Archive of Our Own

Ed looks down at the map.  He looks up at the impenetrable, indistinguishable jungle.  He looks down at the map again.

“Am I really the world expert on this stuff now?” he asks.  “What a load of crap.”

“I think it’s nice,” Al says, because of course he does.

Ed just looks at him for a few seconds, and Al looks levelly back.

“It is,” he says, matter-of-factly.  “Everyone in Amestris knew you as the Fullmetal Alchemist.  But the people here know you as Ed.  You were so brilliant at alchemy that most people couldn’t see past it to all of the other things that are amazing about you.  But because the people here don’t know about that, they’re recognizing your intellect and your drive and your courage and your compassion, which were always there but so often disappeared into the shadow of the fame.  What could be nicer than that?”

Ed continues looking at him.

Al blinks.

Ed takes a deep breath.

“It’s eight thirty in the morning,” he says.

“So what?” Al says.  “The truth doesn’t sleep.”

Last night, neither had Ed.  Al, on the other hand, had crashed out on top of the takeout as soon as they’d dragged it back to their shabby hotel room at the jungle’s edge and scarfed most of it.  Ed had had to fish for a few more kebabs that had been trapped under Al’s folded arms, because they were too good to waste.

Al had barely surfaced from unconsciousness a little while later when Ed had charitably wrangled him into the bed so that he wouldn’t wake up with a crick in his neck and sauce all over his face.  He’d managed to sling an arm blearily around Ed’s neck and mumble something about the price of dumplings into Ed’s shoulder, and then had promptly fallen back asleep.

Ed had taken his shoes off and tucked him in.  Al had giggled without waking up when Ed’s fingertips brushed the soles of his feet, and his toes had curled.  There was something kind of sad about how it felt like being kids again—looking out for each other, the little intimacies, the gentleness, the quiet of the night, how tired Ed was but how satisfied he always felt taking good care of Al—but there was something sweet about that, too.  Always and forever.  They’ll never be so far away from it as to forget themselves, which means they’ll never lose each other.

Ed had still ended up lying awake, trying to toss and turn as inconspicuously as possible even though Al was sleeping with the single-minded intensity of a particularly tenacious log.  He’s just not sure that any of this is a good idea, however “nice” Al claims to think it is.

Maybe it was a mistake to give Féina Al’s address in Xing before he started running towards it at top speed, but they’d sort of ended up being friends, in the same way that Ed ended up being friends with an awful lot of people—the We sure did just stumble dazedly out of the far side of a cave full of bloodthirsty dark-dwelling monster-things together, and you definitely heard me scream enough times that I think there’s some natural solidarity here way.  Likely that’s a poor reflection on his life choices more than it’s a compliment to his friend-acquisition skills, but it all amounts to the same thing.  Féina is smart, and pretty cool, and not so bad for a military type.  He didn’t want her to fade out into the past and disappear forever, like old acquaintances so often do when you don’t have a purpose in common with them anymore.

So he had, very reluctantly, ripped the front off of one of the envelopes from Al and given it to her before he’d left.

She’d written once just to ask how he was, and he’d written her back, and that was all fine.

A couple weeks ago, he’d gotten another letter—this one imploring him to come back to Creta and gallivant off into the jungle again to help them deal with an exciting new recurrence of the same old problem with the shitty alchemists who had somehow mixed up “old-fashioned and traditional” with “threaten human sacrifice”, even though Ed was increasingly positive that there was no precedent for that in any of the actual literature.  Porteus had brought a shit-lot of books on their trip last time.  Ed had disliked him less after figuring that one out.

But if there’s one thing that Ed’s janky, creaky, tilting roller coast of a life has taught him, it’s that there’s a big damn difference between a good thing and a good idea.  This is certainly a useful venture.  He might very well be the most qualified person to execute it, which is a bizarre series of thoughts to have all on its own.

But dragging Al out into the Cretan jungle with him to go track down and neutralize some whackjobs, as much as it does reek of old times’ sake mixed with all of today’s specific blessings in a strangely beautiful way, probably has downsides that he hasn’t even agonized about yet.  The downsides of it probably have downsides.  Even if Al doesn’t get tangled up in a trap or bitten by a leopard or breathe jungle muck into his precious lungs or get swarmed by mosquitos or get hit in the face with a fake-old-fashioned spear by one of the cultist culprits, there are all kinds of other things that could go wrong that Ed hasn’t even come up with.  There always are.

Being a big brother is kind of the worst sometimes.

Being Al’s big brother is torture.

Even while he was lying there last night, though, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Al’s soft, even breathing so close by, he had to admit that there’s a little bit of cosmic justice or something to it.  Al used to have to chase him around nonstop and anticipate the next stupid thing he would do in order to try to protect him from bodily harm whether he liked it or not.  Maybe it’s about time that Ed has to do his share of the damage control.

So here they are, straggling through the muggy, miserable jungle, making liberal use of the machetes before the blisters set in.  

“Lighten up, Brother,” Al says, so warmly that Ed barely even resents him for it.  “It could be worse.  It could be so much worse.  It could be r—”

“Don’t you dare,” Ed says.  “Don’t even say it.”

Al blinks, then smiles, then smirks—and the last one is a goddamn crime.

“Say what?” he asks, all angelic innocence.  “‘It could be raining?’”

The heavy silver sky dutifully opens up.

Ed folds the map and shoves it into his shirt before he gives the downpour an appropriately dour look.

Al just laughs.

Al is laughing slightly less many, many hours later, when he has to keep extracting the water from their tent, and then their supplies, and then the tent again, and then the supplies again, as they scramble to put the thing up and pitch camp.  The rain hasn’t shown a single scrap of mercy, let alone abated in any meaningful way—it’s turned the ground into an endless goopy bog of saturated mud and sopping ferns, which drives them up onto a relatively flat rock to try to keep the tent floor out of the swamp.  Trying to brace the tent poles on solid granite unsurprisingly presents a problem, which provides Al’s next fun little alchemy challenge, and then he gets to try to evaporate the water from underneath the soggy tent while they’re huddled inside it with all of their dripping wet gear.  That lands them with an intolerable quantity of chokingly thick, weird-smelling steam, which sends Ed diving for the tent flap and trying to waft it out with the aid of his still-damp coat.

His coat gets wetter.  The steam, improbably enough, barely even moves as he whips the side of his coat at it feverishly.  Al starts laughing so hard that he starts crying even though this is his fault—sort of, mostly—and Ed tackles him to the not-quite-dry tent floor.  Even while crying laughing, though, Al can still fend him off, and it’s impossible to see this much undiluted joy just bubbling out of him and not end up laughing, too.

Ed makes a big show of collapsing on top of him, careful to keep the metal knee well out of the way to avoid bruising him by accident.  It’s good, sometimes, not to have to worry about the arm.  Especially with Al.  Especially when Ed can touch him and feel warm skin with two hands.

“Hey,” Al says, barely even shoving at his side, with the tail end the laughter still twisting the breath out of his voice.  “You’re heavy.  How are we going to cook in this?”

“We’re not,” Ed says.  “It’s your own fault.”

Al pushes even less effectually at Ed’s head.  His hair’s still soaked.  “For stating the observation that rain was theoretically possible?  The entire scientific community all across the world just cringed in unison, Brother.”

“It’s nice that they can agree on something,” Ed says.

Al pushes at his shoulder in a way that feels more like a squeeze.  “Even if it’s you being a dummy?”

“I think they already agreed on that,” Ed says.  “You remember that time—”

“That we turned your report where you got sidetracked talking about the possibilities of food production alchemy into a manuscript and brought it to the University?” Al says.  “And they tried to kick us out for the crime of being young, and then banned us for the crime of being right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, helpless against the grin as he lays his sopping wet head down on Al’s chest.  “That time.”

Al runs his fingers through Ed’s hair.  They get all tangled up in the wet strands as he reaches the tie.  “For the record, if any of them actually think you’re dumb, I will personally go to their houses and kick their asses.”

Maybe Ed is bad at science—a world-shattering revelation if he’s ever had one.  It shouldn’t be thermodynamically possible to feel this warm when he’s soaked to the bone.

“You’re the best, Al,” he says.

“Wait,” Al says.  “I retract that.  I’d go to their houses and hold them still so you could kick them.”

Ed kisses him until he starts giggling uncontrollably, presumably at the thought of them tag-teaming a bunch of pretentious dweebs with oversized glasses and inflated egos.

They do still have that food problem.  But maybe they can steam something, even if it still smells kind of weird.

A combination of weird-steaming and concentrated alchemical heat (“Don’t tell Teacher I’m doing this.”  “Are you kidding?  She’d kill me, too, I’m an accomplice”) gets some of their supplies close enough to cooked that Ed’s confident neither of them will die as a direct result of having eaten this stuff.  Al holds both hands on Ed’s head for a bit and gently steams some of the water out of his hair.

They do some more coat-flapping, and then Al works up a beautifully clever little air circulation array that flushes the worst of it out of the tent without them having to wave any fabric or paper or other objects around like a pair of maniacs, and Ed gushes over it a little bit because it really is gorgeous, and then they can actually lie down and stare up at the roof of the tent and listen to the rain battering endlessly at the top.  Al curls up against Ed’s side even though it isn’t cold at all and helps him wedge the machine oil rag deep into the crevices of his leg and his knee to get to all the gears inside the joints.

They made decent progress today towards the heart of the miserable jungle in spite of the rain.  Ed more or less even knows where they are right now, which is a pretty substantial plus in this business, as far as he can tell.  Tomorrow, if the weather stops being a vindictive piece of shit, they can haul moderate ass and have time to investigate some stuff that Féina marked out on the map for them.  And that’ll be fine and dandy or whatever shit.

Ed hugs Al a little closer and closes his eyes.

When he wakes up, Al’s gone.

His heart slams up to the top of his throat, to the back of his mouth—rattles around like a musketball in a metal cage, hammers through every last square centimeter of him—

And then he hears the soft humming from outside.

It takes him a couple seconds of deep breathing to slow his heart down, and then a few more to bite back the urge to instruct Al never to leave his sight again—which he knows, logically, is absurd at best and probably a whole hell of a lot of other things besides, controlling and paranoid and creepy all among them.  Then he crawls as quietly as he can over to the tent flap and peeks out.

Al’s cute when he cooks.  Al’s cute when he does everything.  It’s sort of a pain in the ass, actually.  Distracting.

He is not, however, good at cooking.  He can handle all of it in concept, because it’s chemistry-adjacent, and any alchemist worth their salt can follow instructions and combine ingredients.

But the salt is the problem, when you get down to it—or, to be more accurate, the seasoning in general.

Al’s tastebuds were so hyper-sensitive when he first got them back that he could barely even cope with anything more flavorful than gruel.  He worked his way up to different tastes at high speed with characteristic fearlessness, but he never quite internalized the fact that you usually have to put the oomph into the food if you want to be able to taste it there later.

This morning, Al has meticulously alchemy-dried enough of the ground near their tent rock for a modest fire pit and a place to sit beside it.  He’s occupying half of the dry space, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, but for occasionally reaching out with one hand and poking a long spoon at the contents of a pot that smells recognizably breakfast-like.

Ed shoves his shoes on, climbs down, settles next to him, and reaches up to ruffle his hair.  Doing it with the right hand is fucking unparalleled, honestly.  An endless wealth of the finest silken strands, spilling over his fingers, soft beneath his palm.  Sensory heaven.

“Mornin’,” he says.

“Good morning,” Al says, smiling.  A pleased pink flush backlights the cinnamon-colored freckles on his cheekbones.  “Which it is.  Will be.  I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a great day.”

“Maybe lay off the premonitions for a while,” Ed says.  “You had a feeling it wasn’t gonna rain.”

Al gazes at him in transparent false dismay.  “Oh, no.  My beloved brother, indulging unscientific superstition in his old age.”

“Cut it out,” Ed says, but it’s impossible not to grin at him when he’s doing the big serious eyes like that.  “I’m not.  I mean, considering that that Father guy used celestial movement as a way of magnifying alchemy and practically ate half the planet, maybe we ought to operate under the assumption that there’s something to all the star charts and astrology shit.  But in the meantime, I’m just hedging my bets.  That’s not bad science, it’s good gambling.”

“My beloved brother,” Al says, even more solemnly.  “Indulging in a degenerate gambling addiction in his old—”

“Do me a favor,” Ed says.

Al smiles brightly.  “Shut up?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He takes the spoon away.  “But also put, like, five times more salt in that than you think it needs, okay?”

“Hmm,” Al says, eyeing him.

“Trust me,” Ed says.  “We’ll both thank me later.”

Al blinks innocently.  Usually that’s your first and only warning.

“My beloved brother,” he says.  “Overdosing us on sodium despite claiming to understand how chemistry works.”

“My beloved brother,” Ed says, elbowing him gently, “volunteering to cook despite not understanding how seasoning works.”

Al nudges his head against Ed’s temple like an attention-seeking cat.  “Better that than not understanding chemistry.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ed says.  He butts his head right back.  Gently.  “Even mediocre chemists gotta eat.”

There is a pause.

And then Al nudges his head much more insistently—hard enough, actually, that he almost tips Ed’s balance and knocks him over into the mud.

“I don’t actually think you’re a mediocre chemist,” he says.

“I know,” Ed says, tousling his hair again.

The unfortunate part is that Al’s smile would make up for a whole hell of a lot of mind-blowingly bland food.

“I don’t think you’re a mediocre much of anything,” Al says.  “I think you’re the best person on the planet, and you always have been.”

“Al,” Ed manages, faintly, through the tight throat and the explosion in his brain.  “Do you know what fucking time it is?”

“Nope,” Al says, brightly.  “And I don’t care.”

Ed goes for the coffee before it’s too late.

They make pretty decent time starting out, considering that Ed had to fight the salt away from Al.  He knows Al wasn’t too serious about the whole thing—or maybe feels bad about repeatedly stating that Ed is shit at science—based on the fact that he won.

There wasn’t much of a path to speak of even before the downpour forcibly changed the theme of this entire biome, so Ed only lets them get a few steps before he takes the map back out of his shirt where he stashed it yesterday.

Al stops walking.

Before Ed can ask him what the hell it is this time, Al shoves a hand up into his hair like he’s having the worst day ever, regardless of his earlier proclamation.

“Did you sleep with the map?” he asks.

That’s clearly rhetorical, so Ed shrugs and tries to make head or tail or leaf or limb of the trees ahead.  “Are you jealous?”

“Of people who don’t know you?” Al says.  “Maybe a little bit.”

He’s already started apologizing for how hard it is these days to keep mean thoughts inside his head when his mouth wants to speak them before Ed is even close to finished laughing.

There’s one place in particular that Féina asked them to look: some sort of ancient Cretan temple so deep that it’s far more likely that the jungle’s claimed it than that any extremists have.  Still, it’s worth checking into, and if nothing else, it’d be a much better place to hide out if it starts to dump down rain again.  At least that place oughta have walls.

Maybe there’s something to this great day business, anyway.  Tromping through the jungle with Al is so much more fun than it was with the original crew.  They were okay, mostly, eventually, once Ed warmed up to them and vice versa, but this is better.

It always is, with Al.  It always has been.

The really remarkable thing is that even though they read each other’s minds, they never seem to run out of things to talk about—or to argue about, more often than not, but never with any teeth.  Even if Al runs out of stories about Xing someday, he’s always reading, always learning, always broadening his sights and holding both arms out to the horizon.  And there’s always nostalgia.  They have so many old stories to retell that neither of them can remember them all.

That alone makes the trekking through the mud into something relatively pleasant.  Mostly.  Sort of.

The other good news is that Ed was quick with this damn map even before he had a bonding moment with it at some point last night, when it sort of slid around and covered up a particularly threadbare section of his shirt and helped to keep him warm.  Symbiosis at its finest.

“Okay,” Al says after they’ve been tromping in companionable silence for a while.  “Clarify something for me.  When they say ‘uncharted’, they mean ‘unpalatable’, right?  Because it’s clearly charted.  It’s right there on the map.”

“What a day for you,” Ed says.  “Bad science, bad linguistics—”

“Don’t make fun,” Al says, elbowing him so hard that they both stumble and have to grab for each other’s shoulders to steady themselves.  “I’m trying to take an analytical, grown-up approach to this whole adventure thing instead of just barreling in headfirst and finding out what happens.”

Ed looks up at the huge, broad leaves of the ferns ahead and the trees above, all of them bowing under the weight of the accumulated water, gleaming droplets swelling at their edges, tilting slowly until they gather enough weight to fall.

“Why?” he asks.  “Nobody’s gonna know except us.”

Al blinks at him.

Ed blinks back.

“Good point,” Al says.  “Race you to the temple!  Readysetgo—”

A burst of displaced raindrops flares behind him, glittering blindingly in the sunlight, as he tears off through the trees, backpack rattling, boot treads slapping in the mud.

Little bastard.

Ed takes off after him, of course.  Never any question of that.

Ed almost catches up despite the self-awarded head start and the fact that he spent the first thirty seconds laughing for the sheer joy of it.

He probably would have started laughing again when he does catch up—Al’s hair is a windswept mess, his cheeks are bright pink, he’s panting up a brand-new storm, and his eyes are as huge and bright as ever—except for the fact that what they’ve come upon takes his breath away.

When he’d spared it a thought, he’d envisioned something halfway between the sketches that he’d seen in the books and the ruins that they’d stumbled across on the previous venture.  The past manifesting as ruins makes sense, in some rigid back-room of his brain.  Unless they’re maintained, remodeled, renovated, rebuilt, renewed, the ancient ways eventually crumble into dust.  He still dreams about Xerxes, sometimes—about his father’s legacy, dead for centuries before he stumbled through.  In the dreams, he always floats among the splintered columns and the jagged remnants of the walls as they shudder back into their original intentions, unwinding entropy and re-becoming what they were.  The grand halls rise, and the paint shines on the unmarred murals, and he drifts over a bustling cityscape draped in blue and white and gold.  The wreckage restores itself, and this time he’s the ghost.

The temple that they’ve just found is not a ruin.

It is strangely, staggeringly intact.

The jungle has clearly chewed on it a bit—downpours like the one they just endured have whittled away at the yellowing silver stone, and twisting curls of ivy have pried out entire chunks, leaving crumbling-edged craters—but the vast majority of the structure looks like it went up yesterday, erosion aside.

And what a damn structure.

The general concept seems to fall somewhere between the towering, echoey halls whose bones jut up from the desert, and something much more angular—more like the Cretans’ modern cathedrals, sharp angles and slanted roofs.  The carvings in the stone are stunning, like nothing Ed has ever seen at home: impossibly intricate, endlessly repeated, deeply-engraved and meticulously even.  If an alchemist did those, he’d call them an indisputable master of the craft, but given the approximate era of its construction, it’s far more likely these were hacked in by hand, one organically fluid curl of a vine, one flower petal, one tiny star and heart-shaped leaf at a time.

Directly ahead of them, stone stairs lead downward, cracked and half-consumed by the plants, gleaming wet and dappled with mud from last night’s rain.  At the base looms what looks like the foyer to end all foyers, the top of the emptily gaping archway standing some dozen feet above their heads.  Ed can just make out what look like the corroded remains of metal hinges rusted into the sides, but the doors that must have sealed this entrance have long since rotted away to nothing.

There’s a special sort of sadness to old buildings—everyone who stacked the stones, everyone who sponsored them, everyone who walked their halls and gazed up at their ceilings and took shelter within their walls, has been dead for so long that history has washed them away.

But there’s a triumph to them, too.  Human beings built them as a monument to something, intentionally meant to stand defiant against the ravages of time.  And they’re still here.

“Oh, this is so cool,” Al says, and Ed takes a second to revel in the sheer energy of the excitement pouring off of him.  It was harder to clock that when there was a big metal barrier in between.

“Don’t count your chickens,” Ed says, but it’s been inevitable since before they left the city behind.  He takes one step down, cautious about putting his weight on his left ankle, making sure that his boot tread has a solid grip before he continues to the next stair step.  There are a few things that could make this whole escapade a bust right off the bat, and breaking himself sits pretty high on the list.

“I’m not,” Al says.  “I’m estimating them at most.  You don’t have to tell me how purposefully vengeful chickens are.”

Ed splits the difference between extreme care in how he steps and staying ahead of Al.  He doesn’t anticipate any especially nasty traps around here, but just in case.  “Maybe you started it.”

“I never start it,” Al says, trying to sound prim and succeeding only in sounding delighted.  “But I always finish it.”

Doesn’t Ed know that.

In the meantime, though, he’s just set both feet on the mostly-flat stone tiles of the main floor.

He stops to wrangle out the waterproof matches and the ingeniously-designed little lantern that Féina let him keep last time, which is crammed full of perfectly-angled mirrors and engraved glass that refracts the light until the whole thing shines far brighter than it seems like it ought to, given its size.  Féina had seen how enchanted Ed was with its engineering mechanics, told him to consider it his, and refused to take a no for an answer in any of the languages Ed had tried.

Cramming his hand in far enough to light it takes some finagling, but it’s completely worth it—not least because Al gravitates towards it like a particularly adorable moth and immediately starts asking smart questions about the details, even though it just illuminated the whole enormous room stretched out ahead of them.

Elric is as Elric does, Ed supposes.

“And she just gave it to you?” Al says after Ed’s fielded as many of the inquiries as humanly possible.  “You realize that you kind of owe her your soul, right?”

“You already have that,” Ed says.

Al goes an adorable shade of deep pink, mouth screwing up, and then promptly starts to stalk off across the floor.  “Brother, you can’t just say things like—oh!”

His footsteps have started to echo loudly, and his voice just echoed louder still.

“Hellooooo,” Al calls, and it sings out through the darkness until the damp stone walls reflect a warped reply.

“Hey,” Ed says, keeping his voice low enough that it won’t resonate.

“Hey yourself,” Al says.  He cups both hands around his mouth.  “I love youuuuu, even though you are getting superstitious!”

Ed has to bite down hard on the grin.  “Shut up.  I am not.”

Even in the darkness, Al’s eyes are alight with the mischief, and Ed’s heart squeezes itself halfway to scraps.  “What do you call this, theeeeeen?”

Ed’s eyes probably aren’t alight with mischief, which at least makes it easier to roll them hard and then walk past Al to try to keep a couple steps ahead of him.  Just in case.

“Rational caution,” he says.

Al laughs, the little shit.  “‘Rational’.  Right.  Edward ‘Rational’ Elric.  Like it says on your birth certificate.”

“I’m going to get it legally changed,” Ed says, lifting the lantern to the full length of his arm to try to cast warm yellow light up to the heights of the vaulted ceiling.

“If anyone ever gets you to do a non-mandatory form or piece of paperwork ever again,” Al says, “I’ll eat my hat.”

“You don’t have a hat,” Ed says, sweeping his arm back and forth and discovering endless rows of stone benches, marked out with yet more incredibly intricate, beautifully preserved engravings as far as he can see before they’re swallowed by the dark.

“I’ll get one,” Al says.  “A good one.  With a feather.  Or a pompon.  Or both.  What are we looking for?”

Ed can’t help smiling to himself a little more.  He’d missed it so much—the way they both leap topics, fast and fearless, smooth and easy like jumping from one stone to the next to cross a river.  It’s extremely ordinary for the pair of them to do it in tandem, but it tends to register as fairly baffling for anybody else.

“Signs of the guys who probably want to kill us, I guess,” Ed says.  “Féina thinks they’re hiding out in this general area, but it sure doesn’t look like anybody’s been down here in a long-ass time.”

“No,” Al says, very softly, striking out on a winding, idle path forward, weaving in between what must have once been pews.  “It doesn’t look like they have.  Why wouldn’t they, do you think?  Is it too sacred?”

“I mean,” Ed says, trying to make scrambling after him look natural instead of protective, “as far as I can tell, in the old Cretan arcana stuff, life is sacred, and this lot definitely take issue with that.  So I’m thinking there’s gotta be something…”

As he subtly lengthens his stride to try to get a step ahead of Al, the lantern swings from his hand, and the wavering edge of the light seeps out past… a line.

A line carved deep into the stone floor.

A curve, which is part of a circle.

Ed climbs up onto the frontmost pew and lifts the lantern high, slinging his right arm out to stop Al from walking any further.  It’s a blessing, most days, that it’s soft enough to use for things like that.

The circle doesn’t quite look like alchemy.  It doesn’t look like alkahestry, either; or like the complicated, artistic sigils and sweeping lines that turned the crumbling walls of Xerxes into murals with too much meaning.

It’s got too many angles—enough spikes that it reminds Ed in the weirdest way of the shoulders of Al’s old armor, except that those came to be comfortingly familiar, and neither of those words could ever be applied to this.

“Hmm,” Al says, peering effortlessly over Ed’s arm even though Ed is standing on a damn bench.  “That’s interesting.”

“Watch your step,” Ed says.

“You watch your step,” Al says, lovingly, as he skirts easily around Ed’s hand and then saunters calmly along the edge of the exterior ring, staying one long pace away from the lines.

Even after all of it—even after everything they’ve been through, and everything they’ve been—Al still trusts the world not to fuck him.

Ed loves him for that.

“Bring the lantern over?” Al asks.

Ed hops down from the bench and follows.  His arm is starting to ache.  “Would a ‘please’ kill you, or what?”

“It might,” Al says, grinning at him brightly in the sweeping yellow light.  “Why risk it?”

They approach what looks like the midpoint, based both on the radius and on the increasing density of unfathomable symbols carved into the stone, spiraling inward towards what must mark the center.  Ed strains to raise the lantern a little higher, to see a little more—maybe something will jump out at him, either as an alchemical analogue or from the huge wealth of research reading.  Some of the sigils look like things he might have seen, might have skimmed past on a page in search of something more specific, might have glossed over and moved on from because the chord they struck in his heart strummed notes in a minor key.  Some of them he might have passed over because it hurt too much to think about what an alchemist could make them do.

“Hey,” Al says.  “The scepter in this statue of some old guy is clearly a lever.”

Ed whirls around, and the lantern light careens around them, whipping through the shadows, dancing on the pews.  “Alphonse Elric, don’t you dare pull tha—”

“I’m pulling it!” Al says.

Ed can’t even be mad at him in anything more than a distant, vaguely jealous, grudgingly approving sort of way.

Not least because the grinding of the stone lever as Al hauls down on it segues immediately into an impossibly loud ambient rumbling, which drowns out the vast majority of the other feelings in favor of some very rational concern for the future of their structural integrity.  As places to get crushed into bone dust and bleeding guts go, this would rank pretty damn high, but the alternative still wins out.

Ed vaults over the last pew to join Al next to the fateful piece of shit statue that landed them in this curiosity-driven mess.  Arguably, Al’s experiment was good science, but if Ed admits to that, he’ll never hear the end of it, whether they’re bloody bone dust or not.

The walls shake.  The floor shakes—violently enough that Ed’s left knee tries to lock up on him, and he has to grab Al’s shoulder to brace himself.  The rumbling rises and intensifies into a roaring, gravel rattling and bouncing across the vast tiles of the floor, the whole structure groaning as it shifts.

It emanates the loudest from directly overhead—from the center of a flat segment of the stone ceiling.  Dust pours down, cascading like white fog through the path of the lantern light, spilling around them until Ed has to hold his sleeve over his nose to avoid choking.  That’s a much less awesome way to go.

“If it starts to collapse,” Al says, perfectly calmly, slightly muffled by his own sleeve and forearm, “I’ll make us a little dome and then pillar us out of here.”

Stone grinds harder.  Slivers of light open up in the ceiling, showering chips of stone and waterfalls of dust.  Ed can’t tell if he actually can hear gears turning in the walls behind them, or if he’s extrapolating based on how he would build a ceiling that can slowly winch itself open hundreds of years after its initial construction.

He squints a little.  He doesn’t want this shit in his eyes any more than he wants it in his lungs.  “Oka—”

A silhouetted head just appeared in one of the widening gaps in the ceiling.

Definitely still attached to a silhouetted person.  Not decapitated, or anything.  Which means it’s less-bad news than it could be.

But still pretty fucking bad.

“Huh,” he says, jerking his chin up without lowering his arm to draw Al’s attention to the increasing number of non-decapitated heads visible through the transforming roof.  “Found ’em.”

He can’t begin to guess whether these assholes are here because they’ve been lurking around trying to protect this place, or if they’ve been waiting for someone else to pull the lever because it’s some sort of heresy, or if they’ve just been following the Elric Expedition around for fun until now.  It’s impossible to fathom the motives of these wackos, because Ed is a completely different kind of wacko, and his values don’t align.

At least, as the huge triangular pizza-slice-shaped wedges in the ceiling open fully, and all of the grinding rumbles for another second and then stops, he knows how to deal with this part.

“Ooh,” Al says.  “Exciting.”

That’s… a word for it.  That’s definitely a word.

Today’s batch of ill-intentioned and probably ill-fated Cretan extremists all sling ropes down into the gaps and toss their oversized guns over their shoulders to start rappelling down.  Ed counts six idiots altogether.  Word must not have gotten out about the way this ended for the last crew, when Ed was on his own.

The stone dust has drifted down and cleared enough that he and Al can both stop shielding their sinuses without fear of discovering a new disease to be called statue-lung, but Al uses the opportunity to clap both hands together.

“Hey!” Ed says over the unmistakable buzz of rope-skimming.  “Don’t destroy anything!”

“It’s not destroying,” Al says, bright eyes fixed on the figures twirling down the ropes as energy crackles around his palms.  “It’s unrequested redecoration.”

Knowing Al and himself, Ed is positive that that’s a direct quote from his own adolescence, but that doesn’t change the fact that: “This is a priceless and incredibly rare historical site, Al!”

“My beloved brother,” Al says, adoringly, as he dives for the first unfortunate opponent whose boots just touched the floor, “an archaeologist.”

There are worse things to be.

Like the kind of special dumbass who attacks someone who was reckless enough to pull an obviously questionable lever in a rare historical site.

It’s a little unfair to the Cretans, to be perfectly honest.  Even if they did hear about Ed—which would explain why they came with an over-compensating rifle and a sidearm each—nothing in the world could have prepared them for Al.

In the time that it takes Ed to unsheathe his hunting knife and round on the first Cretan to drop to the floor in range of it, Al has already transmuted part of his coat into a rope, slung it around the end of the rifle pointed at his face, yanked that into his own hands, transmuted it into a sledgehammer with beautiful wood paneling along the handle, and then used that new weapon not as a bludgeon but as a springboard to propel himself up to kick its original owner gracefully in the side of the head.  The guy goes down in a grand total of maybe two seconds.

Ed gets a glimpse of a couple other Cretans looking horrified, at least as far as he can see past their masks.  Good.  Al’s going to have a great time.

Meanwhile, Ed has his own little distraction to dispatch.

As soon as the guy finds his feet, he tries to level the rifle at Ed’s forehead—Ed swings the lantern at him, which flings a few sparks but mostly just startles him so much that he instinctively leans back, which fucks his balance, which sends him stumbling.

Ed slams the hilt of the knife directly into the joint of the guy’s wrist, which makes him howl and drop the rifle, and then Ed ducks low to swipe the knife at his shin, slicing it open wide enough that he howls louder and sinks to one knee.  Applying the butt of his own rifle to the back of his head—mostly gently—seems fittingly poetic.  Al’s already handled his second, so that’s half of the invasion force sorted.

It’s like the murderous miscreants don’t even try these days.

Ed slung the lantern handle over his forearm, which lets him use the pilfered rifle to take the next guy out at the ankles.  That one fires a shot off wildly as he goes down, and the bullet buries itself in the stone of the wall not too far from Ed’s head.

The ancient, beautifully-preserved, hand-carved, artifactual wall.

Ed might put this one’s lights out with a little bit more force.  Maybe.

He glances up in time to see Al pirouetting around his latest victim, who keeps spinning after him in a desperate and extremely doomed attempt to pinpoint him for long enough to put a bullet in or through him.  Al smacks his palms together while continuing to dance and duck and weave around the latest disoriented asshole, and the crackle of white lightning scares the guy even worse.  He takes two steps back, playing himself directly into Al’s glowing hands.

The rifle promptly becomes an admittedly fairly stylish pair of handcuffs that spiral around the forearms all the way up to the elbow, pinning the guy’s arms behind his back as Al claps him on both shoulders hard enough to force him to sit down heavily.

He stays put.

Just one left.

One who has watched instead of engaging—one who has kept to the sidelines, kept out of range and out of reach.  One who has stayed just too far from Al for an alchemical response that could outpace a bullet.

One whose eyes narrow coldly as he raises his rifle and aims it at Al.

These bastards don’t know shit.

They don’t know the Elrics.  They don’t know about preservation.  They don’t know how to launch an ambush.

And they clearly don’t know that any knife can be a throwing knife if you give it enough momentum.

Either end of the thing would have stopped the shot, because Ed threw it with the strength of a human being protecting the person that they love most in the entire scope of the enormous world.  He’s glad all the same that it’s the sharp end of his hunting knife that buries itself deep in the fucker’s left arm.

The scream garners Al’s attention, and Ed garners the fucker’s attention by barreling towards him at top speed, brandishing the rifle he picked up, which buys Al time to dart in and transmute this guy’s gun into an even more creative cage for both of his hands.

Ed breathes out.

He drops the rifle and moves the lantern handle back into his fingers again, the better to lift it high and survey the mild-to-moderate carnage they wrought without really breaking much of a sweat.  There’s a lot of groaning, and some ineffectual writhing against the makeshift restraints, and the latest bastard is already getting blood on the artifactual floor, but other than that—not bad.  Not bad at all.

Al rubs it in with a theatrical little hand-wiping gesture.

“That was fun,” he says.  “And it was good exercise.”

Ed can tell from the expression of disgusted humiliation that the leader doesn’t need to speak Amestrian to understand the gist of that.

Al beams at him.  “I can see why you enjoy these trips.”

“I don’t,” Ed says.

Al’s look turns so knowing that Ed has no choice except to wrinkle his nose and look away.

Which unintentionally lands his gaze on the trickle of blood dribbling from the Cretan that he stabbed, which is now dripping into one of the lines of the not-quite-an-array carved out across the entire floor.

Walking, running, jumping, and rifle-smacking all over it altered nothing.

As soon as the blood seeps in to the base of the outermost line, the whole thing lights up gold.

In the broader arena of array illumination colors, gold is highly preferable to something outright sinister like red, but Ed grabs Al’s arm and hauls him back so hard that they both almost fall on their asses anyway.

There’s a lot more grinding of stone and shuddering of the whole damn structure, and Ed tries to calculate some maximally efficient way to scoop the stupid Cretans out of the circle before it tries to devour them, but then—

The smallest sub-circle in the center, just about the circumference of Ed’s arm extended, drops out of the floor.

And the grinding stops.

And the light dims, dwindles, and dies.

Silence.

Except for the groaning.

“Oh,” Al says.  “Is that it?”

Ed couldn’t have put it better himself, but he still gets up on his tiptoes to try to peer down into the gap so that he doesn’t have to step over the lines just yet.  “Uh… maybe.”  He can’t help giving Al a quick once-over to check for any minor injuries before they—inevitably, simply because of who they are—risk more major ones.  Al’s trenchcoat is now much shorter on one side, and he wrapped the transmuted rope around his wrist for safekeeping, but otherwise he looks completely unscathed.

As he should, and must, and has to, because otherwise Ed would do things he’d later regret.

One of the Cretans spits a choked-on curse at him, which is pretty funny, actually, given the overall trajectory of his life.  God cursed him, and he came back swinging—and eventually came out on top.  Some rousted random extremist out in the jungle wilderness really ain’t got shit.

The shafts of light from the cutouts in the ceiling all converge on the circle in the center, so they must have timed this just right.  Ed doesn’t think either of them have it in them to pass up an opportunity like this.

So he sighs, braces himself to be ready to make a run for it, raises the lantern, and extends the other hand to take Al’s in his.

“Okay,” he says.  “Let’s go.”

Al doesn’t even pretend not to be delighted.

The hole in the floor leads to the world’s tiniest stone spiral staircase, which they barely manage to cram themselves into—Ed leads, and Al lets him, presumably just because he’s too excited to find out what’s at the bottom to waste time with the otherwise requisite argument.  The individual steps are so steep that Ed has to plant his left heel extremely carefully every single time.

These walls are unadorned, in an interesting change from the intricate ostentation of the room above.  Ed can only assume that what lies below is important enough that it doesn’t need introduction, let alone embellishment.

The lantern light licks its way up over the even lines of mortar securing the perfect sharp corners of the blocks of stone.  The construction is phenomenal, and the fact that it’s stood up to so much time and humidity, with so many countless feet tromping overhead through all the years, really speaks as a testament to the original engineering and the care put into the assembly.  The ancient Cretans really knew their stuff.  Ed sometimes catches himself feeling a weird sort of kinship with the ones who built all this—just the sheer devotion to their craft, the dedication to their cause, the deeply-burning desire to create something that would outlast their lives, stretch off into the future and leave a bold mark slashed across the pages of the history books.  Their defiance of the prospect of ever being forgotten.  Their resolve to make themselves useful, to carve something out in—

“Brother,” Al breathes, so close to the back of his neck that it gives him goosebumps.  “I’m pretty sure this is what they were here for.”

Huh.

Tiny little stone-walled chamber absolutely fucking packed with finely-crafted treasure made from precious metals, gold and silver gleaming so bright in the lantern’s light that sparks persist on the backs of Ed’s eyelids when he blinks.

Yeah, that’s probably right.

“Hmm,” Al says, peering way too easily over Ed’s shoulder where he just stopped at the foot of the stairs.  “Is this what you archaeologists call a ‘find’?”

“It’s what I call an ‘I’m gonna kick your ass, Al’,” Ed says.

Al’s arms snake around his chest, and Al’s chin settles on his shoulder.  “No, you’re not.”

Ed lays his free hand on top of Al’s and squeezes gently, then reluctantly draws away to go peer at the impossible opulence, which presumably offers either quasi-religious significance or just huge bragging rights to the assholes they incapacitated aboveground.  “No, I’m not.  Don’t touch anything.”

“You keep saying that like you think it matters,” Al says, steps nearly silent despite the thick, crunchy carpet of ancient, undisturbed dust.  “It’s cute.  Hey!”

Ed turns, like a dog to a whistle, like a flower to the sun.

Al has already touched something.  Specifically, he’s just plucked two little gold bracelets out of a pile of stunning riches—each one with an identical small, startlingly clear yellow gemstone mounted in the center of the ring, opposite a sturdy-looking clasp.

“Al, no,” Ed says.

“Al, yes,” Al says, immediately thrusting one of them out towards him, grin a mile wide and almost too gorgeous to look at.  “C’mon!  Finder’s fee.  And the best souvenir.  And those guys upstairs are going to be so mad.”

Ed’s will quavers.  Maybe that makes him a bad person.

Then again, maybe not.

“When we get back to the city,” he says, warningly, “we’re going to get them appraised by an experienced curator.  And if they have historical significance, we are turning them in.”

“Okay,” Al says, so pleasantly that Ed is now completely sure that Al is going to get to add bribing a Cretan jewelry historian to lie to his list of accomplishments on this trip.

Ed eyes Al in a way that hopefully conveys that he is on to that nefarious plan as he takes the damn bracelet.

Al only puts up with a few seconds of Ed fumbling with the clasp before gently catching Ed’s hand in both of his and settling it onto his wrist for him.

Damn thing does fit like it was made to be there.  Al’s looks just as perfect.

Ed gives Al another warning look before he can say anything about it, but the smug expression articulates it just as well.

“Right,” Ed says, starting back up the stairs before Al can fall in love with any other irreplaceable artifacts.  “That was… fast.”

“I thought this was supposed to take us most of a week,” Al says.

“It was,” Ed says.  “But Féina wasn’t counting on my secret weapon.”

“Me?” Al says.

“You,” Ed says.

Treacherous stairs or no, he risks a glance back, and Al is grinning like a whole constellation full of newborn stars.

“It’s good, though,” Ed says, “because that means that we’ll have plenty of time to do the one other thing I wanted to after we deal with…” They top the staircase, and he casts an appropriately disdainful eye over their still-groaning fallen adversaries.  “…this lot.”

“Oh, yeah?” Al says, trying and failing to suppress some of the eagerness in his voice.  “What’s that?”

“It’s a surprise,” Ed says.

Al makes a face.  “I don’t like surprises.”

“You’ll like this one,” Ed says.

Ed doesn’t even have to check the map.  Once they’ve trussed up all of the Cretans and organized them into a neat set next to the temple—with a cage-like metal awning around them so that none of the animals will get any ideas in the meantime—they start off towards the west.

They’ve only been trekking for about half an hour before Al says, “What’s that sound?”

Ed has to work damn hard to keep the glee off of his expression so that he doesn’t spoil it.  “It’s part of the surprise.”

“It sounds like a waterfall,” Al says, bewilderedly.  He reaches for Ed’s hand and holds onto it, knitting their fingers together, and then starts rubbing his thumb thoughtfully up and down over Ed’s knuckles.  “Only… inconsistent?  Which doesn’t make s—Brother.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  This time he doesn’t bother to try to contain the grin.

“Brother!” Al says, stopping mid-stride and staring at him for a long second.

Then Al tightens his grip on Ed’s hand and takes off running.

Ed has to drag him to a halt as the trees and vines and ferns thin out to nothing, and mud melts into sand.  Al does the world’s single fastest and most impatient job of prying his boots and socks off, tosses them on top of a rock, and then pelts off towards the waves, flailing both arms the whole damn way, plumes of sand flying at his heels.

Ed shoves Al’s socks into his boots, ties the laces together, does the same with his own boots, and then hangs both over his shoulder.  He takes his time, picking his way through the sun-warmed sand, patches still damp from yesterday’s downpour, until he comes up alongside Al.  The next wave to crest, crash over itself, and send tendrils of churned water hissing up the shore spills foam over Al’s extremely perfect toes.  Ed watches the saltwater seething around his metal foot for a second, dragging grains of sand into the grooves as it goes.

He has been dutifully pretending not to notice that Al is crying.  It’s the quiet kind where he presses his fist to his mouth, and his shoulders tremble with the effort of trying to contain it.

Ed steps closer, leaning into the warmth of him.  Even over the tang of the salt in the air, Ed can still smell him.  This is still what home is, anywhere they are.

Ed wraps his arm around Al’s shoulders.  They shake a little less after that.

“Damn,” he says.  He prods his biggest metal toe into the sand, watches the fascinating fluid dynamics dip, conform, and then resolve as soon as he removes the impetus.  “Look at this.  Winry’s gonna kill me.”

“She’d better not,” Al gets out, albeit wetly.  It’s a good place to sound wet.  Fitting.  “You’ve been taking such good care of it.”

Ed kicks his toes a little deeper into the sand this time, watching it seal itself around the top of his foot.  The next wave sends tiny grains spinning through the water around him like fireflies on a summer night.  “Except for this.”

“Except for this,” Al says.  He hitches in a deeper breath, lowers his hand, and slides his arm around Ed’s waist.

Ed’s feeling so forgiving that he’s not even going to throw a fit about the way Al leans his head down on top of Ed’s.

Al just breathes for a couple of seconds, and Ed hugs him a tiny bit tighter.  The waves rush, and recede, and return.

“So,” Al says, with the hint of a smile that Ed would conquer any world for, let alone theirs.  “Where to next?”