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The Truth is not benevolent, nor is it cruel. It simply is, because it is as alive as everything is, and it feels every bit of sin a human soul would too.
To visit their domain is to be bared down to the bones of what makes you, stripped of your ego, and to be reborn into something a little more. The Gate opens itself for those who dare to push on them, and plenty do. Yet they cry and scream and plead and never like the realization that they are not the one in control. Not as powerful, beneath the heel of Equivalent Exchange.
So it's a little shocking when someone visits for a second time, seconds, minutes, no time at all between now and then after the first visit.
Take my heart, the boy cries, desperate and bleeding and hurting. Anything, he begs, for his brother. (For the love beholden in him overpowers dread and pride, fear fueling every action towards the Truth.) The red is a shock against white, seeping into the void, and Truth stares at it enchanted. Tastes it over their tongue, smears it on a thousand hands, and the aroma lingers like a stain on innocence.
Golden, true gilded gold of an Alchemist, eyes glare up at them. Alight with such an intensity that Truth doesn't make the boy eat his words. Thinks about it, debates it, but doesn't make it True. Doesn't take the heart although it would be the perfect exchange. Heart for soul, a life for a slow, feelingless death.
Below them, and Truth will always remember this, the boy glares. Straight at them, with hatred and fear and wrathful determination, desperation--with blood drying beneath the nail of the finger used to open the Gate a second time. A visitor, challenging the master of the house.
(In a void of no one and as someone who is everyone, the Truth looks forward to the one who will challenge it.)
An arm. The exchange may not look equivalent, but the Truth can be circular. In what could be and will not be. The boy, golden eyes, little Alchemist gets what he wanted but Truth will get what they want too, another time.
But for now, for a moment, hours and years and seconds at once Truth looks down at the limbs that have been traded. Clenches the right fist, one made of tanned skin and flesh and bones untouchable beneath the layers, and waits. With the name Edward Elric rolling on their tongue, they wait for it to be Equivalent.
The Gate of Truth rebuilds those it deconstructs a little closer to Truth.
Inky black arms reach for the sinner, the absence of light touching and grabbing and dragging them down to nothing. In the white, in the presence of All and Nothing and Everything and Nobody, they are Judged and handed their fair. If they die, that speaks of their seven sins. A soul returned its maker for the price of sin. For them to live, they must truly be unique.
The Gate is meant to hurt, and it is human nature to stay unhurt. Humans want to feel safe, whole, unafraid, and be ignorant in their blissful lives. They find comfort in the familiar and Truth ruins that, takes their world view by the core and shakes until everything must be questioned. Driven mad, they loathe and despise and fear the Truth for cursing them to not be able to look away from the discomforting reality of the universe. Perhaps, their poor mortal egos simply cannot handle the weight of Knowledge.
Edward Elric. Truth enjoys his gate, the tanned calf cut mid thigh and nimble, starved fingers that slide smooth across the noise of White.
The gate shutters each time the little Alchemist claps his hand against the one made of steel. Truth pushes the flesh hand against the grooves of the gate, tracing the opening, almost hoping it should open and rebuild the little Alchemist here-- to the abyss, void, nothingness, something that Truth resides in.
Come back. They whisper. Because each clap and intention and alchemical process of deconstruction and reconstruction, brings Edward Elric a little closer to Truth. To the discomfort and pain and the dread of Knowing.
It's human nature to turn away and cower from the Gate, but Edward Elric never does. No, he reaches for it.
Come here, little Alchemist. Truth beckons, reaching back.
"Not quite, little Alchemist."
The universe, one and all, nothing, the very concept of life and death is alive, aware in a personificated state of being. That being, the Truth of Everything, grins in an expression that looks eerily human. Eager and delighted, like the cat that caught the canary.
They lift up off the void they were sitting on. "Let me propose an exchange instead."
"What?" Ed murmurs, quiet maybe with shock, grief, anger--he isn't sure yet. Truth edges closer, that grin getting larger. "But--I gave you my offer. It should be Equivalent. Al for my Gate."
"What a brilliant trade it is, little Alchemist. Perhaps it would be Equivalent, if not for one thing." Truth stops just before Ed, a perfect mirror. "Do you really think a soul Equivalates to an arm?"
Ed's chest quivers, and he steels himself before he starts to seethe. "But, you gave me his soul for it. The trade worked."
"An exchange was performed, yes." Truth frowns. "Need I spell it out for you, little Alchemist?"
He pauses. To be truthful, he had never questioned what he had to pay to receive Al's soul--it had only mattered that it worked. But, now, Ed has come to understand the weight a human soul holds, the value of it in the law of Equivalent Exchange. Little compares, and yet at the loss of his arm...
"It isn't equal... It never was." Ed swallows, the confidence he held coming in here thrown awayside. Anger instead fills him, like a nervous dog that bites. He wanted this to be on his terms, not theirs. "What are you after, then?"
"Don't fret, little Alchemist. You get what you want, little Alphonse gets to go home. But," Truth's grin gets impossibly wide, uncanny and entirely selfish. "I get what I want, and that's you."
Ed can't feel much here, but he feels himself grow cold at those words. For a dreadful moment, he thinks about it. Anything for his little brother. But, he stops himself before he can get too far, before he can convince himself, because he can’t. "You're not getting my body, or my soul."
He can't do that to Al. Not after they promised that they wouldn't trade each other. They are in this together, for better or worse, and Al would never forgive him if he traded his life away in exchange.
"Not that." Truth says, startling him. "If I had wanted that I would've done so when you first transmuted your brother's soul."
Ed's eyes follow Truth as they walk past him, towards the towering Gate. "What I want is much more than body or soul. You're very being... it is tethered here because you've been reconstructed to exist here."
Truth lays a stark white hand against it. "Rebuilt to withstand me."
"Yeah?"
"Each time you open the gate, you are remade to exist on the corresponding plane. If you were to keep it open at all times... What would happen?"
"... you would be constantly going through the deconstruction and reconstruction process." Ed answers, a bit unsure. "Is there a point to this?"
Truth gazes over to him, or at least, it sort of looks like that. It's hard to tell. "Yes. You would exist on both planes simultaneously. You and I would exist simultaneously."
"...Is that even possible?" He asks, but when God is in front of you, the impossible becomes only theoretical. Ed shakes his head. "What does that even achieve? Granting me an unfair trade just to kill me when you can cash in the favor doesn't make sense!"
"It won't kill you," Truth waves, stepping away from the Gate to properly face him. Their expression is never telling, when it is framed without a smile. "The gate allows the use of Alchemy, you use it all the time. Opening it will simply make your connection with it closer."
"You mean to you." Ed glares. "How much closer are we talking?"
"A perceptible change, but not an unlivable one." They stand before the gate, unmoving but somehow Ed feels them get a little closer. Encroaching on him, curious and possessive and handsy. "The separation between Reality and Truth will be lessened. Your body's alchemic circle will be more complex."
It sounds awfully sugar coated, Ed thinks, a little mad but also a little intrigued. They give nothing away on what it will give them. After all, this trade will be one that balances the scales, as it should have always been. Ed has a debt, as well as something to gain here. The price is steep and yet it sounds like nothing more than an upgrade. He shouldn’t trust it, not when the Truth is always a faceted thing and he is only seeing one side.
Truth is not the picture of innocence, not with the sly quirk they carry and the tanned leg they stand on. Perhaps not evil, but not nice either. Something real yet all powerful and divine in ways Ed swore never to put faith in.
He's stubborn, sometimes single-minded and a bit hot-headed and sometimes he is all the things people call him, to his face and behind his back. But here, before God, standing on level ground with the Truth, broken down to his core being, what he is and what he wants.
He wants his brother's body back.
(Do I scare you? The embodiment of horror and predatory instincts wants to ask, gleeful, filled with the sort of delight that is only found in the consummation of desire. Will you bow to human cowardice, or stand strong as I devour your every being?)
More than anything, he is selfish. That is why Ed once crawled bloody and severed and dying to trade with Truth a second time, and why he does so again. Punches through Gate doors and screams with anger and defiance and rage. Because Ed is nothing but Selfish.
(Disappoint me, fulfill me--tell me your answer, my little Alchemist, and surprise me.)
So, what else is there to do, but say yes?
It won't kill him.
(Anything, for his brother.)
"Al will get his body back?" Ed needs the confirmation. He very may well be signing away his sanity, the least he can do is make sure. "He'll get to live."
"You get your brother, I get you." Truth repeats. "Does this mean we have a trade, my little Alchemist?"
They reach out a blurry hand towards him. Ed stares at it, a little lightheaded, enchanted under the void's spell, and he knows he will remember this moment for the rest of his life. No matter the consequence, for better or worse, this is the defining moment of what will be.
Ed reaches back, takes Everything by the hand, and shakes. "We do."
Truth smiles. "Then open it."
Ed walks past Truth and pries his gate open to stay.
The change is a perceptible one, but not an unlivable one.
Time keeps moving and life continues on, in the aftermath of endtimes; slowly, they move on from what could have been the entire country's demise. Fires get stomped out and firearms are lowered, some semblance of peace settles over the land for the first time in what must be centuries as the government overturns itself.
Life is calculating a new normal. Ed, a few degrees off the axis point from the rest of the world, is too.
The influx of Truth that rushed over him upon opening the Gate was a bit like all the other times, all one two five-- however many times, he passed through. The feeling of it, the instinctive horror before your body stills and you go lax under the touch of deconstruction. It goes fast, so fast that the hands of Truth only just graze you but that brush is enough to fill your head with Knowledge. In an eternity that passed in a blink, you're remade a little more.
Ed has visited Truth far too often, so much so for him to be comfortable enough in disconcerting that versus this.
It's similar, no doubt. Hands pulling and teasing and touching, Knowledge just a touch away. But now the hands seem like they're waiting for him to fall apart, because he won't, not entirely. Not while the forces of reconstruction push him together like broken parts without glue.
Like this, the Truth of it all caresses him slowly, filling his head with things he doesn't think he should know as a human. It is, perhaps, underwhelming compared to the feeling it was before, but now it is constant. (Yet he doesn't cower from it. He embraces it, just as much as he used to reach for it.)
He walks through the pain of always healing injuries, holds his brother's hand to make up for lost time, and rebuilds everything material he touches. Alchemy comes easier than ever before--a clap, the tremor of open Doors, brilliant white sparks igniting as reality falls apart--and the circle his body creates is always receiving an outpour of power. Lighting it ablaze is the only way to feel the relief of release. The city finds him more useful than builders or architects. Perhaps, that's why, in between hospital visits and going home, he walks.
This must be your true calling, Hawkeye teases, a bit too sincerely to be non genuine. Her eyes trail the newly remade fixtures and describe them like they're art. Nowadays, Mustang tends to trail behind her, just like a dog, unable to see exactly what Ed is doing. (A flicker and Ed stares into dark brown circles before the White fades and they are a milky gray again.) Perhaps, that's for the better, because Ed doesn't know how he would explain it, if Mustang questioned how Ed was doing things no one's ever done before without souls.
It isn't a calling, Ed knows this as he stares at perfect walls, smooth without a trace of alchemy left, no proof it was ever used. He just cannot stop, doesn't know how. He thinks, maybe he wouldn't be the one to do this, that things would be happening differently, if not for Truth standing just behind his shoulder. He wouldn't renew his State Alchemist contract that same year, he wouldn't pack a bag to carry around for months at a time, and wouldn't dive back into being the People's Alchemist.
A flickering smile watches him, murmuring comments into his throat, teeth bared and bloody and happy. Ed keeps moving, because he doesn't know how to stop.
What does this give you? Ed glares at the floor. He swears he just saw the endless plane of nothing and everything, the universe, where he was just about to step.
He says it to the mirror, seeing that face next to his. Asks it to the sky, where just beyond the stars lie Hands and Eyes. Ed feels shifted ever so slightly to the left, filled with more than the human mind was ever meant to take. Each time he claps his hands it reverberates like thunder through the open Gate and he tastes it, wants it to linger longer than it does and the unknown desire stains him shamefully. If he so wanted, he could perform the most complex arrays without much more than a thought, without drawing a symbol, without saying a word. Like acid it slides down, knowing he could do anything, but the feeling it leaves is also invigorating, intoxicating and utterly addicting.
So he keeps going, selfishly, never knowing when to stop.
What was it? Al, finally able to move around on his own, asks because when he looks at his big brother, he sees distant eyes and a mouth that speaks when no one is there to talk to. He sees the way Ed moves like he is shaking something off, feet tangled in yarn that isn't there. What did you give for me?
Ed, who looks at him, his little brother finally made of flesh and bone and not armor, thinks, nothing that wasn't worth it.
The pain is so slight, even when Ed twists his head and stares right at the stars forming and exploding and dying a billions years away. The consequences are seen, heard, felt, but they are not unbarable, simply something he will get used to. Perceptable, but hardly unlivable. The ache in his body and the urge to press his hands together, almost like in prayer, will settle and one day become background noise. His knees will bruise in the dirt and blood will smear across his eyes, but that is a light burden for what he sees when he looks at Al.
His Toll will become something he can handle, even when Truth becomes something he cannot. It seems unfair, for what he's been given, so he asks what does this give you?
You, they say back, like always, and Ed wonders what makes him so special to God.
(Perhaps, he may never get his answer in words. But, one day, in his travels, after one thing or another, always, he will challenge the Truth. Look God in the face and defy his mortal limits.
They will smile, go oh? in that delighted, surprised tone, and Ed may catch a hint of what Truth won't put into words. )