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Alphonse tries to see the world in black in white. Good and evil, firmly separated with a stern line, unmoving with no room for little crossover. Gray areas don’t exist and everyone, everything is either this or that. It is simply how his brain tries to function, logically and categorizing, putting things in the places to which they belong.
His mother is the definition of good. Gentle and kind Trisha, the woman that lets him sleep in late when he’d stayed up all night reading his father’s books again, the one who makes his favorite breakfast, sunnyside eggs with extra pepper and thick blueberry pancakes, each and every day. She hugs him when he cries, and even when he doesn’t make a sound. Her voice is calm, that of a gentle wave caressing the waiting shore at sunrise. It steadies him; keeps his heart easygoing and gives him room to play, and learn, and grow on his own time. Without a doubt in the world, his mother is good.
Alphonse wouldn’t say that his father is definite evil, although his elder brother would yell his head off for hours on end, should Alphonse ever speak his mind on their absent parent. He can’t remember much of the man, to be quite honest. He remembers a firm hand on his back, keeping him from tumbling over when he’d run down the hallways, chasing after Edward. He remembers a smile that seemed welcoming on the surface, but he realizes now that there was much, much more behind the tight-lipped thing that contained words he probably should never hear. Alphonse doesn’t think his father is evil. He thinks his father has something to do.
Truthfully, at such a young age, Alphonse isn’t sure that he’s even come close to meeting evil. He’s read stories with evil beings and creatures, those that terrorize villages and steal princesses and wreak havoc throughout full nations, but Alphonse is sure that they’re all make-believe. Nobody could be that cruel, especially in his homely country. Of course, he’s seen anger in his life, too. His guardian, practically grandmother, is the epitome of anger. He’s seen Pinako go on full rampages, bickering with Edward for his attitude and lecturing Winry on feeble mistakes in her workshop, but he isn’t sure if that classified as being evil or not. Pinako has always been gentle with him, anyway. So no, the old woman isn’t evil. She is good.
Perhaps there is no such thing as evil in the world, especially not for a kid like him to notice. Alphonse likes to think with hope, enjoys basking in the idea that goodness was all the world was built on. It’s an easy mindset to prosper with, so he makes up his mind to stick with it.
Alphonse learns, not long after the death of his mother, that evil is not so far off as it seems. That it lurks in the back pages of a book not opened in years, one full of dust and grime, indicating that maybe they should’ve remained closed. He’s opened these books though, opened up his mind to their knowledge and sucked in everything they had to offer him. If his mother was still alive, she’d ramble about how smart her youngest boy was. But his mother isn’t alive. She’s six feet below the ground, buried beneath their feet, and Alphonse plans on doing anything and everything he can to get her back.
He comes face to face with real evil during the attempt to bring her back to life. Wispy red and black hands reaching up, up out of the ground from every curve and corner of the transmutation circle he and Edward had sketched out onto the floor only minutes ago. He hears weeping, a wretched sound coming from the mouth of the black thing in the middle of their mess. It’s supposed to be his mother. He knows it’s not. Alphonse can hardly see through all the flashing lights, red and blue and red and blue and red and– a scream. He can’t even recognize it as his own. Before he has the time to process the look of shock and horror that overcomes his brothers face, he’s being ripped apart. Limb by limb, bone by bone, an eye for an eye. His life for his mother’s. They knew this well at the start. He continues to scream, stretches out an arm in hopes that Edward, who has always been stronger than him and far more capable than him in more ways than one, would be able to pull him out of this nightmare.
His fingertips are swirled up into nothingness a millisecond before his hand would have touched his brothers. Alphonse can hear no screaming, feel no pain. All he sees is white. Pure and evil white. And ah, in the back of it all, in that horrific space of nothingness, a chuckle that sounds of his own voice mixed with that of a demon straight from the depths of hell.
“I find this a fair trade, don’t you, Alphonse? Your body for your mother’s?”
A face emerges from the white, all grinning and cheeky, but then no, a body, no, his body. All too suddenly the poor boy realizes the entire room was white, why there was nothing to touch or see because he himself has lost tangibility. Alphonse wants to scream in disbelief then, wants to tear his lungs, the ones that should be in his now nonexistent chest, open, bleeding and breaking from his nonexistent chest, and yell out for his brother, for his mother, for somebody to save him. But he finds himself unable to do anything at all. Simply because he is nothing at all. Only a juvenile soul lingering in this purgatory of blank sheets and emptiness.
It’s like that for a moment, until a moment that passes like a whirlwind of electric blues and sharp tingles against his vulnerable soul. And within mere seconds, everything feels gray, metallic, but most of all– empty.
He’s just a boy, a boy who thought he could conquer the supernatural powers with his warm heart and a willing mind, and god was he wrong, so terribly wrong. They’ve overdone themselves with this idea, truly, he and his brother with the weakening despair that rained down on them since their mother fell out in the yard, unable to get back up, to breathe again with life. They thought for so long, so hard, sought out a teacher and made plans and got their calculations, wrote them down and had them right, but god, they were so wrong. And now all they have to do is figure out how to make it right.