Ed's eyes were wide and he didn't even care that the hand he had grabbed without thinking was the automail hand. He didn't care that he could feel the faint hum of energy buzzing within those fingers beneath his hand. He didn't care that the hand gripped his own. "You what...?" he said breathlessly. "What did you say?"

Maenz smiled sardonically. "I brought them back." he said slowly, clearly.

"That can't be true."

"But it is, Edward. Arrogance, idiocy, and a year of research, every resource and more available to a State Alchemist later...yes. I did indeed do that thing."

Ed was suddenly reaching to the doctor, and he had grabbed the lapels of his shirt and pulled himself near, demanding, "How? How did you do it?"

"It doesn't matter."

"How can you say that!" Ed screamed, his lips pulled from his teeth unconsciously.
"Because. It doesn't. You realized it yourself, Edward. You didn't know I had children and do you know why that is? The answer is very simple. I do not have children; I had children...even if I had brought them back...where, do you imagine, they have now gone?"

"I...I don't..."

"Do you want me to tell you what happened next?"

Ed hesitated. He released the doctor. "I don't know, but I think you'll tell me, no matter what."

"Because it is something you should hear. Something you, even more than Al, would understand, since, you are, I hear, the one who planned the transmutation...the one who wanted it above anything else..." Ed said nothing and the doctor continued, because he knew the boy was listening, because he knew it was something that the boy must hear. "Of course, it wasn't me alone who brought them back. A team of us did. I volunteered my childrens' bodies. I was the one responsible for the act. Thinking back to it, I can't imagine that it was me. That year and a half seems to me the life of another person who tirelessly documented, watched, waited, calculated, analysized, hypothesized, theorized, formulated, manipulated everything at his disposal...In other words...I was obsessed...And in the end, I truly believed that I had it perfected...and not just the array. The process...I believed I understood the soul...That I had everything planned..."

"But you didn't..."

Maenze shook his head. The regretful smile was gone from his lips. All sense of objectivity had flown as the doctor delved into the darkness part of his own heart. "I didn't. How could I have that planned? Then...she came..."

The rain had picked up. It hammered against the window as though it were trying to break in, as though it were trying to interupt this tale. At that moment, it was the only sound Edward heard, the rain and the doctor's breathing and the beat of his own heart, loud in his own ears.

"Greta came the morning after they were brought back. And she found me with them. I was sitting in my room. It was a small room and always rather dark. It smelled like stone because it was made of stone, but when it rained, stone and mold permeated the room...It had rained the night before, but that wasn't the smell that filled the room." The doctor drew in a shaking breath and Ed turned his eyes away, shut them. It was like hearing a ghost story-fearing the next words, but needing to hear them. "Greta came that morning, she stood in the doorway to that tiny room. She stood in that doorway and the sunlight from that morning streamed in around her. I remember thinking that she had brought that sunlight. That she was made of sunlight...Of course...at that moment...I was out of my mind.

"'Del?' she said as she saw me, sitting on the couch, two small figures bundled in blankets sitting on either side of me. I held Lian in my right hand and Jen in my left. They held me back, gripped me too tight as she spoke...

"I remember I said her name and it must have taken her eyes a minute to adjust because she didn't realize who and what sat with me. 'Why are you sittiing in the dark?' she asked and stepped forward...and went still.

"I said her name and the bundle in my right hand said, "Mama" and the bundle in my left echoed him. She knew their voices. How can a parent ever forget the voice of their children...even children dead for more than six years? I tried to stop them from going to her. I think I believed that she might not realize what I had done to them if she remained in that light and I remained with the children in that shadow, but I was wrong. They went to her, threw their arms around her and she lifted them, pressed them tight to herself and whispered their names. The smell must have been overwhelming, the feel of their bodies repungent, but she held them, tighter and tighter still...those bodies dead for six years...those..."

Ed listened despite himself and slowly, he came to understand what it was the doctor was leaving unsaid, the terrible thing wrong with the transmutation. He didn't look up at the doctor. The voice coming from the man was barely recognizable as the same that had begun the story. The children, the thing wrong with them must have been their bodies...bodies dead for so long...corpses suddenly reanimated and intelligent...

"That night after I confessed everything to her...Greta left...and I followed...but I was too late...and when the sun rose the next morning...I was alone...My arm was gone...My children were gone...My Greta..." The doctor paused and a heavy and pregnant silence fell between them. Ed saw in his mind the transmutation circle and the thing in its center, the thing that the two brothers had conjured with their hopes and dreams and stupidity and blindness and love. That was what he was thinking when Ed suddenly felt a human hand on his chin, forcing his head up. The doctor's eyes met his. "She was gone, Edward, but I still live...and do you know why?"

Ed shook his head. He truly had no idea. He couldn't imagine because in his own heart, he didn't know why he himself was still alive.

"The chance to redeem myself...Then chance that one day Greta and my children might forgive me..."

Ed stared at the doctor wide eyed and slowly, he began to shake his head.

The doctor released him and Ed's head sank bonelessly into his own chest.

"Your father told me that to live is more than living for yourself. It is living for purpose, Edward. Your eyes are empty. Did you know that? I recognize those eyes because I wake with them still...You might believe you have nothing left...but you do...even when everything is lost...there is still something you can do..."

Ed's head shook on its own.

Is this what the old doctor wanted to tell him?

Was this the story that was to inspire him? Breathe hope back into him?

Ed almost laughed.

Redemption? Forgiveness? Purpose? Emptiness?

What kind of words were those?
They had no meaning to Edward.

The fact that they had been told to the doctor by Ed's father made the message all the more meaningless.

Ed and Al had failed to revive their mother.

But Ed would not fail now.

Perhaps he did have a purpose...

There was only one more thing he had to do...

He turned to the window as a long shriek of thunder sounded and the doctor said his name, but the only thing on Ed's mind was one thought, a thought stronger than before, and a determination sharped by a sudden despair..."Al..." Ed whispered and the rain pounded against the window.

TBC...