AN- Alright, everybody, here it is, the final chapter of OEHODK! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me on this whole, wild ride. You're all true warriors for reading the whole thing. I've been working on this for almost a year, and so I'm a little sad to see it done, but I'm glad it's reached its conclusion.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has left reviews, and has favorited and subscribed. You are all amazing. Let's finish this! [muffled "Fly Me to the Moon" in the distance]

Disclaimer: Do I even need to say this anymore honestly

Chapter Twenty- "Oh, but the world is a mess!"

Ed wakes before his alarm and spends fifteen minutes or so staring at the ceiling of his bedroom before his phone begins bleating at him from his bedside table. He had been stirred awake by an unsettling, and incredibly vivid, dream, and found himself unable to fall back asleep. It's early fall, or it's supposed to be, and so the sun still steals into his room early, like a needy child, and hasn't yet retreated for the winter, and he had watched the bars of light that slipped between his blinds as they played along the carpet. There's an odd energy humming through his limbs, made even more unusual for this to be a Monday morning, a day usually reserved only for lethargy and caffeine headaches. The jittery feeling can't entirely be explained by it being the first day of school, either. Ed is fifteen; he had stopped being excited at the prospect of the first day of school ages ago.

Al, however, still does, and today even more so, because today is his first day of high school, and when Ed shuffles downstairs to the kitchen, he finds his brother already there, excitedly munching on a piece of toast, punctuated by enthusiastic gulps from a glass of orange juice.

"You're up early," Ed says, pulling a couple eggs out of the fridge and a skillet from underneath the oven.

"It's my first day of high school," Al says, spraying toast crumbs across the table, which he hastily wipes up. "I don't want to be late!"

"You won't be late," Ed assures him, dropping a small scoop of butter into the now-hot skillet. "Believe me. If I can't be late, then neither can you."

"If you say so," Al says incredulously. Ed supposes that, technically, he's smarter than his brother, but Al has an attitude of perfectionism and attention to detail that ends up leveling the playing field quite a bit. Ed, for as smart as he's always been, has always been too careless and impressively lazy.

After scrambling up the eggs, he drops them onto a plate and moves to the coffee maker, already full of the dark, rich coffee that his father always insisted upon buying. "If I have to deal with college freshman at 8:30 in the morning," he would always say, "then I'm not going to buy cheap coffee." Ed can't really complain, but he's also fifteen, and can't really taste the difference between the stuff his father buys and the stuff you get from the drive-through of most fast food restaurants.

"No offense, but you're looking a little out of it, brother," Al says, leaning onto the table with his forearms.

Ed considers lying and saying that he just doesn't want to go to school, which would be true, because he has his absolute least favorite teacher in the entire world for Advanced Placement Chemistry and he'd honestly rather die, but, upon considering that, he wonders why he would want to. What would lying about a stupid dream to his brother accomplish?

"I had a really weird dream last night," he says, trying to sound as detached as possible.

"Weird how?"

"Like...super involved weird," Ed attempts. "This dream spanned like...years. It covered from when we were little kids until now."

"So it was just memories?"

"No, not really. I mean, everyone we knew was there, but they were...different."

"In what way?"

He debates how much he should actually tell his brother, because the longer he thinks about it, the weirder it sounds. For starters, he and Al and Winry Rockbell all lived with Ms. Hawkeye, the math teacher, but she wasn't a math teacher, she was a military captain, and specifically the captain of an organization that built giant robots that fought equally giant monsters that were trying to destroy the world. Plus, Armstrong, the gym teacher, and Mustang (the aforementioned Least Favorite Ever chemistry teacher) were pilots of said giant robots, and so was he. It was surreal, and dark, and frightening, and people kept dying. Hughes, the nice English teacher that gave Ed a B last year when he almost certainly deserved a B-, got murdered, and Mustang died too. As much as he hates the guy, watching him get killed by a giant monster was still unsettling.

Of course, since Al hasn't actually met any of these people, since he hasn't started at the high school yet, Ed could only imagine what kind of first impressions they would make with Al having been told about their grisly deaths before ever meeting him.

And, perhaps, worst of all-

"Look at my two handsome boys," their mother says, sweeping into the kitchen. "Both of you are in high school now. I feel so old."

Their mother had been dead, too.

"Oh, come on, Mom, you're not that old," Ed says, trying to break up some of the tension that only he feels.

Their mother places her hands on her hips, looking melodramatically offended. "You've got your father's way with words, Ed," she jokes, just as their father comes running through the kitchen, coffee thermos in hand.

"I can't believe you're running late on the first day of the semester," their mother says, watching as their father fumbles with the coffee maker. "Aren't you even going to eat breakfast?"

"Don't have time," he says, pouring the coffee into his thermos. "They only have to wait on me for fifteen minutes before they can leave, and I can't let that happen."

Their mother sighs, reaching for a plate full of no-bake cookies sitting on the breakfast bar and handing one to him. "I made these last night. You can eat it while you drive."

Their father looks to be on the verge of grateful tears as he says "You're an angel, Trisha."

She smiles, says "I know," and places a kiss on his cheek before waving him out the door.

"I swear," their mother says, pouring herself a cup of coffee before sitting down. "What would your father do without me?"

Al seems to have forgotten all about the dream, for which Ed is grateful. It's not exactly the most auspicious start to the school year.

A knock at the door pulls their mother up from the table again, and when she opens the door, Ed hears her say "Good morning, Winry. Happy first day of school!"

"Thank you," Winry says, slipping through the door. "Are you nerds ready to go?"

"Wow, that's hilarious coming from someone who asked for a Lego Robotics Kit for her birthday," Ed says with a smirk.

Winry's face colors angrily. "Well, at least I'm not taking AP Chemistry as a sophomore!"

Ed and Al's mother shakes her head. "Some things never change, I swear."

"Come on, brother," Al says, pushing back his chair and getting up from the table. "We should get going."

It's not an overly long walk to the high school from their house, but Al is right. "Alright, fine."

"Have a good day at school!" their mother calls from the kitchen as they leave.

"You're awfully dressed up, Winry," Al comments as they start their walk.

"You think so?" Winry asks. She's wearing a skirt and a top and knee-high socks that disappear into her high-top sneakers. Last year, you would've had to fight her tooth and nail to get her into anything that wasn't a sweatshirt and jeans. People used to think that Ed and Winry were twins, because they were about the same size, both had long, blonde hair, and tended to wear the same things. But now she looks different, older. She's taller than him (although, as loath as he is to admit it, she's always been a bit taller than him), and the skirt rests at her waist, hugging it with a kind of reverence that Ed thinks he shouldn't be noticing on his best friend.

And so he decides not to. "Yeah, Win, what the fuck? It's school, not a fucking date."

Winry's cheeks puff out in agitation, a gesture that Ed used to think made her look like a blowfish, but now, with her cheekbones accentuated by what might be blush and might just be her embarrassment, it almost looks...cute. What is up with him today?

"Oh, like you're some fashion expert?" Winry retorts. "You've had that same stupid red jacket since middle school, and you doodle skulls on all your binders with permanent marker."

"Yeah, because my jacket is cool, and so are skulls!"

"Are you sure about that? Because I think I know of several girls who would think otherwise."

"What? What girls? Who have you been talking to about me?"

Al, standing between them, sighs the long-suffering sigh of their mother. "Guys, it's the first day of school. Could we not start it by getting into a fistfight before we even get there?"

"I'll stop fighting with Winry when she stops being stupid!"

"Ed, oh my god," Winry says, exasperated.

The walk continues like that, which makes it, oddly enough, perfectly normal. While they may bicker more now than they used to, Ed and Winry have always gone back and forth like this, and Al has always kept the neutral middle spot. Ed is excited that his brother is finally going to the same school as him. He would never admit it, but it was tough not having his brother there the last year. They're all together again, the Golden Trio, and if they can make it through the first day without killing each other or getting expelled, this year is going to be awesome.

"I will never understand the bizarre camaraderie between you guys," Rebecca says, sipping coffee at the small kitchen table of her and Riza's house. Rebecca had sworn that having a house as opposed to an apartment would separate them from all the other aimless college graduates in their town. They were adults now; Riza had an adult job, and Rebecca was sure to get one soon, surely. Because of her hours as a bartender, at present, she spends most of her days watching Chopped on Netflix and going to the gym, which would drive Riza insane. She needs a job, a routine, to keep her head on her shoulders. "You'd think you had been through a war together or something."

Riza shrugs, placing all of her books into the canvas farmer's market bag she uses in lieu of a briefcase. She's not a briefcase kind of math teacher. She refuses to be that person. "We've been through a lot together, is all."

"I mean, I know. I was there." Riza and Rebecca and Roy and Maes had all gone through college together, and three of them had ended up going into education. Not by choice, either. They had all wanted to go into academia for their respective disciplines, but the fear of accruing more student loan debt and the viciousness of the academic job market had scared them enough to fall back on a plan B. Maes is working on a literature master's program currently at the local university, and one day he'll probably find himself at a cushy liberal arts college teaching rich kids about Dante. For now, though, he's stuck trying to get middle class kids to care about Shakespeare.

"But of all people to place your unwavering faith in," Rebecca continues, "you pick Roy Mustang." She makes a face like she had just bitten down on a lime wedge.

"I wouldn't exactly call it unwavering faith."

"He's a jackass, Riza," Rebecca says, dropping all pretense. "And he's just going to take advantage of you-"

"I'm driving him to work, not signing over my firstborn. He totaled his car over the summer, and I don't think it'd make a great impression on the kids if their chemistry teacher took an Uber to work."

"Yeah, but why couldn't Maes take him?"

"Because Maes has to drop his daughter off at school. Honestly, Becca, it'll be fine. I'm making him pay gas money."

"Yeah, you better. Make him pay double."

"No," Riza says curtly, filling up her tumbler with coffee and screwing the lid on tightly.

"Sorry, Riza, but you know I don't like him."

"Really?" Riza says drily. "I hadn't noticed."

Rebecca sticks out her tongue. "Go to work, loser."

"Love you too, Becca."

She knows that Rebecca's distaste for Roy comes from a place of concern, but it's frustrating nonetheless. Still, she supposes that she wouldn't be overly fond of Roy either if the first time they met involved Roy vomiting in her kitchen sink. Roy, Riza likes to say, is an acquired taste, an honestly baffling cocktail of hopeless nerd, unrepentant social climber, insufferable know-it-all, urbane playboy, and genuinely kind and caring friend. What combinations and ratios those traits present themselves in is subject to change, and probably are to blame for why he's managed to make more enemies than friends. But still, Roy has been as steadfast a friend to Riza as Rebecca has been. He may be an idiot who totaled his car and now depends on her for transportation, but he's still her friend.

When she arrives at his apartment, he comes out looking a tad worse for wear, eyes shadowed by dark circles and hair rumpled.

"What happened to you?"

"I was up all night reading articles on JSTOR."

"The night before the first day of the school year? That was stupid."

"I'm reaching my breaking point, Riza. I have another class with Elric this semester, and I honestly don't know if I'm strong enough to deal with that again. I need to get into a PhD program and get out of here."

"He's a bit..." Riza searches for a diplomatic adjective. It's not in her nature to speak disparagingly of children. After all, they aren't really people yet, and so most of the time their unfortunate behavior is a side-effect of their age. "...gregarious, but he's always been fine in my classes."

"That little hellion is going to be the death of me, I swear."

Roy doesn't really have the temperament for teaching high school. He had grand aspirations of being a real public intellectual, the kind who sells out lecture halls on arcane topics and crafts a reputation for being eccentric and brilliant. The economy didn't particularly nurture those ambitions, and so now he's poor and miserable like every other person in Amestris who had graduated college in the last decade. While Riza doesn't get any joy out of watching her friend suffer, she does think that it's a bit funny that his comeuppance has materialized in the form of a fifteen-year-old with a ponytail.

"Did you find any good articles?" Riza asks, trying to direct his thoughts to something a little more productive than the murder of children.

"Not really. It's terrible; I have so much passion for this subject, but I can't find anything that really grabs me enough to write a dissertation on it. I want to research everything."

She can get why Rebecca doesn't like him, honestly. The kind of zest he has for everything, combined with his near-constant, vocal dissatisfaction with the world ends up making being around him similar to dealing with a stir-crazy child.

"Well, you can't research everything," Riza says evenly.

"I know that," he grumbles. "Why can't we all be like Maes and weirdly into seventeenth-century poetry?"

"Because then the world would be a miserable place indeed."

She's happy for Maes; truly, she is. It's just that looking at someone who is so thoroughly content and satisfied with their life throws all the myriad ways in which she isn't into even starker relief. Sometimes she wakes up from dreams shaking with a kind of excess energy that has no outlet, and no amount of running on the treadmill can get rid of it. She feels like she's wasting her life, and one day she'll wake up old, and all her youth will have been spent on nothing.

She knows that this kind of feeling is unwarranted. She should be grateful that she even has a job in the first place. So what if she's not changing the world? So what if she'll never do anything that'll get her written down in history books? Her life is stable. Stability is good.

"How was school?" Winry's mother asks, sweeping into the house. Winry's amazed; normally her parents don't get back from the clinic this early. She says as much.

Her father smiles. "I figured that the clinic could handle itself without us for a night. I thought we could all have dinner together for once."

Winry beams. She had already started making dinner for herself and her grandmother, but doubling up the ingredients wouldn't be much extra work. "That sounds perfect," she says.

Her grandmother is in the garage, souping up an old car that she's planning to sell once it's finished. Retirement has let her work only on the projects she cares about, which means that Winry has been able to watch her build things practically from the ground up. She wants to be half as capable as Pinako when she's old.

"What are you making?" Winry's father asks, sniffing at the air. "It smells amazing."

"Granny's stew," she says, adding a few spices to the already simmering pot.

Her father makes a happy noise. "My favorite! It's almost like you knew we'd be here."

"I didn't, honestly," Winry says. "But I kind of hoped, I guess."

Once dinner is ready, Winry's father runs off to get Pinako from the garage, and Winry's mother helps her set the table.

"I'm sorry we're gone so much," she says, flattening out a napkin next to a bowl.

"Wow, where did that come from?" Winry asks, giggling a bit uncomfortably.

"Just something your dad and I have been thinking about recently. Sometimes it feels like we didn't really get to watch you grow up. But today, when we saw you leave for school this morning, it's like we woke up and you were already a woman."

Winry straightens a spoon that is already perfectly parallel to the wood grain in the table. "I'd hardly call myself a woman."

"Either way," her mother continues, "we're proud of you. I don't know if we get to say that enough."

Small spots on the table begin to darken. When Winry reaches out to touch one, her finger comes away wet.

"Winry, are you alright?"

Winry reaches up to touch her face, and finds the same wetness there. She's crying, and she isn't entirely sure why. After all, she's happy. She never feels hugely neglected by her parents, but it can be lonely not seeing them much. But she isn't overwhelmed enough by happiness that she should be crying. And yet, deep in her core is something melancholy and cold, something that doesn't make any sense, but which she can't shake, like a memory of a dream.

Winry smiles. "I'm just happy."

Maes takes pity on him and invites him over for dinner once a week. Gracia is a stellar cook, and they usually pop open a bottle of wine and talk shit about the school, how it's being run well or poorly, which students they hate, things like that. It's a comfortable ritual, and a pleasant change of pace from the garbage he eats living with Havoc. It's something he looks forward to, and something that doesn't change much week to week, which is why it is so surprising to step out of Maes's sensible hatch-back, walk into his house, and find Riza already there, nursing a glass of wine and playing with Elicia.

Roy isn't an idiot; he knows that Riza has her own life. But still, it's always odd for something she does to catch him off-guard, like he should have paid more attention.

"Hi, Riza," he says, trying to temper his surprise into the cool tone he tries to keep most of the time.

She takes a sip from the wine and sets it on an end-table. She's seated on the carpet, Elicia sitting in front of her, toying with her hair-clip.

"Oh, hello, Roy," she says, eyes still fixed on Elicia, most likely trying to make sure that the child doesn't break her favorite accessory.

"I'm going to check and see how my lovely wife is faring in the kitchen," Maes says brightly, squeezing past him.

"How are you?" He asks, sitting beside her. He had been dropped off at his apartment by her only a handful of hours before, but it still seems weird not to offer some pleasantries.

She doesn't respond immediately, and he watches as her fair brows constrict over her eyes, as if trying to decide what to say. What she settles on isn't what he expects. "I've been feeling kind of weird all day."

This is unusual for Riza. He's fairly sure that she's never taken a sick day, and her moods are always fairly level, never overwhelmingly good or bad. It's rare for her to express distress.

"Are you getting sick?"

"No, not weird that way. Just kind of...off."

Elicia tires of the hair clip and sets it aside before deciding on more fruitful avenues for entertainment and turning to Roy. "Can I see your phone, Uncle Roy?"

Normally, he'd say no, but he's powerless whenever she calls him "Uncle Roy."

"Just this once, okay?"

Elicia grins toothily and Riza lets out a breathy laugh as he hands over his practically brand-new, very expensive, very fragile phone to a three-year-old. If she breaks it, it'll be his own damn fault.

"How do you mean 'off'?" Roy asks. It's not like her to get into a funk, and she's not prone to the same extremes of mood that he has.

"I don't know," she says, voice bearing its trademark calm, but uncharacteristically distant. "Have you ever known you've forgotten something, but you just can't remember what it is?"

"Yeah, all the time," he says with a laugh. He's notoriously absentminded among the administration, often going months without doing paperwork. At least some of that is laziness, but some of it is also just forgetfulness.

"It's like that," she explains. "It's just there, at the back of my mind, but I don't know what it is. I didn't leave the oven on; I paid my rent; I went grocery shopping; I did my laundry. I have no idea what I could've forgotten."

Roy doesn't either. Riza is a hard task-master and rarely forgets things. It isn't like her to get hung up on something so small.

"You're probably just imagining things," he offers. "I very seriously doubt that you of all people could have forgotten something."

She flicks her eyes, deep brown and inscrutable, away from Elicia to look at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Shit. It really hasn't been Roy's month; first he totals his car, conscripting Riza to be his chauffeur until he gets a new one, and now it looks like he's somehow managed to offend her over something stupid. And he won't be fooled by the look of utter absorption that Elicia is giving his phone, which is playing nursery rhyme YouTube videos at top volume; she's as observant as her dad, and will likely run off to him at some point to report that Uncle Roy was being an ass. Well, not in those exact words, but something to that effect, at least.

"It's just that you're so on top of things," he says. "It isn't like you to forget stuff."

She looks at him for a moment, unblinking, as if waiting for him to say something else, and then looks away, down at where Elicia is watching something about a "finger family." "Yeah," Riza says. "Maybe you're right."

"Soup's on!" Maes calls blithely from the kitchen, and Roy reaches over to where Elicia still has his phone.

"Okay, kiddo, I'm gonna need that back."

"But, Uncle Roy..." She says, voice beginning to wobble, and Roy really can't handle pissing another girl off today, and so he sighs.

"Fine. But it's not my fault if your parents don't like it."

Her parents don't like it, and as soon as they sit down the phone is confiscated and returned to its rightful owner.

Dinner is lovely, although Riza is even quieter than usual. They talk about their classes, hedging bets for who will be the best and worst students to deal with this year. Roy complains loudly about Edward Elric, although Maes swears up and down that his younger brother is an absolute delight.

Roy is getting settled for a long evening of complaining, but after dessert is finished, Riza pushes her chair back from the table and stands. "I should probably get going."

"Oh, come on, Riza," Maes protests. "You hardly ever come over. Let your hair down; stay a while."

"My hair is down," she says. "Speaking of which, I believe Elicia still has my hair clip."

"Is that true, Elicia?" Gracia asks.

Elicia nods, reaching into the pocket of her dungarees and retrieving it.

"Thank you very much, Elicia," Riza says, causing Elicia to demur sheepishly. They all watch as Riza sweeps her hair up and secures it. "I'll be going, then. Thank you for dinner; it was lovely." And then, just as unexpectedly as she had arrived, she's gone.

"Why won't that woman let herself have any fun?" Maes asks. "She's been like this since we were in college. You'd think she would have grown out of it by now."

Roy doesn't say so, but Maes is mistaken. Riza can have fun, but it just doesn't present itself how you would expect. Her smiles are small, but genuine, and she has a remarkably loud, unbecoming laugh when you catch her off-guard with something funny. It would take a practiced observer, though, to notice that something is off with her. Roy had never really considered it, but supposes that's what he is now.

"You're staying, right?" Maes asks.

"I sort of have to," Roy says. "You're my ride."

They spend the rest of the evening chitchatting about nothing in particular, although Riza's strange behavior sits heavily at the back of his mind. It really shouldn't; it's not entirely unusual to forget things, but it is unusual for something to unsettle Riza this much. Eventually, Gracia bids them goodnight to put Elicia down, leaving Roy and Maes alone in the living room, and giving Maes clearance to talk about things no one else cares about since he has a captive audience.

"So, for my master's program-"

Roy groans, slumping down in his chair.

"What?"

"I hate to break it to you, Hughesie, but nobody cares about seventeenth-century poetry."

"Well, I do!"

"Congrats: you're the only one."

It's not that Roy hates poetry in general. In fact, there's some he quite likes, and he was forced to read a lot of it by his foster mother in a bid to instill some culture in him as a boy. But it's just that his best and dearest friend somehow managed to find the single most boring specialization possible, which, coupled with a zeal to talk about it constantly, is going to be the death of Roy.

"There's some great stuff in there, I swear," Maes says. "I've been rereading all this stuff to try and come up with thesis topics, and it's honestly amazing. Have you read any John Donne?"

Roy groans again, this time louder.

"I swear, you're like talking to a toddler. And one that isn't Elicia, either. Hang on." Maes gets up and walks to one of the many bookshelves that line the walls of their living room, grabbing a thick anthology off one of the shelves and bringing it over. "I'll read you one."

"Must you?" Roy asks weakly.

"I'm driving you back to your apartment, so yes. You can listen to one poem as payment."

"Okay, fine," Roy says, straightening up in his chair. "Go on."

Maes's voice, which takes on a chirpy, nasal quality whenever he talks too fast, mellows whenever he reads poetry, something that Roy has heard him do countless times. It drops into a register he doesn't use often, sounding almost somber, and something about it, combined with the words of the poem themselves, makes the hair on Roy's arms prickle.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices,
 Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink.
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She is all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
 Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

"You look me in the face and tell me that isn't a great fucking poem," Maes says, grinning smugly, closing the thick book emphatically.

Roy wishes he could, but he can't. Not because the poem is good, necessarily-Roy knows good poetry about as well as he knows the Drachman alphabet-but because something about it feels familiar, like he's heard it before, which can't possibly be true. Even in school, he can guarantee they never read this, and even if they did, Roy didn't, because he had the tendency to do his chemistry homework in literature classes. And yet it fills him with what he can only describe as déjà vu.

"You okay?" Maes asks. "I expected the poem to touch you, but you look like you might've been touched a little too much."

"It's, um," Roy stammers, voice strained. "It's very good, you're right."

Maes proceeds on a rant about the artistic and academic merits of seventeenth-century poetry, but Roy isn't listening. The poem is still rattling around his skull like a song stuck in his head, but not the whole thing. Only four lines:

She is all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

He knows he can't have heard it before, but he feels those lines like he had written them himself. He thinks about Riza's big ocher eyes and how they had looked at him as if looking for something, some confirmation, with a look he couldn't really describe at the moment, but which he now understands.

He feels like he's forgotten something.

The summer just won't go away. It's lingering like a rude houseguest, the kind of simile that Ed is surprised his mind leaps to, because they don't ever have houseguests, and he isn't really one for similes. Ed hates the summer; everything is sticky and gross and because he likes to wear his hair long, it's like he can't ever get cool enough.

They've got all the windows in the house open, trying to let in some of the night air, but it's like the sun refuses to go down, daylight sticking to the sky longer than feels natural. It's the longest summer they've had in years, and news outlets are all crying global warming. But it's not necessarily the heat that has Ed the most uncomfortable so much as what it makes him feel. For lack of a better word, it makes him feel nostalgic, something he thinks that he's too young to feel, but he feels it nonetheless, in the thick, sweet air that comes stealing through the windows and how it leaves trails of condensation on the window panes. It's the kind of weather that makes people lazy, which is not entirely conducive to doing one's homework. But if the sun isn't going to do its job and go down, then he isn't either.

"Don't you think this weather is weird, Al?" He asks, lying flat on his back on Al's bedroom floor, staring at the sky through his open window, fading from hot blue to an orange the color of marmalade.

"Weird how?" Al asks, flipping aimlessly through his book for literature.

"Like...unnatural weird."

"I mean, global warming is screwing up everything," Al replies.

"It's not just that though. It's like it doesn't feel real."

"I think the word you're looking for is 'surreal,'" Al supplies, and Ed tosses a sock at him.

"Thanks for the ACT word, asshole."

"I can sort of see what you mean, though," Al says. "It should be fall by now, shouldn't it?"

Ed feels like there's something on the tip of his tongue, some word he's forgotten but is very close to remembering, but the weather makes his tongue heavy. He hadn't slept well, and now all he wants to do is sleep, but the thought won't stop nagging him. This shouldn't be bothering him like this. Nothing should be bothering him. Sure, he almost threw a beaker at Mr. Mustang, and Winry is acting weird around him, but it was still a good day. He and his brother go to the same school now, and the days are still warm, and he should be happy, but it's like there's a perpetual rock in his shoe, something that keeps him from being comfortable. No, comfortable isn't the word. Satisfied. It's like nothing he does lets him be satisfied.

"I like this weather, though," Al continues. "It always reminds me of when we were kids, for some reason."

Unbidden, images from Ed's dream flash through his mind, of him and Al, smaller than they are now, trapped under a burning house. Of Winry's parents, killed in some skirmish. Of his arm and leg, gone, replaced with gleaming metal. He looks down at his right hand and curls the fingers in until his nails rest against the meat of his palm. Something about the gesture doesn't feel right, like he's waiting on the sound of metal against metal.

The feeling comes all at once, like a wave, but once it hits it's impossible to ignore and impossible to explain away: this isn't real, and he knows this as surely as he knows who he is, as he knows that Al is his brother. He stands up suddenly, perhaps a little too suddenly, because the blood rushing to his head adds to the dizziness he already feels. He feels like he's been shot in the chest.

"Ed?" Al asks, lowering his book.

"I need to go talk to Mom," Ed says.

"Oh, okay," Al replies. "Can you bring me some milk when you come back up?"

"Sure," Ed says. He knows that the boy he's looking at is Alphonse, but not his Alphonse. This Alphonse hasn't experienced any of the things that he has, any of the tragedy, any of the sadness, which is wonderful, but it's not true. They haven't turned out the same as they did back home, no one has. They can't have this; it just doesn't feel genuine.

Their mother is downstairs doing dishes, hair blowing slightly from the breeze coming in through the window over the kitchen sink.

"Mom," Ed calls, and she turns over her shoulder, her ponytail coming unstuck from its position and falling down between her shoulder blades.

"What is it, Ed?" She asks, eyes full of the casual concern that parents always feel for their children.

"This isn't real, is it?"

Her hands stop what they were doing, and her mouth opens slightly, like she is considering asking him what he means, but decides against it.

"I wouldn't say it's not real," she says. "It's real, it's just new."

"But nothing's the same," he says, voice rising in urgency.

"Of course not," she says, drying her hands. "You've lived very different lives in this world, all of you. Better lives. You're happy."

"But I'm not, though," he protests. "It just doesn't feel right."

"Why don't you want to be happy?" Trisha asks, face drawn. "You can have this if you want it, a world where you and the people you love only suffer the normal amount that humans suffer, where you don't have to constantly worry about the world falling down around your ears."

"But living like that made me who I am," Ed says. "It made them who they are." The lights in the kitchen cut out, and the walls of their house disappear with them. He's back in the darkness of the philosopher's stone, all of his friends standing in front of him in a line the way he remembers them: Riza in her heavy boots, a thigh holster visible under her skirt; Mustang in his plug suit, looking braver than anyone should look in something as silly as that; Winry in her cover-alls, covered in grease and oil but all the more radiant for it; Al in his Garfiel's uniform, with tired eyes but a real, vital smile.

"But why would you want them to suffer?" Trisha asks.

"I don't. But there's no such thing as a painless lesson, and we've all learned our fair share of lessons."

"And so you would give up everything you had made for that?" She doesn't sound angry at him, but she does sound confused, and a little sad.

"Not all of it," Ed says. He looks at his mother, regarding him with large, sorrowful blue eyes. "After all, if I have the power to remake the universe completely, changing a couple of things should be a piece of cake, right?"

"Ed," Trisha says, "the world is a mess. There's no end to the things you would need to change."

"The world may be a mess," Ed says, "but it's still mine."

The first thing Riza notices upon waking is the sound of water lapping against a shore, followed by the feeling of sand against her hands. She sits up, and sees herself looking at the ocean, in all its red, bloody glory. She had read books written before any of this had happened, about the smell of the ocean being salty and fresh, the kind of thing people longed for, but now it smells like metal, like a rusty building after it rains. She remembers what Martina had told her, that the stuff in the oceans was the same stuff that ran Alchemists, that made up homunculi, that went into making a philosopher's stone. Sometimes the world feels like one big, complicated transmutation of which she's only one, minute ingredient.

She scans the horizon and sees something else lying in the sand next to her. It is the very last thing she had expected to see, and so it takes her a moment to register what precisely it is.

It's Roy. Lying next to her on the beach is Roy, whole, in his plug suit. Not cremated, but whole, still with skin, and hair, and eyelashes.

Heart hammering against her ribs, she reaches over and gently runs a knuckle over his cheekbone and watches with wonder as his eyes flutter behind his eyelids. His eyes open.

She wants to say something, but it's like her knowledge of language has disappeared completely. There are no words for this. No one has ever needed them before.

He reaches a closed fist up to her, and she watches as he uncurls his fingers to reveal her hair-clip. She had forgotten that she had given it to him before heading to Aerugo. He had hung onto it all this time?

She takes it gingerly from his palm and holds it up, looking at the way the sun, coming in thin beams from behind black clouds, lights up the translucent parts of the tortoise-shell. She's sure that the PSL has matted her hair, and it could probably use a clip, but it no longer feels like what she should do. And so she closes her fingers around it, reares her arm back, and launches it into the sea. It makes a small, satisfying sound as it connects with the ocean, and sinks quickly to the bottom.

He looks at her, slightly confused, before letting out a laugh, loud, the kind that starts in your belly and burbles out of your throat, the kind she hasn't heard in what feels like years. The laugh startles her so much that she can't help but laugh too. She can't deny that the situation is a little bit hilarious, the two of them, looking like they're soaked in blood, laughing at the end of the world.

She laughs until her face aches and her eyes burn with tears. After they have quieted down, she looks at Roy, lying serenely on the sand, and she smiles.

Somehow, despite everything that has happened, despite the ocean being the color of blood and their city being reduced to ashes, she has the distinct feeling that everything is going to be alright. He is here and so is she; how could the world be anything but fine?

She watches as Roy reaches a hand up to run his fingers through a strand of her hair, slowly, reverently, from root to tip.

Yes, she thinks, and she feels it deep in her bone marrow, in the chambers of her heart. Everything is going to be alright.