Agapē - Chapter One
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



Chapter One


Abydos, Egypt - June 21, 1924


Beads clattered against metal, and Al snorted without looking up from the novel perched on his knee. He took a careful sip of tea, taking great pains not to upset the stack of books his elbow was balanced upon.

"You've been gone an awfully long time. Been playing with the serving girls at Ivanov's again, brother?" he asked, when Ed touched him on the shoulder.

"'Playing' makes it sound inappropriate," Ed said, and Al was pleased to hear good cheer in his brother's voice. Some days it felt like living with a rain cloud, the way Ed skulked around heaping guilt after guilt upon himself, until he left none for Al to partake. "Naomi rebraided my hair, is all. She wouldn't let me buy their stock of grapes unless I let her."

Al glanced up; the beads were red this time, little bits of rouge against the arch of Ed's neck. He caught the scent of fresh bread and hummed appreciatively.

"She threatened to cut our rations," Ed protested weakly, setting down a neatly-packed bag of food and supplies on the counter, somehow finding space between all the paper and glass phials of ink.

"I'm sure," Al said, not convinced. "Listen to this, '--and all along the watchtowers of her spine ran burning fires of pleasure as he thrust his long, hard flesh into--"

Ed snatched the book away from him with a glower and brilliantly red cheeks. "I don't know who gave this to you, but they'd better not do it again. Honestly, Al."

"But, 'watchtowers of her spine'? That's such an interesting way to phrase it. They don't have books like that in the libraries in Central."

"Where?" Ed persisted.

"Brother," Al said patiently, "I found it hidden under your pillow."

"Someone must have left it there, then," Ed denied furiously. The curtain of braids swung when he shook his head, tiny globes of glass like rose petals sliding over his shoulders and drumming out sounds against the juncture of his automail.

"Of course. Some pervert must have just stopped in and left it in your bed," Al said. "It was probably an honest mistake."

"Wait. What were you doing in my bed?" Ed asked, and Al pretended to be immersed his tea. He blinked up at his brother, trying his best to look confused at the question.

"Looking for that reference book with the picture index of the alchemical lithographs used in the summoning of the rainy season," Al lied smoothly, leaning back against edge of his bed, stuffing a few piles of notes back into the pages of the books they had escaped from.

Six months ago Al would have reckoned that spending the majority of his emotional development without a proper face would have hindered his ability to keep his real one from revealing every nuance.

If anything, it helped his case.

"Oh," Ed said, and looked down uneasily at the offending novel. "This must have been in the pile that Bouchard gave me. He's always trying to pawn these off on me."

"Are you seeing that girl that brought our drinks last night?" Al pried. "She seemed rather fond of you."

His brother's vague detachment from women was puzzling. He acted, for the most part, if the opposite gender was a curse or an affliction which he could not be bothered with associating himself with. With men, Ed at least had something to discuss if the person in question had a brain located somewhere between his ears.

Al supposed he wasn't one to be pointing fingers when he had been crouched on Ed's bed with his trousers bunched around his ankles, moaning into his brother's pillow. A placid little voice somewhere between his ears reassured him that it was perfectly normal, and that he shouldn't trouble himself overmuch at his recreational oddities at his age.

"No! Do you have any idea at all how many people have some sort of sickness in this part of the world?" Ed sounded a bit panicked, a bit irritated, and gave the bottom of Al's bare foot a rough nudge with his boot.

It meant nothing at all that he lay awake some nights, barely breathing as he listened to Ed's soft gasps for a good hour or so until his brother finally brought himself off.

"She looked like a posh British girl," Al reasoned, catching the cuff of Ed's trousers briefly between his fingers.

"British girls who've come to Abydos can't really be considered 'posh'. Loose, maybe," Ed said. He leaned over Al and pulled a thick volume on chemical theory off of one of the shelves. Al sneezed at the shower of dust that rained on him. "Sorry."

He ran his hand up the back of Ed's automail leg and Ed murmured a string of soft, pretty words. Al couldn't translate the purr of syllables, but he would have recognized when Ed proclaimed his fondness in any language.

"No wonder you never get the girls," Al said. "Your wit and charm must frighten them off."

"I don't see ladies hanging off your arms, so you can't say anything," Ed retorted.

"I'm invisible, didn't you know?"

"Oh -- I'm sorry, Al. I didn't mean to--" Ed flinched back and the cheerful light in his eyes diminished pathetically.

"Don't you dare. I'll be angry with you," he said, exasperated. He seized Ed's ankles and yanked him down to the floor with a whoop of triumph.


+++


His brother looked the very picture of a tawny Egyptian prince, shirtless and savage. Al had hoisted an amphora of wine to his hip, free arm slung around Matthias Logan's broad ruddy neck while he sang loudly over explosive laughter that accompanied the bawdy lyrics.

Ed wasn't even sure when his brother had found time to learn drinking rounds, but the content made him want to sink down into his chair. He was grateful that his hair hid his ears.

He briefly considered leaving, but he'd promised Al that he would try to have a good time.

Al had embraced each new culture he encountered like it was a lover and had become a patron of literary arts in the spare moments they had. His brother stayed up sleepless nights to read aloud, with soft musical tones, John Donne or Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare. Ed only pretended not to listen on those nights.

"Ey, MacDuffy!" Logan howled over Al's singing. "Where's that winsome wench of yours? I'm feeling the powerful need to polish my claymore!"

"I heard from the lasses down at the dock it was less a claymore, more a rapier," MacDuffy shot back, inciting catcalls. "She may be a Protestant harpy, but she's got good enough taste to avoid the likes of you!"

Ed hid behind his warm beer and tried not to listen.

"Can I get you anything else, love?" a silky voice said by his ear, dripping feminine wiles. Ed peered over his glass curiously and found himself peering directly into a corseted bosom. The girl, sixteen if she was a day, smiled at him expectantly. She had lovely eyes, but smelled like alcohol and sweat.

"What? No thanks," Ed said, leaning back. She followed his motion and her hand trailed up the inside of his thigh. His heart pounded like a snared rabbit's.

"You sure you don't see anything you want? I've got good prices and I guarantee a happy ending, love."

"My brother has a girl back home he's absolutely insane for," Al said, coming to his rescue. "Don't take it personally. You're quite lovely." Al's eyes flicked down to her pale breasts, punctuating his implication.

"That's too bad," the girl smiled, her rouged cheeks flushing when Al winked at her. Ed wanted to shove her away from Al, and glowered. "My name's Ness, if he ever changes his mind about his lady."

"Pleasure," Al said.

"I'd be willing give you a discount if two do me a treat and come together," she said with a titter, and flounced off to look for more prey.

"Why'd you say that?" he asked Al when she had latched on to a stout man with a hairy chest. "I don't have a girl."

"What about Winry?" Al asked, raising one eyebrow. He wobbled a little bit, and steadied himself by wrapping an arm around Ed's neck. He said in their native tongue, "The room's getting a bit spinny. Sorry."

Ed nudged Al away a little, but Al didn't take the hint and clung to him as persistently as a cocklebur seed. "We're not in Amestris, are we? And Winry always liked you better, anyhow."

"She did not," Al said derisively to his wine. "She wanted to marry you." He looked into the glass with a contemplative expression, brown eyes wide and unblinking.

"You're drunk, Al," Ed said slowly, "and obviously not thinking clearly."

"You didn't love her, then?" Al asked, tugging at Ed's hair fondly.

"Of course I did. I still do. But, it's Winry, Al," he protested. Winry had always been, well, Winry. Ed could hardly rationalize the reasons that marrying her seemed like a bad idea; she was beautiful, intelligent, strong, and funny.

"Yeah," Al said, and leaned against him. Ed could hear Al's heartbeat strong against his ear, and slid his human arm around Al. The men from the archaeological dig had struck up a raucous exchange of bawdy witticisms with a rival expedition and no one was paying any mind to Ed or Al. Ed suspected that limericks would eventually get involved.

Al made a small, satisfied noise in the back of his throat when Ed hooked two fingers into the waistband of his brother’s trousers and tugged him closer. Suddenly Ed felt too hot for his clothes, skin flushed, and his stomach did a dance like a mad top. Maybe even two drinks had been too much.

"I think I've had too much to drink," Ed said into Al's warm skin. He pulled away, shaking and unsure of himself.


+++


Abydos - June 22, 1924


Ed tilted his brush at an angle and pushed it gently along the lines of the wall, years of dust falling away beneath the soft bristles. Smudges of black darkened the backs of his hands, and there were cobwebs tangled in the hair on his arm. Everything was covered in a thin layer of age, and Ed didn't start when a pale, harmless insects clambered out of a crevice and scurried away.

“Edward, have you heard? Herr Ivanov is returning from Russia to oversee the excavation of the eastern quarter.” Milojkevic looked excited, armed with a magnifying glass and handfuls of papers scribbled with notes. His rosary jiggled around his thick neck as he spoke. "Herr Ahmed is meeting him at the docks this afternoon."

“I hope that he brings some proper food with him. I‘m getting tired of dates and beer,” Ed said, scrubbing sweat away from his brow with his shirtsleeves. Six men were working in the enclosed space and the smell was sometimes overwhelming.

He tapped the butt of his brush along the wall, raining grime onto the floor. They had been at the dig site for nearly two months and Ed was getting tired of craning his neck to sketch hieroglyphs while Bouchard hogged their only ladder.

MacDuffy hooted his disbelief, laughter in his voice, “Who could get tired of beer? I can never get tired of beer and the lovely, lovely women. Skin like chocolate and legs as long as the Nile.”

Ed's skin itched; he hated being so deep underground, buried beneath hundreds of tons of decaying stone. He wiped his hands on his shirt and tugged the collar up further over his automail port. The men had seen his metal limbs, and Logan had even helped replace the machined parts when they wore down, but he didn't like to advertise his oddity.

“Russian food is not proper food,” Milojkevic said, ignoring MacDuffy's lecherous grin in favor of the culinary arguement. “My mother cooks the finest of French cuisine. You must come for dinner one evening at our villa in Aquitaine.”

Ed was amazed that they hadn't killed one another months ago with their fighting over it. The ongoing debate passed the time.

Ed would never have agreed to the job, if it hadn't meant that he and Al would get access to artifacts and burial texts. They had found a man in Cairo who had sold them a handwritten copy of several pages from the Book of Gates and the brothers had seized the implications of transmutation and passage to the underworld with feverish determination.

“Your mother’s cooking would give him indigestion, Emmanuel. She’s been too long gone from the vineyards of our homeland to know what wine goes with what,” Milojkevic teased. Bouchard brandished his pick like a weapon when Milojkevic threatened to empty a water flask onto him. It was an old point of contention between the two, rehashed over the stumbling, hot weeks and days working buried in glorified coffins.

Al was holding the ladder steady while Bouchard worked and smiled winningly at the two of them from between the Frenchman's ankles. “We could try both. My brother will eat anything.”

“I do have standards, Al,” Ed snorted. He would have protested more, but something like alchemical fire crackled under the surface of his skin, longing.

“Not any that I’ve ever noticed,” Al said, brown eyes glinting like copper in the guttering lantern light.

“Life’s too short to waste time on cooking up fancy lots of food,” Logan said. He was an older man, and Ed liked his practicality. Logan was the only man in Ivanov’s motley archaeological team that Ed didn’t have to look up to.

Milojkevic laughed, drumming his hands on his rotund belly for emphasis. “Go ahead and eat your shoe leather beef. I will take finely roasted duck any day.”

Ed let the thrum of conversation fall into the background as he watched Al collecting notes with a pencil and sketch book. Al was his little brother, his savior and responsibility in one, and his only real joy. This was the plump-cheeked, scruffy boy who punctuated his early childhood with laughter and sensibility.

“At least Logan can prepare a meal. I have to do all the cooking for my brother,” Al said, scratching at the small of his back.

“I can cook." Ed protested. It wasn't really true; even when Al had not needed to eat or drink he had cooked for Ed, broad metal shoulders hunched watchfully over the campfire to make sure the food did not burn.

His brother being without a body for years was his fault, he accused himself nastily. He was indebted. It was his fault that Al had to be stuck in this place without their friends, with little income, and no alchemy. He was grateful that Al never questioned the ravenous pursuit of a method to return.

Al laughed, the sound spurring away the spike of guilt. His brother had a body now, thanks to him, and Al was happy no matter how far from home they were. Forever the optimist. “I’d only let you cook if there was nothing you could burn down.”

"Mon ami," Bouchard called from his ladder down to Al, thankfully drawing Al's attention away from Ed. Ed turned fully around to watched them, leaning up against the wall. "Can you grab the light for me, s‘il te plaît? I think I've found a door."

Ed wished that sometimes it wasn't so oppressively hot, so that he would have an excuse to tell his brother to put a damned shirt on.

"Really? Ahmed will be pleased we've made some real progress."

"It is," Bouchard confirmed. He scrambled down the ladder and snatched up the crowbar, wedging it into the crevice. The tiny hairs all along Ed's forearms stood on end.

The air currents changed when Bouchard and Al pushed, the smell of mold and ancient, stale air filling the chamber. Something else welled up dangerously, and he was surprised Al couldn't recognize it too. He bared his teeth when he recognized it; the scent of alchemy like heavy lightning-burnt ozone.

Ed clasped both hands over his stomach and gasped as the bottom dropped out of the world.


+++


Central - June 22, 1924 A.D. (Earth Reckoning)


Roy held his long-cold coffee between both hands, staring sleepily at his desk. Sheska was in Rizembool visiting the Rockbells -- though Roy had a sneaking suspicion that it was Winry that she went to see so often -- and the new recruit filling in for her secretarial duties had a droning voice that made Roy want to fall asleep in his chair.

Being Fuhrer was at times strenuous, but mostly filled with days-long reports on agricultural changes, import and export requests, and men wanting government loans to fund pithy projects. Most of them ended up in the trash bin by Roy's desk against the protestations of his subordinates.

All of them wanted a slice of his power, but he was determined to turn the military dictatorship Fuhrer Bradley had enforced into something respectable. He'd been working for months on end to rebuild the power structure in the wake of Pride's destruction.

Something his stand-in aide said jerked him abruptly out of his reverie.

"What was that about disappearances in Lior?"

"Sir," the girl backpedaled, blinking. "Brigadier General Armstrong sent word by telephone late yesterday evening that six men had disappeared on a drilling expedition when reestablishing buried communications lines destroyed in the invasion."

"In Lior?" Roy asked, setting his cup down with great care.

"Yes, sir," she replied crisply without batting an eyelash.

"Are you sure that's not an error? Six men?" Roy rubbed his fingers together, feeling suddenly naked without his gloves.

"No, sir. The information is accurate to the best of my knowledge. The report reads that Captain Jean Havoc took the call personally. Would you like me to call him and check?" Roy's back stiffened. Havoc wouldn't have taken the call when one of his subordinates could have just as easily passed the message along if he hadn't thought it was important.

"No, no. That won't be necessary. But get me Major Hawkeye on the phone."


+++


Areugo - June 22, 1924 A.D. (Earth Reckoning)


The northern Areugan countryside was like a watercolor painting of flowers, with swatches of pink and runny translucent blues dotting fields of pale green grass. Areugans pushed material gaudiness to new heights, strutting proudly in jewel-toned finery, and Riza felt like a pigeon lost among posturing peacocks.

She had been there nearly a month, and the smiles had not gotten any warmer.

The Minister had penned her into the meeting room once again to assauge his fears. She stood several steps back from the doorway he occupied and tried not to look as if she would dash out the door at the first opportunity.

“I have some concerns regarding your country’s capabilites to hold a treaty,” the Minister said.

She watched his waxed moustache as he spoke, thankful that her military training had taught her how to smile at people she would normally have wanted to strangle. As far as she knew, he didn’t have a name -- he was addressed formally as ‘Majesty’ or ‘Minister’. He had been born into the position and lorded his title around like a god might.

“I would very much enjoy hearing your criticisms, Majesty,” she said. Women were not military or political figures in Areugo, and she would have caused great offense if she had not simpered appropriately. At least he hadn’t called a formal assembly to discuss the matter, she thought. She wasn’t sure she could take all the circular logic or flowery language; the inefficiency of it grated.

"I have come to understand that this man who is your Fuhrer, this Roy Mustang, has a rather unscrupulous record in your miltary,” the Minister said, folding his hands over his broad stomach.

She chose her words carefully. “Majesty, in my best judgement it is not Fuhrer Mustang’s intent to cause disparity in understanding with his open record and candid admissions of deeds that any great Areugan ruler would rightly object. He wishes only to establish a sense of goodwill and trust.”

“He killed innocent men and women,” the Minister said sharply.

“Majesty,” she said, “he did so under orders of a man who could be considered no less than evil by any person’s measure. He was young and prideful, and didn’t know how to do the right thing.”

She would be guillotined, she thought, for that tone of voice. She would be lynched and dragged through the streets for insubordination.

“You love him,” the Minister said pleasantly, bringing her line of thought to a screeching halt. Her cheeks blossomed at the frankness of his accusation. “If a woman as patient and strong as yourself can love this man who runs your country, he may be a man worth signing this treaty with.”


Index of Chapters
Back to Prologue
Forward to Chapter Two