Agapē - Prologue
Fiction: Agapē
Author: Kallianah apocryphal_muse
Pairing: Edward/Alphonse (implied Winry/Sheska and Roy+Riza)
Genre: A bit of adventure, a bit of romance, possibly all insanity.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: explicit sexual content, situational dubcon, spoilers up to and including the movie, artistic license, violence, AU(ish)
Summary: Edward and Alphonse Elric do what it takes to find their way home.
Notes: Special thanks to my lovely, lovely beta and longtime friend mieu



Prologue


Munich - November 9, 1923 A.D.


Lifeless doppelganger; Al crouched over the corpse with his fist pressed hard over his mouth. His memories crept back at debilitating crawl, and for moments he could do nothing but stare in horrification.

Tears welled up in his throat but he could not cry. His burgeoning memories did not let him cry.

-- trapped in that unspecific dark, sounding hollow though he has no ears to hear with --

"Who is he, brother?" Al could hear his voice shaking. The men who had gathered were beginning to speak amongst themselves, hushed, making warding motions.

"Alfons Heidrich," Ed said. Al wanted his brother to touch him, to press a hand reassuringly to his shoulder, but the touch never came. Ed was staring at Heidrich with a resigned expression.

-- the sound of sand on his faceplate, a hundred thousand tiny bullets of earth pinging against metal flesh; a hundred thousand tiny dull echoes that reminded him of his inhumanity. Ed's automail fingers scrabbled for purchase at his breast plate, and Al folded his arms into a shelter around his brother --

Al dug his teeth into his knuckles. It was like looking at himself in a skewed, terrible mirror. Too peaceful, too pale and sickly, no life at all to the gentle swell of parted lips. No breath where there should be.

"Noah?" Ed asked, rooted at Al's shoulder. The woman with liquid eyes looked up at them, tear-streaked and bloody, and smiled.

"He died in my arms with a smile. I sang to him to sleep," she said, her voice like pastel colors that slid over Al‘s skin.

-- Ed stretched out over the bed with one hand flung wantonly over his brow, shirt unbuttoned and coat bunched beneath his head. A book is nestled at his side, pages bunched up --

Al slid his hands up over his face and shook his head. "Why have so many people died?"

-- Ed bent low over the corpse of a young Ishbal girl lying face down on in the sand, automail hand framing the span between her malnourished shoulders --

The man who looked too painfully like Maes Hughes said, with the shocked, hollow voice of someone who has seen something impossible, "Equivalent exchange."


+++


Munich - November 11, 1923 A.D.


Ed could never forget the first night after the gate was destroyed: standing with his knees against his bed, Al tucked safely away beneath a mountain of blankets. Pain was evident on his brother’s sleeping, furrowed forehead; Ed couldn’t take his brother to a doctor, not with his limbs subtly lengthening, jaw broadening. Not thirteen anymore, but not the age he should have been.

Growing pains. Equivalent exchange. Ed thought it was a damn torturous way to go about giving back what had been taken. Noah suggested, unfazed at the incongruence with this world's reality, that they keep him hidden away from prying strangers.

Al stirred and winced, but made no other sound. Noah’s medicine would keep him asleep for the worst of it. It was better that way.

“You think he’s beautiful,” Noah said from the door, her voice low and sleepy like her eyes. At times she reminded him too much of Rose lying complacent in Dante‘s rotting arms; reminded him of what a dream would be like if it had a soul and body, if it could walk and talk. “He’s the only thing you’ve ever really loved.”

“Have you been prying into my head again?” he asked, looking anywhere but at Al. He didn’t have to see Al to know how his brother looks; wheaten lashes and pale, smooth skin have been burned into his mind. The scars were familiar, some intimately.

Alfons had died, bleeding and abandoned on a factory floor, to bring this about. Ed couldn’t find the words to properly express his loss and gratitude, so he tucked the despair deep inside where no one would pry it loose.

There were still tiny pale divots on Al’s right shoulder where Ed had once bitten him hard enough to draw blood. They had been children then.

“You came back to keep him from ever feeling again like he did, looking at that child. Even if it meant leaving him. You had to close the gate.”

“Do you blame me?” Ed asked. He wasn’t sure what he would say if she answered if she blamed him, too. He did it for his brother; his whole life was making up to his brother the time they had lost.

“No. What kind of person would I be if I did?” she asked. Her eyes were the color of burnt chocolate, and their unfocused regard undid Ed’s composure. His hands shook, as he took Al’s thin wrist between them. “But he’s here now. And you don’t want to let him go, even if it means making him live without everyone else you cared about.”

Ed closed his eyes, trying not to let her words in. “Why do you need to keep looking in my head? You‘ve got the reasons why I wouldn't take you to Amestris.”

“I didn’t have to look in your head to see your heart.”


+++


France - November 15, 1923 A.D.


The French countryside was beautiful, and Ed dozed as he watched Al stare with hooded eyes at rolling hills and waving farmlands punctuated by gurgling rivers. Al leaned against the slats that lined the truck bed, fingers woven through the gaps, and smiled at Ed with straw in his hair. It was cold, but the sunshine was warm and Al's leg was curled up beneath his, casual and firm.

The farmer driving the lorry paid no mind to them over the rumble of the tires on the rough road. They'd paid him heaping handfuls of francs to take them as far south as he could, and he hadn't asked questions. The countryside seemed too calm, like a string of undeveloped film waiting with grim images to be revealed. News of war and conspiracy and too much pride clogged up the headlines.

"How do you say it?" Al asked, plucking the baling cord. "Hay. In -- German?"

"Heu," Ed said. Al could piece together rudimentary phrases; Ed had heard him ask, in stumbling German, the price of bread from a street vendor not two days after he'd arrived. It had taken Ed weeks and a parade of cities to be comfortable with learning a new language.

"Danke," Al said without hesitation and wrapped his hand around Ed's bare ankle.

Al paid no mind to his startled flinch and looked back towards a field full of grazing sheep, basking in the sunlight with upturned lips.

Al had not been as similar in looks to Alfons as Ed had expected, but there was a striking similarity. They could have been mistaken very nearly for fraternal twins, for all the matched angle of their jaws and the round warmth of their smiles. Alfons' eyes had been pale blue; a perfect Aryan son of a perfect Aryan son. Al's were like burnished walnut, dark with undertones of green and promises of mischief.

If Alfons had been alive.

"I get disoriented sometimes," Al said abruptly. "I lived part of my life twice, and the part that should have been before came after, instead."

"Are you okay?" Ed asked. He wasn't entirely sure how to treat this quiet, smiling man that Al had so suddenly become. A part of him -- a part that he was deathly afraid of admitting he had -- wanted to sink into Al and smooth away his brother's troubles with his mouth, because Al was beautiful.

"I'll be fine," Al said, brushing his bangs out of his eyes. "I'm with you."


+++


Alexandria - December 5, 1923 A.D.


Al dug his bare feet into the hot sand outside the wind-tumbled room they were renting. Ed chattered in a low, hurried pidgin of English and Masri to the landlord, and Al could only catch a word or two of what they were saying. Al had always had a better ear for languages than Ed, but three weeks and eight different languages left his head reeling. What havoc Ed wrought with his temper, Al mediated with gentle gestures and a tone that was apologetic by anyone's reckoning.

Coins changed hands, and the names for all the types of currency he'd learned to recognize rattled around in his head like clinking metal; pounds, dinars, dollars, rupees, shekels, marks. Made from brass, copper, gold, silver, iron, nickel, cloth. Everything was so fractured, and each day of travel was a new language or custom or religion. He mopped the sweat from his brow and tugged his coat up over his head, warding off the evening sun, and watched his brother intently.

Their landlord was small and so brown his skin looked black if caught at the right angle, with a curling beard. He called himself by many names -- all of which sounded alien and beautiful to Al -- and shone with pride every time mention was made, even in passing, of his family. He smiled at something that Ed said, and Ed gave a sketchy little bow, which they both laughed at.

When the landlord left, Ed sidled up to Al and looked dubiously at his bare feet hidden in the sand. “Why do you never wear shoes? If you get something stuck in one of them, don‘t come crying to me about it.”

“If your automail rusts from sitting in so much sweat you’ll have to file it down,” Al said reasonably. “You worry too much. What was his name? I can’t remember.”

“Ibn or something and another. He shortens it to Jahi. But his English is poor and his German is even worse,” Ed said. Al figured his brother was probably wrong about the name, but held his tongue.

“I got him to lower the rent by a quarter if we can fix his car up for him. Probably just sand in one of the damn fluid pumps.”

“More work, brother?” Al asked, not unkindly. It was good that they could keep themselves in odd jobs; this world had no alchemy and neither of them could profit from the trade they’d practiced for so long. Al had found that he was handy with his hands, and liked working with machinery. Physics interested him, with it’s neat laws and polite cause-and-effect mannerisms.

Ed’s was crisply brown from the sun, and he flipped his hair up off the back of his neck where it lay limp and matted in clumps with sweat. Al stood carefully in the shade, more prone to burning than tanning to dare the glaring sunlight, watching his brother. “We can do it in tomorrow, yeah? It’ll get us some variety in our meals, at the very least. I’m tired of bread and beer.”

They had gotten a steady job with an archaeologist that only needed strong backs, clever hands, and was too busy analyzing findings to question the strange language the brothers spoke in. The work was back-breaking and tedious, but Al looked forward to anything that would chase away the haunting memories of hollow, endlessly sleepless nights. Al liked the crumbling pyramids.

Egypt had stolen his breath at the first sight of Alexandria. He'd thought it was going to be like Lior, with sand and deep wells. He had been startled to see the Nile instead, banks overgrown with flax and papyrus and barley, punctuated with groaning crocodiles and lanky birds.

There were the bugs, too, but he guessed that was a fair trade.

“We can get the money to start up our own research, maybe. And we can get some proper oil for your automail. You’re almost out of the stuff Winry sent back across with you,” Al said and watched as Ed flexed the metal joints experimentally.

“Too much sand here,” Ed said, not looking up at Al, his face framed with frazzled hair. It was beginning to stick out in places, torn by the wind from the length of leather that held it prisoner. He looked too frail sometimes, which puzzled Al. His brother was nothing but compact muscle and smooth curves of bread-brown skin, but Al could see the guilt that gnawed unspoken.

Ed had never been any good at hiding things from Al, despite what his brother thought.

“We’ve been in deserts before. Alexandria is mostly green, and at least we’re out of Munich,” Al said, the name of the cities foreign on his tongue. “Maybe we’ll find a clue to alchemy that can take us back in the pyramids. They seem pretty impossible to have been built without the help of alchemy.”

“Maybe. Oh! I just remembered -- got some figs from the market. Are you hungry?” Al knew the answer before he spoke.



Index of Chapters
Forward to Chapter One