Chapter Twenty-Four: Pity

There were four angry red marks on Winnie's cheek, where Becca had scraped her fingernails down her face. Winnie didn't try to cover the marks; instead, she just ignored them, except for times when she thought no one was looking, when she would grimace and caress them gently, wincing in pain.

None of us heard anything from Al or Becca for a few days. Not that I cared about Becca… I just wanted to know about Al.

Margaret was thriving on the gossip. She grinned and discussed the whole scenario endlessly with Louisa, who insisted on being filled in on everything that had happened, before she arrived at the house.

Helena took to watching Anne draw, which Anne was now doing constantly. Irene had insisted that Anne draw another illustration, this time on Irene's own wall, and Helena would sit on the bed for hours at a time, silently watching the process. Anne told me later that she never honestly thought Helena was watching. Just thinking.

Fiona was getting worse and worse, everyday. She would shout and scream from her room, and when we tried to help her, she just looked past us, a frightened expression on her face, screaming at something that we could not see. Lillian was slowly working up enough money to go back to England. Shauna was quieter, and kept giving me borderline accusatory looks. I didn't know what to say to her.

Roy came up to me one day, that familiar shifty look upon his face, and I rolled my eyes, knowing what was coming.

"One last time," he said. "Come with me, one last time, and I promise I'll never ask again."

"I don't mind going," I replied. "It's really not a big deal."

"Right. Well. One week from now, just for the usual few days. Does that work?"

"Yeah. It's fine."

He grinned and clapped me on the back. "Thanks, Ed. I owe you way too much." And he left.

These stupid, 'government' rocket trips always made Roy jittery, with excitement and some sick mixture of fear. Winnie just shook her head, with an odd look on her face.

She told me, "You know what? I think it reminds him of the war. That's why he's always so anxious about it. He doesn't talk much about what happened over there, but…he's a soldier, and he always had been. He just had to mellow out to have this family, and he's proud of that, but as much as he hates it, he just can't stay away from that mystery and what he thinks is danger." She glanced at me, then smiled. "Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," I replied. "I – well, I think it does."

"That's just all I've ever guessed about him, though," she said with a grin. "I mean, it's not as if he's ever, ever talked to me about it. Like he would." I looked at her, and she shook her head. "I'm not complaining. It's just a fact."

She said nothing more about that. Later, while I was still there, Lillian burst into the room shrieking with delight. When we calmed her down enough to speak, she held out a letter, tears in her eyes. Her grandparents had sent her the letter, offering to let her stay with them when she returned to England, and with enough money to bring her safely back. "I'm going home," she whispered. "Finally…"

There was much hugging and Margaret even managed to squeeze out a fake tear or two. Quiet congratulations continued after Lillian left the room, and she quit her job and began to make plans for her trip back. Things were looking up, at least for this family.

It wasn't until a day or two later that I talked to Al again. It was dark, and I was trying to drown out the suffocating silence of my small apartment, when there was a knock at the door.

When I opened it, Al was standing there, holding a worn notebook. "Hello," he said, and his voice cracked.

"Al – what is it?" There was an uncomfortable expression on his face.

"It's… nothing. Nothing. Can I come in?"

"Yeah, of course."

He slipped in and sat down on the small sofa, laying the notebook out on the tiny table in front of him, as if he didn't want to touch it any longer than he had to. Then he looked up at me.

"Did… did you hit Becca?"

I stared at him. "What?"

He sighed reluctantly, as if steadying himself. "She came home a few nights ago, and she was badly bruised. She wouldn't tell me anything. But…I heard her crying. And today, I asked her again and she finally told me…" He paused. "Well, she told me it had something to do with you."

I stared at him. "Me?"

He nodded. "I know that she can be…upsetting at times, but please, Ed. Don't screw this up for me."

"You're telling me not to screw things up?" I asked incredulously. "Al, she was the one who kissed me-"

"You kissed her?"

His shocked voice rang in my ears, and on his face was first an expression of blank surprise, then, a grimace of something like betrayal. "You kissed her?" he asked again.

I shook my head hurriedly. "No, no, it wasn't like that-"

"So you didn't kiss her."

"Well – no – I mean, yes."

He groaned and buried his face in his hands.

"She kissed me!" I exclaimed. "That's what I'm trying to tell you! I didn't want her to; do you honestly think I would do that to you? Come on, Al, you know me better than that."

"No, you just like to think you're better than that," he argued, a heated tone in his voice. "Because, you know what, you're right. I do know you." He stood up, began to pace, a manic look in his eye. "Do you know when you made your first mistake, Ed? When you brought me back."

Slowly, I turned to him. "What are you talking about?"

"You were alive, you were whole," he said, his voice shaking. "And yet you decided to gamble it all on the off chance that you might be able to save me, again. No one's that lucky, Ed."

I wanted to say, "Well, apparently I am," but I didn't think that would help the situation.

"No one," he repeated, shaking his head. "And you failed, didn't you? You didn't bring me back. Not the way I was supposed to be."

He stopped pacing for a moment, and stared at his hands. I could see them trembling.

"No, no," he continued, shaking his head more violently, as if trying to rid himself of a train of thought. "The thing is, I knew what I was doing, when I brought you back. A Philosopher's Stone alone is not enough to restore a soul to a body, Tucker showed me that when he tried to bring Nina back to life. No. Life isn't fair, not at all, but death… death is fair, isn't it? It claims us all in the end." A deep, shuddering breath. "A soul for a soul. My body was already gone. Your life was already halfway paid for. The decision… it was easier than I thought it was going to be. I didn't allow myself time to think. Everything was-"

"Al, stop." I stood up. "I'm not just going to sit here and listen to this. It's over, it's in the past, isn't that what you've been saying this whole time?"

"The past," said Al, "is a dangerous thing."

I raised an eyebrow. He shook his head, but before he could say anything else, I continued, "Do you really think I don't already know this, Al? I'm your brother. I get it. I did the same for you, remember?"

"No!" he burst out. "No, you didn't! You didn't, not at all! You didn't spend four years with metal for skin! Your life never depended on a seal of blood in a suit of armor! You didn't die!"

There was a tense, pressing silence. It felt like, at any moment, the very air could explode and throw us back with the raw, crackling energy in the atmosphere.

"I didn't die?" I asked quietly.

"You came here," he explained lamely.

"That's not fair-" I began to protest, but he held up a hand for silence.

"If I ever were to believe in some kind of higher power, some kind of God," he said softly, "I would say He took pity on you. But I know you refuse to believe that, and I don't think it works the same if you don't believe it will."

There was more silence. Then, I said, "I'm sorry."

He smiled tightly. "I'm not done yet."

We looked at each other for a long time. I could see something in his eyes, and his lips were pursed, as if he was trying as hard as he could not to say more. I tore my eyes from his gaze and muttered, "Go on."

Almost uneasily, he continued, "I…I had to cross into this world before I remembered why I had sacrificed myself for you. It was because I had seen you die. You don't know what that's like." He shivered, and closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, then opened them again. "When I forgot, I believed you were alive and that I could somehow find you again. If I had remembered that I was there when your heart stopped, how could I have found you again? You were dead, and I knew it, I was there. But I forgot. And so now… this."

He shrugged hopelessly at the dim apartment. "Yeah," I agreed. "This."

Silence.

I asked him, "There's nothing I can say to make this any better, is there?"

He almost smiled, and shook his head. "No. But we're grown-ups now, so let's try to act the part."

A pause, and then I said, "How exactly do grown-ups act, again?"

He laughed, a real laugh. Abrupt, but real. "How am I supposed to know? You're the older brother, after all."

"Yeah," I replied. "But you've always been the better one."

There was an awkward silence. He was pale, and had been pale since he stepped into the room. His clothes didn't exactly fit him, as if he had lost a lot of weight in a short time. I asked, "Are you still sick?"

"No," he told me, simply, and he said no more.

Finally, he shook his head. "I should go. Read the journal." He pointed to the notebook on the table. "It's important."

He turned to leave. Just as he opened the door, I called, "Wait."

He looked back at me.

Truthfully, I told him, "Winnie and Becca got into a fight. She was hitting her pretty hard. That's where the bruises are from."

Thoughtfully, carefully, he nodded. "Is Winnie okay?" He stumbled slightly over Winnie's name, as if he was trying not to say Winry.

"She's fine," I replied. "A little shaken up, but that always happens when Becca comes over. To be honest… Becca didn't fight back too much."

I thought he understood what I didn't say, because, his face unreadable, he nodded. "She's like that, sometimes. The journal," he said again, nodding to the notebook. And then, he was gone.

I didn't know what to do after that. Al had just confessed to me something he had never spoken of before. The second the door closed behind him, I thought of a million things I could have said. But I hadn't said anything, and, he was right, we'd acted like adults, exactly as we should have.

Something dark and deep seemed to slither beneath my thoughts in a menacing sort of way. A sense of disquiet, of apprehension had been left in the air. Al hadn't told me everything. I could feel it; it was a heavy, subliminal feeling in the back of my mind, like someone was pressing their hand to my head. I may not have known my brother as well as I had believed, but I knew him well enough to know when there was something wrong. And there was something very, very wrong.

I picked up the notebook. I flipped through it once, twice. His familiar, untidy scrawl covered every single page. I closed it, then took it to my room and, in the light of the lamp next to my bed, tried to decipher what it said.

After two lines, my brain felt tired and my eyelids drooped. Unable to fully comprehend what I had just read in the state that I was in, I allowed myself to drift into sleep.

…You didn't bring me back. Not the way I was supposed to be.

I sat straight up in bed. Sunlight streamed in through my window, so I knew it must be morning… I looked around for Al's notebook. It was on the floor, where I had discarded it the night before. I reached for it, picked it up, looked at it, my eyes lingering a minute too long. Then, I shook my head and put it aside, because I had work to go to, a life to get back to. I didn't need to sit there all day, remembering the past that Al had so carefully chronicled in that damn notebook.

For a long moment, time I could have spent reading what Al had written, I sat there in bed, wondering where things were going. There was no way to see the future; there was no way to stop time. I knew wondering wouldn't help, but I still sat there, my thoughts moving sluggishly, trying to connect something that just wasn't there…

Shaking my head and ignoring the enigmatic thoughts roiling just beneath the surface, I got up, and left, to Winnie and Roy and the life that I now had.

When I saw Roy that day, I said, "You were right about Becca." He raised an eyebrow in question. "She told Al I hit her."

Roy nodded. "That definitely sounds like her. Did you clear that up?"

I glanced at Winnie. "Yeah. I did."

"I don't regret hurting her," said Winnie coolly. "I hope she's in pain."

"There's no need to be cruel-"

"Oh, shut up, Roy," she told him, rolling her eyes. "Even you can't deny she's a little bitch." Roy said nothing, only pursed his lips slightly and left the room. Winnie looked at me. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing," I replied, shaking my head. "My brother's just being… odd."

She laughed. "I know what that's like."

Just then, Lillian slid into the room. She smiled at me. "Hello."

I said, "I thought you had a ship to catch."

She shook her head wistfully. "It doesn't leave for four more days." She added, "Not that I'm in a hurry to leave you, it's just…" She shrugged. "I want to go home."

Winnie continued to talk to her. I looked out the window. Frost was gathering on the corners of the glass. It had been more than a year since Al and I arrived in America, and instead of moving forward, we seemed to have jumped a few steps backward; we were separated, like I promised we would never be again. He sacrificed himself so that we could live in the same world, but was it enough to be in the same world? He wasn't a crucial part of my life anymore, just a brother who I loved who stayed on the sidelines. We had expected to be friends, just like we were when we were searching for the Stone.

It's funny. Now that we're happy, and we have our bodies back and regular lives that we've always wanted, we're still not as close as we were during the years when we had no home, no life, nothing. I never would have expected this.

Later, when Margaret stopped me to chat about some small piece of interesting news she heard lately, the front door opened and closed, and Shauna appeared. Margaret turned and asked slyly, "Where have you been?"

Shauna said, "Nowhere," then looked me once up and down, and rolled her eyes and marched up the stairs to her room.

I looked back at Margaret. "What did I do?"

"Oh, I'm sure she's not mad at you personally," sighed Margaret. "I think she talked to Becca, so she has quite a twisted view on everything that's going on right now." She paused, thinking. "Actually, she probably is mad at you personally. Becca doesn't seem to like you very much, does she?" Before I could mumble a reply, Margaret laughed and said, "You know what? Go work your magic on Shauna. You'll be doing everyone a favor if you can manage to calm her down."

I eyed the staircase wearily. Margaret pushed me a little. "Do it," she said. "Please?"

Shaking my head, I said, "Fine," and went up to Shauna's room.

I knocked on her door once, twice, three times. There was the quiet sound of glass breaking and then a muffled, "Dammit."

She opened the door with her elbows, because her palms were covered in ink. There was a spot of black on the floor, where an inkpot had smashed. With a glowering look, she said, "What."

There was a smear of blood on the top of her wrist. "Did you cut yourself on the glass?" I asked.

She wiped her inky hands on the wall next to the door. "Yeah. But it's not bad."

"What are you doing?" I asked. She shrugged.

"Pretending I have talent."

I raised an eyebrow at her. She shook her head. "It's nothing. Trying to draw, I should have said. Anyway, that doesn't matter. Why are you here?"

"I just wanted to know why you're suddenly so unhappy. Margaret said-"

She interrupted me by kicking the wall, hard. "Oh, Ed. I know you hate her, but sometimes I wish I could be like Becca and just get the hell out of this place." I said nothing. She was still for a second, then took a deep breath and continued, "Sorry. I just don't like being told what to do."

"And who's telling you what to do?"

She let out a little grunt of laughter. "Are you kidding me? Ed, I'm fourteen years old. Everyone is telling me what to do." She paused. Then, "Becca told me to leave her alone."

With her index finger, she touched the wound on her wrist, inspecting it. Her index finger was still covered with ink, and when he took her finger away, there were dark remnants of ink mingling with the red blood.

"Why did she do that?" I asked, tearing my eyes away from the open cut.

"Because she's stupid," Shauna replied simply. I said nothing more, and she shook her head and corrected herself. "No, I don't know why. I think she's getting serious about your brother, though I can't see why. He seems kind of pathetic to me."

"Hey," I said mildly, reminding her that it was my brother she was talking about.

She glanced at me. "Sorry. I have yet to master those silly manners everyone keeps talking about." There was a hint of a smile on her face now.

"It's okay. I know you don't mean it."

She made a face as if to say, I did too mean it, but she was just acting like the child she was, so I let it slip.

"Does Becca really mean that much to you?" I asked her. She shrugged.

"She's what I want to be in a few years. Beautiful, smart and totally in control of her own life." She smiled wistfully. "She always gets what she wants, because she knows how to play her cards. I wish she would teach me how she does it."

I shook my head, disappointed. "Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

"I just thought you were better than that."

Anger flickered across her face, and she snorted with derisive laughter, but she said nothing. I said nothing either, and eventually she spoke again. "Becca was on the streets for a long time, right? Maybe, if I followed in her footsteps…"

"Shauna, no," I said. "No, don't even talk like that. You don't want to be like Becca. Trust me."

She stared at me blankly for a moment, her crystalline eyes focused on mine. Then her upper lip twitched upwards in an expression of disgust, and she slowly looked me up and down again. Finally, she said, "Yeah. Nobody's telling me what to do, right?"

Before I could answer, she slammed the door shut, the sarcastic note in her voice still ringing in my ears.

I stood there for a moment, then there was a quiet little cough from behind me. Anne stood outside of Daley's room, her hand on the doorknob. She just looked at me for a minute, as if trying to say, It's okay. There was something deep and caring in her eyes. But after a moment, something strangely close to a smile appeared on her face and she went into Daley's room, leaving me standing there alone in the hallway.

That night, I saw Al's notebook next to my bed and didn't want to read it, not at all. But he had asked me to, and even if we were barely talking at all anymore, I still owed it to him, right?

It took me a few hours to decipher all of Al's slanted, untidy handwriting, but finally I reached the last page.

Each person, in any and every world, has a Gate within themselves, which can be opened and can be closed. This is what supplies the energy for alchemy. Alchemy does not work in the dangerous dull world that is this one, but there is still a Gate within every person. If it is possible to open that Gate, and, instead of reaching across worlds for energy, keep the Gate open, expand the Gate within oneself, couldn't one, in essence, become the Gate? Only with an extremely powerful substance could this ever occur. A substance that exists in only one place in this world, a substance I have described in detail with a thousand words in many different journals. But now these words are gathered together, in one place, and I know what I must do.

If Equivalent Exchange is correct, is right, is the one law of the universe- then I deserve this, and this will work.

If Equivalent Exchange is a lie, and one gains nothing from everything and everything from nothing- this will still work. It must.

Slowly, I closed the notebook.

I stared at it disbelievingly.

Al couldn't believe this. He simply couldn't. It was too far-fetched.

That uneasy, manic look in his eye came back to me. A quiet fear rose like a snake inside of me.

He was going to open the Gate.

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The beginning of the end. Sorry it took so long. What do you think?