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~~~
Al resisted the urge to cough as the suffocating dust swirled over him. He didn't have lungs; it was just force of habit knowing he should be struggling to breathe in this.
“Brother?”
He couldn't move. Anything. Not like he was stuck; he literally couldn't move, he couldn't find his arms and legs. Stupid soul armor.
A wet, hacking cough sounded from somewhere to his left, obscured by the dust in the air.
“Brother, is that you?”
“Y-yeah, Al,” a familiar voice answered weakly. “Are you okay?”
“Are you okay?” Al asked at the same time.
The dust began to settle, enough for the younger boy to make out about five feet around him. Enough to see that his armored body was scattered.
Only one of his arms was even visible, resting alone on the floor near where his legs should have been and were definitely not. He could see one metal boot further down the aisle. Everything else was lost to the wreckage, including his helmet.
He was a limbless, headless torso, useless and stationary as a rock.
“I got knocked apart, Ed, I can't move.” He couldn't keep the panic from edging into his voice. “Can you get my pieces?” A wheeze, followed by a sharp gasp. “Ed?”
“That… that might be a bit difficult, Al…”
The dust continued to settle. And settle.
A shrieking wail tore from the younger boy – more like a dying animal than anything human – as his brother's form came into view.
Miraculously, the automail arm was still whole and mostly undamaged.
Nothing else was.
Ed was pinned to the wall of the carriage by a crumpled mass of wood and steel where the train car had buckled upwards, hitting just beneath his ribs. He was slumped over it, shoulders heaving as he fought for every shaky inhale. His left arm lay impaled in the window frame on the few remaining shards of broken glass, the elbow fully bent in the wrong direction. Bangs hung bloody over his ashen face, dripping from a deep laceration in his scalp that Al could swear he saw bone through.
“Brother!” This couldn't be happening...
Ed drew another wet, sucking breath, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. “I know, it's bad. Just... just gimme a minute…” He sounded distant, unfocused.
“A minute for what?!”
“All I gotta do is open it.” It was almost like he was talking to himself.
“Open it? Open what, Brother?”
Golden eyes raised guiltily to meet him. Despite his lack of physical form, Al felt himself go cold.
And he knew.
“Don't you dare, Ed.” His voice choked off with rage. “Don't you dare leave me alone like that!”
“C’mon, Al,” he choked, his words more air than anything. “Only one of us has a chance of getting out of this, and it sure as hell isn't me.” He coughed again, spitting up globules of red.
“No! Someone will come help!”
“I'll bleed out way before that ever happens.”
“You don't know that!”
“Al!” The sharpness in his tone shut his little brother up for an instant. His face softened (weakened?). “Al, I don't think… my lower half is… i-is attached anymore…”
Al stared at him in dumbstruck horror.
And only then noticed the growing pool of crimson oozing from beneath the wreckage.
“I'm pinned enough that it's slowing the flow a little, b-but… Al, I won't be able to… to...” his voice broke for a second. “... but you… all I need to fix you is a gate.” The older, smaller teenager gritted his teeth but still couldn't bite back the strangled whimper as he yanked on his broken arm and pulled his shredded hand free of the glass pinning it in place. Tears were rolling freely down his cheeks. “You're not stuck under anything that could crush you, right? I… I c-can't see so great anymore…”
“Brother, stop it!”
“We should be about… a two hour walk from the next station. Be careful, y-your body might be… pretty frail, you don't want to... to overdo it.” His voice was growing fainter.
“I don't want it if it means losing you!”
“I hope you get to try everything you've ever wanted, little brother.” A slight smile. “Everything.”
“Not like this!” Al sobbed, desperately trying to wrench his soul towards his dying brother, but unable to escape his armored prison.
Ed looked up once more, eyes locked with his brother's blood seal.
“Sorry, Al,” he whispered softly.
"No!"
Clap.
It took every ounce of strength left in his body to lift his hands to his chest and complete the circle.
Blue lightning.
Red lightning.
“Brother!” Al screamed.
Ed's face went slack.
His chest fell.
It didn't rise again.
Al screamed in soul-crushing agony as black tendrils emerged from the depths around Ed's body and began to tear at him greedily.
Al screamed as he watched his brother come apart in flakes, each little bit dragged back into the darkness by little shadow hands.
Al screamed as the last gleam of light faded from golden eyes, and screamed again as the last actual segment of golden eye vanished.
Al screamed and then choked, hands of flesh flying to his throat as he screamed with vocal cords for the first time in four years.
~~~
A freak accident.
Natural disaster.
That's what the radio, the newspapers, the press, the government called it.
No one could have predicted the landslide that derailed the train on its normal route through the mountains.
So many lives lost.
Only one survivor.
A tragedy, everyone said.
And to lose a State Alchemist as well?
Terrible.
He'd shown such promise.
There wasn't even enough of a body left to bury.
Fifteen was just too young…
~~~
“How is he?” Riza asked quietly. The nurse looked at her sympathetically.
“It's… it's not a good day.”
She could count on one hand the number of times that it had been a good day, she mused as they led her down the sterile hallway. They paused at the second room from the end and the nurse gave a soft rap of her knuckles before unlocking the door.
The room would have been cheery.
A pleasant light yellow on the walls.
Green curtains over the bright window.
The bed with its floral quilt.
The small desk with its stack of paper, books, and a utilitarian wooden chair.
The cozy upholstered chair in the corner.
Homey.
Lived in.
The room would have been cheery if it weren't for the writing.
Every usable surface was covered in alchemical symbols, mathematics equations, scribbled notes, and transmutation circles. They scrawled up the walls, along the bedframe, the top of the desk, the legs of the desk, the underside of the desk, the curtains, the chair upholstery, the ceiling – the wood floor was covered in scuff marks where the desk had been dragged in order to get the needed height – the quilt, the pillows, the papers, the books, the floor…
Every usable surface also included the teenage boy laying in the middle of the floor in nothing but his boxers. The same scribbles covered every inch of visible skin, down to the soles of his feet. She wasn't sure how he managed to fill his back so thoroughly or keep the script on his face even partially legible in the mirrorless room, but he did. His shirt was inside out on the floor in front of him, the left sleeve almost done being used as a journal of some kind. The soft sleep pants were folded on the desk, nearly black with ink instead of light blue. This time his boxers seemed to hold the alchemical secrets for transmuting lead to gold, if she was recalling the symbols correctly from her time in white collar crimes.
Riza knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the circle over his ribs was meant for human transmutation.
She also knew the writing on his body would be washed away the next time he was bathed, that he would wail in distress at the loss, and that it would be replaced with a completely different set of notes within a day. Same with his clothing whenever he was given a fresh set after laundry day.
The only unmarked item in the room was a long red coat draped over the foot of the bed, patched and mended and stained.
“Hello, Al.”
He lifted his head as she stepped through the door, molten gold eyes snapping to her face. From this angle she could see the metal collar locked around his slender neck. It sickened her. But she knew it was necessary.
The collar blocked his alchemy, which was the only reason he had been allowed pen and paper in the first place. Well… felt-tip marker and paper. His pens had been confiscated immediately after he got stuck in a loop tracing a transmutation circle on his belly. She didn't know how long he sat there bleeding and continuing to trace – to carve – deeper and deeper into his own flesh before someone found him. She didn't want to know. The marker showed up the next day when they came to change his bandages. He took it without fuss and began drawing the circle anew over the fresh white linen wrapped around his abdomen.
He stared at her for a long moment, then held up a finger and went back to his writing. He was muttering softly to himself, shaking his head sharply and occasionally rapping his knuckles against his temple, brow furrowed in agonized concentration.
“Brother said the carbon was important.”
“The soul has to be fresh.”
“Can't forget the milk.”
“You've gotta be careful in the rain, Ed.”
“Don't want it. Not like this.”
“Mom said no.”
She waited patiently.
And waited.
She suppressed a shudder as she recalled those first few days. The reports of a golden-haired child leveling a train station and mindlessly unleashing destruction on the nearby village and surrounding countryside. The realization that it was not the child they expected, but a fourteen-year-old Al that none of them recognized, and the devastating discovery of why. Major Armstrong's tears as he tried to end the grief-stricken rampage without shattering the most fragile body she'd ever seen on a living human being. The way the alchemist cuffs had chafed and bruised pale, tender flesh, never designed for wrists so thin. The screaming and thrashing as he was dragged through the doors of the high security psychiatric hospital. The life leaving his eyes as the collar clicked into place.
What's done was done.
Ten minutes later, Al capped his marker and clambered to his feet, reverently laying the shirt over the back of his desk chair and giving it a pat.
Then he turned and shuffled directly up to her, burying his ink-stained face in her shoulder.
She hugged him as tightly as she dared.
She knew she smelled of alcohol; she'd stopped at the Colonel’s after work.
No.
Not the Colonel's.
Roy's.
He'd been honorably discharged three months after they lost Ed. One too many mistakes, one too many reckless decisions.
Breda and Fuery's portraits hung in memorial on the lobby wall at Eastern Command, proud grins shining brightly for eternity.
Only his service in Ishval had allowed him to keep the ‘honorable’ and his pension. If the higher-ups had had their way, he would have been thrown in a military prison and left to rot after the shit he'd pulled. But they couldn't just disappear one of their great war heroes like that, the Fuhrer had insisted. Some argued that he could tragically be killed in action, but General Grumman had seen the look on her face and advised against it for their own safety.
So he'd been discharged, quietly and without fuss, fanfare, or thanks.
She removed every firearm from his home.
She knew if he actually decided to end it there was nothing she could do. He was the Flame Alchemist.
She'd gone to see him like she did every Friday.
He'd thrown her out.
Like he did every Friday.
She wouldn't be going back.
She would.
The smell of whiskey and bourbon and rum and whatever-the-hell else Roy was using to kill himself lately apparently didn't seem to bother the boy in her arms as he leaned into her.
He had been without a body for four years.
Without touch.
Without taste.
Without smell.
Maybe even stale liquor smelled good after years of nothing.
Regardless, any request from Al for physical contact would always be granted. He craved it; even lost in the labyrinth of his own broken mind, broken soul, and broken heart, he craved what he had been denied.
He stood quietly for some time, letting her hold him and run her fingers through his neatly-trimmed hair. He was finally no longer skin and bones, but he still felt like a frail little bird in her arms, and she was so careful in handling him. Eventually his own arms wrapped around her and squeezed back lightly. She didn't know what that nurse had been talking about; this seemed like a fairly decent day.
After what felt like an appropriate amount of time, she peeled him back slightly, just enough to reach down and pull a Gracia Hughes apple pie from her bag.
“Happy 17th birthday, Alphonse.”
Molten gold blinked at her slowly.
Tears began to drip down pale cheeks.
“Don't want it. Not like this…”