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It would be interesting to return to Resembool, if a little bit nerve-wracking. It was a good ten years since Hohenheim had last been there, and although he knew that Pinako and her family would welcome him with open arms as they always did whenever he passed through the area, he couldn’t help but be very aware of how much time had passed with his form unchanging whilst everyone else in Resembool would have aged up. Yuriy would be a grown man now, far from the precocious little kid that he had been when Hohenheim had last seen him.
At any rate, he didn’t intend to stick around long enough for anyone to get too suspicious at the fact that he looked exactly the same as he had done when they had last seen him. With any luck, everyone would have forgotten what he looked like the last time they saw him, although he couldn’t really deny his unusual colouring.
It’ll be fine , Carola said in the back of his mind. You worry too much .
“Well, one of us has to.”
“Sorry?”
Hohenheim whirled around on the platform to find a young woman looking at him quizzically, and he immediately felt himself colour up. He was very used to people thinking that he was odd because he talked to himself almost constantly, but having someone think that he was talking to them was always somewhat embarrassing.
“Oh, erm, nothing. Sorry. Talking to myself.”
The woman just smiled and shrugged good-naturedly, and thankfully Hohenheim was saved from any further mortification by the train arriving in the station. He thought that would probably be the end of their interaction, until all of the alighting passengers had dispersed and he was about to get on the train. He wouldn’t have looked back at all if he hadn’t heard a rather squashed sounding ‘uff’ from behind him, and he turned out of curiosity to find the young woman from before attempting to drag what was obviously an exceedingly heavy suitcase along the platform to the train doors.
“Here, let me help you.”
She gave a grateful nod, too winded to speak, and together they managed to get the suitcase up onto the train and into the luggage rack. It was really very heavy and Hohenheim had to wonder how someone as small and slight as his new acquaintance had managed to get it into the station and onto the platform in the first place. What on earth could it possibly have in it?
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Trisha, by the way.”
“Hohenheim. It’s no trouble.” He went to sit down, surprised when Trisha settled herself in the seat opposite him, their conversation evidently not closed yet.
“It’s full of books,” she said by way of explanation. “That’s why it’s so heavy.”
Hohenheim did not ask why she had a suitcase full of books. He was also in the habit of carrying around more books than was healthy in his suitcase, and he found nothing alarming in it, just giving an appreciative nod instead. Trisha laughed.
“You know, you’re the first person who hasn’t told me I’m crazy for that.”
“There’s nothing crazy in carrying around a suitcase full of books. You might want to put wheels on it though. Besides, I’m the one who was talking to himself, so I don’t think I have any right to be calling other people crazy.”
“Well yes, I suppose there is that about it.”
They fell into silence for a while as the train pulled out of the station, until Trisha spoke again.
“Are you going to the sheep festival?”
“Pardon?”
“The Resembool sheep festival. Sorry, I saw from your ticket that you’re going to Resembool so I thought you might be going to look at the sheep. It starts in a couple of days.”
“Oh. No. I’m just going to visit some old friends.”
“Fair enough. I’m doing the same. Well, I say visit, I suppose what I’m actually doing is going home. I’ve been living in Eastern City for the last year or so taking care of my grandmother. But now… Yeah. I’m going home.”
Hohenheim didn’t need to be told precisely why Trisha was now going home. He wondered if he’d met her before during any of his visits to the town, but she couldn’t have been much older than Yuriy, so he would only have seen her as a child and would not have recognised her in passing.
Presently she looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry, you don’t need to know all this. Sarah always says that I talk too much, especially to complete strangers.”
“I don’t mind.” He genuinely didn’t. He was never really alone, not with so many voices in his head trying to talk to him all at the same time at any given moment, but his meaningful interactions with actual human beings could be infrequent, and it was nice to talk to someone without looking like he was a couple of radishes short of a salad.
Trisha’s face lit up when she smiled. He didn’t know why he noticed that, or why he noticed that her eyes were the brightest green that he had ever seen, or why he noticed that it was somehow easier to tune out all of the souls when he was listening to Trisha and he could concentrate on her voice. Hohenheim tried to push those thoughts to one side. Their acquaintance probably wasn’t destined to last much past this train journey; they were going to the same place but he would be moving on again soon enough.
Still, the conversation throughout the train journey was a happy, animated one, and when the time came to manhandle both of their suitcases full of books off the train, Hohenheim found himself feeling sad that it was coming to a close.
Pinako and Yuriy were waiting for him at the end of the platform, along with a young blonde woman who was probably Yuriy’s girlfriend from the fact they were holding hands, and Hohenheim was rather alarmed when Trisha started waving to them, and even more alarmed when they waved back.
“So, I see that you two have met,” Pinako said as they reached her, looking from Hohenheim to Trisha and back again. “At least that makes the introductions simple. You remember Yuriy, obviously, although he was only knee high to a grasshopper the last time you saw him. And this is Sarah, Yuriy’s fiancee.”
“Fiancee?!” Trisha exclaimed as Yuriy sighed.
“Mom, we wanted to break that news ourselves.”
Hohenheim was left with the full weight of two suitcases as Trisha dropped her hold and threw her arms around Sarah, the two of them dancing around on the platform together. Pinako just gave a sigh of good-natured despair and started shepherding everyone in the direction of the exit. Hohenheim trailed after them, wondering at the way that he could have travelled a very big, wide world and found that it could still be so small, that a random acquaintance on a train could turn out to be a friend of a friend.
Presently, Trisha broke away from Sarah and came back to walk beside him, taking up her hold on the suitcase again.
“I’m glad that we have a little more time together,” she said. “I hope we’ll get to know each other.”
Hohenheim nodded. “Yes, I do, too.”