After writing several things as proposed debuts to the FMA fandom, I finally settled on this. Out of impatience, if nothing else and out of recognition of the fact that it contains boykissing, if something.
Because, honestly. Boykissing. You know you want to read it now.
This is my legitimate debut into Full Metal Alchemist Fandom. There is no turning back.
One day, I will be above petty begging for reviews. But tomorrow or the next day. When I can find the strength to punctuate my chatty useless author's notes.
Two Days in SummerEt latet et lucet Phaethontide condita gutta,
ut videatur apis nectare clusa suo.
Dignum tantorum pretium tulit illa laborum:
credible est ipsam sic voluisse mori.
Summer had been long, and promised to be longer. The sun hung in his eyes like thick nectar for long days. He felt each muscle slide, limp and warm, when he moved. Edward Elric liked summer; it was idyllic.
Al sat at their desk, staring out the open window. His face was tipped in his hand, and he frowned and squinted lazily.
"Ed," he said, the movement of his jaw in his palm shaking the sluggish light in his hair, "I'm so bored."
Ed clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched his legs out of the way of the chalk array on the floor. Even chalk was tolerable to touch in summer; the sticks did not scrape or make him cringe. "Al," he said, blowing some of the loose powder from his array, "it's your holiday. Enjoy it."
"It's so boring."
Ed retraced a bit of his circle that looked squashed. "If you don't want to watch, you can go help Mother with supper,"
Al sighed with his shoulders and frowned further. "Your alchemy isn't boring. It's just…" he considered, a little by the sudden lack of words, "this town, you know?"
"No," said Ed.
"I want to…get out. Really. I want to do something. Go study alchemy at one of the universities or… something."
"Like Father?" Ed snapped. He did not remember much of his father, beyond that he never smiled. Ed's memory rarely bothered with lines or distinctions, and so his father's head was a dab of dark yellow somehow expressing a man's head—hard-browed and hard-mouthed. Sometimes Ed stood, looming over his alchemic arrays, hating Hoenheim Elric as much as he possibly could. He did this when he heard his mother in the garden, missing her husband. When he heard her crying more air than tears, waterless and muffled.
"Not like Father," Al said, placating.
"You're not making any sense, Al. There's nothing outside of this town. War, maybe."
"I don't know," his brother said, his dreamer's posture so longing and backlit that Ed tried to cough angrily and turned his bed into a piano.
"Shut up, Al."
Al turned his head around to glare at Ed, barely starting at the piano, eyes glinting like two drops of water. "You've felt it too, Ed. You must have."
"Felt what?"
"Like there's more out there."
"No," he said, "shut up, Al."
"You're a jerk, brother."
Ed was beginning the process of retaliation as Trisha knocked three times on their door.
"Boys," she called, and opened the door just as Edward's piano popped guiltily back into a bed, "wash your hands. Winry's coming."
"Yes, ma'am," they said, and darted past her.
Winry showed up a few minutes later, her hair out from the scarf and glistening blurrily. She smiled down at Al and gave him a hug, then turned to Ed.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," he said.
Her cheeks went red.
Trisha quickly prayed over her soup and carrots and asked them to sit. After a brief scraping of chairs, Al's voice emerged, asking Winry various eleven-year-old questions about her prosthetics. His sombre pose from the desk at the window was gone, and he was bouncing his knees and speaking earnestly.
"Did you give anyone a bicycle for an arm yet, Winry?"
Winry turned to explain to him the drawbacks of such a prosthetic, and when she had finished, Trisha turned to Ed.
"Your brother mentioned to me that he'd like to study alchemy at a university, Edward, dear,"
"Yeah, he said that the me, too."
"Would you be interested?"
"He's too young,
"For you, I mean. Would you like to go? You're almost eighteen. I would be glad to find you some interviews—"
He stacked carrots angrily for a moment before he spoke. "I don't want to leave and study alchemy. I don't want to leave the village. And no, I'm not joking. I really, honestly don't want to leave. Like, you know when people stop on the road to ask me when I'm going off to study? And I tell them that I'm not? I actually mean it."
Winry was staring at him. Al was staring at him.
He continued, "also, when the same people ask me the same question, I still mean it! The truth of the matter is—as difficult as it seems to be to understand—that I don't want to leave. I know, fancy that! It's not like I've ever mentioned it or anything. At least, not more than one thousand times," he stacked more carrots, and glowered.
It was Winry who interrupted him, although Al looked like he wanted to. Her expression was suddenly more composed thanEd was used to, but her hands remained, relaxed, in her lap. "Why not, Ed?" she asked, voice a casual combination of consternation and dire sincerity.
"I don't know," he said, "but if I want to stay, I don't see why I shouldn't stay. My life, and all."
"Right," said Winry, wringing her hands.
The sun was still setting an hour after Winry left. Trisha stood by the window, watching the steam of dust as troops passed in the distance. They marched West, either returning home or travelling straight through Amestris to the other front.
"Mama," Al said, looking up from his horse. He had been transmutating it steadily on the table, forming it lopsided and melting it up again like a potter at a wheel.
"Yes, Alphonse," Trisha said, smiling as the horse's extra tail was exchanged for two lumpy eyes.
"Where are the soldiers going?"
"I don't really know, Al. They might be coming home. I imagine their families are anxious."
Ed snorted. "There're two fronts. Bradley doesn't have enough soldiers as it is, let alone enough to allow some leave."
"The Fuhrer is handling the battles well. Don't scare your brother."
Al puffed. "I'm not scared. I just thought maybe Father was marching with them."
"He's not, Al," said Ed. "He doesn't march."
Al's horse traded its tail for a fourth leg, and Trisha looked down from the window to beam at him.
In the morning, another troop passed. Ed watched the twist of soldiers march wearily under Winry's window and down the dirt road. When he saw it approach his own window, he stared and swallowed and hoped that this troop—what remained of it—was headed home.
The neat military column had been almost fully decimated, and the soldiers, given up keeping spaces in file for the dead, marched in only two rows. Their neutrally-dyed rucksacks dragged on their shoulders, and bandages showed through stained rips in their uniforms. He saw several men with sleeves knotted off below the shoulders, and as many slipping in the dust with splintering crutches. It was the sort of thing that kept him awake whenever Al threatened to run off to Central City.
There were eleven men in total, the officer at the front in some ill-placed attempt to balance the files. The soldiers clattered and stumbled on under Ed's window, and he swallowed past the dust that, unsettled from their passage, powdered his throat. He winced in peculiar sympathy as one man tipped forward, the bar of his right crutch bound to the empty sleeve of his right arm, the scorched left leg of his trousers knotted and swinging. At the head of the procession, the officer's chin angled down, and Ed could noticed only the dark hair gleaming in the heat. The soldiers took a long time to pass.
He spent the day quietly, in his father's library, closing his eyes for long moments to feel the light heat on his eyelids. Summer would be very long.
In the evening, someone knocked on the front door.
"Al," Ed yelled through the wall of the study and into the kitchen, "the door!"
Al's voice came back, barely muffled by the single-layered wall, "yes, brother," and Al raised an eyebrow at the shuffle of his brother's socks interrupted by the clatter of him tripping over a chair. Then he looked back to the book propped on his knee. He heard the soft murmur of greeting, picking out Al's perpetually fascinated voice and another. It was deeper than Al's, but quieter, with an even and enviable enunciation. It was not until he heard Al yell, "Mama! There's a man at the door and he wants to speak with you!" that his brain made that connection that whoever was at the door was neither Winry nor Pinako. It was in fact the antithesis of both, being both male and young. He had his suspicions, and they led him to bury his head further into his book, hoping that his mother would be busy paring potatoes or something equally too consuming to answer.
"Coming, Al!" he heard her say, and winced. If this was the man he thought—and he knew it was, in the part of his mind that recognised all inevitabilities—if this was the man he thought, he had long owed Ed a conversation. Hohenheim Elric.
He set the book down and emerged from the study, cutting his steps sharply as he turned to the door, and squaring his shoulders to face—
"Oh, Edward! I was just going to call you; this man would like to speak with you,"
—not Hohenheim Elric. Someone entirely different. A soldier, but with neat dark hair soft with heat, and white array-stamped gloves. A soldier with dust-painted bars of rank at his shoulder and a gritty bandage taped directly over his uniform's sleeve. Someone Ed had never seen, or perhaps the officer leading his battered division in the morning—whichever and regardless, Ed's posture sagged minutely. There would be no flashing confrontation with his father. But the military could bring worse than Hoenheim Elric, Ed knew, and in the mining towns there was already an uproar about passing troops taking it in their hands to press villagers into their own depleted ranks.
His mother smiled, nervously, but genuinely, and introduced them. "Edward, dear, this is—is—" she paused for a moment
"—Colonel," the man supplied,
"—Colonel Mustang. He said he'd like to speak with you for a moment, and I'd be glad to show you both to the living room, unless you want Al and I to leave,"
The soldier stood still, impartial to Trisha's rapid domestic chatter. Ed narrowed his eyes. "I'm sure you and Al can stay, Mother. A National Alchemist wouldn't have anything to say that you can't hear,"
"No, Edward, I don't," said Colonel Mustang.
Trisha took Al by the hand anyway. "I do have a lot to do, though, so I'll let you talk," and she turned to drag Al to the kitchen, pausing by Colonel Mustang's ear, "I'll only be in the next room," she murmured to him, her voice a rare but bone-chilling housewife's threat, "and he'll be standing there when you leave."
Colonel Mustang inclined his head to her.
Alone in the room, Ed stared up at the Colonel's pale face and dark eyes, then looked down at details he seemed oddly comfortable with—the certain taut lines of his shoulders under his scorched, decorated jacket, the certain hauteur in the straightness of his ankles and knees.
"So, Colonel Mustang," Ed said, at length, feeling the thick, sweet summer soured in his mouth by the dust and blood the officer wore in his uniform.
"Edward Elric," said Mustang, checking his last syllable back into a weary formality, "I'm sorry."
"You can't press me, you know; you can't press alchemists."
Mustang's lips opened, beginning to speak and then his hands opened and then he firmed his mouth, aborting his own hoarse words and took Ed by the shoulders and kissed him. Ed was confused, because he was not being handed a gun or a canteen and instead this tired wounded retreating officer was kissing him and that his gloved thumb was running across his collarbone, and he did not think about impressments but thought that Colonel Mustang had a lovely mouth.
Then Mustang lay the flat of his jaw on Ed's hair and apologised furiously, but not for any impropriety of kissing him. "Happiness," he was saying, finishing some sentence he'd not thoroughly started, "surely, but there is more to equivalent trade than the chemistry of it, and there are thousands of other ways, Edward, but this is the most simple."
"Wait, sorry, I mean, I understand that you've had a rough time of this war business but what the hell is happening?"
"I didn't think you cause it, or even meant to. But testing a hypothesis could change the tide of the war," and Mustang looked in his eyes and told him of a few years that had never happened and when he finished speaking, Al was standing in the doorway, flexing his hollow metal arms and saying in his high lungless little boy's voice, "Mother's gone," and Ed hit Roy in the face with his right arm, the automail arm, and screamed. The sound echoed in the room and reverberated in his brother's hollow chest.
"What did you do," he screamed, hitting Roy again with his steel knuckles and then lashing out with his steel leg until, he thought he felt something give under the steel and then screamed, "what did you do?"
The figure floated, cross-legged, in front of him, and Ed saw his arm and his leg floating also and wanted them back.
"Your brother's body," said the figure, "and your limbs,"
Ed nodded.
"For?" the thing asked, gesturing with Ed's arm.
Ed shrugged. "Anything."
"A soul?" its voice was less immaterial than it should have been, and all the words were strung with a horrifying sing-song.
"What's that?"
"Memories, mostly."
"Take it. Sure."
"Done." Said the figure. "For your brother, also."
Ed bit his lip. "Sure. Okay. Just memories."
"Anything else?"
"My mother."
"A life!" said the figure, shimmering, "you want a life back!"
"No, I was just joking.yes"
"For what?"
"What is the equivalent?"
"I would say…"
"You don't know?"
"I know. It is the individual life that has an individual worth."
"For what, then?"
"Peace?"
Edward's hands shook with the reality of it. "Take it. Done."
That, folks, is commonly referred to as an ending that resolved very little, but took a bit more of your time than I originally intended.
Trapped by the sun-lit drop the bee
Becomes a piece of jewellery.
Secret and shining still she seems,
Embalmed in the honey of her dreams.