Enigma
By TeriyakiPrinces
Rating: Teen+ Audiences, but whatever.
Warnings for the chapter: Science talk. Cursing.
Disclaimer: Not mine. To see original content, look up Hiromu Arakawa
A/N: Thank you so much to the people who read, followed, favorited, and especially reviewed the first two chapters. There'll probably be one more chapter of character development, and then cannon. Do you guys have any questions you'd like answered? Review with them!
Please, PLEASE, please if you have absolutely any suggestions or criticism, express it, even if it's bad, but please also explain your view if criticizing- I can't fix what I don't know is broken.
Reviews are welcomed with open mind and open arms.
It only took Winry two months in close quarters to begin thinking of Gaia Maurer as an elder sister. She began to feel a warmth whenever Gaia woke her up for breakfast, or sat down with her to help with her drawing skills. She never seemed the least bit annoyed with Winry's inquiries into her own Alchemy studies, and she actually came to Granny and her for help with calculations she wasn't sure about (she had some self esteem issues when it came to complex math, though she really did have a good grasp on it).
Gaia was warm, and kind, and got straight to the point in a way that didn't come off as dismissive and irritated, but rather doting and invested. She cleaned Winry's cuts when she got carried away fiddling with her metal and wires, and sat and talked with Granny and her whenever she had the time aside from studying.
And she studied furiously, with books that Winry only heard come to life at the 16 year old's recounting, dusty journals, and a lot of human intuition.
This brought to mind two golden boys she grew up with, who had studied just as hard, and paid an unimaginable price for their arrogance.
And yes, she saw Al as a younger cousin, and Ed as her best friend, schoolyard bully, and partner in crime, but they had abandoned the titles of brother, of family inseparable, when they went away with that Izumi woman, and returned only to lock themselves away and to shun her friendship on a quest doomed to fail.
And yes, she was bitter, but could anyone blame her? They grew up together, Granny and she helped them get through their mother's death, andWinry offered them unconditional support only to be cast aside in the pursuit of something she understood, yet didn't.
She had wanted to scream at them in the months following their accident that they still had her, and Granny, and for God's sake, they still had a father out there who they could go out and find!
But she didn't feel guilty for distancing herself from them, and taking in this mysterious girl as a sister, a part of her family, because who else did Gaia have but their little family, the old surgeon and automail-enthusiast-turned-engineer?
Winry loved Gaia like a sister, and she loved her even more when she came out with her qualms, and Gaia understood and explained to her that she didn't want to replace anyone in Winry's heart, that she'd just make herself a place there, nestled right between Edward and Alphonse Elric and the rest of the Rockbells.
Gaia Maurer was warm, and kind, and understanding to a fault. She was humble, modest (enough to not even mention when her birthday had passed on the 31st of May), yet strong and opinionated beyond measure.
And Winry loved her like a sister, so that was that.
Summer in Amestris was muggy and hot. Wave after wave of heat traveled from the nearby desert, sweeping most of the country with extreme heat. Northern winds, theoretically, brought cool temperatures, but as that humidity was brought down towards the East of Amestris it melded with the desert heat to create an atmosphere you could cut with a knife.
This weather for the majority being affected was simply unpleasant. But, well, for a 16 year old with a pretty serious respiratory condition meant that life was hell in the summer for Gaia. It became so laborious for her to breathe that Winry and Granny Pinako started a neighborhood coalition to clean out the basement of their small yellow home, which was much cooler and shielded from the brunt of the offending weather, for Gaia to move into for the summer.
These new living quarters meant not only the ability to breathe properly for Gaia, or that she wouldn't be getting that tan she had been looking forward to since last summer, but it also meant she could stop worrying the Rockbells with the nightmares she was still experiencing, and the cold sweat she'd wake up with on more than one occasion.
Even before, she had not been one to bother her parents with unnecessary reminders of the damage that her oh-so-glamorous genes had wrought upon her body. Up until the summer heat had bogged the area down, she had not had too much trouble breathing, because of a condition she had developed two years prior that her doctor called Acute Asthma Exacerbation. Basically, she was prone to her lungs contracting at inopportune times, making it harder than usual to breathe. She had to have an inhaler on hand wherever she went to stop any episodes, and after two years of the disease cropping up, she was used to breathing problems.
Now, though, she didn't have her inhaler (the life-preserving miracle machine), and she had one less lung to work with, but it had been more than four months since she had come to this world, and it seemed as if her lung condition had been eliminated alongside half the problem organ.
Which, on one hand, meant that that was one life-threatening thing she could stop worrying about, and on the other, she didn't want to even think through the pros and cons of trading in a disease for the lack of a lung- which, by the way, people have been known to survive without, but usually with late-20th and 21st century medical technology.
Meaning that Gaia was constantly on guard for Izumi Curtis-like coughing fits involving liters of blood.
Before anyone realized, it had been more than half a year since Gaia had been dropped into this world, half a year since she had been living with the Rockbells, and half a year yet since she had began her crusade through the materials she had found on Alchemy. Half a year of daily studying- note taking, reading, calculating, memorizing. About 180 days of pushing herself as hard as mentally, and physically, possible.
In that half year, however, she had not transmuted a single speck of dust.
Oh, yes, she had been tempted on multiple occasions, but she had never done it in the end. When the river flooded in spring, she helped with securing homes against floodwaters with only her manual labor.
Maybe it was fear- fear she wouldn't be able to harness the natural energy to do anything, fear of the power she would hold if it did work. And, of course, fear of Truth itself.
She was sure she'd always have a niggling fear of the entity that had torn her family, her world, away from her.
Yet, ridiculously, and miraculously, enough, Gaia's first transmutation was an indisputable success.
It was a bit too rough on one side, sure, and maybe a bit too much build-up was visible over there, and of course it had transmutation marks all over it, that and the fact that it was still attached to the ground.
But!
But, she had managed the impossible- and the one thing she had been striving towards for six months now. And it had worked! She had transmuted soil- a matrix of minerals, organic matter, air, and water- sand, silt, and clay isolated and each transformed into a completely different material- iron, to be exact.
She had gone flawlessly through the three tenets of Alchemy – comprehension, deconstruction, and reconstruction – now memorized by heart and studied multiple times to make sure which rules applied. She had been sampling from soil all around the Rockbell grounds, separating out each compound meticulously for neigh-on a month to prepare for this moment. Not to even mention creating the correct transmutation circle.
From all her studies, she was relatively well prepared for all of the calculations and conversions- she had been dissecting all types of matter for her steadily-increasing personal collection of journals. She found that the closer the atomic structure of the original element to the final element, the easier it was to transmute.
Theoretically, all matter could be transmuted. The question that stumped most was how. Air was one of the rarest and most difficult alchemic transmutations- if you could transmute air, nearly anything was possible for you to do. Roy Mustang and Master Hawkeye were the first to come to mind in that equation, and Gaia knew that it would most likely die out with the Colonel. The easiest to transmute, obviously, was solid matter- experimentation on that front had been going on for many years previous, and the entire alchemic method was derived from drawing transmutation circles on solid matter.
Once Gaia was over that hurdle, it took no time at all for her practical application of Alchemy in everyday situations skyrocketed from zero to multiple times a day. Within the next month, she had graduated from pure elements (with a large exception for gold) to alloys such as brass and steel.
Her first large-scale transmutation, that of the roof of her yellow home (and when did it become home?) had her out like a light for 12 hours straight. After that, there was absolutely no stopping her in her endeavors to perfect what she saw as a new form of art.
Much like a muscle, the more you exercised Alchemy, the larger and more precise the scale of the transmutation.
She was hopelessly, absolutely, irreversibly, in love.