Fandom: Full Metal Alchemist
Title: not separately.
Pairing: Edward + Alphonse
Rating: PG
Description: (AU) Everything has been dealt with, but can the Elric brothers ever really find "peace"? (Note: Edward and Alphonse pairing)

Disclaimer: FMA…you know what's up here.

not separately.
By miyamoto yui

Epilogue - the adults.

My brother only half-sleeps.

He never uses the bed that we have in our little home. Instead, he has gotten into the habit of sleeping in my lap whenever I sit on the wooden floor and lean my back against the wall. I stare straight out towards the direction of the window, but he leans his head forward while closing his eyes.
I embrace him. His bangs scatter and brush against my metal arms.

"Try to remember," he tells me because he knows what I am thinking with my silence pounding into his heart. But he does not push me.

It is I. I am pushing myself to remember the way he felt whenever I embraced him.

He falls asleep somehow. He is very still except for the occasional mumbling when he talks in his sleep.

But once in a while, he'll wake up with a shriek. And that's when I have to really hold him from falling apart. He reaches for the ceiling and looks for things in the darkness. He's too shocked or scared that his voice loses its volume and it is completely silent again.

However, his tears fall to onto me. I have small rust spots marking me with his inflictions.

As if in a moment of time, we are quiet statues. He is reaching out into the darkness above us. I want to see what he sees…

He never lets me experience what he's going through. He's so selfish that way. He completely forgets all that we've learned about sharing and giving and taking equally from nature and each other.

He always says he wants to save me. He says he loves me, but he hurts me by doing this to himself.

Then, those are the times when we sit quietly all day. I don't move at all and he holds onto me with a silence in which all the tension is squeezed into each atom of the air, waiting to explode. He doesn't want me to leave.

"They'll take you away," he mumbles to himself. "You have to stay here until I say you can go, Al.
Please."

Whenever he pleads, I keep on remembering that time as if I were recalling a memory of holding my breath underwater when we swam as children…

"NOO~! GIVE AL BACK TO ME!" His piercing cry made everyone stop for one second in time.

The Colonel looked at me with a disappointed face. He finally lost all the things he believed in, my brother being most primary. Even though he looked intact, he later laughed to himself and lived in seclusion.
No one knows if he's dead or alive. But for brother's sake, I know he's somewhere out there...

"GIVE AL BACK! I'LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING!" he shouts with a cracked voice as he finally pounds on the ground. Then, he goes on his hands and knees.

All self-respect was gone and I wanted to shout at his stupidity. But all I remembered was when he looked up into my face with tears in his eyes.

He waiting for a judgment.

With a pained smile, he ignored everyone as he firmly told me, "You are all I have left in the world."

And after that, I remember nothing. I have blocked it out of my mind and twice as much from my heart. He keeps me in ignorance even though it is not like him to be that way.

I know the heart and kindness and intelligence of the person that I love still resides in the body that I hold in my arms every night. But I know he is very changed too.

I cannot cry, though. I am unable to.

And so I wrap myself around him, as much as I can.

But I am a little angry.
You are not fair, Ni-chan. You never let me share the burden with you.

You can't protect me forever and not from everything. Maybe, one day, they will come to take me away, some way or another. Every day that you are silent like this, I know I am the one killing you each time.
But as for my sake, I keep on doing the best that I can for you.

Until we are judged,

Let's enjoy our delusional paradise.

Another day ends and I close my eyes.
We drift off to sleep,

hoping we'll never wake up again,
or most of all,
not separately.

It is then, before I lose all control of consciousness, I can feel the warmth of his body…
…but after all this time, it is of no consequence.

As long as his heart is still beating, that's all that matters to me now.

Desperately, I need that to be so.

Owari. / The End.

Author's note: I don't know why, but I'm on a FMA kick. It'll probably turn into HnG soon since my fingers are itching to write about Akira, who has been unmolested-er, unwritten for, for a long time now.
When I get into strange moods, I tend to write things that make no sense at all. And this is one of those
days. Being true to the meaning of "yaoi", it has "no climax, no resolution, no meaning". These are a series of vignettes that are held together very loosely. Somehow, even though I didn't know exactly how to do it, I wanted to make them powerful.
But I tried to make this at least 5 parts for Edward's insignia: 4 points of a cross with a serpent.

Friday, September 10, 2004