"What is an Alchemist…?" Al's head had been trying to find an answer to this question for a long time… Yet he couldn't find a specific answer.
"In Alchemy, not only you have the Equivalent Exchange rule, but you also have the principle that to Create you must first Destroy. So what is an Alchemist? One who destroys? Or one who creates?" he looked at what had become, long ago, his hands.
"Definitely, we alchemists do destroy but, in the same process, we create something from what we destroy… I remember now, Major Armstrong once said that the steps of an alchemic transmutation were Analysis, Deconstruction and Reconstruction… But now I see that Analysis is not really a step, for what is analyzed already was there before the alchemist even decided to perform a transmutation… That leaves the steps of Deconstruction and Reconstruction alone… But can I truly say that an alchemist simply makes something new from something old? That an alchemist 'deconstructs' to 'reconstruct'?... No, I don't think so… I think that an alchemist is one who destroys to create… One who has to destroy in order to create… What a sad purpose is ours…" he then got up and left the hotel, he had to meet with Edward at a restaurant near the place.
I know, pretty random stuff… The thing is that I just thought of it and felt like posting it, so I used Alphonse, whom I know he surely would start thinking about these things…