and turned it. The moment she felt the lock click, she pushed the door open, and almost immediately felt it hit something soft.
She winced and peeked around the door.
Alphonse was unconscious on the floor, expression completely slack and a door jammed into his head.
"Sun and moon above-" She exclaimed. Miss Schmidt grasped him by his shoulders and shook him a little. When this didn't work, she started patting his cheek, gently at first, and then she was almost slapping him. "Alphonse!"
He wasn't injured, as far as she could tell, and no one had hit him in the head. There'd be a painful lump, and her probing fingers had yet to find one.
"Alphonse Elric!" She shook him again. His head lolled on his shoulders like a ragdoll. Miss Schmidt's internal monologue had become one consisting entirely of swearing and/or prayers, as well as a crash course in the first-aid knowledge she had studied when the Bytyl-Kotleyeva conflict had reached its fever pitch.
"Breathing, breathing-yes, alright." Miss Schmidt ran through a quick list. "Roll him on his side? Yes, I think so? No, his back- no, his side."
Miss Schmidt thought he looked better when she rolled him on his side, but that could've been the anxiety talking. "Warmth! Oh no, I'm only in my- stupid, of course she would have blankets! Blankets! Yes!"
She made sure Alphonse wasn't going to roll off like a runaway horse-cart and dashed upstairs.
"Find the linen cabinet! Everything will be fine, Schmidt, keep it together- ah-hah!" Gathering an entire wicker basket (more of a great wicker cave, really) of quilts and those strange, puffy Cretan blankets Winry had a soft spot for.
She clumped down the stairs as quickly as she could with a basket a metre square taking up most of her view. Only when a quiet voice said, "Hello, Miss Schmidt," did she realise that Alphonse had awoken during her expedition into the upper floors of the house.
She peeked around the mass of blankets and quilts to see Alphonse, head on his knees and arms around his legs, staring right at her with a bizarre look on his face.
"How long have I been here?" He asked flatly. Ah, that was what it was. His bizarre look wasn't a look, but rather the lack of one.
"I…" She hesitated before setting the blankets on the floor and kneeling by his side. "It's-" she glanced at the clock nailed to the wall in the foyer, "-a half-hour to ten o'clock, now."
"Seven hours."
"Yes, yes, but Alphonse, do you feel dizzy? Disoriented?" She took in his hollow eyes, and the way he wouldn't meet her gaze. "...did something-"
"No."
"Are you-"
"I'm fine, Mrs. Schmidt. Thank you for being concerned."
Miss Schmidt frowned. Hm.
She hesitated, but then held out her hand. Alphonse lifted his hand, and it hovered in the air for a moment, before meeting hers. She stood up and hauled Alphonse to his feet along with her.
"You must've... been overwhelmed. This place has a lot of memories for you. Come along, Richard's probably worried sick- watch your step- Adam's put a pot of tea on. I'll make you some dinner."
Alphonse nodded, but kept staring at his feet. All the way down to the Schmidt's house, he didn't look her in the eye even once.
_000_
Miss Schmidt didn't notice the gouges in the floor.
She bustled him inside and settled him at their scrubbed kitchen table, muttering about doing everything in their house. She clicked on the radio for a late-night broadcast while busying herself at the stove.
The radio crackled to life. The voices coming from it were tinny and indistinct- you didn't have many radio stations out here in the sticks.
"-factory explosion in Crotogusca, a border town near Aruego, has left the entire city in ruins. No bodies have been recovered. Officials say it would be too dangerous to excavate the rubble at this time. The factory's company is currently under investigation for negligence of safety codes. A national day of mourning is set for the first of September. In other news, diplomatic correspondence with the Emperor of Xing has been brought to a standstill, as he has disappeared right under the diplomat's noses. Along with him is his personal guard, Lan-Fan Fu, a vassal-retainer of the Yao clan. Xing officers are scrambling to find him. Last year, he…"
The news faded into the background. So, Ling had run off again? Maybe Al would meet him somewhere while he was researching.
Al couldn't even manage a snort. His bank account wouldn't be able to hold the strain of supporting that Emperor's eating habits.
The corner of Alphonse's mouth twitched downward. Making attempts at humour wasn't going to help.
Al's eyes followed Miss Schmidt around the kitchen as she rattled about- opening cabinets and shutting them, opening drawers and leaving them out. After one last look around, she plunked an open-face sandwich, cold boiled potatoes, and cold lemon tea in front of him and instructed him to eat.
Even looking at food made Alphonse nauseous, but Miss Schmidt was watching him. He forced down a nibble of the sandwich. It went down tasting like dirt.
"I'm going to be leaving in the morning," He said.
Miss Schmidt paused before sitting down. "Is a train coming tomorrow?"
"They run one once a week." Alphonse speared a potato and bit off a quarter. "I'll start packing, I really have overstayed my welcome."
"Oh Alphonse," She said. "No, no, no, you haven't."
"It's alright. I need to get going anyway. I'm behind on my research."
She took in a small breath. "Into…homunculi."
Alphonse registered the hesitation and glanced up. Miss Schmidt was looking at the floor with a slightly pinched expression. Alphonse felt his shoulders sag.
She cleared her throat. "So, where are you researching?"
"Central City." Alphonse sipped some cooling tea.
"Central City! Ah. Bring all of us some fancy souvenirs back. Margaret was absolutely raving about the…what was it?"
Alphonse felt a wave of nausea building up inside. He was overcome by a sudden desire to be anywhere but in this kitchen, with Miss Schmidt trying to make conversation about Central City.
"What do you think, Alphonse?"
Alphonse forced a watery smile.
Suddenly, a disgusting memory shot across his mind, and he felt his stomach heave. He flung himself up the stairs into the bathroom, leaving an upset chair and a confused Miss Schmidt behind.
_000_
"Pity." Lust sighed. She flicked a limp finger, hanging off of the table and dripping. "Which one was this?"
Pride consulted the sheaf of paper next to him. "5C."
"Maybe we should be a tad more selective in our choosings." Lust frowned. "These ones don't seem to be taking so well."
"They're all we have at this moment." Pride answered. "Unless you have an idea."
"I have plenty, but you won't hear it."
"...I don't know where he is."
"Not him, numbskull." Lust countered off-handedly, standing.
Pride's immediately crimson eyes snapped to Lust, narrowing dangerously. All of the shadows around her gained a sharp edge. She didn't flinch, but her crossed arms tightened, almost imperceptibly.
"Think. Pride is a powerful motivator...Edward."
His trembling hands tightened around the seat of the chair. Widened golden eyes stared unblinkingly at the limp body on the table.