In Another Life
Evelyn believed in God.
She believed in Heaven and Hell. She believed in right and wrong. She believed that good would be rewarded and evil would be punished. Maybe not in the way someone would expect and maybe not in this life, but one day everyone would reap exactly what they had sowed.
It was a hard thing sometimes, believing in something so intangible. It was a feeling, a deep sense of knowing that she could never put into words. That thing they call faith.
Maybe it was because she was raised in it. Maybe it was because her parents were good and kind. Maybe it was because they had lived such peaceful lives. Maybe it was because holding her newborn sister had been the first time she saw something she could call a miracle.
Her little sister Edith.
She'd been so young when her sister had been born that she could barely remember much about it. The look on her father's face as he ran around the house in a panic. The fear that filled her as her mother wailed in the next room. The comforting arms of her aunt holding onto her as she whispered soothing words.
Then she was there. Small and pink and squishy. Impossibly small compared to such a big world. A fragile little thing that should be too breakable to exist.
She remembered thinking that people should be sturdier.
There had to be something didn't there? Some other thing that had breathed life into and protected this small fragile thing that cried so much. Evelyn did her part, to keep her safe, to protect this small fragile girl. Her parents boasted about her; such a good older sister she was, watching out for little Edith
There wasn't anything Evelyn wouldn't do for her sister.
It went on that way throughout their lives, as they grew and changed. If Edith fell, Evelyn was there to catch her. If there were scrapes, she was there to bandage them. If there was heartache, she was there to soothe it.
They learned alchemy together, from their mother who had learned from her mother. Evelyn hadn't particularly cared for it one way or the other, but Edith had been enraptured by it. Bombarding their mother with questions and begging to learn. Playing in the yard and with their dolls soon was replaced with alchemy. She grew to love it, to see the miracle of it.
Their father was a farmer. A simple man with a simple life and a simple job. Evelyn had much preferred it, but they found a way to incorporate the two. She learned how to make plants grow faster, the careful push and pull of life. If they grew too quickly, the life in them would burn out and they would die. The balance of the soil and the water, the phosphorous and the nitrates. The arrays had to be just right.
Evelyn had been content in that little life. She could have gone on that way forever, a simple life of farming with her parents and her sister. Studying alchemy and growing crops. Laying in the grass in the evenings, the sky burning with the colors of the setting sun. Side by side with her sister, counting the stars as the sky slowly bled into that deep endless blue.
If only she could have stayed frozen in that moment.
It was impossible of course. That life was far too small for Edith, and she craved more. More knowledge, more experience. It was devastating when she announced her intention to become a state alchemist. It was the only way to get access to the military library that held far more knowledge of alchemy than could ever be obtained in the place where they grew up. She should have seen it coming.
She did try to stop her. They all did.
Evelyn and her parents tried every tactic they could. Edith tackled every reason they could list. Even the ongoing civil war did not deter her. Her focus would be research, to improve agriculture and discover other uses of alchemy. What use would that be for war?
Evelyn didn't find that comforting.
For weeks she pleaded with her, begging her to change her mind. Until finally, the day came, and she stood on the train platform beside her parents saying goodbye to the person she loved most. They each hugged Edith and said their goodbyes, their father wishing her luck and their mother requesting she call home and let them know when she arrived at Central.
When it was her turn to say goodbye, she begged her not to go, one final plea. "Please don't go."
Edith had only smiled, told her she would call her when she was there, grabbed a suitcase in each hand, and boarded the train.
Evelyn felt just as she did when she'd first held her. Edith was seventeen but still too fragile in her eyes. Impossibly small in such a big world and that world would only get bigger once she was in Central. How could she keep her safe there? What if she got hurt? How could she just let her leave, all alone?
She boarded the train only a few minutes after her, freshly bought ticket in hand after saying her own tearful goodbyes to their parents. They hadn't been all that surprised.
Neither had Edith.
She had only looked up at her elder sister expectantly, beaming at her as she explained the second suitcase was for her.
Of course, it was. She should have expected as much. It was how it had always been. There wasn't a moment of Edith's life that Evelyn hadn't been there for. From the moment she was born to her first steps and then her first words. For most children, their first words were spoken calling out for one of their parents. Edith's first word had been calling out for the older sister who rarely left her side.
There wasn't anything Evelyn wouldn't do for her sister.
Even if it meant leaving behind the small peaceful life that she loved so dearly.
Even if it meant joining the military during the midst of a civil war.
It wasn't common for alchemists to take the test together and unheard of for one alchemist's skill to depend entirely upon the other, but Fuhrer Bradley had allowed it. The test took place outside given that their skills were nearly useless inside a building. The test should have been more difficult, and maybe it would have been for anyone else, but they had been studying alchemy since childhood. Though, the alchemy they used that day was… a bit different from what they were used to.
Growing flowers and vegetables wouldn't be enough, it would need to be bigger, more impressive. That's what Edith had called it, impressive. They had spent the whole train ride and the days leading up to that moment modifying the arrays they needed. It should have been difficult to distort something used to help life flourish into something more sinister.
It wasn't all that complicated. Not for them.
The right array altered the composition of the Earth they stood on into something more hospitable. The right seeds scattered about combined with a secondary array turned something that had once seemed miraculous into heaving vines that grew too quickly. The small life promised inside those seeds was released all at once in a matter of moments. They were volatile, pushing through and destroying the ground they stood on until tall vines reached for the sky. The vines withered and died quickly, the life in them burned out until it left nothing but decay. There was only the ripped-apart earth, and dead vines that crushed the other plant life around them after it was done.
They called them The Flora and Fauna Alchemists.
They were ridiculous titles that were even more ridiculous when thought of individually. The Flora Alchemist? The Fauna Alchemist? What did that even mean?
The Fuhrer had an odd sense of humor.
It didn't matter how ridiculous their names sounded apart; they never were. They poured over the research together. They conducted experiments together. They were always together. Their life was so different and yet so much the same.
Things went smoothly, most of their time was spent researching different uses of alchemy in agriculture. There was a war that left too many mouths to feed with not enough food and it was that logic that gave Evelyn hope they wouldn't be sent to the front lines. As long as they were together in Central, they would be safe. That was the prayer she sent to God every night. The hope she held in her heart.
That hope was more ridiculous than the titles they had been given.
A year after their certification, Order #3066 was signed and issued.
There were no exceptions made for eighteen-year-old researchers. No matter how much their older sisters begged. Edith wouldn't run and Evelyn wouldn't leave her, so they went to the front lines of the war, with all the other state alchemists.
She didn't know how anyone could call what they did a war.
A slaughter.
A genocide.
An extermination.
It was anything but a war.
Even in the moments of silence between the sound of fighting and the screams of the dying were too loud. There was no way to unhear the sound of a wailing mother as she clutched her dead child to her chest. There was no way to unsee the cruel way the soldier had put a bullet in that mother's skull. There was no way to wipe away the memory of that mother's lifeless eyes and her mouth stuck hanging open in that never-ending scream.
She could still hear it, even after the woman was dead in a pile with the other bodies. Even as she held Edith in her arms as she tried to soothe her, just as she had when she was small and had nightmares. Even as her sister sobbed and begged for forgiveness, she still wasn't sure whose forgiveness she was asking for. Through it all, she could hear that desperate scream that shook her bones and turned her stomach.
Evelyn still believed in God, even then.
She just didn't think they were listening. Maybe they never were. If they had been, they weren't anymore. Not to her. Not when the alchemy she had once thought of as miraculous had been used to kill children.
All her life alchemy had seemed like a gift, a blessing. It didn't feel that way when she used it to destroy buildings. It didn't feel that way as she watched the bodies of her victims be pulled from those buildings and thrown into mass graves. It didn't feel that way when she stood alone waiting for her sister to activate the next array.
She waited. And waited. And waited.
She waited until she couldn't bear to wait anymore and then she ran, ignoring the shouts for her to stay put, to obey orders. They didn't have to be right next to each other to activate the arrays and the seeds they had scattered around the area, but Edith wasn't far. Still, it would take several minutes to get to her. She prayed again that she would get there in time and prayed again that God would listen.
Her prayers were answered.
The sound of the gunshots filled her ears just as she turned the corner. Edith's body hit the earth with a thud, the back of whoever had shot her already in the distance as Evelyn knelt beside her. Her sister's blood was hot and slick as she pressed her hands against the wounds in her gut. Tears poured from Edith's eyes, her breaths becoming ragged as she desperately pressed her own hands over the bullet holes that Evelyn couldn't cover. There were too many holes and not enough hands. Edith's eyes shined with tears as she looked desperately at her sister. She almost looked confused, as if she couldn't comprehend what had happened to her.
She had gotten there just in time to watch her sister die.
Her voice cracked as she spoke the same plea from the train station. "Please don't go."
"I won't."
In another life maybe her sister would have spoken those words sooner. In another life maybe her sister got off the train instead of Evelyn getting on. In another life maybe Edith never wanted to be a state alchemist in the first place.
Edith's breathing became shallower, her cheeks lost their color as her blood pooled around her. There had been more blood on the ground than in her body by that point, and eventually, Edith had given up. She wrapped her hand around one of Evelyn's, the one that had still pressed desperately against the bullet holes in her little sister's stomach.
"There are doctors close by," Evelyn said. "Just hold on, okay? Someone will come."
Her other hand touched Evelyn's cheek, she moved so slowly it was like she was barely moving at all. Her hand had already started to lose its warmth and as she stared into Edith's eyes, she watched the light leave them.
In another life, her sister's last words weren't the same as her first.
"Sissy."
She held her sister's limp hand to her cheek as she cried, as she begged and prayed for her to come back. Her prayers were left unanswered as the blood began to cool and her body turned cold.
The screams ripped from her throat, a familiar wail that filled her nightmares, and the moments of silence between the fighting and the screams of the dying. Evelyn held her sister to her chest and waited for the pain to end, for a bullet in her skull. In her grief, she thought maybe that soldier hadn't been cruel after all. Maybe it had been mercy.
But the bullet never came.
Maybe God was there. Maybe they were even watching and listening as their creations destroyed each other. Maybe they had already decided there would be no mercy for her.
Evelyn believed in God. She believed in good and evil. She believed in Heaven and Hell.
After all that she had done, she knew which one she was headed for.
Maybe she could save Edith from it.
If there was to be no mercy. If there was only Hell left for her, then why not try? The taboo among alchemists. The taboo that violated the laws. The taboo that was the greatest sin against God.
Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it would kill her. Maybe she would descend into the pits of hell as soon as she attempted the transmutation. Evelyn just hoped she wouldn't see Edith there.
The array wasn't that complicated. It probably should have been. She almost wished it had been. A taboo should be much harder to accomplish.
It wasn't.
It was child's play.
The hope that filled her heart when that eye opened and looked into her soul was as much a sin as the rest of it. It had to be. Maybe she had opened the gate straight to Hell. The unbearable pain as the menacing tendrils grasped at her was proof of that. She wasn't sure if it was ripping apart her body or her soul as it pulled her in. All she knew was the pain.
Then there was nothing. An empty whiteness with a grand gate made of stone in front and behind her. In front of the gate was a figure the same white as the emptiness around her with shadows drifting off of it like smoke.
"Hello."
"Hello," she echoed. Her mind felt almost as empty as the room and she grasped desperately at the fragments of memory. A burning sky and a starry night. Desperate cries of wailing mothers and dead children. Empty eyes and cold hands. No, no that wasn't right, none of this was right where was –
"Where's Edith?"
"Not here." Its voice was playful; it made her think of a cat toying with a mouse.
"Who are you?"
It had no features, no mouth, and yet somehow it not only spoke but grinned wide. It had the shape of a human though it was anything but. The thing declared itself many things, but the one that stuck out the most was God. It couldn't be true. If this was God then she was in Heaven and if Edith wasn't here then she was –
Evelyn was pulled through the gate behind her, without even a chance to learn her sister's fate, to beg for a second chance for her. Her mind was filled with images she couldn't comprehend and information that seemed to pour into it. Her life, her sister's life, her parents lives, and the life of everyone that had ever lived in her mind all at once. All their memories and all their knowledge.
For a moment, just one, everything in the world made sense. There was no Heaven. There was no Hell. There was only God and the Truth. It was so clear.
Then it was gone.
Just like Edith.
Maybe this was her Hell, to be where she was with this taunting figure before her without her sister. It was somehow worse than she thought and not half as much as she deserved.
But God wasn't done.
She was back, kneeling on the ground as if she had never left at all.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Evelyn knew she was in Hell. A hell custom-tailored to fit her sins.
The pain radiated up her arms and to her shoulders as someone grabbed hold of her. They dragged her away from the transmutation circle and it was only when she tried to fight back that she realized the reason for the pain. Her hands were gone, cut clean through the muscle and the bone. The hands that had held her sister when she was born. The hands the had held her sister in her final moments.
Evelyn looked for her sister's body in the center of the circle. For just a moment everything had made sense and so maybe.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe
It was grotesque and wrong. Twisted and covered in blood as it struggled to breathe. A thing that wore the same blue uniform covered in blood that her sister had died in. A thing that could never be her sister. It couldn't be. It couldn't. It couldn't. It couldn't.
Even still, it felt like watching her die a second time when they shot it.
Her mouth opened in a scream that wouldn't stop, a scream that she could feel in her bones and vibrated through her very being. She screamed as they stopped the bleeding that was pouring from the ends of her arms where her hands used to be. She screamed until her throat was hoarse and she tasted blood on her tongue. She screamed until her voice gave out and she could manage only choked cries.
Evelyn believed in God.
She just knew they didn't care.
This is more than likely a one-shot. I have some vague thoughts of continuing but I'm not sure. If this is something you'd like to see possibly continued, let me know! Cross-posted on Ao3