Rewriting Fiction
KarmaHope
34: Sunday, 14 May (1916)
12.10.2015

Please read the author's note at the end. This one is especially important.

It was strange feeling, being in a place so – impossibly – familiar, and yet so alien at the same time. One would think Karmyn would be used to it by now after spending over a month in Amestris, but it was one of those things that never got any easier no matter what happened. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Quite often over the past couple days, Karmyn had wondered – not for the first time – just how the hell Arakawa Hiromi had been so goddamned accurate with her illustrations.

Despite her burning curiosity, it was a question that would have to wait until she got back to the mainland. Karmyn was sure Ed or Al would be able to give her an answer, but it wasn't like she could ask them at the moment.

She shivered as she sat curled up by the fire she had started earlier that evening, the dancing flames taunting her with her abject failure. The matchbox Izumi had tossed to her from the boat lay open on the ground beside her, and upon closer inspection, one would find there were only eight of the ten matches within. The ninth had been incinerated in the blaze, the first of her failure's two victims. The first had been match. The second was her pride.

She sighed and buried her chin between her knees. Despite the fact Amestris was moving into late spring, the night air still carried a chill with it, and she regretted not being able to grab a sweatshirt. A t-shirt and exercise pants had been a fitting choice for a morning spent practicing hand-to-hand combat, but not quite so for a week spent on an uninhabited island. Pulling herself closer to her only source of heat, Karmyn's thoughts began to turn toward the past couple days as she tried to distract herself.

The first thing she had done once Izumi's boat was out of sight was explore the island. It had been disconcerting, stumbling across Ed and Al's old campsite, littered with the charred remnants of campfires and the desiccated husks of palm fronds. The clearing was much like she remembered it from the anime, and it filled her with a sense of awed wonder to be standing within it. Although she had been loath to disturb the abandoned history of the place, she'd also realized it would be rather prudent of her to make her camp in the same place.

And so she had.

She'd placed new palm fronds on top of the old ones, a task that had sounded a lot simpler than it actually was. She had forgotten that retrieving the new palm fronds would mean actually climbing a small palm tree, the knife clenched uncomfortably between her teeth. She wouldn't recommend it to anyone – the metal was disgusting and the feeling of it against her teeth was something she'd rather have never experienced.

Karmyn had always hated The Rope back during her gymnastics training, but she couldn't deny the fact it had given her the upper arm and thigh strength she needed to climb the limbless palm trees. The rawness of her hands afterward was a familiar, if unwelcome, sensation.

Her next task had been to rebuild the boys' shelter, as it had understandably collapsed in the intervening years. After a few solid hours of struggling with the sticks and supports, cursing into the forest whenever things fell apart again, she finally settled for it looking more like a teepee than a tent. So what if it gave her less space? She was not a large girl by any stretch of the definition, there was only one of her, and the less-than-stellar accommodations would only have to last for a week. It would be enough to keep most of the rain off, and that was good enough for her.

That night, she turned in almost as soon as the sun had set. She was exhausted, and her hands were too raw to even consider trying to start a fire without use of the matches. Tomorrow would be better, she'd told herself as she drifted to sleep beneath the stars, tucked under a couple extra palm fronds for warmth.

Except tomorrow hadn't been better. For starters, she woke in a shivering wreck. She would have to find some alternate way to keep warm at night, because the palm fronds just weren't cutting it. Stumbling out onto the beach, she had collapsed in the sand to bask in the sun's rays. Although it was morning and the sun's light wasn't as warm as it would be that afternoon, she had managed to stop shivering uncontrollably, at least.

The next order of business had been to take care of business, and once that was done she knew she couldn't put off the only remaining task any longer.

She was going to have to find food somehow.

She hadn't eaten the night before, and was now regretting that decision. Her stomach growled at her angrily as she frantically tried to determine the best way to go about the task. She had no doubt that catching fish and prey would be far more difficult than it had appeared in the anime, and trying to do so on an empty stomach would just make it that much harder.

In her explorations the day before, she had found the boys' old fishing pole, only to realize the wood was dry and brittle. She doubted it could take the weight of any fish, and even if it could, she had no bait. She had also found their stash of rope, which had somehow not rotted, but she knew nothing of knots and trapping and was hardly in the mood to figure it out that morning.

It was too early in the year for any sort of berries, and Karmyn shuddered at the thought of eating insects. It was that alone which drove her to grab a stick, whittle it to a point with the large knife, and wade out until she was calf-deep in the lake water. She only hoped gymnastics had honed her reflexes enough that she could spear a fish.

"I suppose," she'd said to herself as she stood there, watching the silvery fish dart around her feet, "that I don't have to worry too much." Thrusting her spear into the water, she sighed as she speared only sand. "After all, the lake is freshwater, and I found a spring earlier. I have the matches, so even if I can't make fire on my own, I can still boil the water. Humans can survive for seven days without food. I've only got six days left, I think, so that works."

Again, she'd hit only sand.

She stood in that water for well over an hour before she finally speared a fish. She'd known better than to lift the stick from the lake's sandy bottom, and so she'd leaned over to grab the fish from the bottom of the lake, soaking her t-shirt in the process. That part hadn't mattered much, though; her shirt had dried out soon enough. The most important part of that endeavor was the fact she'd managed not to lose the fish.

She'd then rubbed her palms horribly raw in an attempt to start a fire the old-fashioned way, but it had been for naught. She hadn't gotten even so much as a spark, and there was no way she was going to eat the fish raw. She hated fish to begin with – it was the one food she'd never particularly liked. The thought of eating it raw made her shudder.

And so her first match had been sacrificed in desperation. It had made for a very small meal, and not an especially tasty one, even for someone who enjoyed fish. She had charred it to a crisp in her attempts not to give herself food poisoning. Even then, she'd only taken the outermost meat, afraid to take anything that was too close to the fish's intestines. She'd thought about gutting and deboning the thing, but had decided in the end that she would likely only end up destroying the thing and any food she might have had otherwise.

She had shivered uncontrollably that night too, foolishly having let the fire she built for her meal die down. Unwilling to sacrifice a second match so soon, she had simply wrapped herself in palm fronds and waited it out.

Her second full day on the island passed in much the same vein as the first. She'd spent most of her time standing in the lake, trying and failing to spear fish. While she knew she would live until Izumi came to get her if she didn't eat anything, it was an unpleasant prospect that she wanted to avoid. She'd also done a bit of exploring, coming back with a new branch to replace the brittle old one in the Elrics' fishing pole.

She'd tried starting a fire from scratch again, but had failed even more miserably than she had the day before. Despite the calluses that still lingered from gymnastics, her hands were still rubbed raw and as such it made many tasks more painful than they should have been.

Which brought her to the present, huddled by her artificially-started fire as the moon rose ever higher in the sky. It was a clear night, and the stars twinkled breathlessly in the sky. Had she not been cold, tired, and hungry, the scene would have been the epitome of tranquil. The crackling of the fire whispered into one ear as the soft sounds of the water murmured into the other, the calm susurrus of the foliage in the breeze joining in perfect harmony.

She found herself wishing that she had someone to share the moment with. Checking that the fire would continue burning for a while longer, she pushed herself to her feet. Folding her arms tightly in around herself to preserve warmth, she wandered down to the water's edge as she stared up at the stars above. She'd never put her shoes back on after her excursions into the lake that day, and so her toes dug into the cool sand as she stood upon the beach.

The night sky was stunning. The stars were not as bright as they had been in Resembool, perhaps, but still far brighter than she'd ever seen them back home. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she began to pick out some of the constellations she knew, along with the ones Alphonse had shown her that night in Resembool so long ago.

The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Cassiopeia. The Milkmaid. The Soldier, the Cat, the Goddess. The Alchemist.

She found herself smiling at the memory of that night. Her life had just gone to shit, but she had still been able to find the light, even if just for a short time before things had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Gazing up at the stars tonight, she thought maybe she'd found it once again.

She wondered if the Elrics had experienced these same emotions during the month they'd spent on this godforsaken island. If they'd felt the same sense of repose she felt now. If they'd felt their inner peace fighting with their hunger pangs for the title of 'dominant sensation.' At ten and eleven, still bright-eyed and naïve to the world of evil that lay before them, had they had the capacity to appreciate the same nuanced emotions she felt as she gazed out at the starlight reflecting off the water?

Or had this island simply been a challenge, a means for them to prove themselves? Just a hurdle in the path of their goal to resurrect their mother?

In a way, she envied their resolve. They'd known exactly what it was they wanted, and they'd known exactly how to go about getting it done. It may have had disastrous results, but that had only led them to their next goals of getting their bodies back and repenting for their mistakes.

But her?

She had no clue where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there.

"Well," she said to herself as she stood there on the beach, her voice cutting sharply through the stillness of the evening, "That's what Izumi put me out here for, isn't it?"

'Cause I'm a loose bolt of a complete machine

Unbeknownst to the girl on the island, her friends sat on the lake's opposite shore, their eyes trained upon the landmass at the center. Neither spoke in the dark of the evening, but the sense of being beside each other brought as much comfort as it ever had. One wouldn't have to glance at them long to see that they were clearly worried, despite trying not to be.

'Can you see her?' Alphonse asked, scanning the horizon desperately. He knew the question was futile – Edward could see as well as he could – but he asked the question anyway. Despite all that Izumi had said about giving Kai her space, he couldn't help but worry.

Beside him, Edward shook his head. 'She's got a fire going, though, so she can't be doing too terribly.' He chuckled suddenly, and Al turned to look at him. 'I wonder if she found our old campsite,' he explained. 'Who ever thought that thing would see any use again?'

Despite the dread that still welled in his heart, Al smiled and huffed a small laugh as he turned back to look at the distant orange glow of Kai's campfire. 'We didn't exactly hide it when we left,' he said fondly. 'It's probably safe to say she found it.'

They fell silent again beneath the stars that twinkled so brightly overhead. They had never been this bright in the other world, obscured instead by the smog and the light pollution of the cities the brothers had lived in. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, they reveled simply in the feeling of being home.

Al couldn't say how much time had passed, but suddenly the tiniest movement on the island across the lake caught his attention. Grabbing Ed's arm he said, 'Brother, look!'

The silhouette was hard to make out, but there was an obvious shadow that now stood in front of the light cast by the campfire. Considering there was only one person on the island, both boys immediately knew the featureless figure for who she was.

'Well, she's still standing,' Edward said, grinning, 'and that's more than can be said about either of us at this point back then, you know.' He turned to Al. 'Feel better now?'

Al grinned sheepishly. 'Yeah,' he said, letting go of the other boy's arm. 'I probably overreacted. Thanks for coming out here with me, Brother.'

Ed laughed as he pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand to help his little brother. 'Any time, Al. I know how much she's starting to mean to you – or maybe always has," he said thoughtfully. "You were pretty close back in Somerville, come to think of it.'

'Shut up,' Al grumbled, grateful for the fact the dark hid the flush that spread across his cheeks. 'It probably won't amount to anything, anyway.'

As they made their way back to the main road, Ed punched his brother in the shoulder lightly. 'Why do you say that?' he asked. 'You're human again, and we're not practically immortal anymore, remember?'

'Yeah, but –' Al broke off and shrugged. 'What if that's part of the reason I … like her? What if it's not her, but just the fact that it's a possibility now?' He stumbled over the word 'like,' as it was the first time he'd admitted it aloud in so many words. 'Besides, she's still not really over David, and she's still adjusting to being here, and … I'm not about to tell her anything that could ruin our friendship, you know?'

Edward rolled his eyes, despite the fact the motion went unnoticed in the dark. 'Al,' he said seriously, 'I meant it when I said there was something there even back in Somerville. Somerville – not California. And if there's anything we've learned over the years, it's that nothing is impossible.'

Al stopped in his tracks, Ed following just a second later in confusion. 'Wha –'

'You're such a hypocrite, Brother,' Alphonse said with no trace of malice, 'giving me relationship advice when you couldn't even face Winry until you'd had ninety years to prepare yourself.'

'Yeah, well,' – this time it was Ed's turn to blush – 'this is different.'

Al was tempted to call his brother out on his bullshit, but simply sighed and shook his head. 'Just forget about it,' he said. 'We have more important things to be worrying about right now.'

Although he couldn't see it in the dark, he knew his brother blanched at the thought – mostly because he did, too. They had more important things to be worrying about indeed, like sneaking back into the house without waking their former teacher.

As they walked through the shroud of the night, neither took notice of the solitary black-clad figure that watched them from a couple rooftops away. Long hair danced in the breeze as the figure stood. Although impossible to tell from a distance, the person smiled in satisfaction and then disappeared into the dark.

I'm half doomed, and you're semi-sweet

Things started to look up by the third day.

Much to Karmyn's relief, the day dawned warm enough that she no longer shivered, even in the shade of the trees. Because she had gone to sleep so late the night before, the embers of the fire were still glowing by the time she awoke. Very carefully, she coaxed those embers back to life until the flames danced merrily once again. She may not need the fire until later, but she desperately wanted to conserve matches. She'd already used more than she'd intended upon receiving them.

She used the Elrics' old fishing pole to catch herself breakfast, having replaced the brittle wood with the branch she'd found the day before. As she forced herself to swallow the fish – realizing once again that she absolutely hated fish – she decided she couldn't take it anymore. Ed and Al had built traps when they'd stayed here – there was nothing saying that she couldn't, either.

Well, she decided later with a slipknot tied into the old rope that had been left behind, nothing except maybe her own abysmal knowledge of the matter.

Laying the loop on the forest floor, she tossed the other end of the rope over a tree branch. It took her several tries to do so, and she nearly danced in happiness when she finally got it. Sighing forcefully, she pushed her greasy, dirty hair out of her face with one hand. What did one do next? Thinking about it for several seconds, she figured it out.

Covering the loop with very loosely-packed dirt, Karmyn then puzzled over what to put in the middle of the trap. Rabbits generally ate grass and berries, but there was an abundance of grass around and none of the berries were ripe. She remembered that there were foxes living on this island as well that she might be able to bait with fish entrails, but … she didn't really want to trap a fox, much less eat a fox.

So she shrugged, ripped up a few handfuls of grass, and dropped them in the middle of the loop. As she settled herself in to wait, she quietly resigned herself to a few more days of nothing but fish.

"Well, Kai," she said to herself as she leaned back against the tree, "it could be worse. It could be ants."

She shuddered at the thought. Edward must truly have been starving if he'd started – and continued – eating ants, of all things. She knew that many people in different cultures ate all sorts of insects, but the thought had always been rather repulsive to her. Would she have done it, in Ed's situation? She supposed she would never know.

"One is all, all is one," she murmured absently to herself. Izumi had told her to think about it, to truly understand it, but what more was there to understand? "Everything in this world is connected," she said. "The plants and animals here give me life, and when I die, I'll in turn give them life."

She paused. "Except … I wasn't born as part of this world's cycle."

Was she breaking the Law of Equivalent Exchange, then? She supposed it was similar to the Law of the Conservation of Matter, in a way. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, and thus all new things must have once been other things. But here she was, bringing brand new matter into the universe. That wasn't supposed to happen.

"So … maybe not only is this universe connected to itself," she mused, "it's connected to mine, too. And perhaps others – we just don't know."

One is all, all is one. One universe was all most people knew, but that 'all' was only one part of a bigger 'all.' She chuckled – she doubted that was how the phrase was meant to be interpreted, but to her it made sense. The world – no, the universe – while already mind-bogglingly infinite, was at least twice as large as most people ever expected. But universe was not the right term, not while there was more than one. No, Karmyn realized, she and the Elrics had accidentally proved the multiverse theory.

Physicists would give an arm and a leg to be able to experience all she had experienced.

She sat there pondering it for a while longer. She didn't remember falling asleep, but when she woke, it was to the midafternoon sunlight streaming down through the trees. Rubbing her eyes blearily with the cleanest parts of her hands, she glanced over to check her trap. The grass remained untouched, and she didn't know whether to be relieved that she hadn't missed anything while she was asleep, or disappointed that her trap hadn't even worked in the first place.

It didn't matter, anyway. Dismissing her rudimentary trap as a lost cause, she pushed herself to her feet and began walking toward the stream that provided her source of fresh water. It had initially taken her about a day to come to terms with drinking unfiltered water – something she'd been warned against for her entire life – but her thirst had eventually driven her to do so, and she hadn't died yet. Now, she didn't really think twice about it. She needed a drink, and washing some of the grime from her skin was an appealing idea as well.

And so she did. First washing the dirt from her hands, she sighed in relief as the cool water flowed over the raw skin of her palms. She then used her cupped hands to bring the water to her lips – she did still have some standards, after all. Although she contemplated rinsing the rest of her body as well, she settled on just scrubbing her face. While it was warmer out today, it was still too cold to immerse herself into cold stream water.

She could already feel her face breaking out something terrible, despite all she had done to try to prevent it. She briefly hoped that neither Ed nor Al would judge her for it, then decided that it didn't matter what they thought. They were just lucky they'd had to spend their month without proper bathing materials before puberty had set in.

Pushing herself to her feet, she stared into the forest for several moments. She hadn't been all the way back there yet, and her curiosity was getting the better of her. Deciding she had some time to do some extraneous exploring, she started making her way through the undergrowth.

Ten minutes later, she stumbled across a stone structure hidden amongst the foliage.

"That's odd," she mumbled. "Who would build something like that on an island in the middle of a lake?"

Ever curious, she approached it without caution. There was no need to be suspicious of it – it was only a curious stone structure, perhaps like Stonehenge, except much smaller. It was definitely manmade, she could tell. The stones didn't end up stacked on top of each other like they were without help.

It took her several moments to place it. When the realization struck her, she took a couple involuntary steps back. She hadn't seen the 2003 anime since … well actually, since she and Kathy sat down in her father's apartment and scoured both the anime and the manga for clues about how to get the Elrics back to Amestris. God, that felt like a lifetime ago now, even if it had only been about a month and a half since then.

Holy shit, just a month and a half?

She shook herself from the nostalgia. What mattered now was what lay before her, and that included the odd stone structure.

The stone structure on which Izumi performed human transmutation.

It was yet another connection between the original anime and the manga, but she didn't linger on it. While the structure was still just an unassuming stone structure, she felt it was wrong to hang about. Casting one last look upon it and noticing for the first time the dark stain in the center of the stone slab, she moved on and left it behind. She shuddered slightly as she walked away, silently swearing to herself that she would never even consider such a thing.

It helped that she'd already learned from the stories of the Elrics and Izumi long before it had ever been an option for her.

She wandered for a while longer, eventually making her way up a rather steep hill. When she reached the top of the incline, she paused to take a deep breath. She'd seen the cliff face from the boat as she and Izumi had approached a few days ago, and it appeared that she'd found it once again.

"Wow, I can see my house from here," she commented dryly to the open air.

The view out over the lake was beautiful. Karmyn kept a careful grip on the nearest tree as she looked out over the water, vertigo threatening to overcome her when she glanced straight down at the rocks below. The afternoon sunlight glittered off the ripples, threatening to blind her when it hit in just the right way. She could see over the sea of green treetops to the town of Dublith beyond, although she couldn't place where Izumi's house was.

She slowly lowered herself to sit on the cliff's edge, allowing her feet to dangle over the side. She sat there long into the late afternoon, falling into one of her increasingly common contemplative moods. Unfortunately, it was the first time she had truly been able to let herself relax since she'd come to the island, and so suddenly the memory of all the days leading up to her stay on the island came rushing back.

Winry's face loomed in her mind's eye, smirking as though she knew something Karmyn didn't. 'What about you and Al?' she asked. 'What about Al? What about Al? What about –'

Karmyn shook her head vigorously as she tried to clear herself of the thought, and she silently cursed her friend for putting it there in the first place. It had absolutely nothing to do with what she needed to be focusing on. She was there to think about 'One is all, all is one,' and to figure out what exactly it was she wanted to do with her life when she got back to reality. Her new reality, that is.

She was there to simplify her life, not make it even more unbearably confusing. At the same time, though …

What about Al?

She sighed heavily. She didn't want to think about this right now. In fact, she would be perfectly happy ignoring this matter for the rest of her life, but try as she might, she couldn't divert her train of thought. Scanning the ground beside her, she picked up a small rock and chucked it petulantly over the cliff.

So what about Al?

That was hard. She hadn't thought there was anything – suspicious? Was that the right word? – in the fact that she spent time with him. Since he'd enrolled in Somerville High, he'd always just been there, same as Ed; especially after she'd discovered their true identities. After that, it just made sense that they'd all hang out together – after all, she and Kathy were the only ones the Elrics could be themselves around.

When everything went to pieces and she'd ended up in Amestris with them, she hadn't had any other option at the time except to go with them. It made sense that Alphonse had been the one to find her in the bathroom that first night after they'd been released, for he still suffered from insomnia. For the same reason, it made sense that he had been the one to find her on the porch outside the Rockbell house the night after she woke form the procedure, and that he had been the one to interrupt her nightmares.

She hadn't ever thought twice about it.

She supposed that they had been spending more time with each other since Edward and Winry got together, but again, it made sense that it had divided along those lines. Obviously the couple would spend time together, and that left Karmyn and Al to pair up in order to give them their space. It still didn't mean anything more than that they were friends, though!

But, her brain supplied traitorously, in a tone of voice eerily similar to Kathy's, what if it did?

Well, fuck.

She chucked another pebble off the side of the cliff. This was why she'd liked having a boyfriend. This is why she'd liked making friends with guys who already had girlfriends. It was so much easier, knowing that the possibility just wasn't there. Unfortunately, David Rowell was now an entire alternate universe away, and Alphonse Elric, well.

If she was being completely honest with herself, there was no universe in which Alphonse wasn't a thousand times better than David. In practically every way.

And if she was being completely honest with herself, that was exactly the reason why she had been trying so hard not to think about it in the first place.

It's not like it really mattered, though. David was long gone, and she didn't like Al as anything more than a friend, despite what Winry might have insinuated. They were friends, and they'd go their separate ways as soon as Karmyn got her life together, and honestly that was going to be hard enough without anything else coming in and complicating things.

So she just wasn't going to worry about it.

Karmyn tossed a few more rocks off the cliff, watching as they hit the water below and sank out of sight. It was oddly satisfying, even if it did make her feel a few years younger than she actually was. Actually, she felt she deserved that feeling, after all the shit that had gone down in her life recently.

It was only when the sun dipped low in the horizon, burning the same intense gold she often saw in her friends' eyes, that she picked herself up and made her way back to camp. She was no closer to figuring out what she wanted to do with her life – in fact, she might have only made things harder – but she still had time. She still had four days left to think things over and figure it out.

12 YEARS, 10 MONTHS
Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Author's Note:

This was the chapter that didn't want to be written. I was about 500 words into it, and then lost everything. That struck a huge blow to my motivation, and so getting back into it was a slog.

Truth be told, I don't think I'll be able to keep up the monthly schedule, either. This chapter took me (unbelievably) three months to write. It's not so much writers block as the fact that college is pulling me in so many different directions that I'm finding it hard to sit down and focus on non-schoolwork for any stretch of time. It doesn't help that the time I get is often late at night, and by then I'm exhausted.

And when I can't focus on one fic, I bounce to a different one, and then just stare at that one for a period of time. Unfortunately, the fact that I feel I need to dedicate all my attention to this fic – that I can't half-ass anything with this one – means that this one is often ignored when I'm in one of those moods.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Nothing has changed – I'm never going to give up on this fic. I've dedicated so much to it over the years. Even if it ends up being months between updates, there will be new updates. I promise.

Did you know that Velf recently updated her fic Indebted? She hadn't updated in years! That gives me hope.

And please. Feel free to message me. Pester me. I love hearing about and talking about this fic. I received a message on Tumblr the other day about it and honestly? I nearly cried I was so happy. Talking about this fic and getting feedback really inspires me like nothing else. Anything related to this fic makes me super happy.

Thank you for all the years' worth of support you've given me. I love you all, and it's with a heavy heart that, for the first time since I started the Rewrite, I can't say for certain when the next chapter will be posted.

03.28.2016
04.02.2016

The next chapter will hopefully be posted sometime in May. I'm gonna try my best.