Chapter Text
It was only on the train ride to Risembool that he finally learned the date.
November 28th, 1914.
Hohenheim was lucky a boy was stopping at each compartment selling newspapers and that he’d had a few cenz to spare on him, otherwise he would have been clueless as to how long it’s been since the last time he saw his family.
12 years. It's been 12 years.
To him, it was barely a blink of an eye. Lots of long journeys to the very edges of the country and carefully thought-out plans, but all in all, it felt like a blur. Living over 400 years would do that to you, he supposes.
But to an average human, that was a lot of time. Enough time to complete an education, or grow a business to a successful empire, or to start a family and watch it grow.
Enough time for children to become adults. 12 years.
Stepping off the train onto the Risembool platform and feeling the slight breeze of crisp countryside air hit his face, Hohenheim felt like an impostor. An intruder in his own home.
He is sure what compelled him to do it. He knows the Promised Day is right around the corner. Maybe that’s why he had to see them again, just in case. What if this would be the last time?
Despite all his complicated reasons and desire to watch that homunculus burn, her face had been cropping up in his mind’s eye more and more frequently. Truth, how long he’s left her alone now. She must have been so lonely, and all while raising two kids! He needs to see her, at least one more time, just in case, and apologize.
And then there were the two kids in question. Edward and Alphonse. They would be what… 14 and 13?— no, 15 and 14 now? He’s pretty sure they were 3 and 2 years old when he left the village, but even that he can’t be sure of.
12 years.
Truth, what a horrible father he is. He doesn’t even have a single photo to remember their faces by, just knows they took after his features. He wonders if they resent that fact now.
But if he explained it to them, if he properly apologized, maybe— just maybe— they would understand. It’s not like he wanted to leave, after all. It was just another consequence of his ignorance that other innocent people were still paying for.
It was needless to say that his arrival in sunny, scenic Resembool was met with a burning bundle of nerves rather than the relief of returning home after a long journey. Because the worst part was he couldn’t stay. His work was not over as long as “Father” still breathed.
Tattered suitcase in hand, he walked off the steps of the platform and down the small village’s cobbled main road, but he couldn’t help but notice something was off. It was the stares; all the passersby he saw would stare at him as he passed, either with contempt or fear or a mix of both. He knew, of course, Risembool was a tight-knit community full of people distrustful of outsiders, and that him leaving behind a family so suddenly surely would’ve tanked his popularity among them, but he felt unsettled nonetheless.
It felt like they saw through him and were glimpsing at the real monstrosity he was, who wore human skin.
However, his public image in this town was not the important thing. He had one goal and one goal only, and that was seeing his family again.
The trek was long and winding, and his mind began to wander as he made his way down the once oh so familiar path.
How would they react? Would Trisha open the door, utterly shocked, clasp a hand to her mouth with tears in her eyes, and run to embrace him? Or would she slam the door in his face for daring to show up like this after 12 years ? He knows deep down that Trisha is too kind a woman to ever do that, but he would deserve it. He would deserve anything but her kindness.
And what about his sons? They were teenagers now (Truth , it felt like yesterday he was hoisting them on his shoulders and giving them piggyback rides ), and it would be hard to win their trust back. What if they want nothing to do with him?
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he doesn’t have more time to spiral down this train of thinking. He’s arrived at the hill his house sits atop of. Or.. where it was supposed to be.
For a good few minutes, Hohenheim simply stares. His brain cannot comprehend what he is seeing.
The house… is gone. Nothing remains but a few scraps of burnt and crumbling foundation, and overgrown vegetation claims ownership of the rubble.
The house he had painstakingly built by hand, the house he built for Trisha, to start his family in. The house with all of his memories of them. Nothing remained, not even the tree with that stupid tire swing he had tried and failed at setting up for his sons to play with. Nothing but ash and charred debris.
Gone. It’s gone. Trisha–
Truth, where is his wife?! His family?! Maybe… maybe an accident happened and the house couldn’t be saved, so they moved? That could be the only plausible explanation, because surely they couldn’t be–
The creeping dread he had felt when he arrived ballooned into a sinking pit in his stomach, twisting and stabbing his insides at the idea, and he immediately shut that train of thought down.
A lot could happen in 12 years.
Pinako would know. Surely she, or Sarah, or Yuery would be home and would explain everything to him. They would know where his family had gone.
In a daze, he stumbled in the direction of the Rockbell house, relying solely on muscle memory. He wouldn’t let his mind think of anything, or else all the dark possibilities he was barely keeping at bay would assault his mind’s eye with images of his family, images of them–
No. Don’t think. Don’t think about it. Just walk.
It could’ve been seconds or hours later when he arrived at the Rockbell home, the sound of his frantic pounding on the door barely reaching him.
A sharp yell of “ Coming! ”, a pause, and then the door was thrown open to reveal a short, grumbling old woman looking ready to start shouting in annoyance when abruptly her face fell in pure shock.
For a long moment, Pinako stood silently portraying a complicated series of emotions. Shock, fury, sorrow, all painted in the lines and wrinkles of her face, but eventually it settled into a grim and hollow acceptance.
That familiar southern drawl, gravelly both from age and her habit of always having a smoking pipe in her mouth, finally cut across the suffocating silence to condemn him. “You’ve got some nerve showing up here again after all this time, Hohenheim.”
His old drinking partner was always blunt in her manner of speaking, never sugar-coating or mincing her words, so he expected as much, but he didn’t have it in him to act sheepish when there was a much more pressing concern on his mind.
“Pinako… What happened? Where is my family? I went to the house and it was just… gone ! Did they move somewhere else? Did they…” The questions all rushed out, frantic and pleading with a note of desperation, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud his worst fear.
He searched Pinako’s expression for any sign of that familiar annoyance and exasperation at his forwardness, but all he saw was that hollowness get darker and deeper.
“Hohenheim…” For the first time since he’d known her, she seemed hesitant and withdrawn, reluctant to speak. She sighed, “Why don’t you come in? I’ll pour us a drink.”
That did not bode well. If they were fine, why wouldn’t she just say so?
Nonetheless, he nodded numbly and followed her inside, past the foyer where various bits of steel gadgets and automail limbs lay propped up against the wall or strewn across a table, through the cluttered living room, and into the kitchen. As he walked, he passed a corkboard in the hall that had numerous photos pinned to it. Photos of the Rockbells and of his family. Some were featuring a combination of both families, some of just certain members, and one in particular that had just Trisha, Edward, and Alphonse. He paused for a moment, drinking in the smiling faces of his wife and two little toddlers before tearing himself away.
The image now burned behind his eyes, and he had a feeling it would haunt him after the coming conversation.
He sat down wearily at the table like a man with the physical strength of his actual age and silently accepted the glass of whiskey passed to him. Pinako poured herself a glass and set the bottle between them, sitting down across from him with a face somehow even grimmer than before. He noticed both glasses contained a very generous amount of alcohol.
He could sense her hesitating again, but he couldn’t wait any longer. “Pinako, please, tell me the truth.”
The old woman took a swig of her glass, sighed, and in the next sentence shattered his entire world to pieces. “They’re gone, Hohenheim. They’re gone.”
Quietly, gravely, and with many pauses for both of them to take a drink, Pinako recounted the events that had transpired in his absence.
Sarah and Yuery being drafted for the war and never returning.
His wife, his sweet, gentle wife, the only person to learn the truth of his depraved existence and not see a monster, overworking herself to raise two boys alone and pushing herself until succumbing to a plague.
And his sons... his adorable little boys who shared his golden features and carried on the last living blood of Xerxes. His sons, who would giggle at the dumb faces he would make and cling to his legs anytime we would try to withdraw to his work desk in the basement to keep his attention and look at him with all the innocent childlike wonder in the world.
“They were truly brilliant, those kids were, y’know,” the old woman continued. “They really did take after you. They were prodigies in their class, teaching themselves scientific concepts way beyond those lessons at the schoolhouse. They could make an alchemy circle at just age five, for chrissake! Hell, I remember hearing Sarah on the phone with Trish that day as she was gushing all about it. She’d always joke about how glad she was they got your smarts instead of hers.” She let out a small, sad chuckle and took another sip of her whiskey.
“Though, I think maybe that was their biggest flaw, too. They were too damn smart for their own good, those kids.” She sighed and paused to pour herself another drink.
That sentence made the pit in his stomach that had been devouring his insides and chipping off pieces of his heart this whole time deepen even more. “What do you mean?” he asked, voice now just as hollow as Pinako’s had been when he first arrived. He could barely process any of this, but he had to hear it. He had to know just how despicably he’s failed them all.
She set the bottle down and continued, “Once they’d gotten a taste for that alchemy business, they dived into it with all their energy. I think it had something to do with how happy it made Trish. In the end, that’s all they wanted, really, was to make her smile. After she passed, though, they were distant, withdrawn. I thought it was the grief, y’know, she was their whole world, and they were still so young, but as more time passed, it seemed they were only more consumed by the big ancient books I hadn’t the slightest clue to understand. They’d skip school, spend all day in that big empty house of yours, studying who knows what, and only coming back here for dinner. It came to a head one day when there was this tremendous flood, one of the worst I’ve ever seen in the village, that was tearing through all the dams in the river. Those stupid boys got the idea in their head they could stop it somehow with alchemy and ran out the door before I could stop ‘em. When I finally caught up to ‘em, the dam was fixed, and they were clinging onto the limbs of some woman I’d never seen before. Apparently, she’d been the one to stop the flood, and they wanted her to teach ‘em her alchemy.”
She chuckled again as the memory resurfaced. “Those boys were nothing if not persistent. Eventually, this woman caved and accepted ‘em as apprentices. Didn’t see ‘em for months after that until one day, over half a year later, they just showed up again, unannounced and suitcases in hand. Said they’d finished their training already. They were hyper as usual, especially Ed, practically bouncing off the walls in excitement to practice their new skills, and soon enough, they were back to their old routine of constant studying and staying in the house all day.”
She paused again, and the fond nostalgia that had colored her face moments prior drained out of her, and the grimness returned. She looked as though she had aged even more in that moment.
“I should’ve kept a closer eye on ‘em, should’ve made they stay over, should’ve pried more into what exactly they were trying to accomplish. God knows there's a hell of a lot I should’ve done. To this day, I still don’t know what they were planning, but… all I know is that one night I’m woken up to the sound of Den barking her head off at something outside. She doesn’t stop, so I got up to go check on her and… all I saw was fire on the hill where your house was supposed to be.”
The hand gripping her glass tightly is trembling now, but she doesn’t stop. She tells the story as if possessed, like if she doesn’t get it off her chest now, it’ll burn her forever from the inside out.
“I ran to the phone to call anyone I could who was close enough. Some had already seen and were rushing to bring buckets of water, and I did the same. It woke Winry up, but I told her to stay put and ran out the door. When I reached the house, a couple of neighbors were already there trying in vain to put out the fire, but it had already consumed the entire building. Nonetheless, we worked for hours gathering more water and more people to help. By the time any of the entrances had been cleared enough to enter, the foundation was already collapsing. When morning came, we were picking through the wreckage desperately, but… we couldn’t find them. All.. all we could find were ashes.” By the end, her voice was wavering, and it broke on that last word.
Silence settled among the two, but Hohenheim felt like his ears were ringing. He knew, since this conversation started, perhaps since he first stumbled upon the broken ruins of his home, what that meant logically.
Hearing it spelled out in detail how each member of his family met their demise, all while he was none the wiser, was different. It made it real.
Taking in the woman struggling to keep her composure in front of him, all Hohenheim could do was cry.
Despair was finally breaking through the wave of numbness that the long talk and copious amounts of alcohol had gifted him. His shoulders shook as he buried his face in his hands and wept. He wept for his family that had all died too young, far too young, that he had abandoned when they needed him. He could have saved them if he were here. All of this could have been avoided. What was the point of him leaving? What good would stopping Father do if he couldn’t even save his own family?
The faces in that photograph, those smiling, joyful faces, he would never see again. He would never get to apologize, never get to fall on his knees and beg for forgiveness, because it was already too late. He had missed his chance, and this was his punishment.
That image only made him cry harder. That same hopeless despair and spiraling thoughts he felt when he lost his first home came creeping back. What had they done to deserve this? They were innocent people, young innocent people. Or was he just destined to ruin the lives of everyone he came in contact with? Was this just more of Truth’s punishment for him, taking his family away?
He never should have left them. Truth knew he was a damned creature, but this was just cruel .
His biggest fear that plagued first when he fell in love with Trisha, but especially when the boys were born, was out living them. But he never even in his most pessimistic dreams imagined it would happen so soon.
It could have been hours that they both sat there each swallowed by their own demons in a silence that was only broken by the muffled sobbing that occasionally broke out when a new despairing thought pierced his mind like a white hot blade.
Eventually, Pinako’s ragged and quiet voice roused him back to the surface a little. “See, looking at you now, I knew it couldn’t have been true…” she spoke softly, more to herself than him.
Hohenheim’s confusion at those words briefly stopped him from spiraling further.
“...What?” Truth, was that his voice? It sounded like his vocal cords had been shredded apart and then pieced together so precariously that they could fall apart at the slightest touch. Or maybe that was just his soul.
The old woman let out another heavy sigh. “After… after the fire, there was a rumor that had spread around town. A nasty, tactless one if you ask me. Word was that…” she trailed off and glanced up at him hopelessly for a second before continuing, “that you had come back to town. That you had been seen at that house the night of the fire. Combine that with the fact that it burned unnaturally fast for a typical accidental fire, and, well, some of the folks around here were inclined to think you’d come back to burn your own house down. Damn ridiculous, of course, but people love to talk. I didn’t believe it then, but seeing you now, I know for certain it couldn't've been you. Whatever really happened, I'll never know, but to see some people take a tragedy and use it for their own entertainment is just…” She cuts off, shaking her head.
Not for the first time tonight, Hohenheim is stunned. “You said… people saw me?”
She scoffed, “Like I said, it was probably some baseless rumor, or maybe some traveler resembling you had come through town around that time, but either way, I wouldn’t put much thought into it.”
But he was barely listening. His mind was running a thousand miles per hour given this new insight. People in town saw someone who resembled him closely enough to think it was him on the night when his house had gone up in flames and his sons had perished. Someone who looks like him. No…
“I need to go,” he blurted out before he really realized what he was saying. If Father has something to do with this…
Pinako looked up surprised. “Oh? Well, I suppose I don’t blame you. For what it's worth, I loved them, too. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret what happened.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore, instead her gaze was fixed upon the amber liquid in her glass.
He nodded numbly, hastily getting up from his seat and gathering his suitcase. As he turned away, however, she called to him again.
“One last thing,” she said with the quiet, gravelly voice of hers, “if you’re going to visit ‘em, they’re on the plot that’s farthest to the left, the one on the hill.”
Their graves, he realizes, she means.
He managed a strained “ thank you ” and hurried out of the kitchen.
Walking back through the house he once again stopped at the picture board. He reached out a trembling hand to the photo he stared at earlier, this time noticing that a part of the image was covered by the corner of another one. He carefully unpinned it from the board and took in the full picture. Trisha stood holding little Alphonse to the camera with a lovely smile, and to her right… was himself holding Edward. He was crying.
He remembers it now, taking this photograph. Trisha had hired a photographer for the day to take a family portrait, but he had felt so out of place in this happy domestic scenery. He felt wrong, like a splotch of ink spilled on a beautifully crafted painting, intruding on such a lovely scene. Holding his two year old son in his hands, who was innocent of his internal struggles, he had tried to smile but all he could show was fear. Fear that he would taint and corrupt this beautiful family.
He should have tried harder.
He doesn’t blame Pinako in the slightest for covering his face, in fact, the longer he stared at it, the stronger the urge is to just rip that part off of the photo. Instead, he settled for folding the corner so that only Edward is visible on that side, and carefully tucking it into a small pocket inside his jacket.
He couldn’t bring himself to look at the rest of the pictures of ghosts. He stumbled his way out of the house like a drunk man, though he knew it wasn’t because of the alcohol.
Part of him wanted to rush back to Central without a second thought, track down that bastard, and atomize him, but a stronger part urged him to visit them. At least once. Is that not what he had come here to do in the first place?
And so he found himself here standing in the old rusted gateway of the Risembool cemetery without much memory of how he got there. It didn’t matter; he followed Pinako’s instructions in the same dazed state and suddenly found himself sinking to his knees in front of three pristine looking graves. He stared hollowly, taking in the words etched into them.
Trisha Elric. 1878 - 1904.
Edward Elric. 1899 - 1910.
Alphonse Elric. 1900 - 1910.
Reading those dates over and over, he broke.
Truth , they had barely lived long at all. 26 years? That’s all his wife got? And the boys… just 10 and 11. He felt a violent nausea grip him suddenly and fought back the urge to vomit. That’s.. That’s barely anything. The weight of all the things they never got to experience and now never will pressed down on him like a crushing boulder. They were still just boys. They never got to experience life.
Memories resurfaced, as if to taunt him, of holding them for the first time; of Trisha’s excitement at being a mother, with a smile so radiant he thought it might blind him, telling him how they look just like him; of sitting outside in the evening enjoying the crisp country air with Edward on his shoulders lightly tugging at his hair and Trisha at his side holding baby Al; of both the first and last times Trisha told him she loved him with such conviction like she was daring him to disagree. Small things too, like family dinners, the way his wife would hum to herself when she was working on something, the sound of his sons’ laughter when she would entertain them.
It had all happened so fast, and he had taken it all for granted.
These thoughts consumed him for what must have been hours, because when he looked up at the sky he dully realized that the sun had gone down and the stars were out. The night sky had always looked so beautiful here.
He wished, not for the first time but certainly stronger than most, that he was a mortal man and that he could just sink into the ground and join them. But most of all, he wished that he had stayed even if that meant they would’ve perished during the Promised Day anyways.
At the mention, his brain suddenly alerted him to the other matter at hand. The homunculus, “Father”. The heavy grief still remained, but the lingering numbness gave way to burning rage.
It must have been him. Somehow, some way, he had found out about his family in Risenbool and destroyed what was left of it. It was probably done as a move to cripple him, to distract him from the homunculus’ plans, or maybe it was just simply because he hated him. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter.
His next move suddenly became crystal clear to him.
Hohenheim was going to murder that bastard.