A/N: Thiatereika: Fair enough. Keep enjoying the story, then, and I won't worry about directly answering a review you've left unless you've left me a way to get in touch with you.

Fair warning for all readers...Not everyone will actually get a re-introduction from Ed's perspective, and Granny Pinako is one of them. Yes, she's been a 'presence' in their lives, but not a big one, and not one I could actually work out a place for. Why? Even in canon, she wasn't there much, and she's an automail mechanic only, so there really isn't a place for one like her in the story line currently (no one currently needs automail). That may change with the arrival of the Gaians, but otherwise...She'll only get some brief mentions.

Divergent

The next three days passed mostly quietly. His mother, Aunt Sarah, and Uncle Yuri sat with him (he was even awake once when Granny Pinako did, which was mind-boggling in its own way), Winry was in and out when they weren't there with her walkie-talkie trials...And Al hadn't come back since they'd talked about bringing the dead back to life. While that hurt, Ed had long since learned not to pine after someone who had chosen to avoid him, so it didn't hurt as much as it probably would have hurt him before he'd ended up on Gaia. Al had to make the decision himself, and the topic had been especially painful—Al was probably avoiding him because he felt like he didn't know his own brother anymore.

It was on the third day that he felt well enough to sit up and even walk around a bit, soreness aside, so he grabbed the blank journals and writing utensils, found his way to a living room chair in the sun, wrapped himself in a blanket, and started on his alchemy journals. Getting started was the hardest part, but once he'd gotten out the first few lines, he suddenly found he had so much to say. Page after page filled with writing and drawing, on and on—it just flowed. He suddenly felt like he had to get it out. Even the drawings of the Eidolons, both male and female for the ones where there was a difference between the genders, found their way into the journals. It also, somehow, kept him from pining too much over everyone he was missing from Gaia.

"Ed? When did you learn to draw like that?" his mother's familiar voice suddenly asked in surprise, tearing him away from the sketch of Typhon he'd been working on, which was on a page opposite Kirin. He stared up at her uncomprehendingly, then looked back down at the journal, then looked back at her in confusion. He'd always been able to draw, after all!

"Trisha, you do realize alchemic arrays are a form of drawing, right?" Sarah asked the younger woman in amusement from the door to the room.

"Yes, I know—but I've never seen Ed sketch mythological creatures before," Trisha replied, and Ed realized what was wrong. They didn't know about the Eidolons.

"They aren't just myths," Ed pouted as Sarah moved over to look at the page he was open to. "They're Eidolons—summoned beings, or guardian spirits. They also operate on the same arrays I already draw—they're souls attached to them. Kirin is an over-time healer, and Typhon does multi-elemental damage—fire, ice, lightning, and earth all at once. That's these two. I have other pages with the Shivas and the Ifrits, and even though I can't stand them, I even drew all the variants of Bahamut, too."

"They have arrays?" Sarah asked in surprise.

With a faint sigh, Ed checked to make sure the ink on that page was dry, then flipped back to where he'd drawn the arrays which corresponded to the Summons as they appeared in Materia. Those, he'd lined up in two columns and three rows down the journal pages, much like he'd done the very first time he drew samples for Genesis. Pointing at the spread of twelve on those two pages he was open to, he indicated each array as he named them in order down the columns, "Phoenix, Sylph, Shiva, Ark, Atomos, Unicorn, Bahamut, Carbuncle, Ifrit, Kirin, Typhon, and Titan are here." He then flipped back to where he was drawing Typhon.

"That's...detailed," Sarah blinked in surprise. "Those arrays you drew for them—if we gave them to an expert, they'd be able to tell what they are, even if they claimed it was impossible?"

"They would," Ed agreed blandly. "But they wouldn't be able to use just that to Summon them, because souls are complicated things, and all of those Summons needs no less than thirty sub-arrays to actually make them functional and summon-able."

Sarah's lips quirked in amusement as she commented, "I don't think that's a word, Ed. I agree that souls are complicated, though."

Shrugging the boy replied, "It's a word when summoning is a thing."

Before Sarah could reply, Trisha began giggling, saying, "I'm so glad to see you feeling better, Ed. Even if you're drawing some odd things—I much prefer you do so if it shows you're getting better. Are you going to start doing a lot of drawing now? I mean, not arrays, but things like those—um...Eidolons?"

"Wow, you remembered the name!" Ed blinked, pausing in his drawing to look up at her in amazement. She blinked, then smiled, and he tipped his head to the side. Was he going to draw more things like that? He'd only started cultivating the skill for things besides the precision of the arrays because one of the Lucrecias had made him sit and draw a few of the Eidolons for her, just to prove the point that he could draw freehand, even if his preference was to draw things which were real. It had worked as a kind of therapy, like the Lucrecia in that first dimension with Lady Shinra had suggested.

Then he realized he was being stupid and said, "I probably will draw more things, but I don't know what or how much until I do it. I only know the Eidolons because I'm doing them right now as part of my journals."

"You're starting your alchemic journals with spirit arrays?" Sarah blinked in surprise.

In response, Ed snorted and reached down beside him for the book he'd already filled, offering it to her. Both women gaped at him in shock, then took the journal away to read it. With a shrug, he went back to work, quickly finishing Typhon to flip the page and start on the Titans, male and female.

His drawing was interrupted again soon after as he sensed a small presence (he was glad his senses were starting to work properly again!) not far away—the door to the room, maybe? Since Winry would have run in to hand him another walki-talkie trial, he had to guess it was either Al or another of the village's children. By their hesitance...probably Al. Rather than react to Al's presence beyond an initial pause, he kept working on the drawing of the female Titan (he'd already finished the male).

Finally, the small presence approached, and Al's tentative voice asked, "Um...Ed...Can I...talk to you?"

"I never said you couldn't in the first place," Ed replied, still working, other than a glance up to meet Al's blue eyes briefly. Come to think of it, how had Al gotten blue eyes when their mother's were green and their father's were gold? "So, talk."

Al hesitated for a long moment, then asked, "Would you really...not try to bring our mom back if she died? Would you really not try to save her?"

Ah. That was how Al had interpreted his refusal to try to bring back the dead. Carefully, he set aside his drawing and capped the ink so he could face Al and the boy would know he had his older brother's full attention.

"Al, that wasn't what I said. If she's already dead and too far gone to be brought back, there's nothing to save. But that's very different from trying to keep her from even dying in the first place, to save her from death before then. Al, I would do anything to save you or Mom from dying. If you were hurt or sick, either of you, I'd even give my own life to save you so you don't die at all," Ed explained with feeling. "You're the two most important people to me, followed closely by the Rockbells, and that means a lot. You really can't undo death, Al, so because that's not possible, I'd try to find ways to keep that 'death' from happening in the first place, until you died naturally of old age."

"What about making it so people just don't die?" Al asked, plopping down on the floor to gaze intently at his brother. "Even from being old? Or so they don't get old?"

Pausing to think about that, Ed had wonder if it was lack of infinite life which made people think living forever was great. Still, he had to cut Al some slack and say, "I suppose in theory it might be possible, but that assumes nothing kills the person and that there's a way to reverse the effect."

Al frowned and said, "But then it's not making people not die."

Shaking his head, the older blond offered, "Al, even if you could keep humans from dying from old age or disease, you still can't stop accidents or malicious actions of others. If someone walks below some, say, scaffolding being lifted up to a higher floor of a building being built and the ropes holding the scaffolding break, the person under it is still going to die. You can't make that kind of thing not happen, no matter how perfect a society you have—it's called an 'accident' for a reason, because you can't always prevent something you didn't expect."

"Ooooh..." Al murmured, brow furrowing as he thought. Finally, he said, "Then...to stop the most people from dying, you'd have to be an alchemic doctor and know the most ways possible to fix something that was wrong with someone."

Ed blinked in surprise at the assessment, then said, "Yeah, I guess that's it. If what I heard from Uncle Yuri once is true, then there's really only one very skilled medical alchemist in all of Amestris. Maybe we need more of them."

"Then I'll be one," Al said definitively. When Ed blinked, the younger blond said, "You said we would have to decide what kind of alchemist we would be, because there are a lot of types. I really think you're an inventor, but—I want to save people and help people. If I can't do that by bringing them back from the dead, then being a doctor and a medical alchemist is the next best way to do that."

With a faint smile at where Al's thoughts had taken him over those days he'd been avoiding Ed, he told his younger brother, "It's going to be a lot of work, but I think you'll be able to do it."

For the first time since he'd entered the room, Al's face lit in a smile, and the younger boy pushed himself up to reach out and hug his brother. Ed hugged him back, wondering what would happen if his and Al's paths diverged so early on.

Then, Al reverted to the first question and asked, "So you really mean you wouldn't just let something bad happen to Mom?"

"Of course I wouldn't!" Ed stared at the younger blond like he'd grown another head. "I love her just as much as you do, Al! I'd never want to see her hurt or dead. It's just—some things really can't be done, or prevented. That's just the way the world works. It wouldn't stop me from doing everything I could to stop the worst from happening."

Nodding, Al smiled again and told him, "Good. I was really worried for a bit."

After a long pause, the older blond asked, "So...You're done avoiding me now?"

"Yeah," the younger agreed. "Winry was a pest, though, handing me her—phone thingy to test every ten minutes yesterday. She didn't stop until I asked her why, and I had to agree I'd talk to you today. That thing—it almost works now. I never actually thought she could make a phone you could carry with you—that's not what they're for, after all. Even if she was a pest, it's still really amazing."

Ed started snickering as he said, "Better you then me. But she still handed it to me a couple times anyway." He pulled his book back over into his lap and said, "But I still have stuff to finish, so maybe you could read some of Auntie's and Uncle's medical books while I finish up?" He was a little surprised by how easily the term 'Auntie' instead of 'Aunt' had come to him. Influence from his actually five-year-old soul part?

"Yeah!" Al grinned suddenly, jumping up to find some books off the shelves in the living room. Normally, neither boy was much interested in them, but with Al's new goal, they had suddenly become interesting.

Both were about to settle into a comfortable silence with Al sitting against Ed's seat, when Winry's familiar voice huffed, "Finally!" Both looked up at her in surprise, and she crossed her arms and said, "You were being stupid boys! Now you're okay again. Now I can finish my carry-phones."

"Walkie-talkies," Ed threw in absently, focus on his drawings, not realizing both of them turned to stare at him in surprise.

"Walkie...talkie..." Winry repeated slowly, in a musing tone, and Ed almost groaned as he realized what he'd just done. "Walkie—talkie. Walkiiieee talkiiieee." Then, she apparently got really happy as she grinned and chirped, "Thanks, Ed! I like it! I'll call them walkie-talkies!"

Al started giggling as Ed turned bright red, but he was suddenly thankful he'd just lifted his pen when Winry crashed into his side to hug him tightly around the neck. Then, she froze and asked in awe, "What are those?" Suddenly, his book wasn't in his hands anymore, and she began flipping through it.

"What is it, Win?" Al asked, and Winry plopped down beside him on the floor, flipping to the images Ed had been drawing of the Eidolons.

"Look at this!" she said, and both of them 'oooo'ed' and 'aaah'ed' over the sketches, and Ed sighed, capped the ink, and leaned back in the chair to rest while he waited for them to finish.

Apparently, he had also fallen asleep, as a hand shaking him made him start awake to see Al leaning over him with the book held open to one of the pages of Eidolon arrays as the younger boy stared at him in something like horror. "Al?" he asked, still not fully awake.

"You said you can't bring the dead back, but these are all soul arrays," Al told him in a soft voice. "And I read what you wrote in here, too, once Winry was done with the drawings and left. This—"

"Not my creations," Ed answered flatly. "I know what they are, but I didn't create them. Not for them to be in those forms, and not to combine those properties with souls. They're—like, guardian spirits and things people can call on to ask for help if they know all the arrays. I only gave the main one there, so no one would actually be able to get a result from it if they tried to use it. Humans can't create those, only ask them for help."

For a long minute, Al just stared at him, then asked, "Arrays really anchor the soul?"

Sighing, Ed nodded. "The soul and the body are two different things, and use complicated arrays to function just for one or the other. But to make the soul stay attached to something physical—like the body—there are also arrays which bind them together. Death happens when those binding arrays are severed. Then, the soul arrays are released, and the body's arrays begin to deteriorate."

"So where do the soul arrays go if they aren't just destroyed or start to deteriorate?" Al asked thoughtfully.

"Back to the planetary energy they came from," the older blond replied dryly.

Al's eyes rose from the book to his brother's gold, and he asked slowly, "It goes back to a bigger energy?" When Ed nodded, he asked, "That's why we can't get it back?" Again, Ed nodded. Then, Al blinked and said, "That's why our best bet is to learn to fix things or heal things before the person dies, so they stay anchored here, not somewhere we can't get them back from. And these spirits are the link that gave us the clue to how we had to do things. That's why you had to explain them in so much detail."

"Yeah," Ed agreed. "The part about the energies would have been in the first book, but Mom and Auntie Sarah took it with them earlier."

"Oooooh," the younger boy murmured. He then put the book back in his brother's lap and said, "I think Uncle Yuri took your first book out with him. I don't know where he went, though."

That was somehow very annoying to Ed, making him scowl. Al gave him an odd look, and the older blond sighed as he returned his gaze to his book. Flipping back to where he'd been, he uncapped his ink again and went back to what he was working on—the images of the second last and last Summon type.

"Yeah, an alchemic doctor, then," Al murmured after a minute, gaze off in the distance. He then turned and ran out of the room, making Ed blink down at his page in momentary surprise.

"Didn't he already decide that?" he asked himself softly, but kept working steadily. He wanted to at least finish the sketches by dark, and after his nap earlier, he didn't have much longer. He was so focused on the last sketch that he didn't notice Al returning with one of Sarah's books on medicine and the body.

He also didn't notice falling asleep again and being carried up to his 'patient room' by his mother, or notice Aunt Sarah putting all his books, papers, ink, and writing utensils on the nightstand beside him.

FoWD-HC

When he woke in the morning to a burst of pain and a cool cloth on his forehead, he was very confused for a minute. Once the pain passed, his mind started processing data again, and he opened his eyes to see his aunt beside him as morning sun shone in from the window of the bedroom. Turning his head to look at her in tired confusion, she smiled and answered the unspoken question, "You fell asleep in the living room chair, so we moved you back to your room."

"...Oh. I didn't know I'd fallen asleep," he answered, gaze wry.

Nodding, she agreed, "Which is a common side effect of exhaustion, pain, and stress, all three of which you've had in big doses since collapsing." The blond woman paused for a minute, then asked, "Earlier, you said others would be coming here from...some other world?"

"When I was pulled into the meeting with the entity called Truth, Minerva joined me there," he told her. "She said, if I wanted her help, she would join me here, 'with all of her little children', which is how she thinks of the people on Gaia, the world she just left. It's because she phrased it in that way. It also means the Omega is going to land here, probably not far from Amestris, or right in it—depends on where Minerva decides is best to land."

"...So...What kind of people will be arriving here, if it was from a destroyed world?" she asked, gaze apprehensive.

"The people she took with her won't be the ones who destroyed it," he answered in amusement, then looked thoughtfully towards one window. "Actually, she usually has to do it suddenly, so she ends up first just taking everyone who was still alive at the moment she launched. But, she's not stupid and doesn't want destructive people to begin what's supposed to be a new society, so she runs a 'cleansing' of all those on the Omega body. Those who have no hope of changing their harmful ways will dissolve back into her energy and genetic data, but the rest will be left unharmed, or in a better head-space than they were when they were taken on board the Omega. That means these are the good people who don't want to see the same kind of suffering they just left behind."

He paused again for a moment before looking up at her. "Some are their version of the State Alchemists, the Military, the Special Forces, the Secret Service. Some are engineers, scientists, doctors, businessmen. Some are children, students, housewives, working men and women. Some are Mages—they're like alchemists who can cast without literally needing to draw an array—and some are healers—they're like alchemic doctors. Most of them look human, but some look like large cats with burning tail tips, and she takes along the robots like the Cait Siths, too, which look like bi-pedal cats. I guess their leader at this point would be Lady Shinra, though."

Sarah's brow rose and she asked, "Lady Shinra?"

Ed gave her an amused smile and explained, "On their world, in their passage of time—which is different from here—they had developed centralized power around the middle of the nineteen sixties. The Shin-Ra Electric Power Company became literally the world power by the time I arrived, which was about forty years later—we'd have called it the year two thousand, but they called it the year zero. Shinra was its only form of large-scale governing, but it was still just a business, even if it was one that ruled the world and had its own military and built cities. It was owned by Marius Shinra, who was its 'President', and its Vice President was Janelle Shinra, his wife. She's the one everyone unanimously calls 'Lady Shinra', even her closest friends sometimes."

"Why does she insist they call her that if they're her friends?" the blond woman asked with a frown.

Shaking his head, he replied, "She doesn't. Everyone else just decided it suited her and she just never bothered to try to get them to stop, because she really doesn't care what they call her as long as she knows they're addressing her and not someone else."

Again, his aunt's brow rose as she asked, "You mean she wouldn't care if they called her a whore as long as she knew it was her they meant?"

Blinking, Ed processed the question, then smirked and answered, "When they did something like that, she usually replied with something along the lines of, 'Whether I am or not, I have standards, and you're not on my list, now either tell me why you're here or run along and play, little boy.' That usually shuts them right up and makes them back down, so it works in her favor. I think they all forget she was a girl from the slums before she became Lady Shinra—they've all forgotten the President was the same, too."

Blinking, Sarah commented, "You seem to know a lot about her for someone not even from their world."

Pausing, Ed's brow furrowed as he thought about how best to address the point. Finally, he sighed and said, "Aunt Sarah...I was jumping from dimension to dimension on Gaia for a very long time. By the first time I'd met Lady Shinra—the first dimension I arrived in where she was still alive—I'd already been alive for over three hundred years, and been in over a hundred dimensions. Since then, I've been in at least a hundred more, but my life expectancy rose exponentially, so that often I was dying of old age before being shunted off to the next dimension and reverted to my sixteen-year-old form. I've been living, and learning things, for over—well, at about ninety years (1) in a hundred dimensions, that's around nine thousand years. Not exact, but I don't think I have a way to make it more specific."

Sitting beside him in shock, she asked, "That's why you've matured so much and didn't 'argue' with Al the way children usually would have...?" She sounded winded, and he knew he really hadn't been so specific in how long he'd lived when he'd last talked with them about it. But, he had to nod to her query, and she just gave her head a dazed shake. "Of all the..."

"Yeah..." he agreed, then realized he should probably be honest the rest of the way. "The only problem was that, in the first—around three hundred years—I got used to being tortured. None of it should show physically now, even though it would have on my sixteen-year-old body, but it did affect my mind and sometimes I still have what the doctors called a 'relapse'. I mean...Sometimes I still react with panic, or fight and flight, or with some sort of response you'd usually see from a returning soldier or a long-term hostage. So far, we've all actually been really lucky that we haven't found an accidental trigger, but that doesn't mean we won't."

"And you won't be able to stop the reaction," she replied, tone both tired and aware. It wasn't common in a small town, but it still happened. "The only issue will be explaining to anyone else who sees them what just happened, but Yuri and I should be able to manage now that we know it may happen. Thank you for letting us know before it took us by surprise."

"That's kinda why I thought I should probably mention it," Ed agreed quietly.

She nodded, then smiled. "So, besides working more on your journals, did you have any plans today or anything you wanted to do to test your recovery?"

"Um," he blinked, then looked down at one arm for a moment. "You might want to check what my blood's like. How thin it is will probably tell us how much has been replaced by now, and how much longer this is likely to go on."

Blinking, she commented, "That's a good point, and a small sample won't hurt you. I'll talk with Yuri about it and we'll do that later today. Breakfast here or in the kitchen?"

Pausing for a moment, Ed thought about how he felt, then decided, "I'll give the kitchen a try, and maybe if it goes well, I could move back to the living room while you get my papers? Otherwise, I'd just come back here."

She smiled and agreed, "We can do that. Maybe later we can also try getting you in a proper bath as well, rather than the sponge baths we've been giving you. We'll see how the day goes."

"Okay," he agreed, letting her help him to his feet. Now that he thought about it, a real bath sounded really good...So later, he'd really like to have one if he felt up to it. That was something to look forward to.

Notes:

(1) This 90-year estimate for Ed's life seems a bit longer than average, right? First, he's got Mako for blood, so his body doesn't break down in the same way others' would. That's the most important point. He's also got Cetra blood to help him along, and has been taking care of himself better (or others were taking care of him). Also, for the most part, since that first dimension with Lady Shinra, he really hasn't been a Turk, or any other combat-related job which would have exponentially (potentially) shortened his lifespan. That doesn't mean he hasn't gone out and fought or helped the Turks/SOLDIERs/etc. (he obviously has, because he was the one who was fighting Fuhito when everything blew up), but he's not been going out of his way to make himself a target.

So yes, between all those things, his average lifespan has generally been closer to 90 years if he was allowed to die naturally of old age, but that doesn't mean every dimension he was ever in gave him a life that long—at least two still got him killed within his first month of being on Gaia. And yes, that means Ed's total time alive now, in the 'last' dimension, is around 9,000 years.