Hello.
Due to circumstances, I wasn't able to do anything for April Fool's last year, so this year, I decided to make up for lost time.
Unfortunately, my dog decided she had the same idea, because she got away from me while I was taking her for a walk, ran onto the highway, and got hit by a car.
The good news is that she's okay.
The bad news is that I spent time I planned to spend on writing taking care of her.
As a result, I only got it halfway done before I ran out of time.
I thought about scrapping it because it's so incredibly cringe, but I'd already started, so I thought I might as well.
So here's what I have so far. I'll finish torturing y'all later.
WARNING: I am incapable of just getting to the fucking point, so the majority of it is purple prose, but the purpose of this is to make your bones hurt. I expect your very osteoblasts to shimmy-aye with agony.
Feel free to tell me to delete this. This is so stupid, its very existence makes my dog look like Socrates by comparison.
The smell of fresh soil and growing things filled the air.
Edward took a deep breath through his nose, savoring every scent, the warmth of the wind, and let it out through his mouth, tasting the newness of the young leaves on his tongue.
It had been a good day, as good as a day could be when one has the weight of an unforgivable sin and fifty pounds of metal melded to one's body. While the lead Mustang had given him had turned out to be pointless, as always, it had been interesting.
A village on the edge of Creta had gained a new doctor, an alchemist who's skills had been more medical than mechanical, and though the woman's skill at tissue regeneration had been impressive, Edward doubted there was any way he would be able to use it to regain his brother's body – or build him a new one, which was what Mustang had thought when he had recommended her.
Still though, it had given Ed something to think about, and he thought about it now as he took in the sights and sounds of spring at East City Central Park.
Alphonse had volunteered to help a street vendor fix his broken cart – his fancy and very expensive new portable refrigerator had broken, causing the ice cream in the cart to melt – and Edward watched from the side, happy to let his brother be in the spotlight for a reason other than his unusual appearance.
"I wonder who thought of that?" he thought aloud to himself, pondering the mechanisms of this recent invention.
"As my old Aunt Citron used to say, 'You can't make lemonade without squeezing a few lemons. Keep squeezing and you'll get something else.'"
Edward jumped. He hadn't heard the woman come up behind him. After a moment, her words sunk in, but the meaning didn't.
"W-what?"
The woman walked forward so that she was standing beside him rather than behind him.
"Electric refrigerators work by absorbing heat from the chamber where the food is kept and releasing that heat outside of the unit."
She kept walking then, over Alphonse's carefully drawn transmutation circle ("Oh, hi, um, what are you…?") and pointed at the pipes circling the metal containers that held the different flavors of ice cream, gesturing for Edward to come closer.
"What do you notice about the pipes?"
Edward approached warily, casting the ice cream salesman an apologetic glance, and crouched so he could study the mechanism.
"Um… the pipes are pretty small here," he pointed at what he assumed was the beginning of the circuit for one of the basins, "but they get bigger as they go around."
"And what does that tell you?" she prompted him, and when Edward hesitated, she pointed at the smaller line of pipe. "If one sense isn't enough, use another."
It took Edward a moment to understand what she meant. When he did, he hesitated again, this time glancing at the vendor for permission, who shrugged impatiently.
"You can't possibly break it any more than you already have."
Edward obliged and reached out his left hand, wrapping his fingers around the pipe.
It was, unsurprisingly, quite cold.
"And now that you have a control…" the woman prompted, Edward followed her advice, letting go of the thin pipe and gripping the fatter line on the other, more dorsal side of the basin. He had to stretch his arm quite a bit, which made it hard to pull away when he touched the pipe and was surprised rather than hurt by the heat he found.
"What?" he asked himself, staggering back on his heels enough he nearly fell on his backside, then, after a moment of quiet deliberation, understood with an, "Oooooh!"
"Oh, what?" the vendor barked impatiently. With Edward and the strange woman in the way, Alphonse wasn't able to to see what he was doing, and though his armor was expressionless, Ed could feel the irritation beginning to emanate from his brother's steel.
"It works by using the correlation of temperature and pressure in a fixed volume!" Edward explained and the vendor made a face like Ed had just spat a swear in Xingese.
"Usually temperature and pressure are inversely related, because in an open space, the increase of motion in the molecules with the increase in heat would increase the distance between the molecules, thus decreasing the pressure," Ed elaborated, which earned him a grimace from the ice cream man and an exasperated sigh from his brother. "But in the case of a fixed volume, like a closed circuit, the molecules eventually run out of space, so as the heat makes them want to get further apart, they start pushing on their container, creating more pressure instead of less. Unless heat is removed to make the molecules contract back into their enclosed space, the pressure will rupture the container – the whole thing will explode.
"This circuit works by first increasing the fixed volume of the circuit, encouraging the substance inside to expand, thus making it pull heat out of the ice cream so that it can expand. Then, the circuit decreases in volume, forcing the substance to contract and release the heat as the molecules slow down. It's like it's stretching it into a fluid and then squishing it into a solid!"
Then Ed frowned as he realized the missing piece of the puzzle.
"But… in order for that to work, there would need to be way for the heat to be released so that the decrease in volume cause release of heat rather than increased pressure… and there would need to be something to keep the fluid moving inside the circuit…"
"Excellent question, my refrigeration friend!" the woman said that reminded Edward of th way Alphonse talked about cats. "Now, where do you thin such things would be?"
Edward deflated slightly as confusion got the better of him, his eyes roving over the basins and the circuits to no avail.
"I don't see anything…"
"And why is that?" the woman asked and a moment later Al said, "Object permanence really is an unfathomable concept, huh, Brother?"
Edward glared at his, admittedly rightfully, frustrated brother, then realized what Alphonse was telling him. He had the humility to look sheepish as he shuffled to the other side of the cart, which had been beyond his field of vision so far.
The vent and box he found there had him huffing with further impression for the engineer and less for himself.
"Of course. Heat wants to go to where there's less of it, so it's taken closer to the outside, where it's released into the air. That's gotta be where the pipe goes from being big to li… not. And that battery is what makes that spark of potential energy that gets everything moving. After that, the heat of its own mechanism keeps it going. The battery probably only needs to be used every once in a while to make sure the fluid doesn't run out of juice."
The vendor seemed to have tuned them out, but started when Ed mentioned the battery.
"Wait… it doesn't need to be on all the time?"
Edward glanced at the vendor, confused by his confusion.
"Well, no, not really. I mean, you'd have to start it up every few hours to make sure the fluid as still moving – there's no such thing as perfect heat retention – but keeping it on all the time would be unnecessary. I mean, I don't think it would really hurt anything beyond draining the battery…"
The ice cream man's cheeks had turned red.
"Oh."
"Yes, oh," Alphonse said, deciding he'd had enough of Edward explaining what he had realized ten minutes ago, "so for now, I can jump the battery by pulling the electromagnetic alkaloids back to their respective sides, but it won't fix the erosion caused by the current. You'll have to get a new battery as soon as possible. So, Brother, if you would be so kind as to –"
"There's no need for that, my metal mastermind," the woman said, laying a hand on the counter of the cart as if she was consecrating it.
There was the sizzle of alchemy and rush of heat and the smell of ozone, then the steady hum of the battery as it sparked the momentum the fluid needed to begin its circuit.
The ice cream man scrambled away from his cart as if he expected it to explode. Edward spat out a swear that had Alphonse admonishing him with a consternated, "Brother!" and apologizing on his behalf to the woman who had helped them.
The man approached his cart with the wariness of a rabbit expecting a hawk, then nervously opened the nearest basin to find perfectly crystallized vanilla ice cream.
"How –" the man said at the same time Ed blurted, "No circle!"
The woman smiled beatifically at him. Edward pointed an accusing automail finger.
"You can transmute without a circle! You've… you've done…"
He looked her up and down, noticing her two arms and two legs, her two eyes, the healthy pallor of her face beneath her red hair.
"But… but there's nothing wrong with you."
"Oh my God, Brother, seriously?!"
Alphonse stepped between the two of them, shoving Edward behind him, who oomphed unappreciatively.
"I'm so sorry, ma'am. My brother's just hungry. He tends to forget his manners when he hasn't eaten."
"I do not!" Edward spat, trying to dance around the armor only to be pushed back by an empty but powerful leather gauntlet.
The woman only laughed and surprised both of them patting Alphonse's helmet, a gesture that required her to stand on her toes.
"Low blood sugar does tend to lower everything else."
Edward snarled, "I'll show you low!", then promptly forgot about how, exactly, he was going to do that when Alphonse shoved him again, this time in the face with a paper bowl full of ice cream.
To say Edward inhaled the dessert would have been an understatement, because he did inhale some of it and promptly began choking. Alphonse gave him a hefty pound on the back to clear his airway.
"On the house," the vendor said, offering a second bowl to Al, who balked, then awkwardly shook his helmet.
"No, thank you, sir, I – "
"Gimme."
Edward snatched the second bowl before anyone could say anything else and began devouring with less, but still impressive, earnestness as the first.
Alphonse sighed, watching his brother move the spoon from the bowl to his mouth with the one-mindedness of a factory line.
"Brother eats a lot," he explained, perhaps unnecessarily, to the woman who had helped them.
The woman smiled beatifically, as if Alphonse had merely commented on the weather.
"I certainly hope so. Most boys his age experience their first bit of growth."
Edward paused in slurping the melted cream that the spoon hadn't been able to catch, watching the woman with the intensity of a dog eyeing a piece of bacon.
"Protein for muscles, calcium for bones, and lots and lots of cholesterol," she said, approaching Edward and studying him as if he was a prized portrait in a gallery. "The main ingredients for an impending growth spurt."
Edward tilted his head, hope glittering in his distrusting eyes.
"Really?" he breathed, as if he was afraid she would retract her statement if he became too hopeful, then his hope shuttered, embracing the fear to lessen the pain of its inevitable fulfillment. "Wha'da you know? Of course, I'm growing, ya crazy bat, I'm thirteen."
He went back to slurping, this time sulkily.
"Brother! She was trying to be nice," Alphonse cajoled, confused by Ed's lack of acceptance of something Al knew Ed desperately wanted.
"By pointing out the obvious?" Edward wiped the sticky residue of the ice cream off his mouth and onto his sleeve. "Sorry. No points for proving that water is wet."
"Brother's a bit sensitive," Alphonse said by way of apology.
The woman "hmmmed" sympathetically at the same time Edward threw the paper bowl at his brother's helmet. It was caught by the wind and sailed away into the grass harmlessly.
"Now why would that be? You said it yourself, you're at the prime age for hastening in height, yet you seem to fear it a fantasy."
"I don't fear nothin'!" Edward snarled, crossing his arms like the petulant child he was pretending not to be. He turned on his heel, marching away from the ice cream vendor, who had been wisely pretending to see and hear nothing. "Come on, Al. Let's go."
"But Brother –"
"I said, come on!"
"But she doesn't need a circle!"
Edward stopped mid-step, his whole body shuddering as he fought with himself over his pride or the opportunity that his pride had nearly made him forget. It was a testament to many things that he put his foot down at an angle so he could turn and glare at the woman.
"All right, fine. But you'd better have something good, lady, or I'll –"
Edward's thoughts trailed away as he looked the woman up and down, annoyance being replaced by confusion.
"What? What in the…"
Edward could have sworn she had been wearing a simple blue dress, something his mother might have worn, if a bit fluffier than Trisha's standards. The blue was still there, but now it was the background of what looked like bones – femur bones, Ed guessed by the length and ball joints.
He had seen his own in the darkness of his father's basement, and the memory set off a nauseous churning in his stomach that had him looking away with a nervous swallow.
The woman's smile faded, the sympathy returning, and with a clap of her hands, the bones melted away, her dress returning to its plain cerulean blue.
"I'm sorry. I've found it helps my students focus when they have a starting point."
"A hypothesis!" Alphonse supplied, trying to diffuse the awkward atmosphere. Then, genuinely, "You're a teacher?"
The woman's smile returned and she bowed dramatically. Edward, who had yet to forgive her, snorted in disgust.
"I am many things, but most of all, I am an explorer extraordinaire." She looked up, sunlight glinting off her earrings. He noticed, with a lurch, that they were flamels, a jolt that was nothing compared to the rush of air that was pulled from him when she said, "A pursuer of the Truth."
Edward's mouth went dry. It couldn't have been clearer if she'd screamed it.
Alphonse hesitated, opening and closing his gauntlets like he was fighting the urge to grab her and run. He gave into a different urge instead.
"Who was it? Who did you try to bring back?"
The woman, who had since stood up, glanced at Alphonse contemplatively.
"I bring myself wherever there are mistakes to be made."
Alphonse made an embarrassed noise and Edward stared at his metal foot through his shoe. It had been a terribly personal question and they both knew that, even if the jab hadn't been intentional, they deserved it.
The woman's shoes appeared below him and he felt her fingers press under his chin and lift his head so that he was looking up at her instead of down at the ground.
"Anything that's worth knowing requires getting a little messy."
Edward felt her reassurance pull at something deep inside him, and despite its warmth, he pushed it back down with a punch of disdain. He pulled his face away from her with a scowl that deepened when she laughed.
"We're not kids," he growled through his teeth. "And I'm not short," he added as an afterthought.
"I would never infer such a thing," she said and Edward noticed the singularity but had realized by now that he would never get a straight answer from her. "Now, you have a question, and while I don't have the answer, I would be honored to help you find it."
"I do?"
The woman tapped the top of his head with a finger, a gesture that had Edward hissing and slapping her hand away. Edward pretended not to hear Alphonse laughing.
"You're perceived delayed development – why it hasn't happened yet and how we can get your bones back on schedule."
Edward had had just about enough of whatever this game she was playing.
"What, you think you can magically make me grow taller?" Edward asked, waving his hands mockingly.
When she didn't answer, it was Alphonse who broke the silence, because Edward was too stunned to speak.
"You… you're serious?!"
"Not magically," she corrected them, her earrings catching the sun again. "With science."
XXX
"So, what did you pay?"
The woman laughed to herself as they followed her.
"The good man gave it to me as thanks for helping with his burnt battery."
Edward huffed.
"Not the damn ice cream. I mean, you're…" Edward mimed clapping his hands. "What did you give up? To the… y'know."
The woman stopped, a red eyebrow raised quizzically.
"Do I?"
Edward swallowed his rising irritation, then swallowed the shame that he could never fight as he reluctantly rolled up his sleeve.
The woman sighed with fascination and proffered her hands for a closer look, which Edward obliged.
"Oh, how elegant! The biomechanics have been emulated excellently!"
The metal couldn't feel, yet Ed felt as if his arm was burning.
"Brother lost his leg, too," Alphonse explained, his empty voice heavy. "I lost… well, I lost a little more."
The woman sighed again, this time a hint of sadness.
"One's physical being is far more than a little more, little one."
Edward pulled away as if she had burned him and Alphonse startled with a rattle.
Before either of them could do anything more, a honking sound sent Edward startling. Al, lacking nerves that could be rattled, simply turned to stare at the streetcar sitting in the middle of the empty road.
Streetcars were common in cities like Eastern Headquarters. What wasn't common was a streetcar that wasn't connected to any cables or tracks.
"Always so impatient," the woman said, stepping off the sidewalk and patting the strip of metal between the doorless entrance and the windshield. Edward looked above the stairs to the operator's seat, expecting someone waiting there with arms crossed.
It was empty.
Edward leaned closer to his brother, intending to whisper a victorious warning about the lady's insanity, when Alphonse wheezed out a word Edward had never heard him say before.
"Al!" Ed barked, scandalized, as Al pulled away from him and clomped in front of the streetcar. The armor dropped to his knees and reached out a gauntlet as if to pet its grill, then pulled his fingers into a fist nervously.
"Um… h-hi," he said, talking to the car as if it was a skittish dog. "I didn't mean to scare you."
The woman hummed and stepped into the car, laying a hand on the operator's seat lovingly.
"It isn't like you to be shy. Be polite. We have guests."
Alphonse pulled his gauntlet away, and for a wonderful moment, Ed thought he had come to his senses and was going to stand back up.
"Don't be afraid. I'm like you. See?"
Edward had had a feeling of unease boiling inside him. When Alphonse raised his gauntlets to his helmet, the unease became overflowing horror.
"Al, no!"
It was too late.
Alphonse tipped his armor, exposing his empty inside to the lights in the car.
Edward ran to his brother, not sure what he was going to do – cover the gaping hole where a head should be, slam the helmet back into place – and nearly skewered his jaw on one Al's shoulder spikes as he threw himself stupidly into his brother's shoulder.
The lights on the front of the car began to shine and for a moment Edward thought they had turned on. Alphonse made a giggling sound and put his helmet back on. The lady inside the car must have been testing the lever because the car made clunking sound, almost like a dog barking.
Edward was too angry to care about any of this.
"Al, you idiot, what are you doing?!"
"They already know, Brother. She said as much."
Edward wanted to shake sense back into the armor. The only thing stopping him was the knowledge of the physical impossibility.
"That doesn't mean you can – we're in the middle of –"
Edward abandoned his brother with a roar of frustration and ran onto the streetcar with such zeal that he tripped on one of the steps.
"I don't know what you're deal is, lady –"
"Please, call me Valerie."
"I don't care! You're gonna tell us what you want from us right now or I'll… I'll…"
Valerie waited patiently for him to decide what he would do. The problem was, Edward realized too late, that if she – they, if Al's ridiculous hunch was to be believed – were on the same level of expertise as him, there really wasn't much he could do that she couldn't.
Edward wasn't afraid of an equal match, but did take away the satisfaction of proving his point, because there was no point to prove.
Edward deflated with an exhausted sigh.
"You can't tell anyone."
Valerie laughed.
"My affectionate abettor, who in this world would we tell? After all, we aren't supposed to be here."
The streetcar clunked in agreement and Edward didn't know why, but he found himself throwing back his head and laughing.
"Of course you're not," he scoffed as soon as he'd collected himself. "If you're not supposed to be here, then what the hell are you doing here?"
"To make mistakes and get messy," she said with the innocence of a lion explaining its presence in a zoo. "And if we investigate your vertical vexation, I expect much of both."
XXX
They said to never make a mountain out of a mole hill.
As it burrowed back the way it had come, fake paws clawing and fake nose tickled by the earth, it wondered if the metaphor was meant to apply to the hypothetical mole as well as the humans who made it.
As it came free into the tunnels of its father's home and returned to its proper form with the crackle of alchemy, it supposed that it would have to be the one to solve that mystery.
If it hadn't known any better, it would have assumed its father was sleeping as he sat on his throne, power coursing into and out of and through him. That power must have alerted him to its presence, because his eyes opened and he stared at it somehow more sightlessly than when his eyes had been closed.
"Envy," he said its name with a unique lack of disdain that was reserved for only one other. "Why do you disturb me?"
Its face broke into a vicious grin, its teeth as sharp as the fox that killed the mole.
"Father. I've found another candidate for sacrifice."
He lifted his head, tilting it to the side in a rare display of curiosity.
"Tell me."
ouch ouch my bones ah