Golden as the Sun, Chapter 1
Here is the second chapter of my beautiful story. Really I'm surprised I got it up so soon ^-^. I am pretty satisfied with how this came out, but... well, I'll let you be the judge. Please reveiw, you've been wonderful to me so far! Tell me what you think of how I'm doing the characters - I don't think they're OOC, but you never know.
Riza Hawkeye opened the door to the hospital room and glanced inside. Her commanding officer still sat next to Ed's bed, his eyes locked on the younger man's face. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her, knowing that Breda and Falman were standing guard outside to warn off any unwelcome visitors. The morning sun streamed in through the window, giving everything a golden tint that matched Ed's long hair.
"He'll wake up when he's ready," she told Mustang, her voice understanding. "It wouldn't hurt to get some sleep, or something to eat." Roy looked slightly haggard, still in yesterday's uniform, a five o'clock shadow gracing his chin.
"I know," he said softly, his gaze not flickering an inch. She waited for him to elaborate, but he seemed content to simply sit and watch. It was an understandable desire, seeing as Riza wouldn't mind just doing that either.
They hadn't believed he was dead, but after five years you begin to lose hope. It was like an eclipse, she supposed. Everything seems normal, the sun burning overhead, irreplaceable and brighter than anything else, and then suddenly it's gone. All the light and warmth is leaving, and you're hoping and praying it will come back, but it doesn't. You can't help but count the seemingly endless seconds, and you're standing frozen, shivering, and you're starting to stop believing what has always been true – that it will always come back – and then suddenly the darkness lifts and the sun reappears. Its golden light and life-giving warmth pour down, and you breathe a sigh and everything is right again. Ed was their sun, the burning brightness in their lives, and without him many of them were lost. She would give Roy the luxury of re-memorizing that face.
She looked over at the second bed in the room. The girl who had appeared with Ed lay there, bandages wrapped tightly around her right shoulder where her arm should be. It was just like Ed's injury, and Riza wondered exactly how they had gotten here, and where they had come from.
The girl looked to be a few years younger than Ed, who was now 21, if she remembered correctly, and had the looks to go along with it. She had pale skin from too little sun, and a thin, malnourished body. Her hair was a dark reddish-brown, and it fell in short waves to her shoulders. She wished the two young people would wake up, so they could get some answers.
"Brother!" The door burst open, admitting an overenthusiastic Al, who immediately jumped towards the bed with his sibling, almost knocking over Ed's IV while he was at it. Winry was close behind, joining Al on the opposite side of the bed from Mustang. "Oh, Al, look, it's really him. It's really Ed," Winry breathed, wrapping her arms tight around Al and squeezing him tight. "Brother…" Al whispered, hugging Winry back with one arm and running his fingers through Ed's silky hair with the other. His voice shook, as did his hands. Water glistened at the corners of his eyes, and he buried his face in Winry's shoulder.
"We came on the first train, as soon as we heard," Granny Pinako said, ambling in after the two exuberant youngsters. She was smiling calmly. Not even her surrogate grandson returning from god-knows-where in an explosion could faze her.
"Hello, Ms. Rockbell," Riza said, nodding to the tiny woman. Winry and Al sank into the two chairs already placed on their side of the bed. Riza made to get a fourth chair for Pinako from the other side of the room, but Roy stopped her with a gesture.
"Don't bother, Captain. I'll leave Ed to his family. I need to change and eat, and Fullmetal's return is going to give me a lot of work." He groaned as he stood up, stretching his back. "Besides, these chairs are not the most comfortable things in the world." He flashed a tired but genuine smile at Al and Winry, which was returned, and bowed to Pinako before striding out of the room. Hawkeye followed his lead, bowing as she shut the door behind him.
He wanted to get home so desperately. This world was cruel to him, absent of automail and alchemy and so restrictive. The colors seemed duller, the air colder. Here he was just a crazy little cripple, a prodigy in a made-up science. No one would believe his stories, so he stopped telling him. Amestris became a construct of his own imagination, only the dying automail to prove that he was not insane.
Even that he had to eventually abandon for this world's crude prosthetics. His home was being ripped away from him. He could barely remember Winry's smile, or Major Armstrong's stupid purple sparkles, or Granny's cooking, or Al's voice, or the Colonel Bastard's flames. What he would give for a homunculus trying to kill him!
That was why, when he met Alexandria, someone who looked as broken as he did, someone, who seemed like she actually was insane, he spilled his story to her. Her uncle was a scientist for the Fuhrer's army, and she understood the chemistry and physics of this world that were pretty much foreign to him. She drilled him for every bit of alchemical knowledge he had, determined that they would both get a happy ending.
She had a tendency to lock herself in her lab and ignore everything but her work. He could only stand so much of this, as he was in this dreary world and not his own, bright one. He would wander around Berlin, careful not to stray into the darkest alleyways. He did not believe in God, but he liked to visit the small church near the house. Religion, he thought, caused so much strife, and yet, it gave so much comfort to people who needed something to believe in. He liked to sit in the back while they sang hymns and prayed, or when it was quiet and only a few people sat in the pews, with their heads bowed and their Bibles in their laps. The stained glass windows somehow made the dim church more like home. He never talked to anyone, he just sat there and listened.
It was the anniversary of his arrival in this godforsaken world, five years ago, when Alexandria grabbed him and drove them out to a large empty field several miles outside of Berlin. Storm clouds rumbled overhead, and the rain soaked them both through. He drew a circle for human transmutation around them with heavy ropes, secured to the ground by stakes.
She stood with her back to him and held a long metal cylinder above her head. She had tried to explain it to him several times, but he had been unable to understand the foreign concepts while longing for alchemy so hard. He remembered the word 'nuclear', but that was about it. He stood behind her, too desperate to be afraid of whatever insane plan she was trying.
He smelled it before it happened; an electric smell rising around them. He dove forward and grabbed on to her waist just as the white-hot bolt of pure electricity hit them, sparking a reaction inside that metal cylinder. And then he felt that old feeling of being transmuted, and he felt ecstatic, happier than he had been in years. In the next moment, they were gone, and the only thing to show that something had happened there was a patch of scorched earth where the circle had been.
The warmth was familiar, warmth he hadn't felt in five years. The Amestrian sun was shining down on him. He took a moment to revel in the feeling. It had been so long since he had felt this, and he felt contentment run down his body, from the top of his head to the tips of his feet. He nearly purred with satisfaction. This was what waking up was supposed to feel like.
His eyelids were heavy, but he opened them anyway, needing to see the colors of Amestris. He caught a glimpse of whitewashed ceiling before a face blocked it, one that was familiar and yet… not quite. He blinked, confused. When he heard the ecstatic yell of "Brother!" though, he realized who this was, and a happy smile stretched, unbidden, across his lips.
"Hey, Al," he said, his voice rough from dryness and lack of use. He hadn't talked much in the dull world.
The laugh that sounded from his brother's flesh-and-blood body sounded so good that he closed his eyes and drank in the sound. "It's really you; you're really back!" Al said, and the thump he heard told him that Al had jumped as high into the air as possible. He opened his eyes again and watched Al dance around the room, free of the giant armor that had once limited him.
"You better not do anything like that again, you heard me, Ed?" a second, female voice shouted in his ear. Ed jerked away in surprise, but it was so good to hear that voice that he didn't stop smiling for a second.
"Sure, Winry, anything you say," he told her, sitting up and grinning even as she burst into tears and hugged him tight.
"Winry, girl, calm down and give the boy a little room. It's got to be as much of a shock to him as it is to us," an older voice scolded, though her tone was more amused than reprimanding.
"It's fine, Granny Pinako," Ed said, twisting in Winry's embrace to catch a glimpse of the woman who was as much of a grandmother to him as she was to Winry. All the warning he got a was a lash of blonde hair before Al piled on on top of Winry and they all fell onto the bed.
"What's wrong!" someone shouted from the doorway. "I heard shouting and – " But Roy Mustang never finished his sentence, catching sight of the golden eyed man nearly buried under his family.
"Hey, Colonel Bastard," Ed said, his eyes dancing with happiness.
Roy Mustang would deny it fervently from that day on, but that was the closest he'd come to fainting since his mother announced that she would be moving to Xing, and he had better get off his lazy bum and find himself something to do with his life.
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