There was a figurative torch illuminating their faces, making mustang's skin glow like the surface of the moon as it shone in the sun's reflection, making Ed's shine like pure gold. Both of their eyes were wide but I couldn't trace fear - those eyes were challenges. I cocked an eyebrow and watched Edward casually lean onto his arm as it was set on the table top. It was a battle of wills: two against one, where only one of the parties participating seemed to have anything to gain.

Though they certainly had something to retain.

The room had been plunged into impenetrable silence, even the abundance of birds that usually fluttered by the windows at those hours had ceased their chirping and left our presence entirely. My hand began to twitch as the silence added to the great weight that had not relinquished itself of its home upon my shoulders. Both Ed and Roy caught the slight waver in my demeanour and allowed satisfied grins to touch their lips in a way that only made my hand twitch more and my feet to tap on the dusty floor beneath them (I'd really have to get around to sweeping).

It was obvious that I had lost but my admit at defeat did not cause them to concede. They looked on at me with unfeeling eyes, blank faces and unreadable body language. "Yes?" The word was empty, hollow, but it did invite me to manoeuvre the conversation slightly.

"The Fullmetal Alchemist? What's the real story?" It was a losing battle, attempting to keep my demeanour as entirely not-compelling as they had made their own. Their mouths opened and a few syllables that told me nothing escaped.

My forced demeanour crumbled like sandstone in my hands as I realised I would finally know. That wasn't what I felt as though I should be wanting to know as a parent - the way that my teenage son lived, the reason he dressed how he did (scared too show what he looked like underneath the layers), the way his eyes stared at me as they did. I knew that it shouldn't be a wish of a woman to make sure that her teenage son wasn't standing on his deathbed at 15.

Then there was a distinct click, a creak and little footsteps across he hard wooden floors that ran through the whole house. I released the air I had inhaled and held in a single, smooth exhalation. I followed it up with a sigh as I placed my head between my arms on the table. I wasn't going to find out - at least not then.

"We aren't finished here!" I told the alchemists as I heard the return of my sons.

"We would expect nothing less." Mustang reassured me, sounding human again suddenly.

"Leave this - at least for now. We're stuck in a rut."

Roy and I both knew what he meant. their alchemic research had came to a standstill, they were stranded in a time that was not their own for in indefinite time period. Though I couldn't help but feel as though I was missing something. I saw but I never really looked. After all, it' an easy thing to see now, as I look back, that I was missing so much because I never looked for what I knew was there.

I had walked through the house, feeling as dead as Ed and Roy had looked when I tried to retrieve answers, truthful ones, hoping that I didn't look the way I thought I did. There was an odd disruption to the routine the years had engrained into my mind. The routine where the boys would return home with complaints about school and a collection of jokes that Winry had told them. How could I focus on something so mundane when everything was proving itself not to be?

Ed and Roy could lie. They could lie to the boys as they told them parts of the fabricated story that I had been fed by them. They could say that they had trained together and known each other for years as they had me. It was neither the hardest nor easiest lie to see through but I could see that the younger Edward, beginning to turn his focus to a book after growing irritated at the words he refused to - no, could not - believe filed from Roy's mouth and directly into his ears.

Edward was laughing with Alphonse, treating him just a he normally did: like a paper doll. Still, I smiled when I saw Al's head fall in slumber and the rise and fall of his chest became more consistent. Ed's left hand drifted to the back of the sleeping boy's head - gently running through is hair.

That was another thing that added to the list of many that were odd. Ed was right handed but he never interacted with human nor pen with it. I had never once seen him pull off that white glove. I had ever seen him take off that black jacket.

I knew nothing of the boy that called himself my son. I felt as though I were watching a stranger coddle my son as I kept my eyes fixed on the image. Ed gently set Al on the sofa a while later - I didn't even realise I had been completely lost within my thoughts for such a long amount of time until I was forcefully removed from them - he took care to rest the boy's head on one of the threadbare cushions before turning. he chuckled slightly at his younger self, he had fallen asleep, his head in his book. my son myself that time before looking at Edward and Roy.

"Come on Mum." The word was still tender and new on Edward's lips it would seem. Though such an idea made o sense at the time as I looked on, trying to unscramble the jigsaw that my son had become and finding it far beyond my ability.

I followed, on their heels like an obedient puppy, ironic considering the two I followed were what the nation commonly called dogs.

"Fullmetal?" I asked again as soon as we could confirm we were out of the boys' hearing range.

"What can we say? It' just the convention of state names. You specialise in alchemy with metal ores, you receive the name Fullmetal." Mustang told me, all sincerity and authority as the words brushed passed his smugly smiling lips.

"Earlier you said he wasn't a specialist though." The look on his face as I noticed his slip up was comical.

"We call it irony." Ed said that and only that as both refused to elaborate further.

"How did you end up here?" I couldn't help but doubt everything they told me after what I had found.

"This bastard called me out on a mission to arrest an alchemist who was playing with human transmutation. Things happen and you know what happened next." Edward shrugged and I felt my own shoulders grow heavier.

"My fifteen-year-old son sent to capture a potentially dangerous criminal?" I received a mere not of confirmation in response but it was enough, more than "Was this your fault Roy?" I would be lying if I hadn't worried that the volume in which I had spoken would wake the boys.

"It wasn't."

"You're doing an awfully good job of defending yourself without Hawkeye here? She train you?"

"Now now, Fullmetal. We may be dogs but we are not feral. Or, at least, I'm not."

"It was an order from a higher up." Ed confirmed as he braced himself for the next in my list of questions. At that moment I knew too little to ask anything too specific so I stuck to the one thing I knew had an answer.

"When?"

"You were eleven when we first met, right?"

"Yep."

"Twelve when you took the test?"

"Just. You should remember, it's Elysia's birthday too."

"And you passed at twelve?" It was ore than a shock to the system to hear the age at which he had sold himself to the military, titled himself a dog, became a human weapon.

"After a very unusual test, he did." Mustang replied.

"I won't blame you." I said as the man looked as though he were trying to either shrink or leave, to disappear from my sight in someway or another "It's my fault entirely! Ed, why did I let you do this? Are you still suffering because of what I did?"

"My work is no reason to suffer. And, besides, the only times I suffer are because of my own idiocy. That idiocy that has done so much." He stood and left abruptly, appearing years older as he shuffled from the room with squeaky shoes and a face hidden in a thicket of shadows cast by his unruly bags,

"Goodnight to you too Fullmetal!" mustang called out after the brooding exit Edward made.

"What- what did he do?" The way my voice shook; the way my hands shook; the way my legs shook; the way my teeth chattered; the way my fists clenched; the way my stomach knotted itself. it was al too much to bear. I could hardly wait to receive a response as I felt everything worsen and my feet itch to remove me from the world my son lived in, two small fractals had passed errand so much was revealed that it made me sick to my stomach to so much as consider the things I would probably never hear a word about.

"It is not my place to tell you, Trisha. but here is something that I can. Ask anyone from our time, you son's name is a household one."

I heard the words but I could not see his face as both my vision and my head spun in fast circles that distorted the wold around me into some kind of abstract art piece that one could not decipher anything from. Even now I wonder - Is it my son and his acquaintance who are the abstract art pieces or is it the masks that they wear?