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When the Elric brothers were young, their wings were small, heart-shaped curves lying along their shoulders to feather along the inset of their spines to the smalls of their backs. Soft gold that would shimmer in the light, cast a thousand resplendent sunbeams to swallow the world in saffron, arch into the blue-white skies to burn like twin supernovae against the clouds.
Their mother hid their wings under their clothing. They flew at night, learned to conceal their loop-de-loops and gravity drops to the the quiet of the midnight moon. A quiet they shattered with whoops of joy.
Of course the neighbours knew, and the teachers knew, and the world knew. But it didn’t make them different.
Then their mother fell sick and paled and gave up her life on the tremulous note of summer’s edge. And with that one instant of time, whittled away from the rest, the home that had sustained them for years transformed into a high tower, a labyrinth.
A prison.
When they met the women with the condor wings the sky wept and the levees had broken, spilling tears across the ground while the onlookers stared. Tucking her wings over the collar of her white coat—black on white, like the Xingese philosophy—she blazed the soil with an azure outburst of electricity. Wiped her palms. Crossed her arms across her chest.
Smirked.
The Elric brothers leaped for her hands. Glaring down at them, the woman with the condor wings nearly shook them off. Until she heard the call: “They don’t have parents.”
“I suppose I’ve gone soft,” she said with an inwards sigh, and promptly exiled them to an island for a month.
On the first day they flew. Clambered to the crown of the trees. Angled their wings against the hot thermals of the midday sun. Flapped, less like birds of prey and more like songbirds flitting to escape a shadowed predator overhead. The sun bore down in tendrils of heat. The thermals pushed them higher, higher.
“Brother!” Al yelled. “You’re too close—too close—!”
“I’ll be fine!” Ed screamed back in the moment before the wind caught his wings and bucked him forward. For an instant in his trajectory he hung, upside down, observing the world from the perspective of an omniscient God. In his mind’s eye he could almost see the flash of alchemy ley lines overlaid in circles of blue, could hear children’s whispers in his ear, could sense a shiver of cold rip through him, transmute him to ice.
He fell.
The water parted like cement. His brother dragged him, half flying and half swimming, to the island again. Fortunately they’d only lasted some ten, twenty seconds in the air. He came away with two broken ribs and bruises over his front. That day he realised that flying further didn’t always equate to flying higher.
On the final day they scaled the treetops, stripped to the waist, and spread their golden feathers to ignite the sky. The suns on their backs. They soared. Climbed high but never higher than the line of the trees. Glided atop the wind. Shifted their shoulder blades, tensed the second line of pectorals. Hands outstretched, they skimmed the crests of the water, splashing one another and laughing.
When they reached the banks of the shore, the woman with the condor wings was waiting. Eating a bear she’d been cooking on the spit. Spearing the right leg, he bit off a massive chunk from the thigh, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed.
They grinned at her. At length she nodded, more to herself than to them. “You can call me Sensei.”
For the breadth and span of her glorious wings, it would take the brothers years to recognise that the tendons where wing bone attached to shoulder blade were decayed from the inside out, as if some foreign fungus had hollowed out the focals of her wings, the origins, the births. A dark disease born of pride, or arrogance, or hubris.
She could not fly, and never would again.
The heat of the transmutation melted his brother’s wings and the guard feathers of his left wing. He cried for the blood that stained the floor in melted pools—cried for his brother—cried for the damnation, the loneliness, the weight of being grounded—
He gave his right wing; while he watched, screaming until the blood rising in his throat choked off his voice, his feathers melted one by one, from the pinions inwards, gold dripping down his wings to ripple amidst the crimson pond.
Gold and scarlet. A gold and scarlet sea for him to fall into at the moment he had tried to fly.
His colours, for so long. The irony bid him throw his head back and laugh as if he knew he would die.
The children tore his feathers apart and he kept his glazed eyes open just long enough to paint the fallen sea on the inner curve of the armour.
Winry fashioned him a new arm and a new leg and a new wing. Useless, falling down his back in a cascade of creaking leather spans and groaning metal braces. Not for flight as much as for balance, the same weight of his other wing, damaged and
Gold. Sloughed away to reveal the dull yellow beneath. Pyrite. Fool’s gold.
Fool. Such a damned fool.
The man with the raven wings called him a State Alchemist and set him to work. “So. Fullmetal.” He held a pen between his teeth like a cigarette. “What’s the story behind the wings? Look like you got caught in a bad fire.”
“You look like you’re a bad fire. Walking.”
The man with the raven wings chuckled. “I’m mildly disappointed that that wasn’t a pun. f I ever burn you, Fullmetal, I give you full permission to take out an eye.”
“Don’t say shit like that.” He clenched his hands into fists while the man with the raven wings arched his eyebrows. “Or it comes true.”
“Never pegged you to be the superstitious type.”
He whirled around, his crimson cloak drenching his shoulders and back in the colour of blood. “There’s no use in begging the devils to smite you when there’s no God to balance the scales.”
When the rings of blue blazed on his arms and head and body he could sense the the ghostly entrails of his wings, whole and perfect, on the other side of the Gate. His brother—his wings—
His outstretched hands grasped fistfuls of gold.
London. Berlin. Names he didn’t know: England, France, Germany, Romania, Greece. Languages that curled his mouth funny. Overcoats not fitted for wings: just as no one in this world could perform alchemy, so, too, could no one transmute.
He bound them up in bandages and hid them beneath undershirts. Bribed the tailors, gave them false names, pretended to be mad enough to have constructed his own false wings. Silently he thanked Winry for forcing the ungainly, ungodly leather and metal on him; silently he thanked the Truth that it had stripped the bottom of his left wing as well until he could fit the withered tips into his boxers.
Each winter he sensed the leylines of the world shift from the north to the south, from the northern pole to the equator and to the southern pole on the other end of the world, and he longed to follow that warmth to its source.
Without his brother, without his wings, his sun had dimmed and gone out again. His feathers shedded during the moults and never grew back. He stuffed gold into garbage bags by the handful. Tied them off. Burned them in the early hours of the morning. When he couldn’t continue to burn them—after the apartment owner warned him against the choking smoke that whispered out of his windows and billowed down from the rooftops where he stood, a pillar of shadow against the rising sun—he tossed them out in bags shoved full of mashed fruit and wet newspapers and other garbage.
He didn’t need someone to barge into his house demanding to interrogate him about his illegal hunting or his illicit feather business. He’d already fallen enough, already lived through prisons enough, already hurt enough in his life.
Alfons moved in and the world became just a hint brighter. Eyes, blue, not exactly the colours of the sun, but the colours of the hottest of stars. When Edward pressed his cheek against the window, gaze tracking the arrow of birds that spread their wings to shadow the movement of the sun, Alfons looked up from his research notes with a moonlike smile.
A crescent moon that could bloom full, and Edward would never uncover the dark side of Alfons’s thoughts.
He carried with him a sketchbook filled to the brim with drawings of rockets and fuselages and missiles. Equations, derivations, proofs he’d mutter about aloud while Edward watched him from the armchair, cognac pooling brown in his flute. As he worked he’d smile and murmur jokes to himself—Edward would bet money that all of them were terrible puns about the acceleration due to gravity or fluid aerodynamics—and laugh until his shoulder shook and his bangs bobbed adorably against his forehead.
Stuffed into the bottom of the trunk, the photograph, dusty and yellowed, caught his attention. He didn’t go through others’ things very often, yet his new roommate looked just too much like his brother for him to leave well enough alone.
He’d always pushed into places where he didn’t belong. Always flown too high to the sun.
“Didn’t know you had a sister,” Edward said.
Alfons slammed the notebook down on the desk. His lower lip trembled and Edward seriously considered throwing himself out of the window, landing in a rubbish bin with the trash. That was where he belonged, surely.
“I don’t.”
Alfons stared at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers slowly. “I’m—”
“So’s my brother.” Edward lowered the photograph to the table, face down. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” Alfons tried on a smile. Edward returned it and it stuck. Crescent moon. Not the sun, but nearly as bright. And if Edward soared, the moon wouldn’t melt whatever remained of his wings. “J-just . . . don’t tell anyone, all right?”
Edward slumped to the other end of the divan, folding his hands in his lap. “I defended my brother for years.” His eyes narrowed, darkened. “If anyone so much as breathes a word, I’ll beat their faces in.”
“I can defend myself, and you’re the first person to know since—since I changed my name.” Alfons’s smile quirked wryly. “But . . . thank you. I appreciate it.”
The world brightened further. Half-moon turned full. If he looked up to the stars, perhaps he could sail out to the cosmos, navigate the stars.
Selenaut.
Once, while Alfons cooked dinner—some Polish recipe he’d picked up from a fellow commuter that morning on the transit, like the sociable idiot he was, capable of getting a stranger from a different country in a different language to scrawl down a family recipe—Edward took the opportunity to glance through the sketchbook. Past the German, the maths, the physics, the beautiful illustrations of flight, the occasional bird stenciled around a page number. And suddenly:
The illustration of a boy with long hair pulled back in a ponytail and wings curling from his shoulder blades downwards, past his hips and thighs, nearly to his heels. Eyes wide and intense. A cloak with a flamel fixed around his shoulders and flowing between that golden windspan.
Alfons waltzed out from the kitchen with the tray of prainiki in hand only to discover Edward collapsed on the floor with his head in his clawed hands and his knuckles whitened around his temples. The plate shattered.
“I’m fine,” Edward mumbled. Drained the remainder of the vodka from the bottle he’d opened half an hour ago.
His vision blurred and the fingers of his right hand shivered; maybe he had a liquor problem and maybe the world needed to shut the fuck up with its light and noise and electromagnetic fields stirring the soft down on the insides of his wings.
“Oh. That? When I was a kid, I had this foolish dream where I had wings.” Drawing Edward up to the divan, Alfons smiled sheepishly. “I lived in a world where people had wings. I’m not sure if everyone, but it was a child’s dreams, and it didn’t . . . Edward?”
Edward had turned to the window again. To the autumn evenings that grew colder day to day. “We’re going to vacation in Greece, this winter.”
“But—”
He fixed his gaze on Alfons’s and Alfons shrank. “If you can’t get a vacation, I’ll get one for you.”
They packed their bags and boarded the train and arrived in Athens with a map of the country and a vague plan for the next fortnight. They travelled the countryside up and down, examining ruins, thoroughly ignoring the other tourists with their loudness and their crassness in favour of sitting and observing and wondering.
The warmth made his wings ache with the need to stretch.
Alfons picked up books of ancient Greek verses from the libraries. Translating back and forth, he would read them aloud to Edward, who marked the next places to visit, farther in and farther south.
“So Icara exists here, too.” Edward snorted.
“Icarus. Yes, he does. Why?”
“Nothing.” The sun beat down upon them. Sweat trickled down his neck, between his shoulder, over the itchy bases of his wings; he felt like he might pass out from the heat. “Nothing at all.”
The first night he climbed to the roof of the inn, tied his shirt off at his waist, and spread his wings, gold as the sun against the horned moon, the wind bid him leap.
He did, and tumbled, and crashed into the dirt below.
Perhaps motivated by the yell, Alfons stepped outside, caught him. Which was how the world worked, really: Any time Edward tried anyway, the universe would shit on him twice over.
Stuttering, he probed his empty mind for an answer and heard nothing but fantastical excuses that would never, ever work someone as brilliant, as talented, as beautiful in every sense of the word as Alfons. But Alfons merely shrugged off his jacket, wrapping it around Edward’s shoulders, around his wings. Hurried him inside. Dropped him onto the bed.
Edward blinked. Alfons seemed to positively vibrate from excitement.
“Oh my God,” he breathed. “Can I—touch them?”
“They’re not really—”
Alfons raised an eyebrow. “I’ve let you in on my secrets, Ed. Can’t I . . . just see them, at least?”
His heart pounding somewhere in his throat or on his tongue, Edward nodded. Alfons knelt behind him on the bed. Ghosted fingers over the scarred bases, the charred feathers, the leather and the flesh alike. Warm and soft, like gossamer silk.
Edward lowered his eyelids and wondered if he could weep.
“You never told me.”
“At least your ‘secret’ would let you fulfill your dreams! Mine hurts. Something I can never tell anyone, or they’ll see differently. Realise I’m not normal. Exile me. For being different.”
“No, your secret makes you human. Mine makes me an outcast. Makes me a freak . . .”
“No. Ssh. Come here.”
Alfons unrolled the canvas paper and flicked the pen expertly between his fingers. Edward rubbed the back of his head. “You can’t fly at the moment, can you? Well, I’m going to fashion you wings.”
The word—fashion—irked some memory, long lost. Absentmindedly he touched the leather contraption, cracked and in desperate need of oiling, at his right shoulder.
“You’re not—”
“I’ll learn. And you’ll help! You know anatomy, and physiology. And I have a friend of mine, er, from when I was a kid. She’s big in medicine, studying to be a physical therapist. I’ll have to introduce you two! You’ll love her, and Whitney’ll love you, I can just tell.” Whitney. Edward gripped the stem of the glass so harshly he sensed it strain beneath his fingers. Placing the drink onto the table, he took a step towards Alfons, settled his hand on Alfons’s shoulder, tugged him back ever to slightly. “And then we’ll make you an artificial wing! And pretty soon, you’ll be flying like anything—mmfm!”
A kiss. Quick and dry, a soft touch of the lips followed by a lengthy gaze, lovely, dark and deep.
“Oh,” whispered Alfons, quietly, and Edward could feel the breath on his mouth.
Edward breathed in. Out. In. Out. Then: “If you can build me wings, I’ll take you flying, golden boy.”
“Oh.” Alfons exhaled. Hesitated. Tilted his chin up, leaned, kissed.
For the hero flew too close to the sun, and the sun bore down too hot, and the wax wings melted to liquid gold. And the hero fell into the sea, fell into the world below the waves, fell into the arms of the moon waiting on the other side.