SPOILERS for the end of Brotherhood and the manga from here on out. Proceed with caution.

Notes: Alright. This story began just after I read the ending to the manga - which I hated with a burning, fiery passion, for the record. It started out as a sort of stress relief. I'm not a Winry basher, I don't hate Winry, but I hate Ed/Win. And I hate the way that Ed became a housewife at the end of the manga. I hate the babies. And I absolutely, absolutely loathe that Ed lost his alchemy. You have every right to not agree with me, I don't want anyone getting up on their high horse here, because I don't give a shit either way. I am allowed stress relief. I recognize that it was an alright, appropriate ending, but I am allowed to hate it.

Anyway, this started out as something like a joke, but it's evolved into a really angsty, twisted plot that I've sort of come to enjoy. I think it's half-decent, if the wangstiest piece of trash I've ever written. I like it. If you hated the end of the manga/Brotherhood, perhaps it will be cathartic for you, too. If you didn't, if you just want an alright AU - well, I think it's good for that, too.

I was writing this for FMA Big Bang, but I wanted it done, and I had sort of a difficult time, and I just couldn't get it together in time. I'm mostly posting here, now, for more stress relief. Because the FMA fandom in general has been frustrating me lately, and I want to know that there's some people on my side. I have about 20000 words of this piece done - the end is a bit distant, but it's all planned, and I think it's going to be awesome. Expect more in the future. Feedback would be amazing, given that this is still very much a work in progress.

Genre: Angst, Drama, Tragedy

Pairings/Characters: Ed/Winry, Roy/Riza, future one-sided Ed/Roy (this isn't what you're thinking, I promise); Alphonse, Pinako

Warnings: Character death, not-so-explicit sexual content

Enjoy!

Al finds out in a hotel room in Xing, sick and silent over the words of a telegram as the delivery boy waits stock-still and smiling for his tip. But that isn't the first time that he feels it. The first time he feels it, he'd been flirting with a cute waitress in sloppy, Amestrian-tilted Xingan. He can remember urging a stop to the tickling sensation at the back of his brain, the tingling sensation in his fingertips, the blue sparks on the top of the table and – the surging wave of anguish that hits him like a fist in the gut.

He has time to think, I was flirting with a waitress and sipping hot and sour soup when this happened. He has time to think, I finished my meal and I paid her a handsome tip and I pet a stray cat on the way home, and I whistled, I actually fucking whistled –

Before he has to go be sick in the hotel toilet.

Roy finds out in a boring staff meeting. An aide whispers it in his ear like it isn't someone's whole world collapsing in on itself. It feels personal and disgusting to hold it, and it's almost hard to believe that the speaker is still talking with this hanging over him. He doesn't feel it beforehand, no, but he feels it during and afterward, impassive face and burning heart.

He looks out the window and sees a burgeoning world, and he's sick with himself for finishing the staff meeting, but he does it anyway.

The trip through the desert is more torturous than usual, which is saying something. But the desert is a good place to think. Here, the world comes down to the bobbing head of his guide, swimming in and out of focus with the decadent mirages of water cast in the shadows of the dunes. The glaring sun sends his mind just out of focus enough to think back to that cutting feeling of anguish over hot and sour soup. It's strange that he connected it to the telegram, to his brother in anguish a thousand miles away, but the nature of the hurt had been very distinct. Poignant as an aroma in his mind – cinnamon, vanilla, sandalwood, misery – he knows what it is to feel death. Strangely, unusually, as is consistent with the Elric brothers, he also knows what it means for Ed to feel death.

The first time he had truly grieved was at the death of his mother. His grief had been dull and gradual. It built in strange staccato stairsteps over a period of time. The peak was brief, the descent was long. Alphonse hurt, and he knew to recover. This gave him a standard to compare to for the next major death in their lives, after the Incident – maybe it was Nina or maybe it was Hughes, but in either case it was the same. He didn't feel things the same way, not after their gates merged, and it wasn't something he had properly been able to fathom until he'd spent a sleepless night watching Ed in the throes of some nightmare and had felt his sorrow just soar. To an extent, it had been sympathy. But –

Ed felt things deeply and suddenly. Where Al had made a gradual descent down a ravine into despair, Ed dove headfirst off a cliff. The day that they learned Mrs. Hughes was a widow, Al experienced a depth of sorrow that felt a bit like being weighted down at the bottom of a lake, pressure building on top and air escaping. The night that the Colonel burnt a so-called Maria Ross to a so-called crisp, Al had hated more than he ever knew to hate. Hate not just for the Colonel, but for himself. Self-loathing so strong it felt like suicide. His own mentality had kept him grounded, but the very thought that anyone could feel this much left Al horrified in a way he really hadn't remembered –

Until the hot and sour soup. Until the telegram. Al could have drowned in it. But the separation had been evident since the removal of Ed's gate. His joy had been his own, his heart had been his own, his pain had been manageable and tepid. He hadn't felt his brother's love in such a suffocating, magnetic way, and he had been physically able to escape him in a way that hadn't seemed possible since they had run in two different directions in the Resembool fields. He loved Ed. He loved Ed more than there was air in the world, but it was exhausting to share his mind.

But that moment had been a flash to what was, a flash to the earth-shattering quality that Ed's emotions brought forth. It was that more than the telegram that brought him home now, maybe. Because he remembered his mentality, steady and strong-willed. He remembered it keeping him afloat. And it was worrisome to think that – maybe that was what had been keeping Ed afloat, too.

And.

And.

Just how the hell had Ed broken through his gate, anyhow?

Roy picks up the phone four times. He knows Al is in Xing, a week's journey away from Resembool at least. He knows Ed is alone in a pretty little blue-shuttered house on a hill in Resembool.

He also knows he is a coward.

In one corner of the desk, there is a sweet little blue card with a stork on it. It had been signed by everyone in the office. Edward had told them all that – it was going to be a boy. Winry knew and Granny knew and he knew. It was gonna be a boy. So the card was blue.

He thinks back to a week ago, fond and not-so-fond reminiscing over lunch. Because it was strange to all of these adults – strange, and more than a little bit aging – that a boy they had all but fostered since the age of eleven was having a baby boy of his own. It seemed soon, and it was clear that it hadn't quite been planned, but Edward was twenty-four and they had known him for more than half his life and –

"Does that make us grandparents?" Hawkeye had said, eyes bright and laughing over a file folder.

Outrage. Laughter. Edward had always given these things to them.

But he had given them more, too. And Roy had almost forgotten sorrow until he dumped the card into the wastebasket by his desk.

The phone number remains written in hard, black ink on his desk blotter.

Al has never seen Ed's new house in person. He'd seen it in photographs plenty of times, sent bickering letters back and forth about its slipshod construction and questionable color schemes. But the house had been a very, very firm step in a new direction for Ed. Once he'd married the love of his life, he'd re-erected a permanent home for himself, a scant few miles from the ashes of the old one. It was symbolic in a way that Ed didn't acknowledge when he wrote Al letters about the specific shade of blue, Al – just like Winry's eyes, but Alphonse was able to recognize that Ed settling was really, finally, the last step of their years-long voyage.

It's at the crest of a hill. There's a sapling in the yard that has all the promise of a tire-swing tree. The shutters are blue – like Winry's eyes. Fresh with new paint. There's even, he notes, a cheerful welcome mat in front of the blue-painted, gold-accented door. The windows are all very dark.

He feels silly standing there. He feels like he shouldn't have to knock at his own brother's house, but at the same time, this is not familiar. True, it holds the person he loves most within, but that does not make it his home. He doesn't know where the bathroom is or the kitchen is or the little yellow-painted nursery is. He doesn't know the furniture – aside from several things they'd received as wedding presents or nursery gifts. For instance, he'd seen the little white crib that Mustang's office staff had collectively given Winry at her baby shower in Central City. It had a blue canopy, yellow stars.

Winry had cried when she hugged Miss Hawkeye. It seems very far away.

He – lifts his hand to knock. There is only Ed that is familiar behind this door, and he's not sure how familiar Ed will be at this point. It's the consequence of coming home following a tragedy. Not being there makes you feel farther from it. He's not sure he'll really realize the truth until he's steeped in it, in this house that Winry and Ed built together.

He almost knocks again, until he hears heavy footfalls from behind the door and steps back to accommodate it opening. There's a moment between when he hears the gentle thrum of fingers – pa-dum – on the doorknob and when he finds himself face down on the not-so-welcome Welcome! mat, where things go a little bit too fast for him to even comprehend. He runs his tongue over the inside of his teeth, feeling their imprints there, and realizes he's been punched. Hard.

There are bare feet in front of his face, and he tracks up the legs that they're attached to before coming to the rapid rise and fall of a bare chest flecked with metal, framed in mussed gold. His brother. Thin and peaky and –

"You bastard."
A cornflower blue door, hard finality in the pa-dum of the deadbolt lock. Al feels his heartbeat in his cheek.

Roy fucks Riza that night.

It's something they had a go at after the Promised Day. The first night home, Roy hadn't been able to see. He'd still been thinking about the stone, the implications of using the stone, the way that Edward had turned down the stone with such unwavering strength when faced with losing the person he loved most. Roy hated that he wasn't that strong, because he'd known from the moment Marcoh had offered him an escape from the dark that he would fucking well take it.

It was the guilt and the surreal situation combined with the normalcy of his apartment and his life that had done it. Sex with Riza had always seemed something akin to the feeling of that day. Because Riza was home and Riza was comfortable, but sex with Riza was strange and unexpected and –

It had been the end of the world, and Roy Mustang had fucked Riza Hawkeye. It was as good a time as any.

But tonight it isn't about seeing or not seeing or Riza or Roy, it is – it really is just fucking. Happiness is tenuous as the curl of her body and the panting of her breath, as this state of heightened pleasure. But there's nothing tentative or fragile about it, it's hard and heavy, and he doesn't know where the balance is or could be or should be, loving her, treating her like a flower, pounding into her with ruthless abandon until she screams in something like pain and something like pleasure. For Ed, happiness is, had been – this. Worry in his eyes when he looks at her, steady as a tree against the wind for her, far away and close to her. Harsh and soft and so in love it looked like the dawn was breaking in his smile every time he looked at her.

And now she's dead. Roy spills into her and on top of her, and he tries not to think of the significance of all this. How this same act of love had turned into hope had turned into death had turned into Ed alone in a blue-shuttered house on a hill in Resembool. No alchemy, no child, no wife.

In the afterward, stripping off a condom, he doesn't say I love you.

Al is left on Ed's doorstep not knowing what to do again when Granny crests the hill with a wicker basket slung over her arm. She looks tired and unsteady, and Al has never been more happy to see her in his life. He skirts down the edge of Ed's river stone path, stumbling into her so hard he almost sends them both off down the hill. She touches his back tentatively at first, then rubs there. It's – strange. Having Granny here. Because their first tie to her had been their mother's friendship with the Rockbells and Winry's friendship with them. And all of the people that tied them together are dead.

That didn't stop him clinging to her in the shadow of his brother's shattered home.

"Have you been to see him yet?" she says, quiet, into his shoulder.

"He punched me and threw me out." She sags. Al is very much not used to having to hold her up.

"The only thing keeping me sane right now is the fact that that boy can't do alchemy."

A twinge of discomfort, of pain. "He wouldn't try again even if he could, Granny. He knows. He knows by now."
"Oh? You'd think so. I would too. But it was the first thing he did when he saw her the – the last time. He'd gone in to say goodbye, and maybe it was the fact that their little boy – " And there, Granny lets out a sob, which is just so disconcerting that he doesn't know what to do. But she continues before he can do anything, angry and urgent, "He clapped his godforsaken hands like he'd never known pain from it. And for a moment," a kind of enlightened expression passes over her face then, "I thought the brat had actually done it."

Al pulls back a bit, looks at her old, weathered face, cracks traced in tears, and says, "What?"

"He sort of – glowed. The way he did. The way he used to. And he had both his hands on her belly. And the way the light moved – " Another sob. Harder than she'd ever cried at her son and daughter-in-law's funerals, feeling this. She whispered, "It looked like she was breathing."

Alphonse thought back to a crackling at his fingers in a Xingan café.

"I know why you boys thought to do that all those years ago. Because even that moment, where I thought she might be breathing again – "

"Granny… I'm sorry that I wasn't – " Her face changes, and suddenly, that's who she is. Granny. The same stone-faced grandmother who had held her granddaughter's hand through her parents' funeral, who had stopped an eleven-year-old boy from bleeding to death, who had given him a new leg to stand on. Al knows that she won't stop so long as she has people she loves alive, no matter how many others she has to bury.

"No matter. Nothing any of us could have done, no matter what Ed thinks. The placenta ruptured."

You bastard.

"Winry bled out."

You bastard.

"The baby died."

You absolute bastard.

"Now. Let's go see your brother."

As they're cooling in their own sweat, resting peacefully on opposite sides of the bed, Riza says, "I should go back to my apartment. It's not an early train tomorrow, but I'll need to pack."

She doesn't move.

"Are you alright, Roy?"

He sits up slowly, swinging his feet from the bed and resting his elbows on his knees. He cups his head in his hands, hides bleary eyes from the sun. They'd never closed the blinds, and Roy is stark naked in the falling dusk. "This is really absurd. The situation is just utterly ridiculous."

"Roy –"

"You know, I couldn't even call him because I don't think I really believed…"

She shifts, and he feels her breasts pressing against his back, her hands making trailing lines across his shoulders. It's almost obscene talking about this with a woman in his bed. If it hadn't been Riza, he wouldn't be. He feels again the strangeness of being able to share touches like this with her before she says, prodding, "…Believed?"

"That anything else this shitty could happen to him. He's a good kid, he's paid his dues. It's just hard to believe that – after all the good he's done, after all the payment. There's still – more."

"I hate to sound insensitive, but I suppose – that's life, Roy."

"And maybe if his had been standard, but he saved – everyone. Maybe if he were a tailor and his wife died, and his baby died, you'd say, that's tragic. That's a tragedy. But a hero, who gave everything for his country and his people and never asked – anything. Anything in return. Is not meant to watch his wife and child – "

"Roy –"

His voice cracks, "Die."

"It didn't just happen to him," she says quietly. "Both of those boys, their grandmother lost – their best friend. So smart and so pretty and so talented."

"He did." Roy says. "Love her." Riza nods. Unspoken between them: It takes a very special sort of person to love and be loved by Edward Elric and all his eccentricities.

"I can still remember her offering me tea when you were in the next room. Way back when he – wasn't himself. She was so polite but so – she was in love with him already. She was upset. I suppose she imagined he would be there forever. She'd already lost her parents by then…" She sniffs if down, hard and dry. There are no tears. "Such a good girl."

There's silence, and Roy raises his head to look blankly at his bookshelf, halfway across the room. "You see that's why I don't –" he swallows past something thick in his throat. "Those are the ones that always get a happily ever after, Riza. Those are the ones that deserve it."

With her head against his back, hair tickling at the nape of his neck, Roy feels the low, rumbling vibrations when she asks, "…What about the ones like you?"

And Roy is afraid to even think about that.

Al begs off being punched in the face again in a series of vague hand gestures and mumbled excuses. Granny looks disappointed, but tells him that the door to the Rockbell house is open, as always, and he takes off running down the hill. His ears ring and his throat hurts, and he tries to remember hot and sour soup.

He can read more into the chilling emotions of that day now, and tiny threads of realization keep weaving in. His own grief for his best friend also weave in, and he tries to separate the very different threads of their emotions, but it's like picking apart a tapestry.

He thinks. Sparks at his fingertips, tickling at the back of his mind and – Ed hadn't just been at his gate. It wasn't just Ed's emotions trickling through. It had been – a full-fledged attempt to use Al's gate.

Al skids to a stop near the river, still a ways from Granny's (Winry's house, mom, we're going over to play –) house, panting and clutching at his chest. Ed had never seemed to openly, seriously regret his decision to give up alchemy. Sometimes, drawing an array for Al to use, he eyes got a bit distant and he looked a bit wistful but – Al truly believes in their new principle of equivalent exchange. Ed had given up so much but – a flash of a memory, back to the sensationless void of their two gates – he had gained more. He assured them, he had gained more.

Ling is the emperor of Xing now. Roy Mustang is a visionary, a decorated General in line for the Fuhrership. Hawkeye and Armstrong and Breda and Fuery and Falman are with him, learning the new world, feeling themselves out, starting new lives. Havoc is walking. Mei is beautiful and smart. Marcoh and Scar and Miles are reforming the country. And – Al is a happy, restless traveler. The friends that Edward cited at the gate as – the people that allowed him to give up his alchemy with confidence. They're all happy. But they are all happy in separate corners of the world. He had been able to give up a huge piece of himself for the sake of all of them, firm in the knowledge that they would all be there for him when he failed or faltered or –

A very definitive emotion, Al remembers, had plummeted his heart as it'd pushed through his gate – a disgraceful, inexcusable, miserable thread of…loneliness.

Al tries to imagine – Ed without alchemy and without friends, alone in a house that's running with Winry's blood. Al's knees go weak under him, as his mind goes back to the uncomfortable places that it had strayed to sometimes during sleepless nights. When he had appeared in the mutilated body of their not-mother, and he had seen Ed alone and bleeding to death in the basement of their old house. Then, he had been desperate enough to resort to the alchemy that had saved Al's life. And thinking back – maybe it was the loneliness that did it again.

He imagines – a faceless doctor wiping his hands of blood and Granny grief-stricken in the shadows of the door. Ed quiet and pale and hovering over his wife and his love and his best friend and –

Ed bleeding to death and alone and staring at the shapeless piles of Alphonse's clothing and –

Clap. No alchemy. But Ed's resourcefulness knew no bounds, and he had pushed himself through, pushed the ethereal heaviness of Al's door with sheer force of will and solitude.

Al can remember shaking his head, and closing the door himself. It had been such a mild annoyance, a gnat flying in the periphery of his vision, a fly buzzing on the wall, the drone of engines in a Central street – his only brother's last ditch efforts to save his dying wife.

(I win Ed, I get to marry Winry –)

To save Al's best friend. Since as far back as he can remember.

You bastard.

Al finally falls, hard, at the base of a tree, and wonders who exactly he failed worse.

He lingers there for a moment trying to restructure his thoughts into some order that won't hurt him every time he thinks them. When he finds it in him to get up again, he walks briskly home, fiercely determined, and tries not to feel anything. It takes some doing to cut off the periphery of his vision, because it seems like every corner of this countryside holds some phantom of his childhood. He'd known that pain with his mother when annual town festivals came around – carnivals, dances. Hell, Alphonse even remembered their father sometimes, when the house had still been standing. His shadow, his smell, his hands on his back on the old tree swing…

They never changed, small towns didn't. Not really. And it's good, usually, but not after you've lost someone.

Trees grow taller, people get older and die. But it's all the same. Really.

Case and point: the old Rockbell house. Al slows his pace to let his hand skim the old red-painted sign, Rockbell Automail, reverently, and he's almost glad Den had died a few years back, because it might be too much to see that old dog limping around the side of the house and expecting Winry home again.

He remembers how upset she had been. They'd buried the old girl in the back yard. Winry had quietly thanked the little pile of turned earth for being there every time Ed and Al hadn't, and Ed had whispered awkward nothings about wishing he could transmute a grave marker for her. Alphonse hadn't done the honor. He figured it was wrong to take that sort of comfort he wanted to give to Winry and shove the ability his brother had allowed him in his face all at the same time.

His legs give out again when he reaches the inside of the house. Just at entryway, amidst the bloodstains that his brother had left there over ten years ago, before the table where Winry had sat crying, afraid, longing for her mother and father.

Alphonse doesn't know how to reconcile the things he's feeling. His mind flashes between the past and the present and Ed and Winry and – himself. And it's too much to have failed Ed and left him alone, to have failed Winry and let her her die, to have failed the new and fragile life that hadn't been his to fail at all. Too much at the same time to be suffering and to see Ed suffering and to be without the one person that he needs most of all. Deservedly, rightfully without.

The phone sits innocuous in the corner, like it hadn't played some part in this heinous crime either, like it hadn't been the first one to tell him and build him up to be hurt again, crackling static over desert sand – "Pregnant, Al, she's – well no, we didn't plan on it but I'm. Gonna be a dad Al, this is what we always dreamed of. New life. It's – awesome."

He gets to his knees in the entryway (Please, help him – he's gonna bleed to death), puts his hand on the back of a chair to balance himself (You have to take your time, Ed, your leg is gonna fall off if you work it too hard), and finds his feet again (Don't worry Al, you'll get it. It must be hard with no feedback, even automail has a little bit –). The trip to the phone is slow (Two good legs –) and filled with hesitation (- get up -) and he doesn't know quite what he means to do when he gets there (- use them).

He needs help.

(You could become a State Alchemist. Regain what you've lost.)

He dials.

"General Mustang."

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

"Alphonse."

Breathe, breathe, break.

"Please."

Feedback very much appreciated.