And then, out of nowhere, an update.

Stressed, stressed, stressed from finals. While procrastinating my Lit Theory studying, I remembered that this fic exists, and I started writing more on it. These 6000 or so words have existed for a very long time, but now there are just about a thousand new ones, and I thought, since I'm making progress, I'll just go ahead and throw these up. I think I meant to do it a long time ago, but...school. Eep.

The same warnings still apply. Character death, bitter I-hated-the-end-of-Brotherhood/manga-with-a-fiery-passion catharsis. Depressing as all hell. The next update will hopefully be (a liiiiiiiittle bit) happier, but who knows when that will be. I'm meant to be thesising, sheeeeesh.

Enjoy!

Roy hadn't planned to accompany Hawkeye to Resembool. He had planned to pay his respects to a bottle of whiskey instead. It would demand much less of him than a grave marker and a dozen tear-stained faces, and he doesn't know that he feels strong enough to face all that. But nevertheless, he finds himself on the noon train to Resembool the next day, sitting by Riza and, hands twitching restlessly, fruitlessly at his sides – trying to figure out if he wants to touch her.

Alphonse's voice floats unbidden on the edge of his consciousness, rolling sobs with the rhythm of the train. It had been impossible to understand fully, but it had been enough to tell him he was needed, and that had been enough to drive him to buy a ticket.

The funeral service will be tomorrow, and Roy wonders absently, watching the scenery go by, if there will be a second coffin for the baby. He doesn't know how long it had really been alive, if it had been alive at all, if it had been stillborn or if it had come out crippled and weak and rasping and underdeveloped –

It – he must have a second grave, mustn't he? He wasn't certain at what point a person becomes a person, or became worthy of a dingy stone with its name on it. Hell, Roy wasn't even sure he'd earned his own name in marble yet.

He knows the baby hadn't been much more than a bump in Winry's stomach (a tool in an innocent woman's demise, a murder weapon) but he feels very real to Roy, for some reason.

And maybe it's because – in Roy's mind, the baby always has Edward's face. Younger and plumper, more like it had been when he'd first met the boy, eleven years old and still clinging to his baby fat. And maybe it's because he can't picture Winry Rockbell well enough to grace it with her features. They'd met very early in her life, it's true, and they'd met at the wedding very briefly. But she had just been a graceful buoy afloat in a sea of congratulations, and she had not paid him very much heed before moving on to the next well-wisher.

He is able to recall – ah, she'd been very beautiful, just as Riza had said. But the baby still looks just like Edward. He has blond hair and a wide face. Edward's high cheekbones and strong jaw. Edward's long, defined nose and dark, thick eyelashes. Edward's ghastly pale face, burned and marred, choking on death and something from a nightmare as it's buried –

"We're nearly there."

He shakes himself into awareness. The countryside has gone more pastoral outside. The structures are fewer and farther between, and they blur green with the lushness of the surroundings. The sun is setting in the west, and this time last night he'd been inside of her. Now he can't bring himself to put his arm around her shoulders.

His arms twitch, and they're full of blood.

He's quite certain that no one sleeps the night before the funeral. Granny Pinako wanders home eventually, mumbling, looking stricken, her face set with the stony determination of a woman who has lost far too much. She sits him down underneath the swinging overhead light in the living room and explains, as if to make sure that Al will be able to take it when confronted with it in the morning, that Ed is not himself.

Al laughs hollowly. That is likely the understatement of the century. Because he hadn't seen his face long before he'd slammed the door shut, but his brother's eyes had held something he'd never even imagined he'd see there again – intent, maybe. There wasn't emptiness there, but a decisive lack of it that was far more worrisome. He'd tried to enter Al's mind once, he'd seen how easily Al had fended him off. What other plans could Edward possibly have?

"—I think he's sleeping in the study. Alphonse? Did you hear what I said?"

No. He'd been busy trying to erect mental sentries somewhere, trying to remember dreams he'd had, trying to comprehend, abject terror ringing in his ears, if his defenses would go down if he slept. Could he always wave his brother off that self-destructive path so easily? It felt like failure, keeping his brother out, but it hadn't yet occurred to him then, when he'd been tossed aside, that maybe it was a victory, and maybe he hadn't killed Winry but he had saved Ed.

Ed wouldn't see it that way though. Not in a million years.

"No. No, say it again Granny?"

"I said, their bedroom was going to be the birthing room. I mean I took the sheets away of course, but the mattress must just be – stained. He's put a bookcase in front of the door, but I tried to tell him to just come stay here for God's sake. He's driving himself crazy in that house.

"And then of course there's the nursery…"

Alphonse feels his eyes growing wider through the exchange, and by the time she mentions the nursery he knows his eyes might as well be coming out of his head. "That's where it happened? And you're letting him stay there? Alone!" He says it like he hadn't left Edward himself earlier.

Her lips tighten dourly, and she taps an unlit pipe against the table. "Do you honestly think he gave me any choice?" It comes out in a quick, harsh whisper. Like she knows that she's wrong and she knows that there's nothing she can do about it. "He's been there since it happened."

"…Did you…?"

"I stayed with him the first couple of nights. He walked the house like a ghost."

"Granny…"

She sighs, "There must be something between you two. He didn't ask for you, even early on, and you couldn't stay with him. So, he's alone in the house where they died. Just for tonight though, he can give us our own night of mourning." Her voice had devolved into something shaky and raspy with age over the past few years. But he knew it wasn't his imagination that – it was wavering a bit more now.

"Do you think he'll come to the funeral tomorrow?"

"I imagine it will be like your mother's funeral."

Color bright memories casting long shadows – Ed being sullenly fitted for a dull, muted, confining suit as Al tugged his collar and baked in the slanted sun. Ed scaring away condolences with an acid tongue. Ed throwing tantrums over – oh, small things, stupid things, getting angry even as Winry and Al cried. Ed stomping his little suit into the ground. Ed transmuting and transmuting and transmuting little trinkets, little rings of flowers for her grave, until he was so tired he drowsed over his transmutation circle and Winry and Al had to help him to bed.

Ed never crying, never condoning any funeral, because, as Al had discovered, he never intended to see her stay dead.

She says, "We'll have to pick him up in the morning. We'll have to go early. He won't likely be dressed."

She says, "It's late. Time for bed, then."

She says, "Hell." And gets up.

He sees her wander off, vaguely, at the edge of his vision. She walks slumped through the swinging door that leads to the hallway, gone into the sprawling abyss of a house that's far too large for her. Al remains seated in the uncomfortable hardness of the chair under the swinging lamp. He is hyperaware of the chafing of travel-worn clothes on his skin. He can feel the grime gathered in the hollows of his collarbone and the insides of his elbows. He concentrates on it, makes himself uncomfortable and awake, and closes his eyes.

He can't tangibly feel the passages of his mind in the same way that he can feel the things outside himself, but he tries to trace them anyway, tries to reinforce them in the same way he might board windows and doors against a natural disaster. He has not done much for Ed since he lost so much, but this. This he can do. Even though keeping Ed alive may be the last thing Ed really wants right now.

Pinako will find him there in the morning, a specter of the giant he once was that first night, awake and trapped inside a hollow shell.

If death makes Roy scared and desolate and weak, if it makes him draw away, it just seems to have the opposite effect on Hawkeye. He should have suspected when she booked them a single room for the night – because they were very close, but not close enough for this to be regular – but he had been simply too tired to fight it. A draining train ride and the prospect of a funeral bright and early in the morning tugs at him as he climbs the stairs, and by the time they've unlocked the door he is ready to collapse onto the bed fully clothed. But before he could make his way there –

"Need you," Riza says, tightly.

He winces, eyes the musty bed longingly. She tugs at one of his buttons with one hand and triumphantly fishes a condom from her pocket with the other. He analyzes the situation, remembers the night before, and tries to dredge up some semblance of arousal for her. It isn't to be. When she tries to kiss him, he pulls swiftly back.

" –Roy?" she says, confused but not hurt.

He sighs. "I'm very tired."

"Oh." She drops her hands to smooth them roughly over her rumpled countenance. Hawkeye is not one to really put herself out there sexually, and he imagines she's only done this because she had figured Roy would reciprocate. It has to be some sort of blow, but considering the circumstances, he can't imagine she'll be too upset. And he honestly can't say that he'll really appreciate it if she has a sudden change in character now, when he needs consistency more than anything. She doesn't disappoint though, and she slips quietly back into the shaky role of subordinate. It's almost sad that there's little to no inbetween today, that he'll be sharing his bed with his Colonel, but if that's what it has to be for them both to come out of this crisis unscathed, so be it.

He slips into the bathroom to change. It seems ridiculous, and it is ridiculous, but he doesn't know how else to handle this. When he goes back into the main room, she's sitting on the bed, facing the bathroom door, swathed in big, roomy blue pajamas. Roy recognizes them as his own, a pair she probably took from his home at his behest, and with her legs tucked up under her and her hands nearly hidden in the sleeves, she looks – diminished, somehow.

She says, "Have you ever thought about being a father, Roy?"

Roy's mind flashes to Fullmetal, face cracking as he is hefted from a wheelchair and the breaking feeling that had produced in Roy for the very first time.

He says, "Yes." And he leaves it to her to understand the implications.

She says, "I brought condoms." Like that is the problem.

"I'm just tired, Riza."

She climbs into the left side of the bed, the side closest to the door, like maybe she's thinking about bolting. That is normally Roy's side at home; he hates having his back to the mirror when he's spooning with her because they make a very pretty picture together.

"I'm sorry, Roy. I honestly don't know what's come over me."

"Biological imperative," he says, settling down on the right side of the bed and facing her lurid outline in the dark. She sighs in the same way Hughes used to when he'd been complaining of Roy's science-oriented brain. They are as far apart on the bed as they can possibly be.

"It isn't as simple as all that," she says. "It can never just be that."

It can never be just fucking until we make more babies to replace the one they lost, to replace the woman that's dead, because she and he makes we, and that is very different from the we that Ed and Winry make together. Made together.

"No," he says, drawing a blanket in tighter to himself. "I don't suppose it can."

"It's hard being here, in the same town, and not being with him. Isn't it? For you?"

No. Damn it all if it wasn't as hard as it should have been. Something inside Roy curls up tight like it's rotting, crumpling along the edges. He just grunts in reply.

Feeling Riza quivering against the mattress, seeing her silhouetted eyes close in some sort of defeat, is enough to remind him of how selfish he's being. He's failed her, and to a far greater extent, he knows that he's failed Edward.

Roy turns away from Riza, belly roiling with his shame and cowardice. With his face toward the window and the vast, open landscapes, he can't help but be reminded of the only other ceremony he'd ever attended in this town.

Their wedding had been beautiful, though his memories of it are tinted dark, now. Her beautiful white dress and white smile are foggy gray. Edward's tuxedo is sullied dark and dirty. One of his treasured keepsakes, proud on his desk in Central, is a photograph of them, together, then. It seems gaudy and bright when he thinks about it in the moon-touched darkness of this room, but it comes to him easy and unbidden. In the picture, they're standing in front of the wedding cake, about to take the first dance, and they are focused so wholly on each other, entangled so completely with one another – that Roy, abruptly, can't fathom what it means for her to be six feet underground and that far away from him now.

And looking back on it, receiving that picture (in a clumsy thank you note, Roy thought with a pang – Winry had written, Ed had signed) had begun his era of indolence and neglect, had kindled in him a very specific brand of flushed arrogance, and it had felt very good indeed to know that Winry was there – ah – picking up where Roy's own office had left off.

He can't understand how that picture can exist, how that wedding could have happened, and how he can be here for a funeral that he has no idea how to deal with.

Passing the torch had obviously made him immature, weak, soft, unprepared. Winry is dead and Ed needs help and he feels like he doesn't know how to love anymore.

Riza's question rises in haunting mockery. His mind twists her words into something sarcastic and sick, and he thinks –

Have I ever thought about being a father?

Yes, once, to two young boys who made me very proud.

Never again, though.

They can't find Ed at first. Granny seems surprised that the whole first floor is empty, and Al takes the searching as an opportunity to scope out the life that Ed and Winry shared here. Al can tell that it had been quite tidy, once.

The main room on the first floor is a living room, cozy and small, with a big, plump, baby blue sofa and little matching loveseat. The loveseat looks a bit worn, but distantly. Two flat imprints that might have held living bodies, once. Behind the loveseat is a fireplace with dark brick that distinctly screams of Ed. The grating covering the hearth is a bit of both of them, dark metal lacing intricately together. Near the edge of the hearth there's a broken vase.

And the vase begins Al's long mental inventory of broken belongings, all scattered across the floor and scraping at the lacquer of the hardwood floors. Through to the kitchen, there's a cookie jar that might have been a rooster, once. There's a breeze blowing through a series of broken windowpanes. At the base of the floorboards, just near the molding, there are dozens of clear foot-shaped imprints punching through the drywall. Some go deeper than others, some inflict the cupboards, and there's even one that's dented the metal of the oven in a pattern that looks suspiciously like toes but – they have all clearly been made with a left foot. Al follows a trail of flatware strewn amid splintered remnants of a stomped-on drawer straight to –

A door at the end of the kitchen. Immaculate, untouched. He reaches out a hand, and he's nearly to the handle when Granny says, "Don't," very quietly.

"Granny?"

"Her workshop."

Al quickly draws back and turns around to face her.

"Was it like this when you –?"

"Left last night? No. This," she makes a sweeping gesture and toes a bent spoon, "is new."

"Oh, Ed…" Al says, throat cracking. Al hadn't slept last night, no, but it is clear that Edward hadn't either. He'd been awake, doing this, tormenting himself in the wreckage of a broken home, and – oh hell, Al is the worst person in the world.

"The only door on the first floor we've yet to open is – his study." She points away from the kitchen, to a doorway on the far side of the living room, and Al walks back, eyeing the dark wooden door. Ed must have upturned several potted plants the night before, because potting soil litters the tile of the entryway. But it is disturbed, a big sweeping swathe is clear where a door might have opened right into it. The hardwood beneath it is irreparably scuffed. "He'll be in there," she says. "He won't be upstairs."

The tension in the room heightens abruptly, in some sort of sick anticipation, and just as Al's about to put his hand on the knob, the door explodes outward, and Ed emerges.

All Al can think is that he looks awful. Greasy hair and wild eyes and twitching fingers. He gives Al a wild-eyed once-over and abruptly steps around him. But there's none of the easy grace there that Al's familiar with. Rather, he falters on his prosthetic leg, and stumbles toward the kitchen. He's slow enough that Al is able to, unthinkingly, catch him by the arm. It must disturb his balance, because he's snarling as he falls down, and Al is left hunched, holding someone spitting with fury and nearly unrecognizable by the sleeve.

"Fuck off, Al," he says, tugging halfheartedly. Al tightens his grip and tugs back. He has no idea what to say.

"Edward," Pinako whispers. "It's her funeral today. We're here to get you."

He stares at the ground between his splayed legs. He's wearing a filthy pair of house pants, and the cuff creeps up his automail leg. Al finds his eyes wandering, creeping, and that seems like private territory too, because Ed catches him at it and uses his other leg to cover it, pull at his pants with wriggling toes. He shoots Al a dirty look.

"Was gonna get ready," he says. "Was gonna go."

Al doesn't believe it for an instant, and he can tell from Pinako's pinched expression that she doesn't either.

"Can you go get washed up, then?" she asks quietly. Cautiously. There's a half-bathroom near Ed's office, but the only showers in the house must be upstairs, and it's clear Ed hasn't been there in quite some time. "We can go back to my house if you're not – "

"Stop it, I can shower in my own goddamn house. This is my house," he says a little desperately.

They all just sit there, then. It's like no one quite knows how to tell Ed to get on with it, because it's too much like telling him to just move on. It seems impossible, but they could all do with a little bit of normality.

Pinako says, "Don't make me have to baby you, Edward. You're not ten years old anymore. Get up, then."

Ed shoots a sullen glance at Al before nodding sulkily at Pinako and jerking his sleeve out of his little brother's hold. Then he goes through the – far too complicated motions of getting up. And that's when it becomes clear why he had fallen so quickly before.

"Brother, what's wrong with your leg?"

Honestly, Al should have known better than to ask.

"There's nothing wrong with it! Why would there be anything wrong with it, she fixed it. She fixed it just a couple of weeks ago, it's fine. Just shut up, fuck off, you don't know anything about it."

He has to manually bend the knee to get it under him in order to be able to stand up at all, and something in the knee makes a strange whooshing sound every time he puts weight on it again. He starts for the stairs, but Al can't imagine how he'll take them like this.

Pinako says, "Ed, your suspension is off. I can hear it."

Ed doesn't respond. He just doggedly drags his leg toward the staircase. They hadn't counted on this.

"Edward," she says. "There's no way we'll be able to walk there with you moving so slow."

Ed sets his face, takes the first step.

Al looks at Pinako, and knows what she's thinking. It would be so, so easy to crack open the door to Winry's workshop. And then they'd have all the tools to fix him. But maybe it wasn't as easy as just that.

Ed takes the second step, and his fierce determination has fallen into something tired. Just tired.

"Alphonse, call the Fosters. They're heading the cemetery, and they should have a horse and cart. They can pick us up here."

Ed takes the third step, slowly. Quietly.

"But Granny –"

"Tell them that we'll meet them outside in thirty minutes."

On the fourth step, Ed's lips tighten visibly, like he's trying to keep them from shaking. Al goes to the kitchen to use a little white phone with a well-worn dial as Granny mounts those bottom steps easily and offers her hand to Ed.

He does call the Fosters. They're only taking the cart to the cemetery because Nellie is so pregnant, he says, a bit distantly. He says he'll be pleased to see Alphonse again, agrees to take them all, and hangs up. The conversation had been so short and succinct that there hadn't been much opportunity for sympathy, but it was clear that they both felt the profound sense of loss, and it was clear that they both maintained an upspoken boon of pity for Ed's plight. Until that point, Winry's death had seemed very close to him, very personal, very much the Elric family's tragedy. But he can see how much her death is hanging over the entire town of Resembool, and he knows how much she will be missed.

By the time he's done, Ed's in the shower upstairs. He can hear Granny coaching him from the bottom of the stairwell, making sure he's washing behind his ears, making sure he isn't slipping on the slick tile. He's reverted to something childlike and dependent, willing to be guided through a bath by his surrogate grandmother, and it's so - insane. Because this is his brother, who had been so fiercely independent from the tender age of eleven, and it just doesn't make any sense.

Al starts up the stairs. Unbidden, images from a life he had never known himself flash before him. Mostly simple things, like Winry carrying a laundry basket up the stairs, or Ed bounding down them and catching Winry at the bottom for a kiss. He knew what kind of relationship they shared. It had been sweet, passionate. Ed fumbled around affection, but Al likes to imagine that here, in his home, he is more calm and easy about it. He can see them just embracing on the landing at the top of the stairs. He can see the dark sheen of Ed's ponytail, the light waves of Winry's, as their heads come together, chaste and beautiful.

He tries to imagine how Ed would have reacted to Winry being pregnant, and he's aware that Ed would have treated her like glass. From his vantage at the top of the stairs, finally, he can see a wavering-thin specter of his brother helping a big-bellied Winry down the steps. Maybe it had happened, maybe it hadn't. Whether or not it had, it would never happen now.

Al can see the bathroom at the end of the hall – steam is billowing out, Ed is grousing, and Pinako is clearly a bit too close for comfort now. At the other end of the hall, there's a bookcase blocking the entrance to a bedroom with a white door and a shining metal knob. Just next to it, there's another door, closed tightly. There's an indentation in the carpet where the bookcase might have been just a little while ago. Al looks back toward the steam-soaked bathroom, back toward the bookcase, and he's consumed by this insatiable curiosity that has consumed him since first entering this unfamiliar place.

He knows it's their bedroom, and he imagines his brother having sex with his oldest friend. Ed bumbled around with his love, yes, but – they did have sex. They must have. They loved each other, and they did have sex. Here, in this house, where they lived together. Maybe up against this wall, maybe in the shower where Ed is now, maybe on the well-worn loveseat downstairs. He can see it, breaking and tender and steady and everything that sex was supposed to be because they did. They did love each other. Al shoves the bookcase just enough to get at the door, and he opens it without really knowing what to expect.

There's a dark brown stain on the mattress. Just in the very center. Big and circular and spreading and uneven and – they had sex here, certainly. Maybe this was where they'd conceived their child.

Al shakes his head frantically to rid himself of those thoughts – he tries to dissociate the sex act from Winry's death then, because if he thinks of it in those terms then romance will be dead for him forever. But it is a sad association that he must make, that their strong and steady love had led to – this. A dark-edged stain of Winry's life on their marital bed. Al thinks abruptly of every girl in Xing he'd fucked, every girl that meant a thousand times less to him than Winry ever had to Ed, and he can almost – feel them going cold on top of him.

This couldn't be all there is to love. Friendship and courtship and marriage and fucking and death, and then it's over and then all that's left is a brown stain in the center of a bed that you'll never have the strength to sleep on again.

And then Ed's behind him, dripping with water and malice.

"Who the fuck said you could come in here?"

Al whirls on him and feels like he's been struck. Ed's thin, clothed only in a towel around his waist, and smells like flowery shampoo. His expression is as cold as the steel that remains embedded in his shoulder even now.

"Ed I just – thought I'd get you some clothes."

Pinako says, "Stop being so cross, Edward," and let's herself in behind him. Ed still bristles with that harsh anger, breathing unsteadily out of his nose in a very audible way. But all of the sudden, his eyes on Al go unfocussed, finding something behind Al, and Al already knows what it is. Ed's face breaks with emotion.

Al raises a hand as Pinako pulls black clothes from the closet. There's a pair well-worn black leather trousers in one of her hands, and her knuckles on it are white.

"Do you even have a black suit, Ed?"

Ed's eyes focus on the bed, and now his breath has started hitching with every stuttering little intake. Al takes him by the arm, and does the first good thing he'd done for his brother for a very long time – he guides him forcefully out of the room.

"We'll be in the hall, Granny."

She grants them a pained backward glance as she tosses the leather trousers to the floor with a slap, like this room holds painful memories for her too, and Ed quietly allows himself to be steered to safety. He focuses on the wallpaper over Al's shoulder – blue – and the vase of dead flowers on top of another bookcase.

"Brother," Al tries, softly.

When Ed speaks, it's so very quiet, Al almost can't hear. "What gives you the right?"

Al can't help but to think about that for a moment. Red-stained mattress and photographs – private lives, private deaths. It hadn't always been this way between them, and Al wonders when exactly it was they had started keeping secrets.

"She was – my best friend, Ed."

Ed snarls, "Well maybe you shouldn't've left her to die then, Al!" Ed's face is dark and shadowed with shame, and it's clear that he doesn't want to be putting this on Al, and it's clear that he doesn't entirely. Indeed, in that moment, they share a sense of knowing. Knowing that if Ed had been able to use alchemy, he would've given his soul for her – would've given his soul for his child. But they both also know that Ed gave his alchemy for Al all those years ago. Al can't help but think, you said you'd be okay. It's not fair that he's making Al to blame now, because he said he'd be okay, and Al had believed him. He'd always, always believed his big brother. But now Ed's diminished and hurt and very clearly not okay, and it's not fair for Ed to blame him for this.

But he doesn't. Al knows him too well to think that he blames Al for this. He blames himself, of course. How far back does that hatred reach? To the moment of death in the room behind him, the moment where Al had denied him access to a power source he had claimed so easily before? To the moment of conception – on the couch or on the bed or in hallowed realms of Winry's workshop? To the moment that he married her, that he fell in love with her, that he really started to notice the way she smiled and the way she laughed?

Or.

To the moment when he brought me back, Al thought. Looking at Ed, thinking he may be thinking that – if distantly, if unintentionally – was one of the hardest things that Al ever had to do.

Ed says, "I…shouldn't've…"

And he never says what he shouldn't've done. But Al thinks maybe it's everything.

"Your suit, Ed. It might be a bit snug, but…" Pinako says coming around the corner.

Ed looks at her like he can't even fathom being here, like he doesn't even know where he is. He takes the suit with hands that are trembling, fingering the buttons like his hands are numb.

Al's stomach feels tied in knots, and he knows Ed's pain very acutely in that moment. Because he had been so closely connected to Ed for so very long, and he knows the depth of his feeling for everything, yes. And he knows now how deep the regret could potentially go, and he hates that Ed is likely regretting every happy moment he's had in this house – because what was it but another nail in her coffin, after all? And maybe he was regretting every happy moment he'd ever had with Al too, because that was incriminating now. Every human smile, every flash of teeth, every sigh and snort and laugh wasn't just that anymore. It was something that meant he couldn't save someone else he loved.

Al watches as Pinako coaches him through the motions of putting on his suit. He kneels to let her button his buttons, and while he's crouching, she runs tender fingers through his bangs, straightening them. They share a moment of quiet pain there, face to face. He breathes heavy and wet, and she looks like she's on the verge of breaking. Al hurts, hurts as much as he never imagined he could again, but he doesn't hurt like them. Maybe it's because he didn't have to watch her live harder than she ever had, blaze and glow, right before she died.

And then Al can almost see a quiet analysis of every little step that he had taken during her pregnancy brewing behind Ed's eyes. Was this the misstep that killed the baby? Should I not have gone on that trip to Central? Should I have stayed?

Al wants to say, No, no Ed. It's not your fault, it was never your fault.

It's something that he had been able to say with absolute confidence at one point in his life, sitting across the room from Ed fever-ridden and desolate, because he had been there to know.

But now, more than anything, maybe the problem is that he'd never been there. He'd been in Xing, learning alkahestry and staging some sort of rebellion. His brother had settled with a quiet sort of dignity, but Al had very much wanted to keep adventuring –

And how could that be wrong?

But it meant that he missed out on that moment on the stairs, or that quiet kiss by the door, or heart-breaking little smile that he had (might have?) given her. He realizes with a twinge that he can't really remember the precise curvature of her smile, or the exact blue of her eyes. He'll never know if pregnancy made her truly glow. He'd neglected this household and his brother, and no wonder they weren't a family of shared secrets anymore. He's a stranger to his brother's life in this house, yes, but he's also a stranger to the man his brother has become here, just as his brother doesn't know what exactly Al has done in Xing or what kind of restless, hedonistic, escapist soul he's apparently turned into.

And. He doesn't know who Winry is. Was. Had been. Had their relationship changed them? Had sharing a home and a life made them different people? Was he her best friend at all anymore?

Pinako deftly folds Ed's black satin tie, and his lips quiver again. Ed is certainly a different person now, sullen and silent and sad. He'd missed that transition too, sitting on a camel and lamenting the heat. Ed is like a child now. He is so different from how he has ever been, and how had Alphonse missed him becoming this? How does he soothe this when he doesn't know its origins?

What is he meant to say in the face of this? I don't know if it was your fault, really, Ed. I was fucking around in Xing, and I'll never know how you loved her. She's dead now, though, so can you and I start over?

In his too-small suit, his shoulders are so broad it looks as if the seam running down his spine is going to burst out. He looks as sturdy as a mountain, and he shakes.

Hello. I'm Alphonse.

"Granny. I don't want to go, I wasn't going to go," he says quietly, abruptly, like a sulking child. But it's not an admission like it should be, which says he doesn't think it's cowardice. It's just a way of the world now, it's just something that is. Something that had become when Al wasn't looking. "I don't know if I can. I don't think I can."

And you are…?

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