Disclaimer: I still don't own FMA. I tried to buy Roy off of eBay, though…

The night was warm. A small boy of four years sat in a field of flowers. His dark hair was brushed back from his face, his grey eyes looking out at the flowers.

His grandmother had told him that he had his mother's eyes. She had left when he turned one. She had been sixteen that year, his grandmother said. She had gone looking for a girl that his father revived. He questioned his grandmother's sanity when she said the girl was his aunt who had died a year before his birth. She reminded him that his father had revived the girl, at the price of his life.

What he got out of that was that his mother gave her body to his father in return for the revival of her sister. His grandmother said that he was right about that.

Turning his gaze towards the stars, the boy smiled as he remembered the only thing he could remember about his mother. He remembered her holding him on her lap, crooning sweet lullabies to him while running her hands through his dark hair. He remembered playing with jade beads that she had always draped gracefully around her neck. He remembered the blonde hair that tickled his cheeks when it was loose. He remembered love.

"Zane!"

Little grey eyes flickered to the side. His uncle was running up the field, a smile splitting his face. "Zane! Selena came back! Selena came back!"

Selena. A bell rang in his head. That was the name of his mother! He leapt to his feet, running down the hill with his Uncle Kal.

A thin blonde woman was sitting in the cottage, a man in a military uniform at her side. "I'm sorry I can't stay, mother. I need to find…Raffo…and finish what I began," her grey eyes were fixed on the teacup in front of her. She didn't even notice Zane walking in until the man whispered something in her ear.

"Zane," a small smile was on her face. "My little boy. My Zane…" she stood up, knees shaking, and walked over to the boy, kneeling next to him. She wrapped her arms around him, picking him up. "Zane, my Zane…"

His small hands found a string of jade beads around her neck, his fingers curling around them. He pulled. The string cut into her skin, and she choked. "Zane, what are you doing?" she demanded. He pulled harder. The string broke, beads clattering everywhere. Her neck bled, and her eyes were wild. He wrapped his fingers around her neck, squeezing, his small boot kicking her in the stomach. A four-year-old was overpowering his mother. He grinned sickly and stepped on her neck, leaping up in the air to jump on it. "Zane!" she cried. "I'm your mother!"

Her trachea snapped beneath his feet.

Zane woke up in a cold sweat. The four-year-old boy clutched his sheets, grey eyes wild with fear, much as those of his mother had been in his dream. "Mother?" he whispered. Dark hair was plastered to his pale face.

"No, little one. Someone much better,"

A flame touched the lamp at the side of his bed. A girl, looking to be in her teens, smiled at him. Her hair was reddish, running down her back in sweet curls. Her eyes had a horrid light within them.

"Who are you?" asked Zane. He was confused, his tiny mind working quickly to figure out what was going on. It was night; he should've been sleeping. Grandma would get mad at him. She always said he needed more rest than the average person because he was a little boy, a child born of alchemic exchange.

"We mustn't talk of that, little Zane. What we must talk of is how you were born. My master would find that knowledge so very sweet," the girl took a seat on the end of Zane's bed.

"I don't know how I was born," breathed Zane. "Grandma told me I was an alchemic child, one my father put inside my mother as a part of him so he would be alive no matter what happened when he transmuted." Zane was quoting this directly from his memory. Of course, Grandma didn't know that much about alchemy. She was a farmer's wife. She said only Selena, his mother, had practiced alchemy, and that was so she could impregnate herself with part of his father.

His father. What had his father been called? He couldn't remember. It was a forbidden name in the house. Grandma refused to talk about his father, saying only that he was a filthy rotten alchemist who had stolen her daughter's heart and disappeared because of a failed transmutation.

The girl looked confused for a moment, but then nodded, figuring it out. "I know that part, Zane. I know that. I might've not been there when it happened, but I do know it. Do you know of any journals your father had? Memoirs of his alchemy?"

"Grandma has one," Zane's breath caught in his lungs. This was a bad person; he wasn't supposed to talk to strangers! He should've been yelling for Grandma!

"Zane, who are you talking to?" Grandma walked in. Her hair was styled in curls on top of her head in the daytime, but it was just limp around her shoulders right now. Her eyes seemed to go as round and wide as teacups. "Raffo! What are you doing with my grandson?"

Raffo leapt to her feet. "Nothing," she said sweetly and innocently. Behind that mask was a vile, traitorous person. Zane knew it. He wanted to…he wanted to what? He didn't know anything that would hurt her. He was a child, a child, not an alchemist! He wouldn't be able to do anything even if he tried.

Are you so sure about that?

The voice had come from nowhere. Zane glanced around.

As you said, as your 'grandmother' said…you are but a piece of your father. And so you should have his memory of alchemy, his talent…

Zane hesitated, picking up a pen from his bedside. He had been writing his numbers down earlier. He dipped it in ink, drawing an alchemic circle on the back of his hand. He didn't know where it had come from; he didn't even know what it was.

The four-year-old put the pen back down as Raffo turned around, grinning sickly at him. Grandma was crumpled in a corner. She wasn't breathing. Zane put his hand over his transmutation circle.

A flash of light came from the house.

The neighbors were surprised when they found the house burned down to the ground in the morning, and footprints made in the mud. They found an abandoned shoe, the size of a four-year-old boy's foot.

-This is a page break, zomg! -

Jean Havoc stirred awake. He could hear someone crying in the room over. Who was it? He wracked his memory for some sort of—ah, yes. Sel was in the other room. What was she crying over, though?

He slid out of his bed, pulling a pair of pants over his boxers. He opened the door to the guest bedroom as quietly as he could to find Sel in the fetal position on her bed, tears running down her cheeks and onto her legs, caking onto the flesh. He didn't even say anything and she noticed him.

"I did something horrible, Jean."

She looked up at him, staring at him with those grey eyes.

"I used alchemy."