So sorry I haven't updated in a while. Long story short I had computer troubles and when I finally got it fixed all my memory was erased including the chapters of this I had already typed up. And also I was just lazy and didn't type up any chapters for a few weeks…

Oh! I also got a beta for this story, great huh? You want to introduce yourself Keeper of the Times?

B/N: Hey! I'm Kott for short. This is my first time really beta-ing so if there are any spelling and grammar mistakes that's all on me and please review! Reviews feed authors (and sometimes even betas, too. XD)

Disclaimer: Since I recently got hit with a copyright strike on my Youtube account, I don't own FMA.

Heavenly Brothers

Ch.7 Human Transmutation

Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg., Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime: 1.5 kg, Phosphorus: 800 g., Salt: 250 g., Saltpeter: 100 g., Sulfur: 80 g., Fluorine: 7.5 g., Iron: 5 g., Silicon: 3 g.,

And 15 other elements in small quantities. This is the chemical make up of an average adult human being.

Two half angels studied alchemy since their mother's untimely death. They someday wish to use their knowledge to bring her back.

"Hurry up, Al!"

"Just a sec, Brother!" The younger one ran up to his older brother with an armful of books. "I had to grab our notes!"

"Ah, right! Forgot!"

"Oh, Ed, you need to settle down." Alphonse lectured.

"I can't, Al, we're finally going to see her again!" Ed didn't have to say who.

The two Elrics had been home for a week now, preparing for what they were about to do. No one knew that they had returned to Resembool, so they had no interruptions in their plans.

Both brothers busied themselves grabbing the required materials needed for the transmutation. Soon a small pile of ingredients was placed in a pan in the middle of the spare room. They walked up to the pile, vigilant to avoid smudging the lines of chalk excruciatingly drawn in an elaborate circle, and stood over it. Ed handed Al a small knife, similar to the one in his own hand.

The brothers theorized that their blood would work as a perfect beacon for their mom's soul and it would help them recreate her body since the DNA would be almost the same. They each cut one of their fingers, letting a few drops fall onto the top of the pile.

Ed went over the array making sure it was perfect. When he deemed it perfect, he turned to his younger brother with a smile spread wide across his face.

"Ready?" He asked.

"Mm-hmm," Al nodded back at him.

"Alright, here we go," Both brothers bent down and put their palms on the outer circle.

The array started to glow a soft blue, then bright gold. Their smiles grew wider as they watched the pile in the middle start to move.

Then, the whole feeling in the room changed, light turned to dark, and energy started to lash out at everything in the room. The lamps smashed, leaving the only light in the room to come from the dark transmutation circle.

"Brother, something's wrong," Al said looking scared.

Then a crack appeared across the circle and opened up. A giant eye blinked open out of it while small black shadow-esque arms scrambled around. The horrific arms started to reach towards the brothers.

"No… a rebound?" Ed couldn't believe the sight before him, they had worked so hard.

"Ed!"

Ed turned to see his little brother arm being grabbed by some of the black hands. When they touched Alphonse, he started to disintegrate.

"Al!" Ed started to reach for his little brother but then immense pain stopped him.

Ed looked around to his left leg and saw tiny, midnight hands grabbing it. Just like Al, his leg was crumbling into nothing.

"Brother, help!" Ed turned back to his brother.

Al's whole body was starting to fall apart in small paper-like strips, then disappearing. The hands pulled Al to the center of the circle to the eye. Ed started to panic. He started to struggle against the arms that had wrapped around him. Ed started to grow his wings and when they were out he tried to flap them to get out of the iron grip. But then the arms restricted his wings too.

Ed was too focused on his brother to notice were the shadow arms touching his wings, black started to spread like ink staining them jet black.

"Al!" He screamed reaching for Al.

"Brother, Brother!" More of Al disappeared rapidly.

Just as Ed's hand was about to grasp Al's, everything went white.

"Wha-…um, what was I just doing?" Ed looked around, "Al?"

One thing he noticed was his wings were gone. He was pretty sure he had had them out before he came here, even though he couldn't remember what exactly he had been doing.

"Hello, there," The voice scared Ed, he looked in front of him to see who had spoken.

The voice he heard sounded like hundreds of people talking all at once. There was a voided, human shape sitting cross legged in front of him. It only contained an outline looking like a cloud of black dots. The only feature on it was a huge mouth plastered in a wide, unnatural grin.

"Who are you?" Ed asked confused.

"Oh! I'm so glad you asked." The thing said, "I am called by many names. I am the world, I am the universe, I am God, I am the Truth, I am one, I am all, but most of all…I am you." At 'you' he pointed to Ed.

He heard something behind him and turned around. There he saw a huge doorway open up and a huge eye stared back at him from the darkness inside.

"You dared to knock on the door, now it's open!" The Truth said, almost gleefully.

Black shadow hands reached out towards him. Ed tried to get away but they grabbed him in a matter of seconds. He was pulled into the black space. He was suspended in the darkness for a few quiet moments before pictures and knowledge started to file into his mind. Ed screamed at the sudden intake of, well, everything. It felt like his head would split in two.

"Stop, stop, STOP IT!" He yelled at whatever was doing this, "It hurts! Stop it!"

Millions of things he would have never known or even think about flashed in front of his eyes. Information unavailable to the average mortal was burned into his mind.

Then, like a light at the end of a long tunnel, his mom appeared.

"Mom!" he reached for her. Just like with Al, he had almost had her hand when he was shoved violently back into the white space.

He said nothing but turned back to the big stone door, which he now knew was called the Gate. Truth watched him intently as Ed walked up to the Gate and slammed both of his fists on it.

"I get it. Our equation wasn't wrong, it just needed something more!" He tuned around to face Truth, "You have to show it to me again! I was almost there!"

The Truth stood up.

"I'm sorry, but I have already showed you all I can with the toll you paid," It said.

"Toll? What toll?" Ed asked.

"This one," Truth took a step forward and a foot started to materialize on its left leg.

At the same time Ed's leg disintegrated. Horrified, he turned back to Truth but Truth was in his face.

"It's an equivalent exchange, right? Al-cha-mist?"

Then he was in the spare room again. Pain racked his body. He griped his left leg and felt a hot liquid under his fingers.

"Damn! This can't be happening! It wasn't… it wasn't supposed to… Damn it all!" he crawled on all fours but for some reason couldn't feel his left leg. He looked back at it.

"No, it's really gone," He cried out after seeing the stump just above his knee. Then he fell to his side landing on his right wing.

"Help! Someone! Mom! Mom…" He looked into the middle of the circle.

Ed saw his mom's dark shape in the mist. Joy overwhelmed him, but died quickly when the mist cleared. His already labored breaths caught in his throat. What ever that thing was…it wasn't his mom.

The thing had no skin and most of its organs were moving around in the spot where the stomach and chest should have been. Two purple eyes stared at him upside down as it took long shuttering breaths. It reached out to him only for the arm to snap off and fall. A puddle of dark blood that almost looked black was forming under it.

"No," he said weakly, "No, this isn't what we wanted!" He looked around for his little brother.

"Al…Alphonse…Alphonse! Alphonse!" He spotted a pile of clothes where his baby brother had once been.

"No, this is my fault… Alphonse!" he yelled his brother's name again as if it would bring him back.

Ed then spotted the old armor their family had had for centuries. Some of the knowledge the gate had given him provided the equation to bind a soul. He crawled towards the armor and tipped it over, making the head fall off.

"Damn it, damn it…" he said as he crawled to the open neck of the armor.

He started to draw a soul array in the blood that covered his fingers.

"Give him back! He's my brother!" He yelled as he drew it. He pulled out when he was done.

"Take my leg! Take my arm! TAKE MY HEART! YOU CAN HAVE IT!" He could feel tears running down his face. "So give him back! He's my only brother!"

He had no idea what made him do it, maybe it was the information from the gate or maybe a new instinct, but he clapped his hands together. A blinding blue light appeared between them.

Alphonse's POV

Alphonse came back to awareness in the dark room. The first thing he noticed was that he felt nothing. He waited for all his senses to come back, but after a few minutes when they didn't, he found that he could move but couldn't feel.

As he sat up he noticed that his body was different. Other then the obvious size difference, he heard the creaking of metal. He brought his hand in front of his face and saw the huge glove of a suit of armor.

Al put aside the different body and looked around the room. It was very dark and he could barely see anything. As his eyes roamed to the middle of the transmutation circle he saw something…something not human.

"Don't look, Al…" came the labored, wheezing voice of his brother.

Al turned his head to the part of the room he hadn't looked yet and saw his brother. Ed was panting and clutching his shoulder, but the thing was…there wasn't an arm attached to it.

Blood was flowing freely down the eldest brother's side, forming a puddle underneath him.

"Ed!" Al rushed to his brother's side just in time to catch Ed as he started to fall.

"I gave my arm… to transmute your soul to… that armor," Ed said between pants, "I'm sorry, I… couldn't get your body too."

"What happened? Our equation was perfect. How did it go wrong?" Al asked, if he could cry he would have been already.

"It wasn't the equation,…It was us." Ed said.

Then Alphonse noticed that Ed's leg was also missing. He shifted Ed a little bit so that he was lying in Al's lap. That's when Al saw Ed's wings. It took a second to register in Al's mind that the bulk of black attached to his brother's back were his wings. They were so black that Al hadn't noticed them before in the dark room. They blended in so well.

Al pushed the color change to the back of his mind then he focused on the freely bleeding wounds. He crudely wrapped them up to slow the bleeding.

"I got to get you to Granny's. She'll help," He said as he began to stand.

'Yeah," Ed said hoarsely, "That's probably a good idea, but I still have my wings out, don't I?"

"Yeah, you do," Al said as he ran out the door. He refrained from telling Ed about their new color.

"Let me put them away then," Ed's energy was fading, "after all, I think us coming to their door like this is enough to give them a heart attack, let alone with wings on my back."

"Don't talk too much, Brother, save your strength." Al said as the auto-mail shop came in to view over a hill.

By the time they reached the back door of the shop, Ed had his wings hidden., but he had passed out from the strain of putting them away. Al fell to his knees and held Ed with one arm as he knocked hard with the other. Thankfully, it was still early enough in the night for the lights to be on and for the Rockbells to still be awake.

Behind the door he heard voices talking. The door swung open to show a girl about the same age as the brothers were. Her face had a smile as she opened the door but her face dropped like a rock when she saw Al there with a half dead Ed in his arms.

The door swung all the way open revealing them to the elderly women at the kitchen table. Her face an exact copy of horror as the young girl. The two stared.

"Please, Granny, help my brother!" Al said.

The girl was the first to snap out of her shock. "A-Alphonse? Is that you?" Winry Rockbell asked.

"Yes, but help Brother first then I will explain."

That's when Granny Pinako snapped out of it. She got up and headed into the house and calling after them.

"Bring him over here, and quickly!" She led them to one of the hospital rooms in the other side of the house.

"Set him down on the bed." She said.

Al did as he was told and backed up to the doorway as the two doctors went to work. Winry was shaking badly and Pinako noticed.

"Winry, why don't you go clean Al off while finish up here?"

Winry looked glad to get out of the room were her childhood friend laid unconscious and bleeding. She led Al out of the room and back into the kitchen. She began busying herself by getting water and rags to clean the blood off of him. Al had just noticed how much blood was caked on his front.

Winry silently started to clean his chest plate first. She didn't seem like she wanted to ask any questions so he just stared down the hallway where Ed was.

It was a while later and Al was still watching for any sign that Ed was going to be alright. A small sound came from Winry, Al turned to her. She was looking down and was wringing her hands. She glanced up at him, but when she saw he was looking at her she quickly looked back down.

"Winry?" he asked nervously.

Winry flinched at his voice "I finished cleaning the blood off." She looked like she was going to say some thing else but went with that instead.

Al glanced back to the hallway but returned his gaze to the girl in front of him. She seemed to get up the courage to ask the question she wanted to.

"A-are you really Alphonse?"

"Yes," he said sadly, keeping her gaze.

"W-what happened?"

"We tried to bring our mother back." He said.

Winry looked down. "That's what you two have been doing, isn't it? That's why you've been studying all this time, right? To do this?"

"We didn't think it would turn out like this," Al said echoy voice trembling .

"Why!" Winry's sudden outburst startled Al, "Aren't we enough? Me and Granny?" Winry had tears in her eyes.

"Winry, you and Granny are the best, but you should understand how we feel." He said trying to calm her down but also clenching his fists at the thought of their failure.

Winry wiped her eyes realizing what drove them to try and bring their mother back.

"We were actually going to bring back your parents after we had mom back." He said in a small voice.

"You idiots." She keep her eyes shaded by her bangs but small tears rolled down her cheeks.

Just then Pinako came in. She looked exhausted.

"Ed will be fine. I have stopped the bleeding and gave him some medicine to help regain the blood he lost."

Her face grew hard and she frowned.

"Explain why you came to our door in a suit of armor with you brother bleeding to death." She said in a hard voice.

"We tried human transmutation. We tried to bring Mom back." Al said again.

Pinako's face softened as the heard the regret in his voice.

"I thought that it was forbidden for any alchemist to try and bring back the dead," she said sternly.

"It is, but we just wanted to see her smile again…" His voice started to crack.

"From what I understand, you two are lucky to be alive," Granny said coming up in front of him. "Tell me, Al, what happened?"

He told them the whole story, starting with when Ed first told him they were going to bring their mom back.

"…and what ever it was we made…it wasn't human." He finished up his story.

Both girls were silent until Winry spoke up.

"So… it was Ed's idea…" she said menacingly but still with a shaky voice.

"No, we both agreed and contributed to it." He said holding up his hands in front of him trying to save his brother from a death by wrench when he woke up. "It was both our faults."

"So you lost your body, Alphonse?" Pinako asked.

"Yeah," Al said then took off his helmet to show the empty inside.

Both girls gasped and stared. Winry looked close to tears again and Granny just looked stunned. Even though he did tell them before how he lost his body, seeing it made it more real for them.

Winry's POV

Winry was silent for a while. How could those idiots do this? They could have died, both almost died! And now Ed was in a coma and Al had no body.

"It's getting late; we should all go to bed." Granny's voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

Indeed it was almost past midnight. Winry sighed and shook her head as if to get rid of the thoughts of her two childhood friends near death experience. But when she opened her eyes and saw Al again they came back. She looked down to her feet not wanting to see Al just a soul in armor. She felt ashamed that she did that and was about to look back up at the youngest Elric when something caught her eye on the floor.

Under the table was a black feather. It was wet from the water she had used to clean Al off. This must have fell off Alphonse's armor because it still had some blood on it. Winry took it to the sink and rinsed it off. After drying it, it didn't get all matted and ugly like most bird feathers would after they got wet. This one seemed to puff out and shine.

She was just entranced by the beauty. She turned around again still looking at the feather. Al must have noticed she had something in her hands.

"What do you have, Winry?" He asked, curious.

"I think this was on you, Al. It still had some…some of E-Ed's blood on it." She shuttered thinking of how Ed looked covered in blood.

"Oh, ahhh…" Al's glowing red eyes seemed to widen when he saw the feather, "Maybe on the way over here a feather stuck to me…"

"Are you going to stay with your brother, Al?" Granny asked before Winry could ponder the feather more.

"Yeah, I think I will. I don't think you need to set up a bed though, I can't feel anything in this body, anyways." Al seemed sad when he told Granny how he couldn't feel any more.

"Oh, alright," Granny said uncertainly, "You call us if something seems wrong with him then."

"O.k." he said.

Then they all went to bed.

It took me forever to actually type this. It is different from how I first wrote it but I'm satisfied about it.

DyingHeartAlchemist

And it took me twice to beta this because I didn't save the changes the first time.

Keeper of the Times