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c-is-for-circinate · 5 years ago

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inauspicious-augury replied to your post: Fuck it, today has been confusing and annoying and...

Listen, I’m always down for FMA related anything

Let’s talk about the Ed-in-Ishval AU, then. Let’s talk about Edward Elric, with all his stubbornness and certainty and impossible furious morals, sixteen years old in the middle of hell on Earth. (Or at least, let’s talk about the path that gets him there, because it’s a long one and there’s more of this story yet to go).

Ed is born seven and a half years early. Van Hohenheim leaves Resembool a couple of years late. Nothing else changes, except in reaction to those two things--so everything changes.

Edward Elric is stubborn and fierce and golden and brilliant, and until he’s almost nine, he’s also alone. He learns everything he can get his hands around, everything his mother can teach him, everything every adult in town can teach him, following everyone and asking questions until nobody can answer any more. He reads every single book in his father’s study that his hands can reach, and learns to turn the floor into stepstools to reach for more, and he learns, and he learns, and he learns.

Al is born when Ed is eight and a half, and Ed loves him instantly, wholeheartedly, with everything inside of him. Hohenheim isn’t there when it happens--off on another one of his mystery trips that he never explains no matter how much Ed asks. Ed holds his younger brother before anybody else, before even his mother, because Sara Rockbell doesn’t quite manage to stop him sneaking in the door to the room in time. His father doesn’t meet Al for another week and a half. Ed spends every second of that time doting on his tiny miracle little brother, on his glowing tired miracle mother.

Ed’s mother keeps her house alone for three weeks out of every five. His brother learns to sit, and then to stand, to hold things, to talk, to think, and Hohenheim is gone for so much of it. Ed understands so much about the world, but there are things he still doesn’t get, mysteries he already resents for eluding him, and his father is the biggest mystery of all. Hohenheim answers no questions, not ever, not about alchemy and not about where he goes, what could possibly be more important than this. Hohenheim watches this boy with eyes and hair like every dead soul from Xerxes, with alchemy sparking from his fingertips, with his ravenous hunger for knowledge and his bone-deep entitlement to every answer, his little boy’s surety and hubris, and is so very, very afraid for his child.

Ed runs away for the first time when he’s twelve, when he’s read every single book in his father’s study, even the ones on the topmost shelves, even the ones hidden behind locks that he has to transmute away, even the ones written in code so intricate it takes him weeks to break. He kisses his brother and promises to write (Al is three, almost four, it’s more than old enough to be reading and learning and starting to figure out alchemical code), and leaves his mother a note. He doesn’t say a word to his father, who’s been gone for a week and a half and won’t be home for another two, and doesn’t matter anyway. He spends four weeks on his own in the back country of Amestris chasing down rumors of a woman who can kill bears with her two hands and does alchemy without even a transmutation circle. Izumi Curtis finds him on her doorstep, grinning and alone. She keeps him for six months before Van Hohenheim shows up at that same door with a look of granite annoyance. Ed would stay, anyway, if Izumi didn’t throw him out face-first in the dirt outside her house to send him back to his mother. He’d stay even then, find his own way, learn more and more and more, convince Teacher to take him back, but Hohenheim is still so much taller than him and his hand on Ed’s shoulder is a vise. Ed’s learned enough from Teacher to throw him off, but--not skills to use on his father. Not that. Hohenheim drags Ed all the way back to Resembool, never mind that he’d had plans, that the Dwarf in the Flask’s plans are drawing ever closer to completion, that he wants so badly to age and die. Trisha has a cough that rattles deep in her lungs when he gets back, something it takes more power than Hohenheim ever would have predicted to heal entirely. Clearly it’s not safe to leave entirely. Not quite yet.

Al grows up toddling after his big brother, reading every book Ed pours through and then passes over, as devoted and beloved as any younger brother has ever been in the world. He and Winry are thick as thieves, Winry who’s too smart for the other kids in town too, Winry whose mother and father used to babysit Ed back when they were teenagers and expect him to return the favor. Ed in all his skinny teenage gangliness roams around Resembool and its outskirts with a pair of toddlers who become small children who become older children, following him like ducklings the whole way. He doesn’t bother with the books in his father’s study any more, mostly, except to answer Al and Winry’s questions, to teach them whatever he happens to know about alchemy and engineering and metal, to answer every single question that nobody would ever answer for him when he was small. He teaches himself, instead, tests and experiments, tries and tries again and learns, and learns, and learns. Al grows up with a treehouse just outside his home that his father tried to build by hand, ten years before he was born, that his brother fixed and enhanced and decorated with alchemy in ridiculous wooden gargoyles and spikes a few years after. He hides there, sometimes, when he comes home and Ed and Father are shouting again. Ed shouts at everything in the world except for Al and Mama, and Father never shouts at anything at all except for Ed. It should mean that Al would be able to get in between them, to make them stop, but he hasn’t figured out the magic words yet. And maybe he shouldn’t have to. Mama says it’s not his job, that Father and Ed are just too similar, that it’s up to them to figure that out. Al thinks she’s probably right, but he’s allowed to be annoyed about it.

The second time Ed leaves, he’s sixteen and Al is eight, and this time Hohenheim isn’t the one to bring him back.

They scream at each other before they go. Ed wants more, he has always wanted more, he has spent his whole life starving. His mother has filled his every plate with oatmeal and stew and warmth and let him gorge himself on all of it, and she’s loved him, and he’s grown, just like a parent and child are supposed to do. His father has refused his questions at every single turn and left him to scrounge for every scrap of knowledge he’s found. So be it. He’ll go off and find what he’s looking for on his own. His father tries to stop him with strong words and non-answers, yet more non-answers. “There are things you’re too young and foolish to even realize you don’t want to know!”, he thunders, and Ed growls at him with glinting, golden Xerxian eyes. His mother cries, and it almost makes him stay. “Promise me you’ll come back,” she says. “Promise me you’ll find what you’re looking for and make it back to me.”

Six months later, when Hohenheim leaves, it’s for good. He’s spent too many years already trying to temper his intemperate son, and there’s no helping him now. Al clings to his mother’s side, and she pets his hair and keeps him close, as days turn into weeks into months for both of them. “There’s no keeping either of them, when they want to go,” she murmurs. “But we’ll be here when they get back.”

Ed Elric, sixteen years old and so sure of himself, so very very sure, takes a train to Central and walks into the State Alchemist examination as the youngest test-taker in history. If his father won’t teach him, then there are other experts. There are other libraries. He’ll find the best. There’s no risk in it, he knows, not for him. He is smarter, faster, more powerful in his art than anyone he’s ever met besides Teacher. He’s too good to waste on the front lines. He’ll show them, and they’ll put him in a lab somewhere, to scour ancient tomes and try experiment after experiment, to unfold every alchemical secret the world has to hold. He transmutes a dozen different substances in his practical display, rock and wood, glass and ice and coal and air. He moves from one to the other without a breath, without a blink, as graceful as a dancer, sketching arrays in the blink of an eye and daring the examiners to toss him anything more. He’s as hungry as Gluttony, in his own way, as possessive as Greed, as prideful as Pride. He’ll do, the test proctors report to their Fuhrer, Wrath reports to his siblings, to his Father. He’ll do.

The Quicksilver Alchemist shows up at Ishval Command sixteen years old and skinny, with a too-big uniform and an annoyed glare for the whole endeavor. "I’m not a soldier, I’m an alchemist,” he complains to anyone who’ll listen. It is strange, Roy thinks, to have Elric here. Not a scrap of him is military. State Alchemists are given honorary rank, but most of the ones here so far have basic training and a legitimate military career to go with it. Why Elric? Why not set him to work in some lab, the way he clearly wants? He can transmute anything, the rumors say, any substance he’s handed. He’s been researching cells and biochemistry: how to turn carbon and phosphorous and nitrates and water from base materials into plants, into meat, into food. They call him Quicksilver because he shifts from one material to the next, one array to another, without a single blink as fast as it would take any other alchemist to find the right page in their own journals. What is that worth right now, right here? It’s 1908. The Ishvalan rebel forces are supposedly on the verge of surrender, say the half of the rumors that don’t have them overtaking the entire East in another month. The war’s been raging back and forth for almost seven years, but it’s possible. Maybe, Roy thinks, Quicksilver will get lucky. Maybe he’s just young enough to’ve missed the worst of it already. Maybe he won’t have nightmares about deserts.

Ed doesn’t fit in with the military alchemists, which it takes him about half an hour to decide is fine by him. Grand and Comanche, who can barely transmute anything that isn’t metal at all, watch him with sheer disdain. Major Armstrong gives him a big, beaming smile of encouragement and regales him for an hour with stories of Armstrong warrior-alchemists throughout the past four centuries. Major Kimblee just watches him, quiet and considering and smiling. It’s creepy as all fuck, but as far as Ed can tell, that’s how Kimblee watches everything. Kimblee and Mustang are the only ones here whose alchemy is interesting enough to catch Ed’s attention for more than a few seconds anyway. Talking to Kimblee for more than five minutes makes Ed’s skin crawl. Mustang just smiles, smug and enigmatic, and won’t talk about the secrets of flame alchemy at all, which just fucking figures. Ed can handle alone, though. He’s been alone most of his life. He writes Al, and his mother, and Winry. He scribbles pages full of theories and ideas. When Comanche and Grand sneer in his general direction, Ed sneers right back.

Lonely is easy. Bored, though...bored is hard. Ed managed to squeeze three alchemy texts into his belongings besides his personal notes, which was two more than the orders sending him here suggested he’d have space to bring. They’re the densest and most complicated-looking ones he could find in the week he had to pack, and he has the first one cracked before his train even delivers him to the Ishvalan front. He’s not a soldier, is the problem, and his new CO knows it, which means they’re not about to send him on missions like one. Defend the encampment if insurgents attack, sure, Ed’s ready to do that, but what does he know about ferreting individual terrorist cells out of Ishvalan hidey-holes? So far his only orders have been to wait. Fuck that, Ed figures. Waiting isn’t exactly his game.

They’re stationed on the outskirts of a town five times the size of Resembool, on the edge of an orchard of date palms, where the whole horizon to the north and east is pale and flat with sand. It’s one of the first places the Amestrian army took in the whole action, and it’s been subdued and cowed over and over again for seven years. There are two bars where soldiers cluster and drink and sing, one for enlisted troops and one for officers. There’s a house near the edge of town with no sign over the doorway where soldiers sometimes disappear, on leave, for an hour or four at a time; it takes Ed an embarrassing two weeks to realize it’s a brothel. There are a handful of empty shopfronts down the main street of town, where soldiers don’t buy candles or sandals or childrens’ toys the way the town’s old residents used to, and an open-air market full of cloth-tented stalls where Ishvallans still try to sell fresh fruit and goat’s milk cheese and get by. It takes all of two days and a half before Ed slips out from the neat rows of soldiers’ tents in camp and loses himself, as fast as possible, in the clay tile and brick streets of the city. If he can’t learn from books or the other alchemists around him--and he’s had years of that, years of finding ways to make his own lessons--he’ll find something else to challenge him. The alleys are narrow and the houses are packed close together, nothing like Resembool or Dublith or Central or anywhere he’s ever lived. He’s got chalk in his pocket and all the hand-to-hand Teacher ever taught him, a white cloak over his stupid blue uniform, reflexes and a brain. He’ll be fine.

This is what Ed learns, then, in his first three months in Ishval: The taste of pomegranates, sharp and sweet and juicy-red enough to drip down his chin and stain white robes much too brightly for blood until he figures out the right array to bleach it away again. Three different alleyway games played by children even younger and smaller than his brother, who don’t mind giggling and chasing around a blonde grownup who brings his own chalk for hopscotch and somehow always loses. The quickest way to cross four miles of desert in the middle of the night to surprise Yuiry and Sara in their clinic, and hang around fixing equipment and transmuting scrap metal back into usable ingots for new automail, and chat about home until they kick him out and he has to hightail it back to camp before dawn roll call again. What the stars look like, and the moon, in the widest sky he’s ever seen, in a place where clouds don’t form and it never rains.

He doesn’t kill. Three months in Ishval, and Ed doesn’t make one single kill. He’s been on a handful of missions--patrol this secured area, establish that new outpost--all of them stupid and make-work, all of them pointless. He wanders around the desert and scrapes lines in the sand with a stick to do basic construction because outposts and guard towers are annoying to build by hand. For this they dragged him out of the library in Central. They call it the front lines, but as far as Ed’s seen, ninety percent of the time it’s just a glorified camping trip. The other ten percent of the time is bad, sometimes. He’s there when Cooper gets shot in the shoulder by an enemy sniper. When Sayers falls asleep on watch, and a handful of Ishvalans almost overrun Outpost 37 in the middle of the night. When the bloody, straggling remains of Captain Hughes’s team make it back to camp, two days late and missing three soldiers. But... But Warren has pressure on Cooper’s shoulder in seconds, and Ed has a twenty-foot-high wall of sand between them in their attacker just as fast, and then another shot rings out from the guard tower behind them and Sergeant Hawkeye drops the other sniper anyway. But he hates trying to sleep on overnight missions at Outpost 37 even more than he hates trying to sleep back at main camp, where there are at least a few raw materials that can be transmuted into something softer than solid rock under a paper-thin bedroll, and so do half the men stationed there, so everyone woke up before anyone died and most of the Ishvalans got away. But General Fessler doesn’t put Ed on missions like Captain Hughes or Major Mustang, because he knows better. Because Ed isn’t a soldier.

And Ed simmers, and Roy watches him, and Maes watches him, because who the hell puts a civilian kid like that in a place like this? Roy’s been a state alchemist for three years. He’s been in Ishval for two. Every day, he wakes up in a world that’s hot and dry and empty as far as the eye can see through to the horizon, and hopes that maybe there won’t be another mission today. Another knot of insurgents to flush out and fry, and try to avoid looking in their eyes, and try to avoid recognizing how skinny, how young, how desperate they all look. Another chance for those young desperate rebels to put a bullet through good men and women Roy’s spent two years fighting and serving and living shoulder-to-shoulder with. It all seemed so straightforward two years ago. They’re tired. They aren’t losing, but they’re not winning, either, and there’s news of fighting halfway throughout the East, and maybe the war just won’t ever end. “It will,” Maes says, and then he gushes about his Gracia some more. To Mustang, who can be goaded into a smile if he works hard enough at it. To Hawkeye, who can’t, but who sometimes relaxes her shoulders just that little bit and gets the twinkle in her eye that means she’s laughing on the inside. To Elric, who’s a kid out here in the middle of the desert, stuck on the world’s most fucked-up extended camping trip in the most extreme game of high-stakes tag ever. Elric’s a good kid. It’s worth trying to be there, to keep him from cracking. It’s worth protecting him from what happens to deserters. It’s worth trying to ease him into the slow discovery that war is always filthy, trying to show him how to keep a little piece of his soul clean even surrounded by blood in the sand.

Ed respects Captain Hughes, who’s willing to try him at hand-to-hand and doesn’t even always lose, in spite of Ed pulling out every move he ever learned from Teacher. He respects Sergeant Hawkeye, who pulls him aside and teaches him poker before he can get sharked at the Lieutenants’ weekly game. He even respects Major Mustang, who’s just as smug as ever even now that Ed’s figured out how to goad him out of his silence into argument after argument, daring Ed to try and figure out his array with every challenging smirk. Hughes brings his teams home bedraggled but more alive than dead again and again, and Ed doesn’t know what they do while they’re gone, but he knows Hughes’ only goal is to make it home alive again, and that’s fair, right? Ed can respect that. Hawkeye takes every single shot perfect and clean, like a hunter who doesn’t want their prey to suffer, and every single one of those shots goes through a human head, but that’s how war works, right? Amestrian soldiers survive when she watches their backs, and nobody she hits ends up screaming and dying in agony on Sara and Yuiry’s operating tables, and maybe that’s actually mercy. He’s never seen Mustang use his array in a battle. He’s seen scorch marks, precise and controlled and exact, and black-burnt corpses, but he’s never seen any sign of collateral damage. A weaker alchemist might let flames run wild, but Mustang never hurts anyone or anything he doesn’t mean to, and that’s better, right? That shows he has honor, or something, that he has a code and standards. He won’t even let Ed have the secrets of flame alchemy without proving he can handle them by figuring them out himself, and right, that’s how it should be, that’s what’s right, and it’s fine. It’s all just fine.

(And maybe Ed has nightmares sometimes, after he’s made it back to camp with an hour or two to spare for sleep after visiting Sara and Yuiry, nightmares about blood and moans of pain and seeing people he knows on those clinic cots, but-- And maybe he wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes, sure he’s heard another Ishvalan infiltration team creeping their way into camp, but-- And maybe he wonders sometimes, if he could kill, if he can, if he’ll be able to when he has to, if eventually he’ll have to, but--)

It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.

Three months in, Fessler and Comanche are standing outside near the Command tent, Comanche looking even more self-satisfied and disdainful in Ed’s general direction than usual. “Not looking forward to dealing with more useless civilians like Quicksilver there,” General Fessler says, and Ed rolls his eyes right back. “Ah, who cares, sir?” Comanche asks. “They’re finally taking the shackles off and using us right. We’ll have the rats cleared out in no time.”

It’s 1908. Ed is 17, barely, just a few days past his birthday, skinny and stubborn and much, much, much too smart, and the sky is wide and bleached pale blue, and the sands of Ishval are still golden and white instead of red. For now. But it’s 1908, and order 3066 came down this morning, and nothing is ever, ever going to be fine again.

#inauspicious-augury #c writes stuff #fullmetal alchemist

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egotisticle · 5 years ago

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@defectiveanarchy: “T̵h'҉ d͢ark wa̢s҉ h͏u͜n͝g͡ry̡. Th' dark is always d̷e͟v̶o̶u҉r͏i̕n̢'. Even th' dark needs things ta eat, th̷i͡ngs̡ ͘t̸a̡ ̸lơv҉è." There is now SILENCE between them before he's to turn to him with an impassive gaze. "Do ye know who i am? Or are ye only lo͕̙̗o̲̘ki̳̪͙̣n̯̭̠̙g̥͇͔̪ ̫̼̱͎̙̥̳i̮̘͔̣n͇̖̼ ̗t͓͎͙̰̤̭̖he͇ ̭̯͍͚̼̻̩m̯̭͉̬i̖͉͕͕̠̺͍r̞̯̱r̜̬̰̻o͇͓̝͙̗̺r̖?"

MABEL prompt ✘

WITH UNCHARACTERISTIC and inexplicable insouciance did the virus meet his eye, incongruously absent of the volatility that the suited entity associated with the other and instead with a stoicism that exacerbated a pronounced sense of discomfort. Anomalous unfamiliarity aroused a bout of tetchiness and didn't sit well with him, not after expectations had already long since been solidified and concrete judgments had been entrenched to an inexorable degree. The confrontation seemed to be chillingly portentous, an inauspicious augury that had taken the form of his long-established rival and spoke without churlish profanity through the ripped edges of reality; it would have been an abnormal circumstance indeed but at least its peculiar intricacies could be unravelled and comprehended with a lucid mind.

As it was, save for the familiar features and the glitch-laden lilt, the being scarcely recognized his callous counterpart at all.

( THE ONLY ME IS ME. ARE YOU SURE THE ONLY YOU IS YOU ? )

❝ You and I are not the same. ❞ Refined poise succumbed to a flicker of conspicuous protest, stature lapsing with jarring results and transiently warping its definition; the brief but telling visual betrayed the conviction in his tone, a glimpse into the crack that had begun to manifest on his veneer of equanimity. Incertitude had already cost him the opportunity to immediately try and coerce the glitch into a state of acquiescence but another window would open in due time. ❝ Not entirely. I used to think that I knew who you were, who I was, but as of recently, I confess myself to be unsure. ❞

Although it was a modest concession, refutation didn't come easily when the other's commentary carried enough veracity to its word. What had been said of the darkness' voracity wasn't untrue: nothing was exempt from consumption, judiciously delivering all from the light. So few could understand the darkness as he could and yet, Anti was never one to show fear in its presence -- even when its claws fit themselves around the glitch's neck and seeped through the open wound, even when it threaded together to keep him in bondage with blossoming roses.

The mention of love, however, impelled a phantom ache in his chest that caused the entirety of his form to violently ripple. Genuine sentimentality was an alien concept, a notion too radical for him to habitually consider and volunteer for its trial. Saccharine suasion or honeyed inveiglement were well-rehearsed and familiar but never could he fathom earnest affection spouting forth from the barren wasteland of his apathy, much less for someone that had known the brunt of his derision over the years. They had been defined by their differences for so long that they had willingly blinded themselves to their underlying similarities -- but no more.

( DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME ? MAYBE YOU DO, MAYBE YOU ALWAYS HAVE . )

❝ The two of us ---- we've always hungered for more, haven't we? ❞ Private epiphany and his sheer avidity tore again at his appearance as a few steps forward further diminished the distance between them, compromising its integrity and furthering its instability. The comparison between him and the glitch couldn't have been any more disparate but somehow, they still existed in equilibrium -- calm and unhinged, rational and emotional; they could play both parts interchangeably to a masterful degree. ❝ The world was never enough.❞

( PERHAPS THEY WERE ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE MIRROR: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS & DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE ! )

Ashen fingers lifted to fit itself along the side of the glitch’s throat, tenderly thumbing over the torn edges of the open wound as their grip firmed into the surrounding flesh and guided Anti closer. He kept them just shy of their mouths, shy of a TORRID kiss as another wave of visual turbulence .overcame him -- ( emotions could not be censored ). The subsequent conclusion was spoken directly onto the other’s lips, its taste already beginning to settle and whetting his appetite for more as starved shadows started to envelop them both. They had known its truth for a long time, even before they had come to terms with it themselves.

❝ We've always deserved each other. ❞

#defectiveanarchy #┊♚┊ − ❛ ᵃᶰˢʷᵉʳᵉᵈ ❜#┊♚┊ − re: ❛ ᵐᵉᵐᵉˢ ❜#┊♚┊ V; i. MAIN #┊♚┊ − dyn. ❛ ᵈᵉᶠᵉᶜᵗᶦᵛᵉᵃⁿᵃʳᶜʰʸ ❜ / ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ's ʙᴇᴀᴜᴛʏ ᴀɴᴅ ʙᴀʟᴀɴᴄᴇ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀ ᴡɪᴛʜɪɴ ᴜs #long post for ts #((sees my opportunity for a glitchy dark and calm anti and takes it))

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