First Meeting
Evening came sooner than he'd realized, caught up in his work as he was, which had made both Trisha and Al giggle at him. Supper at home, in his own kitchen, with his mother and brother sitting with him, had been both surreal and very much something he'd give anything to have again. Well, in theory, he'd given a whole lot in order to have this again. He'd been over the moon with joy just to be sitting there with them both, and once again thought that maybe Truth hadn't been wrong to send him back to his five-year-old's body. He'd barely even joined their cheerful chatter, he'd been too absorbed in just feeling like everything was right in the world again, he was well and truly home.
Towards the end of the meal, however, the shock of it all wore off and he realized something he had never thought he ever would. He well and truly loved his family, his mother and brother, but he'd spent the equivalent of thousands of years with the people from Gaia, and it hurt not having them there. Those people—they were his family, too, and he couldn't just disregard that. He missed them, truly missed them more than he'd have realized before, and what would make him the happiest would be having both of his families at the same table, eating together happily.
When he finally left the table, Al followed him upstairs as he asked, "So, what are we going to study tonight before bed, Big Brother?"
It was just so familiar Ed nearly broke down in tears, but then remembered the work they'd have to do on the healing water. "Have you read all of my hand-written journals already, Al?" he asked, glancing over at the younger boy as he opened the door to his room and headed for the bed.
"All but the—What happened to your desk?" the younger boy suddenly stopped and gaped, and Ed snorted in amusement.
"Remodeling. It didn't turn out like I expected, but I think it's grown on me," he answered, not bothering to look at his brother—and ignoring his own pun, though it made Al giggle. Instead, he began collecting his journals with the intent to move them to the desk. "About my journals?"
"Oh, right." Al paused for a moment, like he was mentally shifting tracks (which Ed supposed he was), then went on, "I've read all of them except the most recent one, the one you're not done yet."
"Okay, then you should know enough to help me with something which, if we can make it work, will be the closest thing to a miracle cure which will ever exist," Ed answered, setting the journals down next to his papers and looking up at Al shrewdly. "I think you'll be better at it, just because you want to be able to do exactly that. Maybe there are things it can't fix, and actually bringing someone back to life or making them younger it can't do, but if I'm right, it should be able to fix even things like plague or—say, tuberculosis."
Al's eyes widened as he said, "But Dad's books said those kinds of things can't be fixed with alchemy!"
"The way alchemy is being used in Amestris, or even in Xing, right now, they can't," Ed agreed. "But with my method, which is different from normal alchemy, it can be, especially if we can catch something before it becomes really bad. We'll have to start from the base of the arrays for Cure, Esuna, and Resist from in my fourth journal."
"If we're going to do that, could we start from Full Cure, which was both Cure and Esuna, rather than the two separately?" Al asked curiously. "Or in the fifth journal, you talked about that version of Cure you called 'Healing Wind', so could we use that? And why did you even give them those strange names?"
"I'm not actually the one who named them," Ed answered in dry amusement. "Also, those are the runes inscribed into the arrays for their functionality—those are the closest translations of the basic purpose of the arrays. As to starting with Full Cure or Healing Wind, I think we can add them to our studies, and depending on how they compare to the singular options, we may be able to substitute them for some parts. We also may not, because of how much more detailed these arrays and sub-arrays are compared to Amestrian alchemy."
"Okay, but Healing Wind definitely has one thing the others don't—it already has terms to let it affect many people," Al pointed out, gazing at his brother in something like amazement.
After a startled moment, Ed realized an important point: so did Great Gospel, the literal base which needed to transition into the liquid form to create healing water. But, Great Gospel wasn't in the journals yet—it would be going into the one he was working on, when he talked about the maximum limits of what a Limit Break could do depending on one's nature. As such, if they were to use it, which they should probably have as a reference from the start regardless, for obvious reasons, he'd have to provide a copy and an explanation to Al.
"Point," Ed admitted, and shifted papers to a clean sheet to begin drawing out the Great Gospel arrays. "I'm going to add one more set of arrays, for a skill called Great Gospel—again, I didn't name it—which is actually the likely closest base we have. It was supposed to go towards the end of the journal I'm working on, but I think we need it sooner. But, the problem is making the transition between pure energy and a physical substance, without losing the energy effect in the process—the whole system of arrays has to be able to stay active so that it reacts when it's put into a body. That stored energy would also be what it would use to do the healing, so there needs to be enough energy for it to draw on to cause the full healing effect."
While Ed worked, Al thought about the explanation, his brow furrowed in a small frown, until he finally asked slowly, "So the biggest problem isn't in the healing instructions, it's in...how to stuff lots of energy into a small space and...keep it from exploding while it's still trying to do something?"
"Pretty much," Ed agreed, lips quirked in amusement. "Maybe that would mean certain exclusion arrays..." Had those ever been in the final result he or Aeris had gotten? Nina's had no such things as exclusion of anything, but the arrays the way he and Aeris had been required to use them may have had one or two. By nature, the healing water couldn't be used for anything but healing, and would never harm. The energy of the planet was benign in that.
"The thing is," he began, while Al watched him work. "That it's not alchemic energy we need to 'stuff into a small space' or 'keep from exploding', it's—"
"The planetary energy your new alchemy is based on," Al finished right away. "I was really careful reading anything you wrote about healing, Big Brother. While we can do those things with our own energy, planetary energy naturally heals when it's used the right way, and there's way more of it than we could actually track levels for. Small bits of it would be able to heal a lot of people, and it would be almost impossible for it to hurt a person unless they got too much. Maybe what we'd need is something in the arrays to be sure anything the body couldn't use would just pass through them?"
A small smile came to Ed's face as he heard that assessment, so he agreed, "That's something we'll probably have to work out, yes. We also have a limited supply of that kind of energy around—when I accidentally did this to my desk, I realized there's literally a wall of—well, bad energy—keeping planetary energy out of this area. That kinda distracted me from my desk, so it apparently decided it wanted to grow again. Drawing in enough energy to do something with will also be hard with a very big wall in the way, so we have to figure out a way to make up for that."
"Or to get rid of the wall?" Al asked.
Ed hummed in response. "We'll have to do that, too, but Al, I think we need to do this first, get at least enough of this stuff for Auntie Sarah and Uncle Yuri to give to everyone in town, and soon."
"Why?" the younger boy asked in confusion, and Ed was suddenly reminded of how young they all were. Al was four, he and Winry were five years old...And to both Al and Winry, none of the things he knew made any sense.
Sighing, Ed said, "I know Mom asked me not to tell you, but she's actually already sick and has been for awhile—it's just that what she has will take a long time to kill her. But, it won't be long before a plague comes here because those come around every so often, and with her being sick already, it's not likely she'll survive. We only have a couple years at most. I know that sounds like a lot because we're kids, but Al...When it comes to making medicine...it's not a long time. Most medicines can only really be used after ten years or more of development and testing, and we have to do this—well, as soon as possible. The sooner we do it, the better."
"But then, how will we know it will work if it needs ten years or more?" the four-year-old asked in confusion.
Ed's gaze turned far away. "Because I've already seen it work for..." He then remembered where he was and that so far, only Sarah and Yuri knew he'd ever been anywhere but Amestris. He wasn't sure Al would believe a story like what he had to tell, and the more people who knew about it right then, the more likely it was that something would go very wrong very soon. As much as he could say he'd been watching it work for hundreds (or thousands) of years, he was physically only five years old and couldn't have been alive long enough to have seen any such thing.
"Big Brother?" Al asked when the older blond stopped speaking.
"It's worked for people before, but not here, because nature made it there, not people," Ed answered, getting back to work. It was also partially true, though he also knew it was partly a lie, and didn't like that he had to do it. "Now we have to take a very rare, natural phenomena and make it to order. That's going to be the hardest part."
"How could nature do it with the wall in the way?" the younger blond blinked, reaching out for the journals to find the ones with the arrays they needed to reference.
"Because I don't think the wall is everywhere around the world, only in some parts, so there would still be places where things work right. It's a big world, after all," the older brother offered. And if it had five sentiences already, if Ishbala was the only sealed one, then the areas of the others would still function properly. It was even possible that all five sentiences could be sealed, but there would still be some places where the walls covering them just didn't exist. That, in turn, implied the walls weren't over a land space, but rather, were targeted to surrounding the sentience's core...
"So it's kind of already done, just not by people, and not in places where we can get it easily..." Al mused. "But if you're right and Mom's already sick with something, any kind of sickness coming here would be bad for her."
"It would," Ed agreed.
After a long silence, Al said, "Okay, let's do this, then. If it's the only way we can save Mom before something bad happens, and if it will save others, then—we have to."
With a small smile, the older brother looked up at the younger and said, "Thanks, Al. Here's the Great Gospel arrays."
Al blinked at it for a minute, then gasped, "Hey, is that immunity to death?"
"Only for about a minute, and this form doesn't work on illness, only on physical injury. This is the other reason why we have to change it," Ed agreed.
"Oooooh," Al murmured. "And, it's too short-term."
"The one we're trying to make is 'short-term', too, and can't be anything else. It does an instant heal to optimum status, then stops working, but in the meantime, the body is better able to take care of itself by having been made fully healthy. The cure itself doesn't just keep working forever. But fixing what's wrong in that moment still means most things aren't a danger anymore," Ed explained. "I can't say that's universal—some illnesses and plagues are so bad they'll risk killing you no matter how healthy you are. The water we're trying to make will just give anyone who takes it a way better chance, and if they can take it while they have the plague, it should purge it.
"Great Gospel protecting someone from physical harm for a minute means even if they were crushed by a falling rock, as long as they weren't still under the rock when Great Gospel wore off, they'd still be alive. But, it takes a lot of energy to do that, so it's the kind of thing to be used in the moment it's needed, not before, and not all the time. We'll recover from scratches just fine, but not from being shot in the head or being stabbed through the heart. That's what it was meant to protect others from. It can also revive and heal by the same terms things like Cure and Revive work on, which still doesn't fix illness."
"Op-ti-mum..." Al repeated slowly, then nodded. "Okay. Is that one done now?" Ed pushed the arrays for Great Gospel over to Al, who eyed them for a long time. "It's small. I think we have to keep this part, if I'm reading it right, though. It's hard to read, like some of Dad's books." As he spoke, the boy pointed at a part of the main array.
With a smile, Ed noted that down and said, "Probably, yes, we'll need that part. Anything else?"
In the end, the two worked until past bedtime, only stopping because their mother threatened to take their books and papers away if they didn't go to bed. By then, Ed felt better about the situation and his ability to save her this time—or to let Al have that honor. He already knew the barrier would be his job to fix, but the question remained—how?
FoWD-HC
For a few weeks, life drifted into a kind of stable flow, a soothing pattern which could easily trick the mind into thinking nothing was wrong, nothing needed fixing. What reminded Ed that he still had things to do was the persistent reminders of who wasn't there yet—Minerva and all the people he'd known and thought of like family on Gaia. Every time he met and re-met people, things had changed in small ways, but some of the most potent changes had been persistent. He had a very limited number of potential partners, for example, but he had never known in each lifetime which one would resonate with him most strongly. And he still missed them all, even knowing they were on their way.
As time passed, their lack of presence was more and more keenly felt, but also the fact that he wasn't really sure what would become of his most recent one now that he was in a child's body. Somehow, that chaffed in a way he doubted a five-year-old could normally feel.
It wasn't just about the person to whom he was closest, either. He legitimately wasn't able to see the world through the eyes of a child any longer, and Al and Winry having child-like discussions about what they'd do in the future, who they'd marry, or what they should do for fun felt a lot more like being a babysitter than a playmate. It had hit home for him how far apart from them his view of the world was when Winry had announced to Al that she was going to marry Ed. Both of them had looked at him strangely when he'd asked why they'd want to get married, or decide that, when they were all of five years old.
He really hadn't remembered her ever saying that, either.
No amount of input from his younger soul would allow his behavior to revert to a child's—his soul had just lived for too long. It wasn't that he couldn't play or have fun, or just do silly things with his two younger 'siblings', but having that 'fun' wasn't just with the open freedom to 'have fun', it was in the way a parent or babysitter had fun while keeping an eye on their charges. As much as he should have been a child and able to just enjoy life, he had found he felt more comfortable mostly just watching them play.
Until then, he had also never realized how persistent the pair could be when they wanted him to play with them, to the point where they'd grab his hands and drag him along with them. If they wanted his full attention, they made sure they had it until they were done with whatever they'd wanted him to join them for—building a blanket-and-cushion fort, a game of tag, or hide-and-seek, or make-believe. What had left him most bemused about the last option had been realizing Winry had been the 'Prince', Al had been the 'Princess', and Ed had been the 'bad guy' in whatever form it took, in about nine out of ten games. A search of his few younger soul's memories had correlated that.
The next time Winry said she'd marry him, he asked if she was sure about that when Al was the Princess to her Prince, and both of them had turned very flustered. While it had been amusing for him, since then, they had stopped talking about who they would marry.
His mother had wanted him to go to school, too. He'd gone the first day and asked the teacher for all the most advanced tests for their highest grade—in a town the size of Resembool, that was only grade six, the last year of compulsory schooling all students had to take before they could choose to go to work. It was a one-room schoolhouse with all the grades in the same class, just grouped together in grade clusters, so everyone heard him ask for the grade six tests. They jeered, and he ignored them, focused so strongly on the teacher that the teacher actually looked a little scared as she gave in and handed him the tests. Though, she gave him the final test for every grade.
By the end of the day, he'd finished them all and given them back.
Later that evening, the teacher called his mother and the two talked for some time before ending the call, and Trisha told Ed that he didn't have to go to school if he could pass all the tests—he'd just disrupt the other students. Since that had been the point, he agreed and promised he wouldn't bother her during the day, since he had his own books and work to keep him busy. She knew that, so had agreed to leave him to his own devices unless she saw him doing, or not doing, something which wasn't appropriate. That was both fair and something he didn't think would be an issue.
But, that peace wasn't fated to last, and it was while Al and Winry were in school (Al had been allowed into Kindergarten early, so spent afternoons there) that Ed realized his time was up and he'd have to make a decision about his path soon.
That day, he was crouched in the garden by one of his mother's plants—one which was wilting early, before its final round of produce was ready in fall. It shouldn't have been, and he wasn't able to find any traces of what might be wrong with it. He'd checked for anything and everything he could think of which would affect a plant, and none of them were wrong. The only thing left was the levels of energy in the ley lines flowing around the world, his world's version of the Lifestream. And he already knew not enough could very well kill random plants, or whole swaths of them.
As such, he'd need to push through the barrier again so he could rejuvenate the plant and refresh the whole garden. For that, he knew he needed to use the arrays he knew for growing plants, but modified to their multi-array forms he'd learned on Gaia, especially since that would stabilize the flow and pull in more ambient energy. While the ambient energy, which was essentially just random, floating energy, wouldn't be as good as restoring the Lifestream in the area, it would still be something the plants could feed on in the meantime.
Focusing on the arrays he needed, he closed his eyes and let them build in glowing lines around his wrist, even as he made sure to direct most of the energy at the wilting plant. As he let the process work, he felt a small burst of amusement and appreciation from Ishbala and smiled faintly as he stayed focused. When he opened his eyes after the flow stopped, he found that this time, the energy had done exactly what he'd called it for and smiled again.
"Do you realize how incredible natural talent like that is?" a voice asked him, a voice he didn't know. Looking up in alarm, he found that he was looking at a younger Doctor Marcoh whose hair was all still black, but also realized he really knew nothing about the man. If Ed was remembering correctly, he had been called the Crystal Alchemist. He'd met him during his first try in Amestris, but they had never been 'close'. Still, Marcoh was more trust-worthy than many people he could name, and definitely wasn't in Bradley's pocket.
Remembering he couldn't act like he knew the man, he asked, "Who are you?" instead, and the man smiled.
"I'm called Doctor Tim Marcoh, from Central," the man answered, walking over to crouch by the plant he'd been working on to examine it. "Your mother sent a very interesting letter to my home while trying to find your father. Since he refused to read it, I took the liberty and forced the issue. I'm glad I did. What was wrong with this plant?"
For a long moment, Ed just stared at him, then spun to face the door into the house—and saw his father standing...awkwardly...just inside the house. He huffed in annoyance, then realized Marcoh was giving him a knowing look and said, "It didn't have enough energy to grow properly."
"Not going to greet your father?" Marcoh asked in amusement.
"Why should I greet the man who abandoned us?" Ed replied flatly.
To his surprise, the Doctor sat down cross-legged where he was on the path and offered, "I know it feels that way. It's hard to deal with when someone whose presence you're used to is suddenly gone, and nothing can change that pain." When he blinked at the man in surprise, Marcoh went on gently, "That's not normally the best way to handle your loved ones. On some level, we all know that, don't we? But when we all feel we're doing what's best for those we care about, we usually forget to think about what our absence will mean for them. What I can tell you, though, is that he never 'forgot' about you—he made sure he sent you money to see to your needs. He may have made a bad decision, but not out of a desire to hurt or be rid of you. Could you just think on that for awhile, young man? And in the meantime, could you tell me what energy you mean?" At the last, he motioned at the plant beside them.
While Ed had met a lot of insightful people, he had never known Marcoh would be one of them, and the words stung in a way he hadn't felt in a very long time. When combined with his father's expression in the photographs they had...He wasn't ready to delve too deeply into that just then. So, he let his eyes drift to the plant as well, and said, "I checked everything that could be wrong, but nothing explained it. If it's true you got some of my journal pages, maybe they mentioned a planetary energy?"
"They did, yes, but only briefly and without all the information," Marcoh agreed. "If what was on those pages was true, though, there should be enough energy to go around."
"There would be. If there wasn't a wall in the way, blocking it off—an alchemic wall," Ed answered flatly, and Marcoh blinked in surprise.
"...An alchemic wall..." the older man mused thoughtfully. "Maybe that's why we..." He then paused and reached out to gently run his fingers over the leaves on the restored plant. "So those glowing arrays around your wrist—those were to pull in energy from past the wall?"
"...They were arrays to restore the plant, which drew in extra energy by default. Those kind of arrays I was using can bypass the wall, but it's hard. The reaction isn't supposed to take so long," Ed explained with a faint sigh.
"What about the energy from the plate tectonics?" Marcoh asked curiously, then blinked in surprise when Ed snorted.
"Plate tectonics?" the boy asked derisively. "You can't shove the energy from plate tectonics out of the area and render alchemy useless and unresponsive."
"What are you saying?" the man asked in alarm, shifting as though he was about to rise. However, he froze when he heard Ed's next word.
"Death," the blond boy bit out. "Energy released from the body when it bleeds, when it dies. Think back on our history. It's exceptionally bloody, and steeped in death—there isn't an inch of soil in Amestris which isn't soaked in blood. Where that blood is strongest is in a very neat circle around the border of the country—the base circle of an array, a circle nearly impossible to break because the blood spilled there is anchoring it. The war against Ishbal is just another excuse to spill blood on one more crucial point on that circle. All you have to do to see it is chart all our wars on a bloody map of the country and it's openly visible. You just have to look. And all of that death is also what's powering standard alchemy, and the resulting energy is easy to dislodge."
For a long time, Marcoh just sat and stared at him in horror, only for both the man and boy to start when Hohenheim said quietly, "It's true, Tim. Why my five-year-old son knows that, I'm not at all sure, but it's true. It's the same thing that's kept me away from home—trying to find a way to counter that array our nation is being made into through war and death."
Ed suddenly yawned, and decided to use that as an excuse to get away from the two men, saying, "I'm going to take a nap."
As he walked away, he heard Marcoh ask, "Why didn't you just tell me that, Hohenheim?"
Why, indeed? Ed found he didn't care about the reply.