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Edward makes his first transmutation in a stuffy room with his little brother at his side, nerves making his fingers shiver but excitement making his cheeks hurt with a smile.
Alphonse turns to him with a nervous, small smile, and Ed, despite his wobbly mouth, pounds a fist against his puffed out chest, and shows his teeth.
“Don’t worry,” he says. I’ll protect you, he keeps to himself. “There’s no way this’ll mess up! It’s pretty simple stuff, anyways.”
Al still keeps a bit of distance from the array drawn on the creaky, wooden floorboards of their father’s old study, gnawing on his lip, but he gives Ed a hesitant smile and nods. It’s all the encouragement Ed needs to grin and hover his palms above the circle before sucking in a breath and slamming his hands to the ground.
His first transmutation is a simple cylinder raised from wood and in a flash of beautiful blue, and both boys cheer and whoop and stare at their creation in awe and childish wonder. Al gives the same array a go and gets similar results, and by the next dawn, their palms were coated with white dust and alchemical creations made with scraps of metal and wood. In a week, they no longer need to rely on their absent father’s perfectly drawn arrays of unknown origin and small scrawled letters, and their mother pats them both affectionately on the head as they proudly hold up their newest creations.
Mom dies.
Life moves on.
But Ed grits his teeth and clenches his fingers through his sleeves, because life hadn’t moved on. Since their mother had passed, whisked away by a single breeze, a breath too late, time had progressed. His hair was longer now, and Al was taller, and Granny Pinako’s stew was warm then turned cold when he was too caught up with research to remember to sit at the table.
Life and time– they are correlated, but one could exist without the other, he supposes. Time moves on– that is a law, a rule, something unchangeable and stable. Life does not share that same clause.
Life had been with Mom and Al, with warm kisses on his cheek and blankets on his stomach. It had been lullabies, whispered until they whispered no more. It had been soft, crackling notes from the decade old phonograph that made it seem as if the entire house swayed along with the drifting tunes.
So as his hair grew longer, and as he and his brother now stand at the same height, he realizes the grief seated deep at the bottom of his heart is not even for his mother. Perhaps it isn’t even grief, and rather, a deep longing for life to simply continue.
Sitting at his mother’s feet that were long gone, Ed opens his wretched mouth and ignores Al’s gasp of shock.
Before, they had only been existing, movements repetitive and predictable. They were breathing only because they must. But now, there is a new fire in Al’s eyes, a new hope and want and greed, and Ed swears that he will protect his brother.
Ed loses track of the amount of transmutations he’s done, but this is one that will stay with him forever– perhaps it will define him more than his first or even last, he thinks, as he retches and clutches his hands at nothingness.
Penance, penance, the Gate screams as it digs its unrelenting claws deep into his face, his eyes, his brain. You fool, you’ve ruined it all.
He wonders if this is heaven, the afterlife– he isn’t religious or superstitious in the slightest, but maybe this is his punishment for that.
Let there be light, God says, and Ed plunges, far too deep to ever be recovered again.
He trips into the open casket and the lid is locked tight as he is lowered into the ground, and his screams reach nobody and nothing. The phantoms of itchy fingers and hands ghost upon his skin, and he feels his entire being– mind, soul, body– being reconstructed and torn apart, again and again and again.
In his desperation he stretches out his hand, reaching for any semblance of light and comfort. He sees an angel– wreathed in a halo of light and a familiar silhouette. She smells of life, and Ed closes his mouth, cuts off his screaming.
Please, please, he prays, he prays. He’s paid the price, he has, so why–?
He wakes up. He is burning and yet freezing, drowning, and when his head is wrenched back above the raging waves he sees Mom. She has no wings and no holy smile, but instead, she moans and shrieks as her breaths are ripped from her open, heaving chest. Her eyes are sunken in so far into her skull that she resembles more of a skeleton than a human, with rotted grayed skin pulled loosely over her crumbling bones. Blood pools beneath her crackling body, each movement accompanied by the pops of joints escaping out of place, and when she finally falls still with a wet cry and several crunches, Ed cannot help but dig his fingers into what remains of his leg with a sense of despair.
(Yet, as he stares and stares in horror at the outstretched hand, fingers twisted and yet reaching for him, he feels a terrible, terrible sense of pride.)
Long ago, he had learned a new word– ‘penance’. It had been innocently placed within Hohenheim’s notes to describe a rebound in a faulty transmutation.
There are clothes and blood and hope on the floor. He crawls and hands reach out to him once again. The trillions of voices cry out to him in accusations, because he had broken his promise. He cries again when he feels his body crumple at the imbalance.
The next time he wakes up, he wakes to a monster. There is water in front of him, and he stares at his reflection. And stares. He stares until footsteps get further away, and he stares until his eyes grow heavy again and he prays to never open them again.
Life has ended. He should’ve known.
He wakes up. There are still bandages around his shoulder and thigh.
He wakes up. Al’s voice is hollow and empty.
He wakes up.
He wakes up–
What have you done? What have you created? He shakes his head, hangs it, doesn’t say a word, because what can he do?
What can you do? What will you do?
Al is dead. Al is dead, and Ed has killed him, strung his body up in the Gate and slaughtered the lamb, Ed, son of Cain, Abel is dead–
Did you see her, Ed wants to ask, to get on his knees and press his forehead to the cold floor and plead. Did you see her?
One day, when Ed is underwater, gone and far, far away, Pinako rubs tenderly at his inflamed, raw skin.
“I buried it,” she rasps. Ed doesn’t respond. Pinako rewraps his bandages in silence, and then leaves.
He isn’t surprised, not anymore.
He wakes up and wonders if Mom has a second grave now.
He wakes up, and sees Al. Al, who now towers over him, silent and expressionless. He has red eyes, Ed notes– but it doesn’t make sense. Al’s eyes are gold, touched by the forest, touched by love and God. But all Ed sees now is glowing red from dark, dark shadows.
It doesn’t make sense in the same way that he can still feel the pain of his arm and leg, or how Mom’s voice is only a memory, or how Ed can still feel the steady thrum of his heartbeat.
Ah, he thinks. He understands. It only makes sense that it doesn’t make sense. He finds it funny, but he doesn’t smile, doesn’t breathe. Al says nothing as Ed closes his eyes to blinding white.
Despite the Gate standing oppressively in front of him, he can still smell Mom’s shampoo in her hair and her distant smiles. He stares at the abyss laid out in front of him. Of course. It doesn’t make sense– the imagination was capable of terrible things. He closes his eyes again, and thinks of sunny skies and rolling hills. He thinks of the time he and Al fought over the amount of water the other had, and how their mother had giggled softly at the end of the table. He thinks of Mom’s soft fingers massaging his scalp in a bathtub, and he thinks about what he should ask Mom to cook for the morning’s breakfast.
He wakes up.
Winry is seated beside his bed, slumped over with her arms guarding her face as she lies prone on the side of the bed. He doesn’t look at her.
“Winry,” he whispers. He feels the sheets shift. His voice cracks, hoarse from misuse as he speaks. “I want to wake up.”
Her arm moves slowly in his peripheral vision, and he closes his eyes. He feels a small, sharp pain on the skin of his elbow.
He never wakes up.
Winry shakes, and with her, the bed.
Ed heaves out a sob.