Chapter Text
Putian / May 27th
Alphonse Elric
We’re going out there tomorrow, to Xiamen. General Mustang told me to write all that’s happened down so that if we get “obliterated” someone will know where we went and why. We have to leave at 0500 and I should be sleeping but I can’t. The hall light is on outside of my room and I can see the shadows of people pacing from the crack between my door and the floor and the anxiety is winding up inside of me like a spring. I’m afraid of what will happen when I let it loose.
And if I’m being honest, I’m anticipating the worst, Brother. I wish you were here. I know I made it through the Promised Day and I know I have Lan Fan and May but… but this is a different kind of nightmare. We can’t punch this monster into submission. We can’t strip her stone away.
She has to be deposited into something else and I’m not sure if I really even know how to do that yet. You told me, and Dr. Marcoh told me, but I feel as though I’m drowning and my head’s been clouded up with little air bubbles, ready to burst from my ears and nose. If I fail then Xing will kneel to a half-homunculus who wears the face of an Amestrian soldier. The general is trying hard not to pressure me but every time he looks at me he sees all the mistakes I made that led him here… and led her here too. I know it.
I can’t blame him for it, Brother. I don’t know why I ever let Selim into the palace. I should have sent him and his mother away but I was curious, and I was mortified, and his mother had this look in her eyes that said
Beijing, Xing / May 21st
Alphonse Elric
“Everything is all right, Mr. Elric.”
“I’m heavily inclined to believe you since you’ve come with clearance from Dr. Marcoh, Mrs. Bradley, but I’m afraid I can’t speak for the emperor.” Al looked over the lines of scribble again. He was able to make out most of the doctor’s sloppy scrawl, something about the Bradleys and help and alchemy.
He could feel May at his back, running her fingers along the fruit in a cart, pretending she cared little for the information being shared. She elbowed Al in the ribs gently, like an accidental bump, and he reiterated on her behalf: “Xing is in an odd place right now. The old emperor is dying, and the new emperor is toeing a line with his people where the friendliness with Amestris is concerned. He’s already got an Amestrian alchemist studying under his roof, and I’m not sure how he’d explain welcoming the late Führer’s wife into his palace as well.”
Mrs. Bradley smiled, the corners of her eyes pinching at the ends as she did. She put her hand on her son’s back, between his shoulders, and it traveled to rest at the back of his head and the nape of his neck. Al’s mother used to hold him like that, way back when.
“I don’t mean to press,” she said, and Al thought he saw her bottom lip quiver, “but the business I have at the palace is unofficially official, as per Führer Grumman’s request.” She leaned over the top of her son’s head, cupping a hand in a half-circle around her mouth, and spoke quietly. Al could hardly hear her over the chatter of the marketplace around him. “We were sent here to see you, Mr. Elric. And no place is safer for our discussion than the royal palace of the emperor.”
Selim Bradley paid no mind to his mother’s touch, or her hushed words. He peeled at the rhine to an orange, the whites of it gathering underneath his fingernails as juice ran down his forearms before dripping onto the rocky road below. He wriggled a piece free and sucked on it before bringing it fully into his mouth. Mrs. Bradley took his hands one at a time and began to dab at the sticky mess.
Al heard May sigh, and then she sidestepped to stand with him shoulder-to-shoulder.
“You say you have business,” she quipped, her little black-and-white cat perched on her shoulder, growling in her ear, “yet we have heard nothing of it.”
Mrs. Bradley continued with her ministrations, unbothered. Selim ate the orange around her cloth, a new streak of juice spilling over his chin as she wiped old ones away. “It is sensitive information, young miss. The Führer believed this matter would be more easily discussed in person than by letters or phone calls.”
“He didn’t think to give us warning? We should be told when Amestrian power is being sprung up on us.” May gestured to the men dressed in black coats encircling Mrs. Bradley and her son, the military police assigned to accompany her across the desert. Her words were sharp, but her tone was cordial.
Mrs. Bradley straightened. The sunlight cast dark shadows over her face, tracing the deep lines folded into her skin from years of wear. Her hair, Al realized, had silvered more in the last few years. It reflected light like a metal, white and nearly blinding. She pulled Selim into her side as he licked his fingers clean, running his tongue along the breaks between them.
Selim had to be nearing four now. His eyes, though still round, had begun to point at the ends. His hair hung low over his ears and face, like it hadn’t been cut in a while. His hands were puffy, lacking definition, and his cheeks stuck out like marshmallows. He peered at Al through a break in his hair, gaze gleaming.
The circles in the small boy’s forehead twisted ever so slightly, coiling and coiling over each other, and Al stiffened.
“Mrs. Bradley…” Al started, and May took hold of his arm in alarm, “how is Selim?”
The late Führer’s wife knelt down in the dusty street. She fussed with the collar of Selim’s shirt, checked the integrity of the belt around his narrow waist, before she said in a near-whisper: “He’s hearing voices, Mr. Elric. And they’re telling him to find a vessel.”