Title: Human Nature
Characters: Alphonse
Summary: Alphonse knew that he should be grateful to his brother for sacrificing so much for him and he was but sometimes . . . Sometimes Alphonse couldn't help but wonder: Should he even have been saved at all?
Disclaimer: If I owned FMA, then I wouldn't be poor and this wouldn't be a fanfic.
Rating: K/G
Warnings: Not much, really. Just the musings of a fourteen year old stuck in a suit of armor.

A fourteen year old boy.

A seven foot tall suit of armor.

A cheerful disposition and optimistic outlook.

A cold, unfeeling body and expressionless face.

Sometimes, despite his attempts to look on the brighter side of their dark life, as opposed to his brother who had been practically born a cynic, Alphonse couldn't help but fall into the same trap of depression that seemed to happen to all of the Elrics eventually.

It had been almost a year since they'd turned their backs on their home. A year since he and Edward had tried to resurrect their mother. A year since Edward had sacrificed his arm in order to save his younger brother's life. A year since Alphonse had been trapped inside a suit of armor. The younger brother had lived for almost a year inside of the numb, metal body he'd been given in order to save his life.

But what kind of life?

Alphonse knew that he should be grateful to his brother for sacrificing so much for him and he was but sometimes . . . Sometimes Alphonse couldn't help but wonder: Should he even have been saved at all?

Their mission, as brothers, was to find a way to restore their bodies so they could go back to the way things had been before the fateful attempted transmutation. But it had been so long since then that Alphonse was having trouble remembering what it had even been like. He wondered if Edward felt the same way he did sometimes but, of course, he knew better than to ask. If he asked, or even seemed like he was going to, then the older boy immediately shut down. This was just how his brother dealt with things though, Alphonse had long since come to realize. Whenever something was bothering him, Edward just shut down and put on an angry front that may have fooled strangers, but it didn't fool him.

The problem was that, not only did Alphonse not always know what his brother was running from, he didn't have a way to run, himself.

Edward, you see, drowned himself in anger and fighting and pain and food. Alphonse, however, didn't really like to fight, he couldn't eat, and he didn't feel any pain -- at least not physical. So all that the younger had to do was think, though that didn't always lead to good places and he had nowhere to run away to when that happened.

Because all he could do was think.

Oh, he could walk and he could talk and he could even perform alchemy still, but what more was he than a soul and a pile of metal? Or was he even that?

Just what exactly was he? Because he most certainly wasn't a boy anymore and, with the way things were looking to be heading, he'd never get to become a man either. No, he was just a soul attached to a suit of armor, if that. Because what was a soul anyway? Something they'd been taught as young children was what made them human and alive. But the brothers had stopped believing in the god that had supposedly given them their souls, so how could they believe that their souls existed when their godly creator didn't?

And how was his soul -- a purely spiritual and possibly even mythological thing -- attached to a suit of armor -- a purely physical thing? By a blood seal? They'd tried to use blood for their mother's soul, though, and it definitely hadn't worked, so why did it work for this?

Alphonse just didn't understand. He didn't understand how he was alive, if it could even be called that. He didn't understand what, if anything, he was.

For some reason, though, there were at least two people that always seemed to be so sure of the answers to these questions, even though he wasn't all of the time. Edward, of course, because there would never be a doubt in his mind about his younger brother's humanity. The other person, though, came from a more unexpected place. Colonel Roy Mustang.

The Colonel had been the first and only person since Edward that hadn't looked at him in horror, shock, or disgust when he'd learned the nature of Alphonse's suit of armor. He'd treated him with respect, as most others had done out of decorum mostly, except the Colonel seemed to actually be sincere about it. He also treated him like a young boy, which was something that no one else did and, while Edward was intent on being treated like an adult because he was always mistaken for a child, Alphonse loved being treated like a child when everyone always mistook him for an adult.

It was this man, as well as his brother, that managed to remind Alphonse of his own humanity every time. He might not always know exactly what he was, but they reminded him of who he was. He Alphonse Elric, fourteen years old, the youngest son of Trisha and Hohenheim Elric, and the brother of Edward Elric with whom, somehow, he was going to accomplish the impossible.

-End