random FMA fic
Apr. 1st, 2007 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
onemuseleftThis is something short I came up with a while back and never did anything with. Once upon a time I had a big plan for writing an alternate end to the end of Fullmetal Alchemist, but this is as far as I ever got with it.
Title: Untitled
Summary: Fullmetal had finally done it.
Timeline: Toward the end of FMA, it doesn't work with the movie at all.
By the time Mustang gets the message and puts the clues together, he's too late to do anything except clean up afterwards. He suspects – he knows - that Fullmetal planned it that way.
He isn't sure why. Was Fullmetal afraid Mustang would try to stop him? Show up with reinforcements and a straitjacket and wrestle them to the ground as he tried to talk sense into them?
For as long as Mustang had known them, the drive to restore their bodies was what had driven the brothers, especially Edward who, more and more, seemed to exist solely for the possibility to heal his brother until Alphonse's loyal and passionate pledge of "and your arm and leg, too, brother," seemed to go mostly unheard. He's seen the way they are with one another, the high regard in which they hold each other, the affection they show each other, the almost desperate need not to be separated.
Mustang thinks of Hughes, too long dead and buried. The days after Ishbal when Hughes' voice was the only thing Mustang could hear over the sound of screaming inside his own head. The only man Mustang had trusted with everything.
No. Mustang wouldn't have stopped them. It would be the height of hypocrisy when the only thing that keeps him from plotting arrays in his head is the knowledge that Hughes would never forgive him.
****
He has no idea what he's expecting.
Untrue. He's expecting blood on the walls and pulpy flesh slick on the floor and shattered shards of bone driven into the walls and floor.
He's hoping to find two young men – in his thoughts, Alphonse is taller and broader than Edward, but he knows that may not be accurate – celebrating their success.
He's so busy hoping for the latter and dreading the former that when he reaches the bottom of the basement steps he is completely unprepared to find something else entirely.
****
The room is mostly clean, though the air smells of ash and woodsmoke and vaguely, ever so distantly, of burning hair. A transmutation array is burned into the floor, its symbols seared into the concrete by a force of energy that must have been devastating to witness up close.
Clothes lay at his feet, along the outside of the array. Black pants and shirt, boots, underclothes, all familiar (well, not the underclothes so much). The red coat Edward has worn for years is crumpled off to the side.
A suit of armor is in the center of the array, dropped carelessly to the ground. Even from several feet away, Mustang can tell that the soul bound to it is gone. It is empty metal again and nothing more.
He'll feel slightly ashamed later, but for now he's almost relieved. He doesn't think either one would have wanted to outlive the other. Almost better this way, for them both to be gone at once.
The armor rocks, every so slightly and something inside strikes weakly against the metal.
His feet carry him, almost unconsciously, into the center of the array.
****
The baby concealed inside the armor is no more than hours old, but cold and hungry and terrified - or furious, Mustang's not sure which. It's pink and wrinkled and it flails its arms at him as he extracts it gently from the armor. A boy, he notes. A boy with bronze-gold hair and copper green eyes. Ed's eyes were never that color. Mustang has never seen Alphonse's, but he wonders.
He wraps the baby in Edward's red coat.
****
Gracia asks a great many questions when he shows up at her front door with a baby in his arms, but not until after she takes the child from him and sends him to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.
The child stays with her when he leaves – where else could he take the boy, anyway? – and Elysia is peering through the bars of her old crib, cooing in delight at her new "cousin."
It takes a few days, but Mustang lies like a pro and enough people owe him embarrassing favors that it's very, very easy to create a birth certificate for "Alphonse Mustang" the son of Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye.
****
Riza, Mustang thinks blearily, at one point, was going to be very surprised when she found out.
****
There was never any doubt in Mustang's mind that the child was Alphonse. Fullmetal had done it, he'd found some way to save his brother and restore Alphonse's human body. The fact that the body was a newborn was, undoubtedly, an unexpected twist. The fact that Fullmetal seems to have died in the attempt was, probably, not.
Of Fullmetal there is never any sign. Roy looks, just in case the boy has done something noble and stupid and misguided, like removing himself from his brother's life out of guilt or some fledging and highly ambiguous sense of honor, but no one has heard of Edward Elric or anyone quite like him since that day.
Alphonse is healthy and well-behaved. He is too calm and too patient for a normal child and he seems anxious for something. Mustang is waiting for his body to develop to the point where he can speak. He has a feeling that Alphonse is not nearly as young mentally as his body would indicate.
Part of him, the General, hopes Alphonse remembers. The part of him that has come to think of Alphonse Mustang as his son hopes not.
Most of him hopes not. He does not think Alphonse will be able to bear the weight of knowing his brother died to bring him back to life.
Title: Untitled
Summary: Fullmetal had finally done it.
Timeline: Toward the end of FMA, it doesn't work with the movie at all.
By the time Mustang gets the message and puts the clues together, he's too late to do anything except clean up afterwards. He suspects – he knows - that Fullmetal planned it that way.
He isn't sure why. Was Fullmetal afraid Mustang would try to stop him? Show up with reinforcements and a straitjacket and wrestle them to the ground as he tried to talk sense into them?
For as long as Mustang had known them, the drive to restore their bodies was what had driven the brothers, especially Edward who, more and more, seemed to exist solely for the possibility to heal his brother until Alphonse's loyal and passionate pledge of "and your arm and leg, too, brother," seemed to go mostly unheard. He's seen the way they are with one another, the high regard in which they hold each other, the affection they show each other, the almost desperate need not to be separated.
Mustang thinks of Hughes, too long dead and buried. The days after Ishbal when Hughes' voice was the only thing Mustang could hear over the sound of screaming inside his own head. The only man Mustang had trusted with everything.
No. Mustang wouldn't have stopped them. It would be the height of hypocrisy when the only thing that keeps him from plotting arrays in his head is the knowledge that Hughes would never forgive him.
****
He has no idea what he's expecting.
Untrue. He's expecting blood on the walls and pulpy flesh slick on the floor and shattered shards of bone driven into the walls and floor.
He's hoping to find two young men – in his thoughts, Alphonse is taller and broader than Edward, but he knows that may not be accurate – celebrating their success.
He's so busy hoping for the latter and dreading the former that when he reaches the bottom of the basement steps he is completely unprepared to find something else entirely.
****
The room is mostly clean, though the air smells of ash and woodsmoke and vaguely, ever so distantly, of burning hair. A transmutation array is burned into the floor, its symbols seared into the concrete by a force of energy that must have been devastating to witness up close.
Clothes lay at his feet, along the outside of the array. Black pants and shirt, boots, underclothes, all familiar (well, not the underclothes so much). The red coat Edward has worn for years is crumpled off to the side.
A suit of armor is in the center of the array, dropped carelessly to the ground. Even from several feet away, Mustang can tell that the soul bound to it is gone. It is empty metal again and nothing more.
He'll feel slightly ashamed later, but for now he's almost relieved. He doesn't think either one would have wanted to outlive the other. Almost better this way, for them both to be gone at once.
The armor rocks, every so slightly and something inside strikes weakly against the metal.
His feet carry him, almost unconsciously, into the center of the array.
****
The baby concealed inside the armor is no more than hours old, but cold and hungry and terrified - or furious, Mustang's not sure which. It's pink and wrinkled and it flails its arms at him as he extracts it gently from the armor. A boy, he notes. A boy with bronze-gold hair and copper green eyes. Ed's eyes were never that color. Mustang has never seen Alphonse's, but he wonders.
He wraps the baby in Edward's red coat.
****
Gracia asks a great many questions when he shows up at her front door with a baby in his arms, but not until after she takes the child from him and sends him to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.
The child stays with her when he leaves – where else could he take the boy, anyway? – and Elysia is peering through the bars of her old crib, cooing in delight at her new "cousin."
It takes a few days, but Mustang lies like a pro and enough people owe him embarrassing favors that it's very, very easy to create a birth certificate for "Alphonse Mustang" the son of Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye.
****
Riza, Mustang thinks blearily, at one point, was going to be very surprised when she found out.
****
There was never any doubt in Mustang's mind that the child was Alphonse. Fullmetal had done it, he'd found some way to save his brother and restore Alphonse's human body. The fact that the body was a newborn was, undoubtedly, an unexpected twist. The fact that Fullmetal seems to have died in the attempt was, probably, not.
Of Fullmetal there is never any sign. Roy looks, just in case the boy has done something noble and stupid and misguided, like removing himself from his brother's life out of guilt or some fledging and highly ambiguous sense of honor, but no one has heard of Edward Elric or anyone quite like him since that day.
Alphonse is healthy and well-behaved. He is too calm and too patient for a normal child and he seems anxious for something. Mustang is waiting for his body to develop to the point where he can speak. He has a feeling that Alphonse is not nearly as young mentally as his body would indicate.
Part of him, the General, hopes Alphonse remembers. The part of him that has come to think of Alphonse Mustang as his son hopes not.
Most of him hopes not. He does not think Alphonse will be able to bear the weight of knowing his brother died to bring him back to life.
