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The man is not Ishvalan, but he is plainly a child of the desert, with his darkened skin, his sun-gold hair and eyes. He doesn't age, looking the same every time he comes back to their town, although years have passed between each visit. The people of Hanaj speculate, wondering who he is, where he's from-- whether he's even human. They call him outsider, heretic, sinner . Some stay well clear of him, wary and suspicious, while others… others are curious .
The Al-Ridha family invited him for dinner, once, over a hundred years ago. And now he just keeps coming back.
("Like an old stray dog," Savta Hodiah teases him, even as she sits him down, piles a plate high with food for him.
"Thank you, Hodiah," he replies, and the children spying in the doorway giggle at the outsider who calls their grandmother by her given name. They do not know that he has known her since she was little older than them.
"Don't thank me yet," Hodiah replies. "Ziauddin is still against letting you stay in the house."
"I can find somewhere else," the strange man offers, but Savta Hodiah only scoffs.
"I said he was against it," she says. "I didn't say he got to decide.")
At eight, Tirzah Al-Ridha adores the outsider, in that empty way that children do. At thirteen, she decides she's going to marry him. At sixteen, he declines her first proposal, says she is young and he is old, too old, and he won't let her waste her whole life on him. She tells him to let her decide who she wants to spend her life on, thank you , because it is hers and Ishvala's and no one else's. He apologizes, but he's gone from the Al-Ridha home, and from Hanaj, the next day.
At eighteen, she sees him again. And this time he stays, long enough to know her. To see her. Long enough for her to know him, too. Tirzah proposes again, three months after her nineteenth birthday, and this time--
(“Tirzah, you have to understand,” he begs. “I won’t age with you. What I am--”
“What you are, is a good man,” Tirzah says, certain and steady. “You’ve told me your story, and it changes nothing. I’ll give you my life. Will you give me yours? ”)
--this time, Hohenheim accepts.
Tirzah’s marriage to an outsider is not enough for her family to abandon her, but it’s enough to bring the wider community’s judgement down on them. Wishing to spare them the whispers and stares, she leaves with Van Hohenheim, heading West into Amestris, to the wide, grassy hills of Resembool. They build their home together. She still goes back to visit her family at least once each year, and oftentimes more. Her husband usually accompanies her.
It’s when Tirzah goes into labor, the first time, that her family finds out about Hohenheim’s alchemy. Tirzah gasps with pain, almost falls on the stairs, and across the room, he moves without thinking, splits the railing from the wall so she can catch herself on it.
“ I knew it, ” her grandfather declares, angry, as the lightning dissipates. “ I knew he was a heretic-- ”
“ Not now , Ziauddin ,” Savta Hodiah snaps, hitting her husband’s shin with her cane. “ Tirzah, is it starting? ”
“ I don’t think-- ” Tirzah stops, feeling a sudden wetness under her skirt. “... Yes .”
“ Bityah! ” Hodiah calls, and Tirzah’s oldest sister pokes her head into the room. “ Find your mother! And you,” Hodiah points at Hohenheim, “Make yourself useful! Go heat some water.”
“R-right,” Hohenheim says.
Esdras Al-Ridha is born in 1899, in his mother’s family home in Hanaj, with his grandmother and aunts acting as his mother’s midwives. His birth certificate, when it’s written a month later by Dr. Yuriy Rockbell, will declare his name Edward Elric. It will name his mother Trisha, and it will say nothing of her white hair. It will say nothing of the blue desert sky he first opens his eyes under, the way he is passed to relative after relative and is held and blessed by each.
(Even before the war, tensions are high, and hatred is brewing. Tirzah holds her newborn son, with eyes as gold as his father’s, and pale-sun hair halfway there, and she decides that if Ishvala wants him hidden, then Tirzah will not brand him where his genes have not.)
Alim Al-Ridha is born in 1900, in his parents’ home in Resembool, with Pinako Rockbell acting as his mother’s midwife. His birth certificate, when it’s written a few days later by Dr. Sarah Rockbell, will declare his name Alphonse Elric. It will name his mother Trisha, and it will say nothing of the red eyes he shares with her. It will say nothing of the prayer she whispers in his ear, welcoming him to the world, the familiar syllables rolling off her tongue.
(Tirzah prays that he will never face the kind of hatred she has witnessed, that the unrest in Ishval will not escalate. She prays that his big brother will always be there to protect him. She looks at her second son, with his hair a light-spun gold a shade paler than Esdras', and his eyes the living blood of the desert, and she knows he will have to be brave.)
When Ed and Al are children, they go back to visit every year. Mostly in the winter, when Resembool grows cold and grey. They travel with their parents, out into the East, past the hills, out to the sand-dusted town where their mother’s family lives. They stay in their mother’s childhood home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The crowded warmth of their family home, and the densely-populated little city it sits in, are a far cry from the sprawling rurality of Resembool.
They've never known a world at peace, but the borders between the land called Ishval and the land called Amestris are still, technically, open, and the front lines are closer to Resembool than to their family's town. The fighting is only talked about in low voices when the kids aren't paying attention; the war looms over the adults, but it seems abstract, to the children.
Ed is five and Al is four, when their father leaves. When he hasn’t returned by winter, their mother takes them out to the desert on her own.
“ --knew that man was no good, ” their Uncle Magdi rages, while Tirzah tries to tell him that it isn’t like that, tries to tell him that Hohenheim will come back. The family doesn’t quite believe it. Ed doesn’t quite believe it, either.
They leave Ishval in the spring, but they visit more often, from then on. Tirzah refuses to say that she’s lonely in Amestris.
(Trisha Elric is an Amestrian citizen, born and raised in Resembool. The space between houses, and the quiet nature of the area, and the close-knit shape of the community, allow this careful lie to exist. The people of Resembool tend not to turn on their own, and Tirzah fell under that protection the day she arrived.
Still, Trisha Elric doesn’t leave her house much, especially not after her husband disappears.)
The first time the Elric brothers do alchemy, they don’t mean for their mother to see it, and they’re surprised by her pride, when she does. They know that their father’s alchemy is a shameful secret, because the Al-Ridhas are proud Ishvalans, because Tirzah’s marriage to an outsider was barely allowed anyway, even without people knowing he was also one of the worst kinds of sinner. They know their great-grandfather, old as he is, would probably disown them.
But Tirzah is proud of them, smiling at the little wooden bird they’ve made.
(She gets sick that summer. The Rockbells treat her, and she gets better after a time, but Uncle Yuriy says the cough that remains may never fully go away.)
Ed is seven and Al is six, when the order is given. The border is closed overnight, and guarded, no more attempt being made to pretend that Ishval is part of Amestris rather than a nation invaded.
Ed is seven and Al is six, when alchemists pour into Ishval, and the war truly reaches their family’s home, becoming all too real all at once.
Ed is seven and Al is six, and their mother gets into a shouting match with her father, trying to convince him to leave before it’s too late, but he refuses to abandon the only home he’s ever known.
( “Ishvala gave us this land,” he says stubbornly, with the rest of the family behind him, “and we are going to defend it.”
“Send the children, at least,” Tirzah begs.
“Send them where? ” Zayde Umar demands. “ Into the desert to die? Into Amestris to be slaughtered? There is nowhere to go! ”
Savta Neta is crying, holding little Alim on her lap. Esdras wants to comfort her, but he doesn’t know how.)
(Tirzah is the youngest of her siblings, and her children are the youngest of their cousins, but only by a few years. Abia, Magdi’s youngest, is only eleven.)
Ed is seven and Al is six, and Tirzah knows it’s too late to leave-- she will never make it back to Resembool.
Ed is seven and Al is six, and the Rockbells come in the middle of the night, at Tirzah’s request. Tirzah gives each of her sons a hug, and a kiss, and a prayer, and she hands a letter off to Yuriy. She folds her sash, black and pale red, into Sarah’s bag.
“ Ima ,” Alim reaches for his mother, and she smiles through her tears and does not reach back. She sends her boys away, despite their protests.
Al has to pretend to be asleep, when they reach the border of Ishval, his head resting in Aunt Sarah’s lap in the back of the car, as she brushes gentle fingers through his golden hair. The soldiers guarding the border see Amestrian doctors and desert-dark children-- Yuriy slips carefully folded bills into one man’s hand as he shakes it, smiling, thanking him for his service-- the soldiers see Amestrian doctors and Amestrian children, and let them through without question.
Ed is seven and Al is six, and they stay with Pinako and Winry, because their own house sits empty and cold.
( If you see my husband again, and I do not, Tirzah’s letter says, when Pinako opens it, tell him I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise. I’m dying first. )
Esdras is seven and Alim is six, and as the screams and explosions and gunshots get louder, closer, Tirzah thinks of her sons, and murmurs a prayer they will never hear.
(Officially, Trisha Elric dies at home in Resembool. A tragic relapse of the sickness that almost claimed her two years previous. A service is had, and a casket buried, because appearances are important, now more than ever when Pinako has two boys to keep hidden from the Fuhrer’s Order, when one of them has eyes as red as the mourning clothes they can’t risk wearing to the funeral.
“ Savta ?” Al asks, that night, cloaked in red because it’s safe here, hidden inside the house where no one will know, where no one will see. He’s crying, and Pinako looks at him, this boy who calls her grandmother , and knows what he will ask before he asks it. She opens her arms and holds him close.)
Tirzah Al-Ridha dies at home in Ishval. She has a dozen of her relatives at her sides, an old ceremonial knife in her hand because it’s the only weapon she has ever owned. Her father stands with her, as do her sisters, her uncles and aunts, a number of cousins and neighbors. Her mother and brother and grandparents are at home, barricading windows and doors with the help of those too young or too weak to fight. Tirzah could have stayed with them-- regrets having to leave them. But she does not intend to die in the shadows rather than under the blue desert sky. She murmurs a prayer for her family, for herself, for her sons, for Ishval.
Tirzah coughs in a violent fit, head bowing, throat aching, a remnant of the disease that could not kill her, and when she raises her head again there’s motion in the distance. She sees a figure a few blocks down the street, striding past the line of Amestrian soldiers. She sees a white coat over a blue uniform, dark hair, an empty hand raised--
And Tirzah Al-Ridha burns.
Yuriy and Sarah Rockbell are killed only a few months later.
A year after that, the war ends. The extermination order, supposedly, ends with it. The Ishvalans know better. As does Pinako. She trusts those who live in Resembool to keep their mouths shut, but they’ve been hurt by the war, their land bombed and burned, friends and family members killed while wearing blue uniforms, carrying guns and naive patriotism. She knows better than to tempt fate.
When Al leaves the house, he wears hoods. He keeps his eyes down, because their color could still be a death sentence-- or at the very least a provocation. Winry and Ed know how to angle themselves in front of Al, how to hide him from sight without making it seem like they’re trying to. They know that no one can be fully trusted, outsiders and soldiers least of all.
(They trust each other, though, these three children who have known loss too young, who know fear too deep. They’ve always trusted each other. Winry was the first Amestrian to know the boys’ real names-- and for a long time, she is the only person to use them.)
Izumi Curtis stands in the rain while two little boys hassle her to take them on as students.
“Get off of me! Where are your parents?” she demands.
“Those two don’t have parents,” a townsman chimes in.
“...Dammit,” Izumi mutters, “I’m soft.”
Izumi looks at the boys. Only one of them looks back, gold eyes bright with determination. The second boy is wearing a raincoat too big for him, hood pulled up, head bent, and Izumi tsks and pulls the hood down. He yelps like he’s been burned, head ducking further down, hands reaching up, while his brother yells in indignation and moves, turns away from her and puts himself between them like a shield, glaring over his shoulder at her. “If you’re going to beg me to teach you, have the respect to look at me when you do it,” Izumi orders.
The hooded boy hesitates. He reaches for his brother’s hand, and they seem to have a moment of silent communication. Then the brother moves, and the boy looks up. His eyes are red as blood, and he looks to be on the verge of half-panicked tears. Ah, Izumi thinks, recognizing her mistake. Shit.
“Please teach us!” he asks again, resolutely, this time making direct eye contact that Izumi breaks with a nod.
“Fine,” she says. The younger brother cheers, grinning as he dries his eyes, pulls up his hood again. The golden-eyed one keeps glaring at her for a second longer before letting his brother's smile infect him too.
After their month on the island, they go to Dublith to train, to learn more, and the rare passers by who catch a glimpse of Al’s eyes are all swiftly glared down by Sig and Izumi. No one bothers him, there.
Edward is eleven, and Alphonse is ten, and Pinako Rockbell answers the door in the middle of the night to see someone in a tall suit of armor cradling something small and bloodied.
“What the hell--” Pinako’s hand tightens on the doorknob.
“ Savta, ” Al’s voice says from inside the armor, quiet and anguished, and Pinako doesn’t know much Ishvalan, but she’s picked up enough to recognize when the next word he speaks is please.
When the soldiers push past her into the house, Pinako is outraged and terrified at once, scared that they know something, that someone in Resembool has broken her trust and betrayed her family-- but Ed looks like Hohenheim, and Al looks like no one at all, now, and the soldiers are only here about the horrible thing Pinako had to bury. Here to offer the Elric brothers a place in the military that destroyed their home. Pinako doesn’t know whether she wants to laugh or cry, at the irony.
Esdras Al-Ridha stops, with a spear held inches away from the man who ordered the genocide of his people.
Fuhrer Bradley walks away, and wishes Ed luck on the rest of his exam.
Red is the color of life, and the color of death. Red is sight, knowing, loving, missing, mourning, and promises. Red is the living blood of the desert. Ed chooses red fabric, for his coat, never even touching the regulation blue uniform he’s initially issued. It’s a dark blue, nothing like the open Ishval sky, and it makes his stomach twist, even imagining how he’d look in it.
("You're not in uniform," Roy points out, that first day, and there's a flicker of… something, in Fullmetal's eyes. Discomfort? Fear? Is he regretting his decision already? Whatever the look was, it's gone in an instant, replaced by that shallow disdain only twelve-year-olds can really pull off, as Edward crosses his arms.
"That ugly thing?" He scoffs. "Yeah, no. This suits me better, don't you think?"
Roy gives the boy a flat look, but Fullmetal just stands there, defiant, in his ridiculous red coat. Still, it's… not a bad thing, that the kid doesn't look like a soldier. Roy swallows the sudden discomfort that rises in his own throat, at the image of Edward, small and cynical, dark skin and light hair, wearing stiff Amestrian blue.
"That should be fine," he allows. "With any luck, you won't be called to active service anyway."
He takes note of the way Fullmetal's shoulders slump with relief.)
They only take a few things from the house, before they burn it. Their mother’s sash, first and foremost, because when Ed comes of age it will be his. The holy scrolls she hid carefully under the floorboards, because with no one left to say the words aloud, Al has to settle for trying to read them. Water bowls, given to them as newborns, inscribed with their names-- also hidden under the floor, because written Ishvalan looks too distinct not to be questioned, if anyone saw.
Everything else burns up. But those things, they hand off to Winry, before they leave Resembool.
“Keep them safe for when we come back,” Alim asks her. She nods with tears in her eyes.
Over the course of three years, Edward Elric, Fullmetal Alchemist, becomes known as the people’s alchemist. He has a reputation for helping out-- and it doesn’t matter who you are, they say. He’s even helped Ishvalans, living in slums.
(Edward Elric is very careful not to spend too much time with Ishvalans, not to become too close to any of their communities dotted through Amestris. He is careful to only speak Amestrian. He allows himself to be nothing but an outsider, because the alternative is to risk word getting back to the military, to the colonel, and that isn’t a possibility Esdras can accept.)
(Nina Tucker dies alone and afraid, on a dark night, and hers is the first death they truly feel like they could have avoided, if they’d been there.)
“I can’t even feel the rain hitting my skin,” Al says, looking up, and wishing he could cry. “That’s something I miss.”
(In the desert, rain is important. Sacred. A gift from Ishvala to Their children. There are prayers and songs to bring rain, dances performed under the first drops. Alim remembers being small, feet bare in the sand, as Ed and their older cousins lead him through the steps of a dance. He remembers his mother’s voice, singing, laughing, her arms raised and face upturned.)
The scarred man approaches and chases them down, corners them in an alley, and Ed transmutes a blade to fight with, similar to the traditional knives he remembers some of his relatives owning. It isn’t the same, though-- the curves sized wrong, the edge not smooth enough. He was too young to remember the shape perfectly, too small to know how one would feel in his hand, now.
The man destroys part of Al’s armor, and Ed’s arm. Offers Ed a moment to pray.
“I don’t have any god I’d like to pray to,” Ed says, face pressed to the rain-wet ground, because it’s hard to believe that Ishvala would still care for him, after the sins he’s committed.
(Ed remembers the Truth, and the thing that called itself God. He doesn’t believe that something with so cruel a smile could be the Creator his family prayed to. But, then again, it’s hard to imagine such a kind Creator could allow the destruction of Ishval, either.
He tells people he doesn’t believe in God at all, because that’s easier than trying to find words to explain the betrayal and anguish of those gates, the questions that plague him, the sensation that he’s standing at the top of a sandstone cliff and that if he looks at his faith too closely it will crumble under his feet, leave him forsaken and broken at the bottom.)
The colonel and his men show up without a second to spare, and the fight continues.
Ed can only stare, for a long few moments, at the hole left by the man’s eventual retreat. Ishvalan.
It explains why he’s going after State Alchemists, but Ed wants to rage, wants to scream after him, you idiot, why would you draw more wrath down on our people, why would you attack me when… when I’m-- he interrupts his own mental tirade, because of course the man hadn’t seen him as Ishvalan. No one ever did. And no one saw Al anymore, either-- wait-- “Alphonse!”
He runs to his brother’s side, and gets a punch in the face for his troubles.
Ed listens to Mustang retell history Ed knows all too well. He knows the death of his mother’s people-- his people. He knows there are survivors in slums, on the outskirts of any town that won’t chase them off. He knows there was destruction and devastation when the Fuhrer sent alchemists into Ishval, knows that it wasn’t fucking safe for anyone Ishvalan, in the aftermath. He doesn’t need to hear about the preceding violence from someone who took part .
Still, Ed listens quietly, because the average Amestrian citizen wouldn’t know so much of these dark truths, and a young Amestrian alchemist should have had no reason to care.
“The State Alchemists produced striking results. Which is why that man, an Ishvalan survivor, has justification in taking revenge,” Mustang says.
“Bullshit,” Ed can’t stop himself from snarling. “There’s no justification for dragging people who had nothing to do with that into his revenge.”
(Esdras doesn’t know how his mother died. He’s never tried to find out, because it seemed pointless; how would he know which of a hundred thousand soldiers or a hundred State Alchemists was the one to… well.
And because, even if he did find something out, if he knew for sure, who killed her… he doesn’t know if he’d be able to control his thirst for revenge any more than Scar.)
(Roy remembers going to Resembool, years ago, entering that empty house with Lieutenant Hawkeye. There was an Ishvalan sash, black and pale red, folded on the mantel. It brought him up short for a moment, before he shook himself-- Resembool was barely west of Ishval, after all, and there turned out to be no other indication of Ishvalan influence in the house, when they gave it a cursory search. Someone must have given the Elric family a sash. A friend from before the war, perhaps.
Roy thinks of that now, seeing Fullmetal get angry about being dragged into a vengeance he has no guilt in.)
Dr. Marcoh looks shocked, to hear that Ed is a State Alchemist. He pinches the bridge of his nose, teeth grit and bared, like he’s in pain--
“After the civil war, there were so many alchemists who turned in their certifications, because they could not bear to be human weapons. And yet, you--”
“I know how foolish it is!” Ed interrupts. He wants to snap that he’s thought about it every day, wondered if it’s worth it, walked the line between feeling guilty and feeling justified-- because using the military’s money and influence to their advantage is the only repayment the Al-Ridhas are ever likely to get. He knows he can’t say all of that. Not in so many words. “But even so, I have to keep lying here until I achieve my goal, even if it is on a bed of thorns.”
“Madam Pinako, are the two of them like grandsons to you?” Major Armstrong asks, looking at a framed picture-- Winry grinning wide, holding Ed and Al close, with Pinako and Trisha behind them. The picture was taken on an old camera owned by a local family, faded shades of brown rather than full color. Otherwise Pinako wouldn’t dare to leave it out for people to see.
(Major Armstrong sees, in the photo, that Alphonse’s eyes are darker than his brother’s, his hair lighter. Their mother’s hair looks pale enough to be white-- but maybe that’s just the sepia tones of the photograph, he tells himself.)
“I’ve been watching over them ever since they were born,” Pinako replies. She explains that she knew their father, how Hohenheim left his family behind. Armstong asks where Winry’s parents are, and Pinako can’t keep the bitterness from her voice when she answers. “They died in the Ishvalan Civil War.”
She tells that story too, her son and her daughter-in-law going out into the field, hoping to save lives in the middle of a warzone.
“It was a terrible war,” Armstrong says, with the heaviness of one who lived it.
“Yes, it was,” Pinako agrees.
“I’m grateful to both of you, Granny and Winry, for always welcoming us like you were our real family.” Alphonse’s voice carries through the barely-open door. “He won’t say it, but brother feels the same way.”
“Al…” Winry trails off.
“We know that,” Pinako says, as firm and no-nonsense as she says everything else. “He doesn’t have to say it for us to know.”
“ Savta… Winry…” Al says, and one word gives Alex pause where he’s in the hall listening. Savta . Up until now, the boys have only called Pinako granny . “ Thank you. ”
The last words, Alex doesn’t understand. But he’s heard the language enough to recognize it.
Ishvalan.
Major Alex Armstrong bears the weight of the war, the weight of orders followed, the weight of overwhelming silence in the wake of explosions and gunshots. This information, this secret, is a small stone, on top of the existing pile, and it’s nothing he isn’t more than willing to carry. He knows, the second his brain connects the dots, that he will not-- cannot-- say anything. Not to the boys, and not to the military.
They crack the code. They find the truth. Ed feels sick to think about it, remembering Marcoh’s words about doing research in Ishval.
“This is unpardonable,” Ross says, when she and Brosh hear it, and Ed takes a breath, resists saying something callous like what else is new?
“Would you mind not speaking to anyone about this?” he asks instead, because Brosh and Ross are Amestrian soldiers, and nothing more. They can still walk away from it all.
(“Ishvala must really hate people who commit taboos,” Esdras says, mouth quirked in a wry smile that fades quickly. “I wonder if we’ll be like this the rest of our lives.”)
“You can put more trust in adults, you know,” comments Ross, standing by his hospital bed after their experience at the Fifth Laboratory. Ed wants to say that he has faith in adults-- well, in Savta Pinako, mostly, but there are a few grown-ups he knows who’ve been growing on him lately-- and that it’s the military he can never trust. But even knowing what they know now about Philosopher's Stones, he doesn’t think that Ross would understand that as anything but hypocritical, coming from someone with the rank of major.
(Maes Hughes dies under a dark night sky. He dies alone.)
Martel grabs Bradley by the throat using Al’s hand. She’s anguished and furious and Al is terrified, begging her to stop because the Fuhrer’s eye is so cold and unaffected, and Al is so scared that he’ll--
Bradley stabs straight down, through the gap between Al’s helmet and his body. The Fuhrer doesn’t even blink, as he kills Martel. Her blood splashes across Alim’s seal, and he remembers… everything.
“Edward Elric,” Armstrong says, holding Ed by the shoulders, his uncovered eye dark with something Ed doesn’t understand, “don’t do anything too rash.”
“R-right,” Ed, haltingly, agrees.
(The major curses himself as a coward, as he walks away from the boys. He knows he should have told them about Hughes, and he knows he should have told them what he knows of their heritage. But when it came down to it, he couldn’t find the words to do either.)
Later that night, when Al is put back together, Martel’s blood cleaned from his armor, Ed awkwardly, haltingly, asks if he wants to do anything for her.
“You carry her now,” he says, then blinks. “Shit, wording, sorry--”
“I know what you meant,” Al says softly. “I-- I don’t know what we could do. They’re not Ishvalan; they wouldn’t want our prayers. And we can’t perform burial rites.”
“...Yeah.” Ed sighs. Then he thinks: “We can keep vigil. That’s something.”
“I can do it for both of us,” Al protests, “you need your sleep.”
“Don’t be silly,” Ed says, quiet. “I’m not leaving you alone tonight.”
“You can’t keep two nights of vigil in a row, brother,” Al says in Central, the news of Hughes’ death weighing on them.
“It’s not in a row, I slept last night!” Ed argues.
“It’s close enough!” Al shoots back, arms crossed. “Please, try to sleep. I’ll keep vigil… like I always do.”
He’s determined, resolute, and Esdras nods once in solemn agreement.
It’s still a restless night.
“You would raise your hand to your superior officer? Don’t forget your place,” Mustang says, and Ed, breathing the horrible stench of charred flesh, sees red .
He rushes forward, but Al holds him back.
“He killed Lieutenant Ross!” Ed argues, when Al won’t let him go. He killed her like he’s killed so many, like he could have killed--
“What is the meaning of this, Colonel?” Al asks, Ed’s own turmoil of emotions echoed in his voice.
“There were orders to shoot the fugitive Maria Ross on sight,” says Mustang. “That’s all.”
“‘That’s all’?!”
“I apologize for hiding Hughes’ death. But do not argue against orders. Do not ask for explanations. Just follow them. That’s what a soldier does.”
He would kill us, if he knew what we were, the thought pops into Ed’s head unbidden. He’s had similar thoughts before, but never so clearly, never put the sentence together in so many words and understood it to be true.
(The hatred in Fullmetal’s eyes is stronger than Roy expected it to be. For the shortest of seconds, he almost considers letting the brothers in on the truth-- but of course he can’t. Not yet, and not here.)
He travels east with Major Armstrong, and Maria Ross is alive , and Ed stands in the ruins of a nation long-dead and curses Mustang for his deception. Ed understands why the colonel didn’t-- couldn’t , say anything, had to let them see for themselves. But understanding doesn’t mean he has to like it.
Would he spare us, too, then? He wonders. It’s not a question he particularly wants answered anymore.
“You want something?” Ed demands of the man who tried to attack him. “I’ll tell you right now, I’ve got no--” he cuts himself off when he sees the man’s eyes. “Ishvalan?” Ed breathes. He loosens his grip, but doesn’t let the guy up. And then they’re surrounding him, more Ishvalans than he’s seen in one place for quite a while, and one man tells him he’s to be a hostage against the military. Ed wants to laugh. “There’s no way the military will take action over a single kid like me,” he says.
“It was the death of a single child that triggered the civil war,” the man replies. He’s got what looks like a burn scar covering part of his face, and Ed flinches at his words. “You never know what will be the catalyst that changes history.”
“Stop it,” a new voice, authoritative, scratched with age. “This is a disgrace!”
“Elder Shan,” the man starts. Shan talks right over him.
“You fool. Are you trying to bring shame to the name of Ishvala?”
“Let him go,” the boy supporting the old woman’s arm requests of Ed. “He won’t attack you again.”
For a moment, Ed had forgotten he still had the first man pinned. He lets him up quickly-- then bows his head to Shan, hands folded in front of him, childhood habits waking up after years of dormancy.
(Savta Neta always drilled it into his head that it was important to show respect to one’s elders. Esdras always argued that they should act worthy of it first. Then, usually, she’d pinch his ear and tell him that he must have gotten his horrible attitude from his blasphemous father.
Ed misses her so goddamn much.)
“Thank you for coming to my aid,” he says to the Elder. “But why did you?” He knows they see him as Amestrian, so there was no reason--
“I know that not all Amestrians are bad,” Shan says. There’s a suspicious look in her eye that Ed doesn’t particularly like; he gave himself away by bowing to her, most likely.
“Elder Shan and I were saved by Amestrian doctors,” the boy says, “when we were severely injured during the war. It’s thanks to that couple that I’m still alive today.”
“‘Couple?’” the word hits Ed like lightning. “They wouldn’t happen to be named Rockbell, would they?”
“You knew the Rockbells?” The boy is smiling now, and so is Elder Shan. “They saved the lives of many Ishvalans.”
“When the fighting became severe, they stayed with us,” Shan adds.
Ed doesn’t want to ask, but he needs to know.
“How did they die?”
“They were killed,” Shan speaks every word as though it pains her, “by an Ishvalan patient who they saved.”
Ed feels sick. The Rockbells saved so many, saved their mother, saved himself and Alim… and the universe repaid them by…
“I’m sorry,” Shan says, her sincerity clear. “We were unable to stop it.”
“Who was it?” Ed asks-- demands , really, he’s too loud and too angry and he knows that but it’s easy to be angry, right now. When Shan describes Scar, the tattoos on his arm, Ed clenches his fists, rage filling his every thought, until she speaks again.
“If you get the chance,” she says, “could you deliver something to the Rockbells’ grave? Our gratitude, and our apologies.”
“...I will, ” Esdras replies in Ishvalan. He sees the moment Elder Shan realizes, her eye widening for only a split second before she nods. A few of the others seem more taken aback, but Ed doesn’t care. He gives one last bow to Shan, and turns away.
“I’m tired of people dying before my eyes!” Al yells, shielding Lieutenant Hawkeye. “I won’t let anyone get killed anymore! I’ll protect them!”
(Even as the words leave his mouth he knows how childish they must sound, how naive-- to think that he can protect everyone, save everyone. But he remembers being small and afraid, in the Rockbells’ car, eyes shut as he and Ed were smuggled out, leaving their family-- their mother-- behind. He remembers getting the news too-late that their town had been reached, had been razed. He remembers their mother’s funeral, and the Rockbells’ funeral. He remembers Martel, her blood splashing out through the joints of his armor.
And he refuses to lose anyone else, not if there’s anything he can do.)
“Well said, Alphonse Elric,” Colonel Mustang’s voice saying his name is all the heads up that Al needs-- he transmutes a wall to shield himself and Hawkeye, and he waits for the fire and the screaming to stop.
“Esdras--”
“ Edward ,” Ed corrects with a snarl, because they are standing over his mother’s empty grave, and this man has no right to call him by the name that she and Ishvala gave him.
“...you’ve gotten bigger,” his father finishes lamely, and Ed wants to punch him in his stupid face, snap that tends to happen when you’re gone for ten years. He doesn’t, if only because Hohenheim is still talking.
“Why didn’t you come back any sooner?” Pinako asks. “...Trisha was waiting for you all that time.” She tries to say it softly, a point of fact and not an accusation, but Hohenheim flinches anyway.
“I… did,” he says haltingly. “Or I tried. I came back to town, and when I got close I saw the boys and Winry playing in the yard, here… I assumed they were okay. That she…”
“That she made it out with them,” Pinako finishes for him, when he can’t. Hohenheim nods, a short, string-jerk motion, and she sighs.
“I should have been back sooner,” he says. “I should have gone to her. Maybe I could’ve--”
“Maybe nothing,” Pinako interrupts, because spirals of regret lead nowhere but the bottom of a bottle. She can’t offer any comfort or platitude, so she doesn’t. Trisha died in Ishval, and Hohenheim wasn’t there, and Pinako took in the boys. None of that can be changed. Pinako drains the rest of her wine, and pours another glass.
“Pinako…” Hohenheim starts, after a little while of silence. “What my sons transmuted… was it really Tirzah?”
“You can keep going without ever eating or sleeping?” Ling sounds amazed.
“As long as this seal is unharmed,” Al confirms.
(He’s thought about it many times, over the years. The irony of his life being sealed by his brother’s blood. Al really is the living blood of the desert, now that he’s practically nothing else.)
Pinako is too careful to keep the pinboard up, most of the time. She keeps it hidden in a corner of the basement, along with a sash, two bowls, and a handful of scrolls; evidence of truths left buried.
But for Hohenheim, she’s dragged the pictures out, and before he leaves he leans forward to look at one photograph in particular.
“Do you mind, if I take this?” he asks, a little haltingly. “This was taken with the four of us… it’s the only one.”
Pinako knows the picture he’s talking about. She doesn’t want it.
“I don’t mind.”
Ed digs up the result of their failed transmutation, because he has to see. He has to know. His memories of that night are blood-stained and twisted, terror shaping his nightmares until he can’t remember the details of reality.
The hair he pulls from the grave is black, not white, and… well.
Now he knows.
They try to use Scar to lure out a Homunculus, and Ed gets angry, brings up the Rockbells without truly hearing his brother’s interruptions.
“Brother!” Al finally yells outright, pointing, and Ed looks-- and there’s Winry, standing barely out of arm’s reach, eyes wide.
“What are you talking about?” she asks, barely more than a murmur.
“Winry,” Ed starts, equally quiet, immediately aware of his mistake.
“This is the man who killed Mom and Dad?” She’s shaking, hands held in front of her chest. “T-They were killed by someone they helped?”
Winry falls to her knees, demanding answers, asking why, saying bring them back, like she’s the same scared child she was when they first got the news-- Ed sees the moment she notices the gun on the ground, and his breath catches in his throat. She picks up the gun, ignoring Ed and Al’s desperate protests, and, eyes filled with tears, she points it right at Scar.
“You’re the doctors’ daughter?” he asks. “...You have a right to shoot me.”
Oh, spectacular, Ed thinks, half-hysterical. There’s a second of intense silence, Winry and Scar staring at each other while Ed and Al stand to the sides, unsure of what to do.
“Shoot me,” says Scar, like he wants to die-- and maybe he does.
“Don’t shoot, Winry!” Ed says, because fuck what Scar wants. “Put the gun down!”
“You shouldn’t be holding that thing!” Al adds. “Winry!”
They still don’t get a response.
“Shoot me!” Scar prompts again. “But if you shoot, in that moment, I will consider you my enemy.”
“You just try and lay a hand on her!” Ed threatens, anger filling up the gaps in him that aren’t taken up by fear.
“Will you kill me?” Scar demands of him. “That will also do. Until one of us dies, this chain of hatred will not cease! But don’t you forget; it was the Amestrians who first pulled the trigger in the civil war! It was you!”
Al shifts, wanting to protest. Winry’s breathing hitches with half-gasped sobs.
“No!” Ed says to both of them. Then, just to Winry, “don’t shoot him!”
“Put the gun down, and get away from here!” Al tries, one last time. “ Winry!”
Scar turns back to her, just for a moment.
“If you cannot shoot, then get out of here,” he says. “You’re in the way!”
He attacks Ed again, and Ed moves without thinking, speaks without thinking--
“ Don’t shoot!”
-- he flips over Scar, landing between the man and Winry, his back to her without hesitation despite the gun in her hand--
Scar freezes, eyes wide with shock, and Ed realizes too late that he spoke in Ishvalan.
(Scar can only stare. He sees his brother, protecting him, standing between him and a State Alchemist. And then the memory fades, and he sees dark skin, pale hair, the language of the desert on this boy’s tongue-- but it can’t be.)
“You speak Ishvalan?” Scar asks, still frozen with one arm outstretched. He jumps back from Al’s kick, looking haunted.
“ We are Ishvalan,” Alim corrects, even as he claps his hands and attacks again.
Ed wraps Winry in his coat, says he’ll tell her everything as soon as this is over. When he tries to pull his hand away, she holds tight, digging her nails roughly into the automail because he won’t feel the difference.
“Tavtiach,” she orders, barely louder than a breath, because even in her current state she’s aware of how close the soldiers are standing around them.
“...I promise,” he agrees in Amestrian. And then he’s gone, leaving Winry cloaked in mourning-red.
Scar doesn’t know what to think. It seems impossible that these boys could be Ishvalan. They’re both alchemists-- the smaller one is a State Alchemist. Yet the language had rolled off Edward’s tongue without hesitation, and without the kind of accent an Amestrian would have speaking it as a second language. He wonders what their game is, getting cozy with the military. Maybe they’re too young to remember the horrors of the war. Or maybe they have a plan he isn’t close enough to see.
“ You’re hollow inside that armor, right? ” he asks, when Alphonse follows him up onto the water tower, out of hearing range of the officers on the streets. “ You poor boy; you have the ill fortune of being put in that body, and you still place faith in alchemy over Ishvala?! ”
Alphonse claps, puts a hand on the metal-- Scar jumps down to avoid the spray of water, and Alphonse follows him.
“There are a lot of things that are inconvenient about this body, but inconvenient does not equal ill-fortuned,” Alphonse says. “There’s no reason for anyone to take pity on me. Brother saved my life with alchemy. To disavow who I am now would be to disavow him, and alchemy. I believe in the possibilities of alchemy-- and in Ishvala. ”
“ Is that so? ” Scar replies. He doesn’t see how the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Edward, take this,” Riza says, in the woods, holding a gun out to him through the car window. “You know how to use it, right?”
“That’s something to kill people with,” Alphonse says, when his brother doesn’t seem inclined to speak. There’s a quiet fear and a quieter judgement in his tone.
“It’s something to protect your lives with,” Riza replies evenly.
She sees the conflict plain on Ed’s face, before he reluctantly takes the gun from her hand.
“I’ll keep it with me,” he promises.
(Riza’s noticed, over the years, how little Edward likes seeing her shoot-- seeing anyone shoot. He doesn’t seem to like guns, or deadly force in any form. He used to flinch when he saw the colonel’s gloves, too. Some might call him naive, idealistic. Riza knows better; the Elric brothers have known grief, and they don’t want to see it inflicted on others.)
It takes Alim all night and through half the morning, until Gluttony starts talking to him, to convince himself that Ed can’t be dead. He doesn’t fully believe it, but he still clings to the idea with everything he has. He doesn’t want to be alone.
“Ishval?” Envy laughs, gleeful , when Ed asks if the Homunculi were behind the war. “I’ve never had a job more delightful than that one! Do you know what the trigger was, that started the uprising?”
“A military officer killed an Ishvalan child,” Ed answers. He hadn’t known that, as a kid, had only known that his family was angry, and then later, very afraid. He learned more later, through the news, then through the military.
“Yes,” Envy says, in a dramatic tone. “And I, Envy, am the very person who shot that child.”
Ed’s breath stops. His blood rushes in his ears. The Homunculi didn’t just push the war in the direction they wanted it to go. They started it, outright. They killed an innocent, and used the righteous anger of the people as an excuse to kill tens of thousands more. Esdras thinks of his family.
“That felt so good,” Envy continues, tone dreamy. “The civil war flared up right before my eyes, all over one bullet.” They laugh. “Man, that was a real thrill.”
Envy is still talking, about how the soldier they impersonated opposed the military presence in Ishval, about humans being easily manipulated-- Ed is barely listening as he wades through blood to get to them.
“So you’re the one who shot that innocent child?” he asks, jaw tight. “Who destroyed our home, killed our people?” He hears Ling shift behind him, but Ling isn’t from Amestris, doesn’t know enough to be truly surprised, to understand what it means that Ed is Ishvalan. “Who ruined Resembool, who made Scar so hell-bent for vengeance? The reason our mother was taken from us, and Winry’s parents were taken from her?”
He only gets angrier the longer he speaks, and when he swings, it’s with the full intention of breaking Envy’s face in with his automail. He’s only made angrier when it doesn’t work.
(Ed thinks he understands Scar more now, in this moment, than he ever has. Looking Envy in the face as they smile about all the pain they’ve caused-- he just wants to see them hurt. )
Working with Envy to get out, to get back to the world, is a decision Ed hates every step of the way. He doesn’t want to work with them. He doesn’t want to use the philosopher’s stone at their core. But… overriding all of his fury and all of his grief, is the desire to survive. He doesn’t want to leave his brother alone.
“That is a surprise! He went and had children?” the man asks, this man who made the Homunculi, this man who looks exactly like their father. He’s turning Ed’s head back and forth to get a better look at him, and it would almost be funny, in any other context. Al watches the anger and tension in Ed’s body go up exponentially, as the man laughs and ruffles his hair. “But as I understood it, your last name was ‘Elric.’”
Ed and Al share a glance, coming to a quick, silent agreement.
“It was our mother’s name,” Ed says, smacking the man’s hands away. (Ed glances at Envy, expecting them to say something, out him-- but they don’t.)
Things escalate rather quickly, after that.
“Scar!” Esdras yells, running out into the open. “ Let me tell you the truth about the Ishvalan Civil War!” He speaks in Ishvalan, because he needs Scar to hear this, needs the truth to ring in every word. “ The child’s murder that triggered the uprising was carried out by Envy,” he points to the monster in question, “who had changed themself into a military officer!”
Behind him, he hears Alim’s armor shift, as his brother steps back in surprise, but there isn’t time to talk about it now.
Ed brings Hawkeye her gun back.
“Is it okay if I ask you about Ishval?” he asks the lieutenant, already knowing he’ll probably regret it. But… he needs details, and pure information about what happened, not just the pain and fear of the aftermath. He needs to know more than the third-hand news and off-hand comments he’s had up until now, needs to hear it from someone who lived it-- from the other side, yes, but Ishvalan survivors (who aren’t trying to kill him) are few and far between, so Hawkeye’s account may be the best he ever gets.
Ed’s grip on his mug tightens the longer she speaks, detailing the horrors of the war. When she mentions the colonel’s intent to return Amestris to a democratic system, despite the fact that he would be punished, Ed is surprised. It’s a path to suicide, and he says as much. Points out that the Homunculi were the ones pulling the strings.
“Even if the Homunculi were the cause of it,” Hawkeye says, “we still carried it out. We must not turn away from death. You must not forget the people you’ve killed. ...They certainly won’t forget us, for killing them.”
Ed feels as tense as a bow string. He could say something, right now, he realizes. He could say anything . He could tell her everything.
“Do you remember where you were sent, in Ishval?” he asks instead, because he can’t bring himself to tell her. “Which regions? Towns?”
“Too many to count,” Hawkeye says, but it feels like a lie. Like she’s counted every one, and tried to carry the guilt of each. Good, a small, vindictive part of him thinks. The rest of him doesn’t feel that she deserves to shoulder all the weight she’s claiming as her own.
“Did you ever go to a town called Hanaj?” he asks, before he can talk himself out of it. Hawkeye tenses, which is all the answer he needs.
“Yes, we did,” she says anyway. “Why do you ask?”
Ed shrugs, aiming for casual. He’s sure he misses it by a city’s length, but hopefully that can be chalked up to the subject matter.
“Met someone from there, once,” he mumbles. “Just wanted to know.”
(Riza remembers the distrust in Winry and Pinako’s eyes, the first day they met. When Roy offered Edward a place in the military. The way Pinako didn’t want to let the two of them in. The way Winry said she hated soldiers because they had taken her parents away to die, and-- the way the girl cut herself off, as if there was another reason that she’d thought better of giving.)
“I, too, have a family,” the Fuhrer says, his hand resting gently on Selim’s head. “It may be a little different from your family, though.”
Which is a threat, if Ed’s ever heard one, but there’s more to it than that. Bradley is telling them that he knows-- Ed doesn’t know whether he’s known the whole time, or if the information is new, but the Fuhrer knows the truth about them, just as they know the truth about him .
“When she said the folks here have all sorts of things to hide, do you have something too?” Ed gets annoyed quickly, when the soldier in front of them won’t answer right away. “It’s no fair if you guys ask all the questions, and never answer any,” he gripes.
Major Miles stops walking.
“You really want to know?” he asks. He reaches for his glasses, and-- dark skin, white hair -- Al suddenly guesses what they’ll see, even before Miles turns.
“Red eyes,” Ed observes.
“You’re Ishvalan,” Al says simultaneously.
“We were told all the soldiers who came from Ishval were purged before the War of Extermination,” Ed says. It’s an odd sight, one of their people in stiff military blue.
Miles tells them he’s only a quarter Ishvalan, and the brothers share a glance, both wondering if they should trust him, tell him-- if he’d care, or understand.
“Amestrian, your people really did a number on my ancestral land of Ishval,” Miles says solemnly.
“It was Ishvalans who burned down the countryside where we grew up, and killed the parents of one of our childhood friends,” Ed answers, which is true.
“Brother!” Al hisses, but Ed doesn’t look at him, staring Miles dead in the eyes until the man… laughs. Huh .
“Sorry,” he says, smiling slightly. “That’s just the first time anyone’s ever given a comeback like that.”
“You were testing me?” Ed asks, sounding mildly annoyed again.
“That was rude of me,” Miles acknowledges. “After the civil war, I’ve often been looked upon with pity. To be honest, I’ve gotten fed up with it. But you’re different.”
Ed hums, and glances at Al, who nods, trusting his brother’s judgement.
“Do you speak Ishvalan?” Ed asks Miles.
“I understand a lot more than I speak,” the major admits.
“Then either claim it, or don’t,” Ed drawls, in Ishvalan, and Miles’ surprise is clear on his face. “You’re separating yourself. Saying you ‘have Ishvalan blood’, and that Ishval is your ‘ancestral’ land. You word everything like you don’t think you have a right to call yourself Ishvalan, even though that’s what everyone sees you as.” Esdras laughs, mirthless and self-deprecating, and taps the side of his face, just next to his eye. “ If anything, you have more right to it than me, and I’ve got twice the Ishvalan blood you do. ”
“Brother,” Al starts, concerned about the familiar note of old doubt and self-pity in his brother’s voice, but Ed waves him off.
Miles looks over both of them again, like the silver armor and Ed’s golden eyes will fade away if he looks long enough, revealing the truth beneath. Al doesn’t know what the major sees, but eventually he nods, not saying a word, and gestures for the two of them to keep walking with him.
“So, Major Miles,” Ed says, shifting the subject two awkward inches to the left, “were you on active duty during the war?”
Miles tells them of working under General Armstrong when the extermination started, of losing his grandfather in the east.
“I was barely outside of the military’s purge terms, so I was spared,” he adds, with a meaningful look toward them. Technically, the purge order is no longer in effect, but who knows how much that would actually mean, depending on who found out about them.
“Didn’t you hold any grudge against the military?” Ed asks.
“You really do ask whatever you like, don’t you?” Miles replies, amused, before he seems to remember who he’s talking to, where the question is coming from, and he sobers slightly. “Yes. I resented what the military did. And I had doubts as to why the general kept me on as her adjutant. By having me, someone with Ishva-- someone Ishvalan, around, it could have caused discord among the soldiers here.”
Alim notices the major’s self-correction-- and by the look Esdras gives him, so does he.
“Hey,” Ed says in a low voice, when Winry leans close. “Don’t go trusting Kimblee too much.”
Winry gives him one of her best, Rockbell-family-patented, how-stupid-are-you glares.
“Of course I don’t trust him,” she murmurs back.
(In the car, on the way to Fort Briggs, Kimblee brought up Winry’s parents. There was a thread of sympathy and regret in his voice, when he mentions recovering their bodies, not being in time to save them, and it sounded genuine enough. But Winry grew up distrusting the military that took her parents away, that puts Ed and Al in danger, that killed Aunt Tirzah. She grew up putting herself between Al and anyone who might report him for his eyes. Winry knows better than to trust any soldier whom Esdras hasn’t vouched for.)
“But, he seems nice enough,” she adds. Ed’s jaw tightens, his eyes going cold.
“He did horrible things in Ishval, and he’d do them again,” he says quietly. Winry doesn’t know how Ed knows that, but it’s all the information she needs. She simply nods, and goes back to fixing Ed’s arm.
“‘A crest of blood,’” Ed echoes, confused for only a second. When his brain connects what the words mean, he feels his stomach flip unpleasantly.
“Like what happened in Ishval,” Kimblee confirms, smiling with such horrible smugness that Ed wonders if he knows . “Kill people, and etch the land with hatred and sorrow.”
Ed slams a hand on the table, indignant.
“There’s no way I could--” He freezes when Kimblee makes a quiet gesture, remembering that Winry is just outside, alone with Kimblee’s men. Damn it, Ed thinks, gritting his teeth. He can’t refuse outright.
“You became a dog of the military without the resolve to kill others?” Kimblee asks, looking at him like he’s a fascinating puzzle to pick apart.
(“ All life is a precious gift from Ishvala, ” Aunt Keshet said once, holding a snake by the back of its head, not giving it the space to twist around and bite her. “ You mustn’t kill any creature without reason. ”
“ It was in my bed! ” Cousin Jinan protested, still holding their sandal up like a weapon. “ That seems reason enough to me! ”
“ It isn’t venomous, ” Keshet replied calmly. She looked at the snake. “ You just got lost, didn’t you?”
She made the snake nod, to amuse the kids standing at Jinan’s sides. Esdras and Alim giggled-- mostly at the horrified look on their cousin’s face-- and stepped forward to look at the creature. Abia, though older, was more hesitant to leave Jinan’s side, until Keshet reached a hand toward her. “ Abia, do you want to see the snake?”
Abia, her eyes faded, mostly-blind, nodded, and Keshet raised the girl’s hand to brush the snake’s scales. Jinan’s expression softened, watching awe cross their little cousins’ faces, and they finally slipped their shoe back on with a sigh.)
“The resolve not to kill others,” Esdras corrects Kimblee.
“‘The resolve not to kill others,’” Kimblee echoes, as if it’s a foreign concept he’s never considered before. “There’d be veracity if you adhere to that, as well.”
(By the end of the conversation, Ed’s at least sure that Kimblee doesn’t know the truth about them. For one thing, the man doesn’t seem like someone not to take every jab he can; he would’ve brought it up by now.)
The realization hits Winry like lightning, that she’s here as a hostage, a shackle, meant to make Ed comply-- meant to make him kill, fulfilling his duty as a State Alchemist. Winry feels sick.
She’s mad at herself for being so happy-go-lucky, for not realizing something was this wrong. But she’s also mad at Kimblee, for his play on her sympathy, for trying to use her as a pawn.
And she’s not about to just let it keep happening.
“I’m glad that there are those like you,” Scar says, speaking to Miles-- but he glances toward Ed and Al, too, as he says it. He hasn’t asked them why they’re in the military, hasn’t brought them into the conversation at all, and Ed realizes now that it’s because he doesn’t think the major knows. Miles, for his part, probably thinks the same of Scar.
That suits Ed perfectly fine.
“All the critical parts are written in ancient Ishvalan.” Dr. Marcoh holds up the notes in question. “Scar is the only one who can read it.”
Winry and Al both glance at Ed, who shakes his head minutely. He never read anything in Ishvalan past the age of seven, let alone an outdated form; he wouldn’t know enough to decipher the notebook. They do need Scar, as much as Ed hates it.
Miles comes up with the plan, to let Scar go, to get him and the others hidden away in Briggs. He asks Scar to promise they can trust him to work with them.
“I swear it on my Ishvalan blood, my red-eyed brother,” Scar tells him, and Ed can only think that the words don’t have the same ring, translated so literally into Amestrian.
It’s only a few minutes later that Winry suggests Scar take her hostage, and Ed hates that even more. But Winry has a point. A good point.
“If you pull anything-- ” Ed starts to threaten, but Scar interrupts.
“I know. I will keep my promise.”
“Tavtiach,” Ed orders, because fuck it, what’s a half-dozen more folks in on this one truth, when the whole country is a human transmutation circle, when Ed’s life is just a mess of secrets and chaos? Scar himself looks mildly surprised, but nods, speaking the words in solemn, clear Ishvalan.
“ I swear as the living blood of the desert .”
Kimblee leaves him bleeding and buried in the rubble of the mine. Ed refuses to die for a lot of stubborn reasons, but one of them is most certainly spite. He was born under the blue desert sky, and Ishvala willing (or not, Ed's not picky) he damn well intends to die under it too. And he won’t be killed by anyone who took part in the slaughter of his people-- not without giving at least as good as he gets.
The slum they end up hiding in is barely big enough to house them, but the people welcome them warmly-- even Jerso and Zampano, still in their uniforms. Alim notices a few strange looks, a few stares, and he feels like he should be used to that, after years of it-- is used to it, usually. But coming from Ishvalans, it always feels different. Heavier. Their eyes are his family’s eyes, his mother’s eyes, Ishvala’s eyes, looking at the evidence of his worst sin.
(Ed tells people he doesn’t believe in God. Alim has never been able to say the same, not even as a lie. He believes that alchemy can be used for good, used in line with Ishvala’s teachings. He believes that there’s a difference, a line, between science and knowledge, and playing God. He believes that he and Esdras crossed that line, the night they tried to bring their mother back, and he’s determined never to cross it again.)
“We saw someone who looked just like you, Tatteh , underground in Central,” Al says in Liore. “I doubt you two have nothing to do with each other. I’ll bet you know who he is, don’t you?”
Al expects a mundane answer; that his father has a twin seems a likely explanation, the one Al’s mostly been considering. He doesn’t expect Hohenheim to turn away, solemn.
“Are you sure you want to know, Ali-- Alphonse?” he corrects himself last second, calling Alim by his Amestrian name, and it hurts more than it should. When Hohenheim looks back, his eyes are closed-off, expression hard. “What if I’m someone on their side?” Al doesn’t need to breathe-- doesn’t even have lungs, the way he is-- but the fearful hitch of air passing through his helmet is as involuntary as any real catch of breath. “As talkative as you’re being, it didn’t occur to you that I might leak it all to them?”
Al is struck silent for a moment, but--
“No,” he replies honestly. Hohenheim’s cold mask stutters, slips away in his surprise.
“Why?”
“Because of Ishval,” Alim answers softly. “Because of Ima.”
After a moment, Hohenheim smiles, sad, and he knocks a gentle fist against Al’s chest.
“Thanks for trusting me, Alphonse,” he says sincerely. “I’m glad.”
At first, Al can only nod. Then, hesitantly:
“Y-you can still call me Alim,” he says. Hohenheim looks surprised again-- maybe more so, now.
“Right,” he says. “Alim.”
(Al listens to his father’s story of Xerxes, and the first, useless thing that pops into his head, is: a lifetime of identity crises, and we’re not even half-Amestrian like we thought .
He waves the thought away. It’s unimportant, in the current scheme of things.)
“To work for me is to become an outcast,” Greed warns. “Make sure you won’t regret it later.”
“Give me a break.” Ed mirrors Greedling’s sharp grin. “When it comes to having regrets, I’ve got the inside track.”
He hears Heinkel and Darius mutter, wondering what the hell that means. But Ling knows Ed is Ishvalan, which means Greed should understand. Sure enough, Greed glances to the side, then smirks as his eyes light up with realization.
“That settles it, then,” he says.
(Winter turns to spring. Plans are made, and traps are laid, and allies are gathered. Al misses Esdras, but he has to trust that his brother is safe, and knows what he’s doing.)
(Ed has to do much the same.)
“What’s wrong?” Winry asks, when Ed stops halfway out of the room. “Aren’t you going?”
“...We’re wanted men in Central,” he explains. “It wouldn’t be good if anyone saw us.”
“Yeah, but--”
“Just like old times, huh?” Ed jokes weakly, interrupting Winry’s protest.
“I hope the next time you come back here,” Miles says to Al, outside the train, “you’ll have your original body.”
He’s looking at the orange of the sunset, as he says it-- not at the station, the people, the festival. He’s only partially talking about Resembool.
“What good is having only those close to you get away?” Winry demands, when Ed tries to tell her to leave, to take Savta Pinako and Den and get out of Amestris. “Can’t you do anything to stop it?”
“I’m gonna stop it!” Ed protests. “But there’s always that one chance in a million--”
“Don’t give me one in a million, or even a billion!” Winry says, stubborn as ever. “Those guys are about to do something awful, right? So slam the door shut on it, and protect the country! And then, Esdras, both you and Al come home with your original bodies. I’ll do anything to make that happen!”
Ed looks at Winry, then has to look away, unable to keep eye contact for so long under her glare.
“You make it sound so simple,” he says. Then, before she can protest, he continues. “‘What good is having only those close to you get away,’” he echoes, then pauses. “...I never really understood that either; why Ima sent us here, and didn’t try to leave herself. But I think I get it now.”
When he looks at her again, over his shoulder, Winry is silent, her face still set in a stubborn glare. She won’t go anywhere. Neither will Pinako. Nor most of Resembool, probably, if they knew what was going on. Stubborn bastards, all of them .
Ed nods his understanding, and leaves the room, ignoring it when he hears Winry call after him.
“Savta Pinako asked me to give you a message from Ima,” Ed says, by the fire in Kanama. “‘Sorry I couldn’t keep my promise. I’m dying first.’” There’s only silence, and Esdras whirls, angry, gritting out: “there, I told you--”
Hohenheim is crying, when Ed looks at him, and Ed, taken off-guard, doesn’t know what to do other than walk away, allow his father a moment of privacy.
“Are you planning to wear something that flashy again?” Heinkel asks despairingly, when Ed transmutes himself a new coat.
“Why does it have to be red?” Greed asks, in much the same tone.
Red is the color of life, and the color of death, Ed could explain. Red is the living blood of the desert.
“This will probably be our last battle against them,” he says instead. “I have to make sure I’m all fired up for it.”
The fight with the Homunculi lasts hours. By the time the sky finally starts to lighten, they’ve made plans and split up again, and Alim is trapped in the darkness with Pride.
Esdras retrieves his new coat from the ground. He doesn’t put it on yet.
Before they left the Rockbell house, Ed grabbed his mother’s sash, tucked it carefully into his waistband, because his birthday passed without any fanfare, and he’s sixteen and of age now, officially a man. Now, he unfolds the sash, and ties it around his waist and over his shoulder. He puts his coat over it, as he watches the sunrise.
It’s time.
“Give them hell, Alphonse,” Heinkel says, bleeding, dying, and he drops the Philosopher’s Stone into Al’s hands. Al holds it tight.
“Alim,” he corrects Heinkel, because he’s not so blinded by optimism that he doesn’t acknowledge the very real chance of dying here, and he doesn’t want to risk dying without being known, being seen, by at least one person present. “My real name is Alim.” Then he holds the stone up to his helmet, and addresses the souls inside, silently apologizing, and thanking them. “ Let’s fight, together. ”
(Solf Kimblee dies under an open blue sky. Some would say it’s more than he deserves.)
Mustang snaps, and fire fills the room, burning the mannequin soldiers as they scream. Ed is frozen, his back still to the colonel, not daring to move as the flames weave expertly around him and the others. There’s only the heat, and the light, and the smell, and the screaming . When the fire fades, and the creatures crumble to ash, Ed becomes aware that he’s shaking.
“They are the enemy, Fullmetal,” Mustang says, and Ed knows that, dammit . He glances over his shoulder, his tense glare fading as he realizes-- he’s never been so grateful to see Amestrian blue in his fucking life.
He doesn’t turn to face them-- Mustang or Hawkeye. It isn’t on purpose. It’s just that he doesn’t want to turn his back on Envy, even for a moment. Hawkeye and the colonel don’t look at Ed, either, likewise keeping their eyes on the Homunculus. So they don’t yet see the sash he’s wearing.
Ed thinks that might be for the best.
“ Scar, do you have a minute? ”
Scar pauses, looks back. Edward is tense; he clearly wants to go back.
“Is this about the Flame Alchemist?” Scar guesses, and Ed nods. “Having once lost myself, burning in the flames of revenge, I understand it all too well. The way he’s going, he’ll burn his own heart up in the flames of hatred.”
Ed transmutes the ground beneath their feet, flicks the little worm that is Envy away from Mustang and into his own hand. He sees Hawkeye track the movement, sees the moment her gaze catches on Ed’s sash.
“Fullmetal,” Mustang says, not registering much past the rage in his eyes. “Let me have that.” Ed stands his ground. “I’ll ask you one more time,” Mustang grits out. “Let me have that!”
“No,” Ed says, firm. The colonel twitches.
“I must give them the worst of all deaths,” he says, and Ed flinches, thinks of fire, but doesn’t waver.
“ No .”
“Give them to me! Or I’ll burn them up along with your right hand!”
“Fine with me!” Esdras yells back. “I’ll fight you like I mean it! But before I do, take a good look at your own face! Is that the face you plan to wear when you’re the nation’s top man? Colonel-- that’s not what you’re after, is it?!”
That, finally, gives Mustang pause. As Scar and Hawkeye continue to talk the colonel down, all Ed feels is numb relief.
Envy, crying, defeated, pulls the Stone from their own core, and dissolves into dust.
“Bye bye, Edward Elric,” they say… and then they’re gone.
“...Esdras,” he says, not truly to Envy, but to Mustang, to Hawkeye, still sitting on the ground ahead of him. He doesn’t look at them, but he knows they’re listening. He glances at Scar, who’s looking closely at him. Scar nods once when Ed meets his eyes, and walks a short distance away, carefully not listening.
(“ Your names are important, ” Tirzah told her sons, once, when they were small and still too-trusting. “ They are gifts from Ishvala. You must only ever say them with pride. ”
“ And only give them to those who deserve to hear them, ” Zayde Umar added. Tirzah pursed her lips, but didn’t dispute it.
“ Ima, can I give my name to Winry? ” Esdras asked, eager, and his grandfather laughed, replying before Tirzah could.
“ Go ahead, boy,” Umar said, “ in fact, give her your heart while you’re at it.”
“ Tatteh,” Tirzah chided her father, but there was a smile pulling at her lips.)
Ed can count on his fingers, the number of people alive today who know his name: Alim, Hohenheim, Winry and Pinako, Izumi and Sig. He hasn’t spoken it aloud since he was nine.
He speaks it now, to a pair who stepped into Ishval dressed in blue, whose hands are irrevocably stained with the blood of the desert. He speaks his name with pride, because here, in this moment, they deserve to know.
“My name is Esdras Al-Ridha.”
(Roy, eyes closed, hears the desert accent in the name. Riza looks at Ed, at the black and pale-red sash he’s wearing across his chest.
And it isn’t a shock, a rug being pulled out from under them.
It’s not a lightning strike of realization.
It’s a confirmation, years of quiet suspicions coming to painful fruition, years of little things they willfully ignored and didn’t mention, didn’t question, because they didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to be right.
But they were right.
The Elric brothers are Ishvalan.)
“Lost, Fullmetal?” Mustang teases him, as they continue through the tunnels, falling easily into old patterns, and through his annoyance Ed feels a thread of relief, that-- for now, at least, until the crisis is over-- nothing has changed.
(Roy forces himself not to think about it yet, not to get caught up. He forces himself to act as though nothing has changed, teasing Fullmetal the way he has for years. He can’t let himself think about it.)
“Edward Elric,” Olivier tells Izumi Curtis. “When I first met him, I intimidated him into telling me everything that he knew, but he did not say a word about them holding a childhood friend of his hostage. All he said was ‘you’ll have to guess’. The look in his eye was not that of a soldier, nor was it that of an alchemist, a so-called Dog of the Military. If I had to describe it, it was the look of someone trying not to lose anything else that was dear to him, no matter what.”
“The eyes of a stubborn child?” Izumi says, tone light and fond.
“The eyes of a survivor,” Olivier corrects, looking for the glint of understanding when Izumi realizes what she means, how much she knows. She hears Alex shift behind her, also understanding, which is interesting-- when did he find out? Izumi and Sig’s expressions darken, just slightly, both of them wary on behalf of the Elric brothers, and Olivier smiles. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t moved when I looked into his eyes. However, I’m not sure if his naivete of thought is going to find us a way out of this fight, or if it will work against us.”
(Fu can’t see the sky, through the blood in his eyes. He dies with the satisfaction that, at least, Bradley won’t be walking away from this fight unscathed.)
(The sky above Central is pale and polluted, nothing like the bright, clear blue that graces Briggs, on good days. But Captain Buccaneer dies surrounded by his men, and that more than makes up for the soot in the air.)
“It gives humans proper despair, so that they do not become boastful,” the old Homunculus says, having mocked each of his ‘sacrifices’ for what they’ve lost. “Such is the very thing that you humans call your god: Truth.”
“I don’t buy it!” Ed yells, his voice echoing through the room. He repeats himself, quieter, in Amestrian, before continuing. “I’d get it if he did it on his own, like we did. But to force someone who doesn’t want to do human transmutation to be caught in the middle of this, and have his eyesight taken… is that what you call proper? I don’t accept any truth, or any God,” he practically spits the word out, “that’s so unreasonable.”
Alim Al-Ridha stands in a space of endless white, face-to-face with his body, and realizes with a heavy heart that he can’t rejoin it. Not now, when his brother needs him, when Al needs to be able to fight . He has to go back, as he is, in the armor. He has to be there for Esdras.
“ I’m sorry!” he calls, through the closing gateway. “ I’ll be back! Just hang in there a little longer. I swear, I’ll be back!”
He looks at bony limbs, and long hair, and red eyes.
“ I swear as the living blood of the desert,” he says, quiet, just before the door closes.
“I thought that alchemy, the construction of matter, was blasphemy against Ishvala, the creator of all things!” Bradley says, as if he has any right to invoke Their name. “Have you abandoned your god?” He keeps attacking, and Scar keeps fighting back, as Bradley tries to taunt him into distraction. “Is that all your god is to you people? During the Ishvalan Civil War, when you were steeped in despair…” Scar is knocked to the ground, Bradley’s foot planted on his chest-- “you must have thought, somewhere in your heart, that there was no God anywhere in this world!”
(Scar thinks of his brother, so determined to use alchemy for the good of Ishval and its people. He thinks of the Elric brothers, and Alphonse’s refusal to forsake either alchemy or Ishvala over the other. He thinks of his own decision, tattooing the other half of his brother’s research on his left arm in order to save the country responsible for so much of his own pain.)
The reappearing sun glints off Bradley’s sword, blinding him, and Scar takes his chance.
They follow the Dwarf in the Flask up from the tunnels, up to the surface, and they fight-- they all fight, with everything they have-- but they leave barely a scratch on him.
Ed is pinned, right arm gone, as the Homunculus approaches-- and then there’s the impact of metal in stone, next to him, and Ed looks, seeing Mei’s knives there, ready to be activated. He looks past the Homunculus, and sees Al lying in the corresponding circle. And Esdras realizes what his brother means to do.
“What do you think you’re doing? ” he asks, helpless to stop it as Alim raises his hands. “No! Don’t! Alim! Stop!”
“Will he be coming to get you back?” asks the thing-- the Truth, the being that Alim will not call God-- and Al smiles.
“He will,” he replies, certain. “ He made a promise.”
The fight goes on. Greed sacrifices himself, and-- they win. The Homunculus is destroyed.
In the aftermath, Esdras is left with Al’s empty armor, and a torn sash, and no idea how to get his brother back.
Ling brings a Philosopher’s Stone, offers it up, but Ed can’t-- they swore they wouldn’t-- and then there’s Hohenheim, leaning on Izumi.
“Edward,” he says, “use my life, and bring Alphonse back. There’s exactly one person’s worth remaining.”
“You dumbass!” Ed practically snarls. “There’s no way I could do something like that! It’s our own fault, as brothers, that we lost our bodies! I will not use human lives to get Al back! And why should you need to put your life on the line?”
“Because I’m his father,” Hohenheim says, in Ishvalan, the language of his wife, the language of his sons. Ed falls silent, surprised. “ This isn’t about need, or reason. You’re dear to me. I want you to be happy. By neglecting you, I do bear some responsibility for your bodies ending up the way they are.” He pauses, expression trembling, and when he continues, it’s in Amestrian. “I’m sorry. I’ve lived long enough. At least let me act like a father at the end.”
Ed feels tears start to fill his eyes, and he closes them, clenches his fists.
“ Don’t be ridiculous, Tatteh, ” he snaps, full of grief and anger with nowhere to go. “Don’t ever say anything like that again! I’ll lay you out!”
It takes Ed a moment to realize he’s crying, and a moment longer to realize he just called Hohenheim dad. Hohenheim, for his part, looks appropriately shocked by both developments.
“...I’m sorry, Esdras, ” he says, and even spoken by the old man, surrounded by soldiers, practical strangers-- Ed can’t bring himself to be angry at the sound of his name.
He tries to think of something, anything, tries to come up with a way to bring Alim back-- and the truth, the Truth, hits him like a bolt of lightning.
“Mei… stand back a bit,” he says, and he finds himself smiling.
He draws the circle. “I’ll be right back,” he says, not wanting the others to worry. “This is the Fullmetal Alchemist’s final transmutation.”
He claps, kneels with his hands to the ground-- he hears his friends calling his name, and he knows they’ll be waiting for him.
“Are you sure about this?” asks the thing-- the Truth, the being that Esdras will not call God. “If you lose your gateway, you’ll never be able to use alchemy again.”
“You’re right,” Ed replies. “It’s true, beyond this gateway lies everything about alchemy. However… I’ve been manipulated because of it. After having been shown the so-called truth, I was convinced that I could solve everything with alchemy. But I was wrong. That was just arrogance.”
Playing God, his great-grandfather’s reproachful voice comes to him.
Grouchy old bastard, Ed thinks fondly .
“You would lower yourself to become just a normal person, unable to use alchemy?”
“‘Lower myself’ nothing,” Ed says. “I’ve been just a person from the start.” He thinks of all is one, and one is all. He thinks of every failure, every person they couldn’t save. “An insignificant human who couldn’t save a little girl who’d been made into a Chimera.”
“You’re sure you’ll be okay without it?” Truth asks.
Ed thinks of his allies, his friends, all of them waiting for him out there in the world. He thinks of Alim, and Savta Pinako, and Winry. He thinks of his family, his mother’s family, and the lessons they taught him, the love they gave him.
“Even without alchemy, I still have them,” he says. Truth grins.
“That’s the right answer, alchemist,” it says. Ed claps his hands once more, presses his hands to the doorway behind him. “You’ve beaten me. Take it with you. All of it!” It starts to dissolve along with the door, crumbling apart, and it grins at him wider than before. “The back door is over there, Esdras Al-Ridha .”
And then it’s gone, and Ed is faced with Alim, emaciated and weak, dark skin and pale hair and eyes the living blood of the desert.
“ That was a crazy thing to do,” he says, smiling despite himself, supporting his brother by too-thin arms.
“ You too, brother,” Alim replies, refusing to be chided.
The door opens, and the world beyond is bright. Ed takes a breath.
“ Now let’s go home, together.”
Alim wakes up under a clear blue sky, surrounded by people who care, people who have been waiting for him, and he feels warm .
Roy still can’t see, but he feels the lieutenant’s hand squeeze tighter around his arm.
“Alphonse’s eyes are red,” she says, blunt and without preamble, just further proof of what they know, now. “Edward… Esdras, asked me to tell him about the war,” Riza continues. “He asked if we had ever been sent to Hanaj. He said he knew someone from there, but...”
“But he was probably talking about himself,” Roy sighs, feeling sick. He remembers Hanaj, just as he remembers every town. He remembers a line of glaring, determined people in the street, armed with knives and pitchforks and less than a half-dozen guns between them, waiting for a fair fight that would never come. He remembers the heat, and the screams, and the smell. Bullets picking off the survivors who tried to run. “We…” he trails off, unable to voice the horrible truth. We killed their family.
“Yet they found a way to look us in the eye, and continue on,” Riza replies, hearing the words anyway. “And now we have to do the same.”
Roy hesitates, then nods.
“Accepting everyone is too greedy, Ling Yao!” Mei says, crying again, and Alim watches Ling’s eyes widen in surprise.
“Ah, maybe he rubbed off on me,” the prince says, half to himself, rubbing his head.
(As they say goodbye, Al sees Ling’s smile sharpen, just for a moment, into a toothy grin, and he wonders if there’s more to it than that. He doesn’t mention it, because he’s more than familiar with secrets, and when they should not be spoken.)
As the sun sets, Ed brings the true form of Selim up from underground, still sleeping cradled in a mourning-red coat. He hands the infant Homunculus off to Mrs. Bradley, and prays for the best.
“You knew too?” Alex Armstrong asks his sister, while they’re patched up side-by-side in the hospital. Olivier scoffs, unimpressed.
“Of course I did,” she says. “My men are loyal. Major Miles told me the day those boys arrived at Briggs.”
Dr. Marcoh brings a Philosopher’s Stone to the hospital, tells Roy it’s one he once created using Ishvalan lives. There’s a short silence as Marcoh tries, in vain, to listen to the souls inside the Stone, to hear whether they would accept being used like this. There’s nothing.
“I would like to heal you with this Stone,” Marcoh declares anyway. “For the sake of Ishval.”
Roy hesitates, because he knows the weight of this decision.
“I have someone I should talk to, first,” he says. “But, in the meantime, there’s someone else who needs that Stone more than I do.”
Alim has been keeping a lonely vigil for five years, and now, the last five nights, it’s finally Ed’s turn. Ed’s body is so fucking tired , but he forces himself to stay awake; he has two nights left, and he’s been taking catnaps during the day, so he at least isn’t running on no sleep. He sits up by Al’s bed, while his brother gains much-needed rest.
Eventually-- when he can reassure himself that Al is here and safe and will still be so when Ed comes back-- he gets bored enough to start leaving the hospital room they share. He walks aimlessly through the halls, just trying to occupy himself, until the fifth night, when he rounds a corner and runs headfirst into someone moving fast in the other direction.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!” Esdras snaps, regaining his balance and looking at--
“Ah, Fullmetal,” Mustang says, stepping back with a hand still on the wall, and Ed realizes he just told a blind man to watch where he’s going. Goddamn it. “Sorry; I’ve been trying to learn the hallways.”
Ed looks him up and down, in his pale blue hospital pajamas, tired bags under faded grey eyes.
“Can’t sleep?” Ed deadpans, and Mustang gives a small smile.
“No,” he admits. “You too?”
“I’m keeping vigil,” Ed says. At Mustang’s faint look of confusion, he explains. “It’s tradition to stay up through the night, after a death. Usually it’s only one night, but for as many people as we just lost…” he sighs. “I didn’t actually know most of the Briggs soldiers that fell, but I figured I’d round it out to a week for them.”
Mustang nods with some level of understanding, the furrow between his eyebrows smoothing out. Esdras thinks about it for only a moment before moving to stand by the colonel’s right side, holding his arm out flat as Mustang tilts his head toward the sound of movement. “Here. Put your arm on top of mine, we can walk together,” Ed says.
“Are you sure you’re qualified to guide the blind?” Mustang asks, teasing, but genuinely dubious, not wanting to be led into a wall. Ed scoffs.
“Asshole. I used to help my cousin Abia around all the time,” he says. “I won’t let you kill yourself.”
The colonel hesitates, but then nods his acceptance, raises his arm to rest it on Ed’s. They start walking, and after a moment, Mustang speaks, saying that Dr. Marcoh came to visit him yesterday.
“You’re asking me?” Fullmetal-- Ed-- asks, stopping dead in the middle of the hospital hallway, after Roy explains his question. He sounds incredulous. “Why?”
“...Because I trust your judgement,” Roy says, as much as it pains him to admit, and God , he can already feel the smugness exuding off of Ed. “I don’t want to misuse the Stone for selfish reasons--”
“That ship sailed when you asked Marcoh to heal Havoc,” Ed drawls, and Roy can’t help the way his brow furrows, the way his fist clenches at his side. Fullmetal starts walking again, and Roy goes with him, arm still resting lightly on top of Ed’s as they walk. “You asked him to heal Havoc, and then you came for my opinion. Because you thought you already knew what I’d say. Right?”
Roy gives a stiff, reluctant nod.
“Thought so.” Ed sighs. “Thing is… it doesn’t matter what I say. It’s not my decision, Colonel.”
“But--”
“The Stone already exists,” Ed says, tone cold, and Roy shuts up quickly, but the kid’s voice loses some of its edge as he speaks. “It’s not horrible of you, to want to use it for something positive. You and Hawkeye, and the others… you’re genuinely determined to help Ishval, moving forward, which is the right thing to do; paying back for the damage by working to fix what can be fixed. If you’re looking for my approval before you stop fucking self-flagellating, then you’ve got it.”
Roy doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he doesn’t yet.
“...Stairs going down, ten steps ahead,” Ed adds casually. “There’s a railing on your left.”
As they reach the stairwell, Fullmetal moves down first, letting Roy use his arm for balance, and to tell how far down he needs to step. They’re both silent, making their way down to the next floor.
“Thank you, Full-- Esdras,” Roy finally speaks, when they reach the bottom.
“No problem,” Ed says.
They both know they aren’t talking about the stairs.
(Hohenheim considers going to Hanaj, but Ishval was never his land, and he doesn’t know if he could even find his way through the city’s ruins, if he tried. Instead, he goes to Resembool, to the empty grave with the false name. He transmutes the stone, changes the letters, because it’s the least she deserves-- to be seen, to be known.
“I’m home, Tirzah,” he says, kneeling there to speak to her.)
(Pinako finds him later, when the sky is bright and blue. He’s still smiling.)
It’s only a couple of months, but it feels like forever before they can go home to Resembool, before Alim is well enough to travel. They make their slow way up the road, to the house, and Al can’t remember a time, when he was a child, that he didn’t have to hide his face, coming up or down this road. The armor let him walk tall, but he’s never been this free before.
When Winry opens the door-- even when she tackles them both to the ground, it’s the best feeling in the world, the minor pain of hitting the dirt overridden by pure joy, at being held, and being home.
They have Mustang and Hawkeye for dinner, at Savta Pinako’s request, because she wants to be reintroduced to the pair who tried so hard to keep her “idiot grandsons” safe, these past years.
“Before we go, there’s something we should have done before now,” the newly-promoted General Mustang says at the end of the evening, standing from the Rockbells’ dinner table, and bowing his head. “I’m sorry.”
“We both are,” Hawkeye adds, also standing, also bowing. Both Al-Ridha brothers go tense. They’ve talked about this, known it was probably coming. But that doesn’t make it less awkward, or less painful. They’ve very carefully not been thinking about the fate of Hanaj, up until now.
“You don’t have to forgive us, but we still needed to say it,” Mustang says simply, as he and Hawkeye straighten to look the boys in the eye.
“...Thank you,” Alim says, determinedly blinking back tears. Esdras looks at his brother, then at Mustang and Hawkeye, and then he closes his eyes with a sigh, pushing his chair back from the table. He disappears into his bedroom, and returns wearing his sash, holding a folded piece of paper.
“Come on,” he says, grabbing his coat-- plain, neutral brown, no longer funeral-red-- from by the door, on his way out. Cautious questions in their eyes, the two soldiers follow. (Alim stays behind with Winry and Pinako, knowing the broad strokes of what his brother is planning.)
Ed leads Mustang and Hawkeye to the Resembool graveyard.
“If you want to apologize,” he says, as they step past the gate, “first tell me if you remember her face.”
(“You must not forget the people you’ve killed,” Riza remembers saying, that night in her apartment, what now feels like ages ago. “They certainly won’t forget us, for killing them.”)
Ed unfolds the photo in his hand, and holds it out for Mustang to take. The general stares at it for a long moment, face drawn and pale when he eventually nods.
“Good,” Esdras says. He comes to a stop in front of his parents’ graves, kneeling in front of his mother’s. He takes a deep breath, and addresses the empty soil. “Ima, I want you to meet some people. They’re… a big part of the reason me and Al are alive today, and why we have our bodies back. Well, y’know,” he raps his knuckles against his left leg, the metal clanking, “mostly. They’re the ones who got us this far, who convinced us to keep moving.”
“Fullmetal…” Mustang starts.
“You’ve paid your debt to our family,” Ed says, when it becomes clear the general doesn’t know how to continue. Hawkeye and Mustang both look like they disagree, but neither of them try to argue. “You can talk to her, if you want.” Ed smiles, and walks past them, out of the graveyard.
And it’s not forgiveness. But it doesn’t need to be.
( Tirzah Al-Ridha. Roy commits the name on the gravestone to memory. He takes a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He remembers a line of determined people, armed with knives and pitchforks, waiting for a fair fight that would never come. He salutes the grave in front of him, a show of respect too little and too late, but the only one he can offer. “I’ll continue to work toward the restoration of Ishval,” he says, “and I’ll continue to look after your sons, as much as I can.”
Riza puts a hand on his shoulder, nods when he looks back at her. Ready to follow him into this, as she’s always followed him before.)
And it isn’t penance. But it’s not supposed to be.
“ I have a favor to ask you, ” Edward says to Scar one night, almost a year after the Promised Day, while they’re both in Ishval to discuss reparations with Mustang and his people. Miles, seated across the room, makes a valiant effort to pretend he’s not listening in.
Scar glances sideways at the kid, humming inquiringly.
“My brother’s birthday is coming up,” Ed says. “He’ll be sixteen. I-- we don’t have-- I mean--” he stops, scowling at the ground, and Scar is speechless, already suspecting what Ed will ask, but unable to wrap his head around it. “Will you help me make him a sash?” Sure enough, there it is.
Traditionally, sashes are passed down through generations, repaired and re-repaired, until they’re too threadbare to be worn proudly anymore, and then they’re remade, new sashes lovingly woven, the old ones burned and their replacements prayed over, waved through the smoke to keep the memory. Some families let younger children wear them, depending on circumstance, but they’re meant to be symbols of adulthood-- or, more specifically, symbols of one’s dedication to a life well-lived under Ishvala’s teachings. There’s a reason Scar left his behind with his name.
With the war… Ed and Al must only have their mother’s sash left, the one Ed inherited as her eldest child. They’ll have to create Alphonse’s totally from scratch. The role of teaching Edward this process would, generally, fall to a family Elder.
“...I know I’m not the oldest Ishvalan you know,” Scar says, still mildly dumbstruck, and Ed scowls even harder, as Miles tries to stifle a snort of laughter.
“No,” Ed grits out, “but the others have their own family lines to worry about. You’re still nameless, right?”
Ah. Without a name, he’ll bring no attachment of his own to the sash’s creation. It will belong solely to them, to their family. Still--
“I’d need to know your names. And your family’s names,” he says, because the lineage is important, for the prayers recited while weaving.
“I know,” Ed says, without hesitation. “I asked Elder Shan about all of it. And then I talked to Al, about telling you our names. So is that a yes?”
“I…” Scar takes a breath, stunned by the level of trust and respect in Ed’s decision-- trust and respect that appears to have come from nowhere, as far as Scar’s concerned. “Yes.”
“Good,” Ed nods. “Thanks.”
With that, he turns and walks away, hands in his pockets.
“...Those boys…” Miles says, trailing off with raised eyebrows as they watch Ed go. Scar feels that just about sums it up.
“‘ The lifeblood of the desert,’” Miles reads aloud.
“Living blood,” Scar corrects, tapping the scroll in Miles’ hand, pointing out the words in question.
“What’s the difference?” Hawkeye asks, curious. (She’s been catching onto the language fast, even though she’s not, technically, the one being taught. Esdras and Alim have only a rudimentary understanding of their written language, so they bullied Scar into teaching them, and Miles wanted in. Scar accepted his new position as their teacher with-- well, not grace , but something a step above resignation, at the very least.)
“Life, or lifeblood,” Alim translates the first example into Amestrian, “is just a metaphor for water. Water brings life, keeps us sustained. The living blood of the desert--” and here, he repeats the correct phrase in Ishvalan-- “ is us. The Ishvalan people.”
“...I don’t get it,” Breda says. The other Amestrians are listening too, now, intrigued.
“It’s about the eyes,” Ed says, rolling his. “Red is the color of sight, and life, because it’s the color of Ishvalan eyes, the color of…” he trails off, swallowing. “The color of our souls.”
Before the Philosopher’s Stones, they never knew that to be so literal. Esdras shifts slightly in his seat, uneasy and trying not to show it, and the tension in the room skyrockets as others make the same connection.
“...And it’s also the color of blood,” Alim picks up where his brother left off, trying to keep the mood from dropping too far. “And Ishvala is the desert-- well, They’re everything , technically, but--”
“ The living blood of the desert is just a fancy way of referring to ourselves,” Ed launches back in. “The eyes, and the holy land, and God, and us, all wrapped up in one neat little hard-to-translate package.”
“...Huh,” Havoc says. “So what about you, boss?”
Ed blinks.
“Me?”
“Yeah, with the--” Havoc waves his hand in front of his own eyes in a vague gesture. “The gold.”
When they were kids, that was a sore spot; so much of Ishvalan identity is tied to their eyes, even the way they’re seen by outsiders. Alim holds back a wince, when Esdras is silent for a few seconds.
“...Guess my blood’s just richer than everyone else’s,” Ed drawls nonchalantly. Alim stretches his leg out under the guise of rubbing feeling back into it, and knocks his foot against his brother’s. Ed does it back, and smiles at him, a silent I’m alright. Al nods.
Another year goes by too quickly, and Esdras leaves Resembool again. Winry walks him to the station.
“What? Come out and say it,” she says, irritated, when Ed just keeps staring at her from the threshold of the train. He seems to struggle a moment, a blush darkening his face, before--
“Equivalent exchange!” he forces out, pointing at her, and Winry blinks in surprise. “I’ll give you half of my life, if you give me half of yours!”
Then he goes quiet, looking like he wishes he could swallow his tongue. Winry sighs, exasperated.
“Why do alchemists have to be like this?” she asks no one in particular. “The principle of equivalent exchange is all nonsense, isn’t it?”
“What did you say?!” Ed demands.
“It’s nonsense!” Winry repeats. “Never mind half, I’ll give you all of it!”
They’re both silent as her words sink in. She feels her face flush, and she stammers to correct herself: “Okay, not all of it! Ninety percent… no, eighty percent…” she mutters numbers to herself, counting, weighing, and comes back with 85. “Yeah! I’d be willing to give you that much!”
Ed snickers, then starts cackling outright when she whirls on him, indignant.
“ You really are amazing, ” he laughs. “ You turn equivalent exchange on its ear so easily.”
And she only knows he’s not making fun of her because of the language he chooses to say it in. He pulls her into a hug. “You cheered me up,” he says warmly. “Thanks.”
Winry, still blushing, hugs him back.
“ Come home soon,” she says against his shoulder, and she knows her accent is awful-- he’s teased her for that often enough-- but Esdras only huffs, amused and fond.
“I will,” he says.
“ Tavtiach, ” she orders, not letting go yet. She can hear the smile in his voice, when he answers.
“I promise.”