Archive of Our Own

“If the first part of alchemy is understanding,” complains Al’s big brother, frowning hugely, “then why’re Dad’s books so hard to understand?”

Al ignores him to chew on his thumb. Ed gets mad every time they get stuck. The first few times, they went and got Mom to tell them what the mysterious adult words meant, but after that they discovered Dad’s dictionary and didn’t have to anymore. Although some of the words aren’t in the dictionary. Al’s been keeping a list of them, just in case they find a secret, better dictionary.

“It’s ‘cause alchemists’ve gotta be super smart, Brother!” says Al. 

Ed mutters something mean about Dad. Al ignores him, ‘cause he always does that. Then Ed says, “Well, look at this one,” and shoves his book at Al, stabbing a bunch of words with his finger. 

It’s one of the big books that someone else wrote, but Dad scribbled a bunch of notes on top of. Ed’s been staring at it for days and days, ever since they found out from one of the easier books that alchemists always hide their real secrets in codes. Ed can’t decide if Dad was trying to decode it or just making more notes in a harder code. Al thinks it’s probably both. Dad’s tricky like that.

“The body, as the worldly container of the soul, is indivisible from the soul except by death, and thus the pursuit of immortality must encompass both immortality of the body and immortality of the soul. Therefore-” Al reads, slowly. 

“Not that, Al, Dad’s note.”

“I was gonna! Move your finger, Brother. Uh, the pearls contained in the leather bag protect from curses, but, uh, that’s a word I don’t know, a container- to spill the pearls, cut the drawstring. Why’s Dad talking about bags?”

“What’s a pearl again?” wonders Ed.

Al runs for the dictionary, and then the encyclopedia also. “Here! A clump of calcium carbonate around a grain of sand. Some kinda sea animals make them?”

“Oh, yeah, Mrs Rosen at the general store has a necklace with ‘em, I remember. Calcium carbonate and sand, huh? Bet we could make some for Mom!”

They spend the rest of the afternoon on that, super careful with the chalk and the steadily-diminishing supply of pure materials Dad left behind. There’s no good arrays in any of Dad’s books so they have to figure out their own, which takes ages, but by dinnertime they have a bunch of pearls way prettier than Mrs Rosen’s all strung up, and Mom’s smile goes so wide it’s like she doesn’t even have cheeks.

It’s not ‘till they’re laying in bed, not sleeping, that Al remembers what got them on the whole pearl thing in the first place. “Brother, why was Dad writing about bags?”

Ed makes a thinking noise in the dark. Also an annoyed noise, because Al made him think about Dad, but Al ignores that. “A bag’s a kind of container,” he says after awhile. “That’s the common word between the book and his note.”

“A body’s a container,” agrees Al. “But the book was saying, you can’t take a soul out of a body. And you can only have one soul in a body, anyway, everyone knows that.”

“Yeah,” says Ed. “Weird. Maybe it’s something else. We gotta look again tomorrow.”

“Uh-huh. D’you think Dad ever transmuted pearls for Mom?”

“No way. We’re way cooler than him!”

“Brother…”

“Well, it’s true. Stupid Dad and his stupid hard-to-understand codes…”

“Brother…”

The world is white. All white. Al knows. Al remembers. Al knows and sees and hears and sees and knows and remembers and knows and knows and knows. All is one, one is all. The truth of the universe unfolds, grass and tree and rock and river and rabbit and fox and brother and mother and life and death and gravity, occupying every spare corner in Al’s mind, burrowing into his nerves and neurons, circles and cycles, and Al knows, and Al knows. And Al remembers.

“Alchemist,” says the truth of the universe, wearing Al’s body, wearing his skin and his blood and his wide staring eyes, microcosm, “this is your toll.”

And he’s reaching out. And he’s reaching out. And he’s crying out. And he knows and he remembers and his soul rips free of its moorings and-

-

They’re in the kitchen. Ed and Al have to stand on stools, and more importantly Teacher is looming behind them, glaring. Al thinks he’s a lot more likely to chop his finger off because she distracts him than by cutting wrong but there’s no way she’d listen to something like that, not after she’d stopped teaching in the middle of lessons to make them cut up basically a whole cow because Ed said something about how using alchemy instead of knives to slice up the butcher’s shop meat would be a lot easier. 

It was an interesting lesson, too. Sure she was trying to kill them with a tree the whole time but she’d been teaching them about the molecular composition of cellulose and how to write arrays that don’t dechain glucose in the transmutation. Al decides he’s kinda mad at Ed.

That’s basically irrelevant, because Ed’s mad at everything much louder than Al’s mad at Ed, and Teacher keeps throwing knives at Ed when he stabs a little too hard. So Al just works on the sirloin quietly, hands covered in gunk. Well. In fat. And protein. And a little bit of iron. He knows what’s in beef, obviously. He could transmute it easy, if Teacher wouldn’t slit his throat for the audacity. 

Eventually Ed says or does something either super wrong or super right or maybe gets hurt—Al wasn’t paying attention, ‘cause he’s kinda mad—and Mr Sig takes him over to the shop part of the shop to talk to him. Which leaves Al with Teacher glaring knives at him and also throwing knives at him. Well actually she isn’t throwing that many. He must be doing okay at butchering.

“Teacher, what’s the difference,” he asks after a minute. He ducks a knife. “Between being alive and having a soul?”

Teacher stops throwing knives and glaring for a little bit, which means either Al’s asked a really good question and she’s thinking about it or he’s asked a really bad question and she’s about to make his day way, way worse. Since he knows better than to be too optimistic about Teacher, he tries really hard not to mess up his next few slices.

When does finally say something she says it slowly, which is a good sign. Slowly means she’s thinking. Thinking means she’s going to teach him something new, even if the lesson hurts. “I think,” she says, “that you should answer that one yourself.”

Ah. Well. Now he’s gotta start thinking. And ignoring Teacher’s glares. And making sure he cuts around the tenderloin right.

This cow. Did it have a soul? It was a living thing, before it was dead. An animal. It’d be sad, Al thinks, if animals don’t have souls. If cats don’t have souls he might want to cry.

But! You’re a scientist! he scolds himself. Crying isn’t scientific!

…he’s not gonna keep thinking about if cats have souls.

His knife slips a little too fast through marbled flesh and hits bone, because actually he kept thinking about it. He almost yelps, frowns. He’s gotta pay more attention. Okay, maybe a cow has a soul. Or maybe it doesn’t. Nobody’s ever heard of animal transmutation being a forbidden; that’s just bio-alchemy. 

And what about the tree Teacher’d been attacking them with earlier? Trees’re alive, part of all, but they’re alive way weirder than a cat or a cow or even a fish or a bug. And if a tree has a soul then a blade of grass has gotta also have a soul and Al’s stepped on way too many blades of grass. Let alone bugs. If he thinks about that too hard he’ll also cry.

But then what makes humans so special? Is it just ‘cause it’s humans writing the alchemy texts that human transmutation isn’t allowed? Can you revive a dead cow? Maybe they should try some sort of animal before they bring back Mom. Test their hypothesis. He’ll have to tell Ed that when Teacher isn’t listening.

What is a soul? What’s being alive, for that matter? Does a river count as being alive, since it’s got a birthplace and a path through life that changes and flows and eventually a place where it dies? What about the world? The whole flow of the universe?

If all is one and one is all, where do souls even come into it?

“Teacher,” he says, very slowly, “If it’s okay, I wanna think about this for awhile longer before I answer you.”

“Alphonse! It’s not like that all!” Mei glares up at him, arms crossed in her thick winter jacket, sleeves so big they nearly obscure her bright red gloves. 

He puts his hands up in alarm. “Sorry, sorry! I was just curious.”

She frowns up at him, Xiao Mei mimicking the expression just to make him feel even worse, then says, “But I suppose, just for you, I’ll explain again. Only for you.”

“Thanks, Mei,” says Al, sincerely but also a little placatingly because he knows better than to test the patience of alchemy teachers. Especially ones who have knives. 

They’re sitting on the ground in a little abandoned shack they’ve located just outside the limits of the Asbec slums, far enough from their generous Ishvalan hosts that if something does go wrong in their experiments, well, at least everyone else will be out of rebound range. Mei’s been drawing in the dust, since there’s so much of it, but apparently she’s done with that because she spears her stick out the open doorway and into a snowbank in irritation.

“There’s not literal dragons,” she starts, sweeping at the dust with the side of her foot. 

Al hauls himself up to join her. “Obviously,” he says.

“Obviously,” she repeats, a little venomously. He thinks if he’d insisted on non-metaphorical dragons she’d have started with the knives, and she’d have been right for it, because he’d have sacrificed any pretense of scientific integrity with the assertion. He bets Yoki was insisting she meant real dragons.

“But symbolically. I think the alkahestric dragon must have a different meaning than the alchemical dragon,” he says, and then kicks a big pile of dust out the door. “In alchemical texts, the dragon tends to represent fire, though not in the same elemental sense as the salamander, sulfur, base mercury. It also can be equated to the snake on the ourobouros. In the general Amestrian cultural sense, power, wealth, military might.”

Al wishes he could frown. And how much of that is the fault of the country’s malintentioned founders? How much of Amestrian alchemy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up? Mustang wants to restructure Amestrian politics- does it fall to the Elrics, having sought out and stumbled upon this truth, to do the same for Amestrian alchemy? Surely there are alchemists more qualified than they. Surely. 

Wishful thinking hasn’t ever gotten them anywhere, has it?

“Even your dragons have something wrong with them,” says Mei, morbidly fascinated. Xiao Mei climbs onto her head. “In alkahestry, there’s the association with power, of course, it is the Emperor’s symbol, but more importantly dragons have to do with water. Rivers, rainstorms, the sea.”

She glances at him to check he’s following. He nods. They’ve managed to expose a lopsided square of the original whitewashed floor, now stained a sad grey with the passage of time, and they sit down on either side of it and both, simultaneously, reach into their pockets to fish out sticks of chalk. Al says, “And water is, metaphorically, blood.”

“Right!” says Mei. With her chalk, she sketches a circle, marking five equidistant points along the edge. “Water flows down from the mountaintops along the riverbeds, comes to lakes and the ocean, evaporates, joins together as rainclouds, and falls back on the mountaintops. Qi, in the sense of energy, follows that path, and as alkahestrists we read its flow to power and direct our transmutations.” Her standard pentagram array spears between the points. “The symbolic dragon being the world, the flow of qi is represented as the Dragon’s Pulse, its circulatory system.”

“And so the world is equated to the body, forming the basis of alchemical- alkahestric, sorry- theory,” finishes Al. All is one, one is all.

“Exactly,” says Mei, with a certain amount of zest. She tilts her head back to the ceiling. “Finally.” Glancing back at him, her hands come to clasp in front of her collarbone and she smiles widely. “Well, if any alchemist was going to get it, it would be you, Alphonse! I knew you’d understand eventually.”

“Um, thank you,” he says. He’s pretty sure that all balances out to a compliment. Probably. It’s hard to tell sometimes with Mei, even though most of the time she’s really nice to him. More importantly, though… “Is that why alkahestry is so specialized medically? Because it sees the whole world as a body?”

Mei taps her chalk on the ground for a second, Xiao Mei finally getting bored and wandering off to go poke at the snowdrift outside. “That’s definitely part of it,” she says finally. “Or maybe it’s the other way around, maybe alkahestric theory interprets the world through the lens of the body because of its use in medicine. I don’t know, I’m mostly trained in practical alkahestry- philosophy’s not something Grandmother and I got to before the succession crisis got really bad. But it’s all because of the search for immortality.”

She plops her chin on one red-gloved fist, twirling her chalk in the other. “The idea was,” she continues, “that if eternal life was to be achieved, it had to be through the perfection of the body, through the application of alkahestry and the directed use of qi. But that never worked. There’s no known way to become immortal through alkahestry.”

“Right,” says Al. “So you turned to alchemy, but it’s impossible with alchemy, too.”

“Except with a Philosopher’s Stone,” she says morosely. 

“Yeah,” says Al. If he could breathe, the word would have come out on a sympathetic exhale. He puts his own stick of chalk to the ground and draws a blank circle. “Okay. The world is the body, the body is the world. Qi flows through both in the same way?” He gets a nod. “So you can read and use it the same for both.” Stops drawing on what would have been an inhale, stick of chalk hovering just above the greying whitewash. “Mei, what do I look like to you?”

“Big suit of armor,” she tells him. 

“You know what I meant,” he grouses.

She laughs, bright and quick, an unfamiliar sound. The ends of her braids skitter above the dusty floor. Then she says, “When I look at you, I don’t see any movement. It’s like all your qi’s been bundled up where your seal is. You don’t breathe, and your heart doesn’t beat, so it doesn’t flow. You’re almost invisible.”

You don’t breathe, and your heart doesn’t beat. Like a blood clot, he thinks wildly. The information isn’t new, but hearing it in someone else’s voice is, and all of a sudden Al is hyper-aware of his hollowness, his lack of biology, the failing bond between his soul and the armor. He waits for the world to go white.

When it doesn’t, he just scrapes his hands over unfeeling cheeks and says, “I thought it might be something like that.” Deep breath. Imagine a deep breath. Shoulders up, shoulders down, just like breathing. “Okay. I think I understand the Dragon’s Pulse a little better now.” Mei’s eyes are big and gleaming and curious, looking up at him. “Tell me how to read it again?”

She claps her hands. “Right! Um. I’ve said, you just kinda—” she makes a face and gestures vaguely “—sense it, you know?”

Some alchemy teachers, reflects Al, entirely in his head so he doesn’t get knives thrown at him, are a lot better at explaining things than others. But maybe what he needs isn’t an explanation at all. Maybe he just needs to remember the island, head-to-head with Ed staring at the endless night sky, remember the truth of the universe unfurling fractally inside his brain. 

All is one, one is all. The world the body, the body the world. Al himself, a still point. Blood clot. Alchemy begins with understanding. Locate a vein, locate the circulatory system of the world. 

Basic bio-alchemy on a vast scale. Right. He can work with this.

Al thinks that maybe the ultimate work of the alchemic arts should be tearing the sun out of the sky rather than the pursuit of absolute Truth and creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, if only because he feels like he’s going to melt into glass if he has to take one more step through the sweltering desert wastes. 

Alkahestry better be worth it. How Ed’d survived the trek to Xerxes with his automail doing Mustang-type things to his skin Al can’t even imagine.

“Sometimes,” he complains, “it really was easier as a giant suit of armor. Then if I overheated I was just burning other people.”

Jerso laughs. The poor man, blessed with a frog’s easily-dried skin, has been sheltering miserably under a parasol and several layers of fabric since they left Amestris. His voice is wry, good-humored. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your human body, Alphonse.”

It’s… strange, to think that he’s had his body back long enough he’s started making jokes about it. The blistering heat on his skin, the sand flying into his throat, the wind whipping across his cheeks. At night, the bitter cold that makes his bones ache. It’s strange to be grateful for those things. It’s stranger still to complain about them. 

They’ve stopped for water and a quick lunch of travel rations, which—Al’s been reliably informed—are only any better than military rations because you’re eating them willingly. Clear water, in his real mouth. Sensation still makes Al greedy, more and more and more now that he can have any at all- Jerso drips a little of their precious water on his face, and Al doesn’t comment. 

He says, “You and Zampano aren’t the first chimeras I met,” and regrets it immediately.

Jerso looks at him a little strangely. “I’d have imagined not, you being State Alchemists and all.”

Al doesn’t correct him on the exact number of State Alchemists between the two of them. These days it’s zero, which suits them both just fine thank-you-very-much-Mustang, and Jerso knows that perfectly well. “Not- standard, non-human chimeras, I mean.”

Zampano comes up at his other shoulder, crouching on the jutting sandstone. “Darius and Heinkel were on about something Greeling said about his gang of escaped chimera prototypes last time we met for drinks,” he puts in. “When you were sick, Jerso.”

It would be so easy to take the out. To let the topic go, here, and pretend that Greed’s gang—that poor Martel, who’d been murdered in his stomach, whose blood he’d spent the night trying to scrub off while Ed slept fitfully—had been who he’d been talking about. But he’s an alchemist, and he can’t shy from the truth. Won’t. Can’t.

“Not them either,” Al forces himself to say. It’s so hot. How hasn’t he spontaneously combusted yet? “Did you ever hear about Shou Tucker, the Sewing Life Alchemist?”

Zampano gives a vague, noncommittal yes; Jerso says, “I saw the name in one of Kimblee’s files? One of Scar’s victims, right?”

Al’s pretty sure his face is saying a lot more than he’d strictly like it to right now. His face is very talkative, everyone’s spent the past two years telling him, and somehow he still never expects it. With his mouth, he says, “He was considered the foremost expert on chimeras, because he once transmuted one that could talk and understand human speech. And then starved itself to death. Since you were a state secret, he was the public face of chimera research, up until it came out that that original talking chimera he’d transmuted hadn’t actually been made with two animals. He used his wife.”

Jerso’s eyes widen. “That…” he breathes. 

Zampano’s face twists.

“To create anything, something of equal value must be sacrificed,” Al recites. “The only way to induce such a human characteristic as use and understanding of language in a chimera is to begin with components that already contain such potential. As the military understood upon Tucker’s first success, and began work on you.” 

He looks down at the smudgy, yellow-grey sandstone, wishing briefly that he kept his hair as long as Ed’s so it would fall properly over his eyes. Surely the pursuit of truth must have some limits. He doesn’t want to see their faces.

“We found out what he’d really done when- when Ed and I walked in on his new talking chimera. Because he’d done it again. With his daughter.” Al presses his hands against his cheeks, comes away sticky with sweat. “It was horrible. It was horrible. It’s only ‘cause Ed nearly beat him to death that I didn’t. And she was watching the whole time.”

Twin intakes of breath beside him, twin rustlings of fabric. Jerso and Zampano have spent enough time around alchemists to know that letting him finish his thought before they start talking is the kindest thing they can do for him, and Al’s grateful for it. Even though the only thing he wants more than a cold river to jump in right now is human touch. Confirmation of existence. Ed’s, ideally, but any will do.

“We couldn’t save her. Maybe with time, but- There’s no known method to restore a chimera to its original bodies. We knew that. You know that.” It takes effort to make the next sentence audible. “Scar knew that, when he killed her. Mercy-killed her.”

Al drags his head back up, looks first at Zampano’s closed eyes, pursed lips; at the ashen cast of Jerso’s face. He says, “That was the first human chimera I met.”

“No wonder you knew what to say to us,” breathes Zampano. 

“Well,” says Al, and gestures down at his body. 

“That too,” admits Zampano, and Jerso huffs a laugh. “But I don’t believe your empathy would’ve been as convincing if you hadn’t known how hopeless it all was.”

Al looks at them, and reaches out to touch them himself if they won’t do it first, one hand each on warm fabric, on sticky, sweltering skin. Confirmation of existence. Confirmation of a soul embodied. 

“I promise you, I’ll find a way to get you your bodies back,” he says, fixing his eyes on the wavering, yellow-grey horizon. The startling blue above meets it in staggering, wind-blown increments, distance inestimable to the unfamiliar eye. “Alkahestry has possibilities Amestrian alchemy doesn’t, understands the body in a completely different way. There’s a whole world of research out there. Only…”

Big brother, says Nina. It was good that Mustang and Lieutenant Hawkeye hadn’t let them see the corpse, or they might have done something very stupid. Al blinks back the tears he hadn’t been able to cry back then. Stupid, to bring this up now. He’s already dehydrated.

Surely Nina would understand, if Al got his body back, and Jerso and Zampano get their bodies back, and she got to die instead. Surely Scar will understand, if Al retroactively makes his sin meaningless. Surely Alexander wouldn’t begrudge Jerso’s nameless donor-frog. Surely. Surely.

Stupid, Elric. The dead are dead. 

Jerso picks Al’s hand off his shoulder and squeezes it once, releases it. Al lets his other hand drop, watches Zampano give them both a nod and haul himself up to stretch. “Dedicate your thesis to her,” he suggests. 

He and Jerso share an eloquent glance over Al’s head. Whatever agreement they come to leads Zampano to walk off to talk to their guide about packing back up from the break and Jerso to screw the top back on his canteen in mournful, overheated resignation. 

Big brother, says Nina. Al’s skin prickles with sweat, and his joints hurt, and his head hurts from not crying, and he’s too hot and he’s dehydrated and every one of his muscles is sore in a new and different way and he has a body, and he’s going to reinvent the field of bio-alchemy for Jerso and Zampano, and Nina is dead.

“He’s right, you know,” says Jerso to Al. “We all know your bleeding heart won’t let you keep whatever you find to yourself, even if you have to redact and encode it. Dedicate your work to her. It’ll help.”

Al lets the suggestion wash over him like acid, scrape him clean. Nina and Alexander. Ling and Greed. Hohenheim. Souls in containers. He closes his eyes, opens them, squints against the sand. “Jerso,” he wonders, a thought forming, shapeless, coalescing, “The frog. Is it alive?” He needs to wire Ed. Well, he needs to get Ling on board with that telegraph line between Xing and Amestris, and in the meantime he needs to write Ed.

Jerso says something. It doesn’t sound definitive. It washes over Al. “Is it part of you? Do you ever feel frog-ish?” Souls, being alive. Human transmutation. He needs to look at Jerso’s cells. “I need to look at your cells.”

Jerso says something else that Al misses. Tries again. Touches him again. Alive. Embodied. Here, here, here. “Can you look at my cells in Xing?”

“Oh,” says Al, embarrassed. His brain slams back into his head. His cheeks have somehow gotten hotter. “Um. Sorry. I got…”

“Heatstroke?” suggests Jerso, laughing at him. As if Jerso’s not the most likely member of their party to get heatstroke. Well. Actually Al needs to look into if frogs can get heatstroke before he starts saying things like that. He drops his face in his hands. “Don’t worry, I know how you alchemists are. I’ll leave you alone to take notes before we break camp.”

Still laughing under his breath, Jerso stands and goes to the camels, taking the brief shade of his parasol with him. Only the sheer heat of the rocks keeps Al from melting onto them like pooling mercury. No matter how many times he loses himself like that, like he’s still in the armor waiting through infinite terrible night after infinite terrible night, it never stops being embarrassing.

Well. On with it. Barely palming his pen and notepad in sweaty hands, he braces his elbows on his knees and starts writing.

-

They’ve moved to the floor. It’s easier to lay books out so they can both reference them that way, so now they’re flat on their stomachs, pouring over the up-to-date anatomy textbook they’d pooled the last of their spare change and marched up to big bookshop in the next town over to get their hands on.

“These diagrams are really awesome,” says Ed, finger trailing hungrily over a map of the human nervous system. “Da-” He scowls. “Hohenheim didn’t have anything like this in his stuff.”

“‘Course he didn’t, this is mostly new research. An’ plus, he’s barely got anything on bio-alchemy,” says Al, arguing just to argue. If Ed’s hungry, Al’s starving, eyes tracing neatly-labeled pathways down the page. The human body is so complex. He wants to see Mom. 

Ed makes a face at him and flips to the next color plate. This diagram’s of the circulatory system, all the blood vessels like rivers cutting through flesh, tiny little tributaries at the extremities gathering slowly until they meet the vast ocean of the heart. Al follows one with his finger.

Ed says, “Blood’s the closest thing to a physical soul.”

“Right,” says Al. “Iron, water. Proteins. What’s in a protein?”

Ed’s face wrinkles, trying to remember, then he goes right to the index. “Protein, protein… Aha!”

It’s a big textbook, even bigger than Dad’s dictionary and his secret dictionary. The part of Al’s brain that has Teacher in it is saying how good it would be for hitting people in a pinch. A bruise bursts the tiny blood vessels, which makes all the weird colors skin can go, because skin’s actually kind of translucent, which is why parchment is like that. 

Ah, Ed’s found the page. Al moves right up next to him to squint at the tiny text, heads together, absorbing, absorbing. If they’re going to make Mom a new body, they have to do it right.

“Wow, blood’s pretty complicated,” murmurs Al after awhile. His head’s swimming a little. It’s almost sunset, it must be, he can tell by the fading natural light, and they’ve been studying since Al woke his brother up with a nightmare just before dawn. Winry’s probably gonna come in soon and start yelling about how Granny’s made dinner and if they don’t turn up she sure won’t be saving plates for them.

“I wonder where the soul goes,” mumbles Ed back, rubbing his eyes. He turns on his side and flips his arm over, tracing the veins there with a fascinated finger, then grabbing Al’s arm and doing the same thing. “There’s so many other components, it doesn’t seem like there’d be space.”

“Well, since the blood proteins bond to and transport other molecules, maybe they also do that with the soul,” says Al. That seems practical.

Ed stretches like a cat, like he’s just remembered a body is something he has. “Or maybe it’s just symbolic. ‘S not like the sun is actually a boy and the moon’s actually a girl or anything. They’re a star and a rock. Alchemists’ve gotta be just as good at understanding the meanings of things as the physical composition of them.”

“Uh-huh.” Al nods sleepily. He pokes at the pages of the textbook. “Go back to the nervous system again. I wonder if the soul’s also in the brain? That’s the mind, that’s as important as the heart.”

“The mind, the heart; nerves, blood. Bone?”

“I don’t think bones are where the soul is, Brother,” laughs Al. “I thought you said we gotta think about metaphor.”

“But skeletons are cool…” complains Ed.

Still, he starts flicking through the pages in reverse, hunting, and they get back to work.

-

The body breathes. Long, slow breaths, as might a sleeper. It sits cross-legged, staring blankly forward with dull, lifeless eyes, palms pressed together in its lap. Its hair falls lank and long. No wind disturbs it.

Before it rises a gate. Behind that gate, all knowledge. Behind the body, another gate. No motion disturbs the body, save the slow rattling of its breath, and the slow pulse of its heart.

The body is held hostage. Or, the soul. 

The body is dying. 

The Philosopher’s Stone is heavy with souls in Al’s grip. Squirming, suffering, half-sane at best, a writhing mass of agony smaller than a stick of chalk. The ultimate work of alchemy. Mass-murder in physical form. 

There are people in there, Al thinks, horror settling where his stomach should be. There are people, murdered but alive, and I’m making the choice to use their lives.

If he had time, if he had the ability, Al try what his father described, what he’d witnessed his father do, and reach within, and pull out the individuals and learn their names and ask their blessing for the use of their lives, but he- 

No. 

Al is a soul, too. Ed’s always had a better instinct for the true esoteric extremes of the alchemic arts, but Al is a soul with a fraying, inanimate anchor. His container encircles theirs, clutching tight, metal and Stone, souls close enough to communicate. 

Hello, my name is Alphonse. I’m an alchemist, he thinks, thinking a circle around himself and the Stone, thinking, If Scar has the trick of stopping at destruction, why can’t I stop at understanding?, thinking, What are your names?

The feedback is horrible, jumbled to incomprehensibility. Yes! Al thinks. Test 1 successful. He has seconds. He doesn’t have time to tease out individual voices. He doesn’t have time for Test 2. Or 3, or 4, or…

I’m sorry, he thinks, and some of the souls go quiet, and some of them start screaming. Scar’s fading accent echoes on the inside of his hollow head. Ten years ago, these people were alive. I’m being threatened by Kimblee, one of the State Alchemists who murdered your people, and by one of the people who orchestrated the massacres. May I use your lives to defend myself?

He won’t do it without permission. He won’t assume. He won’t. Not now that he’s figured out how to ask. 

The souls still. Al can see them, twisted, chimeric things, blood-red. Then, noise. Wailing, cacaphonic, hateful, but legible as: assent.

Thank you, says Al, and floods his mind with combat arrays.

Al sits beside Ed’s bed, and imagines that he’s breathing. It’s dark out, silent except the wind and night-time shouting from the bar down the street, and Al imagines his breath, the crack of bones in joints, the scuff of his feet on the floor. He’s cross-legged, palms pressed together in his lap. Still as a suit of armor.

He can see. He can hear. He can remember. He can’t taste or smell or touch. Ed is behind him, sleeping fitfully; in front of him, out the window, the whole world. He imagines himself breathing. He imagines his heartbeat.

He shouldn’t be here. A soul should have a body. There’s no such thing as a successful human transmutation.

Al imagines he’s alive.

-

“Steel,” says Ed. “An alloy of iron and carbon. Cotton. Cellulose- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Red paint. Minium- lead and oxygen; and a binding agent of linseed oil. Blood. That’s what your body is made of now.”

Al shifts next to him on the grass. They’re outside, but Ed’s back in his wheelchair after overdoing it in physical therapy yesterday and nearly damaging the connection between his nerves and ports. It’d taken Granny threatening to make him permanently shorter by cutting off his other leg too to get him to stop. 

“Iron,” Al says. “Copper wiring. Water. Carbon. Lime. Phosphorus. Salt. Saltpeter. Sulfur-”

Ed puts his face in his hands and makes a terrible noise. “Stop,” he says.

“That’s what you’re made of,” Al continues, unrelentingly. “For now. For now.” His voice goes smaller. He didn’t ask it to. “For now.”

Ed heaves a long, awful breath. He says, “For now.”

Al says, “And a soul.”

Ed swallows, looks down, grabs his automail arm with his flesh hand and squeezes. 

He whispers, “You too. Your soul is there. Your soul isn’t going anywhere.”

“Attached with your blood.” Al clings to that, in a weird, shameful way, holds onto the fact that the medium between his soul and his current, temporary body is proof of his brother’s love, of how much Al can rely on him. Of his sacrifice. Of the fact, Al swears, that neither of their sacrifices will be forever.

Ed flinches, though, when he says it. “Al.”

Al picks up his head and takes it off, exposing the blood seal. That’s another weird thing about this body. He can just pick up his head and look at it, because whatever perceptive sense he’s experiencing as vision stays attached to the main body of the armor. He’s got hearing, too, right to where his ears should be, and balance, but no taste or smell or touch, even though his eyes are just as imaginary as his tongue.

He tries not to think about that very much. It’s not very rational or logical, but he always worries that if he stops believing he should be able to see, maybe he’ll stop seeing. And if he stops believing he should be able to remember, what then? How much can he lose before he stops being Al? It’d be nice if he could shiver in fear.

He can’t worry Ed with that sorta thing, though. Ed already worries enough. Ed’s already in pain every day, his own pain and Al’s pain too. Al says, “Blood’s the closest thing to a physical soul.”

“Ha,” laughs Ed bleakly. “I know. Iron and water. Proteins. Other trace elements.” His hair falls lank in front of his face. “Al, I-”

“Brother?”

Ed’s shoulders heave in another long, awful breath, flesh arm gripping automail, hair falling lank over his face, mouth twisting up. Al watches it, the way his skin shifts, the way shadow falls and blood moves, and tries to remember what it was like, when he had access to sensation. “Soon. I promise. I’ll get your body back as soon as I can.”

“I know,” Al says, and tries not to sound as hungry as he’s sure he must feel. “Yours too. I promise.”

-

“You're a better alchemist than I ever was, Alphonse,” says Hohenheim. “Your brother, too.” 

Al thinks this is the feeling that makes people with bodies blush. His shoulders come up, and his chin goes down. “Ah,” he says. “Dad?”

It’s lunchtime in Liore, thin winter sun filtering through clouds of settling dust. Al and his father, neither of whom strictly need to eat, linger at the back of the line, trying to seem inconspicuous. Al’s father is succeeding better because he’s not a giant suit of armor, but he’s still pretty weird.

Like what he’s saying now. Al’s pretty sure Hohenheim is Mei’s Sage of the West, first of all. Helped invent an entire branch of the alchemic arts. Can do alchemy without even using his hands to make a circle. If only Al had a face to make a face with, he’d be making one right now.

Is this Hohenheim’s version of paternal pride? If so, Al doesn’t want it. He and Ed violated the taboo on purpose, in full knowledge. Definitionally, for all his flaws, the man tricked into becoming a Philosopher’s Stone is a better alchemist than they. Al gestures wordlessly at his lack-of-body.

Hohenheim frowns. He brushes a stray hair out of his face, the motion so Ed Al thinks it would make his heart jolt if he had one, and says slowly, “I'm not one to speak of unforgivable sin.”

“Well,” says Al. “Then-”

But Hohenheim sighs, continues. “I got this body by accident, courtesy of my own oblivious stupidity. For all the flaws in the execution, you got yours relentlessly pursuing Truth. I have to respect that.”

“That’s-” says Al. He often finds himself tongue-tied by this man. It’s partially the awkward distance where there should be familial connection, but it’s also the odd turns of phrase, the centuries-old habits that no longer have a culture in which to find context. Unfamiliarity on both counts. An alchemist shouldn’t be intimidated by ignorance, but that’s hard to remember when faced with as solidly, stoically enigmatic a person as Van Hohenheim. “That’s different.”

“Is it?” says Hohenheim. “Consider me a chimera of the soul, if that helps. You’ve met chimeras. Do you consider them alchemists?”

For a moment, he’s standing in that awful basement laboratory, watching Nina watch Ed nearly beat Shou Tucker to death, and trembling. “I consider them victims.”

“And yourself?” Hohenheim’s eyes are gleaming oddly.

“Never,” Al says, fist clenching, a little surprised at his own vehemence. Scar’s similar accusation flashes in his mind. “We got ourselves into this on our own, and Brother saved me when he gave me this body. I’m some kind of alchemical abomination, maybe. But not a victim. Not ever. And I won’t ever pretend that I am.”

“No,” says Hohenheim, quietly, almost resigned. “Of course you wouldn’t. Alchemist.” The alkhahestric perfect person, golden person. A perfected Philosopher’s Stone. The workday dust caught in it thickens Hohenheim’s golden hair, dulls its sunlit gleam. Al’s father says, “And the souls captured in a Philosopher’s Stone?”

“Are victims of murder,” answers Al. “Attached to a container, like-” Pivoting, putting that thought aside to contemplate in the awful time between midnight and dawn, he anticipates the next question. “And you are-”

His hastily-constructed dichotomy of victim/alchemist, let alone victim/murderer, falls apart like a badly-drawn array. There’s a reason Ed usually wins their philosophical debates where Al wins their physical spars. Tricked, a container for souls, alchemist of unfathomable skill and power, father who never came home. 

“Dad,” says Al slowly, “are you saying you gave up on the pursuit of Truth?”

Hohenheim’s voice is hollow, when he speaks. “Oh,” he says, “five hundred years ago.”

Al thinks he’ll be angry about this, later. It seems like the sort of thing Ed or Winry would get mad about, and leave Al wishing he’d thought of doing that himself before they got there first. Right now, though, he just feels sorta weird. He echoes, “Oh.” He says, “Maybe you’re right.”

The lunchtime crowd has started to thin, men and women joking and jostling as they return their bowls and head back to work. Al and Hohenheim are an island of stillness among them. They’ll have to move sometime. Go help. Hohenheim glances down, sunlight catching on his glasses and the dust in his hair, says, “At least let me be a resource to you. Alchemist. Alphonse. Ask your questions, and I’ll answer anything I can.”

Questions. The dizzying enormity of what Al doesn’t know spirals away from him. He could ask questions until the Promised Day had been and gone, and he still wouldn’t scratch the surface of five hundred years of gathered knowledge. Of over a decade’s lack of familiarity. 

“Dad,” he says, and it’s not the question he wants to ask at all but it’ll do to start, “your alchemy. You don’t draw or clap. How does it work?”

Hohenheim heaves a breath, shoulders up and down, and then leads Al over to a crate someone’s left around to sit down. Al sits on the ground to make their faces level and thinks Winry’s gonna be sad he left the nice polishing oil she sent him behind in Briggs. Hohenheim says, “You use the circle of your body, yes?” At Al’s nod, he continues, “It’s very similar. Except instead of forming a circle with my body, I use the circle of the world.”

“Oh!” says Al. His hands come together in front of him in fascination. The circle of the world. The world as the body. “Like in alkahestry?”

The twitch of his father’s mouth into a wry, impressed half-smile is all Al or Ed could ever have wanted as kids. “Very much like. I learned as much as I taught, in Xing. But consider literal circles as well. The circle of the horizon, the circle of the sun.”

“The circle of the pupil and the circle of the iris,” says Al, slowly, thinking of the truth of the universe unfurling fractally in his brain. The circle of a ripple spreading outward, of a pearl, of an atomic nucleus. “You write your arrays inside them?”

“Essentially, yes,” says Hohenheim. His eyes narrow very slightly in thought, invisible except that Al has been reaching for his father’s truths since they met. “I believe you could figure out the trick of it, if you set yourself to trying.”

“Me?” says Al. He draws his knees towards his chest. “I’m not-”

A perfected Philosopher’s Stone, tricked and chimerized and centuries-old and container for five hundred thousand murdered souls.

“But you are an alchemist, and you’ve witnessed Truth.”

And his father isn’t, not truly, not anymore. Not for five hundred years.

“Dad,” he says, and his voice is smaller than he wants it to be, and his fingers dig into the back of his hands so hard that he thinks he might rip the fabric of his gloves, “d’you think Brother and I will be able to get our bodies back?”

It’s late at night when he has the thought, his companions turning over in their sleep, Al left alone to pretend he can dream. He creeps closer to the window, trying not to clang. As he settles down to look at the moon, the subject of his inquiry shivers and blinks awake, a haunted cast to his ruined face, then notices Al glancing at him and sits up and scrubs a hand through his hair, tilts his head in invitation.

“How do you justify it,” wonders Al, keeping his voice very quiet, “using the Philosopher’s Stone?”

It’s ruder than he likes to be, but maybe that’s okay. He doesn’t think Doctor Marcoh likes it when people step around his murders on their tiptoes.

Sure enough, Doctor Marcoh yawns and rubs his hands over his eyes and grimaces. “You don’t pick the easy ones, do you, Alphonse?”

Al shrugs apologetically. “We’re alchemists.”

“I suppose we are,” says Doctor Marcoh. He hauls himself out of bed and starts rummaging for his coat, sufficiently convinced that Al is enough of an alchemist to drag the subject out to its conclusion now that they’ve gotten on the topic.

Al waits for him by the door and ducks after him into the dark, snow-muffled night. Doctor Marcoh is smart, Al reflects. By coming out here he’s also put a timer on the conversation, and can use the dangerous cold as a perfectly legitimate reason to slip back inside and into bed whenever he doesn’t want to talk anymore. But hopefully it won’t come to that.

Doctor Marcoh settles up against the wall of their residence, leaning, hands protectively in his pockets. Condensation from his breath billows up and clouds his glasses. “So.”

“You use life,” says Al. He tries to make it not sound like an accusation, because it isn’t. Mostly.

“I suppose,” says Doctor Marcoh, “that that depends on whether you consider them alive.”

“Well-” says Al, then pulls himself up short. He shakes his head, like there’s snow on it. “No, I don’t think it does. I’m-”

If they’re dead, then Al- If they’re alive, can they then be- Al puts both thoughts aside. 

“I don’t think it does,” he repeats, a little quieter.

Doctor Marcoh studies him for awhile, at least from what Al can see in the moonlit, intermittently-electrified darkness. “Your objection,” he says eventually, “is it to the use of a Philosopher’s Stone altogether, or to my use in particular?”

Al doesn’t correct him that it’s a question and not an objection. He stands very still for a moment, looking down at Doctor Marcoh’s ruined face, and then imagines himself an inhale and says, “I don’t believe in using other people’s lives. At all. Brother and I, we don’t do that.”

“Even to get your bodies back.”

“Especially to get our bodies back,” emphasizes Al. “We won’t make other people take responsibility for our sin, no matter what. I wouldn’t. I can’t. But it’s not…” Al shakes his head. “I don’t.. think it’s wrong, to do what you’re doing. To use life to save lives. I think everyone has to make their own philosophy about that sorta thing. I just… I want to understand, and I don’t. How you can justify that. Especially when you killed them, but even if you hadn’t.”

Doctor Marcoh sighs, deep and long. His glasses condense again. “An alchemist’s answer.”

Al scuffs his foot on the ground. Ducks his head a little. Waits. He’s gotten pretty good at patience, endless night after endless night. He can be patient for an answer, if he needs to.

“I won’t blame you if you consider me a coward, you know,” Doctor Marcoh says finally. “I’m alchemist enough not to shy from that truth.” 

“That doesn’t-” says Al. Ed would get angry here. He’d start yelling and say Yeah, obviously, ‘cause you’re not answering the question! and then he’d have to limp back inside because his automail would get broken again somehow and Winry would throw a wrench at him. Or something like that. Well, maybe Doctor Marcoh is a coward or maybe he isn’t. That’s a different question that Al doesn’t really care about. “I want to know why you use Philosopher’s Stones.”

“Because I’m a coward,” says Doctor Marcoh, quick and wry and self-deprecating. He breathes through pursed lips. Continues, “And because it seemed like the least I could do, after all my crimes.”

Al picks his head off the top of his body and looks at it. His hair’s still cut sadly short; the polished, scratched up metal reflects the moon. He says, “The Philosopher’s Stone you had when Brother met you. Why didn’t you destroy it?”

“I,” says Doctor Marcoh. He takes one of his hands out of his pockets and scratches it through his hair. His breath billows. “I didn’t want to have murdered all those people for nothing. I thought, at least I can do some good, instead of just throwing a resource like the Stone away. Surely you can understand that, Alphonse.”

A resource. No matter how inhuman its creation, a resource. Al’s fists clench quietly at his sides.

This, then, is the rot at the heart of Amestrian alchemy Mei alludes to, and Ed and Al have been digging up. This is an alchemist’s answer, this re-categorization of life as a thing to play with, of the souls of others as resources in a container, this that ultimate perversion of one as all and all as one into a vision of the world as nothing but ingredients for transmutation. Maybe, Al thinks, the reason that the creation of a Philosopher’s Stone doesn’t open Truth’s portal is that to create a Stone at all, one must stop viewing one’s sacrifices as human, and the capture of their souls as human transmutation.

That’s probably not it, but nobody’s told him any better ideas. He’s gotta bring it up to Ed next time they see each other, see what he thinks. 

“We’re alchemists,” says Al. “Of course I do.”

Al could say, at least you’re saving lives, but there’s still Ishvalan sacrifices in there being used to do the saving, and souls reduced to resources, and if Al’s alive, then so must be those souls, and they’re souls so they can make choices, and if they’re alive then Al- 

No, stop thinking about that. Stop thinking about that. 

Al rubs his hands over his arms, and pretends to shiver. Doctor Marcoh’s looking at him expectantly, shivering for real in the bitter cold, like something about what Al’s saying doesn’t quite add up. 

Al says, “Doctor Marcoh. Teach me to destroy a Philosopher's Stone?"

“Teacher,” says Al. “Do you remember when I asked you about the difference between being alive and having a soul?”

They’re in the kitchen. Al’s been deputized to help chop vegetables for a three-day stew Teacher’s got it in her head to make while Ed helps Mr Sig clean out the attic corners, since he’s small and can fit and Mr Sig is probably the only person ever who can tell him that and not make him mad about it. 

Teacher doesn’t look up from the spices she’s grinding when she answers, “Finally got a theory for me?”

“A hypothesis,” demurs Al. He gathers his thoughts all together in his brain, all the Truth he’s just recalled, that he spent the endless dreary night sorting through to not think about Martel bleeding out inside his stomach. “I think,” he says, “that being alive is a natural process, just like metamorphism and erosion and cementation in rocks. Under the right conditions, anything can become alive, and anything alive can die, and all of those things can be decomposed and recomposed by alchemy.”

Teacher makes a noise. Al, realizing he’s not getting to the point fast enough, nearly chops through his finger instead of a carrot. 

“But a soul arises spontaneously. Well, not spontaneously, um, when a man and a woman…” Al isn’t usually glad he’s stuck inside a suit of armor, but right now it means he’s not blushing all the way down to his neck, which is really good. He can still hear Teacher trying not to laugh too hard at him, though. Mean! “Um. That. A soul isn’t part of that natural cycle, is what I meant. It’s not physical, even though it can be attached to a body, and if you use alchemy on a soul, that’s human transmutation. And that.”

He sneaks a glance at Teacher. She’s sitting down today, because her condition’s still pretty bad after coming to rescue him and Ed from Greed, mortar and pestle in her lap. It’d be so easy for her to clap once and decompose the spices she wants into powder, but she’d never do that. It’s something Al took a really long time to understand about her, but he thinks he really admires it now.

The first thing he is after being Ed’s brother is an alchemist. Teacher, despite being one of the most incredible alchemists Al’s ever met, only thinks of herself as an alchemist after a whole bunch of other things she finds more important.

That’s not something Al wants for himself. He wants to be an alchemist forever, to do alchemy forever, to seek Truth no matter the obstacles. No matter what he’s already seen, no matter that he’s an alchemical construct, a soul in a container. Because of that. But it’s really impressive that Teacher can look at alchemy and decide it’s not the most important thing about her, Al thinks.

“So what I think,” says Al, putting down his knife. If she throws her pestle at him he can just duck. “Is that a soul is the drive to seek Truth.”

“Oh?” says Teacher. Looking over at her again, he sees her put her tools aside and fold her fingers together in her lap, tilt her head, so he turns properly and leans back against the counter, armor scraping against itself. “Interesting. Go on, Alphonse.”

Either he’s actually onto something, or he’s so wrong that she wants to see what sort of hole he digs himself into before hauling him out. 

He says, “Well, maybe. Or maybe it’s having a conscience, ‘cause animals don’t have those, and Barry’s body didn’t- well, neither did Barry, I guess.” Al flexes the fingers of one hand, one by one. “Or maybe it’s making choices and understanding consequences. Or anything like that. But I think, at least partially, I think it’s the pursuit of Truth. And that’s what makes us able to be alchemists.”

Or maybe, Al realizes, it’s not that he’s wrong or that he’s right, it’s that this isn’t something his Teacher’s spent that much time thinking about at all. Why would she? She’s a practical woman, and a practical alchemist, and the nature of the soul is an esoteric topic at best and basically irrelevant to running a butcher shop at worst. 

They’re not her students anymore. She expelled them, and now they’re just fellow alchemists. Maybe she just wants to hear what he has to say. 

She says, and he can see the buried theories of human transmutation unearth themselves behind her eyes, “It’s your contention, then, that the science of alchemy is the purest expression of the human soul?”

Well, student or not, she can still make him feel bad for coming to a kind of reductive conclusion. He chops a few more carrots to give himself time to think. And then he says, “I do think so, yeah.” Her eyes narrow. He clarifies. “‘Cause having a soul is different from being alive. Eating and drinking and wanting things and feeling things are all parts of the greater flow of the universe, they’re all part of being alive. And loving things, too.” He sweeps a hand across the counter, stabilizes himself. “Cats don’t have souls, but they can still feel love, I’m sure of it. But a soul is something else, something of immeasurable value. And the Truth is something else, something of immeasurable vastness. And they’re not, necessarily, alive, attached-”

Her gaze is fixed, steely. She’s listening to him. He should feel proud that he’s come up with an idea interesting enough to catch her full attention. But if that’s true- If all that’s true- If he-

“Teacher,” he says, “if that’s true. What’s it mean to be a soul without a body?”

-

-white, all white. Blinding, and the knowledge there, all the truths and all the Truths he’s ever learned, microcosm and macrocosm and one thought paramount:

“My brother,” swears Al, breath rattling through his weakened lungs, fingers trembling with the effort of emotion, fluttering and misplaced soul in a dying body, in a body, in a body, “will come back for me.”

Victorious, victorious, as Ed reaches out towards him and grabs him by the emaciated hand. 

“If you think about it, a soul is a kind of potential energy,” says Ed, the day after Hohenheim’s funeral. Their parents’ graves are a terrible place to talk about theoretical alchemy, Al’s pretty sure, but it’s never stopped them before. At least sitting here, they’re not likely to be overheard. Ed’s gotta have been holding this one in since before they even got their bodies back.

Al makes an encouraging noise. Ed can be accurately considered the soul expert between them, despite—or perhaps because of—Al’s time as nothing but.

“Your soul has everything you could do contained inside it,” continues Ed. “‘S not the only thing a soul is, of course, but it’s a significant percent. Comparable to water in the human body, I’d say.”

Al, conversely, is their expert on bio-alchemy, for much the same reasons. “It just needs a body to be able to do those things,” he murmurs.

Ed nods sharply. “A Philosopher’s Stone can’t act on its own, unless,” he gestures in the direction of Hohenheim’s headstone, “well. It has a body. But the principle holds in other ways. As I discovered at Baschool.”

Ed had referenced, in the absolute vaguest possible terms, his various recent feats of soul alchemy while they lay utterly bored in their hospital beds. Using himself as a Philosopher’s Stone; refining Pride into a manifestation of its own essential humanity; trading access to his Gate for Al’s body. 

Truth said I won, he’d whispered, and Al’d smiled so wide at him his mouth started hurting, which wasn’t something he’d remembered a mouth could even do.

The implication was they’d dig into the specifics and theory of it all later, away from any prying military ears. Later is now. Let Mustang and General Armstrong do their purges; the Elrics aren’t relying on the military ever again if they don’t have to.

“Do you think, Brother,” wonders Al, “that if you were to be made into a Philosopher’s Stone now, it would be of standard strength? You can’t catalyze an alchemical reaction anymore. Is the Gate a component of the soul?”

Ed frowns, poking the ground with his shoe. “Good question,” he says. “I think I could still be used for potential energy- I’m still alive, after all. And your body was with your Gate for years, while your soul was here, so the soul must be definitionally be separate.”

“But must it? The Gate is what made our bodies reachable, right?” says Al. “I don’t think it’s possible to get your leg back now, no matter what we do. You cut the connection. It’s true there’s nothing lost but the conduit, but a bounding circle is essential to a working array.”

The victory in Ed’s golden eyes, when Al’s own met them for the first time in over four years, is the only reason Al brings up his brother’s sacrifice with such shamelessness. Ed regrets a lot of things, all the time, but Al is absolutely confident that he doesn’t regret that final trade. The knowledge makes Al cry sometimes, when Ed isn’t around to see, from pride and from grief and from knowing that he has eyes he can cry with.

“So, following, the Gate is essential to a complete soul…” Ed’s braid swings side-to-side as he considers. Wow, the grass is so soft… No, Al, focus, focus. “A soul is consumable. Potential energy. I used mine at Baschool, but I didn’t specify which part of it. But Truth takes specific parts in trade…”

“Yeah!” says Al. He sifts through his memories. It’s always hard to call up what his body was feeling when his soul was bonded to the armor. The whole four years are sort of a void of sensation, sight and sound and nothing else. What did it feel like, looking at his Gate? “Well, it’s a hypothesis, anyway. Maybe it’s not the soul or the body.”

“A third thing. A catalyst?”

“Or a binding agent. No, that doesn’t make sense, because you don’t have yours and your soul is definitely in your body.”

Ed pats himself down, as if making sure that’s still true. “And you weren’t in your body, but you still had yours.”

“Uh-huh.” Al looks up at the sky and breathes in. Flowers, dirt, grass, sun on his face, wind on his face. Eyes that open and close. A mouth that breathes. “When I was in Truth’s realm, sitting by my Gate, I didn’t feel like I was looking at myself. Well, not at a mirror. All is one and one is all. My Gate had the whole universe in it, even though it was also in me. Part of my soul. Maybe.”

“Mine did too,” says Ed. He runs his hands through loosening hair. “All the knowledge in the world. Did Truth say that thing to you, too? About being God and Truth and also, You?” His nose wrinkles. “The bastard,” he tacks on, apparently just to say it. 

Should Al tell Mustang he merits the same insult as the all-knowing embodiment of equivalent exchange? Nah. Let him and Ed work that out on their own. It’ll be entertaining.

“Did, yeah,” says Al. He wants to catch the world in his mouth, in his hands. Catch and release. Catch again. Forever and ever and ever. Truth and breath and grass and Ed’s eyes crinkled up in laughter. “Body, soul, Gate. A body is what exists in the world, and channels action, and determines if you’re alive or dead.”

“A soul is consciousness, choices, potential energy, the search for higher Truth,” continues Ed. “It requires a container.”

“And a Gate is…” Al turns a blade of grass in his fingers. “Access to- not power, knowledge. The understanding step of an alchemical reaction.”

“Conduit, bounding circle. The ability to convert potential energy into alchemical energy.”

“Connection to the fundamental forces of the universe.” 

“Access to the fundamental forces of the universe. Body as hands. Soul as power. Gate as equation.”

“You closed a door. Traded it. Destroyed it. Deconstruction.” He tears his blade of grass in two, thinking too hard. “But was it part of your soul? Could it be restored, or is it separate enough that its removal, and your removal from the circuit of the world, means you could never hypothetically be reconnected?”

“Oh, who knows?” says Ed, throwing his arms out, grinning. “We’ve got our whole lives to figure it out!”

Al smiles back, and lets himself fall on his back, head pillowed on his hands, blue sky above. Breath, heartbeat. Mom and Dad’s graves. “Our whole lives,” he marvels. “Wow.”

“We made it back,” whispers Ed, hoarse, and he’s staring at Al, at the flesh and blood and bone of him, and Al isn’t gonna tell him he’s crying. There’s light on his face, in the gold of his hair and eyes.

Al reaches upwards and looks at the sun through the thin, fragile skin of his fingers. “We made it home.”