The cellar wasn't dark.

Al knew it wasn't.

He could see the light streaming in from the windows. He could clearly see the desk Ed had sat in all the times before. He could read the spines of the books lining the shelves and the alchemy charts taped on the wall...

But it felt dark anyway.

Oppressive.

Terrifying.

Al reasoned morbidly, that this was the place, after all, where such terrible things had happened...

The failed transmutation of their mother, Ed, loosing his arm and leg, and Al...

This was the place where Al died...wasn't it?

Clear and sharp in Al's mind then, came the image of his brother, eyes wide and gold, mouth open, reaching towards him. Al could still feel that last brush of his fingertips before everything had just vanished...

Then...

Then what happened?

Al couldn't say.

He couldn't remember...

Was there something...it was on the tip of his memory...a door?...no...not a door...it was a... Al shook his head. It didn't matter if he couldn't remember it, and besides, that wasn't why he was here...

There, just a little ways further from the stairs-there Al could just make out the lines of the transmutation circle he and Ed had drawn.

A perfect circle.

Perfect symmetry.

Geometrically and mathematically perfect in every way, calculated within the smallest degree of error.

Of course, it hadn't been close to perfect, had it? The evidence was splashed across that circle in bright red, but that was it. Al paused.

While some things from the night before were faint in his memory, the sight of that...thing...that thing that they had transmuted to be their mother, but was not...that memory was razor sharp in his mind...but it wasn't there anymore. It had vanished from the floor.

Al began to back away from the circle when he suddenly noticed something that also had not been there the night before-footprints. Small footprints leading back the way Al had come. Suddenly he remembered Pinako-more specifically-her hands and her shoes, covered in mud.

She went to your guys' house. Isn't that was Winry had said? She'll be right back. She said she wanted to get some clothes..."

Ed suddenly realized that the dress she had been wearing when Al saw her in front of the house hadn't been the same she had worn when she had been stirring the eggs on the stovetop. Had she come and buried that thing...?
Al bent down, then, and touched the rim of the circle and quickly pulled his hand away.

That thing...

But what about the soul? What can we possibly offer?

Ed had a solution to that riddle of Equivalent Exhange. The brothers had cut their fingers and let their own blood fall onto that perfect geometry, maring it.

Isn't that what Ed had mentioned when Al had first woken to see the result of their actions?

It wasn't the formulas, Al...It was us.

"No..." Al said as he began to look over the circle again. He couldn't accept that. There must be a mistake they had missed.

His fingers traced the lines, touched the blood of that thing, but he didn't care.

He didn't even notice.

He had come all this way for this. He was sure there had been a mistake on their part. He could then return to Ed and tell him and that look he had in his eye could fade. Al could understand for himself what had really happened.

But there were no errors, not one, and by the time that Al had raised himself from his investigation, the sun was coming through dusty and low through the windows.

It was sunset.

Al stared at it and for once felt truly nothing...

He was numb.