A/N: Sorry for the delay there – I had to take some time and devote it toward my Green Lion contest entry =) (For those who don't know, is having an FMA AU fanfic contest that I'm super excited about =) Check it out!)

Also, FFN seems to hate me. Has the login feature been inaccessible to anyone else lately?

"I'm sorry," Al said for what felt like the thousandth time, staring down into his cup of sagebrush tea.

They were out on the back veranda of the orphanage, a large semi-circular porch that had once served as a meeting place for Leto worshippers. Rose had explained that there had been a time when priests would give sermons out here under the sun, to bask beneath the sun god's presence and be humbled by His all-illuminating rays. Al was sitting next to Citizen Armstrong on one of the many long, curved marble pews, and although he followed no religion himself, he was feeling decidedly penitent.

Armstrong made a soft rumbling noise through his moustache, the way a horse might nicker to reassure a foal. His great bulk shifted as he leaned back to finish his own glass in three dramatic, audible gulps, and Al could feel the stone itself vibrate beneath them.

"Do you think she's okay?" Al asked. Rose had made herself scarce ever since their altercation and he wondered if his presence bothered her. She had appeared long enough to provide them both with tea, but then she was gone again, claiming that the children needed to be put down for a nap.

"Maybe I should book an inn for the night."

Armstrong favored him with an attempt at a quiet smile, five hundred watts instead of a thousand.

"Do not fear, Alphonse. Miss Rose is a kind and gracious woman. She would never bear a grudge over momentary unpleasantness. "

"I know," Al sighed. That only made it worse. He kept trying to tell himself it wasn't his fault, and part of him was still seething -- his family had all lied to him, what kind of family was that? – but it wasn't fair for Rose alone to bear the brunt of his rage. He ought to feel angry at Winry and Gramma and Master Izumi too.

"You will always be welcome here. Any time you require it, a place will be made for you," Armstrong said quietly. The gentleness in his eyes offset the rest of his chiseled features.

"I appreciate it."

He took another sip of tea and tried not to grimace. Desert sage was a bitter plant and most of the time he couldn't drink it without at least three dollops of honey. He hadn't wanted to bother Rose any further though. Even when she'd brought them drinks, she'd still looked wan and strained around the eyes.

"The Liorans say that sageleaf tea is good for cleansing the body and soul," Armstrong commented. Al forced himself to smile at his cup.

"Oh?"

"Yes. They believe its noxious properties encourages the digestive process, and its bitterness makes men painlessly sweat out their cares!"

And Armstrong certainly was sweating, Al noted with minor horror. Whether an effect of the tea or the blazing sun above them, the man seemed to be glistening from head to toe. It was a miracle really, that Armstrong could go shirtless in this climate and not wind up broiled to a crisp. Al didn't dare go out without his arms and legs covered.

"Which is a noble sentiment, of course, ridding oneself of one's worries," Armstrong continued. "It is quite unhealthy for one to hold dark thoughts within. It poisons the body from the inside out."

Armstrong raised a thick eyebrow at him and Al ducked his head a little, uncomfortable. He could see what the man was angling for, but he wasn't at all going to take the bait. Whatever relationship they might have had Before, without any memory of it, this man was effectively a stranger. His quest already forced him to bare too many private things to strangers.

"The Ishvar have a ritual like that," he said lightly, ever-so-slightly changing the subject. "They set up these little sweat baths in the dunes. You dig a hole in the sand and make a fire pit with rocks, and put a tent up over it. Then you sit there and bake until you can't take anymore, and then you get out and rub down with a wet cloth."

Al shrugged. "I did it a couple of times, it works well enough. I think I prefer scrubbing with sand, though. I sweat enough in the desert as it is."

Another trick when there wasn't enough water to go around was to rub clean sand over one's body, which Al had taken to after a fashion. It left his face and body red from the abrasion, but he never got light-headed and overheated because of it.

"But does sand cleanse the spirit as well as the skin, young Alphonse? I think perhaps not!"

Armstrong tilted back on the bench and spread his huge arms wide, nearly sweeping Al off the bench in his eagerness to proletize. His biceps were nearly bigger than Al's face, Al realized in wonder as he ducked the one bulging next to his head.

"In this great state of Amestris, we advocate training oneself, do we not?" Armstrong inquired. "To hone oneself into a tool of the nation!"

"I guess…" He'd had a grade school teacher who had said things like that a lot, that it was the reason they must all learn their multiplication tables, the "glory of the state". Not that he had needed any encouragement to get good marks. Normal school had been effortless and he hadn't spent any more time than necessary on it; after their mother had died, no one had seemed to notice when he and his brother just stopped going.

The man rose and struck a series of impossible flexes, each exhibiting an even more ludicrous assortment of sculpted muscles than the last. He supposed he'd read in books before that it was possible for a man's back to ripple, but before this afternoon, Al had never had an image to put to the phrase before.

"You can flex your latissimi dorsi independently?!" he squeaked.

"Countless generations of my family have dedicated themselves to honing their minds, bodies, and souls for the glory of the empire," the man rumbled back. "These muscles bear witness to the years I have spent in service!"

Armstrong beamed and bowed low with yet another grandiose flourish, flexing every inch of said thick back muscles, then rose and contemplated him seriously.

"But physique is not the only thing that must be trained, Alphonse," the man said. "A gentleman's mind and heart require discipline as well."

"And tongue, right?" Al said bitterly. If he'd been more 'disciplined' earlier, he never would have snarled at Rose and driven her away. Because like it or not, regardless of his anger, he needed to know what she had to tell him. And although he didn't know all of it yet, it was clear that the way he'd pressed her – pushed her too far, too fast into territory that he was coming to understand was painful – had become counterproductive. He needed her to open up to him, she owed it to him to open up to him, but if he wasn't more sensitive he would only hurt both of them in the long run.

"I should have watched how loud I was getting," Al said.

"Right," Armstrong said quietly. "Constant vigilance, Mr. Elric. Constant vigilance. But I can promise you this - an outlet does help."

He sat down again and a few beads of sweat dripped off the ends of his fingers to sizzle on the pavement below. Al offered him the remainder of his tea, and Armstrong finished it in a single draught.

"I am sorry that I yelled," Al told him. It was the truth, he could admit that much. "It's just…"

"Hm?"

The man's piercing blue eyes were on him again, endlessly attentive. Gentle. Kind. Al sighed and tilted his head back, squinting up into the fierce Lioran sky.

"It feels like I was set up to fail," he confessed. "I know I've been a pain in the neck, but it's been two years! Why didn't anyone just tell me what really happened? Gramma, Winry, Miss Sheska, Miss Rose…probably Master Izumi too…they all just kept saying 'okay, if you insist, go look for him', but the whole time I could tell that they thought Ed was dead. Why didn't they tell me why!?"

"Perhaps they did not believe you were ready to hear it."

"Well perhaps I would have made different choices if I had!" Al snapped. He couldn't help himself. Even talking about the betrayal hurt. Thinking about it made him feel raw on the inside, like he had scoured with sand from the inside out.

"My life is this huge mixed-up jigsaw puzzle and I've been trying to put it back together for years. And now I find out everybody I know has been hiding pieces. Do you know what that feels like!?"

"I am not saying you are wrong to be upset, Alphonse," Armstrong said gently. "I am asking, would it have made a difference if they had?"

And that was the trillion cens question, wasn't it? Without a body, would he – couldhe – still accept that his brother was really gone? That he had given himself for Al? An eyewitness report, an unknown array, but still, all circumstantial evidence. Nothing that amounted to definitive proof. If he had known then what he knew now…all it would have meant was that he would have been even more sickened at the prospect of writing his brother off. Now that he had a clearer picture of what it might have cost to get his body back, he could not conceive of accepting Ed's life in exchange for his. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

It wasn't equivalent.

"No…but not for the reason you think," Al said quickly. Armstrong might be right that nothing could have changed the outcome, but Al would be damned if he went along with this pretense that ignorance was bliss.

"Tell me then, what do I think?"

Al looked up and realized that Armstrong's face could be hard when he wanted it to be. Without his smile the man's face was a sculpture, elegant but set, absolutely inscrutable.

"I've had some…interesting experiences, lately," Al said, staring right back up at that stony gaze with a challenging glare of his own, racking his brain for a way to explain. He could accept sounding crazy, he was slowly growing used to that, but he would never accept sounding defeated. And Armstrong was an alchemist himself - a formidable one by reputation, half-naked statues notwithstanding. If he left out the dreams and focused on the scientific side, maybe this didn't sound quite so insane. He had made the mistake of telling Gramma and Winry about the other-self and his dreams, but maybe he didn't have to mention that part. It wasn't so much lying as just…not telling the whole truth, he tried to convince himself.

"You saw last week how I was controlling those armored things, right?" he began. "I made them all start fighting each other."

"I did witness the results," the man said a bit stuffily. "Though not the method."

Al raised his gloved hands to show the array he had embroidered on each palm, a nested circle enclosing a large isosceles triangle, with three smaller isosceles triangles bisecting each side. Aside from those central shapes, they were completely devoid of symbols, a boilerplate for any transmutation he might attempt. Alchemically speaking, itabula rasa. /i

"It was these," he said with pride. "They're my own design."

Armstrong leaned forward to inspect them and his eyes widened. "A blank slate?"

Al nodded. "On the road, you need to do so many different kinds of transmutations…this is the template that's worked the best for me."

Armstrong's blue eyes twinkled and he slapped one knee with a great meaty palm. It echoed like a shot across the small amphitheater.

"Nothing less from the great Alphonse Elric!" Armstrong crowed at him. His cheeks were jubilantly ruddy. "Not many young men your age have created their own multipurpose array! That's quite the accomplishment!"

He gave Alphonse a 'friendly' tap on the shoulder that nearly bowled Al off the bench. Al struggled to right himself, scrabbling a little for purchase on the stone. The man's praise was literally overwhelming and he grinned, feeling hopeful.

"In the process of developing it, I discovered I could transmute parts of myself into things too," he said, a little more hurriedly now. "Like those armors. I was able to move them without an array directly on them all the time because I was part of them. And it's hard to explain, but once I do I can see through it, hear through it – here, give me that tea cup. I'll just show you."

He chanced a look up at Armstrong's expression, hoping the man was still open to the idea. He had advertised his new 'soul alchemy' only a handful of times, and so far it had rarely gone over the way he'd expected. Gramma and Winry had been disturbed by it. His master had forbidden him from even mentioning it in her home. The few others who'd seen it had brushed the miracle off as alchemical rouse. But Armstrong simply nodded and handed him an empty tea cup, and Al's heart started to beat again.

"Watch!" he said and set the cup down on the bench between them. He pressed his palms together, drawing in on himself through the lines of the arrays, and then seized the cup with both hands at once.

As always, there was a rush of noise and a feeling of bright light, a hint of yellow at the edge of his vision. He could feel himself sliding out of his body through his fingertips, like the world around was dilating, closing in on him, but it was only that he was entering the cup, he told himself, the cup was his world, and nothing more. Just enough, not too much, he needed to fill the cup but not be contained by it, just enough, a little closer, yes right there -

Al pulled his hands away and stood up, breathing just a little heavier at the eerie sensation of being in two places at once. He was aware of the cup and its dimensions the way he was aware of any of his limbs – where it was positioned in relation to his body, how much space it would take up if it were to be moved to the left or the right.

Armstrong was staring at the cup with an unreadable expression on his face.

"Just wait," Al said, before the man could even speak. He turned and walked halfway around the little amphitheatre, aware at once of the sun's heat on his skin and also the lack of it on the tea cup's porcelain. Its 'face' was open straight up at the sky, its empty well filled with sun instead of liquid, but it did not feel painful to stare at the sun through the tea cup's 'eyes'. It did not feel like anything.

Once he felt he was a decent distance away, Al closed his real eyes again, focused on the ones he had left across the veranda. From the cup's perspective, Armstrong was even more of a giant. His face alone blotted out half the sky. Al concentrated on the atoms in the sides of the cup, the bottom, let his will flow through them and excite them, let that energy spawn off into waves.

Can you hear me? He could hear his voice saying, though the words sounded unnaturally hollow. Echoes, probably, bouncing off the steep walls of the cup.

"Alphonse!?"

Armstrong's moustache spread out like the milky way and day turned to night as the man's face crowded down over his cup-self. Al shifted his attention from sound waves to vibration, starting a ripple of energy in the walls of the cup that made it rattle back and forth.

Yessir, he said again, willing his voice to be there, willing his focus to stay. It was exhausting to throw himself into a body so alien, and he was tired enough from his travels as it was.

I want you to whisper something to the cup. A word or a phrase, a name, anything.

"Why so?"

To prove that I'm really there. You can lift the cup if you like, to make sure there is no radio receiver.

The world spun crazily as Armstrong did just that, and he had to fight not to be ill in his physical body. Then abruptly he was righted again, brought up right next to Armstrong's bulbous lips. The man's moustache was so large in his field of vision now that he could see individual pores where the bristles started. It was like a silky wheat field, each yellow hair another waving stalk.

"Dum spiro, spero."

Doom-spear-oh, spare-oh? What is that, Ancient Xerxian? He recognized the cadence of the language but not the words themselves.

"Yes, do you know it?"

Not that particular phrase. I only know Xerxian as it pertains to alchemy.

Any alchemist worth his salt knew at least that much. The language had been dead for hundreds of years, but modern alchemy had started in that part of the world, so some of its lingo survived. Even today, new discoveries were given honorary names in the Xerxian classification system. If he had a dictionary in front of him, Al could decode a fair bit, but off the top of his head, all he could tell was that Armstrong's sentence had two nouns in it.

"Excellent! It shall make for a fine test then!!!" Armstrong's quivering moustache proclaimed. Up close, his speaking voice was so powerful that Al could 'feel' it vibrate all the way through his porcelain side. His cup-self was aware of it as a change in energies only, nothing more, nothing less, but in his mind he could imagine how loud that would have been in his ear. His physical body winced.

Yes. Stay where you are, I'm coming back now.

Al turned his mind's eye away from the teacup back to his proper body. Though he was still acutely aware of the part of himself he'd left behind, like an invisible itch he kept needing to scratch, it was no trouble at all to resume using his real eyes. The cup was too inhuman to focus on for long, and seeing from its perspective had felt like being trapped at the bottom of a well with a very wide mouth. If he had stayed there much longer, he rather felt like he would have drowned.

Al crossed the veranda back to where Armstrong was still hanging over the teacup, and activated the arrays on his palms once more.

"Dum spiro, spero," he said triumphantly, and pressed a hand to the cup to reel back in the part of himself that was waiting. Armstrong's applause echoed like gunshot across the little amphitheater.

"Intriguing," the man rumbled. He hoisted the tiny cup up and cradled it in his hands with a tenderness Al would have sworn such massive fingers could not possess. "Does it matter what manner of thing you attach yourself to?"

"It's easier with things that have an obvious point of view," Al said, trying to think how to explain it. "The closer something is to having a human face, the easier it seems to be for me to see through it. Dolls, statues, things like that, I can sustain control longer."

"And suits of armor as well, I take it?" The man had a peculiar look on his face, a strange mix of recognition and resignation. If anything, it was his lack of shock that was shocking.

"Yes," Al said. He took a deep breath. "Last week, I was able to hold on to one of those armors for almost an hour…even after it went through that array. I saw my brother on the other side."

"Other side of what?"

On the other side of the bruise light, he thought about saying for some reason, but the words were nonsensical. He discarded them quickly. Soul transmutation was utterly exhausting, but he couldn't afford to show that weakness right now.

"The other side of the array," Al said instead. "Where the armors came from. I don't understand the mechanics, but I think that somehow, somebody's figured out an array that actually transports matter from one place to another. When I came through to the other side, we were inside this huge atrium, and there was an array on the floor, an insanely complex one, at least seven points that I could see."

He licked his lips. "I didn't get much time to explore it… the next thing I knew, everyone was shooting."

"Shooting at you!?"

"At my brother. There was a lot of commotion, a lot of uniforms – not ours, I didn't recognize the colors. I picked Ed up with one of the armors." He wrinkled his nose as he realized how strange it must have looked – a hunk of plate metal flailing away like its metal ass was on fire, with Ed hanging on piggyback style. The image felt strangely nostalgic.

"After that, we just…ran."

"And that is everything you remember?"

"Yeah," Al said. "I got him somewhere safe, a bank across a river…and that's something, there was a river! Wherever we were, it was close to a river."

"Did you recognize anything else? Architecture, landmarks, other points of interest?"

Al shook his head. "The buildings were a lot like the historic district in Central, lots of brick, except Central isn't on a river. It was sunset outside, everything was really dusky. If I had pictures I might be able to recognize it, I suppose."

"And have you consulted an atlas?"

"Huh?"

"An atlas, Alphonse. The geography of the known world is well-documented," Armstrong said. He raised one bushy eyebrow. "Would it not be prudent to determine which cities lie upon water? Winnow down the possibilities?"

"I—haven't yet, no." Al's ears burned with embarrassment. Why hadn't he thought of it? Research was supposed to be his forte. He had probably spent half his life in libraries. Every lead about his brother, every new bit of information, he had always tried to treat the way he would an alchemical hypothesis. Collect data, verify, analyze and deconstruct…reassemble into a new whole, a theory based on the knowledge he'd gained. But this past week at home, the only thing he'd been able to think was that he needed to return to Lior, had to get to Lior, above all else. It was not theory, it was fact. Since when had he become so impulsive? When had he ever been so rash?

The arms of the red coat tied around his waist seemed to squeeze even tighter for a moment, and Al shivered despite the blazing heat.

"My first priority was to return to ground zero," Al said. He was aware that he was rationalizing, but that was fine. He could use rational. And there was a good argument for what he had done, he realized, it wasn't that he was jumping to an entirely inappropriate conclusion.

"I want to see the array the terrorists were using before it gets disarmed, and probably classified." And classified higher than his contacts in the government could get him. Higher perhaps than anyone could. He had been through that when he'd researched the original False Rapture. He knew that intelligence had once existed regarding it, because there were multiple documents that referenced 'balloon surveillance photographs' – but when he'd finagled his way into the Central archives, all known copies, along with the negatives, were listed as 'lost' to a suspicious warehouse fire. There were images of that.

"What do you intend to do, if you are able to reconstruct this array?" Armstrong asked. His blue eyes were intense, chips of glacial ice peering out from his craggy face.

"Analyze it, deconstruct it. Rebuild it out in the desert, where it can't hurt anyone. If it is meant to transfer matter between one place and another, maybe I could send a piece of myself through again, try to figure out where the other end comes out. A marionette maybe, something smallish. If there is an enemy line to break through, a tinier body might be better."

"Hm." Armstrong brought one hand up to cup his face, stroked the pad of his thumb along his moustache thoughtfully.

"And supposing your avatar was unable to return, or heaven forbid, destroyed. Do you know what would happen?"

Armstrong dangled the teacup from his other thick hand. It glinted briefly silver in the sun, a product of its glaze finish.

"Was it a correct observation that you deactivated the transmutation you set upon this vessel? Right now, it does not contain your essence."

It was a statement, not a question, and Al nodded.

"I am not versed in the art of soul alchemy," Armstrong said. He lowered the cup to his lap again, still teasing at the edges of his moustache with his thumb, still obviously troubled. "But I observed your brother manipulate your armored form once, before you regained your body."

"You did?"

"Yes. There was an incident in Central, you and your brother had been assaulted. Ironically, by the very same Ishvarite terrorist who became Lior's bane. Edward's automail was torn asunder, and even your vessel was rent in two by his pagan alchemy. In the aftermath, I was assigned the honorable duty of escorting you home to recuperate."

Al nodded, trying to think, searching for resonance somewhere deep down in the murkiness. Rent in two…he could picture being in two places at once, soul transfer allowed him to do that all the time. But to have a part of himself completely missing, an arm or a leg lost and nonfunctional, it was not something he could remotely understand.

"Define 'in two'?"

Armstrong shifted a little.

"Your chest plate had been torn in half, quite nasty business. It was necessary to ship you as cargo. No one could have believed a living person was wearing you. But," he said, reaching up to swipe sweat off the back of his neck, "your brother assured us you would be quite all right…as long as the array that bound you was intact."

He reached into one of his slack's pockets and withdrew a tiny nubbin of chalk, dwarfed by his sausage fingers. Emergency chalk, most likely, not surprising in the least; it had long been a joke that one had only to turn out a man's pockets to identify an alchemist. The alchemist would be the one with old chalks crushed to powder all over the insides of his clothes. Al watched with interest as Armstrong bent down and began to sketch strong, thick lines in the space between them on the bench.

"This was the array your brother used," Armstrong said. "I have never forgotten it."

He moved his hand away to let Al see, and Al's breath caught in his throat.

"Familiar, is it not?"

For safety's sake, Armstrong had not completed the outer circle of the array, but the form was still obvious. A circle containing four isosceles triangles bisecting each other at equal points around a second inner circle, overall arranged like an eight-pointed star. There were no other symbols. A blank slate array, yet somehow he knew it had only ever seen one use.

It was RED, was all he could think. Red like rust seared into a plate of metal, except it wasn't rust, it was blood, and that circle at the center wasn't actually perfect, it had come out more like a squiggle, drawn hastily by a hand whose owner had already been deep in the throes of shock. But that squiggle had been his eye, that squiggle had been his core, and looking down at this gave Al the uncanny terror that if he tried to shift his focus, he would find a part of himself looking back through that little circle even now.

"Alphonse?"

Armstrong was watching him closely, and not at all subtlety, Al realized. A man that size could not just 'happen' to lean into one's personal space without being astonishingly obvious. Al was grateful for his concern though. In the searing noon sun, sweat pouring down his neck and chest, Armstrong smelled vaguely porcine, and just the reek of it was enough to lend gravity to Al's senses again. It was not a pleasant scent, but it was undeniably human.

"…it's like my array," Al summoned his voice. He sounded a good deal steadier than he felt. He wondered if Armstrong could tell. "The components are the same, just arranged differently."

He turned a palm over to compare, traced the embroidery shakily with a finger from the opposing hand. The triangles he had used weren't right triangles, and his array was much more elegant overall, but the process was coded exactly the same – points to all four cardinal domains, fire, earth, wind, and water, with the circle at the center representing ether in both designs. He had designed his blank slate independently, but he had the sickening feeling that were he to replace his array with that other one tomorrow, his soul transfers would work just as well.

"According to your elder brother, your soul itself was affixed with this array," Armstrong said, brushing one a finger along the edge again. "If it had ever been compromised, it would have torn your spirit apart."

"Y-you can't say that for certain," Al said. He had to be logical about this, had to approach it rationally. Analyzing gave him a sense of power, security, it was how he ought to address any problem. "It's never been tested. Ergo, it's never been proved."

"But it has never been disproven, either. And the theory is solid. You were clearly bound specifically to that armor by use of an active array. And now you place 'pieces' of yourself in inanimate objects via the same process. Have you in any way tested what happens if a piece is destroyed?"

"Not…as such, no," Al said, considering. The very idea felt disturbingly distasteful for some reason though. Armstrong spinning the cup with him in it had been bad enough. Trying to imagine being inside something as it shattered made him feel even more ill.

Armstrong frowned.

"By your own admission, you piloted a suit of armor for perhaps one hour's time. But you were unconscious for far longer than that. Might it not be hypothesized that being separated from a piece of your soul had an ill effect on your physical body?"

"It could also have been simple alchemical exhaustion. I've lost control of soul transfers before, but I haven't ever lost a chunk of myself," Al said stubbornly, though privately, his conviction was wavering. Going through that strange array had been the first time he'd ever been substantially separated from a part of himself, and when he had lost his grip on that armor…

I was in the bruise-light, he thought again, and shuddered.

"Are you quite certain?" Armstrong mused, looking down at him. His eyes flicked down to Al's coat, lingered there. "Have you a way to measure before and after? How much soul one begins with, how much soul is left? I ask in the spirit of healthy inquiry, of course you understand."

"Of course," Al said, though he felt his hackles rise. Armstrong's formidable bulk was crowding him, even the man's soft smile felt invasive. "And I recognize your concern. I'm aware I need to test the process more thoroughly. For right now, it is merely one option, and much preferable to the alternative."

He plastered a smile on his face and batted his eyelashes as meekly as possible, though again a deep disquiet reverberated inside him. His master had forbidden him to even mention his soul transfers, let alone experiment with them. And for better or worse, until her passing, he had obeyed. He had obeyed much more in general.

"When I saw you in the plaza, last week," Armstrong continued quietly. "I must confess I was alarmed. You remind me eerily of your brother, though not because you are dressed in his guise."

"I needed access to state files," Al began his usual defense, frustrated. It was logical, it was, if anyone would listen they would surely understand.

"And this means you must emulate him? Run from your family, leave them to worry? The Alphonse Elric I knew longed to be cared for, appreciated the concern adults have for their children!"

"And I'm not him," Al said. His throat felt tight, raw and painful at the admission. "I can't remember being him."

"Have you tried?" Armstrong's volume increased again. His deep voice cascaded out over the little amphitheatre and boomed back in waves, like the crash of the ocean. Incessant, relentless. "I ask you this because all I have seen is your search for your sibling."

He swept a hand out to touch the fiery cloth cradling Al's sides. "Why not search for yourself as well?"

Al's voice froze mid-protest, trapped between rage and sick recognition. It's complicated, he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow even in his own mind. At the core, it was fundamentally simple.

If I find him, I feel like I will find myself.

But why? What about being Ed's brother – the Fullmetal Alchemist's brother – was so intrinsically appealing? He didn't even know his brother as the Fullmetal Alchemist, only that he owed a life debt to him. That for all his fire and temper, he had apparently done great things. That on record it was always the Fullmetal Alchemist, front and center and smiling. If The Armor was even in the picture, it was silent in the background, a great gray shade haunting him. But staring down at his brother's coat now, his brother's pants, his brother's shoes on his feet, for the first time he saw the inescapable truth.

He was clad in human flesh now, but he was still a ghost.

Armstrong rose and picked up both tea cups. Shook his head at them, but smiled at Al, and that was somehow worse.

"You have lost so much of yourself already. Were I you, I would be more careful to hold on to the parts that you still have."

Armstrong retreated back toward the old chapel, still shining like neon, head up, shoulders back, every bulging inch outlandishly, inexorably, himself.

"…yeah," Al said numbly after the man's shadow. "Sometimes, I miss being me too."

Armstrong paused in the shade of the door. He turned around, one hand still holding the knob.

"But Alphonse, all is not terrible," he said, and his smile this time was a thousand and ten watts. "Dum spiro, spero," the man said, spreading his hands up toward the sky, and in that moment, all his statues paled in comparison. "'While there is yet breath in my body, there is hope in my heart.'"

He leveled his gaze at Alphonse, and the warmth in his eyes made even the desert heat pale in its wake.

"Keep aspirating, and you may yet reach your aspirations," Armstrong said. "Just as long as you remember to live in the meantime."

**

After his conversation with Armstrong, it was hard to contemplate doing anything at all restful, let alone sleep, but Al was in Lior and in Lior, the afternoon meant sun-sleep. The time between two and four was the hottest, most dangerous part of the day, and in the desert, the people had adapted to holing up in the shade and dozing to avoid over-exertion in the heat. All businesses shuttered, even canteen sales ceased, and by the time the two 'o clock bell rang out from the city hall bell tower, the streets were almost entirely deserted.

It begged to mind the question, who stayed awake to work the chimes, but Al had bigger mysteries to solve.

Rose and Armstrong were indisposed herding the children to bed, so Al made himself as useful as he could be while sequestered inside. The orphanage library was well stocked with primers and picture books, but its atlases were too simplistic to be of any use for his quest, though he did smile to see A is for Alchemy, one of his own early childhood favorites. He put in a call to his contacts in Central too but unfortunately to no avail – he had forgotten about the two-hour time difference, which meant that it was still noon back west, and while the state itself might disavow religion, there was no sacrament higher among the ranks than the twelve 'o clock lunch hour. After a brief period of sweating, he finally deigned to leave a message coded with as much information as he dared. The on-call lunch secretary didn't seem to be the sharpest point in the array, either, and probably the best he could hope for was that the man had taken his phone number right.

In absence of anything else to do, Al sought out the bathroom, took a shower beneath a showerhead that looked disturbingly like the Armstrong family rose crest. The water was plentiful and cool though, and he showed his appreciation by transmuting a better softener for it. Aquifer water was unfortunately hard, and without added salts it would reek like sulfur and leave skin feeling gritty. Al swapped the sodium in the ion exchanger for a quantity of potassium chloride, which would both result in less environmental damage and be cheaper to be replaced when necessary. Sylvite, natural potassium chloride salts, existed in surfeit in the surrounding desert.

He left the arrays required for replenishing the modified softener taped to its side in the machine closet and then sought out his quarters, having finally exhausted all other options. At least he felt clean, and although his wet hair smelled a little like bad eggs courtesy of the water, it no longer itched with sweat. Al flopped down on the little cot Rose had set up for him and stripped down to his boxers, laid back on the soft sheets, and tried to think of anything at all that wasn't that array.

Four triangles, two circles. Arcana drawn in blood, both major and minor. All assembled together in an eight-point star. He had never seen that particular arrangement before, but the second Armstrong had said it had been his, he had known it was the truth, as true as sylvite and sulfur, as true as the blood rushing through his veins. Al reached into his battered suitcase and pulled out a piece of paper, sketched it absently, ran his fingers over the lines again and again and again.

Was Armstrong right, that he could lose pieces of himself using these arrays? He felt whole. The few times he had lost control of a soul transfer, he had just opened his eyes back in his regular body a couple seconds later, alchemically exhausted but physically all right. Though if he deactivated the array before that happened, he was always far less worn out. That detail was troubling…but correlation didn't equate to causation. It was also highly likely that he lost control because he'd become tired, not necessarily that the tiredness was caused by a rebound reaction. The man had certainly right about one thing – he needed to test this.

Al dragged his thumb idly over the central focus of the star, considering, and that was when the bottom of the world abruptly fell away.

A flash went off in the back of his head, not in front of his eyes but behind his eyes, and all he could see was a brilliant fuzzy splotch of yellow, like he'd just closed his eyes after staring at the sun. Nothing seemed to change whether he opened his eyes or closed them. Al blinked around in panic, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, not even the bed beneath him. He tried to reach out and feel for the sheets, but his arms didn't seem to move.

Maybe I'm inside the paper, he had the sudden, terrified thought. He'd been thinking about testing it, yes, but he hadn't thought he'd actually activated the array - surely he had better control than that! - but if he thought about it, the ceiling over his cot was made of adobe. In the afternoon light, the off-white clay looked yellow.

Think, think, have to think, not panic. It was just a bad transfer, he'd had it happen before when he'd attempted to affix a part of himself to a ceiling. As much as he'd wanted to believe that 'the walls have ears', he'd discovered the human mind rebelled against being trapped in a flat plane. The point of view was too broad, all reference became skewed, and it was easy to panic. Al took a deep mental breath and tried to open the eyes in his true body.

Nothing happened.

He closed his current 'eyes', though the yellow haze remained exactly the same, and concentrated harder, willing himself as hard as he could to shift his view back to his proper self, but once again he looped right back to where he was. It was as if this paper-self was the only self he had. It just didn't just feel like there were two of him.

::but there are, there are two of you::

A voice suddenly inserted itself, like an iron curtain dropping down. It was simply there in his mind, without preface or preamble, spoke with his own mental voice but the words were not his. His train of thought had not just been derailed, it felt hijacked, and Al had the hideous sensation of something crawling all over him, prickling like bug feet, like invisible centipedes crawling inside his brain.

::two of you, or three of you, many of you, many many many many many many MANY::

Each 'many' grew increasingly louder, more distorted, and the voice became Winry's voice, became Armstrong's voice, became a cat's voice, became a crow's. There was something right outside his field of vision, he was convinced now, something just behind him, and it was watching him…

Who are you? He screamed without words, terrified.

::we are myriad, we are nothing, we are one, we are legion::

There was a feeling of great movement just beyond his reach and a deafening yet inaudible toll, a sound like the inverse of a bell. He thought if he ever heard it again, he might go mad.

Let me go, leave me be! Al gibbered, squeezing his eyes closed, willing himself to see nothing, above all else, hear nothing. Armstrong was right, he was coming undone, his mind couldn't exist like this, he should never have tried to transfer his soul into anything, now he was lost –

"…what in God's name are you doing?"

The Other was hanging in the nothing-yellow in front of him, staring back with a curious expression.

It was a dream.

Numb relief washed over him so hard he felt he would be sick from it, but in his dream, apparently he was incapable of physically becoming ill. Al realized he was huddled down (if there was such a thing as 'down', in this place) in a ball, arms clutched around his knees in a fetal position. He had arms, and legs, and toes and fingers too. When he raised his head, he found that it moved.

"You again," he said tiredly to the other boy. "Alfons—Haydrich?"

"Heiderich," the Other said with a faint tinge of annoyance. "My family name is Heiderich." He pronounced the 'ich' with particular flourish, with a hint of an accent Alphonse couldn't place.

Al laughed, low and relieved. At the moment, he couldn't care less if the man's name were Alphonse Is-A-Doody-Face Fandango, so long as it was his voice talking and not that…other one. That voice had felt like it was reaching into his very soul and turning him inside out.

What was wrong with him that he could even imagine that?

"What are you laughing at?" 'Alfons' asked, looking alarmed.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry…I was having the worst dream, before this…" And now he was having the best, because here he was again, here they were – himself and the Other, the person who had claimed to be his brother's friend. Someone Ed had lived with.

Someone who knew that city with a river running through it.

Al bolted to his feet, although the emptiness gave no resistance at all beneath his shoes. If not for his Alfons as his reference point, he wouldn't have reason to believe he were standing up at all. Without the other boy in front of him, he could have just as easily unfolded his legs down and he never would have known the difference.

"Where's Ed?" Al asked eagerly. "Where do the two of you live?" He hadn't gotten an answer the last time they had met like this, and this time around he would not be denied. If he only had the address, the city, the country, something he could work with!

"I-I don't know," Alfons stammered, looking deeply unhappy. There was the briefest impression of a hallway behind him, a heavy door that opened and shut in the ether. "I told you, he left."

Because there had been some kind of confrontation, Al remembered with dark fury. Because apparently you drove him out. The world twisted around them, reacting to his thoughts the way it had before, and that same tableau spread out around them, a darkened hallway, stairs. His brother, lying helpless halfway down them. It was a caricature only though, his brother's golden eyes and hair and then a rough slash where Ed's mouth ought to be, hardly any nose; a cartoonish parody of a person. His face couldn't seem to decide whether it was a child's or a man's either, the jaw line kept wavering around the edges, like a picture show reel caught in the projector, flickering back and forth between frames.

'Alfons' gasped audibly and made a sign like an X in the air in front of his body – some kind of ward? It reminded Al of the Ishvarites' sign of penitence – and as he stared, Ed's features came in to stark relief, one second a preimage, the next a complete photograph. Al gaped himself, amazed by how real Ed was, how much he expected him to jump up and start talking. He could even see slight stains on his brother's shirt lapels. Those details hadn't come from him, of that he was certain.

A wave of hot jealousy spiked through his core and he found himself even more furious with the stranger. His hands clenched into fists. He did not understand the mechanic exactly, but he knew the dream seemed to react to things he pictured in his own mind. That was how he had shown 'Alfons' his research data, all the images he had found of Ed. Presumably also how Alfons had shown him Ed's…'girl', an unfamiliar woman who'd appeared Lioran. But if that was the case, and his brother only resolved when Alfons looked at him…in the language of dreams, did that mean that this stranger knew his brother better than he did now? Al had the maddening feeling it might.

He had to focus though, had to focus. If this was anything like the last dream, there might not be much time. He wanted to snarl about it but Alfons's fight with Ed was not the issue. Ed's whereabouts were.

"What is this place?" Al pushed instead. "Where did you last see him? You owe it to him to tell me, people are trying to find him." This Alfons seemed (rightly so) to feel guilty for having hit his brother. Maybe he would actually answer the question this time.

"…it is our boarding house, in Munich," Alfons whispered. He was visibly paler, clutching at the nape of his shirt like the rough fabric was choking him. Not that he had been robust to begin with. In the yellow light he looked jaundiced, and his skin seemed paper thin. It reminded Al eerily of the cadavers at the state research facilities, of illness and of death.

This is not a well man, he realized for the first time.

"Where?" Al asked again, feeling a twinge of sympathy, but he ineeded/i to know. "Where is Munich? Is there a river there?" Come to think of it, Alfons had mentioned a river the last time he'd seen him. Al had to fight a sense of mounting excitement. This person iwas/i real somewhere, he had to be, too many coincidences were starting to add up.

The floor split behind them, sunk down into a small ghostly parody of the river Al remembered…smooth as glass, just a few drifting leaves to suggest the current might be moving.

"The river Isar," Alfons said, sounding confused. He was staring at the vision with something akin to relief though. Apparently he was glad not to look at Edward's face any longer. "And Munich is in Germany."

"Is that a territory name? Or a colony? I've never heard of it."

"No, it is a nation! My fatherland."

That seemed to hit a nerve. Alfons jerked his head back haughtily and his nostrils flared.

"Sorry," Al said hurriedly, though he wasn't sure why he was apologizing. This person had hit his brother, he reminded himself again, he'd admitted to casting Edward out.

"Where is it in relation to Amestris? Is it in Libya or Asias?"

Al concentrated hard and the river disappeared, replaced by a map hanging in between them – the two great continents of the civilized world in bas relief, northern and southern, with jagged marks roughly apportioning the countries whose boundaries he could best picture. Xing hulking to the east, Drachma looming across the north, the scattered smaller nations to the south and west, Creta, Aerugo. Amestris stood out at the center as a glowing landlocked territory.

Alfons was giving him a strange look now, deeply thoughtful. He reached up as though to touch the map, but his fingers stopped just shy of making contact.

"Amestris…?" Alfons said slowly, as though tasting each syllable on his tongue. "Edward used that name."

"Yes," Al said, hardly daring to breathe. "That is where we're from. My 'fatherland'. Ed's too."

"…it's all true, isn't it?" Alfons asked in a raspy voice. His pale eyes were wide, searching Al's face with quiet amazement. "You're ireal/i."

"Yes," Al said, meeting his gaze as best he could. Alfons had expressed doubt before too, and he hadn't known what to say. "Aren't you?"

"I think so," Alfons said slowly. "Insofar as this is a dream." He tilted his head to one side, appearing to consider, one index finger pressed just to the outside corner of his lips. The effect was so over the top 'THINKING' that Al had to restrain himself from laughing. The man looked like a gangly crane cocking its head over a fishpond, stymied by having a selection. Al had to work to banish the image from his mind before it finished materializing beside Alfons.

"I'm dreaming too," Al offered. "It started out as a nightmare…then I came to be here again, with you."

Alfons's lips twitched down slightly and he frowned. "I was not dreaming of anything else, I do not think. Unless I dreamed the alchemy…" The map between them shifted into the shape of a broom for some reason, then winked out altogether.

"Alchemy!?" Al yelped, darting forward a few steps, hardly able to breathe. Something stopped him before he reached Alfons though. It was as though he were wading into a thick, invisible liquid – the further he went the harder the resistance became, until by the fourth step he couldn't lift his feet at all. Al looked down at his stuck legs in surprise, reached down to try and pull at one with his arms.

Alfons moved forward as well with a curious expression on his face. He took four very deliberate steps before stopping dead himself, cocked his head to the side again.

"We seem to move easier this time," Alfons noted. "But not very far." His tone was clinical, detached, a scientist solidly in observation mode. Al recognized that demeanor well. Sometimes, he even played that part himself.

He was less interested in observing the dream phenomena right now though, not when Alfons had just spoken that tantalizing word.

"What were you saying about alchemy!?" Al pressed again. He let his legs be, concentrated on trying to drill through Alfons's skull with his eyes instead.

"I work for a…society of gentlemen," Alfons said, and was it Al's imagination, or did he seem uncomfortable? He took a shallow little breath, coughed a little before he continued. "Today, they showed me something that I thought was impossible."

The floor beneath them rolled back like a carpet in toward Alfons, then out again in every direction. There were dark circles marked in even intervals across the 'room' they were in now, each a highly ominous shade of black. Like burn marks, or the char from a bad transmutation. And that was their purpose, Al realized with sudden delight, he could see the marks of what was clearly meant to be an array in the circle that was now positioned between them.

"You work for alchemists!?"

Alfons nodded reluctantly. "Apparently this is the case. Apparently…I am one too," he said, and he looked up with a stare so fierce Al nearly laughed again. It was like Alfons expected him to take issue with it.

"You didn't know?" It was unusual, but not inconceivable, that someone could grow up a latent alchemist. Most children were tested by the time they left grade school, but if they were homeschooled, or missed a lot of school for some reason, it was possible to go years without exposure to the discipline. Al had a hard time picturing it himself because he and his brother had had their father's old books; they had read about arrays since the time they were three. By the time his brother was four they'd both already experimented enough to know they had the gift. Not knowing at all was hard to imagine.

"Of course I did not know!" Alfons sputtered. There was color to his skin now, little spots of flustered red on his cheeks. "It is madness. Alchemy is a pseudo-science, no one has taken it seriously for hundreds of years. How could I have been expected to know!"

He seemed legitimately perturbed, a brilliant scowl written all the way across his face. Al blinked. The Ishvarite people disavowed alchemy for religious reasons, of course, but they were at best a 'nation' of nomads. Bush people, whose traditions were immune from modern technology only because of the remoteness of their encampments. Alfons did not look like he was one of the desert peoples. His skin was fair enough to belong to a society girl in Central.

The broom appeared again, spinning in slow circles, and Alfons stared at it with a despondent look on his face.

"Edward told me about alchemy," Alfons said. "When he was drunk sometimes. I thought that he was shell-shocked. The circles never worked when he drew them...the only logical conclusion was that he was ill."

His eyes shone with a sudden brightness and Al shifted uncomfortably. iThis person hurt my brother,/i he reminded himself again, but the rage was increasingly difficult to summon. Alfons seemed to radiate hurt when he spoke about Edward, like he was genuinely penitent. And it wasn't as though he and his brother had never bowled each other over in a fit of pique. When he was nine he had once thrown his brother down a flight of stairs at the Master's house because Ed had absolutely refused to accept that their sparring match was over. He remembered that afterward, he had felt horrible (and not just because the Master had spanked him).

"What do you mean, the circles didn't work?" Al asked, trying to summon objectivity again. Whatever Alfons's feelings were, he needed the information Alfons had even more.

"Just that, they didn't work," Alfons said. He still looked wretched. "Edward did not know why they didn't either. He drew them everywhere, when he thought I wasn't looking. Once, he even drew them on his bed sheets."

A miniature bed appeared between them in the ether and a tiny Edward jerked out of it, looking incredibly disgruntled. As the vision opened its mouth to rail wordlessly, Al realized there was half an array printed on Ed's cheek, traces of the array that was drawn across its pillow. The image was so powerfully, inexorably ibrother/i that Al couldn't keep from laughing for a second.

"He does that sometimes," Al explained, and now the Ed in the vision was six again, looking over at a little Al in the bed they shared with the mark of Mercury stamped across his lower chin. "He gets ideas in the middle of the night, can't wake up enough to find paper to write them down."

Alfons blinked for a second, then slowly, he also grinned, shaking his head a little in exasperation. He had a very nice smile, Al realized for the first time. It was the first time he had ever seen it.

"Well, if it weren't for Miss Gracia – our landlady – he would look like a vagrant all the time," Alfons said. "She says she boils and boils his shirts to get the ink out of them."

"That sounds like him," Al agreed. "The master used to have to bend him over the sink and scrub his face for him when he came in from outside, else people would think he was Ishvarite."

He left out the part where she'd also had to do the same for him. Left to their own devices, the two of them had tended to ignore their appearances. Dirt might even be said to build character.

"Where is your boarding house, anyway?" Al asked again, still smiling at the other man. He focused once more on bringing up a map between them. "On a map, I mean. I'd like to come and look for Ed. We haven't seen each other in two years…we've all missed him here at home. I've missed him."

Hopefully, Edward was missing him too. More than once, it had occurred to him that maybe, just maybe the reason his brother had not turned up so far was that he no longer remembered where home was.

Alfons's smile seemed to falter as he looked at the map again, and his pale eyes flicked back and forth between it and Al.

"I can show you, I think…but…"

A small part of western Asias lit up, in the region the ancients had called Europa. It was slightly north of the infamous boot-shaped peninsula of Aerugo - maybe in the contested part of Creta? Al narrowed his eyes at it, trying to commit the location to memory, when suddenly the map exploded with lines.

Unfamiliar borders raced across the western part of Asias – at least he thought they were borders, but none of them were right. If this was correct, there were at least…thirty, maybe forty territories to old Europa, some so small they were barely even visible next to their neighbors.

"What is this?" Al asked, absolutely befuddled.

"Europe," Alfons said, and his eyes were deeply sad. "The Europe that I know, at least."

"I don't understand," Al said, inhaling sharply, although a horrified part of himself was starting to get an idea.

Alfons shook his head a little, reached one finger out to hover over the ghostly map.

"Edward told me once that he was not part of my 'world'," he said quietly. "I always pretended it was just hyperbole."

Al swallowed thickly, reaching out toward the map as well. There was gibbering at the edges of his hearing again and the world was starting to glow brighter.

Alfons's eyes were glowing as he looked at him now, twin sapphires cutting through the increasing yellow haze.

"But now I think, he was not so crazy," Alfons was saying. "His alchemy, his other world, all of it…"

His face was fading away now, obscured by the increasing light, and Al just barely heard him whisper.

"If he is crazy, then I am crazy now too."

Al opened his mouth to speak, to scream, but the sound seemed to congeal in his lungs. Light poured down his throat, thick enough to feel gelatinous, and something – a hand maybe – invisible and strong swiped fingers along the back of his head.

::now you see, now you see::

A cock's voice, his mother's voice, a million dark things at once crowed in triumph, and then the hand holding him twined hard into the base of his ponytail and jerked hard.

The world exploded in light once more, and then Al saw nothing at all.