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The siblings found the half-dead Xingese woman lying face-down in the alleyway. Taking pity on the heat-stroke surely addling her mind and the hunger bidding her to sink to her knees in the middle of a road of dust, the Fullmetal Alchemist dragged the woman onto her shoulder and from there to the nearest café. Her sister alchemically checked the mass that the chair could uphold before seating herself upon it, all two metres of steel of her.
“So,” said Winry Rockbell, lifting an eyebrow, “are you all right? What’s your story?”
“I didn’t require any help, not least from an Amestrisian,” the woman snapped despite the forkfuls of smoked fish she was shoving into her mouth with a reckless abandon. She still accepted help, noted Winry with a smile of amusement, as long as she pretended not to. Not unlike a certain automail mechanic she knew. The woman paused in her voracious consumption to regard the sisters from behind the wall of steel ironed into her visage. “Although I am looking for something, and perhaps you could be of assistance.”
May leaned forward with a creak of metal. “You’re from Xing, aren’t you?”
“I applaud your skills at deduction. You’re a soul affixed to that armour, aren’t you?” As Winry slammed her hand on the table hard enough to rattle the plates, the woman sipped nonchalantly at her tea. “Chi reading.”
Winry touched her right hand with her left. The fabric of the gloves rustled. “Maybe we do know something. You tell us about that chee thing and we’ll tell you about whyever it is you’re in Amestris. Why are you here?”
The woman tucked her fork under the neatly cleaned plate. “Reconnaissance. I’m looking for a method of obtaining immortality, in a sense. Not for myself.”
Winry and May exchanged a glance, the space between their gazes a discussion in of itself, and the former nodded. May cleared her throat. “You’re talking about the philosopher’s stone.”
The woman wiped her mouth on a napkin and trapped that under the plate as well. “And what is that?”
“A violation of equivalent exchange,” Winry added. “Theoretically, you could use it to make someone immortal.”
“I see.” Winry watched the woman scour the size of May’s armour as if her gaze could penetrate each dip in the steel and each seam in the welds. Placing her palms flat against the tabletop, the woman scraped her chair backwards while she unfolded her full height to stand. “Then I have nothing more to say.” The shadows on the woman’s either side coalesced into a pair of guardsmen clad in black. “My retainers, on the other hand . . .”
Her name was Lan Fan Yao, and she was the most infuriating individual whom Winry had ever met. And Winry had spent years dealing with her hellcat of an automail mechanic.
“I don’t like her.” Ed pulled on his gloves with twin snaps that perfectly captured how loud and annoying his griping had become. “Get her out of my hair. She keeps asking me about my damn apple pies. Like apples don’t grow in Xing or some shit.”
“Her retainer’s nice too. He went haywire after I ripped that yellow jacket of his. Greedy bastard.” Winry rubbed her newly re-adjoined automail arm. “Forced me to pay for all of that food too. I thought she could eat, but no, it’s all on him.”
“Speaking of paying.”
Ed waved the bill under her nose. Squinting, she slowly tilted her chin up to glare with the force of a thousand alchemy arrays. “Not even my State Alchemist salary can cover this.”
He crossed his arms. “Alchemy freak.”
Winry grabbed the wrench off of the closest cart of repair supplies. Brandishing it at the bill, she yelled, “Colonel Hawkeye’s going to toss me off of the payroll if I keep throwing this much money around!”
A knock on the door. “Sister? Our train’s leaving.”
Ed snorted. “Good. The only rational person in this entire stupid ensemble.” Turning to loudly clang the automail tools, he mumbled a quick “andseeyoulaterWinrycallmewhenyougetthere” that she would have missed had May not filled her in later.
As the sisters walked out May nudged Winry in the ribs. “When you gonna tell ‘im?”
Winry’s ears flared red; she tugged on the loose edges of her golden hair. “About what?”
The glow of May’s eyes brightened. “Better question: When you gonna tell yourself?”
Drowning in the black overcoat that swamped her shoulders and pooled around her feet like a gaping portal to hell had opened beneath her coiled-up body, Lan Fan pressed her knees to her chest. “I wasn’t ready for this. But he was.”
May nodded; the armour complained against the movement. “You remind me of Sister.”
“Hm?”
“After Mom left and Dad died, the two of us decided to get her back.” Lan Fan inclined her head. Rested her chin on the tops of her knees. May returned her hands to her lap. “She always told me how she didn’t understand why I didn’t hate her. For leaving me in this kind of body, that cannot sleep, or eat, or feel pain.”
Lan Fan dry-swallowed. Her nails left reddish impressions into the backs of her hands. Pain. “And you don’t hate her?”
“How could I hate her? She’s done everything in the world to help me. It wasn’t her fault, and neither is this yours.” Though May could not smile, Lan Fan could almost read the grinning girl behind the optimism in her chi. “Just be here for him, and when he returns—because he will; those kinds of people always do, like boomerangs or loyal pandas—I want you to welcome him back.
“In the meantime, you keep fighting. Okay?”
Lan Fan closed her eyes. “. . . okay.”
“And another thing.” Cold, thick fingers sliding into the spaces between hers: The brusqueness stung, the edges of the metal scraping her skin, but she understood that May could not feel the strength of her gestures. And somehow the weight of the steel anchored her to the world that lurched around her and threatened to spill its contents entirely. “It’s okay to cry. If you need to.”
“I don’t cry.” But even as Lan Fan protested she was gripping May’s hands in turn: Though she usually considered her fingers thick and ungainly, beside May’s they felt slender and deft and nimble enough to pluck thread of her ascension to the Xingese throne from the tapestry of destiny unfolding before her. “I do talk, if you want to.”
“I talk too! Pretty neat, huh? I even started talking about twelve years ago, if you can believe that.” May laughed. Lan Fan smiled at the pulse of light at the heart of the girl’s chi. “Y’know, you should teach me to read chi. Sister’s too invested in the technical, but I think that I could learn to understand the Dragon’s Pulse thing.” Lowering her voice to a grumble, May added, “And it’ll be easier for me once I get ahold of that Xingese boy who knows alkahestry.”
Unbending her knees to lie her legs flat on the floor, Lan Fan shrugged the overcoat to her shoulders. On cue May released her hands, and the absence hit Lan Fan with a homunculus’s clawtips in the chest. “The Prince of the Chang Clan is a blithering idiot. People like him because he’s an iceberg: pretty on the outside but with nothing on the inside whatsoever. The Chang are jealous because the Yao are cleverer and more successful and also much nicer.”
“He seems nice.” May tapped out a pattern on her kneecaps. Another chuckle, vibrating from the chestplate of the armour. “And you seem arrogant, Lan Fan.”
Lan Fan opened her mouth to retort just prior to a rumble silencing whatever cunning answer she’d been considering. She could feel the hollowness in the centre of her stomach. Vaguely she tried to remember the last time she’d eaten. A few days, maybe.
May clapped her shoulder. “Just because I can’t eat doesn’t mean you shouldn’t! I can probably get Sister to bake an apple pie. Ed’s taught her.” Rising up from the floor, she extended an arm towards the Princess of the Yao still languishing on the ground.
For a moment Lan Fan studied the hand she had been offered. The pattern of leather stretched over steel for the palm. The shine of the hallway lanterns in vertical curves that followed the slopes of the armour’s design. The two glowing lights set in the armour’s visor, stars fallen from the midnight sky and set into the darkness of a human soul.
For another moment she studied the hand she had been dealt. Ling needed automail; that damned mechanic of Winry’s could prove useful. The homunculus Gluttony writhed in the basement with a philosopher’s stone pulsing in her chest. And here May Rockbell, despite only knowing Lan Fan Yao for perhaps a month, had spent the night comforting a woman who deserved nothing but pain for her failures.
She took both.
“You don’t have athlete's foot, do you?”
Winry’s hand dipped into her pocket automatically for the wrench she’d snatched off of Ed’s counter that one time in Rush Valley. Instead her fingers closed around the emptiness of her pocket, and she growled. Kicking up to raise her leg to eye level, she shook the automail in Lan Fan’s direction. “Does it look like I have athlete’s foot, you dumbass?”
Calmly, Lan Fan took the bowl of soup from the makeshift fire. “I apologise for having the intelligence to ask. I know that Amestrisians aren’t used to intellect.”
“The more I talk to you, the more I get convinced that you’re looking for some automail punch to the head.” Faux anger spent, Winry slumped onto what she sincerely hoped was a log floating upon the sea of blood. “But how are we going to get out of here?”
“You’ve been asking that same question for hours now. Perhaps you should converse your strength instead of wasting the courage you have left.”
Winry grimaced. “The word you’re lookin’ for is conserve.”
“I’m very sorry for not growing up fluent in this country’s language. Then again, I’m also very thankful for not growing up in this country.” Lifting the bowl to her lips, Lan Fan tips her head back to slurp the thin soup as loudly as possible; Winry watches her throat bob with her swallows. “Tell me about your sister.”
Winry’s eyebrows knitted together. “About May? That’s a—bit of a change of subject.”
“Only slightly. Because. ah, I offered to teach her how to read chi, and I would like to know more about her to better . . . plan my lessons.” Lan Fan smiled, more at herself than at Winry, as if she’d just happened upon the greatest lie in the world. Winry rolled her eyes so hard she almost thought she could hear her skull cracking.
“If you like her, you can just tell me.” Lan Fan’s pupils dilated; she stared up at Winry, who rapidly put in, “I’d want to be friends with her, too. She’s much more deserving of friends than I am at any rate.” At Lan Fan’s response of a deadened silence and a gaze cast down at her soup, Winry leaned back on the log only to feel the heavy ends of her hair dip into the blood. Shooting upwards akin to a cork in water, she hastily tied the red bandanna adorned with the flamel over her locks. “Hey, did I say something wrong?”
“No.” The ice in her voice threatened to cut Winry’s eardrums. “Talk to me. About your sister. May.”
Winry nodded slowly. Ah, her sister. One of her favourite subjects. Sitting forward, she grinned: “Well, my sister likes pandas, for starters . . .”
Lan Fan drank the words in like they were the keys to saving the world.
The arrival of the cavalry brought May and that Xingese kid, apparently named Alphonse—Lan Fan suspected that her half-brother had taken on an Amestrisian name whilst in Amestris—and Greed flexed her new claws, examining the shiny tips of diamond. “I could get used to a body like this,” she announced, cocking her hip. “Yep. Used to it. Thanks Mommy Dearest!”
The elderly woman in white who called herself Mother sneered cruelly. “And with that, the sins are purged from this body. Another step closer to accepting God.” She raised her arms to the air; red lightning circled her outstretched palms. Winry, May, and the Xingese half-brother ogled at the colour. Greed snorted, and Lan Fan struggled to punch the smirk from her own face, but her hands were no longer hers. Another power, another chi swirled in her limbs from the philosopher’s stone thrumming over her heartbeat to the tingling ends of her fingers, every nerve alive and screaming.
She could hear the crying of thousands in the pool of pain that encompassed her form down to the last centimetre. As though her body were a water balloon pumped full of liquid until the skin stretched agonisingly taut, and she waited for her frame to burst free into a never-ending fountain of souls weeping in languages she had never heard.
“Whatever you say, Mom. All right! Want me to get these fucks outta here for you?” Greed thumbed at the three mortals. Envy and Gluttony watched, the former narrowing zir eyes, the latter licking her plump fingers as a dog slobbering over the scraps of kibble in its bowl. “I’m crackin’ to break these babies in.” With a tsink she clicked the carbonised claws together. “Who’s first?”
“Lan Fan!” Winry yelled, palms hovering a centimetre away from one another despite Mother having dampened the alchemy. “What are you doing?”
Greed made a low noise deep in her throat. Flipped her the bird. Funny, thought Lan Fan in the midst of fighting for control of her hand—a single blade of grass trying valiantly to contain a monsoon—because the sigil of the Yao was a bird. A feng. A phoenix, she who dies in fire and is reborn from the ashes. As the original vessel of the avaricious burned and was reborn in the new vessel of the princess’s body.
“Name’s Greed. Lan Fan’s gone. Just think of ‘er as dead’n you’ll be good, ‘cause she might as well be.” Greed sliced her finger across her throat to demonstrate. A slight seconds burst of pain while the edge of the diamond slit the skin. A sparkle of red at the bottom portion of her vision: When Lan Fan tried to glance down to investigate further, Greed affixed her gaze to Winry and May, and the disorientation bid Lan Fan shut her eyes and breathe.
May was screaming her name. May was screaming her name, her name, until Greed threw Winry aside like a ragged doll. Was screaming her name until Greed curled her diamond fingers. Was screaming her name until Lan Fan hit the floor yelling and crying and balling her hands into night-black fists that trembled with the effort of controlling the limbs she’d had since birth.
Control.
Greed could have anyone she liked, but May—May was Lan Fan’s.
“Greed, Lan Fan, whichever. I’ll just call you Greed Fan, all right?” Winry folded her arms across her chest. “We’ve got to lay low until we can hit Central. Actually, I’ve got some idea as to where to go.”
The chimaeras on her either side nodded in agreement. One of them, the lioness, nodded at the homunculus. “You’re welcome aboard.”
“Only if I get to be the captain of this ship,” Greed countered before Lan Fan wrestled control from her more avaricious counterpart. “Where would we go?”
“There’s a little place I know called Resembool. Granny’ll take us in, no problem.” Winry paused. Smirked devilishly. Played her trump card. “And her apple pies are even better than mine. And I have no doubt that May will try to regroup back there at some point.”
The former caught Greed’s attention. The latter, Lan Fan’s.
“Temporary truce, Xingese dog?” Greed hissed through their mental connection.
Lan Fan smirked. Took Winry’s hand. Clapped it between her palms. “Temporary truce, then.”
Ling returned with an arm full of steel and a mouth full of questions. Mostly: “Are you all right, Young Lord?” and “What has occurred since my departure?” and “Look at this! It’s a spring-loaded kunai! Just look at it! Isn’t this the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“I’m glad that you haven’t changed at all, Ling,” she told him in the brief period of quiet between the midnight and dawn of the Promised Day.
He grinned. “This one will never change.” Winked. “After all, you’re Princess Lan Fan Yao. Almost Empress. You can do anything you set your mind to, you know.”
And still she couldn’t save Fuu. For all of her immortality, for all of the souls in the stone thrumming over her heartbeat, for all of her boasting and avarice and Greed, she stood there, watching Ling’s grandmother breathe her last on the rooftop, wet with blood and cold with death.
But if she could not save Fuu, then she could sure as hell avenge her.
When she met May again Winry was covering her with a white blanket, wrapped around a girl skinny enough for her ribs to carve horizons around her torso. Hair thin and stringy, falling out at the tips. Cheekbones slicing through her face, or seeming about to. But the girl smiled. Towards Alphonse, having pledged his allegiance to the Yao under the promise of equality between the Clans. Towards Xiao Mei, Alphonse’s cat, fur black and white and patterned like a panda much to May’s delight. Towards, at length, Lan Fan.
Winry balled a hand into a fist. But her chi revealed nothing but the best of intentions. Lan Fan touched her knuckles against Winry’s. Alphonse hugged May in that exceedingly gossamer manner that vibrated the silver ribbon of chi between them, the best of friends.
The best of friends. Perfect. Now May would have a reason to visit Xing. To visit Xijing, the capitol. To visit the Empress, who would call the Amestrisian newcomer into her throneroom. On official business of course.
Then May lifted her hands. Weak and shivering, autumn leaves in the winter wind. Immediately Alphonse manoeuvred himself to support her, his fingers beneath her lower arms.
“Lan Fan. C’mere,” she called in a voice identical to the vibrations of the armour Lan Fan had heard for months. For a year. Carefully Lan Fan lowered herself to a crouch, then sank to her knees. In her embrace May was somehow even lighter, even more frail, but then Lan Fan found herself mesmerised by the girl’s eyes. Round and dark and swirled with hidden depths.
Not frail at all.
“I saw you sacrifice yourself,” she heard herself saying. “I’m proud of you.”
May smiled. Smiled so genuinely that the corners of her eyes first crinkled, then closed altogether. “You sacrificed yourself, too. Greed. The immortality, gone.”
“I still have the stone for the aging Empress. But no, I’m not immortal anymore. I don’t need immortality.” Lan Fan pressed nearer. Caught her breath in her throat. “But I do need you.”
May coughed psuedo-pitifully. “Come closer.” Burying her face in the girl’s neck, Lan Fan leaned in. “That’s good. ‘Cause Al here can’t teach me chi-reading worth anything. I need someone who could actually show me.”
Alphonse wrinkled his nose. “I’m not that useless.”
“Ssh. You’re not but you are.” May brushed Lan Fan’s hair, stroked her head, and Lan Fan couldn’t contain the grin that spread over her face into the hollow of May’s throat. “As soon as I can walk again, I’ll travel to Xing, and you’ll teach me to read chi, right?”
Lan Fan snorted. “I’ll be the Empress. My schedule might be a bit busy. But I might be able to clear out just enough room for you.”
“Just enough for me? I’m fla—” Then May coughed, truly coughed this time, shoulder-shaking-hacked, and Winry pried Lan Fan and Alphonse off in the next instant. Lan Fan lifted a hand. May clasped it in her slender fingers; a sudden memory of the night spent on the floor rocked through Lan Fan’s body.
Before she could stop herself, she was blurting out words that tumbled out of her mouth: “May Rockbell, I think I’m in—”
May’s hand shot out to grip Lan Fan’s collar. Despite the trembling weakness in her arms, she tugged Lan Fan closer. Closer. Closer, until she could feel May’s warm breath on her lips.
A quiet kiss.
Like that day in the Rush Valley alleyway Lan Fan collapsed. Laughing in relief. Promising May to see her again within the year. Waving good-bye, with Alphonse and Xiao Mei and the body of her retainer burdens on her shoulder. Burdens that Ling would share over the desert and from there over the endless months until she could see May again.
But her country, her people, her Xing awaited. And for the first time in her sixteen years Lan Fan could feel the wings of the Yao nestling over her shoulder blades. When she opened them and soared at last, she knew, her feathers would shimmer gold.