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Al’s size, they soon realize, is a problem.
He and his brother still share a bedroom, and even if there's enough space now, there's been no reason for them to change that fact. It’s cozy, and Al likes the big window with the tree outside that scatters the sunrise across the opposite wall. He likes his top bunk, which he claimed in one of his and Ed's boneheaded fights, and he likes to let the ceiling fan lull him to sleep every night.
Suits of armor probably don't belong on the top bunk. He doesn’t even fit on the mattress anymore.
Winry pads up to their room one of those first nights, her feet lighter than a feather. The floorboards don’t whisper a hint of protest. Al sees her out of the corner of his vision and turns his head with a mechanical, empty tug. A barn owl screech ruptures the air, but Al realizes a second later that it was just the sound of metal crying, and he feels the urge to scream.
He takes a fake breath instead (screaming doesn't feel good anymore, and it would worry everyone).
“What’s up, Winry?”
Winry is so much tinier than he’d thought before. She has to crane her neck to look up at him, eyes wide and thoughtful, even though he’s sitting down. This suit once belonged to Daddy. Was he really this tall? Is this what Ed and Al looked like, to him?
“Why aren’t you in your bedroom?” She asks.
Al makes an effort not to fidget and wake everybody up with his creaking, and then he makes an even bigger effort to ignore how wrong the stillness makes him feel.
“I don’t think this body will let me sleep,” he says finally. “I don’t wanna be in our room.”
She purses her lips. “Oh.”
He thinks he’s not supposed to say that the sight of those heavily wrapped, swollen stubs where his brother’s arm and leg used to be are… gross. At least… he thinks it’s probably gross, or disconcerting, or troubling, or however else you might put it. But he isn’t sure. Because he can’t feel his stomach flipping or his head swimming like they usually do, like when Winry lets pill bugs crawl all over her arm. He knows he doesn’t like how Ed’s shirt sleeve rests flat against his side because something is supposed to be there, but it's... difficult somehow, to feel something about it, without his body to cue him in. He just doesn't like it.
He's seen amputees come to the Rockbell's for maintenance before, of course. He just didn't realize it could happen to anybody. To people he knew, like Brother. And he knows he should have learned, when Mom died, that things can be taken like that, but they'd thought it could be fixed.
It's awful to think those things. It’s wrong. Granny is already being too nice for letting him stay now that he’s not a boy anymore, so if she finds out that Al is so ungrateful that he can’t even bring himself to look at what Ed sacrificed for him to still be here, he’s definitely getting kicked out.
“I woke up. I’m gonna go sleep with Ed,” Winry says. She looks at him and waits for permission, as if he is now the bulky Lamassu of their bedroom door.
“Okay,” Al says. He doesn’t think he should speak any more than that, so he doesn’t.
Winry is frighteningly good at pretending not to be freaked out by the armor. Al thinks she thinks it's cool (it's not, but it's better than the way Ed looks at him, with relief). She hops over his colossal legs like she’s crossing a river on stepping stones, then slips into their bedroom without knocking. She doesn’t really look him in the eyes. Al gets it, but it hurts his feelings anyway.
“Winry?” He hears his brother ask softly, his voice alert and untainted by sleep, before the door idly clicks shut and blocks everything out again.
The worst thing so far about being a suit of armor is that he can’t feel his own body. It’s not just that walking feels like floating or that he could probably stuff his entire arm down his throat if he wanted to. It’s that, no matter how logical it would be to break down sobbing in these circumstances, Al can’t even feel the lump in his throat and the pinpricks behind his eyes that are supposed to mean his feelings aren’t a lie.
That image flashes again. The one of his mother, of what they'd created. Al wishes he'd listened when Ed begged him not to look, however selfish it would have been to let Brother carry the burden of being the only one to see it. That lapping slough of her body on the floor, frozen with its hand outstretched, any semblance of life having already fizzled in the time it took for Ed to bring him back, and Al knows he is horrible because the memory still can't make his stomach flip, or his lungs constrict, or his heart drop in horror and regret. All he can think is, why?
Did the components of the body also create a soul? Is that why she'd been reaching out to them? It had seemed like a natural assumption at the time, of course, that their mother would simply return to them fully formed. It was naive of them, but still--that was the scary part, wasn't it? The fact that their intrinsic, instinctual definition of a soul, the very thing that makes a person a person, had included a physical form, and vice versa. The ability to touch and feel. The steady thump of blood through your veins. Soul, mind, body. He hadn't even thought to question whether these were the things that mean you're alive, because the answer already seemed so obvious.
Now, though, he can't stop thinking about it.
He waits about three minutes in still silence before Winry bursts back out of the door, eyes trained forward, and patters back to her room, just as quiet as before.
“Goodnight, Al,” she says, before disappearing behind the door. So much for that. Ed must have pushed her away.
The moonlight, however, is unabated, clinging to the floorboards with stubborn, unfair irreverence. Al really should be crying right now. Or maybe he shouldn’t.
Just how much of your soul is a body? Neurotransmitters trapped in your gut? Lacrimal glands overflowing? He knows the proportions, he's opened a freaking alchemy book before--sulfur, salt, mercury--clearly, they weren't right. Al wants the better numbers, the right percentage. All is one, his brother had said as he connected the stars with his right pointer finger, and Al knows that but it doesn't explain anything (maybe he didn't learn the lesson after all. Maybe Teacher should have just left him there on Yock island).
And then there's Ed, alone in his room on the bottom bunk, the walls crowded with doodles of alchemical notes and structural formulas, now closing in and betraying him. Unable to run, or kick out his stupid brother Al because even though Ed is mean to him he's really too full of excruciating delicacy when he wants to be. So, Al went to take up space in the hallway instead. Ed wouldn't want to see him. He doesn't want to see Ed (he wants to see Ed so badly it could almost hurt).
Granny is too nice, too, letting Al stay here. She doesn’t understand the real implications of the mistake they’ve made, the depravity of what they’ve done. She’d just silently gone to clean the rot from the floors after wrapping Ed’s wounds, leaving them to dissociate on the couch while Winry obediently stayed in her room. She came back an hour later with fresh latex gloves and little red specks defiling her blouse. And he’s so, so grateful to his Granny who was willing to scrub his own guts from the floor and still want to cradle his head in her lap after, but she doesn’t get it, Al thinks. Adults sometimes need to have things explained to them (but he’s selfishly afraid that she’d do the right thing if she really understood).
He leans his head back with a metal groan until he hears it thump softly against the wall. He knows what’s coming—so he’s not startled when he can’t feel it. He raises a fist, and hesitates, afraid someone will see him acting out. Try not to think about it for a second. He drives it into his leg. It makes a heavy thunk, loud enough that Ed can probably hear it. Is that what Al wants, for Ed to come and check on him? But Ed can’t even get out of bed, so maybe Al is so awful that he really just wanted to proclaim, “I’m hurting, it’s your fault, and you can’t help”. So selfish. They share the blame. Someone has to help him. Right?
(Is he hurting? Is this even real? Is there still time for Al to wake up?)
The words of Teacher, the ants on the island, and the sky filled with a graveyard of stars--fast-traveling echos of hydrogen and helium, abandoned wavelengths strewn across the sphere of the cosmos—yes, they all taught them that all is one. And even though Al feels too small and ignorant to justify a crisis of faith, the thrushes won’t be waking up for another few hours and the moon is still hanging low in the sky, so he’s got some time to kill. He knows, really, that he's being unfair. All is one. It answers his hypothesis perfectly, in reality, but it's not the answer Al wants to hear.
But if Al could have been called a good scientist before, it's certainly off the table now. Ed says he wants to get automail and become a State Alchemist, so Al supposes they both just want to play pretend a little longer. Al is good at pretend. He can do it too. Ed’s feelings get so big that someone’ll have to pick up the slack anyway.
So Al sits. And thinks. He takes it apart, folding it and tilting it and examining it from every angle. Dead stars, cats in boxes, snakes that look like hats from the fairy tales Mom used to read them. All is one. Pieces it back together, desperate for some kind of proof that he's not just in Hell right now (Brother would laugh at him for considering it).
Something churns in whatever part of Al’s that he could still call a “heart”, and he finally hears it burning and understands what it wants.
Anger.
Ed sleeps a lot.
It hadn’t been weird, at first. Granny says there are worse ways for a child to cope with a severe trauma like the one they went through. It made sense that Ed was always dozing off in his wheelchair in the summer, his hair falling in curtains low over his face, and it made sense for Al to stand silent and still behind him, casting a long shadow on the grass like a brick wall.
Three years later, Ed is still conking out in the strangest of places. On train rides, both long and short, letting his head bounce against the window as trees flit by in the distance. Under rainy awnings, curled into a ball as Al watches people hurry through their daily commutes. Leaning onto the armrest of the couch in Colonel Mustang’s office, uneasy-but-willing to let Hawkeye keep a subtle watch over him while Havoc and Mustang softly bicker.
Through those in-between moments, Al has learned how to hold himself completely still. He’s learned to let everything disappear, to take in the vast landscapes around him, patchworked, a meal to be savored.
Birds sometimes perch on his chest and fluff their feathers in the reflection of his metal body; Al laughs carefully, motionlessly, and admires them. Word’s gotten around in the bird community, apparently, and now Al is an avian tourist trap. He spends the mornings categorizing his guests with great care: Goldcrests, cardinals, bristlebirds and pseudo-babblers. Lt. Ross says it’s a tender, clinical show of love, one suited for an alchemist.
But sometimes, Al forgets that his brother is next to him. While he keeps vigil and sinks into these moments of peace, every midday nap has, in turn, taught Ed how to muffle his screams in his sleep.
Al can hardly admit it to himself when he looks down and startles at the loose, golden strands of hair sprawling across his leg. How horrible it is of him to forget.
“G’night, Al,” Ed’s voice comes eventually, almost drowned by the sheets rustling as he shifts.
“Night, brother,” Al replies, not taking his eyes off the manuscripts in front of him.
He knows it’s probably a dead-end, but things tend to get a lot more boring when Ed needs to sleep indoors, in a real bed. Al doesn’t think humans are designed to run 24-7, but, well, he makes do.
The room is neat, but not as much as one would expect from an established inn like this one—as if the innkeeper’s nervous daughter who’d brought them waters that evening had been skipping cleaning duty for the past few days. Downstairs, late-night patrons cheer faintly for the unsure pianist who’s been cranking out sterile improvisations for hours. Havoc is likely already asleep in the neighboring room, thanks to the beer he’d been sampling earlier while giving the brothers some dubious relationship advice (Al still paid attention, because one day, he'll have his body back and maybe then he could start thinking about that kind of thing).
Al doesn’t know how long he’s been trying to decipher the faded documents when he hears a huff from the bed.
He turns his head. It’s well-oiled; it doesn’t make a sound.
Ed’s back is towards him, blonde hair splayed over the pillow like a spiderweb. Even from a distance and by only faint lamplight, his shoulders are clearly tensed. Al wants to frown, but there’s no way to output the urge, so it hangs in the darkness like wind chimes on a still afternoon.
“Brother? Are you awake?”
“…Yeah. Stupid music’s too loud.”
Al can barely hear it. He lets the lie pass on without mention.
The bed creaks as Ed wriggles around so they’re facing each other. “How’s the lead?”
“It’s not amounting to much,” Al admits, glancing back towards the array of papers on the desk. “Dr. Nightow’s notation is pretty dense. I think I might be looking at it all wrong.”
It’s a series of simple folktales, unillustrated but written in simple language that even a little kid could understand. They range from Aesops to origin stories, drawing from a wide variety of cultures. Al recognizes a few, though all of them are scattered with minor inconsistencies. That may be the key to unlocking this puzzle, but unfortunately, he’ll have to wait until they're back at Eastern to cross-reference those he isn't familiar with at the library.
Feet hit the floor, one flesh and one metal. Ed half-walks, half-stumbles towards the desk and hooks an arm around one of the unwieldy spikes on Al’s shoulder. “Y’think there’s a significance to this order?”
Al hums at the rearranged pages. “I was wondering if maybe each folktale could be arranged like a phylogenetic tree based on the animal it’s about, but I’m not really seeing anything from that angle.”
“Good idea, though,” Ed says, then pauses. “Hey, Al.”
Al twists his head to look at his brother, lucky his stern metal face won’t betray his concern. “What’s up?”
Ed passes a thumb over his mouth, like he’d caught himself habitually moving to chew on his nail. “Do you ever, like… dream?”
The question catches him a little off guard.
“I don’t really sleep, so no.”
Ed waves a hand. “I don’t necessarily mean the way most people do. It’s just, even if we haven’t figured out why yet, people’ve gotta have dreams for a reason, right? Maybe there’s some way you… subconsciously compensate for that need. Y'know?”
“Huh,” is all Al can say for a moment. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”
“S’not a big deal. I’m just curious,” his brother responds, and it sounds like the truth, but Al’s brain has already caught on the question like a cotton weave stuck on a corner.
“Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had a real dream, but isn’t it just how your brain revisits what you’ve done and thought about recently? Like, reprocessing it?”
Ed slips into the resting scowl he wears when he’s thinking. “Mh, theoretically, maybe.” He throws up a hand, deliberately nonchalant. "In practice it's more like re-traumatizing."
“Just because it doesn’t always help, doesn’t mean it’s not there to help,” Al supplies, his voice low and careful. “Like a fever, or feeling anxious.”
Bodies aren’t perfect, he doesn’t say. It might sound hypocritical, coming from a walking suit of armor.
“Right,” his brother replies, pensive. Al doesn't push him on it.
Wrapped in comfortable silence, they lean over the desk in tandem to scan over the papers again. The words swim and clamber over each other, fighting for Al’s attention: Allerleirauh, Fitcher’s bird, the tamatebako, and Penglai. His gaze slides to the half-open window hanging on the wall like a framed painting, letting faint light filter in through the crepeline curtains.
“Hey,” Ed murmurs, pointing at the story about the snake and the elephant. “This one’s weird.”
Is it? Al hadn’t gotten to it in earnest yet, its simplicity convincing him to push it down the metaphorical queue. He reads it over again, quickly.
There was once an Elephant who wandered through the jungle, admiring the scenery. The other animals in the jungle tended to keep away from her, but one day, a suspicious-looking snake slithered up into the tree under which the Elephant was resting.
“You look lonely,” said the Snake, dangling from the leaves.
The Elephant hardly bothered to disagree, hoping the snake would spend some time with her if she didn’t make a fuss.
“Why don’t you come with me, and we can explore somewhere new together?” Offered the snake.
“I would like that,” said the Elephant, “for I am growing tired of the jungle.”
Because Elephants were not allowed in the city, the Snake swallowed the Elephant whole before slithering onto the roads, carrying the Elephant in a giant bulge on their back. Disguised as a classy fedora, the Elephant and the Snake hitchhiked across the land, observing the humans and animals around them grow older and older until it could no longer be said whether the Elephant was alive or dead.
“What are you thinking, brother?”
Ed frowns and brushes some hair out of his eyes. “This one’s different. All the other stories have a really clear moral, right? Like they were written for kids?”
“Ah!” Al brightens. “You’re right! This one’s a lot more abstract. The other stories all seem like they’re based off of regular folktales, but this one is a little harder to parse. You'd think it's saying you shouldn't be too trusting of strangers, maybe, but... if that were the case, wouldn't the consequences be more clear?"
"Right. But they're not."
"It's almost like the real question in this story is whether or not the Elephant is still alive..."
Al trails off as the pieces finally begin fitting together. "No, of course. That's exactly the question we're supposed to be asking. Because this folktale is really based off--"
“--Schrödinger’s Cat,” Ed cuts in, eyes sparking.
“Hey,” Al complains, “I wanted to say it.”
His brother ignores him with a cheeky grin. “This one’s gotta be the key. You don’t just throw quantum mechanical theory into a folktale anthology on accident.”
“That must be it. It’s the key—literally,” Al says, re-contextualizing the notes scattered before him. They’re all catboxes, he realizes, their realities locked in quantum superposition. Animals disguised as one another, or masquerading as objects. The questions of death and impersonation lingering in each one. That's where all those inconsistencies he'd noticed earlier must be coming from.
He can’t help but glance towards his brother, automail hand perched thoughtfully on his chin, cat-like eyes glimmering in the dark. “But… brother, shouldn’t you be resting? We won’t have time to nap tomorrow, if the Colonel was right about this place.”
Ed deflates, expression a little sheltered by his bangs, but the sigh that falls from his mouth sounds relieved, not upset. “Yeah, probably.”
“It’s okay, I can handle the notes,” Al assuages. “I’m not sure it’ll really have any leads about the Philosopher’s Stone anyway, so you won’t be missing anything important. I can tell you what I’ve figured out when you wake up, okay?”
“Alright,” his brother says softly, fondness in his eyes and a bitter pull to his mouth. Al knows, no matter how much he tries to keep it to himself, that Ed hates leaving him awake all night almost as much as he hates sleeping alone. “Night, Al.”
“Sweet dreams.”
He hopes the faint city bustle from outside will lull his brother into something like that. Sweet dreams. If he could, he would take on the burden of every one of Ed’s nightmares, and he wouldn’t even complain. Maybe they could even remind him what it feels like to scream until he runs out of breath, or to feel blood pumping through the veins in his neck, or to vomit at the memory of the worst things they've seen. Remind him of the stench of rotting hair. He used to think Ed hated him for not being so raw. Maybe Ed should have hated him. Maybe Al deserves to be more haunted than a ghost in a suit of armor already is.
Is it cruel to think that way? To think after his brother's suffering with envy? Al swallows the wish with a superfluous, shuddering sigh, distorted by the echo of his armor. He’s not gonna get anywhere with these notes by worrying about what he does and doesn’t deserve. It's a question with no objectivity, no hidden truth. The papers rustle and whisper as he begins to trace his gloved fingers over an array. Only the papers hold answers.
He spends the rest of the night counting every treasure box in every story, poking holes into their wooden sides and imagining their contents, piece by fragmented piece, like knitting rows of purls, or like sheep leaping over fences in an organized queue.
One winter day, as the sun breaks through the clouds and casts spasmodic blurs of light on the brick street, Ed’s voice comes unexpectedly from where Al’s been piggybacking him for the last hour.
“Sometimes I think I don’t deserve you, Al,” he confesses, softly kicking his automail leg. “You’re the best little brother in the goddamn world.”
Al cranes back to see a small smile on his brother’s face, eyes scanning the passerby. He can see the red of Ed's sleeves from the corner of his eye where they're wrapped around his neck guard.
He hates knowing Ed would have given everything away to put Al in this body that can't even smile back, hoping his brother won't realize that every breath Al takes is merely play-acting at humanity.
Instead of letting it fester, Al inclines his head, bashful and thankful, like a prayer in the way that sometimes alchemy is like a prayer.
(He'd asked Mom once what she thought about God after reading about it in a book. Some people said he and Ed had gotten their smarts from their father, but it wasn't true. Mom was the wisest person Al's ever known. She told him God is less one being or universal truth, and more like a promise made to you, that it's like alchemy, and you have to find out yourself what that promise is. Al wishes he could have just five more minutes with her, so he could ask her more questions. The stuff that you can only answer with memories, not books.)
There's no such thing as understanding someone without effort, not even between brothers. Al has to work to be heard. So he puts the words together: "It's not about deserving, Brother. You're stuck with me and I'm stuck with you."
Or--no, that was mean, wasn't it? He didn't mean it that way. Al tries to correct, but he's interrupted when Ed lets out an extremely un-contemplative snort. "Guess so!"
There's no such thing as perfect understanding, but it's not like that means everyone has to run around in the dark. Brother grins wide and toothy like he used to when they were younger. Stumbling over smooth rocks in the shallow part of the river and letting dragonflies nip at their legs. If Al closes his eyes and makes the world around him disappear, he could be six years old again; breeze on his face, white t-shirt, hand-me-down shorts.
But Ed is smiling as if it doesn’t matter, like six and fourteen are all the same and completely opposite at the same time. Al readjusts carefully, his joints squeaking, and keeps walking.
(One day, Ed will say those words again, and Al will be able to laugh, and hug his brother without a word. Even a hand on his shoulder would be enough. One day, he'll remember what it feels like--the box will be open, and Al knows he'll climb out of it alive.)