Title: Almost There
Author: Desdemona Marx
Rating: PG-13
Fandom:FullMetal Alchemist
Pairing/Characters: Roy, Al, Archer, Kimbley, mentions of Archer/Kimbely, hints of Ed/Roy
A/n: Written for this challenge: fairymage.livejournal.com/58055.html
I was given this lyric: "Until I arrive at that faraway destination" and I used it as an overall theme for the story.
A/n 2: This is an AU ending to the series so parts of episode 50 and the movie never happened.
The gate had a very specific set of rules. They were fairly simple. A life for a life, a body for a body, a soul for a soul. These rules were the fundamental rules of alchemy; to take, something of equal value must be lost.
Edward knew this. Perhaps not when he tried to bring his mother back, but after he had paid that terrible price for his ignorance, his youth, his folly, he knew. And when he swore to get Al’s body back, he knew the price that he would have to pay.
If they failed to get the stone, if all other methods of cheating the laws ran out he also knew he would pay it.
And pay he had.
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Roy was never really clear on the events of Edward’s last night on this earth. The only ones who had been there to see it were dead or missing. Only Edward knew what had really happened and he was beyond telling anyone.
That, however, did not stop Roy from realizing the truth. The sacrifice that Ed had made stared back at him from big grey eyes, framed by ashen blond hair, in a face so achingly similar to the one that had glared in defiance at him for years.
A life for a life.
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Al acclimated quickly from being a hulking suit of armor to being a slight, fair skinned teenager. He was a prodigy just as his brother had been, more soft-spoken perhaps, but just a vibrant. He carried that same indomitable spirit, that same force of will that seemed to be a trait of the Elrics.
Roy wondered at times why he hadn’t seen it before. But Al had been so content to live in Edward’s shadow that maybe he could be forgiven for the oversight. If not, then it was just another addition to his already long list of blunders.
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Al wondered at times what Roy saw when he looked at him. Did he see him, or simply the shadow Edward? Sometimes Roy’s remaining eye would focus on him for a little bit longer than usual filled with so much pain and guilt it made Al’s heart ache.
Edward was always on Al’s mind. And as he thought about Ed, he started to think about other things. He knew it was foolish, he knew that what he was thinking could undo every sacrifice that his older brother had made.
But that didn’t stop him from thinking it.
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Al sat in front of the mirror. Roy was gone. Working, he thought, but Al couldn’t really be sure. He had trouble paying attention to things lately, so caught up in his thoughts that the people around him barely registered in the back of his mind.
He was in Roy’s bathroom. He liked to think here when the Colonel was gone. It was still balmy from the man’s shower and the scent of Roy’s cologne was soothing.
His reflection’s eyes blinked back at him, grey no matter how often or how hard he willed them to be gold. It was getting harder to remember the sound of Ed’s voice, to picture his smile or his frown. The way he pouted at some perceived insult to his height.
He stared hard at himself in the mirror, looked at the hollows under his grey eyes from too many nights of no sleep reading, planning, and thinking, and a soft sigh left him. He couldn’t will his reflection’s eyes gold, couldn’t round out his face or make his hair a warmer honey blond. The person staring back at him would never be Edward.
He reached out and touched the glass, covering his eyes with his fingers. The time for thinking was over.
His eyes closed and he conjured the image of Ed’s face, his smile, as best he could.
“Forgive me, Brother.”
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Roy was trying so hard to keep his face blank. He didn’t say anything, as if the effort of speaking would break his carefully maintained control.
“I’m going to bring him back,” Al repeated, his voice even, determined, and so much like Edward that Roy had to swallow back a sob.
Defiant, resolute grey eye bore into him, daring him to object, taking him more than a year back to when a different, but so very similar fifteen year old had given him the same look.
“I’ll help you.” Roy’s voice was a harsh, thick whisper and in those three simple words Al saw the colonel’s heart breaking.
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In truth, they had no idea where to start. Edward and Al had exhausted any and all ways of bending the rules. The Stone was gone and the red stones could only take them so far. A small part of Roy hoped that perhaps there was no other way, no easy out. And he knew that Al would never give the gate someone else’s life for his brother’s. Ed would never forgive them.
So they began very similarly to how Ed and Al had started. They began the never ending search for Another Way.
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It wasn’t until they found it that Al started to think again. It was so close to being right that they almost missed it entirely. They were walking back from Headquarters, the sparse evening crowds just starting to dissipate when they saw it. It was walking down the street like it shouldn’t be dead, scattered to the wind in the ruins of Lior. But both Roy and Al knew the truth.
It noticed them too, and narrow, manic eyes that should have been yellow, met Roy’s and there was recognition there. That alone was enough to make Roy’s breath catch slightly. He thought perhaps he’d lost what little was left of his mind as he stared straight into the eyes of the very embodiment of everything he feared becoming. He never met this thing before, even though he knew the man whose face it wore, and yet it smiled at him in recognition.
Al knew what it was, and who it had been, but he was too busy taking in every detail of it to be shocked. It was so much closer to perfect than the others. It looked like a human. Its skin lacked that unnatural pallor, its hair was brown like the man’s had been. Its only imperfection was those inhuman violet eyes. There was a bright red oroboros on the back of its hand, stark against the light tan of its skin. And when it smiled, its teeth were unnaturally sharp.
“Hey there, Colonel Flame, haven’t seen your pretty face in a while,” it said, and the familiar mocking tone of it sent chills down Roy’s spine.
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Greed didn’t know the name of the alchemist who made him, only that he was dead. What mattered was this homunculus, who bore the face and voice of Zolf J. Kimbley, the Crimson Alchemist, was Archer’s doing. That revelation surprised Roy far less than he thought it would, for as much as he hated the man, Frank Archer was a man who knew how to get what he wanted. If anyone could pull off making an almost flawless copy of a psychopathic murder, Archer could.
Al studied him tirelessly and drilled him with never ending questions. The homunculus bore the questions with vague amusement from his seat in the corner. No, Greed couldn’t perform alchemy. Yes, he could remember bits his human life, but they were jumbled. When he saw someone he had known, sometimes he could recognize them, but not always where he knew them from.
Yes, Archer had told him about who he’d been and filled in the blanks. Yes, he knew Archer was dead.
“Do you care?” Al asked, his eyes and voice filled with a strange kind of hope that made Roy frown sadly at him.
Greed narrowed his eyes, glaring up at him from under the fall of his long, loose brown hair. “What do you mean by that?”
“Do you care?” Al pressed. “Did you feel anything when you found out?”
A mute shrug was his only response as Greed turned away.
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“We can do it,” Al said fervently, giving Roy that look, the one that broke his heart.
Roy shook his head, breathing in deeply and looking away. His good eye trailed over the room, focusing briefly on the dark corner where Greed sat. Inhuman violet eyes met his and the homunculus smiled, manic and razor sharp.
That was not a human. Granted, Kimbley really wouldn’t have been classified as human either, but that… that was a doll, a perfectly made caricature of humanity. A being without a soul.
As if reading his mind, Al followed his gaze. “We can make him better than that.”
Roy sighed, eye dark and sad in his smooth face. The Colonel would help him.
Al was thinking again, working all the possible outcomes out in his head. They could make this work. They would have Ed back, whole and perfect, his old self. A small voice in the back of his mind, the one that he barely listened to anymore, told him it would not truly be his brother. It would look like him and sound like him and even have all his memories, but it was still just a copy.
Al wouldn’t listen to it, but if he had he might notice it sounded suspiciously like Edward.
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They needed a test subject.
Al had poured over the notes they’d recovered from the ruin of the building where Greed had been created. It took hours, days, months to work out the formulas, to sift through the pages of handwritten notes, to decide what was fact and what was the ramblings of an obsessed, insane man.
Roy knew, that in his last days, Archer had been mad. Made into something half human by the government he’d given his life to, after losing someone who, by the looks of these notes, had meant something to him in some twisted sort of way, Archer had simply lost his mind.
The notes were methodical even in their ramblings. Roy was secretly impressed with them. Not even highly trained alchemists could have come up with an array so perfectly flawed, so insanely brilliant. It was no wonder the alchemist Archer had no doubt threatened into performing it had died.
Al spent days perfecting it, adjusting lines and circles, adding and taking away. Even Roy had a hard time keeping up with everything he did, but then, that wasn’t really a surprise. Al was a prodigy. Just like his brother.
But they still needed to test it. Al gazed steadily at the far corner of the room and the creature seated silently there.
“I have an idea.”
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Grave robbing was not something Roy had ever contemplated. Now he stood beside Al’s kneeling form, not feet from the unrecognizable remains of the man whose resting place they had just desecrated. The room reeked of rot, thick and cloying. Roy fought not to breath through his nose, swallowed back the nausea and prepared of what they were about to do.
Greed hung back from the circle and the body that lay there, tense and alert. He was thankfully silent. Roy didn’t think he had the strength to deal with any questioning of their actions, even from the mouth of a dead man.
Al finished the last line of the array, his hands steady, mouth set in a firm line. He was resolute that this was going to work. Roy found it bitterly amusing that he had to be reassured by a fifteen year old.
He knelt beside Al and the boy gave him a resolute nod. Roy placed his hands to the array and tried not to think about what they were about to do. Al followed, and the array activated, glowing a sickly bruise purple.
He felt it working, felt the power of the array course through him, felt it as Al directed it. It hurt in a vague kind of way as the array drew on his energy to fuel it. Glow grew blinding and Roy closed his eyes without meaning to.
Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.
Al slumped against him, drained from the amount of energy necessary to fuel the array. There was a wheezing sound from the middle of the array and then a harsh cough. Roy opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was Greed staring curiously at it.
The homunculus laughed, a hollow, dry sound. “Well fuck.”
Al clutched at his sleeve and slowly, Roy looked to the center of the array. The thing sat up, not misshapen or incomplete, but perfect and whole. Just like Al said it would be.
It blinked at them, one eye a perfect ice blue. But the other was blank white, lacking iris and pupil.
Roy suppressed a shudder. He stared into that blue eye and remembered the night he lost his own eye. The deafening blast two guns firing at the same time, the searing pain, the dim panicked voice of Hawkeye yelling his name as he slowly, too slowly, lost consciousness. The other blank eye brought up memories he refused to dwell on.
“It worked,” Al whispered breathlessly, as if he’d secretly been unsure.
Roy nodded, unable to speak. Yes, yes it had.
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After the success of Pride, Al became even more convinced that this was the way they could bring back Ed. It was the driving force behind everything he did, the thought that soon, very soon, he’d be able to see Ed again, hear his voice, see his smile.
He researched every alchemist that had ever attempted the creation of a homunculus, even some who’d only talked about it, and even more who had failed.
It drove him to send Greed and Pride to get more information. It was the reason that he pretended not to notice when Greed came back looking insanely content, at times covered in blood, and Pride had that faint smirk of smug amusement.
It drove him when he saw Roy breaking. When Roy’s remaining eye went dim with pain and bitterness and the man close in on himself.
Al had to do this. It was the only way. But it hurt, hurt so much to know that if Ed was here, he would know what to do to comfort Roy, to make him believe this was the only way.
Al was not his brother. But soon Ed would be back, and Roy would see that what they were doing was right. They were so close. They were almost there.
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Fate, it seemed, despised him.
Al watched, numb and silent, Hawkeye and Havoc beside him, as Roy died in a hospital bed. He wondered silently if Roy had felt like this when that car had hit him, a deep bone-crushing agony that stole his breath and left him numb.
He watched the light leave Roy’s eyes and felt part of his soul die with him. The Colonel slipped away and gone was the last person on this earth that had meant anything to him. Just like Mom and Ed.
What had he done? Was this his punishment for trying to get back what he’d lost? Why did the people he loved always have to suffer?
Not this time. He wouldn’t let it happen again.
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He dropped to the floor as soon as he was home. Safe in the cool confines of the room he spent so many hours in, thinking. His hand moved of its own accord, picking up a piece of chalk and drawing out the new, modified array. It was better than the one they’d used on Pride, so close to perfect, almost complete. Almost ready for Ed.
There was a soft scoff from the corner and Al glanced up. Pride was seated in a chair, straight backed but still managing to look at ease. Greed was on the floor in front of him, leaning against his leg and smirking, his lank brown hair obscuring part of his face. Al wasn’t surprised to see them that way. They were always in contact in some way. Perhaps it was something left over from their old lives. From what Al had read in those notes, it seemed Archer and Kimbley had been lovers.
He turned back to his work, smudging out lines that weren’t right and making new ones, muttering quietly under his breath as he worked. This wouldn’t happen. He couldn’t, wouldn’t lose him. Roy was his comfort, his help, his only source of relief. With Roy gone, he didn’t know if he had the strength to continue.
“The kid’s finally gone bat-shit,” Greed said mockingly.
Pride tilted his head and arched a brow, his blank eye covered by one of Roy’s eye-patches. He made a soft negative sound in response to Greed’s words. “He’s going to bring him back.”
Al faltered in his drawing for a moment, drawing in a quiet breath to calm himself, and then looked up at the homunculi. “Pride, Greed, I need you to…”
Pride made a soft amused sound as if a suspicion of his had been confirmed and Greed sighed as he got to his feet. Pride stood as well and the shadow of a smirk crossed his face.
Greed waved off his request as he preceded Pride to the door, a wide, razor smile on his face. “Let’s go get Flame.”
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It happened just as before. The glow that grew steadily brighter, a flash of light, and there was Roy, whole and perfect, even better than before.
A bright red oroboros marred the smooth skin in the middle of his chest, just below the dip of his collarbone. Two perfect midnight blue eyes blinked up at him and Lust smiled. Al collapsed into its arms, not noticing that even unconsciously he’d identified the homunculus with its sin, not with the man it had been.
Lust’s skin was cool, not imbued with the warmth of a human’s, but Al didn’t notice. Gentle hands stroked his hair and all that mattered was he had him back, more perfect than even Pride had been.
“Al,” the homunculus whispered in Roy’s deep reassuring voice and smiled with Roy’s perfect face.
And that was all that mattered.
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The need to have Ed back was what drove him. Al looked from the array on the floor, now as perfect as he would ever make it, to the three homunculi that watched him. Pride stood, arrogant and smug, watching him in return. Greed leaned against him, inhuman smile in place, feral violet eyes watching the path of his own hand as he traced his oroboros mark. Lust was closest to him, watching him closely, a question clear in his eyes.
This was what he had gained: three almost-perfect creations and one more chance to make one better. He glanced once more around the room and his eyes settled on the mirror handing from the wall.
He stood before it, looking hard at his own reflection. All he saw was the triumph there, not the sunken look of his eyes or the pale pallor of his skin. He stared past his reflection, finally seeing the golden eyes and honey-blond hair he’d longed for.
He reached out, covered the eyes of his reflection with his fingertips and whispered fervently, “Forgive me, brother. Forgive me for taking so long. Its almost time now,” he turned and looked over his creations. “I’m almost there.”