Title: All a dream

Style: Plot bunny
Genre: General
Rating: G
Characters (In case you're confused): The seven homonculi, Ed, Hoenheim.

The thing was rabid and it bit me. Makes almost no sense at all, especially if you don't know the story of how benzene's molecular structure was supposedly discovered.
Has some chemistry references, but I stuffed the formation up slightly.
For those who want to know: the carbon forms a ring, the hydrogen linking to one carbon atom. The carbon then forms a link to the carbon atoms either side of it, those atoms also forming a bond with the atoms either side, so that each carbon atom has five bonds.

August Kekule put down his pen and sighed. It was hard trying to figure out the molecular structure of benzene, it had six carbon atoms and six hydrogen. It shouldn't have been a problem but the carbon atoms would only bond in a certain way.
It was driving him up the wall.

He had spent the entire day sketching out possible ways that the molecule could be formed. Maybe it was a lattice or maybe a net. Whatever it was he hadn't thought of it.

He left his work in the corner table, he might think of it over dinner, his bath and as he went to sleep. It was, after all, taking up all his time with its conundrum so he might as well do it then as well as during the day.

-

"Maybe it's got a triangular structure.." He idly stirred his dinner.
"Or perhaps it's similar to sodium.." He submerged his head underneath the bath water. "Though it doesn't have similar bonds to sodium and chlorine," he shook his head, sending droplets everywhere, "though it could be pyramidal..."
"No, that wouldn't work," he rubbed the towel through his hair and settled back onto his bed, "maybe they're all arranged in a line. But where is the seond bond for the atoms at the end?" He twisted and turned, ideas swirling around in his head, and then as he snuffed the candle out, darkness.

-

Black, deep darkness. Space, nothingness.
Absolute absence of light, but yet there were shadows flickering, flitting at the corners of his vision.
Kekule dreamt on, a strange dream forming.

Twelve pinpoints of light formed and danced, forming patterns. Constellations, geometric shapes, patterns. Eventually they settled into a line, dancing and jittering but staying in-line. They danced, wiggling in spirals and zig-zags then circling, round and round and round, until it was just a blur. A circle with twelve points of light. It danced a bit more, disappearing from sight, then re-appearing, a hexagon.

It flashed for a moment, then it span around again, faster and faster.
Then it disappeared, replaced with a blood red dragon biting it's own tail.

Darkness again, mere nothingness.

Then flashes; slim, dark daggers, a gaping mouth, a figure melting and reforming, another dissolving and moving fluidly. An unseeing eye, a crack and flash of light, a gargantuan muscular figure.
All of which had that same red dragon biting its own tail.
Why? What is this dream?

Nothing replied, instead a luminously white and female chest appeared in front of him, that red ouroburous nestled above it.
Kekule reached, reached for that symbol, but had his hand pierced, speared by long black knives.

The symbol appeared again, on a tongue in a gaping mouth.
Again he reached, his hand eaten away as he placed it on that tongue.

It appeared on a shoulder, on a hand.
He hand went through it, got crushed.

It appeared on a foot, on a thigh.
He watched as his hand got twisted into a grotesque shape, then his fingers broken and unfeeling.

And then, finally, it appeared on that white, unseeing eye.
He reached, a voice booming out.
"No secrets for you boy. Back to your own world."

He fell back, back into nothingness, floating weightlessly.

He woke up, the image of the ourobourous burnt into his eyes, the circle of twelve lights dancing in it.
"That's it! Benzene's molecular structure!" With that he rushed off to make note of his revelation, the rest of his dream soon forgotten.

-
-

"So this August Kekule guy laid his discovery down to a dream?" Edward questioned his father, looking up from the scientific text he was reading.

"Yes, he did. He claimed that he had seen a snake biting its own tail. Well, that was his later version. Among his first ones was that of a dragon biting it's own tail, an ourobourous."

"An ourobourous eh? Well, wonders never cease. I wonder how far they influence..." Ed looked off through the train window, thinking about what if they could travel through the gate and if he could too.